by Mary Gordon
“Great, then I'll meet you at Gallagher's,” she said. She couldn't remember when the prospect of anything had made her so sick at heart.
Slabs of beef hung from hooks in the restaurant window. On the pine-paneled walls, behind the red-leather booths, were pictures of New York sporting, political, religious, and show-business figures from the 1890s to the 1950s. Diamond Jim Brady, Fiorello La Guardia, Jack Dempsey, Yogi Berra. Stiff-looking monsignors beside men in fedoras and coats with collars made of beaver or perhaps mink. An age of easy, thoughtless prosperity, a slightly outlaw age, of patronage and conquest and last-minute saves from on high. She thought how odd it was that she liked this place so much, since it had nothing to do with the way she had always lived her life— was the opposite of the way she had lived her life. Yet she didn't feel out of place here; she felt welcomed, as if they had made an exception for her, and she liked the feeling, as she liked the large hunks of bloody meat and the home-fried potatoes and the creamed spinach, more than the Thai food the sisters would be eating, more than the cookies they would devour while they watched the film.
“So, Gerard, it's a great day for you,” she said with what she hoped he wouldn't notice was a desperate overbrightness, masking her terror at the fact that after she said this, she would have nothing to say.
“I thank God every day of my life. I count my blessings. Except I have to say I was a little disappointed. None of the old students came. I thought they'd come. The celebration was mentioned in the parish bulletin.”
“Oh, Gerard, most of the old students don't live in the parish anymore. And besides, you know how busy people are.”
“Still, you'd think at least one of them.”
“I'm sure they were at the Mass. You know how shy people are to come to anything after Mass. Catholics simply weren't brought up to do it.”
“I was surprised, though.”
He wouldn't let it go. She felt, at the same time, hideously sorry for him and angry that he wouldn't accept the ways out she offered him. Did he have any idea how horribly he had failed as a teacher? Was today the first news of it for him? If it was, her mixture of pity and dislike was even stronger, though equal in its blend.
“I'm surprised Father Steve went off to the baptism. You'd think he could have found a substitute.”
“I think it was a very good friend.”
“He's known me for years.”
“Well, you know Steve, he always thinks he can do everything. I'm sure he'll show up. You know his way of pulling things off in the end.”
“It's a very important day to me.”
“Of course it is, Gerard, of course.”
“It was a great blessing, my being called to the deaconate.”
Yes, she wanted to say, a job with so little to it that you couldn't screw it up.
“My mother was very upset when I was sent home from the sem. I just couldn't cut it. The pressure was very tough. I think these days they'd say I had a nervous breakdown.”
Suddenly she wondered if she had to think of him in a new way, as someone with an illness rather than with a series of bad habits. She didn't know which she preferred, which was more hopeless, which less difficult to bear.
“My mother wanted a son as a priest more than anything. All those years being a housekeeper in the rectory. I really disappointed her. I just couldn't cut it.”
“I'm sure you were a great comfort to her in her last days.”
His dull eyes brightened. “Do you think that's it? Do you think it's the will of God? That I couldn't cut it at the sem because if I had been a priest, she would have been alone in her last illness?”
“I've heard you were very devoted to her.”
“I took care of her for fifteen years. It was a privilege. It was a very special grace.”
“Well, then, you see,” Joan said, not knowing what she meant at all.
“Still, I was a big disappointment to her. There was no getting around that. And I was disappointed today, that so few people came. Next to my investiture, it was the most important day of my life.”
Gerard began to cry. The waiter hovered behind them and then disappeared. Joan wondered what on earth people in the restaurant imagined was going on between them, who people thought they might be to each other— this unfortunate-looking old man and the underdressed old maid across from him.
She tried to give her attention to him, not to think of the waiter or the other diners, not to be mortified at the sight of this man— he was an old man, really— crying, trying to light a cigarette.
“Sometimes I just don't know what it all means.”
