Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Has your milk come in?’ Lily asked urgently.

  Rita nodded miserably, aware of the hard globes of her breasts and the great brown saucers that were her nipples.

  ‘You’ll hardly have enough milk,’ Lily went on, ‘not with those little titties.’

  Walter blushed and looked away. Titties; she used words like that.

  Rita dreaded visitors. Aunt Gracie, Uncle Bartley, Mrs Spearman. They bounced into the ward bearing flowers or gifts for the baby, only to stop short at the empty crib. It made Rita feel like a fraud, as if she were a child feigning illness who had been caught out. To prove otherwise she would show anyone who would look the long scar on her stomach; she had counted the number of stitches. Imelda squawked and covered her eyes.

  ‘Where’s the baby, that’s what I want to see,’ Imelda said. But Rita would not willingly show the baby to anyone. She wanted her to look better. She did not want others to see her as Rita did, as something not quite human.

  ‘Go on,’ Imelda insisted. ‘Please, Rita.’

  ‘I’m tired … it hurts to walk.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll go down myself.’

  She tripped out of the ward. Rita could hear her heels tapping down the corridor to the nursery. Then silence. She half-expected to hear Imelda scream or to be so shocked at what she saw that she would flee. She knew what a bad liar Imelda was. If there was trouble at school, Rita remembered, the nuns would always ask Imelda who was responsible. She would stammer, and instantly incriminate herself or somebody else with her ham-fisted attempts at deception. She couldn’t even take a prompt, Rita remembered. She would blush and stumble when reading aloud, while all around her the air hissed with the word she was reaching for. She pored over her blotched copybooks magnifying her mistakes. It had made Rita feel good to know that Imelda would always be worse than her. Now as she sat waiting for Imelda’s verdict, Rita remembered how she had exulted in telling Imelda she was going to marry Mel. She had always suspected that this was the one department where Imelda might have a head start.

  ‘He’s such a dish,’ Imelda had said eyes popping in amazement.

  She would hardly be able to manage the same enthusiasm this time around.

  She heard Imelda’s footsteps return.

  ‘She’s a sweetheart, that lovely mop of dark hair and those squinchy little eyes. And her skin … the nurse let me touch her. Oh … Rita.’ Imelda sighed.

  It was Rita’s turn to be chastened. She felt a rush of gratitude for her friend’s generosity, followed by a dart of competitive envy. If Imelda could see these things in her daughter – her daughter, how strange it sounded – then why couldn’t she?

  ‘And such a little fighter …’ Imelda was saying. ‘You should be proud of her. What are you going to call her?’

  ‘John Francis,’ Rita said sulkily. She and Mel had never even discussed girls’ names.

  ‘Oh Rita, you’re a howl! Seriously though, what are you going to call her? She looks so pathetic down there with just Baby Spain on her name tag. Poor wee mite.’

  Rita shrugged. ‘Mary, I suppose.’

  Even that had been decided for her. As she was being wheeled away, Rita remembered a nurse’s voice close to her, pressing upon her some urgent question. In her fever she believed that she was dying and that this was the act of contrition being whispered in her ear. And so she started to pray druggedly ‘Hail Mary …’ As it happened it was not she but the baby who was in mortal danger and the nurses wanted to baptise her quickly just in case. What they were asking was the name she had chosen; what they heard was Hazel Mary. Rita had said nothing of this to Mel. Why should she tell him anything? But she knew he’d have a fit over the Hazel bit.

  ‘Mary?’ Imelda queried. ‘Just Mary, plain Mary? Is that because it was a virgin birth? I mean, it was your first time, wasn’t it?’ Imelda cackled. Rising, she bent over and kissed Rita on the temple as if she was as endearing as her baby. Rita caught the intoxicating whiff of perfume.

  ‘Must dash. I’m going out on the town tonight.’

  Rita felt frumpy and inert, her hair falling lankly around her face and a sour smell of baby coming off her. It must be the milk, she thought.

  ‘What do you think of this colour?’ Imelda asked flashing her fingernails.

  ‘I did them at work today between clients. They called it pearly pink. Looks more like faded knickers to me.’

