That Night

by Alice McDermott

  They shook their heads. They believed it. They had heard enough stories about bitter stepmothers and ugly old queens who locked beautiful girls in dungeons and towers. They were willing enough to see themselves as handsome, persecuted princes whose very rights as men these women would deny.

  The familiar, aimless evening took on form, took on drama as they talked. The dark summer trees were thick with it. The dim lights around the parking lot made the black asphalt a stage. They had seen movies with lighting like this. They worked themselves into their best emotions. Isn’t this what they’d always suspected: They were persecuted, wrongly accused, unfairly denied. They told the others who joined them what had happened, their voices rising with outrage.

  “Gimme a dime,” one said, and, to Rick, “What’s her number?” The others watched him cross the street to a lighted telephone booth: spotlight. He dialed and hung up and dialed again. He came back. “She must still have the phone off the hook.”

  Three others jumped in a car and took off. Minutes later, they returned with the news that there were lights on in Sheryl’s house, in the living room and in one window upstairs. Another went to the phone: still busy.

  “Call Angie,” someone said.

  Now the grouping of cars had become a command post. When the girls arrived, they stood to one side, looking sympathetically at Rick, who had once again become possible to them, more possible than ever, hurt as he was, or would soon be (because none of them believed Sheryl’s mother was keeping her from him—they had mothers, too; they knew it couldn’t be done).

  Word came back that Angie and a friend had gone to the nine o’clock movie. Two boys were dispatched to wait for them outside.

  Someone dialed Sheryl’s number again. The plan in the beginning was to ask for her politely; if questioned, to say, “I’m in her math class at school and I thought I’d say hello since I haven’t seen her all summer.” But as the hour grew late, they decided they would simply curse into the phone, “Listen, you old bitch.”

  Rick was drunk by now and growing morose. By now he no longer understood what had happened to him—not merely in the past twenty-four hours, but in the past twelve months. She had said she loved him. She had promised him things he could hardly understand except as some kind of fulfillment of all that he knew he wanted, and then become someone else.

  His two friends returned from the movies. They’d found Angie and her girlfriend, but she said she hadn’t seen Sheryl in a couple of days. She and Sheryl weren’t that friendly anymore anyway.

  Rick leaned against one of the girls who had pulled herself up onto the hood of his car and his arm pushed into her thigh. “I just hope she’s not pregnant,” he told her softly. “I just hope that’s not it.”

  Later, he told them that he, and they, should just go right over there and pull her out of the house. Murder the old bitch if they had to. They agreed, but not tonight, they said. They needed a plan.

  He drove himself home a little after three. He lightly sideswiped a car parked in the street, scraping paint. He called her again from the phone in the kitchen. This time it rang and her mother answered with a gasp, as if she had just struggled up out of the water.

  “C’mon,” he said—he would not remember this in the morning—“let me talk to her. Come on.” But she hung up on him without a word.

  It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones. But Rick’s house was often empty, or maybe his father couldn’t bring himself to move at that moment, or didn’t want to try; maybe his sister ignored the ringing phone, certain it wasn’t for her.

  This isn’t news: the world is as indifferent to lovers as it is to the poor and the unlucky. Sheryl’s mother would have known this: it’s as indifferent to lovers as it is to the dead, and to those who mourn them.

  Before her husband’s sudden death, she had always been known as a sweet, soft-spoken woman. She didn’t pick her nose or pepper her conversations with “Jesus Christ”; she said “sugar” and “fudge” when she drew the wrong cards at canasta, and even the dirty jokes she told were cute and inoffensive. She had curly brown hair and a round, dry face, what I used to think of as gumdrop eyes, as small as buttons.

  But at her husband’s wake, my mother later told me, she screamed shrilly at a young attendant who placed a small arrangement of flowers on the floor by the casket rather than on a table top, where they clearly belonged. She sent Sheryl out of the room at one point to demand that the funeral director tell the group of Irish people in the next chapel to lower their voices and control their laughter.

  “This is a funeral parlor,” she said to those who tried to calm her. “Not some shanty gin mill.”

  In the days that followed, she told the neighbors who asked, “No, there’s nothing you can do for me. What in the world can you do for me?”

  Our mothers were hurt and puzzled by this. The sudden death of one of the block’s husbands had startled them, but Sheryl’s mother’s anger was even worse. They held their throats as they spoke of it, slid their hands over the kitchen table as if there was something they wanted to straighten and smooth. Their own plans for widowhood, which I sometimes heard them discuss in the same frightened, delighted way we children planned our encounters with vampires and communists, usually involved a gallant, tragic air, a nice secretarial job and the return to the house they’d been raised in. (Although Mrs. Evers, whose parents had both died of the same heart trouble that would eventually, when I was about twenty, free her forever from the risk of becoming a widow, had only cousins to go to.) Never this fury. They shook their heads. I remember them repeating the word distraught. I remember thinking that it meant not merely sorrowful but somehow emotionally skewed: you were angry when you meant to be sad, mean when you meant to be grateful; you cried when you were happy.

