Ita Noonan, paled to grey already, in a few hours. Those fingers, incongruously bright from the TNT she’d packed into shells. The mound of her belly under the nightdress. There’s a baby, she’d whispered in my ear. With pride, dread, bewilderment?
In the ordinary way of things, she’d have shed her burden sometime in January, then some weeks later gone to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water. Only now did churching strike me as a peculiar tradition, as if giving birth left a faint taint on a woman that needed wiping away. Did Ita Noonan’s death do away with the need to be churched? I wondered—was it enough to purify her in the priests’ eyes?
Dr. Lynn set a rubber block on the ceramic table. This improves access to the abdominal cavity. Can we manage her between us or will I go fetch an attendant?
She had the far ends of the sheet gripped in her hands.
Childishly, I couldn’t bear to stand there alone in the underlit vault while she stepped out. So I said, No bother.
I seized the near corners and braced myself. The small woman was heavier than I’d expected. My back tightened; I arched it a little to relieve it. The two of us got Ita Noonan onto the ceramic and rolled her to one side, then the other, to remove the browned sheet and set the rubber block along her spine.
A little pink leaked out of her nose. I dabbed it away.
The doctor was already rolling the surgical lamp across the floor. She trained its light on the body and clicked it up to its very brightest.
I began to undo the tapes of the nightdress; I lifted and tugged. Rather ashamed to bare Ita Noonan so to the air.
I stationed myself across from Dr. Lynn with my fountain pen and paper.
She murmured, Livor mortis, the blue of death.
She put her fingertip to Ita Noonan’s livid arm, which went white at the spot. After twelve hours, she remarked, it’ll stay blue even when pressed.
I pointed out, The body doesn’t seem stiff yet.
That’s due to the cold down here, Nurse.
Really?
It may sound rather back-to-front, but it’s the metabolic processes of decomposition that cause rigor mortis, whereas a low temperature slows down decay and keeps the cadaver soft.
Purple was pooling in patches on Ita Noonan’s shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, the backs of her legs. Bruising above her elbows from where I’d tried to revive her. (So often we had to mete out indignity on a body in a vain attempt to keep it breathing.)
Dr. Lynn let out a breath. What a wreck. Practically toothless at thirty-three, and that huge leg must have given her constant pain.
I considered the devastated terrain of Ita Noonan’s belly, which had been pushed up from plain to mountain a dozen times.
Did you know, said the doctor, we lose half again as many lying-in cases here as they do in England?
I didn’t.
Mostly because Irish mothers have too many babies, she added as she unrolled her blades. I rather wish your Holy Father would let them off after their sixth.
I almost laughed at the image of Dr. Lynn—Protestant socialist, suffragette, republican firebrand, in her mannish collar and bluestocking glasses—demanding an audience with Pope Benedict to press her point.
She glanced up as if to check I wasn’t offended.
I said, Ready, Doctor.
Now, I don’t think we’ll chance a cranial cut, as they’re hard to cover up.
I was relieved; I’d helped peel back a face before, and it was one of those sights I wished I could unsee.
Dr. Lynn’s finger rested on Ita Noonan’s hairline. This weird flu. I’ve seen it start with thirst, restlessness, sleeplessness, clumsiness, a touch of mania—then, afterwards, a blurring or dulling of one or more senses…but alas, none of this shows up under the microscope.
I volunteered: For a few weeks after my own dose, all colours looked a little grey to me.
Then you got off lightly. Amnesia, aphasia, lethargy…I’ve seen survivors with shakes and others frozen to living statues. Also suicides, far more than the papers will admit.
I asked, They do it in the delirious phase?
Or long after, even. Hadn’t you a patient jump to his death last week?
Oh. (I felt gullible.) We were told he’d slipped from an open window.
Dr. Lynn set her scalpel by Ita Noonan’s left shoulder. I’ll start the trunk incision here and the family will never spot it. God bless the work.
I watched the skin part in a deep, clean arc under the limp breasts. Barely a trickle of blood.
She murmured, Never easy when it’s one’s own patient.
