by Mary Gordon
Cleaning Up
When the first man walked on the moon, Loretta's mother, as the town said, “snapped.” And it was almost like that, as if you could hear a sound and then see something fly up into the air, not like a bird but like a rubber strap that had broken from too much strain.
“Her life was just too hard for her,” Martine Lavin said to Loretta, sympathetically, without a hint of judgment. Loretta understood that Martine was being kind and that she ought to be grateful. So many people avoided talking to her, so they gave her meals and washed her clothes and tried to find a place for her in their homes beside their own children. She wasn't uncared for, the parish saw to that. But as they packed her bologna sandwiches, identical to their own children's, as they poured milk or juice, careful to distribute identical amounts, they rigorously avoided mentioning her mother or what had happened in St. Rita's church on the day of the moon walk.
Martine Lavin never went so far as to bring that up, but she did at least refer to Loretta's mother, didn't erase her from the pages of life, not as if she'd been dead but as if she'd never lived. And Loretta was grateful to her, but only partly, because what she could see in everyone's eyes was how much they loved themselves for doing what they did, how much they loved themselves for their knowledge of their own humility: “Well, I didn't do much. I did what anyone would do.”
If one of them, just one, had been without that shadow of self-love, so visible to Loretta, perhaps she would have felt free to relinquish the hard stone she carried beneath the flesh of the palms of her hands. The thin flesh, the pointed stone that had penetrated beneath the skin, causing a new skin to grow up around her hate. She hated Martine Lavin most of all because of her belief that she was different from the others. And she wasn't different, or only in ways that carried the kind of tiny risk that allowed her to think of herself as an adventurer, when really, she had never been in any danger and would never be. She was only different enough to be a problem, because she created the temptation in Loretta to let down her guard. And that was dangerous.
Loretta knew about danger. It was the element her mother lived in and carried with her. The women in the Altar Society (Martine was one of them) had seen it, and they wanted to turn their eyes away from it, but they couldn't entirely, because Loretta was a child, thirteen years old.
Her mother had smashed through the barriers of decency that day in church. Why had she chosen a time when the Altar Society was there? The decent women of the parish, polishing, arranging flowers, genuflecting with dustcloths in their hands each time they passed the tabernacle.
Loretta had seen it all, she had to, she had to follow her mother out into the street. Her mother was raving, tearing at her clothes, shouting out words of the most unbelievable filth, some unrecognizable to Loretta, some recognizable to her as the names of body parts she associated with the bathroom.
“Mama, please, Mama come home, be quiet, you're disturbing people, Mama come home with me, we'll eat something, you can lie down, we can lie down together, we can take a nap.”
But she didn't listen and Loretta knew she couldn't, knew, really, that her mother couldn't hear her, no matter how loudly she spoke. But she couldn't speak too loudly. She was trying to encourage her mother to be quiet so she tried to keep as quiet as she could herself. It didn't matter. Whatever she said the words were wrong. Her mother's words didn't make sense to her, either. They were speaking to each other in languages the other didn't understand. Loretta recognized the foreignness although up to that time she had never heard a foreign language spoken, except the Latin of the Mass, and that she knew there was no need to understand.
She had hoped that her mother would be calmed and silenced by being in the church, but she wasn't. Being in the church made her wilder. Or maybe that wasn't it, maybe she was acting the same way she had on the street and it just seemed worse in church.
Loretta's mother took her blouse off at the church door. She began raving about the men walking on the moon and saying it was an abomination, an abomination of desolation because the moon was desolate and the astronauts were abominable. She said that God should not allow it and she was here to punish God for his abomination and filthy, filthy, filthy shit and filthy piss and filthy filthy she was going to punish God.
The Altar Society ladies got scared, thinking she meant to do something to the Host. One of them went next door to the rectory to get Father Rafferty. He was watching the television, watching like everyone else the sight of the men walking on the moon.
