Academy Street (12 page)

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
.

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.