After This

II

Either the wind kept them all away or the entire population took to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day. In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after all, in mid-September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the trees.

The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out after the children as they ran ahead.

“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green canvas car coat.

“They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair-those long strands he combed back over his crown-made it stand, briefly, on end.

Something done right-at least so far-this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.

Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.

Across the ceiling of his bedroom, the dawn had appeared to be made up of reflected light, light that moved with the rise and fall of the wind as if it were light reflecting off water-although the house was ten miles from any shore, smack in the substantial heart of his own spit of island, and even the neighborhood backyard pools had been drained and dismantled.

Beneath this watery light the room itself was in steady shadow. His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning, woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting decades.

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse-the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The children bowed, putting down their toys (plastic machine guns, a football, a shoe box filled with green army men and small, camouflaged jeeps), unlaced their sneakers, and jumped down, arms raised, heels digging into the falling sand of the seawall.

Not a soul.

At the foot of the dunes, John Keane dropped the wool blanket and the tufted pillow and the teddy bear, unhooked the quilted hamper from his shoulder and his wife’s hand from the crook of his arm. He felt the wind raise the sand and fling it, stinging, into his cheek, saw his wife pull the folded edge of her scarf over the side of her face, turning away from him and the blowing sand.

He picked up the wool blanket and moved it farther inside the dunes, to a shallow valley where even the sound of the moving air seemed suddenly to retreat. He spread the blanket, walked out again to lift the tufted pillow and the bear and the plaid quilted hamper, then returned a third time to give her his arm.

She stood, holding the edge of her colorful scarf over her cheek, shading her eyes with the other. Her face made harsh and unlovely by the sand and the wind and the deep line between her eyes.

“Sit back here,” he said. “You’ll be out of the wind.”

Under her chin, the bright red-and-blue tails of her scarf rose, writhed, paddled the air. “I can’t see them,” she said.

He looked toward the ocean, the forlorn image of the abandoned sneakers and toys-the shoe box had already lost its lid-at the edge of the known world where the sand disappeared and there was only water and sky.

“I’ll tell them to come up,” he said and knew she would not move-some vestigial habit of her race or of her sex, this frowning vigil at the edge of the sea-until he had returned them to her sight.

He crossed the wide breadth of beach, hearing their voices coming to him on the wind before he saw them at the shoreline. The two boys were stamping at the creamy edges of the waves-making small explosions of water and wet sand-his daughter down on her haunches, examining something, a mussel or a crab or just the mysterious, bubbling holes that opened and closed like mouths under the retreating waves.

Beyond them, the ocean was high, whitecapped, agitated. There were disks of black and gray as well as gold among the rushing swells. In the panhandle, in the Carolinas, metal blinds had been drawn, iron awnings brought down on the white houses that were bunkers now, among the palm trees and the flamingos. But here the sky was mostly blue and clear, except for a few white, rushing clouds just above the horizon.

Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be long after I’m gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not be equal to the time he’d already spent.

He called to them. “Come up,” he said against the wind. “Your mother wants you up.”

The wall of sand the sea had made, the cliff, the collapse, seemed smaller now with their father standing on top of it, his hair raised in the wind. They scaled it quickly, in wide strides, their arms pumping.

He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to find that some mistaken memory had caused him-momentarily-to be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob, the oldest, ran to retrieve the cardboard lid while Michael, his brother, lifted the shoe box, shifting the contents-green army men, toy bayonets, machine gun, camouflaged jeeps-taking roll.

With his thumbs hooked over the lid, the boy carried the box up the beach, behind his father and brother and sister, feeling the drag of sand but feeling, too, that with a small effort he could overtake them.

Their mother stood at the base of the dunes, her hands seeming to cup her broad face as she waited for them.

“Back here,” their father said. “We’ll be out of the wind.” And once more gave his wife his arm. The children ran before them, the boys running up and down the sides of the dunes, sand slipping, as if they had no choice in the matter, as if the world itself were tilting, the little girl imagining shipwrecked and island-lost, and only her father’s cleverness (there were guns slung over his shoulder) to keep them safe and warm.

The plaid blanket was already spread in a gap between the dunes, the tufted pillow on it, the lunch hamper, and the teddy bear who had not been lost, not drowned in the wreck, after all. She threw her arms around it, an extravagant reunion. “If it weren’t for me,” her mother said dryly, smiling, “you would have left him behind in the car.”

Too soon to eat, they agreed, and her husband gallantly gave her his hand again as she lowered herself to the blanket, first onto her knees and then, carefully, onto the pillow. Straightening himself, he palmed the football like a younger man and called the boys to follow him out to the beach.

She leaned back on her palms, the wool prickly against her skin and already dusted with sand.

There was the now oddly distant knock of the waves against themselves and the softer yet similar sound of the football meeting their hands. There was her husband’s voice, Go out, now, Keep your eye on it, Good, and the voices of the boys, mostly complaining: My turn, Hey, Interference. The ball a kind of shadow passing before her, between them, across the sun itself or so it seemed.

Annie, her daughter, had claimed the corner of the blanket, sitting perversely, her mother thought, with her back to the ocean and to her father and the boys on the windy beach. The worn bear (cherished now that she had recalled its existence) on her lap. She was not speaking, but her lips moved and her eyes were clearly engaged in a conversation of some sort-she frowned, she shook her head-and despite the echo of the ocean falling down on itself, the slap of the football in their hands, and their voices, carried on the wind, it was this conversation as it played like light across her daughter’s features (she raised her eyes, made them smile) that absorbed the mother’s attention.

Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of them both-the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a conversation forever unheard.

She slipped her hand under her belly, shifted her weight on the pillow, and looked up to see the boys returning, windblown, kicking up sand. Her husband behind them, boyish, too, with the red flush across his cheeks and the thinning hair scattered every which way across his head. The baby rolled, roiled, beneath her ribs and the beach grass shuddered in the wind. He sat beside her heavily, while the two boys fell on the shoe box full of soldiers, carrying it off to the foot of another dune-for this had been their plan all along, to restage Okinawa or Omaha Beach, continuing the war game they had begun last night in their room, across the sheets and blankets and pillows of their twin beds, in one of those hours of grace when they had not quarreled and their parents had not called to them to put out the light. They had named each member of their platoon-Murphy, Idaho, Sarge, Smitty-ambushed some Germans, and collected commendations from Patton himself. This morning when their father had come into their room to say, “We’re heading for the beach,” the dissolution of the plans they’d made to continue the push toward Berlin right after Mass was quickly compensated for by the possibility of dune and sand-Okinawa, Omaha Beach, North Africa and Rommel.

It was their father who had put the football in the trunk.

Now they scattered their men across the sand and among the bending stalks of sea grass. Their sister heard the changed pitch of their voices, the harsh and breathy pitch they used when they were speaking for someone else in an imaginary game. She rose to join them. The bear was still in her arms but once again forgotten.

“Can I play?” she asked finally, understanding, even at six, that the timidity of the question invited a single reply.

“No.” Looking to each other, not to her.

She watched them. The orders they barked were low and intimate, running under the sound of the wind.

“Can I have a man?” she asked.

“No,” again, but now their parents on the blanket together looked toward them.

