Academy Street (13 page)

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.

Sometimes, in the months after Molly’s passing, she longed for the nearness of a
blood relative. She went down to 183rd Street to visit Fritz. He was sitting in his
old chair, frail, drinking. He talked about Molly. Later she asked about Oliver.
He searched and found Oliver’s last known address. The next day she took the subway
to Queens, to a brownstone boarding house and an Irish landlady who remembered him,
remembered that he’d worked at the Ford plant in Jersey and on a construction site
in Staten Island. That afternoon Tess stepped onto a building site in Staten Island,
walked uneasily in the shadow of a great metal skeleton, amid noise and smells that
reminded her of childhood and the new tar roads being laid. Under the gaze of male
eyes, she spoke to the foreman, Tubridy. He had hired Oliver and would do so again,
he said, if he turned up. He had not stayed long. He was a drinker. He was there
one day and gone the next, and no sign of him ever since.

She walked away. She remembered warm evenings that first summer, walking downtown
with him, this golden, blue-eyed brother, stopping to listen to the notes of a saxophone
drifting out of a window. He could be anywhere now. He could be happy. He could be
dead. He might have opted to drop from the grid and disappear. This was America.
As she walked along unfamiliar streets she wondered if the self she had become, and
the self that Oliver had become, and the self that Claire had been, would have been
any different if they’d had a mother who lived.

∼

One day, cleaning, she found on top of her wardrobe a scroll of charts, handed to
her at the school door one afternoon by Theo’s fifth-grade teacher. It was not the
words he had used that day—ordinary enough words of praise, and few—but the way he
had hovered, and the look of earnestness, as if seeking a way to make her understand
that his offering signified something.

She unrolled the charts now again, five, six of them. The Greek gods on Mount Olympus—with
illustrations and carefully penned accounts of the twelve gods and goddesses—then
further down the Wooden Horse at Troy, the Cyclops, Penelope. Other charts: the American
War of Independence, its battles and heroes; the countries of Europe, colour-coded
in pastels, the demographic details boxed inside each country. She admired the neat
handwriting, the perfect lines ruled in pencil. He had lain on his belly on the floor
at night, writing, drawing, the TV volume turned low, the soft back and forth sound
of his pencils as he shaded in. He had been ten then, and never happier.

Now, in his teenage years, there appeared to her a dulling, a dimming, of his natural
curiosity, a diminution of his thirst for knowledge. He no longer read for pleasure.
He spent his evenings in his room, lying on his bed, listening to music and staring
at the ceiling. On Saturdays he worked in a record store, and slept all day or stayed
over with friends through Sundays. She could not broach her concerns. Conversations
were sparse and even minor enquiries about his day resulted
in monosyllabic replies
or sudden rebuffs that wounded her. His looks began to alter too. His face lost symmetry
and proportion and refinement. His jaw jutted out, rough-hewn, giving him a raw unfinished
look. His limbs, his gait, his whole bearing now seemed at odds with the boy she
knew him to be. These changes were temporary, she knew, normal, and yet they left
a disquiet in her and one evening when he opened the refrigerator and the haunting
white light crossed his face she was struck by the awful thought that he was growing
gradually deformed before her eyes.

And then, little by little, year by year, his features settled and his face realigned,
and he became complete. And she had been mistaken—there had been no diminution. His
curiosity had simply narrowed, grown more focused, gathered inwards. Instead of its
previous wide reach his hunger now had an intense clarity and concentration. She
would find, strewn on his desk and on his bedroom floor, pages of calculation, mathematical
equations, algebra. He made sense of it all. He could prove theorems, solve complex
problems in trigonometry, calculus, his tiny figures like hieroglyphics. He could
probe the mystery of infinite numbers. Her heart soared. He will be a scientist or
an architect or an engineer, she thought. He will one day build a great bridge, or
a fine house on a hill, ringed by cypresses and an air of gloom. She stood at his
door one evening as he studied. He was hunched over his desk. She wished he were
small again. On the window ledge a prism, a pyramid, a multi-coloured cube from his
childhood.

‘Dinner’s ready…What’re you at?’ She longed to find a way back to him.

Without moving his head he prodded the cover of a textbook with his finger.

She hovered in the doorway. ‘I had no aptitude for Math in school,’ she said. She
shook her head in mock disbelief. ‘How do you do it, Theo, how do you understand
all those symbols? It’s beyond me—like a foreign language!’

He stared at her coldly. ‘Is it now? Beyond you? Ever think
you
might be beyond people?
You—and your own fucking foreign language.’ He said each word slowly, brutally.

She could barely walk back to the kitchen.

The next evening he emerged from his room and did not speak, a book propped at the
table as he ate. He had begun to judge her.

‘His name is David,’ she said. ‘He’s Irish too, from Dublin, but lives here…or did
anyway. We met through mutual friends and had a brief…friendship…He joined the Air
Force and I didn’t hear from him. When you were born I wrote him and told him. I
sent two letters. He never replied.’ She looked at him, waited. ‘He’s a lawyer here,
somewhere in the city. He’s married now. You may have brothers and sisters.’