The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “Liddy doesn’t cook, she doesn’t clean, she doesn’t do child care. How will she cope?”

  Peter looked at her. Then he replied evenly, “There was a time when Liddy did all those things.”

  “Well, Matty must see the child psychologist.”

  Peter, naked, sat down on the toilet seat.

  “We talked to the child psychologist yesterday afternoon. You were right, Rose. He said it was very regrettable behavior and a warning, but it’s important not to overreact. Drugs, drink, sex. They’re all out there and we have to deal with them. Liddy checked the history on his laptop and read all the messages on his phone. There’s nothing scary, I’m happy to report. A few curse words and self-penned rap lyrics about the injustices of his life, but no visits to terrifying websites and no porn.”

  Peter shuddered.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in us spying on him,” said Rose quickly and quietly, not wanting to admit she had no idea how to do this.

  “Not anymore,” said Peter.

  Peter stood up wearily and turned the bath on. She saw the blue-gray ridges of the varicose vein on the back of his right leg, the legacy of a football accident at Harvard when he was nineteen and the handsomest young man on the field. She felt a pulse of lust at the image. On the days when Rose regretted the fact that she had not met him sooner, she reminded herself that if they had coincided at college he, Mr. All-American hero, would never have looked at her, bespectacled and Birkenstocked.

  “What about Liddy’s job?” she asked.

  “She’s taken a leave of absence. She needs time off.” He paused for a moment. “It’s the quietest time of the year, apparently. The biggest day for divorce attorneys is January second, closely followed by September fourth—just after everyone’s spent a holiday weekend with their spouses.”

  “What about the dog?”

  Peter sighed as he climbed into the tub. “The guy who’s buying her apartment loves dogs. He’s looking after it for her.”

  “She’s selling her apartment?” said Rose, bemused now by the rapid fire of startling pieces of information. “Why?”

  “She can’t afford it, it seems. She says she never really could.”

  “My, oh, my,” said Rose. “Talk about once she has decided on a course she is compelled to take action.”

  But he had sunk down under the water and did not seem to hear her.

  Rose looked down to see Peter’s clothes discarded on the floor. She lifted them gingerly to throw them into the hamper, when a piece of paper fell out of a pocket. It was an itinerary Liddy had prepared, with her address and contact numbers in Ireland. Rose stared at it as she lay back down on the bed. Why would she go there? Rose had never once heard Liddy talk about her childhood. And who was this mysterious friend who had come to her rescue? Rose had never heard Liddy mention such a person. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Liddy in a muddy field. She felt as if there was a puzzle portrait of the real Liddy James in a box out of her reach, and she was being given random pieces to try to fit it together.

  “Is that the address?” said Peter, who had reappeared wrapped in her aged pink bathrobe. Rose nodded.

  “Lough Dan, County Wicklow,” she read.

  “We visited Ireland together once before we had Matty. It was Liddy’s grandmother’s funeral and then we drove around a bit. The countryside is incredible,” he continued, resting his hand on the top of her head. “You can see why it inspired so many poets and playwrights.”

  Rose slammed the piece of paper down beside her. “How can you let Liddy do this?” she pleaded. “Maybe we should have a family therapy session together?” (By this Rose meant they would all sit in a room with a therapist who would agree with her and forbid Liddy to go.) “Why can’t everything go back to the way it was?”

  “Rose,” Peter said calmly. “The psychologist said that six years ago Matty’s life was turned upside down because Liddy had another baby. Now you’re expecting and it’s all happening again. No wonder he’s angry. No wonder he’s acting up. I know it’s hard for us to let him go, but my personal view is that he should spend time with Liddy. I think he needs her.”

  There was a long silence, but for once Rose was glad that Peter had stopped talking. It was entirely in character for Liddy to respond to a crisis with an adventurous or reckless act; but Rose knew that Peter had agreed to this not out of the opposite qualities of caution or paralysis, but because he believed it was the right thing for his son. His words stabbed into her; they drove other words that were already under her skin deeper: you, have, no, rights.

  He stood up and looked vacantly around the room.

  “Where are my socks?” he said.

  Rose pointed to the wicker basket in the corner.

  “I’m exhausted,” he said slowly. “I haven’t had a wink of sleep in two nights with the stress of it all.”

  Rose nodded. She felt exhausted too.

  “Peter, with everything that’s going on, you know, sometimes I think I’d like to stay at home with the baby when it comes. For the first few years, at least.”

  “You mean give up your job?”

  “Well, not necessarily. I’ll take a career break first. Liddy will need more help, not less, when she recovers.”

  Peter held up two black socks and measured their size against each other before carefully pulling them on. It seemed like he had not heard her. But then he spoke.

  “Rose, I’m sure that would be wonderful. But . . . I’m sorry, we can manage for six months or so, but more than that we can’t afford. Liddy stopped Matty’s child-support payments when he went to live with her. And now . . . she says she has to downsize.”

  His face was set in an expression of disappointed resignation.

  “By the way, I bumped into Sophia Lesnar at the seminar for the doctoral students last week. We need to get the baby registered for the university day care so we have a place for when you come back. It’s a wonderful center, according to her, heavily subsidized. We’re extremely lucky.”

