Mary and O'Neil Read online

  Now, two weeks later, Arthur sits in his office (ten fifty-two and counting; he really has to go), composing his farewell to Dora Auclaire. Since that day in the woods they have not spoken, though they have seen each other once, in passing. Tuesday last, three days ago: Arthur, hustling back from Lawson’s Stationery with a package of pencils he didn’t really need, his head down against a gritty wind, heard the toot of a horn, and knew it was for him. He raised his head in time to see the sticker-covered tailgate of Dora’s old VW squareback as she passed (ERA NOW, No Nukes, Carter-Mondale ’76), and over the seat, a wave. A greeting? A good-bye? He froze, thinking she might stop; when he saw she wouldn’t, he raised his hand to return the wave, but she was already gone.

  What he wants now, at his desk, the blank paper before him, is to acknowledge her, to finish the wave; he wants to put into words the happiness he feels, that he loves her but will never be with her, and that this love will therefore harm no one. His office is empty; the answering machine is on, the sound turned low. Behind him, beyond the windows of his office, cars pass in an almost continuous flow, washed pale by gray November; the last leaves tremble on their stalks; above his head hovers the yellow stain of his father’s cigarettes, a ghostly halo that no coat of paint seems to cover for long. For some time Arthur simply sits there, his mind a perfect blank. Without realizing it he has nudged his consciousness to the edge of deepest memory, and his dream of 5:00 A.M. with its sounds of distant water and feeling of final flight. At last he takes a clean sheet of white paper—the legal pad was a mistake, of course—from the tray on his desk, selects a fresh pen, fat-tipped and forgiving, and begins again. Dear Dora, he writes.

  The letter is one sentence long; he signs it, love, Art. His eyes rise to the old schoolroom clock above the waiting room door: 11:38. So, after all that, there is no time to mail it. He puts the folded letter in an envelope, writes Dora’s name on it, places the envelope in his pencil drawer, and pushes it shut. Late, he thinks, late. Miriam will be waiting for him in the library foyer, clutching her books and papers and all her nervousness to her chest. The car needs gas, he will have to cash a check on the way out of town; they will arrive at the college in darkness, and there will be confusion about whether to eat dinner first, or check into the hotel, and then the question about restaurants, and if the girl will come with them, and her parents, if they are visiting too—a chain of uncertainties and potential disappointments all shouldered into motion because he, Arthur, is running late. (Not Suzie or Sarah: Sandra. He says the name aloud, to etch it in memory: “Sandra.”) He wraps his neck with a woolen scarf, douses the lamps in his office and waiting room, slides into his trench coat—a gift from Kay at Christmas—and steps outside.

  And this is when he stops—pauses and turns, his keys in one hand and his briefcase in the other, at the open office door. His back to the street, Arthur scans the waiting room, its blond oak paneling and sagging sofa and coffee table with magazines, everything perfectly still and frosted with dust; beyond, through the inner office door, his eye finds the mahogany desk where his father died, and his chair, cocked back on its springs where it came to rest when he, Arthur, stood at last to go. The image seems somehow apart from him, at once frozen and containing movement, like a photograph: the ghost of Arthur, rising. For an instant he imagines he sees this—sees himself—and a dark chill twists through him. What in the world . . . ? But it is nothing, just a trick of the light, of the time of day and his own need to hurry. He shakes his head once to dislodge this vision, steps onto the sidewalk and is gone.

  Miriam Patricia Burke, née Braverman, age fifty-four—wife to Arthur, mother to Kaitlin and O’Neil; empty-nester, librarian, caffeine addict; attendee of conferences and symposia; taker of classes (ornithology, ballroom dancing, vegetarian cooking); registered Democract, former Jew, sometime jogger (you might see her, a lone figure humping her way along a country lane in her purple sweatshirt and pants); holder of degrees in literature (Barnard) and library science (NYU); daughter of the late Daniel Chaim Braverman and his beloved Alicia; sister and trusted counsel to siblings Monica (fifty) and Abraham (fifty-seven); a woman lately described by a man she met at a party as “a gal who did good and still looked it”—Miriam Patricia, Mimi to her friends, stands in the foyer of the Vinegar County Library and wonders if she is dying.

