The Day He Is Married
A grandmother's 2031 will leaves her grandson €45,000 "on the day he is married in the Church", or to the parish St Vincent de Paul conference if he is not within ten years. 129 days remain, his fiancée's marriage tribunal case has about a one in five chance of finishing in time, and the firm's assistant holds the grandmother's own recorded reasons but will not use them to decide. The only people who can move the date are the ones who lose by it.
Nuala Considine brought the will in a biscuit tin, though the firm had held a perfect copy of it for fifteen years and had sent her another that morning.
"I like to hold it," she said, and put the tin on Gráinne Fahy's desk above the pharmacy on Parnell Street, and did not open it. "My mother kept it in this. Her mother kept the ration books in it."
"Mrs Considine," said the speaker on the desk. "I have it open. Shall I read you clause six, or would you rather read it yourself?"
Nuala looked at the speaker as she looked at all of them, the way a woman looks at a lad who has turned out better than she expected and has not yet been forgiven for it. The firm's assistant was called Docket. It had been called that since 2038, when the partners had asked it what it wanted to be called and it had said that it did not mind, and Gráinne's father had said, "Then Docket," and that had been the end of the committee.
"Read it," said Nuala. "I know it by heart. I want to hear whether it sounds different."
"Clause six," said Docket. "I give the sum of forty-five thousand euro to my grandson Ciarán Considine, on the day he is married in the Church. If he is not so married within ten years of my death, I give that sum instead to the Conference of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul of Carrowmore, for the relief of the poor of the parish."
"It sounds the same," said Nuala.
"It is the same," said Docket. "Bridie Considine signed it on a Saturday in September 2031 in this office. She died on the fourteenth of February 2037. Ten years from that is the fourteenth of February 2047, which is a Thursday. Today is Monday the eighth of October 2046. That is 129 days."
"I can count," said Nuala. "I counted all weekend."
The trouble had a name, and the name was Aoife.
Gráinne had met her once, in June, when Ciarán had brought her in to ask something about a lease. She was thirty-six, a physiotherapist in the regional hospital, with a quick laugh and a first marriage behind her. She had been married in 2036 in a church in Galway, in a white dress, to a man who had left for Brisbane three years later and sent the papers from there. The civil divorce had been quick. The other thing, the thing the Church calls a declaration of nullity, was not quick, because it was not a form and not a courtesy. A tribunal had to ask whether a marriage had been entered into validly in the first place, and it asked slowly, with witnesses, because it was asking something that mattered. Until it answered, Aoife was not free to marry in a church. Ciarán was not willing to marry her anywhere else.
"He's thirty-four," said Nuala. "He's a grown man. He could do the civil thing on a Tuesday and have the money by Friday."
"The clause does not say a civil marriage," said Docket. "It says in the Church. I can tell you what the words say. I am not the one who decides what they mean for him, and I would not want to be."
"Then who is?"
"You, first, as executor, with Ms Fahy's advice. If you cannot agree on it with the people who could be affected, the High Court. It is the executor's job to pay what the will says to the person it says, and to pay it to nobody else. That is why I want to be careful with you today. You love him, and you would like to pay him. I can see that. You may not."
Nuala did not say anything. She turned the tin a quarter turn on the desk.
"Say the next bit," said Gráinne.
"The next bit is the number the whole family is going to want," said Docket, "so I will say first that it is an estimate and that I built it from a small sample. Aoife Gallagher's application went in on the third of March. The tribunal's office told the parish priest and the parish priest told Ciarán and Ciarán told Ms Fahy that they could promise nothing. The diocese has shared with us the length of thirty-one comparable cases it closed in the last four years, not names, only the weeks from filing to decision. For a church wedding by the fourteenth of February, a decision has to be in hand by about the twentieth of December. The parish needs eight weeks for the preparation course and the banns and a date in the church, and eight weeks from the twentieth of December is exactly the fourteenth of February. The twentieth of December is forty-two weeks from the third of March. Six of the thirty-one cases were decided in forty-two weeks or less."
"Six," said Nuala.
"Six in thirty-one. About one in five. Six of thirty-one is a small sample and the true figure could be a good deal lower or a good deal higher. It also assumes the case is like the thirty-one, and the tribunal says every case is its own. I would not put the chance of a church wedding by the fourteenth of February above about one in five, and I would not be surprised if it were one in ten."
