by Mary Gordon
But she has lost the thread. She inhabits a place that has no place inside the larger world. She can no longer make connections. She does not know the relation of one thing to another thing. The past crowds in on her, tormenting. She knows the past to be the past, but the present doesn’t set itself down in shapes that she can name and recognize. She looks around the room for anything familiar. But most of her things have been taken out. Now there are only functional objects: overlarge jars containing gauze, cotton, Vaseline, clear solutions, brown bottles of medicine, plastic cups with water, dilute juice, tape, spoons, a blood-pressure cuff, a suction machine, a bellows, rubber tubes.
She is asleep among the objects that are nothing to her. Slowly, she opens her eyes; she is too tired, though, to try to understand her new place in the world, the place of all the other people, whether she is alive. She lets her eyes fall shut again. She cannot make the effort to distinguish anything about her life.
Dan sees his grandmother is asleep. He walks into the kitchen for a glass of water.
It is a meaningless room without Ellen’s governance. Her objects, untouched by her, seem ghostly, artificial. The smell of her spices has disappeared: marjoram, he thinks it must have been, nutmeg and cloves, bay leaves in soups, vanilla, sage. Fondly, he looks at the table where he did his homework on the oilcloth. There’s no more oilcloth in the world and no linoleum. He remembers helping his grandfather lay the first linoleum: speckles against a background of light gray. They never chose a new pattern; they replaced it. Two years ago, Vincent agreed to let two friends of John’s lay a set of speckled vinyl tiles.
The shelving paper in the cupboards looks unfresh. It’s the kind of thing, he supposes, that someone like Mary Davenport can’t be expected to keep up with. He wishes he’d noticed it himself before this. And then he realizes that, in all the time Vincent’s been gone, he hasn’t once gone into the kitchen. He wonders if anyone in the family has.
He sees his cousin Sheilah coming in from the back porch. When she notices him, her face, which had looked as if someone had recently offended her, or as if she’s ready if they plan to, comes to life.
“Hi, Danny,” she says. Of all the people she’s known, she rightly believes that few have genuinely liked her. But she believes Dan does. She hopes he notices how she’s arranged the cold cuts, carefully, beautifully, she thinks, fanning out from the cherry tomato in the center like a star.
Sheilah is a social worker. Her field is called “Quality Insurance.” Regulatory agencies—the State Department of Mental Hygiene, for example—require some guarantee that the services, medical and legal in particular, that are being provided for their clients are up to standards. Sheilah’s office handles this. In other words, she is in charge of checking up. It’s the perfect job for her. The watchful, excluded child, the second of three undesired children, dutifully produced, she grew expert at pinpointing failure. When she discovers fraudulence, carelessness, incompetence, neglect, or an attempt to cover up, she doesn’t move quickly or even seem to be responding. Then she issues reports that are triumphs of meticulous devastation. She believes that she does this because she is the champion of the poor: a legacy of the years when she was Sister Raymond Theresa, a Sister of Charity, from 1965 to 1970. She left the convent scandalously to marry Father Steve Gallagher, her fellow picketer and witness to draft-card burnings, participant in vigils, marches, folk-song fests against the Vietnam War. In fact what makes her good at her job is her talent for finding fault.
As a social caseworker, helping the poor to a better life, she was a disaster. Unlike Cam and Cam’s sister-in-law, Eileen Ulichni, also a social worker, she was angry at her clients for their continued stubbornness in the face of her good advice. “The trouble with Sheilah and her clients,” Eileen once said to Cam, “is that she’s pissed off because they’re not like her. Thank God, most of them have too much sense for that.” Whereas both Cam and Eileen were content with rare and temporary progress, Sheilah had felt betrayed when her clients seemed to be taking her advice to heart, and then, leaving her office, acted exactly as she’d urged them not to, exactly as they’d always acted all of their disorderly lives. She moved into administration, saying she was “burnt out.” But in fact she’d never caught fire; as a caseworker she had failed; running the Office of Quality Insurance, she is, in the circles where she moves, a universally acclaimed success.
