After This

by Alice McDermott

  She had studied her own young face, blotched with weeping, in the bathroom mirror. Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father’s surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan’s ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. But what an effort it took.

  Susan’s baby, she thought, might be better off, after all, never to have been born.

  And then she had cried twenty minutes more.

  “I’m over it now, sort of,” she told Susan, laughing at herself. “But I really lost it.”

  Susan said faintly, “I guess I’ll have to read it.” In all her calculations about what to do, about running away, telling her parents, leaving school, driving to the golf course and throwing herself into his arms, she had not considered dying in childbirth. The baby dead, too. She wasn’t even sure if such things happened anymore. Although she knew the words “even death” had appeared somewhere this morning, on something she’d signed.

  Annie pulled some paper napkins from the steel dispenser and held them under her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, laughing. “Spare yourself. You can copy my summary when it’s due.” Then she straightened her spine, threw back her head. She balled the napkins in her hand. “What is wrong with these people? These nuns?” It was an old refrain, but it comforted, somehow, returned them to the time before today. “What is wrong with our school?” It was their friendship’s eternal question. “Why do they pick these depressing books?”

  Susan smiled, knowing the tune. “That bridge thing,” she offered.

  “God, yes,” Annie cried. “San Luis Rey. What was the point of that?” She held out her hands. “Ethan Frome.”

  “Oh, God.” Susan had a napkin to her eye as well. “When they crashed their sled into the tree.”

  “Nice,” Annie said.

  “Uplifting,” Susan added. It was their old routine. Oh, Mr. Gallagher.

  “And the end of Great Gatsby,” Annie said. “The blood in the pool from where he’s shot in the head.”

  “And then that other guy,” Susan said, warming to it, “in the poem, who goes home and shoots himself.”

  “Miniver Cheevy,” Annie said. “And Anna Karenina.”

  Susan shook her head. “Couldn’t read it.”

  Annie leaned across her plate, emphasizing the words. “She throws herself under a train.”

  Susan laughed once, like a cough.

  “Madame Bovary!” Annie said.

  “Dead, too?”

  She nodded. “After about a million affairs.”

  Susan shook her head. “Well, of course,” she said. “Sex and death. That’s the message.”

  Annie threw the balled-up napkins onto the table. “Christ,” she said, “what is wrong with them? Why do these crazy women want us to read such depressing things?”

  “They want us to suffer,” Susan said, sarcastic so that Annie wouldn’t see how much she wanted to cry. “They want us to be afraid.”

  “They want us to be nuns,” Annie added, so she wouldn’t have to say, Oh, Susan, oh, my poor friend.

  IN COLLEGE, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to be teachers, most of them—industrial or liberal arts the predominant goals since any interest in science or math portended better things: accounting, engineering, med school in Mexico.

  Damien’s, where they drank, was not, as Michael Keane liked to say, in the most felicitous part of town: it was an ugly, desolate old house tucked among ugly, snowplow-ravaged streets that were themselves lined with more narrow, sagging houses, bent fences, scrawny trees. There was a sorry-looking baseball field across the street and the edge of a cemetery off the abandoned lot behind. The black skeleton of an old power plant rose up in the far distance, over the field, and you couldn’t get to the place without feeling three, four, maybe five times the rutted thump and bump of abandoned railroad tracks under your wheels. But by their junior years most of them had had enough of the storefront bars on Main Street, the bars along the river and at the lake, the roadhouses and beer barns out past the fraternities. In the paucity of streetlight and house light that surrounded Damien’s, the place could easily be missed—there was only a bit of red neon in the window—and the joke was that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was. Knowing where it was brought all of them that much closer to what they thought of as the real life of the city. As did knowing Ralph.

