Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (5 page)

So if I couldn’t get the right type of rhubarb, I decided, I might have to leave Grandma Bernadine’s tart as a fond memory rather than tarnish hers with a tasteless look-alike version.

When you are really attached to an ideal, it is just not possible to compromise.

I had no interest in James Nolan. I respected him. We all did. He was a local scholar, but since he was thirty-five when he returned from his studies to take up the post of teacher in Faliochtar school, he wasn’t anyone I had socialized with. The only contact I had with him was in the Friday evening Irish classes he taught. It was the fashion at that time to learn Irish, and on Friday evenings James opened the school and taught us local people the native language that had been beaten out of our grandparents. There was dancing and singing and great
craic
after the classes, and some nights we mightn’t leave until after eleven. Within weeks of starting the classes were packed; people were walking three miles and back from Achadh Mor to attend.

James was a member of the Gaelic League, and along with that, there were rumors that he had served us all in the Irish Republican Army. Nobody knew the whys and wherefores of his ten years away, but there was nothing unusual in that. The smart man knew how to keep his mouth shut. In any case, he had not been shirking because Kitty Conlan noted that his five sisters had been successfully dowered, two into the convent, and he had helped to finance and build a smart new house with a slate roof on the site next to their family home.

Mr. J. Nolan was in danger of becoming something of a champion, except that he was local to our small, humble parish and would therefore never be allowed to consider himself anything other than unremarkable. Certainly his appearance gave nothing away of any alleged heroics or romantic activity abroad. I barely remember the first time I saw James, except that I might have thought him ordinary beyond belief. More truthful is that I didn’t think about him at all.

There had been some small speculation about who, among the women still available, might fancy him. He was respectable and kind with children by all accounts. There was the new house, which remained unoccupied—his brother and his wife having recently moved to England and the old mother refusing to budge from her old cottage—and a teacher’s income, which was nothing to be sniffed at. He was, if you were pushing thirty, a good prospect. However, I was only twenty-three.

I may have had no interest myself, but there was some sport to be had watching the older women fall over themselves to get at him. Mae and I would be in kinks laughing at them; the lipstick drawn on like a clown’s hanging around after Mass on Sunday to enjoy the
cupla focal
with the
Muinteoir.
The worst of them was Aine Grealy. She had a face as pale and plain as bread, but she had brains. She had won scholarship after scholarship—gone as far as university in Dublin, and was back that summer to decide what she was going to do with all her education. I didn’t like her.

My cousin Mae and I were the prettiest girls around the place. Aunt Ann had given me all manner of beautiful things when we had still been friends and Mae also had excellent Yanks who regularly sent home packages. The two of us turned out in public like something you might see in a film. I had a yellow blouse and a matching yellow scarf with which I tied back my long black hair. Mae had a pair of cream-colored shoes with a leather bag to match. Aine was the type who would look down her nose on shows of glamour. She never spoke to us at the Irish classes, and I knew she thought us stupid. I didn’t mind, as I thought it better, at that time, to be stupid and pretty than clever but plain. We were there for the dancing afterwards and spent most of the class scanning the packed room to assess who was going to give us the greatest
craic
for the night ahead. Mae was on the lookout for romance, but I wasn’t.

I only went after James Nolan to upset Aine Grealy.

It was childish and nasty looking back on it now, but she had riled me terribly. Aine had been talking away to James after Mass this Sunday, and I had greeted them both in Irish as I passed by. Aine had corrected my pronunciation in reply. I thought it was a vile thing to do—and still do to this day—so I decided to put a halt to her gallop. Even if I broke his heart, I told myself, I was doing James a good turn. There was clearly an understanding developing between the two of them and I believed Aine to be ugly through from the inside out. He seemed an easygoing type who would be happy for anyone who’d have him. James Nolan might have been a scholar, but I had him down as a
ludarman
in matters of love.

I was wrong about that. It was the first and last time I was ever made to feel a fool in front of James, but it was the first time of many where I had read his character wrong.

The next Friday, I was wearing a lavender cardigan, which I fully knew set off my long black curls to beautiful effect. The class was over and everyone made busy pushing the chairs around to the edges of the room. Mae was talking to Paud Kelly as he was unpacking his accordion. Aine had made a beeline for James and was stuck to his side before the last of his pupils had stood. She was determined all right.

But now she was up against Bernadine Moran. I might not have been good at Irish, but I knew something about love. At least I thought I did. I could look at any man and make his heart melt. It was cruel entertainment perhaps, but as far as I could see the men around me had it all their way. You had a few short years to tease them before you’d be darning their socks and tolerating their drunken abuses. That’s how it was for my mother in any case. Except that I could see James was a harmless type, I might have been more careful at setting myself on him like I did.

All I did was look. I looked across the room at James in the way I had looked at Michael Tuffy some five years before when I had fallen in love. Except this was an imitation. When I had looked at Michael, I’d felt my knees buckle and the color rise in my cheeks in a fountain of pain and joy; this night I looked at our ordinary teacher and pretended. I cannot say how I did it, except that I stared hard at him until I knew he had noticed me. I knew, or believed back then, that I had something worth noticing.

He stayed by Aine’s side that evening and walked her home as usual. I was irritated to have failed, but my resolve in the matter did not stretch to further action.

The following week Aine was not there, and James asked me up for a dance. He was a tall man and made an awkward, gangly dancer. I was mortified as the other girls, including Mae, clapped us on as if there was something in it. As we were leaving, Mae nodded over to him, pointing out that he was loitering after us as if he had the intention of accompanying us. I scurried out quickly and she behind.

I thought that was that, but before the week was up, I would get the greatest shock of my life.

