"After This" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDermott Alice)IVMr. persichetti was good enough to come along. Mary Keane was in the backseat and she touched his shoulder with her gloved hand to say, “This is good of you.” He shook his head, “No trouble,” he said. It was a wet, gray morning, cold yet somewhat humid: the terrible winter being edged out, once again, by spring. There were green spears of crocus, mere buds against the dirt, under front windows and along the edges of lawns. There would be daffodils soon, too, she knew. Then forsythia, azalea, rose, and rhododendron. She leaned back against the seat, folding her hands in her lap. Up front, her husband said, “Do you take the Cross Island or go side streets?” and Mr. Persichetti said, “At this hour, the Cross Island’s fine.” At this hour, the neighborhood was quiet, and somewhat sodden from last night’s rain. John Keane drove cautiously, as was his habit. He wore his topcoat and his fedora-he would head for work as soon as they brought Pauline home-and beside him, hatless, wearing only a thin Windbreaker, Mr. Persichetti looked like a youngster. “I cut over to Northern Boulevard,” Mr. Persichetti said, “when it doesn’t look good.” Mr. Keane nodded. They passed the church and the school, the row of shops. From the backseat, Mary said, “I think Susan and Annie actually left for school early this morning. They said they wanted to see the juniors get their rings.” Mr. Persichetti turned a little in his seat. “That’s a first, hey?” he said. “They’re the big shots this year,” John Keane said. “They think they run the place.” He touched his turn signal, pulled cautiously into the mid-morning traffic. “Next year they’ll be lowly freshmen again.” “Coeds,” Mr. Persichetti said. He was both poking fun at the word and revealing his pleasure in the thought. “Can you believe it? Those two? College girls.” “Lord help the professors,” Mary Keane said. “Lord help the boys,” Mr. Persichetti said with a laugh because girl children went off, but they also came back. They were a comfort in your old age, in your sorrow over lost sons. The three of them rode silently for a while, looking out at the passing homes. As they neared the hospital, Mr. Persichetti sat forward, a hand on the dashboard, showing John Keane where to park. “It’s short-term,” he said. “But then when she’s ready you can pull right up to the door.” Inside, he took them just where they needed to go. In his element, Mary Keane would have said, walking them assuredly through the halls to the desk where the paperwork was waiting and an orderly talking to another nurse looked up and waved and said, “What’s a matter? You’re back already? They didn’t let you in at home?” “Can’t get enough of this place,” Mr. Persichetti said, laughing. When the nurse said she’d call to have Pauline brought down, Mr. Persichetti waved her away from the phone and took Mary Keane’s arm. “We’ll get her,” he said gently. And to her husband, “We’ll go up and get her. It’ll be easier.” The floor of the elevator was wet, with streaks of mud, as if people had been coming and going all night. Mr. Persichetti pushed some of the dirt with his shoe and said, “Sheesh,” disapproving. He pushed the button for Pauline’s floor and then looked up at the row of numbers, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. He turned to Mary Keane as the elevator began to rise and said, “I’m the regular mayor of this place, you know,” and then, as if to prove his point, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open and another orderly appeared, a middle-aged black man, pushing a wheelchair in which a pale, dark-haired boy was slumped, his long thin arms raised before his bent head, waving. The black man said, in military parody, “Mr. Persichetti, sir,” and Mr. Persichetti held out a hand. “Darrin, my man,” he said. Then he grabbed the pale, yellowed hand of the boy in the wheelchair, gripped it firmly. “How you doing, Larry?” he said. The boy, head down, neck twisted, his mouth veiled with saliva, said a tortured, “Good. Real good.” “Behaving yourself?” Mr. Persichetti asked. And the boy drew out a long, “Yes, yes.” “Yeah, I bet you are,” Mr. Persichetti said sarcastically. He looked up at the orderly and winked, and then at Mary Keane, as if they were all in on some joke the young man would never understand. For a moment, she thought this cruel, or just childish, on Mr. Persichetti’s part, but as the elevator rose again, she saw how he kept the boy’s hand in his, clasping it between both of his own, and then, briefly, tightening his grip before letting go when the doors opened again. Alone with him once more, she said, “I don’t know how you do what you do.” But Mr. Persichetti only shrugged. “Oh, Larry’s a piece of work,” he said, refusing her the larger meaning. The hallway on Pauline’s floor was no worse and no better than Mary Keane had imagined it would be. There were all the usual hospital smells, food and urine and disinfectant, along with the smell of the old building itself, a subway smell of dust and metal. Some of the patients were in the hall, tied into wheelchairs. Old women, mostly, or so it seemed, hair streaming and yellowing eyes, glimpses, here and there, of bruised flesh under the limp white and speckled blue of the hospital gowns. “Hello,” one or two of them said as they passed by, Mr. Persichetti with his hand on her elbow. One or two of them called out a name. Mary Keane tried to smile at them all. “Hello,” she said, passing by. “How are you?” A lifetime of friendliness. A shout went up briefly, from one of the rooms, and then a low moaning. At the end of the hall there was a dull window of either smoked glass or grime, black wire inside its frame, and she had a moment of utter disorientation because although she knew they were on an upper floor, that the elevator they had just ridden had risen, she believed, for just a moment (perhaps it was the subway smell of the old tile walls), that they were underground. Mr. Persichetti stopped briefly at the nurse’s station-she was glad for his hand on her arm-and then he led her down another corridor. She had some guilt that she had not visited Pauline before, not since the night she fell, that Pauline had been alone all these weeks in this place. But she knew too that she could not have done it, in the midst of all that these weeks had held. In this corridor, another woman, her dark skin stretched thinly over her bones, sat in a wheelchair with her head bent into one hand and her long fingers held up over her face, touching her eyes and her mouth. Her other hand, in her lap, was white-palmed, empty. She was the weary image of every sorrow women knew. Seeing her, Mary Keane felt herself absolved, at least briefly, of all she had neglected in these past weeks. Were she to bend down and speak to this woman she would say, “I have buried my child.” She would ask, “And you?” “Here we are,” Mr. Persichetti said, and with his hand on her arm guided her into Pauline’s room. She was in a chair by another opaque window, crossed with wire. Her hair was longer than she usually kept it, swept back from her face and showing a good line of gray roots, but she looked well, even younger, perhaps-Mary was surprised to see it-than she had that last night at dinner. It might have been that she was more rested, or better fed. It might have been that she was no longer drinking (psychosis brought on by depression and alcoholism, was what they had said), although never in a million years would she have guessed that the drinking was a problem. It might simply have been, Mary Keane was suddenly sure it was true, that Pauline looked better without her makeup. Her complexion, she had always been glad to point out (usually just after Mary had complained about her own), had always been good. She crossed the room and kissed Pauline on the cheek. There was only the hospital bracelet on her wrist. Not a hint of the broken nose. Or the shock treatment. “You look good,” she told her and Pauline said, as she might of old, “What’s new?” Mary found herself speaking more loudly than she wanted to, the way you spoke, mostly inadvertently, to an invalid or a child. “We’re going to bring you back to our house, Pauline,” she said, leaning down to her in the chair. “You’re going to stay with us for a while.” Pauline nodded. Mary was surprised to see her fur-collared coat was laid out on the bed. Pauline was dressed in the clothes they had picked up for her when they emptied out her apartment, gray pants and a pale blue sweater, although someone had given her an old white cardigan as well, oversize and somewhat pilly. The only indication, perhaps, that Pauline had been changed. “I know,” Pauline said. She looked to Mr. Persichetti, standing at the door. “Sam told me all about it.” Mary turned to look at him over her shoulder. He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his Windbreaker. “Oh, I’ve been stopping by,” he said. “Checking up on her. Seeing how she’s been doing.” He looked at Mary Keane. “Being the mayor and all,” he said. And then he added softly, “I knew you had your mind on other things.” “That was good of you,” she said, and wanted to say more, but the floor nurse was bustling in with the wheelchair, shouting instructions, pulling prescriptions from her smock, referring to Pauline in the third person. Mr. Persichetti pushed the wheelchair back to the elevator, Pauline staring straight ahead as they passed through each corridor. “Goodbye,” Mary Keane said to the women who spoke to them. “Take care.” Pausing for a moment when a shuffling old woman suddenly clasped her hand, holding it between her own as Mr. Persichetti had done for the boy on the elevator. This woman was no older than she. Her blue eyes seemed to race back and forth across Mary Keane’s face as she told a nonsense tale-my sista, was all she could get, my motha, my sista-that grew more urgent as it grew more incomprehensible. The floor nurse stepped between them. “That’s enough, now, Marion,” she shouted. Mary Keane said, walking on, “I’ll pray for you.” The name of Saint Dymphna came to mind. In the elevator, she resisted the memories the whiff of hospital food and of ether wanted to bring. She had been a patient herself only when her children were born, a visitor most recently when Michael had his tonsils out and Jacob had appendicitis and her husband had the