by Mary Gordon
He gives her her cue: “Why do you think that they were like that?”
She says: “It’s no accident the Irish built the subways. And then stayed there. It was the perfect place for them, dark, underground, dangerous, hidden, but the men could get together and tell stories. Drink. And once a year there’d be a party or a picnic and the women would dress stiffly, call each other Mrs., and the men would dance. The next day the women would talk about it in their kitchens. With relief: it was all over for another year.”
He says: “There’s more than that.”
She thinks of Vincent and Ellen’s faces. He knows she is thinking about them.
“I loved them so much,” she says, “I love them.”
Refusing to judge even an absent group, nearly all of whom are dead, he asked her to remember that she loved two of them.
He isn’t interested in judgment. By profession, he urges people to forget their early judgments and to compromise. He is a labor arbitrator. He doesn’t judge Cam when she behaves badly; when she loses her temper, he attributes it to fatigue; when some cruel sentence comes out of her mouth, he forgets it. But unlike Dan and her grandfather, he doesn’t seem diminished by her attacks and displays. Sometimes she’s so grateful for his mercy that she could go down on her knees to him; she wants to tell him that because of him the world is a new place, she sees it fresh, it is a place that she can live in without fear. But sometimes she suspects and judges him for his lack of judgment. How can she trust him when he is so rarely strict? Once he came and heard her in court. He waited in the back of the court, after she’d finished her opening statement; his smile was so extravagant it made her blush. “You were incredible,” he said. “You were a star. I felt like the guy in the audience who gets to take the girl singer home after the show.” For a little while, his praise delighted her. But then she began to mistrust it. She imagined he thought she was eloquent because he was in love with her. She imagined that, with his nature, he would have thought anyone was good. She didn’t want to relinquish her pleasure in his praise. But to be safe, she didn’t give herself up to it entirely; she held on to her portion of mistrust.
She believes that his faults are connected to his lack of judgment. Sometimes she thinks he doesn’t judge because he isn’t paying attention to the world. The same trait, she thinks, makes him careless and forgetful of her. Once she’d agreed to pick up a chair he had bought and to bring it to his apartment. She had a Jeep with a roof rack; she could have the chair tied to the top of the car. He was supposed to be there when she came. But he forgot; he’d gone to get a hamburger. In a rage, she untied the chair from the top of the car and left it on the sidewalk, hoping it would be stolen. Each year he forgets her birthday. Compounding the fault when he apologizes, he says, “I always forget women’s birthdays. I forget my mother’s birthday. I’ve forgotten the birthdays of both my ex-wives. It made them furious.”
She is often angry with him. She wishes it weren’t the case. But she learned how to be in the world from her grandmother, who judged the world in anger, who is judging even in the midst of drawn-out death.
Dying gradually in her bed, her family around her, Ellen judges. She is judging Theresa’s children. She doesn’t know who these people are or what she is judging. But she is furious at the terrible noise that intrudes upon her dreams, the buzz and whine of the power drill John is using, making last-minute repairs for his grandfather’s homecoming. And Sheilah, in the kitchen, using an electric knife. Sheilah and John, at home in the world nowhere, always use wrongly anything to which their hand takes hold. John should not be using the electric drill when his grandmother is having one of her rare peaceful sleeps. There is no reason for Sheilah to use an electric knife on a block of Muenster cheese; it is a useless gesture, a misuse of power: it will get her nowhere, it will open her to ridicule, create a mess. But Ellen rails unjustly with an equal fury against Marilyn, who has tended her for two weeks. She rails against her because she has just used a machine to save Ellen’s life. She has put a tube into her grandmother’s mouth, and then has flipped a switch and sucked out the phlegm that would have choked her.
“Leave it go,” Ellen gurgles, but no one can understand her. “Leave it go.”
It is one of the times when she would like to die, it feels so easy, and she rages because no one will let her do this easy thing.
She is lying in the bed, her dying in the center of the house. She feels she has become her death, feels that they wait for her to be her death, the one event that they have made her. When it is easy she thinks she can accept this one event that they have made her. This bright thing from which all other things fan out. But then, preparing to accept that she is this, she can’t. She does not want to become her death.