“Boys,” their father said, a warning. And a single green soldier was plucked from the shoe box of reservists and replacements and tossed her way, through the air. She picked him up from the sand. The mold had shaped his features precisely, a strong jaw and a sharp nose, the little combat helmet and a sash of ammunition across his chest. Unlike the men her brothers preferred, this one had no rifle pressed to its shoulder, no hand grenade about to be thrown, but stood instead with his arms extended from his sides, palms out. His head was slightly raised, as if whatever he confronted was still at some distance, and was larger than just another man.

His name was Steve. Steve Stevens. And he was a scout, sent ahead. Alone.

She moved him through the sand, up over the boulders and hills that were the arms and legs of the bear.

John Keane, leaning over his knees, watched the children carefully, seeing that they behaved and then, reassured, allowed himself to lie back on the blanket. The sky was blue. They were nicely out of the wind. He placed his fingertips on his wife’s back, just lightly. The football had reminded him that he was not (he would have said) entirely pleased with the behavior of his two sons. It upset some notion he had of order, of rightness, that Jacob, the older, was the smaller of the two, the lesser athlete, the lesser student. It made something unkind, even cruel, about Michael’s efforts to outdo him. Michael’s triumphs over his older brother-and the self-satisfaction they brought him-came too easily. Jacob’s defeats seemed too indicative of a certain kind of future.

He kept his fingers on his wife’s back and placed his forearm over his eyes. The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm.

His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were-one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon one more.

He hoped the fourth would be another boy-although he would never say so to his wife. What he had in mind most especially was a daughter’s wedding day and the pall an absent father casts on the scene, that sad tincture of mortality that mixes with the bright day when the bride appears at the door of the church on the arm of an uncle (as his own niece had done) or an older brother-it would be Jacob, of course.

No equal ghost appears at the ceremony, as far as he can recall, when it is the groom’s father who is missing.

Enough reason, he thought, for a man his age to wish for another boy. But it would be another stone, nonetheless.

He could hear the two of them now, softly crying orders to their men, even as they interrupted themselves to provide machine-gun fire and exploding hand grenades, the sound of the ocean and the wind and the occasional cry of gulls lending a certain authenticity to the scene with their steady indifference.

Then his wife’s voice, startingly close and yet oddly distant, specked with disks of black and gray as well as gold. “Pick him up and put him on the blanket,” she said to their daughter. “He’s full of sand.”

And then she stirred, moving beneath the lightly placed fingertips of her husband’s hand. The baby moving as well, roiling like a wave under her skin, pressing an elbow into her ribs, a heel against her hip.

“Thank you,” she said to her daughter and took the forgotten bear and shook it and brushed the sand from its worn fur and then set it carefully beside her, against her hip as if to offer it comfort, as if it were itself some spurned youngest child. The baby turned again even as Mary Keane glimpsed the drama of Steve Stevens (he had gone down on his belly behind a stalk of grass as Adolf Hitler drove by) on her daughter’s small face.

“Is anyone hungry yet?” she asked, and only Annie, who was never hungry yet, said No without raising her eyes. The boys, who had heard her, she knew they had heard her, ignored the question. Michael was crawling up the side of the dune, his plastic machine gun raised. Jacob-how like him-was watching his brother’s progress warily, his arms encircling his small platoon of green men, protecting them from the sliding sand. They both had heard her.

She looked over her shoulder at her husband. His forearm was thrown across his eyes, his mouth was slightly open. His fingertips, lightly, were on her back.

She leaned down to the bear, or leaned as much as the hump and heft of her belly would allow. “Are you hungry?” she asked it. Her daughter, compelled as equally by whimsy as by drama, suddenly straightened up and turned to her mother. “He’s not answering, either,” Mary Keane told her daughter, and they both smiled.

“I guess no one’s hungry,” Annie said gently, and here the mother glimpsed some future commiseration between them, some future understanding they would certainly share of what passed between women while the men in the world were distracted, unheeding, unconscious.

She shifted again, leaning her weight onto one thigh and then the other as the baby offered its own counterbalance. She moved her hands inside her coat and grasped her belly, the way she might hold a child’s face between her hands to silence tears, or to ask, What is it, what’s wrong?

She stroked her sides, the loose knit of the cotton sweater she had confiscated from her husband’s closet ten years ago, when she was pregnant with Michael and could bear only cotton or silk against her skin. She felt the baby ripple under her fingers. She felt a heel-surely it was a heel here on her left side-press against her skin and then dart away, going under, before she could quite gauge its shape.

It was possible it had something to do with the ocean, all this activity. Something to do with the salt scent of it on the air and on the wind. The tug of some ancient memory-didn’t they say life began in the sea-or maybe some dawning hope that the what-do-you-call-it, the fluid the baby now floated in (which someone had told her was also precisely as salty as the ocean), was a tributary, not merely a pool.

She ran her palms over her taut belly, soothing the poor thing, even as a swift kick under her ribs nearly took her breath away. Or maybe, she thought, it was the hurricane down south, agitating water everywhere-in oceans and bays, dog bowls and cisterns, in the bellies of pregnant women all up and down the coast.

Mary Keane smiled and looked around because the thought amused her, although she knew that in another minute she would not be able to retrace it clearly enough to retell.

Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even as her lips kept moving-now a conversation between her little army man and a headless creature formed by the two fingers of her right hand. But Michael was out of sight.

She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with her fearfulness-had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pins-and-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head, the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune.

She resisted calling to him, telling him to come closer. Her husband was asleep beside her. She could hear the way he pursed his lips with each breath, something like the soft sound of the football against their palms (although it was softer still), something like the thud of the ocean as it punctuated the rise and fall of the wind. He deserved the rest, poor man. They were alone on the beach. They were perfectly safe.

Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass, filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have to remember to shake him out before he got into the car.

Down the path through the dunes she could see the pale expanse of beach and then the place where it gave way to sky. She leaned forward a little, toward it, resting the bulk of the baby on the edge of her thighs. It was possible that the sky was darker, out there, to the east. It was possible that they would catch some part of the southern storm. She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father’s breath as his lips opened and touched closed.

Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have said) that this was her last pregnancy. These the last weeks she would live with the toss and tumble of a child in her belly, with the unseen future a real presence inside her; the unseen future actual flesh and blood inside her, not, as it was for the rest of the population and would be for her again once this child was born, merely imagination or hope or plan-the man Jacob would become, and Michael, the woman (commiserating with her mother while the men were turned away) who would be Annie. What was moving under her hands, pressing and turning under the taut skin, was the future itself, already formed, pressing an ear to the wall of her flesh.

With a cry, Michael leaped down the dune above his brother, charged, fell, rolled, collided with Jacob’s back and Jacob’s carefully arranged soldiers, kicking up sand. He leaped up again and with his machine gun drawn mowed down sister-who was already crying, her fists to her eyes-brother, green army men, mother, father, and then whatever other advancing hordes came at him from the sea.

John Keane was off the blanket in an instant, crying, “Michael!” Jacob was stretched out on the sand, his legs straight before him, crying, plaintively, “Michael!” Annie was heading toward her mother, wailing, her fists-one of them still clutching Steve Stevens-to her eyes. There was sand across her nose and in her hair. John Keane took Michael by the arm and shook him. The boy looked up at his father as if he were an utter stranger, materialized out of the salt air. Mary untied her scarf and, pulling her daughter’s fists from her eyes, gently brushed it over her face. Jacob, resignedly, perhaps, was lifting his flattened men, smoothing an area of sand to his left, setting them upright again.

