by Rice, Luanne
Bay nodded. She finished her beer as the banjo began to play “When the Saints Come Marching In.” It was loud and raucous, and everyone in the tavern was singing along except for her and Dan. She really wanted to join in their spirit, but she was remembering that awful year after Pegeen was born.
“Her name,” Dan said, “is so pretty.”
Bay nodded, smiling now. “I played Pegeen in Playboy of the Western World in college. It's a wonderful play. Do you know it?”
Dan nodded. “Synge. Getting in touch with my Irish roots, I went to the Aran Isles once.”
“I remember,” Bay said. She'd been thrilled when he sent her a letter from there.
“Right after my summer at Hubbard's Point,” he continued, “I decided to travel for six months before getting down to real life. Have you ever been?”
“No,” Bay said. “I've always thought I'd like to go.”
“Why did you name your daughter after that character?” Dan asked. “As pretty a name as it is, why that one? And not Margaret, or Maggie, or another ‘Peg' type name?”
Bay didn't reply. The music got louder, more good-time and raucous. The waitress brought their food, and Dan ordered two more beers. The burgers were rare and delicious, and because the music was so loud, Bay just ate her food and didn't even try to talk. Neither did Dan. It was enough to be sitting there, together.
When the banjo player broke a string and had to replace it, Dan said, “The Aran Isles are in Galway Bay, you know.”
“They are?” Bay asked, her neck tingling.
“I spent most of my time on Inishmore,” Dan said. “Got the ferry from a dock in Galway town.”
“Was it beautiful there?”
“It reminded me of Hubbard's Point,” he said. “With a lot of rocks, and clear cold water, and pine and oak trees. Riding that ferry, I thought of the Connecticut shore. I thought of you.”
“Me?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because it was Galway Bay.”
Bay looked down at the table. It was highly varnished, glowing in the firelight. Her heart was beating fast, and suddenly she was afraid to look up. She gripped her hands in her lap, and she remembered how he had held her, shocked by how much she wanted it again.
“I've sometimes wondered whether that's the reason I went to Inishmore,” he said. “So I'd have the chance to sail through Galway Bay. With all the rest of Ireland to visit, and my relatives coming from Dublin and Kerry . . . I wanted you to have a letter from Ireland . . . from that part of Ireland.”
“You were pulled to the Aran Isles, by the ghost of John Millington Synge,” Bay said.
“Not because I wanted to visit your bay, Galway?”
She shook her head, her pulse racing.
“No,” she said. “Synge persuaded you.”
“Did he persuade you to name your youngest child ‘Pegeen'?”
Suddenly Bay felt hot, light-headed. The fire was too strong, or they were sitting too close. The music was too loud, the crowd too boisterous. She wanted to get some air, and Dan knew. He called for the check, put cash down on the table. The band struck up “Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” as Bay and Dan left the room.
“What's wrong?” Dan asked, walking her to his truck.
Emotion filled her chest. She and Sean had gone to the Crawford Tavern all the time when they were young. They had loved the music and beer, the free popcorn, the sleigh outside. Once, Sean had pulled her into the sleigh, pulled his coat over both of them, and kissed her passionately while people walked up and down Hawthorne's Main Street.
“I don't believe that sleigh crossed any frozen river,” she said suddenly as they walked past. “I don't believe it's even very old, or that there was any great love affair between General Johnson and Diana whatever-her-name-was.”
“You don't?”
“No. I don't believe anyone ever loved someone that much—to take the risk of going right past the enemy camp just to deliver Christmas presents.”
Dan was silent. He opened his truck door and let her in. She watched him come around the truck, and she shivered in the damp cold. Rain slicked the streets, and fallen wet leaves blew down the curb.
“He did,” Dan said quietly, starting up his truck.
“How do you know?”
“Because Diana whatever-her-name-was was Eliza's great-great-grandmother,” Dan said. “And their child, the first Eliza, married the first Obadiah Day.”
“Really? Charlie came from that kind of family?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “As blueblood as you can get.”
