by Mary Gordon
Then she remembered Matthew 10. She had written it out in her notebook: “If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”
She felt the smile rising within her. The smile of triumph. Her enemies had vanquished her now, but they would be repaid in kind a hundredfold. Her fear vanished. She knew she would be cared for. For it said, in the same chapter of Matthew: “So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
And she knew that she was of great value. For that reason she had been persecuted. Beware of men, Jesus had said, for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings.
This had almost happened to her. He said if he told people about what the Spirit had told her, she would be locked up. He said he would get the people in the house to testify against her. Yet she would triumph, and her enemies go down to ruin. She imagined the house of the Children of Light in flames. But she would not be able to help them, for the flames would be the judgment of the Lord.
She slept sitting up in the bus station. In the morning she went back to Mrs. Rosa’s store. She knew she would not stay there long. If they will not receive you, Jesus said, or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave the house or town. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.
She knew she would be going somewhere soon, so she didn’t want to get a room. She slept in the bus station and got to Nettie’s early in the morning, where she washed her body and her clothes, hiding them in the basement of the store to dry.
In less than a week the Spirit had shown her what to do.
She was working at Nettie’s Needles patiently explaining how to work a simple pattern to Mrs. Chamberlain, explaining the same thing for the fiftieth time. She wanted to tell Joan Chamberlain that she had no talent for needlework; her fingers were slow and thick, she had no concentration, she would never finish the pillow cover for her little girl, the one with the squirrel and the nuts, in time for her birthday. But she knew she couldn’t say that, and Joan Chamberlain had been nice to her, asked her about her family, praised Laura’s skill, her clear teaching. So, after ripping out the red threads that were supposed to be green, green of course for the leaves of the tree in the background, and knowing that something was being arranged for her by her Father, who cared for her more than for many sparrows, she was not surprised to hear Joan Chamberlain say, “You wouldn’t be interested in going to London for six months, would you? In January as a mother’s helper for my family. Of course, you’d be one of the family yourself. But paid, of course. We could talk about that later. That is, if you’d like to. But you’re probably happy here, and I wouldn’t want to take you away from Nettie.”
That was the way Joan Chamberlain was. She was a small, light woman with colorless eyelashes; she never finished anything. She twitched; she twittered; she was a nervous little rodent in a cage, first sipping water, then pushing a wheel, then scattering its food, then running from one corner to another, appearing to look for something it could never actually possess.
Shake off the dust from your feet. She knew she was meant to leave the city. London. She didn’t care that it was London; it could have been Buffalo, Detroit. A place had been found for her; her Father had provided.
She told Joan that the lease had just run out on her apartment, and asked if she could move into their house early. Joan said terrific, terrific, she would have to ask her husband first, but he would probably be ecstatic, because maybe she could help out with the housework, only if she wanted to, but that would be terrific because she, Joan, was such a slob.
She said she’d be glad to, that she liked housework, that she found it soothing. Joan said that was just incredible, and just terrific. Laura told Joan to call her at Nettie’s Needles. She did not want the woman she was working for to know that she was sleeping in the bus station.
Laura didn’t like Jack Chamberlain. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man, joking with his children, exasperated with his wife. Laura never understood how he could have married Joan. Perhaps she had once been pretty. Laura did not understand marriage; the idea of it disgusted her: choosing a partner for the urges of the flesh, in filth creating children to be hurt and caused to suffer.
Certainly the Chamberlains were unhappy. Jack raged; Joan cried; the children were disobedient and worried. She knew that she was good for the children. She taught them many things. It wasn’t her fault they weren’t happy.
She had overheard them talking to their mother. “She’s no fun,” they said. “She’s boring.”
“Listen, you,” said Joan, “thank your lucky stars we’ve got her. She’s got the patience of a saint. You could have a real monster. And when we get to London, you’ll have so much to do you won’t even notice her.”
She felt, always, the Chamberlains congratulating themselves for including her in their wonderful lives. She felt them doing it with each museum they took her to, each historic building they pointed out to her, each meal in each restaurant they offered. Food did not interest her; she despised the Chamberlains for their sense that each new food they found was a treasure. They smacked their lips like animals over the desserts at an Indian restaurant. They could talk for a week about English cream. They did not think, they never understood, that the things that entered their mouths ended up in the drain. “I believe that food is so much more than something to fill the belly,” said Jack Chamberlain, congratulating himself on educating Laura. “It’s an art in itself, not only in its preparation but in its consumption.”
And ends up in the drain, Laura wanted to tell him, but did not. Instead she smiled, appeared to take an interest. She wished that she didn’t want to eat, but in fact she was often hungry. She would have preferred to eat the same foods every day. In food she savored what was sweet, white, soft, familiar. She kept in her room in the London flat a loaf of white bread, a tub of soft margarine, a jar of strawberry jam.
When Joan found these things, she tried to make a joke of them. “You don’t need to eat this stuff. Just help yourself to anything in the refrigerator. Anytime, for heaven’s sakes. Margarine, ugh. Laura, you poor darling.”
