Embracing Darkness (65 page)

“You can’t do such a thing,” declared Mary Margaret. “Your husband… .”

“I’ll be the one who decides what is to be done with her,” said Edith.

“You’re a stubborn woman,” replied Mary Margaret. “You stay here and rest. The female can stay until you’re strong enough to take her the hell outta here, but be sure you’re gone before me husband gets home.”

She then put on her coat and took the newborn boy to Seamus Brennan. “He’ll be so proud to see you, me boy!” Edith heard Mary Margaret say as she slammed the front door shut.

Within a few hours dusk began to settle in. Edith had gotten up a few times to feed the child, offering her breast to her, which she took immediately each time. The first time she fed the infant, Edith worried about the boy’s nourishment, wondering how Mary Margaret would feed him. Edith remembered Robert mention how newborns need to eat every two hours or so. This made Edith worry for her son.

Robert Poole came home unexpectedly a short time later. He wasn’t due home until around 8:00, but he wasn’t feeling well and so had a colleague take over his shift for him. He called for Mary Margaret, and instead Edith responded. He opened the bedroom door and saw Edith sitting up in bed and cradling a newborn in her arms.

“Oh, my God! When did this… ?”

“Around 2:00,” Edith answered. “Meet your daughter.”

A
daughter?
Robert thought, and Mary Margaret suddenly popped into his head. “Mary Margaret, where is she? Where’s the other baby? Was it a boy?”

“She left,” replied Edith, as two of the newborn’s tiny fingers wrapped around her mother’s finger. “She took our son with her to show him to your father-in-law.”

“A boy,” Robert said happily. “Now she’ll be satisfied.” He looked down at the infant as he sat on the edge of the bed. “And a girl.”

“Yes,” replied Edith, beginning to cry, “and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Edith explained to Robert how Mary Margaret had reacted to the girl. They knew they had to do something before she returned. They were well aware that Mary Margaret knew she had to get back to the house and get Edith out of there before Robert came home. Edith got the rest of her clothes on while Robert prepared a bag for the baby.

“I have no say in this, do I?” Robert asked.

“No, unless you want her to know that you knew the truth,” said Edith. “If you want to keep your secret, then you must forget that there was a twin.”

They both observed the tiny girl asleep in Edith’s arms. Her mother kissed the tiny head as Robert’s eyes welled with tears.

“This isn’t fair,” he said.

“No, it isn’t, unless you’re willing to confront Mary Margaret, take our son away from her, divorce her, and marry me. Would you be willing to do that, Robert?”

He stroked the baby’s cheek with his thumb. “And would you give up your reputation in the community and make known what you and I did?”

They didn’t say it, but both of them knew that the answer to those questions was no.

Robert Poole and Edith Fisher left the Poole residence shortly before Mary Margaret and Seamus Brennan returned there. By that time Edith had returned home, and Robert was off to the orphanage in Exeter.

Edith would see Robert the next morning, as he had told her to come to the hospital early so that he could examine her to make sure she was alright after the childbirth. It would be the first of many encounters the two would have after the twins’ separation.

Meanwhile Dr. Robert Poole had a very important delivery to make. He took a carriage taxi from Portsmouth to Exeter with his baby daughter in one hand and a bag in the other, a bag that contained a change of baby clothes, a few yards of diaper material, and the blanket that Edith Fisher had crocheted.

There was a clap of thunder outside and the elderly doctor at 35 Faulkner Street stirred from his slumber and shifted in his armchair.

As Father Poole’s bus left the third station, the driver shouted, “NEXT STOP KINGSTON. KINGSTON IS OUR NEXT STOP. WATCH YOUR STEP, PLEASE.” Phineas shifted once again in his seat, almost awakened by the boisterous call. He was tired after having awakened early that day to travel to Manchester in order to meet with Bishop Ramsey.

Phineas closed his eyes again. Within moments, he was sleeping. He dreamed of being a young boy of nearly seven. A late February storm had brought about half a foot of snow to the area. Little Phineas watched from his bedroom window as the larger than usual flakes fell to the ground below.

