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church clothes. Cora Kilkenny insisted it was nothing to do with Lydia or Henry—she just wanted Southie shown at its best advantage to the rest of Boston. When Henry’s mother visited, Lydia exhausted herself examining Ernestine Wickett’s every word and gesture for assurance that the dress she had chosen to wear conveyed the proper respect without suggesting she was spending too much of her father-in-law’s money.
    Michael was the only guest who seemed to feel at home at the Somerset flat. Like any Southie bachelor, Michael acknowledged the city across the bridge onlyon weekends, when he visited Scollay Square or Fenway. Initially Lydia and Henry’s had been the first stop on Scollay evenings for Michael and his friends, many of whom Lydia had known since first grade, but the visits had struck Henry as improper. Whether they were improper or not Lydia could not say, but it was certainly true that Henry did not know what to do during these social calls. Though the fellows were polite and Henry and Michael shared a certain rapport, her husband not being Southie-born precluded his joining most conversations. After a time Lydia would realize that her husband was no longer in the sitting room. And when it came out that Lydia, before becoming Mrs. Wickett, had accompanied a few of Michael’s friends to matinees at the Imperial, that was the end of that.
    Henry remembers objecting not to the matinees but to the liquid appetites of Michael’s Southie chums, who by evenings end would grow too garrulous for the modest parlor.
    Occasionally Michael still came to the West end alone. Lydia loved that he draped himself across the divan just like it was the sofa at 28 D Street, and that he drank his beer straight from the bottle. Because she never knew when to expect him, she always finished her Saturday errands early, just in case. She would wait a few moments before answering Michael’s knock, hiding the extent of her gratitude for his arrival, afraid it might scare him off.
    Mick knew just how badly his sister wanted for visitors, which is why he came every month—even when there was nothing doing at Scollay or Fenway.
    At least once a week, but never on Saturday—because Lydia hated to think that she might miss one of her brother’s visits—Henry would grasp her hand after dinner and lead her to the bedroom. According to
Marriage and Parenthood: The Catholic Ideal
, with which Father O’Brian had equipped Lydia the week prior to her wedding, intercourse was to be completed as quickly as possible in order to preserve its power andto keep it from becoming disgusting. But even
The Catholic Ideal
—which Lydia found fusty and which told her nothing she and Margaret Kelly had not deduced by the time they were fourteen—did not call it a sin for a husband and wife to enjoy each other’s bodies while engaging in their Catholic duty. Having grown up within the confines of three thin-walled rooms, Lydia knew what that enjoyment sounded like, but neither she nor Henry made the sounds she thought they ought to make. Henry’s passionate—but in retrospect vague—letters had implied a certain level of worldliness that he refuted with shy pride their first night together, explaining that as a surrogate he had carefully studied the relevant portions of his medical texts. On their wedding night, as if to prove his diligence, he whispered the Latin names of their respective anatomies as they lay together, a tutorial that ended when Lydia confessed that the words reminded her of Sunday Mass. The ensuing silence was briefly interrupted when Lydia attempted to imitate sounds she remembered emanating from her parents’ bed, but her performance so startled Henry that he shrieked like a girl. The brisk performance that followed removed any lingering doubts regarding Henry’s naiveté. This left Lydia secretly disappointed. Among her girlfriends it had been agreed that while it was fine for a husband to claim inexperience, it was best if