Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“Ireland at last,” their friends and family would say if Edward was awarded the post in Dublin, and she would have to act as though it was nothing short of a miracle.

“Ireland at last!” she would echo.

She closed her purse back up to be returned to the foyer console, noting the USB stick containing the Rodin Museum catalog’s translation still inside. Oh, to escape into one of her translations, beautiful and belonging to a world of heroes and gods and unambiguously punished sinners.

She sat down behind the big desk in the study, taking over the same space Edward had just a short while ago occupied to inform her about the assassination. The main thing was that Jamie always meant well. That was the big difference between her youthful acts of delirium and his. If he’d cheated, it had been to please her and Edward. If he’d forged her name, skipped onto a plane, slipped out of the house now, it was because somewhere in the fog of his adolescent mind he thought these things would make matters easier. Mental note: she had to be sure the headmaster didn’t figure out Jamie had forged her signature giving him permission to leave. Then he might expel him.

Pulling her cell phone out of her pocket, she pressed the rapid-dial for Jamie’s number.

The ring went directly into voice mail.

Damn, she thought. Of course.

“Jamie,” she said on his voice mail, “this is your mother. I need you to call me immediately.”

She knew Jamie wasn’t going to call her back until he damn well felt like it. He probably was making a point of not even checking his messages. Jamie might mean well in a global sense, and he could be sweet as a charm, but keeping his own counsel just didn’t bother him the way it might other kids. Family members commented on how, like Clare, he looked more like his one Swedish great-grandparent than any of his British or Irish ancestors. Clare thought he had something else of Mormor’s, as they’d called her grandmother, the thing that had allowed her to conceal her true age until her death. But his inner life was unruly, and it was the combination of this trait with his opacity that caused such havoc. She never seemed to know until after the fact the problems he was having, something exacerbated by his adamancy she not get involved in his life without his express invitation.

There was nothing to do but just get on with things. She assembled pen and card stock, but the still of the room left her feeling pinioned. She got up, walked to the room’s tall windows, and flung them open. Spring came wafting in, lifting the ends of her hair as though her shoulder-length locks were a curtain, stirring the scarf she wore draped around her shoulders. Taking the scarf off now, she laid it over the back of the desk chair. She shed her cardigan as well. She thought she could smell magnolias or maybe hazelnut blossoms. An urge to put her arms around someone surprised her. Why wasn’t Jamie here, where she could talk with him? She went to the small television on a corner shelf and flipped on the power so as to fill the room with the sound of people. She settled herself behind the desk and began engraving.

Black loops and curls emerged from her fountain pen, and she gave in to the luxury of adding a little swagger: a twist at the end of an “e” and slight flourish at the end of a “t.” Everyone said she had excellent handwriting for an American, and despite herself, despite all weighing on her mind, seeing how beautifully the lines were coming out gave her a twinge of pleasure. For some time when she was young, she’d harbored the dream of becoming an artist. Through high school, she’d even kept a secret journal of drawings, which she hid under a loose plank in the floor of her bedroom, fearing her family would tease her if they saw it. The long broad back of the history teacher who always called her Karen rather than Clare, the Frye boots of a group of giggling girls she feared, the weeping willow outside the home of a boy she secretly liked, all went in there, carefully dated and captioned. Her last year spent living at home, she’d moved on to unauthorized nudes, disrobing the brittle school principal and bossy captain of the cheerleading squad with her pencil in the quiet of her room late at night. But the figure drawing class she’d signed up for first semester at Harvard, using live models, had been a disaster. She couldn’t get used to having ready and willing animate bodies before her, and the teacher had suggested she might feel more comfortable taking a still-life class the following semester. By the end of freshman year, she’d committed to a Romance languages major. Instead of painting nudes, she’d read of the forever-clothed Laura and frustrated Emma Bovary. She’d followed Don Quixote on his pointless quests and endured one hundred years of solitude with the Buendías.

A wise decision, as it turned out. Tonight, she would greet her French guests in their own language and chat with Bautista LeTouquet, wife of the director general at the Quai d’Orsay, in her native Italian. Edward would be proud of her, the home office would be impressed, and their guests would all feel more comfortable, even while English remained the lingua franca. People appreciated having a metaphoric hand extended towards them through the use of their own language; it made them feel respected. Americans and Brits, so used to hearing others speak in English, took this for granted. How that poor man, the sick Turkish wrestler, had struggled to make himself understood in English this morning!

Edward had always insisted that the children not let their linguistic luck breed complacency, and she’d wholeheartedly agreed. Peter was in his sixth year of German and fourth of Russian. Jamie was supposed to be studying Spanish. They weren’t taking classes in French now that they were being schooled in Great Britain, as there’d have been nothing available for them at their levels, but they were both already quite fluent in the language. Native English speakers but born in different countries from one another, citizens of two, schooled in no less than three: where did her sons fit in? Edward would ask, Where does anyone fit in? but nonchalance was easy for Edward, because he did fit in somewhere: he was English from his stately toes to his thinning fair hair. His parents were English, and his grandparents and centuries of generations before them, all living and dying on the same stretch of dirt and rock between the English Channel, St. George’s Channel, and the North Sea, except for one great-great-grandfather who’d spent many years as a colonel in India and a great-uncle who had somehow ended up being buried in Sumatra. And even those peripatetic ancestors hardly counted because they’d brought their Englishness along with them to their colonial postings. “The English manage to import their Englishness,” Niall once said, “to every corner of the globe, like it was a digestive biscuit.” And true to form, the great-uncle had died, of a sudden coronary, in a Sumatran rose garden sipping tea from a cup made of Spode china. She knew this for a fact. She and Edward had inherited the tea set the cup had come from, and the box that had held it had been covered with stamps bearing the abbreviation “Nedl. Ind.,” from when Indonesia was still part of the Dutch East Indies. The set was one cup short.

“Fucks,” Niall had also said, of the English. “Fucking imperialistic bastards. They’ll get their orange arses off our island, won’t they.”

The first time she and Niall had spoken about Ireland, not predicting their future, not understanding anything yet, she’d responded as though she were participating in the Harvard debate club.

“Of course, the Catholics should be treated better. But the Protestants, the ones that have been there for some generations now,” she’d said, “aren’t they Northern Irish now, too? Aren’t they even in the majority? Shouldn’t they also have some say about what country they live in?”