May I Have Some Marmalade, Please?

When Ellie slammed the front door, he slowed his cup's approach to the coffee table to glance across his shoulder at the clock on the mantelpiece. Six forty-five? Of course. Monday. Her night for bridge, his for the art class. His coffee made a smooth landing. He sank into his armchair, carefully unfolded his evening paper, looked blindly at its headlines for a while, let it fall into his lap. If only! If only! If only they had had a child! All day she had not spoken one word to him since she said at breakfast, "May I have some marmalade, please?" And now she was gone for the night.

Which of them first mooted this crazy idea of one night a week apart? She had been sarcastic about it. "Divorced weekly? A comedy in fifty-two acts."

He had been sour. "The road back to celibacy? Act five."

Probably neither of us began it. Just another knight's move, another oblique assertion of another imaginary speck of precious bloody personality threatened by some other imaginary attack by one on t'other. Quid pro quo. My turn now. Tit for tat. Even Stephen. Omens common to every failing marriage? Like her insistence on rising early every Sunday morning for first Mass and his on staying in bed late. His demanding roast leg of lamb on Fridays against her preference for black sole--not that he did not always let her have her way; he liked black sole--or her wanting flowers before her Madonna's statue all through May. It was not the flowers he minded; it was the silent betrayal of her man who had given up "all that" for ... for what? At which, as if an earth tremor made the ornaments on the mantelpiece tremble, he heard all around him for miles and miles the tide of Dublin's suburban silence. Out there, how many mugs like himself were enjoying the priceless company of their own personalities?

He flung the newspaper onto the carpet, tore off his gray tie and pink shirt, went into his bedroom, dragged on his old black roll-neck Pringle pullover, groped for his old black homburg hat and began to brush it briskly. As good today as the day I bought it in Morgan's in Westmoreland Street for the mother's funeral. He curled a black scarf around his neck, felt for his car keys, switched off the Flo-Glo fire and the electric candles on the walls, checked the bathroom taps and the taps of the electric cooker, put out the hall light and slowly drew the front door behind him until he heard the lock's final click.

Fog. A drear-nighted February. Every road lamp on the estate had its own halo. He drove with care. Bungalow, bungalow, bungalow. Some lighted, most caverns of television's blue flicker. Exactly the kind of night he had first persuaded Father Billy Casey to doff their Roman collars, black jackets, black overcoats, black hats, put on sports jackets, checkered caps, jazzy ties and set off for some, any lounge bar in the city, in search, Father Billy had hooted, rocking with amusement, of what laymen call Life.

He was able to accelerate a bit on the yellow-lighted bus route. After 15 minutes or so, he felt space and damp on his right. The sea. The new hospital. Lights in a church for benediction. Inner suburbia's exclusive gateways. The U. S. embassy. He crossed the canal. The city's moat.

"Whither tonight?" Casey had always said at this point, rubbing his palms. Anywhere west of O'Connell Bridge used to be safe from episcopal spies; the east was less safe, too many people coming and going between the big cinemas, the bars of hotels. The Abbey Theater, the Peacock, the Busáras Theater. There was the same contrast on the other side of the bridge between Dublin's only pricey hub, the cube of Grafton Street, Nassau, Dawson and Saint Stephen's Green on to the east and the old-folksy Liberties off to the west. Once you got that bit of geography clear in your head, you knew the only danger left was the moment of exit from the presbytery and your return to it. Holy smoke! Supposing the parish priest caught you dressed in civvies! As Father Billy once put it, a priest in a checkered cap is as inconceivable as a Pope in a bowler hat or, suddenly remembering some scrap of his seminarian's philosophy, if not inconceivable, at least unimaginable. He had enjoyed and hated these small risks, so much so that he could still groan and laugh at the thought of their hairbreadth escape the night they were nearly spotted by the P.P.'s housekeeper coming home late from what she always spoke of as her Fwhishte Diriuve. That was the night Father Billy had in his Edenish innocence pushed him out of the Church.

