Whitethorn Woods (26 page)

   It surprised me, even shocked me, that a place like that, a really respectable institution, would go along with her in such a sub terfuge. It was against the law, it was against everything they stood for. They had always been meticulous about the children in their care. Surely they would have found a legal way for Helen to adopt a child rather than be a party to all this deception? But I knew they would always look out for Helen.

   There were still women there who had been on the staff when she was a baby herself.

   They would have nothing but compassion and pity for her.

   So when I heard the news that our baby had been born suddenly, a little girl, strong and lovely, and that everyone was being so helpful, I started to breathe again. I glossed over the whole birth registration business, easily filling in documents here and signing my name there, asking no questions, raising no issues.

   I held someone else's little girl in my arms, and even I, a mere man, as people would say, realized that Grace was older than the tender age that Helen claimed her to be. I helped to keep people away from the mother and child until it was too blurred and late to know the difference. I reminded everyone that I too had been a very big child at birth and, amazingly, my mother—who is inclined to fight with me on issues like this—agreed and said that I was quite mountainous.

   Helen gave no descriptions of the delivery, not even to people like my mother and her close friends, who begged her for details. It had all passed in a blur, she said, but now that she held her little Grace to her it didn't seem important, and wasn't she lucky that she had been with people who knew how to help her. Nobody thought it was unusual.

   Nobody.

   Well, why would they?

   They had seen Helen over the last six months swelling gently, planning the birth of her child. Only I knew and I would never tell.

   I walked along the carpeted corridors to Helen's room. I had only one more thing to tell her, which was that her secret would be safe with me for the rest of her life. That it didn't matter one damn what that foolish, insensitive boyfriend David said, no one would ever know that Grace wasn't our daughter. But I couldn't tell her straight out. That would be letting her know that I knew.

   I would sit and look at her and it would come to me.

   I would know what to say.

   The room was dark, just a small light and the big shape of the Filipino woman, Mercedes, sitting beside her. Mercedes was holding Helen's hand. Helen's eyes were closed.

   "Mr. Harris!" Mercedes was surprised to see me.

   "Is she awake?" I asked.

   She was asleep apparently; she had just had her cocktail of drugs. The palliative care nurse had been there half an hour ago.

   "I believe that David upset her today."

   "She didn't say, Mr. Harris."

   But I knew in my heart that David had made her uneasy, her face had shown great alarm when he was droning on about some place over in Ireland with a wishing wood or a magic well or something. I can read Helen's face like a book. The nurse was impassive.

   She saw and heard everything but said very little.

   I had to know.

   "Did she mention anything? Anything at all?" I knew I sounded unhinged but I had to know if that boy had made her anxious. Now at the very, very end.

   "No, no, she told me only of you bringing in champagne for her wedding anniversary."

   Mercedes was looking at Helen in the bed as if she might still hear in spite of all the medication.

   So it hadn't turned her whole world around in the fear that her long secret would be discovered. I could breathe again.

   I asked, could I sit with her alone? Apparently not. She was to be watched all night. They were worried about her chest.

   "Please, Mercedes, I want to talk to her when she wakes," I begged.

   "Mr. Harris, when she wakes I will move across the room and you can talk to her where I don't hear you," she said.

   And that's what I did—sat by her bed for two hours, stroking her thin white hand.

   
They must expect her to die today or tomorrow if there was a
twenty-four-hour watch arranged,
I thought.

   Then she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

   "I thought you were at dinner." Her words came out with difficulty.

   "I was, it was wonderful," I said.

   I told her we talked about lots of things: that everyone was very happy, and I was happiest of all. I reported Grace telling us that David said, wasn't it odd that Grace had dark eyes while we were both fair, and I told him how my father had dark eyes too. Black as soot, so I told Grace that she must have got them from him. And Mummy had agreed and even added that Grace could also have got the dark eyes from Helen's side of the family. It was just that we didn't know them. So David had agreed. And shrugged and gone on to something else.

   Helen looked at me long and hard. "You still don't like him," she croaked at me.

   "I do," I lied.

   "You can't fool me, James, we never lied to each other, not once, remember?"

   "I know."

   And then I told her the last lie.

   "I don't really
dislike
him, my darling. It's just that I love my little girl so much nobody will ever be good enough for her. She's my daughter, my flesh and blood: nothing can make me think any other man will make her happy like we did."

   And Helen's smile was wonderful. I could have looked at it forever but something changed in her face and Mercedes was about to go for the Sister.

Before she left the room she said to me:

   "You are a wonderful man, Mr. Harris, you made her very happy by what you said." And even though it's utterly ridiculous— when you come to think of it—I felt for a moment that she knew our secret. That she knew all about Grace.

   But, of course, that's not possible.

   Helen would never have told her.

   Not in a million years.

Well, it was obvious from the word go, wasn't it? I was going to be sixteen on June 16 and my name was June. Where else would we go except to Dublin for Bloomsday? It was going to be a magical day, she said.

   I didn't really believe in magical days but she was so excited about it that she told everyone she met. "My daughter's going to be Sweet Sixteen on the day that Leopold Bloom met Molly." Most people didn't have any idea what she was talking about, but when has that ever stopped Mom?

   The planning began almost a year in advance, with hours on the Internet looking for cheap tickets and accommodations. I swear we must be the only Irish Americans who don't seem to have any relatives in Ireland. I really don't know what Mom did with all her family. Alienated them, maybe. Talked too much about how well we were all doing across the Atlantic—which was far from true.

   She had been born in this place called Rossmore, miles from anywhere. But most of the family had gone to live in Dublin. Over the years we had gotten this much out of her. When she was a child she used to play in these woods and they all went to a holy well to pray for husbands.

