The Music Lesson (7 page)

Wanting the visit with Willy when he called this afternoon, yet suppressing the more pointed questions I would have liked to ask him, and still smarting from the conversation with Annie Dunne, I inquired if Dunne was a local family.

“Enniskeane way,” he replied, shaking his head vigorously to indicate that they were most certainly not the least bit local people at all (Enniskeane is perhaps twelve miles away), and then he added, with a conspiratorial giggle, “You’ve had the treatment, have you? Some bit of rudeness or cuteness? Then you’ve been done. That’s what we call it. You’ve been done, all right. Pay Annie Dunne no mind at all; she’s a right gligeen, that one.”

Those so-called loans to impecunious nephews (I really do hope Mickey wasn’t part of that crowd) are why most of Denis’s land was sold off over the last years of his life to supplement his pension and keep him going. Now the cottage sits on a hapless rhomboid lump of land, a small weed-choked acre, vicious nettles mostly (allegedly worthwhile in soup, but I would need rubber gloves just to pick them), surrounded by cultivated and well-tended fields belonging to the neighboring farmers who bought those fields one by one.

I was lonely here, the first week, with not much to do. I missed Pete. All this Irishness, all this Ireland! And though he knows I’m here, he thinks it’s just a romantic interlude with Mickey, with maybe some
Roots
kind of curiosity, as well. (
Spuds?
) It pains me that I can’t discuss the plan with him. It’s so hard for me to lie to Pete that I’ve just barely kept him informed in the vaguest ways of my whereabouts and plans. It’s such an unusual state of things between us that I am worried that he’ll think I’m mad at him for something, but I don’t know any other way to handle it.

My mail is being forwarded to him for sorting out, and he’s written to me a couple of times, but we’re oddly polite and distant with each other right now. I suppose he’s giving me my privacy with Mickey. And I know he’s happy for me, after the past three years. Katie’s death was a terrible blow to him. He never speaks of her. Oh, we Dolans know how to be sad.

So in that first week, I could only settle in as best I could, write carefully to Pete, find my way, find myself a little bit. I spent hours just sitting in the cottage, reading the books I had brought with me—William Trevor short stories that seem to be set in this very village, my favorite Iris Murdoch novel,
A Severed Head
, and some Walter Benjamin essays that seem to be about everything in my thoughts right now.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin writes:

A
LONE, IN THE
cottage, waiting, I feel as though I have been coming to, waking up a little more each day. There has been something almost hallucinatory in the clarity of my thoughts. Maybe it’s the landscape. Maybe it’s thoughts about Mickey, about us, though we haven’t talked about the future, about life after this is over. I have made such a leap of faith.

I have never been more alone with my thoughts than the time between the day I arrived here on the sixth—Epiphany—and the day the painting arrived, on the sixteenth. I am so conscious of sound here. In New York, I suppose I am constantly filtering everything out. Sometimes in the cottage the wind blowing across the chimney top makes a constant roar. Other times, it is so quiet,
I can hear Nora’s cows crunching grass in the field when I walk along the hedges.

I haven’t been in the mood to write in this ledger daily. And I have to keep it hidden, because while I have never been specifically so instructed, something tells me that a written record would be completely out of the question. It would have been stupid to ask permission about keeping a journal, after all. (Even when I was little, Pete used to encourage me to make decisions independently. Instead of asking his permission—for things like swimming alone in Maine, or climbing on the roof of our garage—he urged me to consider the request from his point of view. Anything that I knew he would say no to was something I probably shouldn’t consider doing.)

In that first lonely, uncertain week, I found a secret hiding place of Denis’s, under the stairs. Don’t ask me why I was poking around under there with all the spiders and filth. A board dropped away on a primitive rusted hinge when my sleeve caught on a protruding nail, revealing a very small, shallow built-in cupboard shrouded in sooty cobwebs. There was a huge old-fashioned key to some long-gone lock, and a rusted tobacco tin with about fifty disintegrating one-pound notes inside. I’ve left the tin where I found it.

I don’t think single-pound notes are in circulation anymore, only big pound coins with a deer on one side and a harp on the other, so the tin has been undisturbed
for a long time. Maybe Denis knew nothing of it—it occurs to me that this might not have been Denis’s stash at all, but that of one of his brothers. Or it could go back further than that. The pound notes look big to me, bigger than the notes in my wallet, so they may be quite old.

I’m satisfied, anyway, that in recent times no one has noticed the existence of this under-stair cranny. As a way of camouflaging my hiding place for this diary, I’ve taken to storing firewood and sods of turf in a heap under there, so my comings and goings, if I am somehow observed, should arouse no suspicion.

Looking over these pages, I see I’m straying badly. This isn’t art history; this is autobiography. This is meant to be an account of what, exactly? The lesson of
The Music Lesson
. Sam, my ex-husband, always accused me of being unable to stick to any point whatsoever, and he wasn’t wrong.

“Just tell us the details,” he would say, glazing over with impatience, a phrase he picked up from a cute utterance of our five-year-old daughter, Katie, who had, of course, meant precisely the opposite.

I knew I would get to this sooner or later. Life is not fair. If life were fair, Katie would be alive and Sam and I would still be together. They say very few marriages can survive the death of a child. It’s true. I would add that
very few individuals can survive it on their own. I didn’t think I had survived it, until now.

A school bus. Rain. A driver who looked but didn’t see.

