by Mary Gordon
She began with Mr. Castanopoulos. He had wrapped two apples in paper towels and presented them to her, with a bow of the head.
“Gif my regods to Brodway,” he said.
“We shall miss you terribly, terribly, my dear,” said Mr. Cox-Ralston.
“I'll write,” she said, trying to control what sounded like wildness in her voice.
“I'm afraid I'm not much up to writing,” Mr. Nelson said. “I'd be glad to hear from you, but you mustn't be disappointed if I don't respond. It's not that I wouldn't be thinking of you. But the old eyes aren't what they were and my arthritis has made my handwriting impossible.”
“Perhaps Mr. Khan could keep me up-to-date,” she said, knowing they both understood that what she meant was “perhaps he'll let me know when you die.”
“Ah, Mr. Khan, a very fine chap. He's my very close friend. A great man. It would be wonderful if you could meet him sometime. He's a chemist, lives in Stockholm. I haven't seen him in many, many years.”
“I did meet him,” Andrea said, and then regretted having embarrassed him.
“Oh, yes, of course, I've forgotten. I forget a terrible number of things, you know.”
“Mr. Cox-Ralston, you must tell me some of the movies you were in so I can look for them,” she said.
“Oh, my dear, I'm afraid you misunderstood. I wasn't in movies. I worked as a film projectionist. But, you see, that was heavenly, that was magical in its own way. You flipped a switch and there was light in darkness, you brought magic into people's lives and they couldn't even see where you were.”
She saw Paul pretending to blow his nose to hide his laughter. He'd always thought Cox-Ralston was an old fool, and he was right, of course he was right, he was an old fool and an old fraud, but Andrea didn't want Paul laughing at him.
The nurse was going over the details of Paul's medications. She made herself pay attention. It was terribly important that they got this right. The doctor arrived, listened to Paul's chest with a stethoscope, and pronounced him right as rain.
“Goodbye, everyone,” she said. She turned her back on them. What she wanted to do was walk down the hall backward, waving at them, blowing kisses, saying very loudly, so that everyone could hear, “I'll miss you, I'll miss you. You don't know how happy you've made me. I think I will never be happier. Yes, I know it: I will never be this happy again.”
“God, what a relief to get out of that loony bin,” Paul said when they were waiting for the taxi. “One compulsive liar, one fruit fetishist, one who's only on our planet two-thirds of the time. lesus, what a nightmare.”
Yes, Paul, she wanted to say, you might be right, what you say is quite probably right. Only there is another way of thinking of it, of thinking of all of them. Not as nightmare, but as triumph. They had triumphed, all of them, in their ways. Simply by living, simply by getting to their age. Mr. Nelson had triumphed over tragedy, and Mr. Castanopoulos had triumphed over disgrace, and Mr. Cox-Ralston had triumphed over mediocrity. And that was something, wasn't it? You couldn't say that it was nothing. Or that it was bad. And certainly not a nightmare. She knew that nightmare was the wrong word for what the two of them had seen. You are wrong, Paul, she wanted to say. I know that you are wrong. But she said nothing. She took his arm. He was her husband; he was young and well.
“I can't wait to get home,” he said.
“It will be wonderful,” she said to him.
She knew their life was just beginning.
Conversations in Prosperity
It is the last day in September, cool and dry. My friend and I are sitting in the park, a few feet from the gardens, admiring the cosmos and the columbines, which we know we are incapable of growing for ourselves. We are quite different, physically: she's tall and thin and blonde, and I am short and dark and fleshy. She's wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless blue shirt, and a denim jacket. I'm wearing purple leggings and a red cotton sweater. I have my dog with me, a seven-year-old black Labrador.
An older woman, alone, a very nice woman in a gauzy flowered skirt, a silk jacket that zips in front, tan Rockport sneakers, stops to pet the dog. She talks about her own dog, long dead. A cocker spaniel. How she used to come to the park with her dog and her son in a stroller. How one time a man gave her dog the rest of his ice-cream cone. But grudgingly. “Take it if you want it so much,” the man said to the dog.
“I wanted to say to the man, ‘Well, at least be gracious about it,’ but of course I didn't,” the woman says to us. She wants to talk. I focus upon the hem of her skirt, hoping it will move, indicating she's ready to leave us. We don't want to talk to her, we want to talk to each other. We love each other and have too little time to sit and talk. So much, too much, in our lives. We position our bodies so the woman will understand that we don't want to talk, but in a way that, we hope, will indicate that it has to do with our affection for each other, not our rejection of her. She does go away. We feel a little bad, but not for long.
Then a young woman, with well-cut hair that falls like a black slash across her cheek, flowered Lycra running shorts, a bottle of water, steps up to pet the dog. She says, “You have the perfect dog. You're so lucky to have the perfect dog.” If she looked different, if her hair were less well cut, if her shoes were dirty, we might interpret these words as madness, but we know they aren't mad. Only, perhaps, a sign of melancholy. It's easier not to talk to her than the older woman, since it seems more likely that the future for her will be bright.
She moves away from us, not happier for having seen us.
