City of Hope
Authors: Kate Kerrigan
To Tommoâfor all the hope.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
âWilliam Wordsworth, extract from “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
T
ABLE OF
C
ONTENTS
The church was packed.
Usually if we were late we sneaked in the back door and sat in the side pews, which were neutral ground. The front pews were where the big shots satâthe doctors, teachers, dignitaries and the wealthier local businesspeople. As successful shopkeepers, my husband, John, and I fell into the latter category, but we rarely took up our seats of privilege, opting instead to bury ourselves in the middle aisles among our country neighbors.
This Sunday, with the distraction of my recent pregnancy, we went straight in the front door without thinking.
The working men stood at the back, starched and sniffing in their Sunday suits. Their backs pressed against the wall so that the cream paint bore the shadow of their hair grease and their nicotine-stained fingers. John, a farmer, crossed himself at the holy-water font, his shoulders hunching with humility as he joined the line with his peers. I prickled with irritation as I realized I would have to either stand at the back or walk through the church alone to find a seat.
My suit was a mauve two-piece I had collected just the day before from Fitzpatrick, the tailor, and I was wearing a fresh pair of stockings, straight from the packet, mailed to me from Saks Fifth Avenue. My blouse and hat were a matching shade of navy, the hat a small trilbyâthe latest shapeâand my hair beneath it curled into tidy waves.
In such a getup I would normally have strutted unbothered up the aisle to find a seat. I might even have rested myself, defiantly, at the front, next to the doctor's wife, just to make a point. But that Sunday was differentâthe excitement and anxÂiety of being pregnant had unnerved me.
I scanned the pews to find somebody I could sit with and spotted the red curls of Veronica, my shop assistant, at the end of a pew in the middle of the church. I squeezed in next to her, and as she made room she smiled at me. Her teeth were still terrible, I noted. Broken and yellow, and she was barely in her twenties. I promised myself I would talk to her about it during the week. Maybe arrange for her to see my dentist in Galway before Christmas and see if he couldn't fix them up a bit. I hated it when the girls who worked for me had the look of poverty about them. I paid them well, but in Veronica's case, working in the country shop, it didn't follow through in her appearance. She was wearing the same drab old hand-me-down coat of her mother's that I had seen a thousand Sundays before.
I reached into my pocketbook for my rosary beads and, with a small shock of panic, realized that I had left them at home, so I closed my gloved hands into fists so that I could substitute my fingers for them. It had become my habit over the past eight weeks that I would arrive at Mass early and say a decade to the Blessed Virgin for the health of the life inside me. The routine had become ruined by our lateness, and now aged Father Geraghty was already droning on in his monotone voice, distracting me. Veronica's wet coat was pressed against my side and I became uncomfortable and agitated. Why was the stupid girl still wearing that old coat to Mass? As I tried to concentrate on praying, each Hail Mary became overshadowed by a list of clothes I had given to Veronica over the years: a primrose-colored cotton dress, a red cardigan with black ribbon trimming, the green tweed coat I had worn on my trip home from America.
The priest led the confessional and the crowd began to chant, but as I tried to stand up and join them, I became dizzy. I sat down again and, as I did, felt a terrible pain lift me up out of the pew. As my body doubled over, Veronica put her arm around me and helped me up the aisle.
The blood poured down my stockings as I left the red trail of our newest child behind me on the church tiles.
After a week the weeping stopped and gave way to an empty bleakness. It was the third baby I had lost. None of them big enough to bury. This last one had released itself in the bathroom of Father Geraghty's house, the nearest place to the church, and then been discreetly disposed of by his housekeeper. There was no trace, no evidence that the small life had ever existed; no prayers said. The thread of life had been there, and now it was gone. Like a spent rose discarded from a vaseâits beauty had been too brief, too transient to grieve for.
I sat in bed and looked out on another dull day. The sky was gray and flat like a dirty sheet, making the green of the land seem to glow. Even in the driest summer, the green never faltered. In the winter, patches of life broke through the snow. John's fields were rich and fertile; his wife a barren failure.
