After This (27 page)

 

“Behaving yourself?” Mr. Persichetti asked. And the boy drew out
a long, “Yes, yes.”

 

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Mr. Persichetti said sarcastically. He looked
up at the orderly and winked, and then at Mary Keane, as if they were
all in on some joke the young man would never understand. For a
moment, she thought this cruel, or just childish, on Mr. Persichetti’s
part, but as the elevator rose again, she saw how he kept the boy’s
hand in his, clasping it between both of his own, and then, briefly,
tightening his grip before letting go when the doors opened again.
Alone with him once more, she said, “I don’t know how you do what
you do.” But Mr. Persichetti only shrugged. “Oh, Larry’s a piece of
work,” he said, refusing her the larger meaning.

 

The hallway on Pauline’s floor was no worse and no better than
Mary Keane had imagined it would be. There were all the usual
hospital smells, food and urine and disinfectant, along with the smell
of the old building itself, a subway smell of dust and metal.
Some of the patients were in the hall, tied into wheelchairs. Old
women, mostly, or so it seemed, hair streaming and yellowing eyes,
glimpses, here and there, of bruised flesh under the limp white and
speckled blue of the hospital gowns. “Hello,” one or two of them said
as they passed by, Mr. Persichetti with his hand on her elbow. One or
two of them called out a name. Mary Keane tried to smile at them all.
“Hello,” she said, passing by. “How are you?” A lifetime of
friendliness. A shout went up briefly, from one of the rooms, and then
a low moaning. At the end of the hall there was a dull window of
either smoked glass or grime, black wire inside its frame, and she had
a moment of utter disorientation because although she knew they
were on an upper floor, that the elevator they had just ridden had
risen, she believed, for just a moment (perhaps it was the subway
smell of the old tile walls), that they were underground.

 

Mr. Persichetti stopped briefly at the nurse’s station—she was
glad for his hand on her arm—and then he led her down another
corridor. She had some guilt that she had not visited Pauline before,
not since the night she fell, that Pauline had been alone all these
weeks in this place. But she knew too that she could not have done it,
in the midst of all that these weeks had held. In this corridor, another
woman, her dark skin stretched thinly over her bones, sat in a
wheelchair with her head bent into one hand and her long fingers held
up over her face, touching her eyes and her mouth. Her other hand, in
her lap, was white-palmed, empty. She was the weary image of every
sorrow women knew. Seeing her, Mary Keane felt herself absolved, at
least briefly, of all she had neglected in these past weeks. Were she to
bend down and speak to this woman she would say, “I have buried my
child.” She would ask, “And you?”

 

“Here we are,” Mr. Persichetti said, and with his hand on her arm
guided her into Pauline’s room. She was in a chair by another opaque
window, crossed with wire. Her hair was longer than she usually kept
it, swept back from her face and showing a good line of

 

gray roots, but she looked well, even younger, perhaps—Mary was
surprised to see it—than she had that last night at dinner. It might
have been that she was more rested, or better fed. It might have been
that she was no longer drinking (psychosis brought on by depression
and alcoholism, was what they had said), although never in a million
years would she have guessed that the drinking was a problem. It
might simply have been, Mary Keane was suddenly sure it was true,
that Pauline looked better without her makeup. Her complexion, she
had always been glad to point out (usually just after Mary had
complained about her own), had always been good.

 

She crossed the room and kissed Pauline on the cheek. There was
only the hospital bracelet on her wrist. Not a hint of the broken nose.
Or the shock treatment. “You look good,” she told her and Pauline
said, as she might of old, “What’s new?”

 

Mary found herself speaking more loudly than she wanted to, the
way you spoke, mostly inadvertently, to an invalid or a child. “We’re
going to bring you back to our house, Pauline,” she said, leaning down
to her in the chair. “You’re going to stay with us for a while.” Pauline
nodded. Mary was surprised to see her fur-collared coat was laid out
on the bed. Pauline was dressed in the clothes they had picked up for
her when they emptied out her apartment, gray pants and a pale blue
sweater, although someone had given her an old white cardigan as
well, oversize and somewhat pilly. The only indication, perhaps, that
Pauline had been changed.

