by Cathy Kelly
That was not happening today. Today, Cari would stand beside the love of her life and marry him.
Inside, the church was a flurry of activity. Her mother was waiting, dressed in a flowery ensemble that Cari knew full well Lottie had helped her pick out.
Nora was not one of life’s beautiful dressers and, without help, might have turned up in one of her old dresses in exasperation with the world of clothes shopping. Jojo looked like something out of a fairytale, as usual, with her beautiful blonde hair curled up onto her head with the same tiny flowers as in Cari’s hair entwined through it. Maggie and Trina were waiting, in their roles as bridesmaids, looking for all the world like delectable sugared almonds in their sage-green silken frocks.
‘I can’t believe you’re getting married, darling sis,’ said Maggie, wiping away a tear and hugging Cari carefully in case she squashed some bit of the bridal ensemble.
Someone came down from the front of the church: it was Stevie, Barney’s best man.
‘The priest wants to know if you are ready?’ he said.
Then with a quick glance at Cari, he said, with an air of duty: ‘You look beautiful on your wedding day, Cari: a beautiful bride.’
Cari, Maggie, Trina and Jojo giggled. Dear Stevie. Cari did look fabulous but Stevie had clearly swallowed a wedding etiquette manual and was determined to do it all by the book. The best man’s speech would not be filled with rude jokes and inappropriate comments about bridesmaids, that was for sure.
‘He is a sweetie,’ said Cari, as Stevie legged it back up the aisle again.
‘Not my type,’ said Maggie.
‘Nor mine,’ added Trina. ‘Second groomsman on the left … he’s mine tonight.’
‘Meanie,’ teased Maggie. ‘I fancy him.’
The music started.
‘I think that’s my cue to sit down,’ said Nora and, planting a heartfelt kiss on her daughter’s cheek, made her own way back up the church.
Mick looked at his daughter. ‘That’s our song,’ he said.
Jojo grabbed Trina and Maggie, told them to calm down on the giggling and shushed them up the aisle. Cari watched them, smiling. She could still see both of the girls’ shoulders shaking as they walked, a sure sign that they were laughing. She loved that they were laughing: today was a day of fun, laughter and absolutely no rules. Because today, she, Cari Brannigan, was marrying the man of her dreams.
‘Ready?’ asked Jojo, turning back.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Cari replied.
Jojo turned and glided up the church, a Viking princess in her gown. Cari could see Hugh up the top of the church staring with love and admiration at his beautiful wife.
Aunt Helen’s hat, a giant thing the size of a UFO, made seeing other people tricky.
‘Is she trying to get radio signals from Moscow?’ Maggie had asked earlier, out of Trina’s earshot.
Cari could see Lottie beside Uncle Edward now, him stately and elegant in his black coat, Lottie wearing what Cari knew was an old dress of hers, something ethereal in cool lavender. Lottie wasn’t feeling well enough right now to go shopping, she’d said to Cari lightly, but this was a dress she loved and she’d wanted to wear something special, something with meaning, for Cari’s wedding.
‘OK?’ said her father.
‘OK.’
And then it was Mick and Cari following at a stately pace that Cari found quite difficult to keep to despite practising. She was so used to striding around everywhere at speed and her gold bridal shoes were tight, so now they felt painful. Plus, they were not made for striding or even standing, for that matter. They were too flimsy, too delicate a leather and there was the sense that they would disintegrate if she did any stomping around in them at all. Still, it was a small price to pay for their beauty. She was definitely going to go barefoot later, though.
As she walked up the aisle slowly, she looked at the beautiful flowers hung carefully on the end of the pews and at the smiling faces of friends and relatives beaming as they saw her and her father. Truly, getting married was the most glorious thing. How had she ever thought it was better to be modern and just live together for ever, forsaking that piece of paper because, who needed it?
At the altar stood Barney, waiting for her.
