After This

by Alice McDermott

  In her prayers she sometimes said, “What you could do for me, what you could do for me, is let this winter never end.”

  It was only the birth itself that frightened her. In health class that fall, they’d been shown a film: a hospital birth, the woman red-faced and panting, her pale, raised knees, more blood and less privacy than any of them had imagined. A scalpel moving in for what they called the episiotomy (“It won’t appease me,” was the joke later). Girls with their hands over their mouths stumbled from the room. All week long, as the film was shown to each class, green-faced students could be found lined up on the floor in the hallways, slumped against the walls like wounded soldiers in trenches. Later, there was talk of a conspiracy: moral injunctions having failed, the powers that be at Mary Immaculate Academy were merely trying to terrify them into chastity. “Too late,” the more troublesome and popular girls had said, laughing, Clare now among them. “Try not to think about it.”

  In the library, bent over the amber-tinted photographs of a baby coming into life, she could manage not to think about it: the pain she was headed for in eight, then seven, then six months’ time, the humiliation of bare knees raised, body convulsed, nothing appeased. In the warmth and quiet of the library—the smell of books, the rustle of newspapers, the occasional voice of a child—she thought instead of the life that was forming, not just the baby’s life but the life of nights in bed beside him and the mornings she would wake with him at her side.

  She set the weekend of daylight savings, the beginning of spring, for the time to shake herself out of her lovely stupor and face the world. She told Gregory on the phone on Saturday, and he cursed softly, the way he did when he made a wrong turn while driving or left his wallet in his other pants, cursing himself and his own stupidity. “What do you want to do?” he said, finally. “What is there?” she said, not really a question, and he cursed again.

  She made her way into Pauline’s room that night, touched her gently on the hip and then sat on the edge of Michael’s bed. With her sister gone, she no longer troubled to give the excuse that she had to sleep here because Annie was reading. She was certain Pauline never bought it anyway. She came in here because it was where Jacob had slept all the years he was home, even in the years before she was born, and there was comfort in looking into the same darkness he had known, guessing at the shapes beneath the same shadows. She sat on Michael’s bed. This was the hour, she guessed, that they were meant to spring forward. The hour erased out of time from this night until the one in the fall, when it would be restored again. As good a time as any, she thought, to plan with a bit more precision just what she wanted to do.

  She told her mother the next night, the first Sunday evening when there was still light left after dinner. They had finished eating, her father and Pauline had left the table, and she watched her mother’s mouth draw down crookedly, searing a line through her chin.

  Her mother slapped her and then burst into tears and Clare’s pain and astonishment were so great she could barely catch her breath. She put her face in her hands, awoken, at last, from the winter’s spell. She said, through her own tears, “A grandchild for you,” but even she heard how ridiculous this was, something spoken out of the illogic of a long dream.

  Her mother’s tears brought her father in from the living room and he stood in the doorway with his hand to his bald head as Mary Keane told him, crying, “She’s pregnant.” Looking at neither her husband nor her child, she said, to the air, it seemed, “How much more can I take?”

  Her father limped to the phone on the wall. “What’s the number?” he said and Clare had a silly impulse to say 911. “The Josephs,” her father said. “Greg’s parents. What’s their phone number?”

  Weakly, she said, “No, Daddy,” but her mother was up already, rummaging through a drawer for her phone book. She read the number out loud as her father dialed. In his business voice he asked to speak to Gregory’s father. But he had only begun the conversation (“It seems your boy,” he said) when his face twisted into a terrible mask and her mother had to take the phone.

  Clare bowed her head and put her arms over her widening waist. There was nothing to be done, she knew, because the future was already here, inside her—she had already begun to feel the baby stir—and the thought seemed to trump everything else, her mother’s now steady voice, her father’s muffled tears, which were not for her, she knew even then, but for Jacob, at long last. The sun had begun to set and the kitchen was darkening, an hour later than it would have just yesterday. Her cheek still stung from where her mother had slapped her. The baby moved, as if waving a thin arm at her from that once-distant galaxy, now a single star, a sun (a son, she thought) well within her sight, warm. When she looked up, Pauline was standing in the kitchen doorway, her hand on the frame and something in her mouth, perhaps a butterscotch or a hard candy pushed behind her teeth. Clare got up and stood beside her, and, as she had been doing all her life, lifted and held the old woman’s hand as if Pauline herself had offered it.

  That evening, Gregory’s parents came to the house and sat with Clare’s in the small living room. Her mother had straightened the slipcover on the couch and drawn the thick curtains and set out coffee and cookies on her wedding china. Clare listened from the top of the stairs. His parents had called Gregory at school. They said he was very sorry, full of remorse. They added as well that it takes, of course, two to tango. Mary Keane drew a sharp breath and said Gregory was a large boy, and older. Coercion was not out of the question. Mrs. Joseph said her boy was certainly not like that. John Keane said nor was their daughter. Mr. Joseph said either way, there wasn’t going to be any shotgun wedding. Mr. Keane said there weren’t going to be any bastard children either. Watch your goddamn language, Mr. Joseph said. Watch yours, Mr. Keane said. The two women made a soothing sound. They were both good kids, it was agreed. Neither one of them a moment’s trouble for their parents. Neither one of them had ever even dated before. It was the future that had to be considered now, Mary Keane said. What was past, was past. Clare had high school to finish, they both needed to get through college. Adoption was mentioned. A Catholic agency. A good Catholic family.

