by Mary Gordon
But she didn’t care. Not living with her father meant she could talk him into meeting her in New York. The City. It was hers.
She’d been seven when she’d moved to Seattle with her mother and sister, and her memories of New York City shone: the treasures of a child for whom childhood is an imprisonment, a temporary, senseless stop on a road she can sense will open up if she can only get going. For Darci, the games of childhood were a torment and the company of other children an enforced, unnatural situation. Early on, she dreamed of sleeping in hotels, riding in taxis. While other children her age wished for ponies, she wanted an apartment with a view.
And New York—she called it, even in Seattle, The City—was her father’s. Her father, in whose company she could feel joy. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother. She felt bolstered up and braced by her mother’s quick, definite, and dry view of the world, and by her sure movements through it. She was proud of her mother’s looks, of the costumes she made for both her children on Halloween, of the envied and enviable birthday parties she created. She loved the cool sheets her mother arranged for her sickness, and her deft hands, her way of measuring out medicines that could inspire faith. But she felt beside her mother and her sister overfleshed and overheated. She made her way through the world crying, “I love, I hate. How happy I am; no one in the world has ever been so miserable.” Valerie looked on her kindly, was amused, impressed by her daughter’s passions, by her paintings and compositions and uneven, undisciplined bouts of piano practice, which the clever teachers loved her for and which the mediocre feared. But Darci knew her mother saw the world she lived in from a distance. She knew her world was, for her mother, overgrown. Her mother watched her from the high place where she lived: a cleansed place, an empty place where nothing hid or bred in secret or disappeared.
But with her father, with his jokes and his apologies, like her jokes and apologies, his miscalculations, his perfect plans, his going into court, the fool he lived with (she had been told why), Darci saw the life that was her blood life. When she stood beside her mother she felt her white flesh insulted Valerie; she felt her physical existence like a living rude remark. Her body lived beside her sister’s only to be reproached. But she could walk in happiness beside her father or Camille. This was for her the emblem of her happiness: to walk between her father and Cam on Fifth Avenue, MacDougal Street, Central Park West.
She is riding on the subway. She looks around her. Everyone on the car is interesting; she thinks they are all living interesting lives. She thinks about her great-grandmother. Today, she won’t be frightened. She can learn something from this. She will be someone on whom nothing is wasted. Someday, she knows, she will be great.
12
CAM SEES THAT DAN IS standing at the door. He says: “Let’s go for a walk.”
She puts her papers in her briefcase and she smiles at him, taking her glasses off, happy at the prospect: they’ll walk on the streets they walked as children with the same flat gray pavements, unambitious trees, the green leaves that show their undersides in a light wind.
Dan looks around the room, Cam’s room in childhood, though she’d never lived in the house, as he had. The house hadn’t been, as it had been for him, the only childhood home. It had been his address. In the front covers of his books, his notebooks, it had said: 128 Linden Street. The numbers and the words described his life. For Cam it was the refuge, the occasional escape. They kept this room for her; they kept it for his sake, too, knowing how happy he was with her.
She was two years older than he; she had never not been there. He’d always come to her as the younger boy. He’d come for comfort and she’d understood. He had been orphaned by two violences: the War itself and the theft of his grandmother, who had stolen him from the simple weakness of his mother, had kept him for herself.
“Five minutes,” she says. “Three.” He decides to look in on his grandmother.
Ellen is sleeping. The skin is stretched so tight against the skull that Dan is afraid that it won’t hold. In sleep she seems not angry. He wonders about these last images. What memory or current sight swims up behind those eyes that, when open, seem dull moons of accusation, discontent, regret? What is the function of that sight?
He walks past his cousin Marilyn. Calm, angelically calm. She has the nature of their grandfather. He sees: She is my grandfather now. Marilyn moves away, out of the room, so Dan can be alone with Ellen.
