Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “You wanna walk?”

  “Nah, I should get home,” she says.

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  “Cool.” She turns the double stroller hard left and crosses the street toward home.

  It’s fairly dark, but Leo won’t be home for hours, and Emma is awake now, content in the stroller. She is watching the leafy canopy go by overhead. Sometimes when she’s in the stroller, I squat, and then turn and look up, just to see what things look like from her vantage point. I push her stroller along by the cemetery fence that runs down Myrtle Avenue. I think about going in, but the sign on the gate says they close at sundown. The sun is down now, and it’s still open.

  “All we need is to get locked in a cemetery for the night, Emma,” I say.

  But then I remember being a kid here, maybe ten or twelve years old, hopping the fence with friends and playing flashlight tag amid the headstones. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Emma opens her mouth, but then closes it again without answering. My phone is ringing in the diaper bag, so I stop and fish it out from beneath the stroller. It’s Mom.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Majella!”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Listen, I found something I thought you’d want to know about,” she says. “I’ve been combing through the genealogy files and I found some really interesting stuff.” I begin to walk again, slowly now, pushing the stroller with one hand. “The woman whose diary you found, Virginia Doyle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She had several children, and it turns out that one of her sons, Raymond Doyle, lived to be one hundred and one years old.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t die until 1947.”

  “What year were you born again?”

  “In 1949. Anyway, the really interesting thing is that, apparently, he participated in some Irish-American folklore project at the New York Public Library in the thirties.”

  I stop walking.

  “What, like an oral history or something?”

  “Exactly. There was some famous professor who wanted to record people’s folk memories of the famine before they were all gone.”

  “That’s amazing,” I say. “Can you read it online, what he had to say?”

  “No, but you can do even better,” she says. “You can go to the library there and listen to it. I think it’s an actual recording. I’m looking at the library Web site now, and it says it’s a spoken-word CD, and that it’s for in-library use only. I guess that means you can’t check it out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still, that sounds amazing, don’t you think? To be able to hear Raymond Doyle’s story in his own words?”

  “Definitely,” I say. “I wonder if he knew what happened, about his mother.”

  “I don’t know,” Mom says. “It seems unlikely. He must have been just a baby when they left Ireland. Why would she tell him a thing like that, that she killed a woman?”

  “Did you find records of their crossing?”

  “Not yet, but I’m still looking.”

  I pull the phone down from my ear so I can check the time. It’s almost seven thirty. I wonder how late the library is open tonight, but it doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t go now, not with Emma. She needs to go home and get to sleep. I stick the phone back to my ear.

  “Maybe I can go tomorrow,” I say.

  “Oh, I wish I was there to come with you,” Mom says. “I’d love to hear that CD.”

  I stop walking and take a deep breath. She wishes she was here. Not so she can spend time with her daughter and new grandbaby. But so she can hear some dead great-uncle tell stories on CD at the library. I remember what Jade said, about the reservoir of hurt, and the curtain and the pain and the jazz-hands, and I decide that it’s definitely bullshit.

  But then again, what have I got to lose?

  “Hey, Mom,” I say, because I am determined to make a change. I will force her to have a real conversation with me. I am going to make this happen. “Mom, I have to tell you something.”

  I hear her take in a quiet breath, and I feel so powerful, when I can make her quiet, even just for a moment. That conversation we had on Saturday—about the diary, the murder, Ginny Doyle—it’s true that that conversation ended the way they all do: with her disappearing, and me feeling sad and exasperated. But before that, there was something in there, some nugget of potential. I think it was fear that quieted my mother and bound us together. Maybe I can find that scab again, and pick it. If Jade is right, if I can locate my mom’s wounds, then maybe I can make her bleed. I can make her feel.

  “What is it, honey?” she says.

  “I don’t know.” I really don’t know. I want to tell her everything. The crying, the therapy, the pills. I want her to know all of it. But what if she doesn’t listen? What if her other line beeps in? “I miss you.”

  “Aww, Majella. We miss you, too, honey! But you would just love this place, you and Leo both. . . .”

  “No, Mom, that’s not what I mean. Listen!”

  My mom goes quiet.

  “What was it like for you, when you first had me?” I ask. “How old were you?”

  “Oh, I was old, by the standards of the day. I was thirty. Over-the-hill!” she laughs.

  “And how was it? Was it hard, having a baby? Or were you just a natural at it?”

  “I mean, it’s always hard, Majella. Being a mom is the toughest job in the world.”

  She sounds like a frigging greeting card.

  “But was it hard for you?” I say. “I don’t want to know about your generation, or your friends, or society back then. I want to know about you. As a person. How you handled it. How you felt.”

  I pause. Will she answer? Will she dodge? It’s like waiting to see how many pins your carefully launched bowling ball will take down. It teeters at the gutter. Mom clears her throat.

  “I don’t know,” she finally says. “It was a different time then. We didn’t talk about our feelings. There wasn’t all of this postpartum mumbo jumbo. We just got on with it.”

