by Mary Gordon
She felt she’d been standing silently, looking at Johnny for much too long. Finally she thought of something it would be all right to say. If she had been a religious woman, she would have offered up a prayer of thanks. But she was not a religious woman, so she put it down to luck.
“What brings you to this part of the world?” she said, in a tone that she believed was light but not dismissive.
“Well that’s a story in itself, Jossie, and like all my stories, as I’m sure you’ve not forgotten, not a short one.”
She turned on the living room light. She would have to offer them something to drink.
“A beer would just hit the spot,” he said, settling back into the couch.
She put her hand to her throat, feeling his request as an accusation.
“I’m afraid I don’t have beer,” she said. “We’re not beer drinkers, my husband and I. Wine, though, we’ve got lots of wine. Or scotch, vodka, or bourbon, any of those. Only we just don’t have beer. My husband has to worry about his weight. Or not really, he’s not heavy, but, you know how men of a certain age put weight on in the gut, and that’s a danger, increases the risk of heart disease.”
She felt her words had a slightly hysterical edge, and she sat in what had been her mother’s chair to calm herself.
“What are you having, then? Let’s just be easy. But I’d say you don’t have to worry about weight, you’re as slim as a girl.”
She knew that wasn’t true. She’d put weight on in the thighs, in the midriff, in the upper arms, but she could dress to conceal it. She wondered what he thought of her, in one of her fifty identical Eileen Fisher outfits, neutral colors, linen or cotton, loose pants, flowing tops. There was nothing loose or flowing about Linnet and Johnny in their jeans and T-shirts. She admired them for it; she was sick of those ads for Viagra showing older couples in matching white outfits, heading, hand in hand, for twin bathtubs with a beautiful view of the sea.
“Neither of us seems to gain an ounce,” Linnet said. “It’s all that good living, I guess.”
“We’re very happy to drink whatever you’re drinking, Jossie,” Johnny said. “Whatever’s easy.”
What in the world would make you feel this could be easy? she wanted to say, but mentioned, instead, Pinot Grigio.
“Is that a dry wine?” asked Linnet. “I like a dry white wine.”
“Yes, yes, quite dry,” Jocelyn said, in the same slightly hysterical tone. “It’s one of the driest, really.”
“Because I just can’t stand sweet white wine. It just makes me feel terrible.”
“No, no, it’s not the least bit sweet. It’s very dry. I’ll just get you some.”
She had to keep herself from running into the kitchen.
She wanted to phone Richard and demand that he come down from Nantucket, instantly, to rescue her. But of course that wasn’t possible. This will be over soon, she told herself. She thought of her mother’s words, when she was trying to instill courage in her timid daughter. “Think of it as an adventure,” her mother had said. Well, she had thought of her marriage to Johnny as an adventure, and it hadn’t turned out well.
“I didn’t know you were back in America,” she said, placing the glasses of wine on the coffee table.
“Oh, Joss, the truth is, I wasn’t long following you back here. I’ve been back and forth home and here over the years, but mostly here. Harder to make a living there, even now.
“Sláinte,” he said, raising his glass. The Irish toast she hadn’t heard since she’d left Dublin, fifty years before. She hadn’t thought about Dublin; she had not thought about it at all. She would have to think about it now, because he was here, reminding her of a part of her life that she had simply amputated. Or no, that was too dramatic. Once again she thought of teeth. It was as if she’d extracted a troubling, a painful tooth, a rear molar, something whose absence would not be visible, even when she smiled, and the emptiness something she got used to so that, even running over it with her tongue, the emptiness seemed the norm, and so, forgotten.
Dublin. When she thought of it now she thought of watery skies, larger than the skies of any city, and the lettering on shops: gold against black, that had so pleased her, and the shop windows, flat-faced but friendly on the quay, and the beautiful ornate ceilings in the great houses, and the great high staircases, and the places he had taken her, pubs on the waterfront, Howth, she remembered it was called, where old men and women sang songs that had made everybody weep.
