by Mary Gordon
She’d walk downtown, among the busy men so full of import and real destinations, and the girls, younger than her they looked, bank clerks and secretaries, stiff with responsibility and pride. Among them she’d take a cup of tea in a shop, as they looked at her and knew her as not their own. As they moved to rush back to their offices, she would languidly expand: Another cake, please, she would say to the cool waitress; tired, she could tell, of ladies and their small appetites. She would walk farther downtown and see what she’d been spared: the filthy tenements, the street-lived life, the bumptious children, the displayed life she hated, envied, feared. Gratefully, then, she’d walk uptown, her packages secure in her bag, her feet that she was proud of sore in their well-made boots. Content, she’d close the door behind her, watch the shadows thickening on the wood floor, comforting, reminding her that she had hours left, hours when she must answer to no one.
She would soak her feet.
She’d not give that up to please anyone. But what would have happened that day had she not, in her anger, run into Laura Fogarty? Laura Fogarty, whom she had met a year before, when they were each sent by their mistresses to do a two-month course with the genteel Miss Berringers in their rooms at the Gotham, a residence hotel on Madison and 89th. The rooms were weighted down with the sisters’ plush draperies, the tiny marble bowl up which climbed alabaster doves, the replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (which she remembered from one of the nuns’ books at school), the cracked carved wood of the large chairs. Five ladies’ maids came there for a two-month course. The connivance of it. Now she makes a fist and brings it down, unsatisfying, on the white plastic arm of the bed. Where did that bed come from? It wasn’t the bed she’d shared with Vincent. She’d never had a bed like it. She never would. Nor Vincent. Flimsy stuff they hated. Would not have it in the house. “Two months,” she remembered the Miss Berringers saying, “two months to learn the art of perfect care of Madame’s clothes.”
Two months to listen to those old sticks, with their surprisingly youthful teeth that they showed when, lifting their lips like horses to get sugar, they smiled. Two months on brushing, folding, packing, invisibly mending. Buttonholes, handkerchiefs, preventatives against the moth, or remedies against the mud that stubbornly adhered to Madame’s hem.
“D’ye call yours Madame, then?” Laura Fogarty had said.
“I do,” Ellen had whispered, resisting conversation.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead.”
After that, Ellen disliked her.
But what if she hadn’t run into Laura that day, the day she had refused Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the day rage bulked up against her line of sight, as solid as a building?
“I’m out of service and I thank God for it. You’re a fool if you don’t get out. A slave. Your life’s never your own, and what’s the use of living it that way?”
Ellen’s pleasure in the free time they’d granted her became hateful from that instant. Why should she be grateful for the free breath, the moments free of another’s power to order her seconds, minutes. Surely this was every human’s right: each day to have some time alone. It was a dreadful thing, a terrible unnatural thing, she saw it now, to have your ear poised to answer a bell that tinkled—so genteel Claire Fitzpatrick thought, almost silent, she imagined. The slight, unobtrusive sound of wealth. You answered to a bell. Dogs did that, came not to their names but to the signal. The abasement of the name repeated constantly was as bad. “Ellen, I’m tired to death, get my book, will you?” A dozen feet away from Claire Fitzpatrick the book sat. But she would ring for Ellen to run up three flights of stairs rather than rouse herself to walk a dozen footsteps. “Ellen dear, help me with my sewing for the charity. I’m perishing of boredom. And while you do it, tell me something of your life.”
She made up lies. You will not have my life.
A slave’s trick, lying. A slave’s gratitude.
Laura Fogarty said: “The lady runs my place is looking for a girl. You’re a good needlewoman, I remember. Throw your chains off. Come with me.”
She followed Laura up a side street within sight of Union Square. The business signs were few, and her heart quickened to see the famous name on the brass nameplate. Madame de Maintenant. Claire Fitzpatrick yearned one day to have a dress made by Madame de Maintenant, but knew it was beyond her. Ellen and Laura passed the row of carriages, walked down a stairway to the basement, proud, were let in by a woman prouder than them both who nodded merely when Laura said: “She’s a good needlewoman. She needs a place.”
