Alice McDermott - After This

She said, “Oh, God,” but she was so skinny it didn’t take any effort at all to turn her away with his elbow and hip, back toward the sidewalk and his car. Under his arm, he could feel the tremor in her shoulders. He could see it in the movement of the bobbing eyes. “Assholes,” was all he said.

He didn’t turn on a single light in his room. They made love and then slept and then began to hear his housemates staggering in, talk and laughter, a waft of dope and then popcorn. It would be the same next year. At one point, Chris opened Michael’s door for a second and then quickly turned away, shutting it. A few minutes later, they heard Jim Croce through the walls.

On the wall beside them were the glowing marks of the pictures she had drawn on Friday. In long sweeping strokes of chalk she had sketched a kind of Eden, tall stalks of grass and leafy flowers and, scattered among them, the figures of men and women-long thighs and bellies, penises, breasts, arms-all entangled, or pressed together, faces indicated only by a nose or an eye or a lock of hair. Some of it had rubbed off already, or had already faded, but there was enough to see what she had aimed for: something, he thought, between pretty and crude, between a cartoon and a vision. Something you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim it as the precise illustration of everything you wanted.

They were lying side by side, naked in the dark, and the old house, as it did every night, was steadily growing colder. The drawings made him think of the satyrs and nymphs on Chris’s dope box, and then of Caroline opening her parka for Ralph, that motley crew of cherubim and seraphim all around her. Hail, Holy Queen. Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope.

He thought how even after you’d disentangled yourself from everything else, the words stayed with you:

To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb…

Words you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim them as the precise definition of everything you wanted.

Sleepless, he raised his head to look at the clock. There was a flashlight on his bed table. Shades of his brother. He picked it up and turned it on.

He told her, the light on the ceiling, his hand on her thigh, that he’d have to get up at 5:45 to get to school. Get up and shower and put on the old student-teacher costume, cords and dress shirt and tie. He told her he could take her home now or in the morning. “On my way out,” he said, “to face the inbreeds.”

She only stirred and then slowly climbed over him, spread herself over him, no weight at all.

Mary keane looked for signs of grace, good fortune, or simple evenhandedness but found none. Tony Persichetti in church this morning, home again anyway, from wherever it was he had disappeared to, but looking like an overly made-up prodigal son, what with the wild hair and the beard and the thin hunched frame beneath his camouflage coat and gray T-shirt. His father beside him-the bulk of those arms still there but the hair gray and thinned, the shoulders stooped. Another boy from the parish who’d returned unscathed, but then died in a car wreck last month at 3 a.m. on the Montauk Highway-going well over a hundred miles an hour was what the rumors said, drugs, alcohol, even suicide the rumors said. (There had been a broken engagement.) An article in the Long Island Press about a father lost in the South Pacific in ’44 and a son, a navy pilot, three years lost in the prison camps of North Vietnam. There were the Krafts down the street-Larry no more than thirteen when the knot appeared on his knee, not yet sixteen when the cancer killed him. His brother, home in his uniform for the funeral, head shorn, stoical, refusing all entreaties to claim hardship leave (or was it, she wondered, heartsick?), to request transfer, to desert, to flee. He was back in the States now, somewhere down south, safe again. But what had it cost his mother while he was away? And what comfort could there be in supposing that the one loss saved her from the second?

Jake from Philadelphia, nineteen or twenty at his short war, and her husband-having already gained the luxury of thirty-five years-making his unspoken promise to the boy. But what did it portend: Was it a blessing or a bad omen? Had they gained their son a guardian angel or the bitter irony of a repeated fate?

Pauline at dinner that Sunday said, “I light a candle at St. Patrick’s every day. For Jacob. Just like we did during the war.”

On the table beside Pauline’s plate was the glass with the dregs of her third Manhattan. (Too many by two, Mary Keane had told her husband in the kitchen when he came out to carve the roast, but, he said, he had asked and she had accepted, what more could he do?) Only one of the three round slices of meat he had put on her plate had been disturbed. She had merely run her fork through the turnips, although Mary had prepared them precisely for her. Daintily, she’d taken only small tastes of mashed potatoes throughout the meal, although she’d also kept an eye on Clare’s plate, as was her habit, urging her to finish her corn and take some more gravy and put more butter on that roll. “Okay,” the girl responded, simply, pleasantly. How old had she been when she’d discovered the knack of dealing with Pauline, her mother wondered. Or had she been born with the knowledge? Annie, on the other hand, got through every meal with Pauline in a slow burn.

“Annie’s not one for finishing her milk these days,” Pauline declared, her fingers touching the stem of her cocktail glass. “Is she worried about her figure?”

“No she’s not,” Annie said. “She’s just knows when she’s had enough.” And suffered for her rudeness her parents’ grim looks across the Sunday lace tablecloth. Now that both her brothers were gone from the house, Pauline’s presence at dinner made Annie think of them all, her father included, as old maids.

“All the girls her age are constantly dieting,” Mary said pleasantly, to show her elder daughter how it should be done. “They can’t be too skinny.”

At the door that evening as Pauline got into her fur-collared coat there was the usual back and forth about how she could easily get herself home and how it was no trouble at all for John to take her-ending, as it usually did, with the compromise of a lift to the bus stop, at least, but only if Clare could come along.

In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else-the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself, “the odor of aging female flesh,” and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner.

Her mother, in the kitchen with the dishes, understood that the question that made her stand stock-still, the water running over her hands, rose out of her sudden solitude, out of the momentarily silenced house, the midwinter darkness at the window over the sink. She understood-since she had had these moments a dozen times at least since Jacob went over-that there was no premonition in it, only a sudden surfacing of what was, of course, a constant fear: What was he doing right now, as she rinsed out the good crystal in the sink, wearing the blouse she’d worn to Mass this morning, although she’d put on slacks before dinner, the house silent around her, the boys’ room empty above her, Annie reading, Clare in the car with her husband and Pauline, what was Jacob doing right now, on the other side of the world (world without grace, without fair measure, without evenhandedness, as far as she could tell)? What was he doing, her firstborn, her mildest child, and did he need her?