The Woman of the House

By Richard Murphy

In memory of my grandmother Lucy Mary Ormsby whose home was in the west of Ireland.

1873-1958

On a patrician evening in Ireland

I was born in the guest-room: she delivered me.

May I deliver her from the cold hand

Where now she lies, with a brief elegy?

It was her house where we spent holidays,

With candles to bed, and ghostly stories:

In the lake of her heart we were islands

Where the wild asses galloped in the wind.

Her mind was a vague and log-warmed yarn

Spun between sleep and acts of kindliness:

She fed our feelings as dew feeds the grass

On April nights, and our mornings were green.

And those happy days, when in spite of rain

We’d motor west where the salmon-boats tossed,

She would sketch on the pier among the pots

Waves in a sunset, or the rising moon.

Indian-meal porridge and brown soda-bread,

Boiled eggs and buttermilk, honey from gorse,

Far more than we wanted she always offered

In a heart-surfeit: she ate little herself.

Mistress of mossy acres and unpaid rent,

She crossed the walls on foot to feed the sick:

Though frugal cousins frowned on all she spent

People had faith in her healing talent.

She bandaged the wounds that poverty caused

In the house that famine labourers built,

Gave her hands to cure impossible wrong

In a useless way, and was loved for it.

Hers were the fruits of a family tree:

A china clock, the Church’s calendar,

Gardeners polite, governesses plenty,

And incomes waiting to be married for.

How the feckless fun would flicker her face

Reading our future by cards at the fire,

Rings and elopements, love-letters, old lace,

A signet of jokes to seal our desire.

‘It was sad about Maud, poor Maud!’ she’d sigh

To think of the friend she lured and teased

Till she married the butler. ‘Starved to death,

No service either by padre or priest.’

Cholera raged in the Residency:

‘They kept my uncle alive on port.’

Which saved him to slaughter a few sepoys

And retire to Galway in search of sport.

The pistol that lost an ancestor’s duel,

The hoof of the horse that carried him home

To be stretched on chairs in the drawing room,

Hung by the Rangoon prints and the Crimean medal.

Lever and Lover, Somerville and Ross

Have fed the same worm as Blackstone and Gibbon,

The mildew has spotted Clarissa’s spine

And soiled the Despatches of Wellington.

Beside her bed lay an old Bible that

Her Colonel Rector husband used to read,

And a new Writers’ and Artists’ Year-book

To bring a never-printed girlhood back.

The undeveloped thoughts died in her head,

But from her heart, through the people she loved

Images sprang, and intuitions lived,

More than the mere sense of what she said.

At last, her warmth made ashes of the trees

Ancestors planted, and she was removed

To hospital, to die there, certified.

Her house, but not her kindness, has found heirs.

Compulsory comforts penned her limping soul:

With all she uttered they smiled and agreed.

When she summoned the chauffeur, no one obeyed,

But a chrome hearse was ready for nightfall.

‘Order the car for nine o’clock tonight!

I must get back, get back. They’re expecting me.

I’ll bring the spiced beef and the nuts and fruit.

Come home and I’ll brew you lime-flower tea!

‘The house in flames and nothing is insured!

Send for the doctor, let the horses go.

The dogs are barking again. The cow

Calved in the night? What is that great singed bird?

‘I don’t know who you are, but you’ve kind eyes.

My children are abroad and I’m alone.

They left me in this goal. You all tell lies.

You’re not my people. My people have gone.’

Now she’s spent everything: the golden waste

Is washed away, silent her heart’s hammer.

The children overseas no longer need her,

They are like aftergrass to her harvest.

People she loved were those who worked the land

Whom the land satisfied more than wisdom:

They’ve gone, a tractor ploughs where horses strained,

Sometimes sheep occupy their roofless room.

Through our inheritance all things have come,

The form, the means, all by our family.

The good of being alive was given through them,

We ourselves limit that legacy.

The bards in their beds once beat out ballads

Under leaky thatch to sea-birds,

But she in the long ascendancy of rain

Served biscuits on a tray with ginger wine.

Time can never relax like this again,

She in her phaeton looking for folk-lore,

He writing sermons in the library

Till lunch, then fishing all the afternoon.

On a wet winter evening in Ireland

I let go her hand, and we buried her

In the family earth beside her husband.

Only to think of her, now warms my mind.

