Authors: Deborah Henry
Marriage was certainly not easy, she considered. True, she was so unpredictable. One minute alive and smiling, and lots of other minutes dead to the world, a haunted mask hanging on her face. Ben could never predict what frame of mind she would be in when he got home. More often than not, though, it was not the sexual mood she was in last night. What was up with women and their moods? he jokingly said. On more than one occasion. He’d even asked Jerry, but Jerry only offered a sheepish grin. His wife was the same. The honeymoon was long over, and Jerry and Marcia didn’t even have a kid yet. He would walk past his old, cobblestone street soon. His mother would probably be waiting for him. Was Ben lying? Was this, in truth, the
third
Friday in a month that he’d made his way to synagogue following this route? The loneliness for the familiar smells, the jokes, the people, all of it, was eating him up inside. As it was, he’d brought Jo to meet his mother twice already, and she would soon blurt this out, no doubt. Johanna saw Marian’s Ma at least once a month. Why should she be denied her other grandmother? “Where is my other Gran? Why doesn't my other Gran come over?” Johanna asked incessantly before the visits to Little Jeru-salem had begun.
Women, Ben concluded recently, would have to get over it. He’d be the one to lead the way, he added. “You and Mammy might actually like each other now,” he said. “Who could know?”
If Marian had been a Jew, it would certainly have been easier, yes. She could hear the Jewish community arguing with him, but
better
? He had fallen for Marian the second he’d seen her on the Zion School playground, of all places. It had been a hazy September afternoon and he’d remarked to some of the older students about the redhead teaching in this Jewish institution. Marian had retorted that it seems some of us haven’t learned that we don’t judge the book by the cover, and the kids had said she was hot under the collar when she’d made her hasty retreat. From that moment on, he knew she was the one. Love is like that. It felt like a strange familiarity, as if they’d waited their whole lives for this chance encounter, as if they’d somehow met before. He had made his choice in love, so what woman could be better than her? What child could be better than Johanna? No, there was no one better, even on her bad days, he joked. Still, she felt a private unhappiness. She wished things had gone slower, that their delirious love hadn’t got out of whack.
If he passed the Hatch Street Nursery where he was born, no doubt he thought of Tatte and Johanna. Marian pictured his maidelah walking hand-in-hand with him, up and down the bustling streets, just like he’d done with his own father. She felt the deep melancholy of missing someone. A flash of embarrassment went through her as she remembered that Ben had once spied her cradling a doll in her arms, listening to some old fogie tune of her da’s, and he’d gone upstairs without a word. With their ambiguous start, she’d lost so much more than he had, really. Her miserable guess was that she was living in a state of heartbreak more often than she let on.
“Marian, you look benkshaft these days,” Ben said last week.
Johanna was a handful since she’d learned sports, which she somehow couldn’t keep outside. Always the basketball bouncing in the kitchen or those damn tennis balls underneath Marian’s feet. That one was so fast that it was hard for either of them to keep up. In private, this was surely a source of pride for him; he’d been an athlete once, too. But for her, Jo’s headstrong ways were taxing. She went to the emergency room twice in four months from the bangs Johanna had taken on the playing fields. She needed some quiet time away from the noise of raising a child. She decided that as soon as he got home, she would suggest that he take her dancing or to the cinema, or to sit up very late at the Green Tureen on Harcourt Street. She remembered when they first dated, he took her to the Shelbourne for high tea. He wiped her mouth decorously, incapable of suppressing a genuine smile, the clotted cream she lopped onto her scone an obvious treat. He touched her buttery cheek then, and she smiled and leaned over, and they kissed.
