The Husband

by Deirdre Purcell

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Women's Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

The Husband is a gripping human story of love in its many guises, of losing everything and ultimately — in the small Midlands village of Glanmilish — of rediscovering the meaning of family.

Marian Lescher's steady if predictable life in her native Chicago is upended when she is unexpectedly swept into a love affair with Irishman Daniel Lynch, a star media renowned for his charismatic personality. Soon she has divorced her husband and, in the throes of newfound passion, finds herself quickly remarried to this extraordinary man.

Her new husband has unlocked something in Marian and she feels high on life as never before, even when a darker side to his nature begins to reveal itself.

Nothing can prepare her for what is to follow, though, as devastating circumstances lead her on a trail to Daniel's home in Ireland, and in turn back to the US, as she tries to come to terms with the enigmatic nature of the man for whom she threw it all away — only to discover that nothing was what it seemed.

(P)2017 Isis Publishing

Release date: September 22, 2016

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 352

Sample

The storm outside had battered the old house for at least two hours now. Although I was wearing a heavy sweater, I shivered. The cast-iron kitchen range, rusting in parts, sighed and pinged, unable to compete with the draughts whistling through the window seals. Designed for solid fuel but converted to oil long before I came to Glanmilish, it usually produced warmth enough to comfort even the furthest nooks in the room. Not so that afternoon. The wind, having swept unhindered across my neighbours’ iron-flat tillage fields, was too much for its aged lungs.

With its dresser, farmhouse table, Belfast sink, mismatched cupboards and a variety of bric-a-brac, the kitchen had not been updated, by my reckoning, for thirty-five years or more. It was still home to my late mother-in-law’s collection of crazed blue and white pottery jugs and what they called in Ireland, certainly here in the depths of County Laois, ‘delph’ or ‘ware’. Living alone as I did, the scale of everything – the table at which I sat was capable of seating ten or more with elbow room for all – served to emphasise losses and absences.

It’s November now and in an effort to get a handle on events since the month of March, I’ve been trying to put on paper what happened in Chicago and subsequently. From such an inauspicious beginning, it’s difficult to accept how such a mundane event, watching TV for a few minutes, turned out to be seismic, turned my life upside down, and led to me moving continents and living here now in this house.

My brain, although trained for journalism (get the story into the first paragraph, follow the timeline, draw a conclusion), doesn’t quite work chronologically, I’m afraid; it follows winding trails and becomes intrigued with why people behave the way they do. Nevertheless, since I came here, now that I have the time, I’ve been determined to get something down on paper in an effort to figure out for myself why things happened and why I, in particular, behaved as I did. There are, of course, some areas where discretion dictates I mustn’t become too explicit …

I suppose you could say that for the past few weeks I’ve been writing a private memoir. And the faster I write, I find, the faster the memories, some very recent, some from earlier life and even childhood, jostle each other, crowding me, baying for attention. In these dark, stormy days and darker nights, I have found the task, if you could call it that, very engaging.

I got up from the table to fill the percolator but as I passed the rattling French windows, I jumped away as a sudden arc of rain – it might even have been hail – was flung at them from the huge weeping willow in the backyard. Staying well clear, I watched the old dowager writhe, thrashing the ground with her skirts. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead …

Since coming to Ireland and Glanmilish House from my native Chicago, I had fallen in love with that tree, not least because she had survived such storms for more than a century, bravely coming into leaf year after year.

But …

Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead …

Nothing in my life has proved to be permanent and I feared for the willow’s safety now. For the integrity of the house, too, should she succumb to this storm and fall on it. My neighbours had urged me to call in the tree surgeons but I had resisted. Mindful, however, of warnings from the scientific and meteorological communities that such weather would become more frequent and intense all through this second decade of the twenty-first century, my reluctance was just for now. And while I watched the gale’s continuing assault, I wondered sadly how many more years she could hold out against such ferocity.

