Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  On dark winter mornings he came into her room and lay sleepily across her body, their heartbeats intersecting across skin and bone and cloth. She rose and dressed in the dark and made breakfast before waking him. They sat at the kitchen table as the sky lightened or snow fell soundlessly, eerily, outside and he sat, rapt, reflected in its strange white light.

  She told him about Easterfield. She led him through the rooms. She saw again every table, every chair and bed and sideboard, just as it had been. A pink eiderdown on a bed. A grey coat on the back of Mike Connolly’s door. The view out over fields through a pane of old wavy glass. The scent of apples, chicken-meal soaking in the back-kitchen, her father calling for his tea. She had no photographs for him. One morning she drew a picture: the avenue, the trees, the gravel courtyard. Her hand hovered over the page, not knowing how to come at the house. So she drew the laurel tree. Later, in Willa’s apartment, he added a house, birds, Captain. She had a vision of him there, running down the stairs with Evelyn’s and Maeve’s kids, rushing to strike the gong in the front hall, then opening the door, tumbling onto the gravel and racing towards the orchard, or out into the fields.

  One morning at work she stood with the medical team at the bedside of an elderly man. She was struck by a sense of something familiar in the old man’s face. When the doctors moved along to the next patient she moved too, and then, feeling something, glanced back. He was staring at her. All morning long she was troubled. In the afternoon she went to take his blood pressure.

  ‘How is the boy?’ he asked.

  Her heart jumped. ‘He’s well, thank you.’ She could not look at him.

  She rolled up his pyjama sleeve. As she pumped the cuff their eyes met.

  ‘Does Theodore see his father? Every boy needs a father.’

  She did not reply. As she walked away rage at his audacity flared in her.

  The next morning he was mute. His name was Boris. He did not register her presence. She took his pulse, his blood pressure, measured his urine output. After breakfast, with the help of a nursing assistant, she washed him. She sponged the wasted muscles of his arms, his thighs, his buttocks. He was silent and compliant, almost meek. She lifted each hand, turned it over, saw the veins, blue, through the skin. She remembered his story on the park bench. She brought the sponge to his chest, over the sparse white hairs, the ribcage. She was aware of his heart, beating rapidly, like a trapped sparrow. She washed him all over, and dried him gently with a towel. The clock on the wall struck twelve. She fixed his bed, puffed up his pillows. She felt a great calm, a composure, in every act. Then she stood still. Down the corridor the lunch trolleys rattled. A nurse went by, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. She looked around the ward—at the chair by the wall, the sink in the corner, the man in the bed, people passing in the corridor. It is this, all of these things, she thought, that confer reality. All at once she felt grounded, compatible with the world and the presence of things in it.

  When her shift ended she approached the old man’s bed. He had no one. After a long time he opened his eyes.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  ‘I am.’ She was sitting on a chair.

  He smiled faintly. She felt the weight of recent years, the crushing loneliness, bearing down on her. He would have been a good father, this old man. A scene appeared before her and all that might have been possible seemed at hand.

  ‘Is there anyone—a friend—you’d like me to call?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. He was very old. ‘They’re all gone.’ He turned towards her. ‘I used to play chess with them,’ he said. ‘I was good! When I was young—in my twenties—I almost made grandmaster.’ His face brightened.

  ‘I never learned to play,’ she said. A little flow of urine trickled into his bag.

  ‘I fell in love with it when I was a kid—I fell in love with the chessmen first, the bishop, the knight. Every game is an odyssey, you know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I played all over, in California, everywhere. Once, at an Olympiad, I competed against an African boy. He was about thirteen—he didn’t know his birthday. He never spoke. He had malaria when he was ten and died for two days, but then came back. He spent every day of his life back home foraging for food.

  ‘I played a man in the Ukraine for years. Igor. We mailed our moves to each other. We never met. A game could take a whole year.’ He smiled. ‘Patience is a great thing.’

  She wondered how it would feel to have one great passion.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Russia. The Black Sea, a town called Anapa. I have no memory of it. I came here when I was a boy. I remember coming over on the ship, huddled up with my brother.’

  After a while he asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’ He was thinking of the African boy who had died and come back, or his dead son. Or himself, maybe.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  He considered for a few moments. He spoke slowly, softly. ‘In chess you feel it, you know…something. It’s involuntary—my hand reached out of its own accord all those years to make those moves.’

  His eyes drifted to the window. They were high up. The sun had gone down. The city lay all around them. After a while he spoke again.

  ‘There is, in some of us, an essential loneliness…It is in you.’

  She looked away. They were quiet for a long time. ‘You know something?’ he said then. He was staring at a spot at the end of the bed. ‘I could fit my whole life on one page. I could write it all down on a single page.’ He turned and looked into her eyes. ‘And I am astonished that it is over and I am here, at the end.’

