Read Online Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon - Free Book Online Page B

stable, which had no door, with the animals ambling around among the humans as if they owned the place. The smell was hardly bearable and the mingled cries of humans and animals had frightened Joseph and made him want to get back to Paris as fast as possible.
    He had eaten eggs and bacon with coarse black bread, toasted, and tea, and was quietly preparing his exit. But in the afternoon, something extraordinary happened, and Joseph, in a state of shock, no longer had thoughts of leaving. That shock arose from meeting his cousin Irene. Irene O’Sullivan, who had not been there the night before, was just back from Dublin, where she had gone to shop. It was love at first sight between Irene and Joseph, instantaneous and mutual, for the first time in their lives. Irene was thirty-six, with abundant curly red hair, aquamarine eyes, sparkling white teeth, a laughing mouth and a body that was sumptuous but well-proportioned. She was “woman personified, grace in the flesh,” thought Joseph, who could not take his eyes off her beauty, captivated by her gaze, her full lips. He wanted only one thing: to press his mouth to hers, to melt into her and lose himself in an embrace of her whole body, right away, now.
    Irene had also felt a powerful passion for Joseph. With his tall, romantic body and slender hands, his perfectly sculpted head and dark, languorous eyes, she thought him “the most handsome man in the whole universe,” as she said to him often, taking his head between her strong hands and adding, “Oh, Joe, darling, you’re such a beautiful boy and I love you so much! Oh, my dear, tell me, are we going to die from this great but forbidden love?” Forbidden because Irene was married and a mother. She had two daughters and a big peasant husband, to whom she had come a virgin at their wedding and sworn absolute faithfulness.
    So Joseph and Irene loved each other madly for a whole summer, hiding and sneaking about in fields and barns and the inlets of Cork Bay. They loved each other with an impossible love, and with the wrenching guilt of Irene, who would say, “Oh, Joe, my dear, I’m faithless to my husband and girls. Heaven will punish me. Oh, Joe, dear, I love you so much, I’m happy for the first time in my life and so guilty, darling, so desperately guilty.”
    Joseph said, “Come to Paris with me. I’ll adopt your daughters. Bring them with you and we’ll go back to America, where divorce is allowed and new beginnings are possible.”
    Irene could not accept that. She said breaking up her marriage and leaving would be her ruin and the ruin of her whole family, even her two daughters, whom she would no longer be able to look in the eye and love with that simple joy with which she had always loved them.
    It was Joseph who decided, with a heavy heart and an aching body, to go away one night, leaving on the kitchen table for his hosts an envelope containing a letter of thanks and farewell to all and a hundred American dollars he had brought to give them.
    Back in Paris, Joseph shut himself away with his broken heart. He confided in Marie-Nicole, not suspecting the disastrous effect it would have on her, making her “sick with the loss of your love,” as she would repeat many times over until her final letter.
    Some months after his return to Paris, Joseph received a letter from Ireland, written by his cousin the priest, who was educated, informing him of Irene’s death. Irene, cousin James wrote, had died of sorrow and gone to “join the Eternal Father,” swallowing an incredible quantity of barbiturates one night in November. But first she had confided in him, James O’Mahoney, her first cousin, and had even confessed her transgression. That was why he believed God would forgive her the final sin of despair, because the despair of love was “the least serious of all forms of despair in the eyes of our Heavenly Father.” He had written this