"Here's to us!" Billy had cheered from where he lay strewn like a podgy Pompeian on the triclinium of his secondhand sofa, his nightcap of malt aloft. "Who have at this triumphant moment once more unarguably demonstrated the undeniable truth that privacy is the last and loveliest of all class luxuries. Look at us! Boozing to our hearts' content in peace and privacy and nobody one penny the wiser. Whereas all the most overpaid, socialist, lefty poor working-man can do when he is thrown out of his pub at closing time is to take home half a dozen bottles of beer in a pack. In a pub, Foley! That's the key word. In a pub! A public house. Subject to public inspection, permission to drink only in public, get drunk in public, puke in public, under the public eye, to public knowledge. But you and I, Foley, privileged nobs by virtue of our exclusive, elitist rank as officers of the Pope's Grande Armée, can sit here at our ease, luxuriating in the lordly privacy of Father William Casey's personal sitting room in Saint Conleth's Roman presbytery, and not another soul one penny the wiser.

He had replied coldly:

"You've got it all wrong, Father Billy. We do not drink in lordly privacy. We drink in abject secrecy."

One word and he became aware of the duplicity of all institutions, the Law, the Army, Medicine, the Universities, Parliament, the Press, the Church dominated by the one iron rule, Never let down the side. There was only one kind of people from whom you might get a bit of the truth, not because they are more moral but because they have no side to let down. Outlaws. Join any organization and truth at once takes second place. They went on arguing it down to the bottom of the half bottle of Irish. "Sleep on it, Billy," he had said. "In whishky weritas."

•

A kindled traffic light halted him as he approached O'Connell Bridge. He peered up at the Ballast Office clock, 7:32, and remembered the night--The Night--when he had answered Father Billy's ritual "Whither tonight?" with the daredevil cry of "Why don't we try the Long Bar in the basement of the old Met?" which--bang in the middle of O'Connell Street--spelled maximum danger. He was still chuckling at Casey's reply when the green let him through.

"The Long Bar? The short life! Onward to booze, death and glory." Poor Billy! Poor in every sense. All a booze meant to him was a large whisky, or two glasses of ale. He remembered how the two of them had cheered like kids that night when they found a parking spot directly opposite the Long Bar of the Met.

And, behold! Here it was, waiting for him again. He slid smoothly into its arms, sighing, "This is what I should be doing every night, instead of staring into bloody TV or an electric fire!"

He halted at the foot of the stairs, pushed open the glass door, three semicircular steps above the floor of the saloon, and surveyed the babble. He saw one vacant table and his mistake. A mob of youngsters. Mere boys and girls. Pint drinkers. Years of tobacco smoke. Life? Gaiety? Unconventional? Bohemian? It was just any ordinary bar. Or had it changed? Or had he? Or was it she who had transformed it that night? He edged down to the vacant table and gave his order to the bar curate. After two slow dry martinis, he surrendered. He took up his homburg--no other man or woman in the rooms wore a hat--felt for his car keys, foresaw fog, the drive, the empty bungalow. How Father Billy had stared around that night at all the pairs and quartets!

"Well, here it is, Foley! Life! And I can't tell you how glad I am to see it, because only last night I found myself going through the dictionary to find out what the divil the word means. I was as nearly off my rocker as that! I can now reveal to you, Father Foley, that Life is, quote, unquote, that condition which distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic objects and dead organisms by growth through A, metabolism, B, adaptability and C, reproduction. Look around you. Look at us. They are growing up. I put on seven pounds since Easter. Look at their fancy dress. Look at our fancy caps and jackets. We all adapt. Reproduction? Look at 'em, every single one of 'em with a one-way first-class ticket for the double bed. All booked!"

"Not all! Or don't I see over there in the corner two unaccompanied young women? The dark one isn't at all bad-looking. Four people spoiling two tables who could be improving one? Maybe those two young ladies are in search of Life? Come on, Billy Casey! Let's ask them over for a drink."

He had not meant one word of it. What they had already done on half a dozen nights was, every time, an act of the gravest indiscipline. Two soldiers of a victorious empire frolicking in taverns with conquered barbarians? At the sight of Casey's terrified eyes, he had leaned back and laughed so heartily that the dark young woman had looked across and smiled indulgently at their happiness. One second's thought and he would have merely smiled back and resumed his chatter with Casey. He spontaneously lifted his glass to her. Her smile widened whitely. His questioning eyebrows rose, his eye and thumb indicated his table invitingly, hers did the same to hers, he said, "Come on, Billy, in for a penny, in for a pound!" and the unimaginable of five minutes before became reality.