Before she met Johnny, and had believed she’d be living there for a long time, she hadn’t thought of Dublin as European. Europe was Paris, where she had traveled with her parents, or Rome or Venice, where she’d been one summer with her roommates, staying in hostels, eating delicious food. London was still Europe, but only just. They spoke English, but they had had the War. Good behavior during the Blitz. Dublin had not had the War; it was only one of the reasons that Dublin wasn’t Europe; it was Ireland, a place you didn’t need to learn about, or learn from.
What had she expected? She landed in Shannon, surprised, even though every cliché she’d ever heard should have prepared her for the striking, the overwhelming green. Taking a train across the country and then landing on the other side, in what was a city, whose elegance impressed her … because she’d expected only a small town, a market town perhaps. She was delighted by the long wide streets, though surprised at their treelessness, and the fronts of the houses and the fanlight windows. Perhaps it was Europe after all.
Fifty years later, images come to her mind. Two young men riding on one bicycle, one pedaling for dear life driving the bicycle, the other perched on the saddle nonchalantly, languid as though in a chaise longue, his legs trailing along the cobbles.
A shop called Junk and Disorderly.
Gypsies, or were they called tinkers, now they were called itinerants, with shockingly beautiful faces, wrapped in blankets with their babies inside, thrusting their babies in your face, a penny for the babby misis (this was not America). They frightened her and made her feel ashamed, and she fled from them as if they were a plague that would infect her with their anger and their thrusting and their poverty and their insistence that they would not wish to be like you, but you must pay them, somehow, for the very things that frightened you and made you feel ashamed. And the women selling fruit and vegetables shouting in voices coarse and aggressive, then, when you bought, suddenly maternal, tender, calling you dear, and then possibly breaking, for no reason she could tell, into song, and breaking the song off for no reason.
But now when she thought of that time, what came to her was not what she saw, but what she heard. Her days were days of talk, a paradise of talk, a wilderness of talk. Or like a large dark room full of old furniture, in which she stumbled, sometimes crashing into a broken useless piece, sometimes coming on something of astonishing grace, heartbreaking proportion. She felt herself getting drunk on their talk, on the large words they felt free to use, “death” and “betrayal” and “mourning,” the large categories: “life,” “truth.” The rage at the church, the playing with all kinds of anarchisms. She had to learn that republicans were not the people of Dwight Eisenhower but revolutionaries, and some of the people she met in the pubs had been imprisoned by the British for their political activities, some of which, she later learned, had ended in violence. Strange, she thought, she had no sense in 1962 that the question of a united Ireland, of getting the British out of the north, was anything that occupied people’s minds very deeply. Was that another kind of untruth, another kind of burying of the reality … that people didn’t talk about it? Or at least to her. Ten years later would be Bloody Sunday, and it would be all anyone would talk about. Oh, they sang revolutionary songs at some of the pubs Johnny performed at, but it seemed an anachronism, a nod to a long-distant past.
Johnny was performing almost every night, usually in pubs. And she was always with him, so they always went to bed late and got up late … it had taken her a while to get used to
that. And then she had “her job,” 12:00 to 4:00 p.m., helping Maeve Riordan organize her memoirs. Or not organize them, actually, talk about organizing them. Maeve Riordan, still beautiful at—what would she have been then?—seventy-eight. Not much older than I, Jocelyn thought now and yet presenting herself as an old lady. That was your only option then. Whereas she and her friends were doing Zumba and yoga and having things done to their eyes and lips and wondering whether it was unseemly for them to be wearing bikinis at their age. She thought of Maeve Riordan’s hands, with their prominent veins and their twisted fingers and her sapphire ring, and her emerald, and she looked at her own hands, which were not yet old. When are we allowed to get old now? she wondered. Some days she thought that might be a luxury; to give it over, this pressure to appear, if not young, then not yet old.
