Authors: Deborah Henry
“I’ll be locked up if Sister Paulinas knew I told you.” Marian put her hand slowly on the table as if trying not to frighten away a stray cat.
“Where? Just tell me. I won’t have you locked up if you tell me. Tell me which orphanage.”
Nurse retrieved a tattered note from her wallet and placed it on the table. “You could try Silverbridge for a start.”
“Silverbridge…”
“Same orphanage I grew up in. No, no—I visit him when I drop off babies. I dropped him in there myself. But now he’s having rows. Some of the teasers took him from his cot and locked him in the boiler room with the rats overnight, then beat him in front of everyone for wetting his pants. I was there the one day he had his wet knickers on his head and the boys were all chanting, ‘He thought he was a sailor of the sea, but he was a sailor of the pee!’ No, no—I couldn’t bear it. He’s not looking well.”
She could tell Nurse was about to speak more and Marian furtively put her finger to her lips.
“You had no right coming to Donnybrook.”
“No post here.”
“Stop listening to Sister Paulinas for everything. If you had mailed that letter, my husband would have come to save me and Adrian.”
Nurse looked down.
When Nurse and Sister Paulinas had arrived in the nursery, all those years ago, Sister Penis barked at Marian to come over to them.
“What age children do you teach?” Sister Penis asked.
“Kindergarten and first year.”
“At the Zion School?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that for Jewish children?”
“Sure, for the most part.”
“And have you made many friends amongst the Jews?”
“Not really,” she said, looking away.
“No?”
Marian shook her head. “I just hope to keep my job.”
Silence from Sister.
“Sister?”
“What is it now, Francie?”
“May I hold Adrian?”
“Who’s Adrian? Oh.” She peered into the cubicle as Claudette was burping him. “This is our first Jew-boy,” she said, turning to face her.
Marian flushed, her blood pumping hard.
“He’s been baptized already,” Sister continued, staring at her.
“I did it myself.”
“Thank you, Sister,” Marian managed.
“I’m scarlet for you. You’re ashamed aren’t you?”
“Yes, Sister. Of my sins. But not of this child,” she added, taking him from Claudette. “His father has inquired about conversion,
Sister.” All she could think of was her baby’s safety, and she would have said anything.
Sister made the sign of the cross over Adrian. “Good for him.
We pray for the perfidious Jews.”
Marian had lowered her eyes.
“Do you recognize this?” Sister Penis pulled the letter from her pocket.
Marian glanced at Nurse, who averted her eyes.
“He seems quite the man with quite a journalism career in front of him. Do you really think he wants the likes of you? Are you trying to create a scandal for the poor fellow?”
Marian looked at her letter in Sister’s hand but kept her mouth shut as Sister left the nursery.
Nurse kept her head down still. Marian had always known Nurse felt remorse about the letter incident; she had to imagine there was something decent about her.
“I pray for him—no, no. It fell out of my pocket.”
“I have to get back to my family,” Marian said.
Nurse pressed down her uniform. “I thought you’d want to know he’s in trouble. I was helping you, I thought.”
“No. I don’t want your help.”
“The farmer family returned him,” Nurse said. “Sister Paulinas said he had a face on him that would turn milk sour. Said we’d take care of him, better than some nests, better than those Protestant orphanages which would ruin him.”
“Okay, Nurse,” Marian said. “You told me he was in America,”
Marian repeated.
“No, no—Sister Paulinas said no. ‘Americans come all the way over here to avoid colored genes. How could we give them this one, this Jew?’ she said.”
“But you told me . . .”
“I told you what I hoped would be. You kept asking. You wanted to hear that,” Nurse said.
Marian gazed at a young girl hovering by the industrial sinks and felt faint. She hit the hard floor. First there was the wet, cool towel
behind her neck and then her forehead. Then the close smell of Nurse’s putrid breath above.
“Are you all right, then?” the girl whispered.
“I’m okay, now. Thanks,” Marian said, taking a sip of the sugary tea she was given. She managed to get up. Everything in the room, particularly the girl’s voice grew strangely amplified and uncomfortable.
“I should go,” Marian said.
“I’ll see you out,” Nurse said, and walked next to Marian as she groped the wood plank staircase.
“I gave him up. It was the right thing to do,” Marian said to Nurse as they stood for a moment outside the Home. “An orphanage right in Dublin? All these years?” Marian said.
“I’ve done my job,” Nurse said, looking over at a group of girls waiting in two lines by the side door for Nurse. “No, no—I have to do my job here.”
“Tell me again the name of the orphanage.”
“Silverbridge. Sister Agnes took custody of him years ago, and he’s not one of her special pets, I’m afraid. No, no—he begged me to find you,” Nurse said and scurried toward the side door. She had the girls line up in single file. As Nurse turned to leave, Marian looked at her anxious face, her sincerity hard to ignore. Nurse blushed as she waved goodbye to Marian in front of the inmates, and then stood there shooting prideful glances at the girls like a young child and waited for Marian to wave back.
