by Mary Gordon
It is through Earl that my friend, age nine, first hears Billie Holiday and the Ink Spots, and although they frighten him a little, they excite him too. He knows they are the signs of a world more daring and truthful than any inhabited by his parents. When he hears this music, he sees lights and gleaming streets, he hears the slamming of cab doors and the shaking of cocktail shakers. Also the silence when these people, these cab riders and cocktail drinkers, who have gone too far, and tried too much, are simply made to disappear from sight.
My friend knows that living in Manhattan is the better thing to do, better than living in the Bronx. His parents whisper about the source of Earl's wealth, but they're not specific, and the boy knows they're afraid tobe.
Earl is divorced and this is different from anyone the boy and his parents know. He has a son the boy's age, although the boy has never met him because he lives with his mother. One day, Earl invites them to come to his apartment for his son's ninth birthday party. My friend doesn't want to go for three reasons. He doesn't know the boy, he doesn't want to go to a birthday party with his parents, and he'll have to wear a suit. His parents say he has no choice: they're grateful to Earl, they owe him. They don't say what for.
The boy is thrilled by entering a building on Central Park West, with its suggestion of Europe. By being shown in by a doorman who acts as if he thinks they're rich. But above all by walking into the sunken living room in Earl's apartment, something he has seen only in movies.
Because none of the children know each other, they attach themselves to their parents, particularly their mothers. My friend focuses on these mothers’ hair, piled high, their filter-tipped cigarettes with lipstick prints left on the butts in the ashtrays, their finely made shoes. They speak more quietly than his mother and he knows it is money that makes them quiet and different. The adults barely speak to each other. Each family inhabits a discrete solar system, no one knows what to say or what to do because although there is cake in the middle of the table, which is set with party hats, horns, and snappers at each place, the birthday boy has not arrived.
Because of this, the light in the elegant apartment, with its thick, gravy-colored drapes, is darkish brown. The boy stands in the brown light, near his mother, and says nothing.
Earl stays in the kitchen, shouting into the telephone. He is shouting at his ex-wife, shouting because the boy has not arrived. Occasionally one of the men disappears into the kitchen to say something to him, but comes out quickly and whispers something to his wife. Nobody says anything to any of the children.
Eventually, one by one the families leave. My friend doesn't remember how this happened. Only a few words picked up from his parents’ conversation on the subway home. Words entirely new to him: Reno, alimony, custody. And a way of referring to a person he has never heard: “his EX.”
What do these stories have in common, beyond the fact that they happened to boys of about the same age in America?
That's it, you see. America! Where the light is always meant to fall clear, straight down to the plain wood of the floor, straight from the sparkling windows. Oh, the Puritans, the Shakers. Oh, the Federalist Builders, spurred on by the light of the Enlightenment. The truth shall make you free. Stand in the light and take your place in it.
As if there were nothing that could not be brought to light.
What the parents of these boys work for, what all parents brought up in, or believing in, or hoping for prosperity work for, is this: that there shall be a curtain, always shut, between light and darkness. That boys will play, grow, flourish in the light that travels through the sparkling glass. And on the other side, the curtain will be fixed and always drawn.
But on the other side of what? The space where their children live? The other side of living space? The parents never understand that such boundaries don't remain fixed. That what they think of as a boundary is only an envelope of brownish light. And that whatever they do, behind the curtain they think of as so concealing, there are stirrings, rumblings. Rumblings that the boys— drawn by the pull away from their own childhood— will approach. They must look. Or not look, glance. Or peer.
With half-closed eyes, the boys approach the small rent in the blackout curtain, which is not black after all, but darkish brown. Peer through. As they continue to peer, the rent will seem to become larger. They will keep their hands still at their sides, as they've been told. They will touch nothing, move nothing.
They are good boys.
Peering, they will see only shadows moving in half darkness, certainly a danger to themselves. Moving in sadness, in disorder. Speaking words that can only cause harm.
The boys stand still as if they have been shot. They cannot move away and they will not move forward. Not yet. The grace of immobility. This much will be allowed them.
They can change nothing; nothing they do can touch all that goes on. One day they will have no choice but to inhabit the abode where those things happen. But for now their feet are placed on the hardwood floor, and although they are standing in a brownish light, the sun still strikes their shiny hair, slicked down, out of politeness. For now, they may stand where they are. They know it is just for now.
They know some things but do not know them fully. They know that they have been deceived and that they can no longer trust their safety to the ones who have deceived them. Yet they must. They have no choice.
Something is in store for them. This is the only thing they understand.
Vision
Temporarily, my vision is impaired. This is of no importance to the story.
It is of no importance to the story; it is not a permanent affliction; it will pass. But while it does not pass, the act of sustained looking, which more than I knew was central to my life for— what? joy, information, solace, rest— is now a difficulty. So I do not do it much. Vision has become abstract. Seeing as idea. While I am thinking of seeing, rather than seeing, a memory floats up into the area behind my eyes where I need not see but may see if I wish. Also the memory in this case is a story, so I can choose to put aside the whole matter of seeing: I can hear.
