‘You must be Mr O’Hanlon.’ Mother Barbara offered Niall a thin hand. She had enjoyed the car journey but now she wanted to get away.
‘Anthony, Mary, this is Mr O’Hanlon. He’ll be looking after you for the next few hours, until you meet your new family. Isn’t that nice?’
Without waiting for a reply, she handed Niall a photograph of the man who would collect the children in Chicago: he was balding, clean-shaven and of medium height, with long arms and a trim physique; he had a little smile that Niall thought made him look smug.
‘You can’t keep the photo,’ said Mother Barbara, taking it back, ‘but Mr Hess will be easy to spot – he’ll be wearing a red bow tie and standing by the arrivals board.’
Niall nodded. The reality of what he was about to embark upon was sinking in. He looked at Mary and Anthony cowering by the nuns’ legs and caught his breath. He felt like a scared little boy himself.
‘Right,’ said Mother Barbara, after they had run over the details of the journey. She drew herself up to her full height, giving the children a fleeting look. ‘We’d best be off. The taxi’s costing us and we don’t want to get back to Sean Ross too late.’
The nuns shook Niall’s hand, thanked him and wished him well. In an unexpected gesture of tenderness, Mother Barbara stooped down to give Anthony a kiss on the cheek. But Anthony, with an unusual expression of defiance, turned his face away.
‘Well,’ she said sharply as she straightened up, ‘I suppose that’s all the thanks we can expect.’
It was a rough ten-hour flight to Boston and to Niall it felt much longer; the children wouldn’t respond to his efforts to reassure them, but he noticed Anthony kept a tight hold of Mary’s hand and stroked her arm soothingly. Shortly before touchdown, the hostess came round with breakfast. Mary pushed it away, but Anthony sliced up her bread and fed it to her with milk from a cup that he held to her lips.
Boston was in the grip of winter. Logan Airfield was covered in snow, and as they were escorted to the terminal the air felt sharp on their cheeks. Mary and Anthony, who had never seen snow, gaped in wonder. Thank God for that, thought Niall, trying not to laugh with relief as the children’s faces lit up.
The immigration official who examined their passports and their Irish Quota visas asked Niall if he was the children’s father. Niall shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
The transfer flight to Chicago was smoother and the children managed a couple of hours’ sleep. The hours they spent together gave Niall the uncomfortable feeling that he was responsible for them, that they were looking to him for protection. When he took them to the bathroom at the back of the plane, Anthony looked up at him.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said in a thin, strangely dignified voice. ‘My sister is scared now but I told her she mustn’t be, because you are looking after us.’
Niall patted the boy’s head and felt his unease deepen.
At Chicago Midway Airport, Niall gathered their belongings and picked Mary up to carry her down the aircraft steps. Through the layers of clothing, he could feel her trembling like a scared bird. Anthony looked at him with trusting eyes and took his hand as they walked across the tarmac.
Once Niall had collected his baggage – the children had none – he searched for the man in the red bow tie. He was standing where the nuns had said he would be, smoking a fat brown cigar bigger than Niall had ever seen. By misfortune, Marge had run to the ladies’ room and Doc Hess was alone. The two men shook hands awkwardly and Niall tried to think what to say.
‘Well, mister, here are the kids I’ve been told to give you,’ he managed, weighing up the man in front of him. ‘I hope you’ll look after them – they’re tired out and hungry too, because they’ve hardly eaten nor slept.’
Doc sucked on his cigar and bent down to smile at the children, but to his horror Mary screamed and burst into tears. Terrified by all she had been through, gripped by panic, she attached herself to Niall’s leg and would not let go. Anthony too looked on the verge of tears, but it was clear he was doing his utmost to hold them back. It was only when Marge came running that Mary finally began to calm down, and by then Niall too was shaking and sobbing.
