by Mary Gordon
It was very queer. He had come to tell them, and now she must not tell anyone, she thought. Perhaps he had come this way only to tell her. That was it: he had come from Delaware to tell her a secret, to give her a gift.
“I won't say anything,” she said. She looked into his eyes; she had never looked into the eyes of an adult before. She felt an itching on the soles of her feet from the excitement of it.
“I'll count on you, then,” he said, and walked quickly down the street, looking over his shoulder.
She went into the house. Upstairs, she could hear Bridget's voice, and her mother's voice in pain, but not yet the voice of the baby. She lifted her skirt. She put the silver dollar behind the elastic of her drawers. First it was cold against her stomach, but then it became warm from the heat of her body.
The Only Son of the Doctor
Louisa was surprised that she was with a man like Henry, after all she had been through. She liked to tell him that he was the best America could come up with. She told all her friends about his father, who had built half the houses in the town where Henry lived, who had gone broke twice but had died solvent; about the picture of his eighteenth-century ancestor, dumb as a sheep but still a speculator; about his mother, who had founded the town library. And she told them— it was one of her best stories now— that when she had agreed to go to bed with him, he had said to her, “Bless your heart.”
It was to expose him that she had wanted to meet him in the first place. There had been a small piece about him in the Times, and she had not believed that he could be what he seemed, a country doctor who ran a nursing home that would not use artificial means to keep the old alive. The story said he was in some danger of being closed down; the home was almost bankrupt.
If things looked simple, Louisa's genius was to prove that they were not. She wrote to the doctor about his home, hoping to unmask him and his project. The Times had been almost idolatrous; they described reverentially his devotion to the aged. They described the street where he lived as if they had dreamed of it over the Thanksgiving dinners of their childhood. Louisa drove the 120 miles from New York hoping to see behind the golden oaks a genuine monstrosity, hungering to discover, in the cellar of the large farmhouse the doctor had converted, white skeletons behind the staircase, whiter than the Congregational church that edified the center of the village. At the very least, she hoped to find the doctor foolish, to catch him in some lapse of gesture or language so that she could show the world he was not what he seemed.
When he opened the door to her, she saw that his face was not what she had expected. The eyes were not simple: blue, of course they were blue, but they were flecked with some light color, gold or yellow, warning her of judgment, of a severeness at the heart of all that trust. And she knew he was a man who was used to getting whatever woman he wanted. She could tell that by the way he closed the door behind her, by the way he led her into the living room.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said, pressing the button of her tape recorder. “Tell me how you came to such work.”
His voice was so perfectly beautiful that she felt she had suddenly stepped into a forest where the leaves were visible in moonlight. He said he was devoted to stopping the trend of prolonging agony. That was what had made her love him first: those words “the trend of prolonging agony.” It made change sound so possible; there was such belief implicit in that construction: that life was imperfect but ordinary, and not beyond our reach.
He had thought he would be an actor, he said, after college. He said his dream was to play light comedy; he had wanted to be Cary Grant. But she could see his gift was not for comedy. His gift was for breaking news. She knew, sitting in his living room, that his was the voice she would have preferred above all others to speak the news of her own death. He said he had decided to take up this work, after years of practice as an internist in Boston, because he had seen how impossible it had been for his mother to die well. So he had come back to his hometown, where his father had built half the houses, where his mother had founded the library, to start an old-age home.
He asked Louisa for her help in keeping the home alive, for it was, as the Times had suggested, in danger of bankruptcy. The piece she wrote about him and his work brought floods of contributions. She talked her friends into helping him with a fund-raising campaign. His own efforts had been small, and local, and hopelessly inefficient. He wrote all the fund-raising letters himself, at a huge black manual typewriter. He was always writing letters, always meeting with the board of directors. The board was made up of townspeople: the lawyer, the minister, the principal of the high school. When she came up from the city to speak to the board, to advise them on the first steps of their fund-raising campaign, her dif-ferentness from them made her feel like a criminal. Later she would be able to sit with them at the doctor's table and joke or help them peel potatoes. But that first meeting of the board made her think of the city mouse-country mouse tales she had read as a child. Sitting around her at the doctor's table, all those people made her feel edgy and smart-alecky and full of excessive cleverness suspiciously come by. She felt as if she were smoking three cigarettes at once. They turned to her with such trust; they were so impressed by her skills; they were so sure that she could help them. Their trust made them seem very young, and it annoyed her to be made to feel the oldest among them when in fact she was the youngest by fifteen years. The night of that first meeting of the board, she went to bed with the doctor because he seemed the only other adult in town.
By the time the campaign was over and the committee had raised its money, she had got into the habit of spending her weekends with him. They never said that she would do this; she simply called on Thursdays to say what train she would be taking Friday. And he would say: “This is what I've arranged for us. We'll have the Chamberlains on Saturday; Sunday we'll take a picnic lunch to the river.”
