Husbands & Lovers

Chapter Sixteen Mallory

July 2022

County Galway, Ireland

Paige pokes her head inside the rental car and turns her head to address the agent, a nice-looking lad with thick dark hair and a thick dark beard and eyes the color of this morning’s sky before the airplane descended into the drizzle. I hear my grandmother’s voice in my head—Black Irish.

“But it’s a stick shift,” she says. “I requested an automatic transmission.”

To his credit, the agent maintains his professional face. “I’m afraid we won’t be having any automatic cars left on the lot, miss. Are ye not trained to drive a manual transmission?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, in high school. Once.”

“I’ll drive,” I say. “Just tell me where to point the nose.”

“Where the hell did you learn how to drive a stick?” Paige wants to know.

“That summer I spent with Dad out at Ruidoso.”

“You were, like, thirteen.”

“It was New Mexico. And he was drunk.” I keep looking for the rearview mirror in the wrong spot. It was a little hairy getting out of the rental lot onto the motorway, what with all the other cars traveling down the wrong side of the road, but here we are, intact, flying north toward this village with the unpronounceable Gaelic name where our mother was born.

Paige scrolls her phone. “You know, I’m dreading the day when your guardian angel goes on strike to protest the inhumane working conditions.”

“Paige, will you quit with the phone? Unplug. We’re on a girls’ trip. Everyone’s fine. My kid has literal renal failure and he’s staying with a childless musician who’s known him for five minutes, and do you see me checking for messages?”

She sighs and slips the phone into her bag. “He’s not childless, Mallie. He’s Sam’s dad.”

“I was referring to his work experience. You did bring the adoption certificate, right?”

“Oh my God, Mallie, I forgot the adoption certificate! I’m such a screwup.”

“Fuck you, Paige. At least I can drive a stick shift.”

Paige looks out the window at the wet green landscape rolling past, dotted with miserable white sheep. “I swear to God, if those nuns give us any trouble.”

“Hey,” I say gently. “What’s up?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Me? Nothing,” I sing back to her.

She reaches reflexively for her phone, then pulls back. Dips into her handbag again and pulls out a tube of lip gloss. She unscrews the wand and strokes it over her lips.

“Do you think Jake’s having an affair?” she asks.

“What? No! Jake? Come on. Mr. Nice Guy?” I reach for a knob that might be the radio dial. “What makes you say that?”

“I’m just being paranoid, I guess. He’s always spent a lot of time on the road, right? Working all the time. It’s just the nature of the job.”

“True.”

“And everyone’s growing a beard these days. Even in finance.”

“Oh, we’re at peak beard right now, for sure. Maybe even past peak.”

“And this rowing kick he’s on, that fancy erg he bought, it’s super trendy right now. Getting rid of the dad bod. It’s a thing. Would you stop fiddling with that fucking dial and just drive? I’ll find us something.”

I put both hands on the wheel. “Can’t you get CarPlay to do your Spotify or something?”

“This is Ireland. We should listen to the local music.”

Under her fingers, a song comes into focus.

“Oh, fuck,” she says. “Et tu, Ireland?”

“No, leave it. I like this one.”

The car bends around a curve in the motorway and a foggy gray sea comes into view to the left. The drizzle drums on the windshield. Monk’s voice croons in our ears, his guitar plucks at our throats.

Paige says, “I found a charge on his personal AmEx at Cartier. Seven thousand dollars.”

I flip on the turn signal and bravely shoot past a trundling minibus full of schoolchildren, staring at us through the windows with dull eyes.

“Seven thousand six hundred and twenty, to be exact.”

“Maybe he’s shopping early for your birthday?”

“My birthday’s in November,” Paige says. She zips up her makeup bag, tucks it back in her handbag, and stares back out the window at the smoky sea.

“If you need me to swing by with a pair of shovels and a bottle of bleach,” I tell her, “just say the word.”

The Convent of St. Hilda lies in the cleavage between two bleak hills, about thirty miles northwest of Galway, on a landscape of grass and sheep, pockmarked by lakes. When we pull through the gates at a few minutes before noon, the car park is deserted. The drizzle hangs over the roof.

I stop the car and gaze up at the stark stone walls. “It looks like a Victorian prison. They’re expecting us, right?”

“Sort of. I mean, I told them we were coming today. Around midday.”

I switch off the ignition and step out of the car. “I’ll bet this is where they used to flog all the pregnant teenagers.”

“Our grandmother wasn’t a teenager, though.”

