Her Name Is Rose Read online

  After twenty minutes the train left the outskirts of Limerick city and began its passage into the deep, green middle of the country, past the silver mines, into northern Tipperary, and into rich, horse-breeding farmland. Hedgerows of whitethorn blooming squared off green fields. She thumbed through Gardens Illustrated and read about treatments for a new strand of boxwood blight. She learned how applying cow dung to the base of plants would give the fungus plenty to think about. It was worth a try. She jotted that down on a scrap of paper. In another article she read about an organic gardener’s experiments with a homeopathic remedy called Helix tosta, made from crushed baked snail shells, to keep slugs at bay. Her blog readers, when she gets any, might like that.

  When she arrived into Heuston Station she’d been feeling absurdly positive. The possibility of rescuing her boxwood and protecting her plants from slugs (and the birds from poison) lifted her heart. In a small thing there can be hope. She focused on the thought of saving the box hedge and for a time raked aside all the rest of it. She’d ask Tommy Ryan next time he was passing for a load of manure. Standing in the taxi queue, she imagined how much she would need for a ten-square meters. But the moment she entered the taxi and as it took her along the bus lane beside the quays heading toward O’Connell Bridge, and cars honked, she lost her sense of hope. As the taxi approached Trinity College her heart raced. The crowds along Dawson Street seemed to be racing, too, all on urgent missions of their own. Camera-laden tourists stood before the great oak doors to the college, snapping photos. Students jostled, rushing to end-of-term exams.

  Iris asked the driver to let her out at the front gates. She paid, then walked slowly under the arch and out along the cobblestone path of the courtyard toward the bell tower straight ahead. She skirted its perimeter, remembering the myth that it was bad luck to walk beneath its dome. This she knew from her days as a student there. She’d planned to walk through the campus and exit right out onto Kildare Street but in choosing this path, she’d tempted fate. She knew it. Luke was everywhere, everywhere around her. His presence, like the ringing of the Trinity bell, was loud and clear and reverberated through her whole being. She nearly lost her footing on the cobbles when the clock rang noon. On a bench not far away she sat, laid her basket at her feet, and closed her eyes, feeling the vibrations of the chimes.

  Iris had met Luke on a rainy afternoon when she was waiting for the 46A bus. Her first glimpse of him was walking, a long, grounded stride and sheltering under a black umbrella. He’d been heading down Pearse Street, toward the seafront to his home, he later told her. As she waited, herself umbrellaless, protecting her books from the heavy rain, a notebook slipped from her bundle onto the edge of the pavement, just as he was passing. In that instant while Iris considered how to retrieve her book without tumbling more books, Luke had stopped and snatched it up. Rainwater gathered quickly in the gutter. Years later when they told the story to Rose, Iris said Luke had bumped her accidentally on purpose, but Luke said Iris had dropped the book just as she saw him coming. “I think your mother imagined she was dropping a handkerchief.” And Rose laughed.

  “Here you are,” Luke had said, shaking the book free, and, satisfied it wasn’t too wet, he’d landed it gingerly onto the pile she was holding. His smile intoxicated her.

  “Thank you.”

  “Waiting for a bus?”

  “I am. Forty-six A. Going to Ranelagh.” Iris squared her books together. “You?”

  “No,” he said without moving and holding the umbrella high enough to include her. “Trinity?”

  “Ah-huh.” She nodded. “First year.”

  “Me, too … but not first year.” He moved closer. It looked as if he was going to wait with her. Submerged under a sudden wave of warmth Iris was caught for words. Even though she was eighteen she was not very experienced with the currency of flirting.

  “A rucksack might be a wise investment,” he continued, “if you’re going to be leaving home without an umbrella, that is. This is Dublin. You know the saying. We have four seasons: rain, rain, rain, rain.”

  She considered his green eyes, gauging whether he had said this in good humor or good old Irish sarcasm. It was both. It was a trait she’d come to love—his self-effaced delivery of facts.

  “I know. But I was rushing this morning. Lecture at nine. I overslept.”

