‘Unfortunately, Anthony, I simply cannot remember your mother,’ she said. ‘We had so many of them going through here in those days. Your mother was most likely given up to us by her parents on the streets of Dublin or somewhere.’
The anonymity of that ‘or somewhere’ was a blow. Mike felt suddenly weary and cheated. Sister Hildegarde pulled an envelope out of her bag.
‘Well, I do have one thing I can let you have.’
Mike looked up.
‘This is your birth certificate. It has your birth listed as 5 July 1952 and your mother’s name as Philomena Lee.’
Mike took the piece of paper and turned it over in his hands. He saw his birth had been registered on 11 July by an Eileen Finnegan, whom he took to be one of the nuns, but a black line had been drawn through the spaces ‘Father’s Name and Address’ and ‘Father’s Profession’, and the form contained no other information.
‘Thank you, Sister,’ he said. ‘This is lovely to have, but actually I already knew my mother’s name. Don’t you have anything else that might help me find her?’
Sister Hildegarde smiled and shook her head.
‘No, I’m afraid this is all.’
She glanced up at a portrait of Christ on the wall, and for the first time Mike sensed the nun might not be telling the whole truth.
‘Sister,’ he said slowly, ‘I have been diagnosed with . . . an illness, and I have been given just two years to live. Now I hope you can understand this – there is one thing I want above all others, one thing I need to do before I die, and that is to find my mother. So I beg you, please, to heed the request of a dying man; I beg you to have mercy on my suffering.’
‘I’m so sorry, Anthony. I would like to help you, but the truth is, the records are gone.’
Mike sensed a flicker of the same intransigence he had met in Mother Barbara – a closing down in the nun’s eyes, a withdrawal of goodwill – and he hastened to soften it.
‘Sister, please believe me. I’m not interested in anything but the present – where my mother is now. I think we should forget the past and whatever things went on back then. That’s all over now. But can’t you tell me, for the love of God, where did my birth mother go when she left here?’
‘As I say’ – Sister Hildegarde frowned – ‘I have looked through our files – that is why I kept you waiting just now – and I have found nothing. I am so sorry.’
‘But, Sister, if we know my mother’s name is Philomena Lee, surely you must have some record of where she went?’
Sister Hildegarde seemed to grow impatient.‘Many of our records were destroyed in a fire. You could possibly try the Irish Passport Office, but I can help you no further. ’
‘Well, what about the money?’ Mike was desperate now and desperation kindled anger. ‘What about the money you took from the Americans who came here looking for babies? The money you took from my parents? Is there no record of all the graft and corruption that went on over that?’
Sister Hildegarde stood up. Mike stood up hastily with her, clutching his head.
‘No, don’t go, Sister. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I’m just very overwrought about everything that’s happening to me.’
The nun hesitated and sat down again.
‘Let me ask you one thing,’ Mike said quietly. ‘A favour. When I die, and I am going to die soon, the greatest regret I shall take to my grave is that I never knew the woman who gave me birth. I was never able to tell her about the life I had or ask her about her feelings for me. But if I cannot find her in life, perhaps I can find her in death . . .’
Mike paused as a tear rose to his eye and slowly subsided.
‘Sister, what I want to ask you is . . . will you allow me to be buried in Sean Ross Abbey?’ He blew his nose. ‘Because I have always had the feeling my mother is trying to find me in the same way I have been trying to find her. And if she is looking for me, the place she will come is right here.’
He thought for a moment, trying to picture the future, the time when it would be too late.
‘But if you would let me be buried here, she might find my grave. It might give her comfort . . . and, who knows? Maybe one day she can use the information on my headstone to discover what I did with my life. Do not refuse me this favour, Sister . . . please.’
Sister Hildegarde’s reply, when it came, was slow and deliberate.
‘Our graveyard is crowded. There is little space left for anyone other than the sisters, who have their plots reserved. But I can see it means a great deal to you, Anthony, so if you are willing to make a donation to the abbey – and we would need to discuss the size of that donation – then I believe something may be possible . . .’
When Mike emerged from the convent, he saw Pete sitting in the sun on the far side of the lawn. He watched him for a while, thinking how handsome, how very good he looked. Mike walked over and, without a word, sat down beside him, slipped his arm round his waist and laid his head on his shoulder.
That evening over dinner their landladies asked how they had got on. Mike told them what Sister Hildegarde had said about trying to find his records but that they had disappeared.
Grace snorted. ‘The records are not there because she destroyed them! She burned them all as soon as the scandals started, may God forgive her. I will never forget the smell of that bonfire – it was the smell of those babies’ souls rising up to heaven. She burned their records and she burned their hope.’
Her sister Ellen nodded. ‘It’s true. Four years ago, in 1989, people started talking about how the nuns had coerced those young women into giving away their babies – how they made mothers sign terrible pledges that they would never seek to contact their children or try to find out what happened to them, how they were so brazen that they even forged some of the signatures and how they took stacks of money from the Americans who bought the babies off them. They may have called them donations but they were cash payments – for babies that weren’t theirs to sell! We who live here have always known about these things. Hildegarde McNulty burned those records because she was scared people would find out what they did.’
