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Every year she remembers the date.
Remembers the shape of it on her lips, the heat of him as she leaned close, whispered it in his ear.
I curse you with knowledge
And such a curse it has been. The impossibility of ever forgetting. The impossibility of ever seeing it as just another day.
Frank never mentions it. The significance, the occasion. Every year the date comes. Every year it passes, without his ever saying a word. As if he could not know. As if it is a detail he would ever forget, the man with miscellaneous dates and scraps of information ever at his command.
She has, with all her might, done her best to put it out of her mind. What matter that it is the anniversary of the birth of a man, and an ordinary one at that. Not one with statues to his name, recorded in history books for works of great honour. No sign, no record, no matter the destruction he wrought on their lives.
He was only a child once.
A baby, that a mother held cradled in her arms. Perhaps celebrated the delivery of a son. A son, and what he would grow into that mother could not have known, surely must have loved him, must have wanted only the best for her boy.
What would that mother say, if only she knew? Would his deeds horrify her, turn that adoration to revulsion? Or would she say, duty, would she say, a man of his position, would she say, what else could he do when he must maintain control and
he looked after his brother
he took responsibility for the girl
he did all that he must and died with honour
And Claire remembers the weight of Brianna in her arms. How small, how snug she fit. And that first September, feeling more than knowing the date on the calendar, cradling her daughter close (sleeping, full of milk), it was all she could do not to picture the baby that Jack Randall must have been. The delicacy of newborn fingers. The downy soft hair.
Felt the clench of her own jaw and pushed the image away.
Later, as Frank lay curled oblivious in a ball on his side of the bed, she slipped from beneath the covers, padded down to the sitting room. Taking a match, she lit a small candle, made the sign of the cross, and kneeling on the carpeted floor murmured a Rosary only for herself to hear.
(The Joyful Mysteries, prayed in the glow of that flickering light.)
What compelled her to do it? What desire? That imagining of the mother that once was? Some need for some kind of recognition? Some desire to say,
Yes, his deeds were monstrous, but he was no more than a man, just a man
Not god, not devil. A being of flesh and blood, and one who met his end as she knew he would.
It is not that she would call it a tradition, simply something that must be done. Not praying for intercession or the granting of some kind of peace but—
It is simply this. That every year, when the day comes, she prays the Joyful Mysteries and thinks of the child that became the man. The child who, for whoever long or short a time, was innocent of the cruelty of the world. That child, and the one who came after, condemned to grow up without a father.
Frank may not be the right father, but he is a father.
Nothing she can do for the child that was, either of them. Only this, woefully inadequate as it might be.
No matter that it is two hundred years and more since the man ceased to draw breath.
No matter that his end was no less than he deserved, and she had told him so.
It is not forgiveness. It is not absolution. It is not the desire for either.
It is something that simply must be done. And there is no one else but her.