Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  Hennessey wheels a cart up to the table. “A little something,” he says.

  She hasn’t seen such food in years. Before her house was stolen from her, she ate whatever the nearby corner store or the Meals-on-Wheels man would deliver. Had she lost the ability to operate a can opener, she would have starved. In comparison, Hennessey’s cart is loaded with treasure. A bowl of almonds. Dark olives in oil and herbs. Clementines. Sliced apples glazed with sugared lime juice. Iced shrimp the size of Mr. Hennessey’s thumb. Peppered goat cheese. Proscuitto. Thin slices of baguette. A bottle of white wine on ice. She is embarrassed by the tears that fill her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Hennessey asks.

  “Oh, yes, certainly. It’s…”

  He waits.

  “…the difference. The very lovely difference.” My mother reaches for the napkin. She will enjoy what is put ahead of her, and pay no mind to her place in the world beyond. For as long as she is here she will think of nothing else.

  Nothing, except poor Bea Hennessey. He has not mentioned his mother yet. But he will, surely he will. And she will have to tell him something. What, exactly?

  I let her die, Mr. Hennessey, now will you pass the shrimp? I had my doubts when I saw the look in her eye. Fear. I suppose I would have to call it fear. But that’s what she said she wanted. Where did you find these grapes?

  What would the big momma’s boy say then?

  Audrey decides the best course is to answer a question of her own choosing, before Hennessey can ask his own. “I’ve been thinking more about the night your mother passed, Mr. Hennessey,” she says.

  “My mother,” he answers. He hoped to avoid all that. He feels at last that he is able to breathe in this house. Finally it is his home, not hers. It was true that he loved her, and just as true that she had worn him down. She had the incessant demands of an infant, an infant with the power of speech. Not to mention a perfect sense of where the thin blade of guilt best fit between his ribs. Hennessey wonders again what possessed him to ask about his mother’s last words. As if he had not heard enough from her.

  My mother considers a yarn about that long corridor of white light into which the dead so famously ascend. Given her own disbelief, she doubts she can sell it to Hennessey. She doesn’t take him for a fool.

  “What does it matter anyway?” Audrey says at last. “Last words. You can’t expect poetry from an old lady who can barely breathe.”

  “Poetry, no. But she said something, is that what you’re telling me?”

  He wonders why he can’t leave this alone.

  Then he provides his own answer: because now he senses that my mother is hiding something from him.

  She busies herself with her napkin. She refuses to meet his eye.

  “I’m afraid I’m jabbering, Mr. Hennessey. The dying don’t recite poetry, in my experience. Nor do the sleeping, so far as I’ve observed.”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Brimsley. It’s just…”

  What, exactly?

  What if his mother had seen around the bend of existence and managed to squawk out a last warning or command? “I loved my mother, you see.”

  “Most people do, I would think, if not necessarily enough.”

  He pauses at that, then laughs. “You are a tough old bird, Mrs. Brimsley.” He fills her glass again.

  “I doubt anything I can say will help you. My opinion is that help comes from within.”

  “And if I say that it’s a professional matter?”

  “Then you have an odd profession. Are you a counselor of some kind? Is that what you mean?” She does not think of this as a mark in his favor. Her generation expected that life’s hard turns must generally be met with gritted teeth. They did not run to strangers for comfort.

  “A counselor,” he repeats. “That’s a way to put it.”

  “An example might help.” My mother feels increasingly confused.

  “If you were put in a dark room, you’d want someone to shine a light, wouldn’t you? Even if the light were dim. You would want an idea of what was there.”

  “I’m not so sure,” my mother says. “I believe it would depend.”

  She thinks again of the sense she had after Mrs. Hennessey’s passing, when her roommate had sunk into her pillows and let loose a final sigh. Her friend’s eyes, which strained so to see just the moment before, settled deep in their sockets. Audrey had pushed the eyelids shut, taking some time to make them even. Better to create a reasonable illusion of sleep, if that was to be her story.

