After This

by Alice McDermott

  Mary found herself speaking more loudly than she wanted to, the way you spoke, mostly inadvertently, to an invalid or a child. “We’re going to bring you back to our house, Pauline,” she said, leaning down to her in the chair. “You’re going to stay with us for a while.” Pauline nodded. Mary was surprised to see her fur-collared coat was laid out on the bed. Pauline was dressed in the clothes they had picked up for her when they emptied out her apartment, gray pants and a pale blue sweater, although someone had given her an old white cardigan as well, oversize and somewhat pilly. The only indication, perhaps, that Pauline had been changed.

  “I know,” Pauline said. She looked to Mr. Persichetti, standing at the door. “Sam told me all about it.”

  Mary turned to look at him over her shoulder. He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. “Oh, I’ve been stopping by,” he said. “Checking up on her. Seeing how she’s been doing.” He looked at Mary Keane. “Being the mayor and all,” he said. And then he added softly, “I knew you had your mind on other things.”

  “That was good of you,” she said, and wanted to say more, but the floor nurse was bustling in with the wheelchair, shouting instructions, pulling prescriptions from her smock, referring to Pauline in the third person. Mr. Persichetti pushed the wheelchair back to the elevator, Pauline staring straight ahead as they passed through each corridor. “Goodbye,” Mary Keane said to the women who spoke to them. “Take care.” Pausing for a moment when a shuffling old woman suddenly clasped her hand, holding it between her own as Mr. Persichetti had done for the boy on the elevator. This woman was no older than she. Her blue eyes seemed to race back and forth across Mary Keane’s face as she told a nonsense tale—my sista, was all she could get, my motha, my sista—that grew more urgent as it grew more incomprehensible. The floor nurse stepped between them. “That’s enough, now, Marion,” she shouted. Mary Keane said, walking on, “I’ll pray for you.” The name of Saint Dymphna came to mind.

  In the elevator, she resisted the memories the whiff of hospital food and of ether wanted to bring. She had been a patient herself only when her children were born, a visitor most recently when Michael had his tonsils out and Jacob had appendicitis and her husband had the surgery for the slipped disk. When her children were born, she recalled, they had marked each homecoming with a bakery cake, thick with sweet icing, and she felt some guilt again that she hadn’t thought to have anything special at home for Pauline.

  When they were settled into John Keane’s car, she and Pauline in the backseat, the two men once again up front, Pauline said, “This is very nice of you,” and crossed her hands in her lap. In the pale light of day, she now seemed older without her makeup, with that sad line of gray along her temples and her forehead. Mary planned a trip to the beautician for both of them, lunch afterward, somewhere nice, a stroll through A&S. As the car pulled away and into the street, Pauline suddenly sat up, something brief and childlike in her eyes, a spark of fear or confusion. And then, haltingly, she sat back again. She turned to Mary. “That raincoat doesn’t suit you,” she said. “You’re not good in black.”

  Mary only smiled.

  “You’ve lost weight, too,” Pauline said. It wasn’t a compliment.

  At the house, John Keane gave Pauline his arm to help her up the steps. They paused in the hallway and he took her coat and hung it in the closet, as if this were just another one of her visits and the world hadn’t altered utterly since last she was here.

  They had lunch in the kitchen, the three of them, and then John went to work and Mary walked Pauline upstairs. The last time she had slept in this house, when Clare was born, she had been given Annie’s room, but now they made a right at the landing. She was to stay in the boys’ room instead. It was nice enough, a little chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital. Mary pulled open the drawers of the oak dresser the boys had once shared. She had lined them with floral paper and arranged all of Pauline’s underclothes and nightgowns and sweaters inside. She had brought her jewelry box, her gloves, her drawerful of saved Playbills and greeting cards.

