ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 24: My Mother

My mother was thirty and my father, thirty-five, when they married.

Bernadette was proposed to by other men before she married my father — in fact, three men before Joseph asked for her hand in marriage — and she accepted one of these proposals. None of this did I find out from my mother, though. Years after she died, her younger sister relayed this to me at the funeral of their brother.

“Oh, yes, Bernadette met Charlie at a U.S.O. dance,” Fran said. “Everyone in the family liked Charlie. He was funny and laid back. She and Charlie set a wedding date. She bought a wedding dress. Charlie was from New York, and that’s where they planned to live. They were to leave on a train shortly after the wedding. Then Charlie told her, almost at the last minute, that he’d been married before.”

“Married before?”

Fran nods. “He told Bernadette: ‘I was about to go into the Army. I thought I might be killed in action, and I didn’t want to die without knowing about married life, so this gal and I married. But right away, I knew it was a mistake. We’re divorced, and I’ll have the marriage annulled.’ Bernadette asked the advice of our parish priest, who was to marry them. He said to her: ‘Charlie wasn’t married by a Catholic priest, so in the eyes of the church, his marriage can be annulled. . . . You love Charlie. Charlie loves you. My advice is to go ahead with your wedding. The annulment papers will come in later.’ ”

“She obviously didn’t take the priest’s advice,” I say.

“No. Bernadette said: ‘But what if the train to New York derails or I die some other way before Charlie’s marriage is annulled? I won’t die in a state of grace.’ ”

When I tell this story to Joshua, he says: “She must not have loved him.”

“Maybe she did, but her fear of hell was greater than her love for him. Not Charlie, not her family, not even the parish priest could change her mind.”

For me, heaven and hell are major elements of a man-made construct, so my mother’s thinking is completely irrational to me. She made a major decision in her life based on man-made nonsense and wishfulness. I wonder, though: In her dreaminess, amid the reality of her life with Joseph and eventually their seven children, did she ever think back to funny, laid-back Charlie?

Of course she did.