Sometimes, Iris thought, picking at a loose thread on a pillow, her life read as a catalogue of loss. If that was being self-pitying, then so be it. Someone had to feel bad for her. Besides, she knew she couldn’t bear pity from anyone else. She didn’t deserve it. She had failed her mother in the end and nothing could relieve her from that burden of guilt.
Losing a parent was a very strange thing, Iris had learned. You didn’t know any life without your parent. Life simply had never existed before her. And then . . . life did exist but it was a completely different one. It was an alien life. And for Iris, that alien life had to be lived on an alien stage, one far away from the vivid reminders of what once had been. Reminders like her father. Reminders like Ben.
Iris got up from the couch and went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and stared inside. A few half-empty bottles of condiments. A lone egg. A head of broccoli she had no interest in cooking. She closed the fridge with a sigh of frustration.
Well, at least her father, Robert Karr, hadn’t seemed to mind her defection, she thought now. He had remarried barely a year after his wife’s death. Iris had already gone off to Portland so hadn’t been on hand to—to what? To talk her father out of his mad idea that his first wife could be replaced?
The doorbell rang then, interrupting Iris’s reluctant trip down memory lane.
“Thank God,” she murmured, and hurried to answer it.
Chapter 3
It was Bess, dressed this evening in a floor-length sable coat. It had belonged to the same great-grandmother who had owned the opal ring, but somewhere along the line its care had been neglected. Moths had eaten tiny holes up and down the arms, and areas of fur were oddly flat and dull. Just looking at the coat made Iris feel itchy.
Bess held out a plastic food container. “I brought you some butternut squash soup. Marilyn’s experimenting with a new recipe.”
“Thanks.” Iris said, accepting the gift. “I kind of forgot to go food shopping this week. I was facing peanut butter on pretzels for dinner.”
Bess dropped the sable coat on the closest chair, a high-backed antique monstrosity (her term) upholstered in a pale green fabric printed with big pink cabbage roses. As was her habit she glanced quickly around the rooms. It never failed to puzzle Bess why Iris, the daughter of a famous artist, had none of her mother’s works on display in her home. There were no framed photographs of her mother or of her father, either, nothing on an end table or on the mantel of the fireplace in the living room.
What Bess didn’t know was that Iris did keep a picture of her mother, hidden away in her college copy of The Riverside Shakespeare. It had been taken on the day Bonnie had graduated from art school. It had always been Iris’s favorite picture of her mother, this smiling, hopeful young woman who had no idea of what awaited her in life, good or bad.
Bess also didn’t know that there was no photo of Ben Tresch hidden away in a book, no letters at the bottom of a desk drawer, not one memory in tangible form. Even the antique locket he had given her on their first anniversary was in a box of neglected memorabilia somewhere in Robert Karr’s basement.
“Peanut butter on pretzels?” Bess said, eyebrows rising. “Are you sure you aren’t a guy?”
“Quite sure. A guy would eat the pretzels with ketchup.”
“True. I once caught my older son chowing down on condensed soup right out of the can. He said it was too much of a hassle to add water and stir.”
Iris pretended a look of sympathetic horror. She watched with some amusement as Bess surveyed her surroundings, as if she were seeing them for the first time.
The furniture was a jumble of styles, some distinctly Victorian, like the maroon velvet couch, others Danish modern, with a few slightly awful pieces from the sixties thrown in for fun. The overall atmosphere was one Iris liked to think of as “decayed elegance.” Bess was inclined to describe the contents of Iris’s home as “messy old stuff,” from the mismatched furniture, to the worn velveteen curtains, to the rough rocks and polished stones scattered on pretty much every surface. Perhaps oddly for a professor of poetry, someone almost required by profession to be romantic and sentimental, Bess’s own home was largely furnished with nondescript but clean-lined pieces from IKEA. She preferred, she said, to invest her limited money and vast creative resources in collecting old books and in practicing on her authentic Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo.