Father Rafferty came in with his red face and red dome of a bald head and said, “Now Margaret, now Margaret,” and all she said was filthy filthy and that he was as filthy as the rest of them, particularly the astronauts, they were the filthiest of all, the moon had always been a clean place, she'd relied on that, but now they were going to make it filthy just like they were and how could the Blessed Mother look on and let it be, she was going to tear the Blessed Mother's eyes out to punish her, no not to punish her just so that she couldn't see. She was walking toward Our Lady's altar, she was starting to climb onto it, when Father Rafferty came behind her and pinned back her arms. And then the police came and took her away, and Father Rafferty told the Altar Society ladies not to say anything of what they'd seen and he told Martine Lavin to take Loretta home with her and her family for the night.
She had never before that night slept in a strange bed, since she and her mother didn't know anybody. Certainly not well enough to sleep in one of their guest beds. In all her life Loretta had never slept in any bed but her own. She and her mother had never taken a vacation, and so she had never so much as brushed her teeth in a sink other than the one where she saw her face each morning in front of the accustomed mirror, really the door to the medicine chest. She felt at a complete loss as to how to behave in the Lavins’ house. Martine Lavin had driven her home and tried to straighten up the devastated kitchen. Her mother had pulled everything off the shelves, emptied bags of sugar and flour into the sink, saying they were filthy, she knew they had bugs in them, but the stuff didn't go down the drain, it stuck in an igloo shape in the sink, solidifying, to a texture like cement.
Her mother had left the water on and run to the church. Of course Loretta had followed her, horrified at her mother's exposure. Going outside, she went beyond her rights. Loretta felt that whatever her mother did or said in their house was her right, really, she had paid for the house. “My hard-earned money” were the words she always used when Loretta failed to turn the light off in the bathroom or filled the bath too full. She earned her money as a saleswoman in a children's clothing store on Madison Avenue. Her job fed her bitterness. She hated her customers and their children, hated the effort she had to make at tailored suits and coiffure and manicure to be acceptable to them, hated their money and their carelessness and the easiness of their lives.
Loretta confused the term “hard-earned” with “hard labor,” words that she'd heard in a movie that had frightened her. It was on The Late Show one Saturday night and her mother had fallen asleep watching it, not noticing Loretta, rapt and horrified, looking through the banister rails. The movie was called I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and it made visible one of her greatest fears, that someone could be punished, punished terribly, for something he hadn't done. But she understood why people thought he had, why they wanted to punish him. He had that look, that dark look around his eyes that made people feel in themselves the wish to punish. “That hangdog look,” her mother said about her, ordering her out of the room sometimes just for having it. And she understood why her mother did it, why her mother said, “You make me feel hunted with that look.” She saw the look in the mirror, saw it again in the Lavins’ mirror, a mirror surrounded not by chrome but by white-painted wood with a light on the top that was softer than the one in her own bathroom, but not soft enough to hide the look that she knew would always make people, as it had her mother, want to be in a place away from her.
“Your father was always sickly
,” her mother would say resentfully whenever Loretta would get a cold or the flu. Only once she was nicer, when Loretta got the croup. Her mother seemed to like the flight from the steamy bathroom to the cold outside, she sang as she ran through the house, her coat open, holding Loretta as she ran, as if the shock of the cold was a delight to her, a particularly pleasant and imaginative game they were playing, not a desperate effort to restore a child's breath.
Loretta couldn't sleep in the sewing room in Martine Lavin's house. She lay much of the night wakeful on the cot beside the headless figure that Loretta supposed represented Martine's body. What was it called? A form? As the hours passed, Loretta grew more and more anxious about not sleeping, not about the wakefulness itself but about her fatigue the next morning. Because however tired she was she would have to go to school and school was in the world and the world required alertness. Particularly now when she knew all the children knew about her mother. They had heard it from their mothers, who had either seen it for themselves or heard it from their own friends. She had to keep alert to clarify the smudgy look around her eyes so that she would seem not like one of their potential victims, but a potential danger to them.
