“The Choc-Ice Woman,” by Mary Costello

Frances had never been in a hearse before. Mr. O’Shea, the undertaker, pulled out into traffic and set off down North Circular Road, past the women’s wing of Mountjoy Prison and the library at Eglinton Terrace, where she had been a librarian for twelve years before her retirement. She was grateful for the hum of the engine, the city outside. She kept herself apart, mentally, from Mr. O’Shea. She forgot, briefly, about the coffin with the remains of her brother Denis behind her until the hearse braked going downhill and she had a vision of it crashing through the glass partition and slamming into them.

“Are you all right there?” Mr. O’Shea asked at the traffic light.

“I am, thanks,” she replied.

“Is it warm enough? Would you like me to turn up the heat?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry about this,” she added. “I’m sure you’d much prefer to be on your own for the journey.”

There had been a moment of confusion outside the hospital morgue when she announced her intention to travel in the hearse. The coffin had already been loaded and the paperwork completed when she and Frank arrived.

“We can head off so, if ye’re ready?” Mr. O’Shea had said.

“I’ll go in the hearse with you,” she’d said suddenly. It had come out of nowhere.

Mr. O’Shea had looked at her and then at Frank, a little alarmed. Without another word, she’d gone around to the passenger side and got in.

They were crossing the Liffey at Islandbridge now.

“I know it’s usually a man from the family that travels in the hearse,” she continued. “Or at least that used to be the tradition. But I don’t drive, you see, so if Frank went with you there’d be no one to drive the car home.”

“That’s no problem at all,” Mr. O’Shea said. “And, as for traditions, aren’t they changing all the time?”

He checked the rearview mirror. “Frank is close enough behind us, anyway. We’ll probably get separated along the way but what harm—aren’t we all going to the same place?”

They were passing Inchicore. An old woman, pulling a wheelie shopper, stopped at a letter box. “We should be in Kerry by five o’clock, all going well,” Mr. O’Shea said.

The woman was trying to push a brown package into the letter box, her white hair tossing wildly in the wind.

“Is that all right?” Mr. O’Shea asked.

“Yes, yes.”

The more he talked, the harder it would be to keep herself separate.

“The woman who does the embalming,” he said, a little tentatively, “will be coming in at half past six. How would ye be fixed . . . would ye be able to get his clothes in to us then? If I’m not there myself, Anne, my wife, will take them in.”

Denis’s suit had hung in his wardrobe for decades. He had last worn it to the funerals of their parents. He had not attended their brother Patrick’s funeral.

“That’s no problem. Frank will drop them in.”

A strange occupation for a woman, embalming, she thought. She wondered if Mr. O’Shea’s wife assisted. The two women packing cotton wool into orifices.

“Are all corpses embalmed? Is it absolutely necessary?” she asked.

“Well . . . I suppose it’s not absolutely necessary,” Mr. O’Shea said. “Some cultures don’t do it, but then they tend to bury their dead very quickly. It’s the done thing nowadays. It makes things a lot easier for the family—it removes a lot of the difficulties, the . . . unpleasantness. It’s best for the deceased, too.”

Stitching up his tongue? I don’t think so, Frances wanted to say.

“Will I send in his socks and . . . everything?” she asked.

“Yes, everything . . . except the shoes. We don’t usually put shoes on.”

For two weeks she had been at Denis’s bedside in the Mater hospital, leaving only after 10 p.m. to return to her B. and B. on Drumcondra Road. In the past two days he had not spoken or opened his eyes, and his breathing had grown shallower and shallower. She’d had an inkling last night, and felt that she should stay longer, but the nurse had assured her that he could last for several more days. Before she reached the B. and B., her phone rang. When she got back to the hospital, it was over and he had been moved to a private room with tea lights, a crucifix, and a leaflet for bereaved relatives placed on a side table. They had stretched a flesh-colored band, like an elastic stocking, around his head to keep his mouth closed. She kissed the top of his head and touched his cold hands, his nose, expecting to feel something. She thought of him as no longer alive but not yet dead. She whispered his name, but in the silence of the room it sounded contrived. She tried to summon the past. Denis and Patrick were twelve years older than Frances. Denis had been a fleeting presence in her early childhood. Home from Dublin one Christmas when she was eight or nine, he brought her a red plastic tea set, six Jaffa oranges wrapped individually in tissue paper, and a box of cornflakes, because cornflakes were a rare treat then. Not long afterward, he’d come home for good, and seldom left his room.

