by Mary Gordon
With the advice of decorators, salesmen who could supply, at the crack of a whip, a dreamy array of new products, Maison Magdalene transformed itself between May 30 and August 15, 1964 (Feast of the Assumption, chosen by Magdalene for luck), into Maggi’s. Young women in short skirts began appearing so that Kevin would cut their hair into geometric shapes. At the same time, Magdalene kept her older customers, and got some new ones: doctors’ wives, the wives of one judge and a local politician, women in their forties frightened that perhaps they had lost their lives. Kevin learned the new boyish haircuts thought up in London and Liverpool. Magdalene continued to arrange the hair of her old customers in homage to the widowed Mrs. Kennedy. Maggi’s was the home of two friendly but unrelated tribes, who watched each other with amusement and regard, occasionally communicating by means of their few words of shared language. At night, when the tribespeople returned to their separate tents to sleep, the two priests, Kevin, Magdalene, met and came together. Cam was in law school; Kevin lived at home and saw each meal he took there as the death of all he loved, so every night he and Magdalene ate out, or bought food for the one meal they would prepare and eat, not at the kitchen table, but on lacquered Chinese trays Kevin had bought for just this purpose, trays they would place on their laps as they sat in front of the TV.
When she came home for weekends, Cam felt she’d walked into a strange house, presided over now by strangers.
She saw how the house she’d grown up in had changed. Kevin and her mother spent their weekends in Suffolk County buying antiques. Magdalene had bought all the furniture in the house in 1952, when she shocked everyone by moving out of the apartment she had lived in as a bride, then an envied mother of a single child, then a widow pitied first, then feared. She was tired, she said, of throwing rent money down the sink. She was tired of the smell of meat that came up from the butcher shop, though for fourteen years she hadn’t said a word about it, and hadn’t seemed to notice that there was a smell. She bought one of her customers’ houses when the customer’s husband died. She furnished the house perfunctorily, as if it interested her as an investment rather than a dwelling. But with Kevin, she became acquisitive. Large, dark pieces of mahogany, plush couches took over the spaces occupied by insubstantial, tired Danish modern she had bought on the installment plan from Montgomery Ward. Gilt mirrors sprouted everywhere like spores, Cam thought, and heavy damask curtains kept out every possibility of light. Only Cam’s room remained untouched, its maple single bed. with plaid spread and matching curtains a kind of shrine, to an unknowing, under-ripe virginity. It was a mixed homage they paid the room, ignoring it. It was the only light room in the house. Leaving it so, they must have seen how it would comment on and mark the others. When she took Dan around the house, Cam said her room looked like the madame’s daughter’s. They both laughed but Dan understood Cam’s sense of defilement, of the desecration of the dwelling that had been her address if not her real home.
Dan and Cam were right in understanding that the decorating scheme had everything to do with sex, but the connection wasn’t simple. What they couldn’t know was that Magdalene and Kevin worshipped the accoutrements that were supposed to lead to sex, but found the act itself abhorrent. High on their list of valued attributes was elegance; they were, in addition, both possessed of an extreme bodily consciousness. The act of sex required that they give up both; they both preferred, therefore, to avoid it. And for Kevin to think seriously about the act of sex would require that he acknowledge that the lovely perfumed women who peopled his other dreams were not the bodies that he wanted near his own. It was the body of a man that he desired when desire did intrude. The idea of that in himself disgusted him. He could only endure himself if he pushed from his mind those pictures that grew of themselves (he tried to stop them) in such lush and frightening profusion, like, he thought when he made his Act of Contrition, a jungle growth.
So together Magdalene and Kevin created a place which was meant to do homage to sex by replacing the act of sex with its effects and its surroundings. And in the center of it all they kept. Cam’s room, their thoughts, their stories about Cam herself. When Cam came home, Kevin was prepared to worship. But she wouldn’t let him. He was ready for a cool and unmoved goddess. He wasn’t prepared for the clear, freezing glance that fell on his every act and killed his spirit.
Cam knew that what she did to Kevin was terrible; she knew it and she didn’t stop. She couldn’t find in anything he had done a single act for which to blame him. But he had done the one thing she could not forgive. He had become to her mother the child she had always wanted.
Cam heard their confiding, easy conversations. Her mother saying: “What’s up, love? You under the weather?”
And Kevin saying, “I’m depressed.”
In twenty years she and her mother had not had an exchange like that. Hypnotized, Cam listened in.
“ ‘Depressed,’ ” said Magdalene. “That’s a word your generation made up. In my day, we had the blues.”