I came in from late Mass that Sunday and found James Nolan sitting in our kitchen. He was at the table with my father and there were papers in front of them. I was immediately confused; although my father was a brutish enough character, he could read and write sure enough. He wasn’t like some of the poor unschooled who needed to get the local teacher in to help them draft a letter.

Father nodded at the kettle for me to make them tea, then at a rhubarb tart I had made in a hurry the night before. I had left it aside because I had already put it in the oven before I realized that I had put no sugar in it. Rhubarb tart is bitter beyond belief without sugar, and so I made our guest tea and deliberately placed a slice of the rotten tart in front of him. My father took none, as he was not in the habit of eating in front of anyone, save his family. I thanked God for that, as he would have thrashed me if he found out what I had done.

James ate every last crumb and declared it the most delicious tart he had ever experienced. I was about to test his endurance and acting skills with another slice, when my father stood up and said:

“Take James and show him around the place, Bernadine.”

My father always called me Bernie.

James was quiet—sheepish, I think now with the benefit of hindsight. I remember that he tried to take my hand, and I pulled it away with the utmost rudeness to deter him. I must have had some inkling of what lay ahead. I gestured my arms at the hens and the hay shed and we were back at the house within ten minutes. My parents had cleared out and I made busy around the kitchen, rolling up my sleeves and walloping pots to make it clear it was time for him to leave, which he did.

When my father came back in and found James gone, he went mad—shouting that I was a useless strap. Still I didn’t understand, until my mother ushered him out and sat me down at the table. Her voice was gentle, the sharp, busy tone gone out of it. She looked worried.

“Do you like James?” was all she asked.

I knew then that they had come to an arrangement, although I could scarcely believe it of them—or, for that matter, him.

*

The sordid details only came out later. How James had come calling with the intention of walking me out and my father had pinned him down to a marriage commitment there and then. After the family had shamed itself in not being able to dowry me to Michael Tuffy, the old bastard was afraid he would be stuck with me forever. James and his mother took me on with no dowry, and they never told a soul or sinner in the parish to save my family name.

James had written and signed an informal contract with my father that afternoon, buying me like cattle, though no money changed hands. A worthless piece of meat, that was how I felt myself. This man didn’t love me, nor I him. My parents clearly did not love me; otherwise they would never have done this terrible thing.

When Michael returned to America, I thought my heart had torn asunder. My loving him, my missing him, that terrible wrenching longing to see him came upon me again that day, and with terrible force.

I ran from the kitchen, and walked fast across five fields and five ditches to a place we called Purple Mountain. It was a small hill, no more than a mound of heather, and below it on the other side was the “lake.” In reality, it was a pond of water that changed from a large brown puddle to a deep pool depending on the rainfall and the time of year. Beyond it stretched miles of black, treacherous bog. No one owned this land and no one cut turf from it, although there were plenty of stories of men who had tried and disappeared. We were told they were dragged down to hell itself by the bony paws of the demons that lived beneath the bog’s surface. It was to deter us playing there, but also played on our terror, as the demons surely didn’t choose their prey at random.

I was full of sin and had gone past caring. Michael Tuffy and I had sinned ourselves senseless on several occasions. It was that, and the knowledge that I could not endure the rest of my life without him, that made the fact of our not getting married so terrible. We had been so certain of our fate together that we had enjoyed each other’s bodies.

On the day of my father’s and James’s arrangement, I stood on the top of that filthy mound of earth and I thought about flinging myself into the lake. There had been heavy rainfall for weeks, so it was deep. I could not swim, and I knew the demons would be ready for me after what I had done.

I opened my arms and I swayed, but I could not do it.

So I thought about what I was left with.

I could flee, but I had nowhere to go. I could not stay at home, that much was clear. And then I realized I had no choice. I had to marry James.

*

As the weeks crept towards the wedding I tried to keep up a front. It didn’t help anyone for me to be surly and sad. My mother and Mae sold him hard to me, and I took heed of them the best I could. James Nolan was clean, respectable, and kind. A tall man, he may have been more than ten years my senior but he was well built and strong. Not handsome, but his fine features gave him a gentle, intelligent appearance that was not entirely unattractive. His mother was decent, and we would have our own house. I could do a lot worse.

But this route of thinking wasn’t mine and while I went along with them, all I could think about was how this was supposed to be happening with somebody else. Every inch of me burned again for the young man who had gone to America five years before and taken with him my heart, my soul, my spirit: the tools I thought I needed to love.

On the morning of my wedding, I wore the cream gown my mother had worn. It was silk and smelt of lavender. Cousin Mae put rouge on my cheeks and on my lips. As her fingers touched my mouth, she slipped her hand around the back of my neck and held my head so that I could weep. I shook into the silk of her shoulder and thought of how nothing would ever be the same again.

When I had finished, I determined then that I would not cry again over any man. James Nolan was supposed to be good, but here he was dragging a young woman into a loveless marriage. So if he was happy with a wife who didn’t love him, then that was exactly what he was going to get.

I smiled and charmed my way through the day of celebrations. I was, everyone agreed, the most beautiful bride Achadh Mor church had ever seen and James, being the popular teacher, drew out every neighbor in the vicinity to wish us well. It was gone ten before the last of them left the house and we settled into our first night alone together.

Two complete strangers—and I was determined that we should stay that way.

Dan was great the day we went out to Yonkers. He said that if I didn’t like it, we didn’t have to move there. He just wanted me to look, as it was something that we had to decide about together. He was trying so hard and with the patience of a saint, but the joint ownership thing hit me like a brick. Another complicated layer of commitment kicking in.

It’s not that I never travel out of Manhattan; it’s just that I prefer not to. I have lived on the Upper West Side most of my life, except for my university years in Galway. I found my apartment back in my twenties. Everyone was renting, but I had enough of my grandparents’ Irish insecurity gene to push myself financially and purchase.