  Gregory came home from school the next weekend and stood his full height and full, soft girth in the small living room and said he and Clare would get married before the baby was born and then he’d finish the semester, come home, get a job, and get a degree at night. He had spoken to a priest at school. It was the right thing to do. John Keane gazed at him sullenly while he spoke, feeling himself begin to relent only when the boy added, with a shrug and a crooked smile, that his grades at Marist weren’t all that hot anyway. Something of Jacob, of course, in the sweet, hapless self-deprecation; the shudder of fate contained in something as simple as not-so-hot grades.

  He looked beyond the boy to his father—both parents as well as Gregory’s remorseful sister had been brought along for the announcement. John Keane thought he saw in the man’s eye a kind of admiration, even pride, as Gregory spoke. Nothing he would feel if the tables were turned and it was his daughter who faced the ordeal, the risk, of childbirth at only seventeen. Both mothers wept again and Gregory’s sister hung her head. But Greg had the priest on his side and the startling power of his own conviction. Her conviction, really. It was what Clare wanted, he said, glancing at her. And whatever Clare wanted it was now his obligation to provide.

  “And where will you live?” Gregory’s mother asked. “How will you pay rent?”

  “We thought we’d live here,” Clare said, and looked to her mother. It was the plan she had devised in that lost hour, in Jacob’s room. “We thought we’d make an apartment, out of the basement. Until we can afford something more.” She smiled, as if it had all been arranged already, as if it were all working out quite well already. “You and Pauline will be here to help me with the baby, especially if I want to take some classes at Malloy. And if you guys want to move to Florida, well, maybe by then”—it was all part of what she and Pauline ha
d planned, whispering in that lost hour—“we can rent this house from you, or even buy it, if we have jobs. You won’t have to sell it to strangers, anyway.” She looked at Pauline. “We can keep the house, and, if Pauline wants to, she can stay.”

  SISTER MARIE IGNATIUS, the school principal, met with Clare’s parents in her office early the next evening when the school was empty. Outside her office window the green lawn and the dark hedge, now edged with daffodils, were lovely in the restored light of the new spring. Although the air was still cool, she’d pushed open one of the small panes to freshen the room. She had to say, of course, that she could not have been more surprised. Clare, of all girls. She would never have imagined it. She did not say, as she had told the other Sisters in the convent, still waters run deep, but she did point out that even the best of girls can, after all, be led astray these days. The pressure is tremendous: the music, the movies, the feminists, the hippies. In the past, and Sister Marie Ignatius had run the school for twelve years, such girls would simply go away. There was, in fact, an unwed mother’s home in upstate New York that Sister Marie had once contacted almost annually. But the stigma, these days, was perhaps not as great as it used to be and with abortion now a legal option, it was up to the school to help its students in trouble in the kindest and most positive way possible. And the fact that Clare had not given any teacher in the school a single moment of worry or concern certainly worked to her advantage now.

  Kindly, her hands folded in front of her on her desk, Sister agreed that Clare could stay in school for the next month or so—she would request only that as little as possible be said about her condition and her marriage (she did not want Clare’s situation to set either a precedent or an appealing example)—and that she eventually leave school (mononucleosis might be a good excuse) once the situation became apparent. It would be both a humiliation for Clare and a mockery of all the school stood for to have her appear in uniform in her eighth or ninth month. Academic matters could easily be arranged. She could take her finals at home. She would miss graduation, of course, the ceremony itself, but she would still graduate.

  Sister Marie walked the parents to the door. She would tell the Sisters later that both of them looked like they’d “been through the mill.” Her heart went out to them, and to their daughter, but there was also the school to run, an enrollment rate to maintain, funds to raise from alumnae, many of whom were mothers of the daughters enrolled today. There were—as much for her as for Clare’s parents—the neighbors to consider. There was also an extremely generous alum who had married well being honored at this year’s graduation. It was not the time for a senior with a huge belly under her robes to be climbing the stage to accept her diploma. Married or not.

  The parents smiled weakly, inclined to linger although all that needed to be said had been said. Sister sometimes joked that these were the “Climb Every Mountain” moments when she wished she could sing. She opened the door for them.

  “Let’s remember,” she told them, “that there’s a new life on the way.” The corridor outside her office was brightly lit, eerily empty, harsh splashes of light against the linoleum and the painted fronts of the girls’ lockers. “And life,” she said, turning back, “is always a cause for celebration.” And then could have bitten her tongue because these were the Keanes she was talking to—she recalled Annie on that terrible morning, in this same hallway, she recalled seeing through the glass door of her own office the great shadow of Sister Maureen Crosby rising from her seat behind the reception desk, catching the two weeping girls in her arms. These were the Keanes she was spouting clichés at, the Keanes who had lost a son in that useless war.

