Shame

This story is based on recent, documented historical fact which some readers might find upsetting.

Will is keeping his distance from an older woman who’s walking along Bishop Street, using shop fronts to keep from the rain where she can. A cathedral looms in the foreground, a mid-Victorian structure which lacks the grace of earlier temples by simply trying too hard. Everything is damp, grey, driving monochrome. 

He had been hoping to catch up with her when she left her home, but the flat Georgian frontage in a terraced, pastel street, offered no subtlety of approach. He did not want to be seen as a loiterer in a place where there was no reason to be one. And this trepidation has followed him, as he follows her, because there is no good place to accost a stranger without causing alarm. 

He realises that she is heading for the church entrance, and is both pleased by the opportunity of sanctuary, and yet disappointed that she goes there. Before entering, she glances up at the Palladian columns and makes the sign of the cross. Will, twenty paces behind her as she disappears within, does not. 

The woman takes a pew towards the pulpit, not at the end but the middle, which makes things difficult for her follower. Still, he waits until she has settled with her prayer book, and makes his way towards the end of the pews where he stands quietly, dripping rain water on the beeswaxed floor. She continues her litanies, knowing that he must be there. Eventually, with another sign of the cross, she looks towards him and her intake of breath is audible in the lofty chamber. Perhaps he reminds her of someone. 

“Hello,” he opens, and the eastern seaboard accent is clear in just those short syllables.

“Not in here,” she says.

“God forbid,” he replies, which elicits a frown from the woman. 

It is clear she doesn’t want to be seen with him, so she leads him to a small park which has a shelter abutting a stone wall. There is graffiti on the walls and silver canisters at their feet. He looks at her profile, but finds nothing familiar. 

“I don’t want anything from you,” he began. “I live in Philadelphia with a wife, two children and four grandchildren —”

“I’ve nothing to give you,” she said. 

He repressed a sigh, which held the understanding that she has no desire to rock boats, but within that suppression of breath, it also held a disenchantment. 

“How did you find me?” she demanded. “I don’t recall giving permission.”

“There are records,” he offered. “But not complete or freely given. I hired an investigative journalist. They’re the best people.”

“Why?” - and here, when she looked at him, her eyes were filled more with fear than compassion.

“I am sixty-one, Bridy - if I can call you that, at least.” She acknowledged this with a nod. “At eighteen months, I was sent to the States and given to a family who didn’t go and buy themselves another. I had no idea they weren’t my parents until my father developed a problem with dementia and out it would all tumble, forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to know. There was no hatred in it. They both loved me dearly, but I was a lonely kid and I felt a hole in me so deep I figured with one storm, I’d drown.” 

“Why now?” she asked, looking about her for anyone she recognised.

“My mother died last month. I have a few decades left and I want to put all this behind me. But the only way I can do that is to know exactly what it is that’s behind me.”

“Do you have a good marriage?” she asked, her voice softer now. 

“The best marriage in the world,” he said readily. “It’s a rare treasure, and I am so grateful for it, every day. The kids have caused me some troubles, but that’s mostly over now. I’ve done well for myself, Bridy, so don’t go thinking I want anything from you.”

“I’ve nothing to give you,” she repeated. He can tell from her cheap raincoat that this must be true in the material sense. 

Will talked Bridy away from the shabby council lean-to and into a little cafe with steamed windows and fresh cakes. She shrugged off her coat and still looked nervously around for people she might know. Will reassured her that if such a scandal broke, the story must surely be that he was simply another customer with nowhere else to sit. This settles her, and they order tea and porter cake. He coaxes her, through his calm and genial nature, to disclose the story she is so reluctant to tell.

When Bridy was seventeen, she fell in starry-eyed love with a tall, dark and handsome man who used to take her hand on Saturday night dances. One night, he got her knocked-up after a fumble at the back of the dance hall, and shortly afterwards, he went to England and joined the army. He didn’t know. Three months along, Bridy realises she’s pregnant and eventually must tell her parents. For shame, they sent her to a mother and baby unit owned by the state and run by the church. Her condition was couched in legal terms: she was a ‘first-time offender.’ The stated aim of this institution was to hide the fallen women from public gaze. The unstated aim was to profit by it. A year after the birth of their child, they were free to leave - and they could leave earlier if their baby was adopted sooner. If their babies weren’t adopted sooner, they had to leave them behind. There was no choice in the matter. Your child was to be sold, and the mothers were made to sign the adoption forms and watch as their children were taken away from them. And at this point in the tale, Bridy confides in Will that she at once escaped, still pregnant then, and took the English ferry to London, where she had an aunt. 

“So, you wanted me?” asks Will. “You were aiming to keep me.”

“Yes,” she says. “I thought I’d be safe at my aunt’s, but she got in touch with a society operating in London who turned up at the door and brought me back to the unit. I had no choice but to return. There was nowhere else for me to go. She betrayed me.”

She looks at her watch, but she needs her glasses. Will tells her the time, and she shows signs of leaving. 

“What did you call me?” he asks. 

She smiled then; the first time she had, and he saw that his mother was once pretty. “I called you William,” she said. “That’s something they didn’t take from me.”

He orders more tea and she resigns herself to more time with him. “I don’t look like you,” he says, and she tells him he looks like his father, the brown-eyed handsome man, but with better teeth. That’s how she knew who he was in the church.

