Academy Street (7 page)

At the airport the summer wind gusted and blew Evelyn’s
hat off and she ran after
it, and they all laughed. This will be my memory, she thought. As they parted they
threw holy water on her and she blessed herself. Denis looked down, his long arms
hanging, and she remembered the injured ash again.

Before the take-off, she grew frantic. The plane roared down the runway and she bent
her head. It was not flying she feared, but dying. When the wheels lifted and the
plane began to climb she pressed her fingers to her ears. Then she remembered the
date: 15th August, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, and her heart
began to quell. God would not let a plane crash on Our Lady’s feast day. She began
to fill up with trust, like a child newly assured. The roar of the engine eased and
the plane levelled and in a while she opened her eyes. They were in upper Earth.
They had broken through into the blue. Dazzling light. Glorious. For a moment all
thoughts ceased and there was this: a glimpse, a proximity, a feeling of being a
fraction of a second away from something pure and sublime, a hair’s breadth from
the divine. And then it was gone, the clarity, the fleeting elation, and she looked
up and saw the other passengers sitting there reading, sleeping or in quiet contemplation.

Claire’s husband, Peter, a tall handsome Irish-American, was waiting at Idlewild
Airport. Shyly she climbed into his car and he whisked her up to Peekskill on the
Hudson where they had taken a summer house. Everything was different—the highway,
the sky, the distant forests. The vast country, green and clean and perfect. The
trucks thundering past with
huge chrome wheels and invisible drivers high up in cabs.
For a while she forgot where she was. The trees are juniper, Peter said. His teeth
were white and gleaming. Juniper, she said to herself. Beautiful word, beautiful
trees. They stopped at a turnpike and paid a toll, just to use the road.

There, on the front lawn of a low-slung villa above the river, stood Claire, a small
child at her feet, another one inside her. Unable to utter a word, they embraced.
When they drew away, there were tears in each other’s eyes. Their aunt Molly was
there, up from the city to welcome Tess, a large buoyant woman with a shock of white
frizzy hair. They moved to the back yard. Later, Peter’s extended family came by
and he lit the barbeque and poured drinks and everyone milled around the pool. Outside,
on the street, big American cars floated by. In the hours and days that followed,
Tess would sometimes look around at the kids and the cars and the pool, at the picture
windows and the sun-drenched world she had tumbled into. Once or twice she remembered
home, Evelyn’s hat and the injured ash. And then forgot them. In the evening the
crickets sang. Peter came up behind Claire, stroked her back, gazed tenderly at her
swollen belly. This is what he has done to her, Tess thought. This act of love, of
sex, on her sister. In a book, once, she had come on the words
fruit of my loins
.
She remembered the nights she had climbed into Claire’s bed and slept in her arms.
They looked at each other now. In the look was an acknowledgement, a declaration,
an affirmation that everything was finally settled, and the lives being lived here
were the right ones, the ideal lives.

Slowly, in the months that followed, Tess tuned to the frequency of the city, to
the accents and the street-grid and the subway, to the black faces on the sidewalk,
the sirens at night, the five-and-ten-cent stores teeming with goods, and buildings
that rose up daily from gaps in the streets. The new words too—
pocket-book
,
meatloaf
,
lima beans
,
Jell-O
. The taste of coffee, the clothes so lovely and cheap and slim-fitting.
The abundance of everything.

In September she started work at the Presbyterian Medical Hospital on East 68th Street,
and in the early weeks walked the long corridors every day shadowing her seniors,
pushing medicine carts, taking blood, listening, learning, delivering all that was
expected of her as things came at her, and her heart beat hard. Unconsciously, she
adjusted her accent to be understood, and altered her handwriting until it attained
the grace and slant of American script. She sat by herself in the cafeteria. The
pall of loneliness that accompanied her from her aunt’s apartment each morning and
which was briefly eclipsed by her duties lowered itself again. At night in the apartment
she studied for her nursing accreditation or sat in the living room with Molly and
Molly’s other boarder—a German man in his sixties, named Fritz—with the fan whirring
and
I Love Lucy
or
The Jack Paar Show
on TV. When the audience laughed, she felt
herself apart, among strangers. Exhausted, homesick, she went to bed and recited
the Rosary and afterwards lay tense and sleepless for a long time under a cotton
sheet. She woke after what seemed like mere minutes to the squeal of a garbage truck
on the street
below and the vague anxiety that she always experienced at dawn brimming
up again.

