The Truth About Love

by Josephine Hart

  “The middle of the week after next. They’ve let me come back late.”

  “After this year you will attend university?”

  “No.”

  She has that quality of certainty, which Harriet also has.

  “No?”

  “When I’m finished at school I think I should stay at home for some time. I talked to my father.”

  “That seems such a pity.”

  “Does it? It doesn’t seem such a pity to me. Something is telling me to hold the fort. We’re all wounded. It’s going to take a long time to heal us. I’d feel I was leaving a battle scene. Leaving them to cope alone. I don’t want to be away from here. I have made my mind up: this is where I stay for a while. They both need me. Mama must survive otherwise they’ll both … be lost, I think. My father is blind and deaf and dumb with love. Yeats. Mrs. Garvey thinks the man has ruined us.”

  “Miss O’Hara. Olivia. May I call you Olivia?”

  “Well I’m too young for you to keep calling me Miss O’Hara. You and Dr. Carter are trying to make me older than I am. But up until last year I wore ankle socks at school.” She laughs. “I’m sure a German girl wouldn’t be wearing ankle socks at sixteen.”

  And I think, in this country young women of seventeen are indeed young, much younger than their equivalent in Germany, even before the war drowned all our youth.

  “Olivia. I do not seek to interfere but this is a major decision. One with consequences. You would be wrong to let this chance—this time in your life—slip away.”

  “Wrong, Mr. Middlehoff? No. I don’t think so. I have a duty and I don’t feel the same about my life. I am less wrapped up in it. Anyway, as the nuns say, people wrapped up in themselves make very small parcels. I’m not ambitious any more. You see, I think with his future gone I should wait a bit longer for my own. I want to be in this place to let it stay with me longer. To let him stay with me longer.”

  “You must miss him all the time.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “You see, Mr. Middlehoff, I keep him here with me. He’s with me all the time. Here. In this house. So no, I don’t miss him at all: I’m living in the house with him. That’s my decision. It’s not lonely. And I talk to him, silently. We have things to work out together. About what I did. The choice I made that day, that moment twist-turning on the porch. Maybe we’ll have to agree I did the wrong thing, took the wrong turning. Decided—no, gambled—that I had time to make it up to him after we’d saved my mother. I can’t quite make out what he thinks yet.”

  I am inexpressibly moved. And worried for her. What can I say to her?

  “I shouldn’t have told you. Ah, here’s Dada. Don’t tell him what I said.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Middlehoff. I should have realised it would be a mistake for you to visit. We are having a hard battle here, aren’t we Olivia?”

  “We are, Dada.”

  “It would seem as though your wife is ill still with the shock.”

  “I hope so. In my bleaker moments I think she’s dying on me. People can simply cease to live. You must know that.”

  “She went missing yesterday,” Olivia interjects quickly.

  “But you found her, obviously.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Where had she gone?”

  “She hadn’t gone anywhere! Had she, Dada? Not really. She just wasn’t where we thought she should be.”

  “She’d done an unexpected thing.”

  “Yes. But we don’t want unexpected things any more.”

  “No.”

  “I panicked. When Olivia told me, I panicked. Came running down from work and my face must have told a story because when she saw me Olivia started crying, ‘Oh Dada, Dada, we’ll find her. We must find her for you.’ Didn’t you, darling?”

  I noted she had not said she would try to find her mother for herself.

  “We were frantic with terror that we’d lose her. We rang the hospital and we went everywhere, the cathedral, the graveyard, down the canal walk. No sign of her. And when we got back, there she was in the kitchen! Laughing! It was awful. ‘Where were you?’ we cried. ‘I’m a prisoner, am I?’ Can you imagine? This is Sissy talking. But it’s not our Sissy. That’s not her. But she went on, defiantly, and said, ‘I met a friend. He was passing through the town. Bumped into him. We went for a drink in the Dublin Arms. What’s wrong with that? Can’t I do that? Am I trapped in my house?’ We just sat there listening to this stranger talking to us. Praying we’d see Sissy, even sad, sad Sissy, again. Then suddenly everything was back to normal. Well the new normal, with just the fear. We’re disconnected from everything. There’s just the four of us. Lost.”

