Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  Sometimes, in the months after Molly’s passing, she longed for the nearness of a blood relative. She went down to 183rd Street to visit Fritz. He was sitting in his old chair, frail, drinking. He talked about Molly. Later she asked about Oliver. He searched and found Oliver’s last known address. The next day she took the subway to Queens, to a brownstone boarding house and an Irish landlady who remembered him, remembered that he’d worked at the Ford plant in Jersey and on a construction site in Staten Island. That afternoon Tess stepped onto a building site in Staten Island, walked uneasily in the shadow of a great metal skeleton, amid noise and smells that reminded her of childhood and the new tar roads being laid. Under the gaze of male eyes, she spoke to the foreman, Tubridy. He had hired Oliver and would do so again, he said, if he turned up. He had not stayed long. He was a drinker. He was there one day and gone the next, and no sign of him ever since.

  She walked away. She remembered warm evenings that first summer, walking downtown with him, this golden, blue-eyed brother, stopping to listen to the notes of a saxophone drifting out of a window. He could be anywhere now. He could be happy. He could be dead. He might have opted to drop from the grid and disappear. This was America. As she walked along unfamiliar streets she wondered if the self she had become, and the self that Oliver had become, and the self that Claire had been, would have been any different if they’d had a mother who lived.

  ∼

  One day, cleaning, she found on top of her wardrobe a scroll of charts, handed to her at the school door one afternoon by Theo’s fifth-grade teacher. It was not the words he had used that day—ordinary enough words of praise, and few—but the way he had hovered, and the look of earnestness, as if seeking a way to make her understand that his offering signified something.

  She unrolled the charts now again, five, six of them. The Greek gods on Mount Olympus—with illustrations and carefully penned accounts of the twelve gods and goddesses—then further down the Wooden Horse at Troy, the Cyclops, Penelope. Other charts: the American War of Independence, its battles and heroes; the countries of Europe, colour-coded in pastels, the demographic details boxed inside each country. She admired the neat handwriting, the perfect lines ruled in pencil. He had lain on his belly on the floor at night, writing, drawing, the TV volume turned low, the soft back and forth sound of his pencils as he shaded in. He had been ten then, and never happier.

  Now, in his teenage years, there appeared to her a dulling, a dimming, of his natural curiosity, a diminution of his thirst for knowledge. He no longer read for pleasure. He spent his evenings in his room, lying on his bed, listening to music and staring at the ceiling. On Saturdays he worked in a record store, and slept all day or stayed over with friends through Sundays. She could not broach her concerns. Conversations were sparse and even minor enquiries about his day resulted in monosyllabic replies or sudden rebuffs that wounded her. His looks began to alter too. His face lost symmetry and proportion and refinement. His jaw jutted out, rough-hewn, giving him a raw unfinished look. His limbs, his gait, his whole bearing now seemed at odds with the boy she knew him to be. These changes were temporary, she knew, normal, and yet they left a disquiet in her and one evening when he opened the refrigerator and the haunting white light crossed his face she was struck by the awful thought that he was growing gradually deformed before her eyes.

  And then, little by little, year by year, his features settled and his face realigned, and he became complete. And she had been mistaken—there had been no diminution. His curiosity had simply narrowed, grown more focused, gathered inwards. Instead of its previous wide reach his hunger now had an intense clarity and concentration. She would find, strewn on his desk and on his bedroom floor, pages of calculation, mathematical equations, algebra. He made sense of it all. He could prove theorems, solve complex problems in trigonometry, calculus, his tiny figures like hieroglyphics. He could probe the mystery of infinite numbers. Her heart soared. He will be a scientist or an architect or an engineer, she thought. He will one day build a great bridge, or a fine house on a hill, ringed by cypresses and an air of gloom. She stood at his door one evening as he studied. He was hunched over his desk. She wished he were small again. On the window ledge a prism, a pyramid, a multi-coloured cube from his childhood.

  ‘Dinner’s ready…What’re you at?’ She longed to find a way back to him.

  Without moving his head he prodded the cover of a textbook with his finger.

  She hovered in the doorway. ‘I had no aptitude for Math in school,’ she said. She shook her head in mock disbelief. ‘How do you do it, Theo, how do you understand all those symbols? It’s beyond me—like a foreign language!’

  He stared at her coldly. ‘Is it now? Beyond you? Ever think you might be beyond people? You—and your own fucking foreign language.’ He said each word slowly, brutally.

  She could barely walk back to the kitchen.

  The next evening he emerged from his room and did not speak, a book propped at the table as he ate. He had begun to judge her.