  I feel like my bowling ball glanced. I got maybe two or three pins, which is all you can really hope for your first time out, right? But maybe I can go for the spare. After all, she did say the word postpartum, and that seems like evidence of something.

  “Well, we talk about our feelings now, Mom,” I say. “It’s not too late for that, you know. People do that.”

  “What people?”

  “Other people. Lots of people. Me!”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she says, but I interrupt her to push my silliness a step further.

  “I’m going to therapy,” I say.

  My mom gasps. It’s a bona fide gasp. I think she would’ve been less shocked if I’d confessed a heroin addiction and a lesbian affair.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “What do you need therapy for?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “You’re fine, Majella, you don’t need therapy. How absurd. Tell me one good reason you would need therapy.”

  “How about because I can’t stand my mother!” I bark. I am standing on the side of Myrtle Avenue with my fists clenched in the dark. The lit-up Q55 bus rolls past and farts exhaust at me. Jesus God, what did I just say to my mother? She is quiet on the other end of the phone. “I didn’t mean that, Mom. Mom?”

  She doesn’t say anything, but I move the phone away from my ear, and I can still see the seconds ticking by. I can hear Jeopardy! coming on in the background. She hasn’t hung up.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “You know I didn’t mean that. I don’t hate you.”

  She’s still quiet, and I hear her take a shuddery little breath. Emma takes a matching one in her stroller.

  “I love you, Mom. I just hate the way our relationship is sometimes,” I say, “the
way we communicate. I just want to be honest, I want us to be closer. I feel like we never talk about anything real. I have so much on my mind right now—I’m so scared I’m going to be a bad mom, there’s so much I don’t know. And I don’t feel like I can talk to you about it. I feel like you don’t really listen to me.” But she’s listening now, isn’t she?

  “Mom?” Still nothing. “The truth is, I started going to therapy because I’m crying a lot, like all the time. And I feel really overwhelmed, with Emma. It’s not like I thought it would be. It’s so scary.”

  I hear Alex Trebek being charmingly pretentious in the background. My dad laughs. I hear a noise like a sliding glass door opening, and then the sounds shift and change. The door closes, and Jeopardy! is gone.

  “I cried a lot, too,” Mom says. I hold my breath. “Your father and I always wanted a big family.” She stops talking for a moment, so that I begin to wonder if that’s all she is going to say, but then she sniffs, and I realize that she is crying. My mother.

  “What happened?” I ask softly. “How come you only had me?”

  “There were others.” Her voice is high and tight. She exhales a squeaky breath. “I had five miscarriages before you.”

  I clutch the handle on Emma’s stroller. Five miscarriages.

  “My God, Mom.”

  “The last one was a boy,” she says. “We thought he was the one. We made it all the way to almost thirty-five weeks, and then my labor came early. . . .”

  She stops. She is pushing these words out for me. She is delivering this terror because I made her. Because I told her it was what I needed.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No, no, it’s good,” she says. “You should know. You had a brother. But he was born gone. He was already gone. They let me hold him.”

  Tears are running down my face now. Snot is collecting beneath my nose.

  “Oh God, Mom, I’m so sorry.” I can’t imagine anything worse than laboring to give birth to a dead baby. It is literally the worst thing I can imagine.

  I hear her crying, softly, tenderly.

  “We called him Jimmy, after your grandfather.”

  I don’t know what to say. I wish I was in Florida, on that stupid condo balcony with my mom, overlooking the golf course. I can hear cicadas.

  “After that, it was hard,” she says. “I mean, I couldn’t have loved you any more, Majella. You know that, don’t you? I love you so much.”

  “Of course, Mom.”

  “But it was hard. I was still grieving. I felt guilty for loving you so much. Like I was cheating on that first baby, all of those first babies. Like I shouldn’t be so happy, when they were gone, when Jimmy was gone.” She takes a deep breath. “I always remembered his little body in my arms. How still he was.” Her voice is ragged.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  “I don’t talk about it,” she whispers. “Not even with your father. Never.”

  I look down at Emma, who kicks her foot at me like I’m a horse that she wants to get moving. I mop up my snot and tears with my free arm, and then begin pushing her down the street again.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I really love you. I love you. I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Majella. I love you, too.”

  After we hang up, I feel incredibly fat and rattled. The Jumbo BBQ Crunchburger Deluxe is sitting like a stone in my gut. And the cheesy waffle fries and the guacamole. Emma and I stride through the darkened streets of Glendale in a vain attempt to outrun the damage I’ve just inflicted on my body. And my mama. When my baby begins to whimper, we head for home.

  I look at the microwave clock as we walk in. It’s a little late for Emma’s bedtime, but she’ll be fine. As long as I feed her and bathe her, and swaddle her tightly before bed, she’s happy. I’ve left the monitor on the kitchen counter. I thought they’d be asleep by now, but on channel C, Jade and her babies are all crying.

