The Impossible Marriage

It wasn’t till he was nearly thirty that Jim Grahame realized the
trick that life had played on him. Up to that time he had lived very
much like any other young man, with no great notion that he was being
imposed upon. His father had died ten years before. Jim, an accountant
in a provision store, had continued to accept his father’s
responsibilities, and his mother, a lively, sweet-natured little
woman, had kept house for him in the way that only mothers can. They
lived on in the house into which she had married; a big, roomy,
awkward house on the edge of the country where the rent they paid was
barely enough to keep the building in repair. Jim had never been very
shy with girls, but none of them he had met seemed to him to be half
the woman his mother was, and, unknown to himself, he was turning into
a typical comfortable old bachelor who might or might not at the age
of forty-five decide to establish a family of his own. His mother
spoiled him, of course, and, in the way of only children, he had a
troubled conscience because of the way he took advantage of it. But
spoiling is a burden that the majority of men can carry a great deal
of without undue hardship.

Then, by the seaside in Crosshaven, one Sunday, he went for a walk
with a girl called Eileen Clery who lived in the same quarter of Cork
as himself, though he had never noticed her before. She wasn’t the
sort of girl who thrusts herself on people’s attention, though she was
good-looking enough, with a thin face that lit up beautifully when she
smiled, and pale hair with gold lights in it. He tried to flirt with
her, and was surprised and a little offended by her quick, almost
violent, withdrawal. He had not mistaken her for a flighty type, but
neither had he expected to meet an untouchable.

The curious thing was that she seemed to like him, and even arranged
to meet him again. This time they sat in a nook on the cliffs, and Jim
became more pressing. To his astonishment, she began to cry. He was
exasperated, but he pretended a solicitude he did not altogether feel,
and when she saw him apparently distressed, she sat up and smiled,
though her tears still continued to flow freely. “It’s not that I
wouldn’t like it, Jim,” she said, drying her eyes and blowing her nose
into a ridiculous little scrap of a handkerchief, “only I don’t like
thinking about it.”

“Why on earth not, Eileen?” he asked with some amusement.

“Well, you see, I’m an only child, and I have my mother to look
after,” she said, still sniffing.

“And I’m an only child, and I have a mother to look after,” Jim
replied triumphantly, and then laughed outright at the absurdity of
the coincidence. “We’re a pair,” he added with a rueful chuckle.

“Yes, aren’t we?” Eileen said, laughing and sobbing at once, and then
she rested her head on his chest, and made no further difficulties
about his love-making.



Now, all books on the subject describe attraction in similar terms;
tanned chests and voluptuous contours which really have very little to
do with the matter. But what they rarely mention, the most powerful of
all, is human loneliness. This is something that women face earlier
than men, and Eileen had already faced it. Jim, though he had not
faced it in the same way, was perceptive enough to see it reaching out
before him, and up there on the cliffs overlooking Cork Harbour,
watching a score of little sailing-boats headed for Currabinny, they
realized that they were in love, and all the more in love because
their position was so obviously hopeless.

After that, they met regularly every week in Cork, to walk, or go to
the pictures when it rained. They did it in the way of only children,
taking precautions that became something of a joke to those who knew
them. One evening, a girl crossing the New Bridge saw Jim Grahame
standing there, and when she came to the second bridge was amused to
see Eileen. “Excuse my interfering, Miss Clery,” she said, “but if
it’s Mr. Grahame you’re waiting for, he’s waiting for you at the other
bridge.” Eileen didn’t know where to look; she blushed, she laughed,
and finally joined her hands and said, “Oh, thank you, thank you,” and
ran like the wind.

It was like them to meet that way, miles from home, because they were
pursued by the sense of guilt. They felt more pity for their mothers
than for themselves and did their best to hide their dreadful secret
out of some instinctive understanding of the fear of loneliness and
old age that besets women whose families have grown and whose husbands
are dead. Perhaps they even understood it too well, and apprehended
more of it than was really there.

