After This (25 page)

 

appeared on his knee, not yet sixteen when the cancer killed him. His

 

brother, home in his uniform for the funeral, head shorn, stoical,

 

refusing all entreaties to claim hardship leave (or was it, she

 

wondered, heartsick?), to request transfer, to desert, to flee. He was

 

back in the States now, somewhere down south, safe again. But what

 

had it cost his mother while

 

he was away? And what comfort could there be in supposing that the
one loss saved her from the second?

 

Jake from Philadelphia, nineteen or twenty at his short war, and
her husband—having already gained the luxury of thirtyfive years—
making his unspoken promise to the boy. But what did it portend: Was
it a blessing or a bad omen? Had they gained their son a guardian
angel or the bitter irony of a repeated fate?

 

Pauline at dinner that Sunday said, “I light a candle at St. Patrick’s
every day. For Jacob. Just like we did during the war.”

 

On the table beside Pauline’s plate was the glass with the dregs of
her third Manhattan. (Too many by two, Mary Keane had told her
husband in the kitchen when he came out to carve the roast, but, he
said, he had asked and she had accepted, what more could he do?)
Only one of the three round slices of meat he had put on her plate had
been disturbed. She had merely run her fork through the turnips,
although Mary had prepared them precisely for her. Daintily, she’d
taken only small tastes of mashed potatoes throughout the meal,
although she’d also kept an eye on Clare’s plate, as was her habit,
urging her to finish her corn and take some more gravy and put more
butter on that roll. “Okay,” the girl responded, simply, pleasantly. How
old had she been when she’d discovered the knack of dealing with
Pauline, her mother wondered. Or had she been born with the
knowledge? Annie, on the other hand, got through every meal with
Pauline in a slow burn.

 

“A n n i e ’ s n o t o n e f o r finishing her milk these days,” Pauline
declared, her fingers touching the stem of her cocktail glass. “Is she
worried about her figure?”

 

“No she’s not,” Annie said. “She’s just knows when she’s had
enough.” And suffered for her rudeness her parents’ grim looks across
the Sunday lace tablecloth. Now that both her brothers were gone
from the house, Pauline’s presence at dinner made Annie think of
them all, her father included, as old maids.

 

“All the girls her age are constantly dieting,” Mary said pleasantly,
to show her elder daughter how it should be done. “They can’t be too
skinny.”

 

At the door that evening as Pauline got into her fur-collared coat
there was the usual back and forth about how she could easily get
herself home and how it was no trouble at all for John to take her—
ending, as it usually did, with the compromise of a lift to the bus stop,
at least, but only if Clare could come along.

 

In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her
perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else—the
good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered diningroom chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to
herself, “the odor of aging female flesh,” and found some recompense
in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner.

 

Her mother, in the kitchen with the dishes, understood that the
question that made her stand stock-still, the water running over her
hands, rose out of her sudden solitude, out of the momentarily
silenced house, the midwinter darkness at the window over the sink.
She understood—since she had had these moments a dozen times at
least since Jacob went over—that there was no premonition in it, only
a sudden surfacing of what was, of course, a constant fear: What was
he doing right now, as she rinsed out the good crystal in the sink,
wearing the blouse she’d worn to Mass this morning, although she’d
put on slacks before dinner, the house silent around her, the boys’
room empty above her, Annie reading, Clare in the car with her
husband and Pauline, what was Jacob doing right now, on the other
side of the world (world without grace, without fair measure, without
evenhandedness, as far as she could tell)? What was he doing, her
firstborn, her mildest child, and did he need her?

 

Had they wrested from that stranger, the other Jacob, a blessing
for their son, or was it all sentimentality and superstition on her
husband’s part—that blood-borne fascination with the dead—that had
made him tell her on that first day of her life as a mother, It’s just
something I’d like to do? Did the fates howl with laughter at the irony
of it all or had some good fortune been secured?

