MARY AND O'NEIL (23 page)

It was. They boarded the porch and stepped through the front door to find themselves in a single open area, generously lit, with fluted white columns supporting the structure where load-bearing walls had once stood. A half-dozen tables occupied the dining room, which flowed to the open kitchen at the rear of the house. From where they stood in the entryway, Mary and O’Neil could see the gleaming range, the copper pots hanging on chains. The air was moist and smelled like garlic, and quiet violin music dribbled from speakers in the ceiling.

“Son of a bitch,” O’Neil said quietly.

The man whose picture they had seen in the paper came out from the kitchen and showed them to their table near the fireplace. The room was small enough that, as they sat, the other parties around them fell silent.

“I guess it’s quite a change,” Mary said.

O’Neil cast his eyes about the room. “You know, I think this is just about the spot where Kay and I used to play Chinese checkers on the floor. There was a sofa right there, and two chairs across from it. I don’t know why I played with her, because she always beat me. So maybe that’s why. It made her so happy.”

Mary took a roll from the wicker basket on the table. Steam wafted up as she pulled it into halves. “I just want to know,” she said, “is the whole evening going to go like this? It’s all right if it is.”

“They were perfectly good walls,” O’Neil said. “They were the walls of my childhood, and now they’re gone.”

Mary held out the basket. “Try a roll, O’Neil. They’re fresh.”

They were finishing the bread when a young woman appeared at their table and lit the candle between them with a long match. She was pretty, with brown hair that fell to a straight line across her shoulders, and small dark eyes.

“Have you been with us before?” the woman asked.

“Not in the way you mean,” O’Neil said.

“No,” Mary said.

The woman handed them menus, single sheets of heavy paper written by hand. “Now, these are not menus in the typical sense,” she explained. “Think of them instead as maps of what’s to come.”

While the woman stood beside their table, Mary and O’Neil looked the menus over. Five courses were listed: an appetizer, soup, salad, entrée, and dessert. The descriptions were lengthy and contained many ingredients that neither of them recognized, or recognized as food. The salad, for instance, contained pansies. There were no prices on anything, but the entire meal cost fifty-five dollars per person.

O’Neil handed his menu back to her. “Say, what’s upstairs?” The stairs were blocked off by a velvet rope, like a forbidden wing at a museum. A brass plaque hung from the rope with the word
Private
engraved into its face.

The woman smiled neutrally. “Storage,” she said.

Their courses arrived, each more bizarre than the last: grilled oysters in raspberry sauce, a watery yellow broth flecked with bits of bitter mushroom, the promised salad of endive and pansy. The endive was served as a single wedge-shaped head, laid at an angle across the plate, with pansies scattered carelessly over it, as if dropped from a great height.

When the woman had left them with their salads, Mary leaned across the table. “Maybe we should just tell her. They might be interested, you know.”

O’Neil speared a pansy with his fork and chewed it, grimacing. “What would I say?” he asked. “‘Thank you for making your pretentious food in my boyhood house’? You know, if my parents were alive, I don’t think they’d even eat here? Though it’s sort of a moot point, because if they were, they’d be living in it.”

“You can’t be sure,” Mary said. “They might have moved. Retired, maybe. Gone off to Florida.” They would, she knew, be somewhere in their late sixties.

O’Neil took a long drink of water and frowned. “Trust me,” he said. “They’d be here.”

