After This (18 page)

to run, where the brave dare not go ow ow
),
and yet wishing that they would because there was something painful
in it, watching her, another kind of pain altogether than what he’d
been fighting these past two days. The boys had their lives off in the
wider world, he thought, but girls, his daughters, they had lives far
wider and far more inaccessible, right before his eyes.

 

The room was lit with the thick yellow light of a summer evening.
The leg was numb and as certain as he was that he would find a way to
heal it—or that the doctors would—he knew, too, that some part of
his future had been retracted, foreshortened by the pain. That it had
added, if only by a month or a year or two, to the time she would have
to miss him.

 

She sang, she seemed to know all the words.
T
HE LOTTERY
was held three weeks before Christmas, which made
something biblical about the whole ordeal, or at least, Mary
Keane said, medieval.

When all the days of the year had been called, she said to her
husband, her mouth held crookedly—a grim joke in the face of what
they could not change—”Maybe if the piano player had skipped
practice that morning, Jacob would have had a different birthday.” He
nodded; it was a joke, given its intimate circumstances, no one else
could share, and even he, all these years later, felt himself blush.
“Maybe if you’d married George,” he said.

And then he took Clare’s hand. She was bundled up against the
cold. They were just going out for a breath of fresh air. At the foot of
his driveway, pulling his garbage cans to the curb, Mr. Persichetti
paused. Tony’s birth date, as it turned out, would have been a lucky
one, if he hadn’t already enlisted and gone over and come back home
again, hollowed-eyed and furious, after all he’d seen. “Hooked on
drugs,” Mr. Persichetti said. He might have just learned the phrase.

Mr. Persichetti told Mr. Keane, “Shoot him in the foot. Break his
legs before you let him go.”

 

Clare looked up at the two men. Her father gripped her hand
and Mr. Persichetti stepped back and then forward, his face shadowy
in the night.

 

“No, honey,” he said, touching her wool cap. “Don’t pay attention
to me.” And then he glanced at her father, his eyes catching the dull
streetlight. “I was there when you came into the world, you know,” he
said, cheerfully, as if cheerfulness now could erase the terrible thing he
had already said. She told him she knew. She had come too soon. She
had come inconveniently. Pauline had only just put on her hat when
the call came, on her way out to the movies.

 

“I was the very first person,” Mr. Persichetti said, “to welcome
you into this crazy world of ours.”

 

And for the second time in that hour, John Keane felt a flush rise
to his cheeks.
A
ND YOUR BROTHER
?” Mrs. Antonelli said because it was Michael
Keane she remembered, all the hours he had cooled his heels on
the leather couch before her desk, waiting to see Sister Rose, the
principal. Jacob, sitting before her now, had left no mark on her

memory—which was understandable enough, given the number of
children who passed through St. Gabriel’s, a hundred graduates each
year, six or seven hundred more since Jacob Keane had been an eighth
grader. As secretary and (she liked to say) palace guard for Sister Rose,
Mrs. Antonelli had far more contact with the troublemakers anyway.
Michael Keane had been one of them. Jacob, clearly, had not.

“He’s upstate,” Jacob said. “College.”

He was a nice-looking boy—dark hair and dark brows, green eyes.
But he was also slight, narrow-shouldered, not much bigger, perhaps,
than he’d been when he left here. It was Mrs. Antonelli’s belief that
God should have made all men tall and broad—out of fairness. Her
own husband was six foot three. She thought of this as an
accomplishment.

“Good for him,” she said, and then wondered at the contrast her
words implied, for Jacob had just told her that he himself had left St.
John’s and was now headed for the army. “And good for you, too,” she
added. “For answering the call.”

Jacob smiled shyly. He wore blue jeans, which she did not approve
of, and a tattersall dress shirt rolled at the sleeves, which was all right.
“Thanks,” he said, politely, although they both understood he’d had
no choice in the matter.

“And you’ll have the GI Bill when you get back,” Mrs. Antonelli
said. “That’s how my husband put himself through Fordham.”

 

Jacob nodded slowly. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and then looked
at her, his large green eyes and a girl’s dark lashes, nothing else to say.