I wondered if by one she meant herself or me.
If you don’t mind my asking, Doctor, with your interest in research, why aren’t you on staff at one of the big hospitals?
Her thin lips twisted wryly. None of them would have me.
She cut straight down from breastbone through navel to pubis, finishing the capital Y.
I was offered a position some years ago, she added, but their medical men shied away from the prospect of a petticoated colleague.
I knew it wasn’t my place to comment, but…Their loss!
Dr. Lynn nodded to acknowledge that. She added crisply, And on the whole, my gain. Shifting my tent has let me encounter and study all the ills that flesh is heir to.
She snipped on, adding, Besides, I’d have been cashiered by now anyway for my commitment to the cause.
My face was suddenly hot. I’d assumed the doctor would keep a veil drawn over her other, underground life. Since she’d brought it up, I made myself ask, So it’s true, then, that you were with the rebels on the roof of City Hall?
She corrected me: With the Irish Citizen Army. I took over as commanding officer when Sean Connolly was shot putting up the green flag.
A silence.
I said unevenly, I got some experience with gunshot wounds during that week.
I’m sure you did, said Dr. Lynn.
A woman who was with child, a civilian, was brought in on a stretcher and bled out before I could stop it.
Her tone was sad: I heard about her. I’m sorry. One of almost five hundred killed that week, and thousands injured, mostly by British artillery.
I saw red, because that was Tim’s army. I said, My brother served. The king, I mean.
(I added that awkwardly, in case I hadn’t been clear.)
Dr. Lynn nodded. So many Irishmen have sacrificed themselves in the cause of empire and capital.
But it was you terrorists who began the shooting in Dublin, and treacherously, in the middle of a world war!
My hands froze. Berating a physician—what had I done? I thought Dr. Lynn might order me out of the mortuary.
Instead she set down her blade and said civilly, I saw the national question much the same way as you until five years ago, Nurse Power.
I was taken aback.
I took up the cause of women in earnest first, she added, then the labour movement. I pinned my hopes on a peaceful transition to a self-governing Ireland that would treat its workers and mothers and children more kindly. But in the end I realised that despite four decades of paying lip service to the principle of home rule, the British meant to keep fobbing us off. Only then, after much soul-searching, I assure you, did I become what you call a terrorist.
I said nothing.
Dr. Lynn picked up the big shears and worked it along each side of Ita Noonan. Then she lifted the breastbone and frontal ribs in one go, the raising of a portcullis.
That made me tremble. How frail my own rib cage; how breakable we all were.
I needed to get us off politics. So I asked, Did your own dose of flu leave you with any odd symptoms, Doctor?
She didn’t look up as she said, I haven’t had it.
Christ Almighty, the woman was up to her elbows in microbes. My voice came out shrill: Would you not put on a mask, even?
Interestingly, there’s very little evidence that they have any protective effect. I scrub my hands, and gargle wi
th brandy, and leave the rest to Providence. Retractor, please?
I handed the doctor what she asked for; I measured and weighed. I didn’t want to disappoint her, for all the gulf between our beliefs.
Dr. Lynn went on, As for the authorities, I believe the pandemic will have run its course before they’ve agreed on any but the most feeble action. Recommending onions and eucalyptus oil! Like sending beetles to stop a steamroller. No, as a wise old Greek once said, we all live in an unwalled city.
She must have sensed she’d lost me, because she spelled it out: When it comes to death.
Oh, yes. Quite.
She lifted Ita Noonan’s lungs—two black bags—and dropped them wetly into my waiting dish. Dear me, what a mess. Take a specimen, please, though I expect the engorgement will obscure the image.
I shaved a thin layer; I labelled the slide.
You know there’s a brand-new expensive oxygen machine upstairs?
I shook my head.
Dr. Lynn said, I tried it out on two men with pneumonia this afternoon, quite uselessly. We trickle the pure gas right up their noses, but it can’t get through their gummed-up passages.
She dictated now, more formally: Swelling of the pleura. Purulent material leaking from the alveoli, bronchioles, bronchi.