Mrs. Grahame, whose intelligence service was better than Mrs. Clery’s,
was the first to speak of the matter to them.

“I hear you’re great friends with a girl called Clery from the Cross,”
she said one evening in a tone of modest complaint. Jim was shaving by
the back door. He started and turned to her with a look of amusement,
but she was absorbed in her knitting, as always when she did not wish
to look him in the face.

“Go on!” he said. “Who told you that?”

“Why wouldn’t I hear it when the whole road knows it?” she replied,
avoiding his question. She liked her little mysteries. “Wouldn’t you
bring her up some night?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

‘Why would I mind, child? Little enough company we see.”

This was another of her favorite myths; that she never saw or spoke to
anyone, though Jim could do little or nothing that she didn’t hear
about sooner or later.

One evening he brought Eileen home for tea, and though she was nervous
and giggly, he could see that his mother took to her at once.  Mrs.
Grahame worshipped her son, but she had always wished for a daughter,
someone she could talk to as she could not talk to a man. Later in the
evening, Eileen, realizing that she really was welcome, began to
relax, and she and his mother exchanged the sort of gossip they both
loved.

“Ah, Dinny Murphy was a bad head to her,” his mother would say darkly,
referring to some object of charity in the neighborhood.

“No, no, no, Mrs. Grahame,” Eileen would say hastily, in her eagerness
laying her hand on Mrs. Grahame’s arm. “Poor Dinny wasn’t the worst.”

“Look at that now!” Mrs. Grahame would cry, putting down her knitting
to fix Eileen with eyes that were bleak with tragedy. “And the things
they said about him! Eileen, haven’t people bad tongues?”

“No, he wasn’t, he wasn’t,” Eileen would repeat, shaking her head. “He
took a drop, of course, but which of them doesn’t, would you tell me?”

And Jim, who said nothing, smiled as he noticed how the voice of
Eileen, young, eager, and intelligent, blended with his mother’s in a
perfect harmony of gossip. Mrs. Grahame did not let her go without
hinting delicately at her lost and lonely condition that made it
impossible for her to know the truth about anything, and made her
promise to come again. She became accustomed to Eileen’s visits, and
was quite hurt if a week went by without one. She even said with great
resignation that of course she was no company for a lively young girl
like that.

Then it was Mrs. Clery’s turn. She might hear of Eileen’s visits to
the Grahames, and be upset, but, on the other hand, she might be
equally upset by an unexpected visit. So Eileen had to prepare her by
telling her first how Jim was situated with regard to his own mother
so that she wouldn’t think he came to the house with any designs on
Eileen. All they had to live on was Eileen’s earnings and a few
shillings’ pension which her mother drew.

They lived in a tiny cottage in a terrace off the road, with a parlor,
a kitchen that they used as a living room, and two attic bedrooms
upstairs. Mrs. Clery was a shrewd old lady with a battered humorous
face. She suffered from a variety of ailments, and, being slightly
deaf, complained of them at great length in a loud, hectoring
tone. She would put a firm hand on her interlocutor’s knee while she
talked, to make sure he didn’t escape, and then stare blankly at the
fireplace in concentration.

“So then, Jim, I had this second pain I was telling you about, and I
had Doctor O’Mahoney to the house, and he said—what did doctor
O’Mahoney say about the second pain, Eileen?”

“He said you were an old humbug,” bawled Eileen

“Dr. O’Mahoney?” her mother said in wonderment. “He did not. Ah, you
divil you!”

At home, Eileen talked nervously, at the top of her voice,
interrupting, contradicting, and bantering her mother till the old
woman’s face wrinkled up with glee and she blinked at Jim and groaned:
“Didn’t I say she was a divil, Jim? Did you ever hear a girl talk to
her mother that way? I’ll engage you don’t talk like that to your own
poor mother.”

“His mother isn’t always grousing,” Eileen yelled blithely from the
back yard.

