After This (8 page)

 

Tony wore a plastic combat helmet and carried a toy pistol. He was

 

thirteen, three years older than the oldest Keane boy, and Mr.

 

Persichetti wondered if he wasn’t too old for such playacting. He

 

resolved, even before Mrs. Keane had agreed to let him do the job, that

 

he’d get the boy to help out tomorrow afternoon, hauling the thin

 

branches and the smaller slices of tree trunk. He was asking twenty

 

dollars—not an exorbitant amount. Some of the women in the

 

neighborhood merely spoke to him from behind their storm doors, but

 

Mrs. Keane opened hers and invited him in. He stood in the small

 

vestibule. She wore a maternity dress with a bow at the neckline and

 

bedroom slippers. She seemed pale and somewhat puffy, not what

 

you’d call a good-looking woman from the start, but she had a direct

 

and friendly manner that encouraged

 

him to say he had been inspired by the storm to make better use of his
free days. He’d been on construction crews in the army. South Pacific.
He knew how to handle a chain saw and clear away trees. He’d always
thought that if he was ever going to get any kind of sideline going, he
wanted it to be something that got him out in the fresh air. Listening
to the wind on the night of the hurricane, he’d heard the crack and
snap of a falling tree and it had brought the whole thing back to him,
the fields he’d cleared, the forests hauled away. One thing led to
another, he said. A new chain saw, a buddy with a truck. A place in
Commack where he could dump the wood. The vestibule was identical
to the one in his own house, although his wife was dark-eyed and
thin-faced, younger than Mrs. Keane but well finished with
childbearing. Twenty dollars wasn’t a lot to ask but she, like the other
women who were not so friendly, said she would have to check with
her husband first.

 

She followed him out to the front step. It was a beautiful day, the
kind that always followed such a storm. The September sky a perfect
blue and the odor of dried rain still in the air. The green odor of the
fallen tree as well. Mrs. Keane and Mr. Persichetti both looked toward
it. The grass had been torn by the exposed roots, but the tree itself
seemed beautiful in repose. They could see through the branches the
children who played there, some brightly colored, others mere
shadows amid the leaves. Her boys and the Persichetti boy and a
dozen neighborhood children among them.

 

“It will be a shame to take it away,” Mrs. Keane said, as if she’d
already agreed to let him do the job. “We’re the most popular place in
the neighborhood.” She put her hand under her belly, the way
pregnant women do, holding up the weight. Mr. Persichetti watched
his son slide along the downed trunk of the tree, his silver cowboy
pistol drawn. There were strings of willow leaves, still strung on their
wiry branches, wrapped around his helmet.

 

Impulsively, Mr. Persichetti called out his son’s name, foiling an
ambush (at the sound of the man’s voice, Michael Keane’s head
appeared on the other side of the upended roots). He said it was time
to go. The response was all in the boy’s shoulders and arms—a slow
sinking. Two more boys, also in helmets, emerged from the leaves,
their indignation at being called from the game tempered only by the
sight of Tony’s father on the steps in his work pants and T-shirt. He
was a broad, short man with muscular arms. “It’s early,” his son called
back, squinting. And it was the squinting, the openmouthed squinting
and the hint of contradiction in his son’s voice that turned what had
been mere impulse on his father’s part into command. It was early,
another two hours before dinner, and there was certainly no need for
him to drive Tony home—he hadn’t driven him here—but still he said,
“Get in the truck,” and bent his powerful arm. He was a night nurse at
Creedmoor, the state hospital, and what he had seen there, the
patients he had hauled and handled—the vibration of mad voices he
had felt through bodies pressed into his arms, held against his cheek
and his chest—made him quick to raise his hand to his own lucky
child, smart as a whip and perfectly formed.

 

Tony bent his head to remove the borrowed helmet. Mournfully,
he handed the helmet and the pistol to Jacob. His father went down
the steps and joined him at the curb. He guided Tony to the truck with
his hand on the back of his son’s neck.

 

(“Shoot him in the foot,” Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane,
years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob
had drawn a bad number. “Break his legs before you let him go.”)
The truck turned and headed down the street. The boys shook off
the disruption and went back to their game. Mary Keane, returning to
the house, her hand under her heavy belly, the baby, as far as she could
tell, sound asleep within, wondered why it was that the Persichettis
had only the two, Tony and little Susan, who was

 

Annie’s age. She felt with some certainty that it would have been to
Tony’s advantage if they’d had at least one other son. (She had in
mind the man’s strong hand on the back of the boy’s neck.) It
benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in
the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected. It reminded
them they were not the center of the universe simply because they
were loved by their parents. How many children, when you came right
down to it (she would have said), were not loved by their parents?
Never mind if the love was skillful or adept.