Already he was changing before her eyes. His face was collapsing inward, leaving his nose looking pointed, like a bird’s beak. The body was dissolving, every cell disintegrating. His soul had probably left his body by now, she thought. Where had she been—running down Drumcondra Road or along Dorset Street—when that happened, when his blood ebbed to a halt and his consciousness slowly shut down? It is easier to track the body’s exit, she thought, than the exit of the mind. There is no knowing what the mind suffers in the final hours and minutes. In the moments before her mother took her last breath, she opened her eyes wide with a petrified look, as if she were seeing something terrible, but twenty-four hours later her face was serene, as if all the pain of existence had left her.

A nurse arrived to say they would soon need to take Denis to the morgue. Frances went down to the foyer and called Frank. “Denis is gone,” she said. She did not wait for his response. “Will you ring O’Shea to come up and bring him home tomorrow.”

Frank was silent for a few moments. “I’m sorry, Frances.”

“And ring the priest as well.”

“Will I come up tonight?” he asked.

“No, wait till the morning.”

Every morning for years she had walked down Drumcondra Road—past the open gates of St. Patrick’s College, where Denis had trained as a teacher decades before—on her way to work at the library in Phibsborough. The walk took forty-five minutes. She arrived an hour before opening time and put out the newspapers and the latest magazines, and logged returns and worked at her computer, checking orders and book-club requests. She had worked alongside first one, then another assistant librarian, but never developed a close friendship with either. At lunchtime during the summer months, she sat on the grass in the little park behind the library and read her book and ate her sandwich. The afternoons, when the schoolchildren arrived, were busiest in the library. She did not mind the older, studious ones, but the truth was she barely tolerated children in her library. She abhorred the way libraries had changed, the way some of the bigger city libraries resembled community centers or crèches, such was the level of noise and activity. Since when can toddlers read? she wanted to know. After work, she locked up and took the 16A bus home.

One day four years ago, on the eve of Frances’s sixtieth birthday, Patrick had come in from the fields, sat at the kitchen table, and slumped over. Denis had gone to the hall, picked up the phone, and called Frances at the library. “I think Patrick is gone,” he said.

For a while after Patrick’s death, a neighbor had checked on Denis every day, but he could not be left alone, and so, after thirty-nine years’ service with Dublin City Libraries, Frances retired from her job and moved back home to Kerry. Within months, Frank, too, retired and they sold the house in Whitehall and the move became permanent. Still reeling from the loss of Patrick, she’d leased out the farm to a neighbor and tried to restore the routine Denis had always known. She knew the shape of his days, his preference for plain food, his need for solitude, and these she could provide. But she could not replace Patrick, and though Denis never mentioned him, Frances was certain that he was pining for his twin brother’s presence in the house. Frank drove Denis to the library in town every fortnight and did his best to help. Frances never asked what, if anything, they talked about on these journeys.

They were on the motorway through Kildare, then Laois. Farmhouses appeared on hills, sheds and outbuildings nestled in behind them, the fields bare of livestock now in the dead of winter. Denis was behind her in the coffin, his head inches from hers. She suspected that this was a workhorse coffin used only for transport purposes. Denis might be in a body bag, dressed in his stained pajamas, zipped up by a stranger from his bony white feet to the top of his head. The odors of a decomposing body would still leak out, leaving a scent in the coffin for the next incumbent. She remembered reading that dogs often go crazy when they’re muzzled at the vet’s surgery—the scents of other dogs thrust on their faces is overwhelming, sending them into a frenzy of fear and panic.

Mr. O’Shea’s mobile phone, propped on the dashboard, vibrated, startling her. He tapped it quickly. “Sorry about that,” he said.

A few moments later, it vibrated again, and again he apologized. “That’s my daughter. Young people . . . it’s always urgent with them, isn’t it?” He switched the phone off.

“How old is your daughter?” Frances asked.

“Sally. She’s nineteen. She’s actually on her way home now for the weekend. She’s in college in Dublin.”

It struck her that Mr. O’Shea might have planned to take his daughter home in the hearse, that it might be a regular arrangement whenever he was tasked with bringing the dead of Castleisland home from Dublin. With a contingency in place: If you can’t reach me, it means I have a family member with me, so take the train.

Mr. O’Shea adjusted the rearview mirror, then checked his wing mirror. “I think we’ve lost Frank,” he said.

Not far out of the city, before hitting the motorway, Frank would have pulled over at a service station, filled up with fuel, bought a newspaper, tea, a breakfast roll, and a bar of chocolate. On a day like this, he couldn’t very well linger on the forecourt. Service stations—along with shopping centers and suburban housing estates—were, Frances used to imagine, one of his pickup spots for women. She’d pictured him parking off to the side, near the service area, with his tea and breakfast roll, the racing page open on the steering wheel, keeping an eye out for a lone woman emerging from the shop, then tracking her, until she—game, like him, for a motorway fling—met his eye. There might be nothing said, just a look. The woman would pull over to check her tires, and Frank would, naturally, offer his help. Or he might simply tail the woman out of the service station, drive steadily in the lane alongside her until she turned her head and a look was exchanged. They were all the same, these women, it didn’t matter where he found them; they were all like Frank.

