This is what a curse does: It takes a truth and twists it. It punishes those who don’t conform. It sets the parameters of conformity so narrow that few can actually stick to them. Ask Rachel, she knows. We’re more alike than she wants to admit. We are all bad apples, Deena, plucked before we were ripe and ready, right off the family tree.
Here, read this, you’ll see.
20.
When a home is not a home
Drumcliff and Donegal, 1936
It took almost six months for anyone to notice that Julia was pregnant. She had only had her monthly blood once or twice before and her mother assured her it was normal for it to come and go during the first year. It was also normal, she said, for Julia’s breasts to be tender, her joints stiff and sore.
“Growing pains,” her mother said fondly, brushing her daughter’s long red hair. She never imagined that Julia could be pregnant. Not even Julia imagined that.
She wasn’t sick the first few months, just tired. (Growing pains, her mother said again.) She didn’t start to show until Christmas, and even then it was easy for her to tell herself she was simply changing, becoming a woman. (Growing pains, her mother kept saying, and certainly her words were true, but it wasn’t only herself that Julia was growing.) The swell of her belly was well hidden under her skirts, and only her sister ever saw her undressed in the room they shared.
It was Lizzie who exposed her, although she could never have imagined what would happen when she did.
* * *
—
It was a shock and a shame on the family. That’s what Julia’s parents both said. It was a curse and a burden. It was all her own doing. It was a great sin.
It was a smacked face. It was a dress torn away from a swelling belly. It was hair pulled to drag her over to the fire, press her hand against the burning stove until she told whom she had been with, whom she’d sullied herself for, whom she’d let turn her into a fallen woman, someone beyond repair.
Lizzie listened outside the kitchen door and her tears were salt and shock and sudden guilt. She was the one who’d told her mother, who’d spied Julia’s round abdomen when she got changed for bed and hadn’t known what to do, had done what any child does with a problem she can’t solve: She’d found an adult to help. Except these adults weren’t helping.
The following morning, Julia nursed her burnt hand and cried while her parents went to speak to the priest. They returned with a solution.
“A home,” Patrick called it. “For mothers and babies. A place for you to rest. To repent. To make things right.”
But nothing would ever be right again.
Patrick remembered the herbs his mother had used. The hot baths she’d prescribed, the teas and ointments. But he also remembered how she’d died, burned to death in her bed. It was difficult not to attribute it to an act of God. It was difficult not to see Julia’s current condition as a form of penance.
Julia never said who the father was. Said she couldn’t remember. Said she must have drank poitín at the St. John’s Eve dance, which made her mother smack her all the more, but didn’t answer the question. Not even when Catherine had pressed her daughter’s hand to the hot stove.
“Cast her out,” Catherine hissed that night, hair askew and face wild. “Let her find her own way in this life, the little slut.”
But Patrick calmed her, stroked her blond hair until it lay flat again, told her that everything was not yet lost for Julia, that Father Hannigan was right, that since this was Julia’s first offense she could be spirited away to the home before anybody else noticed, could come back to the farm right after and none of the rest of the parish need know.
“She made a mistake,” said Patrick.
“A mistake is a kiss,” Catherine insisted. “A mistake is an indecent word at a dance. A mistake is drinking a few too many glasses of Guinness. This was not a mistake. This was a sin.”
Within a day, Julia’s bags were packed, excuses concocted about staying with family up in Donegal, helping out an elderly relative, what a kind, good, selfless girl, a credit to her parents.
* * *
—
Early the following morning, John O’Connor drove his pregnant granddaughter up to Donegal. He whistled as he drove. Julia would not know it, but, when John O’Connor returned home, let himself into the bull’s field to feed him, the creature would charge him, putting him in the hospital for three weeks with a broken collarbone. For the rest of the year, the bull would have to be chained and sedated so he wouldn’t attack or escape.
The Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mother and Baby Home was an imposing block of a building built alongside the main road. Tall iron railings surrounded the property and, when a nun emerged to unlock the gates so the car could pass through, Julia caught sight of a small courtyard and a garden before the car stopped and she was led inside. Once a workhouse, the home and orphanage had high ceilings and long rooms well suited to dormitories. Corridors stretched through the home to the laundries that extended from the original building.
In the Mother Superior’s office, Julia’s clothes were taken away. She was given two brown tunics that looked more like sacks for potatoes than clothes for a girl. She was given one floor-length nightdress made of the same material as the day clothes and a bed in a room with nine others. All the girls were unmarried, all of them pregnant or recently mothers, and they had come from all over the province.
They lived on the west side of the building, adjacent to the laundry, where the girls worked. On the east side of the home was the orphanage, and the nuns.
Work in the laundry began at eight a.m., after breakfast and bed making, after morning prayers. They broke for lunch at midday and again for supper at four. At six o’clock they were given tea or hot powdered cocoa and sent to wash for bed. The only days they didn’t work were Sunday, Good Friday, and Christmas Day. They finished work at midday on Christmas Eve, for a treat.
