“Yes. You did.”
“Two heartbeats.”
“Yes.”
“Two heartbeats. One heartbeat one day, two the next.”
“It can sometimes be difficult to—”
“Two children,” I said and pressed my fingernails into the palms of my hands to keep from crying.
“Yes. God willing,” he said.
“It is wonderful how the will of God corresponds so perfectly with yours.” I swallowed down a great gulp of grief that hurt so much I thought my throat would burst. I felt it rising back and swallowed again. I couldn’t catch my breath. Two children unaware that I was their mother. The sorrow of relinquishing one child did not lend itself to measurement. But somehow, with an effort that had numbed and exhausted me, I had forced it down below the threshold of my soul. Perhaps, in time, the sorrow would have erupted anyway. But now it would not be contained. I had nothing left to hold it back. Sorrow seemed to pour through a massive perforation, flooding the empty, bone-dry chambers of my heart, my soul some inner organ I thought I had but until now had never felt. I lost all sense of my body, had no idea what it was doing, could not see or hear or feel it. I wondered if the end of all this might be death.
“You fainted,” he was saying.
I was lying on the floor beside the bed. His hands were on my shoulders, preventing me from climbing to my feet.
“Sheilagh,” he said, “we know that you are scared. It’s normal. But we’ll take good care of you. And the children.” The children. Not mine, not his. They would be no one’s until after I was gone.
“They’ll be like me, you know,” I said. “Have you thought about that? Twenty years of me times two. That’s what you have to look forward to. Twenty years of their father times two. You’ve never met their father. If you had, you would never have agreed to take these children. But now it’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve told the whole world that your wife is expecting. Your order has gone through and it’s too late to cancel it. They’ll be just like him and me. You’ll never have a moment’s peace. You’ll end up like my father. She’ll end up like—”
I heard my own voice as if it were shouting from another room. He’d pulled me up, was holding me by the wrists and at the same time pressing me down into the bed, all because some girl in the other room was shouting. Miss Long and my mother were there on either side of the bed as if, by attending to me, they could make that other girl stop yelling.
Seconds, minutes, hours later? The room was dark and there was someone in a chair beside the bed. My mother? I might have been dreaming, might have dreamt I heard my mother whisper, “You will never know how hard it was for me to leave you. I would not have left you were it not for him.”
I asked Dr. Breen no questions about what the event itself would be like. I didn’t want to know what someone who had never given birth imagined it felt like. I wanted only to be freed from these two rooms. I read incessantly to populate my mind with other people, other lives. All I had to fear was sleep, which I fought by walking round the suite, trying to pace so softly that no one in the house would hear, though invariably Miss Long or my mother came to my room and told me that Dr. Breen had ordered me to sleep because the babies and I would soon need all the sleep that I was missing.
And so every night, in spite of telling myself that I could lie wide-eyed on this bed for the balance of my life, I gave in to fitful, dream-heavy sleep. The children I would never know did not figure in these dreams, nor did my mother or father or Dr. Breen or Miss Long. They were dreams almost as devoid of content, almost as empty as my womb was soon to be. Almost entirely tactile, gravid dreams in which a featureless weight seemed to make its way into my core and pull me down and make me feel as though my very spirit was in slow descent, waning, falling, as though my soul was seeping from me, and my no-longer-buoyant being would soon have sunk to such a depth that it would never float back up. It took all my will to bring my self back to the surface, to the darkness of my room, or to the light of the day I prayed would be the last of my confinement.
The labour and delivery I passed in a delirium of laudanum. First I drank down what Dr. Breen called “a dram of something that will calm your nerves.” From behind the sheet that divided one-half of my body from the other and by which my arms were trussed to my sides and my torso to the bed, I heard Dr. Breen and Miss Long conferring in whispers.
Miss Long assisted Dr. Breen. I wondered where my mother was. Because of the sheet, I could not see what they were doing. Nor could I even feel very much or identify what I was feeling. As parts of me were touched that had never been touched before, it seemed that they had never been there before, had just now come into being, created by his hands. What the babies felt I could not feel and this surprised me. I had imagined that it would be like losing a limb or having an organ extracted. I felt only the impressions that their bodies made on mine. I felt the babies, first one and then the other, leave my body as though I were expelling them without assistance. Miss Long, before Dr. Breen drew back the sheet, removed them from the room. High-pitched squeals that took on a kind of seesawing rhythm as though the babies were answering each other’s cries. A door opening and closing. And then silence.
“A boy and a girl,” Dr. Breen said in reply to my question.
“Which was born first?”
“The girl.”
“Will you ever tell the children I am their mother?” I asked my mother.
“No.”
“Not even when they are grown and old enough to be trusted with a secret?”
“I cannot see what good it would do anyone, including you.”
“So you will let them take this misapprehension to their graves.”
“You make it all sound so sinister.”
“I’m left-handed.”
“We cannot, of course, control what you will do. Especially after we are gone. But it would be selfish, don’t you think, to disrupt their lives, throw them into confusion, just to satisfy some ill-conceived notion of yours?”
