After This (15 page)

 

Jacob shrugged. This summer, as a graduation present, his father
had given him three hundred dollars toward his own car, a little Capri.
The puzzle he had studied in high-school religion classes—why the
rich were so ungenerous, why the suffering of the poor, the fixable
suffering, was so seldom fixed—began to solve itself for him the first
time he drove off alone, in his own car. There was want, as the
Brothers at St. Sebastian’s had referred to it. But then there was, he
suddenly understood—alone, unfettered, pressing the accelerator,
palming the wheel—I want.

 

His brother leaped off the hood—the percussion of the metal
bending in under his palm and then bending back again. “Let’s
cruise,” he said again.

 

They walked together, down the alleyway that ran in front of what
they still called the new gym, past the modern entryway. Saint Gabriel,
with the shoulders of his folded wings rising up over his head, was
mere shadow behind the plate glass. They emerged from the alleyway
into the sun, passed Krause’s store, where there was still a crowd of
customers inside, pressed against the door. They cut through the
parking lot of the strip of stores beside the school, turned toward
home. It was the route they had walked together for years, when they
were students at St. Gabriel’s and then again when they had come to
this corner to meet their high-school bus. That was over now. Jacob
was starting St. John’s in the fall. Michael would be hitching a ride to
St. Sebastian’s with some friends, his senior year.

 

Jacob said, when they had reached the orderly streets where the
houses, each nearly identical, began, “I called her once.”

 

“Who?” Michael said. He was thinking of how much money
he’d lost today, not caddying. Giving in to his parent’s request that
they all go to the first Mass at the new church.

 

“Lori Ballinger,” Jacob said.

 

Michael looked at him. He was about four inches taller than
Jacob, and still growing, he was sure. He straightened his shoulders.
“You asked her out?”

 

Jacob nodded, smiled a little crookedly, making fun of himself.
Given the look, he didn’t have to say how it had turned out, but
Michael asked him anyway.

 

“She turned you down?”

 

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “She said she was busy.”

 

Michael considered this. He considered saying, Well, that took
courage. Instead he said, “When was this?”

 

“Last year,” Jacob said. “Junior prom.”

 

He stood still on the sidewalk. His brother kept going. “Holy
shit,” he said. “You asked Lori Ballinger to your prom?”

 

Jacob shrugged, shaking off Michael’s astonishment. Michael
caught up with him. “She was dating football jocks in grammar school,
man.”

 

“Really?” Jacob said.

 

Michael fell into stride beside his brother. “You should have asked
me,” he said. “I would have told you to forget about Lori Ballinger.”
Jacob shrugged again.

 

The route was all familiar—gray sidewalks and driveways, green
rectangles of lawns, cars, bicycles, houses, and trees. The familiar
streets. He and Jacob could name nearly every family as they passed.
The O’Haras’ house, the Krafts’, the DeLucas’, Levines’, Persichettis’.
They’d been in most of their kitchens or front hallways, they’d
collected paper-route payments or candy on Halloween, gotten glasses
of water or Kool-Aid from them on hot

 

summer days. As he walked beside his brother, Michael’s recollection
of those days made them all seem soft-focused and gentle, an easy
roundness about things that had since given way to something
thinner, something grown sharper in a threadbare sort of way. Maybe
it was the clean-edged aluminum siding that had replaced the aging
shingles on most of the homes, or the sleeker cars, or the sun catching
the chrome on Tony Persichetti’s motorcycle in the driveway, where he
once would have left his bike. Maybe it was just the sense of it coming
to an end, his time in this place, his childhood. Maybe it was that the
place had worn thin only for him, that he was already worn out with
waiting to leave it and get on.

 

He said to his brother, “I can’t wait to get out of here. One more
year.” He said, “I don’t know how you can stand it, not going away.”
Jacob shrugged again. His father had told him: “I can pay for
private-school tuition, or I can pay your room and board. I can’t do
both. There are four of you to put through college.”

 

“I don’t mind,” he said.

