Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (7 page)

Ellie knew that the love that starts strongest often weakens with time, giving up before the race is ended. It is often the slowest to start that will finish the race.

But this is not a lesson that anything other than time can teach you.

“This,” Dan said as we pulled up at a small grocery store, “is McClean Avenue.”

He said it like we had finally arrived at our destination. Not in Yonkers, but in “life.” McClean Avenue is where you can buy last Sunday’s
Irish Independent
and “tayto crisps,” enjoy a cup of Barry’s Tea with your imported sausages and bacon, or get drunk on Irish beer in an Irish bar with people who also
wish
they were Irish.

Dan’s whole “Irish” angle really made me crazy. It was the only thing we truly had in common, yet our perception of what it means to be Irish couldn’t have been more different. Although I wasn’t born there, I spent much of my childhood and student years there. For me Ireland is the brooding brown boglands, lit up a thousand shades of purple and gold by a temperamental sun. It is the sour smell of burning turf on a wet day, and my grandmother’s rhubarb tart. It is Joyce, Yeats, Behan, Patrick Kavanagh—a complex, creative heritage too vast to attempt explanation.

For Dan? It was green beer and rubbery brack cake.

I knew this because Dan came back out of the shop with a carton of milk and a cellophane-wrapped package claiming to be “genuine, original Irish Barm brack” made by a woman called Kitty. The sell-by date was the following fall and the list of ingredients a roll call of chemicals.

“This is crap,” I said, and he looked hurt. Like I wasn’t just talking about the cake. There was an atmosphere building between us. He knew he was doing something wrong but was afraid to ask me what it was. Then the guilt kicked in, the arbiter of my honesty. As soon as things got close to the truth, guilt always stepped in to create a smoke screen.

“I’ll bake you a better brack than this, baby. A real Irish porter cake.”

He leaned over and kissed me even though he was driving, and I wondered how it was possible I could turn myself into Doris Day so easily, and that, more unbelievably, I had married a man who believed me when I did.

As we wove our way upward, the houses got more affluent. It seems that money can buy character, and the higher we went, the more interesting the houses became. My cynicism toward Yonkers was temporarily quieted by a three-story Redbrick with beautiful wrought-iron balconies. Dan stopped the car and said, “Here we are.”

I was stunned.

“Here?”

“This is it, baby.”

“This? The Redbrick?”

“You like it?”

He was doing that thing that I couldn’t bear: wagging his tail with boyish enthusiasm. Looking for my approval, my praise. “I love you” by another name.

“It looks OK.”

Actually, I loved it already. But I couldn’t tell him that. Dan had bought this house five years previously as an investment. Not just a financial investment, but in his belief that one day he would meet the right woman and have a proper home to put her in. If I said “yes” to this house, I was saying “yes” to so much more. It was idiotic to say that I did not feel ready to move into Dan’s house, when I had already agreed to spend the rest of my life with him. But as long as we had our separate apartments and a temporary à-la-carte living arrangement, I could still see my escape door.

There was no escape door on Longville Avenue. Inside there were exposed beams, aged-oak floorboards, a basement full of cranky bits of furniture that needed polishing, upholstering, loving back to life. There was an original cast-iron bathtub languishing in a hallway, and a dresser with an enamel worktop and broken hinges. The house was a set of a dozen rooms waiting to be cast in their roles as nursery, kitchen, living room, bedroom.

Dan was directly behind me shuffling, gawking, hoping.

He started, “It’s a real mess but...”

He wanted me to finish his sentence. To tell him I could see what he saw: that with his work and my eye this house could be a wonderful family home. I could see his dream, and I wanted to share it. Just not with him. The faded floral curtain over the back door shivered in a breeze and the sadness of my secret washed over me. I didn’t answer but walked toward the back door, rattled it open, and stepped out into the garden. It was a wilderness.

I picked my way down a stone path that seemed to go on forever, then reached a bank of ivy and budding clematis that told me I had reached the end. To my left were young, green nettles, which, I made a mental note, would make excellent soup. To my right, I could see a stone cherub peering at me from behind the weeds. As I brushed them aside, the mossy figure fell with them. I leaned down to rescue him, and saw that he had fallen onto a bed of voluminous frilly leaves sprung with narrow red stalks.

It was rhubarb, growing wild.

We were married one year to the day when Ellie died.

James had made a small fuss over our anniversary, presenting me with a brooch in the shape of a swallow. I thanked him politely, and then placed it to one side of my dressing table, not bothering to try it on. As I prepared Ellie’s breakfast, my mind was occupied with my shiny new trinket. If I wore it, it would give James a message of love. If I left it aside forever, perhaps he would not bother buying me another. I decided on a compromise. I would wear it across to Ellie’s and show off what her son had given me. It would please her to see that James had made me happy.

It had taken me a full year to be willing to sacrifice a small corner of my pride for somebody else’s happiness, and it was too late.

When I found her, Ellie was lying on her back with her rosary beads arranged on her lap. She had died peacefully in her sleep. She must have known herself she was going to die. There was no surprise in that; Ellie had seemed to know everything.

I wept over her cold body for one hour before fetching my husband. There are lies in tears. The ones we weep most loudly are usually for ourselves, yet how easily we can pass them off as grief. I was fond of the old woman, but I allowed her to turn cold while I contemplated my own troubles. Ellie had provided a distraction, and now it was James and me alone. How was I going to cope?