  He paused. “And she hasn’t heard from you about your reapplication. She’s been able to extend the deadline, but you need to get your article in.”

  Rose pulled the quilt up to her neck and seethed. Peter had no inkling of the fact that she had not written one single word, so it was irrational to think he had spoken to Sophia to sabotage her project of passive resistance. But this did not stop her. She thought for a moment about telling Sophia the truth, and imagined a couple of versions of the scene as if she had nothing to do with it. They did not go well. She struggled to explain how her slow, fermented desire to devote herself exclusively to motherhood had risen so intensely, she had become convinced it was a right, and more prosaically, why she had not replied to any of Sophia’s e-mails.

  “I fear I may have misjudged Sophia. She appears to be going out of her way to help us.” Peter smiled. “What’s your article about?”

  He looked at her expectantly. Rose smiled back but said nothing.

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  Rose’s smile disappeared. She braced herself. So this, finally, was the moment.

  “To be honest, Peter, I haven’t started.”

  Before he could reply she reached over and put her hand in his.

  “How can Liddy not have any money?”

  He snatched his hand away.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Then I want to speak to a lawyer. She has obligations, doesn’t she?” (Rose was disoriented and cross and scared and so this sounded more aggressive than she had meant it to.)

  “Stop it! We have obligations too!” He paused. “I hope Matty never asks me to account for the way I treated his mother.”

  “Peter. Liddy was unfaithful and overambitious. She chose her path—”

  “Don’t say that! Whatever path she took I
pushed her down it. She’s not the person you think she is.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “And I am not the person you think I am. You don’t understand. I was a terrible husband to Liddy. Then she was alone. And I crucified her.”

  The muscle on Peter’s face twitched and the tone of his voice made Rose want to cry again.

  “Do you mean financially?” whispered Rose.

  “Every way I could think of,” he said.

  At dinner parties in Williamsburg, and during workshops in the gender studies department, Peter had always enthusiastically espoused an ideal of equality in marriage, a model that proved that the personal could be political, whereby two adult individuals with a capacity for independence would enter and leave it, desiring nothing but good will from the other. Now he told Rose that when Liddy left him, the limits of his idealism became clear. Liddy had knelt before him in the library of Carroll Gardens, and confessed her sin, and begged. She would do anything, she kept saying, if he would forgive her. But he was wild with sorrow and anger and when he told her what she had to do, the only condition on which he would take her back, of course she could not. It’s a boy, she told him, I’m going to call him Cal. So Peter told her he would never forgive her.

  He gave her nothing; she gave him half of everything, from the 401(k) to custody of Matty, and an allowance for child support too (if Curtis Oates had known the very un-sharklike way she negotiated her own settlement, he would never have hired her). But still Peter found his desire for vengeance to be insatiable. He adopted an unremittingly hostile attitude toward her. He announced he could not afford to buy her out of the town house, but refused point-blank to move, so, without protest, she signed over her share of the property to him to ensure that Matty would not lose the only home he had ever known. At one point she had said, “It’s only money,” which was wise because Peter was not quite done; after Liddy had agreed to pay Matty’s school and college fees, there was nothing more he could take. But he had convinced himself he deserved it. After all, he had sneered at Liddy, quoting from Edith Wharton: “‘For always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.’”

  Despite all this, Liddy had never said a word to Matty against his father.

  Rose gulped. No wonder Liddy had tried to warn her. Peter had a dark side, all right.

  “She was so strong, you see,” he said. “It drove me mad. I kept going because I wanted to break her, she hurt me so much I thought it was the only way I would feel better. But I’ve seen her broken now, and I feel nothing but shame.”

  Before Rose could say anything, he walked out of the room.

  Rose finally allowed herself to cry and cry. Then, oddly relieved, she looked out the window at the redbrick buildings baking in the sun, and considered the appeal of the green fields, mountains, and fens of the Irish countryside, “the land of exile and redemption,” as she had once heard it described in a lecture on James Joyce. Obsessed with the constricted world of her body, a growing baby, and a bed, she had forgotten the vast landscapes that lay both outside her room and within the power of her mind; she had chosen to abandon her interior life of thinking and books and art to fixate on the external, over which she had no control. This overload of passivity had changed her personality. In the four short months she had been removed from the stimulation of her work life, she had become fearful and negative and unempathetic.

  Rose remembered a scornful debate she had participated in during her freshman year about women like Liddy, professional women whose lifestyles were balanced precariously on the subjugation of other women, women like Lucia, who were their servants. (For two and a half decades Rose had self-consciously scrubbed her own toilet bowls; the moment she was forbidden to, Peter had greeted with cash and open arms the two undocumented Eastern European maids who came for four hours every week.) But now she knew that Peter’s unpaid sabbaticals, the renovations to the house, the new car, had all been lubricated by his ex-wife’s salary, and the lifestyle Rose enjoyed was wholly dependent on the continued labors of Liddy. Rose’s plan to give up her job for a peaceful, familial, stay-at-home existence had been contingent on Liddy continuing to pay for it.

  She felt dizzy with a sudden rush of truth to the head.

