If we had noticed Mary defective in any way, we would have told you. We would not have let you have her alone with the Doctor if we wanted to hide anything.
If you do decide you do not want to keep Mary, we will have no trouble with the placement of the children. There are thousands who would take Mary if we ask them. But don’t make arrangements for any transportation until you have informed us, as it could cause you and us greater worry.
I am sorry this has happened. We know of nothing like this in Mary’s family.
Until I hear from you again, God bless and keep you.
Sr M. Hildegarde.
PS If you decide to take another child, Doctor Hess had better come over and examine the child. I would not like myself to take responsibility. S.M.H.
Sister Hildegarde’s somewhat terse reply to Doc’s letter arrived in the Hess mailbox the same day the St Louis Post-Dispatch published its article. Marge had almost forgotten speaking to the reporter who had called weeks earlier and asked her to express her excitement on acquiring her new family. Now it was all written up in banner headlines, ST LOUIS DOCTOR AND WIFE ADOPT IRISH CHILDREN, followed by some lame prose: ‘Bundles of joy from Ireland: St Louis Irish eyes were smiling as two Irish youngsters, Mary, two, and Michael, three, were getting better acquainted with their new family this month . . .’ And printed beside the piece was the photograph Marge had loaned the fellow, the shot Doc had taken at the airport with young Mike clinging to his toy plane from Roscrea.
The coincidence of the two events, the letter and the article, sent Doc into a fury. He approached Marge, newspaper in hand, as she washed dishes at the kitchen sink.
‘Look here, Marge, this is damned inconvenient,’ he said, slapping the newspaper down on the counter beside her and folding his arms across his chest. Marge looked at him, then down at the paper.
‘Oh Doc,’ she said, ‘it’s not—’
‘Marge, listen. You know how I feel about these kids, the girl in particular. She’s not normal, and we’ve taken on a great deal of trouble with her. I’ve been thinking very seriously about having her sent back to that convent – don’t try to argue with me, Marge – but this damned story . . . Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that? Damn it, Marge, we can’t send her back now – not with this.’ He stabbed his finger at the paper and tossed the letter down beside it. Marge dried her hands calmly and picked up the letter.
‘We can’t send them back anyway, Doc. Not after what they’ve been through.’
‘Well, hell! It’s too bad. We should never have— We should have thought harder about this whole thing before taking on such a burden. I’m too old for this.’
Marge was stung. She had secretly, guiltily, been thinking the same thing herself. She laid a hand on Doc’s crossed arms.
‘Don’t worry, Doc. I know it seems bad now, but things will get better. I’ll give Loras a call and see if he can get someone to come take a look at Mary.’
‘Well, go ahead and call your brother,’ Doc said. ‘But one thing’s for sure – we have to get this whole thing fixed before the custody hearing.’
The next morning Marge was standing at the kitchen sink, watching Mike and Mary through the window. The ground was still covered in snow, and as soon as Doc left for work Mike had bundled his sister up in her winter coat and tugged her outside. The sun was shining and it made the red of Mary’s hair glow like burning embers against the snowy garden; her cheeks were rosy and her eyes gleamed with energy. Watching as she chased Mike round the yard, sending clouds of snow puffing up around them, Marge could hardly believe her new daughter was a defective, whatever Doc said; she seemed so healthy and so lovely and full of potential.
What worried Marge was Mary’s continuing refusal to speak to them. She opened the window quietly and listened in puzzlement to the incomprehensible words Mary was gabbling, wondering as she had so often how Mike seemed to understand it. Marge was sick of talking to her daughter through Mike: he had become a kind of interpreter, speaking to Mary in nonsense, then translating into English for the Hesses. Doc said it was unacceptable in a civilized house.
After Marge’s phone call, Loras had rung Father Bob Slattery of St Louis Catholic Charities. Slattery was an Irishman himself, and when he showed up one morning in early March Marge took to him at once. She introduced him to the young ones, but Mary was her usual taciturn self and Michael too seemed strangely suspicious of the priest in his black robes.
