by Mary Gordon
She waited a few seconds, certain that someone would come to her defense. But no one raised eyes from the score or the ground at their feet. And Billy was looking into space, as if she had already left the room and he was waiting for the next thing that would happen.
She understood that there were no words that would do anything but weaken her position. She made her way to the front of the chorus— she was, unfortunately, in the third row— and heard her heels making a sharp clack-clack on the gray linoleum floor.
She closed the door and flung her cape around her shoulders, pleased at the military suggestions of the gesture. She was afraid her face must be bright red: heat climbed up it as she thought of Paul's crude words, his vulgar insults. She was certain that Billy would be behind her in a moment; certainly, even if he didn't stand up to Paul, he wouldn't allow her to make her way home like this, entirely unsupported.
But as she climbed the last stair, opened the heavy door, and found herself shocked at the brightness of the day, she began to realize that Billy was not going to follow. Why had it been so difficult for her to admit, always, that he had always been a coward? And why had she tried for so long to deny what Paul was, what he had always been, an insignificant and stinking little turd. She banished the word from her mind; she would not sink to his level. Or to the level of the little Bronzino, the Bronzinetto, she called him to herself. Desmond Marx. Composer of that preposterous atrocity. The Dream of Andy Warhol. She'd have liked to call it instead The Nightmare of the Modern Age.
She must have been walking very fast, propelled by her rage, her shock; before she knew it she was in front of her building. Had she really walked forty blocks in half an hour? She could smell her sweat underneath the wool of her cape, the silk of her blouse, and it shocked her with its robust meatiness. She had never before associated such a smell with her own body.
She couldn't bear to wait for the elevator, propelled as she still was with rage. She burst into the apartment, hardly able to get her key into the lock. “Anybody home?” she called. Her mother's bedroom door was closed. Well, she would open it; she felt, today, she had a right. It was something she never did, but now she couldn't help herself. She had to tell her mother.
She knocked three times, but didn't wait for a response. At first, she couldn't tell whether or not her mother was there; the heavy velvet drapes were closed and she could barely make out her mother's shape under the satin coverlet. But then her eyes got used to the light and she saw her mother, lying on her back, her mouth open. On the night table beside her bed were her hearing aids, and in a glass, one on top of the other, the two halves of her dentures. Her mother's open, toothless mouth made her head look like a skull.
Had she known, had she ever considered, that her mother was toothless, that her mother wore false teeth? When had that happened? How was it that in all the years that they had lived together it was something she never knew? The rage that had consumed her body now spilled over to her mother. Why had her mother kept this from her? And how could she allow herself to be like this? It was against everything her mother stood for, to be lying here, in the middle of the afternoon, the drapes closed against the brilliant autumn sun, impervious to every sound, impervious to her shocking appearance.
She knew that she must leave the room. But she allowed herself to look at her mother for a few more seconds. Her mother was very old. Her mother's life was almost over. She was, lying on her back, cut off from light and sound, her countenance a corpse's, trying out the position she would, quite soon now, Eleanor realized, be permanently taking up.
There was something she wanted to say, but she didn't know exactly what the words might be. “It's over, it's finished.” Was that what she wanted to say? But whom would she say it to? Her mother was deaf; her mother was asleep— she supposed it was peacefully— and her father was nowhere around.
She had been stolen from, and the thief had been not only thief but assailant. She resisted the impulse to go to the mirror and see whether, as a result of the assault, her looks had changed. That would be ridiculous, that would be— her mother's word, always used mockingly— “dramatic.” This was her life, it was not an opera, and she would live it as she always had, as her parents always had: with dignity, on her own terms. And yet there had been this theft— must she think of herself now as impoverished, as her parents had never had to do?
And how could she name the thing whose absence made her feel so utterly bereft. It wasn't something with one name— and if it was impossible to name, it must be irreplaceable. She couldn't resist the impulse any more: she must look at herself in the mirror to see if the loss was visible.
She patted her hair. Of course it looked the same, of course her face was identical to the one she had seen only a few hours before. She need not feel humiliated; humiliation was a trick of the eye, and she would be sure, always, that when eyes fell on her they would see something admirable, something fine. She could do that. It might not even be so difficult; she might even make it into something of a game she played with herself: this covering up, this patching over.
She made her way into the living room, the room her mother had made so delightful, had made her own, so high and airy and refined, and yet so simple, so easy to be one's self in. One's best self.
In a little while, her mother would walk in, fresh, rested from her nap; together they would set the table for an early dinner, beginning with the soup her mother had made, that Eleanor had bought the ingredients for. Things would go on; life would go on.
Above all, she must not let her mother know what had happened, that she was suffering. It was beautiful, her mother's world, and Eleanor knew that the most important thing that she could do now would be to play her part, so that her mother wouldn't know that the world she still believed she was inhabiting had disappeared. Had been stolen.
There would be no need to tell her mother what had happened to her today. There would be no need to tell anyone. No one in the chorus knew anyone she knew— and Billy would never say anything. It suddenly occurred to her that there might be a difficult moment the next time she and Billy met. Perhaps it would be better to say nothing of what had taken place today. As for the other people, her friends, her colleagues, she would simply say that she had decided to resign from the company. And when people asked her why she'd say, “The time has come, the walrus said.” Something light, something amusing. The kind of thing her mother would have said.
