But they all thought that something was wrong somewhere. Their mother was too quiet. It wasn’t natural for her to be so quiet. She didn’t speak until somebody spoke to her. She didn’t have any views or complaints or in fact anything at all much to say.
They conferred with each other. It didn’t look like flu. She assured them she had no pains and aches. They began to notice it on Stephen’s Day and on Thursday it was still there. By Saturday she was positively taciturn.
Brenda worked it out. She had nothing to fuss about, but she also had nothing to do. The central core of their mother’s life had become fuss, like the epicenter of a hurricane. Take that away and she was left with nothing. The others wondered was Brenda being too extreme. After all, it had been a wonderful Christmas.
“For us,” Brenda said darkly. “For us it was.”
On Saturday afternoon she called to see her mother. She had given her no warning and there was nothing prepared. She waited patiently until her mother revved up the fussing batteries and got into the mood where she would sigh and groan and complain about shops being open and not being open and how you never knew which they would be. Brenda nodded in sympathy. She did not produce food from her own well-stocked freezer and larder, as she had been about to do. She allowed the fuss to blow up into a good-sized storm.
Then she played her trump card.
“Are you going to the sales?” she asked. “They’re always so crowded, so hard to decide what to get.”
Mrs. Doyle showed a flicker of enthusiasm.
“I don’t know why we do it,” Brenda said. “They’re real torture, but on the other hand there are great bargains. Now would you think that it’s best to go in first thing on the very first morning with the queues, or do you think that it’s better to wait till the rush has died down a bit?”
She was rewarded. Life, a sort of life, had come back to Mrs. Doyle’s face again. She entered eagerly into the confusion of it all, the exhaustion, the value and the lack of value, the problem of knowing what was rubbish just brought in for the sale and what was a genuine bargain, and as she went to rummage and find the pieces of paper she had cut out during the year about things that would be good value if they were reduced by a third, Brenda sighed and realized that the Season of Fuss had returned and all was well again despite the setback of the perfect Christmas.
“A TYPICAL IRISH
CHRISTMAS …”
Everyone in the office wanted to ask Ben for Christmas. He was exhausted trying to tell them that honestly he was fine.
He didn’t look fine, he didn’t sound fine. He was a big sad man who had lost the love of his life last springtime. How could he be fine? Everything reminded him of Ellen. People running to meet others in restaurants, people carrying flowers, people spending a night at home, a night away.
Christmas would be terrible for Ben.
So they all found an excuse to invite him.
For Thanksgiving he had gone to Harry and Jeannie and their children. They would never know how long the hours had seemed, how dry the turkey, how flavorless the pumpkin pie, compared to the way it had been with Ellen.
He had smiled and thanked them and tried to take part, but his heart had been like lead. He had promised Ellen that he would try to be sociable after she was gone, that he would not become a recluse working all the hours of the day and many of the night.
He had not kept his promise.
But Ellen had not known it would be so hard. She would not have known the knives of loss he felt all over him as he sat at a Thanksgiving table with Harry and Jeannie and remembered that last year his Ellen had been alive and well with no shadow of the illness that had taken her away.
Ben really and truly could not go to anyone for Christmas. That had always been their special time, the time they trimmed the tree, for hours and hours, laughing and hugging each other all the while. Ellen would tell him stories about the great trees in the forests of her native Sweden, he told her stories about trees they bought in stores in Brooklyn, late on Christmas Eve when all the likely customers had gone and the trees were half price.
They had no children, but people said this is what made them love each other all the more. There was nobody to share their love but nobody to distract them either. Ellen worked as hard as he did, but she seemed to have time to make cakes and puddings and to soak the smoked fish in a special marinade.
“I want to make sure you never leave me for another woman …” she had said. “Who else could give you so many different dishes at Christmas?”
He would never have left her and he could not believe that she had left him that bright spring day.
Christmas with anyone else in New York would be unbearable. But they were all so kind, he couldn’t tell them how much he would hate their hospitality. He would have to pretend that he was going elsewhere. But where?
Each morning on his way to work he passed a travel agency that had pictures of Ireland. He didn’t know why he picked on that as a place to go. Probably because it was somewhere he had never been with Ellen.
She had always said she wanted the sun, the poor cold Nordic people were starved of sunshine, she needed to go to Mexico or the islands in winter. And that’s where they had gone, as Ellen’s pale skin turned golden and they walked together, so wrapped up in each other that they never noticed those who traveled on their own.
They must have smiled at them, Ben thought. Ellen was always so generous and warm to people, she would surely have talked to those without company. But he didn’t remember it.
“I’m going to Ireland over Christmas,” Ben told people firmly. “A little work and lot of rest.” He spoke authoritatively, as if he knew exactly what he was going to do.
He could see in their faces that his colleagues and friends were pleased that something had been planned. He marveled at the easy way they accepted this simplistic explanation. Some months back if a collegue had said he was doing business and having a rest in Ireland, Ben would have nodded too, pleased that it had all worked out so well.
