The Misremembered Man (27 page)

L
ydia had difficulty negotiating her way through the streets of Derry. She had not driven in a city before and made several wrong turnings before finally reaching what she was coming to see as journey’s end.

The Mount Carmel Retirement Home was a somber, three-story building, clad in ivy and set on an incline at the end of a sweeping gravel driveway. A wall of lush greenery and rhododendrons fenced the property off from the outer parking lot. Lydia pulled into it.

She parked under the wide-branched shade of a chestnut tree and cut the engine. The afternoon was uncommonly hot. Even though it was mid-September, the summer showed no sign of fading. I should be in school, she thought, and immediately felt a tug of regret for that other life she’d once led; a life that had ended with her mother’s death and had begun again—but so differently—with the letter.

She took the vellum envelope from her purse and turned it over and over, as though the ordinary envelope, addressed with a typewriter in need of a new ribbon, might be an apport from the spirit world. The letter connected her to the louring structure in front of her. Soon she would learn the truth that lay behind its walls. She did not know, as she sat there in the heat of the car, whether she could deal with too much more reality, too many additional facts. They’d been piling up against her, a bonfire of absurdities that might explode if she added any more fuel to what she already knew.

She opened the letter and began to read it again, a perfunctory and unnecessary exercise—she almost knew its contents by heart—but her conscience persuaded her that, in the present circumstances, it was the right thing to do. Sitting there outside her “birthplace,” she felt like a penitent before a high altar; the letter in her hands served as the incontestable evidence that she had been here before, in this place.

Her mother would never know how much those words stung. Lydia looked up from the page to try and block the inevitable tears. The bleak building seemed to mock her, and in her distress she wiped her eyes and turned back to the page. There would be no solace for her, so she pressed on, the sodden handkerchief at the ready.

Indeed, thought Lydia, angry now. How many times had she heard that her parents only had “relations” to bring her into the world?

How many more lies had her mother told her? It seemed that she’d built her life on a succession of them.

Lydia dried her eyes. The word “perfect” had been crossed out and rewritten. Not so perfect after all, it seemed. She thought the error significant.

She stuffed the letter back into the envelope and willed herself to be strong. A week earlier, she had started weeping in Mr. Brown’s office, and it seemed that since then she’d never stopped.

She opened her compact and tried to repair her face as best she could. If only she could repair the damage to her life so easily. All the roads she’d traveled since childhood had suddenly fallen into disuse. She stood at a crossroads and there was no signpost to point the way. She no longer had a mother or a father. She was an orphan, a nobody. Now she understood what Aunt Gladys meant. She saw again the glossy mouth spit out the words that had so confused her.

You know nothing. The truth is always difficult. Now that you’re alone, you’ll have to learn about things the hard way!

Yes, indeed: Lydia had known nothing. And Gladys had known
everything
. Gritting her teeth at the memory of those words, Lydia decided that she had no wish to see her so-called aunt for a long time to come.

She gazed up at the retirement home on the hill and felt that she should rather die than enter through its ominous doors. What truths could this building tell her that she didn’t already know?

But it was best to get it over with.

With this resolve, she reluctantly locked the car and walked slowly up the avenue, through the beauty of an afternoon which was so much at odds with the turmoil of her inner self. God was about his business: in the lace cap hydrangeas, the lime-scented hedges, the sun-heated grass; and somewhere the glissando of a blackbird was unfurling its sweet song, as if to calm her. Such peace, such harmony, within reach—yet a world away.

At the portico she pressed the bell. Four times in all, and still no reply. She was about to turn away when finally the door was pulled open by a very tall monk. He wore a brown habit, secured at the waist by a length of white hemp rope. He was young, but his shaved head and joyless eyes gave the impression of a much older man. His feet were bare in thonged sandals.

“I’m Lydia Devine. I’m here to see Father Finian.”

The monk’s expression did not change as she spoke, a fact that she found most disconcerting. Perhaps he’s taken a vow of silence, she thought; his face had the look of someone who’d chosen years of discipline and self-denial and was, for whatever reason, regretting having made such a choice.

“He’s expecting me,” she added, hoping it would help.

With that he nodded and stood back to admit her.

The vestibule was surprisingly bright; ivory walls, a chessboard floor, the only somber reference being a heavy sideboard—highly polished and deeply carved—which served as an altar for a three-foot plaster virgin. He indicated a chair.

