The Opposite of Chance

by Margaret Hermes

  “I have been that,” Cliona said through gritted teeth.

  “Harder, then,” Martha corrected.

  On the next contraction, Cliona grunted and groaned with the effort and the women on either side struggled to keep her from pitching forward.

  “Harder still,” said Martha.

  “Shut your gob!” snapped Cliona. The outburst was so unlike her it startled both her mother and Bridie into laughter.

  “Listen, Cliona,” said Martha, “the baby’s bottom is hanging out, but the legs are still tucked up. I need you to get them to follow on the next push. All right?”

  Suddenly there was a loud whistling noise that sounded impossibly, horribly familiar to Cliona. “Ma, it’s a bomb!” she cried.

  “It can’t—” started Sheila Rooney, but it could and it was. The whistling was followed by a horrendous thunderclap and a vibration that shook the house followed by another boom. Sheila got up from her knees and ran to the window. “Dear God in heaven!”

  “Please get back to your daughter’s side, Missus.”

  “But it was a bomb!” Mrs. Rooney protested.

  “The baby doesn’t care about bombs,” Martha said. “And neither can we. No matter what happens out there, we have our work to do in here.”

  Cliona looked up at Sister Martha’s resolute face and thought that, except for the puckering, she was really quite beautiful. Another contraction came. This one’s for Sister Martha, she thought to her little plum as she strained forward. Cliona bore down until little blood vessels burst along her cheeks and forehead, like a sprinkling of purple freckles.

  More whistling and more bombs hitting, explosions and the roar and rumble of brick and wood collapsing.

  “You did it, Cliona! The legs are out. And you’ve got yourself a son.”

  Ted Rooney came running back from wherever he’d gone to escape the birthing. “We’ve got to get out o’ here,” he shouted as he burst through the door. “The DeVaneys’ house is in splinters!” The DeVaneys’ house had been next door.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” Martha said with a gentle shove. “We have work to do.”

  Teddy would have given much to unsee the half-born baby dangling from between his daughter’s thighs as he turned and fled down the stairs. He didn’t leave the building, though. If the women could stand it, so could he. As he made his way toward the press where he kept the bottle of whiskey, it occurred to him to wonder if it weren’t the Brits up there bombing in retaliation for the Republic maintaining its neutrality.

  “Good girl,” Martha said. “Now don’t push. I’m going to reach up my finger and try to hook an arm and pull it down. If we get his arms down and deliver the shoulders, then his head can come.”

  Cliona thought there were too many variables to be left to chance. Too many ifs followed by too many thens. If Martha could hook each arm, if she could deliver the shoulders, if the head would come, if the bombing would stop, if their house would be left standing.

  Bridie reported on the left arm descending. Martha again maneuvered. “It’s going to be all right,” she said as more bombs screamed and buildings imploded.

  As the two women steadied her and Martha reached around and up inside her, Cliona shuddered with pain and the thought that not only had the War followed her home from London but it had deliberately chosen this very night to do so. What was the opposite of chance?

  This was the proof she had needed of a higher power. The air strike could have happened anywhere at any time, but it was happening right here and now. On her street on the night she was to give birth. She vowed that if she and her child were spared, she would return to the Church. “God, forgive me,” she said softly and then the head came out and, at last, she heard her son’s cry.

  In Cliona’s mind, her notions of War and God’s reckoning would forevermore be conflated if not interchangeable.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” Sheila Rooney beseeched, concentrating on aspirating her H’s and hoping that “now” and “the hour of our death” were not coincidental. Then she got up from her knees.

  “Amen,” Bridie said as Mrs. Rooney went downstairs to put the kettle on.

  Bridie and Martha stayed the night. All agreed that while mother and child were resting well, it was still too dangerous for the midwives to be out on the streets, though none was foolish enough to think being indoors afforded any real protection.

