Alice McDermott - After This

With the changing light, the room seemed to grow more familiar. She was thousands of miles from home with an utter stranger at her side and yet she was falling into a pleasant, comfortable sleep, she was anticipating, with pleasure, perhaps, what the new day would bring. There was, there would always be, the snag of disappointment-it would not be the life she had wanted-but there was, at last, as well, something it would take her until the end of the year to begin to understand. At the end of the year, when she moved to London with him, quitting school, quitting home, dealing her parents (it could not be helped) another blow, she would recall the story Professor Wallace had told them that night, she would begin to see the wisdom of it-the wisdom of scattering, each to a different corner of whatever shelter they had found, so that should the worst happen, happen again, it would not take them all.

Tony persichetti got religion-or religions, his sister said. He’d spent some months on an ashram in Pennsylvania, a few more with some Krishnas in New York, then traveled across Europe with a Brooklyn girl and ended up on a kibbutz where his whole day was spent, he’d said, shoveling chicken shit. And where, inexplicably (mixing his religious metaphors, Susan said), he shaved his head.

Michael Keane laughed. “Sounds like Tony,” he said.

And then home again, thin and weather-beaten, looking more like a convict than an aesthete. He came into her room and ran a hand down one of the wood panels he had helped their father to install, pressed it gently inward and withdrew a small plastic bag of brittle hash. “I’ve been thinking about this, waiting here for me, for months,” he said.

“Did you think about Mom and Dad,” Susan asked him. “You stupid fuck. They were waiting here for you, too.”

Not to say that that did the trick, Susan told Michael Keane, but the next Sunday night, Tony cleaned himself up and went out and came back some hours later and called them all into the living room, his mother and father, Susan herself who was only home for the weekend because the prodigal had once again returned and her parents had begged her to help welcome him. He announced that he was an alcoholic. That he’d just gone to his first AA meeting. And that with God’s help and theirs, he would get his life together at long last.

Susan couldn’t help it, she told Michael, this back and forth with Tony had been going on for so long. The crazy Vietnam-vet cliché had worn pretty thin. “Do you have any particular God in mind?” she’d said.

The AA meetings were held at St. Gabriel’s, in the basement cafeteria. Tony had breathed in a lungful of his old grammar-school air and found God again. Or God found him, there where he had hunkered down with his bologna sandwiches as a kid. Easier, he said, to pick up an old belief than to talk yourself into a new one. Now he began his day with 6:30 Mass, then went to the job his father had gotten him at Creedmoor, an office thing, then took classes at Queens College. He was headed for a master’s in social work. He was dating a girl he’d met at school.

Her parents, she said, were holding their breaths, not yet certain, it seemed, that the troubled Vietnam-vet thing was something they could say was finally over.

“And you?” she asked. They were in a bar on the East Side, they were being jostled, backs and arms, by the after-work crowd. He told her he had a job at a Catholic school, in Brooklyn, seventh grade. He said the pay was lousy but the kids were great. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said. He was sharing an apartment in the city with three friends from school. “Finally,” he said, “out of the basement.”

And because she knew the story, she said, “How’s crazy Pauline?”

Susan was blonder than he’d remembered her, prettier, too. He added, “I’m thinking of going to law school,” not sure yet if it were true.

Susan said, “The guy I live with goes to law school. NYU. It’s good.”

Michael nodded. His roommates were spread around the room, the familiar hunt for connections.

“He knows you,” she said. “You caddied together one summer. He was in high school. You were home from college.”

“This is a high-school sweetheart?” Michael said.

She slowly closed her eyes, smiled a drawn smile. “A re-acquaintance,” she said. Begun when he had called her, out of the blue, to say, “There was a rumor when we were in high school and I wonder if it’s true.” Jill O’Meara’s name was mentioned. Susan’s eyes, when she opened them, were darker still. “Sometimes it’s easier to pick up an old boyfriend than to talk yourself into a new one.”

“A pickup, then,” Michael said, and recognized his father’s sense of humor.

“A serious relationship,” she said coyly to disguise what a complicated thing it was, her life with this boy.

Michael raised his glass. “Good for you.”

“Annie seems happy,” Susan said, an apology for not being free, because she liked Michael Keane, would have loved to go out with him when, as she thought of it, she was young. “She likes it over there.”

“She really does,” Michael said. For the first time since they saw each other, he looked beyond her, toward the other women in the room.

“And Clare’s good?” she said. “Still at dear old Mary Immaculate Academy?”

“One more year,” he said. “Then college.”

“Your parents will miss her.”

But Michael shook his head. “They’re already planning their golden years in Florida. Though God knows what they’ll do with Pauline.”

“Poor Pauline,” Susan said.

And now their eyes met again, a prelude to separating once more.

Michael had an impulse to say-so simple-and Jacob’s teaching, too, out on Long Island. Better at it than I am. Over at last, that crazy-vet thing. (Or no, he amended the tale-Sorry, Jacob): Never really did do that crazy-vet thing. Whatever was terrible over there kept to himself, the blanket pulled up over the shoulder, the head turned to the wall. The courage it took, for a kid so fearful, to keep so much to himself.

Jacob’s fine, he had an impulse to say. And for just a second there would be the misapprehension on her face, for just a second, the solid past would loosen its grip. Jacob’s same as always. Too nice. Married Lori Ballinger. A couple of beautiful kids yet to be born.

“It was good to see you, Michael,” Susan said.

He bent down to kiss her cheek. “Good to see you, too,” he said. “Say hi to Tony.”

And then walked away with it written all over his face-his friends said later, kidding him-disappointment, the failure to connect, the sorrow of a lost opportunity.

Clare keane returned to school that fall looking grown up. That’s how some of the teachers put it. “You’ve grown up.” Not that this was surprising to them, especially the older of them who had been witness to it for decades: the bony freshman come back as mature young woman for senior year-the time in between seeming no more, they told one another September after September, than the blink of an eye. Clare was only a little taller, and, like most of the girls, freckled and tanned, streaks of sun in her reddish brown hair. Her braces had come off-there was that difference. But there was also the way she carried herself. She had lost-one of the Sisters confided to a lay teacher and the lay teacher heartily agreed-that childish look she used to wear, wide-eyed and eager to please. She’d always been smart enough, there was no doubt about that, but there had also been about her an air of innocence that belonged, perhaps, to an earlier time, an air of innocence that in this day and age-even the Sisters said it-seemed to indicate a lack of depth.

But this fall there was a new quickness in her eye and the range of her emotions did not seem limited in its illustration to a wide smile or a solemn frown. She laughed more. She socialized with some of the more troublesome and popular girls. She had learned, apparently, over the course of what she described to everyone who asked her as the best summer of her life, that there was a hierarchy to her interests and her pleasures after all. Although there was still something childish about her body, especially in the outdated shirtwaist dress that had been for too long now the school’s summer uniform, there was, also, finally, an assuredness in her movements that had not been there before. She had found a boyfriend this summer. (Of course of course, the teachers, even the nuns told each other, indulgent and naive. Those who had been at the school when Annie was a student said, with a shrug, Life goes on.) His name was Gregory Joseph. She wore his heavy high-school ring on a gold chain around her neck.