The Crooked Branch (12 page)

“But I could do it,” Maire said. “I’d be a tremendous chambermaid.” She put her head back down on her mother’s knee. “What if Daddy couldn’t find work straightaway, in America? Or what if the money got lost on its way here? What if it doesn’t get here in time?” She didn’t say in time for what, but Ginny shuddered. She put her arm around her daughter, and leaned over her, kissed her.

“Shh, don’t worry,” Ginny whispered into her daughter’s hair. “It’s my job to do the worrying.”

But Maire’s posture stayed rigid while Ginny sat up and chewed thoughtfully on the last nibble of bread. Ginny licked her fingertips, then brushed them against her petticoat to dry them.

“I’m still hungry, Mammy,” Poppy said.

Maire lifted her chin from her mother’s knee.

“Me, too,” Michael admitted, ignoring the look Maire was giving him.

“Tell you what.” Ginny stood up, lifting Poppy onto her hip, and taking Michael by the hand. “We’ll all have a drop of warmed water. Come inside now.”

They took turns with the mug.

“Better?” Ginny asked.

Michael nodded, but not believably, and Ginny watched his back as he returned outside. She looked at his little shoulder blades standing up in his back, and for a moment, she imagined she could see him withering in front of her, like the stalk of some diseased potato. She had the sense that if she stood still for a time, she would actually watch him disappear. It seemed like a certainty in that moment: they would die here, one by one. Not in some distant, tentative, theoretical way, but soon, presently. Her babies would die. And she might even go first, leaving them to fend for themselves. She imagined them gathered around her body in the morning, trying to waken her, Poppy curling in for a cuddle. That thought seized her with horror, like a hand on her throat. She couldn’t breathe for grief.

“Mammy?” Maire’s hand was soft on her mother’s.

Ginny turned toward her daughter.

“D’you know what I need you to do, Maire?” Ginny said, crouching down and taking her daughter by the two hands. “D’you think you could manage to look after your brother and sisters?”

Maire’s eyes widened, but she answered bravely. “I can of course.”

Ginny brushed a loose strand of hair away from her daughter’s face. Maire had always been a serious child—wise beyond her years. But looking at her now, Ginny could only think how young she was, how much life she hadn’t yet lived. Eleven years of age. “Not just today, but for a little while?” Ginny said. “Until we hear from your father? A few weeks maybe?” She needed to be sure her daughter could take it on. It was an awful lot to ask.

Maire gulped, a tiny quiver in her throat. She nodded.

“You’re the best girl,” Ginny said, giving her a squeeze. “Daddy will be so proud of you when I tell him.”

Ginny stood.

“Are you going to get the job, Mammy?” Maire asked. “At Springhill House?”

“I’m going to try.”

•   •   •

Ginny splashed water on her face, and pinched color into her cheeks. She removed her kerchief and knotted her hair into fresh plaits while her children sat quietly on the floor, watching her. Poppy was crying, but Ginny wasn’t moved by her baby’s tears. She felt renewed. She had a fixed plan. She could shut away her fears, and concentrate on the task at hand. At least for now there was something she could
do
.

“You’ll be all right,” Ginny said, stooping down to kiss Poppy on top of the head. “Maire’s going to take great care of you, aren’t you, Maire?”

“I am.” Maire stood up, and, with some effort, hoisted Poppy up onto her hip. Poppy flopped her blondie head against Maire’s shoulder.

“I’m going to call in to Mrs. Fallon as I’m going past and ask her to look in on ye,” Ginny said, tying a bonnet over her tidied hair.

The Fallons were about the only nearby neighbors left. Ginny fluttered around the cottage while she talked, stoking up the fire for them, looking for things she could set to rights before going. There was nothing. No chores left, no animals, no food in the house, no crop in the ground outside. Until she could get food to them, there was nothing else to be done. She breathed deeply.

“I’ll stop and ask Father Brennan for a reference on the way,” she said to Maire. “You may start preparing the ground in the turnip patch. If I can get some seed, we’ll plant that as soon as the weather turns.”

Michael was watching his mother with a hardness in his jaw. His eyes were dry.

“Help your sister, Michael,” she said to him.

