Absolution

by Alice McDermott

anodyne

Charlene turned to me as well. “Yes, isn’t it?” she said. Now she and Marilee were allies in their admiration. “Tricia’s out to repair the world,” Charlene pronounced, as if I were a precocious child. “She taught me the Hebrew phrase for this: tikkun olam. Repair the world. It’s her cri de guerre.” Marilee shook her head and breathed an admiring “Ahh”—won over completely, although, in truth, She certainly doesn’t look Jewish was written plainly across her big brow.

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

“Yes, Job,” she told him. “Of course. God telling the poor man to go scratch his boils and hush up.” She was meeting his drawl with her own. “Throwing his eternal weight around. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ Isn’t that right?”

boys. “You don’t just give up when the whirlwind throws its nonsense at you. You shout back. Even if it’s chaos for chaos.” Wally took her in, amused,

Or maybe she, too, felt the freedom from all we had briefly left behind. “You might be right,” Wally said. “You know I am,” she told him.

“Lily’s not here to take measurements, then?” I asked

her. Thick as mud, as my father would have said.

“Of course she’s here to take measurements,” Charlene told me with her faux tolerance fo...

“We all have work to do. It’s just nice that she can see her cousin as well.” And then s...

“Marcia Case thinks she’s at my house all day, making doll clothes, then watching the children. Not sure she’d be delighted to know one of her house girls has been hobnobbing with lepers.” We were crossing into the building. “Same story I told Peter,” I said. “He doe...

green eyes. “You liar you,” she said. I felt li...

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 th...

Lily’s cousin followed us in and took a seat on the edge of the bed.

A sound to spark some primitive—or maybe only childish—fear. A flash of ancient, ignorant panic, tickling your spine. A brief awareness of how the natural world might, in an instant, reduce you to a brief, trembling, and utterly inconsequential detail of its larger machinations. Somewhere at this point, this noisy pinnacle—I recall it as the intense height of the storm—a man stood briefly in the doorway, and then slipped into the room.

Being who I was in those days, I smiled up at him with my garden-party smile and shook his hand politely—I remember thinking his grip was weirdly dry, reptilian. I instantly disliked whatever change he had brought to the air in the room, to our company. Although

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

As she chatted with us in her accented English, I had the clear understanding that she knew she would never go home again.

This struck me, at twenty-three, as remarkable.

Maybe because I was so young myself, I was amazed to think that she faced—had, in fact, willingly accepted—a future that was so stunted. She had finished with possibility, willingly. This astonished me. A kind of death in life, I thought. Admirable, I suppose. Suffocating as well.

I wondered: In a life so prescribed, so determined, what happened to the pleasure of expectation?

But her entire demeanor changed when this American

colonel or captain or whatever he was showed up. In my father’s words, she wanted nothing better than to show him the door.

He accepted some tea and wolfed down a bowl of rice. He told us where he was from in the Midwest—Iowa, Wisconsin, one of those places.

He said, “Whatever small good.” And then he grinned at us, at me briefly, at Charlene with more leisure, as if he knew he was paraphrasing her. Just short of mockery. I’m certain I remember this correctly. I’m certain Charlene

looked as though she wanted to show him the door as well.

I wondered—being who I was in those days—if he even knew he was so unbuttoned.

What a fool I must have seemed. There was a damp, smoky smell about his clothes, as if he had spent many nights before an open fire—had doused the ashes and then rubbed them over his skin. He seemed charmed by our little project—

I confess I even, at one point, claimed that the project had, indeed, been my vision. Not my vision alone—I wasn’t that bold—but, I said, my vision initially.

whispered the word—that he was thinking of me as a morsel. As in a tasty little morsel. The realization flattered me, suddenly. (Things were different then.) Maybe because I’d already felt the sting of his dismissal.

turned them to Charlene. I felt the loss of them. An irrational disappointment. “The clothes maketh the man,” he said wryly. For an insane instant, I saw her as a rival.

“And where are your own children while you do your good deeds?” he asked her. He only glanced at me, as if he knew with just that glance that I was childless. “I’m assuming you have them,” he said. “Children.” For a moment I thought for certain that Charlene would deny it, so much so that I was a little surprised by how

easily she said, “I do. Two in school. One at home.”

thought his interest in us had run dry. I glanced at Charlene. She was studying him with some thin anger playing about her mouth. As if he had recently insulted her.

Wally said a reluctant no, like a student caught without the answer,

vernix,

The doctor said the only humane thing for him to do was to hold a gentle pillow over the poor monster’s little face until he stopped breathing—only a few minutes. Whatever muscles he had had mostly atrophied under the orphanage’s misguided care. Not much fight in the kid. A corrective measure, he said. What, after all, was the point of this thing still breathing? Charlene said, “You did no such thing.” The doctor reached inside his shirt to put his hand to

his breast, or just to scratch at the streaked flesh over his heart. He smiled. His lips were very smooth. “Of course not,” he said. “But I was tempted.”

As we left, he offered to join Wally and Dom and the nuns in their afternoon ministrations. Sister said, in English, “Much appreciated,” with a dip of her head.

But no one could believe she meant it.

told Lily I wanted to walk down to the beach before we left, to put my feet in the South China Sea. Just so I could say I’d done so.

American visitor’s bare chest. I realized two things at once: For the past few hours, I had nearly forgotten him, his sudden arrival, his strange, unsettling presence. And now that I’d remembered, I wished I hadn’t.

I said I should have brought a camera, and he answered softly, “Next time.” I think it was then that I truly looked at him—something I hadn’t heard before in his voice. I think it was then that I saw he was crying.

He ran his wrist under his nose, like a toddler. Said, once more, that he was sorry. “Maybe it’s because I have a kid of my own now,” he said. “Maybe that’s what makes it unbearable.”

“The Sisters aren’t on anybody’s side.” Paused, smiled. “Or I guess they’re on everybody’s side—which is a hell of a lot

more complicated.”

I suppose I was searching for some Charlene-like authority I didn’t feel, something to compensate for my silly Gidget Goes to the South China Sea beachcombing

fantasies. Or maybe it was some way to crack open and release my own clenched envy of the life that awaited him back home.