“No snow!” the little boy said, shocked.
“Well, it can snow,” O’Neil explained. “I’m not saying it never snows. It just doesn’t, most of the time. And plus, your grandparents are there. And all your uncles and aunts and cousins.”
“Will you move there with us?” Noah asked.
“No, but I can come to visit. Or you can come to visit me.”
“Where’s Pennsylvania?” the littlest boy asked. He pronounced it deliberately, like a new word he had just learned: Pen-cil-vay-nee-a.
“Well, it’s not so far.”
“Mom’s in heaven,” Noah stated. He was doodling with crayons on his place mat, and did not look up as he spoke.
“That’s right,” O’Neil said. “That’s where she is.”
“With her mommy and daddy. Our other grandparents.”
“Yes, they’re all there together.”
“Cool it, Noah,” Sam said. “Let him eat.” He looked at his uncle. “I’m sorry, O’Neil.”
“No, it’s all right,” O’Neil said. “We can talk about it. I don’t mind at all.”
“Did they die too?” Simon asked.
“Yes, they did, a long time ago. But that doesn’t matter. You see, in heaven there’s no yesterday, or today, or tomorrow. It’s all the same in heaven. So, you’re there already, too, with your mom. Think about it. How could it be heaven if she didn’t have you there?”
Noah frowned. “But I’m alive,” he said.
“Yes, you are. And you’ll live many, many years. Your whole life. But when you get there, it will be like only a day has passed. Not even a day. No time at all. That’s heaven.”
Noah eyed him skeptically. “How do you know?”
O’Neil looked at him, then at Sam. If they had been alone, he would have thrown his arms around the boy and told him how sorry he was, how much he loved him.
“Your mother told me,” O’Neil said.
It happened in September. O’Neil had been back teaching four weeks. He had just turned forty; later, he would wonder if this fact had something to do with what occurred. As the day approached, Mary asked him if he wanted her to plan a party, and though he said no, he knew she would do something. That night, a Friday, he came home to a darkened house. As he opened the door he assumed he would be stepping into the party he had refused, but found only Mary and the girls, coloring with crayons on construction paper at the kitchen table. Happy birthday, Daddy, the girls cried, and hugged him tightly. They showed him what they had made: a picture of the two of them, enclosed in a heart. Go shower, Mary said, as he was admiring it. We have a dinner reservation at seven; Mrs. Carlisle will be here any minute. They dressed and drove to the restaurant, and only when they were seated at their table did O’Neil notice the balloons and the gifts and lift his face to find all his friends there, laughing at him, the oblivious O’Neil.
Forty: how unlikely it seemed. As a boy O’Neil had computed his age in the year 2000—an impossibly distant future—and discovered, to his astonishment, that he would be forty years old. Under the eaves of his bedroom he had wondered, What would the world be like then? Would we be living in outer space, in bubbles under the sea, soaring to work in helicopters? Would he even be able to enjoy these wondrous things, being so old? Yet here he was, the same person, living in the same world, none of it truly changed. He drove a car to work, lived in a house twice as old as he was, looked at the stars when he cared to, feeling only the vague appreciation one gave to anything beautiful and useless and far away. Every day he went to school, just as he had as a boy. Amazing.
Was your birthday all right? Mary asked, driving home from the party. Was it what you wanted? Dozens of old friends had come, some he hadn’t seen for years. His college roommate, Stephen, had even driven down from Boston. O’Neil told her it was; it was perfect, he said. You know, in this light, you don’t look forty, Mary said, and squeezed his hand promisingly. My gift to you comes later, handsome man.
She meant she was pregnant. She did not tell him that night, but he thought she would soon; that was how it had been the first two times, Mary keeping the news to herself until she was sure, living alone with her secret like the answer to a question she wasn’t sure anyone had posed. Well, he thought as sleep came to him, perhaps it wasn’t so. She would tell him, or not. She was, or she wasn’t. He would wait to hear. So, in the meantime, his belief—for that’s what it was—would be a secret too.
Monday he drove to work, his mind buzzing with happiness. Everything he saw—the morning sunlight rebounding in the turning leaves, the bright yellow school buses and dutiful crossing guards, a woman putting on lipstick in her rearview mirror at a stop sign—filled him with a strange delight. It flowed through him like a benign electric current. So much joy! So much to look forward to! The awful months were over; he had stepped back into life. In the faculty workroom the morning talk among his colleagues was still of summer pleasures, of gardens planted and trips taken, of books read and movies seen, of mountains scaled and rivers kayaked and long, unhurried days doing nothing at all. They were teachers, with more time than money; their enjoyments, modest to a fault, seemed to O’Neil to possess the same unassuming purity of green grass, summer light, and flowers in a pail, and he listened to their stories with a feeling like kinship. This life they described was, after all, the same one he had chosen.
