Nolan Trilogy (36 page)

When she opened it, expecting reels of film she’d have to hold up to the light to discern their content until she could sneak in and use the projector, she was surprised to find two red leather bound books, side by side, with
“Five Year Diary”
in gold lettering on the front.  She opened the first one—there was no lock, just a red leather flap with a gold edge—looking at the date written at the top in her mother’s handwriting:
January 1, 1934.

How old would she have been then?  Around Erica’s age now… maybe twenty?  She opened the other book, checking the date on top—
May 12, 1936. 
Clearly her mother had more to say than a five-year diary had space to contain.  She put the later-dated diary down, picking up the first one, knowing she should put it back, that what she was about to do was wrong.  She always knew, the inkling of her conscience nagging at her, and somehow she always did the wrong thing anyway. 

Erica opened one and began to read. 

Leah now knew why the wood floors—and walls and ceilings—were always gleaming at Magdalene House.  The girls spent most of their time doing chores, washing dishes, cleaning toilets or scrubbing floors, and even their “leisure” time consisted mostly of knitting or sewing.  The nuns were nurses, not teachers, so there was no education going on except of the religious variety.  Besides, the girls in the house ranged in age from thirteen—fourteen, since Lizzie had just had a birthday at the end of August—to thirty, most of them averaging between seventeen and twenty, and it would have been difficult to teach them all at a common level.

Of course, learning about God’s will and His plan for them in His infinite wisdom was a lesson they could all be taught, and the nuns accepted this task with relish.  After the initial beastly medical examination, Leah had hoped her humiliation was over, but it turned out Sister Benedict’s attitude toward her wasn’t personal.  All of the girls were reminded on a daily basis they had committed the worst possible mortal sin and they were being punished for it. 

Every night after dinner but before bed, all thirty-two of them were required to get down on their knees in the sitting room in front of the nuns, four rows of eight, and beg God’s forgiveness.  And if they didn’t—there had only been one instance of rebellion Leah had witnessed since she arrived—the sisters at Magdalene House had pointers and paddles and they weren’t afraid to use them.

The nuns taught the girls the value of silence, how to walk softly on the wooden floors, how to whisper when they were speaking and only when communication was an absolute necessity.  Even on days when the doctor or social worker came and the nuns lined them all up in those wooden chairs Leah had seen on her first day outside of the examining room, appointments scheduled throughout the day, the girls were expected to remain quiet, keeping their hands busy with knitting or sewing projects. 

And the nuns had plenty of those, most of them involving gray broadcloth.  They must have received a huge donation from a generous donor, because they had bolts and bolts of it, along with yards and yards of white cotton.  The girls who could sew spent many afternoons on machines sewing the gray dresses or white nightgowns they all wore from patterns.  Marty had once told her the nuns recycled everything, and it was true.  When it was time for a new girl to join them, they would remove the old label sewn into the back collar of each dress with a seam ripper, and replace it with a new one.  They had a rotating name system and labels for each.  The only thing that changed was the size of the dresses or their nightgowns, and most of those could be altered or hemmed.  They were, after all, maternity dresses, made more like tents than anything else.

The best job was knitting the “going-home outfits” for the babies.  The nuns had a wall of shelves full of yarn in the sewing room—pink, blue, white, yellow, green, every possible pastel color combination.  They also had hundreds of knitting patterns and the girls were encouraged to make tiny booties, diaper covers, little jackets and, of course, baby bonnets.  They would sit in the front room where it was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, ten or fifteen of them at a time, knitting needles clacking, whispering back and forth when the nuns were otherwise occupied.

When an outfit was completed, it was packaged in tissue and a flat, white box.  There were stacks of these boxes in the sewing room, filled with outfits the girls had made.  Sometimes stacks would disappear, loaded onto trucks, and Leah wondered if they were being sold to mothers who didn’t have time to knit their own baby outfits.

The girls who never got the hang of sewing or knitting were the unlucky ones.  They all had chores, of course—the chalk board on the second floor detailed those quite clearly—but while Leah and the other sewing girls made dresses and sweet little baby things, the other girls spent their time in the laundry. 

The nuns ran a large laundry out of Magdalene House.  Leah had only been in the laundry room once, stumbling into it by accident.  It was an enormous operation, and both the nuns and the Magdalene girls put in their time there, but other women came to work every day in the laundry too, washing sheets from the hospital next door, bleaching them in the hottest water and ironing them with mammoth machines, creating walls of steam.  It was stifling in there, like a sauna, only not so nice. 

Poor little Lizzie worked in the laundry, never having learned to sew.  When she broke one of the sewing machines, the nuns decided to put her to work elsewhere, and the laundry was the logical place.  Lizzie said they laundered diapers there too, for the babies delivered next door, but others as well.  Hundreds of them came through at a time.  Trucks arrived early, five-thirty in the morning, dropping off dirty ones and picking up the clean ones. 

She told them about it sometimes, whenever the girls in her room escaped to the turrets, taking a transistor radio with them as they snuck up the back stairs after hours.  They would sit in a circle and pass a cigarette around—they were contraband, like gum and radios and Faygo pop—and listen to Tom Clay spinning the tunes while they talked about movies or hairstyles, but mostly about home. 

“Who’s the new girl?”  Leah asked, passing the cigarette from Lizzie on her left to Frannie on her right without taking a drag.  She didn’t smoke, didn’t even like the smell of it, especially since she’d gotten pregnant, but the other girls all smoked like chimneys as much as they could get away with.

