The Lost Mother

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “Mommy!” they cried.

  “Go away,” she groaned from her dark bed. “Just go away. Please, please just go away.”

  14

  Already wearing his hat, jacket, and boots, Thomas watched from the window. It was sunny, but frigid. The snow had melted days before, ridging the frozen ground like a scrub board. Christmas was only weeks away. He and Margaret were excited even though they knew there wouldn’t be any presents. Probably not even a tree, he warned again, preparing not just his sister, but himself. At least they were with their mother. Still though, when he saw Mr. Ronan drag a scrawny tree out behind his house it was hard not to remember last Christmas, when they had all been together.

  Baby James had been dead almost a year then and everyone had been happier. Or that’s the way it had seemed. They had eaten dinner at old Bibeau’s. As usual Gladys had done most of the cooking. His mother must have helped, even though he couldn’t seem to picture her in any particular place or performing any specific chores. What he did remember was Gladys whipping cooked acorn squash with a wooden paddle while Margaret poured in melted butter and cream. His father and old Bibeau sat by the fire, talking. If his mother had been unusually quiet, he wouldn’t have thought much of it. She couldn’t stand the old man but that was the one day Henry insisted they spend with him. After all, old Bibeau had taken him in when no one else would. Christmas dinner with his family was a very small thank you, considering.

  Now that Thomas thought back, he wondered if she’d known that very day that she was leaving. Had she already bought her bus ticket? Or had it really been just that terrible next morning telling her he hated her when what he’d really wanted to ask was “Why don’t you love me anymore?” Why had she been so angry? It hadn’t been anything, really. He and Margaret had been arguing. Or maybe he’d just been teasing her, but Margaret ran into the kitchen, whining. He remembered the way his mother stood there, through Margaret’s complaints, hunched over the washtub, continuing to knead his father’s work shirt up and down, up and down the scrub board so hard he heard her knuckles on the glass ridges. Margaret demanded she do something.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Do you hear me?” she had screamed, lunging at him, suds dripping from her hands as she hit him, slapping, punching, shaking him.

  “I didn’t do anything. What did I do?” he had cried, while Margaret begged her to stop.

  “You’re mean, mean, mean, just like your father. Just like him!” she had sobbed, kicking him as he cowered in the corner. “And I’m sick of it! Sick, sick, sick, sick to death of being alone and no one caring.”

  “I hate you! You’re a terrible mother. And I hate you!” he had screamed and she finally stopped. Had she packed her bag then and brought them to Aunt Lena’s?

  “See them yet?” Margaret called from the table. She had been cutting snowflakes out of newspaper. With no tree to hang them on, it seemed an empty task, but she said she didn’t care. Maybe she’d just give them as Christmas presents. He didn’t want one, thank you, he told her. Well, that was good, she answered, snipping into the tiny folds, because she wasn’t making one for him, anyway.

  “Here they come!” he called, and she ran in to see. The children from Kressey Court were coming home from school. He and Margaret watched them run past the cottage into their houses.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Margaret whined. They couldn’t go outside until she came home from the store. Yesterday her errands had kept her away until it was too dark to go outside. As it was there was probably only an hour of daylight left.

  Ann Ronan waved from the street and Margaret banged on the window, gesturing for her to come in. Ann shook her head; she couldn’t. Her mother wouldn’t let her. But the wide curve of the courtyard was neutral enough territory for any morally displaced children. Clementine had spotted Margaret in the window. She ran up the walk and banged on the door. “I’ll play with you,” she shouted through the glass to Margaret, who tried to say she couldn’t. But then not wanting to hurt Clementine’s feelings she opened the door. Clementine shoved her way inside.

  “You can’t come in here!” Thomas said.

  “I already am!” she said. She moved quickly around the room, putting her hand into an empty blue vase, opening and closing a tortoiseshell box, smelling the marble ashtray. Everything she picked up, Thomas ordered her to put down. Just looking, she said. She held a pink porcelain seashell to her ear. He told her not to do that.

  “Shut up! I’m tryna hear the waves.”

