The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

  When Sister Luke came in, I stared, because I didn’t know what she was doing here so early. But the square of window was quite dark, and my watch, inexplicably, said nine o’clock.

  Mary O’Rahilly was still holding Barnabas against her chest.

  The nun sighed. Well, I heard about poor Sweeney. Such a shock! Truly, we know not the day nor the hour.

  My rage was stuck in my throat.

  The night nurse hung up her cloak; adjusted her veil and mask; bound on an apron. I see the little botch is hanging on?

  She took Barnabas from Mary O’Rahilly and put him in the crib as if tidying up.

  I managed to get up, then; I took one step and then another.

  I stared down at the bloom of Barnabas’s jumbled upper lip. It came to me that it was a sign, a seal set on this boy. I said, There’s nothing wrong with him.

  Above the mask, Sister Luke’s brow arched sceptically.

  A wild idea was flowering. I thought to myself, If Tim—

  No, it wouldn’t be fair to my brother. I’d no right.

  But I pressed on regardless.

  I told the nun, I’m going home tonight.

  Her nod was cursory; she thought I meant just to sleep.

  I spelled it out: I’m taking my annual leave.

  Ah, no, I’m afraid we’re all very much needed here for the duration, Nurse Power.

  I untied my apron and tossed it in the basket. I said, If it’s a sacking matter, then let them replace me.

  Your job’s not to bear the babies, Bridie had told me, it’s to save them.

  Well, maybe save just one. For Bridie. I had this peculiar conviction that she’d want me to keep Barnabas White out of the pipe.

  Before I had time to lose my nerve, I got an old Gladstone bag from the back of the press and filled it with basic supplies: nappies and pins, baby clothes, two of the special bottles with wide teats, the big jar of infant food. That maddeningly popular song went round in my head: Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.

  Sister Luke was studying me. Finally she asked, What do you think you’re doing?

  I’m bringing the baby with me.

  I put an outdoor dress over Barnabas’s other layers.

  The nun clucked her tongue. There’s no need for that—arrangements will have been made to take him over to the mother-and-baby home.

  I swaddled Barnabas in two small blankets and pulled down a woolen hat almost to his eyes.

  I went to put on my own coat and hat, and when I turned back the nun was standing in the way. Nurse Power, this infant isn’t yours for the taking.

  Well, he doesn’t seem to be anybody else’s, does he?

  Do you mean to say you’re putting yourself forward as a foster mother for him?

  I winced. I said, I won’t be asking for pay.

  What would you be after, then?

  I reminded myself that Sister Luke meant well; she thought her duty was to protect this human scrap from all hazards, including me.

  Just to mind him, I said. Raise him as my own.

  She plucked at her mask as if itched. You’re sounding overtired and distraught—quite understandable after the day you’ve had.

  If she said Bridie’s name, I was going to fall apart.

  We’re all tired, Sister. I’m going home to sleep now, and Barnabas White is coming with me.

  Sister Luke sighed. We celibates tend to suffer the odd flare-up of maternal instinct. But a baby’s not a plaything. What about your work here?

  I said, I have a brother who’ll help.

  (How dared I make that claim on Tim’s behalf?)

  I’ll come back to work after my week’s leave, I promised rashly. Now let me by.

  The night nurse drew herself up. You’ll need to speak to Father Xavier, as he’s the acting chaplain. Any Catholic born in this hospital comes under his aegis.

  I found myself wondering who’d put us all in the hands of these old men in the first place. Isn’t he out at a funeral?

  He’s back now—up on Maternity.

  Through my teeth I said, Very well.

  Reluctantly, I set Barnabas on his back in the crib, looking muffled up enough for the Arctic. I grabbed his chart and headed out the door to find the priest.

  The Maternity ward upstairs was long and cavernous. How were they managing for an obstetrician now that Dr. Lynn had been hauled off to Dublin Castle? I passed a score of women grunting, gasping, turning, sipping tea or whiskey, kneeling up, nursing their fragile cargo, weeping. Woe unto them that are with child. Also joy. Woe and joy so grown together, it was hard to tell them apart.

  I found Father Xavier praying with a patient. He straightened up when he saw me and came over, wiping his dripping nose with a handkerchief.

  I wanted to be clear, so it came out curt: I’m taking a baby home.

  His grey tufted eyebrows went up.

  I went through the cold facts of Barnabas White’s case.

  The priest fretted, You’re young to be shouldering such a burden.

  I’m thirty years old, Father.

  What if you go on to marry, Nurse Power, and you’re blessed with some or many of your own?

  I couldn’t simply say, I want this one. I tried to put it in terms the priest might respect. I told him, His mother died on my watch earlier today. I have a conviction that this task is laid on me.

