Whenever Maureen grew tired of being a mother she would make the extravagant threat that she would throw her self under a red, double-decker bus. It was far-fetched; not only was she not English, but she resented having to use public transportation. Submitting herself to the wheels of a public bus filled with members of the public would have been a violation of her way of life. She made the threat throughout my childhood; whenever she felt hopeless or neglected, overwhelmed with the responsibilities or mundane tasks of her life. I never, except for one particular afternoon, believed she was capable of such a thing. It was a weekday, the sky a glinting silver, an underwater light falling across the city. People moved busily across Trafalgar Square. Tourists aimed their lenses into the sky at Lord Nelson atop his column. Buses revolved around the square. Timothy and I were dressed in our uniforms, Maureen in a brown corduroy skirt-suit with a yellow French-cuffed shirt underneath. From the elevated steps in front of The National Gallery, Timothy and I spotted the enormous black lions surrounding Nelson’s column, the fountains, and the famous pigeons. Vendors sold small paper cups of seed and children stood with their arms outstretched, seed in the palms of their hands and sprinkled in their hair. When they felt the first set of clawed feet on their arms and on the tops of their heads, their eyes bulged and they let out small squeals of pleasure. I told Maureen we wanted to visit the square. To climb up between the lion’s enormous paws like the other children, to throw pennies into the shallow fountains and to feed the pigeons. Timothy politely kept quiet while Maureen contemplated her watch and then her guidebook flagged with bookmarks. “We’ll have to see how we get along,” she said.
A particularly long day passed in the gallery: a show of Goya’s prints and pencil drawings. His paintings are usually enormous; I remember specifically the image of Saturn chewing his son like a drumstick, but everything in this show was very small and hung a little too high for Timothy and me. We had to stand back to see. For a child, a gallery is a labyrinth. Just as we saw what we believed to be the exhibit’s end, we turned the next corner to find another long hallway leading in the opposite direction. I was used to it, but Timothy was not. He tired quickly and rested on each available bench when we came to it. He propped his elbows on his knees and wore an expression of complete and painful exhaustion. Had he not been so polite, he might have complained, or made trouble.
If Maureen noticed Timothy’s suffering, she did not let on. She wore glasses and held her notebook across her folded arm as she scribbled her notes. She got so close to some of the exposed prints, the resident guard would step forward a few paces, ready to pounce if she proceeded to kiss the surface of the print as it looked like she might. Maureen ignored them. She considered them a nuisance, an impediment to her work, as all artists need to feel there are powers working against them. But many of the guards in England are capable of arguing their interpretation of a specific work with great authority. Despite her better instincts, I have watched Maureen become embroiled in major disagreements and be matched reference for reference by one of those men or women whom she had wanted to consider beneath her.
There was a crowd in front of one of the drawings that particularly interested Maureen. It was a study for A Dog, one of Goya’s most famous murals (described in Maureen’s book as forlorn and hungry in a lonely world . . . it seems to have misplaced its soul, if dogs possess them). Maureen stood in the crowd with her chin in her hand contemplating the pencil drawing behind non-reflective glass. Timothy and I sat down on a bench where we could watch her. She had a good figure, long legs and broad shoulders. I do not think we were the only ones watching. One group of people moved on and was replaced by another, but Maureen remained, standing almost totally still. It was Timothy who noticed that she was weeping. I had seen her do it before. Timothy touched my hand and pointed. He giggled nervously. Perhaps his mother never cried. We were far enough away that he could whisper to me without being overheard. “She’s crying,” he said breathlessly. I said, yes, she was, but not to worry, it happened sometimes and she would be all right in a few minutes. He did not seem convinced. What might happen to him, he seemed to wonder, in the charge of a grown woman who wept in public? I knew enough not to interrupt Maureen at a moment like that, and Timothy seemed to know the same by instinct. We watched as other gallery goers noticed her tears and then quickly pretended not to, busying themselves with something on the other side of the room. I now understand the degree of affectation that was at work. But at the time—when I watched tears roll silently down Maureen’s cheeks while she stood before Vermeer’s Lady in a Red Hat or Hopper’s Sun in an Empty room—I presumed there was something in those paintings that I could not see, but one day might.
When we finally emerged from the building, I was surprised by the same grey sky. No evolution had occurred from morning to afternoon. Maureen held Timothy’s hand in one hand and mine in the other as we crossed the road and descended the stairs into the square. As we walked, I contemplated the four black lions each covered with a clambering group of tourists, the vendors handing out paper cups full of wet seed, and the children wearing pigeons on their heads.
Maureen gave Timothy and me fifty pence each and walked us over to one of the vendors. We each bought one of the small containers of seed and then found an empty piece of the square and sprinkled seed on the pavement. Our generosity was rewarded and a small crowd of pigeons began pecking franticly at our feet. I poured some of the seed into my open palm and immediately felt the fleshy tug of a bird’s claws on my wrist. I looked over to show Timothy only to discover that he already had a bird on his head. He grinned at me until another bird landed beside the first. He swayed under the weight as if he might fall down and then steadied himself and began, tentatively, to smile once again.
I turned to look for Maureen. She was standing away from the fray, laughing at us. I began carefully to walk towards her, balancing the bird on my wrist. “Keep that thing away from me,” she said. I had almost reached her when the bird had suddenly had its fill and with a furious snap of its wings, rose up between us and flew away.