“What is wrong with you?” their father was saying. “Why can’t you behave?”

Michael-it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind-looked up to say, “Just playing. I was just playing.” But his father shook his arm with the litany of his transgressions: “Hurt your brother, hurt your sister, ruined the day.” He finally tossed aside the boy’s arm as if it were something to be thrown away. “Why don’t you use your head?” he asked him. “Why can’t you behave?” And felt the pain of his own anger, in his chest, in his shoulder. He moved his hand to his neck, moved his shoulder. It was the arm he’d used to throw the football. He looked to his wife. Annie was now collapsed on the blanket beside her, pressed into her side because she could not sit on her lap, the bright scarf, now spotted with her tears, wrapped in her fingers. Mary Keane was fumbling in the pocket of her car coat for a tissue. She found one, held it to the girl’s nose. Leaned a little to say something into her ear. The girl nodded. Mary reached for the stuffed bear that still leaned against her hip, lifted it, and placed it in her daughter’s arms.

As suddenly as the peace of the morning had turned to bedlam, peace returned. John Keane looked around, his hand on his neck, his love for these children three heavy stones against his thumping heart. Jacob was once more bent over his men. Michael, his machine gun hung over his back, was sitting Indian-style just a few feet away, pulling apart a stalk of sea grass, watching the ocean, not crying, his father was relieved to see, but, he suspected, not chastened either. He rubbed his neck. Swung his arm out, shaking it a little. It was the arm he had given to Catherine, his niece, his brother Frank’s only child, at the door of the church on the day she was married. “Maybe we should eat,” he said. And then, raising his voice only enough to be heard over the wind, “Boys. Come over and eat.”

But the wind had indeed changed and as the five of them gathered on the blanket they could feel it prick their faces and their arms. Mary Keane, with Annie still leaning heavily against her and the baby like an iron beach ball in her lap, leaned toward the quilted hamper, unzipped it, and then paused, a single wax-paper-wrapped sandwich in her hand. “Our food will be full of sand,” she said, “with this wind.” And her husband said, “Well, they are sandwiches,” and winked at Michael, who seemed suddenly to recognize his father again.

“Maybe,” Mary said, “we’d better eat in the car.”

Slowly everything was gathered and they made their way out to the beach once more and then over the path that returned them to the parking lot. They placed the blankets and the pillow and the toys into the trunk, depositing as they did a residue of sand that would be there throughout the winter. Standing above the knot the three of them had formed before the open back door of the car-a debate about who would go first and who would get the middle-their mother said, her hand on her belly, “Just get in,” and they did, sliding across the soft fabric of the backseat. Annie was in the middle because Michael moved so quickly and Jacob had put a definite pair of fingers to her shoulder to make her follow him.

Mary Keane eased herself into the front seat. The size of her belly made her legs feel short, as though they could barely reach the floor under the dashboard. Her husband closed the door on her, gently, with both hands, as if he were covering her with a blanket. He crossed in front of the car, his hair on end and the pale scalp at the back of his head exposed. He now looked every bit his age, she thought. As he grew older, it seemed to her that she was not losing sight of his younger self but coming to recognize instead another man altogether, one she was just beginning to find familiar. He opened the door, slid the quilted hamper onto the seat between them, and then got in behind the wheel. He pulled the door closed and the wind became just the slightest rush of air against the rolled-up windows. There was suddenly a pleasant warmth. Their voices, suddenly, seemed rich and sure now that they could speak quietly, now that their words were no longer scattered by the buffeting wind.

Mary, one knee bent up onto the seat-her legs seemed only inches long, her feet in their small loafers appeared no larger than her daughter’s-handed sandwiches into the backseat while her husband poured lemonade from a glass jar into small paper cups.

“Careful now,” he said each time he slowly moved the cup over the back of his seat, bending his arm like a crane, awkwardly, because it was the same arm he had used to throw the football and it still seemed to echo with the strain. “Ladies first,” he said and felt his daughter take the cup from him with both hands. “Careful now.” There was coffee in the plaid thermos and, when he had screwed the lid onto the glass jar and placed it back into the quilted hamper, he poured some for his wife and some for himself. She had packed two china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from anything else. He exchanged a cup for one of the sandwiches. The whole thing was a balancing act: cup and sandwich, napkin and wax paper-careful now-the three children in the back (the fourth would have to be up here, in the front seat between them, the hamper on his wife’s lap, or at her feet), his wife and her belly perched beside him, the wind shut out and their voices suddenly gentle and clear. A sweetened cup of coffee, a ham-and-cheese-the bread a little dry but the meat thick and tender. The wind shut out. It was a balancing act, to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months, even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now.

All around them, the parking lot was deserted, only a scrim of sand moving across the bleached asphalt. Mary Keane stretched her legs and touched her side. “This baby is doing somersaults,” she said and Jacob laughed softly, imagining it. Beside him, his sister put the crust of her sandwich to the line of brown thread that was the bear’s mouth. Beside her, Michael looked through the rolled-up window, across the long and empty parking lot to the dark green pines that seemed to be raising their arms to the wind, shaking spindly fists. His own hands were full, sandwich and paper cup, but the small ivory knob on the silver handle was a temptation. Just a few turns and he could fill the car with the sound of the rushing wind. The hair was mussed across the back of his father’s head, the familiar gleam of his white scalp peering through. His father leaned forward to put the china teacup on the dashboard and then, leaning back, placed his hand over his shoulder, kneading the material of his shirt, raising the shoulder toward his neck, like a pitcher on the mound. “Are you all right?” their mother asked, all their voices grown soft and gentle now that they were out of the wind.

“An ache is all,” their father said.

The wind seemed to come up from under the car, it pressed against the window, muffled, shut out, although they all still felt the sting of it on their cheeks. Michael placed the paper cup, almost empty, between the knees of his jeans and moved his fingers to the ivory knob. His hands were pale, the fingers plump and squared-off, the nails flat and broad, just like his father’s.

He tested the give of the handle with his fingertips. He imagined paper napkins and paper cups, wax paper, cheese, wafers of white bread lifted by the wind, swirled about the car.

Their father took his hand from his shoulder. The wind rattled the windows, careful now.

“Listen to that,” their mother said. “It’s really picking up.”

Above the pines, the sky had turned a deeper blue. In another minute, there would be rain.

“We just might feel the brunt of this hurricane after all,” their father said.

Mary Keane saw how the news made Michael pause, and then change his mind about rolling down the window. He lifted the paper cup from between his knees, took a drink of it. Annie said, “Really?” but it was Jacob who said, “Maybe we should go home,” a crimp of fear in his voice. Her fault. She saw her husband flex his jaw. He did not love his oldest child as he should. There was gray at his temples and a roughened thickness at his throat. His face was not the face of the man she had married, but resembled, instead, some of the men she had worked for when she was single, or a doctor who had cared for her own father in his last days. Closer now, in appearance, to any number of fifty-year-old men she had known than he was to the young stranger he had once been.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. There was the ache in his heart, and now over his shoulder and down his arm, as he caught the reflection of the boy’s pale cheek and full girlish lips, his dry mouth hanging open in fearful expectation of what?-the sky growing black, the wind moaning, the scrim of sand that blew across the empty lot forming itself into tooth and mouth and open jaw. “What are you afraid of?” More derisively than he’d meant it.