“An ill-conceived notion for ill-conceived children.”
“Believe me, it is often the kindest thing to withhold the truth. Why would you be here if you did not think so yourself?”
“We are all liars.”
“In service of a greater good. I can think of thousands of examples.”
“Yes. So can I. Will you send me photographs?”
“It might be best for you if we did not.”
“Perhaps I know best what’s best for me.”
“You are far too young for such self-knowledge. It would be best, Sheilagh, best for everyone, if you did not communicate with us once you leave this house. You have your own life to look forward to. And you will be better able to live it if you leave us to ours. It will take courage. No one knows that better than I do. I was not much older than you are now when I left you.”
“You see your abandonment of me when I was six as an act of courage?”
“Yes, I do. Though I do not mean to hurt you by saying so. And that is all that I will say about it.”
“If that was courage, I can only pray that I remain a coward all my life.”
“Perhaps you will.”
“The babies really will look nothing like you,” I told Dr. Breen. “Have you thought of that? They will not have the Breen family look, whatever that might be. I’ll bet you were hoping for a son, at least one son. A son and heir, in whom there will run not one drop of Breen blood. And what if both of them had been girls? Would you have kept bringing pregnant girls in here until you got a boy?”
“How could a girl like you be your mother’s daughter?” he said, shaking his head.
“Why did you marry her?”
“What?”
“Why did you marry her? Why would a man like you, from a family like yours, marry her? A woman who was known to be divorced. And to have had a child by her first marriage. And to have been born a Catholic.”
“You’ve heard of love, perhaps?”
He turned, his face so engorged with blood I doubted he would make it to the door. But he did and locked it loudly behind him, giving the key such an emphatic, savage twist that it shook the room.
I had put aside my wit for common insults that, though probably true, had been the measure of my defeat. The girl behind the wit had been spooked from her hiding place like a rabbit by a pack of hounds. He, they, had won. They knew it. Had known it before the babies came. All that remained was for me to leave the house. I would make no more “remarks.” They would be magnanimous, polite, attentive, solicitous, even kind in victory, and their magnanimity would be unbearable.
They had known that when it came to relinquishing my child, my wit would let me down, my bravado would vanish. They had foreseen what I had not. I had thought I could hold up until I left the house, perhaps maintain my composure even in some place of perfect privacy, maintain it forever. Two heartbeats.
I would stay in the house, in the suite, Dr. Breen said, until he decided I was well enough to travel.
I lived in dread of hearing the babies crying, but even late at night I did not hear them. I wondered if they had been taken from the house, not to be returned until after my departure. But I did not ask my mother or Dr. Breen for fear that their response, whatever it was, would increase my agitation.
Day after day, Dr. Breen examined me and told me it was not yet safe for me to leave.
“Not safe for you,” I said. “Nor my mother.” That was something they could not afford, having me fall ill on the ship to Newfoundland or in the weeks after my homecoming and, upon being examined by a doctor who might not be my father, be found to be suffering from after-birth complications.
It was three weeks before he pronounced me ready to leave. Three interminable weeks. Whenever I woke, the gown I wore was wet with milk. Those weeks might have been unbearable if not for what he called his “pain potions,” which made me numb. I stared at my still-swollen belly for hours without so much as a single thought passing through my mind.
I did not even know if the babies were in the house when I left it, left it at night by the same route and in the same manner that I had entered it six months before. Except that now it was summer. A winter and a spring had come and gone since I had last set foot outdoors. Now, in Manhattan, in early summer, the night air was warmer than I had ever known it to be in Newfoundland.
I had barely taken a single breath of fresh air before the door of the carriage closed behind me and Dr. Breen drew the curtains just as my father, six months ago, had done.
A great trunk of books was loaded onto the back of the carriage. An absurdly long, drawn-out transaction was at last complete. The house had what it wanted. And I had a trunkload of books.
Only shortly before I left did I learn the names of my children. Someone else, presumably my mother and Dr. Breen, had chosen them. As was their right since it was they who would be raising them and pretending to the world that they were theirs. It was my mother who told me what their names were after the ceremony had taken place without me, its date and time and very fact of its occurrence withheld from me, told me what they had been christened at their baptisms. In fact, she did not “tell” me but left a note on my pillow the night before I left the house. “Their names are David and Sarah” was all it said. Not “I” or “We” have named them but “Their names are.”
Authoritative, beyond question. You’d think they were following instructions. I had never allowed myself to speculate what names I might have chosen under different circumstances. Not even while I was pregnant had I thought about what the baby’s name might be or who would choose it.
I thought of my father, whom I was soon to see again. After “diagnosing” me and after a short but intense period of solitary rage that he had taken no pains to prevent me from overhearing, he had handled everything. “Ruined,” he shouted, “ruined by this galoot of a girl. I might not even be her father. God only knows who it might be. No daughter of mine would do such a thing, only a daughter of hers, the daughter of the woman who betrayed me.”
