Dr. Poole then concluded that there was no way he could live in peace as long as he feared that Phineas might one day tell Mary Margaret or anyone else for that matter. He knew that he needed to make Phineas feel a part of what was going on, so that the boy would take ownership of the secret and have enough of a stake in it not to tell Mary Margaret.
“Phin,” Robert said while they were en route back home. “About the girl. I told you she was in trouble, but I never told you what the trouble was.”
Phineas just licked his fingers that were sticky from his dripping ice-cream cone.
Robert continued, “You need to first know where babies come from.”
“Babies?” said Phineas. “I already know.”
“You do?” Robert replied, puzzled. He assumed that Mary Margaret had taken leave of whatever senses she had left and told her seven-year-old about sexual intercourse.
“The stork. Everyone knows that.”
Robert rolled his eyes in relief. “Yes, that’s what your mother told you. A girl needs a boy to make a baby. They make it by, well, by making love.”
“How do you make it?”
“Make what?” Robert asked, perplexed.
“Love. How do you do it?”
“What I mean is that they create a child through love for one another. They make something out of love, or at least most of the time it’s out of love. Do you get what I’m saying here, Phin?”
Phineas shrugged. Despite the cool breeze blowing, Robert was beginning to perspire. He wondered whether he had added to the problem of keeping Phineas quiet. If he told his son too much about the miracle of conception, his son might want to tell Mary Margaret about what he had learned.
“Sometimes,” continued Robert, “people who don’t love each other make a baby. As I just said, most of the time love can create a child, but sometimes it’s different.”
“You mean they make love without loving?” asked Phineas.
Robert was pleased to see how his son was able to simplify what he’d said, and he wished he could do it himself.
“Yes, Phin, that’s correct. And sometimes the man, the father of the child, forces a woman to make the child. Often the mother and father are not married and sometimes don’t even know each other. And as you know, the mother has to carry the baby.”
“So when does the stork come? After love?”
“There is no stork, Phin. The baby grows in the mother’s belly, but it’s not really a baby until the woman’s belly is big. Until her stomach is swollen, it’s something that doesn’t resemble—sorry, look like—a baby. So it isn’t, is it?”
“What does it look like?”
“It doesn’t look like a baby.”
“How are the boy and girl a father and mother if they’re not married?”
“As long as a baby is made, they are the mother and father of that baby. A mother carries and gives birth to the baby. It comes out of the girl when it’s time. The father is someone who puts what will one day become the baby inside her.”
“What?”
“You’re too young for that just now.”
Phineas found it riveting that he, along with every other human being in history, had come from two other people instead of a stork. To a child who’d always thought otherwise, this fact was like the discovery of the ages.
“But they don’t need to know each other,” Robert continued. “And sometimes it’s done in a brutal and terrible way, with the man hurting the woman so that she doesn’t even want to have the baby.”
“Why wouldn’t she want it?”
Robert knew he had to be delicate in his answer. He had salvaged Phineas’s trust in him and didn’t want to lose it again. “She just doesn’t,” he replied. “As you get older, you’ll understand why. But such a girl is in trouble because she needs to get what will be a baby out of her before it becomes a baby. Therefore she needs to come to someone like me, a doctor, who can take care of it for her.”
“So you take the baby that’s not a baby yet out of the girl?”
“Yes, Phinny.”
“But what happens to the baby after you take him out?”
“Remember, Phin, it’s not a baby yet.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s called a fetus.”
Robert wanted Phineas to distinguish between a baby and a fetus, because, if he were going to include his son in helping with the procedures, he wanted the boy to understand that they were preventing an unwanted pregnancy instead of killing a baby. It was Robert’s ultimate hope that Phineas wouldn’t read too much into what they were doing and one day come to the conclusion that they were in fact preventing a baby from living.
“That’s sad, daddy, the poor baby who’s not a baby yet,” said Phineas mournfully, sinking his head low.
“I know, but understand this, Phinny. If I didn’t help these girls in trouble, there would be two unhappy people, the mother and the baby. This way the baby will never become neglected, unwanted, or unloved, and the mother will be happy again. It’s far better than a baby who’s born to a mother who doesn’t love it.”
To Robert’s surprise his son produced a half smile. The explanation helped Phineas see the point, but Robert was still worried about his wife’s finding out that he was performing illegal abortions in his backyard shed, a place in which he’d promised to do only two things—smoke his cigarettes and do household repairs.
Mary Margaret was a strict Catholic and had been raising Phineas the same way. If she ever found out what her husband was up to, she’d divorce him in an instant, take him for everything he had, be sure he was sent to prison, and never let him see their son again. The couple hardly spoke anymore, so this would be the final nail in the coffin that was their unhappy marriage.
“Phin,” said Dr. Poole, “you’re going to help me in the shed from now on, because I think it’s good for you to understand why I’m doing what I am and how important my work is. We’re doing this for the good of these girls.”
“Is God going to be angry?” Phineas asked in a concerned voice.