   "Was it a real wishing well?" I asked.

   It had delivered my papa to Mom as a result so she obviously didn't think much of it. Apparently people went there to this day.

   Mom had lived in Ireland until she was eleven, for heaven's sake, she must have had some cousins, friends, aunts, uncles. There hadn't been another potato famine since then to wipe them all out or anything. Why couldn't we be normal and go and stay with them?

   Oh, no use asking Mom! She would shrug and flutter and say everything was so difficult these days, what with everyone being dispersed and all over the place. But it was never clear who had gone and where and why. It always seemed to me that we were the only ones who had left, everyone else had stayed.

   No point in trying to pin Mom down, asking her serious questions. She knew nothing about Rossmore, and didn't really remember her years in Dublin. She brushed it all away, and became more vague and restless and anxious.

   It was like mentioning dates and ages and things. It always made Mom uneasy and in the end wasn't really worth it. Mom is forty-four. She says to everyone around here that she is thirty-five, which means that she must have been eighteen when she had me and only seventeen when she got pregnant. I don't know how that leaves time for all the college education she says she had, in places far from here, where all the coeds and sorority friends once lived. But it's better not to ask.

   I see my papa twice a year, when he comes east. He is Italian, very overexcitable, married again and has two little boys. He shows me photographs and calls them my half brothers. He doesn't meet Mom when he comes to collect me and take me to the motel where he stays. If she's at home she watches from the window upstairs. But she's usually at work. People who sell outdoor furniture are at work all the time, it would appear.

   Papa is no help when I ask him about things back in Ireland.

   "Don't ask, Junie, don't ask, you just get a different story every time," he would beg me.

   "But, Papa, you must know something, I mean, when you and she got married weren't there guests from Ireland at the wedding?"

   "A few, but, hey, Junie, you don't want to look back on the past, look to the future, I always say."

   He was about to show me the pictures of my half brothers again so I headed him off at the pass.

   "Okay, this birthday I'm having in Dublin. Did you meet any of Mom's relatives when you were in Dublin?"

   "Nope," he said.

   "But why? She met all yours when you went to Italy, didn't she?"

   "I never went to Dublin, June honey," Papa said. "I always wanted to but we didn't go there. Apparently your mom's grandpa and her father had words one day. Bad words, and her father was a proud young man, so he took his family off to the United States and wouldn't let anyone give a backward look."

   "But wasn't that all years ago, Papa?" I was bewildered that any feud on earth could go on this long.

   "Oh, you know the way things snowball, they just grow," Papa said, forgiving everyone, as usual.

   "But when Mom's father died, when Grandpa was gone, couldn't it have been made up then?"

   "Perhaps she felt it would be disloyal to her father's memory. Anyway I never got to see the place, Rossmore, or Dublin. So I'm no help to you." Papa shrugged.

   "I'll tell you all about it, Papa," I promised.

   "Gina and I are giving you a camera for your birthday, June. Take pictures of everything you see and show them to me next visit. You'll have a great trip. Honey, your mom will be so proud of you whoever you meet. She'll show you a really good time." He is so good, Papa is, wants everyone to like everyone else.

   I could feel sudden tears in my eyes.

   "You never really told me why you and Mom broke up," I began without much hope that I'd hear anything.

   "Oh well, you know, these things happen, they're nobody's fault," he said with a big smile. "And you know, Junie, nothing was ever gained by looking back. We'll look ahead, to your wonderful trip to Ireland and then one day you'll come out to the Midwest to see your little half brothers and . . ."

   I owed him some support. "I'd love to meet Gina, Papa, and get to know little Marco and Carlo," I said and saw his face light up that I had said their names.

   "How was your father?" Mom's voice was clipped and strained. It had obviously not been a good day selling patio chairs. I longed to tell her how kind and generous he was, so open to hearing good news from every quarter. But it wasn't worth it, not if it made her restless and upset. So, like Papa had given in all those years ago about not visiting Dublin, I gave in too and said very little.

   "He was nice." I shrugged. "Didn't have much to say."

   "He never had," Mom said, pleased. And she was humming a little tune as she went to get out the big file of info about our trip. The file she had labeled june sixteen in big green felt-tippen letters.

   "What will you do there?" they asked me at school. I didn't know how to answer because I simply didn't know what we were going to do. But unlike Mom I didn't care what they thought I was going to do.

   "Will there be a party there for you?" my friend Suzi asked.

   I said I didn't know—there might, as a surprise; there might not.

   I'd have a party anyway when we came back. I was hoping we would go to this place Rossmore, where there was a wishing well, but I wouldn't mention it to my mom until we got there. The only thing I knew we were going to do on June 16 was to go on this James Joyce walking tour. Mom had signed us up with this group.

   We were to start out on the coast at a tower, and go to a museum, then have a huge breakfast of kidneys and liver and things, and then go into Dublin on a little train. It sounded weird but my mom hadn't been happier for a long time so that was good. Anyway after all the fussing, the packing, unpacking and repacking of suitcases, the day came and we went to Dublin.

   The flight was crowded, and the bargain hotel was okay—not great, just okay. And the stores were all small compared to at home, and the money was different, and I kept asking Mom if she remembered it all or even anything about it, and she said she didn't really know, it was all so long ago.

   "Not so long, Mom, you're only thirty-five, remember," I said and for once she didn't rise to it.

   "I feel a hundred and thirty-five compared to all the young faces I see around me here, this has turned into a country of teenagers," Mom grumbled. Her face looked tired and anxious. I decided not to tease her anymore.