"It's American for Maureen," I explained.
And he was perfectly satisfied. As he was when we moved to Dublin, and when my mam turned out to be miles better than we all thought, and never said "I told you so" once.
I got a job teaching in a school, where I set up a real library, and Brendan grew up big and strong. I did make sure he went from time to time to see his dad in England, and learned with some pleasure that Eileen was very sharp-tempered and told Declan that he drank too much, and then the principal of the school told him he drank too much.
I wrote to Rivka every week, and then she got a fax machine, which was quicker still.
And finally e-mail.
She was in Europe four times a year now because she ran an art tours section of Max's business and brought people to galleries and exhibitions. They included Ireland in the itinerary so that Rivka could come and see me. Well, there
were
nice art things to visit too, I suppose.
Rivka talked less and less about Max and more and more about Lida. Max went to a lot of business meetings and came home only rarely. We didn't
think
he had another woman but we agreed that he had lost interest in Rivka. Somehow it didn't really matter all that much, any more than Eileen with her sharp temper mattered, nor the fact that Declan had been sacked from his job in England and was back in his place outside Rossmore, helping out his brothers-in-law, where he earned so little that he had to ask Eileen for drinking money to go to Callaghan's every night. But Lida mattered to us and Brendan mattered to us.
They were our future.
When Lida was seventeen she came to me for a holiday in Dublin. She wanted to be away from her mother for a bit and, well, Rivka and I understood
that. W
e could write the textbook on that sort of thing.
She said that her mother and father hadn't slept in the same room for as long as she could remember; she wondered whether that was natural. Normal?
I said I hadn't a clue about America, it was probably different there. And that maybe it was all for the best anyway. I had slept in the same bed as my husband for years and it hadn't done me all that bit of good, since he left me for another woman.
She was very sympathetic. She sat and stroked my hand. She said men were hard to fathom. That a man had said to her she was frigid when she wouldn't have sex with him. Then he had said she was queer like her father. She hadn't said it to anyone.
I told her she was right, best to forget it, the guy was obviously just mad to have sex with her and was flailing around because she wouldn't.
We kept in touch over the years, but she never mentioned it again and neither did I.
Now Lida was in her twenties and headstrong, dark and beautiful. She had studied law. And then this summer she announced that she was going to Greece for two months before she settled down in a big law firm. Nothing her mother said would make her go to Israel. Oh no, she objected to this about the place and that.
Rivka and I were very disappointed.
My Brendan was also in his twenties: fair-haired, leisurely and, I thought, very handsome.
He was almost qualified as an engineer but before his career began properly he would take a long holiday in Italy.
How Rivka and I would have liked them to go to the Negev Desert, to "our" kibbutz. They could have checked whether the gladioli farm had ever come to anything and what kind of women Shimon and Dov had married in the end. They could have fallen in love with each other, Brendan and Lida, against the romantic backdrop of those red cliffs and valleys. They would marry and give us three grandchildren, which Rivka and I could share. The young couple and their family would live six months of the year in America and six months in Ireland.
Well, stranger things have happened, you know. Like both our own mothers turning out to be quite reasonable in late middle age, people you could talk to, not automatically lie to. That had never been in the cards.
And though we sometimes sighed wistfully when we heard the radio play tunes for couples whose thirtieth wedding anniversary it was or saw a big celebration in a hotel, mainly we were fairly contented with the way things had turned out for us.
We were fiftyish, trimmer and better-dressed than when we were twenty-five and not too bad-looking. If we were to put ourselves out in the marriage market again we might not do too badly. But we didn't need to, we each had jobs we enjoyed, we each had a child we adored and for decades we had shared a friendship with no secrets, no disguises and the wisdom to know that such a great friendship was rare.
I remember reading once that your enjoyment of something doubled if you realized how lucky you were to have it. If everyone had a huge diamond on their finger, or if sunsets were universally scarlet and gold, then we wouldn't value them at all. It was like that with us.
Rivka
I sometimes give little talks, nothing too demanding, but you know the kind of thing—either for charity or to get publicity for Max's company. Or both, even. Anyway I have learned over the years that there are two subjects that never fail to hold an audience. One is how to drop five pounds painlessly before your vacation, and the other is the positive power of friendship.
The five pounds one is easy, it's got to do with having exotic fruits for breakfast and supper, mangoes, papayas and the like. And small portions of grilled fish or chicken for lunch. I sort of intersperse it with funny stories about times things went wrong, and I ate a box of chocolate-chip cookies or a tub of ice cream. They love that.
But they love even more my stories about my great friend Malka. I call her that, even though her real name is Maureen. I tell them how we met on a kibbutz and remained friends for a lifetime, and how love could come and go but friendship survived. That friendship was
better
than love in a way, it was more generous. You didn't object if your friend had other friends, you even encouraged it. But you did object violently to your love having other loves and did everything possible to discourage it.
I could see the audience nodding in recognition.
I always smiled when I talked about Malka.
We had great times together after that chance meeting on a kibbutz. My mom thought she was a nice Jewish girl and didn't realize that she came from a town of crazy Catholics who all worshipped some well in the middle of the woods. I mean, if you only
saw
it. Cherish friendship, I advised them, and then I gave them the hard sell about going on vacation with a friend rather than a spouse.
If your spouse didn't want to visit art exhibits, go shopping and sit in a piazza or a square watching strangers and making up stories about them, your girlfriend would.
When I started working for his family firm, Max always admired the way I built up my side of the business: the art tours, the painting classes and the ladies' bridge clubs or reading groups. But he admired this and indeed admired me very distantly and objectively.
