by Mary Gordon
One of the grandchildren was onstage helping him. He made some joke about it, hoping that no one would doubt the honesty of his assistant. For the first trick the child picked three cards. It was a simple trick and over quickly. The audience applauded inordinately, she thought, for it was a simple trick and he used it first, she knew, simply to warm them up.
The second trick was the magic bag. It appeared tiny, but out of it he pulled an egg, an orange, grapes, and finally a small bottle of champagne. “I keep telling my wife to take it to the supermarket, but she won't listen,” he said, gesturing at her in the first row of the audience. She got the thrill she always had when he acknowledged her from the stage. She began, for the first time, to relax.
The next trick was the one in which he threaded ribbons through large wooden cards. He asked his grandson to hold the ribbons. It was important that they be held very tightly. She could see her husband struggling to see the holes in the cards through which the ribbon had to be threaded. She could see that he had missed one of the holes, so when he pulled the ribbon, nothing happened. It was supposed to slip out without disturbing the cards. But he pulled the strings and nothing moved. He looked at the audience; he gave it an old man's look. “Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize,” he said.
Then they applauded. They covered him with applause. How she hated them for that. She could feel their embarrassment and that complicity that ties an audience together, in love or hatred, in relation to the person so far, so terribly far away on the stage. But it was not love or hate they felt; it was embarrassment for the old man, and she could feel their yearning that it might be all over soon. To hide it, they applauded wildly. She sat perfectly still.
If only the next trick would go well! But it was the scarf trick, the one he had flubbed in the living room. She felt as though she could not breathe. She thought she was going to be sick. She should have told him that it had not worked. She should not have been a coward. Now he would be a fool to strangers. To Frederick's business friends.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a magic box, a magic cleaning box. I keep trying to get my wife to use it, but she's a very stubborn woman.”
She knew what was supposed to happen. You put a colored scarf in one side of the box and pulled a white one out of the other side. But in the living room he had pulled out the same colored scarf that he had put in. But she had not told him. And he had not seen the difference.
He did the same thing now. At least it was over quickly. He held up the colored scarf, the scarf he thought was white, and twirled it around his head and bowed to the audience. He did not know that the trick had not worked. The audience was confused. There was a terrible beat of silence before they understood what had happened. Then Frederick started the applause. The audience gave Mr. Hastings a standing ovation. Then he disappeared backstage with a strange, old man's shuffle she had not seen him use before.
Frederick got up on the stage again. He was saying something about refreshments, something about gratitude to the women who had provided them. She was shaking with rage in her seat. How could he go on like that, after the humiliation his father had endured? And it was his responsibility. How could he go on talking to the audience, about games, about prizes, when that audience had witnessed his father's degradation? Why wasn't he with his father, to comfort him, to cover his exposure, when it had been his fault, when it was Frederick, through thickheadedness, or perhaps malice, who had caused his father's failure in this garish public light?
“Let me get you some supper,” said Frederick, offering his mother his arm. He was nodding to other people, even as he spoke to his mother.
She turned to her son in fury.
“Why did you allow him to do this?”
“Do what?”
“This performance. This failure.”
“He got a big kick out of it. He's a good sport,” said Frederick.
“Everyone saw him fail,” said Mrs. Hastings through closed teeth.
“It's all right, Mother. He thinks he did fine.”
“It was a humiliation.”
He shook his head and looked at her but with no real interest. He walked slightly ahead of her, too fast for her; she could see him searching the crowd for anyone else to talk to. He looked over his shoulder at her with the impatience of a young girl.
“Shall I fix you a plate?” he asked.
“You'll do nothing for me after what you've done to your father.”
He stopped walking and waited for her to catch up.
“You know, Mother, Father is twice the person you are,” he said, not looking at her. “Three times.”
She stood beside him. For the first time in his life, Mrs. Hastings looked at her son with something like love. For the first time, she felt the pride of their connection. She took his arm.
The Imagination of Disaster
I am aware of my own inadequacies, of course, but if this happens, no one will be adequate: to be adequate requires a prior act of the imagination, and this is impossible. We are armed; they are armed; someone will take the terrible, the unimaginable, vengeful step. And so we think in images of all that we have known to be the worst. We think of cold, of heat, of heaviness. But that is not it; that does not begin to be it. A mother thinks: how will I carry my children, what will I feed them? But this is not it, this is not it. There will be no place to carry them, food itself will be dangerous. We cannot prepare ourselves; we have known nothing of the kind.
But some days I think: I should prepare, I should do only what is difficult. I think: I will teach myself to use a gun. I hide behind the curtain, and when the mailman comes I try to imagine his right temple in the gunsight as he goes down the sidewalk. How sure one must be to pull the trigger, even to kill for one's own children, for their food, their water, perhaps even poison. The imagination is of no use.
The imagination is of no use. When I run two miles a day, I make myself run faster, farther, make myself feel nauseated, make myself go on despite my burning ribs. In case this one day will be a helpful memory, a useful sensation. Of endurance and of pain. My daughter comes and asks my help in making clay animals. On days like this, I want to say: no, no clay animals, we'll dig, we'll practice digging, once your father was a soldier, he will teach you to use a gun. But of course I cannot do this; I cannot pervert her life so that she will be ready for the disaster. There is no readiness; there is no death in life.
