MARY AND O'NEIL (21 page)

“Help me,” he said.

“Goddamn it, Jack.” She took him to a quiet corner. “How much cash do we have left?”

“Three thousand.” He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “Kay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She computed rapidly. Three days left; they could get by on a thousand if they had to, two to play it safe. The rooms were paid for. How much had they charged for meals, the boat, the trip to the fort to give a whale to Noah? She took his wallet from him, heavy and warm from his pocket.

“We’ll talk later,” she commanded. “Go back and sleep now.”

The casino was quiet; only a few tables were running. She cashed five hundred dollars in travelers checks and took her place at one, stacking her chips on the green felt before her. A waitress approached her and she asked for a glass of water, no ice. It was 2:00
A
.
M.
; she had a van to catch at nine. Seven hours to win back three thousand dollars. She rolled up her sleeves.

“Ma’am?”

She met the dealer’s eye. Others were waiting for her bet before the cards could be dealt. In a moment the game would begin again, but still she paused. In the condo her babies were sleeping; all around she felt the blueness of the sea. It was all real, it was this world and no other, and she was in it. She pulled a fifty-dollar chip from the pile.

“Deal,” she said.

GHOSTS OF WINTER

January 1995

M
ARY AND
O’N
EIL:
they were like any couple. She, just thirty, her figure slender, her beauty pale and Nordic, not striking but sensible; he, two years older, with large, soft hands and a web of creases just taking hold at the corners of his eyes. Homeowners, voters, employees; the provisional adulthood of their twenties was over. They were both teachers, work they told themselves was honorable, though it was, in reality, a career each had chosen by accident, a temporary arrangement made permanent when bolder plans drifted away. Their house, in an older suburb outside Philadelphia, was trying to bankrupt them; the wiring was bad, a spring rainstorm sent them scurrying with kitchen pots, there was lead paint everywhere, chiseled with cracks fat enough to wedge a dime into. Its history was obscure. Prying away a piece of rotten window trim, O’Neil had discovered a Christmas card, dated 1879, with these words, written in schoolmarmish hand so precisely shaped that O’Neil first thought they were typed: “You mention the knife which arouses my curiosity as to whether you received the calendar. I should be much obliged to you to advise me in this regard. I received for Xmas anything and everything from stiff-backed handkerchief to coil-spring ear laps.” They passed their weekends in dust masks and tool belts and old clothes spattered with paint—blue for the bedroom, linen for the living room and hall, a buttery yellow for the guest room that seemed cheerful in the store but turned out to be a bad mistake, the color of electrified lemons—and on Monday mornings emerged from the front doorway to begin another week of teaching, crescents of paint under their battered fingernails, their shoulders bent below the weight of textbooks so fattened with underlines they seemed to have been left out in the rain. In the evening, half watching a television program or listening to music, they graded tests and essays on the sofa, breaking the silence of their earnest work only to ask small questions of each other, or solicit an opinion: Would you like tea? Could I borrow your Hi-Liter? Now, does this sentence make any sense at
all
? Sometimes, beneath a blanket they had brought from upstairs, their still faces grazed by the glow of the television, they fell asleep right there, slipping into an unconsciousness that was somehow deeper for having occurred by accident, and awakened hours later to the flow of images on the television screen—a gangster loading a pistol, a woman in a leotard pumping a ski machine, a flight of birds above a grassy field—that they had swept into their dreams.

And yet, there was something uncertain about them. It was hard to say why. Their love was eclectic and sensual—O’Neil, for instance, sometimes placed his nose against Mary’s cheek simply to smell her skin, or bathed in the water she had just used—and their lovemaking surprised them with its ease. So many years of nervousness; why had no one told them that sex was meant to be funny, and that they could say the things they wanted to and ask for what they liked? They were happy, it was true; they had reached a point of happiness in their lives, a place of rest after a journey of some difficulty, and they frequently marveled at this fact: how, of all the people in the world, and all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. O’Neil had been raised in upstate New York, Mary in Minnesota. How unlikely was it that they would have ever met at all? They had told the story many times, retracing their steps from the private school where they’d come to work (French for Mary, English for O’Neil), through a maze of time and space to the snowy towns of their youth. They recounted it all with pleasure, chiming in to finish one another’s sentences or highlight some detail to keep the telling fresh, but didn’t this simple exercise, good natured though it was, testify to the fragility of their good fortune? O’Neil’s parents had died when he was in college, killed in a car wreck; Mary’s family was far away, a race of chilly Germans on the plains. Wouldn’t such people regard any human attachment, the possibility of happiness itself, with skepticism? So perhaps that was it; perhaps it was their very happiness that made them afraid.

