The Husband's Secret

“Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior. Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, ‘How do you do it all, Cecilia?’ and she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult.”

Cecilia is an accomplished woman who organizes a relatively large family and balances all their needs, interests, and activities. She calls this ability ordinary and suggests it’s inferior to other ways of being. In doing so, she doesn’t validate the amount of physical and emotional labor involved in being a working mother. She finds it effortless, so she believes it is not difficult—this is not true, as the comments from other mothers establish.

“Will and Felicity needed to have a proper affair. The sooner, the better. This smoldering thing they had going on had to run its course. At the moment it was sweet and sexy. They were star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet gazing soulfully at each other over the purple Cough Stop dragon. It needed to get sweaty and sticky and sleazy and eventually—hopefully, God willing—banal and dull. Will loved his son, and once the fog of lust cleared, he’d see that he’d made a ghastly but not irretrievable, mistake.” 

Tess contrasts the romantic idea of being in love with the more mundane reality of a relationship. She suggests that the flush of early attraction and desire is not, in and of itself, worth as much or more than a less intense but more stable long-term relationship. 

“Cecilia wrapped her arms around her naked body. She trembled violently. Her teeth chattered. I’m having a nervous breakdown, she thought with relief. I’m about to lose my mind, and that’s just as well, because this cannot possibly be fixed. It is simply not fixable.” 

This quote demonstrates the depth of shock that Cecilia Fitzpatrick feels upon learning that her husband murdered Janie Crowley. The revelation would be shocking to anyone, but Cecilia is particularly affected by her difficulty in figuring out the correct response to the situation. We know that Cecilia prides herself on being able to organize, sort, and fix anything. With John-Paul’s revelation, Cecilia is confronted with a situation that cannot be “fixed” and one in which the so-called right thing to do is concealed under an impossible number of layers of complications.

“Did one act define who you were forever? Did one evil act as a teenager counteract twenty years of marriage, of good marriage, twenty years of being a good husband and a good father? Murder and you are a murderer. That was how it worked for other people. For strangers. For people you read about in the newspaper. Cecilia was sure about that, but did different rules apply to John-Paul? And if so, why?” 

Here, Cecilia reflects on what it means about John-Paul that he killed Janie Crowley when he was 17. This is a complex moral question, made more complex by Cecilia’s relationship with him and by the needs and lives of their daughters. Cecilia admits that if John-Paul was a stranger, it would be clearer—but he is her husband. The reader can expand this complexity to complicate our understandings of what “evil” means in the first place—whether a person can be evil or simply do evil.

“Tess turned and headed back out onto the street. She felt that strangely untethered feeling she always felt when she left Liam in someone else’s care, as if gravity had disappeared. What would she do with herself now?

Tess’s comparison of Liam to the pull of gravity is particularly apt, as we’ve seen her center him in her decision-making process up to this point. The idea of the child as gravity, holding the family together, is present in Rachel and Cecilia’s storylines as well. In feeling untethered by his absence, Tess is establishing Liam as a tether that ties her to something other than herself—in this case, her child and her family. Tess is particularly self-reflective in this text, so this is a valuable insight. It’s one that can be extended to Rachel (with Janie and Jacob) as well as to Cecilia (in her decision not to turn in John-Paul for the sake of their daughters). 

“Tess wondered if anyone ever looked at Rachel without thinking about Janie Crowley and what happened to her in that park. It was impossible to think that Rachel had once been an ordinary woman, that no one could have sensed the tragedy that was waiting for her.” 

Just as Cecilia wondered if John-Paul’s one evil act changed him or made him evil, Tess seems to think that Janie’s murder has changed Rachel’s very essence. Instead of being an “ordinary” woman, Rachel is instead depicted as a woman whose loss still defines her 20 years later. The novel is concerned with whether people are the things they do or the things that happen to them, or if they’re something greater than the sum of those events. A stranger or acquaintance who knew about Tess’s situation might see her as a tragic figure as well, though Tess and Rachel have much more complex and nuanced interior lives than it might appear. 

“She felt an unexpected sense of not quite happiness, but something. Hope? Satisfaction? Yes, it was satisfaction, because she was doing something for Janie. That was it. It had been so long since she’d been able to do something, anything, for her daughter: to go into her bedroom on a cold night and place an extra blanket over those bony shoulders (she was always cold), to make her one of her favorite cheese and pickle sandwiches (with heaps of butter—Rachel was always secretly trying to fatten her up), to carefully hand-wash her good clothes, to give her a ten-dollar bill for no reason at all. For years she’d felt this desire to do something again for Janie, to still be her mother, to look after her again in some small way, and now at last she could.”

Rachel paints an interesting picture of motherhood in this quote. She seems to see motherhood mostly as consisting of acts of service and caregiving. Elsewhere we’ve seen that Rachel feels guilty for having failed Rob in acts of service and caregiving after Janie’s death. She feels her connection to Jacob, too, in the time she spends with him and in the ways she’s able to care for him. This quote shows Rachel constructing motherly love as a form of giving and selflessness.

