Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  Because, unlike the rest of us, she was a person of hope. A person of hope because a person of faith; I watched her once, at a wedding. It was a Catholic Mass, and I saw her face when she prayed after communion. I would never call Bertie beautiful, but her face was shining. Something happened to her when she prayed. Because she believed in it, and from it took hope. And she really loved people; she said, “Joe, I really love you,” once when a project we'd worked on together came up trumps. And I believed she did.

  She was something of a legend. There was the story of the woman who was going to kill her baby and herself rather than give the baby up to child welfare. She'd gone back on drugs; she was one of Bertie's failures. Bertie was in the projects one day; sometimes she taught classes there: she said she wanted to keep an eye on things, and she liked being back “on the ground.” As if she were, most of her life, somewhere else. But no one would have said of Bertie that she was “up in the air.”

  The police were at the door, but they were stymied. None of them wanted to take the chance with a baby's life. Bertie came up and knocked on the door, as if she were in a first-class hotel and were stopping by to see if a friend was ready to go to luncheon.

  “Janice,” she said. “It's Sister Roberta. I'm here. I won't let anything happen.”

  “You'll let them take my baby.”

  “I'll take your baby,” she said. “I'll keep him until you're better. Then you can get him back.”

  “They won't let you. They'll give him away to some foster people who'll treat him bad.”

  “Of course they'll let me,” Bertie said. “You know me well enough by now. People always do as I say. Now just let me in and we'll talk.”

  The woman let her in. They talked. No one knows what they said, but Sister Roberta took the baby. She did get a family that she knew to take care of the baby. But it didn't turn out well. Janice was killed in prison. Knifed by her cellmate: a lover's quarrel. What did Bertie make of that? And whatever happened to the baby? I don't know; at least his mother didn't kill him, and at least she didn't kill herself. So that was something. “Something is better than nothing, Joe. You've got to believe that. Or you're paralyzed.” Did she know how often I feel paralyzed? I never knew quite what Bertie knew.

  But I know she didn't know some things about her brother. Maybe it was because he was so much younger than she; they really didn't grow up together; he was five when she left the house for the convent, and as she told me, in the years of her preparation for final vows, she wasn't allowed to see her family very much. Her parents both died while Tom was still a teenager; she was very protective of him, and very, very proud.

  He got a scholarship to Yale. That was quite something for a family from Marion, Illinois; no one from the town had ever gone to the Ivy League. Then he stayed on for his master's in painting. He was still living in New Haven when I hired him; he worked as a janitor in an apartment building; he said it was good for his work. He said he didn't want to live in New York, didn't want to be part of the rat race. The gallery scene was a trap; it killed real art, he said. I don't know why he never showed after the first time; I suspect that his show wasn't successful, but I have no proof of that. No one keeps track of people who don't show after the first time; they just disappear. That's what I've been told by people who seem to know the business.

  “My brother's a real beatnik,” Bertie would say. At first I thought she was in a time warp, that she really meant hippie, but she was right— Tom's model wasn't minted in the sixties; it was a decade earlier. He carried copies of Howl in his pocket, and memorized Ferlinghetti. Kerouac was his god. He liked to hint that he'd done hard drugs, but he also liked to be vague about it. “Not just that mind candy Tim Leary was passing out, I mean the real hard stuff,” he'd say, after a drink or two. With a certain kind of student, this had real appeal. Needless to say I didn't like it. I preferred seeing him with Bertie; he didn't talk about that kind of stuff in front of her.

  I wasn't the one who told him to stop referring to our female students as “chicks.” It was actually Andrea who did it, very kindly, very gently— Andrea had that way about her, but I think she made her point. Andrea was another of Bertie's transformations. Or miracles, depending on which word you liked to use. She, too, was something of a local legend. She'd worked as a secretary at St. N.'s; she'd started there just after high school and never worked anywhere else. She'd married her high school sweetheart, and they had three children. But everyone knew he was a drunk. Then one night— we've all heard the details quite often, everyone in town I mean— he went after her youngest daughter. Not sexually, but with a belt. And Andrea knocked him out with a frying pan. Then she sued for divorce. And he sued back, got the police to press charges against her for assault.