  Hmm. Then the old priest’s tone turned more practical. I know you nurses are all of good character, regular massgoers. My concern’s more on the other side.

  I was suddenly too tired to follow.

  He spelled it out: The mother was unfortunate, to say the least. What if it turns out, upon further inquiry, that the father was a brute, or degenerate—bad stock, don’t you know?

  The little fellow can’t wait while we investigate his pedigree!

  Father Xavier nodded. But do bear in mind, he’s certainly not of your class.

  I don’t believe an infant has a class.

  Well, now, that’s all very forward-thinking. But the fact remains, you wouldn’t know what you’d be getting.

  I remembered the dark wells of the baby’s eyes. I said, Nor does he.

  This time the priest didn’t say anything.

  Good night now, Father.

  I moved towards the door as if he’d given his agreement. I heard Father Xavier’s steps behind me. Wait.

  I spun around.

  What are you going to call him?

  He’s already been baptised Barnabas.

  No, I mean…maybe it’ll be best if you let the neighbours think he’s a cousin from the country?

  I considered that for the first time, the stain of being what some called an adopted.

  A fresh start, see?

  The priest meant well.

  So I told him, I’ll think about that.

  I took a step back and Father Xavier’s hand went up as if to stop me. But no, he was sketching a blessing on the air.

  My legs shook a little going down the stairs.

  For a moment I thought I’d turned in the wrong door. No, it was Maternity/Fever, but a stranger was in Sister Luke’s place, giving Mary O’Rahilly a spoonful of something.

  Where’s Sister Luke?

  The nurse I didn’t know said, Running a message.

  There was little Eunice in her crib, but the other one was empty. My pulse thumped.

  Mary O’Rahilly hissed: Sister Luke took him, Nurse.

  I whirled on my heel.

  So the nun meant to hand him over to his keepers herself, just to spite me?

  I dashed down the stairs. (Was there a hospital rule I hadn’t broken yet?)

  I stepped aside to let two men carry a coffin in the doors—lightly, an empty one. Then I pushed out into the chill and galloped down the street.

  The night was dark, quite moonless. I turned one corner.

  Two.

  A sudden misgiving. Had I misremembered the way to the mother-and-baby home listed on Honor White’s chart? Or conf
used it with another? I froze, scanning the dim line of buildings. Was that it, standing tall and stony at the corner?

  I spotted the white bulk of Sister Luke gliding towards the gate with the Gladstone bag over one arm and a small swaddled shape tucked into the other.

  I didn’t call out; I saved all my breath for chasing them.

  As my steps slammed up the footpath behind her, the nun turned.

  No mask now; Sister Luke’s lips were thin and her one eye bulged. Nurse Power, what in the name of God do you think you’re—

  What are you doing?

  She nodded up at the grey facade. Clearly this is the place for the child till things are sorted out. Best for him—for you—for all concerned.

  I stepped close so I was only inches away from her. I have Father Xavier’s say-so. Give me the baby.

  The nun’s grip on the sleeping Barnabas tightened. To be perfectly frank, Nurse Power, you don’t seem in a fit state. That poor girl today, I know it must have been upsetting—

  Bridie Sweeney!

  I roared the name so loudly that people hurrying by turned their heads.

  I added, more quietly: One of twenty slaves kept at your convent.

  The nun’s mouth opened and shut.

  Underfed, I said. Neglected. Brutalised all her life. What was Bridie to you but a dirty orphan—free labour, and you took the wages she earned too. Tell me, when you sent her to serve in my ward, did you even think to check whether she’d had this flu?

  Barnabas’s eyes popped open; he blinked around at the tarnished city.

  Sister Luke said, You’re raving. Quite unhinged. What has Bridie Sweeney to do with this boy?

  I didn’t know how to answer. All I knew was that their two souls were tethered in some way. One barely born, one gone too early; they’d shared this earth for a matter of hours. It was some kind of bargain, that was all I was sure of; I owed this much to Bridie.

  I told her, I have permission from the priest. Give him over now.

  A moment. Then Sister Luke set Barnabas’s blanketed form in my arms and the bag by my feet.

  He mewed. I tucked him inside my cape to shield him from the November air.

  The nun asked coldly, What are you going to tell people?

  I didn’t have to answer her. But I said, That he’s my cousin from the country.

  A snort. They’ll think that means he’s yours.

  I registered her snide implication.

  Maybe even that your brother’s the father, she added in a worldly tone.

  Shame—but then my wrath pushed it away. To defame such a fellow as Tim, who couldn’t answer back.

  I didn’t waste any more words on her. I seized the bag and strode off down the street. I watched my shoes land on each paving stone, being careful not to stumble and drop what I carried.

