MARY AND O'NEIL (12 page)

O’Neil tried to wash the paint from his hair, but it was no use, and the next week he finally asked Kay to cut it. Using a pair of sewing scissors from the kitchen junk drawer, Kay snipped off most of his hair, while O’Neil sat wrapped in a plastic tablecloth and Jack swept up the trimmings with a whisk broom. The good news was that Joe had finally called O’Neil back, and after dinner he picked him up in the company van and drove him to a bar in Port Chester where they used to go after work. The bar was called the Moosehead, and was owned by some Canadians who, like Joe, seemed imprisoned in a sentimental exile. A Canadian flag hung over the bar, there were maps of Canada and travel photos of Canadian destinations on the paneled walls, and if they stayed long enough, O’Neil knew, the bartender would ring a bell and lead everyone in a chorus of “O Canada.”

“About the money,” Joe said regretfully, after they had taken a table. He had a weight lifter’s body, square and solid, and a blond moustache that he liked to stroke with thumb and forefinger. “We may have a tiny problem there.”

“Don’t tell me that,” O’Neil said.

“The situation is,” Joe continued, “the status of the company is a little tenuous at the moment. Technically, I have no employees at all, if we don’t count you. You might say that, as of last week, we are no longer an official branch of Professor Painter.”

“You have no insurance.”

Joe wagged a finger over their glasses. “Let me get the tab for these beers.”

“Is this how they do things in Canada? Pay you in beer?”

Joe left the table to select a song on the jukebox and returned with a bowl of nuts. “Oh, don’t be mad,” he said. “Hey, this is you and me. Am I missing something here? We’ll absolutely work this out.”

“Somebody has to finish that house,” O’Neil offered.

“Right,” Joe replied, chewing a mouthful of nuts. “That’s completely right. And I’ll do it myself, if I have to. I’m just saying we might not have explored all our options at this point.”

“Joe, she’s totally alone over there,” O’Neil said.

“See?” Joe nodded hopefully. “There’s something.”

In the parking lot they settled on three thousand dollars: fifteen hundred for O’Neil’s trip to the hospital, another thousand for back wages, and five hundred dollars compensation for his pain and suffering. O’Neil doubted he would ever see this money, but two days later Joe appeared at the house with a check, and a letter for O’Neil to sign. The letter said, in essence, that he was no longer an employee of Professor Painter, Inc., and that he held both Joe and the parent company harmless of any responsibility for his accident. O’Neil wondered if such a letter was legal—in the purest sense it was a form of extortion—but he was glad to get any money at all, and signing the letter seemed the only way to make this happen. The check did not bounce, and O’Neil gave Kay the fifteen hundred in cash one night after dinner.

Kay looked the bills over. “I hope he didn’t make you sign anything,” she said.

The next day, a Sunday, was the Fourth of July, and the three of them drove to the beach in Old Greenwich, to barbecue and watch the fireworks over the Sound. The shells were to be launched from a barge anchored offshore, and after they had eaten their chicken and drunk their wine they positioned lawn chairs at the shoreline to watch the display. The evening was clear; darkness came on with the swift evenness of a curtain falling. As stars appeared above the still water, the first cannon boomed, and the people cheered as the shell leapt heavenward to release its package of tendriled light.

“What is the magic of fireworks?” Jack said to O’Neil. Kay and Jack were holding hands, and O’Neil understood this remark as a way to include him, although Jack also appeared genuinely moved; his face glowed with the wine, and his eyes were moist in the reflected light of the display. “Is it the way they’re here one moment and gone the next? Are we just remembering other times?”

Before O’Neil could answer, Kay leaned over to her husband and kissed him. “Sweetie,” she said, and squeezed his face, “you’re wasted.”

Back home Jack went off to bed, and Kay joined O’Neil in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said sadly, and took a place across from him at the table. “Jack can’t hold his liquor at all.”

“He was right, though,” O’Neil said. “I
was
remembering.”

Kay thought a moment. “I miss them too.”

