by Mary Gordon
Vincent.
She calls out to him now. He doesn’t answer. He has left, as she has always feared he would. No, that’s not right. She thought he never would. She had believed him. She had made him promise. He would never break a promise.
Vincent.
No answer.
Where is Vincent? Why doesn’t he hear her calling out for him? Is he pretending not to hear, to punish her? Because she knocked him down? She knocked him down because she thought he was making advances towards her. He was reaching towards her skirt. She wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t let him come to her in the state she was in. She knew what she was: a wreck, a horror. She must hide herself from him. She owed him, out of respect for what they once had been, that much.
They had been beautiful, young. High-colored. They had talked, though not as well as she could talk with Bella. Vincent hadn’t the quickness of Bella’s mind, hadn’t read as much. But talk with them had come from and gone back to the body. Garlands their words were, that twined around them, joining them, limb to interlocking limb. It was more truthful, what they said, because of that other knowing. And excitement, at the first, when she had talked at Delia and Jim’s table, about the reading circle. She watched how his eyes were fixed on her—riveted, he’d later said—when she talked about the effects of the War and the sacred rights of every worker. As he looked at her she knew her power. She’d smoothed her hair around her ears to draw attention to it. She’d let her eye fall boldly on his, though he’d not met it. She’d got up, gone to the shelf for more sugar, though she hadn’t the need of it, so he could see her figure and her walk. And for the first time in her life she felt that stretching outward, stretching up, and felt him moving towards her steadily, inevitably, like a flame. How many times they had sat at Delia’s table, him saying nothing, or saying, “It’s just great, the thoughts you have. It’s a great education for me just to hear you speak.”
And then, after some months of sitting, listening, he’d invited her for a walk, and told her he was a great union man himself. It was the way of the future, unions, he said, it was a tide that couldn’t be turned back.
He’s gone, to punish her. She knows she deserves it. Over all the years, she’d done things to deserve his punishment. Not telling him about her mother. Lying, saying her parents both were dead.
He’d turned from her when she told him finally.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you lie all these years?”
She said nothing. She deserved this from him; to raise her voice in her own defense would be to block justice. And to expose her mother and her own life, spent keeping her mother in the dark.
“I always wondered why you married me,” he said, refusing to look at her. “I knew I wasn’t up to you. Now I know you did it for this trick.”
She told him she was afraid to go back home. Afraid of what the father would do to her. He didn’t believe her.
“Afraid? You’ve never been afraid of anything. You wanted to play me for a fool.”
Afraid of nothing? You, too, my husband never knew me. Almost always I have been afraid. You think because I stand up to employers, have a sharp tongue for poor souls who haven’t got the wit to cut me back, because of this, you think I have no fear. I have always been afraid. No. Not always. No. Not before, when she was happy, well, when we would run, sing, make things in the kitchen, when my father would come home, embrace us both, and call us “my two beauties,” dancing with her, twirling me, my cheek against his jacket, I was not afraid then. No. Why would I be?
But afterwards, my mother, shamed and shameful, lying in her failures, in the mess, the family blood I had to find, my mother growing darker and the father turning from us (you are turning from me: you will not be back), always after that I have been afraid.
She’d wanted to kneel before him, not in supplication, but to take his face in her hands so he would have to look at her. But she didn’t. She turned her face to the wall; she closed her eyes; she accepted her punishment: that he would never understand.
Now, lying on her bed, sixty years later, she remembers his face. She understands: he has been waiting all these years, pretending to forgive, to punish her for what she did. It’s why he isn’t with her now; she understands it all; he is away from her to punish her. She is alone, more alone than her mother ever was.
She calls out. Strangers she has never seen approach. “Mother,” someone calls her, but this stiff face can not have been a child of hers.
When the letter came from Anna Foley she’d felt her life unraveling. Everything that she had: her house, her husband, children, safety in this new world, disintegrated. Alone in the house with her two babies, she sat at her table and wept. She ignored their cries until she couldn’t any longer; absently she fed them, not seeing them for her tears. She put them in their rooms to sleep, not caring if it was time yet. She got into her own bed, shameful, in the middle of the afternoon, she’d never in her life done such a thing, and hid in the darkness of the blankets. Over and over again she read the letter that Anna had sent; not that Anna had written it herself: she couldn’t read or write. She’d had a nephew do it. Someone whose face Ellen didn’t know had written to her, “You must come and get her now. I have a sickness, and it will get worse. I cannot do for her like before. I’ve said nothing to your father. I’ll give you the chance. As promised. But act soon.”
Before she’d left, on the night the moon made the road white and the flat fields shone before her, Ellen had made Anna Foley promise: “If anything goes wrong with you, don’t go to my father. Get in touch with me. I’ll provide for her. She’s my charge. He’ll not have her to himself.”
They shared a horror that he would have any charge of her. Him and that woman. They could imagine what the two of them might do. Leave her to grow into an animal, in her own filth. Ellen and Anna knew what she required: bathing, feeding, like a baby. But she had none of a baby’s loveliness. She had her heaviness instead. Still, they honored what she had been. The other two would not.