surgery for the slipped disk. When her children were born, she recalled, they had marked each homecoming with a bakery cake, thick with sweet icing, and she felt some guilt again that she hadn’t thought to have anything special at home for Pauline. When they were settled into John Keane’s car, she and Pauline in the backseat, the two men once again up front, Pauline said, “This is very nice of you,” and crossed her hands in her lap. In the pale light of day, she now seemed older without her makeup, with that sad line of gray along her temples and her forehead. Mary planned a trip to the beautician for both of them, lunch afterward, somewhere nice, a stroll through A amp;S. As the car pulled away and into the street, Pauline suddenly sat up, something brief and childlike in her eyes, a spark of fear or confusion. And then, haltingly, she sat back again. She turned to Mary. “That raincoat doesn’t suit you,” she said. “You’re not good in black.” Mary only smiled. “You’ve lost weight, too,” Pauline said. It wasn’t a compliment. At the house, John Keane gave Pauline his arm to help her up the steps. They paused in the hallway and he took her coat and hung it in the closet, as if this were just another one of her visits and the world hadn’t altered utterly since last she was here. They had lunch in the kitchen, the three of them, and then John went to work and Mary walked Pauline upstairs. The last time she had slept in this house, when Clare was born, she had been given Annie’s room, but now they made a right at the landing. She was to stay in the boys’ room instead. It was nice enough, a little chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital. Mary pulled open the drawers of the oak dresser the boys had once shared. She had lined them with floral paper and arranged all of Pauline’s underclothes and nightgowns and sweaters inside. She had brought her jewelry box, her gloves, her drawerful of saved John Keane had arranged with Pauline’s landlord that the apartment be sublet, for a year. Just, Mary told her, until Pauline was back on her feet. He had spoken to her company, too, and an early retirement for medical reasons would assure her of most of her pension. Pauline nodded. Her coats and her dresses, her dressing gowns and her good skirts were hanging in the boys’ closet. “You’ve been busy,” Pauline said, not-Mary glanced at her-exactly approvingly. “You’ve been sick,” Mary said, gently. “That fall…” and would have said more, but Pauline held up her hand and said, “I know all about it.” And then added, with a tremor to her jaw. “I know where I’ve been.” Mary Keane touched her throat. “And do you know,” she asked, “what we’ve been through?” Slowly, Pauline nodded. Her pale, plain features might have been carved of stone. “Sam told me,” she said. “I’m sorry for you.” Mary would have put her arms around her then, might have broken down herself and wept with Pauline for what they both had been through. But that had never been their way. They were not sisters, after all, they were friends, office friends. And what had bound them all these years had more to do with how their acquaintance had begun (for how could you pray with any sincerity if you were also hoping to ditch the annoying girl at your side?), with habit and circumstance, obligation and guilt, than it had ever had to do with affection, commiseration. There had been a trick in it too, their friendship, something far more complicated than “feed my lambs.” There had been the trick of living well, living happily in her ordinary life under Pauline’s watchful eye. Of living well, living happily, even under the eye of a woman who always saw the dashed tear, the torn seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the aspirations of their pretty faith. “I’ll never get over it,” Mary said. It was a phrase she had kept to herself, until now. The boys’ room was small and narrow. She and her husband had taken the pinups and posters from the walls in preparation for Pauline’s coming, they had moved the desk and the old hi-fi and the record albums and the portable TV to the basement where Michael would sleep when he came home to visit, but they had left both beds here. Pauline turned an impassive face to her, standing between the two beds. “I don’t expect you will,” she said. And then there was the sound of Clare coming in. Clare coming through the front door, dropping her books in the vestibule. “Maaa?” They heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs. “Here,” her mother called. And then she was in the room. Her coat and her hair were wet with rain. She smelled of pencil shavings. Of the halls of St. Gabriel’s. “You’re here,” she said to Pauline, and easily went to her, put her arms around her, as her mother had not, her cheek against her breast. “How do you feel?” she said, gingerly. “Are you better?” Pauline, with something of her old dignity, said, “Oh, yes. Much better.” At dinner, there was the new configuration at the table: Annie had taken Michael’s place and Pauline sat beside Clare. Afterward, Clare sat in front of the television as Michael used to do, watching while she did her homework. Sitting in the chair behind her, Pauline said, “Doesn’t the TV distract you? Wouldn’t you rather sit at the table?” And Clare shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her hair had gone wavy from where it had been wet and it caught the TV light at its ends. “Can you really concentrate?” Pauline said and the girl nodded, “I really can.” The boys’ room was chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital, but it had a pleasant smell: there was a box in the bedside drawer that contained sticks of incense-Pauline put it to her nose-a smell like an old church, just after Benediction, a smell that ran just under the other, ordinary smells of clean sheets and the lingering scent of dinner. She turned back the plaid spread. Both beds were made up, but she chose the one nearest the wall to avoid the light from the hall that came under the door. She was well asleep when she felt Clare’s hands on her shoulders, patting her softly, and had a momentary belief that she was in the hospital again, that another patient had wandered in. But Clare laughed a little in the darkness, whispering, “Is that you? I can’t see.” Pauline said, “Yes, it’s me.” She heard the girl moving away. “Okay,” she said. Heard her pulling at the sheets on the other bed, getting under the covers. “I sleep in here sometimes,” she said. “When Annie stays up reading.” She was only a voice in the darkness, but even in the darkness, Pauline would have known the voice. “That’s all right,” Pauline said. They were both silent. There was, perhaps, some faint music, piano notes from next door. Pauline was beginning to see a little more, some thin light behind the curtains, perhaps the outline of the girl’s small body under the spread. In a moment, she could hear her breathing softly, sweetly, into the dark. The girls had heard it through the night: rain drumming on the roof and rattling down the drainpipes, rain amplifying, giving voice or music (depending on their dreams) to the sound of passing cars. They had ridden to school this morning with the metronome shush of windshield wipers thrumming at their temples, erasing one thought, then another, then another as it formed again. Riding the school bus or in their fathers’ cars with their sleeves and shoulders damp, their loafers and the crowns of their heads darkened with rain. They felt the dampness of it still at 10 a.m., second period, as they moved into the classroom, their books in their arms. The overhead lights had not yet been turned on, nor had the teacher arrived, so here was an opportunity to sprawl, for a minute. Put your head on the desk. Outside the mullioned window was a slate-gray sky, a dark lawn, a black hedge that hid the road, although they could see the headlights of cars behind the tangled shrubs, low beams moving as if through water. There had been general consensus this morning, on the radio at least, that were it not for the unseasonable warmth of the day, there would have been two feet of snow. The raindrops ran in fits and starts across each pane. The morning light, filtered through the rain-spattered glass, turned the colors in the unlit classroom into various shades of gray. Clare Keane folded her arms across her books and rested her forehead in the crook of her elbow. She closed her eyes and the sound of the rain and of her shuffling, murmuring classmates grew hollow and distant, veered from noise to echo to dream. Beside her, Barb Luce slumped at her desk, then stretched her legs to straddle the chair legs of the seat in front of her. Idly, she took inventory: penny loafers, navy kneesocks, dimpled knees, bare thighs-winter pale against the pleated plaid wool of her skirt-a nick of dried blood between knee and skirt hem from this morning’s razor. She licked a finger and put it to the scab, assessed the smoothness of the shave with her fingertips. Knees were always tricky. There was a general yawning, a leaning forward and a leaning back. A lethargic unclipping of hair clips and a clipping back up again. A roll of Life Savers was passed around, its plume of unraveled wrapper like a lengthening stream of smoke as it went from hand to hand. A clicking of candy against teeth. A general whisper, Did we have homework in here? Did she give us homework? Monica Grasso shuffled her books and said out loud, “I don’t want to be here,” but opened her notebook anyway and reviewed (the Diet of Worms, the Council of Trent), just in case. The rain was steady, no particular wind to drive it or to vary its rhythm. Cynthia Pechulis pulled her hair up into a ponytail at the top of her head and Dawn Sorrento, sitting behind her, saw in the lovely declivity between her neck and spine the fine blond hair Cynthia had been born with. They were all fourteen or fifteen in identical plaid skirts and navy blue blazers, white blouses with soft collars. Kathleen Cornelius, her large face drawn, her lips parted, noticed that the blackboard glimpsed through her lashes bled a little at the edges but snapped to again when she opened her eyes wide. She tried this a number of times until her attention was diverted by the floating dust motes that appeared in the gloom of her lowered lashes. They were perfectly round, transparent, either dust motes or sloughed skin cells, bits of