After This

by Alice McDermott

  It had been a setup. Gregory had just finished his freshman year at Marist College in upstate New York. His older sister, who had been a senior at Ladycliff College, had spent most of that year “keeping tabs” on her little brother, driving over on weekends to surprise him in his dorm, calling him at odd hours, or sending friends who were going that way to fetch him for Sunday brunch or a Friday-night hamburger. From all that she could see, he had adjusted well to college life—he had always been to her a gentle giant, a sweet and quiet kid whose size, from an early age, had promised athletic prowess but whose coordination had never delivered it. Her friends and roommates all thought him adorable, but it became clear over the course of the year that his own social life was limited to these visits from her and occasional weekend tagalongs to bars and dances and rock concerts with his more sociable and hard-drinking friends. A mere continuation, as she saw it, of his dateless high-school days. “Never had a date,” she would tell her friends who had praised his sweetness and his shy affability. “He’s going to be nineteen.” At the faltering Ladycliff, where the few recently enrolled male students were mostly pudgy or gaunt young men on their way into or out of the seminary, and where nearby West Point was the fount of romance (MPs being easier pickings than the sometimes snotty cadets), this became a subject of many late-night studies. A blind date was in order, they concluded, but how, and with whom. Finally, sometime in second semester when a late-season snowstorm kept them all in their dorm rooms with endless bowls of buttered popcorn, Betty Kelly who lived down the hall offered up her “little cousin” Clare, who also lived on Long Island, also went to Catholic school, and had never, as far as Betty knew, had a date either.

  Betty Kelly was very pretty. Even with the three feet of snow that covered the steep and winding streets of the college, and hermetically sealed the girls’ dorm against the possibility of an impromptu visit from an ardent male, she resisted the day’s call to slovenliness and remained impeccably well groomed. She was a senior, and engaged to a cadet. She was to be married at West Point in June, after graduation, and she would see her little cousin then, she told the girls, at her wedding.

  When Betty Kelly was inclined to be kind, she thought the reconciliation with Clare’s family was an indication of her mother’s best nature. Betty had been fifteen at the time. At the back of the huge round church, she had watched her mother put her arms around the uncle who had lost the boy, the uncle who was only a pale stoop-shouldered version of the man in her mother’s wedding photos. She had seen him close his eyes in her mother’s embrace, as if it was just what he needed. There had been two other cousins that day, a boy and a girl, both older than Betty and both alternately sullen and weepy, surrounded by a changing orbit of identical friends. Only Clare was approachable, and back at the small house, Betty had sat next to her, introduced herself, and then, eventually, had taken her hand. The photographs of Jacob, the cousin she had never met, made him seem young, and, she’d told Clare, very nice. Even at fifteen, Betty believed her attractiveness came with an obligation to be good, and she had thought, that day, that both she and her mother had succeeded quite well in being beautiful and good.

  But when Betty Kelly was feeling disinclined to be kind, she knew that the death of the boy in Vietnam had actually made his family more socially acceptable to her mother, more interesting at least, and that the sudden reconciliation was as motivated by her mother’s desire to be an insider to the tragedy as much as it was by any pity she felt for the family’s pain. Rather than expose the shallow roots of her own social history, Jacob Keane’s family now provided her mother with a certain moral authority when the war was discussed with her Garden City set, few of whom knew anyone who had even served, much less died, over there. Her uncle’s old car in the driveway when the family came for dinner was no longer an indication to the neighbors of a less than illustrious pedigree, but of a sympathetic noblesse oblige. This was the family, after all, who had lost a boy in Vietnam, so close to the end, and Catherine Kelly was doing what she could for them.

  Betty Kelly wondered, too, from time to time, if both her mother’s sympathy for the family and the satisfaction she felt at being able to display that sympathy were equally real. Preparing now to be a military wife herself, she had, on occasion, mentioned Jacob to her future in-laws, without ever adding that she and her soldier cousin had never actually met. She had seen the advantage the connection gave her; she had, to be honest with herself, savored it, without for a minute feeling any less pain for poor Clare and the gray-haired parents who were left to raise her.

