author's note. Brace yourselves; this is a long one.
So. 'Lilies' was a short-lived BBC series that aired in 2007 or so – this was pre-Downton Abbey and I don't think people were watching costume drama like they do now, so it was canceled after one season. Personally, I only made it three episodes in, because episode two made me SO SO MAD that once I figured out they weren't going to resolve it, I stopped watching altogether. Also, the writing definitely could have been better – I figured out Domingo's Terrible Secret (basically, he lost his genitals to an absolutely horrific war injury) about twenty minutes in to the episode. But I had to fix it. And here's why.
First of all, Iris and Domingo are perfect for each other. PERFECT. Also, they are both great with kids and there's no reason they couldn't adopt. What with the war and the influenza epidemic, I'm sure there were plenty of children in 1921 in need of a loving home. Also, I hated that this episode basically reinforced that as the oldest daughter, Iris is basically the slave of her family and she shouldn't ever want anything for herself. Although that was a more common way of thinking 100 years ago, I don't LIKE it one bit.
Secondly, I think it hardcore sucks that we as viewers are not expected to show any compassion to someone who experienced almost unimaginable suffering. Like his whole worth is tied up in whether or not he's able to reproduce. (Bear in mind that this series also featured an upper-class woman who was having repeated miscarriages, and she's not treated with any compassion either. Guys, I've experienced pregnancy loss. It SUCKS.) For as much as people talk about compromise in this episode, they sure seem unwilling to try it when the chips are down.
And yes, he should have told her. I agree. But I feel like if you watch the whole episode knowing the Shocking Twist, you can identify two or three points where he's clearly TRYING to tell her. I belong to a religion that's at least as conservative about sexuality as the Catholic Church was 100 years ago, and I remember being almost completely unable to talk about sex with my husband before we were married. (I'm not saying that's a GOOD thing, just that I understand.)
Guys, World War One was horrific. As an American I barely even studied it in school since we weren't very involved, but I listened to the Hardcore History podcast series about World War One – 'Blueprint for Armageddon' – and it blew my mind. And most of the books and movies I've seen relating to the Great War deal almost exclusively with the European theater. I had to look up the Mesopotamian campaign on Wikipedia, since I knew nothing about it. (Side note: Domingo tells Iris that he fought at Loos and Vimy Ridge, and THEN to Mesopotamia, but I don't think it would have worked that way, so I'm assuming he was on the same front the entire time.) The way Domingo talks about his war experience is very understated, but I don't think he was joking. This war messed up an entire generation of young men – both physically and mentally – in a way that no war had beforehand, and you could argue no war has since. So, maybe cutting a little slack would be in order.
This chapter is probably the grossest thing I've ever written in terms of bodily horror – I tried to extrapolate what the real-world consequences would be based on the amount of scar tissue we see. (I did get a big fat F in college anatomy, though, so cut me a little slack!) It's fairly impressive that he was able to survive what would have been a pretty messy abdominal wound in the pre-antibiotic era. And the WWI shrapnel injuries were no joke – there were men who lost their faces.
Finally, a programming note: I wrote (and posted) this story out of order. I wrote the middle section – dealing with the immediate aftermath of the episode – first, and then a few years later I wrote the END of the story (where we meet their kids, and ultimately both of them die), and then a few years after THAT I wrote the beginning of the story. The centenary of the Armistice has got me thinking about this story again, so I thought I'd finally re-post the chapters so that they fall in chronological order and not the order I wrote them.
Also, Domingo's mom is awesome. That is all.
March 21, 1916
The first thing Sergeant Hennessy thought, when that shell tore his belly open, was that at least he'd see his brothers again.
He lay on his back on the sun-baked ground, stunned but conscious. He put a hand to his gut, knowing that the warm wet was his own blood. He didn't have to look to know that his entrails were smeared across the ground like Hell's own ticker-tape parade. He'd seen it happen to enough other men to know.
Jeremiah, Saul. Domingo looked up at the burning sky, and waited for Death to take him. My brothers. I'm coming.
August 1914
They all enlisted, the three of them, the first day the recruitment office opened. They queued up at four in the morning and didn't get inside the building until six o'clock that night. It was like a school picnic - everyone singing songs, playing cards, sharing around baskets brought by mothers or sweethearts. The war would be over in six months, it was said, and none of England's finest wanted to miss it. Jeremiah was twenty-one; Domingo, nineteen. Saul, the baby of the family, was only seventeen but swore on a stack of Bibles that he was eighteen. The parish priest was fully prepared to supply him with a doctored baptism certificate should the need arise; as it happened, no one ever asked.
