The next day, she stood in awe of the scene at Murphy’s Funeral Home, the whole place teeming with flowers. Aunt Nellie wore a fine suit in her casket. Nora had never seen anything like it. In Ireland, there would have been just a wreath or two to adorn the grave. The wake would have happened at home.
She was seven years old when her mother died. Old ladies from the church came to dress her in a robe and fresh slippers, to lay her out on her bed, like she was only going off for a nap. Afterward, they sat in the kitchen drinking tea with Nora’s gran, who kept saying, “It isn’t right, losing a child,” as if she might convince God of His mistake and have her daughter back. The door to the house was left open. All day, people came in and walked straight to the bedroom to see her. Nora felt like a ghost. She wondered if she too had died. Hardly anyone took note of her except to frown and say, “Poor girl,” or “You mind your father now. Look after your brother and sister.”
Men came in the evening. They had real drinks and joined her father to sit up all night with the body. They spoke in whispers. In the morning, she was bold enough to approach the bed. Her father did not try to stop her. Nora went up close. She touched her mother’s cheek.
Aunt Nellie’s funeral was a Solemn High Mass. As the priest spoke in Latin, his back to the congregation, Nora remembered how Aunt Nellie told her that before she came to Boston, her family had given her an American wake.
“I was as good as dead to them,” Aunt Nellie said. “It’ll be easier for a girl like you to get back there eventually.”
Nora wondered at the time why Aunt Nellie couldn’t travel home to Ireland now, as easily as she herself could. In the church pew, the answer came—Aunt Nellie no longer had anyone to go back to.
She had liked to tease the young people in the family about how easy it was nowadays. Aunt Nellie hadn’t gone through New York but straight from Cobh to Massachusetts. She told Nora that when she and her family arrived at the port in New Bedford, a woman wasn’t allowed to leave without a male relative. Aunt Nellie was fifteen. Her older brother was asked, “How much is two and two? How much is three and five?” Aunt Nellie was asked, “Do you wash a staircase from top to bottom or bottom to top?”
One brother, twelve years old, got sick with an eye infection on the boat ride over and was denied entry, sent back to Ireland alone. The family never saw him again.
Nora said she didn’t know how they could bear it, or how Aunt Nellie managed to remain so devout.
Aunt Nellie just shrugged and said, “Live long enough, and life teaches you that God is not your lucky rabbit foot.”
Nora thought of this as she sat in the church, bouncing her sister’s child on her lap. The baby began to shriek during the eulogy. People turned, and Nora felt her face and neck go red. She tried to quiet him. She looked over at Theresa, who stared straight ahead.
They went back to Mrs. Quinlan’s house after.
Mrs. Quinlan put her head down to cry as she filled a red Coleman cooler with cans of Narragansett. Nora told her to sit down, and she took over—lining up several bottles of Seagram’s Seven on the table, setting out the cake and salad, the roast chicken and potatoes that Mrs. Quinlan had made.
“The love’s gone out of her cooking,” Charlie whispered, but everyone ate just the same.
The gathering lasted all afternoon and well into the night. There was music in the parlor; instruments Nora hadn’t seen since she left home were pulled out from under beds and from high shelves in closets, taken from their cases and played to perfection. Afterward, the women congregated in the kitchen as usual.
Mrs. Quinlan asked to hold Patrick.
“He’s a beautiful boy, Nora,” she said.
Everyone nodded and clucked in agreement. Nora met Theresa’s eye and smiled. Her sister looked down at the floor.
Babs leaned against the cabinets, several whiskies in. She bounced her own fat baby on her hip. Conor had weighed eleven pounds when he was born.
“Such a big boy!” someone said, tickling his chin. “The birth must have been excruciating.”
“No,” Babs said. “I had the twilight sleep. I woke up and my hair was done and I was holding a baby in my arms. It was after that I felt it all.”
Nora stared at her, wondering what twilight sleep was. Babs caught her looking.