She doesn’t know that everyone is waiting for Vincent. She thinks Vincent has left her to her death, in justice punishing her for the offenses of a lifetime. And that they have collected in the house, all of them, because they think that they know something she doesn’t know: that she is dying. They are here because of her. Each of them is here on earth because she lay three times and pushed three children out of her living body to the light and neutral air. So they fan out from her body, once the source of life and now merely the source of the one event, her death.
Vincent has gone away. Did Vincent never know she loved him? He has the right to leave her to her death; in justice, that’s his right. But he made that promise. Was it a mistake? Could that be it, then, all the years and all the promises? Could that be it? Mistakes?
Ellen MacNamara lies in her white net of cloud and sees only glimpses. Lucid rhomboids of the past. She sees her mother rocking in the darkness, gibbering in the dark. She sees her cruel father and his mistress, and the mistress’s ankles, and her cruel back. She thinks of her father and his mistress fornicating in the room above the pub while a mile and a half away, in the countryside, in the desolate and gorse-surrounded house, built on the brown grass where nothing else could grow, her mother rocked and gibbered in the dark. In her bed now, more than seventy years later, weakened beyond action, beyond speech, beyond the power of coherent image making, Ellen renews her vow. That she will not forgive.
While upstairs Cam sits on her childhood bed, her legs stretched out in front of her, holding a blue-backed legal brief, not thinking of her grandparents, not of the law or of the case of Barnabas v. Barnabas, but thinking of her lover in a rather common way. She is amused that she is now part of the democracy of women yearning for their absent men. Sixteen-year-old girls, she thinks, their red nails bitten to the quick; brilliant undergraduates, stars in the sciences; professionals making their way across large cities dressed for success in copies of men’s suits. Repeatedly betrayed hairdressers, waitresses. Single mothers sitting by the phone. Game sixty-year-olds back from the museum or a game of squash. All of us, she thinks, fed by the songs of half a century, musical comedy, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” she thinks, “The Man That Got Away,” “But Not For Me,” “Where or When.”
Cam knows all this, she’d like to stop, but she is buoyed up on the dense ocean of her longing. Ira Silverman can’t be with her now; she is in her grandparents’ house; she is responsible. You can’t be publicly adulterous, she said once to Eileen, and be the one responsible for three generations of family life.
Some people say this is a ridiculous thing, her failure to leave her empty marriage. They say she could do it anytime. But if she did, she would have to give up the idea of herself, in her own mind and in the mind of others, to whom this idea gives and sustains life. If she left Bob Ulichni she would not be the one to get her grandfather, to bring him home, here to this house, where everyone is waiting. For her to bring him home.
She’s never sure if this is idealism, dutifulness, self-sacrifice, or complicated stubbornness mixed with self-love. Whatever it is, she knows her life is better than it was, even torn as she is between states of longing and happi
ness, at least it’s much better than the life she lived before, the life of duty and achievement, comradeship, the built-up victories of her professional success, then coming home to hear her husband in the basement with his radio, to her mother, watching her sixty-five-inch television in her purple room.
It is twelve o’clock. All morning people came to her for things they needed. She got to her office at seven; knowing she’d leave at ten-thirty, she wanted to have a certain amount of work to give her secretary, Joan Reilley, who arrived at nine. At nine-fifteen, Joan, with whom she is moderately well pleased, brought her pieces of pink paper: calls she had to return. A woman, one of her clients, is nursing her child, who is two and a half years old. Her ex-husband wants to take this child to see his family for two weeks. According to the law, he has the right to his children for two weeks a year. He left the family when the two-year-old was eight months. He has never asked for the younger child before; he left her with her nursing mother. Now he wants to have the younger child as well for his legally agreed-on two weeks. He says there is no need to nurse a two-and-a-half-year-old; it’s time, he says, the baby should be weaned. The mother doesn’t want to wean the baby. Isn’t it her right to make the choice of when her child should be weaned? If her husband takes the child for two weeks, her milk will dry up. How, she asks Cam, can she stop her husband drying up her milk?
