After This (13 page)

 

Above the rooftops of the Belgian Village, the sun had gone from
orange to red—so fiery now it might have been lifted from some
creation tableau itself. Might more appropriately have been shining
down on tar pits or boiling mud. As Annie leaned out to look back
(the line was longer still) and then forward (no shorter ahead), the red
sun struck the gold dome of the pavilion and sent her ducking back
into her place. Now a vertiginous edge of purple outlined everything
she saw. She saw heads turned away from the sun. Shoulders moving
slowly forward. The man’s speckled hand that had missed a belt loop
this morning reaching up to wipe perspiration from his sunburned
neck. His wife was turned around again to say to her mother they had
one son in the army and one in the Marines and another one married
and back near home. And Mary Keane replied four, two boys and two
girls.

 

Something prehistoric, too, in the scaly flesh of the woman’s
throat as she turned to speak to them, chin and neck
indistinguishable. Her voice was worn.

 

She said she should have gone for four and had a girl, too.
Daughters will wait with you to see something like this. Not boys.
“Although my boys are good to me,” she said. “They’re good boys.”

 

The woman turned to Annie, taking her in with small eyes,
perhaps assessing what she’d missed. Suddenly, she asked, “Did you
see the Carousel of Progress, honey?”

 

And her mother answered, “Yes we did.”

 

“The Magic Skyway? Futurama? The Moon Dome? Did you talk
on the picturephones?”

 

“Oh, yeah,” Annie said, knowing her mother wanted her to say
yes, not yeah.

 

“What I want to know,” the woman said, raising her voice, nearly
shouting, “is what if you just got out of the shower, and your
picturephone is ringing? Do you answer it?” She laughed, her open
mouth full of silver and gold. She shook her head and wiped a tear
from her eyes. “That’s your future, honey,” she said to Annie. “Not
mine or your mom’s.” She leaned back, her wide arm touching Mary
Keane’s damp shoulder. “We’ll be well out of it, don’t you think?”

 

The man in the plaid shirt, as husbands will do, was staring
straight ahead, ignoring the conversation, as if both women were
strangers to him. Even in this heat, Mary Keane was aware of a certain
pleasure in being relieved of the burden of a husband.

 

“We sure will,” she said, agreeably.

 

But then the woman suddenly raised her arm, the pale skin
swinging, and gestured toward the fantastic rooflines and white
towers, the sky lifts and the monorails.

 

“The only thing I hate to think about,” she said, “is how all this
will be knocked down when the fair is over.”

 

Other than the slow shuffling forward and the fanning of maps
and brochures, there was the rise and fall of cigarettes to mouths, the
tossing of them onto the asphalt. A couple up ahead occasionally left the line to chase a toddler. The man behind them was saying
“Michael-angelo,” and the woman on his arm was saying, “Meekel,
Meekel-angelo.”

 

They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were
only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered
elbows, freckles, birthmarks. The variety of head shapes and hair
colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or
Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A
missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of
Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity
anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers
in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his
arms, the woman’s weight against him.

 

The fat woman, mopping her thick neck with a small tissue,
turned again to say that the long wait would be worth it. “It’ll be like a
once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.”

 

With her purse in the crook of her arm, Mary Keane reached out
to run her fingers through her daughter’s thin hair, gathering it bit by
bit to the top of her head. She twisted the hair into a topknot and
pulled three bobby pins from the purse to hold it. Annie reached back
tentatively to feel her bare neck. “Better?” Mary Keane said and Annie
said, “Yes,” although one of the bobby pins bit like a tooth.

 

The line moved again. Mary Keane leaned down and blew a soft
stream of air onto her daughter’s neck, miraculously cool. Annie
closed her eyes briefly. “How much longer?” she said at the same time
the woman behind them said, “Not much longer.” They turned,
mother and daughter, to meet her eye, but it was the man she was
addressing, leaning against him, holding on to his arm. There was a
diamond engagement ring on her hand. You had to pity the length and
thickness of her brown hair, the weight of her chin on his shoulder.

 

They shuffled forward again. Now they could hear faint music
coming from the building, and with the next step forward they could
smell, if certainly not yet feel, the air-conditioning inside.

 

Someone up ahead, an official, cried, “No pushing, please,” in
what might have been an Italian accent. They felt the line grow slack
at the reprimand. And then it moved forward again.

 

The fat woman was now talking to the woman ahead of her.
“What if you’d just stepped out of the shower?” she shouted.

 

“Pee-aye-tuh,” the man behind them said and the woman,
laughing deep in her throat said, “Pee-aye-ta.”

 

Here now was the official who belonged to the voice, perspiring in
a red jacket and gray pants. He waved his arms like a traffic cop
although, at the moment, they were standing still in front of him.

 

“Almost there,” he was saying, smiling at them all. His accent not
Italian but Long Island. “That’s it”—as they moved forward—”won’t
be long now.”

 

As if responding obediently to a command, the line pressed itself
together, tighter still, heads, hands, shuffling feet. (Annie briefly
placed the heels of her palms to the damp yellow shirt of the man in
front of her and then drew them away.) Chests to backs and the
woman behind them leaning, it seemed, over Mary Keane’s shoulder.
“No pushing, please,” the man said again.

 

The sun had nearly dropped out of sight although the sky glowed
so vividly with its afterimage that it hardly mattered. The heat still
gave the thick air a slow pulse. The crowd pressed together and her
mother took her hand, moving. For a moment Annie forgot just what
it was they had been waiting to see. And then they were inside.