Frank had started out as her lodger more than thirty years ago. Soon after she bought the house off Collins Avenue, she’d advertised the two spare bedrooms to rent, to help with the mortgage. When he walked through the door—tall, broad, handsome, with dark curly hair—and she heard his country accent and saw his shy, polite manner, her heart flipped. And then there was the coincidence of his name. He worked with the gas board installing, servicing, and repairing gas boilers. A young teacher from Clare took the other room. Frances split the bills three ways, set the house rules, and stuck a cleaning rota on the fridge. Frank had a light footprint. He parked his van out on the road, and was gone every morning before eight. He was clean and tidy and quiet; he hoovered his room every Saturday, was discreet with his laundry, paid his rent on time, and was never drunk. He avoided conversation and eye contact, and in those rare times when he did speak Frances detected an endearing uncertainty in him. After a year, the young teacher moved out and Frank and Frances fell to cooking together in the evenings. She began to look forward to their meals, and their time alone. She told him about Kerry, her twin brothers, her widowed mother. For months Frank offered nothing, but, little by little, over the winter evenings, she learned the outline of his life. He had been placed in an orphanage very early on and, at the age of six, was fostered out to a farmer and his wife in County Kilkenny. At fifteen he started an apprenticeship with a local plumber, and he came to Dublin at seventeen. He knew nothing about his birth mother, other than the name on his birth certificate, and when Frances gently inquired if he was not curious about her or his father he shook his head. She had the impression of a man who did not want to delve into the past, a man who easily forgave and forgot the failings of others. He voiced no strong opinions, held no political allegiance, and was visibly uncomfortable with gossip. One Saturday evening after they had washed up the dishes, he folded the tea towel and stood behind a chair and asked her if she’d like to go down to the Viscount for a drink.

She had not expected to love a man so completely different from her father and her brothers, a man without family: she for whom family was foremost in her life; a man without any obvious origins, as if he had simply materialized on the earth when he crossed her threshold. She used to imagine scenes from his childhood, scenes she had watched in films: eager, obedient children in orphanages lined up for visitors; watching as the pretty ones were chosen and driven away to new lives with the childless. Whenever Frances tried to nudge Frank into investigating his origins, he shook his head. He said that, as a young man going to dances, whenever he’d told a girl about his background the girl had wanted nothing more to do with him. There were times when this absence of a past had bothered Frances, but then she would remember the little boy he once was, and she would be ambushed by a wave of love that flowed from her spine down into her arms and her hands, weakening her.

She was thirty-four and Frank thirty-two when they married. She knew she was no beauty—tall, thin, and angular, with little in the way of hips or bosom, but neither this nor the plainness of her dress (she favored dark trousers, cream or white blouses, navy or wine cardigans) had seemed to matter to Frank. She was convinced that Frank’s lineage must be notable; how else but genetics to explain his good looks, his manners, his work ethic—and had he not made something of himself despite his beginnings? And even when she was troubled by little doubts or signs of his deprivation she would remember an incident from their honeymoon. They were on a street in Edinburgh when Frank went to buy a lottery ticket. “Get me a Bounty bar, if they have them,” she said. When he came out of the shop and handed her the Bounty bar he said, “I don’t know how you eat those things. I hate coconut.” Such a strong word for Frank to use. They sat in a park and he told her that Kelly, the farmer who had fostered him as a boy, had always had sweets, which he never shared with Frank. One day Frank saw a sweet—an Emerald—on the floor of the tractor. He crept out that night and retrieved the sweet and hid behind the cowshed and sucked it very slowly, to make it last.

That first year was the heyday of their marriage. She added his name to the deeds of the house. Together they painted the house, built raised beds in the back garden. That September they took a holiday in Greece, because Frances had always wanted to visit the oracle at Delphi. Frank rarely expressed needs or wants or wishes of his own, a trait, Frances assumed, that had developed early in his life. They bought a car and went regularly to Kerry. Her mother liked Frank and jokingly conspired against Frances, complaining about her dress sense or her regimental life style. “Why are you covering yourself up?” her mother would ask. “And you so slim you can wear anything!” Then she’d turn to Frank: “I have only the one daughter, Frank, and she dresses like a nun. Maybe you can get her to change.”

