Alice McDermott - After This

And then, to his great surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was sweet, lower than he would have expected, although surely he had heard her singing around the house a thousand times before. But now she was singing for him, much as she used to do when she was very small, her hands at her sides, her eyes half closed. The cotton skirt not too short, perhaps, but wrinkled from the hours she’d been sitting. The little-girl knees, although her body was growing lean. She sang and he was both enchanted and embarrassed by her earnestness. Both hopeful that neither of the boys would come upstairs (Jacob would only roll his eyes but Michael would sing along with her, mocking, howling the words, to run, where the brave dare not go ow ow ), and yet wishing that they would because there was something painful in it, watching her, another kind of pain altogether than what he’d been fighting these past two days. The boys had their lives off in the wider world, he thought, but girls, his daughters, they had lives far wider and far more inaccessible, right before his eyes.

The room was lit with the thick yellow light of a summer evening. The leg was numb and as certain as he was that he would find a way to heal it-or that the doctors would-he knew, too, that some part of his future had been retracted, foreshortened by the pain. That it had added, if only by a month or a year or two, to the time she would have to miss him.

She sang, she seemed to know all the words.

The lottery was held three weeks before Christmas, which made something biblical about the whole ordeal, or at least, Mary Keane said, medieval.

When all the days of the year had been called, she said to her husband, her mouth held crookedly-a grim joke in the face of what they could not change-”Maybe if the piano player had skipped practice that morning, Jacob would have had a different birthday.” He nodded; it was a joke, given its intimate circumstances, no one else could share, and even he, all these years later, felt himself blush. “Maybe if you’d married George,” he said.

And then he took Clare’s hand. She was bundled up against the cold. They were just going out for a breath of fresh air. At the foot of his driveway, pulling his garbage cans to the curb, Mr. Persichetti paused. Tony’s birth date, as it turned out, would have been a lucky one, if he hadn’t already enlisted and gone over and come back home again, hollowed-eyed and furious, after all he’d seen. “Hooked on drugs,” Mr. Persichetti said. He might have just learned the phrase.

Mr. Persichetti told Mr. Keane, “Shoot him in the foot. Break his legs before you let him go.”

Clare looked up at the two men. Her father gripped her hand and Mr. Persichetti stepped back and then forward, his face shadowy in the night.

“No, honey,” he said, touching her wool cap. “Don’t pay attention to me.” And then he glanced at her father, his eyes catching the dull streetlight. “I was there when you came into the world, you know,” he said, cheerfully, as if cheerfulness now could erase the terrible thing he had already said. She told him she knew. She had come too soon. She had come inconveniently. Pauline had only just put on her hat when the call came, on her way out to the movies.

“I was the very first person,” Mr. Persichetti said, “to welcome you into this crazy world of ours.”

And for the second time in that hour, John Keane felt a flush rise to his cheeks.

And your brother?” Mrs. Antonelli said because it was Michael Keane she remembered, all the hours he had cooled his heels on the leather couch before her desk, waiting to see Sister Rose, the principal. Jacob, sitting before her now, had left no mark on her memory-which was understandable enough, given the number of children who passed through St. Gabriel’s, a hundred graduates each year, six or seven hundred more since Jacob Keane had been an eighth grader. As secretary and (she liked to say) palace guard for Sister Rose, Mrs. Antonelli had far more contact with the troublemakers anyway. Michael Keane had been one of them. Jacob, clearly, had not.

“He’s upstate,” Jacob said. “College.”

He was a nice-looking boy-dark hair and dark brows, green eyes. But he was also slight, narrow-shouldered, not much bigger, perhaps, than he’d been when he left here. It was Mrs. Antonelli’s belief that God should have made all men tall and broad-out of fairness. Her own husband was six foot three. She thought of this as an accomplishment.

“Good for him,” she said, and then wondered at the contrast her words implied, for Jacob had just told her that he himself had left St. John’s and was now headed for the army. “And good for you, too,” she added. “For answering the call.”

Jacob smiled shyly. He wore blue jeans, which she did not approve of, and a tattersall dress shirt rolled at the sleeves, which was all right. “Thanks,” he said, politely, although they both understood he’d had no choice in the matter.

“And you’ll have the GI Bill when you get back,” Mrs. Antonelli said. “That’s how my husband put himself through Fordham.”

Jacob nodded slowly. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and then looked at her, his large green eyes and a girl’s dark lashes, nothing else to say.

Mrs. Antonelli glanced down at the work before her, but she had taken off her reading glasses when the boy came in (here to pick up his sister for a dentist appointment, although the mother had sent no note), so everything was a blur. From the room beyond came the sound of Sister Rose on the phone, speaking in the clipped rhythms of her professional voice. From down the hall came the drone of a class repeating its times tables. “I suppose it seems like just yesterday that you were here,” she said, making conversation.

The boy merely moved his head, as if uncertain himself whether he wanted to say yes or no.

The office was paneled in dark wood, and the light from the small window was yellow. There was a statue of the Holy Family in one corner, a flagpole bearing the white-and-gold diocesan flag in another. There was a crucifix and an oil painting of the pope on the wall behind Mrs. Antonelli’s desk, and the portrait of Our Lady of Perpetual Help from the old church on the wall behind Jacob’s head. There was the gently overpowering odor of Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume-a powdery scent that was neither fruit nor flower nor spice, like nothing in nature Jacob could think of-and despite the terrible familiarity of the office, the long halls of the school, the sound of the children reciting their lessons, it was this scent alone that brought him back to his years here, years of terror (he’d been a shy child and the nuns with their sweeping skirts and clicking beads had all but made him mute), years of grace (because he was also a good child, chosen above all others to carry messages from his teachers to Mrs. Antonelli’s desk). He briefly studied his hands. Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume brought him there again and put off all that was ahead of him not simply by a few hours but by years.

And then Clare was standing in the doorway, beside the eighth-grade boy who had been sent to fetch her. She wore her beanie, and her pigtails had already begun to fray. There were Band-Aids on both of her knees, above the navy blue kneesocks. She wore the school’s plaid jumper, a new one that still hung on her stiffly, and under the wide white sleeves of her uniform blouse her bare arms seemed as thin as sticks.

Jacob stood. The car keys were in his hand.

“Please tell your mother,” Mrs. Antonelli said, standing as well, “to remember to send a note in next time.”

Jacob nodded. “I will,” he said. And then, “Thank you.” And then, head down, “Sorry to disturb you.” He put his hand out to allow his sister to go before him through the door. “Nice to see you again,” he said.