A Week in Summer: A Short Story (2 page)

“No, not
his
people … mine. Brian’s father came from a village in Russia that no longer exists.”

“Most places are still there in some form,” Chester said reprovingly.

“No, truly, the whole population of the village left for the United States. It’s my roots I’d look for. A long way back, but I’m sure there’s something.”

“So where’s that, then?” Chester was so relieved he might actually sell me a vacation that he was beaming at me.

“Ireland,” I said. “My people were Collinses from Ireland. I don’t know where.”

“Let’s go hunt,” Chester said with the enthusiasm that earned him the position of Chief Vacation Buddy of the branch. He tapped at his computer for a while and looked back at me full of smiles.

“Originally from Limerick,” he said triumphantly. “But they were driven out by the Anglo-Normans and ended up in West Cork. Which area do you want to start in?”

“Where were they in their heyday?” I asked.

“Limerick, I think. They were lords of the Barony of Conello then.”

“Oh, then let’s try Limerick.”

He was good, Chester was. He didn’t want us to spend our whole vacation stuck in a city looking up people who’d been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years. If my husband was ill, if he was difficult to please and in a bit of shock, Chester said this wasn’t the kind of restful holiday we needed. Maybe we should consider the neighboring county, County Clare. There are lovely drives around the Burren, unusual plants to see, castles to look at, porpoises and dolphins in the Atlantic, for the days that we don’t spend looking up my roots. Plus nice comfortable hotels and good food. Build my husband up it would.

At Snappy Seniors’ they wanted us to be happy; it meant repeat business. I felt guilty talking about Brian behind his back. He was such a good man who only wanted the best for everyone, but now he was like an empty shell. No matter how hard Chester and I tried, I feared nothing was going to put a smile on his face or life back into his soul.

The girls came home for two days before heading off to camp.

“You look awfully old, Dad,” said Mel.

“I
am
awfully old, Mel,” said Brian.

“Not so much old as confused,” corrected Margy.

“Oh, I’m confused too, Margy,” Brian agreed.

Our two daughters seemed pleased that they had correctly identified everything.

Brian didn’t talk much about the vacation because he didn’t talk much about anything, really. He just sat there staring ahead.

When the day came, he packed obediently and came along with me to the airport as if it were yet another visit to the supermarket. No enthusiasm. No hope. Nothing but a deal done, a trade agreed, a promise kept.

I had told my customers that I would be away for a week. “A week in summer,” I said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Ireland? That’s nice,” they said without conviction. They would really have preferred me to stay where I was, making passionfruit Pavlovas on their family china for summer parties.

Brian was very quiet on the plane. He pretended to read the airline magazine, but he never turned a page. And then we were in Shannon Airport. It was a bright, sunny day; the fields were small and green; the road signs were in two languages; the rented car was small.

Brian wasn’t listening when they asked us who wanted to drive, so I said I would. I learned about the wrong side of the road and to beware leaving gas stations, and roundabouts. And we set off. The other drivers on the road were, well, interesting,
I suppose you’d call it. They never used turn signals or anything. They just pulled straight out in front of you. But once you got used to that …

I gave Brian the maps and the brochures, but they sat on his lap. In the middle of this lovely early-morning countryside I felt no joy of being on day one of a vacation. I got no feeling of having come home to my roots. I got no indication that this holiday would be the great breakthrough for us. The long, cramped sleepless night on the plane and these narrow windy roads were beginning to take their toll. “Tell me something about Lisdoonvarna,” I said, with the false cheerfulness that I hate in others. I could hear the tinny insecurity in my voice. I must have listened to a thousand of these nonconversations between husband and wife. The kind that ended up either as “Yes dear, yes dear” or “What do you know about that?”

Brian and I were never going to be anything like that. Surely. We had fought to get married. My family thought he was a slow starter with his head in the clouds. His family thought I was a bit too brittle and hard-nosed for them. They didn’t care that I supported him and put the girls through school. They would have liked a poet or a weaver or some damn thing.

