by Mary Gordon
The house in the morning thrummed with expectation. The morning sunlight, weak and ordinary, took on purpose. For the children, life was shining: they were going to the city. A wave of strangers would engulf them, beautiful, treacherous, and carry them on. They might see a movie being made; they might see a murder. It was nearly Christmas. Stores would be lit up, lights would be strung through the dense air.
Formally, they walked into Jane’s building. Her apartment was small and circumspect; it was clear that her domestic life was lived in the country. The walls of all the rooms were white. They had been covered with Caroline’s paintings and were nearly bare. Square drab chairs sat on the living room rug like grounded birds. The curtains were a somber green.
“Come in, my dears, come in,” said Jane, sweeping the children forward. “I’d like you to meet my friend Betty Loomis.”
Jane had told Anne not to bring Laura; she said a woman who did some work for her would be happy to care for the children. It was a pleasure for Anne to be away from Laura for a day; it was a pleasure, even, to feel she was in league with Jane in excluding her. Would Laura spend the day with Adrian? She wouldn’t think about it.
“Betty’s staying with me for the winter,” Jane said. “She’s been helping me around the house.”
Betty Loomis was sitting in one of the chairs as if she would be happiest disappearing into it. Her poor thin shoulders folded in toward the center of her body like a coat hanger stepped on by heavy feet in boots. Her hair—five colors, none of them distinct—was pulled back in a red elastic band; there were reddish-brownish patches underneath her eyes suggesting she might have been rubbing them in a particularly violent, desperately habitual way. Her eyes were large and light, covered by a thin, pervasive film of misery, endurance, patience, and bad luck. She wore black ski pants and a Ban-Lon sweater in a shade that twenty years before had been called, too hopefully, royal blue. On her feet were ballet slippers, the thin laces at the instep tied in two neat bows.
“Where are you from originally?” asked Anne, bowing her knees and hunching her shoulders, fearful that Jane’s physical abundance, all her size and color, might be too much for this girl if she added her own to it.
“Florida,” she said. “My people were from Florida at first. I wasn’t actually brought up there. I lived in Georgia for a while, then Alabama. I came here in 1978.”
“Yes, of course you did,” said Jane. “Now, children, you must be very good and do exactly what Betty says, and more, for she’s very kind, and I’m afraid you’ll find her easy to take advantage of. We’ll be back at four, and then we’ll go right off, Betty, so you must see to yourself for dinner.”
Betty nodded, tapping a cigarette on the arm of the chair.
“You shouldn’t smoke. The surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health,” Peter said.
“Don’t be a bully, Peter,” Jane said. “There’s a very good phrase, ‘Every man to his own poison.’ You may not have found yours yet, but you will.”
Peter fell back on the couch, blushing. Anne was afraid he was going to cry. He was, after all, in love with Jane.
Betty Loomis sat down on the couch beside him. “I know you said that because you cared. Thank you, that means a lot to me.” She said the word cared as if it had three syllables.
Peter’s body corkscrewed into the upholstery with pleasure. Like all moralists, Anne thought, he was at heart a sentimentalist. He would probably marry a country and western singer and spend the rest of his life trying to teach her Greek. Anne kissed the children and gave them each a dollar. Walking down the hall, she wondered what peculiar accident had brought Betty Loomis into Jane’s life. She was obviously more than an employee. Standing behind Jane, waiting for the elevator, she knew she would never dare to ask about it, and she thought it at least possible that Jane might never say a thing about it. Jane was the kind of person who was always puzzled when people found her arrangements unusual. With the extreme isolation of the genuinely self-possessed, Jane thought herself the norm.
Anne had given the people in the gallery the list she had put together of the paintings of Caroline Watson owned by collectors. Today she would meet the gallery people for lunch, to talk about contacting the collectors and perhaps borrowing some of the paintings for the show. She had seen photographs of only a few of them in exhibition catalogues of the twenties and the thirties. So she was counting on Ben—and Jane—to advise her about which of the paintings might be important to pursue.
They were to meet the people from the gallery at a Japanese restaurant. Their choice of restaurant made Anne even more nervous. A business lunch at a Japanese restaurant. It implied, to Anne, a sublime disregard of convention, a fine, imaginative will to distinguish themselves, these people, from lawyers, stockbrokers, publishers, who sweated in other places over large, dark hunks of meat and, like barbarians, grunted their transactions. She had eaten at a Japanese restaurant only once, in Boston, when she had worked at the Gardner. She remembered thinking it was wonderful, the way the things were done: the small, rolled pieces of fish with their alien coloring and textures, the hot green horseradish, the soup one drank from a bowl one lifted up, the green ice cream that tasted as if it had been made of leaves.
Ben and the two young men at the table rose to greet Anne and Jane; the two young women, seated next to each other, smiled slightly to the left of Anne’s head. Anne was introduced to them; the men were Charles and Daniel, the women Cressida and Jill. She was glad to sit down quickly. The four people made her feel like some gross creature shipped in to do hard labor. They were all thin and their clothes had sharp angles. The men wore suits cut close to their slight bodies with thin lapels and thin dark ties. Cressida wore a jacket of a brass-colored soft leather with hard wide shoulders. Jill was entirely in black, and her ankle-length boots were a silver version of the leather of Cressida’s jacket. Sitting in her gray wool skirt and tweed jacket, Anne felt dowdy and parvenu. That she was dressed in a mode at least recognizably similar to Jane’s brought her no comfort. Jane was forty years older than she; these people were more nearly her contemporaries.
