Academy Street (18 page)

‘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 somehow 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?

She crossed the courtyard and turned the corner, half expecting to come upon new
miracles. But there was nothing there, no stamp, no stones. The ground where the
house had stood was an L-shaped patch of grass, indistinguishable from the lawn
but for its deeper shade of green. Old slates lay stacked against the fowl-house.
To the right, the laurel tree, patient, majestic. In the distance the avenue of beech
trees and the lone ash, blue-green and brooding in the evening light, and, further
off, the copse by the quarry, the loamy fields. She stood on the edge of the grass.
She hovered between worlds, deciphering the ground, tracing in mid-air the hall,
the dining room, the stairs. She was despairingly
close to home now, to the rooms
and the voices that contained the first names for home. Memories abounded and her
heart pounded and history broke in. A famine hospital with a stained-glass window.
Bodies in a quarry, smoking in lime. The deeper she went the further she was drawn,
into a lower world with the sound of a gong and a mother coughing up blood. A marble
fireplace. Adam-and-Eve wallpaper. A red lamp under the back stairs as death rattled
upstairs, and the die was cast. The die was cast. A mirror sheathed in black then.
And the Garden of Eden plucked and plundered by a blackbird, toppled by a wrecking
ball—and Adam, Eve, the apple and the angel, all fallen, vanquished, all buried beneath
the rubble.

The cortege followed the hearse up the avenue and turned right onto the main road.
For half a mile they drove along Easterfield’s perimeter wall. This was it. This
was her life, the summation of her life, her dreams run out. She would not encounter
love again. She would not lie down with a man or hold a child in her arms. She was
at the end of her destiny. She turned her head, looked down over the open sloping
fields, with the avenue on the right and groves of old trees, oak and beech, in the
distance, and then she leaned forward, her eyes drawn to the slate roofs and stone
walls of the outbuildings, the courtyard, the orchard. And then she saw it, the gap
where the house had been, the absence at the centre of things. An absence that was
an injury, a scar on the land. She put her hand to her heart. The house was gone,
turned to dust. The earth was mortally wounded. She felt the distress, the long unrest,
the silent suffering of the fields and the beasts, the barns, the grieving ground,
and the walls and the trees with the little birds in the boughs all gathered around,
bowing down in sorrow.

That night she dreamt. She heard the land weeping. At dawn she heard the clarion
call of the city. Streets waiting for her footsteps. Doors to be opened, books to
be read, her life as it had been. And all the days to be got through, the endless
days, the nights, the silent rooms. There was no Eden, there would be no Eden, no
radiant streaming, no transformation. Just time, and tasks made lighter by the memory
of love, and days like all others when she would put one foot in front of the other
and walk on, obedient to fate.

As they drove away, Michael slowed on the avenue, beeped the horn, waved. His children
were playing in a corner of the field, on rope swings hung from trees. They were
swinging high, back and forth, leaning, reaching out over the quarry, over broken
rock and weeds and old water. When they saw their father they swayed in mid-air,
raised their little hands and waved back.

The author is grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland for its generous support.