The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

  The Robbinses trusted her. They said she didn’t seem like other Christians. She was pleased at that. She’d never thought of herself as a Christian. A Catholic, yes, but “Christian” was a word for Protestants. To them, she knew, it was the same.

  Bella and Ellen preferred not sharing their time together with Bella’s omnivorous, hard-breathing family; the warmth, drive, of all that life pressed on their leisure and they couldn’t talk. Their talks were dark, night-blooming, violent bouquets. They were defiant: they were females who felt free to speak to each other about anything on earth. Except they would not talk about themselves. They did not speak of men or love. As if a flag had been flung out between them: None of that for us. No time. Hunger to know the world consumed them. They felt their deprivation and all their lost time. Bella wrote to Ellen from a cousin’s in the mountains of upstate New York:

  What matters most is time is passing. Time is passing and everything is missed. We are not living. I have been thinking: girls must get a living wage and then a shorter workday and many more girls must begin to think. It isn’t that they don’t want to think; they are all too tired to think. Thinking makes you interested in life. To be interested in life makes you a thousand times better as a person.

  In the fog that is her current life Ellen sees perfectly the face of her friend Bella. She thinks of Bella in her dark dresses, with the white collars and sometimes the little bows that did her chin, her face, no good. It made a mockery of all that seriousness, of that understanding. She thinks of her friend’s mouth, lovely, the fine, neat teeth, bluish in some lights, like skim milk, but strong: you’d think that they would last her. And the dark under her eyes so she never looked young or well. But the eyes themselves, the wonderful dark eyes. There were no eyes like that at home, so brown they had a touch of red in them, nothing like the brown eyes of animals, which were the only brown eyes in her childhood. You’d look at Bella’s eyes and know there was nothing she couldn’t understand. And she wouldn’t be likely to think well of a thing. She’d fix her eyes on you, at first you would feel frightened. Some people never got over this, some people never relaxed around her. Delia. Vincent, too; she didn’t like to say it but it was the truth. Vincent was always a bit frightened around Bella. Her hair, smooth and lusterless, collected into rolls around her ears.

  Ellen pitied Bella’s hair, the only thing to pity in this girl she worshipped as a creature far above her, yet who, miraculously, listened to her, was interested in her. They listened to each other. And she made Bella laugh. “The world’s a brighter place for you than me,” Bella had said to Ellen once. Wounding her to the quick.

  She wanted to say to Bella: Do you, my friend, not know me? This laughter, these words of mine, my way of putting things that makes you laugh, and that I mean to make you laugh, do you imagine that I do this out of joy? For pleasure? That I don’t see as darkly as you see?

  I have seen more than you know. The children, born unborn, blood, mess, on the floor, the stain that was the hope of family life. My mother moaning: “How can I have done this. Why do I do this?” My beautiful mother (her thin fingers transparent almost when she held them to the light to show off, to admire her ring), my mother turning, before my eyes, into a man, an animal, in darkness, in the total darkness of her mind, gibbering words no one can understand, her feet in black men’s boots, like trees rooted, taking root. And in the pub where the money was made to send me to the Presentation Sisters, I have heard things, in the first days when my father would take me, thinking I didn’t understand. I have understood what men think: they wish nothing but misfortune to their neighbors. Every good thing for another is a blow to them. They crave a stupor, a calamity. Anything to break the rhythm of the life they strap themselves to like a wheel that turns and never stops.

  I have seen more. The woman taking my mother’s place beside my father. In his bed. Her broad back I see, her thief’s mouth, her fingers thick with the life she lives and doesn’t even try to keep a secret. I know what they do. I stiffen all my life against them. I become a weapon. I become an eye, a glass, a fire burning up their pleasure. You think the world is a bright place for me? I have always known. Men are brutal animals, the yellow teeth, the red eyes, and the damp, destructive breath. I see always in the darkness, in the silence. I keep it all in my mind, which, though not as good as yours, lets go of nothing.

  She never said anything like this to her friend. They talked endlessly of life at the workshop of Madame de Maintenant. It was crucial that they demonstrate to one another in minute detail their knowledge of the workings of the place and their precise awareness of the injustices, tyrannies, falsehoods, insults, chicaneries, and downright thefts which they witnessed every day. Most important, they had to make clear to each other their contempt for the other girls, who believed themselves honored to be working in so fashionable an establishment and with so prized a clientele. So when the forelady, weeping in Madame’s name, asked would they not wait for their wages till the slack season was over and the so-forgetful clients paid their bills, the girls fluttered their honored agreement like sweet birds.

  Bella and Ellen said they wouldn’t wait. “Fire us if you like,” they said to the forelady. “You’ll never get two as good as we are for the sleeves.” The forelady’s face turned red; the other girls feared she would die of heart attack, of shock. None of them would join Ellen and Bella, who were not fired, but were no longer given tea.

  They reassured each other every day they weren’t dupes, like other girls. Yet they didn’t leave the workshop. They dreamed of escaping, but they knew that what they could escape to would be worse.

