Read Online The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon - Free Book Online Page B

with her thick black hair, in a single plait, and the black eyes and the un-Irish olive skin. “My tinker blood,” she’d said, proudly.
    Jocelyn had thought they were her friends. But in the time when she felt she was going mad, because she didn’t know what anything really was, what was really happening, when she couldn’t believe anything anybody said … she felt that even Claire and Moira, if they hadn’t exactly lied, had presented her with some version of untruth.
    One day, she’d run into them coming out of a store that had always puzzled her. The mannequins were nuns, deliberately unsexy, block-shaped rather than curvaceous. She had found the window display sad: garments meant for concealment rather than allure; serviceable, unadorned, unlovely.
    She couldn’t understand what Clare and Moira were doing coming out of that store, their arms full of packages. Her puzzlement must have showed on her face because Moira had said, “Shopping for my trousseau, don’t you know.”
    And Claire had said, “We’ll have a drink to celebrate the dear about to be departed. Only keep it under your hat.”
    Moira was going to be a nun. She was leaving for something called the novitiate in six weeks.
    Jocelyn was appalled. It seemed appalling to her; beautiful, brilliant Moira throwing her life away, hiding herself behind stone walls. She had suggested gently, she hoped, that perhaps it hadn’t been quite fair to Rory, to let him go on thinking there’d be a chance they’d spend their lives together. Moira’s lips had thinned almost to invisibility and she’d said, “There are some things too deep for words, too complicated for words. It wouldn’t have been telling the truth to talk about it, because I didn’t know yet what I felt and I could only decide in the privacy of my own heart. Privacy is not concealment. It is not untruth.”
    But they had never been quite comfortable with each other again. Because what Moira was doing seemed just too strange to her, too difficult for her to understand in someone whom she had believed to be a friend. Now she wondered: was there a kind of jealousy of it? A jealousy that her friend had a secret life, deeper, richer, more glamorous than any life she had access to? It made her friend unknowable to her; as if she were someone who had been born in another century, and the person Jocelyn thought she had been speaking to was only a phantom, a chimera, the product of a dream.
    â€œWe’d better drink up, because this one won’t be getting the water of life too much from now on. We won’t be able even to see her in the first year, while she’s in postulancy. But I’d say in the novitiate they’ll ease up on you.”
    They were using these strange words, “postulancy,” “novitiate,” as if they were ordinary, as if they were saying “knife,” “fork,” “glass,” “spoon.”
    â€œGod knows what you’ll be up to without me to keep an eye on you. I suppose the sky will be the limit with you and the French fella.”
    â€œWell, Jesus, what would you have me do? Join you in the sisterhood of perpetual Irish virginity?”
    Jocelyn was completely confused. They had had a lot to drink. They saw that she was lost, and she could see them sharing a look that meant, “Shall we let her in on it?” And then they decided that they would.
    â€œYou see, my wild American rose, my husband isn’t so much for the below the waist business. It seems I haven’t the right equipment. Not like your Johnny.”
    How long did it take her to understand that she was saying that Diarmid was homosexual?
    â€œI love him with all my heart, you see. My best friend. We’re the greatest of pals.”
    â€œMore than you can say for the President of the Holy Name Society and his lovely wife, Prefect of Sodality.”
    They threw