Chestnut Street

  “Would you come with us?” Dolly asked.

  “Nonsense, darling, your friends wouldn’t want an old fogy like me …”

  “Please, Mother,” Dolly begged.

  Mother said that since she would be working on Saturday, well she could wear a silly hat and just drop in and join them for a drink … or whatever.

  Dolly’s friends thought it was a great idea. Jenny said she would wear her new outfit and it would make Nick sick as a parrot to know she had been lunching at the Grand. Mary said she’d go and grab a look at the menu so they’d know what to order. Judy said there might be film scouts there or men who ran model agencies. They said Dolly’s mother was a genius to have thought of it.

  “How is it that your mother is so fabulous?” Jenny asked with interest.

  “Meaning that I’m not,” Dolly said.

  “Oh, don’t be so boring, Dolly,” Jenny and Mary said together, walking away from her, and Dolly sat in the classroom wishing the world would end. Suddenly and in a big splash of sunset. There seemed to be no point in living in a place where it seemed like a good idea for your parents to pay huge money to take people out to lunch, people who accused you to your face of being boring. Miss Power came in and found her sitting there.

  “Stop slouching, Dolly. Go out and get some fresh air, get some color in your cheeks, and, for heavens sake, don’t come to school with a torn tunic and a ripped jumper. You can be sure your mother was never like that when she was your age.”

  “No, I’d say she was perfect then too.” Dolly’s voice was sour and hurt. The teacher looked after her and shook her head in disappointment.

  Mother had arranged a hairdo at Lilian’s and a manicure for the Saturday morning of the birthday lunch. Dolly hadn’t wanted it, any more than she had wanted the voucher for the new outfit.

  “It will be a disappointment, Mother,” she had said. “Everything is.”

  Had Mother’s eyes grown a little steely or did she imagine it?

  “Shall I choose something for you to wear, then?” Mother had said. And of course she had found a lovely green exactly the color of Dolly’s eyes, she had said, and it did fit, and the other girls loved it; they were being polite to her today, of course, because she was getting them taken to the Grand Hotel, Dolly realized. But still they did seem to think that she looked well. And her hair was shiny and her nails, though short, were pink and neat, and the girl had given her a thing to paint on that meant you couldn’t bite them anymore.

  The hotel manager had welcomed them warmly; the booking had been made in Dolly’s name.

  “And your lovely mother will be joining you later,” he had said.

  “Yes, she’s working, you see,” Dolly explained.

  “Working?”

  “In the flower shop,” Dolly explained.

  For some reason he found this amusing. He smiled and then quickly reassured her. “Of course she is. Wonderful woman, your mother. We see her from time to time here. Not often enough.”

  When Mother came in, it did appear as if everyone were admiring her. She seemed so excited by the group of girls that she was joining … you would have thought it was the most glittering gathering in the land, not four ill-at-ease teenagers lost in a world of too much splendor. Suddenly the lunch looked up; a very very little wine was allowed to toast the newly sixteen-year-old. The girls felt grown up, and they felt as if they belonged. Dolly saw them looking around more confidently now. The day would be one they would all remember. Would she remember it? she wondered to herself. Would she be able to recall it years and years later, like Mother had about records and television programs and coffee bars?

  Mother had said that they should all take a little stroll downtown after lunch, see the musicians and dancers by the fountain. She had a few things to do later—she’d leave them to their own devices. Feeling adult and in charge of their own destinies, the girls got their coats from the cloakroom.

  Dolly had no coat, her soft green jacket and skirt was complete in itself. She waited while the others had gone to titivate still further, and idly pushed open the door to the manager’s office, where Mother had gone to pay the bill personally. She wanted to thank Mother, and thank her with warmth and say that it had been great, and that she did like the green outfit. Mother and the manager were standing very close. He had one arm around Mother and with the other hand he was stroking Mother’s face. She was smiling at him very warmly.

  Dolly managed to get back, but the door still stood open. She sat down on one of the brocaded sofas in the hall.

  In seconds they must have noticed the open door and they came out, Mother looking flushed, as did the hotel manager. Their fear of discovery took on a new horror when they saw the girl sitting solidly on the sofa. At the same time the chattering schoolmates arrived, so it was goodbyes and thank-yous and off with Mother downtown for the action. Jenny, Judy and Mary went ahead. Dolly walked thoughtfully with her mother.

  “Why am I called Dolly?” she asked.

  “Well, in order to please your father we called you Dorothy after his mother, but I never liked the name, and you were like a little doll.” She had answered, as she would every question, simply and without guilt.

  “Do you do everything to please other people to make them happy?”

  Her mother looked at her for a moment.

  “Yes, I think I do. I learned that early on: it makes the journey through life much simpler if you please other people.”

  “But it’s not being honest to how you feel, is it?”

  “Not always. No.”

  Dolly knew if she asked her about the hotel manager she would get an answer. But what would she ask? Do you love him? Are you going to leave Father and live with him? Do other men take you in their arms? Is that what you are going back to, what you meant when you said a few things to do?