Mike and Pete returned to the convent the following morning but were told Sister Hildegarde was sick in bed. For the next two days they travelled the local area searching phone books and visiting churches and cemeteries. They combed every row of graves looking for family tombs with the name Lee, but they did not travel the seventy miles down the N7 to Newcastle West. Had they done so, they would have found not only the Lee family grave but Mike’s uncle Jack, who had bounced him on his knee forty years earlier and spent the rest of his life regretting that he did not pick him up and run off with him, still living in the same council house in Connolly’s Terrace. On the final day of their stay they walked through the grounds of Sean Ross Abbey and sat together in the ruins of the ancient monastery beside the old graveyard. The place was deserted, the white maypole shorn of its ribbons; the only sound was the desultory humming of bees in the summer heat and the faint rustle of sycamore branches in the breeze.
For an hour they lay there in silence. The tranquillity of the garden seemed to calm Mike’s spirit, and when he spoke he sounded brighter than he had for many weeks.
‘Pete? Did you notice anything about the way people look over here?’
Pete sat up.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I keep seeing guys in the street and thinking they look just like me. Haven’t you noticed?’
Pete laughed. ‘If all the guys in the street looked like you, I’d be in heaven! But yeah, I guess I do know what you mean – dark brows, black hair and stuff.’
‘Exactly. Sometimes I look at these people and it’s like looking at myself. There’s something reassuring about it – like these people are my people and this has always been their home. It’s where they belong, and it feels like I do too.’
Pete mulled over Mike’s words and then said, ‘Why we don’t we just pack everything in and come retire over here? We could buy a
little farm and just forget everything and be ourselves. What do you think?’
Mike smiled.
‘I think you are a lovely man, Pete Nilsson. Thank you so much for caring about me. Retiring to Ireland would be a dream, but it’s not going to happen now, is it?’
Mike watched as the bees flew from flower to flower, carrying pollen in the endless round. The world would continue to turn. Leaves would fall and grow anew. He leaned over to Pete and took his hand.
‘We’ll never come to live here; it’s too late for that. But when I die, that’s when I want to come back. This is where I want to be buried, right here in this graveyard in the shadow of the old monastery. Will you remember that when the time comes? Will you do that for me?’
TWENTY-ONE
1993–5
When they returned to Washington, Mike slept better at night, the bad dreams came less frequently and when they did, they seemed less intense. He didn’t tell Pete what he had agreed with Sister Hildegarde, but Pete saw her letter lying on the coffee table.
16 August 1993
Dear Michael,
Just a short note to thank you for your very generous donation – I only discovered the cheques after you had gone.
I was delighted that you called to see me. It is always nice to see old friends and you know you will always be welcome here at Sean Ross. God bless you.
Sister Hildegarde
Over the next year Mike threw himself into his work. Practising the law became his emotional outlet: its certainties reassured him and his successes helped him forget his private Calvary. The 1994 midterms were the target the party had set for capturing the House and Mike was determined to see it through. He might not leave much of a legacy, he told himself, but so much of his life had been invested in the Republican cause that capturing Congress would leave something tangible he could put his name to.
For twelve months his health stayed steady. The doctor at GW Hospital winked every time he read out Mike’s blood results and discovered his T-cell numbers still hovering round 200. In the fall of 1994 he offered his congratulations. ‘Mr Hess, you have just become one of my longest-surviving full-blown AIDS patients not to suffer any serious reverses. Your blood counts have held steady so that means the AZT is working, and you have avoided all the noxious side effects I have seen in other cases.’
On 8 November 1994, with a fifty-four-seat swing, the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Many long-serving Democrats who had previously relied on gerrymandered districts suddenly found themselves out of office, while not a single Republican incumbent lost his or her seat.
In the RNC building on First Street in the shadow of the Capitol champagne corks popped on election night and celebrations continued the next day. Mike’s speech was one of quiet satisfaction.
‘For the first time ever,’ he told his team of lawyers, ‘we have created an electoral system in which the number of seats won by each party reflects honestly and fairly its share of the popular vote. Because of your efforts’ – he waved his arm to take in the whole of the room – ‘we have done away with much of the gerrymandering that distorted previous elections stretching back thirty or forty years. To night brings not only a change in control of Congress, but a change in the way politics are done in this country. The media are talking of a Republican revolution’ – cheers rang out – ‘but what they don’t say is that that revolution was made possible by the efforts of dedicated people like all of you, like the late Roger Allan Moore and like Mark Braden, the man who held this job before me.’
There was respectful applause and a voice called out from the back of the room, ‘But you made it happen, boss. You’re the man who did it!’
Republican euphoria lasted until the new Congress convened in January. Mike was on a high that Christmas and New Year, congratulated and feted by the party leadership. On 4 January the populist Newt Gingrich took over as House speaker and immediately launched the Republicans’ guerrilla war against President Bill Clinton. GOP control of both the Senate and the House gave the party unprecedented scope to sabotage some of the liberal measures Clinton had tried to introduce, including universal healthcare and tighter gun control, and it led to the resurgence of the conservative religious right. Suddenly, Falwell, Buchanan and Robertson were back, and the campaign against abortion, women’s rights and same-sex marriage was centre stage again.