She could not say to Joan that she preferred her margarine to Danish butter, her soft white sliced bread to the hard brown loaf they kept, her strawberry jam to their plum preserves. That she liked eating in her room, in her bed in silence, preferred it to the Chamberlain family table, where the children were forbidden to fight and where it was demanded that the conversation be intelligent.
She knew she was not pleasing to the Chamberlains. The children were not interested in the things she thought of for them to do. She was nearly silent on the excursions the Chamberlains planned for her and the children: the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s. These were the wrong things to be teaching the children. She began reading to them from the Bible. Jessica, the oldest child, said, “Our family doesn’t believe in religion. Our father says it’s superstition.”
Then she knew for certain that the Devil was in the house, had taken root, been fed and nourished, welcomed and revered. So it was no surprise to her when Jack Chamberlain told her they would not be needing her, no surprise that things worked out as they had with Hélène. She knew that Hélène hated Anne. Because Anne was beautiful, and Hélène was not. Because Anne had only to walk into a room to make people love her. Things came easily to her; people wanted to be near Anne for the things she did that were not difficult for her. Sh
e did not have to do favors, write letters, have people to live in her house.
Hélène hated Anne because she did not understand that the things that drew people to Anne, that gave her her house, her husband and her children were of no importance. Hélène was angry, as Laura had once been angry. Now she knew she needed no one; so she need never be angry. People needed her. Anne Foster needed her particularly. She would teach Anne that the things that made up her life were of no importance. And she would teach the children.
Six
ANNE WANTED TO GET an early start to beat, as far as possible, the rush of the Thanksgiving weekend, so she picked the children up at school and drove from there to Jane’s house on Long Island. Driving in the light that at three-thirty was already beginning to fade, she watched Laura pouring drinks for the children, giving them cookies. I would be doing that, she thought, and Michael would be driving. She began to feel teary at the thought of a holiday without him, her first in sixteen years.
Michael. Her husband. All the days together, nights. Food cooked and eaten, children waited for and born, held, nursed in sickness. “I’ll go…. No, you sleep, I will this time.” All the hours shared in sleep, the folded dreams. The sex, two bodies, knowing, known. The arguments, estrangements, lonelinesses: “The person I most love knows not a thing about me, is a stranger, wants to do me harm.” Afterwards, the coming together, exciting, tender after the hard butts of willed misunderstanding, innocent uncomprehending tiredness, resentment, fear. She missed her husband terribly. There were things she wanted to tell him, ask him, every day, that she could say to no one else. And his body, yes, she had the dull ache of desire, constant now. It made her feel ashamed. No one had made love to her in ten weeks. If she weren’t married, that would be the ordinary thing. Single people, widows, divorcees: that was their life. She was a coward. She could only just get by without her husband.
That was the sort of thing she was afraid Jane would find out about her, and despise her for. Marriage, that little dovecote for weak hearts, fearful spirits. The great did not need marriage, entered into it for some convenience: money, sex, domestic comforts, the need for some general fealty formally contracted and arranged. But all the meals at home, the small conversations, the pleasure in familiar furniture, the late-night reading, all those dreams so badly realized in most houses were not the dreams of the great. Caroline had recoiled from those dreams as if they were dangerous. Yet her work was all about them. Was it dishonest of her? Feeling as she did, ought she to have painted flowers like Georgia O’Keeffe, forbidding rocks that would push the children from the room, skyscrapers jutting into skies of industry or carnival but not of birds? When Caroline’s work was dismissed as irrelevant, it was on the ground of excessive domesticity. But she was estranged from her family, kept her child from her, lived in hotels until she was sixty.
Anne wondered what Jane’s house would be like. Women who lived alone revealed themselves in their houses in some clear way that men who lived alone could not. A man who lived alone comfortably was an invention of the will; a woman who lived without comfort, without order, was defying some curse of domestic servitude. It was hard to predict how Jane would live. She had worked hard, yet she had been a beauty; she had lived alone most of her life, yet she had been beloved. Anne hoped the children would be all right in her house. Perhaps she should not have brought them on her first visit, before she knew what the house was like, before she knew Jane better. It was good that Ben would be there. The children adored him, and he was wonderful at taking them off the scene for small trips they considered fabulous.
As they drove up the long pebbled driveway a light above the door of the house switched on. Jane appeared in the light, shielding her eyes; Ben stood behind her. She was wearing a bright blue rough-woven shirt, black corduroy trousers, white socks and black Chinese cloth shoes with straps across the instep. Anne had thought of buying a pair for Sarah, but never for herself. It was partly silly for Jane to wear them: her thick white socks made her feet in those shoes look puffy, like a doll’s or a Japanese painting of a baby. Yet, standing in the harsh light, she struck Anne once again as astonishingly beautiful, powerful in her beauty, single in it, like a navigable river.
“I ought to have put the light on for you earlier, but it’s terrifyingly bright so I can see thieves or marauders coming through the night. I can’t bear to keep it on a second longer than I have to. It costs a fortune. Welcome. How was the drive? And you are Peter and Sarah.”
The children shook hands with Jane and said How do you do.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” Jane said. “Mr. Hardy has said how very nice you are, and your mother of course, though everybody’s mother says they’re nice, you can’t believe that.”