“Can you not call her that? It’s confusing. I keep thinking of Granny. The last person in the world who’d end up here. I mean, these women were like indentured servants. The nuns had the girls do laundry all day long in exchange for room and board—like old school, with scrub boards and wringers and lye soap and boiling fucking water. They gave away the babies. Sold them, basically. To say nothing of the hunger and abuse and disease and everything. It was horrible.”

“You are a font of uplifting information, Pollyanna.”

“I did some research. Not to shock you or anything.”

We walk up to the door, a wooden monster. There is a tarnished plaque that says convent of St. Hilda. Paige pushes open the door. I follow her into a wide stone hall, staircase at the opposite end. A young woman wearing a literal wimple looks up in surprise from a desk at one side. “I’m afraid we don’t do tours for the general public,” she tells us, in a brogue so thick I need to squint my ears to pick out the words.

“We’re not here for a tour,” Paige says. “We’re looking for your adoption records.”

“Oh, ye’ll be wanting the Mother Superior, then.”

Paige says, “I emailed her to let her know we’d be arriving around noon today. We just flew in from Boston?”

“Our mother was adopted from this place in 1952,” I say. “We only found out a few weeks ago. And we have a—a medical issue that makes it really important we find out who she was. Who her biological parents were.”

“Is your mother here with you, then?”

“She passed away a few years ago. We don’t think she even knew about this.”

The nun’s face softens. She looks from me to Paige and back again. “I’m sorry to hear it. I’ll just run and see if Mother Bernadette will be taking visitors.”

She steps from behind her desk and glides across the hall to disappear into a corridor. Paige crosses her arms and casts a look around. “Not exactly inviting, is it?”

The walls are plastered white; the floor is made of bare, worn flagstones. On the wall above the first landing of the staircase, before it makes a sharp right turn to continue up to the next floor, a plain wooden cross hangs at a tilt, like it’s staring down at you and finds you vain. After the heat of New England summer, the cool, damp air makes me shiver.

“Not a place I’d choose to have a baby, anyway,” I say.

“I don’t think these girls had a choice.”

“But she did. She wasn’t a girl. She was a married woman. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe they were poor. Couldn’t afford another kid. Or maybe her husband died.”

“Erm, sorry to interrupt.”

The two of us spin to the wall, where the nun’s reappeared in the passageway. She looks like she’s about twelve years old. Her cheeks are round, her eyes small and dark, her face plain except for her skin, which is like the inside of a seashell, almost pearlescent.

“The Mother Superior says she will see ye in an hour. Will ye be wanting to have a bit of a look around, while ye’re waiting?”

“I thought you said no tours.”

“To the general public, no. But we do have a wee old saying inside these walls, that the babes of our lost girls carry with them a special dispensation.”

I don’t want to go all woo-woo on you, but when we step outside to cross the courtyard, the drizzle stops and the mist no longer sticks to your skin. There might even be a sun hanging up there somewhere. Sister Kate walks at a brisk pace, wimple fluttering in the draft. She keeps up a tour-guide patter over her shoulder, of which I understand about one word in five. Paige even less. Something about the origins of the convent in the days of St. Patrick (She did not just say St. Patrick, did she? whispers Paige) on the site of some Druid something-or-other (She did not just say Druid, did she? I whisper) and this stone here (Sister Kate stops, we pile to a halt just in time) being laid by King Brión himself (Who? whispers Paige)—“Or so it’s said,” Kate adds, resuming her pace.

I stare at the stone in question, a few shades darker than its neighbors, worn to silk.

“This is all bullshit, right?” says Paige.

I turn to jog after Sister Kate’s fluttering wimple. “Like I’m the Irish history expert?”

We reach the other side of the courtyard and a long, gaunt building of stone, embellished by two rows of small windows such as you might find in a prison block.

Sister Kate halts at the door. “This’ll be the dormitory, where they kept the girls. The laundry used to be below, washing and hanging both. But Mother Bernadette’s turned it into a wee chapel now, where we come to light the candles for the souls of the girls and the babes that died here. Would ye care to see inside?”

Paige and I look at each other. “I would,” I say.

Paige shrugs. Sister Kate opens the door to a large, low-ceilinged room, bone clean except for a cross on the far wall, hanging above a table covered with a white altar cloth, on which several candles flicker patiently. A nun sits on one of the two wooden benches before the altar, head bowed.

Sister Kate leans to my ear and whispers, “We can finish here if ye like. Go on upstairs to see the dormitory and the birthing room.”

She leads us out of the chapel to a narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs to the second floor. A long hall stretches before us, windows to one side and doorways to the other. The light sneaks in through the glass. “The girls slept here during their confinements,” says Sister Kate. “Four to a room, it was. There was no heating, as ye see, just the heat that came up from the laundry. It was part of their penitence, do ye see, for they hadn’t just fallen into sin but leapt. According to the sisters, in those days.”

