Mail

by Mameve Medwed

  “And … ?”

  “And I was shocked. You’ve had O’Toole for years. It’s my name. A distinguished name that you were once more than eager to acquire. And, let me remind you, it’s your professional name!”

  This gives me great pause. Seamus wants me to keep his name professionally? He has faith in me professionally. He thinks that the stories and the novels to come under the name Katinka O’Toole will reflect on him. That they’ll be a light worth basking in. Oh glory be! Once you start taking steps to stand on your own two feet you can climb to the height of Mount Katahdin. “I’m flattered, Seamus,” I say.

  “As well you should be, my dear.” Seamus’ voice turns sly. “It is, of course, entirely within my legal right to object.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Several. I can figure out the specifics later. As for now. Well, just take this as a warning. If you don’t give me back your class, I’ll object to your name.”

  I look at the first sentence of “Software: A Computer Story in Three Parts.”

  “It’s yours,” I say.

  Seamus is flabbergasted. He backtracks. His voice is gentle. Then expands with generosity. “Of course you can finish out the last few weeks of the term.”

  I thank him. I don’t tell him that at the end of the term I’m moving to another state. I don’t tell him that I didn’t want his dumb old class anyway. I am beyond childish take thats and so theres.

  And for once so is Seamus. “You know,” he says, “it makes me kind of sad. About the O’Toole. I was always proud of you.”

  * * *

  Yesterday Gregory the Florist put a note in all our boxes. This was done by hand so I didn’t have to worry that Mr. O’Riley got mine or the other way around. Our former and loyal mailman, Louie Cappetti, is getting married, it read. Could all residents of the building please contribute five dollars toward an electric pasta maker and a congratulatory floral arrangement. I stuffed five dollars in the box provided. I sat in front of my desk for half an hour trying to decide whether to call or write a note. If Ann Landers had had an 800 number I would have cleared this point of etiquette with her. Finally I called him at the post office, neutral territory I brilliantly deduced. Besides it was Wednesday. I didn’t want to reach him later at Cheryl’s and cause problems so that the pasta maker might have to be sent back.

  “Hey, Cappetti, some dame’s on the phone,” the man who answered yelled.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” I said. My voice sounded so happy for him I had the fleeting thought that if the novel didn’t work out I could try the stage.

  “I planned to send you a note, Katinka. I didn’t want you to find out through the building grapevine. Cheryl decided she’d have me after all,” he said, sounding not unpleased. “She and Tony have already moved into my parents’ place. I took her to Chris Smith’s wedding where we got the idea.”

  “It must have been quite a wedding.”

  “Not exactly. Not the way that you mean. They were supposed to get married at eleven-thirty with the hands of the clock going up—for good luck—but nobody had figured out the Hebrew name for Christopher. I guess you need it on the wedding certificate. The rabbi and the families had to have a conference. We could all hear them arguing in a side room off the aisle. By the time they were married, the hands of the clock were heading down past twelve.” He paused to let this ominous information sink in. “Chris called me when they got back from their honeymoon. They found out they had nothing in common but, well, sex. And since the circumcision, Chris has been a little …”

  “Circumspect?”

  “Something, anyway. They’re getting divorced.”

  “And that was your inspiration?”

  “Sort of. We figured we had more in common. And real problems to worry about.”

  I pictured the Deaf Child sign two blocks from my soon-to-be home. I would have taken Tony to Indian Island and bought him a feathered headdress and a peace pipe. I would have plied him with cherry Cokes. I would have done up his room in bright colors— visual stimulation to compensate for auditory loss. I would have studied how to speak his name on my fingertips. I would have probably learned to love him. I would have certainly worried about him. A privilege and a responsibility. A responsibility from which I wouldn’t have shirked and from which I’ve now been spared. “Well, good luck,” I said.

  “That means a lot, Katinka, coming from you.”

  * * *

  Jake has donated a Sunday to help me pack. I told him it wasn’t necessary. I’d book him up for moving day to load the U-Haul I’ve already left a deposit on.

