An Affair with My Mother Page 2

  After six months on the job I feel as though I have come a long way. Although my heart still races every time I approach an open body bag, I no longer gag when viewing its contents. As the person responsible for drawing the world’s attention to PHR’s exhumation and identification projects, I have become adept at whisking visiting journalists and dignitaries through the macabre tour of the various projects – the morgue, the tunnels and the ‘de-fleshing room’, a tiled chamber in the morgue where men in rubber overalls extract bits of bodies from the body bags, place them in long wire-mesh trolleys and blast them with powerful water hoses in an attempt to clean the bones for easier identification and storage.

  No, it’s not the dead who are bothering me, I realize, but those left behind – the families of the missing, racked with madness and grief, searching for their loved ones. These people intimidate and scare me. They gather in angry groups around Tuzla, haranguing local officials for more information about the exhumation process, pleading for access to the remains.

  I have no right to compare myself to the grief-stricken families of Bosnia’s missing, but there is something in their wild-eyed desire to fill in the missing pieces that feels oddly familiar. Now, as I jog across this grey city, I access some fresh awareness of the pain of not knowing; the pain of feeling, day in and day out, that someone is missing.

  As the dawn light breaks through the Tuzla smog, my morning run is nearing its end. I make my way back up the main highway, past the glassy walled exterior of the Hotel Tuzla and up the hill to the bumpy potholed street where I live and work. For the first time in weeks the incessant chatter inside my brain has ceased and I realize that there is something I need to do. After a hot shower, and a quick breakfast of espresso and toast, I make my way to my office in the adjacent house and shut the door.

  I turn on my desk light and open my work diary, turning to the back page, where, months ago, I jotted down a telephone number. A quick mental calculation tells me that it’s too early to phone Dublin.

  A couple of hours later I pick up the phone and dial.

  2

  The home in which I grew up was abundant with love and affection, a place of clean sheets, sparkling countertops and nutritious home-cooked meals. Walking in the front door of our house, one was usually met by the aroma of freshly baked brown bread or a sugared apple tart straight out of the oven. The kitchen, which looked out on to our tidy back garden, was brightly lit and cosy, and the kettle was always on. It was a happy home; but it was also an Irish home very much of its time, which is to say that it was not the scene of much genuine emotional intimacy. My parents were efficiently undemonstrative, leaving the tears, the hugging and the grand gestures to the characters that we watched every night in British soap operas. So it is apt that my mother chose a time when we were engrossed in a chore, with very little opportunity for eye contact, to tell me that I was not her biological child.

  It was my sixth birthday, a Wednesday afternoon, and my mother and I were making my bed. I was standing on one side, next to the window, Mam on the far side in the narrow aisle that separated my bed from the one where my older sister, Thérèse, slept. Across the room, on a dresser covered with a delicate lace cloth, lay assorted treasures of our childhood: a china perfume dispenser with hand-painted flowers, a tiny replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà and, in the middle, a glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary, nearly a foot high, that my sister had picked up on a recent pilgrimage to Lourdes.

  On Mam’s count of three we lifted the sheets, as we had done countless times before, and watched as they billowed above our heads then floated down and settled back into place on the bed. The sun was streaming through the window, and I remember feeling incandescently happy. There was a birthday party at the weekend to look forward to, with games of pass-the-parcel and musical chairs, bottles of 7-Up and Fanta, and a sponge cake with freshly whipped cream, jam and pink icing. That night, my family would gather at the kitchen table to celebrate my birthday with my favourite meal, steak and onions baked in thick gravy with boiled potatoes and frozen peas. Soon Dad would be home, parking in our narrow concrete driveway, a Tea Time Express cake sitting in a box on the passenger seat beside him.

  With my little hands I diligently smoothed the sheets and tucked them in neatly. My pillowcase depicted the orphaned Paddington Bear, his red duffel coat bearing a tag that read, ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you.’

  As Mam briskly smoothed out the bedspread, she began to talk.