Robert sighed and brought his face closer to his son’s. “If you believe that you’re doing the right thing,” he answered rather speciously, “then it can never be a sin. And don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Remember that, son.”
“Okay,” Phineas said innocently, as he began touching the fingers of the right hand with those of his left to see whether he’d licked off all the sticky remnants of his quickly devoured ice cream.
Phineas wasn’t far from the next-to-last stop on his bus ride back from Manchester. The bus had left Brentwood ten minutes earlier but had stopped because of a dead deer in the middle of the road that needed to be moved. It wouldn’t have taken more than a minute if the driver, claiming he had a bad back, hadn’t been a prima donna and asked for four strong male passengers to help him.
When the bus was about three miles from Exeter, Father Poole drifted from the memory of learning about his father’s activities in the shed to memories of his actual involvement. As he dreamed about this sordid, unhappy chapter in his life, the old couple sitting across from him looked at the cleric with concern. The priest began to writhe slightly and moan what sounded like “No, no.”
In Phineas’s mind he was now eight years old. It was the fall of 1900 on a clear, cool night in October when the ground was littered with maple leaves. Young Phineas walked out of his family’s cape-style house at 35 Faulkner Street and shuffled through the two-inch deep accumulation of leaves that lay neglected all over the yard. In his hands he carried a pail of freshly boiled water straight from the stove. Because Mary Margaret by this time was enjoying her usual post-supper nap, Robert assumed that it would be a good time to take the day’s last customer.
Dr. Poole’s illegal medical practice for girls in tro
uble was now in its second season of operation, and working with his son, Robert was performing an average of six abortions a week as word of his free services spread. Robert thought it a strange coincidence, perhaps even a bit providential had he been a religious man, that ever since his son began assisting him business had picked up dramatically. It used to be only one to two abortions a month; now Dr. Poole was doing that many in a day.
Phineas entered the shed and let its door slam. The bucket was heavy, and he was worried that, if he let go of it with one hand to catch the door, he’d lose control of the pail, and the water would splash up and scald his hand.
“Shhh!” The hush came from Robert as Phineas reopened the door and peeked out to see whether anyone had heard it slam shut.
“Sorry, daddy,” said Phineas, “but these buckets get heavy.”
“You should be used to it by now,” snapped Robert, who always felt a little on edge upon starting an abortion.
Although he knew he was doing what he believed was right, Robert realized how dangerous it would be if anyone were to ever find out. It didn’t matter that the closest neighbors were a hundred or so yards away. People always alert to wrongdoing, so Robert was always on his guard when it came to doing what Phineas called “unbirthing.”
“Be a good lad and fetch me some towels from over there,” said Robert.
It was another of Phineas’s responsibilities to have on hand enough clean towels for the before and after stages. The former involved wiping the soaked brow of the girl, who was always nervous, trembling, and sweaty. The latter entailed sopping up blood and other bodily fluids that would spill out of the patient. One towel was always reserved for the express purpose of wrapping up the remains of the tiny fetus. Both it and the contents were then taken away by the girl who had received Dr. Poole’s services.
Robert felt that it wasn’t wrong of him to expect these girls to take responsibility for the remains since some of the young women, like those teens who accidentally got pregnant by their beaus, did believe it was a baby they were having aborted and wanted to give it a proper burial in their yards with two twigs tied together to resemble a cross. They would simply tell people that some small pet lay in repose in that spot.
Then there were the girls, the least numerous subgroup, who had been raped and didn’t care what was done with the fetus. To them Dr. Poole simply said, “Do what you will with it, but be sure no one finds it. To be absolutely certain, if you have no emotional attachment, burn it.” These rape victims did just that.
Phineas always remained calm, even when his father grew paranoid before the procedure. If Phineas had a pivotal role in the shed, it was in bringing calm to a tense situation. When he noticed his father pacing and peering out the door, Phineas would simply shake his head, fold his arms, smile at the girl, and say, “My dad! He’s always like this just before.”
It wasn’t that Phineas had grown numb to the whole tragedy of a young girl’s choosing not to carry her child to full term. It was rather that he didn’t fully understand the implications of what was going on. To him it was just as Robert had explained it to him. A fetus wasn’t a baby in the sense that it crawled, slept in a cradle, and cried when it was hungry. Instead, it was an organism the size of a gumball that would become a baby if the pregnancy were not ended.
Almost a year and a half of Phineas’s assisting in these abortions had passed by October of 1900. By this time Robert and Phineas didn’t need any more excuses for spending as much time in the shed as they did during the first few weeks. Mary Margaret had grown so accustomed to the two spending random hours out back in the shed that she relished the additional leisure by herself.
When the father and son first began working together, Mary Margaret had asked, “Are you out there teaching our seven-year-old how to smoke?” She knew he wasn’t because upon first conceiving of this possibility Mary Margaret had intercepted young Phineas and smelled his breath, telling him that she was checking to make sure he had brushed his teeth before bed.
