Academy Street (8 page)

Tess wrote to Oliver.
Oh, Oliver, you have to come out. There’s room now at Aunt
Molly’s. I think about you and Denis and Dadda a lot. And Dadda’s terrible moods,
and his silence. I doubt he will ever change. Maybe Easterfield does that, makes
everyone silent. There’s nothing for you there, Oliver. You can be anyone here. Anything
you dream of. How is Denis? Poor Denis…I miss you all. I dreamt of Mike Connolly
the other night. He was standing by the old well in the yard. Do you remember that
time Dadda sank the pump, Oliver? Denis climbed down for a sample and Mike held the
rope…

∼

One Sunday morning in May she woke to the sound of talk and laughter in the kitchen.
Anne had come off night duty and Tim, her fiancé, was there, and Anne’s brother and
other boys who had recently come out from Ireland. They were frying eggs and waffles.
When she entered the kitchen and saw them around the table she was reminded of summer
evenings in Easterfield long ago when the tea was being readied and the wireless
was on, before the silence took hold. The radio was on now too, the baseball scores
being read in a beautiful melliferous voice, but they were hardly listening, full
of their own talk. Their familiar accents pleased her. A shy boy from Kerry got up
and gave her his chair, moved away with his plate of eggs. She looked around at their
open happy faces and sat among them.

Later they left for the park, urging her to follow. She sat among the dishes, the
day stretching before her. She looked at the egg stains on the plates, the empty
mugs, the chairs pushed back. Something of the others still drifted there. The sun
shone in the window and fell on the pot of marmalade, on the chunky orange peel inside.

She walked the few blocks to Broadway. Up ahead she saw the trees of Inwood Hill
Park. She turned left, entered the library at Broadway and Dyckman, its hush and
concentrated silence bringing contentment. On a table a large art book lay open.
She turned the pages, dazzled by the colours, the yellows and oranges and blues,
their intensity. A street café at night. A strange simple bedroom that exerted a
lure,
a childish longing. A cornfield with crows that made her heart collapse. She
stared at the field and the crows, sad and familiar. She began to read. The artist
had cut off his own ear, died by his own hand. She turned each page. Letters to his
brother. The kindness of Theo moved her. And the life, the words…

I always have the impression of being a traveller going somewhere, to some destination…I
feel in myself a fire…the passers-by just see a little smoke…I know that I could
be an utterly different man. There is something inside me.

Walking along the street, for no reason, she began to cry. She tried to focus on
her footsteps, beat a rhythm between each tree. When her tears passed she saw things
clearly. Each person’s face, the nose and eyes, the buttons on their shirts, the
shivery pattern of leaves. Beauty everywhere. After a little distance a space began
to open inside her, the aftermath of pain. She stood on the sidewalk, as in a dream.
Silence. Light. She was ready to be transformed.

She entered the park in late afternoon. Across the green she saw them, sprawled on
a gentle slope before a blazing flower bed, laughing, smoking, the group larger
now. She was approaching along the path from the north. She saw him instantly, a
stranger, a little apart. Long, lean, blond. He was talking to Tim and when she came
close he looked up and fell silent and she felt a powerful signal. In the minutes
that followed he did not look at her once, and she could not bear to look at him
either.

His name was David. He was a cousin of Anne’s, out from
Dublin, working for the last
nine months with a firm of lawyers in midtown. He reminded her of a brighter, quieter
Oliver.

Later, she found herself sitting beside him. He reached out a hand and passed her
a soda. She saw he was a
citóg
and watched him closely after that. He had been to
university. She felt inferior, always, among city people, among the educated. He
spoke with a city accent. She became acutely aware of her own. She told him she had
trained in the Mater Hospital.

‘I grew up in Glasnevin, not far from the Mater,’ he said. He smiled at her. She
told him she used to visit the Botanic Gardens on her days off. She saw a monkey
puzzle tree there. She had never heard of a monkey puzzle tree before that.

‘The Gardens are just around the corner from my home,’ he said. They might have passed
each other on the street. He was silent then, as if reconsidering what he was about
to say. His arms were tanned, with a thick crop of gold hairs.