  Bertie was the one who talked her into fighting it. She was the one who called in the press. I don't know where they came from, but there suddenly seemed to be hundreds of women who'd been abused, or felt they'd been abused by their husbands. Vince Crawford had to crawl with his tail between his legs for quite a long time. Then Andrea went back to school; first she got her B.A. from St. N.'s, then her M.A. in psychology. She worked for a while at a battered women's shelter. Then Bertie hired her as her assistant. That was when I met her— I mean really met her, not just knew her as a local cause celebre. I always found her wonderful to work with. It wasn't just that she was efficient, although she was, very, and that's always a good thing. She was efficient without being contemptuous: that's not so common. And she liked to laugh. Things would strike her funny— often it was something Bertie said— and she had a way of putting her head back so her neck was exposed; it was a winning gesture. I enjoyed it when I would meet up with her at parties. I suggested to my wife that we have her over for dinner, but my wife was adamant. “Oh, Christ, Joe, not another of your wounded birds,” was what she said. She hates what she calls “professional victims.” She goes ballistic over the Oprah show. She says she doesn't know what happened to good old-fashioned reticence. I'd never say it to my wife, but I think she's a little jealous of Andrea's daughter: she's a Rhodes scholar now. Our two have done fine— they're still finding themselves, but neither of them has done anything with college that a parent could brag about.

  I would have liked to get to know Andrea better, but I know it won't happen. I think she likes seeing me when the circumstances dictate. Work or parties, is what I mean.

  Am I being unfair in my suspicions that Bertie made it happen? Tom and Andrea, I mean, as a couple. She didn't lift an eyebrow over their living together, although they're not married— I can't help thinking she'd like them to make it legal, but of course we've never talked about it. I'm not close to Bertie in that way. I don't know if anybody is.

  I suppose a lot of women would find Tom attractive, although I must say I find it as difficult to figure out what women think is attractive in a man as I do to determine what's a good work of art. He had a boyish quality, Tom, and I guess that goes over well with a lot of women. Brings out the mother in them. I never found him much to look at. Tall, skinny, still has all his hair; it still fell into his eyes, and he had this gesture of pushing it out of his eyes that most men my age have given up. He is my age, Tom Conlon; we once discovered we were born two days apart.

  He was popular with the undergraduates, male and female. I always thought it was that his work was so obvious that it was easy for them to relate to it. A couple are hanging in the college gallery: Tom's face on a female body: called Self Portrait. And one that's just the word “Why” written over and over, in different kinds of script. It's called WHYWHYWHY-WHYWHY You should have seen Bertie's face the night of Tom's opening. She kept taking me by the elbow and bringing me over to the WHYWHY-WHYWHYWHY picture. “It's the question, isn't it? He's so courageous to put it so baldly. What we all wake up thinking. What we're most of us afraid to say.” I told her I was enjoying the paintings very much. “Great, Joe, it's a great thing for the university. And for the world,” she said.


  Her eye fell on him, and his on her; smiled at each other; they walked toward each other. I didn't hear them say anything. They just stood next to each other; he had his arm around her and she— well, the only thing to be said about it was she was beaming. I'd never realized she was so short. Standing next to her brother, his arm around her, she looked smaller than I'd ever understood her to be. The both of them looked entirely happy. I stood next to Andrea. “They're quite a pair,” she said. And she looked happy, too.

