by Mary Gordon
She’d never believed in happiness. The mention of it put her in a fury. Happy. The word could make her bang down pot or scissors, shovel, garbage can, whatever hard thing she was holding. Her hands were never empty. Even when she sat in company she held something in her hand: a glass, an empty ashtray she’d turn over, a coin, a scissors, or a handkerchief, a knife. But she liked to laugh. Jokes made her happy. Jokes, songs, toasts, speeches, arguments, political and passionate. Her angry politics, words that sprouted up like buildings overnight. Words hard and blunt: stone axes. He thinks of her walking out of the butcher shop she’d patronized for twenty years because Joe McNulty said some bad thing about Roosevelt, then six years dead. She chose to live with meat of lower quality and more expense, chose to put her heavy black foot down on the gas pedal of her 1940 Chevrolet and loudly drive past Joe McNulty’s store each week to a strange butcher, an Italian. Vincent was proud of that. He was not proud, though, of all the parties she had left and made him leave, the First Communions, graduations, barbecues, if somebody said something anti-union or Republican. He’d been shamed by that.
He won’t think of her now. He’ll look at the sloping garden. He’ll think of dahlias, asters. He’ll think of herbs the sisters want, whose use he cannot understand. He will go back to Ellen. But he won’t think about it now.
10
SITTING ON HER CHILDHOOD bed, Cam thinks about her grandfather. She plans her visit to her mother, bringing her mother here (she’s pretty sure this won’t happen, but she has to plan for it anyway). She thinks of her grandfather in his pleasant room, of Ellen in the room below, cursing again and refusing her death. She asks herself: How have I got here, how have I come from all those people?
When she thinks like this her thoughts turn to her mother. Magdalene’s face swims up in her mind, bobbing like a discolored ball pushed under water and then rising up. She thinks first: “I don’t love my mother.” Then she says: “It’s not her fault.”
It would never occur to Magdalene that Cam, her daughter, doesn’t love her. She would always say that daughters love their mothers. She assumes she loves her mother, Ellen. She doesn’t question, doesn’t wonder over what she takes to be a natural order. “My mother is a great woman,” she says, “my mother is a saint.” Only when Magdalene is drunk she says: “My mother never loved me.” In this state, even now, when her mother is dying, when her mother could never come to the phone or even understand its ring, she calls her mother on the telephone; she wants to wake her up. She says to Mary Davenport, to Marilyn, to Theresa, to whoever is on the phone, “My mother didn’t love me.”
As a child, Cam would try to stop her. “Don’t, Mom, it’s late. Don’t call Gran, Mama. Don’t, you’ll wake her. You’ll make her upset.” Her mother would push past her. “Goddamn it, she deserves it. She deserves once in her goddamn life to be upset. The cold bitch. She never loved anyone but John. Me and Theresa, she never cared about either of us. I’m going to call Theresa. She’s the only one who understands. Not you, you’re a cold bitch just like she is.” Cam is seven, eight, nine years old. “A cold bitch, just like her.”
“Don’t call Aunt Theresa, Mom. Please don’t.” She has to protect her mother against Theresa. Theresa the collector, holding, hoarding, storing up damning information, instances of offense. She herself never offended. “It’s not that it bothers me, Camille. It’s you and her I think about. I’m upset for you, what you have to go through. Just remember, sweetheart, if it gets too bad, you just walk out and come right here. There’s always a place for you here.”
Never. I will never leave her.
Cam, seven, eight, nine years old, becomes a craftsman building up a carapace to protect her own life and her mother’s. Always afterwards when she thinks of hate, the things that people do out of hate, the crimes that she defends her worst clients for committing, she understands. She remembers what was in her heart towards her aunt Theresa. You are a liar and a murderer. I am a child, but I would kill you if I could.
She’d meet her aunt’s eye; it took all her courage but she’d do it. “It’s fine here with us,” she’d say to Theresa. “In the morning she’s always fine. She goes to work. She makes my breakfast.”
