After This (9 page)

 

He’d had the story from an Irish priest assigned to Creedmoor. “A
sad case himself,” Mr. Persichetti said, and gently pulled the damp
hem of her dress back over her thighs. For a moment he found himself
incapable of remembering Mr. Keane’s face, although they’d been
neighbors for perhaps ten years. Nor could he remember another
conversation he’d had with this woman stretched before him now on
her living-room couch, her hair damp and her eyes a kind of gray, or
green. He took her hand as if she were his child, or his own wife.
“Apparently,” he said, “this Saint Dymphna was the daughter of
an Irish chieftain, a pagan. But she had a beautiful Christian mother.”
Gray eyes or green, he thought they were the one thing that might
have made her pretty when she was young. “So the mother dies.” He
paused only briefly. “When the girl’s about fourteen. And the chieftain
goes crazy and tells his servants to go out

 

and find another beautiful woman who resembled his dead wife so he
can marry her.”

 

He paused again to touch her white lips with the wet towel.
“They should be here soon,” he said softly, interrupting himself. There
was a bit of mad laughter from the children outside. The sun through
the lace curtains at the front window had placed a small spotlight on
the arm of the sofa, just above her head. He could see by the color in
her cheeks that another contraction was on the rise.

 

“The servants were evil,” he said, recalling the tale the way the
whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurse’s station late into the night, those watery blue
eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. “They told the crazy chieftain
that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to
do.” (“If you get my meaning,” the priest had said.) “But Dymphna
ran off to Belgium.” He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face
seemed to swell with color. “Her crazy father followed her,” he said,
tightening his own grip on her hand. “I guess he cut off her head.”
Mrs. Keane said, “Oh my,” but the contraction took hold and at
the end of it she sobbed, “Mother of God,” which he supposed was the
answer he should have given her in the first place.

 

Jesus and Mary, most of the saints, even the alcoholic priest who
could calm an agitated patient with just the laying on of his swollen
hands, Mr. Persichetti himself, plagued by pity—indications all that
the Creator was not indifferent to the suffering He engendered, in His
bustling, in His haste, but also that there would be no end to His
mistakes. Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with
a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came
(would it ever come?), the baby would most likely not survive, would
be born with flesh and plenty of blood but underdeveloped lungs and
insufficient breath. He heard the children calling to one another
outside, Tony among them once again since his father

 

was taking so long inside the house and (stinging injustice) had been
wrong to drag him away in the first place, two hours before dinner.
(Although Tony had quickly discovered that the earlier war game
could not be recaptured; that in the twenty minutes he’d been gone, it
had lost its life, lost its charm.)

 

Mr. Persichetti knew there were children growing in nearly every
house in this neighborhood, in every borough and every town.
Thousands more were being born today, being conceived—women
with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs. Keane herself already
had three. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too
soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue
or ill made or with reason’s taut string already snapped, it was of little
matter in the long history of God’s bustling. There was the Mother of
God to turn to in prayer. There were the angels and the saints. There
were the people like himself, plagued by pity the way other men were
driven by ambition or greed, who would wade through the blood and
the stool, the torn hair and ravaged flesh, the mad cries, to take the
broken, raving thing—God’s mistake—into his arms.

 

When the next contraction had passed, he gently pushed the dish
towels (printed with teapots, printed with kittens) under Mrs. Keane’s
white thighs, pulling away Jacob’s soaked jacket. He put one hand on
top of her belly. “Isn’t it lucky that you’re here?” she whispered,
holding on to his strong arm. And then, a little later, “Isn’t it good the
hurricane caused the tree to fall and so you came by?”

 

And Mr. Persichetti said it was good indeed, although he knew
the baby might not survive.

 

“The storm came,” she said, catching her breath, “and then a
fireman came to the door in the middle of the storm, out of nowhere,
and told us about the tree falling, and then you came by.” She
grimaced and paused, squeezing his hand. “And came back,”
she said as the contraction passed. “Because—who was it?” she said.
“The Krafts,” he told her, “down the street.”

