“It’s helping,” he said again.
She only glanced at him. “You don’t look like you’ve been helped,” she said.
It was Clare who was absorbing the discussion unabashedly, through her wide eyes.
Now Annie appeared. She was talking—these days she was always talking—and both boys raised their hands to hush her. She walked around the bed to join them in front of the small screen. The runners scored. Michael leaned forward to slap Jacob’s hand, jostling the mattress. Clare threw her hands up in the air, and then around her father’s shoulder. Impatient, Mary Keane was leaning over the bed, gathering the magazines.
In fact, he would die alone, accompanied only by the high-pitched pulse of the hospital machine, his last breath missed even by the nurses who were distracted by the changing shifts. None of them gathered at his bed, no candles lit. The offending leg already amputated in the doctors’ routine efforts to save him.
With the plate and the magazines in her hand she said, “Do you want the boys to help you get to the toilet before dinner?”
He knew he would have to manage it sometime within the next twenty minutes (ten minutes, now that she had brought the subject up), but he said, “No. I’m fine.”
He recognized the tactic: she’d humiliate him into a doctor’s office. Using words like toilet when she never said toilet, thought it unrefined, just to get him annoyed enough to make an appointment.
“Maybe I could get you a little bell or something,” she said, as coy as she might ever have been at twenty-one. “You could ring it when you need to go.”
No doubt this was Pauline’s plan.
He glanced at the TV. He felt the pain roil a little, threatening a larger blow.
“Why don’t you all go downstairs and have your dinner?” he said, calmly. Because she would see every bit of it in his face, she saw everything in his face.
“Send me up a piece of steak,” he said.
Clare brought the tray, walking with it through the slatted rosy sunlight that now stretched slowly, leisurely, the stroll of time, across the ceiling and the far wall. He’d just returned from the bathroom and the old army boot, its tongue lolling, lay in its coil of rope at the foot of the bed. He had an impulse, in his daughter’s presence, to throw a blanket over it. It occurred to him that he had reached an age (he remembered Mary’s befuddled old father) when his surest convictions could be transformed into mere foolishness in the blink of an eye.
“Put it here,” he said, dragging the straight-backed chair to the side of the bed. She put the tray down, kissed his cheek. There was something of the metallic odor of the hot subway about her still, the odor of his own missed commute home. All of his children scented with the wider world.
She was talking about the day in the city and what the man at the token booth had said, and what Pauline had said, and who she swore she saw in the lobby when the intermission lights flashed though she couldn’t really be sure. He surveyed the tray. A piece of chuck steak and mashed potatoes and green beans. A roll and butter and a dish of canned pears. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with both feet on the floor, he was aware of a certain numbness taking over his leg. He couldn’t eat a bite.
“The Spanish Inquisition,” she said, and he looked up at her, thinking, perhaps, she was repeating Michael’s joke about the rack. Again he had the impulse to cover up the empty boot. But she was, he quickly gathered, talking about the play. The tickets had been a gift from Pauline. Someone in his office told him they could well have cost sixty dollars apiece.
“They’re all prisoners,” Clare was saying. “In a dungeon. And there’s this long staircase.” She raised her arms, illustrating it. Her skirt was short, too short (he resisted interrupting her to mention this), her knees still chubby although the rest of her body had grown lean. “And Cervantes comes down. The prisoners attack him and then they put him on trial. In order to defend himself, he tells them a story. And then he becomes Don Quixote and all the prisoners are the other characters. So the whole play is like the story he tells, while they’re waiting in jail.”
She pulled off the headband that held back her hair. Scratched her head. The sunlight from the window was on her back. “He’s this old man and he’s read so many books about chivalry that he goes crazy and thinks it’s all real. He thinks he’s a knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha. And only one of his servants goes along with him, Sancho Panza. And they go out on a quest. He sees a windmill and thinks it’s a monster.”
“Tilting at windmills,” he said. “It’s an expression.”