  She laughed merrily and with a swing of her crimson coat and the clack of her black pumps, she was gone.

  A WEEK LATER, Rita was sent home, leaving the baby behind. She was relieved. The hospital exhausted her. The round of visitors, the dispiriting trips to the nursery, the broken sleep. She was constantly woken by the hungry cries of babies and the sound of suckling. Their greed appalled her, the way they clamped on to the breast, the ferocity of their sucking. It looked to Rita like an assault, yet when she had observed the mothers around her feeding (what else had she to do?) she couldn’t help noticing the dreamy calm they seemed to fall into when their babies were on the breast. It was a hypnotic kind of union, like being in love. She couldn’t understand it; it both baffled and irritated her, this love-sickness.

  Her father came to collect her. He stood sentry outside the drawn curtains as she dressed and packed her things. How little had really changed, she thought. She had been in hospital once before – to have her tonsils out and he had nursed her afterwards, feeding her tentatively with soup and ice-cream, and inept concoctions from the kitchen. If she closed her eyes she could just about imagine herself as a sick little girl and her daddy waiting to take her home. But she could only go so far with this fantasy; after all, what was wrong with her now even Daddy couldn’t make better.

  ‘Three weeks and she’ll be all yours,’ Dr Munroe said as she and her father gazed for the last time through the nursery window. ‘And you can come every day to see her!’ He beamed at them. Three weeks, Rita thought, a reprieve. She refused to consider the lifetime after that.

  The house seemed to have grown strange. Dim and quiet after the din of the hospital, its rooms looked secretive and neglected and refused to grant her the gift of familiarity. The staircase was narrower and more forbidding than she remembered; the kitchen seemed to be sulking. It was a shock to find Mel there. The upheaval of the last week had convinced her that in her absence her past was being carefully pieced together again and that Mel, the wedding, the baby, were part of some nightmarish aberration, the product of feverish illness. But no, there he was, large as life, sitting in the kitchen, his mouth bulging with a half-eaten sandwich. Around him on the table were several opened jars of pickle and jam, a half-empty milk bottle, the splayed remains of a sliced pan. He looked guilty as if he’d been found with his hand in the till.

  ‘Ah, Mel,’ her father interjected. ‘There you are.’

  Rita recognised the forced heartiness of the tone, the one he might have used if he had come across the plumber on his hands and knees under the kitchen sink. It made her sorry for Mel, despite herself.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said, rising and pulling back a chair for her. She was oddly touched by the gesture; Mel had never been what she would have called a gentleman. She sat down next to him while her father busied himself noisily with the kettle. She found herself suddenly shy of him, afraid to meet his gaze.

  Mel, sensing the air of truce, hazarded a smile and Rita, glad of being rescued, laughed ruefully. Her life with Mel would always be like this. A series of starting overs. Short joys, long penances.

  For three weeks she became Rita Golden again. She squandered hours at Eileen’s salon on Great Brunswick Street. It was close to the hospital so after Rita had dropped in to view her baby through the glass – she could see no change though the nurses purred about weight gain – she would call into the salon. If Imelda wasn’t doing washes, they would sit in the curtained-off area at the back where the hair-driers were and chatter, or leaf through the tattered magazines, choosing styles for themselves. Imelda did Rita�
��s nails, chiselling and scraping, then polishing her cuticles before applying varnish. It required her to be utterly still as Imelda held her hand and painted laboriously, her tongue inching out between her lips in deep concentration. At school they used to laugh at Imelda for this. Mother Alphonsus would say tartly – we don’t use our tongues to write, isn’t that right, girls! Now, Rita was glad of such uncomplicated attention. She was vain about her hands; they deserved to be pampered, they, at least, had remained unchanged. The rest of her body had been curiously altered. It did not feel her own any more. Throughout her pregnancy it had been clenched tight, now it sagged. Inside it felt slack and laggardly, dejected at having lost its prize so reluctantly borne.

  One afternoon, when Eileen was out, Imelda offered to ‘make her over’. Rita watched as she saw herself disappear under layers of powder and blusher, eyeliner and lip gloss. She felt, literally, like a new woman.