  And suddenly Dolly knew she would ask no questions. No questions at all. She knew that she would have to think about whether her mother’s way was in fact the right way—life was short, why not smile, why not please people … people like her old mother-in-law, Dorothy, now long dead; like Miss Power at school, by knitting a cardigan; like Father, by running to the gate to meet him; like her lumpen, surly daughter, by giving her a birthday party.

  And, as she linked Mother’s arm to walk towards the fountain, Dolly knew with a shock that she would never forget her sixteenth birthday. It would always be there, frozen forever as the day she grew up. The day she realized that there were many ways to go, and Mother’s was only one way. Not necessarily the right way, and not at all the wrong way. Just one of the many ways ahead.

  It was great the way they always found something to talk about. Schoolgirls in a small town. The nuns thought they talked about their careers, and plans for living a Christian life. Their parents thought they talked about getting good results in the Leaving Certificate. The boys in the Brothers thought Maura and Deirdre and Mary talked about clothes and records because that’s all they ever seemed to be going on about whenever you came across a group of girls in their school uniforms.

  But in fact what they talked about was love and marriage. In all their aspects. The love bit would naturally precede marriage. And there were all kinds of love—there was first love to consider, and false love, and love that was untrue, and love that was unreturned, and love that went through difficulties. But then it would all be crowned with marriage.

  Maura and her friends Mary and Deirdre didn’t talk much about love after marriage because, once you got there, then surely that was it. Then everything else would fall into place. Well, of course you were going to be happy ever after. What was the point of the whole thing if that wasn’t the way it would turn out?

  And wouldn’t it be great to be married. Your own home—you could come home whatever time you liked. And get up whatever time you liked. And eat whatever you liked. You could get chips seven nights a week if you wanted to. And people would be giving you presents; you got new things. Not pillows that gener
ations had slept on, or saucepans that had the bottoms all black. Everything was shiny when you got married. Of course it would be great being married once you had fallen in love and he had fallen in love with you.

  They were fourteen when they thought like this. When you thought the best bit would be being able to come home as late as you like.

  When they were fifteen, Maura and Mary and Deirdre talked about the kind of people they would fall in love with, and the general view was that the pool wasn’t nearly large enough to choose from; in fact, the choice was particularly limited once you looked around you. Few young women had ever been given such a poor field of exploration.

  In films there were casts of thousands, in films handsome strangers rode into town. In real life there were the fellows from the Brothers, who would make a jeer and call you names. You couldn’t love any of them.

  When they were sixteen they got technical. The actual physical business of love, how it was done and the etiquette surrounding it all.

  Mainly, they talked about the first night, because the first night of marriage would be the first night of making love also. You couldn’t think of one without the other. Even in the modern up-to-date 1950s only a fool would do what poor Orla O’Connor had done. Her fellow had run off to England as soon as he heard the news. And there was Katy, who had to marry the eldest Murphy boy in such a hurry. Katy stayed at home and looked after her enormous baby, the one who was born prematurely after six months of marriage … and she never went out anywhere even though her husband drank like a fish until all hours. Well, he had married her, hadn’t he? He had done his duty, faced up to it. He could hardly have a word said against him now. Katy wouldn’t want to say a word against a husband who had stood by her at the time of her disgrace. No matter if he drank himself senseless from one end of the county to the other.

  So these were awful warnings for Maura and her friends Mary and Deirdre. Stronger and more terrifying than a thousand warnings from the pulpit, school or home were the two living examples in their own hometown, the feckless Orla and the grateful, trapped Katy.

  For Maura, Mary and Deirdre it was as clear as anything. There was nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by having a first night of sex or love or whatever it was that was separate from the first night of marriage.

  As if acting in a play, they went over and over what would happen when they got to the hotel on the first night of the honeymoon. Presumably they would unpack, and maybe kiss a bit and say hadn’t it all been a great day?

  “Remember, you’re married—you don’t have to do anything like the unpacking or anything at all,” Mary said excitedly.

  “Yeah, but you’d need to get your clothes out of the cases; they’d be awful crushed for the honeymoon,” said Deirdre, who was the best dressed of them.

  “And you wouldn’t want him to think that he’d married a slut or anything,” said Maura, whose mother went in a lot for what people might say or think.

  So they agreed that you would unpack and then change into something smart for dinner and you’d go down to the hotel dining room together and the waiter would call you Mr. and Mrs. And they all giggled at the thought of it, and then because you couldn’t make the meal last forever, you’d come back upstairs and … and now there were different schools of thought.

  Did you go down the corridor to the bathroom first and come back and wait for the man to do the same, and if so, did you get into bed or did that look too eager? Or did it look stupid sitting on a chair?

  Or did you let him go to the bathroom first, so that you could be even fresher and even more nonoffensive when the time arrived? That was a possibility … but then they had heard a story once of this couple where the man had been asleep by the time the girl got back from the bathroom, and she didn’t know whether to wake him or not and it had all been terrible.

  They wondered would it hurt, would it take a long time or a short time, they wondered did you say thank you, or did he say thank you, or maybe you both might say, That was wonderful!

  They also speculated at great length about the actual wedding feast itself.

  Mary was going to have the menu with the slice of melon and ginger to start instead of soup. It was a shilling dearer than the one with mushroom soup but it was very sophisticated.