 

She picked up Jacob’s school jacket and the box of toy soldiers
that had been left on the floor of the hall, but the effort sent a pain up
her back—like a crack through plaster—and drained the blood from
her head. She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on
the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision
of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in
that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one
when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something
sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper
and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a
little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully—a reluctant
skater on a pond—got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room
carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind
her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she
threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all
the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well
as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen
of them—it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that
she should have been counting them off on her fingers—when the first
cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had
been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she
said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable.

 

Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel,
or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the
rise and fall of the wind outside. Long before her husband had woken
and asked her, Who could that be? she had seen—in the silent
anticipation between each long gust, in the fear that rose as the sound
grew more terrible each time, as if edging toward something
unbearable—the parallel between the rise and fall of the storm and the
rhythm of labor. Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she
recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had
kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable
to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was
only silence now, in the small living room. There was a baby doll and a
stack of comic books in one of the chairs, a Wiffle ball beneath it. The
boys’ board game with its scattered pieces was still on the rug, and
there was a pale layer of dust over the hifi and the end tables. She
wondered if the pregnancy had turned her slothful or if the room was
always in some state of disorder and she was only, momentarily,
seeing it clearly. Vaguely, she could hear the voices of the children in
the side yard, climbing through the downed tree. It seemed to her (the
pain rising again, third time) that they were not so much calling words
as shining small silver lights into her ears. The gentle flash of a child’s
voice—was it Jacob?—appearing here and there through the more
general silence and the nausea of the clutching pain.

 

The phone was in the kitchen, and when she got herself up she
would call her husband first, in his office. And then the operator to
send an ambulance. And then one of the neighbors to come and watch
the children. And then Pauline, who had promised to stay with the
children when the time came, although time was supposed to have
been still another month away and Pauline would sigh at the
inconvenience, the altered plans. And this poor baby, so eager to be
born, would emerge from the womb with unhappy Pauline ready to
recount, on birthdays, at the birth of other children, at any of the
innumerable occasions in her life when she was once again forced to
abandon her plans, how she had just powdered her nose and put on
her hat when the phone call came.

 

The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was
perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s
voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call
“Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly,
because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of
the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It was
simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators,
complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your
magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus.
You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it
cold?—because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us,
more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a
lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and
the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next
contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back.
Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around
the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.”

 

He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on
her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she
drew her legs up against the pain. He had returned to say the Krafts
down the street had an apple tree split in two that he was planning to
remove at noon tomorrow (Mr. Kraft was a teacher and since the
schools were closed he was there to answer his door and to engage Mr.
Persichetti on the spot). He’d come back to say he could easily toss
both the willow and the apple tree into his truck, and so charge her
only fifteen.

 

He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then
left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the
first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he
grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery
string and even—she might have planned this—a turkey baster, all of
which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with
cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the
housekeeper his own wife was—there were crumbs on the kitchen
table and stained teacups in the sink—but there was a sweetness in
the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold
of his arm.

 

Mr. Persichetti called his patients God’s mistakes. He pressed his
arms around them when the need arose and sometimes felt their
wailing voices in his own flesh, in his chest, against his cheek. What
was in their eyes, or, more precisely, what was not, he thought of as
some failure on the part of God to fully animate what He had, perhaps
too blithely, made. He thought of God then, God the Father anyway
(for Jesus, of course, was a different case), as somewhat cavalier in His
creations. Not indifferent—Jesus was proof of that, as was Mr.
Persichetti himself, who might have worked construction with his
powerful arms but had instead used the GI Bill to become a nurse—
only swift and bustling and unheeding, like nature itself. Like the
storm. When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the
baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and
clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and
refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness,
and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought
some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor
of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away,
his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress
and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale
legs bare, and he asked,

 

gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded
and when the contraction had passed, added, “Modesty is always the
first thing to go.”

 

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet
underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees
and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear
the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed
her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun
to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter.
He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping
his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over
her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal
around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but
when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron
saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew
Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane.