The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

  Dan would see his grandfather pretend to laugh, or genuinely laugh, for Ellen could do that, she could make her husband laugh, and when her wit was cruel and meant to draw fresh blood he would go quiet. She could see that she had hurt him, and she would regret, but not apologize.

  So that was Europe: the War, the Ireland he could not make a clear picture of. Was it the green country of his grandfather, or the hard, filthy place that she spoke of? He’d traveled to France and Italy, to Spain with Sharon, long before he went to Ireland. He’d gone only two years ago, with Cam and with the girls.

  Cam and Darci loved it. But for him, the country was a sign: they could never be happy, any of them, coming from people like the Irish. Unhappiness was bred into the bone, a message in the blood, a code of weakness. The sickle-cell anemia of the Irish: they had to thwart joy in their lives. You saw it everywhere in Irish history; they wouldn’t allow themselves to prosper. They didn’t believe in prosperity. Perhaps, he thought, they were right not to.

  He saw it everywhere he went in Ireland, the proof of the Irish temperament, the doomed service of the ideal, the blatant disregard of present pleasure. He could see it in their politics, their architecture, in the layout of their living rooms, their towns. He compared the way the Irish lived with what he’d seen in France and Italy. In Ireland, there were no glimpses of shocking, reassuring brightness: a plate with overlarge, loud-colored flowers, a milk jug in the shape of a bird’s head, a rectangular pillow in a dark, primary shade, a fountain, just for nothing, in the center of a town, the trees extravagantly leaved, the chestnut, and the willow. It was fine for Cam and Darci to bend over laughing at the decor of their Bed and Breakfasts, but for him it was a dreadful talisman. It seemed that in every dining room of every B & B in Ireland, even in those that took in only three or four paying guests, there was an inexplicable presence: a tableau of animals that appeared from a distance to be the work of a skilled taxidermist, but upon a closer look (and Cam and Darci planned their mornings around the opportunities to get a closer look) turned out to be plastic animals frozen in deadly attitudes, about to swoop or perch or use their talons, beneath a sheet of Plexiglas.

  He understood the Irish. They were a colonized nation and had taken from their colonizers all their symbols of prosperity and of success. The English gave them their model, and like the colonized everywhere, they learned their lesson only halfway: they learned the wrong half. They copied from the English the jarring printed carpets and the half-glass doors that closed as if they kept out someone dangerous or insane. And, fearful of their reputation as slatterns (fatal to the tourist industry), they put dust-resistant covers on their furniture, and on their mattresses quickly drying nylon sheets. They seemed, Dan thought, to have been taken up by an obsession with concealment, or protection, by impermeable plastic. On the graves were arrangements of plastic flowers, in what looked like plastic cake dishes, the kind churchgoing women would use to transport their layer cakes to the bake sale or the parish tea. He watched the furious, the desperate, the anxiety-filled cleaning of the Irish women who had taken paying guests. He saw that there was nothing natural about their cleaning, nothing learned in childhood, practiced over the years. The cruel, expensive vacuum cleaners (Just doing a bit of Hoovering, so) set the rhythm of the day for these genuinely nice women and their families. A few hours of frantic activities: the breakfasts, the cleaning up. Then the long day of waiting, like unsure lovers, for the rented car, with its Americans, its Germans, for someone to come out and say, “How much?” The tourists didn’t say, as they should have, “How much for the family beds?” For Dan had seen how they had done it—the Americans, the Germans, the English, by their holidaying—turned the children from their beds. He’d awakened in the night and found the children sleeping in their sleeping bags on the sitting-room floor in front of fireplaces that sometimes held peat, but more often facsimiles of peat in neon-colored plastic. How nice they were, how friendly, these children and their mothers. The fathers you never saw: they drove away quite early in the mornings, or they were outside with the cows all day; they came back for a silent dinner; they went back out then to the pub. Sometimes if you were at the same pub as one of these men in the evenings he would smile, embarrassed, for he knew and you knew: his wife was making money off your need for shelter and a bed.

  The towns displayed their own kind of blindness, not mistaken and mislearned, like the distressing ugliness of the private houses, but a willed, blunt disregard for beauty, a blank, punitive, ungenerous self-presentation, a reproach to ornament, to prideful style. The towns were built for commerce, and stripped down for it. They had been market towns once, cattle had been brought from the surrounding areas into the large central square. He saw the trees brutally pollarded, the unwelcoming pebble-dash faces of the houses, the thin sills painted dull blue or prison-green. Some curse of money-changing, money-making, had come down upon these towns. They stood for commerce, but with none of its excitement: no goods flashing, bright stuff disappearing, then appearing once again. No, what Dan could see was that this was the idea of “the town” thought up by people whose genius was rural. Real life was in the countryside. And the country was miraculous.