  Deirdre was going to have the soup because her people would be bound to choke on the ginger and embarrass her, and she was going to have an accordionist who would play during the meal to cover the silences, and then to drown the noisiness when people became somewhat livelier later on.

  Maura wanted all the women at her wedding to wear hats. Big hats with brims and flowers and ribbons on them. Not small, close-to-the-head navy or wine-colored velour hats like older women wore at Mass, but big colored ones, straw or silky, dressy like you’d see in a film or a newsreel about a wedding or showbusiness people or royalty. And she wanted every man in the church to wear a flower in his buttonhole.

  Mary said she was daft—who round here would dress up like that? Deirdre said they’d only think she was cracked and trying to ape the British aristocracy. Men would go in their good suits as usual and open the collars of their shirts and take off their ties after the second drink, the way they always had. Women would buy a costume and maybe a small matching hat but probably not, just a mantilla in the church and then nothing on the head. This garden-party thing was the stuff of dreams.

  Maura feared it might be so, but she was also quick to criticize the melon and ginger and the permanently playing accordionist as pretty much creatures of fantasy as well.

  And then they were seventeen, and they all went their ways, Deirdre to do nursing in Wales, and Mary to the tech to do a course in bookkeeping, and then to work in her parents’ shop, and Maura to Dublin, where she did a secretarial course, and enrolled as a night student in UCD.

  They all met every summer and they laughed and talked like the old days. Deirdre reported from Wales that everyone was sex-mad and that no one, literally no one, waited until the first night, and they made remarks like:

  “Blodwyn’s getting married.”

  “Oh, really—I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

  Mary and Maura listened in wonder to the tales of such a free and easy society.

  Mary said that they could all say what they wanted to about Paudie Ryan, but his spots were gone now and he was a perfectly reasonable fellow.

  “Paudie Ryan?” Maura and Deirdre chorused in disbelief. But Mary was unyielding. The other two had gone off to Wales and Dublin and left her. She had to go to the pictures with someone, for heaven’s sake. Paudie Ryan’s father owned the other grocery shop in the town. Maura and Deirdre sensed a merger might be in the air.

  Maura’s mother said that a wedding was indeed very much on the cards between Mary and Paudie. She nodded about it a lot with an approval that drove Maura mad.

  “Very best thing for both of them. Very sensible of them. The right thing to do for their families, for their futures.”

  Her head seemed to be going up and down, nodding with pleasure like clockwork. Maura was incensed with rage.

  “God Almighty, Mam, you’re talking about them as if they were crowned heads of Europe …”

  “I’m talking about them as two privately owned groceries with the threat of the supermarkets hanging over us all—why wouldn’t we all be pleased?”

  Maura knew there was little point in talking to her mother about love. It wasn’t a subject that had much future in a conversation. In fact it always ended the same way, in a snort. “Ah, love. Love is the cause of many a downfall, let me tell you.”

  She never told her. And Maura didn’t really want to know. It seemed to underline what she had always believed, which was that her own parents tolerated each other and lived in a state of barely contained neutrality, which they saw as their destiny.

  Love certainly seemed to have little to do with what had brought them together, which appeared to have been her mother’s dowry and her father’s abil
ity to run a hardware store. It wasn’t anything she could discuss with her family. Maura’s elder sister was a nun. Her big brother, as silent as her father, worked in the shop, and her young brother, Brendan, the unspeakable afterthought, twelve years younger than herself, was a nightmare.

  As the years went on, Maura felt that her real life was in Dublin. She earned her living by typing people’s theses and even manuscripts of their books. She met the kind of people that she would never have met at home. Professors, writers, people who often went into pubs in the middle of the day for hours and stayed up all night to write or study. People who didn’t go to Mass; people who had companions rather than wives, friends rather than husbands.

  She met people who worked in television and radio, who were actors and politicians, and found that they were all very normal and easy to talk to, and lots of them lived desperately racy lives and didn’t go home to their own homes every night.

  Maura pretended not to be shocked in the beginning and very soon she didn’t have to pretend anymore; it was the sixties, after all, and even Ireland was changing.

  She fell in love with a man who was married, but she said she couldn’t see him anymore because it would break up his marriage and that wouldn’t be fair. Maura noticed with rage that he had a series of other companions after her, and that his wife still appeared on his arm at premieres and cocktail parties. It made nonsense of this love-and-marriage thing. But maybe they had been very childish, she and her friends Mary and Deirdre, back in the awful, old-fashioned fifties.

  After what seemed an endless courtship Mary eventually married Paudie Ryan, and Deirdre came home from Wales in a very short skirt that caused a lot of comment, and Paudie Ryan’s awful sister, Kitty, was the bridesmaid. Kitty wore a particularly horrible pink, which pleased Maura; at least it meant that Mary had stayed true to some of her principles anyway—like decking out an enemy bridesmaid in the worst gear possible. And there were melon slices instead of soup.

  Maura’s desperate brother Brendan and his horrific friends kept asking Maura and Deirdre were they on the shelf now and would they like to play a game of Old Maid. That was bad enough but a lot of the older people were just as rude and intrusive.