The Stars Are Fire(38)



“Sometimes I start to sweat. When it’s really bad, I get the hiccups.”

“You can’t go onstage with the hiccups. How do you get rid of them?”

“I find a knife and stick it in a glass of water, put the blunt end of the knife to my forehead and take ten slow gulps.”

“And that works?”

“Always.”

“Did you just make that up?”

“No.”


Grace stubs out her cigarette and slides out the green and gold dress—the dress deemed too fancy—from the bottom of the pile on the chair and begins to dance with it in a free-form movement she makes up as she goes along. Aidan, catching the game, plays waltz music. Grace swoons herself into the dance as if she were wearing the fabric that swirls with her. She waltzes around the parlor, encircling Aidan and the piano. When he switches to the Charleston, Grace holds the dress to her bodice and swings one sleeve back and forth as she executes the footwork of the dance of her mother’s generation. Aidan’s segue to jazz is Grace’s cue to occupy in a languid manner an empty chair, the dress still clinging to her. She pantomimes leaning forward to have her cigarette, in its holder, lit for her. Relaxing into a louche pose, she crosses her legs.

Aidan laughs, rolls his sleeves, and draws her into a slow jazz piece she thinks he must have learned at a Harlem nightclub.


“Merle’s closet is enormous. She has dozens of dresses and fur coats,” Grace says as she sits with the fancy dress folded over her lap.

“Someone should wear those clothes,” Aidan says.

“There have been pleas for clothing since the fire. Maybe I can get someone to pick them up.”

“And when your husband comes back? Won’t he mind that you’ve given away his mother’s clothing without consulting him?”

“Yes. For a minute. But then he’d see the necessity. If we’d moved in here, which he wanted to do, I suppose I’d have been given the contents of Merle’s closet.”

“Do you see yourself in furs?”

Grace laughs. “No. Can you imagine? Where on earth would I go?”

“You could come to one of my concerts. You’d be beautiful in a fur.”

A blush climbs the sides of her neck. “I hated the house when I first came here,” she remarks, glancing away.

“Why?”

“My mother-in-law wasn’t fond of me. She thought I’d ruined her son.”

“And did you?”

“Seen from her point of view, I suppose I did. He was meant to go places. Marry up.”


In her bedroom, Grace finds a hassock and climbs onto it. She strips down to her slip. In the triple mirror over the dressing table, she can see her reflection. She can’t see her head, only the body and the slip. Her skin is pale, and the slip hangs from her shoulders, not as fitted as it used to be. Common sense tells Grace that it’s her body in the mirrors, but she moves her arm just to make sure. She dips her head down to make double sure. How insubstantial she has become.

“I’ve got everything I need,” her mother announces as she enters the room. “You can get down from there. I have to do the fitting before I can hem anything. Which one did you pick out?”


Sometimes, as Grace walks the rooms of the large house, she thinks she’s won a prize. She thinks she’s stolen a prize.

In the large kitchen, when she and her mother first entered it, they discovered a wringer washer and a gas clothes dryer. At first Grace didn’t recognize the appliance. It was three feet high, two feet across, and low to the ground. When she opened the enameled hopper, she learned that there was a metal drum inside. The appliance had only one switch—on or off—and she and her mother concluded after several tries that it took only fifteen to twenty-five minutes to dry a load of wash. Towels and flannels didn’t need ironing. She and her mother were amazed. When Grace thought of the time needed to dry sheets in the wet spring, she could only shake her head.

Grace is certain that Merle never used the machine. Laundry would have been Clodagh’s province.


“They’re building tin houses for the homeless,” Aidan says that evening as he and Grace are reading in the sitting room.

“How do you know this?”

“I heard it at the post office.”

“Is that where you go when the kids are napping?”

“Either there or the market. The houses are temporary until the new ones can be built.”

Grace remembers the aluminum clinic. “Won’t they be awfully cold?”

“They must have some kind of insulation. They can’t be comfortable, but people are desperate to get them.”

Grace is silent. “We should be taking in refugees here.”

“You already did,” he says.


“What do you and Aidan talk about at night?” Marjorie asks Grace the next morning while they are eating oatmeal.

Grace stares at her mother. Why this question now? “We don’t talk a lot. We’re polite, but mostly we’re just reading.”

“Reading?”

“Yes,” Grace says, avoiding her mother’s gaze.

She rises to rinse out her tea mug and sees Aidan giving the children a ride on a sled he must have found in the barn out back. Because the barn is farther up the hill than the house, he’s able to work up some speed as he sleds down. The children squeal and beg for more. In order to get Tom back up the hill, Aidan puts Claire on the sled and tells her to hold on tight to her brother. Grace watches as Aidan digs in his boots to fit the foot-size ledges in the snow he’s made earlier. It produces the illusion of him climbing a flight of stairs.

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