by Mary Gordon
So they created between them, Ellen and Anna, a shelter for the mother. Anna, unhoused, the middle girl of a dreamless family, called up a romance from some hidden part of her and pressed it down: a lozenge of devotion that expressed itself in furious domestic passion. To the linens lately bought through the father’s prosperity, the crockery kept from the first days of marriage, the white curtains, the long table where they took their meals, she paid the homage she would once have paid to the person of the mother, whom she counted herself blessed to serve. The mother’s voice, her thin hands, her kindness, the lost look of her, all seemed to Anna Foley emblems of the fineness of the world that made life sensible. Why live if it was only what her family thought to live for? Better to be done with it and dead in the gray river and at peace, if there was nothing but the endless labor she was born to with no object but itself.
She saw Ellen as far above her, to be aided, praised, and feared. Ten years younger, Ellen seemed to Anna to have taken in a manly understanding of the world. At twelve, she worked beside her father, ran the grocery on market days while he sold feed, wrote figures down in books so beautifully it would do the heart of anybody good to see them. In silence Ellen and Anna had come to understand and had agreed. The mother was their charge. Ellen could give the welfare of her mother’s body up to Anna. She’d seen too much for a young girl. The mother felt that, felt she had done harm. “Four times she came upon me, Anna, in the midst of losing one of them. It was a thing she never should have seen.”
He was a brute to keep her going through it, Anna thought. She couldn’t offer the father understanding, or justice. His attentions to his wife could have in Anna’s eyes nothing of the love that he professed. She could not imagine that the mother begged for it, begged for him to come to her, so they could try again, so she could prove that she was not a failure, she could do it, be beside him once again, stand up beside him with a healthy child. Anna could not believe that her devotion to the mother had been shared once by himself. She had the simple, deadened views on sex of any girl brought up on a half-ruined farm, with animals that were a misery and too many younger children to feed. She saw that the father had brought her to the house so that he might feel easy in withdrawing his attentions, his responsibility from the mother. She saw that and was glad, for she believed that her attentions were more suited to the mother than her husband’s, bruised now and wounded as she was.
She had her work cut out for her. It was important work. She understood it perfectly and did it well. She saw herself the solid prop that held up the abode of two superior creatures. The mother losing her strength, the daughter just beginning to get hers. Anna Foley took a pride in Ellen’s looks and her quick answers, in her black eyes that stood no nonsense and her hair that one day every man would want to touch, in her success with the Presentation Sisters, her fast retorts to her cruel cousins in the country, too slow-witted now to hurt her, the way she walked up the high street, swinging a slate, a book she’d borrowed from the sisters. (Unlettered herself, Anna would beg Ellen to read aloud whatever it was she had in her hand. While Anna baked bread or peeled potatoes, Ellen read to her: Sir Walter Scott, a catalogue of feeds. It was the same to Anna, the act itself was of importance.)
Ellen’s love for Anna Foley was the pure love of a child who has been rescued. She need no longer preside over her mother’s ruin, started by the failure of the mother’s womb, completed by her husband’s treacherous withdrawal. She was slipping from them daily, the mother, they could see it, growing slighter in existence, but physically heavier. Less capable of movement now, less willing for it, she fattened in her idleness. Her color darkened and her hair grew lusterless and flat. More and more she sat beside the window now. “What’s that, dear?” she would say when one of them asked her something. Less and less captured her interest; less and less, they saw, she understood.
The father moved them to the country. He took over the feed business; he became the money man in town. On market days he kept Ellen home from school, braving the ire of the Presentation Sisters. It was his gift to her, his daughter, facing down the nuns to show them his regard for her, her value. “She’ll work the grocery for me on Thursdays, Sister. There’s not a man in the village with her intelligence, you’d be right to be proud of it yourselves. I’m grateful, Sisters, you can rest assured, and there’s ways I can show you my gratitude. But she’s my only heir, and never too early to learn the way of things, and who would I be trusting if not her?” Thirteen years old then, at her full growth, she stood beside her father, not his daughter now, but his partner, business people facing down the poor, unworldly nuns.