“So, whatever you called it, what did you do when you had the blues?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve always done, because, let’s face it, my life has not been one long picnic. I got the idea from my eighth-grade teacher. Sister Mathilde. The woman was a genius. I think she had a Ph.D. from Europe. But she was humble about it. She told me one day when we were alone, just the two of us, I was helping her with the altar, she said, ‘What’s up, Magdalene?’ I said, ‘Sister, I’ve got the blues.’ She said, ‘You know what I do when I’ve got the blues. I take a piece of paper, a piece of ordinary paper. I fold it in half. On one side of the page I write down all the things I have to be grateful for. On the other side I write my problems. Then I take the piece of paper. I rip it in half, and I throw both halves in the garbage.’ ”
Cam knew that she could never, hearing this story, have presented Magdalene with the kind of rapt, grateful look that took over Kevin’s face. For years, in exasperation, she had listened to her mother’s non sequiturs, astonishing misinformation, conclusions drawn from premises impossible to trace. A night or two before, when Kevin had told her about a dream he’d had, Magdalene had said, “My generation didn’t have dreams. We were too busy.” And Kevin seemed to believe her. Cam stood in the kitchen, at once furious at their complicitous stupidity and jealous that someone else could make her mother feel so happy, so intelligent, so prized.
When Magdalene got sick, Cam didn’t notice Kevin. He stayed in the background, visiting, but only when the family wasn’t there. At that time, Magdalene turned to her daughter in panic; feeling herself near death, she felt only someone of her blood could keep her from it, or accompany her to it when the moment came. As Magdalene withdrew for her demise, Kevin stayed around, keeping the business going, reporting to Magdalene, making money for her, giving her more than her share. In the early years of Cam’s marriage, as it gradually became evident that Magdalene wouldn’t die, Kevin took up again his role as Magdalene’s companion, but only when Cam and Bob were out of the house, which they were often, in the days when they went out together, meeting up with other couples to avoid being by themselves. By the time Cam looked up from the bombed-out site of her marriage, she found she wasn’t without help in her problems with her mother. By the time she understood, Kevin had been helping her for years. He had matured; he was no longer the moonish boy whose skewed erotic source was Magdalene. He lived with a companion; he had become part of a circle in which he could be himself. Cam and Kevin developed a relationship of co-conspirators.
Magdalene doesn’t know that Cam and Kevin speak to each other every day. They talk about their own lives, but mainly they have grieved or anxious conversations, sometimes carefully sardonic: the talk of connoisseurs. Their subject is Magdalene. They’ve never allowed Magdalene to know that over the years they have become a bulwark to each other. It is a necessary fiction for Magdalene that Cam and Kevin are antagonists; it’s the tension without which her life would lack shape.
Ma
gdalene hopes Kevin will tell her she doesn’t have to go to Vincent and Ellen’s house. She takes one earring off as she talks to him on the phone.
“Cam doesn’t know what I go through,” she says. “She thinks everything’s as easy for me as it is for her.”
“I know, darling. Just try. One step at a time. You never told me what you’ll wear.”
“I can’t make up my mind. What did you say, the purple? I was thinking that too, only the shoes kill my feet.”
3
HARRIET DUFFY KNOCKS ON Vincent’s door. Without his answering, she opens the door a bit, and sticks her little bird’s head in the room.
“Yoo-hoo,” she says. “I hope you weren’t thinking of shoving off without saying goodbye.”
He wishes he were wearing a hat, so he could tip it. That would be an acknowledgment she would like. He realizes that men no longer tip their hats. In the old days, you’d tip your hat when you passed a church. He wonders when all that stopped. It was something to do with John Kennedy; after him, men stopped wearing hats.
“A little going-away present for you, then,” she says. “I couldn’t resist.”
She hands him a package wrapped in rainbow-colored tissue paper. Stuck to the top is a yellow bow. He opens the box. It’s a tie, red plaid, wider than the ties he wears.
“I made it myself,” she says. “It’s my new hobby, making ties. My daughters bring me their old clothes, their old dresses, and I just make ties out of the scraps. Sometimes they’ve got big stains on them or holes from I don’t know what. But I don’t let anything go to waste. We were brought up like that, you and me, Vincent, weren’t we? Waste not, want not. People today never heard that one. I’m just grateful they let me have my machine here.”
“My wife was an excellent needlewoman,” he says. He wants Ellen’s presence in the room. Harriet Duffy makes him uncomfortable. There’s something funny about the way she treats him. Wanting to give him her desserts. Asking if he wants to watch a game on the television in her room. He knows she isn’t interested in baseball. Knocking on the door for him, so he can walk her down to dinner. He feels it’s wrong. He feels it’s wrong to Ellen. Ellen can’t help herself. If she was her old self, she’d never allow Harriet Duffy to get this familiar. Whenever women seemed to want to get too friendly, Vincent only had to introduce them to Ellen. Seeing her, they knew they didn’t have a chance.
