When he lifted his head the sun was gone and clouds were gathering. Looking at his watch, he was horrified to see two hours had passed. He returned to the retreat centre at a run, his heart heavy with foreboding, and was seized with panic when he found it deserted.
They’ve left you behind, a voice whispered, and all the old insecurities, the fears of abandonment and rejection swept over him. He ran through the empty rooms, hoping it was all a mistake, that they would be huddled together in deep discussion or hiding from him as a cruel joke – anything but the terrible reality: that they had forgotten him; that he was not worth remembering; that they had left him all alone.
When Father Hiller came back for him two hours later, mortified at the mistake, he found Mike slumped on the black and white tiles of the bathroom, tear-stained and staring through the window.
They travelled back together in silence, and although Mike continued his duties as an altar boy he would no longer discuss or even acknowledge the priestly vocation that had been his obsession.
EIGHT
1963–6
The doctors had diagnosed Bishop Lane’s sickness as a recurrence of acute nephritis and its effects were becoming increasingly serious. By the spring of 1963 he was suffering from blinding headaches, vomiting, and pain in his stomach and joints; he was frequently short of breath and spent more and more time confined to his bed. The doctors concluded the virulent attack he experienced in childhood had damaged his kidneys and he had been living with the consequences ever since. They told him the disease was likely to prove fatal, although with treatment and rest its advance might possibly be slowed. In the short term, there could be no question of him travelling to Rome – his visit to the Vatican would have to wait.
Overcome with foreboding, Marge had set up a camp bed in the bishop’s residence so she could help nurse him, but in spite of Loras’s unwavering optimism his condition continued to decline. The Hess household had been disrupted and unsettled and Mike had fallen sick himself, his anxieties incarnated in a racing heart and violent nausea. But after eighteen months of treatment and bed rest Loras had rallied sufficiently to resume his diocesan duties, and at the end of 1965 he had finally boarded the plane for Rome. He sent Marge a cheery postcard: ‘Arrived safe and sound after a good trip. Am feeling fine, although I still must take it easy. Went to the Council yesterday, for the first time. Only 14 speeches!’
The next September Michael Hess was in the 1966 intake at Rockford’s Boylan High School; Mary would follow him a year later. Their Uncle Loras had laid the school’s foundation stone and worked hard to make it a success; he regarded it as one of his greatest achievements. Since returning from Rome he had been a sick man, already concerned by thoughts of his legacy. Mike was horrified by the pale, emaciated figure his uncle had become; the old gap-toothed smile in the plump round face had been extinguished by kidney failure and the whisper of death.
Fears for his uncle darkened Mike’s first days at high school, and when Marge too fell sick a few weeks later he felt the old panic rising in him. She was going to be operated on for chronic pain in her spine and all her cheery reassurances that it was nothing to worry about failed to calm his fears. The night Marge went into surgery, Mike and Mary sat out on the porch in Maplewood Drive and huddled together against the October chill. Mary rasped a match against a Red Cloud matchbook and lit one of Doc’s Chesterfields – for all Mike’s objections, she had dabbled with cigarettes since her thirteenth birthday.
‘You know, Mike, if Mom dies, we will have no one,’ she said quietly.
Mike’s objection was half-hearted. ‘We’ll still have Uncle Loras.’
Mary looked at him with raised eyebrows and he shifted uncomfortably.
‘Well, it might seem like we’d be on our own. It’ll be OK, though,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ll always be here for you; you can count on me. And I was thinking something else too. You know how sometimes . . . we talk about our mothers in Ireland?’
Mary nodded, looking at him with interest.
‘Well, I was thinking . . . Maybe it would be good if we could go find them. If we could find them and ask them about us. Then we’d know the truth. About . . . how we came to be here and who we really are.’
‘But how will that help, Mike?’ Mary looked dubious. ‘We can’t change things. We can’t go back to what we were.’
Mike fell silent. He wished so much he could explain to her that he wanted to go back to the world before; wanted to rewind the clock and undo the terrible rupture that blighted his life. But he couldn’t say it.
‘I know,’ he said at last. ‘But don’t you want to find out why you were given away? If we could just do that, maybe we could start to put things right.’
Mary smoked her cigarette in silence and Mike stared into the night sky. The orphan’s sense of a life incomplete was strong in him, the feeling that he was robbed of his identity and must rediscover who he was and why he was rejected. In his heart he felt his true self lay elsewhere, tied up in the place they both came from, in that half-remembered feminine world of warmth and whiteness from which they had been expelled.
A week later, after Marge had been discharged from Rockford Memorial, Mike went to see his uncle. He had left his mom complaining she wouldn’t be able to play golf any more but otherwise in high spirits: the pain in her spine and hips had been greatly reduced by the operation and she was about to start physiotherapy. His uncle, though, was dying. Mike had never witnessed the terminal decline of another human being before, and he found it sad and disturbing.
