The Other Side

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by Mary Gordon


  She would have done anything to make him happy, and she knew nothing she could do ever would. He, in his turn, revered her because he believed she didn’t need him and the need of the world pressed on him all the time, he felt it like a spot on his lung, congenital, exhausting, never healed. He had always had to say of his beloved grandparents: They are weak, age weakens them, at any moment those whom I most love can die. He never thought that Valerie would die.

  He never told her, while they were engaged, seeing each other one weekend a month, that what he wanted was to study anthropology. He wanted to listen to the stories of people whose language was private, limited, whose language made for them a pocket or a cave away from the great world. But how could he do that and marry Valerie? She never questioned him when he said he wanted to go to law school. She made charts for him to help him study for the LSATs and read, with him, in the parlor while other students surreptitiously necked, the catalogues from law schools, noting conditions of financial aid. She said: Promise me we won’t live anywhere near either of our families. The Irish genius for the local made her feel choked, balked, and trapped. Dan promised.

  They married at twenty-one, moved into married students’ housing at Cornell. In their last year of life in Ithaca, they conceived Darci, the perfect child, whose name offended everyone in both their families. “I never heard of a Saint Darci,” Jim O’Keefe said. Ellen thought it sounded like an English lord; Vincent counseled her to say nothing: Perhaps it’s someone in Valerie’s family, he doubtfully remarked. Val’s mother asked why they couldn’t pick a name that would make people happy, Theresa said it was best to pick a name that told people where you stood, even Cam thought, but didn’t say, for it was her business publicly to be on Dan’s side in everything, that she hated women’s names ending in “i.”

  The pregnancy and the first months of Darci’s life were the best time in Dan and Valerie’s marriage. In the converted barracks that was married students’ housing at Cornell, they shared meals with other couples like themselves, protested the War, visited prisoners whom they advised about their cases, brought each other’s children to be cared for by an Indian woman whose husband had got his Ph.D. in math. Clitoral orgasm took the barracks by storm; the women formed a consciousness-raising group, the men grew sullen or abashed. Val finished her library degree and got a job in the medical library, Dan took care of his infant daughter and felt for the first time that he took part in the life that other human beings always had been leading but from which he’d been cut off.

  At the same time, in his classes, among his colleagues, anywhere outside his apartment, he felt a stranger, an imposter. He felt that no one knew him; if they did know him and the history of his family, they’d be appalled. He listened to complaints of friends about parents who wouldn’t lend out summer houses, who wouldn’t pass on a ten-year-old used car, who didn’t understand their sons’ refusal to go into corporate law, who wouldn’t join their children for the March on Washington in Resurrection City. He listened to all this in awe and disbelief. Twice a semester he would go back home and speak to Ellen, who was avidly supporting Hubert Humphrey, hold her hand, and tell her all about his life in Ithaca, his friends. He’d listen to her worrying about the future of the Democratic party. “You’ve got to have an organization in this world, they’re all against you, there’s enough outsiders without making outsiders of yourself.” He didn’t argue with her or Jack Morrisey when they said the protesters would destroy the party. He was home when Robert Kennedy was shot and sat beside his grandparents in front of the television, all of them hypnotized, obsessed, watching as if they were waiting for someone, Walter Cronkite perhaps, to appear and tell them it was all a great mistake, a joke, a national experiment: Here is the living Bobby Kennedy and he’ll be talking to you now.

  He saw Cam working happily beside Jack Morrisey, saw Cam grow confident, successful at the bench, sat talking to her in her office, in the chair beside her desk, then went home to Ithaca feeling that he’d been living falsely, among strangers. After graduation, he told Valerie he couldn’t keep his promise, what he wanted was to go back and work with Jack and Cam.

  Val felt he’d betrayed her; it was the first rupture in their married life. But Dan was right; it was good for him to work near the town where he was born.

  He’s been happy, working beside Cam, but working differently from her; they split the practice, their strengths and weaknesses make a coherent whole.

  She sees the people she defends as part of a long parade, leading to something. She likes to stand back from them; she likes them best after they leave her. She likes the bustle of the courthouse, the dark restaurants where she meets other lawyers over heavy slabs of meat during the lunch recess; she likes the serious municipal look of the courthouse building; she likes the mix of criminals and judges, lawyers, guards, and clerks. She even likes sitting in the unheated hall waiting, chatting, reassuring, giving to her opponents not the slightest hint of anything but good cheer and unruffled competence. She loves the word competence, like a classical object set apart from others in the light, without flaw. She likes standing beside her clients, making them feel that they aren’t alone, that they needn’t be frightened, she can stand between them and brute force, cruelty, injustice. She likes winning. She likes walking past husbands who have threatened her and her client with physical harm, not deigning to meet their brutish eyes. She likes walking with her men clients past the cruel wife and saying: See, the world is different, it will be different now, your children are not your property, the world is changing, and I am leading the change.