In the mornings, wakened by her own alarm clock, she would try to lie alert in her bed until Martine's husband Richard had gotten out of the bathroom. And then Martine would use it herself; she'd stay in there until she heard the baby cry. Then she would leave it and only then Loretta knew it was all right for her to use the bathroom.
The house where she'd lived with her mother hadn't had a shower, only a tub, she'd never taken a shower. She knew, somehow, that the Lavins would have thought it strange if they'd heard her taking a bath in the morning. Or even a bath at night. Their children took baths; it was a playful, time-consuming ritual, only in a minor way having to do with cleansing. Loretta felt that, in taking a bath, she was putting herself in the camp of the Lavins’ children, suggesting she required the same brand or quality of care as they, suggesting she thought herself entitled to it.
But she didn't know how to use the shower. She didn't understand what was to be done with the curtain, whether it was to be put inside the tub or outside. And she knew she couldn't ask. She couldn't say the words, “How do you take a shower?” They sounded too pathetic, too deprived, simply too odd. And she knew it was crucial for her not to sound any of those ways. So in the six weeks she lived with the Lavins, she washed only at the sink. She didn't know what they thought of that. But she could be sure that they had not assumed she was claiming any kind of false position as a child of the house.
Martine wanted Loretta to share her joy in her young children. Four of them, four sons, four blond boys, four perfect angels. John was five, Matthew four, Mark three, and Luke, the baby, seven months. Richard said maybe they'd quit when they'd gone through all the books of the Bible. “Of course Hebbukah might feel a little badly done by.” “Or who knows, darling,” Martine said, with a reminder, sunny, irrepressible, that all those babies had to do with something bodily between her husband and herself, “we might, one day, between us, actually produce a girl.”
Loretta did not like children. She wished she could have been in a house without them, or at least without ones so near babyhood, so full of incessant hungers and incessantly expressed demands.
Of all of them she preferred John, because he was the oldest and the most self-sufficient. Martine remarked over and over what an independent child he was, but Loretta was so disgusted by the endless circle of need and response to need that made up the relations between Martine and her children that she couldn't muster anything like admiration for John's behavior. It seemed the only slightly less reprehensible behavior of someone who understood he had only to express the slightest wish to have it granted by his mother. A wish having nothing to do with whether or not he was capable of accomplishing what he wanted for himself. She judged those children for their weakness, and Martine for fostering this quality, which, she was sure, would serve them badly later on. She was sure that her mother was right in what she said, in what became, later, one of the few things Loretta could remember her saying, “You've got to look out for yourself in this world, there's no one looking out for you.”
No one making you another beautiful breakfast if you didn't like your scrambled eggs, no one making you a placemat out of one of your laminated drawings, no one finding you a wooden napkin ring in the shape of your favorite animal, no one taking you on their lap to hear your side of the story when clearly your behavior had been abominable, no one singing you songs in Spanish or in French or teaching you the words of the Mass in Latin, which no one used anymore but which you would know because you were special children, and you must remember that, it must be marked.
The Lavin family life made her feel choked and suffocated and disoriented, as if she were in a tepid whirlpool where distasteful objects were constantly being thrown up against her, in her way, then out of her grasp: placemats, napkin rings, foreign picture books. In the vortex she attached herself to one thing which of all the unbearable things seemed least unbearable to her: the five-year-old John.
For she knew she was expected to attach herself to something. People did. Or at least, they had to appear to be doing so. She understood perfectly well the currency of the transaction in which she was involved. She paid her board by seeming to be aware of the superiority of her new situation to her native one, by suggesting tender yearning and a poignant sense of loss, and always always everything backlit by a constant sense of gratitude. It sickened her, but she had no choice. She had to have a place to live. Her house was empty. She was a child; she could not live in an empty house.
