18–19 December 1955
The novelty of the expedition soon wore off. Curious and excited, Anthony and Mary had begun the trip in high spirits, but their chatter quickly dwindled to uneasy silence. Mother Barbara and Sister Hildegarde were in good humour, gossiping and laughing, occasionally dabbing the children’s faces with a moist handkerchief or telling Anthony to sit up straight.
They found Niall O’Hanlon waiting where they’d told him to be, by the airport taxi rank, a tattered suitcase on the ground between his feet. He was Sister Teresa’s nephew, twenty-four years old and delighted to get his airfare paid. His da’s pub in County Mayo was losing money and the few pounds he’d earned delivering the post hadn’t covered his keep. Niall had never seen a plane before, let alone flown in one, but he told himself he was fine: Uncle Patrick would meet him in Chicago and looking after a couple of youngsters would be no trouble at all. Sure he must be doing a good deed – if the nuns were sending them to America, then it was God’s work.
‘You must be Mr O’Hanlon.’ Mother Barbara offered Niall a thin hand. She had enjoyed the car journey but now she wanted to get away.
‘Anthony, Mary, this is Mr O’Hanlon. He’ll be looking after you for the next few hours, until you meet your new family. Isn’t that nice?’
Without waiting for a reply, she handed Niall a photograph of the man who would collect the children in Chicago: he was balding, clean-shaven and of medium height, with long arms and a trim physique; he had a little smile that Niall thought made him look smug.
‘You can’t keep the photo,’ said Mother Barbara, taking it back, ‘but Mr Hess will be easy to spot – he’ll be wearing a red bow tie and standing by the arrivals board.’
Niall nodded. The reality of what he was about to embark upon was sinking in. He looked at Mary and Anthony cowering by the nuns’ legs and caught his breath. He felt like a scared little boy himself.
‘Right,’ said Mother Barbara, after they had run over the details of the journey. She drew herself up to her full height, giving the children a fleeting look. ‘We’d best be off. The taxi’s costing us and we don’t want to get back to Sean Ross too late.’
The nuns shook Niall’s hand, thanked him and wished him well. In an unexpected gesture of tenderness, Mother Barbara stooped down to give Anthony a kiss on the cheek. But Anthony, with an unusual expression of defiance, turned his face away.
‘Well,’ she said sharply as she straightened up, ‘I suppose that’s all the thanks we can expect.’
It was a rough ten-hour flight to Boston and to Niall it felt much longer; the children wouldn’t respond to his efforts to reassure them, but he noticed Anthony kept a tight hold of Mary’s hand and stroked her arm soothingly. Shortly before touchdown, the hostess came round with breakfast. Mary pushed it away, but Anthony sliced up her bread and fed it to her with milk from a cup that he held to her lips.
Boston was in the grip of winter. Logan Airfield was covered in snow, and as they were escorted to the terminal the air felt sharp on their cheeks. Mary and Anthony, who had never seen snow, gaped in wonder. Thank God for that, thought Niall, trying not to laugh with relief as the children’s faces lit up.
The immigration official who examined their passports and their Irish Quota visas asked Niall if he was the children’s father. Niall shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
The transfer flight to Chicago was smoother and the children managed a couple of hours’ sleep. The hours they spent together gave Niall the uncomfortable feeling that he was responsible for them, that they were looking to him for protection. When he took them to the bathroom at the back of the plane, Anthony looked up at him.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said in a thin, strangely dignified voice. ‘My sister is scared now but I told her she mustn’t be, because you are looking after us.’
Niall patted the boy’s head and felt his unease deepen.
At Chicago Midway Airport, Niall gathered their belongings and picked Mary up to carry her down the aircraft steps. Through the layers of clothing, he could feel her trembling like a scared bird. Anthony looked at him with trusting eyes and took his hand as they walked across the tarmac.
Once Niall had collected his baggage – the children had none – he searched for the man in the red bow tie. He was standing where the nuns had said he would be, smoking a fat brown cigar bigger than Niall had ever seen. By misfortune, Marge had run to the ladies’ room and Doc Hess was alone. The two men shook hands awkwardly and Niall tried to think what to say.
‘Well, mister, here are the kids I’ve been told to give you,’ he managed, weighing up the man in front of him. ‘I hope you’ll look after them – they’re tired out and hungry too, because they’ve hardly eaten nor slept.’
Doc sucked on his cigar and bent down to smile at the children, but to his horror Mary screamed and burst into tears. Terrified by all she had been through, gripped by panic, she attached herself to Niall’s leg and would not let go. Anthony too looked on the verge of tears, but it was clear he was doing his utmost to hold them back. It was only when Marge came running that Mary finally began to calm down, and by then Niall too was shaking and sobbing.
After the Irishman had gone, Marge bent down and wiped the children’s faces. She’d brought warm coats for them and was eager to get them wrapped up against the December chill. Doc said he wanted a group photograph to mark the occasion and he evidently knelt down to take it, because the lens is pointing up at Mary’s troubled face: in her smart new coat with its velvet collar and her white bobbled woollen bonnet, her cheeks are still stained with tears, her mouth is open and her bewildered eyes stare warily into the camera. Anthony is frowning and his gaze is directed over Doc’s head into the middle distance, trying to make out the nature of the place they have landed in; he is wearing a brand new duffel coat and in his hand is the tin plane from Roscrea.
The drive from Chicago to St Louis took almost seven hours. It was the Monday before Christmas so the freeways were busy and the snow sweeping in from the east slowed them to a crawl. In the back of Doc’s Cadillac, Marge tried to keep her voice bright and cheery. She plied the children with the candy and toys she had bought for the journey, but they responded with uncomprehending stares. Thrust into an unknown world where bright lights burned, crowds jostled, voices boomed from airport tannoys and cars and planes filled the universe with noise and speed, the children wanted to go back to the convent – they had assumed they would be going back – but now Anthony was sensing a horrible permanence to their new situation.
Marge understood what they were going through but the day was not easy for her either. As she watched them sitting there, taciturn and unsmiling, everything seemed suddenly to be at risk. Her mind filled with nagging, panicked doubts. Is this all a terrible mistake? What will Doc say now?
She glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw her husband’s eyes focused on the road. He seemed to be taking things OK, at least for the time being: he didn’t complain about having to sit up front alone; didn’t complain about the driving or the weather; just stared ahead and hummed along with the show tunes and light musicals he liked to listen to on the radio. Anthony and Mary were watching him with apprehensive curiosity. In the exclusively feminine world of the convent, men had been an exotic phenomenon and neither of them knew what to make of him. Doc’s masculine features and flinty gaze appeared harsh and forbidding; this word ‘father’ they kept hearing was strange and incomprehensible.
Mary’s lower lip was beginning to tremble, and Marge was frantic at the thought she might start bawling – Doc hated noise and she didn’t want to upset him while he was driving. She poured some Fanta into a cup and offered it to Mary, who choked on the unexpected fizzing sweetness. With a shriek she threw down the beaker on the seat and Marge watched in horror as the liquid seeped into the Cadillac’s immaculate beige upholstery in a bright slash of orange. Seeing Marge’s expression, Anthony whipped his little handkerchief from his pocket and tried feverishly to clean up the mess, but it was too late.
‘What the hell’s going on back there? What are those children up to?’ roared Doc, and with that Mary burst into ear-splitting, uncontrollable tears.
After the worst was over, a tense, silent calm descended on the car. All four of them – even little Mary – knew something bad had happened, something worse than just spilled Fanta, and no one really knew how to put it right.