  The morning brought great sorrow. Neighbors had died or were in hospital. Not only was the DeVaney house demolished, but bombs had left craters in the next two houses on the other side. And in the house after that, the only thing left standing was a staircase to nowhere. There was no denying that God had chosen to preserve the Rooney house.

  It was as if North Strand Road had been the target of the Luftwaffe. The air raid had killed dozens and destroyed seventy houses on Dublin’s Northside. No one could understand why Ireland’s neutrality had been violated. Germany declared it an error and promised reparations. Winston Churchill later admitted that the British had invented a device to distort Luftwaffe radio-guidance beams and that might have succeeded in throwing the planes off course that night. But Cliona continued to believe the attack divine in origin, not determined by anything man-made.

  But the morning brought relief as well as grief. No member of the Rooney clan had been injured and, miraculously, Mrs. DeVaney was alive. She had been out back in the jacks when her house was hit. The body of her husband buried under the debris, she had been found sitting amid the rubble in shock, but she at least was safe.

  Sheila Rooney fretted all this would cause Cliona to relive the night she lost Arlen Jones to the London Blitz. It was only diabolical that her poor daughter had to give birth during the bombing. New mothers were shaky enough without such horrors, past and present.

  But there was joy as well. Everyone agreed Declan was a fine baby—already a dimple decorated his chin, marking him for great things. Serene Sister Martha pronounced him not only unimpaired by his perilous birth but uncommonly sturdy.

  To the delight and amazement of her family, Cliona not only declared herself renewed in her Catholicism but she refused to delay the baby’s baptism for even the customary month of confinement following the birth. She thought it unlikely there would be a repeat of the night’s bombing now that she was returned to the Church, but she saw no point in taking chances with the little plum’s soul.

  For a time, the house on the North Strand Road was as crowded as it had been when Cliona was little. Joining her and Declan and Ted and Sheila Rooney was the newly widowed Mrs. DeVaney and Cliona’s oldest sister and her brood, whose house had shattered as if it had been bone china. Miraculously, they had all been away visiting her mother-in-law in Wicklow.

  Catherine Ann was a real war widow. Along with thousands of his fellow soldiers, her husband had deserted from the Irish Army to join the British and fight Hitler. Catherine Ann’s return to the Rooney house provided another set of hands and eyes on the new baby, and before long, Cliona was able to begin classes at the college run by the Dominicans, where she learned double-entry bookkeeping, by which she was able to support herself and her son even after her parents had passed and her sister remarried.

  Declan had been a good son to her. Once he began working at The Abbey, he would purchase for his mother a ticket for every opening-night performance. Declan believed that the shock of the tragic death of his father and his own birth within a few months of each other had traumatized his young mother as well as forced her to give up her acting career. Though she seldom spoke of his father, she had quietly devoted herself to his memory. Some of Declan’s mates and even his cousins referred to the house on the North Strand Road as The Convent as his mother led a nunlike existence there (and they enjoyed saying he worked at The Abbey and she lived in The Convent). Cliona made it clear to all comers
—and there had been quite a few—that she was done with romance except for what she could view on the silver screen (where, thankfully, the lovers kept their clothes on).

  Cliona enjoyed the performances at The Abbey as much for viewing the opening-night audience as for watching the plays. She still preferred films to theater. A measure of her preference was that for the forty-six days of Lent each year, Cliona gave up going to the movies. But she’d still attend an opening night at The Abbey during Lent as giving up the theater would have been no great sacrifice.

  She arranged two cups and saucers on the tray along with the steeping teapot and a plate of toast and a pot of loganberry jam and returned to the front room, where Declan had remained, in a trance to all appearances.

  “I didn’t see you at Mass this morning,” she said. She settled herself in the chair opposite and poured both cups.

  “I went, though. To Our Lady Queen of Heaven. You know, the airport church.”

  She nodded. “Agnes phoned last night,” she said as she handed him his tea.

  He went from a slouch to bolt upright. “What did you tell her?”