Jeremiah was the tallest, and widely regarded as the best-looking. He had a girl named Annie who worked in the mills, and he was going to marry her as soon as he came home a victorious war hero. Saul was the toughest, using his penchant for fighting to supplement the family's earnings with his winnings from amateur boxing. (Mrs Hennessy didn't like the idea of someone turning her baby's face to mincemeat, but she pretended to look the other way, especially when he bought her chocolates with his winnings.) Saul had left school at only thirteen when their father died, but he liked the paper mills a whole lot better than any of that book nonsense anyway.
Domingo, the middle child, was the most cerebral and the most easily overlooked. He said a little and observed a lot. At the age of seven he'd taken the family clock completely apart, down to the springs - and put it back together again, working. If there'd been money, his mother thought, he could have been an engineer or even a doctor. At the paper mill where the three of them worked, Dom was the go-to when equipment broke down. He knew the machines like the back of his hand. Not surprisingly, he took to army life like a duck takes to water - it was regimented, fraternal, and highly methodical, which suited him just fine.
Privately, though, Domingo was skeptical. He'd been reading the papers and he didn't believe that victory was certain, or that it would be easy or glorious. He was certain that the war would be ugly and brutal and any triumph would be hard-won. But he also couldn't let his brothers march off to it without him.
March 22, 1916
Water.
Water.
Water.
All around him men were crying out for the same thing, though the voices were fewer than they'd been last night. Domingo had passed the night in the no-man's-land between waking and oblivion, never fully sure if he was living or dead. He thought he'd try and crawl over to one of the corpses in search of a canteen, but the bolt of pain in his side when he moved prevented this. So he'd wait. Either someone would come and fetch him, or he'd die; either way, it wouldn't be long.
November 1914
As it happened, Dom was alongside Jerry when the older one was killed. They had been ordered forward in an ill-advised offense, and Jeremiah wanted to keep an eye on his younger brother. "Over the top, boys!" came the battle cry. Domingo stumbled getting to his feet - stepping on another man's hand in the process - and glanced to his right just in time to see Jerry go down, as if tripped by an invisible wire. Quick as snapping your fingers.
Domingo leapt over the ridge like a man possessed, bayoneting the enemy left and right. He didn't count the men he killed but they told him it was over twenty. They told him he was a hero of war, gave him a shiny medal and everything.
He refused to wear it.
March 23, 1916
His flesh was going to rot. Actually, if the smell was anything to go by, it had begun to already.
Domingo laid on his back and cursed the hot, dry climate of the Middle East. Why couldn't he have been sent to France or Belgium, where the misery of the wet and the mud at least had the decency to breed maggots. As disgusting as they were, the wriggling spawn of Satan, the maggots did you the favor of eating away the diseased flesh before the gangrene could take it.
A few maggots wasn't asking much, was it? Only a small miracle. Perhaps one of his dead brothers could put in a good word with God. His blistered lips formed around the words, an inelegant but heartfelt prayer. Please.
January 1915
"Congratulations," Captain Mack said without preamble. "You've been promoted."
Private Hennessy accepted the officer's handshake and returned to sharpening his bayonet. "Why?"
Now that was an odd question. "Top brass is impressed with your bravery."
"Bravery?" Domingo held the blade up to the light, inspecting the edge. "I'm not brave." Artillery boomed in the distance.
The captain tugged at his moustache impatiently. He had places to be. "It comes with a pay raise," he pointed out. "Take it or leave it."
Domingo had little use for money these days - money meant nothing in the trenches. But his widowed mother had one fewer son to support her in her old age. "Thank you, sir."
March 24, 1916
He was temporarily blinded after three days in the sun, and his parched throat couldn't form a sound. He didn't even know if the footfalls around him were friend or enemy until they spoke. "You lot, check over there. Survivors first."
"Think there'll be any?"
"After three days? I hope not."
The voices grew nearer. They were right on top of him, they were going to pass him by, survivors first. Domingo gathered all of his remaining strength and kicked his right leg. It moved maybe an inch or two.
"Hey!" Luck was finally in Domingo's favor, because someone had seen. "Hey, over here! Stretcher!" A shadow moved across his vision. "You're all right, mate," his savior said, though he could tell from the man's voice that he was anything but. "You're all right. Here." The soldier held Domingo's head away from the ground a little, pressed a canteen to his lips. "We'll get you out of here, mate. We'll get you fixed up, all right?"
The water was warm and metallic-tasting, and he was so weak most of it dribbled down his chin, but it was sweet all the same.
