John Keane had arranged with Pauline’s landlord that the apartment be sublet, for a year. Just, Mary told her, until Pauline was back on her feet. He had spoken to her company, too, and an early retirement for medical reasons would assure her of most of her pension. Pauline nodded. Her coats and her dresses, her dressing gowns and her good skirts were hanging in the boys’ closet. “You’ve been busy,” Pauline said, not-Mary glanced at her-exactly approvingly.
“You’ve been sick,” Mary said, gently. “That fall…” and would have said more, but Pauline held up her hand and said, “I know all about it.” And then added, with a tremor to her jaw. “I know where I’ve been.”
Mary Keane touched her throat. “And do you know,” she asked, “what we’ve been through?”
Slowly, Pauline nodded. Her pale, plain features might have been carved of stone. “Sam told me,” she said. “I’m sorry for you.”
Mary would have put her arms around her then, might have broken down herself and wept with Pauline for what they both had been through. But that had never been their way. They were not sisters, after all, they were friends, office friends. And what had bound them all these years had more to do with how their acquaintance had begun (for how could you pray with any sincerity if you were also hoping to ditch the annoying girl at your side?), with habit and circumstance, obligation and guilt, than it had ever had to do with affection, commiseration. There had been a trick in it too, their friendship, something far more complicated than “feed my lambs.” There had been the trick of living well, living happily in her ordinary life under Pauline’s watchful eye. Of living well, living happily, even under the eye of a woman who always saw the dashed tear, the torn seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the aspirations of their pretty faith.
“I’ll never get over it,” Mary said. It was a phrase she had kept to herself, until now.
The boys’ room was small and narrow. She and her husband had taken the pinups and posters from the walls in preparation for Pauline’s coming, they had moved the desk and the old hi-fi and the record albums and the portable TV to the basement where Michael would sleep when he came home to visit, but they had left both beds here.
Pauline turned an impassive face to her, standing between the two beds.
“I don’t expect you will,” she said.
And then there was the sound of Clare coming in. Clare coming through the front door, dropping her books in the vestibule. “Maaa?” They heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs. “Here,” her mother called. And then she was in the room. Her coat and her hair were wet with rain. She smelled of pencil shavings. Of the halls of St. Gabriel’s.
“You’re here,” she said to Pauline, and easily went to her, put her arms around her, as her mother had not, her cheek against her breast. “How do you feel?” she said, gingerly. “Are you better?”
Pauline, with something of her old dignity, said, “Oh, yes. Much better.”
At dinner, there was the new configuration at the table: Annie had taken Michael’s place and Pauline sat beside Clare. Afterward, Clare sat in front of the television as Michael used to do, watching while she did her homework. Sitting in the chair behind her, Pauline said, “Doesn’t the TV distract you? Wouldn’t you rather sit at the table?”
And Clare shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her hair had gone wavy from where it had been wet and it caught the TV light at its ends. “Can you really concentrate?” Pauline said and the girl nodded, “I really can.”
The boys’ room was chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital, but it had a pleasant smell: there was a box in the bedside drawer that contained sticks of incense-Pauline put it to her nose-a smell like an old church, just after Benediction, a smell that ran just under the other, ordinary smells of clean sheets and the lingering scent of dinner. She turned back the plaid spread. Both beds were made up, but she chose the one nearest the wall to avoid the light from the hall that came under the door. She was well asleep when she felt Clare’s hands on her shoulders, patting her softly, and had a momentary belief that she was in the hospital again, that another patient had wandered in.
But Clare laughed a little in the darkness, whispering, “Is that you? I can’t see.”
Pauline said, “Yes, it’s me.”
She heard the girl moving away. “Okay,” she said. Heard her pulling at the sheets on the other bed, getting under the covers. “I sleep in here sometimes,” she said. “When Annie stays up reading.” She was only a voice in the darkness, but even in the darkness, Pauline would have known the voice.
“That’s all right,” Pauline said.
They were both silent. There was, perhaps, some faint music, piano notes from next door. Pauline was beginning to see a little more, some thin light behind the curtains, perhaps the outline of the girl’s small body under the spread. In a moment, she could hear her breathing softly, sweetly, into the dark.
The girls had heard it through the night: rain drumming on the roof and rattling down the drainpipes, rain amplifying, giving voice or music (depending on their dreams) to the sound of passing cars. They had ridden to school this morning with the metronome shush of windshield wipers thrumming at their temples, erasing one thought, then another, then another as it formed again. Riding the school bus or in their fathers’ cars with their sleeves and shoulders damp, their loafers and the crowns of their heads darkened with rain.
They felt the dampness of it still at 10 a.m., second period, as they moved into the classroom, their books in their arms.
The overhead lights had not yet been turned on, nor had the teacher arrived, so here was an opportunity to sprawl, for a minute. Put your head on the desk.
Outside the mullioned window was a slate-gray sky, a dark lawn, a black hedge that hid the road, although they could see the headlights of cars behind the tangled shrubs, low beams moving as if through water. There had been general consensus this morning, on the radio at least, that were it not for the unseasonable warmth of the day, there would have been two feet of snow.
The raindrops ran in fits and starts across each pane. The morning light, filtered through the rain-spattered glass, turned the colors in the unlit classroom into various shades of gray.
Clare Keane folded her arms across her books and rested her forehead in the crook of her elbow. She closed her eyes and the sound of the rain and of her shuffling, murmuring classmates grew hollow and distant, veered from noise to echo to dream.
Beside her, Barb Luce slumped at her desk, then stretched her legs to straddle the chair legs of the seat in front of her. Idly, she took inventory: penny loafers, navy kneesocks, dimpled knees, bare thighs-winter pale against the pleated plaid wool of her skirt-a nick of dried blood between knee and skirt hem from this morning’s razor. She licked a finger and put it to the scab, assessed the smoothness of the shave with her fingertips. Knees were always tricky.
There was a general yawning, a leaning forward and a leaning back. A lethargic unclipping of hair clips and a clipping back up again. A roll of Life Savers was passed around, its plume of unraveled wrapper like a lengthening stream of smoke as it went from hand to hand. A clicking of candy against teeth. A general whisper, Did we have homework in here? Did she give us homework?
Monica Grasso shuffled her books and said out loud, “I don’t want to be here,” but opened her notebook anyway and reviewed (the Diet of Worms, the Council of Trent), just in case.
The rain was steady, no particular wind to drive it or to vary its rhythm. Cynthia Pechulis pulled her hair up into a ponytail at the top of her head and Dawn Sorrento, sitting behind her, saw in the lovely declivity between her neck and spine the fine blond hair Cynthia had been born with.