  Father McShane, Monsignor McShane, pouted a bit, his hands folded over his belly, but quickly relented, telling John Keane he would open the church himself for the family, for the wedding, eight o’clock on the following Sunday night. He’d do the honors, too, he said, the path of least resistance having always been his preference in matters such as unwed mothers, mixed marriages, annulments, and birth control. He could see the humiliation on the poor man’s face—one of these old-fashioned Irishmen who in his near seventy years could hardly bring himself to mention sex in the confessional now sitting here in the rectory saying his little daughter was already six months gone. A man whose biggest concern, at this age, should be his golf swing.

  Pity’s fool, Monsignor even offered to call the choir director to see if he couldn’t come down and play a tune for the ceremony, but John Keane said his wife had already made arrangements with one of their neighbors, the MacLeods, Presbyterians whose nephew played the piano at Juilliard. She had heard the music coming from their house just yesterday, when the boy was visiting. She’d knocked on the door to ask the name of the tune. One thing led to another—she’d been looking for an opportunity to break the news about Clare to the neighbors—and the boy had agreed to come in from the city to play. If that was all right with the Monsignor.

  Monsignor McShane held out his hands. “I don’t think the church will collapse,” he said, “if a Protestant plays.” Or if, for that matter (he thought), a girl six months pregnant walks down the aisle in a white dress to marry a boy with a priest, instead of a shotgun, at his back. “We built her pretty strong, John. With your help, as I recall. I don’t think she’ll fall.”

  The only bother was letting the piano player in half an hour early so he could “get a feel” for the instrument. Because he liked to linger over his Sunday supper, usually with 60 Minutes on, the Monsignor asked old Mrs. Arnold to hold his dinner until after the ceremony and told the other two priests to go ahead and eat without him. He watched the first half of the show with only a glass of sherry and some cheese and crackers to tide him over, and then left the rectory at 7:25. It was a lovely night. The sky was that polished blue it sometimes got after a storm, or a long winter. Even the traffic along the boulevard, which had become intolerable of late, seemed subdued by the color. He climbed the steps to one of the side doors, let himself in with the key. Over at the school, there were lights on only in the old section, the cafeteria where the AA meetings were held on Sundays. He turned on the lights above the altar and then in the choir where the piano was. Someone had already put a vase of flowers on the altar, a simple blue vase with only a handful of white roses, and he seemed to recall some connection between white roses and unborn babies—was it the Mothers Club that sold white roses on Mother’s Day to help save the unborn babies, or was it the Fathers Club that sold white roses on Mother’s Day to help save the men who had forgotten a present? It was poppies on Veterans Day in any case—Flanders Fields—and the thought reminded him that it was the Keanes, of course, who had lost a boy in Vietnam.

  Trouble piled on trouble, Monsignor thought, as he walked down the center aisle (grateful that this would be a quick and simple ceremony, no messing with candles lit at the end of every pew, as was so much in vogue these days, wax dripping everywhere). It struck him, not for the first time, that his modern church, such a miracle to him just a decade ago, would grow dated in the coming years—an old man’s mistaken enthusiasm for the wrong kind of future. He’d already weathered the fight over the return of the old statues, the confessional screens. They’d be asking for Latin again next.

  The piano player was just coming up the steps as Monsignor McShane opened the front doors. He was a young guy, small and dark-haired. A young man’s beard under the fair skin. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase and introduced himself with a Scots Irish name that Monsignor didn’t bother to retain. The two walked up the aisle together. “This is some church,” the kid said, craning his neck to take in the Danish modern stained glass, the circus-tent ceiling. He then mentioned that he occasionally played at another Catholic church, an old-fashioned one, St. Paul’s, near his school. “I went to St. Paul’s,” Monsignor said, “as a boy.” And knew immediately, as if he had never understood it before, what his parishioners were lonesome for, in this monstrosity of his. It was not the future they’d been obj
ecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could not have one without the other.

  He went into the vestry while the boy ran his fingers over the keys. You did not have to be a musician to hear the difference, once he got started, between what this kid could do and what the ordinary Sunday musicians played. Monsignor put on his vestments, prepared the altar, walked down the central aisle again to see that there’d been nothing left behind in the pews this morning, checked that he’d left the front doors unlocked, and then walked back up again, still with twenty minutes to spare. He swallowed a little indigestion, a little impatience, thinking of his dinner. He walked across the altar, touching gaudy, literal Saint Gabriel on the knee, and then stood by the boy. You would have to be a musician to explain the difference, but the priest knew it was there. There were the ordinary pianists who played, no doubt, as they had been taught to play, earnest, obedient, faithful to each note (don’t even mention, Monsignor would have said, those awful folk-mass singers with their guitars), and then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance, eyes closed, transformed, transported, inspired (that was the word)—not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there, in the air, some music, some pattern, sacred, profound, barely apprehensible, inscrutable, really, something just beyond the shell of earth and sky that had always been there and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to bring it, briefly, briefly, to his untrained ear.