Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  “I'm going to make a summer house with them,” she said, pointing to me. “It will be yours. It will be for you and your friends.”

  My alarm was great, and there were, simultaneously, two causes for it. The first and most serious was that I had no idea what was meant by a summer house. I understood that my grandmother, who usually took no time for nor attached any importance to indulgence or endearment, was trying to do something wonderful for me. But I couldn't make a picture of the thing she wanted to do. I saw the six green-painted screens leaning against the concrete, and I couldn't imagine how anything approaching a dwelling could be made of them. And why another house? And where would it be placed?

  The second reason for alarm was that I had no friends, and I didn't know whether my grandmother hadn't noticed that. Or whether she had noticed but believed this new thing she would build, this “summer house,” would instantly draw people to me, people who once thought of me as having nothing to offer, but now would know they had misthought.

  In the midst of my alarm, I heard an unthinkable sound. My aunt was laughing at her mother. That low, closemouthed, entirely mirthless noise that sounded like the slow winter starting of a reluctant car.

  “What are you talking about, Ma?” she said. “You can't do that. You're not up to it. And where do you think you'd put it?”

  “In the backyard,” said my grandmother, with her accustomed force.

  “There's no room for it there, we hardly have room for a barbecue. You must be crazy. I never heard you say anything so crazy in your life.”

  “The boys would help me,” my grandmother said. I didn't know whether she meant her sons, her grandsons, or the neighbor children whom she barely recognized.

  “Forget it, Ma,” my aunt said. “It's not in the cards.”

  There was a moment of brittle silence, like a sheet of gray glass that stretched between them. My mother and I looked at each other. We were part of the silence, but we knew we were of no importance in it. We knew that something would happen, and whatever it was would be important. And we knew that there was nothing we could do. They'd taken us into the house out of charity. We were only there because they'd said we could be, and we had no right to anything.

  My grandmother turned her back to all of us. She tucked three screens under each arm and walked away from us, into the garage, her back straight, her step unfaltering. She closed the garage door, passed silently before the three of us, and went into the kitchen to wash her hands.

  The words “summer house” were not mentioned again.

  And it's been thirty-five years since I've thought of them. Only Proust's words brought them back to me, his description of the dinner in Trouville:

  “A few hours later, during dinner, which naturally was served in the dining room, the lights would be turned on, even when it was still quite light out of doors so that one saw before one's eyes, in the garden, among summer houses glimmering in the twilight like pale spectres of evening, arbours whose glaucous verdure was pierced by the last rays of the setting sun.”

  I am finishing dinner, alone at my table in the restaurant in Trouville among women in pink-tinted gauzy dresses languidly lifting ices to their lips, or grapes. Their men are in frock coats, indolently lighting cigarettes. The champagne is returned, pronounced “undrinkable.” The young waiter reddens, scurries backward, produces the crestfallen maitre d’. Outside the sea laps in the distance, the shore is phosphorescent, glowworms flicker in the arbor, night flowers open, scent the air, retreat. Women rise slowly, men take their arms. No need to hurry, no need, really to do anything but make one's way to bed. A dream perhaps of the sun on the ocean, or a white sail against blue.

  And then my grandmother enters in her stern shoes, old lady shoes, black low-heeled oxfords, a version of which she wears in all seasons and for all occasions. Her legs are thick in their elastic stockings, the color of milky coffee; she wears them for her varicose veins. Her housedress has a pattern of faded primroses; an apron is pinned to the bodice. Her ring sinks into the fourth finger of her square, mannish hands.

  My grandmother doesn't know where to place herself in this company. For them she has only contempt. She is calculating, with a professional's knowledgeable eye, the cost of the gowns, the wastage of good food implied in every half-emptied dish on the exhausted table. She knows that she is saved and they are lost, that she is right and they are wrong, that she is wise and they are foolish.

