Mary and O'Neil Read online

  They arrive at the college after six, its great buildings ablaze with light. Despite the cold, students are everywhere. Doors and windows are open; music pours forth across the little town. They check into their hotel on the edge of campus and then telephone O’Neil in his dorm room. In the background Arthur can hear something like a party going on—loud voices, doors slamming, a girl laughing over the sound of a horn section and twanging guitars.

  “Sorry,” Arthur says, “we got a bit of a late start.”

  “What?” O’Neil says. “Will you guys shut the hell up? Hang on, Pop.” There is a muffling silence as his son smothers the receiver to yell something over the music. When his voice comes back on the line, the music is gone. “We’re all just cramming for midterms here. Very intense stuff.”

  “I could tell. Sorry we’re late.”

  “Sounds like a story.” O’Neil laughs at something Arthur can’t see. “Mom there?”

  “In the shower. Have you had your fill of fun already, or do you still want to eat?”

  “When didn’t I? The stuff they serve here is like army rations. Want to know what they gave us last night? Salmon loaf and pea-cheese sauce. We thought it was a joke, like Eat this, and that’s what you’ll do: you’ll pee cheese-sauce.”

  “Lovely,” Arthur says, laughing. “Bring Sandra, if you want. We’re all pretty excited to meet her.”

  “Sandra who?” His son lets the question—a joke, Arthur realizes—hang for a moment. “Kidding. But she’s got a rehearsal. It’ll be just me, I’m afraid.”

  Thirty minutes later they go downstairs to find O’Neil in the lobby, sitting on the sofa and reading from a stack of alumni magazines on the coffee table. He has dressed up a little, wearing pressed khakis and a navy wool blazer with a slender black necktie hanging loose around his throat. But what Arthur notices first is the haircut. O’Neil has always worn his hair long, in loose curls that hang over his ears. All of that is gone, replaced by a spiky crewcut. Their boy rises, smiling at the sight of them, and catches them both in a long-armed hug.

  “Honey,” Miriam says mournfully. “Oh, God, I know I shouldn’t say anything. Your hair?”

  O’Neil grins self-consciously and runs a hand over his scalp. “It was funny, but I just woke up one day and thought: I have to get rid of all this hair. I actually skipped a class just to go to a barbershop.”

  Miriam reaches out to touch his hair but stops herself, stroking the air just inches from his head. “Well, it can always grow back,” Miriam says.

  “All the guys on the team are getting it cut like this now,” O’Neil says. “Some of the girls too.”

  “I think it looks great,” Arthur chimes in. “Very 1962. I think I had one just like it.”

  O’Neil smiles. “See, Mom? That’s the idea.”

  The steakhouse where they usually go will be too packed by now with the parents’ weekend crowd, so they agree to eat at the hotel, taking seats in the bar while they wait for a table. Miriam, pleading exhaustion, orders a club soda, and Arthur his usual Dewars and water; when the waitress asks O’Neil what he wants, he thinks a moment, and then asks for a club soda too.

  “You know, the hardest thing for most of the guys on the team is not drinking,” he says, chewing a mouthful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar. “They catch you, you’re off, no question.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his blazer and produces a photograph. “That’s Sandra.”

  The girl in the photo is younger looking than Arthur expected, and a good deal prettier. The photo is of the two of them, standing arm-in-arm before a brick building that Arthur recognizes as O’Neil’s dormitory. Her hair isn’t brown, as he imagined, but a bright shade of blond that verges on red, a red that reminds Arthur of certain autumn leaves—though the picture, he realizes, was taken months ago, before the summer had gone. The grass at their feet is lushly green, and they are both dressed for warm weather and sunshine, O’Neil in his nylon running clothes, Sandra in white tennis shorts and a T-shirt. On her head, covering most of her hair and dimming her eyes and brow into shadow, she wears a baseball cap—navy blue, with a red B for the Boston Red Sox. The way the shadows fall makes Arthur think that the photograph was taken just before sunset, and the two of them are on their way to dinner, or to change for dinner. Sandra is small, the top of her head rising only to O’Neil’s shoulders, and a bright splash of freckles dresses her cheeks and nose, which is button shaped and turned slightly upward as she looks into the photographer’s lens. Arthur knows he should say something about how pretty she is, and when he does, his son smiles with happy relief.

