Free After This by Alice McDermott Page B

to stay with the
children when the time came, although time was supposed to have
been still another month away and Pauline would sigh at the
inconvenience, the altered plans. And this poor baby, so eager to be
born, would emerge from the womb with unhappy Pauline ready to
recount, on birthdays, at the birth of other children, at any of the
innumerable occasions in her life when she was once again forced to
abandon her plans, how she had just powdered her nose and put on
her hat when the phone call came.
     
The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was
perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s
voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call
“Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly,
because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of
the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It was
simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators,
complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your
magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus.
You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it
cold?—because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us,
more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a
lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and
the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next
contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back.
Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around
the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.”
     
He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on
her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she
drew her legs up against the pain. He had returned to say the Krafts
down the street had an apple tree split in two that he was planning to
remove at noon tomorrow (Mr. Kraft was a teacher and since the
schools were closed he was there to answer his door and to engage Mr.
Persichetti on the spot). He’d come back to say he could easily toss
both the willow and the apple tree into his truck, and so charge her
only fifteen.
     
He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then
left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the
first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he
grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery
string and even—she might have planned this—a turkey baster, all of
which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with
cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the
housekeeper his own wife was—there were crumbs on the kitchen
table and stained teacups in the sink—but there was a sweetness in
the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold
of his arm.
     
Mr. Persichetti called his patients God’s mistakes. He pressed his
arms around them when the need arose and sometimes felt their
wailing voices in his own flesh, in his chest, against his cheek. What
was in their eyes, or, more precisely, what was not, he thought of as
some failure on the part of God to fully animate what He had, perhaps
too blithely, made. He thought of God then, God the Father anyway
(for Jesus, of course, was a different case), as somewhat cavalier in His
creations. Not indifferent—Jesus was proof of that, as was Mr.
Persichetti himself, who might have worked construction with his
powerful arms but had instead used the GI Bill to become a nurse—
only swift and bustling and unheeding, like nature itself. Like the
storm. When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the
baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and
clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and
refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness,
and the perspiration, had darkened