Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  He’d rarely regretted his decision to become a cop, but, even after working for the Seattle PD for more than twenty years, he’d never really fit in. Early in his time there, one of his colleagues had spotted him reading a book on his lunch break, which was apparently a signal event in the history of the police force, and this led to someone’s calling him “the professor,” a name that had stuck with him since then—mostly because he was a reader, and partly, he suspected, because he was a Jew. Nobody hazed him or gave him a hard time, but he never stopped feeling like an outsider.

  After a few years he found his way into the Crisis Intervention unit, which is a little world within the world of the police force, with its own culture and its own values. He spent most of his time working with people who were mentally ill, trying to make sure they didn’t get swallowed up by the criminal justice system. (Crisis Intervention kept getting funded every year only because the city had found that it was cost-effective in keeping the violent mentally ill from clogging up the courts.) When you’re in CI, most of the other cops don’t think of you as a cop anymore; they think of you as a social worker with a badge. And for Daniel, at least, the description was accurate.

  His parents didn’t know anything about all this. As far as they understood, he was a cop now, through and through. They didn’t know that he still read, doggedly and intently—they probably assumed he’d stopped reading. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure why, he got the feeling that they didn’t even think of him as Jewish anymore. They apparently held to the Lenny Bruce theory that if you live in New York you’re Jewish, and you’re a goy if you live anywhere else.

  But though he was more like his old self than his parents realized, he wasn’t simply the same old Daniel in disguise. He’d been changed by his experiences, and he’d wanted to be changed by them. He had a different idea of what was important. He didn’t believe you could be judged by the number of books you’d read or the number of articles you’d written; he didn’t believe your worth was based on your attainments or your erudition or even your intelligence. Just about the only thing he valued was simple decency.

  Janine had been with him through all of this. She had watched him grow into manhood. Year by year she had been more and more impressed—with his steadiness, his compassion, his gentleness with and interest in the children. But she couldn’t tell herself that all of his changes had pleased her. When they were young, he’d seemed ambitious—or maybe she’d just assumed that he was—but it had been years since he’d shown any signs of wanting to improve himself in any way. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe she should have felt nothing but appreciation for his ability to treasure the life he actually had. But she’d always believed that if you weren’t striving, you weren’t alive, and she couldn’t understand his complacency.

  The life they lived was far from the life she’d always dreamed of living—a life of cultural excitement, a life of conversation, a life in which you kept meeting people who made you think. To the extent that she’d had that life, it hadn’t been one that Daniel had been interested in sharing; it had been one she’d had to find for herself.

  Sometimes she thought that Daniel’s rival wasn’t Lev, it was Manhattan. It was coming here that had made her feel alive to her own possibilities. She hadn’t been unhappy in Seattle; her job was absorbing, and she’d found a balance between being a mother, which she loved, and being a woman at work in the world. But on coming back here she’d discovered how little she’d trained herself to live with. Everything was richer here: work life, cultural life, street life—even her dream life. She didn’t know if it was even possible for her to go back.

  Tonight she couldn’t shake off her restlessness. Before they’d left the apartment, she’d felt as if she were in the wrong clothes, and she’d changed twice, but she still felt as if she were in the wrong clothes.

  Florence’s success had shaken something loose inside Janine. Florence was a woman who had never compromised. And now, at long last, she was reaping the fruits of her courage. So the question, Janine thought, is this: If I exercised a bravery in my own life equivalent to that which Florence has exercised in hers, what would I be doing? What would I be doing differently?

  30

  “You think you could live here again?” she said.

  “Saint Mark’s Place?”

  “You know what I mean. New York.”

  “We’d never be able to afford it. We’d have to live out in Brooklyn, with my father. Cozy times around the fire with Saul. We could read his masterpieces as soon as they came out of the typewriter.”

  “Wherever. You know what I mean. Could you see yourself coming back east?”

  They could do it, if the will was there. Daniel was growing increasingly tired of his job, as budget cuts kept making him feel less like a social worker with a badge and more like a clerk. He’d be eligible to retire at half-salary in a few years, and she was confident of his ability to find something here—much more confident than he was, but she was certain that she was right. And she’d been all but assured that she’d be able to make her position at the lab permanent if she wanted to. Nothing was stopping them, except, perhaps, his mixed feelings about being back in the place he’d once felt the need to escape from.

  “You ever see that show McCloud?” he said. “This cop from out west moves to New York, walks around wearing a ten-gallon hat, outsmarting the city slickers.”

  “I never saw that,” she said, and heard a heart-sunk inflection in her own voice.

  “Maybe it’s on Netflix. I think I’d have to watch a few episodes. Get a sense of whether I could make it work.”

