The Misremembered Man

by Christina McKenna

  “Thank you, Miss.”

  “No, no, you keep it, dear.”

  Then she leaned closer to him and said something that only he could hear, and which he would never, ever forget.

  “I’ll get it from you tomorrow, sweetheart, when we’re in your new home.”

  Chapter thirty-two

  Lydia had difficulty negotiating her way through the streets of Derry. She had not driven in a city before and made several wrong turnings before finally reaching what she was coming to see as journey’s end.

  The Mount Carmel Retirement Home was a somber, three-story building, clad in ivy and set on an incline at the end of a sweeping gravel driveway. A wall of lush greenery and rhododendrons fenced the property off from the outer parking lot. Lydia pulled into it.

  She parked under the wide-branched shade of a chestnut tree and cut the engine. The afternoon was uncommonly hot. Even though it was mid-September, the summer showed no sign of fading. I should be in school, she thought, and immediately felt a tug of regret for that other life she’d once led; a life that had ended with her mother’s death and had begun again—but so differently—with the letter.

  She took the vellum envelope from her purse and turned it over and over, as though the ordinary envelope, addressed with a typewriter in need of a new ribbon, might be an apport from the spirit world. The letter connected her to the louring structure in front of her. Soon she would learn the truth that lay behind its walls. She did not know, as she sat there in the heat of the car, whether she could deal with too much more reality, too many additional facts. They’d been piling up against her, a bonfire of absurdities that might explode if she added any more fuel to what she already knew.

  She opened the letter and began to read it again, a perfunctory and unnecessary exercise—she almost knew its contents by heart—but her conscience persuaded her that, in the present circumstances, it was the right thing to do. Sitting there outside her “birthplace,” she felt like a penitent before a high altar; the letter in her hands served as the incontestable evidence that she had been here before, in this place.

  Elmwood House

  River Road,

  Killoran

  Dearest Lydia,

  I hope that when you finally get to read these words they will not hurt you too much, although I know that what I have to disclose will come as a very great shock.

  I will be at rest with your dear father at last when you get this letter and I write it with a very heavy heart. Please do not grieve for me too much. When I am gone you will be free at last to live your life, so look on the bright side and spread your wings.

  Your father and I did our very best for you, always remember that.

  We agreed and promised each other that you should only learn the truth about the circumstances of your birth after our deaths.

  You see dearest Lydia we adopted you when you were just a few weeks old on the 5th Dec 1934.

  Her mother would never know how much those words stung. Lydia looked up from the page to try and block the inevitable tears. The bleak building seemed to mock her, and in her distress she wiped her eyes and turned back to the page. There would be no solace for her, so she pressed on, the sodden handkerchief at the ready.

  Please don’t cry too much at this news my dear. Your father and I could not have children and I so wanted a little girl I could call my own. You were a little angel who’d been abandoned and we rescued you.

  Indeed, thought Lydia, angry now. How many times had she heard that her parents only had “relations” to bring her into the world?

  I did not want to adopt locally so we went to Londonderry to the Little Sisters of Divine Love Orphanage. I believe that these days it has been turned into a retirement home for the clergy.

  I was Catholic up until I married your father, so I did not think it was such a falsehood to pretend to the nuns that I was still one and would bring you up in the faith. Because you see dearest Lydia I wanted you so much. You must understand that. And what does it matter which religion we adhere to. We all worship the one God.

  How many more lies had her mother told her? It seemed that she’d built her life on a succession of them.

  Oh you were such a beautiful baby, Lydia. We both fell in love with you straight away. You had such beautiful chestnut curls and lovely pink cheeks and you smiled all the time, never cried. I was so proud of you. We could not have wished for a more perfect perfect daughter.

  Lydia dried her eyes. The word “perfect” had been crossed out and rewritten. Not so perfect after all, it seemed. She thought the error significant.

  I’m sorry that I cannot tell you anything about your real mother. The nuns simply said that you’d been abandoned but they did not elaborate. She left you with nothing Lydia. We gave you your name and a place in the world. We gave you a chance, so please don’ t be too vexed with us. We did everything for the best.

  And now dear because we love you so much we thought it only fair that, on our deaths, you should be given the opportunity to find your real mother, if you want to. I’ve told you everything you need to know. If anywhere retains records of her whereabouts, you can look up the above mentioned place in Londonderry.

  But dear Lydia do not dig too deep for answers. If they are not forthcoming let things be. Sometimes it is better that the past does not give up its secrets.

  I hope you have a happy life, dearest. Keep us in your heart and always be kind. I wish that, towards the end of my life, I could have been a better friend to you.

  Always yours, my dear

  Your loving mother,

  Elizabeth

  She stuffed the letter back into the envelope and willed herself to be strong. A week earlier, she had started weeping in Mr. Brown’s office, and it seemed that since then she’d never stopped.

  She opened her compact and tried to repair her face as best she could. If only she could repair the damage to her life so easily. All the roads she’d traveled since childhood had suddenly fallen into disuse. She stood at a crossroads and there was no signpost to point the way. She no longer had a mother or a father. She was an orphan, a nobody. Now she understood what Aunt Gladys meant. She saw again the glossy mouth spit out the words that had so confused her.