  Liddy and the boys emerged from the night flight into Dublin airport, in the haze between sleep and waking, after a couple of hours of snatched rest curled in the economy seats next to the toilets, the only three available when Liddy had booked the day before. She led them through passport control like a mother zombie, the flickering fluorescent lighting increasing her sense of apocalyptic strangeness. As the glass doors into Arrivals opened, she noticed Matty, who enjoyed his five-star childhood, involuntarily looking for a uniformed driver holding a sign with their name on it. She pointed toward another sign reading BUS TRANSFER TO CAR HIRE. As they staggered toward it, she thought of Vince and how she would miss him. She hoped Curtis would treat him well while she was away.

  The car was the last available, a small two-door in bright orange, and was a stick shift, which Liddy had not driven for twenty years. But the staff reassured her with “Ah sure, you’ll be grand!” and a young mechanic helped her load the trunk with luggage and stayed to fix the child’s booster seat for Cal. (He had seen the expression on Liddy’s face as she lifted a seat belt on the backseat ineffectually and peered at the instructions in despair.) After a quick three-minute refresher on how to move between gears, he waved her in the direction of the road going south, saying, “Remember to drive on the left!” She nodded, and as she took her foot off the clutch and lurched forward, he tapped the roof of the car.

  “Dia dhuit!” he shouted.

  “Dia is Muire dhuit!” she called back.

  Matty stared at her.

  “That’s ‘hello’ in Gaelic, the Irish language,” she said. “I had to learn it when I was a kid here. I thought I’d forgotten it all, apart from prayers.”

  He said nothing. He was too tired to decide what mood he was in, though Liddy could make a fair guess. His response to the news of the nonnegotiable Irish vacation with his mother had been to post a picture of Alcatraz on his Facebook page.

  “Remind me to drive on the left,” she continued with a breeziness she did not feel.

  “Reassuring,” he grunted, sticking his headphones firmly over his ears.

  Driving over the toll bridge past the docks, although Matty was staring out the window and Cal was fast asleep, Liddy talked. As she drove past the wide strand at Sandymount, deserted in the morning apart from a few dog walkers and a couple of men hunting for razor clams in the sand, she remembered walking there with her father, her tiny hand in his, and afterward taking tea in a tumbledown cottage with his two elderly aunts, who had no television but sat on either side of an ancient wireless tuned to the BBC world service.

  Matty, though pretending not to listen, surreptitiously turned down the volume on his iPod.

  “And here is Blackrock,” said Liddy. “An Charraig Dhubh,” and although she considered herself a resolutely unsentimental person, she typed a street name into the route map on her phone. Following insistent high-pitched instructions, she turned off the main road, away from the large Victorian houses painted white, into a winding maze of clustered housing estates. Finally she found what she had been looking for: a modest, terraced street first built in the 1950s, apparently unmauled by the rise and fall of the Celtic tiger, where washing still hung on lines in the back gardens and young children played soccer between the parked cars.

  “This is where my granny used to live,” she said.

  “Which house?” said Matty, which surprised her, as she had become used to talking to herself.

  Liddy thought for a moment of the black-and-white photograph pinned on the corkboard in the apartment, her parents standing proudly on either side of a large, old-fashioned stroller on the sidewalk outside one of these doors.

  “I’m not sure exact
ly,” she said. “I think it’s on the right down the end. I know the street name, but I’ve forgotten the number.”

  “They all look the same anyway,” said Matty dismissively, his eyelids fluttering shut as the sudden, disorienting dizziness of jet lag hit him. Liddy got out of the car and looked around, curious to see what memories might be evoked. But she found it impossible to distinguish anything authentic from the incidents she had reimagined out of photographs. Yet she had indeed been a young girl in this place—running around the puddles with a hula hoop, visiting her grandmother’s neighbors next door, arriving for tea in her white dress and veil after her first Holy Communion.

  She turned to see an elderly woman in a floral overall and thick support stockings staring at her from across the street.

  “Are you looking for someone?” called the woman.

  Liddy shook her head and approached her.

  “No,” she said. “But my grandmother lived here. Mary Murphy.”

  “The Murphys lived at number fifteen.”

  She pointed to the house that Liddy now recognized well enough to know it had a newly painted red door. The woman’s leathery hand trembled slightly as she did so.

  “And who do you be?” she asked.

  “I’m . . . Lydia Mary. Patrick Junior’s daughter.”

  “Ah. All the way from America. I should have known.” She stared into Liddy’s face. “You look like a film star.”

  Liddy laughed, but the woman did not. Liddy hastily took off her sunglasses.

  “Will you be going to the graves?” the woman asked.

  “Not today,” said Liddy, and she waved and headed back to the car, where Matty was snoring softly with a high-pitched splutter that harmonized with Cal’s unconscious exhales.

  She sat still for a moment. She was glad Matty had not asked where her parents’ house had been. For the answer was “a mile or so away” but ten years ago it had been flattened so a multistory parking lot could be built on top, and the symbolic implications of this disappearance without a trace were such that Liddy resolved there and then not to turn the trip to Ireland into some self-indulgent back-to-my-roots nostalgia fest. But still—