He only nodded. She was ready to go, ready to walk out the door and down the road, away from her four babies, ready to leave them on their own. Maire allowed Poppy to slide down to the ground and run to Ginny. Poppy wrapped herself around her mother’s legs.

“Michael, take Poppy and Maggie outside for a few minutes,” Ginny said, standing. “Let me talk to Maire.”

Michael unfolded himself from his spot beside the fire, and herded his sisters out into the sunshine. Maire turned from the doorway to face her mother.

“You know what to do if Poppy wakes up crying in the night?”

“Give her a bit of warmed water and a cuddle.”

“That’s right, and sometimes she likes a song,” Ginny said. “If you can sing to her, that always settles her right down.”

Ginny was amazed by Maire’s solemnity, and she could see that it wasn’t a performance. The courage in Maire’s face was not for her mother’s benefit—it was authentic. Maire could do this.

“And you’re not to tell anyone that I’m away, except Mrs. Fallon—she’ll know. But if ye have any other visitors call in, say nothing. If they ask where your father is, you can tell them he’s gone to America, but if they ask for your mother, just tell them I’m gone to see a neighbor, and you expect me back presently.”

“Of course,” Maire said.

“If anything happens, if you need help, send Michael to Mrs. Fallon, or up to Father Brennan,” Ginny went on. “I don’t want you leaving Poppy and Maggie. You send Michael, understand?”

“We’ll be grand, Mammy,” Maire said, crossing the floor to where her mother stood.

Ginny embraced her eldest daughter. She would not cry. She would be stalwart, like Maire. They clung to each other for a full minute, but Maire was the first to let go. Ginny stood, fluffed her petticoat out beneath her, went to the doorway, and looked out. Maire stood beside her mother, and Ginny noticed how tall she was—that the top of her head came nearly to her shoulder now.

“Mam?”

Ginny turned to look at her.

“What will I feed them?” she whispered.

Ginny caught a thick breath in her chest. What a leap of faith she was asking of Maire, to stay calm while her mother walked out the door and away. She was turning her back on them, Ginny was. That’s what it must have felt like, leaving Maire alone with three hungry babies, and not a morsel of food left in the whole of Knockbooley. Surely Maire knew that Ginny would never abandon them; she wouldn’t leave them to perish.

“Oh, Maire, you poor darling, I’ll send food right away,” Ginny said, lifting her daughter’s chin. “I promise, as soon as I get there, that’s the whole point in me going. So I can send food back at once.”

“But how, Mammy?”

Ginny shook her head. “I’ll find a way.”

•   •   •

Ginny kept her legs moving swiftly beneath her, pushing on to Springhill House. When she was fit and healthy, she could have walked this distance in two hours, but now she was weak and her body felt wilted and warm. Her legs were shaky beneath her, and a few times, she was tempted to rest, but she feared sitting down, in case she couldn’t get up again. Tears kept brimming her eyes, but she pushed them away. She felt like a sweet left on a rock in the sun, melting. In the last weeks, there was a strange gnawing sensation in her belly that she initially put down to hunger, but today there was a distinct fluttering there, too.

“It’s only my nerves,” she said to herself, though she knew, in that instinctive way that women know, that it wasn’t her nerves at all.

Her stomach flipped and swooped as she tramped the road. Each step felt more like a struggle, like she’d a yoke on her shoulders, a rope stretching home to her babies that grew taut as she ventured on. There was part of her that hoped she’d be turned away, an icy slice of terror in her gut when she thought of her children at home without her. But then she pictured Maire’s stern and determined little face, and she knew that somehow this might work.

“I’ve no choice,” she reminded herself. “If I go back, we starve. That’s it.”

In truth, she wasn’t sure she was fit to walk home again. She’d heard stories of people falling over dead in the road from the hunger. She took a deep breath and straightened herself from the shoulders. After three arduous hours, Ginny Doyle arrived at the gates of Springhill House. There were two men and a woman already waiting beside the gates. One of the fellas looked to be in fair enough shape. He was lean, but tall, and he still had a color in his face, a bit of animation about him. He was dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and a hat. The brogues on his feet were worn but not broken. He nodded at Ginny when she drew close to the gate.

“All right?” he said. She nodded back.