My baby son is crying. Will it be harder for males or females? Will they capture boy children to wander in roving gangs? Will my son, asleep now in his crib, wander the abashed landscape, killing other boys for garbage? Will my daughter root among the grain stalks, glistening with danger, for the one kernel of safe nourishment? Ought I to train them for capitulation? I croon to him; I rock him, watch the gold sun strike a maple, turn it golder. My daughter comes into the room, still in her long nightgown. Half an hour ago, I left her to dress herself. She hasn't succeeded; she's used the time to play with my lipstick. It is all over her face, her hands, her arms. Inside her belly is another tiny belly, empty. Will she have the chance to fill herself with a child, as I have filled myself with her and with her brother? On days like this I worry: if she can't dress herself in half an hour, if she cannot obey me in an instant, like the crack of a whip, will she perish? She can charm anyone. Will there be a place for charm after the disaster? What will be its face?
When the babysitter comes, I get into my car. She can make my daughter obey in an instant; she can put my son to sleep without rocking him, or feeding him, or patting him in his crib. On days like this I think I should leave them to her and never come back, for I will probably not survive and with her they will have a greater chance of surviving.
To calm myself I read poetry. When it comes, will the words of “To His Coy Mistress” comfort me, distract me as I wait to hear the news of the death of everything? I want to memorize long poems in case we must spend months in hiding underground. I will memorize “Lycidas,” although I don't like Milton. I will memorize
it because of what Virginia Woolf said: “Milton is a comfort because he is nothing like our life.” At that moment, when we are waiting for the news of utter death, what we will need is something that is nothing like our life.
I come home, and begin making dinner. I have purposely bought a tough cut of meat; I will simmer it for hours. As if that were an experience that would be helpful; as if that were the nature of it: afterward only tough cuts of meat. I pretend I am cooking on a paraffin stove in a basement. But I cannot restrain myself from using herbs; my own weakness makes me weep. When it comes, there will be no herbs, or spices, no beautiful vegetables like the vegetables that sit on my table in a wooden bowl: an eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, a red pepper, and some leeks. The solid innocence of my vegetables! When it comes, there will be no innocence. When it comes, there will be no safety. Even the roots hidden deep in the earth of forests will be the food of danger. There will be nothing whose history will be dear. I could weep for my furniture. The earth will be abashed; the furniture will stand out, balked and shameful in the ruin of everything that was our lives.
We have invited friends to dinner. My friend and I talk about our children. I think of her after the disaster; I try to imagine how she will look. I see her standing with a knife; her legs are knotted and blue veins stick out of them like bruised grapes. She is wearing a filthy shirt; her front teeth are missing; her thick black hair is falling out. I will have to kill her to keep her from entering our shelter. If she enters it she will kill us with her knife or the broken glass in her pocket. Kill us for the food we hide which may, even as we take it in, be killing us. Kill us for the life of her own children.
We are sitting on the floor. I want to turn to my friend and say: I do not want to have to kill you. But they have not had my imagination of disaster, and there can be no death in the midst of life. We talk about the autumn; this year we'll walk more in the country, we agree. We kiss our friends good night. Good night, good night, we say, we love you. Good night, I think, I pray I do not have to kill you for my children's food.
My husband puts on red pajamas. I do not speak of my imagination of disaster. He takes my nightgown off and I see us embracing in the full-length mirror. We are, for now, human, beautiful. We go to bed. He swims above me, digging in. I climb and meet him, strike and fall away. Because we have done this, two more of us breathe in the next room, bathed and perfect as arithmetic.
I think: Perhaps I should kill us all now and save us from the degradation of disaster. Perhaps I should kill us while we are whole and dignified and full of our sane beauty. I do not want to be one of the survivors; I am willing to die with my civilization. I have said to my husband: Let us put aside some pills, so that when the disaster strikes we may lie down together, holding each other's hands and die before the whole earth is abashed. But no, he says, I will not let you do that, we must fight. Someone will survive, he says, why not us? Why not our children?
Because the earth will be abashed, I tell him. Because our furniture will stand out shamed among the glistening poisoned objects. Because we cannot imagine it; because imagination is inadequate; because for this disaster, there is no imagination.
But because of this I may be wrong. We live with death, the stone in the belly, the terror on the road alone. People have lived with it always. But we live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar. That the death we fear we cannot even imagine, it will not be the distinguished thing, it will not be the face of dream, or even nightmare. For we cannot dream the poisoned earth abashed, empty of all we know.
Out of the Fray
She looked out of the window of a plane with pleasure for the first time in her life. The land gave way to water, and there was a minute when it was not possible to say where it left off and air began. The word ozone came to her mind, that comforting and fleshless territory where the mere act of breathing was a joy and every issue grew abstract. Now she could feel this, Ruth knew that she had changed her life.
