by Mary Gordon
The food came in: ham with brown gravy that tasted like ink. Margarine. Tomatoes that a fly settled on. But Lucy could not eat. Her throat was full of water. Her heart was glassy and too small. And now they would see her cry.
She was told to go up to her room.
That summer Lucy learned many things. She made a birchbark canoe to take home to her mother. Aunt Bitsie made a birchbark sign for her that said “Keep Smiling.” Uncle Ted taught her to swim by letting her hold on to the waist of his bathing trunks. She swam onto the float like the boys. Uncle Ted said that that was so good she would get double dessert just like the boys did the first time they swam out to the float. But then Aunt Bitsie forgot and said it was just as well anyway because certain little girls should learn to watch their figures. One night her cousins Larry and Artie carried the dog Tramp in and pretended it had been shot. But then they put it down and it ran around and licked her and they said they had done it to make her cry.
She didn't cry so much now, but she always felt very far away and people's voices sounded the way they did when she was on the sand at the beach and she could hear the people's voices down by the water. A lot of times she didn't hear people when they talked to her. Her heart was very thick now: it was like one of Uncle Ted's boxing gloves. The thorn never touched the thin, inside walls of it anymore. She had lost it. There was no one whose voice was beautiful now, and little that she remembered.
Eileen
“There's some that just can't take it,” Bridget said. “No matter what they do or you do for them, they just don't fit in.”
“You certainly were good to her, Kathleen,” said Nettie, “when she first came over. No one could have been better when she first came over.”
“That was years ago,” Kathleen said. “We never kept up with her.”
Nora thought of Eileen Foley when she had first come over, twelve years ago, when Nora was eleven and Eileen, twenty-one. They'd had to share a bed, and Kathleen had apologized. “There's no place for her, only here. I don't know what they were thinking of, sending her over, with no one to vouch for her, only the nuns. The Foleys were like that, the devil take the hindmost, every one of them. You'd see why she wanted to get out.”
But Nora hadn't minded. She liked Eileen's company, and her body was no intrusion in the bed. Her flesh was pleasant, fragrant. Though she was large, she was careful not to take up too much room. They joked about it. “Great cow that I am, pray God I don't roll over one fine night and crush you. How'd yer mam forgive me if I should do that.”
And they would laugh, excluding Nora's brothers, as they excluded them with all their talk about the future, Eileen's and Nora's both. It was adult talk; the young boys had no place in it. It was female too, but it was different from the way that Nora's mother and aunts, Bridget and Nettie, spoke, because it had belief and hope, and the older women's conversation began with a cheerful, skeptical, accepting resignation and could move— particularly when Bridget took the lead— to a conviction of injustice and impossibility and the inevitable folly of expecting one good thing.
They talked every night about what had happened to Eileen at work. She was a cook at a school for the blind run for the Presentation sisters. It was in the Bronx. In Limerick, she'd worked at the sisters’ orphanage; she was grateful they had recommended her over here. She was proud of her work, she liked the people, worshipped the nuns that ran the place. She said she would have loved to be a nun, only for her soft nature. She was right about herself; she had a penchant for small luxuries: lavender sachets to perfume her underclothes, honey-flavored lozenges that came in a tin box with a picture of a beautiful blond child, a clothesbrush with an ivory handle, a hatpin that pushed its point into the dull black felt of Eileen's hat and left behind a butterfly of yellow and red stones. She would take these things out secretly and show them first to Nora, so that Nora felt that she possessed them too and considered herself doubly blessed: with the friendship of one so much older and with the passion of her observation of these objects she could covet, and could prize but need not own.
The nuns, Eileen told Nora often, had a terrible hard life. They slept on wooden pallets and were silent after dark; they woke at dawn, ate little, and were not permitted to have friends. Not even among each other; no, they had to be particularly on their guard for that. “Particular friendships, it's called,” Eileen told Nora proudly. “They're forbidden particular friendships.” She told Nora she'd learned all this from Sister Mary Rose, who ran the kitchen. It was not her praise that mattered to Eileen, though, but the words of Sister Catherine Benedict, the superior.