Frances expected they would have children quickly and easily. After two years, tests revealed blocked Fallopian tubes, and though she couldn’t remember having had symptoms, the condition was attributed to suspected peritonitis as a result of an appendix operation when she was twenty-one. She underwent surgery to unblock the tubes and a year later suffered an ectopic pregnancy, followed in subsequent years by two miscarriages, the latter of which occurred in the sixth month. That was many years ago now, and though Frank had shown little emotion at the time, she’d believed then that his outer display of stoicism was his way of supporting her, and that, inside, he was as bereft as she was.

Now she is no longer sure that Frank experiences grief—or any emotion, for that matter—in the manner that she and, she assumes, others experience it. Still, even now and after everything that has happened, she has to admit that, with the exception of Denis, she has never known anyone as peaceable as Frank. In all their years together, he had never raised his voice or spoken harshly to her or displayed the least flicker of irritation. She had always considered herself a kind person, if a little sharp at times, but there were moments when Frank’s passivity tested the limits of her patience. He avoided looking at her during an argument and said almost nothing. She’d goad him, accuse him of stubbornness, of stonewalling her, until he’d shake his head and put a hand out to her and plead with her not to be cross. “This isn’t normal,” she’d cry. “Why don’t you ever get angry? Where do you put your anger?” One evening, three or four years into the marriage, Frank told her of an incident at work where his boss had been rude, and dismissive of him.

“Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?” she demanded. “Why do you always let people walk all over you? Don’t just sit there like some . . . dumb animal.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry if I’m not the man you want me to be,” he said.

He had never spoken like this. She waited, her heart pounding with fear.

“I saw what anger did in the Kellys’ house. Tom Kelly was a brute. And worse when he got into a rage.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing to be gained from anger, Frances.”

“What happened? Was he a brute to you?”

“He was a brute to everyone and everything. The wife, the dog, me. I slept and ate in the back kitchen—I had a little bed that I folded away every morning. I got the leftover scraps—myself and the dog got the same food. She’d give me nice things when he was gone to the mart or somewhere. Homemade bread and jam, a bit of meat. He wouldn’t allow the dog inside, but I used to sneak him into the back kitchen at night and he’d lie beside me. Captain. The loveliest dog you ever saw. And the brute shot him.”

“Jesus, Frank . . . Why? Why did he shoot him?”

“Because Captain knocked over a bucket of milk, that’s why. That’s what anger does.”

Mr. O’Shea cleared his throat. His pale hands were resting on the steering wheel. Why had it surprised her that he was married, and had children? She doubted whether he had a strong libido. She can tell men like that now; they give off the whiff. She loathes people with big appetites—overeaters and drinkers, loud, gluttonous, noisy people with no self-control and no desire to refine themselves. Bodies swollen, pulsating with lust. Rutting like animals. That is the kind of husband she has. “Base” was the word that occurred to her years ago when his carry on first came to light. Base appetites and instincts. He had kept that side of himself hidden from her, but that is who he is. God knows who he has slept with, whose genitals he has slithered out of.

“I don’t think I ever met Denis,” Mr. O’Shea said. “Was he long sick?”

“No, just a few months. He didn’t go out much. He was always very delicate. The cancer was well advanced when they found it.”

“He went fast, Lord have mercy on him.”

She liked that he had used Denis’s name.

“Very sad, and he a young man,” he continued.

“He was seventy-six.”

Mr. O’Shea shot her a look. “Seventy-six?”

She nodded. “Seventy-seven next month. He was Patrick’s twin.”

Teaching had not suited Denis. Frances was ten when he came back from Dublin for good. He spent his days in his bedroom after that, resting and reading, her mother bringing his meals and his tablets, his laundered clothes, a tonic to build him up. When Frances helped her mother change the bed linen, she read the titles on his bookshelves. “The Complete Works of Shakespeare,” “Paradise Lost,” “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “The Collected Poems of John Donne.” Whenever she met Denis on the landing, he smiled and touched her head lightly, as a priest might do. No demands were made of him—it was Patrick who worked the farm with their father. Once a fortnight Patrick drove Denis to the library in Castleisland, where he spent an hour or more selecting books from the shelves.

In Frances’s teen-age years, Denis began to leave novels at her bedroom door—“Moby-Dick,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Silas Marner.” She was an adult before she understood that he’d had some kind of breakdown. She wondered if a girl had broken his heart. Once, about ten years ago, she came upon him sitting on a tree stump looking out over the fields with his back to her. He was very still. A wood pigeon landed on the stone wall to his left, and he turned his head slightly to watch it, and in those moments, in the neutral way he observed the pigeon, she had a sudden realization of his nature: his absolute surrender and acceptance of things as they were. It was the way he observed everything—devoid of need or memory or rapture.

