“He’s your father,” O’Neil said. “He loves you.”
“He’s an asshole,” Sam said. He sighed and breathed deeply, his mouth curling with anger. “So are you. You don’t want us either. I can tell.”
The boy was trying to hurt him, to hurt anyone. “Sam, listen to me. That’s not it, not at all. If it made even the slightest bit of sense, I’d tell you. But it doesn’t. Not legally, not in a hundred other ways.”
“He thinks you’re going to try, you know. He’s talking to his lawyer.”
O’Neil was astonished. “Well, that should be a very interesting conversation. Trust me, it won’t amount to anything.”
They drove in silence to the school. Sam got out and carried his instrument case toward the entrance, but at the door he stopped.
“Sam?” O’Neil said. “Aren’t you going in?” But the boy was frozen, stockstill.
“You know, I think I’m done with band,” he said calmly, and turned to face O’Neil. “Fuck band. And fuck you. I’m done with everything.”
At home O’Neil called his attorney. She was a friend’s wife who had become a friend herself—a composed, slyly beautiful woman who exuded an air of magisterial competence. The walls of her tiny office were plastered with degrees: law, social work, urban planning, even a master’s in art history that she had, in her words, “picked up somehow along the way.” He described the situation, not even sure what he was truly asking.
“I can’t be very encouraging,” Beth said. “It might be different in Vermont, but in Pennsylvania the law is pretty clear. You’d have to prove that he was an unfit parent, just for starters, and that can be difficult.”
“Well, he isn’t. He’s not going to win any medals, but I wouldn’t call him unfit.”
She thought a moment. “The only thing I can see happening here is, he might ask your sister to sign over full custody. People do it all the time, in situations like this. With full custody there’d be no question. There isn’t anyway, not really.” She paused. “Tell me this, O’Neil. When did you last get a decent night of sleep?”
He almost laughed. “What month is it?”
“Forget about it,” Beth advised. “His lawyer is probably saying the same thing. Get a good night’s sleep, and forget about it.”
Through the spring Kay faded, like a picture going out of focus. Her body was frail and gray. When she had gone into the hospital in January, her doctors had told her it was a matter of a month or two, perhaps less. Her liver, her lungs, the bones of her spine—everything was suddenly involved. And yet it was April, then May.
“I’m like that old Volvo,” she told O’Neil. It was a car she and Jack had driven for years. “That goddamn thing would not be killed.”
He nodded at such remarks, or laughed if she wanted him to laugh. He never knew what to say. Some days he got into her bed beside her, careful of the tubes and wires and her own brittle bones, to read her the paper or brush her hair, which had, after the summer, grown back.
“Remember when you shaved your head?” She said this as if it had happened years ago. “You looked so terrible.”
“I think Mary kind of liked it.”
She closed her eyes. “I hate to break it to you, but she was humoring you, sweetie.”
Sleep dropped on her like a blade. One minute they would be talking, the next she would be falling away. He watched her sleep for hours. Then, without warning, she would be awake again, seamlessly picking up the broken thread of conversation as if she had excused herself only a moment to tie a shoe or answer the telephone. “Noah will do better if they let him nap after lunch,” she said, or “I don’t care if they cost sixty dollars, Sam needs new sneakers,” or “The thing about Jack is, he’s absolutely brilliant. He’s living proof of the sociopathic effects of brilliance.”
Finally she said, “O’Neil? I’ll want one person here.”
It was on a day very near the end that Jack arrived at the hospital, carrying under his arm a large envelope that O’Neil knew, without looking, contained the papers Beth had described. The boys were downstairs in the lounge, playing pinball. Kay was sleeping, and before Jack could say anything, O’Neil pulled him into the hall.
“What’s in the envelope?”
Jack did not meet his gaze. “I don’t see that this is your business, O’Neil. You’ve been a great help to all of us. But this is a private family matter.”
“Stop this, Jack. Think about what you’re asking her to do.”
