After This

by Alice McDermott

  She straightened her spine, pulling her hands closer to her waist, as if she felt a chill. “In the first place, I think she must have been humiliated,” she went on. “Four, five children in a row and she hadn’t met his needs.” She smiled a little, only one corner of her small mouth. It was clear she did not expect them to get her full meaning. “And I know she worried. Every mother worries, but what worries my mother must have had, in those days. I don’t know when she slept. I remember seeing her, long into the night, sitting up at our bedroom window with her rosary.” Sister Lucy stopped again, peering down at them all from under her thick eyelids. The sound of the rain had mixed itself with her tale so that the girls were imagining polio, pregnancy, bridges and subways and long nights at bedroom windows as all a part of the same dark weather.

  She smiled once more. Her lips were pink and smooth. “But my mother took me to the clinic and she took me home and she did the exercises the doctors told her to do. And she fixed our meals and washed our clothes and kept the apartment clean. All the while she was getting bigger and bigger with the new baby. All the while she slept alone and woke alone and sat alone through the night after she’d put out our lights.”

  One of the girls made a sympathetic sound and Sister Lucy’s eyes briefly fell on her. “Girls,” she said, as if to correct something. “In an abortion, a child is pulled from a mother’s womb. If the child is very new, an embryo, it is a simple enough thing to do. There is more blood than flesh. If the child has grown any, arms and legs must sometimes be broken, or a skull must be cracked. There are some procedures, I am told, in which the mother’s womb is filled with saline, salt water, the baby essentially drowned like a kitten and then flushed from the mother’s body.” She paused only briefly.

  “In college,” she went on in her soft way, although she saw how Kathleen Cornelius’s open mouth had reshaped itself in horror and how Monica Grasso was glaring at her from under her bangs, the class wit, the class iconoclast, on guard, as Monica was always on guard, against Catholic double-talk and propaganda, “you will probably read the story of Medea,” glancing at Monica to indicate that she might learn something here. “It is a play by Euripides. If you know the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, you already know something about Medea. She was the sorceress who helped Jason defeat the dragon and gain the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea marry. They have two sons. But then Jason leaves her to marry the young daughter of the king. To form a more advantageous alliance, he tells her. More power. Especially for their sons, who will have as their half brothers the royal sons he plans to have with his new wife.” She smiled again, mildly. “An advantage for them all.

  “But Medea doesn’t think so.” She raised her pale eyebrows. “She is outraged. Humiliated. And in her rage against her husband, she murders their children. She chases them down. Stabs them to death, her own children. It’s a terrible scene. The chorus—remember how in every Greek play there’s a chorus?—the chorus calls her a woman of stone, or iron, to have done such a thing. She is hateful beyond all other women. She has put a sword through her own children.”

  Now Sister Lucy looked outside, to the dark lawn and the black hedge and the rain striking the windows. She watched a pair of headlights as they moved dimly behind the hedge. It seemed to her to be something like her own idea, the point she had hoped to make, moving through the black tangle of memory and emotion and outrage and words.

  She turned her eyes back to the girls. “Of course, I thought of my parents when I first read Medea. I couldn’t help but see the parallels. That’s the thing about the Greek tragedies, isn’t it? Centuries later, there are parallels.” She paused and then added, sounding more like herself, “Although, as we’ll see tomorrow, Saint Augustine had no use for the Greeks.”

  She paused again. She seemed to have lost her train of thought. Some of the girls wondered if they should open their notebooks. “I don’t know,” Sister Lucy went on, “if my mother ever felt any of Medea’s anger. Or if she considered what it would be like to deprive him of this last child, the one still in her womb, the one he had abandoned even before she was born.”

  Sister Lucy leaned forward a bit, her hands on the edge of the desk, and as she did, her right hand brushed her crutch and it began to slide. Quickly, adeptly, she reached for it, steadied it. And then she lifted it and placed it across her lap.

