After This (10 page)

 

Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the
buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped
her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the
street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were
most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months.
Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.
“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane
said.

 

The little Italian man had pulled the slipcover off the couch,
bundled it together with the tea towels and the jacket and brought it
all to the washing machine in the basement, but Pauline had done the
scrubbing and the bleaching and the dyeing. Pauline had restored
order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion—
what a mess it had made—restored order, made things right for the
homecoming.

 

“And how’s my angel?” Pauline asked.

 

“At the moment,” Mary said, “she is sound asleep on Jacob’s
lap.”

 

Her own hunger to hold the baby again struck her as just that, a
hunger—the ache of hollow longing, an awareness, as if for the first
time in her life, of her own arms being empty.

 

“I wanted to give you some time with your new family,” Pauline
said, and meant it—although she couldn’t say, too, that she had not
meant to disrupt the homecoming with her own dramatic departure.
Nor could she deny that she’d wanted both: the thoroughly selfeffacing departure and the attention such generous self-effacement
surely earned her. She’d wanted to give the family their time together,
but she’d wanted as well a more vigorous pursuit, after all she’d done.
It wouldn’t have taken much, after all, for John Keane to have wrestled
the overnight case from her hand.

 

“Kiss her for me,” she said and hung up the phone and faced the
most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had
spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night,
all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that
good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons
usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things—the yellow
light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds,
someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this
terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have
another Manhattan with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush
down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and
get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these
last hours of a Sunday evening. Nice as he’d tried to be—he’d come
home from the hospital each evening to put the children to bed, and
thanked her profusely each morning for the coffee and toast she put
before him, he’d gotten the children ready for church without waking
her this morning—she would not want

 

to be married to balding John Keane for all the tea in China. She’d
heard him singing to himself in the bathroom, for instance, fiat as a
tire. Heard him clipping his toenails one night before he went to bed.
She recognized the simple pleasure of her own room and her own
pillow and no child weeping for her mother across the hall, the boys
whispering words of comfort but not thinking to call on Pauline for
help.

 

In the morning there was the rattle of traffic and the wheeze of
buses, the rising voice of the radio, the whistle of a teakettle. The
slatted sunlight, as it did this time of year, moved across her bed and
her quilted housecoat and her dresser and onto the construction-paper
card that Jacob had made so that later when Clare (who last night had
slept soundly in her brother’s arms) lifted it to read the simple
message, she would not be able to say if the front of the card had once
been gray or blue, only that her brother had used a ballpoint pen and
had pressed so firmly into the soft paper that she could feel the shape
of the letters in relief on the back.
D
URING THE WAR
, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her
lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick’s, and of course
Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so,

 

and although Pauline was estranged from the church—it had to do

 

with something some nun had said—she nevertheless began to tag

 

along. And how could you pray with any sincerity if you were

 

preoccupied with the thought of avoiding lunch with the lonely and

 

annoying girl who was impatiently waiting for your prayers to be over?
If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs.

 

They were at the dining-room table, eating the frosted cake their

 

father had bought at the bakery to celebrate the baby’s homecoming.
During the war, Pauline’s mother passed away and there were

 

really only a handful of people at the funeral—four of them girls from

 

the office. Pauline sat alone on one side of the church and her brother

 

and his family on the other. None of the dates Pauline had, many of

 

which their mother herself had arranged, led anywhere at all.
It’s easy, their mother said, to love the lovable. There’s no virtue

 

in that.

 

They were using the good china and the embroidered table
linen. Milk had been poured into cocktail glasses. The woman at the
bakery had written “Welcome Home, Clare” on the white cake. Annie
had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full
misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her
brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and
said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be
home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t
cry.

 

Michael had thought himself indifferent to the new
arrangements—Pauline, not his mother, there to greet him with her
big, powdered face when he got home from school (and making him
hang up his jacket and pick up his games), Pauline there at the dinner
table with them, urging them to take more of everything they didn’t
want and laughing only (but with real delight) when he said his
teacher didn’t have a mustache but a nunstache, Pauline sitting behind
him in the living room as he did his homework on his lap with the
television on, asking every minute or so, “Doesn’t the TV distract you,
doesn’t the TV keep you from concentrating?” He’d thought himself
indifferent to it all until his mother came through the front door, the
new baby in her arms, and he knew for the first time that he’d hated
every minute of Pauline’s reign. As had Jacob, although Jacob had
known this to be true throughout the ordeal.

 

It wasn’t that they’d found Pauline unlovable. The entire world of
adult strangers was more or less unlovable, with their huge earlobes
and their smoky breaths, their yellow teeth, their intrusions. It was
only that the house was empty without their mother in it.
Recognizable still in all its familiarity: the vestibule where they
dropped their book bags and (at Pauline’s insistence) hung up their
coats, the living room where the slipcover was newly dark, the
cluttered dining room, the Formica counters in the kitchen, the Dutch
Boy cookie jar, the worn carpet on the stairs, the sunlight through the
windows of their bedroom which seemed always, from the time
they woke until darkness fell, the sunlight of four thirty in the
afternoon, all of it familiar but seen, for the first time, as it might look
when it was empty, with none of them there. This both puzzled them
(because all three of them were indeed there, and Pauline was there,
and by nine o’clock each night when visiting hours at the hospital
were over, their father was there) and filled them with despair, which
was what made them tell their mother, once she had returned, the
baby in her arms, that they hated Pauline. That they hoped they would
never again be left in her care.

