The Whipping Club (20 page)

             
And Marian knew that Beva would not try to stop her efforts to bring Adrian home.

“After all these years—now almost thirty working here—I’ve not a shilling to my name,” Nurse confided to Officer Dolan in the dark shed, only a small green candle for light, the faint smell of evergreens in the room from the scented wax. “Maybe just three shillings saved from the Ellises, you know. Not a stamp to write to anyone, though I’m not allowed to, anyway.” 

             
Officer Dolan rummaged in his back pocket, produced a brown leather wallet, his picture identification card in a plastic flap, and handed her five stamps.

             
“Don’t give me–”

             
“Go on. What harm? Take the stamps, my God.”

             
She put the stamps in her shoe and felt giddy enough to emit a giggle. She saw paper bills stuffed inside his wallet, too, and asked how much savings he might have. He looked taken aback, the way men do when they think you might be wanting something from them. “No, no,” she said, changing the subject. “I’m just hoping they don’t put me out to pasture now that I’m old and gray,” she said, knowing by his ruddy cheeks and veiny nose he was at least her age, likely older, and would understand her fears of aging alone.

             
“Ah, you’re still young, Nurse. You can’t be near my age, fifty this December coming.”

             
“I stopped counting, one day going into the next, you know. Around fifty though, I am, too.” She giggled again. “A lot older than the lot of them around here.” Nurse hadn’t been given a birthday in the orphanage and truly didn’t know her exact age.

             
“Well, you don’t look over forty,” he said, chuckling in his odd way, like coughing, at her obvious flirtation and at his attempt at a compliment.

             
“No, Officer Dolan, you wouldn’t want to trade places with the likes of them. No, no—regardless of their age. Some of the new girls are unbelievable. Have you noticed? The place is changing entirely. One got me into bad trouble with Sister Paulinas,” she said, feeling his interest in her as he moved closer.

             
“Would you call me Dan?”

             
“If Sister Paulinas heard me in here, calling you Dan, what would she think? I wouldn’t dare.”

             
He chuckled again, moved closer still, put his hands clumsily around her waist, and she noticed the Br
ylcreem in his pale thin hair.
She withdrew from his arms and began talking fast. “I couldn’t keep a new one from talking last night. Sister Paulinas came in, and heard me coaxing this brassy one to stop gabbing with the others. Sister said I was a useless old lady.”

             
“Go on. Sister respects you,” he said. And then blushing, he asked, “And what’s your real name? Don’t want to be calling you Nurse, either.”

             
She ignored him. “You know how young people are. Or maybe you don’t know. No children?”

             
He choked up a laugh. “Never married myself,” he said.

             
She watched his face and neck turn the color of wild cranberries, his breath dense with mints and tobacco.

             
“I never married, either,” she said, and quickly changed the subject. “I was a behaver, mind you. I wouldn’t have dared speak up like the new girl. There were some bold ones a while back, but none so bad as now. The one who stood up to me frightened me, and in front of Sister Paulinas. ‘Nurse, what are you, listening to this little runt of a child?’ Sister Paulinas asked me. That shut the girl up. Shut her right up. ‘Get back into the bed,’ I said, and the girl obeyed.”

             
Then Sister Paulinas had said, “One runt of a child to another,” staring at her. “I thought you’d be able to master your own, but you’re as much work as they are,” she’d added. Nurse left that last part out. Still, she felt surprise at her candor with Officer Dolan.

             
But Sister Paulinas’s words had troubled her. She knew none of the girls would respect her now, and with all Sister Paulinas and she had been through together, the truth finally hit her: Sister Paulinas would sooner help a cow get milk than she would help her.

“I’d hoped Sister Paulinas would respect me one day. But she despises the sight of me. Sins would sooner be forgiven by our Lord Jesus Christ than by her.”

             
“You have her respect; I see that. You needn’t worry so.”

             
Nurse thought about Marian and how Marian knew how to get what she wanted. Marian had once told her that Sister Paulinas kept the girls down by scaring the wits off them. “Have you seen some of them wearing nylons and hair ribbons, as if they’re going somewhere when they come in,” Nurse said and then giggled. “No, no—one even talked back to Sister Paulinas, telling her not to touch her baby, that she’d do the picking up of her, and Sister Paulinas just looked at her and then walked out of the nursery. I never thought I’d see the day.”

             
“With all the new music they have going now, it’s no surprise,” he said with another cough and a small move toward her.

             
“The girl must have figured that there was no more punishment they could do to her than take her baby. They couldn’t hurt her; her mother had paid the headage. Some things never change. Money still talks,” she said.

             
“True, that.”

             
“Sister is meaner, her job’s getting harder. With the attitudes some of them come in here wearing, Sister’s gone mad. But she’ll never change. No, no—she’s a bitch,” she whispered, and then looked round, sorry she’d said such a horrible thing, and in front of her man. “I’ll be going,” she said.

             
Nurse ran to her room, took out her penknife and slit quickly and deeply into her thigh. All the girls knew, because of Sister Paulinas, that she’d been a fallen woman, too. Though Sister promised Nurse’s deceased sister Anne and Sister’s Superior to be silent on the matter. Thirty-odd years or so on the j
ob, and no respect. No change.
She thought about Adrian, worried about him. She lay down on her cot letting her blood seep into her underclothes, not trying anymore to hold back her memories.

