Alice McDermott - After This

It wasn’t that they’d found Pauline unlovable. The entire world of adult strangers was more or less unlovable, with their huge earlobes and their smoky breaths, their yellow teeth, their intrusions. It was only that the house was empty without their mother in it. Recognizable still in all its familiarity: the vestibule where they dropped their book bags and (at Pauline’s insistence) hung up their coats, the living room where the slipcover was newly dark, the cluttered dining room, the Formica counters in the kitchen, the Dutch Boy cookie jar, the worn carpet on the stairs, the sunlight through the windows of their bedroom which seemed always, from the time they woke until darkness fell, the sunlight of four thirty in the afternoon, all of it familiar but seen, for the first time, as it might look when it was empty, with none of them there. This both puzzled them (because all three of them were indeed there, and Pauline was there, and by nine o’clock each night when visiting hours at the hospital were over, their father was there) and filled them with despair, which was what made them tell their mother, once she had returned, the baby in her arms, that they hated Pauline. That they hoped they would never again be left in her care.

It wasn’t true, they hadn’t hated her at all (Jacob had struggled with the choice between “From” and “Love” on the card he drew for her; Michael had laughed heartily himself when Pauline said that Mr. MacLeod next door, who looked like he dyed his hair with Orange Crush, should lay off that piano and find someplace else to tinkle; Annie now had three different vials of perfume samples tucked in her sock drawer, courtesy of Pauline), but it was an explanation that lingered, a conviction they would share for the rest of their lives.

“You choose likable people to be your friends,” their mother said. She sat back from the table, the baby in her arms, and moved the prongs of her fork, the good silver, through the white icing. “And you have to love your family whether they’re likable or not.” She brought the icing to her lips. “But the people you have to feel sorry for are the ones without family. Unlikable people without family or friends. Who’s going to care about them?”

Gripped by their new conviction, the three children shook their heads. “Just don’t ever leave us with her again,” they said, emphatically, crying it out, not because it was what they truly felt but because it was the only, boisterous way they could demonstrate (other than this birthday party in the dining room, on a Sunday afternoon, with the good silver and the good china and the embroidered tablecloth) their joy at her return.

Their mother, the baby in her arms, held up the small silver fork-it was her wedding silver. In the midst of joy there was, there would always be, the injunction to remember the sorrowful. “You must be kind,” their mother said. “I know it’s not easy. Pauline’s not easy. But what would happen to her if there was no one willing to be kind?”

Later, recalling the homecoming, Annie would tell Michael that like the infant in a fairy tale, Clare’s fate, her future, at that moment, must have been sealed. Long after all of them had scattered, Jacob, Michael, Annie, their mother and father, scattered-as their parents would have said-to the four winds, Clare would have Pauline, still a royal pain in the ass, in her care.

Man is immortal, John Keane thought, or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking.

You either pray to the dead or you don’t.

But the real question before them this winter evening, the six men on the building committee, the pastor, the two priests, the architect, the accountant, and the dead, beloved pope who still smiled at them in oil from the end of the rectory dining room, was far simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?

Like something out of a parable (The Good Servant? The Twelve Talents?) each of the six men had brought to the table this evening the stack of pledges they had garnered over the past six weeks from the people of the parish who had not responded voluntarily to the pastor’s initial appeal for funds. Two weeks into the New Year, when, they figured, the financial burden of Christmas might have just begun to ease, the six men had divided the more or less eight square miles of St. Gabriel’s parish into six sectors. After some rigorous debate, it had been decided that the men would not solicit from their own recalcitrant neighbors. (There was the matter of financial privacy, the threat of hard feelings among men whose children played together, whose wives might see each other every day.) John Keane had the names of thirty-three parishioners on his list, all of them more or less strangers-although he recognized many of the faces from church when they came to their doors to let him in. There was the phone call first: on behalf of Father McShane, I’d like to come by some evening to discuss the new church and gym. Then the appointment itself, usually scheduled between seven and eight so as not to interrupt anyone’s dinner. They were for the most part strangers, but kicking the snow off his heels or brushing the rain from his hat, he never once felt that he was stepping into their homes for the first time. They brought him to their dining-room tables, or to the kitchen. There were children in pajamas on the staircase or stretched across the living-room floor, or biting pencils over homework on whatever table their parents weren’t going to use. There were dogs, usually, pushed behind basement doors or banished to the garage. The smell of whatever had been made for dinner still in the air-garlic in the Italian homes and green pepper in the Polish, something fried among the Germans, broiled meat with the Irish. They offered him coffee or tea, sometimes sherry or a beer. The wives, for the most part, hung up his coat and put down the plate of cookies and then disappeared-or lingered only long enough to admire the architect’s drawing on the front of the pledge packet. (Only the more observant asked, “Where’s Krause’s store?” Only the more prescient shook their heads skeptically when he said Krause had agreed to sell his property to the church.) He’d hear them walking around upstairs as he made his pitch to the man of the house, heard the vague repetition of spelling words or dates or catechism lessons as the men’s conversations moved, inevitably, away from the financing of the new church and gym to the war, what service, what theater, what division, what years.

John Keane was older than most of the men by a decade. None of them asked him to call them by their first names, nor did he. The formality-he wore a suit and a topcoat to every call-seemed appropriate for the transaction he was there to discuss. The wives appeared again only when he rose to leave. They stood beside their husbands as the men shook hands. He would return in a week to pick up the sealed envelope, for Father McShane’s eyes only. They were aiming for one hundred percent participation. In the mimeographed letter inside the packet Father McShane had asked only for “prayerful discernment” regarding what each family could afford to contribute. The men were impossible to read, but the wives’ eyes told him everything-they were eager or wary or resigned, those of them who still loved their husbands, or their lives. Others showed him the battle already brewing, or, far worse, an amused conviction that Mr. Keane had not seen through them, through their guise of good parents, good Catholics, of domestic harmony or financial stability. In every case, he had the sense when he left the house that he had at least given the family by his presence alone the gift of a single, hushed hour of quiet civility, good behavior. It was, perhaps, as close as he would ever come to feeling like a priest.