Academy Street (11 page)

Under the table Tess slipped off her shoes and placed her feet on the cool floor.
She drank a glass of chilled pear juice. She ate salty crackers spread with cheese.
The bird gazed down at her with a benign eye. Then it opened its beak. ‘Talk to me,’
it said.

IO

THE PAIN STRUCK at dawn. Willa came. In the hospital foyer her waters broke. She
looked down at her drenched shoes and began to cry.

That evening when it was all over she thought she had scaled Everest, stood at its
peak, exhilarated. The next morning the enormity of it all hit her. She had brought
forth life, rendered human something from almost nothing, and this power, this ability
to create, overwhelmed her.

She did not take to the child. The light down on his skin resembled fur. She could
not bear to touch the head, the unknitted bones of his crown. She thought of him
as half-hatched, not quite finished. She was not in her right mind. Her body had
been riven open, pummelled, her innards displaced. A disgust at her physical self
took hold, at the engorged breasts, the bleeding. I am a cow, she thought. But
cows
are good mothers. On the ward fathers came, brought flowers, cradled infants. She
closed her curtain. They brought her the child. Alone, he frightened her, and she
rang the bell for them to come and take him away.

On the third day she rose and showered. At feeding time she stood outside the nursery
and looked in. He was the only one left. She felt his profound loneliness. Not long
born he might drift away again into cold interstellar spaces. She walked to the nurses’
station, her heart pounding. She put down his bottle and stared at the face behind
the desk. ‘I want to give my baby up for adoption,’ she said.

All day long she lay thinking, sleeping, crying. She pictured him in other arms,
new voices and scents washing over him, colliding inside him. She imagined his confusion,
his striving to discern each voice, to retrieve hers in the chaos, until finally,
gathering in his cries, he grew mute and surrendered.

She tried to sleep. She dreamt she was back in Easterfield, roaming the dark rooms
upstairs. At the end of the hall she found a toddler hunkered down in a corner. He
had been there a long time, surviving on nothing. He had something in his hand which
he raised to his mouth and bit. She peered closer and saw it was a human finger—hers,
her index finger.

When she woke, night had fallen and the ward was in semi-darkness, the other mothers
all sleeping. She got out of bed and walked to the nursery. She feared it was too
late, like a lamb too long parted from its mother to take. At the sight of him through
the glass her arms ached for his weight and she
rushed to him. Trembling, she bundled
him up in his blanket and fled on weak legs along the corridor, down two flights
of stairs. At the front entrance the night guard stepped into her path and, smiling,
laid a gentle hand on the bundle. ‘It’s a nice night out there, ma’am, but still,
maybe you’d like to get a sweater?’ She looked out at the street. She looked into
the man’s eyes, down at the sleeping child, then back at the man’s face. Confused,
bewildered, she let him lead her by the arm to the elevator and back up to the ward.

The next morning, with the child asleep beside her, she picked up a pen and wrote:
You have a son. His name is Theo.

Nothing was more fully or finely felt, ever again, as the days and nights of that
first summer with the child. Her eyes were permanently trained on his and his were
locked on hers, a flow of wondrous love streaming between them.
Flesh of my flesh,
blood of my blood.
She took him into her bed at night, wanted to put him back inside
her. In the morning she shaded his face from the sun slanting through the blinds.
She put soft seamless clothes on him, so that no harshness would touch his skin.
She did not ever want to leave the apartment or break the spell. She wanted no interruption,
no sight or sound or dissonance from the world to dull his radiance or endanger him.

Little by little, the sense of impending doom that had stalked her for so long began
to recede. She wrote to Claire, told her everything. Each day Willa came, sometimes
with a child or two in tow, once bringing her husband Darius to build a stand for
the crib. Willa took the child from Tess and,
with remarkable ease, carried him in
the crook of her arm as she cooked and tidied and talked. She introduced Tess to
other mothers in the building. One day she brought her own pram onto the landing
and together they carried it downstairs and the two women walked their children in
the sun. On a park bench, in the shade of trees, Willa told Tess her life story.
Born in Mississippi, she never knew her daddy. Her mother moved north to Detroit
when Willa and her sister were small. At seventeen she met Darius and knew instantly
he was a good man. They married and moved to New York where he got a job driving
the A Train. For extra income she minded kids—the Gallaghers on the second floor,
the O’Dowds on the fourth—while their mothers went out to work.

