MARY AND O'NEIL (6 page)

“Where is he?” Miriam is saying. She bounces on her toes, looking over the heads of the crowd. “Where is he?”

“There.” Arthur points, and then it happens, as it always does: all the memories he carries inside him of track meets and soccer games and piano recitals and class plays—twenty years of watching his son from the sidelines of playing fields and the back of dark auditoriums—suddenly organize themselves, like the plot of a novel or movie, leading to this moment. Excitement wells up inside him, a huge and desperate desire to see his son do well, a feeling so intense he would step out of his body if he could. He hears his voice, and Miriam’s, the two of them yelling:

“Go, go, go!”

For the final moments of the race everything seems to slow. As the runners take the last turn around the field, O’Neil makes his move; he has kept something for the kick and in a burst he uses it, passing one runner and then another, his arms and legs moving in perfect headlong syncopation. Even so far away Arthur believes he can see his son’s face, and the pain that is etched across it.

“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine . . .”

The first runner crosses the line, the pack just steps behind. Arthur can hear his voice, yelling his son’s name, and he is yelling still when O’Neil crosses the finish, a split second off third place. He expects his boy to collapse on the ground, utterly spent, but this doesn’t happen. O’Neil slows to a stop, grinning, his chest heaving, his hands riding his slender hips, and then looks upward toward the bleachers, his eyes narrowed in a squint. Arthur, at the finish line, is about to call out O’Neil’s name to show him where they are, but then O’Neil finds who he is looking for—not Arthur and Miriam, but a girl whom Arthur knows is Sandra. Somehow he has missed her; or perhaps she has arrived late, after Arthur had stopped looking. She bounds down the aluminum bleachers and at once is beside him.

Arthur hears Miriam whisper, “God.”

“Steady,” Arthur says, and takes her elbow. “Let’s go see.”

O’Neil is almost too euphoric to notice them. “Can you
believe
it? Fourth place.” He shakes his head in utter amazement. “I’ve never done that well. Not even close. It was the last turn when I knew I could do it. I saw myself passing those guys, and then I just did.”

He introduces Sandra, who shakes first Miriam’s hand and then Arthur’s, meeting his grip with a firmness that is at once surprising and completely natural. The last runners are crossing the line, and in the confusion Arthur has the chance to look at his son’s new girlfriend—to examine her without seeming to. She is prettier, even, than in the photograph—her eyes are somehow brighter, bluer, her hair a truer shade of gold—but her beauty, Arthur decides, is not the kind that everyone would necessarily notice, nor something she herself is aware of, as some pretty girls are. She is wearing jeans and a wool cap, like a beret, and a puffy nylon ski jacket, navy blue and zipped to the collar against the cold; Arthur can see, peeking through the neckline, a pink oxford shirt with a threadbare collar that he recognizes as his son’s—a shirt, in fact, that used to be Arthur’s. He can tell she is as surprised as Arthur is that O’Neil has done so well, and that her surprise is part of his son’s happiness; it is an unexpected gift he has given both of them.

When the last runners have crossed, the coach steps up and claps O’Neil on the back. “See what I’m saying? About the kick?” He puts his bearded face close to O’Neil’s and thumps the middle of his chest with the butt of his fist. “You have to go
in
.” He turns to Arthur and Miriam and shakes their hands again, as if meeting them for the first time.

“Your son ran quite a race,” he says. “I don’t know what you fed him last night, but do it again sometime.”

Despite O’Neil’s surprising finish the team as a whole hasn’t done that well. Most have finished in the second pack, well behind the leaders. Their strongest runner, whom they were counting on to place in the top three, twisted an ankle out on the course and was forced to drop out. O’Neil points him out, an ordinary-looking boy hobbling around the infield with a sack of ice in his hand.

“I guess he didn’t go
in,
” O’Neil says. “To tell the truth, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a good runner, but that’s not everything.”

Arthur looks away from the boy and returns his gaze to O’Neil, who is putting his sweats back on and sucking a wedge of orange that someone has handed him. The pleasure he feels in his son, he knows, is something new. He is watching his son step into himself, into life. Suddenly Arthur knows that, from this day, the love that he feels for O’Neil will be a different kind of love. His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

“Let’s celebrate,” Arthur says. He turns to Miriam, realizing suddenly that he has almost forgotten she is there; he has forgotten Sandra, too, walking beside his son with their arms wrapped around one another’s waists, like any couple.

