Alice McDermott - After This

He threw back his head and shouted a laugh. “It has!” he said. “Isn’t it odd?” Now Professor Wallace was laughing, softly. If Annie hadn’t been sitting beside her, feeling the laughter through the velvet shawl, she would not have known that was what she was doing. On her face, there was only that wry smile. David made a gesture that encompassed the room. “Three young beauties here for dinner and I’m a voyeur in some Parisian hotel room, wondering what it was like. I mean, at forty-five, Elizabeth. Think of it.”

“It was just as it would have been at twenty-five,” Professor Wallace said warmly, and now another kind of mad, sexual transaction was implied. The Americans suddenly felt they had vanished from the room. Monica had Runty in her lap and she paused with both her hands in the cat’s fur. Nate on the floor, an elbow on his raised knee, held a forgotten piece of cheddar in his hand. Ben bowed his head, as if in deference to some sweet intimacy, and Grace-Annie was sure of it-raised a knuckle to her glasses to hide a tear. “She was in love, darling,” Professor Wallace said softly. “I can tell you without hesitation what it was like. It was marvelous.”

David Wallace smiled at his wife. It wasn’t an imaginary hotel room he was thinking of now. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

After the fruit and the cheese, there was a chocolate gateau and the box of candy the girls had brought, and Ben’s Drambuie. Professor Wallace ran the small glass of it under her nose and closed her eyes and then told them that when she was a child her grandmother had kept a decanter of Drambuie on the table in the front hall. During the war, she said, after they’d been down in the cellar for an air raid, she and her cousins, who had also been sent to the safer distance of their grandparents’ little farm, would come up the stairs and into the hall, where their grandmother would give them each a teaspoonful of the liqueur, to reward them, or to prepare them for sleep, or only, perhaps, to steady her own nerves. Professor Wallace closed her eyes and put her lips to the glass. “It comes back,” she said after she had drunk. “That time.” She opened her eyes. “We would wrap ourselves in blankets and dressing gowns. In anticipation, I suppose, of shattered glass. My grandmother would divide us into groups of three, two children and an adult, my grandfather, my mother, herself, my aunt. Each adult with a child under each arm, scattered to different corners of the cellar, in case.” She sighed. “In case, I suppose, some part of the ceiling came down, not, one would hope, on us all.” She paused again. Annie recalled her own family, huddled in the basement, long ago. Milk that tasted like candles in their mouths. A tree had fallen. Forever after, Jacob had kept a flashlight by his bed.

“You must have been scared to death,” Monica said.

Professor Wallace shrugged. “I was very young,” she said, as if to acknowledge that the memory might be flawed. “I don’t recall being frightened at all, only thrilled. By the adventure. Even when we could hear the bombs, the whistle and the long silence-the worst part of it, people have said, that terrible silence before the impact-I don’t know that I ever cried.”

“Brave girl,” David said. But Professor Wallace shook her head.

“It wasn’t real, to a child,” she said. “The danger wasn’t real. You’re all sensations at that age, aren’t you? The smell of the cellar and my grandfather’s pipe smoke on his clothes. Oh,” she said and touched her jaw, “and the satin collar of my dressing gown. That’s what I remember. My cousins and I would look across the darkness at one another as if to say, Isn’t this something, what do you think will happen next? The way we might have glanced at each other in the middle of a film or a play.” She ran the small glass under her nose again. “And then the teaspoon of Drambuie. Like a little jewel. I’d hold it in my mouth for as long as I could.” She took another sip, pursing her lips and drawing down her long nose. “It comes back,” she said again.

They were all watching her, even her husband. Enchanted by her, her voice and gesture, and as if she suddenly noticed this, noticed how they were all watching her, even her husband, she raised the little glass and grimaced, freeing them from the spell she herself had cast. “What can be more tedious,” she said with a laugh, “than someone else’s childhood?”

“It’s kind of disgusting,” Nate said from the floor, and for a moment they all believed he was agreeing with her. He looked up. “How long it took the United States to notice you guys were getting the shit bombed out of you by Hitler.”

“Really,” Monica said, agreeing, shaking her hair. “We knocked ourselves out to save bloody Vietnam but we sat back while London got blitzed.”

Beside Annie, Grace raised her own little glass, gulping the Drambuie as if she had to catch a train. She had, Annie knew, no interest in politics or current events. In their tutorials she had announced more than once that history had meaning for her only as far as it pertained to Henry V or A Tale of Two Cities. On its own, she had said, it was all circumstance and repetition, temporal, not eternal. No more significant than the weather.

“Nixon sucks,” Ben was saying.

“LBJ sucked, too,” Monica added.

From across the room, Ben said, “Spiro Agnew.”

Both Professor Wallace and her husband were nodding, tolerantly, as if the Americans were merely complaining about their parents.

“At least in World War II we knew what we were fighting for,” Monica went on, as if, Annie thought, she and General Eisenhower were contemporaries. “At least there was Hitler.”

“At least,” Ben said, “we won.”

Grace touched her glasses and then dug her elbow into Annie’s side. She put a hand to her mouth and whispered from behind it. “Come with me.” Annie stared straight ahead for a second. What an effect it would have on the assembly, she thought, were she to say, “My brother.” But she felt David Wallace’s eyes on them as Grace poked her again. “Please,” she said and stood quickly, swaying a little as she did, in the narrow space between the couch and the big footstool. Against her will, Annie stood, too. They both sidestepped past the couch and between the small table with the lamp and Mr. Wallace’s knees. Gallantly, he held a hand out to Grace as she made her way around him. She touched it briefly. Before either girl thought to ask, Professor Wallace told them, “It’s just through that door there, first on the right.”

Annie followed Grace into the small bathroom. She shut the door behind them both and leaned back against it. “Are you going to get sick?” she asked. Grace nodded. She was already heaving a bit, hyperventilating, her glasses fallen down her nose and her pale skin greenish behind the spilled red of her flush. Annie leaned forward to lift the toilet seat. She stepped back again. “I’m here,” Annie said, imitating her mother. Grace leaned down, heaved a bit, then knelt and vomited her dinner into the toilet. Annie turned her head away, and then, reluctantly, stepped closer to the girl to hold back her hair. Grace’s neck at the nape was thick, her hair thin and almost weightless in Annie’s hands. “You’re okay,” Annie said. This, too, was what her mother said to her sick children. “You’re okay.”

When she had finished, Grace flopped back onto the tile floor, and Annie could tell by the way her body fell that she was ready to give up all pretense of sobriety or control, that it was not merely drunken spinning that made her collapse, but a long-awaited giving in to despair. She pulled off her glasses, dumped them in her lap, gulped some air, and then, unabashedly, her legs folded in front of her, her arms limp at her side, she began to cry.