Alice McDermott - After This

The grocery bag was light enough but still her back ached and her legs were tired. She had slept fitfully all week in little Annie’s bedroom, wall to wall with stuffed animals that the child never played with and that Pauline would have donated to an orphanage, had the choice been hers. And the little girl had cried herself to sleep in her brother’s bedroom every night, lonesome for her mother. And that little Italian man in the side yard two days in a row, with his chain saw and his hatchet, clearing the fallen tree. Standing too close to her, Pauline felt certain, when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.

The sparse trees along her block were showing signs of red and gold but there was also the smell of dog droppings and bus fumes and sun-warmed garbage in the air, which you didn’t have out on Long Island. And the Empire State Building across the river was useless, a painted backdrop at this hour on a Sunday, its offices empty, its very reason for being temporarily drained. Her company’s own building, her empty office within, not three blocks away. Home again, she changed into another housecoat, the red velvet one she had made for herself last Christmas, the covered buttons she’d found at A amp;S a satisfying perfect match. She boiled an egg for dinner. Mixed a Manhattan to sip with Walter Cronkite. She answered the phone only the second time it rang, Mary calling to say I wish you hadn’t run off (but not meaning it) and that the house has never been so clean (no kidding) and what did you put in your mashed potatoes that made the kids love them so (a little sugar and a little garlic salt, but Pauline wouldn’t tell).

Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months. Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.

“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane said.

The little Italian man had pulled the slipcover off the couch, bundled it together with the tea towels and the jacket and brought it all to the washing machine in the basement, but Pauline had done the scrubbing and the bleaching and the dyeing. Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion-what a mess it had made-restored order, made things right for the homecoming.

“And how’s my angel?” Pauline asked.

“At the moment,” Mary said, “she is sound asleep on Jacob’s lap.”

Her own hunger to hold the baby again struck her as just that, a hunger-the ache of hollow longing, an awareness, as if for the first time in her life, of her own arms being empty.

“I wanted to give you some time with your new family,” Pauline said, and meant it-although she couldn’t say, too, that she had not meant to disrupt the homecoming with her own dramatic departure. Nor could she deny that she’d wanted both: the thoroughly self-effacing departure and the attention such generous self-effacement surely earned her. She’d wanted to give the family their time together, but she’d wanted as well a more vigorous pursuit, after all she’d done. It wouldn’t have taken much, after all, for John Keane to have wrestled the overnight case from her hand.

“Kiss her for me,” she said and hung up the phone and faced the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things-the yellow light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds, someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have another Manhattan with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these last hours of a Sunday evening. Nice as he’d tried to be-he’d come home from the hospital each evening to put the children to bed, and thanked her profusely each morning for the coffee and toast she put before him, he’d gotten the children ready for church without waking her this morning-she would not want to be married to balding John Keane for all the tea in China. She’d heard him singing to himself in the bathroom, for instance, fiat as a tire. Heard him clipping his toenails one night before he went to bed.

She recognized the simple pleasure of her own room and her own pillow and no child weeping for her mother across the hall, the boys whispering words of comfort but not thinking to call on Pauline for help.

In the morning there was the rattle of traffic and the wheeze of buses, the rising voice of the radio, the whistle of a teakettle. The slatted sunlight, as it did this time of year, moved across her bed and her quilted housecoat and her dresser and onto the construction-paper card that Jacob had made so that later when Clare (who last night had slept soundly in her brother’s arms) lifted it to read the simple message, she would not be able to say if the front of the card had once been gray or blue, only that her brother had used a ballpoint pen and had pressed so firmly into the soft paper that she could feel the shape of the letters in relief on the back.

During the war, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick’s, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church-it had to do with something some nun had said-she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could you pray with any sincerity if you were preoccupied with the thought of avoiding lunch with the lonely and annoying girl who was impatiently waiting for your prayers to be over?

If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs.

They were at the dining-room table, eating the frosted cake their father had bought at the bakery to celebrate the baby’s homecoming.

During the war, Pauline’s mother passed away and there were really only a handful of people at the funeral-four of them girls from the office. Pauline sat alone on one side of the church and her brother and his family on the other. None of the dates Pauline had, many of which their mother herself had arranged, led anywhere at all.

It’s easy, their mother said, to love the lovable. There’s no virtue in that.

They were using the good china and the embroidered table linen. Milk had been poured into cocktail glasses. The woman at the bakery had written “Welcome Home, Clare” on the white cake. Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry.

Michael had thought himself indifferent to the new arrangements-Pauline, not his mother, there to greet him with her big, powdered face when he got home from school (and making him hang up his jacket and pick up his games), Pauline there at the dinner table with them, urging them to take more of everything they didn’t want and laughing only (but with real delight) when he said his teacher didn’t have a mustache but a nunstache, Pauline sitting behind him in the living room as he did his homework on his lap with the television on, asking every minute or so, “Doesn’t the TV distract you, doesn’t the TV keep you from concentrating?” He’d thought himself indifferent to it all until his mother came through the front door, the new baby in her arms, and he knew for the first time that he’d hated every minute of Pauline’s reign. As had Jacob, although Jacob had known this to be true throughout the ordeal.