The Magdalen (19 page)

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Authors: Marita Conlon-McKenna

BOOK: The Magdalen
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Esther sat silent in the recreation room. Rita, Sheila, and a few of the others were playing with a greasy, limp pack
of cards at a table in the corner. Tonight she was in no humour for cards. Some of the orphans and women were gathered around listening to the wireless on the sideboard. The BBC had nothing but talk about the death of King George VI, the quiet gentle man who'd taken over from his brother Edward when he'd abdicated. England would now have a queen for the first time in centuries, when his elder daughter Elizabeth was crowned. “The poor thing, losing her father like that when she was away out in Africa!” murmured Maura.
“Will ya switch that radio over!” bossed Sheila. “We've no need to be listening to sad stories about English kings. None of them gave a spit for Ireland! God knows we fought hard for our independence.”
“He was a good man!” insisted Maura stubbornly as Saranne fiddled with the dial and tuned in Radio Eireann. They were playing songs from the Hollywood musicals, Gene Kelly's voice filling the room.
Sister Gabriel had given out yards to her about having a visitor during working hours and the time she'd lost in the laundry. She'd been too distracted and upset to argue with her.
“Are you all right, Esther girl?”
She looked up. Maura had drawn up a chair close to hers.
“I overheard Gabriel giving out to you down below. Don't mind her! You had a visitor, one of your family was it?”
“Aye, Maura. 'Twas my brother Tom.”
“He upset you?”
“No, not really! I was glad to see him. He's the best of
them all, we've always been close. It's just that seeing him made me think of home. So much has happened since I went away, it's as if I'm not part of it anymore. I've made such a mess of everything!” she sobbed. Tears welled up in her eyes and she had to rummage for a hankie in her pocket.
“Home visitors always do it,” murmured Maura. “They always manage to upset us.”
“Did your mother ever forgive you for having a baby, Maura?”
“My mother died when I was twelve, Esther, and I didn't give my baby up. My two children are being raised by my husband Billy.”
“You're married!” gasped Esther, incredulous, though she supposed that Maura
had
always seemed more motherly and mature and wise than the rest of them. That's why people always went to her in times of trouble.
“I got married when I was eighteen, younger than you,” she confided. “Billy's a good man and we lived with his mother and spinster sister down near Wicklow town. Our first baby, Eoin, was born about a year after. Always wanting to be fed, such a pet, then when he was about two and a half I had Catriona, the prettiest little thing you ever did see. Billy was mad about her. The following year I had Cormac. He was a fractious child, God help him, always whingeing and crying, but I did love him though he weren't a bit like the other two. Then one night I went to lift him for his last feed and there he was dead in the cot. I nearly died myself, Esther! He was cold and white when I lifted him. I tried to warm him, get him to breathe, but 'twas no use. My husband Billy didn't know what to make
of it. I told them all what I'd found, but his mother kept on saying that she'd seen me and that I killed my baby, smothered him, that he'd been crying all night and I'd tried to make him stop. As God is my judge, Esther, I don't remember touching him. He were gone when I found him.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Esther couldn't believe what Maura was telling her.
“The police were called, and the doctor. I was in shock! Nobody'd listen to me. I'd just lost my baby. They brought me to the courthouse in Wicklow town, charged me with killing my baby. The judge, a Justice Hanratty, sentenced me to prison, but instead sent me here for three years. Catriona and Eoin still live with their daddy and granny. Billy didn't want me to come home when my time was up, said it would upset the children and his mother. Do you know what he told me—that my children had forgotten me and he didn't want to remind them of what kind of a mother I was!”
“Oh, Maura!” Esther tried to hide her dismay and bewilderment. What could she say to console her, a woman locked away for murder?
“Don't say nothing, Esther, you know there's nothing to say. I was put away for murdering my baby. I've heard it so often that at times I almost believe it. Poor little Cormac was taken from me and I'll never see my other two children again. You think the Marys are crazy, well I'm telling you girl, there are far worse here. This place is full of the ghosts of women gone mad.”
“You're not mad, Maura!” protested Esther, trying to convince herself. Everyone was fond of Maura and respected
her. Perhaps she hadn't noticed it before, but in some strange way maybe they feared her, unsure of what she was capable of doing. “Some day your children will grow up and they'll find out the truth and come to find you.”
“You think so?”
“Aye, of course. You're their mother and nothing can change that!”
Sitting there thinking about her brothers and her mother, and the distance that had grown between them, Esther began to realize that the Maggies had become her family now. She couldn't imagine surviving without them.
“G
ive me back my child!”
The scream rose up from the nursery window and spread through the cold building, penetrating every brick and window and beam. They heard it even down below in the laundry, those that had given up children steeling themselves as, standing at the stone sinks, elbow-deep in lathered water, they washed bucket after bucket of clothes. Esther and the rest held their breath in sheer panic and fear, and the young orphan girls looked bewildered.
Bernice yelled and screamed for hours and hours non-stop. Sister Gabriel, furious with temper, had started up the stairs after her. “I'll not have the likes of that Bernice Doherty causing
an upset in my convent. What's the matter with her anyway? She knew that after six weeks her child was going to the orphanage, same as the rest of the babies.”
Sister Jo-Jo, her face creased with sympathy, pleaded with the women to work, the noise of the heavy tumblingmachines drowning out the commotion going on upstairs, the women scrubbing at shirt collars and cuffs in rage.
“Have a care, girls! Should we say a prayer for poor Bernice?”
They all recited an Our Father.
“Will I go up to her, Sister? Bernice and I are close,” offered Rita. “She'll listen to me.”
Puzzlement and indecision filled the fifty-year-old nun's face. She was never sure whether to trust the Maggies or not. She had been warned often enough by her superiors about how deceiving the women were, and how they would take advantage of her kind Christian nature.
“No words with Sister Gabriel, mind!” she finally agreed as Rita slipped away.
 