  His square face creased as he smiled. “I had company law this morning and I should have slept in.” The skin around his eyes was pale, thin, and freckled.

  “Was it worth it?”

  “What?”

  “The lecture?”

  “Oh. Yes…” she blurted. “‘The Wasteland.’”

  He paused. Thought a moment. “Memory and desire … right?”

  “Yes. Stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

  “Impressive.” He smiled.

  She blushed. “Not really. It’s the next line. Ask me to recite any more and you’ll see I belong at the back of the class.”

  Luke was from the south side of the city near Sandymount Strand, where he lived with his elderly parents on Gilford Road, one block from the Irish Sea and half a mile from the Martello Tower of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His parents, Agnes and Eugene Bowen, married late in life. They maintained a dental practice together. Like two bookends they supported his life, he’d always said. He later told Iris he never once took for granted the serenity of their life, nor their devotion to him. The sea air around Sandymount was like a tonic, he said, infusing tranquility into the Bowen house. It’d had been a charmed life, he knew.

  When they got to know each other better, Luke showed Iris the old leather sofa in the front room where he studied every evening. His mother would bring him a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and slip quietly away. It was so much a part of the fabric of the workings of their life—mother and son—that neither needed to acknowledge her care nor his gratitude. “It just happened like clockwork,” he’d said, “like it was somehow always meant to be that way. Like it was ordained. That’s what I want one day, Iris.” On Saturdays when the dental practice was busy with fathers and teenagers, Luke would bring his mother tea and biscuits at just the hour when he knew she’d be beginning to fade.

  From that chance meeting on a wet November day Iris and Luke’s beginnings had been set in motion. He was three years ahead of her in college. When he trained at Blackhall Place to become a solicitor, Iris was completing her final year at university. Then they moved in together to a one-bedroom flat on the Beach Road in Ringsend. After Luke passed exams and Iris had graduated with a degree in literature, they married in the late summer and had a small reception in Iris’s parents’ back garden in Ranelagh. By autumn they’d moved to the west of Ireland, where Luke accepted a job as a junior solicitor.

  It ran just like clockwork.

  They rented a house near the village of Seafield thirty miles from Ennis so Luke could be near the ocean. (It’s where he’d always felt safest, he’d said.) A few years following their marriage, Iris’s parents both passed away, first her father from heart failure and then her mother, who died in her sleep. With the money left to Iris they were able to put a down payment on an old cottage, ten miles in from the Atlantic, beside a grove of ash trees with a garden overgrown with wild blackberries and grass and nettles and rushes. They called their new home Ashwood and, when Luke went off to Ennis every morning, day by day Iris began the slow process of resurrecting the garden. It was then she really fell in love with gardening.

  Three years after they’d moved to Ashwood, their GP, Dr. O’Reilly, advised them that if they wanted children they would have to adopt. She asked if they wanted to know who was—

  “Deficient?” Luke had said. “Found lacking?” He looked at Iris who said, “Barren, you mean?”

  “No. We don’t need to know,” they’d said. The next week they rang Social Services to inquire about adoption.

  * * *

  “Please take a seat, Mrs. Bowen. One of the social workers is on her way down.” Iris
was sitting inside the large foyer of a Georgian house on Merrion Square, in the offices of the Irish Adoption Board. Moments after settling, self-consciously, into an old wingback chair, she heard footsteps and stood quickly. A tall, slim woman, carrying a brown folder, came down the wooden stairs, then paused at the bottom. The unsmiling receptionist nodded toward Iris. The woman with the folder introduced herself as Sonia McGowan and led Iris into a nearby room with a corner window. She motioned to a chair to the left of a center table and sat opposite.

  “Thank you so much for seeing me,” Iris said. She was breathless with rising excitement.

  “It seemed we had no choice.” Ms. McGowan said.

