by Carol Coffey
When the main course was over, Frank proposed a toast to his sister. He welcomed her to his fold as she sat stony-faced at the other end of the table. Few present were aware of the tension between the two and mistook the tremor in his voice as a poignant reminder of the man’s great love for his family.
As Orla and Kiera set the table for dessert, Brendan noticed Eileen tense up. He knew she was waiting to choose her moment.
“Dad, there’s a party on tomorrow night at Alice’s house, for her retirement,” she said at last. “I’d like to go. Brendan will take me.”
She looked up for a moment and glanced nervously at Brendan. The whole table quietened as Frank narrowed his eyes at his devious daughter who did not raise her eyes from her lap where she twisted her Irish linen napkin into knots in her clammy hands. Nobody moved and it seemed to Brendan that they were all holding their breaths. He wanted to rush over to Eileen and save her from the fifteen pairs of eyes that were now fixed on her.
Without thinking, he heard himself speaking. “I’m going anyway, Uncle Frank, so that’s fine with me.”
Brendan jumped when Frank banged his fist down hard on the table.
“Don’t you make decisions for my daughter, boy!” he roared, sending the baby into screaming sobs.
Kiera stood and took her screaming daughter from the table while Coleen put her head in her hands. A strange silence settled in the room as everyone sat motionless. All eyes were trained on Frank who screwed up his face in anger.
“Let her go.”
The voice was discharged like a speeding bullet from the other end of the table, ricocheting off the crystal glasses and landing on Frank’s head like a warning shot. Nobody moved. Brendan swallowed. He did not have to look down the table to know that it was his mother who had spoken.
“What?” Frank yelled.
He stood and leant onto the table, his fat red face swollen in anger.
“What did you say?” he demanded.
“I said, let her go.” Patricia rose up slowly from her seat.
“How dare you!” Frank yelled.
He left his seat and stumbled around the table until he came face to face with his sister.
Orla and Doug stood to take their children from the room but Frank yelled: “Nobody moves!”
Coleen went and placed her hands on his chest.
“Please, Frank. You’re frightening the children!” she pleaded.
“I’ve had just about enough of your snide little comments since you got here, Patricia, and I’m telling you I won’t put up with it! You should be thanking me, not giving orders!” he shouted, ignoring his wife’s pleas and inching closer to his sister’s face.
“Thanking you?” Patricia shrieked. “Just what the fuck would I be thanking you for?”
Brendan had never heard his mother raise her voice like that before. Neither had he ever heard her curse. He flushed and looked at Eileen who sat pale-faced on the other side of the table, her bottom lip pinched painfully between her teeth.
“Why, you little . . . whore!” Frank screamed.
Brendan jumped up from his seat.
“Uncle Frank! Don’t!” he shouted.
Frank turned to him. “What? Have I offended you, boy? Well, you don’t know what this woman did. You have no idea what Coleen and I had to put up with. What my mother had to cope with before that.”
“Put up with?” Patricia snarled. “You took everything from me. You took my freedom, kept me down – you wouldn’t let me have my own life – you took . . .”
Patricia’s turned her gaze to the other end of the table.
“You even took my daughter from me.”
A collective gasp sounded down the long table followed by fearful, furtive glances.
“You couldn’t take care of her.Eileen would have starved if we’d left her in your care!” Frank bellowed.
“She was my daughter!” Patricia screamed. “I was eighteen years old! I made a mistake but you had no right to do that! She was mine!” She began to cry and lowered herself heavily onto her chair.
All heads turned to Eileen who sat motionless at the end of the table, her eyes fixed on Brendan who stared at her in disbelief, the knowledge that Eileen was his sister too hard to absorb.
Orla stood again and took her two sons out of the room. Doug followed quickly behind with the twins’ husbands.Emer and Fiona nervously inched their way out of the room, glancing back at Eileen as they left.
Only Brendan and Eileen remained, their eyes locked together as they tried to come to terms with what Patricia was saying.
Frank fell into an empty chair as Coleen pretended to dust invisible crumbs from the table.
“You promised you’d never tell her, for her sake.You promised,” he said, his voice quiet now.
He slumped further in the chair. His mouth drooped downward and his eyes flickered.
“Frank?” Coleen said, alarmed.
“I . . . I can’t b-breathe!” he gasped as sweat began to roll down his crimson face.
Brendan moved his eyes from his sister and ran quickly to where his uncle had now fallen forward, hishand held tightly over his chest.
“Frank!” Coleen screamed.
“Call an ambulance!” Brendan ordered as Eileen rushed to the phone.
Patricia stood and moved to her brother.
“Francis, I’m sorry. Francis!” she sobbed but he had lost consciousness and slipped slowly onto the kitchen floor, his face still screwed up in anger as his sister knelt beside him, begging forgiveness for revealing the secret she had promised to take to the grave.
Chapter 24
The waiting area of St Clare’s was a long, brightly lit room on the ground floor of the low-rise hospital building. Hard cream-coloured plastic chairs, occupied by depressed-looking relatives, lined the walls of the area and gave the room an air of quiet desperation.