  He was in his early forties. Lean, a little stooped, a little paunchy. He lived on the second floor of the old house, above the bar. The house itself had once been a funeral parlor. Then a speakeasy. Then, and currently, a dive. Stories that were told about Ralph Damien said that he had dropped out of three colleges before joining the army. And turned down an offer to attend Oxford after beating the “head guy” at chess in a London pub. And accepted another to service a society matron in Saratoga Springs when he was nineteen. He wore his dark hair long at a time when most middle-aged men still didn’t, and had a drooping mustache at a time when every college student who could did too. He was languid and sarcastic and worldly-wise, a source for pot and hash as well as for beer and schnapps and tequila—for cheap stereo equipment, sometimes; sometimes for a stash of watches, commemorative gold coins, leather jackets; once for sealed boxes of Chanel No. 5 to take home to your mother.

  Like Michael, most of them who hung out at Damien’s were juniors and seniors. Most of them had done at least one semester of student teaching in some smelly local school—in their dress pants and button-downs and ratty, poorly knotted ties. Most of them had a pretty clear idea of what the next few years were going to be like.

  But stop into Damien’s at four o’clock in the afternoon with a cold rain falling, and there would be Ralph, a joint burning in an ashtray on the bar, the newspaper spread before him. He’d open the refrigerator in the back room to show off a dozen choice sirloins wrapped in white butcher paper—payback for a favor he’d done someone. He’d berate, leisurely and with a cool amusement, some perspiring liquor salesman in a cheap suit and a hunting jacket who was trying to sell him piss for beer. He’d hunker down at a side table with a pair of locals, his thumb to his jaw, his fingers splayed across his cheek and then rise, laughing, slapping backs. He’d be in Aruba over Christmas, he’d tell the college kids, great little hotel, great little woman waiting for him there, the color of caramel. At ten or eleven on a weekend night, he’d ask, “Anyone want to pump beer for a while?” And then step out from behind the bar to slip his arm around the waist of the woman or the girl who had been waiting on a corner bar stool. He’d bend down first for an openmouthed kiss and then, with his thumb slipped behind her belt, walk her to the stairs.

  It never occurred to Michael Keane, to any of them, it seemed, to wonder what women saw in Ralph Damien, this middle-aged townie with his low-slung jeans and paunch and long hair (and—after the Christmas in Aruba—a diamond earring at a time when no middle-aged men, no men they knew of, wore one). The hours Michael had already spent in those green-walled classrooms had given him his own pretty clear idea of what the next few years would be like, but he wasn’t quite ready to believe that he’d be there, polyester dress slacks, frayed button-down, knotted tie, at thirty-five or forty. Better to imagine vaguely a life like Ralph’s, to imitate his weary smile, his cool squint, his way of palming the cash register or the beer pull. His nonchalance when he returned from upstairs with the girl in tow and either threw on the lights for last call or bought shots all around, or just took up one of his own bar stools for the rest of the night, the girl’s hips in his hands, her rump pressed fir
mly between his skinny legs.

  On a night of cold rain turning to sleet late in October, Ralph put an elbow on the bar and slipped his hand under the long blond hair of a girl Michael knew—Caroline. He leaned toward her and she, stepping up on the bar rail, all graceful and delicate in muddy construction boots and blue jeans and an army surplus parka, leaned toward him. They kissed, just briefly, before she stepped back and raised her plastic cup of beer. Ralph lifted his cigarette from the edge of the bar and said, through the smoke, “You guys want to pour for a while tonight?”

  He never paid anyone for working but he was generous with free drinks for those who did. Michael turned to the guy beside him to see if he was game. The kid looked blanched. Michael didn’t know him very well. A transfer from Nassau Community, he was observing at the same middle school where Michael was teaching social studies that semester. Michael had introduced him to Damien’s at the beginning of the year and now the kid followed him to the place after school as a matter of course. He was a surfer and didn’t much like the upstate weather, but, Michael thought, a nice enough guy, a little doe-eyed and baby-faced—you’d put him closer to fifteen than twenty—and a heavy but inept drinker, which was the first thing he thought of when he saw the kid’s bleached lips. But then he saw the way he looked down the bar at Caroline.

