"Mary and O’Neil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cronin Justin)

GHOSTS OF WINTER

January 1995

MARY AND O’NEIL: 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.”

That night they did as the doctor suggested and split a bottle of Chardonnay. It cost eleven dollars, was as sugary as a candy bar, and by the time they were finished they were both tipsy and babbling like toddlers. Struggling out of his jeans, O’Neil stumbled on the corner of the bedroom rug and watched as one of the finial posts on the bed frame rose toward his face, slowly and then quickly, like the bow of an ocean liner bursting from a bank of fog. In her robe Mary led him to the bathroom, sat him down on the toilet, and held a Ziploc bag of ice cubes to his nose.

“There’s always adoption,” O’Neil said through his thickening nose.

“We’re too old,” Mary said hopelessly, and began to cry. “Who would adopt us?”

In early January they returned to the doctor, who once again did nothing even remotely medical, apart from taking Mary’s temperature. Her questions seemed arbitrary. Did they sleep with the windows open or closed? Did they bathe, or take showers? Was O’Neil still jogging in the cold? The doctor listened to their answers, nodding and clicking her pen. Perhaps, she concluded, they might take a trip together, to take their minds off getting pregnant.

“I’ve found there’s something about a hotel that can be helpful for couples with this problem,” she said.

“This problem?” Mary repeated.

“Try one with movies in the rooms,” the doctor said.

It seemed silly; nevertheless, they decided to do it. All they had was the weekend, so they planned to drive north to see the town where O’Neil had grown up. In all their time together Mary had never actually been to Glenn’s Mills. The drive to upstate New York from Philadelphia took five hours, the last of these on country highways through scenes of such heartbreaking rural poverty that all they could do was marvel. But Glenn’s Mills itself had obviously been discovered. In winter twilight, fidgety from so many hours in the car, they drove down the town’s main street, past boutiques and antique shops, tearooms and craft studios. Though Christmas was long gone, pine boughs still hung from the streetlamps, which were ornately Victorian, like something from the set of a play. They half expected to see men out walking in capes and top hats, but most of the people on the street were wrapped in heavy parkas with scarves pulled up to their chins, hurrying somewhere, their heads tipped against the cold.

“None of this was here when I was a kid,” O’Neil explained. They glided past an herbal shop called the Witchery, then a corner Mobil station with a sign in the window that said: We Have Cappuccino!

O’Neil waved a sorry hand. “Who drinks all this espresso? This was always a boiled-coffee kind of town.”

At the Mobil station they bought turkey sandwiches, taco chips, and a six-pack of beer, and found their motel. It was clean and new, two stories tall, and bathed in a fluorescent glow. They ate their picnic on the bed, then put on their pajamas and climbed beneath the stiff covers. A folded card waited on the nightstand with the names of the movies they could order in their room. The usual fare, and then they came to the ones they were looking for: Up and Coming, Hot Housewives, and Pillow Talk II: Debutantes After Dark.

O’Neil voted for the third. “I liked the original. Is Doris Day in this one?”

Mary shook her head and continued to read. “‘The sexy adventures of a rich girl in Europe.’ It stars somebody named Chandra Loveman, though I don’t suppose that’s her real name.” She wrinkled her nose and peered at O’Neil with her head tipped to one side. “It doesn’t seem like enough to go on, really.”

“I’m not familiar with Ms. Loveman’s oeuvre,” O’Neil said, “but I would be willing to learn.”

They picked the first movie, because Mary, who had done graduate work in poststructuralism, liked the pun in the title. The movie was very dark, and there was a great deal of moaning in the shadows, and a soundtrack that pulsed tumescently whenever the sexy parts came along, which was nearly all the time. The plot was thin, but actually more than either of them had expected. A beautiful young man, orphaned by a tornado that destroys his family’s farm, moves from Iowa to California to find work in the movie industry. No sooner does he step off the bus than he is beset by unscrupulous female casting agents and producers, all seeking his favors. They are determined to corrupt him, but he outsmarts them; his past is gone, his gentle life in Iowa smashed by the four winds, and what is there for him now, but to give himself wholly to his gifts? It was all straight out of Balzac, and vaguely interesting, but the story would never last for very long, and then the music would resume, and the moaning. Sometimes the camera zoomed in so close that neither of them could tell what they were seeing.

“I’m not trying to be uncooperative,” Mary said after some time had passed, “but I have to say, this isn’t doing very much for me at all. What is that? Is that somebody’s leg?” She waved her beer at the screen. “Honestly, I haven’t a guess.”