  My father went to her house one evening not long after her husband died to help her with her income tax returns. He came back furious. At one point she had grabbed the pencil out of his hand and flung it across the room. She’d accused him of intentionally trying to confuse her.

  “What can you do for a woman like that?” he’d asked.

  My mother had shrugged. She seemed a little fearful, as if she were just realizing what being a widow might involve.

  “Did she cry?” she asked, and my father said, somewhat indignantly, “She did not.” We all shook our heads. There was no forgiving her then.

  I think of us as naive in those days. All of us. Years later, just a few months after Billy Rossi was killed, Mrs. Rossi turned a hose on a couple of little boys who had wandered onto her lawn. No one seemed surprised then, although Mrs. Rossi had always been known as easygoing, even kind. Then we merely shrugged and nodded as if we understood. We said seeing little children, boys especially, was rough for her.

  But we resented Sheryl’s mother’s anger. We said (or our parents said and we children concurred), “She’s never going to find another husband with an attitude like that.”

  We gradually replaced the word distraught with ungrateful and then bitter. Our mothers, who had begun by then to look for reasons to avoid her, said it was high time she pulled herself together and started being pleasant again. How long could they go on feeling sorry for her? How long could one person mourn?

  By that summer, she had still not found the courage to look for a job. She had still not learned to change a tire or mow the lawn. She had handed all her
finances over to an accountant. Her deliverance, no doubt, took the form for her as much as for us of another husband, but that must have seemed to her as impossible as her loneliness. By that summer she must have realized that she could not mourn forever, or rage forever, that she would have to do something to get on with her life and that still she had no idea what to do.

  When Sheryl came into the room that summer morning, her mother was already awake, her hand held over her eyes. In the year and some months since her husband’s death, she would have found no change in her sense of loss, or in her disbelief that the loss was hers, but it might have become with each morning more and more difficult to raise the tears that she had thought would wake her for the rest of her life. She might have been remembering some moment from their early marriage, or from their last days together, perhaps some argument they’d once had, turning the memory over and over, searching for whatever it was that would fill her with the appropriate sadness, the only feeling she had become willing to wake for, the only feeling she still feared to lose.

  Sheryl appeared in the doorway and said, “Mom,” in much the same way she might have said it years ago, hoping to be kept home from school. She wore lacy baby dolls, lavender and white, no makeup, but her eyes still smudged with mascara. Her legs and arms were bony, lightly tanned. Her hair, flattened from sleep, was pressed back behind her ears.

  Sheryl walked into the room and knelt on the floor beside her mother, who only turned her head, her hand just lifted off her brow. Reflexively, without tenderness, she reached out to brush the bangs out of her daughter’s eyes.

  She might once have thought, or been told, that if she lost her husband, her children and grandchildren would save her, but she had learned by then that this simply wasn’t true. Sheryl had her father’s mouth and full face and something of his coloring, but she was beside the point somehow. Their child, that was all. Another life, not theirs. She was only vaguely aware of the betrayal in this. What, then, were children for?

  The light in the pale blue bedroom was the early light of a thousand such summer mornings. The windows were open, and through them came the sounds of the first children, out surveying the grounds, revving up bicycles, me knocking on Diane Rossi’s side door.

  “Mom,” Sheryl said softly, kneeling beside her mother, her hand touching the mattress in some approximation of herself at three, demanding to be pulled into her parents’ bed. “I think maybe I’m pregnant.”

  Her mother rose immediately and went to the phone on what had been her husband’s side of the bed. In the months since his death, she had often thought that if it hadn’t been so swift and unexpected, so immediately complete, she would have done well. If he had woken her in the middle of the night, clutching his heart, she would have phoned the police, their doctor, the hospital, she would have supervised the attendants who carried him down the stairs and sat calmly beside him in the ambulance. If he’d had cancer or some such slow disease, she would have learned to use hypodermic needles or catheters or whatever he needed. She would have set up a hospital bed in the living room, slept beside him on the couch every night, drawn the curtains and adjusted the pillows so he could see the street, the progress of his lawn (which she would have tended for him), the cardinals and jays perched on the hedge.

  She would have proven to him, and to herself, that she was capable. She would have done well.

  She asked Sheryl, “When did you have your last period?” and then quickly spoke the answer into the phone. It was nearly three months ago. She said, “Right away,” and checked the bedside clock. When she hung up, she told Sheryl they would see the doctor that morning. Sheryl was now sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap. Her mother went to her then, put her arm around her shoulder, maybe kissed the top of her hair, which smelled of cigarette smoke and hairspray. “Okay,” she said. “It will be okay.” Thinking already of her sister in Ohio and if it wouldn’t be better for Sheryl to fly out there as soon as they knew for sure, maybe tonight.

  She took control of her daughter’s tragedy in a way she had been unable to do with her own and turned the anger she had learned, the nastiness, to what would have seemed to her to be good use. For in these matters, it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the hoodlum boy never know.