 

Cold air and a low Gregorian chant, eyes struggling to adjust to
the change. There was the smell of incense and of new paint. Glass
cases along the walls and the impression of red and gold. Golden arcs
of light. Red carpet at their feet. The line held, still shuffling,
past cases of jewels, now, or books, or vestments, or small ivory
models of churches, paintings of saints and priests. The volume of the
choir’s voices seemed to rise slightly as they moved forward, wavering
the way the heat outside had wavered. But the heat was already
forgotten. “Keep moving, please,” someone said.

 

And then the line broke. Wheat from chaff, Mary thought as redjacketed guards counted them off, said, there—four rows in
descending order—back there, please, here, down there. A brusque tap
on her shoulder and she and her daughter were hurried forward.
Down here, please, keep moving.

 

No choice in the matter, it soon became clear, because what they
were being directed to was a moving walkway, four ascending rows in
a kind of amphitheater of moving walkways. There was the uncertain
first step, the tug of the rubber tread against the soles of their feet,
and then, through no effort of their own, the slow movement forward
into the dark. Mary Keane and her daughter were in the first row. The
air grew colder and the holy chants nearer, even as the faces and the
bodies and the clothes of all who had waited—though they were still
beside them or above them in the darkness—disappeared. There were
only whispers and stirrings, a child’s voice, and then not even that.

 

Mary Keane put her arm across her daughter’s chest, pressed her
close so that the little topknot was just under her chin. Annie took her
mother’s arm in both hands.

 

In the absence of all color and all other light, the white marble
held every nuance and hue a human eye could manage. Here was the
lifeless flesh of the beloved child, the young man’s muscle and sinew
impossibly—impossible for the mother who cradled him—still. Here
were her knees against the folds of her draped robes, her lap, as wide
as it might have been in childbirth, accommodating his weight once
more. Here were her fingers pressed into his side, her shoulder raised
to bear him on her arm once more. Here was her

 

left hand, open, empty. Here were the mother’s eyes cast down upon
the body of her child once more, only once more, and in another
moment (they were moving back into the darkness) no more.

 

The white light reflected dimly off the faces still within its reach
and then disappeared from them, lamps extinguished, one by one, as
they were slowly drawn away. Somewhere among them a woman was
weeping. Slowly, the moving sidewalk delivered them all through the
darkness to the four ascending doors where they disembarked, step
carefully please. Flesh, hair, clothes returned to them in the low light
of the rest of the exhibit. A low, golden light that was nevertheless
painful, accustomed as their eyes had become to the dark, and despite
how briefly they had been in it.

 

Outside, the heat was a comfort, momentarily, on chilled
shoulders and arms. The lights had come on in the park, in the trees,
in the tall clock towers and the soaring pavilions and under the
fountains that surrounded the Unisphere. It led their eyes up, for a
moment. There were stars but also a stain of red on the western
horizon, against the quickly descending night. There was the later bus
to catch from the park to the terminal in Jamaica, and then the second
bus to the intersection where they would call home and John Keane,
unhappy about the late hour, would come in the car to fetch them.
A
T
P
AULINE
’
S APARTMENT
, Clare was already asleep on the couch.
Pauline listed all they had done together that day—an excursion
to the fabric store and lunch at a diner, two cute gingham aprons run
up on the sewing machine, cookies baked and nails painted and a walk
around the corner for Chinese—making each occasion sound, to Mary
Keane, like a compensation Pauline had rendered, since attached to

each one was some surprise, on Pauline’s part, that Clare had done
none of these things in exactly this way before. “And she said her
mother only knew how to make Christmas cookies.”

Mary slipped her hands under Clare’s arms, lifted the sleeping
child to her shoulder, felt the weight of her, and how, not quite asleep,
she tightened her arms around her mother’s neck, brushed her fingers
against her mother’s hair. Pauline was handing a shopping bag to
Annie, the folded aprons, the cookies, a few odds and ends, “Little
presents,” Pauline said, “nothing much,” proudly enough. The
apartment was close, dimly lit, full of the scent of Pauline’s perfume.
In her weariness after the long hot day, in her anger over her
husband’s unreasonable impatience, in anticipation of the bedtime
routine that was still waiting for her at home, Mary Keane looked at
the peaceful rooms with some envy.

Which Pauline saw, of course. At the door, she asked, “Is he
waiting downstairs?”—meaning John Keane. And when Mary nodded,
Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how he is,” and
laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all
the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever
shared with Pauline about her husband’s failings, every unguarded
criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his
personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes
inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her
laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not
loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a
delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft’s transformed into an
answered prayer), and marriage—which Pauline had had sense enough
to spurn—simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John
or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.

A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that
Mary Keane should have kept to herself.

 

In the elevator, Clare heavy in her arms, she told Annie that
Pauline was intolerable, sometimes. Really. “I don’t just bake cookies
at Christmas,” she said resentfully, and Annie agreed although, at the
moment, she could not recall any cookies her mother had ever made
that were not shaped like Christmas trees or snowmen.

 

Her mother said, “You know,” and then paused. She recalled,
briefly, the sacred music and the white stone and all the soaring
aspirations of her faith: gold domes and ivory towers and in the
darkness, light. She considered, too, how tired she was, Clare’s head
heavy on her shoulder, the child’s heels digging into her hips. How
annoying Pauline could be. “You know,” she said again, “Pauline
doesn’t speak to Helen anymore, the girl she went to Europe with last
year.” She looked down at Annie. “And she’s fallen out with Adele,
too, from the office. Even though they shared a cabin on that cruise
and were best pals for a while there.” She hitched Clare up on her
shoulder. Annie transferred the heavy shopping bag from her
right hand to her left. “I wouldn’t mind sometimes,” her mother said,
“if Pauline got mad and stopped speaking to us for a while. It would
be a nice break.”

 

Watching the light move behind each number as they descended,
Annie laughed and said, “I know.”