 

“The Krafts lost a tree as well,” she said, shifting uncomfortably.
“Lucky for me.”

 

And then she breathed another “Mother of God.”

 

His T-shirt was soaked all across the middle. There was now the
salty scent of her perspiration, and his, and the scent of blood. Her
bare knee touched the side of his face. He saw the baby’s dark scalp,
streaks of hair. She cried out and he was aware, too, of the sound of
the ambulance somewhere. He raised the volume of his own voice, a
string of reassurances against his own fear that the baby would not
survive. Skull and forehead and closed eyes streaked with blood. He
reached for the turkey baster, cleared the mouth even as he tugged,
gently, at the head in his hands. The shoulders and arms and the
surprising burst of the pale blue umbilical cord, thick and writhing,
and then the baby was in his hands—”A little girl,” he told her—and
the medics, the ambulance guys were in the room behind him, around
him, a knee against his back as someone said, “Step aside,” and leaned
down to take the little thing from him. The baby’s mouth opened and
two fists went up in fury. And then it cried, but so thinly.

 

But of course, he couldn’t step. He discovered that he was
kneeling at her side. He merely sat back on his bottom and then
crawled a bit, avoiding their shoes. Someone was opening a medical
bag and a stretcher was coming through the front door. He blessed
himself and then said, “I’m in medicine, an RN,” lest they think him a
fool. Then he leaned his back against a chair.

 

As they were hustling her and the child out the door (where the
children from the tree had already gathered) he said to one of the
medics, “Six weeks premature.” The guy shook his head. He had a
crew cut and a broad face and his white coat buttoned across the
shoulder. “That baby’s full-term,” he said. “Seven pounds at least.”
Mr. Persichetti shrugged, rather nonchalantly, among men once more.
“She said she had six more weeks.”

 

And the man shrugged, too, as if to confirm how well they both
understood, being in the profession, that it was all a small matter, this
coming into life and going out, merely part of the routine. “She can’t
count,” he said bluntly.

 

And then he laughed. He paused in the tiny hallway, put his
elbow to Mr. Persichetti’s strong arm. “My wife always knows exactly,”
he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably
because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my
birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then
turned to say, “I got two kids born in November, two in June. No
kidding.”

 

The children gathered along the driveway briefly looked away
from the ambulance as the man went down the steps, shouting back to
Mr. Persichetti. “This guy,” he said, pointing at the house, “is a lucky
man, if she don’t know if it’s been nine months or seven.” Mr.
Persichetti raised a hand, agreeing, nodding and laughing, but also
saying under his breath, Get going, get going. He would not rest easily
until he was sure she was in a doctor’s care. Then he noticed her boys.
They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their
plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn
beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a
comforting arm around each.
C
AREFULLY
, dipping carefully—the broad backside in the good wool
skirt—Pauline reached into the car and took the infant from Mary
Keane’s arms. There was the pink receiving blanket, the long white

 

shawl, the lace bib of her homecoming dress. Pauline stepped back,

 

onto the grass that lined the driveway, the baby in her arms.
Mary said, “Where’s her bonnet?” and then searched the floor,

 

looking for it. Her husband was coming around the car to help her get

 

out. Pauline held the baby in her arms, dipped her large, powdered

 

face closer to its own, her eyes taking in, there on the grass at the side

 

of the driveway, the cashmere shawl (her own gift, from Saks), the

 

receiving blanket, the tiny body, the little face. Slowly, Pauline raised

 

her left hand and cupped it over the child’s skull to keep her warm.

 

The sun was high but there was a clean chill in the air. The smell of

 

autumn, and of the sawdust left behind from the fallen tree. She held

 

the baby against her chest and raised her elbow to bring the small

 

sleeping face nearer her own.

 

“Here it is,” Mary said, lifting the bonnet from the floor.
Inside, the children were waiting around the dining-room table

 

with their homemade cards and the frosted birthday cake their father

 

had brought from the bakery this morning. Inside, Pauline’s overnight

 

bag was packed and waiting in the vestibule. As Mary,

 

carrying the new baby, preceded her into the house, Pauline slipped
her jacket from the hall closet and lifted the bag, even as the three
children gathered around their mother. She simply walked out again,
through the front door. She went down the steps. She raised her hand
without turning when they called after her. She raised her hand
without turning as John Keane followed her down the steps to say, “At
least let me give you a lift to the bus stop.”

