Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (16 page)

Shaking, I rummaged in my purse, praying that Dan had slipped the car keys in there like he always did. As I started the engine and drove home in five minutes flat, I knew it was over, and I thought,
Good riddance, you bunch of messed-up freaks.

But by the time I got home, the shaking anger had given way to the awful realization of what I had done.

I lay on our bed and bawled like a petulant child into the pillow.

Marriage was supposed to be the answer to everything, the blossoming of a mature love. It was supposed to dignified, civilized, supportive, nurturing. Marriage wasn’t easy, but it shouldn’t be a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from.

That afternoon, I realized I didn’t know what marriage was supposed to be like at all. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I cannot say that what I felt for my father was love. I was afraid of him; yet worse than the fear was the way that I understood him. I felt responsible for his anger and guilty for his sorrows. Whether he was silent and sullen or loud and abusive, I always sensed that it fell on me to make him better.

While my mother’s pretensions toward sainthood were often the catalyst to his anger, I was referee to his demons. In his worst drunken moods, I seemed to be the only person he could have around him. My mother could never fully understand my father because she did not have his blood running through her veins. So while his maudlin ramblings enraged my brothers, calming and placating my father out of a drunken frenzy became my job. They all ran like rats out of the house when they saw him coming, my mother wailing and wringing her hands in a way I knew would anger him even more.

He always professed a passionate love for my mother, and claimed that her coldheartedness was killing him. But my father did not want to be loved. He wanted someone to run alongside him and witness his pain, someone to drown in his anguish with him. So he would sit at the kitchen table, his coarse hands fumbling clumsily around the cigarette packet, and start to list his grievances: his brother getting the farm, bad price on cattle, some bastard this, some bastard that—working up to the climax of my mother’s brothers giving him a beating. The betrayal of it! The humiliation! Then the fists would come down on the table and I knew it was nearly over and he was ready for some food.

I preferred my father angry because once the fight had gone out of him, he was just a vulnerable mountain of man. As a small child, it terrified me to see my father cry; as I grew older, it broke my heart. I spent my childhood wishing away my father’s pain.

As a young woman, I assumed that treacherous trickery of fear and guilt, that compulsion to cure, was love. By the time my mother died, I was a woman in my forties and I had learned different. Or at least I thought I had.

When I saw my father help carry my mother’s coffin up the aisle, I knew that he was not going to survive on his own. His ferocious frame confined in the black suit I had bought for him the day before, he shuffled his feet as if the ground were burning them. He had a look of anguish on his face, like an actor frozen mid-speech. It was as if my mother’s death had been flung at him by an adversary. God. Punishment for all the bad things he had done.

When I looked at him, pathetic and broken like that, my heart disintegrated to dust. That was how it had always been. His anguish, his anger always dwarfed the feelings of the people around him. My mother’s funeral became not about her, but about how my father would cope without her.

After years of marriage to a decent man, I came to believe that perhaps my father was not a lost soul deserving of my tolerance and pity, but a cunning, truly evil man. But it takes more than believing something to reverse the habits of a devoted daughter.

My mother was sixty-seven when she died unexpectedly, and for their whole marriage, she had waited on my father hand and foot. He knew how to light the fire and he knew where the well was, but he could not boil a pan of water, and he did not know how many spoons of sugar he took in his tea. My family home was half an hour’s bicycle ride away from our house, and I thought I would manage my father’s meals and look after him sufficiently without having to move him in with us. As the weeks after she died progressed, however, I realized that it wasn’t going to be possible. A neighbor was supplying Daddy with
poitin,
and he wasn’t bothering to eat the food I was leaving for him or light the fire. Twice I found him asleep in the chair, having soiled himself. The second time I thought he was dead and, I confess, I felt a flicker of relief. It’s over, I thought. It seemed so right, that death should come quickly and give him an early release.

It was perhaps only the shock and guilt I felt when he opened his eyes that made me bring him home with me.

That and James. My husband had been insistent from the first, “Your father needs the comfort of his family.”

“Let one of my brothers take him back to England.”

“Oh Bernadine...” His voice moved across my name in that disappointed tone he always used whenever I said something nasty; as if cruel words were so unlike the kindhearted Bernadine that he knew me to be.

James was a Pioneer—a nondrinker. As a young woman, I had thought his refusal of alcohol patronizing and unattractive. A man who did not drink was not a real man—no
craic.
As time went on, I began to realize that perhaps the only good thing my father ever gave me was a husband who didn’t drink.

James occupied himself with his reading and always had plenty to keep him interested around the house: growing vegetables and keeping bees. He had more interest in Niamh than most men had in their children. As he got older, James did seek out the company of other men, but through the more gentlemanly pursuits of fishing and shooting. The pub was somewhere he went to pay his respects after a funeral, or perhaps buy his wife a bar of chocolate on his way home from town. In that way, I felt that James was innocent of the indignities and vulgarities of the drinking man. To him, my father was just the person who had given me to him. He knew that Daddy drank and could be rough at times, but he had never witnessed anything that would lead him to believe that my father was different from any other man. The idea of my refined husband being exposed to the coarse treachery of my father’s drunken tongue terrified me.

I was not afraid of my father himself, but of who I became when I was with him. All my adult sense told me that Daddy was a drunken old fool not worth taking heed of. But in my heart I was still a frightened child, eager to make everything better. James had seen me tired, grieving—but he had never seen me weak.

*

Mother died in mid-August and my father moved in with us by early September. I was relieved at the timing, as it was the beginning of the autumn term, so James and Niamh would be at school all day and I would be left to deal with my father on my own.

Daddy was seventy, and should not have lived past sixty the way he abused himself. He was heavy, and grew out of breath after even the shortest distance walking, but he was still a strong man.

