“Hush,” Mary said. She put down the knife she had been using to spread peanut butter onto sandwiches for the children. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at him. “O’Neil?”
He shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. What do you think? It
feels
great.”
She narrowed her eyes, tilted her head this way and that to examine him. “Well, I think I like it. I really do. Turn around and let me see the back.”
He did, pivoting toward the doorway in time for Kay to enter the room and meet his gaze. She stepped forward and touched his bare scalp. Tears floated in her eyes, and O’Neil’s heart constricted: another mistake?
“Oh, honey,” she said, and laughed. “Is that what I look like? You look just
awful
.”
That evening the two of them went down to the ocean to swim. Kay had asked him if he could get some marijuana for her, to help her appetite, and he brought it with him to the beach—three joints, tightly wrapped in green and red paper, like little Christmas presents. It had been years since he’d smoked it; he’d bought it from a friend of Mary’s, a sculptor she’d known in graduate school, who knew someone who knew someone else—the road it had traveled to him was obscure. Why had Kay thought that he, of all people, would be able to get it? And yet he had, and done it with ease. O’Neil had planned a big meal to follow it: spaghetti with clam sauce, a salad of mixed greens, fresh sweet corn slabbed with butter, and a key lime pie for dessert. He’d told her nothing about this; the meal was an ambush. The joints were in a Baggie, and after their swim, he took one out and lit it, somehow, in the wind.
“I feel like I’m in high school,” she said, and took the joint from him. “I mean that in a good way.”
The smoke tasted like pepper on his tongue. They finished about half the joint before the wind blew it out, and O’Neil returned it to the bag. The pot he’d had in high school and college was all stems and seeds—sometimes they smoked through the night and barely caught a buzz—but everything he’d heard told him that, these days, half a joint would probably be more than enough for his purpose. Sure enough: he looked around and discovered that, already, the scenery seemed a little fluttery, like a movie just slightly out of synch. This fact was also elusively funny.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She was sitting cross-legged on the sand, her legs covered by a towel. He saw her eyes had closed. “Choirs of angels are soaring from the heavens, singing the Hallelujah Chorus.” She turned, wide-eyed and grinning, to look at him. “No, but seriously, I am
stoned
. It’s like 1979 all over again. Where did you get this stuff?”
O’Neil shrugged. “Apparently not much has changed in this regard. A few calls, next thing you know, a car’s in the driveway and money’s changing hands.”
“Interesting.” She looked out over the water, blinking. The sun was behind them, low against the buildings, which sawtoothed the light. “Really, it’s fucking marvelous, O’Neil. I wish I’d had it the last time, though Jack probably would have disapproved. Does Mary know?”
“Mary
helped
.”
“Good for Mary. Thank her for me. No, I’ll thank her myself.” She straightened her back and touched his bald head again. “You didn’t have to do this, you know. Make sure you wear sunscreen. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can burn.”
“Hungry?”
She thought for a moment and nodded. “I could eat.”
She packed it away: two helpings of the spaghetti, three ears of corn, seconds on the pie. O’Neil was elated, but later that night he awoke to a sound he recognized at once. He crept down the hall and waited by the door until Kay finished, as he had learned to do, then entered the room and prepared a moistened washcloth for her face.
“I tried,” she said dispiritedly. “I really tried.”
“It was my fault.” He dabbed her face and mouth with the cloth. “I let you overdo it. It was just so good to watch you eat.”
Sam came in, wearing boxer shorts and rubbing his eyes. Down the hall Leah had woken up and was calling for Mary. It would be just moments before everyone in the house was prowling the halls. “Is Mom okay?”
Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Kay managed a smile. “I’m all right, honey. Go back to bed.”
The boy looked warily at O’Neil. “Is she really okay?”
“She’s fine, son,” O’Neil said. “Just a few too many clams.”