  Michael had passed around a bag of miniature Hershey bars in his class that afternoon, in honor of Halloween, but a lot of the kids had refused to take one—because of their acne or their efforts to be cooler than the student teacher, he couldn’t tell—so he’d brought the extras into Damien’s. He took one now and slid it down the bar to Caroline, who turned as it bumped her elbow. She had one of those wide, clean faces that seem ordinary only on first glance, and beautiful hair. The girls he lived with filled their off-campus firetrap with the smell of hot rollers and singed scalp, but Caroline still wore her hair perfectly straight and nearly waist long. She picked up the candy bar and once again stepped up on the bar rail, leaning to see who had sent it.

  “Trick or treat,” Michael told her. There were probably half a dozen backs and elbows and reaching arms in the short space between them, so he leaned forward and said, “Come here for a minute.”

  He saw her glance at Ralph before she stepped down again and made her way through the crowd. He could see her smiling as she squeezed through, knowing everyone, having a fine night at Damien’s. She pushed through the crowd, flushed and grinning. She put her hand on his shoulder and he put his to the back of her head, just to feel the heavy silk. It was, he understood, why he’d called her over in the first place.

  “You know my buddy here?” Michael asked her because he had momentarily forgotten the kid’s name.

  But she shifted her hips a little and dropped her eyes for just a second before she said, “Hi, Terry.”

  And Terry looked casually away from her, sipping his beer all nonchalant to say, “How’s it going?”

  The crowd pushed her closer and Michael took the opportunity to slip his arm beneath her parka and around her slim waist. “How do you know this lowlife?” he said.

  Terry was still looking straight ahead, his right leg jiggling.

  “High school,” Caroline said. “We went to Valley Stream Central together.” She smiled at his averted face. There was something regal about her although she was not tall. She shook her hair, brushed some stray electrostatic strands of it off her cheek. The gray fake fur that edged her hood could have been ermine. “We ran into each other his first week here,” she said primly. “When he was thinking about going back home, he was so lonely.” She pouted a little, imitating his loneliness. “I tried to make him feel better,” intimating with her smile a certain benevolence bestowed, back when he was so lonely.

  Terry glanced at her from over his shoulder, his color restored.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Nice mouth,” Michael told him even as Caroline sighed and slowly shook her head. “He does it even quicker than he says it,” she said. A few people around them laughed. Charlie Hegi, who was reaching for the bag of Hershey bars, said, “Zing.”

  Now Ralph was in front of them, a bottle of tequila in one hand and four shot glasses in the other. “Play nice, children,” he said. Terry swung off the bar stool and immediately someone else took his place. A big guy, made bigger by his long doughboy coat. Bad skin and short arms and a ponytail that smelled unwashed. Bean was what they called him. He seemed to expand to fit whatever space was left for him, bellying up. “Hey, Ralph,” he said, with that false belligerence guys like Bean substituted for wit. “Where the fuck are your decorations? It’s Halloween, man.”

  Ralph shook his head. “Don’t need them,” he said. He lifted Bean’s cup out of his hand, refilled it. Handing it back, he added, “They don’t make decorations as ugly as some of you assholes.” And then, leaning forward, “You know what this place used to be, man?” He bared his teeth, a kind of smile. “This place used to be a fucking funeral parlor, man.”

  Bean took this in for a second, narrowing his small eyes, and then said, “Bullshit.”

  “The trapdoor in the garage is casket-size,” Ralph went on. “Go look.” He gestured toward the center of the room, toward the jukebox and the bulk of the crowd. “From the turn of the century to the forties,” he said. “One dead body after the other laid out right here. This place has so many ghosts I can’t sleep at night. You want me to put up decorations?”

  “Yeah, man,” Bean said, none of it sinking in. “It’s Halloween.” But the chubby girl who had edged in beside him, Debbie, held out her empty plastic cup and said, “You told me this used to be a speakeasy.”

