MARY AND O'NEIL (3 page)

It went on like this into the fall. He never set foot in her house, nor she in his, and if anyone suspected (suspected
what
?), Arthur heard nothing about it. He told no one, because who was there to tell? His clients? The old women at the Coffee Stop? The man at the service station who changed the oil in his car? He wished for a brother, as he had many times in his life, but hadn’t one; he worked alone, and had few friends that Miriam did not share. His life was like a small, comfortable room, every piece in its place. Only by being with Dora did he step outside of this room, though only for an hour or two, and never so completely that at the end of their time together he could not return to it, and to the life he understood. He wondered how long it could go on.

Then, two weeks ago, Arthur found himself driving with Dora out of town, to see a parcel of land she said she wanted to buy. The town had begun to feel close to her—that was the word she used,
close;
she had always dreamed of building a house and raising her boys in the country. She said she wanted to get his opinion, but her meaning was clear: things had reached a certain point between them. The afternoon was cold and bright, and they drove the fifteen miles south with barely a word between them. For the first time since she had come into his office eight months before, dripping with rain, Arthur felt truly afraid. In Domingo they found the unmarked dirt road that led to the property, which was marked with a large For Sale sign pocked with bullet holes. Arthur recognized the phone number on the sign; it was the number of the county clerk’s office, in Harbersburg. On the phone Dora had told him that before the land had been taken over by the county for nonpayment of taxes, it had been a dairy farm.

In the parked car they changed into sneakers and then set out on foot. The land was level and moist—Arthur could hear running water somewhere—and they moved slowly through the shrubs and shabby trees, all of it tangled by brawny grapevine. It took him a moment to realize that the overgrown path they were following was the driveway, but once he saw this, other details emerged: rusted farm implements poking from the ground, gullies lining the pathway that had once been drainage ditches, a shape in the trees that he recognized as the cab of an old Willys Jeep, melting into the leaves and mossy earth. The scene disturbed and interested him. How long, he wondered, had it taken for nature to reclaim this place? Twenty years? Thirty? How much time was required? Then they emerged into a clearing—the trees opened above them like a hatchway, revealing a sky of radiant, shimmering blue—and found themselves standing at the edge of an immense pit. Of course: the house’s foundation. The hole was some forty feet across, roughly square, and some ten feet deep. Its floor was irregular, long buried beneath a sea of leaves and debris. Again, Arthur’s eyes adjusted. An old-fashioned nail-keg lay on its side, beside a rusted saw blade and a monkey wrench and the head of a hammer, half peeking from the dirt. The scene leapt into view. More saws, hammers, wrenches, an iron sledge, a workbench with a vise, all of it bathed in the brilliant sunlight. The basement was full of tools.

It was then, standing at the edge of the farmhouse’s foundation, that Arthur felt it: a terrible fear, like falling, and then, in its wake, a deep and melancholy calm.

He looked up. Dora was standing beside him, gazing into the hole. He said, “This is something the two of you wanted.”

She answered without raising her head. “What do you mean?”

“To build a house. Out here, somewhere.” He took her gloved hand. “You and Sam.”

Dora said nothing, but her face, paling, gave the answer. She had looked at this very place before, when Sam was still alive. They had stood right where the two of them were standing now. He imagined what that had been like, the hopeful feeling of it, and the sounds of their two boys tearing around the woods, somewhere nearby. It would have been when Leo and Josh were small.

“I really am sorry,” Arthur said.

“Well, you’re right. We did come out here.” She shrugged, and gave him a distant and painful smile. “It was a long time ago, Art.”

“No, I mean I’m sorry that I can’t”—he stopped. He had approached the edge of something, and then he crossed it—“do this.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Wind moved in the trees, and the branches swayed.

“Oh, it’s all right.” Gently, Dora freed her hand from his—as gently as the first time she had taken it, across the table in the restaurant, months before. She folded her arms over her chest.

“I truly am,” Arthur said.

She laughed, almost bitterly, though Arthur knew that, like him, what she felt was more like sadness. “What you are is relieved, Art. Still, it would have been nice, at least for me.” She sighed then, deeply, and Arthur saw that her eyes were glazed with tears. With a long finger she brushed one away. “Forgive me, but I really liked being a wife. I was good at it, and I miss it. Maybe all I’m doing is remembering.”