They didn’t smoke again. By the day the trip ended, his head, despite Kay’s warning, was tender with sunburn. Already it was prickly with stubble; he would have hair again by the start of the school year, just three weeks away. They drove back to O’Neil’s and Mary’s house in Philadelphia, and the next morning, in smothering heat, O’Neil took Kay and the boys to the airport for their flight home to Vermont. At the gate, when Sam took his brothers off to the bathroom, he took the Baggie from his pocket and slid it into her purse.
She wrinkled her brow. “Is that safe? I don’t want to get arrested.”
“You just don’t check it through,” O’Neil explained. “We did it all the time in college.” This wasn’t true; he’d done nothing of the kind. But when it came down to it, he couldn’t believe that anyone would search such an obviously sick woman.
“You’re lying,” Kay said after a moment. “But it’s all right. What could they do to me? I’m a public relations nightmare.” She paused and gave a little laugh. “The good thing about cancer, sweetie, and I mean the only good thing, is that you don’t sweat the details.”
Their plane was announced. Sam emerged from the men’s room, holding each of his brothers by a hand. Noah, almost as tall as his brother, was clutching a paper bag of seashells he had collected on the beach. O’Neil saw that Simon had had some troubles; one buckle of his overalls was undone, and both his sneakers were untied. All three were deeply tanned and wearing souvenir T-shirts O’Neil had bought for them, neon-blue with a picture of a surfer and the words
Sea Isle, New Jersey
printed on the front. Kay rose and waved to hurry them up.
“Mary’s friend,” she said quietly. “The sculptor. Is it Mike?” O’Neil nodded; he knew what she was about to ask. “Can he get some more?”
“I’ll bring it,” he said, and kissed his sister and then the boys, and watched them all fly away from him.
In September, Mary did not go back to teaching; they had discussed this all through the spring and summer, weighing the pros and cons, but in the end it was money that made the decision for them. Though O’Neil’s salary was modest, his parents had left him a small inheritance, and over time these funds, which he almost never touched, had done very well, most of this in the last two years. It seemed foolish for Mary to continue working if she no longer wished to now that her paycheck wasn’t necessary. Mary had abandoned her Ph.D. years ago, a decision she had always regretted, and in August she telephoned her old advisor to see if it was still possible for her to return. It was; her advisor even laughed at the question, asking, What took you so long? We always had the brightest hopes for you, Mary. They converted an attic storage room into an office and hired a woman to look after the girls in the afternoons while Mary worked on her dissertation, and though the effort came at first with difficulty—the muscles that had once been so strong and limber atrophied after ten years of teaching high school French and advising the debate team and the horticulture club—soon she was writing away. When O’Neil returned from school in the afternoon, Mrs. Carlisle presented the children to him like a gift she had been wrapping all day—it was not unusual to find the three of them actually baking something, Nora gleefully licking chocolate batter from the spoon while baby Leah, freshly changed, burbled contentedly in her bouncer—and as the old woman put on her coat and hat and scarf in the hallway, Mary would descend the stairs, yawning, a pencil tucked behind one ear or holding her bun of hair in place. Was it four? she would ask, her face glazed by hours of concentration. Five o’clock already? They spent their evenings together, and once the girls were fed and washed and put to bed, they made a pot of tea and took it to the living room to spend a quiet hour trading stories of their days: the students he had won and lost, the running battles with Nora over television and Leah’s persistent earaches, Mary’s research and her quarrels with the library over certain manuscripts and her hopes for a travel fellowship to France. She had decided to shift her focus a little, she explained. The most exciting work was being done now on women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the early moderns. Literally dozens of them had only just been discovered, though of course they had been there all along; that, she said, was the point, the very thing that made it so exciting, the fact that they had been so
overlooked;
all the research was new. O’Neil had never seen his wife so happy. Working hard, it would take her two years, she conjectured. Certainly not more than three, even if they went to France. Then she could go back to teaching, or have another baby, or whatever else she wanted to do.