‘You see what I mean, Father? I’m at my wits’ end and Doc’s started saying Mary has something wrong with her.’
Father Slattery looked thoughtfully at the children.
‘OK, Mrs Hess,’ he said. ‘Can you leave me alone with them? There’s something I’d like to try.’
Marge went out to the store, and when she returned a half-hour later Father Slattery was beaming.
That evening when Doc arrived home from work, his wife was in better spirits than he’d seen in a long time.
‘I have something to tell you, Doc Hess,’ Marge beamed. ‘It’s real important for all of us and we have Father Slattery to thank for it. While I was out at the store, he spoke to Mike and Mary in Gaelic and they answered him back right away! That gibberish they’ve been speaking to each other is Gaelic, Doc. They’re fluent in it! Bob says they must have picked it up from the staff in the nurseries at the convent. Isn’t that marvellous news?’
Doc thought for a moment but didn’t return Marge’s smile.
‘Well, I guess so. But what I want to know is how come they’ve been so damn tricksy and always speaking it over here? Didn’t they know it was going to get us all spoiling mad?’
Marge tried to explain that for two scared children thrust into a world they feared and mistrusted, the secrecy of a language known only to themselves provided a refuge and a form of self-protection, but Doc wasn’t interested in explanations.
‘So tell me, what does Father Slattery say we should do to get the girl speaking English?’
Marge laughed.
‘Well, Bob says she’s pretty sure to understand English and probably just needs prompting to start speaking it. He says we should let her know very gently that we’re not going to use Michael as an interpreter any more and she needs to start asking for things herself.’
Doc harrumphed. ‘Well, darn it, woman, isn’t that what I said all along! If the girl wants a cup of milk and she sees she ain’t gonna get it till she asks properly, my guess is she’ll start speaking English pretty damn quick!’
It was good advice. Within a couple of weeks Mary was beginning to speak, hesitantly at first but then with growing confidence. By the time Doc and Marge’s twentieth wedding anniversary came round on 25 March, the family had regained some of its lost composure. In the evening Marge cooked Doc’s favourite T-bone steaks and he raised a toast, ‘ To twenty years!’
Afterwards, they got through two bottles of champagne, and before going up to bed Doc whispered in her ear, ‘Well, Marge, I guess we better keep them.’
FOUR
1956
In his first months in America Mike was an enigma – one moment loving and affectionate, the next withdrawn and rebarbative, shunning the company of those around him, retreating into silence. His innate trust of the world, his innocence and openness, had taken a knock after his expulsion from the serenity of Roscrea. The jolting transition to a new life in an unfamiliar country, the loss of all that had gone before – people, objects, faces, places, sounds, smells, clothes – had left him less sure of the world’s goodness, less convinced he could rely on life to be dependable and benign. He had not forgotten the world he had been torn from; he saw it in his dreams, he spoke of it to Mary, and at times he yearned for it terribly.
It took a long period of ups and downs, of unpredictable sullenness and parental doubts, before Mike began to settle, but it eventually appeared to all who knew him in that year of 1956 that his sweet nature had finally resurfaced. His good behaviour and his earnest desire to please
were noticed and admired. Marge’s mother Josephine – Grams to her grandchildren – was especially fond of him and even Doc recognized his obliging disposition, though his praise for Mike was oftentimes implicit with criticism of Mary.
But there was an undercurrent in Mike’s character that Marge found hard to figure. He didn’t argue with his parents; he gave way promptly and meekly in clashes with the boys; he was constantly striving to please to the extent that Marge felt at times he was almost too good. She wondered just why he was so compliant: was it from some kind of fear? She couldn’t say of what exactly, but it was somehow as if he were terrified of losing the good opinion of those around him, of those he depended on. Marge wondered what had caused such deep-seated anxieties.
By early summer Mike had made a handful of friends and the Hesses invited them over for his fourth birthday.
On the whole, the party had been a success. Marge had watched Mike closely and was relieved to see him enjoying the games, discovering a knack for hide-and-seek and giggling uncontrollably at the random collisions and unexpected bodily contacts of blind man’s buff. He had loved pass the parcel, meekly handing over the mysterious bundle each time the music restarted and smiling when candy fell from the paper into the laps of the other children.
