Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  She took refuge in the routine of work, in the care of patients and the ordinary talk of her colleagues. For brief interludes she forgot. She arrived on the ward early and left late, speaking and moving with a slowness, a soft remote kindness in every action. An acquiescence, an atonement too, as if relinquishing all claims to the earth. Everywhere, she watched her step, fearful of walking into doors, trees, people. She lowered her head and walked hard and fast on the pavement to beat down words. Sin. Shame. In the hall each evening she opened her mailbox with trembling hands, and each evening there came nothing, no word from him. She had thought she had known him. She had known only a small corner of him. Is it possible to know anyone, ever? Taking the stairs in one deliberate step after another, she felt her resistance fade. Hours later, with the TV turned down, fear turned to anger. Suffer, her heart cried. Suffer a little of what I suffer.

  Weeks passed. She was late. She had known from the start—amid the confusion of shame and fear she had expected this too and now it was almost a relief to be right. To know the worst had come, and the wait was over. In those first nights she had lain awake visualising the swim: the millions of spawning sperm racing upstream inside her and her mountain of eggs—her twenty-five years’ stockpile of ova—waiting to receive them. She said the word aloud, impregnate. He has impregnated me. She had the thought that she might be multiply, copiously, pregnant. Her breasts grew tender and swollen and she woke to the taste of metal in her mouth. She sat on the toilet and willed herself to expel it. Nauseated, she leaned over the edge of the sink. She ran the bath and sat in boiling-hot water. In her mind’s eye she saw diagrams from her biology books, altered and nightmarish now—blown-up uteruses housing grotesque bodies with large heads and bulging eyes and torsos enfolded in dark creaturely skin.

  At the mouth of sleep she tried to reach him, to dream him back. She could bear anything if he appeared. She listened to the ticking of her brain, hyper alert to the minute register of cells dividing and multiplying in the new body, the new brain, inside her. Then dawn arrived and with it the calamity of a new day.

  Night after night, she contemplated her options. She ventured down avenues that frightened and sickened her. Words, unspeakable words, remembered from books and magazine articles and hearsay. She stared at the ceiling. It need not be terrible. There were people who could assist, direct her—the word was procure—if she had the courage to ask. But never in her whole life had she had one iota of courage. She had sought, always, silent consent for everything she had done—as if she were without volition, as if a father or mother or God himself sat permanently on her right shoulder, holding sway over her thoughts and actions. And when consent was not gleaned, or was felt to be withheld, she resumed her position of quiet passivity. It was not this alone she suffered from now, but terror, and a complete paralysis of the soul.

  She lay awake, dried-out salt deposits on her cheeks. She had prolonged hope to almost unendurable limits. He was gone. All glory, all happiness, had gone with him and she was left imperilled. The memory of the night flooded back, their bodies. She had seen him in his private throes, at his most secret, defenceless self. Did that not count for something? She wore herself out thinking, her lips bitten and bruised. Finally, she slept. She dreamt she was in a big old house, fleeing from someone along dark corridors. She ran to the farthest room and locked the door, her heart a sea of panic. She heard footsteps, saw the handle turn. She ran to a window, saw that the glass was veined with cracks, millions of cracks, barely holding, and the walls the same, and the ceiling—everything about to shatter. If she as much as left a finger on anything, or stirred, or breathed, a ton of glass would cascade down on top of her.

  She felt someone in the room when she woke. She closed her eyes again. Madness, she thought. Yet she felt something, a foreboding. A memory returned, of being alone in the chapel one evening as a child, and in the haunting sacred silence being seized by a fear that the Blessed Virgin would appear and speak to her, claim her.

  The room had an eerie glow now, a strange transient beauty. She sat up. The glow intensified, and she felt its dangerous intoxicating allure. She stepped onto the cold lino and crossed the floor and raised the window blind and there, in the building across, a fire blazed. Flames rose out of windows and leapt upwards, licking at the bricks. She felt its heat, its burning brightness on her face. Panicked, she ran to the door, ran back again. She tried to see into the heart of the fire, beyond it. She imagined rooms, furniture like her own, paint blistering, ceilings buckling and collapsing. Everything consumed. She saw her own reflection in the glass. The whine of sirens carried from the far side of the building. She shrank back from the window into the ghostly glow of the room, the fire’s haunting crackle in her ears.

  She saw it as an omen. Who would save her? Who in the world would save her? Who would remember her? She was already burning. A fallen woman.