  “I’m sorry it was—”

  “Yes. Well.” Ms. McGowan smiled thinly. “Hearing that you’ve come all this way, Mrs. Bowen, we thought it best to agree. We do appreciate your circumstances. But you should have made an appointment. We’re very busy. With cutbacks and—”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But considering what’s happening, or might happen, I mean, I thought you might…” Iris felt her face flush. “I just need some information.”

  Sonia said nothing and for a second Iris thought she would be asked to leave. Sonia went on, “It’s really up to your daughter—”

  “Yes. I know that. But … as I hoped I’d explained clearly to the receptionist, I just need to know one thing. Just in case. Because obviously I don’t want to tell Rose unless the news is not good. About me, I mean. About the cancer scare. I have an appointment on Friday!” Iris’s voice rose. “Do you see? I mean, what if?” With her eyes tearing up, Iris fumbled in her bag for tissues she knew were not there. She felt Sonia’s eyes keenly on her.

  “I do understand. First let me say, Mrs. Bowen—”

  “Please. Call me Iris.”

  “All right. Iris.” She handed Iris a tissue from a small box decorated with yellow ovals on a white background. Iris dried the corners of her eyes, then held the tissue between her hands. She folded her fingertips into her palms, hiding her chipped nails. After an awkward pause, Sonia finally spoke, but this time with a kind of chirpy drone.

  “And how is your daughter getting on?” She laid down the folder she’d been holding, placing it beside the tissues on the side table between them. “Your daughter has gone to college in London to study music. You must be so proud of her. I understand it’s not often an Irish student gets into the Royal Academy of Music.” Sonia’s breathing was measured, as if she was doing yoga in her mind. Everything about her was now measured and straight, as if she was schooling Iris in the ways of conducting oneself in stressful situations. Her fingers were soft-skinned and her nails were lightly polished. Her flat shoes were unscuffed. She might have walked in from a photo shoot advertising women’s office clothes with her gray cardigan and smart pencil skirt.

  Sonia McGowan was a woman in her early forties. And once upon a time she might have been eager and full of the energy young social workers initially possess, but on this day what Iris saw was great weariness. It was around her eyes. A few strands of gray peppered her otherwise shiny black hair.

  “Rose … her name is Rose. She’s doing well. Considering. She’s very gifted. Her father would have been so proud of her. And she loves London. And I’m happy for her, but … I miss her terribly. What I really want—”

  “Sounds very exciting, although I can also imagine your anxiety for her … and for yourself.” Sonia was definitely pacing the meeting, injecting it with a balance of feigned interest and composure.

  “Yes. And now, this…” Iris’s voice stalled. Her hands went to her chest.

  “I’m sorry. It hasn’t been easy, I can imagine—”

  “No, it hasn’t been easy. It damn well hasn’t. That’s why I’m here,” Iris cried. “I have to. I have to find. I have to find Rose’s birth mother. I have to find Hilary.”

  Sonia’s eyes knitted together, but if she was stunned at hearing the name she hid it well. She looked down and reached for the brown folder.

  “Mrs. Bowen, Iris, I’m afraid it’s not good news then,” Sonia said finally. She turned her head toward the door in a way that suggested to Iris that she was suddenly uncomfortable. It was as if she was willing it to open, so she could escape. “We won’t be able to help you. That information is private, available only to the birth family circle and its adoptees. I’m afraid you don’t meet the criteria. The rules are very strict. Yours was not an open adoption.” She allowed just a few moments to let those words to sink in, avoiding Iris’s eyes, looking at the folder. But she didn’t wait long before she continued, “Your daughter can request this information.” She looked at Iris squarely. “And I promise whatever we have we will give her.” Then she placed the folder back down. “I hope you understand.”

  Iris’s mind was in overdrive. She thought of Luke reminding her that in situations like these, when her back was up against the wall, she needed to lighten up. But he wasn’t there. She had to do this on her own. “This isn’t good enough. I’m her mother! I have a right to know.”

  Sonia McGowan may have had a storage of responses tucked away behind her perfect hair and might have been able to deliver whichever of them was needed to calm clients down in situations like these, but this time she chose the wrong one. “Actually, no. You don’t.”