  The blind date, it was agreed—all the girls in the discussion warming to the possibilities—would be arranged by saying that Gregory/Clare had just broken up with his/her girlfriend/boyfriend and wanted to meet someone new. This would eliminate, it was agreed, any hint that either one of them was a loser who’d never had a date, while at the same time taking off some of the pressure to be charming that might move either one of them, shy souls both, toward total catatonia. “Just tell them it’s not really a date,” one of the girls offered. “They just want to have someone to talk to while they’re between serious relationships.”

  “Just a friend,” Gregory’s sister said, nodding, and all the other girls in the circle of T-shirts and pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers echoed the phrase with such wistful enthusiasm it might have been a refrain from their own prayers. “Just a friend.”

  Gregory’s sister, who was in awe of, and a little in love with, Betty Kelly and her clean hair and pink nails and turquoise jogging suit—not to mention the diamond in its Tiffany setting—pictured Clare as a younger, shyer version of her cousin; a willowy beauty who her brother would love instantly, cherish like a delicate bird in his soft big hands: an incongruous but perfect pair.

  Betty, who knew her cousin and had met Gregory in the Ladycliff dining hall, thought more along the lines of beggars can’t be choosers. At her wedding reception, with her train pinned up and her veil pushed aside, she drew Clare’s arm across her beaded waist and walked her to a corner of the room. She whispered, “Would you do me a favor? Would you go out with this boy I know?” From the corner of her eye, Betty saw her new mother-in-law in her raw silk suit smiling at the two of them, making note—Betty was sure of it—that this was the cousin who had lost her brother in the war, making note of the sweet special attention Betty was giving her.

  For Clare, the rapidly accumulating number of “firsts” that her blind date marked became a mantra for the entire summer: first time she talked to a boy on the phone (to set up the time and to give directions); first time she shopped for something to wear on a date; first time she showered and washed her hair and dressed for a date; first time she heard the doorbell rung by a date while she was still getting ready upstairs; first time she heard her father say, “How do you do,” to a boy at the door, heard her mother’s “Nice to meet you Gregory,” and the self-consciously soft, mellifluous call up the stairs, “Clare”—not the usual sweetie pie or baby doll or Clare de Lune—“your date is here.” First time she came down the stairs to greet a boy in the living room (first time in these new shoes, too, which were wooden-soled sandals all the girls were wearing but which she had not gotten the toe-gripping hang of yet). First time she laid eyes on him: a big guy (that was good) in neat shorts and Top-Siders (that was good) and a polo shirt and with not too long hair—all good. First time she said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” before both of them let their eyes drop to the floor. First time her mother and father both moved forward to sweep her out the door by the side of a strange young man. First time she looked up to see Pauline at her brothers’ window, giving a brief wave. First time he opened the car door for her (good) of his father’s Ford Torino (okay) and got in the driver’s side, and before turning the ignition leaned his head toward the steering wheel and said to her, smiling a little and from under a falling shock of his brown hair, “Hi again.” First time he made her laugh.

  He pulled smoothly out of the driveway and
drove to the movie theater with an easy confidence. He repeated, gamely, what they both already knew (“So your cousin knows my sister from Ladycliff and my sister told your cousin all about me and your cousin told my sister all about you…”), leaving out, from sheer awkwardness, the part about Clare having broken up with an old boyfriend, as well as, from sheer tact, his sister’s description of Clare as beautiful. He could not have been more pleased to discover that the latter, which had caused his hand to tremble when he raised it to her doorbell, was inaccurate. He could not have been this charming, he was certain, as he pulled into a parking space and opened her door for her with a bow, had it been true.

  First time to find herself among the denizens of date night—a newly discovered time of day lit by streetlight and movie marquee and scented with aftershave and patchouli and popcorn and spearmint gum. First time to sit beside a boy at a movie, to make small talk before it begins (“So, do you want to go to Ladycliff?”), sharing a tub of popcorn, elbows touching on the single armrest which she had always, until now, thought unnecessarily stingy. First time to laugh, in this new society of her dating peers, when someone cried out, “Start the fucking movie already,” and the whole of the theater erupted in applause.

