An Innocent, a Broad

by Ann Leary

  “Please, Nathan, can I borrow six pounds?” I begged.

  “Six quid?” he replied. “Not a problem.”

  I forced a smile. Nathan had been in the UK for one week and had eagerly adopted every bit of British slang he could wrap his nasal Long Island accent around. Words like “yob,” “quid,” and “bloke” proudly peppered his conversation now, accompanied by only a vague understanding of the customary usage of the words.

  “Thanks,” I said to Nathan, and hurried off toward the Royal Mile.

  “Cheers!” Nathan called after me.

  IT WAS EIGHT-FORTY when we arrived at the Tron, on the Royal Mile, and at the corner where the tour was supposed to meet, there was a kiosk for Edinburgh Walking Tours, but its window was closed. I looked up the road and saw a large group of people following a man in a dramatic top hat and cape. A police officer stood next to the kiosk, and I asked him if that tour had embarked from this corner.

  “If it’s the ghost tour yer after, that’s the one,” he replied.

  I asked the man if there was someplace I was supposed to pay, and he said that usually people pay at the kiosk, but late-comers could surely pay at the end, and he urged me to hurry up and join them.

  So I joined the tour and listened with rapt attention to the guide, who called himself the grand master and high priest of some type of pagan coven. His performance seemed a little forced, as if he’d had a few hundred too many witching hours that summer, but he was periodically relieved from his diatribe by other costumed characters whom we met along the way. For example, turning the corner into a narrow alley, we suddenly encountered a ghoulish creature that leaped out at us and caused me to shriek and then laugh maniacally from nervous excitement. It was the spirit of an unfortunate soul who wanted to share with us her experience of being tortured to death by John Kincaid, the famous “witch pricker.” On the next block, Dr. Jekyll peered out a window at us and warned us of a dangerous criminal on the loose, and later Mr. Hyde lunged at us with a bloody knife.

  I usually avoid anything that involves audience participation, but that evening I laughed uproariously at the speaker’s jokes and recoiled in mock horror at the apparitions that staggered, limped, and cursed at us from various doorways and street corners. I soon worked my way to the front of the crowd, and when the speaker asked literary questions that were so simple even I knew the answer, my hand shot up eagerly. I was having the time of my life. Again, I had this strong sense of belonging. Walking from one attraction to the next, I chatted with some of the other tourists. There was a couple from Brussels and an elderly Englishwoman who asked me Jack’s age and then commented on his tiny size. I told her that he had been premature, and she smiled kindly at me and said, “Bless him.”

  It was late in the day. The sky and the narrow road and old buildings were all a grayish pink in the twilight, and we moved along behind our guide like a contented flock. We ascended a hill, and the city spread below us, and I felt like I’d been there before, right in that very spot on that road built eight hundred years before. My sleeping baby was slung across my chest, and I stood above an ancient city, shoulder to shoulder with my brethren.

  We started to move on down the hill when the guide said, “Wait, I almost forgot… everybody raise both hands!”

  I reached for the sky and was surprised to see that few others did as well.

  “Now,” said the guide, staring fixedly at me, “I must ask those of you with your hands up to leave this tour. Those who have paid have been instructed not to raise both hands—it was worked out at the onset. After all, it’s not fair to those who have paid to have people just tag along for free, is it?”

  All eyes were now on me. Instantly I had gone from the most enthusiastic member of the tour to one of the spectacles—an outcast heathen—and I slowly covered Jack’s tiny body with my coat. Then, with some sidelong glances and a few smirks, the group moved on, leaving me and a couple of tipsy Germans standing where the group had stood just a moment before. I considered running to the front of the tour and explaining to the guide and the rest of the group that my intention was to pay at the end. I thought of myself waving my money frantically, seeking eye contact with someone—the English lady, anyone who might believe me. But what if nobody did? I stood and watched my group make their way toward … who-knew-what. A witch whose skin had been boiled off her body alive? Auld Reekie himself?

