by Luanne Rice
“He’s really coming home,” Agnes said.
But Regis didn’t reply. She just lingered, her hand on their father’s picture as if it were more real than her sister’s words, then smiled at her sisters and left the room.
Five
Honor felt a shiver in her body and a charge in the air, almost as if the seasons were changing and fall was crackling down from the north. But it was late summer, with heat rising from the grass and rocks; the water was calm and the sky a cloudless blue. Doing the breakfast dishes at the kitchen window, she saw Regis stepping out the side door.
“Regis,” she called. “I want to talk to you.”
“Peter’s coming by for ten minutes before I have to do my library job—can’t we talk later?”
“Come on, Regis. It won’t take long.”
Honor watched her stiffen, give a dark glance, and reluctantly come toward the kitchen door.
“What is it?” Regis asked.
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” Honor said. “About your father’s letter. Just you and me, without the other girls.”
“Why?”
Honor took a breath. This was their own private Sahara—conversations about John. It was arid and treeless and unutterably vast, and they’d never once managed to cross it safely.
“Because I want to know how you are.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Regis said.
“Regis, talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say? He’s finally coming home, and I can’t wait. Can you?”
“Never mind me. You’re the one…”
“What? I’m the one who’s responsible for him going to jail? I know, Mom.”
“That’s not what I was going to say!” Honor exhaled. How could Regis always get under her skin so fast? “I mean that you’re the one I’m concerned about. I know you’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. I just want you to…”
Regis looked over at her, listening intently, and at that moment Honor lost the courage to say what she’d wanted to say: that she just wanted Regis not to get her hopes up.
“What, Mom?”
“Do you think we should make an appointment with Dr. Corry?” Honor asked.
“I don’t need any more therapy,” Regis said. “I’m totally well adjusted now. I haven’t dived into Devil’s Hole in three years, I haven’t scaled the chapel steeple in at least four, I kept my promise about not swimming to North Brother again, and I’m getting married.”
“Regis, I’m not sure that belongs in the plus column.”
“What are you talking about?” Regis asked, outraged.
“Darling, you’re so young. That’s all I’m saying. Why don’t you let me make an appointment with Dr. Corry, and you can—”
“Just because you don’t want to be married anymore doesn’t mean everyone feels that way, and it doesn’t mean I need to go back to a shrink!”
“Regis, honey—”
“One thing about Dad going to jail—it made things easier in a way. You didn’t have to kick him out.”
Honor took a deep breath. Regis was gazing at her, begging to be contradicted. She veered back and forth between seeing her parents’ love as idyllic and seeing it as doomed.
“On the other hand,” Regis continued, although her mother hadn’t said a word, “you’ve seemed more charged up about painting again.”
Honor’s heart kicked over. She hadn’t thought anyone knew. Art had become a job. Something to teach. Her own work had felt so stale…. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve started something new. It feels good.”
Regis grinned. “He inspires you,” she said. “And the other way round. You’re both artists. You could never live without each other.”
Honor looked away. Regis had hit a nerve. Her daughter couldn’t know that Honor’s love for John made almost any other love look shallow and small. She had loved him with everything she had. For good and bad, he was the most passionate man on earth, and the idea of him coming home had unleashed a flood of ideas she wanted to explore on canvas.
“Just don’t hold it against him anymore,” Regis said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know. My being on the cliff. That was my fault, not his.”
“You were fourteen,” Honor said.
“I know! I was old enough to take care of myself. So don’t blame Dad for anything. It was my responsibility….”
“Tell me that after you have kids,” Honor said.
“I will,” Regis said. “I hope it’s soon.”
Honor wanted not to take the bait. She really did, so badly she dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. But she couldn’t help herself—Regis was so single-minded, and once she got an idea in her head, it was all over.
“That would be a very big mistake,” Honor said. “As a matter of fact, I think you should postpone your plans to get married. October is coming up so soon….”
“That’s the point! You know that Peter and I are in love, and you know that we’ve been together forever, and you know that I believe in love more than anything in the world—so why are you giving me such a hard time?”
“Because you haven’t thought it through. Because…” Honor trailed off, not knowing how to put into words the fact she worried that Regis was operating from fear, from a compulsion she didn’t understand.
“Mom, if you’re trying to talk me out of marrying Peter, or into waiting till we graduate or something like that—forget it. We want to get married and be each other’s family. Have kids and be happy together. And now that Dad will be here, he can give me away!”
“This is such a big event in your life, Regis, and you’re so young. How can you be talking about kids when you haven’t even finished growing up yourself?”
“I am grown up!” Regis said, her voice rising dangerously.
“I know,” Honor said quickly, going for a different tack. “I know you are. Twenty just seems so young to me. Honey, you’re the oldest daughter; your sisters look up to you so much. I wish you would just take a little time, to be sure of yourself and what you want. Wouldn’t you want that for Agnes and Cece?”
“I’d want them to fall madly in love and feel what I feel for Peter.”
“I’m not trying to say you don’t love Peter,” Honor said.
“Then why shouldn’t I marry him?”