And that was the end of it. They drove back to town, and by the time they returned they were friends again, with things to do: Dora to fetch the boys at Scouts, and Arthur to phone Miriam (not here, they told him; she’d only just stepped out) and then drive out to the Price Chopper in Vermillion to do the shopping he’d promised her he’d do. He pushed his cart through the bright, busy aisles, the air smelling of the cold from the open freezer cases, and knew that he was saved. The thought filled him with an almost manic energy—for he also knew, now, that he would never be caught, nor would have to confess—and standing in the checkout line, jammed into the final gauntlet of movie magazines and candy displays, he found himself talking, almost babbling, to a woman one aisle over, a neighbor who had once baby-sat his children. Was his mother well? And the kids?
Yes, fine, though of course the nursing home did things, certain things he didn’t care for; they wouldn’t for instance let her out for walks when it was raining, which she had always loved, and his children, well, Kay was settling into married life, the usual bumps in the road but nothing serious, her husband, Jack, was still finishing his dissertation, Arthur couldn’t even understand what the hell it was about, trying to teach, she knew how that went, and O’Neil was still enjoying school, running cross-country and thinking about maybe medicine, though he’d have to decide soon, however he and Miriam managed to pay for it, well, that was another subject entirely; they were driving up to see him in a couple of weeks, to meet his new girlfriend, from Boston.
. . . It poured forth from him. It disgorged, like the contents of his cart—flank steak, spaghetti sauce with pork and mushrooms, ice-slickened canisters of frozen juice, and all the rest, a hundred bucks’ worth (for he had overshopped)—onto the cheerfully humming rubber conveyor belt. He wanted to talk, to tell his story; to sing it if necessary, like a hymn, or the tale of a traveler come home at last.

Now, two weeks later, Arthur sits in his office (ten fifty-two and counting; he really has to
go
), composing his farewell to Dora Auclaire. Since that day in the woods they have not spoken, though they have seen each other once, in passing. Tuesday last, three days ago: Arthur, hustling back from Lawson’s Stationery with a package of pencils he didn’t really need, his head down against a gritty wind, heard the toot of a horn, and knew it was for him. He raised his head in time to see the sticker-covered tailgate of Dora’s old VW squareback as she passed (
ERA NOW
, No Nukes, Carter-Mondale ’76), and over the seat, a wave. A greeting? A good-bye? He froze, thinking she might stop; when he saw she wouldn’t, he raised his hand to return the wave, but she was already gone.

What he wants now, at his desk, the blank paper before him, is to acknowledge her, to finish the wave; he wants to put into words the happiness he feels, that he loves her but will never be with her, and that this love will therefore harm no one. His office is empty; the answering machine is on, the sound turned low. Behind him, beyond the windows of his office, cars pass in an almost continuous flow, washed pale by gray November; the last leaves tremble on their stalks; above his head hovers the yellow stain of his father’s cigarettes, a ghostly halo that no coat of paint seems to cover for long. For some time Arthur simply sits there, his mind a perfect blank. Without realizing it he has nudged his consciousness to the edge of deepest memory, and his dream of 5:00
A
.
M
. with its sounds of distant water and feeling of final flight. At last he takes a clean sheet of white paper—the legal pad was a mistake, of course—from the tray on his desk, selects a fresh pen, fat-tipped and forgiving, and begins again.
Dear Dora,
he writes.

The letter is one sentence long; he signs it,
love, Art
. His eyes rise to the old schoolroom clock above the waiting room door: 11:38. So, after all that, there is no time to mail it. He puts the folded letter in an envelope, writes Dora’s name on it, places the envelope in his pencil drawer, and pushes it shut.
Late,
he thinks,
late
. Miriam will be waiting for him in the library foyer, clutching her books and papers and all her nervousness to her chest. The car needs gas, he will have to cash a check on the way out of town; they will arrive at the college in darkness, and there will be confusion about whether to eat dinner first, or check into the hotel, and then the question about restaurants, and if the girl will come with them, and her parents, if they are visiting too—a chain of uncertainties and potential disappointments all shouldered into motion because he, Arthur, is running late. (Not Suzie or Sarah:
Sandra
. He says the name aloud, to etch it in memory: “Sandra.”) He wraps his neck with a woolen scarf, douses the lamps in his office and waiting room, slides into his trench coat—a gift from Kay at Christmas—and steps outside.

And this is when he stops—pauses and turns, his keys in one hand and his briefcase in the other, at the open office door. His back to the street, Arthur scans the waiting room, its blond oak paneling and sagging sofa and coffee table with magazines, everything perfectly still and frosted with dust; beyond, through the inner office door, his eye finds the mahogany desk where his father died, and his chair, cocked back on its springs where it came to rest when he, Arthur, stood at last to go. The image seems somehow apart from him, at once frozen and containing movement, like a photograph: the ghost of Arthur, rising. For an instant he imagines he sees this—sees him
self
—and a dark chill twists through him.
What in the world . . . ?
But it is nothing, just a trick of the light, of the time of day and his own need to hurry. He shakes his head once to dislodge this vision, steps onto the sidewalk and is gone.

