The Ninth Wife Read online

  “I’m really sorry,” she says for the second time today. “I spaced out there for a second.” She turns toward him and quickly looks into his eyes, then down at her feet.

  “Start again?”

  “Sure,” she says, feeling wholly unsure about so much at the moment. Tonight there will be seventy people in my apartment, she wants to scream. Most of them are strangers to me, and if that isn’t excruciating enough, thirty-five of them are SINGLE MEN! So sure, attack away!

  This time he chooses a mugger’s hold. He wraps his right arm around her neck from behind, grabs her left wrist, and stretches it back behind her.

  “No!” she yells. She digs her chin into his elbow, play-kicks him in the shin, stomps on his foot, twists her body under and away from his arm, kicks him again in the knee, yells, “No!” more loudly this time, and runs away to safety.

  Chapter Two

  I was just a boy the first time I got married, barely eighteen and just out of school. This was back in Ireland, in a suburb of Dublin. That’s where I grew up, I mean. My mother wanted me to go to university straight away, but she had my sister still in school and I knew that would be tough enough. My parents weren’t rich—far from it. My father was a credit officer, worked long evenings and worked hard, but he was an honest man. My older brother, Eamonn, helped out some, but we couldn’t count on him. He was a rough one and it ’bout near broke my parents’ hearts.

  My mother was traditional. She didn’t care for the new social changes afoot and she for sure didn’t like the violence up north. My father, he believed in their cause, I think he did anyway, but he was a peaceful man and not one to stir the sea. They knew how close me and Eamonn were and they knew, too, if they didn’t intervene I’d get caught up in whatever he was caught up in. He’d come home to take me out and they’d yell all the way to Belfast. “Jaysus,” Eamonn’d yell back, “let the boy live a little!” But they’d have none of it.

  I’m telling you all this by way of explaining the start of my marriage to Maggie McCabe in 1978 and our trip to America. I loved Eamonn, you know, but his lifestyle wasn’t for me. I was kind of happy-go-lucky you might say, playing my fiddle and pulling off the occasional prank. One day my mother saw me hanging about the house and gave me a swift kick out the door. “Go find y’self a job, Rory,” she said, and so I did.

  With the help of a school chum, I got work at a television studio, running errands mostly. It didn’t pay much but it was thrilling, and not just because I was working the set and sharing pints with the camera crew. It’s where I first saw Maggie. She was the daughter of a producer and the same age as me, a little wisp of a thing, but the brightest, prettiest green eyes and straight, thick black hair that would sway just top of her short skirt when she walked away. She could be as crazy and blinding as the sun direct, hamming it up and getting the laughs, or like a little firefly, moving about stealthily behind the scenes, flickering her charm here and there until you wanted to follow her anywhere. I thought I was the luckiest guy alive to be the one she took a shine to. It wasn’t long before we were passing each other love notes and stealing kisses in the dark.

  I knew right away I wanted to marry Maggie. We talked about it, would dream about where we’d live and what we’d do. Her father, though, wasn’t all that happy about her being with a poor, uneducated punk like me. So we started talking about running away together, but then something happened. The television show we were working on was suddenly plucked off the air in mid-run in a storm of controversy, which, much to her father’s chagrin, was all about Maggie.

  The show was called The Spark. It was, I should say, a pretty bad drama all things considered, but it had a way of stirring things up. Maggie appeared in episodes on occasion. She was an aspiring actress and her father let her play bit parts. One week, they were filming a scene with a nude model in an art class who comes on to her teacher. The woman who was supposed to do it got the chicken pox, and no makeup was enough to erase the red marks. So Maggie lobbied to do the scene instead. I say lobbied because there was her father to contend with, of course, and no one wanted to step on the toes of a producer. But then he’d been out of town and hard to reach, they couldn’t find another actress in time, and Maggie was pretty persuasive when she wanted to be. Plus her father was a forward thinker all things considered, an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and free expression.

  So she does the scene—tastefully, I might add—and the episode runs and suddenly the public—everyone!—is up in arms. And I mean everyone, not just the Church and the government wankers. I didn’t realize this until the whole thing blew up, but it was apparently the first nude scene in an Irish television show. Jesus, it caused such an uproar, you should have seen the letters in the papers. Seriously. It was unbelievable. You’d walk into any pub in the city and they’d be talking about it so much the story grew until it was almost farcical. And Maggie’s dad—he was furious. At his daughter, sure, but he’d made peace with that by the time the show aired. No, it was his show, see, and he was livid at the prudish, almost hysterical censorship. And it was that, really. Like it was okay for foreigners to bare skin on screen, but our own kind? Never. And poor Maggie, she took it the hardest. She could hardly leave home without all the taunting. And it was supposed to be her big break.

  So that’s how we got married and why we left the country. Maggie’s father, now having serious money problems because of the canceled season, was all too happy to marry his daughter off to a nice respectable chap and send her to America, the land of free expression. And my parents—happy, too, that I was marrying up and eager to save me from Eamonn—sent me off with their blessing. Her father used his connections to get us visas. We had a small wedding and took off the next day. My father hugged me good-bye and whispered in my ear, “I know y’won’t come back to live here, son, and that’s okay. You’ll have a good life in America and I’ll see you again.”

