Absolution

by Alice McDermott

I recognized her type from my days at Marymount: she had the healthy, athletic, genetic—as I thought of it—confidence of one born to wealth.

Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.

She would be here endlessly, clutching that bar, turning her terrified eyes on the world, giving wordless voice to her outrage and her pain.

I held her. In those few minutes she became—it must sound strange to say—wholly physical for me, a body, human, distinct, whereas, I think, until just a moment before she was in her misery a problem to be solved, a child in pain, yes, but also a wailing to be stilled, a sound to be soothed or smothered, something pathetic but wholly other.

But I felt, too, insistent life: bone, pulse, voice, flesh—terror and outrage, yes, but also demanding, human, distinct, determined life. I felt the relentless repetition, the unending lineage, life after life after life, that had formed this child.

Born of this old lady’s nostalgia for a lost world, flawed as it was.

I shook my head. “He’ll iron a shirt every morning just to walk down the driveway to get the newspaper. He’ll set the table for one and peel three potatoes instead of five every night for dinner. He’ll say ‘pardon’ if he burps, even with no one there.”

ISN’T IT AWFUL, really, how days and dates disappear, how the bright routines that absorb our attention for so many hours of the living day fall away so easily over the years, obscure and confound memory’s precision. Was that last Monday or last Tuesday? Last month, the month before? Sometime last year? Some season of my childhood? I regret now that I never kept a diary while we were in Saigon,

Vu, the caretaker, speaks in full paragraphs, sometimes pages.

Poetry, he said, is in the world well before a poet finds it. Its source is the unspoken. The unspoken is always translatable.

I’d already noticed this about him in the children’s ward, that he had no sense that he was watching himself, admiring himself, as he went about being a good and generous guy—that kind of clawing self-consciousness that I’ve observed over the years in many an altruist: priests, missionaries, ACLU attorneys, the leaders of certain charities, or all the well-dressed elites at black-tie global fundraisers. Performative bonhomie. Self-congratulatory demonstrations of their limitless agape.

His name was Smith or Jones or Brown or Bates—something comically short and familiar and American.

This astonished me. A kind of death in life, I thought. Admirable, I suppose. Suffocating as well.

I offered God everything. If there’s a spiritual equivalent to an eternal blow job, I offered it.”

“We’re going to sell out Diem for a guy who looks good in tennis whites,” Peter told me. I suppose we shared a working-class disdain for the sport.

other, I reminded Peter of the high romance of our first meeting—his dazed uncertainty there on Fifty-Ninth Street. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life regretting I never asked you for your name.”

willingness to be known.

As you say, no such thing as a life without regret. Maybe because we fortunates have far too many options.

I wasn’t afraid. I’d always believed that as long as I wasn’t alone, I’d be protected, cared for, immune from all harm.