“Nora had a much easier time of it,” she said. “Her Patrick was a prince from the start, as we all know.”
Nora tried to smile. Her husband had made up a story about the birth. When Lawrence asked how long it lasted, Charlie said, “Fifteen minutes.”
She supposed he had no clue how long these things actually took.
“That’s all?” Lawrence had said.
“Yes!” Charlie said. “My boy couldn’t wait to greet the world.”
Babs seemed to resent Nora, and Nora in turn felt guilty, for the ease of the birth that had never actually occurred.
Babs said now, “But Nora, you have a secret, don’t you?”
Nora knew her blushing had once again betrayed her. She met Theresa’s eye.
“Babs, leave it alone,” Mrs. Quinlan said.
“I’m just saying. You were married in April. And Patrick was born in August. Is that why you didn’t wear white on your wedding day?”
The other women laughed in a way that let Nora know they’d been discussing it. She was seven months married and still a virgin, and now they would accuse her of this. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
Nora ran upstairs to the room that had once belonged to her and to her sister. Kitty lived there alone now, for the time being.
She could hear Babs calling, “I was only teasing! Come back!”
Then footsteps on the stairs.
A moment later, Kitty entered the room.
“Don’t worry about her. She’s a twit and everyone knows it.”
“Is it what they’re all thinking?” Nora asked.
“It doesn’t matter what they’re thinking. You’ve got to learn to stand up for yourself, Nora. This family has a way of forgetting what it doesn’t want to know. A year from now, no one will recall that there was ever anything funny about it.”
Nora thought of something that hadn’t occurred to her before, though it should have. Kitty knew everything. She suddenly felt afraid of her. And envious too—Kitty had walked away from her marriage, and yes, those women in the kitchen whispered about it all the time. But what did Kitty care? She was free.
Babs walked in. “Don’t be mad at me,” she cooed. “It was a joke. I’m just jealous. Sometimes I wonder how you and I went through the same thing. I’m still lugging around all these extra pounds. You had such an easy time of it. I said to Lawrence the other night when we saw you, ‘Did Nora even have that baby, or was he left on her doorstep by a stork?’ You didn’t put on an ounce.”
Nora felt exhausted. She wondered how much longer she could keep up the lie, even as she understood that she had committed herself to it for life. She had wanted to take shame off of her sister and she had wanted Theresa to know her son. She hadn’t considered herself. The shame this would bring upon her. The fact that they would all know there was something funny about it.
“You never saw Nora at the beach,” Kitty said. “She was as big as a house when she got those baggy dresses off. The size of her ankles. My God. Sorry, Nora.”
Nora looked at Kitty, grateful.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You’re only telling the truth.”
—
Her sister was quiet on the walk home. She refused to look Nora in the eye.
Charlie went to bed as soon as they got in, so it was just the two of them, Nora and Theresa, standing in the kitchen. Nora handed Patrick to her sister. The weight of him stayed in her arms. She shook them out at her sides. Her back ached. Her head felt like it was about to split open.
“You love that they all think you’re such a fine mother,” Theresa said. “You love when they tell you how beautiful he is.”
“Kee
p your voice down.”
“Why? You’re afraid someone will hear?”
“You ungrateful thing,” Nora said. “Do you know what they all think of me because of you? I never wanted any of this.”
“Say it. You never wanted him.”
“Of course I don’t want him.”
She went into her room and slammed the door. Charlie was awake. He looked at her. Nora wanted to tell him what Babs had said, but she couldn’t. She got straight into bed and closed her eyes.
Around midnight, she heard the baby shriek.
Patrick’s cries went on and on. Nora flipped from one side to the other. She put a pillow over her head. The baby kept crying. She wondered how long he could go on like that before he would suffocate.
Charlie stirred.
Nora sighed. She threw back the covers and stormed down the hall to Patrick’s room. He lay in his crib, eyes open wide, tears on his cheeks, arms outstretched to her.
