After This

steak houses and fish markets, a connoisseur of mushrooms and artichokes who actually ordered cheese for dessert, his tastes were so refined. He took his eyes from the road for a minute to look at her, smiling again, laughing as he spoke, being charming even as she, smiling back at him, found herself growing demure.

In the restaurant, he told her everything about himself that he had already told them over dinners at home-a Midwest childhood, a kidney condition that kept him out of the service, a stint at the Navy Yard before the job at the brewery. She merely nodded, trying to look attentive but actually studying his face, which was pleasant enough, studying his table manners, which were passable but in need of certain refinements-he buttered the back of his entire roll and put the half-bitten piece on the edge of his dinner plate.

In the car coming home he kept his hand on the seat between them. She wished out loud for the weekend and then told him a little about Pauline, and the story of Adele and Mr. Someone-or-Other. He nodded, his eyes on the road. She wasn’t sure he followed, or had any interest. She wondered if he thought this was girlish gossip that she was foolishly telling him, if he had missed her point that girlish gossip was what she had sought to avoid. The uncertainty that had clouded his face this afternoon in the moment after he’d asked her out to dinner was now a tangible presence in the car as they approached her building and the time for some kind of conclusion to this odd impulse of his had finally come.

“Thanks so much for this,” she said as he pulled to the curb. She put the strap of her pocketbook over her arm, put her hand on the door handle. “You really didn’t have to.”

He seemed to rouse himself from a growing disengagement. “I wanted to,” he said. “It was nice to have a chance to get to know you better,” he added, although she could not imagine a single thing he might have learned. He leaned toward her, slowly raising his hand to his hat and then doffing it quickly, as if taken by surprise, when she leaned forward to meet him. And this, she thought, of course, was what the whole evening had been for, the delightful feel of his rough cheek against her fingertips, his hand and lips and warm breath. The lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. Something awkward and lovely (a drumming on the roof, was it rain?) and absurd about Jimmy’s pal George moving his arm around her waist, pressing his hat into her back, and her fingers finding the newly trimmed border of his hair. All that trying to be charming and trying to be demure and hoping to look attentive and to speak well and wondering how this strange impulse of his will come to a conclusion put aside now that they had agreed, finally, that this, after all, was simply what they’d wanted. The warmth of it, the moment’s respite.

Jimmy was in the living room, in his undershirt, reading the Daily News beside a single lamp. He lowered the paper and began to fold it neatly as soon as she came in, but asked only where she had eaten before he said good night. She went into the kitchen and was surprised to find the dishes, including the serving bowls, washed and drying in the dish rack and the remaining lamb chop, a scoop of mashed potatoes, and a handful of peas on a plate in the icebox, another turned over it. She wondered at their logic: Had they thought she’d be too nervous to eat with George? Or that she’d just nibble, hoping to appear dainty, like Scarlett O’Hara at Twelve Oaks? She decided they simply didn’t know what to do with her portion: something ungenerous about eating it themselves, something unkind about throwing it away. She wiped down the kitchen table and the counter and swept the floor, and then ran into Jimmy in the hallway, now in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, as he came out of the bathroom. He held the glass of water he would put by his bedside, on the nightstand between his bed and their father’s.

“Sleep tight,” he whispered, and then surprised her by putting his arms around her, the glass at her back. “Our Mary Rose,” he said, and kissed her head, as if he were bidding her a fond farewell.

She laughed. There could be worse lives than this lonely one. There could be life married to someone like George.

In her own room, she pulled back the covers, took the rosary beads from under her pillow, and got into bed. Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious Mysteries. She chose the Joyful for this night-another day gone, not so bad, a date no less-but in her weariness forgot where she had begun and followed the Visitation with Jesus being lost in the Temple and then Mary’s assumption into heaven, wondering all the while just who-Mr. Who?-had wiped the tear from Adele’s eye.

The next afternoon she lit her candle and said her prayer, and then playfully linked arms with poor Pauline who always waited at the back of the church, no longer on speaking terms with Catholicism. It was a lovely afternoon, a bright afternoon in spring that even Pauline was taking some pleasure in (there were her good new shoes in a rich burgundy, a fresh Danish she’d had this morning at coffee break, a blouse she had made last night from a remnant of green silk and placed on Mary’s desk this morning, because, she’d said, it would only fit someone without much of a chest). There wasn’t a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft’s. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her.

She felt Pauline beside her, stiffening against his greeting. She thought, giving him her name, how there was a trace of sorrow in every joy. She thought, as he held the door, smiling at her, Poor George.

The day before Mary and John Keane were married, Pauline tripped on the sidewalk outside her building (the landlord was somehow to blame) and broke her wrist. When she appears in photographs of that day, her dark suit is slashed by a white sling, and under her stylish turban, her big powdered face is dignified, carved in ivory, only a certain determination about the jaw and the mouth betraying a reluctant smile.

The rush hour that Friday night began with a wet snow. Sitting at her typewriter in her lambskin coat and hat, Pauline saw the first fat flakes pass like small shadows across the office window and expressed her disapproval of nature itself with a loud clucking of the tongue. Impatiently, she leaned down to pull her folded rain boots from the bottom of the desk drawer. Throughout the typing pool all the girls began to do the same.

An hour later, crossing the lobby of their apartment building, Mary Keane felt her own transparent booties squeak and slip on the linoleum floor, which was so streaked with mud and melting snow you’d think the steady stream of residents tramping home had crossed ditches and fields, not merely the four blocks of wet sidewalk between here and the subway. She carried her umbrella and a white bakery box now dappled with gray-a pair of apple turnovers for tomorrow’s breakfast.

The elevator was open and inside it a young man in a dark overcoat was holding the bucking door with his forearm.

Double-stepping, still uncertain of her traction, she hurried to reach it. “Gee, thanks,” she said, although, after a lifetime in her old walk-up, she still preferred to take the stairs. He dropped his arm as soon as she had stepped inside and some impatience in his posture conveyed the idea that he would have dropped his arm at that precise moment had she stepped inside or not.

“Floor?” he said, turning only his profile toward her. He wore a dark fedora and had a roman nose.

“Five,” she said. And then added, “Thanks again.”

Gloveless, he pressed a long pale finger into the elevator button that was a faded shade of ivory, seemed even to grind it in a bit, and then, stepping back, placed the hand into the pocket of his oversize coat.

They both stared into the lobby’s baleful yellow light. Tamed, the doors now remained impassively open. Through them, she saw another pair of residents-another young couple-swing into the lobby, laughing and shaking wet snow from their shoulders and hats. He pressed the button again, with his thumb this time, banging it a bit as if to make a stronger point. The elevator suddenly shook itself, coming to, and the doors slowly closed before the newcomers could look up from their clothes to cry, Wait.

Alone together in the little box that smelled of his wet wool and her wet fur and the various beginnings of other people’s dinners, he glanced at her and then politely doffed his hat, placing it over his heart as if for the national anthem. He raised his eyes to the numbers above the door.

“Some weather,” she said. He merely, barely, nodded. “Who knew it would snow?” she said.

Now he shook his head, shrugging a little, a wordless, No one knew.

He was pale as salt. Although along his jaw there was, beneath the pale skin, the outline of a black beard. His hair was cut short, but it was clear that left to its own devices it would curve, and then curl. He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hat against his overcoat were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin. The way a child’s fingers might move in sleep.