Free The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon Page A

appreciate it if you’d do me the favor of packing my bag.”
    He was always impressed by her packing skills. “Aren’t you great,” he’d say, every time she folded a shirt or found a place for socks in a corner of the bag. But she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be going to the funeral. And for the first time, he became impatient with her when she told him of her disappointment. “Will you give over, I’ll be back before I’m gone.”
    A little shocked, a little bruised, she complained to Moira and Claire when they met in the pub, just the three of them. “I just can’t understand why he acted so unlike himself,” she said, coughing a little from the cigarettes which she was trying to learn to smoke, particularly around Moira and Claire, who smoked, as they said of themselves, like chimneys.
    â€œWell, I’d say his father’s death came as a shock. Though I am surprised he wouldn’t have you with him at the funeral.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” she asked, absolutely puzzled. “Johnny’s father’s been dead over ten years.”
    Moira and Claire looked at each other uneasily. “Well then somebody died again with his name just yesterday,” Claire said, and Moira laughed, but the laugh wasn’t their usual laugh and there was unease in the smoky air.
    â€œIt’s his father’s funeral he’s going to, pet.”
    Jocelyn felt herself falling through, as if the wood of the pub floor, which she believed to have been firm enough to support her, had suddenly rotted, and she was dropping straight down, plumb, to some dark place, but no, the drop down wasn’t straight, she was twirling, head over heels, heels over head, with no sense of a final landing, only that the landing, when it came, would be painful, hard.
    All she could do was say some words which she knew would make her pathetic to these two women, her friends.
    â€œHe told me his father died when he was a teenager. An accident on the farm, something about a tractor.”
    Claire and Moira tried not to laugh. “Oh, Lord, Jossie. Johnny’s father wasn’t a farmer, he owned a draper’s shop in Longford City. Johnny wouldn’t know one end of a cow from the other.”
    Jocelyn tried not to cry. She remembered being a child in school, not knowing an answer and knowing that tears would only double her humiliation, but the child she was couldn’t keep tears back, made fists of her hands to dig her nails into her palms, but it was no use, the tears spilled out, hot, choking: she was helpless, weak; the tears would not be stopped.
    â€œWhy would he have done that? Why would he have told me those things when they weren’t true?”
    â€œProbably because he wanted them to be true, and he thought you’d like to hear them.”
    â€œBut what do I do now?” she said, looking at her friends with a desperation. “What do I do next, how do I tell him that I know he lied to me?”
    â€œI wouldn’t be so quick to be telling him,” Moira said, and Claire nodded her agreement.
    â€œBut I have to tell him. I couldn’t have this secret between us. It would poison everything.”
    â€œOnly if you let it,” Claire said. “What would poison everything is if you shamed him. You have to understand the Irish, Jocelyn. We’re easily shamed: it’s usually our first response to nearly everything. We’re a nation of shamed children, shamed by our parents, the church, the British, maybe even the land itself. And when we’re shamed we want to flee from what’s shamed us, flee as if we were running for our lives. And then we want to hurt the thing we’ve fled. No, Jocelyn, you mustn’t let him know you know. You mustn’t shame him.”
    â€œI can’t,” she said, suddenly dry-eyed, suddenly certain. “It’s not a way that I can live.”
    â€œWell, my love,