MARGARET

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CHAPTER TWO

MARGARET

Delia had expected to collect only a tiny corpse that morning.

She and Finbar had been up all night. The Indian doctor at Boston City Hospital had shown no optimism. Not a spark. His eyes were like black marbles. His skin was darker than anything Delia or Finbar had ever seen. A shade beyond black.

As dawn seeped through the kitchen curtains, Delia imagined kissing this little infant Margaret one last time. She wondered, in a way that made every organ in her small body feel as if it were being sliced, if they would let her hold the wee dead baby. She questioned if she had the strength to do either.

“The creature,” she whispered into the tea colored light.

But the phone had not rung.


Margaret had been born two weeks ago, four weeks premature, and had already had three abdominal surgeries to correct malformations, blockages in her intestinal tract. Finbar, as he wandered here and there in the hospital wringing his huge calloused hands, tried in vain to imagine how repairs could possibly be made in a body so small. I can hold her in the palm of my hand, he thought. A memory percolated up inside him, like a dream might, of an old man repairing a watch his father had given him. His daughter’s stomach was no bigger than that, he thought, no bigger than a watch.

Finbar and his wife Delia parked the big 1974 Ford, a recently retired State Police cruiser, on Albany Street, a few blocks from the entrance to the hospital. Today Delia had spoken one sentence on the drive from Brighton to the South End. One more than usual. Normally there was a solemn silence, for this was the time when they would be away from a phone. The dark time when Margaret could slip away and they could not be contacted. They would walk into the hospital, unknowing, and see the eyes of the nurses and the doctors. They would know without a word being spoken.


“Jesus,” Delia began as she looked away through side window, her breath fogging the glass in puffs, “I feel like those astronauts when they go behind the moon.”

Finbar looked over at her and arched his miraculous brows. They nearly formed two question marks above his eyes. Then he remembered the television broadcasts, the space craft behind the moon, no word to Houston, then a crackle, a buzz of static, a few words, a collective sigh of relief. He laughed as they passed under the shadow of the expressway.

And after looking into the hopeless obsidian eyes of Doctor Chandiwary last night, Delia was quite certain that it would be during this morning’s pass behind the moon that her daughter would die. She didn’t hope for it. Hardly. But she wondered how much more she could bear.

Finbar unfurled himself from the giant Ford and walked to the front of the car. He dropped a quarter into the parking meter and turned the dial, then again, and again. Delia thought to tell him to save his quarters, so sure she was that Margaret was gone, but she held her tongue. There was a strong autumn wind blowing from the north, directly down Albany Street, raising candy wrappers, a few leaves, plastic bags. A page from the Boston Herald wrapped itself around Finbar’s leg. He undid it and watched it flutter like a broken-stringed kite, catching in the grill of a passing taxi.

He walked slowly so as not to leave Delia behind. He consciously cut down the length of his strides. It was an effort, but one that he had mastered soon after they met, when they strolled the streets of New York City early in their courtship. After they married, whenever they walked to and from church, or with their children in the park, he adjusted his gait perfectly so that all could keep pace. However, on his way to and from work, when he strolled down Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton, he moved with Olympic grace and speed. When he passed the projects on Fidelis Way young black men who huddled on the street would often call out.

“Damn, put ten dollars on that white man, he breakin’ his own damn record today.”


Today, and this was unusual, Delia slipped her arm through Finbar’s. He understood the gesture and he pressed down with his bicep and held her tightly. Theirs was such an interesting combination. She was half the size of her husband, fine boned, skin china white, hair so black that it seemed it must have been dyed, thin lips, a sharp but delicate nose, like that of a hawk’s, green eyes, the color of fine glass. While Finbar’s block-like exterior masked an inner softness, Delia’s inner strength, which could sometime be described as ferocious, was well concealed by this museum-like outward fragility. Together they were being severely tested. And they knew intuitively that perhaps neither of them could do it alone. This was the plain gesture of her arm sliding under his, and of his levering down firmly onto hers. They were still on the dark side of the moon.

They walked through the glass entrance into the hospital, then through a small lounge that had become a de facto homeless shelter. A dozen people slept on benches. They looked burnished and yellowed. There was a stale smell of urine in the room.

