Darkness had come down on the city by then, the lights in all the buildings had come up. With the phone still to her ear, Pauline dipped her head to notice through her own blinds that the couple across the street was having takeout Chinese again, in their kitchen. They were most likely newlyweds, only in the apartment for a few months. Pauline knew it did not bode well that the young bride never cooked.
“And you cleaned up that slipcover so beautifully,” Mary Keane said.
The little Italian man had pulled the slipcover off the couch, bundled it together with the tea towels and the jacket and brought it all to the washing machine in the basement, but Pauline had done the scrubbing and the bleaching and the dyeing. Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion-what a mess it had made-restored order, made things right for the homecoming.
“And how’s my angel?” Pauline asked.
“At the moment,” Mary said, “she is sound asleep on Jacob’s lap.”
Her own hunger to hold the baby again struck her as just that, a hunger-the ache of hollow longing, an awareness, as if for the first time in her life, of her own arms being empty.
“I wanted to give you some time with your new family,” Pauline said, and meant it-although she couldn’t say, too, that she had not meant to disrupt the homecoming with her own dramatic departure. Nor could she deny that she’d wanted both: the thoroughly self-effacing departure and the attention such generous self-effacement surely earned her. She’d wanted to give the family their time together, but she’d wanted as well a more vigorous pursuit, after all she’d done. It wouldn’t have taken much, after all, for John Keane to have wrestled the overnight case from her hand.
“Kiss her for me,” she said and hung up the phone and faced the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things-the yellow light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds, someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have another Manhattan with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these last hours of a Sunday evening. Nice as he’d tried to be-he’d come home from the hospital each evening to put the children to bed, and thanked her profusely each morning for the coffee and toast she put before him, he’d gotten the children ready for church without waking her this morning-she would not want to be married to balding John Keane for all the tea in China. She’d heard him singing to himself in the bathroom, for instance, fiat as a tire. Heard him clipping his toenails one night before he went to bed.
She recognized the simple pleasure of her own room and her own pillow and no child weeping for her mother across the hall, the boys whispering words of comfort but not thinking to call on Pauline for help.
In the morning there was the rattle of traffic and the wheeze of buses, the rising voice of the radio, the whistle of a teakettle. The slatted sunlight, as it did this time of year, moved across her bed and her quilted housecoat and her dresser and onto the construction-paper card that Jacob had made so that later when Clare (who last night had slept soundly in her brother’s arms) lifted it to read the simple message, she would not be able to say if the front of the card had once been gray or blue, only that her brother had used a ballpoint pen and had pressed so firmly into the soft paper that she could feel the shape of the letters in relief on the back.
During the war, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick’s, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church-it had to do with something some nun had said-she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could you pray with any sincerity if you were preoccupied with the thought of avoiding lunch with the lonely and annoying girl who was impatiently waiting for your prayers to be over?
If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs.
They were at the dining-room table, eating the frosted cake their father had bought at the bakery to celebrate the baby’s homecoming.
During the war, Pauline’s mother passed away and there were really only a handful of people at the funeral- four of them girls from the office. Pauline sat alone on one side of the church and her brother and his family on the other. None of the dates Pauline had, many of which their mother herself had arranged, led anywhere at all.
It’s easy, their mother said, to love the lovable. There’s no virtue in that.
They were using the good china and the embroidered table linen. Milk had been poured into cocktail glasses. The woman at the bakery had written “Welcome Home, Clare” on the white cake. Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry.
Michael had thought himself indifferent to the new arrangements-Pauline, not his mother, there to greet him with her big, powdered face when he got home from school (and making him hang up his jacket and pick up his games), Pauline there at the dinner table with them, urging them to take more of everything they didn’t want and laughing only (but with real delight) when he said his teacher didn’t have a mustache but a nunstache, Pauline sitting behind him in the living room as he did his homework on his lap with the television on, asking every minute or so, “Doesn’t the TV distract you, doesn’t the TV keep you from concentrating?” He’d thought himself indifferent to it all until his mother came through the front door, the new baby in her arms, and he knew for the first time that he’d hated every minute of Pauline’s reign. As had Jacob, although Jacob had known this to be true throughout the ordeal.
It wasn’t that they’d found Pauline unlovable. The entire world of adult strangers was more or less unlovable, with their huge earlobes and their smoky breaths, their yellow teeth, their intrusions. It was only that the house was empty without their mother in it. Recognizable still in all its familiarity: the vestibule where they dropped their book bags and (at Pauline’s insistence) hung up their coats, the living room where the slipcover was newly dark, the cluttered dining room, the Formica counters in the kitchen, the Dutch Boy cookie jar, the worn carpet on the stairs, the sunlight through the windows of their bedroom which seemed always, from the time they woke until darkness fell, the sunlight of four thirty in the afternoon, all of it familiar but seen, for the first time, as it might look when it was empty, with none of them there. This both puzzled them (because all three of them were indeed there, and Pauline was there, and by nine o’clock each night when visiting hours at the hospital were over, their father was there) and filled them with despair, which was what made them tell their mother, once she had returned, the baby in her arms, that they hated Pauline. That they hoped they would never again be left in her care.
It wasn’t true, they hadn’t hated her at all (Jacob had struggled with the choice between “From” and “Love” on the card he drew for her; Michael had laughed heartily himself when Pauline said that Mr. MacLeod next door, who looked like he dyed his hair with Orange Crush, should lay off that piano and find someplace else to tinkle; Annie now had three different vials of perfume samples tucked in her sock drawer, courtesy of Pauline), but it was an explanation that lingered, a conviction they would share for the rest of their lives.
“You choose likable people to be your friends,” their mother said. She sat back from the table, the baby in her arms, and moved the prongs of her fork, the good silver, through the white icing. “And you have to love your family whether they’re likable or not.” She brought the icing to her lips. “But the people you have to feel sorry for are the ones without family. Unlikable people without family or friends. Who’s going to care about them?”
Gripped by their new conviction, the three children shook their heads. “Just don’t ever leave us with her again,” they said, emphatically, crying it out, not because it was what they truly felt but because it was the only, boisterous way they could demonstrate (other than this birthday party in the dining room, on a Sunday afternoon, with the good silver and the good china and the embroidered tablecloth) their joy at her return.
Their mother, the baby in her arms, held up the small silver fork-it was her wedding silver. In the midst of joy there was, there would always be, the injunction to remember the sorrowful. “You must be kind,” their mother said. “I know it’s not easy. Pauline’s not easy. But what would happen to her if there was no one willing to be kind?”
Later, recalling the homecoming, Annie would tell Michael that like the infant in a fairy tale, Clare’s fate, her future, at that moment, must have been sealed. Long after all of them had scattered, Jacob, Michael, Annie, their mother and father, scattered-as their parents would have said-to the four winds, Clare would have Pauline, still a royal pain in the ass, in her care.
