Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (3 page)

I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I sat up I knew, ten years after her death, that I had finally accepted that Bernadine was gone. My grandmother had been such an influence on my life, especially on my love of cooking. As a child, Niamh and I existed on takeaway scraps and whatever she could rustle up out of a tin. I certainly would never have become a food writer without those holidays spent in Bernadine’s kitchen—crumbly homemade bread straight from the oven with jam dribbling over its salty crusts, lamb shanks made impossibly tender from slow stewing, carrots as sweet as apples, and soft potato fluff bursting through skin so soft it hardly needed mashing. The changing consistency of butter as it melted, pastry as it browned, bread rising—the chemistry of cooking seemed like a miracle to me. A thrill would shoot through me when I saw her take down her worn cotton apron from its hook on the kitchen door and determinedly lay out her ingredients on the long pine table, and I longed to join in. Bernadine taught me to cook methodically. It was never a game to her; there was no throwing flour around, and if I dropped an egg or spilled a cup of milk she would lecture me briefly about the sin of wastefulness. But I didn’t mind. My mother had never been interested in cooking, so my grandmother made me the recipient of her skill and experience and I was a devoted student. My grandfather was an intellectual man, a reader, and he influenced my decision to study English literature. But it was Bernadine who had been my true mentor. I never understood or appreciated that as fully as I did the night before I got married and suddenly knew with certainty that my next project would be to adapt my grandmother’s recipes into a traditional Irish cookbook.

What I still did not feel certain of was my decision to marry Dan the following day. I told myself it was pre-wedding nerves, what everyone experiences. I was afraid if I vocalized them, Niamh would tell me to pull out and I would not have enough conviction to act against her advice. If I pulled out at this stage I would have the drama of a cancelled wedding on my hands, and I am not a dramatic sort of woman. Under that lay the fear that had put me in this position in the first place. The fear that Dan—even if he wasn’t “The One”—was the closest I was going to get to sharing my life with somebody. If I was afraid I was doing the wrong thing in marrying him, my fear of being alone was greater.

We had a traditional Catholic service in Dan’s local church in Yonkers, and Niamh walked me down the aisle and gave me away. Doreen was my maid of honor. As I stood at the top of the aisle in my big dress, I knew that this was what I had always wanted. At the same time, there was a disbelief that it was really happening. Looking back at me, smiling, was everyone I knew. It was the most overwhelming moment of my life. Better, bigger than anything I had ever experienced. I was part of a fairy tale I thought I had left behind long ago, and now realized had just been lying dormant inside me. Hope had been growing bigger and was buried deeper with each passing year. It all came flooding out as I sobbed my way down that walkway to the rest of my life. Dan was the man who had made that happen for me.

*

Dan was sure he could make me happy, but he was wrong. You can’t make other people happy; they have to make themselves happy. Dan loved me, but I now know that it wasn’t enough. I needed to love him back.

And let’s face it—you can’t force yourself to love somebody if the chemistry just isn’t there.

FaIiochtar, Parish of Achadh Mor, County Mayo, Ireland, 1932

When love is pure, it is easy. It comes as fast and hard as a shower of hail and often passes as quickly. It fills your heart and when it’s gone you feel as hollow as an empty cave.

Then there is the other kind of love. The one that comes so slow that you think it isn’t love at all. Each day it grows, but by such small measure that you hardly notice. Once your heart is filled with this perennial love, it will never be empty again.

I have known both, and still I would not like to choose one over the other.

Although for the longest time I thought I had.

*

The moment my eyes fell on Michael Tuffy, every love and loyalty I had experienced up to that point was rendered meaningless. I could feel the heat of my own blood just looking at him. The first time his eyes met mine they branded me; from then on I would be defined by my love for him.

In all my life—which has been long and textured with the emotions of wife, mother, grandmother—I have never forgotten what it felt like to fall so immediately and so completely in love. I would have followed him to the other side of the world. It all but destroyed my youthful optimism when I realized that I couldn’t.