It was partly his voice that made her love doing these things. His voice made everything simpler; it could reclaim for her pleasures she had believed lost to her forever. Her first husband had told her she was a disaster with tools. The doctor (his name was Henry; she did not like his name; she did not like to use it, although she admitted it suited him) taught her simple carpentry. He made it possible for her to ask questions that were radically necessary and at the same time idiotic: “When you say joist, what exactly do you mean? How does a level work?” He made it possible for her to work with things whose names she understood.
She had learned, particularly in the years since her divorce, when people had invited her for weekends out of kindness, that it was impossible for a person living in the country to take a city guest for a walk without reproach, implied or stated. She could see it in the eyes of whatever friend she walked with, the unshakable belief in the superiority of country life. People in the country, she thought, believed it beyond question that their lives had been purified. They had the righteousness of zealots: born again, free at last.
This had kept her out of the country. The skills she prized and possessed were skills learned in the city: conversation, discrimination. She remembered a story she had read as a child about a princess who had to go into hiding on a farm. How she suffered at the hands of the milkmaid, who set up tests that the princess was bound to fail: the making of cheeses, jumping from hayloft to haycart, imitating the calls of birds. The milkmaid took pleasure in convincing the princess of the worthlessness of the princess's accomplishments. And she did convince her, until a courtier arrived. The milkmaid was tongue-tied; she fell all over her feet in the presence of such a gentleman, while the princess poured water from a ewer and told jokes. Louisa saw herself as the princess in the tale, but the courtier had never come to acknowledge her. Always she was stuck in the part of the story that had the princess spraining an ankle on the haycart, unable to imitate the cry of the cuckoo! On the whole, she had found it to be to her advantage to decline invitations to any place where she would be obliged to wear flat shoes.
But s
he loved simply walking in the country with Henry. He had a way of walking that made her want to take month-long journeys on foot with him. He did not spend time trying to get her to notice things— bark, or leaves, or seasonal changes. He would walk and talk to her about his mother's father, about his days in the theater, about his work with the aged. He would ask her advice about the wording of one of his letters. Always, when they were walking, he would soon want to go home and begin writing a letter. So that for the first time in her life it was she who begged to stay outside longer, she who did not want to go indoors.
And his house was the most perfect house she had ever known. It had been his family's for generations. The living room had thirteen windows; he kept in a glass-and-wood cabinet his great-grandmother's wedding china. But his study was her favorite room. He had a huge desk that he had built himself, and on the desk was a boy's dream of technology: an electric pencil sharpener, a machine that dispensed stamps as if they were flat tongues, boxes for filing that seemed to her magic in their intricacies. He had divided his desk by causes; it was sectioned off with cardboard signs he had made: nuclear power, child abuse, migrant workers. He never mixed his correspondences. But the neatness of his desk was boyish— not an executive neatness, but the kind of neatness that wins merit badges, worried over, somewhat furtive, somewhat tentative, more than a little ill at ease.
And he had pictures of ships on the wall of his study. Ships! How she loved him for that! It was impossible that any other man she had ever known well— her father, her husband, any of her lovers— would have had pictures of ships. All the men in her life had doted on the foreign, which was why they were interested in her. Why, then, was Henry interested? Sometimes she was afraid that he would realize he had made a mistake in her, that he would wake up and find her less kind, less generous, less natural, than the women he was accustomed to loving. She was afraid that he had misunderstood her face because he liked it best after sex or early in the morning. He liked her best without makeup, and he didn't notice her clothes. Other men had loved her best when she was dressed for the theater or parties. Henry preferred her naked, with her hair pulled back. This disturbed her; it made her feel she was competing in the wrong event. She could never win against girls who dashed down to breakfast after taking time only to splash cold water on their eyes. She had some chance against women who invented their own beauty. But he would dress her in his shirts; he would kiss her before she had washed her face. Now she did not wear makeup when she was with him— he had asked her not to so simply. How could she refuse such a desire, spoken in the voice she loved? But she was afraid that she could lose his love, in some way she could not predict, if he loved her for herself the first thing in the morning.
And it troubled her that she could not predict in Henry the faults that would cause her one day not to love him. Would she one day grow tired of his evenness; would she long for storms, recriminations? She felt she had to ask him about his wife; they had gone on for months saying nothing about her. What kind of woman would leave such a house, such furniture? Henry said only that she was living in New Mexico, she had a private income, they wrote twice a month. He said nothing that would allow her to look into herself for the wife's faults, to see in Henry the wife's objections. In time she grew grateful for his reticence. She was, for the first time, safe in love. He did not look, for example, at other women in restaurants. He did not see them. Perhaps it was because she and Henry spent so much of their lives away from each other. It made her gentler, that lack of access. It made him, she thought, less curious.
She asked him once if he had ever thought of asking her to come and live with him. He looked at her strangely; she could tell that he had not thought of it. That look surprised her, and it embarrassed her deeply. And then she began to feel that look as an extreme form of neglect. They had been together for six months; they had been in love. And he had not thought of living with her. He said (one of those truths he thought there was no reason not to tell), “I just don't think of you as making much impression on a house. I don't think of you as caring about it.”