  “Girls,” she said again, more forcefully, as if she were now girded for battle. “The men who make our laws see women as being as capable of murdering their unborn children as men have always been of abandoning them. They see all women as equals to Medea, should the circumstances arise. They are blind to women like my mother who put their children above all else, who labor and worry and die…”—she paused, her large round eyes seeming to search for the word, her two hands clutching the crutch she had placed across her lap. Her voice had not risen an octave. “Die tired,” she said finally, and then raised her eyebrows as if she was surprised to discover that the word she had searched for was such a simple one. She looked again to the long wall of windows.

  For a moment, they all listened to the rain. It hit the windows without rhythm or pattern, as listless as tears. A few of them thought of tears.

  The light outside gave no indication of how much class time was left, but Sister Lucy knew instinctively that the time was short and she was losing the thread of what she’d meant to say.

  She turned back to the girls’ faces. Some of them were looking away, playing with their fingers or studying their pens. Two or three were staring cross-eyed at the ends of their long hair. But more still were watching her, their faces serious, lovely, still emerging from the faces of their childhood, and raised toward her now as if to catch the solemn rain.

  “Iron or stone,” she said again, trying to remember the thread. “That’s what they’ll say about you. A woman made of iron or stone.”

  Sister Lucy looked down at her crutch. A few of the girls, only partially attentive, tried to remember if that was good or bad, to be iron or stone. Clare Keane thought that her mother had been like iron, in the cold pew at St. Gabriel’s on the morning her brother was buried. Clare knew she had been grateful for it, the cool stone of her mother’s face and hands. The iron of her arm.

  Barb Luce wrote in her notebook again. Clare glanced at the page. It said, “Things are tough all over.”

  Then Sister Lucy looked up again, dry-eyed.

  “I realize we’ve gone off syllabus today,” she said softly. “Sometimes circumstances make their demands. We’ll return to Saint Augustine tomorrow. And Saint Monica, of course.” Nodding at Monica Grasso, who suddenly raised her hand.

  “Yes,” Sister Lucy said, expecting a question about this week’s quiz, the paper due next Friday, expecting the obliteration of all she had just said by the girls’ preference for practical priorities. “Yes, Monica,” she said.

  Her thick black hair, straight and silky and falling well below her shoulders, caught the white fluorescent light, broad sparks around her face. “When abortion is illegal,” Monica, the captain of the debate team, said clearly, “women die.”

  Kathleen Cornelius turned in her seat as if she’d been stuck with a fork. “But babies die when it is,” she said. Two or three other girls cried out in wordless agreement.

  “You can’t legislate morality,” Monica snapped back. “Look at Prohibition.”

  Now the class was alert, and Sister Lucy saw that even the indifferent students were interested: not so much in the substance of the debate as in the joy of the rebellion.

  Kathleen, having spent her rhetorical trove, looked rather desperately back to Sister Lucy. The other girls looked to her as well, some of them smirking, some anxious, others only curious. At their age, Sister Lucy recalled, she had craved piety, undaunted innocence, even naïveté. Now, worldliness was all they wanted. Sophistication.

  She held up a hand, put a finger to her lips. “Girls,” she said. “We’re not here to debate.”

  “No kidding
,” she heard one of them say.

  “Thousands of babies are killed,” another girl said.

  Under the sudden ringing of the bell, Monica cried, “Thousands of grown-up babies died in Vietnam. Why didn’t they pass a law against that?” There was laughter. Barb Luce looked quickly at Clare.

  When the bell stopped, echoing, there was only the familiar sound of the whole school population, four hundred girls, stirring, standing, pushing back chairs, picking up books. They shook out their skirts and pulled up their kneesocks and flipped their hair. Sister Lucy watched them as they passed her desk, the crutch across her lap.

  Monica Grasso, ever mindful of her grade, said, “Good discussion, Sister.” And Sister Lucy nodded, smiling, disdainfully perhaps.