The other two sat in a fixed heap, leaning against each other for the strength of their combined posture. They were so feeble and gray that a stiff breeze might have blown them away like a scattering of ash. The man’s head hung limp from his neck, his dry mouth agape. The woman stared at Ginny with unblinking eyes. She moved her lips in greeting, but no sound came out. Ginny couldn’t look at her for more than a moment. Beyond the gate, a fat, sweaty man was hustling down the long drive from the house. Without opening the gate, he addressed the older couple first, gesturing toward them.

“What’s your business here?” he said.

The woman’s eyes reeled on to him, and she licked her lips in effort, but there was no voice in her throat. The man beside her never moved, never even twitched. Ginny wasn’t sure he was breathing. The fat man looked at Ginny.

“You know these two?” he asked. She shook her head.

“Nor do I,” said the man in the swallow-tailed coat, “but I can guess their business here as well as you can, Mr. Murdoch.”

The fat man glared through the bars.

“And you, Mr. Brady?” Murdoch said to the man in the coat. “What is it you want?”

“My family and I are going to America,” Brady answered, “and we need to settle our affairs before we go.”

“So you’re packing it in, eh? Calling it a day?”

“There’s little choice now.”

The woman on the ground was becoming agitated while the men talked; she was trying to speak. Ginny watched in horror, the flutter in her stomach growing into leaps and plunges.

“And you?” The fat Murdoch was looking at Ginny now, but before she could respond, Brady interrupted.

“Mr. Murdoch, please,” he said, with a quiet insistence. He gestured to the woman on the ground. “They’ve no time to lose. Couldn’t you send down a bite, for pity’s sake?”

Murdoch’s red neck quivered. “You’d want to mind your insolence before you get to America, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t stand to you.”

“No, sir,” Brady agreed. “But it stands to them.”

The woman on the ground looked up at him, and for a moment, her face changed with gratefulness—Ginny could see what she might have looked like before hunger had robbed her voice and her body. Murdoch had his key in the gate now, and he was opening the lock. He swung it open and gestured Mr. Brady inside.

“Wait for me in the library.”

Mr. Brady stood his ground.

“If you’re not coming in, get off my land before I call for the constable,” Murdoch seethed.

Brady shook his head, and glanced dolefully at the ghosts by his feet. He shook his head, and shoved past Mr. Murdoch. But Murdoch grabbed him by the arm and hissed into his ear as he went past, “Have you any idea the havoc it would cause, if we started handing out food to every beggar who had the nerve to disgrace our gate? It’s well for you to feign righteousness, but I don’t see you forking over the price of your American ticket to feed your fellow paupers out there.”

Brady freed his arm from Murdoch’s grip with a violent shrug and, turning his back, started up the drive toward the house. Murdoch muttered after him, “Empty-headed fool,” and then he turned to Ginny. “You?” he said.

She cleared her throat, tried to infuse herself with some of the bravery she’d just witnessed in Mr. Brady. She drew herself closer to the gate.

“I’m Ginny Doyle, sir, from Knockbooley, and I heard you had an opening for a chambermaid. I’d like to inquire after the position.”

Murdoch scowled in his eyebrows while he scrutinized her.

“Where’s your husband, girl?”

She tried not to show her shock at the boorishness of the question. She cast her eyes downward. “America,” she answered quietly.

“Children?”

She didn’t answer, but shook her head only slightly. Murdoch opened the gate again, just wide enough for her to pass through.

“Around to the back corner, there’s a green door, across from the stables. Ring there and ask for the housekeeper.” He gestured up the drive with his head while he swung the gate shut behind her.

Ginny didn’t look back at the couple heaped on the ground beyond. Instead, she fixed her eyes uphill, on the huge and daunting house, while Murdoch twisted his keys in the lock behind her. Her heartbeat felt like a small riot in her breast, and her lips moved in a quiet prayer of gratitude. Yes, she was grateful. Even though Raymond was gone, gone, and she was on her own with nothing to feed her vanishing children. Even though it was still nigh on impossible she would get this job that might save them. Even though that heavy gate yawned shut between herself and her hungry babies beyond, and she could feel that clang in her bones like an amputation.

“Thanks be to God,” was what she said.