  The sun had settled below the hills, and it was getting cold. My abrupt stillness had awakened Jack, and now his head moved back and forth, his lips rooting about in the air for sustenance. I kissed his head on the soft spot, still so delicate, so unspeakably vulnerable, and I was filled with tenderness and love. The urgent, primitive longing to nourish and protect was upon me, and I know it sounds trite now, but I felt like Mary then, just full of grace. I helped Jack find his little fist, and he sucked it for a few moments and fell back to sleep, and the ground beneath me, once so foreign and unyielding, was suddenly mine. I turned my back on the departing group—on the trusting fold of tourists and their native-born leader. I buttoned my jacket around my son and started up the Royal Mile toward home.

  * These were quotes from British newspapers. Before our trip to London, Denis had received very little notice from the American press, which we considered a blessing, as at the time they had a slightly different perspective on Denis. Most memorable was a New York Post review that said, “Denis Leary spread eight seconds of material over what seemed like forty-five days.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at Logan Airport in Boston the following night, my mother and Steve and my sister, Meg, were waiting. My father and Terry were there also; they’d driven all the way up from Connecticut just to greet us and videotape our arrival. My mother waved a small American flag so that we could see them in the crowd when we came out of the terminal. I had envisioned this moment for months. I had imagined all of us running toward each other in slow motion, tears streaming down our faces, Denis holding Jack aloft for all to see. But I was too exhausted from the flight to feel any emotion, too distracted by the sudden sense of being home and not knowing where I was. Dry-eyed, I hugged my parents and sister, and we climbed into the back of my mother’s car, Jack nestled asleep in his car seat.

  Several weeks later Denis, Jack, and I moved into a rental apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was one of those large white-brick buildings constructed in the 1960s, and it was populated almost exclusively by the elderly. Every day when I wheeled Jack out of the elevator in his stroller, I had to walk through the lobby, which was the roosting spot for all the old resident widows. They took daily outings from their apartments but never ventured past the lobby. In my mind they lay in wait all day for the moment I appeared, so that they could begin their chorus of disapproval.

  “Why don’t you have a hat on that baby, for heaven’s sake? It’s not even sixty degrees out, and the wind is gusting,” one old biddy would commence, and then they’d all join in.

  “My daughter-in-law’s the same. Pushing a stroller in a miniskirt with her bosom exposed for all the world to see. I don’t get it. Why advertise when you’ve got nothing to sell?”

  “That’s the baby from 6B. The husband doesn’t work.”

  “He works! He works! I saw him come in late one night. I think he’s a musician. Or a cabbie.”

  “The baby wants a bottle. Mama! Your baby’s upset. Where’s his baba?”

  “He’s cute, but he doesn’t look like the father.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never seen the father.”

  “I saw him. He’s black.”

  “Black? No, Louise, I’ve told you again and again that’s the man from 11C.”

  “Well, he has a wife. And a baby!”

  “A wife and a baby, yes. This wife and baby, no.”

  And they would carry on like this until we left the building. When we first moved in, I would actually try to appease them by adjusting Jack’s outerwear to their liking and answe
ring their questions about my personal habits, but slowly I began to ignore them, just as their own children did. I didn’t pay attention to what they said, but I secretly loved their very American sense of entitlement to us and to everything else around them. In London people mind their own business. They don’t want to embarrass strangers by talking with them, but they’re sometimes so insular that they will scurry down into the Underground with eyes shielded, rather than help a woman with a baby stroller down the stairs. New Yorkers will go out of their way to hold open a door or help you carry a stroller, but while doing so, they’ll tell you about their sister’s fertility problems or ask you how many children you have and why you don’t have more.

  I was never able to heed Dr. Singh’s advice about forgetting Jack’s difficult beginning and not making him too precious. Jack was over a year old before I could bring myself to leave him with a sitter, for even an hour or two. My sense of the world had been altered slightly but permanently when Jack was born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I didn’t think any human besides myself was an appropriate caregiver. What if the babysitter didn’t strap him into his high chair and he fell out? What if he choked? What if the sitter smoked crack cocaine and then threw Jack out the window? The world had changed from a place where anything was possible in a positive sense to one in which anything was possible in a delightful as well as a dreadful sense, and I approached life with a newfound wariness.