  Two weeks ago: she discovered the lump in her left breast, by rolling over in bed. She turned, half sleeping, and a dark presence met her and then took shape, a mass the size and solidity of an acorn, pressed between the mattress and her rib cage. The awareness of it hurled her into consciousness, and a series of swift calculations to firm the moment into fact. She was in bed; it was seven o’clock; Arthur was away for the day, something about an abandoned farm, and had left for his office early, before she was even awake. She lay in bed, her brain spinning with terror—Not this! Not this!—daring herself to touch the place beneath her nightgown where the thickness was. So large! It met the tips of her fingers with something like an electric current. One in nine women; that’s what they said. But what happened to them, those one in nine? It was more than panic she felt; it was death, making its way to her door.

  And yet, as she began her day—the first day of her dying—a strange orderliness filled her, an almost fatalistic calm. She rose, washed, dressed. She sat down at the table (her cold coffee mug, by the stairs, was waiting, and a note: Price Chopper? Anything? Call, signed with the little sketch of a bear he always left for her), rose again, and treated herself to a breakfast of sausage and French toast, glazed with syrup and stamps of yellow butter. She expected not to want it once it was made, but found the opposite was true: she was unaccountably ravenous, and for the time it took her to eat her breakfast, that was all she did and thought about—sliced the toast into squares, the sausage into cylinders bursting with watery fat, forked it all onto her waiting tongue. She chewed, swallowed, reloaded; if she had been capable of it, she would have licked the plate. Then when she was finished she rinsed her plate and called her doctor and told him what she knew; by two o’clock he had his hand there, and told her not to be afraid. “Concerned,” he said, scribbling, not really looking at her. He was a plump man, bald and flatfooted, a doctor who actually still made house calls. She had known him for years, and now he wasn’t looking at her. “I’d be concerned, for now.”

  There were other doctors then, and more appointments—the ultrasound and mammogram, and the visit to the radiologist in Cooperstown to read the films, then back to Dr. Bardin and the consensus that the surgeon was the next person to see. Serious medicine, she discovered, was a kind of maze, a series of hallways down which one traveled; at the end of each was a door which one opened, hoping to find it locked; but as long as they opened, one was forced to go on. And yet, somehow, through two terrified weeks, she has told Arthur nothing. On Tuesday next—four days from this moment in the foyer, waiting for Arthur to appear so they can drive to New Hampshire—the surgeon will evaluate her; the mass will be aspirated, and then there will be a surgical biopsy, and decisions to be made. Her story will come out. Why hasn’t she told him? Her lies are not elaborate; it has proved simple enough to explain why she will be away for an afternoon, to let slip over breakfast or watching television in the evening some vague announcement about a meeting with the State Library Association in Ithaca or a booksellers’ convention in Binghamton (Arthur, glancing up from his paper or the program, his eyes distracted, saying, Well, okay, thanks for letting me know, why are you even telling me?), all to account for the three or four hours it takes to drive to a new doctor and back, and of course the mileage on her car. She is saving him, of course, from her bad news, waiting until she knows something one way or the other; she is letting him live his life for now because she loves him. But the truth is—and she has to admit it—that the longer she remains alone with the knowledge of what is happening to her, the longer she herself is saved. Under the flat institutional light of the doctor’s office there was “a mass” and a
“cause for concern,” there were “treatments” and “courses of therapy,” the problem was confined to “the affected breast,” which in turn was the property of “a white female, married, 54, no family history.” (She had peeked at the radiologist’s chart.) Nowhere, at no time, has she uttered the word cancer, nor heard it used. The breast was “affected.” The mass was “palpable.” The patient was “married.” She, Miriam Burke, was something—somewhere—else.