Nora picked him up, kissed him.
“All right,” she said. “You’re all right now. Where’s your fool mother? Let’s wake her, shall we?”
She went toward Theresa’s room, taking in the smell of the baby, giving herself over to the strange hour. Nora didn’t bother to knock. She just opened the door and started speaking. “The baby needs—”
The room was empty. Nora thought of Walter, of those dances on Dudley Street. Would her sister be stupid enough to return there?
Then she saw the piece of paper on the still-made bed. She went closer.
Nora looked down and read what her sister had written.
Please make sure he knows how loved he is, until I come back.
She ran downstairs, calling out to the neighbors, not caring if she woke them, no longer herself. Someone must know something.
But no one in the house had seen Theresa go.
—
In the months that followed, Charlie stayed out late at the pub most nights, and that was fine with her. She didn’t thrill to the idea of his return from work. There was such tension in the apartment when they were together. His humor dimmed. Without her income, they had only enough money to cover food and the rent, and some weeks not even that much. She could tell he blamed her for it.
Nora wondered where her sister had gone. She didn’t know what to tell her father. Theresa didn’t know anyone in this country, other than them. Until I come back, she had written. When would that be? In the beginning, Nora looked for her everywhere. She spent hours bouncing Patrick in front of the living room window, expecting to see her sister come up the road at any moment.
She began to tell herself a story. When Theresa returned, she could have the baby. Nora would go away, leave this all behind. Do what she ought to have done in the first place, if she had been brave enough.
The baby had colic, and ear infections and croup. She was forever calling the doctor. One morning when she had been up all night with him, she sat down and cried at the table after Charlie left for work. Her sister had trapped her here, and there was nothing she could do.
What was she so afraid of? Why didn’t she ever say boo to anyone? She should have let the baby go. By trying to save things, she had made a mess of it all.
She went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom for an aspirin. Her sister’s pink lipstick lay abandoned on the bottom shelf. Theresa had made her try it once, before their first Dudley Street dance.
Nora took the tube in hand now and lifted the lid. She ran the color over her lips as she looked in the mirror.
“Let’s get your coat,” she said to the baby.
She pushed the pram faster than she ever had, all the way to the Edison plant. When they arrived at the building—massive, boxy, windowless, the color of fog—Nora pushed open the heavy front door and guided the pram inside.
“I need to talk to Walter McClain,” she said to the secretary in the main office.
The secretary blinked. “I don’t know who that is, ma’am.”
“He works here. Go find him or I’ll scream.”
The woman looked alarmed. She scrambled to her feet.
Walter appeared several minutes later.
“Hello,” he said. “You wanted to see me?”
“I’m Theresa Flynn’s sister.”
“Is that right?” he said, trying to sound jovial, as if they were two old friends. He eyed the secretary. “Let’s go outside, shall we?”
They stood on the steps of the building.
“Theresa is gone,” she said. “No one has seen her.”
“I haven’t seen her,” he said, defensive. “Since.”
“Oh, I know that.”
Walter pointed at the carriage, peering inside. “Is this the baby? Her baby?”
The baby was so clearly his, if anyone’s, but he wouldn’t dare say it.
“He’s my husband Charlie’s boy,” she said. “And mine.”
Nora hadn’t blushed. Her sister wasn’t here to say the words for her. She would say them for herself.
“You owe me something,” she said. “What Patrick deserves. That’s his name. Patrick.”
“What is it you want?” he said.
“I don’t know yet. But someday I’ll know, and you’ll give it. You can’t unsee what happened. I won’t let you. I just wanted to tell you that.”
