“Dolly, if you please, Doctor. Can you tell me how he is?” Her voice had a tight edge to it as though she was working hard to keep it under control as she spoke. A thin, sharp-eyed woman clutching her large handbag in her lap with both hands; a barrier before her.
“Absolutely no change, Dolly, not since I talked to you yesterday. He is alive and we must be grateful for that. But he has been gravely injured and it is going to be weeks, possibly months, before we will know the outcome of the procedures. That is why I need your help.”
“I’m not a nurse, Doctor. I don’t see what I can possibly do.” She straightened the purse on her lap, keeping the barrier in place. She was a good-looking woman — would have looked better if the corners of her mouth hadn’t turned down sharply. She had the appearance of a person the world had not been kind to and who resented it. “You say you need help — yet I don’t have any idea at all what has happened to Brian. Whoever called me simply said that there had been an accident in the laboratory. I had hoped that you would be able to tell me more. When will I be able to see him?”
“Just as soon as possible. But you must realize that Brian has suffered extensive cranial damage. Severe trauma of the white matter of his brain. There is — memory impairment. But he can be helped if I find a way to evoke enough of his early memories. That is why I need more information about your son…”
“Stepson,” she said firmly. “Patrick and I adopted him.”
“I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, Doctor, there is certainly nothing to be sorry about. It is common knowledge. Brian is Patrick’s natural son. Before we met, before he left Ireland, he had this… liaison with a local girl. That was Brian’s mother.” Dolly took a lace hanky from her bag, touched it to her palms, pushed it back into the bag, which closed with a loud snap.
“I would like to know more about that, Mrs. Delaney.”
“Why? It’s past history, nobody’s business now. My husband is dead, has been for nine years. We had… separated by that time. Divorced, I have been living with my family in Minnesota. He and I did not communicate. I didn’t even know that Paddy was ill, no one ever told me anything. You can understand my being a little bitter. The first I knew that something was wrong with his health was when Brian called me about the funeral. So that is all in the past as you can see.”
“I am very sorry to hear about the separation. But, tragic as this is, it does not alter in any way the earlier details about Brian’s life. That is what you must tell me about. It is Brian’s developing years that I want to understand. Now that your husband is dead, you are the only person in the world who can supply this information. Brian’s brain has been severely injured, large areas have been destroyed. He needs your help in restoring his memories. I admit that much of what I am doing is experimental, never tried before. But it is the only chance he has. In order to succeed I must know where to look — and what to look for in his past.
“The problem is that in order to reconstruct Brian’s memories I will have to retrace his mind’s development from his infancy and childhood. The enormous structure of a human mind can be rebuilt only from the bottom up. The higher-level ideas and concepts cannot be activated until their earlier forms again become able to operate. We will have to reconstruct his mind — his mental societies of ideas — in much the way they were built in the first place, during Brian’s childhood. Only you can guide me at this point. Will you help me give him back his past in the hopes that he will men have a future?”
Dolly’s mouth was clamped tightly shut, her lips white with the strain. And she was shivering. Erin Snaresbrook waited in patient silence.
“It was a long time ago. Brian and I have grown apart since then. But I raised him, did my best, all that I could do. I haven’t seen him since the funeral…” She took her handkerchief out again and touched it to the corners of her eyes, put it away, straightened up.
“I know that this is very difficult for you. Dolly. But it is essential that I get these facts, absolutely vital. Can I ask you where you and your husband first met?”
Dolly sighed, then nodded reluctant agreement. “It was at the University of Kansas. Paddy came there from Ireland, as you know. He taught at the university. In the School of Education. So did I, family planning. As I am sure you know, there is finally the growing awareness that all of our environment problems are basically caused by overpopulation, so the subject is no longer banned in the schools. Paddy was a mathematician, a very good one, overqualified for our college, really. That was because he had been recruited for the new university in Texas and was teaching in Kansas until they opened. That was part of the arrangement. They wanted him under contract and tied up. For their own sake — not his. He was a very lonely man, without any friends. I know he missed Dublin something fierce. That was what he used to say when he talked about it, something fierce. Not that he talked about himself that much. He was teaching undergraduates who were there just for the credits and didn’t care at all about the subject. He really hated it. It was just about that time when we began going out together. He confided in me and I know that he found comfort in my companionship.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Perhaps because you are a doctor. I’ve kept it inside, never talked about it to anyone before. Looking back now, now that he is dead, I can finally say it out loud. I don’t… I don’t think he ever loved me. I was just comfortable to have around. There is a lot of mathematics in demography, so I could follow him a bit when he talked about his work. He lost me rather quickly but he didn’t seem to notice. I imagine that he saw me as a warming presence, to put it simply. This didn’t matter to me, not at first. When he asked me to marry him I jumped at the chance. I was thirty-two then and not getting any younger. You know that they say that if a girl is not married by thirty that’s the end of it. So I accepted his proposal. I tried to forget about all the schoolgirl ideas of romantic love. After all, people have made successes of arranged marriages. Thirty-two is a hard age for a single girl. As for him, if he loved anyone it was her. Dead, but that didn’t matter.”
“Then he did talk about this earlier relationship with the girl in Ireland?”
“Of course. Grown men aren’t expected to be virgins. Even in Kansas. He was a very honest and forthright man. I knew he had been very, very close to this girl but the affair was long over. At first he didn’t mention the boy. But before he proposed he told me what had happened in Ireland. Everything. I’m not saying I approved, but past is past and that’s all there was to it.”
“And how much did you know about Brian?”
“Just as much as Paddy did — which was precious little. Just his name, that he was living with his mother in some village in the country. She didn’t want to hear from Paddy, not at all, and I knew that made him very upset. His letters were returned unopened. When he tried to send money, for the boy’s sake, it was refused. He even sent money to the priest there, for the boy, but that didn’t work either. Paddy didn’t want it back, he donated it to the church. The priest remembered that, so when the girl died he wrote Paddy about it. He took it badly, though he tried not to show it. In the end he worked hard to put it all from his mind. That’s when he proposed to me. As I said, I knew a lot of his reasons for what he did. If I minded I kept it to myself. She was dead and we were married and that was that. We didn’t even talk about it anymore.
“That is why it was such a shock when that filthy letter came. He said he had to see what was happening and I didn’t argue. After he came back from that first trip to Ireland, I have never seen anyone so upset. It was the boy that mattered now, past was past. When Paddy told me about his plans for the adoption I agreed at once. We had no children of our own, could have none, there were fertility problems. And the thought of this motherless little boy growing up in some filthy place at the end of the world, you see there was really no choice.”