His brother-in-law sighed with nervous irritation. “Okay, since you seem to know what it’s all about. Let me ask you something. What would you do if you were me? Since you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Exactly the same thing.”
“I don’t want to be you, Jack. I just don’t want you to do something everyone will feel sorry about later on.”
“For Godsakes, O’Neil! It’s just a formality, a few papers to sign!” He made a face of exasperation and lowered his voice. “You and I both know she’s never leaving here. It’s awful to say it, but those are the facts. I have to think about what’s best for the boys. I have to make plans. She’ll understand that.”
Would she? O’Neil looked toward the room, where Kay was sleeping. Perhaps she would. But it didn’t matter. She would never have to.
“Let’s just go someplace to talk about it,” O’Neil said. “She’s sleeping now, anyway. Just hear me out. Listen to what I have to say, and then you can do whatever you want to do.”
Jack folded his arms over his chest. “You’re not talking me out of it,” he warned.
“Trust me,” O’Neil said. “That’s the furthest thing from my mind.”
He walked with Jack to the parking lot, letting his brother-in-law get three steps ahead of him. Jack would wonder where he was taking him, which was exactly what O’Neil intended, and when Jack turned to look for him, O’Neil took two steps and hit him, hard, just below the left eye. O’Neil had never hit anyone before, and the sensation was not at all what he would have expected if he’d thought about it, which he hadn’t. His hand sailed through Jack’s face easily, without a trace of pain, and seemed to pop him right off his feet. As Jack went down, a second surge of adrenaline passed through O’Neil’s body, and his fist clenched again, ready for more.
“Jesus Christ, O’Neil!”
O’Neil relaxed his fist and went to where Jack was sitting, his back braced against the tire of a minivan. One hand covered the spot near his eye where O’Neil had made contact. O’Neil crouched beside him.
“You fucking asshole!” Jack’s sneakers kicked at the pavement. “Get away from me!”
“Oh, stop it,” O’Neil said. “Let’s see that eye.”
A nurse in the ER gave O’Neil a plastic bottle of alcohol and a bandage for Jack’s cut, and some tape for O’Neil’s knuckles, which were split and bleeding after all. Back in the parking lot O’Neil sat Jack on the bumper of the minivan and swabbed his eye clean with a Q-Tip.
“Aw, hell, O’Neil, I probably deserved that. I told my lawyer it was a dumb idea.”
“Dumb is the least of it, if you’ll pardon my saying so.” A purposeful calm had filled him, a feeling beyond exhaustion or anger or fear; he wasn’t threatening, merely stating the facts. He pasted a bandage to Jack’s clean cut.
“There, good as new. Now, give me those papers or I’ll hit you again.”
With a sigh of defeat Jack removed the now-crinkled envelope from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to him. O’Neil opened it to look the contents over. As he’d expected, the document was an agreement giving Jack full custody of the boys. There was more to it—four pages of mumbo-jumbo he was too tired to wade through—but that was the gist. Jack had already signed it, and on the last page, at the bottom, beside his signature, was a place for Kay to write her name, marked with a red arrow. O’Neil saw that Jack’s signature was dated two weeks before. So at least he had waited before deciding to go ahead with it.
“I won’t fight you, if that’s what y
ou’re worried about.” O’Neil folded the agreement and put it in the pocket of his coat. What would he do with it? Burn it? Shove it in a Dumpster somewhere? “If you’d asked me, that’s what I would have told you. They’re your children, and they need you. But I don’t want you to tell Kay anything about this. She’s never going to know you even thought it. Agreed?”
Jack frowned hopelessly. “Why should I believe you? You just assaulted me, for Chrissakes.”
“Yes, but that’s all done,” O’Neil said.
At the hospital entrance Jack stopped. “Let me ask you one last thing. Do you even have the faintest idea why I did it?”
“Actually, no.”
“Fucking Saint O’Neil,” Jack said, shaking his head. “So perfect he doesn’t even know it.”
O’Neil left Jack with the children and went up to Kay’s room. “Breaking news. I just punched your husband.”
