Searching for Pemberley (48 page)

When Ruth and Laura came in, we were sitting innocently on the couch. We had been talking about Angela and James's wedding night, and Michael said it was a good thing his brother had pulled the covers off the bed because his aim was terrible, and the chances of his hitting the modesty hole dead-on weren't very good.

“I can see that you two have been having a nice talk while we were playing canasta with Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who won every game but the last.” Pretending to yawn, she said, “If you don't mind, I would like to retire, and we can visit in the morning. By the way, I'm a very heavy sleeper. I don't hear a thing, and Ruth is the same way.”

After I heard the doors close on Laura's and Ruth's doors, I asked Michael if he thought she knew. He laughed, and pointing to my legs, he said, 'You didn't put your stockings back on.”

I turned beet red and asked Michael why he hadn't said something.

“About what?” he said, laughing. “Why do you think she left us alone?”

We waited for about ten minutes before returning to the guest bedroom. This time Michael was not in a hurry, and it was different from anything I had ever experienced with Rob. I got to the point where I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anything before, and I wrapped my legs around his and pulled him into me. And, afterwards, I wouldn't release him because I
needed to be reassured that someone could love me so much, and it was only with great reluctance that I finally let him go.

After making love, he pulled me onto his chest and asked when I had first known I was in love with him. “I'm not sure,” I answered honestly. “I know that as soon as I met you that I liked you a lot. When you came home from Malta, your mother asked you why you had cut your hair so short, and you said, 'So I can do this,' and you combed your hair with your fingers. Then at the Grist Mill, you started flirting with me, and that night I had impure thoughts about you.” After I refused to go into more detail, I said, “I knew I was in trouble at the ball, because I had hardly seen Rob all night, and yet it didn't bother me all that much. Shame on me.”

“What happened with Rob?”

I told Michael everything about Rob's visit and his comment that he knew Michael was in love with me when he saw us dancing together at Montclair.

“Now, it's your turn,” I said.

“I suspected it on the day you fell into my lap at Thor's Cave. I was absolutely sure the night of the ball. By the time we had the last dance, I was in over my head. So Rob was right, when we danced to 'Always,' I was in love with you.” Holding me tightly, he asked, “Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“It's too late to get married today. What about tomorrow?”

I pointed out that we needed a marriage license, and we had to get married in the Church. It was at that point I realized we weren't going to get married anytime soon. There would have to be three weeks of announced banns, and Michael would have to agree to raise any children in the Catholic faith, or a
marriage could not take place in the Church. I asked him if this was a problem.

“I was baptized in the Anglican church. However, I grew up in India amid Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs. I want to have children who are moral and compassionate.”

There was also the matter of a courtship. It was wonderful to think that Michael was so in love with me that he wanted us to marry immediately. However, I had to slow the process down. It was true we had known each other for four months, but in those months, we had spent very little time together. Michael suggested the best way to accomplish that was to say good-bye to Aunt Laura and Ruth Johnson and to check into a hotel for a few days.

We chose the Algonquin, and when we weren't making love, I was in the bathroom taking long, hot baths. There was even a shower, and I sat in the tub with the hot water pouring over my head. Michael kept checking on me to make sure I hadn't gone down the drain. But after living overseas for two years, with restrictions on everything because of fuel shortages, I was going to make the most of an unlimited supply of hot water. Finally, Michael climbed into the tub with me saying that it was the only way he was going to get to see me. The experience of having someone who was head over heels in love with me and willing to show it was so wonderful that it had almost a fairy-tale feel to it. But even fairy tales have to come to an end, and after three days, Michael and I boarded a train in Penn Station for our trip to Scranton. The closer we got to Scranton, the higher my anxiety level. How was I ever going to explain what had happened between Michael and me? I didn't think it was going to go well.

WHEN SADIE, PATRICK, AND my father came home from work, Michael and I were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee. Mom was peeling potatoes and doing her best to ignore me. She had warned me not to go to New York, and I had defied her. All the changes that had happened as a result of the war had passed my mother by. While her daughters had gone to Washington and her son into the Navy, Mom had remained behind in a village that was little different from the one her mother had known in the nineteenth century, and she remained locked into a morality that was as exacting as that of the Victorians. Although she was polite to Michael, she had nothing to say to me.

My father is a man of few words. Instead of asking who Michael was, he sat down in his chair waiting for something to happen. Mom explained that Michael was visiting from England, making it sound as if he had been passing through Scranton and had decided to stop by. We were several minutes into dinner with very little being said, even by Patrick and Sadie, who usually dominated the dinner hour, when Michael finally broke the silence.

“Mr. and Mrs. Joyce, I met your daughter at my parents' home in Derbyshire. It was a brief introduction to a woman whom my parents had come to love as if she were their daughter. But because I was serving in the Royal Air Force, I had to leave to go to my station in Germany. In August, my parents hosted a party, and I was able to get leave. When I saw Maggie again, I realized that I had fallen in love with her. There were complications— another man—but I was not going to be put off for any reason. I was making some headway when she was called home to say good-bye to her Aunt Marie. For the past four weeks, I've been at home in England, pacing the floor, wondering if some unkind fate had intervened and had taken her away from me. I decided to come and find out because this is the woman I want to be my wife.” And turning to me, he said, “I have asked Maggie to marry me, and she has accepted.”

My mother's mouth dropped open, my father started to scratch his head, and Grandpa came out of his bedroom and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“You must be Mr. Joyce,” he said, rising from his chair as if he was addressing a senior officer. “Maggie has told me so much about you, especially your role as a freedom fighter in Ireland. As I'm sure you've guessed from my accent, I'm British, but I'm proud to say that I have a fair share of Irish in me.”