Lydia seated herself as the monk disappeared down a dark corridor. All was silent except for the creaking floorboards that followed him into the depths of the house. Then the footsteps stopped and a door cried open; just as quickly it was banged shut again. Afterward she was left with nothing but the huge silence of the entrance hall.

“Miss Devine, pleased to meet you.”

The young priest stretched out a hand. “I’m glad you could come. This can’t be easy for you.”

Father Finian, with his ready smile and easy manner, could not have been more different from the cheerless monk. He ushered her down several long corridors, then up a flight of stairs. She climbed slowly, taking everything in with forensic attention. This place, she kept telling herself, was once my home. This gray, gloomy prison with its concrete floors, chipped paintwork, high-grilled windows. There was nothing at all to lift the eye. When she reached the top of the stairs she felt faint.

“Thank God I was taken away from this.”

“Sorry? Are you all right?” The priest was behind her.

“Yes…thank you…” She stopped; her hand gripped the banister. She stared down at her tautened knuckles. “Yes…I’m…fine.”

The last word—thin, hollow, weightless—fell away from her and into the echoing depths of the stairwell. As she gazed down, she wondered when she’d be able to retrieve and live the full meaning of that one gentle syllable again. Fine.

“I’m fine,” she said again, trying to muster courage.

Father Finian sensed her sadness. He’d seen that lost look many times before.

“We don’t use this part of the building anymore. It’s mostly closed off for storage.”

He sped ahead of her down the corridor, resolute now, his heels like hammer blows on the stone floor. He stopped abruptly, riffled through a set of keys. He unlocked a door.

“Here we are.” He stood waiting for her.

She walked slowly toward him, past what once had been the Mother Superior’s office. She saw the worn nameplate on the door and, beside it, a scarred bench. For some reason she wanted to rest on it a while, as if out of respect for all the children who had sat there and suffered. Because she knew instinctively that every child who’d passed through that building had suffered, and suffered greatly.

They entered a large office-cum-sitting room; a musty, dimly lit place that escaped the afternoon sun. He directed her to a balding sofa which had a rug thrown over it, in a futile attempt to brighten it. Stretched limply on the floor between the priest’s desk and the couch was a carpet of faded peacocks and humming birds. She wondered idly how many decades it must have lain there and how many pairs of feet must have trodden on it down through the years.

Father Finian read her mind. Since the building that housed the notorious orphanage had changed hands in 1968, he’d had to deal with so many Lydias. People who wanted to make sense of their lives through connecting with the mystery and secrecy of mothers who had borne them, only to abandon them.

“You’ll have to excuse this room,” he said, “but when the orphanage closed we kept this place more or less as it had been, to hold the filing cabinets of records. So it’s a kind of storeroom which contains the past, if you like. We think it best not to tamper with the past, otherwise we might not be able to help people like yourself who come here looking for answers.”

Lydia nodded slowly. She didn’t know what to say. She was determined not to cry.

“I’m sorry for your loss. It is hard enough to lose someone so close without having to learn a truth kept hidden for so long.”

“Thank you, Father.”

An arrangement of blue lobelias had withered in the grate: They accounted for the acrid smell that pervaded the room. There was a claw-footed sideboard of heavy coffin-wood with a mirror which threw back no reflection and a worm-eaten desk. It seemed to Lydia that everything in the room had died. She felt she could neither breathe nor speak; the enormity before her was so daunting.

She looked out the window, wishing to distance herself from this nightmare, but her eye was drawn to an incline some way off, and she saw a series of lichen-coated headstones, many of them slumped down in the earth from having stood to attention for so long. No, there would be no relief here. She turned again to the young priest.

“If you’d like me to have a look at your mother’s letter,” he said, “it might make it easier for you.” He got up from the desk and came and sat at the other end of the couch.

“Yes,” she managed to say. “Thank you.”

She watched his lips move over her dead mother’s words and wondered why such a handsome young man should condemn himself to a life in a place as awful as this, disconnected from everything.

“Hmm…fifth of December, nineteen thirty-four. Right, let me see.”

The filing cabinets were ranged along the back wall. She counted eleven. Father Finian went to one near the middle and pulled open the top drawer. He extracted a folder and carried it to the desk.