The only difficult moment had come near the end, when Mike was opening his presents. The biggest of them, and most alluring to four-year-old eyes, was a toy drum wrapped in silver-specked birthday paper that Mike had torn off in a frenzy of excitement, yelping with pleasure as the drum itself slid out. Ronald Casabue from over the way in Risdon Drive had made the mistake of trying to grab it from him and Mike had responded with the protective belligerence he’d learned in the Roscrea dinner lines, tussling and yelling, ‘No, no, no, that’s mine,’ and – in his deepest Irish accent – ‘Do you wanna fight, boy? Put your dooks up!’
James and Thomas, the older Hess boys, had laughed out loud at the incongruity of Mike’s display of Irish defiance. For years afterwards they would taunt him – mostly good-naturedly – whenever his brow seemed to darken with anger or annoyance by shouting, ‘Mike’s got his “Do you wanna fight” look on! Put yer dooks up! Put yer dooks up!’ Young Stevie, less understanding of his new brother’s quirks, had taken to referring to him as ‘that creep’.
At the end of the summer Marge brought peaches home from the store and offered one to Mike. He had never seen a peach before, and sitting at the sunny kitchen table he turned it over, cupped it in his hands and slid his fingers over the strange furry skin. Marge was charmed by his unselfconscious wonderment at things which to her seemed so everyday. He sniffed its sweet heavy perfume, like nothing he had ever encountered, pressed its warm yielding flesh, licked it and drew back his tongue in puzzlement at its forbidding texture, then jumped off his chair, ran with it into the sunshine of the backyard and plunged his teeth into its welcoming softness.
Marge laughed, finished her cup of tea and went upstairs to make the children’s beds. The moment she was gone, Mike, overcome by temptation, sneaked back in and devoured the other eleven peaches Marge had bought. For the rest of his life he would love peaches – he loved them most when their yellow ripeness would melt under his thumb, when after the first delicate bite the flesh would fall away from the stone of its own accord, no need for teeth to pierce it, a gentle suck enough to entice it into his mouth. He loved the sweet, sticky juice that scented his lips and left its warm stain on his fingers. He was a sensual person, and when his senses took over he could not stop himself. Later in life, he would gulp down mugs of coffee to feel the surge of adrenalin, devour chocolate bars to give himself the sugar rush they brought and surrender to other, more complex delights.
He was slumped at the table licking his fingers when Marge came back in and let out a gasp.
‘Why, Mike, what on earth have you been doing in here?’
The table was tacky with juice and littered with peach stones sucked clean. Mike’s face and hands were flecked with little chunks of fruit. Thinking of the peach pie she’d been planning for dessert, Marge grasped him by the shoulders and lifted him from his chair with more force than she’d intended.
‘Those peaches weren’t just for you, Mike; they were for everyone. You did a bad thing just now . . . and you’ve probably made yourself sick too. Go upstairs and clean yourself up while I deal with this mess.’
The tone of Marge’s voice made Mike panic. He grabbed the dishcloth and wiped the table frantically, but Marge took it from him.
‘No, Mike – go upstairs. Just go upstairs and wash. And don’t ever do it again.’
Annoyed more by her own reaction than by Mike’s gluttony, Marge couldn’t bring herself to look at him and set about cleaning up. Mike, close to tears, racked his brains for something to say that would make her love him again, but her back stayed resolutely turned.
That evening as they lay in their beds, Mike turned to face Mary.
‘Are you awake?’ he whispered in Gaelic. Mary rolled over quickly, her mouth open with surprise. Mike hadn’t spoken to her in Gaelic for weeks, under instructions from Doc, and hearing it again made her feel cosy and secret.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘What is it?’
‘Shh! Or they’ll hear us.’
The room was lit by a tiny nightlight in the shape of a red mushroom, and in its dim glow Mary saw Mike’s eyes fixed on her.