Mary didn’t answer. The chef and the woman—his wife, Mary guessed—were obviously trying, and how were they to know that their place of business was, in fact, a tomb of memory? Mary had once been back to visit the house where her family had lived when she was very small. This occurred during an uncertain period in her life, the year after college, when she was working as a barmaid in the Minnesota town where she had gone to school and living in a tiny apartment over a shoe store. The house was just a few miles away from her parents’ development, and yet she had not been back for many years. The address was tattooed into her memory—694 West Sycamore Lane—and she found it easily, as if guided by an internal compass: a tiny shoebox of a house, still painted Pepto-Bismol pink, on a damp patch of ground shaded by a pair of threadbare hemlocks her parents had planted twenty years before. People who had revisited their childhood homes always spoke of how small it seemed, but Mary knew it had always been that way—the house had seemed small even then—and a flood of sensations returned to her: the close feeling of its cramped square rooms, the thin walls and nearly weightless doors, the smell of the airless kitchen and the way the light fell on winter afternoons across the threadbare carpets. During the time they had lived there, her father worked two jobs, selling used cars for her uncle by day and moonlighting at night as a cashier in a drugstore, selling candy and cigarettes, and one winter evening her mother took them—Mary and her older brother, Mark, and her little sister, Cheryl, still in a basket—to visit him. So vivid was this memory, sitting in the car outside the house, that she doubted, momentarily, if it had ever happened at all. Mary was four or five; her father, standing behind his register, was wearing a smock, dark green, with his name, Lars, on a tag over the breast pocket. Mary knew this was his name and yet to find it this way, announced so plainly for all to see—it seemed as if he had been stolen from her, that she had been deprived of some essential right—amazed and frightened her. The feeling was so new, so overwhelming in its strangeness, that Mary began to cry. There was a general commotion; her mother had meant the trip to be a treat, and here she was, in tears; and then her father had stepped out from behind his register and lifted her into his arms. He was a large and powerful man, both in memory and in fact, and held her against his broad chest until she was calm, and sat her on the counter beside his register. Her mother took the other children home, but Mary stayed with him until closing time, sucking on cherry lollipops.

Why had he done it? In Mary’s experience many people claimed to have epiphanies when nothing of the kind occurred—insight filled you slowly, like sips of water from a cup—but that is what happened to her, parked in front of the pink house. Her father had wanted her to know that he loved her, of course, but also what such love as his contained: that it was made of iron, and could work without ceasing or rest. Though he lacked the words to say this, he wanted to tell her it was all for her, everything he did in the world; whatever happened in her life, there had been one such person. She knew this, as she also knew that the pink house was a monument to this memory; that was why she had come. She hadn’t knocked on the door, or even gotten out of the car. The house was inside her, that place in her heart where she was still a tiny girl, and to enter it would have stolen this feeling from her.

Mary reached under the table and found O’Neil’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not really so bad to be here,” O’Neil said. “I only wish the food wasn’t so
weird
. I wanted you to have a nice meal.”

They managed to eat a respectable amount of salad before the entrée arrived: braised medallions of venison with cranberries and lemongrass, served on a bed of buckwheat couscous. After the pansies it was surprisingly good, and they ate hungrily, even O’Neil. By this time it was after ten and most of the other tables were empty. O’Neil began to talk freely about his memories of the house and the town, as he had not done since they’d arrived the day before. The stories he told were happy, and Mary understood then that part of his pleasure was his invisibility—it had been that way for her—and he would neither tell the owner who he was nor try to go upstairs. And yet she knew that was what he truly wanted: a few moments alone, in his old room.

They were the last to leave the restaurant. Outside, the winter sky was hung with a dense tapestry of stars. She waited until O’Neil was buckled in before she announced her intentions to return to the restaurant to use the bathroom.

O’Neil looked at her with a puzzled expression. How, she wondered, could he possibly fail to know what she was about to do? “The motel is only five minutes.”

“I don’t think I can wait,” she said, and got out of the car.

She found the dining room empty, as she had hoped. Their table had already been cleared and laid out with clean linen and silverware for the next night. From the kitchen she heard the sound of pots clattering in the sink and running water, and country music playing on a radio. She waited a moment at the door to see if anyone had detected her return, then stepped over the velvet rope and climbed the stairs.