The children laughed and looked at Ben. “Actually,” said Peter, “not everybody’s mother says they’re nice. I mean, I have this one friend, his mother always says to my mother when he comes to my house, ‘If Oliver is terrible, I don’t want to know about it.’”
He was imitating Cheryl Jackson. He was showing off. In one minute, Jane had made a conquest; her son was in love.
“Sarah,” said Jane. “I have a room with a beautiful bed in it. It used to be my bed. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, please,” said Sarah. If only, Anne thought, they would act like this for the rest of the weekend. They all walked into the house. Laura hung back, a few feet behind them. Anne had forgotten to introduce her. She put her arm on Laura’s shoulder.
“This is my friend, Laura, who helps me with the children,” Anne said.
Jane looked at her perfunctorily. “How do you do,” she said, and turned away.
“Just fine,” said Laura, smiling, to Jane’s back.
Peter was jabbering to Jane about his friend Oliver, about how terrible he really was. The children disappeared upstairs with Jane and Ben; Anne put her bags down in the kitchen. It was a wide, high room, painted white, with blue-and-white plates hung on the wall and copper pots on hooks. There was a step down to the eating area, dominated by a refectory table. Places were set for seven, and in the center, yellow chrysanthemums stood in a blue vase. There were skylights in the ceiling and windows above eye level that looked out to the dark garden.
“It’s a beautiful room, isn’t it?” Anne said to Laura.
Laura merely smiled and looked ahead of her. Anne’s heart sank. It was a mistake to bring her. But she couldn’t have been left. How horrible it would have been to think of her alone in the kitchen, eating a peanut butter sandwich while they feasted. It would have been impossible, thinking of her so, to enjoy the holiday.
Sarah came racing into the room. “I get to sleep in a canopy bed like the one in Snow White when she’s dead, and it was Mrs. Watson’s when she was my age.” Sarah emphasized the my as if to indicate a linked proprietary state with Jane.
“And we each have a tin of cookies next to our bed in case we wake up hungry,” Peter said.
“That was Ben’s idea,” said Jane. “That’s always done in English houses,” Jane explained to the children. “Have you ever been in England?”
“Our father’s in France,” said Peter. “He’ll be back on May twenty-second. He’s been gone since August thirty-first.”
“I want to go to England,” Sarah said. “They have the queen there.”
“For now, come and have some ice cream. I suppose you’ve had your dinner.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “We stopped at McDonald’s. I got a cheeseburger, french fries and a Coke. My sister got a hamburger, french fries and a root beer. My mother got…”
“That’s enough,” said Anne. “Keep our nasty secrets.”
“Our mother got a milk shake,” Peter said, giggling.
“Traitor, you swore,” Anne said.
“Tomorrow,” said Jane, “you children can help me make pies. Would you like that? Your mother and Mr. Hardy will have work to do. We’ll do the cooking.”
“Our mother does the cooking,”
Sarah said.
“Not tomorrow, Sarah,” said Jane. “Tomorrow she looks at pictures.”
“That’s not work,” Peter objected.
“It’s the most important work your mother can do. She looks at pictures, then she writes about them. She’s very good at it.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Anne said.
“Of course we do. We’re not stupid,” Jane said, leading Ben to the table.
She awoke at six. The light, still darkened, only turning silvery, made her feel at first diminished; she seemed small to herself in the white bed with its gray iron frame. The leaves outside the windows were barely visible; she seemed to exist in space. I am in Jane’s house, she thought; it is Thanksgiving. Yet I am not expected to make a meal. She swung her legs out of her bed as if she were on an ocean liner, feeling the suspension of the rules that governed and pressed down her life into the shape that made it recognizable to strangers.
The walls of the room were completely white. White curtains, moved by a breeze whose source was mysterious, blew in the thin light. She looked around to see the painting on the wall above her bed. Then she felt ashamed, as if she had awakened forgetting that there was a lover in the bed beside her. It had taken her an hour and a half to get to sleep after seeing the painting for the first time. Jane had shown her to the room, and she had found it on the wall, simply there above the bed in its decorative function.
One of the figures in the painting wore a blue dress, the other, a brown with black stripes. They were walking into leaves that would engulf them; the lift of their heavy feet suggested they were ready happily to disappear. Their backs were toward the viewer, so their faces were invisible, clearly unimportant. They were going somewhere, standing for something, for journeys which appeared to be small but which could mean the house unseen again, the town only remembered, the clothes left in the bureau drawers, forever smelling of soap. The women’s heads bent toward each other. Their arms encircled each other. The hands (which were not a success, Anne saw; one hand looked rather like a leg of lamb) were about to meet in the middle of the back of the brown figure. Both women’s hair was greenish blue to complement the green of the background; their boots were blue-black; their stockings bluish gray. The posture of their backs spelled grief, connection. The figure in brown bent toward the blue one as if she were weeping on her shoulder from sheer weariness. Anne looked again at the hand of the blue figure on the waist of the figure in brown. She saw it then: the figure in blue propelled the other slightly forward. In the curve of her body was impatience for the other’s hesitancy—over mourning, memory. The figure in blue wanted to get on: to the woods the color of emeralds. She was not thinking of the town at their backs.