             
She cut herself deeply on the same thigh.
Blood is good. It makes babies.
She lay there, thinking about Officer Dolan, and she imagined that he was going to ask her to be his wife. He certainly respected her, like Marian did. Tomorrow, she’d just go about her business. If the girls asked her any questions, she’d tell them to shut it. Her life was none of their business. She’d show Sister Paulinas that these girls respected her.

             
Sister Paulinas. Bitch. Unhappy, old nun.

             
Ah, the hell with her! She wrote Marian a missive that said simply,
Help me, need a visit
. And the nex
t morning before nursery duty,
she hurried down to the front of the property and dropped a stamped envelope into the letterbox.

With Benjamin’s arm in a cast, Marian took the driver’s seat on the way home from the hospital. The rest jockeyed for positions by the other doors. Beva had not had a chance to chat with her grandson but accepted the middle seat between her daughter-in-law and Benjamin in the front without a word as Gran made a big to-do about everything with the kids in the back.

             
Where were Jo’s hair bows? Gran asked Marian. Where was Adrian’s sun hat? And on and on she chattered. “Stop your clowning, now.” Gran tapped Johanna’s wrist.
Adrian retaliated a poke from
Johanna and received his own tap on the knee.

             
Obviously Gran and Marian had been unable to teach these young people manners, Beva thought.

             
“You won’t, either of you, be having the chocs in this box on my lap after tea, I can tell you,” Gran said.

             
Beva suddenly felt badly abo
ut the way she treated Marian.
She thought about the young woman that Marian was when she first met her, barely out of school. Perhaps Marian had been hoping that they might even be thrilled to have a little one running around the table. Beva understood a tad more now. Marian had been nervous. The nervous Beva herself had been rude, heartless even. With Marian’s pregnancy in the picture, it all made sense. She wondered where the boy had been born and how different it would have been if Marian had never gone away, if she had told Benjamin the truth.

             
“Children, cut it out,” Benjamin called.

             
Raising an eyebrow, Beva turned around. The
kinder
immediately stopped jumping around in the car. She patted her son on his knee.The muggy day proceeded, the sky’s gray clouds bunched together. A sudden downpour, replete with thunderous noise, ensued, and they were stuck in an awful traffic jam. Squawking
horns from miserable motorists
exacerbated the discomfort. Marian took the opportunity to point out Da’s office building, or at least the direction of The
Irish Times
and the green further down, with the Shelbourne Hotel on the right, where the Irish Constitution was signed. “A favorite of your ma and da’s, this area in general,” she said. “Isn’t it,” she said to Benjamin.

             
“Ah, it is. Open the windows back there,” Benjamin said. “I’m roasting.”

             
“It’s raining, Da,” Jo answered back, laughing at him.

             
“That’s where your da and I celebrated our wedding day,” Marian pointed, looking straight ahead.

Benjamin had told his mother it was a filthy day, with rain slashing the windows of the Registrar’s Off
ice. Marian and Benjamin stood
in the queue to be married by a Justice of the Peace. Except for Mr. Robert Thompson, their witness, they were alone. They sipped a bottle of G. H. Mumm Grand Cru at the Shelbourne. “May you know nothing but happiness from this day forward,” he whispered to his bride. Had thoughts of Adrian crowded her mind? Had she not foreseen the depths of maternal feelings? Or was she surprised by them, as she herself had been? It might have been raining, but it was only weather, after all. There’s food, and there’s weather, Marian said to Benjamin, who made an apelike face. They kissed and laughed and finished their champagne.

             
“Ah, we’re bloody married,” Benjamin had declared. They sat for a moment, looking out the window at the darkening clouds. There was no denying the heat and swelling humidity before the coming rain. “Come on. Let’s go to my place before another onslaught.”

He threw ten pence on the table and put on his overcoat and hat. “It’s about to come down hard.”

             
“In more ways than one,” Maria
n said as he took her hand and
led her away from the crowds, against furious winds through St. Stephen’s Green, and past the usual cut-off to Mercer Street and her home. “Christ!” she shouted as she bolted, his newspaper covering her stiff curls, all the pent-up nerves flying about.

             
“Marian!” Benjamin called after her and she stopped.

             
Heads of passersby turned, and she suddenly felt self-conscious.

             
“Let them stare if that’s all they have on their minds to do. I don’t care.” He tipped his hat and faced them. “I love her!” he shouted, throwing his arms out wide. Shocked, Marian turned toward him, and they both began to laugh. Everything would turn out fine,

he told her.

             
The slashing mist thickening into a sudden downpour, the two continued south like kids in a three-legged race, until the door of his flat on Martin Street shut behind them. She’d only been here that one other time. And it had felt nothing like sin. Marian took in as much of the room as she could: the crumpled brown hat and beige mackintosh dripping on the hall stand, the typewriter and newspapers and cigarette packs splayed across his wooden desk, the pea green couch and glass coffee table, soiled sneakers on the oval tweed mat, the smell of dirty socks. She watched him study her as he slipped off her raincoat.

             
“My ma’s going to think–”

             
“It only matters what I think,” Benjamin said. She held him tightly. “We have a couple of hours,” he said, and gave her that squint she loved as he slowly unzipped her dress. She felt it slip to the floor.

             
“Stop shaking,” he whispered and kissed her all over and then held her face in his hands. “Everything will be okay, Marian. I just know it.”

             
She did feel safe here. She could let her worries fall away. Whenever they were together, it was as if she had left dreary Dublin behind. She loved the rush. They moved together as if to a slow song until the urgency overtook her. “I have never been so hot and bothered in my life.”