Alice McDermott - After This

Now the long windows pressed back the dreary day, reflected rather than filtered-showing them now, as they glanced toward it, their own white faces, dimly described-foreheads and cheeks, some chins, only blond hair, nobody’s eyes.

Sister Lucy’s desk at the front of the room now seemed as yellow as an egg yolk. She leaned against it and pulled the cuff of her metal crutch off her wrist. She rested the crutch beside her and then turned back with one uneven step to lift herself, her small and slightly twisted torso in its black dress, up onto the desk. She rearranged her body, palms pressed to the desktop, lifting her thighs once, twice, getting comfortable. Her legs in their black shoes and black opaque stockings swung girlishly.

This was not remarkable to them. They had seen her do this many times before.

She placed her folded hands in her black lap. Sister Lucy had a round face, dark though graying hair drawn back into the white band of her headpiece, large, deep-set eyes, and a small nose. Her full cheeks were pocked delicately with scars, as if marred by rain.

“Today,” she said, softly, beginning. And then paused. She had a slight overbite, a delicate fuzz above her lip, small and perfect teeth. She was known never to raise her voice, although what she did instead, for discipline’s sake, was described by the girls as “the hairy eyeball.” But there was none of that in her look now as she waited for their attention.

“Today,” she said again, her feet no longer swinging but hooked together and drawn back a bit, beneath her desk. “Today, girls, marks a terrible anniversary. The anniversary of the decision that allows women in this country to kill their own children.”

In the stillness that followed, the girls moved their eyes toward each other. Barb lowered her head and murmured, “Don’t tell my mother,” into the soft collar of her shirt, which caused one or two of the girls around her to lower their heads as well.

The sound of the rain only made the silence in the classroom seem more deliberate and profound as Sister Lucy waited, once again, for their full attention.

“I was three years old when I came down with polio,” she said. It might have been another topic altogether. “My father left us as soon as I got sick, even though my mother was expecting. Her fifth. He moved in with a woman he’d been visiting since before my older brother was born. My father was a welder,” she said, as if that explained something. “Subways and bridges. Dangerous work, but he was very good at it.” She shrugged, looked briefly at her hands, which she half opened, as if offering herself something from her own palms. “He had needs my mother couldn’t meet,” she said before she looked up again. “That’s all we were told about it. And the fact that if he had gotten polio, too, we would have been destitute. But he took care of us. He sent money, he visited. He still took my brothers to ball games. He just never lived with us again.”

She closed her hands. They were pale white against the black lap. The girls had their eyes on her now. Barb Luce wrote something in her notebook and moved the book to the edge of her desk so Clare Keane could see. It said, “As the World Turns.”

“My mother was given a series of exercises to do with me. They involved lifting and bending my legs. They were painful. I don’t remember that they were painful to me but I’m sure they were painful for her. She would sometimes strap me down on the dining-room table. Or have my brothers hold on to me. My brothers have told me how I would scream. And how my mother would cry, just tears running down her face as she was lifting my legs and bending them, and pressing them down again, the way the doctors had told her. All the while she was expecting.”

Sister Lucy’s little chin moved up and down, the way it did when she wanted to be reasonable, consider all sides. “Of course, we weren’t alone in the world,” she said. “I had an aunt and an uncle and a wonderful grandfather. We had some very nice neighbors.

And people from church helped out. It was really only later, as an adult, that I realized how hard it must have been. For my mother.”

She straightened her spine, pulling her hands closer to her waist, as if she felt a chill. “In the first place, I think she must have been humiliated,” she went on. “Four, five children in a row and she hadn’t met his needs.” She smiled a little, only one corner of her small mouth. It was clear she did not expect them to get her full meaning. “And I know she worried. Every mother worries, but what worries my mother must have had, in those days. I don’t know when she slept. I remember seeing her, long into the night, sitting up at our bedroom window with her rosary.” Sister Lucy stopped again, peering down at them all from under her thick eyelids. The sound of the rain had mixed itself with her tale so that the girls were imagining polio, pregnancy, bridges and subways and long nights at bedroom windows as all a part of the same dark weather.

She smiled once more. Her lips were pink and smooth. “But my mother took me to the clinic and she took me home and she did the exercises the doctors told her to do. And she fixed our meals and washed our clothes and kept the apartment clean. All the while she was getting bigger and bigger with the new baby. All the while she slept alone and woke alone and sat alone through the night after she’d put out our lights.”

One of the girls made a sympathetic sound and Sister Lucy’s eyes briefly fell on her. “Girls,” she said, as if to correct something. “In an abortion, a child is pulled from a mother’s womb. If the child is very new, an embryo, it is a simple enough thing to do. There is more blood than flesh. If the child has grown any, arms and legs must sometimes be broken, or a skull must be cracked. There are some procedures, I am told, in which the mother’s womb is filled with saline, salt water, the baby essentially drowned like a kitten and then flushed from the mother’s body.” She paused only briefly.

“In college,” she went on in her soft way, although she saw how Kathleen Cornelius’s open mouth had reshaped itself in horror and how Monica Grasso was glaring at her from under her bangs, the class wit, the class iconoclast, on guard, as Monica was always on guard, against Catholic double-talk and propaganda, “you will probably read the story of Medea,” glancing at Monica to indicate that she might learn something here. “It is a play by Euripides. If you know the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, you already know something about Medea. She was the sorceress who helped Jason defeat the dragon and gain the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea marry. They have two sons. But then Jason leaves her to marry the young daughter of the king. To form a more advantageous alliance, he tells her. More power. Especially for their sons, who will have as their half brothers the royal sons he plans to have with his new wife.” She smiled again, mildly. “An advantage for them all.

“But Medea doesn’t think so.” She raised her pale eyebrows. “She is outraged. Humiliated. And in her rage against her husband, she murders their children. She chases them down. Stabs them to death, her own children. It’s a terrible scene. The chorus-remember how in every Greek play there’s a chorus?-the chorus calls her a woman of stone, or iron, to have done such a thing. She is hateful beyond all other women. She has put a sword through her own children.”

Now Sister Lucy looked outside, to the dark lawn and the black hedge and the rain striking the windows. She watched a pair of headlights as they moved dimly behind the hedge. It seemed to her to be something like her own idea, the point she had hoped to make, moving through the black tangle of memory and emotion and outrage and words.