by Helen Cullen
Don’t get me wrong, I am longing to meet you, too, but I’m scared. Scared of how loving you will change me. I remember my mother telling me that when I was three months old, Papa took her to Manhattan for lunch in Bergdorf Goodman’s for a treat, and my cousin Carletta babysat me. She said she spent all day feeling as if she’d left her handbag behind her until she realized it wasn’t her handbag that was missing. It was a part of herself. It was me. And it dawned on her that she would never be the same again, that she could never again be alone in the world with just her own mind, independent of me, even when I was somewhere else.
How does that change you?
Friends say to me nothing else will ever be as important again, that having a baby gives you purpose, puts things in perspective. Well, can I say, I find that quite tragic. I don’t want to not care about all the things I’m passionate about, and my former childfree self is insulted at the implication that I was merely filling time, waiting for you to come along to give my life meaning. Does saying that already mark me out as a bad mother? I’m sure you think I deserve a good, hard kick, but I can’t be the first mother to feel that way so why aren’t we allowed to say it? Is that one of the rules of membership of the secret society? If we aren’t delighted all of the time, we’re broken? Well, maybe hesitation, doubt even, is good. It just means our minds are still open, questioning, curious, awake to inspiration.
And one more thing, and then I promise I’ll stop panicking. I am so tired of everyone saying this is a magical time, because I have never felt anything so physical, so real, in my life.
My body is transformed, irrevocably.
I will feed you at my own breast, hold your skin against mine night after night and breathe in the smell of you.
Maybe we have to believe in a type of magic to help us get through the sleepless nights, but I don’t think it helps to call it that. The mothers who feel exhausted, inadequate, anxious...should they be made to feel worse if this very real, very physical experience doesn’t also dance along as a magical experience of infinite joy? It seems there are only two types of mothers allowed: the perfect mother, and the bad. How can that be when nobody is pure perfection or pure badness? Maybe the perfect mothers are lying, and the bad mothers are too hard on themselves.
I hope that this is my hormones talking, my sweet thing.
You deserve a mama who believes in magic. Can I try and go one better and just believe in you instead?
Hurry up and come along now, little one.
We’re ready for you,
Your loving mama
She ripped the page from the pad, cursed the raggedy edge and folded it into a tidy square to slip inside her journal later. When she turned around, she jumped to see young Father Dónal staring in at her, his forehead pressed up against the glass. He waved her over and so, with a deep sigh under her breath, she waddled over to the door and unbolted the lock.
“It’s yourself, Maeve,” he said. “I’m glad I saw you there. I’ve something for you.”
She hoped it wasn’t another St. Francis medallion or booklet of prayers for a new mother but smiled at him nonetheless. “The suspense is killing me!”
He grinned at her and made two rings around his eyes with his thumb and forefingers as if to impersonate an owl.
“Dónal? I’m not sure—” And then it hit her, and she mirrored the same action back at him. “Murtagh’s binoculars? Tell me you got them!”
“I did,” he said, patting his black shoulder bag. “I was just scheming about the best way to get them to you on the sly, and sure then I saw you in the shop as if you were expecting me.”
“Come in, come in,” she said, bustling him inside.
Father Dónal stepped around the neat piles of photographs she had arranged on sheets of newspaper on the floor. He laid a white tissue parcel before her on the counter. Impatiently she tore the string off before gently revealing a brown leather case with gold stitching and silver hardware; inside were the Swift Skipper, Model 789, binoculars of Murtagh’s cloud-spotting dreams. “I’m afraid to even take them out of the case,” she said as she breathed in the aroma of the fine leather. “Thank you so much, Dónal. I would never have been able to take the ferry this week, and they still hadn’t come in the last time I was in Galway.”
He patted her on the arm. “It was my pleasure, dear. And hopefully it won’t be the only present he gets this year, eh?”
She wriggled into her raincoat, which now only barely snapped closed across her bump.
“To be honest, Dónal, with tomorrow Christmas Eve already, I hope she hangs on a few days. I think we could do without that drama until the holiday’s over.”
“We’ll leave it in God’s hands, so. Shall I walk you to the corner?”
But they didn’t make it that far; not four feet from the door of the shop Maeve’s water broke and drenched Father Dónal’s black patent shoes. With all the dignity he could muster, he wiped each foot on the back of the opposite leg in turn and held up Maeve as he guided her toward the pier. “Come on now, Maeve. You’ll get the last ferry to the mainland if we’re quick.” A great bellow of pain filled the air, and she doubled over on the path. Two girls in matching red cloaks came skipping around the corner and froze when they saw her; a chocolate biscuit fell from the hand of the taller of the two. “Sinead and Aisling Brennan, just the girls. You know Mr. Moone the potter? You need to run to his house and tell him the baby is coming. He needs to come to the pier at once. Scoot!”
Aisling started to cry, but Sinead shook her little sister’s hands and said, “Come on, Ais, this is God’s work we’re doing.” And their four legs ran as fast as they could up the hill, their cloaks flashing red behind them like flags in the breeze.
