by Mary Gordon
Louisa walked over and extended her hand.
“I'm very glad to meet you,” she said.
He did not take her hand. She went on extending it. With some aggressiveness she thrust her hand almost under his nose. He finally shook her hand. She wanted to tell him that she had got better handshakes from most of the dogs she knew.
“Why are you glad to meet me?” he said, looking up at her for the first time.
“What?”
“I mean, people say they're glad to meet somebody. But how do you know? You're probably really a little ticked off that I'm here. I mean, you don't get to spend that much time with Henry. And here I am cutting into it.”
“On the contrary, I feel that knowing you will enable me to know your father better.”
“Watch out, Eliot,” said Henry. “Watch out when she says things like ‘on the contrary’”
The two men laughed. She felt betrayed, and excluded from the circle of male laughter. Henry had put his feet up on the table.
“I'll go and unpack,” she said, feeling like a Boston schoolteacher in Dodge City. She wondered if Henry had told his son what she was like in bed.
She looked at the barn through the window of Henry's bedroom. She used to like looking at it; now it bulked large; she resented its blocking her view of the mountains. She kept walking around the bedroom, picking things up, putting them down, putting her dresses on different hangers, anything so that she would not have to go downstairs to the two men. My lover, she was thinking, and his son.
Henry had a drink waiting for her when she did go down. He stood up when she walked into the room. How much smaller he was than his son. It did not have to do entirely with Eliot's being born after the war and having more access to vitamins. She had loved Henry for being so finely made that his simplest gestures seemed eloquent. Once she had wept to see him taking the ice cubes out of the tray. She remembered his telling her that when Eliot was a child they called him “Brob,” for “Brobdingnagian.”
While Henry talked to her about his work on the Child Abuse Committee and the letters he had received from a prominent U.S. senator, Eliot sat at the table, whittling. It distracted Louisa so much that she was not exactly able to understand the point of Henry's letter. She stared at Eliot until he put down his knife.
“I thought whittling was something that dropped from a culture when people became literate,” she said.
“What makes you think I'm literate?” said Eliot, throwing the pop top of his beer can over her head into the garbage.
“I assume you were taught to read.”
“That doesn't mean I'm still into it.”
Henry put his head back and laughed, a louder laugh than she had ever heard from him.
She spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and making dinner. Bouillabaisse. She was glad of the time it took to saute and to scrub; it meant she did not have to be with Henry and Eliot. And the dinner was a success. But while Henry praised Louisa, Eliot sat in silence, playing with the mussel shells. Then Henry turned his attention to his son. They spoke of old outings, old neighbors. They laughed, she was disturbed to see, most heartily about a neighbor's wife who had gained a hundred pounds. They imitated the woman's foolishness in clothes, the walk that forgot the flesh she lived in. They talked about their trips to Italy, to the Pacific Northwest.
Louisa saw there was no place for her. She cleared the table and washed the dishes slowly, making the job last. They were still talking when she rejoined them at the table. They had not noticed that she had left.
Henry mentioned the meeting he would have to go to after supper. He was the chairman of a citizens’ committee to stall a drainage bond. Louisa was annoyed that Henry had not told her he would be away for the evening, had not told her she would be alone with Eliot. Perhaps he had guessed she would not have come if she knew.
“I think it's good that you and Eliot will have the time alone. You'll get to know each other,” said Henry when he was alone with her in the bedroom, tying his tie.
After Henry left, she took her book down into the living room, where Eliot sat watching a country and western singer on television. She was embarrassed to be sitting in a room with someone at seven thirty on a Saturday night, watching someone in a white leather suit who sang about truck drivers.
“When did you first become interested in country music?” she asked.
“A lot of my friends are into it.”
She opened her novel.
“You don't like me much, do you?” he said, after nearly half an hour of silence.
His rudeness was infantile; no one but a child would demand such conversation. All right, then, she would do what he wanted; she would tell the truth, because at that moment she preferred the idea of hurting him to the idea of her own protection.
