Free The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon Page B

I’d say then it’s your funeral. And it will be no Finnegan’s wake, let me tell you. There won’t be lots of fun at this.”
    And of course they were right, because it was the death of their love. She couldn’t sleep, and when he came home, late, the cold of the early fall on his rough cheeks (his beard was always rough by nightfall), which he rubbed against her to wake her, he thought for love.
    She had to say it, she had to speak the words, and she was compelled, as she had felt her body compelling her to weep. She had to say what had to be said.
    â€œWhy did you do it, Johnny? Why did you lie to me? About your father?”
    And he stood and paced up and down the small room, pounding his fist into his hand, walking in smaller circles.
    â€œIt just happened, somehow. Because I didn’t want to burden you with the real sordid story. That I hated my father. That he was a brute to us, my sisters and my mother, hoarding his money, refusing to get someone in to help her when she had a weak heart, never the slightest word of praise, only the cutting edge of his tongue, cutting you down to size.”
    â€œWhy did you tell me you grew up on a farm?”
    â€œBecause I hated where I grew up. The oh-so-respectable draper’s shop selling the oh-so-respectable clothes to the oh-so-respectable women who only wanted to pass for English, and the town with nothing in it, I couldn’t wait to get out. And so I made, what we call in the catechism, a mental reservation. What they would tell you, even the priests and the nuns, especially the priests and the nuns, was that, for example, if someone came to the door, a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness, that your mother didn’t want to speak to, you could say, without sinning, ‘My mother isn’t home,’ and you made the mental reservation, ‘My mother isn’t home
to you.
’ So I made a kind of mental reservation: my father is dead, and in my mind I said, ‘My father is dead to me.’ And I said, ‘I grew up on a farm,’ and what I said in my mind was ‘I grew up on a farm in my dreams.’ ”
    â€œBut you made me believe things that weren’t true, Johnny. You made me think you were a person that you’re not.”
    He knelt down on the floor beside her and took her hands, began kissing them. “No, Jossie, I am the person I told you I was. What I’m not is the son of a mean, pious, begrudging bastard who grew up in anugly, dead town. I’m much more the person of the stories I told than the person of the circumstances of my birth.”
    She felt her mouth go dry, the skin at the base of her throat go cold, her hands freezing; she took them from his hands and put them under the covers. Was he mad? What he said made a kind of sense, but it was the sense of a madman. Once again, she felt the floor on which her bed rested falling through, but the insubstantial flooring didn’t make her fall down; she was carried aloft, and she saw herself, in her white nightgown, in her white bed, whirled through the heavens, with no prospect, ever, of landing on any firm place she might know.
    â€œWill you forgive me, Jossie? I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to make things easier for you, lovelier for you, happier for you. Can you forgive me for that?”
    She felt the boy in him, the suffering boy, and she could not keep back forgiveness from this wretched child. But he could never be the man she loved once; that man had been a phantom, and had been carried away, as she had felt herself carried away, into the heavens, only she had come back now, but he was gone forever.
    She wonders now if things would have been different if, a week later, John Kennedy had not been assassinated.
    A cliché of her generation: you always remember where you were when you heard the news of John Kennedy’s death. And yet when Americans were recently asked in some survey about the television images