“Let’s at least have our dessert before we go,” Mary said, soothing. A balancing act. “I have plums,” she said, leaning over her stomach, over the baby’s feet that were now-little acrobat-pressing themselves up against her breasts. She leaned over the curve of its back and spine as they pressed themselves into her stomach and bladder, leaned over the head that was now pressing itself down toward the worn upholstery of the old car, sensing, perhaps, that its watery world was a tributary after all, not a pool. She leaned into the quilted hamper where she had plums and grapes and sugar cookies shaped like laurel wreaths.

In a few minutes, the rain began. The children spit the plum pits into their paper cups and handed them across the seat to their mother. John Keane pressed his chest to the steering wheel as he put the key in the ignition, taking a deep breath as he did, hoping the change of movement would ease the growing pain. The windshield wipers were like a new beat in the day’s rhythm. Mary Keane wrapped the two coffee cups in paper towels. Her husband put his arm across the back of the seat. “Everybody set to go?” he said. He had been too harsh with Michael, too derisive of Jacob, and who knew what his daughter needed, looking up at him, the bear in her arms. “I’m ready,” she said, primly, the first to respond. The apple of his eye.

“Let’s just go,” Jacob added, fighting tears. His face was once more turned to the window. “Let’s get home,” unable to keep the crimp of fear out of his voice. Michael leaned forward, looking toward him across his sister’s lap, and his mother saw that his lips were pursed with either the sour aftertaste of the plum or the sharp phrase of an insult, a tease. She watched him until he sat back again, thinking better of it. He understood, even then, that he could repeat word for word something his father had already said about some weakness in his brother and still be reprimanded for it as severely as if he alone had let the cat out of the bag.

That evening, just after midnight, John Keane was drawn downstairs by a pounding at his door that might have been theatrical, something falsely urgent and echoing about it. Something familiar and rehearsed, too, in his own manner as he asked Mary, “Who could that be?” and then slowly pushed the blankets aside and found his slippers. The rain was a steady rush against the roof and the windows. The light in the empty living room was just enough to see by, to distinguish the black shape of the couch and the chairs, the tables and lamps, the television set and hi-fi and decorative mirror that caught and reflected the oddly gauzy, deep blue light that came through the front window, cast off by the storm. A puddle of darkness in the center of the floor was the board game the boys had left there. In the short hallway, which lacked any light whatsoever, he could feel under his slippers a remnant of sand on the linoleum. The football and the box of soldiers were beside the door, invisible. “Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the heels of a distant roll of thunder, and in the instant before he reached for the doorknob, he felt with utter certainty, as if all of this were indeed merely something revisited, rehearsed, recalled, that he would not return-not to the living room behind him or the narrow stairs or the small rooms where his wife and his children slept.

This was the culmination, then, this odd darkness, this familiar dream, of the day that had begun with the tugging of the wind at his eaves; this was the simple and terrible meaning, after all, of the pain in his arm, the weight on his heart. Here now and at last, and too soon-as it had come to his brother’s heart too soon-the utter darkness, the black street, wind rain and sea and some glimpse, in his final fall, of the damp room (odor of salt, odor of peat) where in another darkness he had been conceived. An instant so close-in its familiarity, in its blackness, in the cry of the wind-to everything he had been told as a child would attend his last moment (he would hear the banshee, he would open the door, he would see the black coach, wet with rain), that he felt both amused and terrified.

Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more.

The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque.

“I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree-thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow-breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.”

He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.”

“There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

The wind was howling in long gusts, driving the rain straight across his face, against his slippers and pants legs. He listened for some sound of an idling motor, strained his eyes against the wind and the rain to see some indication-a stain of red light or blue light, perhaps-of the truck or car that must be waiting for the fireman on the next block. But there was nothing he could see, or hear above the sound of the wind and the rain and the shaking leaves. Across the street the blue storm light briefly caught the blind windows of his neighbors’ homes.

He stepped back and closed the door. His fingers, too, where they had gripped it, were wet. He dried them on his pajamas, then groped for the closet door and found the flashlight he kept on the shelf there. The living room was as it had been. He turned to the stairs, aware, now, of the sound of the willow branches brushing the opposite wall of the house. It would indeed fall straight, from the front yard to the back, parallel to the house, and for the next few days his children, all the neighborhood children, would crawl over its trunk and up into its branches, like Lilliputians over a longhaired Gulliver, until Mr. Persichetti down the street arrived with a newly purchased chain saw and a borrowed truck, offering his services. Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired by the storm’s destruction (he would say) to make better use of his days. The loss of the tree, then-the lovely willow that had made them, ten years ago, choose this house above any of the others-was all of the inalterable change that the long day had portended.

In their room, the boys, who had been awoken by the pounding at the door, watched silently as the beam of their father’s light moved slowly up the stairs. For Jacob, the slow pace of the rising beam was a comfort; there could be no immediate danger if his father walked so steadily up the stairs. Michael felt only disappointment at his father’s quiet return. But then their father stood in the doorway, the light pooled at his feet, and told them, whispering, that they’d better get up and come downstairs. He whispered the same to their mother, who was already standing beside her bed, tying her robe at the narrowest place left to her, high up on her belly and just under her breasts. He lifted their sister from her bed and carried her downstairs over his shoulder. Even in the peripheral light (Michael had asked to carry the flashlight but his mother had taken it instead, and Jacob’s hand), it was clear that she was only pretending to still be asleep-her eyelids fluttered, there was the smallest shape of a smile. Herding them all toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window, pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed tree.

After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul air, Jacob pulled at his mother’s hand to draw her to safety. But Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father’s arms to stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their mother patted Jacob’s hand to soothe him. On their way through the kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father’s flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it seemed to draw all the surrounding shadows to its edge. Only Michael walked alone although, at one point, as they made their way down the stairs, he touched his fingers to the back of Jacob’s neck and made him jump. They sat together on the old couch that was just the other side of the toy-train table. Their mother between the two boys to avoid trouble, Annie on her father’s lap. The washing machine and the sink and the long string of the clothesline where she hung clothes in bad weather were just behind them, each illuminated, however dimly, by the blue light of the storm at the narrow windows. Around their own circle of light, their mother said, “Let’s say an Angel of God,” the bodies of her two boys pressed against her. “Angel of God,” they said, following her voice. “My guardian dear, to whom God’s love, commits me here, ever this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father’s neck. “There went the tree,” he said.

In the small circle of the flashlight, their mother poured milk into the paper cups and carefully handed them to the children.

When john and mary keane said “during the war,” their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

During the war, their father said, we sometimes slept in people’s cellars. France, Belgium, into Germany. (The milk in the paper cups smelled like candles, like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

Once, three or four of them had taken shelter for the night, in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse-it was maybe late ’44 or early ’45-and when the sun came up (not a sun, really, as he recalled it, only darkness turning to pale gray) they realized a new guy, a replacement, had joined them during the night. He just appeared among them, as if he had sprung from the dirt floor while they slept. No more than nineteen or twenty. Anxious and poorly trained, the way all the replacements were at that stage of the war. “Who the fuck are you?” one of the guys said. (Although telling the tale to his children-around the single flashlight-John Keane said, “Who the blankety-blank…”) “Jacob,” the boy said. “Jake. From Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob.

