Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  One Saturday they rode a bus across the George Washington Bridge out to New Jersey for the christening of Claire’s new baby. Fritz carried bags with containers of fried chicken and bean salad and beer. Tess brought gifts for Claire’s little boy, Patrick, and the new baby, Elizabeth, named after their mother. Peter met them at the bus station and drove them to a street of houses with verandas and driveways and sloping lawns, the kind that had become familiar to Tess from TV.

  Molly and Fritz took charge of the kitchen. Claire took Tess upstairs to see the new baby. The sight of the child moved her. She thought her a miracle. Out of Claire she had come, from Claire’s flesh and blood. So close to Tess’s own biology, the same blood coursing through her veins. The blood that binds us all, she thought, now and in the past. She looked down at the child, at the closed eyes. A clean slate, pure and unblemished. Not long born, not long out of the other realm.

  There was a little whimper and then a cry and Claire lifted the child and began to nurse her. Tess went to leave but Claire whispered to stay. The blinds were down and a small lamp cast a pink glow in the room. She caught sight of Claire’s bare white breast and the engorged nipple directed into the child’s mouth.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ Claire said. She did not look up. ‘We’re moving to California. Peter’s being transferred out there.’

  There were footsteps on the landing, a child’s voice. Patrick pushed open the door. ‘You’ll come out and visit us, won’t you?’ Her hand, as she reached out to touch her son’s head, was trembling.

  They drove to the church for the christening. In the afternoon, guests filled the house, the children running around. The adults mingled in the open-plan rooms and spilled out onto the back yard. At dusk they were getting a little drunk, laughing, leaning against walls. Tess stood apart, sipping a beer, keeping an eye on the pool, the children. She looked at her watch, added five hours. A map of America came to mind, the west coast, images from TV of wagon trains crossing wide open plains. Peter was talking to two men and a young woman, work colleagues. He was smoking a cigarette, holding a glass of wine. He leaned and bumped softly against the woman, and said something. The garden lights came on. Tess moved to a quiet corner. There were earthquakes in California. Her father’s brother had gone there years ago and never returned.

  The young woman moved away from Peter, drifted in and out of other groups, touching men’s arms. Claire came out and stood with Tess, smiling. She seemed smaller, thinner. Then her eyes moved off and her smile waned. Tess turned and watched Peter stride across the yard and in one swift wordless movement he picked up the young woman and threw her in the pool.

  In the city she felt the stir of anxiety on the streets, and day by day it entered her. On the TV, missiles, warheads, ships steaming towards Cuba. The end of the world. Fritz sat quiet and sombre. In the mornings she felt the foreboding, the impending doom, gigantic explosions and firestorms flashing across her mind. She thought of home, her father, Evelyn in a houseful of kids, danger floating close. No one was safe. One day she saw a rich woman emerge from a building, usher children into a taxi. Everywhere an exodus, people holding their breaths, looking at one another. As if we are all brothers and sisters, Tess thought. One night the president addressed the nation. She was mesmerised by his beauty, his pain, as if the words themselves afflicted him. Thank you and good night.

  And then the ships turned back. We were all brought together in fear and mutual need, she wrote to her father, and now its passing has brought something else—hope, love—down on the streets. She had found a new language—this country had given her new ways to think and speak. One Saturday afternoon Fritz took her up to Loew’s Paradise Theatre in the Bronx. In the foyer was a fountain of Italian marble and, all over the walls, murals and hanging vines. In the dark theatre she sat deep in a velvet seat and when she looked up there was a moonlit sky above her, and stars twinkling and clouds passing by. A week later she returned to the Bronx and bought five dresses in a dress store, one lovelier than the other, because she could. She took the subway back down to 181st Street and walked out into the autumn sun and floated along the sidewalk, catching herself for a moment in that concentrated life.

  6

  MONTH BY MONTH in that first year Tess discovered a rhythm to her life in the city. The early-morning rise, the subway ride downtown, the day spent among patients and colleagues on the ward. On Sundays when she was off duty she went to Mass with her aunt Molly at the chapel of St Elizabeth’s Hospital. On other days she went to the library on West 179th Street and browsed the bookshelves and sat at a table reading. She came to understand that she could live almost anywhere, so long as there was someone of hers—her own kin—there. Claire had moved to San Francisco earlier in the year. Still, she is in the country, she thought, she is in the same land.