  They went to the diner after. He ordered a cheeseburger platter and she, demurely, a grilled cheese on whole wheat. In his car in front of her house, he put his arm across the back of the seat as they talked more about the difference between college and high school. Her first kiss was soft and gentle and lasted long enough to make her wonder how to breathe. His tongue tasted of dill pickle. Hypothetically, her plans about how far to go with a boy when the opportunity came involved the coy catching of a hand or the playful but firm whisper of “No, no, no.” But the reality was that this was the first time she had been held in anyone’s arms and there was no certainty whatsoever that it would happen again, so rather than the coquettish straightening of the spine and the flirtatious reprimand, she found herself simply giving in, falling into him, letting his tongue fill her mouth and his hand brush her arm, her thigh, and gently make its way under her shirt to her bare skin. His fingers covered her breast and he stirred and sighed and moved his legs out from under the steering wheel. His fingertips hooked themselves over the cup of her bra and tugged a little and were it not for the fact that Betty Kelly had told her he had just broken up with a longtime girlfriend, she might have seen this as an indication of his inexperience. He moved his hand to her back, brushed the hooks of her bra, and then, as if he had been barred from the door, moved his hand out of her shirt and onto her arm. He lifted her own hand and placed it on his thigh and were it not for his sister’s lie, he, too, would have seen the way she simply kept it there, unmoving, as proof of her inexperience as well. As it was, they both believed the other’s awkward hesitation was due to a painful remnant of affection for someone else and they broke apart, a little breathless and shy once more.

  Each of them wondering if they could ever replace the phantom ex in the other’s loyal heart.

  At her door he said, his eyes on the welcome mat, “Do you want to go out again tomorrow?” and she said, softly, “Okay. That’d be good.”

  In only a few weeks’ time, the refrain of first—first party together, first walk on the beach, first dinner in a restaurant—exhausted itself in the social realm and came to refer exclusively to the physical milestones they marked during their hours together in the dark: first love bite, first success with those hooks, first glimpse of her bare breasts in the shadowy streetlights, first obedient touch of her hand, first nakedness against the plush cloth seat, first astonished completion of what they had begun, the silver shimmer of their success spread across her bare belly.

  That summer, Barb Luce, who had been Clare’s best friend since fifth grade, accused her of abandoning their friendship because of a boy—an error they had marked in other girls at their school and had always condemned—and Clare denied it, but without conviction. She would not return to those suffocating Saturday nights of TV movies and cake mixes and playing with each other’s hair for all the best girlfriends in the world. “Maybe we can double date sometime,” she told Barb. “You know, when you meet someone.” And that was the end of that.

  It was the girls who already had boyfriends, or who already had a string of them, who noticed his ring around her neck the first morning back at school. Clare was part of their sorority now.

  In the second week of the term, a priest visited, as was tradition, to hear confessions and to say Mass, but he was a young guy—a new assistant at a nearby parish—with thinning hair and an effeminate voice, and in an effort to keep the sacrament relevant to the girls he asked that they first meet with him in small groups so they could all have a conversation about life, about their accomplishments (he said) as well as their transgressions, before he met with them individually to offer absolution. He was pale and earnest, gay, they were pretty sure.

  In Clare’s group discussion, held in the small room that usually served as the PE teacher’s office, she and Christine Dodd and Cynthia Pechulis talked about being nasty behind their friends’ backs and lying to their parents about stupid things and using fake IDs to buy beer, but no one said anything about sex. In her individual meeting, Clare shyly bent her head when the young priest asked her if she had anything more she wanted to discuss. He suggested that they both take a minute to “open our hearts to God” before they said an Act of Contrition together, and although she bowed her head again, it was not as easy, at that moment, to keep a silent conscience. For surely if she had ever sinned it was when she had first let him, helped him, to slip her sweater up over her head, to slide her jeans off over her hips.

  Without opening his eyes, the young priest suddenly began to say an Act of Contrition and softly, Clare followed along. He then blessed her, and absolved her, and as he did, she noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the core. It was the kind of thing Pauline would have pointed out. It was the kind of thing that indicated, Clare already knew, that the man wasn’t as sure of himself as he seemed.