  ‘You know how it is your birthday today? Well, there is somebody very special that you need to say a prayer for.’ I nodded obediently, not comprehending.

  ‘You know how Mammy and Daddy have always told you how special you are? How we chose you especially to come and live with us? Well, before you were born, another mammy carried you in her tummy but was unable to keep you. She gave you to us and ever since on your birthday, and other special days, we have said a prayer for her. Now that you’re a big girl I want you to remember her yourself and to pray for her, particularly on your birthday.’

  The first pangs of an anxiety that would haunt me for the rest of my life began to spread across my gut. All of a sudden I felt unsure of my place in the world. I was not who I thought I was. There had been somebody else, another parent, a long time before, but she had given me away. Why would she do that? Was there something wrong with me? And if I had been given away once before then surely that could happen again? Fear began to creep into my mind.

  I sat on the end of the bed as Mam held my hand. I remember looking out of the window at the canopy of the ash tree on the street below, trying to understand. I wanted to cry but worried that Mam would take my tears the wrong way; that she would think I was sad that I was not with the other woman – whoever she was. I had a million questions but was too shy to ask.

  My mother’s birthday revelation was a shock to the system, and yet it was not a complete surprise. Mam had told me many times before, albeit cryptically, that I was ‘special’. During get-togethers with extended family I had seen furtive glances and heard the words ‘adoption’ and ‘the natural mother’. But this, now, was something more concrete and dramatic: my mother telling me that I was not, in fact, her flesh and blood; that there was another woman, a woman who had given me away. A mother – my mother – who for no apparent reason had handed me over to a pair of complete strangers. A ghost for whom, on special occasions, I was now being asked to pray.

  That was the day when my identity fractured and a dull emptiness established itself in my gut. I was now two people: the people-pleasing adoptee, ever fearful of being sent back; and the melancholy inner child locked in a quest to locate that missing part of me. Who was I? Where had I come from? I was an imposter, expected to continue living happily with one family having just been told that I came from another.

  My thoughts were quickly dominated by this mythical mother, the one who had given me away. The villain or the victim, depending on my mood. She loomed constantly in my mind, this airy creature – beautiful, self-assured and fabulously successful. She took me out for ice cream and Coca-Cola, allowed me to eat candyfloss and chewing gum – delicacies forever denied to me by Mam and Dad – and let me stay up late to watch TV. She bought me a pony and cheered as I won rosettes in show-jumping competitions across Ireland, beaming in the stands as I beat kids from the posher parts of Dublin. She was glamorous, sophisticated, outrageously funny. She was the perfect mother, the envy of the playground, my greatest advocate and my biggest fan. This person was real and alive and tangible in every sense except the most important: she didn’t exist.

  Adoption was far from the minds of Liam and Mary Palmer when they began their married life together i
n a hastily built housing estate in north Dublin in July 1961.

  They had fallen in love not quite two years earlier, having been introduced by my mother’s brother Bill Wyse, an avid swimmer who knew Liam Palmer as a familiar face at a gentlemen’s swimming hole, the Forty Foot, on the south side of Dublin Bay. Most evenings after work, rain or shine, Liam would hop on a bus or train out of the city centre and make his way to this rocky promontory. In the concrete bathing shelter that looked out on to the Irish Sea, Liam would change into a pair of swimming shorts and plunge into the frigid waters.

  It was a bank holiday Sunday in August 1959, after an early-afternoon swim, when Bill – who was soon to enter the priesthood – invited my father to the modest terraced house in Terenure where he lived with his family. At the dining-room table, piled high with ham sandwiches and hot scones, Liam sat opposite Bill’s younger sister, Mary, the only girl in the Wyse family. He could not take his eyes off her. Towards the evening’s end, Mary mentioned an upcoming dance, a fundraiser for a local hospice. Liam saw his chance. The dance, which took place a couple of weeks later, became the first of many dates.

