The Crooked Branch (30 page)

I feel like my bowling ball glanced. I got maybe two or three pins, which is all you can really hope for your first time out, right? But maybe I can go for the spare. After all, she did say the word
postpartum
, and that seems like evidence of something.

“Well, we talk about our feelings now, Mom,” I say. “It’s not too late for that, you know. People do that.”

“What people?”

“Other people. Lots of people. Me!”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she says, but I interrupt her to push my silliness a step further.

“I’m going to therapy,” I say.

My mom gasps. It’s a bona fide gasp. I think she would’ve been less shocked if I’d confessed a heroin addiction and a lesbian affair.

“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “What do you need therapy for?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You’re fine, Majella, you don’t need therapy. How absurd. Tell me one good reason you would need therapy.”

“How about because I can’t stand my mother!” I bark. I am standing on the side of Myrtle Avenue with my fists clenched in the dark. The lit-up Q55 bus rolls past and farts exhaust at me. Jesus God, what did I just say to my mother? She is quiet on the other end of the phone. “I didn’t mean that, Mom. Mom?”

She doesn’t say anything, but I move the phone away from my ear, and I can still see the seconds ticking by. I can hear
Jeopardy!
coming on in the background. She hasn’t hung up.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “You know I didn’t mean that. I don’t hate you.”

She’s still quiet, and I hear her take a shuddery little breath. Emma takes a matching one in her stroller.

“I love you, Mom. I just hate the way our relationship is sometimes,” I say, “the way we communicate. I just want to be honest, I want us to be closer. I feel like we never talk about anything
real
. I have so much on my mind right now—I’m so scared I’m going to be a bad mom, there’s so much I don’t know. And I don’t feel like I can talk to you about it. I feel like you don’t really listen to me.” But she’s listening now, isn’t she?

“Mom?” Still nothing. “The truth is, I started going to therapy because I’m crying a lot, like all the time. And I feel really overwhelmed, with Emma. It’s not like I thought it would be. It’s so scary.”

I hear Alex Trebek being charmingly pretentious in the background. My dad laughs. I hear a noise like a sliding glass door opening, and then the sounds shift and change. The door closes, and
Jeopardy!
is gone.

“I cried a lot, too,” Mom says. I hold my breath. “Your father and I always wanted a big family.” She stops talking for a moment, so that I begin to wonder if that’s all she is going to say, but then she sniffs, and I realize that she is crying. My mother.

“What happened?” I ask softly. “How come you only had me?”

“There were others.” Her voice is high and tight. She exhales a squeaky breath. “I had five miscarriages before you.”

I clutch the handle on Emma’s stroller.
Five miscarriages
.

“My God, Mom.”

“The last one was a boy,” she says. “We thought he was the one. We made it all the way to almost thirty-five weeks, and then my labor came early. . . .”

She stops. She is pushing these words out for me. She is delivering this terror because I made her. Because I told her it was what I needed.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, no, it’s good,” she says. “You should know. You had a brother. But he was born gone. He was already gone. They let me hold him.”

Tears are running down my face now. Snot is collecting beneath my nose.

“Oh God, Mom, I’m so sorry.” I can’t imagine anything worse than laboring to give birth to a dead baby. It is literally the worst thing I can imagine.

I hear her crying, softly, tenderly.

“We called him Jimmy, after your grandfather.”

I don’t know what to say. I wish I was in Florida, on that stupid condo balcony with my mom, overlooking the golf course. I can hear cicadas.

“After that, it was hard,” she says. “I mean, I couldn’t have loved you any more, Majella. You know that, don’t you? I love you so much.”

“Of course, Mom.”

“But it was hard. I was still grieving. I felt guilty for loving you so much. Like I was cheating on that first baby, all of those first babies. Like I shouldn’t be so happy, when they were gone, when Jimmy was gone.” She takes a deep breath. “I always remembered his little body in my arms. How still he was.” Her voice is ragged.

“I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I don’t talk about it,” she whispers. “Not even with your father. Never.”

I look down at Emma, who kicks her foot at me like I’m a horse that she wants to get moving. I mop up my snot and tears with my free arm, and then begin pushing her down the street again.

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“I really love you. I love you. I’m sorry.”