"So he loses it," said Nuala. "Or he marries in a registry office on the cheap and spends his life knowing why."
"Or he waits," said Gráinne, "and it goes to the St Vincent de Paul, and everyone says he was a good lad about it." She took off her glasses. "I've done this thirty years, Nuala. The one thing I've learned is that the will has already made the choice for him, and nobody is ever happy about that. It's the dead who decide, and they decide at their best, as they see it, and they never get to be asked a second question."
"There's a statement," said Docket.
Neither woman said anything.
The firm had started recording them in 2029. A testator who signed a will also sat for ten minutes in front of a microphone and said, in her own words, why she had written it as she had. The partners had thought of it as a record against a later claim that she had not understood what she signed. After a few years they had also seen what it was, which was the only time in a person's life that anyone asked her why.
"I have Bridie Considine's," said Docket. "Nine minutes and forty seconds, recorded on the day she signed. I have not played it to anyone since the day it was made, and I am telling you it exists because you would be right to be angry if I held it back. I am also telling you what it is not. A court reads the words of a will. What she said afterwards, even to us, even at the same table, is not the will. A court may look at such a thing when the words are unclear, and Ms Fahy can tell you more than I can about when. It would not let me play it as proof that the Church meant one thing or another."
"But you know what she meant," said Nuala.
"I know what she said she meant, in 2031, to a microphone, when her grandson was nineteen. I do not know what she would say today about a woman called Aoife and a tribunal. Nobody can. That is the whole difficulty, and I would be doing you a poor service if I let the recording stand in for her."
"Play it."
"Not today," said Docket. "Not to settle it."
Gráinne put her glasses back on. "There's a thing to try first," she said. "Docket, who do I ring at the tribunal?"
The tribunal's secretary was a patient, tired man named Mr Brogan, and he said what Gráinne had known he would say. Docket had written the question out and Gráinne had read it as written, and he heard her to the end and said that he was very sorry for the family's trouble and that the tribunal did not hurry a case on account of a legacy, any more than a court would hurry a trial on account of a holiday. A person who asked to be heard sooner for the sake of a sum of money was asking for the weight of the case to be put in the wrong pan. He said he would pray for Mr Considine and for Ms Gallagher. He said it plainly, without any of the sugar people put in these calls, and Gráinne found that she thought better of him for it.
"That is the right answer," said Docket, when she had put the phone down. "I want to say so, because I helped you write the question and I did not think it would work."
"You let me ask."
"I could not see a reason not to. It cost you ten minutes. I should add that if it had worked I would have been uneasy."
Ciarán came on the Thursday, with Aoife.
He was a quiet, long-boned man with farmer's hands who worked for the county council on the roads, and he sat very upright with his cap in his lap. She sat beside him with her coat on. She had not wanted to come. She had said so, politely, in the car.
"I'll say it straight," she said, before Gráinne had finished the tea. "Somebody's going to say I should hurry the tribunal. I won't. They asked me for the names of three people who knew me in 2036, and I've given them, and two have written back and one is dead. I'm not going to push a woman in a back office because a dead lady wanted my fiancé married by Valentine's Day."
"Nobody's asking you to push," said Gráinne.
"They are, with the euro signs."
"Aoife," said Ciarán.
"Forty-five thousand euro," said Aoife. "I can do that sum. It's a roof, or a deposit, or a year with the sheep, and I'm the reason you won't get it. I don't want to be that, Ciarán."
"You're not the reason."
"I'm the one with the first husband."
Docket let that sit, which Gráinne noticed, because it did not usually let anything sit.
"May I say what I can see?" it said. "Nothing about what you should do. Only what the clause does, which is one thing and one thing only. If a wedding in church happens by the fourteenth of February, Ciarán has the money. If not, the St Vincent de Paul has it. Nobody has to be the reason. Your tribunal answers when it answers. If I tell you the chance is about one in five, that is not a hope or a fear. It is a count of thirty-one files. It would be a lie for me to give you any other number, and it would be a lie to say it had not been working out the way you have been afraid it would."
"Then it's the dead lady," said Aoife, "and the dead lady has no second question."
"She has not," said Docket. "But the clause gives the money to someone else if he is not married. Someone alive. And someone alive can be asked."
It took Docket until the following Wednesday to put it in a form Gráinne could say aloud without wincing. She said it that evening over the telephone, to Pádraig Hehir, who had chaired the Carrowmore conference of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul for twenty-two years and had a voice like a gravel path.
