Chapter Eight
The leaves were down, and they’d already had snow when Faye, home from the grocery, noticed a strange car in the driveway. She set the packages on the counter. She’d planned a romantic dinner for William with music and candles to celebrate Kennedy’s victory. Was he home early? “William?”
Unlike her husband’s reedy voice, this one from the other room rumbled like thunder.
“In here.”
She walked into the living room. Conor O’Kane was on the couch, his arm extended across the back, legs crossed like this was his place.
Her Life magazine was open on the table in front of him to the spread that Faye had so admired about the young senator from Massachusetts that all the women went on about.
His glamorous wife, like Faye, was more than a decade younger than her dashing husband and, unlike Faye, was quite pregnant that November.
She’d read the Life article while William watched the news, peppering him with facts as she read them.
“You know Jackie was twenty-four when she got married.”
“And John Kennedy was a decade older than her.”
“And he was in the navy.”
“She is going to have that baby any day. What an exciting time for them!”
Faye had hoped she might be pregnant by now.
They’d been married for months, had been intimate plenty by Faye’s measure, though what was too much or too little was hard to say.
She liked it enough, especially the attention William paid her afterward, when he collapsed into her, flushed with exertion, the way he murmured and stroked her hair, as if grateful to her for something essential.
He would ask sometimes if she was okay, and she was, though her body felt a wanting.
Wanting what, though, Faye didn’t know. Maybe if they made a baby, that feeling would go away.
But her cycle had come three times since the wedding, and with each one, a rising panic.
William had done his part. Clearly, the failure was hers.
Faye had gone to bed the night before, hopeful Kennedy would defeat Nixon, that this elegant family would go to the White House.
She had hoped for it as if it would say something about her own prospects for happiness.
At twenty-three, it was Faye’s first time voting.
She and William had gone to the ballots together.
“For the Irishman, of course,” William had said, when a neighbor asked how they’d voted.
But as she stood now in her own living room, all hope and happiness drained from her at the sight of Conor O’Kane.
She knew from her father that O’Kane had come to the cove house a few times, that for some odd reason, Jean welcomed him, made him tea and buttered his bread, even smoked cigarettes with him, which bothered Thomas to no end.
“She stops short of mending the holes in his socks,” her father had quipped.
“Though to my knowledge, he hasn’t asked.
” When Faye about fainted with worry the first time he mentioned it, Thomas reassured her that Conor seemed wholly uninterested in Faye or William.
“They talk about Ireland and the old days, stories upon stories. I don’t like to hear .
. . I walk away when they start in. He doesn’t say much about what he’s up to now. ”
Those words echoed in Faye’s head. What is he up to?
“I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind.” O’Kane leaned forward and closed the magazine. “What a victory for the Irish!”
Faye took notice of the bottle of Jameson on the side table, the glass of whiskey that O’Kane now held up to her before taking a swig. She looked at the clock on the mantel. “William should be home any minute.” She tucked her shirt into the waistband of her slacks.
“You look scared . . . Fiadh. You don’t need to be frightened of me.” He held his hands up as if to show no trick was up his sleeve.
“I prefer Faye.”
“I’m sure you do. Now c’mon. Sit down. I won’t bite. Let’s be friends, like we were when we were kids.”
She softened, a memory popping into her head of Conor and his brothers splashing each other on the rocky shores of Dunmanus Bay.
Those days seemed fuzzy and waterlogged, like she was looking at them through a damaged lens, the edges dark.
She wasn’t lying. William would be home any moment.
She sat tall on the couch next to Conor, trying to be firm.
“You know who I am and who I am not.”
“Do I? Let’s see. You’re the new bride of my friend, William. You’re the daughter of neighbors I knew as a lad. You were my friend. Briefly. But you were my friend.”
He was not mocking her, but she could sense his wheels turning.
“Yes, all of that is true. But I need to know something from you, Conor. You must tell me what happened after our ship sailed.” He could put it to rest. Put her at ease. “You must tell me what happened to Elisabeth.”
“Elisabeth? Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
And you were . . . Gisela. Hard to get it straight.
