by Mary Gordon
So Cam went to Bryn Mawr, enabling Daniel, two years later, easily to go to Haverford. And they were caught, Cam, Dan, and Bob Ulichni, on the moving staircase of American upward striving.
There they were in college; Bob Ulichni, Camille MacNamara, working-class Catholics at Haverford and Bryn Mawr, with their endless part-time jobs in restaurants in town or in the library, and then, after a Saturday night studying late or washing dishes, up for Sunday-morning Mass. They lived the anxious, crabbed life of the scholarship student, but darkened, hardened by the Newman Center and the chaplain, warning and reminding, “The others are not like you. But they would like to take away your treasure: this jewel, this faith, this your salvation. Date each other, Catholic men and women. Do not set your roots to twine among the Protestants, the Jews. Come to our dances, our discussion groups on contraception and divorce. Sign up here for the bus, the Catholic bus, to register black voters down in Mississippi. But remember your kind. Look around you at the students in your classes. They are not your kind.”
Thinking themselves liberal, the priests allowed guitars at Mass and even had days of recollection with Methodists and Presbyterians. But they still said, “Marry each other, Catholics.” They spoke about mixed marriages (like mixed drinks, mixed nuts, mixed economies). They said, “Look, we’re not saying it’s impossible the other way, we’re only saying that our way is easier.”
They made it easy for Bob Ulichni to love Cam MacNamara, to worship her white skin, her coloring: the perfect Irish rose. To worship her wit, her squarish, competent fingers. To go, because of her, to register voters in Alabama (where she didn’t speak to him, didn’t notice him), to oboe concerts that he had no interest in where she sat with her girlfriends, her legs heavy in blue knee socks, and forgot his name.
He studied chemistry and was at the top of his class and was able to go to Columbia Engineering because Cam chose Columbia Law, though in three years in Pennsylvania they had barely spoken. In New York, reminding her who he was the first time he bumped into her (she had forgotten, she apologized, his name) that they had known each other from the Newman Center, and the concerts, and the Mississippi bus. He kept asking her out to experimental plays, thinking she was interested and that he ought to be. In fact, neither of them was. In the taxi, he’d hold her hand as stiffly as a paralytic, and then, after dinner, he would kiss her with closed lips. And she would say, “Thanks, Bob. We’ll see each other sometime soon.” He knew that when she closed the door of the graduate dorm she never thought of him. But at the end of the year, he’d phone and say that he was driving to Long Island, could he take her things home, would she like a ride?
Who knows what would have happened if in 1965 Magdalene MacNamara hadn’t developed cancer of the breast, and Cam had not had to think about and plan her mother’s death? In the summer of 1965, just before she was to begin her third year of law school, Cam was told by all the doctors that her mother was about to die.
Dan was in Cornell, framed by Married Life. She was alone. There was no one to whom she could explain the complications of her mother’s nature and their joint history. She didn’t want to expose her mother and reveal the oddness of their life. And to whom would she reveal it? To her law-school pals, who sat around after classes in dark bars, talking about old cases, their professors, telling jokes, or talking politics, but never mentioning their families? They had no families: they were living in the world. The mention of a family past in the dark, conversational air, among the spilt beer and the peanuts and the ice cubes melting horribly in the full ashtrays—the mention of family life would shock. It would introduce the notion that, at one time, these people around the table had not been adult. It would be as if someone had set up a crib beside the bar and then crawled into it.
Cam knew that to tell the truth about her mother would be a betrayal, for to tell the truth she would have had to say: “My mother is a failure.” Worse: “My mother is a failure in these ways.”
And now her mother was dying.
So, when Bob Ulichni called to ask her did she want to see the in-the-round production of Citizen Tom Paine, she said no, she was spending her time in the hospital seeing her mother. He said, “Let me stay there with you. I’ll bring sandwiches.” She let him wait in the green lobby with the picture of the Sacred Heart, and Sister Dismas, founder of the order of nursing nuns who staffed the hospital. She let him hold her hand during her mother’s operation, had every meal with him in the three weeks of her mother’s hospital stay, let him visit with her mother, let her mother flirt with him, and listened, and was pleased, when her mother told her, “Hold on to that one. A good man is hard to find.”