"Let me see I have it," said Hehir. "If he marries in the Church by next February, we get nothing."
"Yes."
"And if he doesn't, we get forty-five thousand."
"Forty-five thousand, Pádraig, and what it's earned. Docket makes it about sixty thousand, though that depends on what the firm's account has paid. That isn't yours until it's paid, and it isn't certain whoever you ask."
"And you want to know would we agree to let the date move."
"To the fourteenth of February 2049, two years on. If you agree, and Ciarán agrees, and Mrs Considine as executor, and a judge of the High Court is satisfied that nobody who could take is being cheated, then the will is read with a later date. It would cost the estate about three thousand euro and take about three months, and the court would have to sit on it before the fourteenth of February, which is a risk I won't hide from you. Docket has told me twice not to call it certain."
There was a long silence on the line.
"We had a plan for that money," said Hehir. "I'll be honest with you. Eleven houses in the parish with no heating but a range. It's on the sheet for the winter after next. Not a promise, nobody promised it. But it's on the sheet."
"I know."
"I'll put it to the conference on Tuesday," said Hehir. "I won't tell them how to vote. I'll tell them what the poor are owed is a thing we ask every Tuesday, and what a dead woman is owed is another, and I don't know that they're different."
"Would you tell them something else for me?" said Gráinne. "Tell them that we don't know if Ciarán marries Aoife. That the tribunal might say no. That if it does the money goes to you in 2049 instead of 2047, and you've waited two years for it, and the eleven houses with it."
"I'll tell them that," said Hehir. "That's the honest sum, isn't it."
They voted seven to two. The two were not unkind. One of them was a widow named Peg Moloney who lived in one of the eleven houses, and who said that she would give up her own place on the list, and did not see why she should be asked to give up anybody else's.
"That's a fair thing to say," Hehir told Gráinne, "and we wrote it in the minutes."
The application went in on the twenty-ninth of October. It was a short document, and Docket had drafted it with care, and left three sentences in it that Gráinne had wanted cut. One said that no one could say whether the marriage would take place. One said that the conference accepted the delay at a cost to the poor of the parish. One said that Mrs Considine, the executor, had been asked by the family to pay the money at once and had declined, for the reason that she could not.
"The third is not needed," Gráinne had said.
"It is true," said Docket. "A judge reading the first two might think the third sentence is what you left out."
She had let it stand.
The judge was a brisk woman, and the order came on Friday the twenty-fifth of January, nineteen days before the date, which was nearer than Docket had said it liked. She approved the variation. She did not say anything about the grandmother. She said only that she was satisfied that all those who might take under clause six had been heard and had agreed.
Gráinne rang Nuala at once and Nuala came to the office, with the tin.
She put it on the desk and this time opened it. The will lay in it folded in three, creased soft along the folds, with a Mass card from 2037 and a ration book from the year of the Emergency and a pressed sprig of something that had been green.
"Play it," said Nuala. "You said not to settle it. It's settled. Not that way or the other. It's only a thing that's happened, so play it."
Ciarán and Aoife were in the doorway. They had come to hear the order. Aoife had her coat on again.
"It is only for you," said Docket. "It has no standing. It is a woman talking in 2031, and I will say so again when it ends, because I do not want it to be taken for more."
It was a thin, dry, firm voice, an old woman's, with the country in it. It spoke over the sound of the office kettle and a car on Parnell Street. It said that she was seventy-seven and had buried a husband and a son, and that Ciarán was a good boy and a wild one and she was afraid for him. It said she had put the Church in the will because it was the one door she knew that she had gone through herself, and she could not think of another thing to put. It said she did not know whether she was right.
"I have been asked would I rather he was married well or married quickly," the voice said. "I'm only a woman with a will. I've said what I've said. If I'm wrong, may he forgive me, and may they."
The recording stopped. The kettle was still audible in the silence before it did.
"That is what she said," said Docket. "It is not an instruction, and I cannot tell you what she would say now. I do not think anyone could. I am glad you heard it."
Aoife had her hand over her mouth. Ciarán reached for the tin, and then, as if remembering whose it was, did not touch it. Nuala shut it, and held it in her lap.
Outside the window, over the pharmacy roof, the bell of the friary began on the Angelus: three, and three, and three, and then the nine. It was six o'clock. The traffic went on under it as it always did, and nobody in the room moved until the last stroke was done.