  A few nights later, when she came on duty, she found him in a room assigned to the dying, no longer conscious. Near midnight, with the lights low and the other patients sleeping, she sat with him. She had a need to talk to him, the living to the almost dead. His long body lay beneath the bedclothes, his breath shallow. She touched his hand. He had left a clarity, an intense burn, on her. She leaned close, stroked his head, the wisps of white hair. She left her hand on his forehead. There would be no one to wash him or wake him. She felt the tip of his nose, his fingers, icy cold. She sat back and waited. ‘Not long more,’ she whispered.

  The following night she sat at the kitchen table cutting grocery coupons from the newspaper. Theo was asleep in his room and the radio was on, low. Now and then the central heating pipes hissed, then sighed. She hummed along to the song on the radio. I would rather go blind, boy, than to see you walk away. She thought of a life fitting on one page. She had always had a need to live by inner signs and had been in perpetual waiting for them to break through. In their absence she had gone blindly on, abiding, making few human measurings.

  And yet now in this time, in this life with Theo, there was calm. She felt it a vocation. And she was, she thought, the kind who needed a vocation, to be given over to one thing. She smiled. In another life she might have been a nun. A bride of Christ, her whole being turned over to prayer and reflection, a dissolution of her corporeal self. On the radio a saxophone played. She tilted her head, each plaintive note reaching her. She was a mother, a nurse. These were good things, sure and pure and constant. She need not be afraid. There were worse things. She thought of David. His face floated before her, and with it the
germ of an ache. Would there ever come another night, another time, another man, to match that brief all-consuming union? The scene of their lovemaking surfaced. The dreamy feeling, the intoxicating evening, the desire that went awry.

  Suddenly the light bulb flickered and the radio crackled. She heard the rumble of thunder nearby and a flash of lightning lit the building opposite. The bulb flickered again, and went out. She sat still, in the darkness, waiting for the next eruption. If only there had been a second time with him, a second chance to make good that night, to make right that wrong. She had been too happy. Such happiness carried danger at its heart, the seed of its own demise.

  When the child was five he started at the Good Shepherd School. Willa took him by the hand and led him and her own kids and the Gallaghers—a trail of small children—along the streets to the school door. On her mornings off Tess herself took him and he strode ahead of her, advancing like he already knew his way, fair and strong and beautiful. After school on summer days he poked in the borders in the park and pressed his face into the grass. She was reminded of Captain nosing in the undergrowth at Easterfield, privy to scents and sounds and hidden wonders—a myriad of minuscule things. She thought that the child sensed this too—the teemingness, the intoxication, the mystery of the physical world.

  He learned to read quickly, drawn deep and enchanted by stories. She told him folk tales from her own school days, the Salmon of Knowledge, the Children of Lir. She took him to the library, to Mass on Sundays. She wanted him to know all she held dear, everything that would make rapturous his heart. Heedless of his surroundings, he was drawn to solitary activities, fascinated by singular things. He had a hunger to know everything and year after year his enthrallment grew: birds, trees, the stars and planets, the moon landing, the human body—the boundless universe—all subject to his penetrating intensity. Sometimes, over-excited and overwhelmed by the approach of some dizzying new project, he paled and vomited. He was stepping outside the range of normal awareness into another domain. She sensed inner rhapsodies, an antique state of mind, felicities he could scarcely bear. Occasionally, among other kids, she observed a hesitancy in him, a caution that troubled her. Hyper alert, eager to join in, but guarded, conflicted, wary that what he felt inside—the raptures and ecstasies—might be visible, and mark him out for ridicule or shunning.

  ‘What’s your book about?’ she asked one evening when he was eight. She stood behind him, smoothed his hair. A time would come when she would not be able to touch him thus.

  ‘Ants. An ant city,’ he said, engrossed. He did not look up.

  When she went to turn out his light the ant book lay across his chest, and she imagined him drifting to sleep a while before, the ants pulsing in his brain. She took the book into the kitchen. She had not known such subterranean marvels existed. Minute creatures who were master builders. She gazed at the drawings of tiny insects bearing gigantic loads on their backs, pushing mountains of matter with their heads, their delicate antennae foretelling obstacles up ahead. In the dark of deserts there were networks of tunnels in the sand, terraces, towers, refuse heaps. She was filled with awe at the complex social order they created, the castes of workers, the division of labour, the labyrinthine city. God’s architects. Guided, impelled, by what? Instinct? Divine intervention? She lingered over a drawing of an ant, the compound eyes, the mandibles, the thorax and abdomen, the wings shed after flight. She was mesmerised. Here in her kitchen that evening, oblivious to everything, the child had been transported, lost in the ant city, tumbling into tunnels, into ants’ lives. Seeing with their ant eyes and beholding their city, their Jerusalem. Their Jerusalem becoming his Jerusalem.