A wave of anger rose up in her. Anger toward Gerard and toward the institution of the Catholic Church. What was it all worth, the piety, the devotion, if it left him crying, struggling helplessly over an ashtray? Seeing life as meaningless. At least it should have provided him with sustenance. He had missed the whole point; he had taken only the stale, unnourishing broken crusts and missed the banquet. She was angry at him for having missed the whole point of Jesus and the Gospels, when he had been surrounded by them every day of his life, and angry at the Church for having done nothing to move him.
“Surely, Gerard, you know that you are greatly beloved.”
He stopped crying and shook his head like a dog who had been fighting and had had a bucket of cold water thrown on him.
“I appreciate that, Sister. I appreciate that very much. That's why even Father's not showing up is the will of God, I think. I always thought that of all of them, you were the one who really cared about me.”
She felt sick and helpless. How could she say to him, I wasn't talking about me, I was talking about God. He was looking down at the tablecloth; his shoulders were relaxed, not hunched and knotted as usual. He lifted his head and gave her a truly happy smile.
“You see, you were the only one who cared enough to notice what I was going through. Everybody just let me go on teaching, doing a terrible job, giving me class after class to screw up. Do you think I liked it in there? I was just afraid of losing my job. It's all I have, coming to the school.”
“There's the deaconate— you could make something of that.”
“I'm not very good with people,” he said. “But you figured out what I was good at. You looked at what I was really like. You saw that I had a talent for computers. You paid attention. That's what caring really means. You were the only one since my mother who cared enough to tell me I had to improve. Everybody else thought I was hopeless. They didn't want to look at me, just kept me around so I wouldn't be on their conscience. You really looked, and you found my gift.”
Turning computer switches on and off? she wanted to say. Dusting keyboards? Turning out the lights and locking the door?
“Now I know I have a real place, a place where I'm needed, and it's all thanks to you. That's the kind of thing Jesus was talking about.”
Oh, no, Gerard, she wanted to say, oh, no, you're as wrong as you can be. Jesus was talking about love, an active love that fills the soul and lightens it, that draws people to each other with the warmth of the spirit, that makes them able to be with each other as a brother is with a sister or a mother with her child. Oh, no, Gerard, I do not love you. You are a person I could never love. Never, never, will I feel anything for you when I see you but a wish to flee from your presence. She prayed: Let me stay at the table. Let me feel happy that I made Gerard happy. Let me not hate him for his foolishness, his misunderstanding, his grotesque misinterpretation of me and the whole world. She prayed to be able to master the impulse to flee.
But she could not.
“Excuse me,” she said, and ran into the ladies’ room. In the mirror her eyes looked dead and cold to her. She believed what she had said to Gerard, that all human beings were, by virtue of their being human, greatly beloved. But the face she saw in the mirror did not look as if it had ever been beloved, or could ever love.
She looked in the mirror and prayed for strength— not to make herself love
Gerard but to sit at the table with him. Only that.
He believed that she loved him. He believed that she had his interest at heart, when all she cared about was keeping him from doing damage to her children, whom she did, truly, love. Only Steve had prevented her from throwing him out on the street. Steve, who, she was more sure than ever now, was relaxing in Westchester.
The poor you always have with you. She heard the words of Jesus in her head. And she knew that she would always have Gerard. He was poorer than Estrelita Dominguez, thirteen years old and three months pregnant, or LaTrobe Sandford, who might be in jail this time next year.
The poor you always have with you. She thought of Magdalene and her tears, of the richness of the jar's surface and the overwhelming scent of the ointment— nard, she remembered its being called— and the ripples of the flowing hair. She saw her own dry countenance in the greenish bathroom mirror. She combed her hair and smoothed her skirt down over her narrow hips. She returned to Gerard, who had been brought a Scotch and soda by the waiter.
“On the house,” Gerard said. “I told him we were celebrating my anniversary.”
