After This

III

Man is immortal, John Keane thought, or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking.

You either pray to the dead or you don’t.

But the real question before them this winter evening, the six men on the building committee, the pastor, the two priests, the architect, the accountant, and the dead, beloved pope who still smiled at them in oil from the end of the rectory dining room, was far simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?

Like something out of a parable (The Good Servant? The Twelve Talents?) each of the six men had brought to the table this evening the stack of pledges they had garnered over the past six weeks from the people of the parish who had not responded voluntarily to the pastor’s initial appeal for funds. Two weeks into the New Year, when, they figured, the financial burden of Christmas might have just begun to ease, the six men had divided the more or less eight square miles of St. Gabriel’s parish into six sectors. After some rigorous debate, it had been decided that the men would not solicit from their own recalcitrant neighbors. (There was the matter of financial privacy, the threat of hard feelings among men whose children played together, whose wives might see each other every day.) John Keane had the names of thirty-three parishioners on his list, all of them more or less strangers-although he recognized many of the faces from church when they came to their doors to let him in. There was the phone call first: on behalf of Father McShane, I’d like to come by some evening to discuss the new church and gym. Then the appointment itself, usually scheduled between seven and eight so as not to interrupt anyone’s dinner. They were for the most part strangers, but kicking the snow off his heels or brushing the rain from his hat, he never once felt that he was stepping into their homes for the first time. They brought him to their dining-room tables, or to the kitchen. There were children in pajamas on the staircase or stretched across the living-room floor, or biting pencils over homework on whatever table their parents weren’t going to use. There were dogs, usually, pushed behind basement doors or banished to the garage. The smell of whatever had been made for dinner still in the air-garlic in the Italian homes and green pepper in the Polish, something fried among the Germans, broiled meat with the Irish. They offered him coffee or tea, sometimes sherry or a beer. The wives, for the most part, hung up his coat and put down the plate of cookies and then disappeared-or lingered only long enough to admire the architect’s drawing on the front of the pledge packet. (Only the more observant asked, “Where’s Krause’s store?” Only the more prescient shook their heads skeptically when he said Krause had agreed to sell his property to the church.) He’d hear them walking around upstairs as he made his pitch to the man of the house, heard the vague repetition of spelling words or dates or catechism lessons as the men’s conversations moved, inevitably, away from the financing of the new church and gym to the war, what service, what theater, what division, what years.

John Keane was older than most of the men by a decade. None of them asked him to call them by their first names, nor did he. The formality-he wore a suit and a topcoat to every call-seemed appropriate for the transaction he was there to discuss. The wives appeared again only when he rose to leave. They stood beside their husbands as the men shook hands. He would return in a week to pick up the sealed envelope, for Father McShane’s eyes only. They were aiming for one hundred percent participation. In the mimeographed letter inside the packet Father McShane had asked only for “prayerful discernment” regarding what each family could afford to contribute. The men were impossible to read, but the wives’ eyes told him everything-they were eager or wary or resigned, those of them who still loved their husbands, or their lives. Others showed him the battle already brewing, or, far worse, an amused conviction that Mr. Keane had not seen through them, through their guise of good parents, good Catholics, of domestic harmony or financial stability. In every case, he had the sense when he left the house that he had at least given the family by his presence alone the gift of a single, hushed hour of quiet civility, good behavior. It was, perhaps, as close as he would ever come to feeling like a priest.

Now the pledges had been counted (not, it turned out, exclusively by Father McShane but by Father Melrose and Father Hecht, his assistants, as well, and by Mr. Marrs, an accountant, whose respect for privacy-Father McShane had assured them all-was as inviolate as any confessor’s), and through the power of prayer and (Father McShane said) good old-fashioned shoe leather, the initial goal had been more than met. But, he added (nerves or indigestion or simple displeasure caused him to precede all difficult announcements with a swallowed burp), there was an obstacle. Mr. Krause would not sell.

The architect’s design for the new gym and eighth-grade classrooms was a marvel of symmetry. There was the simple brick square of the old school building’s left side, updated by a wide glass door, then the new entrance to the new gym, a single-story swoop of steel and glass, then another, new brick square to balance the old.

A series of low white marble steps led from the gym’s modern entrance to a green lawn (Saint Gabriel himself, in white stone, at the center of it) that was bracketed by two curving white paths that led directly to the sidewalk and the street. Mr. Krause’s property, which consisted of a backyard, a small detached garage, and an eighty-year-old clapboard house out of which he had run a delicatessen for thirty-five years, began at the gym’s modern entrance and ran to the edge of the sidewalk. A year ago, when Father McShane first approached him, Mr. Krause had agreed that he was more than ready to sell. His was one of the last houses left along what had become a mostly commercial boulevard, and the last bit of frontage on a block that was equally divided between St. Gabriel’s Church and School on the one end and a small strip of stores on the other. A descendant of the Germans who had first farmed this land and established this village in the wilds of Long Island just east of Queens, Mr. Krause knew that the postwar sweep of homes and families had already obliterated most of the old traces of the last century, and that his little farmhouse was one of these. It was only a matter of time, he said.

He had been looking, as it happened, into moving the deli to a storefront in a new mall in the next town.

But buried in Father McShane’s pitch to pay Mr. Krause a handsome price for his house and his land was the bad seed of his own destruction-or so the priest told them. (John Keane sought to remember the parable.) “The parish is burgeoning,” Father McShane had said. The school was bursting at its seams. Mr. Krause was a Lutheran so he might not be fully aware, but Father McShane, in his pride and boastfulness (through my fault, he told the men) had assured him that eight Masses were offered every Sunday morning-seven, eight thirty, ten, and one-in the church and simultaneously in the auditorium, and still there were folks standing in the aisles. There were double shifts of kindergarten in the school, morning and afternoon, to accommodate all the children. Building the gym was only the first step. Once it was up and Masses could be held there on Sunday mornings, then the old church was coming down and a new, larger one would take its place. Father McShane was thinking of something “in the round” to suit the new liturgy.

But of course Mr. Krause knew the Mass schedule and the school schedule at St. Gabriel’s. Also the hours of the Mothers Club meetings and the Holy Name Society meetings, the basketball games, the first communions and confirmations. Father McShane said three, sometimes four Masses on Sunday mornings, but he had never once edged his way into Mr. Krause’s little store after any of them, never found himself pressed cheek to jowl with thirty other parishioners vying to order cold cuts or potato salad or those marvelous doughnuts from Mr. and Mrs. Krause, their two sons, and the daughter who worked the counter. He’d never reached an arm through the crowd outside to throw some coins into an open cigar box and grab a Sunday Daily News before they were all gone. Father McShane had forked boiled ham and rolled pieces of Swiss cheese onto paper plates, added a dab of good mustard and some coleslaw, snitched a green olive from the tray, in living rooms after funeral Masses or at backyard graduation parties, but he had never thought to note how these always came from Krause’s store.

The parish is burgeoning, he’d said, and no doubt Mr. Krause saw housewives holding wrapped trays of cold cuts high over their heads, like Copacabana chorus girls, as they maneuvered through the Sunday-morning crush. Husbands sent back to get a good-size container of rice pudding. He saw St. Gabriel’s kids in their uniforms coming in for sodas, for chips, for a quick perusal of the candy displayed beneath the counter, saw them handing their mother’s scribbled shopping list to him over the deli case, or ordering a bologna hero because there had been no time this morning for making lunches. And now added to that vision, thanks to Father McShane and his (he was the first to admit it) big mouth, bricklayers and electricians and plumbers and painters filling the place every lunchtime for however many years or months it took to build the gym and the eighth-grade classrooms, and then to tear down one church and put up another.

Mr. Krause understood that the old places were fading, the dairy farms and the potato fields and the clapboard houses of the last century, and nostalgia over the loss of a past that had never been his had made him momentarily lose sight of the present, and of the indisputable fact that there wasn’t a storefront anywhere on Long Island that could beat this location. When Father McShane returned with his generous offer and a copy of the architect’s drawing that graced the cover of each pledge form, Mr. Krause said simply that he’d be a fool to sell.

How, then, would they break ground in the spring?

From the far end of the priests’ dining room, Pope John XXIII, even in profile, looked benevolent and amused. The men on the building committee had wondered, only half joking, if they had to wait for his canonization before they could send the good old man their petitions or if they couldn’t start praying to him even now. With Mr. Krause’s store stubbornly in place there was only a sliver of street access available to the school-a narrow driveway, an alleyway, really, bordered by the cinder-block wall that divided the church parking lot where the bulk of the new building was to sit and the Dumpsters that served the small strip mall on the far corner. The design, the one printed on every pledge form the men had delivered and returned, displayed on a gold easel in the church vestibule and in Sister Rose’s office at the school, sent to the bishop, approved by the diocese, would have to be scrapped, utterly changed. Father McShane swallowed another burp. “None of these people,” he said, indicating the stacks of pledges, “will feel he’s gotten what he’s paid for.”

Is it too early, the men asked, only half joking, to pray to Pope John? Or would they have to wait till he was a saint? Wasn’t anyone in heaven more or less a saint?

If that’s the case, Mr. Marrs asked, does anyone here know any recently deceased architects?

The six men and the three priests and the accountant all turned their eyes to the living architect who stood above the plans that were spread across the dining-room table with his cheeks puffed out and his brow furrowed. Thus far he had donated his work, both time and material, with the hope that he would then be selected to design the new church, but he could not very well afford (he was considering the best way to say this) to do it all over again, gratis. He could offer them, he said, two options. He could turn the entrance around-he pretended to pick up the building with thumb and forefinger-put the back of the gym and the new classrooms to Mr. Krause’s backyard, but then the spanking-new entrance of steel and glass that Father McShane was so fond of would face only the cemetery.

“Unacceptable,” the pastor said.

Or-he moved the building again-he could turn it to the side, facing the alleyway and the cinder-block wall. Goodbye green lawn, but the white statue of Saint Gabriel might easily be moved into the lobby. And the alleyway, at least, could accommodate a car or a truck or a school bus that needed, for whatever reason, to pull up to the front door. It was a compromise no doubt, the architect said. Not nearly as grand as the original, but they could break ground in the spring and have the gym going in a year’s time. Which meant the new church could get started and it was the new church, after all, that would be the showpiece.

“It seems a shame,” Father McShane said, “that one man’s intransigence will leave generations of St. Gabriel’s students in an alley.”

Collectively, the men bowed their heads and considered this.

The six men on the building committee had jobs that only vaguely qualified them for the task-Mr. Keeley was an electrician, Bill Schultz managed a bank, Mr. Kozlosky sold insurance, both Mr. Keane and Mr. Battle were with the telephone company, Lou Pintaro owned a garden center-but each of them was happy to concede the point when the architect replied that a man had to make a living and provide for his family, first and foremost, come what may. No one could blame Mr. Krause for that.

It was late. No one could blame the men for wanting this business to be concluded. They had work tomorrow. They were missing Bonanza. Mrs. Arnold was waiting in the kitchen to clear away the coffee cups and get home herself. Father McShane folded his arms across his chest. He called the men by their first names, Robert? Bill? Jerry? John? Larry? Lou? And one by one they all agreed. It was not ideal, but it was a solution. With Mr. Krause dug in like this, there weren’t many alternatives. Mr. Marrs said, “Those Krauts do dig in,” and the men laughed, pushing back their chairs. The matter was settled. The new church, then, would be the showpiece.

In the cold black sky over the rectory parking lot, there was Orion, as he’d always been. And always would be. Jacob had drawn the constellation once and labeled it “O’Ryan.” At dinner tonight, Michael had announced that a kid in school asked if Jacob was a Jew. Michael thought this was very funny. Jacob had brushed it aside. So what, he’d said. Jesus was a Jew. There was something rehearsed in the boy’s reply. John Keane wondered if one of the nuns hadn’t provided it to him, against another kid’s teasing. Across the dinner table, his wife had bowed her head, more effective than catching his eye. Fourteen years was no time at all in the life of an I told you so.

Mr. Keane got into his cold car. Let the engine run a bit. The other men were pulling out of the drive and he saluted them as they drove past. They had done the work of their church. Solved the question of Mr. Krause. At home, there would be a light left on in the kitchen for them, or a lamp lit in the living room. A wife under a caftan, watching TV, or in bed, asleep already, or pretending to be. The scent of dinner still in the air. A child (probably Michael, but maybe even Clare) still awake. Some of them might open a beer or pour two fingers of scotch. Or walk the dog. Read the paper.

They were either immortal, or they were not. It was prayer, all of it, this talking to the dead, or it was howling at the moon. At the winter sky. At Orion. O’Ryan. It was another bit of misapprehension, another mistaken imagining-the dead pope hearing their prayers, his parents, his brother Frank, all the angels and all the saints, the other Jacob. Or it was true.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

Positively, Mr. Shean.

At home, his wife was at the dining-room table with Jacob. What distinguished this room from the priests’ was the clutter of bills and magazines on the server, the simplicity of the small chandelier (the priests’ was Waterford), the dust. A portrait of a pretty little girl in a wide-brimmed hat rather than the old pope. She had his history book before her and her forehead in her hands. Jacob was sitting quietly to her left, looking ready for sleep. “It’s late,” John Keane said, coming in, but she ignored him.

“Battle of Hastings,” she said and he answered, dejectedly, in his new voice, “1066.” His face was changing, too, growing thinner and longer, balanced somewhere between homely and beautiful.

“Magna Carta?” There was silence. The boy frowned. Swallowed hard, perhaps resisting tears. His Adam’s apple, also new, looked swollen. His father had an impulse to turn away.

From the couch in the living room, Michael called out, “1215,” and Jacob slammed his fist on the table and, standing, threw back his chair. “I’m going to bed,” he said, and his father might have reprimanded him if the boy had not also said, turning slightly toward them, “Good night.”

Mary Keane looked up at her husband. Her face was colorless and worn, as dimpled and lined as a potato. She ran her finger down a double page of dates and names and places. The end-of-chapter review. “He doesn’t know half of this,” she said.

He shrugged, walked through the living room where Michael, lounging on the couch in his pajamas, said, “It’s easy.”

His father said, “Don’t be a smart aleck,” and then, when he had hung up his coat, “Get to bed.”

Upstairs, in their room, Michael said, matter-of-factly, as if it were the middle of the day. “Battle of Hastings, 1066, Magna Carta, 1215…”

“I’m asleep.” Jacob had his back to him. His voice was muffled.

“I thought Jews were supposed to be smart,” Michael said. In the dim light from the hallway, he couldn’t tell at first what his brother had thrown at him-it missed anyway and hit the floor. But then he saw it was the flashlight Jacob kept at his bedside and the potential pain it might have caused filled him with indignation. They were on each other in seconds, legs and arms and blows struck into ears, into shoulders. The overhead light came on-if they hadn’t expected that it would they would not have begun the battle-and their father barked a single word. He dragged them apart, both of them splotched red in the cheeks and across their shoulders and throats, but whether from blows or their own fury, their father couldn’t have said.

He grabbed them, both of them panting, by their shirts. Their mother was in the doorway with Clare in her arms and Annie was next to her. “Enough,” was what he said.

He shoved them both down on the edge of their beds. “Sit.”

They glared at each other, across the short space between their beds, believing, each of them, that there was no greater flaw in all the vast design of the universe than these two made brothers, condemned to this same small room. Only their father between them, saying words, kept them from colliding again.

“Flesh and blood,” were the words their father was saying, standing between them. Michael’s eyes fell on the black flashlight, rolled just under Jacob’s bed, and he pointed to it as if it could bear witness. “He threw the flashlight,” he said, before his father cut him off. “Your own brother,” their father said, raising his voice again. “Who,” he asked with his finger in the air, “who do you think you’ll have on your side when your mother and I are gone? Who do you think you’ll be able to turn to when you’re as old as I am and there’s something you need-a buck or two, or a piece of advice, maybe just someone you can ask, Remember when? Your friends? Your Little League team?” He waved his broad hand. “They’ll be scattered to the four winds. They’ll have forgotten your name.” He paused, as if waiting for them to speak. And then he said, “Your family. Your flesh and blood, that’s who you’ll have. If you’re lucky. Your two sisters. Each other. That’s who you’ll have.”

Michael held out his arm once more. “It could have really hurt,” he said, trying again; the occasions when Jacob struck the first blow were so rare. Their father put his hand in the air. “Enough,” he said again. “Apologize,” he said, suddenly weary. “Then say your prayers and go to sleep.”

He walked past them, past their mother and the two girls, turning off the overhead light as he did. Into the darkness, with Clare in her arms, their mother whispered, “Think of poor Uncle Frank.”

“He threw the flashlight at me,” Michael said, all in a rush.

His mother peered into the shadowed room. His sisters, little Clare and Annie both, stared at him too, duplicating her eyes.

“Think what your father would give,” she told him, whispering, “to have his own brother beside him for just another night.” Then she walked away.

Jacob was slipping his pale feet under the covers, awkwardly, as if his feet were much bigger and his legs much longer than he could manage. He threw himself at his pillow like a landed fish, put his back to his brother and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. After only a second or two of silence, he said, “Sorry, Michael.”

Michael said nothing. He remained seated on the edge of his bed, the lumpy whorls of the chenille bedspread just under his palms. He looked into the lighted hallway, heard his mother putting Clare back into her bed, and asking Annie to put her head down. Then he heard them praying, “Ever this night, be at my side…” Next door, Mr. MacLeod was playing his piano again, each note just a slight vibration against their bedroom wall.

Michael had only a vague recollection: Uncle Frank had looked like their father, only ugly. A broader, taller, bizarro-world version of their father with more hair and bigger teeth and a white handkerchief that he would mop his maroon face with, like Louis Armstrong. He drove Cadillacs and always spoke to them in a voice like Donald Duck’s. When he visited, mixed nuts and chips with onion dip were served, and they would hear him downstairs late into the night, telling long, loud stories that involved a multitude of voices-Porky Pig, Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Durante-stories that made his parents scream with laughter. Sometimes, lying in the dark, listening, missing most of it, he and Jacob would laugh, too.

Michael watched his mother cross the hallway to her own room. Heard his parents’ voices. On the floor by his feet, just under the fringe of Jacob’s bedspread was the flashlight he had thrown. Quickly, Michael bent down and picked it up and then slipped into bed with it. He turned it on under the blankets, put his fingers over it to see if he could count the bones. Turned it up to the ceiling. He wrote his name, drew a face. The light went off in the hallway. He moved the beam over Jacob’s back, the bedspread and the blanket, his dark head, his ear.

He moved it down the length of his brother’s body and over the wooden footboard of his bed, past the dresser they shared, out the door. Leaning out over his own mattress, he saw the light catch the doorknob of the linen closet, the door to his sisters’ room. He willed the light to push the door open a bit more. He could then move the beam over Annie’s face, play it across her eyelids.

“Michael,” he heard his mother say from his parents’ room. She was trying to keep her voice low, but not whispering. “Go to sleep,” she said. She sounded not exactly far away but heading there, as if she had stopped in the middle of her leaving. “Do you hear me?” she said. He imagined she was speaking to him from over her shoulder, just as she was stepping out, maybe through one of her bedroom windows, maybe following his father, her hands on the window frame, her foot on the sill, their father already gone before her (when we’re gone, he had said) into the night. “Put out that light,” she said, over her shoulder, as he imagined it. And he did. In the darkness, he felt more certain of their absence. His parents had left the house and if he called out “Mom?” only Jacob and the girls would hear him. If there were a knock at the door tonight, it would be left to him to answer. He would take Jacob’s flashlight. He imagined Pauline, scratching at the glass, wanting to get in. Lying alone in the darkness, he formed the words in his mind, willed them across the room, but did not speak them out loud. “Sorry, Jacob.”

Instead, he whispered, “Mr. MacLeod is tinkling on his piano again.”

And then they were both laughing in the dark.

They should have come earlier in the day, but it was a World’s Fair, after all, and there had been much to distract them. Now the sun was low and orange, radiating heat like a glowing coal. The asphalt that had been wet and clean this morning-hosed down by jumpsuited workers intent, it seemed, on lending the paved-over park a hint of morning dew-was now gummy and pliant underfoot. Now heat waves rose from it, smeared the air and made a mirage of the shoes and the ankles and the pink knees of the passing crowds. The painted benches had grown too hot to sit on. The shrubs and sparse trees were limp. Now the jumpsuited men walked listlessly, clicking their long-handled brooms against the opened and closed mouths of their long-handled dustbins. The passengers in the sleek Glide-a-Rides, erect and smiling earlier in the day as they tested a bit of space-age transportation, now slumped in the molded plastic seats or gazed out from behind their sunglasses, unimpressed even with the future. It was the end of the day.

In another hour, the sun would dip into the Hudson and the humidity would begin to give way. In another hour-by the time they got through the exhibit-the lights in the trees and on the pavilions and under the fountain that surrounded the Unisphere would draw the eye up, to the spires and the arches and the silvery searchlights of the fair, to the stars themselves. But not now. Now every head was bent under the day’s accumulated heat, every grimy collar and darkened arm ring exposed, every stranger’s arm or bare shoulder-as they joined the line outside the exhibit-was sticky, unpleasantly cool.

“We should have come earlier,” Mary Keane said, although, she supposed, earlier the line might have been longer still.