“I don't think you deserve your father.”
The boy stopped lounging in his chair. He sat up— she wanted to say, like a gentleman.
“Don't you think I know that?” he said.
She turned her legs away from him, in shame and in defeat. How easily he had shown her up. He could work with honesty in a way that she couldn't. He reminded her that he was, after all, better bred; that she was what she had feared— someone who had learned the superficial knack of things but could be exposed by someone who knew their deeper workings. She did not know whether she liked him for it; she thought that she should leave the house.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I had no right to speak to you like that.”
“The real secret about my father is that nobody's good enough for him. But he keeps on trying. His efforts are doomed to failure.”
Did he say that? “His efforts are doomed to failure.” Of course he did. He was, after all, the son of his father. And she saw that he had to be what he was, having Henry for a father. She saw it now; such a moderate man had to inspire radical acts.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I was very rude.”
He was not someone used to listening to apologies. She wanted to touch his hand, but she realized that for people connected as they were, there was no appropriate gesture.
“Once I was in Alaska, riding my bike through this terrific snowstorm. And I had a real bad skid. I fell into the snow. I think I musta been out for a couple of minutes. I thought I was going to die. When I came to, I could hear the sound of my father's typewriter. I could hear him at that damn typewriter, typing letters. I was sure I was going to die. I was sure that was the last sound I'd hear. But someone came by in a pickup and rescued me. Weird, isn't it?”
She could see him lying in the snow, wondering whether he would survive, thinking of his father. Hearing his typewriter. Was it in love or hatred that he had heard it? She thought of Henry's back as he wrote his letters, of the perfect calm with which he arranged his thoughts into sentences, into paragraphs. And what would a child have thought, seeing that back turned to him, listening to the typewriter? For Henry needed no one when he was at his desk, writing his letters for the most just, the most worthy, of causes. He was perfectly alone and perfectly content, like someone looking through a telescope, like someone sailing a ship. She thought of this boy, four inches taller than his father, fifty pounds heavier, wondering if he would die, hearing his father's typewriter. But was it love or hatred that brought him the sound?
She began to cry. Henry's son looked at her with complete uninterest. No man had ever watched her tears with such a total lack of response.
“I'll say good night, then. I'm taking off in the morning. Early. I'll leave about four o'clock,” he said.
“Does your father know?”
“Sure.”
“And he went to the meeting anyway?”
“It was important. And he's going to get up and make me breakfast.”
“What about tonight?”
“What about it?”
“Don't you want to stay up and wait for him?”
“He'll be late. He's at that meeting,” said Eliot, climbing the stairs.
“I'll wait up for him,” said Louisa.
“Far out,” said Eliot— was it unpleasantly?— from the landing.
She read her novel for an hour. Then she went upstairs and looked at herself in the mirror. She took out all the makeup she had with her: eye shadow, pencil, mascara, two shades of lipstick, a small pot of rouge. She made herself up more heavily than she had ever done before. She made her face a caricature of all she valued in it. But it satisfied her, that face, in its extremity. And it fascinated her that in Henry's house she had done such a thing. Her face, no longer her own, so fixated her that she could not move away from the mirror. She sat perfectly still until she heard his key in the door.
The Neighborhood
My mother has moved from her house now; it was her family's for sixty years. As she was leaving, neighbors came in shyly, family by family, to say goodbye. There weren't many words; my mother hadn't been close to them; she suspected neighborly connections as the third-rate PR of Protestant churches and the Republican Party, the substitute of the weak, the rootless, the disloyal, for parish or for family ties. Yet everyone wept; the men she'd never spoken to, the women she'd rather despised, the teenagers who'd gained her favor by taking her garbage from the side of the house to the street for a dollar and a half a week in the bad weather. As we drove out, they arranged themselves formally on either side of the driveway, as if the car were a hearse. Through the rearview mirror, I saw the house across the street and thought of the Lynches, who'd left almost under cover, telling nobody, saying goodbye to no one, although they'd lived there seven years and when they'd first arrived the neighborhood had been quite glad.