Our first meeting was at a
spraoi
in Kitty Conlan’s house. Kitty had the knack of matching, and there was nothing to do in Achadh Mor back then—only work and wait. Bad, unyielding land, and a hard history blighted with famine and the messy, bloody politics of occupation meant that emigration to England and America from our area was an almost foregone conclusion. Those of us left behind were half a community, not knowing whether we were lucky to be still at home when the greater number of our family and neighbors were in New York or London. Sometimes it felt as if the hundreds of thousands who had left since the famine had each brought a handful of Mayo earth with them and unsettled the very ground from under us. We waited for our men to return from summer’s potato picking in Yorkshire, adventure implied in their new jackets, and affluence in their shiny brown wallets. In the meantime we had to draw whatever entertainment we could from looking at one another.

I didn’t mind being looked at. I was brazen by nature. Some people thought me spoiled, even my own mother at times.

“She wants jam on everything!” I remember her saying it to Aunt Ann the summer her sister returned from America.

“Nothing is good enough for her. She wants everything her own way. I keep telling her, Bernadine, life is
hard.
She has her head full of silly notions.”

Falling in love certainly came under the banner “silly notions.” People made romances all the time but they rarely ended in marriage. Marriage was about land and security and money. To marry for love was considered reckless. Looking back, I suppose my mother was worried that my idealism would lead to disappointment and eventually despair.

I was the only daughter among three brothers, and my father drank. In those days nobody had anything. A woman was at the mercy of how hard her husband was willing to work. A lazy man, no matter how much land he had, would end you in the poorhouse. A drinker was worse again, for he might work hard and then spend every penny in the pub and believe himself entitled to do so. That is how it was with my father. And so my mother, in addition to running the house, worked like a slave on the farm. She reared pigs for a Ballyhaunis butcher and sold eggs to a grocer in Kilkelly. Both men were careful to have business dealings only with my mother. They understood what type my father was and that they were providing our only source of income. They were decent, and doubtless the good price they gave her reflected my mother’s desperation. Hardship had made my mother bitter at home, and she was a slouching, distant woman with barely the gumption to nag her children. She was unhappy. I could see the miserable circumstances that had turned her that way and I was determined to avoid them.

Mam’s sister, Ann, was my savior. A confirmed spinster, Ann had gone to America in 1910 and become a seamstress to a wealthy American socialite. She returned in the thirties a “millionaire”—the description in our poverty-stricken times of someone who owned more than one coat.

My aunt told me stories of New York. She read books and had an easy life with plenty of money and no men to look after. She was always glad of my company and often asked my mother if I might stay with her the night. In the evenings, we could suit ourselves entirely. Making dainty potato cakes and spreading them with butter and my mother’s tart gooseberry jam, eating them greedily as we discussed the news of the neighbors in intricate detail. Ann told shocking stories of their relations in America: This one’s son married a Jew, another was killed boxing bare-fisted in a bar. I embellished duller tales of arguments over field boundaries with gory details. To me, Ann’s house was a palace filled with exotic and beautiful things. A vase made of heavy glass the color of a cat’s eye to hold a single rose, an ermine stole, two red cushions with gold braid trim, a silk kimono lavishly embroidered with peonies and chrysanthemums.

My relationship with this glamorous aunt elevated me above the hoi polloi of our village—in my own mind certainly, and in the minds of many of the lads roundabout, who considered me one of the finer-looking girls among the diminishing supply of would-be wives in our parish.

It suited me just fine to be placed high on a pedestal, with my long black curls and my delicate pointed nose stuck high in the air. Those brave enough to approach me would soon find themselves withered by my indifference. I had the idea of leaving Achadh Mor when the summer had passed. Aunt Ann still had contact with all of her friends in America and would surely pay my passage across. I was a brave and adventurous young woman. I would not have emigrated for survival, but, with Ann as my role model, for success. It would have happened but for my falling in love.

Love changes everything, but not always for the better.

