Mary and O’Neil

A GATHERING OF SHADES

March 1999-September 2000

THE FIRST TIME, after the surgery, O’Neil drove. Kay had told him not to come, that the doctors would soon know more and then he should visit if he wanted to. But on he came anyway, arriving in the early morning darkness at the hospital, a citadel of light surrounded by dense green woods. The air was cold and very still, and smelled of the tall pine trees that were everywhere beyond the lamps of the parking lot. Eight hours at the wheel of his tiny car: he’d stopped only once, at a McDonald’s south of Albany, to empty his aching bladder and call Mary, who was already in bed. The baby had a cold, she said drowsily; it would be a long night.

The nurse was expecting him, the brother from Philadelphia; his sister was awake, she said, and waiting for him. She smiled with heavy lids when he entered the room. She wore a gown, of course, thin as a pillowcase, which embarrassed her; an IV was threaded into her arm. Someone was sleeping in the next bed, a dark form O’Neil glimpsed as he entered, shielded by a vinyl curtain. He helped Kay out of bed and into a robe, and down the hall to a small room where they could talk.

She had lost a breast to cancer eight years ago. There was some correlation, not well understood, between cancers of the breast and colon, and that was what was happening to her now. Fatigue, weight loss she welcomed at first and then worried over, some bleeding that she thought was hemorrhoids; it had happened slowly and then all at once, like anything. She hadn’t put all of it together, until two weeks ago. The cancer had moved outside the colon, she explained, into adjacent lymphatic tissues, though her liver and lungs were clear; that’s what the tests had shown. Her hair was grayer than the last time he’d visited, eight months before. In other ways she looked the same. He’d brought photographs of his older daughter, Nora, who was three, and baby Leah, just six weeks old, whom they called Roo; he brought a small CD player he’d purchased on his way out of town, and some disks for her to listen to: Bob Marley, whom she had loved in high school, Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. He told her that he had bought the last recalling a time, many years ago, when he had seen her dancing to “Brown Sugar” at a summer party. She was the big sister home from college and had smuggled him into a party at the house of friends, and he had stood in the kitchen doorway, a glass of warm beer in his hand, and seen her dancing. Why did some images stay with us that way, he wondered, arbitrary flashes of life seared into memory, while others vanished without a trace? Kay thanked him for the gifts, and when she said she was tired he walked her back to the room and kissed her good-night, the first time in years he had done this. I’m glad you’re here, she said sleepily, and squeezed his hand. The boys will be happy to see you.

It was late March, the sky sodden and gray. The mountains around the town were dolloped with white, and all the cars on the streets had ski racks. O’Neil slept on a foldout in the den that had been Jack’s office before the divorce, and spent the days of his visit with his nephews-ice-skating, pizza, trips to the movies and the mall. The oldest, Sam, was fifteen, Noah twelve, Simon five. O’Neil did not think he would ever have a son, and he welcomed this time with the boys, especially Sam, who was the same age as many of his students and had grown into a boy of surprising sweetness and touchingly mature enthusiasms: the flute, which he played expertly, and Scouts, and helping with his younger brothers, especially Noah, who was autistic and required almost as much looking after as Simon. Evenings, after dinner, O’Neil returned to the hospital. The room was awash with flowers, cards, gifts. Visitors came and went constantly, mostly women but some men, even Jack’s colleagues at the college. It was hard for her to rest, but good to see she had so many friends. I have the most famous colon in the Lower Champlain Valley, she said. Everybody here knows everybody else.

The rule was, she had to pass gas; it would mean that everything was working again. This happened on the fourth day after the surgery. The boys were at a hockey game with their father, and O’Neil and Kay were reading the Sunday Times together. She put down her paper and frowned. Honey, she said, I do believe I farted, and laughed. How wonderful to see her laughing! He hugged her, kissed her. Pull my finger, he said. Like they were kids again.

