After This (17 page)

 

Jacob’s sneakers were grass stained and there were grass stains
like brushstrokes on his skinny calves and his khaki shorts. Not just
slower and shyer than his brother, but shorter, too: you could see in
his legs, in the way he walked, that at nineteen there was no more
growth in him, that the sudden, surprising adolescent transformation
his father had imagined for him all through his childhood was not
going to occur. It surprised him. The men in his family were all of a
good size. He thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that
his son should take after no one so much as his long-ago namesake,
the other Jacob.

 

John Keane watched the boy as he carefully edged himself
between the bed and the TV on its rickety stand, turned it on, fiddled
with the antenna, leaning a little, his back to his father. He smelled
like mown grass, sun, and air. There was some sinewy strength in his
tanned arms and in his hands. A young man’s strength, a young man’s
compact body under the loose, sweat-limp T-shirt. It was another kind
of pain—a sweet, heart-dropping pain—what he felt for his son, what
he felt for the boy’s young body, his awkward-

 

ness, his earnestness, his life ahead. And he suddenly found himself
pulling against it, deliberately, with an opposite and equal weight,
meant, like the contraption that bound his foot, to provide
equilibrium. There were his failings as well. There was the question,
after a less than successful first year, of whether he’d go back to St.
John’s in the fall. (“Good money after bad,” he had told the boy, after
Jacob’s last set of grades. He’d said, “I’ve got four of you to put
through college, you know.”) There was the draft. There was the
chance that the military would be the making of him. There was the
chance of Vietnam.

 

Jacob stepped back for a moment, watching the TV—two soapopera characters, a man and a woman, arguing intently, another
woman shown wide-eyed, elaborately eavesdropping from behind a
closed door. Jacob watched them all with utter absorption as he
finished his sandwich. His father could see the small crop of sparse
beard along his son’s jawline, under the fair, sun-touched skin. He
needed a haircut, but these days they all did.

 

When a commercial began, Jacob turned to his father as if he’d
just come to. (It was the heart of the boy’s trouble, John Keane would
have said; he was too easily absorbed.) “You want to see this?” he
asked and his father waved a hand. “Christ, no,” he said. “Turn it off.
Get your shower.”

 

And then he reached out to touch his son, to playfully slap him on
the back, but he missed and paid the price for the awkwardness of the
movement with another neon-bright rush of pain. He pulled some air
through his teeth, he couldn’t help it, and Jacob paused, looking down
on him from beside the bed, and then, gently, put a hand to his
father’s shoulder. His face was white under his tan and his dark hair
fell into his eyes. “Dad,” he said with some alarm, and then paused.
And then, in another tone altogether, he said evenly, “What can I do
for you?”

 

There was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd
connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves,
some pattern across the years that would convey assurance. He had
said to that other Jacob, in a prayer, What can I do for you?—and now
here was his own boy, that other’s impulsive namesake, saying the
same. Some pattern in the coincidence, the connectedness, some
thread of assurance that was woven through the passing years—but he
was in too much pain now to discern it, if it was there at all. He put
his fingertips to his son’s arm. “Get your shower,” he said. “I’m fine.”
When Michael returned, he leaned into the bedroom and said,
“How you doing, Dad?” and “The Met game’s on” in the same breath.
He turned on the television, sat on the edge of the bed. He, too, had
the smell of the outdoors on him. The smell of the golf course. The
smell of the wider world. At the first commercial break, Michael
looked over his shoulder at the boot and the rope and the pulley and
the wood, at his father’s suspended leg. He tested the rope a bit.
“Maybe we should patent this thing,” he said. “We can write to the
army and buy up their old boots.” He laughed. His father glimpsed the
face Michael would wear as a grown man, the blue eyes and good
teeth. It was handsome now, in its youth, but it would be no more
than pleasant, perhaps, in middle age. “If they don’t all have jungle rot
by now,” he added.

 

Jacob had joined them to watch the extra innings. He was in the
chair beside his father’s bed. He was showered and dressed, a shortsleeved shirt and cutoff blue jeans. There was a girl who took up his
evenings this summer, although it was Michael who, his father
noticed, had a pink bruise on his neck, the shape of a small bite.
“Tony Persichetti,” Michael was saying, “said in his letter that the
skin comes off with his socks.”

