Chestnut Street (4 page)

She never told her. And Maura didn’t really want to know. It seemed to underline what she had always believed, which was that her own parents tolerated each other and lived in a state of barely contained neutrality, which they saw as their destiny.

Love certainly seemed to have little to do with what had brought them together, which appeared to have been her mother’s dowry and her father’s ability to run a hardware store. It wasn’t anything she could discuss with her family. Maura’s elder sister was a nun. Her big brother, as silent as her father, worked in the shop, and her young brother, Brendan, the unspeakable afterthought, twelve years younger than herself, was a nightmare.

As the years went on, Maura felt that her real life was in Dublin. She earned her living by typing people’s theses and even manuscripts of their books. She met the kind of people that she would never have met at home. Professors, writers, people who often went into pubs in the middle of the day for hours and stayed up all night to write or study. People who didn’t go to Mass; people who had companions rather than wives, friends rather than husbands.

She met people who worked in television and radio, who were actors and politicians, and found that they were all very normal and easy to talk to, and lots of them lived desperately racy lives and didn’t go home to their own homes every night.

Maura pretended not to be shocked in the beginning and very soon she didn’t have to pretend anymore; it was the sixties, after all, and even Ireland was changing.

She fell in love with a man who was married, but she said she couldn’t see him anymore because it would break up his marriage and that wouldn’t be fair. Maura noticed with rage that he had a series of other companions after her, and that his wife still appeared on his arm at premieres and cocktail parties. It made nonsense of this love-and-marriage thing. But maybe they had been very childish, she and her friends Mary and Deirdre, back in the awful, old-fashioned fifties.

After what seemed an endless courtship Mary eventually married Paudie Ryan, and Deirdre came home from Wales in a very short skirt that caused a lot of comment, and Paudie Ryan’s awful sister, Kitty, was the bridesmaid. Kitty wore a particularly horrible pink, which pleased Maura; at least it meant that Mary had stayed true to some of her principles anyway—like decking out an enemy bridesmaid in the worst gear possible. And there were melon slices instead of soup.

Maura’s desperate brother Brendan and his horrific friends kept asking Maura and Deirdre were they on the shelf now and would they like to play a game of Old Maid. That was bad enough but a lot of the older people were just as rude and intrusive.

“Time you two were settling down yourselves now,” they would say, wagging their heads in a way that made Maura want to scream.

“Too choosy, that’s what they are,” said Maura’s father gloomily.

“Wouldn’t want to wait too long all the same,” said Maura’s mother.

“Is there any hardware shop in the neighborhood you’d like me to marry into, by any chance?” Maura snapped, and regretted it immediately.

“You could do worse,” her mother said, mouth in a hard line.

Later on in the day, Deirdre whispered to Maura that she too
might be getting married, but that David’s people where Chapel and hated the whole idea of priests and it was all very problematic. They went to Mary’s room as she was getting changed into her going-away outfit.

“Well, I’ll be the first to know,” she said excitedly.

“Know what?”

“About the first night,” Mary said, as if it were obvious. It was the middle of the liberated sixties. Even the swinging sixties.

Deirdre, seven years in permissive Wales, looked aghast.

Maura, seven years in bohemian Dublin, with a total of three consummated romances to her record, looked at Mary in disbelief. But it was their friend’s wedding day, so they recovered quickly. And they all giggled, as they had done ten years ago.

“Imagine,” they said. “Imagine.”

Maura found her family particularly trying that weekend of Mary’s wedding. Her sister the nun was home from the convent, dying to know every detail of the ceremony, and had Mary promised to Obey. She had—good, good. There was a lot of nonsense talked about that these days, said her sister. The women’s liberation people were only doing more harm than good.

Maura snapped at her that just because nuns took a vow of obedience, it didn’t mean that half the human race, the female half, should do the same thing. Her sister’s eyes looked hurt and pained, but Maura saw their mother making terrible facial gestures and signs behind her. It was as if to say, “Go easy on poor Maura—she’s obviously very jealous of Mary getting married.”

This annoyed her even more.

“What do all those antics mean, Mam?” she demanded.

“Oh, very touchy, very touchy indeed,” said her mother.

Her elder brother said, “That friend of yours Deirdre is a bit of a goer—I’d say she’s no better than she should be over in Wales,” and Maura wanted to smash him into the ground. He had reached this view after feeling under Deirdre’s short skirt and getting a knee in the groin as a response.

Her young brother, Brendan, who normally had a variety of songs to sing tunelessly to his unmusical strumming of a guitar, had only one song, and the chorus was “I’ll die an old maid in the garret.”

Her father, as usual, said nothing, had no views on any subject, and her mother’s face was set in such hard disapproving lines it didn’t look like a face anymore, it looked like a diagram.

Maura couldn’t wait to get back to Dublin. To Dublin and to Larry. Larry, the
love
of her life. Maura hadn’t told them anything at home about Larry, and she told Larry a fairly edited version of things at home. It wasn’t that she was being secretive or deliberately trying to live two separate lives, pretending to be different things to different people, it was just that the vocabulary wasn’t there. There weren’t the words to say to her mother.

“Look, please don’t worry about me. I’m not remotely jealous of poor Mary marrying that
ahmadahn
Paudie Ryan. I have a terrific fellow altogether in Dublin, and we’re as good as living together, I’m in his flat so much and he’s in mine, and it’s all great.”

She might as well tell her mother that Martians had arrived in the hardware shop with an order for a spaceship.

And even though she could talk about everything to Larry, and they got on so well on every level, she couldn’t really explain her inquisitive mother, who automatically counted up to nine on her fingers when she heard of a pregnancy to check that it was all within the correct timescale. How could she tell Larry about her sister, the nun, with the earnest face, saying that the women’s movement had a lot to answer for, or about her silent father, or her discontented brother making swipes and gropes at women because he was afraid of them. Or about Brendan, the evil-tempered spoiled brat who got away with pure murder.

The worlds would have to continue to live apart. Maura sighed as she got into her car to drive back to Dublin.

“I wonder would some men think driving a car was a bit fast,” her mother said, having given the matter some thought.

“I wonder,” Maura said, keeping her temper with difficulty by stamping a nightmarish grin on her face.

“It couldn’t be that that’s holding the men back,” her mother speculated.

“Perhaps I should take the car into the square and burn it symbolically—would that do, do you think?” Maura offered, still smiling idiotically.

“Oh, wait till you end up like your aunt Anna—that’ll soften your cough for you,” said her mother.

Maura drove back to Dublin wondering had her mother ever even remotely loved the silent man in the hardware shop. Why had they had four children together, one of them at an age when people might have thought they were past that sort of thing. It was a mystery.

Larry cooked dinner for her. He told her that she looked beautiful when she was tired. He said he had another short story accepted. He said they should go to Greece for a holiday. He told her about the beautiful light out on the Greek islands. He told her he loved her. And she fell asleep in his arms.

Maura got the letter from Deirdre a few months later. She and David were getting married. David’s father and brother loved fishing; if they could combine it with a week on a riverbank then they’d swallow the Catholic ceremony and come over to Ireland by car. Would Maura be the bridesmaid? She could wear whatever she liked, honestly, none of that caper of dressing her up in puce like Mary had done to poor Paudie’s unfortunate sister. Please, would Maura do this for her—it would be just one day out of their lives, then they could go on living as they wanted to live. Forever.

Maura read the letter many times. Something in it had touched her. Deirdre, fast Deirdre, leading a liberated life in Wales, was
going to give her parents the day they wanted so desperately, the day that would mark them out as respectable people in their community; they would marry off a daughter in the parish church in the local hotel, everyone would come and listen to them make their vows. Deirdre didn’t need it; she had been living with David for two years, she would not be living back in her hometown afterwards, it wasn’t as if she sought the neighbors’ approval.