For the first few months, it looked as if everything was going to be fine. Daddy had got a fright when I had found him passed out for the second time, and promised his drinking days were well and truly behind him. He was still in shock over having lost my mother, but seemed to accept that a holiday in our house was a good idea. He was more outgoing than I had ever seen him before. He declared that James was a charming man, saying that this not-drinking thing was very good indeed and that he wished he had taken his pledge more seriously as a youth. Niamh, who barely knew her grandfather and was used to living in the exclusive company of her parents, adapted quickly to having him around. They both reveled in the novelty of each other’s company and after supper would sit by the fire in a conspiratorial huddle playing Old Maid or Snakes and Ladders while I cleaned the scullery and James tended the vegetable garden.

Those evenings, watching them from the scullery door, I could not help a feeling that my family had finally taken shape: three generations under the same roof. There was such warmth in seeing how the old man was with my child. It was as if the complications of parenthood had disappeared with a generation, and all that was left was his paternal love. If my own childhood had been fraught, then perhaps this idyll was my reward.

While my husband and child were at school, a cheerful working relationship opened up between my father and me. Eager to distract himself from drinking, but anxious not to step on James’s toes, my father asked to be given simple jobs around the house. He cleaned the fires for me, and I even had him polishing furniture and cleaning windows. He seemed proud of finishing each task, and we argued playfully over his reward:

“That’ll be apple tart and cream on the menu tonight, young lady.”

“You’ll have stewed gooseberries like the rest of us and be glad of them.”

“What about a few blackberries then?”

“You’ll have to pick them first, Mister.”

I had never enjoyed a light banter with my father before and it was wonderful. He praised my cooking, and for the first time in my life I had the feeling of being my Daddy’s little girl. I began to understand the carefree confidence that James gave to Niamh. This late blossoming of affection was my reward for enduring a childhood fraught with confusion and hardship. Compensation perhaps, perhaps, for losing the great love of my life and being married off heartlessly to the safest, cheapest option.

Although I was sorry my mother was dead, I was sorrier for the fact that I was enjoying the benefits of my father’s sobriety and not her. Meanwhile a little demon princess was whispering that perhaps I had some power over him that my mother had never had. Perhaps I had the secret to stopping my Daddy drinking after all, and all the wishes I had wished and all the prayers I had prayed had finally come true.

The day you think you have the answers is the day life tells you that you know nothing at all. When you think you have suffered enough and the road ahead looks sunny and flat, you will turn the corner and find there is a mountain to climb. When you climb the mountain there are no guarantees that there will not be another, and another after that.

My father was seventy years of age. He had terrorized his family for the best part of fifty years and been forgiven, forgiven, forgiven. But with men like my father, it isn’t over until they draw their final breath. And even then, you will carry them around forever like a stone in your heart.

Waiting for Dan to get back from his mother’s house was insufferable. The longest and most dreadful half hour of my life. When I heard the front door bang, I thought I had been up in the bedroom for hours.

He came straight upstairs and found me lying face-down on the bed. Gently, he put a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you OK, babe?”

Call me a raving psychopath who doesn’t know when to stop, but I turned from a weak, weeping kitten into a possessed madwoman as soon as I felt his touch.

“Where the
hell
have you been?”

“I came home as quick as I could—I had to get a lift off Tom.”

“Yeah, I bet that bitch Shirley had something to say about me?”

“She didn’t say anything, we were all just really worried about you.”

That really finished me off.
“Worried about me?”

Dan was looking right at me, and I saw his benign expression flicker for a second. I was still angry, but instinct made me draw back from ranting about his family and I finished with a frustrated, “Huh!”

Dan turned to go. “I’ll go down and make us some coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee!”

He spun back around, looked at me straight, and said, “Well then what
do
you want, Tressa, because I am sure wearing myself out here trying to guess.”

He wasn’t shouting, but he was calling me out: eyeballing me in this calm, you-better-start-talking way.

And I did not like it one little bit, not least because the answer was, “I want to bury you and your family under twenty tons of shit, set light to it, then transport the ashes to outer space.”

“I just want the two of us to spend more time alone together.”

Where did that come from?

I had a fear of the truth. Not the obvious truth like Dan’s family was weird, or even the next layer under that, which was that his mother gave me the creeps, but the next floor down. Otherwise known as gut level: the underlying truth. Why did I find his family such hard work? Why did I find doing what I didn’t want to do for him so intolerable? If I loved him, I could endure the unendurable. If we were meant to be together, I would gladly have suffered boredom, indignity, awkwardness as part of my commitment to our marriage.

Within the confines of my own head, I obsessed about whether I really loved Dan enough to be married to him, and sometimes dreamed of escape. But as soon as I was given the chance to tackle this most fundamental of questions, an opportunity to speak my truth and thus put my hand on the handle of the “out” door, I would instantly teleport myself into a state of unswerving marital devotion.

Delusion devoured the truth, and made me say something utterly inaccurate, by which time it was too late. You can say something bad, then take it back like you didn’t mean it—but it doesn’t work the same for good things.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to say, ‘I just want the two of us to spend more time alone together.’ What I really meant was, ‘I’m not sure if I love you enough to tolerate a lifetime of your awful family.’”

And, of course, once you start down that coward’s highway of white lies, there is no turning back.

Dan walked straight over and folded me in a suffocating hug.

He said, “I have been so selfish, Tressa, putting my family before us.” Then he launched into this story about how his mother had had a stroke when they were all very young, how nobody had explained to them all why their mother couldn’t speak properly, and how the experience had made them all very protective of their mother. I wondered why he hadn’t told me before, but was too self-absorbed to care. Too busy searching for the exit door on this dead-end alley of fake devotion. If it was there, it was blocked by my shame.