Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  Monkey kept pestering her, breaking the spell. He jumped on her bed and rolled over, flagrant. She stroked his head, his pixie face. She caressed his belly, felt his heartbeat, his pulsing purr. With her fingers she encircled his neck…Such a small neck, all said. She pressed lightly. With my giant hands I could throttle you, she thought. I could crush your bones, see your eyes open wide with surprise, your sad little head slump over. He looked into her eyes. ‘Yes, you,’ she whispered. She placed her thumbs on his throat and pressed and he meowed and lashed out and fled.

  Days passed, then weeks. The grief was so deep her eyes could not weep. All good had gone out of the world. And to think that the world still went on. She saw again children playing, people eating and drinking and laughing, the purchase of life. Birds, books, the notes of a cello, the glossy green heads of ducks in a pond, all indifferent. She put the TV on mute, watched a man on a dust track in India, with trees, water, the setting sun—a huge orange orb lowering itself into the earth. She had never understood that—why the sun and the moon looked so large and near in the East. Intolerably beautiful. She had no armour left. She had no son left. Was there something she had missed? She stared at his photograph. Was there something she could have done to avert it? But the dead don’t talk back. The dead don’t talk. The dead.

  On a cold bright Saturday in October, a funeral car collected her for the Memorial Mass. She climbed into the back and embraced Jennifer and the children. She stroked the children’s heads. An image from the past rose up—a boy, a president’s son, stepping forward to salute his father’s casket.

  ‘How are you holding up, Tess?’ Jennifer asked tenderly.

  She had succeeded in keeping feeling at bay all morning. ‘Some days are better than others. You know yourself. When you wake up…’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Everyone is saying we’re all in this together, united in our grief. But…’ She frowned, shook her head.

  ‘I know. It’s so hard. I don’t want anyone to be part of this either, except you and the children.’

  Tess began to cry.

  Rachel’s hair was plaited. She stroked the plaits. The child nestled against her.

  ‘Tess,’ Jennifer said. ‘He never got to tell you. He made contact with his father. About three years ago, he found him.’

  ‘He told me. The night before he…The night he stayed over.’

  Jennifer reached across, touched her hand. ‘They met only once.’

  An image crossed her mind, a meeting in a café, an assignation. Momentarily, she felt deceived. ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Yes. I called him.’

  She looked out of the tinted glass window. Your son is dead. Our son is dead.

  ‘They have no children—he and his wife,’ Jennifer said.

  She left her hands flat each side of her on the seat. The smell of the polished leather was overpowering. Why must everything floor her so?

  ‘Can you braid hair, Nana—do you know how?’ Rachel was looking at her.

  She smiled at the child. ‘Yes, sweetheart, I can braid hair. How about I teach you next time you come by? My sister taught me when I was small. Her name was Claire.’ She said it again, abstractedly. ‘Her name was Claire.’

  They pulled up at the Church of the Good Shepherd. She looked up at the steps, the three arched doorways. People from the old neighbourhood stood outside, come to pay their respects, Willa among them.

  She held on to the handrail as she climbed the steps. ‘Will he be here?’ she asked in a low voice.

  Jennifer leaned in, whispered, ‘No, don’t worry.’

  In the middle of Mass, for some reason, she remembered that he was left-handed. Theo had inherited this trait. As a toddler she had watched it emerge, become manifest in an almost imperceptible pause, a faltering, before a hand reached out to a toy, as if a brief internal tussle was being played out, a faint quarrel between the two sides of him. In that pause, she intuited a shy soul, a vulnerability, a tender wound at the source, a little wrong that his little body was trying to right. ‘We need, in love, to practise only one thing—letting go,’ the priest said and looked vaguely upwards as if an invisible Theo was departing skywards before them. ‘God speed you,’ he added then. She had an image of birds in flight, a tunnel of light, the number Phi.

  After Communion, Esurientes. The Magnificat. She had requested it. Anima mea Dominum. Her conversation with God. She tried to recover him, his hands, his sleeping eyes, but he would not be summoned. She could not conjure his face in death. The words and the music engulfed her. She rode on waves, lost, blind, awash in silent grief. She wanted to relish the pain, the sorrow in her marrow, the dark heart taking over. Suscepit Israel puerum suum.

  She did not want it to end. When the choir began the final hymn the parting sickness rose in her. The strife is o’er, the battle done.

  At a reception back at Theo’s house catering staff in white gloves moved among the mourners pouring wine, bringing offerings on trays. She chose a morsel and chewed it but it lodged drily in her oesophagus. She shook hands with strangers and semi-strangers. She noted their pressed suits, their painted nails. Jennifer was the chief mourner. She heard their stories, laughter, memories of him. She heard them say his name. They had known him for five minutes, all of them, Jennifer too. It was in Tess that images of him dwelt, millions of them. I am his mother, she wanted to cry. I made him. Inside me. With only a drop from a man now barely remembered I forged him, I moulded him, body and soul. She watched their mouths, their moving tongues, eating, speaking, their white teeth. How can you eat, she thought, at a time like this? She looked around for someone who understood. She did not even feel sufficient pity for his children.