“We could see what else is on.”

Mary traded her empty beer for a fresh one from the small ice-chest beside the bed. Under the blankets she was wearing a flannel nightgown and woolen socks. “It’s your six dollars,” she said.

They scanned through the other channels and selected a nature show about a family of bobcats. The mother had a pair of cubs; she taught them to hunt, and play in the dust. She brushed them clean with her long tongue.

Mary turned toward O’Neil in the dark room. The screen flickered blue across the small round lenses of his eyeglasses.

“You know, in this light there’s something about you. It’s very appealing somehow.”

“Is this the beer talking?” O’Neil asked.

Mary kissed his nose and settled down beside him. “I like this show much better.”

“Those are cute kittens,” O’Neil agreed.

For a while they watched without talking. The kittens grew; finally the day came when it was time for them to strike out on their own. Mary watched as the mother cat led them away from the den, on some pretense, then kept on walking. The show ended with the mother cat, on a rocky outcrop, looking over the arid valley where she had left her children behind.

“It must be hard for you to be here,” Mary said into O’Neil’s chest. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

“I’m all right,” O’Neil said, but in the dark, almost invisibly, she knew him to be weeping.

The next morning, cold and clear, they put on heavy coats and boots and walked around town while O’Neil pointed out the sights: the pharmacy where he had once shoplifted baseball cards, his father’s old law office on Main Street and the library where his mother had worked, the blue clapboard house where his sister, Kay, had taken piano lessons from a woman named “Mrs. Horsehead.” Whether this was her actual name, or a nickname made up by her students to be cruel, O’Neil could not recall. At a pottery gallery they looked at vases without buying any, and when the morning seemed over, they had lunch at a diner behind the town hall, called the Coffee Stop. The insides of the Coffee Stop were dim and smoky-it seemed to be an oasis of what the town once was-and the booths and counter stools were packed with large men in flannel work shirts whose dirty hands and nicotine-stained faces bespoke a life of ceaseless toil. Mary bought a copy of the local paper to read over her grilled cheese sandwich, and that was when she saw the article. She read it in its entirety, then passed O’Neil the paper, folded back to show the photo of the house-a large white four-square with black shutters that she recognized at once as O’Neil’s, from other photos she had seen. Even the paint job was the same.

“Boyhood home gets rave review,” she said.

O’Neil’s parents’ house had been turned into a restaurant, called Le Café. Beside the picture of the house there was a second photo of the restaurant’s owner, smiling and shaking hands with a woman O’Neil had gone to high school with, who was now the mayor of the town. The owner, who was also the chef, was a tall man, handsome and bald, with a neatly trimmed goatee. He had trained at Cordon Bleu, it said, “in Paris, France.” “It has always been my dream to open a country inn,” he told the reporter, “to return the finest cuisine to its source, such as one finds in the hills of Tuscany or Provence.” Before moving to Glenn’s Mills he had owned a successful restaurant in Manhattan.

O’Neil looked the article over then put the newspaper aside. “Unbelievable. A fucking restaurant.”

“I’m sure it’s a shock.”

“This place in Manhattan. How successful could it have been, if he ended up here?”

Mary dipped her grilled cheese into a small pool of ketchup. “What kind of food do they serve?”

O’Neil searched the article again. “It doesn’t say, not in so many words. Seriously, how would anyone around here know the difference?”

The waitress, an old woman in a ruffled apron, came to their booth and refilled their coffee cups. O’Neil looked out the window at the snowy town.

“There ought to be a law against this sort of thing,” he remarked. “It’s like a desecration.”

Mary looked at her sandwich. “I do see your point. On the other hand, I would like to see your old house. And we could use a good meal.”

Mary stayed at the table while O’Neil went to call about a reservation. The waitress brought her the pie she had ordered-cherry, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream-and she decided not to wait for O’Neil to return to begin eating. The cherries, she could tell, were canned, but the crust was excellent-light and buttery and still warm from the microwave.

O’Neil returned, shaking his head. “They couldn’t take us until eight-thirty,” he said. He sat across from her, frowning. “I remember when everybody around here was in bed by then, if they weren’t beating their wives. That was always a problem in these parts.”

“Oh, idle threats,” Mary said, forking the last of the pie into her mouth.

