Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  She learned that there was one connection that was possible. She craved the bodies of men. Not their love or even their attention, or not the kind of attention that could go on over time. What she wanted was an unclean place she had to travel to, treasured, a place of truth, the other side of the light, high truthfulness of the Latin language, of the surgical precision of the Horatian line. This low, dark place pleased her, made her smile, secretly, because it itself was secret and a home to her in a way no home had ever been. It pleased her because it was such a transgression to invest in this place the word “home.” She knew what she thought of when she thought of the word “home,” and she compared it with what came to other people's minds: dining tables covered with rich foods, soft furniture, a predictable cast of characters— mom, pop, brother, sis, grandma, gramps. Her idea of home was silent and anonymous, populated only by furtive creatures taken up only with their own drives, frozen in the postures of their striving toward each other, toward satiation and the oblivion to which it would inevitably lead.

  The darkness that she knew was in and around her eyes, the darkness that her mother saw and hated, that made her mother drive her from the room, was the sign of her true homeland, and the sign by which she could be recognized by other inhabitants. She was small and dressed, as befit the academic fashion beginning with the midseventies, almost entirely in black: close-fitting but unrevealing knits, overlarge shoes or boots that made a joke, a parody of her smalm ess.

  In the declasse bars where she liked to go, no one had college degrees and Horace was the name of somebody's cracked uncle. They played Kenny Loggins and Kenny Rogers on the jukebox, and she stood out among the women because of her short hair and boyish clothing. She gave the signal to these men, who at first could not understand her, that she might be easily approached. She might have been in danger, but she had known danger once, with her mother, and she knew its smell. Nothing bad had ever happened to her at the hands of one of these men, or in their beds, the motel beds where they met for what it was they both knew they wanted, leaving an hour, two hours later, not meeting again. Thirty years earlier this kind of behavior might, if it were found out, cause a kind of nontenurable scandal, but by the eighties such activities were commonplace in the academy, the ordinary fare of faculty dining-table talk, and she risked nothing. Most of the people who would judge her fitness to be among them were men, and although she was careful not to approach them physically or allow herself to be approached, she knew that she suggested to them an allure far from their comfortable wives, women of large amber beads and madrigal groups and Birkenstock sandals. And so, craving what they only guessed at, they would want to keep her close to them. So that, if ever, or in case … Meanwhile she attended their dinner parties, and gave a couple a year of her own, and produced work that earned their respect, that they couldn't ignore (for fear of lawsuit). She had, she believed, everything she wanted. She had chosen what she wanted in a life.

  She had seen his name first on the roster. It had jumped out at her: “John Lavin.” An intrusion, an eruption, a penetration into the matte backdrop of her life, of the thunderous, and violent, unmanageable past. In three days, the days between the first sight of his name on the roster and the first meeting of the class, she allowed the form of the intrusion, the propulsion, to recede. John Lavin was, after all, not an uncommon name, it was unlikely that it would be he.

  She knew everything when she saw him seated at the seminar table— one of only six students in a course on Horace in the original Latin— the only stranger in class, the rest having been brought to this rare level of proficiency by Loretta herself. It was not his face she saw but a boyish version of Martine, the same thin, light gold curls, the skin, milky white with an undertone of bluing, transformed only a little by a residual, not yet manly beard. When she saw the slope of his shoulders as he bent over his notebook, the combination he had learned from his mother of uprightness yet devotion to a task, the shoulders of a supplicant who would never fully abandon himself to his petition, when she saw the shape of his hands, the thumbnail, more recessive than the ordinary, heard the hesitation when she asked them for a sight translation and he paused after what she understood was a false semblance of puzzlement or frustration, when he put his hands on his head, a girlish gesture, that she had seen his mother perform, especially if she knew herself to be in the range of her husband's appreciation— she knew there was no doubt.

  For a brief while she wondered if he knew her connection to his life. But her name— Moran— was no more unusual than his. And she had disappeared entirely from the life, not only of his family, but of the parish. Martine had for several years sent copies of a Christmas letter to her at her uncle's address. “John has made us all proud playing Bach solos at his school recital. Mark, our athlete, continues to astound us all as the perfect shortstop. Luke began by playing with his Daddy's movie camera and did what we think of as the Lavin version of A Child's Christmas in Wales— it had us all in stitches. Matt loves to garden, and seems able to make anything grow.”

  But she had last seen them thirteen years ago, and after many years of nonresponsiveness, Martine had stopped writing. Loretta wondered if Martine had ever talked to the children about her time with them. Which would have meant, of course, that she had talked to them about Loretta's mother, the “scandal,” the “performance.” It was then that her bitter protective heart contracted to a point under the thin bones of her chest. “How dare they?” were the only words that came into her mind. “How dare they speak of her?” Her mother had made a performance of it, insisted on an audience, insisted upon being watched, and, then, of course, spoken of. It was then that she was steeped in her dark pool of unforgiveness that spilled over onto everyone. Her mother should have kept herself hidden. And she, herself, Loretta, thirteen years old, what should she have done? The torrent of her mother's madness was too strong for her, a hurricane of disorder and discrete force. And yet, in the thousand times when she replayed the scene, focusing on her non-silence, then her timid, pitiful, half whimpers of suggestions, “Mama, go in the house, Mama lie down, Mama don't go outside,” it was herself she hated, for her weakness, and her failure to think boldly or at all.