  But where? Outside, beyond the smoked glass of the library foyer, the sky is so white it seems to tremble, poised on the very edge of snow. Leaves whirl in the parking lot, nearly empty now of cars, a temporary oasis of calm tucked between toddler story-hour and the full-blown hurricane of the after-school rush. Miriam looks at her watch and sees that it is noon, on the button. Where is Arthur? She is already wearing her coat—she had expected to find him, waiting at the curb, twenty minutes ago—and the dry heat of the foyer has begun to close in on her, dampening her frame with perspiration. Should she go back in and call? And if no one answers—if he is neither home nor at the office—what then? For a brief moment she fears that something has happened—Arthur is not the best driver; he has seemed, of late, even more distracted, more airy, than usual—but then she realizes it is herself she is thinking of. Arthur is fine; Arthur is late. Sighing to hear herself sigh, she removes her coat, her hat, her gloves; finding then that her arms are too full, she puts the coat back on, leaving it unbuttoned, and checks her watch again. Beneath her coat and her white turtleneck sweater and her brassiere’s gleaming apparatus of wire and lace, in the folds of skin where her left breast meets her rib cage, a bright point of cancer glows.

  She is thinking, then, of her children, Kay and O’Neil, and of her daughter’s wedding, fourteen months ago. A bright day in September: all the trees had just begun to turn, beneath a sky so vastly blue—blue like neon, so blue it seemed to buzz—it was impossible not to remark on it. (Such perfect weather! they all said. And the sky!) After the ceremony everyone drove back to the house, where a tent had been erected in the yard. The memory visits her in a series of pictures: Kay in her wedding dress, a full gown studded with small white stones; her husband, Jack, whom Miriam wishes to like but can’t, handsomely serious in his gray morning coat; his hard-drinking relatives from St. Louis—nearly all of them were bankers or the wives of bankers, it seemed—smoking cigarettes and talking up a storm as the waiters in their black pants and pressed white shirts passed trays of cheese and crab puffs and tiny things on sticks; Arthur’s mother, just recovered from gall bladder surgery, rising, somehow, against the tidal pull of age, to shuffle through a dance. From the sidelines she watched the tiny floor fill up—Jack and Kay, Arthur and his mother, the bankers and their wives—turned, then, to find O’Neil beside her, smiling, then taking her elbow in his hand. C’mon, he said. The band was playing something, she guessed, you could lindy to. I won’t tell my shrink if you don’t. You do dance, right, Ma?

  She looked at him, pleasure filling her like water pouring into a vase: her grown son just back from his first two weeks of college, all smooth white teeth and rangy limbs, his eyes glowing with champagne. How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there? She hadn’t cried during the wedding but now it seemed she was about to; it was possible she would begin to cry and never stop, so she let him take her to the dance floor, place his hand at the small of her back, and steer her into and through the music—when had he learned to do this?—then spin her out to the ends of his fingers, catching her before she flew away. She saw herself, as if from the corner of her eye: a blur of blue dress, arcing like a comet’s tail away from the sun’s bright heat and light; the boy in his gray suit, taller by far than she, hurling her outward and reeling her in again. As the song’s last bars approached he folded his arms over her somehow, catching her weight as he tipped her back on one foot; her other foot rose, and before she knew what had happened her full weight was in his arms. Her hair skimmed the floor, blood filling her skull in a dizzying rush; O’Neil, her boy, had his mama in a full dip. As he returned her to a standing position she detected, around her, a smattering of jokey applause.

  As the next song began he tipped his head across the floor toward his sister and Jack, who was wiping the lenses of his heavy eyeglasses on a handkerchief.

  “Aw, he’s not so bad, Ma,” O’Neil said. He handed her a glass of ice water; she hadn’t even seen him get it. “You know? So it’d be okay to lighten up a little. At least for Kay.”

  The remark startled her. Had she been so obvious? And it was true, about Jack: he seemed rigid and fusty to her, not at all like the boys Kay had dated in high school and then college—clever, flirtatious, quick with a joke—and not at all like O’Neil or his friends, whom Miriam adored. She drank the water O’Neil had handed her, surprised to find how much she wanted it. No, she couldn’t quite bring herself to like him, much as she’d tried. From the first day Kay had brought him home to visit, she had thought it; his life was a train he expected her to board. She saw it all: the old station wagon strewn with toys and the sacks of groceries in back, the dry dinners with deans and visiting economists, the burrowing claws of life on the margins of some small college town. (And wasn’t it also true that she, Miriam, had never really gotten along with Kay? That love was one thing but getting along was something else, and there had been, well, certain difficulties, certain unnameable tensions, between them? That this gap was the very one Kay had chosen to fill with Jack? Making it, in the end, Miriam’s fault?) So, no. She didn’t like him, not one bit. But more than this, she had forgotten—actually forgotten, if for a moment—that the party was her daughter’s, not O’Neil’s. The yellow stripes of the tent, the band’s silly music, the crispness of the autumn air, and the calming presence of the waiters and waitresses gliding through the company with trays in their hands—she had forgotten that all of this has been called into being by her daughter’s decision to marry Jack.