By coincidence my current reading was Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings with Remarkable Trees, in which the author writes that prior to a major storm he walked around his charges, hugging each individually to wish it luck during the night. Imagining the possible fate of this one, either by wind or the chainsaw, I was overcome with loneliness of a kind that, deep and black as a coalmine, signals awareness of transience, not just of the people you love but of everything you value as a companion piece to your life, even the planet itself.

Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead … That’s now the background drumbeat to my life. I heard it sometimes in comparatively minor circumstances: seeing a couple having a pavement argument about something silly, such as who forgot to lock the front door; reading a plea for help in finding a missing dog, complete with a photo pinned to a store’s message board; or watching airport reunions on TV when it was a slow news day. Each event, simple of itself, would open the floodgates and I would find myself in tears.

The storm lulled. I left the windows and was priming the percolator when I heard the clatter of the brass mail-slot, or letterbox, as they call it here. I switched on the machine so it could do its thing and went up the steps to the gloomy hallway and towards the front door.

The house faces north-east, and although the main force of the south-westerly had exerted its force at the rear, I saw at a glance from the windows on each side of the double entrance doors that the steps leading up to them were littered with foliage, small twigs and two large, splintered branches. Then, on the doormat, I noticed another of those buff envelopes among bills and leaflets advertising water softeners, grocery stores and pizza deliveries.

I gathered it all up, dropped everything onto the hall table, ripped open the envelope and withdrew the single sheet from inside. Same cheap, greyish copy paper as the first and second deliveries, same uppercase and bolded font, same placement of a single line. Only the ink differed. The sender had used magenta for the first letter (‘HUMPTY DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL’) and cyan for the second (‘HUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL’). This one, a bright, mustardy yellow, shouted, ‘ALL THE KING’S HORSES …’

Journalistic pedantry dies hard and, for some unknown reason, I stood there and counted the periods. There were ten. Ten little Indians. Ten green bottles – until there was one.

As I stood there with the wretched thing in my hand, the gale strengthened again, squealing as it invaded the gap under the door, agitating slates on the roof of the portico, until one came loose and crashed to the top step, shattering on the granite. For a few seconds, staring at those wet shards, as if by doing so I could unite them again, I felt overwhelmed, not just by the storm, the letter, the decrepitude of the house, but by my whole goddamned life in this whole goddamned place, where I was now living in just three of the many rooms: the kitchen, the drawing room, which the family had always referred to as ‘the parlour’, and the enormous master bedroom upstairs.

A second slate came down and, like the first, smashed on the granite. We were under siege, the house, the willow and me. During the past months, even on the blackest of my black days, I had rarely felt as alone and insignificant as I did right then.

Glanmilish House stands above the village of the same name. Adapted from the Gaelic, its original meaning is, apparently, ‘Sweet Glade’, but while I was under such a barrage, the name had never felt so inappropriate. I reminded myself that, in general, I don’t take fright and I’m no longer easily intimidated. So, from its place at the bottom of the stairway, I fetched the worn draught excluder in the shape of an elongated dachshund, and placed it along the bottom of the door. Then I went back down to the kitchen, scant as its comfort would probably be.

Because Daniel is dead. He was a shit, but he was my shit and he’s dead.

My name is Marian Lescher and at the time this story opens, three days after that major storm, I was forty-two, almost forty-three years of age, recently widowed, and after my husband’s death, I had come to live in the damp midlands of Ireland at the Big House, as locals called it, in the village of Glanmilish. And I was determined not to surrender to what might be an adolescent prank … or a campaign to intimidate me into leaving town.

It was again stormy outside, although not as violently as it had been the previous day, thank goodness – I had already cleared away some broken roof tile and had collected as much as I could from the carpet of fallen branches and twigs on the grounds in the immediate vicinity of the house until rain again swept in to defeat me. Now, while I waited for coffee to finish perking, I searched through the kitchen window for the slightest patch of blue in the sky. There was still no sign of it.

