The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition)

by Sixsmith, Martin

  ‘I love you, Mom,’ he said, slurring his words a little. ‘I wanna thank you . . . for everything. All the things you’ve done for me and Mary over the years. You’re a wonderful mom and we’re lucky to have you.’

  Marge was touched.

  ‘Oh Mikey,’ she sniffed, ‘you know how much we love you guys. You needed someone to look after you all those years ago and we were just happy to be there for you. You’ve always been such a good boy – right from when you came here – and you’ve repaid our love many times over.’

  Mike took her hand, suddenly feeling very sober.

  ‘Mom, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

  ‘Sure, Mike,’ Marge replied. ‘What is it?’

  He hesitated for a moment – the subject was not an easy one for him, or for Marge, and he didn’t want to hurt her. He dropped his gaze momentarily, then met her eyes.

  ‘It’s about Ireland, Mom. I mean, about me and Ireland. You know how you’ve always told us you got us from the orphanage and how you took me because I was Mary’s best friend and held her hand and stuff? Well, I was just wondering what you knew about us before that all happened. Did you, like, know where we came from or who we were?’

  Marge looked at him. He had asked her similar questions in the past and she was aware her answers had left him disappointed. She began to repeat the usual story, the family legend of How the Kids We re Adopted, but Mike interrupted.

  ‘The thing is, Mom – and it’s nothing to do with you – that is, you’ve been the best mom I could have had, and all – but I want to know about my other mom, the one who gave birth to me and gave me to the nuns.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how much I can help you on that, Mikey,’ Marge stammered, but Mike persevered.

  ‘Because there’s something that has always bothered me: it’s a long time ago and I’m not sure if I’m imagining things, but sometimes it seems I can remember my Irish mom, like she was right there and I can picture her face and hear her voice.’

  Marge shook her head gently.

  ‘No, honey. I’m sorry but I don’t think that can be right. So far as we ever knew, your mom gave you to the nuns right after you were born. She left you in the convent and went to get on with her life. We simply have no idea who she was or what made her give you up or where she went afterwards. But I’m sure she wasn’t there with you in the orphanage.’

  Mike sighed, his hopes fading.

  ‘OK, Mom. I guess you’re right. It’s only vague memories, you know, like everything is kinda fuzzy and unclear.’

  Marge squeezed his hand. She felt for her son but it wasn’t as if he was ever going to go back to Ireland, and it was surely best for him to forget the past and focus on his future.

  ‘Well, that’s OK,’ she said. ‘Just don’t torment yourself over all those things. You’re Mike Hess now, the all-American boy’ – she laughed – ‘and you’re doing real well for yourself. We ’re proud of you, son.’

  Mike kissed her goodnight and finished his beer a little dejectedly at the kitchen table.

  As Marge got into bed she whispered to Doc that Michael had been asking about his Irish mom.

  ‘Well,’ Doc asked groggily, ‘what’d you say?’

  ‘I kept to our agreement. I told him what you said I should.’

  Doc grunted.

  ‘It’s for the best, Marge. There’s no point telling them about all that stuff with their moms; it’d just make things harder for everyone.’

  When Mike’s formal acceptance at Notre Dame came through, Mary said she would miss him: Jim, Tom and Stevie had already left home, and now, she said, Doc was talking about selling up and retiring to Florida. Mike found all this unsettling. He was moving away to college while the others were scattering to distant places. And he was worried about Marge, who had seemed a little fragile in recent times. She’d fretted and lost weight since Loras’s death, which had hit her badly, and she oftentimes seemed overwrought and unhappy.

  Uncertainty about the future reinforced Mike’s need for certainty about the past. With his imminent release from the bonds of his adoptive family the quest to discover his real identity seemed more urgent than ever, and he found a way to take it forward.

  The Notre Dame Admissions Office had written asking Mike for his birth certificate, social security number and naturalization papers. When Doc put the papers in an envelope to mail to the university, Mike offered to take the letter to the post office, where, with glances to left and right, he carefully opened it and noted down the details: ‘Anthony Lee, a male child having been born on the 5th day of July 1952 at Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, Ireland; and Philomena Lee, mother of the said child, having relinquished full claim forever . . .’