At the edge of the field O’Neil stops. “Great,” he says. “Well, actually, I should go back for a while.” He tips his head over his shoulder toward the bleachers, where the two teams are still gathered. “It’s the last meet of the season. Sandra has a game to get ready for too.”

“That’s right.” Arthur gives her his best smile, though he is disappointed; he would like to have O’Neil to himself for a while. “Field hockey, right?”

She shrugs modestly. “It’s just JV.”

“JV nothing,” Arthur says. “I hear you girls really kick some ass.”

Sandra laughs at this, knowing, as she must, that she is hearing O’Neil’s words played back by his father. They agree to meet instead for dinner, after her game, and that Arthur and Miriam will spend the day shopping in town. The question of Sandra’s parents turns out to be no question at all; they are out of the country, she explains, sailing in the Caribbean.

“Did you notice the shirt?” Arthur asks later. They have returned to their room to change for lunch; they are planning to eat someplace nice, to make up for last night’s bad meal at the hotel. Miriam is sitting on the bed, wriggling out of her jeans and into a pair of warm wool slacks. Arthur, at the mirror, slides the knot of his necktie to his throat.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sandra’s.” He can’t say why he’s brought the subject up; he wonders if he’s being mean. “It’s not important, I guess. Under her coat? A pink oxford, frayed at the collar.” He shrugs, and resumes tying his tie. “I thought maybe it was one you gave me once.”

Miriam flops back on the mattress to pull her slacks on the rest of the way. “I’ve never given you a pink shirt in my life,” she says.

Miriam sleeping, dreaming of birds: a silly and disturbing dream, in which all the birds—ravens, parrots, sparrows, canaries—are wearing hats. Why are you wearing hats? she wants to ask. Do birds wear hats now? Was it always this way? She is in an empty room, she is at the hospital—not the one in Cooperstown, but a hospital from years ago—she is alone in a field of purple heather and can’t find her children; the birds are responsible, the birds have taken them away. Arthur is beside her now.
See?
he is saying.
It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you
. She turns then but it is no longer Arthur beside her; her father is there now, wearing a white shirt and suspenders to hold up his gray trousers. She breathes him in, a smell like the color blue. Pure happiness fills her, as if she has stepped into a beam of light. Daddy, she says, Daddy, I thought you’d died.
Oh, baby girl
, he says, and touches her wet cheek;
oh, baby girl, I’m sorry, I did
.

She awakens then in the half-dark room, a room she doesn’t remember at all. Her mind is adrift, unfixed; she feels almost afloat. Across from her she sees a bureau with a porcelain washbasin and pitcher, and on the nightstand, a telephone, with instructions taped to the dial. The hotel, she remembers. She is at the hotel, in New Hampshire. It is Saturday. O’Neil has run his race—a sudden pleasure fills her, not only for his victory but the fact that she knew, in advance, that it would occur—and she and Arthur had lunch together after, and wine besides, and returned to their room for a nap. The clock on the table says that it is just past four; at six they will meet O’Neil and Sandra for dinner. Beside her Arthur softly snores.

What is wrong with me?
she thinks.
Why can’t I like this girl?
She reviews, in order, O’Neil’s girlfriends of the past: sweet little Ellen, whom he used to buy Cokes for at school dances; the vaguely Asiatic, exotically named Ione, almost certainly his first kiss (she had caught them, or nearly, standing too close and blushing at the bottom of the basement stairs); the girl who she has always thought of as “ninth-grade Nancy,” plump and funny and without question the smartest of them all (at MIT now, she’s heard, and
thin
); the blur of Betsys and Danielles and Sarahs and Elizabeths in the last two years of high school, when there was always some new voice in the kitchen on Saturday evenings and O’Neil, in so many ways, had begun to hit his stride.
Why can’t I?