Although we are quite different physically, my friend and I share a concern for virtue. My friend, who is a midwestern Protestant, carries in her heart a sentence a philosophy professor said to her once: “What have you done today to justify your existence?” And I, raised by Catholics who mixed a love of pleasure with a sense of endless duty, carry in my heart the words of Jesus: “Greater love than this no man hath, than that he lay down his life for his friends.” We have talked about this to each other, and we understand that both these sentences take for granted that just living is not enough. Something great, something continually great must be done because this thing “life” is not to be taken for granted, consumed, like a marvelous meal or a day at the ocean. My friend has in fact devoted her life to serving the poor. She's a social worker; now she's working with children in Washington Heights. I have not put my lot with the poor, and my friend's saying that I am heroically committed to an ideal of language isn't, I know, enough for me. I have not laid down my life. But my friend, too, feels she hasn't done enough. Some days we are so sickened by the events of the world that we can't read the newspaper. Then we force ourselves to read it, on the phone, together. We hate our political opponents with a vengeance that there is no place for in the ideals of the liberal minded. It is always on our minds: we haven't done enough.
And so we can't quite brush away the two women who wanted to talk to us, to whom we refused to talk. We wish we could be other than we are. Or we wish we could be seen clearly for what we are really. Not, as everyone imagines, people who are endlessly sympathetic, endlessly dependable, but people who deeply resent invasions on our pleasure and our privacy. No one understands our hunger for solitude, or that we could quite easily and totally give ourselves over and became voluptuaries. When my friend had a short space between jobs she spent a day naked, eating the box of chocolates her co-workers had given her by way of farewell. She finished the whole box sitting on her couch watching the Simpson trial. She said no one would believe her if she told them. As no one understands when I describe the days spent with the phone off the hook eating Milano cookies and reading People magazine. They say my friend and I only do these things occasionally, that we need to do them because normally we are so productive and responsible. What they don't understand is that we would like to be doing those other things quite often. Maybe all the time. That we would if only we could believe that we could get away with it. If these were things of which it would be impossible fo
r us to stand accused.
I may be speaking only about myself. I think that, much sooner than I, my friend would give up luxury and put her shoulder, as she always does, to the wheel.
I might not.
Both of us have things to do the next day that we don't want to do. A visit to the country. A friend who has lived in a foreign city for years and is back in town. Both of us say yes too much, because we do like people, we really do, but usually not as much as we first thought we would. Or when they're not around, we don't like them as much as when we were with them, and certainly, we don't look forward to seeing them again. And there are always too many people with whom it would be moderately pleasant to spend time. We are not the kind of people who have to speak to women in the park who seem approachable because of the kind eyes of their dog.
My friend says that when she saw the movie II Postino, she knew she would do exactly what Pablo Neruda did. Have an intense, deeply felt friendship with the postman. Then, leaving the island, fail to write. Then come back for a visit to the island, but too late, after the postman was already dead.
We talk about the sickening sense that you have betrayed someone simpler, finer than yourself.
The truth that for a certain time, it was right to say you loved them.
Realizing too that while you never thought of them, your face was always in their heart, behind their eyes.
My friend says, “I've never been left.”
I say, “I haven't been left since I was twenty.”
As we say this, we are not proud. We understand that what is missing in us is the impulse to surrender. We speak of another friend of ours who has been left, again and again. Dramatically. Midnight scenes involving things thrown out of windows. Furniture removed when she's gone to work. She has been left, and left greatly. I think of her when she dances with a man. She puts her head back, exposing her throat, as if she were ready for the knife. When I see her do it, I envy her the beauty of the gesture. And I envy the man who is her partner. If I were a man I would fall at her knees. Or put a knife to her throat. Perhaps both. Perhaps both, simultaneously.
My friend and I agree that we are both too old now to be left dramatically. Or at all. We've chosen good men, accomplished men with a secret streak of passivity which we may be the only ones to see. These men make a still center around which we move, purposefully, anxiously, believing we are doing good.
I ask my friend if she thinks it's a good thing for a man to love someone like us.
Or for a son to have us as a mother.
She tells me her son once said, “The thing about you, Ma, is that emotionally, you're very low maintenance.”
We realize that no one we can in good faith call a friend is one of the poor. We know only one person who doesn't have health insurance. One who won't get social security. We both worry about these people and hope that if they're in need we'll have the wherewithal to help. By wherewithal we mean both money and goodwill.
My friend tells me about a woman whom she works with who has three children, a husband out of work, a mother with Alzheimer's in a nursing home, an alcoholic father in another nursing home. My friend says, “I think that I should genuflect to her. But there's nothing I can do for her. Nothing at all.”
No one we know well doesn't have some sort of household help. A cleaning woman.
I tell my friend that when I was young no one I knew had household help, and that in the years when no one I knew had household help, I was left by men, or boys, over and over.
I suggest that it would be too simple to say this has to do with age and money.
But I don't know how else to explain it.