The storm was over by early afternoon. Young Phineas ran to his mother, who as usual was perched on the sofa reading a back issue of
Harper’s
Round
Table
from 1892 that contained a serialized installment of Thomas Hardy’s
Tess
of
the
D’Urbervilles
and that she had appropriated from Edith Fisher’s coffee table years earlier when Edith’s water had broken.

Mary Margaret had kept the magazine as a memento of the most important event in her life, the birth of her son. Phineas ran into the living room and jumped onto the sofa.

“Mamma!” he said excitedly. “It stopped snowing! Can I go out and build a snowman? Can I?”

Unwilling to break her concentration on
Tess
of
the
D’Urbervilles
, though she had read it often before, Mary Margaret said passively, “Yes, honey. That’s fine.”

Phineas yelled, “OH BOY!” and ran back to his room. He knew he’d have to put on his heavy pants, the thick Abercrombie & Fitch sweater that his paternal grandmother had given him for his last birthday, and his galoshes. He then ran out the back door. With a satchel over his shoulder that contained two pieces of charcoal for the snowman’s eyes, a long carrot for his nose, and a handful of coffee beans for the mouth, he leaped through the snow like a frog jumping from one lily pad to another. He made it to the center of the back yard, where he now had plenty of room to start rolling the three balls that would make up his snowman.

As he swung around to unload the satchel from his back, Phineas saw the shed where his father would always go to smoke his cigarettes. It was a ritual Robert had come to enjoy, since it got him away from Mary Margaret. With his wife glued to the couch all day, he was never bothered by her. This made his refuge all the more enticing. There he wouldn’t have to see his wife or hear her nagging Irish voice.

In fact, Robert enjoyed his new quiet space in the shed so much that he began doing other things there too, such as fixing hinges or doorknobs. Sadly, he now wanted to escape from both his wife and son any chance he got. The shed became his oasis in a desert of indifference to his wife and disconnection from the son he’d been manipulated into having.

As little Phineas’s eyes focused on the shed, he noticed a light coming from inside. He squatted down and crept stealthily out to the shed, which was nothing more than a makeshift series of wooden planks carelessly nailed together to resemble a small house. Robert, not the handiest of men, had installed a small glass window in the back and a large plank as a door in the front. The tiny window was the only attractive feature of the otherwise crude shack, and Robert had located the window away from a view of the house so that Mary Margaret (or anyone else) couldn’t see what he was doing inside. It would be a true sanctuary for the doctor.

Phineas crept to the shed’s solitary window. Stepping on a small stack of logs that served as a reserve supply for the Poole’s fireplace, he pushed his nose against the glass. His plan was to rap on the window as soon as his father put a cigarette in his mouth, but something interrupted Phineas’s scheming. Someone else was there with his father. At first it was difficult for the boy to make out whether it was a man or a woman. He pulled back from the window and wiped off the mist that had collected there. With his view now clear, Phineas pressed his face again to the glass and held his breath, although not for long, because what he beheld was something that would haunt him for the next few months.

Though stricken with terror at the sight, Phineas couldn’t look away. It was almost as if the shock had turned him into stone. Inside the shed he saw his father between the legs of a girl who was naked from the waist down. Robert Poole was poking inside what Phineas knew to be the private part of a girl’s body. Still frozen in his tracks, the boy watched this unfortunate girl of no more than fifteen weep as his father continued to hurt her. Were it not for the amount of blood, Phineas perhaps would have assumed that the two were playing some sort of inappropriate game, but the girl was sobbing, and blood was everywhere.

Phineas might have remained there to watch had not Dr. Poole paused to get something from a shelf just under the tiny window. As he turned, he saw his son staring at him, visibly horrified. Robert gasped and called the boy by name. Phineas’s reaction was the same as his father’s: he went to move away from the window. Instead of making a run for the house, Phineas lost his balance on the stack of firewood and fell onto his back in the snow. By this time Robert had reached the back of the shed.

He pulled Phineas up by the arm and said, just above a whisper, “What do you think you’re doing boy? What are you doing out here? Spying on me? Did your mother tell you to spy on me?”