Then she would see the closed face of her aunt stiffen, knowing she had been lied to. She would see the eyes sharpen, the teeth working behind the lips trying to smile. Theresa was caught up in her hatred. Her hatred had no brilliance; it was functional, and she loved it in its function: to do hurt.
Theresa saw Cam in her carapace. She thought that the child had made herself impervious. But underneath Cam bled, whimpered for her mother, for the fragrant, coiffed woman who walked out of the house in the morning, perfect for the ones who paid her to cut their hair, to do their nails. To this mother she cried: “Why do you leave me to this hate and shame and force me to build up this hard enclosure to protect our lives? I am a child. Your child. Why don’t you protect me? I will always protect you from your mother, your sister. Anybody in the world. I will protect you always. Therefore, you must not ask me for love.”
In the mornings, after her mother’s nighttime telephoning, Cam would walk the two blocks to her grandmother’s. She was seven, eight, nine years old. She would walk silently into the kitchen. She would slip into a chair; she’d watch her grandmother’s clever hands, deft but bluntly molded: their padded fingertips, their pinkish palms. She would watch her crimp pastry, fill it with fruit, shut the oven door angrily, hard, bang down her pots, chop violently, stir deliberately, slip silently to Cam a nip of pastry, a tender carrot, or a spoon of soup. Her grandmother would say nothing of Magdalene’s shame. And Cam would see her grandmother, seriously busy, listening to the radio as she ironed, Our Gal Sunday, The Romance of Helen Trent, or cursing at the news, calling out to her husband, “Dad, it’s lunch now.” And Cam would see, from behind her carapace, her grandmother’s similar edifice, and feel safe then to break out of the enclosure she had built up to protect her mother’s and her life. So that by the time her grandfather came to the kitchen, washed his hands at the sink, Cam’s cramped limbs had relaxed. And she was able once again to speak to him, her darling grandfather, speak her first unchoked words of the day. She had been set free by her absorbed, purposeful grandmother. And Ellen had been in turn set free by her own skill, and her consuming tasks.
In adulthood, Cam has retained her carapace. Some who have flung themselves against it have sprung back in shocked anger. But nobody hates Magdalene. Magdalene has always had her champions, who burrow in the soft flesh of her nature and find love. They find there a bright, wounded creature, an example of originality in her heroism. “Think of her,” her champions say, “let down by her husband, then him killed in that way that only was a shame to her, the no-good, and the kid just six. And what did she do then? Lay on her back and die? Not her,” they say. “She went back to her hairdressing. She never went to school for it, learned it herself watching John Impanata, working as a cashier, then a manicurist, working herself up till she became a hairdresser herself. Then getting back to it while the husband was away. Then buying into the shop, then taking it over when John got sick. Today she’d go on welfare,” say Magdalene’s champions. “But no, not her. Not with her spirit. No. With everything she did for that kid, college, law school, big success, the kid treats her mother like dirt. Does for her but acts like she’s too good for her. But not too good to live in the mother’s house. Of course I guess they have to, with Magdalene always on the edge like she is. So sick.”
Her champions see Magdalene the invalid, gallant in her prison-bed. They visit Magdalene, they tell her all their sorrows, and they come away refreshed.
In 1965, the year that Cam got married, Magdalene developed cancer of the breast. Your mother won’t live, the doctors said to Cam, a law student at Columbia. What shall we tell her? Cam thought: There is no one to ask. Her grandparents were too old, and Magdalene was their child. It would be too terrible to ask someone for help with the death of their child.
She longed to talk to Dan. But Dan had a wife, a baby. She thought it was his first real life, she didn’t want to mar it. Finally she couldn’t stay away. She went up to Cornell, sat at his table in the married students’ dorm, and said, “Magdalene’s going to die, the doctors say. What should I tell her?”
