Free Land of Dreams: A Novel by Kate Kerrigan Page A

enthralled with my sons, and more loving toward him—Charles would still be here with me now?
    Yet, I reminded myself, while he had been an affectionate beau, and then a persistent and passionate lover, once we were married, I had felt Charles move away from me.
    There was no defining moment, no specific incident that made it clear that Charles’s love for me was waning, just a gradual ebbing of passion and respect, on both our parts, if truth be told. The love that began our marriage started falling like sand through a sieve; shaken by small cruelties—a sarcastic remark, a turned shoulder, a joke fallen flat—until our marriage was emptied of affection and kindness, but running simply on the mutuality of a shared roof and children.
    I believed it was because Charles had craved having me for so long that, once he got me to marry him, I lost the cachet of the unavailable. As his wife, I became humdrum to him, and Charles loved drama; he hated things to be ordinary. That was, I came to believe, where much of his motivation as a political agitator and activist came from—the drama of rhetoric. The plight of the downtrodden. While I became cynical about his activities, he became dismissive of my work as an artist. Our love was not strong enough to humor our differences, although, looking back, it should have been. It certainly should have been. Anger and bitterness and grief—war wounds from our previous marriages—destroyed us. Life and experience are supposed to make you strong, but sometimes life itself can batter and weaken love. Love needs nurturing and protecting, especially marital love, which is so easily muted by disagreement and the dullness of the everyday. We took our love for granted. Perhaps I did more than he did.
    Charles believed that our marriage had died because I still loved my first husband. “I can’t compete with a dead hero,” he said to me late one night, after he had been drinking and I had refused his attempt to make love.
    I had left Charles and returned to Ireland and my husband John. Charles, as dashing and as handsome a charmer as he was to this young, heady housemaid, had not succeeded in keeping me in America. John’s love was my lifeblood. Charles was a bonus—his attention flattered and pleased me, but he had never held the same claim on my heart.
    We spent more and more time apart from each other. At first because we were busy; I worked in the studio during the day, and when I could I attended functions and openings with Hilla in the evenings—leaving the children to stay over with the Sweeneys rather than inconvenience Charles. Charles stopped expecting me to cook him meals in the evening—I did not ask him to help me with the children. By not asking anything of the other, or allowing the other the satisfaction of giving, we were disallowing each other’s love.
    He began to travel more and more with his union work. The war raging in Europe had brought talk of it to America. That aside, we were in recovery from the Great Depression and everywhere there were pockets of political activity brewing—male sap would rise with the promise of empowerment, and Charles Irvington, the great charmer, would be called in to set up a new union or negotiate a failing one into better terms.
    The previous November, less than twelve months ago, Charles had announced that he had to go to Hawaii.
    “You’ll be back for Christmas?” I said, more as an accusation than a question.
    In truth, I was growing tired of the coldness between us. I did not ask Charles any details of his business in Hawaii, but some part of me resolved that, when he did return, I would take some time away from my own work and make the effort to be a good wife to him that Christmas.
    The evening he left I had planned to cook for us all, but at the last minute Hilla had begged me to join her at dinner with a visiting collector from Los Angeles. “The Arensbergs are important collectors, Ellie, but Walter can be a frightful