“Grousing? Who’s grousing?” asked Mrs. Clery, her eyes half-closing
with pleasure, like a cat’s when you stroke it. “Oh, my, I live in
terror of her. Jim, boy, you never heard such a tongue! And the lies
she tells! Me grousing!”



All the same it was pleasant for Jim and Eileen to have a place to
turn to on a wet night when they didn’t want to go to the
pictures. Mostly, they went to Jim’s. Mrs. Grahame was more jealous
than Eileen’s mother. Even a hint of slight on the part of either of
them would reduce her to mutinous tears, but if they sat with her for
half an hour, she would get up and tiptoe gently out of the room as
though she thought they were asleep. Her jealousy was only the measure
of her generosity.

“Wisha, Jim,” she said roguishly one evening, putting down her
knitting, ““wouldn’t you and Eileen make a match of it?”

“A match?” Jim repeated mockingly, looking up from his book. “I
suppose you want to get rid of me?”

His mother could usually be diverted from any subject by teasing
because she took everything literally even if she rarely took it far.

“Indeed, what a thing I’d do!” she said in a huff and went on with her
knitting, full of childish rage at his reception of her generous
proposal. But, of course, it didn’t last. Ten minutes later, having
forgotten her huff, she added, this time as though speaking to
herself: “Why, then, you wouldn’t find many like her.”

“And where would we live?” he asked with gentle irony.

“My goodness, haven’t ye the house?” she said, looking at him severely
over her glasses. “You don’t think I’d stop to be in your way?”

“Oh, so you’d go to the workhouse and let Mrs. Clery come here?”

“Wisha, aren’t things very peculiar?” she said vaguely, and he knew
that she was brooding on the coincidence by which he and Eileen had
been drawn together. His mother and he were both familiar with the
situation in its simple form, common as it is in Ireland, and could
have listed a score of families where a young man or woman walked out
for years before he or she was in a position to marry, too often only
to find themselves too old or tired for it.

“We’re not thinking in that direction at all, Mrs. Grahame, thank you
all the same,” he said, giving her a sweet smile. “It’s got to be a
double murder or nothing at all.”



He knew that in spite of her jealousy, Mrs. Grahame resented this fate
for them, but Mrs. Clery jovially pretended that they should be
grateful for their good fortune.

“Ye don’t know how well off ye are,” she said. “Ye’re young and
healthy; a lot ye have to complain of. The way they rush into marriage
you’d think they were robbing a bank. Soon enough they get tired of
it, and then, oh my! Nothing is bad enough for them to say about one
another.”

“So vou don’t approve of marriage. Mammy?” Eileen would ask demurely.

“Who said I don’t approve of marriage?” her mother asked suspiciously,
certain that the “divils” were trapping her again. “What matter
whether you approve of it or not? That doesn’t make it any better. Let
ye be young while ye can, Jim,” she counseled, laying a rocky hand on
Jim’s knee. “Ye’ll be married long enough.”

But, of course, Eileen and himself did not share her views. On their
evening walks they usually passed through one of the new developments,
glanced into half-built houses with the enthusiasm of the children who
played cowboys and Indians in them; chatted with young husbands
digging in little patches of garden that were mainly builders’ rubble,
and let themselves be invited in for cups of tea by young couples in
all the pride and joy of recent possession. They saw nothing of the
ugliness of it. They saw only the newness of everything as though it
were life itself renewed; the way the evening sunlight brought up the
freshness of the paint, the whiteness of the curtains, the tender
green of the new grass. Later in the evening Eileen would say, shaking
her head: “I didn’t think the curtains were right in the big corner
windows, Jim, did you?” and Jim would know she had furnished the house
in her own mind.