What happened next needs to be explained in the context of the time. It was a nervous city. All the rubbish bins had been removed from public spaces. There had been several bombs, some of which came with warnings, and some of which did not. There was a sound, what might have been an explosion, but that might also have come from one of the construction sites near the river. The people in the square lifted their heads. It came from the direction of Downing Street and the government buildings. And then the sound was heard again, but this time it was closer and someone in the square decided to run.
Three hundred people ran from one side of the square to the other. From the sky, it would have seemed that the wind had suddenly changed direction, the way pigeons in flight move like a single plastic bag in the wind. They came running towards us. I remember the slow adjustment in Maureen’s face as she began to understand the situation. She snatched my hand where the pigeon had rested and we began to run. At the stairs, people crowded against the walls, and took the steps two at a time. A policeman tried to come down the stairs, but he could not move against the crowd. He had lost his helmet; his thin brown hair was askew as if he had just been roused from bed. He fought the tide for a moment and then changed his mind and let himself be carried away up the stairs. I remember Maureen’s knees as they came out of her skirt beside me. I felt the stone wall against my side. I could not see the sky from the crowd of bodies; it seemed to have gone black.
When we got to the street, the crowd opened up and the sky returned. The people ran across the street like a river overflowing. The drivers in the cars did not know what came at them. Some of them tried to accelerate and men angrily beat their hands against the bonnets of the cars. We crossed safely to the steps of the gallery where we stood in a huddled crowd. Minutes had passed without another explosion and the crowd had grown quieter. Men slowly wandered down the steps of the museum and looked around for anyone they might help. Embarrassment at the earlier panic slowly surfaced. People looked at one another. Had anyone acted bravely? As we stood, awaiting the police, Maureen looked down at me and smiled. I smiled back. And then her face clouded over and she said, with horror, “. . . Timothy.”
We rushed back into the street and through the traffic. Drivers had begun to get out of their cars and stood looking around wondering what had caused the charging crowd. People continued to stumble up the stairs from the square. Two men supported a woman as she bled into a handkerchief. “You’ve just fainted,” they were telling her.
The policeman would not let us go back down the stairs. “But we’ve lost someone,” protested Maureen. He took on a grave expression and took us to the side where we could look over the wall down onto the square. I expected to see bodies. The only casualties dotting the square were hats, bags of shopping, a walking cane on one of the steps. The pigeons were frenzied over all the spilt seed, and there amongst them, still clutching his little empty cup was Timothy, crying, and talking to a policeman who had thoughtfully removed his hat and dropped down to his knees to talk with the boy at eye-level.
On the way home, Maureen tried to calm Timothy. We ate pizza, and bought him an ice cream for dessert and although Timothy had stopped crying, he would not allow Maureen to wipe his eyes. I respected him for this. He was still breathing unnaturally. He could not forgive Maureen. He had never met anyone like her. He felt, I imagine, that he had been wronged in a way that no one had ever been wronged before.
I stood out on the pavement while Maureen explained to Timothy’s au pair what had happened. I think we narrowly missed the arrival of Timothy’s mother. At first, the au pair smiled politely and then she suddenly pulled Timothy closer to her, as if she imagined Maureen capable of doing him harm. The au pair dropped to her knees just like the policeman had. She looked at Timothy, who I saw give a great dramatic sigh, and then she gave him a heartfelt kiss. She did not look again at Maureen for several moments, although Maureen spoke continually, and then, apparently, she said something curt, for the door soon closed. Maureen looked at her reflection in the gleaming black door and then gave a sigh of her own. She came back to me and took my hand. She looked defeated. I thought she might start to cry, but instead she asked, “What have the Irish got against us?” I told her I didn’t know. We walked up to Queen’s Gate where we flagged a cab, a rare extravagance. She held me closely to her all the way home.
Nothing changed between Timothy and me. The next day at school, we were, as usual, inseparable. It did not last. Maureen soon announced that we would be moving, quite abruptly, back to New York. She barely mentioned that day again. I can remember only once a few years later when she recounted the story to friends. We were at a restaurant, the guest of someone she met at a class in New York. I was the only child there. I can measure out a great stretch of my childhood sitting in restaurants surrounded by adults. “I was terrified,” she said. “I think Gordon was as well. And coming to the edge and looking down at that little boy . . . I have never felt so empty before. I almost feel I would have felt better had I looked down and not seen him there, or, God forbid, if something terrible had happened. Of course, later, I would have felt much worse. But at the time, I just can’t tell you what I felt.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
When we returned home that evening, Maureen mentioned him again. She walked around getting undressed for bed, hanging her clothing. I could not understand why he was on her mind. Somehow, she had gotten the news about Timothy. He had been on holiday with his grandparents, she explained. They had pulled over on the side of the road so he and his grandfather could relieve themselves in the trees. Timothy had become confused and went around the wrong side of the car. It was a narrow hedgerow, and another car came whipping around the bend. Maureen stopped her movement, her back and forth to the bathroom. She shook her head. It was one of her gestures, as if she were trying to dislodge something that teetered precariously on one of the shelves in her mind. “I’m sorry Gordon. I didn’t know how to tell you.”