Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (24 page)

After Mass, Aine pushed her way over to me at the door, and made her statement within earshot of everyone, beadily scanning my face for evidence of a reaction. I ignored her, as if I hadn’t heard, and she would have surely repeated her statement more loudly, if James had not hurried me outside.

In actual fact, I did not ignore her deliberately, rather she had propelled me into a state of shock. James had not heard what she said, or at least if he did he passed no comment, but was irritated by my distractedness as we took off in the car.

“For God’s sake, Bernadine, are you listening to me at all? I’ve volunteered to work in St. Mary’s for the day. The crowds will be terrible at the shrine itself, and Father Kenny has asked me to give a talk on the stories of the fifteen.”

I caught my reflection in the wing mirror, and felt sadness wash over me. Sadness that here I was, in my sixties and yet so easily overcome by romantic reverie; that the decades had robbed me of my beauty and forged lines that suggested wisdom into my face, yet my stomach was fluttering like a silly schoolgirl’s.

James went on, “I’ve put you down for serving refreshments between eleven and two in St. Mary’s, if that’s all right. You can do later if you like, but...”

“No.”

For more than forty years I had held my love for Michael Tuffy as sacred. He had abandoned me, tried to embezzle from my family, and had dishonored my name. But as sure as a part of me had died when I learned the truth about him, another came alive at the thought I might see him again. Aine had harbored a grudge all this time, and gotten me.

Michael would be here to see the Pope, and the Pope would not be appearing at St. Mary’s Hall in Toureen.

“I want to go to Knock.”

“But the crowds will be terrible, Bernadine, and I’ve already said that...”

“I’ll go alone, then.”

“No, no—if that’s what you want, I can cancel.”

But this was something I had to do without James.

“I’ll go on the bus. Cousin Mae is going with the Ballyhaunis ICA. I’ll tag along with them.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll just tell Father Kenny that we’ve changed or minds and...”

“No, you go to Toureen. It’s important. I’ll be grand with Mae and the girls.”

There was a moment’s stand-off while James interpreted my protestation. The Pope’s visit was history in the making, and it was an event that husband and wife should experience together. Yet his wife wanted, for some reason, to go without him.

James was hurt, but I couldn’t care. True love had beckoned and I had no choice but to follow.

When things in my life are uncertain, I fall back on the food of my youth. My grandmother’s baked ham is wonderful for that. A huge hunk of meat, slowly simmered then slathered in honey, pricked with cloves, and roasted in a hot oven until it is crisp and tender. It is not fast food, but a joint of ham will last for days. Two of you will get one hot meal, a lunch, and suppertime sandwiches out of it. Proving that, sometimes, putting your time into something will pay dividends.

Doreen had been my friend for fifteen years, and though I hadn’t seen her since my wedding, she had remained a constant. An eternally forty-one-year-old fashion editor. Stick thin and irre-pressibly stylish, with a tongue as sharp as her nails, she was possibly the very last person I would have picked as a best friend. Yet Doreen got me my first break as a food writer after she discovered me working in a diner local to her magazine offices. I was floating through my post-college early twenties, looking for a career path, and she was careering toward middle age, trying to stay thin. To the distress of her couturier, Doreen developed a lunchtime taste for my clove-roasted ham on rye, and felt compelled to call me out on it. Such temptation was surely the work of the devil.

“I’ve gained nearly four pounds,” she squawked over the counter at me.

I knew who she was. Doreen Franke was a high-profile columnist and her style musings on everything from shoes to restaurants were legendary. So I told her I wanted to be a food writer, and we struck a deal. She talked me up to some key editors and I left the diner.

Over the coming years, I was to become responsible for a colossal two-inch addition to her waistline, but then Doreen only ever ate when I cooked for her. Apart from the occasional cocktail party canapé, I more or less kept the woman alive.

People were often surprised by our friendship. Doreen was older than me and reputed to be an unscrupulous bitch. But I never felt that way about her. Doreen was cutting, but I found her humorous. She could be exhausting in her unassailable wit and dramatic delivery, but she was always entertaining. As our friendship spilled into years, I discovered that the icy fashion queen had a warm heart that she took great pains to disguise.