  You know nothing. The truth is always difficult. Now that you’re alone, you’ll have to learn about things the hard way!

  Yes, indeed: Lydia had known nothing. And Gladys had known everything. Gritting her teeth at the memory of those words, Lydia decided that she had no wish to see her so-called aunt for a long time to come.

  She gazed up at the retirement home on the hill and felt that she should rather die than enter through its ominous doors. What truths could this building tell her that she didn’t already know?

  But it was best to get it over with.

  With this resolve, she reluctantly locked the car and walked slowly up the avenue, through the beauty of an afternoon which was so much at odds with the turmoil of her inner self. God was about his business: in the lace cap hydrangeas, the lime-scented hedges, the sun-heated grass; and somewhere the glissando of a blackbird was unfurling its sweet song, as if to calm her. Such peace, such harmony, within reach—yet a world away.

  At the portico she pressed the bell. Four times in all, and still no reply. She was about to turn away when finally the door was pulled open by a very tall monk. He wore a brown habit, secured at the waist by a length of white hemp rope. He was young, but his shaved head and joyless eyes gave the impression of a much older man. His feet were bare in thonged sandals.

  “I’m Lydia Devine. I’m here to see Father Finian.”

  The monk’s expression did not change as she spoke, a fact that she found most disconcerting. Perhaps he’s taken a vow of silence, she thought; his face had the look of someone who’d chosen years of discipline and self-denial and was, for whatever reason, regretting having made such a choice.

  “He’s expecting me,” she added, hoping it would help.

  With that he no
dded and stood back to admit her.

  The vestibule was surprisingly bright; ivory walls, a chessboard floor, the only somber reference being a heavy sideboard—highly polished and deeply carved—which served as an altar for a three-foot plaster virgin. He indicated a chair.

  Lydia seated herself as the monk disappeared down a dark corridor. All was silent except for the creaking floorboards that followed him into the depths of the house. Then the footsteps stopped and a door cried open; just as quickly it was banged shut again. Afterward she was left with nothing but the huge silence of the entrance hall.

  “Miss Devine, pleased to meet you.”

  The young priest stretched out a hand. “I’m glad you could come. This can’t be easy for you.”

  Father Finian, with his ready smile and easy manner, could not have been more different from the cheerless monk. He ushered her down several long corridors, then up a flight of stairs. She climbed slowly, taking everything in with forensic attention. This place, she kept telling herself, was once my home. This gray, gloomy prison with its concrete floors, chipped paintwork, high-grilled windows. There was nothing at all to lift the eye. When she reached the top of the stairs she felt faint.

  “Thank God I was taken away from this.”

  “Sorry? Are you all right?” The priest was behind her.

  “Yes…thank you…” She stopped; her hand gripped the banister. She stared down at her tautened knuckles. “Yes…I’m…fine.”

  The last word—thin, hollow, weightless—fell away from her and into the echoing depths of the stairwell. As she gazed down, she wondered when she’d be able to retrieve and live the full meaning of that one gentle syllable again. Fine.

  “I’m fine,” she said again, trying to muster courage.

  Father Finian sensed her sadness. He’d seen that lost look many times before.

  “We don’t use this part of the building anymore. It’s mostly closed off for storage.”

  He sped ahead of her down the corridor, resolute now, his heels like hammer blows on the stone floor. He stopped abruptly, riffled through a set of keys. He unlocked a door.

  “Here we are.” He stood waiting for her.

  She walked slowly toward him, past what once had been the Mother Superior’s office. She saw the worn nameplate on the door and, beside it, a scarred bench. For some reason she wanted to rest on it a while, as if out of respect for all the children who had sat there and suffered. Because she knew instinctively that every child who’d passed through that building had suffered, and suffered greatly.

  They entered a large office-cum-sitting room; a musty, dimly lit place that escaped the afternoon sun. He directed her to a balding sofa which had a rug thrown over it, in a futile attempt to brighten it. Stretched limply on the floor between the priest’s desk and the couch was a carpet of faded peacocks and humming birds. She wondered idly how many decades it must have lain there and how many pairs of feet must have trodden on it down through the years.

  Father Finian read her mind. Since the building that housed the notorious orphanage had changed hands in 1968, he’d had to deal with so many Lydias. People who wanted to make sense of their lives through connecting with the mystery and secrecy of mothers who had borne them, only to abandon them.

  “You’ll have to excuse this room,” he said, “but when the orphanage closed we kept this place more or less as it had been, to hold the filing cabinets of records. So it’s a kind of storeroom which contains the past, if you like. We think it best not to tamper with the past, otherwise we might not be able to help people like yourself who come here looking for answers.”

  Lydia nodded slowly. She didn’t know what to say. She was determined not to cry.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. It is hard enough to lose someone so close without having to learn a truth kept hidden for so long.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  An arrangement of blue lobelias had withered in the grate: They accounted for the acrid smell that pervaded the room. There was a claw-footed sideboard of heavy coffin-wood with a mirror which threw back no reflection and a worm-eaten desk. It seemed to Lydia that everything in the room had died. She felt she could neither breathe nor speak; the enormity before her was so daunting.

