Here Lies Sister Mary
NOT LONG AFTER my escape, Fiona was released from the convent to work as a housemaid for a family in Sunday’s Corner. She dutifully attended Father Joseph’s services at the parish church. Her misspelled letters to me swelled with her old false cheer, claiming she couldn’t be happier or safer, and that she prayed every day for her little boy. ‘I hope he’s never told where he came from,’ she wrote. ‘The nuns always knew what was best for us, didn’t they?’
Upon reading that line, I ripped Fiona’s letter into a hundred pieces, the fiercely torn shreds turning up for weeks when I swept my room.
‘Don’t be angry at Fiona,’ Bess wrote. ‘She was raised by the nuns. If believing in them keeps her from going mad, who are we to take that away from her?’
I couldn’t stop myself sitting down and writing to tell Fiona how her little boy would always have a memory of her, deep in his bones and blood. That’s how it works with humans. ‘A baby never entirely leaves a mother’s womb,’ I wrote. ‘Traces of your boy – the very cells that comprise his living form – are still contained inside of you.’
She wrote back to tell me the roses that year were the most beautiful she’d ever seen. And she’d gone to the convent to buy milk and radishes for her household, and all the nuns seemed wonderfully well.
In Philadelphia, Bess tried to be happy. It shouldn’t have been so difficult. Her husband was a kind man who adored her, and he found good work as the manager of a shipyard. They lived in a white clapboard house in a pleasant neighbourhood. There were two bedrooms waiting to be filled with children: her husband wanted two boys, two girls. But when Bess walked into these rooms, she didn’t see them as empty of future children, the family she couldn’t convince herself to start. She saw them empty of Ronan, who’d kicked and swum inside her, promising his arrival, and then emerged as a cold, unbreathing bundle.
‘Do you remember how beautiful he was?’ she would ask her husband late at night. He held her close in his arms and kissed her hair, and hoped one day she could find a way to move past it all.
‘But I can’t move past it,’ she confessed to her doctor. He was bald, with shockingly dark eyebrows and a compassionate bearing. ‘It’s left me so afraid.’
‘You’re perfectly healthy,’ Dr Levine promised her. ‘There’s no need to be afraid. You’re young.’
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that it was the priest who caused it? The stillbirth?’ She had told Dr Levine what she’d endured, on previous visits, to explain scarring he’d found when he first examined her and worried her husband was the perpetrator.
He raised his eyes to the ceiling before answering. Thinking. Wanting to give her an honest answer.
‘I can’t say for certain one way or the other,’ he finally said. ‘But I do know it can’t have helped.’
She wept, and he patted her shoulder. Bess hadn’t left Ireland unable to accept human touch from a man. She could take comfort from Dr Levine’s kind thumping. She could enjoy making love with her husband. Father Joseph hadn’t taken that away from her.
But she couldn’t recover what she believed with all her heart he had taken from her. She would walk outside her cosy house, a mug of coffee in her hand （a full-fledged American now, no more tea）， to wave goodbye to her husband as he walked off to catch the train to work. Once he was out of sight, the mothers began emerging, to play in the pretty yards with their children. Bess would see, so clearly, her Ronan. Whatever age he would have been. Riding in a pram. Toddling after a cat in the garden. Rolling a toy truck along the drive. Chalking the sidewalk.
He should be here. He should be here, he should be here, he should be here.
‘I want to leave my old life behind,’ she wrote to me. ‘I send letters to you and Fiona and my sister Kitty. Apart from that I’m only interested in what’s here for me, here and now.’