Academy Street (17 page)

Willa stood in the bedroom doorway, the super beside her. Her face was solemn.

‘Darius,’ Tess said. Willa shook her head, frowned, came and sat on the bed.

‘Willa. You’re frightening me. Please, what’s wrong?’ Her mind was slow, leaden.
She looked at the super. She thought there was something she was missing.

Willa took her hands, looked into her eyes. ‘Have you seen the news, the TV?’ Vaguely
she shook her head. A wave of nausea began to rise in her. ‘
Theo
,’ she whispered.

The worst thing had finally happened, the calamity she had always been waiting for.
It was almost a relief when it arrived, and the waiting was over. She felt a strange
surreal calm sitting in front of the TV all evening. Over and over she
watched two
planes with glinting wings fly into skyscrapers, from a sky so blue it did not look
real. Then the skyscrapers buckling, collapsing, folding under. People on the streets,
their hands on their mouths, looking up in disbelief. People fleeing, enveloped in
ash, as rivers of smoke pursued them through the streets. Everyone running, the cameras
running, crowds crossing bridges, getting off the island. She wanted to go out and
search but they would not allow it. She could not take her eyes from the screen.
She saw them all running. And over and over the planes flying, the towers tumbling,
the ground giving.

If she could die herself, then, at that moment, it would be all right. It would,
actually, be the most perfect thing. She had always felt temporary, provisional,
as if waiting in a holding bay. Now the wait was over. This thought brought peace.
She wanted to hold this thought, this peace, but people kept entering the room, bending,
speaking, touching her. All evening long they came. Some of them cried. The phones
were down. Willa’s sons came, then went out to join the search. She heard the elevator
ping and her heart lifted and she turned her head and waited for him to enter. She
got a towel, ready to wipe his face, wash his feet. She fetched her purse, urgent.
What had she been thinking? Ludicrous, to think he would come here! He would go home
to Academy Street, expecting to find her there. Gently, Willa led her back from the
door. ‘Let’s wait, Tess. Let’s wait for some word. We have to be patient. We have
to have hope.’

Jennifer arrived, pale and distraught, with her brother. She
hugged Tess. Theo had
called her—he had talked to her from the stairwell between the 77th and 76th floors.
She was certain he was out there.

After midnight she sent them all home, Willa too. She switched off the TV and listened
to the silence. She stood at the sink and looked out at the night.
They have pierced
my hands and my feet
, she whispered,
they have numbered all my bones.

I5

DAWN WAS THE cruellest hour. The wind was sifting his bones, scattering his ash,
leaving tiny pale shards in hidden corners. She wanted to roam the streets, scavenge
in the sewers for his teeth. She sat at the table and tallied up his time: thirty-seven
years, two months and twenty-one days. Monkey kept meowing. ‘Stop that racket,’ she
snapped. Then the elevator pinged. She tilted her head. ‘Is that you, Theo?’

People came by. Jennifer brought the children, but in their presence, especially
the boy’s, she felt inexplicably angry, and then when they were gone, more deeply
alone.

She was better at night. In the quiet apartment she fell under the spell of memories,
dreams, visions. He was lying on the floor at her feet, drawing stars, his head in
his hand, his heart on the floor. Oh, to be that floor.
Tell me their names, Theo,
their constellations. Read me your favourite lines.
She
closed her eyes. She was
waiting, with others, at a gate. She could see him inside, seated at the right hand
of his father. She tried to break away, run across the threshold into his arms, but
a hand held her back. She was running through smouldering streets then, gathering
up his bones, placing them in a little casket, bringing them home.

Monkey kept pestering her, breaking the spell. He jumped on her bed and rolled over,
flagrant. She stroked his head, his pixie face. She caressed his belly, felt his
heartbeat, his pulsing purr. With her fingers she encircled his neck…Such a small
neck, all said. She pressed lightly. With my giant hands I could throttle you, she
thought. I could crush your bones, see your eyes open wide with surprise, your sad
little head slump over. He looked into her eyes. ‘Yes, you,’ she whispered. She placed
her thumbs on his throat and pressed and he meowed and lashed out and fled.