April 1915
"Dom! Hey, Dom!"
He was being shaken awake by Private Wills, a man whom Domingo had known since grade school. Domingo, asleep sitting up with his helmet on, snapped to almost immediately. "What?"
"Come quick."
Corporal Hennessy didn't ask what the emergency was as he followed Wills through the rats'-maze of the trenches. He could tell it was nothing good. And it wasn't.
It was Saul.
The men around him parted to reveal Domingo's brother, wide-eyed with fear, blood gurgling in his throat. "He was on sentry," someone explained, "and a sniper got 'im."
Domingo couldn't think of any words to say, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. There was only enough time to lock eyes with his brother, to offer the tiniest nod of comprehension, before Saul's young life slipped away.
March 24, 1916
"What are you doing? Don't bring that one in here."
"This one's alive."
"Really?"
"He was when we picked him up, anyway."
Domingo felt strong fingers press into his neck. It was thready and weak, but there was a pulse there. The voice of the one who was apparently in charge was inches from his face. "My God."
"Sir?"
Someone was down near his belly, rearranging things. It felt like they were shifting his guts around. What was left of them. "It's gone gangrene; he won't last the night," the voice of authority proclaimed. "Put him with the other hopeless cases."
"Sorry about that, mate," the familiar one said from his position near the head of the stretcher. "Can't be helped. Hup!" The stretcher was lifted and borne away.
Summer 1915
With both of his brothers gone, Domingo was more machine than man. He was methodical and precise, and apparently without fear; he volunteered for every assignment, kept his gun the cleanest and his bayonet the sharpest. Wrote letters home every week without a word of truth in them. Dear Mother, I believe this war will be over soon.
"Do you know what I think?" Captain Mack said the day he promoted Domingo to sergeant (largely by virtue of Domingo's still being alive). "I think you're trying to get yourself killed."
"And what if I am?" Domingo said without emotion. "What does it matter, so long as I am of use?"
March 25, 1916
He was in a tent. He still couldn't see, but it was darker, and the smell of the canvas was unmistakable. Domingo understood that he was one of the 'hopeless cases.' He had been sent here to die.
It was quieter than the battlefield had been, most of the men too weakened to do anything more than groan out a dying breath. On his left side a man sobbed, cried out for his mother, then went silent. From the other end of the tent came the sonorous tones of a priest administering last rites - Domingo had been a good student at catechism, he knew the Latin well. He just hoped the priest worked fast, or that he died a little slower.
Then again, Jerry and Saul hadn't been sent with a blessing into the afterlife. Did that mean they were doomed to spend eternity in Purgatory? He hoped not.
Besides the priest, there were half a dozen orderlies working the tent. Domingo certainly didn't envy them their job. He felt strong hands at his neck, feeling for the identification tag he carried. "Sergeant Hennessy?"
Domingo managed a slight nod. "My name's Bush, Reginald Bush. Friends call me Reg."
Domingo didn't know what response was expected, so he made none. His new friend didn't seem to mind.
"Can I get you anything?"
His throat could barely produce sound, so he hoped Reg was skilled at lip-reading. "Water."
"Sure you don't want anything stronger? We've got whiskey, don't tell the others." Reg laughed at his own joke.
"Water," Domingo repeated. A canteen was pressed to his lips and he drank his fill. Somehow it didn't taste as good as that first life-giving sip he'd had on the battlefield and he suspected that maybe it never would.
"Is there anyone back home - a wife, a sweetheart?" Reg asked.
Domingo shook his head. Too late for that now. "Just my mother." Who would take care of her now, he wondered.
He knew why Reg was asking, because it would be Reg's job to send his mother a letter full of lies. Dear Mrs Hennessy, your son died an honorable death. But it was a lie. His guts were blown out and rotting away. Hard to find any honor in that.
Reg's voice got low and quiet. "Listen," he said. "There isn't much morphine to go around, but I've been… careful. I save it up." Domingo's fingers were closed over the smooth round of an ampule. "There's enough there to ease your passing."
Domingo knew what he was being offered. He knew it was an act of mercy. Of kindness. But he was Catholic enough that he had to turn it down. "No."
"You won't feel a thing," Reg promised, "you'll just drift off. Peaceful like."
Domingo shook his head. No.
March 21, 1916
"One last big push," Captain Neville promised. "One big push and we'll be home by May Day." He was Captain Mack's replacement. Actually he was Captain Mack's replacement's replacement.
"You believe this guy?" whispered the private to Domingo's right. He was so new that the sunburn on his face hadn't turned to tan yet. "Home by the first of May?"