“And the story is true? The general risked his life to bring her a Christmas present?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “A silver cup, made by one of the top silversmiths in New England. A man by the name of Paul Revere. Commissioned just for her.”
“What happened to the cup?” Bay asked.
“It belongs to Eliza,” Dan said. “It should be in a museum, and I keep thinking we should donate it to one.”
“I can't believe it's true,” Bay whispered. Her heart felt so precarious, as if she was standing right at the edge of a very steep cliff and with one false move she might fall off. She looked away from Danny, pressing her forehead against the cold glass. If love like that between the general and the first Eliza was possible, what had happened to her and Sean?
“Tell me about Pegeen's name,” Danny said, and suddenly she felt him take her hand, hold it from across the seat.
“It's Irish,” she whispered.
“It means something to you,” he said. “Annie and Billy—Anne and William. Those names are good and strong, but they're one way, and Pegeen is another. Tell me, Bay.”
“It was because of how I felt inside,” she said, needing that cold glass against her skin, just to keep her grounded and still, to keep her from flying apart. “Everything had changed with Sean after I got pregnant that third time and I needed a powerful name for my new baby. . . . Billy was born . . . he had his son, and he loved him so much, but it was as if he didn't need me anymore.”
“But he did, he had to . . .”
Bay shook her head, still not looking at Danny. The memories were so deep and eviscerating.
“He stopped wanting me,” she said. “He needed me to mother the kids, but he didn't want me. He thought I was fat, boring, as if my only interests were milk and diapers. When he wanted to have fun he'd go looking for a friend. The guys at first, kids we'd grown up with, who had kids of their own. Sean would grab one of them, and they'd go out for a boat ride . . .”
“While you were pregnant?”
“Yes. I told myself it was because I was so huge. After the baby was born, I told myself I'd lose weight. I'd take it all off, get my body back to the way it used to be, never gain weight again. I'd see the way he'd turn away when I got undressed; how he wouldn't sleep near me in bed.” The details were so painfully intimate, but the rain thrummed on Dan's truck roof, and Bay couldn't have stopped the words if she'd wanted to. They needed to come out, and she let them.
“He had an—it wasn't even really an affair. A ‘thing.' Got drunk and went home with some girl at the bank Christmas party. I found out because she called him at home.”
“That's terrible, Bay,” Dan said.
“You wouldn't have done that to Charlie, right?” Bay asked, trying to get some laughter into her voice, to make it all a little light. What was the point now, anyway? Sean was dead and gone.
“No, I wouldn't,” Dan said, not laughing at all. “I'd never have done that to her.”
“Well, Sean did it then, and he did it again on Saint Patrick's Day. Same girl . . . that time Tara saw them at the Tumbledown Café. I was going to kick him out. But he promised. He swore.”
“You were still pregnant?”
“Yes,” Bay said, and she touched her stomach in the dark of the truck, so no one, not even Dan, could see, just to remind herself that three children had come out of her belly, that she had carried them all and c
arried them with love. She thought back to her last month carrying Pegeen, when Sean would come home every night—not because he wanted to be there, but out of a sense of duty, personal responsibility, as if he had sworn to himself that he'd be faithful, that he'd be a good husband, that he'd be the father he'd been before.
Bay could picture Sean in his chair by the fire, staring at the TV. Focused on the screen, on basketball games and sitcoms, on anything but Bay. She'd try to talk to him about the kids, about being a week overdue with the baby, about his job at the bank and how great it was that he kept getting promoted.
She had tried to talk to him about the garden, how she wanted to plant a garden for each child, how the new one felt so light and buoyant that for it she wanted to have beautiful, airy, feather flowers like anemones and violets and larkspur.
And she had tried to talk to him about how lucky they were to have known each other forever, to be bound by history and family and Irishness, to have Hubbard's Point as the place they had met and where their kids would spend all their summers and maybe meet the loves of their lives . . .