Coleen Dalton sat on the first seat outside the emergency department, waiting anxiously for news of her husband. Four of her daughters sat silently beside her. Only Eileen was missing. At Coleen’s insistence she had remained behind to sit with Patricia in the hope that it would give the two women an opportunity to talk about the past.
Brendan sat on a seat alone on the other side of the room, chewing over the evening’s events. He glanced at Coleen who smiled at him across the hallway with watery eyes. She crossed over and sat beside him, rubbing his hands in hers.
“So,” she said.
Brendan creased his brow and sighed. He had no idea where to begin with his questions.
“So,” he echoed. “So, Eileen’s my sister.”
Coleen nodded.
“Rafael Martinez, he’s Eileen’s dad?”
Coleen shook her head. “It was before she met him. Your mom got a job in a bar downtown and she met this guy. They were both very young. She was, I guess, very innocent and she . . . well . . . she became pregnant. He took off, left town. Frank . . .” she began, shaking her head furiously.“Frank was so – so mad . . . and I guess disappointed. He felt he’d let his own mother down. He promised your grandmother that he would look after Patricia and felt he’d broken that promise. When she finally told us, we talked and we all agreed that it was best for everyone if Frank and I adopted Eileen so that Patricia could get on with her life. Your mom did agree to it but, you know, when Orla was born and I became a mom myself, I often thought it was wrong . . . that Patricia should have been Eileen’s mom. I wondered if she’dfelt she’d had no alternative but to give her up. She stayed on with us and we pretended to everyone that Eileen was mine. It must have been hard for your mom watching me raise her daughter while she went back to work in that bar every day. We all just got on with it and things seemed to settle down for a while. Then she met your dad . . . If it makes any difference to you, your mother was very much in love with Rafael.”
Brendan looked at the grey linoleum floor.“I know she was pregnant when she married him. Was it so she wouldn’t have to give me up too?”
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Coleen sighed. “I guess. Things were very different back then. Oh, she could have gotten benefits but she didn’t want to live like that and . . . I think Rafael pressurised her into it too.”
Brendan looked up and watched as Coleen squirmed.
“He was illegal and Patricia was an American citizen . . . so . . .”
Brendan nodded. “I see,” he replied sourly.
A doctor appeared and squinted around the room, looking for Coleen. She stood up and moved swiftly to him. One by one her daughters joined her, leaving only Brendan sitting alone on the other side of the room. Orla glanced over and beckoned for him to join them. He stood and moved to the periphery of the little group and listened as the doctor explained that Frank hadonly had a mild heart attack and that he would be fine in a couple of days. Brendan cringed as his cousins amazingly smiled with relief for their bullying father and pulled each other into a group hug. He wondered if this was for Coleen’s benefit because he couldn’t accept that his cousins loved their father as much as they seemed to.
“Now, he needs rest so you all go home now and you’ll see him tomorrow,” the doctor ordered.
The house was in darkness when Brendan and Coleen returned from the hospital. He was glad that Eileen and his mother had obviously gone to bed. He checked all the windows and doors for his aunt, a task his security-conscious uncle took great pleasure in doing each evening. Then he said goodnight to her and left.
As he lay on his bed in the annex, he thought about how he had a sister he never knew about and how he could now make sense of his uncle’s call to his mother after Eileen had been assaulted. He could also now understand Coleen’s pitying glances towards him. Even though Frank had taken over Eileen’s life since her ordeal, he and Coleen had until that point offered his sister a stable, albeit over-protective home – but they felt they had abandoned him to a life of silence with his cold and indifferent mother on the other side of the Atlantic. He exhaled loudly and as he drifted off to sleep he wondered what other family secrets he was yet to discover and how many of them would vindicate his mother’s behaviour and bring him closer to understanding the woman.
When he awoke late the following morning, he was relieved that his mother had remained in her room. He did not want to face her yet and was unsure what, if anything, he would say to her when she appeared. He spoke briefly to Coleen as they sat facing each other across the kitchen table. His aunt looked as though she hadn’t slept and her normally coiffured brown hair hung down in straight, lank bangs around her face. But she laughed as he admitted to the driving lessons, informing him that she had noticed the car parked differently on several occasions and was thankful that Frank’s extreme short-sightedness prevented him from noticing it too.
He then took Eileen on a drive to the hospital. On the way, they talked a little about Eileen’s conversation with their mother the previous night and how Patricia had told her about a young romance which ended badly and how she had always felt bad for keeping Brendan when she had given her up.
“So I have a brother!” she beamed, once again taking her eyes off the road.
“Eyes!” he yelled, pointing to the windscreen.
“Sorry!”
“You’re not angry?”
Eileen swerved into the car park and parked the car unevenly in a large space.
“I kind of knew,” she admitted.
Brendan raised his eyebrows at her.“Knew?”
“Well, I knew I’d been adopted,” she said sheepishly. “I suspected, though, long before I knew for sure. Sometimes . . . you just know that you don’t belong somewhere. You can feel it. I always felt different, like I belonged somewhere else.”