Why I love Carl Dennis:

Not the End

Don’t let the quarreling near the end

Convince you the breakup would have been predictable

From the beginning to somebody more insightful.

Remember that any suggestion back then

Of the actual outcome would have been swept aside

By the evidence that the joys you shared

With your beloved would prove enduring:

The joy on workdays of cooking supper together,

The joy on weekends of rambling the woods

With no agenda.

The silences weren’t a sign of holding back,

They were calm and easy, your thoughts

Drifting away in a stream of association

And then returning with a sprig of woodland flowers,

Here, this is for you, each said, and meant it.

And remember the climb you loved, to the ridge,

The wide view of the valley that left you both

Feeling open to whatever the day might offer.

Don’t diminish those moments now by wondering

What you could have done to make them last

Had you been attentive enough to cherish them.

You were happy back then, remember,

And knew you were happy.

What you need now isn’t the work

Of regret but the work of gratitude.

And all it takes to be grateful is to feel grateful.

Go back to the beginning and embrace its bounty,

Beneath the story of cause and consequence

Another story is pointing another way.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote — and, later in the essay, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” recounting “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

D. R. commented that I was a “sick man,” and to “get over” myself.

Thank you ChatGPT for clarifying what this means:

The expression “to get over yourself” is an idiomatic phrase used to convey the idea of someone needing to stop being self-centered, self-important, or excessively focused on their own thoughts, opinions, or concerns.

It suggests that the person should let go of their inflated ego, self-absorption, or excessive self-importance and adopt a more humble, open-minded, or considerate attitude.

When someone tells another person to “get over yourself,” they are often implying that the individual is being too self-centered, arrogant, or egotistical.

It is a way of suggesting that the person should shift their focus away from themselves and consider the perspectives, needs, or feelings of others.

It is an invitation to develop a more balanced or empathetic approach in their interactions and attitudes.

Thank you for the invitation. Perhaps I’ve mislaid the script. Not remembering correctly, or rather remembering all too well but misinterpreting, seeing the situation, the turn of unfortunate events, from an insular, wounded, self-centered point of view. I can doubt the premise of that story, delete that story from the stories I tell myself.

Unwelcome advice from a secret stalker, a jolt from the blue, seriously taken.

What now? Plenty of other stories to fill life’s pages. New chapters to be written.

December 30, 2021

I’m thinking of my final Christmas in San Francisco, Christmas 2019, now a week away from two years ago. December that year had been a month of farewells. Josh and Peggy’s poignant dinner party, my close friends Ray and Michael, Greg and Ross, Zina and Al, there to say goodbye, Ray not well that night, barely hanging on. Christmas was with Adam and Rachel and Rachel’s family, Adam still enduring chemotherapy. 2019 had been a bad year by so many measures: Brenda’s abrupt decision to end our marriage, Adam’s lymphoma, Ray’s cancer. The world had not yet succumbed to a global pandemic—who would have guessed that fate was only a few months away, maybe even percolating as we sat around Josh’s dinner table in Mill Valley. I wore a beaded bracelet that evening that said Love.

Two years.

Ray is gone; he died in April 2020 as the pandemic was just beginning to grip the city. He was so fearful of contracting the virus but died alone in his apartment in still what’s unknown circumstances.  It wasn’t Covid-19.

Adam recovered, graduated from medical school, and began his residency at Highland Hospital. In May 2021 he and Rachel had a baby boy, Oliver Elliott Schwemberger Mortimer. They are prospering.

Josh and Peggy sold their house in Strawberry, organizing their exit while I visited last August, and moved to a rental in Corte Madera.

And I have been in Boston, two years on January 7^th, two years—and counting—of living under the cloud of a virus that still keeps us masked and out of casual circulation.

All of us have moved on. For me, Boston has been a godsend. Close to Sam and family, work blossoming at Hult and Northeastern and for a year at Fletcher, an apartment I like across from an East Boston swimming beach, Walden Pond, a few new friends. My close friends in San Francisco have remained close. Josh, Josh and Peggy, Fran, Mark, Don, Robin, Travis. My hopes of being bi-coastal with frequent cross-country trips spoiled by Covid. I miss swimming in the Bay.

I think about those twelve years in San Francisco, the significance of those years in my life, what they gave me, what I lost. What I found as a result of loss. The unexpected passion of love, for the first—and perhaps only—time. The shattering disappointment of that love gone. The tranquility and eventual sadness of a kind of love regained. And lost again. I realize now I was the lucky one, the one who could leave, to start again. I should be, and am, grateful.