In her childhood, she was a failure, the one who woke un-beautifully with crusted eyelids, who fell over her open shoelaces in the middle of a game of tag and stopped the game. In a circle where wit was prized she had no sense of humor; she never got jokes, especially the ones she was the butt of, the ones from her mother’s mouth. Always cringing, she would cave in almost entirely at her mother’s sharpness. But in adult life, since leaving the convent, she’s placed herself in the center of circles of earnestness, of serious, sincere people who believe in something, who use their spare time to act on what they believe in for a better world. She is the head of her parish council; she is working on her master’s degree in family history (for which she has tried to interview her grandfather, with results that frustrate and anger her), she travels regularly to Manhattan for meetings of a society dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture; with her son, Diarmid, and her husband she takes weekly classes in the Irish language and in Irish dance. In these circles of earnestness, she is respected and looked up to. But in her family she is seen by the kindly as pathetic, by the less kind as a joke. She is never seen as a success.
Even Dan, with his merciful eye, looks at Sheilah and sees failure. He sees the plate of cheese and cold cuts she has arranged to fan out like a star from the cherry tomato at the center and does not think, as she had hoped, how original, how pleasing. He notes with pity that this simple infantile arrangement took his cousin an hour and a half to effect. He would love to run up to Cam and laugh about it, laugh that it took Sheilah an hour and a half, think of her trying to slice Muenster cheese with an electric knife, so they can become children again, cover their faces with their pillows to stop the intoxicating bubbles of illegal laughter.
Sheilah sees in Dan’s eyes, which can hide nothing, that in looking at the plate of cold cuts for a second he wanted to laugh. She’d been proud of the arrangement. She had hoped that Dan would come in first and see it, see what she had done, and compliment her on her work. But now she sees the shadow that passed over his gaze. She understands that everything she has done is ridiculous, always will be, nothing will change it, when she thinks that it has changed she is the fool and they are laughing at her. Nothing will change.
Then angrily she blames him for making her feel this way. She thinks: Why has he made me feel this. I have arranged these things attractively on a plate. None of them would do it. None of them cares about these things. They’d have put it any old way, horrible, disgusting how they would have put it. I see what they never see. I do what they would never think of doing. I am happily married, and they are not. My husband and I stand on the edge of the new world. We have courage. We left our orders for each other. We are at the center of a movement which allows the Irish to reclaim our heritage. We study the language, our child learns the traditional dances. Not theirs. He competes each year in the city-wide Feis. One day he will win ribbons for me, medals. I know a history they never even knew they lost. How dare they make me feel a failure. They are the failures. She wants to say: You are a failure, Dan, not me; your ex-wife half a continent away, your one child unmanageable, the other who will never love you. Never. And the woman you won’t marry. It is you who fail.
But Daniel doesn’t run upstairs. He could only laugh with Cam about it if Cam, too, felt sorry for Sheilah. But she doesn’t; she’s impatient with Sheilah, she wants to dismiss her like a pesky fly buzzing on the screen door of the family life. And he won’t disturb Cam. She’s working; they are partners. Partners, the lovely word. His cousin. Partners. He won’t go up to Cam to laugh because he pities Sheilah, and fears Cam’s scorn,
which falls on Sheilah, and turns her vicious. He hates the sight of all of it: Sheilah’s failure, Cam’s scorn, Sheilah’s viciousness, Cam’s shamed withdrawal, then her guilt. Cam knows that she has never been able even to like Sheilah and that Sheilah has always needed love. She has known this for forty years. Knowing it has helped nothing.
“How’s Diarmid?” Daniel asks. Diarmid is Sheilah’s eight-year-old son.
The question, as always, frightens her. She can’t answer truthfully. She’s afraid if she makes her pride in her son public it will be taken from her. She will be punished, mocked. For her boy is a miracle to her. She has been, since she has known that people looked at her, aware of that great minus in the glances that have fallen on her. The inevitable minus of the unloved child. No one, not even her husband, ever looked at her as she looks at her son, with joy and gratitude. From birth she was a disappointment to her mother, who had hoped in having children to gain the respect her own mother had withheld from her, on account of her sex.
