Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (17 page)

And so it was that I found myself standing at the front door of the house of a woman I loathed with a bunch of flowers in my hands, a rehearsed apology on my lips, and a heart that was thumping so hard it felt like it might jump out of my body and bite her.

Eileen wasn’t going to make this easy, but knowing that didn’t make it any more pleasant when she opened the door. She greeted me with expressionless silence, and then walked straight back into her kitchen where she continued her chores as if I wasn’t there.

I put the flowers down on the counter and said my piece.

“Eileen, I owe you an apology.”

It was unreserved, featured no “buts,” offered no line of defense and was a text-book, perfect apology to which the only possible response was a counter apology.

When no response of any kind was forthcoming, I started to flail about with explanations and excuses. Eventually I tripped across something that got her attention.

“Eileen, I love your son and...”

I hadn’t had a chance to finish whatever thoughtless platitude was on its way out when the old woman turned to me, and her eyes were raging.

“You don’t love my son.”

It was like a bolt had gone through me. I didn’t know where to start. This sudden show of passion from a woman I thought was an impervious lump. Then there was the whole ghastly element of it being true.

“Eileen! How could you say such a thing!”

“Because it’s true!”

I was taken aback. We were heading for a showdown very different from the muted, grudging apology acceptance I was prepared for. I was going to have to tread very carefully if I wanted to prevent my mother-in-law from beating me.

“I am not even going to comment on that, Eileen. Why would I have married your son if I didn’t love him?”

“Because you are nearly forty and afraid of missing the boat...”

Thirty-eight, actually, but otherwise—good call.

Before I had the chance to formulate a response I was afraid I could not find, she added quite aggressively, “...
and
your brown bread is rubbish.”

Was this an escape route she was offering me? A side turn off the truth route perhaps neither of us was ready for right now?

Whatever. Nobody criticized my cooking and got away with it, and I guess the old lady knew that.

“Oh really? And what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s too dry. You need to use butter.”

“I always use butter,” which was a lie.

“And an egg...”

“You don’t put eggs in bread.”

“Well maybe you should try, and a spoon of sugar might stop it tasting of cotton wool...”

“Thanks for your opinion, Eileen, but...” I stopped as I realized there was no but. She was right, my bread was shit. Then I saw what was really going on. We were two stubborn, self-righteous bitches standing in a kitchen arguing over how to make bread. It had been a long time since anyone had been anything other than deferential toward my cooking, so for chutzpah alone, I decided to rise to her challenge.

“Well, if you want to show me how it’s done, Eileen, I am all eyes and ears.”

She looked nervous—as well she might, the old cow.

“I don’t have the ingredients.”

“Oh, I’m sure we can come up with something...” I said, stridently starting to open cupboard doors. I didn’t care now. The old lady despised me anyway, so I may as well trample all over her boundaries and be done with it. I had nothing to lose.

I found flour, bicarbonate of soda, sugar—then went to the fridge and removed a pat of butter, milk, and rather pointedly placed a single egg on the worktop in front of her. Eileen looked stunned, and for a second I felt sorry for her.

“We have no buttermilk. It’s not the same without the buttermilk.”

She was trying to cop out.

“It’ll do,” I said.

Eileen gave me one of her unnerving stares, then she did something extraordinary. She emptied the sink of dirty dishes, then rinsed out the blue plastic washing-up bowl, dried it with a cloth, and placed it on the work counter. Eileen rooted in a cupboard under the sink and came out with a sieve, into which she roughly threw handfuls of the flour and a large, unmeasured pinch of soda. As she shook the flour into fine downy peaks, the memories came flooding back. Grandma Bernadine’s bowl was bright green and her sieve stainless steel, not plastic, but otherwise they could have been the same. I don’t know that their methods were identical, all I know is that as I watched Eileen’s worn, plump fingers swiftly churn the milk and flour into an airy dough ball, I was transported back to my grandmother’s side. Like a child, I was transfixed by the speed with which the expert hands hoovered up every crumb and placed the perfect, crossed dome onto a floured baking tray and into the oven.