‘When I was ten,’ he said, ‘I saw a tree there struck by lightning. I was with my
brother. It went up in flames in front of us. I was terrified, rooted to the spot…but
under a sort of spell too.’

She told him about her work, her home, the little groves of oak and beech. His legs
were long, strong, muscular. The sight of them made her shy.

‘I have an uncle, a teacher, in Australia,’ he said. ‘He told me in a letter once
that in the bush, years ago, when the police were hunting down outlaws like Ned Kelly
they’d burn a tree to keep warm on cold nights. They’d find a dead tree and set it
alight there where it stood, and gather around it. Then the
outlaws would see the
burning tree in the distance and make off, gaining ground through the night.’

He had beautiful hands. He was so far from Denis and Oliver, his life so polished,
that she felt a pang of pity for them, for all they lacked. At this thought she felt
suddenly disloyal.

‘Do you like it here, in New York?’ she asked.

He looked out across the park. ‘Yes, I suppose. I don’t like the evenings. Late summer
evenings when…’

He did not finish. He took out cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head.
He lit his own and exhaled. She was aware of every breath, the flex of every muscle,
where his eyes fell, his hands. To be this watchful, this attuned to a man, a stranger,
excited and confused her. He lit another cigarette and looked pensive. He was on
the point of telling her something else, but he stood up and moved away, and she
felt the parting like a loss.

Later, when they drew near again he did not say much. He gave off an air of mild
irritation, as if regretting all he had told her. Then a silence, a pall, began to
envelop them. It took all her talk away.

7

FROM A DISTANCE he exerted a great force on her. She craved solitude to conjure him
up again, finding significance only in the recall of that day. Everything moved her.
Every sight and sound, every song, every man’s face—the whole city—turned him over
to her. She went out to Brooklyn one morning with Anne to help choose Anne’s trousseau.
In the afternoon they left the shops, each enwrapped in her own fantasy. They walked
along a street with a slight incline where kids rode bikes along the cracked pavement,
calling out to one another in the bright sun. She gazed at the clapboard houses and
imagined the back yards and clotheslines and husbands sitting in the shade. She began
to imagine coming home to this, entering, calling out ‘I’m home, honey,’ and he in
the kitchen peeling onions, frying meat. The meat browning on the pan, the smells,
the sounds of the kitchen. She, pausing in
the hall, hearing the children outside,
breathing deeply before entering the kitchen, then standing behind him, laying her
face against his back. Home. She shook herself out of the reverie and smiled at Anne.
They rode the subway back into the city, trundling along under the hot streets into
the heart of Manhattan.

Oliver came out in June, and found work in construction. The American sun bleached
him blonder. At weekends he joined Tess and Anne and their social group. They went
out to New Jersey for a Fourth of July garden party. Oliver was handsome beyond words.
His blue-eyed charm reminded her of the Kennedys. If you weren’t my brother, she
thought, I’d marry you. There was no one to whom she felt closer than to her siblings,
no greater bond. She thought of David constantly. Already he had forgotten her. She
felt the approach of hurt. She tried to glean things from Anne, careful not to betray
the tug she felt. The longing to see him became a kind of sickness.

And then, one Saturday, there he was, on the beach at Coney Island when they arrived.
Sitting on a towel in their crowded patch near the water, smoke trailing from his
fingers. Emblazoned in the sun, the glittering sea before him. He looked up, wordless,
unyielding. But something in his eyes—a flash, a shock—before he averted them, and
she knew she had not been wrong, that what she had felt was the truth. She retreated,
and watched him from a safe distance. When he removed his shirt she saw his chest,
his skin, his bare beauty.
She thought of a deer; stark, sleek, nervy. Now and then
he looked out at the ocean with a far-off gaze. In an instant he could break her
heart.