Honesty, in my experience, is seldom an act of kindness; more often it is a brutal, selfish need to purge, thinly disguised as morality.

So I buried my face in the gray wool of Ellie’s blanket, clutched at her hard, knotted fingers, and wept for all my misfortunes. I told her I did not love her son, but I promised I would never stop trying. And even as I said it, I knew that I had not tried to love him up to that point, beyond keeping him and his house clean and tidy.

After I had cried myself dry, I went to the schoolhouse and I told James that his mother had passed. He was stoic and kept the school open until lunchtime. Ellie was old, and when James was seen leaving the school stony-faced, the neighbors guessed at what had happened. The funeral began with barely an instruction from us.

The wake went on for three days and two nights. As was the custom, Ellie was laid out in her kitchen. It was the first funeral I had ever been directly involved in. The neighbors brought in their best crockery and laid out scones, sandwiches, tarts, cooked hams, chickens. For those few days, the house belonged to them, and they came and went as they pleased. Their message was clear: They had known and loved Ellie all of her life, and I was an interloper. An obscene amount of food and ten full bottles of whisky were consumed by a host of friends and strangers who came to pay their respects. James welcomed them all as if they had been as close to Ellie as he had been. He offered them food and drink as if they were as deserving of comfort as he.

I stayed by his side and together we nodded and accepted condolences until we could barely stand. It was the first thing in our marriage that I can truly say we did together. I had respected Ellie, and for those few days I admired James for how he was handling his grief and for the generous way he received his guests.

For the burial, I wore my fitted black coat and a smart woollen hat that Ellie had once said she would like me to have. On my lapel I wore the swallow James had given me. It was inappropriately decorative, but I didn’t care. Neither did James, and I felt Ellie would have been pleased at our small rebellion. It did not rain down on us, but stayed dry for the Sorrowful Mysteries, the final decade of the Rosary. I held James’s arm throughout the service as a public show of support. As the clay clattered down onto the coffin, I felt James’s hand reach for mine and I did not move it one way or the other but let him hold me. His fingers felt as cold and dry as his mother’s had two days beforehand.

We arrived home, the two of us alone again as we had been on our wedding night. James was in the footless, disbelieving grief of the adult orphan. A mother draws a map for her child and places herself at the center of it. Her death wipes that map clean. She leaves you knowing you must redraw it to survive and yet not knowing where to start. James was left staring at a blank page and a young, foolish wife who did not love him as he wanted her to.

Our house seemed strange after spending all of our time up in Ellie’s, as if we had been out of it for months instead of only three days. That is death’s dirtiest trick; the way it plays with time so that the funeral seems to go on forever, yet when it’s over, you are placed back in your first moment of shock, as if it hadn’t happened at all.

I asked James if he wanted food, and he declined. Although it was barely past four in the afternoon, I went into the bedroom, closed over the curtains, and lay down in the bed. My eyes were like lead, but as sleep began to pull me down into its velvet blackness, I suddenly felt something behind me. I sat up in the bed and called out in terror. My voice was so loud that I hardly recognized it, and that served to frighten me even more.

James had climbed into the bed next to me. Although he was under the covers, I could see that his arms and shoulders were bare, which I took to mean he was naked. I did not know whether to laugh or cry, but I wasn’t afraid. The room was light and he was looking at me.

His eyes were stuck on my face. Love being too much to hope for, he was searching for the finest thread of feeling. Evidence to prove there could be some comfort in being married to me. He would not have expected much after the year we had had together. Just enough to get him through that night. Enough warmth for him to hide in; enough spirit to hold him up; enough strength for him to cling to. He found nothing and I knew then that he had seen my disdain for him, and heard it in my voice when I cried out in shock.

In that instant, I witnessed the depth of his grief. His face crumpled in on itself, and he turned his back to me. Our bed became a boat floating on the waves of his grief, as it rocked in rhythm with his sobbing. I might have lost patience, were these the petulant, self-pitying tears I was so familiar with in myself. But this was justified grief. He was a naked, rejected man unable to physically lift himself away from me, such was the power of his sorrow.

I was afraid, not of what James might do, but of what I could not do. Afraid of my own coldheartedness. So afraid that I tried.

I reached out my hand and I touched the top of his head. His hair was wiry and this surprised me. I had looked at it often and wondered, yet never touched it before. I had expected his body to freeze, as if a single innocent touch from me was enough to quell a mountain of passion. I was disappointed when he continued to cry. More than that, I wanted him to stop. I did not feel I was strong enough to bear witness to such pain. So I leaned across his back, and clumsily kissed the wet of his cheek.

He turned on me suddenly and kissed me hungrily on the mouth. I felt betrayed, as if he had tricked love out of me by weeping for his dead mother. I knew that was not the case, but that was how it felt.

When you are young, feelings are your truth; love is how you feel. The years have taught me that love is not an emotion that you feel about someone, but what you do for them, how you grow with them.

That night I gave James my body. I did not give with the feeling or the passion I had given to Michael Tuffy. Although I choose not to remember it now, I probably did not give with much good grace. But I gave.

In the years that came after, I never told him I felt only pity in my heart for him that first night. That truth was hard and I knew it would hurt him, so I kept it to myself. I compromised my own truth for his.

Yet the truth is not always as it seems. Many years afterwards, James told me that the person I had called out for in my fear had been him.

In sacrificing something we believe, we can be rewarded with something we love.