  ‘His name is David,’ she said. ‘He’s Irish too, from Dublin, but lives here…or did anyway. We met through mutual friends and had a brief…friendship…He joined the Air Force and I didn’t hear from him. When you were born I wrote him and told him. I sent two letters. He never replied.’ She looked at him, waited. ‘He’s a lawyer here, somewhere in the city. He’s married now. You may have brothers and sisters.’

  He said nothing. His face was sullen, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

  She got up and went to her bedroom and returned with the newspaper clipping, and left it by his plate.

  ‘That’s all I know, all I have,’ she said. ‘You have his name now. I do not know his date of birth or his address or anything else.’

  She let him read.

  ‘One day you will want to find him,’ she said distantly.

  He asked no questions then or in the days following, or after.

  She told Willa.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ Willa said softly. ‘It’s hard, but the kid will survive. There are worse things than having no papa.’

  A long contemptuous silence ensued, times when he simmered, seethed, bristled at just the sight of her in the kitchen. It would have been easier if he’d kicked down doors. She left money and notes on the table, delayed her return from work in the evenings. At weekends he stayed out late, drinking. Her heart was breaking.

  One Saturday morning before his graduation a girl emerged from his room into the hall. She looked up, her hair tossed, a jacket in her hand, and saw Tess. Startled, she took a step towards the kitchen door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know…I’m very sorry.’

  She was young, no more than sixteen, blonde. Her voice was soft, kind, ashamed. Tess looked at her and a fear, an irrational mindless fear that had lain dormant in the far reaches of her mind, unearthed itself: that out there, somewhere in the city, Theo had sisters, brothers. They might live nearby. They might go to the same school, to the same bars and ball games. She could not speak or even nod to the girl. Rising from her mind was the image of her son naked, in the sexual act, rearing up on his sister.

  In the following weeks a shift occurred, and a slight truce took hold. Small offerings were made. She found, on the table one evening, a
school assignment, The Golden Mean, scored with an A+. She leafed through the paper, pages with tables and columns of numbers, text too—the longest entitled ‘The Fibonacci Sequence’. She read the overview, random paragraphs, the conclusion. She felt a surge of pride, and joy at his return, at the possibilities of his youth and all that lay before him.

  There had been a time, briefly, in adolescence when she had feared for him. He had frightened her with his subterranean silence, and a stare so deep she had felt imperilled. She would picture him at school slouched at his desk, distracted, perplexed, his eye scanning the text and then the air, as if searching for the equation for human feeling. And then interludes when his talk grew profuse, fragmented, euphoric, and he could not sleep. Everything—his whole being—disturbed by a storming of the spirit.

  She felt his struggle, as if a part of him—some deep Theo part—yet needed begetting. Or was being begot. She waited for that part to be switched on, for the faint little bleeps to sound, and for him to come to. More than once her fear spiked into panic that what she was witnessing were the beginnings of mania, or a schizophrenic breakdown. She prayed. She made deals with God. She worried that he had been bequeathed something terrible by his father, which had lain latent within him until now. She wrestled with herself, feared that her flawed mothering had caused a rupture and unseated some deep psychological disturbance.

  And then, in his late teens, the storm began to abate. Clipped by a demon, she thought. A darkness fell on him for weeks, as if he were grieving for an ancient fabulous self, mourning its loss at a deep cellular level, feeling the taming, the tempering, the toll it was taking to beget his mortal self and allow the entity that was Theo to emerge and live and move and have its being in the world.

  I3

  IT HAPPENED FIRST one Sunday morning at Mass, and again, the next day, in line at the hospital cafeteria—the urge to touch a man. Any man, any man’s hand, any man’s arm. Or lean against a man, leave her head on his shoulder. In crowded places, in shops and buses, she had to fight the impulse to reach out. A face was not essential. The view from behind, the broad shoulders, the back of a head, a neck. A hirsute hand on a wallet, on a tray moving alongside her in the hospital canteen, could bring on the urge. Her fingers twitched and she longed to touch skin, lay her hands on a head, be privy to a man. One night at a retirement party for a colleague she stood in the corner of the room watching people, couples, their body language, their secret signs. Her friend Priscilla was at one end of the room, her husband at the other. Tess saw him turn, find his wife. She saw the look they exchanged. Later at the bar he kissed the top of her head. She had an image of them driving home later, whispering, giggling, as they undressed in the dark, their son sleeping in the next room. She looked around at all the wives. Did they realise their good fortune? How, at any moment, day or night, they could lie against their men, lay claim to them, lay their heads on chests, their hands on heads.