Her surgeon said she could be released the next day. It seemed too soon, but Kay was determined. O’Neil offered to stay longer, to help with the boys until she was really well, but she would have none of it. “Don’t they need you back home?” she said. “Don’t you have classes to teach? I’m fine. I miss my boys, I want to get back to work. Go home.” He brought them with him the next morning and found her up and dressed and looking well. The flowers that had not wilted were boxed in their vases to be carried down, wedged into place with the books and magazines and cards and the photos of her sons and O’Neil’s daughters that she had kept on the table by her bed. The boys flew into her arms. “My babies, my babies,” she said. Light poured from her face. “Did Daddy do fun things with you? Did Uncle O’Neil? And look at you, Simon. So big, in just a week!” The little boy puffed with pride. He had his mother’s hair, his father’s nose, eyes that were completely his own, iridescent and knowing. She hugged them again, each in turn, and then together. “It’s so good to see you all.”

He wondered how they would manage. She would begin her chemotherapy in three weeks, once the surgery was completely healed; it would last six months, each round taking a greater toll on her strength. Jack lived in a small apartment on campus, and though he and Kay shared custody, the boys had never spent a single night there. How would she make sure the boys got fed, that the bills were paid on time, that the complex enterprise of a house with children did not collapse into chaos? Already, the effects had started to show: the boys were living on pizza and hamburgers, Noah had worn the same sweatsuit three days running, the bathrooms reeked of piss. One of the boys’ rabbits-there were three or four, O’Neil could never be sure-had wriggled under the wire of his hutch and left droppings all over the garage. Before he left, O’Neil did the only helpful thing he could think to do, scouring the house from top to bottom and washing a dozen loads of laundry. He was angry at himself for failing to do these things before, for letting Kay come home from the hospital to a filthy house.

He planned to leave that evening; he could drive through the night, go home to shower and see Mary and the girls for breakfast, and then go straight to school. He had already missed five days of teaching. His students would be behind in everything, happily bewildered by this unplanned vacation; it would take him at least a week to get them back on track. He worked all day on the house, then loaded his car after dinner and went to Kay’s bedroom to say good-bye. Noah and Simon were under the covers beside her, listening to her read from Treasure Island; Sam, lying diagonally at their feet, was listening with earphones to the CD player O’Neil had brought for Kay and punching numbers into a calculator, recording them on a yellow legal pad. All eyes rose as he entered the room.

“Kiss your uncle, boys.”

They did, even Sam, though he also shook O’Neil’s hand. Fifteen years old, O’Neil thought. Now you’re in charge. He bent over the bed to embrace his sister. She was wearing a flannel nightgown, and he felt, against his chest, the doleful space of air where her left breast had been. He couldn’t imagine having to go through such a thing more than once. Their parents had died, swiftly, together, years ago, when O’Neil was still in college; it was Kay who had carried him through that awful time. A piercing loneliness touched him, and he realized, with a start, that it wasn’t his parents he was thinking of, or even Kay. He was thinking of his wife and daughters. He longed to hold them in his arms.

“Will you be…?” he began.

“We’ll be fine,” his sister said merrily, “won’t we, boys?” and waved him out the door.

After that he flew: when she began the chemo in April, in mid-May when the worst of the sickness set in, again in early June when her white count crashed and she finally asked him-Would you come? For the boys? He flew on Fridays, always taking the same 5:00 P.M. flight and renting a car in Burlington so that she would not have to send someone to get him, and because an extra car was always helpful: trips to the grocery or hardware store, to her doctor’s, to Noah’s therapist-he was always driving somewhere. His glimpses of Jack were cordial and fleeting, always in doors or driveways, when one or the other was delivering the boys. The divorce, two years ago, had been amicable; as Kay explained it, Jack had simply drifted away, like a comet slipping into a progressively wider orbit. O’Neil believed her but also knew this wasn’t the whole story. Though no one had said as much, he could tell there had been other women.

“In a way we’re better friends now than we were before,” Kay told him. They were folding warm towels at the kitchen table; it was early summer, and the boys were at the pool with friends. “All those years, I waited for him to get the hang of it. When I stopped asking for that to happen, I could appreciate him for what he is.”

“Okay, what is he?”

He’d meant it as a joke, but O’Neil could tell he had startled her. She snapped a towel into form and folded it across her chest with her thin arms. “He’s the boys’ father, O’Neil. He’s not a bad man. I know you think he is, but he’s really all right.” She sighed and looked away. “He just can’t face this sort of thing.”