  Occasionally, she went shopping or up to a céilí in Gaelic Park in the Bronx with other Irish nurses. She longed to give herself up to their good cheer and lightness. Being among people left her feeling lonely, even, at times, endangered. She felt divided from others. Their talk, their dreams, seemed to her incidental, artificial, something that had to be got through en route to the real conversation, the heart of the matter. She found herself waiting for someone who shared her sensations. One day, at a patient’s bedside, at a tender moment approaching death, she looked into the attending physician’s eyes and he looked into hers and she felt an affinity with him. It was this she craved. She had had intimations of it in books. Perhaps such things, even such people, existed only in books. She was reading Doctor Zhivago then. She sat in a corner of the cafeteria at lunchtime, transported. She was Lara in the battlefield hospital. She was lost to Yuri. She journeyed in the snow, felt their grief. Sometimes she cried. The feelings called to mind moments from childhood, when she was distant from herself but experienced the same peace, as if she were entering another dimension, one which contained the answer to a question she could not yet form. She looked up from her book. Though she felt sure it existed she was not sure such knowledge could be attained or recovered. Or at least not by her. She did not even know what the question was, aware only of vague intimations. Such knowledge was beyond her, requiring more intelligence or learning, or a higher faculty of feeling, than she possessed. At this realisation she grew dispirited. She rose from the table and went down in the elevator and returned to the bustle of the ward, to the clanking of trolleys and bedpans and the humming of machines.

  ∼

  In early spring she transferred to the 168th Street campus of the hospital and to the private wing, the Harkness Pavilion. There she befriended another Irish nurse, Anne Beckett from Wexford, who had come out several years before and was now engaged to be married. Together they went to the St Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue and just before Easter they rented an apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up, at 471 Academy Street in Inwood. It was unfurnished except for a single bed in each bedroom. They bought a table, four chairs and a sofa from a couple upstairs. They bought delph and pots and pans, and brightly coloured curtains for the bedrooms. They shared evening meals at the kitchen table and Anne told her about the movie stars and singers who had been patients. Marilyn Monroe had been in the psychiatric wing, though Anne had not nursed her. She had nursed Elizabeth Taylor and Mrs Roosevelt and Cole Porter, who had a wooden leg that he named Geraldine.

  Tess wrote to Oliver. Oh, Oliver, you hav
e to come out. There’s room now at Aunt Molly’s. I think about you and Denis and Dadda a lot. And Dadda’s terrible moods, and his silence. I doubt he will ever change. Maybe Easterfield does that, makes everyone silent. There’s nothing for you there, Oliver. You can be anyone here. Anything you dream of. How is Denis? Poor Denis…I miss you all. I dreamt of Mike Connolly the other night. He was standing by the old well in the yard. Do you remember that time Dadda sank the pump, Oliver? Denis climbed down for a sample and Mike held the rope…

  ∼

  One Sunday morning in May she woke to the sound of talk and laughter in the kitchen. Anne had come off night duty and Tim, her fiancé, was there, and Anne’s brother and other boys who had recently come out from Ireland. They were frying eggs and waffles. When she entered the kitchen and saw them around the table she was reminded of summer evenings in Easterfield long ago when the tea was being readied and the wireless was on, before the silence took hold. The radio was on now too, the baseball scores being read in a beautiful melliferous voice, but they were hardly listening, full of their own talk. Their familiar accents pleased her. A shy boy from Kerry got up and gave her his chair, moved away with his plate of eggs. She looked around at their open happy faces and sat among them.

  Later they left for the park, urging her to follow. She sat among the dishes, the day stretching before her. She looked at the egg stains on the plates, the empty mugs, the chairs pushed back. Something of the others still drifted there. The sun shone in the window and fell on the pot of marmalade, on the chunky orange peel inside.

  She walked the few blocks to Broadway. Up ahead she saw the trees of Inwood Hill Park. She turned left, entered the library at Broadway and Dyckman, its hush and concentrated silence bringing contentment. On a table a large art book lay open. She turned the pages, dazzled by the colours, the yellows and oranges and blues, their intensity. A street café at night. A strange simple bedroom that exerted a lure, a childish longing. A cornfield with crows that made her heart collapse. She stared at the field and the crows, sad and familiar. She began to read. The artist had cut off his own ear, died by his own hand. She turned each page. Letters to his brother. The kindness of Theo moved her. And the life, the words…

  I always have the impression of being a traveller going somewhere, to some destination…I feel in myself a fire…the passers-by just see a little smoke…I know that I could be an utterly different man. There is something inside me.

  Walking along the street, for no reason, she began to cry. She tried to focus on her footsteps, beat a rhythm between each tree. When her tears passed she saw things clearly. Each person’s face, the nose and eyes, the buttons on their shirts, the shivery pattern of leaves. Beauty everywhere. After a little distance a space began to open inside her, the aftermath of pain. She stood on the sidewalk, as in a dream. Silence. Light. She was ready to be transformed.