When it was over, Eileen was flustered, and could not untie her apron strings. I went and helped her and it was the first time (after an early aborted hugging attempt) that I had been that close to her physically. She smelled of sour milk and kitchen soap, of an ordinary old woman who never bothered with pretty things. I felt a snap of pity, but knew this was no time to let down my guard.

“I’m impressed, Eileen.” Then, by way of an olive branch, “You make bread like my grandmother.”

She gave me a cursory “thanks”—then disappeared into the drawing room. Just as I was wondering if I was meant to follow her, she came back, and thrust a silver framed photograph at me.

The image was an old black-and-white photograph of a kindly looking older woman with her hair swept back in a bun and small round glasses.

“She taught me.”

“Your mother?” I asked.

“Ha!” she said strongly. “My grandmother.”

Over the next forty-five minutes, I dragged Eileen’s story out of her. Her mother had become pregnant, then run away to America, leaving the baby Eileen in the hands of her grandparents, whom she assumed to be her mother and father. Her grandparents sheltered her from the truth for as long as they could, but when she was seventeen, her grandfather died and a neighbor let slip her parentage at his funeral. Grief-stricken and furious, Eileen bullied her mother’s address out of her grandmother and started to write to her, but her mother never replied. Finally, when she was twenty-three, her grandmother managed to scrape together her passage to America and Eileen went and found her mother living in Yonkers, only to be rejected in person. She had met and married a wealthy older man, who knew nothing of Eileen’s existence. Her daughter’s letters had all been destroyed without being opened. With no family, and no money, Eileen presented herself at the presbytery of the first Catholic church she could find and was given a job as assistant to their housekeeper. Dan’s father was the housekeeper’s younger brother and that was how they met. She continued to live in the same city as her mother and learned of her death through the local paper. She did not attend the funeral out of deference to her mother’s new family.

All of this was delivered in matter-of-fact single sentences. Not a shred of embellishment or self-pity, just shrugging, that’s-the-way-it-was pragmatism. When she had finished, I wanted to embrace her—this motherless burdened woman.

“The bread!”

We saved it just in time, wrapped it in an
I LOVE ST. PATRICK
’
S DAY IN YONKERS
! tea towel, the first clean one to hand.

I wanted to ask if she saw her grandmother or her mother again after that, but thought it best to let her finish reminiscing another day. There would, I knew, be other days to fill.

As I stood at the door, she handed me the loaf.

“Now,” she said, “I hope it’s up to your standards.”

She gave me one of her sarcastic lopsided looks.

I looked into her eyes and saw they were soft with affection.

With shame, I remembered the stroke, and realized that Eileen had been smiling at me all along.

I came downstairs to find my father sitting by last night’s fire. His back was to me and his head was as still as a statue.

“I didn’t light the range for you this morning, Bernadine.”

His voice delivered the words deliberately, as if he had been rehearsing them.

Dread lurched up through my stomach.

I knew from his inflection that my father had been drinking. He hadn’t had much, maybe only a sniff of whisky, but I could hear trouble in his tone. Knowledge of my father’s mood swings was etched into my bones.

“I am missing your mother today.”

“I miss her, too, but we have to get on with our work.”

I spoke before I had the chance to breathe in and smell the heaviness of a storm brewing.

I was operating on a wing and a prayer, using the same harsh, pragmatic tone I used on my husband. As if it were the same thing; as if my everyday honest words would not antagonize him into a rage.

I had not lived under my father’s roof for almost twenty years. This was my home. I was an adult with mature responsibilities. I had my own family; I was no longer a part of his world, but he of mine. He was staying in another man’s house, and I was another man’s wife. James was a respectable, hardworking, honest person. My father would not dare abuse me in my husband’s house.

His voice was barely audible.

“You evil bitch.”

I had heard him say it to my mother. Mutter an atrocity so quietly that you might think the devil himself was whispering inside your head.