She wished she hadn’t come to Dan, for the grief passed so visibly over his features. And she couldn’t bear to see him grieve, she couldn’t bear to watch his face when it was like this, so porous to unhappiness. As a child, she’d do anything to take that look away, run to exhaustion, dance, tell jokes, make up stories, offer money, steal food, ransack anything. Seeing his face, she wanted to say, “It was wrong, what I said. I got it wrong. She’s not going to die. I have to go now.”
“How long does she have?” he asked.
“Six months.”
“Don’t tell her.”
From the shadows, the quick certainty rose up that made him good at the law. But, hearing him say it, she thought he was wrong.
“I have to tell her. There might be something she wants to do. Or say to someone.” (She did not mean herself.)
“Magdalene? Your mother? What sense does she have of the past? What’s her memory: the dresses that she wore, the dances, the nights out before she met your father? Do you think she’ll tell you she’s sorry for what she’s done? Never. She thinks she did everything for you anyone could do. She kept on working, she thinks that is everything.”
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe she did all she could do.”
Always when her mother is criticized, even by Dan, the glittering enclosure shoots up. Don’t hurt my mother. Praise her. Understand.
“So you’re going to tell her?” Dan asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Remember, Magdalene never minds being lied to.”
But she should have the truth.
So Cam came in one evening to her mother’s room, not too late, and told her what the doctor said. And Magdalene rose up to the second great act of her life: the calm acceptance of the news of her death. She reassured the nurses who prepared her for surgery. She was every doctor’s favorite patient. In the hospital she had her hair washed and set twice a week, put on her makeup every day, and changed her bed jacket the first thing every morning. She made black jokes about her missing breasts and urged her fellow patients to get up, try to walk, not to malinger. She had a parade of visitors like an ambassador: her customers, pulling at their hair in mock horror: When will you be back?
She came back home from the hospital. She redid her bedroom all in purple, with the advice of a decorator, one whose hair she dyed and cut. She bought herself a bed fit for a dying queen, a purple velvet spread, lavender sheets. She had built into her bathroom a black marble tub and shower, she filled brandy snifters with small soaps in the shape of shells or flowers. She built a special closet for her shoes. She took, then, to her bed, waiting for her suitor, death.
Who did not come, as false to her as her betraying husband. It is twenty years later; she is cured, but still is waiting. She never goes outside her house; hardly outside the two rooms she invented for herself, for her role of dying queen. Every five years she buys a larger television. Last year she installed a microwave. In one lavender cabinet she keeps her foodstuffs: Cup-a-Soup and Noodle-roni. Waverly Wafers. Swiss Knight cheese. Every week she gives her daughter a list of foods to buy, a list of liquor for herself and guests, handing the piece of paper to her, holding it at arm’s length, holding it with her fingertips, as if they were distasteful to her, all these bodily needs. Twice a week Kevin, her old partner, comes to do her hair. He runs the shop now, and has hired four more cutters, but he and Magdalene are partners. Kevin and his companion, Dennis, and their friends pop in and out, gossip, bring her the National Enquirer, the Star, People magazine, sometimes Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue. They advise her on her health and dressing up.
She lives now in the joy and peace of one in love with her vocation. She has found her calling; all her talents are put to use: indolence, a limited but well-formed vanity, a desire that people should come to her. Once they have come, an infinite desire to hear their stories, no unwillingness to hear the stories repeated many times.
She is of real help to her visitors: Kevin and Dennis, and her old customers, retired couples whose children have moved south or west, or died, or grown into disappointments to their parents. Cancer victims who can see she is alive. She gives the cancer victims holy pictures with a printed prayer on the back to Saint Peregrina, patron saint of cancer. To her gay friends, terrified of AIDS, she gives out holy pictures of Saint Anthony. For some time, she had trouble coming up with a saint appropriate to this special cause. She settled on Saint Anthony, as she told her friends, because he is the patron saint of finding, and she prays to him to find a cure for AIDS.