When Sheilah now looks at the old pictures of herself, among her family, she’d like to cry for the child standing apart who inserts herself into the family grouping next to Daniel, and desperately holds his hand. Dan, when he was allowed to choose his own place in the pictures, always chose to be with Cam. In the pictures, he holds Cam’s hand, not merely kindly, as he does with Sheilah, but with joy. Cam in the pictures, bold even as a child, makes Sheilah rage. Cam the thief, the pirate. If you had not been, I might have been you.
So her love for her son frightens her. Suppose it can be stolen, lost? She has to hide it, no one must know of this gift she gives her child. She and her son are weak. She won’t allow anyone to steal from her or from her son. So she says to her cousin Dan, who asked about him, “Well, you know, he drives me crazy.”
Dan ruffles her hair. “He’s a nice boy,” he says.
Now, secretly, she preens. This is the sun that she can, for a moment, bask in, Dan’s praise of her boy. For he could never say anything like that to Cam. Cam has no children, Sheilah thinks, as always with clear joy. And never will.
A childless woman, Sheilah thinks, and barren. To think in secret of her cousin and to use the word, the terrible, the cruel word, barren, lights a joyful flame in Sheilah’s heart. She could almost be kind to Cam, or could at least not be hateful to her. She thinks that maybe when Cam comes downstairs later she won’t be hateful to her. She wonders once again why Cam’s marriage is childless. No one has ever told her; she has never asked.
8
ELLEN MACNAMARA MADE A happy marriage. But it was not enough. She came into it from a life already scalded by shame, stiffened by disappointment, judgment, fear. So her happy marriage could not make her a happy woman. Her husband’s happy marriage almost made him a happy man.
Until that thing happened, ten months ago, he was almost a happy man.
Cam thinks of Vincent sitting now, not in the house where people fan out from the center of his dying wife, but twenty miles away. He is sitting in a room that looks out to a sloping garden. It is summer now; the roses bloom, the zinnias, nasturtiums, marigolds, planted by him and the other residents, flourish in the black soil of Eastern Long Island, famous for potatoes. Three months before, Vincent had said to Cam, “Bring my garden tools, my work pants, my old shoes.” He made this request on May third, more than three months ago, and Cam went into her grandfather’s workroom in the basement to get these things. She was happy to do it for him, remembering how happy he had been there, in this room that really was not a room, a slice of cellar, where no light entered, where the naked bulb hung from the ceiling, where the air presented an unvarying cold damp, where seasons came and went, leaving no mark. He worked there, he made things, and he was happy, singing tunelessly, or whistling without song. He thought his thoughts.
And what thoughts were they? In that room, seeing his constructions, his inventions, Cam had always thought: My grandfather was a genius. He was a genius at design. He had a gift for abstract thought. She could say this only to Daniel, and to her lover, Ira Silverman, for to anyone else it could become a joke. This man, leaving behind him abstract shapes in tin. Left over from his models. His work was wonderful for a child to watch. He worked as a machinist when she knew him; his days in the Transit Authority shop were over before her birth. His job was to make models of scaffolding. Seven inches high. He had no interest in the scaffolding itself. Or in the skyscrapers it made possible. She’d asked him if he’d ever visited the finished buildings. “No,” he said, “I never thought to.”
As children she and Dan had walked behind him, asking him things he was pleased to answer fully and at length. They played among his abstract leavings. No tempests there, no dangers; that was safety to them, it would always be their memory of safety, sitting with their grandfather, courtly even to children, patient in the cellar.
He was a gentleman, Camille would say. A word she honored, despite who she was politically. All my desire for a life that had a shape grew here, Cam thought, looking for her grandfather’s garden tools. And for a life that had a vivid pattern: this I learned from him in the garden. Dahlias, marigolds, flowers of line and pattern. There was nothing shifting in his flowers. Dark-colored sweet peas. Flowers that stood out in the world.
Walking by his workbench that day three months before, she put her hand on the vise and the grindstone. On the racks she looked at screwdrivers, wrenches (crescent, monkey, ratchet, pipe), tools with their proper names and places, and their exact functions, their specialized tasks. The hammers, some clawed, some with a ball head. In her memory, not the traditionally comforting smell of wood: the smell, instead, of burning tin, industrial and unpoetical.
