Jenny Rose

by Mary Anne Kelly

  The waiter was a self-conscious, hives-prone redhead who was flattered to be talking to Temple Fortune at all. He probably thought Temple was wrinkling up his brow like that because he was considering him for a role. Temple, I knew, was truly intent upon which wine would do.

  “Well, I’ve begun to enjoy myself,” I announced.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You can tell you’ve done well just by looking at you.” I smiled. Or if he hadn’t, I thought quietly, he’d taken quite a bit of care about the quality of his clothes. He’d become snooty, my Temple Fortune had. “Of course,” I combined conversation with my braised celery heart, “in Germany you’d already been the rising foreign film director, so I’m not surprised.”

  “Plenty a those that fall by the wayside, lassie,” he reminded me.

  “Ah, yes, but already you’d worn the prerequisite many-pocketed vest and American ballcap which precludes success.”

  “I was always a great hit in Germany,” he remembered.

  So was I, I thought but didn’t say. We reminisced silently.

  “Ah, there’d been so much money, then.” He joined me in the antipasto. “We both had the added attraction of being foreign even to the foreign place we were.”

  “Here in your own country you still stand out, Temple,” I quickly assured him. “Only now you look like the BBC’s idea of the country squire. Such elegant Irish tweed!”

  He fingered his sleeve lovingly. “It’s Donegal,” he said.

  I felt a little bit shy teasing him about it, because he really was sincere. He’d caught my look, though, and he didn’t take this too well. I sensed he’d lost any sense of humor about his remarkably tasteful duds. Already I was hoping he’d be kind enough not to indicate I’d lost mine about loose-fitting clothes.

  “My work was the issue, then as now”—he frowned—“not my clothes, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I never meant to suggest your work wasn’t—”

  “Some people move on to family life and let their work slide while others—”

  “Hold on, bub. I might have put my family first, but I never put my work second. I never let it slide. I just put it on hold while I was raising the future of America.” I said all this with recklessness because, of course, what he’d said was true.

  “Dear me! How quickly one takes umbrage.”

  “‘One’ happens to have thought an awful lot about this very subject.” I held my chin up. “Just because I come from Queens doesn’t mean I’m dead. Queens happens to house the salt of the earth, the immigrant in transition. Maybe I’m secretly working on character sketches more poignant than I ever could in Paris or Vientiane.”

  “Not Vientiane, surely.”

  “Well, all right, not Vientiane.” We smiled at each other, happy again. I relaxed and looked around the room. “You know, every move we make will no doubt be reported back to Bally Cashin.”

  He winced in agreement.

  “I hate that. I know Aunt Bridey is unduly crisp, but I feel for her, I really do. She reminds me of that sister of Lazarus, Martha, who was so miffed about doing all the schlepping and preparations and then along comes this other one, the sister Mary, the good-time girl, who perfumes Christ’s feet and winds up getting all the credit. Poor Martha gets the insult to injury with Jesus telling everyone Mary had chosen the better part. Well, sure she did but who knew that’s how the Boss would feel?”

  “Especially after all those humorless instructions in the Old Testament,” Temple agreed. “Or what about the parable where the brother of the Prodigal Son … the one who was good as gold all those years and then the gambling, boozing brother shows up and the besotted father whips out the fatted calf in honor of his return.”

  “Exactly. It just seems a no-win situation to be in. All you could do is nod and dodder humbly from the corner. Anything else and you had God Himself calling you a bad sport. Poor old Aunt Bridey.”

  “You know there’s an article in the Sun about the mixup. ‘Corpse Switch Staggers Irish Town’ is the headline.”

  “Who’s responsible for that one, your friend Tobias?”

  “Tobias just handles the camera,” he said loyally. “They surely must have paid your aunt for the story.”

  “Or my cousin Bernadette.” I seethed. We’d ordered the lobster. They would soon be here. Meanwhile we were nibbling on prawn dumplings and butter lettuce with crumbles of gorganzola. The waiter had been enthusiastic about the oysters but, “I don’t eat bivalves,” Temple had raised one hand in the air and announced.