  When he was nine or ten she took him out to Brooklyn one Saturday, to a birthday party at the home of Priscilla, an Italian-American girl who nursed with her. Priscilla and her husband and son lived on a quiet street with neat lawns and cars in driveways. Tess stood in the hall and Theo moved away to join the others. She saw through to the back yard and the adults and children moving about. In the evening when she returned he did not want to leave. Something in that house, in that family, had favoured itself to him. ‘Let him stay, Tess,’ Priscilla said. ‘We’ll drop him back tomorrow.’

  She walked along the street. It was February. She looked in windows, at living rooms with TVs, lamps, open fires. The lives of others. She had not felt this way before: less, in his eyes. She understood what he had seen, what he had been denied, and she was bereft. His life was wanting. She had not ever baked him a birthday cake or put up balloons—his birthdays had been celebrated in Willa’s apartment after school. She had bought him books, taken him to libraries, but had not had his friends over. Once she had taken him to Coney Island but the sight of his happiness in the water mixed with her memories of that place had hurt her. She had not taken him back. She had not taken him to a circus or a ball game or an ice rink. She had not provided him with a father to kick a ball with in the park.

  She slept poorly, recalling, in the middle of the night, a cake Claire had once baked for her birthday—a sponge cake with cream and jam, the only birthday of hers that had ever been remembered. She woke to a watery winter light and a terrible silence in the apartment and when she could no longer bear it she rose and went out in the rain for the newspaper. She made coffee and read The New York Times at the table. A young heiress had been kidnapped—taken from her apartment in San Francisco. She turned the pages, read a review of a restaurant, gazed at photos of homes and gardens, and then, near the end, as if fate had cruelly decreed it that lonely morning, she turned a page to find David’s smiling face, a radiant bride by his side, and underneath, a notice.

  Bianca Rodriquez and David O’Hara were married in Holy Cross Church in Manhattan on December 29th, followed by a reception at the Silver Springs Country Club in Rochester. The bride, 29, is the daughter of Mr and Mrs Paolo Rodriquez, Lima, Peru, and a senior stewardess with Pan Am Airlines. The bridegroom, 35, is an associate at the Manhattan law firm Goldberg and Levine where he specializes in corporate law.

  It was to Willa she turned. She stood in her friend’s kitchen that evening and opened her purse and silently handed her the clipping. Willa was serving up the evening meal. She paused, read it, and, without uttering a word, went on ladling out food to her husband and children and Theo at the table. Then she touched Tess’s arm lightly and got her coat. They walked along the street, their heads bent close. They sat in a diner until their coffee grew cold. Tess told her friend everything: the dead mother, the dead sister, the childhood, the man. In the telling it did not seem so bad. She even laughed at times. It was not that it was funny, but neither was it tragic. It was as if she were recounting someone else’s life, from long ago.

  I2

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING when he was fourteen he walked into the kitchen and stood before her.

  ‘Who is my father?’ he asked.

  He stood still. She had rehearsed this moment many times before sleep. But she was not prepared for the iron grip that fastened on her heart now, the trapdoor she fell through. He would abandon her. He would enter a new life. He would enter a ready-made family with a house in the suburbs and a lawn and a pool and beautiful friends. She saw it all. An education, too. He would reclaim the father she had deprived him of. She had done too little. She should have found his father, insisted he play his part.

  ‘I will tell
you his name when you are eighteen. I did not know him long, but I loved him. I cannot say if he loved me.’ He held her look, then turned and left the room.

  She had often, over the years, pored over the newspaper clipping of the wedding notice. They were both beautiful. The bride’s exotic eyes, her lustrous hair, the groom’s allure. Tess looked at her own pale freckled arms, her rural hands, and felt insignificant. She gazed at their faces, searched the bride’s eyes, her confident pose, looked at her for a long time. Something began to take hold, and clarify. Slowly it came to her that this was the only kind of woman he could have chosen—sanguine, self-assured, with a centre of her own. She would not want to climb behind his eyes or probe his silence or know its source. In that instant Tess saw their life together, his silence, her acceptance, and she felt a sudden gratitude to this woman, this stranger. She would let him be.

  One night her aunt Molly passed away in her sleep. Tess and Fritz followed the coffin down the church aisle, and she and Theo rode with him in the funeral car out to Woodlawn Cemetery. She looked out at the streets and houses going by. She had been in the country for fifteen years, some tumultuous times. She had lost Claire and now Molly, her father and Mike Connolly were gone too, and she did not know where Oliver was. Her collection of mortuary cards was growing. She sent word of Molly’s death home to Ireland. Her sisters’ replies, in turn, offered condolences and glimpses of their own lives occupied with raising families and earning a living. Occasionally, on hearing that the Gallaghers or the O’Dowds or other Irish neighbours were making a visit back, Tess felt a little twinge. It was an ache for the place, more than the people, and for a past that was bound to others, some now gone. She was not certain that a visit home would sate that ache, and year by year it grew harder to imagine a return.