Julia raised herself slowly, muttered a Thank you, Sister before returning to her room.
She could not speak to her friends again for a full week, and then it was only because of what happened with Nellie’s baby.
* * *
—
After Julia fainted, she became obsessed with washing clothes. In her dreams, she could not find the dress she had worn to the St. John’s Eve dance, the one she wanted to wash above all others. Each night her dreams were endless labyrinthine terrors in which she searched through every room of every house she’d ever known, armed with salt and soap and water, armed with bleach and lye, but she could never find the clothes she needed to wash the blood out of.
But it wasn’t just that dress—she needed all her clothes to be clean. Her sheets. Her friends’ nightgowns. She begged the nuns to be allowed to wash her spare dress daily, often stayed in the laundry all through lunch. She spent her days scrubbing fabric, wringing it dry, hanging it up on the line, mending its rips and tears. Cleaning and mending clothes in the way she could never clean and mend herself.
Everything was dirty. The girls bled after having their babies; they bled when they were beaten. She washed the children’s clothes as well, and they bled too. Scraped knees, bloody noses, fights and scuffles, canings when they were bad. There was blood everywhere and she needed to wash it all off.
Sometimes the children died. They fell down the stairs; they became sick; they didn’t eat enough; they coughed up blood that Julia cleaned out of tiny clothes. The babies died even more often. One every couple of weeks. Sometimes their mothers were gone already—back home, or on to one of the industrial schools. Those mothers were never even told their babies had died. Sometimes the mothers were still in the home. Sometimes they knew it was coming—their baby was weak or sickly; there had been signs, symptoms. It didn’t come as a surprise.
For Nellie, it was sudden.
She’d followed the other mothers into the nursery for the one hour a day she was allowed to spend with her child. Her son, Henry, who was over a year old, would light up when she came into the room, would babble nonsense at her while she tickled and hugged him, played peekaboo from behind the curtains.
He wasn’t a healthy child—none of them were. All a bit thin, all a little gray, like they were reflecting the walls around them. Maybe the day before he’d been more sullen than usual, but Nellie chalked that down to him having had a row with another baby or having been scolded by the nuns. There was nothing Nellie could do about it anyway. There was nothing she could have done.
The other mothers filed in before her, picking up their babies and toddlers, finally smiling for the first time that day. Nellie came through the door and looked around for Henry. Thought it strange that he wasn’t there.
Her first thought—filled with horror—was that he had been adopted out and she hadn’t been told. That he was now on his way to live with a family, to have a life outside these tall gray walls and away from the fourteen-year-old mother he only saw for sixty minutes of every day.
Her tears had already begun to fall when the nursery nun saw her. “So you’ve been told, then,” she said to the crying girl.
“When did it happen?” Nellie choked out.
“Last night,” the nun said. “It was fast and painless. He’s with the angels in heaven now.”
The words sank like stones.
* * *
—
Nellie was led out of the nursery because her screaming was upsetting the babies. The Mother Superior wanted to send her back to work, but she threw herself on the floor of the laundry and wouldn’t move. Her howls were heard all the way through the home, echoed around the empty dormitories, screamed through the kitchens, screeched over the noise of the laundry machines.
“I want him buried!” she cried. “Beside my baby sisters in the angels plot in the cemetery. I want to put flowers on his grave. That’s all. That’s all I want.”
Cecilia and Julia averted their eyes from their friend. They knew the baby wouldn’t be buried in the angels plot for unbaptized babies. This child, born of sin, wouldn’t lie in consecrated ground at all. He would lie with the other home babies in the mass grave at the bottom of the big garden.
It took a few days for Nellie to realize where the nuns had buried her baby. No priest, no funeral. Just a few prayers, like when a family pet dies. Illegitimate children were not buried in consecrated ground.
Neither were suicides.
When Nellie disappeared, her friends assumed she had finally been sent home. The nuns believed they were protecting the other girls by not telling them, and the girls didn’t think anything of the extra prayers the nuns required of them that evening. They didn’t think to wonder why the bishop had been called over from the town.
And they didn’t wonder why the big window on the main landing had been boarded up, the ground below scrubbed clean.
22.
Penance
Donegal, 1936–1937
After Nellie left, Julia and Cecilia grew closer. They worked side by side, exchanging whispers when they could. They tried to slip out to the bathroom together, to take a few minutes outside the heat and the steam and the noise of the laundry, to talk and to breathe.
In the laundry, the girls washed the nuns’ habits. Julia was fascinated by those black robes, so like witches’ cloaks. You couldn’t even see a body underneath them. It was like they were floating across the floor. Except for the clacking of the heels of their black shoes. When you heard that, you knew that if you were doing something you weren’t supposed to, you’d best stop at once.
The girls’ tunics were like the robes, Julia thought. Designed in such a way that any sign of there being a female body underneath was entirely masked by the heavy drop of the fabric that flattened even the largest of breasts, that erased even the widest of hips. Julia’s baby was due within the month, but in those dresses even the swell of her belly was lessened.
It was so hot in the laundry that girls often fainted for want of fresh air, for want of lighter clothing, for want of a ten-minute break. Julia’s own sweat pooled into her scratchy underwear, seeped into the fibers of her dress, ran down the space between her breasts. She kept looking down to see if it was showing through. But nothing showed through those dresses. Nothing except blood.
Julia’s arms were deep inside the sink, soapsuds to her scalded elbows. Cecilia joined her with a fresh load of dirty laundry, leaned close so she could whisper without the nun in charge that day hearing.
“Am I bleeding?” Cecilia asked.
Julia started, afraid that her friend had injured herself, but Cecilia turned slightly to show the back of her dress.
“I’ve my . . . monthlies,” she whispered. “They’ve only just come back after the baby. And it’s been too busy to change my rags in the bathroom.”