Academy Street Read online

  In the early years of her grandchildren’s lives she experienced sudden frequent longings to see them, but a natural reserve—and the fear of becoming a nuisance—prevented her from ever visiting, uninvited, her son and his wife. She attended birthday parties and Thanksgivings at their home but otherwise she did not think she had the right to ask. Occasionally, out of the blue, Theo would drop by with the children. Her bell would buzz and then, his voice. Hi Mom. Her heart leapt at the thought of his face, the thought of the children. She bought them toys, clothes, books. She, in turn, received a steady stream of gifts, more than she’d ever received in her whole life—sweaters, scarves, books and, once, a stereo sound system, which brought a new dimension and richness to her life. On weekend nights, she put on her music, cooked and ate her dinner and drank a glass of red wine, content. The image of Theo setting up the speakers in her living room often returned to her. And the image of him in a store, choosing the system for her. Giving her thought. For a few minutes, for a specific time, he had given her thought. At times, a gap of several weeks would open during which she did not hear from him. She felt very unsure of her place in his life then, assuming that, in the midst of his and Jennifer’s busy routines, they had forgotten her. She had always felt separate from people, and lately she had the sense that when she was out of view she disappeared entirely from the minds of others. At such moments she siphoned off images from the past and used them to imagine herself back into existence.

  ‘The King of Persia is dying. Oh, Tess…what am I going to do?’

  She was back in her old neighbourhood, in the diner she and Willa had often sat in when the children were small. Now, together, they cried. ‘Lung cancer. From those damn cigarettes…and all those years in his underground train. It’s not natural, that…’ She shook her head. ‘A subterranean man—that’s what Darius was.’ She looked at Tess. ‘Six months, they said. Oh, Tess.’

  She put an arm around her friend. She called up words to give hope. She cited new treatments, cases she’d known in the hospital that had turned out well. Willa shook her head. ‘No, Tess, it’s not good. I just know.’ She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘I’ve known him so long—since I was sixteen years old. We never spent a night apart, except when I was giving birth.’ She looked out the window onto the street. ‘How will I go on living without him?’

  In the library on 179th Street, one evening in September, she found a slim book of poetry. On the front cover there was a portrait of a man with fixed haunted eyes. Years before she had thought poetry beyond her. She read the biographical note and the introduction. Then page after page—sonnets for Orpheus, the raising of Lazarus, a requiem. Her deepest nerves were touched, sudden mysteries given sanction. Outside, the light began to fade. She looked up and out of the high window. If I could just live here eternally, she thought, at this desk, in this light, with this poem. The librarian touched her arm, whispered, ‘Time.’ She checked out the book and stepped onto the street. Under the twilight the lines repeated themselves. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? She walked to their beat, the words in harmony with her feet, her feet in harmony with her heart.

  Something brushed her arm, pressed against her. She felt a jolt and looked up. She had strayed onto the wrong street. A shadow darkened over her, and faces, all black, closed in on hers. Teenage boys loomed above her, bearing down on her. An open mouth, teeth close up to her face, roaring obscenities. She tried to speak. Cold eyes glared at her and she shrank backwards, another body, like a wall, behind her. Then her arm was tugged and her bag wrenched. No, she begged, my book. She held fast to the strap. Bitch. A violent tug and she lost her footing, and as she went down she saw a boot, black, high, being raised. She put her hands to her face and covered her head. She waited. And then it came, not a blow to the head or the stomach, but a boot on the small of her back, left there for a long moment, and then pressed. She held her breath, numb, until she heard footsteps running away.

  A man and a woman knelt beside her. The woman dialled her cell phone. Trembling, Tess began to rise. Stay, stay, they urged. She pushed herself onto her knees, rose and fled. She lurched to the right, then left, along the pavement, lost. She looked up, searching for signs, landmarks. At a corner she halted, traffic whizzing by. She stepped to the edge of the kerb and raised a feeble hand and hailed a cab.

  Willa took her to the hospital, stayed for the x-rays, took her home again, remained with her through the night as she drifted in and out of sleep. She heard a foghorn in the distance, dreamt of ships, rain, a burning bush. In the morning she stood before the bathroom mirror and cried.

  All day she slept. In the evening Theo came. When he entered the room she struggled to sit up. ‘Shh,’ he whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  She lay back. In the faint glow of the night-light they were silent. She felt his presence, mightily, in the room.

  ‘I’ve been lying here…thinking,’ she said. She could not look at him. ‘There’s so much I regret, so much I wish I’d done differently.’

  They were silent for a long time.

  ‘I wanted a strong mother,’ he said. ‘Like Mary O’Dowd. Or Willa.’ He was speaking into the dark. ‘I had no father and…you were always so…afraid.’

  He sounded wounded, like an injured animal.

  ‘You were all I had,’ she said, pleading. ‘I did my best.’

  She began to cry. He stroked her arm for the first time.