Beside her, Annie stood on her toes to glimpse the distance to the entrance and then leaned out to see how many more had joined the line behind them. There was solace in the seven or eight-and now another four-who would have to wait longer still. She stepped back into place. There was a tall, older couple ahead of them, the woman fat, the man slightly stooped. Behind them, a younger couple, but not so young that the woman didn’t look a little foolish, hanging-in this heat-on the man’s hairy arm.

They had already missed the exhibit twice. Once, the first time they had come to the fair, when they had Clare and the two boys, who had balked at waiting an hour and a half to see a statue. Once again when their father was also along. After only ten minutes on the long line, he had shown them his wrist and declared that if they were not all in the car in the next half hour it would be a nightmare on the Grand Central.

(Because he was a man who always knew precisely when they must all be in the car, knew precisely the minute after which the trip would be in vain, impossible, a nightmare. “Look at the time,” turning furiously on his wife as if she were both the single force delaying them and the single reason in all the world that he sought to wage this battle. It made little difference if their arrival or departure was meant to be precise or merely eventual, he held his wrist in the air, his fist clenched as if he would bring it down on their heads if they failed to understand-tapping the face of his watch-that time was against them.)

But now they were just the two-mother and daughter-and while Mary Keane, in deference to her husband’s habit of mind rather than out of any impatience of her own, reprimanded herself for not getting here earlier, she also made calm accommodation for what would clearly be a long wait: a later bus home, was all, she told herself. A phone call to the boys to tell them to fix some spaghetti. Another to Pauline, who had Clare for the day. Nothing else to stop them, really, from finally seeing this through.

“Probably,” she said to her daughter, “it’s best to have left this for last. Probably after you see this you won’t want to see anything else.”

Together, months ago, they had watched on TV as the statue arrived. Or at least they had seen the crate that contained it as it was lowered from a ship. One of the world’s most profound and precious works of art, taken from Rome for the first time in history. The television showed men reaching up to touch the wooden crate as it slowly descended. Carved by the artist in his youth, nearly five hundred years ago.

And the line was moving. Shuffling, really, as if the hot asphalt pulled at their feet, and with so little distance between them all that each step brought the bump or brush of another body, a bare forearm, a soft hip. The touch of a toe against your heel. Among the fair’s sweet, pervasive smell of Belgian waffles, there was a stirring of human odors, perfume and aftershave and sweat and hair warmed by the sun. The odor of breath as they all turned to one another to say, “At least it’s moving.”

The tall old man in front of them wore a yellow plaid shirt, short-sleeved. Although his arms were tanned, his puckered elbows were chalky. He had missed a belt loop in back. Beside him, his wife was fanning herself with a map of the fair. Despite the heat, there was a white pillbox hat pinned to the back of her head. She wore a floral shirtwaist dress and the flesh beneath her arm moved like a pink hammock filled with something heavy. She turned to the mother and daughter to say that the lines had been terrible all day long. They’d waited forty-five minutes to see It’s a Small World. More than an hour and a half at the Bell Pavilion. There was an orange plastic dolphin on her dress, a gift from the Florida exhibit. She said they’d brought their son along, who was on leave, but he’d already gone back to the hotel to cool off. He told them he did enough standing in line in the army.

For Annie, the lines, the crowds, the restricted view while she waited, were all part of the fair’s adventure, like being led, blindfolded. At the end of every wait-it had been happening all day-wonders were revealed.

(She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of tomorrow. They had sat-after the hour wait-in a moving theater as a mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and the 1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They’d watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended above the ordinary Queens skyline. They’d walked quietly through the spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of snow. They’d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental highway while a voice like God’s told them, whispering softly into their ears, that the present was just an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.)

The line shuffled forward three more steps. Constricted by the space between them, Mary Keane reached back carefully and pulled her blouse away from her spine. She felt a bead of perspiration roll down her back. And then another. Cascading, she thought. “I’m melting,” she said. Behind them, the man with the woman on his arm was reading from a guidebook. Annie felt the edge of the paper against the back of her head.

“They shouldn’t have moved something so old,” he said. “Something could have happened to it.” And the woman on his arm made a sympathetic noise and then seemed to readjust herself, as if she were turning in bed.

“God, it’s hot,” she said and Mary Keane turned to nod at her, “Isn’t it, though?” Farther behind them there was a family, parents and two teenagers, limp shouldered and unhappy. Then what might have been a church group of pastel men and women, all with name tags and crosses on their breasts, fanning themselves with identical paper fans printed loudly with the name of an Atlanta funeral home.

Above the rooftops of the Belgian Village, the sun had gone from orange to red-so fiery now it might have been lifted from some creation tableau itself. Might more appropriately have been shining down on tar pits or boiling mud. As Annie leaned out to look back (the line was longer still) and then forward (no shorter ahead), the red sun struck the gold dome of the pavilion and sent her ducking back into her place. Now a vertiginous edge of purple outlined everything she saw. She saw heads turned away from the sun. Shoulders moving slowly forward. The man’s speckled hand that had missed a belt loop this morning reaching up to wipe perspiration from his sunburned neck. His wife was turned around again to say to her mother they had one son in the army and one in the Marines and another one married and back near home. And Mary Keane replied four, two boys and two girls.

Something prehistoric, too, in the scaly flesh of the woman’s throat as she turned to speak to them, chin and neck indistinguishable. Her voice was worn.

She said she should have gone for four and had a girl, too.

Daughters will wait with you to see something like this. Not boys. “Although my boys are good to me,” she said. “They’re good boys.”

The woman turned to Annie, taking her in with small eyes, perhaps assessing what she’d missed. Suddenly, she asked, “Did you see the Carousel of Progress, honey?”

And her mother answered, “Yes we did.”

“The Magic Skyway? Futurama? The Moon Dome? Did you talk on the picturephones?”

“Oh, yeah,” Annie said, knowing her mother wanted her to say yes, not yeah.

“What I want to know,” the woman said, raising her voice, nearly shouting, “is what if you just got out of the shower, and your picturephone is ringing? Do you answer it?” She laughed, her open mouth full of silver and gold. She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eyes. “That’s your future, honey,” she said to Annie. “Not mine or your mom’s.” She leaned back, her wide arm touching Mary Keane’s damp shoulder. “We’ll be well out of it, don’t you think?”

The man in the plaid shirt, as husbands will do, was staring straight ahead, ignoring the conversation, as if both women were strangers to him. Even in this heat, Mary Keane was aware of a certain pleasure in being relieved of the burden of a husband.

“We sure will,” she said, agreeably.

But then the woman suddenly raised her arm, the pale skin swinging, and gestured toward the fantastic rooflines and white towers, the sky lifts and the monorails.

“The only thing I hate to think about,” she said, “is how all this will be knocked down when the fair is over.”

Other than the slow shuffling forward and the fanning of maps and brochures, there was the rise and fall of cigarettes to mouths, the tossing of them onto the asphalt. A couple up ahead occasionally left the line to chase a toddler. The man behind them was saying “Michael-angelo,” and the woman on his arm was saying, “Meekel, Meekel-angelo.”

They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered elbows, freckles, birthmarks. The variety of head shapes and hair colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his arms, the woman’s weight against him.

The fat woman, mopping her thick neck with a small tissue, turned again to say that the long wait would be worth it. “It’ll be like a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.”

With her purse in the crook of her arm, Mary Keane reached out to run her fingers through her daughter’s thin hair, gathering it bit by bit to the top of her head. She twisted the hair into a topknot and pulled three bobby pins from the purse to hold it. Annie reached back tentatively to feel her bare neck. “Better?” Mary Keane said and Annie said, “Yes,” although one of the bobby pins bit like a tooth.

The line moved again. Mary Keane leaned down and blew a soft stream of air onto her daughter’s neck, miraculously cool. Annie closed her eyes briefly. “How much longer?” she said at the same time the woman behind them said, “Not much longer.” They turned, mother and daughter, to meet her eye, but it was the man she was addressing, leaning against him, holding on to his arm. There was a diamond engagement ring on her hand. You had to pity the length and thickness of her brown hair, the weight of her chin on his shoulder.

They shuffled forward again. Now they could hear faint music coming from the building, and with the next step forward they could smell, if certainly not yet feel, the air-conditioning inside.

Someone up ahead, an official, cried, “No pushing, please,” in what might have been an Italian accent. They felt the line grow slack at the reprimand. And then it moved forward again.

The fat woman was now talking to the woman ahead of her. “What if you’d just stepped out of the shower?” she shouted.

“Pee-aye-tuh,” the man behind them said and the woman, laughing deep in her throat said, “Pee-aye-ta.”

Here now was the official who belonged to the voice, perspiring in a red jacket and gray pants. He waved his arms like a traffic cop although, at the moment, they were standing still in front of him.

“Almost there,” he was saying, smiling at them all. His accent not Italian but Long Island. “That’s it”-as they moved forward-”won’t be long now.”

As if responding obediently to a command, the line pressed itself together, tighter still, heads, hands, shuffling feet. (Annie briefly placed the heels of her palms to the damp yellow shirt of the man in front of her and then drew them away.) Chests to backs and the woman behind them leaning, it seemed, over Mary Keane’s shoulder. “No pushing, please,” the man said again.

The sun had nearly dropped out of sight although the sky glowed so vividly with its afterimage that it hardly mattered. The heat still gave the thick air a slow pulse. The crowd pressed together and her mother took her hand, moving. For a moment Annie forgot just what it was they had been waiting to see. And then they were inside.

Cold air and a low Gregorian chant, eyes struggling to adjust to the change. There was the smell of incense and of new paint. Glass cases along the walls and the impression of red and gold. Golden arcs of light. Red carpet at their feet. The line held, still shuffling, past cases of jewels, now, or books, or vestments, or small ivory models of churches, paintings of saints and priests. The volume of the choir’s voices seemed to rise slightly as they moved forward, wavering the way the heat outside had wavered. But the heat was already forgotten. “Keep moving, please,” someone said.

And then the line broke. Wheat from chaff, Mary thought as red-jacketed guards counted them off, said, there-four rows in descending order-back there, please, here, down there. A brusque tap on her shoulder and she and her daughter were hurried forward. Down here, please, keep moving.

No choice in the matter, it soon became clear, because what they were being directed to was a moving walkway, four ascending rows in a kind of amphitheater of moving walkways. There was the uncertain first step, the tug of the rubber tread against the soles of their feet, and then, through no effort of their own, the slow movement forward into the dark. Mary Keane and her daughter were in the first row. The air grew colder and the holy chants nearer, even as the faces and the bodies and the clothes of all who had waited-though they were still beside them or above them in the darkness-disappeared. There were only whispers and stirrings, a child’s voice, and then not even that.

Mary Keane put her arm across her daughter’s chest, pressed her close so that the little topknot was just under her chin. Annie took her mother’s arm in both hands.

In the absence of all color and all other light, the white marble held every nuance and hue a human eye could manage. Here was the lifeless flesh of the beloved child, the young man’s muscle and sinew impossibly-impossible for the mother who cradled him-still. Here were her knees against the folds of her draped robes, her lap, as wide as it might have been in childbirth, accommodating his weight once more. Here were her fingers pressed into his side, her shoulder raised to bear him on her arm once more. Here was her left hand, open, empty. Here were the mother’s eyes cast down upon the body of her child once more, only once more, and in another moment (they were moving back into the darkness) no more.

The white light reflected dimly off the faces still within its reach and then disappeared from them, lamps extinguished, one by one, as they were slowly drawn away. Somewhere among them a woman was weeping. Slowly, the moving sidewalk delivered them all through the darkness to the four ascending doors where they disembarked, step carefully please. Flesh, hair, clothes returned to them in the low light of the rest of the exhibit. A low, golden light that was nevertheless painful, accustomed as their eyes had become to the dark, and despite how briefly they had been in it.

Outside, the heat was a comfort, momentarily, on chilled shoulders and arms. The lights had come on in the park, in the trees, in the tall clock towers and the soaring pavilions and under the fountains that surrounded the Unisphere. It led their eyes up, for a moment. There were stars but also a stain of red on the western horizon, against the quickly descending night. There was the later bus to catch from the park to the terminal in Jamaica, and then the second bus to the intersection where they would call home and John Keane, unhappy about the late hour, would come in the car to fetch them.

At Pauline’s apartment, Clare was already asleep on the couch. Pauline listed all they had done together that day-an excursion to the fabric store and lunch at a diner, two cute gingham aprons run up on the sewing machine, cookies baked and nails painted and a walk around the corner for Chinese-making each occasion sound, to Mary Keane, like a compensation Pauline had rendered, since attached to each one was some surprise, on Pauline’s part, that Clare had done none of these things in exactly this way before. “And she said her mother only knew how to make Christmas cookies.”

Mary slipped her hands under Clare’s arms, lifted the sleeping child to her shoulder, felt the weight of her, and how, not quite asleep, she tightened her arms around her mother’s neck, brushed her fingers against her mother’s hair. Pauline was handing a shopping bag to Annie, the folded aprons, the cookies, a few odds and ends, “Little presents,” Pauline said, “nothing much,” proudly enough. The apartment was close, dimly lit, full of the scent of Pauline’s perfume. In her weariness after the long hot day, in her anger over her husband’s unreasonable impatience, in anticipation of the bedtime routine that was still waiting for her at home, Mary Keane looked at the peaceful rooms with some envy.

Which Pauline saw, of course. At the door, she asked, “Is he waiting downstairs?”-meaning John Keane. And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how he is,” and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband’s failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft’s transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage-which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn-simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.

A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself.

In the elevator, Clare heavy in her arms, she told Annie that Pauline was intolerable, sometimes. Really. “I don’t just bake cookies at Christmas,” she said resentfully, and Annie agreed although, at the moment, she could not recall any cookies her mother had ever made that were not shaped like Christmas trees or snowmen.

Her mother said, “You know,” and then paused. She recalled, briefly, the sacred music and the white stone and all the soaring aspirations of her faith: gold domes and ivory towers and in the darkness, light. She considered, too, how tired she was, Clare’s head heavy on her shoulder, the child’s heels digging into her hips. How annoying Pauline could be. “You know,” she said again, “Pauline doesn’t speak to Helen anymore, the girl she went to Europe with last year.” She looked down at Annie. “And she’s fallen out with Adele, too, from the office. Even though they shared a cabin on that cruise and were best pals for a while there.” She hitched Clare up on her shoulder. Annie transferred the heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left. “I wouldn’t mind sometimes,” her mother said, “if Pauline got mad and stopped speaking to us for a while. It would be a nice break.”

Watching the light move behind each number as they descended, Annie laughed and said, “I know.”

“It would be nice to untangle ourselves a bit,” her mother said. Clare stirred against her shoulder, moved the ringers she had placed in her mother’s hair, tugged.

Mary Keane and her daughters rode the rest of the way down in weary silence. It was an unkindness, she knew, what she had just said about Pauline. Words said in conscious defiance of all the gentle aspirations of her faith. But it was also true, what she had said. Just as it was true that there would be no untangling herself from Pauline. Not with Clare already so fond of her.

The church had gone to pot. It had gone to seed. It had been minimally repaired for the last five years and come Monday the dismantling would begin. Any parishioner wishing to purchase one of the old pews should have already called the rectory. There were shingles missing from the exterior; the bell, for safety’s sake, had long ago been removed from the belfry. The green canvas awning that had once shaded the entrance and the tall brick steps that led from the street had been torn in the ’60 hurricane and never repaired. In ’64 it was taken down altogether and now only the metal frame remained, a crisscross of bare ironwork against the sky. The choir loft, also for safety’s sake, had been off limits for as long as most of the children in the school could remember. A rumor spread among the younger ones, Clare Keane included, that the unused staircase at the back of the church, with its wide marble banister and its velvet rope (and its scent, when you got near it, of incense and attics) was an entrance to heaven. The painting across the high ceiling, of John the Baptist pouring water from his palm over the head of a beautiful Christ, was itself marred by water-there was a misshapen, ominously gray cloud in the blue sky above their heads, another stretched across the saint’s feet and over the savior’s knees. The stained-glass window high above the altar-Saint Gabriel with his halo and his wings-also leaked. On a bad day, the water ran down the wall and over the crucifix and behind the gold tabernacle. The filigree on the old altar had chipped away. No one remembered the last time the organ had actually played.

On the Friday before the last Sunday, all the children in the school were led into the church for a farewell prayer, and just as Father Hecht said, “The old makes way for the new,” Marilyn Giovanni in the fifth grade slammed the back of her head into the back of the pew and with an echoing, inhuman cry, rolled onto the worn carpet of the center aisle. It was an epileptic seizure. Mrs. Ryan, who taught the third grade, had an afflicted child of her own and knew just what to do, and superstition in this day and age was well to be avoided. But the Bible itself was full of misdiagnoses and who could help but wonder what it was the devil would have objected to-the old or the new? Was it protest that made him seize the little girl at that moment, or celebration?

(“Nonsense,” Father McShane said to the younger priest. “I’m ashamed of you.” And then, with a wink and a crooked smile, “They talk about the Irish.”)

On the corner in front of the church, the boys waiting for the high-school bus watched the workmen carrying statues over their shoulders like huge dolls. They saw them carrying the large framed oil paintings in both hands, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, stained with the smoke of votive candles, of forty years of petitions, and Saint Pius, still clean, carried like suitcases to a waiting van. The old wooden pews, eased out through the front door and down the old steps like streamlined, oversize coffins, were either placed in the van or-as in some final reckoning-carried to the lawn in front of the rectory where they were labeled with the purchasing parishioner’s name. Then a high chain-link fence went up around the old church and the wrecking ball came and in no time it was all splinters and smoke.

Jacob Keane, waiting at the corner with the other boys from his high school, in a jacket he had not grown into and his school tie, swore that the smell of incense still came from the hole where the church had been. He made the other boys pause and sniff the air. Yes, they nodded, their chins raised, they could almost agree. The road in front of the church seemed to grow more congested every morning. There was the thick diesel smell of county buses and school buses, delivery trucks and flatbeds, so that even on a spring morning at seven there was hardly a trace of new leaf or daffodil or even the cool dawn in the suburban air. But Jacob told the other boys, “You can still smell it,” and with their fingers in the fence they paused, raised their noses. Those who had once shared the belief that the stairs to the old choir loft led to another world, to heaven itself, considered briefly the possibility that some sort of holiness lingered everywhere, perhaps just beneath the shell of earth and sky. Jacob wondered as well. Then Michael told a joke about a workman in a church who hammered his thumb and cursed. A nun who was praying nearby said his bad language had made Our Lady cry. She pointed to the statue. “See the tears?” the nun said. The man shook his head. “She’s only crying cause I hammered a nail into her backside to hang up my coat.”

The laughter outran the mystery. Michael was pleased to see his brother blush. The joke, he was pretty certain, had come from Uncle Frank.

But if there was inspiration in the lingering smell of incense, there was incentive in the church’s rising frame. The new church was to be in the round-a spaceship, some of the older parishioners complained, a circus tent-and every afternoon when the boys from the Catholic high school left the bus, they could mark the progress that had been made that day, at first in the dark stakes and poured concrete of the foundation but then, more clearly, in the skeletal web of steel and wood. By summer, a number of them had begun projects of their own-backyard tree houses and storage huts and potting sheds. Tony Persichetti and his father worked on their attic, transforming the space the developer had left as bare beams into a bedroom and a bath. Jacob and Michael Keane, making a case for privacy, for a place to gather with their friends that was not the kitchen, where their mother would have to break things up to make dinner, or their bedroom, where their sisters could listen at the door, convinced their parents to let them finish the basement-which meant to cover the cinder-block walls with knotty pine panels, to drop a white ceiling, enclose the furnace with its own room, and replace the shower curtain at the entrance of the tiny bathroom with a real door.

Their father took them to the lumberyard, bought them levels and tape measures and boxes of nails, cartons of two-foot-square linoleum with which to cover the concrete floor. Every evening that summer, when he returned from work, he changed into his old clothes, put on the army boots he wore for all household chores, and went down to assess the boys’ progress, to offer corrections and advice. With the help of a do-it-yourself manual, father and sons figured out the wiring for the fluorescent lights, got the door hung right, laid a checkerboard pattern across the floor. The old couch and the train table were donated to St. Vincent’s and their father agreed to splurge on a six-piece set of Danish modern from Sears, which gave the new room a sleek, science-fiction look that Mary Keane found cold, although it inspired in her sons a sense that their own modern futures, part Buck Rogers, part James Bond, were finally upon them.

In only a matter of months, Michael learned that the cheap foam cushions of the Danish modern sofa will buckle on you when you press a girl too ardently into its frame.

