Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  On the third day she rose and showered. At feeding time she stood outside the nursery and looked in. He was the only one left. She felt his profound loneliness. Not long born he might drift away again into cold interstellar spaces. She walked to the nurses’ station, her heart pounding. She put down his bottle and stared at the face behind the desk. ‘I want to give my baby up for adoption,’ she said.

  All day long she lay thinking, sleeping, crying. She pictured him in other arms, new voices and scents washing over him, colliding inside him. She imagined his confusion, his striving to discern each voice, to retrieve hers in the chaos, until finally, gathering in his cries, he grew mute and surrendered.

  She tried to sleep. She dreamt she was back in Easterfield, roaming the dark rooms upstairs. At the end of the hall she found a toddler hunkered down in a corner. He had been there a long time, surviving on nothing. He had something in his hand which he raised to his mouth and bit. She peered closer and saw it was a human finger—hers, her index finger.

  When she woke, night had fallen and the ward was in semi-darkness, the other mothers all sleeping. She got out of bed and walked to the nursery. She feared it was too late, like a lamb too long parted from its mother to take. At the sight of him through the glass her arms ached for his weight and she rushed to him. Trembling, she bundled him up in his blanket and fled on weak legs along the corridor, down two flights of stairs. At the front entrance the night guard stepped into her path and, smiling, laid a gentle hand on the bundle. ‘It’s a nice night out there, ma’am, but still, maybe you’d like to get a sweater?’ She looked out at the street. She looked into the man’s eyes, down at the sleeping child, then back at the man’s face. Confused, bewildered, she let him lead her by the arm to the elevator and back up to the ward.

  The next morning, with the child asleep beside her, she picked up a pen and wrote: You have a son. His name is Theo.

  Nothing was more fully or finely felt, ever again, as the days and nights of that first summer with the child. Her eyes were permanently trained on his and his were locked on hers, a flow of wondrous love streaming between them. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. She took him into her bed at night, wanted to put him back inside her. In the morning she shaded his face from the sun slanting through the blinds. She put soft seamless clothes on him, so that no harshness would touch his skin. She did not ever want to leave the apartment or break the spell. She wanted no interruption, no sight or sound or dissonance from the world to dull his radiance or endanger him.

  Little by little, the sense of impending doom that had stalked her for so long began to recede. She wrote to Claire, told her everything. Each day Willa came, sometimes with a child or two in tow, once bringing her husband Darius to build a stand for the crib. Willa took the child from Tess and, with remarkable ease, carried him in the crook of her arm as she cooked and tidied and talked. She introduced Tess to other mothers in the building. One day she brought her own pram onto the landing and together they carried it downstairs and the two women walked their children in the sun. On a park bench, in the shade of trees, Willa told Tess her life story. Born in Mississippi, she never knew her daddy. Her mother moved north to Detroit when Willa and her sister were small. At seventeen she met Darius and knew instantly he was a good man. They married and moved to New York where he got a job driving the A Train. For extra income she minded kids—the Gallaghers on the second floor, the O’Dowds on the fourth—while their mothers went out to work.

  In October she left Theo with Willa and returned to work at the hospital. Each evening she rushed home, exhausted, sleep-deprived, and swept him up in her arms, like a woman in love. One evening when she entered her apartment a telegram lay on the floor. Father died peacefully last night. Tell Oliver. Denis. Shaken, she put Theo into the pram and took the subway down to 181st Street, imagining, as the train rushed through the tunnel, that she heard the bawling of newly weaned lambs beyond the walls. She rang Molly’s doorbell and waited, nervous, headstrong, but no longer ashamed. The two women embraced and Fritz lifted out the child. They called Claire. Tess could scarcely make out what Claire was saying. She had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Tess cried into the phone and together they grieved their father.

  ∼

  The child’s hair grew fair, his eyes blue. Early one spring morning when she came off night duty she collected Theo at Willa’s and wheeled him, still sleeping, to the park, and sat on a bench. She loved this hour, with almost no one around, and the hush of the night and the sleeping patients still lingering in her. She grew open and alert to the newness of the morning, the possibilities of the day. She looked at the new green leaves—so many shades of green—and almost had to shield her eyes from their brightness, their newborn beauty. Too much beauty, she thought. And too much happiness, these days. Too much happiness frightened her. She pulled back from these thoughts and looked around. An old man was approaching along the path, as if making for her. She began to gather up her things but then he was there, standing before her. He asked the child’s name. Theo, she replied, warily.

  ‘Theodore,’ he said. ‘I had a son by that name. We lost him to glandular fever. It was during the Depression. We were living in Tent City.’ He sat next to her and told her the whole story. Theo was sitting up in the pram, his eyes fixed on the old man, and she saw for the first time what he might look like—the boy emerging out of the baby—and the mannerisms he might have, in the years ahead. She had the sudden urge to confide in this stranger, befriend him, make him a surrogate grandfather. A gift for him, too.