“Yeah,” she said. She slipped the headband on again, it was a habit of hers. “But it was really good the way they did it. The windmill was just this huge shadow at the back of the stage.”
He picked up his fork. Tried, and failed, to lift the bum leg. The pain, he realized, was far preferable to the numbness. She was on about the sleazy inn that Don Quixote thought was a castle, the servant girl (“A slut really,” she said, catching his eye for a second to see if he disapproved of the word—he did) he thought was a beautiful damsel.
He wondered briefly if she would end up wanting to go on the stage herself. She was pretty enough, he thought. But then all the little girls her age struck him as pretty.
The cure they came up with, she said—he had missed just who “they” were—was mirrors. (She said it mear-ras, the way her mother did. A touch of Brooklynese carried out to Long Island.) They surrounded the old man with mirrors, she said. And made him look at himself. Made him see.
She paused and said, “You’re not hungry?” But he shook his head, lifted the warm roll. “I’m listening,” he told her. He would give himself another minute or two before he tried moving his leg back onto the bed. It was possible that he’d have to call the boys for help. It was possible that he’d lost all use of it. “Did it work? The dose of reality?”
She stepped back a little. Now the sun was on her shoulder and her hair. Downstairs, he heard Michael saying, “A nine iron, a fucking nine iron,” and Jacob laughing, Annie, too. Their mother shushing the bad language. His brother Frank somewhere, in the boy’s laughter. And what a vocabulary his youngest child would take into the wider world. But Clare was attending only to her own tale.
“Yeah,” she said, dramatically, “but then you see him in bed and he’s dying.” Her eyes didn’t fall on his own bed, the empty old boot, or on him in his pajamas. But there was, perhaps, a catch in her voice, a sweet change of pitch as she went on. “Sancho Panza’s there, and his niece. But he doesn’t remember anything about being Don Quixote. Not even when Dulcinea comes in. She’s kind of cleaned up. She wants him to remember, but he tells her he was just confused. He says he was confused by shadows. Like the windmill thing.”
She paused. Looked at her father and shrugged. He suddenly realized that she was about to cry.
“That’s too bad,” he said. He knew enough not to laugh at her. He had already offended her, more than once, when he’d teased her about her easy tears. Downstairs, the water was running, the kitchen chairs were being pushed back from the table. He broke the roll in two and handed her a piece. “Did you have your dinner?” he asked.
She took the bread. Held it in her hand. “But that’s not the end,” she said, caught up in it now. Not just her mother’s accent but her delight in the sound of her own voice, once she got started. He smiled, watching her. The only way to temper the outlandishness of a father’s love was to weigh it against the facts of your children’s imperfections. She was a plain child, truth be told, not as pretty as her sister. “Dulcinea sings the impossible dream song and, really slowly, he begins to remember. He starts to get out of the bed. Sancho helps him. All of a sudden he knows he really is Don Quixote. Really.”
And then, to his great surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was sweet, lower than he would have expected, although surely he had heard her singing around the house a thousand times before. But now she was singing for him, much as she used to do when she was very small, her
hands at her sides, her eyes half closed. The cotton skirt not too short, perhaps, but wrinkled from the hours she’d been sitting. The little-girl knees, although her body was growing lean. She sang and he was both enchanted and embarrassed by her earnestness. Both hopeful that neither of the boys would come upstairs (Jacob would only roll his eyes but Michael would sing along with her, mocking, howling the words, to run, where the brave dare not go ow ow), and yet wishing that they would because there was something painful in it, watching her, another kind of pain altogether than what he’d been fighting these past two days. The boys had their lives off in the wider world, he thought, but girls, his daughters, they had lives far wider and far more inaccessible, right before his eyes.
The room was lit with the thick yellow light of a summer evening. The leg was numb and as certain as he was that he would find a way to heal it—or that the doctors would—he knew, too, that some part of his future had been retracted, foreshortened by the pain. That it had added, if only by a month or a year or two, to the time she would have to miss him.