She left then and returned moments later with an envelope, which she placed on the table in front of O’Neil. He knew, even before he looked at it, that it was something their parents had left behind. Their father was—had been—a lawyer, and on the outside of the envelope was his name and the address of his office, embossed in heavy black ink, and then the name of the person the letter was meant for, a woman named Dora Auclaire. O’Neil saw that one end of the envelope had been opened with a single, neat stroke of a knife. He slid the letter out, and as he unfolded the heavy paper he felt his heart grow large. The letter was written in his father’s hand, a single sentence long.
Dear Dora
, it said,
It would have been nice for me too
. He had signed it,
Love, Art
.

“I’m sorry, O’Neil. I thought it was probably time you saw this.”

“God Almighty.” He put the letter down, though at once he picked it up again. “How did you find it?”

“It wasn’t hidden, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just sitting there in the top drawer of his desk. I found it just a couple of days after the accident when I was looking for the lease on his office. I guess I shouldn’t have opened it, but there was no address, and I thought it might be important.”

O’Neil read the letter again, its one taut sentence of yearning. Dora Auclaire: He searched his memory for this woman, but came up with nothing. “Jesus Christ, Kay.”

“I know, honey. It’s not good news.”

O’Neil sighed, uncertain what to say or think. “Any idea who she was?”

“He did some legal work for her, I do know that. A will, some real estate stuff.” Kay shrugged. “It wasn’t really my business to look.”

“I can’t believe Dad was screwing around.” O’Neil shook his head; he was suddenly cold. “I mean, they went to a
motel
.”

Kay took his hand. “He never mailed it, O’Neil. And the letter doesn’t prove anything. There’s a lot we’ll never know about them.”

O’Neil looked at the floor. “Can’t know, you mean.”

“Don’t, can’t. It’s all the same.” She paused; he felt her eyes on his face. “They were just people, O’Neil.”

“How can you say that?” He pulled his hand away, though he was instantly sorry for doing this. “They were our parents.”

Kay rose and lit the stove for tea. When her back was turned he closed his eyes, and tried to remember them, his parents. For some time he had longed to hear their voices again. But he could not imagine his father saying these words.

Kay returned to the table and pulled her chair close to O’Neil’s. “Honey, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I think it’s time we talk about you doing something with yourself.”

“I thought I was.”

Kay frowned. “Painting houses for this con man?”

“Oh, Joe’s not so bad.”

“Joe’s a liar, and a thief. What about law school? You’ve talked about law school.”

“I think that was just something to say.”

“Okay. No law school.” Kay sighed maternally. “How about teaching? You’re good with kids.”

“Have you ever even seen me with kids? I don’t think I even know any.”

For a while they sat in silence. The kettle whistled, and Kay left the table to pour the tea, which smelled like lemon and roses. She placed a cup on the table in front of O’Neil, then leaned over to put her arms around his shoulders and kiss the top of his head.

“They had their lives, O’Neil. Go have yours. That’s what I’m saying to you.”

“You’re kicking me out.”

“I love you, boyo.” She pulled away to fix him with an even gaze. “And, yes. When the leg’s better, off you go into your life. And off I go into mine.”

When Kay left him, O’Neil sat alone at the table, drinking his tea. No one had called him by that name in many, many years. He remembered the day he had graduated from college and the moment, stepping from the dais with his diploma in his fist, when he had lifted his eyes to search for Kay. A sea of sunlit faces, and then he had found her, waving to him. Of all the people in the crowd, Kay was the one who belonged to him, and he had never loved her so much as he did at that moment, the way a drowning man would love a life ring. What would he do without her now, in the life she was sending him to? The letter still lay on the kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers; he read it once more.
Dear Dora. Love, Art
. What did you do with something like that? It was a riddle, as the motel bill had been a riddle, and he knew he had no hope of solving either one; that was the point that Kay was making. It was not beyond imagining that she had saved the letter for a day such as this one, believing it would do the trick. O’Neil finished his tea, knowing what he was about to do but still taking the time to envision it, so that later he would know if the image he had made in his mind was the correct one. It was. He rose on his crutches, took the letter to the stove, and when he dipped it into the blue flame of the burner, the paper caught so quickly he was still holding it when it disappeared.