  She hates losing. After nineteen years she still can’t stand it. The only thing she likes is the rough forgetfulness, meeting the others in the dark bar afterwards, and going on, all of them going on, knowing there will be others—more victims, more cases. She dislikes many of her colleagues. But she likes the game of it, pitting herself and leading the march away from the dead world. At night she still wakes up saying: I should have said this; I should have made that point. I should have closed in this way, I should have called him to the stand.

  If it is bad for her, for Daniel it’s ten times worse. She sees it in his eyes, when the woman loses all her money, or the man his bid for joint custody, she sees his eyes darken with self-blame. She sees that recently he has got better. It has not occurred to her till just that moment, sitting on her childhood bed. It occurs to her now for the first time: Dan suffers less over losing than he once did. She wonders why. She wonders if it would be right to ask him.

  For Dan, each case is like a postulate in science or a work of art. It exists by itself in the world. She reckons he spends three times longer talking to the clients than she does. He gives them his phone number at home. They call him at all hours. He interrupts his dinner and his peaceful sleep to comfort them. He still does this after seventeen years. He comes in early and stays late to confer with them. Many of his clients fall in love with him. And why not: for them a man, listening to them, with his blue eyes that absorb their grief, is like a gift. “Don’t worry, things will be all right,” he says, and they believe him. To her clients she says: “Don’t worry, we’ll win.” She would never think of promising that things will be all right.

  Their clients give them different sorts of gifts. Both of them have cakes baked for them. Cam’s clients bake cakes that are large, heavy, oversweet, or cookies made with honey, spongy breads, their hard crusts shiny with brushed egg. The cakes Dan’s clients bake are miracles of invention and new industry: Julia Child’s three-chocolate bombe, the Pinwheel Fruit Tart from The Silver Palate Cookbook. In his closet, Dan has seven framed needlepoint renderings of scales of justice. Cam has, in a secret bureau drawer, a papier-mâché object, three inches high, brought back by one of her clients from her home in Guadalajara. It is the figure of a woman, robed in white, with a cavity in the center of her chest. A doctor stands behind her holding her bleeding heart with tongs. At the base is written: “Por un amor.”

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bsp; “But, Silvia,” she’d said to her client, ten years younger than she, the mother of six, a nurse’s aide, whom she’d been successful in helping to keep her children after her divorce although she was living with a new man. “Silvia,” she said, “I have a husband.” Silvia laughed, suddenly maternal, superior. “I had a husband, too. Now I have a different man. You and me,” she said. “I know what you need. I look in your eyes and I see my old eyes. So I bring this back to give you luck.” A month later, Cam met Ira Silverman.

  She’d agreed to serve, at a greatly reduced rate, as counsel for the co-op board of the building where Bob’s brother and his wife lived. She told her sister-in-law, Eileen, she wasn’t a real-estate lawyer, they could probably do better. “We can’t do better,” Eileen said. “We’re broke. Besides, you’re good at keeping people from screwing other people. You’ll be terrific.”

  At one of the board meetings, a woman was talking about having taken her children to a circus and how much she’d hated it. Especially the clowns.

  “Everyone hates clowns,” Cam said. “They make you feel guilty. They’re not funny, they look miserable, they’re trying too hard, and you’re bored to death, but you feel you have to laugh. Just because they’re miserable and they’re trying so hard. Circuses in general, only a real sicko would like them. They put you in an untenable moral position. You’re so bored, you keep hoping that someone will break his neck just so you have something interesting to look at. Who can live with themselves after thoughts like that?”

  The people around the table looked at her as if she’d just gone mad. Only one of them laughed, a short pudgy man with reddish hair. It happened to Cam often: she would go on talking, thinking everyone knew she was joking, and then see that she had puzzled or appalled the crowd. But this man understood. She could see, as if they were on a dance floor, that he wanted to join her, partner her, follow her lead. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “It reminds me of when I was a kid, a teenager, we used to go to burlesque houses in New Jersey. Union City. The comics would go out first, but of course no one wanted to see them, everyone wanted to see the girls. Someone in the balcony threw a penny at the comedian. The guy walked to the front of the stage. ‘What is wrong with you?’ he said to the audience. ‘Don’t you understand, we’re out here, we’re doing our best, like anybody else, this is our job, like any of you have jobs, and you do a thing like that. Throw a penny from the balcony. It could have put my eye out. Suppose it put my eye out? What would happen to me? But you never think of us like that. We’re nothing to you.’ ”

  “Talk about moral pressure,” Ira Silverman said. It was the first time she’d met him. Three months later they were lovers. But Cam is married to Bob Ulichni, and living with him and her mother, two blocks away from her grandparents, in the house she’s lived in since she was three years old. She doesn’t want to think of Ira now. She makes her mind go back to Lorraine Barnabas.

  It won’t go back. She wonders if she could allow herself to call Silvia Ramirez. She wants Silvia to read her palm, tea leaves, the movements of the clouds, entrails of chickens still warm from the slaughter. She wants Silvia to tell her the future.