  I couldn’t help admiring the plain fish at the other tables. Haddock. And what was that beautiful sauce? I wriggled my nose like a rabbit. Gruyere. Mmm. And zucchini croquettes. Someone had crabcakes. I sighed. Would I never be content with what I had? This was my fondest wish here, coming true, I reminded myself. Was scoping out the other diners’ meals all I could do? The waiter appeared beside us. The cork popped out and the bottle fumed. Temple had chosen a ’94 Chardonnay Cotes de Duras.

  “So,” he said teasingly, “are you loving the land of your forefathers then?”

  “Yes, and I’m ashamed of myself that I never made an effort to come here before this. I feel as though I’ve been everywhere else. I really believed my not coming here was somehow mixed up with my being virtuous, because you were here,” I rattled on. “I thought I was supposed to do the ‘right’ thing and stay away. Now I find out that my own family members have been subtly putting me off coming here for years. Since even before I met you.”

  “How would they do that?”

  “Just the way they painted this place! ‘So boring you’d die before you woke up.’ ‘So rainy there are fish in the vasty meadow.’”

  “Well, with such goings-on…”

  “What? You mean the accident?”

  “I mean your aunt being gay. I’m sure your mother wasn’t proud of that fact.”

  I sighed. “You’re very right about that.”

  “You know,” he said gently. “In those days, in her era, that was something no one talked about openly. Certainly not here.”

  “But that’s only part of it. You won’t believe the intrigue going on within my own family!”

  Temple, always interested in intrigue but less in my family, gazed tipsily at the sailboats bobbing across the street in the bay. Suddenly, he put down his glass. “Isn’t that someone you know?”

  I turned to look out the window. “Oh, no!” I groaned.

  There at the window, drooling and grinning at us, was Seamus. “I’ll go out,” I said, but just as I said it, he came in. He wore overalls and wet black boots. No sweater for Seamus. You’d have thought it was the middle of summer, to look at him. He was so delighted to see me I didn’t have the heart to send him away.

  “Sit down, Seamus.” I patted the chair beside me. I could see Temple’s put-out face. You couldn’t blame him. This was the moment to precede the moment we’d both waited for for so long. But Seamus was here now. He’d probably make more of a scene if I sent him away. And, anyway, I supposed, he was my friend. “Where’s your sweater, Seamus?” I asked, hoping to instigate a joke.

  “Weather’s changing,” he said in his mother’s wobbling voice. “African wind.”

  Temple didn’t know how to take this. His fork remained in midair for what I was beginning to think was a theatrically rude amount of time.

  I ordered Seamus a dish of strawberries. He would enjoy them and they wouldn’t take that long to eat. “How’s your mother now, Seamus? Feeling better?”

  “Och, it’s that pain in me limbs.” His hurt eyes rounded into an incredible grimace of his mother’s.

  Temple had entirely stopped eating now. He was furious. I thought he should at least enjoy the histrionic aspects. But Seamus was like a big, overgrown child and people who don’t have children themselves are often frightened by what they might do. When you have your own, you can throw back your head and laugh, because you’ve already been cracked open, I guess, and
what could be worse? But I remember what it was like. “Aw.” I reached over and rubbed Seamus’s back a little bit the way I’d seen Jenny Rose do to Mrs. Wooly. He put his big head to one side and panted, happy as a puppy. Suddenly he remembered something and sat up and cleared his throat and said, in his own voice, which was a sort of ra-ta-tat rum-pum-pump, “Willy Murphy called Father Early at the rectory and he said yes, he’d come and bless the race and Jenny Rose said could we have the monstrance the way they had it at the sodality parade but Father Early said no he didn’t think they could. It wouldn’t be right, he said, because it wasn’t a feast day.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Never mind. God will be with us.”

  Seamus hit the table with a crashing fist. Everything clattered. “That’s just what Jenny Rose said!” he cried, then smiled his toothless grin. “Let’s go to me mother’s,” he invited me, turning a shoulder to Temple.