This was the time that held the seeds for everything to come. His faith in her, his teaching her the ways of money, giving her the care of it, his moving them away into the country. It was his pride in fine material that made the house miserable. He demanded that it be a stone house, a grand house, he believed, but everything around it darkened, and he picked a high spot without trees for its good view of the valley, its glimpse of the river, like the glimpse of a concealed knife on a thief. But nothing grew there. Desolate brown grasses, tough and springy, dry at all times of the year. The land ate moisture up; the house devoured light. Why could he not have put in more windows? Because he built the house to keep his wife from sight. He had no thought of her seeing.
The seeds of everything were planted then. He kept the house in town. He’d stay there, he said, when the business was heavy, not ride the five miles out to the countryside. He was that tired some nights, he said.
But Ellen and Anna knew, and the mother knew that he could not bear to set eyes upon his wife. She’d darkened, coarsened; her flesh was treachery to him, and accusation: he had done this thing. He said he let the rooms in the house on the high street to commercial travelers. Later they found he’d hired a girl from Gort to run the pub for him; he moved her into the house in town, her and her sister, for respectability. The Monahan girls, Rose, the sister, and the name of the offender: Marin. A name that brazen, Anna said, what could you expect from her but brazen actions. Although at first he was not open with her, Anna saw the woman made him be. As proof of love.
He would not let his daughter and the woman speak. He kept them far apart. The woman was glad to go along. On market days, if they met on the street, Ellen crossed over to the other side, pretending she saw nothing. The hate filled Ellen then, and from that time grew up in her a love for vengeance that would mark her life, a cruelty that gave her strength, a knife she always held close to her body. Ready at any time.
In that time, too, there came together the dense sediment that later hardened into hate. She knew that she must hate her father. Looking at him, she knew that she took after him. Like looked at like. She saw the man whose shirts she’d loved, whose boots she had admired, whose posture, upright and commercial, she’d chosen as the model for her own. She understood she could never move as her mother had once moved, silently, the sources of the movement in themselves mysterious. Unfixed. She liked her father’s purposefulness, not the hidden actions of her mother’s world.
But it was her job to hate her father. To punish him for leaving them alone in the stone house with only two windows, for allowing Marin Monahan in the house that had once been her mother’s. To soil it with her filth. He’d made the mother darken, coarsen, till she looked out at the brown grasses from the moment of her waking until dark, her only pleasure food, eaten fearfully and greedily, like an animal. Her mother, once beautiful, now ruined, was her father’s work.
She felt bound to punish him. To hate the pleasure she had had in him. Hate the easy pride, the joy in his company, his words. She would distrust from now on pride and pleasure. She would bind herself to this. She would know that what looked like charm could easily be murderous intent.
She began to plan how she would cheat her father. The idea came when Delia Mullins and her family left for America with much less money than what Ellen had imagined was enough.
Delia was
the one friend she had made. The one child who had had the faith, the courage, the desire to stick with her through the father’s scandal and never say a word. Ellen admired Delia for this, but for nothing else. Compliant, biddable, good-natured (it was said with literal truth) to a fault, she was a pretty, fattish girl with round arms and light hair who seemed to want only a place at Ellen’s feet. It took years for Ellen to unbend to Delia, years of Delia’s presents, secret notes, false errands, false favors asked. Gradually, Ellen grew accustomed to Delia’s attentions. She would not have admitted this; But Ellen depended upon Delia, like an abstemious person who tries liquor, at first to go along, and then acquires a thirst she wrongly believes she can at any time give up.
From the age of ten, Delia had come to Ellen to sort out her muddles. First with the nuns or with her spending money, later, in America, with the power company, the bank, the income tax, the dangerous insulting bill collector, the landlord, the parish priest. For seventy-five years Ellen spoke to Delia, whose existence she required so that she might recognize her own, in a tone of exasperated, hard-pressed impatience. Not a word in all this time of gratitude or love.