"Ellie," her companion apologized admiringly for her friend, "is very saucy." She was herself a striking redhead, but he thought the dark one much more handsome and she had by her laugh and gesture across the bar suggested a touch of dash and character. As for her looks, she had only one slight flaw; her mouth was by the faintest touch awry, and even this was in itself an attraction, that delicate, that charming fleck of imperfection that never fails to impress a woman's looks unforgettably. Her black hair, divided down the center of her skull, was drawn back boldly like two curtains. Her eyes were as clear as her clarid speech. Their large brown irises, shining like burred chestnuts, harmonized with her willow-colored skin. She was dressed entirely in black, apart from the little white ruff on her high neck that somehow made her look like a nun. He confided to himself the next day that her smiles came and went like the sly sunshine of April.

He introduced himself as Frederick Cecil Swinburne and his companion, to Casey's grinning delight, as Arthur Gordon Woodruffe, both of them final medicals at Trinity College. She said, "I am Ellie Wheeler Wilcox and my friend is Molly Malone," both of them private secretaries to directors of the Irish Sweep. They passed what any casual observer would have seen as a merry hour, as light, bright and gay as a joking and laughing scene in an operetta.

On parting, they all four said they might meet again the next Monday night. He said a couple of hours later in Father Billy's rooms in the presbytery that the only thing missing was that those two young women should have been nuns in disguise and they should all have burst out into an Offenbach quartet. Casey's solemn reply had infuriated him:

"I am afraid, Father Foley, we went a bit too far tonight. We deceived those two young ladies. We pretended. We were guilty of bad faith."

He responded in exasperation with a whisper of "Well, I'll be damned!"

This restored Father Billy's sense of humor far enough to let him disagree about the damnation bit, though, possibly, there might be an extra couple of thousand years of purgatory in store for them both. All the same, he kept coughing dramatically the following Monday morning to indicate the onset of a bad cold.

The corner table was empty. No Miss Wilcox. No Miss Malone. He sat at the table that he had shared the week before with Father Casey, prolonging three tasteless martinis for an hour. Thereupon, cursing his silliness, he had clapped on his checkered cap and risen to his feet, and there she was on the platform of the three semicircular steps of the entrance door, tall and slim, dressed in black, her eyelashes overflowing her cheeks, her hair as close-fitting as a cap, her high neck extended to assist her searching gaze. He flung up his hand. Smiling back at him, she slowly edged her way between the tables. She sat opposite him though still looking about her, explaining that she had expected to meet her friend Molly Malone, though Molly did mention something today about feeling a cold coming on; but he felt so happy in her presence that he heeded little she said until he got her to talking about herself, her girlhood in the country, in County Offaly, where her father was a national teacher, her two younger sisters, her brother Fonsy, short for Alphonsus, who had emigrated to England and was now married in Birmingham; not that he attended to her chat half so much as he did to the fleeting mobility of her features, her contralto laughter, her vivacious gestures, though he did heed her carefully when she described her Auntie Nan with whom she was lodging in a little house in Ranelagh, and her friends, working mostly in the Irish Sweep, which led her in turn to ask him about what it is like to be a final medical in Trinity College and about his plans when he became a doctor, a question that instantaneously reminded him of Father Billy's words about bad faith. She listened to his lies with such a transparent expression of belief that he felt thrown down beneath her feet by a whirlwind of shame that kept gnawing at him for the rest of the night, until the moment came when he had halted outside her aunt's little red-brick home in that terraced cul-desac at Ranelagh. There, drawn up beside the curb, he gripped her hand, not, as she obviously thought and by her warm smile showed, to say a grateful good night but to plead for her trust. He must confess the truth about himself.

"Miss Wilcox, I have been deceiving you."

"The truth? Deceiving me?" Staring, frightened by his intensity and tone.

"I am not a medical student. I made all that up."

If only he could have stopped there. Neither, she could laugh, was she Ella Wheeler Wilcox. He had to tell her the essence of him. He kept pressing her hand tighter and tighter.

"I am a clerical student. Trying to become a priest. You have been a revelation from heaven to me. I can't go on with it. I no longer want to be a priest."

Her eyelids shot open at that last word. While he went on to half explain, they opened wider and wider, as if she were opening the doors of her soul to him. In the silence that followed, she kept staring at him and he at her. In his celibate ignorance, he was feeling for the first time the full blast of power that Woman when reduced to one special woman possesses by the mere fact of being female. She in her virginal ignorance was transfixed by the power that Man in the person of this one man held over her by the mere fact of being male. Each was at that moment so evenly conqueror and conquered that if the essential god of all lovers had in that blind alley breathed over them so delicately as would not have shaken the filaments of a dandelion in full cloud of seed, they would have sunk into each other's arms.

