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  The captain announced we would have a forty-minute layover, somewhere I'd never heard of. But it sounded English. A second-tier airport, no doubt, but still likely to have a pub. I nodded off listening to a mix of accents and languages—French, more soothing than I'd expected, American, British, maybe Scottish—and slept for hours.

  “Aldergrove,” the loudspeaker cackled. “We'll be landing in Aldergrove Airport in ten minutes.”

  “Now, where is that?” I asked my mother, suddenly awake herself.

  “I have no idea,” she said, her voice clipped. The plane dove deeper.

  The blond woman in front of us turned. “Ach aye,” she said, unable to contain her excitement. “It's Belfast. Best city in the whole bloody world.”

  The words hit me like a monster hangover. They hit me like food poisoning from a rotting mussel. No, rotting was too sweet. They hit me like a mussel that had calcified over centuries, sitting in the midst of a war no one could end.

  I glared at my mother. “Why don't you just deliver me back to the Cossacks?”

  “Cossacks don't bring people chocolates, dear,” she replied, as if this was a cogent argument.

  “Mother!” I shouted. “He's not even Jewish!”

  “Shh!” said the Belfast woman.

  My mother adjusted her turban. “We are on this flight because I got a good deal, which wasn't easy at the last minute. You should remember, though, that people do convert.”

  “Mother,” I hissed, trying to restrain a violent urge. “He could become the Chief Rabbi of Israel and I wouldn't go near him.”

  “That's because you don't like Jewish men. If you'd only be a little more reasonable.”

  I spotted green fields. The plane dove harder. We'd be down any minute.

  “I'd like to see Belfast someday, though,” my mother said.

  “Why would you ever want to see Belfast?”

  The woman in front of us turned and glared through the space between the seats. “Greatest city in the world.”

  “Chaim Herzog,” my mother said as we bumped on the ground.

  “Chaim who?”

  “Herzog! The President of Israel. Shame on you for not knowing he was born in Belfast.”

  I doubted that was true. “Fine,” I said. “You can go to Belfast on your own time. We are not getting off this plane.”

  “We could buy you an Aran sweater in Aldergrove. Warmest sweaters in the world.”

  “Ach aye,” agreed the woman in front.

  “No way,” I said.

  And I said it loud.

  As we taxied in, my mother began to wheeze. The sounds started delicately but built quickly, to an intensity she usually reserved for the B'nai Israel Board of Trustees. Passengers turned, horrified. The woman in front of us stood, handed my mother a can of Coke, and spoke soothingly, in a Scottish accent that I now knew wasn't Scottish at all but Northern Irish.

  The flight attendant appeared. “Your mother will have to disembark.”

  The object of her concern was now making sounds unknown to the human experience.

  “She's faking,” I said. People got thrown off planes because they had guns, knives, or too much to drink. Not for bogus coughs.

  “Yew must hate yer mum,” the woman in front said.

  “I am sorry,” the flight attendant replied stiffly. “We cannot chance bringing an American plague to Paris.”

  “You should have thought of that before you sold my mother a ticket.”

  The woman in front sniffed and retrieved her bag from the overhead compartment. A few of the other passengers stood to pull down their carry-ons and glare at me. “Aye, that's why Belfast is the best place to live in the whole bloody world,” a woman closer to the door chimed in. “People in Belfast do not hate their mummies.”

  Yeah, I thought, they only hate each other's mummies.

  My wheezing mother stood, patted her turban, and through the noise beckoned me with her hand.

  “Have fun, Mother,” I said. “I am not going with you.”

  She walked down the aisle, still wheezing. A second flight attendant wrapped my mother's arm around her shoulder and helped her out the door.

  I sighed with relief. Until I realized my mother had my knapsack.

  Mulvaney says not to worry. He'll help me write sex. For inspiration he suggests I read the screenplay he is in the midst of writing: The Jim Mulvaney Story.