You see, looking back on it all, Max never really loved me, not
loved
the way people write about and sing about and dream about. I never thought that he loved anyone else. I told myself that possibly he didn't have a high sex drive, not like Malka's husband sure did over in Ireland. No, I was sure that he didn't love anyone else, he just thought of what we had as a sort of business partnership. That's the way he was made.
For a while I thought that if I tried harder, dressed better, got thinner, developed more sparkle, he would grow to love me. But oddly it was my friend Malka who convinced me that this was not really the way it worked. Otherwise all thin, groomed, sparkly people would be very happy, and we all knew—because we saw them all around us—that most of them were totally miserable.
And Malka told me I was a scream, and as bright as a button, and sharp as a tack, and a dozen other insane Irish phrases, and I started believing it all and became unreasonably confident about almost everything. And I was happy, most of the time, when I look back on it.
I wasn't happy in those years when my mom was on my case, screeching at me about getting married. And there was that time when I was wearing myself out, eating nothing and putting in a ten-hour day at the office followed by social functions: I wasn't happy then.
But when Lida was born, my beautiful, beautiful daughter, I was happy then, and never stopped being happy. And I had a notebook where I wrote down all the things my mom had done to irritate me and break my heart, and I tried not to do any of them myself.
But the world had changed.
Imagine my asking Lida to consider her marriage options before she lost her looks.
I mean,
imagine
it! It would be like living on a different planet.
And oddly, my mom had changed around that time too, she became normal and knew a lot of the world's wisdom. She certainly had not been normal or wise when I was young and needed it, still it was nice that she had discovered it in later life.
Malka said the same thing about her mother too, that she had calmed down since she had a grandchild. But I had never thought that Mrs. O'Brien was all that bad. Very superstitious, of course, and caring about what other people in Rossmore thought or would say, like all people of her age. But basically a nice person.
Yet Malka said Mrs. O'Brien had been really terrible when she was younger, so I guess that generation just improved with age.
Malka's little boy, Brendan, was a sweetheart, which was just as well, since her husband turned out to be a lot less than we had all hoped he would be. I loved it when she brought Brendan over to stay with me for a few weeks that time, the time that Declan, the roving husband, had roved off with Eileen the school secretary. Malka was very depressed when she arrived at first, she cried a lot. She said she hadn't cried back home—she wouldn't give her sistersin-law or her own mother the satisfaction of seeing her down. But she cried in my kitchen, and in my garden as we watched our children playing in the pool, and she cried when we went out to a bar one evening, she and I, and the pianist played "Blue Moon," which had been their song, hers and Declan's.
"I never thought he'd fancy another woman," she wept. "He always said I was the only one. I thought that if I ever lost him it would be to the drink, I believed it was a battle between Callaghan's licensed premises and myself for his attention."
I patted her hand in the bar, and passed her tissues. This was not the time to tell Malka that her intended had hit on me three evenings in a row before their wedding.
If I hadn't told her back then, just on the eve of her wedding day, when it might have been helpful, useful, wise, then there was no point in telling her any time afterward.
I had told myself that maybe it was just high spirits. I didn't know these people and their culture, did I? Maybe for him and his friends it was just meaningless to press me, the bride's best friend, up against a wall in a hold I couldn't get out of and to kiss me. So I either spoke then and ruined her wedding and our friendship, or I shut up.
You might have done it differently but I made my choice and was stuck with it.
And I always told myself that if I had said anything that time, then maybe Brendan would not exist and her life would have been so much less happy.
Brendan has been a fine son for her—won't listen to advice, of course, but then what young person does listen these days? He was never any trouble to her, all that time he grew up in Dublin, with his father away from home. He always got himself a summer job to help to pay his tuition. One summer Max gave him a position in one of the travel agencies and he worked so hard they were prepared to offer him a full-time job. But I said, No way, imagine if my friend Malka were to be deprived of saying, "My son the engineer"!
Unfortunately he didn't get to know my Lida that summer; she was in Ireland of all places. She and Malka had loved each other from the word go, but then I knew they would, so that didn't surprise me a bit. And I liked her Brendan too, very much, when he came to stay here on weekends. He was easy and relaxed and had no hang-ups about his father.
"Dad was overinterested in women always, one was never enough for him," Brendan told me. "I think he felt he had to try it on with everyone to prove he was alive or something."
I nodded in agreement, he had it right. That's exactly what Declan was doing, proving something.
"And are you the same?" I asked. Sort of joking.
Apparently not, it's like the children of a wino being teetotalers. Brendan told me that his friends said someone would have to light a fire under him to get him going.
"I expect my father made a pass at you, Rivka?" he said.
"Way back, it wasn't important," I heard myself say.
"Did you tell my mam? You know, later, when they split?" he asked.
"No," I told him. "As I said, it didn't seem important."
He nodded approvingly.
It was the only secret we had, Malka and I, that's a fact. We told each other everything. I don't think she had any secrets from me. I don't think so, but then if she were to be asked if I kept anything back, she would have said no.
And what could she have known or experienced that she couldn't tell me? Max certainly never made a pass at Malka like her husband-to-be had hit on me. Max had a low libido, that's what my mom said to explain his long absences. She said I should be grateful. I suppose that told me more about her life with Father than I wanted to know.
I never felt it was great sex with Max but I realize that he felt that it was never great with me.
Malka always said that she had loved it with Declan but had always been nervous that she would get pregnant. His sisters had five children each and these were regarded as
small
families.