An Innocent, a Broad

by Ann Leary

  In America responses to my new hairdo might have been something like, “Oh, you have a new haircut. Doesn’t that look ni-i-ce!” Or the less hypocritical might simply have said, in an enthusiastic tone, “You got your hair cut!” My new friends at UCH said things like, “Who did that to you?” and “There really ought to be a law….”

  FIFTEEN

  DENIS WAS COMING to take us home.

  It had been eight long weeks since Jack was born. He had graduated from Room A to Room B. Now he was about to be moved to Room C, which could possibly be his last stop before being released. Jack was gaining weight each day. He breathed on his own and was beginning to nurse. When his weight reached two kilos, approximately four and a half pounds, he would be allowed to go home.

  Denis was scheduled to arrive in London on Friday, May 25, and the day before, I went for my usual walk during doctors’ rounds. This time, instead of wandering around the park, I went to the local supermarket. Denis and I would be staying at a bed-and-breakfast until Jack’s release, and I bought us some snacks for the room and some bottled water and magazines.

  I walked back to the hospital, and when I entered Jack’s room, I saw Denis standing holding Jack in his arms. He had decided to surprise me by coming a day early. The ward was full of people, but all the fear and loneliness of the past weeks came up and hit me hard when I saw Denis, and I burst into loud, wrenching sobs. The other nurses in the ward grabbed boxes of tissues for themselves, and years later, when I visited the unit, one of the nurses on duty recalled the time I had “sent all the staff into fits of crying” when Denis came back to get us.

  THE NEXT DAY Denis and I were discussing our plans for our return to the United States when the chief neonatologist, Dr. Wyatt, overheard us.

  “You’re not planning to take Jack on an airplane when he’s discharged, are you?” he asked.

  “Of course we are,” I replied.

  “I’m afraid Jack’s lungs aren’t mature enough yet for an airplane flight.”

  Denis and I both stared at Dr. Wyatt.

  “So you’re saying we can’t take him home?” Denis asked.

  “Well, I suppose you could take him home, but you’ll have to make some other arrangement besides flying!” Dr. Wyatt said with a chuckle. Then, seeing our astonished stares, he said soberly, “Oxygen levels on aircraft are too unpredictable. Our lungs can cope with the rises and falls in oxygen levels, but I’m afraid that it might cause Jack some problems.”

  Denis and I continued staring at him, desperately searching for a sign that he might be joking.

  “I’m terribly sorry…. I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this to you before.”

  THAT NIGHT DENIS and I walked back to the B and B silently. I noticed, when we walked beneath one streetlight, it flickered off and then back on again. I looked up and saw that several of the lights on that block were having problems. They flickered on and off against the night sky, three of them, all in a row.

  “Jesus …,” I said.

  “I know,” said Denis.

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER, on July 7, 1986, Denis and I were sitting in our Boston apartment reading the Sunday paper, when he said suddenly, “Let’s go to the airport. I want to say good-bye to my parents.”

  Denis’s parents were leaving for a monthlong trip to Ireland that evening. It was a trip they had been planning all year.

  “We just saw them on the Fourth,” I said. “We saw your whole family on the Fourth of July. Why didn’t you say good-bye then?”

  “I did,” said Denis. “I just want to see them off, that’s all.”

  So we drove to the airport and found Denis’s parents and his younger sister, Betsy, in the ticket line. We waited with them and talked about their plans. Then John and Nora and Betsy checked their bags, and we all walked to the security gate together. As we neared the metal detector, we hugged and said our good-byes, and then Denis and I stayed for a moment and watched them disappear into the terminal crowd. Later, on the drive back to Charlestown, Denis said, “I feel bad. I didn’t get a chance to shake my dad’s hand.”

  “What?”

  “He went through the metal detector before he realized what he was doing, and then Ma was hugging me and everything. I just never got a chance to shake his hand.”

  Denis usually saw his parents only a few times a year. Although he loved them dearly, he almost never called them on the phone.

  “They’re only gone a month,” I said.

  “I know. It just left me with a bad feeling.”

  “You’ll see your dad when they get back,” I said, but Denis never saw his father alive again.

  Four nights after they arrived in Killarney, John and Nora were at Drum Hall, an Irish club, with John’s brother Patrick and his wife, Joan. Patrick and Joan had just arrived, and John went to the bar to buy them a drink. “I still have the five-pound note he was clutching in his hand,” Nora says now, when discussing that night. Nora chatted with Joan and Patrick, and then suddenly there was a commotion at the bar. Somebody called out for an ambulance, and Nora and Joan and Patrick ran to find John lying dead next to the bar. He had died instantly of a heart attack.

  Denis’s mother and Betsy flew back after the Irish wake, and we first spotted them walking through the terminal toward us, huddled together, shocked and gaunt. Nobody had slept in days. None of us could really talk. Nora and Betsy drove back in Denis’s brother John’s car; Denis, his brother-in-law Neil, and I in another car. Neil had to pull over as we left the airport, and we all sat weeping on the side of the road for a few moments, and then we drove on to Worcester.

