After This (12 page)

 

He grabbed them, both of them panting, by their shirts. Their
mother was in the doorway with Clare in her arms and Annie was next
to her. “Enough,” was what he said.

 

He shoved them both down on the edge of their beds. “Sit.”
They glared at each other, across the short space between their beds,
believing, each of them, that there was no greater flaw in all the vast
design of the universe than these two made brothers, condemned to
this same small room. Only their father between them, saying words,
kept them from colliding again.

 

“Flesh and blood,” were the words their father was saying,
standing between them. Michael’s eyes fell on the black flashlight,
rolled just under Jacob’s bed, and he pointed to it as if it could bear
witness. “He threw the flashlight,” he said, before his father cut him
off. “Your own brother,” their father said, raising his voice again.
“Who,” he asked with his finger in the air, “who do you think you’ll
have on your side when your mother and I are gone? Who do you
think you’ll be able to turn to when you’re as old as I am and there’s
something you need—a buck or two, or a piece of advice, maybe just
someone you can ask, Remember when? Your friends? Your Little
League team?” He waved his broad hand. “They’ll be scattered to the
four winds. They’ll have forgotten your name.” He paused, as if
waiting for them to speak. And then he said, “Your family. Your flesh
and blood, that’s who you’ll have. If you’re lucky. Your two sisters.
Each other. That’s who you’ll have.”

 

Michael held out his arm once more. “It could have really hurt,”
he said, trying again; the occasions when Jacob struck the first blow
were so rare. Their father put his hand in the air. “Enough,” he said
again. “Apologize,” he said, suddenly weary. “Then say your prayers
and go to sleep.”

 

He walked past them, past their mother and the two girls, turning
off the overhead light as he did. Into the darkness, with Clare in her
arms, their mother whispered, “Think of poor Uncle Frank.”

 

“He threw the flashlight at me,” Michael said, all in a rush.

 

His mother peered into the shadowed room. His sisters, little
Clare and Annie both, stared at him too, duplicating her eyes.
“Think what your father would give,” she told him, whispering, “to
have his own brother beside him for just another night.” Then she
walked away.

 

Jacob was slipping his pale feet under the covers, awkwardly, as if
his feet were much bigger and his legs much longer than he could
manage. He threw himself at his pillow like a landed fish, put his back
to his brother and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. After only a
second or two of silence, he said, “Sorry, Michael.”

 

Michael said nothing. He remained seated on the edge of his bed,
the lumpy whorls of the chenille bedspread just under his palms. He
looked into the lighted hallway, heard his mother putting Clare back
into her bed, and asking Annie to put her head down. Then he heard
them praying, “Ever this night, be at my side . . .” Next door, Mr.
MacLeod was playing his piano again, each note just a slight vibration
against their bedroom wall.

 

Michael had only a vague recollection: Uncle Frank had looked
like their father, only ugly. A broader, taller, bizarro-world version of
their father with more hair and bigger teeth and a white handkerchief
that he would mop his maroon face with, like Louis Armstrong. He
drove Cadillacs and always spoke to them in a voice like Donald
Duck’s. When he visited, mixed nuts and chips with onion dip were
served, and they would hear him downstairs late into the night, telling
long, loud stories that involved a multitude of voices—Porky Pig, Ed
Sullivan, Jimmy Durante—stories that made his parents scream with
laughter. Sometimes, lying in the dark, listening, missing most of it,
he and Jacob would laugh, too.

 

Michael watched his mother cross the hallway to her own room.
Heard his parents’ voices. On the floor by his feet, just under the
fringe of Jacob’s bedspread was the flashlight he had thrown. Quickly,
Michael bent down and picked it up and then slipped into bed with it.
He turned it on under the blankets, put his fingers over it to see if he
could count the bones. Turned it up to the ceiling. He

 

wrote his name, drew a face. The light went off in the hallway. He
moved the beam over Jacob’s back, the bedspread and the blanket, his
dark head, his ear.