“She’s not a girl—she’s almost thirty!”  Frannie took a long, deep draw on the Lucky Strike. 

“What’s wrong with her?”  Marty asked, accepting the cigarette from Frannie and tapping an ash into the ashtray sitting on the floor in the middle of the circle.  “She looks...” 

“She’s retarded,” Lizzie piped up.  “I heard Sister Benedict telling Mother Superior about her.  She’s a mongoose.” 

Leah met Marty’s eyes and they burst out laughing. 

“What?”  Lizzie frowned, accepting the cigarette from a still-giggling Marty. 

“It’s Mongoloid, ya goof.  A mongoose is a weasel.” 

“Anyway, she’s the new ‘Jean.’” Frannie leaned back on her arms, groaning at the weight of the belly in her lap.  She was bigger than all of them, and due later. 

“I heard she was raped,” Lizzie said, tucking her Shirley Temple curls behind her ears.  She had the face of a china doll, and her curls were natural, unlike the tap-dancing Miss Temple, who used to spend hours in curlers—at least that’s what all the magazines said. 

Frannie snorted, massaging her huge belly.  “Yeah, right, me too.” 

“Really?”  Leah raised her eyebrows at the swarthy brunette.  Frannie had skin like café au lait, and the biggest, darkest eyes Leah had ever seen.  She was sure her real name wasn’t Frances or anything like it. 

“No,” Frannie giggled.  “But that’s what I told my padre when he found out.” 

“Wasn’t it your basketball coach?”  Marty asked, watching Leah pass on the Lucky Strike.  Marty had procured the pack from one of the laundry women.  She could always get things, it seemed—gum and Faygo pop and cigarettes.  Leah knew it wasn’t her favorite brand, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. 

“He told me he loved me.”  Frannie accepted the cigarette, blowing an impressive smoke ring—she was the only one of them who could.  “Would do anything for me.  Wanted to marry me.” 

“What happened?”  Leah asked. 

Frannie smiled, handing Marty the cigarette.  “Turned out he was already married.” 

“What about you, Lily?”  Marty inquired, reaching her bare foot across and nudging her with her toe. 

Leah shook her head.  She wouldn’t talk about Rob.  She couldn’t bear it. 

“My boyfriend wanted to marry me, but my parents wouldn’t let us.”  Marty took a second drag on the cigarette like she was a drowning woman sucking at the air.  “Dick was from the ‘wrong side of the tracks.’ Besides, I heard he got some other girl knocked up.  My daddy had one of his guys go beat the crap out of him.” 

“What about you, Lizzie?”  Leah smiled over at the little blonde on her left.  Lizzie was everyone’s favorite, so impossibly young and naïve, she always spoke her mind and got away with it.  “Did your daddy beat the crap out of the guy who knocked you up?” 

“My daddy was the guy who knocked me up.”  Lizzie stabbed the barely remaining butt of the cigarette out in the ashtray, looking up at them staring at her.  “What?” 

“You’re joking,” Marty said with an uncomfortable laugh, meeting Leah’s eyes. 

“Nope.”  Lizzie blew the last bit of smoke out of the corner of her mouth.  “When I told the ghoul, she said my baby would probably be born deformed.  Said he’d probably have to be raised by the nuns.” 

Joan Goulden—all the girls called her the ghoul, because she wore so much makeup and she never, ever smiled, so her red-lipsticked mouth would droop into a frown, and her heavily made-up eyes behind her thick glasses—was the social worker who handled their adoptions.  She came once a month, like the doctor, and met with all of them, asking all sorts of invasive questions. 

“You told her?”  Leah blinked in surprise. 

“She wouldn’t stop asking me who the father was.” 

Leah knew the drill.  And although she had refused, so far, to tell the ghoul—“
Joan, dear, you can call me Joan,”
as if they were the best of friends—who the father of her baby was, now she knew she could never, ever give in and reveal the truth, or her baby wouldn’t be placed in a respectable home. 

What if he’s deformed? 

She rubbed her belly through her white cotton nightgown, feeling the baby moving.  It wasn’t long after the doctor had heard the heartbeat—a few weeks—when she’d felt it for the first time.  She’d been in the shower and she’d thought, at first, it was just the water running over her rounded belly. 

They had two bathrooms for thirty-two girls, one on each of the residence floors.  The toilets were lined up in stalls, six of them, but the showers were open, community affairs, just showerheads in a line along one tiled wall, no curtains or anything. 

There was no privacy in Magdalene House and the nuns walked in whenever they liked, coming in to hurry them along while they were scrubbing up, wet and naked at six in the morning.  The girls kept tabs on each other’s bellies, watching navels evolve from tucked away “innies” to flattened whorls to poked-out little bits of flesh. 

They watched each other growing bigger and bigger—and bigger still—faces and bellies getting rounder every week.  The girls whose names were near the top of their weekly rotating chore list were the biggest, getting ready to pop—that was Marty’s phrase.

Marty had been teasing her about her belly-button, her long red hair like wet copper over her creamy white shoulders as she poked Leah’s tummy,
“It’s gonna pop out any minute now!” 
Marty’s navel was already slightly extended, and she’d felt her baby move a hundred times, she said. 
“Like butterflies,”
is what she claimed it felt like. 

Leah had turned off the shower, standing there wide-eyed and dripping on the tile, the first time she felt it, sure she was imagining things, but no—there it was again.  Like the lightest of touches, a sweet caress, only it was on the
inside
of her body. 

“Did you feel it?”  Marty had asked, grabbing Leah’s arm.  “You’re feeling it, aren’t you?  Did you feel it?”