The Lynches were Irish, Ireland Irish, people in the neighborhood said proudly, their move from the city to Long Island having given them the luxury of bestowing romance on a past their own parents might have downplayed or tried to hide. Nearly everybody on the block except my family and the Freeman sisters had moved in just after the war. The war, which the men had fought in, gave them a new feeling of legitimate habitation: they had as much right to own houses on Long Island as the Methodists, if not, perhaps, the old Episcopalians. And the Lynches’ presence only made their sense of seigneury stronger: they could look upon them as exotics or as foreigners and tell themselves that after all now there was nothing they had left behind in Brooklyn that they need feel as a lack.
Each of the four Lynch children had been born in Ireland, although only the parents had an accent. Mr. Lynch was hairless, spry, and silent: the kind of Irishman who seems preternaturally clean and who produces, possibly without his understanding, child after child, whom he then leaves to their mother. I don't know why I wasn't frightened of Mrs. Lynch; I was the sort of child to whom the slightest sign of irregularity might seem a menace. Now I can place her, having seen drawings by Hogarth, having learned words like harridan and slattern, which almost rhyme, having recorded, in the necessary course of feminist research, all those hateful descriptions of women gone to seed, or worse than seed, gone to some rank uncontrollable state where things sprouted and hung from them in a damp, lightless anarchy. But I liked Mrs. Lynch; could it have been that I didn't notice her wild hair, her missing teeth, her swelling ankles, her ripped clothes, her bare feet when she came to the door, her pendulous ungirded breasts? Perhaps it was that she was different and my fastidiousness was overrun by my romanticism. Or perhaps it was that she could give me faith in transformation. If, in the evenings, on the weekends, she could appear barefoot and unkempt, on Monday morning she walked out in her nurse's aide's uniform, white-stockinged and white-shod, her hair pinned under a starched cap, almost like any of my aunts.
But I am still surprised that I allowed her to be kind to me. I never liked going into the house; it was the first dirty house that I had ever seen, and when I had to go in and wait for Eileen, a year younger than I, with whom I played emotionlessly from the sheer demand of her geographical nearness and the sense that playing was the duty of our state in life, I tried not to look at anything and I tried not to breathe. When, piously, I described the mechanisms of my forbearance to my mother, she surprised me by being harsh. “God help Mrs. Lynch,” she said, “four children and slaving all day in that filthy city hospital, then driving home through all that miserable traffic. She must live her life dead on her feet. And the oldest are no help.”
Perhaps my mother's toleration of the Lynches directed the response of the whole neighborhood, who otherwise would not have put up with the rundown condition of the Lynches’ house and yard. The neighbors had for so long looked upon our family as the moral arbiters of the street that it would have been inconceivable for them to shun anyone of whom my mother approved. Her approvals, they all knew, were formal and dispensed de haut en has. Despising gossip, defining herself as a working woman who had no time to sit on the front steps and chatter, she signaled her approbation by beeping her horn and waving from her car. I wonder now if my mother liked Mrs. Lynch because she too had no time to sit and drink coffee with the other women; if she saw a kinship between them, both of them bringing home money for their families, both of them in a kind of widowhood, for Mr. Lynch worked two jobs every day, one as a bank guard, one as a night watchman, and on Saturdays he drove a local cab. What he did inside the house was impossible to speculate upon; clearly, he barely inhabited it.
