After This

by Alice McDermott

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. There was the ache in his heart, and now over his shoulder and down his arm, as he caught the reflection of the boy’s pale cheek and full girlish lips, his dry mouth hanging open in fearful expectation of what?—the sky growing black, the wind moaning, the scrim of sand that blew across the empty lot forming itself into tooth and mouth and open jaw. “What are you afraid of?” More derisively than he’d meant it.

  “Let’s at least have our dessert before we go,” Mary said, soothing. A balancing act. “I have plums,” she said, leaning over her stomach, over the baby’s feet that were now—little acrobat—pressing themselves up against her breasts. She leaned over the curve of its back and spine as they pressed themselves into her stomach and bladder, leaned over the head that was now pressing itself down toward the worn upholstery of the old car, sensing, perhaps, that its watery world was a tributary after all, not a pool. She leaned into the quilted hamper where she had plums and grapes and sugar cookies shaped like laurel wreaths.

  In a few minutes, the rain began. The children spit the plum pits into their paper cups and handed them across the seat to their mother. John Keane pressed his chest to the steering wheel as he put the key in the ignition, taking a deep breath as he did, hoping the change of movement would ease the growing pain. The windshield wipers were like a new beat in the day’s rhythm. Mary Keane wrapped the two coffee cups in paper towels. Her husband put his arm across the back of the seat. “Everybody set to go?” he said. He had been too harsh with Michael, too derisive of Jacob, and who knew what his daughter needed, looking up at him, the bear in her arms. “I’m ready,” she said, primly, the first to respond. The apple of his eye.

  “Let’s just go,” Jacob added, fighting tears. His face was once more turned to the window. “Let’s get home,” unable to keep the crimp of fear out of his voice. Michael leaned forward, looking toward him across his sister’s lap, and his mother saw that his lips were pursed with either the sour aftertaste of the plum or the sharp phrase of an insult, a tease. She watched him until he sat back again, thinking better of it. He understood, even then, that he could repeat word for word something his father had already said about some weakness in his brother and still be reprimanded for it as severely as if he alone had let the cat out of the bag.

  THAT EVENING, just after midnight, John Keane was drawn downstairs by a pounding at his door that might have been theatrical, something falsely urgent and echoing about it. Something familiar and rehearsed, too, in his own manner as he asked Mary, “Who could that be?” and then slowly pushed the blankets aside and found his slippers. The rain was a steady rush against the roof and the windows. The light in the empty living room was just enough to see by, to distinguish the black shape of the couch and the chairs, the tables and lamps, the television set and hi-fi and decorative mirror that caught and reflected the oddly gauzy, deep blue light that came through the front window, cast off by the storm. A puddle of darkness in the center of the floor was the board game the boys had left there. In the short hallway, which lacked any light whatsoever, he could feel under his slippers a remnant of sand on the linoleum. The football and the box of soldiers were beside the door, invisible. “Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the heels of a distant roll of thunder, and in the instant before he reached for the doorknob, he felt with utter certainty, as if all of this were indeed merely something revisited, rehearsed, recalled, that he would not return—not to the living room behind him or the narrow stairs or the small rooms where his wife and his children slept. This was the culmination, then, this odd darkness, this familiar dream, of the day that had begun with the tugging of the wind at his eaves; this was the simple and terrible meaning, after all, of the pain in his arm, the weight on his heart. Here now and at last, and too soon—as it had come to his brother’s heart too soon—the utter darkness, the black street, wind rain and sea and some glimpse, in his final fall, of the damp room (odor of salt, odor of peat) where in another darkness he had been conceived. An instant so close—in its familiarity, in its blackness, in the cry of the wind—to everything he had been told as a child would attend his last moment (he would hear the banshee, he would open the door, he would see the black coach, wet with rain), that he felt both amused and terrified.

  Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more.

  The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque.

  “I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree—thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow—breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.”

  He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.”

