Alice McDermott - After This

It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street, already gone.

He lowered the leg again, heard the pile of thick books, tied together like a schoolboy’s satchel, hit the floor. Pain such as this had a tendency to reduce everything, every effort, every belief, to brittle plastic, easily shattered. It could shatter the notion of Paradise opened by a single, wracked body hung on a cross. It could shatter any hope you had that you were worth more than the bustling of your ordinary days. It could remind you easily enough that death was no more or less than the choke and sputter of a single muscle, the sudden exposure of gut and bone, your skin turned black in the cold.

If you didn’t argue against it, the idiot pain, the very things you’d based your life on could shatter.

His eyes went from the reflected crucifix to the blank gray face of the television. He could make out his own reflection there, sitting up against the headboard. His chest and shoulders in his pale pajamas, his bald head, his face, which in the reflected shadow and distorted sunlight caught by the blank screen, was suddenly the face of his brother.

It had happened before: one of his sons would be talking in another room and he’d hear, for a moment, Frank’s laughter. His niece once raised a hand, turned her head, and it was Frank’s gesture. He would raise his own chin shaving and there he’d see his brother, briefly, briefly.

Even now his own reflection in the blank gray face of the TV set had become simply his own again, too bald, too gaunt for Frank. But the glimpse, nevertheless, had been well timed, and as if to acknowledge it, small gift that it was, he pulled at the leg again. He held his breath again as the pain flared. No realistic person expected a full-fledged visitation, or even hoped for one-it was, surely, what they meant when they said “laid to rest”-but still there were tricks of the eye or of the mind that could satisfy even someone like himself, who, steeped in superstition as a child, had long ago learned to resist it. Surely there were assurances, even for the most reasonable of believers, that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day. Frank’s face, glimpsed briefly, assuring him, his own heart, his spirits, rising at the mere possibility of once again seeing his brother’s face.

He recalled that all the pain of that rainy day-the endless Mass at Incarnation, the traffic-choked ride to the cemetery-had been for Catherine, Frank’s daughter. All the dignity, resignation, joyful hope of resurrection the rest of them had mustered, as one must, to get through the day, undermined by the poor girl’s tears. She cried a torrent through it all. Thin as a willow in her dark sweater and skirt, bent over in the pew or under her mother’s arm at the cemetery. A scrap of tissue in her hands and the pale red hair falling over her face. Too young to be so wracked by grief. Too pretty, too newly formed to know that particular kind of disappointment. Afterward, back at the house, he had knelt beside her chair and said, “Your father will be with you for the rest of your days,” and she, nineteen at the time, had looked at him with her red eyes and said, “I’ll never stop missing him.”

Six months later, when he gave her his arm on the day she was married, he felt himself a poor substitute, although she had whispered her gratitude, leaving the scent of her lipstick on his cheek and his ear. She had married a kid from Greenwich, a wealthy boy who had a seat on the Stock Exchange now. They lived in Garden City and had refused so many invitations, to Clare’s christening party, to her first Holy Communion, to confirmations and graduations, even to a few odd Sunday suppers, that he and Mary had simply stopped asking. “She moves in different circles now,” Ellen, Frank’s wife, had said, with more pride than disappointment, although many of her invitations were also refused.

Last he saw her, just last year, he was waiting for his wife and the girls outside A amp;S when Catherine, in a beige Cadillac, pulled into the parking space beside him. It took him a moment to recognize her, and she was out of her car by the time he waved at her through his own passenger window. Then he opened his door to get out and greet her. But she was already walking away, her head down. There was another woman with her and she was the one who glanced over her shoulder when he called. But neither one of them paused.

He looked again at his reflection in the TV set. You’ll be pleased to know that she drives a Cadillac. That she’s doing quite well, her own daughter growing, Ellen tells me. A big house in Garden City. I can’t say that it didn’t cut me like a knife, Frank, standing in that parking lot. I can’t say that I didn’t see some of it in you, while you were here, with your own Cadillacs every other year, your Chivas Regal and your fancy beer, a certain fascination, when we were kids, with the society page.

He lifted the leg again. The pain, he realized, was constant, there was only the illusion of ebb and flow.

His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with our relatives.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

He pulled at the leg again-it was only stubborness that made him continue to believe that what he was doing was therapeutic.

At noon mary called from the city. They had met Pauline at Penn Station and now they were having lunch at Schrafft’s before the show. It was hotter than heck. They were looking forward to getting into the cool theater.

And then, with (he would have said) much hemming and hawing, she asked him cautiously (she was building up to something) how he was feeling, if he’d gotten any sleep, if he could eat-and, finally, if his contraption was doing him any good.

He said, Yes it was, believe it or not, and he knew immediately that the lie had taken the wind out of her sails.

Still, she said, “Pauline says it’s a slipped disk.”

“Pauline’s the expert, then,” he said.

Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience, recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry-the kind of concoction only a long marriage can brew. Rising behind it was the faint clatter of dishes, the hum of restaurant conversation.

“No,” she said finally. “But a gal from the office had a brother-in-law with the same problem. Just woke up one morning with a terrible pain. Down his leg. A slipped disk.”

His wife would replace the natural laws with anecdotes. No gravity until someone’s sister’s cousin’s husband had fallen down the stairs. Night and day mere rumor until a girl she used to know in high school was stricken with insomnia, or burned to a crisp by the sun.

“Is that so?” he said placidly. “Same exact thing?”

“Yeah,” she said, with some hesitation. “More or less. You know, his leg.”

The line clicked to say their three minutes were up and instead of getting off, she said, “Hold on,” and dropped another dime into the phone.

“Right or left?” he asked when the coin had been swallowed.

“What?” she said.

And he repeated more emphatically, “Was it the right leg or the left leg? Of this fellow just like me?”

She paused and then said, “Very funny,” to show that it wasn’t. “Pauline read an article about it,” she said. “It happens to a lot of men. It’s evolution. It’s the price men pay for standing upright.”

Pauline, he thought, would be happy to learn that there is a price men pay for standing upright.