The Stars Are Fire(36)

Grace’s mother, who seems both exhausted and happy, retires with the children shortly after eight o’clock. Grace, with a cup of cocoa, walks into the sitting room across from the turreted parlor and finds Aidan in a chair, reading a book. He stands.

Grace shakes her head. “You needn’t stand for me.” She sets her cup down on a wobbly side table. “Please use every room. We want you to be comfortable.”

“That’s very kind,” he says, “but you must be tired.”

“If I need to be by myself, I can always go upstairs. To my suite. You have no idea how small the house my husband and I lived in was.”

“I think I can imagine,” he says.

“Are you happy with the piano?”

Does he hesitate just a second? “It’s good. I am.”

“I’m not sure I believe you,” she says.

“Well, there are one or two notes that are slightly…off. I’m not sure the average person would notice, and I’m confident that a piano tuner can fix them.”

Grace is silent.

“It’s one of the best pianos I’ve ever played.”

“Can’t be. It hasn’t been used in years.”

“I love it.”

“It’s an odd make. I’ve never heard of it.”

“German. Very rare.”

“The moving changed the notes?”

“It’s impossible to move a piano and not do something to it. I’m happy with the tone, though.”

Grace feels vaguely guilty. If she hadn’t insisted on Merle’s room, the damage would not have happened. But having a man upstairs with all of them would have been untenable. She refuses to feel guilty. She can’t afford guilt now.

After a time, Aidan picks up his book and continues to read. Grace removes a slip of paper and a pencil from her skirt pocket and makes a list of all the items she must take care of in the morning.


How quiet the house is. How awkward she feels. In another woman’s sitting room with a man she doesn’t know. Did the fire do all of this? She remembers Dr. Lighthart speaking of the diaspora. Aidan is part of that as well. Where does he belong?

Gene must have died, she realizes with an inner jolt. He would not have walked away from this house. He would not have walked away from his children. A chill settles around her shoulders as she thinks of him dead, his flesh burned away, his white bones in a cornfield or on a forest floor, perhaps disturbed by animals. She imagines the agony of such a death. And to have no resting place, no grave where his wife and children can go to pay their respects, to remember him. It’s not right.

She shifts in her chair. She wonders how long it will take to replace all her painful memories with fond ones.

A hundred years, she thinks. At least a hundred years.



Aidan



The sitting room, with all the lights lit, seems a friendly place. Grace has taken to migrating toward the room after the children are in bed because Aidan is often there. She has asked her mother to join her, but the older woman always begs off and goes upstairs.

“Are you Irish?” Grace asks him one evening.

“I am,” he says, looking up from his book. He greets Grace when she enters by half standing.

“Do you speak Gaelic?”

“I used to.”

“You haven’t got a brogue.”

“I lost it.”

Grace opens her book at the bookmark. “Why?”

“Irish Need Not Apply.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“Is Berne an Irish name?”

“It can be. It can also be French.” Aidan speaks a French sentence with Berne in it. The e in the name sounds halfway twisted around. “Or German.” He says a long harsh sentence in a German accent, and Grace can’t even tell where the Berne is. “Or even Danish.” He spouts Danish and she hears the Berne, with barely a second syllable, like an afterthought.

Grace, in the sitting room, studies him. “You made that all up, didn’t you?”

He smiles. “Maybe.”


After she has left the sitting room and gone up to her bedroom, Grace checks that the children are asleep and then stands facing the window. She stares at her feet. As she tries a few steps, the rhythm and the dance begin to come back to her. She straightens her back, puts her arms to her sides, and starts to execute the most rudimentary of steps. She wishes she had taps on her shoes. It was the clicking of the metal toes that was so satisfying.

With no one to watch her, Grace stares straight ahead (“never look at your feet”) and moves sideways in a linear fashion across the room, then forward and back as best she can remember. After school twice a week, Grace accompanied Patty Rooney to her Irish step-dancing classes. Grace didn’t dance, merely watched, but occasionally after the class Patty would teach her a few steps. At a dance recital that Patty took her to, Grace remembers sitting in the audience with Mrs. Rooney, loving the precision that kept the top of the body immobile while the footwork dazzled.

Grace dances until she is breathless. She wipes her forehead and forearms with a handkerchief. She knows a little Irish.


Marjorie outfits Claire and Tom with dark green sweaters she knit for them.

“Where did you find the wool?” Grace asks at breakfast.