  She looked out the window, wishing to distance herself from this nightmare, but her eye was drawn to an incline some way off, and she saw a series of lichen-coated headstones, many of them slumped down in the earth from having stood to attention for so long. No, there would be no relief here. She turned again to the young priest.

  “If you’d like me to have a look at your mother’s letter,” he said, “it might make it easier for you.” He got up from the desk and came and sat at the other end of the couch.

  “Yes,” she managed to say. “Thank you.”

  She watched his lips move over her dead mother’s words and wondered why such a handsome young man should condemn himself to a life in a place as awful as this, disconnected from everything.

  “Hmm…fifth of December, nineteen thirty-four. Right, let me see.”

  The filing cabinets were ranged along the back wall. She counted eleven. Father Finian went to one near the middle and pulled open the top drawer. He extracted a folder and carried it to the desk.

  After a few minutes of study, he said: “I’m terribly sorry but I cannot give a name to your birth mother.”

  The priest had, in his wisdom, decided to spare Lydia the details. It was a decision he’d had to make before. He’d read that she’d been left on the steps of the Saint Agnes Orphanage, wrapped in newspaper and inside a bag, on November 4, 1934. She had been adopted one month later by Perseus Cuthbert Devine and his wife, Elizabeth.

  “That’s all right, Father,” said Lydia, surprising him with her equanimity. “I was not expecting to get a name, but I needed to know, just to make sure.”

  Father Finian looked down at the folder in sadness.

  “Is there anything else you can give me though?” Lydia said. She managed to keep her voice even. She wanted suddenly to be gone and knew she would never return. It was now or never.

  “A sample of her handwriting. Anything?”

  “There is an envelope here.” It was not sealed. From it he extracted what looked like a newspaper.

  “There is only this.” He handed it over, but avoided her look of bewilderment. Lydia’s hands trembled as she examined the flimsy, yellowed remnant. She read the masthead and date: The Vindicator, Thursday, November 3, 1934.

  “What…what…does it mean?”

  She’d forced the words out, in a voice that seemed not to belong to her. Father Finian’s grave expression told her all she needed to know. She held his gaze. Waiting. But he did not answer. She saw his image blur as the tears came. Between them a silence spread, a silence that excused him explanation and forced her to confront what she could barely comprehend.

  “I was…was…I was…” She held the paper out to him with trembling hands. “I was…wrapped in this, wasn’t I?”

  And as she uttered the words, something in her heart loosed itself and began falling, a part of her she’d always known was there, but which she’d never wished to look at or get to know—the abandoned child within. The child who had always shadowed the woman she tried to be. All at once her disconnectedness, the isolation she’d felt from her “parents,” made sense. She’d entered the world to be merely discarded, like garbage, in a sheet of newspaper. How could her real mother, her birth mother, have done such a thing? Lydia’s despair turned to anger and she wiped her tears.

  “You mustn’t blame her,” Father Finian said, trying to console. “She did what she felt was best for you at the time. We do not know the circumstances she found herself in.”

  “Yes…I know.”

  But Lydia knew as she uttered the words that in fact she knew nothing.

  She studied the young man’s face, willing him to comprehend her need, but his mournful look confirmed for her what she’d known from the time she’d read
the letter. No one could help her. She was hostage to the unfathomable decisions a young mother had made a long time ago. As she sat there in the musty room with its faded rug and dead flowers, she came to the conclusion that for the rest of her life, nothing or no one would ever release her from that knowledge, that haunting, perplexing, ungraspable knowledge.

  The priest shuffled through the pages. He could not meet her eye, just kept focusing on the book. There was a prolonged silence which her voice dared not break. Then, knowing it was hopeless, she rose.

  But the priest wasn’t paying her any mind. He was poring over the book with a frown of consternation. He was looking at a page of numbers.

  “I think you should sit down, Miss Devine.”

  She complied.

  “When you were brought here the nuns gave you a number,” he said. “All children were given numbers. You were number Eighty-Five-F. F for female. But there is another number beside yours.”

  “So?” Lydia’s pulse began to quicken. “What does that mean, Father?”

  “It means that your mother left two of you here. It means that the child given the number Eighty-Six-M was your brother.”

  Chapter thirty-three

  It was while he’d sat in Dr. Brewster’s waiting room, with the young mother pacing the floor, that Jamie made the decision.

  Thursday the twelfth would be the day, and seven o’clock in the evening would be the hour. He had been adopted by Mick and Alice on a Thursday and had arrived at their home and his new life at around 7 P.M. Appropriate, then, to mark the date again, even if he knew that what he was about to do would change nothing. It would, however, finally solve the puzzle of his being, if what they said about a life hereafter was true. He had spent so many years of his adulthood trying to fit together the pieces, trying to make everything all right, but now he had reached the conclusion that his awful childhood ensured that there would always be segments missing. Nothing or nobody could make up for the love he’d been denied as a child.