She sang, she seemed to know all the words.
THE LOTTERY was held three weeks before Christmas, which made something biblical about the whole ordeal, or at least, Mary Keane said, medieval.
When all the days of the year had been called, she said to her husband, her mouth held crookedly—a grim joke in the face of what they could not change—“Maybe if the piano player had skipped practice that morning, Jacob would have had a different birthday.” He nodded; it was a joke, given its intimate circumstances, no one else could share, and even he, all these years later, felt himself blush. “Maybe if you’d married George,” he said.
And then he took Clare’s hand. She was bundled up against the cold. They were just going out for a breath of fresh air. At the foot of his driveway, pulling his garbage cans to the curb, Mr. Persichetti paused. Tony’s birth date, as it turned out, would have been a lucky one, if he hadn’t already enlisted and gone over and come back home again, hollow-eyed and furious, after all he’d seen. “Hooked on drugs,” Mr. Persichetti said. He might have just learned the phrase.
Mr. Persichetti told Mr. Keane, “Shoot him in the foot. Break his legs before you let him go.”
Clare looked up at the two men. Her father gripped her hand and Mr. Persichetti stepped back and then forward, his face shadowy in the night.
“No, honey,” he said, touching her wool cap. “Don’t pay attention to me.” And then he glanced at her father, his eyes catching the dull streetlight. “I was there when you came into the world, you know,” he said, cheerfully, as if cheerfulness now could erase the terrible thing he had already said. She told him she knew. She had come too soon. She had come inconveniently. Pauline had only just put on her hat when the call came, on her way out to the movies.
“I was the very first person,” Mr. Persichetti said, “to welcome you into this crazy world of ours.”
And for the second time in that hour, John Keane felt a flush rise to his cheeks.
AND YOUR BROTHER?” Mrs. Antonelli said because it was Michael Keane she remembered, all the hours he had cooled his heels on the leather couch before her desk, waiting to see Sister Rose, the principal. Jacob, sitting before her now, had left no mark on her memory—which was understandable enough, given the number of children who passed through St. Gabriel’s, a hundred graduates each year, six or seven hundred more since Jacob Keane had been an eighth grader. As secretary and (she liked to say) palace guard for Sister Rose, Mrs. Antonelli had far more contact with the troublemakers anyway. Michael Keane had been one of them. Jacob, clearly, had not.
“He’s upstate,” Jacob said. “College.”
He was a nice-looking boy—dark hair and dark brows, green eyes. But he was also slight, narrow-shouldered, not much bigger, perhaps, than he’d been when he left here. It was Mrs. Antonelli’s belief that God should have made all men tall and broad—out of fairness. Her own husband was six foot three. She thought of this as an accomplishment.
“Good for him,” she said, and then wondered at the contrast her words implied, for Jacob had just told her that he himself had left St. John’s and was now headed for the army. “And good for you, too,” she added. “For answering the call.”
Jacob smiled shyly. He wore blue jeans, which she did not approve of, and a tattersall dress shirt rolled at the sleeves, which was all right. “Thanks,” he said, politely, although they both understood he’d had no choice in the matter.
“And you’ll have the GI Bill when you get back,” Mrs. Antonelli said. “That’s how my husband put himself through Fordham.”
Jacob nodded slowly. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and then looked at her, his large green eyes and a girl’s dark lashes, nothing else to say.
Mrs. Antonelli glanced down at the work before her, but she had taken off her reading glasses when the boy came in (here to pick up his sister for a dentist appointment, although the mother had sent no note), so everything was a blur. From the room beyond came the sound of Sister Rose on the phone, speaking in the clipped rhythms of her professional voice. From down the hall came the drone of a class repeating its times tables. “I suppose it seems like just yesterday that you were here,” she said, making conversation.
The boy merely moved his head, as if uncertain himself whether he wanted to say yes or no.