“Tell me about that divine pasta you got, Daniel,” said Charles. “I want to know everything.”
“Well, it’s this place in the West Village, this absolutely adorable, tiny, absolutely ancient lady makes it in the back every day. I swear she grinds her own wheat.”
“Of course, the pasta in America is inedible if you’ve spent any time in Italy. As is the coffee,” said Jill.
“I know a place that has the most amazing blend of coffee. It’s their own, but it really tastes European.”
“Obviously, there is no such thing as European coffee. Or American. It has to do with the grinding, the blending and the preparation,” Jane said, putting on her glasses to look at the menu.
“Yes, of course,” said Cressida, “but if you drink what passes in America for coffee you’re drinking dishwater.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Jane. “One can easily get good coffee here.”
“I can’t drink coffee anyway,” said Charles. “Half my salary goes to Zabar’s to get their decaffeinated. At least I can get Ferrerelle there.”
“I don’t understand this craze for mineral water,” said Jane. “It’s fine mixed with something, but people nowadays seem to drink it plain.”
“It doesn’t have any calories,” said Jill, viciously lighting a match, as if the mention of calories made her feel she should have a weapon close at hand.
“But it doesn’t taste good,” said Jane. “One might as well drink nothing.
“I think it’s got a kind of fascinating, ascetic taste,” said Daniel.
“People don’t enjoy eating and drinking the way they used to. Don’t you agree, Ben?” said Jane.
“Absolutely,” said Ben. “And they look the worse for it. In my day, women looked like Anne and Jane, with flesh they were proud of and a good color.”
“I think
Americans eat too much,” said Jill.
“Of course they do,” said Charles, “but it’s all shit. I mean if you look at the way a French or Italian peasant eats…”
Jane was looking into the middle distance, clearly bored. Ben turned to Anne and spoke to her about the children’s Christmas presents. For the rest of the meal, he ignored the four young people and turned his attention exclusively to Anne. This made her feel worse. She imagined they thought he had selected her to do the catalogue because she was his mistress. From time to time, one of the four would try to get Ben’s attention. They wanted his approval or his contact; he was famous, he was influential, he had access to wealth and property. Miserably she ate the several courses of her meal. Not one word had been said about the paintings.
As they rose to leave, Ben said, “I think we all agree that the selection of the paintings in private collections should be left entirely to Mrs. Foster. She is the best qualified of us to judge.”
“Of course,” said Charles. “Remarkable piece of research you’ve done. Just remarkable.”
“I guess you have a lot of free time in the country where you live. No distraction. Nothing to see, no other shows. No place to go. Just you and your children in that small, sweet town. It must be very peaceful,” said Cressida.
Was she trying to understand or deliberately misunderstanding? Anne felt she outweighed the girl by fifty pounds.
“Really great work you’ve done,” said Jill. “First-rate. Going to be a major show.”
“Thank you,” said Anne. She felt that they despised her.
In the cab on the way to her apartment Jane said, “That’s what I call a nasty piece of work, those four affected sillies.”
“They didn’t say a word about Caroline’s work,” said Anne, feeling close to tears. She felt they’d slighted Caroline; it was as if they’d slighted one of the children.
“They’re afraid to in front of you,” said Ben. “They don’t know anything, and they’re afraid to reveal themselves before an expert.”
“I see how you would frighten them,” said Anne.
“Not me, dear. You.”
“Me?”
“You know more about Caroline Watson than anybody in the world.”
Anne looked out the window. Afraid of her? No one in her life had been afraid of her.
“Where are the children?” Ben asked.
“In my apartment,” said Jane.
“Who’s looking after them?”
“Betty.”
“Betty the Basher?”
“Ben,” said Jane angrily. “You’re much too old to be puerile.”
“Giving her a second chance with Peter and Sarah, are you? Well, I suppose Peter’s old enough to look out for himself and his sister.”
“Of course he is,” said Jane haughtily. “When she hurt her children they were much smaller.”
“Hurt her children?” asked Anne with anxiety.
“She had a few unfortunate incidents at a time when she was mentally unstable. But she’s much better now. Anyone can see that.”
Alarmed, Anne sat up straighter. “Jane, did you leave my children with a child abuser?”
“You say the phrase, Anne, as if that were all there was to her identity. There is much more to her besides. She’s a brave person, with tremendous loyalty.”
“Besides, darling, Jane’s rehabilitating her. So we must all be part of the experiment.”
“Of course, I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t quite sure she was trustworthy. I met her last year, when I was volunteering to teach people to read.”
“She can’t read?” Anne said, as if that made the woman more unreliable.
