After This (35 page)

At her door he said, his eyes on the welcome mat, “Do you want
to go out again tomorrow?” and she said, softly, “Okay. That’d be
good.”

 

In only a few weeks’ time, the refrain of first—first party together,
first walk on the beach, first dinner in a restaurant—exhausted itself in
the social realm and came to refer exclusively to the physical
milestones they marked during their hours together in the dark: first
love bite, first success with those hooks, first glimpse of her bare
breasts in the shadowy streetlights, first obedient touch of her hand,
first nakedness against the plush cloth seat, first astonished
completion of what they had begun, the silver shimmer of their
success spread across her bare belly.

 

That summer, Barb Luce, who had been Clare’s best friend since
fifth grade, accused her of abandoning their friendship because of a
boy—an error they had marked in other girls at their school and had
always condemned—and Clare denied it, but without conviction. She
would not return to those suffocating Saturday nights of TV movies
and cake mixes and playing with each other’s hair for all the best
girlfriends in the world. “Maybe we can double date sometime,” she
told Barb. “You know, when you meet someone.” And that was the
end of that.

 

It was the girls who already had boyfriends, or who already had a
string of them, who noticed his ring around her neck the first morning
back at school. Clare was part of their sorority now.

 

In the second week of the term, a priest visited, as was tradition,
to hear confessions and to say Mass, but he was a young guy—a new
assistant at a nearby parish—with thinning hair and an effeminate
voice, and in an effort to keep the sacrament relevant to the girls he
asked that they first meet with him in small groups so they could all
have a conversation about life, about their accomplishments (he said)
as well as their transgressions, before he met with them individually
to offer absolution. He was pale and earnest, gay, they were pretty
sure.

 

In Clare’s group discussion, held in the small room that usually
served as the PE teacher’s office, she and Christine Dodd and Cynthia
Pechulis talked about being nasty behind their friends’ backs and lying
to their parents about stupid things and using fake IDs to buy beer,
but no one said anything about sex. In her individual meeting, Clare
shyly bent her head when the young priest asked her if she had
anything more she wanted to discuss. He suggested that they both
take a minute to “open our hearts to God” before they said an Act of
Contrition together, and although she bowed her head again, it was
not as easy, at that moment, to keep a silent conscience. For surely if
she had ever sinned it was when she had first let him, helped him, to
slip her sweater up over her head, to slide her jeans off over her hips.
Without opening his eyes, the young priest suddenly began to say
an Act of Contrition and softly, Clare followed along. He then blessed
her, and absolved her, and as he did, she noticed that his fingernails
were bitten to the core. It was the kind of thing Pauline would have
pointed out. It was the kind of thing that indicated, Clare already
knew, that the man wasn’t as sure of himself as he seemed.
That Saturday afternoon she walked down to St. Gabriel’s and
slipped through the eight-paneled door of one of the confessionals.
This, too, in the way of contemporary churches, was just a room, not
terribly different from the PE teacher’s office at school, but
empty except for a freestanding kneeler before a folded screen. Early
on (Clare had memories of her first confessions here), when
everything still smelled of wood and paint, there had been just two
chairs, but her parents, and others, it seemed, had claimed Father
McShane had taken the modernization thing too far and the kneeling
bench and the screen had been added. Father McShane, now
Monsignor McShane, was seated behind the screen, she could see his
profile clearly, his cheek in his hand. There had been rumors, when
she was in grammar school, that he slept through most confessions,
sometimes even snored if you went on too long. She repeated the list
of sins she had been confessing since those days—adding only “I let
my boyfriend take some liberties,” which she placed between, “I lied
to my mother three times” and “I took the Lord’s name in vain twice.”
The priest prescribed for her penance four Our Father’s and four Hail
Mary’s and the avoidance of the “occasion of sin.”