 

Michael looked at him again. Someone, some girl, had told him
once, “Your brother’s nice.” And then added, as if it pained her, “Too
nice, if you know what I mean.” He hadn’t, not exactly. He thought
again of Lori Ballinger. Jacob had made a plan and worked up the
courage and called her and asked her to the prom and she had shot
him down and through it all, he’d never said a word. About any of it.
Through it all, he’d pulled his blankets up over his shoulder and faced
the wall. Michael would hear him sometimes, the mattress, the deep
sighs. No doubt Jacob heard him, too, when his turn came. Tempting
as it had been to say, across the short space between their beds—“Are
you jacking off?” “Are you crying?”—Michael never had. Not out of
any kindness, he knew, but in exchange for future consideration, when
the agitation under the covers, the tears, would be his.

 

“I think the new church is bullshit,” Michael said. He had only
the slightest hankering, like the first hint of hunger, to start a fight.
Jacob shrugged again. “The other one was falling down.”
“They could have fixed it,” Michael said. “Instead of spending all
that money.”

 

Jacob said nothing. They were almost home. The Rosenbergs’
house, the Lavins’. “Putting the screws to guys like Dad,” Michael
said. “Making them cough up the dough to make McShane look good.
It’s bullshit.”

 

“You gotta have a church,” Jacob said.

 

“Why?” Michael asked. The MacLeod house, him with the
musical aspirations and the Orange Crush hair. Michael was certain
that if Jacob had told him what he was thinking, he would have said,
There’s no way you can go with Lori Ballinger, give it up. He would
have saved him from whatever it was he had felt when she said, No, I
can’t. “Why do you have to have a church?” More belligerent than he’d
intended.

 

Behind them, they could hear Clare calling, jokingly, “Oh, boys.”
She was hanging out the window of the car. The car was slowing
down, passing them. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving her headband
toward them. In the front seat, their mother and father were laughing.
They both waved back. The car swung into the driveway ahead of
them.

 

“People need a place to go,” Jacob said.

 

“Why?” Michael asked again. “What for?” And when Jacob
shrugged, but smiling this time, as if he knew they both knew the
answer, Michael said, once more, “It’s bullshit.”
J
OHN KEANE LAY IN BED
and held a running argument with the pain. It
was a terse, dismissive argument, the kind he might have with some
idiot shop clerk or dishonest mechanic, the kind of hopeless, useless,
beneath-your-dignity argument that you know you should walk away

from but don’t. Can’t. Raising your eyebrows at any bystander or
eavesdropper as if to say, Can you believe this idiot? Can you believe
I’m bothering to talk to him?

The boys, before they left for their summer jobs—Jacob was
cutting lawns again this summer, Michael caddying by day and
pumping gas at night—had knocked together a number of two-byfours and, following his instructions, had rigged it with a pulley and a
rope. They had then wrapped the rope around one of his old, paintspattered army boots, across the instep and up through the laces, and
weighed the other end with a dictionary and half a dozen volumes of
their grocery-store encyclopedia. Following his instructions (they were
good kids, both of them), they had slipped the boot over his right
sock, adjusting the whole contraption until his leg was pulled taut,
nearly suspended over the damp mattress, and the pain that had
woken him two nights ago, all unbidden and unaccountable, met its
match with this new pain—a disciplined, intentional pain—intended
to be the cure.

Michael had hesitated at the bedroom door. This was at about
eightfifteen this morning, Mary downstairs getting the rest of them
out of the house. If anyone was going to say this two-bit attempt at
traction was an eccentric, half-assed scheme, it would be Michael the
wise guy. But Michael merely waved his arm—a long, thin arm,
softened, nearly blurred by the fair hair that covered it—and said,
“Take care.”

He had lifted his own arm, the mold from which the other had
been formed, and said, “Sure I will.”

