Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  Her few friends, of course, thought it peculiar at best that this attractive young woman should want to stalk around the city streets by herself. At worst they thought it suicidal. It would only be a matter of time, they told each other, before Glynnis was assaulted, or raped, or worse.

  Glynnis, though, never felt endangered. She went into the city to forget herself, to drain her mind. In the simplicity of young logic, she concluded that it wouldn’t be fair if something happened to add to her concerns. It didn’t work like that. When she was a small girl, the parish priest had once looked her squarely in the eye, smiled a gentle smile, and pronounced that she had special angels hovering over her.

  “How can you tell, Father? How do you know?” she had asked.

  “I can just tell, Glynnis. Your angels will always be there to protect you. Always.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “No,” the priest replied. “But you’ll know they’re there. And if you’re ever a bad girl and they decide to leave you, you’ll know that, too. But that won’t happen. I can see your heart as well, and there’s no evil there. Your angels will never have reason to leave.”

  The priest had been right. Glynnis believed the angels were still with her. In her girlish fancy she imagined them to be tiny, no bigger than matchsticks, and dressed so lightly in silver that they were transparent on those rare occasions when they, teasingly, might allow themselves to be seen. Their eyes were blue. Glynnis’s angels would protect her and bring her good things. She did not know why they should select her, but she was infinitely glad that they had.

  Glynnis believed that, aside from the angels, no one she might encounter on those streets cared whether she was there or not. They would not go out of their way to harm her, so all she had to do was give any potentially uncertain character or situation a wide berth.

  She had become fascinated with the city when she was fifteen. She had escaped after a particularly vicious argument with her mother to walk in downtown Boston for three hours. She had no place to go, and at the time she had had to get away. The vibrancy of the city drew her in, bleached her thoughts and tranquilized the sudden burst of anger she had kindled. Glynnis had found a catharsis; she returned time and again. Not once had she ever been even remotely accosted.

  And so she walked, slowly, unhurriedly, her head up to watch whom and what she passed. The city fascinated her as a locus, as the site of an infinite outpouring of human passion. Each individual she passed had his story, his reason for being where he was. She often overheard their conversations as she walked by, and she tried to fill in the gaps. If an individual appeared distinct for any reason, by appearance or dress or action, she tried to imagine his life, what he did how he felt, why he looked as he did. No group was exempt. She gazed with equal curiosity at the businessmen hurrying to their trains at day’s end, the students going into and coming out of the museums near the park, schoolchildren shuffling along the sidewalks in groups, the tourist families wandering confusedly, cameras in hand and children in tow. She even regarded the winos and the panhandlers, grizzled, smelly old men who appeared as if from ether and grew more numerous as the night drew on. Her curiosity was not the clinical kind of a sociologist, for she did not care about societal types or collective behaviors. Her curiosity was personal, based solely on her wonder at the gamut of human emotions and experiences. If she could, Glynnis would have crawled into the skull of each person she passed. Humanity enchanted her; she craved understanding of it so that she might in her own way define both mankind in general and the peculiar creature that had become Glynnis Mear in particular. In the bottomless perspective of the eddies swirling about her, the cares and rejections that propelled her to take flight invariably became muted. The strange beasts that prowled within her bowed to the equally strange and wondrous beasts that created the tide sweeping her away.

  In early November, Glynnis received a letter from her mother. She dreaded these letters. Almost always before reading them she grew physically upset, her stomach tightened, her nerve ends tingled. She picked up her mail at the campus post office in the basement of the student center. When she pulled the letter from her box and saw the postmark, her initial reaction was to shove it back in and slam shut the tiny metallic door. Perhaps it would fly back to where it came. But logic, of course, dictated otherwise. She turned the letter over to confirm the return address, to confirm the recognizable script, placed it in her jacket pocket and went upstairs for coffee. She was in no hurry to read it.

