After This (34 page)

 

they told one another September after September, than the blink of an

 

eye. Clare was only a little taller, and, like most of the girls, freckled

 

and tanned, streaks of sun in her reddish brown hair. Her braces had

 

come off—there was that difference. But there was also the way she

 

carried herself. She had lost—one of the Sisters confided to a lay

 

teacher and the lay teacher heartily agreed—that childish look she

 

used to wear, wide-eyed and eager to please. She’d always been smart

 

enough, there was no doubt about that, but there had also been about

 

her an air of innocence that belonged, perhaps, to an earlier time, an

 

air of innocence that in this day and age—even the Sisters said it—

 

seemed to indicate a lack of depth.

 

But this fall there was a new quickness in her eye and the range of

 

her emotions did not seem limited in its illustration to a wide smile or

 

a solemn frown. She laughed more. She socialized with some of the

 

more troublesome and popular girls. She had learned, apparently, over

 

the course of what she described to everyone who

 

asked her as the best summer of her life, that there was a hierarchy to
her interests and her pleasures after all. Although there was still
something childish about her body, especially in the outdated
shirtwaist dress that had been for too long now the school’s summer
uniform, there was, also, finally, an assuredness in her movements
that had not been there before. She had found a boyfriend this
summer. (Of course of course, the teachers, even the nuns told each
other, indulgent and naive. Those who had been at the school when
Annie was a student said, with a shrug, Life goes on.) His name was
Gregory Joseph. She wore his heavy high-school ring on a gold chain
around her neck.

 

It had been a setup. Gregory had just finished his freshman year
at Marist College in upstate New York. His older sister, who had been
a senior at Ladycliff College, had spent most of that year “keeping
tabs” on her little brother, driving over on weekends to surprise him in
his dorm, calling him at odd hours, or sending friends who were going
that way to fetch him for Sunday brunch or a Friday-night hamburger.
From all that she could see, he had adjusted well to college life—he
had always been to her a gentle giant, a sweet and quiet kid whose
size, from an early age, had promised athletic prowess but whose
coordination had never delivered it. Her friends and roommates all
thought him adorable, but it became clear over the course of the year
that his own social life was limited to these visits from her and
occasional weekend tagalongs to bars and dances and rock concerts
with his more sociable and hard-drinking friends. A mere
continuation, as she saw it, of his dateless high-school days. “Never
had a date,” she would tell her friends who had praised his sweetness
and his shy affability. “He’s going to be
nineteen.”
At the faltering
Ladycliff, where the few recently enrolled male students were mostly
pudgy or gaunt young men on their way into or out of the seminary,
and where nearby West Point was the fount of romance (MPs being
easier pickings than the

 

sometimes snotty cadets), this became a subject of many late-night
studies. A blind date was in order, they concluded, but how, and with
whom. Finally, sometime in second semester when a late-season
snowstorm kept them all in their dorm rooms with endless bowls of
buttered popcorn, Betty Kelly who lived down the hall offered up her
“little cousin” Clare, who also lived on Long Island, also went to
Catholic school, and had never, as far as Betty knew, had a date either.
Betty Kelly was very pretty. Even with the three feet of snow that
covered the steep and winding streets of the college, and hermetically
sealed the girls’ dorm against the possibility of an impromptu visit
from an ardent male, she resisted the day’s call to slovenliness and
remained impeccably well groomed. She was a senior, and engaged to
a cadet. She was to be married at West Point in June, after graduation,
and she would see her little cousin then, she told the girls, at her
wedding.