Ellen tries to sit up, but she can’t; she’s strapped.
She can’t remember the look of that old place. She sees shadows, gaps, then objects disconnected from each other and their names. She sees scissors on a long white table. The ornate black legs of some machine. She sees sleeves, a set of sleeves it was her job to put into a dress someone has made.
She sees her own hands working with the sleeves. Her hands are real, they are palpable in the grasp of her eye. The room holds promise. She can recognize her hands. And a voice, severe, noting a fact. Answered by her own voice, noting another fact. Two girls, working together. Helpful to each other? No. Contingent to each other. I will get you something you have dropped. Praise? No. But later, the fierce, shy friendship of two girls, made up of adoration, mutual humility, a sense of honor, and momentarily the lifting of the curse that is their life: poverty, hard labor, the female sex.
Now through her mind pass all the bodies she has been. The girl child running behind the easy body of her mother, the mother’s body like a ship, then older limbs, light, long, and painful in their joints, and the new arrivals: breasts, hair, blood, monthly pain. Grown used to that at last, the self lost, and herself a mother, who does not see herself a ship at ease in movement, but is disquieted by her unbalance and the shock, splash, danger-cry of giving birth. My body not my own but empty once again. The heavy softening: Where are the girl’s light limbs? How have my breasts become this shape? Did you, child, do this to me? Take all that? The veins, the feet, hardening like trees and growing roots. And now she once again has taken on a lightness. She has become a leaf now, insubstantial to herself, in the light body of near death.
She is remembering the bodies she has been. And yet she understands: at any moment to herself she always has been the one body. The lost body forever lost. But not the voices. No. Not lost. Bella. She hears Bella’s voice, as she has always. Bella. My friend. She calls out. Tries to remember: How did we first speak to one another.
First in shame. Shame that they passed each day the other girl, the courageous girl, shamed that they said nothing, shamed by the girl’s brave eye.
Ellen had been at Madame de Maintenant’s two months. She felt she’d bettered herself; she was delighted to be free of service, left alone, left to the silence of the workroom where she served. After work she could leave behind the person she was to them in that room, the wage earner, could take herself up once again, at no one’s beck and call, For a few hours each night she had quiet, she had what she desired of silence, emptiness, where the ideas could sift down, the sights turn over and over, stones, dry stones: The thoughts I have.
Delia was living in West New York with Jimmy and three children now. At first, saving herself expense and helping Delia, Ellen had agreed to live with them, but she couldn’t stick it. The noise of the children, Delia’s hurt if Ellen wasn’t speaking to her every minute of the day, her hurt if Ellen closed the door, her timid knocking: “I’ve got a cup of tea here for you. Would you just take a look at this paper from the government….It worries me, this envelope. Does it look important? Can it be Immigration? We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Every brown or yellow envelope she thought was Immigration. That made Ellen furious. “It’s nothing, Delia. City water. Why would you think it was Immigration? You’re a citizen, for God’s sake, have been since you married Jim. Fortunately, they weren’t giving out intelligence tests then or they’d have sent you on your horse forever as a fool.�
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Delia cried when Ellen left them. One day she saw a sign in the window, rather near to Delia’s, “Room for Rent.” Her wages were quite good, and unlike other girls she had no family needing her money. She climbed the back stairs of Mrs. Devlin’s boarding house and was shown the dark room with a view of a garden, and, if you leaned out and the night was clear, a glimpse, like a strip of mirror, of the river. “That’s fine,” she told the landlady, hardening her heart to what she knew would be Delia’s pain. Delia was pregnant once again: she put it that way. She said: “You need the room.”
“Oh, El, I can’t believe it,” Delia wept, watching her friend pack, as if she were crossing the ocean, not a few streets. Jimmy Flaherty, jovial and addlepated as his wife, had helped Ellen with her things. So it was hers, the place she could close the door of, every night now if she wished. She knew Mrs. Devlin charged her too much. The other boarders in the house were rough and loud; she had nothing to do with them. The window of her room was cracked; the water in her basin froze over in winter. But it didn’t matter. She could put her own things around her. She could keep herself to herself.
