Alice McDermott - After This

A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself.

In the elevator, Clare heavy in her arms, she told Annie that Pauline was intolerable, sometimes. Really. “I don’t just bake cookies at Christmas,” she said resentfully, and Annie agreed although, at the moment, she could not recall any cookies her mother had ever made that were not shaped like Christmas trees or snowmen.

Her mother said, “You know,” and then paused. She recalled, briefly, the sacred music and the white stone and all the soaring aspirations of her faith: gold domes and ivory towers and in the darkness, light. She considered, too, how tired she was, Clare’s head heavy on her shoulder, the child’s heels digging into her hips. How annoying Pauline could be. “You know,” she said again, “Pauline doesn’t speak to Helen anymore, the girl she went to Europe with last year.” She looked down at Annie. “And she’s fallen out with Adele, too, from the office. Even though they shared a cabin on that cruise and were best pals for a while there.” She hitched Clare up on her shoulder. Annie transferred the heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left. “I wouldn’t mind sometimes,” her mother said, “if Pauline got mad and stopped speaking to us for a while. It would be a nice break.”

Watching the light move behind each number as they descended, Annie laughed and said, “I know.”

“It would be nice to untangle ourselves a bit,” her mother said. Clare stirred against her shoulder, moved the ringers she had placed in her mother’s hair, tugged.

Mary Keane and her daughters rode the rest of the way down in weary silence. It was an unkindness, she knew, what she had just said about Pauline. Words said in conscious defiance of all the gentle aspirations of her faith. But it was also true, what she had said. Just as it was true that there would be no untangling herself from Pauline. Not with Clare already so fond of her.

The church had gone to pot. It had gone to seed. It had been minimally repaired for the last five years and come Monday the dismantling would begin. Any parishioner wishing to purchase one of the old pews should have already called the rectory. There were shingles missing from the exterior; the bell, for safety’s sake, had long ago been removed from the belfry. The green canvas awning that had once shaded the entrance and the tall brick steps that led from the street had been torn in the ’60 hurricane and never repaired. In ’64 it was taken down altogether and now only the metal frame remained, a crisscross of bare ironwork against the sky. The choir loft, also for safety’s sake, had been off limits for as long as most of the children in the school could remember. A rumor spread among the younger ones, Clare Keane included, that the unused staircase at the back of the church, with its wide marble banister and its velvet rope (and its scent, when you got near it, of incense and attics) was an entrance to heaven. The painting across the high ceiling, of John the Baptist pouring water from his palm over the head of a beautiful Christ, was itself marred by water-there was a misshapen, ominously gray cloud in the blue sky above their heads, another stretched across the saint’s feet and over the savior’s knees. The stained-glass window high above the altar-Saint Gabriel with his halo and his wings-also leaked. On a bad day, the water ran down the wall and over the crucifix and behind the gold tabernacle. The filigree on the old altar had chipped away. No one remembered the last time the organ had actually played.

On the Friday before the last Sunday, all the children in the school were led into the church for a farewell prayer, and just as Father Hecht said, “The old makes way for the new,” Marilyn Giovanni in the fifth grade slammed the back of her head into the back of the pew and with an echoing, inhuman cry, rolled onto the worn carpet of the center aisle. It was an epileptic seizure. Mrs. Ryan, who taught the third grade, had an afflicted child of her own and knew just what to do, and superstition in this day and age was well to be avoided. But the Bible itself was full of misdiagnoses and who could help but wonder what it was the devil would have objected to-the old or the new? Was it protest that made him seize the little girl at that moment, or celebration?

(“Nonsense,” Father McShane said to the younger priest. “I’m ashamed of you.” And then, with a wink and a crooked smile, “They talk about the Irish.”)

On the corner in front of the church, the boys waiting for the high-school bus watched the workmen carrying statues over their shoulders like huge dolls. They saw them carrying the large framed oil paintings in both hands, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, stained with the smoke of votive candles, of forty years of petitions, and Saint Pius, still clean, carried like suitcases to a waiting van. The old wooden pews, eased out through the front door and down the old steps like streamlined, oversize coffins, were either placed in the van or-as in some final reckoning-carried to the lawn in front of the rectory where they were labeled with the purchasing parishioner’s name. Then a high chain-link fence went up around the old church and the wrecking ball came and in no time it was all splinters and smoke.

Jacob Keane, waiting at the corner with the other boys from his high school, in a jacket he had not grown into and his school tie, swore that the smell of incense still came from the hole where the church had been. He made the other boys pause and sniff the air. Yes, they nodded, their chins raised, they could almost agree. The road in front of the church seemed to grow more congested every morning. There was the thick diesel smell of county buses and school buses, delivery trucks and flatbeds, so that even on a spring morning at seven there was hardly a trace of new leaf or daffodil or even the cool dawn in the suburban air. But Jacob told the other boys, “You can still smell it,” and with their fingers in the fence they paused, raised their noses. Those who had once shared the belief that the stairs to the old choir loft led to another world, to heaven itself, considered briefly the possibility that some sort of holiness lingered everywhere, perhaps just beneath the shell of earth and sky. Jacob wondered as well. Then Michael told a joke about a workman in a church who hammered his thumb and cursed. A nun who was praying nearby said his bad language had made Our Lady cry. She pointed to the statue. “See the tears?” the nun said. The man shook his head. “She’s only crying cause I hammered a nail into her backside to hang up my coat.”

The laughter outran the mystery. Michael was pleased to see his brother blush. The joke, he was pretty certain, had come from Uncle Frank.

But if there was inspiration in the lingering smell of incense, there was incentive in the church’s rising frame. The new church was to be in the round-a spaceship, some of the older parishioners complained, a circus tent-and every afternoon when the boys from the Catholic high school left the bus, they could mark the progress that had been made that day, at first in the dark stakes and poured concrete of the foundation but then, more clearly, in the skeletal web of steel and wood. By summer, a number of them had begun projects of their own-backyard tree houses and storage huts and potting sheds. Tony Persichetti and his father worked on their attic, transforming the space the developer had left as bare beams into a bedroom and a bath. Jacob and Michael Keane, making a case for privacy, for a place to gather with their friends that was not the kitchen, where their mother would have to break things up to make dinner, or their bedroom, where their sisters could listen at the door, convinced their parents to let them finish the basement-which meant to cover the cinder-block walls with knotty pine panels, to drop a white ceiling, enclose the furnace with its own room, and replace the shower curtain at the entrance of the tiny bathroom with a real door.