Early in their collusion Robert had devised an excuse. “We’re making a project, just us boys,” he had said, although he hadn’t thought any further than this, not expecting his wife to question what the project was.
“What project?” she said, surprised at Robert’s sudden interest in their son.
“Uhm,” Robert temporized. Just then his eyes spotted the summer edition of The New Englander, whose cover featured a schooner with a tall mast and billowing sails. “We’re making a ship,” he answered quickly.
“A ship?” she replied, not believing him.
“Yes,” he said, sounding confident. “A ship in a bottle.”
“Oh, I love those!” Mary Margaret exclaimed. “Perhaps Phinny will be wantin’ to give it to his mommy as a surprise.”
Robert wanted to tell her that she’d have to wait an eternity to see it, but instead he added, “It’s for a school “Show and Tell” project. Phinny got the idea from your magazine right there.”
So that’s the way things went for the first several months. Phineas and Robert were doing nothing more than male-bonding activities in the shed, as far as Mary Margaret and her father were concerned.
Seamus Brennan complained once, “I never see the boy anymore. Me grandson’s not got so much more growin’ up to do before he’s a man himself, you know. I don’t want to be missin’ his entire childhood.”
“Yes, pa,” rejoined his daughter, “but at least they’re bein’ constructive, they are.”
On off days such as Sundays, when even girls in trouble needed time to go to church and pray that their little mistake would miraculously go away, Robert would take his son to the park. This was the same place where Robert had taken Phineas to get the boy to open up about what he’d seen in the shed.
Robert was in the habit of buying a new kite for his son on every outing because Phineas always lost the kites to the wind, which would take them over to the seagulls by the water. This in turn happened because Robert never seemed to be with Phineas when it came time to fly them. Instead, Robert would walk fifty or so yards away until he was so immersed in the crowd of people that he was nearly out of Phineas’s sight.
Dr. Poole did so in order secretly to rendezvous with Edith Fisher, who was now happily raising a daughter, about four years younger than Phineas whose father wasn’t Ralph Fisher but Edith’s lover Allen Reid.
Edith’s purpose for meeting Robert Poole in Wallis Sands Park was to see the son who had been taken from her, along with the boy’s twin sister, eight years earlier. She and Robert tried to stay concealed behind trees or passersby, but Phineas paid more attention to spotting his father in the distance than he did to making sure his kite didn’t plummet to the seagulls.
“How he’s grown, Robert,” Edith said.
“I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, Edith.”
“There’s nothing else to do. He doesn’t belong to me.”
“I know that your friendship with my wife made it impossible for you to stay away from Phineas. You helped Mary Margaret in those first few years.”
“I wanted to do it despite what she did.”
“Even though it meant knowing that he would never recognize you as anything more than a good friend of the family?”
“Far better for me to be able to see him grow up than to wonder all these years what he was like.”
“Is it?”
“Is it what?”
“Is it really better?”
Edith shrugged, indicating her genuine uncertainty. Thinking of more practical matters, she then asked, “What if he tells his mother that I’m always at the park or that you always leave him alone or that he’s seen the two of us together here?”
“He won’t, Edith,” replied Robert. “Phineas and I have an understanding about the secrets we keep, how divulging ce
rtain things to his mother would do more harm than good.”
“What other secrets are you two keeping from your wife, Robert?”
He didn’t answer the question.
Phineas in 1905 was preparing to make his confirmation. He attended Sunday school from ten to eleven in the morning after Mass. He hated going because his teacher, Mrs. Weig, was as authoritarian in her class as a lion tamer is in a cage. Mrs. Weig didn’t carry a whip, but rumor had it that she kept one in the bottom drawer of her desk.
One Sunday the topic was the Ten Commandments. The focus seemed to be on the fifth: “Thou shall not kill.” Phineas knew the commandments by heart, as any child of a devout Christian woman such as his mother would. He wanted to ask his teacher what Jesus or God would think of a woman who decided not to have a baby she’d been carrying.
“I don’t think I understand your question,” said Mrs. Weig, as Phineas suddenly realized that the entire class was staring at him for having asked such a question.
He repeated his point in a different way, to which Mrs. Weig replied, “Are you speaking of regret, Master Poole?”
Phineas shook his head and huffed in frustration. “No, I mean getting rid of it before it’s born!” he said, sounding angry. He felt self-conscious as it was in having to ask such a question. He hated having to repeat or clarify it. What’s more, he didn’t want to have to spell it out for her.
Mrs. Weig turned red. Phineas wasn’t sure whether she did so because she was embarrassed by the subject or because a student of hers had raised his voice in front of twenty other thirteen-year-olds.
“You’re talking about murder, Phineas!” she said, “the same exact thing we’ve been discussing. When a person does the unthinkable, however she goes about it, she is murdering her child. God and Jesus would send her straight to hell!”
Mrs. Weig sounded melodramatic, to say the least, but her message was sinking in for both Phineas and the rest of the class.
Embracing Darkness Page 49