 

It wasn’t true, they hadn’t hated her at all (Jacob had struggled
with the choice between “From” and “Love” on the card he drew for
her; Michael had laughed heartily himself when Pauline said that Mr.
MacLeod next door, who looked like he dyed his hair with Orange
Crush, should lay off that piano and find someplace else to tinkle;
Annie now had three different vials of perfume samples tucked in her
sock drawer, courtesy of Pauline), but it was an explanation that
lingered, a conviction they would share for the rest of their lives.
“You choose likable people to be your friends,” their mother said.
She sat back from the table, the baby in her arms, and moved the
prongs of her fork, the good silver, through the white icing. “And you
have to love your family whether they’re likable or not.” She brought
the icing to her lips. “But the people you have to feel sorry for are the
ones without family. Unlikable people without family or friends.
Who’s going to care about them?”

 

Gripped by their new conviction, the three children shook their
heads. “Just don’t ever leave us with her again,” they said,
emphatically, crying it out, not because it was what they truly felt but
because it was the only, boisterous way they could demonstrate (other
than this birthday party in the dining room, on a Sunday afternoon,
with the good silver and the good china and the embroidered
tablecloth) their joy at her return.

 

Their mother, the baby in her arms, held up the small silver
fork—it was her wedding silver. In the midst of joy there was, there
would always be, the injunction to remember the sorrowful. “You
must be kind,” their mother said. “I know it’s not easy. Pauline’s not
easy. But what would happen to her if there was no one willing to be
kind?”

 

Later, recalling the homecoming, Annie would tell Michael that
like the infant in a fairy tale, Clare’s fate, her future, at that moment,
must have been sealed. Long after all of them had scattered, Jacob,
Michael, Annie, their mother and father, scattered—as their parents
would have said—to the four winds, Clare would have Pauline, still a
royal pain in the ass, in her care.
III

 

M
AN
is
IMMORTAL
, John Keane thought, or he is not. And if he is,
there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not,
then prayer is wishful thinking.

You either pray to the dead or you don’t.

 

But the real question before them this winter evening, the six
men on the building committee, the pastor, the two priests, the
architect, the accountant, and the dead, beloved pope who still smiled
at them in oil from the end of the rectory dining room, was far
simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?

 

Like something out of a parable (The Good Servant? The Twelve
Talents?) each of the six men had brought to the table this evening the
stack of pledges they had garnered over the past six weeks from the
people of the parish who had not responded voluntarily to the pastor’s
initial appeal for funds. Two weeks into the New Year, when, they
figured, the financial burden of Christmas might have just begun to
ease, the six men had divided the more or less eight square miles of
St. Gabriel’s parish into six sectors. After some rigorous debate, it had
been decided that the men would not solicit from their own
recalcitrant neighbors. (There was the matter of financial privacy, the
threat of hard feelings among men whose children played together,
whose wives might see each other every day.) John Keane had the
names of thirty-three parishioners on his

 

list, all of them more or less strangers—although he recognized many
of the faces from church when they came to their doors to let him in.
There was the phone call first: on behalf of Father McShane, I’d like to
come by some evening to discuss the new church and gym. Then the
appointment itself, usually scheduled between seven and eight so as
not to interrupt anyone’s dinner. They were for the most part
strangers, but kicking the snow off his heels or brushing the rain from
his hat, he never once felt that he was stepping into their homes for
the first time. They brought him to their dining-room tables, or to the
kitchen. There were children in pajamas on the staircase or stretched
across the living-room floor, or biting pencils over homework on
whatever table their parents weren’t going to use. There were dogs,
usually, pushed behind basement doors or banished to the garage. The
smell of whatever had been made for dinner still in the air—garlic in
the Italian homes and green pepper in the Polish, something fried
among the Germans, broiled meat with the Irish. They offered him
coffee or tea, sometimes sherry or a beer. The wives, for the most part,
hung up his coat and put down the plate of cookies and then
disappeared—or lingered only long enough to admire the architect’s
drawing on the front of the pledge packet. (Only the more observant
asked, “Where’s Krause’s store?” Only the more prescient shook their
heads skeptically when he said Krause had agreed to sell his property
to the church.) He’d hear them walking around upstairs as he made
his pitch to the man of the house, heard the vague repetition of
spelling words or dates or catechism lessons as the men’s
conversations moved, inevitably, away from the financing of the new
church and gym to the war, what service, what theater, what division,
what years.

 

John Keane was older than most of the men by a decade. None of
them asked him to call them by their first names, nor did he. The
formality—he wore a suit and a topcoat to every call—seemed ap-
propriate for the transaction he was there to discuss. The wives
appeared again only when he rose to leave. They stood beside their
husbands as the men shook hands. He would return in a week to pick
up the sealed envelope, for Father McShane’s eyes only. They were
aiming for one hundred percent participation. In the mimeographed
letter inside the packet Father McShane had asked only for “prayerful
discernment” regarding what each family could afford to contribute.
The men were impossible to read, but the wives’ eyes told him
everything—they were eager or wary or resigned, those of them who
still loved their husbands, or their lives. Others showed him the battle
already brewing, or, far worse, an amused conviction that Mr. Keane
had not seen through them, through their guise of good parents, good
Catholics, of domestic harmony or financial stability. In every case, he
had the sense when he left the house that he had at least given the
family by his presence alone the gift of a single, hushed hour of quiet
civility, good behavior. It was, perhaps, as close as he would ever come
to feeling like a priest.