Three Men Tell Me Stories
About Their Boyhoods
Three different men have told me these stories, if they can be called stories. Perhaps it's better to say: three men have told me these things, and when I heard them, each of them was bathed in the same light. Yes, I heard them, but the words created pictures— or perhaps not pictures, it is better to say an atmosphere. And so it's not wrong to say the words were bathed in a particular light.
Everything these men say has to do with boys moving in rooms of adults. Uncomprehending boys, trying to understand. Rooms with no or little natural light. Rooms lit by lamps. Lamps lit by adults, dimmed by adults.
Has any child ever performed the action of dimming a light? Has any child ever felt he has had too much of brightness? Even if a blinding light were shone in the eyes of a child, he would only cover his eyes. A gesture adults think of rarely. They close their eyes, but they don't cover their eyes with their hands. Not as a rule.
The beginning of what the first man tells me happens in Belgium in the 1920s. A wealthy house in the city of Antwerp. A house owned by Americans living in Europe. The man is an American now, living in America, but he began his life as an American boy brought up in Europe.
His father is the European representative of the Swift meatpacking company, based in Chicago. But the family is far from Chicago, far from the smell and noise of the stockyards, of the elevated trains. They are in Antwerp, in a house where you can hear the click of civilized, decorous heels on the outside pavement, a house of wealth where servants move noise
lessly up and down carpeted staircases, where the light, in every season, always falls through drawn curtains and always takes on something of their brown. Whatever season, whatever the texture of the fabric, the curtains are always brown.
No one is happy in the house because at the center of it is a tyrannical father, who sits in a chair that the son thinks of as something like a throne. Later, when the son, a grown man, inherits the chair he will see that it is not very large and is nothing like a throne at all. But that will be much later.
The son knows that his father is the source of all the misery in the house, although his father is always nice to him. He admires his son's lightness of body, which is like his own. But to everyone else, the mother, the older brother, the sister, the servants, he is a humiliator. Many days he opens his mouth only to humiliate. He fires servants, particularly young girls, for minor infractions, and then the mother has to hide them, until he forgets and it is all right to bring the servant back out to the light of day.
In this dark house, the only source of light for the boy is his sister, with whom he plays upstairs in the nursery, supervised first by nannies, then by governesses. When the sister is ten and the boy is seven, she is hit by a car on the streets of Antwerp and killed. After her death, no one in the house speaks of her and only forty years later does the boy, middle-aged, realize how deeply the loss of this sister has affected him. How everything, every decision in his subsequent life, has flowed from that.
The summer that the boy is twelve, the family goes back to America, to visit their families and for a holiday to the Far West. Their first stop is Moline, Illinois, the mother's hometown. While they are there the father, who is known to be suffering from an enlarged heart, dies. An excessively methodical man, he somehow dies without a will, and somehow the family is suddenly poor. The older brother, who played on the Belgian Olympic tennis team, must change his life. By day, he must work in the Swift meatpacking plant and by night play tennis for money with rich men in an exclusive tennis club. He is allowed to be a member, and not to pay, because it is clear that, despite certain circumstances, he has the right breeding. And it is perfect for the rich men that they be challenged by, and lose money to, someone so well-bred.
The boy and his mother spend the summer in Moline. The boy is not sad, he is happy. He is happy because of the rich, uncultivated trees and the white houses with porches. Most of all, he is happy because of the open doors of Moline. The open doors of a Midwest summer. The screen doors that open and bang shut as children walk in and out of each other's houses, as mothers say, “Go on upstairs, he's in his room playing with his trains. Do you want some lemonade to drink?”
Is he happy because in America the enlarged heart of his father, the tyrant, was made to explode?
He believes nothing is closed to him in America. All doors, like the screen doors of Moline, will always be open to him.
But he is not allowed to stay in America. His mother says they must go back to Belgium where they have, at least, a house. A house he hates as he hates Europe for its closed doors, its locked doors, its frightened children, who must wait in rooms whose light is never clear and never generous, to be taken somewhere, to walk, never alone, on streets that do not look as if they should be dangerous, but where, nevertheless, it is possible for one of them to die.
The second man tells me about being a boy, also in the Midwest, but in the thirties. One day, the boy is standing in a room in the family house, a house of the Indiana dunes, a house built by his father, who is stern but not a tyrant. A house doubtless, with a screen door like that beloved by the first man. The boy learns from his mother (usually smiling but not smiling now) that his father has a brother he has hidden from his three sons.
This frightens the boy because he is not only a son but a brother, the youngest of three, and he loves his brothers, particularly the middle one, his protector. It frightens him more than he can bear to imagine a time when his brothers would not speak of him. When he has this fear, he is standing in brown-stained light. The light that permeated the large prosperous house in Antwerp.
The boy is nine years old, and so his mother doesn't tell him the whole story till he is ready to leave home for the army, nine years later. So for nine years, until he hears the story, when he thinks of his father and his father's brother, he is bathed in that brown light.