dandruff, perhaps, or perhaps merely an optical illusion, her own blood moving behind her cornea, illuminating the defects, snags, infinitesimal genetic mutations in the sticky fabric of her eye. The interval of idleness grew longer. Was it possible there would be no class today? Clare Keane dreamed she was still at the breakfast table. Her father was watching the coffee percolate on the stove. Annie (who in the dream was not really Annie) was stirring her cereal. Pauline was spreading soft butter on a pinch of sweet roll, covering her fingertips with it. Much to Clare’s surprise, Annie picked up her cigarette lighter which she had unaccountably left beside her plate and struck the flint three times. “Good morning, all,” Sister Lucy said. She stood at the door, her index finger held under the three light switches as if (Clare thought) she was hoping to keep three little noses from sneezing. “In the name of the Father,” Sister began, as she walked in, not blessing herself because she held her crutch in one hand and her large leather briefcase in the other, “and of the Son.” Overhead, the trio of fluorescent lights merely buzzed, then clicked, then flashed angrily, before coming to full, obedient light as Sister Lucy limped into the room. One by one, the girls raised their heads, touched a pencil, stored some books beneath their desks, praying with her all the while. Clare Keane had a red spot on her forehead, marking the place where her face had heavily met her forearm. Kathleen Cornelius closed her mouth. Now the long windows pressed back the dreary day, reflected rather than filtered-showing them now, as they glanced toward it, their own white faces, dimly described-foreheads and cheeks, some chins, only blond hair, nobody’s eyes. Sister Lucy’s desk at the front of the room now seemed as yellow as an egg yolk. She leaned against it and pulled the cuff of her metal crutch off her wrist. She rested the crutch beside her and then turned back with one uneven step to lift herself, her small and slightly twisted torso in its black dress, up onto the desk. She rearranged her body, palms pressed to the desktop, lifting her thighs once, twice, getting comfortable. Her legs in their black shoes and black opaque stockings swung girlishly. This was not remarkable to them. They had seen her do this many times before. She placed her folded hands in her black lap. Sister Lucy had a round face, dark though graying hair drawn back into the white band of her headpiece, large, deep-set eyes, and a small nose. Her full cheeks were pocked delicately with scars, as if marred by rain. “Today,” she said, softly, beginning. And then paused. She had a slight overbite, a delicate fuzz above her lip, small and perfect teeth. She was known never to raise her voice, although what she did instead, for discipline’s sake, was described by the girls as “the hairy eyeball.” But there was none of that in her look now as she waited for their attention. “Today,” she said again, her feet no longer swinging but hooked together and drawn back a bit, beneath her desk. “Today, girls, marks a terrible anniversary. The anniversary of the decision that allows women in this country to kill their own children.” In the stillness that followed, the girls moved their eyes toward each other. Barb lowered her head and murmured, “Don’t tell my mother,” into the soft collar of her shirt, which caused one or two of the girls around her to lower their heads as well. The sound of the rain only made the silence in the classroom seem more deliberate and profound as Sister Lucy waited, once again, for their full attention. “I was three years old when I came down with polio,” she said. It might have been another topic altogether. “My father left us as soon as I got sick, even though my mother was expecting. Her fifth. He moved in with a woman he’d been visiting since before my older brother was born. My father was a welder,” she said, as if that explained something. “Subways and bridges. Dangerous work, but he was very good at it.” She shrugged, looked briefly at her hands, which she half opened, as if offering herself something from her own palms. “He had needs my mother couldn’t meet,” she said before she looked up again. “That’s all we were told about it. And the fact that if he had gotten polio, too, we would have been destitute. But he took care of us. He sent money, he visited. He still took my brothers to ball games. He just never lived with us again.” She closed her hands. They were pale white against the black lap. The girls had their eyes on her now. Barb Luce wrote something in her notebook and moved the book to the edge of her desk so Clare Keane could see. It said, “As the World Turns.” “My mother was given a series of exercises to do with me. They involved lifting and bending my legs. They were painful. I don’t remember that they were painful to me but I’m sure they were painful for her. She would sometimes strap me down on the dining-room table. Or have my brothers hold on to me. My brothers have told me how I would scream. And how my mother would cry, just tears running down her face as she was lifting my legs and bending them, and pressing them down again, the way the doctors had told her. All the while she was expecting.” Sister Lucy’s little chin moved up and down, the way it did when she wanted to be reasonable, consider all sides. “Of course, we weren’t alone in the world,” she said. “I had an aunt and an uncle and a wonderful grandfather. We had some very nice neighbors. And people from church helped out. It was really only later, as an adult, that I realized how hard it must have been. For my mother.” 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 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 naivete. 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 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 meal. 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 Bingham ton?” The girls exchanged a look. Grace, with her whiskey, had not allowed herself more than the last six inches of the sofa’s seat and so sat somewhat hunched over her knees, more curved than she needed to be. She touched her glasses, of course, as she said, popping up a bit like a good student, “Neither of us.” She touched her sweater. “I’m from Buffalo,” she said. “Annie’s from Long Island.” “Well, good,” he said. He had picked up another piece of loo paper and was holding another glass up to the golden lamplight. “We’ve had two Americans from Binghamton here in the past two weeks and I think I’ve learned all there is to know about the place. State University,” he said. “Three hours to New York.” “That would be Lydia,” said Grace, the good student. She touched her index finger to her cheek, tapped it, raised her eyes to the shadowy ceiling, pantomiming thought. Then Grace pointed the index finger at Mr. Wallace. “And Kevin Larkin,” she said. He raised his eyebrows. “Right you are,” he said. “Kevin. Rugby player, all taken up with Rupert Brooke.” Grace popped again. “That’s right,” she said. “And Lydia,” he went on. “Pretty girl. Mad for Wordsworth.” “Yes,” Grace said, warming to the conversation. He was, after all, more or less sitting at her feet. Annie thought only of what a thing it would be to hear Mr. Wallace say of her, “Pretty girl.” Lucky Lydia. She sipped her Chianti. She supposed it was the way it was meant to taste. “But Buffalo,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve had anyone from Buffalo yet. What’s it like?” Grace was now clutching the stubby glass in both hands, leaning toward him. “Boring,” she said and barked a short laugh, the ends of her blunt-cut hair swinging forward along her chin and then swinging back. She touched her glasses, returning to the more successful serious student guise. “No,” she said. “It’s nice, I guess. My parents like it. I have a lot of family there.” She hunched a little more. Her head snapped to the right for just a second. It was a curious little tic Annie had seen in their tutorials; it meant that she felt her point was not yet made, that she knew her intelligence had not yet burned through the obscuring fog of her plain, chubby face. “It’s where Dick Diver ends up in Examining the row of glasses before him, Mr. Wallace raised his eyebrows when she said Dick Diver, and then placed his hands on his brown corduroy knees. It was likely that he was somewhat younger than his wife. He leaned toward her, rolling on his haunches. “And is it Fitzgerald you’re mad for?” he asked. “You wouldn’t be the first American to come to England to study Fitzgerald, or Hemingway. You’re all mad for Hemingway as far as I can tell.” But Grace sat up a little straighter. It might have been in imitation of Professor Wallace-as much as a girl like Grace could aspire to imitate Professor Wallace. “I’m not, really,” she said. And then added, “I love Spenser.” She touched her glasses again and took another nip at her whiskey. What a smile he had. While his wife’s had been thin-lipped and wry, forgiving, insightful, his was warmly amused, reservedly delighted. He had, Annie was convinced, the best teeth in all of England. A boon, she thought, for the entire nation’s dental gene pool. “Well, you’ll be teacher’s pet then,” he said. “At least for Elizabeth,” his smile grew a bit wider, a sparkle, at his wife’s name. “Spenser’s her man.” Annie thought the smile more charming still if its source was not Grace’s declaration but his pleasure at hearing his wife’s man championed, or perhaps, more simply, the pleasure it gave him to say his wife’s name. Suddenly she found herself both fully enchanted and heartsick. To live, as these two did, in a comfortable, warmly lit room full of velvet chairs and old books, with cats and, yes-she was only just hearing it, or perhaps Professor Wallace had just put it on in another room-classical music playing softly somewhere, low enough for conversation, loud enough to add romance to the air. To reach over your knees at the end of a day, the book falling from your lap, to take such a man’s handsome face into your hands. It was a life from a novel. It was a still life, beautifully arranged. It was a life she’d never attain. When he turned to her and said, “And who’s your man?” she said, “Edith Wharton,” without thinking and without an inkling of truth in it, her only impulse being that she should name a woman, since the life she wanted-their