Which was one of the things, according to Bess, that had led to her divorce several years back. Frank had demanded Bess not play the instrument in the house. Not everyone, he argued, could tolerate its low-pitched drone without wanting to kill himself. Bess had declared she would play her didgeridoo wherever and whenever she pleased. Frank sold the didgeridoo. Bess filed for divorce, which, in Iris’s opinion, was entirely understandable. You just didn’t sell another person’s stuff without express consent.
Soon after, Bess bought back her beloved instrument and Frank moved to Southern California to take a job at his brother’s plumbing business. (What, Iris wondered, had led him to choose plumbing as a midlife career option, especially after a career in teaching Latin and Greek?) And as soon as their two sons had graduated from college, they had followed in his wake. Not long after learning about Bess’s family situation, Iris had asked her if the boys had rejected her for having rejected their father.
“You throw the nasty reality of a divorce at a teenaged kid,” Bess had explained, “and then you add on top of it the ‘interesting’ information that his mom has changed teams midgame, and let me tell you, there’s bound to be dissatisfaction.”
“But your sons got over the shock?” Iris asked hopefully. “I mean, it’s not as if you left their father for another person. You didn’t meet Marilyn until much later.”
Marilyn Schwartz was a few years younger than Bess. She owned a small and very popular restaurant named Snug on Pine Street in the West End. Marilyn was long divorced from someone whom she once described as “an insult to Neanderthal man.” Iris could only imagine. Perhaps luckily, they had had no children.
Bess had shrugged. “They tell me they’re okay with it all. But they left the East Coast and they never mention Marilyn when we talk. They’ll come around in their own time. Or, they won’t.”
Iris put the tub of soup into the fridge and offered her friend a glass of wine.
“Have I ever said no?”
“There’s always a first time.”
“Not until I’m on my deathbed,” Bess said with a laugh. “And by then, who cares?”
Iris ignored Bess’s careless reference to dying and poured them each a glass of Malbec. They sat at the kitchen table. It was an old pine piece, the only bit of decor with a distinctly country feel to it, but somehow, even Bess admitted that it worked with the “messy old stuff.” Iris had a flair for bringing odd bits together into a coherent whole.
“I think there’s something you’re not telling me about that Ben fellow,” Bess said, after taking an appreciative drink of the wine. “By the way, he’s quite good-looking.”
“Yes,” Iris said, pretending absentmindedness, toying with her glass.
“Yes, there’s something you’re not telling me or yes, he’s good-looking?”
“What? Oh. Uh . . .”
“What’s struck you with a case of the inarticulate?”
“Nothing. I’m just thinking about all I have to do for the holiday season. . . .”
Bess finished her wine and got up from her seat at the table. “I’ll take the hint and get out of here. But you know I’m available to help at your open house. Ring up your massive sales and all.”
Iris laughed. “From your mouth to God’s ears.”
Bess looked at her curiously. “That’s an odd thing for someone who doesn’t believe in God to say.”
“I never said I don’t believe. I just said that I’m not sure.”
“Well, you’re not alone there. I should be off.”
Bess put on the ancient sable and let herself out.
When she was gone, Iris took Marilyn’s soup from the fridge and a spoon from the drawer next to the stove and began to eat the soup cold.
Chapter 4
Iris’s studio was on the tenth floor of a large old brick building on Congress Street just off High Street. Close to forty artists rented space in the building, and more than a handful lived illegally in their studios. From the windows of her studio Iris could see a good deal of the PMA, and in the winter when the trees were bare, if she leaned up against the far most window at a certain angle she could make out the curving back of the Rising Cairn in the museum’s side yard.
The work was by an artist named Celeste Roberge. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture Iris had ever seen. It bothered her that she had no idea what her mother had thought of it. Iris had never asked her.