  They stripped their dreams of the domestic with a devotion that was female in its thoroughness, as if they stripped a house for a spring cleaning. Their dreams came from their discussions at the Women’s Trade Union League, a club for working girls: international governments, living wages, decent work. Being female, they could not dream dreams without rooms. The rooms they saw were not rooms with warm, inviting beds, or round familiar tables, around which the beloved few gathered to be fed. The rooms of their dreams were large and public. Underheated meeting rooms, lecture halls, the daunting rooms of the new Public Library, where they were told (but did not believe it, and feared to see for themselves) they had a right to be. They saw themselves at the heads of audiences, crowds of women like themselves listening to them, acting on their words. Or they would listen and then act. The men in their dreams stood at lecterns, or beside them, not too near, pointing out to them important passages from crucial books.

  Streets were in their dreams. They walked the streets where trees flourished before them; they walked across a bridge. The lights fell on the river in drops, wafers, coins. They leaned over the bridge, rested for a moment, talking, then went on. They walked along a boardwalk; they could smell the ocean, it excited their talking, and encouraged their belief. They did not, in their dreams, talk to the young men in straw boaters; these were not dreams with places in them for young men. They were different from the other girls they saw. But they would change the other girls.

  Outside the dream the girls around them did not change. And their notions of their new heroic selves were smashed not by the falling action of some fist, some whip, but by the silent power of the forelady and of Madame herself. At the Trade Union League, the organizers said: “It’s places like your shop that most need organization. The injustices in the name of gentility. Girls starving thinking it’s an honor. Wages almost as low as sweatshops. But a nice room, a fire, tea.” Ellen and Bella thought but did not speak of the young girl who sat on the stone steps demanding her sister’s wages, the girl whose eye they did not meet. They took with them the union cards, with the blank spaces for names and addresses. They tried to talk to some of the more friendly girls. But they were met with silent, fearful glances, or the genial upturned face of the non-listener. They decided they would put a card down at each place. Lying on her bed, Ellen remembers, though there is no act she can p
erform now, therefore no reason to fear action, strapped in her bed whose plastic armrests are the color of a poisoned shell (This was never mine), even now she remembers her fear. She remembers lying in her bed at Mrs. Devlin’s, the street sights through her window: the stiff, city trees, bunched, conical in the darkness. She was rigid in her fear. She remembers digging her nails into her palms for courage. She remembers saying to herself, fear making her organs light, acute, and lively: Tomorrow we will do it.

  And they did. On the dark wooden tables among the mix of threads, scraps, scissors, tissue papers, they placed down cards that said: I ________ wish to become a member of the Women’s Trade Union League. They did not meet one another’s eye. Then, suddenly, one of the girls, one of the ones who most disliked them, rose, pretending she must show some work to the forelady. But they knew where she was going. The forelady, looking at no one, disappeared up the stairs. And, a few minutes afterwards, she came back. She opened the glass doors of her office. Everyone in the large room was waiting, pretending all the time they weren’t.

  But nothing happened. Nothing ever happened. Ellen and Bella gave out union cards. But no one responded, not one of the girls.

  In their discussions of this, which they had endlessly that winter, walking at night up and down streets where the air challenged their failure with its expectant breath, in the tea rooms where they allowed themselves their weekly luxury, they puzzled out their failure. At the meeting of the Women’s Trade Union League, no one could understand why they failed. But no one blamed them.

  Bella blamed the Church, the state, the family: those things of which she refused to declare herself a part. Ellen pretended baffled anger. But she knew, although she never said, that she and Bella were not successful for the simple reason that they were not well liked.

  In their friendship there was room only for themselves. They were exclusive and excluding; their friendship had a force no marriage could approach; they spoke of the world only as something they would put their mark on. They’d excluded Bella’s family, and Delia, who cried every Sunday when Ellen refused to go to church, saying that her religion was the religion of humanity, her divinity the divine human soul. Delia would cross herself, pushing her children from the doorway so they wouldn’t hear. “God forgive you, Ellen,” she would say. “God bring you back to the True Faith. It’s being friendly with that Jewish girl that did it.”

  Ellen would turn on Delia: “You belong back in the bog. This is America. We’re all equals here. If you say a word against my friend, I’ll never come to your house again.”

  That threat was too terrible for Delia. “You’re right, Ellen,” she said. “It’s America. We’re all alike.”

  But they were not all alike and there were times when she knew that she was more like Delia than like Bella. The home fear, the home silence: “Mind you, I’ve said nothing,” you’d hear them say at home. They wanted things kept in the dark. In some ways they were right. But then your tongue stuck to your mouth and wouldn’t give out information, you spoke to placate, fob off, cause forgetfulness. To entertain. Bella could speak up at the Women’s Trade Union Lectures. Ellen could not. She thought that if she said the first word everyone would know her ignorance. She would be banished, her huge lacks would be seen. They would have no choice but to turn her away. She thought that if she kept silence she might be safe.

  Delia would come to Ellen’s room, touch the covers of the books as if they were dangerous or sacred objects, look at her old friend whom she had known from childhood, and from home, look at her with that wide gaze that understanding never touched, and say: “I can’t get over it, El, coming where we come from, reading books like that.”

