After This (16 page)

 

And yet it was an argument he could not resist.

 

He swallowed the aspirin without water, tossing them one at a
time into the back of his throat, the second one catching on his
tongue. What he was hoping to put off for as long as possible was
the inevitable slipping out of the boot and off the bed, the awkward,
gimping trip across the hallway to the bathroom.

 

There was an old hockey stick on the other side of the bed,
another basement resource the boys had fetched for him, meant to
serve as a crutch, although using it had made him feel like some Old
Testament prophet leaning on his staff.

 

“Like Charlton Heston,” Michael had said from the doorway of
his own bedroom last night. It seemed to John Keane that over the
past two days, one or the other of his sons was always lounging
casually in the doorway whenever he got himself up and hauled
himself across the hall to the bathroom. Had he been a younger father,
they might have simply thrown him over a shoulder and carried him
across.

 

He lifted his hand to wipe the perspiration from his lip, raised and
lowered his good leg and then slipped both hands under the thigh of
the bad one and slowly raised it until he could feel again the weight
pulling against his foot.

 

And then the pain again, wire thin this time, through his leg and
into his gut and reaching up to hook the corners of his mouth.

 

He turned his head, waiting for it to pass. The fan on the dresser
was humming, though it offered no breeze. The Saran-wrapped
sandwich and the pile of magazines his wife had left for him on her
side of the bed, the damp bedsheets themselves, gave off a nauseating
yellow sheen and in his impatience with it, with the pain itself, he
pulled at the leg again.

 

The pain answered in kind.

 

It was a ridiculous argument. A stupid fight. And yet, he raised
his chin defiantly at the speckled boot. There were white dots of paint
from the living room, bits of pale green from when he had done the
boys’ room, pale pink from the year Clare was born. Other colors, no
doubt, were he to examine it more closely, two decades’ worth of
housekeeping chores done in these boots, paint-

 

ing and gardening and leaf raking, the very peacetime pursuits the
army, in giving them to him, had sought to insure. Pursuits that the
pain, on this hot still morning, now easily reduced to foolishness. He
had wasted his life with painting and gardening and leaf raking. He
had squandered his time.

 

With his hand under his thigh, he lifted his leg again. The pulley
squeaked a little, slowly turning. Foolish man, Michael had said. Ve
have other ways. Well, no, not squandered. There were his children,
after all.

 

In the mirror above his wife’s dresser, he could see the reflection
of the crucifix that hung over their bed, the tiny gold Christ curled
against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because
behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret
compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the
accoutrements of Last Rites. It had been a gift from the priest who
married them, a reminder, no doubt, that their marriage bed might
also be the bed in which they would breathe their last. It had not been
difficult for them, bred-in-the-bone Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at
the beginning of their lives together, to imagine the final scene: the
candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on
his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at
his bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring
him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving.
Certainly, they had said till death do us part, but it wasn’t until they’d
opened the priest’s present (he recalled the wrappings of the other
gifts spread across the living room of her father’s apartment, her
pretty beige going-away suit, the nervous anticipation he had felt,
opening a few packages while they waited for the cab that was to take
them to the city) that the scene became vivid for them both—the
crucifix spread apart, the thin white tapers lit, the dim room where he
would breathe his last.

 

It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had
clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street,
already gone.

 

He lowered the leg again, heard the pile of thick books, tied
together like a schoolboy’s satchel, hit the floor. Pain such as this had
a tendency to reduce everything, every effort, every belief, to brittle
plastic, easily shattered. It could shatter the notion of Paradise opened
by a single, wracked body hung on a cross. It could shatter any hope
you had that you were worth more than the bustling of your ordinary
days. It could remind you easily enough that death was no more or
less than the choke and sputter of a single muscle, the sudden
exposure of gut and bone, your skin turned black in the cold.

 

If you didn’t argue against it, the idiot pain, the very things you’d
based your life on could shatter.

 

His eyes went from the reflected crucifix to the blank gray face of
the television. He could make out his own reflection there, sitting up
against the headboard. His chest and shoulders in his pale pajamas,
his bald head, his face, which in the reflected shadow and distorted
sunlight caught by the blank screen, was suddenly the face of his
brother.

 

It had happened before: one of his sons would be talking in
another room and he’d hear, for a moment, Frank’s laughter. His niece
once raised a hand, turned her head, and it was Frank’s gesture. He
would raise his own chin shaving and there he’d see his brother,
briefly, briefly.

 

Even now his own reflection in the blank gray face of the TV set
had become simply his own again, too bald, too gaunt for Frank. But
the glimpse, nevertheless, had been well timed, and as if to
acknowledge it, small gift that it was, he pulled at the leg again. He
held his breath again as the pain flared. No realistic person expected a
fullfledged visitation, or even hoped for one—it was, surely,
what they meant when they said “laid to rest”—but still there were
tricks of the eye or of the mind that could satisfy even someone like
himself, who, steeped in superstition as a child, had long ago learned
to resist it. Surely there were assurances, even for the most reasonable
of believers, that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would
trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day. Frank’s face,
glimpsed briefly, assuring him, his own heart, his spirits, rising at the
mere possibility of once again seeing his brother’s face.

 

He recalled that all the pain of that rainy day—the endless Mass at
Incarnation, the traffic-choked ride to the cemetery—had been for
Catherine, Frank’s daughter. All the dignity, resignation, joyful hope of
resurrection the rest of them had mustered, as one must, to get
through the day, undermined by the poor girl’s tears. She cried a
torrent through it all. Thin as a willow in her dark sweater and skirt,
bent over in the pew or under her mother’s arm at the cemetery. A
scrap of tissue in her hands and the pale red hair falling over her face.
Too young to be so wracked by grief. Too pretty, too newly formed to
know that particular kind of disappointment. Afterward, back at the
house, he had knelt beside her chair and said, “Your father will be
with you for the rest of your days,” and she, nineteen at the time, had
looked at him with her red eyes and said, “I’ll never stop missing
him.”