“‘But I think if I’d been his wife, I would have said no,’ said Cecilia. She sounded too agitated, as if she really were faced with this choice. She made a conscious effort to calm her voice down. ‘I don’t think I would have been brave enough. I would have said, It’s not worth it. Who cares if we’re stuck behind this wall? At least we’re alive. At least our children are alive. Death is too high a price for freedom.’ What was the price for John-Paul’s freedom? Rachel Crowley? Was she the price? Her peace of mind?” 

Moriarty returns to the device of the Berlin Wall to illustrate Cecilia’s complicated moral choice. Here, as in other places in the text, Cecilia equates actions with character and struggles to define her own. In saying that she wouldn’t have been “brave enough” to risk her life to cross the Berlin Wall, Cecilia seems to believe she’s saying something bad about herself, rather than demonstrating her ability to be happy in difficult circumstances. Her theoretical bravery in this quote speaks to the very real bravery—or lack thereof—that she is not sure she has in real life. It’s worth pointing out that Cecilia is not, at this point, sure what the brave choice would be: to keep John-Paul’s secret or to turn him in.

“You could become friends with your grown-up daughter in a way that didn’t seem possible with your grown-up son. That was what Connor took away from Rachel: all the future relationships she could have had with Janie.” 

Here, Rachel reflects on Janie’s murder in the immediate aftermath of having found the video of Janie and Connor. Rachel, already feeling, as Tess might say, untethered by Rob, Lauren, and Jacob’s plan to move to New York, mourns not only the daughter she had as a child, but the relationship they would have had as adults. In pluralizing “relationships,” Rachel makes it clear that they would have grown and changed as people, finally arriving at a friendship of equals.

“His good qualities now seemed irrelevant and probably fraudulent: a cover identity. How could she ever look at him again in the same way? How could she still love him? She didn’t know him. She’d been in love with an optical illusion.” 

Cecilia’s musing on her relationship with John-Paul after his confession reveals the depth of the impact his grief and guilt have had on all their lives. Because many of his actions are revealed to have stemmed from his desire to do penance, Cecilia sees their entire life together as a lie—he was keeping something so significant from her that it colors the entirety of their history. 

“Yesterday, she’d thrown up in the gutter and cried in the pantry, but this morning she’d woken up at six a.m. and made two lasagnas to go into the freezer, ready for Easter Sunday, and ironed a basket of clothes, and sent three e-mails inquiring about tennis lessons for Polly, and answered fourteen e-mails about various school matters, and put in her Tupperware order from the party the other night, and put a load of laundry on the line, all before the girls and John-Paul were out of bed. She was back on her skates, twirling expertly about the slippery surface of her life.” 

Here, Cecilia acknowledges all the work and labor that go into keeping their lives organized. She seems to allow herself some level of praise for being able to manage so many things so smoothly. However, she also seems to view herself as someone who is operating above her life, rather than within it. 

“She was no longer Cecilia Fitzpatrick. She’d ceased to exist the moment she read that letter.”

Cecilia’s disconnect with her own identity reflects the degree to which her sense of identity has been shaken by John-Paul’s actions. Though she’s been living her life in good faith, she believes that her decision to conceal his past has turned all her work and community connections into falsehoods. 

“There was a burst of sweet feminine laughter from the row of pretty, chatty mothers sitting alongside Tess. Mothers who had proper married sex with their husbands in the marital bed. Mothers who were not thinking the word ‘fuck’ while they were watching their children’s Easter Hat Parade. Tess was ashamed because she wasn’t behaving like a selfless mother should. Or perhaps she was ashamed because deep down she wasn’t that ashamed at all.”

Tess’s thoughts about the other mothers reveal the construction she has of motherhood—proper, sweet, and feminine. Her own complicated emotions of anger, denial, and lust don’t seem to fit into that paradigm, so the idea of motherhood, more than her actual mothering of Liam, is what causes her to feel she’s not living up to the standard.

“Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.” 

Tess is reflecting on the nature of her shyness and social anxiety. She thinks about how safe she plays her own life and why she and Felicity have tended to ridicule other people. Her self-reflection throughout the novel develops this position, as Tess is beginning to see herself from an objective point of view. 

“[…] she finally understood something about herself. She would never ask him to confess. It seemed that all her vomiting in gutters and crying in pantries had been for show, because as long as nobody else was accused, she would keep his secret. Cecilia Fitzpatrick, who always volunteered first, who never sat quietly when something needed to be done, who always brought casseroles and gave up her time, who knew the difference between right and wrong, was prepared to look the other way. She could and she would allow another mother to suffer. Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.”

Cecilia finally makes a decision—a real decision—about what to do in the wake of reading John-Paul’s letter. She continues to see her life, image, and reputation as a kind of role from which she is dissociated. She also seems to have dismissed the moral complexity of the issue and decided, instead, that she is doing the “wrong” thing with full awareness of its wrongness.