  She rearranged the items on the tray. She wanted to give him time to worry. “I told her you were out celebrating the Merrion Street mayhem and that you’d probably get back too late to ring her. What else would I be tellin’ her?”

  Declan slumped back into his chair.

  “Agnes said she’d seen pictures of the battle with the gardai on the news in Bath and she was sure you’d been in the thick o’ things. I said you were only in and out of the house with not a moment’s breath to report on your participation, but that you looked well enough. ‘No permanent harm done,’ I said.”

  Declan shifted uncomfortably. “Did she say how the tour is going?”

  “Standin’ room only the last weekend in Bath.”

  “And where are they off to now?”

  “They’re off to Cardiff.” She looked at her son. She never saw Rolly in him, thanks be to God. He was better looking, for one thing. She had always thought him kinder and more honorable too. She asked herself if she had thought that because he was hers and it pleased her to think so. Maybe he was like Rolly after all, and all the other men who had come sniffing around in the decades that followed. “But Agnes isn’t going on with them. She’s left the tour. She said to tell you that your wife is comin’ home.”

  And Back

  15.

  Bleary-eyed, Betsy emerged from Customs at Mitchell Airport. She searched for a familiar face among those waiting beyond the mesh barrier and found none. Her gaze dropped to a pair of familiar brown leather huaraches. The woman wearing them was holding a hand-lettered sign in front of her face that read:

  Amelia

  Earhart

  Betsy tapped on the sign. “Really?” she said.

  Gina lowered the cardboard and grinned. “It was beginning to feel like you were never coming back.” Betsy put down her backpack and the sisters hugged.

  “Careful,” Betsy said. “I have a sore arm.”

  “My God,” Gina scrunched up her nose as she pulled away. “You smell like . . . like a giant loaf of banana bread.”

  “I know. I know. There’s a banana peel wrapped around my upper arm. I was hanging into the aisle half the flight to spare the poor man seated next to me.” She shook her head. “Where are the twins?” She swiveled, expecting to see a pair of three-year-old boys pop up from behind a row of seats.

  “They’d better be in bed. It’s almost ten.”

  “Bed,” Betsy yawned. “I want some of that.”

  “Sorry. No sleep for you. Not yet.” She hoisted her sister’s backpack and headed for the door. “I want to hear everything.”

  “You do realize it’s like, I don’t know, five in the morning for me?”

  “Okay, then. Not everything. The banana peel compress can wait. Just some things.”

  “One thing. And then you’ll leave me alone until morning?”

  “Only if you give me the best you’ve got.”

  “That’s easy.” Betsy stopped and waited for her sister to turn back around and face her. “I’m in love.” She enjoyed watching her sister’s jaw drop.

  Gina was practiced in the art of quick recovery. “Is he titled? Rolling in money? I wouldn’t mind having a duke or an earl for a brother-in-law.”

  “He’s wonderful and principled.” She considered a moment. “Not conventionally handsome. More like ruggedly good looking in a burned-out super hero sort of way.”

  “Uh, oh. Sounds like he’s probably insolvent. Is he employed at least?”

  “He’s a theater lighting technician.”

  “So semi-employed. I know those theater types. That’s why I married a dentist. Is he interested in you or a green card?”

  “I only wish he wanted to move here.”

  “Does this wonderful, principled theater guy have a name?”

  “Yes, a wonderful name. Declan Jones. And he’s not a theater type. He’s an electrician.”

  “What kind of name is Declan?”

  “Irish.”

  “And that makes him—?”

  “Irish. Half Irish, to be precise. The Jones half is English.”

  “Oh. Now as to your options, either don’t tell Mom or just refer to him as Mr. Jones. If you do decide to tell her he’s Irish, promise me you’ll wait until I’m there to watch.”

  Betsy stopped at her sister’s bedroom door after she’d put her nephews to bed and announced, “I should tell you guys I’m embarking on my new career with a new name. Well, not new, I’m reclaiming my birth name.”

