Embracing Darkness (67 page)

“Phin,” said Dr. Poole, “you’re going to help me in the shed from now on, because I think it’s good for you to understand why I’m doing what I am and how important my work is. We’re doing this for the good of these girls.”

“Is God going to be angry?” Phineas asked in a concerned voice.

Robert sighed and brought his face closer to his son’s. “If you believe that you’re doing the right thing,” he answered rather speciously, “then it can never be a sin. And don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Remember that, son.”

“Okay,” Phineas said innocently, as he began touching the fingers of the right hand with those of his left to see whether he’d licked off all the sticky remnants of his quickly devoured ice cream.

Phineas wasn’t far from the next-to-last stop on his bus ride back from Manchester. The bus had left Brentwood ten minutes earlier but had stopped because of a dead deer in the middle of the road that needed to be moved. It wouldn’t have taken more than a minute if the driver, claiming he had a bad back, hadn’t been a prima donna and asked for four strong male passengers to help him.

When the bus was about three miles from Exeter, Father Poole drifted from the memory of learning about his father’s activities in the shed to memories of his actual involvement. As he dreamed about this sordid, unhappy chapter in his life, the old couple sitting across from him looked at the cleric with concern. The priest began to writhe slightly and moan what sounded like “No, no.”

In Phineas’s mind he was now eight years old. It was the fall of 1900 on a clear, cool night in October when the ground was littered with maple leaves. Young Phineas walked out of his family’s cape-style house at 35 Faulkner Street and shuffled through the two-inch deep accumulation of leaves that lay neglected all over the yard. In his hands he carried a pail of freshly boiled water straight from the stove. Because Mary Margaret by this time was enjoying her usual post-supper nap, Robert assumed that it would be a good time to take the day’s last customer.

Dr. Poole’s illegal medical practice for girls in trouble was now in its second season of operation, and working with his son, Robert was performing an average of six abortions a week as word of his free services spread. Robert thought it a strange coincidence, perhaps even a bit providential had he been a religious man, that ever since his son began assisting him business had picked up dramatically. It used to be only one to two abortions a month; now Dr. Poole was doing that many in a day.

Phineas entered the shed and let its door slam. The bucket was heavy, and he was worried that, if he let go of it with one hand to catch the door, he’d lose control of the pail, and the water would splash up and scald his hand.

“Shhh!” The hush came from Robert as Phineas reopened the door and peeked out to see whether anyone had heard it slam shut.

“Sorry, daddy,” said Phineas, “but these buckets get heavy.”

“You should be used to it by now,” snapped Robert, who always felt a little on edge upon starting an abortion.

Although he knew he was doing what he believed was right, Robert realized how dangerous it would be if anyone were to ever find out. It didn’t matter that the closest neighbors were a hundred or so yards away. People always alert to wrongdoing, so Robert was always on his guard when it came to doing what Phineas called “unbirthing.”

“Be a good lad and fetch me some towels from over there,” said Robert.

It was another of Phineas’s responsibilities to have on hand enough clean towels for the before and after stages. The former involved wiping the soaked brow of the girl, who was always nervous, trembling, and sweaty. The latter entailed sopping up blood and other bodily fluids that would spill out of the patient. One towel was always reserved for the express purpose of wrapping up the remains of the tiny fetus. Both it and the contents were then taken away by the girl who had received Dr. Poole’s services.

Robert felt that it wasn’t wrong of him to expect these girls to take responsibility for the remains since some of the young women, like those teens who accidentally got pregnant by their beaus, did believe it was a baby they were having aborted and wanted to give it a proper burial in their yards with two twigs tied together to resemble a cross. They would simply tell people that some small pet lay in repose in that spot.

Then there were the girls, the least numerous subgroup, who had been raped and didn’t care what was done with the fetus. To them Dr. Poole simply said, “Do what you will with it, but be sure no one finds it. To be absolutely certain, if you have no emotional attachment, burn it.” These rape victims did just that.