That year Jim suggested that he and Eileen should take their holidays
together. This didn’t suit Mrs. Clery at all. She was sure it would
give Eileen a bad name. Mrs. Clery was all for their being young while
they could, but only as long as they were being young under her
eye. Jim knew it wasn’t Eileen’s good name that her mother worried
about at all, but the possibility that their holiday might start
something she could not control. He had his way; they went to a
seaside place north of Dublin, and walked and swam and sun-bathed to
their hearts’ content for a fortnight, going into the city when it
rained.

On their way home, looking out at the Galtee Mountains from the window
of their carriage, he said: “(Next time we go on holidays like that,
we should be married. It’s not the same thing.”

“No, Jim, it isn’t,” she agreed. “But what can we do?”

“What’s to stop us getting married?” he asked with a smile.

“Now?” she asked in alarm. “But what would we do with our mothers?”

“What we do with them now,” he said with a shrug.

“You mean get married and go on the way we’re going?”

“Why not? Of course, it’s not what we want, but it’s better than
nothing.”

“But suppose—well, Jim, you know yourself there might be children.”

“I should hope so,” he replied. “We can cross that bridge when we come
to it. But anyhow, there’s no particular reason we should have kids
yet.”

“But Jim,” she asked timidly, “wouldn’t people talk?”

“Do you think they don’t talk now?”

Jim was like that, and what Jim thought his mother would think,
regardless of public opinion. She, of course, had seen nothing wrong
with their going on holidays together, and Eileen, who had felt rather
doubtful of it herself, now knew that she was right. She felt he was
probably right now too, but she wasn’t sure.

The more she thought of it, the more she felt he was, though her
reasons were of a different kind. Jim didn’t want to wait; he didn’t
want to grow old and sour in expectation of the day when they could
get married; he wanted something, however little it might be, of the
pleasure of marriage while they were still young enough to enjoy
it. Eileen thought of it in a more mystical way, as a sort of
betrothal which would bind them to one another, whatever life might
have in store for them. She knew it was too much to hope that she and
Jim would both be set free at the same time; one would be bound to be
free long before the other, and then the real temptation would begin.

But she knew that even this she would not get without a fight with her
mother. Mrs. Clery was conventional to the heart, and besides she knew
what happened in marriage. Eileen was very sweet and gentle now, but
Eileen as wife or mother would be an altogether different proposition
and one an old lady might be unable to handle at all.

“What a thing you’d do!” Mrs. Clery gasped with one hand on her
hip. ““What sort of marriage would that be? Him living there and you
living here! You’d have the whole town laughing at you.”

“I don’t really see what they’d have to laugh at, Mammy,” Eileen said
earnestly. “Any more than they have now.”

“Go off with him!” her mother said brokenly. “Go on off with him! I’d
sooner go to the workhouse than be disgraced by ye.”

“But, Mammy,” persisted Eileen, laughing in spite of herself, “we
won’t do anything to disgrace you, and you won’t have to go to the
workhouse or anywhere else.”


Mrs. Grahame was upset too, but it was her pride that was hurt. What
the neighbors would say did not worry her at all, but it seemed to her
that it was her dependence on Jim that forced him into this caricature
of a marriage. If by getting out of his way she could have made it
easier for him, she would cheerfully have gone into the workhouse. But
when Jim explained that even if he agreed to her doing so, it would
change nothing regarding Eileen and her mother, she saw that he was
right. When next Eileen called, Mrs. Grahame embraced her and
muttered: “Ye poor children! Ye poor, distracted children!”

“You don’t think we’re doing wrong, Mrs. Grahame?” Eileen asked,
beginning to be tearful herself.

“Sure, how could you be doing wrong, child?” Mrs. Grahame exclaimed
angrily. “Why would ye care what anybody thinks? People who never
sacrificed a thing in their lives!”

Then Mrs. Clery threw a fit of the sulks, would not speak to Jim when
he called, and finally refused to attend what she called “the mock
wedding.” Mrs. Clery had little experience of that sort of thing but
she did know when she had been tricked, and she had been tricked by
Jim. He had come to the house as a friend and stolen her only daughter
from under her eyes. As for all this talk of putting her first, she
didn’t believe a word of it. A man who would do what he had done would
think nothing of putting arsenic in her cup of tea.