  “The whole thing is sex,” he says, his chest puffed like a Paperboy without a clue.

  I find this an extraordinary comment, coming from a man who thinks he's Henry Miller based on one past literary foray. Years ago, inspired by something the Non-Naked Men did on Message Pending, Mulvaney tried to write a dirty book himself.

  “Was it good for you?” he'd asked, after I'd read it.

  “Mulvaney,” I'd said, “have you ever had sex?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Felshtin

  In Aldergrove Airport, I ran smack into a cop and banged my hip against something hard, a shining silver pistol.

  “Whoa, darlin'.”

  “I lost my mother, an old American lady,” I said breathlessly.

  “Sorry for your troubles, darlin'. Are you from New York? Have me a cousin in Queens.”

  I scanned the departure board, noticed there was a flight to Bordeaux, if I couldn't get back on the Paris plane. Then, in the distance, I spotted my mother loping through a contingent of British soldiers, her health suddenly restored.

  “That's her!” I said to the Royal Ulster Constable. “Shoot!”

  “Couldn't shoot yer mum, dear.”

  She'd made it to the exit. I ran past the soldiers and outside, in time to see her wave down a bus. I caught up to it as it pulled away and banged hard on the doors. “Promptness is a virtue,” the driver said, pointing to his schedule and motioning me on board.

  She sat alone in front of a man wearing a tweed cap and, for no apparent reason, sunglasses, tinted light blue like a sunny sky. Outside it drizzled. “Mother, where's my knapsack?” I demanded. My passport was in it; my wallet, too.

  “What knapsack, dear?”

  “Mother!”

  She smiled and, ceremoniously, unwrapped her turban, draping her shoulders in a stole of pink cloth until she got to the layer that had a photograph stuck to it.

  I saw it and yelped.

  Mulvaney in Belfast. Mulvaney in Belfast perched in my mother's turban. Typical Mulvaney.

  “Didn't want to lose this,” my mother said, pulling the photograph off. “Directions are on the back. In case I forget them.” I tried to grab it but she held tight.

  “We want our knapsack back, don't we, dear? Doesn't he look well?”

  He'd grown a beard. It didn't look bad. I swallowed. My mother took off the rest of her turban and stuffed it in her bag. In the Gloomroom they said Mulvaney had rented a room from an IRA family. That was how he found his stories now. He lived with people who set off bombs.

  “How did you get that?” I asked.

  “How do you think?”

  My head pounded. Claire had been in on this, too.

  The airport road was worse than the L.I.E., and every few miles British soldiers stopped the bus and asked more questions than a Washington Post reporter in an underground garage. After the third stop my mother pulled out a paperback: Too Long a Sacrifice. One of the best books about the Irish troubles. If only the title didn't remind me of my former romance.

  “The writer seems to have survived being the product of a mixed marriage,” my mother said, trying to make conversation.

  I remained sullen. “It's not a mixed marriage if both people celebrate Christmas.”

  The man behind us chuckled through his newspaper. I stood and peered over it to examine him.

  Far as I knew, Van Morrison was Northern Ireland's only celebrity.

  “Are you a rock star?” I asked.

  He put down the paper—a local rag called The Newsletter—and looked at me through those sky-blue lenses. “S
orry to disappoint yew, darlin'.”

  “The duality of this writer's upbringing seems to have made him a brilliant observer,” my mother continued, making me wonder what had happened to the woman who used to consider Erma Bombeck a sage.

  Outside, the clouds hung stagnant and stubborn, as if they could refuse to mature and might never release the inevitable shower. The next contingent of soldiers stopped the bus and ordered us all off. “Might be a bomb,” one of them reported dully. “IRA, you know.”

  “What a bother!” the man in sunglasses said.

  Great, I thought. I am going to get killed running after a man who dumped me. And it's going to be my mother's fault.

  We got off with the other passengers and stood a distance down the road while the soldiers searched the inside racks and luggage compartment. Each time the bus shook, I expected it to explode.