Fritz was a machinist in a factory downtown. In the apartment he fetched and fixed
things and on Fridays carried home the shopping from the Safeway store on 183rd Street.
On Saturday nights he and Molly sat in the living room, drinking—he, small shots,
she, highballs of whiskey. On weekday evenings all three of them sat at the table
and ate pot-roast or gammon steak and sweet potato. Afterwards Fritz and Tess washed
up, and then Fritz tuned the radio to a jazz station for the night. One night as
he turned the dial she caught a snatch of a song she recognised, and, in its beat,
briefly forgot herself, until she became aware of Fritz’s eyes on her. The next evening
he came in and handed her a box. ‘This is for you,’ he said, in his sad accent. Inside
was a new transistor radio. The kettle on the stove began to sing. She saw the jets
of flame underneath, their fragile blue beauty, and when she looked up at Fritz she
was overcome by a memory of home and Mike Connolly.

One Saturday they rode a bus across the George Washington Bridge out to New Jersey
for the christening of Claire’s new baby. Fritz carried bags with containers of fried
chicken and bean salad and beer. Tess brought gifts for Claire’s little boy, Patrick,
and the new baby, Elizabeth, named after their mother. Peter met them at the bus
station and drove them to a street of houses with verandas and driveways and sloping
lawns, the kind that had become familiar to Tess from TV.

Molly and Fritz took charge of the kitchen. Claire took Tess upstairs to see the
new baby. The sight of the child moved her. She thought her a miracle. Out of Claire
she had come, from Claire’s flesh and blood. So close to Tess’s own biology, the
same blood coursing through her veins. The blood that binds us all, she thought,
now and in the past. She looked down at the child, at the closed eyes. A clean slate,
pure and unblemished. Not long born, not long out of the other realm.

There was a little whimper and then a cry and Claire lifted the child and began to
nurse her. Tess went to leave but Claire whispered to stay. The blinds were down
and a small lamp cast a pink glow in the room. She caught sight of Claire’s bare
white breast and the engorged nipple directed into the child’s mouth.

‘I have to tell you something,’ Claire said. She did not look up. ‘We’re moving to
California. Peter’s being transferred out there.’

There were footsteps on the landing, a child’s voice. Patrick pushed open the door.
‘You’ll come out and visit us, won’t you?’ Her hand, as she reached out to touch
her son’s head, was trembling.

They drove to the church for the christening. In the afternoon, guests filled the
house, the children running around. The adults mingled in the open-plan rooms and
spilled out onto the back yard. At dusk they were getting a little drunk, laughing,
leaning against walls. Tess stood apart, sipping a beer, keeping an eye on the pool,
the children. She looked at her watch, added five hours. A map of America came
to
mind, the west coast, images from TV of wagon trains crossing wide open plains. Peter
was talking to two men and a young woman, work colleagues. He was smoking a cigarette,
holding a glass of wine. He leaned and bumped softly against the woman, and said
something. The garden lights came on. Tess moved to a quiet corner. There were earthquakes
in California. Her father’s brother had gone there years ago and never returned.

The young woman moved away from Peter, drifted in and out of other groups, touching
men’s arms. Claire came out and stood with Tess, smiling. She seemed smaller, thinner.
Then her eyes moved off and her smile waned. Tess turned and watched Peter stride
across the yard and in one swift wordless movement he picked up the young woman and
threw her in the pool.