The parishioners on that first Sunday seemed both reluctant and awed, filing in not down a single central aisle but along any number of aisles that fanned out from the semicircle that was the altar. The faces in the new stained-glass windows were all angles (Mary Keane thought they looked vaguely Danish modern themselves), their robes all long bright shards of color. The crucifix suspended above them was a long swoop of gray steel intersected by a small crossbeam that seemed hardly the breadth of a man’s arms. There were no recognizable statues of any sort and the Stations of the Cross were merely white rectangles of carved stone, the Passion barely discernible within them. Because there were no corners, there were few shadows in the new church. The confessionals were small rooms, with actual doors (John Keane tested one on the way out, assessing how well it had been hung) and doorknobs, not curtains. Between them, behind a large plate-glass window, there was what Father McShane seemed delighted to call the “Bawl Room,” a soundproof room for mothers with small, noisy children. He pointed it out three times in his dedication sermon-it might have been the sole motive for the new construction-and Mary Keane, who throughout the service grew progressively dissatisfied with the too new St. Gabriel’s, added to her criticism of the place the fact that a baby’s cry or a toddler’s shouted phrase added life, and sometimes even laughter, to a Mass, which was, after all, supposed to be a celebration, not a dirge. She imagined the Blessed Mother with baby Jesus in her arms, standing behind the plate glass, the child’s mouth moving but not a sound getting through. Beside her, her husband noticed how the new pews lacked the small brass hat clips that had been secured to the back of every pew in the old church (spring-loaded, felt-tipped clips that Michael would stealthily snap at least once every Mass, a sound like a gunshot echoing through the place). He understood there was no longer a need for them-so few men wore hats anymore (he blamed JFK with his thick hair and his big Irish head for changing the fashion)-but the lack of them added to his dawning sense that the new church had turned the stuff of his own past, his own memories, into something quaint, at best. At worst, obsolete.

And yet, the smell of the incense from the censer was the smell of the incense of old, and the stately movement of the priests in their robes as they walked down the aisles swinging them, sending the pale smoke into the air, their free hands placed gently over their hearts, was as it had always been. At his shoulder, Jacob’s bowed head and thin folded hands reassured him somewhat (and told him the three hundred a year for four years that he’d spent on his Catholic high school might actually have purchased the boy something). Beside Jacob, Clare had lost her initial, openmouthed fascination with the saucer-shaped ceiling and was now simply studying her sister’s hand (which Annie, limply, had allowed her to take into her lap), studying especially the latest boyfriend’s thick high-school ring, which Annie had made smaller with a welt of yellow yarn. Beside her, Michael sprawled in the pew (three hundred a year for three years with not much to show for it), his eyes cast down not in prayer but in a kind of wry embarrassment for how utterly mistaken everyone around him, everyone who had ever had a hand in the construction of this place, seemed to be.

As soon as the priest said, “The Mass is ended” (“Thanks be to God,” was the only response Michael joined in on, saying it loudly and sarcastically and always adding, just loudly enough for his siblings to hear, “Let’s cruise”), Michael was in the aisle, out the door, the first to grab a fresh Sunday News from the pile outside of Krause’s store.

He carried it and his ritual bottle of Sunday-morning root beer back to his parents’ car. They were delayed, touring the new church (his father testing the confessional’s sturdy doors, his mother with the girls on either side of her clucking her tongue at each white and nearly indiscernible depiction of Christ’s suffering). Sitting on the warm hood of his father’s car, Michael watched the people leaving the church, getting into their own cars, pulling out. He saw Lori Ballinger walking behind her parents, her legs tan, her hair glossy in the sun, and he raised the bottle of soda in a debonair salute. She waved back, smiling.

When Jacob joined him (“They’re talking to people,” was his only explanation for their parents’ further delay), Michael said that he had seen her. “She’s cute,” Jacob said.

“A nice girl, I hear,” Michael added, emphasizing nice so that Jacob would know he hadn’t said “good.”

Jacob knew, and showed that he knew with a slight smile. He put out his hand and his brother passed him the soda, although he said as he did, “Get your own.” Jacob took a drink and then passed it back. It was a taste that made him feel ten years old.

“Where the hell are they?” Michael said. He leaned back on the hood, his knees raised. “Why the hell didn’t you take your car?” The sky was clear blue above them, hardly a wisp of cloud. He felt sometimes that all he did anymore was wait. He put his hand in his pants pocket and found a stubby pencil from the golf course where he caddied. He sat up. “Let’s walk home,” he said. “I’ll leave a note.” He wrote across the clean border at the top of the Sunday comics. Propped the entire paper up on the windshield and secured it with a wiper, left the empty soda bottle beside it. His father’s car, a ’65 Ford, was, he told Jacob, a piece of junk.

Jacob shrugged. This summer, as a graduation present, his father had given him three hundred dollars toward his own car, a little Capri. The puzzle he had studied in high-school religion classes-why the rich were so ungenerous, why the suffering of the poor, the fixable suffering, was so seldom fixed-began to solve itself for him the first time he drove off alone, in his own car. There was want, as the Brothers at St. Sebastian’s had referred to it. But then there was, he suddenly understood-alone, unfettered, pressing the accelerator, palming the wheel-I want.

His brother leaped off the hood-the percussion of the metal bending in under his palm and then bending back again. “Let’s cruise,” he said again.

They walked together, down the alleyway that ran in front of what they still called the new gym, past the modern entryway. Saint Gabriel, with the shoulders of his folded wings rising up over his head, was mere shadow behind the plate glass. They emerged from the alleyway into the sun, passed Krause’s store, where there was still a crowd of customers inside, pressed against the door. They cut through the parking lot of the strip of stores beside the school, turned toward home. It was the route they had walked together for years, when they were students at St. Gabriel’s and then again when they had come to this corner to meet their high-school bus. That was over now. Jacob was starting St. John’s in the fall. Michael would be hitching a ride to St. Sebastian’s with some friends, his senior year.

Jacob said, when they had reached the orderly streets where the houses, each nearly identical, began, “I called her once.”

“Who?” Michael said. He was thinking of how much money he’d lost today, not caddying. Giving in to his parent’s request that they all go to the first Mass at the new church.

“Lori Ballinger,” Jacob said.

Michael looked at him. He was about four inches taller than Jacob, and still growing, he was sure. He straightened his shoulders. “You asked her out?”

Jacob nodded, smiled a little crookedly, making fun of himself. Given the look, he didn’t have to say how it had turned out, but Michael asked him anyway.

“She turned you down?”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “She said she was busy.”

Michael considered this. He considered saying, Well, that took courage. Instead he said, “When was this?”

“Last year,” Jacob said. “Junior prom.”

He stood still on the sidewalk. His brother kept going. “Holy shit,” he said. “You asked Lori Ballinger to your prom?”

Jacob shrugged, shaking off Michael’s astonishment. Michael caught up with him. “She was dating football jocks in grammar school, man.”

“Really?” Jacob said.

Michael fell into stride beside his brother. “You should have asked me,” he said. “I would have told you to forget about Lori Ballinger.”

Jacob shrugged again.

The route was all familiar-gray sidewalks and driveways, green rectangles of lawns, cars, bicycles, houses, and trees. The familiar streets. He and Jacob could name nearly every family as they passed. The O’Haras’ house, the Krafts’, the DeLucas’, Levines’, Persichettis’. They’d been in most of their kitchens or front hallways, they’d collected paper-route payments or candy on Halloween, gotten glasses of water or Kool-Aid from them on hot summer days. As he walked beside his brother, Michael’s recollection of those days made them all seem soft-focused and gentle, an easy roundness about things that had since given way to something thinner, something grown sharper in a threadbare sort of way. Maybe it was the clean-edged aluminum siding that had replaced the aging shingles on most of the homes, or the sleeker cars, or the sun catching the chrome on Tony Persichetti’s motorcycle in the driveway, where he once would have left his bike. Maybe it was just the sense of it coming to an end, his time in this place, his childhood. Maybe it was that the place had worn thin only for him, that he was already worn out with waiting to leave it and get on.

He said to his brother, “I can’t wait to get out of here. One more year.” He said, “I don’t know how you can stand it, not going away.”

Jacob shrugged again. His father had told him: “I can pay for private-school tuition, or I can pay your room and board. I can’t do both. There are four of you to put through college.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

Michael looked at him again. Someone, some girl, had told him once, “Your brother’s nice.” And then added, as if it pained her, “Too nice, if you know what I mean.” He hadn’t, not exactly. He thought again of Lori Ballinger. Jacob had made a plan and worked up the courage and called her and asked her to the prom and she had shot him down and through it all, he’d never said a word. About any of it. Through it all, he’d pulled his blankets up over his shoulder and faced the wall. Michael would hear him sometimes, the mattress, the deep sighs. No doubt Jacob heard him, too, when his turn came. Tempting as it had been to say, across the short space between their beds-“Are you jacking off?” “Are you crying?”-Michael never had. Not out of any kindness, he knew, but in exchange for future consideration, when the agitation under the covers, the tears, would be his.

“I think the new church is bullshit,” Michael said. He had only the slightest hankering, like the first hint of hunger, to start a fight.

Jacob shrugged again. “The other one was falling down.”

“They could have fixed it,” Michael said. “Instead of spending all that money.”

Jacob said nothing. They were almost home. The Rosenbergs’ house, the Lavins’. “Putting the screws to guys like Dad,” Michael said. “Making them cough up the dough to make McShane look good. It’s bullshit.”

“You gotta have a church,” Jacob said.

“Why?” Michael asked. The MacLeod house, him with the musical aspirations and the Orange Crush hair. Michael was certain that if Jacob had told him what he was thinking, he would have said, There’s no way you can go with Lori Ballinger, give it up. He would have saved him from whatever it was he had felt when she said, No, I can’t. “Why do you have to have a church?” More belligerent than he’d intended.

Behind them, they could hear Clare calling, jokingly, “Oh, boys.” She was hanging out the window of the car. The car was slowing down, passing them. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving her headband toward them. In the front seat, their mother and father were laughing.

They both waved back. The car swung into the driveway ahead of them.

“People need a place to go,” Jacob said.

“Why?” Michael asked again. “What for?” And when Jacob shrugged, but smiling this time, as if he knew they both knew the answer, Michael said, once more, “It’s bullshit.”

John keane lay in bed and held a running argument with the pain. It was a terse, dismissive argument, the kind he might have with some idiot shop clerk or dishonest mechanic, the kind of hopeless, useless, beneath-your-dignity argument that you know you should walk away from but don’t. Can’t. Raising your eyebrows at any bystander or eavesdropper as if to say, Can you believe this idiot? Can you believe I’m bothering to talk to him?

The boys, before they left for their summer jobs-Jacob was cutting lawns again this summer, Michael caddying by day and pumping gas at night-had knocked together a number of two-by-fours and, following his instructions, had rigged it with a pulley and a rope. They had then wrapped the rope around one of his old, paint-spattered army boots, across the instep and up through the laces, and weighed the other end with a dictionary and half a dozen volumes of their grocery-store encyclopedia. Following his instructions (they were good kids, both of them), they had slipped the boot over his right sock, adjusting the whole contraption until his leg was pulled taut, nearly suspended over the damp mattress, and the pain that had woken him two nights ago, all unbidden and unaccountable, met its match with this new pain-a disciplined, intentional pain-intended to be the cure.

Michael had hesitated at the bedroom door. This was at about eight-fifteen this morning, Mary downstairs getting the rest of them out of the house. If anyone was going to say this two-bit attempt at traction was an eccentric, half-assed scheme, it would be Michael the wise guy. But Michael merely waved his arm-a long, thin arm, softened, nearly blurred by the fair hair that covered it-and said, “Take care.”

He had lifted his own arm, the mold from which the other had been formed, and said, “Sure I will.”

He had a bottle of aspirin by the bedside, a cold cup of tea, a tube of Ben-Gay, even, his wife’s idea, a tumbler of scotch, but he resisted resorting to any of them just yet. Yesterday, the boys had moved the portable TV into his room, close enough so he could reach the dial and the antenna (another jerry-rigged affair with rabbit ears and a coat hanger and aluminum foil), but he resisted that as well. The house was empty now-the boys at their jobs and his wife and the two girls off to a matinee in the city-and silent but for the whir of the fan on the dresser, which by now had become a part of the silence as well. This was the beginning of his second day of sick leave, the first two he had taken in more than twenty years, and he didn’t like the vertigo he felt at this sudden suspension of his routine any better today than he had yesterday. (He raised his chin at the army boot, at the pale blue pant leg of his pajamas: I don’t like it.)

It wasn’t that he was a company man, he was happy enough to use up his three weeks of vacation time every year-one week to work around the house in the spring, two in summer to take the kids to the shore. He was just mostly healthy, and found a couple of aspirin or a cold tablet taken in the morning far preferable to the silence and boredom of a sickroom. And he didn’t like doctors. Mary Keane rolled her eyes every time she heard him say it. She understood that what he didn’t like about doctors had less to do with what he called their arrogance and more to do with the diplomas on the wall, the golf-course tans-the disadvantage, the particular kind of humiliation a man with four children making fifteen thousand a year endured while sitting with his bare legs dangling, those missing toes, in his boxer shorts and T-shirt before a diplomaed man in a good suit who had been to Columbia University or Cornell. Once a year, he went downtown for his company physical and every year he got a clean bill of health-as had (he was quick to point out) his brother Frank two weeks before he died, which told you something about doctors.

He was convinced anyway that lingering illness and curable, or incurable, disease was not likely to get him. His end, when it came, he was certain, would be swift and unavoidable. The black coach. The sudden fall. Like Frank’s.

He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, palms pressed to the mattress to ease the pressure on his tailbone. He moved his foot inside the boot. This morning, when he had shown the boys the sketch he had drawn during the sleepless night, Michael had muttered, “It looks like a guillotine. Or the rack.” He had raised an eyebrow and flicked an imaginary cigarette and said in a squinting, lip-curling German accent, “Foolish man, ve have other vays to make you talk.” But Jacob, who if he had been another kind of oldest child might have had the courage to dissuade his father, to point out that they were not setting a broken limb, that this was not the Wild West and it was high time a doctor be consulted, said simply, “Dad thinks it will help,” and then led Michael to the basement where there was still a small, leftover pile of two-by-fours tucked away in the furnace room.

It might have been more fitting for them to have rebelled, and he suspected that were he a younger man, a younger father, they would have. But the solemnity with which the two of them had come, one after the other, into his bedroom yesterday morning revealed something. Here he was out sick for the first time in more than twenty years and here they were standing over him, dumbstruck and wary, their fear of his dying sprung into their faces as if from the very moment their mother had awakened them with the news that sometime during the night, something had gone wrong with Daddy’s leg. He suspected that they followed his instructions for the weights and the pulley and the contraption that was to support it not so much to humor him in his pain but to coax themselves into believing that he was still in charge, that they were still under his care.

And then the sound of them pounding the wood reached him from the basement, and it was all he could do to cast aside as utter nonsense his own morbid thoughts regarding coffins and crucifixes. It was only a bum leg, after all. Sprung on him in the middle of the night.

He stirred again against the mattress, tilted his head back against the mahogany headboard. He tried to gauge the movement of the sunlight across the white ceiling. There were the blue shadows cast by the valances of his wife’s curtains, the reflection of light in the mirror above her dresser, in the glass of the children’s school photographs, in the blank face of the TV. The pain stretched its own legs for a few seconds, reached up over his thigh and across his back and into his chest and arms. In response, he moved the toe of the boot, then bent his knee to lift the weight of the books that pulled against it, matching pain for pain, the unbidden with the intentional, in some vague theory that the one would defeat the other, that the one was preferable to the other. When he reached for the aspirin on the bed stand, he saw that his hand was trembling and he whispered a quick “Son of a bitch.” It was an ongoing and unwinnable argument with an idiot.

And yet it was an argument he could not resist.

He swallowed the aspirin without water, tossing them one at a time into the back of his throat, the second one catching on his tongue. What he was hoping to put off for as long as possible was the inevitable slipping out of the boot and off the bed, the awkward, gimping trip across the hallway to the bathroom.

There was an old hockey stick on the other side of the bed, another basement resource the boys had fetched for him, meant to serve as a crutch, although using it had made him feel like some Old Testament prophet leaning on his staff.

“Like Charlton Heston,” Michael had said from the doorway of his own bedroom last night. It seemed to John Keane that over the past two days, one or the other of his sons was always lounging casually in the doorway whenever he got himself up and hauled himself across the hall to the bathroom. Had he been a younger father, they might have simply thrown him over a shoulder and carried him across.

He lifted his hand to wipe the perspiration from his lip, raised and lowered his good leg and then slipped both hands under the thigh of the bad one and slowly raised it until he could feel again the weight pulling against his foot.

And then the pain again, wire thin this time, through his leg and into his gut and reaching up to hook the corners of his mouth.

He turned his head, waiting for it to pass. The fan on the dresser was humming, though it offered no breeze. The Saran-wrapped sandwich and the pile of magazines his wife had left for him on her side of the bed, the damp bedsheets themselves, gave off a nauseating yellow sheen and in his impatience with it, with the pain itself, he pulled at the leg again.

The pain answered in kind.

It was a ridiculous argument. A stupid fight. And yet, he raised his chin defiantly at the speckled boot. There were white dots of paint from the living room, bits of pale green from when he had done the boys’ room, pale pink from the year Clare was born. Other colors, no doubt, were he to examine it more closely, two decades’ worth of housekeeping chores done in these boots, painting and gardening and leaf raking, the very peacetime pursuits the army, in giving them to him, had sought to insure. Pursuits that the pain, on this hot still morning, now easily reduced to foolishness. He had wasted his life with painting and gardening and leaf raking. He had squandered his time.

With his hand under his thigh, he lifted his leg again. The pulley squeaked a little, slowly turning. Foolish man, Michael had said. Ve have other ways. Well, no, not squandered. There were his children, after all.

In the mirror above his wife’s dresser, he could see the reflection of the crucifix that hung over their bed, the tiny gold Christ curled against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the accoutrements of Last Rites. It had been a gift from the priest who married them, a reminder, no doubt, that their marriage bed might also be the bed in which they would breathe their last. It had not been difficult for them, bred-in-the-bone Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at the beginning of their lives together, to imagine the final scene: the candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at his bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving. Certainly, they had said till death do us part, but it wasn’t until they’d opened the priest’s present (he recalled the wrappings of the other gifts spread across the living room of her father’s apartment, her pretty beige going-away suit, the nervous anticipation he had felt, opening a few packages while they waited for the cab that was to take them to the city) that the scene became vivid for them both-the crucifix spread apart, the thin white tapers lit, the dim room where he would breathe his last.

It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street, already gone.

He lowered the leg again, heard the pile of thick books, tied together like a schoolboy’s satchel, hit the floor. Pain such as this had a tendency to reduce everything, every effort, every belief, to brittle plastic, easily shattered. It could shatter the notion of Paradise opened by a single, wracked body hung on a cross. It could shatter any hope you had that you were worth more than the bustling of your ordinary days. It could remind you easily enough that death was no more or less than the choke and sputter of a single muscle, the sudden exposure of gut and bone, your skin turned black in the cold.

If you didn’t argue against it, the idiot pain, the very things you’d based your life on could shatter.

His eyes went from the reflected crucifix to the blank gray face of the television. He could make out his own reflection there, sitting up against the headboard. His chest and shoulders in his pale pajamas, his bald head, his face, which in the reflected shadow and distorted sunlight caught by the blank screen, was suddenly the face of his brother.

It had happened before: one of his sons would be talking in another room and he’d hear, for a moment, Frank’s laughter. His niece once raised a hand, turned her head, and it was Frank’s gesture. He would raise his own chin shaving and there he’d see his brother, briefly, briefly.

Even now his own reflection in the blank gray face of the TV set had become simply his own again, too bald, too gaunt for Frank. But the glimpse, nevertheless, had been well timed, and as if to acknowledge it, small gift that it was, he pulled at the leg again. He held his breath again as the pain flared. No realistic person expected a full-fledged visitation, or even hoped for one-it was, surely, what they meant when they said “laid to rest”-but still there were tricks of the eye or of the mind that could satisfy even someone like himself, who, steeped in superstition as a child, had long ago learned to resist it. Surely there were assurances, even for the most reasonable of believers, that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day. Frank’s face, glimpsed briefly, assuring him, his own heart, his spirits, rising at the mere possibility of once again seeing his brother’s face.

He recalled that all the pain of that rainy day-the endless Mass at Incarnation, the traffic-choked ride to the cemetery-had been for Catherine, Frank’s daughter. All the dignity, resignation, joyful hope of resurrection the rest of them had mustered, as one must, to get through the day, undermined by the poor girl’s tears. She cried a torrent through it all. Thin as a willow in her dark sweater and skirt, bent over in the pew or under her mother’s arm at the cemetery. A scrap of tissue in her hands and the pale red hair falling over her face. Too young to be so wracked by grief. Too pretty, too newly formed to know that particular kind of disappointment. Afterward, back at the house, he had knelt beside her chair and said, “Your father will be with you for the rest of your days,” and she, nineteen at the time, had looked at him with her red eyes and said, “I’ll never stop missing him.”

Six months later, when he gave her his arm on the day she was married, he felt himself a poor substitute, although she had whispered her gratitude, leaving the scent of her lipstick on his cheek and his ear. She had married a kid from Greenwich, a wealthy boy who had a seat on the Stock Exchange now. They lived in Garden City and had refused so many invitations, to Clare’s christening party, to her first Holy Communion, to confirmations and graduations, even to a few odd Sunday suppers, that he and Mary had simply stopped asking. “She moves in different circles now,” Ellen, Frank’s wife, had said, with more pride than disappointment, although many of her invitations were also refused.