Before she left for the church that morning, Eileen went into her
mother and asked gently: “Mammy, won’t you even wish me luck?” But all
her mother said was “Go away, you bold thing!”

“I’ll be back tomorrow night in time to get your supper, Mammy,” Eileen
said meekly.

“You needn’t come back at all,” said her mother.

Eileen was very upset, but Mrs. Grahame only scoffed at it when they
said good-bye outside the church.

“Ah, she’ll get over it, child,” she said. “Old people are all lick
alike. I’m the same myself, if the truth was known. I’ll see her on
the way home and give her a bit of my mind.”

“And, Mrs. Grahame, if you wouldn’t mind making her an egg flip, she’d
be easier to talk to,” Eileen said earnestly. “She’s very fond of
egg flips, and she likes a lot of whiskey in them.”

“I’ll give her an egg flip,” said Mrs. Grahame, suddenly lighthearted
because her own savage jealousy melted in the thought of comforting
another old woman in her tantrums. She had a job on her hands, even
with the egg flip.

“Don’t talk to me, ma’am!” cried Mrs. Clery. “Young people today are
all the same; all selfish, all for pleasure.”

“How can you say it, Mrs. Clery?” Mrs. Grahame asked indignantly.
“There isn’t a better daughter in Ireland. I’d be the last to
criticize Jim, but I only wish I had one like her.”

“And when the children start coming?” asked Mrs. Clery, looking at her
as if she were out of her mind.

“You reared one yourself.”

“’Tisn’t alike, ma’am,” said Mrs. Clery and refused to be
comforted. She was intelligent enough to realize that the presence of
another baby in the house might rob her of some of the attention to
which she felt entitled, and might even result in her being totally
deprived of her privileges. Young people today were so selfish!



After their one-day honeymoon, Jim and Eileen obediently returned to
their duties as though they had never been married at all. Yet Eileen,
when you met her on the road, was exceedingly lighthearted and
lightheaded, sporting her ring like any young bride. She needed all
the joy her new position gave her because her mother had been shrewd
enough in her summing up of what the neighbors’ attitude would be. The
marriage had become a matter of scandalous jokes, and remained so as
long as it lasted. Even from intimate friends, Eileen got little jabs
that reminded her of her anomalous wifehood. It wasn’t that the
neighbors were uncharitable, but their feelings about marriage, like
their feelings about death, had a certain fierceness that was obvious
even in their dislike of second marriages. This marriage that seemed
to end at the church door was a mockery of all they believed in, so
they took their revenge as people will whose dearest beliefs have been
slighted.

Jim affected not to notice the scandal: he had his mother’s curious
imperviousness to public opinion, and he dropped in on Eileen as
though nothing in particular could be said against him. Eileen dropped
in rather more frequently on him and his mother, and Jim and she went
off for a fortnight in the summer to Kerry or Connemara. It took
Mrs. Clery a full year to get used to it, and all that time she
watched Eileen closely, expecting her each week to show signs of
pregnancy. Perhaps it was fortunate that there were none. Heaven alone
knows what she might have done.

Then Mrs. Grahame fell ill, and Jim nursed her by day while Eileen
took over from him at night. She was dying, and in the intervals of
consciousness, she molded Eileen’s hands with her own and said: “I
always wanted a daughter, and I had my wish. I had my wish. Ye’ll be
happy now that ye have the house to yerselves. You’ll look after Jim
for me?”

“I’ll look after him for you,” Eileen said, and on the night when his
mother died, she let him sleep on.

“I thought I’d better not wake you, Jim,” she said when she roused him
next morning. “You were so tired and Mammy went so peacefully. ...
That’s the way she’d have wished it, Jim,” she added gravely when she
saw his look of surprise. “I dare say you’re right, Eileen,” he
agreed.