life-was all unattainable and she must begin to prepare herself to be a woman alone. She glanced quickly at Grace to see if she would contradict her, but Grace had the glass to her lips again, her eyes on David Wallace. Annie imagined Grace felt it, too: the enchantment and the despair. Professor Wallace swept into the room with a large, tufted footstool held high in her hands, like a farcical English maid with a tea tray. “Edith Wharton?” she said and then spun a little, her long skirt flaring, her little leather boots. “How interesting,” and then, “David, my love,” in that way she had of speaking in soft asides, “you’ll have to move your glasses and your loo paper so I can put this down.” With a kind of salute, he stuck the roll of toilet paper under his arm. Leaning forward, he moved a few of the glasses, one at a time, as if they were chess pieces, to the side of the couch, and then gathered up the rest in his hands, the crystal clinking, and placed them and the paper on a side table. “Careful,” she said. “Always,” he told her. And then, so smoothly, he was on his feet again, taking the stool from her hands. He lowered it to the ground. It was a maroon upholstered footstool with four wooden, turnip-shaped legs and on it were half a dozen small plates, black cloth napkins, a silver bowl of olives and celery, and a small black crock containing what Professor Wallace announced was pate. She handed a napkin to each of the girls, smeared a tablespoon of pate onto each little plate, added some olives and some thin crackers, all the while saying, “Although she married fairly young I think it’s well accepted that she was a virgin until she was somewhere around forty-five.” She gave Annie a little plate, and started putting together another. “She’d divorced her husband at last and fallen madly in love and taken up residence with her lover in Paris. Forty-five or so.” She handed the plate to her husband, who was now in a small chair at Grace’s side. “It appears she wrote Professor Wallace spun around again in her soft little boots and then took the other corner of the couch. Grace was smiling at her, ogling, Annie would have said. There was a lightness about Professor Wallace at home, a physical buoyancy she didn’t have in the lecture hall. It made it seem possible that she was not older than her husband after all. “A lesson for you girls,” she said, looking up, “in matters of the heart.” She raised her long nose and trilled the word. “Patience,” she said. But David laughed. “Surely, Elizabeth,” he told her, “you’re not making a case for forty-five years of virginity.” He smiled at both girls, full knowing, it seemed, that if there were sides to be on, they were on his. With his handsome face before them, forty-five years of virginity seemed worse than cruel. “I’d call that corrupting the morals of a minor,” he said and his eyes flashed. They sparkled. There was the sound of Grace’s whiskey glass colliding with the bridge of her glasses. Professor Wallace smiled her wry smile at her husband and then seemed to sip the air the way a bird sips water, her throat all exposed. “Surely I’m not,” she said. And then she turned her head, regally. “But Annie must tell us,” she whispered, “what it is about Wharton that she loves.” She felt all their eyes on her. Felt suddenly like a bird herself, a baby bird, helpless, wordless, her mouth opened. The truth was that she had read very little of Edith Wharton. Had thought, until a few minutes ago, that Edith Wharton was a spinster, homely and professional (she recalled a mannish jaw, a heavy pile of dark hair), with no exquisite husband waiting for her at home. It was the sole reason she had said her name. She had a vague memory of “Oh, Mr. Wallace said, “No doubt you’re a James fan as well.” And his wife said, “Being a James fan is de rigueur for Americans in England, I should think.” “He was a big poof, you know,” David said and his wife cried, “Really, darling,” and Grace ducked and giggled, and drank more whiskey, touching her fingertips to the edge of her glasses as she did. Gently, Professor Wallace leaned over and took the small plate from her lap and placed it on the cushion between them. And then, as if she were caring for a child, with her shoulder pressed languidly to the back of the couch, she lifted a cracker and spread it with pate. “Well, if we’re going to bring up Edith Wharton’s moldy virginity,” he cried, charmingly, “then we might as well get it all out. Henry was a poof and William a religious fanatic and Alice was a sexual deviant, flummoxed by shyness, who figured the only way she could get professional men to come see her in her nightgown was by taking to her bed.” He turned his attention to Grace, who was beet red behind the Waterford crystal, hunched and laughing into her ice cubes. Professor Wallace gave her one of the spread crackers. “Never mind,” she said gently, although Annie couldn’t say if she was addressing her husband or the girl. “A prototype for the modern American family,” David said, smiling. The light from the lamp at his elbow only burnished his glow. “Hedonism plus Puritanism yields both deviant sex and deviant religion. What could be more American?” His eyes met his wife’s. Annie thought that there was a complex intelligence even in their unspoken conversation. Only more to envy. To despair of. “But we were talking about Buffalo,” he said, more gently. He turned again to Grace, who had just, obediently, bitten into the cracker, which had, in turn, broken apart in her hands. There was a tiny shower of crumbs falling from her lips to her palm to her sweater. Graciously, he diverted his attention across the room. “And what of Long Island?” he asked Annie. “We seem to get as many from Long Island as from Binghamton.” She smiled. She did not want to appear flummoxed by shyness. “There’s a lot of us,” she said. She was aware of the fact that it was as close as she had come since she’d arrived to speaking a full sentence. “And your parents are there?” he asked, more gentle still, luring her into a conversation. “Brothers? Sisters?” Implying that he recognized her shyness but knew it was his duty as her host to relieve her of it, as if it were only a heavy coat. “Big family? Small?” “Small,” she said. She would not make herself more interesting to him, more American, by mentioning Jacob. “A brother and a sister,” she said. “An aunt who lives with us,” she would not say “a moldering virgin,” to prove herself clever. She took another sip of her wine. She saw that Professor Wallace was smiling at her, as if-it was all unaccountable-admiring her restraint. Then the buzzer rang downstairs and Professor Wallace stood, her skirt sweeping. “I’ll get that,” she said. They were in a play again. “If you’ll refresh the girls’ drinks.” Behind her when she returned were three more American students, two boys and a girl. Entering, they looked at Grace and Annie with some resentment, as if the ratio of Americans to English in the room suddenly made the occasion less interesting. Mr. Wallace stood, there was the bustle of introductions and new drinks. For a moment, the music disappeared. Monica and Nate were a couple-a bond they had formed at the same time Annie and Grace had formed theirs, in the five hours of pillow talk that was the transatlantic flight. Ben was, perhaps, Nate’s version of Grace. A friend from their New York campus who held on to Nate perhaps a little too tightly now that they were abroad together, comfort in a strange land. He was a big guy, a little thick around the jaw, with dark curly hair. At his side he held a bottle in a brown paper bag, grasped by the neck as if he had just taken a swig of it and planned to take another. He greeted Mr. Wallace and said, “Beer would be great,” before he seemed to remember it was there. Awkwardly, he handed it to Professor Wallace and she said, “Thank you,” and “Lovely,” as she slipped it out of the bag. “Drambuie,” she said to her husband as she placed it on the server. “How nice,” he said. Together, Ben and Nate made Professor Wallace’s cozy living room seem smaller. They looked so starkly American, so comically American male that it seemed the room should have filled with the odor of gunsmoke and horse manure. Beside them, David Wallace seemed not only the member of some more advanced, more refined civilization but a creature who must also be ranked a good deal higher on the phylogenetic scale. “Sit, sit,” David was saying once again. He had poured Chianti for Monica and opened bottles of beer for both boys. Grace caught Annie’s eye and patted the empty cushion beside her, tilting her head, pleading, and against her better judgment, Annie stood and crossed over to sit with her friend. Monica took the velvet chair, Nate at her feet, his elbow in her lap. Ben went to another chair, a gold ladderback with a dark turquoise seat. It looked somewhat fragile under his thick thighs in their new jeans, although he declined, smiling, when David offered him his own chair beside the couch. “This is good,” he said, the brown bottle held between his legs. Annie could see him regretting his decision to come along with Monica and Nate, and thought of her mother’s injunction never to be a third wheel. “Yes, well,” David Wallace said as his wife distributed pate and crackers, olives and celery to the new guests. Annie prayed that he wouldn’t again mention Binghamton because she knew if he did she would think less of him. “Will there be more of you?” he asked the assemblage. “Tonight? Any more of you coming? That you know?” The Americans looked at each other, frowning, shaking their heads. Grace offered, eagerly, that she didn’t know. “You don’t consult?” Mr. Wallace said, smiling. “All you American students? It’s rather remarkable to have five of you here all at once. I thought perhaps it was part of a plan.” They continued to look at one another, shaking their heads, “No,” they said. It was clear the two boys were wary of Mr. Wallace; they suspected he was making fun of them. “No, of course not, David,” Professor Wallace said. “They hardly travel en masse. They’re an independent bunch, our American students. Aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. “You’re made to come together, what is it, once a month, to see how you’re getting on, but that’s it, isn’t it?” “Actually,” Grace said, “it’s every fortnight.” “Is it?” Professor Wallace asked. “It’s