  Clare Keane, passing by, glanced briefly at the nun. Unlike so many of the teachers at Mary Immaculate, Sister Lucy had never before spoken about her life—her parents, her childhood, her time outside of school. Never a word about her crutch and her limp. It had lent her a certain dignity, her reticence. Clare thought it gave her a kind of professionalism. Now she wondered, glancing briefly at the nun, if Sister Lucy would take it all back if she could. If, given the way the girls were shaking off her story—her mother’s poor life, her father’s, all that sadness—laughing, moving on, following the bell, Sister Lucy now wished she had kept it to herself. Instead of turning it into a single day’s lesson for a bunch of heedless teenage girls.

  Joining the crowds in the long hallway, Clare checked the books in her arms. She was headed for geometry. This year, much to her own surprise, it was the one class where she felt sure of everything.

  HER HUSBAND was exquisite. Ginger-haired, as the British would have put it, but the two American girls would have said ginger as well—although not for the color but the taste: gingersnaps, gingerbread, ginger ale. Some mild and easygoing spice that nevertheless prickled the tongue.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by wineglasses. He wore brown corduroy pants and a shirt that was a soft, autumn-evoking shade of gold, an ascot—a pattern of greens and browns—tied loosely at his throat. His ginger hair curled over a broad forehead that might have been deeply tanned earlier in the year but was now faded and freckled, a burnished ginger itself, as were his cheekbones, his handsome man’s dimpled chin. His eyes were brown or dark green, the whites bright against his skin.

  “Loo paper,” he said by way of greeting. And held up a single sheet. “The cheapest kind. Nothing like it for getting lint off the crystal.”

  Professor Wallace had a hand to the small of their backs, ushering them in. “David,” she whispered, reverentially, bending to place her cheeks beside theirs, as if David were some distance away, on a pedestal perhaps, and, like his namesake, carved out of white marble. “My husband.” And then, straightening, raising her voice. “Two more of our American students.”

  Gracefully, he stretched out his legs and stood, sweeping up two of the glasses in one hand, the faint sound of a bell ringing. He studied their faces carefully as they introduced themselves. He was not as tall as he’d seemed sitting, not as tall as his wife, but it made no difference to the girls, who were just now noticing the long apricot lashes. “Some wine?” he asked. “We have a lovely Chianti.” And then turned to a sideboard, marble-topped and piled with books. And then turned back. Asked over his shoulder, “Or do you American women prefer whiskey?”

  “Wine, thank you,” Annie said, but Grace pushed her glasses up her nose with her index finger and said, “Whiskey.”

  Annie bowed her head as she accepted the glass of wine, afraid that if she met his eye, her hand would tremble. “My dear,” he said, handing it to her. And then to Grace, “I’ve got just the thing.” He reached for a square decanter. “Straight up or on the rocks?” he asked and Grace said, shuffling a bit, “On the rocks.” There was a silver ice bucket and silver tongs.

  Professor Wallace’s face wore the expression Annie would have liked to wear, or would work at wearing in the future. Under Professor Wallace’s long nose, her mouth was a thin, wry grin. Her small black-brown eyes were warm and understanding and forgiving. They said she understood that Grace had probably never had whiskey before in her life and would probably not like it when she had it, but that an attempt was being made here, at worldliness, at sophistication. An attempt on Grace’s part to undercut the stumpy body and the dowdy clothes and the reputation she had already secured, six weeks into the term, as the smartest but dullest of the fifteen American students studying this year at the university. An attempt to promote the impression that beneath the cliché of smart and plain and studious was something like uncharted depths, even danger. Whiskey, indeed, Professor Wallace’s smile said. Well, yes, of course, go ahead, her smile said. You will not be the first unhappy girl to seek to transform herself here, go ahead.

  As if the injunction had actually been spoken, Grace stuck her nose into the stubby glass as soon as it was in her hand and took a large gulping swallow, sliding the ice cubes into her lip and knocking the rim of the glass against the bridge of her glasses. Coughing a little as she swallowed, of course.

  Mr. Wallace, David, was either the most gracious man on earth or simply oblivious to the pretense and the struggle. He took Grace’s elbow as if this were only one of many evenings in which they had met for a drink and a chat—as if, Annie thought, Grace were an old, dear friend in elbow-length satin gloves, a tapered cigarette holder in her left hand rather than the trademark (already) crumpled bit of Kleenex. He led her to the couch. “Do sit,” he said and then held his hand out to Annie, indicating a red velvet chair with brown fringe. “My dear,” he said again, warmly, as if she were indeed.