 

He moved it down the length of his brother’s body and over the
wooden footboard of his bed, past the dresser they shared, out the
door. Leaning out over his own mattress, he saw the light catch the
doorknob of the linen closet, the door to his sisters’ room. He willed
the light to push the door open a bit more. He could then move the
beam over Annie’s face, play it across her eyelids.

 

“Michael,” he heard his mother say from his parents’ room. She
was trying to keep her voice low, but not whispering. “Go to sleep,”
she said. She sounded not exactly far away but heading there, as if she
had stopped in the middle of her leaving. “Do you hear me?” she said.
He imagined she was speaking to him from over her shoulder, just as
she was stepping out, maybe through one of her bedroom windows,
maybe following his father, her hands on the window frame, her foot
on the sill, their father already gone before her (when we’re gone, he
had said) into the night. “Put out that light,” she said, over her
shoulder, as he imagined it. And he did. In the darkness, he felt more
certain of their absence. His parents had left the house and if he called
out “Mom?” only Jacob and the girls would hear him. If there were a
knock at the door tonight, it would be left to him to answer. He would
take Jacob’s flashlight. He imagined Pauline, scratching at the glass,
wanting to get in. Lying alone in the darkness, he formed the words in
his mind, willed them across the room, but did not speak them out
loud. “Sorry, Jacob.”

 

Instead, he whispered, “Mr. MacLeod is tinkling on his piano
again.”

 

And then they were both laughing in the dark.
T
HEY SHOULD HAVE COME EARLIER
in the day, but it was a World’s
Fair, after all, and there had been much to distract them. Now the
sun was low and orange, radiating heat like a glowing coal. The
asphalt that had been wet and clean this morning—hosed down by
jumpsuited workers intent, it seemed, on lending the paved-over park
a hint of morning dew—was now gummy and pliant underfoot. Now
heat waves rose from it, smeared the air and made a mirage of the

shoes and the ankles and the pink knees of the passing crowds. The
painted benches had grown too hot to sit on. The shrubs and sparse
trees were limp. Now the jumpsuited men walked listlessly, clicking
their long-handled brooms against the opened and closed mouths of
their long-handled dustbins. The passengers in the sleek Glide-aRides, erect and smiling earlier in the day as they tested a bit of spaceage transportation, now slumped in the molded plastic seats or gazed
out from behind their sunglasses, unimpressed even with the future. It
was the end of the day.

In another hour, the sun would dip into the Hudson and the
humidity would begin to give way. In another hour—by the time they
got through the exhibit—the lights in the trees and on the pavilions
and under the fountain that surrounded the Unisphere would draw
the eye up, to the spires and the arches and the silvery searchlights of
the fair, to the stars themselves. But not now. Now every head
was bent under the day’s accumulated heat, every grimy collar and
darkened arm ring exposed, every stranger’s arm or bare shoulder—as
they joined the line outside the exhibit—was sticky, unpleasantly cool.

“We should have come earlier,” Mary Keane said, although, she
supposed, earlier the line might have been longer still.

 

Beside her, Annie stood on her toes to glimpse the distance to the
entrance and then leaned out to see how many more had joined the
line behind them. There was solace in the seven or eight—and now
another four—who would have to wait longer still. She stepped back
into place. There was a tall, older couple ahead of them, the woman
fat, the man slightly stooped. Behind them, a younger couple, but not
so young that the woman didn’t look a little foolish, hanging—in this
heat—on the man’s hairy arm.

 

They had already missed the exhibit twice. Once, the first time
they had come to the fair, when they had Clare and the two boys, who
had balked at waiting an hour and a half to see a statue. Once again
when their father was also along. After only ten minutes on the long
line, he had shown them his wrist and declared that if they were not
all in the car in the next half hour it would be a nightmare on the
Grand Central.