Marian put her hand in the air, an anger and disgust for herself and for Nurse gyrating inside her. Whatever desperate friendship they had shared had curdled long ago. Still, as wrong as it was for Nurse to have opened the wound, it was not lost on Marian that without Nurse, she would have spent her life wondering. Marian walked back to her car. It had been that bad in there. She would have done anything to survive, and her desperation mortified her. She would have stooped much lower than she did to get out of there. If she had really cared about her newborn, why hadn’t she gone to the Reverend Mother and gotten Father Brennan involved to guarantee Adrian a decent home in America?
She slammed the car door, sped away from her ugly girlhood
mistakes. She felt unrefined and clouded again. How could she have depended so heavily on Nurse? She felt she had been a stupid girl,
a sheep; no wonder Sister Paulinas had so much power in there.
She flipped on the radio, lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, the smell of fresh rain and manure everywhere. Dogs pranced after old men carting wheelbarrows through the fields as she drove through the near-deserted country roads.
By dusk she was back in Donnybrook. Marian shut off the car engine and sat there, looking from across the street at their brownstone. Although at times as punishment for her sins she forced herself to remember, she never shared her unspeakable shame with anyone. But now that the facts had come into stark relief she could no longer keep from Ben the secret of Adrian’s birth eleven years ago.
And, oh God. Johanna.
Once Marian left, she never gave second thought if Nurse was as slow as she appeared. Nurse watched Officer Dolan glance at her and then look toward the shed, and she dawdled a bit longer inside before she left for her refectory duties. The hell with them, these girls, draining her morning, noon and night, Nurse thought. She often lay awake, her strained eyes closed, listening to staccato sobs that echoed through the dark halls. Well she needed a break from their pain, and the shed was her break, so to speak. She made it her business this spring to enter the shed in full sight of Officer Dolan. She swept the place out, made it useful for storing more than kindling and a rusty wheelbarrow. Perhaps hooks could be nailed in, a place to keep an umbrella or two, a few mackintoshes, muddy boots could be left to dry. Odd what a crush will do to you, odd the extra energy it brings. And now he’s seen her with Marian, too, and knows there’s a lot more to her than this job.
After the girls said their prayers, they rushed like animals into their chairs, grabbing at the crusty bread she left in the small room off the refectory. She trusted Marian, knew she needed the information about Adrian and felt good all over seeing her again. Yes, she felt an unaccustomed happiness remembering Francie’s hugs so long ago.
Perhaps Francie could still be her friend. “Not Francie, you mentaller,” she whispered to herself.
That is Marian. She’s out of this place and her name is never Francie anymore. Your real name is not Nurse. Get that through you, you mentaller.
Nurse sat on her cot and thought to the future now. She would have more connection to the outside. Marian, that one had been
determined to get out of here as quickly as she could. She would never forget that about her. No, no—she was a good one. Nurse would have to think hard about Marian telling her not to be afraid to send a letter out of there. She carefully wrote a little note and pressed it inside a thin diary she kept hidden. She touched the photo of her baby daughter Beth pasted inside the diary’s back flap. Twenty years old, she’d be now.
She took out her little penknife and methodically cut the inside of one thigh, just enough so that she could feel. Watching the thin line of blood kept her vital, cleared the sadness from her mind.
She reminded herself that she must remain a help, not a hindrance, if she hoped to stay in good stead with Sister Paulinas. She won a better fate than many. Room and board. A roof over her head. And a respectable job, Sister Paulinas told her. She must remain good and quiet at Castleboro, or be returned to the Magdalene laundry.
She cut herself again. Blood was good; blood made babies.
Nurse watched the small dot become bloated before she dabbed her thigh to stop the blood from getting on her sheets. To keep the blood off the sheets must have been why Sister Paulinas had pushed Marian forward onto the chromium commode, so shiny Nurse could see any anal swelling as the girl progressed toward birth.
“I need to lie down,” Marian said.
“You need nothing of the sort. This is the fastest way for the baby to come down,” Sister told her.
“Oh, God, please,” Marian said.
“It’s a little late to be asking God for anything,” she retorted.
This manner of child delivery, a recent demand from Sister Paulinas, was unfamiliar to Nurse, and she worried the baby would drown in urine and amniotic fluid on the bottom of the commode.
“Put a blanket around her. I'm going to the convent. See that she doesn’t disturb the new mothers with her whining. And keep her on the commode.”
“Yes, Sister.” Nurse wrapped a blanket around Marian’s shoulders.
But as the head was crowning, Nurse moved her to the bed. The final push, and then the cry. A six-pound baby boy was born.