 

When Betty Kelly was inclined to be kind, she thought the
reconciliation with Clare’s family was an indication of her mother’s
best nature. Betty had been fifteen at the time. At the back of the huge
round church, she had watched her mother put her arms around the
uncle who had lost the boy, the uncle who was only a pale stoopshouldered version of the man in her mother’s wedding photos. She
had seen him close his eyes in her mother’s embrace, as if it was just
what he needed. There had been two other cousins that day, a boy and
a girl, both older than Betty and both alternately sullen and weepy,
surrounded by a changing orbit of identical friends. Only Clare was
approachable, and back at the small house, Betty had sat next to her,
introduced herself, and then, eventually, had taken her hand. The
photographs of Jacob, the cousin she had never met, made him seem
young, and, she’d told Clare, very nice. Even at fifteen, Betty believed
her attractiveness came with an obli

 

gation to be good, and she had thought, that day, that both she and
her mother had succeeded quite well in being beautiful and good.
But when Betty Kelly was feeling disinclined to be kind, she knew
that the death of the boy in Vietnam had actually made his family
more socially acceptable to her mother, more interesting at least, and
that the sudden reconciliation was as motivated by her mother’s
desire to be an insider to the tragedy as much as it was by any pity she
felt for the family’s pain. Rather than expose the shallow roots of her
own social history, Jacob Keane’s family now provided her mother
with a certain moral authority when the war was discussed with her
Garden City set, few of whom knew anyone who had even served,
much less died, over there. Her uncle’s old car in the driveway when
the family came for dinner was no longer an indication to the
neighbors of a less than illustrious pedigree, but of a sympathetic
noblesse oblige. This was the family, after all, who had lost a boy in
Vietnam, so close to the end, and Catherine Kelly was doing what she
could for them.

 

Betty Kelly wondered, too, from time to time, if both her mother’s
sympathy for the family and the satisfaction she felt at being able to
display that sympathy were equally real. Preparing now to be a
military wife herself, she had, on occasion, mentioned Jacob to her
future in-laws, without ever adding that she and her soldier cousin
had never actually met. She had seen the advantage the connection
gave her; she had, to be honest with herself, savored it, without for a
minute feeling any less pain for poor Clare and the gray-haired parents
who were left to raise her.

 

The blind date, it was agreed—all the girls in the discussion
warming to the possibilities—would be arranged by saying that
Gregory/Clare had just broken up with his/her girlfriend/boyfriend
and wanted to meet someone new. This would eliminate, it was
agreed, any hint that either one of them was a loser who’d never
had a date, while at the same time taking off some of the pressure to
be charming that might move either one of them, shy souls both,
toward total catatonia. “Just tell them it’s not really a date,” one of the
girls offered. “They just want to have someone to talk to while they’re
between serious relationships.”

 

“Just a friend,” Gregory’s sister said, nodding, and all the other
girls in the circle of T-shirts and pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers
echoed the phrase with such wistful enthusiasm it might have been a
refrain from their own prayers. “Just a friend.”

 

Gregory’s sister, who was in awe of, and a little in love with, Betty
Kelly and her clean hair and pink nails and turquoise jogging suit—not
to mention the diamond in its Tiffany setting—pictured Clare as a
younger, shyer version of her cousin; a willowy beauty who her
brother would love instantly, cherish like a delicate bird in his soft big
hands: an incongruous but perfect pair.

 

Betty, who knew her cousin and had met Gregory in the Ladycliff
dining hall, thought more along the lines of beggars can’t be choosers.
At her wedding reception, with her train pinned up and her veil
pushed aside, she drew Clare’s arm across her beaded waist and
walked her to a corner of the room. She whispered, “Would you do me
a favor? Would you go out with this boy I know?” From the corner of
her eye, Betty saw her new mother-in-law in her raw silk suit smiling
at the two of them, making note—Betty was sure of it—that this was
the cousin who had lost her brother in the war, making note of the
sweet special attention Betty was giving her.