Last he saw her, just last year, he was waiting for his wife and the girls outside A amp;S when Catherine, in a beige Cadillac, pulled into the parking space beside him. It took him a moment to recognize her, and she was out of her car by the time he waved at her through his own passenger window. Then he opened his door to get out and greet her. But she was already walking away, her head down. There was another woman with her and she was the one who glanced over her shoulder when he called. But neither one of them paused.

He looked again at his reflection in the TV set. You’ll be pleased to know that she drives a Cadillac. That she’s doing quite well, her own daughter growing, Ellen tells me. A big house in Garden City. I can’t say that it didn’t cut me like a knife, Frank, standing in that parking lot. I can’t say that I didn’t see some of it in you, while you were here, with your own Cadillacs every other year, your Chivas Regal and your fancy beer, a certain fascination, when we were kids, with the society page.

He lifted the leg again. The pain, he realized, was constant, there was only the illusion of ebb and flow.

His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with our relatives.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

He pulled at the leg again-it was only stubborness that made him continue to believe that what he was doing was therapeutic.

At noon mary called from the city. They had met Pauline at Penn Station and now they were having lunch at Schrafft’s before the show. It was hotter than heck. They were looking forward to getting into the cool theater.

And then, with (he would have said) much hemming and hawing, she asked him cautiously (she was building up to something) how he was feeling, if he’d gotten any sleep, if he could eat-and, finally, if his contraption was doing him any good.

He said, Yes it was, believe it or not, and he knew immediately that the lie had taken the wind out of her sails.

Still, she said, “Pauline says it’s a slipped disk.”

“Pauline’s the expert, then,” he said.

Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience, recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry-the kind of concoction only a long marriage can brew. Rising behind it was the faint clatter of dishes, the hum of restaurant conversation.

“No,” she said finally. “But a gal from the office had a brother-in-law with the same problem. Just woke up one morning with a terrible pain. Down his leg. A slipped disk.”

His wife would replace the natural laws with anecdotes. No gravity until someone’s sister’s cousin’s husband had fallen down the stairs. Night and day mere rumor until a girl she used to know in high school was stricken with insomnia, or burned to a crisp by the sun.

“Is that so?” he said placidly. “Same exact thing?”

“Yeah,” she said, with some hesitation. “More or less. You know, his leg.”

The line clicked to say their three minutes were up and instead of getting off, she said, “Hold on,” and dropped another dime into the phone.

“Right or left?” he asked when the coin had been swallowed.

“What?” she said.

And he repeated more emphatically, “Was it the right leg or the left leg? Of this fellow just like me?”

She paused and then said, “Very funny,” to show that it wasn’t. “Pauline read an article about it,” she said. “It happens to a lot of men. It’s evolution. It’s the price men pay for standing upright.”

Pauline, he thought, would be happy to learn that there is a price men pay for standing upright.

“Tomorrow I’m calling the doctor,” she went on, the very reason she had dropped the second dime into the machine. He could see her do her little “so there” nod. There, I said it.

“What are you going to call him?” he asked her.

When she hung up the phone he could hear her say “Stubborn” before the receiver hit the cradle. He could not be sure if she was speaking to herself or to Pauline, or perhaps to the two girls, who would also nod. Maybe only to a waiter, clattering dishes.

An hour later, Jacob returned, banging into the house as he tended to do, always sounding like a drunk on a stage set. He moved around the kitchen a bit, clink of glass and clatter of silverware and slam and then slam again of the refrigerator door. When he poked his head around the doorway of the bedroom, he had half a sandwich in his cheek, the other half, dripping mustard and pickle relish, cupped like a small creature in his hands.

“How are you doing, Dad?” he asked, stretching his throat to get the food swallowed as he spoke. John Keane could not help but wonder how many years would have to go by before it would occur to his son that maybe he should have come up and asked after his father before he made the sandwich.

“Better,” he said.

And then Jacob began nodding, that long, low, exaggerated nod that he and his friends so often substituted for speech. “The thing’s working, then,” he said.

His father shrugged. “Seems to be.”

“Good enough,” Jacob said, still nodding. He was not quite meeting his father’s eye. “You want me to put the TV on for you?”

Although it was within easy reach and the last thing he wanted, he said, “Sure. That’d be great.”

Jacob’s sneakers were grass stained and there were grass stains like brushstrokes on his skinny calves and his khaki shorts. Not just slower and shyer than his brother, but shorter, too: you could see in his legs, in the way he walked, that at nineteen there was no more growth in him, that the sudden, surprising adolescent transformation his father had imagined for him all through his childhood was not going to occur. It surprised him. The men in his family were all of a good size. He thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that his son should take after no one so much as his long-ago namesake, the other Jacob.

John Keane watched the boy as he carefully edged himself between the bed and the TV on its rickety stand, turned it on, fiddled with the antenna, leaning a little, his back to his father. He smelled like mown grass, sun, and air. There was some sinewy strength in his tanned arms and in his hands. A young man’s strength, a young man’s compact body under the loose, sweat-limp T-shirt. It was another kind of pain-a sweet, heart-dropping pain-what he felt for his son, what he felt for the boy’s young body, his awkwardness, his earnestness, his life ahead. And he suddenly found himself pulling against it, deliberately, with an opposite and equal weight, meant, like the contraption that bound his foot, to provide equilibrium. There were his failings as well. There was the question, after a less than successful first year, of whether he’d go back to St. John’s in the fall. (“Good money after bad,” he had told the boy, after Jacob’s last set of grades. He’d said, “I’ve got four of you to put through college, you know.”) There was the draft. There was the chance that the military would be the making of him. There was the chance of Vietnam.

Jacob stepped back for a moment, watching the TV-two soap-opera characters, a man and a woman, arguing intently, another woman shown wide-eyed, elaborately eavesdropping from behind a closed door. Jacob watched them all with utter absorption as he finished his sandwich. His father could see the small crop of sparse beard along his son’s jawline, under the fair, sun-touched skin. He needed a haircut, but these days they all did.

When a commercial began, Jacob turned to his father as if he’d just come to. (It was the heart of the boy’s trouble, John Keane would have said; he was too easily absorbed.) “You want to see this?” he asked and his father waved a hand. “Christ, no,” he said. “Turn it off. Get your shower.”

And then he reached out to touch his son, to playfully slap him on the back, but he missed and paid the price for the awkwardness of the movement with another neon-bright rush of pain. He pulled some air through his teeth, he couldn’t help it, and Jacob paused, looking down on him from beside the bed, and then, gently, put a hand to his father’s shoulder. His face was white under his tan and his dark hair fell into his eyes. “Dad,” he said with some alarm, and then paused. And then, in another tone altogether, he said evenly, “What can I do for you?”

There was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance. He had said to that other Jacob, in a prayer, What can I do for you?-and now here was his own boy, that other’s impulsive namesake, saying the same. Some pattern in the coincidence, the connectedness, some thread of assurance that was woven through the passing years-but he was in too much pain now to discern it, if it was there at all. He put his fingertips to his son’s arm. “Get your shower,” he said. “I’m fine.”

When Michael returned, he leaned into the bedroom and said, “How you doing, Dad?” and “The Met game’s on” in the same breath. He turned on the television, sat on the edge of the bed. He, too, had the smell of the outdoors on him. The smell of the golf course. The smell of the wider world. At the first commercial break, Michael looked over his shoulder at the boot and the rope and the pulley and the wood, at his father’s suspended leg. He tested the rope a bit. “Maybe we should patent this thing,” he said. “We can write to the army and buy up their old boots.” He laughed. His father glimpsed the face Michael would wear as a grown man, the blue eyes and good teeth. It was handsome now, in its youth, but it would be no more than pleasant, perhaps, in middle age. “If they don’t all have jungle rot by now,” he added.

Jacob had joined them to watch the extra innings. He was in the chair beside his father’s bed. He was showered and dressed, a short-sleeved shirt and cutoff blue jeans. There was a girl who took up his evenings this summer, although it was Michael who, his father noticed, had a pink bruise on his neck, the shape of a small bite.

“Tony Persichetti,” Michael was saying, “said in his letter that the skin comes off with his socks.”

Downstairs, their mother and the girls were just coming in. Clare was the first to climb the stairs. She hesitated for a moment at the door of the bedroom before her father called her in, and then she leaped easily up onto the bed, rattling the mattress and the magazines, the plate with the untouched sandwich and every plate, it seemed, in her father’s fragile spine. He put a hand out, “Go easy,” he said. Michael turned from the game to say, “Watch it, nimrod.” Only slightly subdued, she perched herself on the pillow beside her father, patted his bald head. “We had fun,” she said.

Then Mary was in the doorway, in her skirt and blouse and stocking feet. Her hands on her hips. “Are you ready to get out of that thing?” she asked.

John Keane saw both boys bow their heads.

“No,” he said simply. “It’s helping.”

She looked to the boys, as if they would corroborate her skepticism. But they were having none of it. She looked especially at Michael, who might have been her surest ally, given all the times in the past he’d stood against his father, over politics, over hairstyles, over mandatory Sunday Mass. “Honestly,” she said, moving into the room, gathering the clutter from her side of the bed. “I hardly think this is the solution.”

“It’s helping,” he said again.

She only glanced at him. “You don’t look like you’ve been helped,” she said.

It was Clare who was absorbing the discussion unabashedly, through her wide eyes.

Now Annie appeared. She was talking-these days she was always talking-and both boys raised their hands to hush her. She walked around the bed to join them in front of the small screen. The runners scored. Michael leaned forward to slap Jacob’s hand, jostling the mattress. Clare threw her hands up in the air, and then around her father’s shoulder. Impatient, Mary Keane was leaning over the bed, gathering the magazines.

In fact, he would die alone, accompanied only by the high-pitched pulse of the hospital machine, his last breath missed even by the nurses who were distracted by the changing shifts. None of them gathered at his bed, no candles lit. The offending leg already amputated in the doctors’ routine efforts to save him.

With the plate and the magazines in her hand she said, “Do you want the boys to help you get to the toilet before dinner?”

He knew he would have to manage it sometime within the next twenty minutes (ten minutes, now that she had brought the subject up), but he said, “No. I’m fine.”

He recognized the tactic: she’d humiliate him into a doctor’s office. Using words like toilet when she never said toilet, thought it unrefined, just to get him annoyed enough to make an appointment.

“Maybe I could get you a little bell or something,” she said, as coy as she might ever have been at twenty-one. “You could ring it when you need to go.”

No doubt this was Pauline’s plan.

He glanced at the TV. He felt the pain roil a little, threatening a larger blow.

“Why don’t you all go downstairs and have your dinner?” he said, calmly. Because she would see every bit of it in his face, she saw everything in his face.

“Send me up a piece of steak,” he said.

Clare brought the tray, walking with it through the slatted rosy sunlight that now stretched slowly, leisurely, the stroll of time, across the ceiling and the far wall. He’d just returned from the bathroom and the old army boot, its tongue lolling, lay in its coil of rope at the foot of the bed. He had an impulse, in his daughter’s presence, to throw a blanket over it. It occurred to him that he had reached an age (he remembered Mary’s befuddled old father) when his surest convictions could be transformed into mere foolishness in the blink of an eye.

“Put it here,” he said, dragging the straight-backed chair to the side of the bed. She put the tray down, kissed his cheek. There was something of the metallic odor of the hot subway about her still, the odor of his own missed commute home. All of his children scented with the wider world.

She was talking about the day in the city and what the man at the token booth had said, and what Pauline had said, and who she swore she saw in the lobby when the intermission lights flashed though she couldn’t really be sure. He surveyed the tray. A piece of chuck steak and mashed potatoes and green beans. A roll and butter and a dish of canned pears. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with both feet on the floor, he was aware of a certain numbness taking over his leg. He couldn’t eat a bite.

“The Spanish Inquisition,” she said, and he looked up at her, thinking, perhaps, she was repeating Michael’s joke about the rack. Again he had the impulse to cover up the empty boot. But she was, he quickly gathered, talking about the play. The tickets had been a gift from Pauline. Someone in his office told him they could well have cost sixty dollars apiece.

“They’re all prisoners,” Clare was saying. “In a dungeon. And there’s this long staircase.” She raised her arms, illustrating it. Her skirt was short, too short (he resisted interrupting her to mention this), her knees still chubby although the rest of her body had grown lean. “And Cervantes comes down. The prisoners attack him and then they put him on trial. In order to defend himself, he tells them a story. And then he becomes Don Quixote and all the prisoners are the other characters. So the whole play is like the story he tells, while they’re waiting in jail.”

She pulled off the headband that held back her hair. Scratched her head. The sunlight from the window was on her back. “He’s this old man and he’s read so many books about chivalry that he goes crazy and thinks it’s all real. He thinks he’s a knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha. And only one of his servants goes along with him, Sancho Panza. And they go out on a quest. He sees a windmill and thinks it’s a monster.”

“Titling at windmills,” he said. “It’s an expression.”

“Yeah,” she said. She slipped the headband on again, it was a habit of hers. “But it was really good the way they did it. The windmill was just this huge shadow at the back of the stage.”

He picked up his fork. Tried, and failed, to lift the bum leg. The pain, he realized, was far preferable to the numbness. She was on about the sleazy inn that Don Quixote thought was a castle, the servant girl (“A slut really,” she said, catching his eye for a second to see if he disapproved of the word-he did) he thought was a beautiful damsel.

He wondered briefly if she would end up wanting to go on the stage herself. She was pretty enough, he thought. But then all the little girls her age struck him as pretty.

The cure they came up with, she said-he had missed just who “they” were-was mirrors. (She said it mear-ras, the way her mother did. A touch of Brooklynese carried out to Long Island.) They surrounded the old man with mirrors, she said. And made him look at himself. Made him see.

She paused and said, “You’re not hungry?” But he shook his head, lifted the warm roll. “I’m listening,” he told her. He would give himself another minute or two before he tried moving his leg back onto the bed. It was possible that he’d have to call the boys for help. It was possible that he’d lost all use of it. “Did it work? The dose of reality?”

She stepped back a little. Now the sun was on her shoulder and her hair. Downstairs, he heard Michael saying, “A nine iron, a fucking nine iron,” and Jacob laughing, Annie, too. Their mother shushing the bad language. His brother Frank somewhere, in the boy’s laughter. And what a vocabulary his youngest child would take into the wider world. But Clare was attending only to her own tale.

“Yeah,” she said, dramatically, “but then you see him in bed and he’s dying.” Her eyes didn’t fall on his own bed, the empty old boot, or on him in his pajamas. But there was, perhaps, a catch in her voice, a sweet change of pitch as she went on. “Sancho Panza’s there, and his niece. But he doesn’t remember anything about being Don Quixote. Not even when Dulcinea comes in. She’s kind of cleaned up. She wants him to remember, but he tells her he was just confused. He says he was confused by shadows. Like the windmill thing.”

She paused. Looked at her father and shrugged. He suddenly realized that she was about to cry.

“That’s too bad,” he said. He knew enough not to laugh at her. He had already offended her, more than once, when he’d teased her about her easy tears. Downstairs, the water was running, the kitchen chairs were being pushed back from the table. He broke the roll in two and handed her a piece. “Did you have your dinner?” he asked.

She took the bread. Held it in her hand. “But that’s not the end,” she said, caught up in it now. Not just her mother’s accent but her delight in the sound of her own voice, once she got started. He smiled, watching her. The only way to temper the outlandishness of a father’s love was to weigh it against the facts of your children’s imperfections. She was a plain child, truth be told, not as pretty as her sister. “Dulcinea sings the impossible dream song and, really slowly, he begins to remember. He starts to get out of the bed. Sancho helps him. All of a sudden he knows he really is Don Quixote. Really.”

And then, to his great surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was sweet, lower than he would have expected, although surely he had heard her singing around the house a thousand times before. But now she was singing for him, much as she used to do when she was very small, her hands at her sides, her eyes half closed. The cotton skirt not too short, perhaps, but wrinkled from the hours she’d been sitting. The little-girl knees, although her body was growing lean. She sang and he was both enchanted and embarrassed by her earnestness. Both hopeful that neither of the boys would come upstairs (Jacob would only roll his eyes but Michael would sing along with her, mocking, howling the words, to run, where the brave dare not go ow ow), and yet wishing that they would because there was something painful in it, watching her, another kind of pain altogether than what he’d been fighting these past two days. The boys had their lives off in the wider world, he thought, but girls, his daughters, they had lives far wider and far more inaccessible, right before his eyes.

The room was lit with the thick yellow light of a summer evening. The leg was numb and as certain as he was that he would find a way to heal it-or that the doctors would-he knew, too, that some part of his future had been retracted, foreshortened by the pain. That it had added, if only by a month or a year or two, to the time she would have to miss him.

She sang, she seemed to know all the words.

The lottery was held three weeks before Christmas, which made something biblical about the whole ordeal, or at least, Mary Keane said, medieval.

When all the days of the year had been called, she said to her husband, her mouth held crookedly-a grim joke in the face of what they could not change-”Maybe if the piano player had skipped practice that morning, Jacob would have had a different birthday.” He nodded; it was a joke, given its intimate circumstances, no one else could share, and even he, all these years later, felt himself blush. “Maybe if you’d married George,” he said.

And then he took Clare’s hand. She was bundled up against the cold. They were just going out for a breath of fresh air. At the foot of his driveway, pulling his garbage cans to the curb, Mr. Persichetti paused. Tony’s birth date, as it turned out, would have been a lucky one, if he hadn’t already enlisted and gone over and come back home again, hollowed-eyed and furious, after all he’d seen. “Hooked on drugs,” Mr. Persichetti said. He might have just learned the phrase.

Mr. Persichetti told Mr. Keane, “Shoot him in the foot. Break his legs before you let him go.”

Clare looked up at the two men. Her father gripped her hand and Mr. Persichetti stepped back and then forward, his face shadowy in the night.

“No, honey,” he said, touching her wool cap. “Don’t pay attention to me.” And then he glanced at her father, his eyes catching the dull streetlight. “I was there when you came into the world, you know,” he said, cheerfully, as if cheerfulness now could erase the terrible thing he had already said. She told him she knew. She had come too soon. She had come inconveniently. Pauline had only just put on her hat when the call came, on her way out to the movies.

“I was the very first person,” Mr. Persichetti said, “to welcome you into this crazy world of ours.”

And for the second time in that hour, John Keane felt a flush rise to his cheeks.

And your brother?” Mrs. Antonelli said because it was Michael Keane she remembered, all the hours he had cooled his heels on the leather couch before her desk, waiting to see Sister Rose, the principal. Jacob, sitting before her now, had left no mark on her memory-which was understandable enough, given the number of children who passed through St. Gabriel’s, a hundred graduates each year, six or seven hundred more since Jacob Keane had been an eighth grader. As secretary and (she liked to say) palace guard for Sister Rose, Mrs. Antonelli had far more contact with the troublemakers anyway. Michael Keane had been one of them. Jacob, clearly, had not.

“He’s upstate,” Jacob said. “College.”

He was a nice-looking boy-dark hair and dark brows, green eyes. But he was also slight, narrow-shouldered, not much bigger, perhaps, than he’d been when he left here. It was Mrs. Antonelli’s belief that God should have made all men tall and broad-out of fairness. Her own husband was six foot three. She thought of this as an accomplishment.

“Good for him,” she said, and then wondered at the contrast her words implied, for Jacob had just told her that he himself had left St. John’s and was now headed for the army. “And good for you, too,” she added. “For answering the call.”

Jacob smiled shyly. He wore blue jeans, which she did not approve of, and a tattersall dress shirt rolled at the sleeves, which was all right. “Thanks,” he said, politely, although they both understood he’d had no choice in the matter.

“And you’ll have the GI Bill when you get back,” Mrs. Antonelli said. “That’s how my husband put himself through Fordham.”

Jacob nodded slowly. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and then looked at her, his large green eyes and a girl’s dark lashes, nothing else to say.

Mrs. Antonelli glanced down at the work before her, but she had taken off her reading glasses when the boy came in (here to pick up his sister for a dentist appointment, although the mother had sent no note), so everything was a blur. From the room beyond came the sound of Sister Rose on the phone, speaking in the clipped rhythms of her professional voice. From down the hall came the drone of a class repeating its times tables. “I suppose it seems like just yesterday that you were here,” she said, making conversation.

The boy merely moved his head, as if uncertain himself whether he wanted to say yes or no.

The office was paneled in dark wood, and the light from the small window was yellow. There was a statue of the Holy Family in one corner, a flagpole bearing the white-and-gold diocesan flag in another. There was a crucifix and an oil painting of the pope on the wall behind Mrs. Antonelli’s desk, and the portrait of Our Lady of Perpetual Help from the old church on the wall behind Jacob’s head. There was the gently overpowering odor of Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume-a powdery scent that was neither fruit nor flower nor spice, like nothing in nature Jacob could think of-and despite the terrible familiarity of the office, the long halls of the school, the sound of the children reciting their lessons, it was this scent alone that brought him back to his years here, years of terror (he’d been a shy child and the nuns with their sweeping skirts and clicking beads had all but made him mute), years of grace (because he was also a good child, chosen above all others to carry messages from his teachers to Mrs. Antonelli’s desk). He briefly studied his hands. Mrs. Antonelli’s perfume brought him there again and put off all that was ahead of him not simply by a few hours but by years.

