Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  “Try these strawberries,” Hennessey says. They are tiny, wild it seems, picked in some corner of the planet she will never see, such a deep red that they are nearly purple, so sweet they make her jaws ache.

  “Oh, you have no idea how exciting this is, Mr. Hennessey.”

  Certainly he has no idea, for he lives in a world where one expects food to have flavor, where wine might be within reach, where coffee is something more than brown water.

  She supposes she will have to sing for her supper again. Everything has its price. She is surprised that Mr. Hennessey, being otherwise such an intelligent man, is not content to leave his mother be. The woman, after all, is dead.

  My mother has spent years telling herself that I am simply dead. She tells herself, decade after decade, that I was here, and then I was not, just like all the millions and millions before me. She tells herself that if the spirits of all of the dead remained behind, then the living would hardly be able to breathe, so clotted with ghosts the air would be.

  I would be upset by her faithlessness, except that she has never managed to convince herself. She feels my presence, she always has. I have been an itch just beyond reach; a word she knows perfectly well but can’t recall; a half-remembered melody. I have longed to tell her that she is right. I am here. I do know that she has not forgotten me, that all her efforts to forget have come to nothing, will always come to nothing. Of course there is nothing I can do. She is on her side of the wall and I am on mine. I am not so certain that a change would be an improvement. Would her life have been better, had she spent sixty years talking to a ghost?

  Though in a sense that’s exactly what she’s done. She imagined the entirety of my future. My first day at school, my graduation, my wedding, my children. All of it seemed so possible, so tantalizingly within reach, that she is still astonished it did not come to pass. She is stunned that reality could so defy the power of her imagination.

  Too often she doubted that it had. Her mind played terrible tricks on her. She woke to the sound of a baby crying down the hall. She sighed with that combination of exasperation and love that propels a mother from her warm bed. When she awakened fully and remembered, again, that there was no baby, that there could be no baby’s cry, that she and James were alone in their house, taunted by its noises, oh, she trembled with rage and grief. She fought to contain her tears. Night after night she lost. She shook so that James would awaken and reach out to her. “What is it?” he would say, knowing the answer.

  “I thought I heard… but it’s just…” Her bitterness, her frustration, would not let her finish the sentence.

  Worse still was that time before she finally resolved to box up all of my things and banish them to the attic. After the funeral her sister offered to pack up the clothing, the stroller, the bassinet, the hundreds of odds and ends that arrived along with me. “You don’t want to look at all this, honey,” said her sister. “It will just break your heart.”

  Her sister was right. It was breaking her heart. But then her heart would have been no less broken had all of my things disappeared at once. She knew that, too.

  “I can put it in her room, and you can just close the door until you’re ready,” her sister said.

  My mother wondered when that day would come.

  My mother’s sister looked to James, who simply shrugged. He had no idea what would help his wife. Time, he supposed. Should enough time exist.

  Slowly, as she could bear it, my mother moved my bottles to the nursery. She picked up the baby blankets that were scattered in unlikely places — on the bookshelf, on the floor beside the bed, over the bathroom radiator — and piled them on the nursery dresser. Still, there was hardly a nook that I had not infiltrated. My mother moved the sofa to dust beneath it and there was a pacifier. She lifted a stack of books and there was a forgotten baby picture. She took a navy sweater from her closet and stuck to the shoulder was a fine blonde strand of my hair. She held it to the light and saw that familiar glow of life. Or, rather, the mocking illusion thereof.

  I confess that I was not entirely displeased. Death and vanity make a better pair than you might imagine.

  Sometimes, sitting in the rocker in my nursery, my mother allowed herself to think that I was not altogether departed. Oh, she fought against this impulse, taking it for the sort of weakness that would drag her farther from the reality of the world. Farther from her husband, her chores, the children that could exist in the future if only she could bear the thought.

  But what, she wondered, of the toys that suddenly appeared in odd places? What could they signify? More than once she had picked up some bauble — a rag doll, a wooden block — and asked James, “Did you put this here?”

  “No,” he said softly, hoping that his answer would not make things worse.

  But if he had not put out the doll or the block, or any of the other things that seemed to wash up by themselves, then where did they come from? It was a house, not a tide-swept beach. Things should not simply appear.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe you set it down and forgot.”

  Maybe, she thought, she was sabotaging her own sanity. Maybe she was seeding the house in an effort not to forget. Already there were days when she could not quite call my face to mind. Instead she saw a generic toddler. Fat round cheeks, blue eyes, pudgy thighs, milky skin. A child, certainly, but not exactly me. How could she forget so soon? How could she betray her own baby?

  And if she was not undermining her own sanity, planting the house with my small things, then could it be… Could it be that I knew I was being forgotten, and so left behind these reminders? My mother wondered if I would ever allow her to rest, even as she told herself that her suspicions were crazy.

  She did not share these fears with James. Honesty might only serve to drive him away. And if she lost him, what would she have left?

  She worried that she had already stretched his patience. She did not care for him to touch her. The idea of intimacy, of thrashing around in their bed as if life could merely go on, as everyone told her it must, well, she would just as soon tattoo her face and dance naked in the street. Yet she could hardly tell James as much. He had lost a child as well. She was obliged to comfort him, just as he was obliged to comfort her. If she did not, then she would have to live with the further consequences. She did not dare to be alone.