  “Sox fan, I see,” Arthur adds.

  O’Neil shrugs. “I guess. Really, she just likes hats. She’s what you would call a hat person.”

  “She’s in a play?” Arthur asks.

  O’Neil frowns in confusion. “No. Well, she has been, but she isn’t now. What gave you that idea?”

  “You said she had a rehearsal.”

  “Oh. I did, didn’t I.” O’Neil nods. “Actually, it’s a jazz band. She plays the trombone, if you can believe it. You’ll hear her tomorrow night.”

  Arthur laughs at his son’s embarrassment, though he also knows that this is exactly the kind of thing he likes about her. What does anyone like? Freckles, the curve of hair where she tucks it behind an ear, the sound of her voice when she tells a joke, her great, gleaming trombone in its velvet case. O’Neil has had girlfriends before, but this, Arthur knows, is different; he is entering the web, the matrix of a thousand details that make another person real, not just an object to be wanted. Beside him Miriam, looking at the photo, hasn’t said anything.

  “Hey,” Arthur says, “the trombone can be very sexy.”

  “I don’t know how she does it all,” O’Neil says. “There’s field hockey and band. She’s starting this year, so next year she’ll probably be varsity, and she’s on the lacrosse team too. Then, she’s, like, a straight-A student, doubling in bio and English, with all her premed courses on top of it.” He shakes his head, amazed. “Some days it’s all I can do just to get out of bed and go to class.”

  “Seems like she’s a good influence,” Arthur says. “Don’t you think, Mimi?”

  Miriam manages a smile and passes the photo back to Arthur, who hands it to O’Neil. “She sounds like a lovely girl,” Miriam says.

  “It’s true,” O’Neil says, and laughs at himself. “God knows what she sees in me.”

  They each have two drinks before they are seated at a table and order dinner. The hour is just nine, but already O’Neil is yawning. Every time this happens he apologizes and makes a joke about how they’re not really boring him, it’s just the running, all the workouts this past week for tomorrow’s race.

  “You don’t really have to come,” he says, smearing a piece of bread with cheese from a crock on the middle of the table. “We’re going to get hammered, anyway. We’re completely overtrained. You should go to the field hockey game instead. Sandra’s just JV, but those girls are really good.”

  The food is so bad it’s actually funny—everything overcooked and drenched with heavy sauce—and in the end, O’Neil eats most of what’s on his parents’ plates in addition to his own. An amazing performance: he caps off the meal with a slab of chocolate pie while Arthur and Miriam share a pot of watery tea. They offer to drive him back to his dormitory, but in the lobby he changes his mind; the walk will do him good, he says, to help him digest all of it before the race, which is at one o’clock the next afternoon. Arthur goes up to their room and returns with a hat and scarf, to keep him warm on the walk home.

  “I meant what I said,” O’Neil reminds them, winding the scarf around his throat. “You really don’t have to come. There’s not much to see even if we do okay. You’ll be pretty much just waiting around to watch me drag up the rear.”

  “We’re here to be with you,” Miriam says. She steps up and hugs him, quickly. “There’s no way we’re missing it.”

  From the doorway they w
atch him trot down the walk, head hunched down against the cold, not looking back.

  “He’s probably going to see her,” Miriam says.

  “Wouldn’t anybody?” Arthur asks. “You saw that picture.” He gives a little admiring whistle. “Holy moly.”

  A silence falls over them. Miriam hugs herself against the cold air moving through the open door. It is certainly cold enough to snow; under the lights of the hotel Arthur can see shimmering puddles of ice just beginning to form on the flagstone walkway. Finally she says, “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “This morning.” She shrugs. “In the car. All of it. I’m not being a good sport, am I?”