The Irish climate gets to me sometimes – a lot of the time, if I’m honest. While I accept that occasionally the gloom does lift and temperatures do rise (seeming to surprise everyone and causing widespread joy and celebration), I have gathered that for most of every year, spring, summer, fall or winter, the skies over this country can lour to a greater or lesser degree, regularly letting loose with storms. This one, if not quite as noisy as yesterday’s, was forceful enough to drown out the thump and bubble of the old percolator.

Dented and tarnished, the coffee pot was one of the few articles I had salvaged from my parents’ apartment when clearing it out after Dad died. I don’t think of myself as sentimental and I am no longer a Catholic but for some reason, alongside the percolator, I had also saved Mom’s mournful picture of the Sacred Heart that, all through my childhood, had reigned gorily over our household in the kitchen at Shangri-La, the small, rickety ranch-style we rented on Circle Pass in the suburb of Northbrook, thirty to forty-five minutes north of the city, depending on expressway traffic. After I left home, my parents had downsized to a city apartment and, along with the percolator and other household goods, it had moved with them.

I was still contemplating what to do about those Humpty letters. In a detective novel or police drama on TV, there would have been a blonde hair (complete with epithelial), a little chip of blue nail polish or a drop of calcified sweat to be retrieved with tweezers from them. It’s not in my nature to do nothing when I encounter a problem so I wondered if I should bring the correspondence to the attention of the local garda.

‘What do you think?’ I flicked the Sacred Heart a glance as I carried my coffee mug past His position on the back wall of the house by the French windows. ‘Should I go to the cops? Would you think they’re from fifteen-year olds? Even a group?’

No advice was forthcoming. He remained impassive, staring sorrowfully at me from the wall while inviting me to check out His cardiac injury with a bony finger, guilting me as usual about my lapsed-Catholic condition.

It was at times like this I missed Peter’s rock-sensible attitudes to life and his advice …

***

Seven years previously, Peter Black and I had met across my father’s bed in the Chicago hospital where Dad was being treated following his first, relatively minor, stroke, just a year after Mom had died. Even though I had been, understandably, pretty shaken by Dad’s condition, I had noticed that this particular doctor, one of several who attended, was particularly kind, radiating calm confidence. While he wasn’t handsome, in the traditional sense of Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, he wasn’t bad-looking either, tall and of a type – thick, sandy hair, blue eyes, rimless glasses, somewhat like the present-day British Prince Harry. Anyhow, I immediately trusted him.

But it wasn’t until after my father had been discharged back to his apartment, a second-floor walk-up on Devon in Rogers Park on the north side of the city, that I really saw Peter’s best side. At the time, Dad’s neighbourhood was still faithful to its old-fashioned origins, replete with Jewish delis alongside family-run Italian trattoria. Dad loved fresh bagels with Parma ham: I had been shopping for him and had just let myself back into the apartment when I got a call. To my surprise, Peter, as I had already come to think of him, was offering to attend to Dad in his own time. I could barely hear him because of the din from one of the L trains that, day and night, rattled past Dad’s kitchen and bedroom windows, but I got the gist. ‘This is too much,’ I yelled. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Very, very sure,’ he said.

Mercifully, the train had now passed and I could speak at normal volume. I hesitated a little. Then: ‘This has to be on a business footing.’ It would be difficult for me to find the money because I was going through a lean work period.

For more than a year, as well as providing for myself, I had been discreetly shoring up the gaps in Dad’s tiny pension income while trying to ensure that his failing health did not mean he felt isolated or lonely. Without making a big deal of it (‘Things are good, Dad. Got a great commission last week!’), I had tried to make sure he could pay his rent, eat wholesomely, take the occasional trip to the movies, even have the occasional ‘treat meal’ in Giordano’s Pizza on Sheridan Road. And regularly, after Mass on Sundays, we would stop for coffee and a breakfast sandwich – eggs, cheese and ham on Texas toast – at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Loyola Avenue.

