City of Hope (32 page)

We had a full house that Christmas. Bridie had asked Matt to spend Christmas Day with us. “The Balduccis deserve a bit of time on their own. Besides, they do things different in Italy, and it's only right that we should be feeding the Irishman.”

He came over at dawn on Christmas Day. The rest of the house was still asleep and I was sitting in the kitchen giving baby Tom a bottle. After a fretful night's teething, he was finally falling asleep. Sucking on the milky teat, he opened one lazy eye to Matt and closed it again.

“I thought I'd get over before Mario and Anna woke up— otherwise I might get dragged in for the day.”

“The kids will all be running around here soon enough,” I said.

“Grand so,” he said, pulling the coffeepot down from its shelf, “they'll be dying to see what Santa got them. Times have changed from our day, surely.”

“Just a few sweets and daft little trinkets, that's all, Matt,” I replied. “These kids deserve as much as we can give them, after all they've been through.”

“Coffee?”

“Of course.”

Tom stirred and, as I adjusted myself in my seat, my cardigan fell from my shoulders. Matt set the coffee cup down in front of me and then, my hands being full, leaned across me to put a spoon of sugar in it. As he did so, he let out a long yawn.

“Oh God—excuse me,” he said.

I chided him gently.

“I heard ‘the men' were out celebrating the Lord's birth last night all right. Did you go to bed at all?”

As he stood up, he stopped and looked me in the face, quite deliberately. His expression was querying, his eyes burning with intent. He paused as if to say something, then moved around my chair and gently adjusted the cardigan back up onto my shoulders. Although I knew that he was full of longing for me, Matt's hands never lingered over these small gestures. When our arms brushed as he laid a cup in front of me, or patted the top of my hand to comfort me over some failing, or helped me on with a coat, or pulled a falling cardigan up over my shoulders—these automatic, meaningless gestures of friendliness were a facade of paternal affection that I was happy to go along with. I had always been flattered that Matt loved me, while remaining comfortably confident that he would never act. But that morning, with my body warm from sleep, the intimacy of our shared domesticity and the ordinariness of our words, coupled with the impropriety of me being in flimsy night attire, sent a shot of hunger through me.

With Tom still feeding, I reached up to my shoulder and put my hand over Matt's hand to hold it to my neck. He hesitated, unsure what this meant, but before he could move away I turned toward him and, reaching my hand up to his face, pulled him firmly toward me for a kiss.

He fell on me like a hungry wolf, and as he reached for my breast, I shuddered so hard that I feared I would drop the dozing child.

“Morning—we're up early?”

Matt leaped back and knocked over two chairs as Bridie marched past us both. I grabbed the baby in both hands and stood up so suddenly that he let out a yelp.

“Hope I'm not disturbing anything?” she said, without looking at either of us.

“No, no,” I said.

“I'll get the fires started,” Matt replied, tripping over both fallen chairs in his hurry to get out onto the porch.

“I'd better go upstairs and get dressed,” I said. Careful not to meet her eye, I hoisted Tom up to my chest and flicked my hair back from my face.

“Yes, indeed,” the old woman replied as I passed her on my way through the kitchen door, “you better had.”

Matt and I markedly avoided each other for the rest of the day. We passed each other in the kitchen after lunch. Tom was napping, and I was taking some dishes into the kitchen as he was coming in from the garden with an armload of wood. His arms were bare where he had rolled up the sleeves of his clean shirt to protect them, and the hairs curled up in the cold along the muscles. As he brushed past me I could smell the musky scent of the wet wood mingling with his pipe smoke. He walked straight ahead, deliberately not meeting my eye, and it was all I could do not to pull him out onto the porch and kiss him again. If Maureen and Anna had not been in the kitchen with us, I might well have done so.

As it was, I retired to my room early, settled Tom and waited for Matt to come to me, as I knew he would.

