“LET’S GO!” ISABELLE BARKED at Finn, interrupting Finn’s open-handed refusals to help his brother.
“Why did you come here?” Finn was saying. “What do you think I can do about it? I’m going to catch hell for this. My wife—you’ve caused me so much trouble already, Lucas—”
“Finn! Shame on you,” Isabelle said. “Let’s go!” Her words were so sharp and final, Finn and Lucas were halfway down Acorn Street before Finn ventured to ask where they were going.
“To Schumann’s,” she said, walking like running. The men could barely keep up.
“Why are we going to Schumann?” Finn asked, panting. “We don’t need anything tailored or cleaned.”
“We’re going to Schumann’s because he can help us,” said Isabelle. “If anyone can, it’s him.”
“By stitching a torn sleeve?”
“By tending to your”—she stopped herself and regrouped—“to Lucas’s mother.”
Finn’s eyes were to the ground. “How can Schumann tend to the sick all of a sudden?”
“Not all of sudden,” said Isabelle. “Continuously. Why do you think he’s got so many customers who come to him with their problems? In Ukraine, Schumann used to be village doctor. He is still doctor. Everybody knows.”
“I didn’t know,” said an astonished and anxious Finn.
“Lot you don’t know,” said Isabelle. “You didn’t need him before. You were lucky.”
The first thing Schumann said when Isabelle told him about Lucas’s mother was, “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She collapsed this morning at the sink and couldn’t get up.”
“Did she faint?”
“Maybe. Then she started babbling.” Tears sprang to Lucas’s eyes. “She kept saying Finn Finn Finn over and over.”
It was all Finn could do to stand straight.
“What’s your mother’s name, Lucas?”
“Cora,” Lucas said. “Cora McBride.”
“Is your father with her?”
Lucas shook his head. “No one’s seen Tadhg McBride in ages. Ma thinks he’s back in Ireland. Or dead. Hardly a difference between the two.”
Schumann disappeared into the back, emerging in a white coat and carrying a black doctor’s bag. “Lead the way, Lucas,” said Schumann.
With Isabelle bringing up the rear, Finn doggedly followed Lucas through the narrowing streets of upper North End, winding here, ending there, past tenements of such decrepit poverty it hurt Finn’s eyes. They stopped at a slight ramshackle house, squeezed as if in a vise between two tall apartment buildings. The stoopless front door was level with the sidewalk. Lucas opened the door, calling out, “Ma, I’m home!” and showed them into the rundown parlor room, where a white-haired woman lay on a brown sofa, her head thrown back. “Ma, look, I brought a doctor.” Lucas knelt by her side and kissed her hands. “And look, Ma, I brought Finn. Remember you was asking for Finn? Well, here he is, look, Ma, look.”
It was then that the woman, who had appeared to be in a dead faint, opened her eyes, turned her head, and stared into Finn’s oppressed, aggrieved face.
Schumann stepped up, taking out his stethoscope. “Excuse me, boys,” he said. “I need to listen to her heart.”
The woman shooed Schumann away and motioned for Finn. “Come here, my boy.” Her voice was gravelly, tinged with Irish brogue, crackling with emotion.
No one could’ve been more reluctant than Finn to step forward. But now he stood, towering like a mute hulking presence over the woman on the sofa. Isabelle found him a chair, and he fell into it.
“I’m Cora McBride,” she said.
“I’m Finn,” he said.
“I know who you are,” she whispered. “I know it well.”
“Her pulse is weak and irregular,” Schumann said, holding Cora’s wrist. “Very weak. She may have had a heart attack.”
“I’ve been having them heart attacks for the last ten years,” Cora said, pulling her hand away from Schumann. “It’s nothing. I’ll be all right. Lucas, being the last child and the only one in the house with me, is as always overreacting. I fainted is all. Get me some soup and a sandwich, doc, I’ll be good as new.” All of this was spoken weakly but firmly, as if brooking no argument.
“Is there any food in kitchen I can make you?” Isabelle said.
“Who is this?” said Cora. “If there was food in the kitchen, would I be faint on the floor? I’d be eating that food, wouldn’t I? You think I need you to go into me own kitchen to make me a sandwich? I need you to go out there”—the woman gestured to the front door—“and find me something.”
Schumann didn’t think that was a bad idea. “If she eats a little, she might feel better. Let’s go, Isa.”
Finn couldn’t explain to Schumann or to Lucas or to the ailing woman on the couch, or to Isabelle, or even to himself, how much he didn’t want Isabelle to leave. For reasons innumerable, he needed to feel her presence behind him, needed her not to leave him alone with what he didn’t want to face.
“Isabelle and I will go together,” Finn said.
“No,” Cora said from the couch. “You stay, Finn.” She said his name with such emphasis, such intensity, such meaning. He nearly groaned.
Behind him, Isabelle said, “It’s fine, I go by myself.”
Finn whirled around, imploring her with his eyes.