Michael turned to his brother whose eyes were large and dark at the edge of the light. He had hoped until now that his father’s story pertained to him.

The two of them walked out of the cellar together, into the cold. Jake seemed to think that John Keane, perhaps because of his age, was of some superior rank, and it was possible that the kid was looking for some advantage, sticking with him. Or it may have been only that the other men, superstitious about replacements, had given him a wide berth. It was a gray dawn, an overcast day, only the beginning of the worst of it. There would have been the sound of boots breaking frost-tramp, tramp, tramp. A smell of diesel fuel, which was pervasive. Creak of army boots and canvas cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?-opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child’s.

At one point during that cold day John Keane had said to the kid, the other Jacob, “We’re a regular Gallagher and Shean,” and the kid had surprised him by knowing more choruses than even his brother Frank did, humming them softly under his breath, carrying the tune.

Oh, Mr. Gallagher, oh Mr. Gallagher, if you’re a friend of mine you’ll loan me a couple of bucks. I’m so broke, I’m nearly bent and I haven’t got a cent. I’m so clean you’d think that I’d been washed in Lux.

Oh, Mr. Shean, oh Mr. Shean (how did it go? Frank would know), to tell the truth I haven’t got a bean. Cost of living’s gone so high, why it’s cheaper now to die.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

Positively, Mr. Shean.

He’d said to the kid (he’d shaken him off late that afternoon, in a frozen rain, and only learned he’d been hit after nightfall, when they were pressed into foxholes, the taste of dirt and smoke like blood in their mouths), What can I do for you? Not out loud, but in his mind, like a prayer. Plenty of others had been killed, but this one had sprung up out of the dirt floor, fresh faced and too young. He’d spent less than twenty-four hours at his war. This other Jacob. What can I do for you, John Keane had said in that foxhole in the Ardennes, in the winter of ’44 or ’45, the worst yet to come-more death and the bitter snow, shrapnel, three toes of his own lost to the cold. What can I do for you? He’d said it like a prayer, it was a prayer, believing the kid heard him because (he told his children) all of us are immortal or no one is. You prayed to the dead or you let them go silent. What can I do for you? he had said, in his mind, like a prayer, and later their mother, in her hospital bed, their firstborn in her arms, grimaced and said, “That’s a Jewish name.”

Michael grinned, turning to his brother whose mouth hung open, dark as his eyes behind his raised knees.

But their father had told her, “It’s just something I’d like to do.”

In the small circle of flashlight, with the sound of the storm already seeming to fade-as if the tree’s fall (or perhaps her husband’s story) had abated something-Mary Keane pressed her two sons against her sides. It was pleasant, to be in the basement like this, with her family, in the middle of the night. She looked across Jacob’s dark hair to her husband, who still had Annie’s thin arms wrapped around his neck. She doubted, thinking back, that she had said, straight off, That’s a Jewish name-or perhaps she did not doubt it as much as regret it, since it had become, in the intervening years, Jacob’s name alone, the name of her own boy, the Jacob from the war having become, in the intervening years, poor kid, mostly forgotten.

Much as she had forgotten, already, what it was that had brought him to mind tonight, that other Jacob. Was it the storm itself? The banging at the door? The young fireman, appearing like a guardian angel to warn them that the lights were out and trees were falling all over the neighborhood?

She wondered briefly if her husband should have told the children this particular war story at all. Michael would surely use it against his brother. There was always the possibility of bad dreams.

If he had wanted to tell the children the story he might simply have said that he and the boy had sung vaudeville tunes together, in the middle of a war. Gallagher and Shean. Mutt and Jeff. Catholic and Jew. Fresh-faced replacement and aging veteran, tramping through the cold, singing. He could have left it at that. He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one.

With her arms around her sons and the new baby curled against her rib cage, her husband and her daughter a mere arm’s length away, and the storm turning from them even as the sun was surely approaching, Mary Keane considered the wisdom of leaving certain, difficult things unsaid. She considered the wisdom of the Blessed Mother who, as the Christmas gospel told it, pondered everything in her heart.

Gently, she collected the children’s cups. With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

The tiny spiders that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves and pliant branches, on their skin and in their clothes. Mr. Persichetti, standing at the top of the three steps, the borrowed truck with the new chain saw just behind him, saw Tony, his own son, moving among the fallen branches as if through a jungle. Tony wore a plastic combat helmet and carried a toy pistol. He was thirteen, three years older than the oldest Keane boy, and Mr. Persichetti wondered if he wasn’t too old for such playacting. He resolved, even before Mrs. Keane had agreed to let him do the job, that he’d get the boy to help out tomorrow afternoon, hauling the thin branches and the smaller slices of tree trunk. He was asking twenty dollars-not an exorbitant amount. Some of the women in the neighborhood merely spoke to him from behind their storm doors, but Mrs. Keane opened hers and invited him in. He stood in the small vestibule. She wore a maternity dress with a bow at the neckline and bedroom slippers. She seemed pale and somewhat puffy, not what you’d call a good-looking woman from the start, but she had a direct and friendly manner that encouraged him to say he had been inspired by the storm to make better use of his free days. He’d been on construction crews in the army. South Pacific. He knew how to handle a chain saw and clear away trees. He’d always thought that if he was ever going to get any kind of sideline going, he wanted it to be something that got him out in the fresh air. Listening to the wind on the night of the hurricane, he’d heard the crack and snap of a falling tree and it had brought the whole thing back to him, the fields he’d cleared, the forests hauled away. One thing led to another, he said. A new chain saw, a buddy with a truck. A place in Commack where he could dump the wood. The vestibule was identical to the one in his own house, although his wife was dark-eyed and thin-faced, younger than Mrs. Keane but well finished with childbearing. Twenty dollars wasn’t a lot to ask but she, like the other women who were not so friendly, said she would have to check with her husband first.

She followed him out to the front step. It was a beautiful day, the kind that always followed such a storm. The September sky a perfect blue and the odor of dried rain still in the air. The green odor of the fallen tree as well. Mrs. Keane and Mr. Persichetti both looked toward it. The grass had been torn by the exposed roots, but the tree itself seemed beautiful in repose. They could see through the branches the children who played there, some brightly colored, others mere shadows amid the leaves. Her boys and the Persichetti boy and a dozen neighborhood children among them.

“It will be a shame to take it away,” Mrs. Keane said, as if she’d already agreed to let him do the job. “We’re the most popular place in the neighborhood.” She put her hand under her belly, the way pregnant women do, holding up the weight. Mr. Persichetti watched his son slide along the downed trunk of the tree, his silver cowboy pistol drawn. There were strings of willow leaves, still strung on their wiry branches, wrapped around his helmet.

Impulsively, Mr. Persichetti called out his son’s name, foiling an ambush (at the sound of the man’s voice, Michael Keane’s head appeared on the other side of the upended roots). He said it was time to go. The response was all in the boy’s shoulders and arms-a slow sinking. Two more boys, also in helmets, emerged from the leaves, their indignation at being called from the game tempered only by the sight of Tony’s father on the steps in his work pants and T-shirt. He was a broad, short man with muscular arms. “It’s early,” his son called back, squinting. And it was the squinting, the openmouthed squinting and the hint of contradiction in his son’s voice that turned what had been mere impulse on his father’s part into command. It was early, another two hours before dinner, and there was certainly no need for him to drive Tony home-he hadn’t driven him here-but still he said, “Get in the truck,” and bent his powerful arm. He was a night nurse at Creedmoor, the state hospital, and what he had seen there, the patients he had hauled and handled-the vibration of mad voices he had felt through bodies pressed into his arms, held against his cheek and his chest-made him quick to raise his hand to his own lucky child, smart as a whip and perfectly formed.