My mind was alive with objections: What am I doing? This is ridiculous—only a short time ago you shared this bed with Charles, and now another? You're a widow: sleeping with two men in less than a lifetime is bad enough—but two in as many months? And no thought of marriage in your head? Or even what could be understood as true love in your heart?

Yet the more I tried to reason with myself, and the more “wrong” I told myself my behavior was, the greater my desire became. I was breaking my own moral code; merely to think of consummating such a thing was against God and all religious convictions; Matt was a completely unsuitable match for my passions—more brother than lover. But the more reasons I put forward not to act, the greater my intention to do so became. I knew that he would surely be thinking all the same things about me, and that he would be considering the obstacles that had stopped him making a move before: my respectability, my reputation—my mourning for my dead husband. In Matt's eyes, Charles” public seduction of me would have been a thoughtless act of disrespect and would have angered him. My reciprocation may have hurt, but it would also have shown Matt that I was not untouchable. If he had had any doubt about that, then my behavior earlier that day would have clarified things for him.

Tom was curled up fast asleep in his cot when Matt quietly opened the door and entered my room. We tore at each other with no introduction or apology, making love semiclothed and in rapid desperation. He held his hand to my mouth to muffle my passionate shouts, as I bit and buckled against his strong, certain touch.

Immediately afterward I fell asleep, on my back, my body a flat, wet cross. When I woke some hours later Matt was still in the bed beside me—half sitting up, with the baby nestled into the bend of his chest. He put his finger to his mouth to indicate that Tom was about to drop off again, then put his arm back down to form the child's cradle. I curled back under the sheets and half closed my eyes as if to sleep. Although it was the middle of the night, the snow outside reflected a shaft of blue light through a gap in the curtains. It threw the soft features of Matt's face into chiseled contrast and made him look stronger and more sophisticated than I knew him to be. With Tom lying across his chest, they both looked like a marble statue: man and baby, their naked skin creamy and smooth, shadows falling across their still bodies.

Here was a man—no more than a friend—whom I had known for less than a year, and a child who belonged to somebody else; yet, in that moment, in some part of my heart, I laid claim to them both.

We felt like a family.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
SIX

The secret, illicit nature of our love affair did not last beyond that night.

I was past worrying what people thought of me, particularly those in our close circle. There had been times, in the earlier days of our friendship, when I had thought Maureen had her eye on Matt herself, even just as a father figure for her son. However, Maureen could not open herself to any such possibility as long as there was a chance that Patrick Sweeney was still alive, and she could not consider getting intimate with another man. My own husband was dead less than a year, and already I had been with two other men. Strangely, Bridie showed no signs of disapproval. I could not say that she actively encouraged the union, but then she was not given to commenting if she liked things—only if she disliked them, and she liked Matt.

“He's honest,” she said one night when I asked what she thought about him, as she was peeling some spuds by the sink, “and strong. Men are weak, stupid creatures at heart—that's as much as you can hope for in any of them.”

“Do you think I'm terrible, Bridie—carrying on with him in the way I am?”

“There's worse things than
that
, Ellie. In any case, who am I to judge? Only the good Lord can judge any of us in the end.” Then, as she gathered the peelings up for the hens, she muttered, “And I wonder about that too sometimes.”

Had God deserted Bridie? I wondered. If that Catholic stalwart's faith was floundering, what hope was there for me that mine would ever come back? The safety net for all hardship—the certainty that, no matter what happened in this life, you would be rewarded in the next; the ability to put the responsibility for one's fate, one's happiness in the hands of an all-powerful God—I missed it. The worries of the world were on my shoulders now, not His. He wasn't going to look after the poor and the hungry, so I had to do it—and He certainly wasn't going to look after me. God had proven that, by taking John from me and refusing to give me a child. Was this petulance on my part? Was He simply punishing me for my lack of faith? Or perhaps there was no lack of faith in me, because perhaps there was no God.

In any case I decided that after all the passionate ups and downs I had experienced in my marriage to John, and then the complex confusion of my affair with Charles, Bridie was right. Perhaps strength and honesty were the best, simplest foundations on which to base love.

