She turned to the priest. “Did the archbishop…?”
He nodded. “I spoke to his office. His people will have a word with the Commissioner-there’ll be no need for the police to get involved.”
Sister Anselm made a sound of disgust. Sister Stephanus turned her tired gaze on her. “Did you speak, Sister?”
She turned and limped out of the room. Sister Stephanus and the priest looked at each other, and then away. They said nothing.
THERE WAS ICE ON THE FRONT STEPS AND ANDY KEPT AN ARM AROUND Claire’s shoulders so she would not slip. Since the accident with the kid he had not known what to do with his wife, she was so silent and withdrawn. She spent her time sitting around the house half in a trance, or watching the kiddies’ programs on TV,
Cora had been the only good thing for him in all of this. She had calmed him down on the night of the accident and helped him get his story straight. Sometimes now during the day she came up and sat with Claire, and more than once he had arrived home to find her preparing his dinner, while Claire, wearing the housecoat that she had not changed out of since morning, red-eyed and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, lay on her front on their bed with her feet hanging over the side. There was something about her feet, white on the instep and discolored and callused on the undersides, that gave him a nauseous feeling. Cora’s feet were long and tanned, and narrow at the heel and broad and rounded where the toes started. Cora wanted nothing from him but his hard brown body. She never asked him to tell her he loved her, or worried about the future, or what would happen if Claire found out about the two of them. Being with Cora was like being with a man, except when they were in bed, and even then she had almost a man’s brutal appetite.
They were walking down the driveway of the orphanage when they met Brenda Ruttledge coming in at the gate. She was wearing a big alpaca coat and a woollen hat and fur-trimmed boots. Andy did not remember her from when Claire had bumped into her when they were leaving the Christmas party at Josh Crawford’s place-in fact, there was not much he did remember about that afternoon-and Claire of course was too wrapped up in herself to know whether she recognized someone or not. But Brenda remembered them from the party, the pale young woman with the baby and her baby-faced little husband flushed and in a rage from having drunk too much beer. The young woman looked terrible today. She was gray-faced and gaunt, as if she were in shock, or sick with dread, or grief. Brenda watched them as they passed her by, the wife walking stiff-legged and the husband guiding her with his arm around her shoulders.
Brenda had expected America to be different from home, the people happier, more forward-looking, friendlier, but they were just the same as her own folk, just as angry and petty-minded and afflicted. Or maybe it was just Boston that was like that, with so many Irish here, still with their race memories of the Famine and the death ships. But she did not like to think of these things, of home, and her being here, and lonely.
The door was opened by the same young nun with the prominent teeth who had opened it the last time she was here, when she’d brought the baby. She thought of asking her name but did not know if it was allowed to ask such a thing; anyway it would not be her own name but that of some saint Brenda had never heard of before. She had a nice face, small and round and jolly-looking; well, they would soon knock the jollity out of her, in this place. She too, like the couple on the drive, showed no sign of remembering Brenda. But then, probably she had opened the door to hundreds of people since Brenda had last been here.
“I wonder if I could see Sister Stephanus?”
She was afraid the nun would ask her what her business was, but instead she invited her to step into the hall and said she would go and see if Mother Superior was in. When she smiled her teeth stuck out and two babyish dimples appeared in her fat little cheeks.
She was gone for what seemed a long time, then came back and said Sister Stephanus was not in at present. Brenda knew she was being lied to. Embarrassed, she avoided the young nun’s not unkindly eye.
“I just wanted to ask about-about one of the babies,” she said. “Christine is her name.”
The young nun answered nothing, only stood with her hands clasped one upon the other at her waist, smiling politely. Brenda supposed she was not the first courier-would that be the word?-to come back here to St. Mary’s inquiring after a baby. She recalled the cockney purser on the boat when she was coming over who had warned her about getting attached to the child. He had barely glanced at their papers, hers and the baby’s, then sat back in his chair behind his desk and looked at her bosom with the hint of a weaselly leer and said, “Believe me, I’ve seen it happen, time and again, girls going out, some of them hardly out of school, by the time they hit Stateside they think the baby’s their own.” But it was not that she felt an attachment, exactly, she thought now, walking back down the driveway, only she still found herself thinking about little Christine, and remembering the funny feeling in her insides when she first took the baby in her arms that evening on Dun Laoghaire pier. The couple she had met here on the drive, where was their baby today, she wondered? She saw again the woman’s shocked white face and dead eyes, and she shivered.
26
PHOEBE HAD SLEPT FOR MOST OF THE FLIGHT OVER, WHILE QUIRKE with bitter determination had got drunk on complimentary brandies liberally plied to him by a frisky-eyed stewardess. Despite the five hours they had saved flying westwards it was dark when they arrived aboard the Clipper, and Quirke was resentful of the whole day he seemed to have missed out of his life, a lost day that was nonetheless more significant now than so many others he had lived through. From the airport they took a taxi to Penn Station, slumped away from each other against their respective windows, both groggy in their own way. The train was new and sleek and fast, although it smelled much the same as an old steam train. In Boston they were met at the station by Josh’s driver, a dark, slight young man who looked more like a boy got up in a chauffeur’s uniform, a smart gray affair complete with leather leggings and a cap with a shiny peak. He smelled of hair oil and cigarettes. His name, he said, when Quirke asked, was Andy.
An icy rain was falling, and as they drove across the city Quirke peered through the murk at the lighted streets, looking for remembered landmarks and finding none. It was twenty years, and seemed a thousand, since he had last been here, he and Mal, two tyro medical men working-masquerading, more like-as interns for a year at Massachusetts General thanks to the strings that had been pulled for them by the Judge’s old pal Joshua Crawford, a freeman of this city and father of two lovely and marriageable daughters. Yes, more like a thousand years.
“Tender memories stirring?” Phoebe inquired slyly from her side of the car. He had not realized that she had been watching him. He said nothing. “What’s the matter?” she asked, in a different tone. She was fed up with his moodiness; he had been in some kind of sulk the whole way over.
Quirke turned his eyes to the window again and the shining city sliding past. “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” he said.
“You’re different. No jokes anymore. I’m the one who’s supposed to be in a mood. Is it that fall you took?”
He was silent for a time and then said:
“I wish we could…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Talk.”
“We are talking.”
“Are we?”
