by Mary Gordon
“Banish this evil spirit,” the stiff face says.
“Get her away from me. Send her back home to hell.”
“All right, Theresa. I’ll take over now.”
Bella. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Bella will send the lying stiff face from her, back to her home in hell.
“Gran. It’s all right, Gran. I’m with you. I won’t leave.”
A man’s voice. She remembers now. It’s Daniel. She can tell him. She can ask where Vincent is. He will tell her the truth.
“Where’s your granddad gone to?”
“He’s been sick. He’s coming home today. That’s why everyone’s here, for a celebration, Granddad’s coming home.”
His hand is warm and full of health. She remembers this hand, and the other one, the girl’s hand. These were the children who made her want to go on with her life. She can’t remember why. Only that they were interesting to her. She could watch their minds absorb the world. Knowing. Watching them take in the world made her willing again to be alive.
Those children, Dan and Cam. She had told them they must go into the world. She had allowed them to do it, she had made it easy for them. And they had done it, and come back to her, with the world in their hands, laying it before her, so it could be hers as it was theirs.
So she could, again, wish to live her life.
Vincent. Forgive me. I was proud of you.
“The union,” she shouts out.
“The union, Gran?”
She tries to sit up. Her vision clears. She can see Daniel’s face, knows that she can say something that he will understand.
“Brave,” she says.
Now the mist comes up, exposing one patch of the river, one island becomes visible. The decade of the 1920s, once a blur to her, her young motherhood vague, a watery existence she can never settle on. But she remembers the excitement of the years when Vincent, risking everything, worked to build a union, when they could have killed him for it. He told her that, “I could be killed for it, they could kill me, they’d be glad to do it if they could,” and she was proud of him, “but let them try.”
“The hell with them, then, Vincent. No sense living if you can’t stand up and say who you are.”
She couldn’t remember what the issues were or why the bosses fought them. But she could bring back the feelings, the excitement, code words Vincent would tell her, jokes played on the company spies, “beakies” they were called. Tuesday substituted in the code for Monday. “We know they’re listening in,” Vincent would say, “so we say on the phone, ‘We’ll have a meeting on the Tuesday. By the way,’ we’d say then, ‘I’d a letter from the family at home, they’re extending the cowhouse on the west side of the farm to accommodate twenty-three new head of cattle’; that means, you see, El, this is great now, that we’re meeting at the place we all know about on Twenty-third Street, on the Monday night.” Excited as a boy and boyish in his ardor, he would come to her at night, home from a late meeting, now older, heavier in his body, and his rough cheek, cold from the outside, would arouse her. In the mornings he would talk at the breakfast table to the children about starving workers, and the hope of the trade unions, about Sacco and Vanzetti, the tragedy of it, Al Smith, he’s Irish, children, but he might yet be the President, about how the Pope himself would sooner or later endorse labor unions, he knew it on good authority, they needn’t fear what the priests said. She’d get angry then: “What do you care a damn for the priest’s word, there’s not a one of them who’s not a liar or a thief. Or a pansy on the top of it.”
She’d never go into a church. Vincent would take the children. The parish priests would try talking to her, series of them coming to the house over the years. Now, Mrs. MacNamara, don’t you think. Some pretending they had just stopped by. One, threatening her with hellfire, in her kitchen, told her of her melting bones to come, her crackling flesh, eternal separation from the ones she loved. “What kind of God is it that you worship, a God who would do that?” she said to him. “The same God you say separates babies from their mothers if they die before a splash of water hits their heads.” The face of Bella clear before her eyes. I believe in the religion of mankind.
“You’re nothing but a Red,” the priest said, with his heavy accent. “No better than the satanic Communists of Russia.”
She thought of Bella’s family.
“I’ll be asking you to leave, then, Father. I didn’t cross the ocean so I could be insulted in my own home.”
Arguing with Vincent against religion. “You’re a union man. They’ve threatened every Irishman who has a union card with eternal damnation. They’ve held the labor unions back for fifty years.”
Turning the radio up so he would have to hear the voice of Father Coughlin. “This is the mouthpiece of the church you want your children brought up bending the knee to. Filth. Poison. And you want their veins opened up to that.”
I will not close my mind or bend the knee.
The children, though, were pious. Seeing of course their father, who was kinder than she, who never shouted, did not turn away, had not the tongue that mocked. They thought, perhaps, his kindness was from God, that perhaps God would keep them from her anger.