 

(Because he was a man who always knew precisely when they
must all be in the car, knew precisely the minute after which the trip
would be in vain, impossible, a nightmare. “Look at the time,” turning
furiously on his wife as if she were both the single force delaying them
and the single reason in all the world that he sought to wage this
battle. It made little difference if their arrival or departure was meant
to be precise or merely eventual, he held his wrist in the air, his fist
clenched as if he would bring it down on their heads if they failed to
understand—tapping the face of his watch—that time was against
them.)

 

But now they were just the two—mother and daughter—and
while Mary Keane, in deference to her husband’s habit of mind rather
than out of any impatience of her own, reprimanded herself for not
getting here earlier, she also made calm accommodation for what
would clearly be a long wait: a later bus home, was all, she told
herself. A phone call to the boys to tell them to fix some spaghetti.
Another to Pauline, who had Clare for the day. Nothing else to stop
them, really, from finally seeing this through.

 

“Probably,” she said to her daughter, “it’s best to have left this for
last. Probably after you see this you won’t want to see anything else.”

 

Together, months ago, they had watched on TV as the statue
arrived. Or at least they had seen the crate that contained it as it was
lowered from a ship. One of the world’s most profound and precious
works of art, taken from Rome for the first time in history. The
television showed men reaching up to touch the wooden crate as it
slowly descended. Carved by the artist in his youth, nearly five
hundred years ago.

 

And the line was moving. Shuffling, really, as if the hot asphalt
pulled at their feet, and with so little distance between them all that
each step brought the bump or brush of another body, a bare forearm,
a soft hip. The touch of a toe against your heel. Among the fair’s
sweet, pervasive smell of Belgian waffles, there was a stirring of
human odors, perfume and aftershave and sweat and hair warmed by
the sun. The odor of breath as they all turned to one another to say,
“At least it’s moving.”

 

The tall old man in front of them wore a yellow plaid shirt, shortsleeved. Although his arms were tanned, his puckered elbows were
chalky. He had missed a belt loop in back. Beside him, his wife was
fanning herself with a map of the fair. Despite the heat, there was a
white pillbox hat pinned to the back of her head. She wore a floral
shirtwaist dress and the flesh beneath her arm moved like
a pink hammock filled with something heavy. She turned to the
mother and daughter to say that the lines had been terrible all day
long. They’d waited fortyfive minutes to see It’s a Small World. More
than an hour and a half at the Bell Pavilion. There was an orange
plastic dolphin on her dress, a gift from the Florida exhibit. She said
they’d brought their son along, who was on leave, but he’d already
gone back to the hotel to cool off. He told them he did enough
standing in line in the army.

 

For Annie, the lines, the crowds, the restricted view while she
waited, were all part of the fair’s adventure, like being led, blindfolded.
At the end of every wait—it had been happening all day—wonders
were revealed.

 

(She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green
convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the
wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of
tomorrow. They had sat—after the hour wait—in a moving theater as a
mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and the
1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They’d
watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended
above the ordinary Queens skyline. They’d walked quietly through the
spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was
burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of
snow. They’d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past
lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental
highway while a voice like God’s told them, whispering softly into
their ears, that the present was just an instant between an infinite past
and a hurrying future.)

 

The line shuffled forward three more steps. Constricted by the
space between them, Mary Keane reached back carefully and pulled
her blouse away from her spine. She felt a bead of perspiration roll
down her back. And then another. Cascading, she thought. “I’m
melting,” she said. Behind them, the man with the woman on his arm
was reading from a guidebook. Annie felt the edge of the paper against
the back of her head.

 

“They shouldn’t have moved something so old,” he said.
“Something could have happened to it.” And the woman on his arm
made a sympathetic noise and then seemed to readjust herself, as if
she were turning in bed.

 

“God, it’s hot,” she said and Mary Keane turned to nod at her,
“Isn’t it, though?” Farther behind them there was a family, parents
and two teenagers, limp shouldered and unhappy. Then what might
have been a church group of pastel men and women, all with name
tags and crosses on their breasts, fanning themselves with identical
paper fans printed loudly with the name of an Atlanta funeral home.