  John Keane had arranged with Pauline’s landlord that the apartment be sublet, for a year. Just, Mary told her, until Pauline was back on her feet. He had spoken to her company, too, and an early retirement for medical reasons would assure her of most of her pension. Pauline nodded. Her coats and her dresses, her dressing gowns and her good skirts were hanging in the boys’ closet. “You’ve been busy,” Pauline said, not—Mary glanced at her—exactly approvingly.

  “You’ve been sick,” Mary said, gently. “That fall…” and would have said more, but Pauline held up her hand and said, “I know all about it.” And then added, with a tremor to her jaw, “I know where I’ve been.”

  Mary Keane touched her throat. “And do you know,” she asked, “what we’ve been through?”

  Slowly, Pauline nodded. Her pale, plain features might have been carved of stone. “Sam told me,” she said. “I’m sorry for you.”

  Mary would have put her arms around her then, might have broken down herself and wept with Pauline for what they both had been through. But that had never been their way. They were not sisters, after all, they were friends, office friends. And what had bound them all these years had more to do with how their acquaintance had begun (for how could you pray with any sincerity if you were also hoping to ditch the annoying girl at your side?), with habit and circumstance, obligation and guilt, than it had ever had to do with affection, commiseration. There had been a trick in it too, their friendship, something far more complicated than “feed my lambs.” There had been the trick of living well, living happily in her ordinary life under Pauline’s watchful eye. Of living well, living happily, even under the eye of a woman who always saw the dashed tear, the torn seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the aspirations of their pretty faith.

  “I’ll never get over it,” Mary said. It was a phrase she had kept to herself, until now.

  The boys’ room was small and narrow. She and her husband had taken the pinups and posters from the walls in preparation for Pauline’s coming, they had moved the desk and the old hi-fi and the record albums and the portable TV to the basement where Michael would sleep when he came home to visit, but they had left both beds here.

  Pauline turned an impassive face to her, standing between the two beds.

  “I don’t expect you will,” she said.

  And then there was the sound of Clare coming in. Clare coming through the front door, dropping her books in the vestibule. “Maaa?” They heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs. “Here,” her mother called. And then she was in the room. Her coat and her hair were wet with rain. She smelled of pencil shavings. Of the halls of St. Gabriel’s.

  “You’re here,” she said to Pauline, and easily went to her, put her arms around her, as her mother had not, her cheek against her breast. “How do you feel?” she said, gingerly. “Are you better?”

  Pauline, with something of her old dignity, said, “Oh, yes. Much better.”

  At dinner, there was the new configuration at the table: Annie had taken Michael’s place and Pauline sat beside Clare. Afterward, Clare sat in front of the television as Michael used to do, watching while she did her homework. Sitting in the chair behind her, Pauline said, “Doesn’t the TV distract you? Wouldn’t you rather sit at the table?”

  And Clare shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her hair had gone wavy from where it had been wet and it caught the TV light at its ends. “Can you really concentrate?” Pauline said and the girl nodded, “I really can.”

  The boys’ room was chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital, but it had a pleasant smell: there was a box in the bedside drawer that contained sticks of incense—Pauline put it to her nose—a smell like an old church, just after Benediction, a smell that ran just under the other, ordinary smells of clean sheets and the lingering scent of dinner. She turned back the pla
id spread. Both beds were made up, but she chose the one nearest the wall to avoid the light from the hall that came under the door. She was well asleep when she felt Clare’s hands on her shoulders, patting her softly, and had a momentary belief that she was in the hospital again, that another patient had wandered in.

  But Clare laughed a little in the darkness, whispering, “Is that you? I can’t see.”

  Pauline said, “Yes, it’s me.”

  She heard the girl moving away. “Okay,” she said. Heard her pulling at the sheets on the other bed, getting under the covers. “I sleep in here sometimes,” she said. “When Annie stays up reading.” She was only a voice in the darkness, but even in the darkness, Pauline would have known the voice.

  “That’s all right,” Pauline said.

  They were both silent. There was, perhaps, some faint music, piano notes from next door. Pauline was beginning to see a little more, some thin light behind the curtains, perhaps the outline of the girl’s small body under the spread. In a moment, she could hear her breathing softly, sweetly, into the dark.