We had some things in common. Where Doreen was an appalling style snob, I reserved my snobbery for food. “Although,” as she often said,
“how
you can differentiate between one type of pasta and another is beyond me.”

“That’s because you don’t eat enough of it.”

“Enough? Honey, I haven’t eaten pasta since
1977.”

Doreen spoke in italics, and her minions copied her mannerisms as well as her clothes. So did half of New York, apart from me. I kept wearing my Levi’s and “classic” John Smedley fine-knit sweaters bought mail order from England, despite Doreen’s pleading.

“I am so bored looking at you in those what-do-you-call-them?”

“Jumpers.” I always used my mother’s Irish term for this particular item of clothing.

“This is a new one, right? What
is
this color? It’s like something you’d see leaking from a child’s nose.”

“Pea green.”

“Green is something you
eat,
darling, not wear.”

“But I’m Irish.”

“Especially
if you’re Irish. God, do you know nothing?”

For my part, I derided Doreen for disappearing when she stood sideways, and inspiring eating disorders in the nation’s youth.

Doreen was a relationshipphobe. Married briefly in her early twenties, she had long since declared the concept of sharing one’s life with another to be overrated. “Honey, I can barely stand to share a plate of sushi—but a bathroom? Eugh!” She nonetheless prevented me from going down the path of confirmed spinster-hood. “You’re not stylish enough to get away with being old and single, and besides, you can cook. You
have
to get married!”

Doreen kept me trying. She was deeply unimpressed when I first started seeing Dan.

“Slept with your building superintendent? Have you
lost your mind?”

It was one of Doreen’s top three rules on how to run a successful sex life as a single woman in Manhattan: Wax every six weeks whatever the weather, always tip other people’s doormen, and never,
ever
sleep with your own building super.

“It had been so long, Doreen.”

“So, now all of a sudden you’re a sex maniac...”

“I don’t know what came over me.”

“I know it’s tempting, Tressa. They’re male, they’re on hand...”

“I think I like him.”

“Oh Christ—you’ve done it more than once.”

“Last night.”

“At night!”

“I like him, he’s, he’s...”

“He’s a building superintendent, Tressa. You stay friendly, at Christmas you tip. You do not date them. Your manicurist dates them. If you must have sex with them, you do it in the afternoon in the laundry room, and you only do it once.”

“Well, he makes me feel good.”

“You’re just desperate, that’s all. You’re lonely. Whatever. Put an end to it now. It will end in tears. Believe me.”

It ended in marriage.

Bluntly, Doreen did not think that Dan was good enough for me. If I had been 100 percent sure myself, none of her doubts would have been an issue with me.

Doreen had called me on my decision to marry Dan in her own unique way.

“You’ve been seeing him
what?
Five months?”

“Nine.”

“Well, that’s a lie, honey. March, I was dragging you off to the D & G party. Then you start this ‘convenience fuck’ thing with your super...”

I knew that breaking the news of my engagement to Dan was going to be an impossible conversation, because Doreen knew me inside out. She could smell I wasn’t entirely convinced about Dan, and she was going to milk it. But though I wasn’t sure marrying him was the right thing, I was less sure that it was the wrong thing.

As Doreen herself had once said, “Being divorced is not the same thing as being terminally single. Once you’ve been married and divorced, you
know
being married is not such a big deal.”

It would have been too easy for Doreen to assure me that somebody better than Dan was only around the corner. So I eye-balled her and told her I was totally sure. “I love him,” I said. It’s the last line of defense. The Holy Grail of the single girl. Beyond the endless lists of pros and cons, the cappuccino-fuelled analysis: Will I, won’t I? Is he, isn’t he? The neurotic, nitpicking, navel-gazing, soul-searching quest for perfect love.

“We’re getting married. I love him.” It was a mystery solved, job done, the end of the line. The question, solution, resolution all rolled into one. I hoped that if I said it often enough, it would come true.

Doreen couldn’t argue with that, although she didn’t for one second believe me. But she sat back and smiled. “I suppose you’ll want me floating up the aisle in front of you in green chiffon?”

She helped me organize the wedding, and was the perfect companion on the day. She found her own way of being nice about Dan—largely focussed on how he looked, which made him blush like an embarrassed schoolgirl and me feel like I was marrying a Chippendale. But I swallowed it. That was just Doreen’s way, I told myself. She had a wicked sense of humor, and I had enjoyed it long enough at other people’s expense so that I could hardly be prissy about it when it was pointed at me.