 

She took Pauline’s empty glass from the counter beside her and
dipped it in the soapy water and resolved to think instead (it was how
she would get through Jacob’s time in Vietnam) of what could
possibly have been better, given all the occasions of her life, than that
morning in the hospital with little Jacob in her arms. Our baby grand.
The thrill and disbelief of finding herself a mother. Even recalling it
now, she could vaguely smell the ether in the air, the particular sweet
odor of a newborn’s scalp. And then Michael and Annie and little
Clare’s breathless entrance into the world. Mr. Persichetti’s strong
arms.

 

But one moment nudges the other out of the way. It was
something to regret. It was something to be grateful for. She rinsed
the glass and placed it with the others in the dish drainer. On the windowsill above the sink was the small replica of the
Pieta
in its clear
plastic dome—Annie’s Christmas gift to her the year they had seen it.
She dried her hands, turned to gather the plates from the kitchen
table. There was enough of the roast for the girls’ sandwiches
tomorrow. Pauline had been garrulous tonight—the three drinks had
done it. She was no thinner than she used to be, but age was making
her gaunt, hollowing her cheeks, darkening the circles under her eyes.
Mary Keane carried the dishes to the sink. Upstairs, Annie turned a
page. Across the hall, her brothers’ room was empty. On the
boulevard, the bus behind them lit the rearview mirror above Clare’s
head. Pauline presented her cheek to the girl for a kiss and then held
up her gloved hand and told John Keane to stay where he was, she
could open her own door, thank you.

 

There were seven people on the bus, all sitting separately, most of
them leaning against windows, a few clasping, straight-armed,
the back of the seat in front, none of them white. The light inside was
a stale and ugly light, too bright, given how dark it was outside.
Pauline knew it wasn’t kind to her face, this light, that it lit the fine
hairs on her cheek and chin and the powder that clung to them.
Turning to the black window, she saw her own reflection more clearly
than the neon signs and streetlights they were passing by. She looked
older than she believed herself to be.

 

But how Clare’s skin glowed, and how pleased she had been with
the gifts Pauline had brought her today. Even Annie had seemed
pleased with the loopy earrings that were certainly not to Pauline’s
taste, but that the girl at Lord & Taylor had said were just right for
teenagers. (“Something for my niece,” Pauline had said, a little white
lie that she had been telling salesclerks and strangers for so long now,
she no longer noticed it herself, or questioned its meaning. Something
for my little niece, for my nephew in college, for my sister’s boy in
Vietnam.) She was a black girl, the one behind the counter at Lord &
Taylor—which wasn’t as nice as it used to be—and Pauline had asked
for her advice in defiance of her own expectation that the girl wouldn’t
know anything, would most likely respond with a dumb or indignant
look, as if puzzled by Pauline’s strange notion that the people behind
the counter were supposed to help the people on the other side. (Or
so she had put it at dinner tonight, telling the story.) But it turned out
the girl was actually quite gracious, looked something like Leslie
Uggams, and so added to the pleasure of the nice conversation they’d
had (“Something for my niece. A teenager”), and to the satisfaction
that Annie had indeed approved of the gift, was the nice story she was
able to make out of it all at the dinner table tonight, one that led to all
kinds of reminiscence about how gracious salesclerks used to be and
remember when you could just say, I think I’ll have it sent?
Beyond the black glass of the window beside her, Pauline saw the
blurred strips of neon signs, the dulled nightlights of shuttered
storefronts, many of them with black grates across their windows and
doors. Nighttime had a different color now, on this familiar route from
Nassau to Queens, different from what it had had years ago when
streetlights burned a soft yellow, and you could—hadn’t they said it at
dinner tonight—feel safe riding the subway at any hour. That was over
now. There was a drunk at the back of the bus, muttering angrily to
himself. There was a fat Spanish woman nodding to sleep across the
aisle. The familiar world was slowly being overrun by strangers. The
smell of odd spices drifted into her apartment at all hours now, even
clung to her clothes. Courtesy—a man holding a door for you, tipping
a hat—was long gone. You could not take it for granted that anyone
spoke English.