  THE GIRLS had heard it through the night: rain drumming on the roof and rattling down the drainpipes, rain amplifying, giving voice or music (depending on their dreams) to the sound of passing cars. They had ridden to school this morning with the metronome shush of windshield wipers thrumming at their temples, erasing one thought, then another, then another as it formed again. Riding the school bus or in their fathers’ cars with their sleeves and shoulders damp, their loafers and the crowns of their heads darkened with rain.

  They felt the dampness of it still at 10 a.m., second period, as they moved into the classroom, their books in their arms.

  The overhead lights had not yet been turned on, nor had the teacher arrived, so here was an opportunity to sprawl, for a minute. Put your head on the desk.

  Outside the mullioned window was a slate-gray sky, a dark lawn, a black hedge that hid the road, although they could see the headlights of cars behind the tangled shrubs, low beams moving as if through water. There had been general consensus this morning, on the radio at least, that were it not for the unseasonable warmth of the day, there would have been two feet of snow.

  The raindrops ran in fits and starts across each pane. The morning light, filtered through the rain-spattered glass, turned the colors in the unlit classroom into various shades of gray.

  Clare Keane folded her arms across her books and rested her forehead in the crook of her elbow. She closed her eyes and the sound of the rain and of her shuffling, murmuring classmates grew hollow and distant, veered from noise to echo to dream.

  Beside her, Barb Luce slumped at her desk, then stretched her legs to straddle the chair legs of the seat in front of her. Idly, she took inventory: penny loafers, navy kneesocks, dimpled knees, bare thighs—winter pale against the pleated plaid wool of her skirt—a nick of dried blood between knee and skirt hem from this morning’s razor. She licked a finger and put it to the scab, assessed the smoothness of the shave with her fingertips. Knees were always tricky.

  There was a general yawning, a leaning forward and a leaning back. A lethargic unclipping of hair clips and a clipping back up again. A roll of Life Savers was passed around, its plume of unraveled wrapper like a lengthening stream of smoke as it went from hand to hand. A clicking of candy against teeth. A general whisper, Did we have homework in here? Did she give us homework?

  Monica Grasso shuffled her books and said out loud, “I don’t want to be here,” but opened her notebook anyway and reviewed (the Diet of Worms, the Council of Trent), just in case.

  The rain was steady, no particular wind to drive it or to vary its rhythm. Cynthia Pechulis pulled her hair up into a ponytail at the top of her head and Dawn Sorrento, sitting behind her, saw in the lovely declivity between her neck and spine the fine blond hair Cynthia had been born with.

  They were all fourteen or fifteen in identical plaid skirts and navy blue blazers, white blouses with soft collars.

  Kathleen Cornelius, her large face drawn, her lips parted, noticed that the blackboard glimpsed through her lashes bled a little at the edges but snapped to again when she opened her eyes wide. She tried this a number of times until her attention was diverted by the floating dust motes that appeared in the gloom of her lowered lashes. They were perfectly round, transparent, either dust motes or sloughed skin cells, bits of dandruff, perhaps, or perhaps merely an optical illusion, her own blood moving behind her cornea, illuminating the defects, snags, infinitesimal genetic mutations in the sticky fabric of her eye.

  The interval of idleness grew longer. Was it possible there would be no class today?

  Clare Keane dreamed she was still at the breakfast table. Her father was watching the coffee percolate on the stove. Annie (who in the dream was not really Annie) was stirring her cereal. Pauline was spreading soft butter on a pinch of sweet roll, covering her fingertips with it. Much to Clare’s surprise, Annie picked up her cigarette lighter which she had unaccountably left beside her plate and struck the flint three times.

  “Good morning, all,” Sister Lucy said. She stood at the door, her index finger held under the three light switches as if (Clare thought) she was hoping to keep three little noses from sneezing. “In the name of the Father,” Sister began, as she walked in, not blessing herself because she held her crutch in one hand and her large leather briefcase in the other, “and of the Son.”