  Just before Jack’s second birthday, his sister, Devin, was born after a full-term pregnancy and a relatively uncomplicated birth, and I began to relax a little bit. I remember walking down Broadway, the four of us, one day in early spring when Devin was just a few weeks old. Denis pushed Jack in his stroller, and I carried Devin across my chest in a pouch, and I was aware of how complete we seemed, our little herd. We walked to the park and ran into a few people we knew. We stopped on a bench to wipe Jack’s nose and change Devin’s diaper, and then we watched Jack run ahead of us after a pigeon. On the way home, rap music blared from an open car window on Columbus Avenue. The sun had disappeared behind the buildings, and the air was becoming thin and cold. We walked along, and I knew the smells of each block—garbage on one corner, coffee and garlic on the next—and I had a sudden awareness that we were a family, an American family, and New York was our home.

  While I was busy birthing and suckling and fretting over our babies, Denis became famous. I had no idea at the time. I think he tried to tell me, but I was too distracted. Jack and Devin and I were doing the “Mommy and Me” circuit all over the Upper West Side. The minute the babies were old enough to support their own heads, they, like many of their tiny New York peers, were enrolled in an exhaustive curriculum of classes to help prepare them for preschool. They began gymnastics and dance classes before they could walk. They took art and music classes before they could hold a spoon. These classes were filled with mothers and caregivers who tumbled and danced and painted and clapped while their babies sat and drooled on the floor. The story hours at the library, the play groups and birthday parties and Gymborees became such an all-consuming whirlwind of activity that although I got to be a first-class tumbler and finger-painter, I lost track of Denis’s career.

  The year that Devin was born, despite my advice to forget comedy and get a more dependable job writing for television, Denis took his one-man show, No Cure for Cancer, Off-Broadway, to the Actors’ Playhouse. The show, which had been written only because our baby was too weak to fly, had a sold-out run and produced a book and a bestselling CD. Denis’s friend, director Ted Demme, shot some short segments of the show, and they ran constantly on MTV. Denis was also on Comedy Central and HBO regularly, but the only things I ever saw on television in those days were Barney and Sesame Street.

  One night when Devin was a few months old, Denis insisted that I get a sitter. We had been invited to a film premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre. I can’t remember the name of the film, but I’ll never forget the shock of having fifty photographers hollering, “DENIS! DENIS, OVER HERE! DENIS LEARY!” as we walked the red carpet leading into the theater.

  I clutched Denis’s arm in fright. “What do they want? How do they all know your name?” I asked.

  Denis said, in a slightly exasperated tone, “I’ve told you again and again. I’m famous.” And we walked out of the dark street right into those blinding lights.

  EPILOGUE

  JACK IS NOW thirteen years old. He’s the tallest boy in his class and is just teetering on the edge of adolescence, which means that although he knows he’s smarter than Denis and me, he still likes us and isn’t too embarrassed to bring his friends around. He plays hockey and baseball. He plays the drums. He is a brilliant physical comedian, a master impersonator, and, when he feels like trying, a very good student.

  We live in a Connecticut farmhouse now, and not long ago I was in our basement looking for a flashlight and came across a box of photos. Our house is old, and the basement was designed for shorter people. Shorter people who don’t mind dirt floors and damp holes in the foundation where mice and snakes creep in. So I grabbed my flashlight and the box and ran upstairs to the kitchen, where I was thrilled to discover that the photos were from the SCBU. I hadn’t seen these photos in years, and as I gazed at them one by one, I heard the screen door slam.

  “MOM?” Jack called from the front room.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” I called back.

  “I’m … [a string of unintelligible words], okay?” Jack replied.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m … [more gibberish] Adam’s, okay?”

  “I’m IN THE KITCHEN! COME IN HERE, PLEASE!” I shrieked.

  Jack walked into the kitchen and looked at me like I was insane.