In October she left Theo with Willa and returned to work at the hospital. Each evening
she rushed home, exhausted, sleep-deprived, and swept him up in her arms, like a
woman in love. One evening when she entered her apartment a telegram lay on the floor.
Father died peacefully last night. Tell Oliver. Denis.
Shaken, she put Theo into
the pram and took the subway down to 181st Street, imagining, as the train rushed
through the tunnel, that she heard the bawling of newly weaned lambs beyond the walls.
She rang Molly’s doorbell and waited, nervous, headstrong, but no longer ashamed.
The two women embraced and Fritz lifted out the child. They called Claire. Tess could
scarcely make out what Claire was saying. She had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Tess cried
into the phone and together they grieved their father.

∼

The child’s hair grew fair, his eyes blue. Early one spring morning when she came
off night duty she collected Theo at Willa’s and wheeled him, still sleeping, to
the park, and sat on a bench. She loved this hour, with almost no one around, and
the hush of the night and the sleeping patients still lingering in her. She grew
open and alert to the newness of the morning, the possibilities of the day. She looked
at the new green leaves—so many shades of green—and almost had to shield her eyes
from their brightness, their newborn beauty. Too much beauty, she thought. And too
much happiness, these days. Too much happiness frightened her. She pulled back from
these thoughts and looked around. An old man was approaching along the path, as if
making for her. She began to gather up her things but then he was there, standing
before her. He asked the child’s name. Theo, she replied, warily.

‘Theodore,’ he said. ‘I had a son by that name. We lost him to glandular fever. It
was during the Depression. We were living in Tent City.’ He sat next to her and told
her the whole story. Theo was sitting up in the pram, his eyes fixed on the old man,
and she saw for the first time what he might look like—the boy emerging out of the
baby—and the mannerisms he might have, in the years ahead. She had the sudden urge
to confide in this stranger, befriend him, make him a surrogate grandfather. A gift
for him, too.

The old man looked at Tess with rheumy eyes. ‘He was our only child. My wife died
twenty-three years ago.’ She saw his clean-shaven face, his neat clothes. She got
a glimpse of
his life, his daily routine, the order and discipline, rising and cooking
and walking. He turned his gaze back to the child and she felt him wander. She wanted
to say something, call him back from his sorrow.

‘This is my love child,’ she said.

He nodded abstractly and his eyes drifted off along the path in the wake of other
strollers. Then he got up, walked over to the stone tables where old men played chess
on summer evenings. She watched him sit, alone, and stare at the chequered table
top.

That night in her kitchen, she said it again,
love child
. Born against the odds,
more hard-won, more precious, than all others. She had not elected to be a mother.
In the next room the child whimpered. She listened, waited for him to return to sleep.
She would have liked to have the father there beside her, for him to hear that whimper
too. The memory of his face returned. The memory of his beauty hurt her mind. On
the radio Billie Holiday began to sing.
More than you know.
She thought of the city
beyond the apartment, lights twinkling in high-rise buildings all around her. Inside,
nests of families. He could not give what he had not got. She began to weep. She
knew that a great part of love was mercy. What she wished for then, what she wanted
more than anything else, was for all ultimate good to come to him.

On Good Friday in the ward she received a call from the front desk telling her she
had visitors downstairs. Molly and Fritz were waiting in chairs and when she saw
them her heart
lurched. Molly rose, came towards her, her face crumbling. ‘She’s
gone, Tess. Claire is gone.’

