What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Why she isn’t, or can’t, he doesn’t want to speculate.

  Next he dials a number scrawled in pencil in his address book, Plummer, M., but no answer. Then another number of another girlfriend of Thalia’s but it’s years old and he gets a recording, Sorry this number is no longer in use. Thalia did volunteer work for Vic Slattery’s campaign two years ago, but those headquarters are long gone and Corky would be embarrassed to call mutual associates, men, hunting down his wife’s daughter from whom he’s estranged, a messy family situation, Aunt Frances used to say primly We keep ourselves to ourselves, thank you, and so we do, or try. Last, Corky calls Ross Drummond Realty, the old man isn’t available which is what Corky was counting on, instead he speaks with Agnes the office manager, Miriam’s approximate counterpart, and as capable, and friendly to him, Corky’s a favorite of the invisible network of women, most of them middle-aged, maternal, underpaid and -valued, who run, behind the scenes, Union City’s male-dominated business and government offices, loves to hear their voices lift in pleasure when they learn who’s on the line, “Corky?—Corcoran? Oh hello.”

  Sometimes he thinks that’s all there is to life, really: if, when you identify yourself on the phone, or run into a friend, there’s genuine pleasure in it. Smile, handshake, Hello!

  But Agnes, husky-voiced and warm as she is, can only supply Corky with a telephone number and an address for Thalia, fuck it, Corky already has.

  Since he has Agnes on the line, Corky inquires into The Bull’s Eye, the property is cross-listed at Drummond’s so Agnes reads off the specs, asking price is steep—$485,000—but this will come down, Agnes thinks, since the owner, that’s to say the widow of the owner Demetrius Crowe, has had only a few offers well below the list price and she’s turned them down flat but the expectation is she’ll be getting desperate, the property’s a hard sell in this market, been listed eleven months now. In a surprised voice Agnes asks Corky if he’s thinking of buying and Corky says smoothly, “Me? Christ, no. That part of downtown is dead. I’m inquiring on the behalf of a client.”

  One man’s sorrow is another man’s bliss.

  Before hanging up Corky asks Agnes a favor: not to tell her boss about the call, O.K.? Either that he inquired about Thalia or The Bull’s Eye. “I’d just feel more comfortable, Agnes, if the old man doesn’t know,” Corky says, and Agnes says quickly, with a conspiratorial air, and a touch of reproach that he should even ask, “Corky, of course I won’t tell Mr. Drummond, or anybody,” and Corky says, “Agnes, you’re a sweetheart, thanks!” knowing for sure the old gal will tell Ross Drummond as soon as she hangs up just as, in any similar situation, Miriam would tell Corky Corcoran. That’s what these women are for.

  Corky’s eager to get out and going but Miriam waylays him, plucking at his sleeve, she’d almost forgotten and of course Corky had forgotten—the wedding present for Mike Donnelly’s daughter Rose who’s getting married in early June. Bought it at Presson’s, the only high-quality department store remaining downtown, Miriam hopes it’s all right—“Beautiful, and real silver, just look,” Miriam says, lifting the glittering finely engraved tray out of a mass of tissue paper in a gilt-lettered box, and Corky stares at the damned thing for a moment registering it. At this time! Right now! So much on his mind! A fucking silver tray! And for the daughter of one of Corky’s shit-faced Donnelly cousins, Mike pisses Corky off every time they meet and no doubt it’s reciprocal, that branch of the Donnellys has always been tightfisted and spiteful and envious of the Corcorans, pretending grief, shock, outrage, when Corky’s father was murdered but secretly gloating. For sure, secretly gloating. Tim Corcoran was getting ahead of himself, Tim and Sean both, serves them right, what else can you expect, thinking they’re so high-and-mighty, now look. Corky knows, he’s Irish. Nobody has to tell the Irish their relatives are whispering behind their backs and gloating at ill fortune, they know.