  My mother, though, did not flinch. Not even when the soldiers took off a large, neatly wrapped package and threw it down the hill.

  In the winter of 1919, the Cossacks rode into Felshtin.

  “One child to one adult,” my grandfather ordered. He sent my mother, the eldest of his three little ones, to hide with her bachelor uncle in the Council House.

  Then the Cossacks set the Council House on fire.

  My mother, choking but determined, slid through her falling neighbors and pushed her way out the door. She ran, alone, for what seemed like hours, into the snowy countryside, to the places where no Jews lived.

  When she could run no longer, she stopped at a haystack, made herself a hole, jumped inside. Throughout the night she listened as the Cossacks—who had just murdered her uncle and hundreds more—rode their horses over her.

  In the morning my six-year-old mother climbed out of the hay and ran again, this time to a nearby cottage. She knew that if the people who lived there let her in they could be killed themselves.

  “I am the watchmaker's daughter,” she said.

  Back in the village, my grandfather, hiding with his family in an attic, roused his two younger children and told them they would never see their sister again. He watched, helpless, as my grandmother's grief spiraled until she could not speak through her screams.

  Later, searching through mounds of corpses, he found his dead brother and steeled himself to keep looking.

  A farmer pulled him away. “I have your daughter,” he said. “She is alive.”

  And so my grandfather became the first person, but far from the last, to marvel at my mother's durability.

  Finished, the soldiers sent us back to the bus. I asked my mother, again, for my knapsack.

  “Negotiate!” she ordered.

  I considered my options. Claire would refuse to wire money. My father would insist on asking my mother. I could try the American consulate. . . .

  Was there a foreign officer in the world who would get this?

  I looked behind me and realized that the man in sunglasses had disappeared.

  “Mother,” I said, knowing this was a mistake, “I will say hello to Mulvaney. Then you will give me my stuff and we will go back to the airport.”

  “Done!” she agreed, sounding much too happy about it.

  Gaelic graffiti covered the Belfast train station, resembling hieroglyphics more than it did any modern language.

  Tiocfidh Ar La

  The black letters obliterated an advertisement for Cadbury chocolates. Under it, as if mandated by a tourist board in exile, a translation:

  Our day will come.

  With my mother in the lead, we walked past a group of teenagers, young, angry denizens of a war zone, their heads shaved, their pants, noses, and eyebrows adorned with metal spikes. Beyond them a caravan of London-style taxis, large, black, and funereal, lined up alongside dour passengers. The city appeared bare and fractured, just the kind of place that bred good stories. Any other city in the world that looked like this and I might consider staying.

  I followed my mother onto the taxi line.

  “Felons Club,” she said in undeniable Brooklynese. The people behind us gasped.

  What the hell, I wondered, was the Felons Club?

  The driver said he couldn't take us there.

  Thank God.

  “Ach, yewr on the Protestant line,” a woman scolded. “The Catholic taxis go over there.” She pointed across the road to another line of cars that looked exactly the same. “Yew can tell they are Catholic taxis because they are dirty. Protestant taxis are clean.”

  “We're not Catholic, we're Jewish,” my mother called back as I ran after her.

  Outside the Felons Club in West Belfast, we stood in front of a booth with a bulletproof window, separating us from a room we could not see but which my mother, in a stage whisper, insisted contained both Mulvaney and the glitterati of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

  Provos. These were not old men congratulating themselves over the Easter Uprising of 1916. “Ever committed a crime?” the man behind the booth asked gravely.

  “Of course not!” my mother insisted.

  “Canna let yew in.”

  At last. A helpful Irishman.

  “We can't get in unless we've committed a crime?” my mother asked.

  The man nodded sadly. “Why dew yew think we call it the Felons Club, darlin'?”

  My mother threw back her head—it would have been a better gesture if she'd left on her turban—and shook it at the sky. Then she looked straight ahead, hard. “This is no way to run a hospitality business,” she informed the gatekeeper.