  Anthony Lee, son of Philomena Lee. Mike stared at the piece of paper for a long time. That night he wrote a letter, the first step on a journey he hoped would lead him to his mother, and to himself. He addressed it to the Mother Superior, Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea.

  EIGHTEEN

  1970

  Mike loved Notre Dame from the moment he arrived. It was such a heady, unlikely mixture of smells and bells, Catholicism and stage Irishness that he almost suspected the place was a private joke deliberately aimed at him. The twin presiding spirits of the campus were the gilded statue of the Blessed Virgin looking down from the dome of the Sacred Heart Basilica and the gigantic Christ with outstretched, celebrating arms that the jocks nicknamed Touchdown Jesus. Priests with Irish names presided over morning Mass; the Fighting Irish battled most weekends in a stadium where 60,000 raucous spectators, many with green-painted faces, led by cheerleaders in leprechaun out -fits, sang thunderous renditions of the ‘Notre Dame Victory March’ (‘Rally sons of Notre Dame, / Sing her glory, sound her fame / . . . Rah, rah, rah for Notre Dame, / Wake the echoes with her name’); and Irish pipe bands marched through the leafy quadrangles and across the rolling lawns to the twin lakes of St Mary and St Joseph, where long rows of black crosses marked the graves of generations of teacher brothers called to their heavenly reward.

  Mike was assigned to Fisher Hall, where he had a bedroom to himself and shared a bathroom down the corridor with a half-dozen other freshmen. He covered the walls with Santana and Led Zeppelin posters and settled down to read the texts for his US constitution module between duties as a eucharist assistant serving Communion in the basilica and stints as the dorm DJ hosting noisy parties late into the night. His love of music got him singing in the chapel choir, playing piano for Aloha celebrations and jamming in the campus nightclub. He was beginning to acquire the encyclopedic knowledge of rock and pop music that would stay with him and grow throughout his life. Word spread through the university about his talents as a DJ and his services were increasingly in demand, but he did not lose sight of prayer and contemplation. Time spent at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes alternated with volunteer work at Riverside Hospital and mentoring at South Bend’s Juvenile Justice Facility.

  In 1970 Notre Dame was still a male-only institution, with a testosterone-charged reputation fuelled by exploits on the sports field and a deliberately fostered image of aggressive masculinity. But Mike did not play football and did not thrill to the exploits of the jocks. The coterie he moved in was cerebral and sensitive: his friends were intellectuals and aesthetes interested in poetry and the arts; where the jocks wore tracksuits and baseball caps, they revelled in their flared trousers, flowered shirts and long hair. Tall and naturally slim, Mike made a fine clothes horse: he attracted a following among the girls of the adjacent St Mary’s College and from certain of the boys in Fisher Hall. It was a period of exploration and self-discovery; he felt liberated after the constraints of family life, uncovering new things about himself, readjusting his projections of the future. His studies were going well; his grades were good; he felt more at ease with himself than he had done for many years.

  Kurt Rockley, a sophomore English major and budding poet with a shock of blond hair that flopped over his pale forehead, took
a particular interest in Mike. They would sit together for hours in the Memorial Library or the social lounge of Fisher Hall discussing the beat poets, Andy Warhol, Miles Davis and Stanley Kubrick. Mike found Kurt’s attention flattering and his conversation inspiring. He felt relaxed in his presence; they understood each other and were able to discuss important things. When they spoke about their plans and ambitions, their hopes for the future and regrets about the past, Mike confided in him about his adoptive family and his Irish roots. He told him of the quest he had embarked on, the search for the mother who abandoned him and whom he was now trying to contact. But, he said, there had been no answer from Sean Ross Abbey and the passing weeks were fanning his ever-smouldering sense of foreboding.

  ‘How romantic!’ Kurt exclaimed when Mike reached the end of his story . ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten produced a Boy Without a Shadow . . .’

  Mike gave a helpless smile, but Kurt was a Californian and convinced that every problem must have a practical solution.

  ‘So, listen! If the nuns won’t write you, then you better just pick up that telephone and call them,’ he said, as if the answers to the riddle of life, fate and identity were simply a phone call away. Mike laughed.