Sergeant Hennessy studied the lad's face. He was tired of the lies. And he was tired of the truth. "Sure," he replied easily, "why not?"
"Why not?" the young private agreed. Domingo fixed the bayonet to the end of his rifle, crouched below the lip of the trench in the predawn still, and waited for the whistle.
March 26, 1916
He could see a little better the next time he opened his eyes, and Domingo hoped that this was because he had died at last. But unless Heaven had green canvas walls and roof, his hopes were to be dashed again. He could just make out two shadowy figures standing over his cot, and strained to understand what they were saying; one of the voices, at least, was familiar.
"This is the one I was telling you about, sir. Name's Hennessy." That was his old friend, Reg.
"Right," said the other. "Have you given him anything?"
"Just water," Reg explained. "He won't take nothing else."
"Hm." Domingo had the unpleasant sensation that he was being looked over like livestock. "How long has it been?"
"Thirty-six hours? Maybe more."
"That long, are you sure?"
"Meanin' no disrespect, sir." The man's voice was weary, and Domingo knew he had hardly left his side. "You know your trade, and I know mine."
No one asked Domingo if he wanted to live or die, which was just as well.
"I suppose you do." There was a pause, a scratching of pen against paper. "Well. Looks like God means for this one to live." And once again he felt himself being moved.
May 1916
A field hospital, then another field hospital, then a ship, then a train and he was in London. Domingo felt every jostle and bump of the return journey. The Veterans' Hospital in London had specialists, and after the first of what would be more than half-a-dozen surgeries, one of the most talented doctors on staff stood at the end of Domingo's bed and delivered the news.
He had lost a kidney and a good chunk of his liver, though neither of those would be fatal on their own. The bigger concern was his intestines - he had maybe a third the volume of a healthy man's, and what remained was scarred from the gangrene. They'd operate again when he was stronger, if he didn't die from sepsis or malnutrition, give a little more precision to what was admittedly a hasty patch job. Domingo was young - he'd turned twenty-one his last week in the trenches - and had always been strong, so there was hope. And then, almost as an afterthought, the doctor delivered the final blow.
"I regret to inform you," he said stiffly, "that we were unable to preserve your… male organ." The doctor looked at him pityingly for a moment, but didn't elaborate before hurrying on to the next patient.
Groggy from fever and morphine, at first Domingo didn't comprehend. "Male organ"? He'd grown up with two brothers and a privy, and he'd certainly never called it that. Finally the orderlies on the ward took pity on him. Bandaged as he was they couldn't sit him up far enough that he could see it for himself, but one of them came up with a hand mirror. Gingerly the dressings were pulled away.
Domingo screamed.
He had known grisly war - had seen both of his brothers die before his very eyes - but this - this -
Domingo Hennessy screamed until his throat was raw, screamed so long and loud that patients on other wards were disturbed. Passers-by on the street were disturbed. It wasn't so much out of pity, as it was because he was creating a distraction, that they injected him with enough morphine to stun a horse.
July 1916
He was a monster. An abomination. A freak.
Time came and went without Domingo's knowledge - sunk in a bottomless pit of despair, he lost whole weeks at a time. He cried every day for the first month - he was deeply ashamed, to be twenty-one years old and crying like a baby - but he couldn't stop himself. Sometimes they'd dose him with morphine and he'd stop crying and sleep for days at a time. What his doctors thought was an act of mercy, in truth was anything but - when he woke from the sleep of the drugged, he had to remember all over again.
The gaping wound in his belly refused to heal, subjected to endless surgeries and ripe for infection. They had to clean it out several times a day with carbolic acid, and as weak as Domingo was, he had to be held down by three strong men when the disinfectant touched his abused flesh. He rode out sepsis and double pneumonia, defying everyone's expectations by remaining alive. As if his gut wasn't riddled with enough holes, he developed ulcers in his stomach, the inevitable result of stress and shell-shock. He'd dream that he was back under the Mesopotamian sky, unable to move or make a sound - what was for most people a mere nightmare, for him was a memory. Or he'd dream that he was already dead and buried, the stench of rotting flesh real in his nostrils. When the dreams woke him sweat-drenched and shaking, he'd wonder why on earth he had turned down Reg's offer.
His mother came down when she could, which wasn't often. She taught piano lessons, a meager source of income which didn't allow for train fare from Radcliffe more than once or twice a month. It was hard for her to know what to say, knowing her words were small comfort in the face of his monstrous loss. Sometimes Domingo was so far gone with fever that he didn't even know her. Mrs Hennessy always found it hardest to leave him behind on those days, insensate with pain and fear, knowing he could slip away without ever having recognized her.
