The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition)

by Sixsmith, Martin

  When the pictures of Mike and Mary’s naturalization ceremony had arrived, Marge had got one framed and hung it on the wall by the front door. Arriving home now, exhilarated by Mike’s success, Mary felt her spirits fall the minute she saw it. She couldn’t see anything else in the picture but her nose, and long after everyone else had taken off their coats and retired to the den to chat excitedly about their glamorous young star-in-the-making, Mary remained standing in front of the picture, weighing it up and thinking tormented thoughts.

  James had been watching the calendar. His call-up date was drawing closer and Marge, frantic at the thought of him leaving, had pleaded with Doc to do something. The morning after the show the mail brought the first sign that Doc’s efforts might be paying off. A letter from the Department of Defense indicated that James M. Hess was to report for a six-month intensive training programme at the US Army’s Officer Candidate School. Doc’s contacts had reassured him that if his son completed the training, he would graduate with the rank of lieutenant in a unit scheduled to serve in Panama. It would be hot, but it wasn’t Vietnam. Marge took the letter to her bedroom and read it over and over again. She kissed it and held it to her heart. She said a silent prayer of thanksgiving to Our Lady. Her eyes filled with grateful tears.

  In the evening the phone rang and Marge picked up the call. Charlotte wanted to speak to Michael, but she didn’t object when Mrs Hess engaged her in conversation. Charlotte laughed when Marge said what a lovely couple she and Mike had made on stage and how much Mike had been talking about her and what a pleasure it would be to have Charlotte and her family over for lemonade on Sunday. And when Marge told her the good news that James would not be going to Vietnam after all, Charlotte was genuinely pleased for her. Her own brother’s birth date would be in next year’s lottery and she knew her parents were going through agonies. When, eventually, Marge said, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard enough of me. I guess I’d better get Mikey for you,’ Charlotte laughed again and thanked her. She was calling to say she and her brother had got a loan of their father’s Buick for the evening.

  A half-hour later Marius and Charlotte Inhelder pulled up outside the Hess house in Maplewood Drive and Mike jumped in back. The car was pulsing with excitement: endless vistas of possibility stretched ahead and Mike felt grown-up and powerful. Charlotte introduced him to her brother, who responded with a conspiratorial wink. Marius had the same Saxon beauty as his sister – the same blond hair, the same lithe elegance. Sitting behind him, Mike gazed at the slim curve of his neck above the whiteness of his T-shirt, delicate shoulder blades rising and falling as he manipulated the heavy steering wheel, and he was shocked by the intensity of his admiration. An overwhelming longing came over him to reach out and touch the gleaming skin that glowed only feet away from his own face.

  In the front passenger seat Charlotte bounced around with feverish excitement, eschewing her seat belt with a teenager’s faith in her own immortality. She chattered excitedly, on a high, swivelling her gymnast’s body this way and that, turning to Mike in the back and then to her brother beside her. They were going to Marius’s favourite bar, Mr Henry’s on State Street, she said, where his friends were dying to meet Mike and see the boy who had captured his little sister’s heart. Marius’s eyes met Mike’s in the rear-view mirror and he gave him a little smile, man to man, amused by his sister’s enthusiasm.

  Mike had never been to Mr Henry’s. He liked it at once. It was dark-panelled, pub-like and crowded, the tables pushed close together and covered in plastic checked tablecloths. An old upright piano sat on a dais at the end of the room and one wall was covered in the kind of nude paintings that might have been risqué once, before the seen-it-all nonchalance of the 1960s. Marius was the only one old enough to drink legally, so they sat at a shadowy corner table and ordered a pitcher of beer.

  Mike was enthralled by the noise, the dim, sexy lighting and the sweet, grimy smells of spilled beer and cheap perfume. He watched excitedly as men in biker jackets and women with close-cropped haircuts gathered in little knots at a bar that stretched the length of the room and waiters with brightly dyed hair sailed through the throng like ballet dancers.

