After This

Also by Alice McDermott

 

A Bigamist's Daughter

 

That Night

 

At Weddings and Wakes

 

Charming Billy
Child of My Heart
After This

 

Alice McDermott
After
This

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

 

•
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
©

 

Copyright
2006 by Alice McDermott
All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas & Mclntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

McDermott, Alice.
After this / Alice McDermott.
—
1st ed.
—

 

p.
cm.

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-16809-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

 

ISBN-10: 0-374-16809-1 (hardcover)

 

1. United States
Social life and customs
—
20th century
—
Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction.
I. Title.
PS3563. C355A68 2006
813'. 54
—
dc22

 

2006005598

 

Designed by Abby Kagan

 

www.fsgbooks.com
1 3 5 7
9
10 8 6 4 2

 

For Mildred
After This

 

I

 

L
EAVING THE CHURCH
, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of
pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks—the slivered
shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite
steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—felt
the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.

And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun
and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or
else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to
bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the
gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging
into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers,
candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists? The paper
detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails
armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and
wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the
dead have fled?

She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows,
heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and
underneath it all something banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped
can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and methodical. The march of time.

And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the
hat bent into the onslaught. She went down the steps just in front of
him, drawn more by forward momentum than by any desire to meet
up with, or to avoid, her brother’s latest best pal.

The cold wind made it di
fficult to breathe, as if it could snatch
your next breath before you had time to swallow it, and she bent her
head, too, hand to her hat, submerged in wind and beginning to
imagine herself slowly losing ground with each step forward, slowly
beginning to stall, and then to sail backward—a quick scramble to
regain ground and then another sailing backward. In church she had
prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A
good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At
least, she had asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be
content.

And now a slapstick windstorm
fit for Harold Lloyd or Buster
Keaton.

 

It was either God’s reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel
that was midtown Manhattan. The scent of it, the Easter scent of April
in the city, all around her, in the cold air itself as well as on the
shoulders of the crowd; the smell of sunlight and dirt, something
warming at the heart of it all.

 

And then she felt his hand on her shoulder and he shouted,
“Mary Rose,” which bound him forever to her brother and her father
and her life at home since nowhere else did she tolerate the double
name. His head was still lowered, his hand still on his hat—he might
have been waiting for the right opportunity to doff it—and he peered
around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another
life.

 

And she, her hand on the back of her own hat, did the same.

 

“Hello, George,” she said. She could feel the crunch of city grit
between her back teeth.

 

“Some wind,” he said. He had one eye closed against it, the other
was watery.

 

“You’re-telling me,” she said.

 

They walked together to the corner and as they stepped off the
curb, he suddenly reached up and took her raised elbow—the one that
led to the hand she held against her hat—and kept it between his
fingers as they crossed. She thought he must look like a man attached
to a subway strap. At the next corner, he did the same; a gesture that
was either brotherly or proprietary, but awkward either way, as if one
of them were blind or doddering, or as if both were involved in some
odd, raised-elbow folk dance. At Forty-sixth, the light was against
them and the wind paused enough for her to take her hand off her hat
while they waited with the crowd.

 

She turned to him—was he going to speak? His eyes were teary
from the wind, red-rimmed and bloodshot. His nose was running and
there were tears on his windblown cheeks. She clicked open the purse
that hung on her arm and found her handkerchief, but he refused it,
reaching into his overcoat for his own. He mopped his face and blew
his nose before the crowd got them moving again and as they got to
the curb, she placed her left hand on her hat so he could reach her
elbow at a more convenient angle—which he did, guiding her across
the street as if she were a novice pedestrian, and this time, perhaps,
putting a little more pressure behind the fingertips that held her.

 

“Where are you headed, George?” she asked him. He shouted
something unintelligible into the wind.

 

“Have you eaten yet?” she asked, because it was only polite. And
then the wind paused completely, as it will in April, a sudden silence
and maybe even the hint of warmth from the sun, so that he replied
with odd gentleness, “Yeah, I had my lunch.”

 

They were at the door of the restaurant. The wind was picking up
again. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

 

He shook his head and she could not deny her own relief. “I’m
out of time,” he said. And then added, “What about dinner?”

 

“Lamb chops,” she told him. “You coming over?” Anticipating
already a stop at the butcher’s to pick up two or three more.

 

He shook his head. There was another tear streaming down his
windblown cheek and as he replied she lifted the handkerchief in her
hand and wiped it away, feeling the not unpleasant pull of his beard
against the thin cotton.

 

He said, “I mean, what about us having dinner?”

 

The wind puffed up again and they both put their hands to their
hats. “Where?” she said, rudely, she realized later. But it was like
having a passing stranger suddenly turn to sing you an aria. Anyone
would have a second or two of not quite knowing what was really
going on.

 

“Out,” he told her. He was a broad-faced man who looked good in
hats. Who looked better now than he did at home, where he had been
thus far only the unremarkable source of her brother Jimmy’s
unpredictable enthusiasms. “At a restaurant,” he said. And then to
make himself clearer, “The two of us.”

 

“Tonight?” she said, and then they both turned away for a
moment from the peppered wind. When they turned back, he said,
“Why not?” but without conviction, confirming for them both that
this was a sudden impulse that most likely would not last out the
afternoon. “What if I come by at seven?” he said.

 

She paused, squinting, not for the chance to see him better but
for him to see her. “I’ll have to cook those lamb chops anyway,” she
said. “Or else Jimmy and my father will be gnawing the table legs by
the time I get home.”