Phineas, still traumatized, couldn’t find words with which to respond. He wished he could disappear into the house, the one place he wanted to be just now. His dear mother would never subject him to such a terrible thing.

“Answer me, Phineas!” Robert Poole hissed. “Why were you back here?”

In a low voice the seven-year-old prevaricated, “I just wanted you to help me build a snowman.”

Robert told his son to make his snowman close to the house and not go inside until it was completed. The boy did as he was told, anxious to be far away from his father. Robert, meanwhile, finished his work with the door open so as to keep an eye on Phineas. About a half hour later the doctor sent the girl on her way and tidied up the mess in the shed.

In an attempt to entice Phineas to speak to him, Robert Poole asked his son whether Phineas might like to join him in town for a hot cocoa with as much whipped cream as the boy liked. Young Phineas continued forming the third and smallest ball of the snowman, which would soon become the head.

Robert gave up and went inside to join his wife. To her surprise Robert didn’t leave Mary Margaret’s side for the rest of the afternoon, his motive being to intercept Phineas in case his son meant to confide in his mother. The boy, however, didn’t approach his parents while they were together.

That first evening Robert tried talking to his son alone. He knocked on the boy’s door and asked whether they could talk. Phineas just rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes tightly. “Phinny,” said Robert from behind the bedroom door. “we’ll talk when you’re ready, but the most important thing is that you don’t say a word to your mother about this. You’ll understand why once I explain it, but until then you cannot say anything to her. She won’t understand.”

Phineas avoided his father for the rest of the week. Every time he thought of his father he’d remember that young girl with her legs open. He couldn’t get the image or the girl’s whimpering cries out of his head. Every night that week, while he lay in bed, Phineas would see these visions over and over again. They were a torment to him, one that he couldn’t dispel no matter how hard he tried to think of other things such as the first day of spring, his impending birthday, playtime at school, or wondering what he would ask Santa Claus for next Christmas. Each time he closed his eyes he saw blood and heard weeping.

Although Robert greatly feared that Phineas would tell Mary Margaret everything he’d seen in the shed, he couldn’t stay home from work forever to keep a paranoid vigil by Phineas’s side. It was a risk that each time he walked out the door might be the last of his seemingly normal family life, but each morning since the shed incident Robert Poole did make it to work.

Before leaving he would muss Phineas’s hair and ask him, “How’d you sleep, champ?” to which Phineas would always reply in a monotone voice, “Good,” while keeping his eyes on his porridge. As Robert went to kiss Phineas goodbye, he’d whisper in his ear, “Remember, when you’re ready we’ll talk, but not a word to your mother. She’ll be very upset if you do say anything.”

Finally, on a Friday about two months after the day of the snowstorm, Robert decided to confront his son about what Phineas had seen in the shed, but he couldn’t do it while the two were at home. So Robert decided to give Mary Margaret some extra sofa time while he picked up Phineas from school. His excuse to his wife would be simple: “Why, it’s so beautiful outside, the first warm afternoon we’ve had in seven months. I’ll go pick the boy up at school. The walk will do me good.”

As he waited for his son outside West Portsmouth Elementary School, just blocks from where they lived, Robert anxiously anticipated the long overdue and increasingly inevitable conversation he was going to have with his seven-year-old. He kept reviewing in his mind how he would bring up the matter.

Robert was willing to do anything to remedy his son’s estrangement from him. He was grateful, though, for at least one thing: Mary Margaret remained completely unaware of the tension between father and son. Since the two had never been close, it was easy to mistake avoidance for indifference. Another thing that still worried Robert was how he was going to get his son to understand what it was that he had been doing. He had to think of some way to allay, if not exorcise, Phineas’s fear.

Phineas, along with the other boys and girls, raced out the front doors of West Portsmouth Elementary School at 3:05 that Friday afternoon in April. Phineas searched around nervously for his mother. He saw a hand waving over the heads of all the other parents and matched it with a voice that called out his name.

Phineas frowned upon seeing his father breaking through the crowd and smiling widely. “Where’s mommy?” he asked.