Academy Street (10 page)

Night after night, she contemplated her options. She ventured down avenues that frightened
and sickened her. Words, unspeakable words, remembered from books and magazine articles
and hearsay. She stared at the ceiling. It need not be terrible. There were people
who could assist, direct her—the word was
procure
—if she had the courage to ask.
But never in her whole life had she had one iota of courage. She had sought, always,
silent consent for everything she had done—as if she were without volition, as if
a father or mother or God himself sat permanently on her right shoulder, holding
sway over her thoughts and actions. And when consent was not gleaned, or was felt
to be withheld, she resumed her position of quiet passivity. It was not this alone
she suffered from now, but terror, and a complete paralysis of the soul.

She lay awake, dried-out salt deposits on her cheeks. She had prolonged hope to almost
unendurable limits. He was gone. All glory, all happiness, had gone with him and
she was left imperilled. The memory of the night flooded back, their bodies. She
had seen him in his private throes, at his most secret, defenceless self. Did that
not count for something? She wore herself out thinking, her lips bitten and bruised.
Finally, she slept. She dreamt she was in a big old house, fleeing from someone along
dark corridors. She ran to the farthest room and locked the door, her heart a sea
of panic. She heard footsteps, saw the handle turn. She ran to a window, saw that
the glass was veined with cracks, millions of cracks, barely holding, and the walls
the same, and the ceiling—everything about to shatter. If she as much as left a finger
on anything, or stirred, or breathed, a ton of glass would cascade down on top of
her.

She felt someone in the room when she woke. She closed her eyes again. Madness, she
thought. Yet she felt something, a foreboding. A memory returned, of being alone
in the chapel one evening as a child, and in the haunting sacred silence being seized
by a fear that the Blessed Virgin would appear and speak to her, claim her.

The room had an eerie glow now, a strange transient beauty. She sat up. The glow
intensified, and she felt its dangerous intoxicating allure. She stepped onto the
cold lino and crossed the floor and raised the window blind and there, in the building
across, a fire blazed. Flames rose out of windows and leapt upwards, licking at the
bricks. She felt its heat, its burning brightness on her face. Panicked, she ran
to the door, ran back again. She tried to see into the heart of the fire, beyond
it. She imagined rooms, furniture like her own, paint blistering, ceilings buckling
and collapsing. Everything consumed. She saw her own reflection in the glass. The
whine of sirens carried from the far side of the building. She shrank back from the
window into the ghostly glow of the room, the fire’s haunting crackle in her ears.

She saw it as an omen. Who would save her? Who in the world would save her? Who would
remember her? She was already burning. A fallen woman.

∼

Over the city, dawn was breaking. She was on the roof, the light diffuse. A cluster
of flower pots sat in the corner, the flowers wilting, their best days over. She
leaned over the wall. Far below the first of the day’s cars glided by. To her left
she saw the tree-tops in the park. Soon they would shed their leaves. Easterfield’s
leaves were probably gone, blown away now. More than a year had passed since she’d
seen those trees, the beeches, the injured ash. Time, moment by moment, trickling
away to bring her to now. She kept her eyes on the trees, the rays of the rising
sun just then touching the uppermost branches. She could not go back. She could not
face her father. He had raised four motherless daughters, delivered them into womanhood
without blemish, and he had not been found wanting—his moral compass had sufficed.
She remembered his face. She could hear him.
Street walker…Bringing disgrace down
on top of me…Driving me into an early grave…Your mother…Your mother…Don’t ever darken
this door again…

My dearest Tess,

How are you? I keep hoping you’ll come. I had a letter from Maeve
last week. Poor Dadda. I remember what Mamma said to Evelyn and me before she died.
‘Ye have a good father but ye have a hard father.’ When I think of him now, sick,
I’m filled with pity. I didn’t always see it this way but now my heart is crying
for him, and all his struggles. And the way he always stayed loyal to her. So much
harder for a man.
 
I long to see you, Tess. When will you come? Write anyway, tell me how you are. I
dreamt of you the other night, that you were a little girl again and you fell into
the old well. Oh, aren’t dreams terrible things?
 