Is there anything to say? He takes the hand, a claw now, of the woman whose soft flesh was bolster, shelter, refuge, and reward. She stole him from his mother with the righteous grasping of the victim of a great disaster. Most likely she was right to steal him from his mother. He saw his mother for the first time when he was thirty-five. All Ellen’s predictions had come true. At fifty-three she was a ruin. And, soon after, dead.
But she was his mother. And he couldn’t know if she was born to be a ruin or if Ellen made her into one.
By which he meant he wanted to ask his mother: Did I? I didn’t mean to abandon you, I was a child. And now, a continent away from his two children and their mother, he wants to say: I didn’t mean this separation. I never meant to be apart.
Now he takes Ellen’s hand, which is claw, paper, bone. He thinks: After all this time I have not found the right name for you. What can I call you? What should I have called you? Grandmother. Too long, too indirect. No word comes, so he thinks of pictures: her apron over her flattened breasts, the thin ring sunk into the flesh of her fourth finger, the fingers themselves. The smell of her, he was unable to forget that she was physical, unlike the mothers of his friends. Those mothers of the fifties were corseted even for housework; they wore scarves around their pin-curls and their housedresses were not like Ellen’s; on theirs you smelt detergent and felt the fabric stiffened by starch. His grandmother wore dresses limp from washing, sweaters even in the summer, cardigans with silver buttons, thick stockings the shade of milky coffee, in the forties worn-out pairs of old black shoes and in the fifties sneakers, navy-blue. Her hand, still covered with wet earth, arranged tight bunches of flowers in a glass. Vivid flowers, and unfashionable, shocking combinations: night-blue, purple, and then orange, yellow, red. Cosmos, marigold, cinque-foil, pansy, flowers with simple facelike centers, sweet peas, lilies of the valley so abundant they were nearly wild.
When Dan thinks of how he came to live with his grandparents, he wants to shut off his mind. He knows that Ellen took her grief, her loss, her hatred, greed, and sharpened it against the weak and unarmed nature of a girl. Dan’s father, John MacNamara, his mother’s favorite, only beloved child, married Doris Butler a week before he went into the Air Force. She was four months pregnant with his child. Ellen never would forgive her.
Once Vincent had told Dan the story of Dan’s father’s death. He’d said: “I never thought a son of mine would die.” But Vincent had never said anything to Dan about how his mother had been made to go away and he had been brought up by Ellen and Vincent. Over the years, Dan had constructed pictures he could comprehend. He placed his mother at the center.
Doris Butler, a weak girl, with a weak spirit and a kind, un-discriminating heart. It was her bad fortune to mature just as young men her age were going off to war. For Doris, the world was fluid; edges disappeared; in her vision pastel discs merged and recombined. Her effortless good nature fed itself on images flickering from films. She thought the world was made of brave men terribly in need of comfort. She would comfort them. They told her she was pretty; they were only boys: why shouldn’t she believe them? Her physical ignorance was as complete as if she had grown up, not twenty miles from Manhattan, but in some tribe where it was believed that a baby was implanted in its mother’s womb by mist, rain, or a visit from the moon.
It didn’t matter how she met John MacNamara. Anyplace at the beginning of the war. The Roadside Rest, where you could drink beer and dance. John MacNamara told her she was pretty. She was pretty. Small, pale: Look at you, I could put my hands around
your waist; see, two of your hands don’t make one of mine; watch, I can hold you like a flower.
Or it might only have been that Doris Butler and John MacNamara drank too much one summer evening, had each other in the back seat of a car. Brute hunger met brute hunger; it was simple; it resulted in a child.
Or they might have talked about their families, their jobs, their friends from high school, the War. And John might have thought: I could see her in a kitchen, smiling easily, as my mother did not smile. And one day I would like to have a child and leave my parents’ house. To come home to her singing, to her lightness, unlike my mother’s heaviness, her serious quiet reading. But first I will go to war, and I will see her every night before I go. Tenderly, almost brother and sister, lying down outside somewhere, night after night, one summer. And one night, almost not frightened, she tells him: I think I’m going to have a baby. John is almost not unhappy. Until he thinks of his mother, of her face.