Her work at Madame de Maintenant’s did not displease her. She was valued, praised by the stout forelady, whom she despised for meanness. Mrs. Bellamy thought herself a lady, above them, but Ellen knew her for what she was: gossipy, ignorant, a creature fattened and made solid on her greed and pride in being above others. Ellen was praised and was not interfered with. Each day they were given lunch, a privilege, the forelady told them, each day, nearly tearful over the mistress’s generosity. “Look at the sandwiches, the tea carried to you. Where else would you be getting this? Ladies: remember Madame every evening in your prayers and in the morning as you kneel beside your bed, let her name be first upon your lips, before your family even, for she gives you everything, and none of you know what she suffers.”
When she disappeared, racked with emotion, into the glass office that was an island in the center of the room, from which she could see them at every moment, see each thing they did, the girls would keep their eyes down on their lunches. No one would meet another’s eye. But it was over lunch that she and Bella spoke, she and Ellen, who didn’t know each other’s names. They sat together; Ellen was pleased by the dark girl’s angry look. She liked somebody looking as angry as she knew she was herself. Each day at lunch the dark girl’s hunched back hid the book she read as she ate, not looking at her food, not looking up. But one day, reading, not looking, she knocked Ellen’s full cup of tea onto the floor. Mercifully, nothing was soiled. They were on their knees together, swiftly cleaning up the evidence, for it would cause a reprimand and any moment the forelady could roll towards them, seeing the spilled tea as proof of everything she always knew: they were uncouth, ungrateful girls; they did not deserve a bit of Madame’s kindness, and they never would.
Kneeling, acting with swift, efficient motions, they kept the damage from the enemy’s all-seeing eye. And their eyes met. Ellen, kneeling, said to the other kneeling girl, “Every morning on your knees let Madame’s name be first upon your lips, before, even, your family.” They could lose wages if the laughter that they recognized in each other’s eyes spilled out. They allowed their mouths slightly to twitch. Meaning: I single you out.
After that, she got the courage from Bella Robbins to do what she wanted: bring a book to work. She knew the world, the times were terrible. The year was 1913. Danger from Europe threatened the innocent Yankee air. She wanted to understand how these things came about. She wanted to read history. Not just the newspapers, which she devoured, but history. She found two books on the dustbin in the alley between Mrs. Devlin’s house and the Farley house to the right: she plucked them, frightened of the defilement of books cast out, of the books themselves. Two books, one brown-covered, one blue. The brown A Shorter History of Ireland. The blue: The Course of Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte. “Would you be reading these?” she asked Mrs. Devlin. “Would it be any trouble if I took them?” Mrs. Devlin shrugged, incredulous that a book could be of value.
At night in her room, feeling that she stole grace, she read the books that she’d found on the dustbin. She was unused to ideas: the reading was difficult. It was labor. Her mind strained, moving a heavy object. She cursed her mind. It was impermeable with stupidity. She cursed her training at the Presentation convent. Catechism and the simplest pious poetry, needlework (that she was grateful for: it earned her living), cookery, the painting of china or of fans. Ideas they feared, and in the house she lived in with her mother in the dark, in shame and hiding, there was not one book. Not even the Bible, which in Ireland was thought dangerous, to be read only with the guidance of a priest. Although the ideas she tried to take in overmastered her, she was in love with them, and even when she beat her temples with her fists—it was impossible, she was too dull—just after that, she would feel calm and honored by the grandeur of the enterprise she was allowed to have a part in.
So, while the other girls ate quietly and decorously, talking of their families, their beaux, dress patterns, Ellen Costelloe and Bella Robbins sat in silence. They ate and read. For months, in silence, saying nothing of what they saw behind their eyes, because the printed words were vulnerable: who knew what would become of them if they were turned to speech.