She married him before school started in September, through fatigue and gratitude and fear that she was twenty-four and no man before this had seemed to love her.
Nothing good came of it. Not one good thing. At the start there was the blank self-blame of genuinely moral natures, the tender guilty gestures never met in kind and never simultaneous, the outings of the childless young: the restaurants, the movies, theatre evenings, nights with other couples, always failures, always friends of Cam’s (he seemed to have no friends) and Bob Ulichni sitting silent, trying to project a quiet geniality when what he felt was black despair. Cam had her rings of pals: the men she worked with, the women friends from college, the few like her, lawyers and women both. They took part in the proud, uneasy mating of the middle-sixties, marriage not quite passé, but almost, no one yet unfaithful or yet dreaming of it. And at night, less and less frequently, Bob Ulichni would approach his wife, and she, brought up above all to be dutiful, lay back, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, in excruciating pain. She thought, It will get better, this is my fault, just relax. She felt the muscled nature of her heart, its chambers distinct and hardened; she saw the straining worried face of the man she had never loved but married out of gratitude and fatigue and thought: This is my fault and I deserve it.
Now Bob Ulichni is almost destroyed. This is the fault of a disease. Not a disease of his. Nothing in Bob Ulichni’s body has been touched. No silent organism tunnels through, or eats, or weakens, lodges, tears apart. He is the victim of a disease that never touched him: it touched Cam’s womb. Her womb was victimized by endometriosis.
Endometriosis: a disease affecting tissue of the endometrium, outside the uterus, of unknown etiology. Called by the men who do the calling, and think this kind of thing would benefit from a good joke, “career women’s disease,” because it is supposed to go away, or at least the symptoms dissipate, if the uterus has once contained a child. But the joke is that the disease encourages sterility, is cured by that which it prevents. Its symptoms are, to the clinician, dysmenorrhea and dyspareunia. To the sufferer: severe cramping large parts of the month and painful intercourse.
Severe cramping. Painful intercourse. The descriptions make it. sound as if the two effects were the same in a life: a monthly tightening of the abdomen and the impossibility of making love. But if Cam MacNamara had suffered only menstrual cramps, the life of Bob Ulichni would not have been destroyed.
She saw the face of a man who she now knew had loved her many years and had desired her. She saw his simple nature close, close in. She kept trying; most of the time she was in pain.
“Let’s see the doctor,” Cam said after several months. Abashed, Bob agreed, although it meant he had to present to Larry Riordan, who had been Cam’s doctor since her childhood, the evidence of failure: the failed husband and his victim wife.
“You’re not the first, you think you’re the first?” said Larry Riordan. He sent Cam to sit in the waiting room and talked to Bob Ulichni, man to man. “Look, these Jewish bastards, these Protestant guys, or guys with no religion, they’ve got a leg up on us. You know what I mean? Who’d you have in high school, Christian Brothers?” Jesuits.
“Jebbies, Christians, same difference,” the doctor said. “The trouble is, we grow up thinking we’re what they tell us, temples of the Holy Ghost. So we’re afraid to touc
h a girl, won’t put a hand on a girl’s tit till we’ve brought her to the altar. Am I right?”
Bob nodded.
“And with girls it’s worse. So give it time. They don’t want to do it at first, so they say it hurts. They really believe it. But don’t let her get away with it forever. You’re a man, you’ve got needs. You don’t want to knock the whole works out of commission.”
“You don’t think there could be anything wrong with her? Physically, I mean. She has a bad time at her time of the month.”
“Listen, what’s wrong with her is what her grandmother and her mother told her men did to you on your wedding night. They probably made it sound so awful it scared the poor kid to death.”
“But she said she’s always had trouble at her time of the month.”
“What she needs is a baby, that’ll take care of it. Try putting a pillow under her behind.”
They put a pillow under Cam’s behind. But this did not relieve the pressure. The pressure built, until even contact suggested pressure, and all contact ceased.