That they did not, he often thought later, was due less to the gods than to her aunt, or to whatever other hand had suddenly lit the fanlight. What she may have said before she jumped from the car and ran up the brief concrete path to the door beneath the light he was never after to remember verbatim except for the petals of her voice declaring with unarguable clarity that they must never meet again, and her "Very well!" to his wild pleading that they must meet just once more so that neither of them should remember the other ungratefully.

They did meet just once again, and went on meeting just once again for the whole of the next year, propelled as gently and as irresistibly as a yacht before a summer breeze by sympathy, chivalry and self-immolation, until, to his astonishment, one gentle May evening in the stodgy bedroom of her Auntie Nan's dim house in Ranelagh, while the old lady was away on holidays in County Cork, a typhoon of passion swallowed them both. After another year, marked by more agonizing and less passion, he extricated himself from his priestly vows. They married.

All that was five years ago, and he had long since accepted that he was never to understand what estranged them, he who had so often in his presbytery given counsel and comfort to young marrieds lost in the same fogged wood. All he knew for certain was that that year of waiting, of tenderly comforting each other, of trying to decide what he should do, had been the happiest year of his life, conjoined then by the misery of separation, divided now by the disaster of domesticity.

They had never really quarreled, never violently confronted each other, though of course they now and again "had words," the worst being the night he had evaded her clamant desire on the eve of Good Friday, the anniversary of the execution of a great man in whose alleged godliness he no longer believed. She had spat at him, "Your very skin is dyed black! You will never wash yourself of your precious stigmata!" To which he had retorted, "You? You, of all people, dare say that to a man who has cast off every last trace of what you call black? You with your getting up at dawn, your statues and your flowers and your evening benedictions and all the rest of your pietistic falderals and fandangos, you say that to me?" All of which she (continued on page 272)Marmalade, Please(continued from page 172) dismissed haughtily with the passionate observation that God's world is one--joy and pain, crocuses and the Crucifixion, love and lust, desire and denial, human passion and prayer.

"Dare you deny it?"

Weaponless, he did not.

The only clear hint he ever got anywhere about how marriages break had been vouchsafed to him one morning a bare month ago in the little shop of convenience near their bungalow, managed by an aging man and wife. He had always found each of them normally friendly and loquacious. That day the two were in the shop together. The old man, before attending to him, quietly asked his wife some trivial question concerning their stock. Was it about fire lighters, or washing soda? She answered him in the voice of ancien régime courtesy, in the softest voice, with all the formality of a duchess from the good old days before the revolution. She said between politeness and hauteur, "I beg your pawrdon?" He had fled from the shop, horrified by the revelation that this old pair were living out their last days in a state of savage war. Passion ends in politeness. After that, he added to his "If only we could have had a child" the wish that they could have one blazing, battering, bloody row.

•

He jingled his car keys, rose to face the fog, the bungalow, the evening paper already out of date, clapped on his black hat, and saw a vision. His wife was standing on the platform at the end of the stairs, dressed in black, her hair as black as thunder, her midnight lashes enlarging her eyes that roved the rooms in search of ... in search of whom? He flung up the arm of a drowning man. For a moment, she looked across the rooms at him, then her eyelids sank, her eyebrows shot upward; she looked at him again, decided, smiled her small crooked smile at him and edged forward between the tables. She held out her hand with, "Well, after all these years, if it isn't Mr. Swinburne! And what have you been doing with yourself all this time? Medicine?"

"Miss Wilcox!" he said and shook her hand. "You will join me in a drink?"

She gave him her sly smile, took the proffered chair and let silence fall between them as she slowly removed her gloves ringer tip by finger tip. He as slowly extracted a cigarette and lit it. At their first far-off meeting, when he had taken her to be an ingenuous miss of about 20, he had been struck by this same air of assurance. They both asked simultaneously, "Do you often come here?" and chuckled into a fresh silence which she quickly took hold of with "I have been told that some gentlemen have their pet pubs. Is this one of yours, Mr. Swinburne?"

Two seconds' silence during which he wondered if it were one of hers.

"I have no pet pub. I used to come here years ago to meet a girl I used to know."

"What happened to her?"