By the time Dónal had helped Maeve into the bottom deck of the Brigidin, a small group of islanders had gathered to witness the excitement. “Where’s Murtagh?” Maeve shouted. “I’m not going without him.” One of the island women wrapped a shawl around her and covered her legs with blankets that the captain thrust at them. For a seafaring man, he had never looked so unsteady on his feet. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll wait for him.” And then Maeve heard Murtagh’s footsteps on the stairs, him calling out to her, and the panic in his voice quietened her own. He rushed toward her, the laces of his shoes traipsing behind him, coat incorrectly buttoned and with cream in his beard. He had barely wrapped his arms around her before the ferry was heading in the direction of Galway Maternity Hospital.
After eighteen hours of labor, Nollaig June Moone was born, at five minutes past five in the morning. Murtagh sobbed when he saw her, gently touching the soft fuzz of golden blond that covered her little pink head. “You’re a miracle worker, Maeve,” he said. “You did it.” And his wife felt his salty tears mingling with her own.
Maeve never found the letter she’d written to Nollaig, but it didn’t matter. She needed no words to tell this little baby how she felt; Maeve knew she understood it in her bones. She had passed on the knowledge in their secret communion at dawn, when from a mother, a daughter was born.
Inis Óg: 1985
MURTAGH WAS TOUCHED that the islanders wore their Sunday best for Maeve’s premiere performance of The Playboy of the Western World. They sat in their usual seats in Tigh Ned’s but adopted airs of formality as they whispered to each other about what to expect. There was no stage, little to set that night apart from any other except that the television behind the bar was not only turned off but covered in a black sheet, and that Ned had stopped serving.
When the chapel bell rang eight times, Murtagh, in his role as stage manager, turned off all the lights in the pub, leaving just the flicker of tealights in jam jars. The audience emitted a few nervous yelps and spluttered laughs before Murtagh switched on the light behind the bar, exposing Ned himself, his auburn hair greased back, dressed in a collarless white shirt, with braces holding up gray tweed trous
ers from the turn of the century. A lit pipe hung from his lips. Maeve popped up beside him, Pegeen now, her blue-black hair hanging in two tight braids over her shoulders. She wore a full-length dark green bustled skirt, high-collared ivory blouse, and a gray apron that she used to polish a glass. In the moment of her arrival, Tigh Ned’s had become Flaherty’s Tavern and a hushed awe blanketed the pub. When Sean Lally burst in, transformed as Christy, roaring that he had killed his father, no one laughed, and Maeve was relieved. The magic of the theater had worked its spell, curling around the imaginations of the audience as the smoke from the turf fire thickened the air.
By the end of the play, when Pegeen crumples into a heap against the bar, lamenting that she has lost the only playboy of the western world, the islanders were clutching each other’s arms, shocked at what they had seen: the sex, the violence, the comedy. It felt as real to them as their own lives.
Maeve waited a beat, her shoulders heaving with each deep breath she drew, and then snapped around, Pegeen no more. She grinned at them as she shook herself back into reality. The rest of the cast gathered beside her and, arms entwined, they bowed while the audience clapped, stamped their feet and hollered. Just one performance, and yet, it would be spoken of for months.
Did you see the way he pretended to be riding that donkey? I felt I was at the race, true as God.
Do you think that they were really up to mischief behind the bar? Father Dónal says they were only coddin’, but it sounded fairly real to me.
I always knew there was something special about Maeve Moone, sure she was like a film star in that.
As Tigh Ned’s hadn’t been able to serve during the performance, a collective decision was made that opening hours could extend beyond official closing time. Father Dónal gave his blessing, and Jerome Brennan, the only policeman on the island, confirmed it could be approved on a technicality. He was parched himself after all the excitement, he said. Murtagh was collecting up the props when he heard Nollaig starting to wail from where she lay in her pram on the porch. He saw Maeve’s head whip toward the sound, but before he could intercept her she had broken away from the clutch of neighbors surrounding her so she could pluck her baby from the pram, her outlandish skirt impeding her exit as she maneuvered through the crowd. Murtagh followed a few minutes later, a bottle of milk warmed in the kitchen in one hand, a cup of hot chocolate for Maeve in the other; she had never liked to drink alcohol after a performance, wanted to keep the whole night crisply clear in her mind’s eye. He found Maeve perched on the cobblestone wall, Nollaig on her lap, sucking on her little finger. They rocked together back and forth, and Murtagh caught the tail end of a tune Maeve was humming as he approached. She turned her face to him; the flush from the heat of the pub faded from her cheeks, eyes glassy, just the rim of her scarlet lipstick left, as if she had drawn around her mouth with a pencil and forgotten to fill in the rest.
“Maeve, my love, let me take her.” He held out his arms. “Go and enjoy the party. You blew them away!”
She shook her head. “I’m happier here. Will you sit with me for a bit?”
He placed the bottle and mug of hot chocolate on the wall beside her, threw one leg over and sat sideways, watching her in profile, his hand stroking the small of her back.
“My darkling, you were so wonderful. It almost hurt to see it.”
She smiled at him. “It almost hurt to do it. Darkling? You haven’t called me that in a long time.”