  ∼

  Over the city, dawn was breaking. She was on the roof, the light diffuse. A cluster of flower pots sat in the corner, the flowers wilting, their best days over. She leaned over the wall. Far below the first of the day’s cars glided by. To her left she saw the tree-tops in the park. Soon they would shed their leaves. Easterfield’s leaves were probably gone, blown away now. More than a year had passed since she’d seen those trees, the beeches, the injured ash. Time, moment by moment, trickling away to bring her to now. She kept her eyes on the trees, the rays of the rising sun just then touching the uppermost branches. She could not go back. She could not face her father. He had raised four motherless daughters, delivered them into womanhood without blemish, and he had not been found wanting—his moral compass had sufficed. She remembered his face. She could hear him. Street walker…Bringing disgrace down on top of me…Driving me into an early grave…Your mother…Your mother…Don’t ever darken this door again…

  My dearest Tess,

  How are you? I keep hoping you’ll come. I had a letter from Maeve last week. Poor Dadda. I remember what Mamma said to Evelyn and me before she died. ‘Ye have a good father but ye have a hard father.’ When I think of him now, sick, I’m filled with pity. I didn’t always see it this way but now my heart is crying for him, and all his struggles. And the way he always stayed loyal to her. So much harder for a man.

   I long to see you, Tess. When will you come? Write anyway, tell me how you are. I dreamt of you the other night, that you were a little girl again and you fell into the old well. Oh, aren’t dreams terrible things?

   I hope you’re living it up there in the city. I imagine you on summer evenings walking downtown with a handsome man. Oliver too, with that girl you told me about. All of you together.

   And you with your beautiful soul shining out of you. Oh Tess, you’re worth ten of the rest of us.

  God bless,

  Claire

  One day she saw that the trees were bare. It was November, the seasons had changed unknown to her. On the ward she placed pills in an old woman’s hand, the skin parchment thin. The woman was watching TV, almost in a trance. As the World Turns. Her hand brought the pills to her lips, then halted and hovered there. Tess touched the hand and guided it to its destination. A moment later, stretching up to replace an IV vac she felt constrained, her uniform tight, her body constricted. She glanced down and saw the swell of her breasts, fuller than before, and her heart dropped. Soon, her belly would begin to bulge. A hush fell on the ward
and when she looked up all eyes were trained on the TV. The programme had been interrupted for a news bulletin. The newscaster, uncertain, moved his head from script to camera and back again. The president had been shot. People let out little gasps. Tess stood before the TV. She remained there, staring, when the commercial break came. Nu Soft fabric conditioner. Niagara laundry starch. Chewing gum for heartburn.

  Two days later, at home, she watched the killer being killed live on TV. And then, over and over, the president’s motorcade speeding along the Dallas streets, his beautiful wife crawling, scrambling in her blood-splattered suit, frantic to get out of the car. Tess watched, stunned. Why was Jackie abandoning him in his hour of need? Did she not want to hold him, die with him even? Or does self-preservation trump love? She turned from the TV. Then the truth hit her—Jackie was climbing to get to her children. Her frantic scramble was to get to them, wherever they were, fling herself over them, save them.

  The next day a sombre silence fell again on the ward and all eyes were glued to the TV. Outside the cathedral the president’s small son stepped forward and saluted his father’s casket. Around Tess, everyone wept. She feared the end of the world again. Everything would be extinguished, the child inside her too. She was jolted by the gun salute at the grave. Bang. Bang. Bang. She felt the impact and put a hand to her stomach.

  That night, she watched it all, over and over. The funeral procession, the marching cadets, the prayers and intonations. There is an appointed time for everything…a time to be born and a time to die…She rose and went into the kitchen. She lifted a small jug of milk from the table and carried it to the sink. She thought of Mike Connolly rising from his stool after milking a cow, then pouring warm milk from the bucket into a saucer for the cat. Once he’d put her kittens into a sack and drowned them in a barrel of water. She looked out at the night. She began to pour the milk down the sink. She paused and poured it over her hands, first one, then the other. Then she ran her milky palms down her face.

  ‘What have you done, Tess? Jesus, what have you done? How did this happen?’

  She was standing in Aunt Molly’s living room, her hand holding the edges of her herringbone tweed coat together against the bulge of her stomach. She looked at the floor. In the next room Fritz coughed.

  ‘I’ll get the blame, you know. I’m supposed to be looking after you. Your father will blame me. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Tess, what did you do? Who’s the father? You’d better be getting married, madam.’

  She vowed never again to explain herself. She did not see Oliver—he had not been in touch for months. One day she bought a thin gold wedding band and at work smiled weakly and nodded, yes, yes, she’d gotten married. Outside of work she saw few people. Anne Beckett had moved down to the main campus of the hospital soon after her marriage and, having no wish to take in a stranger, Tess kept on the apartment alone, a decision that caused financial strain for some time. She let the friendship with Anne wane, wanting no reminder of the child’s paternity. She resolved never to reveal it. She resolved to erase him from her memory, think him and reason him out of her life. She placed herself in the care of an obstetrician, a small, round middle-aged man with tiny eyes and a kind demeanour who made Tess feel so safe that, after each consultation, she wished he was the father. Evenings, boarding a bus or a subway train, her eyes involuntarily scanned the aisles for young, earnest-looking men and, finding one, she sat next to him with a familiar ease, her wedding finger on view, as if she were his, and he hers and the swollen belly theirs, and devised for that short ride an alternative life.