“Did you kill him?” Kay smiled weakly. “You look so happy.”
He showed her his bandaged knuckles. “Just minor damage. Would you like me to?” A joke: but he would do it if she asked.
Kay shook her head. “Maybe later.” She sighed deeply, haltingly. Two sentences, and already she was exhausted. “Right now I’d like to see my children, please.”
He brought the boys to her and waited outside with Jack. It was noon when they emerged: Noah and Simon looking confused and uncertain, Sam holding his face bravely so they wouldn’t know what was happening. Be strong, Kay had whispered to him. Help your brothers. O’Neil left Jack with Kay and took the boys to the cafeteria and tried to feed them, and an hour later Jack came down. O’Neil saw him first, as he passed through the door and stood a moment, drying his glasses and then his face with a handkerchief. Then he strode briskly to the table.
“Okay, boys,” he said, rubbing his hands together.
When O’Neil returned to the room, Kay was sleeping. The morphine button was in her hand, her thumb resting on it. Without opening her eyes she pushed the button. O’Neil watched as the morphine moved through her, like rings on a pond, easing her into a state far deeper than sleep and yet of little use. For years it had been just the two of them. Now, for the first time since Kay had gotten sick, he felt her exhaustion as if it were his own. He knew what she wanted, and wanted it too; he wanted her suffering to end more than he wanted her not to die.
“I’m not leaving,” he told her.
The nurse brought him dinner; he left the room only to go to the bathroom, and once to call Mary from a pay phone. It was happening, he told her. He couldn’t talk for long. Later that evening Kay awoke, moaning. “God, honey,” she said. Her eyes were open but unfocused. Could she see him? Did she know where she was? Her voice was etched with pain; her words seemed to hang in the air, not sounds alone but things with form and substance. “God, honey, God.” Then she was silent.
He spent the night in a chair by her bed, and the night after, and just as he promised, was there in the room when she died the next morning.
They went to Paris after all. O’Neil had thought to cancel the trip, but when, at the last minute, Mary’s fellowship came through, he agreed to go; there was no telling if she’d ever get the grant again. With the help of one of her professors they rented an apartment for the month of July in Saint-Germaine, a small town near the end of the Metro line where O’Neil had stayed with friends on a trip after college. O’Neil looked after the girls while Mary wrote or worked at the library, and on weekends they took long drives through the countryside in the car that came, unannounced, with the apartment—an ancient Fiat that stank of stale cigarette smoke and had an engine the size of a milk bottle. At night, when Mary stopped working, he cooked for all of them, trying new recipes with ingredients he’d picked up at the open-air market down the street. Even these simple excursions required a constant vigilance that left him dazed with adrenaline; trying to manage the girls and his awful French besides, he often asked for the wrong things entirely, or else bought gigantic quantities of the right ingredients by accident: a loaf of pâté the size of a shoe box, a liter of salt, an entire wheel of Roquefort cheese. It didn’t matter; Mary was working, the girls were enjoying themselves, Nora laughing herself senseless as the dog shit all over the sidewalks, Leah chatting away in a mishmash of French and English that sometimes seemed to be a language all its own.
“I feel so guilty,” Mary said to him one evening. They were lying in bed, a huge four-poster with a curtain. “Cooped up with Nora and Leah all day. You haven’t even been to the Louvre.”
He couldn’t have cared less about the Louvre. “What’s at the Louvre?” he said, laughing. “I’m fine, I’m perfectly happy.” He hugged her to reassure her this was so. “It’s nice just to be here, to spend so much time with the girls. I’ve been away too long.”
Nevertheless, he decided to go. The car would be too much trouble; he planned to use the train. It took him two hours to assemble his supplies and get the girls dressed and ready, and by then they needed lunch. After he fed them, Leah went down for a nap; by the time she woke up, whining for the cup of heated milk that was her habit, Nora was beginning to fade. She slept two hours, until four o’clock, while O’Neil read the Tribune, bouncing Leah on his knee. Then he heard Mary’s footsteps on the stairs.
