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

bore—he’s obsessed with the idea that William Shakespeare was really somebody else and goes on and on about it until I think I’m going to scream—please, Ellie.” So Maureen took the boys out to Yonkers, and I left a note for Charles telling him there was a hot plate of food in the oven and that we looked forward to seeing him again in a couple of weeks’ time. When I returned late that night the oven was switched off, but the plate of food was still inside, cold and congealed. The note was where I had left it, with no comment from him. His travel case was gone from above the wardrobe, his shaving kit from the bathroom.
    I never saw Charles again.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    My friends from Yonkers had shared Thanksgiving with us the weekend after Charles left. There were ten of us sitting around the table in the apartment and, like most homes in America even in the thinnest of times, it was groaning with the best food we could muster. In addition to the turkey, Bridie had roasted a ham and made a corned beef, Irish-style. Despite myself, I had felt Charles’ absence. As we sat holding hands to give thanks, I saw how petty and pointless many of our small cruelties were. For my part, at least, it seemed unfair that I would prepare such a lavish feast for friends, yet resent doing the same for him as an act of female servitude. Many of our problems stemmed, I knew, from the fact that I had married Charles despite being uncertain if I wanted to be married at all. He picked up on my reticence and it frightened and hurt him, so he turned against me. Yet with my friends all smiling around the table, the warmth of the fire and the food, the candlelight glow of Maureen’s Thanksgiving centerpiece and Patrick carving the turkey, being married didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.
    During the Depression, Patrick and Maureen had lost each other. He had gone looking for work and she had become evicted from their temporary shack. They were reunited by virtue of their refusal to give up hope of finding each other, and a dose of God’s good luck. Fate refused to part them, and they gave thanks for that every day. Fate had played its part with Charles and me, too—reuniting us over oceans and continents and decades—and yet I took his love for me for granted and, at times, reviled it as a curtailment of my freedom. Perhaps a happy marriage was not caused so much by fate, I thought, as by our response to it. I held the hands of both my sons and outwardly gave thanks for them and “for the love of my absent husband,” inwardly making a secret pact with myself to be a better wife on Charles’s return.
    On Sunday, December 7th, I had given the boys a pot-roast chicken lunch straight after Mass and told them to occupy themselves, as I was going to dive into cleaning the apartment. Leo was reading in the drawing room and Tom was in his room playing with his building blocks, having turned the entire room into a tent using the bedsheets I had just stripped. Both my sons were happily occupied and I was free to clean.
    I had decided to prepare early for Christmas and give the apartment a good purge before putting up the decorations. I wanted this Christmas to be a special one. Leo was fifteen and Tom six. Charles had called each Saturday night while he was away and had promised he would be back by mid-December.
    “I’m taking the full month of December off from work,” I said.
    He paused on the other end and I felt he was happy about my decision, but before he could make a comment to that effect, I could not help but add the proviso: “Hilla says I have too much work stockpiled, and I should take a break and come back with fresh ideas in the New Year.”
    “Well, bully for Hilla!” he said.
    “And I want to spend some more time with the boys . . .” And you. I meant to say it, I should have said it, but I just couldn’t.
    “I’m almost finished up here anyway,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can for them for the time