 

When she changed at Jamaica, the second bus was empty, its door
left open, its engine idling. She sat on it alone for ten minutes, chilled,
headachy from the diesel fuel, before she got off to ask the dispatcher
if the driver was going to come. “He’s coming,” the man said, waving
her away. When she returned to the bus, there were two people sitting
in the front and she said to them, with great dignity, “I’ve already
waited here twenty minutes and there’s no sign of a driver.” They
looked at her impassively—a black woman and a young black man—
and then looked over her shoulder to the driver, also black, who was
swinging up the stairs. He ducked into his seat and as she turned to
hand him her transfer he took his time stowing his things, adjusting
his mirrors, taking off his gloves, and then he sat for a second more
with both hands on his thighs, staring straight ahead. She had to say,
“Here,” and thrust the paper at him. He took it disdainfully, not
turning to meet her eye. The other two passengers got up to hand him
theirs and he said thank you to both of them. They passed her, going
back to their seats, the boy smirking, like good students turning up
their noses at the one who had just gotten the reprimand. She was
alone here. Middle-aged, aging, a woman alone, making her way
between her few safe havens—the

 

Keanes’ house, her office, her own apartment—through the ugly,
amber-colored night.

 

She sat down at the far end of the first long seat, her back to the
window, her gloved hand on the silver pole. The air of the bus was still
chilled from the door being left open so long. Because the door had
been left open for so long, the air inside smelled strongly of diesel
fuel. She sat forward, on the edge of the molded plastic and leaned
down as he made a wide turn out of the terminal. And then another.
Although she knew this route as well as any, she suddenly found
herself disoriented and she looked out the far window and then over
her shoulder and then heard herself say, shouting at him over the
wheeze of the bus, “Don’t you go down Jamaica Avenue?”
He may have said, “Yeah,” his arms moving in wide arcs over the
big wheel. He might have said nothing at all. She waited, leaning
down to see where they were. Once she recognized something,
anything, she would sit back and say, pleasantly enough, “Oh, I’m all
turned around,” and the black lady on the other side might say,
“Happens to me all the time.” Or the driver might say, “I just made a
wrong turn,” apologizing. “We’re back on track now.” But this was no
longer the route she knew (they should have passed a Bohack’s by
now) and when she asked him, somewhat alarmed, “Is this the Q54?”
his answer was once again garbled. She looked to the woman across
the aisle, who said, “Huhn huhn,” which she hoped meant yes but
could have meant she didn’t know. “I don’t know what ‘huhn huhn’
means,” she said, out loud, but not, she was certain, loud enough for
the woman to hear. She looked out again, over her shoulder, and then
reached up for the buzzer over her head, fumbling for it with her
glove. She stood. “He doesn’t know where he’s going,” she said. She
was sick to her stomach from the time she had waited in the cold, and
the diesel odor had made her dizzy. She reached for the pole by the
door. “You’re not going the right way,” she told him, shouting to be
heard over the engine, “I’m getting

 

off.” There was another wide turn, she held on, leaning down now to
look through the glass in the door. Where were they? “You’d better let
me off,” she said. And in the same moment that she saw the familiar
storefront of Green Point Savings go by (and perhaps, recognizing it,
relaxed her grip a bit) the bus swung into the curb and the driver
pulled the doors open and she felt herself thrown forward and her
feet, moving to regain her balance, stepped instead into the well of the
stairs. She cried out, lunged forward, missed the handrail and then felt
herself collapse, giving in to the fall, the harsh bang of the rubber
tread against her hip, against her thighs, her good coat and good skirt,
surprised herself at all the noise she made, against the fiberglass and
the steel and the
oof of
her heavy flesh, her arm and her shoulder and
her face against the curb. Blind pain, and then there was the feel of the
cold air against her stockings, against the bare flesh at the top of her
thighs. She struggled to pull down her hem, to cover herself but her
arm was pinned, her body immobile. She was aware of voices, none of
them urgent, it seemed. Spanish, perhaps laughter, strangers
conferring above her in what she hoped was a dream. She would have
cried out, if she could. There was dirt in her mouth and the taste of
blood. And then a hand, soft and large, calloused, or perhaps it was a
glove, touching the good wool of her skirt, pulling its warmth down
over her bare legs.