We’d waited a few weeks to meet again after that day in the hospital chapel. It was possible, of course, that it had been pure coincidence, that the use of that phrase a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun was just chance. Could it have been hers at first and somehow been adopted by Charles and Maude as if it had traveled across the city along with my small body? Or had Charles just thought the same thing and these had been the obvious words to use? And even the date of birth could have been happenstance. How many children, after all, were born in Dublin on the same day each year? And yet somehow I knew immediately that this was no coincidence; that we had been in each other’s lives all these years without ever realizing who the other one was.
But, of course, our timing was terrible. My mother had just lost one son; she wasn’t ready to deal with the implications of potentially finding another only a few hours later. She grew terribly upset when I sat down and told her what I suspected, and finally I had no choice but to call her daughter-in-law, whose number the hospital gave me, and dispatch her in a taxi for home. Afterward, I waited a couple of weeks to write to her—I didn’t attend Jonathan’s funeral, as much as I wanted to—making it clear that I needed nothing from her and that I was not one of those unfortunate souls seeking retribution for my abandonment many decades earlier. I simply wanted to talk to her, that was all, and for us to get to know each other in a way that we hadn’t to date.
And in time, she replied.
Let’s meet, she said. Let’s meet and talk.
And so we met in Buswells Hotel, across the road from Dáil éireann, one Thursday evening after work. I could barely keep still all day, so anxious was I about what lay ahead, but once I crossed the road I began to feel strangely at peace. The bar was fairly empty, save for the Minister of Finance sitting in a corner of the room with his head in his hands, apparently weeping into his Guinness, and I turned away from him, not wanting to get involved with whatever madness was going on over there. I looked around and saw Mrs. Goggin, as I still thought of her, sitting on the other side of the room, and gave her a wave as I approached and she smiled back nervously. She had a cup of tea in front of her that was almost empty and I asked her whether she wanted another.
“What will you be having?” she asked. “Will you be having a drink?”
“I might have a pint,” I said. “I have a thirst on me after the day’s work.”
“Then perhaps you’d be good enough to get me one too.”
“A pint?” I asked, surprised. “Of lager?”
“Of Guinness,” she said. “If you don’t mind. I might need it.”
Somehow it made me happy that we were both going to be drinking; it would take the edge off, I decided.
“Sláinte,” I said when I returned, lifting my pint, and she lifted hers too and we clinked glasses, failing to look each other in the eye as one is supposed to do at such moments. I didn’t know what we were expected to do next and for a while we sat quietly, making small talk about the weather and the condition of the soft furnishings.
“Well now,” she said at last.
“Well now,” I repeated. “How have you been?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“It’s a terrible loss that you’ve suffered.”
“Yes.”
“And your daughter-in-law and the girls?”
She shrugged. “They’re remarkably strong, all of them,” she said. “It’s the thing I most admire about Melanie. But I hear her at night, crying in her bedroom. She and Jonathan loved each other very much. Of course, they were together since they were just teenagers, the pair of them, and he should have had many decades ahead of him yet. But then, you know what it is to lose someone too young, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. I had told her about Bastiaan many years earlier when she was still employed in the tearoom.
“Does it ever get any easier?” she asked.
I nodded. “It does,” I said. “You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I’ve grown accustomed to his absence. In some ways it was more difficult to get used to his presence once we started going out.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because it was new to me,” I said, considering it. “I messed up everything when I was young. So when I finally found myself in a normal, healthy relationship I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Other people learn those tricks so much younger.”
“He left them very well provided for all the same,” she said. “Jonathan, I mean. So there’s that to be grateful for. And Melanie is a wonderful mother. I’ve been living there since Christmas. But it’s time I went back to my own place. I’m going back next week, in fact.”
“You keep talking about your daughter-in-law,” I said. “But how are you? How are you coping?”
“Well, I’ll never get over it,” she said with a shrug. “A parent never could. And somehow I have to find a way to cope with that.”
“And Jonathan’s father?” I asked, for I had never heard her mention him.
“Oh he’s long gone,” she said. “He was just a man I met. I can barely remember what he even looked like. The thing is, Cyril, I wanted a child, a child that I could keep, and I needed a man’s help to make the baby. He wandered in and out of my life over the course of one night and that was as much as I ever knew of him or wanted to. Does that make me sound like a terribly wanton woman?”
“It makes you sound like someone who wanted to be in charge of her own destiny. Who didn’t want anyone telling her what to do ever again.”
“Perhaps,” she said, considering this. “Anyway, the thing is, Jonathan was all that I needed from then on. He was a good son. And I think I was a good mother.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“Does that make you angry?”
I frowned. “Why would it?” I asked.
“Because I wasn’t a good mother to you.”
“I have no interest in blaming you for anything,” I told her. “I said as much in my letter. I’m looking for no argument nor do I want any unpleasantness. I’m too old for that. We both are.”
She nodded and looked on the verge of tears. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “You’re not just saying it?”
“I really am. There doesn’t have to be any drama here. None at all.”
“You must have had very loving parents to feel that way.”
I thought about it. “Actually, they were very strange parents,” I told her. “Neither of them were what you might call conventional people. And they had an extremely peculiar approach to parenting. Sometimes I felt as if I was little more than a tenant in their house, as if they weren’t entirely sure what I was even doing there. But they never mistreated me, nor did they ever do anything to hurt me. And perhaps they loved me in their own way. The concept itself might have been slightly alien to them.”
“And did you love them?”
“Yes, I did,” I said without hesitation. “I loved them both very much. Despite everything. But then children usually do. They look for safety and security, and one way or another Charles and Maude provided that. I’m not a bitter person, Mrs. Goggin,” I added. “I have no bitterness inside me at all.”