Ask Again, Yes (32 page)

“Mom,” Kate had said, once they were seated in the car.

“I just don’t like seeing her,” Lena said. “I feel embarrassed for some reason.”

“You have no reason to feel embarrassed. She should be embarrassed.”

“Still.” She shrugged.

“Mom sleeps later than she did when you girls were young,” Francis said now. All of Kate’s life, he seemed to always know when there was something on her mind. She put her bag down by the door and took the mug he offered. He passed the milk in silence.

“Just felt like a visit?” he said. He folded his newspaper into quarters. He was already dressed, had been to the deli. He had an empty sheet of wax paper in front of him, another wrapped around a buttered roll on the counter, waiting for Lena.

“Yeah, haven’t been home in a little while.”

“Well, you’re busy. How’s work?”

He knew, she realized. She didn’t know how, but he did. She listened for her mother’s footsteps on the stairs but the house was silent. The space heater hummed lightly in the corner by the stove.

“I need to ask you a favor,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Peter is applying to the police academy.”

Francis was silent for a beat. “Peter Stanhope.”

“Yes. That Peter.”

Francis studied her with a blank expression.

“Anyway. He hasn’t heard whether he’s eligible yet, but it’s been longer than usual, and a few things came up in his interview.”

“And in his psych exam,” Francis said.

Kate felt every part of her body go still.

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes, of course he told me, but they may have only said that to rattle him.”

“No, it’s true. A few little things. Minor. But combined with his family history it’s troubling.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have a friend. He called to let me know, asked what I thought.”

Kate stared at him over her tea.

“What did you say?”

“Is that the favor? To put a good word in for him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants to be a police officer and he’d be a very good one. And because I love him and one day probably pretty soon we’re going to get married.”

Finally, Francis sighed, pushed back from the table. “You’re throwing your life away,” he said.

She put down her mug just as neatly as he had, and pointed out that it was her life. Besides, was he in a position to lecture about throwing one’s life away? It was only because of Lena’s forgiving nature that he was even sitting there right now, in front of her.

Francis let that pass over him.

“You think a person comes out of a house like that undamaged? You don’t see it now, Kate, but it’s there. I promise you. Marriage is long. All the seams get tested.”

“Well, you would know, right?” Kate said,

Francis gave her a warning look. She looked right back.

“Why him?”

“Because I love him.”

“Love isn’t enough. Not even close.”

“It is for me. Him, too.”

Francis smiled but there was no light in it. “You don’t have the first clue what you’re talking about.”

Kate stayed exactly where she was and tried not to react. How dare he of all people tell her what love was. Along the windowsill was a row of jam jars stuffed with dirt and seedlings. Francis stood and Kate saw that his jeans hung from his hips. Even his shoulders seemed narrower than they used to. He had crumbs down the front of his shirt. She wondered, as she did once in a great while, why he’d never returned to Ireland, why he’d never brought them there, how it was possible he’d lived a whole life before she was even born. She’d always felt sort of sad for him, leaving his parents forever when he was still so young, but now she saw how much freedom that had given him, with no one hovering on the sidelines telling him what to do.

“You can be against it, Dad, but it’s happening. I love him. You can be a part of our lives or not, it’s up to you. He can stay on with the ironworkers, or he can go to law school, or he can do something else. He wants to be a cop, but the truth is that I don’t care if he ends up digging ditches.”

Francis sighed. He got the ice tray out of the fridge and cracked it by twisting. One by one he removed cubes and dropped them into the jam jars. When he finished he remained facing the window.

“I told them to go ahead and put him on the list for the next class. I told them he was a good boy, a good student, though his parents were trouble. I told them I had no problem with it.”

Kate stood so quickly that her chair tipped backward and clattered to the floor.

“I told them none of it was his fault, what happened that night. I told them that he’d gone on to do well in school and all that. What you told me that time, when Mom was in surgery. Running and getting a scholarship. They already knew that, of course.”

“So you forgive him then? You don’t blame him?” She wanted to throw her arms around him like she was ten again. “You don’t blame me?”

Francis turned. “I never blamed him. He was fourteen years old. Why would I blame him? And why in the world would I blame you? You’re not understanding the problem here. You’re not even near understanding it.”

But it was he who wasn’t understanding, Kate knew. All would be well now. They had gone through a bad time—the Gleesons, the Stanhopes—but now look at them. Look at the funny way life could go. Immediately, Kate pictured Peter on Jefferson Street for Thanksgiving, Christmas, all the holidays, sitting between her sisters on the couch, getting up to make them another pot of coffee, pulling gifts from under the tree and calling out the names. George, too, maybe. Rosaleen. Look at the happy ending that could come out of a terrible thing. Theirs was a story for the ages, star-crossed, but without the tragic ending, without the fatalities.

“I still worry about her,” Francis said. “Your mother does, too. Now that she’s living on her own we don’t get updates.”

“You mean Peter’s mother? He doesn’t even see her. He never talks about her. She doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter? Katie. Love. She’s the person who made him. She’s always going to matter.”

At that, Kate turned away from the memory of the woman framed in the door of the Dunkin’ Donuts restroom on Halloween, her face pale and gaunt, the expression in her eyes wild. She turned away from the other glimpses she’d had since then—Anne Stanhope sitting in a car on 103rd Street, engine off, a cup of pistachio shells on her lap. Kate had pulled up her hood as she passed, and walked quickly by Peter’s building, calling instead from the Thai restaurant two blocks away, asking him to
meet her there. Another time in Riverside Park, where Peter liked to run, standing next to a tree in a bulky coat that was far too broad in the shoulders for her. Kate had noticed her just before Peter arrived at their appointed spot, his sweaty skin steaming lightly in the cold air. “You okay?” he’d asked that day.