ridiculous,” Nate said from Monica’s knees. “I quit going.” Monica put her hand in his curly hair. She was loose-limbed, slim, and large-breasted. Her face was plain but there was a luster about her skin and her hair, a luster of sex and of good health. She shook his head a little, playfully gripping his scalp. “You were at the last one,” she said in a tone that seemed to imply that the last one had ended in some mad sexual transaction. Grace had turned to Mr. Wallace, explaining. “Only a few of us live in the same halls,” she said, piling on the Britishisms (Annie, stubbornly, still said dorms). “We’re scattered about campus precisely so we don’t stay to ourselves. It’s sort of the point of the whole program.” “And yet, here you all are,” David Wallace said. “All on the same evening.” Quietly, Professor Wallace slipped out of the room, through the door to what Annie guessed was the kitchen. She wished for the courage to join her, but felt the anchor of Grace, sitting beside her, who was now saying, “Yes, isn’t it funny?” and once more raising her glass. “Great minds think alike,” Ben said, leaning over his lap on the small chair. Whether he intended to or not, he sounded bitter. Mr. Wallace then questioned the three about their hometowns. Monica was from Long Island, too, and Nate from outside Albany. Ben was from Staten Island, “A city boy,” Mr. Wallace said, to which Ben replied, with a tilt of his beer bottle, “I hate New York City.” David Wallace nodded, touched his silk cravat. They could now smell their dinner in the kitchen. “Unfortunate,” he said, as if resisting his own disappointment in the boy. “Yet understandable. No doubt you’re a Wordsworth fellow as well,” he added. But Ben seemed to miss the connection. He glanced at Monica and Nate before he spoke. “What’s a Wordsworth fellow?” he asked. Now David Wallace looked puzzled. “A fan,” he said, as if the word were a colloquialism he wasn’t quite sure of. “Of Wordsworth. Since you don’t like the city, I assumed you’d be a devotee of someone like Wordsworth. The romantics. The pastoral poets.” Ben was looking at Mr. Wallace with what Annie had come to recognize as a particularly American look. He suspected Mr. Wallace was putting him on the spot and even before he’d demonstrated his own lack of knowledge, he was preparing his case for how useless what he didn’t know really was. “Wordsworth’s okay,” he said, with some caution. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about him.” So fuck you, was only implied. Mr. Wallace asked, pleasantly, “Well, what inspired you to study in England then?” and Ben laughed once, through his nose, and raised the bottle in his hand. “The beer,” he said. Nate dropped his head, amused at his friend. Monica leaned down over her lap to whisper something in his ear, her thick hair falling to shield them both. Mr. Wallace turned to the two girls. “Well, that’s honest at least,” he said, although his face, Annie thought, also said he was sorry the conversation had taken such a boorish turn. He looked at both of their glasses. “Let me refresh those for you,” he said, gently, and took the glasses out of their hands, out of their laps. Grace said, “Thank you,” looking up at him, her throat and chin growing flushed. “It won’t be long,” he said, kindly. Annie knew he meant until dinner, but felt he might just as well have said, Till we’re alone again, the way Grace’s breath seemed to catch on the words. The way her fingers, reaching up to touch her frames, were trembling. Just as he returned with their fresh drinks (over his shoulder, “Can I get you gentlemen another. Young lady?”) Professor Wallace came through the door again with a tray stacked with dinner plates and silverware and a huge pot that rilled the room with the woodsy odor of meat and mushrooms. In what struck the girls as marvelous choreography, one neither had ever seen in her own home, Mr. Wallace swung back into the kitchen and emerged with another large pot and then, without a single word of instruction between them, the two began to fill plates with pasta, to ladle sauce, to distribute plush throw pillows in silky Indian prints that seemed to appear miraculously from behind the couch. “You’ll want these on your laps,” Professor Wallace told the students. “To shorten the distance from plate to lips,” she said. She shook out huge napkins to place over each pillow; she might have tucked another just under their chins, the way they all, suddenly, with pillows and napkins and plates of steaming food on their laps, felt swaddled, childish and also cared for. Mr. Wallace took his place beside Grace again, with only a napkin, no pillow on his knee. Professor Wallace made the rounds with a small glass dish and a tiny silver spoon, sprinkling Then she sat with her own next to Annie. “This is delicious,” Monica said. Nate had abandoned her knee and her lap and was hunched now over his plate. He may even have moved away from her a bit. “Oh God,” he said, looking up. There was a fleck of sauce on his chin. “So good.” It was a kind of moan. “The food in hall is so freaking bad.” Professor Wallace smiled. “Poor dears,” she said. “I’m sure it takes some getting used to.” Beside Annie, Grace was struggling with plate and pillow and fork and the stubby glass she still held in her hand and just as Annie was about to suggest she put it down, Mr. Wallace leaned over and took it from her and put it gently on the small table at her elbow. “There,” he said softly. “Easier to manage.” And Grace touched her glasses and nodded and said, “Thank you.” Now her skin flushed up over her chin and down, Annie noticed, the length of her plump, pale arms. David Wallace was questioning them again. “Where are you going and where have you been?” he asked. Monica and Nate had been to Stratford and Bath and London. Annie and Grace to London and Stonehenge. Ben would be joining his parents in Dublin over Christmas. The girls wanted to get to Bronte country, of course. Ben’s father wanted him to visit the village near Dover where he had been stationed during the war. Nate was hoping to get to Pamplona in the spring. (Mr. Wallace turned to Grace and said, “Hemingway, you see,” as if it were an old joke they had long shared. He lifted her plate, and then her glass from the small table. Took both away and then returned with her glass once again full.) When all the plates had been cleared, Professor Wallace brought a tray of fruit and cheese and placed it on the footstool, serving them again, this time using small plates painted with branches and birds. She recommended the Rambling Club at the university to all the American students. A lovely and inexpensive way to see the countryside. She would suggest, she said, kneeling among them, slicing a ripe pear, finding a focus for your travels. Historical, literary. Lawrence walked through the Pyrenees looking for roadside crucifixes. Read his essay. An American student once followed the route of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another made a trip to the Hebrides, for Virginia Woolf’s sake. “Something like that,” Professor Wallace said. She proffered the slices of ripe pear, the Americans reached for them, childish, Annie thought, grateful. Nate had scooted farther away from Monica, across the Turkish rug to the footstool. Closer to the food, but also to Professor Wallace’s feet. “It’s nice to have a focus,” Professor Wallace said, taking the couch next to Annie once again. “It’s nice to see a pattern emerge out of travels that might, otherwise, seem random.” She turned to Annie, looked at her down her long nose, kindly, fondly, perhaps. “You might follow in Wharton’s footsteps, for instance,” she said. “Find that hotel in Paris where she was so thoroughly happy.” “So thoroughly shagged,” David said, and only Grace laughed with him, her blush having settled in permanently now. He looked at the other men in the room. “We were discussing it earlier,” he said. “She’d been a married virgin, Edith Wharton.” He turned to his wife. “Until what age, Elizabeth? Forty-five?” Annie saw Professor Wallace put her fingertips, forefinger and thumb, to a crescent of pear on her plate and hold them there, as if, briefly, measuring something. “That’s right,” she said without raising her head. Then she leaned a little into Annie, there was a hint of perfume on her velvet shawl. “Poor David,” she whispered and then, looking up, she said across the two girls. “My dear, I’m afraid your mind has been in that hotel room all evening.” He threw back his head and shouted a laugh. “It has!” he said. “Isn’t it odd?” Now Professor Wallace was laughing, softly. If Annie hadn’t been sitting beside her, feeling the laughter through the velvet shawl, she would not have known that was what she was doing. On her face, there was only that wry smile. David made a gesture that encompassed the room. “Three young beauties here for dinner and I’m a voyeur in some Parisian hotel room, wondering what it was like. I mean, at forty-five, Elizabeth. Think of it.” “It was just as it would have been at twenty-five,” Professor Wallace said warmly, and now another kind of mad, sexual transaction was implied. The Americans suddenly felt they had vanished from the room. Monica had Runty in her lap and she paused with both her hands in the cat’s fur. Nate on the floor, an elbow on his raised knee, held a forgotten piece of cheddar in his hand. Ben bowed his head, as if in deference to some sweet intimacy, and Grace-Annie was sure of it-raised a knuckle to her glasses to hide a tear. “She was in love, darling,” Professor Wallace said softly. “I can tell you without hesitation what it was like. It was marvelous.” David Wallace smiled at his wife. It wasn’t an imaginary hotel room he was thinking of now. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure you’re right.” After the fruit and the cheese, there was a chocolate gateau and the box of candy the girls had brought, and Ben’s Drambuie. Professor Wallace ran the small glass of it under her nose and closed her eyes and then told them that when she was a child her grandmother had kept a decanter of Drambuie on the table in the front hall. During the war, she said, after they’d been down in the cellar for an air raid, she and her cousins, who had also been sent to the safer distance of their grandparents’ little farm, would come up the stairs and into the hall, where their grandmother would give them each a teaspoonful of the liqueur, to reward them, or to prepare them for sleep, or only, perhaps, to steady her own nerves. Professor Wallace closed her eyes and put her lips to the glass. “It comes back,” she said after she had drunk. “That time.” She opened her eyes. “We would wrap ourselves in blankets and dressing gowns. In anticipation, I suppose, of shattered glass. My grandmother would divide us into groups of three, two children and an adult, my grandfather, my mother, herself, my aunt. Each adult with a child under each arm, scattered to different corners of the cellar, in case.” She sighed. “In case, I suppose, some part of the ceiling came down, not, one would hope, on us all.” She paused again. Annie recalled her own family, huddled in the basement, long ago. Milk that tasted like candles in their mouths. A tree had fallen. Forever after, Jacob had kept a flashlight by his bed. “You must have been scared to death,” Monica said. Professor Wallace shrugged. “I was very young,” she said, as if to acknowledge that the memory might be flawed. “I don’t recall being frightened at all, only thrilled. By the adventure. Even when we could hear the bombs, the whistle and the long silence-the worst part of it, people have said, that terrible silence before the impact-I don’t know that I ever cried.” “Brave girl,” David said. But Professor Wallace shook her head. “It wasn’t real, to a child,” she said. “The danger wasn’t real. You’re all sensations at that age, aren’t you? The smell of the cellar and my grandfather’s pipe smoke on his clothes. Oh,” she said and touched her jaw, “and the satin collar of my dressing gown. That’s what I remember. My cousins and I would look across the darkness at one another as if to say, Isn’t this something, what do you think will happen next? The way we might have glanced at each other in the middle of a film or a play.” She ran the small glass under her nose again. “And then the teaspoon of Drambuie. Like a little jewel. I’d hold it in my mouth for as long as I could.” She took another sip, pursing her lips and drawing down her long nose. “It comes back,” she said again. They were all watching her, even her husband. Enchanted by her, her voice and gesture, and as if she suddenly noticed this, noticed how they were all watching her, even her husband, she raised the little glass and grimaced, freeing them from the spell she herself had cast. “What can be more tedious,” she said with a laugh, “than someone else’s childhood?” “It’s kind of disgusting,” Nate said from the floor, and for a moment they all believed he was agreeing with her. He looked up. “How long it took the United States to notice you guys were getting the shit bombed out of you by Hitler.” “Really,” Monica said, agreeing, shaking her hair. “We knocked ourselves out to save bloody Vietnam but we sat back while London got blitzed.” Beside Annie, Grace raised her own little glass, gulping the Drambuie as if she had to catch a train. She had, Annie knew, no interest in politics or current events. In their tutorials she had announced more than once that history had meaning for her only as far as it pertained to “Nixon sucks,” Ben was saying. “LBJ sucked, too,” Monica added. From across the room, Ben said, “Spiro Agnew.” Both Professor Wallace and her husband were nodding, tolerantly, as if the Americans were merely complaining about their parents. “At least in World War II we knew what we were fighting for,” Monica went on, as if, Annie thought, she and General Eisenhower were contemporaries. “At least there was Hitler.” “At least,” Ben said, “we won.” Grace touched her glasses and then dug her elbow into Annie’s side. She put a hand to her mouth and whispered from behind it. “Come with me.” Annie stared straight ahead for a second. What an effect it would have on the assembly, she thought, were she to say, “My brother.” But she felt David Wallace’s eyes on them as Grace poked her again. “Please,” she said and stood quickly, swaying a little as she did, in the narrow space between the couch and the big footstool. Against her will, Annie stood, too. They both sidestepped past the couch and between the small table with the lamp and Mr. Wallace’s knees. Gallantly, he held a hand out to Grace as she made her way around him. She touched it briefly. Before either girl thought to ask, Professor Wallace told them, “It’s just through that door there, first on the right.” Annie followed Grace into the small bathroom. She shut the door behind them both and leaned back against it. “Are you going to get sick?” she asked. Grace nodded. She was already heaving a bit, hyperventilating, her glasses fallen down her nose and her pale skin greenish behind the spilled red of her flush. Annie leaned forward to lift the toilet seat. She stepped back again. “I’m here,” Annie said, imitating her mother. Grace leaned down, heaved a bit, then knelt and vomited her dinner into the toilet. Annie turned her head away, and then, reluctantly, stepped closer to the girl to hold back her hair. Grace’s neck at the nape was thick, her hair thin and almost weightless in Annie’s hands. “You’re okay,” Annie said. This, too, was what her mother said to her sick children. “You’re okay.” When she had finished, Grace flopped back onto the tile floor, and Annie could tell by the way her body fell that she was ready to give up all pretense of sobriety or control, that it was not merely drunken spinning that made her collapse, but a long-awaited giving in to despair. She pulled off her glasses, dumped them in her lap, gulped some air, and then, unabashedly, her legs folded in front of her, her arms limp at her side, she began to cry. Annie flushed the toilet and turned the water on in the sink. The guest towels were starched linen, old-fashioned and neat. There was a ceramic clamshell with a small cake of fragrant soap. She wet some loo paper, making a compress of it, and handed it to Grace. “Put this to your lips,” she said. “It will make you feel better.” But Grace merely held it in her hand, the hand still in her lap. She let her head fall back against the wall, the tears falling freely. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.” Her shoulders were shaking with her sobs. Her face was terrible, the pale, myopic eyes and the torn mouth, the short forehead and the bloated cheeks. “I love him,” she said. “I’m so in love with him.” Annie smiled a little. “Oh, come on,” she said, gently, the way you do, the way she’d done before, to a drunken girl crying. “You don’t love him.” But Grace put her fist to her soft stomach, and then to the space between her breasts, as if the love were lodged there and so there was no denying it. “You don’t understand,” she said, sobbing. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, nothing, no one. I’m ugly and stupid and fat.” “You’re not,” Annie said. She crouched down beside her. “You’re pretty, you’re brilliant.” But Grace pressed her fist into her breast as if it were a dagger, leaning over it to bring her face to Annie’s face. There were wet flecks of her dinner at the corners of her lips. “You don’t understand,” she said, ferociously, her eyes both furious and oddly unfocused-or focused, perhaps, on something other than what she saw. She was grimacing, showing her teeth. Annie would not have been surprised if she had punched her. “I’m lonely,” she said; she seemed to extract the words from the place her fist had pierced. “I’m completely lonely.” She slowly tilted her head in that gesture of hers: she wasn’t making herself clear. Her eyes were a blur of tears. “I’m lonely,” she said a third time, and then collapsed back again, into her tears. After some minutes, Professor Wallace rapped at the door and asked, through it, “Is everything all right?” Annie said, “Yes, thank you,” and Professor Wallace asked, gently, “May I come in?” Annie began to stand, but Grace grabbed her wrist, looked at her through her red eyes, and then let her go. Annie opened the door and began to say, “Grace isn’t feeling too well,” when Professor Wallace looked beyond her to Grace on the floor and said, “My dear girl.” She was in the room, touching Grace’s forehead, then helping her to stand. Grace was still crying but more gently now, as Professor Wallace said, “Silly girl,” and led her out. The other Americans had left and all signs of dinner had been cleared away and the couch she and Grace had been sitting on was now made up into a bed, fresh floral sheets and a comforter and a blanket and a crisp-looking pillow. “Well, you’re not the first,” Professor Wallace was saying, getting Grace to kick off her shoes. “My husband is known to be a bit liberal when he pours. Poor girl.” Annie stood by the velvet chair as Professor Wallace pulled back the sheet and fluffed the pillow for Grace, who was still crying but seemed weak with it now, not ferocious. “He’s so beautiful,” Grace said, a cartoon drunk. “You’re both so beautiful.” “Yes, well,” Professor Wallace said. “Drink will do that.” She glanced at Annie, perhaps to assess how sober she was. “If I don’t keep an eye on him, my husband will get everyone who enters blind drunk. He believes he alleviates suffering.” There was a satin bathrobe thrown over the back of the velvet chair, but Professor Wallace didn’t mention it as she guided Grace onto the couch, between the sheets in her clothes. Grace crawling in like a weary child. “I’m so in love with him,” she said as her head touched the pillow, but now she said it as if he were merely a character in a novel, as if the love were merely a source of comfort and delight. Merely a part of the delight she felt at the moment, with Professor Wallace shushing her like a child and touching her face. “Silly girl,” she said again. “Is the room still spinning?” Grace, the good student once again, shook her head. “Only a little.” “There’s a basin here,” she said, and indicated the ceramic bowl at her feet. “If you’re sick to your stomach.” Grace smiled a little, her cheek to the pillow. “Thank you,” she said. Professor Wallace looked down at her, almost fondly, and said again, “Silly girl.” She turned to Annie. “I can set up a cot for you if you’d like to stay as well. You’re more than welcome.” But Annie shook her head. It wasn’t that late, she said. She’d get the bus. “David will walk you down,” Professor Wallace said and as if on cue, David appeared in the far doorway, creeping softly into the room. “Everything all right?” he asked. He looked over the back of the couch to Grace, who Annie knew was only pretending to sleep. “Poor child,” he said, and Annie was certain Grace smiled. David Wallace walked her to the bus stop, offering her a cigarette as he did. They stood smoking together as they waited. In the wet lamplight, with his collar turned up, he was even more handsome. He chided himself for pouring Grace too many whiskeys, and then praised Annie for handling her wine. “She leans on you a bit, does Grace,” he said gently. “You’re kind to be good to her.” Annie shrugged. At the end of the street there was a large crescent moon, rolled over on its back. She was thousands of miles from home, across a vast ocean, out on a wet night in a strange country, and standing next to a beautiful man whom, in another life, she would have loved. He threw the cigarette into the street as the bus approached. “Or good to be kind,” he said softly, “whichever you prefer.