 

“I know,” Pauline said. She looked to Mr. Persichetti, standing at
the door. “Sam told me all about it.”

 

Mary turned to look at him over her shoulder. He shrugged, his
hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. “Oh, I’ve been stopping by,”
he said. “Checking up on her. Seeing how she’s been doing.” He
looked at Mary Keane. “Being the mayor and all,” he said. And then he
added softly, “I knew you had your mind on other things.”

 

“That was good of you,” she said, and wanted to say more,
but the floor nurse was bustling in with the wheelchair, shouting
instructions, pulling prescriptions from her smock, referring to
Pauline in the third person. Mr. Persichetti pushed the wheelchair
back to the elevator, Pauline staring straight ahead as they passed
through each corridor. “Goodbye,” Mary Keane said to the women who
spoke to them. “Take care.” Pausing for a moment when a shuffling
old woman suddenly clasped her hand, holding it between her own as
Mr. Persichetti had done for the boy on the elevator. This woman was
no older than she. Her blue eyes seemed to race back and forth across
Mary Keane’s face as she told a nonsense tale—my sista, was all she
could get, my motha, my sista—that grew more urgent as it grew more
incomprehensible. The floor nurse stepped between them. “That’s
enough, now, Marion,” she shouted. Mary Keane said, walking on, “I’ll
pray for you.” The name of Saint Dymphna came to mind.

 

In the elevator, she resisted the memories the whiff of hospital
food and of ether wanted to bring. She had been a patient herself only
when her children were born, a visitor most recently when Michael
had his tonsils out and Jacob had appendicitis and her husband had
the surgery for the slipped disk. When her children were born, she
recalled, they had marked each homecoming with a bakery cake, thick
with sweet icing, and she felt some guilt again that she hadn’t thought
to have anything special at home for Pauline.

 

When they were settled into John Keane’s car, she and Pauline in
the backseat, the two men once again up front, Pauline said, “This is
very nice of you,” and crossed her hands in her lap. In the pale light of
day, she now seemed older without her makeup, with that sad line of
gray along her temples and her forehead. Mary planned a trip to the
beautician for both of them, lunch afterward, somewhere nice, a stroll
through A&S. As the car pulled away and into the street, Pauline
suddenly sat up, something brief and childlike in her eyes, a spark of
fear or confusion. And then, haltingly,

 

she sat back again. She turned to Mary. “That raincoat doesn’t suit
you,” she said. “You’re not good in black.”

 

Mary only smiled.

 

“You’ve lost weight, too,” Pauline said. It wasn’t a compliment.

 

At the house, John Keane gave Pauline his arm to help her up the
steps. They paused in the hallway and he took her coat and hung it in
the closet, as if this were just another one of her visits and the world
hadn’t altered utterly since last she was here.

 

They had lunch in the kitchen, the three of them, and then John
went to work and Mary walked Pauline upstairs. The last time she had
slept in this house, when Clare was born, she had been given Annie’s
room, but now they made a right at the landing. She was to stay in the
boys’ room instead. It was nice enough, a little chilly after the
overheated rooms of the hospital. Mary pulled open the drawers of the
oak dresser the boys had once shared. She had lined them with floral
paper and arranged all of Pauline’s underclothes and nightgowns and
sweaters inside. She had brought her jewelry box, her gloves, her
drawerful of saved
Playbills
and greeting cards.

 

John Keane had arranged with Pauline’s landlord that the
apartment be sublet, for a year. Just, Mary told her, until Pauline was
back on her feet. He had spoken to her company, too, and an early
retirement for medical reasons would assure her of most of her
pension. Pauline nodded. Her coats and her dresses, her dressing
gowns and her good skirts were hanging in the boys’ closet. “You’ve
been busy,” Pauline said, not—Mary glanced at her—exactly
approvingly.

 

“You’ve been sick,” Mary said, gently. “That fall . . .” and would
have said more, but Pauline held up her hand and said, “I know all
about it.” And then added, with a tremor to her jaw. “I know where
I’ve been.”