 

For Clare, the rapidly accumulating number of “firsts” that her
blind date marked became a mantra for the entire summer: first time
she talked to a boy on the phone (to set up the time and to give
directions); first time she shopped for something to wear on a date;
first time she showered and washed her hair and dressed for a date;
first time she heard the doorbell rung by a date while she was still
getting ready upstairs; first time she heard her father say, “How do
you do,” to a boy at the door, heard her mother’s “Nice to meet you
Gregory,” and the self-consciously soft, mellifluous call up the stairs,
“Clare”—not the usual sweetie pie or baby doll or Clare de Lune—
”your date is here.” First time she came down the stairs to greet a boy
in the living room (first time in these new shoes, too, which were
wooden-soled sandals all the girls were wearing but which she had not
gotten the toe-gripping hang of yet). First time she laid eyes on him: a
big guy (that was good) in neat shorts and Top-Siders (that was good)
and a polo shirt and with not too long hair—all good. First time she
said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” before both of them let their eyes drop to
the floor. First time her mother and father both moved forward to
sweep her out the door by the side of a strange young man. First time
she looked up to see Pauline at her brothers’ window, giving a brief
wave. First time he opened the car door for her (good) of his father’s
Ford Torino (okay) and got in the driver’s side, and before turning the
ignition leaned his head toward the steering wheel and said to her,
smiling a little and from under a falling shock of his brown hair, “Hi
again.” First time he made her laugh.

 

He pulled smoothly out of the driveway and drove to the movie
theater with an easy confidence. He repeated, gamely, what they both
already knew (“So your cousin knows my sister from Ladycliff and my
sister told your cousin all about me and your cousin told my sister all
about you . . .”), leaving out, from sheer awkwardness, the part about
Clare having broken up with an old boyfriend, as well as, from sheer
tact, his sister’s description of Clare as beautiful. He could not have
been more pleased to discover that the latter, which had caused his
hand to tremble when he raised it to her doorbell, was inaccurate. He
could not have been this charming, he was certain, as he pulled into a
parking space and opened her door for her with a bow, had it been
true.

 

First time to find herself among the denizens of date night—
a newly discovered time of day lit by streetlight and movie marquee
and scented with aftershave and patchouli and popcorn and spearmint
gum. First time to sit beside a boy at a movie, to make small talk
before it begins (“So, do you want to go to Ladycliff?”), sharing a tub
of popcorn, elbows touching on the single armrest which she had
always, until now, thought unnecessarily stingy. First time to laugh, in
this new society of her dating peers, when someone cried out, “Start
the fucking movie already,” and the whole of the theater erupted in
applause.

 

They went to the diner after. He ordered a cheeseburger platter
and she, demurely, a grilled cheese on whole wheat. In his car in front
of her house, he put his arm across the back of the seat as they talked
more about the difference between college and high school. Her first
kiss was soft and gentle and lasted long enough to make her wonder
how to breathe. His tongue tasted of dill pickle. Hypothetically, her
plans about how far to go with a boy when the opportunity came
involved the coy catching of a hand or the playful but firm whisper of
“No, no, no.” But the reality was that this was the first time she had
been held in anyone’s arms and there was no certainty whatsoever
that it would happen again, so rather than the coquettish
straightening of the spine and the flirtatious reprimand, she found
herself simply giving in, falling into him, letting his tongue fill her
mouth and his hand brush her arm, her thigh, and gently make its way
under her shirt to her bare skin. His fingers covered her breast and he
stirred and sighed and moved his legs out from under the steering
wheel. His fingertips hooked themselves over the cup of her bra and
tugged a little and were it not for the fact that Betty Kelly had told her
he had just broken up with a longtime girlfriend, she might have seen
this as an indication of his inexperience. He moved his hand to her
back, brushed the hooks of her bra, and then, as if he had been barred
from the door, moved his hand out of her shirt and onto her arm. He
lifted her own hand and placed it on

 

his thigh and were it not for his sister’s lie, he, too, would have seen
the way she simply kept it there, unmoving, as proof of her
inexperience as well. As it was, they both believed the other’s
awkward hesitation was due to a painful remnant of affection for
someone else and they broke apart, a little breathless and shy once
more.

 

Each of them wondering if they could ever replace the phantom
ex in the other’s loyal heart.