He’d be walking up Bloomfield Avenue by now, crowds of
Yiddishkeit
everywhere bellowing on the hectic street, the smell of smoked fish rising like a vapory veil over the neighborhood. A world unto itself. He’d be glancing into the busy store windows, the boot maker, Freedman’s Grocery, and Betty Fine’s Drapery. He’d stroll past handsome brownstones, gold Stars of David visible on window ledges, apple trees lining vegetable gardens, beefsteak red tomatoes in baskets on front stoops. Ben would look at girls covered by their dark coats coming out of Barron’s, bags of coconut macaroons under their arms, their youthful faces peeping out from their scarves. He would make his way toward the canal, the smell of sour fish from the bins and the atrocious smells coming from the canal would bring back boyhood memories of stick ball in short pants until the street lamps came on.
From a distance, Marian imagined that he would see his “delicate” mother yakking to someone in front of the house, her hands still doing a lot of the talking. Nothing that ingrained could have changed, and, yet, things were not the same. Marian had admitted last night that she became furious when she remembered that as a girl she’d allowed others to think for her. She wouldn’t allow Johanna to make the same mistakes she’d made, and she would not allow her to be afraid of Mr. Hinckley. But Ben had no worries about Johanna sticking up for herself, that she would was obvious. All these talkative, strong women in his life had a lot in common, he said.
Ben, though, I am different.
She fluctuated between listless and forceful. Even though they were all mysterious to him, especially her, after ten years with his little family, Ben said that he felt life was pretty good. Johanna should not be denied her family. Johanna should have both her grandmothers. No one’s parent should be left behind, he said. He would not be the type of man who would walk away from his beloved family,
she knew this.
She imagined Ben bending down now to kiss his mother hello.
The drive down to Castleboro Mother Baby Home wasn’t as long as it seemed that first time, when Marian rode in the backseat. What she remembered was the scorching silence. This time she had the radio on low, but she turned it off as she sat in the parking lot. She watched the fog bleed over everything and listened to the moans of the motionless cows. She could not bring herself to look at the buildings and gazed far beyond into the verdant farm pastures with their bungalows and haystacks and bales of straw like the shredded wheat cereal Jo might have for breakfast back home. Finally Marian looked over at the Motherhouse, an imposing pewter residence with double stone doors, a slot letterbox used by the nuns to peek at anyone who used the cast iron door knocker. Statues of religious figures stood beside each door, one a saintly-looking woman with eyes rolled back too far in her head, the other a depiction of Mary Magdalene, a black serpent entwined in her bare feet. Marian pictured the Reverend Mother, with watery eyes, her cheeks like plums embossed into her plump face, sitting by the electric fire, and she remembered the feeling of being tricked, remembered feeling something was very wrong when Nurse had led her away just minutes after her formal admittance.
Beyond the Mother Baby Home across the gravel driveway, a couple of depleted girls, clad in scant sweaters, sweeping pebbles off the road in the wind and drizzle. It looked worse than before when she’d been so young and indifferent to outer appearances. All that lack of caution was gone. She watched Sister Paulinas enter the van and drive away down the back road. She had given the woman a nickname during her residency, Sister Penis. Marian could tell that Sister was still a willowy nun. Her narrow face peeked through the car window, with the beauty mark on her high drawn cheekbone, which led to arresting eyes. She hadn’t changed much. Marian had counted on Sister Penis’s schedule to be just as it was back then, when she’d leave Nurse in charge of leading the pregnant outcasts to chapel. Every Tuesday meant penance, arms outstretched, without moving, for a quarter of an hour for their lewd sins. She watched from a distance the women in their worn smocks, mantillas on their heads, enter the little cathedral after the nuns, about thirty of them, who would kneel on the far left side of the chapel, the girls on the right. She listened to the women singing, sweet as children, and studied through the pale light the two ash trees at the chapel’s entrance, emaciated now, no more downy leaves gracing them.