  The old man looked at Tess with rheumy eyes. ‘He was our only child. My wife died twenty-three years ago.’ She saw his clean-shaven face, his neat clothes. She got a glimpse of his life, his daily routine, the order and discipline, rising and cooking and walking. He turned his gaze back to the child and she felt him wander. She wanted to say something, call him back from his sorrow.

  ‘This is my love child,’ she said.

  He nodded abstractly and his eyes drifted off along the path in the wake of other strollers. Then he got up, walked over to the stone tables where old men played chess on summer evenings. She watched him sit, alone, and stare at the chequered table top.

  That night in her kitchen, she said it again, love child. Born against the odds, more hard-won, more precious, than all others. She had not elected to be a mother. In the next room the child whimpered. She listened, waited for him to return to sleep. She would have liked to have the father there beside her, for him to hear that whimper too. The memory of his face returned. The memory of his beauty hurt her mind. On the radio Billie Holiday began to sing. More than you know. She thought of the city beyond the apartment, lights twinkling in high-rise buildings all around her. Inside, nests of families. He could not give what he had not got. She began to weep. She knew that a great part of love was mercy. What she wished for then, what she wanted more than anything else, was for all ultimate good to come to him.

  On Good Friday in the ward she received a call from the front desk telling her she had visitors downstairs. Molly and Fritz were waiting in chairs and when she saw them her heart lurched. Molly rose, came towards her, her face crumbling. ‘She’s gone, Tess. Claire is gone.’

  That afternoon, she accompanied two elderly patients to the hospital chapel for the gospel readings of the Passion. A choir and a small orchestra performed Bach. Once, as
a child, she had fainted in the packed church during the long Good Friday readings. Claire, or Evelyn perhaps, had carried her outside, her bottom lip bleeding from the fall, and put her down on the grass. She remembered coming to, the sun, the light. She had felt resurrected. Now she stood for the long reading. Peter denies Christ three times, the cock crows. The musicians played the opening chorus, and it took hold of her and she was brought down by the terror, the torment, the fury. Peter’s anguish. Herr, Herr, Herr. She sat, stricken. The priest began again, and she was there by the cross with the men, the weeping women. She felt the crown of thorns, the sword piercing his side. She closed her eyes to the serene music, the sorrow in the soloist’s voice, the last still note. She became bereft. She was with Christ on Calvary, with Claire in Gethsemane. ‘It is finished,’ he said. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

  That night she went up on the roof and lit a cigarette. The sounds of the city rose and fused into one deep hum in her ears. She inhaled deeply and the nicotine spiked her lungs. Lighted windows surrounded her, eyes watching her in the dark. She stood in the centre and turned, dizzy from the nicotine. Above her, an unbounded sky, infinite, too much to behold. Her grief was as large as the sky. How had it come to this? She lay down on the roof and curled up and Claire’s face came to mind. All her faculties, her senses, were quiet now. In a few days she would be laid to rest, side by side with strangers, under a Californian sun. What these months must have cost her. The small girl, the boy, presented to her one last time, unable to raise a hand to touch their heads, groping for words through wasted muscles and withered vocal chords. The sound of their play later in the day drifting up from the back yard, while indifferent angels sat and stared as she faded out in a darkened room, fighting off Heaven until Heaven won and she vanished.

  She heard a thud. She raised her head, scanned the rooftop. She was alone. She peered into the corner and saw the door, closed. She jumped up, ran, saw that the plank of wood used to prop it open had been kicked away. The janitor had come, locked up for the night. She flung herself at the steel door, pounded her fists, called out his name. Blind with panic she picked up the plank and lashed it against the metal, then paused, listened out for a voice or footsteps inside. She ran across the rooftop to the west wall, the east wall, the north and south, back and forth until the space in between increased with each crossing. She leaned over, called down eight stories to the street below. She searched other rooftops, windows, for faces, the image of Theo in his cot three floors below tormenting her. Over and back she ran, calling out until her voice grew hoarse and tears came. She slid down against the wall, pulled her cardigan tight around her, and began to pray.

  Above her the sky was a vault. Stars looked down on the whole round earth. She felt herself remote. She was staring into emptiness. In the dark and deepening shades she divined a cry. She felt the child stir and his eyelids flicker, and every breath, every minute sound, reached her distinctly. She held her own breath and his cry came again from within her, loud and soft, hypnotising her, twisting, circling, echoing from ear to ear inside her head. Shh, go back to sleep. His eyes opening, registering the room, the light shining in from the hall. His small arms starting to free themselves, raising a thumb to his mouth. For a while he lay still, alert for any sound, then rose from under the covers, held onto the bars of the cot. Shh, shh, she whispered. She strained to reach him. He started to whimper, then paused, listened. She was not coming. He began to sob. The sob became a cry, and the cry a howl. His howls pierced her. She summoned every power and willed him near her.

  Exhausted, he threw himself down on the covers, his cheeks flushed and tear-stained, his little fists yielding. Shh, Rock-a-bye baby. She hummed, whispered, strove until there existed a perfect consonance between his breath and hers, his heart and hers. Hours passed. The chill of the night entered her bones.