“She came up to me once, that quiet, I didn't know she was behind me. I was cutting up some cod for boiling, you know the blind ones have to have soft foods, as they can't cut, of course— and Sister must have been watching me over my shoulder all the time. ‘You are particularly careful, Eileen Foley, and the Blessed Mother sees that, and she will reward you, mark my words. A bone left in a piece of fish could mean death for one of the children, so to cut up each piece with the utmost care is like a Corporal Work of Mercy for the poor little souls.’”
Eileen said that Sister Catherine Benedict had come from Galway city. “You could tell she comes from money. But she gave it up. For God.” At Christmastime, Sister had given Eileen a holy picture of her patron saint, Saint Catherine of Siena, and on the back had signed her name with a cross in front of it. Nora and Eileen would look at the picture; it seemed to them a sign of something that they valued but could not find or even name in the world that they inhabited; excellence, simplicity. One day, Eileen promised, she would bring Nora to the home so that she could meet Sister Catherine for herself. But it never happened, there was never time.
Because, really, Eileen hadn't lived with the Derencys very long, six months perhaps. Nora tried to remember how long it was; at twenty-three the seasons of an eleven-year-old seemed illusory: what could possibly have happened then to mark one month from another, or one year? Each day of her adulthood seemed like the dropping down of coins into a slot: a sound fixed, right, and comforting accompanied her aging, the sound of money in the bank. Childhood was no gift to a cripple, she'd often thought, with its emphasis on physical speed, with those interminable hours which required for their filling senseless, interminable games of jumping, running, catching, following, scaling, shinnying, those various and diffuse verbs that spelled her failure. Even now, in her well-cut suit, her perfumed handkerchief shaped like a fan tucked in her pocket, the gold compact she had bought herself with her first wages, even now she could think of those childhood games and bring back once again the fear, the anger, the thin high smell that was the anguish of exclusion. Even now, though her success at Mr. Riordan's law office was breathtaking, even now she could bring back the memory of her body's defeat.
Even now, at twenty-three, as she stood in the kitchen drinking black coffee while her mother cooked and her aunts lounged over their boiled eggs, even now Nora could feel the misery. She thought of Eileen and of the pleasure it had been to have her; one of her few physical pleasures as a child. She thought about Eileen's abundant flesh that seemed to have much more in common with a food than with an object of sexual desire: the white flesh of an apple came to mind or milk, a peach in its first blush of ripeness, the swell of a firm, mild, delicious cheese. Nothing dark, secretive, or inexplicably responsive seemed to be a part of Eileen's body life. And Nora prized Eileen because it seemed to her that Eileen was as definitely cut off from coupling as she, although she could not quite say why. For it was Nora's body's brokenness that always would exclude her from the desiring eye of men, whereas with Eileen it was excessive wholeness that would turn men's eyes away: nothing could be broken into, broken up.
Six months it must have been, thought Nora, that she lived here. After that she moved into the convent. She felt embarrassed, she'd confessed to Nora, to be living with the family. She'd offered money for her board, but Kathleen had refused it. And she hated the remarks that Bridget made about her
family. Family passion and its underside, the family shame, could make Eileen's high color mottle and her perfect skin appear sickish and damp. She knew what her family was, but after all, she said, they tried their best, their luck had been against them.
“You make your own luck,” Bridget had said when Nora tried, just after Eileen had left them, to defend the Foleys. She'd mentioned their bad luck. “Every greenhorn in America came here through nothing but bad luck. If it was good luck that we had, we'd be back home in great fine houses.”
“Still there's some like the Foleys that God's eye doesn't shine on,” said Kathleen.
“God's eye, my eye, ‘tis nothing wrong with them but laziness and drink, the same old song, and no new verses added,” Bridget said.
“But what about the mother?” Nettie said. The two sisters looked sharply at her, warning her to silence.
