John Dornan was pleased not to appear too rumpled on his fiftieth birthday. Indeed he felt that, through a happy accident of birth, he looked rather grand. John was a handsome man and had always been so. He had very curly, soft black hair that was now only slightly greyed at the temples. He was that odd sort of union leader, a well- dressed one, especially in the company of his colleagues who, like him, represented rank and file against management and were generally pretty slovenly. John's nod to fashion was his only betrayal of what he called "his class," that is, the pressmen, bindery workers, and pre-press computer guys he lead for the Graphic Arts Union in San Francisco. His only betrayal, except for his looks themselves.
He had fine eyes, very large ones of carbon-like darkness, with long lashes, that gave his face an air of suave kindness. In a navy-blue Italian sportcoat, white shirt, and Hermes tie, dark brown wool slacks and wicker spectator shoes, he appeared more lush, more dignified, than in fact he was. At the office John was known as a labor leader's labor leader who stood up against privileged interest with almost a Wobbly's intensity. Away from work he was associated, mistakenly, with things like yachts and Porsches.
He had always had an easy time of it, meeting people. Raised without his mother, who had died in Ireland, he had learned early the pleasing manner that made him appear a little facile to some of his acquaintances. He was a man who had a smile on his face a good part of the time. It was not that he was dishonest. There was a softness at the center of his heart that, sometimes, made him appear facile even to himself. He had always wanted to be more flinty. A hardnose. Someone like his father or Dick Cheney. He wished for harder edges in himself, something less polished at the bottom of his soul.
The trouble was that when he willed such moments for himself, in a fight with his wife Kate or as a reaction to some perceived slight or nastiness on the part of an opposing corporate management guy, he lost whatever momentum he had gained and ended up acting foolishly. Being flinty was too much out of character. When hardnosed, John appeared to himself as weakwilled. Unsteady. A noisy complainer.
So generally he gave in to the softness that he so disliked.
Although of course he was rabid in pursuit of a fair contract for his union. His wife, a partner in an advertising firm downtown, hoped she'd never have to defend her company's labor practices against someone like her husband.
The voice of his father -- now eighty-six years old and living by himself, rather fiercely, in a house out on Forty-Fourth Avenue at the beach -- and that of his grandfather as well had murmured harsh sentiments in John's ear all his life. Starting with the citizens of Great Britain, for whom neither man had anything good to say.
“Is it any damned surprise,” his father had asked just the other day while reading in Fortune magazine about the latest round of multi-million dollar bonuses to CEO’s of poorly-performing corporations, “that American business is run by the same bloody Englishmen that screwed the Irish?”
John himself had no such outward resentment of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
He and his family went to the U.K. once every couple years on vacation, and he loved what the English represented, what they'd written, what they'd put on the stage. What in their hearts they defended. But still there was a kind of DNA whisper that haunted him whenever he thought too long about the English. Something that came from the utterances of his father and his grandfather, from their grandfathers and probably from the goose-bumped Celts themselves watching the first Englishman land on some beach eight hundred years ago on the southeast coast of Ireland, the Celts standing there in their sheepskins, or naked with a torque wrapped about their neck, powerful men with great gnarled clubs in their hands, toothless, dirty poets, the kind of men whose knuckles scraped the ground when they walked, murmuring to each other that this visitor speaking that strange indecipherable language perhaps should not be trusted.
That memory soured John's feelings for the English now and then, but he smiled when it did, because he knew it was simply part of the blood itself that was running through him.
On this particular day, Kate had gone shopping at Union Square with their daughter Pearl, home for the weekend from Stanford. They were to celebrate John's birthday that evening with dinner at home and presents. John, standing at the desk in his home office, looked over the article he was trying to write for the G.A.U. national, his right hand resting on the computer keyboard as the words defied him from the screen. He wished he could write better, but it was almost impossible for him to approach the sentence as a concept without an immediate case of nerves. So, as frequently happened, he was stuck. The words would not come.
He wondered, smiling, if having a baby were anything like this, the words struggling to get out, sometimes dying within him.
So, he did what he often would do at such moments. He decided to describe where he was. If he were working in the kitchen, for example, he would look at the kitchen table where he was sitting, at the table setting, the ceramic blue plates, and the light from the venetian blinds woven through the napkins, at the ceramic salt and pepper shakers like small fire hydrants, or at the way the ballpoint pens on the table seemed to have died at random angles, slugs in the sun. After five minutes of describing these things, he'd be able again to write his own work, and he'd throw the descriptions away.
He took up one of the pens from his desk and looked at the bookshelves behind him. His mother was there, Florence Dornan, in a photo as a schoolgirl in Ireland in 1949, wearing a white blouse, dark skirt and sweater, and heavy leather shoes. Her hair was like John's, so soft with curls that the sunlight that flowed through them seemed actually to come from them. It was a favorite photo of John's, the only one he had of his mother.
She had died the day John was born.
He reached out to adjust the picture when he suddenly imagined himself being lifted from the open cavity of her body, soaked in offal and spume, the only thing left alive.
He sat back and looked out the window. The yard was soaked in sunshine, and Pearl's cherry tree, which John had planted just after her birth, appeared to float above the flowerbeds, a cloud of caressing white light in the late spring.
He lowered his head and stared at his hands gathered in his lap, guiltily keeping his eyes away from the photo.
He imagined the moment before his birth in the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Dublin, March 17, 1958, Saint Paddy’s Day, the trapped child's head clamped in pain, his eyes shut tight against the saline blood rupturing all around him, the pressure. And his dying mother, his protection, attacked with such violence from inside. John grimaced as he felt the explosion of pain, how his mother's pelvis had been stuck through with serrations of it, and how lying on the table, she had crazily demanded release from it—from him—crying out for release in lightning screams as she approached the moment of greatest pain and, just at that moment, the abrupt end of her brine-filled, bloody moans, her newborn saved from drowning inside her. The surgery room light glared from his mother's sweat-sodden hair. Her mouth lay open, saliva dripping to the table. The baby’s cord was cut. They wrapped him in towels and took him away from her, where she lay opened and still, reduced to grey carnage.
Kate and Pearl came up from the garage a few minutes later. The rustle of gift-filled paper bags in the kitchen, the women's laughter, and the sound of their voices as they ascended the stairs to John's study did little to divert him. When they found him sitting at his desk, he turned toward them and tried to fashion an explanation. Kate hurried across the room toward him and put her arms around his shoulders, worried that he had received some terrible news, that someone had had an accident. His daughter took up his hands and caressed them, then placed a hand on his cheek.
The schoolgirl in the photo smiled in the sunlight slanting across her face. She was eleven years old in the picture. John tried fighting back his sadness, to hold back its whelming, insistent surge. But it was to no avail. He leaned forward finally, placed his hands over his eyes and began—whelmed over—to weep.
Copyright ©2012 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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This story is one from my collection titled Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell. Available on order everywhere.
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