When Cari had first met him, she had been slightly surprised that he had noticed her. Not that she thought that she was a boot or anything like that, because she and Jojo both knew they were hardly the worst-looking girls on the planet. People looked at the Brannigan girls, all of them – from Jojo’s blonde Viking beauty to the other three’s dark elegance with their amazing blue eyes with the emerald chips.
But Barney had always been in a different league, a sort of very young George Clooney but, astonishingly, with better hair.
Women looked at him when they were out together, longing looks at him and envious ones at Cari.
He was an advertising executive in a big firm, an old pal of Paul’s, her cousin. He was very clever, going places everyone said, but that didn’t mention the sheer sculpted beauty of him both in and out of his clothes. Barney wasn’t vain but he spent plenty of time in the gym honing those same muscles that gave Cari such pleasure in bed.
Cari grinned up at him as she finally arrived at his side, thinking how naughty she was to be imagining her groom without his clothes as they stood in a church with the priest in front of them.
And she was just wondering if she could possibly murmur this thought into his ear, her eyes sparkling at the deliciousness of it all, when Barney leaned low and said, ‘Cari, I can’t do this, I’m really sorry I just can’t.’
‘What?’
Her heart realised the meaning of his words before her mind had. It began to thump loudly, forcefully, beating out of her chest. She stared at him, wondering, was this a joke? If it was, it was a poorly thought out one at that. She would kill him for teasing her so at the altar.
Nobody else could hear, everyone else was still listening to the final strains of the music, a string quartet Uncle Ed had insisted they’d have to have, which was to be one of his wedding presents to them. Along with the quartet had come a lady soprano with an exquisite voice that reached into the vaulted ceiling of the Star of the Sea and was making everyone tearful with its beauty.
‘What do you mean you can’t go through with this?’ whispered Cari.
‘I’m really sorry, I’m sorry to do it now, but I can’t. I meant to talk to you about it all but …’
Barney, god-like in his dark suit, looked down at her with such a look of pain and yearning on his face.
Still not understanding, not able to compute this, Cari reached out and touched his cheek.
Later when she thought about it, she wanted to cut off her own hand for having touched him so tenderly and not belted him halfway across the church, but he was her darling Barney and he looked so distraught that she had to do something.
He pulled her hand away roughly. ‘Don’t,’ he said huskily. ‘I can’t do this, it’s not fair to you.’
And then he muttered sorry again and turned and strode down the church on those long legs, out of Cari’s life for ever.
Twelve
SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #3
Resentment increases at a rate faster than compound interest. That tiny thing you resented two years ago? It’s a giant woolly-mammoth-sized resentment now. Get it out into the open early before the compound interest resentment equation gets at it.
‘The big party for Edward’s seventieth is going to be a party the likes of which Lisowen has never seen before,’ wrote Isobel to Faenia.
‘All the flower shops in the area have gone into overdrive searching out orchids and black lilies because old Mrs Brannigan loved lilies and had those black ones in the garden, remember? They were said to only bloom once every seven years.’
Isobel paused. She didn’t want to lay it on too thick.
‘I hear that there’s practically an orchestra coming, which is lovely, because Edward deserves it af
ter how he’s built up his empire from nothing. Lord knows, none of you had a ha’penny in those days, pet. His new wife is a much tougher cookie than poor Lottie was but from what I hear up at the castle, she wants it to be right for him – not for her.’
Isobel’s fingers, now arthritic and with the nodes of inflammation on the joints, needed stretching, so she stopped, paused. She wanted Faenia to come home, just this one time, because if she didn’t come now, she’d be coming home for one of her brothers’ funerals and that was no way to come back: to stand at the grave of someone you hadn’t seen for forty years and watch cold earth being shovelled onto their coffin.
‘We are all invited. Yes, I knew I’d shock you. My invitation came for the big Saturday night gala. The Friday night is dinner for the family, but I am thrilled we’re all going.
Won’t you come?’