  She raged that Delia should speak out the thing she feared: that it was all ridiculous, you were who you were born, and you were born nothing. She heard the home voices, buzzing at her: “You particularly, Ellen Costelloe, we in the church, among the swarm, know who you are. We know your father and your mother. We know you from your birth. You are no different from us. You are no better.” One of the favorite sayings in the town was this: “Two things never change: the mist, and the nature of man.”

  When she’d heard them at home, in the churchyard, in the market, saying things like that, she’d wanted to stand beside her father, saying to them: He and I are together, the same. Whatever he is it’s better than you ever thought of being.

  Her father didn’t have thick, dead eyes like the rest of them, reflecting the belief that nothing could be done in the world, it was useless to begin to raise your hand. Their heavy feet trudged like those of the cattle they fattened and led to death, trudged from one day to the next, the day of their death no different from any other, the last, only, in a series of identical dead days. Her parents hadn’t been like that and so the parish was relieved by their disasters, reveled in them as if their touching pleasure, liveliness, had brought as a matter of course illness, sin, madness, the betrayal of a daughter, and her leaving in the dead of night. When these thoughts came to Ellen, in her bed in America, she wanted to get up, go back, stand with her father, stand against the town. She’d force the other woman out, then stand beside her father, help him with the business, they would prosper, they would stand apart from the thick crowd of the townspeople, whose envy would rise up, steady and predictable as coins in the till, rising up like the incense at Benediction in Knock James Church. They’d have their place, she and her father, at the head of things, the other woman gone, their pride well earned, and justified. Not to be cast down.

  But how could there be pride in the mother, gibbering in her chair, in the darkness? She could not be brought out to the light of day. The noise of her words that weren’t words was low and repetitive and damning, like the swarm noise. It was the worst curse in the world: Forget your efforts. Nothing will prevail.

  The parish had been right about the bees. It had endured their swarming and had not been harmed. Action was danger, and the lie that there was nothing there needing their action had been their safety. Who had cleared the walls of all those clots, and spreading stains? The honey that spilled down and that she knew could ruin the walls? It hadn’t. Who had prevented ruin? Secretly, at night? The priest? Old women? Young, married ones leaving their babes at home at the priest’s whispered request? They had prevailed. Nothing had happened. She had wished them the harm of their lie and it hadn’t harmed them. Only she had been harmed. The sound of the bees swarming came into her dreams, telling her everything was useless. There was nothing to be done.

  It had prevented her, the sound of swarming and the lie that had not brought its rightful punishment, from speaking up about the books she read in the Trade Union League reading circle. It had caused her to fear the others, caused her to crawl, shamed as a child who vows to run away from home and turns back at the first sign of a stranger, back to Delia and Jimmy’s house for the old food, the soda bread, potato with butter and a drop of milk, the stirabout, the meat cooked black, the dense, muffling comfort of the sweets: rice pudding, trifle, custards, sago. Delia dishing out plate after plate. She came to them after the meetings where her silence was her shame and talked to Delia and Jimmy about the books. She abashed them into silence as they fed her the meals she craved and gave her the false homage that she craved like the soft foods: “El, you’re a marvel. What you know. Imagine, Jim, from my own town. My best friend knowing that.”

  Did she go to Vincent for these things as well? No. Yes. Yes and no.

  He said, like her, that you could do something in the world. The world could change. But she had never known if he believed it, or said it to keep her love.

  The memory of Vincent’s body comes back to her on her bed, known as she has no other thing: face, chair, ring, article of clothing. Better known than her own body, for she has looked freely at the whole of his as she has not looked at her own.

  Warned against her own flesh, she never caressed it as the loved object that Vincent’s had been. They would never tell you not to touch t
he man’s body, assuming that no girl would want to. But she had wanted to. From the beginning she had. It comes back to her now, his body, but gradually and not at once. The shoulders first, high spurs of bone, the lively tendons of the neck, the chest with its enchanting whorls of hair, flat, smooth, that she has followed with her lips, for she was never shy with him once she had given herself over. Her belonging came to her like language. This body, the words, the phrases she had known. Following the path of hair down to the narrow waist, the hips, the sex she did not fear, the satisfaction of its rising up with yearning for her, and the strong, protective legs, the feet, boyish, white, surprising for a man who worked as he did. The hands come to her next, then the arms. Hands that had traced and found her, smoothed and calmed and then aroused. Afterwards holding her face, kissing it as he held it in his hands, kissing her eyes, her nose, making her laugh with boyish kisses on her neck. Saying: “Imagine, you, my wife.”

  Wife. A simpler word than husband. Older, preferable. More intact. She was glad of being Vincent’s wife. Whatever else she might feel, she had never been wrong to be with him. How dark he’d been when she had met him. Like an Arab prince, like an Italian, she had thought. She’d loved the darkness of his hair against the white skin, surprising a man’s skin could be so white. The hiddenness of it, his whiteness, so that she’d wanted to protect it. And as he grew older age spots appeared on the white expanse of his back. How? She could never see them coming. Only knew that they were there. His hands, small for a workman, were covered by sparse, dark hairs.