At the funeral for his brother, Great-Uncle Seamus became the only gay member of the family. This surprised Gail, the eldest of the aunts, because there were so many of them, and she supposed that it might be obvious. She wasn’t to know that in the coming years, one granddaughter and one uncle would follow suit, and that only one would end happily. He had always been known affectionately as an eccentric, who dyed his white hair a luminous shade of orange, and wore three piece suits that smelled of Patchouli and Stout. His nephew, Robert, would tell his wife that he had always known, and didn’t think he was homophobic at all to say that they all looked the same, more or less. The funeral had been short, and with quiet judgement they had come together to eat, exercising their keen ability to avoid eye contact and compete in their grief.
After dinner, Seamus, with much fragility, spoke about his wife. Bridget was a small woman with the constitution of an ox, and bore the labour of her husband’s sins the way a secretary covers for her boss. Seamus had finally been honest two years into their marriage, and rather than attempt to somehow correct him, she let him live his life under the cover of immense and impenetrable darkness. Throughout their long marriage she had left her love for him like a table ornament, regularly refreshed and eternal, without judgement and with quiet hope for a return. She had become heavy with the guilt of her role, and what that meant for someone like him. Her status as wife had always been presented as a requirement, not a choice, a fact that she had become coldly ashamed of.
To punish herself for the secret he had been forced to hide within her, she forbid herself from love while he was discovering the meaning of his. Bridget let herself ache at the smell of his coat at the rack – heavy with cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, among other, vaguely familiar smells. She made herself presentable for the neighbours, and attended church regularly, where she gossiped about Seamus with the other wives. Her mythology had become intricate, not really lies but invention, the life she was secretly having when he was away – a man-shaped shadow at the kitchen table. She had been taught to love a certain way, and she would not reveal to herself the life that she would lead without it.
The rest of the family had learned how upon hearing about the death of her brother-in-law, the closest immediate family, she had told Seamus that she was leaving him. Seamus was not so cold as not to cry, for Bridget was his wife, and once her stable, unconditional love was gone, he would be alone. Seamus told his more tolerant grandchildren the stories of his other companions, the Sailors in Dublin and the perfumed boys of the Quartier Pigalle, but they never seemed real. The nature of a secret is that it never materialises fully, and therefore Bridget was all he could hold on to in the winter of his life. Bridget died that year, and he mourned for her love in the arms of the man who had become her replacement. His nephew Robert would tell his girlfriend that this was typical of his sort, and that some people are just greedy.