I provided her with two children in each of whom ran one-quarter of my mother’s blood.
Perhaps that was the point, that there was less of her ex-husband in them, her grandchildren, than there was in me. That there was also less of her own blood in them than there was, is, in me did not matter as much. How she must have come to despise my father, I thought, during their short marriage. She renounced me, her own daughter, because half of me was him.
Their names are David and Sarah. I took the note and put it in my pocket purse, a dark blue velvet purse with opposing clasps that could be eased open but that snapped shut loudly. Since then I have carried the purse with me, everywhere, always, kept it on my person or, at bedtime, stored it safely somewhere; even throughout my years in New York and at the San. I often take it out and read it or, without unfolding it, merely look at it, before replacing it. I have never felt the need to be discreet about it, except around my father. No one could guess the meaning of those words. That simple sentence. Not even Prowse. The purse, with the note inside it, is beneath my mattress now.
LOREBURN
I put down my pen, looked around the front room at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, thought of how absolutely non-judgmental they would be if I took a drink.
It had been a while since I had opened the unsigned note from my mother. Yellowed and desiccated with age, it had so frequently been folded and unfolded that it barely held together at the creases, more of the paper having pulled apart than remained connected so that it now consisted of eight small squares that seemed to adhere by little more than habit or an ancient compatibility of once-interlocking shapes.
How small the note was, about the size of a sheet from one of my father’s prescription pads. Folded three times, it was not much bigger than a postage stamp. I had often imagined pressing it into someone’s hand with my thumb and then, with both my hands, closing that person’s fist around it. The handwriting as neat and even as that on a birthday cake, it might have been written for the little girl I had been the day before my mother went away.
I tried to write more but could not. I read a journal entry that I had written in the berth of a ship bound for Newfoundland.
July 17, 1916
Forgive me, my children. My babies. For I myself am just a child. I am leaving without ever having seen you. Leaving, without ever having seen it, the city of your birth. It feels as if my life is ending just as yours begins. Ended just as yours began. In the trunk, not only books, but other things that seem like bribes. It is crammed with packages of cigarettes and there is even a bottle of Scotch. And an envelope that contains not the long letter from my mother that like a fool I mistook it for containing, but money, bills that in the darkness I will scatter like confetti from the ship. “Their names are David and Sarah.” I felt that I had found and brought home something I was not old enough to keep, something valuable that must be returned to the rightful owner. My mind is brimful with bitter, accusatory words. Renunciation. The erasure of me from your future. Oblivious. But not you from my future. My crime is greater than theirs and my conscience cannot be appeased with bribes.
Goodbye. I brought you here, smuggled you here inside my body from the place of your conception, the island city of St. John’s that you may never see.
A man can be a father without knowing it. Can have children without knowing it. Better by far to feel, to know, no matter what, than to be like Prowse.
I am returning to the country of my birth, where no one lives whose body has ever been sustained by mine, nor anyone by whose body my own has been sustained. My father refused when they asked him to come and escort me home. When I close my eyes I feel myself plunge downward as if the ship is already far from shore, downward into an unforgetful, unforgiving sleep. It is as if, when my children were born, my soul followed theirs into the world and no
w is lost. It seems there is nothing left of me but matter, mortal matter.
It is a calm, warm summer night.
The fury of the storm inside me cannot bend a blade of grass.
And then, in my berth, after I had been out to take the air, my first communication from him.
I watched you walk about the deck tonight. Looking so desolate I thought you meant to jump. We would not have let you. Dressed all in black. Tall enough to be mistaken for a widow. I heard you say something. “I am a mother who will never be a wife.” I couldn’t tell if you were vowing to remain single or lamenting that you would never marry. To have endured so much so soon. And yet remain so beautiful. Did you notice how you were stared at by the crew members? We watched them as closely as we watched you.
I too am bound for Newfoundland, though not, like you, for the first time. Bound for it for the first time though you have lived there all your life. Almost all of it.
This will be my second visit. Both times to see you. Or rather to meet you, though you have no recollection of having met me and even when you meet me this time you will afterwards have no more idea what I look like than you do now.
These cryptic lines are not meant to upset you. They are as much of the truth as you are ready for and as I, at the moment, am able to divulge.
I know who and what brought you to Manhattan.
I know who and what you leave behind.
You are just a child who needs to feel that she is neither unloved nor alone. All who are loved have no reason to despair.
Take courage, child.
It will not be long before you hear from me again.
The letter is so devoid of detail that I have no idea if its writer knows my secret as he claims or is only guessing that I have one. Guessing that a girl out on the deck past midnight dressed in black must be brooding over something. I feel certain that the writer is a man but cannot say just why. What he means when he says “we” I cannot imagine. I saw no one on the deck but the crew members. It sounds as if the person watching with him was a man, though I’m unsure what I mean by “sounds.” The veiled reference to protecting me from the crew perhaps.
The Custodian of Paradise Page 8