She blinked in silent understanding. “You know what? Why don’t we wait,” Isabelle said. “Or perhaps Lucas can go?”
“I got no money,” said Lucas.
“I don’t want Lucas to leave my side,” said Cora. “He already left once to fetch you, Finn. That’s plenty of fetching for one day.”
“Cora, let Schumann examine you,” Isabelle said. “He’s doctor.”
Cora wouldn’t let Schumann touch her. “I can’t be helped no more,” she said. “But I can be comforted.”
Reaching out, she grabbed Finn’s sleeve and pulled him closer. Her hand slowly traveled up to his face; she rested her palm against his cheek. She rubbed his stubble and ruffled his hair and caressed his face, her blue eyes oozing love and sadness and regret, her entire long imperfect life sliding out of her tear ducts. Finn could barely look at her.
“Oh, my boy,” she kept whispering. “Oh, my boy.”
No one said anything else. For long minutes, Cora’s agonized sniffling and Finn’s agonized breathing were the only sounds in the room.
“Finn, I know you must be smeck with me for what I done,” Cora said. “Lucas tells me how awful you are to him.”
“No, I don’t, Ma! I don’t say awful, never!”
“I don’t blame ya,” Cora said. “But you know what Lucas says to me? He says why didn’t you give me up, Ma, instead of him? Lucas says all you want is to be back with me, and all he wants is to be where you are. Your brother keeps telling me I gave up the wrong son.”
“Ma, I never said this in my whole wasted life,” Lucas said. “Those words never come out of my mouth. Why you saying this?”
“You wanted to, though, son,” Cora said to Lucas. “You been thinking it for thirty years.” She turned her eyes to Finn. “Finn,” Cora said, “I birthed you, and I named you, and I fed you with my own milk. For five months you were my bonny baby boy, such a good, sweet baby. It broke my heart to give you up, but your brother Travis was sick, Finn! He had tuberculosis, and to fix him was going to cost me a thousand dollars! And if I didn’t fix him, he was gonna die!” Cora almost laughed. “I had eight kiddos back then. It was Christmas 1898, your father away on one of his binges I thought, but he was already in the wind, my Travis eighteen months and dying, you five months, and I was pregnant with Lucas! Now there’s only you, me and Lucas left.” Cora’s voice was barely a whisper. “And soon there’ll be only you and Lucas. I couldn’t give up the dying boy. And your older brothers and sister wouldn’t have fetched a quarter of what we got for you.”
A dry sob left Finn’s throat.
“Your new mother and father gave me two thousand dollars!” Cora said. “They’d been trying to have a baby fifteen years. I knew your mother well. She was a teacher here in North End. Every Saturday she stayed hours to tutor your brothers and sister who, don’t mind my saying so, were not the sharpest tacks in her drawer. She was a remarkable woman who wasn’t given the gift of childbirth. And my Travis was gonna die. What could I do, Finn? Olivia said I changed her life by giving you to her. And you saved your brother’s life, and me and all the kids lived off the money I got for you for nearly three years. Lucas was more than two when that money dried up.”
Finn hadn’t raised his sunken head once, looking nowhere but at his feet, at his knotted hands. He couldn’t speak about Travis, couldn’t tell Cora about the existential injustice perpetrated on Travis McBride in Northern Italy on November 2, 1918. Finn, you are my brother.
“I know you think I sold you, son . . .”
“I don’t think this,” Finn said. “You did. You sold me.”
“You never come to me, though you knew I was here all them years,” Cora said, tears down her face. “I would’ve begged forgiveness from you. I didn’t give you away to a slave master. I gave you to a lovely, serious couple mourning their barrenness. I knew you’d be in good hands. And you were. Look at you, look how you turned out. Your one life made so many other lives better. At this late hour, this eleventh hour, please don’t be cross with me. Please forgive your dear old desperate ma and rejoice in the pride I feel for you, in the love I’ve had for you my whole life.”
Finn didn’t know how he was ever going to look up or face her or Lucas or himself. O Lord, hear my prayer, help me.
And help bent to him from above in the form of a refugee fleeing all her days from her own sordid griefs. Finn felt a strong, warm hand around his shoulder, an open palm full of tenderness and compassion, clasping him, holding him, and Isabelle bending to him, to his deeply lowered head, and whispering in his ear, “Finn, it’s your mother. She is dying, and she is begging you for mercy and forgiveness. Don’t leave her this way. Please, Finn. Lift your eyes. Look at her.”
Finn wiped his face, raised his suffering gaze, leaned forward, and very carefully laid his head into the crook of his mother’s neck.
Lightly sobbing, Cora gratefully wrapped her arms around him. “There, there,” she whispered. “There, there, my golden boy, my beloved baby, my sweetest son, my divine angel. There, there.” One of her arms continued to hold Finn, and the other hand lowered to Lucas’s head.
Isabelle didn’t have a chance to bring Cora McBride soup and a sandwich. She died that morning, with Finn’s head cradled under her chin and Lucas’s resting on her stomach.