NEW YORK, NOW

D
r. Zimmer and I are having a bit of a stare-down. Sometimes she does this to me when I first come in—she just sits there and looks at me from beneath that great, voluminous swell of gray hair. If I stubbornly refuse to break the ice, will we just sit here and mock each other with our eyes for the entire hour? I pull a strand of hair out from behind my ear, and sniff it. So clean. So dry.

“How are you feeling today?” she finally asks.

Her jacket and hair are the same color as the building across the street, out the window behind her. If I blur my eyes she almost disappears.

“How’s the baby?” she tries again.

I nod. “Emma’s good.”

“Getting easier?”

“Sure,” I lie.

“Perhaps this week we should talk about your mother,” she says.

I snap my eyes back into focus. She’s wearing glasses, and I can feel her eyes behind them, studying me for a reaction to this suggestion.

“Why my mom?”

“Oftentimes, when a new mother finds the transition into parenthood uncommonly difficult, we can trace at least some of that struggle back to the relationship with her own mother.”

“Yeah, I guess that doesn’t seem like rocket science,” I conclude. I expect Dr. Zimmer to leave it there, to wait for a moment while I ponder my mama, while I flip through memories, and zero in on a good place to get started. But she surprises me instead.

“She seems like a decent woman, from what you’ve shared with me so far.”

“Yeah, she is. Of course.”

“So then where do you think all the hostility comes from?” she says.

I feel the air squeezed out of my lungs like water from a sponge. I try to suck it back in. Is this what a panic attack feels like?

“What hostility?” I splutter. “What are you talking about?” I glare at Dr. Zimmer, who is raising a hand in protest.

“Perhaps
hostility
is too strong a word?” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It just seems to me that there is some clear animosity there.”

I can feel my jaw clenching and unclenching. How is it that she can reduce me to this—this insolent, enraged teenager feeling—with just a peppering of words?
This
is what hostility looks like.

“Why do I keep coming here?” I accidentally say out loud.

Dr. Zimmer takes a short breath and purses her lips.

“Because you want to feel better?” she asks. “And even though sometimes I say things that anger you, deep down, you know we’re on the right track. And the reason you respond so strongly is because I’m touching a nerve?”

I pick up the gold pillow and stuff it into my lap like any self-respecting fourteen-year-old would do. I study my fingernails, select one to chew.

“Listen, Majella, mother and daughter relationships are some of the most complicated on earth,” she says then. “It’s perfectly natural for you to feel a degree of tension there. Every woman I know thinks her mother is annoying in some way or another. Surely you can admit that much, at least?”

“What, that she’s annoying?”

“Yes.”

I shrug. “Of course she is,” I say. “She’s incredibly annoying. That doesn’t mean I hate her.”

“Okay, how?” she asks. I pull on a hangnail with my teeth. “If you had to pick one thing about her that annoys you the most, what would it be?”

The hangnail rips loose, and the little pocket of my nail bed fills up with blood. I grab a tissue from the cry-box that Dr. Zimmer keeps beside the couch, and blot the tiny wound. Then I look Dr. Zimmer in the face.

“I guess the worst thing is probably the way she talks to me.”

“How does she talk to you?”

“The same way she talks to everyone,” I say. “I mean absolutely everyone. The ladies at church, the bank teller, the grocery store clerk, the guy who pumps her gas. They know as much about her as I do. Last week she told me that her neighbor’s dog has cataracts. She talked about it for like ten minutes. I don’t even know this neighbor, let alone the dog. It’s a Pomeranian, by the way, named Luke. He’s almost fourteen.”

“I see.”

“It’s like she’s an open book, but all the pages are blank.”

“I imagine that’s quite frustrating.”

“Of course it is,” I say. “Because I know it’s not real. I know she has depth, somehow. She has interests. She’s a smart lady. But it’s like she can’t access her feelings unless they’re immediate.”

“Or at least she
won’t
access them,” Dr. Zimmer says. “Or share them with you.”

“Right.”

She shifts her position in the chair. “That’s difficult, because we can’t change your mother. It’s not your job to change her. We can only change you, how you cope and respond.”

“Yeah.” And then it’s quiet, and something pops into my head, so I just say it out loud, because that’s how therapy works, right? “Last week I was watching some baby show on television, after Emma went to bed and Leo was still at work.”

“Mm-hmm.” Dr. Zimmer nods encouragingly.