“O’Neil, what’s gotten into you?” someone asked—the science teacher who, so long ago, had explained the leaves to him. “Nine months to go,” Paul said. “What’s there to be so happy about? You’re grinning like an ape.”
“Was I?” O’Neil laughed and sipped his coffee; he didn’t know.
“Forty years old,” another said, shaking his head. He was a young man, just a few years out of college, who had joined the faculty a year ago. He had spent his summer teaching sailing on the coast of Maine, and was as brown as a shot of scotch.
“It’s not so bad,” O’Neil reassured him.
The young man helped himself to a cookie off the tray. “I don’t know about you, but I’d want to go hang myself.” He lifted his face and smiled so everyone could see he was joking. An embarrassed titter ran through the room.
“Trust me,” O’Neil said. “You won’t feel like that at all.”
The bell rang; off they went to class, sliding into the river of students that flowed through the hallways. Clanging lockers, books, and backpacks strewn everywhere—huge piles of them, heaped under stairways and in every open corner—the urgent din of voices, the girls erupting in shrieks, the boys croaking and wailing: it was like stepping into chaos itself. Let’s hurry it up now, O’Neil heard himself saying. They darted from his path like minnows in the shallows. Let’s move it along, people. How like a teacher, he thought.
His ninth graders were studying the Odyssey. It was, by the standards of the school, a rite of passage; his department chair liked to say that students at the academy had been reading it since the Trojan War itself. Even in the lower grades the students spoke of this task like a terrible fate that awaited them all. The Odyssey! they cried. All of it! It’s, like, a thousand pages long! And yet most of them came to like it, even as they refused to admit this. War, magic, adultery, ruination, betrayal; nymphs and cyclopses and men turned into pigs; a long trip and the yearning for home. What was it, in the end, but a metaphor for the trials of growing up? They had read to Book Eleven, “A Gathering of Shades,” in which Odysseus and his men, blown to a dark and nameless shore by Circe, queen of Aeaea, filled a trench with blood to summon forth the spirits of the dead.
“What are we seeing here?” he asked them. “Is Circe doing him a favor, or not?”
Half a dozen hands went up. “It’s like Odysseus is getting another chance,” a girl said. “Tiresias tells him everything that’s going to happen to him, so he can avoid it. It’s like he’s reading Cliff Notes.” She smiled. “Like he’s cheating on a test.”
Others disagreed; one boy, a passionate rationalist, thought it w
as a dirty trick.
“What good can it do him?” he asked. “How can it help you to see the future, if you can’t change it?”
“Well, that’s just the question,” O’Neil said. “What do you think? Is the future fixed, or isn’t it?”
The boy was immovable. “The future is what it is,” he said.
The discussion was spirited; they moved through the text line by line. As the end of the period neared they came to the part where Odysseus was approached by the ghost of his mother. Though he had taught the book a dozen times, this scene remained, for O’Neil, a moment of the deepest poignancy—the great hero, so full of arrogance, reduced to a childlike yearning for his mother’s touch. He rose, took his copy of the book from his desk, and read these lines to them:
I bit my lip
rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,
and tried three times, putting my arms around her,
but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable
as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.
Wavering like a dream. O’Neil stopped, the book cradled in his hand; he knew what was about to happen. All along he had hoped it would happen when he was alone, or else with Mary. He entered an interval of time that felt suspended, and in that instant he found he was at once aware of who and where and when he was—the physical parameters of his consciousness—and all the weeks and months that had brought him to this moment: the planes and airports and rental cars, the long white hours of the hospital, the jaws of the open moving van. He knew that soon he would begin to cry, and that the force of it would blind him. He would cry and cry and cry, and struggle for breath like a man who was dying, until another moment came when the tears separated on the surface of his eyes, and he would see again—see the world through tears. He felt all this coming toward him, a rumbling in the hills above, and then it did, more powerfully even than he had imagined it. His hands found the table so he would not fall.
“Mr. Burke, what’s wrong—”
“Shut up, idiot,” someone said. “Didn’t you hear? His sister died.”
His children: why had he thought they would not know? Of course they would know. And then he realized: everyone knew. They had only been waiting for him to tell them. The bell was ringing, but he sensed no stirring, no familiar shuffling of feet or papers or books. No one moved. Others would come—the changing period was moments away—but then he heard the sounds he longed for: the shade being drawn over the small square window, and the quietly locking door.
“Shhhh,” a small voice said, and he felt their hands upon him. “It’s all right.”
His children were around him. They had sealed themselves away. The moment would pass, but until it did, no one was going anywhere.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the following:
Susan Kamil and Carla Riccio; Ellen Levine; Stephen Kiernan and Susan Chernesky; Andrea McGeary, M.D.; Students 1–7; The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; the College of Arts and Sciences of La Salle University; The MacDowell Colony; and K.M., for the inspiration of her courage.