A nurse who worked in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and who Finbar and Delia had come to know over the past few weeks, approached from the other direction. The low morning sun, glaring through the smudged and dirty entrance glass, blinded her. She had just finished a twelve-hour night shift. She passed in a daze without saying a word. Their hearts sank. Delia was sure of it now. She began to weep silently.

Delia and Finbar stepped into the elevator. The silver car was filled with a smiling group of young doctors in blue scrubs and crisp white lab coats. It seemed so incongruous, Finbar thought, that they could appear so nonchalant and unaffected by what surrounded them. In fact, they seemed happy. Someone had already pressed the button for the third floor. They did not have to speak. The doors closed. The elevator rose.

When the car slid to halt and the doors opened, Dr. Chandiwary stood waiting in the hall. He was dressed in blue operating room scrubs, a matching blue hat and blue coverings over his shoes. He looked very tired and his skin appeared even darker, surrounded as it was by the light blue cotton of the scrubs. He was about to step into the elevator when he saw Finbar and Delia. They, of course, saw him and hesitated. He backed away from the elevator to let them step off.

As the doors closed behind the three of them a nurse stopped and handed Dr. Chandiwary a chart.

“Could you sign this order please,” she said, and then matter of factly, “”Morning Mrs. Joyce, Mr. Joyce.”

He scribbled an illegible gliph across the paper and the nurse padded off.

“Well your little Margaret is quite a fighter Mrs. Joyce,” he said, adjusting the blue cap. “ She’s much brighter this morning and as a matter of fact she has passed a bit of stool.”

Delia began to cry in earnest now, silently, the tears pouring down and dripping onto her coat. Finbar too, not to be outdone, welled up.

“But this is good news,” Dr. Chandiwary said, a hint of humor in his voice.

“But I suppose she’s hardly out of the woods Doctor, is she, ” Delia said.

“Indeed, Mrs. Joyce, she’s hardly out of the woods” he said, his crisp British accent stepping through, “But I wouldn’t bet against your little Margaret at this point.”

And this is how Margaret’s life began. This is how she endeared herself to them. Her sisters, still sleeping soundly at home in Brighton, were born rugged and thick like their father. Margaret, in turn, was born as tiny and fragile as a teacup. She became a pet of sorts, her sisters treating her like a miracle in the flesh. Her mother, hovered, feeling guilty that she had ever given up hope. Finbar, when he looked down at how neatly she fit into his two open hands, simply cried. It was pure emotion, unfettered by thought.

And Finbar always retained something of this two handed memory, this elemental love. Over the years, especially after the death of his wife, it was distilled into a powerful liquor that buckled Finbar’s knees. The more and more Margaret came to resemble her mother, or when she slipped her arm through his, or when he felt the bird-like fineness of her frame in an embrace, Finbar weakened.

Margaret, during this same period, came to a clear understanding of the power she exacted over her father. It was long before this, however, that her sisters became acutely aware of it, and cleverly used it to their advantage.

“You ask Dad Margaret, you go ask him,” they would insist, all gathered in one of the plaid curtained upstairs bedrooms, “He’ll say yes to you. Go ask him, ask him.”

And so he would.

As Margaret’s understanding matured, so did a certain embarrassment for the way she was favored. Her embarrassment was further tempered by an inevitable Catholic guilt, inevitable because when molten feelings such as these are dipped into the cold liturgical waters of “Lord I am not worthy,” or icier still, “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” they can only harden and cool like dark metal.

And so was created a fierce triad of intersecting forces: Margaret’s smoky guilt, paired with her clear professional ambitions, running headlong into Finbar’s unspoken wish to have her forever near to him. As he became older, he became a master of manipulation. He could deny it, because perhaps he did not manipulate consciously. But indeed this is the most pernicious sort.

Margaret’s task, and it was unmistakably clear to her now, was to balance three things - the passion for her profession, the ability to melt Finbar’s heart, and the guilt she would feel when she told him of her decision that she was leaving to work in Africa.

However, she held tenaciously to a certain underlying personal belief. It was not something externally imposed, not a metaphysical tenet one accepts “on faith.” No, it had more to do with the wide waxy scars across her stomach.

It had to do with healing.

With miracles of a natural order.

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