Iris’s neighbors in the building were a motley crew. Down the hall was a young woman who worked with encaustic and to Iris’s immediate left was a guy who built kinetic sculptures out of discarded pieces of old cast-iron furniture. A woman on the fourth floor specialized in assemblage and on the ninth floor a very popular photographer of children and pets had set up camp. Iris knew these fellow artists as acquaintances but not as friends. That was fine with her.
This late Sunday morning, the fourth of December, found Iris in her studio preparing to work. The room was about three hundred square feet. The bank of windows was the studio’s best feature. They were seven feet tall and ran almost the entire length of the wall facing the street. The other walls of the studio were bare but for some sturdy racks from which Iris had hung tools of her trade.
The room was stocked with the usual things one would find in a jewelry designer’s studio. There were two worktables and various pieces of equipment, from an all-purpose flex shaft (a big machine you worked with a foot pedal), to a mandrel, steel hammers, pumice blocks, and a fan. There were her soldering tools, including an acetylene tank, a torch, and clamps, and the items needed for the steps following, including a tumbler. There was a punch stamp for identifying a piece as authentic sterling silver, and one for adding her initials to a finished piece.
From the largest wall rack hung a variety of metal tongs, including some made of copper, and a collection of pliers, from needle-nose to flathead, to those covered in nylon so as not to gouge silver. Iris didn’t cast her own metal; she bought metal in sheets from a wholesale online source. Coils of round, flat, and square gold, silver, and pewter wire, in a variety of gauges, were neatly piled on one of the tables.
Against the left wall stood an enormous safe—it had been in place when she rented the studio—where Iris housed her stones. She bought the stones, most of them cut and calibrated and many but not all of them polished, from reputable Web sites, as well as at wholesale gem and jewelry shows. On occasion she found wonderful, odd pieces at a store called Stones & Stuff on Congress Street. The owner, Heather, kept an eye out for particular gems she thought might be of interest to Iris, like a stunning fire opal from Mexico, and a faceted chunk of garnet that flashed a burgundy red, reminding Iris of medieval stained glass.
The work of a jewelry designer and crafter might sound glamorous to some, but the reality was it could be very dangerous. It took not only skill but also a fair amount of natural talent and a good dose of sheer luck not to ruin a piece of jewelry in progress, or, worse, to get seriously burned. Mostly, Iris loved every minute of it.
Except this morning she just couldn’t seem to get started and that worried her. She couldn’t afford to be distracted, especially not at this time of the year. What had her mother told her about those times when inspiration just wasn’t visiting? Right. Just go ahead and work. You can always toss the results and start over the next day. The important part was to keep in motion.
From when she was a little girl Iris had loved visiting her mother’s studio. For years Bonnie had rented a space about an hour from their house. Over time, when the daily trip became too wearying, Bonnie had moved her studio closer to home. But then, the marble and wood dust began to exacerbate her already compromised ability to breathe, and eventually, Bonnie had been forced to stop working.
Iris assumed her father had taken care of the contents of Bonnie’s studio after her death. Robert had been Bonnie’s true partner in life, her professional manager, her husband, the father of her child, her friend.
Just as Ben had been Iris’s true partner . . . Iris picked up a short length of silver wire and idly twisted it between her fingers. Ben had always been supportive of her work. He was the academic to her practitioner, the theorist to her craftswoman. They had both gone to Hollander College of Art though Ben was a few years ahead of her and they hadn’t met until Iris was in her senior year.
After college, while Ben was finishing graduate work, Iris had taken a job as an apprentice to a local jewelry designer. After a time she was able to set up her own small workshop in her parents’ basement until, with a loan from her father and a few steady clients, she was finally able to afford a studio in Boston’s arts district. Eventually, she was earning enough to get a tiny apartment in the South End. Ben shared an apartment in Charlestown with a friend from school.
Iris dropped the length of wire onto a table and picked up one of the sketching pencils she preferred. She tapped the pencil on the table as her thoughts turned to Ben’s parents. Hanna and Jim Tresch had supported her burgeoning career as firmly as they had their son’s. Hanna had bought a piece from Iris’s very first complete collection, an eighteen-karat gold pendant set with a cabochon peridot. She had purchased several more pieces over the years and had introduced a few of her friends to Iris’s work. She had even provided the wine and cheese for a few openings, and helped Iris to ring up sales.
