by Annie Murphy
A concerned admissions nurse examined me. “Have you had a baby before, dear?”
“Yes. Stillborn at five months or so.”
She nodded. “That explains the dilation.” She patted my tummy. “This little mite won’t take long.”
A nurse came to shave me, another gave me an enema. I was put in a small overheated room with cubicles separated by curtains. Next to me, a woman was about to have twins. I had cramps, but what she had to endure only her animal screams suggested.
Some people think God is a woman. They must be joking.
I told myself: Mustn’t get frightened. Mustn’t scream. Mustn’t curse Eamonn. It’s not good for my baby. To dull the pain, to block my ears to the cries of my fellow sufferer, I put myself into a kind of self-hypnosis. Having recently read Nicholas and Alexandra, I went in spirit to the Crimea. I saw Yalta’s mountains with their feet in the water and cypresses with cones like little bells. I inhaled scents of magnolia and wisteria vines. I walked the cool corridors of the Tsars’ shiny white Livadia Palace beside the Black Sea.
It worked. In this soul-time, I heard no more screams, felt no more cramps. All I remember—this was three hours later — was being wheeled to the delivery room. Not even the Crimea could anesthetize the pain of being knifed from within. I wanted the nurses to leave me. I wanted to be alone like a cow calving in a field. Thumper seemed to sympathize with me, pushing consistently. It was as if he knew when he wanted to come out, as if he already had a sense of himself.
Suddenly, at 2:30 in the morning, I was a mother and, with the pain gone, I saw my darling child. At seven pounds two ounces and twenty-two inches long, Thumper was a string bean of a boy with dark hair, black gorgeous eyes, and a big birthmark on his left knee. He was like Eamonn in every way.
They put him in my arms, and in that first instant I knew what millions of mothers before me had known: I would never give him up. See, touch, feel, hold, and keep forever. They would have to cut me to bits before I gave up this vulnerable little thing who was part of me.
Instantly, the hitherto anonymous Thumper had a name. “Hello, my Peter,” I whispered.
There this warm bundle lay for five minutes, mewing, scarcely moving. This miracle was all mine. Since I came to Ireland, new smells, tastes, sights, colors, sounds, and now the newest keenest most overwhelming sense of all: motherhood.
A nurse showed me Peter’s feet were a bit webbed. Nothing serious, she said, smiling. Due to him being cramped in the womb. She put some kind of instrument on them. “Just for a while,” she assured me.
They moved me to a room I shared with five other mothers, where, later, my son was brought to me clothed in a white fleecy gown with a little collar. He was put in a crib at the foot of my bed.
A second nurse came and said, “I’ll have to take him away for a while. As you can see he’s a yellowy brown.” I hadn’t noticed. All I could see was the beauty of him.
“A touch of jaundice, Annie. Get some rest. You’ll soon have him back.”
I couldn’t wait to be reunited with Peter for my heart was full of him. When they gave him back, the sense of miracle was still upon me. This was a wonder that would never go away.
Hey, maybe God was a woman, after all.
I hugged him so tight the nurse had to warn me, “If you go to sleep with him like that you might smother him.”
I allowed him to be put back in his crib and then slept on and off for a few hours.
Around 2:30 that afternoon Eamonn appeared. I had asked the Devlins to telephone him when I went into the hospital, but I had not expected him so soon. He scared me. Could I withstand the pressure he was bound to exert?
His shock on entering my room was even greater than mine at seeing him. I don’t think it had crossed his mind on his rush across Ireland that there would be a crib at the foot of my bed, or that there would be a baby in it.
His eyes exploded with anger. Because the other mothers might hear, he said in a quiet, tense voice, “Why is that here?”
“Didn’t you get my letter?”
“Forget the letter.”
“That,” I said, “is a baby.”
“It should be in the nursery.”
Something in my subconscious stirred uneasily at the little word it. Eamonn did not even want to know if I had had a boy or a girl.