 

Downstairs, their mother and the girls were just coming in. Clare
was the first to climb the stairs. She hesitated for a moment at the
door of the bedroom before her father called her in, and then
she leaped easily up onto the bed, rattling the mattress and the
magazines, the plate with the untouched sandwich and every plate, it
seemed, in her father’s fragile spine. He put a hand out, “Go easy,” he
said. Michael turned from the game to say, “Watch it, nimrod.” Only
slightly subdued, she perched herself on the pillow beside her father,
patted his bald head. “We had fun,” she said.

 

Then Mary was in the doorway, in her skirt and blouse and
stocking feet. Her hands on her hips. “Are you ready to get out of that
thing?” she asked.

 

John Keane saw both boys bow their heads.

 

“No,” he said simply. “It’s helping.”

 

She looked to the boys, as if they would corroborate her
skepticism. But they were having none of it. She looked especially at
Michael, who might have been her surest ally, given all the times in
the past he’d stood against his father, over politics, over hairstyles,
over mandatory Sunday Mass. “Honestly,” she said, moving into the
room, gathering the clutter from her side of the bed. “I hardly think
this is the solution.”

 

“It’s helping,” he said again.

 

She only glanced at him. “You don’t look like you’ve been
helped,” she said.

 

It was Clare who was absorbing the discussion unabashedly,
through her wide eyes.

 

Now Annie appeared. She was talking—these days she was always
talking—and both boys raised their hands to hush her. She walked
around the bed to join them in front of the small screen. The runners
scored. Michael leaned forward to slap Jacob’s hand, jostling the
mattress. Clare threw her hands up in the air, and then around her
father’s shoulder. Impatient, Mary Keane was leaning over the bed,
gathering the magazines.

 

In fact, he would die alone, accompanied only by the high-pitched
pulse of the hospital machine, his last breath missed even by
the nurses who were distracted by the changing shifts. None of them
gathered at his bed, no candles lit. The offending leg already
amputated in the doctors’ routine efforts to save him.

 

With the plate and the magazines in her hand she said, “Do you
want the boys to help you get to the toilet before dinner?”
He knew he would have to manage it sometime within the next
twenty minutes (ten minutes, now that she had brought the subject
up), but he said, “No. I’m fine.”

 

He recognized the tactic: she’d humiliate him into a doctor’s
office. Using words like toilet when she never said toilet, thought it
unrefined, just to get him annoyed enough to make an appointment.
“Maybe I could get you a little bell or something,” she said, as coy
as she might ever have been at twenty-one. “You could ring it when
you need to go.”

 

No doubt this was Pauline’s plan.

 

He glanced at the TV. He felt the pain roil a little, threatening a
larger blow.

 

“Why don’t you all go downstairs and have your dinner?” he said,
calmly. Because she would see every bit of it in his face, she saw
everything in his face.

 

“Send me up a piece of steak,” he said.

 

Clare brought the tray, walking with it through the slatted rosy
sunlight that now stretched slowly, leisurely, the stroll of time, across
the ceiling and the far wall. He’d just returned from the bathroom and
the old army boot, its tongue lolling, lay in its coil of rope at the foot
of the bed. He had an impulse, in his daughter’s presence, to throw a
blanket over it. It occurred to him that he had reached an age (he
remembered Mary’s befuddled old father) when his surest convictions
could be transformed into mere foolishness in the blink of an eye.
“Put it here,” he said, dragging the straight-backed chair to the
side of the bed. She put the tray down, kissed his cheek. There was
something of the metallic odor of the hot subway about her still, the
odor of his own missed commute home. All of his children scented
with the wider world.

 

She was talking about the day in the city and what the man at the
token booth had said, and what Pauline had said, and who she swore
she saw in the lobby when the intermission lights flashed though she
couldn’t really be sure. He surveyed the tray. A piece of chuck steak
and mashed potatoes and green beans. A roll and butter and a dish of
canned pears. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with both feet on the
floor, he was aware of a certain numbness taking over his leg. He
couldn’t eat a bite.

 

“The Spanish Inquisition,” she said, and he looked up at her,
thinking, perhaps, she was repeating Michael’s joke about the rack.
Again he had the impulse to cover up the empty boot. But she was, he
quickly gathered, talking about the play. The tickets had been a gift
from Pauline. Someone in his office told him they could well have cost
sixty dollars apiece.