  ‘Shh, don’t cry…I didn’t understand then. I was only a kid. I didn’t know anything…and you never talked much. We never talked much.’

  ‘We can talk now.’

  He shrugged, looked away. The past flooded back. She brightened.

  ‘You know, I think I got you wrong,’ she said. ‘I thought I knew you. For instance, I always thought you’d choose a career—a life—in the arts, or science. You were so creative when you were a child. And then you chose business!’ She was smiling at him, like he was a child again. ‘Does it suit you? Do you like it?’

  Again he shrugged, but softer. ‘I buy and sell. It’s not really business as such…I deal in risk. Chance. The mathematics of chance. Yes, I like it.’

  ‘Once, years ago at a PTA meeting, your Math teacher said you could solve problems without being taught.’

  He smiled. ‘I never understood why the others couldn’t! I don’t know…I probably got those things intuitively. You see… there’s such logic and truth in Math. And beauty. People don’t see the beauty. They don’t know that actually it’s in Math that beauty is told.’

  She loved to hear him talk like this. ‘What do you mean? How? How is beauty told?’

  He searched, for a moment. ‘Let’s take risk, chance. In Math it’s probability. In probability truth is clearly told. The beauty of probability is that truth, however vague, is logical. One outcome, that is possible out of so many, happens. People are amazed by that! Amazed by that chance. But why shouldn’t it? In the very long run everything happens. Everything is inevitable.’

  The night grew dense around them. She drifted in and out of sleep. When she opened her eyes he was still there, in the chair.

  ‘What time is it?’ Her voice was young, like that of a girl. She remembered nights long ago, waking up when someone tiptoed into her room for something.
He whispered a gentle reply. He was like a father now, watching over her.

  Hours passed. In the dead of night she woke with a start, feverish, sweating. He was still there.

  ‘Did you ever find him? Your father.’

  He looked into her eyes, and nodded.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A few years ago.’

  There were so many questions. The enormity of everything, of Theo’s life, hit her.

  ‘How will you ever forgive me?’ she whispered.

  The silence deepened. She could feel him recall it all. He leaned forward, his arms on his knees, his head down, and she grew afraid. When he lifted his head his face was soft, lighted. ‘You’re my mother,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to forgive a mother.’ She sank back on the pillow. He got up and took off his shoes and lay down on the bedcovers beside her. ‘Shh, go back to sleep now. We’ll talk tomorrow.’ She did not know if she was dreaming or living this moment. She closed her eyes. She felt his breath on her face, sweet, the promise of peace. He left his hand on hers. The night drained away and the whole world slept.

  In the morning he was gone. Monkey was in his chair. He had left a glass of orange juice on the night stand beside her. She listened out for sounds in the corridor, for the ping of the elevator. She got up, fed Monkey, walked around the apartment. The building was eerily quiet. She was besieged by loneliness. She wished she were back in Academy Street, hearing doors slam, shouting in the corridors. In the kitchen she tried to be busy. She made coffee and sat at the table. The minutes passed slowly. She felt old and alone, the years yawning before her, a graceless old woman with sagging flesh and clammy skin. A woman in decline. There was nothing to be done about it. Tomorrow would be the same.

  Monkey jumped onto her lap and settled down and began to purr. She stroked the little head, cupped the tiny face in her hand. Poor little creature, she said. The eyes looked into hers, clear, green, shining. Theo was right. She had been too afraid. She had always been waiting for something to take, for the veils of abstraction to lift and reveal the life that was meant for her. There was a time, when Theo was small, when she thought he had cured her. He had been enough.

  She grew distraught. He would forget what had occurred in the room last night. There would be no breakthrough. He would be his usual self the next time, and she would wonder if she had dreamt it. It was impossible to know the truth. So many feelings between people were encoded in gesture and silence, because words fell short. A time might come when words would be extinct and all communication conducted in silence. The line between sound and silence might simply dissolve.

  A time might come. A time might come. A feeling of foreboding began to rise. She had the clear lucid thought that something was wrong. She put a hand on her heart. She took her pulse. She touched each breast, pressing, searching, self-examining for lumps.

  Willa came later. ‘It’s normal to feel this way, Tess,’ she told her, ‘after what you’ve been through, the attack. You’re not going to die! You’ve come through worse.’ She set down a cooked dinner before Tess.

  ‘How is Darius?’ She needed to remember others now.

  Willa sighed. ‘We took a little walk this morning. The boys carried him downstairs in a chair.’

  Tess thought of all that was before Willa. We could set up house, you and I, she thought, like two spinster sisters. Care for each other, call to each other when we’re frightened in the night.

  ∼

  That night she barely slept. At dawn she dozed off. Later, she woke to the phone ringing by her head. A cheery male voice tried to sell her a multi-channel TV upgrade. She hung up and left the phone off the hook. The tone hummed on, then died. She got out and opened the window blind. A brilliant sky this morning, pure blue, without blemish. She hoped Theo would come again. She knew now there were only a few moments, ever, in one’s life, when one is understood. She remembered a novel she had read. Michael K, a silent disfigured man wheeling his sick mother out of the city on a makeshift wheelbarrow and, after her death, wandering the desert, surviving on almost nothing. His mind growing emptier by the day. She had worried for him, as if he were real and in her life. She would have liked to have him as a son, have him mind her, mourn her.