 

Kneeling in the pew to say her prayers, she recalled how she once
had thought an occasion of sin meant a social occasion dedicated to
wrongdoing—St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras most likely. She smiled
into her hands. Of course, what it meant now was the backseat of
Greg’s father’s car, the couch in her basement when her parents
weren’t home, the friend’s apartment near Marist where, he had
assured her, he and she would have a room to themselves,
undisturbed, when she came up to visit him this weekend, getting a
ride from his sister, who would stay with friends at Ladycliff and
assure both sets of parents that Clare too was staying there. She had
bought new pajamas. He said he was buying new sheets. She would
brush her teeth and wash her face, tie up her hair in a ribbon and then
kiss him. They would sleep together in the same bed for the first time
and in the morning they’d go out to breakfast together—he’d said the
diners upstate were pretty lousy but he had a favorite spot for waffles
and fresh juice. After breakfast, they would take

 

a long walk—he had the trail all planned. The leaves were just
changing and he knew a farm where they sold hot cider. There was a
rugby game to watch Saturday afternoon and a keg party that night.
His friends would treat her with that delicious graciousness otherwise
wild and sometimes gross boys reserved for the girls who were loved
by their buddies. And then a second night in bed together, like a
married couple.

 

She could feel her own heart under the softness of her breast,
beating against her folded hands as she knelt, anticipating it, the best
weekend of her life, losing count of what prayer she was on, or how it
was, here in St. Gabriel’s, that her thoughts had wandered so
pleasurably and so far. She raised her eyes. In the past few months,
statues had been added to the altar, a recognizable Joseph and Mary, a
formidable Saint Gabriel, blond and fine-featured, kneeling on one
knee. It was what the parishioners had wanted, realistic statues, easily
identifiable. She blessed herself and rose and slipped out of the pew,
suddenly struck by the conviction that she was going to have the
happiest life. And then she paused and knelt again to say a prayer to
Jacob, who had once sat beside her, here in this place, to thank him for
it.

 

Her baby began, as she reckoned it, sometime during the first cold
days of that autumn. She pictured it forming like the far-off swirl of
some distant galaxy in the darkness of her womb, more blood than
flesh, and then, perhaps by Christmas, more flesh than blood. Because
she had always been so thin, no one was surprised to find she had
begun to fill out, and because the winter uniform meant wool skirt
and soft blouse and V-neck sweater, if you wished, under the blue
blazer, because Pauline had shown her years ago how to adjust a hem
and open a seam, she had no worry all through the winter that she
would have to tell anyone yet. Not Gregory or her parents or the
teachers at school. Gregory had midterms just after

 

the first of the year and then the weather turned bad, so he was
spending fewer weekends home. With only a vague idea of what next
year would be like, she told her parents she’d decided she’d rather go
to college nearby and applied only to Malloy and St. John’s. On
Saturdays she drove herself to the library and spent long hours in the
overheated rooms studying biology books and medical texts, Dr. Spock
and
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
but mostly the lovely full-color photos from
an old
Life
magazine that showed a fetus floating like a spacewalker in
the limitless universe of a uterus, a thin and otherworldly baby
crooking an arm, sucking a thumb, lifting a snub nose and a dark, an
ancient, eye to the top of the page. Breathing slowly, with a sleeper’s
rhythm, she placed one hand on her waist and touched Gregory’s ring
with the other, leaning over these pictures. The best afternoons were
the ones when a cold rain, or a sleet, or a bit of snow fell from a
colorless sky and hit the library windows, making her believe this deep
winter would never end.

 

In her prayers she sometimes said, “What you could do for me,
what you could do for me, is let this winter never end.”

 

It was only the birth itself that frightened her. In health class that
fall, they’d been shown a film: a hospital birth, the woman red-faced
and panting, her pale, raised knees, more blood and less privacy than
any of them had imagined. A scalpel moving in for what they called
the episiotomy (“It won’t appease me,” was the joke later). Girls with
their hands over their mouths stumbled from the room. All week long,
as the film was shown to each class, green-faced students could be
found lined up on the floor in the hallways, slumped against the walls
like wounded soldiers in trenches. Later, there was talk of a
conspiracy: moral injunctions having failed, the powers that be at
Mary Immaculate Academy were merely trying to terrify them into
chastity. “Too late,” the more troublesome and

 

popular girls had said, laughing, Clare now among them. “Try not to
think about it.”