Frances had never questioned her mother about Denis’s breakdown. In recent years she had considered various possibilities: that he might have been gay, or that something terrible had been visited upon him, or even, on days when all kinds of fears populated her mind, that he had visited something terrible on someone else—a child, for instance.

It is Denis she credits with giving her a love of books and a glimpse of the life of the mind. In her first posting, Frances had been taken under the wing of the senior librarian and, in less than two years, learned how to read with an open mind, how to discern good writing from bad and trust her own artistic sensibility. The senior librarian delivered to Frances a literary education that rivalled those offered by most universities, so that by the time she left that post Frances could make a good fist of describing what symbolist poetry was or explaining why James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner mattered.

She read the biographies, too, and would come upon little tidbits that delighted her, like the fact that Joyce had kept two parakeets in his Paris flat, or that Robert Musil had once been a librarian. Over the decades, she continued to watch and learn and discern from the book lovers and aesthetes who frequented her libraries—middle-aged, bluestocking ladies, rakish young men, and intense young women—and took note of the books they read and the journals they requested. One winter, a Dutch student began to appear in her library on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. He was thin and pale, with fair to reddish hair and high cheekbones. He often requested books that she had to call in from other libraries—titles by Robert Walser or Joseph Roth. She saw him, one evening, hunched against the wind, on the street in Phibsborough. When he returned the books, she took them home, one by one, and read them. Of all these books, Robert Musil’s stories made the greatest impression on her, tales of young urban men—students and engineers and geologists—heading out of the city on work assignments into bleak valleys where they seduced peasant girls. The stories were pervaded with sickness and death and what the young men thought was love. They weighed on Frances and threw a pall over her, but, perhaps because she had been a country girl herself, she kept being drawn back to them. The Dutch student had disappeared by spring, but she associated these stories with him. In her mind, now, she somehow associates them with Frank, with the grim, miserable landscape of his childhood. And the sex: there was always sex in Musil’s stories; the sexual act had an almost religious fervor, and the men experienced something like a mystical union with the girls, but had little regard or pity for the girls’ feelings or their futures. The poor girls, Frances thought, believing they were truly favored by the men, hoping for love.

They were coming off the motorway. She looked at Mr. O’Shea.

“We’ll have to stop,” he said, a little agitated. “I’m afraid I might have collected the wrong remains at the morgue. I don’t know for certain . . . But when you said your brother was seventy-six I was taken aback. It’s a younger man I collected, I’m sure of that. I’m very sorry about this, but I’ll have to open the coffin and check. Do you want to call Frank and he can link up with us, and he can check with me?”

She shook her head as the words began to register. “No, it’s all right. I can do it.”

“This is Roscrea we’re coming into,” he said. “I know the church here. It’s surrounded by trees, so it’ll be more private.”

The church tower came into view and Mr. O’Shea turned in to a churchyard bordered by cypress and yew trees. He came to a halt at the back of the stone church.

“If you can give me ten—or maybe fifteen—minutes.”

She put on a woollen hat and scarf and walked along the street and into a square with a stone fountain. She sat on a bench. They might have ferried a stranger’s corpse all this way, she thought. A young woman in a puffer coat came and sat on a nearby bench, then lit a cigarette and became engrossed in her phone. The smell of the cigarette gave Frances a sudden longing. She had smoked in her youth—never more than ten a day—and quit when she turned thirty. She started smoking the odd cigarette again after the discovery about Frank, and then quit again four years ago after moving to Kerry. She had hoped that the move would herald a new start for them, that it would remove Frank from temptation. But after six months Frank was back on the road again, working part time with the local heating contractor.

It was on the 16A bus one summer evening as it crawled through Drumcondra that she discovered Frank’s betrayal. A Thursday evening, just before the June bank-holiday weekend. From her seat, she looked across the road at Thunders Bakery, remembering that she had ordered a cake for collection the following afternoon to take to Kerry. As she shifted her gaze, her eyes registered a Bord Gáis van a little ahead in the lane alongside the bus. It was the yellow sticker on the back door—a smiley character giving the thumbs-up sign—that caught her attention. That’s Frank, she thought, happily, and leaned forward, ready to wave when the bus drew level. And in the space of about five seconds and in a distance of about five yards her whole self began to slide sideways. A bare forearm rested on the passenger window. In the passenger seat sat a woman, her profile and short dark hair visible to Frances from her higher perch. The woman was talking, then laughing. She raised a choc ice to her mouth and licked it. Then she stretched out her arm and Frank’s face came into view, and then Frank’s tongue, licking the woman’s choc ice.

