Alice McDermott - After This

It wasn’t that he was a company man, he was happy enough to use up his three weeks of vacation time every year-one week to work around the house in the spring, two in summer to take the kids to the shore. He was just mostly healthy, and found a couple of aspirin or a cold tablet taken in the morning far preferable to the silence and boredom of a sickroom. And he didn’t like doctors. Mary Keane rolled her eyes every time she heard him say it. She understood that what he didn’t like about doctors had less to do with what he called their arrogance and more to do with the diplomas on the wall, the golf-course tans-the disadvantage, the particular kind of humiliation a man with four children making fifteen thousand a year endured while sitting with his bare legs dangling, those missing toes, in his boxer shorts and T-shirt before a diplomaed man in a good suit who had been to Columbia University or Cornell. Once a year, he went downtown for his company physical and every year he got a clean bill of health-as had (he was quick to point out) his brother Frank two weeks before he died, which told you something about doctors.

He was convinced anyway that lingering illness and curable, or incurable, disease was not likely to get him. His end, when it came, he was certain, would be swift and unavoidable. The black coach. The sudden fall. Like Frank’s.

He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, palms pressed to the mattress to ease the pressure on his tailbone. He moved his foot inside the boot. This morning, when he had shown the boys the sketch he had drawn during the sleepless night, Michael had muttered, “It looks like a guillotine. Or the rack.” He had raised an eyebrow and flicked an imaginary cigarette and said in a squinting, lip-curling German accent, “Foolish man, ve have other vays to make you talk.” But Jacob, who if he had been another kind of oldest child might have had the courage to dissuade his father, to point out that they were not setting a broken limb, that this was not the Wild West and it was high time a doctor be consulted, said simply, “Dad thinks it will help,” and then led Michael to the basement where there was still a small, leftover pile of two-by-fours tucked away in the furnace room.

It might have been more fitting for them to have rebelled, and he suspected that were he a younger man, a younger father, they would have. But the solemnity with which the two of them had come, one after the other, into his bedroom yesterday morning revealed something. Here he was out sick for the first time in more than twenty years and here they were standing over him, dumbstruck and wary, their fear of his dying sprung into their faces as if from the very moment their mother had awakened them with the news that sometime during the night, something had gone wrong with Daddy’s leg. He suspected that they followed his instructions for the weights and the pulley and the contraption that was to support it not so much to humor him in his pain but to coax themselves into believing that he was still in charge, that they were still under his care.

And then the sound of them pounding the wood reached him from the basement, and it was all he could do to cast aside as utter nonsense his own morbid thoughts regarding coffins and crucifixes. It was only a bum leg, after all. Sprung on him in the middle of the night.

He stirred again against the mattress, tilted his head back against the mahogany headboard. He tried to gauge the movement of the sunlight across the white ceiling. There were the blue shadows cast by the valances of his wife’s curtains, the reflection of light in the mirror above her dresser, in the glass of the children’s school photographs, in the blank face of the TV. The pain stretched its own legs for a few seconds, reached up over his thigh and across his back and into his chest and arms. In response, he moved the toe of the boot, then bent his knee to lift the weight of the books that pulled against it, matching pain for pain, the unbidden with the intentional, in some vague theory that the one would defeat the other, that the one was preferable to the other. When he reached for the aspirin on the bed stand, he saw that his hand was trembling and he whispered a quick “Son of a bitch.” It was an ongoing and unwinnable argument with an idiot.

And yet it was an argument he could not resist.

He swallowed the aspirin without water, tossing them one at a time into the back of his throat, the second one catching on his tongue. What he was hoping to put off for as long as possible was the inevitable slipping out of the boot and off the bed, the awkward, gimping trip across the hallway to the bathroom.

There was an old hockey stick on the other side of the bed, another basement resource the boys had fetched for him, meant to serve as a crutch, although using it had made him feel like some Old Testament prophet leaning on his staff.

“Like Charlton Heston,” Michael had said from the doorway of his own bedroom last night. It seemed to John Keane that over the past two days, one or the other of his sons was always lounging casually in the doorway whenever he got himself up and hauled himself across the hall to the bathroom. Had he been a younger father, they might have simply thrown him over a shoulder and carried him across.

He lifted his hand to wipe the perspiration from his lip, raised and lowered his good leg and then slipped both hands under the thigh of the bad one and slowly raised it until he could feel again the weight pulling against his foot.

And then the pain again, wire thin this time, through his leg and into his gut and reaching up to hook the corners of his mouth.

He turned his head, waiting for it to pass. The fan on the dresser was humming, though it offered no breeze. The Saran-wrapped sandwich and the pile of magazines his wife had left for him on her side of the bed, the damp bedsheets themselves, gave off a nauseating yellow sheen and in his impatience with it, with the pain itself, he pulled at the leg again.

The pain answered in kind.

It was a ridiculous argument. A stupid fight. And yet, he raised his chin defiantly at the speckled boot. There were white dots of paint from the living room, bits of pale green from when he had done the boys’ room, pale pink from the year Clare was born. Other colors, no doubt, were he to examine it more closely, two decades’ worth of housekeeping chores done in these boots, painting and gardening and leaf raking, the very peacetime pursuits the army, in giving them to him, had sought to insure. Pursuits that the pain, on this hot still morning, now easily reduced to foolishness. He had wasted his life with painting and gardening and leaf raking. He had squandered his time.

With his hand under his thigh, he lifted his leg again. The pulley squeaked a little, slowly turning. Foolish man, Michael had said. Ve have other ways. Well, no, not squandered. There were his children, after all.

In the mirror above his wife’s dresser, he could see the reflection of the crucifix that hung over their bed, the tiny gold Christ curled against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the accoutrements of Last Rites. It had been a gift from the priest who married them, a reminder, no doubt, that their marriage bed might also be the bed in which they would breathe their last. It had not been difficult for them, bred-in-the-bone Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at the beginning of their lives together, to imagine the final scene: the candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at his bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving. Certainly, they had said till death do us part, but it wasn’t until they’d opened the priest’s present (he recalled the wrappings of the other gifts spread across the living room of her father’s apartment, her pretty beige going-away suit, the nervous anticipation he had felt, opening a few packages while they waited for the cab that was to take them to the city) that the scene became vivid for them both-the crucifix spread apart, the thin white tapers lit, the dim room where he would breathe his last.