Marrying Up - Part XII
“Marrying Up” is a fictional story set in 1950s Manhattan revolving around Frances Riley, a difficult and ruthlessly ambitious young woman who moved from one social class to another—Irish immigrant off the boat to high WASP— when she married into the aristocratic Woolsey family.
THIS IS PART 12 of a FOURTEEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14
Image: Ike Louie Natividad
Kip collapsed of a heart attack as he was crossing his kitchen with a cup of tea. According to the coroner, he was dead a good thirteen hours before anyone found him. Frances screamed as if she were in physical agony when she heard the news. She fell back on the bed, knees drawn to her naked breasts, unaware of who was around her or how her cries might affect the sleeping household. "Slap her for Christ's sake!" Helen hissed at Jack, but he couldn't bring himself to do more than give her a little whack on the shoulder, so Frances lay there howling, clawing at her face in pain, and it was the cook who finally stopped her, applying an ice cold washcloth to her face and forcing a sedative down her throat. "There, there, poor thing," she crooned with her Irish lilt, and Frances squirmed and stared with horror into the cook's blue eyes until finally the drug overtook her, and she was swept into a thick, black sleep.
Later, in a limousine on the way back to the city, she spoke only in monosyllables. Jack made all the funeral arrangements. The service was held in a Catholic church in Brooklyn, and Frances, veiled in black like Jackie Kennedy, sat between Jack and Peg and didn't say a word to anybody. Peg, sweet and simple-natured as she was, thanked people for their kindness at the reception, but Frances, who took mechanical bites of food off the plate someone handed her, remained utterly silent. It was as if her grief had swallowed her voice and for days she sat like a catatonic, dry-eyed and stunned, staring without interest at her children and the servants and the people who came to visit, doing nothing but dragging herself through the rituals of getting up and going to bed, remaining for hours on the couch with a dog or a magazine on her lap. The holiday spirit grabbing the city didn't affect her anymore than loud music erupting from one of the children's rooms or the gray weather out the window or her twelve-year-old son, Harry, who was her favorite, returning from school with a black eye because of a fight with another boy.
Inside she was as dead as her father who had been put into the ground beside his wife, Noreen, in a cemetery in Queens.
Out of a sense of delicacy, Jack moved into another room. In the mornings he'd creep in to see how Frances was doing, and she'd turn her head away. She couldn't stand the sound of his breathing, the smell of his hair and cologne, the mere presence of him trying to comfort her.
Cover Image: Pavel Danilyuk