Days passed, then weeks. The grief was so deep her eyes could not weep. All good
had gone out of the world. And to think that the world still went on. She saw again
children playing, people eating and drinking and laughing, the purchase of life.
Birds, books, the notes of a cello, the glossy green heads of ducks in a pond, all
indifferent. She put the TV on mute, watched a man on a dust track in India, with
trees, water, the setting sun—a huge orange orb lowering itself into the earth. She
had never understood that—why the sun and the moon looked so large and near in the
East. Intolerably beautiful. She had no armour left. She had no son left. Was there
something she had missed? She stared at his photograph. Was there something she could
have done to avert it? But the dead don’t talk back. The dead don’t talk.
The dead.

On a cold bright Saturday in October, a funeral car collected her for the Memorial
Mass. She climbed into the back and embraced Jennifer and the children. She stroked
the children’s heads. An image from the past rose up—a boy, a president’s son, stepping
forward to salute his father’s casket.

‘How are you holding up, Tess?’ Jennifer asked tenderly.

She had succeeded in keeping feeling at bay all morning. ‘Some days are better than
others. You know yourself. When you wake up…’

‘I do.’

‘Everyone is saying we’re all in this together, united in our grief. But…’ She frowned,
shook her head.

‘I know. It’s so hard. I don’t want anyone to be part of this either, except you
and the children.’

Tess began to cry.

Rachel’s hair was plaited. She stroked the plaits. The child nestled against her.

‘Tess,’ Jennifer said. ‘He never got to tell you. He made contact with his father.
About three years ago, he found him.’

‘He told me. The night before he…The night he stayed over.’

Jennifer reached across, touched her hand. ‘They met only once.’

An image crossed her mind, a meeting in a café, an
assignation. Momentarily, she
felt deceived. ‘Does he know?’

‘Yes. I called him.’

She looked out of the tinted glass window.
Your son is dead. Our son is dead.

‘They have no children—he and his wife,’ Jennifer said.

She left her hands flat each side of her on the seat. The smell of the polished leather
was overpowering. Why must everything floor her so?

‘Can you braid hair, Nana—do you know how?’ Rachel was looking at her.

She smiled at the child. ‘Yes, sweetheart, I can braid hair. How about I teach you
next time you come by? My sister taught me when I was small. Her name was Claire.’
She said it again, abstractedly. ‘Her name was Claire.’

They pulled up at the Church of the Good Shepherd. She looked up at the steps, the
three arched doorways. People from the old neighbourhood stood outside, come to pay
their respects, Willa among them.

She held on to the handrail as she climbed the steps. ‘Will he be here?’ she asked
in a low voice.

Jennifer leaned in, whispered, ‘No, don’t worry.’

In the middle of Mass, for some reason, she remembered that he was left-handed. Theo
had inherited this trait. As a toddler she had watched it emerge, become manifest
in an almost imperceptible pause, a faltering, before a hand reached out to a toy,
as if a brief internal tussle was being played out, a faint quarrel between the two
sides of him. In that pause, she intuited a shy soul, a vulnerability, a tender wound
at
the source, a little wrong that his little body was trying to right. ‘
We need,
in love, to practise only one thing—letting go
,’ the priest said and looked vaguely
upwards as if an invisible Theo was departing skywards before them. ‘God speed you,’
he added then. She had an image of birds in flight, a tunnel of light, the number
Phi.

After Communion,
Esurientes
. The Magnificat. She had requested it.
Anima mea Dominum.
Her conversation with God. She tried to recover him, his hands, his sleeping eyes,
but he would not be summoned. She could not conjure his face in death. The words
and the music engulfed her. She rode on waves, lost, blind, awash in silent grief.
She wanted to relish the pain, the sorrow in her marrow, the dark heart taking over.
Suscepit Israel puerum suum.

She did not want it to end. When the choir began the final hymn the parting sickness
rose in her.
The strife is o’er, the battle done.