“How was it?” she said happily. She piled her books onto the table and hugged the girls. “Did you like the paintings? Aimiez-vous les peintures?”
“Mona is in top form,” O’Neil said. “You know, I somehow always thought it would be bigger.”
Mary, crouched, studied him with her eyes. Her face fell with sympathy. “It didn’t work out, did it?”
O’Neil shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said.
Their last night, they hired a baby-sitter and went to eat at a café down the street. While they waited for their meal, they wrote their final postcards to friends back home: Mary’s family in Minnesota, Mrs. Carlisle, the couple next door who were watching over their house. O’Neil hadn’t seen the boys since the day after the funeral, when Jack had told him that he would be taking them back to St. Louis in August. O’Neil thought at first that he meant for a visit, but realized as they were talking that Jack meant permanently, to live. All of Jack’s family was there, and he would need their help raising the boys, especially Noah and Simon. He had found a teaching job there—a temporary appointment, but one which, with luck, could turn into something long term. He had already submitted his resignation and arranged to put the house up for sale. The move would be hard for Sam, he conceded, but in another year he would be off to college anyway.
O’Neil saved the last postcard for Sam. The boy had barely spoken to him since the day in the car when he had asked O’Neil—what? To be his father? O’Neil had never fully known what to make of the request. The boy had been in pain, no doubt, and still was. Sixteen years old, and all his life people had been asking him to be strong when others could not. Noah’s problems, the divorce, his mother’s illness. Perhaps all he had wanted was for someone else to carry his load. But what could O’Neil have done? He looked at the blank postcard—on the other side was a picture of the Eiffel Tower—waiting to find the words. But none would come.
“O’Neil?” Mary looked at him quizzically. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.” He capped his pen and did his best to smile. “I’ll see him when we get back. Whatever I have to say, I’ll think of it then.”
Mary offered her hand across the table. “I just want you to know how much this month has meant to me. I know how difficult it’s been for you this last year, and now, spending so much time without me to help, taking care of the girls . . .”
“Really, I was happy to do it. We’ve had a great time together. You’ve wanted to come back for years.”
“Still, it means something, O’Neil.” Her face and voice were serious, almost scolding. “It means something to me. I’m just telling you how thankful I am. With all you’ve done, I don’t think anyone has said that to yo
u.”
It was true. No one had.
He traveled north one last time, the week before the summer ended and school began. He took the car, as he had done the first time, all those months ago. The weather was clear, the sky a flawless blue; he treated himself and did not cut east from Albany into Vermont, the quickest route, but instead drove north along the lake, and took a ferry across it. The boat ride from New York to Vermont was forty minutes; he passed it lying on the hood of his car, his eyes closed, the sun spilling on his face, his ears and body tuned to the throb of the engine and the slap of water against the steel plating of the ferry’s hull.
A moving van was parked in the driveway, and two men in jumpsuits were carting out the contents of the house: furniture, appliances, clothing, toys. A thousand crates of books. Jack had set aside some things of Kay’s for O’Neil to take with him—a single cardboard box, containing mostly photographs. In the box O’Neil also found her Phi Beta Kappa key, the engraved silver hairbrush she had had since she was a baby, and her senior thesis from college, a slender, yellowed volume entitled “Wayward Women: The Poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.” The last pleased him the most. Reading it, he knew, he would hear her voice.
“It’s not a lot, I know,” Jack apologized. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt circled with sweat; he had been packing for days. “Really, if there’s anything else you want . . .”
“It’s perfect,” O’Neil said. All his anger had left him, long ago. “Thank you.”
The next day he took the boys to Friendly’s for lunch. The house was empty, a silent, ghostly hall. His nephews would spend another day in town, and on Monday Jack would put them on a plane to St. Louis. Then he would drive west to meet them, and together they would begin their new life.
“What’s St. Louis like?” Simon wanted to know.
“Let’s see.” O’Neil thought a moment. “Well, it’s a lot like here. It’s warmer, that’s one difference. It almost never snows.”