Alice McDermott - After This

Their father took them to the lumberyard, bought them levels and tape measures and boxes of nails, cartons of two-foot-square linoleum with which to cover the concrete floor. Every evening that summer, when he returned from work, he changed into his old clothes, put on the army boots he wore for all household chores, and went down to assess the boys’ progress, to offer corrections and advice. With the help of a do-it-yourself manual, father and sons figured out the wiring for the fluorescent lights, got the door hung right, laid a checkerboard pattern across the floor. The old couch and the train table were donated to St. Vincent’s and their father agreed to splurge on a six-piece set of Danish modern from Sears, which gave the new room a sleek, science-fiction look that Mary Keane found cold, although it inspired in her sons a sense that their own modern futures, part Buck Rogers, part James Bond, were finally upon them.

In only a matter of months, Michael learned that the cheap foam cushions of the Danish modern sofa will buckle on you when you press a girl too ardently into its frame.

The parishioners on that first Sunday seemed both reluctant and awed, filing in not down a single central aisle but along any number of aisles that fanned out from the semicircle that was the altar. The faces in the new stained-glass windows were all angles (Mary Keane thought they looked vaguely Danish modern themselves), their robes all long bright shards of color. The crucifix suspended above them was a long swoop of gray steel intersected by a small crossbeam that seemed hardly the breadth of a man’s arms. There were no recognizable statues of any sort and the Stations of the Cross were merely white rectangles of carved stone, the Passion barely discernible within them. Because there were no corners, there were few shadows in the new church. The confessionals were small rooms, with actual doors (John Keane tested one on the way out, assessing how well it had been hung) and doorknobs, not curtains. Between them, behind a large plate-glass window, there was what Father McShane seemed delighted to call the “Bawl Room,” a soundproof room for mothers with small, noisy children. He pointed it out three times in his dedication sermon-it might have been the sole motive for the new construction-and Mary Keane, who throughout the service grew progressively dissatisfied with the too new St. Gabriel’s, added to her criticism of the place the fact that a baby’s cry or a toddler’s shouted phrase added life, and sometimes even laughter, to a Mass, which was, after all, supposed to be a celebration, not a dirge. She imagined the Blessed Mother with baby Jesus in her arms, standing behind the plate glass, the child’s mouth moving but not a sound getting through. Beside her, her husband noticed how the new pews lacked the small brass hat clips that had been secured to the back of every pew in the old church (spring-loaded, felt-tipped clips that Michael would stealthily snap at least once every Mass, a sound like a gunshot echoing through the place). He understood there was no longer a need for them-so few men wore hats anymore (he blamed JFK with his thick hair and his big Irish head for changing the fashion)-but the lack of them added to his dawning sense that the new church had turned the stuff of his own past, his own memories, into something quaint, at best. At worst, obsolete.

And yet, the smell of the incense from the censer was the smell of the incense of old, and the stately movement of the priests in their robes as they walked down the aisles swinging them, sending the pale smoke into the air, their free hands placed gently over their hearts, was as it had always been. At his shoulder, Jacob’s bowed head and thin folded hands reassured him somewhat (and told him the three hundred a year for four years that he’d spent on his Catholic high school might actually have purchased the boy something). Beside Jacob, Clare had lost her initial, openmouthed fascination with the saucer-shaped ceiling and was now simply studying her sister’s hand (which Annie, limply, had allowed her to take into her lap), studying especially the latest boyfriend’s thick high-school ring, which Annie had made smaller with a welt of yellow yarn. Beside her, Michael sprawled in the pew (three hundred a year for three years with not much to show for it), his eyes cast down not in prayer but in a kind of wry embarrassment for how utterly mistaken everyone around him, everyone who had ever had a hand in the construction of this place, seemed to be.

As soon as the priest said, “The Mass is ended” (“Thanks be to God,” was the only response Michael joined in on, saying it loudly and sarcastically and always adding, just loudly enough for his siblings to hear, “Let’s cruise”), Michael was in the aisle, out the door, the first to grab a fresh Sunday News from the pile outside of Krause’s store.

He carried it and his ritual bottle of Sunday-morning root beer back to his parents’ car. They were delayed, touring the new church (his father testing the confessional’s sturdy doors, his mother with the girls on either side of her clucking her tongue at each white and nearly indiscernible depiction of Christ’s suffering). Sitting on the warm hood of his father’s car, Michael watched the people leaving the church, getting into their own cars, pulling out. He saw Lori Ballinger walking behind her parents, her legs tan, her hair glossy in the sun, and he raised the bottle of soda in a debonair salute. She waved back, smiling.

When Jacob joined him (“They’re talking to people,” was his only explanation for their parents’ further delay), Michael said that he had seen her. “She’s cute,” Jacob said.

“A nice girl, I hear,” Michael added, emphasizing nice so that Jacob would know he hadn’t said “good.”

Jacob knew, and showed that he knew with a slight smile. He put out his hand and his brother passed him the soda, although he said as he did, “Get your own.” Jacob took a drink and then passed it back. It was a taste that made him feel ten years old.

“Where the hell are they?” Michael said. He leaned back on the hood, his knees raised. “Why the hell didn’t you take your car?” The sky was clear blue above them, hardly a wisp of cloud. He felt sometimes that all he did anymore was wait. He put his hand in his pants pocket and found a stubby pencil from the golf course where he caddied. He sat up. “Let’s walk home,” he said. “I’ll leave a note.” He wrote across the clean border at the top of the Sunday comics. Propped the entire paper up on the windshield and secured it with a wiper, left the empty soda bottle beside it. His father’s car, a ’65 Ford, was, he told Jacob, a piece of junk.

Jacob shrugged. This summer, as a graduation present, his father had given him three hundred dollars toward his own car, a little Capri. The puzzle he had studied in high-school religion classes-why the rich were so ungenerous, why the suffering of the poor, the fixable suffering, was so seldom fixed-began to solve itself for him the first time he drove off alone, in his own car. There was want, as the Brothers at St. Sebastian’s had referred to it. But then there was, he suddenly understood-alone, unfettered, pressing the accelerator, palming the wheel-I want.

His brother leaped off the hood-the percussion of the metal bending in under his palm and then bending back again. “Let’s cruise,” he said again.

They walked together, down the alleyway that ran in front of what they still called the new gym, past the modern entryway. Saint Gabriel, with the shoulders of his folded wings rising up over his head, was mere shadow behind the plate glass. They emerged from the alleyway into the sun, passed Krause’s store, where there was still a crowd of customers inside, pressed against the door. They cut through the parking lot of the strip of stores beside the school, turned toward home. It was the route they had walked together for years, when they were students at St. Gabriel’s and then again when they had come to this corner to meet their high-school bus. That was over now. Jacob was starting St. John’s in the fall. Michael would be hitching a ride to St. Sebastian’s with some friends, his senior year.