  “That, too,” he said, “but I do insist.”

  He arrives wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt layered under a green poplin vest. “L.L. Bean catalogue,” he explains. “I’m ready— among other things—to change my look.”

  “It suits you,” I say, “though it comes as a shock. I think I’ve hardly seen you out of a gray or navy pinstriped worsted wool.”

  “The city lawyer’s uniform,” he admits, lacing the words with disgust.

  I look down at my own jeans and T-shirt. We all have our uniforms, I think, though some are more quickly identified. My T-shirt says “Save the Square.” I bought it during the campaign to save the Blue Parrot Café which was torn down after months of protest to make way for a concrete and steel office tower. The Harvard Square I’m leaving is unrecognizable as the Harvard Square I saw when I first arrived for freshman week.

  Jake hands me two bottles of wine. I read the labels. “Chardonnay,” I say. “My favorite, thanks to you.”

  “Let’s stick them in the fridge,” Jake says.

  I take the bottles into the kitchen. “Do they need to be stored on their side?” I ask him.

  “Oh, Katinka, stick them in any which way. I should apologize for all the fuss I usually make about the wine. I can be insufferably pompous when I’m insecure.”

  I put the wine on its side in the refrigerator just in case. “Are you feeling insecure these days?” I ask Jake.

  He takes my hand. “Less and less,” he says, “now that I’m making changes in my life.” He folds his fingers over mine and clasps them tight. “Especially now that you gave that other guy the boot.”

  “I didn’t exactly give him the boot. In fact, he refused me.”

  “Impossible!”

  “But true,” I confess. As soon as I say it I’m amazed: I didn’t even attempt a white lie to make myself look good. “Though now I realize it was inevitable. We weren’t compatible. It was an alliance bound for failure,” I add.

  For a long time Jake doesn’t say anything. Instead he takes my wineglasses down from a kitchen shelf and starts wrapping them with the old Boston Globes I have piled up. He is doing such a good job, wadding Business into their bowls, winding Metro around their stems I don’t have the heart to tell him they’re cheap glass, probably relics from Sears before it became a Gap. That I planned to throw them out and start again. When he lovingly swathes the last one, I realize we’ll have to sip the Chardonnay from coffee mugs. More suitable, perhaps, to my back-to-basics lifestyle.

  Jake arranges the glasses in a box and places Real Estate on the top. “Cambridge Rents Skyrocketing” a headline proclaims. Jake clears his throat. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he begins.

  “Not at all,” I say. “In fact I want to tell you.”

  We pour the wine into the mugs although it isn’t even noon and the wine isn’t chilled. We take the mugs into the living room and wedge ourselves onto the sofa next to a stack of stereo components sandwiched between old towels. Jake puts a plaid Pendleton arm behind my neck.

  I take a gulp of wine. And then a second one. I am drinking it like medicine. Not doing justice to what I’m sure is a special pressing if not an outright glorious vintage. Jake doesn’t seem to notice. Like me he’s letting old habits die. “He was my mailman!” I confess.

  “So,” Jake says.

  “So!” I exclaim. />
  “So what? I’m sure if you loved him, Katinka, he had special qualities.”

  I tell him the whole story from the moment I saw Louie in my vestibule to the electric pasta maker I contributed five dollars for. I tell him about the party where he bid on my story, about his connection to Seamus, about our playing house with Daniella, my class, his broken leg, Cheryl, and Tony, Sal and Rosalie, about our sad scene at the Pamplona, our last good-byes. I even confess my obsession about Louie’s body parts.

  Jake listens with such attention I can practically reach out and touch his waves of empathy. He’s open, impartial, fair—everything you’d want in a juror or a judge not to mention the significant other in your life. “Aren’t you shocked he’s my mailman?” I ask after I have done my summing up.

  “Why?” he asks. “Let’s face it. Some people think lawyers are pretty close to the bottom rung.”

  “Not you,” I say. And it comforts me that another word for lawyer is counselor.