 

He had a bottle of aspirin by the bedside, a cold cup of tea, a tube
of Ben-Gay, even, his wife’s idea, a tumbler of scotch, but he resisted
resorting to any of them just yet. Yesterday, the boys had moved the
portable TV into his room, close enough so he could reach the dial and
the antenna (another jerry-rigged affair with rabbit ears and a coat
hanger and aluminum foil), but he resisted that as well. The house
was empty now—the boys at their jobs and his wife and the two girls
off to a matinee in the city—and silent but for the whir of the fan on
the dresser, which by now had become a part of the silence as well.
This was the beginning of his second day of sick leave, the first two he
had taken in more than twenty years, and he didn’t like the vertigo he
felt at this sudden suspension of his routine any better today than he
had yesterday. (He raised his chin at the army boot, at the pale blue
pant leg of his pajamas: I don’t like it.)

 

It wasn’t that he was a company man, he was happy enough to
use up his three weeks of vacation time every year—one week to work
around the house in the spring, two in summer to take the kids to the
shore. He was just mostly healthy, and found a couple of aspirin or a
cold tablet taken in the morning far preferable to the silence and
boredom of a sickroom. And he didn’t like doctors. Mary Keane rolled
her eyes every time she heard him say it. She understood that what he
didn’t like about doctors had less to do with what he called their
arrogance and more to do with the diplomas on the

 

wall, the golf-course tans—the disadvantage, the particular kind of
humiliation a man with four children making fifteen thousand a year
endured while sitting with his bare legs dangling, those missing toes,
in his boxer shorts and T-shirt before a diplomaed man in a good suit
who had been to Columbia University or Cornell. Once a year, he went
downtown for his company physical and every year he got a clean bill
of health—as had (he was quick to point out) his brother Frank two
weeks before he died, which told you something about doctors.

 

He was convinced anyway that lingering illness and curable, or
incurable, disease was not likely to get him. His end, when it came, he
was certain, would be swift and unavoidable. The black coach. The
sudden fall. Like Frank’s.

 

He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, palms pressed to the
mattress to ease the pressure on his tailbone. He moved his foot
inside the boot. This morning, when he had shown the boys the
sketch he had drawn during the sleepless night, Michael had muttered,
“It looks like a guillotine. Or the rack.” He had raised an eyebrow and
flicked an imaginary cigarette and said in a squinting, lip-curling
German accent, “Foolish man, ve have other vays to make you talk.”
But Jacob, who if he had been another kind of oldest child might have
had the courage to dissuade his father, to point out that they were not
setting a broken limb, that this was not the Wild West and it was high
time a doctor be consulted, said simply, “Dad thinks it will help,” and
then led Michael to the basement where there was still a small,
leftover pile of two-by-fours tucked away in the furnace room.

 

It might have been more fitting for them to have rebelled, and he
suspected that were he a younger man, a younger father, they would
have. But the solemnity with which the two of them had come, one
after the other, into his bedroom yesterday morning revealed
something. Here he was out sick for the first time in more than twenty
years and here they were standing over him, dumbstruck and wary,
their fear of his dying sprung into their faces as if from the very
moment their mother had awakened them with the news that
sometime during the night, something had gone wrong with Daddy’s
leg. He suspected that they followed his instructions for the weights
and the pulley and the contraption that was to support it not so much
to humor him in his pain but to coax themselves into believing that he
was still in charge, that they were still under his care.

 

And then the sound of them pounding the wood reached him
from the basement, and it was all he could do to cast aside as utter
nonsense his own morbid thoughts regarding coffins and crucifixes. It
was only a bum leg, after all. Sprung on him in the middle of the
night.

 

He stirred again against the mattress, tilted his head back against
the mahogany headboard. He tried to gauge the movement of the
sunlight across the white ceiling. There were the blue shadows cast by
the valances of his wife’s curtains, the reflection of light in the mirror
above her dresser, in the glass of the children’s school photographs, in
the blank face of the TV. The pain stretched its own legs for a few
seconds, reached up over his thigh and across his back and into his
chest and arms. In response, he moved the toe of the boot, then bent
his knee to lift the weight of the books that pulled against it, matching
pain for pain, the unbidden with the intentional, in some vague theory
that the one would defeat the other, that the one was preferable to the
other. When he reached for the aspirin on the bed stand, he saw that
his hand was trembling and he whispered a quick “Son of a bitch.” It
was an ongoing and unwinnable argument with an idiot.