  “You can’t. It’s not real.”

  “It’s a seashell,” she scoffed, setting it down hard. “Hey, what’re those?” She held up the newsprint snowflakes to peer through. Grateful to have Clementine away from her mother’s precious things, Margaret folded paper into a smaller and smaller square. She showed Clementine how to cut a design into the paper. Clementine quickly tired of her own fumbling attempts. Instead she tried hanging the finished snowflakes in the window. She licked the back wet and pressed them against the glass. They kept falling to the floor. Thomas said she’d better go. His mother would be home soon. Clementine said he was just jealous because she was playing with Margaret and not with him. She decided that the snowflakes would stick with paste. They’d make some, she said, pulling the red flour tin from the shelf.

  “Margaret!” Thomas warned, but his sister was helpless.

  Clementine needed a pan, a spoon, she said, ordering Margaret around the little kitchen, now some water. She lifted the stove lid to draw the flame higher when Margaret could bear her polite cowardice no longer. They weren’t supposed to cook, she said.

  “I’m not cooking.” Clementine clumsily spooned more flour into the pan. “I’m just making paste.” She poured in more water from the metal cup Margaret had given her. “This way they’ll stick.” She bent close to stir the bubbling mixture. “A little more flour,” she said. Only this time she tilted the tin over the pan. The rush of flour spilled into the pan, down on the stove top, onto Clementine’s shoes, and all over the floor. A cloud of white dust floated in the air.

  “Look what you did!” Thomas shouted. “Look at the mess! You’re gonna be in trouble for this!”

  Clementine ran to the door, slamming it behind her. Margaret was trying to sweep the mess on the floor into the dustpan. With the wet dishrag Thomas wiped away his and Clementine’s trail of white footprints across the parlor rug. The bell rang. Sure it was Clementine again, he opened it in a rage.

  “Well,” said the tall priest. He had a bag in his arms. “So I did find the right house. And hello, Margaret,” he said as she came out from the kitchen. Told their mother wasn’t home, he said he’d only be a minute. He opened the bag to show them what he’d brought. For Thomas a red wool cap with furry fold-up ear flaps. A pair of red knitted mittens. And look at this, a perfectly good flannel shirt. Just this one little stain on the pocket, he said, trying to scrape it away with his fingernail. And for Margaret—from the second bag he pulled a pair of blue wool leggings—“girls’!” he announced, holding them up, the bib at his own chest. And girls’ boots, he said, setting them down on the floor. A nice warm hat, white with mittens to match!

  “Thank you,” Margaret said, grinning.

  “What’s that smell?” The priest lifted his head and sniffed at the smoke pouring out from the kitchen. Not only had the glue concoction burned down to the bottom of the charred pan, but the flour on the stove top was burning. Margaret, who still held the broom, stood stunned for a moment, watching as the priest plunged the charred pan under the faucet. Using Thomas’s rag, the priest was trying to wipe the smoking flour off the stove.

  “What happened? What’re you doing? Who are you?” Irene demanded from the doorway.

  It was all Clementine’s fault, they tried to explain as the priest introduced himself. Father Harrington. He’d just stopped by with warm clothes for the children when the fire broke out.

  “The fire?” she gasped, her eyes already swollen raw. It hadn’t been very l
ong ago that she’d been crying, so now these tears poured out. It was all too much. And she couldn’t do it any more. She just couldn’t.

  “We’d better get these windows open,” the priest grunted as he forced up the balky sashes.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Margaret wept to see her mother so bereft.

  She couldn’t look at them, couldn’t even lift her head. “I can’t,” she sobbed from the chair. “I can’t … I can’t … I can’t … I can’t …”

  “You can’t what?” Every time the priest asked she groaned. He slid down on one knee to hear better. “Tell me, what is it you can’t do? The smoke? Get the smell out? I’ll help you. Is that it? Tell me. Tell me now.” He touched her hand and she looked up, her once lovely face ravaged by such sorrow that her children stared down at the floor.

  “This!” she said, turning her sore, wet gaze on him with as much anger as regret. “Any of it.”