Loras had always treated Mike as a grown-up, an equal, and their conversations were serious and honest. Mike had asked him many times about his illness and Loras had always replied that he was fighting it but could not be sure of the outcome. They frequently discussed the Church, and today they were discussing politics. Rockford was blue-collar Republican – Doc and Marge were lifelong supporters of the Grand Old Party – and looming Senate elections were mobilizing the party’s forces. Loras had explained the current political situation and the Church’s involvement in it, telling Mike about Illinois’s senior senator, Everett Dirksen, the long-standing Republican leader in the Senate and a staunch ally of Joe McCarthy through his rise and fall in the 1950s. The state’s other seat was occupied by a Democrat, the now elderly Paul Douglas, but LBJ’s pursuit of the conflict in Vietnam had made the Democrats vulnerable and the Republicans had identified Douglas as a key target.
‘Just take a look at these,’ Loras said, thrusting a bundle of sermons and diocesan letters in Mike’s direction. ‘I’ve been given these by my bosses in Chicago. They’re so hell-bent on getting Douglas out of the picture they want me to spread the word with this kind of nonsense. They send me stuff like this practically every week – they aren’t taking any prisoners.’
As Mike flicked through the draft sermons unsettling phrases leapt out at him – warnings that the Democrats ‘would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people’; references to the ‘sacraments of their secular culture, namely abortion, sodomy, contraception and divorce . . . which are the seeds of the destruction of our nation’. ‘It is the duty of every Catholic,’ one sermon concluded, ‘to work for the extirpation from our society of all those who would in any way foster or promote these things.’
‘Jeez,’ breathed Mike, ‘that’s terrible!’
Seeing the horror on his face, Loras patted his arm.
‘Don’t worry, son.’ He smiled. ‘I won’t be using any of that. The bosses can say what they like, but I have only one authority to answer to now . . .’
NINE
1967
Apollo 1 burned up on 27 January 1967. As America mourned the astronauts who had lost their lives on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, Boylan High observed a minute’s silence and the students wrote letters of condolence to the Grissom, White and Chaffee families. In physics Mr Strom abandoned his lesson plan and instead reviewed the scanty information that had emerged about the fire.
The principle of Brownian motion had been on the curriculum for next fall, but he had decided to bring it forward – this, he said, was as good a moment as any to examine the way gases interact.
No one yet knew of the arbitrary, minor events that had caused the tragedy, the chance electrical spark from the friction of an astronaut’s nylon spacesuit which had ignited the blaze, but Mr Strom explained how the oxygen-rich mixture of gases in the pressurized cabin would fan a tiny flame to the point where an aluminium stanchion would burn like a piece of wood. The students watched as he introduced a phial of bromine gas into a diffusion tube. He told them to observe how its brown-coloured particles moved chaotically as invisible speeding molecules in surrounding gases smashed into them. He asked them to imagine how the tangled zigzag movements of a bromine particle were actually the result of hundreds of tiny random impacts nudging it from its intended trajectory – great brains including Einstein had attempted to describe it in mathematical models.
But Mike’s thoughts were wandering a path of their own. The swirling gases had crystallized a notion – it had long been on his mind – that powerful invisible forces were shaping his own existence: that chance collisions and impacts over which he had no control were deflecting his own trajectory, and that their effect was to a large extent a negative one.
He thought of Mrs de Boer’s geography class the previous week when she had told them there were 3.5 billion people in the world; now, watching the random, frenzied collisions inside the diffusion tube, he was haunted by the notion that he could have ended up in the hands of any one of them. It was not, he said to himself, that he resented Marge and Doc. What upset him was the lack of any reason why he should be there: nothing made it more natural for him and Mary to be in Rockford, Illinois than to be in Peking, China. He looked at his classmates, who had real mothers and fathers, and envied them because they were where they should be, anchored in the place life had reserved for them. He could never be in that place unless and until he found his mother. The image of his life as a particle in some cosmic Brownian motion preoccupied him now; the sense of his existence rootless and spinning out of control was always with him.
‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning . . .’
Sister Brophy’s cracked, gentle intonation roused Mike from his sombre thoughts. He raised his head, suddenly alert. The English teacher sighed with pleasure.
‘That’s one of my favourite poems by Yeats. Beautiful,’ she mused. ‘William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and his Irish heritage features strongly in his poetry.’
Mike was dumbfounded. He had recognized something of himself in the poem Sister Brophy had read out: a smallness, a humility, a desire to escape from the life that was his prison and find the peace of elsewhere.
The bell sounded and the classroom emptied – except for Mike. Sister Brophy sat at her desk, rereading the poem with a smile on her face.
‘Yes, Mike? Did you want something?’
Mike smiled eagerly.
‘Do you have any other poems by . . . Yeats?’ he ventured, slowly putting his books into his bag. Sister Brophy looked delighted.
‘Why, Mike! I might have known you’d be interested . . .’
Mike had studied a little poetry before, but nothing like this. He spent the weekend lying on his bed, reading and rereading the Collected Poems Sister Brophy had given him. His brothers sneered and Doc shook his head disapprovingly – he disliked and distrusted poetry – but Mary and Marge were enthralled by his dramatic recitations of the haunting, beautiful verse.