 

In the library, bent over the amber-tinted photographs of a baby
coming into life, she could manage not to think about it: the pain she
was headed for in eight, then seven, then six months’ time, the
humiliation of bare knees raised, body convulsed, nothing appeased.
In the warmth and quiet of the library—the smell of books, the rustle
of newspapers, the occasional voice of a child—she thought instead of
the life that was forming, not just the baby’s life but the life of nights
in bed beside him and the mornings she would wake with him at her
side.

 

She set the weekend of daylight savings, the beginning of spring,
for the time to shake herself out of her lovely stupor and face the
world. She told Gregory on the phone on Saturday, and he cursed
softly, the way he did when he made a wrong turn while driving or left
his wallet in his other pants, cursing himself and his own stupidity.
“What do you want to do?” he said, finally. “What is there?” she said,
not really a question, and he cursed again.

 

She made her way into Pauline’s room that night, touched her
gently on the hip and then sat on the edge of Michael’s bed. With her
sister gone, she no longer troubled to give the excuse that she had to
sleep here because Annie was reading. She was certain Pauline never
bought it anyway. She came in here because it was where Jacob had
slept all the years he was home, even in the years before she was born,
and there was comfort in looking into the same darkness he had
known, guessing at the shapes beneath the same shadows. She sat on
Michael’s bed. This was the hour, she guessed, that they were meant
to spring forward. The hour erased out of time from this night until
the one in the fall, when it would be restored again. As good a time as
any, she thought, to plan with a bit more precision just what she
wanted to do.

 

She told her mother the next night, the first Sunday evening when
there was still light left after dinner. They had finished eating, her
father and Pauline had left the table, and she watched her mother’s
mouth draw down crookedly, searing a line through her chin.
Her mother slapped her and then burst into tears and Clare’s pain
and astonishment were so great she could barely catch her breath. She
put her face in her hands, awoken, at last, from the winter’s spell. She
said, through her own tears, “A grandchild for you,” but even she
heard how ridiculous this was, something spoken out of the illogic of a
long dream.

 

Her mother’s tears brought her father in from the living room and
he stood in the doorway with his hand to his bald head as Mary Keane
told him, crying, “She’s pregnant.” Looking at neither her husband
nor her child, she said, to the air, it seemed, “How much more can I
take?”

 

Her father limped to the phone on the wall. “What’s the
number?” he said and Clare had a silly impulse to say 911. “The
Josephs,” her father said. “Greg’s parents. What’s their phone
number?”

 

Weakly, she said, “No, Daddy,” but her mother was up already,
rummaging through a drawer for her phone book. She read the
number out loud as her father dialed. In his business voice he asked to
speak to Gregory’s father. But he had only begun the conversation (“It
seems your boy,” he said) when his face twisted into a terrible mask
and her mother had to take the phone.

 

Clare bowed her head and put her arms over her widening waist.
There was nothing to be done, she knew, because the future was
already here, inside her—she had already begun to feel the baby stir—
and the thought seemed to trump everything else, her mother’s now
steady voice, her father’s muffled tears, which were

 

not for her, she knew even then, but for Jacob, at long last. The sun
had begun to set and the kitchen was darkening, an hour later than it
would have just yesterday. Her cheek still stung from where her
mother had slapped her. The baby moved, as if waving a thin arm at
her from that once-distant galaxy, now a single star, a sun (a son, she
thought) well within her sight, warm. When she looked up, Pauline
was standing in the kitchen doorway, her hand on the frame and
something in her mouth, perhaps a butterscotch or a hard candy
pushed behind her teeth. Clare got up and stood beside her, and, as
she had been doing all her life, lifted and held the old woman’s hand
as if Pauline herself had offered it.