  “You’re the mom. You love your kids. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  Upstairs, Arthur showers and puts on his pajamas, then sits in darkness on the edge of their bed. He feels a slight movement under the covers and turns to see that Miriam is laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  It takes her a moment to speak. “Your face,” she manages. “When you looked at that picture. You should have seen yourself.” She rises on the pillows and touches his arm to reassure him. “I’m sorry, Art. It was just so funny.”

  Arthur climbs under the covers beside her. “She is pretty,” Arthur says. “You know, I think she reminded me of you.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Miriam says. She turns and puts her arms around him. “You’re very sweet, but you don’t have to say that.”

  “Nothing sweet about it,” Arthur says. He kisses her, and feels sleep coming. “It’s true.”

  Arthur and Miriam, out of town: they awaken late, eat a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls in the hotel lobby, then set out on foot to the campus to find O’Neil. It is nearly eleven; the day is bright and icy cold. Overnight, a mass of clear arctic air has moved in, and the effect is vaguely kaleidoscopic, all the colors and shapes of the town and campus at once less than real and somehow more. Above the college’s stone entranceway a banner says, Welcome Parents, and beneath the bare trees and blue, blue sky, the wide lawn of the college’s main quadrangle floats like a plate of ice.

  They arrive at O’Neil’s dormitory, hoping to surprise him with a bag of muffins filched from the hotel breakfast buffet, but no one answers the door when they knock. A moment of confusion: Didn’t they arrange to meet him here? Then, as they’re leaving, they run into his roommate, Stephen, on his way back from the shower. They have known him for years; O’Neil and Stephen went to high school together, and though the college did not let them share a room freshman year, now they are together again. Stephen, who is tall and fair with a long nose and a hairline that’s already receding, is wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and carrying a plastic basket of toiletries under his arm. Behind one ear is a dab of shaving cream. He seems startled to see them, but after an awkward moment he hugs Miriam and shakes Arthur’s hand.

  “He left, like, an hour ago,” Stephen explains. The door across from Stephen and O’Neil’s room opens, washing the hallway with the smell of cigarettes and the sound of Steely Dan. Miriam recognizes the record—it is one that O’Neil played all through high school. A young woman Miriam doesn’t know steps from the room in a silk dressing gown, says hello to Stephen, and heads down the hall to the showers, humming the song as she goes. Miriam tries not to look but does; her hair is a thick, glistening black, like a curtain of velvet, and the way she walks, her bare feet silently striking the hallway’s green carpet, suggests that, beneath the gown, she isn’t wearing anything at all. The smoke from her cigarette follows her like a laugh.

  “I wasn’t even awake yet, really, but I heard the door,” Stephen says, yawning. Miriam wonders if Stephen is lying, to cover for O’Neil—did he even spend the night there?—but decides not to say anything about this. “You can probably catch him over by the grandstands. I think he thought you were meeting him there.”

  They leave the muffins with Stephen, who is biting into one even as he’s saying good-bye, and head back out into the bright day. By the grandstands, a five-minute walk away, they find O’Neil in his sweats, milling around with the other members of the cross-country team. A few students and parents are already sitting in the aluminum bleachers, chatting and hugging themselves in the cold. O’Neil explains the course: five miles down trails through the woods that abut the playing fields, then up the hill into the middle of town, and back to the starting line. He hasn’t shaved, and his hair, despite its length, seems disheveled, as if he had only awakened moments ago. On the other side of the field a fancy motorcoach is parked, and Miriam can see the other team stretching out in their shimmering violet sweatsuits. The race is thirty minutes away.

  “God, why did you let me eat all that?” O’Neil is on the grass, sitting Indian style, though the bottoms of his running shoes are somehow together. He bends forward at the waist, his forehead dropping to his knees in a single liquid motion. “Never mind. My fault, right? The chocolate pie was definitely a mistake, though. I was up moaning half the night.”

  “Is Sandra going to be here?” Arthur asks.

  “You know, I thought she would be, by now.” He rises nimbly and does half a dozen quick hops on his toes. Miriam can practically feel the energy coiled in him, a spring about to release, chocolate pie or no. O’Neil scans the scene, looking for Sandra, and shrugs when he fails to find her. “I’m sure she’ll show up. I told her you were coming, and if that doesn’t get her here, nothing will.”