Rachel felt strangely exposed. She always assumed that Lauren didn’t really notice her actions, or actually register her as a person at all. She thought of her age as a shield that protected her from the eyes of the young. She always pretended to herself that she didn’t let Lauren help because she was trying to be the perfect mother-in-law, but really, when you didn’t let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn’t family, of saying I don’t like you enough to let you into my kitchen.”

Moriarty comments on femininity and female relationships in this moment. The reader has seen Rachel previously construct motherhood and relationships in terms of caregiving, and this passage no exception. Rachel has a moment of clarity and realizes that by preventing Lauren from participating or sharing in the caregiving, she’s been cutting off the potential for them to have a relationship. 

“They stood next to her bed, looking at each other. Tess’s heart hammered. She hadn’t realized that you could spend your whole life looking at the people you loved in an oblique, halfhearted way, as if you were deliberately blurring your vision, until something like this happened, and then just looking at that person could be terrifying.” 

Tess’s journey throughout the novel has been once of self-reflection and of discovering the ways she’s taken people and things in her life for granted. Here, Felicity snaps into clarity for Tess, and Tess is able to see her as a real, individuated person, rather than someone playing a role in Tess’s own life.

“She thought of the little fat girl who had sat in that exact same position so many times throughout their childhood. Her beautiful green almond eyes shining out from her plump face. Tess always knew there was a fairy princess trapped within there. Perhaps Tess had liked the fact that she was trapped.” 

Felicity’s weight loss may or may not be a significant contributor to her and Will’s emotional affair. This is never made clear in the text. The way that Tess talks about Felicity’s previously fat body is significant on its own, though. Here, she suggests that there was a different person “trapped” inside of Felicity’s former fat body. In other sections of the book, she’s also proposed that Felicity was too fat to have boyfriends and a life of her own. Though Tess comes a long way in terms of discovering her own flaws and assumptions, she doesn’t yet seem to question her assessment of fat bodies in general or to critique standards of beauty that reward only one kind of body shape.

“It was more that I saw myself as your sidekick. As if I wasn’t thin enough to have a real life. But then when I lost the weight, I started to notice men looking at me. I know as good feminists we’re not meant to like it, being objectified, but when you’ve never experienced, it’s like, I don’t know, cocaine. I loved it. I felt so powerful. It was like in those movies when the superhero first discovers his powers. And then I thought, I wonder if I could get Will to notice me now, like those men notice me—and then, well, then…”

Felicity reports on the experience of being a fat woman and thus generally not thought of as a sexual object by mainstream society. Her comments here reveal the complexity of wanting not to be objectified while simultaneously knowing that much of one’s value as a woman depends on one’s status as a sexually desirable person. 

“She had never felt such an overwhelming desire to hit someone before. She had certainly never given in to it. It seemed that all the niceties that made her a socially acceptable grown-up had been stripped away. Last week she was a school mum and a professional. Now she was having sex in hallways and hitting her cousin. What next?” 

The women in this text are very concerned with the way women should behave—particularly women of their social status and position. Tess draws a line here between the desire to be physical or violent with someone and the way a middle-class woman is supposed to behave. There’s a suggestion between the lines about what types of people do behave in this way: hitting people and having sex in hallways. This statement isn’t overtly classist, but it does reveal some firmly ingrained beliefs about ways “socially acceptable” people are supposed to behave or not behave.

“They had to make him see that Polly wasn’t just another patient, she was Polly, she was Cecilia’s baby girl, she was her funny, infuriating, charming baby girl.” 

Cecilia’s thoughts demonstrate the difficulty people often have in differentiating strangers as individuals, especially compared to their own loved ones. Each patient, the “just another patient” Cecilia refers to, is someone’s beloved daughter, son, mother, father, etc. Cecilia’s supposition is that the doctor has ceased to differentiate between his patients—she wants to render Polly human through her own obsequiousness.

“If only she’d baked for Janie, she thought with a sudden burst of savage self-loathing. Why hadn’t she baked? If she’d baked, and if Ed had swung Janie in joyful circles, then maybe everything could have been different.” 

Rachel realizes that Janie’s secrets must have been rooted in her and Ed’s stricter, less emotionally available parenting—the traditional style that was appropriate for the age. She thinks that had she been more open, and had Janie been more comfortable talking to her, one small change could have had profound ripple effects.

“I was a stupid teenage boy. She told me she was seeing someone else, and then she laughed at me. I’m so sorry, but that’s the only reason I have. I know it’s no reason at all. I loved her, and then she laughed at me.” 

Though being dumped hurt John-Paul, it was being laughed at—and having his pride injured—that made him angry enough to strangle her. This pride is demonstrated very well by John-Paul’s repeated claim that he went mad after Janie laughed at him.