“Because you don’t always know what you want at twenty. You think you do—”
“You knew. You loved Dad.”
“But I didn’t marry him until we were older—”
“But you knew. And you were together—you only waited because things were more conventional back then.”
Honor winced at the word “conventional.” “We waited until after graduation, and until your father saw that he could make a living. He’d chosen to be an artist, and even with my teaching job he thought it would be irresponsible to just get married and start a family without knowing he could afford it.”
“Peter is responsible!”
“He’s a college student.” Honor spoke slowly, knowing that she had to be careful. “I know he works part-time at the golf course, but his parents are supporting him now. You have two jobs, and he works part-time. What will happen after you’re married?”
“He’ll get a better job! Of course he will. We both will!” Regis exhaled, paced around the kitchen. “You and Dad struggled when you were first married. I remember all the stories about you cleaning houses before you started teaching, and him trying to sell his photographs, having to take school photos and pictures of kids with Santa at the mall.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Honor said. Had she and John romanticized their starving-artist years to the kids? Even as she wondered, she felt a sharp longing for those days, when they had lived on bread and cheese and wild grapes and apples, when they had been living for their dreams and shooting for the stars.
“No, but you loved each other and believed in each other,” Regis said. “Like Peter and I do.”
/> Honor reached for Regis’s hand. To her surprise, she let her hold it, and their eyes met and locked. “Your father and I wanted to live as artists. We knew that, and it drove us. That’s what made it possible to know what we wanted, and what we had to do.” She held herself back from saying that she had almost given up on making real art while John’s had flourished. “Do you and Peter know what you want?”
Regis stared into her mother’s eyes for a long moment, and Honor had one of those startling senses of disbelief, seeing the baby Regis had been, suddenly watching her grow up here and now.
“Each other,” Regis said. “That’s what we want.” She eased her hand away, kissed Honor’s cheek, and walked out the door. Peter was waiting in the driveway; Honor watched Regis run toward his car and climb in. She saw him lean over to kiss her, watched Regis throw herself across the gearshift for closer contact. They held each other in the driveway for a long time. Then Peter shifted, and they drove away.
Honor leaned out the window to see them go. Her body hurt, watching her daughter’s passion for her boyfriend. It wasn’t so much because she disapproved, but because she remembered being twenty. She remembered having that kind of love for John.
Abandoning the sink filled with dishes, she walked into her studio. Her fingertips tingled, wanting to paint. Sisela was curled up on the window seat, one paw over her eyes. Sunlight slanted in, turning the old cat bright white. Honor paused, her heart in her throat. For a second, she’d thought Sisela looked like the kitten she’d been when she and John had found her in the stone wall.
Regis had been a tiny girl, just learning how to walk. They’d been on a painting excursion and picnic in the vineyard. Both John and Honor had brought their easels and paints, with paper and crayons for Regis. Suddenly they’d heard a sound, and there was the little kitten—all alone, just sitting on a flat stone as if she was waiting for them. John had gone to her, and the kitten had practically jumped into his arms, meowing with hunger.
“She’s starving,” John had said.
Honor had rummaged through the picnic basket, broken off a tiny piece of smoked salmon, held it out; the cat ate, mewing for more.
“Kitty cat,” John had said, holding her out for Regis to touch.
“Kee-cah,” Regis had tried to imitate.
“That’s right, sweetheart,” John had said, delighted, as always, with everything Regis did. “Kee-cah.”
“Sisela,” Regis said then, trying to hold the kitten.
“Where does that come from?” Honor asked, like John taken with the wonder in Regis’s eyes, her joy at seeing the kitten.
“I have no idea,” John said.
And it wasn’t until later, when they were walking home along the path that led past the nuns’ enclosure, that Regis laughed, pointing at Bernie in her black habit standing among a group of novices, looking like apprentice angels in their all-white habits and veils, saying of them “Sisela!”
“Sisters,” John translated, gazing from their bright child to the tiny white cat, her head poking out from the crook of Regis’s elbow.
“She named the kitten after Bernie,” Honor said, reaching for Regis’s hand. Her father was carrying her, and Regis was holding Sisela.
“And the young nuns,” Honor said, looking over at them.
Now, nearly nineteen years later, Sisela lay curled up in the sunlight. She was a constant reminder to Honor of those old, precious days—for a long time after John’s arrest, Honor was barely able to look at the cat. She still ached to say her name—it reminded her too much of that day when the three of them had been together, so purely happy.
“Oh, Sisela,” Honor said now, petting the cat. She purred, stretching her neck so Honor could tickle the spot under her neck.
After a minute, Honor walked over to the sideboard and opened a cabinet door. Pushed deep inside was an old paint case. It had belonged to John—she had given it to him when they were Regis’s age, and he had been using it that day when they’d found Sisela.
John had left it behind—not just physically, but spiritually—when he’d given up painting entirely for photographs. Honor sometimes opened it, smelled the oil paints and linseed oil, remembered the days when they’d gone to the beach to paint and swim, where they could be all alone.