Even John: “I’m going to be an altar boy. You wouldn’t stop me, Mom.”
“No.”
“You’ll help me with my Latin.”
“I’ll help you learn anything.”
“But you won’t come see me serve the Mass?”
“I’ll not set foot inside a church.”
He didn’t say “Even for me?” As Magdalene would have. Theresa would not, she’d have made her mother feel she was missing something, and was glad she was able to keep her mother from a thing of value. Her prayer a thorn to pierce her mother’s flesh.
Her John.
Her boy. His body growing up, a tree beside her. Honor, shelter, and a place of pride. Her son. Intact, he seemed to her. And safe. The only one of them not frightened by her mother. Although Ellen understood why she could appear frightening. A woman with hair growing on her face. A beard. Like a goat.
A man.
“Does Grandma have a beard? Why, Mom? Is Grandma a man?”
“Your grandma loves you. You must love her back.”
John sitting on the floor as she cooked. Knowing her need of his company but saying nothing.
The girls refused to look at their grandmother. Magdalene: Don’t make me, Mama. Theresa: I will not.
Then Vincent getting sick. How scared the children were, and her anger at the children for the fear they wore so he could see it on their faces. “You’re no good to your father with those faces.”
But she was angry at Vincent when they brought him to her sick, near death. The doctor said a heart attack. “At his age, Mrs. MacNamara, barely forty, he will have to find another job, an easier one, and the union work is too much for him.” Shop steward he was, and meeting every night. “Tell him the decision is his, the doctor said. Stop it or die.”
She was angry at her husband’s white, sick face. She wanted to scream at him: “How could you do this to me?”
He knew that her voice lied when she was so sympathetic, that she made her body lie. He cried when they told him he had to quit the subways. He turned his face to the wall so she could not see the tears on his face. “A change will be good, I guess. Everyone needs a change.”
The strike happened while he was in the hospital. It hurt her to see the others come and tell about it. She was dying to know, but she wouldn’t listen. If he’d missed it she would miss it too. She saw him drift away when they talked about it, the pain of it sickening him once again. She was angry with them for going on with it, angry at them for having had the strike without him. She wanted to scream at them that they were selfish, disloyal, they should have waited for him, all the thousands of them, she didn’t care; it was unjust that it should happen while he lay in hospital. She wished ill to the union. She was furious when they offered her a job in one
of the change booths after he’d used up all his sick pay. “We were thinking, since you’ve this great interest in the union, you could become a member. Sort of take his place.”
“Thank you, I’ve found another situation,” she said, clenching her fists so as not to strike out at them. As if she’d be a part of something he couldn’t be! As if she’d jump in and watch him on the shore, separate, ill, ashamed of the failure of his body, as if he’d failed her as a man.
Bella got her a job in Ratner’s millinery. Once again with silly girls she had no patience with. But her fingers were dull now; she didn’t like the work, the heavy materials: wool, felt, pushing the needle through: no fineness to it, skill was nothing. Bella talked her into joining the union. She couldn’t refuse, but she’d not go to any meetings, though the talk of them excited her, and she pressed Bella for every detail of what was said. But she’d not do that to Vincent. He never knew she had a union card. She was happy to quit the job after a year; it made her feel old, out of the swim of the young girls.
She quit when Vincent took the job with Patent Scaffolding. She didn’t understand his work. Making up models of scaffolds for buildings. Engineers would give him plans. He’d make up models, like a child’s toys, she thought, she didn’t respect the work as she did when she believed he made the subways run. And working for a company that didn’t have a union.
“How could there be a union, El, there’s only five of us in the whole operation.”
He knew she’d lost her pride in him.
With this new work, he wasn’t a man Bella could understand her pride in being married to. Though Bella was kind, said he’d done the right thing, Ellen knew that Vincent’s step down from union work meant he had lost his footing in Bella’s life. It was never the same between them.
And then, when John died, Bella, too, told her not to grieve. She closed her heart to her then. You have not understood that I have lost my life.
Why was he taken from her? Of them all the most beautiful, the bravest?
And before his dying why were those last hours with him spent fighting about a whore? The girl he’d got with child. “The foolishness, the filth,” she’d said. “Why were you with a girl like that?”
Like her own father, foolishness with a woman.