  Mike, Charlotte and Marius, young, fresh-faced and beautiful, were themselves the object of admiring glances from those around them. Marius’s friends were only slightly older than Mike and Charlotte, but they could have come from a different planet. Their bright T-shirts and jewellery, long hair and earrings made Mike feel staid and dull. They babbled breathlessly about art, music, poetry and a festival they were all going to in upstate New York. A young man in a black shirt and yellow pants recited a strange poem by some guy named Leonard Cohen and a lazy-eyed girl announced she had slept with Andy Warhol, a claim that was greeted with jocular scepticism.

  Marius had told his friends about Mike and Charlotte’s ‘fabulous’ performance in the school musical and someone suggested they should get up and sing. The piano had been in desultory use during the evening, but no one had succeeded in stopping the chatter and commanding the room’s attention. After five or six rounds of beer, Marius’s friend Joey, a tall, willowy boy with long hair and a sly smile, took Mike and Charlotte by the hand and led them to the dais. To their intense embarrassment, he raised his hand and called for silence.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘pray quiet, for it is that time of the night when we welcome our star turn. Mr Michael Hess and Miss Charlotte Inhelder will – for your exclusive benefit – reprise their award-winning performance of Mr Jerry Herman’s most beautiful, fabulous runaway Broadway success, erm . . . Help me, Michael, what was it called?’

  The room tittered and Mike blushed, but Charlotte was made of feistier stuff and hit the opening chord on the piano. Mike took his cue and added his voice to hers. For all their hip sophistication, the crowd in the bar loved the glamour of musicals, and by the first chorus those who knew the words were joining in. The number got a round of applause and an older man with an earring asked if they knew any Judy Garland numbers.

  ‘Sure.’ Charlotte shrugged and smiled. ‘But you’ll have to play the piano part.’

  Without a word, the guy jumped up onstage and the three of them let rip with a string of songs that drew wild applause. Free drinks were forced on them, and by the time they responded to the audience’s demands for The Wizard of Oz, their inhibitions were a thing of the past. Mike slipped effortlessly into the role of Dorothy (it was one of Marge’s favourite movies so he had seen it a hundred times) and he put his heart into ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ because he so wanted to be the bird that flies away – ‘why oh why can’t I?’ When they left the stage, they were offered drinks by half the bar and it took Marius’s good sense and fear of paternal retribution to drag them out and bundle them into the back seat of the Buick.

  THIRTEEN

  1968

  Mike and Charlotte were the talk of Boylan High, and Mike’s male classmates were quick to tease him, hinting at their envy of his good fortune in bawdy comments he tried to ignore. Unsure if he was being mocked or admired, Mike responded with a sheepish smile that only confirmed his peers’ suspicions of his sexual prowess. Jake Horvath alone spoke seriously to him. He wanted to know if he really loved Charlotte and what it was like to be in love. Mike sensed the earnestness of Jake’s questions, but had no answers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I feel.’

  Charlotte’s girlfriends made a show of congratulating her, then whispered to each other about the ‘plastered on’ make-up that made her look ‘such a hussy no wonder the boy couldn’t resist’.

  On the Sunday the Inhelders were due to call, Doc and Marge scurried around tidying the house. The Inhelders had a reputation in Rockford – they were regarded as an ‘arty’ family. Everyone knew Charlotte’s mom played Brahms and Mendelssohn on the baby grand her forebears had brought with them from Germany; her brothers painted the scenery and served as stage hands for Boylan High’s annual plays; and her dad Otto, well, he co
llected cigar wrappers.

  The afternoon turned out to be one of those embarrassing occasions when everyone knows something is hanging in the air, but no one broaches the subject. Otto did his best.

  ‘Bravo, junger Mann,’ he barked at Mike with an encouraging pump of the hand. ‘Sie haben ja eine schoene Stimme!’

  Mike smiled awkwardly, but Mary burst into laughter.

  ‘A in’t no use talking German to Mikey, Mr Inhelder: he’s all Irish through and through!’

  Otto turned to Doc with a confused frown. ‘But Mr Hess, I was thinking your family are all German through and through. Is this not so?’