But that had never mattered to Brian or me. We rose above it. We had so much going for us for years. But as we drove
through the beautiful County Clare countryside, I thought that all we had going for us might have kept on going—and gone away.

He opened a brochure and read to me obediently, like a child at school, about the Spa Wells and the curative water and the restorative baths. And there was a matchmaking festival in September. “Pity we’ll miss that,” I joked. “We might have found the love of our lives.”

“Nobody would blame you for leaving me, Kathy,” he said, “nobody at all.”

I was busy trying to negotiate the Lycra-covered backsides of some cyclists who were hogging the road. It wasn’t the moment to tell him that I had never loved anyone else and never would.

At the hotel in Lisdoonvarna they were very nice and welcoming. Cups of tea, congratulations on our having managed to drive there, our first day in a new land. “You’ll have a great week,” the receptionist said. “The weather looks up and you were so lucky to get the cancellations.”

Chester hadn’t mentioned any cancellations. I was puzzled. Perhaps somebody hadn’t liked something about the hotel. Brian hadn’t heard any of it, so I hid my frown of worry, and the girl chatted on happily.

“The nicest couple in the world they are, they normally come here every year and stay for the whole week, but this year
they’ve gone to Australia. They were most apologetic, but the chance came up, you see, and what with them being in their nineties they though they should go now in case it might be more difficult later.”

I felt a pang of sharp envy for these people and an unreasoning sense of jealousy. In their
nineties
for heaven’s sake and had gone to the other side of the earth. We were in our fifties and a week in Ireland was nearly killing us. We could never fill their shoes.

“But have a great rest now,” the receptionist urged. “And then you’ll be in fine form for the Fáiltiú.”

The Fáiltiú? What, exactly, was that? She said it was the Irish for “welcome.” That sounded familiar, though why people were going to welcome us was beyond me.

But it wasn’t us, it turned out. It was the start of a summer school of some sort. Everyone went to the Fáiltiú, she said reprovingly.

“We don’t want to be difficult, but what is it, exactly?” I asked. She said she thought it might be a reception with some wine and maybe some finger food. We’d have a great time. I looked at Brian’s gray, empty face and doubted it but thanked her very much.

We went up, unpacked and lay beside each other in the big, cool bed. The unhappiest couple in the Western world, and it was nobody’s fault, really. That was the terrible thing. I sort of
slept. I must have, because I dreamed of Margy and Mel when they were toddlers. They were asking me what was going to happen in life, and I was telling them it would all be great. I woke and found Brian sitting in a chair. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at anything.

It was six p.m., and outside the window we saw people heading down the road in the early-evening sunshine. Old and young, men and women; they walked in twos and threes, on their own or in laughing groups. Heading towards the Spa Wells on a summer’s evening to have a couple glasses of wine and some finger food. “Come on,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”

“Late?” he replied, astounded.

Anything was better than a long night looking at each other with nothing left to say. Soon I was out of the shower and choosing which dress to wear. Some of the men walking down the road wore collars and ties; some had open shirts. Some of the ladies had cardigans; some had smart suits, flowery dresses; some were in jeans. It looked fairly free and easy.

“I don’t know whether we should go to this thing, Kathy. We haven’t been invited.”

“Oh, come on, Brian,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the lady at the desk? Everyone is invited.”

“We may have to pay,” he said, sounding anxious.

“So we pay,” I told him.

We discovered that it was going to cost €120 each to sign up for the summer school’s week of activities. A bit expensive for a welcome reception, I thought, but then I looked at the brochure. There were all kinds of things: lectures, poetry readings, bus trips, dancing lessons, seminars and debates. And the main thing was, it would be a distraction. We wouldn’t be left on our own, facing each other with nothing left to say, forced to admit the emptiness of our lives.

It wasn’t men in tuxedos and women in gowns leaning on a ship’s railing, but a lot of these people had fairly playful eyes. You got a sense that there might be a fair amount of flirting in this lot, if you know what I mean. If not now, then in the past. They had all been coming here for years and years, apparently, to dance in squares and roam the countryside. They liked it so much they booked in again every year. It was all about Brian Merriman, some poet dead for hundreds of years, but people brought him back to life every summer.

Everyone was very friendly. They told us all sorts of things, like where to go for a swim, where to get cheap lobster, which translation of his poem
Cúirt an Mheán Oíche
to read. The poem wasn’t even in English, for heaven’s sake, but there seemed to be a stack of translations of
The Midnight Court
, and everyone recommended a different one. People were full of advice about everything. They said we should drive out and see the
Burren—but not to pick the flowers—or maybe go to Doolin and get a boat to the Aran Islands, or go to places we had never heard of. Ballyvaughan, Ennistymon, Lahinch, Corofin: they tripped off the tongue. There were people speaking in the Irish language, which they told us we’d know in no time after a few lessons in the mornings.

So we listened to the opening of the school and to a lecture, and then we discovered that the theme of this year’s gathering was marriage. They could have had something less brutally relevant, I thought, but I kept a bright smile, as if I hadn’t a worry in the world about marriage and how it seemed to be panning out in our lives.

And then there was dancing. Mainly we couldn’t do it at all, because there were complicated things much more intricate than our square dancing at home. Caledonian sets, Ballyvourney sets, all way, way beyond us. But apparently we could learn all that, too, in special dancing lessons every day. By the end of the week we would be whirling with the best. There
were
a few waltzes, so eventually Brian and I took to the floor like everyone else. Everyone in the hall sang the words. “My mother died last springtime, when Irish fields were green. The neighbors said her funeral was the finest ever seen.” Brian listened in amazement. “Some topic for everyone to dance to,” he said. But at least he was smiling, and I hadn’t seen that for a while.

And so it went on for the week. We went to poetry readings and lectures. We learned about the construction of the Irish language at one seminar and about the courts of Munster poetry at another. We tried to keep up with horrifically fit dancing instructors, and soon we had our own eight and were swinging each other around in great style. We had conversations way into the night with poets, politicians and polka dancers.

If they asked us what we did, which was rarely, I told them I baked for people in their own dishes; Brian said he wrote poetry and had been doing some teaching on the side. Everyone seemed to think this was a completely reasonable thing to do. Nobody asked if there was money in it, or what he had published recently, or what his real job was, or what his ten-year plan was. I may have been imagining it, but, as the days went on, I thought that there were fewer lines etched on his face and that his eyes were brighter.

People kept assuring us that they were pacing themselves. They urged us to pace ourselves, too. This, I think, had to do with not staying up until six a.m. singing, which was a danger. And not starting to drink after the dancing class and forgetting to stop all day, which was another danger. And we heard amazing amounts of gossip. Things that happened some years back, when certain people had more energy than they currently did or had not been as wise as they were now.

One summer a man had lost his false teeth and asked rather sheepishly at reception if any had been handed in. He was discreetly given a set in an envelope. When they didn’t fit, he was told that all the other sets in the lost-and-found had been claimed. Once upon a time another man had made so many perambulations to the rooms of different ladies that he never knew which was his own room, and when he went to pay his bill there was nothing to pay, because the hotel had assumed he was a no-show and had relet it.

There was a marvellous woman who told us that it usually took her until November to recover from her indiscretions every third week of August. Another said regretfully that everyone was very old and staid and settled now, and that it was a pity we hadn’t met them in their heyday. They looked very much in their heyday to us. A great roaming band of people, old and young, serious drinkers and teetotalers, fit as fiddles or bent over canes, long retired or in their first jobs. Some went to every lecture, took notes and asked questions. Others adjourned to bars, golf courses, lunches in craft shops; or to have healing baths in the Centre, where ropes suspended from the ceiling had helped haul thousands out of the mineral salts over the years.

They talked about any number of subjects: the nature of evil, the joys and problems of being part of a united Europe, the wisdom or lack of it in having a celibate clergy. And because of the theme we discussed marriage at length: whether it
was possible to have an equal partnership, what equal meant, if a marriage could last forever and whether it should last forever. My head was in a whirl.