And Sean had nodded and acted polite and stared at the TV, especially the thin, beautiful, large-breasted, not-pregnant basketball team cheerleaders on the screen with such interest and lust that Bay had longed to smash that TV—with a poker, a bat, her garden rake, or even Sean's stupid, selfish head.
She had gone into her bedroom and mourned alone. Her grief was deep and total; she had created a family with a man who could not care less for her. With their third baby on the way, he didn't know a thing about her. She felt as if they were two ships sailing in different directions, completely unconnected, an unbridgeable gulf between them.
Those hours were the darkest moments of her life—worse, even, than finding out about his affairs. Bay was filled with deep despair as she faced the truth about her life, her marriage.
And in that moment, the air had shimmered with a very particularly Irish magic. Bay recalled looking out the window, seeing the marsh sparkling under starlight.
And Bay had taken a swift emotional journey, down the marsh and into Long Island Sound, where salt water and the Connecticut River met in the estuary. History unfolded, backward and forward—all the way into the future, when her children would be grown, playing on the beach with children of their own. And with silt swirling, Bay had thought of her own name . . . Bay.
And she had thought of all the great bays, the powerful bays of the world, the bays that spawned shellfish and finned fish, the bays that provided dockage for great shipping lines: Hudson Bay, San Francisco Bay, the Bay of Fundy, the Baie des Anges, Biscayne Bay, Galway Bay, and of course, Hubbard's Point Bay . . .
“In a way you were there,” she said to Danny now, her voice and hands shaking as she turned to look at him across the front seat of his truck. “The night I named Pegeen.”
“I was?”
They sat there in the parked truck, looking deeply into each other's eyes. Bay remembered the end of that night: how, after Sean had gone to bed and she had known for sure her baby was Pegeen, she had called Tara and they had unplugged the bosom-laden TV set. Tara had muscled it barefoot through the nettles—telling Bay that being a week overdue entitled her to merely watch—and thrown it with a resounding and satisfying splash-kerplunk into the salt creek.
“You were,” Bay said.
“How?”
“Because it went through my mind, as I was christening my daughter ‘Pegeen,' that John Synge had been sent across Galway Bay to the Aran Isles by the greatest poet in Ireland, and how I had been given my other name, ‘Galway,' by you. So somehow, I'm not sure whether you can follow my logic in the same way I did that night and still do, but somehow you were there.”
“I don't have to follow,” Dan said, reaching across the seat as Bay did what she'd wanted to do for so many years: slid closer, right into his arms.
“You don't?” she whispered, forgetting to be nervous as she tilted her head back to kiss the only other man besides her husband she'd ever loved.
“No,” he whispered back. “I don't have to follow, because I'm right here with you.”
He's Irish all right, she thought, admiring Danny Connolly as a poet just two seconds before he lowered his face to hers, kissed her with such fire and passion that she felt it all through her body, all the way down to her toes, erasing every year and memory and event and sorrow that had ever happened in her life.
They kissed each other, the independent woman who had once played Synge's Pegeen and the Irish poet wooden-boat-and-boardwalk builder, the widow and the widower, who touched and tugged and moaned and needed so much more than they could get in a truck parked under a streetlight in Hawthorne.
Bay pushed her hands up under his barn jacket, touching a button of his chamois shirt, just touching that button, thinking what it might be like to undo it, feeling his arms come inside the sleeves of her jacket, pushing up the left cuff of her sweater, trying to do the same with the right, getting stuck on the lining, his hands so rough with calluses and so warm on her cold skin . . .
Skin that hadn't been touched in so long, a heart that hadn't been touched in even longer. His mouth was hot on hers, and his beard scratched her cheeks and chin. She wanted to kiss him forever, to feel her smooth face scrape on his beard shadow. Feeling his lips on hers, turning her inside out, making her live again! That's what this was—nothing less than magic, being touched where she'd thought she was dead, being brought back to life . . .
They kissed, so unexpectedly, and as frantic as she felt inside, she wanted to be conscious of taking this slow—it wasn't at all slow inside, but they had kids and kids and kids and kids to worry about. There were the kids.