Later, when he came in, she never pretended a thing. He went upstairs and showered as usual and at the dinner she asked, as she often did, “Where are ye working these days?”

He chewed and swallowed before answering. “We’re out in Portmarnock since Monday, finishing up that housing estate.”

“Oh. I thought I saw your van in Dorset Street on my way home. That mustn’t have been you, so,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, that wasn’t me,” he said. “I dropped Tony over to Swords on the way home.”

So much of the past now made sense. It was not his first time. There had been patterns: callers who hung up when she answered, flurries of activity involving late-evening jobs, sudden changes to his scheduled hours, weekend jobs to which he went off bright-eyed and happy, followed by months when there was no evening work, no weekend jobs, just evenings in, early nights, and evasiveness. How blind she had been. She took a sip of water. Liar, she thought, glaring at him and, for a second, there was panic in his eyes.

When bedtime came, she said, “You can sleep in the front room from now on,” and there was no argument, no opposition, no discussion, ever.

That summer, she would exchange looks with dark-haired women on the bus or walking slowly past her house or loitering near the library, any of whom might have been the choc-ice woman, coming to have a look at Frances. At lunchtime she sat under a tree in the little park behind the library, and felt the world shrink to nothing but the terrible quivering of the birch leaves above her. She wrote letters to Frank that she never gave him. She thought herself a fool, a mug, a female cuckold; she thought the words “unfaithful” and “infidelity”—men’s words—too tame, too benign. Call it what it is: fornication. She saw through walls into suburban houses, into the back of his van. She saw him arranging cushions and rugs, talking dirty, laughing, feasting on their bodies, cleaning up. The women would be coarse, sexually daring—devious, even—and Frank would let that side of himself out. He would show them photographs, and they would ridicule her. Yes, nunnish, they’d agree, a dry old stick, a prude. His was a sexless marriage, he’d tell them, and, to top it all, she was barren. The mortification almost annihilated her. In her worst hours, she feared AIDS. Or a child. A child who would one day turn up on her doorstep to claim his inheritance. A child who would be legally entitled to part of her home. She lay awake at night. What if Frank fell in love with one of these women? What if he left her? What if they fell in love? What if they wanted to be rid of her? There was a murder case in the news at the time—a doctor and his lover were on trial for killing the woman’s husband. Every night when the item came on the nine-o’clock news, Frances could hardly breathe.

There were days when she felt that she was walking through veils of fog, that reality was thin and provisional and at the same time terribly real and material and fated. She sensed danger everywhere. She grew obsessive about hygiene, took copious showers and brutally scrubbed her body. She lost her appetite. Certain foods—their textures and odors—repelled her. She saw sexual similes and correlations everywhere—she shunned milk first, and then yogurt, because they reminded her of semen. She grew thin and anxious and watchful, afraid that somehow her shame might be discernible. Late one night, in the middle of a film, the lead actress turned to Frances and addressed her directly through the TV screen. You must wash your tongue every night, she said.

The next day she would regain her equilibrium and tell herself that she had overreacted, that she had exaggerated what she saw from the bus that evening, that there must be other explanations for the choc-ice woman. Because surely, surely, the housewives of Dublin were not so lustful that chance encounters with tradesmen led immediately to attacks of passion and fornication? And Frank was not a cruel or heartless man. He would never ridicule her, or harm her; he was incapable of doing evil. But in the evening, as the light faded, she’d remember the choc-ice woman again, the short dark hair, the bare, tanned arm. She started checking the redial button on the phone late at night. One night she dialled, waited a few seconds after the woman answered. “Listen,” she said, her calm voice belying the terror she felt. “You’re one of many. You’re just one of his many whores.” She held her breath until the woman hung up. She did it again the following night. Whore.

The coffin was at the mouth of the hearse, resting waist-high on a stand, the lid unscrewed and sitting on top.

Mr. O’Shea slid the lid diagonally.

She nodded and smiled. “That’s him, that’s definitely Denis.”

Mr. O’Shea lowered his head and heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

She touched Denis’s face, the band around his head. There was nothing of him left, she thought, nothing she might call a soul still lingering. Just this fast-disintegrating ragtag of an old body, and her memory of it and him. She left her hand on his hair. Denis had been the lucky one. He had not had to navigate ordinary human relationships or contend with the intense emotions and pain they bring. Whatever he had suffered in his youth, he had survived through the shelter of home. He had withdrawn from the world and turned inward. Now she wondered if his youthful suffering had ever awoken in him an awareness of pain outside of himself. She has had intimations of pain outside of herself, moments when the whole suffering pantheon—the sick, the hungry, the tortured—from time immemorial hits her like a tsunami, so much so that whenever a documentary on orphanages or institutional child abuse comes on the TV she switches channels immediately or gets up and puts on a wash or cleans out a cupboard, something—anything—to turn her own soul toward distraction.

