The Pull of the Stars(42)

Dr. Lynn peered into the abdominal cavity, which was pulpy with dark juice. She dictated: Liver swollen, signs of internal bleeding. Kidney inflamed and oozing. Colon ulcerated.

I followed her scalpel with my own, taking samples.

She murmured, We could always blame the stars.

I beg your pardon, Doctor?

That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.

I pictured that, the celestial bodies trying to fly us like upside-down kites. Or perhaps just yanking on us for their obscure amusement.

Dr. Lynn freed Ita Noonan’s small intestine with her scissors and lifted it in the way of a snake charmer. Now, autopsy comes from the Greek word meaning to see with one’s own eyes. You and I are lucky, Nurse Power.

I frowned. Lucky? To be alive and well, you mean?

To be here, in the middle of this. We’ll never learn more or faster.

Dr. Lynn put down her scalpel and flexed her fingers as if they were cramped. Then she picked the blade up again and slit Ita Noonan’s uterus with delicacy. We all do our bit to increase the sum of human knowledge, including Mrs. Noonan.

She lifted the flap, peeled back the amniotic sac. Added under her breath, Even her last little Noonan.

She scooped the foetus out of the red cavity, cupped it in her hands.

Not it—him. I saw that it was a boy.

Dr. Lynn said, No sign the flu did him any harm. Measure, please?

She stretched him lengthways in the dish as if he were standing up for the first and only time in his life.

I set the tape at the crown of the skull, went down to the big toe. I said, barely audibly, Just under fifteen inches.

I placed the dish on the scales and added, A little under three pounds.

About twenty-eight weeks, then, said Dr. Lynn with relief. And underweight.

I understood; she’d been right not to do a caesarean.

The tiny, alien face. I let myself look too long and all at once was gasping, blinded by salt water.

Nurse Power. Julia. The doctor’s voice was kind.

How did she know my first name? I wondered as I choked on my tears. Excuse me, I—

It’s quite all right.

I sobbed, He’s perfect.

He is.

I wept for him, and his mother on the slab, and his four brothers and sisters gone before him, and the seven orphaned ones, and their bereft father. Would Mr. Noonan raise them somehow or would they be carted off to grandparents, aunts, strangers? Scattered to the winds? To a home, so called, like Bridie Sweeney was?

I wiped my eyes as Dr. Lynn started putting the organs back.

Her hands slowed to lay the infant inside his mother. I offered her a box of flax-tow swabs. She put in three handfuls as padding, then set the rib cage into place. She pulled the edges of skin together as if drawing bedroom curtains to shut out the night. I was ready with the threaded needle, and she began to stitch.

After she finished, Dr. Lynn thanked me briskly and went off to conduct night rounds.

I washed Ita Noonan one last time before putting her in a fresh nightdress to be buried.

Outside the hospital gates, I took a deep breath of the chill, dark air and felt my exhaustion.

Buttoning my coat as I headed for the tram stop, I almost stepped into a pothole two feet deep. I wondered if I’d be secretly glad to break a leg if it meant a month off work.

Let them go, I told myself as I did at the end of every long shift. Eileen Devine, and Ita Noonan with her never-to-be-born son; Delia Garrett’s stillbirth. Secretive Honor White gripping her prayer beads; Mary O’Rahilly trapped in a labour that seemed like it would never end. I had to let it all fall from me so I could eat and sleep and be fit to pick it up again tomorrow morning.

The three nearest streetlamps had burnt out; no doubt the carbon electrodes were German and couldn’t be replaced. Dublin was sinking into dilapidation, its cracks yawning. Were all its lights going to blink out one by one?

I spotted a waning crescent moon speared on a spire and draped in clouds. A red-eyed paper boy, his cap upended on the pavement in hopes of coins, was singing that rebel song in a squeaky soprano: Tonight we man the gap of danger…

I thought of Dr. Lynn and her comrades clambering onto the roof of City Hall; they’d manned the gap of danger, and for what? So strange to think of a physician taking up the gun, blasting bodies apart instead of mending them.

But then, army doctors did the same, it struck me. War was such a muddle.

A goods tram went by freighted with spuds. The next held pigs, shrieking in their darkness. Then a locomotive hauling wagons of rubbish; I held my breath till the stench had cleared.

The paper boy repeated his chorus, the battle cry sounding innocent in his sweet voice. Of course, he might not give a fig for king or freedom; he’d pick whatever songs pleased the customers. Street traders were supposed to be at least eleven, but this fellow looked more like eight. I wondered what kind of home he’d go back to at the end of the night. I’d made enough follow-up visits to patients to be able to guess. Cracks rived the walls of what had once been mansions; families now lay five to a mattress under crumbling plaster vines and dripping washing lines. All the Dubliners who could had escaped to the suburbs, leaving the rest to live like squatters in the capital’s rotting heart.

Perhaps the paper boy had nowhere to live at all. I supposed one could survive a chill night on these streets at the end of October, but how many nights, over how many years? I thought of Dr. Lynn’s dream of an Ireland that would treat its least citizens kindly.