“Of course I do. I like having a beautiful place to live.”
“Yes, but I mean you don't become attached to a house itself. You become attached to the things in it.”
There was no way she could prove him wrong. She would have to do something so extreme that everything in her life would have to change utterly. She would have to build herself a house in the woods and live in it for years to prove to him that she cared about houses. And she was ready to do it; she awoke next to him at four in the morning and she thought that that was just what she would do. She would quit her job; she would stop seeing him. She would build herself a house to prove to him that she cared about houses. In the morning she laughed to think of herself writing a letter of resignation, buying lumber, but she was frightened that because of him she had entertained, even for a moment, such a fantastic renunciation. She saw that loving someone so calm, so moderate, that being loved so plainly and truthfully, could lead to extremes of devotion, of escape.
He accused her of being unable to resist the habit of separating sheep from goats. It was a loving accusation. He told her that her habit of sheep and goats had lifted from him a burden; he did not have to look so clearly at people when he was with her. She made a list of the phrases he used to defend the people she criticized: “good sort,” “means well,” “quite competent at his job,” “very kind underneath it all.” He put the list on the cork-board above his desk. He said he kissed it every morning that she was not there. He touched it for good luck, he said, before writing a letter.
One Thursday in August when she called he said, “My son is with me.” She had made his son one of the goats. Partly it was an accident of their ages; his son was nearly her age and she resented him for it. But it was a class resentment as well, and a historical one. Henry's son— with, she thought, using a phrase her mother might have used, all the advantages— had gone the way of the children of the affluent sixties. He had dropped out. Dropped out. It was such a boring phrase, she had always thought, such a boring concept. Dropped out. And yet she resented his hitchhiking through Denmark while she was working as a waitress or in the library to support her scholarship, resented him for not carrying on his father's line, for not having an office by this time, with pictures of ships. And she did not comprehend how he could resist all this. All this: she meant the house with all the windows, the attic full of old letters, the grandmother who was named for her great-aunt, killed during the Revolution. Before Louisa met him, she decided the boy was thickheaded. She could not be sympathetic to this boy who had left his father. When his father was the man she loved.
On the train up, she tried to remember what Henry had told her about his son. There had been the same reluctance to talk about his child as there had been to talk about his wife, and she had been as grateful. He had said something about the boy's hitchhiking through Denmark. And there was something about a fight. She remembered now that there was some reason for her wanting to forget it. She had not liked Henry's part in it.
The family had been vacationing in Europe and Henry's son had refused to return home. He was fifteen at the time, and he wanted to spend the year in Scandinavia, hitchhiking around, earning money at odd jobs. Why Scandinavia? she had asked, searching for some detail that would make the boy sympathetic. It simply took his fancy, Henry had said. He had, of course, insisted that his son come home and finish high school. His son had refused. Finally, after a week of silence, the boy had said, “Well, there's only one thing to do. We'll have to go outside and fight.”
“What did you do?” Louisa had asked, with that combination of thrill and boredom she felt when she watched Westerns.
“I let him go.”
Of course. What had she wanted him to do? Arrange some display of paternal weapons? He would not be the man she loved if he had forced his son to succumb to his authority. But why was she so disappointed? How would her own father have acte
d toward her brother? Her brother, a lawyer now with three children, would never have had the confidence for such defiance. He would have known, too, physical anger at his father's hand. Such knowledge would have prevented risk. Louisa resented Henry's son for knowing, at fifteen, that he could survive without the sanction of his parents. She wanted to tell that boy what a luxury it was— that defiance, that chosen poverty. She wanted to tell him that with less money and position, he could never have been so daring. She wanted to tell him he was spoiled. By the time the train pulled into the station, she was terribly angry. She realized that she had ridden for miles with her hands clenched into fists.
She was exceptionally loving in her embrace of Henry. He told her, with some excitement, that Eliot had spent the last few days painting his barn. He said, with a gratitude that touched and frightened her, that his barn was now the most beautiful in the county. He told her what good stories Eliot had to tell, about Alaska, about South America. She closed her eyes. Nothing interested her less than stories about men in bars, and fights, and roads and spectacular views, and feats of idiot courage. She knew she would have nothing to say to his son. Would this make Henry stop loving her? By the time they were in front of the house, she knew she was wrong to have come.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with his legs spread out, at least halfway, she thought, into the room. Henry had to step over his son's legs to get to the table. She followed behind Henry, stepping over his son's black boots. She hated those boots; there was something illegal-looking about them. They were old; the leather was cracked so that it looked not like leather but like the top of a burned cake. It was an insult to Henry, she thought, to wear boots like that in his house.
“Eliot, I'd like you to meet Louisa Altiere. Louisa, my son, Eliot Cosgrove.”
“Hey,” said Eliot, not looking up.