I wrote it all down.
If something attacks the lungs, she murmured, they fill up, so one drowns in one’s own inner sea. I had a comrade go like that last year.
From the flu?
No, no, he’d been force-fed, Tom Ashe had, and it went down the wrong way.
I’d heard of suffragettes mounting hunger strikes, but—Sinn Féin prisoners too? My voice wobbled as I asked, This man actually…died of it?
Dr. Lynn nodded. As I stood there taking his pulse.
I felt terribly sorry for him, and for her, but that did not change my disapproval of their cause.
One dark braid was coming loose at the back of Dr. Lynn’s head; it bobbed as she worked her instruments. I wondered how long she’d spent in prison and how she’d stayed so sturdy, so lively.
She dictated: Vocal cords eroded. Thyroid three times normal size. Heart dilated.
Isn’t it always bigger in expectant women, though?
She held up the heart for me to study. But Mrs. Noonan’s is flabby on both sides, do you see? Whereas the normal enlargement in pregnancy is only on the left—to supply the foetus with more blood.
I supposed the foetus demanded more of everything. A mother’s lungs, circulation, every part had to boost capacity, like a factory gearing up for war.
I asked, Could that be why this flu is hitting them so hard—because their systems are overworked already?
The doctor nodded. Sky-high morbidity, even for weeks after birth, which suggests their defences have been weakened somehow.
I thought of the old tale of Troy, Greek soldiers dropping out of the wooden horse’s belly under cover of night and throwing open the gates. Betrayed by one’s own side. What was it Dr. Lynn had quoted about an unwalled city?
She cut, she scooped; I labelled, I bagged.
She grumbled: So many autopsies being industriously performed all over the world, and just about all we’ve learnt about this strain of flu is that it takes around two days to incubate.
Aren’t they any closer to a vaccine, then?
She shook her head and her loose braid leapt. No one’s even managed to isolate the bacterium on a slide yet. Perhaps the little bugger’s too small for us to see and we’ll have to wait for the instrument makers to come up with a stronger microscope, or possibly it’s some new form of microbe altogether.
I was bewildered and daunted.
All rather humbling, she added ruefully. Here we are in the golden age of medicine—making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria—and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow. No, you’re the ones who matter right now. Attentive nurses, I mean—tender loving care, that seems to be all that’s saving lives.
Dr. Lynn peered into the abdominal cavity, which was pulpy with dark juice. She dictated: Liver swollen, signs of internal bleeding. Kidney inflamed and oozing. Colon ulcerated.
I followed her scalpel with my own, taking samples.
She murmured, We could always blame the stars.
I beg your pardon, Doctor?
That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.
I pictured that, the celestial bodies trying to fly us like upside-down kites. Or perhaps just yanking on us for their obscure amusement.
Dr. Lynn freed Ita Noonan’s small intestine with her scissors and lifted it in the way of a snake charmer. Now, autopsy comes from the Greek word meaning to see with one’s own eyes. You and I are lucky, Nurse Power.
I frowned. Lucky? To be alive and well, you mean?
To be here, in the middle of this. We’ll never learn more or faster.
Dr. Lynn put down her scalpel and flexed her fingers as if they were cramped. Then she picked the blade up again and slit Ita Noonan’s uterus with delicacy. We all do our bit to increase the sum of human knowledge, including Mrs. Noonan.
She lifted the flap, peeled back the amniotic sac. Added under her breath, Even her last little Noonan.
She scooped the foetus out of the red cavity, cupped it in her hands.
Not it—him. I saw that it was a boy.
Dr. Lynn said, No sign the flu did him any harm. Measure, please?
She stretched him lengthways in the dish as if he were standing up for the first and only time in his life.
I set the tape at the crown of the skull, went down to the big toe. I said, barely audibly, Just under fifteen inches.
I placed the dish on the scales and added, A little under three pounds.
About twenty-eight weeks, then, said Dr. Lynn with relief. And underweight.
I understood; she’d been right not to do a caesarean.