People basically didn’t think deeply about other people.
He went into the travel agency to book a holiday.
The girl at the counter was small and dark, she had freckles on her nose, the kind of freckles that Ellen used to get in summer. It was odd to see them in New York on a cold, cold day.
She had her name pinned to her jacket—Fionnula.
“That sure is an unusual name,” Ben said.
He had handed her his business card with a request that she should send him brochures and details of Irish Christmas holidays.
“Oh you’ll meet dozens of them when you go to Ireland, if you go,” she said. “Are you on the run or anything?”
Ben was startled, it wasn’t what he had expected.
“Why do you ask that?” he wanted to know.
“Well, it says on your card that you’re a vice-president, normally they have people who do their bookings for them. This seems like something secret.”
She had an Irish accent and he felt he was there already, in her country where people asked unusual questions and would be interested in the reply.
“I want to escape, that’s right, but not from the law, just from my friends and colleagues—they keep trying to involve me in their holiday plans and I don’t want it.”
“And why don’t you have any of your own?” Fionnula asked.
“Because my wife died in April.” He said it baldly, as he had never done before.
Fionnula took it in.
“Well, I don’t imagine you’d want too much razzmatazz then,” she said.
“No, just a typical Irish Christmas,” he said.
“There’s no such thing, any more than there’s a typical United States Christmas. If you go to one of the cities I can book you a hotel where there will be a Christmas program, and maybe visits to the races and dances, and pub tours … or in the country you could go to somewhere with a lot of sports and hunting and—or even maybe rent a cottage where you’d meet no
body at all, but that might be a bit lonely for you.”
“So what would you suggest?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know you, I wouldn’t know what you’d like, you’ll have to tell me more about yourself.” She was simple and direct.
“If you say that to every client you can’t be very cost effective; it would take you three weeks to make a booking.”
Fionnula looked at him with spirit. “I don’t say that to every client, I only say it to you, you’ve lost your wife, it’s different for you, it’s important we send you to the right place.”
It was true, Ben thought, he had lost his wife. His eyes filled with tears.
“So you wouldn’t want a family scene then?” Fionnula asked, pretending she didn’t see that he was about to cry.
“Not unless I could find someone as remote and distant as myself, then they wouldn’t want to have anyone to stay.”
“Isn’t it very hard on you?” she said, full of sympathy.
“The rest of the world manages. This city must be full of people who lost other people.” Ben was going back into his shell.
“You could stay with my dad,” she said.
“What?”
“You’d be doing me a huge favor if you did go and stay with him, he is much more remote and distant than you are, and he’ll be on his own for Christmas.”
“Ah, yes, but …”
“And he lives in a big stone farmhouse with two big collie dogs that need to be walked for miles every day along the beach. And there’s a grand pub a half a mile down the road, but he won’t have a Christmas tree because there’ll be no one to look at it but himself.”
“And why aren’t you there with him?” Ben spoke equally directly to the girl Fionnula, whom he had never met before.
“Because I followed a man from my hometown all the way to New York City, I thought he’d love me and it would be all right.”
Ben did not need to ask if it had been all right, it obviously had been nothing of the sort.
Fionnula spoke. “My father said hard things and I said hard things, so I’m here and he’s there.”
Ben looked at her. “But you could call him, he could call you.”
“It’s not that easy, we’d each be afraid the other would put the phone down. When you don’t call that could never happen.”
“So I’m to be the peacemaker.” Ben worked it out.
“You have a lovely kind face and you have nothing else to do,” she said.
* * *
The collie dogs were called Sunset and Seaweed. Niall O’Connor apologized and said they were the most stupid names imaginable chosen by his daughter years back, but you have to keep faith with a dog.
“Or a daughter,” Ben the peacemaker had said.
“True, I suppose,” Fionnula’s father said.
They shopped in the town and bought the kind of food they would like for Christmas, steak and onions, runny cheese, and up-market ice cream with lumps of chocolate in it.
They went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.
Niall O’Connor told Ben his wife had been called Ellen too; they had a good cry together. Next day as they cooked their steaks they never mentioned the tears.
They walked the hills and explored the lakes, and they called on the neighbors and they learned the gossip of the neighborhood.
There had been no date fixed for Ben’s return.
“I have to call Fionnula,” he said.
“She’s your travel agent,” Niall O’Connor said.
“And your daughter,” said Ben the peacemaker.
Fionnula said New York was cold but back in business, unlike Ireland which had presumably closed down for two weeks.
“It went great, the typical Irish Christmas,” Ben said. “I was about to stay on and have a typical Irish New Year as well … so about the ticket …?”
“Ben, your ticket is an open ticket, you can travel any day you like … why are you really calling me?”
“We were hoping that you could come over here and have a quick New Year with us,” he said.
“Who was hoping …”
“Well, Sunset and Seaweed and Niall and myself to name but four,” he said. “I’d put them all on to you but the dogs are asleep. Niall’s here though.”