  It’s not convenient to be born or to die overseas. We had to wait a week for John’s body to be flown back to Massachusetts. There was a problem obtaining the proper casket in County Kerry, because the casket had to be hermetically sealed for the flight. We spent that week at Denis’s parents’ house and waited with his mother and brother and sister, his aunts and uncles and cousins. We stayed up until the early-morning hours each night. This was during a heat wave, and we just sat around the living room those nights talking about John and the transportation problems—and also about the lights.

  The night that Denis’s father died in Ireland, his brother Mick O’Leary stood at his kitchen window and saw lights coming toward him across the field. This caused him great alarm, as there is a family legend that when one of the O’Leary men dies, the death is usually accompanied by strange electrical phenomena. Later, when he learned of John’s death, he told his brother and sisters about the lights. That same night, we’d heard, John’s brother Patrick had watched a lightbulb from his hall fixture fall right out of its socket and shatter on the floor.

  Now that Nora was back, we were having some electrical phenomona Stateside. Nora’s power went out one night as we all sat around the living room. Candles were lit, and Neil was just making his way down to the cellar to have a look at the circuit breaker when the power came back on. “It’s the heat wave,” somebody said. “There’s a power shortage.” And somebody else said, “It’s John. He’s showing us he’s here, with us now.”

  There were light stories all week. A family friend left the Learys’, and when he arrived home, his porch light was flickering on and off. People arrived home to find lights on that they were sure they’d left off. I have to say that at the time I had some doubt about some of these stories. They probably didn’t remember that they’d left the light on, I thought. Lights flicker.

  Ann Marie and Neil Coleman, Denis’s sister and brother-in-law, had recently bought their first home. On the front lawn was an old gaslight that had never worked since they’d had the house. John had come over to have a look at the light just before he left for Ireland. “I’ll fix it when we get back from Ireland,” he’d promised Ann Marie. The week that we waited for John’s body, Ann stayed at her mother’s. Finally she needed some clothes for the funeral, so she went home, and though it was the middle of the day, the gaslight was lit, and it worked from that point on.<
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  Over the years, when we have family get-togethers, something always happens. A couple will announce they’re pregnant and the chandelier above will suddenly dim for a moment—or some of us will think it dimmed. On Christmas Eve, when everybody is finally under one roof, somebody will go to switch on a light and the bulb will blow. Then everybody laughs and blames Dad, except Nora, the cynic, who says, “That was an old lightbulb. It just burned out.” Now, walking down this historic street in a once foreign city, the flickering streetlights had a soothing, reassuring effect, and left us with the feeling you only receive from a loving parent—the feeling that we were at home and that we were being cared for.

  IT WAS EARLY June, and we needed a flat to rent for the entire summer. Unfortunately, we discovered upon visiting several estate agents that short-term summer rentals in London are outrageously expensive, meant to be leased for one or two weeks at a time by tourists on holiday.

  “I never envisioned this,” I said to Denis one afternoon after being laughed at by an agent when we told him what we were able to pay for a rental. “I just somehow assumed that when we had our first baby, we wouldn’t be homeless.”

  We were, in fact, entirely homeless. We were so broke with our London expenses that we couldn’t afford the rent on our Boston apartment. We had to let it go. It was the home where we had conceived our child, where I had wandered about dreamily for five months, thinking, This is where I’ll feed the baby, and I’ll put the baby’s bassinet here in the mornings, and I’d better fix that exposed electrical outlet before the baby comes. Denis had packed up our things in a haphazard fashion one day and moved them into my mother’s garage, leaving behind the baby’s room littered with remains of our former life. When we returned to the States, the plan was that I would stay at my mother’s house for a few weeks while Denis looked for an apartment in New York and earned enough money to put down a deposit.

  The hospital social worker had given me a list of charitable organizations that provided emergency housing, and I was just about to start on this list when Jo called with the exciting news that she had found us a flat. Somehow Jo’s investigative genius had led her to a one-bedroom flat in Islington. Its tenant was an American man who had suddenly learned that he needed to return to California for a few months. He would sublet us his place at the same rental rate that he had been paying. This we could afford, because Denis now had a regular source of income in the UK. Not long after Denis’s initial appearance on Live from Paramount City, he had met John Thoday of Avalon Entertainment. John managed several successful British comedians, and he began booking Denis in comedy clubs in and around London.

  * * *

  IN THE SCBU at University College Hospital are two parents’ rooms. These are rooms where parents can sit and read or use breast pumps in relative privacy. When a baby is ready to be discharged from the hospital, the rooms are used as sleeping-in rooms for the parents and the soon-to-be-released infant. I don’t know if such a setup exists in American hospitals, but it was a wonderful way to make the transition from being an institutionalized pseudofamily to being a real family. Denis and Jack and I slept in this room for two nights. Denis and I bathed Jack, I nursed him, we dressed him and put him to bed, all in the safety of the hospital where Jack had lived his entire life. If his color changed for an instant, we sprinted down the hall with him in our arms, just to have a resident doctor or nurse reassure us that he was fine. We felt like children playing house in a larger house that was run by grown-ups, and I personally would have been happy to keep on with this arrangement until Jack’s eighteenth birthday. The initial resentment I’d felt toward the hospital staff for usurping my role as a parent had been replaced by utter dependence. Despite the many weeks of hoping and praying for the day when Jack would be well enough to go home, now that the time had arrived, I was terrified.