"She just disappeared." The bar curate stood silently beside them. "Your usual, Miss Wilcox? A dry martini? Make it two. On the rocks."

"Nice of you to remember my favorite drink, Mr. Swinburne."

"I have a good memory. When you stood in that doorway just now, you reminded me very much of my friend. Oddly enough, she also liked a dry martini. Like you, she was tall, dark and queenly."

She lowered her head sideways to deprecate the compliment, smiled to accept it.

"This is odd. When I saw you just now, you reminded me of a man I first met in this bar several years ago. I have not seen him for a long time. He, as you say, disappeared."

"What happened to him?"

Three seconds' pause.

"I have wondered. My friends and I have never been able to agree about what happens to make people disappear."

"Your friends?"

Four seconds' pause, during which she slowly turned her head to look toward a large round table, in an alcove that he had not previously noted, occupied by five or six women of varying ages. They were all looking her way. Her left wrist lifted her palm an inch to greet them. Her chin nodded an unspoken agreement. She turned back to him.

"My friends."

"Your bridge club?"

Five seconds' pause.

"I never play bridge. But we are a club. All married, all botched, all of us working now in the Irish Sweep. We came together by chance. Last summer, I got chatting with Mrs. Aitch, that is the jolly fat woman in the orange head scarf with her back to us. Angela Hanafey. She is about forty-six. Her husband was, is, always will be an AA case. She has four sons, all but one grown up. She just happened to be walking beside me one evening when we were pouring in our hundreds out of the Sweepstakes offices at five o'clock. We had never laid eyes on each other before. 'God!' she said to me. 'I'm starved for a drink. Come and have a quick one on me at the Horseshoe.' We met Mrs. King there. She's the slim, handsome blonde; don't let her see you looking. She is still bitter of her ex. He left her holding three children and slid off to get lost somewhere in England with a slut of seventeen. It was she brought along Kit Ferriter, the baby of the bunch, six months married and glad to be living alone again in her virginal bed-sit. Kit studied sociology for three years at Trinity. She says she learned far more about it in six months of marriage. Three or four others drop in and out. All sorts. One is married to an army captain who batters her. Another to a briefless barrister. Mrs. Aitch calls us the Missusmatched. Monday is club night. No other rules. No premises."

"And you talk about men and sex and marriage."

"Sex? Never. Men? No. Marriage? Occasionally. Not as an important subject. We mostly talk about woman things. Food, cooking, dress, make-up, kids, the cost of living, our jobs, nothing in particular."

"And in your club's view, why do those marrieds have this odd way of disappearing?"

"Why?"

Her eyebrows threw a shrug over her left shoulder. Her eyelids lowered a curtain on the shrug. The corners of her mouth buttoned it down. She leaned back, to consider either the question or him. When she tinkled the ice in her glass, it sounded like his idea of Swiss cowbells in far-off valleys. When she laughed her contralto laugh, it hurt him that he had not heard it for a long, long time.

"Yes, why?"

"Why? We solved that months ago, when we invented the Seven Cs. Every marriage, we decided, sinks or swims on any three of"--right finger on left thumb checked them off--"Concupiscence, Comradeship, Contact, Kids, Cash, high or low Cunning and not to give a tinker's Curse about everything in general and anything in particular."

"Ye have left out Love!"

"Mrs. Aitch, our mother hen, dealt ably with that. 'I made a fatal mistake,' says she, 'with my fellow. I led him to think I was the reincarnation of the Blessed Virgin. On our honeymoon, I got a sudden, terrible thirst for tangerines. Afterward, we both found out, too late, that pregnant women get these odd hungers. He would have done anything for me, of course, on our honeymoon. He went to a power of trouble to get me the tangerines, but get them he did! When we were back home, I got a sudden wish for apricots. He rumbled and bumbled about it, but still and all, the poor devil did get me the apricots. A month later, I got an unquenchable longing for nothing less than wild strawberries. Well, by that time, I had a belly on me like a major. He told me to go to hell and find out for myself where anyone could find wild strawberries in the month of November and I knew at once that my dear love had vanished from the earth as if the fairies had got him.' Kit Ferriter, our expert on sociology, told her she was lucky that he didn't batter the other fellow's baby out of her. The dear child insists that Love, which you say we have omitted from our Seven Cs, is a mass-invented delusion with a life expectancy of three weeks."