  Miriam’s looking at Corky awaiting his judgment. Seeing the look on his face. Which she can read perfectly—the tone, if not the details. For years now Miriam has been in charge, and very capably in charge, of buying most of Corky’s obligatory gifts. For weddings, baptisms, anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas. Relatives, friends, business and political associates, yes and for a while she’d bought presents for Charlotte when Corky couldn’t be bothered, you stop loving a woman you stop being able to think about her long and seriously enough to buy presents. Also, there’s no time. Miriam sends flowers to funeral homes and hospitals at Corky’s instruction, she’s forever selecting the appropriate cards for him to sign. If Corky ever goes into politics seriously—which, Christ knows, he doesn’t want truly to do, does he?—he’ll need a full-time secretary for this kind of crap. Like the Mayor’s got, plus Red Pitts. Like Vic. Somebody to do PR for you so even when you’re sincere, you know it’s worthwhile to be sincere. You’re not just wasting your time like a private citizen.

  Corky asks how much the silver tray cost, and Miriam says $139.98 which is within the price range he stated, not under $100 and not above $150, and Corky nods satisfied, “O.K., Miriam, thanks a lot, that’s great. Just so the asshole knows—I mean the girl’s father—that Corky Corcoran has good taste, and can pay for it.”

  He signs the card with a flourish. For this quick moment, he’s feeling good.

  Heading back then to Empire Parking. The second time that day.

  Jesus!—he’s sweating inside his clothes, an itch like lice in his crotch he’s so worried wondering what he’ll find at 8397 Highland.

  But she wouldn’t, would she? Without saying goodbye?

  Corky passes a shivering sidewalk vendor, same guy with the dark glasses, spiky hair and goatee, poor bastard from some tropical climate—Pakistan?—Guatemala?—they all look alike—Corky buys a can of club soda which, at the car, he uses to water the badly wilted pink begonia for Sister Mary Megan. He figures, water’s water, isn’t it?—even if it’s carbonated? To make sure he doesn’t get the back seat damp he sets the plant onto some newspapers, Wall Street Journal he’d skimmed that morning at breakfast and there’s a front-page headline that really pisses him off—DEVELOPER FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY IN DISPUTED $300 MILLION HOUSTON PROJECT.

  Hot-shit financiers up to their asses in other people’s money—how do they do it? how get away with it?—while Corcoran, Inc., only just manages to stay afloat.

  The price you pay, Corky’s thinking, for being honest.

  6

  Corky Resists Evil

  It’s 5:20 P.M. and downtown Union City is emptying out.

  Corky in his car, east on Fifth Street, a back route to avoid the bus routes on Union Boulevard and State, he punches on the radio, out of nerves, listens without comprehending to a staticky gabble of news reports, global oil boycott urged by the European Community to help force an end to Serbian intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mortar attack on a breadline in Sarajevo, Christ! every week a new disaster area in the world, and now the countries, the very names of the countries, are unknown and unpronounceable, Corky’s wondering what has happened to the ex–Soviet Republic, rarely hear about that any longer, not to mention Northern Ireland, what about that struggle?—but basically, the sad truth is, there isn’t enough time and compassion to spare. “Fuck it”—Corky punches another station, WWTZ, mellow jazz, sounds like Brubeck. O.K.

  Hearing, though, Thalia’s voice, six years ago: “The world really is good against evil, either you stop evil or are stopped by it.”

  That voice bell-like and accusatory. Her hair, dark and limp and without luster, spread like a drowned woman’s on the dazzling-white hospital pillow.

  They’d thought she might die. Yet there was arrogance in her bruised eyes, a defiant set to her parchment-pale lips. Ignoring Charlotte and staring at Corky as if, shit, he was supposed to do something about the world’s evil?—in the next ten minutes?

  Corky and Charlotte were inclined to blame Thalia’s professors, especially the one, a Jew of course, who taught “Visions of the Holoca
ust” unleashing terror and morbidity on impressionable young minds. You have to blame somebody for Christ’s sake! have to sue somebody! so Corky made a few quick belligerent calls threatening to sue Cornell University but it was mainly to let off steam, scare a few of these academic pricks, Professor, Dean, Provost, take themselves so seriously well fuck that shit he’s the father of a sensitive girl who has almost died as a direct result of an undergraduate course there and who’s responsible?

  How alarmed they were, everybody Corky spoke with. Scared shitless he was going to sue, not knowing how he hates, is terrified of, lawyers.

  Well, somebody’s responsible. And it’s not the parents.

  In the hospital Thalia said, unable to raise her head from the pillow, “—They really rubbed our noses in it,” and Corky asked, “What?” and Thalia said, with a faint, pleased smile, “The evil of the world that’s our own shit out there we don’t dare acknowledge.” And Corky was shocked into silence, as was Charlotte. The calmness, matter-of-factness of the remark making their blood run cold.