I confide that my closest male friend, J., had a cancer scare this summer. The day before he left for a month-long holiday, his doctor phoned and said the minute he came back, he had to schedule a biopsy. He was about to get on a boat to sail around the Caribbean. He did get on the boat, he went sailing, and he told the friend he was sailing with about his cancer scare. But he didn't tell me, although I'm the person he usually confides in, because he knew I was trying to finish a book and he didn't want to distract me.
When he finally told me after the book was finished, and the biopsy had come back negative, I was grateful that he hadn't told me before. Then I was appalled. I say to my friend, “I often think I'm not really capable of love. Or capable of real love.”
I repeat to her for the thousandth time the story about my daughter and me when we were in a riptide. I didn't try to save her. I saved myself. Someone else saved my daughter.
My friend (the friend with whom I'm having the conversation) tells me that I panicked, that it doesn't mean anything about my character. And that I wouldn't have felt like that about our other friend's not telling me about his cancer scare if I hadn't been finishing a book.
I don't believe her.
I know that one day it will be clear to everyone: I am incapable of love.
We stop for a cappuccino, and though we know it's overpriced, we don't for a minute consider not buying it. $2.75. Too much, but nothing, really, in our lives. On the tables there are bowls full of packets of sugar. I tell my friend that if I were one of the poor, I'd load my pockets with these packets of sugar; it would make a big difference. Perhaps I'd allow myself a coffee— not a cappuccino like this, but a plain coffee in a plain coffee shop— eighty-five cents— once a month. Each time I did this, I'd fill my pockets with sugar. I'd have to choose a different coffee shop each time because if I were one of the poor, I'd be noticed.
But, my friend says, if we lived in a really poor country, there wouldn't be packets of sugar on the tables.
Because of the conversation we are having, we pick up the movie The Story of Adele H. from the video store. We can hardly bear to watch it. The daughter of a famous man, Victor Hugo, Adele puts herself in the place of the desperate. For love. For unrequited love. She condemns herself to wandering. To starvation. Beneath our pity and our fascination, there is gratitude. Because she has done it, we need not.
The next day, I copy a line from a book I'm reading, and mail it to my friend. It says, Ready to be someone else in order to be loved, she would abandon herself to ridicule and even to madness. Under the words I write,
Today it is the fifth day of October. My friend meets me in front of my son's school. A little paradise, this school, where children can be happy as they learn. A private school, with a very high tuition. Leaning against the building is a woman wearing a white clown's wig, bell-bottomed jeans, a blue bra, and no shirt. I have neglected to mention that it's raining and she appears to be at least seventy. And that she's not wearing shoes. My friend and I don't say anything about her.
No one entering or leaving the building appears to look at her.
It is not possible that anyone entering or leaving the building will speak to her.
It is also impossible to invent anything that might approximate her history.
My friend and I don't say anything about her because we both know she's the woman we're afraid of becoming.
The one we fear becoming when we have lost our prosperity.
The one we really are.
The Healing
Veronica loved to hear, and then go over in her mind, the story of how her uncle Johnny Nolan came to marry Nettie Bordereau. They had met when he was working as a lifeguard at a hotel in the Adirondacks. She was a chambermaid, and they'd been thrown together because they were the only two young people who went into town for Sunday Mass. Nettie confessed afterward— not to the priest, but to Johnny— that she'd made a point of being in the station wagon that brought people to Mass because she'd had her eye on him since Memorial Day and saw that he never missed a Sunday. He'd promised his mother, he'd told Nettie later on, and she'd liked that. She told him that not only was he good-looking, he was reliable.
Johnny went back to New York after Labor Day, and she went back to Watertown. But every weekend he made the nine-hour trip to see her. He was starting a job with the te
lephone company, a linesman. The lifeguard job was just an interval between Korea and the job he thought would be his for life. It was a perfect time for him to get married, and the Nolans were pleased enough with Nettie. They admired her liveliness; they thought it would be good for Johnny, who, they were afraid, had a tendency to be lazy. But there was something about her quickness— which they attributed to her being French Canadian— that made them feel inadequate, apologetic, dull.
She and Johnny married in February. She wore a blue suit with a fur collar which made her look like an expectant little animal. The Nolans found the fur collar at once exciting and in bad taste. They were relieved when the couple announced they would live in Long Island City. Delia, Johnny's mother, Veronica's grandmother, had been a widow fifteen years; she liked to have her sons around her. She'd had seven, but had lost one in the war and one had moved to Baltimore. It never occurred to her that any of the three daughters would move away.
All the sons had married well, all six of them, but of the three daughters, only Veronica's mother had married. Aunt Noreen had become a Sister of the Good Shepherd. It was a cloistered order, so they never saw her. The other girl, Aunt Maddie, lived at home. She worked for the telephone company too. Or, she had worked there first, which was how Johnny had got the job. She was an operator. People said she had a good telephone voice on account of her having been musical. At family parties she played the piano while everyone sang. Veronica had never heard her sing.
Veronica knew her grandmother liked her best of all the grandchildren. It wasn't just that she was the youngest by three years; she was only nine, but she knew her having been singled out had nothing to do with her age. “You're nobody's fool,” her grandmother had said to her once, when she'd heard about what Veronica had done when the butcher tried to shortchange her.