  She stirred. Cold and stiff, she tried to rise. The whole building listed, tilted in the night, and she swayed and slid back down. She drew up her knees. She wished she were made of stone. She peered at a narrow gap, black, between the roof boards, and her mind slipped in, bored a hole down into the dark, a channel through the heart of the building to where the child lay. She poured herself in. Falling, falling. Walls pressing against her. Coffin walls, quarry walls. Orchard walls. Well walls.

  All night long she drifted in and out of dreams, visions, prayers. At dawn the sun broke over the rooftops, and the city stirred. She heard the clang of metal and the steel door fell open. To the west a plane rose slowly, climbed into the sky.

  II

  THE CHILD’S EXISTENCE turned a plain world to riches. Her life raised up like this, the child giving point and purpose to each day, the care of him transforming her, widening and deepening her.

  Something else, too, accrued. Everywhere her heart softened towards mankind. The minor irritations—the slow strollers on the pavement at rush hour, a broken elevator, a long line in a café—were shed. A tenderness entered her actions, a softness in her tone of voice. She found unbearable a raised voice, a blaring horn, a rough hand on a patient. She saw vulnerability everywhere—old women in shopping aisles, the bums and drunks and hobos on the subway, the blind, the lame, the stray dogs—the voiceless and defenceless on every corner. One day she stopped before a broken branch on the pavement and when she looked up the bare wound on the bough grieved her.

  A small circle of people attached to her life—Willa, Molly and Fritz, a few colleagues, and at a further remove, the Irish families in her building. She saw Anne Beckett only once, before Anne and her husband returned to Ireland. Neither of them mentioned the child—there was no need, they were unlikely to meet again. Tess wrote to Claire’s husband in California and offered to have the children visit. His reply, when it came, was polite but non-committal, and between the lines Tess found the hint of a new love. She thought of the boy and girl in the years to come, imagining their lives, in a house with a new mother, on a beach with a new brother.

  It was with Willa she was most herself. With Willa she found an affinity that she did not find with her colleagues or with the other mothers in her building. It had existed from the start, this understanding. She saw how Willa treated people, her ease with children—how she mollified them—and from her example Tess learned how to be a mother. She noted the patience and grace with which Willa conducted herself when subjected to racial barbs and insults, sometimes inflicted by Tess’s own compatriots. She was in thrall to Willa’s life too, to her appetite for life, her freedom, the order she brought. Her apartment was warm, noisy, full of cooking smells and chatter and arguments and Willa at the heart of it. Tess tried to emulate her ways but an air of quietude seemed to hang in her own rooms always, as if something vital was missing.

  Theo grew strong and healthy. He was almost too beautiful. With this thought came a vague feeling of premonition, a presentiment. When he was two and a half Willa stood him against her kitchen wall one day and measured him. ‘Two foot one,’ she announced. ‘He’ll be triple that, you know—six foot three when he’s fully grown.’ She winked. ‘Tall daddy, huh, Tess?’

  The next day she wrote three letters to Ireland, warm, factual, unapologetic, and enclosed a photograph of Theo in each. She did not mention his paternity. She received no reply from Denis and those from Evelyn and Maeve, while expressing mild congratulations in the final lines, were brief and wary and distant. They stopped short of condemnation, and
Tess knew that this was merely because her morally compromised life was sufficiently removed from theirs so as not to incur shame. Her heart sank reading the letters, but as the days passed and she remembered the country she had left behind, and placed herself in her sisters’ shoes, she understood, and forgave. On the subway one evening she contemplated an alternative life back there. A pall grew, a feeling of ennui, at the thought of the daily mundane, the restraint, the stasis. The feeling of things closing off, closing down. She could never have kept Theo. It seemed to her now to be a place without dreams, or where dreaming was prohibited. Here, life could be lived at a higher, truer pitch. Though her own was a timid life, there was, since Theo’s birth, a yearning towards motion and spirit and vitality. As she walked along the Manhattan streets she felt a sudden elation. She started to see possibilities everywhere, and it was this feeling of possibility—even if she did not always avail herself of it—this vibrancy and passion that were essential to life. Perhaps that was the very source of her anxiety, she thought, the mark of all anxiety: the acute awareness of the endless possibilities that can simultaneously imperil and enhance us, and all that might be lost or gained. And the terrible tension that exists when everything hangs on a moment, that moment when one may take a leap of faith, or not. It is choice, then, she thought, freedom of choice, that is the cause of all anxiety.

  When she was on night duty Theo slept at Willa’s and, in turn, Tess had Willa’s two boys sleep over occasionally, a small black face waking up on either side of Theo, like brothers. Theo went to the playground with them, played on the landing, ran up and down the stairs with them and the Gallagher and O’Dowd kids. And yet a deep solitariness attached to him. She watched the way his eyes followed a moving ball, a Frisbee, a dog running up to him in the park. She saw him pause between thought and action, faltering on the brink of speech, his face solemn. She watched him endlessly, alert to the moment when he became aware of his own separateness. At those times it seemed to her that he had been inevitable. He had always been deemed. The surprise was that it was to her he was born. Succubus. Incubus.