  The Ireland in which Liam and Mary conducted their romance was economically impoverished and socially conservative. Liam and Mary came from devout Catholic families and conducted their courtship accordingly, spending a lot of time in the chaperoned living rooms of their respective childhood homes. They went to Mass most mornings, performed the devotions on every First Friday and attended weekly Expositions of the Sacred Sacrament and confession. Well-thumbed copies of the Messenger of the Sacred Heart sat on their kitchen tables. On weekends and some evenings after work, Liam would call at Mary’s house, a twenty-minute walk from his home in Crumlin, and escort his sweetheart by bus into the city centre. At the Savoy Theatre on O’Connell Street, for 2/6 apiece, Liam would buy tickets to see the latest films from America and the UK. Around payday, Liam might splurge and take Mary to see Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in the Gaiety Theatre, just off Grafton Street. On some weekends during football season, Mary would join Liam and his twin brother, James, in the terraced stadium at Milltown to cheer on Shamrock Rovers. Liam, though a poor dancer himself, indulged Mary’s love of dancing, taking her to a ballroom where a live showband played quicksteps, tangos and old-time waltzes.

  They became engaged on 11 February 1960, a mere six months after they had first met. On the day of the engagement there was a big celebration in the Wyse family home, a high tea presided over by my maternal grandparents at which the two families officially met for the first time. My grandmother, Elizabeth, served tea and sandwiches, and bottles of lemonade were opened to toast the happy couple. A large cake, prominent in the centre of the table, completed the spread.

  The ring was bought a couple of weeks later in a small jewellery shop on South Anne Street. Liam had saved assiduously for the purchase, and it showed. The ring was a dazzler: three diamonds set in yellow gold, a lavish gift for his bride-to-be and a sure sign that the couple were on their way up in the world. Now, with a wedding to plan and a house to buy, the trips to the Gaiety began to dwindle. Liam, a clerk in the payroll office of a rail and shipping company, had a well-paid and pensionable job, but still had to scrimp and save hard for a deposit to buy a house. Mary also had a good job, as a clerical officer for Bord na Móna. But there was a catch: her employment was subject to the ‘marriage ban’, under which she would be required to relinquish her position upon getting married. The rationale for the ban was ostensibly economic – the premise being that there were not enough jobs to allow some households to have two breadwinners – but it is no coincidence that the ban chimed perfectly with the social mores of the time and even with the Irish constitution, which stated (and still states) that ‘the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’.

  By the end of the year, Liam and Mary had saved enough money for a deposit on a house. Mary wanted to stay south of the River Liffey, where they had both been raised. Liam, more adventurous, was willing to go further afield. One weekend, they visited a work colleague of Liam’s in his newly built home in the north-eastern suburb of Raheny. During their courtship my parents had sometimes ventured north, taking the train out to Howth, a little fishing village perched beneath a gorse-strewn hill. There Liam and Mary would walk hand in hand down the pier and eat ice creams on a wall overlooking the harbour. Despite the charms of Howth, a move to the north side seemed out of the question until that Sunday afternoon when the couple walked into the gleaming new home of Liam’s friend. The house was a modern marvel: a two-storey, three-bedroomed semi-detached with an attached garage and small gardens front and back. It was a veritable palace, particularly to Liam, who had started his life sharing two rooms in a house in the inner city with his parents and four brothers. To Mary, the kitchen in the new house was like a bright, modern dream. Before long, she and Liam paid £2,000 for a house in the same estate, Number 49. The house had a pebble-dashed front and wrought-iron gates that led to a small concrete driveway for the car that the couple still yearned to buy.

  Liam and Mary married on 26 July 1961 at the Church of the Holy Rosary in Harold’s Cross. The day before, Mary’s mother buried a faded statue of the Infant of Prague in her back garden; according to superstition, this guaranteed good weather on the day of a wedding. The following day was sunny, but windy: a photograph from that morning shows Mary standing outside the church door, clasping her left hand to her veil, whipped up in the air by a sudden gust. She is laughing, her long slender right arm clutching a bouquet of delicate white orchids. Liam, handsome in a rented dark morning suit, stands to her left, smiling shyly, his hand on the door of the black limousine that will take them to their wedding reception. They look elated, hopeful, a little scared.