And then Clare was standing in the doorway, beside the eighth-grade boy who had been sent to fetch her. She wore her beanie, and her pigtails had already begun to fray. There were Band-Aids on both of her knees, above the navy blue kneesocks. She wore the school’s plaid jumper, a new one that still hung on her stiffly, and under the wide white sleeves of her uniform blouse her bare arms seemed as thin as sticks.

Jacob stood. The car keys were in his hand.

“Please tell your mother,” Mrs. Antonelli said, standing as well, “to remember to send a note in next time.”

Jacob nodded. “I will,” he said. And then, “Thank you.” And then, head down, “Sorry to disturb you.” He put his hand out to allow his sister to go before him through the door. “Nice to see you again,” he said.

Mrs. Antonelli doubted very much that Jacob Keane would find the army to his liking. She looked up to see the eighth grader, a brazen thing, nearly six feet tall, who still lingered at the door with his shirttail out, hoping for another assignment from her to keep him from going back to class. She dismissed him and then sank into her chair. She put her glasses on and Sister Rose’s lovely handwriting-a perfection of the art, she always said-came clear to her again. She said a prayer: Let them find something easy for the poor kid to do. A desk job in Germany. Lifeguard duty at a base on Okinawa, as a neighbor’s boy had done. Amused to find how the world had turned since she was young-Germany and Okinawa now safe places for an American soldier.

But there was something unlucky about the boy. She would not have said tragic, just unlucky: his small stature, the awkward attempts at good manners, the apparently unsuccessful years at St. John’s, the draft. Getting sent to Vietnam would be of a piece with all that. And what opportunities for bad luck would he find over there? Mrs. Antonelli had no children of her own, and so felt herself more clear-eyed about such things. There were kids who were born with luck on their side and others who simply weren’t. It wasn’t about intelligence or good grades, not even necessarily about good looks (although there was luck in that, too). It was chance, plain and simple. Kids born lucky and kids who never got a break. It was fate, perhaps, although she supposed God came into it somewhere (she couldn’t say how, except, perhaps, that God had his favorites, too). She saw herself, some months from now, telling Sister Rose, who would not remember him, how Jacob Keane had come to her office not long ago, just before he went in, to pick up little Clare and take her to the dentist.

Two boys from St. Gabriel’s had already died in the war. Neither was memorable to her as a student, although she had attended both funerals, sitting behind the three eighth-grade classes who had filled up the back of the big round church, warming it a bit, for both boys had been buried on cold winter days. From where she sat, the flag-draped coffins and the stooped families in their dark clothes had seemed rather a long way away. Although she had heard one of the mothers say, simply enough, “My baby.”

Mrs. Antonelli touched her glasses to make sure they were still there, for Sister’s blue ink and fine letters had once more lost their clarity, and the steady yellow light briefly wavered. She looked up. The tall eighth grader was in her doorway again, his shirttail still out and his tie still crooked, a white attendance sheet from Sister Savior in his hand. His face and his hair, all his edges, a blur, through her tears. An angel himself, through her tears.

In the narrow alleyway beside the school, Jacob paused and then leaned down to whisper into his sister’s ear. “It was a fib,” he said.

He leaned down, out of the autumn blue sky, out of the cinder-block wall, out of nothingness (she would say later) and into awareness, into memory. His eyes were green and his lashes long and thick. There were marks on his face, freckles, lingering acne, nicks from his razor. There was the trace of a beard. He leaned down and put his lips to her ear and said, “It was a fib,” a buzz against the soft bones that made her raise her shoulder and giggle. Surely not her first memory of him-he had read to her when she was still in a crib, he had sat beside her on the stairs waiting to be called down on Christmas morning, at the dinner table he had spoken to her through his raised milk glass, the milk bubbling with his words until their father said, “Enough”-but surely this was her first clear memory of his face, leaning down to her out of the autumn sky.

There was no dentist appointment, he said. He had the car keys in his hand. He started walking again. He just wanted to take her for a ride, he said. She hurried to keep up. They were in the alleyway. On one side was the long cinder-block wall that separated the school property from the strip of stores and the parking lot next door. On the other, the low steps and wide glass doors of the gym. The alleyway itself was a magnet for lost mimeographed worksheets and loose-leaf paper, for candy wrappers and brown lunch bags and the yellowed wax bottles, many of them marred by teeth marks, that had once been filled with sweetened, brightly colored liquids, purchased from Krause’s store. There seemed to be a constant wind blowing along the ground here, full of sand and grit, and she felt she was racing through it, following him. He had the car keys in his hand and they jingled like a cowboy’s spurs as he led her around the cinder-block wall and into the parking lot next door, where he had left his car. He unlocked the door, opened it for her. “Hop in,” he said. There was a thin terry-cloth cover over the old leather seats. It seemed to be attached with rubber bands. It slid underneath her as she climbed in, but it was soft to the touch. He slammed the door, walked around the back of the car. He had parked under the single tree in the lot and a few leaves, yellow and gold and rust colored, had drifted onto the red hood and across the windshield. He got in the car, put the key in the ignition. “Let’s just drive around,” he said.

She said okay, although still she expected the drive to end at the dentist’s office-the eighth grader who had fetched her had said so, and so had Mrs. Walters when she called her to the front of the class. She could already smell the cinnamon and alcohol of the place. Hear the hateful sound of the drill. The office was in the basement of the dentist’s house. There was a long concrete stairwell, damp and steep, that went down to the door. The floor of the waiting room was black and white. There would be a shoe box full of charms and toy jewelry from which she could pick two when it was over.

Her brother put his arm across the seat and slowly backed out of his space. He drove first through the length of the narrow lot, past the candy store, the hardware store, the five-and-dime. “That’s where the ‘hoochie-koochie-koo’ man used to stand,” he said. He pointed to a row of shopping carts in a corner near the grocery store. “When I was your age,” he said. “He was just a crazy old man, always kind of drooling. If he got close enough to you, he’d pinch your cheek and say, ‘Hoochie-koochie-koo.’ ” He looked over his shoulder as he turned out of the lot. He was smaller than their father, but he had the same seriousness when he drove. “People said he was shell-shocked. From the war.” He made another turn, driving slowly, slower than she could walk. “I don’t know when he stopped being there.” He drove past the bowling alley and told her he’d been on a bowling team in eighth grade. He was so bad, he said, that he never broke a hundred. He said he used to sit there and pray, waiting for his turn. Just one spare, he used to say. Not even a strike. You don’t have to make me good, he used to tell God. “Just average.” He looked at her and laughed. She laughed, too, mostly because it was the middle of the morning and she was supposed to be in school and she wasn’t. She was sitting beside her brother in his car. He raised his arm and pointed and then quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. “That’s where we used to go for our polio shots, when we were little. And then they changed it to those little sugar cubes.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I guess they worked,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ve never had polio, have you?”

She laughed, not exactly certain it was a joke. “No,” she said.

He put the turn signal on again and once more pulled out into the road. It was a familiar route, the one that led from the church or the school to home, but it was made strange and new by the fact that it was mid-morning and she should have been in school, by the fact that she was alone with her brother, in his car, and they were driving even more slowly than she could walk. They passed the playing field at the back of the school, beside the cemetery. Without a word, the two of them turned their heads to watch it go by. The grass was balding and the fence behind home plate was bent and torn. There was still something of summer’s dust over the whole thing although the leaves on the trees at the far end were yellow and red. They turned again, down another street, this one lined with houses like their own. Lawns and driveways and sidewalks. Jacob named the friends who lived in some of them-Louie, Kevin Malloy, Ted Fish. He told her a story about one Halloween. He turned again. Lori Ballinger’s house. Michael took her to the prom. Bobby Kent’s house. Bobby cried in sixth grade when people wouldn’t stop calling him Clark. He turned again. Now they were off the familiar route to church and school and she began to suspect once again that he was taking her to the dentist.

“Did you ever see this house?” he asked her and once more raised his hand from the steering wheel. She looked. A house like all the others but as they passed she saw that the bushes beneath the front windows were scattered with garden gnomes, maybe a dozen of them. And then that the front steps were full of ceramic animals-dogs, geese, rabbits. And then, as they passed, that the garage door was painted with a huge, colorful portrait of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by stars and rainbows. “Not sure what’s going on there,” he said.

She said, “It’s pretty.”

They passed a woman pushing a baby carriage. Lawns with sprinklers going. He reached to turn on the radio. He said, “Don’t let me hear you listening to anybody but the Good Guys while I’m gone.”

She said, “I won’t,” and remembered for the first time that last night before she went to bed her mother had said that when she got home from school today Jacob would be gone off to the army. Like their father had done.

He turned again, the signal making a ticking sound, and she recognized the street once more. They were nearly home. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Scoot down.” She looked at him, unsure. “Scoot down,” he said, more urgently. He put his hand on the top of her head, over her beanie, and pushed her a little. The terry-cloth cover slid with her. He did not increase his speed. “Just in case Mom’s looking out the window,” he said.

All she could see were the tops of the trees and the blue sky, but she knew they were passing their house, the driveway and the lawn, the white shingles and the dark red trim, the sheer white curtains in the front window and the drapes upstairs, in their parents’ room.

She knew her brother had turned and was looking at their house over the top of her head. It was like a dream of passing her own house and not turning in. There was a slow song on the radio and the tick tick tick of the turn signal seemed to mar it somehow. Jacob looked down at her over the rolled-up sleeve of his arm. Her beanie had come down over her forehead and she had buried her chin in her chest. He glanced back at the street and then reached out to touch her thin elbow. “Okay,” he said, softly. “Sit up again.” But the terry-cloth cover was slipping under her and it was more of a struggle than she would have imagined. She wiggled and pressed her palms against the seat and raised her legs and pulled at her skirt. Her saddle shoes flashed black and white beneath the dashboard. He watched her, his eyes going back and forth from the windshield. “Jeepers,” he said, finally, when she had settled herself, pushed the beanie to the back of her head. “A little spastic there,” he said, and although he was smiling, not teasing, she pouted at him anyway, for saying spastic. He reached out again and put his palm on her head.

They drove on, through an intersection and up a hill and then around the front of the high school with its long row of gray doors. Past the football field and the tennis courts, then, turning again, back among houses that over here were all single-story with long front lawns. He gave names to only a few of them. He was mostly listening to the music, only occasionally, softly, singing along. His sleeves were rolled up and his arms looked strong to her, although his hands, fingers and nails, were pale and thin, like her own. He said, “This can be Michael’s car when he gets home from school, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Dad’s got to go out and turn the engine over every other day or so. Remind him.”

She said okay. They were driving back down the hill. She could see the wiry spire stuck on top of St. Gabriel’s round roof. There was the stubble of a beard on her brother’s cheek and his hair brushed the collar of his shirt. She was beginning to feel the first pinpricks of doubt, or guilt. The morning was growing long. The sun was now hot through the windshield. She was supposed to be in school. Surely it was not her first memory of her older brother-he had once helped her make a bus for dolls out of a cardboard box and pushed it across the living-room carpet, from bus stop to bus stop-but it was, perhaps, the first memory in which she saw him distinctly, on his own, apart from their house and their family, separate. He took his hands from the steering wheel one at a time and rubbed the palms against his jeans. He glanced at her again. “Got me a ticket for an aeroplane,” he said, and grinned, but stopped at a light at the next intersection, he leaned his head back and blew air at the cloth ceiling. He closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid that he had forgotten about her completely. But then the car behind them beeped to get them going again. “Hold your horses,” he said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. There was a brown scapular, a small picture of the Sacred Heart, dangling from it. They were now passing the far side of the church and her school, the cemetery and the gray incinerators.

“I don’t want to get yelled at,” she told him.

He nodded slowly, as if she had said much more and he was slowly, bit by bit, agreeing with it all. He pulled into the parking lot beside the church and walked her only to the door of her school. He pushed the door open for her and she walked under his arm, from the heavy autumn sun to the cool shadows of the hallway. The entire school was reciting the prayers before lunch-Sister Rose’s voice on the PA sounding from every classroom, the children’s collective voice following along-Our Father and Hail Mary and Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty… She walked along the shining linoleum, down the stairs, and pulled back with a start as she began to turn into the wrong classroom. By the time she found her own, the prayers were over and the children were reaching under their desks for their lunch boxes. When she saw Mrs. Walters’s powdered face, smiling at her, she began to cry, all unaccountably until she felt the woman’s hand stroking her head and realized that somewhere along the way she had lost her beanie. In the parking lot where they played during recess, she recruited a pair of friends to help her search for it, but with no luck, although one of them spotted Jacob, coming through one of the doors of the church and called to Clare. She looked up just in time to see him leave.

Later that afternoon, on the plane, his first flight, he leaned his head against the window and tried to distinguish the streets and highways and parks below, looking for the thrill of spotting something familiar. He looked for the church and the school, certain they would be his surest landmarks: the roof of St. Gabriel’s, from up here, would indeed look like a flying saucer. The school and the gym made identifiable, from up here, by the way they jogged around Mr. Krause’s store. But the plane was banking already and wisps of cloud touched the rising wing. He could not get his bearings. Down below, there were green yards and long gray roads and more baseball diamonds than he would have imagined. There were the blue ovals of backyard pools. There was the Unisphere and then the stadium and then the spires of the city, a glimpse of limitless ocean before the plane banked again and the clouds took over. He sat back. He was aware of an obligation to say something to the woman beside him-she was a smallish woman, older than the girls he knew, younger than his mother, she was already reading a paperback-but he was uncertain of the protocol. Where you headed, maybe. Or, Good book? Fly much? He was leaving home for the first time and already he saw how ill equipped he was, how unready. He could not make conversation with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life. He touched his seat belt. Put his hands in his lap. He closed his eyes and thought to pray but all petition was undermined by Jesus’ superior prayer, on the night before his death: Your will, not mine. Jacob wanted only to say, Take care of me. Give me a break. The change of light in the cabin made him open his eyes again. The plane had cleared the clouds-they now ran like a great white field just below the wing, they were touched with gold-and the sky was a solid blue. “Incredible,” Jacob said, and the woman beside him put down her book and leaned forward, their shoulders brushing, her hair smelling fresh, like green leaves. He had a memory of the scent of green willow leaves on yellow, pliant stems, small starbursts of blood on his palms. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said.

In June, Susan Persichetti found a job at the Woolworth’s in the mall-the cosmetics counter, which was fun and gave her a chance every once in a while to slip a lipstick or a bottle of nail polish into her purse. She had to wear a smock, a pale blue polyester thing, all the employees did, and by early August she was bringing it home and putting it on over her clothes in her bedroom before she went downstairs and out past her parents to work.

Her room was in the attic, the long, dormered space that had been left unfinished by the builder (although he did provide the center-hall staircase that led to it), and paneled and plumbed rather inexpertly by her father and Tony while he was still in high school. She’d borrowed the room while Tony was in the army and now that he had left home-for good, it seemed-the space was hers alone, but it still retained the dark scent and insurmountable dreariness of a boy’s room: oak paneling and brown shag carpet and a wooden toilet seat in the bathroom. She didn’t mind. She had even kept a couple of her brother’s old posters on the far wall.

Putting her smock on over her clothes, she skipped down the stairs, her car keys in her hand, and cried, “Going,” to her parents, who would always look up from the couch or the table or the television and then-if they were in the same room-look at each other to confirm how they both understood that this summer’s quick glimpses of their teenage daughter breezing in and out the door were mere prelude to her leaving them for college in another year. And then for the rest of her life. But the look they exchanged acknowledged, too, how pleasant it was to know that for her, stepping off into her life, there would not be the quicksand that had met Tony: the army, the war, the year away in which the child they had known was lost, utterly drawn down, sucked under by the troubled, angry, silent young man he had become.

“Drive safely!” they cried back. Or, “Be careful!”-cheerfully, because girl children went off but they also returned, bringing grandchildren and their own solicitousness to their parents’ old age.

Sometimes her father would begin to sing, teasing her, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

It was amazing, she learned, what you could find out. There was no sense looking under A in the phone book, for instance, you should look under W instead: Women’s Health. Women’s Medicine. (Woman itself sounding in their mouths like a newly coined word-not ladies, not girls anymore, but women.) Information filtered down from a college-age friend of a co-worker at Woolworth’s that one of the clinics in the city was in the same building that held a famous hair salon everyone at school was talking about going to. She called the clinic from a pay phone. She needed proof of age and three hundred dollars and if she hadn’t had a pregnancy test yet, they would do one there. Also someone to accompany her home.

She wasn’t eighteen but she could use Annie Keane’s phony birth certificate and driver’s license, the one she used to get into bars. Although Annie had hazel eyes and hers were brown, they were both five foot five or so and slim. Annie said she’d come with her, too, so no need to call the boy-”The Jackass” was how Susan now referred to him-who had stopped calling her himself early in July. There was only the matter of the money.

She had saved seventy dollars so far this summer. Annie loaned her fifty from her own savings and then two more ten-dollar bills, filched (on two separate occasions) from her mother’s lingerie drawer. Susan added thirty-five of the fifty dollars her father had given her to shop for fall clothes-indulgently, because her mother wanted her to use her own money-saved by buying a single sweater and then going into the dressing room to put a blouse and a kilt skirt into the same bag. The trick-amazing what you could find out-was to go to the better departments of the nicer stores where there was usually only one saleslady working the floor (a plump grandmotherly type in this case, whose daughter had gone to Mary Immaculate Academy as well), and no one counting hangers as you moved in and out of the dressing room, looking for another size.

She added the next thirty of the thirty-seven dollars from her second-to-last paycheck.

In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break. They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the blue sky-the beginning of a late-summer sunset. Because they had not seen each other since June-they were not particular friends-conversation demanded an accounting. Jill had had a perfectly boring summer, working at a card shop in a strip mall near her home, the backyard pool, Jones Beach, two weeks camping with her family-where, she added, a spontaneous lie, she met this guy. They went pretty far, she said, improvising, swimming together late at night, in the lake, out of their suits. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed and funny-but from Syracuse, she said, the first place she could think of that sounded like the dark side of the moon.

Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit, her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly, never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.

Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the reports others gave of themselves-the incredible dates, the wild parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers-but she had always trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a table in the lunchroom.)

Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”

A laugh, sophisticated, wordly-wise, broke from Susan and she said, “Start saving your pennies now,” and opened her smock and put her hand on her stomach, although what she thought of as her paunch was mostly invisible to Jill, and to everyone else.

“This ain’t pizza,” she said.

At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in Susan’s voice, were high drama.

Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan-the summer suddenly become interesting-”I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with your

Susan spent the night before at Annie’s house so in the morning they could walk to the bus stop. They both told their mothers they were accompanying the other to the famous hair salon in the city to give her moral support while she got a new cut. (The story would be that in the end Susan/Annie had chickened out on getting something totally new and just got a few inches cut off, you could hardly notice the difference.) They took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and then rode the hot subway uptown. Of course, they didn’t run into any neighbors or relatives who worked in the city, or anyone else who knew them, but that was no matter-the haircut story was already in place; they were, until they got off at the eleventh floor and not the third, precisely where they were supposed to be.

Susan filled out the forms with Annie’s name and placed Annie’s fake license and birth certificate under the clip on the clipboard before handing it back to the woman at the reception desk. The woman, handsome and serene, with a small face and an old-fashioned French twist, merely slipped them out from under the clipboard and handed them back to her-no question of hazel or brown. “That’s fine,” she said, sweetly. “And how will you be paying?”

The day before, Susan had gone to a bank near the mall and exchanged her collection of money for six crisp fifty-dollar bills, sensing somehow that the neatness of her payment would confirm the authenticity of her age. She handed these to the woman, still in their yellow bank-provided envelope. The woman merely attached the money to the same clipboard and then said again, “That’s fine.”

“We’ll call you in a minute,” she said.

It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in late August and there was no one else in the waiting room, which was very small and comfortable-a pale lavender sofa and two plaid chairs, shaded lamps that might have been in someone’s living room. Annie had brought the last of her summer reading books-A Farewell to Arms-which she was only halfway through and Susan herself had not yet finished. “Boring,” Susan said, glancing at it. “A lot of war stuff.”

Although they would have said they were prepared for it, they both were startled when a woman-a nurse in a white uniform-came through the door beside the receptionist and said, “Anne Keane.” After only a moment’s hesitation, Susan stood.

“Good luck, Annie,” Annie whispered and Susan laughed a little. “Thanks, Susie.” Like the spunky, place-trading twins from a sitcom.

The nurse-square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm brown eyes-advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the ends of her pale hair.

In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes-brown not hazel-on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

Annie took her friend’s bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff, she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment-trembling, looking ahead-could be called courage. And wondered why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.

Inside, Susan gave a urine sample and then undressed and was examined, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the procedure was explained to her. The strange words: cervix and uterus, dilation and curettage, felt like a steel blade against the edge of her teeth. In religion class, Sister Lucy had said, more simply, that they break the baby’s arms and legs and drown it in salt water.

Pain like a pretty bad period, the doctor said, some heavy bleeding afterward.

There was another paper to sign and she was halfway through her own first name when she remembered and went over the S and the U.

