Twillyweed

by Mary Anne Kelly

  He gave me a screwy look and I realized he might think me nuts. Well, I am nuts.

  And I remembered I must go find my car. But on the floor a box moved. I think we both jumped. It moved again. Both of us half expecting a rat, Morgan stretched a long leg out and lifted the milk crate cautiously with his toe. It was a leggy kitten, milky gray and cowering.

  “Oh, the poor thing!” I cried, kneeling down to pick it up.

  “A stowaway!” He laughed.

  “How long has it been here, do you think?”

  He leaned over and I caught his scent, salt and canvas and leather. “I’ve no idea. My mother had a cat. Yellow eyes just like hers. But she went missing just before Mother died. For a moment I thought it might be her, but her Weedy was a hefty size.”

  “Ooh,” I crooned and carried it over to the sink. “It’s scared to death!” She just stood there blinking her yellow eyes, shaking her head with outrage. I cupped some water into my palm and held it to her. At last she figured it out and took it, lapping at it with her little pink tongue. I knew I still had the deli paper my sandwich had come in. I’m not one to litter and any small animal could probably live for days on the entrails of snacks in my purse. I opened the white, waxed crumple of paper and scraped the cheese shreds and offered them to her. Very daintily she sniffed them. Surprised, she looked at me as if to sum up my trustworthiness, then nibbled at it skeptically. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a cat talk. But the little nipper let out something between a yowl of complaint and a sigh of relief. It was the same groaning sound we’d heard when we came in. Mystery solved, I thought. No ghost. I can’t stand cats. I really can’t. I don’t like their torturing ways with mice and birds. But I picked her up into the curve of my arm and she didn’t try to jump away. She sunk in compliantly, no doubt exhausted from trying to right the milk crate. I stroked her back with a knuckle. Pure velvet. She turned over on it and looked right at me as if to say A little to the left, please. I could feel her ragged breath through the skin. I looked up at Morgan, standing there with his straight face, his arms barricaded across his chest. He shook his head, charmed, despite himself. “Well, you can’t leave now,” he said in his gruff way. “Who’s going to feed the cat?”

  I became aware that I was alone in a house with a man. Suddenly unsure, I asked him, “Well, what should I do now? Stay here?”

  He scratched his ear. “I don’t exactly see how you can. It’s such a mess.”

  I shrugged. “Now or tomorrow. No reason for me not to start right in.” I scrunched down on my haunches and peeked into the GE. “Do the washer and dryer work?”

  “They should. I had them put in just over a year ago.”

  “Well, that’s good.” I stood up, mentally beginning my list. “I’ll drive to a store and buy some new sheets. I can’t bear someone else’s. Oh! I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “I’m not that sensitive. And neither was she. At least … not when she was well. She’d have been the first to see you set up right.” He hesitated, giving me a quizzical look. “But wouldn’t you like to get yourself some new, uh … duds?”

  I stood, self-consciously backing my rear against the wall. “New clothes. Right. That’s just what I’ll do. Because I simply don’t have the courage to go back home and face Enoch.”

  “Enoch?”

  I tried to laugh. “You know, my gay fiancé.”

  This time he didn’t laugh. He shrugged his leather jacket off and rubbed the dirt from his hands. He put them under the faucet in the sink and lathered them with dish detergent. I don’t know why I stood there staring at his hands, the workman’s veins like ropes climbing his forearms, so able and alive, but he looked up suddenly and caught me looking at them with a stupid look on my face. They were beautiful, his hands. Luckily, heartbroken, I was immune to his charms. But evidently I wasn’t blind to beauty. That I never was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a way that he hadn’t spoken to me before. A gentle way. The mocking tone was gone and I felt for this reason worse. He grabbed a dishtowel and dried himself, then put a strong, brotherly hand on my shoulder.

  I was wrong about immunity to men’s charms. I felt his touch right down to my toes.

  “It’s only natural that you’re upset,” he said.

  “You know, you’re a funny guy. I can’t figure you out.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “That’s because I’m all mixed up myself.”

