Alice McDermott - After This

Impulsively, Mr. Persichetti called out his son’s name, foiling an ambush (at the sound of the man’s voice, Michael Keane’s head appeared on the other side of the upended roots). He said it was time to go. The response was all in the boy’s shoulders and arms-a slow sinking. Two more boys, also in helmets, emerged from the leaves, their indignation at being called from the game tempered only by the sight of Tony’s father on the steps in his work pants and T-shirt. He was a broad, short man with muscular arms. “It’s early,” his son called back, squinting. And it was the squinting, the openmouthed squinting and the hint of contradiction in his son’s voice that turned what had been mere impulse on his father’s part into command. It was early, another two hours before dinner, and there was certainly no need for him to drive Tony home-he hadn’t driven him here-but still he said, “Get in the truck,” and bent his powerful arm. He was a night nurse at Creedmoor, the state hospital, and what he had seen there, the patients he had hauled and handled-the vibration of mad voices he had felt through bodies pressed into his arms, held against his cheek and his chest-made him quick to raise his hand to his own lucky child, smart as a whip and perfectly formed.

Tony bent his head to remove the borrowed helmet. Mournfully, he handed the helmet and the pistol to Jacob. His father went down the steps and joined him at the curb. He guided Tony to the truck with his hand on the back of his son’s neck.

(“Shoot him in the foot,” Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. “Break his legs before you let him go.”)

The truck turned and headed down the street. The boys shook off the disruption and went back to their game. Mary Keane, returning to the house, her hand under her heavy belly, the baby, as far as she could tell, sound asleep within, wondered why it was that the Persichettis had only the two, Tony and little Susan, who was Annie’s age. She felt with some certainty that it would have been to Tony’s advantage if they’d had at least one other son. (She had in mind the man’s strong hand on the back of the boy’s neck.) It benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected. It reminded them they were not the center of the universe simply because they were loved by their parents. How many children, when you came right down to it (she would have said), were not loved by their parents? Never mind if the love was skillful or adept.

She picked up Jacob’s school jacket and the box of toy soldiers that had been left on the floor of the hall, but the effort sent a pain up her back-like a crack through plaster-and drained the blood from her head. She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully-a reluctant skater on a pond-got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen of them-it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that she should have been counting them off on her fingers-when the first cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable.

Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel, or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the rise and fall of the wind outside. Long before her husband had woken and asked her, Who could that be? she had seen-in the silent anticipation between each long gust, in the fear that rose as the sound grew more terrible each time, as if edging toward something unbearable-the parallel between the rise and fall of the storm and the rhythm of labor. Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it-or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only silence now, in the small living room. There was a baby doll and a stack of comic books in one of the chairs, a Wiffle ball beneath it. The boys’ board game with its scattered pieces was still on the rug, and there was a pale layer of dust over the hi-fi and the end tables. She wondered if the pregnancy had turned her slothful or if the room was always in some state of disorder and she was only, momentarily, seeing it clearly. Vaguely, she could hear the voices of the children in the side yard, climbing through the downed tree. It seemed to her (the pain rising again, third time) that they were not so much calling words as shining small silver lights into her ears. The gentle flash of a child’s voice-was it Jacob?-appearing here and there through the more general silence and the nausea of the clutching pain.

The phone was in the kitchen, and when she got herself up she would call her husband first, in his office. And then the operator to send an ambulance. And then one of the neighbors to come and watch the children. And then Pauline, who had promised to stay with the children when the time came, although time was supposed to have been still another month away and Pauline would sigh at the inconvenience, the altered plans. And this poor baby, so eager to be born, would emerge from the womb with unhappy Pauline ready to recount, on birthdays, at the birth of other children, at any of the innumerable occasions in her life when she was once again forced to abandon her plans, how she had just powdered her nose and put on her hat when the phone call came.

The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call “Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It was simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators, complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus. You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it cold?-because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back. Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.”

He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she drew her legs up against the pain. He had returned to say the Krafts down the street had an apple tree split in two that he was planning to remove at noon tomorrow (Mr. Kraft was a teacher and since the schools were closed he was there to answer his door and to engage Mr. Persichetti on the spot). He’d come back to say he could easily toss both the willow and the apple tree into his truck, and so charge her only fifteen.