  Suddenly my mother realizes what Hennessey is not quite saying. “You’re a psychic? That’s what you’re telling me? You chase after the dead?”

  He had seemed like such a sensible man.

  “That’s not how I would put it. So many people are confused by their feelings, particularly regarding those who have passed on. I help them straighten out their thoughts. There’s really nothing more to it than that.”

  “I have tried not to let my imagination run wild.”

  “I’m not asking you to imagine anything, Mrs. Brimsley. But if you have something to tell me…”

  She does not trust her ability to relate the truth.

  “Did your mother can vegetables, Mr. Hennessey?” she asks after a prolonged silence.

  “What?”

  “Peaches. Tomatoes. That sort of thing. Did she put them up?”

  Hennessey nods. “I’m not sure I see the connection.”

  “The valve rattles and huffs. You lift it and out comes a geyser of steam. An awful racket until you turn off the heat. Then a whisper. At last, quiet. After all that commotion, peace.”

  “Assuming,” says Hennessey. There were still gouges in the ceiling from when the pressure valve went flying during his mother’s domestic sprees.

  “I doubt I’ve made myself clear,” she says.

  So intently does he stare at her that she cannot help but squirm in her seat. “Maybe more will come to you later,” he says.

  “I’m sure you’re right. But for now, excuse me, please, Mr. Hennessey. I tire so easily, you see.” A lie, of course, but it is her experience that the old are never questioned too closely. “I wonder if you could pour just a sip more of that excellent wine?”

  Hennessey is certain she has more to say. He wishes he had the strength not to ask.

  ≈

  As Hennessey wheels her back into her room, my mother feels she is returning to a cell. She wants to take up Mrs. Hennessey’s life. She wants to live in that fairy tale house, with its stuffed pantry, and its wine cellar, and the virgin snow beside the brick walk. Mr. Hennessey promises her that they will talk again. She wonders how long she can make the story last.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As he falls from his roof, Wald flattens himself against the shingles, spreading his arms and legs to slow himself. When that fails, he grasps at the gutter as he hurtles past. He gets a solid grip despite his thick gloves, and manages to enjoy a split second of relief before the gutter tears away from the rotted fascia.

  He had climbed the ladder easily enough and stepped onto the roof. From there he stuck close to the edge, where the snow had melted. He crawled along the peak to the chimney. No point in taking stupid risks. Wald let a leg dangle on each side of the crest as he slipped his tools out of the backpack. He figured that a dollop of roofing cement would fix the leak that dripped water onto the parlor mantle.

  “Just put a bucket there,” Mag advised. This was one of the differences between them. He would as soon set out a bucket to catch his own dripping blood. What did dripping water leave behind but a trail of rot and ruin? What choice did he have but to solve the problem?

  A crow in a nearby tree jabbered at him. Wald pulled back the loose flashing around the chimney and smeared the gap with black roof cement. A plume of smoke rose from the fire in the living room hearth.

  As kids he and his brother spent hours lingering in the shade of the poplars out back. They stared at the clouds and told lies about the shapes
they claimed to see. Dragons. Castles. That sort of thing. It was a way to kill the abundant time.

  Wald tipped his head back to watch the smoke rise. What’s that? he asked himself, playing the old game. Nothing. A cloud. It reminded him of the tear gas roiling down the street at that college riot where he met Mag. So much for careful planning. A crack on the head had changed his life. He wiped away the blood that filled his eyes that day and wondered how it happened that Snow White had rescued him. Fair of skin, hair coal black, lips of ruby red; the odd notes being those cut-off jeans and the lumberjack shirt she wore. He still couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. He wasn’t the only one. His father, upon first meeting Mag, drew Wald aside and said, “She’s really something.” Leaving unspoken —just barely — the question: What is she doing with you?

  He was steady, that was the key. Mag took him to be the opposite of her father. He wasn’t an adventurer, he wasn’t an artist. Just as well. No home could bear two. Someone had to earn the money. Someone had to keep the leaks stoppered, the toilets flushing. That was his job, which he would eventually master. No need to dwell on the setbacks. The embarrassment with those pipes, to name just one.