  And just so you know, my brother made it through his rough years and died of pneumonia six years later. My mother passed on, too. But my father and my sisters, they’re doing all right. My dad and one of my sisters have been out to visit.

  Anyway, I left, with Maggie on my arm. We arrived into Boston and tell the truth, I was scared to death. We went to Boston because it was thick with the Irish and we figured that’s a good place to start, but I’ll never forget standing out in the street in the South End, just off the bus from the airport with our suitcases, dirty snow in the curbs and steam coming up from the roofs of the brick row houses, a fat black woman in rags walking past talking to herself, and I just remember getting this wave of panic and thinking, What have I done? I had never been out of Ireland. The city looked and felt like Dublin in the way one industrial city can feel like another, you know what I mean, gray and cold and always simmering under the surface. Plus Boston wears its history like a fur coat, rich and proud, and while it’s a history I didn’t know a whole lot about, I knew some of it was against the English and that put me at ease. But beyond that, everything new came at me at once and all I could do was retreat. I think what struck me most, and Maggie, too, was the sheer variety of people: the color of their skin, their languages, their foods, their faiths, their mannerisms. You didn’t see a lot of that back home. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in it all, it’s just that it seemed to me, at the time anyway, that everyone kept to their own kind and no one got along all that well. The Italians, the Jews, the blacks, even the Irish had their own neighborhoods, their own hangouts. So I guess I just followed their lead. I got a gig playing the fiddle a few nights at an Irish bar in Quincy Market and the rest of the time got hooked up doing construction with other Irish ex-pats. I spent my off time watching American television in our small studio apartment, or at the bar where I worked, drinking watered-down beer and missing my family.

  But Maggie? She hit the ground running. Everything was exciting, everything was absolutely ahmazin’, Rory, truly ahmazin’. She lived in a constant state of awe, her lovely little mouth and her green eyes wide open, that’s how I picture her. Over here, Rory, she’d say, pulling my arm toward a store window or a street performer or a boys’ fight. We were in love still and had grand moments of passion in this mesmerizing new world, but she couldn’t relate to my periods of melancholy, or didn’t want to, I suppose. And she didn’t want to spend time with other Irish people, neither. She didn’t see the point when there were so many more interesting people to meet. She’d say if she wanted to be with Irish people she wouldn’t have left home.

  Believe me, I saw her point. I did. And I didn’t want to lose her. I felt like she was drifting away from me and I wanted this to work with Maggie, I really did. We were husband and wife and I loved her, but there was just too much working against us, I guess. It wasn’t long before she said she was leaving me. We were sitting in a diner sharing French fries, and I felt like I was going to die of loneliness right then and there. But what she said next by way of an explanation was not what I expected. She held my hand and said, “Rory, I love you. I will always love you. But we have to be practical.” Then she said that she loved America so much she wanted to stay, that she couldn’t see herself going back to Ireland, not after what happened. And for that reason, she needed an immediate divorce from me to marry another man, an American man, who would help her stay and thrive in the country. She said she had found someone, a Jew, a lawyer, who loved her and wanted to marry her and would even bring her to New York and help her start an acting career and that I should know she did not love him the way she loved me, but it was the right course of action. That’s what she said: course of action.

  And off she went. A year and three months to the day. I saw her after that, kept up with her for a while, and then we lost touch. I called her once years ago, and it was a nice conversation. She got married again, but I didn’t hold it against her, especially since I then went off and did the same thing. In a way.

  Chapter Three

  Bess enjoys a steady stream of visitors at work—Ukrainian wood carvers, Ghanaian drummers, Cherokee potters, Khmer court dancers, Cajun guitarists. During the folk festivals she helps organize, they come in and out of her office, these talented makers of masks and beadwork, players of xylophones and dulcimers and accordions. They leave her with gifts that fill her walls and sing from her speakers.

  For six years she’s coordinated national multiethnic events for a large nonprofit. She landed this dream job shortly after she received her Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. It allows her to be part researcher, part community organizer, part curator, but mostly an advocate for the traditional arts, many of which were once across the seas, but because their practitioners were kicked out or escaped or were enslaved by foreigners, or left in search of a better life or maybe just a different life, have traveled to America and—for one reason or another—decided to stay.

  For this, Bess loves America. She doesn’t buy American products just because they’re American. She’s never stepped foot in a McDonald’s. She doesn’t know all the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or the “Star-Spangled Banner” or, if you get right down to it, the Pledge of Allegiance, except for the reference to God, which she wouldn’t say out loud anyway as a matter of principle, preferring the phrase one nation, under Canada. Rather, the America Bess loves is a beautiful quilt of cultures and art forms, sewn together with the threads of rich histories, and a new sense of place, of home. She’s seen a Japanese calligrapher clap to the rhythms of gospel, a mariachi vocalist marvel at Tibetan sand paintings, a Greek bouzouki player fall in love with a Midwestern decoy carver. Things like that stir her heart, giving her some of her greatest pleasures in life.