‘What is it?’ she repeated more quietly. Mike was silent for a moment.
‘Do you remember your real mammy?’ he asked at last. ‘Mom isn’t her.’
Mary said nothing, but put her thumb in her mouth and looked at her brother with wide eyes.
‘Our real mammies didn’t want us because we were bad,’ Mike whispered, then paused to reflect on what he had said. ‘They hated us. So they sent us away. I did something bad today, and Mom got mad at me.’
He raised himself up on his elbow and leaned across the gap between their beds for emphasis.
‘So we must remember always to be good. If Mom knows how bad we are, she’ll hate us too. And maybe she’ll send us away.’
He lay back down and looked at the ceiling.
‘So we must always be good,’ he repeated softly.
FIVE
1956–7
In September 1956 Mary McDonald and Anthony Lee legally became Mary and Michael Hess. Marge had been thrilled, showing the papers first to Doc, then to Michael and Mary, then to the older boys with exhortations that they must ‘all be one happy family now’. Doc had patted his wife on the arm and gone to fetch the camera for a family photo. James and Thomas had humoured their mother with nods and smiles, but Stevie’s response was less gracious. Posing for the camera outside in the driveway, he had placed a large, gloved hand on Mike’s neck, given it a warning squeeze and whispered, ‘Watch your back, bro,’ through clenched teeth.
Watching Doc arrange the kids for the photograph, Marge had felt old doubts. He’d spent several minutes preening Stevie, getting his bow tie right, adjusting his collar and ruffling his hair, but he’d barely glanced at the two older boys. Doc had always blundered his way through parenting: he said what he thought even if it was tactless and offensive. Marge had known from early on that Stevie was Doc’s favourite – he made little effort to conceal it – and she spent more and more time these days worrying about the effect this was having on James and Thomas.
To add to Marge’s concerns, as Mike was growing steadily into the role of model child, Mary seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. Now she had found her tongue in English, she was not afraid to use it: she was becoming argumentative and difficult. Growing up with four brothers, she was changing from a self-effacing, almost catatonic child into a noisy, assertive tomboy. Marge dressed her in pretty dresses, but she abandoned her dolls for Mike’s toy trucks, learned to run and shout, climbed trees and played rough. Doc still thought she was a problem child – no longer a defective mute, but now too rowdy and quarrelsome. Yet for all her force and energy, Mary wou
ld unaccountably burst into tears at times so prolonged and so violent that her whole body would shake and only Mike was able to calm her down.
Fall came and the acorns fell from the trees. Separated from Ireland by a fourth of their lives, the children’s memories of life there – the half-formed products of developing brains – were growing dim. But for Mary acorns brought back memories of the fairies. Early one morning Mike found himself being shaken awake by strong little hands.
‘What’s wrong, Mary?’ he asked in a sleep-muffled voice. ‘What time is it?’
‘After five – they’re all asleep,’ she whispered. ‘We must go down to the garden before they wake up!’
Mary, impatient and excited, pulled the blankets off him and ran to get his clothes from the closet.
‘Mary, stop that! Why d’you want to go outside this time of the morning?’
Mary rolled her eyes impatiently.
‘Because,’ she announced with a teacher’s authority, ‘we gotta find an acorn cup. An acorn cup filled with dew – that’s where the fairies wash their faces. Then the fairies’ll grant us a wish – and we can go home!’
The fairies did not send them back to Roscrea. They were, though, fated to leave St Louis within a year.
On 27 June 1956 Raymond Peter Hillinger had resigned on health grounds as fourth bishop of Rockford, Illinois and Monsignor Donald Carroll had been nominated as his successor. But Carroll himself had fallen sick within a month of his nomination and by the end of the year the Church had decided Rockford could no longer wait for its new bishop.
The nomination of Loras Lane as sixth bishop of Rockford shook up the Hess household. Loras was about to become the youngest full bishop in the United States. He was regarded as a future star of the Church, destined for great things. He was also beginning to earn a reputation among his clerical contemporaries for being hugely ambitious and more than a little cocky.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 10