Alice McDermott - After This

“Tomorrow I’m calling the doctor,” she went on, the very reason she had dropped the second dime into the machine. He could see her do her little “so there” nod. There, I said it.

“What are you going to call him?” he asked her.

When she hung up the phone he could hear her say “Stubborn” before the receiver hit the cradle. He could not be sure if she was speaking to herself or to Pauline, or perhaps to the two girls, who would also nod. Maybe only to a waiter, clattering dishes.

An hour later, Jacob returned, banging into the house as he tended to do, always sounding like a drunk on a stage set. He moved around the kitchen a bit, clink of glass and clatter of silverware and slam and then slam again of the refrigerator door. When he poked his head around the doorway of the bedroom, he had half a sandwich in his cheek, the other half, dripping mustard and pickle relish, cupped like a small creature in his hands.

“How are you doing, Dad?” he asked, stretching his throat to get the food swallowed as he spoke. John Keane could not help but wonder how many years would have to go by before it would occur to his son that maybe he should have come up and asked after his father before he made the sandwich.

“Better,” he said.

And then Jacob began nodding, that long, low, exaggerated nod that he and his friends so often substituted for speech. “The thing’s working, then,” he said.

His father shrugged. “Seems to be.”

“Good enough,” Jacob said, still nodding. He was not quite meeting his father’s eye. “You want me to put the TV on for you?”

Although it was within easy reach and the last thing he wanted, he said, “Sure. That’d be great.”

Jacob’s sneakers were grass stained and there were grass stains like brushstrokes on his skinny calves and his khaki shorts. Not just slower and shyer than his brother, but shorter, too: you could see in his legs, in the way he walked, that at nineteen there was no more growth in him, that the sudden, surprising adolescent transformation his father had imagined for him all through his childhood was not going to occur. It surprised him. The men in his family were all of a good size. He thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that his son should take after no one so much as his long-ago namesake, the other Jacob.

John Keane watched the boy as he carefully edged himself between the bed and the TV on its rickety stand, turned it on, fiddled with the antenna, leaning a little, his back to his father. He smelled like mown grass, sun, and air. There was some sinewy strength in his tanned arms and in his hands. A young man’s strength, a young man’s compact body under the loose, sweat-limp T-shirt. It was another kind of pain-a sweet, heart-dropping pain-what he felt for his son, what he felt for the boy’s young body, his awkwardness, his earnestness, his life ahead. And he suddenly found himself pulling against it, deliberately, with an opposite and equal weight, meant, like the contraption that bound his foot, to provide equilibrium. There were his failings as well. There was the question, after a less than successful first year, of whether he’d go back to St. John’s in the fall. (“Good money after bad,” he had told the boy, after Jacob’s last set of grades. He’d said, “I’ve got four of you to put through college, you know.”) There was the draft. There was the chance that the military would be the making of him. There was the chance of Vietnam.

Jacob stepped back for a moment, watching the TV-two soap-opera characters, a man and a woman, arguing intently, another woman shown wide-eyed, elaborately eavesdropping from behind a closed door. Jacob watched them all with utter absorption as he finished his sandwich. His father could see the small crop of sparse beard along his son’s jawline, under the fair, sun-touched skin. He needed a haircut, but these days they all did.

When a commercial began, Jacob turned to his father as if he’d just come to. (It was the heart of the boy’s trouble, John Keane would have said; he was too easily absorbed.) “You want to see this?” he asked and his father waved a hand. “Christ, no,” he said. “Turn it off. Get your shower.”

And then he reached out to touch his son, to playfully slap him on the back, but he missed and paid the price for the awkwardness of the movement with another neon-bright rush of pain. He pulled some air through his teeth, he couldn’t help it, and Jacob paused, looking down on him from beside the bed, and then, gently, put a hand to his father’s shoulder. His face was white under his tan and his dark hair fell into his eyes. “Dad,” he said with some alarm, and then paused. And then, in another tone altogether, he said evenly, “What can I do for you?”

There was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance. He had said to that other Jacob, in a prayer, What can I do for you?-and now here was his own boy, that other’s impulsive namesake, saying the same. Some pattern in the coincidence, the connectedness, some thread of assurance that was woven through the passing years-but he was in too much pain now to discern it, if it was there at all. He put his fingertips to his son’s arm. “Get your shower,” he said. “I’m fine.”

When Michael returned, he leaned into the bedroom and said, “How you doing, Dad?” and “The Met game’s on” in the same breath. He turned on the television, sat on the edge of the bed. He, too, had the smell of the outdoors on him. The smell of the golf course. The smell of the wider world. At the first commercial break, Michael looked over his shoulder at the boot and the rope and the pulley and the wood, at his father’s suspended leg. He tested the rope a bit. “Maybe we should patent this thing,” he said. “We can write to the army and buy up their old boots.” He laughed. His father glimpsed the face Michael would wear as a grown man, the blue eyes and good teeth. It was handsome now, in its youth, but it would be no more than pleasant, perhaps, in middle age. “If they don’t all have jungle rot by now,” he added.

Jacob had joined them to watch the extra innings. He was in the chair beside his father’s bed. He was showered and dressed, a short-sleeved shirt and cutoff blue jeans. There was a girl who took up his evenings this summer, although it was Michael who, his father noticed, had a pink bruise on his neck, the shape of a small bite.

“Tony Persichetti,” Michael was saying, “said in his letter that the skin comes off with his socks.”

Downstairs, their mother and the girls were just coming in. Clare was the first to climb the stairs. She hesitated for a moment at the door of the bedroom before her father called her in, and then she leaped easily up onto the bed, rattling the mattress and the magazines, the plate with the untouched sandwich and every plate, it seemed, in her father’s fragile spine. He put a hand out, “Go easy,” he said. Michael turned from the game to say, “Watch it, nimrod.” Only slightly subdued, she perched herself on the pillow beside her father, patted his bald head. “We had fun,” she said.

Then Mary was in the doorway, in her skirt and blouse and stocking feet. Her hands on her hips. “Are you ready to get out of that thing?” she asked.

John Keane saw both boys bow their heads.

“No,” he said simply. “It’s helping.”

She looked to the boys, as if they would corroborate her skepticism. But they were having none of it. She looked especially at Michael, who might have been her surest ally, given all the times in the past he’d stood against his father, over politics, over hairstyles, over mandatory Sunday Mass. “Honestly,” she said, moving into the room, gathering the clutter from her side of the bed. “I hardly think this is the solution.”