After lunch they returned to their hotel, watched the second of the three movies, napped through the afternoon, and awoke to the disorienting early darkness of a winter evening. O’Neil went to get more beer while Mary showered, and returned to find her lying on the bed wrapped in a thick towel, reading from the Bible she had found in the bedside drawer. Her hair was wet and thick, and she had scrubbed her face so hard it looked dusty.

“Now here’s something,” she said, and began to read aloud from the Bible, squinting without her glasses at the tiny print. Her eyesight was very poor, and yet she often read this way. “‘When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business; but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.’” She lifted her blue eyes from the page. “It’s interesting to me that this is not a widely mentioned part of Scripture.”

O’Neil opened a beer and handed it to her. “I’m not sure dinner is such a hot idea.”

Mary closed the Bible. “Well. Tell me about that.”

He sat on the bed beside her; the cold of the outside still clung to the wool of his coat. “We could eat someplace else.”

“This is true.”

“I haven’t been back there in almost twenty years, not since we sold it.” He removed his coat and opened a beer of his own. “You know, when Kay and I got home after the accident, the first thing we found was a huge pile of mail in the front foyer. Our folks had been dead for a couple of days, but the mailman had been shoving it through the mail slot just the same. So there it was, this pile of letters and bills and magazines, all mailed to dead people.” He shook his head mournfully and took a long swig of beer. All day long, Mary realized, he had been thinking about this melancholy pile of mail. She understood this was unavoidable-the mind went where it wished-and yet, deep down, she believed such brooding was profitless. O’Neil sighed hopelessly, as if he had heard her thoughts. “Now lawyers from Albany are sitting around the living room, praising the pot stickers.”

“So you found out what kind of food they serve,” Mary said expectantly.

“Sino-French.” O’Neil sipped again and wiped his mouth. “The guy at the 7-Eleven told me. Apparently, the chef does something very nice with duck.”

At eight o’clock they left for the restaurant. Mary fully expected O’Neil to change his mind at the last minute, sending them out onto dark country lanes searching for something to eat, but he surprised her and drove straight there. They parked at the curb across from the house, and sitting in the cold car, O’Neil gave her the lay of the land. The house, set back from the street, was not immediately recognizable as a restaurant, and the sign by the front door was so small it would have been possible to miss it altogether-to pass the house by, thought Mary, without knowing it was in any way different or special. O’Neil spoke quietly, as if they might be overheard, as he pointed out the details: the stone walkway his father had laid one summer, the crabapple tree that had been a sapling when his parents died but now stood fifteen feet tall, the window on the second floor that had been his room, before he had gone off to college. He spoke only of the exterior; his mind, it seemed, did not want to go inside the house.

“We sold it to a couple with kids,” O’Neil said. “I think their name was McGeary. After that I just lost track.”

“How does it feel?” Mary asked, and took his hand.

O’Neil looked at the house once more, taking it in, and sighed through his nose. “Strange,” he said. “In most ways it’s just the same. But probably the inside is all different now.”

It was. They boarded the porch and stepped through the front door to find themselves in a single open area, generously lit, with fluted white columns supporting the structure where load-bearing walls had once stood. A half-dozen tables occupied the dining room, which flowed to the open kitchen at the rear of the house. From where they stood in the entryway, Mary and O’Neil could see the gleaming range, the copper pots hanging on chains. The air was moist and smelled like garlic, and quiet violin music dribbled from speakers in the ceiling.

“Son of a bitch,” O’Neil said quietly.

The man whose picture they had seen in the paper came out from the kitchen and showed them to their table near the fireplace. The room was small enough that, as they sat, the other parties around them fell silent.

“I guess it’s quite a change,” Mary said.

O’Neil cast his eyes about the room. “You know, I think this is just about the spot where Kay and I used to play Chinese checkers on the floor. There was a sofa right there, and two chairs across from it. I don’t know why I played with her, because she always beat me. So maybe that’s why. It made her so happy.”

Mary took a roll from the wicker basket on the table. Steam wafted up as she pulled it into halves. “I just want to know,” she said, “is the whole evening going to go like this? It’s all right if it is.”

“They were perfectly good walls,” O’Neil said. “They were the walls of my childhood, and now they’re gone.”

Mary held out the basket. “Try a roll, O’Neil. They’re fresh.”

They were finishing the bread when a young woman appeared at their table and lit the candle between them with a long match. She was pretty, with brown hair that fell to a straight line across her shoulders, and small dark eyes.

“Have you been with us before?” the woman asked.

“Not in the way you mean,” O’Neil said.