She rose, holding out her hand. "Nice meeting you again, Mr. Swinburne. It was very pleasant. Now I must join my friends."

He held her hand pleadingly. "Can't we meet again? Say next Monday night. Just for a quick drink?"

She looked around the rooms, said, indifferently, "All right," and joined her welcoming group. As he walked out, he heard behind him again her miraculous laughter.

Back home, he kicked aside the evening paper, switched on his fire, sank into his armchair and fell into a stunned sleep. In the morning, the only time either of them spoke over their break-fastette in their kitchenette across their hinged tablette was when she said, "May I have some marmalade, please? ... Thank you." On their way into town to work, he as always driving, he did say that next Monday night he would be, as usual, at his art class and she with an air of slight surprise replied that she would, of course, as usual be playing bridge with her friends.

Accordingly, on the following Monday night, she again left home before him to walk to the bus, and he, after taut calculations, followed her in time to be in the Long Bar before her arrival, seated facing the glass doors. Now and again, he glanced furtively toward the women's table in the alcove to his far left. His jury? His judges? His amused witnesses? Again, after two slowly sipped drinks, he jumped to his feet between rage and regret just as she appeared in the doorway. For a moment, she stood there motionless, then slowly descended to the level of the bar, edging between the tables toward him with "So we meet again, Mr. Swinburne," sat, began calmly to deglove. Of the precious ten minutes she allowed him that night, he could afterward recall clearly only one sequence, which he initiated:

"Did they ask if we were related?"

"No. And I did not vouchsafe. You could be only one of two things."

He worked it out.

"Or I could be a new friend?"

"Here? So briefly?"

"Did they say nothing at all about me?"

"Mrs. King said, 'He looks like a priest, all in black, even to the hat.' I said that the first time I met you seven years ago, here, you were dressed in the colors of the rainbow. I left them guessing. I said, 'Maybe he has become a priest since then.' " Ten seconds' silence, looking at each other. She swallowed her last piece of ice, put down her glass smartly, picked up her gloves and handbag, rose, said, "Have you?" and turned to go.

He winced but held her hand to beg for next Monday. He pleaded for it. They had talked so very little. "And I have nowhere else to go."

"Except," she said sympathetically, "back? All right. Then they will know!" and left him for her beaming friends.

In this fashion, he continued to meet her every week into the first green promises of spring, until by early May these extemporaneous meetings took on the character of regular assignations and, since they were never mentioned at home, the clandestine air of a double life. He looked forward to these encounters more and more eagerly. As we say, he lived for them, suspected that she enjoyed them equally, noted with excitement that they extended themselves on occasion to 15 minutes, even to nearly 20 minutes and on one memorable night to fully 25 minutes, this being the night when he asked for her opinion as to which of her club's Seven Cs of marriage was the most important of all. She answered promptly.

"The first three, of course. Concupiscence, Comradeship and Contact. Some people think Comradeship comes first, but that is just Con disguising itself as Com. Kids inevitably follow. Then Cash edges forward. Then more and more need arises for high Cunning. But on all occasions thereafter, there is the need for not caring a damn, for the indifference of a divorce-court judge."

Naturally, they started to argue, and they might have gone on arguing if she had not suddenly become aware of radiations of impatience from across the room.

The next morning, she said, "May I have the marmalade, please? Thank you." But then, as lightly as she pasted the preserve on her toast, she added, "By the way, I understood you to say some time ago that your art class meets twice a week. My bridge club is proposing to meet on Mondays and Fridays." He at once decided that their relations had completely changed.

On that following Friday, the women's alcove contained only two elderly men drinking stout. His chest swelled with triumph. She arrived on time. Unasked, he clicked his fingers for the bar attendant and ordered their drinks. Presently, he observed with a tolerant amusement at the transparency of the feminine mind that the conversation had returned to last Monday's question about the primacy in marriage of feelings of fellowship or of desire, to which she referred as "passion" and rather brazenly (he thought) as "lust." In the course of their conversation, she said:

"Of course, in all this, one should first agree about the general principle of the thing. I mean, is it not all largely a question of what in life one most believes in? In poetry or in prose? I happen to see the world as a complex of things beyond all understanding, far too bewildering to be confined or defined by human laws or rules, shalls and shalt nots. I look at it all as a miracle and a mystery, a place of beauty and horror, a spring flower, a tree in bud, a dead child, a husband dying of cancer--Mrs. Aitch's boozy husband is dying that way, and she has fallen in love with him again--a lottery like the Irish Sweep, chance, fate, the gods, God, the Madonna, love, lust, passion, a baby at the breast. Everything is one thing. That is why I love to have flowers for the Madonna who had a baby, miraculously according to you, not that it matters how she had it, why I rise in the morning for the first dark Mass, where they celebrate again the execution of a god, or of God, not that that matters either, why I like to go in the evening for the last benediction before the dark night, why I let that friend of mine whom I loved years ago go to bed with me because I thought he saw life the way I do, a poem that anybody can read and that nobody can understand."