Outside the window a dozen birds busied themselves among the branches of the laburnum tree, pecking frantically at the small bags of nuts I had hung for them. Among them was a bullying goldfinch, its elegant gold-and-black wings and painted face a signal to the ordinary brown tits that they were lesser creatures. Perhaps that was why God wouldn't let me have a child. I was too proud, too grand for Him.
John carried me in a breakfast tray. I had barely eaten since it happened. Even Maidy's delicious brown bread crumbled into tasteless dust in my mouth and made me retch. I felt as if nothing belonged inside me except a child.
I took a sip of coffee. It was bitter and I grimaced.
“It's burned,” I said ungratefully, pushing the tray back at him.
I wanted John to leave me alone again. I could not bear to look at him. I had known this man all my life and I sensed the mourning behind his capable demeanor. His disappointment and grief were as clear to me as they were invisible to everybody else.
“You have to eat something,” he said, sitting down.
I picked up a piece of bread and shoved it into my mouth, glaring at him angrily, hoping it would silence him. Like most countrymen, John was not given to revealing his emotions. I realized that was one of the rare occasions when he wanted to put his natural reserve aside. I tried to move out of the bed, but he was sitting in my way.
“I wanted to say, Ellie . . .”
He was looking at the floor, his feet square on the ground, his elbows resting on his knees, with his large hands dangling between them. The soft cotton of his collarless work shirt stretched across his broad back as he hunched forward in an effort to get the words out.
“I wanted to say, Ellieâthat I don't mind . . .”
It was excruciating to watch him try to get the words out, so I helped him.
“Don't mind what, John?”
“. . . that I don't mind if we don't have a baby.”
I didn't know what to make of it. John was longing for a child, I knew that.
He lifted his head, turned to face me and took my hands in his, wrapping his warm, rough palms around my fingers until they were all but enveloped.
“I love you, Ellie,” he said, “and that's enough for me.”
It was spring. Wispy puffs of smoke released themselves from our chimney and hung in the still air. As I stood outside our cottage door I could smell the sharp tang of winter being smothered by a softer season. Half a dozen swallows swooped and swerved around the small apple trees I had planted eight years ago, and the daffodils with their sure stems and gaudy bonnets stood firm and glaring against the struggling sun, willing it to show itself.
The sun had passed over the lake beyond our bottom field and turned it into a circle of dazzling light. It flickered as the blurred shadow of my husband, John, walked in front of it. He was on his way back to the house and, as he had been up half the night delivering lambs, was doubtless starving with hunger. He was a good twenty minutes' walk away, having to negotiate the rocky bog that separated our farm from the grazing land beyond. John was not yet forty, but he had the gait of a much older man. He was carrying something in his arms. I could not see what it was from that distance.
I went back into the house and placed my recently acquired heavy iron pan on the range. The oven had been heating for an hour and, as I threw the sausages in, they started to sizzle right away. I got a warm feeling of gratitude at the ease and simplicity of my new contraption.
I was thirty-four, back living in a house on my husband John's family farm near the town where I grew up. Although electricity had come to Mayo, it had not stretched as far as our home, some seven miles from the nearest town. However, in the past few years John and I had modified the small cottage that he had inherited from his parents, adding three rooms to its original two and attaching every other modern convenience. We had a tank for collecting rainwater on our roof, and as a result enjoyed the luxury of running water. There was a Tilley lamp in every room, and two battery-operated radios that I had brought back from one of my regular trips to Dublin.
I left the butter dish down on the bare wood of the table, with two mugs, knives and forks and the teapot. John liked to drink his tea from a tin mug, which he kept hot by the fire. The coarse skin of his hands worked as a protective leather from the hot metal, and I had picked up the habit from him and, dispensing with many of my fancy ideas about how one should sit at table, now joined him in his casual breakfast routine.