“No,” Mary said.

The woman handed them menus, single sheets of heavy paper written by hand. “Now, these are not menus in the typical sense,” she explained. “Think of them instead as maps of what’s to come.”

While the woman stood beside their table, Mary and O’Neil looked the menus over. Five courses were listed: an appetizer, soup, salad, entrée, and dessert. The descriptions were lengthy and contained many ingredients that neither of them recognized, or recognized as food. The salad, for instance, contained pansies. There were no prices on anything, but the entire meal cost fifty-five dollars per person.

O’Neil handed his menu back to her. “Say, what’s upstairs?” The stairs were blocked off by a velvet rope, like a forbidden wing at a museum. A brass plaque hung from the rope with the word Private engraved into its face.

The woman smiled neutrally. “Storage,” she said.

Their courses arrived, each more bizarre than the last: grilled oysters in raspberry sauce, a watery yellow broth flecked with bits of bitter mushroom, the promised salad of endive and pansy. The endive was served as a single wedge-shaped head, laid at an angle across the plate, with pansies scattered carelessly over it, as if dropped from a great height.

When the woman had left them with their salads, Mary leaned across the table. “Maybe we should just tell her. They might be interested, you know.”

O’Neil speared a pansy with his fork and chewed it, grimacing. “What would I say?” he asked. “‘Thank you for making your pretentious food in my boyhood house’? You know, if my parents were alive, I don’t think they’d even eat here? Though it’s sort of a moot point, because if they were, they’d be living in it.”

“You can’t be sure,” Mary said. “They might have moved. Retired, maybe. Gone off to Florida.” They would, she knew, be somewhere in their late sixties.

O’Neil took a long drink of water and frowned. “Trust me,” he said. “They’d be here.”

Mary didn’t answer. The chef and the woman-his wife, Mary guessed-were obviously trying, and how were they to know that their place of business was, in fact, a tomb of memory? Mary had once been back to visit the house where her family had lived when she was very small. This occurred during an uncertain period in her life, the year after college, when she was working as a barmaid in the Minnesota town where she had gone to school and living in a tiny apartment over a shoe store. The house was just a few miles away from her parents’ development, and yet she had not been back for many years. The address was tattooed into her memory-694 West Sycamore Lane-and she found it easily, as if guided by an internal compass: a tiny shoebox of a house, still painted Pepto-Bismol pink, on a damp patch of ground shaded by a pair of threadbare hemlocks her parents had planted twenty years before. People who had revisited their childhood homes always spoke of how small it seemed, but Mary knew it had always been that way-the house had seemed small even then-and a flood of sensations returned to her: the close feeling of its cramped square rooms, the thin walls and nearly weightless doors, the smell of the airless kitchen and the way the light fell on winter afternoons across the threadbare carpets. During the time they had lived there, her father worked two jobs, selling used cars for her uncle by day and moonlighting at night as a cashier in a drugstore, selling candy and cigarettes, and one winter evening her mother took them-Mary and her older brother, Mark, and her little sister, Cheryl, still in a basket-to visit him. So vivid was this memory, sitting in the car outside the house, that she doubted, momentarily, if it had ever happened at all. Mary was four or five; her father, standing behind his register, was wearing a smock, dark green, with his name, Lars, on a tag over the breast pocket. Mary knew this was his name and yet to find it this way, announced so plainly for all to see-it seemed as if he had been stolen from her, that she had been deprived of some essential right-amazed and frightened her. The feeling was so new, so overwhelming in its strangeness, that Mary began to cry. There was a general commotion; her mother had meant the trip to be a treat, and here she was, in tears; and then her father had stepped out from behind his register and lifted her into his arms. He was a large and powerful man, both in memory and in fact, and held her against his broad chest until she was calm, and sat her on the counter beside his register. Her mother took the other children home, but Mary stayed with him until closing time, sucking on cherry lollipops.

Why had he done it? In Mary’s experience many people claimed to have epiphanies when nothing of the kind occurred-insight filled you slowly, like sips of water from a cup-but that is what happened to her, parked in front of the pink house. Her father had wanted her to know that he loved her, of course, but also what such love as his contained: that it was made of iron, and could work without ceasing or rest. Though he lacked the words to say this, he wanted to tell her it was all for her, everything he did in the world; whatever happened in her life, there had been one such person. She knew this, as she also knew that the pink house was a monument to this memory; that was why she had come. She hadn’t knocked on the door, or even gotten out of the car. The house was inside her, that place in her heart where she was still a tiny girl, and to enter it would have stolen this feeling from her.