And this Welsh David was agreeing to it all, even if disguising it as a fishing holiday. Maura felt a pang. She felt very disloyal even allowing the thought to seep into her heart. She and Larry had been of the same mind since the start. Love did not need chains. Ceremony and ritual were in fact fences and padlocks. They were like saying to society, All right, we’ve promised in front of you all and now there’s no getting out. You’ve seen us make the bargain so if one of us cheats on it, then the full force of public disapproval can come down.

Making public marriage vows with all the dead old words and the meaningless ritual was reducing love to a series of charadelike phrases.

Larry and Maura loved each other—of course they were forsaking all others, of course it was for richer and poorer and sickness and health. Larry had paid for the holiday in Greece out of his new contract; Maura hadn’t left him when he got pneumonia—she had sat beside him until he got better.

Love wasn’t a contract with small print entered into by two suspicious parties who each thought the other was going to rat on the deal.

Marriage made little of love.

Larry and Maura knew too many married people who lived according to the letter of the thing rather than the spirit of it. Their love would not be brought down like that.

So, because this was undoubtedly true, Maura felt guilty when she wondered why they couldn’t give her mother and father the day, just one day, out of their lives. And her sister could come
down from the convent, and Brendan, well maybe she could bribe Brendan to behave. But it went against everything they believed in, so Maura put it firmly out of her head. She wrote to Deirdre and said she would be honored to be the bridesmaid and would wear a lemon-colored linen suit and big white hat with lemon ribbons on it. Deirdre wrote back pleased and said that Maura had always been a devil for hats even when she was a kid in the convent.

“I’m dying to see you in the outfit,” Larry said.

“I’ll do a fashion parade for you before I go.”

“Am I not coming with you?” he asked.

This startled Maura. Life had never been better for the two of them. They lived almost entirely in Larry’s flat on Chestnut Street; since they had come back from Greece it seemed foolish to be apart. Little by little she had moved in her clothes, her pictures, her books. They were getting to the point of subletting her flat to someone else.

Everything Larry wrote was being published, and Maura’s own typing business had gone so well that she now had an office and employed someone to help her.

Things were on an even keel—why did he upset them by wanting to come to her hometown?

“You wouldn’t like it. Too much ritual, feudal,” she said.

“Well, you have to go through it for your friend; I’ll come and hold your hand.”

He really didn’t get it. He didn’t realize what expectations his visit would cause, what speculation, how he would be inquired about, his motives questioned, his whereabouts checked and his name brought into conversation forevermore.

It was different for him. Larry’s mother was long dead, his brothers and sisters scattered, his father a vague, reclusive man who seemed mildly pleased to see his son, but never to worry about him. How would he know the frenzied interest that his visit would create.

But he was adamant.

“I love you, I want to see you up there at the top of the church all dressed in lemon and a big hat and everyone admiring you. Let me be there. I’ll be so proud.”

She looked at him in frustration. If he would be proud of her in lemon, why not in ivory in the real starring role; it was only a day, one day out of their lives.

It would get her mother off her back, the nuns in her sister’s convent could cease their novenas, Mary, now the serene Mrs. Paudie Ryan, would stop telling her about some very nice commercial traveler who was about to settle down, her brother Brendan would not be able to ask her, as he did now with sickening regularity, whether the family was normal at all, one sister a nun, a brother a confirmed bachelor, the other sister an old maid.

She would ask him. She would propose to Larry. There and then. All he could say was no.

“Would we get married ourselves, do you think?” Maura heard herself say, through the roaring sound in her ears.

He didn’t look shocked, he didn’t look guilty or reproachful. He wasn’t even slightly apologetic. He was just interested.

“What for?” he said.

“To tidy things up, sort of,” she said lamely.

“Are you serious?”

“Half serious, yes.”

“But I love you, you love me—what would we need it for?”

His much-loved face was honest and open. He was genuinely puzzled.

“There’s a way,” Maura began slowly, “that if you really loved me, and I believe you do, then you wouldn’t mind going through one day of ritual and vows and rubbish, as we may see it, just to make other people contented.”