She finds herself thinking, then, not of Sandra but of Kay, realizing that she hasn’t spoken to her in at least two—three?—weeks. (Though if Kay wanted to talk, she could have called herself. And isn’t silence, in its way, a good sign? That everything is well, that the ship is still steaming safely away from shore?) Disapproving, moody Kay. How like Kay to make Miriam feel so awful, suddenly, about everything, by doing nothing, by simply existing at the far end of a telephone line running from this hotel room to the apartment in New Haven that she shares with her husband, Jack—dreary, low ceilinged, and filled with obscure, unreadable books and rickety graduate-student furniture. What has Kay ever wanted except to be left alone? Even when she imagines Kay now, when she goes to the past to think of her child, she sees her at a distance; this little girl with curly brown hair, frowning at her dull and meaningless toys, waiting only for the moment when she could leave them all behind. It was as if Kay was born with a secret she was determined not to share, the secret of who she was. Of all the difficulties Miriam had imagined, this was the one she had never anticipated: that her child should seem not to love her, to acknowledge her as important and real. Other parents complained about their teenagers, how these sweet, cuddly children who had doled out love in generous heaps had, almost overnight, been reborn as intense and gloomy strangers who shrank from their very touch; how their bad hair, bad skin, bad moods, and bad friends were a symptom of some deeper, but one had to believe temporary, badness. On paper Kay was the daughter any mother would be proud of, a trouble-free honors student who spent her weekends reading fat Victorian novels and won a full ride early to Yale, tidy and polite, with a nugget of loyal friends whom Miriam knew less about than the inhabitants of a distant sun. It would have been a relief, almost, if Kay had run into some trouble: if she had missed curfew once or twice, come home in a daze smelling of beer or pot, or been caught smoking cigarettes behind the metal shop at high school; something, anything, to prove that she was angry and give her anger shape, a place at the table. But there was nothing. She lived in their house like a dowager boarder. There was no badness to complain about; there was just no Kay.

“Don’t you like any of us?” Miriam had asked once, in despair. The insult was slight; Kay had declined, with her customary cool politeness, to go on a family picnic. She was fifteen, and had chosen to forgo a few hours of togetherness in healthy summer sunshine to finish a novel she was reading. (Not even one assigned for class; her homework, she confessed, was long done.) The car was packed. O’Neil and Arthur were waiting in the drive; Miriam had returned to the house half hoping to find Kay doing something wrong but had found her, instead, sitting at the kitchen table intently reading precisely the book she had professed a desire to read. The room was silent; not even the radio was playing. She had poured herself a glass of milk. At the sound of Miriam’s voice Kay’s eyes rose from the page, wearing an expression of bored concern that was, Miriam realized, completely parental.
What are you talking about?
her eyes said.
What on earth are you doing? I’m trying to read a book
.

“Don’t take it personally. Of course I like you.”

Miriam opened her mouth to speak, but what more was there to say? The disarming literalness of Kay’s answer made anything else, any deeper probing, impossible.

“It’s all right,” Kay insisted. Her eyes returned to her book before she had even finished talking; she gave a little wave. “For goodness sakes, go have fun.”

Now, ten years later, Miriam feels the humiliation of the moment afresh, how her fury and need had been twisted in on themselves, and turned into silence. She remembers almost nothing of the picnic itself; she remembers only this moment in the kitchen, and the one that followed, when she stepped from the house into the sunshine and surrendered to it, its blinding light and promise.
Fine. Fun. Read in the dreary kitchen if you must
. On the bed Miriam lets one hand rise to where the lump is; at the end of her fingertips she feels its firm, insistent shape, and allows her touch to linger there. (It could still, of course, be nothing; though wouldn’t someone have said so, if it could be nothing? Whatever it is, it is not nothing.) Beside her, on the little bedside table, the telephone rests, unused.

She rises then, careful not to wake Arthur, pulls on a sweater and shoes and her coat, and leaves the hotel. Evening has fallen; the air is dry and very still, and lights are coming on. She walks alone to the center of town, toward the restaurant where she and Arthur had lunch, though that is not her destination. Horace Bullfinch, Glassworks: the sign hangs on iron hooks over the front door, its lettering crisply ornate, like the sign on an old-time apothecary shop. It is a large brick structure, half hanging over the dammed river, with a wheel that turns in the water beneath it. By the door, a wide glass window is fogged with steam.