When he thought about it, Domingo found one point particularly infuriating. He was a virgin - he'd endured some good-natured ribbing in the trenches for that, but he was far from the only one. He was a good Catholic, he had wanted to be married someday, and this was how God had repaid him?
November 1916
One of the men on their ward had died with no next of kin - no mother, no brother, no sweetheart, nobody. It was the saddest thing they had ever heard.
Which wasn't stopping them from divvying up his things.
"Have a look, Hennessy?" One-legged Private Turner shifted on his crutches and offered the box to his bedridden comrade.
Domingo braced a hand against his bandaged middle and turned towards the other man. "Don't you feel like vultures?" The halftoned portraits of Mary Pickford and Leitzel were already being shared up and down the ward; all that remained of the dead man were a few pulp novels and a deck of cards. Baker, that had been his name.
Turner shrugged. "He's got nobody else to remember 'im. It's up to us."
That seemed fair, now that Domingo thought about it. If they didn't take Baker's belongings, they'd be consigned to the ash-heap. There'd be no recollection by any living man that Baker had ever lived. There but for the grace of God go I. Domingo had no need for dime novels and he didn't play patience, but the pack of cards reminded him of Bobby Hudson from Finchley. Domingo had mastered his trick once before, trying to stay awake on midnight watch; he wondered if he still had the knack.
It didn't escape Domingo's attention that he was using a dead man's cards to perform another dead man's trick. Such were the spoils of war, he supposed.
Domingo wasn't looking for attention, just a way to pass the time. He turned the mechanics of the trick over and over in his mind as he turned the cards over and over in his hands. The pasteboard edges were as frayed as his nerves; at first, he couldn't shuffle them without spilling half the deck on the floor. And when that happened he couldn't even retrieve them himself - bending and reaching was entirely out of the question - but had to wait for one of his more mobile comrades to notice and take pity. He persisted mainly out of pride, but found that his hands grew steadier. Domingo didn't notice, but the hospital staff did, that he needed a bit less morphine to get through the night.
Ten days or so after poor Baker had been interred, the man to Domingo's left - Grant - finally grew impatient watching him fiddle endlessly with the cards. "Hey," he hissed across the divide. "Whazzat?"
Domingo looked up from the cards, but his hands kept moving. "Just a trick."
"Show us."
"It's nothing, really."
"Aw, come on," Private Grant persisted. "I'm bored."
Domingo relented. He shuffled the cards, laid them out, solemnly performed Bobby Hudson's trick. "Hey," Grant said, "that was really something." He whistled sharply to his friend on the other end of the ward. "Oi! Get a load of this."
Like a trained monkey, Domingo did the trick for Grant's friend, then his friend's friend, and eventually half the ward plus a few curious nurses. He performed the trick a dozen times in a row and, unlike poor Bobby Hudson, he never once failed to turn over the right card. Then he did it again with a different deck of cards, to show he wasn't cheating. Already the gears in his mind were turning, working out three or four variations on his one trick. He never cracked a smile, but his hands never faltered.
"Fess up, Hennessy," one of the members of his little audience demanded, "how'd you do that?"
"I can't explain."
"Ahh, you can tell us." The other man winked. "It's magic, right?"
"No." If there were such a thing as magic, Domingo wouldn't waste it on playing cards. Not with his body wrecked, his brothers dead and gone. "Just a trick."
January 1917
"All right, Sergeant, no putting it off any more. Up!"
The good news is that the skin was finally growing back over his wound, which had lain open for many months. The bad news was that the ugly scar tissue was thick and inflexible, and it itched. When he wasn't scratching crimson furrows into his skin, he was rolled up like a pillbug against the burning. But if they didn't stretch the new skin as it was forming, he'd be bent into a permanent question mark. The Veterans' Hospital had assigned the largest and toughest of the trained nurses to his case, and though he wasn't by nature a violent person, Domingo entertained himself in between their sessions by imagining Nurse Carson's grisly death.
"No," he groaned, folding himself around the hot water bottle that at that moment was his only friend. "It hasn't even been an hour."
Domingo's enemy touched a fingertip to the watch pinned to her ample bosom. "Actually it's been two, Sergeant. On the dot. Let's go!"
"I hate you," Domingo said, searching the bedside table for a weapon of self-defense. His deck of cards was there, but if he threw that it'd surely be confiscated.
"Understood," she said crisply. "Now get up, I don't have all day."
