Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

He was not unhappy over his first wife’s death a few years after they left England, because they had never really liked each other, and it seemed to him now that even before she was dead he had made up his mind, if she did die, never to marry again. He had held out on this until he was nearly fifty, when he met Rosaleen at a dance in the County Sligo hall far over on East 86th Street. She was a great tall rosy girl, a prize dancer, and the boys were fairly fighting over her. She led him a dance then for two years before she would have him. She said there was nothing against him except he came from Bristol, and the outland Irish had the name of people you couldn’t trust. She couldn’t say why — it was just a name they had, worse than Dublin people itself. No decent Sligo girl would marry a Dublin man if he was the last man on earth. Dennis didn’t believe this, he’d never heard any such thing against the Dubliners; he thought a country girl would lep at the chance to marry a city man whatever. Rosaleen said, “Maybe,” but he’d see whether she would lep to marry Bristol Irish. She was chambermaid in a rich woman’s house, a fiend of darkness if there ever was one, said Rosaleen, and at first Dennis had been uneasy about the whole thing, fearing a young girl who had to work so hard might be marrying an older man for his money, but before the two years were up he had got over that notion.

It wasn’t long after they were married Dennis began almost to wish sometimes he had let one of those strong-armed boys have her, but he had been fond of her, she was a fine good girl, and after she cooled down a little, he knew he could have never done better. The only thing was, he wished it had been Rosaleen he had married that first time in Bristol, and now they’d be settled better together, nearer an age. Thirty years was too much difference altogether. But he never said any such thing to Rosaleen. A man owes something to himself. He knocked out his pipe on the foot scraper and felt a real need to go in the kitchen and find a pipe cleaner.

Rosaleen said, “Come in and welcome!” He stood peering around wondering what she had been making. She warned him: “I’m off to milk now, and mind ye keep your eyes in your pocket. The cow, now — the creature! Pretty soon she’ll be jumping the stone walls after the apples, and running wild through the fields roaring, and it’s all for another calf only, the poor deceived thing!” Dennis said, “I don’t see what deceit there is in that.” “Oh, don’t you now?” said Rosaleen, and gathered up her milk pails.

The kitchen was warm and Dennis felt at home again. The kettle was simmering for tea, the cats lay curled or sprawled as they chose, and Dennis sat within himself smiling a sunken smile, cleaning his pipe. In the barn Rosaleen looped up her purple gingham skirts and sat with her forehead pressed against the warm, calm side of the cow, drawing two thick streams of milk into the pail. She said to the cow: “It’s no life, no life at all. A man of his years is no comfort to a woman,” and went on with a slow murmur that was not complaining about the things of her life.

She wished sometimes they had never come to Connecticut where there was nobody to talk to but Rooshans and Polacks and Wops no better than Black Protestants when you come right down to it. And the natives were worse even. A picture of her neighbors up the hill came into her mind: a starved-looking woman in a blackish gray dress, and a jaundiced man with red-rimmed eyes, and their mizzle-witted boy. On Sundays they shambled by in their sad old shoes, walking to the meeting-house, but that was all the religion they had, thought Rosaleen, contemptuously. On week days they beat the poor boy and the animals, and fought between themselves. Never a feast-day, nor a bit of bright color in their clothes, nor a Christian look out of their eyes for a living soul. “It’s just living in mortal sin from one day to the next,” said Rosaleen. But it was Dennis getting old that took the heart out of her. And him with the grandest head of hair she had ever seen on a man. A fine man, oh, a fine man Dennis was in those days! Dennis rose before her eyes in his black suit and white gloves, a knowledgeable man who could tell the richest people the right things to order for a good dinner, such a gentleman in his stiff white shirt front, managing the waiters on the one hand and the customers on the other, and making good money at it. And now. No, she couldn’t believe it was Dennis any more. Where was Dennis now? And where was Kevin? She was sorry now she had spited him about his girl. It had been all in fun, really, no harm meant. It was strange if you couldn’t speak your heart out to a good friend. Kevin had showed her the picture of his girl, like a clap of thunder it came one day when Rosaleen hadn’t even heard there was one. She was a waitress in New York, and if ever Rosaleen had laid eyes on a brassy, bold-faced hussy, the kind the boys make jokes about at home, the kind that comes out to New York and goes wrong, this was the one. “You’re never never keeping steady with her, are you?” Rosaleen had cried out and the tears came into her eyes. “And why not?” asked Kevin, his chin square as a box. “We’ve been great now for three years. Who says a word against her says it against me.” And there they were, not exactly quarrelling, but not friends for the moment, certainly, with Kevin putting the picture back in his pocket, saying: “There’s the last of it between us. I was greatly wrong to tell ye!”

That night he was packing up his clothes before he went to bed, but came down afterward and sat on the steps with them, and they made it up by saying nothing, as if nothing had happened. “A man must do something with his life,” Kevin explained. “There’s always a place to be made in the world, and I’m off to New York, or Boston, maybe.” Rosaleen said, “Write me a letter, don’t forget, I’ll be waiting.” “The very day I know where I’ll be,” he promised her. They had parted with false wide smiles on their faces, arms around each other to the very gate. There had come a postcard from New York of the Woolworth Building, with a word on it: “This is my hotel. Kevin.” And never another word in these five years. The wretch, the stump! After he had disappeared down the road with his suitcase strapped on his shoulders, Rosaleen had gone back in the house and had looked at herself in the square looking-glass beside the kitchen window. There was a ripple in the glass and a crack across the middle, and it was like seeing your face in water. “Before God I don’t look like that,” she said, hanging it on the nail again. “If I did, it’s no wonder he was leaving. But I don’t.” She knew in her heart no good would come of him running off after that common-looking girl; but it was likely he’d find her out soon, and come back, for Kevin was nobody’s fool. She waited and watched for Kevin to come back and confess she had been right, and he would say, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings over somebody not fit to look at you!” But now it was five years. She hung a drapery of crochet lace over the frame on the Billy-cat’s picture, and propped it up on a small table in the kitchen, and sometimes it gave her an excuse to mention Kevin’s name again, though the sound of it was a crack on the ear drums to Dennis. “Don’t speak of him,” said Dennis, more than once. “He owed it to send us word. It’s ingratitude I can’t stand.” Whatever was she going to do with Dennis now, she wondered, and sighed heavily into the flank of the cow. It wasn’t being a wife at all to wrap a man in flannels like a baby and put hot water bottles to him. She got up sighing and kicked back the stool. “There you are now,” she said to the cow.

She couldn’t help feeling happy all at once at the sight of the lamp and the fire making everything cosy, and the smell of vanilla reminded her of perfume. She set the table with a white-fringed cloth while Dennis strained the milk. “Now Dennis, today’s a big day, and we’re having a feast for it.”