  That night, as soon as I’d managed to break out of my mother’s grip, I left our porch and went into the street. All the children were doing it, not even running but almost staggering, somewhat reluctantly, in our fathers’ wakes, going only as far as what seemed to be the prescribed borders of the fight: about six feet or so from the cars and her lawn, which left us scattered across both sidewalks on either side and down the middle of the street. When the first police car approached, we merely turned our heads, stricken, I suppose, with that strange paralysis that seems to grip all crying and moaning children. Georgie Evers and I were the first two in his path, and it never occurred to us to step out of his way.

  But by then the officer had seen the cars on the lawn and the brawl that took place beyond them.

  He stopped, then turned on his siren and his lights, got out quickly and stood dumbfounded for a moment with one foot still in the car and his hand on the open door. He shouted, “You kids,” waving his arm (still none of us moved), and then dove into his car again. He turned off the siren, made a call on his radio (the Meyer twins, who stood nearly at his elbow, claimed he said, Mayday! Mayday!), then leaped from the car again, the nightstick in his hand.

  But the boys had begun a retreat as soon as they heard the siren. We saw them shaking our fathers from their legs and their arms, dropping their chains and even their jackets to the lawn if that was the only way to get rid of them. Some of the boys were bloodied, the blood black shadows that covered their mouths or their ears. They were shouting each other’s names. I saw one of them was lifted and pushed into a car by the others. Car doors slammed. Even as the poor young officer jogged toward the fray, the first car, the one in Sheryl’s driveway, the white one with the painted flourish, backed up with a screech and, turning its front wheels over the curb, headed out—passing within inches of some of the children who still stood crying or who, seeing the car come toward them, had leaped into bushes or onto the grass.

  Again the cop turned to us and with another wide wave of his hand cried, “Get out of the street.” But at the same time, the car that had led the procession did a sudden U-turn across Sheryl’s lawn, its horn a staccato yell, and pulled out from her driveway. The next instant, I saw Rick. The light was on inside the remaining car, the one he had emerged from. I saw him through the back passenger window. I almost thought he was turning toward me, but he was simply curling forward in pain. He had lost his sunglasses. His hands, streaked with blood, were cupped over his face. I later learned his nose had been broken, but at the time I was certain he was crying. Then the door closed and the light went out.

  While our fathers were still pulling at its doors, pounding at its windows, the car suddenly spit out in reverse and then raced backward down the street, wavering in the streetlight like a fish. Just past the north corner it stopped, darted forward and disappeared.

  It seemed the whole world was wailing. In the now nearly total darkness, the sound made you think you should see an orange glow in the sky just beyond the rooftops, see the red flames of some city being consumed by the final conflagration. There was the disappearing siren of the young cop’s car, the approaching sirens of his reinforcements, little Jake screaming in his mother’s arms. There were the other children, who had been blasted into the hedges and the grass by the escaping cars (and who were lying tragically now, unharmed but unwilling to stand until their own part in the adventure, their own brush with death, had been fully recognized), the children like Georgie Evers, who had never stopped wailing, the mothers who were now running to their battered husbands’ sides, even Sheryl’s grandmother, who had finally opened the door again and now stood crying in Polish from behind the screen.

  It seemed our whole neighb
orhood had raised its voice in one varied, inharmonious wail.

  Amidst all this, I saw my father and Mr. Rossi, who had a glistening gash on his head and on his arm, help Sheryl’s mother up the steps and into the house. My mother followed. Just before I caught up with them, I saw Billy Rossi and Billy Carpenter burst out of their driveways on their bicycles, headed in the direction the hoods had gone and whooping like Indians.

  Inside, Sheryl’s living room seemed soft and comfortable (there were the green drapes and the green carpeting, the small velvet paintings hung high on the walls) and yet at the same time, perhaps because of the plastic slipcovers, sheathed in a thin layer of ice. Her grandmother stood trembling and crying by the single floor lamp, the only light on in the room. She was a small, plump woman. She wore a light cotton shift, her neck and freckled shoulders bare. Her sunken eyes were dark in the dim yellow light. Sheryl’s mother salt on the couch. The men were trying to get her to lie down, but she kept saying, “I’m all right, I tell you. I tell you I’m all right,” her voice quivering. She was shoeless, and her legs looked clawed. There was dirt on her palms and on her knees. My mother came through the dining room from the kitchen, a glass of water and a wet dish towel in her hands.

  “Here, Ann,” she said.

  Sheryl’s mother refused the water but took the cloth and wrapped it around her wrist, sighing and telling them she was all right.

  “Mama,” she said suddenly and quite crossly to the old woman who stood by the lamp, crying and murmuring, clasping and unclasping her plump hands. “I’m all right.”

  I saw my parents exchange a look. What can you do for a woman like that?

  Then the police cars pulled up outside, their sirens dying. Their blue lights moved eerily behind the drapes. We heard the doors slam, heard the cops’ and our neighbors’ voices, heard the spit and sputter of the police radios, those small muttering sounds that seem to accompany all disasters.