"I said no!" The closest projectile at hand was a blue-and-white enamelled bedpan - empty - and he hurled it at her with all his strength. Which wasn't much. He missed by a wide mile; the bedpan clattered noisily on the tile floor.
Nurse Carson folded her arms and looked down at him, unimpressed. "All done?"
He shrank back against the mattress, instantly contrite. "Yes, ma'am."
"Anything else you'd like to say?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am. It won't happen again."
"You're right, it won't. And don't scratch."
"I wasn't."
"You were about to," she surmised correctly. Nurse Carson wouldn't hold a grudge, but she wouldn't let him off easy, either. "Let's go. Up!"
March 1917
He didn't even weigh a hundred pounds when his mother brought him home.
Domingo was a walking skeleton when Clarinda Hennessy brought her son back to Radcliffe. They couldn't really afford it, but she booked first-class rail fare, a private compartment away from prying eyes. He couldn't even wear trousers, unable to bear the least bit of pressure on his midsection, so they covered his spindly legs with a lap robe. Domingo's face was as white as a piece of paper, the brown of the Mesopotamian sun having given way to long months spent indoors, and the cheekbones showed in sharp relief on his once handsome face.
The famous surgeon overseeing Dom's case hadn't wanted to let him go. Truth was, he wanted to study Sergeant Hennessy - there was a friendly wager going on among his colleagues. How much bowel could a man lose and still live? There was a very good bottle of champagne riding on it.
Domingo couldn't stomach anything but skim milk and soda crackers, and that wasn't enough. Mrs Hennessy suspected the hospital staff of keeping him on a near-starvation diet because the clean-up was easier; anything more substantial and his gut rebelled, but any fool could see he was dying by degrees. She camped outside the famous surgeon's office for three days before he even condescended to see her, and then he was inflexible: the man belonged in a hospital, where he could receive expert care, not in whatever slum this ridiculous woman had come from.
Clarinda Hennessy drew herself to her full height of five feet even, slammed both of her palms on his desk. "He is my boy!" she raged. "He is all I have left."
The famous surgeon stared at her a long moment. "Have it your way, then," he said, teeth clenched around the stem of his pipe, and signed Sergeant Hennessy's discharge. Two days later, Domingo was home.
Home was good, because he'd been away for more than two years by now. But home was also bad. He wasn't prepared for how quiet it was, after eighteen months in a war zone and another year in hospital. Constantly being around other men had shielded him a bit from the loss of his brothers. Now that he was home, it struck him how alone he really was. He felt their absence every day like a physical thing, like a great gaping wound in his gut.
He couldn't make it to the privy on shaky legs, so it was the hated bedpan. Sometimes four or five times in one night. Sometimes he didn't get onto it in time and he had to call out like a child for his mother. His cheeks burned with shame as he'd stand there with soiled nightclothes and cramping guts. Twenty-two years old, a grown man.
Not a man, Domingo reminded himself. Half a man. Maybe less.
The Ladies' Aid Society at St. Michael's Church had their work cut out for them. Domingo wouldn't be seen by anyone but his mother, which meant that Clarinda could barely leave the house. The Ladies' Aid did all her shopping, and a not inconsiderable amount of laundry, and provided bandages and a listening ear. Still, the work was hard on Domingo's mother and he knew it. She aged ten years in the first six months.
Of pressing importance was the patient's diet - they were determined to put a little meat on his bones, but most foods had the same inevitable effect on his body, and he had no appetite besides. The summer was marked by a long string of failures; Domingo was no worse, but he was no better, either, and Clarinda privately wondered if she'd been right to bring him home.
The first real victory they had was a piece of beef-liver, brought by one of the Aid Society ladies whose husband was a butcher. Domingo had never liked organ meats as a child, and now he found that the thing turned his stomach, raw and bloody in its brown paper wrapping. He'd seen a lifetime's worth of viscera strewn slick across foreign battlefields. Including his own. But once it was cooked up and sliced up enough to be unrecognizable, it turned out to be the first thing he could keep down of any substance. An ounce or two of beef-liver every day seemed to make his sluggish blood circulate more energetically, pinked up his sallow complexion.
The day he tipped the scales at a hundred and one he threw his bony arms around his mother and whooped for joy.
He didn't like the stuff in the brown glass bottle from the chemist's. It made him feel… not like himself. Made him remember things he'd rather forget. Sometimes a dietary misstep would put Domingo out of commission for days, sweaty and shaking and huddled in agony, and Mrs Hennessy could always persuade him to swallow a teaspoon or two of it then. As much as he could, though, Domingo simply handled the pain with distraction.