Staring at her, taken again by her passion, yes, he could remember those wild talks during that year of blissful agony before....

"Alas!" she smiled her hurt smile. "When we got married, he changed. Looking at him then, I was often reminded of the marvelous thing Keats once said about the greatest quality any human being can possess--the power to live in wonder and uncertainty, mystery and doubt, without ever reaching out after fact and reason. My friend turned out to be a man always looking for fact and reason, a lawmaker, a lawgiver, a law explainer, a policeman, a judge, a proseman, a prosy priest longing for his pulpit."

The bar's chatter, rumble, clinking, talk, laughing stopped dead. Silence. Then:

"Did you never consider, Miss Wilcox, that this friend of yours may nevertheless have once dearly loved you?"

She pounced.

"Once? Yes. Once! One night in my aunt's house in Ranelagh while she was on holidays in County Cork with her sister. For a whole year alter that night, my wild lover wandered around and around in his head in search of fact and reason. I," she smiled crookedly, "was left waiting for more of the poetry."

Unguardedly, he laid a hand on her hand, said, "Ellie!" saw that he had blundered, withdrew. There was a staring silence. Then she looked at the ceiling as if she were listening to a plane passing over Dublin, looked at him once again, pushed back her cuff from her wristlet watch with her index finger, seized her bag and rose.

"You have reminded me, Mr. Swinburne. I promised my Auntie Nan to keep an eye on her little house in Ranelagh while she is gone to Derbyshire to stay with a niece. Would you mind leaving me there on your way home?"

He threw up his palms. Outside, it was raining. They did not speak in their car. She became proprietress of his homburg hat, nursing it on her lap. When they arrived outside the tiny red-brick house, he offered Miss Wilcox to wait and drive her to wherever she lived, it was no night for busing, she had no hope of getting a taxi. She said that that would be most kind of him, "But do come in! This is real rain," and clapped his black hat comically on her head and ran through the rain beside the new-mown patch of grass. He was relieved to see her laughing gaily at him as he also ran, hatless and stooped, through the rain. She left him in the parlor while she went off to do her checking, room by room. He could recognize only two items in the parlor: the aquatint of Christ with the Samaritan woman at the well, its frame painted in ugly commercial gilt (his mind clicked, "They shall not thirst anymore"), and the corded old sofa where he had put his arms around her for the first time. He heard her steps on the linoleum overhead. The photograph of a bearded man on the mantelpiece. What relative? He went into the kitchen. Her aunt's kingdom. An antique iron range. A stoneware sink. A crucifix. Tidy. Cold. He wandered to the stairs. On its side walls, lithographs of castles. He identified Ross Castle in Killarney. Then Blarney Castle in Cork. He paused longest at Reginald's Tower in Waterford, still seeing that corded sofa in the parlor. It had been raining that night, too. That, too, had been May. Through a little shower they had raced for the door.

From the front bedroom, she called him. "Mr. Ess?" When he reached the half-open door, he saw through the vertical aperture between the paneled door and its jamb an object that he recalled clearly, and with emotion, a tall mirror so mounted on its mahogany frame as to be able to tilt forward or backward. In this cheval mirror he had, that first night, first seen her completely undressed. Now, modestly undressed, in black bikini and black brassiere, she was smiling into the mirror in the direction of the slowly opening door. He entered, became aware that she was deliberately modeling female allurement, his hat tilted on her head, one wrist back-twisted on her left hip, right knee forward, the other hand airily held aloft.

"Well?" she invited him in the mirror with her minx's smile. "Do you really still love me?"

