After This

Description

On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux–and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.“Again and again, After This moves toward revelation and then modestly, modernly, pulls back, but not without a memory of what it glimpsed.”—New Yorker

“Ms. McDermott gives us an affecting meditation on the consolations and discontents of family life.… And her easy authority with this material, combined with her clear-eyed sympathy for her characters, results in a moving, old-fashioned story about longing and loss and sorrow.”—The New York Times

“It is hard to know how to start piling on praise for this gripping, poignant book….Before we are aware of what McDermott has done, we are completely engaged….Like magic, we are drawn in.”—Chicago Tribune

“A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life . . . [McDermott] flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family’s life.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Word by word, metaphor by metaphor, McDermott writes the most exquisitely perceptive and atmospheric fiction published today. Heir to Woolf and Nabokov, she nets the totality of human consciousness.”—Booklist

“After five penetrating novels and a National Book Award, McDermott infuses the undulating plot with the knowledge that lives become most vivid in small moments of connection . . . Genuinely moving yet amorphous, like a remembered fragrance that you can’t quite place.”—Kirkus Reviews

Alice McDermott is the author of five previous novels, including A Bigamist’s Daughter; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy (winner of the 1998 National Book Award); At Weddings and Wakes; and That Night. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.Winner of the National Book Award, Alice McDermott has captivated countless readers with her tender portrayals of family life in America, from Irish-Catholic suburbia to the beaches of Long Island and Manhattan’s historic streets. After This, her sixth novel, takes us to the cultural transitions of the mid-twentieth century—the span between World War II and Nixon, when a sexual revolution, Vatican II, draft registration for the controversial Vietnam conflict, and other headlines spelled upheaval for families across the nation.

Bringing those cultural shifts vividly to life, McDermott introduces us to Mary and John Keane, a middle-class couple raising four children as the country arrives at historic crossroads. Michael and Annie test the boundaries of their changing world, while the eldest and most cautious sibling, Jacob, is sent to war. Young Clare proves to possess a worldliness that belies her innocent sensitivity. Together, the Keanes navigate the clashes of a traditional life and modern freedom. Portrayed by McDermott through a serious of seamless, beautifully wrought vignettes, their story opens our hearts to new understandings of fate and everyday mercy.

The questions and discussion topics that follow are designed to enhance your reading of Alice McDermott’s After This. We hope they will enrich your experience as your book club explores this moving novel.

1. Alice McDermott’s writing style has been widely praised for its evocative imagery and powerful use of understatement. How were you affected by the quiet lines that told you of John’s future death (pages 130-131) or of Jacob’s fate in Vietnam (page 199)? What everyday images best capture the most emotional events of your life?

2. The initial scenes in After This tell us that Mary dated her brother’s friend George before she married John, and that she had given in to Mike Shea’s advances at a party. How did these facts shape your understanding of her as you read about her life? Before she was married, what did Mary seem to believe her destiny was?

3. Discuss the memory of the “baby grand.” How would you describe Mary and John’s life at that point, before the birth of their children? What was Mary discovering about her husband when they were newlyweds? How did the death of his brother shape John?

4. What was foreshadowed by the scene at Jones Beach, not only in terms of Vietnam, but in the temperaments of the children and the dynamics of the family as a whole?

5. What do Mary and John teach their children about the role of religion, from the time they are young (saying an “Angel of God” during the 1960 hurricane) to the novel’s closing scene? How does the children’s relationship to the church differ from their parents’ relationship to it? Did you adopt your parents’ views on religion?

6. Does the typical twenty-first-century American family resemble the Keanes? Has the very definition of family shifted? What would the future likely hold for Clare and Gregory?

7. Mary became an adult when images of the ideal woman were almost always domestic; she was even expected to cook dinner for her father and brother each night, regardless of her plans for the evening. Her daughters would have access to far more career options, as well as birth control and legal abortions. Was the generation gap of the 1960s more significant than for other generations of mothers and daughters? How did gender roles for men shift during this time period? Did John’s sons fulfill his expectations?

8. How does the novel’s setting affect the storyline? How was the turmoil depicted in After This playing out elsewhere in the country? What is distinctive about the locales so frequently featured in Alice McDermott’s fiction?