“And you, Sister,” the waiter said. “What can we give you? A ginger ale?”
“Just water, please,” she said. “A lot of ice.”
The waiter was an Irishman; he'd be scandalized by a nun's ordering Scotch. She didn't want to disappoint him.
Bishop's House
The Morriseys bought their house in County Clare in the early sixties, before the crush of others— Germans mostly— had considered Irish property. It had been a bishop's residence, a bishop of the Church of Ireland, a Protestant, but it had fallen into decay. Repairs had to be done piecemeal. The Morriseys were both editors at a scholarly press, and they had three children who needed to be educated; it was twenty years before the house was really comfortable for guests.
The house looked out over a valley whose expanse could only be understood as therapeutic. So it was natural, given the enormous number of bedrooms and the green prospect, like a finger on the bruised or wounded heart, that the Morriseys’ friends who were in trouble, or getting over trouble, ended up in the house. Sometimes these visits were more indefinite than Helen would have liked. But she and Richard must have known, buying such a house, that this outcome was inevitable. And it soon began to seem inevitable that friends from three continents—
North America, Australia, where their son had lived, and Europe, where they had numerous connections— were always showing up, particularly now that the Morriseys had retired and were spending May to October of every year at Bishop's House.
Lavinia Willis ran into Rachel, Helen and Richard's daughter, on the Seventy-second Street subway platform. Lavinia was crying, or rather she was sitting on a bench trying not to cry, but tears kept appearing under the lenses of her sunglasses. She was crying because she'd just broken up a fifteen-year-old love affair, and although she hadn't seen Rachel in three years, Rachel was the perfect person to run into if you were crying behind your sunglasses. You'd be able to believe she hadn't noticed since it was perfectly possible that she hadn't. Rachel was an oboist and she often seemed not to have too much truck with the ordinary world.
She and Lavinia had been roommates at Berkeley during the troubled sixties, but had both avoided politics. Not that they were reactionary or opposed to what the demonstrations stood for. In Lavinia's case, it was that she had a horror of anything that she might understand as performance. In Rachel's case, it was simply that her devotion to her instrument, a mixture of passion and ambition, cut her off from quite a lot.
Lavinia's parents had divorced and remarried, both unsuccessfully, and had divorced and remarried again. When Lavinia was at Berkeley, they were on their third partners. This made the decision of where to go on holidays a nightmare; even Rachel could see this. For all her musi-cianly abstraction, she had inherited something of her mother's thin skin for people in distress. She invited Lavinia to come home with her for Christmas of their freshman year.
Lavinia slept on a cot in the living room of the Morriseys’ lightless, book-encrusted railroad apartment on the corner of 119th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. But she only did it once; in her sophomore year she left Berkeley to get married. Everyone understood why she'd done it, or at least they understood that it had something to do with the extreme disorder of her parents’ lives. Those who thought the marriage was a good thing were happy that Lavinia would have a comfortable and stable home, for clearly Bradford Willis was the essence of stability. Those who thought Lavinia was rushing into something feared she had inherited her parents’ heedlessness, a shaky understanding of marriage learned at her parents’ joined or separated knees.
But it surprised everyone when, two years into the marriage, when Lavinia was only twenty-one and not finished with her degree at N.Y.U., she became pregnant. Before that, her professors hadn't known quite what to do with her. She was studying history, focusing on the Dutch renaissance; a period she liked because of its subtlety and attention to detail. They could see she was an outstanding student but, since she was married, they were reluctant to suggest graduate school. So it was something of a relief to them when she got pregnant; they no longer had to consider her.
Brad was in a management program at Chase Manhattan, and his parents were happy to help them with their rent. They lived on Eighty-first Street between Lexington and Third, but moved three blocks north a year and a half later when, surprising everyone again, Lavinia became pregnant a second time.