  Later, she returned to her room. Lynda thankfully was out so she would have space, and no need to mask her reactions, whatever they might be. Sometimes, without knowing it, she would clench the hand not holding the letter into a tight fist and drum it against her thigh. The first time she did this Lynda had become a bit concerned—Glynnis never betrayed such tension—and had asked a string of annoying questions that Glynnis had had to sidestep, with moderate success. Lynda remained curious as to why letters from Glynnis’s family should upset her so. The letters came frequently, for her mother loved to write them, feeling the paper beneath her fingers, once or twice a week. Glynnis received three or four for every one she answered.

  She sat at her desk, tore at the end of the envelope, pulled out the letter, and read:

  Dear Glynnis,

  It’s raining here as I write this, and I’m cold. I’m sitting here with a big mug of coffee, which I dearly need. Tonight it might freeze. I’m trying to keep the heat turned down so we can save our oil. It’s too early to be worrying about winter but I’m afraid it’s a fact we have to face.

  Martha, Bobby and Peter continue as always. Martha was named cheerleader two weeks ago, but I think I told you that in my last letter. (Two letters ago, Glynnis thought.) She doesn’t get home now until nearly six. We always have supper late, sometimes in shifts. She looks very attractive in her outfit. She’ll be having the boys beat a path to our door by the end of the year, I think.

  Bobby and Peter are still playing football. Their seasons don’t end until mid-November, and then maybe the playoffs after that. Bobby’s team won again last week, so they’re still in first place. Peter’s team got beat, but Pete scored a touchdown. He was so proud. He ran about 40 yards to score it. To hear him tell it you’d think he just won the Rose Bowl all by himself—you know how excited he gets. They’re both always asking about you—’Did we get a letter from Glynnis today? What do you think she’s doing right now?’ That sort of thing. (The first not-so-subtle attempt at guilt, thought Glynnis. Stay tuned, more to come.)

  Of course, even with the three of them around, the house still seems awfully empty. I never considered myself a lonely woman. I have lots of friends. As many as I need. You remember how they filled the house after your father’s funeral? Some of them I barely knew. They kept coming for days afterward, too, always bringing food, like I was incapable of lifting a pot or pan. They forget that we were so well provided for. I guess they just wanted to help. Most of them still come around, and I see many of them at the hospital. I go out sometimes with one or two of them, to a movie or dinner, just to do something. Still, it gets quiet here. I’m not accustomed to that yet. I miss your father.

  And I miss you. (Here it comes, thought Glynnis. No more subtleties. She’s ready for the frontal assault.) I know we’ve been over it before, but for the life of me I can’t understand why you were so anxious to go away to school. What did you have to prove, Glynnis? We have always been such a close, close family. With your father gone, I could use you here. I want you here.

  You went away assuring me, assuring us, that you would come home as often as you could. Here it is November and we have yet to see you. I know you’re busy getting used to things there, but you could spare us at least a weekend, no? And now you’re hesitating about Thanksgiving for God knows what reason. That I won’t take quietly. I expect you the Wednesday before the holiday. No excuses. I’ll make your plane reservation, Philly to Logan, 6:15, USAir #628. I’ll be at the airport to pick yo
u up. Like I said, no excuses.

  You don’t even call much anymore. It’s been nearly a month. My God, Glynnis, I don’t know what to think. It’s as if you had only been a visitor with us these past eighteen years. What have we done, my lovely daughter? Please tell me. Or if you can’t, then come home, where you’ll always have a place, and hearts enough to love you forever. Come back to life for us again. We’ve already lost your father. We couldn’t bear another passing.

  With love,

  Mother of the Mears

  Glynnis sat in her chair for several minutes more, not reading but retracing with her eyes the forms of blue ink on the paper. It had become so difficult, and it drained her. Her mother now moved bluntly where before she had lightly danced. Glynnis concluded that she could postpone the inevitable no longer. She could no longer hide at a distance. She would be on USAir flight 628.