9. Discuss the other outcomes described in the novel, such as Mr. Persichetti’s addicted son, or Pauline’s spinsterhood (is she a difficult person because she never married, or did she never marry because she’s such a difficult person?). What determines which course a life will take?

10. Part III (page 79) begins with John’s thoughts: “Man is immortal, or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking. You either pray to the dead or you don’t.” What is the greater quandary he wrestles with in this passage? Do you think he ever resolves it?

11. How did war and politics shape family life in the 1960s and early 1970s? Has the impact of one on the other changed in contemporary America?

12. As Annie bluffs her way through the Edith Wharton dialogue and embarks on a relationship with an English lover, how does she seem to view her past? How is she defining herself in those scenes? What enabled her to have an identity that seems so different from her mother’s?

13. The friendship between Pauline and Mary is often referred to as obligatory, a fulfillment of the commandment to “feed my lambs.” Is this friendship by contemporary standards? Is that sense of obligation waning, and if so, what are the consequences for communities in general? Does Mary seem to have any friendships like Annie and Susan’s?

14. How would you have responded to Sister Lucy’s story (page 214) if you had been one of her students?

15. What was your reaction to the novel’s closing conversation? What is the impact of the priest’s question about distinguishing God-given gifts from an accomplishment attained only through strenuous effort? How does that scene speak to the Keane family’s destiny?

16. What comes to mind when you consider the novel’s title? What aftermaths resonated the most with your own life story?

17. In what ways does After This complement and amplify the themes of McDermott’s previous fiction? What might the Keanes think of the other families she has created?

Chapter One

LEAVING THE CHURCH, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks—the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.

And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and methodical. The march of time.

And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the hat bent into the onslaught. She went down the steps just in front of him, drawn more by forward momentum than by any desire to meet up with, or to avoid, her brother’s latest best pal.

The cold wind made it difficult to breathe, as if it could snatch your next breath before you had time to swallow it, and she bent her head, too, hand to her hat, submerged in wind and beginning to imagine herself slowly losing ground with each step forward, slowly beginning to stall, and then to sail backward—a quick scramble to regain ground and then another sailing backward. In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be content.

And now a slapstick windstorm fit for Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton.

It was either God’s reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was midtown Manhattan. The scent of it, the Easter scent of April in the city, all around her, in the cold air itself as well as on the shoulders of the crowd; the smell of sunlight and dirt, something warming at the heart of it all.

And then she felt his hand on her shoulder and he shouted, "Mary Rose," which bound him forever to her brother and her father and her life at home since nowhere else did she tolerate the double name. His head was still lowered, his hand still on his hat—he might have been waiting for the right opportunity to doff it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.

And she, her hand on the back of her own hat, did the same.

"Hello, George," she said. She could feel the crunch of city grit between her back teeth.

"Some wind," he said. He had one eye closed against it, the other was watery.

"You’re telling me," she said.

They walked together to the corner and as they stepped off the curb, he suddenly reached up and took her raised elbow—the one that led to the hand she held against her hat—and kept it between his fingers as they crossed. She thought he must look like a man attached to a subway strap. At the next corner, he did the same; a gesture that was either brotherly or proprietary, but awkward either way, as if one of them were blind or doddering, or as if both were involved in some odd, raised-elbow folk dance. At Forty-sixth, the light was against them and the wind paused enough for her to take her hand off her hat while they waited with the crowd.

She turned to him—was he going to speak? His eyes were teary from the wind, red-rimmed and bloodshot. His nose was running and there were tears on his windblown cheeks. She clicked open the purse that hung on her arm and found her handkerchief, but he refused it, reaching into his overcoat for his own. He mopped his face and blew his nose before the crowd got them moving again and as they got to the curb, she placed her left hand on her hat so he could reach her elbow at a more convenient angle—which he did, guiding her across the street as if she were a novice pedestrian, and this time, perhaps, putting a little more pressure behind the fingertips that held her.

"Where are you headed, George?" she asked him. He shouted something unintelligible into the wind.

"Have you eaten yet?" she asked, because it was only polite. And then the wind paused completely, as it will in April, a sudden silence and maybe even the hint of warmth from the sun, so that he replied with odd gentleness, "Yeah, I had my lunch."