He handed the phone to Fionnula’s father. And as they spoke to each other he moved out to the door and looked at the Atlantic Ocean from the other side.
The night sky was full of stars.
Somewhere out there two Ellens would be pleased. He took a deep breath that was more deep and free than any he had taken since the springtime.
TRAVELING HOPEFULLY
They were full of envy at the office when Meg told them she was going to Australia for a month on December 11.
“The weather,” they said, “the weather.”
She would miss the cold, wet weeks in London when the streets were so crowded the traffic was at a standstill, when people were fussed and it was also so commercialized.
“Lucky Meg,” they said, and even the younger ones, the girls in their twenties, seemed genuinely jealous of her. This made Meg smile to herself.
Even though she was fifty-three, which didn’t feel terribly old, she knew that most of the people she worked with thought she was well over the hill. They knew she had a grown-up son in Australia, but because they knew he was married they weren’t interested in him. That, and because he didn’t come back home to visit his mum. Married or single they would have been interested had they only seen her handsome Robert. Robert who had been captain of his school, who got so many A levels. Robert, aged twenty-five and married to a girl called Rosa, a Greek girl that Meg had never met.
Robert wrote and said the wedding would be quiet, but it didn’t look very quiet, Meg thought, when she got the photographs. There seemed to be dozens and dozens of Greek relatives and friends. Only the groom’s family was missing. She tried hard to keep her voice light when she asked him about this on the telephone. He had been impatient, as she had known he would be.
“Don’t fuss, Mum,” he had said—as he had said since he was five years old and appeared with blood-soaked bandages around his knee.
“Rosa’s people were all here, you and Dad would have had to come thousands of miles. It’s not important. You’ll come someday when we all have more time to talk.”
And, of course, he had been right. A wedding where most of the cast spoke Greek, where she would have to meet Gerald, her ex-husband, and probably his pert little wife, and make conversation with them … it would have been intolerable. Robert had been right.
And now she was off to see them, to meet Rosa, the small dark girl in the photographs. She was going to spend a month in the sunshine, see places that she had only seen in magazine articles or on television. They would have a big party to welcome her once she had got over the jet lag. They must think she was very frail, Meg decided; they were giving her four days to recover.
Robert had written excitedly: they would take Meg to the Outback, show her the real Australia. She would not be just a tourist seeing a few sights, she would get to know the place. Secretly she wished he would have said that she could sit all day in the little garden and use the neighbors’ swimming pool. Meg had never known a holiday like that. For so many years there had been no holiday at all, as she saved and saved to get Robert the clothes, the bikes, and the extras that she hoped would make up for the fact that he was missing a father. Gerald had done nothing for the boy except to unsettle him about three times a year with false promises and dreams, and then gave him a battered guitar which had meant more to the boy than anything his mother had worked so hard to provide. It was while playing his guitar during his year in Australia that he had met Rosa and discovered a love and a lifestyle that were going to be forever, he told his mother.
In Meg’s office they clubbed together and bought her a suitcase. It was a lovely light case, far too classy for her, she thought. Not at all the case for someone who never made a foreign j
ourney. She could hardly believe it was hers when she checked it in at the airport. The plane was crowded, they told her, this time of year all the rellies were heading down under.
“Rellies?” Meg was confused.
“People’s grannies, you know,” said the young man at the desk.
Meg had wondered whether Rosa might be pregnant. But then they would never be heading for the Outback, wherever it was. She must not ask. She steeled herself over and over not to ask questions that she knew would irritate.
They settled into the plane and a big square man beside her put out his hand to introduce himself.
“Since we’re going to be sleeping together in a manner of speaking, I think we should know each other’s names,” he said in a broad Irish accent. “I’m Tom O’Neill from Wicklow.”
“I’m Meg Matthews from London.” She shook his hand, and hoped he wouldn’t want to talk for the next twenty-four hours. She wanted to prepare her mind and practice not saying things that would make Robert say “Don’t fuss, Mum.” In fact, Tom O’Neill from Wicklow was an ideal neighbor. He had a small chess set and a book of chess problems. He perched his spectacles on his nose and went methodically through the moves. Meg’s magazine and novel remained unopened on her lap. She did a mental checklist. She would not ask Robert what he earned a year, whether he had any intention of returning to the academic studies he had abandoned after two years of university, when he went to find himself in Australia and found singing in cafes and Rosa instead. Meg told herself over and over that she would say nothing about how infrequently he telephoned. She wasn’t aware that her lips moved as she promised that she would allow no words of loneliness or criticism to escape.
“It’s only a bit of air turbulence,” said Tom O’Neill to her reassuringly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I thought you were saying the Rosary. I wanted to tell you there was no need. Save it till things get really bad.”
He had a nice smile.
“No, I don’t say the Rosary actually. How does it work?”
“Irregularly, I would say, like maybe one time out of fifty, but people are so pleased when it does, they think it works all the time and they forget the times it doesn’t.”