After the Irishman had gone, Marge bent down and wiped the children’s faces. She’d brought warm coats for them and was eager to get them wrapped up against the December chill. Doc said he wanted a group photograph to mark the occasion and he evidently knelt down to take it, because the lens is pointing up at Mary’s troubled face: in her smart new coat with its velvet collar and her white bobbled woollen bonnet, her cheeks are still stained with tears, her mouth is open and her bewildered eyes stare warily into the camera. Anthony is frowning and his gaze is directed over Doc’s head into the middle distance, trying to make out the nature of the place they have landed in; he is wearing a brand new duffel coat and in his hand is the tin plane from Roscrea.
The drive from Chicago to St Louis took almost seven hours. It was the Monday before Christmas so the freeways were busy and the snow sweeping in from the east slowed them to a crawl. In the back of Doc’s Cadillac, Marge tried to keep her voice bright and cheery. She plied the children with the candy and toys she had bought for the journey, but they responded with uncomprehending stares. Thrust into an unknown world where bright lights burned, crowds jostled, voices boomed from airport tannoys and cars and planes filled the universe with noise and speed, the children wanted to go back to the convent – they had assumed they would be going back – but now Anthony was sensing a horrible permanence to their new situation.
Marge understood what they were going through but the day was not easy for her either. As she watched them sitting there, taciturn and unsmiling, everything seemed suddenly to be at risk. Her mind filled with nagging, panicked doubts. Is this all a terrible mistake? What will Doc say now?
She glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw her husband’s eyes focused on the road. He seemed to be taking things OK, at least for the time being: he didn’t complain about having to sit up front alone; didn’t complain about the driving or the weather; just stared ahead and hummed along with the show tunes and light musicals he liked to listen to on the radio. Anthony and Mary were watching him with apprehensive curiosity. In the exclusively feminine world of the convent, men had been an exotic phenomenon and neither of them knew what to make of him. Doc’s masculine features and flinty gaze appeared harsh and forbidding; this word ‘father’ they kept hearing was strange and incomprehensible.
Mary’s lower lip was beginning to tremble, and Marge was frantic at the thought she might start bawling – Doc hated noise and she didn’t want to upset him while he was driving. She poured some Fanta into a cup and offered it to Mary, who choked on the unexpected fizzing sweetness. With a shriek she threw down the beaker on the seat and Marge watched in horror as the liquid seeped into the Cadillac’s immaculate beige upholstery in a bright slash of orange. Seeing Marge’s expression, Anthony whipped his little handkerchief from his pocket and tried feverishly to clean up the mess, but it was too late.
‘What the hell’s going on back there? What are those children up to?’ roared Doc, and with that Mary burst into ear-splitting, uncontrollable tears.
After the worst was over, a tense, silent calm descended on the car. All four of them – even little Mary – knew something bad had happened, something worse than just spilled Fanta, and no one really knew how to put it right.
TWO
Christmas 1955
Number 810 Moundale Drive was a single-storey ranch-style house set in a wooded plot with a backyard sloping down from a crazy-paved patio. Like those around it, the house had been built seven years earlier, and the district was still establishing itself. Ferguson, Missouri was full of similar subdivisions; the place lacked the good-neighbourly feel of older St Louis suburbs, but the Hesses had friends in the homes around them and their boys had good buddies to play with. That first evening when they arrived from the airport, Anthony and Mary found the house disconcertingly
full of noise and activity – after the cold bare convent, the place was overwhelming in its opulence, its hubbub and clutter.
Before they had left for the airport, Marge had got the Christmas decorations under way. She had bought a tall Norwegian spruce from Magruder’s Garden Supplies and erected it in the corner of the family room, telling the boys to help her with the tinsel and baubles and electric fairy lights. The two older ones, James and Thomas, were fourteen and thirteen – kind of old for getting excited about Christmas trees – but little Stevie was only nine and had always been her most diligent helper.
As they untangled the flex of the tree lights, Marge had started to explain that this would be a very special Christmas with the arrival of a new brother and sister. But something in Stevie’s face suggested he didn’t share her enthusiasm, and she put an arm around him.
‘Oh, honey,’ she said, ‘don’t look so worried. The new guys aren’t going to take your place. We still love you best in the whole world.’