The tiny, alien face. I let myself look too long and all at once was gasping, blinded by salt water.
Nurse Power. Julia. The doctor’s voice was kind.
How did she know my first name? I wondered as I choked on my tears. Excuse me, I—
It’s quite all right.
I sobbed, He’s perfect.
He is.
I wept for him, and his mother on the slab, and his four brothers and sisters gone before him, and the seven orphaned ones, and their bereft father. Would Mr. Noonan raise them somehow or would they be carted off to grandparents, aunts, strangers? Scattered to the winds? To a home, so called, like Bridie Sweeney was?
I wiped my eyes as Dr. Lynn started putting the organs back.
Her hands slowed to lay the infant inside his mother. I offered her a box of flax-tow swabs. She put in three handfuls as padding, then set the rib cage into place. She pulled the edges of skin together as if drawing bedroom curtains to shut out the night. I was ready with the threaded needle, and she began to stitch.
After she finished, Dr. Lynn thanked me briskly and went off to conduct night rounds.
I washed Ita Noonan one last time before putting her in a fresh nightdress to be buried.
Outside the hospital gates, I took a deep breath of the chill, dark air and felt my exhaustion.
Buttoning my coat as I headed for the tram stop, I almost stepped into a pothole two feet deep. I wondered if I’d be secretly glad to break a leg if it meant a month off work.
Let them go, I told myself as I did at the end of every long shift. Eileen Devine, and Ita Noonan with her never-to-be-born son; Delia Garrett’s stillbirth. Secretive Honor White gripping her prayer beads; Mary O’Rahilly trapped in a labour that seemed like it would never end. I had to let it all fall from me so I could eat and sleep and be fit to pick it up again tomorrow morning.
The three nearest streetlamps had burnt out; no doubt the carbon el
ectrodes were German and couldn’t be replaced. Dublin was sinking into dilapidation, its cracks yawning. Were all its lights going to blink out one by one?
I spotted a waning crescent moon speared on a spire and draped in clouds. A red-eyed paper boy, his cap upended on the pavement in hopes of coins, was singing that rebel song in a squeaky soprano: Tonight we man the gap of danger…
I thought of Dr. Lynn and her comrades clambering onto the roof of City Hall; they’d manned the gap of danger, and for what? So strange to think of a physician taking up the gun, blasting bodies apart instead of mending them.
But then, army doctors did the same, it struck me. War was such a muddle.
A goods tram went by freighted with spuds. The next held pigs, shrieking in their darkness. Then a locomotive hauling wagons of rubbish; I held my breath till the stench had cleared.
The paper boy repeated his chorus, the battle cry sounding innocent in his sweet voice. Of course, he might not give a fig for king or freedom; he’d pick whatever songs pleased the customers. Street traders were supposed to be at least eleven, but this fellow looked more like eight. I wondered what kind of home he’d go back to at the end of the night. I’d made enough follow-up visits to patients to be able to guess. Cracks rived the walls of what had once been mansions; families now lay five to a mattress under crumbling plaster vines and dripping washing lines. All the Dubliners who could had escaped to the suburbs, leaving the rest to live like squatters in the capital’s rotting heart.
Perhaps the paper boy had nowhere to live at all. I supposed one could survive a chill night on these streets at the end of October, but how many nights, over how many years? I thought of Dr. Lynn’s dream of an Ireland that would treat its least citizens kindly.
I wondered about the orphanage that Bridie had grown up in and about what she’d said of an unwelcomed baby such as the one Honor White was expecting, that it would go into the pipe. A rather extraordinary young woman, this Bridie Sweeney. Such zest and vim. Where had she learnt all she seemed to understand? No comb of her own; a single stolen visit to a cinema. Had she ever been in a motorcar, I wondered, or listened to a gramophone?
“Faith of Our Fathers” tolled from the church behind, drowning out the singing boy. The stained glass glimmered with candlelight. A notice on the door under the heading Allhallowtide said, During of this time of crisis, TWO special masses will be offered each evening at six and ten to entreat divine protection.
The Pull of the Stars Page 13