Tony bent his head to remove the borrowed helmet. Mournfully, he handed the helmet and the pistol to Jacob. His father went down the steps and joined him at the curb. He guided Tony to the truck with his hand on the back of his son’s neck.

(“Shoot him in the foot,” Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. “Break his legs before you let him go.”)

The truck turned and headed down the street. The boys shook off the disruption and went back to their game. Mary Keane, returning to the house, her hand under her heavy belly, the baby, as far as she could tell, sound asleep within, wondered why it was that the Persichettis had only the two, Tony and little Susan, who was Annie’s age. She felt with some certainty that it would have been to Tony’s advantage if they’d had at least one other son. (She had in mind the man’s strong hand on the back of the boy’s neck.) It benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected. It reminded them they were not the center of the universe simply because they were loved by their parents. How many children, when you came right down to it (she would have said), were not loved by their parents? Never mind if the love was skillful or adept.

She picked up Jacob’s school jacket and the box of toy soldiers that had been left on the floor of the hall, but the effort sent a pain up her back-like a crack through plaster-and drained the blood from her head. She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully-a reluctant skater on a pond-got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen of them-it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that she should have been counting them off on her fingers-when the first cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable.

Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel, or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the rise and fall of the wind outside. Long before her husband had woken and asked her, Who could that be? she had seen-in the silent anticipation between each long gust, in the fear that rose as the sound grew more terrible each time, as if edging toward something unbearable-the parallel between the rise and fall of the storm and the rhythm of labor. Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it-or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only silence now, in the small living room. There was a baby doll and a stack of comic books in one of the chairs, a Wiffle ball beneath it. The boys’ board game with its scattered pieces was still on the rug, and there was a pale layer of dust over the hi-fi and the end tables. She wondered if the pregnancy had turned her slothful or if the room was always in some state of disorder and she was only, momentarily, seeing it clearly. Vaguely, she could hear the voices of the children in the side yard, climbing through the downed tree. It seemed to her (the pain rising again, third time) that they were not so much calling words as shining small silver lights into her ears. The gentle flash of a child’s voice-was it Jacob?-appearing here and there through the more general silence and the nausea of the clutching pain.

The phone was in the kitchen, and when she got herself up she would call her husband first, in his office. And then the operator to send an ambulance. And then one of the neighbors to come and watch the children. And then Pauline, who had promised to stay with the children when the time came, although time was supposed to have been still another month away and Pauline would sigh at the inconvenience, the altered plans. And this poor baby, so eager to be born, would emerge from the womb with unhappy Pauline ready to recount, on birthdays, at the birth of other children, at any of the innumerable occasions in her life when she was once again forced to abandon her plans, how she had just powdered her nose and put on her hat when the phone call came.

The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call “Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It was simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators, complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus. You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it cold?-because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back. Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.”

He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she drew her legs up against the pain. He had returned to say the Krafts down the street had an apple tree split in two that he was planning to remove at noon tomorrow (Mr. Kraft was a teacher and since the schools were closed he was there to answer his door and to engage Mr. Persichetti on the spot). He’d come back to say he could easily toss both the willow and the apple tree into his truck, and so charge her only fifteen.

He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery string and even-she might have planned this-a turkey baster, all of which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the housekeeper his own wife was-there were crumbs on the kitchen table and stained teacups in the sink-but there was a sweetness in the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold of his arm.

Mr. Persichetti called his patients God’s mistakes. He pressed his arms around them when the need arose and sometimes felt their wailing voices in his own flesh, in his chest, against his cheek. What was in their eyes, or, more precisely, what was not, he thought of as some failure on the part of God to fully animate what He had, perhaps too blithely, made. He thought of God then, God the Father anyway (for Jesus, of course, was a different case), as somewhat cavalier in His creations. Not indifferent-Jesus was proof of that, as was Mr. Persichetti himself, who might have worked construction with his powerful arms but had instead used the GI Bill to become a nurse-only swift and bustling and unheeding, like nature itself. Like the storm. When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness, and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away, his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale legs bare, and he asked, gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded and when the contraction had passed, added, “Modesty is always the first thing to go.”

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane.

He’d had the story from an Irish priest assigned to Creedmoor. “A sad case himself,” Mr. Persichetti said, and gently pulled the damp hem of her dress back over her thighs. For a moment he found himself incapable of remembering Mr. Keane’s face, although they’d been neighbors for perhaps ten years. Nor could he remember another conversation he’d had with this woman stretched before him now on her living-room couch, her hair damp and her eyes a kind of gray, or green. He took her hand as if she were his child, or his own wife.

“Apparently,” he said, “this Saint Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish chieftain, a pagan. But she had a beautiful Christian mother.” Gray eyes or green, he thought they were the one thing that might have made her pretty when she was young. “So the mother dies.” He paused only briefly. “When the girl’s about fourteen. And the chieftain goes crazy and tells his servants to go out and find another beautiful woman who resembled his dead wife so he can marry her.”

He paused again to touch her white lips with the wet towel. “They should be here soon,” he said softly, interrupting himself. There was a bit of mad laughter from the children outside. The sun through the lace curtains at the front window had placed a small spotlight on the arm of the sofa, just above her head. He could see by the color in her cheeks that another contraction was on the rise.

“The servants were evil,” he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Per-sichetti at the nurse’s station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. “They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do.” (“If you get my meaning,” the priest had said.) “But Dymphna ran off to Belgium.” He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. “Her crazy father followed her,” he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. “I guess he cut off her head.”

Mrs. Keane said, “Oh my,” but the contraction took hold and at the end of it she sobbed, “Mother of God,” which he supposed was the answer he should have given her in the first place.

Jesus and Mary, most of the saints, even the alcoholic priest who could calm an agitated patient with just the laying on of his swollen hands, Mr. Persichetti himself, plagued by pity-indications all that the Creator was not indifferent to the suffering He engendered, in His bustling, in His haste, but also that there would be no end to His mistakes. Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came (would it ever come?), the baby would most likely not survive, would be born with flesh and plenty of blood but underdeveloped lungs and insufficient breath. He heard the children calling to one another outside, Tony among them once again since his father was taking so long inside the house and (stinging injustice) had been wrong to drag him away in the first place, two hours before dinner. (Although Tony had quickly discovered that the earlier war game could not be recaptured; that in the twenty minutes he’d been gone, it had lost its life, lost its charm.)

Mr. Persichetti knew there were children growing in nearly every house in this neighborhood, in every borough and every town. Thousands more were being born today, being conceived-women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs. Keane herself already had three. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason’s taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God’s bustling. There was the Mother of God to turn to in prayer. There were the angels and the saints. There were the people like himself, plagued by pity the way other men were driven by ambition or greed, who would wade through the blood and the stool, the torn hair and ravaged flesh, the mad cries, to take the broken, raving thing-God’s mistake-into his arms.