Magdalene is in a strange position with her gay friends. She is devout, although she hasn’t been inside a church since her illness (she says the crowds make her faint, she’d just pass out and God doesn’t want that). And she doesn’t believe in sex. She never believed in it in relation to herself. Sex, she thinks, is something that men need and women put up with. Her picture of sex is this: a man, his nature crystallized in his tumescence, looms above a woman, who, eyes closed, pretends to be a corpse. She allows this to go on because she wants a child and wants a house and wants things paid for and not to worry or have to go out to work. Because of these ideas it is difficult for Magdalene to include in this picture a man with a man. She can’t talk to her old customer friends about it; she knows they understand even less than she. Nor can she ask the priest who comes once a month to give her communion. Priests are consecrated temples. They do not want sex.
And she doesn’t want to ask the men themselves, for fear of hurting their feelings. So she comes up with theories she keeps to herself. She is proud of these theories; she believes she is the first to think of them. She says to herself: They’re like this because their mothers didn’t love them. It could be in the blood. The genes. She makes her mind go blank from creating a picture of what this sex might actually be. What she knows is that from these men, these friends of hers, she gets praise for herself as a woman, the praise she always wanted from her daughter, still living beside her in her house, still withholding the smallest word of praise.
Cam lives in her mother’s house because both she and her mother believe that Magdalene is too sick to live alone, but it is as though they live in different towns. Their sections of the house are separate and distinct. Cam has her bedroom, and the living room and dining room, her study, and the kitchen. And Cam’s husband, Bob Ulichni, has his zone: male, scientific, and apart. He has his bedroom and his study and the finished basement, where he has installed what is called a kitchenette. In this way he need never see his wife, her mother, or her mother’s guests. And yet he doesn’t leave. None of them leaves.
Bob and Cam’s marriage is a failure. Looking at the painful life of Bob Ulichni in his kitchenette, the flourishing life of Cam in the world, in the happy bed of her lover, anyone might point and say: “See what you have done to your poor husband.”
They never should have married. Bob should have married, at nineteen, a nursing student, supporting her on his scholarship money. He should live in a long, one-story house: the basement, in any house he lived in, would be his. There, as here, he could have his ham radio, where he could talk, as he does now, to Europeans, to Southeast Asians, and in his study, there, as here, he could install his homemade telescope. With which, in that one-story house which he will never now inhabit, he could show the constellations to his many children, each of whom, in his or her suburban school, would be outstanding in science class. Still he would be nearly mute, but it would be better. He would have a place to live.
Their marriage is a story of the middle-1960s, and of Catholics in Ivy League (or nearly) colleges and universities, where they feel they do not belong. Cam went to Bryn Mawr in 1959. Miss Blake, Cam’s high-school Latin teacher
, had studied at Bryn Mawr. Bookish, tenderhearted, pigeon-breasted, plain, a competent but uninspired student at Bryn Mawr, she watched the student body of the high school turn from light-haired Protestants, with the occasional infusion of a German farmer’s child, to a postwar salad of Brooklyn refugees. She grievously misunderstood these children, thinking, for example, the Italians would be interested in Latin since it was the language of their ancestors, and the Irish, in their devotion to the Church, would be in love with Latin as she was, having heard it from birth. The students were polite, it was the age when students were polite, the students of working-class parents who worshipped teachers as the incarnation of the intellectual life they despised and feared. But after ten years of teaching, Edith Blake knew that her students thought her odd and finicky, and so, when she met Camille MacNamara in 1955, in her freshman class of Latin I, and saw returning her gaze the clear, level eye of sheer intelligence, she poured half a century’s love into this brilliant child of such a vulgar mother, grandchild of the charming, heroic grandparents, poetic-looking and political, though they were Democrats and Edith Blake’s people had always been Republican.
Edith Blake convinced Cam’s grandparents (she phoned them, wisely stepping over Magdalene) that Cam should apply for a scholarship to Bryn Mawr so she could study classics and teach Latin at a university, as Miss Blake never could have done.