  And the way Thalia ignored Charlotte who trembled with love for her. As if anyone who loved her was by that love contemptible. Concentrating her attention on Corky, step-Daddy Corky, needing to be punished too for the lust in the poor bastard’s heart for her, he’s never acknowledged?

  How Corky replied stammering, or if he’d managed to say anything, he can’t remember. Gripping Charlotte’s hand hard. Husbandly, in control. Except he wasn’t in control, and never has been. Poor Charlotte: Anorexics are repudiating the mother’s nourishment. The condition is a daughter-mother struggle sometimes to the very death. And Charlotte sobbing but what can I do? what can I do? I want to be a good mother what can I do?

  The psychotherapist was a man, smug cocksucker. Corky’d felt the injustice, had a quick glimpse of what it is, to be a woman judged by men.

  Except there’s no other judgment they take seriously. Is there?

  The first time Corky knew of Charlotte’s daughter he and Charlotte were already sleeping together and he’d been frankly pissed, she had her hooks in him pretty deep. It all happened fast the way these things did in Corky’s younger life. Corky was crazy about Charlotte Drummond his boss’s daughter, not just he’s a mick hustler from Irish Hill with an eye for the best bet, but Charlotte was a knockout in those days and carried herself in so classy a way, you had to love her even if, by the rules of common sense, you couldn’t always like her.

  So being introduced to Charlotte’s eight-year-old daughter Thalia Corky was on his guard what the hell am I getting into? another man’s kid but as soon as he saw the little girl he fell for her. Love at first sight. Couldn’t resist. Those big long-lashed brown eyes and fine soft brown bangs to her eyebrows, hair brushed back and tied with a red velvet ribbon, she’d been dressed by her mother in a red tartan jumper, white stockings and black patent leather shoes like a child-mannequin in the show window of the fanciest store in town. And what a sucker Corky Corcoran himself young then, twenty-seven, staring and blinking at this beautiful little girl shy with two fingers in her mouth staring and blinking up at him like there’s some special understanding between them instantaneously, some destiny.

  Which will turn out to be true. Could Corky have known, maybe he’d have run like hell.

  The first meeting—the first time Corky’d met, too, Charlotte’s mother Hilda—was at the elder Drummonds’ house, a French Normandy mansion at 19 Lakeshore Drive, one of those big beautiful baronial homes in the Edgewater district of Union City just far enough away from the southwest industrial section to be prime property. Those millionaires’ houses on grassy slopes overlooking Lake Erie that Corky knew from how many drives along the lakeshore, his heart stirred by raw yearning, like staring at the regal facade, the canopy and uniformed doormen of the Athletic Club—What must it be like, to live in one of those houses! To be even a guest, to be known by such people!

  Even after you know what it is, you still feel that thrill of expectation. Like it’s your old, lost self, your forgotten soul.

  As a young child Thalia was already taking piano lessons, and that first evening Charlotte encouraged her to play for Corky and her grandparents, and so, shyly, she did, clearly excited by the adult attention, and eager to please her lovely glamorous mother. (Of Thalia’s father, Charlotte’s first husband, Corky had been told very little at this time. Except he knew the marriage had been a disaster and Braunbeck, the husband, had walked out when Thalia was three and Thalia never asked about him, behaved uncannily as if nothing had happened as if maybe there’d never been a father, which Corky understood might not be healthy but for which Charlotte was grateful. For she too preferred silence on the subject.) And after little Thalia played her piano exercises and the adults clapped enthusiastically there went, to the Drummonds’ surprise, their guest Corky Corcoran to the piano himself, the big handsome Steinway grand like nothing he’d ever approached in his life, and unhesitating, in childlike good spirits, played “Chopsticks” and “Glow, Little Glowworm” sitting beside Thalia as companionably as if he was an uncle, or an older brother. For in Irish Hill this was common. In Irish Hill, you drank quickly (as, in the Drummonds’ house, Corky certainly did, not Twelve Horse Ale to which he was accustomed but Ross Drummond’s fancy French wine) to get to that state where you liked everybody a lot, and everybody liked you.

  Glow, little glowworm!

  Glimmer, glimmer!

  Glow, little glowworm!