Ellen saw that Bella’s book was not in English. German, she thought. She saw the writer’s name, Schopenhauer, and the name abashed her. She was happy simply to know someone who could read a book by someone with a name like that. At the end of the day they walked out the door together, and wished each other good night. Respecting one another’s silence, knowing the treasure of the other’s anger, pride.
And then there was the day when they passed the accusing girl. Sitting on Madame’s doorstep, saying to each girl who went in: “If you go in and do her work and take her money, you put in your pocket money soaked in blood. She owed my sister wages. She still does. For the honor of working for Madame Maintenant,” the accuser went on, “who could not pay her [the so-careless customers, they did not pay; and what could Madame do? they’d heard the forelady say], my sister went for months without her proper wages. Madame said she’d pay her in the spring. For now, would she take half? She would. Her shoes wore out; she didn’t buy new ones. My sister died of her old shoes.”
Small, wild-eyed, mad, the girl cried out and the policeman was ashamed to move her. “Do not believe her, the disgrace of her,” said Mrs. Bellamy.
Madame herself appeared, the first time any of the girls had seen her, a full figure and a beautifully coiffed head. She stood before them. Her carriage stupefied them all. She said, “It is my deepest joy to know my girls are working happily and well.”
And then she disappeared above the stairs.
After she left, the girls, discommoded as if by a royal visit, blushed and giggled. Cookies were sent down with tea. The girl on the steps was made to disappear.
Three days after the girl was taken from the steps, Bella Robbins turned to Ellen Costelloe and said: “I’m worried sick about a war.”
And her words were a knife slicing the thick air of the room of women sewing. Women stitching fine, beautiful stitches, women ignorant as dirt, skilled women, making things for other women who need do nothing for themselves, the unreal dream-work of the dresses of the period. Bella’s sentence let in life, breath, pulse, the whole world of ideas. It set the tone for the whole of their friendship. They did not, like other women, say to each other sentences beginning with the words “I love, I hate, I fear.” Ellen told Bella nothing of her mother, not until it was too late. And Ellen never knew her friend had been for years the lover of a married man until he died (they were in their fifties) and Bella tried to kill herself. Bella’s sister accused Ellen, “You must have known.” Bella did not forgive her sister for telling Ellen. She said to Ellen, “Don’t believe her, what she told you. About why I did this. I don’t know why I did it. There’s no reason. I don’t know why I did.”
Ellen
allowed Bella, her cut wrists crossed on her bosom like a corpse’s, to see the face it had pleased them both to turn a thousand times towards the world. The face of their shared superiority, of their contempt: two girls above it all.
“Who’d listen to that dope?” said Ellen. “If she ever had an idea in her head it would have to leave the neighborhood. Driven away by its own loneliness.”
They said nothing more about the subject.
Ellen never disbelieved the sister. She feared the depths of her old friend.
Throughout their lives they gave each other names and information as other girls give each other pastilles, or open up their lockets, show their photographs. Bella would tell her about Spengler, Comte, German philosophers whose words could turn the world.
They would say, “I believe in the religion of mankind.”
All Bella’s family were atheists. Bella’s father, a tailor, and her mother, and all eleven of their children believed, they said, in the divinity of man. “Why do they invent pie in the sky except to keep your eyes off what’s in front of you,” Bella’s father had said. From Bella she first heard the sentence, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” She heard the bees in Knock James Church; that sentence could break up the swarm: it could dissolve the buzzing. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Bella’s family said sentences like that. Large sentences they were not afraid of. “To drink tea is not to hew wood.” “To cross a field is not to live a life.” Sometimes Ellen didn’t know what they meant, but she was thrilled to hear the courage in them. The courage to make a sentence that could cover the whole world. No one else she knew would do it. From Bella’s family she heard the words that made her see lives she had never known of. Hooves raised above the faces of women and their babies, dark modest girls torn apart by mustached brutes who said they had a right to, and a right to burn the towns. She heard in these stories the quiet of ruin, the silent aftermath, the departure of the men on horses, the respite till the next disaster struck.