  “There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

  The wind was howling in long gusts, driving the rain straight across his face, against his slippers and pants legs. He listened for some sound of an idling motor, strained his eyes against the wind and the rain to see some indication—a stain of red light or blue light, perhaps—of the truck or car that must be waiting for the fireman on the next block. But there was nothing he could see, or hear above the sound of the wind and the rain and the shaking leaves. Across the street the blue storm light briefly caught the blind windows of his neighbors’ homes.

  He stepped back and closed the door. His fingers, too, where they had gripped it, were wet. He dried them on his pajamas, then groped for the closet door and found the flashlight he kept on the shelf there. The living room was as it had been. He turned to the stairs, aware, now, of the sound of the willow branches brushing the opposite wall of the house. It would indeed fall straight, from the front yard to the back, parallel to the house, and for the next few days his children, all the neighborhood children, would crawl over its trunk and up into its branches, like Lilliputians over a long-haired Gulliver, until Mr. Persichetti down the street arrived with a newly purchased chain saw and a borrowed truck, offering his services. Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired by the storm’s destruction (he would say) to make better use of his days. The loss of the tree, then—the lovely willow that had made them, ten years ago, choose this house above any of the others—was all of the inalterable change
that the long day had portended.

  In their room, the boys, who had been awoken by the pounding at the door, watched silently as the beam of their father’s light moved slowly up the stairs. For Jacob, the slow pace of the rising beam was a comfort; there could be no immediate danger if his father walked so steadily up the stairs. Michael felt only disappointment at his father’s quiet return. But then their father stood in the doorway, the light pooled at his feet, and told them, whispering, that they’d better get up and come downstairs. He whispered the same to their mother, who was already standing beside her bed, tying her robe at the narrowest place left to her, high up on her belly and just under her breasts. He lifted their sister from her bed and carried her downstairs over his shoulder. Even in the peripheral light (Michael had asked to carry the flashlight but his mother had taken it instead, and Jacob’s hand), it was clear that she was only pretending to still be asleep—her eyelids fluttered, there was the smallest shape of a smile. Herding them all toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window, pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed tree.

  After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul air, Jacob pulled at his mother’s hand to draw her to safety. But Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father’s arms to stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their mother patted Jacob’s hand to soothe him. On their way through the kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father’s flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it seemed to draw all the surrounding shadows to its edge. Only Michael walked alone although, at one point, as they made their way down the stairs, he touched his fingers to the back of Jacob’s neck and made him jump. They sat together on the old couch that was just the other side of the toy-train table. Their mother between the two boys to avoid trouble, Annie on her father’s lap. The washing machine and the sink and the long string of the clothesline where she hung clothes in bad weather were just behind them, each illuminated, however dimly, by the blue light of the storm at the narrow windows. Around their own circle of light, their mother said, “Let’s say an Angel of God,” the bodies of her two boys pressed against her. “Angel of God,” they said, following her voice. “My guardian dear, to whom God’s love, commits me here, ever this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

  And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father’s neck. “There went the tree,” he said.

  In the small circle of the flashlight, their mother poured milk into the paper cups and carefully handed them to the children.

  WHEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said “during the war,” their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

  During the war, their father said, we sometimes slept in people’s cellars. France, Belgium, into Germany. (The milk in the paper cups smelled like candles, like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

  Once, three or four of them had taken shelter for the night, in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse—it was maybe late ’44 or early ’45—and when the sun came up (not a sun, really, as he recalled it, only darkness turning to pale gray) they realized a new guy, a replacement, had joined them during the night. He just appeared among them, as if he had sprung from the dirt floor while they slept. No more than nineteen or twenty. Anxious and poorly trained, the way all the replacements were at that stage of the war. “Who the fuck are you?” one of the guys said. (Although telling the tale to his children—around the single flashlight—John Keane said, “Who the blankety-blank…”) “Jacob,” the boy said. “Jake. From Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob.

  Michael turned to his brother whose eyes were large and dark at the edge of the light. He had hoped until now that his father’s story pertained to him.