There was a rusty set of hand-tools left behind on his father's workbench, and Domingo sanded and oiled them nonstop until they were useful again. Mrs Hennessy bought a broken victrola at a junk-shop and it occupied him for weeks, and then he had music to listen to while he tinkered.
It wasn't long before every broken thing in the household was fixed. He thought he'd have to go back and start breaking things, just so he'd have something to do, until Mrs Hennessy brought home a book on magic tricks from the library.
Spring 1918
Domingo regarded his unpredictable digestive system the way one viewed the lions at a circus. Trained, but not tame by any means. Dangerous, but manageable with the right care and feeding.
They could survive on his war pension (he'd been awarded the full amount by a sympathetic, or perhaps embarrassed, pension board) and his mother's piano lessons. And yet it struck him one day - he wanted to do more than survive. This represented a sea change in his thinking, after spending so many months wanting to die.
Domingo read every book on magic he could find, and subscribed to magazines, and once he felt bold enough to leave the house he saw every magic show, large or small, in a fifty-mile radius. He wasn't so much interested in copying the tricks as the stage manner and even the outfit - he'd sit and watch with a notebook on his knee, scribbling furiously while the audience gasped and applauded. He'd never be able to pull off the large-scale effects, he realized, not without an assistant; but he could put together a small program, for birthday parties and church fairs and the like. He practiced for hours at a time, watching his hands in a mirror, and he built every one of his gadgets himself.
Domingo had handbills printed, and he took out an advertisement in the newspaper, but no calls were forthcoming. He lowered his rates, and tried again, with the same result. It began to dawn on him from the way people whispered and stared when he was in public - from the way parents pulled their children nearer at his approach - that he was some sort of untouchable. It was a small enough town, and Domingo was well aware that people talked, but he didn't appreciate being regarded as some sort of ogre. He felt like he was the same sort of man he'd always been, but it was apparent that in the public's eyes he was not, and he didn't know how to fix it.
Sitting on a park bench one day absorbing the April sun, occupied with a stack of Illusionists' Quarterly, Domingo was surprised to find a woman with a pram actually approaching him. "Domingo?" she said, and he looked up. "Domingo Hennessy?"
He knew her right away. "Annie Bright?" Jeremiah's Annie; they were to have been married after the war. Annie had been a fixture in the Hennessy parlor, always laughing or singing. He hadn't thought of her in years, but he found that he had missed her.
"Annie Laycock, now," she said. "And this is Dora." The baby sat in her pram gnawing a zwieback biscuit; she surveyed Domingo with bright intelligent eyes, apparently unaware that he was a pariah. Annie kissed Domingo's cheek, then settled companionably beside him on the park bench. "Listen, I'm so sorry about your brothers."
"I could say the same to you," Domingo said. "I don't know if you knew this, but Jerry talked about you in the trenches all the time. I mean all the time." Annie laughed. "You know, I'm sorry I never got to have you for a sister. I would have liked that."
"I would have, too." Her sad smile seemed to encompass all the things the war had changed. "How is your mother? I used to visit her often, the first year or so, after. But I think, in the end, that I reminded her of too many things."
"She's doing well."
"And you?"
"I keep busy," Domingo said, too embarrassed to mention his failed business venture.
"I'm sure you're doing more than keeping busy," Annie said encouragingly. "You always were the smart one." She craned her head to read the title of the magazine perched on his knee. "Illusionists' Quarterly? Wait, you're a magician now! I've seen your poster at the Women's Institute."
Domingo flushed. "I tried," he said, "but I can't seem to get the idea off the ground. And if there's anything sadder than a failed magician…"
"What seems to be the problem?"
"You mean you haven't heard?" His cheeks burned with shame, and he spat out his words. "I thought everyone knew."
Dora fussed, and Annie rocked the pram back and forth. "I... I heard an ugly rumor about you. I didn't believe it. I don't deal in gossip."
"It's true."
Annie gasped, and clapped a hand over her mouth. To her credit, she maintained eye contact, where a lesser woman would have dropped her gaze to his trousers. "I am so sorry," she said with feeling. "How awful. How brave you must be, to endure it."
"Not brave," Domingo said. Annie offered sympathy, not pity or disgust, and he found that it made her easy to talk to. "I just didn't die, is all. There were a hundred men braver than me who didn't make it back. I - I spent a year in the hospital, pitying myself and wishing I was dead. There's nothing brave about that."
Annie would not allow him to wallow. "And yet, here you are," she said, squeezing his hand in a gesture of solidarity. "But I don't understand. Why should that stop you from being a magician?"