  Iris was on her feet in a flash.

  “Please sit down, Mrs. Bowen. It’s all right. I do understand.”

  Sonia moved to the edge of her chair and waited for Iris to sit. Then she leaned forward, her voice quiet.

  “I’ve looked through the file and what I can tell you is that we’ve lost contact. So, really, even we would find it difficult to trace her today.” She continued, “We try to follow the birth mothers for the first few years—as you probably know. And—”

  “Her name was Hilary. Right? We met her, you know.” Iris had softened her voice, too.

  “Yes, I see that. But the thing is, according to our records, your daughter’s birth mother”—Sonia was talking with that scripted calmness again but she dropped her voice—“Hilary … stopped responding.” Sonia inched forward as if to reach out and touch Iris.

  Iris’s heart beat double time. She thought she might choke. The room was cold, and the armchairs were older than Iris, and the floor was so polished that her shoes squeaked when she shifted position in an effort to ease her panic. “When was that?”

  “About sixteen or seventeen years ago,” Sonia said, her voice low, nearly a whisper.

  Iris wished it all was easier. The whole thing. Just as she was working her way through the grief of having lost Luke, now this. She’d anticipated she wouldn’t be given all the information she needed, but she had not prepared herself for this. A dead end. Full stop. She sat back, covering her eyes, then looked up and spoke quickly, her voice now straining.

  “Where does that leave me? I mean, is that all there is?”

  “What more do you want?” Sonia asked, somewhat puzzled. “I don’t understand, what more could there possibly be?”

  “I’d expect more … more information,” Iris said now, edging forward on her chair. Wasn’t she entitled to something more definitive? What was Sonia not getting? “This can’t be the end of the line. It just can’t.”

  “I’m so sorry…” Sonia said reaching out to touch Iris’s arm.

  “No, no, no.” Iris pulled away. “I have to have more information. What about the parents … I mean Hilary’s parents. Can’t I, or you, or the agency, contact them and find out where their daughter is?”

  “Okay, Iris, calm down…”

  “Addresses. Birth certificates. Something. Don’t you know anything? Is that legal? Birth mother just drops off the face of the earth and that’s all right with you? Well, it’s not all right with me! I’m sure Luke … you know, my husband was a solicitor … I’m sure he wouldn’t agree with this. What if something happens to me? What don’t you understand? I could die! Who’s going to look after Rose? You?”

  Sonia froze. And
for a long moment fingered the cuff of her cardigan. Iris stared at her. “And what about the birth father?”

  “We don’t request details about birth grandparents,” Sonia replied, then shifted her gaze out the window and went on. “There’s no mention of a birth father in the file, I’m sorry. Nor does his name appear on the original birth certificate. I’m afraid he’s not in the picture.”

  “You can’t do anything to help me? Is that what you’re saying!” Iris heaved herself back against the armchair.

  “I’m sorry, Iris. I really am.” She reached forward and laid a hand on Iris’s knee.

  Iris didn’t move. She was free-falling into a black empty space and it hurt. Was this it? The end. What about my promise, she wanted to shout.

  After a few moments, when the only sound came from a bird across the road, Iris looked up because she heard Sonia lift the box of tissues from the side table and rise. With a hand on Iris’s shoulder she said, “I’m going to make us a cup of tea. Okay? I’ll be right back. A few minutes. I’ll only be a few minutes.” She placed the tissues on Iris’s lap and closed the door behind her.

  Breathe, Iris, just breathe. Slowly in, and slowly out. White in, gray out. Count to ten and breathe again. She couldn’t do it. Her heart raced away on its own, beating hard. She gathered her hair in one hand and twisted it around with the other, making a rope that tightened with each twist until the nape of her neck hurt. She stood up and as she did the tissue box fell with a soft thump. Crossing her arms against her breasts she looked out at the gray wall outside the window. Where was that bird? She could still hear him. Her shoulders stiffened. She held her breath, then paced the room. When she came back around, it was then that she noticed the file.

  How long does it take to make a cup of tea?