“Did you ever see him again?”

There is a hesitation; a wall of reluctance, and the dime drops with Will. 

“He came back and you married him ..”

She nods.

“And then you had four other children after me, and all of them are my full-blood brothers and sisters.”

She nods again. Will looks away, marvelling that he is still capable of tears at his age. From all that he has read, he understands his mother and the way it had been back then. He had understood all of that, but this was different. It was as if both his parents had abandoned him. His mother was a tragedy, but the pair of them, continuing on with their lives, raising children without enquiry, well that was a conspiracy. She put her hand on top of his.

“I never told him, he doesn’t know.” 

He looked at her, speechless, so she fills the void. “Look, William. You have your family and I have mine. I can’t change the past or the way it was. You’ll never understand the shame they made you feel, what they beat into us and those children. All the little ones adopted by local families carried the stigma of being a bastard everywhere they went. You were better off in America, where no-one knew, and perhaps cared less anyway. It was day-to-day indoctrination, but it’s over now for the most part. Please Will, let it be. I am too old to want that feeling of shame again.”

“But you married him?” he said, keeping his voice low. “He wasn’t some Johnny-come-lately.”

“But I wasn’t married then,” she said. “The other children were my atonement. You were my sin.”

Again, she makes to leave and this time, Will is not inclined to stop her. He is an architect and knows that nothing can be built on bad soil. She puts something on the table between them. A little plastic baggy with a lock of hair in it. 

“That’s yours,” she said.

He picks it up and looks at it, this little blond curl she’s been keeping a secret in all the handbags she’s ever owned, zipped in a side pocket, and easily explained, if found, as the hair of another child she had later. 

“At least, I think it’s yours.” 

“What does that mean?”

She’s buttoning her frayed coat. “Will,” she says. “I want you to respect my wishes. I may tell them in my own time, but I must have this one advantage over you. I suffered more, and that’s the truth. I can’t tell you how happy I am that you have a loving wife and good kids. They are your family, the ones who’ll lay you to rest one day. But I think there is something you can do, to make you feel better.”

He looks up as she places another plastic baggy on the table, with an identical blond curl. Now her tears are rolling, so he passes her a serviette. 

“I was only allowed to feed one of you,” she said. “The other was given some formula. I was allowed to see him, of course, but he wasted away without my care. Most of those little ones died from gastrointestinal troubles.”

Will felt disembodied. Her words were going in but not absorbing, like water on lead.

 “I had a twin,” he said. 

“I called him Thomas,” she said. “Two of my other children are twins too.” 

“Where is he? Where’s my brother?”

“He died. I did once try to find his birth record, but he’s not there. Just you. This lock of hair is the only proof of his existence.”

“Where is he buried?” Will persisted. 

She leant forward. “At the top of the hill, just out of town, there’s an old stone building with a long driveway. The council occupy it now, but that’s where we were kept with the nuns. It’s surrounded by acres of ground, and the council says it’s too expensive to find them now. Hundreds of them, wee bairns, thrown into holes in the ground and covered over without absolution —”

“You still believe this crap?”

“I believe in the Father and the Son, William. The Holy Ghost I might have a problem with.”

“But I am a son who has a father,” he argued. “Why won’t you believe in that?”

“Because I am the Holy Ghost,” she said. “William, we can argue this all day long, but I must be getting back. Look. Find your brother. Make a big noise and don’t stop. If there’s one thing the government can’t abide, it’s being pestered, especially all the way from America. Do that, Will. Find him, take his bones back with you and you’ll be buried beside him one day, however long it takes. I want my baby found.”

Two days later, on a blessed day when it was not actually raining, Bridy heard a knock on the door, just a double-rap which she might have imagined. Stiff in body and bone, it took her a while to answer the summons, and there was no one there when she did. Her failing eyesight just caught a tall figure disappearing around the corner. He really was the image of his father. 

At her feet was a parcel with her name on it. Inside was a beautiful, new raincoat, which she hung on a hook in the wardrobe, stroking the sleeves as she closed the door. She would tell her husband she’d bought it herself, on the next rainy day. 

And when the next rainy day came, she found a note in the pocket. It said:

Bridy, I thought you needed a new coat, and I hope you like it. I’ve thought about what you said, and I respect your reasons, even though I will never fully understand how they made you feel, or why their reach is still so long. If you ever change your mind, my number is written below. 

I only want to say this one thing. I have a father, and four siblings, and then there’s me and there’s you. That makes seven people bothering the council, looking for Thomas. Think about it, Mammy.

Love, William 

Her shopping bag lay empty on the floor, and this is how her husband found her, staring into space, wearing her new coat. And she said, “I’ve something to tell you, and now I’m about it, I can’t for the life of me think why I never told you before. I just didn’t want you fretting over something we had no control over. He was gone, all legal, and no way of having him back again ..”

When she was finished, her husband cupped her face in his hands and said, ‘My God, Bridie, but they worked a number on you, didn’t they. My poor old love. Now pass me that note.”

“I don’t know what the time is over there,” she protested. “It might be the middle of the night.”

“Well, I don’t give a shit about that and neither will he. Now give me the note, Bridie.”

Minutes later, he heard the international dialling tone, and then a woman’s cheerful voice. “Who shall I say is calling?” 

“You can tell him it’s his Daddy.”