After This (3 page)

 

“Be sure to put it back,” Jimmy said and winked at her father, but
she was barely out of the small kitchen before the two men faced each
other across the table, across the empty place where she usually sat
between them, and glimpsed the possibility of a change in their
routine.

 

George took her arm again, walking across the sidewalk to his car.
He opened the car door for her and once she was inside, he leaned
down to smile through the glass. And once inside himself, he took the
wheel and told her without prompting that they were going to a steak
house downtown that a friend had recommended. His hands on the
steering wheel were short and clean and it slowly dawned on her that
his fingernails were buffed, perhaps even manicured. She looked at his
ear, under the brim of his hat. Sometime since this afternoon, he’d
stopped for a haircut, too. The thought flattered her, even made her
shy as he talked about this pal of his

 

who knew from steak houses and fish markets, a connoisseur of
mushrooms and artichokes who actually ordered cheese for dessert,
his tastes were so refined. He took his eyes from the road for a minute
to look at her, smiling again, laughing as he spoke, being charming
even as she, smiling back at him, found herself growing demure.

 

In the restaurant, he told her everything about himself that he
had already told them over dinners at home—a Midwest childhood, a
kidney condition that kept him out of the service, a stint at the Navy
Yard before the job at the brewery. She merely nodded, trying to look
attentive but actually studying his face, which was pleasant enough,
studying his table manners, which were passable but in need of certain
refinements—he buttered the back of his entire roll and put the halfbitten piece on the edge of his dinner plate.

 

In the car coming home he kept his hand on the seat between
them. She wished out loud for the weekend and then told him a little
about Pauline, and the story of Adele and Mr. Someone-or-Other. He
nodded, his eyes on the road. She wasn’t sure he followed, or had any
interest. She wondered if he thought this was girlish gossip that she
was foolishly telling him, if he had missed her point that girlish gossip
was what she had sought to avoid. The uncertainty that had clouded
his face this afternoon in the moment after he’d asked her out to
dinner was now a tangible presence in the car as they approached her
building and the time for some kind of conclusion to this odd impulse
of his had finally come.

 

“Thanks so much for this,” she said as he pulled to the curb. She
put the strap of her pocketbook over her arm, put her hand on the
door handle. “You really didn’t have to.”

 

He seemed to rouse himself from a growing disengagement. “I
wanted to,” he said. “It was nice to have a chance to get to know you
better,” he added, although she could not imagine a single thing he
might have learned. He leaned toward her, slowly raising

 

his hand to his hat and then doffing it quickly, as if taken by surprise,
when she leaned forward to meet him. And this, she thought, of
course, was what the whole evening had been for, the delightful feel of
his rough cheek against her fingertips, his hand and lips and warm
breath. The lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. Something awkward
and lovely (a drumming on the roof, was it rain?) and absurd about
Jimmy’s pal George moving his arm around her waist, pressing his hat
into her back, and her fingers finding the newly trimmed border of his
hair. All that trying to be charming and trying to be demure and
hoping to look attentive and to speak well and wondering how this
strange impulse of his will come to a conclusion put aside now that
they had agreed, finally, that this, after all, was simply what they’d
wanted. The warmth of it, the moment’s respite.

 

Jimmy was in the living room, in his undershirt, reading the
Daily
News
beside a single lamp. He lowered the paper and began to fold it
neatly as soon as she came in, but asked only where she had eaten
before he said good night. She went into the kitchen and was
surprised to find the dishes, including the serving bowls, washed and
drying in the dish rack and the remaining lamb chop, a scoop of
mashed potatoes, and a handful of peas on a plate in the icebox,
another turned over it. She wondered at their logic: Had they thought
she’d be too nervous to eat with George? Or that she’d just nibble,
hoping to appear dainty, like Scarlett O’Hara at Twelve Oaks? She
decided they simply didn’t know what to do with her portion:
something ungenerous about eating it themselves, something unkind
about throwing it away. She wiped down the kitchen table and the
counter and swept the floor, and then ran into Jimmy in the hallway,
now in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, as he came out of the bathroom.
He held the glass of water he would put by his bedside, on the
nightstand between his bed and their father’s.

 

“Sleep tight,” he whispered, and then surprised her by putting
his arms around her, the glass at her back. “Our Mary Rose,” he said,
and kissed her head, as if he were bidding her a fond farewell.

 

She laughed. There could be worse lives than this lonely one.
There could be life married to someone like George.

 

In her own room, she pulled back the covers, took the rosary
beads from under her pillow, and got into bed. Joyful, Sorrowful,
Glorious Mysteries. She chose the Joyful for this night—another day
gone, not so bad, a date no less—but in her weariness forgot where
she had begun and followed the Visitation with Jesus being lost in the
Temple and then Mary’s assumption into heaven, wondering all the
while just who—Mr. Who?—had wiped the tear from Adele’s eye.

 

The next afternoon she lit her candle and said her prayer, and
then playfully linked arms with poor Pauline who always waited at the
back of the church, no longer on speaking terms with Catholicism. It
was a lovely afternoon, a bright afternoon in spring that even Pauline
was taking some pleasure in (there were her good new shoes in a rich
burgundy, a fresh Danish she’d had this morning at coffee break, a
blouse she had made last night from a remnant of green silk and
placed on Mary’s desk this morning, because, she’d said, it would only
fit someone without much of a chest). There wasn’t a tear to be seen
on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them
walked down to Schrafft’s. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit
jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored
bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a
cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting
for her.

 

She felt Pauline beside her, stiffening against his greeting. She
thought, giving him her name, how there was a trace of sorrow in
every joy. She thought, as he held the door, smiling at her,
Poor George.