Some of O’Neil’s colleagues also had money—a woman in the math department, a Wanamaker, drove a Benz and owned a summer house in Sienna; the dean of the upper school was the husband of a Main Line plastic surgeon; one of the secretaries, it was said, had won a million dollars in the lottery, but given it all to the church. Their situations were not the same, but O’Neil knew that, like them, he was lucky—who would have thought that a company named Yahoo would do so well?—and that such good fortune was best kept secret. When people asked him about Mary, he said only that she had decided to stay home with Leah a while longer, suggesting with his silence that this new arrangement was temporary and soon she would return. Well, that was certainly understandable, they all agreed, with a baby who was still so young. Tell her we miss her. On the last Friday in October the school held its annual Halloween parade, and as the crowds of parents and teachers assembled, O’Neil found himself standing beside the headmaster, a tall, athletic man who was fifty-five but looked forty. The low stone buildings of the campus were arranged in a U-shape around a spacious quad, and under crisp autumn sunshine everyone watched while the lower-schoolers, dressed as fairies and mermaids and pirates, some of them holding hands, marched three times around before their teachers whisked them inside so that they wouldn’t be frightened by the costumes of the older children, who followed. Psychotics in hockey masks, rotting corpses, vampires with trails of ketchup running down their chins, an accident victim carrying a severed limb in a basket of smoking dry ice: one of O’Neil’s students, a precocious ninth grader who loved to torment him over the most delicate distinctions of grammar, waved to him as he passed, dressed as if for an ordinary day at school but with an ax apparently buried in his bleeding skull. “Mr. Burke, Mr. Burke!” he called. “You’re giving me
such
a headache!” When all the prizes had been awarded, the headmaster turned to O’Neil, agreeing that it had been one of the best parades ever, and asked, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, So tell me, how is Mary? And the girls? O’Neil assured him that all was well, that she missed the old place, but on the whole he had to say it was good for her to have some time at home. Well, the headmaster said, he was certainly glad to hear it. He shuffled his feet on the gravel. He had two kids of his own, one in college, the other grown and gone. It all goes so quickly, he said, shaking his head. She should enjoy this special time. Tell her I asked about her, won’t you? It’s not the same without her here. Tell her she can come back whenever she’s ready.
His students were bright, sometimes alarmingly so. For many years O’Neil had doubted his worthiness as a teacher and waited for his fraud to be unmasked. But somehow, over time, he had come to be, he understood, beloved, a fixture of the institution and its memories. Khakis and loafers, an oxford shirt frayed at the collar and the wrists, a fifteen-year-old tie—that was his costume. His other life, his real life, was a mystery to them. Nearly every year he received a letter or postcard from a student he had taught years ago, thanking him for all he had done. He understood these letters were written in a mood of nostalgia (many began, “Today I am graduating from Harvard/Penn/Princeton/Yale . . .” and went on to describe some small but life-changing generosity he did not recall), and yet they touched him deeply. He kept them together in a manila folder in his desk, knowing that someday they might save him.
The Sunday after the parade his nephew Sam telephoned. O’Neil was doing an art project with Nora in the kitchen, and Mary and the baby were napping. Leah had become Leah: the nickname Roo had failed to stick.
“Mom doesn’t want you to know, but there’s something wrong.”
He gripped the phone tightly. His nephew’s voice was taut with fear; he knew the boy had been crying.
“Where are you?” O’Neil asked. A ludicrous question: the boy was many miles, and hours, away.
“I’m upstairs.” He lowered his voice to a desperate whisper. “They say it’s in her liver, O’Neil. She can’t stop throwing up.”
He thought to tell the boy to call his father, but stopped himself. “I’m coming,” he said.
He caught a plane that afternoon, arriving at the house a little after eight o’clock. It was Halloween night; all the houses on her street had decorations up. Groups of children still prowled the neighborhood, pillowcases of candy flung over their shoulders, the beams of their flashlights volleying through the trees. But Kay’s porch was barren, the lights doused. He wondered if she had taken the boys out trick-or-treating, but as he climbed the steps, the door opened to meet him. His sister stood in the doorway, bathed in darkness.