Seven
He’d been pressed into taking his cousin Maeve to the winter formal at his alma mater, the small all-boys college in Rochester he’d reluctantly attended after his parents were unable (or unwilling) to pay for his tuition at the University of Rochester, where he’d hoped to go.
He wanted a big school where he could study not only business, as his father ordained, but literature and history and art and maybe even French.
He’d doubled up on courses while living at home and finished a year early.
Also decreed by his father: Finn went straight to work at Finnegan’s Grocer starting as a floor manager at the smaller of the two stores they had open back then.
Having to spend his days greeting his mother’s friends in the aisles and, more often than was comfortable, former classmates home from college or faraway cities or shopping with the girlfriends who soon became wives who soon were pushing strollers through the automated opening doors was dispiriting.
That December, Maeve was visiting from Ireland and wanted nothing more than to meet an American boy to marry so she wouldn’t have to return to her hometown of Sligo and work in the family store like her five older siblings.
That she would trade her father’s family store for her uncle’s family store seemed not to matter to Maeve because one was situated in the place she’d lived her entire life and the other on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.
She saw the United States as her future, not Sligo, where her family still had an outhouse and a peat fire, and she shared a bed with her older sister.
She had no intention of returning to Ireland without a solid marriage prospect, and the formal seemed like an opportunity.
When Finn walked into the school’s recreation center with Maeve on his arm he didn’t have high hopes for the evening.
He hated formal dances, where the opportunities for humiliation ran deep.
He wasn’t friends with any of the girls, and he didn’t like how everyone in the room evaluated one another, the girls waiting to be asked to dance, the boys trying to figure out who looked enticing but also respectable.
What he’d found exhausting at twenty-two was now depressing.
As Finn expected, Maeve was surrounded immediately by curious students enchanted by that lyrical accent and wanting to know about the village where she lived.
Everyone in his Irish-Catholic world venerated Ireland unless they were the generation that fled.
His peers, his friends, talked about the “old sod” even though they’d never been.
He was standing against the wall, a glass of punch in each hand, watching Maeve laughing and dancing with his friend Roman.
Nice. He liked Roman a lot. Roman was respectful and studious.
Maeve couldn’t have done better if she’d tried.
He stood there, sipping the fruit punch—God, it was awful stuff—and scanning the crowd standing along the perimeter of the dance floor, when he turned and saw Honey.
Sometimes, on particularly difficult days or nights, Finn would replay that moment in his mind, asking himself if he’d do it all over again.
In his memory, he turned and (had he embellished this part?
Heightened the lighting? Lowered the music?
Made that moment far more cinematic than it had been?) the door to the auditorium opened and standing there was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.
She wore a fitted black dress, and her flaxen hair wasn’t teased or curled or tortured into some kind of unlovable force, unlike so many of the other girls in the room, but hung in loose waves around her shoulders.
A black velvet ribbon held the hair away from her face.
Finn couldn’t stop staring. He didn’t know why, but the ribbon captivated him.
He imagined himself tugging on one end and watching this girl’s hair fall around her face.
She’d arrived by herself, which was unusual.
Most of the women arrived in packs of five or six, not leaving one another’s orbit until later in the evening when they’d determined who was worth their time.
In a completely uncharacteristic move, Finn crossed the room in quick, long strides and handed Honey the glass of punch he’d been holding for Maeve. “For you,” he said.
She took it, smiling but confused. “For me?”
“Yes.”
“But I just got here. I’m sorry, have we met?”
“I’m Finn Finnegan.” He put out his hand to shake hers. “Now we have met.”
He called Honey at her home early the next morning. Their courtship was fast, and Finn surprised himself by how quickly he acquiesced. “Timberrrrr!” his cousin would say when Finn got dressed for a date. “The old-growth tree has finally fallen.”
Both sets of parents were delighted at the couple’s brief engagement.
Once Finn proposed, he didn’t want to wait for physical intimacy.
Eight weeks until they walked down the aisle.
Why wait? But Honey was an upstanding young woman, observant, and there was no way she was having sex with Finn before a priest declared them husband and wife in front of one hundred of their closest friends and family members on the altar of Saint Benedict’s.
No way Honey would allow his hand to hover in the vicinity of her breasts or somewhere lower until she had a ring on her finger and a smear of frosting on her nose from the cutting of the wedding cake and her name was Mrs. Fintan Finnegan.
Their reception went late into the night, so Finn understood when Honey fell asleep while he was brushing his teeth in the small hotel room where they stayed on their wedding night, the one close to the train station for their morning trip to New York City.
He was patient, if taken aback, when Honey asked if they could take things slowly after their first dinner in New York.
“We don’t have to do everything tonight,” Honey said, sitting far away in the corner of the room, arms crossed over her ivory chiffon-and-lace peignoir. “We have our entire lives. Can’t we work up to—you know.”
“Sex?”
“Finn, don’t say it like that.”
“Like what? This is what married people do, Honey. I love you. I want to sleep with you.”
“I want to sleep, too.”
Honey’s best friend Gina had come back from her honeymoon in Bermuda with a third-degree sunburn and a urinary tract infection.
She’d detailed the unpleasantness to Honey and her other girlfriends over a long dinner recently, along with her belief that she would have truly enjoyed Bermuda if she’d had the wherewithal to ask her new husband to take everything a little slower.
“I barely got to enjoy the things”—here she blushed—“the things he did that go along with, you know, making out, before he climbed on top of me and . . .” She shook her head.
“I will only say that nobody should have to spend the first week of their marriage being pounded to death.”
Pounded. It sounded terrifying. Honey didn’t want Finn to pound her. She wanted them to dance and kiss and maybe midweek move on to more intimate encounters.
Confused, Finn said, “Honey, you have to give me a chance.” That was the first but definitely not the last time Finn noticed that because Honey’s first name was an endearment, it diluted any declarative statement that followed.
She was born, the story went, with an almost full head of blond hair and after only a few days her newborn smoky gray eyes had turned the color of amber.
According to family legend, she also smiled unusually early for an infant, and when her great-aunt Eleanor visited, she took one look at the baby’s silky blond hair and bright amber eyes and gooey smile and said, “Well, look at her! Just like a teaspoon of honey.” Honor was Honey’s given name and the one that suited her better as she grew and took on the self-appointed role of judge and juror of everyone around her.
Finn understood why her parents allowed the gentle moniker to stick.
He sometimes wondered if anyone in history had been so ironically nicknamed.
Once they were home and settled, things progressed, and although Honey wasn’t exactly a fervent or enthusiastic lover, she was dutiful in a way that Finn could accept.
And the evening Finn came home from another frustrating day at the store, whip-tired after completing January inventory, and Honey greeted him with a smile and a lavish meal and told him she was pregnant, was one of the best days of his life.
The pregnancy immediately softened her, opened her up to him, and that night they went to bed early, and she welcomed him in a new way.
Maybe this was all it took, maybe the creating of her own family was the thing that would allow Honey to fully give herself to him.
The next morning, she cried for him from the bathroom.
Although the doctor told them they hadn’t done anything wrong, that sex was absolutely not the reason she miscarried, that first pregnancies often went that way, that it was nature’s way of correcting a mistake, Honey refused to believe him.
The following year, after Dune’s uneventful pregnancy and safe arrival, all intimacy ended and didn’t resume until Honey wanted to get pregnant again.
After Fern’s birth, Honey announced she didn’t “need” any more children—“We have a boy and a girl! The perfect family.” Finn inherently understood what she also didn’t need or want—physical intimacy.
He assumed everyone’s marriage ended up that way.