The fog settled into her bones. She thought about Ben making a pot of coffee right about now, just before rousing Johanna, or would he take her absence as an opportunity to have his coffee in little Jerusalem. She blocked the thought. The shock of Nurse’s reentry had demanded that petty issues about her life in Donnybrook take on an inconsequential value. What had seemed important had dissolved, and Marian was transported back into her overwhelming past. It was as if Johanna and Ben were eons away from her. She had to hold on to her resolve and the secrets she held to protect Ben and Jo. She opened the car door and stepped onto the gravel, wanting to quiet its crunch, like skeletons underneath her shoes.
She veered to the right; every sound she made was too loud for her. As she skirted past the ancient stone Motherhouse with all its cold magnificence, she peered at the stained glass windows and then walked past the stone pillars toward the Mother Baby Home. Closer now, it looked run down. A concrete slab, it had the feel of a sanatorium, and she could almost hear imaginary shrieks and screams in the locked birthing rooms. She did see real, shadowy figures by the barred windows in the toilets looking down at her, smoke coming from a crack in one window winding and waving like a thin sheet in the air, a desperate SOS call for help. A familiar and uncomfortable heat rose within her. Feeling like an inmate again, she began to lose her composure and wished she could stop the bones beneath her, and stop herself from shaking. They couldn’t lock her up again. She was having trouble swallowing, her throat contracting like a muscular cave; she might choke. But she walked to the front door with its slanting eaves and rows of narrow windows with black iron bars. She decided instead to enter through the side door of the maternity ward. She looked out at the yard, with its three dry evergreen trees, some scattered scrub brush, and a row of unkempt bushes surrounded by an old barbwire fence. She pictured her hard shoe pressing down on noticeable dips in the wire, and she wondered why no one really tried to escape. Here it was so easy to get in. But how many miles would they have gotten before the officers returned them? And where on earth were they to go? How true it was that there was no escape, even if no one knew.
I know, even if I pretend I’ve forgotten the place.
Beyond the fence to the gray horizon were more patchwork fields, meandering and imprecise. She wondered if anyone from afar could see her shameful silhouette. Out in the fields she saw girls spreading fertilizer, and further to the far left, the old silos and creaky farm outhouses, the smell of manure and the raspy churl of crows sickening her again.
At this hour, with Sister Paulinas gone and having rid herself of her charges, Nurse would be having tea in the refectory. Marian made her way toward the front staircase. Two white-clad nuns were whispering down the dark hall that led to the entrance offices where the new girls were signed in. Three bulging girls on the staircase stopped and stared at Marian as she walked upstairs. She bent her head down in concentration, wondering if Sister Paulinas, or anyone who treated the downtrodden so cruelly, could be heard by God. Sister Penis used to tell her she did not appreciate her stubborn, sneaky face, and Marian would just shake her head and walk away. Yes, she was stubborn and came to judge the nuns, remembering the hate she had felt as a small girl, hating the smack of the ruler for the “shifty” look on her face, or for being “vain.” She glanced at the large bodies now in their tattered blue smocks with their hungry glares. These girls with hollow eyes frightened her. Everything seemed even baser and rougher than she remembered. The haze of her younger years had protected her with its numbing fog.
She continued down the frigid hall. There was the smell of mansion polish in the air and two girls shuffled along on the second story, rags tied to their raw feet. She wanted to shake them, stop them from turning into ghosts, stop the shuffling sounds that made everything eerie. It would be hard to run back to the front gates from up here. She felt trapped in the middle of this haunted place.
Marian stalled outside the barren dormitory-style room for a
moment, noticing the linoleum floor polished to a heavy shine, and the two long rows of iron beds made with creased, white sheets and pillows, lumpy, green coverlets on top. Except for a large oak crucifix on one of the whitewashed walls, there was no ornamentation, no individual mark of who slept here, no night tables, no pictures, no flowers. No personal effects of any kind near or under the beds.
“Take off your clothes,” Nurse instructed, those eleven years ago,
scurrying into the room after Marian.
“Excuse me?” A younger, different Marian held tight to her leather satchel. Nurse tilted her head forward, staring with unblinking eyes. She reminded Marian of an old, fat skunk.