  The next thing he knows he is tumbling down the roof.

  The gutter barely slows his fall. He shoots off the roof’s edge, makes a somersault, ricochets from the porch roof and lands, more lightly than he expects, in the snow-covered yews near his front door.

  He remains there silently, not daring to move. For one melodramatic moment he considers that he might be dead. The crow in the oak squawks again to its mates. A car in need of a new muffler drives past. If this is the afterlife, he thinks, it is remarkably familiar and imperfect.

  True enough. I hear the same awful racket. The afterlife is imperfect.

  The front door opens. “Wald?” Mag says tentatively. An instant later she calls, “Wald!” She runs to the yard and looks up at the roof.

  She seems upset, Wald is pleased to observe. Her hands rise to her mouth when she sees he isn’t on the roof. She cries out his name again, this time with a shrill note of panic.

  “Over here,” he says finally, feeling as if he has awakened at his own funeral. Something wet drips on his face. He hopes it is snow.

  Mag runs to the green wall of yew and pulls aside the overgrown branches. Wald thought he saw a rat lurking beneath the branches one morning as he came out for the paper. He had talked afterward about ripping out the messy shrubs and planting something that offered less of a hiding place —lilies, maybe, or ferns. Lucky for him this was another job that remained on his to-do list. Had he fallen into a frozen flower bed instead of the mess of yew, his list might have been reduced to a single item: get buried.

  Mag bends over him.

  “Help me out,” Wald says.

  “Don’t move.”

  She stares into his eyes. “Your pupils aren’t dilated.”

  “That’s good, right?” he says.

  “Wiggle your fingers.”

  “I’m okay.” He is surprised to think it might be true. He flounders against the yews, struggling to get up.

  “What happened?” Mag asks. She doesn’t mind the bungled jobs around the house; the leaking pipes, the faucets he never quite fixes. She doesn’t care whether the roof leaks. But he can’t kill himself while acting out his handyman fantasies. Not now. A child needs a father. No one knows that better than she. “What happened, Wald?” she says, struggling with her anger.

  He shrugs. A memory of the day they met sent him crashing off the roof. That is probably not the right thing to say. “Ice,” he says. “I slipped.”

  “You should go to the clinic.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve got to be more careful,” Mag said. She decides this is the right time to tell him she is pregnant.

  ≈

  A note about awakening at your own funeral. You may attend or you may choose to be elsewhere. Children, so far as I know, do not witness the actual event, but may revisit it later, once their consciousness has had a chance to ripen. A small kindness, which suggests an Intelligence hidden here somewhere. But there is no curtain, and no Toto to pull it back. If we have an Oz, then he, she or it is a being of remarkable restraint.

  To answer the inevitable question: Yes, just once. I will not do it again.

  ≈

  It is midnight before Wald gets to bed. He falls asleep immediately. Mortality, paternity: he’s had a big day. He bought a bottle of champagne to go with dinner, thinking he and Mag should celebrate. She wouldn’t touch it, being pregnant. He finished off most of the bottle himself. As a result he was somewhat absent during their first baby conversation.

  A few hours later he wakes with a start. The radiators are banging. Air in the pipes. Another item for his list.

  His stomach churns, as it always does after he drinks champagne. The bedroom is freezing, also as usual. Mrs. Brimsley never insulated the walls. One more job. He snakes a hand under Mag’s flannel gown and scratches lightly at her back, tracing her vertebrae. There is so little to her that he wonders how a baby will fit. Mag purrs briefly, then mumbles, “Thanks,” her way of saying, “Stop bothering me.” He gets up to go to the bathroom.