  She began to realize that he didn't know that she had a connection to his past. And with that understanding grew the struggle in her mind. Should she deal with him justly, a gifted first-year student with a passion for the Latin language, and attend to him as his gifts deserved, as she would any other gifted young man in his place. Or should she reveal their connection and say that she was unable to work with him, he should find someone else. But there was nothing to justify that; the connection would seem too weak, too tentative, too far in the past, and then she would have to bring her mother and her mother's fate to light. Her mother, whom she went months without thinking of, still in the hospital in Central Islip where she'd been brought fifteen years before, whom she had not seen after that, not even once, her mother whom the doctors agreed was too far gone, even, for de-institutionalization. And that had been a blessing, if not for her mother, Loretta knew, then for herself; it allowed her to think she was right not to think of seeing her mother again. There was no real mercy for her mother but the mercy of death.

  She tried to behave justly or at least professionally, but the darkness underneath the thin bones of her breast sharpened, then hardened to a solid point. John Lavin would be punished. She would punish him. She would punish him in his place as representative of the people of the parish. And in her mother's name.

  He made it easy for her, he made it easy by being completely himself, blond, quiet, with a series of identical Bic pens clipped to the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, always some variety of blue (to match his eyes?), some plain, some with a white stripe, or a yellow. His translations were always on time and always nearly perfect, yet not so perfect as to render them unlovable: there were one or two words crossed out, never an infelicity, but occasionally a slight swerving away from the most desirable nuanc
e, the word's best, truest sense.

  And he helped by the way he looked at her, adoring, and yet with a calmness none of the others, particularly the young men, could muster. It was only the young men she gave her attention to; the young women, reminding her too sickeningly or too pathetically of herself, were never candidates for her full regard, with their implied dreams of palhood, confidences exchanged, cuddle-ups under quilts with the inevitable redolence of domestication.

  Sometimes he came carrying an instrument in a small black case.

  She had heard a classmate ask which instrument it was and he said, simply, “Oboe” with the confident person's lack of need for further explanation.

  And yet, because, after all she was his teacher and possessed of a knowledge and accomplishment he clearly valued, because she was female and young and small of stature, with a hint of the fashionable in her close-to-the-skull hair, the multiple silver studs in each of her earlobes, she knew she could, if she chose, exercise what all this had given her: the power to intrigue him, John Lavin, a young heterosexual man.

  At first, she was undecided as to what her path might be. Would she keep him at arm's length, be hypercritical, hyperdemanding, and in the end order sex from him as her due, as a privilege he ought to think of himself as fortunate in having been asked to exercise? Or should she start this way and gradually soften, suggesting that everyone who had preceded him had been a disappointment and that he, only he, had fulfilled the promise which made her feel less futile, less alone.

  She had no desire for him. He was all transparency, there was no place that was fecund or capable of the dense growth that was the only environment in which desire and then satisfaction could, for her, take root. His lightness was repulsive to her. But taking the place of a darkness emanating from him was the sense of stain she would impose from her own body onto his, his blondness, his fairness, his quiet sense of his own worth, his embodiment of the notion of right doing, of having got things straight once and for all and living that way, with no sense of any future need of emendation fueled her purpose. A purpose not sexual in its flavor but which, she knew, could only be worked out on the unused, pure body of this boy. She would approach him and leave him unfresh; his sweet skin would nevermore be lovable in quite the same way. The vessel of dreams would be not only scratched and flawed, but its surface invaded with a growth.

  She knew it would be easy, but circumstances made it easier still. He told her that the next year he was going to Rome, taking a year off to study with his oboe teacher, who had relocated there.

  “Well, then,” she said, handing him his final paper, on the shape of the Horatian line, which she had graded A+, “Your grade's in, I have no more power over you, I'd like you to join me for dinner, so I can wish you bon voyage, and congratulate you for your first-rate work.”

  John Lavin blushed. The boy is blushing, she said to herself, seeing his heart, the red tight muscle in the center of his chest, overflowing with blood from the presence of— what, she wondered— astonishment, embarrassment, desire, shamed desire, gratitude, the apprehension of a pleasure?

  At dinner, in the town's best restaurant, which offered oversmall portions of pasta or fish, she insisted that he talk about his family. He was glad to, she could see the pleasure, greater than the one with which he approached his meal, at the prospect of opening up his family's life to her.

  “I guess I'm proudest of my mother,” he said. “She was trained as a musician, but she really gave it up for us. She went back and got a social work degree, she's working in the hospice movement. I mean, she does what I think of as the hardest thing in the world. She's with dying children and their families.