“Well, she can now. I’ve taught her. She’s had a most dreadful life. She got pregnant at sixteen. Her boyfriend married her, then joined the army, impregnating her twice more, then vanishing without a trace. Her mother was an alcoholic, her father half dead of emphysema. They told her they couldn’t help her anymore. Imagine, they simply said they were tired of helping her. She got on a bus with her children—three days she was on a bus with them. When she arrived in New York, she knew no one. She lived in a single room in the West forties and worked as a waitress in a donut shop. The one man she met who was kind to her left her eventually because he couldn’t stand being around her children. One day, after she’d picked up the children from a wretched day care center, her four-year-old, in a fit of temper, knocked over a gallon of milk. Before she knew what happened, she’d broken his arm. Well, she was absolutely undone by it. She called the child abuse center, and they set her up with a counselor. Her life’s infinitely better now, I’m sure she never beats children anymore. But her children are in foster homes now—if I told her she couldn’t take care of your children, it would be a terrible blow to her confidence.”
“Jane, you might have asked me first,” said Anne.
“Well, my dear, I knew you’d feel just as I do. We’re terribly alike; we could be mother and daughter.”
All Anne’s anger melted at the intimacy Jane implied. It was absurd, of course; she was nothing like Jane; she could live a hundred years and never would be. But it was an honor even to have Jane imagine it. She couldn’t say now what she wanted to say: How could you have put my children in danger? Child abuse was understandable; one could easily see why it happened all the time. In the three years when she had been home all day with the children, her own frustration had shocked her, the boredom that led to irritation at the smallest thing. But she thought of the flesh of her children, and the flesh of the woman who had abused her children took on the odor of contamination. You did not hurt your children. You kept them from harm. That was what you did in the world if you were a mother.
She ran up the stairs of Jane’s building. The children were sitting happily on the floor with Betty doing a jigsaw puzzle.
“We had a great time,” Sarah said.
Anne hugged them, dizzy with relief. Looking at Betty, she thought of Laura with gratitude. She was boring, she was irritating, but she was utterly dependable. However much she intruded on the peace of Anne’s inner life or, Anne thought unhappily, upon her own self-love, she never had to worry if her children were unsafe when they were with Laura.
The sky was zinc-colored that morning. Anne leaned her cheek against the windowpane; the cold glass reminded her how lucky she was to be indoors, it made her happy to get back to work. She heard Ed Corcoran working downstairs. He’d asked if he could bring his son Brian on days when something went wrong at home and his sister couldn’t baby-sit. Anne had been happy to say yes.
She thought of Ed’s wife whenever she watched Brian Corcoran sitting on the floor, playing seriously with his toys, out of his father’s way, but never allowing himself to move too far from the protective nimbus cast by his father’s body. How were children attached to their father’s bodies, where they had never lived, she wondered. Michael’s attachment to the children had always seemed so different from hers. When they were babies, she physically ached for them if she was away from them. At night before she went to sleep, she had to restrain herself from lifting them out of their cribs, she wanted so much to have them near her, to put her mouth against their cheeks, their hair. She knew their bodies better than Michael did, for she tended them more, and they had lived closer to her body. They had lived in the curves her body made while she nursed them; she had felt their small, primitive fingers tapping, running up her torso. Flesh of my flesh. Did it go for fathers too? She hadn’t thought so. Michael’s passion for the children was a remove farther from the body. There was a kind of nostalgia about it, as if in holding his children he was holding the child he wished he had been. He never saw himself as once the flesh that housed them; he didn’t see it as a miracle that they got through one whole day of their lives alone. This made it easy for him to give their natures a moral credit she always had to strain after.
But it was different for Brian Corcoran. Safety to him was his father. A mother’s safety was
a bolster this poor child would never know. But was he a poor child? He seemed happy. Anne admired him; it didn’t seem inappropriate in his case to use the word “admire” for a three-year-old. He took part in the world of work. He was a serious person. She could never have left her children with as little attention as Ed left Brian when they were his age. He was happy with his father, but happy nowhere else. He played shyly for brief periods with Peter, who loved small children and was talented with them, but always his glance flicked nervously toward his father. She could see the child’s eyes lift with alarm when his father left the room, then drop down again in peace when he could see his father near him. She watched them eat their lunch together, heard Ed talking to his son as she talked to her children, but most men did not, familiarly with an element of gossip and confiding.
Ed Corcoran was very tall; six three, she guessed. It was a pleasure for her to stand near him; he made her feel—a thing she rarely felt with men—not oversized. She remembered Barbara’s flirtatious giggles over the blue pages of his estimate and realized she was attracted to Ed too. Were all the women he did work for secretly in love with him? Because he was a nice man, and there were so few nice men? Because they were alone in those big houses?
It was strange to her, this feeling of being attracted. She had felt it before, of course. It was a scintillating feeling, but always before, Anne had been stopped by the solid presence of her husband and the physical life of marriage.
Was she in danger, alone in the house with a man she found desirable? No, Ed Corcoran wasn’t the man she would betray her husband with. There would always be, in her coupling with Ed, something comic; they were both so large, so shy, so lacking in the ease of quick seduction. She would have to be taken over by someone, and Ed was much too nice for that. He would allow her hesitation, and in hesitating she would always choose fidelity. And what would they talk about? He was an electrician. Yet they seemed to have a lot to say. They talked about their children.