Maureen stared.
“I beg your pardon,” he started again, “but I wonder if you’d allow me the privilege of taking your portrait.”
The girls started to giggle.
“Are you a photographer?” she asked, because she wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Alas, no,” he said.
The girls fell into gales of laughter. “‘Alas’?” one of them repeated.
Finch’s face turned red.
“Why?” Maureen asked, realizing she was making it worse.
“You can take my picture,” the girl called Kitty said. “You can take my picture anytime.”
“Why would you want my photograph?” Maureen asked again, ignoring her friend.
“Because you are by far the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”
Having brothers, she was not used to such flattery, and she was certain that he was making fun of her.
Convinced she had just been insulted, she turned away from him, but, as she did, she caught an expression on his face that broke her heart. He looked so stricken.
“You should go,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
But the look had caught her friends, particularly Kitty. “You should pose for him,” Kitty said. “Maybe he could make you a model or something.”
Maureen ignored her friend. Kitty was a silly girl who had no place giving advice to anyone. Maureen became aware that Finch was still standing in front of her. She could feel his eyes on her. He hadn’t moved.
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Maureen,” her other friend said after it became apparent that Finch wasn’t going anywhere. “Let him take your damned picture.”
Maureen confessed to Zee that she had allowed Finch to lure her beyond the shore to where the tall beach reeds and the wild roses grew. He told her the light was better there, and the photo would gain a certain texture.
At this point in her rendition of their love story, Maureen would always turn to Zee and say, “You, my darling, will never be talked into such a thing by any boy. Going off into solitary places with a boy you do not know is the kind of unfortunate choice that leads to rape and murder.”
It was the only part of her story that ever rendered Zee speechless. She found herself unable to breathe until Maureen continued, laughing.
“Of course, we didn’t know then, did we, how absolutely harmless Finch was in that area.” Sometimes she would choke as she said it. Sometimes she would laugh.
Finch was older than Maureen-thirty-five, maybe, she said-and had always seemed to be from another era. Later, when she saw the way he had grown up, she would understand. There was a bit of the outsider about him-he always held himself a bit apart-which was something she understood well. In a time when the world was changing fast, they both seemed to belong to some other time and place.
When Finch won her heart, she said-and he did so quickly-it was not with his photographs but with poetry. Not Hawthorne, she said, but Yeats. Yeats spoke to her soul in the same way that Hawthorne spoke to his, and he had guessed this about her. He knew her soul, she said.
The night she finally knew she loved him, Maureen told Zee, they were out on Nahant, by the old coast guard station. An early hurricane was predicted, and already the winds were whipping around them and waves crashing white and foamy on the rocks below. Finch stood in profile, far too close to the edge, and recited “The Harp of Aengus,” his words delivered back to her on the wind.
Edain came out of Midhir’s hill, and lay
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,
And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made
Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite
Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,
Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,
Because her hands had been made wild by love.
When Midhir’s wife had changed her to a fly,
He made a harp with Druid apple-wood
That she among her winds might know he wept;
And from that hour he has watched over none
But faithful lovers.
Maureen and Finch married at City Hall in Salem, with Mickey as best man and Maureen’s mother conspicuously absent. Not only was Finch not a Catholic, but as far as Catherine Heaney (she had quickly remarried and left behind the name of Doherty in favor of the name of her well-to-do Irish-American husband) could determine, he wasn’t much of anything. A service that was not in the church was a slap in the face. Never mind that he had agreed to raise the children Catholic, a civil ceremony was tantamount to mortal sin. At the very least, they should have been married at the rectory, and by a priest. No good can come of it, she declared, and stayed away.
Maureen told Zee she had spent a week’s wages on the outfit she was married in, a pastel suit perfect for the trip to Niagara Falls the couple had planned. But on the day of the wedding, Maureen refused to go on their planned honeymoon and begged Finch to take her instead to the cottage on Baker’s Island, a place owned by her wealthy stepfather that had once belonged to his first wife. A generous man who was embarrassed by Catherine’s treatment of her daughter, he had presented the cottage to the couple as a wedding gift. And though Finch hated being on the ocean and was seasick for the ferry ride from Manchester, he canceled their trip northwest and took his new bride to honeymoon on Baker’s Island.
Her two-week vacation came and went, and when Maureen didn’t return to the factory, they replaced her with another of the young Irish girls, and life in the elevator went on without her.
Days and nights blended. Finch and Maureen lived by the sun and the tides. Food was delivered by boat, though Maureen insisted that they lived on love and never ate a bite. Pies made from wild blueberries were left on their doorstep by neighbors whose families had summered on the island for generations. The couple never came ashore until October 12, when the ferries and shuttles stopped running and Baker’s connection with the mainland was severed.
Every time Maureen told Zee the story, the honeymooners stayed longer and longer on their island. “We made love by starlight,” she often told her daughter. “We lay naked in the roses.”
When they got back to Salem, Maureen went on to say, she had changed from a girl to a woman. She was happy and contented. But when they settled in the house on Chestnut Street with its staff of native Irish, Maureen was mostly stunned. In the time they had courted, Maureen had no idea where Finch lived. She knew that his parents were no longer alive, and, being a proper Irish girl, she hadn’t thought it right to visit him unchaperoned. So she had never seen the old mansion with the twelve bedrooms and the staff kitchen in the basement and a cook named Brigid (of all things) Doherty, a slap in the face to both Maureen and the middle-aged servant who looked at the new lady of the house with immediate disdain.
The furniture in the house reminded her of the best that she had seen in Ireland, nothing like she’d ever been accustomed to growing up. It illustrated their class difference to her in a way that she hadn’t noticed when Finch was courting her. How had this happened? Only here in the New World would a wealthy gentleman such as Finch have anything to do with the likes of her. This kind of match would never have happened in the old country. Best that his family was dead, she heard Brigid say. If they had been alive, they would have stopped such a union before it ever started.
Maureen was miserable. Though the house was only a few blocks inland, she missed the smell of the ocean and the pull of the tides. She began to have bouts of insomnia and periods of panic where she almost believed that Brigid was trying to poison her, to punish her for over-stepping her bounds. She pushed back against these thoughts, and the reasoning of logic prevailed. She found that she could talk herself out of such thinking. Still, she ate little at all, and nothing prepared by the Irish cook. Maureen grew thinner and weaker as the months wore on.