  Doc shrugged. ‘They’re adopted, him and Mary. Adopted from Ireland. That’s the way it is.’

  Otto looked across to Charlotte and saw his daughter was as surprised as he was, but before he could say anything his wife nudged him and he coughed stiffly.

  ‘So,’ he said to Mike, ‘as I was saying, young man, you have the lovely singing voice.’

  Mike smiled again and thanked him, but he was watching Charlotte from the corner of his eye.

  On Monday in school Charlotte was distant and Mike asked her to let him explain things – the need to apologize hovered over him his whole life like an ever-present albatross – but Charlotte was hurt and didn’t want to know.

  ‘Look, Mike,’ she sniffed. ‘I just don’t understand you. I thought we were being honest with each other. I thought we were telling each other everything. So how d’you think it made me feel yesterday when I found out pretty much the most important thing about you in front of everyone?’

  Mike tried to object, but Charlotte was in full flow.

  ‘You know your problem, Michael Hess? You never let anyone get close to you. You’re like a closed book and you don’t want anyone to see inside – not even me. Why don’t you want people to know you? Why don’t you want people to love you?’

  Mike was about to say this was nonsense, but something was telling him maybe she was right. Before he could grasp the thought, Charlotte had jumped in with another reproach, this one clearly intended to give him a way out.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to say being Irish doesn’t mean much to you,’ she said. ‘Is that what you’re going to tell me?’

  Mike looked down. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘It does mean a lot to me. It means an awful lot.’

  Charlotte’s eyes flashed with bitter triumph.

  ‘Well, that’s just as I thought, then. The most important thing in your life and you don’t bother to tell me about it! You know what that means, Michael? It means you don’t love me.’

  Mike shifted on his feet and lifted his gaze. Charlotte’s eyes were glistening and he felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her pain at being rejected.

  ‘Don’t say it means that, Charlotte. I don’t know why I never told you about Ireland, about being adopted. Maybe I thought it would put you off me.’

  Charlotte looked thoughtfully at him.

  ‘Well, I gotta tell you, Mike, my dad doesn’t like the idea of me seeing someone who pretends to be German but is nothing of the sort.’

  ‘I never pretended to be German,’ Mike replied indignantly. ‘I never wanted to be German! I wanted to be what I’m meant to be. It’s not my fault where I ended up. Sometimes I feel . . . like I was never meant to be here. Anyway, I don’t like talking about it. That’s why I never told you. I hate talking about it.’

  Charlotte looked doubtful. ‘You’re missing your real mom, is that it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I don’t remember anything about her and other times it’s like . . . I can remember the feel of her.’

  He struggled to put his thoughts into words.

  ‘You know, it’s like . . . you’ve heard a song and really loved it, and can’t get it out of your head, but then it fades and you can still recall the feeling of it but it won’t come back to you. That’s how it feels.’

  Charlotte put her hand on Mike’s arm, thinking how different he was from other boys. All her old feelings for him came back in a rush. He was so sensitive and vulnerable. All the tension she felt with other boys – the suspicion they were always looking down her brassiere, always thinking of putting their hands on her – Mike made her forget all that; he made her feel at ease, and she loved him for it.

  ‘Oh Mikey,’ she soothed. ‘I understand. We all get sad and lonely. We all need someone who cares about us and thinks about our feelings instead of just what they want. That’s how I feel about you and I think – I hope – that’s how you feel about me . . . Isn’t it?’

  Mike thought for a moment and decided that it probably was how he felt about Charlotte. What he wanted from her was not the kisses and the embarrassed fondling in the woods in Oak Park; he wanted the sympathy and concern and – yes, maybe – the love she was offering him.

  He put his hand on hers.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry about . . . Sometimes I get pretty down. I can’t figure it at all, because I got a good life here and my mom and dad look out for me and stuff. But it still feels like there’s always something missing—’

  ‘Well I can be that something for you, Mikey. I can be there for you . . .’

  Charlotte had interrupted him and he had lost his train of ideas; he wasn’t completely sure that was where his thoughts had been taking him, but Charlotte’s certainty made him forget what else it could have been.