“Haven’t I?”
She repositioned Nollaig in her lap and reached for the hot chocolate. “I wouldn’t mind a drop of whiskey in this,” she said, after tasting it.
“They’re already asking when the next one will be. Have you thought about it at all?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not sure if I will be doing another one. Maybe. We’ll see.”
He brushed her fringe from her forehead, where curls had sprung lose from the braids.
“Did you not enjoy it? I know it was a lot of work, and not a fancy theater or anything, but you’d struggle to get that reaction in the action in the Abbey. Would you—”
“No. It’s harder to have a taste and then go hungry. If you never had a bite, you wouldn’t know what you were missing.”
She refused to look at him, her eyes focused on the beacon of the lighthouse in the distance.
“But, Maeve, you don’t have to—”
“Will you get me my coat, love? We should get her out of this damp night.”
She stood up abruptly and started walking, Nollaig in her arms, though she was too heavy now to be carried such a distance.
The pram stood abandoned on the porch of Tigh Ned’s.
Murtagh stood abandoned at the wall outside.
He knew he should chase after her, say something to make this right, but he didn’t trust himself not to make things worse. Maeve would never tell him what he wanted to hear; that she was happy, that she would consider another play, that all this was enough for her. How many times before had he desperately needed her reassurance that everything would be okay in the end? But she would never make promises she wasn’t certain she could keep. Could never say what he wanted to hear unless it was the truth. And he wasn’t prepared to ask questions tonight that might draw from her answers too brutal to bear. Her conviction to the truth was her great strength; his inability to hear it his great weakness.
Instead, he watched quietly over the next few days as Maeve ate as little as she could; enough to keep his interventions at bay. As she lay in the bath three nights later, her hair wrapped in an orange towel like a turban, he sat on its edge and squeezed suds along her legs with a sea sponge. “Don’t, Murt.” She hesitated, closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the silver taps. “I have it under control.”
Murtagh held the sponge to his face, suds cascading down his arm to where his sleeve was rolled at the elbow, then he dropped to his knees on the floor and took her wet, birdlike body in his arms. He held her there, the ends of her orange turban submerged now in water, until the sound of Nollaig crying penetrated the closed door. She peeled him away, stepped out of the bath and went to her daughter.
Murtagh stayed kneeling on their pink bathroom mat, facing the wall, his forehead resting on the edge of the bath. Maeve turned off the light as she left the room, leaving just spears of streetlight to pierce the dusk through the venetian blinds. He waited there until the house fell silent and then plunged his hand in the cold water to drain the tub, but he couldn’t get up off the floor.
Not until Maeve came to fetch him and led him away by the hand to the kitchen.
There they sat at the table, where Murtagh dried his arms with her damp orange towel.
Maeve ate a rice pudding and, in doing so, gave them permission to go silently to bed.
Inis Óg: 1986
MURTAGH STEPPED OFF the ferry with gripe water for the colicky twins and lavender essential oil for Maeve. Tomás and Dillon hadn’t stopped crying since they’d slid into the world eleven days before. Dillon had arrived first, purple and screaming, Tomás reluctantly seven minutes later, with the help of the midwife’s impatient forceps, pale and whimpering. Murtagh began to question the moral integrity of his sons, becoming convinced they were conniving in a cruel tag-team manipulation. As soon as one fell asleep, the other would wail, waking his brother up and continuing the vicious cycle. Nollaig, only two years old herself, was all but abandoned; a veritable grown-up in the wake of these two helpless monsters. Maeve was trying to feed them herself, but that couldn’t go on much longer. Though she was determined to try for as long as she could, the twins refused to feed at the same time, so she was awake constantly as they took it in turns to latch, with various degrees of success. She had begun to hallucinate with exhaustion, advising Murtagh that he himself was downstairs if he needed him. Something would have to give.
Murtagh’s head was bent
against the sheets of rain that were crashing down on the island. It hadn’t stopped pouring since the babies were born, which didn’t help. It was never a good idea to keep Maeve confined to the house for long—shackles to her were a dare. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise to look up and see her sitting on the low stone wall at the corner where their lane met the main road of the island. Her clothes were drenched, and she sat completely still, looking past him as he rushed toward her, his plastic bag of shopping banging against his leg as he ran.
“Maeve, who’s minding the children? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I thought you were there.”
“What? You knew I went into Galway! Don’t tell me you left them on their own. Jesus, Maeve, anything might have happened.”
She looked at him, gray pools of emptiness where her eyes should be, unmoved by the panic in his voice.
“You’d better go check on them, then.”
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, that’s enough, Maeve. Those babies are depending on us. You can’t wander off. Things are different now. Are you trying to catch your death of cold?”
Father Dónal stopped at the corner to see what the matter was. His wet black gabardine gave him the look of a seal walking on his hind legs. “Everything okay here, my Moones?” he asked.
“We’re fine, Dónal. Maeve just came to meet me off the boat.”
“I see. Well, while I have you, have you given any more thought to the date for the blessing? I could—” A desperate look from Murtagh silenced him. “Right, well, another time then. Maeve? If there’s ever anything—”