  On those nights when my mother decided that James must be served, when she slipped from her gown and edged up beside him, she was overcome by the sense that I was at the foot of the bed, watching as my replacement was created. Watching as I was betrayed.

  As indeed I have been. I say this again: there are no private moments. There are no secret thoughts. She came to hate me as much as she loved me.

  My mother suffered by herself. She did not speak of it to anyone — not to James, or her mother, or her sister, or her friends. She would not turn herself into a figure of pity or ridicule.

  This, she believes, is where Hennessey now wants to drag both her and himself. Back into the land of the dead. She would have refused at any other time of her life. She would not have returned, not even for a man as charming as Mr. Hennessey, except that she is so nearly a ghost now herself, abandoned in the Sheltering Arms.

  “Have this last olive,” says Hennessey. It glistens, black with oil. My mother can still taste the strawberry juice on her lips. She shivers as the champagne fizzes in her mouth.

  She decides she will tell Hennessey something of the truth, and something of what he apparently wants to hear. He can make his own peace with the consequences, which she will not allow to be her concern.

  ≈

  “This isn’t enough to save,” Hennessey says, topping off their glasses.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t,” my mother replies, but she knows that she will, and that she will enjoy it, at least until the next morning, when she will have a headache and a sour stomach. She doesn’t care. She tells herself she is finished with worrying about tomorrow.

  When w
as the last time she has enjoyed such pleasures? Not since the last time Hennessey spirited her away. And before that? She can’t say. Those afternoons with the ladies from church were pleasant enough, in their way — in their sober, weak-coffee, stale reminiscences way — but they were not the same as sharing a bottle of wine with an interesting man. If only she were thirty or forty years younger. She wonders what might happen then. In fact she does not wonder so much. She knows.

  Audrey feels unfaithful to find herself with such thoughts regarding Hennessey. She was lucky with James. He was patient, attentive. He listened to what she said. When she reported as much to her friends she became a figure of some awe and resentment.

  Hennessey, however, seems to hear not only what she says, but deciphers the silences as well. He asks about her children, nodding along as she describes her disappointing boys. He reaches out and takes her hand. He closes his eyes, and is still for so long that she wonders if something is wrong with him. Were he to pitch face forward onto his plate she would not be altogether surprised. Then he says, “Excuse the question, Mrs. Brimsley. But I wonder if you have had another child.”

  She has not so distinctly sensed my presence in decades. Somehow Hennessey has spied me on the shadowy back shelf where I have settled in my mother’s mind. He has brought me forth again.

  Hennessey stares at my mother. His eyebrows peak expectantly, waiting for her to speak. The blood tingles in her scalp. She would not have guessed she still possessed enough blood for it to surge so inside her.

  She looks into her glass, at her hands, at the wedding ring now so loose on her fingers, anywhere but in his eyes.

  “I had a girl who did not reach the age of two years, Mr. Hennessey,” she says at last. “I was hardly certain I would survive myself. Though here I am.”

  And my mother feels my eyes so clearly upon her that she could not will herself to look into the room’s dark corner. She is certain she will see me there.

  “How could you know?” she whispers. “How could you possibly know?”

  He cannot say why. Something in her bitterness about her two boys, in the heartbeat of silence before she mentioned them at all. He cannot name all of the reasons. “A feeling,” he says. “That’s all.”

  “Then you are a sensitive man.”

  “Not sensitive enough.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “My mother, Mrs. Brimsley. You have made me fear I didn’t leave her at rest.”

  “You are not at rest, Mr. Hennessey. You, not your mother. Your mother could hardly rest more deeply.”

  Never mind that she is so profoundly wrong about that.

  “If it were so simple,” Hennessey says, “then you would dare to turn around.” Her spine stiffens. How can he know?

  A prolonged silence again hangs between them. “I wondered for years what more I could have done,” she says, though she knows that is not quite true.

  It is not what she did or failed to do. It is her thoughts, not her actions, that gnaw at her. She wanted her mind to be orderly, with the propriety and sentiment of a greeting card. Instead she discovered an ugly mess.

  “It was as much my fault as yours,” James told her a thousand times. “And it wasn’t my fault either. It was something that happened. Something awful that happened.”

  She wanted to see it his way. It was a question of philosophy, of deciding how the world is made. My father did not accept the idea that everything had a reason. He was able to believe that the world operated on dumb circumstance and odd chance. My mother was not made that way.

  He left his tool box on the steps as he worked to fix a loose bannister spindle. The doorbell rang. He stepped away to answer it. She descended the stairs with me in her arms, having changed my diapers for the fourth time that morning. I had eaten something that upset me, then fussed throughout the morning. I cried until my faced turned blue, the whole time wriggling as though trying to escape my mother’s arms. An upset stomach, nothing more, but it pushed my mother to the end of her wits. Once I was done, briefly, with crying, I made a game out of dropping my rattle. Another of the stupid toys, thought my mother, that I never needed in the first place. I laughed when she handed it back to me, howled if she took too long. Thus I emptied my mother’s well of patience.