  ‘So how do you suggest we get the phone number, Einstein? Look in the South Bend directory?’

  But Kurt was enjoying the challenge of the quest and the prospect of intimacy with Michael it conferred on him. Two days later he appeared at Mike’s door brandishing a scribbled note from Father Benjamin in the Notre Dame Secretariat. ‘Roscrea 220!’ he announced triumphantly and handed over the paper.

  ‘How on earth did you get that?’ Mike asked, grinning, but Kurt shook his head teasingly.

  ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’ he said. ‘Go dial the number!’

  Next morning, standing in the international phone booth at the South Bend post office with the scrap of paper in his hand, Mike stared at the phone and told himself to pick up the receiver. He stood for a quarter-hour and felt the sweat break out on his palms, but when the clerk came and asked him if he intended to make a call, he shook his head and walked out onto the windy street.

  NINETEEN

  1971

  Mike spent the summer at Notre Dame, working as an administrator for the university’s summer extension programme. The campus filled up with earnest adults attending courses on life sciences, writing for the stage and screen, and biblical exegesis. Most students who stayed on to provide support services were guys like Mike – without a home they wanted to go to, or too poor to take a vacation. When Mike asked Kurt Rockley why he had remained instead of flying back to his parents in San Francisco Kurt raised an eyebrow and said archly, ‘Well, I’m surprised you need to ask. I stayed here to be with you, of course.’

  Doc had found a house in St Petersburg Beach on the Gulf Coast of Florida and they had moved as soon as Mary graduated from Boylan High in June. In August Mike phoned to say he wanted to come down for a week to see them and, if it was OK, he’d like to bring a friend. Marge was delighted and said she was sure Doc wouldn’t mind, so eight days later the two of them descended the steps of the Eastern Airlines 727 at the newly opened Tampa International Airport and jumped a Greyhound to St Petersburg Beach.

  Mike lay on the poolside, listening to the hypnotic beat of his own heart and the lapping of the water. Tiny beads of sweat trickled over his closed eyelids. The universe was sailing away into airy nothingness and a half-remembered tune from some place in his past was hovering on the fringes of his mind. He didn’t hear Kurt slip out of the water and glide over the hot path; didn’t see the trail of moist Rorschach blots that marked his passage; felt nothing until the boy’s lips were on his own and warm droplets were falling from Kurt’s hair onto his cheeks and neck.

  That evening at dinner Doc asked Kurt how he had gotten to know Michael, and Mike replied quickly that they played football together for Fisher Hall.

  At the end of the week, the night before the boys were due to fly back north, Mary asked Mike if she could speak with him alone. They sat in the dark by the pool and talked about how different it was here from the cold nights when they sat on the porch in Maplewood Drive. Kurt was inside, playing cards with Marge while Doc watched TV, and Mary put her hand on Mike’s arm.

  ‘That friend of yours sure is nice, Mikey. Cute too.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mike agreed, ‘he’s a good man.’

  They spoke about Marge, and Mike said he was worried about her – how frail she seemed and how unhappy. Mary said it was hard starting over in a new place, and there were tensions in the family. Then she fell silent. Mike asked her if she was OK.

  Mary hesitated and whispered, ‘Mikey, I’ve been seeing this guy and . . . I think I’m pregnant.’

  Mike was quiet on the plane up to Chicago. He was quiet on the Greyhound from Chicago to South Bend.

  At first Kurt respected Mike’s obvious desire not to talk, but his irritation finally got the better of him.‘Hey,’ he hissed, jostling Mike with his elbow. ‘What’s with the Greta Garbo act? What’s with the big sulk? Did I say something? Did I do something?’

  Mike apologized and said it was nothing Kurt had done. But when they got back to Notre Dame he said maybe it would be better if they didn’t see each other for a while.

  TWENTY

  1971

  Father Adrian knew the students who came regularly to confession. In theory the screen and dim light of the confessional were guarantees of anonymity, but the reality was you got to recognize their voices – and often their sins. Tonight, he could tell that Mike was agitated and struggling to find the right words. Father Adrian tried to guide him but the conversation was awkward, like they were avoiding something, and they both left the booth feeling things that needed saying had gone unsaid.