  • • •

  The next day, Leo doesn’t have to be at work until early afternoon, so I’m waiting alone on the library steps when they open at ten o’clock. Well, not alone exactly—there are plenty of caffeinated undergrads and some sneaker-sporting tourists waiting with me. It dawns on me that after living my whole life in New York, I can tell the tourists from the locals without even trying, and I accidentally sort people into these groups at a glance. There is a young, ambitious tourist on the steps beside me, and she’s trying to fake everybody out. She wants to be a New Yorker. She wears all black, and she’s vigilant about keeping her hair lightly mussed, her giant sunglasses perched just so on her nose. She impersonates disdain well, but she’s only wearing it; it’s not real. And is she really alone? Aren’t those her criminally embarrassing parents posing with the lions? She looks like she wants to crawl inside her clean Armani handbag. As soon as she’s old enough, she will move here. She will run.

  When the doors open at ten o’clock, I follow the grad students up three flights of steps to the Rose Reading Room. I grab a call slip and mini-pencil, and fill in the information that I looked up on the Internet last night. I even have the call number on a crumpled scrap of paper in my pocket, because I am a professional. When the serious, bespectacled librarian hands over the CD a few minutes later, he reminds me to use headphones when listening.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  He nods solemnly.

  In the South Hall, I find an empty table and open my laptop. I pop in the disc, plug in my earbuds, and sit down to listen. It’s a collection, and the files are listed first by county and then by surname. There are hundreds of Irish voices here. So many stories. I scan the list until I find Mayo. R. Doyle is the fourth file. I take a deep breath before I click on his name.

  There is static, like the sound you used to hear when you would play old records, and then the time-warped voice of a young American, the famous professor.

  “Just start with your name there. Don’t worry about the microphone, no need to lean in.”

  “How’s that?” Raymond Doyle’s voice flashes brightly into my brain.

  “Perfect. Now. Your name?”

  He clears his throat. “My name is Raymond Doyle, sir.”

  “And where are you from, Mr. Doyle?”

  “Originally from a place called Knockbooley, in the County of Mayo, sir. In Ireland.”

  His voice is weathered, throaty, full of living. His accent is broad, gorgeous New York, one hundred percent. There’s no trace of a lilt or a soft T. Nothing Irish about him. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. This is better. He sounds like an aged gangster. I have goose bumps on my arms. I draw his mother’s diary out from my backpack, but don’t open it. I set it on the table, and place my hand over it gently. It feels like a heartbeat.

  “Very good, Mr. Doyle, and would you mind telling me your age, sir?”

  “I believe I am ninety-three years of age or thereabouts. I was born at Springhill House in County Mayo in Ireland, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-seven.”

  “Springhill House?” the famous Irish-American professor asks. “An estate house?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “You were born into the landed aristocracy?”

  “No, sir,” Raymond Doyle laughs, and I can hear the years of accumulated smoke in his lungs. I wonder what he did for a living. “My mother was under their employ, at Springhill. She was a chambermaid to the missus, Mrs. Alice Spring.”

  “Ah. And your father?” I can hear the pencil-scratching of the famous professor taking his notes. I close my eyes so I can hear everything better, sharper.

  “He died before I was born. Died on the passage over to America, on the coffin ships.”

  “As so many did, so many,” the professor says. There seems to be a note of anger in hi
s voice, more than in his subject’s. “And when did you make the passage yourself, Mr. Doyle?”

  “I was only an infant. To be honest, I remember nothing of Ireland, only my mother’s stories.”

  “And that’s why we’re here, Mr. Doyle, to collect your stories.”

  “Not my stories,” Raymond corrects the famous professor. “My mother’s stories. The famine stories.”

  “That’s right,” the professor concedes.

  “She was a saint, my mother. Ginny Doyle was her name.”

  I open my eyes, rub my fingertips across the diary. A saint, I think, and I shake my head.

  “She saved my life more times than I can count, God rest her soul.” The reading room is beginning to fill up with people. I turn up the volume on my laptop, and close my eyes again. I wish I could see him. “It started before we ever left Ireland. Before I was born, even.”

  “She saved your life before you were born?” the professor interrupts.

  “She did,” Raymond says.

  “How so?”

  “Did you ever hear of any babies being born in the middle of the famine?”

  The professor grunts, but makes no real answer.

  “I nearly wasn’t. Nearly wasn’t born. We were starving, all of us, starving after my father left and died on the coffin ships. I was starving in my own mother’s womb. My sister Maire would tell it better, before she died, God rest her. She remembered. She was the oldest, and she saw all the babies born. She saw how a woman ought to look when she has a baby in there, but she said I wasn’t growing at all, inside, until my mother went out and got the job at Springhill.”

  “She went there when she was pregnant?”

  “She did.”

  “And they employed her?”

  “They did.”

  “Highly unusual,” the professor remarks.

  I click pause on the file, so I can stop and try to take this all in. I need to imagine it. Being pregnant, having—how many?—other children at home already, and Leo being dead and gone, and there being no food at all, to feed my children. My God. I breathe deep. I click play.

  “It was unusual, but that’s how it happened,” Raymond says. “I was so small that she wasn’t even showing she was with child, so she left the other children at home, with my sister Maire. She had no choice, you see, because Dad was gone already, and there was nobody else to mind them. Sure, Maire was only a child herself at the time.”