“And the woman just had this baby, and she was holding him, in the hospital delivery room, and she was all sweaty and swollen, and happy. So happy. And her mom was there with her, and she looked at the mother, and she said,
Mom, I never knew you loved me this much.
”

As soon as these words are out in the room, I very predictably and insipidly begin to cry. Dr. Zimmer watches silently for a few minutes, while I snuffle myself back together. I pat at my bleeding fingernail some more, to distract myself.

“And what do you think about that?” Dr. Zimmer finally asks. “What’s making you so upset?”

I blow my breath out heavily, from my puffed-out cheeks, and drop my head back on the couch to look up at the ceiling. I picture Emma. Fuzzy, squeaky Emma. My voice comes out in a whisper. “When I hold my baby, I guess the thought I have is:
I don’t think my mother loves me this much.
”

“Oh boy,” Dr. Zimmer says, and it’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard her say. She closes her notebook and leans slightly forward in her chair. “What if she’s just not able to show it?”

“I’m worried that she’s not even able to feel it.”

“What about the other women in your family, other mothers? What about your grandmother? Was she like this, too? Sort of glossed over?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, my dad’s mother was a crazy bitch, but my mom’s mom was amazing, tremendously warm and sweet.” And then I remember the diary. “But there were others.”

“Like who?”

“Well, there was some great-great-grandmother or something. . . . I don’t really know how she was related to me, but I recently found her diary in my attic, and I started to read it.”

“And?”

“She seems more than a little crazy, actually. Even her handwriting. She had some kids, but she only refers to them obliquely, and she’s just totally obsessed with herself, like she’s just living inside her own head.”

“Well, sometimes a diary can just seem like that,” Dr. Zimmer says. “It’s a bit like therapy. Navel-gazing. Maybe she wasn’t as crazy as she seems, if the diary was just her outlet.”

“She heard crunching, too,” I say, as if that proves everything. But Dr. Zimmer ignores this, so I carry on. “Apparently something horrible happened when she was leaving Ireland or something, and she came here hoping for a fresh start, but she just seems completely haunted and tragic and fucked-up.”

“When does the diary date from?”

“From 1848.”

“Oh, so she came during the famine times.” Dr. Zimmer’s eyebrows are up a little, over the tops of her glasses. “Seems like that would be enough to traumatize anyone.”

“Yeah, I never even thought of that,” I say. “The famine.”

“I bet it’s fascinating, that diary.”

“Yeah, I’ve only managed to read a few pages, because every time I sit down with it, Emma wakes up, or something interrupts. But it’s really something. I wonder what happened to her.”

“Do you believe in genetic memory?” Dr. Zimmer asks.

“What, like I could remember something that didn’t happen to me, just because it happened to some ancestor of mine?”

“Well, that’s a rather literal interpretation, but yes,” she says. “I was thinking more along the lines of you, looking for an ancestral excuse to be a bad mother.”

My nail has stopped bleeding, so now I look for another one to assault. “I hardly need an excuse,” I mutter.

•   •   •

Leo is standing at the kitchen counter when I come in, fiddling with the baby monitor. Behind him, I can see through the glass doors of the refrigerator that he’s been shopping. How does he always manage to get so much done when I’m gone, even with Emma here? He makes it look so damned effortless. I throw my bag down on the counter.

“Hi, honey.” I sling my arm around him, but he shushes me.

“Listen,” he whispers, pointing at the baby monitor.

I lean my elbows down on the counter beside his, to look at the tiny screen, but it’s not Emma there. It’s channel C: the four cribs, their wooden slats glowing green in the night-vision light of the dim room. The baby nearest the monitor weeps and wails, like he’s acting in a Greek tragedy. He gnashes his gums together, and I reach across Leo to the far side of the monitor to turn the volume all the way down. I can’t stand the crying.

“We can pick up other channels on this thing,” Leo whispers gleefully. “We can watch our neighbors.”

“Yeah, but why are we whispering?” I whisper.

“Because if we can hear them, they can hear us, too, right?”

Strange that I hadn’t thought of that.

“Sure, but only when we’re upstairs, in Emma’s room, right?” I say out loud.

Leo stands up straight and sets the monitor back on the counter. “Yeah, yeah.” He clears his throat. “And there’s this other family, on channel B, my God. . . .”