Do I want any of those old relationships again? Not with those same women—three strikes, over so many years, and I’m more than out. The times have changed, too. Not with any women. I don’t want any of that possible drama. I’m willing to be surprised, and willing to be open to something different, too. And willing to be free of any relationship. It’s a good place to stand.

For Christmas this year Travis sent me a book titled Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Apart from moving to Okinawa the key is keeping busy, being focused, having purpose. Some people I meet ask if I’m retired. I can’t imagine that. I love teaching and have come to see teaching as the purpose I’ve always wanted.

This fall in my strategy class, as a final assignment I asked the students to write a five-year strategic plan for themselves, focused on career goals, their commitments beyond prestige and monetary gain, and their definition of career happiness. I was unprepared to be as moved as I was reading what they wrote, these strong yet still fragile young men and women. As I read their plans, their worries, their hopes, their dreams, I teared up. I want them all to realize these plans, to achieve their goals. That I could be, in some small way, a catalyst on their journeys is a purpose I couldn’t have conceived when I started my own career adventure in teaching. Now I do.

Professor Niland, this is off topic, but I feel I need to address this. I want to say thank you. Thank
you for being an amazing professor for my last semester at Hult and for continuing to further my
understanding of marketing. I appreciate you and the care and passion you have for teaching. Thank you so much. Professor. I hope to see you again!

In such a serendipitous, even mysterious way, this is the gift Brenda gave me by ending our marriage. From that rupture a new life has evolved.

Welcome 2022.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. He died a few days after his 90^th birthday in 2018. He didn’t suffer—had rarely been ill in his life. The end came fast from the first phone call I received from his wife Sonya informing me he had been admitted to the hospital and the next day call telling me he was gone. She organized a fast memorial at their church and didn’t invite me. She said, “I didn’t think you would want to come.”

I would have gone. Because I grieved for the love we never shared? Because a son, an only child son, ought to attend his father’s memorial? Because my blood bond with him was stronger than theirs, his adoptive children and grandchildren? To prove a point? To be a reminder to all the people I didn’t know, and wouldn’t have wanted to know, that this man their friend had had another life, a life before Alabama, a life that in no way at all resembled the life he lived there in exile from everything that came before? To stand in isolation of all that?

I didn’t grieve his death. As I hadn’t enjoyed his life. Very late in our lives, a few years before he died, I called him and told him I thought he had never loved me. His response was that he believed I had never loved him. A father and son who perhaps had loved one another but never could accept that love and lived in the doubt of being unloved.

I don’t grieve him today on this death anniversary. I have a portrait of him hanging in my bedroom, a tinted photograph of my father when he was perhaps thirteen. He’s a handsome boy. He was a handsome young man. I see myself in that portrait. I see my sons. The bloodlines are evident.

In so many ways I constructed my life to be different from his. I rejected his masculinity, his love of hunting and shooting, of fishing in any kind of water, his pursuit of Pittsburgh capitalism, his flirtatious charm with women, his ready ability to build anything.  I never wanted to be him. I wanted to be the opposite of the man he was. He wanted me to be a lawyer. I majored in English and went to Ireland to pursue a graduate degree in literature. He disapproved—but paid for it all. He never said no even when the distance grew farther and deeper. I don’t think I ever said thank you.

When he divorced my mother, leaving me with the emotional wreckage of her attempted suicide and subsequent dependency, I hated him. I was nineteen, a sophomore in college. He bought me a vintage Austin-Healey in a wordless attempt to say he was sorry. We didn’t speak for three years. He didn’t attend my college graduation or years later my wedding. My life diverged away down pathways he would have found distasteful at best. His disapproval hung like smog over my life, silent but ever-present.

Life repeats itself even when we don’t want it to. I said I would never divorce yet have twice.

Today I ask myself would I have turned out differently, made other decisions, had his influence not been such a heavy weight on my shoulders? Would I have been less fearful of being myself, not some anti-Dad?

I can’t create a life that didn’t happen. The past needs to be placed securely in the past drawer. I don’t need to be the man I wound up being. I’m still trying to figure that out—at this late but not too-late stage.

And I can’t know the effect my life, the deeds of my life, has had on my own sons. They are each remarkable men, making remarkable choices, leading remarkable lives. Having been a burden in the past, perhaps having left unknown scars I can only imagine, I live today knowing that all I can do is not be foolish, not be a burden, build my own future on right decisions, and express my unconditional love in as dependency-free ways as I can.

I will try to think fondly of my father today. Think of him as the man he was and not the father he wasn’t. May he rest in peace.

Can we ever really know someone else? We can touch; we listen; we see. That smell that only she owns, precisely hers, that instantly takes you to a place that once had meaning. Was that love? That only touching her caused instant tumescence. Was that lust? Was it knowledge? Did I ever know her?

A tear in my heart, healed over, is only the memory inside of three women. They were the only ones.  The scars aren’t visible. Once painful, no more. Nothing lasts. Not this. People break apart.

Touch, I remember touch
Pictures came with touch
A painter in my mind
Tell me what you see

Snapshots of other days. I take them out of the past drawer and look long and deep into the faded technicolor, looking for a sign, something that hinted at what was missing. Late afternoon in the Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada de Toledo, light streaming through the ceiling windows, an organist playing: I couldn’t stop crying, spontaneous tears that flowed and flowed in quiet sadness, provoked by god knows what—the light, the music, the mystery of faith no longer held– maybe the knowledge that so early the seeds of an end were growing and that a great mistake had been made. Another year, the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, closed, arriving too late in the rain. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t speak. I stared out of the taxi windows on the way back to the pensione on the Piazza Navona, the rain streaming, Roman streets a blur, my life a blur. My eyes as wet as the rain. Her anger had subsided; she tried to recover the moment. Silent, a great weight lodged deep inside, leaden.

Why is this on my mind, anyway? I was thinking about the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many. I haven’t been entirely honest with you about that.

A tourist in a dream
A visitor it seems
A half-forgotten song
Where do I belong?

Years later we returned. Redemption? Shelley’s heart.  My heart. That day there was light, yet bittersweet , reconciling what couldn’t be put back together because it had never been of one piece.

Tell me what you see
I need something more

Kiss, suddenly alive
Happiness arrive

Another snapshot: another woman, another time. Walking in the Mission, a man stopped us and said we were a beautiful couple. We were a beautiful couple. Love was the answer, then. The only time in my life. San Francisco was a dream. She was that dream.

Hunger like a storm
How do I begin?

A room within a room
A door behind a door

I remember her touch. I didn’t need more.  Then I needed more. Happiness arrived for the first time, true happiness. Amsterdam in the snow. One time out of all time.

Touch, where do you lead?
I need something more
Tell me what you see
I need something more

Was the more I wanted too much? She thought so, said so.  It’s what she saw and it frightened her. The expectation was too heavy. It was too heavy for me, too, and nearly sunk me. JP said happiness is a small boat on a very rough ocean. The boat made it to safe harbor. That life departed, another began. Short-lived. Unlucky triad.

My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it.

Hold on
If love is the answer you hold

Touch, sweet touch
You’ve given me too much to feel

If love is the answer, what was the question? I was always asking.

Sweet touch
You’ve almost convinced me I’m real
I need something more

This is an important thing, which I have told many people…When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person.

Grace: free to be, free to act.  What would that look like in my life? Would I be a different man? Would I take another close to my heart? Would I choose differently? Try another way?

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.

Thanks to Daft Punk (Touch) and Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

February 9^th. The dreaded 9^th of February. I wonder if she remembers?  I didn’t.

February 9, 2019. Today’s the second-year anniversary of the afternoon Brenda told me she no longer wanted to be married, didn’t love me anymore, wanted to be on her own. Ironically, we had been to Bobby Roper’s memorial service at the South End—ironic because it was Bobby who named the 9^th of February the Dreaded 9^th, allegedly the day when the water in the Bay is the coldest.

We got home from the memorial and Brenda said, “we need to talk.”

Cold water on a cold day.

And it didn’t occur to me today until a friend mentioned the cold water reference. Two years past, one in Boston. The days were long at first, the nights painful. Then the days slipped by unmarked by memory.

Regret? No, not much. The times it was good it was lovely. Then it wasn’t. I don’t think she could help it, the outcome was ordained. I chose not to see the signs, the patterns that ought to have been so evident. Only in hindsight.

Love is cancelled. Never again. And it’s okay.