  He wasn’t surprised to find Mike waiting outside the basilica. When he asked him if he could help, Mike replied, ‘I don’t know.’

  Adrian smiled. ‘Let me try then.’

  Over coffee in the priests’ residence, they chatted about academic life, books, music and movies. Adrian did not push Mike to talk about the things he had on his mind, and it was Mike who brought the subject up.

  ‘Father, I’m feeling guilty . . . .’

  Father Adrian asked if he could be more specific and Mike said, ‘Well, for one thing, my brother James has been kicked out of the family and I haven’t done anything to try and contact him or tell him how bad I feel for him.’

  The priest nodded. ‘It is always sad when families quarrel. But from what you tell me, it hardly seems your fault that your brother has been sent away. And anyhow you can remedy your sin of omission by contacting him and expressing your love for him, can you not?’

  ‘I guess you’re right, Father. I should just write him and Shirley, I know I should. I’ll do it tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘But there are other things too . . .’

  And suddenly he was telling Father Adrian how worried he was about Marge; how guilty he felt for not taking care of her after all she had done for him; about Mary’s pregnancy and how he wished he could be there to support her as he always had been.

  Father Adrian listened with sympathy in his eyes.

  ‘Well, sure, Mike,’ he said when Mike had finished. ‘We all could do more to help others. But you are beating yourself up too much. Really. You can’t go through life blaming yourself for everything that happens to people you love, feeling responsible for every bad thing in the world. I can tell you are a loving son and brother, so why do you feel so bad about yourself? What makes you think you’re always to blame?’

  Mike took a breath. He hadn’t planned on saying anything more, but Father Adrian seemed such an understanding guy that maybe he would understand this.

  ‘I feel bad about myself because I am bad, Father. Everyone who gets close to me sees it and runs a mile. And I don’t blame them. I look inside myself and I see things that scare me.’

  Father Adrian leaned over and put a hand on Mike’s knee.

&
nbsp; ‘Oh come now, my son. What sort of things can there be? You’re a mere innocent at your age. You confess your sins, but in reality your sins are nothing at all.’

  The priest smiled encouragingly but Mike was growing agitated and shook his head.

  ‘You’re wrong, Father. I’m not innocent . . . My sin is that I love men.’

  LONDON

  Present Day

  The photo on my desk now is of a young man in a bright short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses in the Florida sunshine. He is sitting by the side of a swimming pool and the ocean is glinting through the trees behind him. Beside the picture a slightly older copy of the Rockford Register, from summer 1970, carries the headline TODAY’S GOOD NEWS: PUPILS ARE HEROES AT HOME FOR AGED.

  Shopping with your mother can be a drag, but when you help an elderly woman go to the grocery store – and she’s not even your mother – you’re somewhat of a hero. That’s what the boys of Boylan High School’s Key Club do each Wednesday afternoon for the women at North Main Manor Home, 505 N Main St. ‘We’re a service organization,’ explained Michael Hess, club president, ‘and we got the idea of helping these women.’ Two or three of the boys come each Wednesday to the retirement home and take the ladies ‘wherever they want to go, but usually it’s grocery shopping’, Hess explained.

  The photograph with the article is of a serious-looking teenager in a shirt and tie, his black hair flopping over a clean-cut attractive face in half-profile, ushering a frail-looking lady in a headscarf into the passenger seat of a parked car.

  Going back further, the footsteps of the distant life I have been following resound faintly in the cavernous archives of the Catholic Church. A photograph of Bishop Art O’Neill shows him presenting graduation prizes at Rockford’s Boylan High School to a female student in white robe and cap, and a smiling young man wearing a purple and black gown with the tassel of his mortar board hanging casually over the side of his face. A splendid 1965 print from the annals of the Vatican captures Pope Paul VI preening for the camera in the Vatican Library, flanked by a beaming Bishop Loras Lane in Rome for the closing sessions of the Vatican council and an old lady in widow’s black, hair carefully curled under a lace mantilla with black purse and white gloves, standing unsteadily on painfully swollen ankles. Worried by her son’s health, Josephine Lane in her late eighties appears to have made a final journey across the Atlantic to be with him, and this is the last picture of her. While the two men smile at the camera, she is staring into the distance beyond.