Freelance journalism is a precarious existence at the best of times – you can never refuse an assignment because there are always long lines of eager aspirants, many of them seeming just twelve years old from my perspective, ready and willing to take on what you won’t or can’t. And having had to spend so much time looking after my father, I had, unsurprisingly, fallen off many editors’ contact lists. So, even as I had made the offer to pay the doctor, I was already calculating how Dad and I could cut back in order to come up with the appropriate fee.

That good Samaritan had immediately turned down flat any suggestion that I pay him anything at all: ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘It will be my pleasure.’ It was an extraordinary offer and I made a few attempts at arguing, but although more than a little guilty at what I saw as taking advantage of someone (an absolute prohibition in my late mom’s lexicon of morals and ethics), I was secretly delighted.

Thankfully, my father’s speech had not been affected by his stroke, and during Peter’s first visit a few days later, I had left the two of them alone until I judged medical information had been elicited and needs potentially met.

Getting back into the living room, I found the doctor sitting on a stool beside Dad’s ratty old recliner, listening as my father rambled on about the ‘olden days’ in Chicago ‘when carpenters like me, son, were top dogs on Irish construction sites. We could pick and choose who to work for then, and sometimes it was the Irish working for the Irish and the Polish working for the Poles. We had a lot of them Poles in Chicago, those days. Some didn’t like ’em, but I did. They were hard workers. I admired ’em.’

I sat myself quietly on the couch, kitty-corner to them, watching as Peter Black displayed a quiet patience that, to my shame, I had rarely shown during Dad’s halting and repetitive trips down Memory Lane. He laughed and nodded appropriately, tolerated long, interim pauses in the narratives, even refrained from supplying prompts when memory proved elusive – for instance, as to whether it was in the Howard or Granada cinema my parents had met for the first time: ‘Oh, that was a sad day when those cinemas were pulled down, kids …’ I saw clearly that Peter would make a great family physician, should he decide to move on from the hospital to set up his own practice, but right then, it was time to set him free. ‘I’m sure the doctor has to get back to work, Dad – or maybe, Doctor, you have to get home in time for dinner?

‘You remember what that was like, Dad?’ I turned back to him. ‘When Mom would get annoyed if you were late? Remember the time she threw your lamb chops down the garbage chute?’

***

‘That’s a nice guy,’ Dad said of his new friend, when I came back to the apartment having shown Peter out. ‘Didn’t see no wedding ring, though, Marian. Wink, wink, nod, nod, eh?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad!’

For years, both my parents had crusaded, jointly and separately, to marry me off. They had nagged, connived with their friends and neighbours, but nothing had ever come of their efforts, either covert or open, to introduce me to ‘suitable’ men. ‘You’re too independent, Marian,’ Mom had scolded. ‘And you’re picky, what’s more. So tell me again what exactly was wrong with Mrs Feinstein’s nephew. OK, he’s not of our persuasion but I betcha he’d convert. They do that, you know. The Feinsteins are good people and he has a job in that nice jewellery store on State Street downtown. And he can get discounts! Think of that, eh?’

‘He’s dull, Mom. And he’s half my size!’

‘For goodness’ sake, Marian! He’s a good five foot seven or eight.’ She bristled. ‘What are you now? Eleven feet?’

‘You know what I mean – I’m at least half a head taller, maybe even more. I couldn’t wear heels! I like to look my dates in the eye, Mom!’ Their relentless matchmaking had resulted in the opposite of what they wanted. Like a teenager, I was stubbornly determined not to please them.

‘Listen, Dad.’ I was serving him his dinner of soup and tuna salad on a TV tray later on the day of Peter’s first visit, as he continued, meaningfully, to sing his new friend’s praises. ‘Dr Black hasn’t shown the slightest interest in me.’ And then, blatantly lying: ‘And, anyway, I’m so busy, these days, I don’t have time for dating.’

***

At the end of Peter’s second attendance, when I was seeing him out, we chatted a little and, to my surprise, discovered we had a lot in common: we were both single, and only children with one parent still living. ‘Is it your mom or your dad?’ I asked.