“I know, Majella. I love you, too.”

After we hang up, I feel incredibly fat and rattled. The Jumbo BBQ Crunchburger Deluxe is sitting like a stone in my gut. And the cheesy waffle fries and the guacamole. Emma and I stride through the darkened streets of Glendale in a vain attempt to outrun the damage I’ve just inflicted on my body. And my mama. When my baby begins to whimper, we head for home.

I look at the microwave clock as we walk in. It’s a little late for Emma’s bedtime, but she’ll be fine. As long as I feed her and bathe her, and swaddle her tightly before bed, she’s happy. I’ve left the monitor on the kitchen counter. I thought they’d be asleep by now, but on channel C, Jade and her babies are all crying.

•   •   •

The next day, Leo doesn’t have to be at work until early afternoon, so I’m waiting alone on the library steps when they open at ten o’clock. Well, not alone exactly—there are plenty of caffeinated undergrads and some sneaker-sporting tourists waiting with me. It dawns on me that after living my whole life in New York, I can tell the tourists from the locals without even trying, and I accidentally sort people into these groups at a glance. There is a young, ambitious tourist on the steps beside me, and she’s trying to fake everybody out. She wants to be a New Yorker. She wears all black, and she’s vigilant about keeping her hair lightly mussed, her giant sunglasses perched just so on her nose. She impersonates disdain well, but she’s only wearing it; it’s not real. And is she really alone? Aren’t those her criminally embarrassing parents posing with the lions? She looks like she wants to crawl inside her clean Armani handbag. As soon as she’s old enough, she will move here. She will run.

When the doors open at ten o’clock, I follow the grad students up three flights of steps to the Rose Reading Room. I grab a call slip and mini-pencil, and fill in the information that I looked up on the Internet last night. I even have the call number on a crumpled scrap of paper in my pocket, because I am a professional. When the serious, bespectacled librarian hands over the CD a few minutes later, he reminds me to use headphones when listening.

“Yes, sir,” I say.

He nods solemnly.

In the South Hall, I find an empty table and open my laptop. I pop in the disc, plug in my earbuds, and sit down to listen. It’s a collection, and the files are listed first by county and then by surname. There are hundreds of Irish voices here. So many stories. I scan the list until I find Mayo. R. Doyle is the fourth file. I take a deep breath before I click on his name.

There is static, like the sound you used to hear when you would play old records, and then the time-warped voice of a young American, the famous professor.

“Just start with your name there. Don’t worry about the microphone, no need to lean in.”

“How’s that?” Raymond Doyle’s voice flashes brightly into my brain.

“Perfect. Now. Your name?”

He clears his throat. “My name is Raymond Doyle, sir.”

“And where are you from, Mr. Doyle?”

“Originally from a place called Knockbooley, in the County of Mayo, sir. In Ireland.”

His voice is weathered, throaty, full of living. His accent is broad, gorgeous New York, one hundred percent. There’s no trace of a lilt or a soft
T
. Nothing Irish about him. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. This is better. He sounds like an aged gangster. I have goose bumps on my arms. I draw his mother’s diary out from my backpack, but don’t open it. I set it on the table, and place my hand over it gently. It feels like a heartbeat.

“Very good, Mr. Doyle, and would you mind telling me your age, sir?”

“I believe I am ninety-three years of age or thereabouts. I was born at Springhill House in County Mayo in Ireland, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-seven.”

“Springhill House?” the famous Irish-American professor asks. “An estate house?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“You were born into the landed aristocracy?”

“No, sir,” Raymond Doyle laughs, and I can hear the years of accumulated smoke in his lungs. I wonder what he did for a living. “My mother was under their employ, at Springhill. She was a chambermaid to the missus, Mrs. Alice Spring.”

“Ah. And your father?” I can hear the pencil-scratching of the famous professor taking his notes. I close my eyes so I can hear everything better, sharper.

“He died before I was born. Died on the passage over to America, on the coffin ships.”

“As so many did, so many,” the professor says. There seems to be a note of anger in his voice, more than in his subject’s. “And when did you make the passage yourself, Mr. Doyle?”

“I was only an infant. To be honest, I remember nothing of Ireland, only my mother’s stories.”