“That baby,” I retorted sharply, “is not an it but a he. It is a boy, Eamonn.”
His head jerked back.
“He’s my son,” I said, “your son, our son.”
Reality was coming even closer to him. Danger was taking an ever more definite shape. I gestured to the crib. “Say hello to Peter.”
His problem even had a name. He blinked savagely as though a vulture not a stork had brought the baby. Maybe the word Peter, meaning “rock,” something not easily shifted or hidden away, troubled him.
He got up to draw the curtains around us and sat near me. “It—he—cannot stay here.”
“He is staying here. And, please, don’t raise your voice. He doesn’t like it.”
This big tough man who ordered people around had not the courage to look at his own son. Didn’t he want to know if he looked like me, like him? Where was the human being in him that I had found, touched, loved? Did he believe that by not looking at Peter, his dark little secret might go away?
“Look at him, Eamonn.”
He scraped his chair even closer to the bed. With a heavy emphasis: “You know… you cannot keep… this baby.”
I pursed my lips and shook my head inches away from his.
Firming his jaw, he said, “It is not yours to keep. You must give this baby up. You must.”
Mouth open to show my teeth, I shook my head again. “I am as likely to give up my son as the Virgin Mary.”
“You are no Virgin Mary.”
“And you,” I said, “are no Saint Joseph.”
With a tremulous lift of the voice, he said, “You’re not thinking right. You will give it up.”
I was saying to myself, I lost one baby, Eamonn, don’t make me lose another. I pushed the covers aside and, not trusting my legs now that he had unnerved me by his enmity, started to crawl to the end of the bed.
“What’re you doing?”
“Picking him up so you can see him.”
“Don’t do that.”
As though I were kneeling on a mountain in Kerry, I gazed down upon this child in his crib, the fruit of our love.
“Look at him, Eamonn, he’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful little baby. Hold him just for a minute.”
“No!” His horror sent a shiver through me. There was such a gulf between us. This child was everything to me and nothing to him.
“At least look at him, for God’s sake.”
It hurts me to say it but, at that moment, I reckon he could have run Peter over like a lamb on the road and not cared. Had he hated me I could have understood, but he hated our son.
“No!” he repeated. I couldn’t believe this. He was a priest, he called himself father, and he couldn’t rest his eyes on his own son?
“You look at him,” I insisted, in a kind of wail. “If you don’t, I’ll cause a scene, I really will.”
Turning sideways on the bed to face him squarely, I said: “You may not hold him but, by God, you will look at him.”
There must have been something savage in my new mother-face that made him stand up and walk to the crib. Circling it with those restless tap-dancing feet of his, he looked down while I searched his features. There must be some sentiment, some pride, some fatherly affection there.
I saw only a skull.
After at most three seconds, he said, but not from the heart, “Yes, a beautiful child.”
He could not see the child for the sin.
I went back to bed and as he sat beside me I could read what he was about to say in those eyes I knew so well. “Stop it, Eamonn.”
“I will not. It must be adopted.”
His face brightened up
insincerely. He smiled, but it looked wrong, like a green sun. “Afterward, you can come back to Inch with me. We’ll go to Greece, London, wherever you like.”
I banged my forehead with my fists. “What will that do for me? I won’t have my baby anymore.”
He touched his heart, next to his pectoral cross, as if to say, You’ll still have me. I was always worried he wore a cross so close to his heart.
“After Greece, Eamonn?”
“You could stay in a convent for a year or so to recover.”
“Go into a crazy house to recover my sanity? Besides, nuns worship a different God from me.”
He wasn’t listening. “After you have recovered your peace of mind, you might like to work in an orphanage.”
“In a what? Give up my baby to strangers so I can look after other people’s children?”
“You would know how they feel.”
I felt at that moment that I was dealing with a lunatic. Or, rather, with a man who had worked that trick before. “No, no, no, Eamonn,” I said. “I’d never even talk with you again. Whenever I saw you I’d be thinking, ‘This is the man who took my baby from me.’ And I would hate you for that, and I really don’t want to hate you.”