  “You?”

  “When I was in the seminary, I was told—”

  “Hold on,” I interrupted. “You were in the seminary? As in studying for the priesthood?”

  He made a pained face, “That’s it.”

  “Oh” was all I could say, thinking, Aha! That’s why no kids.

  He stood abruptly. “But that’s a story for another day.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it,” I said, meaning it.

  He stood at the open window, looking out reflectively, squinting into the cold light. “Odd,” he remarked at last, “our meeting like this.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We’re both at a crossroads, aren’t we?”

  I tried to smile. “Yes. That’s it exactly. And I’m sorry if I was rude. Hopefully we can help each other out. Shall we start fresh?”

  Again we shook hands. There was the cry of gulls as they swept by just outside the window. What a place! You could hear the waves lapping against the sand. All at once I was so grateful. This sort of opportunity didn’t fall into your lap often. Morgan jammed his hands into his pockets and turned in a circle, looking around the room. “She wasn’t always like this,” he remarked. “It was just this last year … She was always sharp as a tack … then all of a sudden”—he shook his head sadly—“she just went senile. Senile and deaf at practically the same time.”

  I waited.

  “The thing is”—he bit his lip in an effort to stave off emotion—“I really regret losing my temper with her. I didn’t realize at first what was happening. And you had to repeat everything. I know that’s no excuse …” He looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said and I meant it. But he didn’t like anyone being sorry for him, you could tell that right off. He grimaced at his chronometer watch. “That’s it for me. I’ve got to meet the harbormaster in ten minutes. Big regatta coming up.”

  I shut the window and firmed the latch. “Okay,” I said, “so how shall we do this?”

  The shrill of his cell phone cut me off. “Donovan,” he answered. He listened intently to the person at the other end. “Right,” he said, seeming to change his mind about something. Scowling, he hung up. “Well, it seems I’m to dine at Twillyweed this evening. Why don’t you find me there and we can talk about it. I can’t make heads or tails of anything now. I’m too distracted.” He turned abruptly and, becoming the captain again suddenly, ordered, “I’ll expect you no later than sixteen hundred hours. Give you time to see your niece. Will that suit you?”

  I laughed. “Aye, aye. Four o’clock.” I saluted. “Got it.”

  “Now I really must go. Draw up a list of things you’ll want. Oh. You’ll be needing money.” He reached into his pocket.

  Horrified, I pushed his fistful of bills back at him. “Don’t be silly. I have some.”

  “Well, then, keep the receipts and I’ll reimburse you.” He took hold of his leather satchel and went out the door, the screen slamming with a friendly bang. He loped down the path. “Bring the list with you to the Cupsands’.”

  Scooping the kitten up, I followed down the windy path and called after him, “But I don’t even know the Cupsands!”

  “Nobody does.” He laughed with his back to me. “Least of all the Cupsands.”

  When the sun leveled with the horizon, he washed out the gray gloves, his agitated hands inside them. He worked them feverishly, with a mixture of m
ild white soap and fabric softener. It seemed to work. The water ran foamy and clear. He relaxed, leaning on his outstretched arms, his wrists and palms against the old grain sink.

  A job well done.

  He consulted himself inside the broken mirror and was comforted by the conviviality and composure that greeted him there. He winked. He drew his legs up on the bed and rested now, clicking on the TV to watch the news. He liked channel 2.

  Beside him, the gloves lay neatly out to dry—one on top of the other, palms down like hands in repose—away from the heat on a polished table. It was a small, elegant table with feet, each foot holding tightly on to its own mahogany sphere. Each rigid foot had claws painted abalone and verdigris, claws pearly and expectant with their greenish talons.