At a reception back at Theo’s house catering staff in white gloves moved among the
mourners pouring wine, bringing offerings on trays. She chose a morsel and chewed
it but it lodged drily in her oesophagus. She shook hands with strangers and semi-strangers.
She noted their pressed suits, their painted nails. Jennifer was the chief mourner.
She heard their stories, laughter, memories of him. She heard them say his name.
They had known him for five minutes, all of them, Jennifer too. It was in Tess that
images of him dwelt, millions of them.
I am his mother
, she wanted to cry.
I made
him. Inside
me. With only a drop from a man now barely remembered I forged him, I
moulded him, body and soul.
She watched their mouths, their moving tongues, eating,
speaking, their white teeth. How can you eat, she thought, at a time like this? She
looked around for someone who understood. She did not even feel sufficient pity for
his children.

In the evening the funeral car arrived to take her home. She asked to be driven to
Academy Street. She was hoping for something, a visitation. She sat in the parked
car, behind the blacked-out windows, his countless footsteps echoing in the streets
around her. The echoes of other mothers’ sons too, and no bodies for souvenirs. She
tapped the driver and he drove on, crossing Sherman, Broadway, towards the park.
She remembered summer evenings, old men playing chess under trees, a winter’s day
when he was four and ran out onto the frozen pond and fell through the ice, a clean
vertical drop, almost soundless.

Twilight came. The car turned around, drove south. The city was lighting up. She
wondered if he had seen amazing things, nearing death. He, who had been a child of
wonder, must have felt astral, aerial, metaphysical. Had the sun spun before him?
Had his hands glowed white and luminous? Had he fallen, or fled from flames, his
bladder failing, his bowels evacuating, but all of his past—every hour—still contained
within him? She began to ponder the precise instant of his death, the tiny subtle
intuition when he knew for certain he was going to die. His petrified gaze into mid-air,
beyond the
threshold of consciousness into the deepest centre of the stars, and then
the silent folding, the inward motion, the dissolution into the dark biosphere.
How had that moment not registered in her? How had she not felt a disturbance that
morning, a little quiver of the self? She closed her eyes. She longed to reach him,
lift him under the arms, drape him over her. She looked out the car window, the hum
of the engine beneath her. Above her, a sea of tiny stars lighting the sky. She had
been here before: night time, being ferried through the streets, enclosed and alone
like this. And then it came to her. Stendhal. Mathilde, inside her black-draped carriage
with the head of her beloved Julien on her lap, while outside the priests escort
his bier to the grave. Then, in the depths of the night, burying his head with her
own hands.

There was no sign of Monkey. She stood often at her window looking down on the enclosed
courtyard with the single tree. Sometimes at dusk she thought she saw him moving
in the boughs. She could not sleep. The tolling of bells made her cry. She was always
a heartbeat away from brokenness. Does the body go on feeling after death?

She walked a lot, mostly in the evenings. Her feet led her back to Academy Street.
She stood on the sidewalk, keeping vigil. She looked up at her old window. There,
she had been happy. There, where the air of the outside world did not infiltrate.
She lingered, as if waiting for a flare from the window, a sign for where to go next.
One afternoon she stood across from the school, under a tree, as parents gathered
at the door. In an
upstairs classroom, the lights were on, the heads of children
visible and, as she watched, a little hand was raised in answer, lowered again. One
day from a bus she saw him. She got off and rushed back, her heart beating wildly.
She searched the street, frantic, peered into stores. Back and forth she trudged
along the pavement, crying. She entered a church where a congregation was gathered
for a funeral. She sat in a pew, stood, knelt, prayed for the dead man whose photograph
sat on the coffin. At the end, with incense wafting in the air, she stepped into
the aisle and walked with the mourners behind the coffin.

The talk was relentless. On the TV, the radio, in the streets—everywhere—the clamour,
the arguments, the outrage, the heroes and the villains, all tormenting her. She
wanted none of it, wanted the world to go mute. At night it rained. In the mornings
the city gleamed. She tried to return to her books, but had little will. She was
afraid of certain thoughts, of being devoured by certain thoughts. She began to dread
nightfall, heartbreaking twilights. She drew down the blinds, shut out the city.
His name resounded in her rooms, in her footsteps, a chant, an echo, a hide-and-seek
cry.
The-o, The-o.