  Prior to her father’s death, Glynnis had been uncertain how she would react. She alone among the children had accepted the fact that he would indeed pass, that the illness that daily sapped his energy and lifted his sensibilities into a pain-dulled, cloudlike ether would not go away. As the oldest child, she had always been the one most prepared, most ready, to face adversity. She had had to be, and she took quiet pride in her composure and resiliency, whether shooing a bat out of her brothers’ room or repairing her sister’s torn best dress. While Glynnis had been a soft-spoken girl, it would have been a mistake to confuse silence with weakness.

  She knew her father would die, knew it months ahead of the fact and, because she acknowledged the reality, thought she had properly braced for it. In the closing stages of his disease she consciously tried to construct their lives without his presence. She tried to determine her world without him there. The result did not necessarily frighten her, although it made her sad beyond measure. The family would lose his stability, his constancy and his gentility, she concluded, but there would have to be ways to compensate. He had provided well for them financially. They were all good kids with well-developed attitudes of responsibility. His death would bind them even more closely; they would stand beside their mother, each supporting the others. We would miss him, she thought—his wit, his firmness, the way he made us laugh, his wisdom, his grand, glorious, unbounded love for all of us. We would miss him, but we would survive. We can do nothing else.

  The fault with Glynnis’s conclusions lay with their basic construction: they were purely logical, projections of their current status with one of the pieces clinically removed and the others continuing down their previous paths. But when one of the pieces, in fact the central piece, is removed, the other pieces stagger and fall out of line. They would struggle mightily to find their places again, but they never would. In falling out of line, the pieces themselves had changed.

  Glynnis herself changed most of all, in ways she could not possibly have foreseen. With Robert Mear’s death the others caved in, giving way to a grief they had suppressed for months. Glynnis’s mother initially tried to bear up stoically, but her muffled sorrow could not long be restrained. By the end of the second day after her husband’s death, she, too, had fallen into a weeping desolation. Glynnis alone functioned efficiently, tending to her family, preparing the meals, even doing the laundry. She had known what was coming. Her grief had spread itself widely over several months, and she had swallowed it in sips.

  She grew tired of the wailing and the mourning. Whether the result of some subliminal guilt of her own or the product of a mind grown weary, she began to question silently the direction of that mourning. Was it grief for the departed father and husband they were expressing, or grief for themselves? They did not see in Glynnis’s eye the spirit, the resolve, the brooding anxiety of the man just passed. They did not absorb his anguish, the bitter flame of a life wrenched from its socket, a life that had paced, that had surmounted, that had embraced all it could in the time it had, a life from which had sprung issue, a life that had experienced the tears, agonies, exultations and vivid wonder granted us by a chuckling God. They did not see it enough at all.

  Change comes. Profound, life-shaking change comes in time. There can be no escape, for we are consigned to it from our first suckle. It is what we do when we encounter the great currents and spasms of our lives that helps define us. Change comes, whether it scars us, and, if it does, whether the skin grows back thick and hard, or febrile, easily broken at the next bump.

  Glynnis Mear saw her family respond to her father’s death by changing in ways that she had not anticipated. In the dark corners of her considerations, places where she looked only reluctantly, she saw their fears, which she had dismissed, and saw their grieving loneliness, which she had compartmentalized. Grieve now for the man, if grief be in order. We are not lost, we are not forsaken. But we are changed, and changed forever: we are new pieces that cannot fit into old forms.

  CHAPTER VI

  I have found power in the mysteries of thought,

  exaltation in the chanting of the Muses;

  I have been versed in the reasonings of men;

  But Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

  —Euripides, Alcestis

  Neither Conor Finnegan nor Tom McIlweath had ever been to New York City so on the short drive up the New Jersey Turnpike they were all eyes. Their heads flipped back and forth trying to take in everything on all sides. Six young men packed into Reg Coleman’s old Chevrolet, Finnegan and McIlweath jammed knee to knee in the back seat. They were the only two of the group who took any notice at all of the bleak, grimy, smoky, belching landscape of the turnpike route in North Jersey. To the other four, this stretch of road was an annoyance to be leapfrogged before landing in the city.