‘OK.’ Stevie had nodded dubiously, but when Marge put the Christmas presents under the tree she had noticed that he went round very carefully and counted a couple of times which pile had the most parcels.
Marge had intended the tree, the lights, the decorations and the presents to make Mary and Anthony feel loved and wanted. She had been imagining the happiness in their faces when they discovered the festive scene in the family room. But when they arrived, thirty-six hours after leaving the convent in Roscrea, the children were in no state to enjoy anything. Mary cried incessantly and would not say what was wrong. She had not spoken at all since she got off the plane and showed no pleasure at the surprises Marge had prepared for her. Anthony appeared disoriented and unsure how to react. He seemed interested in the coloured lights and the tree, and also in the three boys: as Marge introduced them he managed a shy smile, but his eyes kept flicking back to Doc, who was snapping photographs and instructing the boys to pose ‘with the new kids’. Their rowdiness became too much for Anthony: amid a chorus of shrieked observations and mocking questions (‘D’you grow up in a church?’ ‘Hey, Mom, what’s with his hair?’ ‘Say something in Irish!’) he found himself close to tears and buried his face in Marge’s skirt.
In Sean Ross Christmas had never been an occasion for overt celebration – there was no tree and certainly no decorations or fairy lights – so Mary and Anthony were mystified by the fuss of Christmas morning. They were woken early by the excited whooping of the boys, and shortly afterwards Marge came into their bedroom with mugs of cocoa.
‘Merry Christmas!’ She beamed at Anthony, putting the mugs on the bedside table and kissing his forehead. ‘And a Merry Christmas to you, dear!’ she repeated to Mary, who looked at Anthony nervously but allowed herself to be kissed on the cheek. Marge had bought Mary a pretty sailor dress and Anthony a white sweater and neat cord pants, and she fussed around the room laying out their outfits at the bottom of their beds. Mary and Anthony watched her in silence.
Marge spent the morning preparing the Christmas meal while the boys played noisy games, shouting and racing round the house. Anthony and Mary sat in the den, speaking to one another quietly in strange words no one could quite understand, and Doc marched from room to room, snapping photographs. Carols blared from the radio; Doc whistled a tuneless accompaniment; Stevie roared with pleasure at the sight of his pile of parcels, and James and Thomas bickered good-naturedly about who would get the best presents.
Anthony found the ruckus intimidating. He thought of the nuns and the familiar halls of the convent and wanted to cry. He took Mary by the hand and pulled her with him into the space between the sofa and Doc’s vast armchair, looking out with large, melancholy eyes at his big, strong new brothers. Marge found them there and knelt down beside them with a parcel in each hand.
‘I know things are a little scary right now, sweetheart,’ she said to Anthony – Mary seemed happier when she wasn’t being addressed directly – ‘but you’ll soon get used to us. Here, this one’s for you, and this one’s for your sister.’ She placed the parcels in the children’s hands and said a silent prayer: Please God, let the presents go down well. Let something go right.
Her prayer was answered. Having unwrapped his package with almost comical caution, Anthony seemed entranced by a pack of plastic toy soldiers and leaned over to encourage Mary to open her parcel. With her thumb in her mouth, she gave the sparkly paper a half-hearted tug and Anthony helped her along, craw ling out of his hiding place to give himself more space. As Mary caught a glimpse of light pink satin, she wriggled out after him and ripped the paper open. A pretty blonde-haired doll stared at her with wide blue eyes and Mary beamed from ear to ear for the first time since their arrival. Marge felt a wave of euphoria and relief.
‘You like that, huh? What d’you wanna call her? She’s yours now.’ She smiled. But her elation was short-lived.
‘Hey,’ called Stevie, suddenly paying attention to the little group by the armchair, ‘are they Marine Corps soldiers? He got Marine Corps soldiers! How come he gets soldiers and he doesn’t even belong here? How come—’
Marge grasped Stevie by both shoulders and looked at him intently.