“My hand is shaking,” she said, apologetically, and the tanned nurse whispered, “No worry,” and gently took the botched form away.

The woman who did the exam and all the explaining was small and wiry with wiry red hair and a humorless face. She had been introduced as the doctor but still Susan expected a man to come in for the abortion itself. Someone stooped and gray in a white coat and a tie who would call her “young lady” and look at her over the top of his glasses both to reprimand and to forgive. Who might say something old-fashioned and complimentary, something like, “Well, I can see why your young man might have been carried away. You’re a lovely girl.”

But only another nurse came in, a pretty Asian woman who might have been alone with the doctor in the small and crowded room for all the notice she paid. The doctor said, “Are we ready then?”

The tanned nurse stood right beside her. She complimented the sun streaks in Susan’s hair and then held her hand when she drew a sharp, unsteady breath at the cold touch of the instruments. She told her, “Go ahead and say ‘Ouch’ if it hurts,” but Susan only turned her head, her eyes now fixed on the woman’s white uniform, which was the same woven polyester of her Woolworth’s smock. She could smell the sweet clean odor of the detergent it had been washed in. “Not much longer now,” the nurse said. And, “You’re doing great.” She was supposed to be in what they’d called, so prettily, a twilight sleep, but the pain was on a steady rise and in the midst of it, Susan gripped the woman’s hand and raised it to her own mouth to stifle a sob. There was the smell of hospital soap on the nurse’s skin, sharp, medicinal, and, because of the pain, somehow cruel. It was a scent that would return her to this moment for the rest of her life.

They brought her to another room to recuperate. She had not worn a sanitary napkin and a belt since she was thirteen and the thing felt like a diaper between her legs. There was a kind of chaise longue for her to sit on, a small table beside it with grape juice and a few cookies: a kindergarten snack, a clean sheet, and a light blanket. The tanned nurse lowered the light a little further and said she would go tell her friend she was okay. She could go home in an hour or so, depending on how she felt.

“Rest a bit, honey,” she said, like a mother, before she left the room.

Susan could hear the traffic rising up from the street, the bang and rattle of trucks, taxi horns, a warning shout and a whistle and then a man’s laugh. She could picture the men in the street below, men pushing carts and backing vans into narrow parking spaces, men in suits, men with briefcases, going to lunch, ducking into cabs, running their hands down their ties as they walked across a subway grate. She closed her eyes but knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had never gone to sleep in New York City.

An Act of Contrition started up in her head. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” more a habit of mind than a plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it was, its immediate effect was that she could go back to school next week, her senior year. She could take the SATs, go to the prom, go to graduation. She could apply to colleges and choose one and move into a dorm in September. She could go out with her friends this weekend, maybe meet another guy. She could sleep late tomorrow (she had already asked for a late shift at the store, three to nine) and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock-”Going”-her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another room, “It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,” sweet and affectionate and naive as he always was because he had no fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son had plumbed and paneled with their own hands. “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

The tanned nurse came in again to take her temperature and check her pad. She came back a little while later to say the doctor would be in to talk to her once more and then she could get dressed and go. “Although,” she said, blithely, “I’m not sure where your friend has gone off to.”

Susan almost said, “Annie?”-but instead pursed her lips to show she had no answer.

The nurse glanced at her watch. “I thought maybe she’d gone out for a bit of lunch, but she’s been gone a while now.” She gave Susan the full, professional warmth of her brown eyes. “Pam at the desk said she just kind of flew out.”

Susan nodded. She and Annie had agreed to have lunch together, if she was up for it, at a diner on Third Avenue. Vanilla egg creams and greasy cheeseburgers, they’d said.

“We can’t let you go home alone, you know,” the nurse told her kindly, deliberately. “Is there someone else you can call? If she doesn’t come back?”

Jill O’Meara came to mind, but Susan suspected she was probably at work now. Susan didn’t even know the name of the card store. Jill would be two hours coming in from Long Island anyway. The Jackass had a car-a GTO, the whole problem-and lived in Queens, and it would serve him right to get the full weight of the whole summer delivered to him in one phone call (You screwed me, you dumped me, I just had an abortion, and you need to drive me home), but she wasn’t that crazy. She knew he caddied on Tuesday and Thursday anyway; she’d made enough plans this summer to casually drop by the golf course.

Slowly, she shook her head. “She’ll be back,” she told the nurse. “She said she might run over to Bloomingdale’s.” And then, when the nurse had gone out again, wondered how messed up she was to find herself praying, praying earnestly this time, that her half-assed lie was true.

The doctor, without a smile, gave her a lecture about venereal disease and a prescription for birth control and told her about the new risks a second abortion would raise. Then she handed her a small white business card, the name and number of a social worker.

Frowning at her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the doctor suddenly asked, in quick succession, “You live with your family? Mother and father? Are you afraid of your father? Is he violent? Does he hit you?”

After everything, Susan was surprised to feel herself blush. There was a time when she might have been afraid that her father would hit her. When she and her brother were kids, he had often shown them the back of his hand, and though they’d never once been struck, they had always flinched. But that was long before Tony went to Vietnam, and came back, and disappeared. Long before the night she saw him weeping in their father’s thick arms, not like a baby or even a kid, but like a lunatic, one of her father’s own patients, God’s mistakes, as he called them, saliva veiling his open mouth. Or the day he put his fist through the living-room wall. Or the day their mother told Susan that it would have been easier for their father if Tony had been killed in the war.

“My father’s never hit me,” she told the doctor. “Not at all.” After everything, it was the first time she saw them suspect a lie.

The nurse had just handed her the first month’s supply of pills in a little case that looked like a pink compact when she said, cheerfully, “Your girlfriend’s outside.”

Annie was on the same couch where Susan had left her, but it was clear, even in the warm light of the waiting room, that she’d been crying.

There were two other, middle-aged, women also in the room so Annie whispered when she said, “You okay?” and Susan whispered back, “Yeah, are you?”

“Fine,” Annie said shortly, and then handed Susan her purse.

They walked down the hall to the elevator in silence. Although they lived on the same street, although Susan’s father had helped to deliver Clare, they had been best friends only since the first week of freshman year. At mixers with the all-male Catholic schools, they had discovered they were the perfect boy-meeting pair: You ask the blonde, I’ll ask the brunette. They had gone on their first dates together. They had lost their virginity within a week of each other-Annie on the night of the junior prom, Susan a week later in gratitude for the prom and in regret for not having done it, perhaps more memorably, then. They had gone through this ordeal all summer knowing that their places were interchangeable-that Annie could be Susan and Susan could be Annie. Knowing, too, all they knew about breaking the baby’s arms and legs and drowning it in salt water.

“Did you have lunch?” Susan asked her in the elevator and Annie said, “No. Aren’t we going to the diner?”

At the third floor, they got the full whiff of the famous hair salon and then watched a tall, beautiful woman get on, her frosted hair blow-dried to elaborate perfection. Stepping back to make way for her, the two girls exchanged a look behind her back, a grimace and a grin.

If Annie hated her for what she had just done, Susan thought, then she would be alone in the world, as lost as her crazy brother screaming in his dreams.

In the diner, they found a booth near the window. The cheeseburgers were perfect, flat and juicy and turning the soft rolls beneath them a reddish pink. The sweet egg creams, in frosted fountain glasses, might have been a balm for any number of things. They both put their straws in and then drew them out again and licked the white, vanilla-scented foam.

“So, where’d you go?” Susan asked, hoping to deflect Annie from saying, How was it? This morning she would have trusted her not to ask “How was it?” but now, suddenly, everything seemed tentative between them. It was possible Annie hated her for what she had just done.

Annie slipped the straw back into her drink, churned it a bit. Reluctant to speak until finally, she simply said, “I lost it.” For Susan, the thick pad and the cramps and the terrible word-curettage-that set her teeth on edge, all gave way to the sudden descent her heart took. If their places were exchanged, Annie would not have done what she’d done. And there was no undoing it.

Tears came into Annie’s eyes-green eyes now against their red rims. Susan saw her swallow hard before she leaned across the Formica tabletop and asked, whispering, “Do you know she dies?”

Susan felt herself draw away from the question, even as Annie seemed to lean into it. “Catherine,” Annie said. “In the book. Did you know she dies at the end, and the baby’s dead and he walks out into the rain by himself?”

Annie’s voice seemed to twist away from her and she tried to laugh through it, suspecting she would lose it again were it not for the good cry she had had an hour ago, in a deserted ladies’ room some floors below the clinic-a place she had sought blindly, flying (as the receptionist had said) from the waiting room (another pair of women had entered by then, a greenish-looking girl in her twenties and an older woman who might have been her mother) and into a nearby stairwell where the first sob had broken from her throat and echoed so loudly that she’d run heavily down the stairs just to cover the sound with her own footsteps. Out onto another floor where there was, luckily, an empty ladies’ room. She had locked herself in a stall and sobbed for the unbearable sadness of the story: Catherine dead and the baby dead and nothing at all left for him-like saying goodbye to a statue, he had said-but to walk out into the desolate rain all alone.

She had cried for what must have been twenty minutes and then went out to the sink and splashed cold water on her face-knowing she should get back upstairs for Susan-and then began to cry again.

Because it was intolerable: Catherine dead and their baby dead. Intolerable and terrible and made even more so by the fact that within the same hour of her reading, the book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain (despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a nice hotel, a warm fire, a fine meal, love.

She had studied her own young face, blotched with weeping, in the bathroom mirror. Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father’s surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan’s ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. But what an effort it took.

Susan’s baby, she thought, might be better off, after all, never to have been born.

And then she had cried twenty minutes more.

“I’m over it now, sort of,” she told Susan, laughing at herself. “But I really lost it.”

Susan said faintly, “I guess I’ll have to read it.” In all her calculations about what to do, about running away, telling her parents, leaving school, driving to the golf course and throwing herself into his arms, she had not considered dying in childbirth. The baby dead, too. She wasn’t even sure if such things happened anymore. Although she knew the words “even death” had appeared somewhere this morning, on something she’d signed.

Annie pulled some paper napkins from the steel dispenser and held them under her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, laughing. “Spare yourself. You can copy my summary when it’s due.” Then she straightened her spine, threw back her head. She balled the napkins in her hand. “What is wrong with these people? These nuns?” It was an old refrain, but it comforted, somehow, returned them to the time before today. “What is wrong with our school?” It was their friendship’s eternal question. “Why do they pick these depressing books?”

Susan smiled, knowing the tune. “That bridge thing,” she offered.

“God, yes,” Annie cried. “San Luis Rey. What was the point of that?” She held out her hands. “Ethan Frome.”

“Oh, God.” Susan had a napkin to her eye as well. “When they crashed their sled into the tree.”

“Nice,” Annie said.

“Uplifting,” Susan added. It was their old routine. Oh, Mr. Gallagher.

“And the end of Great Gatsby” Annie said. “The blood in the pool from where he’s shot in the head.”

“And then that other guy,” Susan said, warming to it, “in the poem, who goes home and shoots himself.”

“Miniver Cheevy,” Annie said. “And Anna Karenina.”

Susan shook her head. “Couldn’t read it.”

Annie leaned across her plate, emphasizing the words. “She throws herself under a train.”

Susan laughed once, like a cough.

“Madame Bovary!” Annie said.

“Dead, too?”

She nodded. “After about a million affairs.”

Susan shook her head. “Well, of course,” she said. “Sex and death. That’s the message.”

Annie threw the balled-up napkins onto the table. “Christ,” she said, “what is wrong with them? Why do these crazy women want us to read such depressing things?”

“They want us to suffer,” Susan said, sarcastic so that Annie wouldn’t see how much she wanted to cry. “They want us to be afraid.”

“They want us to be nuns,” Annie added, so she wouldn’t have to say, Oh, Susan, oh, my poor friend.

In college, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to be teachers, most of them-industrial or liberal arts the predominant goals since any interest in science or math portended better things: accounting, engineering, med school in Mexico.

Damien’s, where they drank, was not, as Michael Keane liked to say, in the most felicitous part of town: it was an ugly, desolate old house tucked among ugly, snowplow-ravaged streets that were themselves lined with more narrow, sagging houses, bent fences, scrawny trees. There was a sorry-looking baseball field across the street and the edge of a cemetery off the abandoned lot behind. The black skeleton of an old power plant rose up in the far distance, over the field, and you couldn’t get to the place without feeling three, four, maybe five times the rutted thump and bump of abandoned railroad tracks under your wheels. But by their junior years most of them had had enough of the storefront bars on Main Street, the bars along the river and at the lake, the roadhouses and beer barns out past the fraternities. In the paucity of streetlight and house light that surrounded Damien’s, the place could easily be missed-there was only a bit of red neon in the window-and the joke was that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was. Knowing where it was brought all of them that much closer to what they thought of as the real life of the city. As did knowing Ralph.

He was in his early forties. Lean, a little stooped, a little paunchy. He lived on the second floor of the old house, above the bar. The house itself had once been a funeral parlor. Then a speakeasy. Then, and currently, a dive. Stories that were told about Ralph Damien said that he had dropped out of three colleges before joining the army. And turned down an offer to attend Oxford after beating the “head guy” at chess in a London pub. And accepted another to service a society matron in Saratoga Springs when he was nineteen. He wore his dark hair long at a time when most middle-aged men still didn’t, and had a drooping mustache at a time when every college student who could did too. He was languid and sarcastic and worldly-wise, a source for pot and hash as well as for beer and schnapps and tequila-for cheap stereo equipment, sometimes; sometimes for a stash of watches, commemorative gold coins, leather jackets; once for sealed boxes of Chanel No. 5 to take home to your mother.

Like Michael, most of them who hung out at Damien’s were juniors and seniors. Most of them had done at least one semester of student teaching in some smelly local school-in their dress pants and button-downs and ratty, poorly knotted ties. Most of them had a pretty clear idea of what the next few years were going to be like.

But stop into Damien’s at four o’clock in the afternoon with a cold rain falling, and there would be Ralph, a joint burning in an ashtray on the bar, the newspaper spread before him. He’d open the refrigerator in the back room to show off a dozen choice sirloins wrapped in white butcher paper-payback for a favor he’d done someone. He’d berate, leisurely and with a cool amusement, some perspiring liquor salesman in a cheap suit and a hunting jacket who was trying to sell him piss for beer. He’d hunker down at a side table with a pair of locals, his thumb to his jaw, his ringers splayed across his cheek and then rise, laughing, slapping backs. He’d be in Aruba over Christmas, he’d tell the college kids, great little hotel, great little woman waiting for him there, the color of caramel. At ten or eleven on a weekend night, he’d ask, “Anyone want to pump beer for a while?” And then step out from behind the bar to slip his arm around the waist of the woman or the girl who had been waiting on a corner bar stool. He’d bend down first for an openmouthed kiss and then, with his thumb slipped behind her belt, walk her to the stairs.

It never occurred to Michael Keane, to any of them, it seemed, to wonder what women saw in Ralph Damien, this middle-aged townie with his low-slung jeans and paunch and long hair (and-after the Christmas in Aruba-a diamond earring at a time when no middle-aged men, no men they knew of, wore one). The hours Michael had already spent in those green-walled classrooms had given him his own pretty clear idea of what the next few years would be like, but he wasn’t quite ready to believe that he’d be there, polyester dress slacks, frayed button-down, knotted tie, at thirty-five or forty. Better to imagine vaguely a life like Ralph’s, to imitate his weary smile, his cool squint, his way of palming the cash register or the beer pull. His nonchalance when he returned from upstairs with the girl in tow and either threw on the lights for last call or bought shots all around, or just took up one of his own bar stools for the rest of the night, the girl’s hips in his hands, her rump pressed firmly between his skinny legs.

On a night of cold rain turning to sleet late in October, Ralph put an elbow on the bar and slipped his hand under the long blond hair of a girl Michael knew-Caroline. He leaned toward her and she, stepping up on the bar rail, all graceful and delicate in muddy construction boots and blue jeans and an army surplus parka, leaned toward him. They kissed, just briefly, before she stepped back and raised her plastic cup of beer. Ralph lifted his cigarette from the edge of the bar and said, through the smoke, “You guys want to pour for a while tonight?”

He never paid anyone for working but he was generous with free drinks for those who did. Michael turned to the guy beside him to see if he was game. The kid looked blanched. Michael didn’t know him very well. A transfer from Nassau Community, he was observing at the same middle school where Michael was teaching social studies that semester. Michael had introduced him to Damien’s at the beginning of the year and now the kid followed him to the place after school as a matter of course. He was a surfer and didn’t much like the upstate weather, but, Michael thought, a nice enough guy, a little doe-eyed and baby-faced-you’d put him closer to fifteen than twenty-and a heavy but inept drinker, which was the first thing he thought of when he saw the kid’s bleached lips. But then he saw the way he looked down the bar at Caroline.

Michael had passed around a bag of miniature Hershey bars in his class that afternoon, in honor of Halloween, but a lot of the kids had refused to take one-because of their acne or their efforts to be cooler than the student teacher, he couldn’t tell-so he’d brought the extras into Damien’s. He took one now and slid it down the bar to Caroline, who turned as it bumped her elbow. She had one of those wide, clean faces that seem ordinary only on first glance, and beautiful hair. The girls he lived with filled their off-campus firetrap with the smell of hot rollers and singed scalp, but Caroline still wore her hair perfectly straight and nearly waist long. She picked up the candy bar and once again stepped up on the bar rail, leaning to see who had sent it.

“Trick or treat,” Michael told her. There were probably half a dozen backs and elbows and reaching arms in the short space between them, so he leaned forward and said, “Come here for a minute.”

He saw her glance at Ralph before she stepped down again and made her way through the crowd. He could see her smiling as she squeezed through, knowing everyone, having a fine night at Damien’s. She pushed through the crowd, flushed and grinning. She put her hand on his shoulder and he put his to the back of her head, just to feel the heavy silk. It was, he understood, why he’d called her over in the first place.

“You know my buddy here?” Michael asked her because he had momentarily forgotten the kid’s name.

But she shifted her hips a little and dropped her eyes for just a second before she said, “Hi, Terry.”

And Terry looked casually away from her, sipping his beer all nonchalant to say, “How’s it going?”

The crowd pushed her closer and Michael took the opportunity to slip his arm beneath her parka and around her slim waist. “How do you know this lowlife?” he said.

Terry was still looking straight ahead, his right leg jiggling.

“High school,” Caroline said. “We went to Valley Stream Central together.” She smiled at his averted face. There was something regal about her although she was not tall. She shook her hair, brushed some stray electrostatic strands of it off her cheek. The gray fake fur that edged her hood could have been ermine. “We ran into each other his first week here,” she said primly. “When he was thinking about going back home, he was so lonely.” She pouted a little, imitating his loneliness. “I tried to make him feel better,” intimating with her smile a certain benevolence bestowed, back when he was so lonely.

Terry glanced at her from over his shoulder, his color restored.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Nice mouth,” Michael told him even as Caroline sighed and slowly shook her head. “He does it even quicker than he says it,” she said. A few people around them laughed. Charlie Hegi, who was reaching for the bag of Hershey bars, said, “Zing.”

Now Ralph was in front of them, a bottle of tequila in one hand and four shot glasses in the other. “Play nice, children,” he said. Terry swung off the bar stool and immediately someone else took his place. A big guy, made bigger by his long doughboy coat. Bad skin and short arms and a ponytail that smelled unwashed. Bean was what they called him. He seemed to expand to fit whatever space was left for him, bellying up. “Hey, Ralph,” he said, with that false belligerence guys like Bean substituted for wit. “Where the fuck are your decorations? It’s Halloween, man.”

Ralph shook his head. “Don’t need them,” he said. He lifted Bean’s cup out of his hand, refilled it. Handing it back, he added, “They don’t make decorations as ugly as some of you assholes.” And then, leaning forward, “You know what this place used to be, man?” He bared his teeth, a kind of smile. “This place used to be a fucking funeral parlor, man.”

Bean took this in for a second, narrowing his small eyes, and then said, “Bullshit.”

“The trapdoor in the garage is casket-size,” Ralph went on. “Go look.” He gestured toward the center of the room, toward the jukebox and the bulk of the crowd. “From the turn of the century to the forties,” he said. “One dead body after the other laid out right here. This place has so many ghosts I can’t sleep at night. You want me to put up decorations?”

“Yeah, man,” Bean said, none of it sinking in. “It’s Halloween.” But the chubby girl who had edged in beside him, Debbie, held out her empty plastic cup and said, “You told me this used to be a speakeasy.”

Ralph took her cup and filled it, shaking his head like he was the weary professor and she some dumb-ass student who hadn’t done the reading. “My grandfather was the undertaker,” he said patiently, “but my father was the bootlegger.” He handed her the cup, took her dollar. His earring caught some light. “During Prohibition,” he said, and then looked at Bean. “You know what Prohibition is?” and Bean said, “Shit, yeah. I’m a fucking history major.”