“I’m fine,” Kate had said, glancing over her shoulder and then taking hold of his arm, leading him down to the river to point out the faint Christmas lights all the way over in New Jersey. Here was a woman who’d wanted to hurt her, a woman who had hurt her father so badly that the father Kate remembered from when she was a little girl had disappeared, and in his place came a new father, a man she often struggled to recognize. And he’d never returned, that first father. She waited and waited but he never came back after that, not completely, and that was Anne Stanhope’s fault. Kate should be afraid of the woman. She knew she should be, and yet she wasn’t, at least not the way her father meant.

And the most recent time, near Kate’s apartment, Peter all the way across town. Anne was sitting on a bench outside the Hungarian bakery, scowling at the passersby. Her eyes lifted when Kate arrived at the opposite corner, as if sensing her there. Kate was beginning to turn back, beginning to flee, but she decided, No, I will not flee, and instead felt something like rage rise up in her throat. Four lanes of traffic divided them—two northbound, two south—and Kate began to cross before the light turned. She held up her arms to stop traffic and knew what Moses felt like when he stopped the waves from crashing over him.

When Anne stood from her bench, Kate felt her courage falter but she jutted out her jaw and kept moving. She stretched her body as tall as she could to make herself seem bigger, just like her father had done that night when he strode up to their door. The sunshine was bitter cold, and trapped in the gutter ice were cigarette butts, candy wrappers, a pen.

“What do you want?” Kate asked when she was close enough for Anne to hear. The subway entrance was just a few paces away. Whenever she needed to she could disappear down there, reemerge somewhere
far downtown, pretend to herself and to Peter that this encounter had never taken place. She’d take a cab back home and she’d avoid this corner for a week.

“I want to talk with Peter,” Anne said. “I thought you could help me.”

“Me? You want me to help you?” Kate laughed, but it came out clotted and choked. “You have some nerve. You know that?” Kate took a step closer to Anne.

“Stay away from him,” Kate said, her voice a low growl. “And stay away from me. He doesn’t want to see you.”

Anne took a breath as if to speak, but Kate was already gone, crossing traffic against the light once again.

fifteen

W
HAT HAD BEEN DONE
to Anne at twelve by their neighbor, Mr. Kilcoyne, kept being done until she turned sixteen and left for England. He’d show up with a fistful of ribbons, or a dress that needed mending, and ask if she could come help with the little girls. He was hopeless with bows and plaits, he said. Mrs. Kilcoyne had died of a stomach ailment the same year Anne’s own mother had walked into the rough water at Killiney Beach with all her clothes on, her shoes, three days before Christmas in the year 1964. She left a mother-of-pearl brooch and a few pound notes on the mantel. That first time Mr. Kilcoyne came for her, once they got just past the stone that marked Kilcoyne land, Mr. Kilcoyne said, “Wait there just a minute, Anne,” and then clutched her by the shoulder and by the hip, pulling her up against him, hard. It was a bit like a hug except Anne didn’t hug back and he was trembling, clutching her tighter and tighter as the trembling became more violent. Something was happening to him under his clothes.

“The girls will be waiting for us,” Anne said when he finally let her go, and in her bewilderment—she felt dazed, light-headed, though what
had happened? Maybe nothing—she strode through a thicket of nettles and her shins went afire.

When she got to England she made a friend called Bridget and after a while told her about Mr. Kilcoyne, how it had begun and how he’d graduated from clutching her over her clothes to asking her to follow him into the hayshed.

“But, Anne, why’d you go? Could you not think of any reason not to?” Bridget asked. “There was a man had a shop at home who was like your Mr. Kilcoyne, and I always told him my mother was expecting me. That she’d come round looking for me any minute. And then I’d run off.” They were sitting on a low wall in a schoolyard on the outskirts of London, both assistants at the hospital, both Irish and living with a group of other Irish girls they found through an ad in the newspaper.

Why did I go? Anne wondered. It was a good question, and one, even more than forty years on, she couldn’t answer. Once, she almost sent her sister, younger than Anne by one year but older seeming than Anne in some ways, and Anne had heard in the schoolyard that she had a fella. Mr. Kilcoyne had come to the door as always, but instead of pulling on her cardigan right away she said she wasn’t feeling well. “Bernadette can go,” she said. Her father turned the radio down and rubbed his wiry brows. Bernadette looked up from picking her fingernails in surprise. Like a school pantomime, everything stopped for a beat of one or two breaths. But then, before Bernadette or Mr. Kilcoyne could even respond, Anne continued. “But the girls are used to me now,” she said. Always, when she returned home, her father would ask after the Kilcoyne daughters, two of them still in nappies when it all began. Bernadette would have made the tea and would be sitting in the corner, hopping her foot, waiting for time to pass. She almost told them once, the first time Mr. Kilcoyne put his hand under her clothes, his cold hand that had delivered a calf that morning, but her father was taking his tea and listening to the radio and next thing she knew he was packing his pipe and heading out again. Watching him cross the small yard to the
path by the cowshed, she knew that even if she told him, nothing would change except then it would be in the air between them, undiscussed, just like her mother’s death. Bernadette went flying outside to visit with her schoolmate, who was passing on the low road.

Anne regretted telling Bridget almost immediately. Telling her, bringing that story to England, spoiled England for her. When she left for America two years later, she knew she would be smarter. She’d bring none of Ireland with her. She’d start the training program in New York City and she’d buy a few new blouses and she’d get her hair cut like Jackie Kennedy and she’d never even think about Ireland again.