‘He’s one of us now, Stevie. Please don’t you talk to him that way.’
But when she let him go, Stevie ran out of the room yelling ‘It’s not fair!’ and slammed the door behind him.
By the afternoon things were looking a little better. Anthony and Mary had eaten their lunch with surprising gusto and they seemed full, sleepy and content, sitting side by side on the sofa, surrounded by presents. Stevie played on the floor beside the tree, Thomas was reading his new book about steam engines and James was somehow eating a third slice of cake. Feeling the warmth from the sherry wash over her, Marge proposed a toast.
‘Well, Doc,’ she said, with her glass raised, ‘I’ve had my Christmas present with these two beautiful children and I thank you for that. Jim and Tom and Stevie have had their gifts, and the little ones sure got plenty too. But I think you need a present, Doc, a very special one. I would like very much if we were to name our new son in your honour. Your name – Michael – is a beautiful one, an angel’s name. And I think we should give it to our new boy.’
THREE
1955–6
In the days that followed, Anthony Lee was transformed seamlessly into Michael A. Hess. Marge and Doc decided he could keep Anthony as a middle name, but they stipulated that from now on everyone would call him Michael, or – if needs be – Mike.
The Hess boys said nothing, but there was jealousy, and it manifested itself in small ways. When Michael first saw the TV playing in the den, he had been both fascinated and alarmed. He had crawled round the back of the set to see where the little men and women on the screen were coming from and, unable to find an explanation, had become indignant and stamped his foot.
‘Get that man out of that box!’ he had shouted. ‘Get him out right now!’
The boys had laughed uproariously. They told all their friends how their simple Irish ‘brother’ thought there were real people in the TV set. Michael had been puzzled and abashed by the boys’ scorn, and began to keep away from them as much as he could. They had also noticed Mike’s attachment to his stupid Irish tin plane. When he woke on New Year’s morning, he looked for it everywhere – in the house, in the backyard, in the trash – but to his sorrow and dismay it was nowhere to be found.
New Year 1956 was a tough time for the Hess household. The new arrivals had upset the family’s balance. Settled patterns were disrupted and unfamiliar emotions were stirring.
Doc, in particular, had been struggling. He tried to be open and welcoming, but the Irish children were changing the way things were done here: the bathroom rota was unrecognizable since they arrived; the little girl’s crying woke him in the night and left him irritable in the morning; Marge was always running round after them and he wasn’t getting his breakfast on time.
By the time Doc returned to work in early Janua
ry, he was deeply worried about Mary. After his medical studies in Iowa City Doc had majored in urology, but he prided himself on keeping up to date on other branches of medicine, including the newer sciences of psychology and mental health. He had observed Mary’s behaviour with what he believed was an expert’s eye, and he didn’t like what he saw. Ever since she had arrived in America, the girl had not addressed a single word to anyone other than her brother, and even when she spoke to him it was in that strange gibberish that no one else could understand.
Doc had told Marge of his concerns on several occasions, but she’d insisted Mary was just a shy little chick intimidated by the sudden change in her life and taking time to get used to things. Doc wasn’t buying it. He had always said he didn’t want this experiment of Marge’s to saddle the family with a long-term burden and knew it was best to nip the problem in the bud. The first morning back in his office, Doc had dictated a letter to his secretary expressing his concern and addressed it to Sister Hildegarde.
A couple of days later Doc received a letter from Bill King, the Hess family lawyer, which heightened his sense of urgency. Custody petitions were due to be filed; the children would be officially declared under the Alien Registration Act and the registration renewed each year until their final adoption and naturalization as US citizens. Doc read the letter with growing panic. Bill made it all sound so inexorable; if there was a problem with Mary he would have to act fast.
Sean Ross Abbey,
Roscrea,
County Tipp.
27th January 1956
Dear Mr and Mrs Hess,
I was surprised to get your letter with the account of Mary.
You will remember that it was you who brought Mary to the Doctor and you had her with you all day, so there was nothing hidden from you.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 9