  Glimmer, glimmer!

  —Corky Corcoran’s flat nasal funny voice that made Thalia giggle, playing piano with two or three fingers, no pedal, not the slightest self-consciousness. And Thalia clapped excitedly, and demanded to be taught “Glow, Little Glowworm,” and also “Chopsticks.” Saying to Corky she didn’t know piano could be fun.

  And Corky said, with a wink over Thalia’s head at Charlotte, “Hell, everything’s meant to be fun.”

  Afterward, Charlotte remarked, “You’ve made quite a conquest, Jerome. Usually, Thalia hates my—” pausing then, wanting to choose the most decorous word, “—male friends.”

  So Corky thought belligerently, I’m not a male friend, sweetheart. I’m the one.

  Years later, after Thalia was twelve, thirteen, how many times Corky came away from a scene with her frustrated and angry, regretting he’d ever put his head through the noose, taking on another man’s kid. Those scenes, the specifics long forgotten, veering into clumsy flirtation or snotty archness on Thalia’s part, and on Corky’s uneasy banter. And beneath that banter Corky’s quick terrible temper. (But never, not once!—did he hit Thalia. Nor even slap her, nor shake her. Knowing once started it might be hard to stop.)

  Corky’s instinct is, when things get too serious, to crack a joke. Thinking even now if he could just get Thalia to laugh at his jokes as in the old days wouldn’t everything be all right?

  That time in Killian’s Red Star he’d gotten on the subject for him a subject of which he never spoke though thought almost constantly, putting it to his friend Nick Daugherty like a joke, sure it was a joke, Do you ever get, y’know, sort of—antsy, excited—your own daughter running around the house in her nightie or panties?—at that time Nick’s girl Angie was about eleven, and Thalia already thirteen, and Nick snorted with laughter a little too loud, wiping beer-froth from his lips, Christ, Corky, you’re a dirty old man, eh? And you’re not even old.

  The whispered tales of the old country, rural Ireland, the Dingle Bay relatives, how fathers and even grandfathers, yes and certainly brothers, “bothered” girls. And whose fault was it, whose fault exactly. In Ireland, right now, May 1992, incest is only a misdemeanor.

  Corky’s gripping the steering wheel so tight his hands ache. Sweating inside his clothes, anxious about Thalia and angry, too. Not knowing what the fuck’s waiting for him. If anything’s waiting for him. If maybe he’s wasting his time.

  Then again, remember: that midnight telephone call from Thalia’s hysterical roommate at Cornell. T
halia had just been taken to the hospital by ambulance, she’d collapsed on the stairs. She’d had bronchitis for three weeks and it turned into pneumonia but the surprise, the shocker, what Corky won’t ever forget, was when he and Charlotte walked into the intensive care unit unprepared to see what Thalia had become—flat and wasted and deathly-white as an Auschwitz victim, a girl of twenty whose normal weight was 115 pounds (and this too, the doctor told them, was low) now weighing, even with the fluids pumped in her, 89 pounds.

  Seeing, Charlotte burst into tears.

  Corky’d just stared, frozen. Scared shitless.

  A radiant sickness it was, an icy-cold calm, teasing-starving, the mimicry of Death, very different from Theresa’s helpless tearful-raving sickness, the voices in Theresa’s head, the dreams striking her open-eyed, sometimes in her son’s very presence, yes this sickness of Thalia’s was in the girl’s control, her mastery, her pride.

  Displaying her bones, the stark collarbones almost poking through the translucent skin, the ribs, jutting pelvic bones, child-sized wrists, ankles, and the tiny muscles of her upper arms attached, it seemed, so precariously to those bones, the pride in her face Corky recognized he’d last seen in one of his nieces showing visitors her ten-day-old baby.

  A glisten to Thalia’s eyes, fixed on him. Always he’d thought them beautiful eyes, dark and thick-lashed and expressive, Dreamy-Eyes he used to tease, back when Thalia was teasable, what’s Dreamy-Eyes thinking about now, huh?—at the dinner table liking to make the kid blush, and the kid liking it too, or seemed to. And now, the triumph in those eyes. A yellowish tinge to the eyeballs as to Thalia’s skin generally, like old ivory keys, jaundice it was, and this too she was vain about, you could tell. Am I beautiful now? Am I? Is it easy to love me, now?