  • • •

  We go to bed. It’s the best yet. Almost stars. Maybe because Jake is less insecure and I am more secure. Maybe because now that I’ve told him about Louie it’s removed the last barrier. Maybe because along with our clothes we’ve stripped away all pretense and are down to bone. Afterward, lying there amid my boxes and crates and piles of mismatched socks we could be lovers sprinkled with gold dust in a flower-strewn glen.

  18

  It’s the middle of May. My last class. My students sit around the table in Sever Hall like children forced to eat their spinach before they’re allowed to go out and play. On New England college campuses, spring fever arrives with a vengeance. This evening all the windows are open. Even India Germaine, queen of the drafts, doesn’t protest. Outdoors, undergrads walk through the yard resolutely wearing shorts above goosebumped knees. Somebody is tossing a Frisbee. A dog barks. A drama student announces Gilbert and Sullivan tickets on sale.

  Indoors, I am trying to discuss Muriel Kingsworthy’s chapter but even she doesn’t seem interested. They’re moving on. I understand. I was a student once. Summer vacation were two of the most beautiful words in the English language. Next to first love. In the fall, they’ll be on their way to other classes, other teachers. Some of them, even, to Professor Seamus O’Toole. My eyes drift from one to another of their faces. I stop at Russell MacQuillen, Junior’s. I look down. In his lap is an enormous bouquet of flowers peeking over the tabletop from their paper cone. My heart melts. I have vastly underestimated him. But he, on the other hand, has not underestimated me. Under his nerd pack beats the heart of an appreciator. For this last class he has brought me a token of his esteem. Maybe it’s not just his personal contribution. Maybe the class took up a joint collection and he gets to hold it. Like the loving cup our Latin club won once in the intercity Latin Club Olympics. We each got to keep it for a week. It ended up in the school trophy case where it tarnished to such a state of unpolishable green as to be mistaken for a Roman artifact.

  I smile tenderly at Russell MacQuillen, Junior. He doesn’t notice me. Perhaps his glasses are too thick. It’s all been worthwhile, I suddenly realize, my anxiety over my wardrobe, my hours deciphering Seamus’ syllabus, the humiliation of being fourth choice. My teaching is so great that even the lone voice in the wilderness has come around. I award the table at large my benevolent smile.

  Which they quickly take advantage of. Let’s forget everybody’s stories, they implore, and talk about how to get an agent, And, hey, what about the size of the advance?

  “First you have to do the writing itself,” I explain for the zillionth time, “and make it as good as you can. Publishing is a whole separate issue.”

  And the only issue they want to talk about. For the last half hour, I improvise a riff about agents. I had one once, who has now switched to telemarketing. Does this make me an expert? I try to remember articles I have read in Publishers Weekly. The experience of my more successful friends. Half this stuff I must have already told them the night we had a drink at the Casablanca after class. But if they don’t mind the repetitions neither do I. Like Max they probably like to hear the same stories over and over again. I must be doing a good enough job because they sit rapt, more attentive than in any class since February when I started teaching them. I wind down five minutes before the hour. “I’ve enjoyed teaching you,” I say. “And wish you good luck.”

  There is a polite murmur of thank-yous. And a lot of shuffling of backpacks and books. I sit back and wait for Russell MacQuillen, Junior, to stand up. Perhaps the whole class has joined together to write a speech to accompany the bouquet. I feel like an Oscar nominee with her eye on the envelope.

  Russell MacQuillen, Junior, stands up. With his books in one hand, the flowers in the other, he leaves the room.

  * * *

  I don’t exactly sail back to my apartment. I trudge there like a thousand-year-old creature fighting through a blinding storm. By the time I make it to my front door I am shivering. Last night I packed my woolens away in mothballs and stored them under the boxes of books waiting for the U-Haul. A terrible mistake, I think tonight. I am feeling grumpy. I am feeling even grumpier when Mr. O’Riley corners me in the corridor just as I am putting my key into the lock. “Miss O’Toole,” he says.

  I don’t bother to correct him.

  “This is getting entirely out of hand, Miss O’Toole,” he goes on. He has the nose of a drinker and a miser’s mouth.