I hear my mother's best friend telling a story as my mother and I sit beside her on a stone front porch. The situation of the story indicates I must know something about sex; the flavor of the memory reveals that I am still a child. I must be twelve years old.
What do we need to know about my mother and my mother's friend? Their looks? Their voices? Harder, impossible, perhaps, to describe voices. Always, one must go outside the frame to other issues: money, history. Between my mother and her best friend there are schools, dollars, rooms, linens, doctors, a variety of forks, musical instruments. My mother's friend grew up in privilege, and this explains her voice. But now she has sometimes less money than we do, sometimes as much, but never more. This can make her sometimes inaudible but never adds to her buffed consonants an edge. My mother's voice, shaped in a house of scarcity, impatience, anger, passions laid out like the evening meal, hurts me sometimes because it can provide me with no bolster, sometimes strengthens me because it lets me know that all my life behind me and within my blood there is the brute, inflexible, impermeable force of instinct, given in this case the name of mother love.
What are they wearing? My mother's friend is wearing some garment signifying a genteel, overdetermined recoil from sex. It will be flocked, or lightly dotted. Printed without distinction blue and white. I will dress my mother in one of the two dresses of my childhood love. Apple green cotton with a print of branches and a durable round flower— zinnia, hollyhock— the branches and the flowers both in white. Or perhaps her bluish purple sundress so I can see her buoyant upper arms. Both dresses are wonderfully resistant to the touch: starched, ironed by her, they cry out their bifurcated cry: we are delicious, we will not succumb.
It must be summer. We are sitting on a porch. The porch is not familiar, so we must be on vacation.
My mother is a widow and I am her only child; we always take vacations with at least one
of my mother's childless friends. The cynical contemporary reader says: the mother takes another grown-up to spare her the boredom of enforced aloneness with her child. But it is not this; it is the opposite of this. It is her pity for her childless friends that presses on my mother's always originally constructed sense of duty. It urges her to share me with her friends. Most of her friends seem never to have married or to be older than she, so that their children could be my parents. She is old to be the mother of a child herself.
We always have a very happy time. We choose places with lakes or mountains, sometimes both. A drive six to eight hours in duration, long enough so that we feel the glamour of a journey, but not so long that we turn upon each other with sour questions, accusations, or regret.
My mother's friend is speaking now. “We didn't have a porch on our house; I was looking out the windows of the living room. There was a window seat. The people across the street had just moved in and didn't seem to want to know the neighbors; I had never seen the woman, she had no children, and she never left the house. We'd seen the husband leaving in the mornings. Well, he looked like any other husband, and at that age I did not give men a thought.
“It was August when she started coming on the porch. I know that it was August; in July mother and I went to my grandmother's. Every summer we did that; that's how I know that it could not have been July. Each morning she would come onto the porch wearing her wrapper. I was very shocked by that: no woman I had ever known would have dreamed of appearing even at her breakfast table in a wrapper. And her hair was down, down on her shoulders. No woman I ever knew would have done that. Her wrapper was light pink with a pattern of large red birds: peacocks, I guess. Or they might have been herons. Herons, yes. She was behind the screen and I looked out through the window. I could see though that on her lap she held a paper sack. Slowly throughout the morning she'd take pears out of the sack and eat them. Perfectly still she sat, except to reach inside the sack and get a pear, and then of course to eat. Other than that she was motionless. The trees were wonderful in summer on that street: tall, wide old elms. Beeches. All the houses were quite cool even though it was southern Illinois, which has a southern climate, and if you stepped out from the shelter of the trees the heat was killing. So there was not at all a great deal of activity out on the street, no reason to be looking out there. But she just sat there looking, eating. And I noticed she was getting bigger. So I kept watching her. All the time that she sat there, I sat and watched her. On the window seat I sat. I brought a book with me so when my mother asked I could say I was reading.
“One day my mother said: ‘You know that woman is about to have a baby’
“I was innocent; I must have known that children came from the body of a mother. Yet I hadn't seen a hint of it, and so I hadn't thought of it. It was all hidden; everything was hidden in those days. When women were pregnant you couldn't tell; it was the way they dressed. But once I found out the woman was going to have a child, it was one of those things like a key to a puzzle so everything begins to make sense, you see everything, you can't imagine why you didn't see it. Every day I felt I could see her getting bigger and bigger. It was almost as if she grew as I watched her, like one of those speeded-up films where the flower blooms before your eyes. Except of course we didn't have them in those days.
“But I just watched her sitting, looking out at the street, the street that was nearly always empty, watched her eating those pears, one after another, growing bigger before my eyes.
“Then one day she didn't come out on the porch, and we could see a great commotion going on across the street there. I don't know if we heard anything: I don't remember. Just the doctor going in and once the husband on the porch to smoke a cigarette. And then the doctor leaving. I sat the whole day watching. I kept thinking she would come back out, but with the baby now, not eating pears, not now she had a baby, and not looking out at nothing on the street, but feeding the baby, tending it, seeing that it was comfortable.