“He doesn’t look anywhere near seventy-six,” Mr. O’Shea said.

“No, I suppose not. I forgot to say his hair was still dark,” she said. “He never went gray. It’s no wonder you thought he was younger.”

When Mr. O’Shea went to put the lid back on the coffin, she turned away. Suddenly she was alone in the world. Unbidden came the words of a prayer from childhood that she said in times of fear and danger. Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.

After that first summer, she thought the worst was over. Then one evening in late November she was removing the day’s newspapers from their station in the library when she spotted a headline in the health pages of the Irish Times. “Chlamydia, the silent destroyer.” Her insides plummeted. She knew, before she read a word, what was in the article. She locked the library doors, switched off the main lights, and sat at a low table in the children’s corner. The complications listed—infertility, blocked Fallopian tubes, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage—had all been hers. She had always had an inkling, a vague sense of fear and foreboding around sex. She had put it down to the legacy of her upbringing, of being raised in an era when becoming pregnant outside marriage was the worst sentence a girl or a woman could face—worse, maybe, than death. And as if that weren’t enough the aids epidemic was at its height when Frances met Frank. It had not been easy at the start. Although Frank was gentle and kind, sex had been painful and messy and embarrassing. She had faulted herself, but she persevered, and on those occasions when sex was pleasurable she had felt womanly and worldly and sophisticated, like a character in a film. But the unease and the sense of foreboding were never far off. Now it was almost a relief to know that they had not come from nothing.

Back on the road, Mr. O’Shea was in a grateful, almost buoyant mood.

“You know we always check that we’re picking up the right sex—when we’re collecting remains, I mean. But Lord God, no way does your brother look his age. He could easily pass for forty with that head of black hair.”

She never confronted Frank. Instead, on quiet mornings in the library she went online and read about the bacterium she had unwittingly hosted in her body for years. Chlamydia trachomatis, derived from the Greek word for “cloak,” may have originated in amphibians, most likely frogs. She pored over the microscopic images on the screen, magnified into bulging, purple, misshapen globules, and thought of them invading and contaminating the pink flesh of her cervix and womb and tubes. She began to detest Frank’s bodily presence, his smell, the sound of his chewing. In the evenings, they ate in silence. When Frank moved to clear the dishes—or do any task in the kitchen—she lifted her hand, “Leave that, I’ll do it,” and meekly he acquiesced. He could have left. She could have asked him to leave, she could have screamed, Go on, get out! Go to one of your fancy women. But she was not a screamer, any more than he was. Eventually, she summoned the courage to see an S.T.I. consultant in a private clinic and told the woman the whole story. The tests came back positive for chlamydia, negative for everything else. She had been a virgin, a novice on her wedding night. She had assumed that the pain and discomfort and discharge were associated with intercourse. Sitting there in the privacy of the doctor’s office, Frances started to cry for the fool of a woman she had been. She went home, started a course of antibiotics, and went to bed for the weekend, full of hatred for Frank and for her own body, befouled with his filthy bacteria.

There was a Robert Musil story that Frances came upon around that time. The protagonist, a student of chemistry and technology, became involved with Tonka, a humble, passive girl who had been hired to care for his grandmother. He believed he’d once caught sight of her in the countryside, standing outside a cottage. His friend told him that hundreds of such girls labored in the fields when the beets were harvested, and that it was said they were as submissive as slaves to their supervisors. The young man saw something noble in this simple creature, in her innocence and helplessness. He thought, If it were not for him, who would understand her? When his grandmother died, he took Tonka with him to a big city. He did not love her, exactly, but he saw her as pure and natural and unspoiled. He believed she rinsed his soul clean. He loved all her little defects, even her deformed fingernail, the result of a work injury. After some years, Tonka became pregnant. The dates revealed that he had been away at the time of conception. But Tonka had no memory of anything having happened, and there was no man that he could suspect. He began to wonder if it could have been an immaculate conception. Then Tonka became ill with a horrible, “insidious” infection—syphilis. His doctors found no trace of the disease in him, and his mother hinted that Tonka was a prostitute. He grew suspicious and superstitious, but Tonka was steadfast in her denials. Send me away if you won’t believe me, she said calmly. He sought several doctors’ opinions, hoping for a rational explanation that would prove her innocence. He wrestled with philosophical questions, like the idea that one must believe in a thing—a chair, a door—before the thing can exist in front of one’s eyes. His private ordeal revolved around this question of belief—could he force himself to believe in Tonka’s innocence? The disease progressed and Tonka grew sick and gaunt and ugly, but he continued to care for her, all the while wavering between hope and despair. He believed that Tonka was inwardly pure, despite her outward ugliness, and that her goodness was mysterious, like a dog’s goodness. And then one day Tonka’s old calendar lay open, and the young man saw, among other domestic entries, a little red exclamation mark recording the incident that Tonka denied. Frances remembers the young man’s mental anguish, how demented he was with dreams and visions and feelings that were constantly oscillating. He did not believe Tonka, but he believed in Tonka.