“Pardon?”

The request to repeat it was out automatically.

He did not reply straight away, so I pretended that nothing had been said.

“I said, you evil bitch.”

My hands were shaking as I scooped handfuls of flour into my basin and I repeated to myself,
Give us this day our daily bread, give us this day our daily bread.

“Did you hear me, Bernadine? Are you going to reply to your father?”

Our Father who art in heaven.

I realized in that moment that I had no special skills for dealing with such a bully. No innate understanding running through my veins. What had protected me in the past was not my status as his blood relation or his child, but my mother. Now she was gone, he needed another victim to pour his rage into. Another “coldhearted” woman to justify his bitterness and depression. A reason he could give himself to explain the lump of pain inside, and help dilute it into something more digestible—like hate.

“Look at you—standing there making bread. My daughter, the coldhearted, evil bitch. Your mother lies in her grave and you are standing there. Making bread. You don’t give a shit about anyone or anything.”

He had never spoken to me like that before, but when he had spoken in that way to my mother, I had always been terrified because I knew it precipitated violence. And as he spoke, I knew I should be feeling afraid, but I wasn’t.

I felt angry. Really angry. And it didn’t take much more than that first outburst to pull this surge of loathing up from my feet to my mouth. It was as if the
Titanic
had risen from deep inside me, and I lashed out. A stream of obscenities I did not know I understood flew out of me, and I threw the basin of flour across the room, narrowly missing my father’s head.

Flour scattered around the fireplace, a cloud of it catching him on the side of the face in a ghostly sheath. We both stood for a few seconds, shocked.

Then he came at me. Silently, his mouth opening around a half-created insult, drugged by his own anger, he flung his arm at my head and swiped me to the ground. It was a blow as heavy as if he had been holding a brick. As if he were a big man and I still a little child. I fell like a weighted cushion and as my shoulder hit the flagstones, I surrendered. My anger vanished in the impact; defeat was instant and absolute. As my father lifted his leg to kick me, there was a shout.

“Bernadine!”

James was at the door. The sound of his voice itself pushed my body into a fetal curl.

“Get out of my house, John Moran, or so help me God, I will kill you.”

My father stepped away from me and turned to James. For a moment, I thought he might hit him and I cried out, “No!”

As my father walked towards him, James put his hand to the back of the door and, in one discreet motion, took his hunting gun in his hand.

“I won’t speak freely, John, but I know what kind of man you are. If you ever show such disrespect to my wife or lay a hand on her again, I will kill you. Now get out of my house.”

My father looked back at me, and his parting shot was a look of pathos. As if he were the slighted one. As if the world were not big enough to contain the agonized regret of having hit me. As if I were the only person who could understand that it was himself, not me, who was the victim.

*

That night I woke under the bedclothes with my head buried in the soft flesh of James’s stomach, sobbing “Daddy, Daddy.”

James drew me up and held me in a protective knot, and I allowed the boundaries of father and husband to blur as he wiped my tears and kissed the top of my head. I cried without shame and the schoolmaster comforted the brave girl who had reared him a daughter and grown gray hairs at her temple. I never needed my husband’s love as much as I did that night. It was as a replacement for someone else’s, but he gave it willingly nonetheless.

Recovery from childhood traumas was unrecognized by my generation. They were not fashionable as they are now, but they were felt no less deeply. James was an intelligent, perceptive man, ahead of his time in many ways.

“You know that your father can come back and stay here at any time, Bernadine. You only have to say the word.” James was a big enough man to play second best, to a runaway rogue or a brutal alcoholic. He would always walk two steps behind if he thought it would make me happy.

It took a few weeks for the ice to thaw, but I continued to visit my father and tend to his needs twice a week. That day was never mentioned again.

Within a year, the mild arthritis my father had been suffering from turned chronic. He became virtually chairbound, and, reluctantly, came to live with us again. My father remained with us for the rest of his life, another nine years. He drank, when he had the energy to get it himself, but there were no more violent scenes.