When the next contraction had passed, he gently pushed the dish towels (printed with teapots, printed with kittens) under Mrs. Keane’s white thighs, pulling away Jacob’s soaked jacket. He put one hand on top of her belly. “Isn’t it lucky that you’re here?” she whispered, holding on to his strong arm. And then, a little later, “Isn’t it good the hurricane caused the tree to fall and so you came by?”

And Mr. Persichetti said it was good indeed, although he knew the baby might not survive.

“The storm came,” she said, catching her breath, “and then a fireman came to the door in the middle of the storm, out of nowhere, and told us about the tree falling, and then you came by.” She grimaced and paused, squeezing his hand. “And came back,” she said as the contraction passed. “Because-who was it?” she said.

“The Krafts,” he told her, “down the street.”

“The Krafts lost a tree as well,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “Lucky for me.”

And then she breathed another “Mother of God.”

His T-shirt was soaked all across the middle. There was now the salty scent of her perspiration, and his, and the scent of blood. Her bare knee touched the side of his face. He saw the baby’s dark scalp, streaks of hair. She cried out and he was aware, too, of the sound of the ambulance somewhere. He raised the volume of his own voice, a string of reassurances against his own fear that the baby would not survive. Skull and forehead and closed eyes streaked with blood. He reached for the turkey baster, cleared the mouth even as he tugged, gently, at the head in his hands. The shoulders and arms and the surprising burst of the pale blue umbilical cord, thick and writhing, and then the baby was in his hands-”A little girl,” he told her-and the medics, the ambulance guys were in the room behind him, around him, a knee against his back as someone said, “Step aside,” and leaned down to take the little thing from him. The baby’s mouth opened and two fists went up in fury. And then it cried, but so thinly.

But of course, he couldn’t step. He discovered that he was kneeling at her side. He merely sat back on his bottom and then crawled a bit, avoiding their shoes. Someone was opening a medical bag and a stretcher was coming through the front door. He blessed himself and then said, “I’m in medicine, an RN,” lest they think him a fool. Then he leaned his back against a chair.

As they were hustling her and the child out the door (where the children from the tree had already gathered) he said to one of the medics, “Six weeks premature.” The guy shook his head. He had a crew cut and a broad face and his white coat buttoned across the shoulder. “That baby’s full-term,” he said. “Seven pounds at least.” Mr. Persichetti shrugged, rather nonchalantly, among men once more. “She said she had six more weeks.”

And the man shrugged, too, as if to confirm how well they both understood, being in the profession, that it was all a small matter, this coming into life and going out, merely part of the routine. “She can’t count,” he said bluntly.

And then he laughed. He paused in the tiny hallway, put his elbow to Mr. Persichetti’s strong arm. “My wife always knows exactly,” he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. “But that’s probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine’s and my birthday, so it’s not hard to figure.” He stepped out the door and then turned to say, “I got two kids born in November, two in June. No kidding.”

The children gathered along the driveway briefly looked away from the ambulance as the man went down the steps, shouting back to Mr. Persichetti. “This guy,” he said, pointing at the house, “is a lucky man, if she don’t know if it’s been nine months or seven.” Mr. Persichetti raised a hand, agreeing, nodding and laughing, but also saying under his breath, Get going, get going. He would not rest easily until he was sure she was in a doctor’s care. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.

Carefully, dipping carefully-the broad backside in the good wool skirt-Pauline reached into the car and took the infant from Mary Keane’s arms. There was the pink receiving blanket, the long white shawl, the lace bib of her homecoming dress. Pauline stepped back, onto the grass that lined the driveway, the baby in her arms.

Mary said, “Where’s her bonnet?” and then searched the floor, looking for it. Her husband was coming around the car to help her get out. Pauline held the baby in her arms, dipped her large, powdered face closer to its own, her eyes taking in, there on the grass at the side of the driveway, the cashmere shawl (her own gift, from Saks), the receiving blanket, the tiny body, the little face. Slowly, Pauline raised her left hand and cupped it over the child’s skull to keep her warm. The sun was high but there was a clean chill in the air. The smell of autumn, and of the sawdust left behind from the fallen tree. She held the baby against her chest and raised her elbow to bring the small sleeping face nearer her own.

“Here it is,” Mary said, lifting the bonnet from the floor.

Inside, the children were waiting around the dining-room table with their homemade cards and the frosted birthday cake their father had brought from the bakery this morning. Inside, Pauline’s overnight bag was packed and waiting in the vestibule. As Mary, carrying the new baby, preceded her into the house, Pauline slipped her jacket from the hall closet and lifted the bag, even as the three children gathered around their mother. She simply walked out again, through the front door. She went down the steps. She raised her hand without turning when they called after her. She raised her hand without turning as John Keane followed her down the steps to say, “At least let me give you a lift to the bus stop.”

“Go back to your new family,” she said without turning. “This is a precious moment. There shouldn’t be any strangers at this homecoming.” Meaning it, every word of it, but not turning to see how thoroughly her sudden departure had disrupted the homecoming anyway, how the children had looked away from their mother and the new baby to stare after her, how John Keane had looked back to his wife, their new daughter in her arms, to shrug, to show her his annoyance. The woman drove him crazy.

Without turning, Pauline walked with her bag the three blocks to the bus stop, then changed at Jamaica for the bus home.

At her building, she struggled with the six days of mail shoved every which way into her box (she’d had no time, when the call came, to leave her mailbox key with her neighbor), bills and advertising circulars and bank statements and a mailman who would probably keep pushing mail into her box even if she was gone for six months, dead for a year-only one of the phalanx of indifferent strangers she faced every day.

Upstairs in her apartment she unpacked her bag-two house-dresses in polished cotton and a floral housecoat, another good skirt and sweater and the underwear, girdle, and stockings she’d have to wash out in the sink this evening. In the bottom of the bag, beneath her makeup case and her slippers, the card Jacob had drawn for her-a vase with six spindly flowers: a purple tulip, what seemed to be a red rose, and four simple daisies (she guessed that the success with the tulip had inspired the rose and the failure of the rose had led to the safer daisies). Inside the folded piece of blue construction paper he had written only, in careful cursive, From Jacob.

Although she preferred Michael, whose distrust of anything placid echoed her own, she put the card on her dresser.

Moving into her small kitchen, Pauline went through the refrigerator, tossing out the milk and the sliced ham she had not had time to dispose of last week, when the call came that the baby had arrived early and they were on their way to the hospital. A minute later and they would have missed her, she told John Keane, when the call came. She had just powdered her nose and put on her hat.

She rode the elevator down again to shop briefly-it was Sunday and the stores closed early-for what she needed: milk and eggs and bread and margarine. She told the lady at the deli where she ordered her ham that it had not been a vacation by any means: three children to look after and a much neglected house to clean. The lady at the counter-Maria, in housecoat and worn slippers and swollen ankles-called her some good friend to do all that and Pauline said, “Oh, but the baby is beautiful,” a kind of reprimand, as if it had been Maria herself who had complained so ungenerously about the dirty house.

The grocery bag was light enough but still her back ached and her legs were tired. She had slept fitfully all week in little Annie’s bedroom, wall to wall with stuffed animals that the child never played with and that Pauline would have donated to an orphanage, had the choice been hers. And the little girl had cried herself to sleep in her brother’s bedroom every night, lonesome for her mother. And that little Italian man in the side yard two days in a row, with his chain saw and his hatchet, clearing the fallen tree. Standing too close to her, Pauline felt certain, when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.