In the city she felt the stir of anxiety on the streets, and day by day it entered
her. On the TV, missiles, warheads, ships steaming towards Cuba. The end of the world.
Fritz sat quiet and sombre. In the mornings she felt the foreboding, the impending
doom, gigantic explosions and firestorms flashing across her mind. She thought of
home, her father, Evelyn in a houseful of kids, danger floating close. No one was
safe. One day she saw a rich woman emerge from a building, usher children into a
taxi. Everywhere an exodus, people holding their breaths, looking at one another.
As if we are all brothers and sisters, Tess thought. One night the president addressed
the nation. She was mesmerised by his beauty, his pain, as if
the words themselves
afflicted him.
Thank you and good night.

And then the ships turned back.
We were all brought together in fear and mutual need
,
she wrote to her father,
and now its passing has brought something else—hope, love—down
on the streets.
She had found a new language—this country had given her new ways
to think and speak. One Saturday afternoon Fritz took her up to Loew’s Paradise Theatre
in the Bronx. In the foyer was a fountain of Italian marble and, all over the walls,
murals and hanging vines. In the dark theatre she sat deep in a velvet seat and when
she looked up there was a moonlit sky above her, and stars twinkling and clouds passing
by. A week later she returned to the Bronx and bought five dresses in a dress store,
one lovelier than the other, because she could. She took the subway back down to
181st Street and walked out into the autumn sun and floated along the sidewalk, catching
herself for a moment in that concentrated life.

6

MONTH BY MONTH in that first year Tess discovered a rhythm to her life in the city.
The early-morning rise, the subway ride downtown, the day spent among patients and
colleagues on the ward. On Sundays when she was off duty she went to Mass with her
aunt Molly at the chapel of St Elizabeth’s Hospital. On other days she went to the
library on West 179th Street and browsed the bookshelves and sat at a table reading.
She came to understand that she could live almost anywhere, so long as there was
someone of hers—her own kin—there. Claire had moved to San Francisco earlier in the
year. Still, she is in the country, she thought, she is in the same land.

Occasionally, she went shopping or up to a
céilí
in Gaelic Park in the Bronx with
other Irish nurses. She longed to give herself up to their good cheer and lightness.
Being among
people left her feeling lonely, even, at times, endangered. She felt
divided from others. Their talk, their dreams, seemed to her incidental, artificial,
something that had to be got through en route to the real conversation, the heart
of the matter. She found herself waiting for someone who shared her sensations. One
day, at a patient’s bedside, at a tender moment approaching death, she looked into
the attending physician’s eyes and he looked into hers and she felt an affinity with
him. It was this she craved. She had had intimations of it in books. Perhaps such
things, even such people, existed only in books. She was reading
Doctor Zhivago
then.
She sat in a corner of the cafeteria at lunchtime, transported. She was Lara in the
battlefield hospital. She was lost to Yuri. She journeyed in the snow, felt their
grief. Sometimes she cried. The feelings called to mind moments from childhood, when
she was distant from herself but experienced the same peace, as if she were entering
another dimension, one which contained the answer to a question she could not yet
form. She looked up from her book. Though she felt sure it existed she was not sure
such knowledge could be attained or recovered. Or at least not by her. She did not
even know what the question was, aware only of vague intimations. Such knowledge
was beyond her, requiring more intelligence or learning, or a higher faculty of feeling,
than she possessed. At this realisation she grew dispirited. She rose from the table
and went down in the elevator and returned to the bustle of the ward, to the clanking
of trolleys and bedpans and the humming of machines.

∼

In early spring she transferred to the 168th Street campus of the hospital and to
the private wing, the Harkness Pavilion. There she befriended another Irish nurse,
Anne Beckett from Wexford, who had come out several years before and was now engaged
to be married. Together they went to the St Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue
and just before Easter they rented an apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up, at 471 Academy
Street in Inwood. It was unfurnished except for a single bed in each bedroom. They
bought a table, four chairs and a sofa from a couple upstairs. They bought delph
and pots and pans, and brightly coloured curtains for the bedrooms. They shared evening
meals at the kitchen table and Anne told her about the movie stars and singers who
had been patients. Marilyn Monroe had been in the psychiatric wing, though Anne had
not nursed her. She had nursed Elizabeth Taylor and Mrs Roosevelt and Cole Porter,
who had a wooden leg that he named Geraldine.