"I am known for one thing around here," Domingo said sadly, "and it isn't card tricks."
"But that shouldn't matter."
"But it does." He needed her to understand - not everyone was like her. Too few, in fact. "You don't see the way people look at me. Children stare and adults whisper. I'm a freak and I should have known better than to try and be anything else."
Annie chewed her bottom lip, deep in thought. "What if I hired you?"
"You don't need to do that."
"Dora here has a birthday next month." The baby, recognizing her name, shrieked and clapped her hands. "We'll have you do a little show for her party. There are about a million kids on our block, and they'll all go home with one of your cards." Domingo was silent. "Come on, isn't it worth a try? For old times' sake?"
Domingo studied her face - she seemed sincere. And he'd already decided he'd not charge her a dime for Dora's entertainment. "For old times' sake," he said, and shook on it.
November 1918
Influenza. The very name of it struck fear.
Clarinda Hennessy had known this fear once before - five years before Domingo was born, as a young bride, she'd contracted what was then called the Russian flu. Though she survived, the sickness cost her the child she carried - her only girl. She had only one child left now, and though she didn't much care if she lived or died, Clarinda couldn't stand to lose another one. Not after all she had been through with him.
The flu ripped like wildfire through the wards of the Veterans' Hospital where Domingo had once lain. Churches and schools were closed, people afraid to leave their homes. The magic-show business dried up completely. But it was a curious disease, striking down the young and healthy in their prime. And this was, perhaps, where luck was on their side - Domingo was a good deal stronger than he'd been, but it was a stretch to call him 'healthy,' and as it was he contracted only a mild case.
1919
The war was over, and the town put up a monument to its dead, as they were doing all over England. Domingo knew where it was, a bronze plaque on the side of City Hall engraved with the names of the dead - his brothers' names, and many of his friends. He did not go to see it, not once.
Once the fear of the influenza epidemic died down, the magic was reasonably successful. He played two or three shows a week to modest receipts, and performed for free once a fortnight at the Orphans' Home. Domingo wasn't looking to make more money, but he was ready for a change, and his mother was too. The walls of their home were imbued with memories - good memories, to be sure, but it was hard to be always living in the past. And the appeal of a modern home - with modern plumbing - was undeniable.
In June they packed up their modest household and moved west to Merseyside, to a tidy comfortable home with all the conveniences. By September he was back to two or three shows a week, and there was more opportunity for growth, and no one knew his horrible secret.
1920
When his weight topped out at a hundred and forty, Domingo treated himself to new clothes, fashionable in cut, the finest he'd ever owned. He'd never thought of himself as vain before (Saul had been the clothes-horse, of the three) but he'd worked hard for every ounce of flesh on his frame, and thought it ought to be decently covered. Of course, the idea of concealing his ugly body with handsome tailoring was not without its appeal. Domingo was a magician, after all - he was skilled in the art of illusion.
He did not know, and wouldn't have believed, that when young women stared at him it was simply because he cut a fine figure. Thin, to be sure, but handsome, and tidy, and impeccably mannered. He would never marry; he understood that. No sane woman would want a mangled human being for her own.
And that was a shame, when Domingo thought about it, which he didn't often. He had the same craving for love and intellectual companionship as any man, and wished without hope that there existed a woman who would return his love with understanding. He would have loved to be a father someday, as well. At least in that there was compensation; the children who came to his shows, not knowing his shame, seemed to adore him.
March 1921
When he knocked on her door, he was really only thinking of rabbits. He knew something was missing from his act and possibly his life, and he was perfectly sure that it was rabbits.
The girl who came to the door looked like an angel. It wasn't that she was especially beautiful, and her clothes were plain and entirely practical, but there was a calm to her, a glow. As if the the love within her was more than her mortal frame could contain, and it spilled out of her hair and her eyes and her fingertips. He didn't know what was different about her; he only knew that he wanted to bask in that glow for the rest of his life.
It wasn't love at first sight, not exactly. He didn't truly love her until he knew her - knew how perfectly suited they were to each other. But when he laid eyes on her a part of Domingo he'd thought long dead and buried seemed to awaken. "This," it cried out to him, "this is what you've been missing." He knew instinctively, before he even knew her name, that his life from that point forward would never be the same. And later, when they'd been through the searing agony and singular joy that would be their story, she would lay beside him and tell him that she knew exactly what he meant.
All of this passed through Domingo's mind in an instant, while the girl waited patiently for him to speak. The realization left him stunned - he almost couldn't remember what he was supposed to say, until it tumbled out of him in a rush. "What color are your rabbits?