After This (36 page)

 

That evening, Gregory’s parents came to the house and sat with
Clare’s in the small living room. Her mother had straightened the
slipcover on the couch and drawn the thick curtains and set out coffee
and cookies on her wedding china. Clare listened from the top of the
stairs. His parents had called Gregory at school. They said he was very
sorry, full of remorse. They added as well that it takes, of course, two
to tango. Mary Keane drew a sharp breath and said Gregory was a
large boy, and older. Coercion was not out of the question. Mrs. Joseph
said her boy was certainly not like that. John Keane said nor was their
daughter. Mr. Joseph said either way, there wasn’t going to be any
shotgun wedding. Mr. Keane said there weren’t going to be any
bastard children either. Watch your goddamn language, Mr. Joseph
said. Watch yours, Mr. Keane said. The two women made a soothing
sound. They were both good kids, it was agreed. Neither one of them
a moment’s trouble for their parents. Neither one of them had ever
even dated before. It was the future that had to be considered now,
Mary Keane said. What was past, was past. Clare had high school to
finish, they both needed to get through college. Adoption was
mentioned. A Catholic agency. A good Catholic family.

 

Gregory came home from school the next weekend and stood his
full height and full, soft girth in the small living room and said he and
Clare would get married before the baby was born and then he’d finish
the semester, come home, get a job, and get a degree at night. He had
spoken to a priest at school. It was the right thing to do. John Keane
gazed at him sullenly while he spoke, feeling himself begin to relent
only when the boy added, with a shrug and a crooked smile, that his
grades at Marist weren’t all that hot anyway. Something of Jacob, of
course, in the sweet, hapless, self-deprecation; the shudder of fate
contained in something as simple as not-so-hot grades.

 

He looked beyond the boy to his father—both parents as well as
Gregory’s remorseful sister had been brought along for the
announcement. John Keane thought he saw in the man’s eye a kind of
admiration, even pride, as Gregory spoke. Nothing he would feel if the
tables were turned and it was his daughter who faced the ordeal, the
risk, of childbirth at only seventeen. Both mothers wept again and
Gregory’s sister hung her head. But Greg had the priest on his side
and the startling power of his own conviction. Her conviction, really. It
was what Clare wanted, he said, glancing at her. And whatever Clare
wanted it was now his obligation to provide.

 

“And where will you live?” Gregory’s mother asked. “How will
you pay rent?”

 

“We thought we’d live here,” Clare said, and looked to her
mother. It was the plan she had devised in that lost hour, in Jacob’s
room. “We thought we’d make an apartment, out of the basement.
Until we can afford something more.” She smiled, as if it had all been
arranged already, as if it were all working out quite well already. “You
and Pauline will be here to help me with the baby, especially if I want
to take some classes at Malloy. And if you guys want

 

to move to Florida, well, maybe by then”—it was all part of what she
and Pauline had planned, whispering in that lost hour—”we can rent
this house from you, or even buy it, if we have jobs. You won’t have to
sell it to strangers, anyway.” She looked at Pauline. “We can keep the
house, and, if Pauline wants to, she can stay.”
S
ISTER MARIE IGNATIUS
, the school principal, met with Clare’s
parents in her office early the next evening when the school was
empty. Outside her office window the green lawn and the dark hedge,
now edged with daffodils, were lovely in the restored light of the new
spring. Although the air was still cool, she’d pushed open one of the
small panes to freshen the room. She had to say, of course, that she
could not have been more surprised. Clare, of all girls. She would

never have imagined it. She did not say, as she had told the other
Sisters in the convent, still waters run deep, but she did point out that
even the best of girls can, after all, be led astray these days. The
pressure is tremendous: the music, the movies, the feminists, the
hippies. In the past, and Sister Marie Ignatius had run the school for
twelve years, such girls would simply go away. There was, in fact, an
unwed mother’s home in upstate New York that Sister Marie had once
contacted almost annually. But the stigma, these days, was perhaps
not as great as it used to be and with abortion now a legal option, it
was up to the school to help its students in trouble in the kindest and
most positive way possible. And the fact that Clare had not given any
teacher in the school a single moment of worry or concern certainly
worked to her advantage now.

