Chapter 25.
1983 After Ireland
Eighteen, give or take. Mostly take. I could get away with a lot because I looked and sounded like an adult, and in a lot of ways, I was. I didn’t take shit, and I knew my own worth. That went a long way, but I was still as greedy as a child. I craved experiences. New things. Broken. Unraveled. Unwound. I could test the world. See what I could make anew.
I would have been a sociopath if I hadn’t learned to give a shit when I got back from the cold stone convent in the old country. I’d eaten the shit sandwich I’d been fed, shed my rock groupie skin, and I acted like the oldest of eight.
The first time my mother put Jonathan into my arms, she looked nervous. She hadn’t wanted me to touch him for the first week. Anyone else could, but not Margie. Maybe because he was the precious only boy of her eight children, but she handed him over as if I’d drop him or something. Or my irresponsible behavior would rub off on him. I didn’t take it personally.
Post-partum wasn’t properly diagnosed back then, so she was treated like a hysterical female, and I wasn’t treated at all. I felt as if my guts had been ripped out and replaced with sawdust. I didn’t eat. I didn’t talk much. We were both in deep pain and acting as if nothing had ever gone awry.
Eventually I took Jonathan from the nurse while Mom napped. He was everything. He had a little tuft of red hair and crystal-blue eyes that would eventually turn green. I’d held just about all of my siblings, but there was something about Jonathan. And the smell. Baby smell wasn’t new, but his was different. It was the scent of heaven and earth. He held my finger with his tiny hand, and it didn’t feel as though he did it out of newborn reflex. His grip felt like a plea. A connection. A deal rubbed with the salt of the earth.
I was going to make it my business to be there for him. To make myself useful if not to my own child, then to the brother born at the same time. I pledged it to him.
I straightened out so quickly, my family got whiplash. I never spoke to Lynn or Yoni again. I didn’t make friends, but I made a few appropriate acquaintances.
It wasn’t even hard.
“Did you breastfeed any of us?” I asked as Mom popped the bottle from Jonathan’s mouth.
He was three months old, and I was still acclimating to my new life. Or my old life, depending on how you looked at it. It was the life a normal person my age should be living, not the life of someone who’d been whisked away to a foreign country to be tutored by stiff Irish nuns so she could secretly give birth to a baby she would never hold.
“Heavens, no. Why would I do that?” Mom handed the baby to the nanny to burp.
Her name was Phyllis, and she held her arms out but looked at me. She and I had set a pattern. Mom left before the baby kicked up his milk, and as soon as she was gone, Phyllis handed him to me. I slung him over my shoulder and patted his back, pressing my cheek to him so I could get a whiff of his baby smell. Best in the world.
I knew I was making Jonathan a replacement for the baby they gave away, but I couldn’t help it. He smelled so good.
“I’ll protect you, little brother,” I whispered then put his little hand up against my own as if swearing on a stack of Bibles. “I pledge it.”
I studied and behaved. I was a model of good and right behavior. I won my parents’ trust back by staying in, helping my sisters with their homework, and finding a deep well of ambition.
You might think I was somehow browbeaten into good behavior. That I resented it. That I lost a wild part of myself to meet the expectations of others.
But it didn’t feel like that. I felt wonderful. I helped Carrie and Sheila with their homework while Dad was off doing business and Mom was in her room. I wiped chocolate off Fiona’s hands when she found the baker’s cocoa in the back of the cabinet and ate the whole box.
I did everything but feed Jonathan. Mom insisted on feeding Jonathan until he started walking, then she abdicated, like with everything else. She was a figurehead, and oddly, I was okay with that. I loved her arm’s-length parenting because she gave me room to fill my days with something meaningful to me.
Daddy was not an affectionate person, but after he spanked me for getting knocked up, he was never closer than half a room away. Even when I struggled in the back of the limo on the way to my flight to Ireland, he left the manhandling to an Italian bodyguard. He watched from the seats across with his jacket in his lap.
“One day,” he’d said as Franco held me down, “one day you’ll see this is for your own good.”
I stuck my middle finger out at him.
“Who’s the father?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”
I got my hand from under Franco’s arm and stuck up my other middle finger.
“I’m going to find out.”
All he’d have to do was dig around the groupie scene and he’d know, but he was so far removed from it, and I’d kept it so far away from my regular life, that I had hope he’d leave Strat and Indiana alone.
He sat next to me during the whole flight over. Just him, and he scared me. He checked me into the convent and left. They sent letters Sister Maureen made me answer. I said nice things, but I was shut down until he and Mom showed up three months before the baby was due.
“You look good,” Mom had said. She was farther along than I was.
I felt gross being next to her like that. “So do you. How do you feel?”
“Better than ever.” She smiled and rested her hand on her belly. She loved being pregnant. I didn’t know how she felt about raising children, but she loved carrying them. “We found a family for your baby. They live here. It’s a good home.”
“Thank you.”
I hadn’t fought that part of it. I didn’t want to be a mother at that point, and I had no choice anyway. I was sure they’d done all the diligence in the world.
“Your friends miss you. They come by to let us know.”
“Who came?”
She rattled off a few girls I knew from the Suffragette Society and Jenn from the Chess Strategy Club, then she looked at Dad.
He sat in the corner with an ankle crossed over his knee, staring at me. The movement of his head was barely perceptible, but he gave her a definite no to whatever she was asking. Mom was a lion when it came to everything except Dad. So she acted as though no one else had come, smiling as if our family dynamic was as normal as peas and carrots.
I went into labor three days early.
Dad was there when I gave birth, not Mom. I hadn’t expected him to be in the room. I tried to ignore him, and once the pain got really bad, I could pretend he wasn’t there. The midwife handed him the baby still slimy with goop.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” I’d asked, trying to catch my breath.
He didn’t answer. No one answered. Sister Maura just shushed me, and Dad took it away. By the time I delivered the placenta, I knew they’d never tell me a thing.
I’d flown home alone. My sisters had greeted me like a long-lost child. Even my mother had been overcome with happiness when I walked in the door.
Dad seemed cautious. He treated me as if I were a museum artifact behind a velvet rope.
When I got into Wellesley, he congratulated me with a handshake and a genuine smile, but he never touched me again.
I had to hang up a lot of my family duties when I went to Stanford Law, but I was always there. I called teachers when Fiona didn’t understand her homework, chewed out Father Alfonso when he fire-and-brimstoned Deirdre, and tried to keep Jonathan inside the lines as he proved, time after time, that he could push every boundary with a cocky smile.
By the time I was studying for my bar, I felt as if the eighties were behind me. My parents had done their best, and I had a good life ahead. Sometimes I even felt gratitude.