  Bertie moved away from Tom when the students began buzzing around him. They were standing so close to him that when he moved his arms to gesticulate (he did that a lot when he spoke) he often knocked the wine out of the students’ plastic glasses. He was certainly popular with the students. I suspected it was partly because he let students determine their own grades. He often went out with them for beers. I was tempted to tell him that was a dicey proposition, but I didn't want to appear to be an old fogy. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

  For three years, everything went fine. Tom taught his classes; he painted his paintings; he and Andrea took a Chinese cooking course. When I saw them at parties, I thought he embarrassed her sometimes; he could be loud when he'd had a bit too much to drink. One time, I thought she was looking for me to quiet him down when he was spouting off about the poison of the marketplace for artists. But I didn't say anything: I couldn't think of anything to say. In any case they seemed happy enough, and when Bertie was with them (Tom never drank in front of Bertie) they seemed like the dream of a happy family. Enviable, really. I never found my situation enviable. Occasionally, I'd look in The Chronicle of Higher Education, but there were no jobs that seemed like the risk of moving might be worth it. Besides, my wife has a real place in the community. Real estate. She does very well.

  Then there was the incident with Amber Wirthman. Amber wasn't the type you'd think of as trouble; she was a weedy-looking girl with reddish blonde hair and protruding teeth. A little too long-legged, so she reminded you sometimes of a stork. Or in winter, when she wore this gray fake fur hat that she seemed devoted to, an ostrich. She was a business major with a minor in accounting. But she liked to paint; she'd taken three of Tom's classes; she was one of his groupies, but to my mind, she didn't stand out among them.

  I forgot to say that her father owns the company my wife works for. Wirthman Realtors, a division of Coldwell Banker. I always found the name confusing; as if they couldn't tell whether they were a real-estate company or a bank. I never liked jim Wirthman, and I certainly didn't like his wife, Donna. She was active in our alumni association; the president had once called her “one of our jewels.”

  So she went to the president first, and then he came to me.

  “It seems there's a problem with one of the faculty,” he said.

  This is never a sentence a dean likes to hear. But I'd been a dean long enough to know there was no sense in panicking. Students were easily disgruntled, and in the current climate— education as a consumer good— they felt entitled to complain.

  “Tom Conlon,” the president said.

  What did I feel when I heard that name? I have to admit: at first I was glad that it wasn't a faculty member I was really fond of. Then I thought of Bertie, and I dreaded hearing the details.

  “It's old-man sex, of course. But it's always sex or money, isn't it joe?” The president liked adopting a men-of-the-world conspiratorial tone with me; he usually did it when he was going to pass me the buck. Or a particularly steamy, stinking mess.

  “Donna Wirthman came in really upset. It seems Conlon stepped over barriers in all kinds of ways. He and Donna's daughter had an affair: she has letters to prove it. That's bad enough. But he gave Amber a sexually transmitted disease, and now it's possible she isn't going to be able to have children. The Wirthmans are talking lawsuits. Big-time, Joe.”

  I knew better than to ask the president what he thought we should do. That was why he'd come to me; if he'd had any good ideas, the matter wouldn't have gone any further than his office.

  “Set up a meeting, Joe. You, me, and Conlon. And get Larry Casper. Don't say a thing without him being there.”

  Larry Casper was the university counsel. I'd be glad to have him in the room.

  I don't know whether Tom Conlon suspected what was wrong, but if he did, he didn't dress for an occasion that might be serious. He was wearing jeans and a workshirt; his boots were spattered in paint. He didn't make eye contact with the president or Larry Casper; he looked to me as if he considered me the one ally in the room. I didn't know how I felt about that. Or no, that's wrong; I did know how I felt. I wanted to say to Tom, “Don't look to me for help. You got yourself into this mess, get yourself out of it.” Then I thought of Bertie.

  “Amber Wirthman's parents have been in to see me,” the president said.

  I had to give Tom credit; he blushed. “OK,” he said. “That can't be good.”

  “It's unfortunate,” Tom said. “But she's an adult. She was twenty-three last July. She works half-time for her father; that's why it's taken her so long to get her degree.”

  “Her age is neither here nor there, nor is her degree status,” the president said.