Very small consolation: There’s a new law on the books in Connecticut, Katie’s Law, requiring safety devices on the fronts of school buses, making that sort of accident much easier to prevent. When the bus is stopped for loading or unloading, not only does the
STOP
sign swing out to the side to stop passing traffic but also a yellow gate unfolds off the front of the bus, preventing anyone from walking too closely under the front windshield, just below the driver’s line of sight.

I can’t describe this safety gate without considerable pain, because each time I have happened to see one in use, it looks to me like nothing so much as an animated diagram of what happened that afternoon in the third week of kindergarten. The bus stops. The lights flash. The arm swings slowly, like a pointer—
She was walking just here
, it says, stopping for a long moment to indicate the location of fatal impact before it sweeps back to fold up against the front of the bus like an insect’s wing.

I don’t live in Connecticut anymore. I didn’t want her name used for the law, but Sam persuaded me to
allow it. I don’t even drive now, not that my driving had anything to do with it. I was a good driver, actually, but after the accident, I lost my confidence. I became afraid I might hit something or someone and not even know it. I let my driver’s license expire last year.

So I don’t have a car here, which is awkward, but so far I’ve managed, the worst of it being the bus ride from the airport in Cork to Clonakilty, the bus from Clonakilty to Ballyroe, and then the trudge up to the cottage with my bag. A farmer gave me a lift on the back of his tractor for the last mile, though I hadn’t asked for one. He’s Billy Houlihan. (His mother was a Hayes, Willy told me. Billy is his cousin. Of course.) Billy gives me a jaunty little two-fingered salute whenever he sees me out walking on the roads. I always feel that we have some sort of connection, because he was my first Ballyroe inhabitant.

“All on yer own, is it?” he asked me that windy afternoon in the watery sunlight, appraising me frankly. The countryside is teeming with lonely bachelors. Billy might be thirty and he might be fifty.

“Divorced,” I replied, though he had only meant to ask if I was on my own in a literal sense, now that I think of it. I’m still not sure if my being divorced is a turnoff (it’s a sin) or a turn-on (she’s got some experience).

“Oh, well then,” Billy replied, blushing.

Most of the people I have come to know since Katie’s death—I’ve loads of acquaintances, but I have developed
no intimate friendships—know I used to have a husband, but they don’t know I had a child and lost her. It rarely comes up in conversation. It rarely comes up in my thoughts. No, that’s completely wrong. A lie. I have learned to tune it out because it is so constant in my thoughts—like tinnitus. I have been in such pain for these past three years that I have learned not to have feelings. Or at least that’s what I thought until now.

I couldn’t stay in that house, in that life, in that state. It wasn’t Sam’s fault. Katie’s death killed something between us. Maybe we didn’t have a great marriage anyway, though we’d been together for nine pleasant years. It surely killed something in me. New York doesn’t have a Katie’s Law. In Manhattan, the school buses aren’t equipped with the gate, the moving diagram of how a child might die. Though I prefer not to look at school buses under any circumstances, anywhere, if I can help it.

There’s something else I cannot bear to look at anymore: the Metsu painting
The Sick Child
. Before I was a mother, the subject matter didn’t have any particular meaning for me—I could study the way it was painted, the light falling on the sick child’s pallid skin, without feeling anything particularly. Then Katie had a terrible virus when she was three, and her fever soared to 105 through an exceptionally harrowing night of cold baths and the fear of convulsions, and all that night my thoughts kept going back to that painting, because it
seemed so true to the experience of holding a feverish child. Since Katie’s death, the painting seems to me to be about death. It’s so clear now, inevitable, that the child is going to die. How could I have never noticed that?

There was so much money. Insurance money. What does it insure? That the heartbroken will go away rich. The city of New Haven cannot make this up to me. They cannot “cover” this “liability” with dollars. I have not been “protected from loss” by money, any more than sending my child to kindergarten was a “reasonable assumption of risk.” I wanted Sam to keep it all, but he persuaded me to divide it, and in the end we did.

The money hasn’t changed my attitude toward my work, the way I thought it might. I worried for a while that I could drift without the necessity of earning a living. But I find that I am doing what I want to do. I work hard, but at the same time I don’t have to think about my lost income while on unpaid leave from the Frick, or worry about paying the monthly rent for my apartment while I’m away. I will never again have to think about running up the phone bill, or paying for plane tickets, or buying a really nice pair of shoes.

There was a time—not so long ago, when I think about it, but it seems like another life—when I thought I might have to go into private dealing in order to pay for Katie’s education. When she was an infant, I even had a couple of lunches in New York with different dealers in old masters who wanted me to work with them. It’s
admittedly a nice thing that I can afford to do the work that matters to me without fretting over my meager salary and benefits.

I was the number-two person in the art library at Yale, which helped me to get my job at the Frick Art Reference Library. They’re pretty flexible about my schedule, since they don’t have to pay me when I’m not there.

Having very few close friends has made it disturbingly easy for me to slip my moorings. I left a message on my machine that I’m on a trip, which won’t surprise the odd friend who might be looking for me. I’ve told my colleagues at the Frick that I had an urgent family matter to deal with and I didn’t know when I would be back, and no one was interested enough to ask me much about it, so I didn’t even have to use the lie I’d worked out about a sick relation in London. If it weren’t for Pete, and aspects of my work, I would have very little reason to go back.

Sam has done better at getting on with his life. He still has his architecture practice in New Haven, and, last I heard from a mutual acquaintance at the Yale British Art Center, his work goes well and he has a serious girlfriend—a divorced woman with a little boy. I’m glad for Sam that he could go on living in our life when I couldn’t. It was a good life. He’s great with children, and I’d like to be happy for him, but it tears my heart. It really does.