Three Wise Men, page 11
Eimear hovers hesitantly in the corner of her field of vision.
‘Gloria, do you think we should say a prayer?’
She looks at her blankly.
‘For the repose of your father’s soul,’ adds Eimear.
Gloria is reminded of the formula: ‘Eternal rest grant to the souls of Brian and Mary Gormley and Patrick and Clodagh Mallon, oh Lord, let perpetual light shine upon them, may they rest in peace, amen.’
But that’s the prayer they say for her dead grandparents, it has nothing to do with her father.
She resumes packing. Eimear backs off when she sees her face, mumbling something about hunting out her weekend bag.
Father O’Kane is talking about the man lying in a toast-coloured box to the side of the altar – Gloria assumes it must contain her father since they chose it for him. Chose is an exaggeration. Donal Downey the undertaker – also landlord of Mulholland’s pub – said, ‘This model is our most popular one,’ and Rudolph and she nodded. She can’t connect the person the priest is talking about with her father. It’s the same cleric who performed her marriage ceremony, Father O’Kane; she remembers him joking to Mick that if he smelled so much as a hint of alcohol from his breath he’d abort the wedding service. Except he wasn’t joking.
Her father liked Father O’Kane, he said the quickest Mass of any priest in the parish: twenty-one minutes on weekdays; forty-four minutes on Sundays when his hands were tied by the choir. Gloria’s father approved of speedy priests, he groaned when they had a young one assigned to the parish because he’d be full of sincerity and determined to extract every ounce of meaning from the service.
Mick is sitting beside Gloria, he’s been shadowing her since the removal of the remains – that’s how they refer to her father now, as remains – to the church yesterday. She doesn’t want Mick throwing his arm around her and answering questions on her behalf, it seems hypocritical in view of their separation. But Mick argues it wouldn’t be fair on the family to give them something else to worry about. Eimear and Kate are in the pew behind her. Kate hasn’t stopped crying since Mass started, Gloria can hear her sniffling and the rustle as Eimear passes her tissues.
‘May the divine assistance always remain with us …’
Father O’Kane’s voice cuts through her musings but only for a moment.
Already she’s distracted, off at another tangent. Gloria remembers a fellow from her final year in Queens called Hugh Devine who used to claim it was his family’s intercession being importuned during the Mass.
She glances past Mick to her mother, a dry-eyed stranger in her new black hat, and thinks of the surprised-looking young woman in a knee-length white dress and veil, holding a prayer book, in the wedding photograph at the top of the stairs. Gloria’s mother seemed younger than twenty-three, like a teenager dressing up as a bride for a fancy-dress competition. Her father was twenty-seven, ill-at-ease in his navy suit – the photo is black and white but he never bought anything except navy suits all his life – and his normally wavy hair was slicked back and compressed to his head, only a wayward curl above the right eyebrow escaping.
And then, virtually obscured by a pillar beyond her mother, she spies Jack. He’s kneeling near the side entrance to the church, face in his hands, but there’s no mistaking his solid frame and the set of his head. Initially taken aback, Gloria reassesses her response and is immeasurably touched; she tries to remember if he ever met her father but can’t. Belatedly she thinks of Eimear – and Kate. Then shrugs mentally. Jack’s made the effort out of respect for her bereavement, irrespective of how his gesture (never mind his presence) might impact on the women in his life, and she won’t slight him for it.
He approaches her as she leaves the church and wordlessly envelops her in a bear hug. An enthusiastic social kisser, she can never recall Jack embracing her in this way. Gloria inhales tweed and aftershave, something else too, something indefinable. Pheromones, perhaps, although surely not at her father’s funeral … As they disengage she catches Eimear and Kate watching them. Jack sees them too and seems determined to avoid both.
‘You must come back to the house for something to eat later,’ she tells him, automatic words she’ll use to dozens of well-wishers within the half-hour.
His hands linger on her shoulder for a moment. ‘Gloria, I can’t, I have to be back in Dublin by later afternoon. But thank you for the invitation.’