  But she won’t do that. How can it be, she says to Ira, that at our age, with what we’ve gone through, who we are, we should be here together like this? She looks at herself in the mirror, sees herself as she believes she is seen in the world, and knows herself not to be romantic. She has white smooth skin (a good skin, she’s been told; she believes that is the last-ditch compliment, the bone cast to the plain woman). She has large clear gray eyes set far apart, light lashes that can’t be helped by mascara. She knows she doesn’t dress well. Everybody tells her. Her law-school friends just itch, they say, just itch to get their hands on her. And sometimes she has let them, with infinitely bad results. Come with us, they say, come shopping. Shopping. To them the word suggests the vista open to the sky, the sheen of illumined buildings: points of truth in the December evenings of great cities. To Camille the word, simply the word—SHOPPING—is a February twilight in the company of a wet, dying dog. It is the test foreordained to be failed, the trial presided over by a judge paid off for years to be against you. Try this, her friends say, handing her a blouse, a skirt, a pair of trousers. This color is good for you, you need more color, brighter color, these lines will help you. How lucky you are to be so tall.

  And Cam will grip the hangers, carry to the curtained cubicle the garments of her doom. Once on her body, the clothes turn against her; so promising on hangers, they bunch and hang perversely. They pucker; they cling where they should not cling. She holds her body against them. Like clever animals, the garments of her doom sense her terror and turn on her, calling up the judgment of her friends (Well, if you stand like that), the salespeople (She might as well save her money), and herself (No use, no use).

  She doesn’t know how to dress. She wears dark-colored pant-suits and dark-colored low-heeled shoes with chains, small horseshoes, or dull buckles at the instep or perhaps thick stitching at the toes, indicating to the world, she hopes, that she has no illusions on the subject of her looks.

  She doesn’t understand how she could have had the good fortune to fall in love with a man who loves her. It had never been a likely thing to happen at any point in history; now in the history of men and women, she knows it is a statistical freak. Women her age were supposed to have greater chance of being hijacked by a terrorist than falling happily in love. She’d said to Ira once that men and women together now were walking through an unlit warehouse. “We keep bumping into furniture, things we have no more use for, names we hardly know and never say. Armoires. Credenzas.” (“Whatever happened to them,” he interrupted her. “I remember everyone had a credenza once. That’s the trouble with the world.”…She wouldn’t let him go on. She wanted to finish what she had to say.) “We keep walking in the dark, bumping into these things with sharp corners, falling onto overstuffed things that could swallow us up. And then we see these angry faces in the picture frames, staring out at us in the dark. Mattresses on the floor with stains from God knows what.”

  “Stick with me,” he said. “I’ll get you through the warehouse. I’ve got a flashlight. I’ve got keys.”

  She tries to bring her mind back to Lorraine Barnabas. She wonders if she should, after all, ask Dan to handle the case. Sometimes she thinks it’s just good luck, the way she and Dan divide the practice. He believes in pro bono work, but the real, desperate lives of the people whom he works for take too much out of him. She has no patience with privileged victims.

  Sometimes she worries that she’s invented this neat split, that she has made Dan her victim. Would he like to be leading the march away from the dead world? Does she leave him the boring cases, the paying cases, so that she can trail glory, so that she can keep intact the image of herself she had in law school?

  She doesn’t ask Dan any of these things. She never has.

  7

  ELLEN IS ASLEEP. SHE will no longer have a life outside this bed. The nurses, there are two of them now, one for day and one for night, Mary Davenport and Beulah Rice, pride themselves that on account of them she has no bedsores. Twice a day, they sit her up in the chair in the corner of the room. They strap her in while they change the sheets, shake out the bedding. Mary Davenport suggested an investment be made in a sheepskin pad for Ellen to lie on; it was wonderful, she said, what bedsores it kept back; but at the same time they really know how to charge. Think about it, she said to Cam. There’s nothing to think about, Mrs. Davenport, Cam said coldly: If it’s needed, order it. The sheepskin pad cost two hundred dollars; Cam always suspected that Mary Davenport took a cut.

  The room that was once an ordinary bedroom is now a sickroom. Over the course of Ellen’s lifetime in it—she’d been young when she and Vincent had come to the house—she’d filled the room with her identity. To the children, it was a little frightening, dark, overfull of furniture, smelling of liniment. There were no pictures on the walls. News
papers were piled on several chairs; at night, Ellen would lay her day clothes on the backs of these chairs; her shapeless undergarments would graze the piles of yellowing paper. Once a year, perhaps, Vincent would grow impatient: “Are you really going to read all of these, Ellen? Would you go through them, some of them might be ready to be thrown out?” She’d be furious at him; “They’re there for a purpose, Vincent. If they weren’t there for a purpose, they wouldn’t be there.” And at night, she’d read them, wearing the glasses that made her eyes look liquefied, in the light dimmed by the pink lampshade, she’d read the months-old newspapers, folding each page as it was done, putting some on the desktop underneath the scissors she used for clipping articles. Some nights she’d let Dan and Camille clip with her; she kept clippings in a wooden box and hid it underneath the bed. “You like to have a sense of things,” she said.

 

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