So she did a few things, as few, she calculated, as she could do and still pay her rent. She made clay animals with John. She rather enjoyed it. Not very much, but she didn't enjoy anything very much, and at least, shaping the clay with John she could be silent, or nearly. She enjoyed silence. And she almost allowed herself to admire the little boy's ability to be silent for quite a long time. Much more than most people. More than most adults. She almost liked him for it, but she saw the trap of that. She was an employee, a tenant, and it was another thing her mother had taught her: the boss is the boss and whatever he says, at the end of the day he gives you your money or he doesn't, whatever he likes, it's up to him. Loretta kept in her mind that she was a wage earner. And, like her mother, she considered herself overworked.
Martine could be said, Loretta knew, to work very hard. Yet there was nothing in her that conveyed the strained, burdened sense that had been so much a part of Loretta's mother's posture. Martine sang while she worked; she played the record player while she cooked; she told Loretta it was a way of keeping up with the music. She'd majored in music in college, had played the piano, although she knew that because of the children these were not her years for “the instrument.” At Christmastime, or teaching the children, yes. “But those days,” she told Loretta, “of hours upon hours of practice, hours lost in, given up to music, those are in my past. Maybe in my future. My family is my present tense,” she said, with a smile that Loretta turned against, feeling herself excluded from what the smile suggested, and glad to be.
After six weeks with the Lavins, Loretta was sent to her uncle and his wife in Hartford. They didn't want her and they made it clear that they had money and would send her to boarding school at the Madames of the Sacred Heart when she graduated from eighth grade the next year. She could spend her holidays with them. Christmas and Easter. Other arrangements would be made for summers, as their summers were for traveling. Loretta's uncle was eighteen years older than her mother; he'd just retired from Hartford Accident and Indemnity; they'd had no children, they'd saved for years for their new freedom, and they weren't going to let Loretta get in their way. Brother and sister had not been close; Loretta hardly knew her uncle, and she understood his position.
Her years in the Convent of the Sacred Heart were better than any that had gone before. She excelled in foreign languages, par
ticularly Latin. The Latin teacher, Mother Perpetua, arranged for her to attend summer programs at the Sacred Heart Convent in Rome the first three years of high school. The last year, she was sent to a summer program at Harvard to learn Greek. “My smattering's not good enough for you,” Mother Perpetua said. “You can do better than me.”
She liked Mother Perpetua, although the other girls were afraid of her. She liked her white hands, and the unhealthy pallor of her face beneath her wimple, liked the fact that she didn't change out of her old habit when the younger sisters modified or discarded theirs. She admired Mother Perpetua's deliberate and unwavering impersonality. Unlike the other nuns, she didn't lapse into jokes or slip in some details of mothers, sisters, mischievous younger brothers, schoolgirl episodes, lovable teenage pranks. Loretta and Mother Perpetua met only in the high, unfinished rooms of a language which, being spoken by none of the living, being not at all part of the mess of daily life, was high and calm and beautifully inhuman.
Mother Perpetua sent her to Bryn Mawr for college. She graduated with highest honors in classics. From there she went to Berkeley, where her thesis on Horatian odes was given highest honors as well. Jobs in Latin were scarce, the young had little interest in this language of the imperial-minded dead, so she was lucky, very lucky to be hired at Peabody College, so near Boston, so near New York, arguably the most prestigious small college in America, where the tradition of the classics was honored even if the classes were nearly empty.
She had had no training in what might be called personal life, and so friendships with her colleagues were difficult for her. Friendship didn't tempt her; she mistrusted most people, and they bored her. She was fond of Mother Perpetua and she knew it would have pleased the nun if she'd joined the order. Loretta guessed that Mother Perpetua's thinking of her being part of the community was the one fantasy, the one indulgence she'd allowed herself in a life made up of strict self-discipline. But Loretta knew the convent, living in a circle of women, even, as the life was constituted now, living in apartments in university towns or in the poorer parts of cities, was impossible for her.