‘Thank you for coming,’ she responds, social niceties carrying her through a cloak of bleakness as the coffin shouldered by six men passes her. Her eyes stray past Jack to the honey-brown box saturated in wreaths. There’s a touch on her elbow, it’s Mick, and when she looks back Jack has melted away.
‘Wasn’t that Eimear’s Jack?’ he asks. ‘Decent of him to come the length.’
Eimear’s Jack. That’s debatable, thinks Gloria. Equally debatable if he’s Kate’s. Then she loses interest in everything but the necessity to pick her steps with care as Mick guides her to the funeral car, before stepping up to join Rudy and her uncles at the coffin. Women don’t tend to walk behind coffins in these parts, they say it’s not fitting, although the Walsh sisters did after their mother died. But then, there weren’t many men in that family. Mick approaches her again at the graveyard. Kate and Eimear have their arms around Gloria but they move aside.
‘I’ve decided I’ll come to that hospital meeting with you on Thursday, Gloria,’ he whispers.
‘Right, see you there,’ she answers distantly.
She’s just thrown a rose on top of the disappearing box her father is lying in – the man who told her the story of the Children of Lir every bedtime and promised her a swan for her eighteenth birthday, but in the meantime bought her a white felt duck (he couldn’t find a swan) to cuddle to sleep with.
‘Couldn’t I collect you and take you there?’ Mick asks.
‘Whatever you like,’ she agrees, watching the gravediggers watching the family. They can’t begin their work till the mourners leave.
‘So I’ll see you on Thursday evening at Eimear’s.’
‘Fine,’ she nods, impatient for him to move away. He lingers but she’s saved by her Auntie Kathleen who descends, bosoms a-quiver, demanding that Gloria recount every last detail of ‘poor Jamesie’s final moments’. As if she didn’t know it all already better than anyone.
‘He never lived to collect his pension,’ sighs Auntie Kathleen. ‘How’s your poor mother taking it?’
‘The lack of a pension or the lack of a husband?’ asks Gloria, rather meanly, but Auntie Kathleen affects not to hear.
Eimear and Kate are shoulder to shoulder for the first time in Gloria doesn’t know how many months. It strikes her with the force of a blow that this is the first time she’s seen them together since her ectopic. The trio have sloped away to Mulholland’s for a quiet drink, without neighbours and schoolfriends approaching for the ‘I’m sorry for your loss’/’I know you are’ ritual.
Mulholland’s was her father’s home from home, although he wasn’t a heavy drinker – he used to have the odd bottle of Guinness here to lubricate his card-playing. Gloria is drinking one now to toast his memory, although it’s a vile concoction. She envies her companions their white wines, if she can just sink a few more inches of this she’ll be on the pig’s back. Her mind coils backwards to childhood as she sips.
Gloria (aged eight): ‘Where are we now, Daddy?’
Daddy: ‘We’re on the pig’s back.’
Gloria (a minute later): ‘Are we on his shoulders yet, Daddy?’
Mammy: ‘Don’t go climbing on the back of your father’s seat, Gloria, you’ll spoil his concentration and have us all killed.’
Gloria: ‘Where are we now, Daddy?’
Daddy: ‘We’re on his shoulders, honeybunch.’
Gloria: ‘And you’ll let us know when we’re on his forehead and sliding down his nose, won’t you, Daddy, won’t you?’
Mammy: ‘How many times do I have to tell you about climbing on your father’s seat, Gloria. Rudy, take your finger out of your nose. Marlene, if you think you’re going to be sick roll the window down.’
Daddy: ‘I will of course, Gloria, you’ll be the first to know. But we’ve a few more miles to go yet before we’re on his neck, never mind sliding down his nose.’
They decamped to a caravan in Mullaghmore for the first fortnight in July every year – that way they’d avoid the marching season – and she doubts if a single journey to the Sligo seaside went by without the distance being measured on the pig.
‘If I can see the bottom of this glass of Guinness I’ll be on the pig’s back,’ Gloria promises herself. ‘Hold your nose and think of Ireland, woman.’
Eimear speaks as Gloria’s swigging determinedly. ‘I saw Jack talking to you outside the church.’
Gloria nods.
‘Did he have much to say for himself?’
Gloria shrugs.