  So they had both been right, his grandmother, his grandfather. Ellen, brought up in town, had seen the bleak, commercial greed; his grandfather had seen the land’s beauty. Dan had wanted to see what they both had seen. So they had driven south to Cork and found Vincent’s village, Dromnia, lush and gentle, a female landscape full of hidden brooks and noble trees. And they had gone north, to the west of Clare, and had found Tulla, Ellen’s town. A steep-streeted town with mute, gray sooty houses all connected, as if they’d all been poured from the same batch of concrete, all at once. They’d found her father’s pub.

  Darci and Cam, who loved pub life (Darci was, to her great joy, served her first drink in Tulla, a shandy, beer and lemonade), were adopted lovingly by Ellen’s town. “Can you imagine, this one is the granddaughter of Ellen Costelloe.” No one remembered Ellen; they couldn’t have; no one they met was old enough; they pretended that they did. It was a kind pretense; Dan didn’t mind. But in the stones of the streets, in the blank cement faces of the houses, Dan felt the child Ellen’s misery, imagined her a little girl living above the pub noise, the men’s sickness, the dark small rooms. For he could feel it when he walked into the rooms she knew. He saw the countryside around the town, brief fertile patches, taken over soon by brown grass and the gorse the farmers cursed. Everyone but tourists cursed it. He understood. He couldn’t sing and joke like Cam and Darci; he was happy to take Staci home to the room, to read while she made perfect sketches of the hillsides and the furniture and wrote brief, numerous, and uninforming letters to her friends back home.

  He felt they were his people, the Irish, and he pitied and admired them. He enjoyed them, but he felt that, like him, they had no idea how to live.

  He takes Cam’s arm as they walk down their childhood street. They look across the street; their eyes fall on the same sight; they are thinking the same thing. Some children, young teenagers they must be, thirteen at most, are getting on the bus for Jamaica. Cam and Dan know from the way they’re dressed (uneasily) and standing (tentatively, as if they are afraid someone will come along and tell them they have no right to be there) that these children will take the subway at Jamaica and get off in midtown Manhattan. The City. They travel only from borough to borough but it is as if they travel to another continent. They are leaving home.

  Dan says: “Remember when you took me into the museum. It was so exciting. I felt like you were taking me in a covered wagon.”

  Cam isn’t listening. They are about to pass by 163 Linwood Avenue, where Cam lives with her mother and Bob. Cam’s eye is on Magdalene’s window, facing out onto the street. Dan sees Cam’s mouth go tense. He knows she won’t suggest that they go in. It occurs to him that in all his life he hasn’t been in that house more than twenty times. That house. It was a place that you got out of
, quickly, into the fresh air, to the city, or to Vincent and Ellen’s, or away somewhere in your car. Cam never wanted him in that house; he never particularly wanted to be there. There was something dangerous about it: infected, forbidden. Magdalene ruled there, making Cam behave her worst.

  Cam sees that the drapes of her mother’s room are drawn. It makes her furious; she’d like to bang open the doors of the house, run up the stairs, open the curtains, and say, “Mother, it’s the middle of the day. How about letting the sunshine in.”

  She knows it’s a bad sign, the drawn curtains. She wonders how much time she has before she’ll have to go into the house and find out, once and for all, whether Magdalene will do it. Whether she’ll walk out of her room, onto the street, back to her parents’ house. To be there for her father.

  Cam expects the worst. She doesn’t want to think about it now. She takes Dan’s arm and steers him forcefully around the corner, as if he were a stranger, as if he didn’t know where they were.

  2

  BEHIND THE DRAWN CURTAINS in Magdalene’s room, the telephone is ringing. Magdalene answers it as she always does, expectantly, flirtatiously. “Hilooo,” she says, drawing out the last syllable. It is Kevin Browning, her partner in Maison Magdalene.

  “Oh, darling, I’m so glad you called,” she says. “I’ve been trying to get dressed and I just don’t think I can make it. I have these terrible spots in front of my eyes.”

  “Sweet, you’ve got to go. What will you wear? Let’s plan what you’ll wear.”

  She can’t listen to what usually enthralls her: this description of the contents of her closet, which he analyzes and embellishes with his devoted eye. “The teal shirt with the green stretch slacks?” he says. “The purple pants with the white blouson top?”

  She isn’t listening. He has betrayed her. He has left her. The world is made up of sides. He hasn’t taken her side. He has taken their side. Cam’s. She pities herself.

  In the first months after her operation, twenty years earlier, Magdalene was entirely without self-pity. Then she began to resent everyone who had allowed her to be brave. She saw the way they swallowed her stories as evidence of their brutality. They believed she was all right because they didn’t care if she was not. She retreated to her bedroom. She had expended her reserve. The energy that she had used for the eighteen years of her widowhood to cut a figure of public bravery was used up.

  She’d had no notion of herself apart from the responses that she could engender. Her parents’ early disappointment in her left her hungry, as if she’d been permanently underfed. Her nourishment came from the eyes of strangers, it had to. The only other choice left her was to take the grudged minimum, whatever the parents had left.