  Claire

  I stretched and raised my arms above my head to reach the sky and realign my spine. The wind in the boat sheaves wailed and you could just hear the harbor bells clang. If you had to pick a place in which to be miserable, I thought, stepping over the ruins of daffodils—I must locate a broom—you couldn’t find a better one than this, overgrown and mysterious and far away from it all. What better place to sort one’s self out? And things were looking up. Morgan. Good name. He must be just my age. A little older, I thought hopefully. I didn’t see why I should always be the oldest one around. I’m not going to play coy and say it didn’t occur to me that he might not be someone in my future. A friend. A good friend, maybe. When you reach my age, you know right away when someone is interesting to you or not. Well, just wait and see, I reminded myself. A priest! I couldn’t get over it. I hopped over the puddles. On my way back up the path, I noticed the neighbor, Mrs. Dellaverna, hunched over the fig tree wrapped in potato sacking; her iron-gray helmet of hair stayed in perfect chunky waves despite the wind. I put the kitten in my pocket and leaned on Noola Donovan’s creaky lattice gate. “Hi!”

  “Oomph!” She affected a jump. “I didn’t see you there! Was that Morgan?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood back, an apron over her coat, her crafty brown eyes inspecting her hacked-up square of earth, wiping her brow with her forearm. “I’m not planting yet. Just clearing away the dirt for when it gets warm.” She gave an impish shrug. “I can’t wait to get started.” Then she sat back on her broad haunches, up to her knees in boots, her face still smooth for a gardener’s. “Of course”—here she frowned, shaking her head, looking a bit puzzled—“now that Noola’s gone, it will all be different. We used to have a big competition with our flowers.” She rocked in the hard dirt and her little eyes filled with peevishness. “My tomatoes were always better than hers … and my figs.” She sniffed, then, remembering me standing there, she added, “I never told her my secret.” When I didn’t bite, “Anchovies,” she volunteered, making a shrewd face. “That or sardines. Whatever’s on sale. Now that she’s gone it takes all the fun out. Death,” she whispered. “It’s so final.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I wanted to say thank you,” I went on, changing the subject before she ran away with herself, “you know, for mentioning where I could find Mr. Donovan. And to let you know—you won’t believe it—I’ll be staying here for a while!”

  I was sure I detected real disappointment in those nut-brown eyes. But she hoisted herself from the soil and brushed the dirt from her knees, out of breath from the exertion. There was something cold and off-putting about her now, and I wasn’t sure if I should back off. But I introduced myself properly, and we shook hands over the hedge. From my pocket, the kitten gave a hearty mew. “Oh,” I explained, pulling her out. “Someone left her in the cottage.”

  Mrs. Dellaverna’s expression turned to mush. She scooped her away from me, huddling it to her breast. However cold I’d thought her expression, the iciness dissolved at that moment. “Dio! Una gattina. Noola used to have one looked just like her. Weedy. She never came back.” She narrowed her eyes. “It kind of looks like Sam, too—that nasty big boy cat at Twillyweed. Son of a bitch! Eh!” She stroked the kitten, shaking her head suspiciously. “How come you’re going to live in Sea Cliff, eh? I’d like to know.”

  “It’s so funny.” I shrugged. “Everything just fell into place. For some reason it suited us—Morgan Donovan and me—both.”

  “But you’re not going to move in yet?” Mrs. Dellaverna sniffed the air. “Place is too crazy.”

  “I haven’t decided yet what to do. I might have to drive back to Queens tonight and stay at my parents’ house,” I said, thinking out loud. “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re gonna need a team of a cleaning ladies for that place,” Mrs. Dellaverna cautioned.

  “That’s a good idea. Do you know anyone?”

  “There’s Radiance. She does housework. I wouldn’t trust her, though.”

  “Oh? Why not? I’d like someone local.”

  “She’s more interested in the showbiz!” She wiggled her nose with distaste. “I’m from Ischia and I know that type!”

  I shrugged and gave my own tender nose a tentative feel. “If I could have her number …”

  She watched my two black eyes now with interest. It was clear to her they were the traces of the fight she was sure had gone down.

  “Oh, this!” I touched my face. “It’s from falling,” I told her.