  The first spires of the mythic apple came into view over a junkyard ridge. The towers of the Verrazano Bridge, bluish-green in the fading sun; the needle-point of the Empire State Building; the Deco spire of the Chrysler Building, dimming sunlight reflecting off its glossy facades; the other tall buildings rising like grass.

  “What bridge is that?” asked McIlweath.

  “Verrazano, son. The third greatest bridge in the world,” replied Lanny O’Hanlon, Conor Finnegan’s roommate.

  “What are the top two, Dice?” asked Finnegan.

  “Brooklyn Bridge, number two. And the Charles River Bridge to Somerville, number one.” Lanny O’Hanlon had grown up in the Boston suburbs.

  “Explain that last one, Mick.” Dan Rosselli leaned over from the front seat with his left arm. In the luck of the roommate lottery, Rosselli had been paired with Reg Coleman, the two of them placed next to Tom McIlweath and his mate, Rick Murdoch. Finnegan and O’Hanlon roomed down the hall. Due to logistics and common temperaments, the six of them had grown close during the year’s first weeks. On this evening, the three dorm rooms had emptied in search of adventure and alcohol in New York City.

  “A personal preference,” responded O’Hanlon. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, big guy, unless I clarify. Jeannie Anthony. The Charles River Bridge spans more than a river. On the far side rests physical ecstasy whose name is Jeannie. For that reason alone, this one bridge will be forever special. Across that bridge I became a man, and I can say that about no other bridge in the world. You’ll find your own bridge someday.”

  Rosselli turned back to the front seat, shaking his head.

  In a few more minutes the entire city came into view. An upward surge of . . . something, perhaps passion, welled through Finnegan’s breast. The sun had not quite set, and its final rays passed through a crystal blue autumn sky to paint Manhattan orange. Fitting, thought Finnegan, that my first view of this incredible city should be like this.

  What lay in its bowels, on its streets, in its buildings for one like me? An infinity of possibilities, built on an infinity of faces. Millions of people, working there, eating, walking, cursing, fighting, screwing, each passing through his own universe come together here. The lights shooting down the streets, changing in their colors, highlighting the faces here in
differing moods. No space, no air; throbbing, alive in its own plasma, breathing its iron, its glass, its stone. Sounds piercing off its sides, causing echoes, reverberations, until one could not tell where real sound dies and echo begins, a cacophony rolling back onto itself.

  Infinite variations, infinite themes. Food, drink, women, dance, music, art. What lies within the city’s sprawling, weblike system of streets? No, that is not the question. Rather, what does not lie there? If a man has a sense of himself, if he knows what he wants and why he came, how can he fail to achieve it in this glorious place?

  This journey had arisen from basic goals: the group wanted a good meal, and they wanted to get drunk. The city, with its endless restaurants and taverns, could irresistibly satisfy them.

  To add a degree of dignity, Lanny O’Hanlon had insisted they all wear sport coats and ties. He explained to them that this was indeed necessary. “No matter how shitfaced we get, we’ll look at least somewhat respectable, not like drunken misfits. Trust me on this one. The city is loaded with cops looking for an easy arrest.”

  To the casual observer they appeared in fact as proper young men who might be on their way to the theater. Tweeds predominated. O’Hanlon wore his prep school tie, Rosselli a plaid touring cap. The air created, not accidentally, was that of a polished group of young men exploring their options. The gentry had their fox hunts; young men had their night in the city.

  They crept through the dark, slow-moving tube of the Lincoln Tunnel and spun into the Port Authority Terminal, a ghastly, cavernous tomb that allowed neither light nor air. Before leaving campus they had settled upon a restaurant, cheap but pseudo-elegant, offering all the beer one could drink with the purchase of a top-end dinner. They would park the car and walk the fifteen blocks or so.

  The city at twilight is a marvelous place—fluid, twinkling and cool in the fading October day, the kaleidoscopic swirl of colors and patterns of the streets at once sunning and invigorating every sense. Conor Finnegan stepped from the immense parking facility into the pulsing streets and, in a heartbeat, felt the deepest, most profound hunger of his life.