  Or does she? Is she, perhaps, not judging but yearning? Is she adoring those light, slow-moving people, with their empty hands? Their lovely skins, their high, impractical limbs. Their shoes that could take them nowhere. Perhaps she is not my grandmother, that is to say not an old woman, but a young girl. Her bones are delicate and long. The skin of her hands is bluish white, transparent. She is hoping that one of them will say: “What a pretty child. Perhaps she'd join us for an ice.”

  And she will sit with them in a summer house, eating an ice, pistachio, lemon, perhaps in the shape of something, a flower or a bird. They will ask her about herself.

  And she will say nothing, because she knows that would spoil everything. She will shake her head, refusing words, lifting the spoon from her dish to her lips, silent. Happy, very happy, thinking perhaps of the word “glaucous,” with nothing asked of her and nothing that she needs to do.

  The Deacon

  No romance had been attached to Joan Fitzgerald's entering the convent. She wasn't that sort of person, and she hadn't expected it. A sense of Tightness had filled her with well-being, allowed her lungs to work easily and her limbs to move quickly, removed her from the part of life that had no interest for her, and opened her to a way of being in the world that connected her to what she believed was essential. Her faith, too, was unromantic; the Jesus of the Gospels, who was with the poor and the sick, who dealt with their needs and urged people to leave father and mother to follow him— this was her inspiration. Yet when she thought of the word “inspiration,” it seemed too airy, too silvery, for her experience. What she had felt was something more like a hand at her back, a light pressure between her shoulder blades. The images she had felt herself drawn toward had struck her in childhood and had not left the forefront of her mind: the black children integrating the school in Little Rock, the nuns in the Maryknoll magazine who inoculated Asian children against malaria.

  The source of their power was a God whose love she believed in as she believed in the love of her parents; she felt it as she had felt her parents’ love; she believed that she was watched over, cared about, cared for as her parents had cared for her. She had never in her memory felt alone.

  Her decision to become a nun, her image of herself as one, wasn't fed by fantasies of Ingrid Bergman or Audrey Hepburn. By the time she entered the Sisters of the Visitation, the number of candidates was dwindling and almost no one was wearing the habit except the very oldest sisters in the order; she'd been advised to get her college education first, and by the time she entered the order, in 1973, only two others were in her class. After twenty-five years she was a school principal in New York City and the only member of her class still in the order.

  They joked about it, she and the other sisters, about how they'd missed the glamour days, and now they were just the workhorses, the unglamorous moms, without power and without the aura of silent sanctity that fed the faithful's dreams. “Thank God Philida's good-looking, or they'd think we were a hundred percent rejects,” Rocky said, referring to the one sister living with them who was slender and graceful, with large turquoise eyes and white hands that people seemed to focus on— which she must have known, because she wore a large turquoise-and-silver ring she had gotten when she worked on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Rocky and the fourth sister had grown roly-poly in middle age. They didn't color their hair, they had no interest in clothes, and they knew they looked like caricatures of nuns. “Try, as a penance, not to buy navy blue,” Rocky had said. They seemed drawn to navy and neutral colors. They weren't very
interested in how they looked. They had all passed through that phase of young womanhood, and sometimes, watching her Hispanic students, and the energy they put into their beauty (misplaced, she believed: it would bring them harm), Joan nevertheless understood their joy and their absorption, because she had been joyous and absorbed herself— though she had wanted to make things happen, to change the way the world worked.

  All the sisters she lived with had the same sense of absorption. Rocky, who had been called Sister Rosanna, ran a halfway house for schizophrenics and was now involved in fighting the neighborhood in Queens where the house was located. “They want us out,” she said, always referring to herself and the psychotics as “us”— believing, Joan understood, that they were virtually indistinguishable. Four days a week Rocky lived in the halfway house; the remaining three days she joined Joan and two other sisters— Marlene, who directed a homeless shelter, and Philida, who was the pastoral counselor at a nursing home. They shared a large apartment— owned by the order— on Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue. They had easy relations with the neighborhood prostitutes and drug dealers, who were thrilled to find that these people, whom they called “sister,” seemed to have no interest in making them change their ways.

