Alice McDermott - After This

“It’s helping,” he said again.

She only glanced at him. “You don’t look like you’ve been helped,” she said.

It was Clare who was absorbing the discussion unabashedly, through her wide eyes.

Now Annie appeared. She was talking-these days she was always talking-and both boys raised their hands to hush her. She walked around the bed to join them in front of the small screen. The runners scored. Michael leaned forward to slap Jacob’s hand, jostling the mattress. Clare threw her hands up in the air, and then around her father’s shoulder. Impatient, Mary Keane was leaning over the bed, gathering the magazines.

In fact, he would die alone, accompanied only by the high-pitched pulse of the hospital machine, his last breath missed even by the nurses who were distracted by the changing shifts. None of them gathered at his bed, no candles lit. The offending leg already amputated in the doctors’ routine efforts to save him.

With the plate and the magazines in her hand she said, “Do you want the boys to help you get to the toilet before dinner?”

He knew he would have to manage it sometime within the next twenty minutes (ten minutes, now that she had brought the subject up), but he said, “No. I’m fine.”

He recognized the tactic: she’d humiliate him into a doctor’s office. Using words like toilet when she never said toilet, thought it unrefined, just to get him annoyed enough to make an appointment.

“Maybe I could get you a little bell or something,” she said, as coy as she might ever have been at twenty-one. “You could ring it when you need to go.”

No doubt this was Pauline’s plan.

He glanced at the TV. He felt the pain roil a little, threatening a larger blow.

“Why don’t you all go downstairs and have your dinner?” he said, calmly. Because she would see every bit of it in his face, she saw everything in his face.

“Send me up a piece of steak,” he said.

Clare brought the tray, walking with it through the slatted rosy sunlight that now stretched slowly, leisurely, the stroll of time, across the ceiling and the far wall. He’d just returned from the bathroom and the old army boot, its tongue lolling, lay in its coil of rope at the foot of the bed. He had an impulse, in his daughter’s presence, to throw a blanket over it. It occurred to him that he had reached an age (he remembered Mary’s befuddled old father) when his surest convictions could be transformed into mere foolishness in the blink of an eye.

“Put it here,” he said, dragging the straight-backed chair to the side of the bed. She put the tray down, kissed his cheek. There was something of the metallic odor of the hot subway about her still, the odor of his own missed commute home. All of his children scented with the wider world.

She was talking about the day in the city and what the man at the token booth had said, and what Pauline had said, and who she swore she saw in the lobby when the intermission lights flashed though she couldn’t really be sure. He surveyed the tray. A piece of chuck steak and mashed potatoes and green beans. A roll and butter and a dish of canned pears. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with both feet on the floor, he was aware of a certain numbness taking over his leg. He couldn’t eat a bite.

“The Spanish Inquisition,” she said, and he looked up at her, thinking, perhaps, she was repeating Michael’s joke about the rack. Again he had the impulse to cover up the empty boot. But she was, he quickly gathered, talking about the play. The tickets had been a gift from Pauline. Someone in his office told him they could well have cost sixty dollars apiece.

“They’re all prisoners,” Clare was saying. “In a dungeon. And there’s this long staircase.” She raised her arms, illustrating it. Her skirt was short, too short (he resisted interrupting her to mention this), her knees still chubby although the rest of her body had grown lean. “And Cervantes comes down. The prisoners attack him and then they put him on trial. In order to defend himself, he tells them a story. And then he becomes Don Quixote and all the prisoners are the other characters. So the whole play is like the story he tells, while they’re waiting in jail.”

She pulled off the headband that held back her hair. Scratched her head. The sunlight from the window was on her back. “He’s this old man and he’s read so many books about chivalry that he goes crazy and thinks it’s all real. He thinks he’s a knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha. And only one of his servants goes along with him, Sancho Panza. And they go out on a quest. He sees a windmill and thinks it’s a monster.”

“Titling at windmills,” he said. “It’s an expression.”

“Yeah,” she said. She slipped the headband on again, it was a habit of hers. “But it was really good the way they did it. The windmill was just this huge shadow at the back of the stage.”

He picked up his fork. Tried, and failed, to lift the bum leg. The pain, he realized, was far preferable to the numbness. She was on about the sleazy inn that Don Quixote thought was a castle, the servant girl (“A slut really,” she said, catching his eye for a second to see if he disapproved of the word-he did) he thought was a beautiful damsel.

He wondered briefly if she would end up wanting to go on the stage herself. She was pretty enough, he thought. But then all the little girls her age struck him as pretty.

The cure they came up with, she said-he had missed just who “they” were-was mirrors. (She said it mear-ras, the way her mother did. A touch of Brooklynese carried out to Long Island.) They surrounded the old man with mirrors, she said. And made him look at himself. Made him see.

She paused and said, “You’re not hungry?” But he shook his head, lifted the warm roll. “I’m listening,” he told her. He would give himself another minute or two before he tried moving his leg back onto the bed. It was possible that he’d have to call the boys for help. It was possible that he’d lost all use of it. “Did it work? The dose of reality?”

She stepped back a little. Now the sun was on her shoulder and her hair. Downstairs, he heard Michael saying, “A nine iron, a fucking nine iron,” and Jacob laughing, Annie, too. Their mother shushing the bad language. His brother Frank somewhere, in the boy’s laughter. And what a vocabulary his youngest child would take into the wider world. But Clare was attending only to her own tale.

“Yeah,” she said, dramatically, “but then you see him in bed and he’s dying.” Her eyes didn’t fall on his own bed, the empty old boot, or on him in his pajamas. But there was, perhaps, a catch in her voice, a sweet change of pitch as she went on. “Sancho Panza’s there, and his niece. But he doesn’t remember anything about being Don Quixote. Not even when Dulcinea comes in. She’s kind of cleaned up. She wants him to remember, but he tells her he was just confused. He says he was confused by shadows. Like the windmill thing.”

She paused. Looked at her father and shrugged. He suddenly realized that she was about to cry.

“That’s too bad,” he said. He knew enough not to laugh at her. He had already offended her, more than once, when he’d teased her about her easy tears. Downstairs, the water was running, the kitchen chairs were being pushed back from the table. He broke the roll in two and handed her a piece. “Did you have your dinner?” he asked.

She took the bread. Held it in her hand. “But that’s not the end,” she said, caught up in it now. Not just her mother’s accent but her delight in the sound of her own voice, once she got started. He smiled, watching her. The only way to temper the outlandishness of a father’s love was to weigh it against the facts of your children’s imperfections. She was a plain child, truth be told, not as pretty as her sister. “Dulcinea sings the impossible dream song and, really slowly, he begins to remember. He starts to get out of the bed. Sancho helps him. All of a sudden he knows he really is Don Quixote. Really.”