  In the evening the funeral car arrived to take her home. She asked to be driven to Academy Street. She was hoping for something, a visitation. She sat in the parked car, behind the blacked-out windows, his countless footsteps echoing in the streets around her. The echoes of other mothers’ sons too, and no bodies for souvenirs. She tapped the driver and he drove on, crossing Sherman, Broadway, towards the park. She remembered summer evenings, old men playing chess under trees, a winter’s day when he was four and ran out onto the frozen pond and fell through the ice, a clean vertical drop, almost soundless.

  Twilight came. The car turned around, drove south. The city was lighting up. She wondered if he had seen amazing things, nearing death. He, who had been a child of wonder, must have felt astral, aerial, metaphysical. Had the sun spun before him? Had his hands glowed white and luminous? Had he fallen, or fled from flames, his bladder failing, his bowels evacuating, but all of his past—every hour—still contained within him? She began to ponder the precise instant of his death, the tiny subtle intuition when he knew for certain he was going to die. His petrified gaze into mid-air, beyond the threshold of consciousness into the deepest centre of the stars, and then the silent folding, the inward motion, the dissolution into the dark biosphere. How had that moment not registered in her? How had she not felt a disturbance that morning, a little quiver of the self? She closed her eyes. She longed to reach him, lift him under the arms, drape him over her. She looked out the car window, the hum of the engine beneath her. Above her, a sea of tiny stars lighting the sky. She had been here before: nig
ht time, being ferried through the streets, enclosed and alone like this. And then it came to her. Stendhal. Mathilde, inside her black-draped carriage with the head of her beloved Julien on her lap, while outside the priests escort his bier to the grave. Then, in the depths of the night, burying his head with her own hands.

  There was no sign of Monkey. She stood often at her window looking down on the enclosed courtyard with the single tree. Sometimes at dusk she thought she saw him moving in the boughs. She could not sleep. The tolling of bells made her cry. She was always a heartbeat away from brokenness. Does the body go on feeling after death?

  She walked a lot, mostly in the evenings. Her feet led her back to Academy Street. She stood on the sidewalk, keeping vigil. She looked up at her old window. There, she had been happy. There, where the air of the outside world did not infiltrate. She lingered, as if waiting for a flare from the window, a sign for where to go next. One afternoon she stood across from the school, under a tree, as parents gathered at the door. In an upstairs classroom, the lights were on, the heads of children visible and, as she watched, a little hand was raised in answer, lowered again. One day from a bus she saw him. She got off and rushed back, her heart beating wildly. She searched the street, frantic, peered into stores. Back and forth she trudged along the pavement, crying. She entered a church where a congregation was gathered for a funeral. She sat in a pew, stood, knelt, prayed for the dead man whose photograph sat on the coffin. At the end, with incense wafting in the air, she stepped into the aisle and walked with the mourners behind the coffin.

  The talk was relentless. On the TV, the radio, in the streets—everywhere—the clamour, the arguments, the outrage, the heroes and the villains, all tormenting her. She wanted none of it, wanted the world to go mute. At night it rained. In the mornings the city gleamed. She tried to return to her books, but had little will. She was afraid of certain thoughts, of being devoured by certain thoughts. She began to dread nightfall, heartbreaking twilights. She drew down the blinds, shut out the city. His name resounded in her rooms, in her footsteps, a chant, an echo, a hide-and-seek cry. The-o, The-o.

  ‘Do you believe in an afterlife?’ she asked Willa. It was December and she had gone to visit Darius. She sat by his bedside. His skin was stretched dry and tight over his bones, his voice little more than a whisper. Afterwards she and Willa walked in the park. It was cold. The cold got into her bones these days. She had been wondering lately about God, if He had been merely a habit in her life. ‘Or do we only have this life?’

  Willa considered the question. ‘Oh, God, Tess, if there’s no afterlife…I don’t know.’

  They walked on in silence. She pulled up her collar. When he was small she had told Theo about Claire, his aunt in Heaven. For a while afterwards, he had been obsessed with Heaven. Will you be you and I be me in Heaven? How will I find you in the crowd? Will we be jealous in Heaven?

  No, Theo, there’s no jealousy in Heaven.

  ‘Maybe I’m just a coward,’ Willa said. ‘But I’m hedging my bets. Why—what are you thinking, Tess?’

  She had always had an inkling, an awareness of something other. God, she supposed. Even as a child, she had been in the habit of awe, drawn to the sacred, to lyrical intuitions and distant heavens. She thought of her mother and father now. She would, if she were to meet her father again, be a little afraid. In his presence she would be a child again.