When she thinks about the ways of men, she tries to get out of the bed, but she is strapped, she tries to tear herself free. I will not submit to the ways of men. She remembers why she struck Vincent. The ways of men do damage in the world.
And her own son. Like that as well. Like her father. With that foolish girl. Who sat, smoking her cigarette, painting her nails, crying into her bunched-up tissues. Her perfume so cheap it made the house stink of sex. And nothing in her mind but what’s between a man’s legs and her own and how to make the most of the whole foolish business.
Unable to keep herself pure for memory of the dead man she claimed she loved.
Like most women, her word meant nothing.
I was right to take the child from her. He meant nothing to her, I knew it all along. That is why I did it. Her grief, her memory were nothing to my own.
She recalls her towering grief. The telegram. “Your son, an honor to his country.”
Her mind, she could see her mind, a door blown off a house in a wild storm. I have lost my mind.
She felt herself become an animal. From pain she threw herself against one wall and then another, pulled the pins out of her hair and then her hair out of her head, scratched at her flesh, happy to draw blood.
I will not live my life.
I will no longer be in my life.
The grief that towered, cut off sight.
My son is no longer in the world. I will not, either, live. My lungs will stop, I will not allow them to draw breath. My heart, I will allow my bones to crush it. For the best.
I hate this life.
The buzzing noise inside her head. Mocking. Like the electric noise at the power station Vincent took her to. The lights that flashed in darkness.
To stop the buzzing she banged her fists against her head, her head against the floor, on the hard table. Vincent tried to stop her.
“Stop, Ellen, stop, you’ll kill yourself, you’ll hate yourself for throwing yourself around like this.”
“I want to.”
“I won’t let you. You have other children to think about.”
She spat in his face then. “Let me go.”
“I won’t. I’ll hold you. I will never let you go.”
She scratched at him. He held her tighter; he was stronger than she. “I won’t let go of you so you damage yourself. Stop it, Ellen, you have to stop this in yourself.”
She looked at him with hate. He didn’t understand her. The wild nature of her grief.
Because of this grief that towered, because they said she must stay alive, she had to take the child. Daniel. She knew his mother never really loved him. She never even loved his father. She was incapable of love.
And now, lying in bed, holding the boy’s hand, Daniel, whom she took from his mother, she hears the buzzing come again. You had no right. You stole the child from his mother.
She cries out, “I had the right. Her grief was nothing next to mine. She was nothing. Bad from the start. Look what became of her. I kept him from all that.”
The buzzing says: You made her be that way. NO, she always was. And Daniel never minded. Listen, he’ll tell you. He always told me when I asked him. But I never asked him. But he would have said.
He was glad to be mine. He was glad not to be hers.
I know it: he was happy.
“Dan,” she calls out.
He comes to her. He holds her hand. She confronts the buzzing. I’ll ask him now.
“I’m with you, Gran,” he says, holding her hand, a claw, with his live, healthy hand.
He puts the bars of the bed down. He lays his head against her chest as if he wants to listen to her heart.
“Rest now, Gran.”
She pats his head. She can sleep now, she understands that he has always needed to be hers. Even now he needs her comfort.
Everything is over. But he is here with her.
Vincent will not be back.
But she can sleep.
And she is falling into sleep, and dreaming now, of all the things for which she cannot be forgiven.
Part III
1
“IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME,” THERESA SAYS, “THINK we should start packing things up gradually, the things they never use. They won’t notice and we can keep on top of it, not have some huge mess all at once.”
“We’re not going to do that, Theresa,” Cam says. “It’s their house. He’s coming back today. He’ll be here living in it.”
“It’s ridiculous, him rattling around this house like that.”
Marilyn and Dan listen to them, standing in the doorway of Ellen’s room. They watch everyone fall into place: Cam and Theresa fixed at the center, the antagonists; Sheilah in back of her mother urging injury; Ray and his son, John, outside the circle, knowing no act of theirs can have weight. Marilyn hangs behind Dan a little, waiting for him to walk between the two antagonists, to fool them, to distract them, sing, tell a joke, make a remark on the weather, anything to make them stop.
“I thought we were going for a walk,” Dan says to Cam.
