The Liar's Wife Read Online Free

day she met him. She remembered it was Bastille Day.
    He had come into their lives because her father had met him on the train. His usual train, the 5:38. Johnny had sat down next to him, out of breath, having only just made the all-aboard. She always imagined a conductor shouting “All aboard” and Johnny running down the track, jumping onto the train at the last minute. But she wasn’t really sure if anyone shouted “All aboard” on suburban commuter trains.
    Johnny had engaged her father in conversation. Had her father been reluctant, putting his face in his
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to seem discouraging? But no shield could withstand the thrusts of Johnny Shaughnessy when he was determined to make contact. Of course her father had been charmed. Perhaps it was his voice, the beautiful Irish cadences, making you feel you’d never heard English spoken properly before. Her father had been seduced. Johnny was a seducer. His seduction of her was in a way the least spectacular of the many she’d observed. He had seduced her, but it had been he who’d been abandoned. There was a category “seducer,” but none for the abandoner. That is who she had been.
    Johnny had missed his station: New Rochelle. What had got into her father, that he’d invited Johnny home for supper? It was quite unlike him; he was a careful, a reserved, a predictable man. But he arrived at the door with Johnny, Johnny with his rucksack and guitar. Like the wanderer in an adventure story.
    She had wondered later about her father’s unusual impulse, inviting a stranger to dinner. Was it a vestigial longing for the wildness and camaraderie of the War? Lieutenant Pemberton. Stationed in France 1941–45, an orderly in a wartime hospital. He never spoke of it.
    Or was it that in Johnny he saw the son he’d always wanted, lighthearted, free, so different from the careful women—wife and daughter—he’d come home to after the War?
    Summer of 1962. It might have been one of the best summers in the history of the world to have been young and in love. If you were healthy, prosperous, American.
    She had just graduated from Cornell, B.S. in animal physiology. She had wanted to be an entomologist, wanting to work in a laboratory, but not like her father: he was involved in cancer research, and she didn’twant to work at something where so much was at stake. She preferred the nineteenth-century model of scientist, naturalists they were called, whose métier was slow observation and precise recording. She took the job in the lab of Dr. Probst, her father’s friend, just to give herself time to figure out her next move. “Rest, you need your rest, after the ordeal of senior year and all those exams,” her mother said, having no real idea of what Jocelyn’s college life had been. She had worked hard, but certainly not to the point of exhaustion, like many of her friends. She never left things to the last minute, and she wasn’t given much to late nights. She dated, but the men she met didn’t interest her enough to become seriously involved. She was famous for refusing a fourth date, although if they were handsome she enjoyed the light kissing and fumblings in the backs of cars, the incomplete expressions of desire in the dormitory “parietal hours.” But no one interested her enough to give up her virginity, which was still, in 1962, something of a big deal for someone like her.
    She enjoyed working in the lab; everyone was young and enthusiastic. Often they went out for drinks after work. She couldn’t remember what they talked about. Nothing very serious. Five years later, it would have been impossible not to talk about politics. But in June 1962 it was certainly possible. It was, in fact, the norm. John Kennedy was in the White House. Everything would be all right.
    Her work was interesting but not taxing; her colleagues were pleasant, but she knew that none of them would be