  ‘Yeah, you can,’ he replied a little uncertainly.

  Mike told Jake Horvath about Charlotte and about the doubts he couldn’t shake off.

  ‘You know, Jake, she says I never open up to her and I guess it’s true. It’s like there’s something inside telling me not to get too close to people in case they let me down . . . like I know I’m going to get rejected so there’s no point even trying. Do you know what I mean?’

  Jake nodded. He was kind of shy himself.

  ‘I see what you mean, Mike. But you’ll never find out how things might end up if you don’t take a gamble on it. I’d say you’ve got to let your defences down sometimes.’

  When Mike told Mary about it, she understood at once. Every orphan has been rejected, and not just by anyone – their rejection has come from the most important person in the world.

  Mike and Charlotte saw less of each other in the weeks that followed. Charlotte told her friends and maybe told herself that it was because her dad had forbidden their love – they were studying Romeo and Juliet in English and Charlotte was thrilled by the tragedy and romance of it all – but she knew Otto’s complaints were more show than substance. The real reason they were drifting apart was because their relationship had trespassed on areas where Mike was far from comfortable. He had opened his heart to Charlotte and he was regretting it. The more he found excuses for not seeing her, the more Charlotte was mystified and offended.

  That’s just like him, she thought. You get close to him and straight away he draws back . . .

  Mike began spending more and more time with Jake Horvath. When he invited him over to Maplewood Drive, Jake said how much he adored Marge for her selfless devotion to her husband and her children, but when he heard Doc cursing the government, calling LBJ an ass and a schmuck and demanding ‘someone put a bomb under those goddam Democrats before they destroy the whole country’, Jake looked at Mike and grimaced. The two boys were spending most evenings at each other’s houses now, and although they hadn’t officially broken up, Mike avoided Charlotte’s eye as they passed each other in the school corridors.

  The phone call changed everything. It came while Doc was at work and the kids at school. Marge was watering plants in the backyard and stripped off her gardening gloves as she raced into the house to catch it. The voice at the other end was raspy and broken – it was no longer the voice of Otto the phlegmatic burgher; it was some poor, broken man dialling every number in his address book, hoping that by sharing his sudden, terrible burden he might somehow lessen its unbearable weight.

  ‘Mar
ge? Marge? That you? It’s Otto.’

  Marge sensed his urgency. ‘Yes, Otto, it’s me. What’s wrong?’

  The line seemed dead for a second, then thrashed wrenchingly into life.

  ‘Charlotte . . . It’s Charlotte. Last night . . . She was going to the drugstore. That’s what’s most . . . That’s what I can’t understand. Can you, Marge? Can you understand it?’

  Marge swallowed and hesitated.

  ‘Otto, you’re going to have to tell me what’s happened. Tell me slowly. I’m listening. Just tell me what’s happened.’

  The line heaved with Otto’s grief.

  ‘My girl, Marge. It’s my girl. They killed her . . .’

  Marge listened to twenty minutes of pain and sorrow.

  Charlotte and her brother had taken the Inhelders’ Buick for an evening drive into Rockford. They’d planned to meet some friends and stop for a couple of Coca-Colas at the drugstore on State Street, but they never got there. On North Second Street a drunk in a blue pickup had crossed the centre median, veered through the left-hand lane and ploughed head-on into them. Charlotte, who never wore a seat belt, was thrown clean through the windshield and hit a truck. Her brother was saved because the steering wheel caught him in the chest and pinned him to the seat. He was in hospital, Otto said; the doctors had promised he would be OK.

  ‘But Marge’ – his voice was hoarse and faint, as if grief had tugged him away to some distant, untrodden land, stretching and beating to airy lightness the copper line between them – ‘I had to . . . identify her body . . . at the morgue . . . Oh God, Marge, she was so beautiful . . . No father should have to do that, should he? No man should have to do that . . .’

  Rumours of the Inhelders’ tragedy circulated in Boylan High for much of the morning. After lunch the principal called the school together to announce that one of their most promising and most gifted students had been called to the bosom of the Lord.