  “Sorry, missus.”

  “Besides,” my mother continued, “we know Jim Mulvaney.”

  “Jimmy Mulvenna's dead,” he said gravely.

  “No!” I cried out.

  “Not since yesterday?” my mother asked.

  “Years ago,” the man said. I took a breath.

  “This is a different one,” my mother said.

  “Ach, there'll never be another Jimmy Mulvenna.”

  “Mother,” I said, “time for my passport!”

  “You have to say hello.” She turned back to the man in the booth. “What if we know a criminal?”

  He nodded.

  “My husband went to jail for gambling,” she offered.

  He looked at her as if she was trying to pay a king's ransom with pennies. Or pence.

  “It would have to be a political crime,” the man in the booth noted.

  A few years earlier, according to my reading, IRA prisoners had fought a long, grotesque battle to win concessions to distinguish themselves from the general riffraff, otherwise known as “ordinary, decent criminals.”

  “No daysent criminals,” he said. “No wee ordinary ones either.”

  My mother looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. “My husband,” she said, “was a prisoner of the Brooklyn Democrats.”

  “What makes you think you can write sex?” my husband demands. “You can't even get us back into bed.”

  “Just watch,” I say.

  Sex for Siding

  It is a late summer afternoon at a backyard party. The barbeque is raging, flip-flops are strolling in from the beach, and the conversation has reached that fevered, intellectual pitch that is such a signature of the suburbs.

  “How's your new house?” someone asks me. Mulvaney is two hours late and this puts me in a reckless mood. “My new house? The one that looks like a Walker Evans photograph?” I reply, confident that no one will know what I mean.

  “Yeah.”

  “I told Mulvaney that if he doesn't fix it up soon, I am going to have an affair with a contractor.”

  With that, a man turns around.

  “Funny,” he says, “I'm a contractor.”

  Quickly, I examine him. He is dark, lanky, and tanned. I wonder if I could be attracted to anyone so conventionally good-looking.

  “You're a contractor,” I say. “What a coincidence.”

  “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” he replies.

  There has to be something very
wrong with this man.

  He looks, with appreciation, at a leg sticking out of the slit of my summer skirt. I am always impressed when men get past the breasts. His eyes, I notice, are green, which would be my downfall if blue eyes did not exist.

  Mulvaney is two hours late and it is not as if he is at home painting the kitchen.

  “Where do you live?” he asks.

  I tell him. “It's the one that needs work,” I say.

  “Funny,” he says, again. “Tomorrow I'm putting a new front on the house across the street from yours.”

  His eyes twinkle. A man like this could make a woman forget all the bad things she once thought about aluminum siding.

  I must have been insane not to see its potential.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mother's Night

  The Felons Club smelled of mildew and its walls were painted the color of olives. So much for kelly green. Swirling pastels danced on a worn carpet that ended at a patch of linoleum—and at a bar packed for lunch.

  Mulvaney handed a drink to a woman with curly red hair so long it reached beyond her small waist. She wore a black sweater that made her seem concave, but she had delicate arms, a small nose, porcelain skin. Mulvaney took a strand of that red hair in his hand and playfully shook it up and down.

  A souped-up jukebox played “Four Green Fields.”

  My mother told me she had to go to the bathroom. “Nice carpeting,” she commented as she loped away, swaying to the rebel music.

  Slowly he walked over, smiling, taking a slug of stout. “You look great,” he whispered in my ear.

  And why shouldn't I? Running through an armed airport and riding in an exploding bus is supposed to be good for your skin.

  Not to mention your hair.

  “Who's that?” I asked. It was not what I had meant to say.

  He took a step back. “Marsha McCain. California broad. Fell in love with some IRA guy.”

  “Just what the world needs, another misguided West Coast idealist.”

  His new brown beard moved closer to my face. A flash of blue followed. I attempted to ignore it.