  “Sounds like McCloud made it work,” she said.

  “Well, he did. But I’m not sure I have his talents. You should see the way he could ride a horse. The bad guys would jump into a getaway car, but McCloud . . .”

  She didn’t listen to the rest. She took his arm and they continued their ramble.

  31

  “You must be hating all this,” Vanessa said.

  “Why?” Florence said.

  “It must be upsetting all your routines. It must be hard for you to clear out your inbox every day.”

  Florence grunted. She was vain about the tidiness of her inbox.

  “Seriously,” Vanessa said. “Is it overwhelming? Or is life pretty much back to normal now?”

  Florence was having dinner with five friends whom she’d known for more than forty years. Three of them were in her study group; they’d been meeting once a month to talk about books and politics since the seventies. (Back then they used to call it a consciousness-raising group, but none of them had used the term in years.) Tonight her friends had taken her out to celebrate what Vanessa had called her “coronation.”

  “It never stopped being normal. You know that. You get a few phone calls, you get a few emails. Life goes on.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Vanessa said. “Success can make you crazy.”

  Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who’d so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression from which it took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who’d always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.

  Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is ju
st as bad as change for the worse.

  The conversation wandered away from its starting point, the revolution in Florence’s fortunes. And Florence was thankful for that. Her experience had been very different from the kind of thing they were talking about, and she was glad to be relieved of the necessity to explain this or to pretend otherwise.

  For Florence, this moment in the limelight hadn’t been disorienting in the least. It hadn’t been disappointing, or vexing, or complicated in any way. It had been that rare thing: an unmixed pleasure.

  Ever since the voluble philosopher had anointed her, Florence had been enjoying herself. She felt as if she’d been preparing for this all her life: preparing to be appreciated. She hadn’t been hungering for it; she’d never really felt the need for anyone’s applause. But now that she was getting it, it was a delight.

  But flaunting your happiness is no less vulgar than flaunting your wealth, so she was happy to avoid the subject of how she was feeling these days.

  The conversation meandered further, and she grew more and more relaxed. She was more comfortable with these women than with anyone else in the world. Their lives had gone in different directions over the years; some of them had seemed to go from success to success, some through decades of bad choices and bad luck. But when they were together, none of this seemed to matter. What mattered wasn’t what any of them had achieved or had not achieved. They knew one another well enough to see beneath the vicissitudes of the moment.

  Their get-together lasted for hours, and the subject of Florence’s success came up only once or twice more, and that was only when her friends teased her about it.

  She enjoyed being teased, by these women. These were the people she trusted. This was her tribe.

  32

  It was strange, though, that your close friends are rarely the people who ask the questions that mean the most to you.

  Florence was still turning over the questions that her granddaughter had asked her: “Are you going to do anything differently now? Isn’t this a chance to change your life?”

  None of her friends would have ever thought of asking her questions like this.

  Maybe they’d never ask because they knew her so well. They knew she wasn’t interested in changing.

  Or maybe they’d never ask because our ideas about our friends and loved ones congeal over time. We see them in a fixed and limited way, so we come to imagine that they themselves are fixed and limited.

  When Emily had asked, Florence had hardly even bothered answering. She wanted to make it clear that the line of inquiry was beneath her.

  But the questions had kept scratching at her.

  She could see what Emily meant. Nussbaum’s article had summed up her life’s work sympathetically and clearly. Florence didn’t need to repeat herself, because it had all been understood. So maybe it was time to say something new.

  But what?

  A few days after her little exchange with her granddaughter, Florence had taken out a box of old notes. Years ago, she’d flirted with the idea of embarking on a grand project, a synthesis of feminism and radical social theory—A Vindication of the Rights of Woman meets Das Kapital. She’d imagined writing a volume that would be gnarled, daunting, exhaustive; it would be filled with footnotes and thick as a canned ham. Now she unearthed the notes she’d made, to see if she might want to revisit the project, and spent a few days looking through them.

  It was a clarifying experience, because it helped her understand why she’d put the project aside in the first place. More than that, it helped her understand who she was. She had put it aside because she wasn’t a grand system builder. She wasn’t, and she didn’t want to be. She was a guerrilla fighter, a saboteur, a master of the sneak attack. Her métier was the long essay. Of the books she’d written, most had been essay collections, and even the ones that weren’t essay collections were essay collections in disguise.

  After a few days of looking over the old notes, she threw them, with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, away.

  Emily’s question had been important because it helped Florence remind herself what she wanted. She didn’t want to do anything differently. She didn’t want to change her life. She wanted to keep going. Maybe the shot of public approbation would help her become more reckless, more slashing, more licensed to assault and insult and offend. But probably not. She felt free to assault and insult and offend already.