  Gina was puzzled. “But you already took back your birth name when you went through the divorce.”

  “Elizabeth. Shouldn’t be any problem at the library—they don’t know me by any other name.”

  “But why? You’ve always been Betsy.”

  “Because I prefer it.”

  “Since when?”

  “A long time, I guess. But I can tell you exactly when I decided to do something about it: the night I stayed at that creepy hotel at the port in Le Havre.”

  “The boys will still call you Betsy, you know,” Gina said.

  “Maybe. Our bedtime conversation tonight wasn’t solely about steam engines and dump trucks. We had a nice chat about how I was Betsy when I went away and how I became Elizabeth while I was over there. They seemed to like the idea that I came back a different person. Anyway, when I left the room, they were already calling me Elizabeth. Well, Whizbeff, to be precise. If you like, you can call me Whizbeff too.”

  Each day when Elizabeth left work and returned to Gina and Matt’s house, she sifted through the basket on the table by the front door that held incoming mail. And each day, not finding a letter, she asked Gina if there was “by chance” any other mail, and each day she was disappointed.

  “Why don’t you just write to him?” her sister finally asked.

  “I would but I don’t have his address. He has mine. And he’s living at his mother’s right now and I don’t know her name or how she would be listed.”

  “You said he worked at the Abbey Theatre. You could write to him there.”

  “That feels desperate. Like I’m stalking him.”

  “He could have lost the scrap of paper with your address and right now be praying for you to get in touch.”

  “No. He couldn’t have lost my address. It wasn’t on a piece of paper. I wrote it in a book.”

  In the weeks since her return, she kept remembering, reliving, reveling, spending much more time thinking about Declan than they had spent together. Several times a day she heard him say she was a well-spoken lass and smiled to herself. Even more times a day she felt his mouth on hers and lifted her fingertips to her lips. She went to sleep with him each night and woke with him each morning. Their brief time
together expanded inside her.

  He had said he wasn’t much of a letter writer—she remembered everything he’d said including that—but they both knew he would write to her. She worried that he had been caught up in another demonstration, that he had been arrested, that he was already isolated and wasting away in one of those wretched H blocks. At the library she sifted through international news sources for coverage of Dublin and found nothing specific to encourage or alarm her.

  She worried he had been hit by a bus.

  Elizabeth sat staring at the Scrabble board. “It’s your turn,” Gina prompted.

  “Sorry.”

  “Your mind is definitely elsewhere,” Matt said.

  “Dublin,” Gina nodded.

  “Actually a lot closer to home.” Elizabeth looked from one to the other. “Now that I’m feeling comfortable with the job and getting a regular paycheck, I think it’s time I look for a place of my own.”

  “No!” said Gina.

  “We would be happy if you’d think of this place as your home,” Matt said.

  “We thought you did,” Gina sulked.

  “I have,” Elizabeth said. “You guys made that easy. Maybe too easy. I’m really grateful. You got me back on my feet. But it’s time for those feet to do some walking. I’m going to look for someplace to rent on the East Side, closer to the library.”

  “What about the twins?” Gina threw out in desperation. “How can you even think about abandoning them? They’ll be broken-hearted.”

  “High drama,” her sister lifted one eyebrow. “I gather this is a warm-up for your audition next week.”

  “God, I’m so tired,” Elizabeth sighed as she came into the house. She looked enviously at her nephew Doug, who was snoring gently on the couch, and collapsed into the chair closest to the front door.

  “Pssst. Dennis, remember?” Gina beckoned the other twin sotto voce from the kitchen doorway. “We’ve got a surprise that will make your Aunt Elizabeth really happy.”

  Dennis darted past his mother into the kitchen and returned with an envelope. “He-ah, Aunt Whizbeff,” he said solemnly as he thrust the slim blue rectangle at his aunt.