Always before when any plane she flew on became airborne, she'd searched around for the stranger she would choose to die with. As a young woman, she'd picked people whose faces or clothes or postures indicated they would face death interestingly, or flippantly, or with some wit. After she had children, she looked for someone who seemed as if he would keep his head— if the children were with her, she'd want the practical help of such a person; if she were alone she'd want to go over the details of her life insurance and discuss the prospects of half-orphans finding psychological wholeness in maturity. But now she was with Phil, and they were on their way to London. It was a business trip for him; he worked for a human rights organization whose headquarters was in London, and he suggested Ruth come along: it would be, he said, their last vacation before marriage. Soon he would be her husband. She remembered that when she was with her first husband, she'd still searched planes, and that memory made her squeeze Phil's arm, guilty that these stray pieces of information could so reassure her, that she needed reassurance. But it was an odd decision that they'd made, to marry. It struck everyone they knew as at best unnecessary, and it made them feel apart from other people. Like orphan children in a foreign country they'd become solicitous, protective, unnaturally alert. Phil felt something more, though, he was almost childishly proud of their decision, as if it were an original, brave idea. For the last month, he'd taken her to meet people he'd known in grammar school or worked with for six months in college. She felt it made the people cynical and bored, and she didn't blame them; he'd been married twice before and left a woman he had lived with. It would be for her a second marriage, and she had been reluctant to agree.
“How,” she said, refusing him at first, “how can we do it, knowing what we know?”
“But what about the kids?” he'd said. “How can they go around saying ‘that guy my mother lives with?”
“You like ‘my stepfather’?”
“I do,” he'd said. “It sounds like something you can count on.”
And she had wanted that, that the children could count on him, somehow, even if he and she broke up. If they were married, she could name him in her will as the person to have custody in case both she and her ex-husband died. She had quite amicable relations with her children's father; still, she felt it would be odd to get him to agree to naming her paramour as the person in charge of their children's fate. If she could say “my husband” to her former husband, she could put the idea to him in language that had dignity and weight. It was important to her, this relation between language and the facts that it encircled. She was a science writer. She'd wanted to be a scientist herself; genetics was the field she had chosen. But quickly she learned that she lacked the kind of imagination that real scientific distinction called up; what she was good at was taking the findings— often brilliant, often crucial— of men and women who could not communicate what they had found, and making of them something articulate and shapely and still true. And so it bothered her that, in marrying, she was making a promise she couldn't keep. She felt like a child crossing her fingers behind her back: she felt it for both herself and Phil. When she thought of their marrying, she saw them as children, standing before a judge, their fingers crossed behind their backs, saying, “I promise I will never leave you.” When what they meant was, “I will try.”
Before they left for London, Phil had himself measured for a custom-tailored suit. My wedding suit, he'd called it. And he gave the children a hundred dollars each to buy new clothing for the wedding. Elena was fourteen; she was delighted with the prospect of new clothes. But Jacob was eleven; he told Phil he'd just broken his Walkman and asked if he couldn't use the hundred dollars for a new one instead. Phil never got angry with the children, but Jacob could see that he had hurt him and pretended he'd said what he said as a joke. When Phil pretended to believe him, Ruth felt herself fill with a surprising love that made the walls of her heart, which was a muscle after all, feel
thin and stretched like a balloon filled up with water. She remembered thinking of heavy water, water with an extra molecule, made only artificially and never to be put in contact with living things. You could poison plants by watering them with heavy water; it could be dangerous if drunk.
Was Philip dangerous? She couldn't understand how a man so lovable, so tactful, and so generous of heart had left three women. It was an odd position she was in in her relation to his past. She didn't want to seem merely inquisitive, although there was an element of gossip in her desire to know the details of her predecessors. But there was more: there was something much worse. What she really wanted was to have him paint pictures so unflattering that they were little murders: then she could bury the mutilated carcasses herself and never fear. But she knew the way of it, everyone did: people began, in great hope, love affairs, and then things soured and went bad. And so she and Phil spoke remarkably little about the women in his life, and his friends had been more than reticent. After three disasters, she suspected they had lost the energy for one more round of reassurances: she was infinitely better than the others, they could see that now for the first time Phil was really happy, they were glad she was around.
They were driving through London in a taxi, the exciting route past Marble Arch. The massive green of Hyde Park, the enlivened whiteness of the buildings made Ruth feel daring. “We're really here,” she said to Phil. “We've made it.”
“We always make it, darling,” he said. “And we always will.”
She kissed him on the mouth so that he would not feel her doubting.
“Tell me again how you met Sylvie,” she said. They were on their way to visit Sylvie MacGregor, who was divorced from Jack MacGregor, Phil's oldest friend.
“It must have been, what, I guess 1965. Jack and I had just come from the San Gennaro Festival. I'd won two prizes, throwing rubber balls and knocking over ducks or one of those games. I'd won a bottle of wine and a breakaway cane. For some reason we decided to drive up to Tanglewood. Well, I know why we did it, we were trying to pick up girls. Tanglewood is a terrific place to pick up girls. So I was walking with this cane. And when Sylvie saw me, she said I must be tired, did I want to sit on her blanket with her and her friend. I pretended to be a cripple for the whole day— I didn't want to embarrass her. It's no wonder she chose Jack instead of me.