That afternoon, she accompanied two elderly patients to the hospital chapel for the
gospel readings of the Passion. A choir and a small orchestra performed Bach. Once,
as a child, she had fainted in the packed church during the long Good Friday readings.
Claire, or Evelyn perhaps, had carried her outside, her bottom lip bleeding from
the fall, and put her down on the grass. She remembered coming to, the sun, the light.
She had felt resurrected. Now she stood for the long reading. Peter denies Christ
three times, the cock crows. The musicians played the opening chorus, and it took
hold of her and she was brought down by the terror, the torment, the fury. Peter’s
anguish.
Herr, Herr, Herr.
She sat, stricken. The priest began again, and she was
there by the cross with the men, the weeping women. She felt the crown of thorns,
the sword piercing his side. She closed her eyes to the serene music, the sorrow
in the soloist’s voice, the last still note. She became bereft. She was with Christ
on Calvary, with Claire in Gethsemane.
‘It is finished,’ he said. And he bowed his
head and gave up his spirit.

That night she went up on the roof and lit a cigarette. The sounds of the city rose
and fused into one deep hum in her ears. She inhaled deeply and the nicotine spiked
her lungs. Lighted windows surrounded her, eyes watching her in the dark. She stood
in the centre and turned, dizzy from the nicotine. Above her, an unbounded sky, infinite,
too much to behold. Her grief was as large as the sky. How had it come
to this? She
lay down on the roof and curled up and Claire’s face came to mind. All her faculties,
her senses, were quiet now. In a few days she would be laid to rest, side by side
with strangers, under a Californian sun. What these months must have cost her. The
small girl, the boy, presented to her one last time, unable to raise a hand to touch
their heads, groping for words through wasted muscles and withered vocal chords.
The sound of their play later in the day drifting up from the back yard, while indifferent
angels sat and stared as she faded out in a darkened room, fighting off Heaven until
Heaven won and she vanished.

She heard a thud. She raised her head, scanned the rooftop. She was alone. She peered
into the corner and saw the door, closed. She jumped up, ran, saw that the plank
of wood used to prop it open had been kicked away. The janitor had come, locked up
for the night. She flung herself at the steel door, pounded her fists, called out
his name. Blind with panic she picked up the plank and lashed it against the metal,
then paused, listened out for a voice or footsteps inside. She ran across the rooftop
to the west wall, the east wall, the north and south, back and forth until the space
in between increased with each crossing. She leaned over, called down eight stories
to the street below. She searched other rooftops, windows, for faces, the image of
Theo in his cot three floors below tormenting her. Over and back she ran, calling
out until her voice grew hoarse and tears came. She slid down against the wall, pulled
her cardigan tight around her, and began to pray.

Above her the sky was a vault. Stars looked down on the
whole round earth. She felt
herself remote. She was staring into emptiness. In the dark and deepening shades
she divined a cry. She felt the child stir and his eyelids flicker, and every breath,
every minute sound, reached her distinctly. She held her own breath and his cry came
again from within her, loud and soft, hypnotising her, twisting, circling, echoing
from ear to ear inside her head.
Shh, go back to sleep.
His eyes opening, registering
the room, the light shining in from the hall. His small arms starting to free themselves,
raising a thumb to his mouth. For a while he lay still, alert for any sound, then
rose from under the covers, held onto the bars of the cot.
Shh, shh
, she whispered.
She strained to reach him. He started to whimper, then paused, listened. She was
not coming. He began to sob. The sob became a cry, and the cry a howl. His howls
pierced her. She summoned every power and willed him near her.

Exhausted, he threw himself down on the covers, his cheeks flushed and tear-stained,
his little fists yielding.
Shh, Rock-a-bye baby
. She hummed, whispered, strove until
there existed a perfect consonance between his breath and hers, his heart and hers.
Hours passed. The chill of the night entered her bones.

She stirred. Cold and stiff, she tried to rise. The whole building listed, tilted
in the night, and she swayed and slid back down. She drew up her knees. She wished
she were made of stone. She peered at a narrow gap, black, between the roof boards,
and her mind slipped in, bored a hole down into the dark, a channel through the heart
of the building to where
the child lay. She poured herself in. Falling, falling.
Walls pressing against her. Coffin walls, quarry walls. Orchard walls. Well walls.