  On the crowded subway a few days later a man seated next to her accidentally touched her foot. He was wearing a light suit, navy blue, expensive. His beautiful hands rested on his legs. His left leg was partly touching hers. She felt the rise and fall of his breath. Under the fabric his thigh muscles flexed. Weak, she left her hands on her lap. The need to touch him was immense. The train curved, eased into a bend and her body leaned lightly against his. She closed her eyes, imagined him raising an arm, taking her into his wingspan. He shifted to free himself. Then the train was speeding into a station and he was on his feet, moving along the aisle. She rose and pushed through and stood behind him. He was poised to exit. Outside, on the platform, a million eyes, and the door opened with a hiss and, in the crush and split second that his body leaned forward, she put a hand on his arm and pressed her face into his back, and simultaneously closing her eyes and inhaling she moved with him, in communion with him and with the body of passengers alighting from the train. Pardon me. Her voice was clipped, confident, her tone sincere, as if she had merely bumped him accidentally, absent-mindedly, so preoccupied with life was she, and then carried on, stepping to the left when he went right, going, against her will, on her way.

  On the platform, she stood, dazed. Out in the streets people pushed by her. She moved along the sidewalk, heat coming off the pavement. She looked up at the street numbers—she was in the 80s, far from home. She looked in gleaming shop windows, cafés, restaurants with diners outside under awnings. The sun beat down. She crossed onto quieter streets. Fine hotels, apartment buildings with doormen. She looked up at the windows. She saw, in her mind’s eye, lovers in shaded rooms, naked, spent. Emerging out onto the street later, holding hands, all loved up. All loved up. Those were the words Willa had used one time telling a story when she and Darius had returned from a vacation. There we were, she’d said, heading out for dinner, all loved up.

  She turned right, crossed Third Avenue, then Second, First, York, drawn by the promise of water. She entered a park and followed the path. Families with children, young couples, old men with dogs and sorrowful eyes seeking the shade of trees. Then she was standing on the edge of the East River. Seagulls’ wings glinted in the sun. On the other side, in a blue haze, Queens. It was there he had lived. A boat passed and left behind a trail of white foam. She watched it spread and diffuse, until there was almost no trace left. Watching the swell and motion of the waves and the surf, she felt seasick. She tried not to break. She looked around. Under the still surface of the day she saw turmoil everywhere. She thought of the water that had lain quietly calm, each tiny drop, each molecule, restful, suddenly wrenched, catapulted through a metal rotary, tossed back out into the turbulent current, reeling, confounded, changed.

  ∼

  She confessed her compulsion to Willa. They were sitting under trees in Inwood Hill Park, behind them a hill of old stone, like a quarry. They had brought a small picnic, and wine.

  ‘I think there’s something wrong with me. I’ve started looking at men, strange men,’ she said shyly.

  Willa eyed her, beamed a smile. ‘Go on!’

  She winced. ‘On the subway, in church, you know, just watching them…I can’t help myself. It’s turning into an obsession. Next I’ll be stalking them!’

  ‘Oh Tess, you’re just a real ripe healthy woman, that’s all!’ She gave a little smile. ‘We’ll have to find you a suitor, Miss Lohan. We’ll have to find you some gorgeous gentleman caller!’

  She expected Theo to enter a field of science, or the humanities. She thought this was where his sensibilities lay. But he chose business at Fordham College. For a time he continued to live with her, before moving into a house in Harlem with a girlfriend and two friends. He took all his belongings, his records. She did not think he would ever come back. Little by little, since childhood, he had grown further from her. She wondered if he had ever searched for his father. He called her each Friday; their conversations centred on his studies and finances. Now and then he dropped by. In person he gave off an air of irritation. She felt estranged from him. She felt his resistance to being fully known by her, as if time spent together in naked silence would reveal something he could not bear. And yet, at times, she saw understanding in his eyes. When he rose to leave a softening occurred, a hesitation in his limbs. She knew then that he had gleaned the parting sickness in her. She felt the terrible tug and conflict within him and wanted to free him. In that moment she braced herself, summoned all her
strength, affected an air of busyness, of a life fully engaged, and sent him on his way. Her rooms could barely endure the silence left in his wake.

  No gentleman caller wooed her. Some tried, but no love materialised. She went on several hopeful dates with Priscilla’s brother-in-law, a high school teacher, a great bear of a man whose ebullience and over-eagerness to please ate up all her energy. She began to see an older man, a doctor at the hospital—a divorcé. He took her to an elegant restaurant and with a little wine inside her she felt beautiful, and in the candlelight he was not unhandsome. His manners were impeccable. He had just returned from Rome. But in his hands, in his darting eyes and self-conscious awareness of himself in the world, she sensed an otherness, felt him a stranger. She knew already he was not a fit. In her life, ever, there were only a few people who had been a fit, with whom she had felt understood. Her mother, Claire, David, Willa. In his childhood, Theo. The longing to be with them persisted, a longing so deep and eternal it must have had ancient origins.

  Out in the street her doctor hailed a cab. ‘May I kiss you?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘I haven’t been kissed in quite a while.’