But First, Today, We Cover

Albert is hunched over the desk in our bedroom when I set his tea before him. Despite the electric light hanging above him, he’s working by a flickering candle. “Mind, darling,” he cautions. He’s using tweezers to peel a canceled stamp from its envelope.

“Has Willie written again?” I ask, gathering my nightclothes from the wardrobe.

Albert grunts. “Sends his wishes.” He exhales; he’s successfully freed the stamp for his collection—the image of a politician. From across the room, I can’t tell the likeness. I unfasten my brassiere. Albert fetches his album from the study.

When he reappears, the garment lies at my feet. He doesn't seem to notice, returning to the desk, the album full of men and birds and ships. I slip my nightgown over my head.

“Sophie and the children are well?”

“Presumably,” Albert says. “He hasn’t said otherwise.” He admires the stamp, kneads it into the album with tender fingers, tongue flicking between his teeth.

I sit on the bed and observe my husband, bent over his work, eyelashes fluttering in the dim light. His demeanor is boyish, a reflection of the childhood friend I once raced along the quays of Dublin Bay.

That was before the Great War, when Albert lived next door and came for Sunday dinner. Occasionally my cousin Willie attended with my aunt and uncle too. We skipped stones in the pond behind the church for hours, Albert so delighted that any bend of his knees might cause him to float away. Willie had marbles and a toy musket. Though Albert was happy to play house every other day of the week, on Sundays he echoed Willie’s assertions that dolls were for girls as he gleefully followed my cousin into the alley between our houses.

I knew it was worse to be a girl, but I’d never thought Albert really believed it.

When Albert returned from the war, still newly mine, he took up his father’s stamp collection and letter writing. In some ways he was unchanged, still the gentle soul I once knew, only now withdrawn and quick to tears.

He missed it, he’d admitted to me. The companionship of the trenches. The men he’d fought alongside and nearly died with. He wanted them, needed them. But the war, by ending, had stolen them too.

I wanted to let him find peace in my body. He never recoiled, but I saw how my touch pained him, and eventually stopped trying.

“I love you,” he often said in the adoring—friendly—tone I used so many times with girlfriends. It was the truth. Only, not the type of love that covers, wraps the soul, and binds two beings limb by limb. Love all the same, but different.

One night, not long ago, he lay haunted beside me. All at once, he melted into my arms. “Oh, Ruth,” he sobbed. “I think I might be…” he shuddered, strangled by some forbidden thing. I held him close. He didn’t need to say it, couldn’t say it—not as an Irishman or a Catholic.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” I said, and meant it.

Albert withdraws a fresh piece of paper. A wide smile plays on his lips, chin dotted with evening stubble. “A quick response, my darling. Then I’ll come to bed. I promise.”

I close the distance between us, pluck a pen and paper from the pile. “I’ll write too,” I say.

“To whom?”

“Maeve in Glasgow,” I lie.

“She’ll reply? The stamp…” His eyes glisten with the excitement I long to draw from him.

“Of course.” I smile. I’ll write to Maeve tomorrow. Albert never forgets a stamp.

Tonight, I address the letter to my cousin.

Dearest Willie,

Albert and I would like to invite you to visit…

I seal the envelope, affixing one of my husband’s uncancelled stamps he keeps next to the ones he’s seen before, the mountain of repeats from Willie. Men whose faces no longer trigger his passions, birds he’s already ensnared. Those days on the quays flutter through my mind, the way Willie and Albert ran from me. Their tousled hair and vibrant lips when they returned.

Sometimes I long to toss the extra stamps away.

I never do.