He had kept some of her notes inside. She pulled one out now, read it:
Oh cute boy,
Really intriguing new images. I am as ever impressed with your fluidity, use of color, and integration of emotion. What made you decide to do a stone wall series? There are stories to be told in your pictures, that’s for sure. Mysteries of the Connecticut River, mysteries of Long Island Sound. Mysteries of Ireland.
I was interested in the exchange with your mother. I’m glad she’s inquiring about “the artwork.” I put the words in quotations, because that makes it sound like a hobby—which I know it isn’t. It’s only your lifeblood. Asking you how the artwork is going is a little like asking someone else if they still have red and white blood cells and platelets. It’s a little like asking whether you’ve exsanguinated lately.
Her eyes filled with tears, and the words blurred. She wanted to read it over again, but she couldn’t. John’s mother hadn’t approved of his becoming an artist; his father had been ashamed of the fact that he hadn’t wanted to go into sales, join the family business. Honor remembered laughing with John, knowing that his parents could never understand anything as impractical as art. If work didn’t make money right away, what was the point of doing it?
His work had never been about money, even though he had become very successful. John’s art never originated outside himself; he didn’t rely on his eye, like other artists. He had such darkness inside; it informed his work, and he’d been edging toward it for such a long time.
Of all the things John had found in the box hidden in the stone wall, the one that had fired his imagination most had been the ticket stub from the passenger ship leaving Cobh for New York. He had pictured his ancestors starving to death in West Cork, the terrible conditions that had driven them to emigrate. Fired by Tom’s revolutionary leanings, haunted by his family’s suffering, he needed to explore the same things they had—the emotional loss, the leaving home, the quest, the exile.
In that, he had succeeded.
John and Tom had found the box on a hot summer morning, clearing the field so the nuns could plant their vineyard. It was years before Sisela. The children weren’t born yet. John and Honor weren’t married. Bernie wasn’t yet a nun, hadn’t told anyone but Honor about thoughts she’d been having about entering the convent.
She and Honor had spread out a blanket in the shade, and Honor was helping her paint a watercolor. Clearing the top two feet of soil in a meadow atop glacial moraine was grueling, backbreaking work—John was hot and sweaty. He had thrown his T-shirt over a tree branch as he used a pickax and dug with his hands, pulling rocks from the earth, throwing them into a pile.
Bernie had gazed proudly as her brother stopped digging and started to pile the rocks into a pyramid. Then he’d pulled fallen pine boughs from the edge of the woods, made a triangle around the rocks. To Honor, it had looked primal, symbolic, filled with the power of the earth and forest. After a while he came over to get his camera, and Honor and Bernie followed him back to watch him take pictures.
“Jesus Christ, the nuns are never going to get their grapes planted if you don’t knock that off,” Tom said, wiping the sweat off the back of his neck.
“Nuns making wine,” Bernie said. “Do you think they drink it?”
“Your ancestors would roll in their graves to see him making art out of goddamn rocks,” Tom said.
“I think they’d understand he has it in his blood,” Bernie said.
“These rocks were the bane of their field-clearing, wall-building existences, and here he is making extra work. Know how I see it?”
“How?” John asked, setting up another shot.
“You’re making it twice as hard. We dig the stone
s out of the earth, you do your Picasso thing, and now we have to cart the rocks all the way over to the walls, and somehow manage to make them look as if they’ve been there forever.”
“You’re the new generation of stonemasons,” John said, laughing. “You gave up the family bank account to do this shit, so why don’t you show us how it’s done?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’d like to do—”
“Tear down my masterpiece?” John asked.
“Damn right,” Tom said.
They started jostling, as if about to start a fight, but John pushed him away. “There’s only one place to bury the hatchet,” John said, laughing.
“And that’s right between the eyes,” Tom said, laughing harder, the two friends teasing as they had since they’d first met. “Come on, let’s knock down that eyesore and get to work.”
“Fine, you’re on,” John said.
“Really?” Tom asked, sounding surprised. “But you just built it—I was just kidding.”
“He sculpts from nature,” Honor said.
“And nothing in nature is permanent,” John said, reaching out to tear the stones down, throw them into the wheelbarrow. They clanged against the metal and each other. Something in his willingness to destroy what he had just created seemed to shock Tom, but Honor was beginning to know John’s work style, how he took his inspiration from what was ephemeral and wild.
“Okay, so you can handle the abstract,” Tom said. “Now let’s see you pile these rocks onto those walls, and make them look right.”
“You’re the rich boy. I’m descended from the best wall builders in Ireland,” John said. “I think I can handle it.”
“Put your money where your mouth is, Sullivan.”
Bernie smiled, watching them. Strands of her copper-colored hair slipped out from under her sunhat, glinting in the sunlight. Honor glanced over, noticing how Bernie couldn’t take her eyes off Tom. Because the attraction between them had always been so obvious, John said he bet Bernie and Tom would be engaged by Christmas. But Bernie had confided in Honor the terrible conflict she felt—she loved Tom, but she’d been feeling a deep calling, something she couldn’t ignore, to become a Sister of Notre Dame des Victoires. Honor had held back, keeping the secret Bernie had made her promise not to tell.