Every three weeks she returned to the hospital for her infusions, and if one of these weeks coincided with his visits, O’Neil would take her. For the hour before these trips Kay would say nothing; an expectant quiet fell over the house, and O’Neil knew it was time to go when he saw her in the hallway putting on her coat or, in summer, a light sweater and a scarf, for the chills that came after. The hospital had a special parking lot for cancer patients, and inside there was a room of upholstered easy chairs facing a large television, though in all of O’Neil’s visits he had never seen anyone turn it on. O’Neil had heard some of the other patients call this room “the gas station.” It had been decorated to suggest a den or basement rec room, but the floor was bare linoleum and beside each chair there was a rolling tray of supplies: gauze and tape, needles holstered in cellophane, basins. Many of the other patients chatted away with one another like customers at a hair salon, and scheduled their treatments to coincide with one another’s. They introduced themselves to O’Neil by citing both their profession and their illness-Peter, for instance, was a mechanical engineer with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Delores a lawyer with the state’s attorney’s office who had ovarian cancer-and when next they saw him, they always asked him specific questions about his life: his daughters, his teaching, the movies he had seen and the books he had read. Then a nurse would set up the IV of clear liquid for Kay, and while the medicine dripped into her arm, the two of them read magazines and listened to the new CDs O’Neil brought with him each time he visited: Charlie Parker, the Beatles’ “White Album,” a new recording of the Brandenburg Concertos. Sometimes Kay received an injection first, to control the nausea, and fell asleep at once, leaving O’Neil to watch over her, listening through his headphones to the same music on which his sister floated into dreams.

Her weight plummeted, stabilized, plummeted again; by midsummer her hair was mostly gone. In August there was a break in her treatments, and O’Neil rented a house for all of them on the Jersey shore. He had taken it sight unseen, over the phone, but it was perfect: a charming cottage on a quiet street that ended at stairs and the beach. He had lied to his sister about how much it cost, which was fifteen hundred dollars for the week. It took him two days before he realized his mistake. Her bony body, one breast gone, her balding head impossible to really hide, no matter what hat she wore: of course it would break her heart to be at the beach. She took off her T-shirt or robe only to swim; everywhere she looked she would see golden, healthy bodies in the sun. The next morning he drove around town, looking for a barbershop, but had to settle for an expensive salon called Trendz.

When his turn came, he sat in the chair. “Short,” he instructed.

The girl was slowly chewing gum; she was very attractive, with hazel eyes and silver bracelets all up and down her bare arms. She held her comb and scissors slightly raised, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra. She spoke to him through the wide mirror.

“How short, exactly?”

O’Neil nodded. “All of it,” he said.

She used scissors, then clippers, and finally a safety razor to scrape his scalp clean. At the first touch of the blade O’Neil felt the coolness of air on skin that had not felt it since the first days of his life. When she was done, he ran his hand over it again and again, amazed. And yet his face in the mirror was the same.

“I don’t get many requests for something like that,” the girl said, bewildered. “A lot of older guys come in here and actually want me to somehow make it longer.”

He paid her, tipping generously, and returned to the house. It was lunchtime, and Mary and the children were making sandwiches in the kitchen. Sam, reading at the kitchen table, saw him first and started to laugh.

“Holy shit, O’Neil,” he said. “You look like a white Michael Jordan.” But his face was proud-he understood what O’Neil had done.

Nora giggled. “Daddy lost his hair,” she sang. “Bald man, bald man.”

“Hush,” Mary said. She put down the knife she had been using to spread peanut butter onto sandwiches for the children. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at him. “O’Neil?”

He shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. What do you think? It feels great.”

She narrowed her eyes, tilted her head this way and that to examine him. “Well, I think I like it. I really do. Turn around and let me see the back.”

He did, pivoting toward the doorway in time for Kay to enter the room and meet his gaze. She stepped forward and touched his bare scalp. Tears floated in her eyes, and O’Neil’s heart constricted: another mistake?

“Oh, honey,” she said, and laughed. “Is that what I look like? You look just awful.”

That evening the two of them went down to the ocean to swim. Kay had asked him if he could get some marijuana for her, to help her appetite, and he brought it with him to the beach-three joints, tightly wrapped in green and red paper, like little Christmas presents. It had been years since he’d smoked it; he’d bought it from a friend of Mary’s, a sculptor she’d known in graduate school, who knew someone who knew someone else-the road it had traveled to him was obscure. Why had Kay thought that he, of all people, would be able to get it? And yet he had, and done it with ease. O’Neil had planned a big meal to follow it: spaghetti with clam sauce, a salad of mixed greens, fresh sweet corn slabbed with butter, and a key lime pie for dessert. He’d told her nothing about this; the meal was an ambush. The joints were in a Baggie, and after their swim, he took one out and lit it, somehow, in the wind.