Dear Oona,
After all your years living in town, I wonder how you find the farm. I suppose it’s the opposite way for me here. When I first arrived, the strangest part of this new place was the light. It was so bright, even at midnight. I shut the curtains, shut my eyes, and still it never seemed to get dark. I thought of how at home the nights were black, with nothing to illuminate objects, near or far. You closed your eyes, and you opened them, and there was no difference in what you saw. The streets are so busy here. There are too many strangers in the house. Yet I am mostly alone. One thing no one prepares you for with a child is how alone you’ll be. How overwhelmed and yet how bored! But I try to keep busy and happy. I miss home, and you.
Yours,
Nora
Dear Nora,
The big news from here is that Malbay Manufacturing is sending me and a few other married girls to Shannon to get trained as overlockers. They’ll set me up with a special machine to use at home once I’m back, so I can do all the hardest hems and seams right from my own kitchen table. It was difficult being out here in the country at first, and as you know, that was the least of my difficulties. I’ll confess to you that I was properly miserable in the beginning. But after you left, my mother said I must make my happiness here. Bloom where you’re planted, she told me. I have tried my very best. I hope I will see you before long, somehow, PG.
With love,
Oona
Nora ran her fingers over the PG. Please God.
She prayed for the same.
Theresa had left Aunt Nellie’s prayer cards behind on the kitchen windowsill. Whenever she had a spare moment, Nora used them and tried to speak to God the way Aunt Nellie did. Some days she swore it was working. Others, her prayers only felt like wishes, sent off into nothing.
As he got older, Patrick cried less. She could reason with him, make him laugh. She began to take pleasure in the way he showed such simple wonder at all things—a car, a bird, a yellow dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Somehow it felt like magic when, for the first time, he did what every other child did. Took a step, grew a tooth.
I’m your mother now, she said. Trying to convince him, and herself. Nora longed for her own mother in a way she hadn’t since she was a child. She recalled her mother’s sternness, her competence, and attempted to imitate it. All the time she had spent looking after her brother and sister had been no preparation for this. She thought of poor Theresa, who had never had any mother but her.
Nora missed her sister’s sparkle. All the color in her life came from Patrick now.
“Mama,” he called her, and her heart swelled. His first word, said over and over again like a prayer.
One Saturday morning, she awoke on her own, the sun already bright outside the window. Nora was amazed. The baby had outslept her!
She stepped into the kitchen.
Charlie was feeding Patrick a bottle, telling him a story about a difficult customer as if he were a sympathetic pal.
“And I told her peach is no color for a house, ma’am,” he said. “I told her pale yellow, now that is what you’ll wish you’d gotten if you don’t do it now. She went with the peach.”
He looked up and saw Nora there, smiling.
“You got up with him?” she said.
“We thought we’d let you sleep in today and have a morning chat, man to man.”
She pointed at the bottle. “How do you even know how to do that?”
“What? Warm a bit of milk up on the stove a minute? I did it for my younger brother all the time. Jack only got as fat as he did because of me and my way with the bottle.”
Nora was flooded with warmth for him. It surprised her to find that there were parts of Charlie she did not know.
This became their Saturday morning routine. When Nora came out of the bedroom and saw the two of them at the table each week, she felt something like love.
Whenever Charlie got a paycheck, he left her a quart of Brigham’s vanilla ice cream in the icebox, and when she emptied it, he left another in its place. She noticed that his easy laughter was returning as he told silly stories to their son. He started telling his bad jokes again, and Nora tried to laugh.
They came to a peaceful acceptance. They had made a decision that would fuse them for the rest of their lives. They could choose to be content with it, or not.
—
Two years after they were married, Nora stood at the sink washing dishes.
Charlie came home from the pub. She could hear him taking his coat off in the hall, then walking quietly toward her so as not to wake Patrick. She was about to say that his dinner was on the counter as he entered the kitchen. But before she could speak, Charlie smiled at her strangely, walked right over, and kissed her, holding on to her longer than usual.
Nora took his hand, led him into the bedroom. If she didn’t do it now, she might never. She didn’t turn on the light. When they made love, he touched her as if afraid she would break, or possibly change her mind.
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