She passed the metalwork bench and walked to the woodworking section, which he used less often: plane and lathe, the puritanical nails in their jars. On the other side of the cellar he kept pitchforks and rakes, bags of manure, spades, paper bags of bulbs, now sprouting from neglect (he’d had his accident in autumn), grass seed in boxes.
He was interested in life, so was Ellen, always interested, thought Cam, bending and choosing only light tools for him, the tools of simpler labor. He was old now, he was eighty-eight, but it was wonderful that he was working in the garden. She picked up his gardening gloves, put them on her own hands. She stroked the gloves as she had stroked his hands to comfort him the night that Ellen had knocked him down and she had come to see him in the hospital. The neighbors had called Theresa. They had been unable to get Cam. The night that it all happened she was with her lover.
Panic rises up. My fault, my fault. The sex was still wet between her legs when she came to the hospital. She wanted to kneel down before her grandfather, ask his forgiveness. Had she been wrong to go along with him when he said he could care for Ellen after she’d had the last stroke? “I can care for her, Cam,” he had said, “at least at night, after all these years. She is my wife, I just don’t want a stranger in the house. Just not at night. Please, Cam. You can see to it.”
She had seen to it, and had been wrong. “Judgment calls,” her friends who spent their lives in meetings, on committees, called them. The kind of words she hated and made fun of that these people who did such good works always would use: “ballpark figure,” “bottom line.” And yet these were the people who could make money trickle through the world so that her grandfather could be in that nice place, Maryhurst. You had to thank people who said “Let’s interface” for things like that. “It was a judgment call,” her friends said, thinking that was comfort. “You called it wrong. We all do.”
Called it wrong. As if it were a ballgame or a square dance. But what had happened that night was like the gunshot that sets off an avalanche.
Vincent had lain on the floor, calling out to anyone for help. He couldn’t move himself into the hall, where the telephone sat on a stand that he had painted black. It was autumn and the windows all were shut. No one could hear him calling out. He could see Ellen walking in her nightgown. He was afraid drivers w
ouldn’t see her in time; he had to do something before somebody in a car ran her down before his eyes.
On a table near him, low, within his reach, were the historical figurines they had collected. Roosevelt, the Kennedys, an inscribed ashtray from the Democratic Club, a brown-and-green statue of the Bicentennial eagle. He picked one up: a statuette of Robert Kennedy. He threw it through the window. He picked up six more figurines and broke six windows in the front of his own house. A man whose life had been devoted to respect and care for property, he did this shocking and disgraceful thing. He knew he had to. It had worked. Somebody called the rescue squad. The ambulance arrived with its flashing lights and its good citizens: trained neighbors, paramedics, lifting her grandfather onto an air cushion not larger than himself. “It’s a shame there’s so much furniture,” one of them had said, Vincent had told her later. Even then he was able to notice things.
When she finally came to the hospital, he didn’t look at her. When she came to the room, his eyes were fixed on the ceiling; the attentive eyes, the courtly glance, grew fixed. He was trying not to think, he who had always passionately thought about the world before him. She could see him looking at the ceiling, willing himself into an abstract noun, two nouns: age, death.
9
HE DIDN’T STAY THAT WAY. For two weeks he lay on his bed in Mary Immaculate Hospital, trying to make himself let go of his life. Then he grew courtly again, shaved, and asked about the nurses’ families. But he did not inquire about his wife. Something was sloughed off, some burden shifted, then laid down. First in terror. Then relief.
Now, in the room he is about to leave, he fears returning to her anger. All her anger had become corrupted like her body in old age. As a young woman, she’d been beautiful in her anger, he remembered, looking at the sloping garden, far from her. He thought of her anger at the Irish countryside, the harsh soil and scrub growth, the gorse she hated. She’d no memory of tilled field, of the elm or the potato, tender when in leaf. Anger had been Ellen’s chief food. And she feared sympathy like a disease. Do not give it, do not take. Action was what she loved. Is there nothing I can be doing for you, she would say, when he would say he loved her and she couldn’t answer back.