“I feel like I’m in high school,” she said, and took the joint from him. “I mean that in a good way.”

The smoke tasted like pepper on his tongue. They finished about half the joint before the wind blew it out, and O’Neil returned it to the bag. The pot he’d had in high school and college was all stems and seeds-sometimes they smoked through the night and barely caught a buzz-but everything he’d heard told him that, these days, half a joint would probably be more than enough for his purpose. Sure enough: he looked around and discovered that, already, the scenery seemed a little fluttery, like a movie just slightly out of synch. This fact was also elusively funny.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

She was sitting cross-legged on the sand, her legs covered by a towel. He saw her eyes had closed. “Choirs of angels are soaring from the heavens, singing the Hallelujah Chorus.” She turned, wide-eyed and grinning, to look at him. “No, but seriously, I am stoned. It’s like 1979 all over again. Where did you get this stuff?”

O’Neil shrugged. “Apparently not much has changed in this regard. A few calls, next thing you know, a car’s in the driveway and money’s changing hands.”

“Interesting.” She looked out over the water, blinking. The sun was behind them, low against the buildings, which sawtoothed the light. “Really, it’s fucking marvelous, O’Neil. I wish I’d had it the last time, though Jack probably would have disapproved. Does Mary know?”

“Mary helped.”

“Good for Mary. Thank her for me. No, I’ll thank her myself.” She straightened her back and touched his bald head again. “You didn’t have to do this, you know. Make sure you wear sunscreen. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can burn.”

“Hungry?”

She thought for a moment and nodded. “I could eat.”

She packed it away: two helpings of the spaghetti, three ears of corn, seconds on the pie. O’Neil was elated, but later that night he awoke to a sound he recognized at once. He crept down the hall and waited by the door until Kay finished, as he had learned to do, then entered the room and prepared a moistened washcloth for her face.

“I tried,” she said dispiritedly. “I really tried.”

“It was my fault.” He dabbed her face and mouth with the cloth. “I let you overdo it. It was just so good to watch you eat.”

Sam came in, wearing boxer shorts and rubbing his eyes. Down the hall Leah had woken up and was calling for Mary. It would be just moments before everyone in the house was prowling the halls. “Is Mom okay?”

Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Kay managed a smile. “I’m all right, honey. Go back to bed.”

The boy looked warily at O’Neil. “Is she really okay?”

“She’s fine, son,” O’Neil said. “Just a few too many clams.”

They didn’t smoke again. By the day the trip ended, his head, despite Kay’s warning, was tender with sunburn. Already it was prickly with stubble; he would have hair again by the start of the school year, just three weeks away. They drove back to O’Neil’s and Mary’s house in Philadelphia, and the next morning, in smothering heat, O’Neil took Kay and the boys to the airport for their flight home to Vermont. At the gate, when Sam took his brothers off to the bathroom, he took the Baggie from his pocket and slid it into her purse.

She wrinkled her brow. “Is that safe? I don’t want to get arrested.”

“You just don’t check it through,” O’Neil explained. “We did it all the time in college.” This wasn’t true; he’d done nothing of the kind. But when it came down to it, he couldn’t believe that anyone would search such an obviously sick woman.

“You’re lying,” Kay said after a moment. “But it’s all right. What could they do to me? I’m a public relations nightmare.” She paused and gave a little laugh. “The good thing about cancer, sweetie, and I mean the only good thing, is that you don’t sweat the details.”

Their plane was announced. Sam emerged from the men’s room, holding each of his brothers by a hand. Noah, almost as tall as his brother, was clutching a paper bag of seashells he had collected on the beach. O’Neil saw that Simon had had some troubles; one buckle of his overalls was undone, and both his sneakers were untied. All three were deeply tanned and wearing souvenir T-shirts O’Neil had bought for them, neon-blue with a picture of a surfer and the words Sea Isle, New Jersey printed on the front. Kay rose and waved to hurry them up.