They were at the door of the restaurant. The wind was picking up again. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked.

He shook his head and she could not deny her own relief. "I’m out of time," he said. And then added, "What about dinner?"

"Lamb chops," she told him. "You coming over?" Anticipating already a stop at the butcher’s to pick up two or three more.

He shook his head. There was another tear streaming down his windblown cheek and as he replied she lifted the handkerchief in her hand and wiped it away, feeling the not unpleasant pull of his beard against the thin cotton.

He said, "I mean, what about us having dinner?"

The wind puffed up again and they both put their hands to their hats. "Where?" she said, rudely, she realized later. But it was like having a passing stranger suddenly turn to sing you an aria. Anyone would have a second or two of not quite knowing what was really going on.

"Out," he told her. He was a broad-faced man who looked good in hats. Who looked better now than he did at home, where he had been thus far only the unremarkable source of her brother Jimmy’s unpredictable enthusiasms. "At a restaurant," he said. And then to make himself clearer, "The two of us."

"Tonight?" she said, and then they both turned away for a moment from the peppered wind. When they turned back, he said, "Why not?" but without conviction, confirming for them both that this was a sudden impulse that most likely would not last out the afternoon. "What if I come by at seven?" he said.

She paused, squinting, not for the chance to see him better but for him to see her. "I’ll have to cook those lamb chops anyway," she said. "Or else Jimmy and my father will be gnawing the table legs by the time I get home."

He smiled a little, unable to disguise what she was sure was a bit of confusion about his own impulse. He said again, "I’ll come by at seven," and then turned back into the wind.

She pushed open the door to the restaurant. More lunchtime bustle, mostly women in hats with their coats thrown over the backs of chairs, the satiny linings and the fur collars and cuffs, the perfume and the elegant curves of the women’s backs as they leaned forward across the small tables, all giving the hint of a boudoir to the busy place. She found a seat at the counter, wiggled her way into it. Saw the man beside her who was finishing a cigarette give her a quick up and down from over his shoulder and then turn back to flick an ash onto the remains of his sandwich. She imagined returning his dismissive stare, and then maybe even letting her eyes linger distastefully on the crust of bread and the bitten dill pickle and the cigarette debris on his plate. She could slide the ashtray that was right there between them a little closer to his elbow—hint, hint. Emboldened, perhaps—was she?—by the fact that she’d just been asked out on a date.

She ordered a sandwich from the waitress, whose pretty youth was still evident in the doughy folds of her weary and aging face, and a cup of tea. And then she held her hands over the steaming water for a few seconds. Thin hands, long fingers, with a kind of transparency to the chapped skin. Her mother’s gold ring, inset with a silver Miraculous Medal, on her right hand. The man beside her rubbed his cigarette into the plate, then stood, swinging away from her on the stool and causing a slight ripple through the customers all along the other side of him. He took his overcoat from the hat rack and put it on standing just behind her, and then leaned across his empty stool, brushing her arm, to leave a few coins under his plate.

"Overcoats in April," he said. "Some crazy weather."

She turned to him, out of politeness, the habit of it. "I’ve never seen such wind," she said.

He was handsome enough—dark eyes and a nice chin, though his hair was thinning. He wore a dark overcoat and a dark suit, a white shirt and a tie, and there was the worn shine of a brass belt buckle as he reached for his wallet. "Reminds me of some days we had overseas," he said, taking a bill from his billfold.

She frowned, reflexively. "Where were you?"

He shook his head, smiled at her. Something in his manner seemed to indicate that they knew each other, that they’d had such conversations before. "In another life," he said and snapped the bill and slapped the wallet and returned it to his pocket with a wink that said, But all that’s behind us now, isn’t it? He was thin and his stomach was taut and his starched white shirt was smooth against his chest and belly. The brass belt buckle, marked with decorative lines, a circled initial at its center, was worn to a warm gold. "Once more into the breach," he said, turning up his collar. "Wish me luck."

For an odd second, she thought he might lean down and kiss her cheek.