“That was never proved,” said Kathleen.
“What was never proved?” eleven-year-old Nora had asked.
“Time enough for you to be knowing that kind of story. Hanging about the way you do, you know far too much as it is,” Bridget said.
I know more than you'll know when you're a hundred, Nora wanted to say to her aunt, whom she despised for her bad nature and yet feared. She felt that Bridget blamed her for her leg, as if, if she'd wanted it, she could be outside running with the other children. There was some truth in that, there always was in Bridget's black predictions and malevolent reports. It was the partial truths in what she said that made her dangerous.
It was only recently that they'd explained about Eileen's mother. Nora tried now to remember what the circumstances might have been that would have made the sisters talk about it. She could not. It wasn't that they'd seen Eileen, they hadn't, not since Nora's high school graduation, which was six years ago now. They had known the Foleys’ house, so it was real to them, the news, when it came from her cousin Anna Fogarty, who had stayed on at home. Mrs. Foley, Eileen's mother, who everyone had thought was queer, had burned the house down and she herself and her youngest baby, a boy of six months, had both perished. Everyone believed that she had set the fire. Nora felt she saw it, the fixed face of the mother as her life burned up around her, the green skeleton of the boy baby, left to be gone over like the ruined clothes, the spoons, the pots and pans.
Eileen's father had married again, which just showed, Bridget said, the foolishness of some young girls. All the sisters thought of marriage as a sign of weakness: they made only partial exceptions for themselves. But the young girl who'd married Eileen's father seemed to prove the sisters’ point. She'd left her family where she had considered herself unhappy, thinking she was moving out to something better. The parish had helped Jamesie Foley build a new house: that had turned the young girl's head. But what she got for her pains was a drunken husband and a brood of someone else's children whom she tormented until Eileen couldn't bear to see it and left to work in the orphanage in Limerick, where the nuns, knowing her wishes, got the place for her in their house in New York.
The sisters in both convents knew her dreams were for her brother Tom. Tom was twelve years younger than Eileen, the youngest living child. He was wonderfully intelligent, Eileen told Nora, and had an angel's nature. Every penny of her salary she could she put into the bank to bring him over; that was why she took the sisters’ offer of her living in the convent instead of with the Derencys, she could save her carfare. That was what she said to the Derencys, but Nora knew there was more to it. Her pride, which couldn't tolerate Kathleen not taking any money. Nora could tell that Eileen worshipped Kathleen. And it troubled her that there was nothing she could do for Kathleen when Kathleen did so much for her.
As Kathleen's life had blurred, Nora's had been pressed into sharp focus. She had wanted to become a teacher, and her teachers encouraged her. Austere and yet maternal Protestants, romantic from the books they read, they treasured the pretty crippled girl with her devotion to the plays of Shakespeare and to Caesar's Gallic Wars, to anything, in fact, that they suggested she should read. Nora had been accepted at the Upstate Normal School on the basis of her grades and of her teachers’ letters. But none of them had mentioned Nora's deformity; she'd been born with one leg shorter than the other. She realized they hadn't known, the moment she arrived, nervous to the point of sickness, driven by her nervous mother. How shocked those men were, in the office of the dean, when they beheld her with her high shoe and her crutch. They blamed the teachers. “No one has informed us … You must see, of course, it's quite impossible … We must think first about the safety of potential children who might be in your charge. Imagine if there were a fire or a similar emergency…” They talked as if they were reading what they said from a book. They did not look at her. They said that it was most regrettable, but they were sure she understood, and understood that it was no reflection— not-a-tall— on her. They were just sorry she had had to make the trip.
She drove back with her mother in shamed silence, as if she'd been left at the altar and in all her wedding finery was making her way home. That was the way her father behaved, as if she had been jilted. He said he and some of his friends whose names he wouldn't mention would drive themselves up there and teach a lesson to those Yankee bastards. It was a free country, he said; you didn't get away with that kind of behavior here. He was very angry at his wife.