It had been in the back of her mind; it was what she saved her money for, when other girls were sending it back home or spending it on dresses. She was saving it, not knowing what could be done with the mother, but thinking she would buy a house for her, where they could live beside each other, and the mother could be sheltered, kept from view.
After two years in the apartment in the Bronx, Vincent began to mention to her dreams of a small house, out in the country, raising her own food (would Ellen feel up to it? He’d teach her; it would not be hard). His wages were good, he was a machinist now, they could afford it. He saw greenness, animals, the warm eggs under the hens, the gardens he would dig for her, one for vegetables, one for flowers. While he saw that, she saw a place to hide the mother, and in Vincent a man who would help her keep the mother from sight, who would take the mother in. She saw not the children’s health, not all the money saved on homegrown food, but a place with an upstairs. A room with something for the mother to look out on where she could live her life in peace. Where she could die kept from the tearing hands of the deserting father, from the hard eyes of the woman in his bed.
But now the time had arrived, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Lying in the dark, pulling the covers over her for protection, she saw her father’s face. The harsh eyes, the prosecuting mouth. She saw him gathering the strong boys, the muscled men in his employ. And around them, all the people in the parish, calling her thief, ringing around her, swarming in their accusations, lifting up stones to strike her. But her father won’t let them. He waits for the police, who take her from the square, where all the town have assembled around her. Her father turns his back. He allows her to be taken away, he tells them to show no mercy. But she doesn’t care; it’s his eyes she fears, more than the policemen, more than the accusation of the parish, the eyes that turn from her, the back that stiffens itself against her, the arm that links up with the arm of that woman who shares his bed, their backs turned to her, disappearin
g down the road.
She lay in her bed, weeping, shamed in front of Vincent. He should never see her in this shameful state. She had to tell him that she couldn’t do it, and he had to help her. She said she’d never ask him for a thing again, not even a word between them. Only he had to do this thing.
She wanted to cry out to him. She wanted to open her arms, beg him for comfort, throw herself against the hardness of his body, pull him by the hair, say to him: You have to understand me. This is why I couldn’t tell you. What if you said no before we married? Then I could never have you, and I need you, you are the one thing in my life I cannot be without. You never understand you are the stronger of us. You can live without me. Without you I have no life. In all my life, only you have not been a stranger.
But she said nothing. She lay in her bed, covered herself, and wept. Her life was lost to her. All the years, plans, self-denial and renunciations, acts of courage. And now that it was the time she couldn’t go. The sight of her father’s eyes, his back turning against her, his sending her to prison while he went off with the other woman—none of this would she be able to bear.
Vincent refused to sleep beside her. He didn’t speak to her for several days. He took the children away to stay with Delia. He came back into the house. He turned the light on in the bedroom. “I was thinking about things,” he said. “Suppose I could arrange it, then, to go there for you. Do it square. Talk to your father. Tell him we could pay him back the money you took from him. Say she’d be better off here. He’d have to see it.”
She nodded, she barely had the strength for assent. His goodness overwhelmed her. She was overwhelmed with love. She couldn’t meet his eye. His goodness was like a natural thing, like rain, or clement weather, growth in the earth, shade when the sun was merciless. Vincent, can you love me as much as this? So much? Really as much as this?
“Thank you,” she said. “It would be good if you could do all that.” She never said another word to him before he went. She packed his bags.
She did the necessary things. Bought the tickets from savings she had hidden from him for this purpose. The papers: the mother was old, she was infirm, but they would be responsible, they both were citizens, her husband had a steady-paying job. “A machinist. Very good,” the man said. Protestant. “A very steady job.”
“Yes,” she said, her large heart beating, spreading like a stain, “there’ll be no problem sir.”
“No, not with your husband and you vouching; and she’d not be taking away, like so many of them now, some citizen’s good job.” Laughed, she had to laugh now with him.
“No, sir, I’ll see to her all myself. We’ve a nice house in Queens. Sir, another time I’ll bring you some of our good eggs!”
The greenhorn palaver they expected and gave things over for. She took the papers from him, left in terror: he could change his mind.
He never told her what he saw in the town she had left as a thief. He only came home, bringing her mother with him. She understood that, on the boat with her mother, he must have seen to her needs. She wasn’t filthy on arrival. Did he do everything, or did he pay someone, a stranger, a woman he’d never seen? Would her mother have let him wash her on the boat, or would she have kept her modesty? She was ashamed that he might have had to do these things. But after all that, all that he’d done, how could she have done what that stiff-faced one, her daughter, said she did? She wouldn’t knock him down. She’d die for him. She’d always been ready to do that.
A shadow, spade-shaped, the width of a hand, falls on her brain and she remembers that it isn’t true, that after that she’d never hurt him.
After the son’s death, she turned from him, again.
Because he kept her from her grief.
And, she remembers now, she pushed him down, because he reached for her skirt, and she knew what he wanted, she couldn’t let him, she had to keep her body from him, in honor of what they had been.