Ann did not come with me to Kitty Conlan’s party that night. She thought the widow a foolish woman, indulging the young people of the parish with silly matchmaking games. Also, the men were allowed drink even though the company was mixed, and Ann didn’t like that at all. She was prudish in matters where drink and romance were concerned. Looking back as an older woman myself now, I believe Ann was less committed to her spinster status than she let on. Perhaps she had been let down by a sweetheart in her younger days. Certainly that would go some way towards explaining what happened between her and me.

Kitty’s parlor was small and her fire roaring, and the crowd kept having to disperse into the cold outdoors, so as not to roast themselves alive. Joe Clarke had come back from his break and was starting up the squeezebox again. Cousin Mae and I were giggling over some trivia when she prodded me in the ribs and nodded towards the door.

Then I found I was both floating and sinking.

The room grew huge as crowds of people receded into the white walls and Michael alone walked towards me. With each step he took, I knew he was the braver, stronger of us because I could not move. For a moment I thought perhaps he did not care for me at all, otherwise he would be paralyzed as I was. He did not speak, only held his hand out to mine so he could take me to dance. When we touched, a thrilling heat shot through me and I thought the feet would go from under me. But they didn’t.

We danced, him holding my eyes all the time and not speaking at all. I, drained of my usual brazen huff, blushed scarlet throughout, so that every neighbor could carry back as far as Kilkelly, Knock, and Kiltimagh news of our big romance. That Bernadine Moran of Faliochtar in the parish of Achadh Mor and a young American lad by the name of Michael Tuffy, whose mother had returned to claim the estate of her deceased husband, Michael Senior—tragically passed away in New York City some six years past—were doing a line.

People talked, but as I said, I never minded that. Gossip and truth feed off each other. If our romance was great, then it was made greater by talk. In a townland, talk brings pressure to bear. Let them speculate; and the fireside ruminations of a thousand old biddies added fuel to our burgeoning passion.

Michael and his mother were strangers to Achadh Mor, but we welcomed them in a way we rarely welcomed our own. Returned emigrants, like Aunt Ann, seemed to goad those left behind with what might have been. They were expected to keep a low profile, sink back into the grim, boggy landscape as if they had never been away. The likes of Maureen Tuffy and her handsome son were different. The real McCoy—they had American accents and had not been born to the drudgery of our land but had come here by choice. We thought them marvelous for believing us worthy of their company.

I could not believe that Michael had chosen me to love, and yet when I was with him, I felt so beautiful that I might have been picked by royalty itself. My disbelief was tempered by a sense of having known him all my life; a certainty that I would be with him until the day I died.

What we did, where we went, what was said is as meaningless now as it was then. We walked fields, we took tea with my aunt, we attended the same Masses. We stood across from each other on either side of the main street in Kilkelly on market day, our views of each other interrupted by cows and carts. And we each wondered at the miracle of our matched souls meeting in this insignificant, squally corner of the world. We saw God in each other, and perhaps that was our only sin. What we had was rare, and still, after all that has happened since, I believe that to be true. It was the love that fools stand in wait their whole lives for, then die loveless and bitter when it evades them.

Perhaps that knowledge alone saved me in the end. Knowing that my love for Michael Tuffy could never be repeated.

We didn’t marry, although it was fully intended.

Our parents met in a hotel in Ballyhaunis, at the suggestion of his mother. My father, for all his shaving and washing, looked like a boiled ham in his suit. My mother was already nervous, and taken aback when money was mentioned, although she could see herself the opportunity that was being offered her. It seemed a small price to pay for her daughter’s eternal happiness. Mrs. Tuffy was clearly a woman of means and it was only a token of respect she was asking for.

In any case, we all knew that Aunt Ann would be happy to provide whatever money was needed. She, of all people, would be thrilled for me to marry into such a respectable household—and for love. It was every dream she could have had for me.

Ann did not poor-mouth over declining to pay my dowry. We all knew she could well afford it. Her first insult was to refuse to offer the money of her own volition, but instead to wait for my mother to ask her. It was a humiliation my mother had never had to endure before; Ann had quietly provided for our family countless times in the past.