All day long, they came and went, swimming and eating and talking. She stayed close
to Oliver. She looked at the others, wondering at their lives now, their mothers
and fathers back home. All the time the sea, the wing-flash of gulls, him on the
edge of her vision. She had to pass him to get to the water and she half ran, shy,
feeling the pull, the oscillation in him: in a glance, an invitation, in the next,
a rejection.
Admit it
, she wanted to cry.
Only the truth matters.
Tense, febrile,
she threw herself on her towel and watched him through half-closed eyes in a swirl
of sun and cigarette smoke. A birthday card was passed around and he took the pen
in his left hand and tilted his head and half twisted his torso and hooked his wrist
at an awkward painful angle, and scratched out the words. She was rooted to the spot.
In his hooked hand, his twisted body, she saw a striving, something that rendered
him vulnerable. Misshapen hand, she thought, misshapen words. Misshapen man. The
effort implied something fragile, broken, a wound far greater than any visible deformity.

The sun beat down. From the promenade, the cries of carousel riders carried in the
air. She got up, walked into the water, pushed her legs against the weight of the
sea. She had learned to swim in Dublin, the one thing in her life that she had ever
mastered. Chest-high in the waves she lowered her head, raised her legs, let her
body float, the ocean under her. She lay on the shimmering surface. The swell of
each wave
lifted her, then gently lowered her again. She was almost dreaming, the
sun on her back.

And then he was there, gliding silently under her. Hair flowing back from his temples,
his head pushing on. All sound muted by water. She glided, opened her arms and legs,
swam parallel above him. They were beyond the reach of others, moving in perfect
unison, two sea creatures, cold, radiant, luminous. They swam further, deeper, through
sudden patches of cold. She had an urge to wrap her legs around him, ride on his
back down into the dark.

And then he banked and they were before each other in the underwater silence. His
eyes blinked, searched hers. He brought a hand to her face, stroked it. Air bubbles
rose from his mouth. A faint frown, and then a smile. She was elated. And then he
was gone, surging upwards, breaking the surface into sunlight. In his after-tow she
lost her tread and floundered for a second and lunged back towards the shore, desperate
for the touch of the sea floor.

In the evening they gathered up their belongings and piled onto the boardwalk, to
the hot dog and drinks stands. Oliver and the others drifted off. They found themselves
together again, a sphere of uncalm surrounding them. His silence was overbearing,
a force field, sucking everything out of her. He raised his head and looked from
him, as if nothing had happened. There was an eerie depth to him, an inwardness that
was infinite. She thought he was not in command of it.

That night they all met up again at City Center ballroom on West 55th Street. She
was fevered, agitated, consumed by
the day’s events. The ballroom was heaving, dancers
jiving to the Irish show band. Oliver found a raven-haired girl and never left her
side. Anne and Tim danced and then, pitying her, Anne went to the bathroom and Tim
took her onto the floor. The crowd swelled and swayed and she searched for the head
of David among the throng.

He appeared at her side. She had gone outside for air, sat on a window sill. Under
the streetlight he smiled at her. He was very tall. His smile drew her to him and
she felt herself in the presence of something good.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. She knew she would remember this day for the rest of
her life.

‘How’re all the patients? Any more falls?’ She had told him, before, of patients—men
mostly—fainting when blood was drawn, at the sight of the syringe even. She suspected
him a faller himself.

‘Every day, without fail,’ she said, smiling. She wanted to dance, but not just yet.
He sat down beside her, their arms almost touching.

Minutes passed and nothing happened. She felt him retreat into the depths again.
He could not help it. She gazed at his hand resting on his thigh and longed to hold
it, make something of it. She sensed a longing in him too. She closed her eyes. She
remembered something she had read—that the more desperately a man is in love, the
greater the violence he must do his feelings to risk offending the woman he loves
by taking her hand.

They began to walk. The night was warm, the streets
alive. She told him again about
the place she came from, the family left behind, the father. She wanted desperately
to get him back.

‘I never knew my father,’ he said. ‘My mother reared me and my brother. When I was
eight my cousin told me my father was a bus driver. I’d stare at all the buses going
by, at the drivers. Wondering…is it you? When I got on a bus, I thought he’d surely
know me, he would just
know
me.’ He threw away his cigarette. ‘One day when I was
walking home from school a bus passed and the driver waved at me, and smiled. I thought
it was him—I was certain. For a long time I searched. Now, well, I think…he probably
wasn’t a bus driver at all.’