Alice McDermott - After This

The fat woman, mopping her thick neck with a small tissue, turned again to say that the long wait would be worth it. “It’ll be like a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.”

With her purse in the crook of her arm, Mary Keane reached out to run her fingers through her daughter’s thin hair, gathering it bit by bit to the top of her head. She twisted the hair into a topknot and pulled three bobby pins from the purse to hold it. Annie reached back tentatively to feel her bare neck. “Better?” Mary Keane said and Annie said, “Yes,” although one of the bobby pins bit like a tooth.

The line moved again. Mary Keane leaned down and blew a soft stream of air onto her daughter’s neck, miraculously cool. Annie closed her eyes briefly. “How much longer?” she said at the same time the woman behind them said, “Not much longer.” They turned, mother and daughter, to meet her eye, but it was the man she was addressing, leaning against him, holding on to his arm. There was a diamond engagement ring on her hand. You had to pity the length and thickness of her brown hair, the weight of her chin on his shoulder.

They shuffled forward again. Now they could hear faint music coming from the building, and with the next step forward they could smell, if certainly not yet feel, the air-conditioning inside.

Someone up ahead, an official, cried, “No pushing, please,” in what might have been an Italian accent. They felt the line grow slack at the reprimand. And then it moved forward again.

The fat woman was now talking to the woman ahead of her. “What if you’d just stepped out of the shower?” she shouted.

“Pee-aye-tuh,” the man behind them said and the woman, laughing deep in her throat said, “Pee-aye-ta.”

Here now was the official who belonged to the voice, perspiring in a red jacket and gray pants. He waved his arms like a traffic cop although, at the moment, they were standing still in front of him.

“Almost there,” he was saying, smiling at them all. His accent not Italian but Long Island. “That’s it”-as they moved forward-”won’t be long now.”

As if responding obediently to a command, the line pressed itself together, tighter still, heads, hands, shuffling feet. (Annie briefly placed the heels of her palms to the damp yellow shirt of the man in front of her and then drew them away.) Chests to backs and the woman behind them leaning, it seemed, over Mary Keane’s shoulder. “No pushing, please,” the man said again.

The sun had nearly dropped out of sight although the sky glowed so vividly with its afterimage that it hardly mattered. The heat still gave the thick air a slow pulse. The crowd pressed together and her mother took her hand, moving. For a moment Annie forgot just what it was they had been waiting to see. And then they were inside.

Cold air and a low Gregorian chant, eyes struggling to adjust to the change. There was the smell of incense and of new paint. Glass cases along the walls and the impression of red and gold. Golden arcs of light. Red carpet at their feet. The line held, still shuffling, past cases of jewels, now, or books, or vestments, or small ivory models of churches, paintings of saints and priests. The volume of the choir’s voices seemed to rise slightly as they moved forward, wavering the way the heat outside had wavered. But the heat was already forgotten. “Keep moving, please,” someone said.

And then the line broke. Wheat from chaff, Mary thought as red-jacketed guards counted them off, said, there-four rows in descending order-back there, please, here, down there. A brusque tap on her shoulder and she and her daughter were hurried forward. Down here, please, keep moving.

No choice in the matter, it soon became clear, because what they were being directed to was a moving walkway, four ascending rows in a kind of amphitheater of moving walkways. There was the uncertain first step, the tug of the rubber tread against the soles of their feet, and then, through no effort of their own, the slow movement forward into the dark. Mary Keane and her daughter were in the first row. The air grew colder and the holy chants nearer, even as the faces and the bodies and the clothes of all who had waited-though they were still beside them or above them in the darkness-disappeared. There were only whispers and stirrings, a child’s voice, and then not even that.

Mary Keane put her arm across her daughter’s chest, pressed her close so that the little topknot was just under her chin. Annie took her mother’s arm in both hands.

In the absence of all color and all other light, the white marble held every nuance and hue a human eye could manage. Here was the lifeless flesh of the beloved child, the young man’s muscle and sinew impossibly-impossible for the mother who cradled him-still. Here were her knees against the folds of her draped robes, her lap, as wide as it might have been in childbirth, accommodating his weight once more. Here were her fingers pressed into his side, her shoulder raised to bear him on her arm once more. Here was her left hand, open, empty. Here were the mother’s eyes cast down upon the body of her child once more, only once more, and in another moment (they were moving back into the darkness) no more.

The white light reflected dimly off the faces still within its reach and then disappeared from them, lamps extinguished, one by one, as they were slowly drawn away. Somewhere among them a woman was weeping. Slowly, the moving sidewalk delivered them all through the darkness to the four ascending doors where they disembarked, step carefully please. Flesh, hair, clothes returned to them in the low light of the rest of the exhibit. A low, golden light that was nevertheless painful, accustomed as their eyes had become to the dark, and despite how briefly they had been in it.

Outside, the heat was a comfort, momentarily, on chilled shoulders and arms. The lights had come on in the park, in the trees, in the tall clock towers and the soaring pavilions and under the fountains that surrounded the Unisphere. It led their eyes up, for a moment. There were stars but also a stain of red on the western horizon, against the quickly descending night. There was the later bus to catch from the park to the terminal in Jamaica, and then the second bus to the intersection where they would call home and John Keane, unhappy about the late hour, would come in the car to fetch them.

At Pauline’s apartment, Clare was already asleep on the couch. Pauline listed all they had done together that day-an excursion to the fabric store and lunch at a diner, two cute gingham aprons run up on the sewing machine, cookies baked and nails painted and a walk around the corner for Chinese-making each occasion sound, to Mary Keane, like a compensation Pauline had rendered, since attached to each one was some surprise, on Pauline’s part, that Clare had done none of these things in exactly this way before. “And she said her mother only knew how to make Christmas cookies.”

Mary slipped her hands under Clare’s arms, lifted the sleeping child to her shoulder, felt the weight of her, and how, not quite asleep, she tightened her arms around her mother’s neck, brushed her fingers against her mother’s hair. Pauline was handing a shopping bag to Annie, the folded aprons, the cookies, a few odds and ends, “Little presents,” Pauline said, “nothing much,” proudly enough. The apartment was close, dimly lit, full of the scent of Pauline’s perfume. In her weariness after the long hot day, in her anger over her husband’s unreasonable impatience, in anticipation of the bedtime routine that was still waiting for her at home, Mary Keane looked at the peaceful rooms with some envy.

Which Pauline saw, of course. At the door, she asked, “Is he waiting downstairs?”-meaning John Keane. And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how he is,” and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband’s failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft’s transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage-which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn-simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.