  “Not just yet,” I said. The strawberries arrived smothered in thick, fresh cream. I think they were afraid to keep Seamus waiting.

  “What do you think about that, Seamus?” I said. That would keep him busy.

  I asked Temple about the film, the way you will with sulky children to distract them with something they like. Grudgingly, he started to tell me about the complications, ignoring Seamus totally, how frustrating it was to wait for the sea to calm down so they could wind up shooting. I didn’t understand too much about his film, something moody and inspirational about the end of the healthy atmosphere as we knew it and I hate things like that. I mean I do my bit, I recycle, wash out my tin cans, tie up my newspapers, separate the color from the newsprint, pay the extra wad for the dye-free, environmentally safe detergent, squash the plastic containers, lug the whole heavy mess out in pails but please don’t tell me the world is about to end and we’ll all be wearing gas masks, I just cannot take it, I was thinking, so I was a little taken aback when he said, “It’s a turn-of-the-century film.”

  Seamus tugged on my sleeve. “The ferry’s on its way,” he whispered.

  “Good. Does that mean you’d like to go watch it come in?”

  Seamus jiggled up and down in his seat.

  “Go on, kiddo. Be careful.”

  He clattered out, upsetting the stride of the slender waiter. Several diners looked up, annoyed. Seamus was such an unfashionable fellow.

  Temple was shaking his head, smiling. “Claire. You are wonderful.”

  “Oh, sure, now he’s gone, I’m wonderful.”

  “Before I interrupted myself”—he laughed charmingly—“you were about to tell me what you were thinking.” He took my hand across the table. His was smaller than I’d remembered it. The restaurant was so filled with sunlight it was a shock. We’d always spoken in darkness, met in darkness. Or so it seemed. Now here we were in the midst of all these people. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  I said, “I was just thinking. You really weren’t as crazy about me as I was about you all these years, were you?”

  “The truth?”

  “Please.”

  “You’ve got me so hot, I don’t know if I’m coming or going.” I don’t think he was sober, because quite a few people turned to look at us.

  “No, I know, I mean, I know you feel like it now. I just mean it wasn’t the Taj Mahal all along for you, was it?” Now why had I said that? I hadn’t meant to use Johnny’s term.

  The lobsters arrived. I love the claws. He cracked the first one open. With a voluptuous click, the flesh slipped out. He dunked it into the mouth-watering sauce and brought it to my lips. I’ll never forget that first taste. “Wow,” I said, and should have left it at that but I never learn, I just have to say what’s on my mind. “What I meant to say was, I was not your every waking thought. I’m not saying this right.”

  “You are. You’re saying it exactly right.” He sucked on his other claw. “You mean did I always think of you when a song came on, when the stars would shine.” He grinned mischievously.

  I looked at him. God, he was beautiful. “No.” I smiled. “I meant was I there when you washed your face?” I knew I sounded piddling, but I couldn’t stop. “When you’d find yourself alone, was I there?”

  He took the back of two fingers and grazed them over my cheek. “Can you come upstairs, take off your clothes and I’ll show you what I think of you.”

  I must have an errogenous zone right there because several parts of me began to throb. I turned away. “I know you’ll think I’m a terrible tease, but I can’t now. I promised my aunt I’d go there at dark.”

  “What for?”

  “For supper.”

  We both burst out laughing. “Well, to show my face, anyway.”

  “When, then?”

  “I … later. I’ll meet you later. Just not in Skibbereen. I don’t want my aunt to be shamed. I’ll come here.”

  “Christ, you sound like a local girl.”

  “I do? Much practice finding that out?”

  He stopped. “Yeah.”

  “Ah.”

  “Am I supposed to feel guilty?”

  “I thought you might, just a little. To please me.”

  He reached under the table and put his hand behind my knee. He held it, like he was weighing some London broil, and looked into my eyes. My foot left the floor. “I’ll please you,” he promised.

  “It’s awfully warm in here,” I said.

  “You’ve always been for me,” he went on, “the moon through the trees.” It was a romantic thing to say. Still, he’d said it mockingly, as though he were making fun of me, and I didn’t know where to look.