She didn’t mean to push him down.
Only away.
She weeps now, for the things she never meant to do.
Vincent, you must know the things I never meant.
She thrashes in the ugly bed, as if she can wash it all into a blankness if she moves her head wildly enough. Why will the blankness not come now?
The blankness will not come. The sight comes back now, when she doesn’t want it. Where are you, lovely mother, your complexion pink, your hands transparent, and your clever feet?
I cannot forgive you. Because you must have let my husband see your shame.
Her mother lived with them in the house. Her eyes were dead.
Vincent said: “I think she’s happy here. She’s happy for this change.”
Almost, sometimes, the mother looked as though she could be happy. Ellen let her hold the baby; the mother almost let her dead eyes come alive.
John was born while the mother lived among them. Was that why she loved him best? Did the presence of the mother bless his birth?
She felt the other two were born to be against her, by their births to thwart, balk, halt her progress, press her down. The first one, Magdalene, named foolishly, she thought, for Vincent’s mother, who had died in childbirth shortly after he left home. He blamed himself, she knew that, for he’d helped her as the others in the family did not. “You were in Cork, Vincent,” she said, “for years before that; she’d grown unused to your help by the time she started this baby.”
“No, I could have helped.”
So she allowed the daughter a foolish name, and it began a life of foolishness. She never could respect the child. All of her a softness. No resistance to the world. She felt she must resist against the softness of the child or else be swallowed up in it. Already she felt, in marriage, in motherhood, that which she most valued in herself beginning to be lost. She had no time to read or think. She grew ashamed when Bella visited, ashamed when she had to admit she’d not read the last books Bella had left her, ashamed when she saw Bella slip the new books back into her bag, trying to be tactful, trying to keep Ellen from feeling shame.
But she felt shame that her mind was being softened and pressed down in service to two babies. The second one knew her anger, and pulled herself back, stiffened herself, and made her body a refusal to be supplicant, like her sister. The second child understood what the first had not. She turned away.
Ellen was jealous of Vincent, popular and successful in his job. Jealousy and pride. The two strands: Why him and not me?
But with the mother in the upstairs room, she felt herself becalmed: a small boat moored in shallow water. She gave herself up to it. It pleased her to have given birth to a male child. She felt that she did not have to resist this one. She allowed the days to wash over her. She didn’t try to read. She lost track even of the newspaper, until Vincent chided her. “You must keep up,” he told her, “it’s a great world out there, a great day for the workingman. You have to keep up;” At night he wanted to talk about it: the new world he saw growing outside the house. Once, in front of Bella, he said, “It’s time men knew there are some women have twice the brains of them. It’s certainly the case in this house.” He said that to honor her, in front of Bella. She was spooning out tapioca. She banged down the spoon in rage. Furiously, she shook a spoon of tapioca under her husband’s nose. “That’s the brains of me, and not an inch above it.” His praise mocked her, she felt, before her friend. Bella and Vincent looked away, pretending to see nothing.
Did Vincent like talking to Bella? Or was he too afraid? He never did relax with her, but he admired her. “She’s a person you can learn from,” he’d said. And she listened to him talk about the union, about the Democratic party. Sometimes when they talked, Ellen would feel her eyes grow heavy, would realize that she had fallen asleep a moment, because she was so tired from the children, from the mother, she couldn’t follow their ideas.
Sixty years later, the events of what has been her life stretch out before her like a river covered over by a mist. The mist clears
in patches; the water becomes visible, and then from the leaden band of water rise up mountains: events in her life. Then the mist falls once again, and nothing is distinguished. She is lost. She can hear sounds through the mist, like conversations in fog. The voices fade and even her fear fades: she gives over to the undifferentiated blur, it’s better that way. It will lift, or it will not. The mountains, the islands, will show themselves or will submerge forever. She is quiet and no longer angry. It is summer evening and the sun, late in descending, vanishes. The birds are silent. In the heavy darkness nothing more will come to pass.
But where is Vincent? The moments when she is free of fear have gone. He has left her among strangers.
All her life, she knew she would live out this moment. It always came to her, this fear, pushing up through fog: she knew it would become her life. The night she made him promise, she was lying awake, feeling her sleepless, lively skull, she saw herself alone like this, in fog, and among strangers. The sound of swarming came to her, a young woman, alone with her new husband in a bed in the first light of the morning of a sleepless night. She couldn’t stand the mocking voices she couldn’t shut out. She heard the swarm, the voices once again, but now in fog, she called out to him, knowing he was happy in his sleep. She said his name to wake him. She wanted him to give up his happiness. She dug her nails into his palms.
“Swear you’ll let me die in my own bed. Not among strangers.”
He has tricked her. She brings her lips together and forms the curses she heard from the drunken men in her father’s pub, from the sailors or the seasick men on the boat coming over, from ancestors, dead a hundred years before her birth. The curses and the filth rise up. She opens her mouth to release them.
The stiff face comes towards her. “Calm down, Mother.” The stiff face says prayers.
Now she will curse the prayers, brought to this place from hatred.