by Brian Morton
Surprise.
Friends from NYU, friends from the movement, friends from the writing world. Even her family was there: her daughter-in-law, her granddaughter.
Vanessa was embracing her.
“This was the only way we thought we’d be able to celebrate you.”
“It’s not my birthday.”
“I thought if we did it too close to your birthday, we’d lose the element of surprise. You’d know what was coming and you’d never show up. It was a delicate operation. Like trapping the mythical yeti. We wanted to celebrate you. And we wanted to get you out of your apartment so you could have some fun.”
It was astonishing how little people know each other, even old friends. I was having fun, Florence thought. I was having fun sitting in my apartment and trying to understand our life, our collective life. I was having fun trying to make the sentences come right. I was having fun trying to keep a little moment in time alive.
And now that was gone. She had been so close to seeing things clearly, but it had felt so precarious, so fragile. Who could know whether that little flicker of clarity would still be there in the morning.
Janine, her daughter-in-law, and Emily, her granddaughter, were at her side. They’d been in New York for months now, and she hadn’t arranged to see them. She felt guilty for a moment, then realized that the guilt was merely a sort of tribute she was paying to convention—in fact, she simply hadn’t wanted to see them—and she stopped feeling guilty.
“Happy birthday, more or less,” Janine said.
“Not that you look that happy,” Emily said.
“I wish someone had nipped this in the bud.”
“I tried. I tried to nip it,” Janine said. “I told them it was a bad idea. But . . . Vanessa. She’s almost as much of a force of nature as you are.”
Oh Christ. Even Saul was here.
He put his arm around her shoulder. He seemed to be half drunk.
“I couldn’t not be here,” he said. “And I mean that literally. Your friend wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Someone Florence half remembered materialized at her side and told a long story about how hard it had been to get there from Rockland County. Someone else told Florence a story about how hard it was to tear herself away from her adorable but not yet housebroken puppy. As Florence smiled and nodded and pretended to listen, all she was trying to do was hold on to the moments of clarity she’d experienced at her desk, and all she wished for was to go back home.
In the women’s room, she looked at the window. It was ten feet off the ground. Maybe if I stood on the toilet seat I could lift myself up to the top of the stall . . .
No. Too craven. Too undignified.
She returned to the room where the celebration was in progress, picked up a glass, and tapped a knife against it until she had everyone’s attention.
“My friends,” she said, “I’m touched that you decided to do this. I’m touched, and I’m honored. What was it Yeats said? Something like ‘Think where our glory begins and ends, and say my glory was, I had such friends.’”
There was a murmur of appreciation.
“One of the things that I find beautiful about you all is that you understand me. I know I’m not easy to be with. I’m a difficult woman.”
“You’re a gloriously difficult woman,” Vanessa said—she always gushed too much—and others made noises of agreement.
“Well, thank you. But whether I’m gloriously hard to get along with or just plain hard to get along with, each of you has found ways to get along with me. Which is a tribute to your generosity, tolerance, and ingenuity. Because I’ve asked you to put up with a lot.
“And now I’m going to ask you to put up with one more thing. I’m delighted by this surprise party, but I’m going to leave you now, because I need to get back to my desk. I hope you know that I truly do appreciate this, and that I’ll be here in spirit. And I hope you have a wonderful evening.”
She turned and left. It would have been nice to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, but it was more important to keep her head up, and therefore she saw the faces of several friends as she passed them. They looked as if they weren’t sure whether she was serious.
She’d left her computer on, and as soon as she got home she sat back down in front of it. It took a while for the fog to burn away—the fog of embarrassment or ambivalence or whatever she was feeling—but after a time she found that she was not so far from where she’d left off. She worked for the rest of the night with satisfaction, and didn’t give her friends and well-wishers another thought.
5
After she left, no one knew what to say. Nobody even seemed to want to look at anyone else.
“Now you understand why I divorced her,” Saul said.
People laughed, and went back to eating and drinking.
“What the hell,” Vanessa said. “Let’s have a party. Let’s celebrate Florence in absentia.”
“I think I’ll ‘celebrate’ her some other time,” Saul said. “I’m out of here.”
6
“Did he divorce her?” Emily said to her mother.
“Other way round,” Janine said.
“That’s what I thought. I can’t even imagine them married.”
“Why?”
“She’s so independent. And he seems like he needs somebody needy.”
Janine was constantly surprised by the things her daughter came out with. But parents always are.
For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine’s mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, “Where did she learn that?”
“We’ve got the evening free, at least,” Janine said. “Wanna go to the movies?”
“But can we not see anything self-improving tonight? Can we go to something fun?”
“Only if you promise . . .”
But Janine couldn’t think of anything to make her daughter promise. There was nothing she wanted Emily to change. This hadn’t always been true, and wouldn’t always remain true, but it was true right now.
7
The next time Janine and Emily saw Florence, it was in an even less intimate setting.
The two of them were in the audience at Town Hall, waiting for the panel discussion to begin.
“Is it unhealthy to have an intellectual crush on your mother-in-law?” Janine said.
“Not if it’s only an intellectual crush,” her daughter answered.
Janine’s relationship with Florence was an unusual one for a woman to have with her mother-in-law. It was an unusually strong relationship, though it existed mostly in Janine’s mind.
Janine had heard of Florence before she’d ever met Daniel, and when Daniel told her who his mother was, she couldn’t believe it.
Not that Florence was in any sense famous. She was a feminist writer—an essayist and, as she called herself, a seat-of-her-pants historian. She’d had a little flare of literary glory in the seventies, which had vanished, as flares of literary glory tend to do, and since then she’d continued, calmly and patiently and entirely out of the limelight, to do her work.
But though she wasn’t famous to the world, she was famous to Janine. Janine had read a book of essays by Florence in college. She read them for a class in modern American feminism, and Florence’s voice on the page was unlike anything that Janine had encountered before. By turns eloquent and chatty, confident and self-questioning, it was the voice of a real person. It was a style Janine later encountered in other writers—Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Katha Pollitt—and though all of them were better known than Florence was, Florence had been the first member of this tribe whom Janine encountered, and, maybe for that reason alone, Florence had always meant the most to her.
; Janine had never wanted to be a writer—after a few years spent “finding herself” after college, she went to grad school in psychology—so Florence wasn’t a role model for her in any direct sense. But Florence remained an inspiration. She continued to represent Janine’s idea of a free woman.
The collection of essays that Janine read in college was called Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life, and the idea that there were such opportunities—the idea, in the words of a psychologist whom Florence quoted, that one is constantly confronted by situations in which one must make either a growth choice or a fear choice—conferred a new significance, first, on Janine’s life, and then, the longer she thought about it, on the lives of everyone she knew or came in contact with.
Janine and Daniel were on their third or fourth date before she found out who his mother was. She couldn’t believe it. She tried to tamp down her excitement—she limited herself to saying something like, “Your mother’s Florence Gordon? I’ve heard of her,” and when Daniel seemed surprised, she said, “Yeah. I’ve read some of her stuff. I liked it.” The funny thing about all this was that because she was determined to play it cool when she first found out (it seemed weird and somehow risky to let a new boyfriend know that she had an intellectual crush on his mother), Daniel never understood, and probably still didn’t understand, how important his mother was to her. She’d told him about it since, but she had the feeling that he’d never really revised his first impression.
“Here she comes,” Emily said, as the lights went down.
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About the Author
BRIAN MORTON is the author of four novels. Starting Out in the Evening was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into an acclaimed feature film, and A Window Across the River was a Book Club selection of the Today show. He teaches at New York University, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Sarah Lawrence College, where he also directs the writing program. He lives in New York.