Another woman owns half her husband’s business. Should she give it up and agree to his offer of alimony, tax-deductible for him? She doesn’t want to give him her share of the business; she wants to know that he requires, if nothing else, her signature. Even though the alimony will be financially more profitable to her and without it the husband will not sign the separation agreement.
The office manager from the Battered Women’s Shelter has called. Cam is their unpaid counsel. If they break the lease with the company from whom they rent their copier and buy one outright, they will save a thousand dollars in two years. But can they break the lease? The company, says the office manager, are incompetent criminals. They never service the machines. But will they sue us if we break the lease?
Dan’s daughter Darci has called. The message: If you don’t take me shopping today, I’ll have to throw myself out of the window from boredom.
Her mother has phoned. The message: I’m low on Cup-a-Soup. Get the tomato, not the vegetable like you did last time. I hate those little peas.
For all of these she has responses.
To the mother who asks: Can he make my milk dry up, she says regretfully: “You won’t win this one. Your child is healthy and happy, he’s two and a half years old. It’s time to wean him. In a court, you’ll be forced to do it anyway. Decide yourself.” She doesn’t say: Don’t be unfair, it’s the father’s right to have his children as the contract says. It’s not her job to speak about this kind of justice. She says: “Probably this won’t work.”
To the vengeful wife she says: “You might win this in court. But financially, it’s ridiculous. Why take a loss?” She doesn’t say: Do not be eaten up by thoughts of revenge.
To the secretary of the shelter she says: “Cancel the contract. Let them try to sue.”
She tells Darci on the phone: “We can’t go shopping today. Great-Granddaddy’s coming home.” She comforts her when she sees her sinking into the bog of seventeen-year-old shame.
She does not return her mother’s call.
And on the piece of paper she has put on the bottom, the message: “Mr. Silverman called. Please return his call.”
This is what the piece of paper records. But she sees: “I love you, you are wonderful, you are mine.” And now, lying on her childhood bed, all she wants is to be with him, to kiss his shirt, his face just underneath his sideburns, his temples and his knees, to be kissed, to talk, to be held, to look, be looked at. His mouth on her breast. Her sex. To be entered. To be with him now. She rolls onto her back, right there in her grandparents’ house, right on her childhood bed, she puts her hand behind her head and dreams. The August heat brings heaviness. She dreams of herself, the tan blinds drawn in her office, where they most often make love. They can only go to his apartment when the Ulichnis are away. She dreams of herself and Ira on the fold-out couch, the red light of the telephone signaling that there are messages she doesn’t answer, there in the place where clients weep, shaking their fists at the betrayal of what they had thought was love. Her grieving clients reach to the glass table for the tactful Kleenex, they rock back and forth in anguish, rage. They cry: “He never loved me.” “She never really meant a word she said.”
11
FROM A PHONE BOOTH on the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, Darci phones her father to say she’s on her way. Standing next to her is her best friend, Rebecca, whom she’s known for seven weeks.
“Daddy, I’m getting on the train now, right this minute. So forty-five minutes, give it fifty maybe, I’ll be at the house.”
“OK,” Dan says.
“Daddy, I did this incredibly stupid thing this morning. I’m so embarrassed. I called Cam in the office and I left a message that I wanted to go shopping. I completely forgot that Great-Grandaddy was coming home today. I don’t know why I did that. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, I know how important it is to everyone. I don’t know what the matter is with me.”
“You really didn’t forget, Darci. It just slipped your mind.”
“You know I don’t believe in euphemisms. Euphemisms are for those wonderful people that brought us Vietnam and vaginal sprays, I’m not one of them.
“It’s true, darling. No one thinks Vietnam is your fault.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
“Darci, you are a splendid human being with the moral fiber of many saints. Just get on the train. I’ll take you out to Howard Johnson’s if you get here soon.”
“I probably won’t eat anything. A Diet Coke.”
“Whatever you like. You can watch me. Just get on the train. I can’t wait to see you.”
Darci knows that he means what he says. She knows she always makes her father happy.