“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.

“I told him not to call,” she said and hugged him, shaking and fiercely weeping.

She fell swiftly. After Christmas, Jack moved in to look after the boys; three weeks later Kay went into the hospital, knowing she would not return. A haze of airports and rental cars: each week, O’Neil taught his classes and then caught the five o’clock plane on Friday afternoon, driving straight to the hospital in spotless, midsized American sedans that all seemed, somehow, to be the same car. Some weeks he didn’t even unpack. His lessons were scattered, but his students seemed not to know or if they did, to care. Some days he simply turned off the lights in his classroom and read to them-The Grapes of Wrath, which the ninth graders were hacking their way through like explorers in a jungle-or sent them to the library with assignments he knew he would only pretend to grade. Are you all right? they asked him, barely hiding their pleasure. What’s gotten into you, Mr. Burke? Whatever it is, they assured him, we like it. He slept fitfully or not at all, and yet his body and mind were filled with a strange energy he could not express. At lunchtime, when this internal churning became too much to bear, he put on sweatpants and went running on the paths of the sanctuary behind the campus, his mind drifting formlessly. The winter was snowless and mild; many of the trees were still dropping their leaves, though the autumn was long gone and the first of Mary’s bulbs, the crocus and hyacinth, had appeared. Had he simply failed to notice it in winters past, this anachronistic overlapping of the seasons? The woodlands where he ran were bisected by a weedy creek, and one blustery day in February he paused on the old stone bridge that crossed it, while all around him a showering of leaves, light as paper, came down. He turned his face upward and closed his eyes, receiving them. He had not been to church in years, having long forgotten how. Leaves fell on his shoulders, into his hair. Suddenly he knew that this was prayer, standing in a cathedral of falling leaves.

Later he asked a colleague, who taught science, about what he had seen.

“They’re white oaks, O’Neil,” he replied, his voice incredulous. His classroom was like a greenhouse, filled with every kind of plant. “Didn’t you know? They keep their leaves all winter.”

Weekends, he stayed at a motel on the highway that led to the hospital. Many of the other guests were there because someone they loved was dying, or so he imagined. Surely, he believed, there must be others who were living the same divided existence, one foot in each of two worlds. He spent long days at the hospital with Kay: shuttling the boys back and forth for visits, eating off a tray in the cafeteria, hoping for some glimmer of good news but knowing none would come. At night he fell into bed, exhausted but still humming with wakefulness; sometimes he would talk to Mary for hours, finally falling asleep with the telephone resting on the pillow beside him. For Simon the time was almost happy: their father was at home with them again. Noah regarded it as he regarded everything, with a vague but neutral interest; Mama was sick, Daddy was sleeping where he used to sleep, it was winter, he had to wear gloves and a hat. Sam was trying to be brave, but underneath, O’Neil felt the strain, a disturbance that rippled through his body like a flush of fever. On a Sunday in early March, O’Neil had caught him in a moment when he thought no one was watching. Sam was standing in the snowy yard; at his feet, he had built a pile of snowballs, perhaps a dozen of them, expertly spherical and perfect for throwing. As O’Neil watched from the window, Sam had hurled these snowballs one by one, as hard as he could, at the wall of the garage. The target was unmissably large; accuracy was not the point. Nor was the grace of his throw; he released each one with the full force of his entire body, nearly falling over every time. When he was through, he leaned over, his hands on his knees, panting with exertion. Then he made more snowballs and did it all again.

O’Neil waited to hear from Sam. Finally he did, two weeks later. It was Saturday morning, an ice-cold day at the end of March. O’Neil was driving him to band practice at the high school. After, they would meet Jack and the other boys at a McDonald’s, and O’Neil would ferry the three of them to the hospital.

“I think we should come and live with you,” he announced.

He meant after his mother had died. Of course it was impossible, even if O’Neil had wanted to. He pulled the car over.

“Sam-” he began.

“He doesn’t care about her!” the boy burst out. “He never did!” His face fell. “Nobody told me, but I knew what he was doing.”

What could he say to the boy? That marriage was complicated, that there was more to it than he could understand, that the things that made a man a bad husband did not, necessarily, make him a bad parent? How could he explain something he didn’t really know himself?

“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 you’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 you.”

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.”

“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 was 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:

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.