Mary and O'Neil Page 0,11

she is letting him live his life for now because she loves him. But the truth is—and she has to admit it—that the longer she remains alone with the knowledge of what is happening to her, the longer she herself is saved. Under the flat institutional light of the doctor’s office there was “a mass” and a “cause for concern,” there were “treatments” and “courses of therapy,” the problem was confined to “the affected breast,” which in turn was the property of “a white female, married, 54, no family history.” (She had peeked at the radiologist’s chart.) Nowhere, at no time, has she uttered the word cancer, nor heard it used. The breast was “affected.” The mass was “palpable.” The patient was “married.” She, Miriam Burke, was something—somewhere—else.

But where? Outside, beyond the smoked glass of the library foyer, the sky is so white it seems to tremble, poised on the very edge of snow. Leaves whirl in the parking lot, nearly empty now of cars, a temporary oasis of calm tucked between toddler story-hour and the full-blown hurricane of the after-school rush. Miriam looks at her watch and sees that it is noon, on the button. Where is Arthur? She is already wearing her coat—she had expected to find him, waiting at the curb, twenty minutes ago—and the dry heat of the foyer has begun to close in on her, dampening her frame with perspiration. Should she go back in and call? And if no one answers—if he is neither home nor at the office—what then? For a brief moment she fears that something has happened—Arthur is not the best driver; he has seemed, of late, even more distracted, more airy, than usual—but then she realizes it is herself she is thinking of. Arthur is fine; Arthur is late. Sighing to hear herself sigh, she removes her coat, her hat, her gloves; finding then that her arms are too full, she puts the coat back on, leaving it unbuttoned, and checks her watch again. Beneath her coat and her white turtleneck sweater and her brassiere’s gleaming apparatus of wire and lace, in the folds of skin where her left breast meets her rib cage, a bright point of cancer glows.

She is thinking, then, of her children, Kay and O’Neil, and of her daughter’s wedding, fourteen months ago. A bright day in September: all the trees had just begun to turn, beneath a sky so vastly blue—blue like neon, so blue it seemed to buzz—it was impossible not to remark on it. (Such perfect weather! they all said. And the sky!) After the ceremony everyone drove back to the house, where a tent had been erected in the yard. The memory visits her in a series of pictures: Kay in her wedding dress, a full gown studded with small white stones; her husband, Jack, whom Miriam wishes to like but can’t, handsomely serious in his gray morning coat; his hard-drinking relatives from St. Louis—nearly all of them were bankers or the wives of bankers, it seemed—smoking cigarettes and talking up a storm as the waiters in their black pants and pressed white shirts passed trays of cheese and crab puffs and tiny things on sticks; Arthur’s mother, just recovered from gall bladder surgery, rising, somehow, against the tidal pull of age, to shuffle through a dance. From the sidelines she watched the tiny floor fill up—Jack and Kay, Arthur and his mother, the bankers and their wives—turned, then, to find O’Neil beside her, smiling, then taking her elbow in his hand. C’mon, he said. The band was playing something, she guessed, you could lindy to. I won’t tell my shrink if you don’t. You do dance, right, Ma?

She looked at him, pleasure filling her like water pouring into a vase: her grown son just back from his first two weeks of college, all smooth white teeth and rangy limbs, his eyes glowing with champagne. How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there? She hadn’t cried during the wedding but now it seemed she was about to; it was possible she would begin to cry and never stop, so she let him take her to the dance floor, place his hand at the small of her back, and steer her into and through the music—when had he learned to do this?—then spin her out to the ends of his fingers, catching her before she flew away. She saw herself, as if from the corner