There was one thing left to do. The next afternoon O’Neil dressed in clean shorts and a polo shirt and hitchhiked the five miles to Patrice’s house. The crew kit still sat in the driveway with a tarp over it, and the yard was quiet under the mild shade of the willows. O’Neil had tried to page Joe for a couple of days, but he’d heard no reply, and it seemed likely that he was already back in the Canada he loved.

Patrice let him in and led him to the kitchen, where she sat at the table to resume spooning cereal into Henry’s mouth. Grains were caught in the little boy’s hair and eyebrows. “How’s the leg?”

“Not so bad,” O’Neil said. “I’m afraid I have some news. I don’t think anybody’s going to be painting your house.”

Henry picked up his cup and began to bang it on the tray of his high chair. Patrice scooped more cereal from the nearly empty bowl, and as she brought the spoon to the little boy’s mouth, O’Neil saw her pause to wipe a tear from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I’m truly sorry,” O’Neil said.

“I have to say I shouldn’t be surprised.” She lifted her tired face toward him. “I’m not very good at reading the signals. Any chance of finding him?”

“None at all. I’d say we’ve both been had.” O’Neil shifted on his crutches. “How much did you pay him?”

She sighed miserably. “Oh, four thousand dollars.” Patrice put her palms to her eyes, then opened them like doors to look at Henry. “What a goddamn idiot your mother is. Say, hello, idiot.”

Standing at the counter, O’Neil wrote the check. He would have gladly written it for more, but fifteen hundred dollars was all he had. In any event, it would probably cover the repairs to the roof. He had wondered all morning if he would write the check when the time came, but the moment it did, he found it was easy, and made him feel lighter than anything had in a long time.

Patrice stored the check in a drawer. “I won’t cash this, you know,” she said.

“It’s my hope that you will.”

They kissed, then, for the first time—a kiss that O’Neil realized he had been imagining for weeks, a kiss of tender longing. He touched her face, still damp with tears; he tasted these as he kissed her, their salty essence, and when they parted O’Neil saw that Henry had fallen asleep in his high chair. Patrice freed the little boy from the belt that held him in place and led O’Neil back through her empty house, waiting at the top of the stairs with Henry in her arms while O’Neil hobbled up on his crutches. He stood at the door to Henry’s nursery, waiting for the cascade of tears that would bring everything to a crashing halt, but this never came; a moment later Patrice crept from the room, holding one finger over her lips, and took O’Neil down the carpeted hall to a large room with nothing in it but drapes, a mattress, and an alarm clock on the bare floor beside it. The clock, O’Neil saw, was blinking 12:00
A
.
M
.—not the correct hour at all. O’Neil lay on his back while Patrice helped him remove his shorts over the bulky cast, and this fact, which might have seemed strange, did not. With everything else—the kiss in the kitchen, Henry’s plunge into sleep, the blinking alarm clock, and the sunshine enfolded in the curtains—it seemed to belong to several periods of his life at once, as if they had stepped together outside the flow of time. She removed her skirt and blouse and placed them, folded, in a bureau drawer. The light was behind her, where she stood. She folded O’Neil’s shorts and put these aside as well. Then she returned to where he lay and all thought left him.

When the sun had moved from the windows Henry called from his crib, and they dressed and fed him juice and slices of apple in the kitchen before taking him out to the hammock in the yard. It was afternoon, an afternoon in July. Together they lay and rocked, the long branches of the willows enclosing them like a tent.

“Would you like to hold him?” Patrice asked.

O’Neil did, so much it surprised him. Patrice helped him lift the little boy from the space between them and onto O’Neil’s stomach. Henry was clutching a stuffed cube with bells inside and handles on the corners, and O’Neil pulled on these, to make the chimes ring. Henry frowned, but did not cry. O’Neil watched the boy bob up and down on his chest, listening to the bells, a sound that seemed to come from under them and all around.