“Yeah, well,” Ralph said. He slapped the dollar into the register. “During Prohibition,” he said, “my father had something going with some Mafia guys to ship booze from Canada-in coffins. Most of it went downstate but my dad kept enough of it to get a little side business going with a speakeasy-you know what that is, Bean?” And Bean, who had a mouthful of beer, swallowed it before he nodded. “They served the stuff right next to the stiffs,” Ralph said. “I kid you not. My grandfather would stuff ‘em and truss ‘em and then as soon as the last mourner left, my father would bring in his customers and get them stiff, too. His biggest challenge, he said, was keeping the cigarette butts out of the coffins. One time he came down here in the morning, just as the dead guy’s family was coming in to close him up for good, and, holy shit, he sees the corpse has a shot glass on his forehead.”

Ralph plucked a few empty cups out of hands and refilled them, collected his money. “This is a fucking funeral parlor,” he said, his arms outspread. “What do I need Halloween decorations for?”

“It’s not anymore,” Bean said, but uncertainly.

Ralph shrugged. He’d grown tired of the subject.

And then he looked at Caroline, who turned on her smile the way you flick on a lamp. Michael had driven home with her once, Thanksgiving vacation, a whole carload of them. She lived in a split-level, the shingled part painted pink. There was a saint in a stone grotto between some bushes, a boat on cinder blocks in the driveway, and her mother already waiting for her behind the aluminum-and-glass storm door. Someone had made a joke about Mom radar.

Ralph touched his crotch, shook his head, and then turned to reach into the cooler for two long-neck bottles of beer. He made his way around the bar just as Caroline moved to meet him. He took her under his arm, the two beer bottles resting just over her shoulder, and had his face in her hair before they’d reached the stairs.

Bean murmured, “Oh man,” as if he were in some mortal pain. Charlie Hegi had bowed his head and was twisting the Hershey wrappers into little bows.

Michael stepped behind the bar, but for a moment no one was ordering.

Then Terry returned. “I’m leaving,” he told Michael, as if he were obliged to. Michael shrugged. He felt sorry for him, in his student-teacher clothes. By the look of his eyes, he’d either been crying somewhere or throwing up.

He put a shot glass on the bar. “Have a drink,” he said. “And take off that fucking tie.”

“The guy’s a creep,” Terry said after he swallowed. “He’s old enough to be my father.”

“He’s old enough to be dead,” Bean said. And then added, “He probably is,” pleased with himself. “Probably sleeps in a coffin.”

Terry said again, “He’s a creep.”

But Charlie Hegi looked up to the ceiling. His teeth were full of chocolate. “He’s a lucky son of a bitch at the moment,” he said.

The place got busy then and Charlie stepped behind the bar to help out. Michael was pouring drinks and shots and slapping the cash register with the flat of his hand and the more time Ralph took with Caroline upstairs, the more the place became his own. What he was thinking of, he found himself telling a girl with a small face and short hair and dark eyebrows that were alternately appealing and weird, was teaching for a year or two and then heading south, maybe Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona, maybe even Key West, to open a bar on the beach-work his tail off over Christmas and spring break and then kick back the rest of the year, go fishing, travel, maybe write. Not for him, he said, polyester pants and short-sleeve dress shirts and the scorn of thirty inbred seventh graders for the next forty years. Not his old man’s Robert Hall suits five days a week, either, and the Long Island Rail Road to the city, the subway to the cubicle. Someone else’s shot glass on your forehead when you’re dead.

The girl was pretty enough, petite. She said something about wanting to be an artist as well as a kindergarten teacher. When Ralph returned, he slapped Michael on the back and said, I owe you, man. The scent of the pot they’d smoked was on him and Caroline took a bar stool in the corner and drank another beer, her hair still mussed in the back and her lips kind of blurred. Her friends seemed to stay away from her, but Ralph walked to that end of the bar every chance he got and leaned there next to her, watching the crowd, playing with her hair, not saying much.

Michael left with the short-haired girl. She was from Commack. In his room they smoked a joint and listened to Pink Floyd and then he showed her some glow-in-the-dark chalk he’d bought for his class. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it yet, he told her, he just thought it would get their attention. Later, with all the lights out, she stood naked on his bed and drew all over the wall-pretty good drawings, he thought, some of them fairly obscene. He told her she was going to make one hell of a kindergarten teacher and then pulled her down again and wrapped his legs around her-she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds.

When he finally took her home late Saturday afternoon, the sky was slung so low over the rusty city and everything looked so beat up and damp it seemed more like the end of winter, the beginning of mud season, than the height of fall. He went out for subs with some of his housemates and ended up at a Halloween party in one of the Main Street bars. Bean was there and at one point stumbled over to ask if Michael had a shovel in his car. He was wearing a girl’s hoop earring and a bandanna. A pirate, Michael supposed, digging for treasure. “This is upstate New York,” he said. “Everybody has a shovel in his car.” Bean asked if he could borrow it and Michael asked if he was snowed in. They both glanced through the crowd to the orange light of the plate-glass window, to the brown and desolate street. “No,” Bean said. “I’m not snowed in.” “Then you can’t have it,” Michael told him.

After last call, he went by Damien’s. He went in the back way-a set of wooden steps beside the garbage cans. This door was always open. It led to a small screened porch and what had been the original kitchen, which now stank of wood grown moldy with spilled beer. There were still plenty of people inside. Ralph had an arrangement with the police that usually allowed him to serve all night as long as he flashed the lights at one and cleared the place of most of the younger kids, and then locked the front door and turned off his sign. Michael didn’t see the short-haired girl, Beverly was her name, but Caroline was there, behind the bar with a couple of girlfriends. Ralph was at a table playing chess. Michael had a beer and watched him for a while. Then he had another and played some pool. At one point, about ten of them did shots of schnapps, simultaneously, up and down the bar, laughing like this was the wackiest college stunt ever. When Michael finally left, Ralph was still at his game and Caroline was curled up in a corner under her own parka. The sky just beyond the ball field was beginning to lighten-nothing spectacular about it, just the darkness turning into a queasy kind of pink. He could see a couple of neighborhood dogs running together across the outfield, noses to the ground. He could hear some poor working stiff trying to get his car started in the cold.

There was no food in the house on Sunday and there was no use bemoaning, yet again, this part of the state’s lack of decent delis and diners. Hungover, all any of the downstaters wanted was a chocolate egg cream and a buttered roll. But they drove over to campus anyway and paid three bucks for brunch in one of the dining halls. They watched the residents, mostly freshmen and sophomores, move around the table with their trays-some of them still joined to last night’s date, most of them stuck in same-sex groups of friends or roommates who also hadn’t scored. A girl walked by wearing torn fairy wings. Another had a tall striped hat. There was a subdued murmur throughout the room, the smell of steam-table scrambled eggs and burning toast and bins of bacon and beef bourguignonne. The staff had hung cardboard skeletons from the window of the dish room; one of them wore an apron and a hairnet. Michael noticed that most of the kids eating had wet hair and damp clothes, just out of the shower, and it made him think how young they looked, half formed. Outside, the campus, too, seemed sodden, the leaves gone from every tree but still lying in black heaps and scattered rags across the grass and along the walkways.

Then a roll of laughter came from the far end of the room. And then, following one another at a run, three guys dressed as the Marx Brothers-Harpo, Groucho, Chico. They climbed over tables, sat in girls’ laps, chased one another, the whole routine. Groucho put his arms around one of the fat dish-room ladies and did the eyebrow thing. Harpo had his bicycle horn. Their costumes were excellent-theater majors, no doubt-and all their gestures dead-on. People began standing on their chairs to watch, some of them shouting jokes or bits of encouragement or merely caught up in the growing, crazed enthusiasm that made Michael think of his own students when some glorious distraction disrupted the day and sent them all to the windows-a sudden hailstorm, a screaming fire engine, the milk delivery truck backing itself into a basketball hoop on the playground.

And then, out of the blue, a boy stood up from one of the tables and smacked a full plate of steaming eggs right into Groucho’s face. The impact floored the poor kid, sent his cigar flying. There was a moment’s pause in the general noise and Michael found himself listening for a moan of anger or resentment, but what he heard instead was only the silence of a change in the tide. Suddenly, someone else dove for Harpo and pulled off his wig. He saw it fly into the air, bouncing from hand to hand until somebody else slam-dunked it into the milk dispenser. Chico’s hat, too, was being passed around and when he appeared again among the crowd, he was hog-tied in his own plaid jacket and someone had squirted ketchup and mustard down his shirt. On the other side of the room, some girls were dancing around a dog pile of guys-one of them had Harpo’s horn and was squeezing it in short bursts, like a rising orgasm. Then Harpo scrambled free. He was naked from the waist down, cursing wildly. He ran for the door they’d come in through, hunched over, bare-assed and limping. Chico and Groucho followed, Groucho turning as he ran, the nose and mustache gone, the eggs still stuck to his shirt front and hair. He gave the room the finger and was gone.

It took a few minutes for things to settle down. Someone else had the bicycle horn and blew it intermittently, another guy held up Harpo’s pants and underwear and danced them around a bit. But people were returning to their seats, finishing their coffee, picking up their trays. Michael turned to one of his housemates and said, “What the hell just happened?”

He shrugged. Chris was a good guy. Stocky, already balding, laid-back, and funny. His father taught industrial arts in a Bronx high school and that’s what Chris wanted to do, too. Michael knew he’d be good at it. Everybody’s favorite teacher. Chris had made all the furniture in his room-bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, even the box he kept his dope in, intricately carved with vines and flowers, satyrs and nymphs.

He was going to get married right after graduation and they had a running joke around the house about what his girlfriend had decided was going to be their wedding song: “Time in a Bottle.”

Chris shrugged, his elbows on the table. “The world is full of assholes,” he said, nonplussed. “What are you going to do?” Michael could see him asking his students this very question for the next thirty years.

At Damien’s that night, Michael scanned the room for the short-haired girl, not sure whether he was hoping to see her or not. There were a few people in costumes, mostly masks or crazy hats, nothing too ambitious. Some of the girls wore leotards under their parkas and little ears on their heads-black cats or bunny rabbits. The less shapely ones were kids in flannel pajamas or housewives in bathrobes, curlers in their hair. One kid-every year-in a thrift-store trench coat that he would part to reveal a piece of pink rubber hose glued to a square of brown carpet whenever he caught a girl’s eye.

Ralph still didn’t have any decorations up, but there was a plastic pumpkin filled with candy by the register and every once in a while he lifted it and tossed some candy into the crowd. When Caroline squeezed in beside Michael, she put her elbow on the bar and held out her hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, coyly, but a little defiantly, too.

Ralph looked her up and down, baring his teeth in that strange grin. “Where’s your costume?” he said. He held the candy away from her, eyeing the turtleneck and jeans beneath her parka. “You’ve got to have a costume to get a treat,” Ralph said slowly, as if explaining something he thought she already understood. She stared at him a second longer and then abruptly turned away. The ends of her long hair briefly clung to Michael’s arm and shoulder as she turned. Then Bean moved in. He was still wearing the earring and the bandanna. He’d be wearing them for the rest of the year.

“Is he going upstairs?” he asked. He had put bits of black and gold paper over his teeth. “To get his nut?”

Michael shrugged. But Bean was watching Ralph behind the bar and didn’t seem to notice. Then he leaned closer, elbowing Michael’s side as if he were the one with the attention problem. “Is he going upstairs tonight?” he asked from behind his hand. “With her?”

Michael turned away from him-the bandanna was tight, digging into his eyebrows. He had a sudden recollection of Pauline’s big face, bearing down on him. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said, and Bean, still watching Ralph, said a breathless, “Fuck.”

And then he took a drag from his bottle of beer and shouted, “Hey, Ralph.” The hoop earring swaying with the effort. “What’s this about ghosts? I hear you got ghosts. You can’t sleep at night cause of the ghosts.” He looked around, noted the attention his voice had drawn. “Or is it because you’re some kind of frigging vampire?”

Ralph was handing beers over the bar to outstretched hands. When he finished, he walked down to where Bean stood. He touched the corner of his mouth, the drooping ends of his dark mustache. “You know, I never came down here when I was a kid,” he said softly. “There was an outside staircase we used. Straight to the second floor. I had it torn off when my folks moved south-it was a fucking death trap, it was so rotten. But when I was a kid, that’s how we went in and out. I never came in here. So I never really knew when the funeral parlor changed over to a bar. I mean, to a kid, it’s all the same. People are talking, somebody’s crying, somebody’s laughing. A fight breaks out. Every once in a while there’s this creepy silence and then everybody starts talking again. All the same. Still is.”

He looked at them all. He seemed to be making an effort to stay interested in his own words. “I had no problem with it. Dead guys, drunks.” He shrugged to show his indifference. “All the same.”

“No ghosts?” Bean said. “No ghosts keeping you up at night, like you said?”

Ralph let his black eyes rest on Bean for a minute. And then he said, “Only you guys.” Michael laughed with the others. Then, as was his way, Ralph leaned forward, squinting through his own smoke. “I listen to you guys, when I’m upstairs,” he said. He had his hands on the bar, a cigarette burning in one of them. “You don’t sound any different from last year or the year before. Or ten years before. Or even when I was a kid trying to go to sleep upstairs and there was a stiff down here in the middle of it all. And next year it won’t sound any different either.”

Bean straightened up at that, pulled himself back. “Fuck, I’m out of here next year,” he said. He looked around as if for corroboration, then pushed at the bandanna that had begun to slip over his eyelid. “I won’t even be here.”

But Ralph only grinned, patiently. The long-suffering professor. “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said, straightening up. “It won’t matter.”

He turned to toss his cigarette into the sink behind the bar, and Bean, his tongue still poking at his cheek, cried out sarcastically, “That’s one hell of a scary story, Ralph,” just as Caroline was squeezing herself between them. She had some of her girlfriends behind her and Michael heard them giggling and whispering, “Oh my God,” before he took in everything else. She squeezed up to the bar, smiling, her parka with its dirty fake fur closed up around her neck, and her hair, except for a few strands that rose and fell with static, tucked down inside it. She said one sharp, “Ralph,” as if she needed to get his attention. Michael looked down at her and then looked back over her shoulder. Her legs were bare from the hem of her parka to the tops of her construction boots. Michael looked back just in time to see her open her coat and say, “Lady Godiva.”

Beside him, Bean said, “Mother of Mercy.” The bright orange lining of her parka set off her pale body like neon. Through the veil of her hair there were her small, conical breasts and the shadows of her nipples, the teardrop-shaped navel carved into her stomach, the tender fuzz of pubic hair. In the mirror above the bar he could see all around her a dozen pale, openmouthed faces, like seraphim and cherubim in parkas and half-assed Halloween costumes, surrounding a Madonna.

Ralph bowed his head and moved his mustache from side to side, laughing. And then he reached into the plastic pumpkin and pulled out a Milky Way. He handed it to her. As she slipped the candy bar into her pocket, Ralph put his hand beneath her ear, lifting her hair as she stepped up on the bar rail to move toward him. Bean was now doing a backbend to see her lovely bare legs rising out of the muddy construction boots, her white, dimpled behind under the hem of the khaki parka, and if the low-grade moan that filled the air wasn’t from him, it was from half a dozen guys in the immediate vicinity, like a muffled howl.

When they broke apart, Ralph casually pulled two beers from the cooler. “You mind?” he asked Michael, as if he were just running out to use the john. Michael said, “I don’t mind.” Caroline, meantime, had bowed her head and let her hair fall over her face. Ralph went around the bar, bottles in hand, and Caroline, now holding her coat tightly closed, turned to meet him.

Because Bean was there Michael asked him if he wanted to help out, but he downed his beer and said he was already helping, he was on the decorating committee and did his own Groucho thing with his eyebrows under the bandanna, and then moved back into the crowd.

Chris volunteered instead. He was wearing a sombrero and se-rape he’d brought home from last year’s spring break and he was repeating halfhearted lines from Cheech and Chong that cracked up a group of girls reaching for their beers. Michael had known Chris since freshman year and it had seemed to him since then that the bulk of his emotional effort had always gone into staying faithful to his girlfriend back in Yonkers. He wasn’t always good at it-there were too many opportunities in the dorms-and his every misstep was followed by hours of banging his head against the cinder-block walls. He hated himself, he loved his girlfriend. He wanted to be faithful. He wanted to get laid. He was breaking up with her. He was marrying her. Now that he was, finally, officially, engaged, he had adopted this jokey, old-fart way of dealing with the women at school. A class-clown kind of thing that struck Michael as terribly sad, the way he shook his shoulders and wiggled his broad backside under the serape, the way they laughed at him and then let their eyes skip over to somebody else.

When Michael looked toward the door, he saw Beverly come in with her own crowd. She was wearing one of those plastic headbands with bobbing alien eyes. Then he heard the door in the back room slam open and a few seconds later Bean was backing a coffin into the bar. He was shouting “Move!” in his dumb-jock way and people were laughing. A couple of other guys were pallbearers and Terry held the far end, bumping it into the doorjamb, the jukebox, the edge of the pool table. Some people ran ahead to grab some chairs and place them in the middle of the room. It was a gray metallic coffin and at first Michael thought it was something they had made in shop. He even turned to Chris to say, “What’s this, an IA project?” But Chris shook his head. “None of those guys is industrial arts,” he said.

Michael turned back as they were struggling to get the chairs under the thing. It wasn’t a gray coffin but black. It was the dirt that made it seem paler.

“They dug that fucking thing up,” Chris said into his ear.

It was wild. Bean, the impresario in his earring and bandanna and long coat, made a big deal of opening the lid, then shutting it, then spinning around to ask, “You want to see? Who wants to see?”

Terry was leaning against one of the tables, hugging himself and laughing. He might have been shivering.

Finally, Bean snapped back the upper half of the lid-flashing white satin-girls screamed as the thing rocked on the chairs, threatening to topple, empty. Now a kind of relieved hysteria took over the room and people began coming to the bar, shaking their heads. Crazy ass, they were saying. Bean was saying he’d found the thing in the basement. He was telling everybody it was where Ralph “really sleeps.”

Terry was white-faced, swaying a little, definitely trembling. With a sudden lurch, he headed toward the bathroom. Michael saw him touch the corner of the coffin as he passed by.

Other people were touching it too, rubbing the dirt, playing with the lid. It had lent its own odor even to the smoky room, something earthy and sharply unnatural at the same time. Beverly came to the bar for a beer and as he handed it to her she said, “Do you think this is funny?” She was smiling a little, as if ready to agree whether Michael said yes or no. He said no, he didn’t think it was funny.

She sipped her beer, looked at the thing over her shoulder. He still wasn’t sure he liked her eyebrows, or the super-short hair, but he liked her eyes and her throat and the shape of her head. He liked the lightness of her, on top of him. The stretch of her spine in the dark.

“You want to go?” he said. And she said, “Yeah.”

He told Chris he was leaving and Chris looked at Beverly, the sombrero pushed back on his head, and said, “Vaya con Dios.”

After the rowdy wedding in Yonkers that June, there would be his annual backyard barbecues-famous for the Gennie Cream Ale he served long after any of them still wanted to drink it. There would be his three kids, one with problems, his tacky affair with another teacher which almost cost him everything, and then didn’t. There’d be the quick cancer at forty-two and the heft of his own coffin as they got him down the steps of his church. The party later, in his backyard once again, where they decided that if they weren’t the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough.

Michael walked around the bar and took the girl’s hand. It was soft and cold and she pulled back for just a minute as she turned to put down her beer. He recalled that he also liked the way he could feel her bones, rib bones, hip bones, the small bones of her fingers through the smooth skin.

There was a heavy smell of upstate winter in the air-the smell of frozen mud, low clouds, heating oil. There was the faint spill of red neon light on Damien’s narrow steps. They walked through it. He put his arm around her. The alien eyes bobbed in his face. “Dogs,” she said, looking past him. He turned. There were four or five neighborhood dogs along the side of Damien’s back door, where he kept his garbage cans. Michael heard their low growling before he could distinguish what it was they were pulling at. At first he thought it was a dummy, a Halloween dummy from someone’s front porch. They were dragging it a bit, tearing at it. But then he saw that it was too solid and too stiff, no newspaper stuffing, and a pale hand showed beneath a dark sleeve. He wore a suit jacket and pants and a white shirt, no shoes, just like they say. The hair was thin and gray and long enough to catch on the hard mud beneath its head. As they moved closer, they saw there was still flesh on the face, the nose, the chin, the sockets for the eyes, but in the dark it looked more like carved bone. A mutt with wiry haunches was tugging at something that turned out to be the man’s tie, slowly, in jerky stops and starts, the way dogs do, pulling the body into the dim yard.

She said, “Oh, God,” but she was so skinny it didn’t take any effort at all to turn her away with his elbow and hip, back toward the sidewalk and his car. Under his arm, he could feel the tremor in her shoulders. He could see it in the movement of the bobbing eyes. “Assholes,” was all he said.

He didn’t turn on a single light in his room. They made love and then slept and then began to hear his housemates staggering in, talk and laughter, a waft of dope and then popcorn. It would be the same next year. At one point, Chris opened Michael’s door for a second and then quickly turned away, shutting it. A few minutes later, they heard Jim Croce through the walls.

On the wall beside them were the glowing marks of the pictures she had drawn on Friday. In long sweeping strokes of chalk she had sketched a kind of Eden, tall stalks of grass and leafy flowers and, scattered among them, the figures of men and women-long thighs and bellies, penises, breasts, arms-all entangled, or pressed together, faces indicated only by a nose or an eye or a lock of hair. Some of it had rubbed off already, or had already faded, but there was enough to see what she had aimed for: something, he thought, between pretty and crude, between a cartoon and a vision. Something you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim it as the precise illustration of everything you wanted.