‘I didn’t notice him back at the house,’ continues Eimear.
‘He wasn’t there,’ says Gloria.
Now Kate takes up where Eimear leaves off, neither of them able to let it rest.
‘Did you know Jack was coming, Glo?’
Gloria shakes her head.
‘You must have been surprised to see him.’
She shrugs again.
‘Did he have to get back to the city in a hurry?’
‘Said he needed to be somewhere by late afternoon,’ volunteers Gloria. ‘I appreciated his coming, it was a kindness I didn’t expect.’
Kate and Eimear nod in unison, each delighted by this spark of human decency from a man they both love although aware he doesn’t just have feet of clay – it’s shins, knees and thighs too. Gloria senses their chagrin that he spoke to neither of them; would they ever get some perspective into their lives and stop obsessing about bloody Jack O’Brien, she thinks, swirling around the creamy liquid in the bulbous glass with its distinctive harp stamp.
She has a brief respite, then Kate picks up the threads of their earlier conversation. The one unshadowed by Jack – but tinted by darker nuances.
‘It’s a terrible idea, Glo.’
‘Beyond terrible,’ agrees Eimear. ‘The timing’s banjaxed. Give it another couple of months and see how you both feel – you’re bound to be emotionally confused.’
‘Exactly,’ nods Kate. ‘You and Mick should have a break, go lie in the sun and drink daiquiris until you feel stronger. A funeral takes it out of you, you think you’re coping and then wallop, it hits you like a lorryload of cement.’
‘You’re on automatic pilot now,’ interjects Eimear. ‘It will be weeks before reality bites. Just head off the two of you, put some space between yourselves and all this.’
‘Quality time,’ says Gloria.
‘Just so,’ they exclaim in unison, delighted she’s seeing sense.
‘Fuck quality time.’ Gloria empties the glass in one final draught. ‘Here’s to you, Daddy. Another round, Patsy,’ she signals the barman. ‘But make it three white wines this time.’
He brings the drinks over. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘I know you are.’
At least he doesn’t try and shake her hand. Gloria sips the sauvignon, which trails sourly along her tongue after the Guinness, and gathers up the threads of the conversation again.
‘All we’re doing is going to an open meeting for couples interested in assisted reproduction, I won’t be bringing a specimen bottle with me and tricking Mick into discharging his manhood into it,’ she tells them. ‘We need information. If we don’t get it at Thursday’s meeting we’ll have to wait months for the next one. Then months before they can start us off on the treatment. I don’t have an infinite number of months, I want to get this show on the road. Sláinte.’
She knocks back her wine and looks challengingly at her friends.
Kate stands and walks away. At the bar she reaches over a note and returns with three slim glasses. Patsy arrives a moment after, uncorks a bottle of sparkling wine and pours each of them a foaming beaker. Kate lifts one.
‘Here’s to Nasty Spumanti,’ she toasts. ‘And may the next time we drink this be at your baby’s christening.’
The three clink glasses.
‘To babies,’ agrees Eimear. ‘May you have the fattest ones in Dublin and may they all grow up to be brain surgeons and film stars.’
CHAPTER 14
Eimear phones Kate to complain.
‘Gloria meant what she said after her father’s funeral, she’s really going home to Mick purely and simply to have a baby with him – not that there’s anything pure or simple about it. She’s just told me she’s moving back to Ranelagh tomorrow.’
‘So the IVF open meeting went well,’ says Kate.
‘Must have, it’s all systems go on the babymaking front. Incidentally, she insists we’re to refer to it as assisted reproduction. Such a daft name, it makes you think of couples having marital relations in little rooms with someone in a white coat hammering on the door, calling, “Need a hand in there?’”
‘Eimear,’ Kate protests, ‘she’s married to Mick, it makes sense for them to sort out their differences and they’ll never do that while Gloria’s in your spare room. More to the point, they’ll never have a baby that way either which seems to be their priority.’
‘It’s Gloria’s anyway.’