“Oh, the Elmos?”

Leo laughs. “They
do
sound like Elmo. Hungarian Elmo!”

I giggle, too. “I always wonder where they live,” I say.

“You already knew about this?”

“Of course, I found it out like the first day,” I say, and I feel a tiny thrill of pride because I’m beginning to recognize these slivers in Emma’s world where I’m the expert, where I know more than him. I
need
this. “The first day, I was flipping around the channels, and I heard them singing the alphabet. Like they were at a Phish concert. Who the hell is that happy?”

“I’m exhausted just
listening
to it,” Leo agrees. “One day that kid is going to wake up and say,
Yo, Ma! Dad! Shut the hell up, you’re driving me insane with the baby talk!
”

I laugh, and Leo kisses me again. For a split second, it feels like the old us, from before we were parents. He looks sexy, and I’m suddenly self-conscious in my floppy clothes. I’m in second-trimester maternity pants, and a baggy T-shirt. I keep waiting for my waistline to spring back like the women in the pages of
Us Weekly,
but it’s been almost six weeks since Emma was born, and there is no evidence that any part of my body will ever spring again. My C-section belly is still distended, my breasts droopy and drippy. I turn from Leo and open the fridge, take out a Diet Coke, and pop the top. He flips the monitor back to channel A, and turns it up. We listen to Emma breathe.

“I got a few groceries together while you were out,” he says. “And some diapers. We needed everything.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t had a chance to stock up,” I say, and now I feel self-conscious about that, too. “I guess Emma had a good morning?”

“Yeah, she was great. She’s snoozing now.” Leo pretends to look at his watch, but he’s not wearing one. “You know, I have over a half an hour until I have to leave for work.” He snakes his arms around me. “Baby’s sleeping, Mama and Daddy are alone.” He begins kissing my neck. He smells so good. I feel so gross, so leaky and globular. I’m wearing jeans with a five-inch elastic waistband, for God’s sake. How could he possibly want to have sex with me? That
is
what he’s suggesting, isn’t it? It’s been so long, I can hardly remember how one initiates these things.

“The doctor said six weeks,” I say, pulling away from him, wrapping myself around the Diet Coke instead.

“It’ll be six weeks on Friday,” he says, running a finger along my neckline.

I gulp at the Coke in a panic. I’m still so sore, so fragile. Sometimes, when I sit on the toilet, I’m afraid important body parts are going to fall out with a splash. Clean, blow-dried hair can only do so much for you. Leo takes the Coke can out of my hand and sets it back on the counter, and I’m suddenly terrified, that he’s going to take me by the hand, and lead me up the stairs, and that there will be smooth jazz playing while he undresses me. Smooth jazz! And stretch marks! And a nursing bra! The
horror!

But instead, he just kisses my hand. He rubs my knuckles with his thumb. “Hey, no rush,” he says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

And he wraps his arms around me, and I press my head against his chest, and I feel tremendously guilty, because I fear that I will never be ready again. He’s so loving and patient, and I’m so relieved; I don’t want to kill the kindness of this moment by explaining it to him, that my body is permanently altered now. These boobs have finished phase one of their biological job: in perky innocence, they attracted a mate. Now they have obviously matured to their second biological use: to
suckle.
To feed our child, as from an udder. Yes, I am bovine, entirely.

“Moo,” I say to Leo.

He draws back and looks at me. “What?”

“That was a cow joke,” I explain. “I feel like a cow.”

“God, Majella, you’re beautiful, would you stop?”

“Moo,” I say again, softly.

•   •   •

After he leaves for work, I take the monitor, and flip it back to channel C. That baby is still crying, and now there is even more crying—at least two screamy little voices, maybe more. Man, if I was that mother, I would lose it. It sounds like someone is murdering Smurfs over there. I turn the volume all the way down again, and watch the red volume light flicker and dance along the bottom of the screen. After a moment, the light in the channel C room changes, like someone has opened a door, or turned on a lamp. I quickly turn the volume back up. The babies stop screaming, and strain their necks to see who has come in. One of them flips from his back to his front, and I can see now, from that movement, that it’s definitely just two babies, and that their cribs are pressed up against a large mirror.