In the weeks that followed Sister Brophy introduced him to John Donne, Robert Frost, Baudelaire and countless others until his mind swam with gold-tinted images and his heart floated on a sea of words.
Loras Lane reached his fifty-seventh birthday in October 1967 and felt well enough to enjoy a quiet celebration with his family at the bishop’s residence. The following day he sent word that he would like to speak to Michael, who arrived to find his uncle propped up on pillows in bed and looking exhausted. For a moment Loras struggled to speak. When he did, his voice was hoarse and came from somewhere deep inside him.
‘Thank you for coming, Michael. I asked you because I shall not much longer be in this world.’
Mike made as if to object; Loras silenced him with a smile.
‘Don’t trouble yourself, my son. You’re a good, kind boy; you always have been. But there are matters I wish to resolve before . . .’ Loras hesitated. ‘Before it is too late. You and I have always spoken frankly with each other and I know you have followed my advice in many things. What I wish to understand, Michael, is why I sense such unhappiness in your life.’
Mike looked hard at his uncle and nodded. The question did not surprise him and this was not a time for denial or flippancy. In as measured a tone as he could manage, Mike told the dying bishop about the fears which underlay his life, about the helplessness he felt in the face of a world that buffeted him one way and another, and about the sense of rejection that stemmed from his secret certainty of his own worthlessness. He spoke about the fleeting hope he had found in the idea of entering the priesthood and the comfort he still took in the rites of the Church, the talismanic rituals and magic formulae that, repeated hard enough and often enough, might ward off life’s cruelty. It was a strange kind of religion and he knew Uncle Loras could not approve of it, but it was one that a frightened boy could cling to.
When he finished, Loras squeezed his hand. In a voice charged with emotion, he whispered, ‘Thank you, my son. Thank you for coming into my life. I would like so much to tell you that God will provide the answers you seek, that He will clasp us back to the sanctuary of His paradise, but now – as I prepare to meet Him – I cannot be certain what to think. If I could know the truth of the world beyond, I would reach out and tell you of it; but all I can say is, seek for answers, seek to know who you are, and do not forget the love that is within us. When I am gone, please be kind to my sister, Mike, be kind to your own sister . . . and be kind to yourself.’
Within a month, Loras was dead.
Marge, desperate with grief herself, suggested Mike take time off school to cope with his uncle’s death, but he insisted on going. He walked through the corridors in a daze, barely comprehending anything that went on in class, but welcoming the distraction school offered: home felt like a tomb. The second day after Loras died, Mike sat in English class and felt his cheeks flush with emotion as Sister Brophy read out a poem which seemed to him to sum up his life in two stanzas.
‘It’s a translation of a work by the Russian poet Michael Lermontov,’ she said by way of introduction. ‘Humanity’s sin made God expel us from Eden, and our fate is to suffer the memory of Paradise in the torment of exile . . .
‘An angel was flying though the midnight sky, and softly did
he sing; And the moon and the stars and the clouds hearkened to that
holy song. He sang of the bliss of the innocent souls in the gardens of
paradise; He sang of the great God, and his praise was sincere.
In his arms he carried a young soul, destined for the world of sorrow and tears;
And the sound of that song stayed, wordless but alive, in the young soul’s mind.
And for a long time the soul languished in the world, filled with a wonderful longing,
And earth’s tedious songs could not replace for it those heavenly sounds.’
TEN
1968
Mike’s sixteenth birthday came in the summer of revolutions. The events of May ’68 in France had roused the campuses of the US. In August the National Guard in Chicago beat and gassed the foot soldiers of the revolution, spawning l
egions more. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot dead.
By September the mood at Boylan High was febrile. The world was rising in protest and Mike was tormented by thoughts of revolt and escape. Erik Erikson’s theories were circulating on the pages of psychology journals, and students were recognizing themselves in the bastardized word-of-mouth versions that reached places like Boylan. Mike’s classmates saw themselves through the mirror of Erikson’s teenage identity crisis, but Mike knew that orphans alone were truly without an identity.
The new music that blew in with the spirit of revolt made Mrs Finucane, Boylan’s music teacher, feel she was fighting a losing battle. She was teaching Mozart and Beethoven, but John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix filled the students’ hearts. She announced auditions for the school’s annual musical, Mame, without great hopes, but was surprised by the turnout.
When Mike saw the flyer, his head had filled with thoughts of music and dressing-up, of poetry and greasepaint. He pictured Doc and Marge applauding. To be admired was to be accepted, and he didn’t hesitate: he was first to arrive at the audition, and when Mrs Finucane asked him to sing his favourite song, his performance of ‘Danny Boy’ brought a tear to her eye. With two other hopefuls, he was given sheet music to practise at home before returning to try out for the male lead, Patrick.
When he got in from school, Mike took advantage of Marge’s daily half-hour among the backyard petunias to tell her about it. She smiled and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
‘Oh Mike, how wonderful! You’ll be a shoo-in with your lovely voice – and it’s so nice to see you taking an interest in good music. All this rock and roll going on the whole time is so annoying, don’t you find? You must tell Doc the moment he gets home. Are there any nice girls in the show?’
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 12