Isobel wiped her eyes. It had been over forty years since she’d seen Faenia, for all that air travel was fabulous and fast, and she wanted to see her now. She didn’t want to say that Edward, Kit and Mick weren’t getting any younger, or that neither was she. She didn’t say that it was time for Faenia to come home, time to leave the past in the past.
Faenia felt as if she’d spent half of the day in the stockroom. She had an assistant who could do it for her but Faenia liked the order of the stockroom and the treasures it sometimes threw up. Like the adorable beach sandals that looked as if they’d been made with Hawaii in mind, and were a riot of colours and textures, sure to make everyone’s toes look as if they’d just been bathing in an azure pool.
Scooping every size she could find, she got her assistant, Annette, to carry them up to their dressing room.
‘These are just darling,’ Faenia said.
‘Very retro,’ said Annette, who had a good eye.
‘I had sandals just like these ones,’ Faenia said when they got up to the dressing room, putting one on a small, pale foot and examining it from a distance.
And then she remembered the truth: her memory was playing tricks on her. She had never had these sandals – she’d seen ones like them in movies in the old theatre house, The Graham on Whitney Avenue in Brooklyn, where they used to play old movies for Saturday matinees and she sat with her popcorn in the dark and cried over her marriage to Chuck.
1969
Mary-Kate got her a job.
‘Waitressing,’ she said. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’
‘I was raised on a farm,’ said Fáinne with spirit. ‘If I can help make the hay and bring in the turf, I can fill a few coffee cups.’
It was a different sort of work but just as backbreaking. The shifts were often ten-hour ones and while the tips were good once Fáinne got over her shyness, she was exhausted when she got home at night.
The diner was like ones Fáinne had only ever seen in movies: voluptuous red booths, chrome fittings and an actual uniform with a gingham dress and an apron.
She was three and a half months’ pregnant now but with a bit of letting out of seams, she got into the uniform.
‘You can’t tell?’ she said twirling round in the only room in the small house with a long mirror.
‘Not now but you will soon enough, honey.’
Mary-Kate was kind to her but realistic.
Her own child had been born in a shared room in Brooklyn, no drugs, no doctor, nothing. Just the landlady screaming that no kids were allowed as Mary-Kate’s son had slid, painfully, into the world. Mary-Kate had tried not to fall in love with his beautiful face and had signed the adoption papers quickly, in floods of tears.
‘You didn’t want to keep him?’ said Fáinne, this new world and her new life giving her the confidence to ask questions she might never have asked at home.
‘The father had gone,’ said Mary-Kate bluntly. ‘There was no marriage, no happy ever after. What could I do? I had nothing to offer a child, Fáinne. Nothing. I gave him the best gift I could.
‘What are you going to do when the baby’s born?’ she asked, dishing up the meat loaf for dinner. She’d taught Fáinne how to make it. ‘If you’re going to live here, you need to learn American dishes,’ Mary-Kate said. ‘No pining for potato cakes, soda bread and barley soup.’
‘Keep him or her.’
‘At least you never considered an abortion.’ Mary-Kate crossed herself. ‘It’s the worst sin.’
‘And keeping pregnant women in slave labour in Magdalene houses in Ireland isn’t a sin?’ snapped back Fáinne. ‘Sin is balanced out in a very convenient way, isn’t it? Who works it out, because it’s not very kind to women?’
Mary-Kate, who went to morning Mass and saved money to send to the missions to convert poor folks who’d never heard of the Bible, crossed herself again.
‘You can’t say things like that.’
Fáinne dug her fork into her dinner mutinously. She would say what she liked: this big new country had given her that right.
Chuck was a regular visitor to the diner. He was like the Americans Fáinne had seen in the movies: big and kind, with a slow drawl to his voice that he said meant he came from Texas, the Lone Star State. He had a way of calling her ‘ma’am’ that made her flush in a way she hadn’t since Peadar.
‘Miss Fae … Miss Fay …’ Her name was on a badge over her left breast and just about nobody who worked in the diner could pronounce it.
‘Faynea.’
‘Hey, we can’t say it either,’ roared the short-order cook.