  What was I doing, bringing a frail baby home to inflict on my frailer brother, who didn’t take well to noise or disruption? Hadn’t Tim been through more than enough already—what right had I to drag him into this story?

  But he was such a tender fellow, I argued in my head. A natural at nurturing; he didn’t even need speech to look after me so well. If any man could rise to this strange occasion, it was Tim.

  Small, practical worries crept in too. Once I got off the tram I’d have to walk the rest of the way home; I couldn’t get on a cycle with the baby.

  And what would I say, how would I begin, once I let myself into the hall? Tim, you wouldn’t believe what—

  I met this girl—

  Tim, wait till I tell you—

  This is Barnabas White.

  I was in no condition to persuade my brother with argument or eloquence. Was this anything like Tim’s state when he’d emerged from the trenches, baptised in the blood of the man he loved? If I ever told anyone what had happened to me—the fever dream of the past three days—it would be Tim.

  Maybe these hushed thoroughfares looked so foreign because I was showing them to Barnabas. A stranger come among us, unheralded; an emissary from a far star, reserving judgement. Breathe in the fresh air now, Barnabas, I whispered to the downy top of his head. It’s a while more till we’re home, but not too long. We’ll go to sleep then, very soon. That’s all we have to do for tonight. And then when we wake up tomorrow—we’ll see what we’ll see.

  So I carried him along through streets that looked like the end of the world.

  Author’s Note

  The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.

  The Pull of the Stars is a fiction pinned together with facts. Almost all details of Bridie Sweeney’s life are drawn from some of the rather less harrowing testimonies in the 2009 Ryan Report on Irish residential institutions: https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie/ryan-report/. She and Julia Power and the rest of my characters are invented, with the sole exception of Dr. Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955).

  In the autumn of 1918, Lynn was vice president of Sinn Féin’s executive and its director of public health. When she was arrested, the mayor of Dublin intervened to have her released so she could keep combatting the flu at the free clinic she’d set up at 37 Charlemont Street (leased by her beloved Madeleine Ffrench-Mullen). The following year, on the same premises, Lynn founded her children’s hospital, St. Ultan’s, with Ffrench-Mullen as its administrator. In the general election that followed the armistice of November 11, 1918, Lynn campaigned for their friend Countess Constance Markievicz, who became the first woman elected to Westminster, and Lynn herself won a seat in the new Irish Parliament in 1923. She and Ffrench-Mullen lived together until Ffrench-Mullen’s death in 1944. Lynn worked on into her eighties at St. Ultan’s, campaigning for nutrition, housing, and sanitation for her fellow citizens. To those interested in her and in the diaries she kept over four decades, I recommend Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh’s Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor (2006) and the 2011 documentary Kathleen Lynn: The Rebel Doctor.

  Influenza viruses were not identified until 1933, when they were discovered with the help of the newly invented electron microscope, and the first of the flu vaccines that protect so many people today was developed in 1938.

  Symphysiotomy (dividing the ligaments holding the pubic bones together) and pubiotomy (sawing through one of the pubic bones) operations were performed in Irish hospitals most frequently between the 1940s and 1960s but as early as 1906 and as late as 1984. Since the 2000s, this has been the subject of bitter controversy and legal conflict.

  The film Bridie and Julia discuss, the silent short Hearts Adrift (1914), made Mary Pickford a huge star, but all prints seem to have been lost.

  In October 2018, inspired by the centenary of the great flu, I began writing The Pull of the Stars. Just after I delivered my last draft to my publishers, in March 2020, COVID-19 changed everything. I’m grateful to my agents and to everyone at Little, Brown; HarperCollins Canada; and Picador for pulling together to bring out my novel in this new world in a mere four months.

  Above all, thank you to all the health-care workers who risk so much and into whose hands we give ourselves. Midwife Maggie Walker was kind enough to take time during quarantine to correct some of my misunderstandings, and as on previous occasions, I owe so much to the corrections of the doubly extraordinary physician/copyeditor Tracy Roe (working through a pandemic this time). On a personal note, I’m grateful to the midwives at Womancare and Dr. Kaysie Usher of London Health Sciences Centre for the babies you’ve caught and the mothers (me among them) you’ve saved.

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  About the Author

  Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over; she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genre
s, writing literary history, biography, and stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (The Wonder, Slammerkin, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Akin, Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes. Her screen adaptation, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, was nominated for four Academy Awards.

  For more information, visit emmadonoghue.com.

  Also by Emma Donoghue

  Akin

  The Lotterys More or Less

  The Lotterys Plus One

  The Wonder

  Frog Music

  Astray

  Room

  Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature

  The Sealed Letter

  Landing

  Touchy Subjects

  Life Mask

  The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

  Slammerkin

  Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

  Hood

  Stir-fry