 

“They’re all prisoners,” Clare was saying. “In a dungeon. And
there’s this long staircase.” She raised her arms, illustrating it. Her
skirt was short, too short (he resisted interrupting her to mention
this), her knees still chubby although the rest of her body had grown
lean. “And Cervantes comes down. The prisoners attack him and then
they put him on trial. In order to defend himself, he tells them a story.
And then he becomes Don Quixote and all the prisoners are the other
characters. So the whole play is like the story he tells, while they’re
waiting in jail.”

 

She pulled off the headband that held back her hair. Scratched her
head. The sunlight from the window was on her back. “He’s this old
man and he’s read so many books about chivalry that he goes crazy
and thinks it’s all real. He thinks he’s a knight, Don Quixote de la
Mancha. And only one of his servants goes along

 

with him, Sancho Panza. And they go out on a quest. He sees a
windmill and thinks it’s a monster.”

 

“Titling at windmills,” he said. “It’s an expression.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. She slipped the headband on again, it was a
habit of hers. “But it was really good the way they did it. The windmill
was just this huge shadow at the back of the stage.”

 

He picked up his fork. Tried, and failed, to lift the bum leg. The
pain, he realized, was far preferable to the numbness. She was on
about the sleazy inn that Don Quixote thought was a castle, the
servant girl (“A slut really,” she said, catching his eye for a second to
see if he disapproved of the word—he did) he thought was a beautiful
damsel.

 

He wondered briefly if she would end up wanting to go on the
stage herself. She was pretty enough, he thought. But then all the little
girls her age struck him as pretty.

 

The cure they came up with, she said—he had missed just who
“they” were—was mirrors. (She said it mear-ras, the way her mother
did. A touch of Brooklynese carried out to Long Island.) They
surrounded the old man with mirrors, she said. And made him look at
himself. Made him see.

 

She paused and said, “You’re not hungry?” But he shook his head,
lifted the warm roll. “I’m listening,” he told her. He would give
himself another minute or two before he tried moving his leg back
onto the bed. It was possible that he’d have to call the boys for help. It
was possible that he’d lost all use of it. “Did it work? The dose of
reality?”

 

She stepped back a little. Now the sun was on her shoulder and
her hair. Downstairs, he heard Michael saying, “A nine iron, a fucking
nine iron,” and Jacob laughing, Annie, too. Their mother shushing the
bad language. His brother Frank somewhere, in the boy’s laughter.
And what a vocabulary his youngest child would

 

take into the wider world. But Clare was attending only to her own
tale.

 

“Yeah,” she said, dramatically, “but then you see him in bed and
he’s dying.” Her eyes didn’t fall on his own bed, the empty old boot,
or on him in his pajamas. But there was, perhaps, a catch in her voice,
a sweet change of pitch as she went on. “Sancho Panza’s there, and his
niece. But he doesn’t remember anything about being Don Quixote.
Not even when Dulcinea comes in. She’s kind of cleaned up. She
wants him to remember, but he tells her he was just confused. He says
he was confused by shadows. Like the windmill thing.”

 

She paused. Looked at her father and shrugged. He suddenly
realized that she was about to cry.

 

“That’s too bad,” he said. He knew enough not to laugh at her. He
had already offended her, more than once, when he’d teased her about
her easy tears. Downstairs, the water was running, the kitchen chairs
were being pushed back from the table. He broke the roll in two and
handed her a piece. “Did you have your dinner?” he asked.
She took the bread. Held it in her hand. “But that’s not the end,”
she said, caught up in it now. Not just her mother’s accent but her
delight in the sound of her own voice, once she got started. He smiled,
watching her. The only way to temper the outlandishness of a father’s
love was to weigh it against the facts of your children’s imperfections.
She was a plain child, truth be told, not as pretty as her sister.
“Dulcinea sings the impossible dream song and, really slowly, he
begins to remember. He starts to get out of the bed. Sancho helps him.
All of a sudden he knows he really is Don Quixote. Really.”
And then, to his great surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was
sweet, lower than he would have expected, although surely he had
heard her singing around the house a thousand times before. But
now she was singing for him, much as she used to do when she was
very small, her hands at her sides, her eyes half closed. The cotton
skirt not too short, perhaps, but wrinkled from the hours she’d been
sitting. The little-girl knees, although her body was growing lean. She
sang and he was both enchanted and embarrassed by her earnestness.
Both hopeful that neither of the boys would come upstairs (Jacob
would only roll his eyes but Michael would sing along with her,
mocking, howling the words,