  They could have been almost any group of middle-aged, unmarried women who made their living at idealistic but low-paying jobs and had to share lodgings if they wanted to live in Manhattan, housing costs being what they were. But at the center of each of their days was a half hour of prayer and meditation, led in turn by one of the four of them. They read the Gospel of the day and the Old Testament Scriptures; they spoke of their responses, although they didn't speak of either the texts or their thoughts about them once they had left the room they reserved for meditation. This time was for Joan a source of refreshment and a way of making sense of the world. If anyone had asked her (which they wouldn't have; she wasn't the type people came to for spiritual guidance), she would have said that this was why she loved that time and those words: they were the most satisfying consolation she could imagine for a world that was random and violent and endlessly inventive in its cruelty toward the weak.

  Unlike the other sisters, including Philida, Joan had always been too thin. When she thought about it, she thought she had probably become stringy, and her skin, which had tanned easily, was probably leathery now. Perhaps her thinness and the coarse texture of her skin were traceable to her anomalous bad habit. Joan was a heavy smoker. She'd begun smoking in graduate school, the education program at the University of Rochester. Her study partners had all smoked, and she had drifted into the habit. She had wanted to persuade them— and herself, perhaps— that they didn't know everything about her just because she was a nun. Nuns didn't smoke; everyone knew that. But Joan did, though she had tried to quit. The women she lived with didn't allow her to smoke in the apartment; they had put a bumper sticker up on the refrigerator that said SMOKE-FREE ZONE. And of course she didn't smoke in school. She went over to the rectory to smoke.

  She was the principal of St. Timothy's School, at Forty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue. Once all Irish, it was now filled with black and Hispanic children. Joan was proud of what St. Timothy's provided. She knew that she suffered from what one of her spiritual advisers called “the vanity of accomplishment.” She knew she had a tendency to believe that she could do anything if people would just go along with her programs, and she made jokes about it, jokes on herself, jokes she didn't really believe. When she made her last retreat, which was run by a Benedictine sister, the nun urged her to contemplate the areas of life that were unsusceptible to human action, the mysterious silences of God, the opportunities for holiness provided by failure. She tried, for a while, to center her meditations the way the Benedictine had suggested, but then concluded that this was a contemplative's self-indulgence; she was in the world, she was doing God's work in the world. There was work to be done, and (was this what she had grown up hearing described as “the sin of pride”?) she could do it. She had long ago given up heroic plans and dreams, but she could make her school run well, and she could give to children— who often didn't have it elsewhere— a place where they were made to feel important, where things were demanded of them, but where they were valued and praised.

  Though Joan was frustrated and vexed by the poor quality of many of her teachers, she believed that the children got from her and her staff a quality of schooling they could never have gotten in the public schools. She came to understand that many of the teachers were at St. Timothy's because they wouldn't have been tolerated anyplace else. She put up with most of them, because at least they created zones of energy and discipline. She drew the line, though, at Gerard Mahoney. Gerard had been teaching seventh grade at St. Timothy's since he left his seminary studies, in 1956. Joan was sure he'd been thrown out, not for bad behavior or any spiritual failure but simply because he couldn't make the grade— not then, not in the years when the seminaries were full to overflowing. God knows, she said to herself, nowadays he would probably be ordained. But they'd sent him home, to his mother, who had been the housekeeper at St. Timothy's since, Joan once speculated to Rocky, Barry Fitzgerald was a curate. Mrs. Mahoney had been there when Steve Costelloe arrived, fresh from the seminary, thirty years earlier. Steve had been the pastor at St. Timothy's for the past fifteen years. Gerard's mother had died twelve years ago, after a long illness, when Gerard was fifty-two.