Kindly, her hands folded in front of her on her desk, Sister
agreed that Clare could stay in school for the next month or so—she
would request only that as little as possible be said about her
condition and her marriage (she did not want Clare’s situation to set
either a precedent or an appealing example)—and that she eventually
leave school (mononucleosis might be a good excuse) once the
situation became apparent. It would be both a humiliation for Clare
and a mockery of all the school stood for to have her appear in
uniform in her eighth or ninth month. Academic matters could easily
be arranged. She could take her finals at home. She would miss
graduation, of course, the ceremony itself, but she would still
graduate.

Sister Marie walked the parents to the door. She would tell the
Sisters later that both of them looked like they’d “been through the
mill.” Her heart went out to them, and to their daughter, but there
was also the school to run, an enrollment rate to maintain, funds to
raise from alumnae, many of whom were mothers of the daughters
enrolled today. There were—as much for her as for Clare’s parents—
the neighbors to consider. There was also an extremely generous alum
who had married well being honored at this year’s graduation. It was
not the time for a senior with a huge belly under her robes to be
climbing the stage to accept her diploma. Married or not.

The parents smiled weakly, inclined to linger although all that
needed to be said had been said. Sister sometimes joked that these
were the “Climb Every Mountain” moments when she wished she
could sing. She opened the door for them.

“Let’s remember,” she told them, “that there’s a new life on the
way.” The corridor outside her office was brightly lit, eerily empty,
harsh splashes of light against the linoleum and the painted fronts of
the girls’ lockers. “And life,” she said, turning back, “is always a cause
for celebration.” And then could have bitten her tongue be-
cause these were the Keanes she was talking to—she recalled Annie on
that terrible morning, in this same hallway, she recalled seeing
through the glass door of her own office the great shadow of Sister
Maureen Crosby rising from her seat behind the reception desk,
catching the two weeping girls in her arms. These were the Keanes she
was spouting clichés at, the Keanes who had lost a son in that useless
war.

Father McShane, Monsignor McShane, pouted a bit, his hands
folded over his belly, but quickly relented, telling John Keane he would
open the church himself for the family, for the wedding, eight o’clock
on the following Sunday night. He’d do the honors, too, he said, the
path of least resistance having always been his preference in matters
such as unwed mothers, mixed marriages, annulments, and birth
control. He could see the humiliation on the poor man’s face—one of
these old-fashioned Irishmen who in his near seventy years could
hardly bring himself to mention sex in the confessional now sitting
here in the rectory saying his little daughter was already six months
gone. A man whose biggest concern, at this age, should be his golf
swing.

Pity’s fool, Monsignor even o
ffered to call the choir director to see
if he couldn’t come down and play a tune for the ceremony, but John
Keane said his wife had already made arrangements with one of their
neighbors, the MacLeods, Presbyterians whose nephew played the
piano at Juilliard. She had heard the music coming from their house
just yesterday, when the boy was visiting. She’d knocked on the door
to ask the name of the tune. One thing led to another—she’d been
looking for an opportunity to break the news about Clare to the
neighbors—and the boy had agreed to come in from the city to play. If
that was all right with the Monsignor.

Monsignor McShane held out his hands. “I don’t think the
church will collapse,” he said, “if a Protestant plays.” Or if, for that
matter (he thought), a girl six months pregnant walks down the aisle
in a white dress to marry a boy with a priest, instead of a shotgun, at
his back. “We built her pretty strong, John. With your help, as I recall.
I don’t think she’ll fall.”

