Alice McDermott - After This

That evening, Gregory’s parents came to the house and sat with Clare’s in the small living room. Her mother had straightened the slipcover on the couch and drawn the thick curtains and set out coffee and cookies on her wedding china. Clare listened from the top of the stairs. His parents had called Gregory at school. They said he was very sorry, full of remorse. They added as well that it takes, of course, two to tango. Mary Keane drew a sharp breath and said Gregory was a large boy, and older. Coercion was not out of the question. Mrs. Joseph said her boy was certainly not like that. John Keane said nor was their daughter. Mr. Joseph said either way, there wasn’t going to be any shotgun wedding. Mr. Keane said there weren’t going to be any bastard children either. Watch your goddamn language, Mr. Joseph said. Watch yours, Mr. Keane said. The two women made a soothing sound. They were both good kids, it was agreed. Neither one of them a moment’s trouble for their parents. Neither one of them had ever even dated before. It was the future that had to be considered now, Mary Keane said. What was past, was past. Clare had high school to finish, they both needed to get through college. Adoption was mentioned. A Catholic agency. A good Catholic family.

Gregory came home from school the next weekend and stood his full height and full, soft girth in the small living room and said he and Clare would get married before the baby was born and then he’d finish the semester, come home, get a job, and get a degree at night. He had spoken to a priest at school. It was the right thing to do. John Keane gazed at him sullenly while he spoke, feeling himself begin to relent only when the boy added, with a shrug and a crooked smile, that his grades at Marist weren’t all that hot anyway. Something of Jacob, of course, in the sweet, hapless, self-deprecation; the shudder of fate contained in something as simple as not-so-hot grades.

He looked beyond the boy to his father-both parents as well as Gregory’s remorseful sister had been brought along for the announcement. John Keane thought he saw in the man’s eye a kind of admiration, even pride, as Gregory spoke. Nothing he would feel if the tables were turned and it was his daughter who faced the ordeal, the risk, of childbirth at only seventeen. Both mothers wept again and Gregory’s sister hung her head. But Greg had the priest on his side and the startling power of his own conviction. Her conviction, really. It was what Clare wanted, he said, glancing at her. And whatever Clare wanted it was now his obligation to provide.

“And where will you live?” Gregory’s mother asked. “How will you pay rent?”

“We thought we’d live here,” Clare said, and looked to her mother. It was the plan she had devised in that lost hour, in Jacob’s room. “We thought we’d make an apartment, out of the basement. Until we can afford something more.” She smiled, as if it had all been arranged already, as if it were all working out quite well already. “You and Pauline will be here to help me with the baby, especially if I want to take some classes at Malloy. And if you guys want to move to Florida, well, maybe by then”-it was all part of what she and Pauline had planned, whispering in that lost hour-”we can rent this house from you, or even buy it, if we have jobs. You won’t have to sell it to strangers, anyway.” She looked at Pauline. “We can keep the house, and, if Pauline wants to, she can stay.”

Sister marie ignatius, the school principal, met with Clare’s parents in her office early the next evening when the school was empty. Outside her office window the green lawn and the dark hedge, now edged with daffodils, were lovely in the restored light of the new spring. Although the air was still cool, she’d pushed open one of the small panes to freshen the room. She had to say, of course, that she could not have been more surprised. Clare, of all girls. She would never have imagined it. She did not say, as she had told the other Sisters in the convent, still waters run deep, but she did point out that even the best of girls can, after all, be led astray these days. The pressure is tremendous: the music, the movies, the feminists, the hippies. In the past, and Sister Marie Ignatius had run the school for twelve years, such girls would simply go away. There was, in fact, an unwed mother’s home in upstate New York that Sister Marie had once contacted almost annually. But the stigma, these days, was perhaps not as great as it used to be and with abortion now a legal option, it was up to the school to help its students in trouble in the kindest and most positive way possible. And the fact that Clare had not given any teacher in the school a single moment of worry or concern certainly worked to her advantage now.

Kindly, her hands folded in front of her on her desk, Sister agreed that Clare could stay in school for the next month or so-she would request only that as little as possible be said about her condition and her marriage (she did not want Clare’s situation to set either a precedent or an appealing example)-and that she eventually leave school (mononucleosis might be a good excuse) once the situation became apparent. It would be both a humiliation for Clare and a mockery of all the school stood for to have her appear in uniform in her eighth or ninth month. Academic matters could easily be arranged. She could take her finals at home. She would miss graduation, of course, the ceremony itself, but she would still graduate.

Sister Marie walked the parents to the door. She would tell the Sisters later that both of them looked like they’d “been through the mill.” Her heart went out to them, and to their daughter, but there was also the school to run, an enrollment rate to maintain, funds to raise from alumnae, many of whom were mothers of the daughters enrolled today. There were-as much for her as for Clare’s parents-the neighbors to consider. There was also an extremely generous alum who had married well being honored at this year’s graduation. It was not the time for a senior with a huge belly under her robes to be climbing the stage to accept her diploma. Married or not.

The parents smiled weakly, inclined to linger although all that needed to be said had been said. Sister sometimes joked that these were the “Climb Every Mountain” moments when she wished she could sing. She opened the door for them.

“Let’s remember,” she told them, “that there’s a new life on the way.” The corridor outside her office was brightly lit, eerily empty, harsh splashes of light against the linoleum and the painted fronts of the girls’ lockers. “And life,” she said, turning back, “is always a cause for celebration.” And then could have bitten her tongue because these were the Keanes she was talking to-she recalled Annie on that terrible morning, in this same hallway, she recalled seeing through the glass door of her own office the great shadow of Sister Maureen Crosby rising from her seat behind the reception desk, catching the two weeping girls in her arms. These were the Keanes she was spouting clichés at, the Keanes who had lost a son in that useless war.

Father McShane, Monsignor McShane, pouted a bit, his hands folded over his belly, but quickly relented, telling John Keane he would open the church himself for the family, for the wedding, eight o’clock on the following Sunday night. He’d do the honors, too, he said, the path of least resistance having always been his preference in matters such as unwed mothers, mixed marriages, annulments, and birth control. He could see the humiliation on the poor man’s face-one of these old-fashioned Irishmen who in his near seventy years could hardly bring himself to mention sex in the confessional now sitting here in the rectory saying his little daughter was already six months gone. A man whose biggest concern, at this age, should be his golf swing.