The Whipping Club (12 page)

             
“You must have been whispering.”

             
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! The officers said that you girls just want to get the hell out. I could believe it. I saw some sights up close, Marian. Desperate faces of clammy, pregnant girls about to fall into huge

baskets of hospital sheets and towels they were hauling somewhere. What a photograph this would make in the
Times
: ‘A medieval maternity ward.’ They told me not to ever bring it up, either, if you didn’t. Finally, I paid,” Ben said.

             
“So you’ve said.”

             
“Are you blaming me?”

             
“Let me ask you this. You’re a journalist, and you believed that I was going on vacation with my uncle the priest?”

             
“Marian, I–”

             
“And you’re calling Nurse a nut?” She picked up the bowl of cashews and threw them at him. He leapt from his seat and grabbed the bowl away from her.

             
“Where is the child, Marian?”

             
Marian glared at him.

             
“Johanna said the visitor was peculiar,” Ben said.

             
“Nurse. And apparently you’ve met. He’s eleven-and-a-half, and he lives in Inchicore. In an orphanage. The nuns never sent him to

America like they told me, but put him in a hellhole in Dublin,”

she said perfunctorily. Ben looked horrified. As well he should.

             
“I’ve been going there. It’s hideous. Nurse has been seeing him all along. He’s not faring well at all. He’s being bullied.”

             
“My God.”

             
“I was so busy with Johanna, I suppose. I just buried it,” she mumbled, leaning against the wall. She began to cry, and he tried to hold her again but she shoved him away.

             
“You know, you’re always off in la-la land, Ben, thinking you’re helping the world. Helping others starts at home.”

             
“I’m not going to put up with Pollyanna shit from you, Marian. They gave me proof, all right? You put it in writing that you wanted to get out of that jail. Tell the truth for once. They showed me your letter. Proof you wanted out.”

             
He could see she was ashamed, but also, he couldn’t believe he’d been snowed and his actions were the cause of so much suffering.

She knew he was ashamed as well.

             
“Now what?” he said. “God, those fucking black-robed people.”

             
“Don’t be talking shite about things you know nothing about!

I don’t allow anti-Semitism, and I won’t have the other, Ben. It was my fault. No one else’s.”

             
“Damn Catholics. You’re eating yourselves alive.”

             
“Don’t be damning the Catholics, either. Damn those sinister nuns, though,” Marian muttered. “I wanted us to take Adrian home together,” she said.

             
“They never would have allowed it,” he said.

             
Marian looked away. She wondered if he was thinking what she was thinking: If only he had gotten there before she had the baby, could he have saved her and their son? He should have gotten there sooner. He should have hounded Father Brennan until the priest fessed up instead of driving around Ireland on hunches.

             
“We can’t hurt Johanna,” Ben said.

             
“It’s all too much to think about,” Marian said.

             
“No more lies, Marian. If there’s anything else we’re hiding, we should tell each other now.”

             
“That’s the only thing I’ve ever kept from you. And you from me, Ben? Is that it?”

             
He nodded.

             
“Are you sure?”

             
“Yes, I’m sure, Marian.”

             
“I want you to know I waited for a donkey’s years in that hellatious doctor’s office, thinking about you and wondering how I would tell you. I should have told you before we got to your parents. I know that much now. One misstep and look at all the consequences. I wanted everything to happen in the right order, stupid girl that I was: the meeting of your parents, the dreaded meeting of my mother, more
craic
wandering the streets of Little Jerusalem and all over Dublin in the evenings after work, more Gaelic lessons for you, more Hebrew lessons for me, the marriage proposal. Please. I imagined your face transforming into something joyous when I told you about the pregnancy. You wouldn’t leave me, I reminded myself as we walked to your parents’ house that night, but you never gave me the time to get the words out.”

             
He nodded, took a sip of his drink and waited for her to continue.

             
“We could have left for England immediately, could have married there and come back home to live,” she said. “No one would have been privy to the order of things.”

             
Ben took another sip, and Marian thought about her first year schoolchildren and all the questions they would have had watching her belly grow.

             
“I haven’t been the same, Ben.
I’m a derelict to have damaged
myself. You must see that. I’ve never stopped thinking about him.” She shook her head. “And I’ve been so alone.”

             
“I thought you wanted to move o
n. I didn’t want you to suffer
anymore.”

             
She didn’t look at him but nodded in his direction.

             
“We’ve abandoned him,” she said into the air, and then gave him a steely look.

             
“We’ll figure something out, I promise.”

             
She sat down, rested her head on the tabletop.

             
“Who’s he like?”

             
“He’s like me,” she said, lifting her head. “He looks like me.”

             
“Marian, I wish we’d talked.”

             
“I wish we’d waited,” she said and gave him one of her hard looks. “You’ve told me you can’t bear living without me. Well, I can’t cope knowing that Adrian is in Dublin right near us, living in poverty, being beaten,” she said.

             
Ben got up, draining his drink.