 

Six months later, when he gave her his arm on the day she was
married, he felt himself a poor substitute, although she had whispered
her gratitude, leaving the scent of her lipstick on his cheek and his ear.
She had married a kid from Greenwich, a wealthy boy who had a seat
on the Stock Exchange now. They lived in Garden City and had refused
so many invitations, to Clare’s christening party, to her first Holy
Communion, to confirmations and graduations, even to a few odd
Sunday suppers, that he and Mary had sim

 

ply stopped asking. “She moves in different circles now,” Ellen,
Frank’s wife, had said, with more pride than disappointment, although
many of her invitations were also refused.

 

Last he saw her, just last year, he was waiting for his wife and the
girls outside A&S when Catherine, in a beige Cadillac, pulled into the
parking space beside him. It took him a moment to recognize her, and
she was out of her car by the time he waved at her through his own
passenger window. Then he opened his door to get out and greet her.
But she was already walking away, her head down. There was another
woman with her and she was the one who glanced over her shoulder
when he called. But neither one of them paused.

 

He looked again at his reflection in the TV set. You’ll be pleased
to know that she drives a Cadillac. That she’s doing quite well, her
own daughter growing, Ellen tells me. A big house in Garden City. I
can’t say that it didn’t cut me like a knife, Frank, standing in that
parking lot. I can’t say that I didn’t see some of it in you, while you
were here, with your own Cadillacs every other year, your Chivas
Regal and your fancy beer, a certain fascination, when we were kids,
with the society page.

 

He lifted the leg again. The pain, he realized, was constant, there
was only the illusion of ebb and flow.

 

His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the
mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the
gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first
hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with our relatives.

 

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

 

He pulled at the leg again—it was only stubborness that made
him continue to believe that what he was doing was therapeutic.
A
T NOON MARY CALLED
from the city. They had met Pauline at Penn
Station and now they were having lunch at Schrafft’s before the
show. It was hotter than heck. They were looking forward to getting
into the cool theater.

 

And then, with (he would have said) much hemming and hawing,
she asked him cautiously (she was building up to something) how he
was feeling, if he’d gotten any sleep, if he could eat—and, finally, if his
contraption was doing him any good.

 

He said, Yes it was, believe it or not, and he knew immediately
that the lie had taken the wind out of her sails.

 

Still, she said, “Pauline says it’s a slipped disk.”

 

“Pauline’s the expert, then,” he said.

 

Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience,
recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry—the kind of concoction
only a long marriage can brew. Rising behind it was the faint clatter of
dishes, the hum of restaurant conversation.

 

“No,” she said finally. “But a gal from the office had a brother-inlaw with the same problem. Just woke up one morning with a terrible
pain. Down his leg. A slipped disk.”

 

His wife would replace the natural laws with anecdotes. No
gravity until someone’s sister’s cousin’s husband had fallen down the
stairs. Night and day mere rumor until a girl she used to know
in high school was stricken with insomnia, or burned to a crisp by the
sun.

 

“Is that so?” he said placidly. “Same exact thing?”

 

“Yeah,” she said, with some hesitation. “More or less. You know,
his leg.”

 

The line clicked to say their three minutes were up and instead of
getting off, she said, “Hold on,” and dropped another dime into the
phone.

 

“Right or left?” he asked when the coin had been swallowed.
“What?” she said.

 

And he repeated more emphatically, “Was it the right leg or the
left leg? Of this fellow just like me?”

 

She paused and then said, “Very funny,” to show that it wasn’t.
“Pauline read an article about it,” she said. “It happens to a lot of men.
It’s evolution. It’s the price men pay for standing upright.”
Pauline, he thought, would be happy to learn that there is a price
men pay for standing upright.

 

“Tomorrow I’m calling the doctor,” she went on, the very reason
she had dropped the second dime into the machine. He could see her
do her little “so there” nod. There, I said it.

 

“What are you going to call him?” he asked her.

 

When she hung up the phone he could hear her say “Stubborn”
before the receiver hit the cradle. He could not be sure if she was
speaking to herself or to Pauline, or perhaps to the two girls, who
would also nod. Maybe only to a waiter, clattering dishes.
An hour later, Jacob returned, banging into the house as he
tended to do, always sounding like a drunk on a stage set. He moved
around the kitchen a bit, clink of glass and clatter of silverware and
slam and then slam again of the refrigerator door. When he poked his
head around the doorway of the bedroom, he had half a sandwich in
his cheek, the other half, dripping mustard and pickle relish, cupped
like a small creature in his hands.

 

“How are you doing, Dad?” he asked, stretching his throat to get
the food swallowed as he spoke. John Keane could not help but
wonder how many years would have to go by before it would occur to
his son that maybe he should have come up and asked after his father
before he made the sandwich.

 

“Better,” he said.

 

And then Jacob began nodding, that long, low, exaggerated nod
that he and his friends so often substituted for speech. “The thing’s
working, then,” he said.

 

His father shrugged. “Seems to be.”

 

“Good enough,” Jacob said, still nodding. He was not quite
meeting his father’s eye. “You want me to put the TV on for you?”
Although it was within easy reach and the last thing he wanted,
he said, “Sure. That’d be great.”