"Good luck," she said. Over her shoulder, she watched him walk away. A slight limp, a favoring, perhaps, of his left leg. A flaw that would, she knew, diminish him in some women’s eyes. Even
if he’d been wounded in the war, there would be, she knew, for some women, the diminished appeal of a man who had suffered something over which he’d had no control. Who had suffered disappointment.

She turned back to her sandwich. And here, of all things, was desire again. (She could have put the palm of her hand to the front of his white shirt.) Here was her chicken sandwich and her tea and the waitress with a hard life in her eyes and a pretty face disappearing into pale flesh asking if there’s anything else for now, dear. Here was the boudoir air of respectable Schrafft’s with its marble counters and pretty lamps and lunchtime bustle (ten minutes until she should be back at her desk), perfume and smoke, with the war over and another life begun and mad April whipping through the streets again. And here she was at thirty, just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of herself to put her hand to the worn buckle at a stranger’s waist, a palm to his smooth belly. A man she’d never see again. Good luck.

She sipped her tea. Once, ten years ago, at a Sunday-afternoon party in some apartment that she remembered now as being laby-rinthine, although it probably had only four bedrooms, as opposed to the place she shared with her brother and her father that had two, Mike Shea had seized her by the wrist and pulled her into a dim room and plastered his mouth against hers before she could catch her breath. She had known him since high school, he was part of the crowd she went with then, and he had kissed her once or twice before—she remembered specifically the train station at Fishkill, on a snowy night when they were all coming back from a sledding party—but this was passionate and desperate, he was very drunk, and rough enough to make her push him off if he had not, in the first moment she had come up for air, gently taken off his glasses and placed them on a doilied dresser beside them, and then, in what seemed the same movement, reached behind her to lock the door. It was the odd, drunken gentleness of it, not to mention the snapping hint of danger from the lock, that changed her mind. And after two or three rebukes when he tried to get at the buttons that ran up the back of her dress, she thought, Why not, and although her acquiescence seemed to slow him down a bit, as if he was uncertain of the next step, she was enjoying herself enough by then to undo the last button without prompting and then to pull her bare shoulder and arm up out of the dress—first one then the other—and to pull dress and slip (she didn’t wear a bra, no need) down to her waist in a single gesture. And then—was it just the pleasure of the material against her bare flesh, his shirt front, her wool?—she slowly pushed dress and slip and garter belt and stockings down over her narrow hips until they fell to her feet. And then she stepped out of her shoes. ("Even the shoes?" the priest had whispered in the confessional the following Saturday, as if it was more than he could bear, or imagine—as if, she thought later, he was ready to send her to perdition or ask her for a date.)

The banging at the door was his excuse to turn away—some people had their coats in there—and while he stood with his back to her she dressed again and unlocked the door and walked out. She smiled at the taunts and jeers of her friends and when someone asked, "Where’s Mike?" she said, "I think I killed him," which got a great laugh.

Mike Shea became a medic during the war and was now married, working for Pfizer. To this day he can’t look at her straight. To this day she can’t quite convince herself that the sin was as grave as it seemed. (She thought, in fact, of telling the priest as he whispered his furious admonitions that she weighed barely a hundred pounds and was as thin as a boy and if he would adjust his imagination accordingly and see the buds of her breasts and her flat stomach and the bony points of her hips, he would understand that even buck naked, her body was not made for mortal sin.)

She can’t quite convince herself, these ten years later, that anything at all like it will happen to her again.

She finished her sandwich, gave an extra quarter to the waitress, who also wore no wedding band, and headed back into the breach.US

Additional information

Weight	8.2 oz
Dimensions	0.6000 × 5.2000 × 8.2000 in
Imprint	The Dial Press
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780385334693
ISBN-10	0385334699
Author	Alice McDermott
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC043000
Subjects	american literature, historical fiction, Family relationships, Catholicism, Catholic, family life, literary fiction, books for women, womens fiction, contemporary fiction, women's fiction, relationship books, women writers, long island, historical novels, contemporary women's fiction, marriage books, domestic fiction, Catholics, Contemporary American literature, contemporary, women, historical, war, relationships, family, drama, American, Friendship, Literature, coming of age, literary, FIC019000, novels, siblings, FIC043000, New York, Vietnam, 1960s