The sparse trees along her block were showing signs of red and gold but there was also the smell of dog droppings and bus fumes and sun-warmed garbage in the air, which you didn’t have out on Long Island. And the Empire State Building across the river was useless, a painted backdrop at this hour on a Sunday, its offices empty, its very reason for being temporarily drained. Her company’s own building, her empty office within, not three blocks away. Home again, she changed into another housecoat, the red velvet one she had made for herself last Christmas, the covered buttons she’d found at A amp;S a satisfying perfect match. She boiled an egg for dinner. Mixed a Manhattan to sip with Walter Cronkite. She answered the phone only the second time it rang, Mary calling to say I wish you hadn’t run off (but not meaning it) and that the house has never been so clean (no kidding) and what did you put in your mashed potatoes that made the kids love them so (a little sugar and a little garlic salt, but Pauline wouldn’t tell).

Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months. Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.

“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane said.

The little Italian man had pulled the slipcover off the couch, bundled it together with the tea towels and the jacket and brought it all to the washing machine in the basement, but Pauline had done the scrubbing and the bleaching and the dyeing. Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion-what a mess it had made-restored order, made things right for the homecoming.

“And how’s my angel?” Pauline asked.

“At the moment,” Mary said, “she is sound asleep on Jacob’s lap.”

Her own hunger to hold the baby again struck her as just that, a hunger-the ache of hollow longing, an awareness, as if for the first time in her life, of her own arms being empty.

“I wanted to give you some time with your new family,” Pauline said, and meant it-although she couldn’t say, too, that she had not meant to disrupt the homecoming with her own dramatic departure. Nor could she deny that she’d wanted both: the thoroughly self-effacing departure and the attention such generous self-effacement surely earned her. She’d wanted to give the family their time together, but she’d wanted as well a more vigorous pursuit, after all she’d done. It wouldn’t have taken much, after all, for John Keane to have wrestled the overnight case from her hand.

“Kiss her for me,” she said and hung up the phone and faced the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things-the yellow light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds, someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have another Manhattan with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these last hours of a Sunday evening. Nice as he’d tried to be-he’d come home from the hospital each evening to put the children to bed, and thanked her profusely each morning for the coffee and toast she put before him, he’d gotten the children ready for church without waking her this morning-she would not want to be married to balding John Keane for all the tea in China. She’d heard him singing to himself in the bathroom, for instance, fiat as a tire. Heard him clipping his toenails one night before he went to bed.

She recognized the simple pleasure of her own room and her own pillow and no child weeping for her mother across the hall, the boys whispering words of comfort but not thinking to call on Pauline for help.

In the morning there was the rattle of traffic and the wheeze of buses, the rising voice of the radio, the whistle of a teakettle. The slatted sunlight, as it did this time of year, moved across her bed and her quilted housecoat and her dresser and onto the construction-paper card that Jacob had made so that later when Clare (who last night had slept soundly in her brother’s arms) lifted it to read the simple message, she would not be able to say if the front of the card had once been gray or blue, only that her brother had used a ballpoint pen and had pressed so firmly into the soft paper that she could feel the shape of the letters in relief on the back.

During the war, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick’s, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church-it had to do with something some nun had said-she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could you pray with any sincerity if you were preoccupied with the thought of avoiding lunch with the lonely and annoying girl who was impatiently waiting for your prayers to be over?

If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs.

They were at the dining-room table, eating the frosted cake their father had bought at the bakery to celebrate the baby’s homecoming.

During the war, Pauline’s mother passed away and there were really only a handful of people at the funeral-four of them girls from the office. Pauline sat alone on one side of the church and her brother and his family on the other. None of the dates Pauline had, many of which their mother herself had arranged, led anywhere at all.

It’s easy, their mother said, to love the lovable. There’s no virtue in that.

They were using the good china and the embroidered table linen. Milk had been poured into cocktail glasses. The woman at the bakery had written “Welcome Home, Clare” on the white cake. Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry.

Michael had thought himself indifferent to the new arrangements-Pauline, not his mother, there to greet him with her big, powdered face when he got home from school (and making him hang up his jacket and pick up his games), Pauline there at the dinner table with them, urging them to take more of everything they didn’t want and laughing only (but with real delight) when he said his teacher didn’t have a mustache but a nunstache, Pauline sitting behind him in the living room as he did his homework on his lap with the television on, asking every minute or so, “Doesn’t the TV distract you, doesn’t the TV keep you from concentrating?” He’d thought himself indifferent to it all until his mother came through the front door, the new baby in her arms, and he knew for the first time that he’d hated every minute of Pauline’s reign. As had Jacob, although Jacob had known this to be true throughout the ordeal.

It wasn’t that they’d found Pauline unlovable. The entire world of adult strangers was more or less unlovable, with their huge earlobes and their smoky breaths, their yellow teeth, their intrusions. It was only that the house was empty without their mother in it. Recognizable still in all its familiarity: the vestibule where they dropped their book bags and (at Pauline’s insistence) hung up their coats, the living room where the slipcover was newly dark, the cluttered dining room, the Formica counters in the kitchen, the Dutch Boy cookie jar, the worn carpet on the stairs, the sunlight through the windows of their bedroom which seemed always, from the time they woke until darkness fell, the sunlight of four thirty in the afternoon, all of it familiar but seen, for the first time, as it might look when it was empty, with none of them there. This both puzzled them (because all three of them were indeed there, and Pauline was there, and by nine o’clock each night when visiting hours at the hospital were over, their father was there) and filled them with despair, which was what made them tell their mother, once she had returned, the baby in her arms, that they hated Pauline. That they hoped they would never again be left in her care.

It wasn’t true, they hadn’t hated her at all (Jacob had struggled with the choice between “From” and “Love” on the card he drew for her; Michael had laughed heartily himself when Pauline said that Mr. MacLeod next door, who looked like he dyed his hair with Orange Crush, should lay off that piano and find someplace else to tinkle; Annie now had three different vials of perfume samples tucked in her sock drawer, courtesy of Pauline), but it was an explanation that lingered, a conviction they would share for the rest of their lives.

“You choose likable people to be your friends,” their mother said. She sat back from the table, the baby in her arms, and moved the prongs of her fork, the good silver, through the white icing. “And you have to love your family whether they’re likable or not.” She brought the icing to her lips. “But the people you have to feel sorry for are the ones without family. Unlikable people without family or friends. Who’s going to care about them?”

Gripped by their new conviction, the three children shook their heads. “Just don’t ever leave us with her again,” they said, emphatically, crying it out, not because it was what they truly felt but because it was the only, boisterous way they could demonstrate (other than this birthday party in the dining room, on a Sunday afternoon, with the good silver and the good china and the embroidered tablecloth) their joy at her return.

Their mother, the baby in her arms, held up the small silver fork-it was her wedding silver. In the midst of joy there was, there would always be, the injunction to remember the sorrowful. “You must be kind,” their mother said. “I know it’s not easy. Pauline’s not easy. But what would happen to her if there was no one willing to be kind?”

Later, recalling the homecoming, Annie would tell Michael that like the infant in a fairy tale, Clare’s fate, her future, at that moment, must have been sealed. Long after all of them had scattered, Jacob, Michael, Annie, their mother and father, scattered-as their parents would have said-to the four winds, Clare would have Pauline, still a royal pain in the ass, in her care.