Alice McDermott - After This

Michael held out his arm once more. “It could have really hurt,” he said, trying again; the occasions when Jacob struck the first blow were so rare. Their father put his hand in the air. “Enough,” he said again. “Apologize,” he said, suddenly weary. “Then say your prayers and go to sleep.”

He walked past them, past their mother and the two girls, turning off the overhead light as he did. Into the darkness, with Clare in her arms, their mother whispered, “Think of poor Uncle Frank.”

“He threw the flashlight at me,” Michael said, all in a rush.

His mother peered into the shadowed room. His sisters, little Clare and Annie both, stared at him too, duplicating her eyes.

“Think what your father would give,” she told him, whispering, “to have his own brother beside him for just another night.” Then she walked away.

Jacob was slipping his pale feet under the covers, awkwardly, as if his feet were much bigger and his legs much longer than he could manage. He threw himself at his pillow like a landed fish, put his back to his brother and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. After only a second or two of silence, he said, “Sorry, Michael.”

Michael said nothing. He remained seated on the edge of his bed, the lumpy whorls of the chenille bedspread just under his palms. He looked into the lighted hallway, heard his mother putting Clare back into her bed, and asking Annie to put her head down. Then he heard them praying, “Ever this night, be at my side…” Next door, Mr. MacLeod was playing his piano again, each note just a slight vibration against their bedroom wall.

Michael had only a vague recollection: Uncle Frank had looked like their father, only ugly. A broader, taller, bizarro-world version of their father with more hair and bigger teeth and a white handkerchief that he would mop his maroon face with, like Louis Armstrong. He drove Cadillacs and always spoke to them in a voice like Donald Duck’s. When he visited, mixed nuts and chips with onion dip were served, and they would hear him downstairs late into the night, telling long, loud stories that involved a multitude of voices-Porky Pig, Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Durante-stories that made his parents scream with laughter. Sometimes, lying in the dark, listening, missing most of it, he and Jacob would laugh, too.

Michael watched his mother cross the hallway to her own room. Heard his parents’ voices. On the floor by his feet, just under the fringe of Jacob’s bedspread was the flashlight he had thrown. Quickly, Michael bent down and picked it up and then slipped into bed with it. He turned it on under the blankets, put his fingers over it to see if he could count the bones. Turned it up to the ceiling. He wrote his name, drew a face. The light went off in the hallway. He moved the beam over Jacob’s back, the bedspread and the blanket, his dark head, his ear.

He moved it down the length of his brother’s body and over the wooden footboard of his bed, past the dresser they shared, out the door. Leaning out over his own mattress, he saw the light catch the doorknob of the linen closet, the door to his sisters’ room. He willed the light to push the door open a bit more. He could then move the beam over Annie’s face, play it across her eyelids.

“Michael,” he heard his mother say from his parents’ room. She was trying to keep her voice low, but not whispering. “Go to sleep,” she said. She sounded not exactly far away but heading there, as if she had stopped in the middle of her leaving. “Do you hear me?” she said. He imagined she was speaking to him from over her shoulder, just as she was stepping out, maybe through one of her bedroom windows, maybe following his father, her hands on the window frame, her foot on the sill, their father already gone before her (when we’re gone, he had said) into the night. “Put out that light,” she said, over her shoulder, as he imagined it. And he did. In the darkness, he felt more certain of their absence. His parents had left the house and if he called out “Mom?” only Jacob and the girls would hear him. If there were a knock at the door tonight, it would be left to him to answer. He would take Jacob’s flashlight. He imagined Pauline, scratching at the glass, wanting to get in. Lying alone in the darkness, he formed the words in his mind, willed them across the room, but did not speak them out loud. “Sorry, Jacob.”

Instead, he whispered, “Mr. MacLeod is tinkling on his piano again.”

And then they were both laughing in the dark.

They should have come earlier in the day, but it was a World’s Fair, after all, and there had been much to distract them. Now the sun was low and orange, radiating heat like a glowing coal. The asphalt that had been wet and clean this morning-hosed down by jumpsuited workers intent, it seemed, on lending the paved-over park a hint of morning dew-was now gummy and pliant underfoot. Now heat waves rose from it, smeared the air and made a mirage of the shoes and the ankles and the pink knees of the passing crowds. The painted benches had grown too hot to sit on. The shrubs and sparse trees were limp. Now the jumpsuited men walked listlessly, clicking their long-handled brooms against the opened and closed mouths of their long-handled dustbins. The passengers in the sleek Glide-a-Rides, erect and smiling earlier in the day as they tested a bit of space-age transportation, now slumped in the molded plastic seats or gazed out from behind their sunglasses, unimpressed even with the future. It was the end of the day.

In another hour, the sun would dip into the Hudson and the humidity would begin to give way. In another hour-by the time they got through the exhibit-the lights in the trees and on the pavilions and under the fountain that surrounded the Unisphere would draw the eye up, to the spires and the arches and the silvery searchlights of the fair, to the stars themselves. But not now. Now every head was bent under the day’s accumulated heat, every grimy collar and darkened arm ring exposed, every stranger’s arm or bare shoulder-as they joined the line outside the exhibit-was sticky, unpleasantly cool.

“We should have come earlier,” Mary Keane said, although, she supposed, earlier the line might have been longer still.

Beside her, Annie stood on her toes to glimpse the distance to the entrance and then leaned out to see how many more had joined the line behind them. There was solace in the seven or eight-and now another four-who would have to wait longer still. She stepped back into place. There was a tall, older couple ahead of them, the woman fat, the man slightly stooped. Behind them, a younger couple, but not so young that the woman didn’t look a little foolish, hanging-in this heat-on the man’s hairy arm.

They had already missed the exhibit twice. Once, the first time they had come to the fair, when they had Clare and the two boys, who had balked at waiting an hour and a half to see a statue. Once again when their father was also along. After only ten minutes on the long line, he had shown them his wrist and declared that if they were not all in the car in the next half hour it would be a nightmare on the Grand Central.

(Because he was a man who always knew precisely when they must all be in the car, knew precisely the minute after which the trip would be in vain, impossible, a nightmare. “Look at the time,” turning furiously on his wife as if she were both the single force delaying them and the single reason in all the world that he sought to wage this battle. It made little difference if their arrival or departure was meant to be precise or merely eventual, he held his wrist in the air, his fist clenched as if he would bring it down on their heads if they failed to understand-tapping the face of his watch-that time was against them.)

But now they were just the two-mother and daughter-and while Mary Keane, in deference to her husband’s habit of mind rather than out of any impatience of her own, reprimanded herself for not getting here earlier, she also made calm accommodation for what would clearly be a long wait: a later bus home, was all, she told herself. A phone call to the boys to tell them to fix some spaghetti. Another to Pauline, who had Clare for the day. Nothing else to stop them, really, from finally seeing this through.