They were lying side by side, naked in the dark, and the old house, as it did every night, was steadily growing colder. The drawings made him think of the satyrs and nymphs on Chris’s dope box, and then of Caroline opening her parka for Ralph, that motley crew of cherubim and seraphim all around her. Hail, Holy Queen. Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope.

He thought how even after you’d disentangled yourself from everything else, the words stayed with you:

To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb…

Words you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim them as the precise definition of everything you wanted.

Sleepless, he raised his head to look at the clock. There was a flashlight on his bed table. Shades of his brother. He picked it up and turned it on.

He told her, the light on the ceiling, his hand on her thigh, that he’d have to get up at 5:45 to get to school. Get up and shower and put on the old student-teacher costume, cords and dress shirt and tie. He told her he could take her home now or in the morning. “On my way out,” he said, “to face the inbreeds.”

She only stirred and then slowly climbed over him, spread herself over him, no weight at all.

Mary keane looked for signs of grace, good fortune, or simple evenhandedness but found none. Tony Persichetti in church this morning, home again anyway, from wherever it was he had disappeared to, but looking like an overly made-up prodigal son, what with the wild hair and the beard and the thin hunched frame beneath his camouflage coat and gray T-shirt. His father beside him-the bulk of those arms still there but the hair gray and thinned, the shoulders stooped. Another boy from the parish who’d returned unscathed, but then died in a car wreck last month at 3 a.m. on the Montauk Highway-going well over a hundred miles an hour was what the rumors said, drugs, alcohol, even suicide the rumors said. (There had been a broken engagement.) An article in the Long Island Press about a father lost in the South Pacific in ’44 and a son, a navy pilot, three years lost in the prison camps of North Vietnam. There were the Krafts down the street-Larry no more than thirteen when the knot appeared on his knee, not yet sixteen when the cancer killed him. His brother, home in his uniform for the funeral, head shorn, stoical, refusing all entreaties to claim hardship leave (or was it, she wondered, heartsick?), to request transfer, to desert, to flee. He was back in the States now, somewhere down south, safe again. But what had it cost his mother while he was away? And what comfort could there be in supposing that the one loss saved her from the second?

Jake from Philadelphia, nineteen or twenty at his short war, and her husband-having already gained the luxury of thirty-five years-making his unspoken promise to the boy. But what did it portend: Was it a blessing or a bad omen? Had they gained their son a guardian angel or the bitter irony of a repeated fate?

Pauline at dinner that Sunday said, “I light a candle at St. Patrick’s every day. For Jacob. Just like we did during the war.”

On the table beside Pauline’s plate was the glass with the dregs of her third Manhattan. (Too many by two, Mary Keane had told her husband in the kitchen when he came out to carve the roast, but, he said, he had asked and she had accepted, what more could he do?) Only one of the three round slices of meat he had put on her plate had been disturbed. She had merely run her fork through the turnips, although Mary had prepared them precisely for her. Daintily, she’d taken only small tastes of mashed potatoes throughout the meal, although she’d also kept an eye on Clare’s plate, as was her habit, urging her to finish her corn and take some more gravy and put more butter on that roll. “Okay,” the girl responded, simply, pleasantly. How old had she been when she’d discovered the knack of dealing with Pauline, her mother wondered. Or had she been born with the knowledge? Annie, on the other hand, got through every meal with Pauline in a slow burn.

“Annie’s not one for finishing her milk these days,” Pauline declared, her fingers touching the stem of her cocktail glass. “Is she worried about her figure?”

“No she’s not,” Annie said. “She’s just knows when she’s had enough.” And suffered for her rudeness her parents’ grim looks across the Sunday lace tablecloth. Now that both her brothers were gone from the house, Pauline’s presence at dinner made Annie think of them all, her father included, as old maids.

“All the girls her age are constantly dieting,” Mary said pleasantly, to show her elder daughter how it should be done. “They can’t be too skinny.”

At the door that evening as Pauline got into her fur-collared coat there was the usual back and forth about how she could easily get herself home and how it was no trouble at all for John to take her-ending, as it usually did, with the compromise of a lift to the bus stop, at least, but only if Clare could come along.

In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else-the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself, “the odor of aging female flesh,” and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner.

Her mother, in the kitchen with the dishes, understood that the question that made her stand stock-still, the water running over her hands, rose out of her sudden solitude, out of the momentarily silenced house, the midwinter darkness at the window over the sink. She understood-since she had had these moments a dozen times at least since Jacob went over-that there was no premonition in it, only a sudden surfacing of what was, of course, a constant fear: What was he doing right now, as she rinsed out the good crystal in the sink, wearing the blouse she’d worn to Mass this morning, although she’d put on slacks before dinner, the house silent around her, the boys’ room empty above her, Annie reading, Clare in the car with her husband and Pauline, what was Jacob doing right now, on the other side of the world (world without grace, without fair measure, without evenhandedness, as far as she could tell)? What was he doing, her firstborn, her mildest child, and did he need her?

Had they wrested from that stranger, the other Jacob, a blessing for their son, or was it all sentimentality and superstition on her husband’s part-that blood-borne fascination with the dead-that had made him tell her on that first day of her life as a mother, It’s just something I’d like to do? Did the fates howl with laughter at the irony of it all or had some good fortune been secured?

She took Pauline’s empty glass from the counter beside her and dipped it in the soapy water and resolved to think instead (it was how she would get through Jacob’s time in Vietnam) of what could possibly have been better, given all the occasions of her life, than that morning in the hospital with little Jacob in her arms. Our baby grand. The thrill and disbelief of finding herself a mother. Even recalling it now, she could vaguely smell the ether in the air, the particular sweet odor of a newborn’s scalp. And then Michael and Annie and little Clare’s breathless entrance into the world. Mr. Persichetti’s strong arms.

But one moment nudges the other out of the way. It was something to regret. It was something to be grateful for. She rinsed the glass and placed it with the others in the dish drainer. On the win-dowsill above the sink was the small replica of the Pieta in its clear plastic dome-Annie’s Christmas gift to her the year they had seen it. She dried her hands, turned to gather the plates from the kitchen table. There was enough of the roast for the girls’ sandwiches tomorrow. Pauline had been garrulous tonight-the three drinks had done it. She was no thinner than she used to be, but age was making her gaunt, hollowing her cheeks, darkening the circles under her eyes. Mary Keane carried the dishes to the sink. Upstairs, Annie turned a page. Across the hall, her brothers’ room was empty. On the boulevard, the bus behind them lit the rearview mirror above Clare’s head. Pauline presented her cheek to the girl for a kiss and then held up her gloved hand and told John Keane to stay where he was, she could open her own door, thank you.

There were seven people on the bus, all sitting separately, most of them leaning against windows, a few clasping, straight-armed, the back of the seat in front, none of them white. The light inside was a stale and ugly light, too bright, given how dark it was outside. Pauline knew it wasn’t kind to her face, this light, that it lit the fine hairs on her cheek and chin and the powder that clung to them. Turning to the black window, she saw her own reflection more clearly than the neon signs and streetlights they were passing by. She looked older than she believed herself to be.

But how Clare’s skin glowed, and how pleased she had been with the gifts Pauline had brought her today. Even Annie had seemed pleased with the loopy earrings that were certainly not to Pauline’s taste, but that the girl at Lord amp; Taylor had said were just right for teenagers. (“Something for my niece,” Pauline had said, a little white lie that she had been telling salesclerks and strangers for so long now, she no longer noticed it herself, or questioned its meaning. Something for my little niece, for my nephew in college, for my sister’s boy in Vietnam.) She was a black girl, the one behind the counter at Lord amp; Taylor-which wasn’t as nice as it used to be-and Pauline had asked for her advice in defiance of her own expectation that the girl wouldn’t know anything, would most likely respond with a dumb or indignant look, as if puzzled by Pauline’s strange notion that the people behind the counter were supposed to help the people on the other side. (Or so she had put it at dinner tonight, telling the story.) But it turned out the girl was actually quite gracious, looked something like Leslie Uggams, and so added to the pleasure of the nice conversation they’d had (“Something for my niece. A teenager”), and to the satisfaction that Annie had indeed approved of the gift, was the nice story she was able to make out of it all at the dinner table tonight, one that led to all kinds of reminiscence about how gracious salesclerks used to be and remember when you could just say, I think I’ll have it sent?

Beyond the black glass of the window beside her, Pauline saw the blurred strips of neon signs, the dulled nightlights of shuttered storefronts, many of them with black grates across their windows and doors. Nighttime had a different color now, on this familiar route from Nassau to Queens, different from what it had had years ago when streetlights burned a soft yellow, and you could-hadn’t they said it at dinner tonight-feel safe riding the subway at any hour. That was over now. There was a drunk at the back of the bus, muttering angrily to himself. There was a fat Spanish woman nodding to sleep across the aisle. The familiar world was slowly being overrun by strangers. The smell of odd spices drifted into her apartment at all hours now, even clung to her clothes. Courtesy-a man holding a door for you, tipping a hat-was long gone. You could not take it for granted that anyone spoke English.

When she changed at Jamaica, the second bus was empty, its door left open, its engine idling. She sat on it alone for ten minutes, chilled, headachy from the diesel fuel, before she got off to ask the dispatcher if the driver was going to come. “He’s coming,” the man said, waving her away. When she returned to the bus, there were two people sitting in the front and she said to them, with great dignity, “I’ve already waited here twenty minutes and there’s no sign of a driver.” They looked at her impassively-a black woman and a young black man-and then looked over her shoulder to the driver, also black, who was swinging up the stairs. He ducked into his seat and as she turned to hand him her transfer he took his time stowing his things, adjusting his mirrors, taking off his gloves, and then he sat for a second more with both hands on his thighs, staring straight ahead. She had to say, “Here,” and thrust the paper at him. He took it disdainfully, not turning to meet her eye. The other two passengers got up to hand him theirs and he said thank you to both of them. They passed her, going back to their seats, the boy smirking, like good students turning up their noses at the one who had just gotten the reprimand. She was alone here. Middle-aged, aging, a woman alone, making her way between her few safe havens-the Keanes’ house, her office, her own apartment-through the ugly, amber-colored night.

She sat down at the far end of the first long seat, her back to the window, her gloved hand on the silver pole. The air of the bus was still chilled from the door being left open so long. Because the door had been left open for so long, the air inside smelled strongly of diesel fuel. She sat forward, on the edge of the molded plastic and leaned down as he made a wide turn out of the terminal. And then another. Although she knew this route as well as any, she suddenly found herself disoriented and she looked out the far window and then over her shoulder and then heard herself say, shouting at him over the wheeze of the bus, “Don’t you go down Jamaica Avenue?”

He may have said, “Yeah,” his arms moving in wide arcs over the big wheel. He might have said nothing at all. She waited, leaning down to see where they were. Once she recognized something, anything, she would sit back and say, pleasantly enough, “Oh, I’m all turned around,” and the black lady on the other side might say, “Happens to me all the time.” Or the driver might say, “I just made a wrong turn,” apologizing. “We’re back on track now.” But this was no longer the route she knew (they should have passed a Bohack’s by now) and when she asked him, somewhat alarmed, “Is this the Q54?” his answer was once again garbled. She looked to the woman across the aisle, who said, “Huhn huhn,” which she hoped meant yes but could have meant she didn’t know. “I don’t know what ‘huhn huhn’ means,” she said, out loud, but not, she was certain, loud enough for the woman to hear. She looked out again, over her shoulder, and then reached up for the buzzer over her head, fumbling for it with her glove. She stood. “He doesn’t know where he’s going,” she said. She was sick to her stomach from the time she had waited in the cold, and the diesel odor had made her dizzy. She reached for the pole by the door. “You’re not going the right way,” she told him, shouting to be heard over the engine, “I’m getting off.” There was another wide turn, she held on, leaning down now to look through the glass in the door. Where were they? “You’d better let me off,” she said. And in the same moment that she saw the familiar storefront of Green Point Savings go by (and perhaps, recognizing it, relaxed her grip a bit) the bus swung into the curb and the driver pulled the doors open and she felt herself thrown forward and her feet, moving to regain her balance, stepped instead into the well of the stairs. She cried out, lunged forward, missed the handrail and then felt herself collapse, giving in to the fall, the harsh bang of the rubber tread against her hip, against her thighs, her good coat and good skirt, surprised herself at all the noise she made, against the fiberglass and the steel and the oof of her heavy flesh, her arm and her shoulder and her face against the curb. Blind pain, and then there was the feel of the cold air against her stockings, against the bare flesh at the top of her thighs. She struggled to pull down her hem, to cover herself but her arm was pinned, her body immobile. She was aware of voices, none of them urgent, it seemed. Spanish, perhaps laughter, strangers conferring above her in what she hoped was a dream. She would have cried out, if she could. There was dirt in her mouth and the taste of blood. And then a hand, soft and large, calloused, or perhaps it was a glove, touching the good wool of her skirt, pulling its warmth down over her bare legs.

The Keanes were asleep when the phone rang, although Annie was awake, her bedside light still on, Clare breathing softly across the room. She was writing in her diary and when she heard the phone, it was well past midnight, she raised her pen, skipped a line, and then wrote down, “Here it is.” And then waited. Through the wall she could hear the tension in her father’s voice, the effort to be alert and comprehending when he had just woken from a deep sleep. He seemed to be saying, Yes, yes.

She’d had a vision, once, of what would happen to her if her brother was killed in the war. She would not become one of those folk-singing peace-sign hippies, she knew, she would become instead something outrageous, something screaming, full of rage, burning things, tossing flaming bombs. How else would anyone get it, get what it would mean to lose Jacob? Now she saw that she would merely close the book in her hand, get out of bed, go into her parents’ bedroom. It would mean their small family made smaller still. Her father’s limp more pronounced from now on, her mother steely somehow (she thought of Susan’s eyes, in the abortion clinic, getting through this). Michael more disdainful, Clare too babyish for a little longer. Crying jags for her, when she got drunk. No more effort or inclination to record it all in her little diaries, to remember how it had all played out.

Her father said, “No, not her sister. Just a friend.”

Pauline was going to be kept in the hospital for a few days at least, and of course they could have visited her in the morning, but there had been some questions about psychiatric history and her mother felt it would be best if they went right down there. Pauline all alone, she said. She must be so scared. Her father had already dressed and gone down to warm up the car. Annie stood in the doorway, watching her mother run a quick comb through her hair.

“The woman is such an ass,” she said, loud enough to wake Clare. “I thought it was about Jacob.” It seemed the crying jag was going to happen anyway.

Her mother took her briefly in her arms, she smelled of her familiar lotion, warmed by sleep. “I know,” she said. “It startled us all. But the army doesn’t call. They send a telegram. Or they come to the door. And not in the middle of the night, I should hope.” Then she backed away, brushed her daughter’s hair. “It’ll be over soon,” she said. “Things are winding down over there. He’ll be home before we know it.”

Annie followed her downstairs. She watched her get into her coat in the small vestibule. “You’ll be all right?” her mother said. “We won’t be long.”

Annie could hear the idling engine of her father’s car. “Poor Dad has to go to work tomorrow,” she said, but her mother missed the accusation.

“And you have to go to school,” she said. “Go back to bed.” Then she asked again, “You’ll be all right?” and Annie said, impatiently, “Yes.”

The front door stuck a little before her mother got it open. Annie could see the headlights of her father’s car, the wet glimmer of frost on the black windshield. “Lock up,” her mother said, over her shoulder, and with a small smile, “and don’t let anybody in,” because there were other things to fear, out there in the darkness, even if the army didn’t come in the middle of the night.

It was full daylight by the time her parents returned. Annie had gotten Clare up and dressed and they were eating cereal with Susan Persichetti, who was giving Annie a ride to school, when they came in to say that Pauline was all right-a lie by the looks on their faces. Annie saw them glance at Clare. A broken wrist and a broken nose and some bad bruises. Upset, though, their mother added. “The fall,” their mother said, “kind of threw her for a loop.” And then, again to Clare, “She’ll be fine, really. Although,” she added-and now she glanced at Annie-”she might have to come stay with us, for a while. When she gets out. We thought she could have the boys’ room, for a while.”

Annie glanced at Susan and then said, complaining, “What about when Michael comes home for the weekend?” After only the briefest pause, “What about when Jacob gets back?”

Her mother held up her hand. Her lips were pale. Her hair was littered with gray. “I’m not saying all year. I’m saying till her wrist is healed. Till she’s herself again.”

Annie said, “Who wants her to be herself again? I’d rather she be someone else.” And Clare cried, “That’s mean.”

But her father, who was watching the coffee percolate on the stove with something of Jacob’s own distracted absorption, looked at her over his shoulder and smiled. He’d liked the joke.

“I think it’s mean to make the boys sleep in the basement,” Annie said.

Susan laughed. “Hey, I sleep in the attic,” she said.

“Well, the attic would make sense,” Annie said. She turned to her mother. “Let’s put Pauline in the attic. Like Grace Poole.”

But her mother, buttering toast, was thinking of something else. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said shortly. She was about to lose her temper. “It will just be for a few weeks.”

“Your mother has enough on her mind,” their father said.

There was only the smell of coffee, the sound of the pot over the blue flame. The heater in the basement ticking on. “It’ll be fine,” Clare said into the quiet, as if she were the one to settle things. “The boys won’t mind. It will be fine.”

There was more silence and into it Annie whispered, “Bet she never leaves.”

As the girls were going out the door, Mr. Keane asked Susan, his voice low, if her father would be around this afternoon. He’d like to call him. Susan said he was usually up by noon.

Standing in the small vestibule, Annie asked him, impatiently, in a way that conveyed her disinterest in both the question and the answer, “Why?” The lack of sleep had turned her father’s skin to gray parchment. It had hollowed out the skin around his eyes. Just last evening he and Pauline had sat in the living room together with their cocktails, discussing retirement and pensions, the high cost of living on Long Island, the bargain that was Florida.

“They’re talking about sending her over to Creedmoor,” he said, quietly, shielding Clare. “For some treatment.” And to Susan: “I’d like to ask your father about that.”

The girls left the house, walking down the front steps into the icy morning cold. It occurred to them both that a year ago, they would have put their heads together and laughed wickedly at the news. They would have said, the loony bin. Perfect. Annie would have said, I knew it all along. She had already said, Grace Poole. But it was a cold morning, the dry air seemed scoured by the cold, and in their shortened uniform skirts and thin jackets they were both shivering by the time they reached Susan’s car at the curb. It would not be worth the effort it took to make a joke out of it all. The cold was bitter enough. Between the sidewalk and the curb the grass was frozen, each small blade frosted white. Annie heard it crunch beneath her feet as she reached for the passenger door. Tramp, tramp, tramp.

There was a car approaching from the opposite end of the street, the white of its exhaust no doubt exaggerated by the cold. Susan leaned over and opened the lock for Annie. Annie got in. Susan already had the heat blasting and the radio turned up and an unlit cigarette between her lips. They were late, but they were seniors, they were obliged to be late. The car passed them, moving slowly in what might have been an illusionist’s elaborate billowing of exhaust. Last night, when she’d gone back to her bed, she’d picked up the diary and written, underneath, “Here it is,” “Well, maybe not. Silly me. Only Pauline.” She and Susan stopped at White Castle for doughnuts and coffee and then spent five minutes in the school parking lot brushing powdered sugar and cinnamon from their plaid skirts. The old nun at the front desk, Sister Maureen Crosby, although the girls called her Chuckles, waved them away as they began to fill out their late slips, saying, with exaggerated patience, “Just get to class, ladies.” And they had only just turned away, heading toward their lockers, when the nun said, “Hold on, Miss Keane.” Annie looked back; the nun was squinting at a small strip of paper, as if it were a bit of late-breaking news, just in. She was soft and shapeless, slump shouldered in the black suit she now wore instead of a habit, a mouth breather, as solid as gray granite, as dependable, as immobile. The challenge was to get her to laugh just once during your four years at Mary Immaculate. “Call home,” she said.

There had been the car, of course, in its cloud of smoke, dreamlike, slow-moving, reading house numbers, perhaps. Chuckles lifted the phone from her desk and placed it on the counter just above her. “Don’t dawdle,” she said. The lights in the office were bright. They were bright against the linoleum in the hallway behind them. “Miss Persichetti, you can get to class,” Chuckles said, but Susan, standing close to her, murmured, “I’ll wait.”

“I am quite sure,” Chuckles said, as nuns did, “that Miss Keane is capable of calling home without your assistance.”

But Susan shook her head, lied easily. “I’ve got my stuff in Annie’s locker. I have to wait for her.” She touched Annie’s arm and said, “Go ahead, I’ll wait.” And then walked with her anyway, the few steps back to the desk. She knew, of course, what it was like to dread every message, every phone call, every change in the day’s routine. She knew what it was like. She watched Annie dial home (“Don’t each of you girls have your own locker?” Chuckles was saying) their eyes meeting briefly as she waited. Her mother said only, “Daddy’s coming to get you.” And then she was in Susan’s arms.