We just looked at her, huddled together on the bed, tears rolling down our respective faces, newly christened Kate roaring like a train.
"What's going on?" she said in frustration.
Still we sat there. Still we said nothing.
"I'm going downstairs to ask Dad," she threatened. But then she bit her lip and lingered by the door as she thought about it. "Unless he's going to start crying too."
Finally Mum managed to speak. "No, don't go anywhere, love," she said, stretching out her hand to Helen. "Come and sit down. You haven't done anything."
"Then why are you crying?" asked Helen, reluctantly returning to us weeping on the bed.
"Yes, why are you crying?" I asked my mother. I was just as curious as Helen. Had her husband just left her? Did her diaper need changing?
"Because I was just thinking about Granny," she sniffed. "And how she didn't live to see her first great-grandchild. And it's lovely that you've named the baby after her. She would have been glad. And honored."
I felt so guilty. At least my mother was still alive. Poor Mum, Granny had only died last year and we all missed her so much. I hugged Mum and baby Kate, both of them crying.
"It's such a pity," mused Helen wistfully.
"What is?" I asked her.
"Oh you know, that Granny wasn't named something nice like Tamsin or Isolda or Jet," she said.
I don't know why I didn't kill her there and then.
But for some reason it was very hard to get angry with her.
And then she turned her attention to me. "And why are you crying?" she demanded of me. "Oh, God, I know, I bet
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you've got that postnatal depression thing. There was a thing in the paper about a woman who had that and she threw her baby out of a twelfth-story window and then she wouldn't open the door when the police came and they had to break the door down and she hadn't taken the trash out for weeks and the place was disgusting and then she tried to kill herself and they had to put her in an electric chair. Or something." Helen spoke with relish, never one to let annoying little details like hard facts interfere with the telling of a good blood-thirsty tale.
"Or maybe they just locked her up, or something," she admitted reluct- antly, trailing off.
"Anyway, is that what's wrong with you?" she demanded cheerfully of me, back on track. "Just as well we don't live on the twelfth floor, isn't it, Mum? Otherwise it'd be splatted baby all over the patio. And Michael would go crazy about the mess."
Michael was our ill-tempered, work-shy, superstitious octogenarian gardener. The wrath of Michael was a fearful thing to behold, as was Mi- chael's gardening. My father was far too frightened of him to fire him. In fact, the whole family was terrified of Michael. Even Helen was quite sub- dued around him.
I remembered the afternoon the year before when my poor mother stood, freezing, in her apron (which she wore purely for the sake of appearances) in the garden, nodding desperately, smiling tightly, far too afraid to leave, as Michael explained, in great detail, with inarticulate grunts and frighten- ingly wide-sweeping gestures with the shears, how, for example, if the hedge was trimmed the wall would fall down. ("You see, it needs the hedge for the support, missus.") Or how if the lawn was cut all the grass would wither and die. ("The germs gets into the grass, in through the cut bits, and it all just ups and dies on you.")
My mother finally made her way back into the kitchen, where she tear- fully banged utensils as she boiled the kettle for Michael's tea.
"The lazy old bastard," she sobbed to myself and Helen. "He never does anything. And he made me miss The Flying Doctor and Countdown. And the grass is up to our knees. I'm
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ashamed of my life of it. We're the only house in the neighborhood with a jungle of a garden. I've a good mind to spit into his tea!"
A tearful pause. A count of three.
"May God forgive me," she quavered. "Helen, leave those cookies alone! They're for Michael's tea."
Michael was at the back door at this stage, conspicuously holding his back, as if it ached from the rigors of his labor.
"Can I pour your tea?" my mother asked him obsequiously.
But later that evening I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen.
"Jack, you'll have to say something to him."
"Look, Mary, I'll cut the grass myself."
"No, Jack, we pay him to do it. So he should do it. Giving me all that nonsense about grass catching germs! He must take me for a right bloody idiot."
"All right, all right, I'll talk to him!"
But Dad never "talked" to Michael. And I happened to know for a fact that he cut the grass himself--the day Mum went to Limerick to see Auntie Kitty--and told my mother a barefaced lie about it.
Helen was right. If a baby was "splatted" (is there such a word?) all over the patio, Michael would indeed go crazy about the mess.
But it wasn't going to happen.
Although if Kate didn't stop crying soon, I'd have to reconsider that.
"No, Helen," I explained to her. "I don't have postnatal depression. Well, I don't think I do. Not yet, anyway."
Christ! That was all I needed.
But before I could tell her about James's leaving me, my dad came into the bedroom.
We were going to have to start moving some of the furniture out into the hall if the visitors continued to arrive at this rate.
"Hijack," we all chorused.
My father acknowledged this greeting with a smile and a bow of his head. You see, my father's name was Jack, and in the early seventies when hijacking was the popular news item
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(since overshadowed by child abuse), an uncle from America greeted my father with the words "Hi Jack." My sisters and I nearly did ourselves an injury with mirth. It never failed to raise a smile.
Well, perhaps you needed to be there. "I've come to see my first grand- child," announced my dad. "Can I hold her?"
I handed Kate over to Dad and he held her expertly. Immediately Kate stopped crying. She lay placidly in his arms, clenching and unclenching her little starfish hands.
Just like her mother, I thought sadly--putty in men's hands.
I really would have to nip this in the bud with Kate. Get some self-respect, girl! You don't need a man for your happiness! Every other mother would be reading her little girl stories about engines that could talk and wolves that meet their comeuppance. I would read my child feminist diatribes in- stead, I decided.