  Ralph took her cup and filled it, shaking his head like he was the weary professor and she some dumb-ass student who hadn’t done the reading. “My grandfather was the undertaker,” he said patiently, “but my father was the bootlegger.” He handed her the cup, took her dollar. His earring caught some light. “During Prohibition,” he said, and then looked at Bean. “You know what Prohibition is?” and Bean said, “Shit, yeah. I’m a fucking history major.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ralph said. He slapped the dollar into the register. “During Prohibition,” he said, “my father had something going with some Mafia guys to ship booze from Canada—in coffins. Most of it went downstate but my dad kept enough of it to get a little side business going with a speakeasy—you know what that is, Bean?” And Bean, who had a mouthful of beer, swallowed it before he nodded. “They served the stuff right next to the stiffs,” Ralph said. “I kid you not. My grandfather would stuff ’em and truss ’em and then as soon as the last mourner left, my father would bring in his customers and get them stiff, too. His biggest challenge, he said, was keeping the cigarette butts out of the coffins. One time he came down here in the morning, just as the dead guy’s family was coming in to close him up for good, and, holy shit, he sees the corpse has a shot glass on his forehead.”

  Ralph plucked a few empty cups out of hands and refilled them, collected his money. “This is a fucking funeral parlor,” he said, his arms outspread. “What do I need Halloween decorations for?”

  “It’s not anymore,” Bean said, but uncertainly.

  Ralph shrugged. He’d grown tired of the subject.

  And then he looked at Caroline, who turned on her smile the way you flick on a lamp. Michael had driven home with her once, Thanksgiving vacation, a whole carload of them. She lived in a split-level, the shingled part painted pink. There was a saint in a stone grotto between some bushes, a boat on cinder blocks in the driveway, and her mother already waiting for her behind the aluminum-and-glass storm door. Someone had made a joke about Mom radar.

  Ralph touched his crotch, shook his head, and then turned to reach into the cooler for two long-neck bottles of beer. He made his way around the bar just as Caroline moved to meet him. He took her under his arm, the two beer bottles resting just over her shoulder, and had his face in her hair before they’d reached the stairs.

  Be
an murmured, “Oh man,” as if he were in some mortal pain. Charlie Hegi had bowed his head and was twisting the Hershey wrappers into little bows.

  Michael stepped behind the bar, but for a moment no one was ordering.

  Then Terry returned. “I’m leaving,” he told Michael, as if he were obliged to. Michael shrugged. He felt sorry for him, in his student-teacher clothes. By the look of his eyes, he’d either been crying somewhere or throwing up.

  He put a shot glass on the bar. “Have a drink,” he said. “And take off that fucking tie.”

  “The guy’s a creep,” Terry said after he swallowed. “He’s old enough to be my father.”

  “He’s old enough to be dead,” Bean said. And then added, “He probably is,” pleased with himself. “Probably sleeps in a coffin.”

  Terry said again, “He’s a creep.”

  But Charlie Hegi looked up to the ceiling. His teeth were full of chocolate. “He’s a lucky son of a bitch at the moment,” he said.

  The place got busy then and Charlie stepped behind the bar to help out. Michael was pouring drinks and shots and slapping the cash register with the flat of his hand and the more time Ralph took with Caroline upstairs, the more the place became his own. What he was thinking of, he found himself telling a girl with a small face and short hair and dark eyebrows that were alternately appealing and weird, was teaching for a year or two and then heading south, maybe Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona, maybe even Key West, to open a bar on the beach—work his tail off over Christmas and spring break and then kick back the rest of the year, go fishing, travel, maybe write. Not for him, he said, polyester pants and short-sleeve dress shirts and the scorn of thirty inbred seventh graders for the next forty years. Not his old man’s Robert Hall suits five days a week, either, and the Long Island Rail Road to the city, the subway to the cubicle. Someone else’s shot glass on your forehead when you’re dead.