  Overhead, the trio of fluorescent lights merely buzzed, then clicked, then flashed angrily, before coming to full, obedient light as Sister Lucy limped into the room. One by one, the girls raised their heads, touched a pencil, stored some books beneath their desks, praying with her all the while. Clare Keane had a red spot on her forehead, marking the place where her face had heavily met her forearm. Kathleen Cornelius closed her mouth.

  Now the long windows pressed back the dreary day, reflected rather than filtered—showing them now, as they glanced toward it, their own white faces, dimly described—foreheads and cheeks, some chins, only blond hair, nobody’s eyes.

  Sister Lucy’s desk at the front of the room now seemed as yellow as an egg yolk. She leaned against it and pulled the cuff of her metal crutch off her wrist. She rested the crutch beside her and then turned back with one uneven step to lift herself, her small and slightly twisted torso in its black dress, up onto the desk. She rearranged her body, palms pressed to the desktop, lifting her thighs once, twice, getting comfortable. Her legs in their black shoes and black opaque stockings swung girlishly.

  This was not remarkable to them. They had seen her do this many times before.

  She placed her folded hands in her black lap. Sister Lucy had a round face, dark though graying hair drawn back into the white band of her headpiece, large, deep-set eyes, and a small nose. Her full cheeks were pocked delicately with scars, as if marred by rain.

  “Today,” she said, softly, beginning. And then paused. She had a slight overbite, a delicate fuzz above her lip, small and perfect teeth. She was known never to raise her voice, although what she did instead, for discipline’s sake, was described by the girls as “the hairy eyeball.” But there was none of that in her look now as she waited for their attention.

  “Today,” she said again, her feet no longer swinging but hooked together and drawn back a bit, beneath her desk. “Today, girls, marks a terrible anniversary. The anniversary of the decision that allows women in this country to kill their own children.”

  In the stillness that followed, the girls moved their eyes toward each other. Barb lowered her head and murmured, “Don’t tell my mother,” into the soft collar of her shirt, which caused one or two of the girls around her to lower their heads as well.

  The sound of the rain only made the silence in the classroom seem more deliberate and profound as Sister Lucy waited, once again, for their full attention.

  “I was three years old when I came down with polio,” she said. It might have been another topic altogether. “My father left us as soon as I got si
ck, even though my mother was expecting. Her fifth. He moved in with a woman he’d been visiting since before my older brother was born. My father was a welder,” she said, as if that explained something. “Subways and bridges. Dangerous work, but he was very good at it.” She shrugged, looked briefly at her hands, which she half opened, as if offering herself something from her own palms. “He had needs my mother couldn’t meet,” she said before she looked up again. “That’s all we were told about it. And the fact that if he had gotten polio, too, we would have been destitute. But he took care of us. He sent money, he visited. He still took my brothers to ball games. He just never lived with us again.”

  She closed her hands. They were pale white against the black lap. The girls had their eyes on her now. Barb Luce wrote something in her notebook and moved the book to the edge of her desk so Clare Keane could see. It said, “As the World Turns.”

  “My mother was given a series of exercises to do with me. They involved lifting and bending my legs. They were painful. I don’t remember that they were painful to me but I’m sure they were painful for her. She would sometimes strap me down on the dining-room table. Or have my brothers hold on to me. My brothers have told me how I would scream. And how my mother would cry, just tears running down her face as she was lifting my legs and bending them, and pressing them down again, the way the doctors had told her. All the while she was expecting.”

  Sister Lucy’s little chin moved up and down, the way it did when she wanted to be reasonable, consider all sides. “Of course, we weren’t alone in the world,” she said. “I had an aunt and an uncle and a wonderful grandfather. We had some very nice neighbors. And people from church helped out. It was really only later, as an adult, that I realized how hard it must have been. For my mother.”