  All I want to do, she thought, is to keep doing what I’m doing, as long as I can.

  33

  At the age of seventy-five, Florence embarked on her first book tour. It had been thrown together hastily, and it didn’t take her to all the major markets, but it still felt lavish to her. She visited Miami, D.C., Philadelphia, and Boston, stayed in nice hotels, and spoke in one bookstore and three synagogues. Kevin had explained to her that this was what a book tour was. “Jewish women,” he said, “are all that stand between us and the death of the publishing industry.”

  Florence’s friends expected her to be curmudgeonly about her book tour, but she enjoyed it. You travel around and you talk to women who’ve never been part of any social movement of any kind, women for whom the word “organizing” probably refers to nothing more radical than redoing their closets, and you find that not only have they felt the stirrings of feminism throughout their lives, they’ve often acted upon them, struggling out of hostile and constricting circumstances in the effort to breathe a freer air.

  What delighted her most was that women in their twenties were showing up. A new online magazine, the New Inquiry, run by a circle of feminists just out of college, seemed to have adopted Florence as an honorary grandmother—they’d run an interview with her and a review of her work in the same week—and in both D.C. and Philadelphia, confident and well-read young women showed up, most of whom said that they’d first heard of her because of the New Inquiry. It might not have been true, as Vanessa would have it, that Florence was a hero to the young, but this kind of attention from the young was more than she’d had in a long time, and it was flattering.

  34

  The last stop of her tour was Hartford, Connecticut, where she was going to speak at another synagogue. She took a train from Boston, where a summer storm had limited the audience at Newtonville Books to four or five old friends and email acquaintances. She was tired, and the weirdness in her hand and foot was flaring up again—her fingers wanted to jump around and her foot wanted to scrape against the pavement—and all she wanted, the whole woman as distinct from her parts, was to be back home.

  She was met at the train station by a young woman—was she young? Florence couldn’t tell. Everyone seemed young to her now—named Dolly.

  Dolly had organized this event. “I’ll be your chaperone, your bodyguard, your guardian angel, and your groupie, all mixed in one,” she said.

  Dolly’s car was not what Florence would have expected, had it occurred to her to expect anything. Most of the people who picked her up for this kind of engagement had cars that were professionally spotless. You could have eaten off the floors. But this one was redolent of a large and—somehow Florence sensed this—not particularly happy family.

  A family, she quickly realized, with dogs. The car was doggish. It was the car a dog would own if a dog could own a car. Dog hair on the seats, the smell of dog food, the smell of dog breath, the smell of rain-soaked dog fur locked in by airless heat.

  It was also filled with the detritus of childhood: boxes of apple juice, wrappers from cheese sticks, potato-chip bags. After a minute in the car Florence thought she knew this woman and her family too well.

  “I thought you might like to read this while we’re driving,” Dolly said. She handed Florence a stapled brochure, which turned out to be this week’s edition of the synagogue newsletter. There was an article about Florence’s talk that night, by someone named Alice Tyler. Florence looked through it quickly.

  “It’s amazing how they can never get a damned thing right. If this chucklehead didn’t fee
l like putting down a dime to make a phone call, you’d at least think she’d go on the Internet to check her facts. I wasn’t born in 1937; I never got a doctorate; I’m not retired.”

  “I wrote that, actually,” Dolly said. “That’s my pen name.”

  “That’s you? It’s a good thing you have a pen name, so nobody finds out what a terrible writer you are. You need to get your facts right. You also need to get your grammar right. ‘A New Yorker whom I think is one of the savviest thinkers around . . .’? It’s ‘who,’ not ‘whom.’ ‘Whom’ is phony elegance, and it’s grammatically incorrect. ‘She’s not adverse to calling herself a democratic socialist.’ It’s ‘averse.’ You might try finding out what a word means before committing it to print. This is appalling.”

  Dolly had a beatific smile on her face. “This is just so awesome. To get insulted by Florence Gordon on our first encounter. Within, what, five minutes of picking you up. I feel like I made it to the big leagues.”

  “You don’t make it to the big leagues by writing with such bad grammar that it makes Florence Gordon want to insult you.”

  “I know, I know, I know. It’s just that I’m so stressed lately. My husband—he’s the associate dean of students at Trinity—my husband has back problems and he hasn’t been able to help me at all around the house. He can’t even get comfortable on the couch. Sometimes he’ll come home at night and turn on the TV and lie on the floor.”

  “Sounds like the assistant dean of students has a nice thing going for himself.”

  “No, Ronald would never—you’re teasing. And both of my kids are in a gifted and talented program, and the amount of homework they get every day is whack. I swear, I spend three hours a night doing homework with them.”