Between incomprehension and revelation, desire, and revulsion, passion and despair, he gestured wildly around the room. Over the bed head in black and white, Pope Pius X in black and white stared like an intolerant boy from under black eyebrows. His mind clicked: Giuseppe Sarto, that bitter antimodernist. By the bed on the wall, a holy-water font. Last thing before sleep. His mind clicked: daring seminarian joke--Here I lay me down to sleep, upon my little bed; but if I die before I wake, how will I know that I am dead? On the dressing table, a tiny Infant of Prague, gaudy, pyramidical, pagan.

"Yes!" he said defiantly. "I do still love you. But not this way! Not here! Where everything smells of spinsters and sanctity!"

She turned to him. She handed him back his black hat. He was prepared for her to spit that there is no other way; or that "This room was once heaven to you." If she had said that, he would have said, "Yes! But then I was defying it, now I would be accepting it." Or she might in a sad memory of lost hope say nothing. She said nothing. She looked from his eyes to his feet, and from his feet up to his eyes, and with one fast swing of her fist, she crashed him across the face. Her engagement ring drew a red line in blood across his jaw. He returned the blow, they grappled, swaying and stumbling, screaming bitch and bastard, fell across the bed, where her nails tore at his face until he found himself mastering her on her back and suddenly she was kissing his slavering mouth and groaning over and over, "Give it to me."

•

Whether it was the morning sun milliarding through the window into his face or the boom of a plane just taken off from Dublin, or the sound of a neighboring church bell that woke him, he found himself sitting up in bed startled, bewildered until he was calmed and fully informed by a hand stroking his bare back and her voice soothing him with "It is all right, Swinny! This is Saturday. Neither of us has to work." He sank back on the pillow, closed his eyes, remembered, turned his head toward her face on her palm on her pillow watching him quizzically. Beyond her on the floor, he saw his homburg hat battered flat.

"I'm starving," he announced querulously.

"Love always does that."

Always?

"Can we have breakfast?"

"Here? There's nothing in this house. No bread, milk, butter. Nothing. Water and power turned off. No shave, no shower. Where do you live, Swinny? Let's have brekker in your place."

At this inane question, his eyes widened. His lips tightened. He could say, "What the hell is this game you are playing?" or, "I am sick and tired of this fal-lal," or, "How long more are we going to act the parts of cat and mouse?" He said sourly, "I live near Ballybrack. Half an hour away."

While they were hurrying into their clothes, she rudely toed his black hat with. "You might as well throw that out."

He lifted it, dusted it affectionately, punched it, said, "One never knows," and put it on. "Hadn't we better make the bed?" he asked in his disciplined way.

She waved a paw. "She won't be back for a week; I'll drop in someday."

He held her wrist when she was unlocking the street door. "The neighbors?"

She ushered him out. "You are the gasman come to measure the meter."

He took the six-lane Bray Road. She murmured, "I am still sleepy," and leaned back her head and closed her eyes. The morning traffic was floating inward on his right. His outward lane was empty. He would be home in 20 minutes. He pondered the coming confrontation.

Home, she silently prepared breakfast while he showered and shaved, phrasing his ultimatum to his mirror. His cheek received a slim strip of plaster. Back in the kitchen, he found a changeling who spoke silently, as all long-marrieds can, ignoring words, hearing thoughts, interpreting silence, speaking runes. He sat to table and waited for it. Her open palm politely indicated his dish of marmalade. His belly went red with rage. He accepted the challenge. He withheld his marmalade. She looked at him mildly. He yielded the dish and waited. Slowly and seductively, she stroked his marmalade to and fro. Do come a little early. Before the others. My aunt will not be home until Saturday. He was almost certain that the extreme corner of her upper lip stirred. A speck of marmalade clung to her cheek. It made her look agreeably silly. He rubbed brisk palms, grabbed three slices of toast, surveyed his favorite dish of bacon and tomatoes, poured himself coffee, faced a hearty breakfast. But wait! Hold it! Half a sec! This woman? His fists closed like castles on either side of his breakfast. Who is she? My wife? Somebody else's? Nobody's? Is she a bit crazy? Does she mean all this? His memory clicked. Who said "Love is a mood to a man, to a woman life or death"? It was Ella Wheeler Wilcox! Without raising her eyes or ceasing to munch her toast, she slowly pushed the marmalade back to him. He considered the move, and her. The snippet of marmalade kept seductively moving up and down. Pensively, he plastered his toast, began to eat and eat his fill. She watched him impassively.

"She let silence fall between them as she slowly removed her gloves finger tip by finger tip."