 

“Go back to your new family,” she said without turning. “This is a
precious moment. There shouldn’t be any strangers at this
homecoming.” Meaning it, every word of it, but not turning to see
how thoroughly her sudden departure had disrupted the homecoming
anyway, how the children had looked away from their mother and the
new baby to stare after her, how John Keane had looked back to his
wife, their new daughter in her arms, to shrug, to show her his
annoyance. The woman drove him crazy.

 

Without turning, Pauline walked with her bag the three blocks to
the bus stop, then changed at Jamaica for the bus home.

 

At her building, she struggled with the six days of mail shoved
every which way into her box (she’d had no time, when the call came,
to leave her mailbox key with her neighbor), bills and advertising
circulars and bank statements and a mailman who would probably
keep pushing mail into her box even if she was gone for six months,
dead for a year—only one of the phalanx of indifferent strangers she
faced every day.

 

Upstairs in her apartment she unpacked her bag—two housedresses in polished cotton and a floral housecoat, another good skirt
and sweater and the underwear, girdle, and stockings she’d have to
wash out in the sink this evening. In the bottom of the bag, beneath
her makeup case and her slippers, the card Jacob had drawn for her—a
vase with six spindly flowers: a purple tulip, what seemed to be a red
rose, and four simple daisies (she guessed that the success with the
tulip had inspired the rose and the failure of the rose had

 

led to the safer daisies). Inside the folded piece of blue construction
paper he had written only, in careful cursive, From Jacob.

 

Although she preferred Michael, whose distrust of anything placid
echoed her own, she put the card on her dresser.

 

Moving into her small kitchen, Pauline went through the
refrigerator, tossing out the milk and the sliced ham she had not had
time to dispose of last week, when the call came that the baby had
arrived early and they were on their way to the hospital. A minute
later and they would have missed her, she told John Keane, when the
call came. She had just powdered her nose and put on her hat.
She rode the elevator down again to shop briefly—it was Sunday
and the stores closed early—for what she needed: milk and eggs and
bread and margarine. She told the lady at the deli where she ordered
her ham that it had not been a vacation by any means: three children
to look after and a much neglected house to clean. The lady at the
counter—Maria, in housecoat and worn slippers and swollen ankles—
called her some good friend to do all that and Pauline said, “Oh, but
the baby is beautiful,” a kind of reprimand, as if it had been Maria
herself who had complained so ungenerously about the dirty house.
The grocery bag was light enough but still her back ached and her
legs were tired. She had slept fitfully all week in little Annie’s
bedroom, wall to wall with stuffed animals that the child never played
with and that Pauline would have donated to an orphanage, had the
choice been hers. And the little girl had cried herself to sleep in her
brother’s bedroom every night, lonesome for her mother. And that
little Italian man in the side yard two days in a row, with his chain saw
and his hatchet, clearing the fallen tree. Standing too close to her,
Pauline felt certain, when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.
The sparse trees along her block were showing signs of red and
gold but there was also the smell of dog droppings and bus fumes
and sun-warmed garbage in the air, which you didn’t have out on Long
Island. And the Empire State Building across the river was useless, a
painted backdrop at this hour on a Sunday, its offices empty, its very
reason for being temporarily drained. Her company’s own building,
her empty office within, not three blocks away. Home again, she
changed into another housecoat, the red velvet one she had made for
herself last Christmas, the covered buttons she’d found at A&S a
satisfying perfect match. She boiled an egg for dinner. Mixed a
Manhattan to sip with Walter Cronkite. She answered the phone only
the second time it rang, Mary calling to say I wish you hadn’t run off
(but not meaning it) and that the house has never been so clean (no
kidding) and what did you put in your mashed potatoes that made the
kids love them so (a little sugar and a little garlic salt, but Pauline
wouldn’t tell).