I stand for a minute or so, staring through one of the doorways into the tiny room beyond. “Did you say four girls?”

“Two sets of bunks,” says Sister Kate. “The ones that were earliest along had the top. Then once the labor came on, the nursing sisters would take them down the hall to the birthing room to have the baby. Dosed the poor lasses with the chloroform so they wouldn’t scream. Then the wee babes would be taken away to the nursery in the convent proper, for the families to choose from. When the girl woke up after, they told her the babe had died.”

“My God, it’s barbaric,” says Paige.

“If the girl woke up, mind ye. Should there be any sort of complication, the sisters would save the babe, not the mother. The families, do ye see. The families from America paid a lot of money for a nice fat healthy baby. And the girls—well, the poor girls were but sinners, after all.”

I turn to Sister Kate. “I want to see the birthing room.”

I went into labor with Sam just after lunchtime on the day before Mother’s Day. I was staying with my dad out in California, because I didn’t want to run any risk of bumping into someone I knew. The pregnancy was pretty straightforward, thank God. The morning sickness lasted a few rough weeks. I got a job as a barista at a coffee shop in Pomona and worked right up until the last week, when I couldn’t tie the apron over my stomach.

I called up Mom. “I think the baby’s coming,” I told her.

“But the baby’s not due until next week,” she said.

“Mom, the baby was due three days ago.”

“I could swear you said the seventeenth.”

“I said the seventh, Mom. The seventh of May.”

“But my plane tickets are for the fifteenth.”

“Mom,” I said, “if you fly out here on the fifteenth, you’ll get to meet an adorable little week-old grandchild, I’m just saying.”

There was a short pause, then—“I’m leaving for the airport in five minutes. Just keep your legs closed, all right?”

Dad was at the track, so I drove myself to the hospital. As I passed through the various stages of reception and check-in and examination, as they settled me into a bed in labor and delivery and hooked me up to the machines, gave me the epidural, the nurses kept asking if the father was on his way.

The father is not in the picture, I told them. Over and over.

Dad finally arrived around nine o’clock. He’d been drinking, but not enough to cause any trouble. At first the nurses assumed he was the father of the baby, kind of a sketchy situation but to each his own, so I had to repeat this line all over again. The father is not in the picture. By this time I was progressing quickly. Around midnight I was five centimeters dilated. At one o’clock I was eight centimeters. The doctor looked up from my vagina and said it was going to be any minute now, was I ready to push.

No, I’m not ready to push, I said. My mother’s not here yet.

The doctor said she didn’t think the baby cared one way or another. Could my father maybe lend a hand?

I said my dad went on a cigarette break an hour ago and hadn’t come back.

Just then a massive contraction walloped me, blasting through the epidural meds like a red-hot knife through a pound of cold buttercream frosting. After it subsided, I felt an overwhelming urge to empty my bowels and mentioned this desire to the doctor, since after all she’d had her nose up my vagina for a good part of the evening.

She turned her head and called for a nurse.

I started pushing. Forty-five minutes into the pushing, I started screaming for a Caesarean, for God’s sake, could someone just slice me open and get this damn baby out of me. And as I’m yelling at the doctor, and the doctor barks at the nurse, my mom runs into the room and yells, Over my dead body you’ll cut my daughter open, so help me!

Ma’am, said the doctor, if this baby isn’t out in ten minutes, I’m wheeling her into the operating room right over your dead body, so help me.

Mom turned to me and grabbed my hand. She said, Look in my eyes, Mallory, do as I say, you feel that contraction coming on and you just think about the asshole who did this to you.

She’s crowning, yelled the doctor from my vagina.

Two more pushes and Sam gushed into the world, eight and a half pounds, red and loud as hell. They put him right on my chest, all slippery and beautiful. I looked into his squashed face and started to cry. Mom cradled us both and said, Look what you made, you made me a grandson. Then the nurse said they needed to take him for a minute, do the tests, and I remember I looked up at her and thought, Nobody is taking my son away from me, nobody ever.

At which point my dad strolled in, reeking of cigarettes and booze, and asked if he’d missed anything.

As I stand in the middle of the cold stone birthing room at St. Hilda’s, maybe ten feet by eight feet—not enough room to swing a cat, my grandfather would have said—and stare at its walls of white plaster, the single small window, I think of the mayhem of Sam’s birth, the doctor barking between my legs, my mother galloping in, even my dad eventually present and accounted for; Paige (though I didn’t know it at the time) in the air on her way from Singapore, where she’d been working on some currency trading desk.

I remember something I said to Monk, one true thing in the middle of that lonely scene in Paige’s kitchen, the two of us bent over a stack of legal documents—Monk who had held me in his arms and loved me once.

Sam is surrounded by love.

He has that, if nothing else. From the moment of his birth, we were gathered together in love for him.

Paige leans against the doorframe, watching me. Her eyes glisten.

“Isn’t it weird?” she says. “Mom was born in this room.”

When the Mother Superior opens her mouth to welcome us, I’m a little taken aback to hear a Brooklyn accent.

Paige leans forward. “Excuse me, are you American?”

“I sure am,” says Mother Bernadette. “Came overseas to nurse in ’44. Fell in love with a bomber pilot, like the young idiot I was. He got killed, of course. When the war ended I didn’t want to go home and get married, like everybody else. I felt the calling. Wound up here as a novitiate in ’46. Been here ever since.”

I stare at the woman’s smooth, sagging face and try to run the numbers. Paige is better at math than me and speaks first.

“So you must be, what? Ninety-six at least.”

“Ninety-seven in September.” She taps her forehead. “Still have all my marbles, thanks be to God.”

“And your complexion,” says Paige.

“Well, that’s this Irish weather. Haven’t seen the sun in weeks.” She looks down at a curling caramel-colored folder on her desk, which looks like it was once manila. “While you were off with Sister Kate, I rooted around the archives and found the file on your mother’s adoption.”

Paige reached for her handbag. “I have the identification and the original certificate right here—”

“Never mind all that. I can see who you are. That.” She nods to the bracelet on my wrist. “That’s all the identification I need.”

I look down at my wrist, then back up at Mother Bernadette. She’s staring at me with these small, nut-brown eyes, as if she’s waiting for something.

“You were there,” I say. “You were there when she was born.”

Mother Bernadette spreads her small palms across the folder and stares at the backs of her hands. “I remember your grandmother like it was yesterday. She wasn’t like the other girls who came here. She was a woman, for one thing. She was lovely, or I guess you might say she had once been lovely. A man brought her here in a big black car. Said he was her husband. There had been a fire, he told us, a terrible fire. Her hair was burned short.” Mother Bernadette held up her hands to her wimple. “Her face was bandaged. Her hands were bandaged. Her right leg was broken.”

I leaned forward. “Did you say a fire? What kind of fire?”

“The man didn’t say. He spent about an hour with the Mother Superior, in her office. Oh, she was an old bag, that woman. You give some people an ounce of moral authority and they turn into tyrants, you see. They become despots because they know they’re right. He spent an hour with her and got in his car and left. I took charge of the poor woman, because I was a trained nurse, you see.”

“What did she say?” Paige asks. “Did she tell you anything about herself?”

Mother Bernadette shakes her head. “Not a word. She hardly spoke, poor thing. Her wounds healed up and her hair grew in. She had scars on her face and her hands but everywhere else she was lovely, just the loveliest thing. But she wouldn’t speak. When she was well enough she worked in the laundry, like the other girls. Then her time came. Oh, it was terrible. Everything went wrong from the beginning. The baby was turned around, the doctor was late and stone drunk. He wanted to do a Caesarean but I wouldn’t let him, not in his condition. I saved that baby myself. Got her turned around at last and out she came. Beautiful little girl. A bit squashed after what she went through, but beautiful like her mother.”

“That was Mom,” I say. “That was our mother.”

“When she woke up from the chloroform,” says Mother Bernadette, “I gave her the baby to hold. The other sisters said we should take her to the nursery, but I said over my dead body, that child has a father and a mother, married and everything, she’s not born in sin, she’s not going anywhere but her mother’s arms. And Mrs. Ainsworth—”

“Ainsworth! Was that her name?”

“Mrs. Ainsworth. Hannah Ainsworth. It’s been in my head ever since. She looks down at her darling wee babe and puts her to nurse, just like that, like she knows what she’s doing. And she looks up at me and says—not the first words I ever heard her say, but the first words I remember her to say—she says, She has his eyes.”

Paige looks at me. “You have Mom’s eyes. Her green eyes.”

“Have you, now?” Mother Bernadette finds a pair of glasses at the side of her desk and puts them on to peer at me. “Well, I wouldn’t know. New mothers will say such things. But I do recall I felt a shiver at that. I remember I thought that this man who brought her in, who said he was her husband—well, I was pretty sure his eyes were blue. Not green.”

“Hold on a second,” says Paige. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I had a funny feeling about the whole affair, that’s what. That it was the husband who wanted to give up the baby, not her.”

“So how did Mom end up getting adopted?” I ask.

“Well, I did my best. But the Mother Superior was furious. She came up and said in that voice of hers, I’ll never forget her voice as long as I live, she said, What do you think you’re doing, letting that baby nurse with its mother. We’ve got a nice American family right here that wants to adopt the child. And there was nothing I could do, really. They got their hands on the baby and took her away. Oh, you should have heard that poor mother screaming for her child. Like one of those banshees. I had to give her something to make her sleep. When she woke up, she gave me that bracelet. She said to find the family that had taken her baby and give them that bracelet to give to her daughter. Of course, they’d left for their ship by then. I had to take the bus to Galway. I made it to the docks just in time. Found the parents with the baby and told them this was the mother’s dying wish. I’m sure the Lord forgives a wee white lie such as that. I’m glad to see the parents kept the promise. They seemed like a nice couple. Here, love.”

She hands me a Kleenex. Paige reaches for the box on the desk and takes one too.

“I hope you murdered that husband when he came to fetch her,” says Paige.

“Well, that’s the funny thing. He came to fetch her, all right, about a week after the birth, but she was already gone.”

“Gone! You mean she ran away?”

Mother Bernadette shakes her head. “A woman drove up the day before and asked to see Mrs. Ainsworth. Of course the Mother Superior said no, there was no Mrs. Ainsworth in the convent, never heard of her. But after this woman walked out, I ran to her car—it was raining fit to drown—and said to come with me. Between the two of us, we got Mrs. Ainsworth down the stairs and out to that car, and that was the last I saw of her.” She lifts the folder from her desk and holds it out to us with her short, knobbled fingers. “You can take that with you, if you like. I’m only glad to see the pair of you with my own old eyes before I die. I always did wonder what became of that poor woman’s child.”

The sun burns through the mist as we wind between the hills on our way back to Galway, where Paige has booked us a room at some luxury hotel. A sky of preposterous blue appears patch by patch, then spreads out like a sheet from horizon to horizon. Against the green hills, it breaks your heart.

“So what do you think?” I said. “Do you think she had an affair? Mom wasn’t the husband’s child?”

Paige stares straight ahead. “I don’t know what to think. I guess we’ll find out more when the DNA stuff comes in.”

I reach out to turn on the radio. “At least we have a name now. Hannah Ainsworth. That gives us something to go on.”

Paige lets me have the bathroom first. I don’t know if she’s taking some kind of revenge on Jake or whether this is how they usually travel, but the suite she’s booked is larger than my house. After a long, hot shower, I stand in front of the lighted mirror and examine my eyes.

I remember going sailing with Monk and the twins one afternoon. I guess he must have had the day off or something. Like all the Winthrop kids, he’d learned to sail around the time he learned to walk, or maybe shortly after. It was a gorgeous day but humid, and I gathered up my hair in a knot at the back of my head and complained about how frizzy it got in weather like this; how I should move to the desert. This was in June, before Monk and I got together, and he didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Just busied himself with the tiller and the sheets. Out of the blue, he said, “You have the greatest eyes, though.” I laughed it off. He said it was true, they made him think of King Arthur’s castle. (I remember those exact words, King Arthur’s castle, because they could mean anything, because they warmed me from my belly outward.) That green color, he told me. Nobody has eyes like yours.

Naturally I blushed and turned away to pull Blue back from the water—she had leaned over the edge to look for fish—and Monk said quickly, Not that there’s anything wrong with your hair. Your hair is great too. And we laughed, because my hair is the color of poop, let’s face it, and regularly defies the laws of physics.

But that night, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at my green eyes, the way I’m doing now. My mother’s eyes. I remember I had this strange feeling that they weren’t really mine, or even hers.

That they belonged to somebody else who had given them to me for safekeeping.

When I emerge from the bathroom, swathed in a towel made of clouds, Paige is sitting on the sofa in the living area. She’s spread out the papers from the manila folder on the coffee table and bends over them with that look of superhuman concentration she gets, the look that got her into Yale.

“Bathroom’s free,” I tell her.

She looks up as if I’ve woken her from a trance. “I guess I could use a shower.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah.”

Paige disappears into the bathroom. I head for my suitcase and pull out some fresh clothes. My phone buzzes from inside my handbag. I pull it out and find a message alert from Monk Adams.

Shit, I think.

I click on the alert and the message comes up.

Sam is fine don’t worry. Has your sister been checking her messages

I stand there in my towel of clouds and type back, idk, whats up

The gray dots appear (so gratifying, those gray dots, so validating) then—

I think her husband is on the news.