  Before babies are discharged from the SCBU, they must be examined by a physician, so Denis and I passed Jack’s final morning in the hospital saying our emotional good-byes to the other parents and to the staff. Finally it was time for Jack to be examined by a Dr. Singh, whom we had not met before. He declared Jack healthy enough to go home and wished us luck. Then he said to me, “You must try very hard to leave this experience behind you now.”

  “Okay,” I said vacantly, as I swaddled Jack tightly in a blanket. When I lifted him from the table, I checked his cheeks for color and quickly felt his pulse, just to make certain that the examination wasn’t too taxing. Then I pulled a wool hat over his head and tucked him into the carry pouch that was strapped across my chest.

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” said Dr. Singh. “We’re having a heat wave. You don’t need to bundle the baby so.”

  “Do you think he’s too hot?” I asked in a panic.

  “Yes. I think, maybe.”

  I had read that overheating was considered a likely cause of crib death, and although I was not aware of a baby’s ever succumbing to crib death outside a crib, it seemed altogether likely that it could happen. I frantically pulled off the hat and began unwrapping Jack’s many layers.

  “I’m saying this for his sake more than yours,” said Dr. Singh. “I’ve seen it happen that these babies grow up into children who are too protected—too precious—and it isn’t healthy for them, physically or emotionally. He’s fine now. Try to forget that he was premature, and treat him like any other newborn.”

  I know that Dr. Singh was right. It’s always better not to make a child too precious, but the problem is that children are just so unspeakably precious, all of them, and especially the uncertain, precarious ones like Jack. I wondered if Dr. Singh actually expected any parent to be able to follow his advice after the ordeal of the Special Care Baby Unit. Just two weeks earlier, Jack had been regularly setting off his apnea alarm because he still couldn’t always remember to breathe, but now I was supposed to put him to bed each night without a second thought.

  Normally the birth of one’s first child is, I think, supposed to be life-affirming, but the circumstances surrounding Jack’s arrival had shaken loose my tentative grasp of faith in God and humanity. I had seen a baby born with missing limbs and babies with swollen, bleeding brains. I saw a newborn girl who had been born with her intestines on the outside of her body. I saw babies born to drug addicts, and I saw a man say to his wife, about a very sick premature black baby, “Look at the wee monkey!” and I watched them both snort with laughter. I saw a baby born weighing less than a pound, who existed for only a few days, long enough to taunt the parents with a glimpse of what might have been, and then he was gone forever. Now, for Jack’s own good, I was supposed to act as if it all had never happened.

  THIS IS IT, Jack … you’re free!” exclaimed Denis as we carried him out of the hospital for his first breath of outside air. Jack slept in his pouch, with his cheek against my chest. Denis and I walked carefully along the sidewalk for a few feet, and then I stopped.

  “He’s not breathing,” I said.

  “Let me see,” said Denis, peering into Jack’s face. Then he said frantically, “Let’s go back!”

  We turned and, hearts pounding, started walking rapidly back toward the hospital doors. Then I saw Jack move his head, and he gave a little cry.

  “I think he’s okay,” I said, grabbing Denis’s arm.

  “Do you think he’s breathing?” asked Denis.

  “Well, I think you can’t cry without breathing. Look … he’s trying to suck his thumb. He’s fine,” I said, and then we turned our backs on the hospital for good.

  SIXTEEN

  WE TOOK A taxi to our new lodgings on Thornhill Road in Islington, where we were met by Caroline, the owner of the house. Jo had told me that Caroline was the mother of five and a grandmother, but the woman who opened the door with a warm smile was younger looking than I had anticipated. She wore hip, baggy trousers and Birkenstocks, and her graying hair was caught up in a sloppy ponytail.

  “There he is,” she said, nodding at Jack. “Your
friend Jo told me the baby is two months old but still has a month before he’s due to be born. I’ve been quite curious to have a look at him.”

  I turned so that Caroline could see Jack’s sleeping face.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Well, he’s got all his bits and pieces, doesn’t he? I’m quite amazed, really. I wasn’t sure what to expect when your friend told me about what had happened. Marvelous what medical science can do today!”

  “Oh … thank you,” I said. I was certain that Caroline had complimented Jack somehow.

  Caroline showed us our flat on the third floor. There was a small kitchen with a table and two chairs set against a window that looked down upon lovely Thornhill Road. Although there was no dishwasher, there was a machine that both washed and dried clothing. This machine didn’t know it, but it was about to start running twenty-four hours a day for the next several months. Next to the kitchen was a living room with a television and a well-stocked bookcase. And across from the living room were a bedroom and a bathroom. Caroline explained how everything worked and told us to knock on the door of her first-floor flat if we needed anything. Then she left us, and there we stood, for the first time alone together—a family.