 

He smiled a little, unable to disguise what she was sure was a bit
of confusion about his own impulse. He said again, “I’ll come by at
seven,” and then turned back into the wind.

 

She pushed open the door to the restaurant. More lunchtime
bustle, mostly women in hats with their coats thrown over the backs
of chairs, the satiny linings and the fur collars and cuffs, the perfume and the elegant curves of the women’s backs as they leaned
forward across the small tables, all giving the hint of a boudoir to the
busy place. She found a seat at the counter, wiggled her way into it.
Saw the man beside her who was finishing a cigarette give her a quick
up and down from over his shoulder and then turn back to flick an ash
onto the remains of his sandwich. She imagined returning his
dismissive stare, and then maybe even letting her eyes linger
distastefully on the crust of bread and the bitten dill pickle and the
cigarette debris on his plate. She could slide the ashtray that was right
there between them a little closer to his elbow—hint, hint.
Emboldened, perhaps—was she?—by the fact that she’d just been
asked out on a date.

 

She ordered a sandwich from the waitress, whose pretty youth
was still evident in the doughy folds of her weary and aging face, and a
cup of tea. And then she held her hands over the steaming water for a
few seconds. Thin hands, long fingers, with a kind of transparency to
the chapped skin. Her mother’s gold ring, inset with a silver
Miraculous Medal, on her right hand. The man beside her rubbed his
cigarette into the plate, then stood, swinging away from her on the
stool and causing a slight ripple through the customers all along the
other side of him. He took his overcoat from the hat rack and put it on
standing just behind her, and then leaned across his empty stool,
brushing her arm, to leave a few coins under his plate.

 

“Overcoats in April,” he said. “Some crazy weather.”

 

She turned to him, out of politeness, the habit of it. “I’ve never
seen such wind,” she said.

 

He was handsome enough—dark eyes and a nice chin, though his
hair was thinning. He wore a dark overcoat and a dark suit, a white
shirt and a tie, and there was the worn shine of a brass belt buckle as
he reached for his wallet. “Reminds me of some days we had
overseas,” he said, taking a bill from his billfold.

 

She frowned, reflexively. “Where were you?”

 

He shook his head, smiled at her. Something in his manner
seemed to indicate that they knew each other, that they’d had such
conversations before. “In another life,” he said and snapped the bill
and slapped the wallet and returned it to his pocket with a wink that
said, But all that’s behind us now, isn’t it? He was thin and his
stomach was taut and his starched white shirt was smooth against his
chest and belly. The brass belt buckle, marked with decorative lines, a
circled initial at its center, was worn to a warm gold. “Once more into
the breach,” he said, turning up his collar. “Wish me luck.”

 

For an odd second, she thought he might lean down and kiss her
cheek.

 

“Good luck,” she said. Over her shoulder, she watched him walk
away. A slight limp, a favoring, perhaps, of his left leg. A flaw that
would, she knew, diminish him in some women’s eyes. Even if he’d
been wounded in the war, there would be, she knew, for some women,
the diminished appeal of a man who had suffered something over
which he’d had no control. Who had suffered disappointment.

 

She turned back to her sandwich. And here, of all things, was
desire again. (She could have put the palm of her hand to the front of
his white shirt.) Here was her chicken sandwich and her tea and the
waitress with a hard life in her eyes and a pretty face disappearing into
pale flesh asking if there’s anything else for now, dear. Here was the
boudoir air of respectable Schrafft’s with its marble counters and
pretty lamps and lunchtime bustle (ten minutes until she should be
back at her desk), perfume and smoke, with the war over and another
life begun and mad April whipping through the streets again. And
here she was at thirty, just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour,
still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of
herself to put her hand to the

 

worn buckle at a stranger’s waist, a palm to his smooth belly. A man
she’d never see again. Good luck.

 

She sipped her tea. Once, ten years ago, at a Sunday-afternoon
party in some apartment that she remembered now as being
labyrinthine, although it probably had only four bedrooms, as opposed
to the place she shared with her brother and her father that had two,
Mike Shea had seized her by the wrist and pulled her into a dim room
and plastered his mouth against hers before she could catch her
breath. She had known him since high school, he was part of the
crowd she went with then, and he had kissed her once or twice
before—she remembered specifically the train station at Fishkill, on a
snowy night when they were all coming back from a sledding party—
but this was passionate and desperate, he was very drunk, and rough
enough to make her push him off if he had not, in the first moment
she had come up for air, gently taken off his glasses and placed them
on a doilied dresser beside them, and then, in what seemed the same
movement, reached behind her to lock the door. It was the odd,
drunken gentleness of it, not to mention the snapping hint of danger
from the lock, that changed her mind. And after two or three rebukes
when he tried to get at the buttons that ran up the back of her dress,
she thought, Why not, and although her acquiescence seemed to slow
him down a bit, as if he was uncertain of the next step, she was
enjoying herself enough by then to undo the last button without
prompting and then to pull her bare shoulder and arm up out of the
dress—first one then the other—and to pull dress and slip (she didn’t
wear a bra, no need) down to her waist in a single gesture. And then—
was it just the pleasure of the material against her bare flesh, his shirt
front, her wool?—she slowly pushed dress and slip and garter belt and
stockings down over her narrow hips until they fell to her feet. And
then she stepped out of her shoes. (“Even the shoes?” the priest had
whispered in the confes-