And yet she did feel grateful, for Delia had been the only one to see the mother in her ruined state. And had said nothing, knowing that her silence was the coin that bought her treasured place. In the whole of Ellen’s youth, Delia was the only child to sit at the long table beside her and Anna Foley, to smile at the mother and meet only the dead eyes. Delia’s father was a farmer prosperous enough to send her to the Presentation Sisters. Her mother was gregarious and easygoing, happy in her kitchen, but struck dumb with terror of the outside world. There were two sisters who had gone to Dublin. But the imaginative center of the family, the knot of color around which it spread, like a peacock’s tail, was the life of the oldest sister, Moira, in America. She’d trained as a baby nurse there. She’d married a doctor. She lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and whenever the family was ready, she had always said, she and her husband would bring them over. Money was no object, she told her family. She missed them every minute of her life. But money was an object to Delia’s father, Jack Mullins: an object palpable and looming and immense. He would not go to America a beggar. He would save up money till the time was right. They would not sail in desperation, like the people he’d seen go over when he was young, running from grim lives and from poverty, as if it were the plague. The Mullinses’ planning and their saving up impressed Ellen from her thirteenth year.
Each month her own father drew back from them more and more, drew himself towards the woman. Or was drawn. In weak moments, when conscience struck him or a sense of the lost past, he turned to Ellen for forgiveness and was given stone. He admired this hardness in his daughter; he wished for punishment. He respected her for this as he respected her as a keeper of his accounts. He bragged to everyone that his daughter had a great head for business, better than any man in the district, she was born to it, like him. His idea that she was honorable and precise enabled Ellen to steal, over the course of four years, enough for him to pay her passage to America.
The year Ellen and Delia were fifteen was the year the Mullinses left. Ellen had taken Delia into her confidence, as she had taken Anna Foley. The secret was that in the bureau drawers where Anna kept her underclothing Ellen had hidden a pile of money she had stolen, the pounds a term she overcharged her father for tuition, and the daily coins she pilfered from his till. They sat around the kitchen table, Delia, Anna, Ellen, while the mother hummed across the room, a weight of ruin, and heard nothing. Anna told Ellen she was right to go, right to leave the father to his shame, and the mother to Anna’s care. On Delia’s shaky sense of things they depended for the facts, the details of costs, the papers. Ennobled by the importance of the one serious task she’d ever in her life been given, Delia made no mistakes and rose to the occasion like a boy who is useless at home but grows invaluable to his sergeant at war.
Delia said she was sure her sister could be taken in on the business. Anyone would sympathize. She didn’t name the thing that needed sympathy: she knew that she must not. But anyone would understand, she said. Particularly any woman. She said this though she had no memory of her sister, who’d gone to America when Delia was six. But from her sister’s letters she was sure she was a sympathetic person. She was sure Moira would help.
The mother darkened and the father’s actions grew more brazen every day. Yet as he defied the town, the parish priest, his brother, and his family, he grew more to fear his daughter. Most likely, had she asked him, fixing him with the gray look, unforgiving, obdurate, he’d have given her passage money then and there. He’d have railed first, said the business was for her, he couldn’t do without her, but he’d know he lacked the necessary weapon of a good name. He’d have given in. But she never asked him. She took pleasure in her deceit: it was a way of punishing him and only punishment could bring her peace.
She stole and saved money. She obeyed the Presentation Sisters, learned the things they had to teach her, deportment and fine sewing, though she thought them rot. Her mind was fixed on commerce, revenge, and escape. What the sisters could teach her were contemptible, weak-minded female tricks she needed only for camouflage. With Delia gone, she was alone, proud in her refusal of the other girls’ society yet shocked sometimes at her own common loneliness. She turned even more inwards; she tried to curb her pleasure in her father’s business. She would leave it soon. Her purpose was to leave it. At nightfall, she would sit beside her mother. Bringing her chair nearer, she would sit and watch the window filling up with darkness. She would hold the hand that had been lively, clever, magic in its ministrations, dead now, fat, the flesh growing over the wedding ring so that the gold was barely visible.