  “Sure,” she said too fast, clearly not believing. She could just see the cad who’d beat me and she’d never mention it again because she knew in her heart that was why I was out here in Sea Cliff, running away from a man, un diavolo of a man. She put one hand on a hip and twirled the other wrist in a Mediterranean flourish. “I wouldn’t worry about anything, cara. Claire, is it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Her nose wrinkled, and her voice was thick with understanding. “You were right to come here. Get away. You wouldn’t be the first to look for sanctuary here. I have my friend, Patsy, that shit of a motorcycle-­driving husband, he beat her up good. Eh. She came here and she slept on my sofa. Got a good job now and she’ll never go back. Basta. Don’t you worry.”

  “Hmm. I’m sorry.” I edged away from her tirade. “I was just really hoping to find someone to clean.” And then I thought, Hell, the woman is right. I am here running away from a man, a devil of a man. Suddenly I was exhausted and just wanted to rest.

  Mrs. Dellaverna stood ruminating, inspecting me and sizing me up head to toe. She nodded with a closemouthed smile. “That’s like Morgan to come up with a nice house sitter like you! Out of the blue! Eh?”

  “You know him well, I guess. Living next door and all.”

  “Sure.” She leaned her chin against the handle of the tall wooden hacker with a thick pick of iron. “When he’s not in Scotland, he’s here. Nice little boy he was.”

  “He was in the seminary, he mentioned,” I pushed.

  “Ah! No more.” Her tongue clicked. “Noola, may she rest in peace, she drove him to that.”

  “So he is a priest?”

  She laughed.

  I ventured, “So he isn’t a priest?”

  “Morgan? Dio, no!”

  “Lost his faith, did he?”

  “His faith? Ha! More like he discovered the earthly pleasures.”

  “Oh.”

  “No”—she got rid of her coat—“he never made it that far, to the priesthood. Not that Noola she didn’t try and hound him into it. I shouldn’t speak bad of the dead now, I know. But there was nothing she wanted more than for Morgan to join the priesthood. From the time he was a boy she’d be marching him off to church for one thing or another. First, he had to be a paten boy. Then it was an altar boy. After that he was a—what do you call it?—Eucharistic minister. Nothing wrong with all that, I don’t mean that. But it’s sad, you know, when someone pushes their own ideas onto a child—won’t stand back and let the child find his own way.” She sighed. “Morgan was so heartbroken over the separation, see.”

  “Oh. Hi
s parents were divorced?”

  “Not she!” She gave a snort. “In her mind, you didn’t get divorced. He was from Scotland, the father—they’re Protestants—and she was Irish, the Catholic part. They shared him up, the two of them. Tom couldn’t take her religious ways. Ooh, he hated the Catholic Church! Of course he loved her, he just hated what she was”—she tapped her noggin—“how she thought. Anh. It’s hard to describe.”

  But she didn’t have to. My flamboyant mother, convent educated, clandestinely paying for indulgences; my father, intellectual and conservative, spiritual as she was but scornful and wary of the politics within the church, the secret cover-ups, money changing hands. I knew the wars that went on without words. I knew the anguish it could cause in children. There was no divorce in homes like ours. Misery, even, sometimes. But you stuck it out.

  “He went back to Scotland in the end,” Mrs. Dellaverna confided, leaning comfortably on her pick. “A piccolo village called Invergowrie, that’s outside Dundie, Noola always tells. Morgan spent half his days there and half here; went to school at Edinburgh, near the father. That was the deal. All the way across the sea in Scotland!” She gave a quick look off to the side as if to see if someone could hear. “The poor boy didn’t know if he was coming or going! The only peace he had was taking out that little boat of his. That’s what he loved most, all the time. Any moment he had to himself, if there was just a bit of a wind, you’d see him scoot right down the hill. Ten minutes later his piccolo boat would be shooting out from the cove. That was what Morgan loved. The wind and the sails.”

  “So no divorce …”

  She closed one nostril with her finger. “Uh-uh. She was a veramente catolica and wouldn’t even let the word divorce cross her lips. There’d be none of that. She was Mrs. Donovan until the day she died. Sad, really. I think she always thought one day he’d come back to her. I really do. And here she is dead.” She shook her head.