  She was living too much among books and memories, and this room had become a sick room. She would go out later to the food store, the library. The day would herald a return. She would sit in her favourite café and eat a toasted English muffin with blackcurrant jelly. But first, she would sleep. She got back into bed. As soon as she lay down, yesterday’s pall returned. She felt herself floating close to hazard. A vague intimation, a premonition, that there was more to come, that the end was nigh, and she would soon die. She leaned out and opened a drawer and took two sleeping pills and a mouthful of orange juice. Then she lay back.

  A medley of sounds mingled with her dreams. Distant traffic, banging doors, her name being called. She was standing on a corner downtown. A voice behind her said ‘Look!’ and she looked up and saw water—a circular shower amid the sun, with thick glistening drops enclosed in tiny membranes, and she was transfixed by their beauty. Then someone laughed and she turned, thinking they were laughing at her, frightened that she had lost her mind. Above it all she heard the sea.

  She woke to a terrible gloom, and a knocking on the door. She was drunk with sleep. The air was dense and stale, the heat of the afternoon weighing down the room. Outside the sky was still blue. She felt someone in the apartment, footsteps in the hall, voices. Alarmed, she tried to rise.

  Willa stood in the bedroom doorway, the super beside her. Her face was solemn.

  ‘Darius,’ Tess said. Willa shook her head, frowned, came and sat on the bed.

  ‘Willa. You’re frightening me. Please, what’s wrong?’ Her mind was slow, leaden. She looked at the super. She thought there was something she was missing.

  Willa took her hands, looked into her eyes. ‘Have you seen the news, the TV?’ Vaguely she shook her head. A wave of nausea began to rise in her. ‘Theo,’ she whispered.

  The worst thing had finally happened, the calamity she had always been waiting for. It was almost a relief when it arrived, and the waiting was over. She felt a strange surreal calm sitting in front of the TV all evening. Over and over she watched two planes with glinting wings fly into skyscrapers, from a sky so blue it did not look real. Then the skyscrapers buckling, collapsing, folding under. People on the streets, their hands on their mouths, looking up in disbelief. People fleeing, enveloped in ash, as rivers of smoke pursued them through the streets. Everyone running, the cameras running, crowds crossing bridges, getting off the island. She wanted to go out and search but they would not allow it. She could not take her eyes from the screen. She saw them all running. And over and over the planes flying, the towers tumbling, the ground giving.

  If she could die herself, then, at that moment, it would be all right. It would, actually, be the most perfect thing. She had always felt temporary, provisional, as if waiting in a holding bay. Now the wait was over. This thought brought peace. She wanted to hold this thought, this peace, but people kept entering the room, bending, speaking, touching her. All evening long they came. Some of them cried. The phones were down. Willa’s sons came, then went out to join the search. She heard the elevator pi
ng and her heart lifted and she turned her head and waited for him to enter. She got a towel, ready to wipe his face, wash his feet. She fetched her purse, urgent. What had she been thinking? Ludicrous, to think he would come here! He would go home to Academy Street, expecting to find her there. Gently, Willa led her back from the door. ‘Let’s wait, Tess. Let’s wait for some word. We have to be patient. We have to have hope.’

  Jennifer arrived, pale and distraught, with her brother. She hugged Tess. Theo had called her—he had talked to her from the stairwell between the 77th and 76th floors. She was certain he was out there.

  After midnight she sent them all home, Willa too. She switched off the TV and listened to the silence. She stood at the sink and looked out at the night. They have pierced my hands and my feet, she whispered, they have numbered all my bones.

  I5

  DAWN WAS THE cruellest hour. The wind was sifting his bones, scattering his ash, leaving tiny pale shards in hidden corners. She wanted to roam the streets, scavenge in the sewers for his teeth. She sat at the table and tallied up his time: thirty-seven years, two months and twenty-one days. Monkey kept meowing. ‘Stop that racket,’ she snapped. Then the elevator pinged. She tilted her head. ‘Is that you, Theo?’

  People came by. Jennifer brought the children, but in their presence, especially the boy’s, she felt inexplicably angry, and then when they were gone, more deeply alone.

  She was better at night. In the quiet apartment she fell under the spell of memories, dreams, visions. He was lying on the floor at her feet, drawing stars, his head in his hand, his heart on the floor. Oh, to be that floor. Tell me their names, Theo, their constellations. Read me your favourite lines. She closed her eyes. She was waiting, with others, at a gate. She could see him inside, seated at the right hand of his father. She tried to break away, run across the threshold into his arms, but a hand held her back. She was running through smouldering streets then, gathering up his bones, placing them in a little casket, bringing them home.