“And that’s why we’re here, Mr. Doyle, to collect your stories.”

“Not my stories,” Raymond corrects the famous professor. “My mother’s stories. The famine stories.”

“That’s right,” the professor concedes.

“She was a saint, my mother. Ginny Doyle was her name.”

I open my eyes, rub my fingertips across the diary.
A saint
, I think, and I shake my head.

“She saved my life more times than I can count, God rest her soul.” The reading room is beginning to fill up with people. I turn up the volume on my laptop, and close my eyes again. I wish I could
see
him. “It started before we ever left Ireland. Before I was born, even.”

“She saved your life before you were born?” the professor interrupts.

“She did,” Raymond says.

“How so?”

“Did you ever hear of any babies being born in the middle of the famine?”

The professor grunts, but makes no real answer.

“I nearly wasn’t. Nearly wasn’t born. We were starving, all of us, starving after my father left and died on the coffin ships. I was starving in my own mother’s womb. My sister Maire would tell it better, before she died, God rest her. She remembered. She was the oldest, and she saw all the babies born. She saw how a woman ought to look when she has a baby in there, but she said I wasn’t growing at all, inside, until my mother went out and got the job at Springhill.”

“She went there when she was pregnant?”

“She did.”

“And they employed her?”

“They did.”

“Highly unusual,” the professor remarks.

I click
pause
on the file, so I can stop and try to take this all in. I need to imagine it. Being pregnant, having—how many?—other children at home already, and Leo being dead and gone, and there being no food at all, to feed my children. My God. I breathe deep. I click
play
.

“It was unusual, but that’s how it happened,” Raymond says. “I was so small that she wasn’t even showing she was with child, so she left the other children at home, with my sister Maire. She had no choice, you see, because Dad was gone already, and there was nobody else to mind them. Sure, Maire was only a child herself at the time.”

“How old was she?”

“I don’t know. Eleven? Twelve? She was young.”

“And how many other children were there?” the professor asks. “How many brothers and sisters?”

“When I was born, there were four. One had died when he was a baby, before I was born. That was Thomas. And then I had an older brother, Michael, who died around the same time I was born, or shortly after.”

“Did he die of the hunger?”

“Typhus.” Raymond clears his throat again, coughs out a smoky rasp. “And there were two other little girls besides Maire. One of them died on the passage over—Maggie, she was called. I don’t remember her. So there was only three of us left by the time we got to New York: myself, Maire, and Poppy. My poor mother, she lost three out of six of us. And our father.”

The professor makes a sympathetic sort of a noise, and I imagine him shaking his head. There is a whacking noise then. Perhaps Raymond is smacking the table. He is sitting up, beside the microphone. He is grieving for his broken mother.

“Would you tell me more about her?” the professor prompts. “Your mother? You said she saved your life more times than you could count.”

“She did.”

“Tell me some of those stories.”

Raymond pauses. There is a clicking noise. I can nearly hear my own heartbeat in the earphones.

“How about I just tell you the big one?” he says. “How she got us the hell out of the famine.”

IRELAND, JULY 1847

“I
will pay you for him,” Mrs. Spring said again, her voice wild and strained. There was something feral about her, in that moment.

She loosened her grip on Ginny’s arm and grabbed on to Raymond’s blanket instead. Ginny backed away from Mrs. Spring, who let go, but stamped her feet beneath her billowing purple gown like a spooked stallion. The feather flapped windily from her hat.

Behind Ginny, Maire came back into the yard carrying the blue Wedgwood china pie plate.

“You forgot this, Mrs. Spring,” Maire said, stepping toward her mother and the visitor.

Neither of them answered Maire. Instead, they stared at each other. Maire looked from her mother’s face to Mrs. Spring’s and back again. She asked nothing; she didn’t say a word, but she went to Ginny, and she took Raymond from her mother’s arms. Ginny’s hands were shaking, and when Poppy peeked out into the yard, Maire told her to go back inside and close the door.

Ginny didn’t turn, but she heard the cottage door squeak and then slam. Raymond started to fuss, so Maire tucked the china plate beneath her armpit so she could rock him up on her shoulder. She shushed him and patted his back, but her eyes stayed locked on the two women in front of her. Finally Mrs. Spring broke the edgy silence.