They were on the ring road around Limerick city. Mr. O’Shea was tapping lightly on the steering wheel.

“We’ll be home in good time, after all,” he said. “Frank won’t have too long to wait.”

“No,” she said.

After a few moments, he gave her an inquisitive look. “Frank isn’t a Kerry man, is he?”

“No. Kilkenny.”

Over the years, much of the pain had abated. Little things had helped. The habit of passing the women’s prison every morning and imagining the lives behind the walls—women who’d been driven to kill their men after years of being kicked and beaten, of losing their minds and their pregnancies. There were worse fates than hers, she knew. Frank had not a violent bone in his body; as he aged, he had put on weight, and walked with a slow, lumbering gait. She would catch sight of him bending down to tie a shoelace or putting on his jacket in the hall, and something about the lonely slope of his shoulders would soften her and remind her of the boy he had been. Then she would catch herself: Beware of pity, Frances.

She glanced at her watch. By now, Frank would be parked outside the funeral home waiting for them, worried by their delay. She had lied to the S.T.I. doctor. When the doctor said that Frank would have to be told, and treated, Frances had nodded. But she had no intention of telling him. Let him go on infecting them, she thought. Let them rot.

She turned to Mr. O’Shea.

“My husband is a serial adulterer,” she announced. She had been rehearsing those words in her head for years.

Mr. O’Shea looked at her in panic. Then he gave a little cough, and cleared his throat. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “That’s terrible. I don’t know what to say.”

He looked at her softly, kindly, and for an instant she was afraid that he might put his hand on hers. She looked out her window. Maybe he’s one, too, she thought. If I were a different woman, younger, more attractive—or maybe not even attractive, but capable of giving off a certain signal—would he be game, too? He might at any minute exit the motorway, drive along a country road and down a forest track, and there might be some talk or laughter and maybe even a little awkwardness as he unbuckled, and then he would do it and I would let him, with my dead brother lying there, inches from our heads.

Dusk was falling as they crossed the county boundary into Kerry. The last of the evening light appeared between the clouds, signalling, she thought, winter’s end. She wondered what angle she would have on her life, her whole existence, when the end came. And what angle would Frank have on his life, if he ever pondered such things? It was difficult to know what, if anything, had meaning for Frank. If she had meaning for him. She knew precisely what meaning Frank had for her—he was a weight that would never leave her. They would be bound together for infinity, under one roof. She would be exiled with him within the walls of her childhood home, and this exile would start tomorrow or the next day. They would grow old and infirm together. She would tend to his body, or he to hers. In time, memory would fade or alter. The small boy creeping out at night to retrieve a sweet from the floor of a tractor would fade. Standing behind a cowshed then would be Frank as a grown man, sucking the sweet slowly and carefully until the chocolate was all gone and the desiccated coconut formed a hard, tight little ball in his mouth.

The street lights were on when they arrived in Castleisland. They turned off Main Street. Frank was parked across from the funeral home. In their life together, she had made all the decisions. She had brought them to Kerry without consideration for him. He had objected to nothing, and she had taken his silence as acquiescence. And what of his suffering? Where had he put the lost mother, the abandoned child, and all the sad days that followed? Had he reined it all in, sublimated everything? Everything except the sex.

Mr. O’Shea drove around the back of his premises and parked the hearse and turned off the engine. For a moment, all was darkness. Then a light came on and a door opened. And from around the side of the building Frank’s outline appeared. She squinted. Any moment now, she thought, I will be able to make out his face, his eyes. As she waited, a question rose: Who is the choc-ice woman? The choc-ice woman is nobody. Then Tonka came to mind. Tonka, gaunt and ugly on her deathbed, with her secret locked inside her. And the young man, who had loved her deformed fingernail, crying out her name and understanding, for an instant, all he had never understood, and feeling her, from the ground under his feet to the top of his head, feeling the whole of her life, in him. ♦

This is drawn from “Barcelona.”