The news from Delia, good at first, became dispiriting. There was no love between her and her sister. The sister treated Delia as a maidservant, ordered her about, and left the children to her care exclusively. She gave her not a cent for her work, and introduced her to no living soul. Delia was lonely in America. She was a prisoner in her sister’s big house. She lived only for the day when Ellen joined her. They would get a room together, go to dances, join clubs, meet young men. She hadn’t spoken to her sister about Ellen’s plans, and she had to say she wasn’t hopeful. But she’d think of something. Something would turn up.
Ellen wrote Delia terrible letters, blaming her for everything. It was her fault Ellen ever had the first idea of leaving. Because of her and her daft schemes, Ellen had become a thief. She now had a drawerful of useless money, stolen off her father’s back. Because she’d thought that she was leaving, she’d made no new friends at the school and could not now look to the sisters for a character. If she’d never had the idea of leaving, she’d have long ago resigned herself to settling in the town and put her energy into making the best of a bad lot. But Delia’d put ideas in her head and for the rest of her life she’d be tormented.
Delia took the blame. Alone and miserable, she was cut off from her parents, who in turn couldn’t reckon where their loyalties should be: with the older daughter, in whose house they lived, whose food they ate, or with the younger, whom the older persecuted. Her friendship with Ellen Costelloe and her responsibility for Ellen’s happiness had been the only source of meaning in Delia’s life. Now she’d failed Ellen, so she was nothing but a failure. In her dark room at the back of the house, the room that looked out on the somber, joyless garden, insulted by her sister, ignored by her brother-in-law, disobeyed by her nieces and nephews, who, she knew, thought her a fool, her failure made her desperate. It was desperation, then, or perhaps loneliness or the high sense of purpose that grew higher with lost time, that gave her the courage to make friends with Jimmy Flaherty, who drove the baker’s wagon, to offer him morning tea in secret in the kitchen, to meet secretly with him in the garden when everyone in the large house slept, meeting with him all that long summer so that in September, she had to present him with the news: somehow they’d made a baby.
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nbsp; Neither of them was displeased. The shame she carried made real what had been their desire: to fly in the face of family expectations. They ran off. They married and moved to New York. She brought the baby to visit her mother, her sister wouldn’t see them. It didn’t matter. She was married now; her husband was a citizen. He had a job with the Sanitation, could vouch for Ellen anytime. He’d be pleased to, Delia wrote with pride to Ellen. She told her friend what her husband had said: “She’d only to name the day; they’d meet her at the boat with bells on.”
A stronger character than Delia might have written back to Ellen, refusing blame. She might have written, “Don’t say such things to me. You’re young and you’re intelligent, go off to Galway City or to Dublin, do a teachers’ training course, a secretarial, come over by yourself, others have done it.” A strong character wouldn’t have married, out of loneliness, out of necessity, literally the first young man she spoke to in America. But Delia was not a strong character. As a child, she’d looked at Ellen and saw what she herself lacked. Had she known the terror Ellen lived in, a terror similar to her own, she would have suffered a dreadful loss. In seeing Ellen as she really was, she would no longer recognize herself; she would become a different person, would have to have a different life. But she never saw Ellen’s terror, and so her nature stayed intact.
Ellen would wake in the night and see the moonlight fallen on the bare floor like a wafer, like a slice of mirror, an oval of white gold. She’d look at it for portent, but it gave her back only her own fear. What she’d despised in her life grew, in apprehension of its loss, now dear to her. She’d never traveled to a city. What would happen to her in New York? To her father, she would be as dead, and he would be as silent as the dead to her. The mother would be silent too, only just alive, in the dark stupor she’d grown into. And suppose, Ellen would think, her eyes wide open as if they were propped on stalks, suppose I don’t succeed and make the money that I need for my mother? She saw herself locked in a bedlam of a factory room with hundreds of other girls, and dragging herself home through streets that swarmed with thieves. She could be hurt or robbed or cheated. And she saw her mother, sitting by the window, asking for her, calling her by name. She’d never leave, she couldn’t. She’d been deceived. It was Delia who deceived her, then had forgotten her, then married, and had left the sister’s grand house, where there would have been room for both of them to live.