In those years, Helen Morrisey was more help to Lavinia than she would have guessed. She'd drop by once a month with a pot of jam and a book for Lavinia to read, something Lavinia in her fatigue had to work hard to concentrate on. But the mental effort reassured her, and she was strengthened by Helen's belief that she was still capable of abstract thought.
Helen would come on a Friday morning— she worked a four-day week— and talk to Lavinia about politics. She was a draft counselor and encouraged Lavinia to get involved but Lavinia said she was in an awkward position generationally; she'd feel uneasy advising men not much younger than herself. She was sure they'd see her as an East Side matron with two children, and it would make her feel finished, done-up. Helen absolutely understood. She left Lavinia the address of congressmen and senators to write to, and Lavinia did, regularly, following Helen's instructions, changing the text of her letters slightly each time in case that might mean something.
She loved Helen because Helen had a way of asking you for things that were a bit difficult for you, but not impossible. You felt enlarged doing the thing she asked you for, and never hopeless. She would do things for you, but she always made you believe they were things she wanted to do, and if she found them too onerous, she'd stop doing them. She made you feel that her life was full but not overcrowded. She and Richard always seemed to have room for people, partly because they worked as a tag team. More than Richard, Helen would suddenly need to be alone, and would wander off sometimes when someone was in the middle of a sentence, leaving Richard to say, to the bewildered speaker, “Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean.” They seemed to swim through people, lifting their heads occasionally to offer a meal, a blanket, a magazine. If you were in trouble, they conveyed their belief that your situation was only temporary. They knew you had it in you to overcome whatever was, at that moment, in your way.
They managed to convey that to their own children because the three of them prospered quietly, unspectacularly. Rachel moved back to New York where she taught at the Manhattan School of Music and played in various chamber orchestras. Neal was working in ecological waste management in Melbourne. Clara was the only one who had made money. She and her girlfriend ran a catering business in San Francisco that had, for some reason they didn't understand, become fashionable. When Helen talked about her children she said she felt they all worked too hard. Only Neal had children, two sets, by his two marriages (his first wife had died in a train wreck), but they were in Australia. So
Helen had room, in her grandmotherly imagination, for Lavinia's boys. She liked boys increasingly as she aged and grew more boyishly valorous herself, more romantic about the untrammeled, the ramshackle, the hand-to-mouth.
When the boys were ten and eleven, Lavinia went to Teachers College at Columbia for a master's. She got a job teaching history at the Watson School, the best girls’ school in New York. She was considered a thrilling teacher, demanding and imperious, although everyone understood this was a mask thrown up by shyness, and that her heart rejoiced and bled at the triumphs and failures of her girls. They adored her; they fell in love with her. She grew, with middle age, into a surprising voluptuousness: her field hockey player's body somehow suddenly understood itself. Men looked at her, as she left her thirties, in the dangerous way they'd looked at her mother, a way that, before this time, she'd tried to forestall.
But as she approached forty, it began to seem ridiculous to forestall it any longer. She had a series of enjoyable but otherwise pointless affairs. One day she was in the back of a cab, changing under her coat from a silk blouse to a cotton shirt. She'd left the house in the cotton, to keep Brad from suspecting, and had changed into the silk in the cab on the way to the hotel. Now she had to change back, and wipe the perfume from her neck with a Handi-Wipe. She caught a glimpse of herself in the driver's mirror and felt grotesque. She was only thirty-eight; she'd been married eighteen years, she'd done all right with her marriage. The apartment was elegant, they had a nice house for the weekends in Dutchess County. But here she was, changing her blouse in a cab. Her youthfulness seemed like a gift and a challenge it would be not only foolish but ungrateful to ignore. She knew Brad would be hurt, but she imagined it would take him about a year to remarry. He was shocked, at first, mainly by his failure to foresee the breakup. He was more hurt than she knew, but she was right that, within a year and a half, he'd married again, a Swiss woman who sometimes wore little hats to dinner parties, and who ruled his social calendar with an iron hand.