Alice McDermott - After This

There had been the car, of course, in its cloud of smoke, dreamlike, slow-moving, reading house numbers, perhaps. Chuckles lifted the phone from her desk and placed it on the counter just above her. “Don’t dawdle,” she said. The lights in the office were bright. They were bright against the linoleum in the hallway behind them. “Miss Persichetti, you can get to class,” Chuckles said, but Susan, standing close to her, murmured, “I’ll wait.”

“I am quite sure,” Chuckles said, as nuns did, “that Miss Keane is capable of calling home without your assistance.”

But Susan shook her head, lied easily. “I’ve got my stuff in Annie’s locker. I have to wait for her.” She touched Annie’s arm and said, “Go ahead, I’ll wait.” And then walked with her anyway, the few steps back to the desk. She knew, of course, what it was like to dread every message, every phone call, every change in the day’s routine. She knew what it was like. She watched Annie dial home (“Don’t each of you girls have your own locker?” Chuckles was saying) their eyes meeting briefly as she waited. Her mother said only, “Daddy’s coming to get you.” And then she was in Susan’s arms.

Mr. persichetti was good enough to come along. Mary Keane was in the backseat and she touched his shoulder with her gloved hand to say, “This is good of you.” He shook his head, “No trouble,” he said. It was a wet, gray morning, cold yet somewhat humid: the terrible winter being edged out, once again, by spring. There were green spears of crocus, mere buds against the dirt, under front windows and along the edges of lawns. There would be daffodils soon, too, she knew. Then forsythia, azalea, rose, and rhododendron.

She leaned back against the seat, folding her hands in her lap. Up front, her husband said, “Do you take the Cross Island or go side streets?” and Mr. Persichetti said, “At this hour, the Cross Island’s fine.” At this hour, the neighborhood was quiet, and somewhat sodden from last night’s rain. John Keane drove cautiously, as was his habit. He wore his topcoat and his fedora-he would head for work as soon as they brought Pauline home-and beside him, hatless, wearing only a thin Windbreaker, Mr. Persichetti looked like a youngster. “I cut over to Northern Boulevard,” Mr. Persichetti said, “when it doesn’t look good.”

Mr. Keane nodded. They passed the church and the school, the row of shops. From the backseat, Mary said, “I think Susan and Annie actually left for school early this morning. They said they wanted to see the juniors get their rings.”

Mr. Persichetti turned a little in his seat. “That’s a first, hey?” he said.

“They’re the big shots this year,” John Keane said. “They think they run the place.” He touched his turn signal, pulled cautiously into the mid-morning traffic. “Next year they’ll be lowly freshmen again.”

“Coeds,” Mr. Persichetti said. He was both poking fun at the word and revealing his pleasure in the thought. “Can you believe it? Those two? College girls.”

“Lord help the professors,” Mary Keane said.

“Lord help the boys,” Mr. Persichetti said with a laugh because girl children went off, but they also came back. They were a comfort in your old age, in your sorrow over lost sons.

The three of them rode silently for a while, looking out at the passing homes.

As they neared the hospital, Mr. Persichetti sat forward, a hand on the dashboard, showing John Keane where to park. “It’s short-term,” he said. “But then when she’s ready you can pull right up to the door.”

Inside, he took them just where they needed to go. In his element, Mary Keane would have said, walking them assuredly through the halls to the desk where the paperwork was waiting and an orderly talking to another nurse looked up and waved and said, “What’s a matter? You’re back already? They didn’t let you in at home?”

“Can’t get enough of this place,” Mr. Persichetti said, laughing. When the nurse said she’d call to have Pauline brought down, Mr. Persichetti waved her away from the phone and took Mary Keane’s arm. “We’ll get her,” he said gently. And to her husband, “We’ll go up and get her. It’ll be easier.”

The floor of the elevator was wet, with streaks of mud, as if people had been coming and going all night. Mr. Persichetti pushed some of the dirt with his shoe and said, “Sheesh,” disapproving. He pushed the button for Pauline’s floor and then looked up at the row of numbers, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. He turned to Mary Keane as the elevator began to rise and said, “I’m the regular mayor of this place, you know,” and then, as if to prove his point, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open and another orderly appeared, a middle-aged black man, pushing a wheelchair in which a pale, dark-haired boy was slumped, his long thin arms raised before his bent head, waving. The black man said, in military parody, “Mr. Persichetti, sir,” and Mr. Persichetti held out a hand. “Darrin, my man,” he said. Then he grabbed the pale, yellowed hand of the boy in the wheelchair, gripped it firmly. “How you doing, Larry?” he said. The boy, head down, neck twisted, his mouth veiled with saliva, said a tortured, “Good. Real good.”

“Behaving yourself?” Mr. Persichetti asked. And the boy drew out a long, “Yes, yes.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Mr. Persichetti said sarcastically. He looked up at the orderly and winked, and then at Mary Keane, as if they were all in on some joke the young man would never understand. For a moment, she thought this cruel, or just childish, on Mr. Persichetti’s part, but as the elevator rose again, she saw how he kept the boy’s hand in his, clasping it between both of his own, and then, briefly, tightening his grip before letting go when the doors opened again. Alone with him once more, she said, “I don’t know how you do what you do.” But Mr. Persichetti only shrugged. “Oh, Larry’s a piece of work,” he said, refusing her the larger meaning.

The hallway on Pauline’s floor was no worse and no better than Mary Keane had imagined it would be. There were all the usual hospital smells, food and urine and disinfectant, along with the smell of the old building itself, a subway smell of dust and metal.

Some of the patients were in the hall, tied into wheelchairs. Old women, mostly, or so it seemed, hair streaming and yellowing eyes, glimpses, here and there, of bruised flesh under the limp white and speckled blue of the hospital gowns. “Hello,” one or two of them said as they passed by, Mr. Persichetti with his hand on her elbow. One or two of them called out a name. Mary Keane tried to smile at them all. “Hello,” she said, passing by. “How are you?” A lifetime of friendliness. A shout went up briefly, from one of the rooms, and then a low moaning. At the end of the hall there was a dull window of either smoked glass or grime, black wire inside its frame, and she had a moment of utter disorientation because although she knew they were on an upper floor, that the elevator they had just ridden had risen, she believed, for just a moment (perhaps it was the subway smell of the old tile walls), that they were underground.

Mr. Persichetti stopped briefly at the nurse’s station-she was glad for his hand on her arm-and then he led her down another corridor. She had some guilt that she had not visited Pauline before, not since the night she fell, that Pauline had been alone all these weeks in this place. But she knew too that she could not have done it, in the midst of all that these weeks had held. In this corridor, another woman, her dark skin stretched thinly over her bones, sat in a wheelchair with her head bent into one hand and her long fingers held up over her face, touching her eyes and her mouth. Her other hand, in her lap, was white-palmed, empty. She was the weary image of every sorrow women knew. Seeing her, Mary Keane felt herself absolved, at least briefly, of all she had neglected in these past weeks. Were she to bend down and speak to this woman she would say, “I have buried my child.” She would ask, “And you?”