Maeve Riordan, who was a much younger friend, an “associate,” of Constance Markevwicz, despite her name an Anglo Irish aristocrat turned revolutionary suffragette: first woman elected to the Irish Parliament and the Irish cabinet. Yeats had written about her and her sister, “Two beauties / One a gazelle.” And so Maeve Riordan had known Yeats (“He liked being called Senator,”) and AE, “a great windbag,” and to listen to her might have known Cathleen ni Houlihan and Wolfe Tone. Jocelyn never knew what of her stories had really happened, and nothing ever got written, not a word. Maeve would shuffle papers, pat them into piles, put rubber bands around them and then take rubber bands off others. But nothing got written. As far as Jocelyn knew, it never had. And yet, Jocelyn thought, I spent days with someone who thought of herself as a friend of Yeats and of the woman Yeats has described, she and her sister, “both beautiful, one a gazelle.”
Johnny had told Maeve Riordan that Jocelyn was a direct descendent of Rogier van der Weyden, and she had believed him, and Jocelyn didn’t know how she could possibly say, “But that’s not true.” He’d got the idea because in one of his friend’s apartments the van der Weyden portrait of a lady was hanging on the wall, and he’d pulled it off, dancing around with it, and said, “Isn’t it just the spit of Jossie here? Couldn’t this one be the great-great-great-great-grandmother of my beautiful wife?” And everyone had been taken up by his enthusiasm and had said, yes, look at the high forehead, the shape of the mouth. But Jocelyn hadn’t seen herself in the beautiful woman with the transparent headdress, except that she had always thought her forehead too wide. She assumed that in the fifteenth century it had been fashionable. But in 1962, it was, for her, only an annoyance.
Every evening was spent in talk with Johnny’s friends, and the whole of Sunday, from waking to sleeping, was full of talk.
And amidst all the talk she would want her own silence; there were places she could go to escape. The beautiful park, called Stephen’s Green if you were Protestant (which she was), St. Stephen’s Green if you were Catholic. She wrote a letter to her mother, sitting on a bench there, describing a well-dressed matron on her knees, looking around her like a thief, taking a cutting from some plant with a nail scissors, sticking it in her fancy handbag and running out of the park as if the police had given her chase. And she would treat herself to a coffee at Bewley’s, as much for the coffee (she missed American coffee) as for the beautiful stained glass window, rich deep colors, which you had to describe in terms of jewels, ruby red, emerald green, sapphire blue, tropical birds with long curling tails, bright rampant flowers, butterflies, solid as shining rocks, flashes of orange against a muted yellow and green background. And sometimes, when she was very lonely, stealing comfort from the Madonnas tucked into the corners of buildings, a comfort to which she knew she had no right.
Because she wasn’t Catholic, and although she had been told different, she believed everyone else was. And she could never be, and so would never be of the tribe. Her parents had been nominally Episcopalian; she’d been confirmed in the Episcopal Church, but they were scientists, rationalists. They went to church because they thought it was something good to do. A kind of placeholder. No word of religion made its room in the house.
The tribe. She did feel she had been brought, provisionally, into a tribal society. And that was how she knew she’d have to live. She was unprepared for the shock when she realized the depths of what had been kept from her.
In all the talk, a central silence, and in the end it was why she had to leave. She was never sure she really knew what people meant. A mania for secrecy, for keeping things mysterious. Women in stores whispering their orders, so you thought they were asking for some illegal drug when they were only ordering toothpaste or stamps.
She had the sense of walking always in a fog, a fog in which the features of the landscape were unrecognizable, and there was in the offing no sun which would have presented the slightest hint of a burning off, a hole even through which there might be visibility. These people lived by words, and yet their words were, she came to see, of less and less use to her.
She began having headaches. The dampness made her headaches worse, the daily rain no longer an emolument but another problem to be got around. Another lie, “It’s a soft day,” meant the rain might possibly let up by two, and with the sun setting at four, she found no softness, only a heaviness pressing on her head, on the bones of her face. She was always cold; she remembered the heater with its single insufficient orange bar.
Until one day, she left.
She couldn’t wait any longer; she felt she had to know, and that enough time had passed so that she wouldn’t seem impolite.
“How is that you happen to be in New Canaan?”