  ‘I don’t know. Life goes by so quickly. Nothing seems to make much sense any more. But I have to believe, Willa. I have to believe. Because I cannot bear the thought of never seeing Theo again.’

  She began to cry inside. If he had died young, if he had drowned in the pond that day, how much he would have been spared. He would have been spared his catastrophic ending. As it was, now, he had been spared old age. She remembered patients nearing the end in the hospital and the great effort, the immense straining, that each body made to hold on to life. Had his life, his thirty-seven years, counted for something? Had it been enough?

  They came upon a dead bird on the path, tiny, stiff, its little chest upturned to the world. They stood before it in silence. She was arrested by grief, and pity. Willa poked it with her shoe, and then withdrew, her thoughts likely with Darius then. She would soon be his widow, his witness on earth. There was no name for what she, Tess, was: an old childless mother. There would be no witness to her life. No Claire, no Theo. Oliver was probably gone too, lying in some potter’s field.

  She spent Christmas with Jennifer and the children. They would soon forget her, drift from her life. One night in January, she woke in the dark. A shadow crossed the room. Theo, come in search of the missing half of his soul, she thought, yearning to be reunited. She remained very still, waiting. With every breath she edged a little closer to her last. Please.

  In the morning the light was different. She turned her head. There, outside on the window ledge, sat Monkey. She jumped out of bed and let him in. Warily, he watched her. Then he came and rubbed against her legs, and when she bent to stroke him, her tears flooded back.

  Snow fell at Easter. On the streets the wind buffeted from all sides. One morning, the seasons changed. In her kitchen she brewed coffee, split an English muffin, slid it into the toaster. The radio was on.

  She poured her coffee, raised her mug. Could a woman sit in her kitchen and drink coffee and wait for a muffin to pop in her toaster, and then smother it with apple jelly and bite into it and not weep for her dead son lost beneath the rubble? Could she listen to the news, the weather, the stock reports, the live phone-ins full of grief and outrage, and mentally calculate what her stock was worth? And still be a mother?

  The pale sun streamed in, fell on the pot of jelly, and for a second she felt herself halted. In all her life she had never really known what to do or how to act. She had always been waiting for something or someone to guide her, and age had not altered that essential self.

  ∼

  She returned, once, to Easterfield. It was May and she went back for Denis’s funeral. His son Michael met her at Shannon and swept her along newly built motorways, through towns and villages whose names she could barely recall. He turned onto the avenue at Easterfield and they drove slowly in dappled light under the trees. She would know this place anywhere on earth. She would feel it forever in her bones, every stick and stone of it.

  The old house was gone. Denis had built a bungalow thirty years earlier and they were all assembled there. Evelyn, Maeve, widows now, their families. Denis’s widow, his grown children, all seated around the coffin. Grandchildren wandering in from the garden. They all embraced her. Her sisters cried, whispered, ‘Sorry.’ She touched Denis’s cold hands and blessed herself.

  She could not, at first, find her bearings. She felt herself among strangers, kind curious strangers. She sat in the unfamiliar kitchen and the talk flowed, words upon words. She wondered if the past was real at all, and what, if anything, remained of it, apart from pain, the memory of pain—its vestiges, like old stumps. She thought how distant the dead had become, lost in the haze of time, the disappeared. Theo had not disappeared. He was close, even as she sat there, as close to her as her jugular vein.

  Evelyn looked at her. ‘You never found Oliver,’ she said.

  She shook her head. She stood accused, and someh
ow culpable. But Evelyn took her hand. ‘Claire, Oliver…And your own boy, Tess…all gone, and so young…Do you know what? All America ever brought this family was misfortune.’

  In the afternoon people came to pay their respects. She walked outside. All of the outbuildings—the coach house, the barns, the arch leading to the orchard—were intact. She felt at a loss for the house but she could not blame Denis—it had been impossible to maintain, and had fallen derelict and dangerous after they had moved out. One does one’s best for one’s family.

  ∼

  She entered the orchard, entered a great silence, a farm girl again, scarcely disturbed by time. The old fruit trees bent low, ivy-covered, stunted. She walked to the far end and leaned against the wall. The stones were warm, mellow from hundreds of years’ sun, acquiescent. She laid her head back and she was caught by something—the flicker of sky, intimations of eternity—and for one pure moment she was free and everything was revealed and everything resolved, the final question—the only question—resolved, and she was being delivered, given her first fleeting glimpse of landfall. A fall of memories loosened and images of happiness returned. Afternoons with Captain and Mike Connolly, her father in a straw hat in a yellow hayfield, her mother at an upstairs window, Oliver at her breast. The lull of Eden, of ancient perfection. Had this been her destination all along, this return to the source, the starting point, the only place she had ever belonged?