Quite a trick you lot pulled.” He snickered, put his palm to his forehead, pushed black hairs along his crown.
He could only be a few years older than Faye but seemed weathered somehow.
“Lots of confusion. The priest drunk for days . . .” His voice drifted, and he cocked his head as if spies might be in the next room.
“The one left behind? That girl blubbered on about how it wasn’t what it seemed.
Of course, no one listened. Me, I cared only that Fiadh had gone without saying her goodbye.
No one cared about a weeping orphan, poor thing.
Father Doyle tried to quiet her, you know, ‘God’s will and all that. ’ I remember she spat at him.”
Faye tried to picture what he described.
The only priest she could conjure was from the orphan home in the Irish mountains, the one whose fingers wiggled in her mouth along with the body of Christ between them.
She recalled Hannie and Hugh and their kindness.
Surely, they’d helped Elisabeth despite her carrying on.
“What did Hannie do? Did Elisabeth stay on with them?”
O’Kane’s blue eyes shot side to side like comets. “I’m sorry to tell you. But, well . . .” He shook his head.
“What? Say it! What?” She could not bear it.
Her heart pounded like she’d run a footrace.
To what end had she consigned her own sister?
Shame swelled in her like high tide. Headlights shot across the room.
William was home. He would not poke his head into the barn first, not with a strange car in the driveway.
“Where is Elisabeth? I demand to know!”
“You demand, do you?” He poured himself another shot and downed it, setting the glass next to the magazine with a thud.
Then, with a hand on Faye’s leg, he pressed himself to standing.
She cringed when he made a pitiful face then tilted his ear to his shoulder as if to imply she was stupid for asking. “What difference does it make to you?”
“How can you say that?” Faye rose in fury.
“You’ll give all this up? Oh, I doubt that very much.”
He rested his arm on the mantel, picked up the framed wedding picture, then set it back down.
“Fiadh was supposed to meet up with me. The night before she sailed. She was me mot, you know. My girlfriend. Figured we’d try wearing each other’s faces off before she left for America.
Then she got fished from the bay, and I figured that was the reason she didn’t show.
Shocked I was, the next day, that the Beattys were gone.
See it now, though. The likes of you is what got her killed off. ”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
O’Kane grabbed Faye’s waist with both hands, pulled her so tight she could see the creases in his dark lips, smell whiskey on his taste buds, feel the bulk of him against her pelvis.
“Like I said, thought it’d be me marrying Fiadh Beatty.
” His hands slid down. “There’s that arse I remember. What do you say we—”
Faye pushed his hands off her, stepped back. Blood coursed through every vein, swelling her like a tick. She was mortified, embarrassed as if she had done something wrong in that moment, invited his advance. “Don’t you touch me!”
The back door shut then, and William’s voice ran between her and Conor like a lance. “You’re home!” She shoved past O’Kane, who slouched himself into the doorway as if the conversation they were having was nothing at all. “Conor stopped by—”
William’s mouth opened slightly, and he squinted like he was laboring to figure out the scene in his own home.
Conor held up the bottle of Jameson. “Let’s drink to the Irishman! How about it?”
Faye could do little except go along, though what Conor said consumed her.
Did she truly want to know about her sister, even if it would upset her life?
And what would William say? How could he trust her if he found out she’d kept such a thing hidden from him?
And Thomas, her father! William would never forgive the betrayal. It was all too much.
She put the lamb chops aside for another day, made a quick meat loaf, then drank with the men into the night, to the bottom of the bottle, the whiskey warming the cold spot O’Kane exposed with his insinuation that she cared nothing about her sister.
They put records on the player, and William and Conor sang along with the Irish songs they knew, their arms around each other’s shoulders like they were in a pub.
There had been little music for Faye in America, none in the house, Jean especially preferring a kind of reverential silence in her daily routine.
Thomas recited poetry, his Yeats, which certainly had lyricism, though it wasn’t the same as music.
But William had grown up with parents who listened to the radio and brought records home to play on the console.
“Jean is too stern,” he’d confided. “A good Irish home should be filled with music. I promise you. We’ll fill our house with children and song. ”