  “Well, actually, Mort, it's better that she's not a minor,” Larry Casper said.

  “You understand we'll have to ask for your resignation. You're not tenured, so we can do that. I'm sure you understand why we would want to. I'm hoping that will forestall a lawsuit, but I can't promise.”

  “You're saying I could be completely wiped out; I'm losing my job; and then they could sue me on top of it? Well, the good news is I haven't got a cent. What are they going to take, my car? I suppose they could put me in debtors’ prison.”

  “I think you fail to understand the gravity of the situation,” the president said. “You committed a very serious breach of student-teacher trust. You've betrayed your position; you've betrayed the values of this college.”

  “Save it,” Tom said, getting up. “I'll pack up my gear, but I don't want any bullshit about students and teachers. She's an adult. I'm an adult. I didn't hurt her.”

  “She may be unable to have children,” I said.

  “That's a crock,” he said. “Lots of people have chlamydia and do just fine.”

  “I wouldn't suggest taking that line with the Wirthmans,” Larry Casper said. “I would have no contact with them without an attorney present.”

  “Are you my attorney?” Tom asked.

  “No, I represent the college.”

  “How am I supposed to pay for a lawyer?”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before,” Larry Casper said.

  When I phoned Bertie to ask if I could take her out for coffee, I was hurt by the eagerness in her voice.

  “To what do I owe this incredible pleasure, loe?”

  “A sticky issue, I'm afraid, Bertie,” I said. “I can't talk about it on the phone.”

  She ordered a mocha frappuccino with whipped cream. I had a double espresso. After I left Bertie, I had to go to a faculty budget committee meeting. I needed straight caffeine.

  “It's about Tom,” I said.

  “He's all right, isn't he,” she asked, looking alarmed. “He's not sick or anything? He isn't hurt?”

  I explained the situation to her.

  “I don't believe it,” she said. “The girl is trying to frame him. She was probably infected by some rich boy who can afford expensive lawyers and the parents know Tom's an innocent, a babe in the woods, an easy mark.”

  “Your brother hasn't denied anything,” I said.

  “Why would he do something like that with a student? He has Andrea to keep him on the straight and narrow. It doesn't make sense. He's too old for all of that; he's put all that behind him. Let me talk to the girl and her parents; I'll get to the bottom of this.”

  “I can't stop you, Bertie, but I don't think it will do any good. You have to consider the possibility that they might be telling the truth.”

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p; “I won't consider it for a moment, Joe. And I'm surprised that you would. I'm going to leave now.” She walked out of Starbucks like she'd like to set the whole thing on fire, with me inside it.

  I don't know what happened with Bertie and the Wirthmans, but they decided not to sue. Tom's gone back to New Haven. Andrea's stayed in the apartment. I don't know if she considered going east with him or not.

  I really don't get to speak with Andrea anymore, because I don't have a lot of contact with Bertie. When Bertie has some business at the college, she makes a point of going over my head. Sometimes I think of talking to Andrea about the situation— offering my condolences, or something like that. But why would I say condolences? No one died. Anyway, what could I tell her? About a situation like the one with Tom and Bertie, I don't think there's much that can be said. And what could I ask her? I saw her once, in a parking lot— I think it was the supermarket, or it may have been the mall. It was late September; she was pushing a shopping cart, but it didn't look like it had much in it. The light was clear and it fell straight onto her; her hair looked golden; she was wearing a red jacket that looked quite wonderful that day. But I didn't say anything to her; I didn't even wave; I don't know if she even saw me.

  What would I say to her? I would have liked to say, “I miss you and Bertie. I miss the two of you terribly.” I would have liked to say the words accompanied by some gesture; I would have liked to put my hand on her shoulder; I would have liked to touch her hair. I would have liked to say, “How are you, the two of you? Are you all right? Tell me how you are, what has happened to Tom. How has Bertie taken it all?”