‘My mom. Getting on now, living alone out in Skokie. I worry about her, but she has good neighbours.’

‘Do you ever feel trapped?’ I asked. It had just popped out and I immediately regretted it. He had so much on his plate – all doctors do – and we weren’t on that kind of footing. ‘Maybe we should do a bit of subtle getting them together,’ I added hastily. ‘Do you think they’d get on?’

He smiled. He had a nice smile. ‘I’m assuming you do. Feel trapped, I mean.’

‘Sometimes,’ I admitted. ‘Dad’s the best in the world, but—Look, it’s not your problem. Forget I said that.’

‘I know the feeling, Marian. You feel you can’t do anything spontaneous, that when you get an invitation, the first thing you think of is not whether you want to go but what about Dad? Or, in my case, Mom. You start trying to figure out ways you can accept.’

‘Exactly!’ He was easy to talk to.

‘Well, as it happens, I’m going out to Skokie now. See you same time next Monday?’ he said. Then, with his hand on the door latch: ‘You don’t have to be here, you know, Marian. The super can let me in. They usually trust doctors, not that that’s always such a good idea!’

‘I’ll be here. Thank you very much.’

After I’d closed the door behind him, I stood for a few minutes in the hallway. The exchange had made me think. My reducing income and pitifully thin social life proved that, over the years, I had ceded a good deal of control over my life to the task of looking after my parents. But I had slid willingly into the role of Dad’s semi-carer and, earlier, as Mom’s too: after her cancer diagnosis, which had so quickly descended from ‘treatment’ into ‘terminal’, Dad had been too scared. ‘She always looked after everything, Marian. I don’t know what to do …’

I had never had much control over my life and it occurred to me, again, that perhaps not many only children do. And since my parents had been relatively elderly when they’d had me, my fate had probably been sealed on the day I was born. I didn’t resent it, truly, merely accepted it as the way things were. They had done their very best for me so I had to return the compliment, and I always felt guilty when such mean thoughts arose. So, it was comforting to know that, actually, those feelings were not uncommon, and while I would be careful not to impose, I was kind of looking forward to speaking again with Peter Black.

But it was not until his third visit to Dad that the penny really dropped. I was downstairs, again accompanying him out through the entrance foyer of the block, when, instead of saying casually, as he had twice before, ‘See you same time next Monday?’ he hesitated, jingling his keys. Then: ‘Would you like a coffee, Marian?’

‘You asking me on a date?’

I had meant it jokingly, but he blushed and said, awkwardly: ‘If that’s what you want to call it – yes. But if it’s not—’ He stopped. Another resident had pushed through the building’s entrance door and was opening one of the mail lockers beside us.

During the hiatus, while all three of us smilingly acknowledged each other’s presence, I thought quickly. While I liked him and had relaxed more and more in his presence, it had genuinely not occurred to me that he had any motive in coming other than innate kindness and, peripherally, fulfilling the finer diktats of the Hippocratic oath. We had our straitjackets in common but didn’t know much else about one another.

But he had been seriously generous with the time he had given to Dad and, by extension, to me so I sure did owe him. ‘Cool!’ I smiled at him. ‘Why not?’

Over that coffee date, we talked easily – as we did over dinner the next time. There followed outings to the cinema, the Goodman Theatre, and even to the Lyric Opera to hear a Mozart symphony. ‘Tell me if I’m being a bore, Marian,’ he said, as we travelled in on the L, ‘but, to me, Mozart is supreme. Don’t know why I think that – it’s all subjective, of course. But Amadeus has a lot to answer for. Great movie, great acting, great costumes and a fantastic soundtrack – but now anyone who doesn’t know about the real Mozart, much less about his music …’ He grimaced. ‘Honestly! They portrayed him as a bit of an idiot, and that’s what stuck. Did you see it?’

I shook my head.