For a while the challenges of their house distracted them, its insatiable appetite for their labors. They pleased themselves by working hard, and then, later, with the idea that the house was haunted. The notion delighted them at once, even as they knew it was foolish; but once the idea arose—it was Mary, over dinner, who first suggested it—evidence bounded into view. There was, of course, the Christmas card O’Neil had found. (Coil-spring ear laps? What unfinished business with the knife?) And there was no question that the house at times hinted at some benign inhabitation. Lights blazed and dimmed; ceiling fans reversed themselves of their own volition; doors swung open and closed without warning, pushed by unaccountable drafts. Hidden lines of connectedness seemed to snake through the structure; they had discovered, for example, that the toilet lid in the second-floor bath would sometimes slam when they turned on the kitchen disposal. In the basement—an inhospitable, gravelike hole where they stored old boxes and did the laundry, with crumbling plaster walls and miles of sketchy wiring stapled to the joists—pockets of frigid air lingered, and once, mysteriously, the washing machine had overflowed. Later, O’Neil found a tube sock stuck in the basin drain, and certainly it was possible that it had found its way there by accident, but wasn’t it also true that this occurrence, like all the others, bore the qualities of a prank?

Then, in December, on a night after Christmas in the third year of their marriage, Mary awoke from a troubled sleep and realized that for some time she had been listening to the sound of footsteps. Strangely, she felt no alarm; she had been anticipating this, or something like it. She lifted the covers and stepped gingerly into the cold hall, where the apparition waited. It was a young woman—she appeared to be draped in a cloud of stars—and her blond hair was done curiously: not in some elaborate style of the past, but cut unevenly at the ends, as if by pinking shears. On her slender body she wore a smooth white smock that fell to her ankles; her feet were bare. “We got your card,” Mary said, thinking this would be a good icebreaker, but the woman—just a girl, Mary realized—gave no reply. A wardrobe stood at the end of the hall, where Mary and O’Neil kept old clothing that no longer fit but, for one reason or another, couldn’t be parted with. The girl smiled at Mary and stepped into the wardrobe, sealing the door behind her.

Then O’Neil was at her side. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a girl,” Mary whispered. “She’s in there.”

O’Neil returned to the bedroom and reappeared with the tennis racquet he kept under his side of the bed, an old Jack Kramer he had bought at a yard sale for a quarter.

“I don’t think she’s here to play tennis,” Mary said.

O’Neil stepped back and cocked his racquet, though Mary could tell he was doing this only to humor her. “Open it when I say,” O’Neil commanded.

Mary sighed with irritation and opened the door. Of course there was no one; Mary had already figured this out. O’Neil poked the head of his racquet through the row of hanging coats and dresses. “Yoo-hoo,” he said.

“She was in there.”

“You were dreaming,” O’Neil said. “You were asleep, sweetie.”

“She has fled the scorn of the unbeliever,” Mary said.

He yawned and kissed her on the forehead. “Perhaps that’s so.”

“I saw what I saw,” Mary said.

Under the covers of their bed Mary, sleepless, gazed up into the darkness. She knew that O’Neil was probably right—as a girl she had been a sleepwalker of some renown, once letting herself into the neighbors’ house to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at their kitchen table—and yet she felt that her experience in the hallway could not be explained away so easily. The details were striking, as was her memory of them. The girl had smiled; she wore a smock; she had an awful haircut. It was puzzling but not frightening, and Mary lay awake for some time, replaying the images in her head. Then, as she watched, a twinkling, reflected light began to dance on the ceiling above her face. This, too, seemed a part of the night’s enchantments—it seemed to be the light of angels—but then Mary rose and went to the window and saw that it had begun to snow; the falling flakes had tripped the motion sensors over the back door, bathing the yard with cones of snowy light.