  “My father works in insurance, but I don't think that's really where his heart is. But he had all of us to support, and he was great about it.”

  Loretta realized she never knew what Richard Lavin had done, she had never cared; he was hardly present, only as Martine's husband, or the children's father; for himself, he was nothing.

  “His real love is woodworking, that's what makes him happy. He's set up an amazing workshop in the basement. And my mom's even got him to learn the recorder. I have three younger brothers, and we have a family recorder group. My mother really has to lean on the younger ones to practice. I'm the only one she didn't have to force, but everyone's glad she did it, because we always have our music. I'm the most grateful to her, she gave me my music, what an incredible gift. But we're really a happy family, I think it's because my mother's so incredible. All my brothers feel good about themselves. My brother Luke's into acting, Matt's a great organic gardener, I sometimes think Mark thinks of nothing but soccer, but my mother says I should get off his case. He's the least musical of us all.

  “Sometimes I feel bad about my mother's music. She has a lot of talent as a pianist, but it's been so long since she's practiced. Sometime I'd try to get her out of the kitchen to practice, but she'd just laugh at me, and say she'd made her choices, and she knew they were right.”

  Loretta saw the kitchen. She would have liked to ask him if the kitchen had changed, but of course she knew she couldn't. She saw the shower that she was afraid to use, and the cot she slept in in the sewing room, and the form in the shape of Martine's body.

  Then she saw her mother in the church, and what she imagined was the look on Martine's face, although she'd allowed herself to see nothing when her mother was doing what she did. But it was Martine who came over afterward, when her mother was taken away, came to where she was standing near Our Lady's altar, which her mother had attempted to destroy. She leaned down toward Loretta, putting her arms around her shoulders. And, meeting Martine's eyes, Loretta didn't know what she needed to find there but she knew it had to be exactly the right thing.

  What she saw was relief. She saw that Martine was relieved that it was Loretta's mother who had done this thing and not Martine and not anyone connected to her. And Loretta knew that Martine believed that because she'd seen it up close, but not so close that it had touched her, that she'd been spared.

  But she had not been. Loretta would see to that now.

  He accepted her invitation to come back to the apartment. She told him to sit on the couch while she made coffee.

  In the kitchen, she put the coffee into the espresso pot and lit the flame. Then she walked into the living room. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his hands folded at the top of his head. She ran the top of her thumb around the outline of his lips. She allowed him to initiate the kiss, then she took over.

  He was overwhelmed by his own ardor, and for a moment the simplicity of what he was so visibly experiencing made her want to send him home. But she thought of his mother's face, and of her mother's— wild, defeated— her mother whom she had not seen again after that day. Because of this she did not give in to her impulse to end the whole thing right there. She made herself go on.

  She took his hand and led him, like a child, into the bedroom. He seemed willing to leave everything up to her. She unbuckled his black belt and pulled his jeans down but did not take them off completely. She left his shoes on but kicked off her own. She took off her skirt and panty hose and underpants. She unhooked her bra but did not take it off and she kept her shirt on. She climbed on top of him. It was important to her that she felt she was doing something to him, that nothing was being done to her. It was she who was planting the seed, a seed which, without her, might never have taken root in the pure soil that could have been his understanding of the world. He would know now that it was not a sure thing, not a guarantee that he would remain spared. That the darkness that invaded Loretta's mother and taken her over and made her do shameful things, a darkness stronger than anything that could be fought against, was not something to which he was impervious. And if he knew this was true of himself, he would know it was true of the people connected to him. Perhaps he might think there were people in the world who were impervious, who were safe. But he would understand that they were people very unlike himself, so unlike him
self as to be unrecognizable.

  As she expected, it was over quickly. So quickly that she ought not have been surprised at the speed and completeness of his transition from abandonment to shamed regret. She put on her skirt, leaving her panty hose in a coiled lump at the side of the bed. He didn't know what to do about covering himself.

  “I haven't done this before,” he said.

  “Well, you have now,” she said, stepping into her underpants.

  She could smell the coffee, which had boiled over; she imagined the mess that had been made. She had stopped thinking of him. She was thinking of how angry it would make her to clean up the coffee which would have spattered all over the white surface of the stove, maybe onto the walls and floor, that the pot would be ruined, that the kitchen would be full of the dark, bitter, ruined smell of burnt coffee for days, perhaps.

  “It's time you left,” she said, and he obeyed her.

  She was glad of his obedience. It made her feel that she had done her job and done it well.

  As she wiped the brown spots from the stove, the walls, the floor, imagining all the time what he might be doing as she scrubbed, she knew that she was feeling something like what others might call happiness.

  She thought it was unlikely that he would say anything of what had happened to his mother, and too bad she could say nothing to hers.

  I Need to Tell Three Stories

  and to Speak of Love and Death

  I want to tell someone these stories that have come together as one story in my mind. There is no reason to connect these stories. Only one of them happened to me, not in the sense that it was done to me, but I was there when it happened. The other two were told to me by a friend who was dying at the time we spoke, but neither of us knew that he was dying.