But their troubles were far from being at an end. When they proposed
to shift into Jim’s house, Mrs. Clery raised more of a hullabaloo than
she had raised over the marriage.

“Is it up among strangers?” she cried aghast.

“Strangers half a mile away, Mammy?” Eileen exclaimed, still unable to
conceal a laugh at her mother’s extraordinary reception of every new
proposal.

“Half a mile?” her mother echoed dully. “’Tis a mile.”

“And you think your old friends would desert you?” asked Fileen.

“I wouldn’t ask them,” her mother replied with dignity. “I couldn’t
sleep in a place where I wouldn’t hear the sound of the trams. Jim’s
mother died in her own house. Oh, my, isn’t it a queer thing he
wouldn’t let me die in mine!”

And once more Jim and Eileen had to resign themselves to frustration.
They could offer no adequate substitute for the soothing squeak of the
trams climbing Summerhill from the city, and as Eileen saw, it would
be folly for them to give up Jim’s excellent house, which they would
need later on, and come to share her own tiny cottage with a cranky
mother-in-law.

Instead, they played at being married. On a couple of evenings each
week, Eileen would give her mother supper early, and then come to
Jim’s house and have supper ready for him when he got in from the
shop. When she heard his key in the lock, she ran to the front door to
meet him in her white housecoat, and he would let on to be suitably
astonished at seeing her. As they went in, she would point silently to
the big fire she had lit in the living room, and they would have
supper together and read or talk till he saw her home coming on to
midnight. Yet, even with the extra work, it gave them both a deep
pleasure to make the big bed that Eileen never slept in except as a
visitor, to wash up together, or best of all, to entertain some
friends, just as though Eileen did not, like Cinderella, have to fly
back at midnight to her old part as daughter and nurse. Someday, they
felt, the house would really be theirs, and she would open the door in
the morning to milkman and breadman.

But this was not how things happened. Instead, Jim fell seriously ill,
and rather than consent to the conflict which he knew this would set
up in Eileen’s mind between her duty to him and her duty to her
mother, he chose to go to hospital. Two years after his mother’s
death, he died there.



Something seemed to happen to Eileen at this point that made even her
mother afraid. There was no argument between them as to what she
should do. She shut up her own cottage, and her mother joined her in
Jim’s house, where she received his relatives. The body had been taken
to the church, and when Jim’s family came, Eileen had lunch ready for
them, and chatted as she served, as though the trouble had been theirs
rather than hers. It was a cold lunch, and she was full of
apologies. At the graveside while they wept, she showed no sign of
tears. When the grave had been covered over Jim and his mother, she
stood there silently, her head bowed, and Jim’s aunt, an enormous
woman, came up and took her two hands.

“You’re a great little girl,” she whispered huskily. “ ’Twon’t be
forgotten for you.”

“But, Auntie,” Eileen replied, “that’s the way Jim would have liked
it. It makes me feel close to him, and it won’t be too long till we’re
together again. Once Mammy goes, there’ll be nothing to keep me.”

There was something about her words and her dry-eyed air and her still
youthful face, that the other woman found disconcerting.

“Ah, nonsense, child!” she said lightly. “We all feel that way. You’ll
be happy yet, and you’ll deserve it. One of these days you’ll have a
houseful of your own.”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” Eileen replied with a sweet smile that was curiously
knowledgeable and even condescending, as though Jim’s aunt were too
much of a child to understand. “You know yourself I could never find
another husband like Jim. People can’t be as happy as that a second
time, you know. That would be too much to ask.”

And relatives and even neighbors began to realize that Eileen was only
telling the truth; that in spite of everything she had been intensely
happy, happy in some way they could not understand, and that what had
seemed to them a mockery of marriage had indeed been one so complete
and satisfying that beside it, even by their standards, a woman might
think everything else in the world a mere shadow.


142
(1957)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981