Alice McDermott - After This

“Here we are,” Mr. Persichetti said, and with his hand on her arm guided her into Pauline’s room. She was in a chair by another opaque window, crossed with wire. Her hair was longer than she usually kept it, swept back from her face and showing a good line of gray roots, but she looked well, even younger, perhaps-Mary was surprised to see it-than she had that last night at dinner. It might have been that she was more rested, or better fed. It might have been that she was no longer drinking (psychosis brought on by depression and alcoholism, was what they had said), although never in a million years would she have guessed that the drinking was a problem. It might simply have been, Mary Keane was suddenly sure it was true, that Pauline looked better without her makeup. Her complexion, she had always been glad to point out (usually just after Mary had complained about her own), had always been good.

She crossed the room and kissed Pauline on the cheek. There was only the hospital bracelet on her wrist. Not a hint of the broken nose. Or the shock treatment. “You look good,” she told her and Pauline said, as she might of old, “What’s new?”

Mary found herself speaking more loudly than she wanted to, the way you spoke, mostly inadvertently, to an invalid or a child. “We’re going to bring you back to our house, Pauline,” she said, leaning down to her in the chair. “You’re going to stay with us for a while.” Pauline nodded. Mary was surprised to see her fur-collared coat was laid out on the bed. Pauline was dressed in the clothes they had picked up for her when they emptied out her apartment, gray pants and a pale blue sweater, although someone had given her an old white cardigan as well, oversize and somewhat pilly. The only indication, perhaps, that Pauline had been changed.

“I know,” Pauline said. She looked to Mr. Persichetti, standing at the door. “Sam told me all about it.”

Mary turned to look at him over her shoulder. He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. “Oh, I’ve been stopping by,” he said. “Checking up on her. Seeing how she’s been doing.” He looked at Mary Keane. “Being the mayor and all,” he said. And then he added softly, “I knew you had your mind on other things.”

“That was good of you,” she said, and wanted to say more, but the floor nurse was bustling in with the wheelchair, shouting instructions, pulling prescriptions from her smock, referring to Pauline in the third person. Mr. Persichetti pushed the wheelchair back to the elevator, Pauline staring straight ahead as they passed through each corridor. “Goodbye,” Mary Keane said to the women who spoke to them. “Take care.” Pausing for a moment when a shuffling old woman suddenly clasped her hand, holding it between her own as Mr. Persichetti had done for the boy on the elevator. This woman was no older than she. Her blue eyes seemed to race back and forth across Mary Keane’s face as she told a nonsense tale-my sista, was all she could get, my motha, my sista-that grew more urgent as it grew more incomprehensible. The floor nurse stepped between them. “That’s enough, now, Marion,” she shouted. Mary Keane said, walking on, “I’ll pray for you.” The name of Saint Dymphna came to mind.

In the elevator, she resisted the memories the whiff of hospital food and of ether wanted to bring. She had been a patient herself only when her children were born, a visitor most recently when Michael had his tonsils out and Jacob had appendicitis and her husband had the surgery for the slipped disk. When her children were born, she recalled, they had marked each homecoming with a bakery cake, thick with sweet icing, and she felt some guilt again that she hadn’t thought to have anything special at home for Pauline.

When they were settled into John Keane’s car, she and Pauline in the backseat, the two men once again up front, Pauline said, “This is very nice of you,” and crossed her hands in her lap. In the pale light of day, she now seemed older without her makeup, with that sad line of gray along her temples and her forehead. Mary planned a trip to the beautician for both of them, lunch afterward, somewhere nice, a stroll through A amp;S. As the car pulled away and into the street, Pauline suddenly sat up, something brief and childlike in her eyes, a spark of fear or confusion. And then, haltingly, she sat back again. She turned to Mary. “That raincoat doesn’t suit you,” she said. “You’re not good in black.”

Mary only smiled.

“You’ve lost weight, too,” Pauline said. It wasn’t a compliment.

At the house, John Keane gave Pauline his arm to help her up the steps. They paused in the hallway and he took her coat and hung it in the closet, as if this were just another one of her visits and the world hadn’t altered utterly since last she was here.

They had lunch in the kitchen, the three of them, and then John went to work and Mary walked Pauline upstairs. The last time she had slept in this house, when Clare was born, she had been given Annie’s room, but now they made a right at the landing. She was to stay in the boys’ room instead. It was nice enough, a little chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital. Mary pulled open the drawers of the oak dresser the boys had once shared. She had lined them with floral paper and arranged all of Pauline’s underclothes and nightgowns and sweaters inside. She had brought her jewelry box, her gloves, her drawerful of saved Playbills and greeting cards.

John Keane had arranged with Pauline’s landlord that the apartment be sublet, for a year. Just, Mary told her, until Pauline was back on her feet. He had spoken to her company, too, and an early retirement for medical reasons would assure her of most of her pension. Pauline nodded. Her coats and her dresses, her dressing gowns and her good skirts were hanging in the boys’ closet. “You’ve been busy,” Pauline said, not-Mary glanced at her-exactly approvingly.

“You’ve been sick,” Mary said, gently. “That fall…” and would have said more, but Pauline held up her hand and said, “I know all about it.” And then added, with a tremor to her jaw. “I know where I’ve been.”

Mary Keane touched her throat. “And do you know,” she asked, “what we’ve been through?”

Slowly, Pauline nodded. Her pale, plain features might have been carved of stone. “Sam told me,” she said. “I’m sorry for you.”

Mary would have put her arms around her then, might have broken down herself and wept with Pauline for what they both had been through. But that had never been their way. They were not sisters, after all, they were friends, office friends. And what had bound them all these years had more to do with how their acquaintance had begun (for how could you pray with any sincerity if you were also hoping to ditch the annoying girl at your side?), with habit and circumstance, obligation and guilt, than it had ever had to do with affection, commiseration. There had been a trick in it too, their friendship, something far more complicated than “feed my lambs.” There had been the trick of living well, living happily in her ordinary life under Pauline’s watchful eye. Of living well, living happily, even under the eye of a woman who always saw the dashed tear, the torn seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the aspirations of their pretty faith.

“I’ll never get over it,” Mary said. It was a phrase she had kept to herself, until now.

The boys’ room was small and narrow. She and her husband had taken the pinups and posters from the walls in preparation for Pauline’s coming, they had moved the desk and the old hi-fi and the record albums and the portable TV to the basement where Michael would sleep when he came home to visit, but they had left both beds here.