  “I entirely agree,” I say. “What is getting out of hand?” I ask.

  “The mail, of course.”

  “Of course. The mail.”

  He hands me a thick white envelope. “This came today,” he says. “Yesterday I received Professor Arthur T. Haven’s American Scholar!”

  I shake my head.

  “Dealing with such an incompetent makes one really appreciate what a gem our old mailman was.”

  Suddenly I feel incredibly warm. Mr. O’Riley shuffles off mumbling about tax dollars. I promise to check for his mail among my sheaf of Citibank Visa promotions and invitations to join a health club. After tonight, my class, my hallucinatory false expectations, my megalomania, I should be joining a mental health club.

  And I’m even more convinced of it when I open the envelope Mr. O’Riley has handed me. It’s an invitation to Seamus and Georgette’s wedding. There’s a Claddagh ring engraved on the top. Presumably the same Claddagh ring that graced the announcement of our own mis-nuptials. Only Seamus would have saved the plate and recycled it. I call Seamus immediately.

  “How was the last class?” he asks before I can vent my astonishment.

  “Fine. They brought flowers,” I say, neglecting to add: then took them away.

  “I’m not surprised,” he says generously.

  “But I am. Not over the flowers, naturally. Over your wedding invitation. That you’re getting married!”

  “They say practice makes perfect, after all.”

  “And that you’re inviting me!” I exclaim. “But of course. The tie that binds weakens but never really breaks.”

  I think of this. It’s true of course. Here I am talking to Seamus. I’ve just talked to Louie. Who, in turn and when we were most passionately linked, never broke his connection with Cheryl. Jake still talks to Laura. Over the phone she demonstrates in short little pants the breathing she and Harriet are learning in Lamaze. Jake’s been shopping for the baby gift trying to decide between a car seat or a silver porringer. “Laura’s so practical,” he explains.

  “Then the porringer,” I advise. God, it occurs to me now, I’ll have to get Seamus and Georgette a gift. Electric pasta maker? Electric chair?

  “Will Georgette be taking your name?” I ask now.

  “Indeed. And with such enthusiasm it warms my cockles. The wedding will be grand,” Seamus adds. “Feel free to bring a guest.”

  I will, I say. I don’t say to make sure that the wedding’s on time so the hands of the clock won’t be heading down. I try to remember what directio
n those hands were heading when Seamus and I were wed, but that day, the honeymoon, the whole marriage is a blur— which is just as well since not remembering allows me to wish Seamus the best with absolute sincerity.

  I put the envelope facedown on the table and stagger to the refrigerator where there’s an inch of wine left in a bottle whose cork has fallen into a bowl of leftover applesauce. I drink the wine from the bottle. I better watch it.

  There is a knock on my door. I dispose of the evidence under the sink and go to answer it. Not Mr. O’Riley again, I hope, with yet another example of the diminished quality of our mail delivery.

  It’s my mother, standing at my threshold with an enormous bouquet of roses which are wrapped in cellophane and tied with red ribbon from which dangles a tiny envelope. My mother’s had her hair done, sculpted into a shining but stiff helmet of curls. “You look like Miss America,” I say.

  She pats her head. “It’s the hair.”

  “No, actually it’s the bouquet.”

  “Oh, right,” she says. She thrusts the flowers into my arms. “It’s your bouquet.”

  “You shouldn’t have …”

  “I didn’t,” she explains. “I was just coming in from the store and the florist was ringing your bell. I explained you were teaching—at Harvard. I promised I’d deliver them to you myself.”

  I open the florist’s envelope. Congratulations on your last class, love Jake.

  “They’re from Jake,” I tell my mother.

  “I thought as much.”

  I find a vase. I arrange the flowers carefully. Jake has sent me my second glorious bouquet. The roses fill my whole kitchen with their sweet smell. I think of Jake. How sweet he is. When I told him about giving Seamus his class back, his eyes turned into little pools of sympathy. “Now you can go to Old Town and have more time for what really counts,” he’d consoled.