Chapter 46
When Sadie, Patrick, and my father came home from work, Michael and I were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee. Mom was peeling potatoes and doing her best to ignore me. She had warned me not to go to New York, and I had defied her. All the changes that had happened as a result of the war had passed my mother by. While her daughters had gone to Washington and her son into the Navy, Mom had remained behind in a village that was little different from the one her mother had known in the nineteenth century, and she remained locked into a morality that was as exacting as that of the Victorians. Although she was polite to Michael, she had nothing to say to me.
My father is a man of few words. Instead of asking who Michael was, he sat down in his chair waiting for something to happen. Mom explained that Michael was visiting from England, making it sound as if he had been passing through Scranton and had decided to stop by. We were several minutes into dinner with very little being said, even by Patrick and Sadie, who usually dominated the dinner hour, when Michael finally broke the silence.
“Mr. and Mrs. Joyce, I met your daughter at my parents’ home in Derbyshire. It was a brief introduction to a woman whom my parents had come to love as if she were their daughter. But because I was serving in the Royal Air Force, I had to leave to go to my station in Germany. In August, my parents hosted a party, and I was able to get leave. When I saw Maggie again, I realized that I had fallen in love with her. There were complications — another man — but I was not going to be put off for any reason. I was making some headway when she was called home to say good-bye to her Aunt Marie. For the past four weeks, I’ve been at home in England, pacing the floor, wondering if some unkind fate had intervened and had taken her away from me. I decided to come and find out because this is the woman I want to be my wife.” And turning to me, he said, “I have asked Maggie to marry me, and she has accepted.”
My mother’s mouth dropped open, my father started to scratch his head, and Grandpa came out of his bedroom and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“You must be Mr. Joyce,” he said, rising from his chair as if he was addressing a senior officer. “Maggie has told me so much about you, especially your role as a freedom fighter in Ireland. As I’m sure you’ve guessed from my accent, I’m British, but I’m proud to say that I have a fair share of Irish in me.”
“Seafóid,” Grandpa said, not believing it for a minute.
“Allow me to translate,” my father said, “Garbage, rubbish, nonsense. Take your pick.”
“Honestly. It’s true, Mr. Joyce. My grandmother’s family was from County Meath.” After a few minutes of silence, Grandpa said, “County Meath. Bah! Never a callous on the hands of a County Meath man.” After saying that, he went back into his bedroom. Michael would settle for his relations being called sissies if it meant that Grandpa wouldn’t throw him out of his house.
After Grandpa left, Dad offered his congratulations in a voice that said, “I hope you know what the hell you are doing.” My mother said absolutely nothing. I couldn’t blame either for their reaction. They had been expecting an announcement that Rob and I were engaged, and instead, I had brought home a different man. Sadie and Patrick made up for my parents’ lack of enthusiasm, and my sister, while crying, bear hugged her future brother-in-law. Throughout it all, Michael remained calm and unperturbed. He was probably meditating.
News travels fast in a small town, and by the following afternoon, everyone was talking about my engagement. “It’s not the same guy who was at Judge’s. It’s some English guy nobody knew anything about.”
The same day the news was making its way around town, I received two phone calls. One was from Bobby’s mother, who demanded that I come to her house and explain myself. There was some unwritten rule that Mamie Lenehan had a right to poke her nose into everybody’s business, and for some reason, everyone went along with it. The second call was from Father Lynch, and he wanted to see me in the rectory office.
Sadie said she wished that she could be a fly on the wall in the pastor’s office. “I’d love to hear how you’re going to explain this.”
I decided not to explain it. I didn’t go to see Father Lynch, nor did I rush down to Mamie’s to make some sort of confession. I had been out of Minooka for four years, and I was not going to run a gauntlet when I hadn’t done anything wrong. However, in order to be on the safe side, I called my uncle, Father Shea, whose parish was in a small coal town buried deep in the mountains, but who bought his scotch in Scranton.
Raised jointly by my grandmother and Aunt Marie, John Shea was the cigar-smoking, card-playing type of priest, who had worked among the poor of coal country’s mining towns since he had been ordained thirty-five years earlier. In that time, he had shaved his theology down to the two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. “Everything else is commentary.” He didn’t preach; he comforted.
I asked him if I was going to go to hell for defying Father Lynch, and he said, “Don’t worry, lass. I’ll give Father Lynch a call and get him to back off. As for Mamie Lenehan, she’ll have enough to think about when she learns Bobby is dating the Mateo girl.”
Michael, who had studied Hinduism, seemed nonplussed by the complexities of the Catholic Church. He left me to sort out the details and went to Judge’s for a beer with Patrick. Before leaving, he said, “It’ll give you an opportunity to bring your father up to speed on why you are marrying me and not Rob, and while you’re at it, see if you can discourage your grandfather from putting me on an IRA hit list.”
After Michael left, I knocked on Grandpa’s bedroom door and asked if I could come in. He was sitting in the shadows smoking his pipe. When my grandmother had died three years earlier, he had started to spend more and more time in his room. In profile, I could see his expansive chest — one of the signs of emphysema — his reward for forty years of working underground.
“So which one will ye be marrying?” he asked.
“Michael, the one with the black hair,” I answered.
Grandpa pointed his pipe at his chest of drawers.
“Go and open Mam’s sewing box.”
I did what he said, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.
“Them silver coins. They washed up on Omey from a Spanish ship. Your Mam’s father give ’em to her before we come to America, saying to sell them if need be. Say what ye will, I be putting food on the table even in the worst of times.” I picked up five silver coins with irregular edges worn down by time and the sea. “Take them. I’ll not be seeing you again.”
Before dismissing me, he spoke at length in Irish, but listening to this ancient tongue spoken by a wheezing man with no teeth, I wasn’t quite getting what he was saying. But my father, who was sitting near the door, later boiled the speech down to one sentence: “Your mother is not always right.”
When I left Grandpa’s room, my mother said her brother had called back. “Father Lynch has agreed to let your uncle handle this situation. But Father Shea wants to talk to you tomorrow afternoon here at the house.” All of this was said in the dispassionate tone she had been using since my return from New York.