“I adore my father,” she says to Rebecca. “Any woman would be so lucky to have him. It just pisses me off that he’s with that idiot. I mean, he could have anybody, anybody. He feels tied to her by guilt.”
“Let’s promise never to do anything in our lives because of guilt. Let’s make an absolute promise. Not one thing.”
“Not one thing,” says Darci.
They fall into each other’s arms.
“What if he makes you go back in September? What if your mother won’t let you stay?”
“Cam will let me stay in her house. She wouldn’t throw me out. They don’t want me to end up on the Minnesota Strip.”
“What would you do about school?”
“Oh, do an Equivalency,” Darci says, as if the thought didn’t appall her.
“What about college? You’re not going to flush college down the toilet?”
“They’re going to let me, Rebecca. I’ll go to the high school Cam went to. I know my father thinks it’s a good thing. I’ll make Cam talk to my mother. Even my mother’s afraid of Cam.”
“God, you’re so lucky in your family. What do I have, Bernie and Miriam, twin shrinks? My uncle Al, my aunt Lorraine. Who’d be interested in them? Your aunt Cam is really great.”
“I know, I think she’s great-looking too, except she dresses like shit. She’s got these really great boobs. You’d never know it. God, if I had them.”
“So I’ll see you tomorrow,” Rebecca says.
“Yeah. I’ll call you tonight. After we get home. This could be extremely strange. But I’ll be able to use it. Like Mona says in class. You can use everything.”
Darci gets on the train. She thinks how lucky she is, to be an actress, to have an unusual family, to be in New York, to have her father, to be the kind of person who can use all her experience. Her teacher Mona Labourdette had quoted them some words of Henry James. “Be one of those on whom nothing is wa
sted,” she advised her seventeen-year-old students. Darci is determined to do that. She will use everything in her life, her pain when her parents separated, her estrangement in the house where she lives with her mother and her sister and stepfather. She wishes she had known her great-grandparents. She can’t remember what her great-grandmother’s voice was like; she wishes she could, she could use it; she’d love to play Pegeen. She wishes her great-grandfather didn’t make her feel so far away, as if she were always listening to him from another room. She wishes her great-grandmother didn’t scare her, lying in her bed with those eyes that look so frightened, or so horrified. She doesn’t know how they look. She doesn’t understand them. Today she’ll make herself go in and look at her great-grandmother. Lately, she’s been too afraid.
This summer, she knows, has been the best time in her life. She’s taking courses at the Actors Studio. It gives her an excuse not to live with her father and Sharon in Quogue—it’s too far, they all agree, for her to go into the city every day. She’s living with Cam and Magdalene. She takes the bus and then the subway into the city by herself, a child and yet a worker among workers. She has lunch with kids who get their education at the Dalton School, Brearley, among the children of ambassadors and movie stars and meter maids. She makes a passionate friendship with Rebecca. They walk through the magic summer of young girls who believe the world will one day know that they are great. In class, they read the parts of Clytemnestra, Peter Pan.
In June, when she arrived from Seattle, she put a cot in Cam’s study; Cam took off the walls her Spy prints and her Dürer violets and allowed Darci to put up Rothko posters and a poster advertising Judith Anderson playing Medea. Darci was too horrified by Bob to speak to him; there were hints about Cam she didn’t want unveiled—like everyone else, she found it easier to forget that Cam had a husband. Secretly she liked her great-aunt Magdalene, but saw that Cam both did and didn’t want her to—in her confusion, she tried to pretend her attention was only kindness, but Magdalene’s sense of drama was too kindred to her own for Darci to feel mere pity. She saw the way Magdalene used Cam; she saw her beloved Cam grow into a hard stranger in her mother’s presence. She saw, too, with the vision of the gifted young, that the adult world was a series of armed camps that demanded loyalties that she was glad to give because they must be absolute. The excuse for her living with Cam was that it was closer to the city, but everyone knew that she didn’t want to live with Sharon, and everyone knew that was for the best, and so said nothing. Only Staci dropped the odd remark about how pleasant it was with the swimming pool, the hammock, and her father barbecuing every night. Just for the three of them. So pleasant.