  “Mom? Come in, Mom.”

  She looked up to find O’Neil, grinning and wagging his eyebrows. A waiter moved past, and she placed the empty water glass on his tray, trading it for a full one of champagne.

  “Ammunition,” she said then, and drank; she smiled back at O’Neil, who was drinking too. She thought about telling him to go easy on the champagne, but decided quickly not to. Beyond the walls of the tent it had begun to grow dark, blue afternoon bruising to black. One of the caterers was firing up the propane heaters that hung on poles in each of the tent’s four corners.

  “All right, hon.” She put down the empty champagne glass. “The mother of the bride will go ask her son-in-law to dance.”

  “Now you’re talking.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure that will be, you know, interesting. Jack is an interesting guy.”

  “Very,” she agreed, and touched his sleeve. “But I’m not doing it to make you laugh. For Kay, like you said.”

  And so she danced with Jack (O’Neil, solving a problem, appeared at that moment to take Kay by the arm and whisk her off across the floor); she danced with him not once but twice, and though he talked her ears off—all nonsense about his dissertation and his theories of wage and price controls, and which uncle was a partner in which St. Louis investment firm, as if she might someday have some serious money to spend in St. Louis—she found herself, for that time, liking him, almost, just as O’Neil had hoped. He was just a nervous boy, not really a man at all, uncertain how to dance with a grown woman or where to place his gaze and what to say to her while he did so (nothing; Say nothing, she thought). He was doing his very best, in other words, and what else was there to wish for? When it was over, he made a little bow, awkwardly hugged her; looking over her shoulder, he might have actually called her Mom.

  The sound of a car horn: Arthur, idling at the curb, is waving to her from the wheel of the mud-spattered Peugeot. Miriam buttons her coat again and heads outside to meet him. Their suitcases are in the backseat, as promised, and a surprise: beside
them she sees their old wicker picnic basket, with a wool blanket folded neatly on top. Greasy diesel fumes huff out the tailpipe and are whisked away into the autumn air.

  “Sorry.” He makes a flustered gesture with his hands. “I decided to pack a lunch. And I couldn’t find the goddamn cat again.”

  “You and Nestor need to work some things out.” She arranges herself in the front seat. “Anyway. You did find him? And left him some food? We’re not abandoning him to the foxes, in other words?”

  “He was under your dresser.”

  “Ah.” She nods. “I see. My dresser. Sounds like a conspiracy.”

  “Mimi, I just got held up.” His voice, though apologetic, is impatient too. He has been late for nearly everything his entire life; his voice says she should be used to it by now. “I said I was sorry. I had some work to do.”

  “So you did.” She hears herself sigh; the urge to fight has passed. “Oh, it’s all right, Art. I should be, but I’m not really mad at all.” She leans over the gearbox and—why not?—kisses her husband’s cheek. She knows this will surprise him, and it does; as she pulls away, Arthur reaches with his hand to the place on his face where she has kissed him.

  “Now,” she says, slapping her knees to tell him it’s over and to get the car in gear, “let’s go rescue our boy.”

  Arthur and Miriam, on the road; an hour of winding country lanes—woods and towns and gas stations floating by, everything denuded and bathed by a thin autumnal light—and then they join the interstate, a pulsing artery of commerce headed east into New England. In Albany they change places in the parking lot of a McDonald’s—it is just after two o’clock—continue into Massachusetts and the Berkshires, and stop at a state park near Great Barrington to eat the sandwiches and drink the soup that Arthur has packed.