  There were piles of books beside the chair as well—old books with dark covers, the room was scented with them—and as soon as she sat, a dark Siamese cat curved around the pile to her left and brushed itself against her legs. “That’s Runty,” Professor Wallace said. She herself was wrapped in a large velvet shawl, as black as her lecturing robes but spotted with gold beads, trimmed with a bit of lace. She had lifted her glass from somewhere—another crystal goblet, only half full of the nice Chianti—and now held it beside her ear as she stood, looking down on the cat, one arm across her middle, the other resting its elbow in her hand. “So named for the obvious reasons,” she said. “Bozo’s around here somewhere. And Tommy, the tiger-striped.”

  Both girls added to their growing list of things to love about Professor Wallace the fact that her cats had nonliterary names. “But Runty,” she said, “is the sycophant.”

  And that she did not ask them, as an American professor might do, if they knew the meaning of the word.

  Six weeks ago, the American students had stumbled out of Professor Wallace’s first lecture with their breaths held, tripping over one another to be the first to say, out of earshot of their humorless British counterparts, “My God, the Wicked Witch of the West,” to imitate her accent as she said, trilling it, “Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.” But six weeks into the term, they were all enchanted. She had only to turn up a corner of her thin mouth in the middle of a lecture, or to raise a single eyebrow as she recited, or to touch her hand to her breast as she made some aside (“As You Like It,” she had said, “not, necessarily, my dear ones, as I like it”) to get them all grinning, clutching the edges of their small desks, leaning to see that the other Americans in the lecture hall had gotten it too, the wry pun, the witty reference, the experience they were all having, basking in her brilliance, growing literary and worldly-wise, nearly British.

  When they discovered, on a bulletin board crowded with Carnival flyers and club schedules, tutorial appointments and reading lists, a small index card that said Professor Wallace is home every Thursday evening, followed by brief directions—the bus number, the shop on the corner, “fourth house in, red shutters”—it had taken some time for any of them to get the courage to take her up on what the English students told them was simply an opportunity to have a nice mea
l. But one of the American boys—Caleb, a bit of a sycophant himself—had gone along with a pair of African students in the third week of the term and returned to tell the other Americans of curry and Sauternes and incredible conversation. One by one, the others made plans to go, Annie knowing that she and Grace would have to go together since it was Grace who had sat beside her on the flight from Kennedy. Grace with whom she’d eaten dinner and watched the movie and exchanged biographies with blankets up to their chins and their faces turned to each other like lovers. Poor Grace who, it sometimes felt, had slipped her hand into the crook of Annie’s arm during those five hours and kept it there ever since. Her own private Pauline.

  David bent down to scoop Runty from her feet. “I don’t mind,” she said, but then he was crouched before her, brushing the cat hair from her trousers, touching her instep and her knee, the cat pressed to his golden shirt. “Come what may,” he said softly. “He’ll be in your pocket by the end of the evening.” He smiled up at her, his face rising over her lap as he straightened. The strong cheekbones and the dimpled chin, the adorable lock over the forehead. He paused, speaking to her from just the other side of her knees. He lowered his voice, as if to share a secret. “We don’t want to encourage him too early in the proceedings.”

  Professor Wallace stepped forward to take the cat from his arms. Annie noticed that there were cat hairs, too, along the hem of her sweeping black skirt. And that she wore soft leather booties and bright purple tights beneath it. Like a character from D. H. Lawrence. Or Virginia Woolf herself.

  “Thank you, darling,” he said. Side by side, the extremes of their physical beauty were startling. Professor Wallace all hooked nose and bun, white skin and black hair, David soft and warm-hued. One to be photographed, the other painted. Professor Wallace turned, spinning her skirts a bit, and disappeared through the door beside the server. Mr. Wallace sank to the floor once more, behind his ring of crystal goblets. “Now,” he said, looking up at them both, “which one of you is from Binghamton?”