  The two of them walked out of the cellar together, into the cold. Jake seemed to think that John Keane, perhaps because of his age, was of some superior rank, and it was possible that the kid was looking for some advantage, sticking with him. Or it may have been only that the other men, superstitious about replacements, had given him a wide berth. It was a gray dawn, an overcast day, only the beginning of the worst of it. There would have been the sound of boots breaking frost—tramp, tramp, tramp. A smell of diesel fuel, which was pervasive. Creak of army boots and canvas cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child’s.

  At one point during that cold day John Keane had said to the kid, the other Jacob, “We’re a regular Gallagher and Shean,” and the kid had surprised him by knowing more choruses than even his brother Frank did, humming them softly under his breath, carrying the tune.

  Oh, Mr. Gallagher, oh Mr. Gallagher, if you’re a friend of mine you’ll loan me a couple of bucks. I’m so broke, I’m nearly bent and I haven’t got a cent. I’m so clean you’d think that I’d been washed in Lux.

  Oh, Mr. Shean, oh Mr. Shean (how did it go? Frank would know), to tell the truth I haven’t got a bean. Cost of living’s gone so high, why it’s cheaper now to die.

  Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

  Positively, Mr. Shean.

  He’d said to the kid (he’d shaken him off late that afternoon, in a frozen rain, and only learned he’d been hit after nightfall, when they were pressed into foxholes, the taste of dirt and smoke like blood in their mouths), What can I do for you? Not out loud, but in his mind, like a prayer. Plenty of others had been killed, but this one had sprung up out of the dirt floor, fresh faced and too young. He’d spent less than twenty-four hours at his war. This other Jacob. What can I do for you, John Keane had said in that foxhole in the Ardennes, in the winter of ’44 or ’45, the worst yet to come—more death and the bitter snow, shrapnel, three toes of his own lost to the cold. What can I do for you? He’d said it like a prayer, it was a prayer, believing the kid heard him because (he told his children) all of us are immortal or no one is. You prayed to the dead or you let them go silent. What can I do for you? he had said, in his mind, like a prayer, and later their mother, in her hospital bed, their firstborn in her arms, grimaced and said, “That’s a Jewish name.”

  Michael grinned, turning to his brother whose mouth hung open, dark as his eyes behind his raised knees.

  But their father had told her, “It’s just something I’d like to do.”

  In the small circle of flashlight, with the sound of the storm already seeming to fade—as if the tree’s fall (or perhaps her husband’s story) had abated something—Mary Keane pressed her two sons against her sides. It was pleasant, to be in the basement like this, with her family, in the middle of the night. She looked across Jacob’s dark hair to her husband, who still had Annie’s thin arms wrapped around his neck. She dou
bted, thinking back, that she had said, straight off, That’s a Jewish name—or perhaps she did not doubt it as much as regret it, since it had become, in the intervening years, Jacob’s name alone, the name of her own boy, the Jacob from the war having become, in the intervening years, poor kid, mostly forgotten.

  Much as she had forgotten, already, what it was that had brought him to mind tonight, that other Jacob. Was it the storm itself? The banging at the door? The young fireman, appearing like a guardian angel to warn them that the lights were out and trees were falling all over the neighborhood?

  She wondered briefly if her husband should have told the children this particular war story at all. Michael would surely use it against his brother. There was always the possibility of bad dreams.

  If he had wanted to tell the children the story he might simply have said that he and the boy had sung vaudeville tunes together, in the middle of a war. Gallagher and Shean. Mutt and Jeff. Catholic and Jew. Fresh-faced replacement and aging veteran, tramping through the cold, singing. He could have left it at that. He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one.

  With her arms around her sons and the new baby curled against her rib cage, her husband and her daughter a mere arm’s length away, and the storm turning from them even as the sun was surely approaching, Mary Keane considered the wisdom of leaving certain, difficult things unsaid. She considered the wisdom of the Blessed Mother who, as the Christmas gospel told it, pondered everything in her heart.