  It took a long time to have the check brought over. Then there was some difficulty about our not staying to try the pride of Ireland desserts. Finally, vowing to return another time, we left the restaurant.

  Outside, the air was salty and fresh. There was no wind and I just wrapped my sweater around my waist, leaving my arms to enjoy the warm air. He took me over to the sloops and dinghys. They sloshed and rocked against the low tide. It was June and five o’clock, the light yellow as butter. Everything I’d dreamed of for the last five years was now wrapped up in Donegal tweed right before me. He took my hand and I tried not to feel silly about mine being so big in his. There was no one around over here on the other side of the boats. He drew me against the largest sloop and started kissing my neck. I hate to say it but the white wine on his breath was stale. And my foot kept catching on that chrome wing where you attach the anchor rope. The moor. I suppose I’d imagined all this happening in the moonlight, in the fairy circle. He was so different from the way I’d imagined him in my fantasies. It was like I had to put the ghost of my thoughts on top of him so they’d dissolve into the reality of his true outline. Like one icon over the other on the computer. “Watch out,” I said, “here comes Seamus with a bouquet of flowers!”

  Temple held me behind the bulwark. Seamus marched along, his tubby middle thrust out before him like a basketball, the flowers before that. “We ought to talk to him,” I suggested but Temple balked.

  A family of boaters straggled past us, laughing, and we left as well. We walked past the restaurants on the waterfront and up the steep hill toward the tiny Hotel Algiers where he was staying. It looked across at the castle ruins. I saw myself climbing from Temple’s white bed and looking out that window. Looking at those ruins. I didn’t want to say no to holding his hand again so I busied myself adjusting my hair. “I’m not coming up,” I said desperately, when we turned the corner.

  He just closed his eyes.

  I don’t know why but I felt relieved.

  “Just for a minute.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know.

  “You are always interrupting our affair with your family!” he cried. I had no doubt he was hurt, because of the vehemence with which he spoke, but if he had said I was always interrupting our love, everything might have been different. I might have stayed right there right th
en and rolled with him, as they say, in the hay.

  “Okay,” he said, easygoing, used to the quirks of women. “I’ll meet you back here. We’ll do it later.”

  It? I thought.

  “Come on,” he said, suddenly in a hurry. “I’ll find a taxi.”

  “No,” I insisted. “Let me take the bus back. Look, it’s already taking passengers down the hill.”

  “They’ve just come in from Sharkin Island,” he agreed.

  The bus wagged its way the short distance up the hill and stopped for us. Temple walked onto the bus with me and paid the little fare. The way he pressed those coins into the hand of the driver, so carefully, concerned that they might fall to the floor, it endeared him to me all over again. How poor he must have been when he was small, I thought. He then went down the couple of steps and walked to the side of the hill to watch me off.

  I turned around, expecting Miss Fiona Ferry and was surprised when she wasn’t there. “Oh, she’s gone to confession,” the driver told me, without my asking, “over in Bantry.” Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy was in the same seat across from me, though, I noticed with surprise when I sat down in the second aisle seat. I nodded politely and was amused to see her chin go up. She lowered her eyes and bowed her head, the bishop acknowledging the bellowing crowds. I had my own things to think about and slid over to my window seat. I didn’t give her another thought until we both got off at the Trinity Lanes. She struggled with her clumsy assortment of parcels and a huge plastic bag of fish. She kept looking around and down the road for someone to come help her. The thing is, you find yourself standing there at a bus stop with this old lady who obviously can’t manage and try as you might to bolt, your mother’s voice appears from nowhere and you hear yourself being her good little girl. “Someone coming to meet you?” I said.

  “Evidently not.”

  “Oh.” I’m always left defenseless in the face of rudeness. “May I help you with that?” I was ashamed to hear myself say.

  “Well.” She looked me over doubtfully. “You might carry the fish.”

  I’d never been up the third walk. It was an uncomfortable journey with the new clogs I’d bought in Skibbereen and my instep is too high for any new shoes for any length of time. Then the fish would slither around however you moved your grip.