The fall of 1969 was the last time Bob Ulichni had sexual contact with a woman. What he saw was this. He had admired Camille MacNamara and his admiration caused her pain. He had been all his life a studious, reclusive, secretly romantic boy, with a gift for chemistry and engineering. He could say: The elements behave this way, and this and this. He had been kind and deferential to his mother; in the welter of her seven children, giving no trouble, he was ignored. He had dreamed of a tall fair woman he could honor. And his honor would mean marriage. So he married Cam. And all this, his experiment in the world outside the elements of the periodic chart, ended in nothing but failure and pain.
Three years later, in 1972, Cam, doubled over with cramps, was forced by her sister-in-law, Eileen, to see a gynecologist. She was given a laparoscopy, and was told there was a name for what she suffered: endometriosis, extensive in her case, involving the uterus and both ovaries. She was given various drugs. Nothing worked. She was asked if she wanted children and was told that in any case the possibilities were slim. The doctor recommended a hysterectomy. A tragedy in a young woman, thirty-one. But really, he said, the best course. She didn’t think she had a choice. She had no marriage, but she wouldn’t leave Bob. It wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t have to go to Ulichni family Thanksgivings, Christmases without a wife. She agreed to give up her womb. “And then,” the doctor told her, “you and your husband can resume a normal life.”
A normal life. By which, of course, the doctor had meant sex. So it can be said that Bob Ulichni has not resumed a normal life.
Cam, over the years, allowed herself halfheartedly to be pulled into brief extensions of her friendships with male colleagues: a night here or there in a conference hotel room, a weekend at the beach. None of it came to anything, and she had begun to tell herself that it wasn’t in her nature, as it wasn’t in her mother’s, to love and be beloved. But at forty-one, she met Ira and her life was changed.
Nothing could change the course of Bob Ulichni’s life. He had a nature built for one and only one journey out of himself, out of the world of elements. But on this journey, he was smashed up; he was shipwrecked. Too distant, too impoverished of experience, too abashed and shamed, he couldn’t try again. Bob makes himself frozen dinners in his kitchenette, then disappears to his basement ham radio to converse with people in other hemispheres. “And how’s the weather in Bangkok?” “Spasibo.” “Au revoir.”
But Cam’s life has changed. “I’ve never known anyone like you,” she’s said to Ira hundreds of times, like any lover. And it was true. He wooed her with stories. In her family, the storytellers had been women: her grandmother, her aunt Theresa, herself. The stories were always linked to judgment; they were correctives, proofs, signs that someone in the world had thought too much of himself, the storyteller would show how. This amused Cam in her grandmother, but she dreaded it in her aunt Theresa, and she feared that she herself shared the qualities of her aunt’s styptic heart. She understood the pleasures of judgment, the taste for condemnation like a taste for salt. A racial trait, she guessed, of preserving, self-preserving Irish women. She’d seen them thrive on judgment, finding in it nutrition, healing, the reward for hours of exhaustion and for years of self-control. Refusing alcohol (they saw its devastations all around them), they filled themselves on judgment, and then gave it out, as calmly and with as much confidence as if they nursed the people whom they judged. She’d felt the effects of judgments, cold as an iron railing in the winter, to be feared, you thought you’d never be free of the mark of them—those words and looks, as if you’d put your hand on the cold rail in winter and torn it away, leaving behind some leaves of your flesh. She’d both felt the effects of judgment and known the lust for it, the utter pleasure of it, the buildup of excitement, as in sex, but unlike sex, the high, sustainable plateau. As if you stood up on a high point: (butte, mesa, bluff) open to the winds, and saw the view beneath it of the sea, ice cold and dazzling. The stories told by the women in her family were always in the service of this: this judgment, without whose proximity they could not, any of them, think of pleasure.
But Ira’s stories weren’t tied to judgment. They were surprised, bemused descriptions of the world. Once, after she’d bought a new nightgown, he told her a story of his childhood.