“Think of your girls, Ginny,” she said. “Look at your fine daughter there.”

“I have a name,” her clear voice rang out. “It’s Maire.”

Alice Spring turned her faulty smile on Ginny’s daughter, but Maire’s face was as grim as the blight.

“Maire,” Mrs. Spring said. “Perhaps you should let the grown-ups chat, dear.”

Ginny stepped forward, between them. “My daughter is more grown than you’ll ever be,” she said.

Mrs. Spring’s face betrayed shock, but she wasn’t ready to kill decorum. She still had hope in her wild scheme, so she let Ginny’s insolence go.

“I didn’t mean to insinuate . . . ,” she said. “I only thought perhaps it would be better for us to discuss the matter in private. To come to an arrangement.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Ginny said. “There will be no arrangement.”

Ginny looked at Maire, who was staring intently at her mother, and bouncing her brother softly in her arms.

“At least hear me out!” Mrs. Spring pleaded, her voice rising again. “Don’t be so hasty. I’m not asking you to abandon him. The very contrary, dear! I’m offering you an opportunity. Think of it. Look, look!”

Mrs. Spring pulled back her cloak again, and revealed a thick silver chain that was looped across her shoulder and through a hidden belt inside the cloak. She drew on the chain until a large mesh purse appeared from behind her back. It was bulging, heavy, filled mostly with gold coins. She opened the clasp and pulled out all the notes at the top of the purse. She held them out to Ginny.

“Take it!” She stepped forward. “It’s money. Take it, I’ll send more!”

Raymond was beginning to cry loudly. He needed a feed. There was that awful stink in the air. Alice Spring stepped forward again and grabbed Ginny’s arm. She pressed the folded bills into Ginny’s hand and forced her fingers to curl around them.

“There is fever here,” Alice Spring reasoned. “You’ve lost one child to the fever already. Will you risk this one as well, when you have a chance to save him? You can get him out of this misery.”

Maire’s eyes widened as she watched. She looked younger, suddenly, than Ginny had seen her look since her father left. Alice Spring was still talking.

“You have blight here, even the little one said it. What will you feed your children when your crop is gone again? How will you feed little Raymond, if you can’t nourish yourself?”

Ginny could feel her breast rising and falling erratically. She was shaking her head, shaking her head. She tried to shake all the reason and outrageous logic loose from her ears. Instead, she would hold only to the sound of her baby’s cries. His hungry voice.

“And how would
you
propose to feed him?” Ginny said, but her words were deficient of the bitterness she felt. She could see a glimmer of triumph in Alice Spring’s eye. “He’s hungry now.” Ginny’s voice was defeated.

“I’ll get a wet nurse.”

“No, no!” Ginny said, finding her strength again. “I am his mother!” She beat her fist against her chest, but then fell silent. She was so worn down by fear and anguish. She was so wholly exhausted. “If you want him, you will have to bring all of us,” she said resolutely. “
I
will nurse him.”

“Hah!” Alice Spring huffed, her face incredulous. “Don’t be preposterous. I can’t show up in New York with an entire ragtag family of Irish beggars at my heels.”

Maire’s face pinkened, but she held her tongue. Ginny stepped forward and opened her fingers, threw the matted wad of bills back in Alice Spring’s face. They rained down around her like summer snowflakes. Her eyes and mouth popped open in shock. She was still holding her purse in one hand. She had locked the clasp over the weight of gold coins inside, and now her fingertips yellowed beneath her furious grip.

“You fool!” Alice Spring screamed, and she swung the purse wildly, hitting Ginny hard in the side of the head. The weight of gold made a sickening clunk against the side of Ginny’s head, and she half buckled, but then recovered herself. She could hear nothing of Mrs. Spring’s continued rant, only a loud ringing in her right ear. She clutched the side of her face, and turned to Maire, who was backing away now from Alice Spring. Maire was shielding the baby boy in her arms. Ginny lurched for them, but she was dizzy from the blow, and she collapsed down on one knee. Alice Spring was bulging with rage. Everything felt slow and contorted. Ginny couldn’t hear past the ringing. And then there was a sound like air being sucked from a balloon, and Ginny could hear Alice Spring again, shrieking like a madman.