My father died when I was seven and from then on I believed the world was dangerous. Almost no one treated me sensibly after his death. Adults fell into two categories: they hugged me and pressed my hand, their eyes brimming over with unshed tears, or they slapped me on the back and urged me to get out in the sunshine, play with other children, stop brooding, stop reading, stop sitting in the dark. What they would not do was leave me alone, which was the only thing I wanted. The children understood that, or perhaps they had no patience; they got tired of my rejecting their advances, and left me to myself. That year I developed a new friendship with Laurie Sorrento, whom I never in the ordinary run of things would have spoken to since she had very nearly been left back in the first grade. But her father had died too. Like mine, he had had a heart attack, but his happened when he was driving his truck over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, at five o'clock, causing a traffic jam of monumental stature. My father had a heart attack in the Forty-second Street Library. He died a month later in Bellevue. Each evening during that month my mother drove into the city after work, through the Midtown Tunnel. I had supper with a different family on the block each evening, and each night some mother put me to bed and waited in my house until my mother drove into the driveway at eleven. Then, suddenly, it was over, that unreal time; the midnight call came, he was dead. It was as though the light went out in my life and I stumbled through the next few years trying to recognize familiar objects which I had known but could not seem to name.
I didn't know if Laurie lived that way, as I did, in half darkness, but I enjoyed her company. I only remember our talking about our fathers once, and the experience prevented its own repetition. It was a summer evening, nearly dark. We stood in her backyard and started running in circles shouting, “My father is dead, my father is dead.” At first it was the shock value, I think, that pleased us, the parody of adult expectation of our grief, but then the thing itself took over and we began running faster and faster and shouting louder and louder. We made ourselves dizzy and we fell on our backs in the grass, still shouting “My father is dead, my father is dead,” and in our dizziness the grass toppled the sky and the rooftops slanted dangerously over the new moon, almost visible. We looked at each other, silent, terrified, and walked into the house, afraid we might have made it disappear. No one was in the house, and silently, Laurie fed me Saltine crackers, which I ate in silence till I heard my mother's horn honk at the front of the house, and we both ran out, grateful for the rescue.
But that Christmas, Laurie's mother remarried, a nice man who worked for Con Edison, anxious to become the father of an orphaned little girl. She moved away and I was glad. She had accepted n
ormal life and I no longer found her interesting. This meant, however, that I had no friends. I would never have called Eileen Lynch my friend; our sullen, silent games of hopscotch or jump rope could not have been less intimate, her life inside her filthy house remained a mystery to me, as I hoped my life in the house where death had come must be to her. There was no illusion of our liking one another; we were simply there.
Although I had no friends, I was constantly invited to birthday parties, my tragedy giving me great cachet among local mothers. These I dreaded as I did the day of judgment (real to me; the wrong verdict might mean that I would never see my father), but my mother would never let me refuse. I hated the party games and had become phobic about the brick of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream always set before me and the prized bakery cake with its sugar roses. At every party I would run into the bathroom as the candles were being blown out and be sick.
Resentful, the mothers would try to be kind, but I knew they felt I'd spoiled the party. I always spent the last hour in the birthday child's room, alone, huddled under a blanket. When my mother came, the incident would be reported, and I would see her stiffen as she thanked the particular mother for her kindness. She never said anything to me, though, and when the next invitation came and I would remind and warn her, she would stiffen once again and say only, “I won't be around forever, you know.”
But even I could see there was no point trying to get out of Eileen Lynch's party. I didn't say anything as I miserably dressed and miserably walked across the street, my present underneath my arm, a pair of pedal pushers I was sure Eileen wouldn't like.
Superficially, the Lynches’ house was cleaner, though the smell was there, the one that always made me suspect there was something rotting, dead, or dying behind the stove or the refrigerator. Eileen's older sisters, whose beauty I then felt was diminished by its clear sexual source, were dressed in starched, high dresses; their shoes shone and the seams in their stockings were perfect. For the first time, I felt I had to admire them, although I'd preferred their habitual mode of treatment— the adolescent's appraisal of young children as deriving from a low and altogether needless caste— to their false condescending warmth as they offered me a party hat and a balloon. Eileen seemed unimpressed by all the trouble that had been gone to for her; her distant walk-through of Blind Man's Bluff and Pin the Tail on the Donkey I recognized as springing from a heart as joyless as my own.