The office was paneled in dark wood, and the light from the small window was yellow. There was a statue of the Holy Family in one corner, a flagpole bearing the white-and-gold diocesan flag in another. There was a crucifix and an oil painting of the pope on the wall behind Mrs. Antonelli’s desk, and the portrait of Our Lady of Perpetual Help from the old church on the wall behind Jacob’s head. There was the gently overpowering odor of Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume—a powdery scent that was neither fruit nor flower nor spice, like nothing in nature Jacob could think of—and despite the terrible familiarity of the office, the long halls of the school, the sound of the children reciting their lessons, it was this scent alone that brought him back to his years here, years of terror (he’d been a shy child and the nuns with their sweeping skirts and clicking beads had all but made him mute), years of grace (because he was also a good child, chosen above all others to carry messages from his teachers to Mrs. Antonelli’s desk). He briefly studied his hands. Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume brought him there again and put off all that was ahead of him not simply by a few hours but by years.
And then Clare was standing in the doorway, beside the eighth-grade boy who had been sent to fetch her. She wore her beanie, and her pigtails had already begun to fray. There were Band-Aids on both of her knees, above the navy blue kneesocks. She wore the school’s plaid jumper, a new one that still hung on her stiffly, and under the wide white sleeves of her uniform blouse her bare arms seemed as thin as sticks.
Jacob stood. The car keys were in his hand.
“Please tell your mother,” Mrs. Antonelli said, standing as well, “to remember to send a note in next time.”
Jacob nodded. “I will,” he said. And then, “Thank you.” And then, head down, “Sorry to disturb you.” He put his hand out to allow his sister to go before him through the door. “Nice to see you again,” he said.
Mrs. Antonelli doubted very much that Jacob Keane would find the army to his liking. She looked up to see the eighth grader, a brazen thing, nearly six feet tall, who still lingered at the door with his shirttail out, hoping for another assignment from her to keep him from going back to class. She dismissed him and then sank into her chair. She put her glasses on and Sister Rose’s lovely handwriting—a perfection of the art, she always said—came clear to her again. She said a prayer: Let them find something easy for the poor kid to do. A desk job in Germany. Lifeguard duty at a base on Okinawa, as a neighbor’s boy had done. Amused to find how the world had turned since she was young—Germany and Okinawa now safe places for an American soldier.
But there was something unlucky about the boy. She would not have said tragic, j
ust unlucky: his small stature, the awkward attempts at good manners, the apparently unsuccessful years at St. John’s, the draft. Getting sent to Vietnam would be of a piece with all that. And what opportunities for bad luck would he find over there? Mrs. Antonelli had no children of her own, and so felt herself more clear-eyed about such things. There were kids who were born with luck on their side and others who simply weren’t. It wasn’t about intelligence or good grades, not even necessarily about good looks (although there was luck in that, too). It was chance, plain and simple. Kids born lucky and kids who never got a break. It was fate, perhaps, although she supposed God came into it somewhere (she couldn’t say how, except, perhaps, that God had his favorites, too). She saw herself, some months from now, telling Sister Rose, who would not remember him, how Jacob Keane had come to her office not long ago, just before he went in, to pick up little Clare and take her to the dentist.
Two boys from St. Gabriel’s had already died in the war. Neither was memorable to her as a student, although she had attended both funerals, sitting behind the three eighth-grade classes who had filled up the back of the big round church, warming it a bit, for both boys had been buried on cold winter days. From where she sat, the flag-draped coffins and the stooped families in their dark clothes had seemed rather a long way away. Although she had heard one of the mothers say, simply enough, “My baby.”
Mrs. Antonelli touched her glasses to make sure they were still there, for Sister’s blue ink and fine letters had once more lost their clarity, and the steady yellow light briefly wavered. She looked up. The tall eighth grader was in her doorway again, his shirttail still out and his tie still crooked, a white attendance sheet from Sister Savior in his hand. His face and his hair, all his edges, a blur, through her tears. An angel himself, through her tears.
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