“Damn you, I will have him!” she was screaming. “He belongs with me!”

Ginny staggered to her feet and listed forward, but she couldn’t get to them in time. Maire clung tightly to Raymond. She kept one hand over his head, and pitched her own head low to cover him. Alice Spring was pulling at his blanket, wrenching Maire’s arms. The Wedgwood pie plate came loose in the struggle and Alice Spring bobbled it, then caught it secure in her fingers. Ginny could see the veins throbbing in Alice Spring’s hands as she lifted the pie plate overhead. Maire cowered beneath the lunatic, shielding Raymond. And then Ginny’s own voice flew from her like a woeful, animal thing—a curlew.

Ginny saw the Wedgwood bludgeon coming down slow over her children, a violent streak of blue against the morning sky. Her voice flew out around them and her body hurtled forward, but she was too late, too late. There was a crack and smash as the plate shattered down over her daughter’s head, and Maire dropped to her knees, but she never let go of Raymond.

“My God!” Ginny was shrieking now, too, though there was nothing of God in her heart at that moment. Her daughter was on her knees. Maire crumpled into her mother, and Ginny caught her. Alice Spring caught Raymond. She lifted him triumphantly into her arms.

“Maire.” Ginny was on her knees now, too, down beside her daughter. Maire’s eyes were open and she latched them on to her mother. Her mouth was slack and her cheeks were pale, but there was a bright red ribbon of blood running down from a wicked gash in her hairline. She was moving her lips. Ginny held her daughter’s face and kissed her. She kissed her.

“I’m all right,” Maire said, but her voice had a terrible windy quiver. She was garbled. “I’m grand, Mammy. Mammy, Raymond. Get Raymond.”

She pointed to Alice Spring, who was stood looking down at them. She had baby Raymond in her arms, and a demented tiny half smile on her face. Ginny’s soft confusion snapped and diffused. Maire sat up, and Ginny stood to face Alice Spring, who lifted her chin.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” Mrs. Spring said, and there was a crazy brilliance in her eyes.

Raymond was crying, and she was squeezing him, too tight. She would wind him.

“Give me my baby,” Ginny said to her.

“He’s coming with me. He needs to come with me.”

“He’s going nowhere with you.” Ginny bent quickly, and lifted Raymond’s hurley bat from beside Maggie’s cairn. She held it loose by her side, and stood above her daughter. “Give me my son,” she said again.

“Look. Look,” Mrs. Spring cried, and real tears came quick to her eyes. Her voice warbled, and she shook her head urgently. “Don’t make me hurt him. Let me take him with me, let him go. God, I love him so dearly, don’t make me hurt him. I will.” She was trembling. She had the fingers of one hand splayed awkwardly across his tiny head. She held him slippy in one arm and his head was lolling back. She could snap his neck. She could hurl him at the ground. She was capable of anything. She was barking mad altogether. She backed away from Ginny slowly. “Don’t make me hurt him,” she cried again softly.

“Mammy!” Maire’s voice was in a panic. “Mammy!” she screamed.

Ginny was so quick then. She didn’t falter. She didn’t think. She lifted the hurley bat behind her with the fast certainty of a god, and she heaved it without conscience. With all the might in her spent body, she hurtled forward and brought that cudgel down. A bloodcurdling crack split Alice Spring’s waiting skull.

And she dropped.

It was so slow, the way Raymond came loose from Alice Spring’s arms, sickening slow. Ginny reached out for her baby when Alice Spring fell, and she saw him tumbling, the tuck of his blanket unrolling, unraveling. He came free from the blanket, and he flew, his ten little fingers splayed out in terror. Ginny sprang, she leapt. Her fingertips grasped his in the naked air, his arm wrenched.

She caught him. By one dangling arm, she caught him.