Phineas always remained calm, even when his father grew paranoid before the procedure. If Phineas had a pivotal role in the shed, it was in bringing calm to a tense situation. When he noticed his father pacing and peering out the door, Phineas would simply shake his head, fold his arms, smile at the girl, and say, “My dad! He’s always like this just before.”

It wasn’t that Phineas had grown numb to the whole tragedy of a young girl’s choosing not to carry her child to full term. It was rather that he didn’t fully understand the implications of what was going on. To him it was just as Robert had explained it to him. A fetus wasn’t a baby in the sense that it crawled, slept in a cradle, and cried when it was hungry. Instead, it was an organism the size of a gumball that would become a baby if the pregnancy were not ended.

Almost a year and a half of Phineas’s assisting in these abortions had passed by October of 1900. By this time Robert and Phineas didn’t need any more excuses for spending as much time in the shed as they did during the first few weeks. Mary Margaret had grown so accustomed to the two spending random hours out back in the shed that she relished the additional leisure by herself.

When the father and son first began working together, Mary Margaret had asked, “Are you out there teaching our seven-year-old how to smoke?” She knew he wasn’t because upon first conceiving of this possibility Mary Margaret had intercepted young Phineas and smelled his breath, telling him that she was checking to make sure he had brushed his teeth before bed.

Early in their collusion Robert had devised an excuse. “We’re making a project, just us boys,” he had said, although he hadn’t thought any further than this, not expecting his wife to question what the project was.

“What project?” she said, surprised at Robert’s sudden interest in their son.

“Uhm,” Robert temporized. Just then his eyes spotted the summer edition of
The
New
Englander
, whose cover featured a schooner with a tall mast and billowing sails. “We’re making a ship,” he answered quickly.

“A ship?” she replied, not believing him.

“Yes,” he said, sounding confident. “A ship
in
a
bottle
.”

“Oh, I love those!” Mary Margaret exclaimed. “Perhaps Phinny will be wantin’ to give it to his mommy as a surprise.”

Robert wanted to tell her that she’d have to wait an eternity to see it, but instead he added, “It’s for a school “Show and Tell” project. Phinny got the idea from your magazine right there.”

So that’s the way things went for the first several months. Phineas and Robert were doing nothing more than male-bonding activities in the shed, as far as Mary Margaret and her father were concerned.

Seamus Brennan complained once, “I never see the boy anymore. Me grandson’s not got so much more growin’ up to do before he’s a man himself, you know. I don’t want to be missin’ his entire childhood.”

“Yes, pa,” rejoined his daughter, “but at least they’re bein’ constructive, they are.”

On off days such as Sundays, when even girls in trouble needed time to go to church and pray that their little mistake would miraculously go away, Robert would take his son to the park. This was the same place where Robert had taken Phineas to get the boy to open up about what he’d seen in the shed.

Robert was in the habit of buying a new kite for his son on every outing because Phineas always lost the kites to the wind, which would take them over to the seagulls by the water. This in turn happened because Robert never seemed to be with Phineas when it came time to fly them. Instead, Robert would walk fifty or so yards away until he was so immersed in the crowd of people that he was nearly out of Phineas’s sight.

Dr. Poole did so in order secretly to rendezvous with Edith Fisher, who was now happily raising a daughter, about four years younger than Phineas whose father wasn’t Ralph Fisher but Edith’s lover Allen Reid.

Edith’s purpose for meeting Robert Poole in Wallis Sands Park was to see the son who had been taken from her, along with the boy’s twin sister, eight years earlier. She and Robert tried to stay concealed behind trees or passersby, but Phineas paid more attention to spotting his father in the distance than he did to making sure his kite didn’t plummet to the seagulls.

“How he’s grown, Robert,” Edith said.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, Edith.”

“There’s nothing else to do. He doesn’t belong to me.”

“I know that your friendship with my wife made it impossible for you to stay away from Phineas. You helped Mary Margaret in those first few years.”

“I wanted to do it despite what she did.”

“Even though it meant knowing that he would never recognize you as anything more than a good friend of the family?”

“Far better for me to be able to see him grow up than to wonder all these years what he was like.”

“Is it?”

“Is it what?”

“Is it
really
better?”