The washing machines were huge beasts of gnarled metal, and the presses were heavy rolls that needed to be turned by hand. The worst stains they scrubbed out on grating washboards. The irons and the presses were so hot that to simply brush your sleeve against them in passing would raise blisters. Girls got scalded by the steam itself.
With salt and steam, with bleach and lye and boiling water, the girls washed the blood off their own clothes, washed the stains off hotel bed linen, washed food they’d never be served off tablecloths so long it took four girls to fold them. They got blisters from grating the laundry over the washing racks, rashes from spilled bleach, burns from the steam irons, eye infections from the washing chemicals, fungal infections from standing up to their ankles in dirty water for eight hours a day over two weeks before the leaks in the machines were fixed. Some of the girls left with hacking coughs that never got better. Everyone’s skin took on an ashen-gray hue.
In the darkness, it was hard to tell if the screams they heard were wailing ghosts or the others’ night terrors.
The days were all the same in the home. Every morning they woke early and ate their porridge. They went to work. They worked in silence. They were not encouraged to make friends. Every afternoon they ate the same supper, they knitted until lights-out, and nothing ever changed until one of the girls, round and fit to burst, was brought into the small ward at the back of the building to give birth.
There was a maternity ward in the nearest hospital—in almost every hospital, in fact—but none of the girls in the home were wanted there.
At night sometimes, they heard the cries. Or in the daytime, from the corridors, holding their sweeping brushes. The pregnant girls knew from the ones who were already mothers that they would not be offered pain relief. They would not be offered glasses of water or soothing words. The pregnant girls knew that it would hurt, for however interminably long it lasted. They knew this was their penance.
The pregnant girls didn’t
cry often, however much they felt like it. They learned not to. They learned to hold it in. They knew they’d cry plenty enough when their baby was born. That no matter how uncomfortable and shameful they felt, no matter how painful and lengthy their labor would be, they’d feel a thousand times worse when it was over.
21.
Washing the clothes
Donegal, 1936
The girls of the home were not encouraged to make friends, but you cannot spend every waking hour with nine other people without beginning to know each other’s stories. Without learning each other’s ways. Without recognizing each other’s moods.
The girl in the bed to the left of Julia’s was named Cecilia; the girl to the right was named Nellie.
Nellie was fourteen, one of the youngest girls in the home. She had been there a year and a half. Usually, the girls stayed for one year after the birth of their child, working in the laundry to pay the nuns back for their maternity care. But Nellie’s family had not yet come to get her.
When they learned that she was pregnant, they showed her the door. None of her family would take her in. So she walked from her home in Letterkenny—thirteen years old, six months pregnant, and alone—to the home in Donegal town. Almost thirty miles. Over twelve hours. A whole day. When she arrived, she was starving and her feet were so bloody her brown boots had turned red.
Cecilia had been in the home for six months. Her daughter was named Daisy. Cecilia was engaged to be married, and had been even before she became pregnant.
“I didn’t know,” Cecilia whispered to the other girls one evening after work, her words hushed under the clack of knitting needles, the crackle of burning wood in the fireplace, the prayers of the nuns. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. How could I have?”
The other girls softly shuffled their chairs closer to her, didn’t look up from their knitting for fear of giving away the fact that they were talking.
“I have no older sisters,” Cecilia went on. “My mam surely wasn’t going to tell me. I asked her what happens on your wedding night and do you know what she told me?”
“What did she tell you?” Nellie breathed.
“She said to have a glass of sherry and close my eyes.”
Nellie and Cecilia laughed quietly at that, heads bent to their knitting, but Julia suddenly felt as though there was no air in her lungs. No air in the big echoing room with its high ceilings and hard floors, no air in the world at all. She didn’t understand how her friends could be laughing when their lungs must have been as empty as hers.
Julia had two thoughts before she fainted. The first was that Nellie and Cecilia were clearly town girls; anyone who had grown up on a farm knew exactly how a baby was made, even if their mothers rapped their knuckles for looking, even if their fathers tried to steer them from the fields during mating season, even if it took years of surreptitious curiosity to properly figure out what went where when a bull mounted a cow. Julia’s family farm relied on her grandfather’s bull making calves with fine dairy cows; it was natural that she should know how that happened.
The second thought she had—and it was a thought that had not yet occurred to her, despite having known of her condition for a couple of months now—was that somebody must have done to her what the bull did to the cows. Mounting and rutting. A base and animal act. No wonder they wanted to lock her up.
When Julia came to, she found herself in the home’s sickbay, a cool, damp cloth on her forehead.
“A little overheated,” said the matron nun. “It’s normal, in your condition.”
Julia raised herself slowly, muttered a Thank you, Sister before returning to her room.
She could not speak to her friends again for a full week, and then it was only because of what happened with Nellie’s baby.