  “All right! How come you’re yelling?” he said. “Jeesh!”

  “You know I don’t like yelling from room to room. When you want to speak with somebody, you need to go into the room where they are. I don’t know why I have to keep telling you this.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I’m going to Adam’s, okay?”

  “Are you walking?”

  “No, riding my bike.”

  “Well, be careful. Stay on the right side of the road.”

  “I know,” Jack said.

  “Don’t talk to anyone. If somebody slows down to ask directions or something, just ride away. Don’t get—”

  “Mom, I know.”

  “All right. Just be careful.”

  “What’re those pictures of?” Jack asked.

  “You, when you were a little baby. When you were in the hospital in London.”

  “Can I see?” said Jack, so I handed him a photo that was taken just a few days after his birth. It showed Jack in his isolette and me sitting next to him, staring dazedly up at the camera. Jack studied the picture and I saw the color drain from his face.

  “Don’t you remember these photos?” I asked him.

  “No,” said Jack.

  “I used to show them to you when you were younger. They were kind of buried away. I just came across them this afternoon.”

  Jack continued to stare at the picture, frowning.

  “They’re kind of hard to look at, aren’t they?”

  “Kind of?” Jack replied. “You look like a guy with that haircut! Did Dad ever see you like that?”

  “Well, of course,” I said.

  “Did you go out in public like that?”

  “Yes …”

  “Mom, no offense, but…”

  Now I braced myself. My kids believe that the slap of any insult is somehow soothed by prefacing it with “no offense, but…”

  “You look like a freak.”

  Then, trying to placate me with a smile, he handed the photo back and went bounding out of the room with his dog, Rocky, at his side, and I turned my attention back to the photographs.

  * * *

  JACK’S ONLY PHYSICAL scars from his prematurity are a constellation of tiny white dots on his hands, wrists, and feet. These are from the many bloo
d tests, transfusions, and IV needles he endured during his time in the unit. You can really only see them in the summer, when his skin is tan. Today he’s proud of these battle wounds and often asks me to confirm for his friends that he was indeed two pounds when he was born. (Thirteen-year-olds consider other thirteen-year-olds lousy sources and always insist on corroborating stories when being issued a brag.)

  And I have a lingering scar of my own that exists to this day. Every now and then I’m stricken with an immediate and heart-wrenching awareness of the prodigious wonder of Jack’s existence. I’m sure all parents experience this with their first child, but I think that during those months in London, I overtaxed the part of my psyche that inhibits embarrassing public demonstrations of feelings, and I find myself now rendered emotionally incontinent when it comes to both of my children, but especially Jack. When Denis plopped Jack in Santa’s lap at Macy’s that first Christmas, for example, the whole absurdly American splendor of the moment caught me by surprise and, as six-foot-tall elves made faces at Jack to get him to smile and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was piped at a deafening pitch into my ears and Jack sought out my face before producing a deliciously gummy smile, I burst into fitful, sobbing tears and had to be led from Santa’s cave supported by two nervous reindeer in miniskirts.

  When Jack was born three months early, I bitterly envied the pregnant women I saw walking down the street. I felt then that my pregnancy had been stolen from me, but now I know that it was Jack’s pregnancy, too, not just mine, and it was never really under my control. Having children really is like driving a car from the backseat, without a steering wheel, just like in my childhood nightmares, and sometimes the car simply goes too fast past the things we’d have preferred to stay and enjoy a little bit longer, and we have to keep our eyes open and take in the changing scenery now, knowing we’ll never pass this way again. I still meet all of Jack’s firsts with the same dizzying emotional confusion of joy, gratitude, wonder, and, of course, sorrow that we’ve left a part of our lives behind forever. It was this bittersweet blend of pride and nostalgic longing that summoned those annoying and embarrassing tears at Jack’s christening, his first steps, his first day of school, and the first time, after many weeks of Little League, that he swung his bat in a perfectly timed arc and met the pitched ball with a resounding thwack, then paused before running to watch in wonder as his first hit entered the world.