  St. Elizabeth’s. The first day there Thomas was shoved aside so hard he staggered into a door.

  “Don’t walk in front of me,” growled his assailant, a wide-chested older boy in the same brown trousers and tan shirt they all wore.

  Thomas watched him swagger down the corridor. Margaret was in the girls’ half of the building. They would see each other at mealtime but not to talk. They would eat their meals in the same dining room, boys on one side, girls on the other, Sister Mary Sebastian had explained when the priest brought them. They were lucky children. As it was, St. Elizabeth’s was bursting at the seams, but Father Harrington had persuaded the nun to take them in. Their mother was distraught. No job, no husband, the poor woman could barely take care of herself. Providence, Father Harrington said; something divine had brought him to that little cottage. In the nick of time. A fire. A mother on the verge of a complete breakdown. And now the benevolence of Louis Dexter.

  Mr. Dexter had come to the house late in the night after Father Harrington left, promising to be back first thing in the morning. He said the priest had called him. They’d heard his voice veer between anger and exasperation. How dare she have a priest call in her behalf. What did she expect of him? What could he do; think about it, Irene, a man in his position. He had his own situation to consider. She should have been honest from the beginning—about her circumstances. And about the children. Of course it made a difference. How could it not? She was a married woman with children. Children the same age as his. He had his own family to consider, their well-being, their happiness. His wife wasn’t a well woman. Such a scandal would destroy her.

  Cigar smoke seeped into the cold attic room. It smelled of shame and regret. It always would.

  Her flat voice rose with a relentless question, the words ineluctable in their unceasing demand.

  “Yes! Yes!” Of course he cared for her.

  Again, the same question, again and again, over and over, a dull chant for the dead.

  All right! Yes! He did! He loved her! But there was nothing he could do about it, didn’t she understand?

  Mr. Dexter’s donation to St. Elizabeth’s, while small, was most remarkable considering that Mr. Dexter was Episcopalian. The children’s mother had worked for him at one time, but the mill had been too rugged a place for a lady of her temperament. And so he had been helping her until she found a better situation for herself.

  That first night in the orphanage Thomas lay awake for a long time. He couldn’t fall asleep surrounded by so many other whispering, squirming boys. As the newest arrival he got one of the middle beds. The rows along the walls were the most desirable, Monty whispered from the next bed. Monty had just been warned by the nun not to wet his bed again. “Takes a while though. The best one’s the corner one,” Monty continued as soon as the nun was gone. “That’s Robert Groomes’s. He’s been here the longest, that’s why.”

  Thomas looked up. “How long?” he whispered, his head sinking into the pillow. It had been Groomes who had pushed him into the door.

  “Since he was little. Ten years, I think.”

  “Ten years!”

  “Yeah. Except for St. Leo’s. He was there for a while too.”

  Thomas crossed his arms over his face. Ten years. It was like being in jail. Was his father feeling this same numbness? Or would he get used to it? Ten years. He’d be old by then. He’d be twenty-two; Margaret, eighteen. It was all her fault. Once again she’d messed everything up for them. So what if she had hurt Clementine’s feelings. She never should have let her into the house. No one else on Kressey Court ever did. Margaret always let things get so terribly out of control that she’d just freeze and turn helpless. Poor Margaret. Father Harrington had to drag her away from her mother to get her into the car. Someone was crying. He lifted his arms to look.

  “Shut up, Monty,” someone said.

  “It ain’t me,” Monty sniffled back.

  “It is too, you crybaby.”

  “No, it’s him. The new kid.”

  “Hey!” Thomas said. He sat up, but Monty’s back was to him.

  “It’s always him,” the voice said with a yawn.

  Except for the fact that he ate and slept in the same building, it was almost like being in a real school again. The girls and boys weren’t separated in class, but Margaret was four grades behind him. At recess they eyed each other across the play yard. Margaret was swinging one end of a jump rope. Her brown dress was like the other girls’. Too big, it hung unevenly below the hem of her coat in clumps above her ankles. Without her mother’s care her thick hair was wild again.