Eimear knows she’s being selfish but she prefers the status quo. When Gloria mentioned fertility treatment at her father’s funeral Eimear didn’t take her seriously. Bereavements can have a destabilising effect, some people are carried away with an urge to replace the lost life with a new one. Others just want to do anything to take their minds off their grief. One of her fellow librarians told Eimear he couldn’t wait to get home from his mother’s freshly filled-in grave so he could drag his wife off to bed. By the scruff of the neck if necessary. Either a panic attack or some kind of life affirmation, she assumed.
‘I was convinced Gloria would think better of it as soon as she was safely back in the real world with me in Dublin,’ Eimear explains to Kate. ‘Besides, fertility treatment is the sort of undertaking that requires two volunteers, not one able seaman and another who’s been pressganged.’
‘But we both toasted her in Mulholland’s, we clinked glasses and wished her triplets,’ Kate points out. ‘I thought you were all in favour of it.’
Kate’s usual extravagant gesture over cheap bubbly.
‘I played along, I didn’t want to come across like Cassandra, but this will all end in tears,’ predicts Eimear. ‘Come over and help me talk some sense into her.’
‘I’ll come over but I can’t promise anything. It’s not up to us to interfere. What are you afraid of, Eimear? She can’t live with you forever, even if she never goes back to Mick. Besides, you drive each other demented.’
‘What’s Gloria been telling you?’
‘Nothing, but it’s obvious the two of you weren’t cut out to share a window box let alone a house.’
Gloria can’t wait for Eimear to plunge the coffee before she fizzes over with plans.
‘Kate, have you heard I’m moving home tomorrow?’ says Gloria. ‘Mick and I are determined to make it work this time. Besides, we need to be interviewed by a doctor and a counsellor from the unit before they’ll accept us on the programme and we’re not going to present a convincing case if we don’t even share the same address.’
‘Why are you going back to him? I thought we were agreed we didn’t need men.’ Eimear looks sulky as she doles out the coffee.
‘Except as occasional playthings,’ interjects Kate.
‘We need men for babies,’ replies Gloria. She reaches for the milk jug and adds: ‘Even an IVF baby.’
‘I always was hazy on letters,’ admits Kate. ‘That stands for infertile, involuntary …’
‘In vitro fertilisation,’ says Gloria.
‘Is that the same as test-tube babies?’ asks Kate.
‘That’s right, they’re the only sort I can have.’
She brightens visibly as she turns technical. ‘Mick’s sperm rendezvous with my eggs in a dish in a laboratory, hopefully producing embryos, which get zapped up my insides and then I cross my fingers that they’ll convert into babies.’
‘Romantic, isn’t it.’ Kate pulls a face.
‘I’ve had it with romance,’ storms Gloria. ‘I don’t care how antiseptic it is, I don’t care how many doctors and nurses prod me around, I don’t care if Mick feels like a walking sperm bank, I don’t care if we never have sex let alone a candlelit dinner again, if this is what it takes to have a baby then I’ll do it.’
She’s breathless by now and radiating defiance.
Eimear is ashamed of her ungracious reaction to Gloria’s news – it’s a selfish combination of ‘If I can’t have babies then no one else should be allowed to’ and annoyance that other couples can work out their differences but not Jack and herself.
Kate is straight down to practicalities. ‘I hear it’s expensive. Is there a long waiting list? And will they do it for you in Ireland or do you have to slope off to England, the same as if you’re having an abortion?’
Gloria has the answers at her fingertips. ‘Yes, it’s pricey but so’s a cruise or a kitchen extension and nobody blinks an eye if people have those. We’re advised to budget for three attempts; I’m cashing in an old endowment policy and that ought to cover it. I shouldn’t have to wait more than a few months and yes, they will do it in Dublin – we approve of making babies here, after all. We’ll never keep our laurel wreath as the European city with the youngest population if we don’t replenish stocks.’
‘So the money’s coming from you – that could cause problems later,’ notes Kate. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if Mick contributed? It might make him feel more a part of it.’
‘Listen, he can contribute all he likes,’ says Gloria, ‘I don’t care who pays for the treatment, it’s not some power trip with me. What’s important is that the money’s there and I don’t have to wait while we apply for a bank loan or sit on some health board waiting list until my hair turns grey.’