 

Mrs. Antonelli glanced down at the work before her, but she had
taken off her reading glasses when the boy came in (here to pick up
his sister for a dentist appointment, although the mother had sent no
note), so everything was a blur. From the room beyond came the
sound of Sister Rose on the phone, speaking in the clipped rhythms of
her professional voice. From down the hall came the drone of a class
repeating its times tables. “I suppose it seems like just yesterday that
you were here,” she said, making conversation.

 

The boy merely moved his head, as if uncertain himself whether
he wanted to say yes or no.

 

The office was paneled in dark wood, and the light from the small
window was yellow. There was a statue of the Holy Family in one
corner, a flagpole bearing the white-and-gold diocesan flag in another.
There was a crucifix and an oil painting of the pope on the wall behind
Mrs. Antonelli’s desk, and the portrait of Our Lady of Perpetual Help
from the old church on the wall behind Jacob’s head. There was the
gently overpowering odor of Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume—a powdery
scent that was neither fruit nor flower nor spice, like nothing in nature
Jacob could think of—and despite the terrible familiarity of the office,
the long halls of the school, the sound of the children reciting their
lessons, it was this scent alone that brought him back to his years
here, years of terror (he’d been a shy child and the nuns with their
sweeping skirts and clicking

 

beads had all but made him mute), years of grace (because he was also
a good child, chosen above all others to carry messages from his
teachers to Mrs. Antonelli’s desk). He briefly studied his hands. Mrs.
Antonelli’s perfume brought him there again and put off all that was
ahead of him not simply by a few hours but by years.

 

And then Clare was standing in the doorway, beside the eighthgrade boy who had been sent to fetch her. She wore her beanie, and
her pigtails had already begun to fray. There were Band-Aids on both
of her knees, above the navy blue kneesocks. She wore the school’s
plaid jumper, a new one that still hung on her stiffly, and under the
wide white sleeves of her uniform blouse her bare arms seemed as
thin as sticks.

 

Jacob stood. The car keys were in his hand.

 

“Please tell your mother,” Mrs. Antonelli said, standing as well,
“to remember to send a note in next time.”

 

Jacob nodded. “I will,” he said. And then, “Thank you.” And then,
head down, “Sorry to disturb you.” He put his hand out to allow his
sister to go before him through the door. “Nice to see you again,” he
said.

 

Mrs. Antonelli doubted very much that Jacob Keane would find
the army to his liking. She looked up to see the eighth grader, a brazen
thing, nearly six feet tall, who still lingered at the door with his
shirttail out, hoping for another assignment from her to keep him
from going back to class. She dismissed him and then sank into her
chair. She put her glasses on and Sister Rose’s lovely handwriting—a
perfection of the art, she always said—came clear to her again. She
said a prayer: Let them find something easy for the poor kid to do. A
desk job in Germany. Lifeguard duty at a base on Okinawa, as a
neighbor’s boy had done. Amused to find how the world had turned
since she was young—Germany and Okinawa now safe places for an
American soldier.

 

But there was something unlucky about the boy. She would not
have said tragic, just unlucky: his small stature, the awkward attempts
at good manners, the apparently unsuccessful years at St. John’s, the
draft. Getting sent to Vietnam would be of a piece with all that. And
what opportunities for bad luck would he find over there? Mrs.
Antonelli had no children of her own, and so felt herself more cleareyed about such things. There were kids who were born with luck on
their side and others who simply weren’t. It wasn’t about intelligence
or good grades, not even necessarily about good looks (although there
was luck in that, too). It was chance, plain and simple. Kids born lucky
and kids who never got a break. It was fate, perhaps, although she
supposed God came into it somewhere (she couldn’t say how, except,
perhaps, that God had his favorites, too). She saw herself, some
months from now, telling Sister Rose, who would not remember him,
how Jacob Keane had come to her office not long ago, just before he
went in, to pick up little Clare and take her to the dentist.

 

Two boys from St. Gabriel’s had already died in the war. Neither
was memorable to her as a student, although she had attended both
funerals, sitting behind the three eighth-grade classes who had filled
up the back of the big round church, warming it a bit, for both boys
had been buried on cold winter days. From where she sat, the flagdraped coffins and the stooped families in their dark clothes had
seemed rather a long way away. Although she had heard one of the
mothers say, simply enough, “My baby.”