  “Hi, Margaret.” He stood next to her.

  “Hi.” She kept swinging. The girl jumping was up to seventy-eight.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Maybe Mommy’ll come visit.” He thought she nodded. She seemed to be in a daze. “Or maybe even Daddy.” He whispered, telling her again how that had been one of the letters Irene had gone out to mail the day the paste burned. He hadn’t actually seen it, but it made sense that she would have written, care of the sheriff, to Henry asking him to come for them as soon as he could. He said he wasn’t sure who the other one had been to. “Couldn’t be Aunt Lena though. Uncle Max said not to.”

  “Ninety-one, ninety-two,” the eagerly waiting jumpers chanted. The next girl in made crazy faces, trying to make the jumper laugh and falter.

  “Say something.” He nudged Margaret’s arm.

  “What?” she said through her fixed stare.

  “I don’t know.” Something, anything to make him feel better the way he was trying to cheer her up. Why was he always the one having to hold things together? He nudged her, harder this time. The rope bobbled and caught the jumper’s ankle. “Hey!” she said.

  “I saw that!” Sister Mary Joseph called. A short, bulky woman with girth and height almost the same in inches, she lifted long, heavy skirts and waddled toward him in a rattle of beads and jangling keys. Her cheeks bulged out from her stiff wimple. “That was a push. A deliberate push, young man!” Her hand clamped onto his shoulder.

  “I bumped her. By accident!” He raised his eyebrows in a plea for Margaret’s confirmation of this, but she was too afraid of the red-faced nun to help him.

  “You were bothering her. I saw you.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “That only makes it worse, young man!” she panted, steering him back inside the building.

  A double detention meant no playtime for the next two days. Instead, he would work in the kitchen peeling carrots and potatoes. He sat on a low stool turning the paring knife around the potato. He’d nicked his thumb. The cook was a fierce-eyed man with a cigarette always burning in the corner of his mouth. Two nuns also worked in the kitchen. The older one did all the baking, assisted by a much younger nun in glasses so thick her eyes looked wavy. The cook had just dragged another sack of potatoes over to Thomas. He picked up a peeled potato. “What the hell’s this?” Ashes spilled with every word.

  “I don’t know. Blood?”

  “Jesus Christ!” He threw it into the pail and grabb
ed Thomas’s arm.

  “Mr. Kent!” warned the older nun. She was dropping spoonfuls of raisin cookie dough onto long trays that the younger nun slid into the oven.

  “He’s bleeding all over the potatoes!” he said, flipping Thomas’s arm away.

  “Then he shouldn’t be peeling them,” the older nun said. “Just give him another job, Mr. Kent.”

  “I don’t have another job, unless you want blood in the meat loaf too. I told you before this ain’t no place for kids. I’m not a damn jailhouse guard, I’m a cook!” With that he hurled a pot cover, which clanged into the sink.

  The younger nun hurried over to ask Thomas his name. “All right, Thomas, you come help me. But first let’s take care of that cut.” All the while Mr. Kent slammed down ladles and cans, banging his way about the kitchen, she washed Thomas’s hand under warm water, then patted it dry. She asked how long he’d been here and where in the city he’d come from. Kressey Court, he said, explaining how he was really from Belton, Vermont. To get the gauze right on the cut she had to hold his hand so close he felt her breath on his palm. When she spoke she lisped through large, gapped teeth. Stray ends of red hair stuck out from her wimple. Her eyebrows and lashes were orangey red and magnified under her thick lenses. He couldn’t stop looking at her. What seemed at first glance a rash was really freckles. More than he’d ever seen on a face. She cut a strip of cloth and wrapped it around gently. He knew better than mention Mr. Dexter, but he told her about his mother getting sick, for that was what the priest had said. He told her about the burned paste, the terminated bus ride with Margaret, Mr. Wentworth’s sleepy classes in the Farleys’ hot front parlor, Margaret’s kitten scratching old Bibeau, scaring him half to death, lying in the tent at night while the spring peepers sang and raccoons prowled close by under stars so near they almost seemed to fizz.