  I feel suffocated by their pain. It is too close. A witness needs distance. I feel I am being forced into a false intimacy. Standing there beside them I have no hiding place. Yet decency requires some gesture from me. I must say something, if only to leave with some grace. About the gate perhaps. But I am too late.

  “Dada’s right, we think she’s dying on us. She doesn’t eat. She just sits there and goes back into that silent world. She’s gone down to nothing. Her black suit is hanging off her and all she’ll wear is that, or one of the black cardigans and skirts she’s wearing today. She’s rolling up the waistbands of her skirts to make them stay on. I offered to move the buttons and she turned on me: how useless I am at sewing and stuff. And then she was sorry. But her ‘sorry’ was so far away. Like she is now. So far away.”

  I know this disconnection. And that it rarely passes. I remain silent.

  “It’s not getting any better. Sometimes I think it’s worse. She’s not alive in the normal sense.”

  And I wonder what is the normal sense of being alive? Am I alive in the normal sense, living with so much of me missing?

  “What is awful is when she just sits there watching Daragh going to school each day. She just watches him. He runs from the house to get away from her … from us.”

  And I think he’ll be running away for years.

  “Olivia does the opposite, don’t you darling? I don’t know which is best. I made Sissy stay here. Living close to what is lost—do you remember, Mr. Middlehoff? Does anything work?”

  “I do not know. If I could tell you, Mr. O’Hara, I would. However, I must go now. I have written to my father about the gate, Mr. O’Hara. It originally came from the house of his childhood, you see.”

  My lie appals me. He looks at me hard. He knows the subject has been changed and is for a second not certain how to react.

  “I will contact you as soon as I have a reply. It is fair to warn you that my father rarely makes sudden decisions.”

  “Sudden decisions are usually made for us, Mr. Middlehoff. I’m sorry. I’ve blundered into your family history. Blind, I suppose, not knowing which way to go or what to do for him now that I can do nothing. I honestly didn’t know I’d asked for a family heirloom. I’ll put the idea out of my mind now. It was a mad thought. I was a bit mad at the time.”

  I am aware that I may have broken the connection between us. I hadn’t wished to do that quite so harshly. However, equally I do not wish to come any closer to the O’Haras. The agony of others obscures rather than clarifies.

  The Greeks were right to keep the great events off stage. Send the information by messenger. Essential, if only because there is always the possibility that the messenger may be wrong.

  EIGHT

  … this young man is talking to me. This young man wants me to talk to him. Everybody wants me, Sissy O’Hara, to talk to them. It will be a triumph for them. “Sissy talked to me,” they’ll say. “Chatted away, just like old times.” If we talk in this country we’re all right. Silence is death to us. And that’s why my silence frightens them. Let them be frightened! I’m sorry. Let them be frightened. I don’t want to make the sound words make any more. Not me, say I. Not me.

  “Mrs. O’Hara? Mrs. O’Hara! Talk to me, Mrs. O’Hara. We’ve been si
tting here a while now Mrs. O’Hara.”

  We have indeed. And why not sit in silence? Why not live in silence? The Cistercians do. They look radiant. Maybe they’ve got all the answers, since they never ask a question. So you, Brendan Begley, sitting opposite me here, do not ask me for the sound of words. Everyone is hungry for the sound of the word, for the fare of life. We feel we’ll starve without it. And we fear starvation. But I am not hungry. Not for human sound nor for those who make it. I am not hungry for people. Neither the sight nor the sound of them. I am hungry for nothing except what I cannot have. I will starve within and without, without him. What is it that they want from me when they say “Sissy, you have other children”? Should I feed on them? No. And so I eat less and less. They are all worried about me. They think I’m dying. Tom thinks I’m dying. Dying? I’m dead! In the week before Tom finally relented and let me come here he tried one last time to love me back to life. Love! He has such faith in love! He is love! He believes that he can make it course through me—a circulation of love pumping from his heart into my heart—pushing through the veins, pumping and pushing that old rhythm that brought life into the world. He thinks love, his love, can bring me back to life. A man in love never gives up. Never. Tom O’Hara is certain he will not fail in this. And he knows that if he fails in this he is lost. And I know that. I am what he has to show for life. I am all he has to show for life; that his love for me triumphed and the children who followed. Two of them gone …

  And still I could not join him. He was holding his heart out to me. There you are, Sissy. Take it. Partake of it. This is my body. The way the Sacred Heart cries out to us in that picture in the kitchen. What a picture in a kitchen! You’ll see His Sacred Heart bleeding in bedrooms and kitchens all over Ireland. But never in sitting rooms, or in none that I’ve seen. No, sitting rooms are for mahogany sideboards and sherry and sherry glasses, Waterford glasses, cut as though by a dentist’s drill into so many peaks of sharpness it’s a wonder we’ve ever had the courage to touch them. And Irish linen napkins, huge with heavy folds you could almost hide an infant in. Polished wood and crystal clarity and white napkins, order, perfect order in sitting rooms and in convent parlours and bleeding hearts in kitchens.

  And he brought his bleeding heart to me, and all the bulk of his man’s body towards me like a gift. It’s what women want, they say, heart and body, and I was still frozen, looking at him with nothing, no light or warmth glimmering in my face. Nothing. I gave him nothing. I left him lying there with his heart in his hand. He could be lying there for eternity. The place I’m in is the place I will stay. It is not a place for Tom. It has no place for him. I do not want him here. And never will again. And that’s the truth. I do not want Tom here. I’m waiting for someone else. Someone I have not seen in many months. Someone I will never see again. My son is dead. There can be no doubt about it. None at all. I have left Tom and Olivia and Daragh. They must be lonely, I suppose. But I can’t help them now.

  So I have gone down somewhere, to a place without a name. Maybe some day an explorer will find it and will map it out. Is it an island I’m on? How did I get here? Was the crossing rough? And this hidden place on the island: how did I find it? Were there twists and turns? Did I stumble? Or was I thrown down here? Maybe I’ll be the one to map it, to write the directions and then, with all my late-come cruelty, I’ll put up a sign that says “keep out.” Stay out Tom! Stay out! Stay with those who live, Tom.

  We separated from each other even before I came into this hospital. The first separation of our souls. That’s a deep separation. We two who lived so peacefully in one another’s souls and whose bodies slept so peacefully together night after night. No separation except to have my children, and then home after days to the shape of the night, which was his shape. Shaping the hours and shaping me into the morning when I would disentangle and wait for nightfall again. But that’s over now. I would not respond. And that is separation. It lies in the turning away, in the blank look that says, I do not recognise you any more. Are you, you? Are you? Were you my lovely husband? And who are you now? Tell me. Who are you now? Ah. That is separation. Leaving a man with all the history of the words that worked, and the stroking that worked, the union that worked, leaving him with all the things he learned in all that life of love amounting to nothing, nothing. Nothing working any more.

  It was sad to listen to him. He was whispering because we always whispered in bed, even before the children came. Why? I don’t remember. The children took longer to come to me than I’d imagined, but they came. I always told Mrs. Garvey, “they are waiting for you May. When they’re ready they will come.” And one of them is clearly ready. Someone told me May Garvey is pregnant again. She kept it secret until she was past the danger time. Didn’t tell me. Kind, that was kind. And this time she is certain they say that he or she will make it to the gate of life and push it open and tumble into life, screaming. And his or her mother will be laughing. Wildly.