“But she died. She died and the baby was born dead too. We didn't see them take her out; they must have done it in the night. And then quite soon the man sold up the house and moved away. We always thought that there was something shady there.”
Now I can remember that at this point in the story I became dissatisfied. My mother's friend's voice changes. The rapt, clouded, reverent tone turns coy: she makes the thing a joke. She giggles. “After that I was afraid of eating pears. I thought the pears had done it, made her pregnant, killed her and the baby. For years, you couldn't get me to go near a pear.”
As I listen to her speaking, I do not believe her; I do not believe her now. I do not know how much she could have known, a lonely child on a street of heavy trees, holding her book as a deception, looking, looking. But I know she did not think it was the pears.
Here are the things I do not know:
What did the woman see as she looked at the empty street?
Was she happy with the child within her womb? Was she trying, filling herself with pears and staring down the empty street, the street down which her husband walked to work each morning, was she trying to connect the secret child, whose face she could not know, with the whole outside world?
Did she know the girl across the street looked at her? Was she grateful?
Did she speak English?
Was she really married to the man?
If she had lived to her new status as a mother, would she have spoken to the neighbors?
Did every aspect of the episode take place in silence?
Did the girl think she had killed the woman and the baby by her failure to keep them in sight?
Did the girl invent the whole thing? Was there a pregnant woman who came on the porch each morning and ate pears and looked out to the empty street and died in childbirth, giving birth to a dead child? Or was it the girl's vision of the life of women which so frightened her that, sitting on a porch herself, fifty years later, she must turn it to a joke: the rapt girl looking, and the woman growing large looking at nothing, knowing or not knowing she is seen, invisible in death, taken away, out of the sight of the so faithful watching girl who as a woman will not marry, will tell the child of someone else about it, and will turn her vision to a joke for fear of disappearing, being made to disappear?
from TEMPORARY SHELTER
Temporary Shelter
He hated the way his mother piled the laundry. The way she held the clothes, as if it didn't matter. And he knew what she would say if he said anything, though he would never say it. But if he said, “Don't hold the clothes like that, it's ugly, how you hold them. See the arms of Dr. Meyers's shirt, they hang as if he had no arms, as if he'd lost them. And Maria's dress, you let it bunch like that, as if you never knew her.” If he said a thing like that, which he would never do, she'd laugh and store it up to tell her friends. She'd say, “My son is crazy in love. With both of them. Even the stinking laundry he's in love with.” And she would hit him on the side of the head, meaning to be kind, to joke, but she would do it wrong, the blow would be too hard. His ears would ring, and he would hate her.
Then he would hate himself, because she worked so hard, for him; he knew it was for him. Why did she make him feel so dreadful? He was thirteen, he was old enough to understand it all, where they had come from, who they were, and why she did things. She wanted things for him. A good life, better than what she had. Better than Milwaukee, which they'd left for the shame of her being a woman that a man had left. It wasn't to be left by a man that she'd come to this country, that her parents brought her on the ship, just ten years old, in 1929, when they should have stayed home, if they'd had sense, that year that turned out to be so terrible for the Americans. For a few months, it was like a heaven, with her cousins in Chicago. Everybody saying: Don't worry, everyone needs shoes. Her father was a cobbler. But then the crash, and no one needed shoes, there were no jobs, her mother went out to do strangers’ laundry, and her father sat home, his head in his hands before the picture of t
he Black Madonna and tried to imagine some way they could go back home.
“And I was never beautiful,” his mother said, and he believed that that was something he would have to make up to her. Someday when he was a man. Yes, he would have to make it up to her, and yet she said it proudly, as if it meant that everything she'd got she had got straight. And he would have to make it up to her because his father who'd lived off her money and sat home on his behind had left them both without a word. When he, Joseph, was six months old. And he would have to make it up to her that she had come to work for Dr. Meyers, really a Jew— once you were one you always were one— though he said he was a Catholic, and the priests knelt at his feet because he was so educated. And he would have to make it up to her because he loved the Meyerses, Doctor and Maria. When he was with them, happiness fell on the three of them like a white net of cloud and set them off apart from all the others. Yes, someday he would have to make it up to her because he loved the Meyers in the lightness of his heart, while in his heart there was so often mockery and shame for his mother.
He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't lived with the Meyers in White Plains. His mother got the job when he was two, answering an ad that Dr. Meyers had put in the Irish Echo. No Irish had applied, so Dr. Meyers hired Joseph's mother, Helen Kaszperkowski, because, he had explained with dignity, it was important to him that the person who would be caring for his daughter shared the Faith. Joseph was sure he must have said “The Faith” in the way he always said it when he talked about the Poles to Joseph and his mother. “I believe they are, at present, martyrs to the Faith.” He would speak of Cardinal Mindszenty, imprisoned in his room, heroically defying Communism. But the way Dr. Meyers said “The Faith” made Joseph feel sorry for him. It was a clue, if anyone was looking for clues, that he had not been born a Catholic, and all those things that one breathed in at Catholic birth he'd had to learn, as if he had been learning a new language.