Mary Costello - Academy Street

I always have the impression of being a traveller going somewhere, to some destination…I feel in myself a fire…the passers-by just see a little smoke…I know that I could be an utterly different man. There is something inside me.

Walking along the street, for no reason, she began to cry. She tried to focus on her footsteps, beat a rhythm between each tree. When her tears passed she saw things clearly. Each person’s face, the nose and eyes, the buttons on their shirts, the shivery pattern of leaves. Beauty everywhere. After a little distance a space began to open inside her, the aftermath of pain. She stood on the sidewalk, as in a dream. Silence. Light. She was ready to be transformed.

She entered the park in late afternoon. Across the green she saw them, sprawled on a gentle slope before a blazing flower bed, laughing, smoking, the group larger now. She was approaching along the path from the north. She saw him instantly, a stranger, a little apart. Long, lean, blond. He was talking to Tim and when she came close he looked up and fell silent and she felt a powerful signal. In the minutes that followed he did not look at her once, and she could not bear to look at him either.

His name was David. He was a cousin of Anne’s, out from Dublin, working for the last nine months with a firm of lawyers in midtown. He reminded her of a brighter, quieter Oliver.

Later, she found herself sitting beside him. He reached out a hand and passed her a soda. She saw he was a citóg and watched him closely after that. He had been to university. She felt inferior, always, among city people, among the educated. He spoke with a city accent. She became acutely aware of her own. She told him she had trained in the Mater Hospital.

‘I grew up in Glasnevin, not far from the Mater,’ he said. He smiled at her. She told him she used to visit the Botanic Gardens on her days off. She saw a monkey puzzle tree there. She had never heard of a monkey puzzle tree before that.

‘The Gardens are just around the corner from my home,’ he said. They might have passed each other on the street. He was silent then, as if reconsidering what he was about to say. His arms were tanned, with a thick crop of gold hairs.

‘When I was ten,’ he said, ‘I saw a tree there struck by lightning. I was with my brother. It went up in flames in front of us. I was terrified, rooted to the spot…but under a sort of spell too.’

She told him about her work, her home, the little groves of oak and beech. His legs were long, strong, muscular. The sight of them made her shy.

‘I have an uncle, a teacher, in Australia,’ he said. ‘He told me in a letter once that in the bush, years ago, when the police were hunting down outlaws like Ned Kelly they’d burn a tree to keep warm on cold nights. They’d find a dead tree and set it alight there where it stood, and gather around it. Then the outlaws would see the burning tree in the distance and make off, gaining ground through the night.’

He had beautiful hands. He was so far from Denis and Oliver, his life so polished, that she felt a pang of pity for them, for all they lacked. At this thought she felt suddenly disloyal.

‘Do you like it here, in New York?’ she asked.

He looked out across the park. ‘Yes, I suppose. I don’t like the evenings. Late summer evenings when…’

He did not finish. He took out cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit his own and exhaled. She was aware of every breath, the flex of every muscle, where his eyes fell, his hands. To be this watchful, this attuned to a man, a stranger, excited and confused her. He lit another cigarette and looked pensive. He was on the point of telling her something else, but he stood up and moved away, and she felt the parting like a loss.

Later, when they drew near again he did not say much. He gave off an air of mild irritation, as if regretting all he had told her. Then a silence, a pall, began to envelop them. It took all her talk away.

FROM A DISTANCE he exerted a great force on her. She craved solitude to conjure him up again, finding significance only in the recall of that day. Everything moved her. Every sight and sound, every song, every man’s face — the whole city — turned him over to her. She went out to Brooklyn one morning with Anne to help choose Anne’s trousseau. In the afternoon they left the shops, each enwrapped in her own fantasy. They walked along a street with a slight incline where kids rode bikes along the cracked pavement, calling out to one another in the bright sun. She gazed at the clapboard houses and imagined the back yards and clotheslines and husbands sitting in the shade. She began to imagine coming home to this, entering, calling out ‘I’m home, honey,’ and he in the kitchen peeling onions, frying meat. The meat browning on the pan, the smells, the sounds of the kitchen. She, pausing in the hall, hearing the children outside, breathing deeply before entering the kitchen, then standing behind him, laying her face against his back. Home. She shook herself out of the reverie and smiled at Anne. They rode the subway back into the city, trundling along under the hot streets into the heart of Manhattan.

Oliver came out in June, and found work in construction. The American sun bleached him blonder. At weekends he joined Tess and Anne and their social group. They went out to New Jersey for a Fourth of July garden party. Oliver was handsome beyond words. His blue-eyed charm reminded her of the Kennedys. If you weren’t my brother, she thought, I’d marry you. There was no one to whom she felt closer than to her siblings, no greater bond. She thought of David constantly. Already he had forgotten her. She felt the approach of hurt. She tried to glean things from Anne, careful not to betray the tug she felt. The longing to see him became a kind of sickness.

And then, one Saturday, there he was, on the beach at Coney Island when they arrived. Sitting on a towel in their crowded patch near the water, smoke trailing from his fingers. Emblazoned in the sun, the glittering sea before him. He looked up, wordless, unyielding. But something in his eyes — a flash, a shock — before he averted them, and she knew she had not been wrong, that what she had felt was the truth. She retreated, and watched him from a safe distance. When he removed his shirt she saw his chest, his skin, his bare beauty. She thought of a deer; stark, sleek, nervy. Now and then he looked out at the ocean with a far-off gaze. In an instant he could break her heart.

All day long, they came and went, swimming and eating and talking. She stayed close to Oliver. She looked at the others, wondering at their lives now, their mothers and fathers back home. All the time the sea, the wing-flash of gulls, him on the edge of her vision. She had to pass him to get to the water and she half ran, shy, feeling the pull, the oscillation in him: in a glance, an invitation, in the next, a rejection. Admit it , she wanted to cry. Only the truth matters. Tense, febrile, she threw herself on her towel and watched him through half-closed eyes in a swirl of sun and cigarette smoke. A birthday card was passed around and he took the pen in his left hand and tilted his head and half twisted his torso and hooked his wrist at an awkward painful angle, and scratched out the words. She was rooted to the spot. In his hooked hand, his twisted body, she saw a striving, something that rendered him vulnerable. Misshapen hand, she thought, misshapen words. Misshapen man. The effort implied something fragile, broken, a wound far greater than any visible deformity.

The sun beat down. From the promenade, the cries of carousel riders carried in the air. She got up, walked into the water, pushed her legs against the weight of the sea. She had learned to swim in Dublin, the one thing in her life that she had ever mastered. Chest-high in the waves she lowered her head, raised her legs, let her body float, the ocean under her. She lay on the shimmering surface. The swell of each wave lifted her, then gently lowered her again. She was almost dreaming, the sun on her back.