The only bother was letting the piano player in half an hour early
so he could “get a feel” for the instrument. Because he liked to linger
over his Sunday supper, usually with

60 Minutes
on, the Monsignor
asked old Mrs. Arnold to hold his dinner until after the ceremony and
told the other two priests to go ahead and eat without him. He
watched the first half of the show with only a glass of sherry and some
cheese and crackers to tide him over, and then left the rectory at 7:25.
It was a lovely night. The sky was that polished blue it sometimes got
after a storm, or a long winter. Even the traffic along the boulevard,
which had become intolerable of late, seemed subdued by the color.
He climbed the steps to one of the side doors, let himself in with the
key. Over at the school, there were lights on only in the old section,
the cafeteria where the AA meetings were held on Sundays. He turned
on the lights above the altar and then in the choir where the piano
was. Someone had already put a vase of flowers on the altar, a simple
blue vase with only a handful of white roses, and he seemed to recall
some connection between white roses and unborn babies—was it the
Mothers Club that sold white roses on Mother’s Day to help save the
unborn babies, or was it the Fathers Club that sold white roses on
Mother’s Day to help save the men who had forgotten a present? It
was poppies on Veterans Day in any case—Flanders Fields—and the
thought reminded him that it was the Keanes, of course, who had lost
a boy in Vietnam.

Trouble piled on trouble, Monsignor thought, as he walked down
the center aisle (grateful that this would be a quick and simple
ceremony, no messing with candles lit at the end of every pew, as was
so much in vogue these days, wax dripping everywhere). It struck him,
not for the first time, that his modern church, such a miracle to him
just a decade ago, would grow dated in the coming years—an old
man’s mistaken enthusiasm for the wrong kind of future. He’d already
weathered the fight over the return of the old statues, the confessional
screens. They’d be asking for Latin again next.

The piano player was just coming up the steps as Monsignor
McShane opened the front doors. He was a young guy, small and darkhaired. A young man’s beard under the fair skin. He wore a suit and
carried a briefcase and introduced himself with a Scots Irish name that
Monsignor didn’t bother to retain. The two walked up the aisle
together. “This is some church,” the kid said, craning his neck to take
in the Danish modern stained glass, the circus-tent ceiling. He then
mentioned that he occasionally played at another Catholic church, an
old-fashioned one, St. Paul’s, near his school. “I went to St. Paul’s,”
Monsignor said, “as a boy.” And knew immediately, as if he had never
understood it before, what his parishioners were lonesome for, in this
monstrosity of his. It was not the future they’d been objecting to, but
the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could not have one
without the other.

He went into the vestry while the boy ran his
fingers over the
keys. You did not have to be a musician to hear the difference, once he
got started, between what this kid could do and what the ordinary
Sunday musicians played. Monsignor put on his vestments, prepared
the altar, walked down the central aisle again to see that there’d been
nothing left behind in the pews this morning, checked that he’d left
the front doors unlocked, and then walked back up again, still with
twenty minutes to spare. He swallowed a little indigestion, a little
impatience, thinking of his dinner. He walked across

 

the altar, touching gaudy, literal Saint Gabriel on the knee, and then
stood by the boy. You would have to be a musician to explain the
difference, but the priest knew it was there. There were the ordinary
pianists who played, no doubt, as they had been taught to play,
earnest, obedient, faithful to each note (don’t even mention,
Monsignor would have said, those awful folk-mass singers with their
guitars), and then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance,
eyes closed, transformed, transported, inspired (that was the word)—
not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that
was already there, that had always been there, in the air, some music,
some pattern, sacred, profound, barely apprehensible, inscrutable,
really, something just beyond the shell of earth and sky that had
always been there and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to
bring it, briefly, briefly, to his untrained ear.

Something he hadn’t even known he’d been straining to hear.
The boy finished the piece and in the fading of the last notes came
the voices at the front door of the church, the Keanes and (he had
their names on a slip of paper in his pocket) the other parents, the
groom, and the young, expectant bride.

 

“Have you taken a lot of lessons?” the priest asked, before he
walked down the aisle to greet them (because it would be an informal
wedding, the best kind, really, softly spoken, unrehearsed). “Or have
you always known how to play?”