The face of Ellen MacNamara in 1942. Her life shaped by two men: her son and Franklin Roosevelt. Passionately driving around town, campaigning for local Democrats, handing out leaflets, arguing, creating rifts, her black shoe heavy on the gas pedal, her mouth tight with threats. “Good, vote Republican. You hardly have a pot to piss in as it is, and they’ll take that.” Three causes—Roosevelt, the unions, and the War—took up the love she should have given to her daughters, whom she saw as torpid, truculent, and weak. Proudly she went with John to sign up for the draft. It did not seem possible that he would die. She saw him safely under the protection of Franklin Roosevelt. She didn’t think about her son with women, but she supposed that someday he would marry. She didn’t like young women; she didn’t like women much at all. She thought they lacked the edge that made a cut through the world’s murk, the murky atmosphere she hated. One kind of young women she liked, the indefatigable girls at Democratic headquarters. Up till dawn and ready for the next job, girls with short, overmuscled legs and jokes that made the thought of sex ridiculous.
Dan had imagined the night his father had to tell his parents. Perhaps John found them sitting at the table after dinner. He knew this was the night he had to tell them, he’d been with a girl, now she was going to have a child. Theresa had done the dishes and had gone upstairs. His parents were reading the newspaper. Ellen sat, leaning into the paper as if the wind were at her back, hungry for details of the War. His father leaned against his chair, courtly in his posture towards the baseball score. Was this the worst moment to tell them, or as good as any other? Who could know? John at nineteen, who had never done a thing not pleasing to his parents, who had been head altar boy and Eagle Scout and high scorer at basketball though he was not exceptionally tall, this same John had to say: I’ve been with a girl. Now she is going to have a child.
Perhaps Ellen stood and, turning her back to son and husband, left the room.
Or perhaps John had spoken to his father first. Left it to his father to break the news. Male first to male. No, John would not have done that. To keep something from his mother would be to deny her place in the family, the first place. With his mother out of the room he might have said to his father: Watch out for Doris if I don’t come back, then gone out once again to be with Doris, to tell her he’d broken the news, to say: “I’ve told them. They’re fine. Everything’s fine. Everything’s all right.”
But it wasn’t all right. It was never all right. Never once did Ellen MacNamara come near Doris Butler with anything but cruelty; she would not approach her, except to hurt. Injury to this girl was Ellen’s only pleasure in her company. “It’s your fault; he was never like that,” she said, not in words, but over and over in her acts to Doris. And when John died she blamed Doris, thinking: If he’d gone into battle pure he’d have been saved.
John married Doris, and moved Doris into Ellen’s house the week before he went away. Dan imagined Doris living there throughout her pregnancy. Ellen silent except to injure, Theresa contemptuous, horrified by the proof of female physical life that Doris gave. Perhaps John had told her that Theresa would warm up, that before long she’d be coming upstairs, bringing her cigarettes, her ashtray, would sit down on Doris’s bed and chat all night. But Dan knew she never did. He knew Theresa came in late at night from dates and shut her bedroom door. He knew how they all were. Only Magdalene was nice to her, but she was married, had her husband and her baby girl. She made packages of baby clothes, gave advice, but she was busy: in the day she had her job at the hairdresser’s and at night her family to tend. Vincent bestowed on Doris a constant, furtive kindness, worried always that Ellen would see, would hear him saying to her, “Drink your milk up, now, you want the baby to have nice strong bones.”