I hope you’re living it up there in the city. I imagine you on summer evenings walking
downtown with a handsome man. Oliver too, with that girl you told me about. All of
you together.
 
And you with your beautiful soul shining out of you. Oh Tess, you’re worth ten of
the rest of us.
God bless,
Claire

One day she saw that the trees were bare. It was November, the seasons had changed
unknown to her. On the ward she placed pills in an old woman’s hand, the skin parchment
thin. The woman was watching TV, almost in a trance.
As the World Turns
. Her hand
brought the pills to her lips, then halted and hovered there. Tess touched the hand
and guided it to its destination. A moment later, stretching up to replace an IV
vac she felt constrained, her uniform tight, her body constricted. She glanced down
and saw the swell of her breasts, fuller than before, and her heart dropped. Soon,
her belly would begin to bulge. A hush fell on the ward and when she looked up all
eyes were trained on the TV. The programme had been interrupted for a news bulletin.
The newscaster, uncertain, moved his head from script to camera and back again. The
president had been shot. People let out little gasps. Tess stood before the TV. She
remained there,
staring, when the commercial break came. Nu Soft fabric conditioner.
Niagara laundry starch. Chewing gum for heartburn.

Two days later, at home, she watched the killer being killed live on TV. And then,
over and over, the president’s motorcade speeding along the Dallas streets, his beautiful
wife crawling, scrambling in her blood-splattered suit, frantic to get out of the
car. Tess watched, stunned. Why was Jackie abandoning him in his hour of need? Did
she not want to hold him, die with him even? Or does self-preservation trump love?
She turned from the TV. Then the truth hit her—Jackie was climbing to get to her
children. Her frantic scramble was to get to them, wherever they were, fling herself
over them, save them.

The next day a sombre silence fell again on the ward and all eyes were glued to the
TV. Outside the cathedral the president’s small son stepped forward and saluted
his father’s casket. Around Tess, everyone wept. She feared the end of the world
again. Everything would be extinguished, the child inside her too. She was jolted
by the gun salute at the grave.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
She felt the impact and put a hand
to her stomach.

That night, she watched it all, over and over. The funeral procession, the marching
cadets, the prayers and intonations.
There is an appointed time for everything…a
time to be born and a time to die…
She rose and went into the kitchen. She lifted
a small jug of milk from the table and carried it to the sink. She thought of Mike
Connolly rising from his stool after milking a cow, then pouring warm milk from the
bucket
into a saucer for the cat. Once he’d put her kittens into a sack and drowned
them in a barrel of water. She looked out at the night. She began to pour the milk
down the sink. She paused and poured it over her hands, first one, then the other.
Then she ran her milky palms down her face.

‘What have you done, Tess? Jesus, what have you done?
How did this happen?
’

She was standing in Aunt Molly’s living room, her hand holding the edges of her herringbone
tweed coat together against the bulge of her stomach. She looked at the floor. In
the next room Fritz coughed.

‘I’ll get the blame, you know. I’m supposed to be looking after you. Your father
will blame me.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph
, Tess, what did you do? Who’s the father? You’d
better be getting married, madam.’

She vowed never again to explain herself. She did not see Oliver—he had not been
in touch for months. One day she bought a thin gold wedding band and at work smiled
weakly and nodded, yes, yes, she’d gotten married. Outside of work she saw few people.
Anne Beckett had moved down to the main campus of the hospital soon after her marriage
and, having no wish to take in a stranger, Tess kept on the apartment alone, a decision
that caused financial strain for some time. She let the friendship with Anne wane,
wanting no reminder of the child’s paternity. She resolved never to reveal it. She
resolved to erase him from her memory, think him and reason him out of her life.
She placed herself in the
care of an obstetrician, a small, round middle-aged man
with tiny eyes and a kind demeanour who made Tess feel so safe that, after each consultation,
she wished he was the father. Evenings, boarding a bus or a subway train, her eyes
involuntarily scanned the aisles for young, earnest-looking men and, finding one,
she sat next to him with a familiar ease, her wedding finger on view, as if she were
his, and he hers and the swollen belly theirs, and devised for that short ride an
alternative life.