And then the wind and the blood and the blight were all coursing through her, ferrying remorse and relief both all through her blood, as she folded Raymond’s tiny, twisting body into her arms, and stepped through the scattered blue shards of china. They crunched like bones beneath her feet. The purple hat had come loose from Alice Spring’s head, and it skittered across the yard now like a frightened bird, its sole feather waving manically. The loosened money, too, flapped along the breezy ground. A few bills caught in Maggie’s cairn, and more clustered around Alice Spring’s fluttering skirts. Her blue eyes were open to the sky. The bloodiest horror of the head wound was hidden beneath the soft golden loops of her hair. My God. What had Ginny done? She put her hands over her baby’s face and closed her own eyes.

“God forgive me,” she whispered.

Raymond howled and cried, from the shock, Ginny hoped, but his little arm was hanging at a queer angle. Maire was crying softly behind them. Her voice was windy. She called out, “Mammy.” Ginny turned to look at her daughter, at the blood beginning to clot and dry in her hair. Ginny took two crunching steps to where her daughter sat trembling, still pointing at Alice Spring.

“Mammy,” she said again.

“Here, we’ll get you inside,” Ginny said, and she stooped to lift her daughter.

Maire put an arm around her mother’s neck and struggled to her feet. At the door, Maire turned back to look at the body, but Ginny stood in her way so she couldn’t see.

“Mammy, the money,” she said.

“Don’t worry, Maire. I’ll take care of it.”

Inside, Maggie and Poppy were all round eyes and mouths. They were all silent astonishment.

“What happened to Maire, Mammy?” Poppy whispered.

“I’m grand, Poppy,” Maire said, but her voice was still shaking. “I just fell and hit my head.”

“Oh.” Her little sister nodded reverently.

“And I’m going to clean it up for her,” Ginny said.

“That’s good because it looks disgusting,” Poppy said.

“How do you feel?” Ginny said, settling Maire onto the stool. “Are you dizzy?”

“No.”

“Maire.”

“A little,” she admitted.

“Listen, I’m going to clean you up, but I have to take care of some things outside first, right?”

Maire tucked in her lips.

“Maggie, come here and hold your brother.”

“Why does Maggie get to hold him?” Poppy whinged.

“Because you have to hold me,” Maire said.

“But you’re too big for me to hold.”

“You have to hold my hand,” she explained.

“Oh,” Poppy said. “That’s all right.” And she stood in beside the stool, lifted Maire’s hand, and gave it a squeeze. “How’s that?”

“Perfect.”

“Don’t get up,” Ginny said to Maire. “If you’re dizzy, I don’t want you falling again.”

“All right, Mam.”

“I mean it. Promise?”

“I promise,” Maire said.

“Why is he crying like that, Mammy?” Maggie asked then. Raymond’s little cry was frantic, his lungs squealing out all the volume he could manage.

“He’s all right, Maggie,” Ginny said. “Babies just cry like that sometimes. It’s nothing to worry about.”

But Maggie didn’t look convinced.

“I think he hurt his little arm,” Ginny said, bending over the baby to inspect him. “You just hold on to him tight there and make him cozy. I’ll be back in just a few minutes to feed him.”

Maggie nodded, but her face was still creased with worry.

“It’s no worry if he cries, love,” Ginny said. “It’s good for him. Just keep this door closed until I get back.”

“Why?” Maggie asked.

“Because there’s a monster outside,” Maire said. Poppy’s eyes widened. “Don’t worry, it can’t get in as long as we keep the door closed.”

“But what about Mammy?” Poppy asked, tears threatening.

“Oh, it’s not a grown-up monster,” Maire said. “It’s a baby monster. It only eats babies and little children. Mammy will be fine.”

Ginny closed the door behind her and leaned against it. There was blood in the yard. Maire’s bright red blood, all scattered through the china. And then Alice Spring’s blood, pooling dark and mortal beneath the twisted wreckage of her body, her legs akimbo beneath her splendid gown. Ginny clapped her hands across her face, and wept at the sight of Alice Spring, the damnation of her soul.

•   •   •

When Ginny was able, she ran. She reeled up to the ridge, and down the other side, all the way down the lane through the bottom field and over to the gate in the rock wall. She pawed frantically at the latch on the gate. It loosened and the gate swung in. Mrs. Spring’s carriage was parked in the road beyond. The two horses stood still and quiet, and behind them, Seán sat up with his feet propped high on the footboard and his arms crossed in front of him. His chin was dropped to his chest, and he was snoring lightly.