Only as he is about to go to the world war, to a possible heroic death (a death which does not come), his mother tells him the story.
The two brothers were orphaned, and they were left a pool hall as their only inheritance. The plan was that they would take turns going to college. One would stay home and manage the pool hall and make sure it was earning properly, and the other would go off to Purdue. The older, my friend's father, went off first. My friend's mother tells him that perhaps this was the natural way of doing things, but that it was too bad the boys were so young they didn't see the possibilities of trouble. Perhaps it should have been done the other way; perhaps running the pool hall was too much responsibility for the younger brother. Perhaps he should have been allowed to go off to college to mature. Especially since he was very handsome and eager to please. Catnip to women, my friend's mother said.
Bad things began to happen. The younger brother fell in love with the landlady of his boardinghouse. He was eighteen and she was thirty-five. He began drinking and gambling. The pool hall had to be sold. The older brother had to come home from Purdue, but by the time he arrived back home the younger brother had run off with his landlady, whereabouts unknown. I can hear the whistle of the train in the air of Illinois as they escaped. When the boy, or the young man, hears this story he can see the landlady's full body, her corsets, her straw or feathered hat. And the young handsome man, reaching in his pocket for a flask, or maybe a pint bottle.
He went from bad to worse. He married the landlady but she left him. He became involved with mobsters. He hit the skids. Then, somehow, my friend's mother didn't know how, he pulled himself together. He got work in a bank as a clerk. Then he was promoted; he became what was known as a repo man, repossessing the assets of the failed.
Then he met Hazel, who was a buyer at Indianapolis's largest department store. After two years, he told her the story of what he had done to his older brother, and his grief at their estrangement. He loved his brother and he knew he had done wrong.
She said he must write to his older brother. But the older brother was not inclined to forgive. He'd been robbed of a college education and forced to work in the hellish steel mills of Gary, Indiana, instead of behind a desk, wearing a white collar. But his wife, my friend's mother, said that it was a terrible shame that brothers shouldn't speak. She reminded him that blood was thicker than water. She reminded her husband that the brothers had loved each other. He agreed that the younger brother and his wife should be allowed to visit. He made no promises about what would happen after that.
But when the two men meet they fall into each other's arms like sisters. My friend doesn't know what was said; whether or not forgiveness was asked for and granted.
The families visit back and forth. Usually because the older brother has children and the younger one does not, the younger couple does the traveling. But once Hazel invites the whole family for a slap-up weekend in Indianapolis. She takes them to a restaurant that has a real pond in its lobby, full of live lobsters which are caught, right there, then prepared and served to the guests. Hazel orders lobster and champagne all around. She insists that the three sons of her brother-in-law be given, in her presence, and at her expense, their first taste of champagne.
My friend and his two older brothers are abashed in their stiff shoes, their stiff suits, their stiffly brushed hair. They're overawed at the opulence of this restaurant, the tinkling of cocktail glasses, the women with furs slung around their shoulders and jewels dangling from their ears. My friend says he was in love with everything and everyone; he believed his family was the most desirable in the world.
One time t
he uncle takes them to the racetrack: the whole family, my friend and his brothers and his parents. Hazel doesn't go along. He provides everyone with betting money. Ten dollars apiece for the grown-ups. Five for each child. But it isn't a good time because after his uncle bets he begins trembling, his whole body shakes and his face goes gray. This is when the brown light permeates again; when my friend, aged eleven, observes his glamorous uncle, trembling. They win a hundred dollars, but it doesn't matter. They've seen what they didn't have to see. But none of them ever speaks about it. The visits take up their old pattern: the younger coming to the older, to the house the older built in Ogden Dunes, Indiana, overlooking Lake Michigan, which, particularly in summer, is a pleasant place.
The younger brother prospers as a repo man until he gets bored. He decides to open a little bookie operation, investing his wife's savings. Soon he's wiped out by mobsters. Hazel writes my friend's family that the younger brother has lost all interest in life, that he sleeps most of the day and sits in the living room in the darkness weeping. She says the older brother and his family should stay away until the younger brother pulls himself together.
But he never does. He dies in a year, of a blood clot in the leg. Hazel moves to Florida but doesn't contact the family. Except one letter to the mother saying she has remarried and it was the worst mistake of her life but she deserves her unhappiness for betraying the memory of her own true love. Years later, they learn of her death from strangers who say they found the address going through her papers.
The third story isn't placed in the Midwest. It happens in New York, in the forties, during the war. Like the story of the uncle, this one has to do with mobsters, not the small-time mobsters of Indianapolis, but the big-time mobsters of New York.
The man with mob connections who is the center of the story isn't big-time, isn't even a full-time mobster. His name is Earl and he's a business associate of my friend's father; they both work in the garment district. But somehow Earl has much more money than my friend's father. He owns a car. He lives in Manhattan, on Central Park West. My friend admires the way Earl dresses, particularly his black-and-white shoes. He loves it when he and his family travel from the Bronx to eat with him in restaurants. Or sometimes he picks my friend and his father up in his car and they go for jaunts. Often they go to Colony Records in Times Square and Earl buys stacks and stacks of 78s. My friend is impressed; his parents buy only one record at a time, and that rarely.