During January Mike received letters and emails from Republican friends congratulating him on helping to engineer the party’s revival, and from gay friends expressing their horror at his role in helping the conservatives regain power. By the end of the month, he was coming home from work looking harassed and exhausted.
‘What have I done, Pete?’ he said. ‘I’ve been so stupid – devoting my life to this goddam party. I can’t tell you how despicable they are. I closed my eyes to it for so long. I must have been blind . . . or dazzled by the glitz and power, because I just never focused on what they’re really about.’
Pete stood behind him and put his hands on Mike’s shoulders. ‘What’s the matter, Mike?’ he asked, massaging his neck. ‘What’s got you so wound up? Isn’t there something we can do about it?’
‘It’s this anti-gay bill that Jesse Helms is introducing on behalf of the party. It’s so fanatical that even the “Moral Morons” are having second thoughts. It establishes the right of federal agencies and employers to discriminate against gay men: anyone employed by the federal government can be fired simply for being gay.’
Pete took Mike’s hand and stroked it gently.
‘That’s terrible. But it’s not much worse than the stuff they’ve been doing for years, is it? And it won’t affect us, so why get so agitated about it?’
But Mike was agitated. From his pocket he produced a printout of an email bearing that afternoon’s date. Pete scanned it with growing unease.
To Michael Hess.
This is to inform you that if the Helms Bill goes through Congress, you will be the first to suffer its consequences. You have aided and abetted this party of bigots; you have stood by as they let gay Americans die and invoked the curse of God on them. Now it will be your turn to feel their wrath when the media discover the Republicans’ chief counsel is gay himself – then let’s see who gets fired.
Sincerely, a friend.
In the middle of February Mike fell sick. It began with a slight fever one evening; the next morning he still felt bad. In the bathroom he looked in the mirror and it was there – so innocuous he could easily have missed it – a pale reddish purple, an inch above his right nipple. When he touched it, it felt tender and a little raised like a bruise. He ran his fingers over his stomach and neck, turned to examine his back, raised his arms and saw that two other lesions had appeared in the soft flesh of his armpit.
Mike showered and dressed slowly. When he emerged he told Pete he was feeling much better. As he left he called out, ‘I’ll be late home, but don’t worry – I’ll be OK.’
That evening when Mike came in from work, Pete met him at the door and hugged him. ‘Did you see the doctor?’ he asked.
Mike’s face was buried in Pete’s right shoulder; they held each other close and their eyes did not meet. It was easier that way for both of them, easier to say things that were important and difficult and fraught with the spectre of separation.
‘Yes, I did. The numbers have dropped. I’ve got lesions now. It’s most likely Kaposi’s. They’re going to do a scan, but I think it’s the endgame.’
The flatness of Mike’s voice, the quiet enumeration of the fatal symptoms lent the moment an illusion of calm. Then they began to cry, still locked in the embrace that gave them hope and strength. Their sobs were almost apologetic. Weeping undermined the old pretence that nothing had changed and life would continue; it acknowledged a loss that could no longer be postponed.
Their relationship felt the strain. They were no longer equal partners. There was resentment from Mike – the re
sentment of the sick for the healthy – though he kept it veiled, and there was anxiety from Pete. They were affectionate, kissed and hugged, but sex was proscribed and its absence cast a pall. They stayed loyal to each other, though, and Pete, sensing things were coming to a close, tried to do what he could for Mike while there still was time.
‘Do you want to go back to Ireland again?’
Mike thought for a moment and shook his head. ‘There’s no point, Pete. It’s too late to go chasing dreams.’
Every week brought bad news. Mike’s T-cell count dipped alarmingly, then recovered and plunged again to new lows. After twelve months of remarkable good health his condition was deteriorating fast. He coughed and lost weight; his body was marked with discoloured patches where lesions bloomed and faded; his fingernails were turning black; his face had taken on the gaunt, sallow look that was the badge of membership in the brotherhood of AIDS. The lower he sank, the higher the mountain of his medication became: by the spring of 1995 he was taking so many pills he needed a chart to keep track of them.
The doctors at GW Hospital offered him counselling but he told them he didn’t want it. When Pete tried to persuade him, he lashed out: ‘Counselling’s for losers. If I’m going to get through this, I’ll do it on my own.’
They had not discussed Mike’s death, and Pete suspected he was being offered a cue.
‘If you get through it, Mike?’
But Mike drew back. ‘Oh, if, if, if – it’s all ifs. There’s no point even talking about it. I’ll keep taking the medication, so there can be no excuses, but I don’t think there’s much anyone can do for me now.’
When Mike thought about how he was responding to what was happening to him, he felt – hoped – there was courage in his resignation, not cowardice. He sensed Pete wanted him to keep trying, keep fighting, but he was very tired. Death’s presence imposed a calm, lucid logic. He had tried to explain this to Pete, but Pete just wanted him to keep on living. As the cherry blossom unfurled along the Mall and the Capitol glowed pink in the spring sunshine, it seemed that all that remained was for them to say goodbye.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 38