Iris dropped the pencil and glanced out at the colorless December sky. She doubted that Mrs. Tresch still wore those bracelets and earrings and pendants she had bought. Not after what Iris had done to her son.
Iris turned from the window, put her hands over her eyes, and pressed her fingers into her forehead. For a brief and insane moment she thought that she might call Ben and . . . And what? Apologize?
Well, she had a lot for which to apologize. Everybody had known that Ben and Iris would marry. They would have. They should have. By leaving Ben, especially in the way that she had, she had destroyed the rightful assumptions of two good families. She had broken a verbal contract. She had betrayed an emotional promise to Ben, her parents, his parents, and finally, to herself.
She hadn’t set out to damage so many lives. If it hadn’t been for that fatal conversation, the conversation no one knew about but for Iris and her mother . . .
A few months before Bonnie had gone into hospice she had asked Iris into her bedroom for a private talk. “I want you to be happy,” Bonnie had said, without preamble. “And it would make me happy, too, to see you and Ben married before I die.”
Iris remembered standing there in shock. Her mother had never, ever mentioned her death. And when the shock had passed, the forces of superstition and avoidance reared their formidable heads.
“I’m not wasting time planning a wedding when you need me,” she had said firmly. “Besides, you’ll be fine, Mom. You’re not dying. You always come through.”
Her mother had begun to protest but Iris had cut her off. “But nothing, Mom. No more talk of dying.”
Iris had practically run from the room and her mother never mentioned a wedding again. And even when Bonnie had gone into hospice, a sure indicator of the impending finality, Iris had refused to believe the evidence staring her right in the face. No matter that death was inevitable. Let the Grim Reaper work alone. Iris would not prepare his way. If there was no wedding, there would be no dying, at least for a long, long time.
It was foolish and delusional thinking. And then, Bonnie hadn’t survived and it was too late for Iris to give her mother that one final gift she had desired.
Iris walked over to the window and looked out at the Rising Cairn, so beautiful in its simp
licity, so monumental and weighty. It consisted of a welded steel grid shaped like an oversized human crouched on one knee on the ground, head bent. Inside the grid the artist had packed rocks collected locally, gray and brown, smooth and round, large and small. Since Iris had first come under its spell she had found herself imagining the figure one day rising from its crouching position and standing tall, its limbs stretched, its head raised to look out at whatever challenge came ahead.
Iris turned away from the window. The day the sculpture rose would be the day she would forgive herself for failing her mother. And that day would never come.
Chapter 5
“Knock, knock.”
Iris looked up to see Alec Todd standing in the open doorway.
“You in?” he asked, loping into the studio, his footsteps loud on the old and slightly bouncy wood floor.
“I guess I am.”
Alec and Iris had dated desultorily for close to two years. The desultory part was her doing. Alec had finally left her because he wanted more of a commitment and found her position on relationships to be frivolous. That was his word, frivolous. Iris had almost laughed the first time he had accused her of this, but out of consideration for his feelings, which were genuine, she had not.
Iris’s former boyfriend was a “brilliant computer guy,” a successful thirty-eight-year-old man wrestling with the spirit of the nerdy eleven-year-old boy he had once been. He was medium height and stocky. His light brown hair was thinning in the classic horseshoe pattern, about which he wasn’t happy because he was a little vain. For some reason Iris couldn’t understand he refused to shave his head, as if clinging to the sad stray strands was any more attractive than a naked skull. He wore funky glasses (his eyesight was awful) and a virtual uniform of jeans, black mock turtlenecks (in honor of Steve Jobs), and black work boots (those even in summer). Once in a while a frayed flannel shirt made an appearance, but only on special occasions, like when one of his favorite bands was playing in town.
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