Alice McDermott - After This

“The Krafts,” he told her, “down the street.”

“The Krafts lost a tree as well,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “Lucky for me.”

And then she breathed another “Mother of God.”

His T-shirt was soaked all across the middle. There was now the salty scent of her perspiration, and his, and the scent of blood. Her bare knee touched the side of his face. He saw the baby’s dark scalp, streaks of hair. She cried out and he was aware, too, of the sound of the ambulance somewhere. He raised the volume of his own voice, a string of reassurances against his own fear that the baby would not survive. Skull and forehead and closed eyes streaked with blood. He reached for the turkey baster, cleared the mouth even as he tugged, gently, at the head in his hands. The shoulders and arms and the surprising burst of the pale blue umbilical cord, thick and writhing, and then the baby was in his hands-”A little girl,” he told her-and the medics, the ambulance guys were in the room behind him, around him, a knee against his back as someone said, “Step aside,” and leaned down to take the little thing from him. The baby’s mouth opened and two fists went up in fury. And then it cried, but so thinly.

But of course, he couldn’t step. He discovered that he was kneeling at her side. He merely sat back on his bottom and then crawled a bit, avoiding their shoes. Someone was opening a medical bag and a stretcher was coming through the front door. He blessed himself and then said, “I’m in medicine, an RN,” lest they think him a fool. Then he leaned his back against a chair.

As they were hustling her and the child out the door (where the children from the tree had already gathered) he said to one of the medics, “Six weeks premature.” The guy shook his head. He had a crew cut and a broad face and his white coat buttoned across the shoulder. “That baby’s full-term,” he said. “Seven pounds at least.” Mr. Persichetti shrugged, rather nonchalantly, among men once more. “She said she had six more weeks.”

And the man shrugged, too, as if to confirm how well they both understood, being in the profession, that it was all a small matter, this coming into life and going out, merely part of the routine. “She can’t count,” he said bluntly.

And then he laughed. He paused in the tiny hallway, put his elbow to Mr. Persichetti’s strong arm. “My wife always knows exactly,” he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then turned to say, “I got two kids born in November, two in June. No kidding.”

The children gathered along the driveway briefly looked away from the ambulance as the man went down the steps, shouting back to Mr. Persichetti. “This guy,” he said, pointing at the house, “is a lucky man, if she don’t know if it’s been nine months or seven.” Mr. Persichetti raised a hand, agreeing, nodding and laughing, but also saying under his breath, Get going, get going. He would not rest easily until he was sure she was in a doctor’s care. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.

Carefully, dipping carefully-the broad backside in the good wool skirt-Pauline reached into the car and took the infant from Mary Keane’s arms. There was the pink receiving blanket, the long white shawl, the lace bib of her homecoming dress. Pauline stepped back, onto the grass that lined the driveway, the baby in her arms.

Mary said, “Where’s her bonnet?” and then searched the floor, looking for it. Her husband was coming around the car to help her get out. Pauline held the baby in her arms, dipped her large, powdered face closer to its own, her eyes taking in, there on the grass at the side of the driveway, the cashmere shawl (her own gift, from Saks), the receiving blanket, the tiny body, the little face. Slowly, Pauline raised her left hand and cupped it over the child’s skull to keep her warm. The sun was high but there was a clean chill in the air. The smell of autumn, and of the sawdust left behind from the fallen tree. She held the baby against her chest and raised her elbow to bring the small sleeping face nearer her own.

“Here it is,” Mary said, lifting the bonnet from the floor.

Inside, the children were waiting around the dining-room table with their homemade cards and the frosted birthday cake their father had brought from the bakery this morning. Inside, Pauline’s overnight bag was packed and waiting in the vestibule. As Mary, carrying the new baby, preceded her into the house, Pauline slipped her jacket from the hall closet and lifted the bag, even as the three children gathered around their mother. She simply walked out again, through the front door. She went down the steps. She raised her hand without turning when they called after her. She raised her hand without turning as John Keane followed her down the steps to say, “At least let me give you a lift to the bus stop.”

“Go back to your new family,” she said without turning. “This is a precious moment. There shouldn’t be any strangers at this homecoming.” Meaning it, every word of it, but not turning to see how thoroughly her sudden departure had disrupted the homecoming anyway, how the children had looked away from their mother and the new baby to stare after her, how John Keane had looked back to his wife, their new daughter in her arms, to shrug, to show her his annoyance. The woman drove him crazy.

Without turning, Pauline walked with her bag the three blocks to the bus stop, then changed at Jamaica for the bus home.

At her building, she struggled with the six days of mail shoved every which way into her box (she’d had no time, when the call came, to leave her mailbox key with her neighbor), bills and advertising circulars and bank statements and a mailman who would probably keep pushing mail into her box even if she was gone for six months, dead for a year-only one of the phalanx of indifferent strangers she faced every day.

Upstairs in her apartment she unpacked her bag-two house-dresses in polished cotton and a floral housecoat, another good skirt and sweater and the underwear, girdle, and stockings she’d have to wash out in the sink this evening. In the bottom of the bag, beneath her makeup case and her slippers, the card Jacob had drawn for her-a vase with six spindly flowers: a purple tulip, what seemed to be a red rose, and four simple daisies (she guessed that the success with the tulip had inspired the rose and the failure of the rose had led to the safer daisies). Inside the folded piece of blue construction paper he had written only, in careful cursive, From Jacob.

Although she preferred Michael, whose distrust of anything placid echoed her own, she put the card on her dresser.

Moving into her small kitchen, Pauline went through the refrigerator, tossing out the milk and the sliced ham she had not had time to dispose of last week, when the call came that the baby had arrived early and they were on their way to the hospital. A minute later and they would have missed her, she told John Keane, when the call came. She had just powdered her nose and put on her hat.

She rode the elevator down again to shop briefly-it was Sunday and the stores closed early-for what she needed: milk and eggs and bread and margarine. She told the lady at the deli where she ordered her ham that it had not been a vacation by any means: three children to look after and a much neglected house to clean. The lady at the counter-Maria, in housecoat and worn slippers and swollen ankles-called her some good friend to do all that and Pauline said, “Oh, but the baby is beautiful,” a kind of reprimand, as if it had been Maria herself who had complained so ungenerously about the dirty house.