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. He waited until she had taken her seat inside before he turned to walk away, back to the house and the room with the books and the cats and the music and the rugs, pate and Chianti, and a woman whose name alone lights up his handsome face. And Grace, tonight and tomorrow morning when she woke, snug in the middle of it all. No matter who leans on whom, Annie thought, it was Grace who, tonight, had gotten what she wanted. She put her head against the cold window. She had said Edith Wharton because she saw herself as a woman alone, square-jawed and mannish, making do, but she had been wrong. Edith Wharton had been both married and then, at a later date, madly in love. But it hardly mattered. She had seen tonight that she was a woman alone because their life was the one she wanted and she couldn’t have it. She could imitate: she could adopt Professor Wallace’s wry smile, she could fill her rooms with books and cats, she could find a man with ginger hair, but it would all be just that, an imitation, a diminished version of the unattainable original. Elizabeth and David Wallace themselves, precisely, was what she wanted: his eyes looking over her knees, her clever mind. Their exact lives in that exact place, not some substitute, and suddenly she found her eyes filling with childish tears, like Grace’s tears, tears of utter, miserable despair. It was a despair she already understood because she had also, once, wanted a life with both her brothers in it. Suddenly, a boy slid into the seat beside her. He was scruffy-looking, a sparse beard over his pale cheeks, long hair, a long black coat. She had seen him as she got on, his feet up on the seat beside him, his back to the window and his eyes closed; she had instinctively avoided sitting opposite him. He leaned into her. “Are you all right?” he said. Aww right. She looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes were black with long lashes. He smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and beer. “I’m fine,” she said. There was a single tear caught on the edge of her lid and speaking made it fall. She felt it on her cheek and then her chin but didn’t bother wiping it away. He seemed to watch her for a few seconds and then shrugged. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s not worth crying over.” She had begun to recognize the flat sounds of a Midlands accent. He raised his left arm to grab the handrail on the back of the seat in front of them. It became a wall over which they spoke. A safe distance. “Trust me.” She was surprised to see that his fingernails were clean, everything else about him seemed so dirty. Looking straight ahead, he asked her if she was going back to the university and she said yes. He asked her which hall she lived in and when she told him, he grimaced. “Kind of a convent,” he said. She said, for lack of anything else, “I suppose.” And then he turned his face toward hers, grinning, his arm still between them but their faces as close as strangers could comfortably get. His skin beneath the patchy beard was a bluish white and his face was probably childish without it. His teeth were small. “Speaking of sex,” he said, “I was wondering if I could convince you,” he leaned down to look out into the dark street, “in three more stops, to have a drink with me.” She turned toward the window; they were still on the residential streets that made up the wasteland between the university and the city. “Where?” she said. “At my flat,” he said. He was drunk, but she couldn’t tell by how much. She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Now he leaned his shoulder against hers, brought his lips closer to her ear. “I have books,” he said and then drew back a little, raising his eyebrows. He might have said caviar or Moroccan gold. “Not just books,” he said. “Fucking literature. T. S. Eliot, Pound, Byron, Coleridge,” he said, as if each one made him more irresistible. “Who do you like? Christina Rossetti? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? You’ve got Professor Wallace, I take it. I saw her husband put you on the bus. Sir Philip Sydney, perhaps? I’ve got novels, too. All the big guys. Tolstoy. Or plays? Euripides, if you like. Shakespeare, of course. Fantasy? Christian allegory. I’ve got Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I’ve got…” The bus stopped and he leaned across her lap to look again through the window. His long hair was tangled here and there, a little dusty-looking. “Two more stops to talk you into it,” he said. He sat up and brought his face closer to hers. “It’s too early for either of us to go home,” he said. “All alone.” His eyes, bloodshot, looked right into hers, steadily enough, although his lids were at half-mast. He brushed a knuckle to her cheek. “And all tearful,” he said. She said, “It’s almost midnight,” more flatly than she had intended, sounding, she thought, like Grace. He watched her for a few more seconds. His lips were full and smooth inside the scruffy beard. Then he shrugged and dropped his arm. He slumped down in the seat beside her. She turned to look out the window. The passing, narrow houses, many of them dark, one or two with single lights burning. She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take. They rode together in silence for a few minutes. He let himself be jostled against her in his dark coat. “One more,” he said at the next stop. Her eyes fell on his hands, British pale, especially under the dark sleeve of his coat, but soft-looking, faintly freckled. Edith Wharton had been a married virgin until she was forty-five, but Annie hadn’t thought to ask Professor Wallace how anyone knew this. Was it something Wharton wrote about or was there some sexual autopsy performed at her death? Pauline, under her mother’s care, had made her first visit to a gynecologist just last year. The doctor had said he’d broken her hymen to do the exam. Her mother couldn’t understand why he hadn’t kept that information to himself, and Annie had said, unkindly, “I might have asked the same about you, Mother.” She said to him, falling, skidding. “I haven’t had sex with anyone since high school.” He smiled without turning to her. The bus was pulling to the curb. “High time, then,” he said. Walking into his tiny apartment, there was a moment when she stood in the dark as he paused behind her, leaning to turn on a small lamp. All the strangeness, and the danger, of what she was doing appeared to her then, she even felt herself bracing for a blow, or-in this land of Jack the Ripper-a cold blade to the back of her neck. She felt a moment’s pity for her parents. And then, oddly enough, for Grace, who would be the first to come to her room tomorrow, whenever she freed herself from the Wallaces’, Grace who would be the first to know that Annie had not come home. But then the light came on. The room was cluttered with tossed clothes and empty teacups, papers and books (he was a doctoral student, she’d later learn, in engineering, not literature, although the apartment was indeed filled with hundreds of soft Penguin editions that he would later toss on the bed where she lay, like so many pastel rose petals). It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else’s life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable. It made him both less threatening and less interesting. He was as ordinary as anyone she knew. She turned around. He took her face in his hands. On the five-hour flight over, she had told Grace, quite simply, a younger sister and a brother, and felt the information trail off into the darkness below them-the black ocean, the curved earth, the empty space through which the plane was moving them, away from all that and into another time as well as another place. She would not, she knew, recalling Professor Wallace’s wry smile, be the first American student to seek to remake herself in her year abroad. The boy was thin and pale and startlingly comfortable out of his clothes. He remained consistently comic in response to both her reticence and her ardor. He did a funny bit, a kind of magic trick with condom as coin, that she suspected was a well-rehearsed routine. He pulled the books from his shelves and tossed them onto the bed like so many pastel-colored rose petals and then climbed over them to land in her lap. When some of the tissue-thin pages tore, he pulled the damaged copies out from under them and set each on the floor. He said she should take the worst of them home with her. “And when you’re old and gray,” he said, “and nodding by the fire, you can take down this book and say, ‘What is this funny stain on this wrinkled page?’ “ When the sun came up, merely a lightening at the single window, a shaded version of the gray that would mark the full day, he let his head fall back, one arm under her neck, the other stretched to the edge of the mattress. His body was white and thin and boyish, it might indeed have been carved out of marble. As if it were carved out of marble, she thought there was beauty in it as well as tremendous sorrow. Because of Jacob, she knew, she would for the rest of her life see the bodies of young men in this way-lovers, husband, her own children, if she were to have them. It was not what she wanted to do, but she had no choice in the matter, it was no longer the life she had wanted, after all. On the mattress between them, at their feet and over their heads, were the scattered paperbacks. One was pressed uncomfortably into his side, spine up, just under his ribs, and she reached out to pull it out from under him. She held it up to the light, it was Malory’s With the changing light, the room seemed to grow more familiar. She was thousands of miles from home with an utter stranger at her side and yet she was falling into a pleasant, comfortable sleep, she was anticipating, with pleasure, perhaps, what the new day would bring. There was, there would always be, the snag of disappointment-it would not be the life she had wanted-but there was, at last, as well, something it would take her until the end of the year to begin to understand. At the end of the year, when she moved to London with him, quitting school, quitting home, dealing her parents (it could not be helped) another blow, she would recall the story Professor Wallace had told them that night, she would begin to see the wisdom of it-the wisdom of scattering, each to a different corner of whatever shelter they had found, so that should the worst happen, happen again, it would not take them all. Tony persichetti got religion-or religions, his sister said. He’d spent some months on an ashram in Pennsylvania, a few more with some Krishnas in New York, then traveled across Europe with a Brooklyn girl and ended up on a kibbutz where his whole day was spent, he’d said, shoveling chicken shit. And where, inexplicably (mixing his religious metaphors, Susan said), he shaved his head. Michael Keane laughed. “Sounds like Tony,” he said. And then home again, thin and weather-beaten, looking more like a convict than an aesthete. He came into her room and ran a hand down one of the wood panels he had helped their father to install, pressed it gently inward and withdrew a small plastic bag of brittle hash. “I’ve been thinking about this, waiting here for me, for months,” he said. “Did you think about Mom and Dad,” Susan asked him. “You stupid fuck. They were waiting here for you, too.” Not to say that that did the trick, Susan told Michael Keane, but the next Sunday night, Tony cleaned himself up and went out and came back some hours later and called them all into the living room, his mother and father, Susan herself who was only home for the weekend because the prodigal had once again returned and her parents had begged her to help welcome him. He announced that he was an alcoholic. That he’d just gone to his first AA meeting. And that with God’s help and theirs, he would get his life together at long last. Susan couldn’t help it, she told Michael, this back and forth with Tony had been going on for so long. The crazy Vietnam-vet cliché had worn pretty thin. “Do you have any particular God in mind?” she’d said. The AA meetings were held at St. Gabriel’s, in the basement cafeteria. Tony had breathed in a lungful of his old grammar-school air and found God again. Or God found him, there where he had hunkered down with his bologna sandwiches as a kid. Easier, he said, to pick up an old belief than to talk yourself into a new one. Now he began his day with 6:30 Mass, then went to the job his father had gotten him at Creedmoor, an office thing, then took classes at Queens College. He was headed for a master’s in social work. He was dating a girl he’d met at school. Her parents, she said, were holding their breaths, not yet certain, it seemed, that the troubled Vietnam-vet thing was something they could say was finally over. “And you?” she asked. They were in a bar on the East Side, they were being jostled, backs and arms, by the after-work crowd. He told her he had a job at a Catholic school, in Brooklyn, seventh grade. He said the pay was lousy but the kids were great. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said. He was sharing an apartment in the city with three friends from school. “Finally,” he said, “out of the basement.” And because she knew the story, she said, “How’s crazy Pauline?” Susan was blonder than he’d remembered her, prettier, too. He added, “I’m thinking of going to law school,” not sure yet if it were true. Susan said, “The guy I live with goes to law school. NYU. It’s good.” Michael nodded. His roommates were spread around the room, the familiar hunt for connections. “He knows you,” she said. “You caddied together one summer. He was in high school. You were home from college.” “This is a high-school sweetheart?” Michael said. She slowly closed her eyes, smiled a drawn smile. “A re-acquaintance,” she said. Begun when he had called her, out of the blue, to say, “There was a rumor when we were in high school and I wonder if it’s true.” Jill O’Meara’s name was mentioned. Susan’s eyes, when she opened them, were darker still. “Sometimes it’s easier to pick up an old boyfriend than to talk yourself into a new one.” “A pickup, then,” Michael said, and recognized his father’s sense of humor. “A serious relationship,” she said coyly to disguise what a complicated thing it was, her life with this boy. Michael raised his glass. “Good for you.” “Annie seems happy,” Susan said, an apology for not being free, because she liked Michael Keane, would have loved to go out with him when, as she thought of it, she was young. “She likes it over there.” “She really does,” Michael said. For the first time since they saw each other, he looked beyond her, toward the other women in the room. “And Clare’s good?” she said. “Still at dear old Mary Immaculate Academy?” “One more year,” he said. “Then college.” “Your parents will miss her.” But Michael shook his head. “They’re already planning their golden years in Florida. Though God knows what they’ll do with Pauline.” “Poor Pauline,” Susan said. And now their eyes met again, a prelude to separating once more. Michael had an impulse to say-so simple-and Jacob’s teaching, too, out on Long Island. Better at it than I am. Over at last, that crazy-vet thing. (Or no, he amended the tale-Sorry, Jacob): Never really did do that crazy-vet thing. Whatever was terrible over there kept to himself, the blanket pulled up over the shoulder, the head turned to the wall. The courage it took, for a kid so fearful, to keep so much to himself. Jacob’s fine, he had an impulse to say. And for just a second there would be the misapprehension on her face, for just a second, the solid past would loosen its grip. Jacob’s same as always. Too nice. Married Lori Ballinger. A couple of beautiful kids yet to be born. “It was good to see you, Michael,” Susan said. He bent down to kiss her cheek. “Good to see you, too,” he said. “Say hi to Tony.” And then walked away with it written all over his face-his friends said later, kidding him-disappointment, the failure to connect, the sorrow of a lost opportunity. Clare keane returned to school that fall looking grown up. That’s how some of the teachers put it. “You’ve grown up.” Not that this was surprising to them, especially the older of them who had been witness to it for decades: the bony freshman come back as mature young woman for senior year-the time in between seeming no more, they told one another September after September, than the blink of an eye. Clare was only a little taller, and, like most of the girls, freckled and tanned, streaks of sun in her reddish brown hair. Her braces had come off-there was that difference. But there was also the way she carried herself. She had lost-one of the Sisters confided to a lay teacher and the lay teacher heartily agreed-that childish look she used to wear, wide-eyed and eager to please. She’d always been smart enough, there was no doubt about that, but there had also been about her an air of innocence that belonged, perhaps, to an earlier time, an air of innocence that in this day and age-even the Sisters said it-seemed to indicate a lack of depth. But this fall there was a new quickness in her eye and the range of her emotions did not seem limited in its illustration to a wide smile or a solemn frown. She laughed more. She socialized with some of the more troublesome and popular girls. She had learned, apparently, over the course of what she described to everyone who asked her as the best summer of her life, that there was a hierarchy to her interests and her pleasures after all. Although there was still something childish about her body, especially in the outdated shirtwaist dress that had been for too long now the school’s summer uniform, there was, also, finally, an assuredness in her movements that had not been there before. She had found a boyfriend this summer. (Of course of course, the teachers, even the nuns told each other, indulgent and naive. Those who had been at the school when Annie was a student said, with a shrug, Life goes on.) His name was Gregory Joseph. She wore his heavy high-school ring on a gold chain around her neck. 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 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 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 had 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 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 objecting 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. Something he hadn’t even known he’d been straining to hear. The boy finished the piece and in the fading of the last notes came the voices at the front door of the church, the Keanes and (he had their names on a slip of paper in his pocket) the other parents, the groom, and the young, expectant bride. “Have you taken a lot of lessons?” the priest asked, before he walked down the aisle to greet them (because it would be an informal wedding, the best kind, really, softly spoken, unrehearsed). “Or have you always known how to play?” The boy was arranging the pages of his music. He looked over his shoulder at the priest. The lights from the altar cast the shadow of his long lashes across his cheeks. A young man, beautiful in his way. “Both,” he said, politely. “A lot of lessons, but it seems I’ve always known how to play.” Monsignor nodded. John Keane in his gray suit was coming toward them from one of the side aisles, favoring that bad leg, his son, his other son, just behind him, and then what had to be the bridegroom looking like the oversize boy he was in his first suit, well-scrubbed, determined, afraid. The women in their pale wedding clothes were gathered at the door. “It’s a gift, then,” the priest said. |
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