About the Author
Born and raised in New England, Justin Cronin is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Awards for his fiction include the Stephen Crane Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his wife and children in Houston, Texas.
MARY AND O’NEIL
JUSTIN CRONIN
“Delicate, dreamy, and yet grounded in a crystalline world of the real, Mary and O’Neil offers many pleasures to its readers . . . an array of graceful and reflective stories that illuminate the painful and the ordinary in its characters’ lives with a distinctive sense of such moments’ mystery.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Few debut novels are as rich, subtle and gracefully written as Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil . . . a mature, quiet novel, perhaps unexpected in a debut. Its very understatement belies its poignancy and strength.” —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“The stories are delicately wrought and perfectly paced, giving the reader enough time to get to know the players and the players the time to reveal, or to become, themselves. . . . This is the kind of storytelling that goes down easy, and sticks to your ribs. More than once I had a lump in my throat.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Gentle humor . . . perfectly balanced prose . . . emotionally nuanced, beautifully written.” —Newsday
“Mary and O’Neil is, pure and simple, one of the most tender, moving, and beautiful books I have read in years. Justin Cronin writes about love—between parents and children, between siblings, and, yes, between lovers—with a wisdom and humor that’s rare.” —Chris Bohjalian, author of Trans-Sister Radio and Midwives
“Justin Cronin’s unusual and admirable book offers—in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout’s Amy & Isabelle—a rare combination of brilliant prose, precise feeling, and omniscient wisdom regarding the complicated bonds between generations. A wonderful debut.” —Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal
“[A] powerful novel about romantic love and family love . . . Beautifully written . . . Yes, there’s aching beauty in this novel, but there’s a celebration of love and tenderness and joy also. Mary and O’Neil, like your first youthful romance, will live in your memory.”
—The Tampa Tribune
“Justin Cronin looks at family relationships with rare tenderness and wisdom. . . . Even in describing tragedy, Cronin writes with an intense awareness of the world’s pitiless beauty.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Written with an aching beauty—for the passage of time, the yearning for peace, the haunting sorrows and small joys that all of us know in life. There is wisdom in these pages. There is compassion and understanding. But most of all, this book contains genuine love.” —Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight and Out of theWoods
“[A] fine debut . . . the power of Cronin’s stories lies in their emotional truth.” —New York Post
“One of those rare novels whose characters and events are so vivid they seem to become part of one’s own life. Justin Cronin demonstrates an extraordinary instinct for the essential moment, the resonant line, and the lasting image. This is a wonderful novel, luminous and compassionate, and very hard to put down.”
—Tom Drury, author of The End of Vandalism
“A tender portrait of regular people . . . Through his characters, [Cronin] shows us the way happiness and sadness circle around each other, flashing through here and there, illuminating the roundness of human life.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Justin Cronin writes beautiful prose that aches with its sense of passing time. He was born to tell stories, and he narrates his characters with penetrating wit as well as loyalty. His book has left me gasping with admiration, with appreciation, and of course with envy.” —Frederick Busch, author of The Night Inspector
“With subtlety and grace, [Mary and O’Neil] illuminates momentous if commonplace events in the lives of a modern New England family. . . . A quiet debut, its very understatement giving rise to its poignancy and strength.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[An] elegant debut . . . Cronin’s sentences are suffused with the wisdom of moral choices born from random events. As a result, we grow close to his characters, sympathizing with their setbacks, and celebrating their milestones.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Mary and O’Neil contains such beautifully written prose that readers will want to pause between chapters, knowing the next could not possibly best what they have just read. Yet Cronin continuously betters himself with each passage . . . Mary and O’Neil can be read as a love story, as a life’s lesson or as a mellifluous narrative. However it is seen, the novel is a victory of beauty and insight both in the writing and the reading.” —Memphis Commercial Appeal
“A writer of astonishing gifts. Mary and O’Neil is h
onest, meticulous, and ultimately heartbreaking.” —Gary Krist, author of Chaos Theory
“Mary and O’Neil seems to emanate light. The writing is gorgeous and the secrets the characters reveal to us, even if they withhold them from each other, are the essential, private mysteries of yearning and love, loss and healing grief. This is a wise and deeply beautiful book.” —Marcie Hershman, author of Safe in America
MARY AND O’NEIL
A Delta Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Dial Press hardcover edition published February 2001
Delta trade paperback edition / February 2002
Delta trade paperback reissue / July 2004
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
Excerpt from “Leaf Season” by John Updike from Trust Me.
Copyright © 1988 by John Updike. Published by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.
The author gratefully acknowledges Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, where “Groom” and “Life By Moonlight” first appeared.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2001 by Justin Cronin
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-049377
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
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