* * *
—
After Julia fainted, she became obsessed with washing clothes. In her dreams, she could not find the dress she had worn to the St. John’s Eve dance, the one she wanted to wash above all others. Each night her dreams were endless labyrinthine terrors in which she searched through every room of every house she’d ever known, armed with salt and soap and water, armed with bleach and lye, but she could never find the clothes she needed to wash the blood out of.
But it wasn’t just that dress—she needed all her clothes to be clean. Her sheets. Her friends’ nightgowns. She begged the nuns to be allowed to wash her spare dress daily, often stayed in the laundry all through lunch. She spent her days scrubbing fabric, wringing it dry, hanging it up on the line, mending its rips and tears. Cleaning and mending clothes in the way she could never clean and mend herself.
Everything was dirty. The girls bled after having their babies; they bled when they were beaten. She washed the children’s clothes as well, and they bled too. Scraped knees, bloody noses, fights and scuffles, canings when they were bad. There was blood everywhere and she needed to wash it all off.
Sometimes the children died. They fell down the stairs; they became sick; they didn’t eat enough; they coughed up blood that Julia cleaned out of tiny clothes. The babies died even more often. One every couple of weeks. Sometimes their mothers were gone already—back home, or on to one of the industrial schools. Those mothers were never even told their babies had died. Sometimes the mothers were still in the home. Sometimes they knew it was coming—their baby was weak or sickly; there had been signs, symptoms. It didn’t come as a surprise.
For Nellie, it was sudden.
She’d followed the other mothers into the nursery for the one hour a day she was allowed to spend with her child. Her son, Henry, who was over a year old, would light up when she came into the room, would babble nonsense at her while she tickled and hugged him, played peekaboo from behind the curtains.
He wasn’t a healthy child—none of them were. All a bit thin, all a little gray, like they were reflecting the walls around them. Maybe the day before he’d been more sullen than usual, but Nellie chalked that down to him having had a row with another baby or having been scolded by the nuns. There was nothing Nellie could do about it anyway. There was nothing she could have done.
The other mothers filed in before her, picking up their babies and toddlers, finally smiling for the first time that day. Nellie came through the door and looked around for Henry. Thought it strange that he wasn’t there.
Her first thought—filled with horror—was that he had been adopted out and she hadn’t been told. That he was now on his way to live with a family, to have a life outside these tall gray walls and away from the fourteen-year-old mother he only saw for sixty minutes of every day.
Her tears had already begun to fall when the nursery nun saw her. “So you’ve been told, then,” she said to the crying girl.
“When did it happen?” Nellie choked out.
“Last night,” the nun said. “It was fast and painless. He’s with the angels in heaven now.”
The words sank like stones.
* * *
—
Nellie was led out of the nursery because her screaming was upsetting the babies. The Mother Superior wanted to send her back to work, but she threw herself on the floor of the laundry and wouldn’t move. Her howls were heard all the way through the home, echoed around the empty dormitories, screamed through the kitchens, screeched over the noise of the laundry machines.
“I want him buried!” she cried. “Beside my baby sisters in the angels plot in the cemetery. I want to put flowers on his grave. That’s all. That’s all I want.”
Cecilia and Julia averted their eyes from their friend. They knew the baby wouldn’t be buried in the angels plot for unbaptized babies. This child, born of sin, wouldn’t lie in consecrated ground at all. He would lie with the other home babies in the mass grave at the bottom of the big garden.
It took a few days for Nellie to realize where the nuns had buried her baby. No priest, no funera
l. Just a few prayers, like when a family pet dies. Illegitimate children were not buried in consecrated ground.
Neither were suicides.
When Nellie disappeared, her friends assumed she had finally been sent home. The nuns believed they were protecting the other girls by not telling them, and the girls didn’t think anything of the extra prayers the nuns required of them that evening. They didn’t think to wonder why the bishop had been called over from the town.
And they didn’t wonder why the big window on the main landing had been boarded up, the ground below scrubbed clean.
22.
Penance
Donegal, 1936–1937
After Nellie left, Julia and Cecilia grew closer. They worked side by side, exchanging whispers when they could. They tried to slip out to the bathroom together, to take a few minutes outside the heat and the steam and the noise of the laundry, to talk and to breathe.
In the laundry, the girls washed the nuns’ habits. Julia was fascinated by those black robes, so like witches’ cloaks. You couldn’t even see a body underneath them. It was like they were floating across the floor. Except for the clacking of the heels of their black shoes. When you heard that, you knew that if you were doing something you weren’t supposed to, you’d best stop at once.
The girls’ tunics were like the robes, Julia thought. Designed in such a way that any sign of there being a female body underneath was entirely masked by the heavy drop of the fabric that flattened even the largest of breasts, that erased even the widest of hips. Julia’s baby was due within the month, but in those dresses even the swell of her belly was lessened.
All the Bad Apples Page 13