Why did she stay? Her family was just across the town. Why didn’t she go home? Because she knew that she had pushed herself out of the estate of girlhood. How could she go back pregnant to the sisters’ bedroom in the family house, four beds in the room, her youngest sister six years old? It was a house full of eight children; she, the oldest, was eighteen. Where could she put her baby there? As each brother and sister was born, the two-year-old would move out of the parents’ bedroom and be placed in a crib in the middle of the sisters’ room, near Doris’s bed. Dan could see that room. The crib in the middle surrounded by the sisters’ beds, their white chenille spreads pulled tight each morning. How could Doris bring her own baby there? And who would pay its expenses? The MacNamaras had more money than the Butlers. Dan had never met his mother’s family. Sometimes he walked past what used to be their house. They’d moved to Iowa soon after he was born.
In the MacNamaras’ house Doris kept the light on in her room. John’s room: the baseball pennants still up on the wall, the wallpaper pretending to be knotty pine. With the light on, she thought that she would try to read; she thought that John would like that. But she never did. She’d never read before. How could she? In her sisters’ room, with fights and chatter, and giggling and then the command: Silence! shouted by her father up the stairs, then the silence that fell on the room, sudden and absolute and violent: the crack of a whip. When she began to feel the baby move, Doris treasured it as company.
And then the news came—John was dead—and his cruel mother became terrifying. She who was cold and perfect flew apart; her wildness made the house a danger, and made Doris fear for her child moving in her. How could she be safe when the mother at the center of the house first raged and then collected all she had left of herself beneath an iron sheet of hate? No one thought to comfort Doris; she had known John so short a time they felt she didn’t need much comfort. And her family? It was as if, in leaving the house, she had dived down below the surface of the water on which they, as a family, sailed. The waters covered over; she was gone.
She moved in the house of mourning as a foreigner. They spoke, when they remembered to speak to her, more kindly now, except Ellen, who never spoke to her at all. When labor began, Vincent took her to the hospital, sat with her in the evenings after work; her sisters came, her mother and her father. But she felt that no one wanted to be near her. The nurses kept the baby from her. Mostly she would sleep.
So she was clumsy when she took the baby home, and frightened, although she’d cared for all those brothers and sisters. She was grateful when Ellen took him over, comforted him when she could not. Little by little, she became convinced that she could do nothing for her baby that was right. She felt he stiffened in her arms and relaxed only in his grandmother’s. Ellen suggested that Doris might like to go back to work. The feigned kindness in her offer frightened Doris, like the witch’s offer of sweets to Hansel and his sister, Gretel: to eat was to be poisoned, to refuse was instant death. She went back to work in the 5 & 10, and was happy there, happier than she was in the MacNamara house. She tried to feed her baby, change his diaper, but under Ellen’s eye she failed at everything, and Ellen’s eye was never off her. The child gagged on the food she spooned him, or screamed so Ellen thought she’d stuck him with a pin. “Don’t touch him, yo
u upset him,” Ellen would say, taking the baby from her, turning her strong back. And how could Doris not believe her? Her son became a stranger to her; she feared to approach him, for the sound of his refusal of her each time pierced her heart.
She did well at the 5 & 10 selling makeup: lipstick, rouge, compacts of powder, bobby pins, hairnets, nail polish (thirty shades whose names she knew) and the clear bottles of remover, emery boards, orange sticks, nail buffers, files. Her boss began to praise her. Harvey Kelley was his name. He had a wife, two children. But he wasn’t happy, he told Doris, he dreamed dreams. He drove her to the beach and they walked there in the evenings. One night they made love. They were both very lonely. When the time to go away together came, they felt that they were leaving no one.
Dan couldn’t imagine how they lived, what they felt, how long they stayed together. Or if Doris thought of her son, Daniel, company for her when in the womb, after his birth a stranger. Doris ran away, with no word, no forwarding address, leaving Ellen her child. Ellen allowed the child to bring her to life; she made for him a living heart and housed him there. For him alone she dug up roots and boulders, created a moist living place, and said to him: You can live here. And made a place for another child, a girl, his cousin Cam, his sister, she could see they both were orphaned, saw them huddling together, warming each other with their breath.