  I remember the wild laughter after Olivia. Laughter that was even wilder after … after. They say it doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl. It does, though. You’re looking for yourself in a girl and with a boy it’s all a-wonder. It’s all a-wonder. Fathers and daughters, is that all a-wonder? Not with Tom. They’re great friends, Tom and Olivia. I was never “friends” with my boys. No. And Daragh? Mysterious child. I can’t think at all about my other daughter. Silent I remain. As did she. But all a-wonder? No. Tom is all a-wonder with me. Only with me. He lay whispering last night. Last night? No, sure wasn’t I in here last night and the night before and before? What day is it now? What night was it then? Anyway, whatever night it was, he tried again. After we’d been lying there, me frozen even underneath all those blankets and eiderdowns, he said, “Sissy, listen to me. Come over to me Sissy, like you used to.” I lay there and I whispered, less than a whisper—the sound was like a leaf falling, because I thought it would hurt him less if he could barely hear me. “I can’t, Tom. I can’t.” And then his slow-sighing, “All right darling,” and me, trying to save him with a little bit of energy still left for him, whispered again, “Give up on me, Tom. Let me drift away.” And his “No Sissy. We started out on a road and we’re going on together. Remember that little advertisement, the two children in their Start-rite shoes walking hand in hand that I framed for you years ago? Is it in the attic now?” I was so tired but I made a bit of an effort, for old times’ sake. “I don’t know where it is Tom.” I did. I’d hidden it. I didn’t want to remember what had been waiting down the road for us. I never knew how he managed to get a copy of the original advertisement, God knows where. But he had it framed and I kept it on my dressing table, and when I used to put my lipstick on each day I’d think, there you are, Sissy! Armed for the fray, and I’d pat the picture. The Start-rite kids. The children holding hands with the long road before them. Why did it mean so much to us? Is it all just the memory of childhood dreams?

  I can’t think of those things any more, or of the weariness of carrying all this love from him. It’s heavy, his love. He just won’t take it away. It’s tiring me out. All his love. And his voice comes back, “Sissy, travelling down the road with you was all I have ever wanted in life. And I’ll tell you something else, that’s all there is in life. It is the greatest thing in life. The glory of it Sissy! The beauty of it. So no matter how long this takes, I’ll wait. I’ll wait for the slightest sign from you and then I’ll wait for the sign after and then I’ll make you laugh a few times and I’ll bring you a pair of shoes from Dublin or a pale blue silk scarf or a new twinset. Blue’s your colour. Miss Coyle will help me with the shade. I’ll wait, because I know you won’t wear it for a while because colour will hurt you. But one day you will wear it and I’ll be there waiting for you to look at me again, really look at me. And I’ll wait for the day you walk head-high up the road and I’ll notice that your feet lift a little and I’ll know that within maybe a year or so you’ll walk the way you once did. So gracefully, Sissy. I loved t
o walk beside you. You’ll go back to your lipstick and I’ll buy you a gold compact, old and beautiful. I’ll search in those little shops in Dublin where secret histories are wrapped up in little velvet envelopes and I’ll be drawn to the right one, the one owned by a woman who was loved day and night, night and day by a man who couldn’t believe that he had walking beside him the treasure of all the world. Oh I’ll wait, Sissy.”

  Indeed you will, Tom. Poor Tom, you’ll always wait for me. But I’m gone Tom, I’m gone. Then I thought, try to help him Sissy. For old times’ sake. Haul yourself up through all these layers of silence, which press on me down here in this place that I stay in now. It’s a hidden, animal place. Try, Sissy. Try, for old times’ sake. I did. You can give me that. I found a few words: “I’m lying here, Tom, listening to the loveliness of all this but it’s as though the words are just wisps of poetry that I don’t understand. I’m so sorry but I can’t love any thing.” Oh, but he would not stop. Love-lines pouring out of him. Until I had to say again, a bit louder this time, “Stop loving me! I’m too tired for love.” “You’re full of love Sissy. It’s just frozen at the moment. I think it’s to protect you. Even to feel a little love now would hurt too much. You’re all bruised by love and by the absence of who you loved. That’s what it is, a constant absence. He’s missing.” I couldn’t stand it. I shouted at him: “But he’s missing in the house. In the house, Tom! Do you understand? In the house!” I could hear Tom crying beside me. What else could he do? What else could I do? Nothing.

  After a long time he whispered, “We’ll walk around the house Sissy, in and out of bedrooms, and we’ll find him again one day, the easier memories.” “It’s his absence we’ll find. That’s all, Tom.” “Well Sissy, if that’s all, maybe absence has its own power. Maybe you can snuggle an absence down in you. Honour it. Love it. Come on, Sissy. Come for a walk with me around the house. Let me take your hand my lovely love, we’ll walk around this house in a dream … into every room and tell each other how it is that we remember him … look, the door of our bedroom … remember how he’d peer in, such a skinny, sunny lad, a bit too soft for his own good, and then he’d go scuttling back to his own room.”