  But she had only to walk onto the street to know that her parents were wrong. She could tell that her physical presence was a gift to everyone that she passed by. It was her looks, but not only that, it was the conviction that came over her after the first glance fell on her that she existed with a wholeness that was perfect and almost abstract. The wholeness of a geometric shape. She existed in the minds of those who looked at her with the solidity of a mathematical idea. She felt herself grow more durable every moment she walked in the world. Soon she could feel herself impermeable. Nothing chipped or marred the surface of the self they made for her, those who looked. She didn’t have to give them anything. It was perfect; it was what she liked.

  Even in middle age she could command the look that made her, to herself, substantial. It was given to her by her clients, by the men who took her to expensive restaurants and told her she ate like a bird, she needed someone to take care of her; they gladly would if she would only say the word. She never felt her grip on men slacken. Before that could happen, the men became unnecessary. Kevin came into her life, providing everything that she had wanted in a man. He was her handsome escort. From him came the praise that fed and made her whole. She could trust the praise; it was discriminating, like a woman’s, but he said it as a man.

  In June of 1963, at the height of bouffant, beehive, those exhausting, challenging architectural days in the world of beauty parlors, Kevin Browning walked into Maison Magdalene with his diploma from the Robert Valli School of Beauty. He was hoping to be able to find a job in his hometown. His first choice was Maison Magdalene, because he had known Cam in school. Awed, like everyone else, by her public achievements, he would never have talked to her, but her connection with Maison Magdalene gave it the suggestion of solidity he craved.

  Kevin was one of those inexplicable flowerings that grow up in a household marked by nothing but drabness and a numbed attention to the plain details of daily life. His father was a postman and his mother raised five children with the withdrawn, unoriginal stoicism of a financially pressed woman whose dreams are of “sets” of furniture—a bedroom “set,” a living-room “set”—that she will never have. Early on, from a source he could never place, came to Kevin the dream of a glamorous mother. Her nails would be polished a shade called Tudor Rose. Smooth nails, untouched, unused to dishwater, not cracked and striated like his mother’s. The dream mother would walk, high-heeled, through light rooms smelling wonderfully of perfume. She would take him on vacations, to the movies. She would take him out to lunch. Inside her heart would be a suffering maiden she would hide with jokes that everybody loved. She would see how he stood out among his family. For, although his dream mother was not his mother, he peopled his dream family with siblings from the life. “A rose among thorns,” she would call him. She would tell him, “We are just alike.” When Kevin walked through the door of Maison Magdalene, he experienced a searing moment when the dreamer sees, shockingly embodied, the figure of his dream. Magdalene smiled, turned, shook a can of hairspray, joked as she sprayed the tower of hair she’d crafted for a customer, then swiveled the customer in her chair so she could see the effect of the back of her now perfect coiffure.

  He said, “I’m Kevin Browning, I’m a hairdresser, and I’m looking for a job.”

  She answered, “Dream on, Macduff.”

  He wasn’t daunted. “Well, at least you could talk to me. You could give me a cup of coffee, for God’s sakes,” he said.

  Of course she hired him. They soon found in one another natures generous but enclosed, imaginative yet easily discouraged by the world of fact which they both hated and revered; ambitious, concerned with fashion, interested in money, pious, sentimental, attentive, but often surprised by the effects of their own acts.

  Kevin’s presence changed the tone of Maison Magdalene in ways that were alarming or invigorating, depending upon who spoke. It was said at the same time “He’s ruined everything,” and “He’s a real breath of fresh air.” He and Magdalene spent all their time together, endlessly turning the pages of magazines, not idly, speculatively, but as professionals who needed to find the precise objects that could make their vision real. What they had in mind was a blending of the most desirable of Magdalene’s old clients with the new young faces Kevin could bring in. There was a middle range of women who came to the shop three or four times a year, seen to by Betty or by Myrna, whom Magdalene and Kevin thought of as so much underbrush, more profitably cleared away. In a while, their attitude towards Betty and Myrna’s clients extended to Betty and Myrna themselves. Sensing rightly the danger to their positions, Betty and Myrna took exactly the wrong approach. Their relations with Magdalene had been impersonal and formal. Resolutely, Magdalene had discouraged their confidences. If she saw them approach her with a need to unburden themselves, she became jokey, hyper-urban: an Irish tough. She lifted up one shoulder; she looked in the mirrors that were everywhere to check her lipstick. She shot at the sufferer, from halfway out of the room, some bracing platitude. And then she was gone: her high heels tapping, beating out the truth: How futile is self-pity. How relentless is the world. When Betty and Myrna tried to speak to Magdalene about their worries, they never got her ear. She was always off somewhere, to lunch with Kevin, or to church, a decorator or a
salesman was soon coming and she must look over the samples which she hadn’t had a God’s blessed minute even to think about. “You know how my brain is, like a rag picker’s bag, my mother used to say.” Then she was flipping through brochures; she was writing numbers out on scraps of paper. She was not available to them. They were out of her world, and soon they quit working for her.