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,