“Do you think that’s how Jonathan feels?”
“I guess, but I suspect it is much worse for him,” she sighed. “I thought you weren’t going to call him Jonathan anymore,” she added.
“I don’t. Not to his face anyway. So, when did you find out for sure?”
“When I was about sixteen. It was before Mom and Dad broke down the wall to make the kitchen bigger. The other end of that room used to be a study room for us. I was in there one evening doing my homework. Mom was in the kitchen talking to a neighbour who had just lost a baby. The woman was crying. She was really upset. The door was partially open and I heard Mom tell her that she lost a baby through miscarriage a couple of days after her dad died and that she felt that the shock of losing him brought it on. I just sat there stunned because I remembered her telling me that I was born five months after Granddad died and that looking after me gave her a reason to go on. So I knew then. I knew that she hadn’t given birth to me. I just sat there at the table and cried as quietly as I could and I didn’t move until I heard Mom walking the woman to the door. When I came out of the room I set the table and helped Mom cook dinner and I realised that nothing had changed except what I knew in my head. I decided that it didn’t really make any difference. I cried a lot about it for the next few months but I never said anything. I never told her or Dad that I knew.”
Brendan looked at her in amazement. “You didn’t want to know who your birth parents were?”
Eileen exhaled heavily. “I was curious, how could I not be? I tried to get my original birth certificate once only to discover that the original birth certs of adopted children are sealed – that means they can never be accessed.”
“Did you have no suspicion at all that my mother was your birth mother?”
Eileen looked at her lap and chewed on the side of her lip. “When everyone went on so much about how we were alike, I thought about how she might be my mom . . .” she bit her lip and looked shyly at Brendan, “but I preferred to think that it wasn’t true. I mean, she kept you so why would she give me up?It was easier for me to believe that I belonged to a complete stranger, someone who couldn’t offer me what my parents did. But deep down . . . deep down I knew she was my mom. I’d see the strange way that Mom and Dad looked at each other anytime anyone mentioned how much we looked alike and I knew.”
“So, you knew when I arrived here that I was your brother . . . or at least . . . your half-brother?”
Eileen smiled shyly and nodded.
“I was so excited that you were coming to stay. I felt like a part of me was coming home. That I’d no longer feel so lonely in this life. I mean, I got a good home and everything and, even with how Dad ended up treating me, I don’t feel that I . . . that I wasn’t wanted. I just always felt that I was on the outside looking in. Patricia said she feels now that she made a mistake coming here. She thought they could all put the past behind them and perhaps she’d stay in town, buy an apartment or a house or something but . . . now she says she’ll go back to Ireland as soon as she can change her flight.”
Brendan felt his heart quicken at the thought of his mother returning to Ireland alone.
“I told her Dad wouldn’t want that and that she should stay and work things out . . . with everyone,” she said meaningfully.
Brendan walked down the long white corridor and opened the door to Frank’s room where he was dozing in his bed. A heart monitor beeped loudly over his head and was attached to his bare chest by long grey wires.Eileen had never seen her tough father look so fragile and helpless. She moved to the bed and rested her hand on his arm. He opened his eyes slowly and stared at her. His loose jaw line began to quiver. She leaned in and hugged him tightly.
“Eileen!” he wept.
“Dad, it’s okay,” she said, embarrassed by his emotion.
Frank looked up at Brendan and gave him a nod.
“No, Dad,” Eileen said. “I want Brendan to stay.”
Brendan moved to the back of the room, lowered himself down on a chair and pretended to look out of the window.
“I never wanted you to know,” Frank began. “I wanted to protect you. To save you from the life I felt she would have given you.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I knew all along,” she said, trying to ease the strain on her father’s heart.
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He raised his face up to her in surprise.
“I always felt different, Dad. I always knew that I didn’t quite . . . belong.”
“You belong! You’re my own blood!” he cried.
A cough racked his body and he bent forward, his fat face quivering as he tried to catch his breath.
“Shh!” she said.“It’s okay, Dad. I’m glad to know that I am really related to you. I thought that . . . well, I’m glad that Patricia is my mother and that I really am part of this family.”
“When . . . what happened to you in Philadelphia . . . I just thought that . . . it was happening again.”
Eileen tensed and trained her eyes on the bright window beside her father’s bed.
“Dad, Patricia wasn’t raped. She made a mistake, that’s all,” she replied brusquely.
“Don’t say that word, Eileen. I don’t want to hear you use it.”
“Why? Because it makes you feel that no one could control what happened to me? I didn’t lead that boy on, Dad. Sooner or later you will have to face up to the fact that none of what happened to me was my fault.”
“I just wanted to protect you.”
“I know that, Dad, but you didn’t protect me. You hid me away from the world, you imprisoned me. I know that you did it because you thought it was right but there was a part of you that wanted to punish me because you couldn’t punish Patricia for letting you down.”
Frank’s chin trembled. “So . . . you think . . . it’s all my fault? Patricia’s coldness, how much she hates me, Brendan living like he’s a teenager, unable to settle, to get close to anyone and you . . .” He shook his head.