 

Mrs. Antonelli touched her glasses to make sure they were still
there, for Sister’s blue ink and fine letters had once more lost their
clarity, and the steady yellow light briefly wavered. She looked up. The
tall eighth grader was in her doorway again, his shirttail still out and
his tie still crooked, a white attendance sheet from Sister Savior in his
hand. His face and his hair, all his edges, a blur, through her tears. An
angel himself, through her tears.

 

In the narrow alleyway beside the school, Jacob paused and
then leaned down to whisper into his sister’s ear. “It was a fib,” he
said.

 

He leaned down, out of the autumn blue sky, out of the cinderblock wall, out of nothingness (she would say later) and into
awareness, into memory. His eyes were green and his lashes long and
thick. There were marks on his face, freckles, lingering acne, nicks
from his razor. There was the trace of a beard. He leaned down and
put his lips to her ear and said, “It was a fib,” a buzz against the soft
bones that made her raise her shoulder and giggle. Surely not her first
memory of him—he had read to her when she was still in a crib, he
had sat beside her on the stairs waiting to be called down on
Christmas morning, at the dinner table he had spoken to her through
his raised milk glass, the milk bubbling with his words until their
father said, “Enough”—but surely this was her first clear memory of
his face, leaning down to her out of the autumn sky.

 

There was no dentist appointment, he said. He had the car keys in
his hand. He started walking again. He just wanted to take her for a
ride, he said. She hurried to keep up. They were in the alleyway. On
one side was the long cinder-block wall that separated the school
property from the strip of stores and the parking lot next door. On the
other, the low steps and wide glass doors of the gym. The alleyway
itself was a magnet for lost mimeographed worksheets and loose-leaf
paper, for candy wrappers and brown lunch bags and the yellowed wax
bottles, many of them marred by teeth marks, that had once been
filled with sweetened, brightly colored liquids, purchased from
Krause’s store. There seemed to be a constant wind blowing along the
ground here, full of sand and grit, and she felt she was racing through
it, following him. He had the car keys in his hand and they jingled like
a cowboy’s spurs as he led her around the cinder-block wall and into
the parking lot next door, where he had left his car. He unlocked the
door, opened it for her. “Hop in,” he said. There was a thin terry-cloth
cover over the old

 

leather seats. It seemed to be attached with rubber bands. It slid
underneath her as she climbed in, but it was soft to the touch. He
slammed the door, walked around the back of the car. He had parked
under the single tree in the lot and a few leaves, yellow and gold and
rust colored, had drifted onto the red hood and across the windshield.
He got in the car, put the key in the ignition. “Let’s just drive around,”
he said.

 

She said okay, although still she expected the drive to end at the
dentist’s office—the eighth grader who had fetched her had said so,
and so had Mrs. Walters when she called her to the front of the class.
She could already smell the cinnamon and alcohol of the place. Hear
the hateful sound of the drill. The office was in the basement of the
dentist’s house. There was a long concrete stairwell, damp and steep,
that went down to the door. The floor of the waiting room was black
and white. There would be a shoe box full of charms and toy jewelry
from which she could pick two when it was over.

 

Her brother put his arm across the seat and slowly backed out of
his space. He drove first through the length of the narrow lot, past the
candy store, the hardware store, the five-and-dime. “That’s where the
‘hoochie-koochie-koo’ man used to stand,” he said. He pointed to a
row of shopping carts in a corner near the grocery store. “When I was
your age,” he said. “He was just a crazy old man, always kind of
drooling. If he got close enough to you, he’d pinch your cheek and say,
‘Hoochie-koochie-koo.’ ” He looked over his shoulder as he turned out
of the lot. He was smaller than their father, but he had the same
seriousness when he drove. “People said he was shell-shocked. From
the war.” He made another turn, driving slowly, slower than she could
walk. “I don’t know when he stopped being there.” He drove past the
bowling alley and told her he’d been on a bowling team in eighth
grade. He was so bad, he said, that he never broke a hundred. He said
he used to sit there and