Edith shrugged, indicating her genuine uncertainty. Thinking of more practical matters, she then asked, “What if he tells his mother that I’m always at the park or that you always leave him alone or that he’s seen the two of us together here?”

“He won’t, Edith,” replied Robert. “Phineas and I have an understanding about the secrets we keep, how divulging certain things to his mother would do more harm than good.”

“What other secrets are you two keeping from your wife, Robert?”

He didn’t answer the question.

Phineas in 1905 was preparing to make his confirmation. He attended Sunday school from ten to eleven in the morning after Mass. He hated going because his teacher, Mrs. Weig, was as authoritarian in her class as a lion tamer is in a cage. Mrs. Weig didn’t carry a whip, but rumor had it that she kept one in the bottom drawer of her desk.

One Sunday the topic was the Ten Commandments. The focus seemed to be on the fifth: “Thou shall not kill.” Phineas knew the commandments by heart, as any child of a devout Christian woman such as his mother would. He wanted to ask his teacher what Jesus or God would think of a woman who decided not to have a baby she’d been carrying.

“I don’t think I understand your question,” said Mrs. Weig, as Phineas suddenly realized that the entire class was staring at him for having asked such a question.

He repeated his point in a different way, to which Mrs. Weig replied, “Are you speaking of
regret
, Master Poole?”

Phineas shook his head and huffed in frustration. “No, I mean getting rid of it before it’s born!” he said, sounding angry. He felt self-conscious as it was in having to ask such a question. He hated having to repeat or clarify it. What’s more, he didn’t want to have to spell it out for her.

Mrs. Weig turned red. Phineas wasn’t sure whether she did so because she was embarrassed by the subject or because a student of hers had raised his voice in front of twenty other thirteen-year-olds.

“You’re talking about murder, Phineas!” she said, “the same exact thing we’ve been discussing. When a person does the unthinkable, however she goes about it, she is
murdering
her child. God and Jesus would send her straight to hell!”

Mrs. Weig sounded melodramatic, to say the least, but her message was sinking in for both Phineas and the rest of the class.

“Now,” she continued, “if the young woman were to have these feelings but still gave birth to her child, that is one thing. God and Jesus would forgive her. She would just need to ask for Their forgiveness. But once she acts upon her feelings, she is damned for all eternity.”

“You mean she’s damned for killing her baby,” replied Phineas bluntly, “but it’s not a baby yet.”

The eyes of the entire class were locked on Phineas, and some had their mouths agape.

“WHO TOLD YOU THAT?” yelled Mrs. Weig. “THAT IS UTTER NONSENSE! OF COURSE IT’S A BABY! WHAT ELSE WOULD IT BE?”

“A fetus,” answered Phineas matter-of-factly.

Mrs. Weig stood before the class holding her breath, her head trembling slightly. “Don’t you
ever
use the word ‘fetus’ in my class! Who do you think you are?” She stopped and forced herself not to say anything she might later regret.

Phineas ignored his teacher. “She can’t very well do it herself.” he continued. “Someone else has to do it. So my question is: Does the person who takes the fetus out get damned to hell, or is it only mother because she wants her child never to be born? Who’s the guilty one?”

Mrs. Weig was ready to throw Phineas out of the class, but then she thought that perhaps he really did want to know the answer to his question. Surely she would have to tell his mother what he had said in class, but not before she gave Phineas her answer.

“They would both burn in hell forever, Phineas, the mother
and
the person who helped her in such a terrible and bloody act of murder!”

Phineas struggled with this idea as he walked home. He couldn’t believe how damned he was by taking part in this sinful act. After all, he’d been involved in so many, watching and helping his father more times than he could count, so much so that he could easily do these procedures himself. A destiny of burning in the flames of hell for eternity made his stomach lurch. He didn’t want to face his father, whom he now hated for damning both their souls while his mother would be in heaven alone.

As he walked through the front door of 35 Faulkner Street, his mother screamed, “PHINEAS SEAMUS POOLE! YOU BE GETTIN’ YOURSELF IN HERE RIGHT AWAY, MISTER!”