Miriam Patricia Burke, née Braverman, age fifty-four—wife to Arthur, mother to Kaitlin and O’Neil; empty-nester, librarian, caffeine addict; attendee of conferences and symposia; taker of classes (ornithology, ballroom dancing, vegetarian cooking); registered Democract, former Jew, sometime jogger (you might see her, a lone figure humping her way along a country lane in her purple sweatshirt and pants); holder of degrees in literature (Barnard) and library science (NYU); daughter of the late Daniel Chaim Braverman and his beloved Alicia; sister and trusted counsel to siblings Monica (fifty) and Abraham (fifty-seven); a woman lately described by a man she met at a party as “a gal who did good and still looked it”—Miriam Patricia, Mimi to her friends, stands in the foyer of the Vinegar County Library and wonders if she is dying.

Two weeks ago: she discovered the lump in her left breast, by rolling over in bed. She turned, half sleeping, and a dark presence met her and then took shape, a mass the size and solidity of an acorn, pressed between the mattress and her rib cage. The awareness of it hurled her into consciousness, and a series of swift calculations to firm the moment into fact. She was in bed; it was seven o’clock; Arthur was away for the day, something about an abandoned farm, and had left for his office early, before she was even awake. She lay in bed, her brain spinning with terror—
Not this! Not this!
—daring herself to touch the place beneath her nightgown where the thickness was. So large! It met the tips of her fingers with something like an electric current. One in nine women; that’s what they said. But what happened to them, those one in nine? It was more than panic she felt; it was death, making its way to her door.

And yet, as she began her day—the first day of her dying—a strange orderliness filled her, an almost fatalistic calm. She rose, washed, dressed. She sat down at the table (her cold coffee mug, by the stairs, was waiting, and a note:
Price Chopper? Anything? Call,
signed with the little sketch of a bear he always left for her), rose again, and treated herself to a breakfast of sausage and French toast, glazed with syrup and stamps of yellow butter. She expected not to want it once it was made, but found the opposite was true: she was unaccountably ravenous, and for the time it took her to eat her breakfast, that was all she did and thought about—sliced the toast into squares, the sausage into cylinders bursting with watery fat, forked it all onto her waiting tongue. She chewed, swallowed, reloaded; if she had been capable of it, she would have licked the plate. Then when she was finished she rinsed her plate and called her doctor and told him what she knew; by two o’clock he had his hand there, and told her not to be afraid.
“Concerned,”
he said, scribbling, not really looking at her. He was a plump man, bald and flatfooted, a doctor who actually still made house calls. She had known him for years, and now he wasn’t looking at her. “I’d be
concerned,
for now.”

There were other doctors then, and more appointments—the ultrasound and mammogram, and the visit to the radiologist in Cooperstown to read the films, then back to Dr. Bardin and the consensus that the surgeon was the next person to see. Serious medicine, she discovered, was a kind of maze, a series of hallways down which one traveled; at the end of each was a door which one opened, hoping to find it locked; but as long as they opened, one was forced to go on. And yet, somehow, through two terrified weeks, she has told Arthur nothing. On Tuesday next—four days from this moment in the foyer, waiting for Arthur to appear so they can drive to New Hampshire—the surgeon will evaluate her; the mass will be aspirated, and then there will be a surgical biopsy, and decisions to be made. Her story will come out. Why hasn’t she told him? Her lies are not elaborate; it has proved simple enough to explain why she will be away for an afternoon, to let slip over breakfast or watching television in the evening some vague announcement about a meeting with the State Library Association in Ithaca or a booksellers’ convention in Binghamton (Arthur, glancing up from his paper or the program, his eyes distracted, saying,
Well, okay, thanks for letting me know, why are you even telling me?
), all to account for the three or four hours it takes to drive to a new doctor and back, and of course the mileage on her car. She is saving him, of course, from her bad news, waiting until she knows something one way or the other; she is letting him live his life for now because she loves him. But the truth is—and she has to admit it—that the longer she remains alone with the knowledge of what is happening to her, the longer she herself is saved. Under the flat institutional light of the doctor’s office there was “a mass” and a “cause for concern,” there were “treatments” and “courses of therapy,” the problem was confined to “the affected breast,” which in turn was the property of “a white female, married, 54, no family history.” (She had peeked at the radiologist’s chart.) Nowhere, at no time, has she uttered the word
cancer,
nor heard it used. The breast was “affected.” The mass was “palpable.” The patient was “married.” She, Miriam Burke, was something—some
where
—else.