Mary and O’Neil

“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 ru

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 Sie

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/Pe

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.