  Joan and Steve got along, which was more, she thought, than a lot of women in her position could have said. Essentially, Steve was lazy; his saving grace was that he understood it. He was a pale redhead, with freckles under the gold hair that grew on his hands; he was going bald; he had broad shoulders, but then his body dwindled radically— he was hipless, and his legs (she'd seen them when he wore shorts) were hairless and broomstick-thin. He had a little pot— whimsical, like something he carried tucked in his belt, a crystal ball he tapped his fingers on occasionally, as if he were waiting for messages. He was incapable of saying no to people, which was one reason he was universally beloved. St. Timothy's was a magnet for people who had nowhere else to go; Steve was constantly cooking up vats of chili (his recipe said: “feeds 50-65”), and some unfortunate was always in the kitchen.

  Often someone who had no real business being there was found to have moved into one of the spare bedrooms; the rectory, built for the priests, was nearly empty. It housed only Steve and Father Adrian, from the Philippines, who giggled all the time; when faced with the desperate situations of junkies and abused wives, he would say, “Pray and have hope,” and giggle. Sometimes Joan and Steve said to each other— thinking of the hours they spent counseling people in trouble— that Adrian's approach might be approximately as successful as theirs, considering their rate of recidivism. In the Filipino parade he'd been on a float, playing a martyred Jesuit. His brother, who had contributed to the construction of the float, blamed Father Adrian for their failure to win the prize for best float. “You were laughing when they hanged you,” he shouted at his brother. “That's why we didn't win.” “I couldn't help it,” Father Adrian said, giggling. “The children made me laugh.” Steve was happy to have Father Adrian, because he was willing to take the seven o'clock Mass, and Steve liked to sleep late. Joan suspected that Steve was often hungover. He was in good form by noon, for the larger Mass that served the midtown workers, who came to him on their lunch hour and usually, she guessed, went back to work refreshed.

  Problems arose when Steve felt that one of the people in the rectory rooms ought to be moving on; then he would come to Joan desperate for help. She would summon the person in question to the office (not in the rectory, of course, but in the school, next door) and speak firmly about getting a hold on life and going forward. Some of them just ignored her, and stayed on until some mysterious impulse sent them elsewhere. But a few of them listened, and that was bad: it encouraged Steve to ask for her help again, and she couldn't say no to his unhappiness; he was as hopeless as a hopeless child. She often said that th
e one temptation she could not resist was to try to fix something when it seemed broken and she believed she had the right tools. More often than not she felt she did.

  Steve was dreadful with money, and a terrible administrator. He was saved by his connections; people he'd met when he played minor-league baseball, or when he sat in the Sky Box at the Meadowlands because someone had given him a Giants ticket, or people whose confessions he had heard on an ocean liner while he was a chaplain on a Caribbean cruise. Once a year St. Timothy's would have a fund-raiser, and somehow he'd be bailed out. He left the administration of the school to Joan, allowing that she was much better at it than he, and saying, “Just don't get our name in the papers, unless it's for something good.” He had no stake in proving himself the boss, and she was grateful for that; when her friends ran into trouble with their pastors, it was because those pastors resented a loss of power. Steve wasn't interested in power; but Joan believed he was genuinely interested in the welfare of his flock. When she was angry at him, because he had foiled her or screwed something up, she thought he was interested only in being universally liked, and that he'd become a priest because it gave him a good excuse for not being deeply engaged with human beings.

  In the end he'd backed her up about Gerard, whose shortcomings were impossible to ignore. When she walked down the hall past his classroom, the sounds of chaos came over the frosted-glass pane above the door. She had taken to making random visits; the sight of her in the doorway quieted the kids. Pretending she was in full habit, pretending she was one of the nuns she'd been taught by, she could stand in a doorway and strike what her mother would have called the fear of God into any class. Even the rowdy seventh-graders— the boys who could have felled her with a punch, the girls who were contemptuous of her failure to get the knack of feminine allure— even they could be silenced and frozen in place by the sight of “Sister” staring down at them, as if from a great, sacral height. It couldn't go on.