I could not say that I loved Matt—certainly not in the same way that I loved John, or even Charles. What I could say for certain was that I felt satisfied in his bed and safe in his company. Life fell into a settled routine after I decided to be with Matt. It felt like the right thing to do at the right time.

Baby Tom woke me every morning with a gurgle, the burgeoning curls above his ears sticking out in milk-gelled spikes, banging the empty bottle on the bars of his cot until I picked him up and took him downstairs.

Tom inched his way to physical independence: sitting up on his own, rolling around the floor, grabbing his own bottle and lumps of bread. Once he discovered that he could hoist himself high enough onto his short limbs to crawl, he was away—into every dark corner, seeking out mischief—and at all times I was not far behind him. I was not his real mother, but I did not give Tom the chance to question the difference between young Nancy and this other woman, who was familiar, but didn't share his blood. When he found a dead spider, I was the one who leaned over him and grimaced it away. If he fell, I scooped him and comforted him before he barely had the chance to draw breath on his cries. The other women graciously stepped aside, taking up the slack in the household chores and shops, so that I could dedicate my time to this abandoned child.

As quickly as I adopted the role of Tom's mother, Matt took on that of an attentive husband to me—even though neither of these roles was grounded in fact, we gave each other what we needed. We formed a family unit in the house and, with Nancy gone, moved to the top floor, where we created a living space independent of the others.

There was a small conservatory area on the landing, which we furnished with two low cane armchairs and a table, turning it into a comfortable dayroom. Matt built a wooden playpen in the corner; he painted the slats a bright blue and I filled it with a nest of blankets. After a hectic morning, Tom would nuzzle his head into the milky softness and doze as I sat and did my paperwork. We opened up the fireplace in Nancy's bedroom and covered the bed in broad cushions, turning it into a small drawing room, where we spent our evenings quietly sitting in each other's company, reading and listening to the radio. Matt wore glasses to read, and smoked a pipe; I took up knitting and began embroidering a small tapestry with Tom's name on it. On evenings like that, lost in a comfortable domestic silence, it was easy to imagine that we were married, and that the small child asleep in the next room was our own.

Matt pre-empted my every whim. He carried baby Tom into the bed and placed him in my arms each morning, before bringing me up coffee and toast in bed. He ran a bath for me when I seemed tired; he even noted the rose-scented bath salts that I used, replacing them from the drugstore before they ran out. He came and stood behind me as I was brushing my hair or applying my makeup, told me I was beautiful and kissed my neck. At another time Matt's attention might have felt cloying; I might have interpreted his constant affection as the desperate ingratiation of a man too much in love, but I was exhausted from the cycle of grieving and giving in which I had been caught up, so his attentions brought me grateful relief—a sense that perhaps things were coming together for me at last. Matt was happy to shower me with love, and I was happy to receive it now; I was ready for the love of a good, honest man again. I took his love and banked it away in the gray hollow where my heart once lived. It seemed to help.

In early March 1935 Matt bought a brand-new forward-facing “buggy” for Tom, with polished chrome on the handles, a smart navy body and wide wheels. It would be used only for a few months, but Matt was pleased as punch with his new purchase and had bought and tied a balloon to its handlebars, which Tom grabbed at busily, then chased around the room as if it were an elusive fly.

“A waste of good money,” Bridie puffed, when Matt maneuvered it into the kitchen to show off.

“I'll not have Ellie out walking the neighborhood with that shabby, second-hand baby carriage, Bridie—and the child hanging out the side of it, like a ruffian. Not a lady of her standing, it wouldn't look right.”

I waited for Bridie's sarcastic rebuff—Matt's comment was certainly begging for one—but she simply shrugged and said, “I suppose you're right,” and carried on slicing yesterday's ham.

“We can take him up to Mass in it this Sunday,” Matt went on, “it's about time we got him started in church. I don't know that he's even been christened yet?”