He sighed deeply to show my words had no effect on him. It was like talking to someone for ages before you realize you are alone in the room. But I tried. I had to. “If Peter’s adopted, Eamonn, I don’t know what’ll happen, because one day, I promise you, one day I’ll turn on you.”
“You are threatening me?”—as if this was only a bishop’s prerogative.
“I’m just talking sense. We can’t have physical relations ever again.”
He shrugged as if to say, Why not?
“Because,” I went on, “we already have a child and I couldn’t have another with you. What the hell, are we going to keep on having children which you keep forcing me to give up? Are we going to fill an orphanage?”
He was rubbing the sides of his face madly and scrubbing his head and scraping his chair on the floor. I pitied him, but I could not spare him. I said, “This is horrible what you want me to do.”
“Not horrible—just the opposite.”
“Can’t you,” I cut in, “call me by my name just once?”
“The whole thing is God’s way of cleansing you… Annie.”
Poor Eamonn. What had religion done to him?
I asked, “Whose God are you talking about?”
That got through his pious defenses. He really didn’t believe there was any God but his, the One he had created out of nothing and had a patent on. He spat out: “We both know you are not morally fit to keep that child.”
His mouth actually twisted as he said, “That child.”
“Who are you to tell me that? That came out where you went in.”
“How,” he said, waving my words aside, “can you ruin the life”—he indicated the crib as if it were a mile away—“of that beautiful child?”
“I reckon he’d take his chances with me.”
“But you are a nervous wreck, Annie. Think how you hide in wardrobes and run out of the house at nights and are unable to communicate.”
“I communicated with you. Time after time after time.”
“Then”—with a dismissive gesture of his ringed hand—“think of your poor family, Annie.”
“Did you?”
“Your father —”
My last question sank in and it shamed him for violating my father’s trust. He went back to rubbing his face, which was getting ever redder. Eventually, he raised both hands a few inches apart, fingers stretched, in front of my face. “You knew from the start that you and I can never be together as man and wife. I’m a priest and I’m also married to my diocese.”
He held up his finger with the ring on as if to say this was the only ring he was entitled to wear.
“You mean, after what we both did you can still be a good bishop but I’m bound to be a rotten mother?”
“I mean simply and honestly, Annie, that a single mother can never give that beautiful baby all it needs.”
He had a point, but was it not better for Peter to be half an orphan than a full one?
I stopped listening. I was at the sharp end of the Church Eamonn served. I was angry that he felt his vow of celibacy bound him more than the demands of his own son. I knew he had to deal with the guilty feeling that the only Apostle he was descended from was Judas Iscariot. I also knew that sin was his profession, so to speak, and he had to make his peace with his God. But did the price of peace have to be a bloody war over our son?
I was reminded of the first night he came into my room and tried to make love to me. He was ravenous then and he was, in a hateful way, ravenous now. Violent then in wanting to possess me, he wanted now, with the same violence, to dispossess me.
But this time I was not willing to be the food to sate the massive hunger of his self-will. After about forty minutes of his pleading and silently praying, I had had more than enough. I was exhausted first from having the baby and now warding off this pressure. I felt I was about to blow like a geyser. And guess who saved me?
Suddenly Peter began to cry. Not just cry but scream. He balled his baby fists like spring buds, screwed his face up, and shook. He was his father’s son. He must have sensed that there was enmity in that room and that his whole future was under threat. He had somehow—I really believe this—tuned in to my anguish, my fears, and feeling of abandonment.
Eamonn went white as my pillow. It got through to him, I think, for the very first time that there was a third person in the room. We were not just talking about what to do with the furniture. There was a little human being here with a voice of his own—and what a voice. That baby cry shook Eamonn more than if the devil himself had come screaming at him like a banshee.