  And so after karate, she went to her office to pick up a plate for her party, but she knows deep down that was an excuse, one of many she’s used to come back to her office during off hours to feel grounded. She needs this grounding today especially. Thirty-five years seems insignificant in the midst of such ancient traditions; in her office, her own story is dwarfed by the quills and feathers, the trills and echoes of other people’s ancestors who, she imagines, stand regally on the tops of mountains, along riverbanks, in sexy sweaty jook joints at the edge of wide open fields.

  Bess knows too little about her own ancestry to feel connected to a past. Her father—an amateur folksinger and folklorist in his own right—died in a car accident when she was eight. He was a troubled teenager who ran away from a broken home to unlisted numbers and a new identity. Why he chose the name Gray, Bess couldn’t say. Weeks of research turned up little about his original name or past history, other than he was three-quarters Polish, one-quarter German. By the time Bess located her paternal grandparents, one was gone and the other was mean with Alzheimer’s, living in a nursing home in Georgia with white walls and rented furniture.

  Carol, her mother, who was taken by cancer when Bess was in college, was adopted. She was darker in complexion and ethnic-looking, and, despite Bess’s questioning on the facts of her adoption and her biological makeup, Carol repeatedly said she cared not a bit about the people who gave her up and to leave it alone. Ethnic-looking, therefore, was as far as one got in description, hypotheses running the gamut from Mexican to Middle Eastern. The only hope Bess has of attaching herself to a culture is her grandparents on her mother’s side, who adopted Carol and raised her Jewish, encouraging her to do the same with Bess.

  Millie and Irv Steinbloom—the most important people in Bess’s life—are a feisty, shrunken couple married sixty-five years. Though they are intensely private about their marriage and how or why they adopted a baby girl, they love telling stories about their own childhoods and how they met, which Bess captured one time on tape for a high school project. She asked them what their families were like in the Old Country. Their answers astounded her. There were brothers who were bootleggers, cousins who were escape artists, wealthy uncles and aunts who were robbed blind by the system but sure to have hidden away treasures, don’t you worry.

  Bess told it all to her mother. “It’s unbelievable what they’re saying, Mom. Did you know Gram’s father was a spy?”

  “Nonsense,” she had answered. “My grandfather was a night watchman with a couple of daytime mistresses.”

  Bess gave up. If only she was half this, half that, quartered, portioned, and percentaged neatly to give the census takers a run for their money. Instead she was blended into something so vague as to be called, finally, a Caucasian-American female with a history best fictionalized to be interesting. So she turned to the stories and crafts of others.

  Bess gets the most interview assignments at her organization because her boss claims she can open doors with her warm eyes and sweet smile. Maybe, Bess had said, but she’s always thought her subjects open up to her because they can sense her sincerity. Though the world has its share of assholes (Exhibit A: Certain Ex-Boyfriends from Bess Gray’s Past), Bess believes people are inherently good and by sheer endurance through life have interesting, or at the very least different and therefore edifying stories to tell. This is particularly true when they’re from other cultures. And they’re telling the truth.

  So turning to the stories of others has always been easy. Turning to the crafts of others proved more difficult. Her fingers bled learning the mandolin; the mound of clay in her pottery class had a habit of spinning bits of itself off the wheel and into the ponytail of the very angry, very large bearded biker in front of her; and no amount of lighting could help her thread a needle. But she didn’t give up, for a good way to truly understand the traditions of other cultures—and, if she was being honest with herself, to maybe find her own place in the world—is to experience them. Thus another reason that she loves karate. Part of her study of karate, of Tae Kwon Do in particular, is to learn Korean words and the historical basis for the movements, about the villagers who were forbidden to carry actual weapons and thus developed their bodies as weapons to protect against marauders.

  And in turning to the histories of others, she finds herself attracted to certain types of men: foreign ones, or if not foreign then first-generation Americans with ties to their parents’ homelands, their accents, their foods and fairy tales. And if not once removed, then halved and quartered in curious ways, like Sonny the Asian-American Southerner.

  But most of the dozen or so relationships she’s had since college sadly fizzled after a few months. Before she was thirty, she could usually pinpoint the reasons—the South African was an insatiable flirt; the Panamanian had a gorgeous, perfect mother with whom no woman could compete; and the adjunct physics professor from grad school couldn’t handle the distraction from his research, which he assured her would one day win him a Nobel. But in the last five years, it seems fear of commitment was the refrain, as with Sonny. Either that or they simply ended it with an acceptance of blame and an inarticulate apology, and then they were gone. When it came to dating, she used to feel too young and naïve until this morning, when she suddenly felt awfully old.

  The party is a few hours away. Bess zips up her knapsack and locks the door to her office. On her way home she drops off a handful of bilingual books at a nearby health clinic, offering a friendly hello to the security guard.

  “Hot out today,” he says, holding the door for her. “Spring’s finally come ’round.”