  She began to think darkly about all she had given up. Those nights out, those splendid nights out with my father, the dancing in the hotel ballroom, the feel of herself inside her clothes, the dress cut just this side of scandalous, the pearls that glanced so lightly between her breasts, the sense — the absolutely correct sense — that every eye was on her. Then the furtive, illegal drink or two in the packed back room set aside for the purpose, the closeness and the noise, the collection of scents, of perfume and smoke, of the sweat from so many overheated bodies. The giddy ride home is James’ polished black car, the soft touch of fur against her cheek in winter darkness, the knowledge that their bed waited them, their bed with the fresh sheets she had dressed it in, specifically in preparation for the moment so nearly upon her, when her clothes would fall to the floor and she would stretch out upon it, feeling like nothing less than a goddess. All this, all this and more, traded now for the odor of sour milk that permeated her clothes, the aching, engorged breasts, the slackness everywhere else, the unremitting work of diapers and feeding, of tending to the endless fussing, of chasing after the damned rattle and the rest of the mindlessly excessive inventory of toys, of cleaning and cooking. And then, on top of all else, pretending to have time or energy or desire for James, whose world had not changed half as much as hers. He did not understand; she did not really understand herself. Her love these days was mixed with a fury, like a fire that was fueled somehow by blocks of ice.

  Her foot struck James’ tool box instead of the steps. She pitched forward. I flew from her arms. The rattle sprang from my hand and clattered across the entryway.

  An accident, a simple accident. No one to blame, everyone to blame. My mother’s first thought was not blind panic, not fear, not even, really, concern. Instead, her hard-edged thought was this:

  Now you got what you deserve.

  Unruly, improper, selfish and completely understandable. Not even I now hold her accountable. I was not doomed by a single intemperate thought. I would have told her that a million times, if only I had been able. But my mother might as well have opened the door to a room full of rotting carcasses. She managed to appall and offend herself.

  Soon enough she came to wonder, What if I had entered a realm in which such thoughts were known? What if I were in heaven, or limbo, or wherever it was that babies landed, and I knew the extent of her betrayal? Could there be a more dismal indictment of herself as a mother, as a human being?

  She could not believe it was possible that the dead should be able to invade your very thoughts. The world, she told herself, could not possibly be so unjust. She managed to believe that much in the light of day, though by night she was not so fortunate..

  James heard my cry, and my mother’s scream, and the clamor of tools banging down the steps. He dashed to the stairway. He found my mother frozen in place, clutching the banister. There was an odd look on her face, one he had trouble placing. Oddly detached, he decided later, as if looking at a photo of a disaster that had befallen strangers.

  An instant passed in which their eyes briefly locked and a volume of information, which both would later struggle to expunge, passed between them. Then they rushed to me. I looked up at them through my tears, seemingly unharmed. I gurgled and waved my arms toward my mother, who at last swept me up and pressed me to her breast. Then I began to cry again.

  ≈

  Hennessey twirls the wine in his glass. “The last time I saw my mother, I lifted her from her wheelchair and put her in her bed,” he says. “When I picked her up she groaned and made a face. It seemed to me whatever joy had been in her life was gone. And so I asked what I thought was a sensible question.”

  After the silence between them h
as lingered too long, my mother says, “Go on, Mr. Hennessey.”

  “Concerning her desires for the end of her life.”

  “Well then you know she was concerned. She made me promise…” She stops herself.

  “The look I got from her. An accusation.”

  “Oh, she didn’t blame you.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Perfect, my mother tells herself. She had been startled by Mrs. Hennessey’s too-easy embrace of death that first day in their room. Her son worried that he had seemed to rush her toward it. She wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Hennessey blamed them both. Or would have, if Mrs. Hennessey’s blaming days were not so thoroughly over. So my mother imagines.

  They sit quietly together as the candles sputter. Then Hennessey offers to return my mother to the Sheltering Arms.

  ≈

  In fact, Beatrice Hennessey is now struggling with the reality, assuming the word applies, of her new situation. She has the usual questions, which she broadcasts in the manner of a radio station sending its signal out into the night.

  Where are the… Why aren’t there… They told me that… As if the hereafter were a product, and all the descriptions of it were a guarantee rather than wishful thinking or ranting. At the moment Mrs. Hennessey feels that her warranty has been violated, that she is entitled to get her money back.

  This is a hazy place, as I’ve said. The rules may have been written in stone for Moses, but they are not even written in fog here. I whisper to Mrs. Hennessey, Relax, dear, relax. Not that she will, not for now, but the message may eventually seep in, so that she can begin her work here, whatever for her that may be.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Later that evening William Hennessey hurries over the ice-glazed walk toward the bar he favors, The Mirage. He pauses with his hand on the door, examining himself quickly in the reflection from the leaded glass. His gray hair swoops over his ears and falls to his collar. His nose is a touch bulbous — no fixing that — but his blue eyes are lively, expressive. He wears a dark suit, a starched white shirt and red silk tie. He hopes to have a drink and forget his afternoon with Mrs. Brimsley.