“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.