Mary reached under the table and found O’Neil’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not really so bad to be here,” O’Neil said. “I only wish the food wasn’t so weird. I wanted you to have a nice meal.”

They managed to eat a respectable amount of salad before the entrée arrived: braised medallions of venison with cranberries and lemongrass, served on a bed of buckwheat couscous. After the pansies it was surprisingly good, and they ate hungrily, even O’Neil. By this time it was after ten and most of the other tables were empty. O’Neil began to talk freely about his memories of the house and the town, as he had not done since they’d arrived the day before. The stories he told were happy, and Mary understood then that part of his pleasure was his invisibility-it had been that way for her-and he would neither tell the owner who he was nor try to go upstairs. And yet she knew that was what he truly wanted: a few moments alone, in his old room.

They were the last to leave the restaurant. Outside, the winter sky was hung with a dense tapestry of stars. She waited until O’Neil was buckled in before she announced her intentions to return to the restaurant to use the bathroom.

O’Neil looked at her with a puzzled expression. How, she wondered, could he possibly fail to know what she was about to do? “The motel is only five minutes.”

“I don’t think I can wait,” she said, and got out of the car.

She found the dining room empty, as she had hoped. Their table had already been cleared and laid out with clean linen and silverware for the next night. From the kitchen she heard the sound of pots clattering in the sink and running water, and country music playing on a radio. She waited a moment at the door to see if anyone had detected her return, then stepped over the velvet rope and climbed the stairs.

The hallway was dark, but as her eyes adjusted she saw five doors, all closed. There were three bedrooms, she knew-O’Neil had given her the basic layout-plus a bathroom and a linen closet. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the wall, and at the far end of the hall she saw a small table with a telephone on it. It was an old-style rotary phone; probably it had been there since O’Neil was a boy. She had already guessed that the chef and his wife lived up here. Turned around in the darkness, Mary had lost track of which door was which, but she guessed and opened the second one on the left.

The room was small and square, and a night-light glowed on the wall above a baby’s crib. Mary stepped inside. The air was warm and sweet, like clean laundry. She saw a bureau and a changing table, and a bookshelf with toys-dinosaurs and trucks, a baseball glove, the kinds of things a boy would like. What was she doing in here? And yet she could not remove herself; the urge to remain was irresistible, as if she were soaking in a bath. She stood another moment, tasting the air, then approached the crib where the little boy was sleeping.

It was then that she saw the blinking baby monitor on the bureau. Mary’s heart froze with panic, but it was too late-she had been detected. She heard footsteps running up the stairs, and then a voice, slicing through the darkness.

“What are you doing in there?”

It was the woman who had served them dinner. She pushed past Mary into the room, placing herself between Mary and the crib.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I was looking for the bathroom. Nobody was downstairs.”

“I thought you left,” the woman said sternly. “It says private, you know. Private means something to most people.”

The baby had begun to fuss in its crib. The woman turned away from Mary and bent over the railings to lift him into her arms. It was then that Mary saw that it wasn’t a baby at all, but a much older child-a boy in Barney pajamas, perhaps as old as five. His eyes were closed, but his mouth, which was large and wet, twisted with his soft cries. He laid his head over her shoulder; his bare feet hung nearly to the woman’s knees and made a series of jerky movements. Mary noticed things in the room she somehow had not seen before: a tiny wheelchair parked beside the bureau, a white box with tubes and dials that looked medical, a shiny chrome stand for an IV. Even the crib was different-much larger, like a raised bed with bars.

The woman smoothed the child’s hair. “Mummy’s here,” she cooed. “No bad dreams, no bad dreams.”

Mary stood in the doorway. “I truly am sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake him.”

“He’s deaf.” The woman looked at Mary then, fixing her with a firm gaze. “It’s not even words he hears, just a vibration.”

Outside, O’Neil was waiting in the Toyota, the engine idling. He was gripping the wheel tightly, as if he couldn’t wait to drive away.

“All set,” she said.

He looked at her as if he was about to speak, then put the car in gear. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” O’Neil said.

In the early morning, before O’Neil was awake, Mary rose from bed, seized by a turbulent nausea, and went to the bathroom to vomit. She managed to do this quietly, then rinsed her mouth out and returned to bed. But when the two of them awoke later, she found that the feeling had not passed.