Since I moved out of the city, Doreen and I had been busy building new lives. But since I was the one who had found a husband and left Manhattan, I suspected that Doreen was feeling left behind. She did not want or need a man—but she had become dependent on me for whatever small emotional sustenance she did need. Since my wedding, she had fallen back on her gay fashion friends, and every time I rang her, she appeared to be recovering from one party or on her way to another. I sensed she was exaggerating how fabulous her life had become, and could not find the words to tell me she missed me.

But since things came to a head with Dan, I found myself missing her.

Doreen and I have seen off several presidents, Day-Glo jewelry, shoulder pads, nouvelle cuisine, cigarettes, and many boyfriends together. We reviewed restaurants, “did” Florence, hosted each other’s birthday dinners, schmoozed each other’s mothers, interviewed each other’s latest flames, and, on one terrifyingly drunken night, waxed each other’s armpits.

She made me laugh like nobody else and more than anything right then, I needed to laugh. I needed to break the bad spell poisoning my home, and there was no witch better than Doreen for cutting through the shit and telling it like it was.

So that afternoon, I e-mailed her and invited her to slum it out in Yonkers for the weekend.

“I’m off now, Bernadine,” James shouted from the door. “There’ll be a bus leaving the Church of the Apparition at five o’clock, if you want to leave early and come on down to Toureen.” Then, on my giving no reply, he repeated, “Bernadine?”

James came into the bedroom, and found me fussing through my wardrobe looking for a coat.

“What are you doing? Mae will be here in a few minutes.”

It was nearly twelve, and my husband was full of excitement. He had been watching the pontiff’s visit live on television that morning.

“Come and watch, Bernadine, Bishop Eamon Casey is on,” James had called earlier. “Jesus, but he’s a great man altogether— such confidence. Come on, Bernadine—you’re missing it all!”

I could not bear to watch. The day before I had watched, with disbelief and despair, the size of the crowds in Dublin and Drogheda. Tens of thousands of people stretched across miles; they were all jubilant, hymn-singing faithful, sure that they would get a good view of St. Peter’s successor as he whirred through the clouds in his helicopter, like an orange eagle. The TV cameras caught him up close, his hands raised in greeting and benediction—but that proximity was just a false promise. If the pontiff himself was just a white dot to the thousands there, in reality what hope had I of finding Michael Tuffy in such a crowd?

For the full week before, I had been trying to talk myself out of seeing the Pope’s visit as a backdrop to my own childish fantasy that Michael and I would be the two whom fate would mysteriously draw together through the crowded fields. We had spent a lifetime apart, yet the greater part of me still wondered if Michael and I were destined to be together. With the Pope there, God was sure to be in attendance. And fate was very much God’s remit.

“What coat should I wear?” I said to James, holding aloft a navy rain mac, and a hooded cardigan that Niamh had posted me from New York.

“Wear the mac,” James said. “It looks like rain.”

He was right, of course, but I decided to wear my daughter’s gift from New York. For luck.

*

At three p.m., as the pontiff’s helicopter landed to the side of the basilica, the crowd let out a welcoming cheer. Four hundred and fifty thousand individual bodies seemed to merge into one giant mass of devout delight. Exultation.

Four hundred and fifty thousand—and me. I had never felt so alone in my life.

Utterly underestimating the vastness of the crowd and its sheer volume, I had left Mae and the others at the coach park and wandered ignorantly into the crowd to search for Michael. I knew I was behaving out of character. Still, I walked and walked, expecting the crowd to dissipate, but it grew thicker the further in I walked. Within moments I was lost in a forest of bodies. I could not find my bearings, I had no idea of north or south. The familiar landscape of Knock was gone and all I could see was the grass under my feet and people crushing around me on all sides. The gray sky seemed to descend on us. It was one of those days that struggled to overcome dawn and turned to twilight soon after lunch. My cardigan felt clammy and was pulling down on me from a damp hem. The early beginnings of my arthritis (a condition I associated with old age and therefore denied) began to tug at my knees. I wanted to sit down.