 

The day before Mary and John Keane were married, Pauline
tripped on the sidewalk outside her building (the landlord was
somehow to blame) and broke her wrist. When she appears in
photographs of that day, her dark suit is slashed by a white sling, and
under her stylish turban, her big powdered face is dignified, carved in
ivory, only a certain determination about the jaw and the mouth
betraying a reluctant smile.
T
HE RUSH HOUR
that Friday night began with a wet snow. Sitting at
her typewriter in her lambskin coat and hat, Pauline saw the first
fat flakes pass like small shadows across the office window and
expressed her disapproval of nature itself with a loud clucking of the
tongue. Impatiently, she leaned down to pull her folded rain boots
from the bottom of the desk drawer. Throughout the typing pool all
the girls began to do the same.

An hour later, crossing the lobby of their apartment building,
Mary Keane felt her own transparent booties squeak and slip on the
linoleum floor, which was so streaked with mud and melting snow
you’d think the steady stream of residents tramping home had crossed
ditches and fields, not merely the four blocks of wet sidewalk between
here and the subway. She carried her umbrella and a white bakery box
now dappled with gray—a pair of apple turnovers for tomorrow’s
breakfast.

The elevator was open and inside it a young man in a dark
overcoat was holding the bucking door with his forearm.

 

Double-stepping, still uncertain of her traction, she hurried to
reach it. “Gee, thanks,” she said, although, after a lifetime in her old
walk-up, she still preferred to take the stairs. He dropped his arm as
soon as she had stepped inside and some impatience in his posture
conveyed the idea that he would have dropped his arm at that precise
moment had she stepped inside or not.

 

“Floor?” he said, turning only his profile toward her. He wore a
dark fedora and had a roman nose.

 

“Five,” she said. And then added, “Thanks again.”

 

Gloveless, he pressed a long pale finger into the elevator button
that was a faded shade of ivory, seemed even to grind it in a bit, and
then, stepping back, placed the hand into the pocket of his oversize
coat.

 

They both stared into the lobby’s baleful yellow light. Tamed, the
doors now remained impassively open. Through them, she saw
another pair of residents—another young couple—swing into the
lobby, laughing and shaking wet snow from their shoulders and hats.
He pressed the button again, with his thumb this time, banging it a bit
as if to make a stronger point. The elevator suddenly shook itself,
coming to, and the doors slowly closed before the newcomers could
look up from their clothes to cry, Wait.

 

Alone together in the little box that smelled of his wet wool and
her wet fur and the various beginnings of other people’s dinners, he
glanced at her and then politely doffed his hat, placing it over his heart
as if for the national anthem. He raised his eyes to the numbers above
the door.

 

“Some weather,” she said. He merely, barely, nodded. “Who knew
it would snow?” she said.

 

Now he shook his head, shrugging a little, a wordless, No one
knew.

 

He was pale as salt. Although along his jaw there was, beneath
the pale skin, the outline of a black beard. His hair was cut short, but
it was clear that left to its own devices it would curve, and then curl.
He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hat against his overcoat
were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they

 

moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves
against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin.
The way a child’s fingers might move in sleep.

 

At the third floor, the elevator stopped haltingly, bouncing them
both on the balls of their feet. The doors slid open to show the
familiar green walls, the chipped ledge and decorative mirror that
marked each floor. A smell of frying onions.

 

They both looked out at the empty hallway and then she turned to
him to say, “No one,” as if this were indeed a small mystery.

 

He stabbed the button once again. He had a thin face behind the
large nose, and pretty, dark brown eyes with heavy lashes. He was
younger than she, not even thirty, but he would have to be far younger
still before she could say what it was that came into her mind to say: A
girl would kill to have those eyelashes.

 

The door closed again and again the elevator shook itself and
slowly rose. She tried to think of some small talk. (Because it was
simply what you did. You made small talk, you commiserated.)

 

Her eyes fell on his hands again, so white against the dark felt of
his hat. She watched them moving, involuntarily, rhythmically, one at
a time and in no apparent order, and thought briefly of a friend of her
brother’s who had come back from overseas with what they’d called
Saint Vitus’ dance. But was this kid even old enough to have been in
the war?

 

Suddenly she said, “Are you the piano player, upstairs?” For that
was how she and John had come to refer to him, The piano player,
upstairs.

 

He turned his nose to her again, warily now. “I play,” he said.

 

She nodded. “We hear you,” she told him. “My husband and I, we
listen,” she said. Every evening from seven fifteen until nine and
Saturday mornings eight to eleven, which she preferred, since they
woke to it. “You play beautifully,” she told him, although the music
was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics,
unmemorable to her.

 

But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of
his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell.

 

“I hope it doesn’t disturb you,” he said.

 

She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped
around her wrist. “Not at all,” she said, although three or four times
now she had hung on her husband’s arm to keep him from banging
the broom handle against the ceiling. “We enjoy it,” she said. And
then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, “You
must have some beautiful piano.”

 

They had reached her floor and once again he put his forearm
against the door to hold it for her. “A Steinway,” he said, his tongue
poked behind his lips as if to suppress a boastful smile.

 

Stepping out of the elevator she said, “Oh, sure. The factory over
in Long Island City.”

 

“A baby grand,” he added with such sudden animation that she
thought for a moment he might follow her into the hallway to say
more. But the doors were once again butting against his arm.

 

“No kidding?” She smiled at him. He was very young. “How’d
you even get it up here?”

 

He gave his smile the go-ahead, moving to put his shoulder, too,
against the elevator door. “It was already there,” he said. “Someone
left it behind. They didn’t want it. The super said they couldn’t even
rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole
bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it?
A Steinway.”