  ‘Why don’t we cut your hair?’ Imelda asked as she stood behind her, lifting, then letting fall, her lank strands. Since the baby, it too had seemed colourless and dull.

  ‘Why not?’ she said taking up Imelda’s tone of defiance.

  Imelda set to. Rita saw the clippings spread at her feet in a carpet of fair down. It looked like baby’s hair, curling and defenceless. She was glad to be rid of it. Instead of a dull weight around her shoulders, it bobbed cheekily at her ears. Rita was pleased with the effect. It made her look older, like a married woman. She emerged on to the street on a cloud of chemical whiff. She touched her hair as she walked; it felt tacky and stiff. She caught glances of herself in shop windows; she saw a taller, more stately reflection than she was used to. The perm gave her a couple of inches and made her feel like an African woman bearing something precious on her head. The packed foundation on her face was like an armour, a way of fending people off and her new hair-do, a helmet. She was delighted when she passed Mrs Spearman on Mecklenburgh Street who looked at her quizzically but couldn’t place her.

  ‘My god,’ Mel said, ‘what have you done to yourself? What’s that muck on your face?’

  He was standing in front of the mirror in the kitchen adjusting his bow tie, making ready to go out to work. She thought he would have been pleased. A glamorous wife as trade for a dowdy girl. Before she could answer, her father emerged from the shop.

  ‘Have you told her?’

  He didn’t even notice her shorn locks.

  ‘The hospital rang,’ her father said accusingly.

  ‘So?’ She could hear the truculence in her voice.

  ‘We can take the baby home.’

  The triumph of his tone toppled her newly acquired sense of grandeur. She trailed up to the bathroom and scrubbed her face until it stung.

  There was a carnival air as they rose the next morning. Mel and her father set up the spare room. The Moses basket, which had been Rita’s when she was a baby, stood proudly in the middle of the room. Rita had made it up the night before, running her fingers along the soft winceyette sheets and the satin-rimmed blanket which Aunt Gracie had crocheted. Two towers of nappies sat on the bed beside a basket crammed with cartons of talc, cards of safety pins, a cloud of cotton wool, jars of antiseptic cream, a tiny nail scissors. Rita was amazed at how many accoutrements babies needed, little vain accessories to primp and pretty, as if they were greeting the arrival of a pomaded princess. She remembered buying these things but it seemed so long ago now, belonging to a time when the baby had been all possibility and enhancement. She plucked out the lace christening robe in which she had been baptised from the bottom drawer of the chest in her father’s room – her mother had kept it for just such an occasion – and a pink matinée jacket which Lily had given her. The choice of these items gave her a sense of history and celebration; it convinced her that everything, finally, would be alright. She was being given a second chance.

  Dr Munroe greeted them in the entrance hall of the hospital. It was a perfect round. Grim marble busts sat on pedestals in the alcoves under the long, high windows, filled with lozenges of the blue day. The tiled floor, radiating in a chequered mosaic at their feet, still bore damp patches and there was a faint smell of pine, adding to the air of newly scrubbed morning. Rita was anxious to see the baby. In her mind, her child had grown fat and bonny, ruddy-cheeked with dimpled arms, a baby a mother would be proud to claim. Rita was seized by a kind of excitement, her baby about to be delivered to her. She could safely wipe out the memories of the past few weeks now – the awful birth and the mechanised limbo to which her baby had been consigned. Now, with her husband at her side, her new life – their new life was about to begin. The loving mother, the proud father, the doting grandfather, she saw the three of them as a blessed tableau. A Holy Trinity.

  ‘Mr Golden,’ Dr Munroe said, smiling tensely. ‘Can I have a word?’ He drew Rita’s father a couple of paces away.

  There was some anxious whispering. She nudged Mel.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, ‘everything’s fine.’

  She abdicated for a moment to his certainty, as she had done once before, holding fast to the picture of the holy family, even as her father approached.

  ‘Rita,’ he said quietly.

  She stared at him. Something was wrong.

  ‘Rita,’ he said again, sharply, as if she wasn’t paying enough attention.

  ‘What, what is it?’

  ‘It’s the baby … she’s gone.’