“Well the truth is, it’s our last stop before we leave the country. Back to Ireland, Jossie, maybe this time for good. We drove this load from Ohio we have to leave off in Long Island, and I don’t know why, we were driving through Connecticut and I got this idea in my head, I knew it was a chance in a million but I said to Linnet, Let’s go for it, let’s drive by Jocelyn’s old house. Just for old times’ sake. And who knows when I’d ever be back on this part of the road. Of course Linnet knew all about you and she’s always up for anything, aren’t you, girleen?”
“Yup. I just said, Hey, Johnny, go for it. Though I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you’d be here. But that’s Johnny. Born lucky.”
“Right you are,” he said. “Wasn’t I lucky to find you, Linnet?” He turned to Jocelyn. “The two of you as a matter of clear fact.”
Jocelyn raised her glass. She hoped her displeasure wasn’t visible. She didn’t want to be linked to Linnet. Not in any way. And certainly not by the suggestion that they had anything like an equal place in Johnny’s life. It wasn’t that she wanted a larger share than Linnet; she wanted a smaller one. Clearly, this woman was his partner, in a way that she had never been. What had she been to him? A ghost? A dream?
“It’s sort of a miracle I’m here, actually,” Jocelyn said. “I mean, we don’t really live here, Richard and I. It’s not really our home.”
“Richard, that’s hubby then, Richard.”
“Hubby.” She hated that word, as she hated the words “boob job.” Maybe, she wondered, they both had too many b’s, and too many b’s were an ugly sound.
“Yes, Richard Bernstein. He’s a lawyer.”
Why did I say that, she asked herself … why did I say he was a lawyer? Nobody likes lawyers; nobody likes a lawyer’s wife.
“He specializes in intellectual property. Actually, he’s very concerned with the protection of the rights of musicians, with the new technology, the whole issue of copyright is completely up for grabs, and people aren’t paid for what they’ve created.”
“ ‘Intellectual property,’ that’s a term that could only have been made in America,” Johnny said, but not unkindly. “As if what came from your mind was something like a house that you could put a fence around. I’m sort of in favor of everybody having access to all the music in the world. Though it’s not in the interest of me and my friends’ pocketbooks to say that. But I’ve never been a great man for the pocketboo
k.”
“That’s for sure,” Linnet said, snorting, and patting his knee.
“And what about you, Jossie? Are you still working? Still the mad scientist following in the footsteps of Madame Curie? Or is it just that you’re about your father’s business? The science business, I guess it was a natural for you; if he’d been a cobbler you’d have spent your life mending shoes.”
“Johnny said you were a real career gal,” Linnet said. “He said you were real devoted to your work. It must have been real challenging, being a scientist and all.”
She knew that people only used the word “scientist” in that way when they really knew nothing about it. “I’ve been retired for six years now. And I wasn’t really a scientist. I was more a high-level technician.”
Those were the words her daughter, Erika, had used once, in a daughter’s anger: “You’re nothing but a high-level technician.”
She had felt her daughter’s words flung like sharp pebbles against a window that would not break, but might be pocked. “You’re like one of those people in the ads you see on the subway,” Erika had said, “for places like Voorhees Tech. Love animals? You could be a veterinarian’s assistant. Meaning you can clean up shit while other people do the real work and get the real money. You are allowed to breed mosquitoes and feed mice so that the real scientists can get on with their work, and love you, and tell you how grateful they are. Call you the mother of the lab. Whereas if you’d had any guts or gumption you’d be doing what they do.”
Useless to tell her daughter, “But I didn’t want to.” Sometimes it was painful to examine why it was that she was telling the truth when she said, “I didn’t want to.”
She didn’t want to because she didn’t want the struggle, the push, the hardening over that would be required if, as a woman of her generation, you wanted to protect yourself from the insults, the slights, well meaning or not, patronizing or malicious. And she didn’t want a life like her father’s—late nights, the sense that your work is never enough and never done. She did not want to be the only girl. It had been hard enough at Cornell, a major in animal physiology. “You’re such a pretty girl, why do you want to be fooling around with rats and mealworms? Or don’t you ever feel bad taking up a place that should go to a man, who really needs it to support a family? You’ll just do this as a game, then marry a doctor and stay home with his kiddies.”