  There is no point in going back to bed. He has too much to think about. They’d had what he guessed was a predictable conversation. Boy or girl. Names. When to tell their parents. He barely has an opinion. Instead he is stuck on the essential fact. They have created another life, a consciousness, that now exists under his failing roof. He is responsible for another being. Now more than ever Mag will want assurance that she can depend on him. This is the bargain they have made. Her beauty for his reliability. Her sensibility for his common sense. But the job suddenly seems so overwhelming, so fraught with potential failure, that for the first time he feels a kinship with her father. He understands the temptation to flee.

  Milk — maybe that will help.

  He goes to the kitchen, fills a glass and takes it to the table. There is no need to turn on a light. The moon is so bright that it casts shadows from the oak branches onto the snow. You could read a newspaper out there, though you’d freeze to death as you did it. The temperature is well below zero. He hears the gassy hiss of the furnace below.

  That afternoon as he shook the snow from his collar he wondered if he would be one of those characters who smiles, takes three steps and falls over dead. That’s when Mag announced that she was pregnant.

  The rest of what she said buzzed past him, all picture, no volume. His wife, so lovely that his breath stuck in his throat to look at her. Her expression, such a confounding combination of anger, joy and apprehension. She had staked her future on a man who was saved from death by dumb luck. She threw her arms around him and said, “I’m so happy.” Happy that she was pregnant, happy that he hadn’t killed himself. He had no choice but to embrace her and the baby and all the rest of the future. She needed him. He could not be so careless, not anymore.

  He threw his arms around her, kissed her, bought the bottle of champagne, drank too much, argued over baby names. He had done his job. The elemental truth of it hadn’t struck him then. Existence, awareness, called up out of nothing and deposited inside his wife, as eerie as it was beautiful.

  He feels that someone is watching him.

  He does his best to act as if he believes the so-called truth. There is no one. It is nothing. Nothing except the swell of the past and the future, of creation itself, lifting him up with its irresistible force. Nothing except his anxiety over all that awaits them. He gulps down his milk and takes the glass to the sink. Unable to help himself, he turns slowly toward the window. The window is rimed. Beyond is the moon-lit snow. So far as he can tell there is nothing more than that.

  I follow him to his bed and wish him sweet dreams. Sweet dreams for Wald, and Mag, and the child within her, whose thoughts are now a low, steady hum, another being in the making, inchoate, unreasoning, yet living and here.

  Chapter Fourteen
/>
  As Hennessey enters her room, my mother turns her disconcerting smile toward him. Her dentures gleam like a well-scrubbed sink.

  “Please, make yourself comfortable,” she says.

  He sits on the edge of the bed his mother once occupied. He will not become too comfortable there.

  “I have lunch waiting,” he tells Audrey. “Assuming you don’t mind a drive.”

  “Oh, I’ll survive.” She waits eagerly for him to drape his coat over her shoulders and tuck it in around her. Once again he rolls her down the shining corridor, decorated with so much false cheer. The crayon-drawn snowscapes produced by that kindergarten class. The parakeets in their cage beside the dining room door. The announcements for the Valentine’s Day social. When the door opens and winter’s blast hit her, she feels intoxicated by the fresh air. She wants to plant a kiss on Mr. Hennessey’s florid cheek, though that would never do.

  They drive in his Cadillac, down streets only vaguely familiar to her. So much has changed over the years that she scarcely believes this is her home. The distant skyline is a mystery. She has never — will never — set foot in the brutal new buildings that rise in the city’s center.

  She is a tourist in the present. She belongs to the past, to the days when gentlemen wore hats, automobiles had runners, families listened to the radio together. Odd to think that in this alien city there are young women, as fashionable now as she once was, who will be rendered just as extraneous, just as invisible.

  They arrive again at Hennessey’s cottage. My mother is surprised to discover that though she has eaten scarcely an hour earlier, she is suddenly famished. Hungry not only for the meal that Hennessey quickly arranges on the table, but hungry for her life. She has spent so many years locked in a world of miserly pleasures. A dash of cream in her coffee instead of skim milk. Turning on her electric blanket after supper to warm her bed. Trifles that passed as luxury.