“Did you say nothing to them, Kathleen? Did you just walk out with your tail between your legs like some bog trotter thrown off the land by an English thief? Was that the way of it?”
Nora saw her mother's shame. She knew her father was just talk; he would have done no better. She herself had remained silent, and she bore her own shame in her heart. She would not let her mother feel the weight of it.
“I think, you know, Dad, it's a blessing in disguise. I'd make three times the money in an office. You were right, Dad, all along. I should have taken the commercial course.”
“I was not right. You went where you belonged, there in the academic. You've twice the brains of any of them. Reading Latin like a priest. French too. I'm that proud of you.”
She wanted to tell him that her education had been nothing, foolishness, Latin she was already forgetting, French she couldn't speak, history that meant not one thing to her, plays and poems about nothing to do with her life. She felt contempt, then, for her teachers and the things they stood for. She felt they'd conspired against her and made her look a fool. They could have fought for her against the men who sat behind the desks there in the office of the Normal School. But they did not fight for her, they kept their silence, as she had and as her mother had. And they had counted on that silence, those men in that office; it gave them the confidence to say the things they said, “regret” and “understanding” and “upon reflection.” They had counted on the silence that surrounded people like Nora and her family, fell upon them like a cloak, swallowed them up and made them disappear so quickly that by the time Nora and her mother stopped in Westchester for a cup of tea they could forget that they had ever seen her.
She determined that she would be successful in the business world. She finished senior year with the high grades she had begun with: she owed her parents that. But her attention was on the girls she knew who worked in offices: the way they dressed and spoke and carried themselves. She would be one of them; she would be better than any one of them. She would take trains and manicure her nails. Every muscle in her body she would devote to an appearance of efficiency and competence, with its inevitable edges of contempt.
Her one regret was that she had to ask her father for the money for her business-school tuition. He was glad to give it to her, she could tell he felt that he was making something up to her, making it all right. She was first in her class in every subject. Easily, within a week of graduation, she was hired by the firm of Macintosh and Riordan, where she thrived.
She almost became the thing she wanted. She grew impatient with home life, in love with the world that required of her what she so easil
y, so beautifully could give. The years of all the anger which her family had not acknowledged or allowed she put into a furious, commercial energy. Soon Mr. Riordan had only to give her a brief idea of the contents of a letter; she herself composed those sentences that shone like music to her: threatening or clarifying, setting straight. This new person she had become had no place in her life for Eileen Foley, or for her brother Tom, whom she had finally brought over after six hard years.
He was fifteen when he arrived in New York; two years younger than Nora, but he was a child, and she a woman of the world. Eileen brought him to the Derencys to ask advice about his schooling; she was determined he be educated, although everyone advised against it, even Sister Catherine Benedict. And certainly Bridget advised against it.
“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” she said, and everyone grew silent. Any kind of quote abashed them all.
“Well, what would you say, Nora, with your education?” Eileen asked.
It was a terrible word to Nora, education, all that she had had violently, cruelly to turn her back on, all that had betrayed her, caused her shame. Yet even in her bitterness, she saw it need not be the same for Tommy Foley. He would not want what she had wanted, Latin and the poetry, the plays. He would want, and Eileen wanted for him, merely a certificate. What he would learn would never touch him; therefore it would never hurt him. He wanted, simply, a good job.
Nora felt her mother's eyes hard on her, wanting her to give encouragement to Eileen. She understood why. Eileen's desire for her brother's prospering was so palpable, so dangerous almost, that it should not be balked.
“Why not try?” said Nora in her new, sharp way. Her parents did not know she'd begun smoking; if she'd dared, it would have been a perfect time to light a cigarette.
Eileen was constantly afraid that her ambitions for her brother would be ruined by the influences of the neighborhood. For her they were contagious, like the plague; the greenhorn laziness, the fecklessness, the wish for fun. Nora's success made Eileen worshipful; she grew in Nora's presence deferential, asking her advice on everything, ravenously listening to every word she said, and urging Tom to listen, too.