  That Saturday afternoon she walked down to St. Gabriel’s and slipped through the eight-paneled door of one of the confessionals. This, too, in the way of contemporary churches, was just a room, not terribly different from the PE teacher’s office at school, but empty except for a freestanding kneeler before a folded screen. Early on (Clare had memories of her first confessions here), when everything still smelled of wood and paint, there had been just two chairs, but her parents, and others, it seemed, had claimed Father McShane had taken the modernization thing too far and the kneeling bench and the screen had been added. Father McShane, now Monsignor McShane, was seated behind the screen, she could see his profile clearly, his cheek in his hand. There had been rumors, when she was in grammar school, that he slept through most confessions, sometimes even snored if you went on too long. She repeated the list of sins she had been confessing since those days—adding only “I let my boyfriend take some liberties,” which she placed between, “I lied to my mother three times” and “I took the Lord’s name in vain twice.” The priest prescribed for her penance four Our Father’s and four Hail Mary’s and the avoidance of the “occasion of sin.”

  Kneeling in the pew to say her prayers, she recalled how she once had thought an occasion of sin meant a social occasion dedicated to wrongdoing—St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras most likely. She smiled into her hands. Of course, what it meant now was the backseat of Greg’s father’s car, the couch in her basement when her parents weren’t home, the friend’s apartment near Marist where, he had assured her, he and she would have a room to themselves, undisturbed, when she came up to visit him this weekend, getting a ride from his sister, who would stay with friends at Ladycliff and assure both sets of parents that Clare too was staying there. She had bought new pajamas. He said he was buying new sheets. She would brush her teeth and wash her face, tie up her hair in a ribbon and then kiss him. They would sleep together in the same bed for the first time
and in the morning they’d go out to breakfast together—he’d said the diners upstate were pretty lousy but he had a favorite spot for waffles and fresh juice. After breakfast, they would take a long walk—he had the trail all planned. The leaves were just changing and he knew a farm where they sold hot cider. There was a rugby game to watch Saturday afternoon and a keg party that night. His friends would treat her with that delicious graciousness otherwise wild and sometimes gross boys reserved for the girls who were loved by their buddies. And then a second night in bed together, like a married couple.

  She could feel her own heart under the softness of her breast, beating against her folded hands as she knelt, anticipating it, the best weekend of her life, losing count of what prayer she was on, or how it was, here in St. Gabriel’s, that her thoughts had wandered so pleasurably and so far. She raised her eyes. In the past few months, statues had been added to the altar, a recognizable Joseph and Mary, a formidable Saint Gabriel, blond and fine-featured, kneeling on one knee. It was what the parishioners had wanted, realistic statues, easily identifiable. She blessed herself and rose and slipped out of the pew, suddenly struck by the conviction that she was going to have the happiest life. And then she paused and knelt again to say a prayer to Jacob, who had once sat beside her, here in this place, to thank him for it.

  Her baby began, as she reckoned it, sometime during the first cold days of that autumn. She pictured it forming like the far-off swirl of some distant galaxy in the darkness of her womb, more blood than flesh, and then, perhaps by Christmas, more flesh than blood. Because she had always been so thin, no one was surprised to find she had begun to fill out, and because the winter uniform meant wool skirt and soft blouse and V-neck sweater, if you wished, under the blue blazer, because Pauline had shown her years ago how to adjust a hem and open a seam, she had no worry all through the winter that she would have to tell anyone yet. Not Gregory or her parents or the teachers at school. Gregory had midterms just after the first of the year and then the weather turned bad, so he was spending fewer weekends home. With only a vague idea of what next year would be like, she told her parents she’d decided she’d rather go to college nearby and applied only to Malloy and St. John’s. On Saturdays she drove herself to the library and spent long hours in the overheated rooms studying biology books and medical texts, Dr. Spock and Our Bodies, Ourselves, but mostly the lovely full-color photos from an old Life magazine that showed a fetus floating like a spacewalker in the limitless universe of a uterus, a thin and otherworldly baby crooking an arm, sucking a thumb, lifting a snub nose and a dark, an ancient, eye to the top of the page. Breathing slowly, with a sleeper’s rhythm, she placed one hand on her waist and touched Gregory’s ring with the other, leaning over these pictures. The best afternoons were the ones when a cold rain, or a sleet, or a bit of snow fell from a colorless sky and hit the library windows, making her believe this deep winter would never end.