As for me, I felt strangely secure. Of course, I would guard my son for as long as he needed me, but this baby boy would also in some obscure way defend me. He would fill me with the courage to face the might of Eamonn and the powerful ages-old institution that stood right behind him. Make no mistake about it, I had seen Eamonn operate, I was really scared of what he could do to me. Wasn’t he the original warlock, the sorcerer who could attack from any position at any time?
He jumped to his feet, realizing, intuitively, that a mother will always listen to her child before the man who fathered him. When a baby cries, it’s like the Angelus: the whole world stops. That child, a rock indeed, was his rival, and he knew it and feared it.
Maybe he even grasped dimly that, for all the wealth and force at his command, this little fellow who couldn’t even feed himself would not be a baby forever. Eamonn might trust me, but could he rely on Peter when he grew up not to open his mouth and destroy his life as I never would?
“Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
Knowing Eamonn, I had not the slightest doubt that in this at least he was telling the truth.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
WHEN EAMONN LEFT, I squeezed my breasts, fearing anguish would sour my milk.
No sooner had I quieted Peter in my arms than in barged Father Coughlin, goose-necked chaplain, gargoyle extraordinary, founder member of the Church Belligerent. He started in at once. “You are morally unfit to keep that child.”
If he showed me any kindness during this theological stampede, I must have blinked. I was not sure if he knew who the father was, but he was shrewd in a peasant sort of way. Besides, even some of the medical staff suspected Eamonn was the culprit.
“I am not doing it for that man,” Father Coughlin said. “I’m concerned with you. And you’re no good for this child.”
I told him that his attack on the Bishop was part of his strategy for separating me from my son. If two clerics who did not see eye-to-eye agreed that I was unfit to mother my baby, God agreed with them, they must think.
Whether he liked Eamonn or not, they worshiped the same forbidding God. If my mother was Wishie, Father Coughlin was
Don’tsie. Everything was Don’t do this, Don’t do that. On and on he went, scouring me with his words, and I gave as good as I got by telling him he was a bag of sour wind, a bark without a dog. Finally, I had had my bellyful of clerics for one day. I clambered out of bed.
“What’re you doing, woman?”
I gently laid Peter in his crib before turning on this tower of a man with “Shove off.”
“I am not —”
“Get out of here this minute or”—I pointed—“I’ll punch you where it hurts.”
I don’t suppose he had been threatened with physical violence since he wore a clerical collar. Certainly not by a woman and one recently delivered. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said, backing away.
“Just try me, you hypocrite. You may not be strong”—he looked as if a light wind would knock him over—“so if you don’t leave I’ll punch the hell out of you.”
We both called out, “Nurse!” at the same time.
One came running. Seeing my ready-to-go fist, she must have wondered if I wanted her as a referee. “Will you please,” I said, “for his own safety, get this out of here?”
Father Coughlin halted at the door. “I swear to God I’ll be back and I’ll take that boy with me.”
I raised a clenched fist at him again and he went, leaving nothing but a faint candle smell behind. But Father Coughlin did get his revenge in a most terrible way.
In the hospital, a young woman with Down’s syndrome, Maura, had recently given birth. The staff feared she might accidentally kill her baby; it was, therefore, taken from her. Maura had then snatched someone else’s baby and, if a porter hadn’t stopped her, she would have walked out of the Rotunda with it.
On the sixth day, I returned from the shower, with my hair in curlers and wearing only an old bathrobe. My baby was gone. Thinking Maura had snatched Peter, I was frantic.
A nurse said, “Father Coughlin’s got him.” She pointed me down the corridor.
Hearing Peter crying, still clutching my damp bath towel, I ran with dread in my heart. The storeroom was a place full of mops, brooms, and pails, and it smelled of urine, medicines, and disinfectants. There was Father Coughlin holding my baby. With two women flanking him, he was doing his best to stop Peter’s bawling and not succeeding. Babies seem to scare the shit out of priests.