  ‘Gone, what do you mean gone. Dead?’

  An image of the baby trapped in her glass bowl passed in front of her. And then she indulged the notion of the baby not being in this picture. It was not wholly unpleasant, this wicked thought. The past months miraculously unravelled, the clock wound back, their coupling undone, her life before, intact. But it wouldn’t hold, this vision of the past. Too much had happened. Too much.

  ‘Somebody’s taken her.’

  Why is he talking in riddles, she wondered. If the baby is dead, why doesn’t he say so?

  ‘Taken her. What do you mean, taken her?’

  Her voice came out as a shriek. Its shrill echo rebounded back at her in the colonnaded hallway. Dr Munroe stepped forward.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Spain,’ he said, grasping her at the wrist and elbow as if to restrain her. (Some kind of status was being conferred on her after the event. Dr Munroe had always called her Rita.)

  ‘Nurse Matthews left the nursery for two minutes after the feed. Just two minutes,’ he insisted contritely, appealing directly to her father. He refused to meet her gaze. ‘Such a thing has never happened before. Some woman, they say.’

  He wrung his hands absently.

  ‘Some desperate woman.’

  She should never have let them take the baby away from her. That was her first mistake. No, she corrected herself, she should never have let that tinker woman touch her; that was her first mistake. They had come, as she knew they would, they had come and stolen her baby from her. If she had only held the baby, just once, maybe that would have broken the spell and unhinged the hold they had over her. Or if she had fed her from her own breast? If the baby hadn’t been incarcerated in that tent. She should never have allowed that. No, no, she argued with herself, it went back further than that … But no matter how far back Rita went, she could not gainsay the terrible truth; that someone had wanted her baby more than she had.

  FOR WEEKS GOLDEN’S Boots and Shoes on Mecklenburgh Street was besieged. Neighbours crowded into the back kitchen where Rita sat, surrounded by small mounds of baby clothes which she sorted absentmindedly by colour and by type. They brought food; it was all they could think of doing. They had never eaten so well, Mel thought. Trays of sandwiches appeared from nowhere, a pot of stew bubbled on the stove. Blancmanges, trifles, bowls of jelly sat about the place unheeded. These were for Rita – to tempt her to eat, as if she were a picky child who had to be coaxed. Pots of tea were on the go all day. Damp tea towels sat on every chair. It was, he th
ought, like the aftermath of a wake, except there had been no death. A knock would come to the hall door and Mel would answer it. There would be a reporter slouched against the jamb.

  ‘Any news of Baby Spain?’ A query accompanied by a chromium flash.

  Mel found himself elected as the family spokesman. He got used to the click and whirr of cameras, the endless queries roared at him from the street.

  ‘Are you happy with the police investigation, Mr Spain?’

  ‘How is your wife bearing up, Mr Spain?’

  ‘Have you anything to say to the kidnapper?’

  Mel found he had a gift for it, this loud, indelicate camaraderie. And it was his face which appeared on the front pages of the newspapers under declamatory headlines: HEARTFELT PLEA BY FATHER OF SNATCH BABY; BABY SPAIN NEEDS HER MOTHER, SAYS KIDNAP DAD. He liked the image it gave of him. The reporters ascribed to him words and statements that made him seem like a man of authority. He was suddenly at the centre of things, firm and capable, acting the part of the grieving father. In truth, he was not grieving. Mel believed at that stage that the loss of the baby was temporary, a brief suspension of normality. Some other mother had taken the wrong baby home, he told himself; after all, they all looked so much alike. He felt too much lazy goodwill about the world to believe that the taking of the baby was sinister or calculated. And he would never believe that she was dead. For years to come – even after Stella was born – he believed that one day his long lost son would return. (He thought of her still as John Francis.) He imagined opening the door one day to a fine young man, a sailor with a kit bag or in a soldier’s uniform, who had been out adventuring in the world and had come back with tall tales to tell. In the meantime, he stood on the doorstep on Mecklenburgh Street and thought of Gary Cooper; he had seen enough of his movies to know how to simulate quiet dignity. And raising his hand, he could command silence from the assembled huddle of the press.