‘Faynea’s a nice way to say it,’ Fáinne said, fed up with trying to get the sense of the Irish fáda and its emphasis on a word into everyone. The only person in her new world who could say her name was Mary-Kate. ‘How would you spell that?’
Blushing, Chuck took a notebook and a small propelling pencil out of one pocket.
‘Hey, Irish, hurry up, coffee over here!’ said a customer. ‘I don’t care what you’re called, as long as you’re quick.’
Fáinne rushed off with the ever-ready coffee pot and by the time she was back to Chuck, he had a few versions of her name written down in neat handwriting.
Fáinne’s finger stopped at one that started Fae, which Chuck had actually crossed off.
‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Chuck said.
‘No, I like it.’
Fáinne took the pencil from him and wrote it down fully: Faenia.
It wasn’t Fáinne, not by a long shot, but she had a new home now: she could have a new name. She beamed at Chuck. ‘Can you say that?’
‘Faenia,’ he said, pronouncing it the way it looked ‘Fay-nea.’
‘My new name,’ she said, ‘for my new home.’
Chuck began to wait for her shifts to finish so he could escort her home.
The first night, Faenia let him: she was tired, her feet and lower back hurt and she wasn’t thinking straight.
He’d helped her onto the bus and paid her fare.
‘You don’t have to,’ Faenia said, alarmed now.
‘I’m a Texan, ma’am,’ said Chuck. ‘That’s what we do.’
At her front door, he shook her hand formally and headed back down the street.
‘Have you gone out of your mind, girl?’ said Mary-Kate, as soon as Faenia shut the door behind her.
‘He asked to walk me home and—’
‘You can’t encourage men like that.’
‘I didn’t encourage him,’ shot back Faenia, stung.
‘Something encouraged him. Have you an invisible friend now, who flirts with strange men?’
Next day at work, Chuck came in minutes before Faenia was due on her break and she realised that he noticed her breaks, was waiting for some time alone with her.
‘I might stretch my legs,’ she said to him, which was a lie, as her legs were tired – who knew standing all day was so exhausting? But it would get her alone with Chuck, who needed to be told the truth.
There was a tiny park near the diner and they found a free bench.
Faenia didn’t waste any time. She had changed a lot in the
se weeks in New York: she had a different life now and even though she was still young, she had to be savvy.
‘Chuck, it was lovely of you to walk me home last night but it can’t happen again.’
‘Whyever not, Faenia?’ he said.
‘Because I’m four months’ pregnant, Chuck, an unmarried pregnant girl and this—’ She cast around for the words she needed. ‘This relationship has nowhere to go. You’re a kind person but I can’t offer you anything else.’
There. She’d done it. She got up to go but Chuck laid a gentle hand on her arm.
‘I know, honey. I can tell, could tell from the get-go. I grew up on a cattle ranch. That doesn’t matter.’
Faenia sat down again. To the expert eye, pregnant women and cows obviously had more in common than she’d thought, which was not flattering.
‘Chuck, were you not listening? I am pregnant with another man’s child and I don’t know what that’s like in small-town Texas, but it’s a pretty big deal, and not a good deal, in small-town Ireland. So—’
‘My pop didn’t hang around either,’ Chuck said. ‘I have feelings for you, Faenia. I’d like to be there for you, marry you. Be a daddy to your baby.’
Her mouth fell open. ‘Don’t be daft. I can’t marry you.’
‘Whyever not?’
It was a slow courtship, and a strange one. Mary-Kate was convinced it was all doomed to failure and she glared at Chuck every time he came into the house but he never deviated in his mannerly way with her.
He’d left Texas to work in New York for an oil company, but he planned on going back there, he told Faenia.
‘I hope that’s good with you, honey,’ he said. ‘I could never live here.’ He gestured to the city blocks as if he was stifled from being away from the large blue skies and landscapes that stretched on for ever.
Faenia, who was slowly falling in love with this gentle giant, didn’t mind.