             
“Look in on Johanna,” he said and left the house. Up and down the streets, he would berate himself for his suppressions. He’d recall with shame a newspaper article that he wrote, just after Johanna was born, it was March of 1958, about abuse in industrial school
s.
He began it immediately after reading a column in which Gay Byrne discussed the misuse of fists as a school tool. He said he admired Mr. Byrne for his piece, and Ben—a new father and, admittedly now, a father who lost a son to the orphanage system, a scary thought—he was passionate about the subject. Had he often worried about his newborn son’s placement? Once more, crappy Mr. Darby refused to print his take on the matter. Too scandalous, he said. Bollocks. He hadn’t shared with Marian the myriad story ideas that Mr. Darby recently shot down, but Marian knew he was he on probation for more than writing about the violence in the Catholic schools. He worried more and more over the bills, even their recent splurge on new gardening tools added up, he said. He didn’t want to worry her but his inheritance, generous as it was after selling Tatte’s picture frame gallery, would not last forever. He told her how much he missed visiting regularly with his mother, how he wished they could all move on, that he prayed Marian would be the big-hearted one and make the telephone call to Bubbe, who was all alone and becoming increasingly frail.  

             
When he returned from his walk, he sat in the living room alone until Marian came down the stairs in her beige bathrobe, a faint smell of Dippity Do gel in her hair. He looked calmer, and she came over to sit with him on the couch.

             
“Well, at least he’s ours,” he whispered. Was he
also
thinking what a mess the boy must be? Probably not good for Johanna, his
maidelah
—but voiced none of his doubts.

             
“We’ll use everything we’ve got, all your connections down at the
Times
. And we’ll get him home,” Marian said.

             
“We’ll do everything we can,” Ben agreed, though being on probation was a huge worry. He would have to make amends to his boss somehow.

Downstairs, Marian could hear Jo
crack her bedroom door ajar to
listen to her parents talk and whisper on the couch. How long had she been listening?

             
“Children should be unseen and should listen!” Jo shouted from her room, startling Marian.

             
“How long do you think she’s been listening to us?” Marian whispered to Ben.

             
Jo came down the stairs and stare
d at them, still in her school
uniform. She had her door ajar long enough so that her heart leapt with all the murmurings about a long lost big brother, that the odd-looking lady knew exactly where he was, that she’d brought him to the secret hiding place herself, and a Mulvin’s Sweet Shop was on the way. He toughened up over the years, rest assured, Nurse told Marian, and Marian told Ben that she was seeing purple. A ward of the state, Nurse had put it. He was raised less than one hour away. Less than one hour away, Marian repeated over and over, each time getting Johanna more and more excited. The girl had big ears.

             
“The place is awful. The orphans spit at each other!” Jo yelled with anger and excitement mixed together in her little body.

             
“Johanna, you shouldn’t be eavesdropping on your parents,” Marian said in a low voice. “You’ve disobeyed me again. I asked you to stay in your room.”

             
“Stupid,” Jo said, looking at Ben as she stood by t
he front door, playing with the
doorknob. “Ma’s been doing a lot of oddities lately, but no more so than tonight.”

             
“Johanna! Up to your room. How dare you talk like that about your mother,” Ben said, somewhat surprising Marian.

             
“And now, of course,” Jo said, somewhat mocking him, “Da, you’ll chime right in!” Then, no dummy herself, she marched upstairs and closed her door.

             
Marian told Ben with her finger to keep mum. Ben nodded, put his head in his hands. He must have realized, too, that Jo was not done with them yet.

             
They listened to her door creak open, waited for her to descend.

Jo cocked her head halfway down the stairs.

             
“Children pick up on stuff, even very young children. The parents think they’re fooling them, but they’re not. Don’t you know I know something’s up?” she asked.

             
Marian and Ben looked at each other.

             
“I didn’t come up the Liffey on a bicycle, ya know. Silly and stupid,” Jo said. “Annoying as a bag of cats, too. Whatever it is, I ought not to be sitting in my room. I ought to be told, too. I’m not a baby, for God’s sake! If I’m old enough to walk to school, I’m old enough to know!” she screamed.

             
Marian sent her immediately back to her room.

             
Ben got up and held onto the stair railing. Jo appeared at the top of the stairs again.

             
“All right, spit it out. Spit it out!” Jo seemed to be begging now as she came down the stairs and stood on the bottom step, staring quizzically at her father.

             
Marian and Ben looked at one another and then at their daughter, dumbfounded looks on their faces. Marian walked over to the two of them, staring at each other like a cat and mouse, Jo ready to pounce.

             
“What you heard is correct, Johanna,” Marian said. “You have a brother. We’re going to be filling you in on the details all along the way, love.”

             
“
Tanzhe, tanzhe vevyeke
,” whispered Ben as he put his arm around a droopy Jo. “Dance, dance, little squirrel. Up to your room.” He wrapped her blanket around her slender shoulders as he trudged upstairs with her like a sack and plunked their daughter onto her bed. But Johanna soon came back downstairs, shook her head at them and then ran up the stairs and whacked her door shut.