The kids.
What could a kiss have to do with those kids?
Bay didn't want to know, but of course she had to know. The heater blew hot air into the steamy, cold truck, and Dan's hands were so slow and hot inside her jacket but outside her sweater, and the instant he felt—zzzt—the electricity change, the thoughts of the kids stopping her in her tracks, mid-kiss . . .
She stopped herself by thinking of that sleigh, of Eliza's ancestor dashing through the snow with his precious silver cup for his true love . . . snow falling, the river frozen, Christmas angels singing above, the redcoats sleeping in their fort . . . Diana—the first Eliza's mother—not knowing whether her beloved general would make it to her alive . . .
Oh, there was love like that, she thought.
It allowed her to slow down, to not take everything she wanted from the kiss right then. It made her believe in something truer than she had felt in so long, so so long, in years.
She hadn't believed in love, that kind of love, for such a long time.
Probably not, as hard as she had tried, for the whole duration of her youngest daughter's life, for Pegeen's life.
“Are you okay?” Dan asked, pressing his rugged hand against her cool cheek, pushing the hair out of her eyes.
“So okay,” she said, knowing that her eyes were shining, seeing them reflected in his.
“I shouldn't have kissed you,” he said, shaking his head.
She laughed; she wished he hadn't said that, wished he felt just as incredible and miraculously alive as she did. “Why?” she asked.
“Because . . .”
The expression in his eyes took her aback. He was wrapped up, in his mind, with something bad. He didn't want to kiss me, didn't want me, I started it, she thought, suddenly confused, ashamed.
“I've wanted it so badly, for so long,” Dan said, reaching for her again, but visibly holding himself back. “I had to kiss you, but I should have waited—”
“Till what?” Bay asked.
Dan looked not just thoughtful but tormented, touching her hair, trying to make up his mind about something. “To tell you about Sean. He came to me, to build a boat, but that wasn't the only reason.”
“What was?” she asked.
“It's complicated,” he said.
/> “I need to know,” she said, feeling suddenly afraid.
“I wish none of these intervening years had happened,” he said, holding her face between his hands. “I wish I'd trusted what I knew deep down twenty-five years ago, that you were the one. That I'd waited for you to grow up . . .”
“So do I,” she said. “Everything but the kids—”
“I've made a big mistake,” Danny said. “You know what you used to say, about Sean flying too close to the sun?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling afraid.
“I was tempted to do that myself.”
“In what way?”
“My wife was very rich,” Danny said. “And your husband oversaw her trust. He—I think he wanted me to come in with him on something illegal.”
“Don't tell me this,” she said, bowing her head, not bearing to think of him this way.
“Bay, please listen. Nothing happened. I was tempted, though. I heard him out, thought it over, and told him I wasn't interested.”
Bay was silent, her heart pounding in her chest.
“Bay?”
“Drive me home, Danny,” she whispered. “Okay?”
But she never heard the answer, because instead of driving her anywhere, Danny Connolly just leaned over to pull her into his arms, to kiss her again. And in spite of all the questions and doubts raging through her mind, she could only kiss him back.
24
TARA,” CALLED AUGUSTA FROM HER DRESSING ROOM. She was tangled up in blue, swaths of midnight blue, almost black, really, chiffon—or was it taffeta; she could never get them straight—and she couldn't extricate her arms. “Tara, dear! Can you come help me?”
“Augusta, what happened?” Tara asked, running in from the bathroom, smelling of lemon-scented cleaning fluid.
“I'm attempting to decide what I should wear to the Pumpkin Ball,” Augusta said, “and I have this marvelous bolt of witchy-blue taffeta—or is it chiffon?—that Hugh brought me back from Venice on one of his painting jaunts, and I thought to myself, Augusta old dear, it's now or never. Since the theme this year is ‘Witchcraft,' what better color than night-sky blue? Thank you, darling,” she said, as Tara unwound her like thread from a spindle.