Cam walks out of the house ahead of him and bangs the screen door. He can see the line of it, starting with Ellen, hating herself, refusing to love her daughters, stealing him from his mother, taking Cam from Magdalene; he sees John and Sheilah in their mother’s blackened house. And he and Marilyn, always a little desperate: We’ll fix it, wait a minute, we’ll do something; it will be all right.
He knows he has to make something move in Cam, Cam’s anger is like a foreign power that can colonize their lives. When she’s angry (she is never angry at him), the look of the world changes for him, as if a war had happened. The peaceful streets where you could live a modest, public life have been
demolished; where there were cafés, churches, simple houses there is rubble: you sit on the bombed-out site searching in the wreck for the familiar things.
“Look around at all this,” he says, pointing to the new houses. “Look how it’s changed.”
He knows that, even angry, she can be interested in the world.
“I mind,” he says. “You wouldn’t think I’d mind, considering we weren’t happy here. You’d think I’d like it all wiped out.”
He knows she has begun to listen, but he hasn’t got her yet. The engine of her anger still runs, he can hear it; it slows down but doesn’t stop. She knows he’s trying to distract her; she can feel his effort.
“I guess that’s the oldest story in the book, right, talking about the neighborhood going downhill? They probably said it in the Stone Age—‘Look at those assholes, iron’—and in the Middle Ages, ‘Who wants those goddamn spices from the East?’ ”
She pities him. She sees him floundering, desperately trying to be interesting, to make her laugh so that she’ll give it up, this anger that she treasures, that she doesn’t want to give up, that she enjoys hoarding, fingering. Its sharpness creates borders she can understand: a skeleton, a frame. Pleasant to feel that bone, that wood, like lying down and feeling the jutting pelvis, like touching rafters, beams, before the ornamental camouflage is once and for all in place. She can know who she is in the world if she is somebody’s antagonist; to be Theresa’s enemy, therefore not Theresa in the world, satisfies her, gives her certainty and hope. But Dan is drowning in his efforts to make her stop; what gives her certainty and hope brings him anxiety and displacement. She won’t do that to him. She’ll give it up for him, this anger, desirable to her, valuable as medicine or wealth.
“Do you remember that magazine with house plans in it?” she says.
He remembers it; it was a magazine Vincent brought home for them, made up of photographs of houses with blueprints of the houses beneath. He thinks of them poring over it as children, looking for something. What? The book itself enchanted them. They loved the shiny pages, heavier than those of ordinary magazines, the photographs of new-built houses among trees that in themselves looked modern, unencumbered trees, trees without sad histories, trees that would give the right amount of shade, but wouldn’t, for a moment, cut off from the wonderful and lucky family who lived among them even an inch of light. The man outside the house, the father, wore a plaid shirt, smoked a pipe; the mother wore a Fair Isle sweater. He forgets the children, their faces, what they wore. The children, boy and girl, were not important: it was those young parents. Those young parents who had nothing at all to do with Europe. He and Cam got the magazine in 1949. He remembers: she was eight and he was six. Europe seemed to him still covered over by a cloud of danger and shame, the War, the ruined streets, children hidden for years in basements. Europe was Ireland, which Ellen called a bog, a backwater, a filthy hole. She mocked the rich first-generation greenhorns who took their families back home. To see what? she would say. The cattle shitting in the streets, right up to your door, the children with their teeth rotted out of their heads, the beautiful thatched cottages swept only once a year, the tinkers carrying their filthy babies in their filthy blankets? Oh, this beautiful thing, Ellen would say, through furious cruel teeth, we loved it so, that’s why we couldn’t wait to leave. And when his grandfather would send into the air a nice memory, rising like a balloon to give them pleasure, when he would say: The greenness of the grass, the goodness of the milk, the lovely bread, the songs, the smell of the peat fire, she would raise the hammer of her scorn. She would begin to talk in a false brogue. “Yes, Dad,” she’d say, “ ’tis little enough ye knew of it. You left at fifteen and lucky for you. ’Twas a lovely life you had. Breaking your back on the farm that went all to your brother, then apprenticed out at twelve. ’Twas what ye wanted for yer children, wasn’t it. The lovely bread, the lovely singsongs by the peat fire. Everybody slaving till they died or wore out. ’Twas wonderful. If only I could have it back, my carefree youth.” And she would flap and dance and invent a song. “My carefree youth / The cowshit and the toothless mother / And the starving tinkers out to steal me blind / Back, back to the auld sod of my dreams.”