My darling Tess,

What you must be going through. Oh, how I wish I could be with you.
I am there, in heart and mind, you know. If you would only call me, or answer the
phone. There is nothing to fear, Tess. Please talk to me. I will not judge you. I
will ask no questions—I want no answers, except to know that you are safe, that you
will be all right. And you
will
, Tess. It will all come right in the end. Are you
taking care of yourself? Are you seeing a doctor? Please, please, let me know how
you are. And do not despair.
 
I would come, Tess—I would fly there in the morning—if I could, but the children.
And this problem of mine. I cannot hold a cup of tea now without spilling it, and
my legs are like lead so that I stagger all the time—it looks like I have drink taken.
Even my writing has gone shaky. They’ve done tests, but nothing is confirmed yet.
 
Say a prayer for me, Tess, and I pray for you. And for Oliver, wherever he is. We
are all orphans again.
With all my love, always,
Claire

Snow fell in December. Alone, she wept. She wrote and rewrote and tore up each letter
to Claire. Everywhere on the streets carol singers, lights, scenes of joy. She worked
on Christmas Eve, spent Christmas Day alone, shunning Molly and Fritz, declining
an invitation from Anne Beckett. She went to eleven o’clock Mass and in the afternoon
cooked her dinner and propped a book on the table, reading as she ate. Later, she
watched
The Andy Williams Christmas Show
, interrupted by ads with families around
dinner tables, rosy-cheeked children around fires. She permitted herself a brief
vision of the future and a quiet hope whispered itself to her. In the evening, in
the lamp-lit bedroom, she stood before the mirror and lifted her dress, and stroked
the gleaming globe of her belly. She felt vast, large with life, and she was moved
by her own fecundity.
He
had put this into her, he had filled her up. She was the
carrier of his flesh and blood, his skin and bone, their co-joined cells dividing
and multiplying, and the new thing ripening within her. She gazed in the mirror.
She was no longer blemished, but beautiful. She wished she could remain in this gestational
state for ever, live her whole life in this perfect state of waiting.

At twilight she went out and walked the streets to Inwood Hill Park, marvelling at
the light fall of snow, glistening, pristine in the streetlights. In the distance,
the city murmured. Above, a blue-black sky. She longed to know where on this earth
he was tonight, on what continent, under what sky. She walked along the park’s perimeter,
ice glittering on bare branches overhead. She felt the child stir. She walked for
a
long time, looking up at lighted apartments, frosted trees, the moon. The night
was unbearably beautiful. How had she traversed the earth to arrive here, at this
splendour?

Dear David,

I would like to talk to you. Perhaps you could call me.
Yours kindly,
Tess Lohan

She wrote it twice, on identical greeting cards, her address and phone number on
the left-hand side. She posted one to the address she had memorised, the other to
McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Her hand hovered at the mouth of the mailbox
and a second later the tiny sound of the letters dropping left a heartbreaking echo
inside her.

One evening in late February, after an eight-hour shift and a subway suicide that
disrupted the A Train, she trudged home along the streets in the rain. Inside, she
paused on the third-floor landing to get her breath, her feet, her back, aching.
A door opened and a small neat black woman, whom Tess had often seen on the stairs,
stepped out and placed trash in the refuse chute, and then turned. Tess went to take
a step, but faltered. Their eyes met and the woman approached.

‘Honey, are you okay? You don’t look so good.’ Eyes shining out of a dark face, black
hair, wide like a halo around her head. She took a step closer. ‘I know you, don’t
I? You’re the Irish girl from upstairs. You feel like a drink of water, honey?’ She
put a hand on Tess’s arm. Suddenly tears came.
Wordlessly, the woman led her through
the open door to a lighted room, to small children eating and playing in corners,
warm. Eyes shining like their mother’s. A glorious place, the hum of heaven. The
woman was named Willa. Tess sat at the table and thought she was dreaming. She could
not speak. A bamboo cage hung from the ceiling and inside, on a perch, sat a dark
bird with a collar of yellow feathers. Willa was watching her watching the bird.
‘It’s a mynah bird,’ she said.