The hallway was dark, but as her eyes adjusted she saw five doors, all closed. There were three bedrooms, she knew—O’Neil had given her the basic layout—plus a bathroom and a linen closet. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the wall, and at the far end of the hall she saw a small table with a telephone on it. It was an old-style rotary phone; probably it had been there since O’Neil was a boy. She had already guessed that the chef and his wife lived up here. Turned around in the darkness, Mary had lost track of which door was which, but she guessed and opened the second one on the left.

The room was small and square, and a night-light glowed on the wall above a baby’s crib. Mary stepped inside. The air was warm and sweet, like clean laundry. She saw a bureau and a changing table, and a bookshelf with toys—dinosaurs and trucks, a baseball glove, the kinds of things a boy would like. What was she doing in here? And yet she could not remove herself; the urge to remain was irresistible, as if she were soaking in a bath. She stood another moment, tasting the air, then approached the crib where the little boy was sleeping.

It was then that she saw the blinking baby monitor on the bureau. Mary’s heart froze with panic, but it was too late—she had been detected. She heard footsteps running up the stairs, and then a voice, slicing through the darkness.

“What are you doing in there?”

It was the woman who had served them dinner. She pushed past Mary into the room, placing herself between Mary and the crib.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I was looking for the bathroom. Nobody was downstairs.”

“I thought you left,” the woman said sternly. “It says private, you know. Private means something to most people.”

The baby had begun to fuss in its crib. The woman turned away from Mary and bent over the railings to lift him into her arms. It was then that Mary saw that it wasn’t a baby at all, but a much older child—a boy in Barney pajamas, perhaps as old as five. His eyes were closed, but his mouth, which was large and wet, twisted with his soft cries. He laid his head over her shoulder; his bare feet hung nearly to the woman’s knees and made a series of jerky movements. Mary noticed things in the room she somehow had not seen before: a tiny wheelchair parked beside the bureau, a white box with tubes and dials that looked medical, a shiny chrome stand for an IV. Even the crib was different—much larger, like a raised bed with bars.

The woman smoothed the child’s hair. “Mummy’s here,” she cooed. “No bad dreams, no bad dreams.”

Mary stood in the doorway. “I truly am sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake him.”

“He’s deaf.” The woman looked at Mary then, fixing her with a firm gaze. “It’s not even words he hears, just a vibration.”

Outside, O’Neil was waiting in the Toyota, the engine idling. He was gripping the wheel tightly, as if he couldn’t wait to drive away.

“All set,” she said.

He looked at her as if he was about to speak, then put the car in gear. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” O’Neil said.

In the early morning, before O’Neil was awake, Mary rose from bed, seized by a turbulent nausea, and went to the bathroom to vomit. She managed to do this quietly, then rinsed her mouth out and returned to bed. But when the two of them awoke later, she found that the feeling had not passed.

“It’s that goddamn restaurant,” O’Neil fumed. “Pansy salad. And that awful soup. What the hell was that all about?”

They had planned to visit the cemetery that morning, but agreed this was now impossible, and O’Neil left the motel to find muffins and tea for Mary, to put something on her stomach before they attempted the drive back to Philadelphia. At the window Mary watched the car pull away, then put on her coat and walked into town. She had seen the clinic the day before, near the gallery where they had looked at pots; the sign had said it was open for Sunday walk-ins from nine to twelve o’clock.

The door was open and the lights were on, but the waiting room was empty. Mary sat down and thumbed through a needlework magazine, and a few minutes later a woman appeared, wearing a white coat and stethoscope.

“Ah,” she said, seeing Mary. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Are you the doctor?”

The woman, who had short gray hair and a handsome heart-shaped face, held up the disk of her stethoscope and looked at it in mock surprise. “Now, who put this stethoscope on me?”

The doctor led Mary into an examining room, where Mary told her about the pansies and the soup while the doctor took her temperature and blood pressure and asked her about the pain. She eased Mary back on the paper-lined table and pressed her bare stomach here and there. Her fingers were pale and slender, yet eased into Mary’s flesh with surprising force.