By the next morning a foot of snow had fallen, and a cold wind blew. School was still closed for Christmas break, and Mary and O’Neil passed the day baking pointlessly enormous batches of tollhouse cookies and watching movies on cable television. Late in the afternoon, when the storm had ended, they bundled up and walked the streets of their neighborhood. They moved heavily through the deep snow, holding one another up as they stumbled onward. Everything was quiet; the scene they beheld was one of glasslike stillness, a diorama of a snowy town. In their neighbors’ yards lay the abandoned evidence of the day’s amusements: snow forts, snowmen, sleds and saucers scattered everywhere. But now it was too cold, and all the children had gone inside. At a distance they heard the plows lumbering through the neighborhood streets, the chains on the tires ringing.

Back at the house they removed their wet coats and blue jeans, and O’Neil made tea. In boxers and socks he carried their mugs into the living room, where Mary waited on the sofa, a blanket drawn up to her chin.

“I want a baby,” Mary declared.

O’Neil put the tea on the table. His glasses were fogged, and he drew them to the tip of his nose and lifted his eyes to her face. “Right now? The stores are closed.”

“I mean I want to make one.”

O’Neil grinned, enjoying himself, as she’d expected he would. “I thought we’d have spaghetti.”

“Fine, make fun,” Mary said, and removed the blanket to show him that she, too, was wearing only her underwear. “We have work to do.”

A baby: of course that was what they would want. They had discussed this before, when they had first begun to talk of marriage. They had agreed that children were a part of their future—it was, in fact, one of the things that had attracted them to one another, this willingness to let such things happen in due course—and that they would know when the time was right.

Now the moment was upon them, and they set to the task at once—that very night, there on the sofa while their tea grew cold. After, they made the spaghetti O’Neil had promised, and talked at the kitchen table about the child they wished to have. They decided that they would like to have a girl, and that she would be named Nora, Emily, or Zoë. She would both be and look like Mary, though they also hoped she would draw certain qualities from O’Neil: his even temperament, his comfort talking to strangers, his easy athleticism and knack for tools. Her life would be interesting and prosperous, and they skipped around inside it as if they were perusing a magazine, reading an article here and there, returning to the table of contents to find another subject of interest. She would choose law or medicine, they agreed, though she would also harbor a lifelong passion for literature, and perhaps find time to take a Ph.D.—to finish the same degree that Mary had abandoned. They would take her often to the city, to expose her to music and theater and art, but in later life she would live in a cottage by the sea. They had never talked like this before, with such certainty about what they wanted for their lives, and by the time they went to bed, it seemed impossible to think that Mary wasn’t pregnant already.

But she wasn’t: not that month, and not the next one or the next, and by the time spring came, they had begun to worry. Mary had been pregnant once before—years in the past, a painful story she did not like to revisit—and from that experience she had carted away one belief: getting pregnant was easy. “Like falling off a log onto a man,” she said. The irony, now, was obvious, but it was hard to complain. So many years of thwarting their own biology, of rubber diaphragms dusted with cornstarch and sleek condoms in their foil pouches—they could hardly expect, now, to conceive on demand, like people ordering dinner in a restaurant. Mary kept track of her cycle, taking her temperature each morning before she rose and recording the information on a sheet of blue-lined graph paper she left by the bed. But by fall, when school resumed—after a summer of making love in bed, on the sofa, in a friend’s beach house in Cape May, on a picnic table in the Poconos, swinging in a hammock in the yard on Mary’s birthday—they agreed that something wasn’t working the way it should.

Their insurance plan allowed them to begin fertility counseling in November. The doctor who saw them was a young woman, very precise, with pencil-gray streaks in her long black hair.

“My prediction?” The doctor looked over their chart and shrugged at what she saw. “Pregnancy is just around the corner. You only need to give it time.”

“We’ve given it a year,” Mary said.

“And what a year I’m sure it’s been. Sometimes, however, it can take longer.” She dropped her eyes again to the chart. “Thirty-two years old. A history of irregular menstruation. Your period comes and goes like the March wind.” She closed the folder conclusively and waved a hand over it. “Have you tried wine?”

Mary leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”

The doctor settled back into her chair. “A glass of wine can ease the tension.”

“I am not tense,” said Mary.

“Aren’t there tests?” O’Neil asked. “Shouldn’t you be examining my sperm?”

The doctor yawned and glanced at her watch. “Pardon me. But no. It’s not something we do at this point. Have you ever looked at sperm under a microscope? It’s like the hordes at Mecca.”