Mary and O'Neil Page 0,28
your husband.”
“So he is. This doesn’t necessarily make him something to discuss, however. Mama? Is something going on there?”
Miriam touches her cheeks, and when her fingers come away glistening with moisture, she realizes she is crying.
“I think I’m just in a sad kind of mood. A winter mood. It’s snowing here, I think. Or it’s about to snow. I was just thinking about you.”
“Well I was thinking about you, too, Mama. And you don’t have to worry about me and Jack. He’s really not so bad.”
“Does he make you happy?” She is sorry the instant she has said it. “Forgive me. It’s really none of my business.”
“Of course it’s your business, Mama. Why would you think that wasn’t your business? And to answer your question, I guess I’d have to say that, on the whole, he has the ability to make me happy. I know a lot of women who don’t get even that.”
From the bathroom Miriam hears the groan of the pipes as Arthur shuts the shower off. “I think that’s so. I was lucky with your father.”
“Was?”
“Was what, honey?”
Kay hesitates. “You said ‘was lucky.’ Like you weren’t lucky anymore.”
“Did I? Well, that’s wrong. Am, I mean.” She nods her head against the pillow. “Am lucky.”
A momentary silence falls, though not, to Miriam, an uncomfortable one. She listens to her daughter’s breathing, even and clean, and her own, slower but somehow the same, mingling over the wires. In the glow of the lights from the parking lot outside, she imagines Kay in her cramped kitchen, sitting on a stool with the phone pressed to her ear, waiting to hear what she, Miriam, will next say.
“You know, I was thinking that I’d like to get Jack something special for Christmas this year. Can you let me know if there’s something he’d like?”
“I will, Mama. That’s sweet of you. I really will give it some thought.”
“And not a book, though I know that’s probably what he wants. Something more . . . I don’t know. Personal.”
“Okay, Mama.”
“And for you, too, of course. If there’s anything.”
“There won’t be, but thanks. Mama?”
“Yes, sweetie?” Her eyes are half closed.
“Is there something you’re not telling me? Because the problem is, I have to go now. I really, really do. I have to pick up Jack at the library, and then we’re meeting some friends for dinner. I was on my way out when you called.”
“Oh.” Miriam hears the disappointment in her voice. “Well, that’s fine. We can talk later.”
“If it was something I could change, I would. We haven’t spoken in a while, and I’m really glad you called. But Jack’s going to be waiting for me.”
“It’s really all right. You go get Jack.”
“And everything’s fine with you and Daddy?”
“Everything’s fine, sweetheart.”
“And the boyo’s okay?”
She thinks of O’Neil standing in the dormitory parking lot, his arm around Sandra, as she and Arthur drove away. But the memory, she realizes, is not accurate. At the end they had stood together without touching.
“O’Neil’s fine too. Don’t you worry. You go get Jack, okay? He’ll be waiting for you. Everything’s all right. I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you, too, Mama.”
And they hang up without saying good-bye.
Dusk in November, the last of the leaves pulled away; it is a little after five, and in the cities and towns of northern New England—in Rutland and Manchester, in Montpelier and Burlington, in Concord and St. Johnsbury and White River Junction and all the rest—the weathermen and air-traffic controllers see, on their radar screens, the same thing: the arrival of the first snowstorm of the season, a widening wedge of lights poking eastward from upstate New York and the Great Lakes. Their faith in their technology is absolute, a religion of professional habit, but they cannot help themselves; the eyes long to see what the mind already knows, and what science has predicted. They see the weather on the screen (there is something Christmassy about it, this expanding cone of light), and lift their gaze to the window, and the snow.
At a long wooden table in the college library, O’Neil takes no notice of the arriving storm; he has pushed his books and papers aside to place his head in the hollow of his folded arms, and is fast asleep, and dreaming. It is a simple, happy dream—a dream of springtime and a golden field in mountains—and O’Neil is both everywhere and nowhere in it. He is the mind of the dreamer and the dream itself, the sunshine and the dreamer of