  My darling Tess,

  What you must be going through. Oh, how I wish I could be with you. I am there, in heart and mind, you know. If you would only call me, or answer the phone. There is nothing to fear, Tess. Please talk to me. I will not judge you. I will ask no questions—I want no answers, except to know that you are safe, that you will be all right. And you will, Tess. It will all come right in the end. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you seeing a doctor? Please, please, let me know how you are. And do not despair.

   I would come, Tess—I would fly there in the morning—if I could, but the children. And this problem of mine. I cannot hold a cup of tea now without spilling it, and my legs are like lead so that I stagger all the time—it looks like I have drink taken. Even my writing has gone shaky. They’ve done tests, but nothing is confirmed yet.

   Say a prayer for me, Tess, and I pray for you. And for Oliver, wherever he is. We are all orphans again.

  With all my love, always,

  Claire

  Snow fell in December. Alone, she wept. She wrote and rewrote and tore up each letter to Claire. Everywhere on the streets carol singers, lights, scenes of joy. She worked on Christmas Eve, spent Christmas Day alone, shunning Molly and Fritz, declining an invitation from Anne Beckett. She went to eleven o’clock Mass and in the afternoon cooked her dinner and propped a book on the table, reading as she ate. Later, she watched The Andy Williams Christmas Show, interrupted by ads with families around dinner tables, rosy-cheeked children around fires. She permitted herself a brief vision of the future and a quiet hope whispered itself to her. In the evening, in the lamp-lit bedroom, she stood before the mirror and lifted her dress, and stroked the gleaming globe of her belly. She felt vast, large with life, and she was moved by her own fecundity. He had put this into her, he had filled her up. She was the carrier of his flesh and blood, his skin and bone, their co-joined cells dividing and multiplying, and the new thing ripening within her. She gazed in the mirror. She was no longer blemished, but beautiful. She wished she could remain in this gestational state for ever, live her whole life in this perfect state of waiting.

  At twilight she went out and walked the streets to Inwood Hill Park, marvelling at the light fall of snow, glistening, pristine in the streetlights. In the distance, the city murmured. Above, a blue-black sky. She longed to know where on this earth he was tonight, on what continent, under what sky. She walked along the park’s perimeter, ice glittering on bare branches overhead. She felt the child stir. She walked for a long time, looking up at lighted apartments, frosted trees, the moon. The night was unbearably beautiful. How had she traversed the earth to arrive here, at this splendour?

  Dear David,

  I would like to talk to you. Perhaps you could call me.

  Yours kindly,

  Tess Lohan

  She wrote it twice, on identical greeting cards, her address and phone number on the left-hand side. She posted one to the address she had memorised, the other to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Her hand hovered at the mouth of the mailbox and a second later the tiny sound of the letters dropping left a heartbreaking echo inside her.

  One evening in late February, after an eight-hour shift and a subway suicide that disrupted the A Train, she trudged home along the streets in the rain. Inside, she paused on the third-floor landing to get her breath, her feet, her back, aching. A door opened and a small neat black woman, whom Tess had often seen on the stairs, stepped out and placed trash in the refuse chute, and then turned. Tess went to take a step, but faltered. Their eyes met and the woman approached.

  ‘Honey, are you okay? You don’t look so good.’ Eyes shining out of a dark face, black hair, wide like a halo around her head. She took a step closer. ‘I know you, don’t I? You’re the Irish girl from upstairs. You feel l
ike a drink of water, honey?’ She put a hand on Tess’s arm. Suddenly tears came. Wordlessly, the woman led her through the open door to a lighted room, to small children eating and playing in corners, warm. Eyes shining like their mother’s. A glorious place, the hum of heaven. The woman was named Willa. Tess sat at the table and thought she was dreaming. She could not speak. A bamboo cage hung from the ceiling and inside, on a perch, sat a dark bird with a collar of yellow feathers. Willa was watching her watching the bird. ‘It’s a mynah bird,’ she said.

  Under the table Tess slipped off her shoes and placed her feet on the cool floor. She drank a glass of chilled pear juice. She ate salty crackers spread with cheese. The bird gazed down at her with a benign eye. Then it opened its beak. ‘Talk to me,’ it said.

  IO

  THE PAIN STRUCK at dawn. Willa came. In the hospital foyer her waters broke. She looked down at her drenched shoes and began to cry.

  That evening when it was all over she thought she had scaled Everest, stood at its peak, exhilarated. The next morning the enormity of it all hit her. She had brought forth life, rendered human something from almost nothing, and this power, this ability to create, overwhelmed her.

  She did not take to the child. The light down on his skin resembled fur. She could not bear to touch the head, the unknitted bones of his crown. She thought of him as half-hatched, not quite finished. She was not in her right mind. Her body had been riven open, pummelled, her innards displaced. A disgust at her physical self took hold, at the engorged breasts, the bleeding. I am a cow, she thought. But cows are good mothers. On the ward fathers came, brought flowers, cradled infants. She closed her curtain. They brought her the child. Alone, he frightened her, and she rang the bell for them to come and take him away.