  “I’m beginning to think you invented her,” Miriam says.

  “Trust me, Mom.” O’Neil smiles confidently. “I couldn’t have made her up if I tried.” Still standing, he spreads his legs wide, pivots on the balls of his feet, and drops one knee to the grass. “God, I feel just awful. At least it’s cold,” he says. “I’m better when it’s cold.”

  O’Neil introduces them to some of his teammates and then to his coach—a surprisingly young man, not much older than the runners themselves, with a woolly beard and long black hair—and then shoos them to the grandstands, to wait for the race to begin. By the starting line O’Neil and his teammates have stripped to their shorts and tank tops and gathered in a tight circle around their coach, their bodies making constant small movements even as they listen to what he’s telling them. They break apart then, each finding someplace nearby to go. Some jog in place, or stretch; others merely stand quietly, waiting.

  “What are they doing?” Arthur asks.

  Miriam watches. O’Neil is one of the quiet ones. Apart from the others, he has selected a spot fifty feet from the starting line, near a line of parked cars. His hands dangle limply at his sides, and his head is slightly bowed; even at this distance, she can see him breathe, and knows by the rhythm of his rising chest that his eyes, turned down, are closed.

  “He’s being alone with it,” she says.

  A hush has fallen over the crowd; everyone, parents and friends, has been led into this moment of silence, like a prayer before mass. The runners gather at the starting line.

  “This is it,” Arthur says.

  Miriam looks to O’Neil, who has taken a spot in the middle of the line, between two runners from the opposing team. She knows at once that he will do well, better than he has ever dared imagine, that this day will be his. Her confidence is absolute; she knows this fact as certainly as she knows his name. She says it then—“O’Neil”—and as she does, the runners crouch, the gun appears from nowhere, and with a single report, they’re off.

  She rises to her feet. “Go!” she cries, and the two teams burst away. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Arthur in the bleachers, thinking of Dora Auclaire: his son is running—the two teams are gone; in seconds they have flown over the field and disappeared into the woods—and yet his mind has drifted away from all of this, crossing two state lines and traveling half the width of New York State to alight in his office, where the letter waits in his desk. Unsent but sealed, it is, like his wave on the street a week ago, one more thing half finished. When he m
ails it, he knows, these many months of secrecy will all be over, and he can rejoin his life. And yet he has not done this. He was already so late another delay would hardly have mattered; he could have dropped it off at the clinic (no: he would have seen her, stopped to talk) or paused at the post office on his way home to feed the cat and pick up their bags. He could have, but didn’t, and so here he is, thinking of her.

  “Did you see that?” Miriam says. She is pointing across the field. “That kid tripped him. He almost went down.”

  “Where? What kid?”

  Her tone is sharp; she lifts her eyebrows with impatience, and all at once he returns to her. Miriam. The race. A bright cold day in fall.

  “The tall one, Art. At the starting line.” She frowns incredulously. “How could you have missed it?”

  He smiles; she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about. “Well, no harm done. Or was there?”

  “Sometimes, it’s like your head is a big empty dance-hall, Art.” She squeezes his arm. “No. No harm done.”

  As O’Neil predicted, for the next twenty-five minutes, until the runners return, they have nothing to do. To keep warm they walk around the infield, where students and other parents, about thirty of them, have gathered in little groups to talk and pass the time sipping hot cider from foam cups. For a while they fall into conversation with a man and his wife, parents of one of O’Neil’s teammates, up from New York City for the weekend. Arthur wonders about Sandra, if she has arrived yet, but supposes she hasn’t; O’Neil would have said so, even just to tease them, to make them guess. He is thinking about this and looking over the crowd to try to pick her out when a cry goes up.

  Impossibly—so little time seems to have passed—the first runner has appeared at the edge of the woods. Like the point of a wedge he leads the other runners in a long arc around the field, a jostling mass of gold and violet. Arthur looks for O’Neil, doesn’t find him, then does, about midway through the first pack, five or six runners off the leader. Everyone scrambles toward the finish line, where both coaches are counting out the seconds on their stopwatches.