Dance Lessons: A Novel

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33 Behind the line of yew trees, a lawnmower drones, the sound growing closer, then fading again. Now there are just the crows cawing in the trees behind the church. Ellen stands there in the pebbled churchyard to take in St. John’s Church, Gowna—the stone Gothic steeple against the fading, evening sky. This is the church where someone took that snapshot of first communion Fintan with his mother and father. An hour ago, she woke up in her little hotel room, hungry, shocked at the red numbers on her bedside clock: 5:10. Her first day in Ireland and she’s slept all afternoon. After a shower, she walked out into the hotel landing, up and down past the other room doors. She listened for sounds of other guests—a radio playing , someone on a phone, a bed creaking. But the hotel’s upstairs was silent. She went downstairs and past the bar door, where she could hear a television turned up extra loud. She thought to go in there but kept walking instead, craving a stroll and some fresh air. In the church vestibule, the heavy wooden doors are fastened back to reveal a modern church with a central aisle and rows of pews in blond wood. She has not been inside a church for years. Unless you count the hospital chapel where they held Fintan’s memorial service. In Boston, neither she nor Fintan belonged or attended, so Fintan’s colleagues in the fund-raising department at Boston Central Hospital suggested the chapel for his service. She was grateful and relieved. In those days after his death, she wanted to be told where and when to show up, 34 * Áine Greaney when to kneel, stand, when to shake hands, and when to eat an egg salad sandwich. She dips her hand into one of the stone holy water fonts and crosses herself, “Nom du père et du fils et du Saint Esprit.” The words, the remembered entreaties of her childhood. The light is stained-glass bright over the pews. At the top, just beneath the altar, two older women kneel, heads bent, their whispery prayers echoing through the empty sanctuary. Someone has lit four candles. Along the side walls, the stations of the cross are little sculptures of polished brown wood. Jesus falls the first time. Ellen Boisvert genuflects at a pew just inside the door. One of the women glances around at her, frowns, then goes back to her prayers. Ellen bows her head, smells the soapy whiff from Flanagan’s bathroom hand soap. Pray, she tells herself. God knows you need some prayers. Kneeling here, her face buried in her joined hands, she could just as easily be back in St. Jean Baptiste in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, amid that smell of damp Sunday coats and old women’s perfume. She remembers that old man who always played the organ to accompany their school choir: Sánctus, sánctus, dominus déus . . . At one end of Patterson Falls stood the French church. At the other end, the Immaculate Conception, the Irish church. When the archdiocese closed the French church down, crying insufficient funds, Thomas Boisvert and all his fellow mill workers took up a special collection to support their French church as their fathers had before them. They wrote, petitioned, opposed the Irish bishop. They lost. So for Ellen’s last years in high school, the Boisverts and the other Franco-American families grudgingly attended the Immaculate Conception whose Irish American parishioners they found too blustery-loud, too pretentious, too damn smug. She can’t pray. So she buries her face deeper in her cupped palms and strikes a bargain with the gods or with universal karma or the kindness of the universe. For what? Deliverance. Délivre-nous du mal. Deliver us from evil. She grabs onto the word. Yes, Délivre. Let me drive out there, out to that house in the country and meet a woman who weeps on my shoulder, makes me some tea, and then we both deliver up eulogy pieces of a son Dance Lessons * 35 and a husband. And then, let her tell me something simple, as innocuous as a falling out in which a mother and son kept a transatlantic stalemate because each was too stubborn to make the first gesture. Outside, the crows have grown louder in the yew trees. The lawnmower...