  She entered the park in late afternoon. Across the green she saw them, sprawled on a gentle slope before a blazing flower bed, laughing, smoking, the group larger now. She was approaching along the path from the north. She saw him instantly, a stranger, a little apart. Long, lean, blond. He was talking to Tim and when she came close he looked up and fell silent and she felt a powerful signal. In the minutes that followed he did not look at her once, and she could not bear to look at him either.

  His name was David. He was a cousin of Anne’s, out from Dublin, working for the last nine months with a firm of lawyers in midtown. He reminded her of a brighter, quieter Oliver.

  Later, she found herself sitting beside him. He reached out a hand and passed her a soda. She saw he was a citóg and watched him closely after that. He had been to university. She felt inferior, always, among city people, among the educated. He spoke with a city accent. She became acutely aware of her own. She told him she had trained in the Mater Hospital.

  ‘I grew up in Glasnevin, not far from the Mater,’ he said. He smiled at her. She told him she used to visit the Botanic Gardens on her days off. She saw a monkey puzzle tree there. She had never heard of a monkey puzzle tree before that.

  ‘The Gardens are just around the corner from my home,’ he said. They might have passed each other on the street. He was silent then, as if reconsidering what he was about to say. His arms were tanned, with a thick crop of gold hairs.

  ‘When I was ten,’ he said, ‘I saw a tree there struck by lightning. I was with my brother. It went up in flames in front of us. I was terrified, rooted to the spot…but under a sort of spell too.’

  She told him about her work, her home, the little groves of oak and beech. His legs were long, strong, muscular. The sight of them made her shy.

  ‘I have an uncle, a teacher, in Australia,’ he said. ‘He told me in a letter once that in the bush, years ago, when the police were hunting down outlaws like Ned Kelly they’d burn a tree to keep warm on cold nights. They’d find a dead tree and set it alight there where it stood, and gather around it. Then the outlaws would see the burning tree in the distance and make off, gaining ground through the night.’

  He had beautiful hands. He was so far from Denis and Oliver, his life so polished, that she felt a pang of pity for them, for all they lacked. At this thought she felt suddenly disloyal.

  ‘Do you like it here, in New York?’ she asked.

  He looked out across the park. ‘Yes, I suppose. I don’t like the evenings. Late summer evenings when…’

  He did not finish. He took out cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit his own and exhaled. She was aware of every breath, the flex of every muscle, where his eyes fell, his hands. To be this watchful, this attuned to a man, a stranger, excited and confused her. He lit another cigarette and looked pensive. He was on the point of telling her something else, but he stood up and moved away, and she felt the parting like a loss.

  Later, when they drew near again he did not say much. He gave off an air of mild irritation, as if regretting all he had told her. Then a silence, a pall, began to envelop them. It took all her talk away.

  7

  FROM A DISTANCE he exerted a great force on her. She craved solitude to conjure him up again, finding significance only in the recall of that day. Everything moved her. Every sight and sound, every song, every man’s face—the whole city—turned him over to her. She went out to Brooklyn one morning with Anne to help choose Anne’s trousseau. In the afternoon they left the shops, each enwrapped in her own fantasy. They walked along a street with a slight incline where kids rode bikes along the cracked pavement, calling out to one another in the bright sun. She gazed at the clapboard houses and imagined the back yards and clotheslines and husbands sitting in the shade. She began to imagine coming home to this, entering, calling out ‘I’m home, honey,’ and he in the kitchen peeling onions, frying meat. The meat browning on the pan, the smells, the sounds of the kitchen. She, pausing in the hall, hearing the children outside, breathing deeply before entering the kitchen, then standing behind him, laying her face against his back. Home. She shook herself out of the reverie and smiled at Anne. They rode the subway back into the city, trundling along under the hot streets into the heart of Manhattan.

  Oliver came out in June, and found work in construction. The American sun bleached him blonder. At weekends he joined Tess and Anne and their social group. They went out to New Jersey for a Fourth
of July garden party. Oliver was handsome beyond words. His blue-eyed charm reminded her of the Kennedys. If you weren’t my brother, she thought, I’d marry you. There was no one to whom she felt closer than to her siblings, no greater bond. She thought of David constantly. Already he had forgotten her. She felt the approach of hurt. She tried to glean things from Anne, careful not to betray the tug she felt. The longing to see him became a kind of sickness.

  And then, one Saturday, there he was, on the beach at Coney Island when they arrived. Sitting on a towel in their crowded patch near the water, smoke trailing from his fingers. Emblazoned in the sun, the glittering sea before him. He looked up, wordless, unyielding. But something in his eyes—a flash, a shock—before he averted them, and she knew she had not been wrong, that what she had felt was the truth. She retreated, and watched him from a safe distance. When he removed his shirt she saw his chest, his skin, his bare beauty. She thought of a deer; stark, sleek, nervy. Now and then he looked out at the ocean with a far-off gaze. In an instant he could break her heart.