 
Esther was almost asleep when Bernice joined them back in the dormitory. She had been given Detta's old bed near the window, as Saranne had moved into her normal spot. Her eyes were red and raw with crying and she had rubbed welts under them. She moved slowly, her breath coming in deep shudders. She looked like an old woman instead of an attractive twenty-five-year-old drapery assistant. Rita led her towards the bed, helping her to undress. Her breasts were engorged and swollen with milk. She hadn't tried to
wean her baby, hoping that as long as little Stephen kept feeding she would be allowed to stay with him. Her white breasts with their brown-tinged nipples were hard and hot and sore. She could barely raise her arms. They were all afraid to do or say anything in case it would set off her weeping and wailing again, only Sheila and Maura getting out of bed to go and hug her.
“Honest, Ber, it'll be all right!” whispered Sheila. “You'll get a bit better every day, honest, lovey, you will!”
Rita talked to her like she was a little child, fixing her pillow, tucking her in, sitting with her till she eventually fell asleep.
Esther's thoughts were racing. Pain was etched on Bernice's face. She had witnessed that very same expression on her mother's face when her brothers had carried Nonie back from the bog. Such was the grief of losing a child. She did not think that she was capable of bearing such pain; already her life had been touched by too many sorrows, too much tragedy.
They all had a fitful sleep as Bernice thrashed and turned through the night. “I'll never see him again!” were her waking words as dawn broke.
They all looked out for her as Sister Gabriel sent her back to work straight away. Bernice returned to her old routine, ironing men's shirts, folding and wrapping them neatly, but her usual good humour and sparkle seemed to have disappeared. She haunted the orphan girls, asking them all about the nursery and how the babies were treated in the orphanage. Saranne had worked for more than a year with the infants and was able to relay lots of
information. Bernice had her pestered. “What time do they get the babies up?” “Will Stephen be bathed every day?” “How often do they change the nappies?”
Saranne, who was a serious sort, with straight mouselike hair and a nervous expression, had been raised in the Holy Saints orphanage. She knew no other life, only that which the nuns had exposed her to, hardship and duty and routine. “The babies are well cared for, Bernice, honest to God! Sister Angela would strap anyone who would harm any of the babies. Your baby will be fine.”
Bernice at least took some comfort in that.
 