 

Mary Keane touched her throat. “And do you know,” she asked,
“what we’ve been through?”

 

Slowly, Pauline nodded. Her pale, plain features might have been
carved of stone. “Sam told me,” she said. “I’m sorry for you.”

 

Mary would have put her arms around her then, might have
broken down herself and wept with Pauline for what they both had
been through. But that had never been their way. They were not
sisters, after all, they were friends, office friends. And what had bound
them all these years had more to do with how their acquaintance had
begun (for how could you pray with any sincerity if you were also
hoping to ditch the annoying girl at your side?), with habit and
circumstance, obligation and guilt, than it had ever had to do with
affection, commiseration. There had been a trick in it too, their
friendship, something far more complicated than “feed my lambs.”
There had been the trick of living well, living happily in her ordinary
life under Pauline’s watchful eye. Of living well, living happily, even
under the eye of a woman who always saw the dashed tear, the torn
seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew
that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the
aspirations of their pretty faith.

 

“I’ll never get over it,” Mary said. It was a phrase she had kept to
herself, until now.

 

The boys’ room was small and narrow. She and her husband had
taken the pinups and posters from the walls in preparation for
Pauline’s coming, they had moved the desk and the old hifi and the
record albums and the portable TV to the basement where Michael
would sleep when he came home to visit, but they had left both beds
here.

 

Pauline turned an impassive face to her, standing between the two
beds.

 

“I don’t expect you will,” she said.

 

And then there was the sound of Clare coming in. Clare coming
through the front door, dropping her books in the vestibule. “Maaa?”
They heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs. “Here,” her

 

mother called. And then she was in the room. Her coat and her hair
were wet with rain. She smelled of pencil shavings. Of the halls of St.
Gabriel’s.

 

“You’re here,” she said to Pauline, and easily went to her, put her
arms around her, as her mother had not, her cheek against her breast.
“How do you feel?” she said, gingerly. “Are you better?”

 

Pauline, with something of her old dignity, said, “Oh, yes. Much
better.”

 

At dinner, there was the new configuration at the table: Annie had
taken Michael’s place and Pauline sat beside Clare. Afterward, Clare
sat in front of the television as Michael used to do, watching while she
did her homework. Sitting in the chair behind her, Pauline said,
“Doesn’t the TV distract you? Wouldn’t you rather sit at the table?”

 

And Clare shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her hair had gone
wavy from where it had been wet and it caught the TV light at its
ends. “Can you really concentrate?” Pauline said and the girl nodded,
“I really can.”

 

The boys’ room was chilly after the overheated rooms of the
hospital, but it had a pleasant smell: there was a box in the bedside
drawer that contained sticks of incense—Pauline put it to her nose—a
smell like an old church, just after Benediction, a smell that ran just
under the other, ordinary smells of clean sheets and the lingering
scent of dinner. She turned back the plaid spread. Both beds were
made up, but she chose the one nearest the wall to avoid the light
from the hall that came under the door. She was well asleep when she
felt Clare’s hands on her shoulders, patting her softly, and had a
momentary belief that she was in the hospital again, that another
patient had wandered in.

 

But Clare laughed a little in the darkness, whispering, “Is that
you? I can’t see.”

 

Pauline said, “Yes, it’s me.”

 

She heard the girl moving away. “Okay,” she said. Heard her
pulling at the sheets on the other bed, getting under the covers. “I
sleep in here sometimes,” she said. “When Annie stays up reading.”
She was only a voice in the darkness, but even in the darkness, Pauline
would have known the voice.

 

“That’s all right,” Pauline said.

 

They were both silent. There was, perhaps, some faint music,
piano notes from next door. Pauline was beginning to see a little more,
some thin light behind the curtains, perhaps the outline of the girl’s
small body under the spread. In a moment, she could hear her
breathing softly, sweetly, into the dark.
T
HE GIRLS
had heard it through the night: rain drumming on the
roof and rattling down the drainpipes, rain amplifying, giving
voice or music (depending on their dreams) to the sound of passing