“Seafóid,” Grandpa said, not believing it for a minute.

“Allow me to translate,” my father said, “Garbage, rubbish, nonsense. Take your pick.”

“Honestly. It's true, Mr. Joyce. My grandmother's family was from County Meath.” After a few minutes of silence, Grandpa said, “County Meath. Bah! Never a callous on the hands of a County Meath man.” After saying that, he went
back into his bedroom. Michael would settle for his relations being called sissies if it meant that Grandpa wouldn't throw him out of his house.

After Grandpa left, Dad offered his congratulations in a voice that said, “I hope you know what the hell you are doing.” My mother said absolutely nothing. I couldn't blame either for their reaction. They had been expecting an announcement that Rob and I were engaged, and instead, I had brought home a different man. Sadie and Patrick made up for my parents' lack of enthusiasm, and my sister, while crying, bear hugged her future brother-in-law. Throughout it all, Michael remained calm and unperturbed. He was probably meditating.

News travels fast in a small town, and by the following afternoon, everyone was talking about my engagement. “It's not the same guy who was at Judge's. It's some English guy nobody knew anything about.”

The same day the news was making its way around town, I received two phone calls. One was from Bobby's mother, who demanded that I come to her house and explain myself. There was some unwritten rule that Mamie Lenehan had a right to poke her nose into everybody's business, and for some reason, everyone went along with it. The second call was from Father Lynch, and he wanted to see me in the rectory office.

Sadie said she wished that she could be a fly on the wall in the pastor's office. “I'd love to hear how you're going to explain this.”

I decided not to explain it. I didn't go to see Father Lynch, nor did I rush down to Mamie's to make some sort of confession. I had been out of Minooka for four years, and I was not going to run a gauntlet when I hadn't done anything wrong. However, in
order to be on the safe side, I called my uncle, Father Shea, whose parish was in a small coal town buried deep in the mountains, but who bought his scotch in Scranton.

Raised jointly by my grandmother and Aunt Marie, John Shea was the cigar-smoking, card-playing type of priest, who had worked among the poor of coal country's mining towns since he had been ordained thirty-five years earlier. In that time, he had shaved his theology down to the two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. “Everything else is commentary.” He didn't preach; he comforted.

I asked him if I was going to go to hell for defying Father Lynch, and he said, “Don't worry, lass. I'll give Father Lynch a call and get him to back off. As for Mamie Lenehan, she'll have enough to think about when she learns Bobby is dating the Mateo girl.”

Michael, who had studied Hinduism, seemed nonplussed by the complexities of the Catholic Church. He left me to sort out the details and went to Judge's for a beer with Patrick. Before leaving, he said, “It'll give you an opportunity to bring your father up to speed on why you are marrying me and not Rob, and while you're at it, see if you can discourage your grandfather from putting me on an IRA hit list.”

After Michael left, I knocked on Grandpa's bedroom door and asked if I could come in. He was sitting in the shadows smoking his pipe. When my grandmother had died three years earlier, he had started to spend more and more time in his room. In profile, I could see his expansive chest—one of the signs of emphysema—his reward for forty years of working underground.

“So which one will ye be marrying?” he asked.

“Michael, the one with the black hair,” I answered.

Grandpa pointed his pipe at his chest of drawers.

“Go and open Mam's sewing box.”

I did what he said, but I didn't know what I was looking for.

“Them silver coins. They washed up on Omey from a Spanish ship. Your Mam's father give 'em to her before we come to America, saying to sell them if need be. Say what ye will, I be putting food on the table even in the worst of times.” I picked up five silver coins with irregular edges worn down by time and the sea. “Take them. I'll not be seeing you again.”

Before dismissing me, he spoke at length in Irish, but listening to this ancient tongue spoken by a wheezing man with no teeth, I wasn't quite getting what he was saying. But my father, who was sitting near the door, later boiled the speech down to one sentence: “Your mother is not always right.”

When I left Grandpa's room, my mother said her brother had called back. “Father Lynch has agreed to let your uncle handle this situation. But Father Shea wants to talk to you tomorrow afternoon here at the house.” All of this was said in the dispassionate tone she had been using since my return from New York.

“Mom, do you like Michael?” I asked. I believed if she would only give him a chance, she would see what a kind and decent man I was in love with.

“It doesn't matter what I think. You made that clear when you went to New York. But since you've asked, I'll tell you what I think happened. When you were in England, Rob called it quits on you, so you set your sights on Michael because he's the one who can make sure you get to stay over there.”

I have never back talked my mother. She didn't deserve it, and even though what she had said was incredibly hurtful,
I was not going to get into an argument with someone who already had too much pain in her life. I took a dish towel out of the drawer and started to dry the dishes. “What if Michael and I had a lengthy engagement? Would that help put your mind at ease?”

Wiping her hands on her apron, she said, “Remember when Suzie Luzowski wanted to marry that Jewish boy? She told her mother that she would stay a Catholic and he would stay Jewish. But the Jewish priest didn't go for it, saying one was a fish and the other a fowl.” She went back to washing the dishes.

Logic was never my mother's strong suit. It was part of the reason why she and Dad had such a strained relationship. He had a university education while my mother had left school in the tenth grade to go to work. His was the world of reasoned debate; hers was all emotion based on an innate sense of what was right. But even for my mother, this argument didn't make sense. Suzie and Seth had gotten married and moved to Philadelphia where he was going to medical school. They had successfully overcome all obstacles, and to the best of my knowledge, were doing well. I decided to leave it alone. Michael was a Protestant, and for someone whose daily life was tied to the Church calendar, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference anyway.