‘That’s great. Means that tonight you’ll have an open mind. He had seven children, you know. And after all that wonderful music, the poor guy was buried in a pauper’s grave. Sorry!’ He smiled, a little shyly. ‘Got carried away there! But I really, really hope you’ll take to his music. It’s been known – it’s proven – to lower blood pressure and heart rate. Am I talking too much?’

‘I’m sure I’ll love it, Peter.’

I can’t say I immediately jumped into line with Mozart as fervently as Peter Black might have wished. I knew nothing at all about classical music at the time and that concert at the Lyric was the first I had ever attended, an appalling admission to make when I was a resident of such an arts-loving city. But I did enjoy the evening, the atmosphere and the company. And that introduction to Mozart has stood me in good stead: from time to time his music has even provided consolation. On that stormy day in Glanmilish, I sincerely hoped that, wherever he was now, Peter could find similar solace.

He had been easy company, cultured, well-read, interested in politics, the environment, films, the arts in general, and had a laid-back, subtle sense of humour. Little by little, I had relaxed into the relationship. There was a bonus too. From the start, I really took to his mom, who was widowed early on, as he’d told me, living alone in the suburb of Skokie, and, unlike Dad, in full, robust health. After our first meeting, she had run out after us when we were about to climb back into his Karmann Ghia, catching my arm and pulling me aside. ‘You’re the answer to my prayers, honey. I don’t know how my son got so lucky. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I hope we can be great friends.’ She hugged me so tightly that the sunglasses I had just put on fell to the ground and broke. ‘Oh, my! Oh, my! I’m so sorry, I’ll get you another pair – but Peter’s told me so much about you, I’m just so excited to meet you!’

After what happened subsequently, that little scene often rises to haunt me and I tear up, seeing her kind, open face under its grey cap of curls, probably shampooed and set in the beauty shop in honour of my impending visit. She had perhaps confided in the stylist what was to unfold that Sunday afternoon: My son Peter – you know my son, the doctor? He’s bringing his lovely new girlfriend home to meet me! And all through that afternoon in her cluttered living room, behind her glasses, her eyes had glistened with sincerity, love for him and a welcome for me. These days, when I can’t sleep and it’s four in the morning, I’m still stabbed by guilt because of what I did to her and, of course, to her son.

During our old-fashioned, decorous courtship, Peter never pushed me to go more deeply into the relationship than I wanted, and it was perhaps a couple of months before our first overnight together. The sex, when it began, was similarly traditional and remained that way. As our association continued, though, I was conscious of a deep-down niggle. Mom’s favourite singer had been Peggy Lee, her favourite song the sixties hit ‘Is That All There Is?’. For me, the lyric illustrated perfectly that, while I was undoubtedly very fond of Peter, something might have been missing.

That being said, after about six months with him I scolded myself for that: I had come to the conclusion that this, the longest alliance I had ever had, was probably ‘it’ and – this is going to sound callous – at thirty-five years of age I would in all likelihood never do better. A person could not, I reasoned, have both excitement and stability in the same relationship and, anyhow, I had become confirmed in my view that my lack of sexual adventurousness (prowess?) was of my own making and something I had to accept, since it didn’t seem to bother my partner.

It was not a new revelation. As an embarrassed, gangling sixteen-year-old loner – a geek, in fact – my first strangled attempts at making out in the back of an automobile had been a disaster, and that sense of discomfort, even failure, had lingered, wraith-like, right into my thirties. Secretly, I hoped that within me somewhere, behind the fear that I might make a fool of myself, there lay a heap of ardour that would enable me to let go of my inhibitions and fling myself around, not caring about anyone else’s reaction to my clumsiness.

In the meantime, while no one, certainly not Peter, had ever accused me of coldness, I had always felt a little underwhelmed by sex. And having met the man I now reckoned was my life partner, I had resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t destined to ascend the peaks of passion described by novelists. I decided Mom had been right and that I was, as usual, being picky: I should concentrate on Peter’s good qualities, of which there were many.

After those first six months, I happily gave up my. . .