“It’s that goddamn restaurant,” O’Neil fumed. “Pansy salad. And that awful soup. What the hell was that all about?”

They had planned to visit the cemetery that morning, but agreed this was now impossible, and O’Neil left the motel to find muffins and tea for Mary, to put something on her stomach before they attempted the drive back to Philadelphia. At the window Mary watched the car pull away, then put on her coat and walked into town. She had seen the clinic the day before, near the gallery where they had looked at pots; the sign had said it was open for Sunday walk-ins from nine to twelve o’clock.

The door was open and the lights were on, but the waiting room was empty. Mary sat down and thumbed through a needlework magazine, and a few minutes later a woman appeared, wearing a white coat and stethoscope.

“Ah,” she said, seeing Mary. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Are you the doctor?”

The woman, who had short gray hair and a handsome heart-shaped face, held up the disk of her stethoscope and looked at it in mock surprise. “Now, who put this stethoscope on me?”

The doctor led Mary into an examining room, where Mary told her about the pansies and the soup while the doctor took her temperature and blood pressure and asked her about the pain. She eased Mary back on the paper-lined table and pressed her bare stomach here and there. Her fingers were pale and slender, yet eased into Mary’s flesh with surprising force.

The doctor stepped back. “Well, I don’t think it’s food poisoning.”

“The meal was strange but I’d have to agree.”

“I’ve eaten there. The duck is really what’s special.” The doctor furrowed her brow at Mary. “How late are you?”

“Ten days, give or take.”

“Have you ever been pregnant before?”

“Not in many years,” Mary said. “Has it changed?”

From a cabinet of supplies the doctor removed a square pink box with a picture of a daisy and handed it to Mary. Inside were a small specimen cup and a plastic wand, like an undersized thermometer, wrapped in cellophane.

Mary held up her bare wrist. “I don’t have a watch.”

The doctor unclasped her own-a Timex, with three hearts forming the first three links of the band on either side of the face-and showed Mary to the rest room. Mary squatted over the toilet and held the cup between her legs until she had filled it, and placed it on the toilet tank. The instructions on the box said the test would take three minutes, but the instant Mary dipped the wand into the cup, a turquoise ribbon shot up the blotter paper and filled the little window, resolving into a tiny cross. She counted off three minutes with the watch, waiting to see if there was some mistake and the blue cross would be retracted. When it wasn’t, she dumped the cup into the toilet, wrapped the wand in tissue paper to show O’Neil, and returned to the office.

“These tests are pretty accurate,” the doctor said, scribbling on a prescription pad, “but they’re not the real thing, so when you get home, you should go see your gynecologist.”

“Somebody told me this was going to happen,” Mary said.

“Well, they knew something.” The doctor put her watch back on. “If you don’t mind my asking, is this good news for you?”

Mary fingered the wand in her pocket. “It’s what I wanted,” she said.

On the way back to the motel Mary stopped at a Rexall to fill her prescription. It was an old-style drugstore with a lunch counter, and the air smelled of wet clothing and fried eggs. An entire aisle of the store was devoted to baby products-fat packages of diapers, cans of powdered formula, rattles and teething toys and little spoons with kittens or puppies on the handles, all sealed in plastic-and Mary paused to look it over, this vast, hopeful inventory she had never paid any attention to. She believed it was important now to stand before it-she felt as if she had achieved some final homecoming-and when she handed her prescription to the druggist, an old man with a shuffling step who took the paper from her without comment, he, like the wall of diapers and the well-worn light of the store’s interior and the lunch counter with its pies and cakes under elevated domes of glass, seemed somehow inevitable, like a figure from a dream she’d once had years ago.

The druggist handed the prescription to her in a stapled package, his face broadening with a smile. “Congratulations,” he said.

Mary thanked him, bought a carton of milk at the lunch counter, and stepped outside. O’Neil would be back at the motel, pacing with worry. Where had she gone off to? Had she gotten so sick she couldn’t wait for the muffins and the tea? Why hadn’t she left him a note? The air had warmed; a pale and ghostly snow was falling all around. Standing by the door, Mary opened the druggist’s package, which contained a bottle of prenatal vitamins. They were large orange pills that smelled like fish food, and the directions said to take one daily. The bottle contained forty pills, and the prescription could be refilled five times, for a total of two hundred-the number of days until the baby was born. Two hundred days, Mary thought, and removed her mittens to take the first pill, tipping her face into the falling snow and using the milk to wash it down.