Before or after they made love, he cooked for her; she didn’t like to be naked when he cooked and she didn’t want to be clothed. He wore a robe, but she had nothing suitable. So she bought a thin pink cotton nightgown. It allowed her breasts and sex to be visible, but why not, she thought, why not with him? The neck was high and square. A lace border grazed her collarbone.
She walked into the kitchen wearing her new nightgown. He was cooking. She’d just bathed; the ends of her hair were damp; the lilac scent of her expensive soap was on her skin. It was hot in the apartment. They hadn’t yet made love, but she knew how it would be that night: slow, expressive, punctuated by pauses filled with reverie, returns to languid, half-absent caresses, leading, almost surprisingly, to an active end. Sex that night would be in favor of the female, she thought, walking towards him; that night, she predicted, women all around New York would sleep in peace.
“How nice you look,” he said. He put his spoon down. He forgot his cooking; he walked her to the bed; he asked her to keep her nightgown on when they made love.
Kissing the lace border of the nightgown, he followed it, half-inch by half-inch, with his lips.
“That nightgown brings back pleasant memories to me,” he said afterwards. “We’d go away each summer to the country. To the mountains. There were these houses, farmhouses called kuchelaines, big houses, with several families. There were these long days when you did nothing. Rainy days when you played games with other children. Or fooled around on a piano. Or one year someone played the banjo. Another year some aunt had a guitar. It was just women and children, mothers, grandmothers, aunts; the fathers came on weekends, some of them, or on vacation for two weeks. In the evening, all the children would take baths, and then we’d go outside for the last moments of light. The dark would come, the mothers would turn the lights on, you could see them sitting in the kitchen, at the table, playing cards. They were happy to leave us alone. Everyone’s hair was damp from their baths. Like yours,” he said, kissing the ends of her hair. “The girls wore cotton nightgowns with lace trimming. Like yours,” he said, kissing the lace border once again. “The cloth of those nightgowns was fresh and beautiful. It had a beautiful fresh smell. And the grass smelt wonderful. It wasn’t sex, but all your senses were alive and at the same time calm. Well fed.”
She’d liked the story for itself, but also because it allowed her to feel the bracing deprivation of race difference. It’s one of the things they enjoy about each other—their riffs, Ira calls them—long descriptions or analyses beginning with large generalizations: “The Irish,” they say. “The Jews,” Once Cam said to him: “God, it must be a burden being part of a superior
culture. It’s kind of a relief coming from a bunch of third-raters or self-destructors. Flops.”
“What do you mean, flops?”
“Flops,” she said. “Who do we have? You have Jonas Salk, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Artur Rubinstein. Who do we have? Teddy Kennedy. Phil Donahue. You know, I’m the only person in America who really understands Phil Donahue. He’s just mimicking a particular kind of priest. There was always one of them, not the pastor, the assistant pastor, prematurely gray. The middle-aged women always went to him to confession. He was the moderator of the Rosary Society, the Catholic Daughters. They felt they could talk to him about birth control. At the parish picnic he walked around with a mike, breaking up fights, making sure nobody drank too much. The women all said to their husbands: Why can’t you be more like him? Eventually, he became a pastor and he stopped talking to the ladies. But while he lasted, they were in heaven.”
Things like that would make him grab her and kiss her on the mouth. “All my life, I wanted an Irish girl,” he said. “But I was afraid the Irishers would kill me if they saw me touching one of them. Finally,” he said, “I get my reward. All those rocks your people were throwing at us on the way home from Hebrew school, they were all worth it.”
When he told her the story about his childhood vacations, she felt it was another clue she needed, another piece of the puzzle, Why are we who we are? When he’d finished the story, she said to him: “Why weren’t the Irish interested in pleasure? Why didn’t they give it more attention? Some Jew had the idea of buying farmhouses, building bungalows. Because he understood that people without money needed things like that.”
“And he could make a good living off it,” Ira said.
“Never mind. Two cheers for capitalism. Why didn’t the Irish have pleasant ideas?”
This is a false question, set up only so that she can answer it. As a gift, he will become conductor to her: tap the baton, give her the signal so she can begin the aria, the virtuoso piece.