 
Esther herself felt both physically and mentally weary. She was tired all the time, and longed to lie down and rest. Her feet and ankles were swollen and although she was only twenty she had varicose veins like those of a middle-aged woman. It came from all the standing. She also felt depressed, Bernice's situation seeding doubts in her own mind about what would happen to her.
“From next week on, you'll work in the kitchens,” Sister Josepha had informed her. “You're too near your time to be of much use to me here. Ina will have plenty of jobs for you.”
She almost cried with gratitude.
As Bernice seemed to gradually resign herself to what had happened, only crying in her sleep at night, it was Rita who really worried Esther. She seemed totally distracted, slipping away too often to meet Paul. She seemed crazy, in love almost, recklessly courting danger and disaster, taking risks to see her lover.
“They'll get caught!” warned Jim Murray. “Sure everybody knows about them.” Every day the van driver appeared at the kitchen door for a mug of Ina's strong dark tea and a slice of whatever was fresh out of the oven.
The cook had a soft spot for him. “He's a gentleman, Esther, and you don't get many of those in this neck of the woods.”
He always enquired about Esther's well-being. Watching him, she realized what a good, kind man he was. Although he was only of average height, he was broad and strong, which was obvious from all the heavy loads he lifted day after day. Every day he read the
Irish Press
and could tell you all the latest news, as he always collected an early edition hot off the presses down in Burgh Quay.
“Any mention of Galway?” she'd ask, dying for a bit of local news about her own place.
Jim's blue-grey eyes were serious as he tried to see if there was anything worth reading aloud.
“I think you have an admirer yourself, Esther,” joked Ina. Esther flushed. 'Twas very unlikely she'd have any admirer with the state she was in, ready to drop a baby. Ina needed her head examined. Anyways, Jim was far too old, he was at least thirty-five and what in heaven's name would he be bothered with someone like her for? “I'm telling you, Esther, the man is lonely out ever since his wife died and he trying to raise those poor children on his own. Why do you think he keeps coming to the kitchen looking for a bit of home cooking and a bit of a chat, instead of gallivanting off to the pub like most men would do? He's lonesome, if you ask me!”
Jim didn't strike Esther as the lonely type at all, for he
was always laughing and chatting with the rest of the drivers and enjoyed delivering and collecting and meeting his regular customers. Still, she remembered how her mother used to cry for her daddy at night, alone in the kitchen when she thought all the rest of them were asleep.
“If I were twenty years younger I'd be mad about him myself. He's got a great look of that actor fellow that can sing and dance, Gene Kelly!”
Esther thought Ina was half daft.
“Will you lift out two or three of the buckets, Esther, and leave them in the yard? I think I hear the pig-man coming.”
It was the one kitchen job she hated: the buckets stored in the scullery, the smell of rotting food making her nauseous. Taking a grip of the handles, she grabbed two, choosing not to look at them in any detail at all as she rushed outside.
“Hold on, lassie!” She ran into Jim, almost spilling the buckets. “What in God's name are you doing?” he asked, all annoyed.
“I'm putting these out for Joe.”
“You shouldn't be lifting things like this in your condition. Ina shouldn't be asking you when you're so near your time. Give them to me and I'll leave them down for you!” He took the buckets from out of her hands, leaving them in the laneway outside the yard where Joe stopped every second day to collect the institution's food scraps. Esther smiled to herself. Ina was right, he was a gentleman. No wonder he was saying so little about Rita and the good-looking Paul.
Rita herself had got friendly with Saranne, and Esther
couldn't help but wonder if she was up to something. Why was she so interested in the young girl from the orphanage all of a sudden? Perhaps Esther was getting too suspicious of her, like the rest of them.
 
 
As the days dragged slowly into one another, she longed to see her own child, feel it in her arms. She wondered if Conor ever thought of the baby he had fathered, or was he so caught up in his marriage to Nuala that his own flesh and blood no longer mattered? One thing was for sure: that old McGuinness bride of his would never give him a child!

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