  In keeping with Irish tradition at that time, the wedding ceremony was held at 9 a.m., necessitating a pre-dawn preening session for the bride and her two attendants. The Mass, presided over by Father Colum O’Donnell, the priest rolled out for all the Wyse clan’s religious occasions, was sung in Latin, the traditional liturgy that would be abandoned a few years later as part of the Vatican II reforms. The bride wore white, a sumptuous gown of heavy satin overlain with delicate Carrickmacross lace. The dress, made by a friend of Mary’s, was a clever rip-off: a duplicate of an expensive gown that Mary had seen in an elegant Dublin department store but lacked the funds to buy. Mary’s two bridesmaids – her best friend from work, Anne Hammil, and my father’s sister Carmel – wore lemon taffeta gowns and carried bouquets of roses. The best man was Liam’s brother James, a slender, tall man with a shock of wiry black hair who bore little physical resemblance to his shorter red-haired twin.

  The couple, breaking from the tradition of holding a small reception in the home of the bride, chose the Salthill Hotel in Dún Laoghaire as the setting for their wedding ‘breakfast’ – a turkey and ham lunch in the hotel dining room for sixty or so guests, followed by an afternoon of music and dancing. Waiters in black bow ties served guests from stainless-steel platters. There was a three-tiered wedding fruit cake covered in layers of sweet marzipan and hard sugared icing, decorated with a silver-papered horseshoe for good luck. In the garden of the hotel, amid blooming rose bushes and hydrangeas, a local photographer corralled the happy wedding party into a huddle, the bride and groom in the middle, their parents on either side. Those photographs are the only pictures I have of my Wyse and Palmer grandparents together, awkward in their stiff woollen suits and smiling timidly at the camera.

  The bride and groom, suited up in smart ‘going away’ clothes, left the party in a rush just after lunch, bound for Amiens Street station and the three
o’clock train to Belfast. From Belfast they caught a ferry to Heysham and then a train to the southern English port of Dover. (Dad cannot recollect why they took such a roundabout route.) They then sailed on to the French port of Calais and took a train to Paris, where they spent the first two proper nights of their marriage in a little hotel near the Champs-Élysées. From Paris they travelled to the pilgrimage town of Lourdes, in the Pyrenees, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a fourteen-year-old girl in 1858. They spent a week there, good pilgrims who happened to be on their honeymoon, before crossing the Spanish border to the town of San Sebastián. There, Liam picked up a horrendous case of food poisoning, cementing Mam’s deep hostility towards non-Irish food, aka ‘foreign muck’.

  When the honeymooners returned to Dublin they moved straight into Number 49. The estate was still being built around them, the road unpaved and multiple houses along the street incomplete. But despite the noise of the cement mixers and the bags of gravel stacked outside their front gate, the couple were starry-eyed over their new home. The walls were papered, the doors, windows and trim freshly painted, the linoleum flooring in the kitchen and bathroom neatly laid. The new furniture, bought as wedding gifts by relatives and friends, was arranged carefully on the still-uncarpeted floors. Visiting relatives clucked and cooed over the wedding china in the cherry cabinets, the new sofa and chairs in the living room, the fancy electric stove in the kitchen. A blessing of their marriage from Pope John XXIII hung on the kitchen wall. Next to it was another wedding gift, a picture of Christ, his eyes downcast, his head pinched by a crown of thorns, his hand gesturing sadly towards a bleeding open heart. Underneath the picture was a small red lamp, a flickering flame that paid eternal homage to the Sacred Heart. As a child, the glow of that red electric light both comforted and unnerved me – a welcoming sight on gloomy wintry mornings but also a constant reminder that Jesus was always watching.