This Harriet is taking advantage of Ellen’s position. Ellen’s position: lying in a bed, her eyes looking up at the ceiling, or at nothing. Ellen might not even recognize him anymore. He feels that Harriet is hovering around Ellen’s bed, waiting for something, like those witches that waited around deathbeds at home, and then, when the moment came that they’d been waiting for, the death itself, they’d set up their wail. Except you knew they weren’t sorry. Harriet wants something from him as a man. He’ll have no part of it.
“I’m much obliged to you,” he says.
She walks over to him. She opens her arms. He can tell she wants him to kiss her. He holds his arm out stiffly to her, keeping her back. He shakes her hand.
When she goes out the door, his eyes fix on her disappointed back. He is sorry to hurt her, but he can’t help it. You have to be who you are.
4
DAN AND CAM TURN TOWARDS THE TWO LOCAL STORES: Johansen’s Deli, Friedman’s Candy Store. “Do you remember, that magazine had floor plans,” he says.
“That was the best part,” Cam says.
Dan tries to understand who the magazine was meant for. Contractors, builders, someone his grandfather came across at work? What genius made him know children would like something like that? Or did he simply bring it home? He and Cam studied the floor plans, they talked about the architecture of each house. They never talked about the photographs. He knew that she, too, had her treacherous, her shameful dreams.
It’s thirty-six years later, a summer afternoon. The light is changing. The trees that are rich with leaves now were saplings when the houses they walk in front of were built. Slapped up, their grandfather had said: the only contempt he ever showed, a workman’s for bad work. Each summer when they were children walking down this street a house, two houses would grow up. The vacant lots they treasured disappeared; the exposed roots, the colorless, downtrodden grass, the severe wild chrysanthemums, the rose hips and choke cherries, the cracked bricks, the shards of broken glass, the inexplicable and random objects they found frightening—a single shoe, a handbag—all these were dug under. And the new houses slapped up. There was a moment when the mourning for the lot was over and they couldn’t decide which they preferred: the flat space where they could invent landscape, or the bare, challenging, inviting bones of the new house and all the objects that the workmen left at night. Useful by day: barrels of nails, work aprons, cement mixers, wheelbarrows, files, yardsticks, rolls of tape. By day the things were taken up. The bare-chested men pushed the heavy wheelbarrows full of wet cement, frightened the children with their hammer blows, the noise of their electric saws, but stopped, some of them, for a minute to be friendly till a mother saw and made the children leave. “Don’t play by the new houses,” every mother shouted every morning as the children banged the screen doors running out. Even Vincent was adamant. “Don’t go near those houses. Keep away.” But the children obeyed no one, and no one was hurt.
Dan looks at Cam, walking beside him on the streets they’ve walked on all their lives. All the romance children might have put into trips, holidays at the seaside, vacations to the mountains went into these walks he took with Cam. For they never went anywhere else. Not once in all their childhood had they gone anywhere. And was it a mistake? He thought of the failed vacations he had taken with his children. He thought that really what children loved was routine. Change as an idea delighted them, and the voyage itself might give them pleasure, but a strange place was a danger: they were always wanting to be home.
Better, perhaps, these walks, these trips to vacant lots or half-built houses, than the trips he took his children on. To Disney World, when they were nine and ten. There was an unexpected cold spell in Florida that Christmas week. The girls had brought with them only summer clothes. They shivered; then, ineptly, he had to buy them an overpriced, unsatisfying wardrobe of warmer clothing in a shop in the hotel. All the time that he was buying the girls their pants and sweaters, he was worried that Val would be angry, accuse him of trying to win them by one more indulgence that she would not or could not match. “You have them for a month, buy them everything; then they expect it from me and throw it in my face. Be real, Dan, just for once,” she’d said to him the last summer. How could he be more real? They wanted; he could give; he gave. Was a father’s real role denial? Was that what she meant? He had had no father; he would never know. Perhaps he was not a real father.
They’d stood on the interminable lines of Disney World. He told Cam later what it was like. Disney World, he said, is the Lourdes of divorced fathers. He stood behind men he had nothing in common with, men he would never have spoken to, except they now shared an estate: they were waiting on lines with impatient, cranky children. Men with sunburned necks, white creases where they bent their heads. Beefy half-boys wearing satin jackets with the names of high-school teams, recently left, embroidered on the back. Blacks in leisure suits or sweating, as he did, in too-warm jackets: proof and uniform of uneasy tenancy in the middle class. These men who in any other setting would have fallen within minutes into insult or tense silence made sympathetic comments to each other on the weather, the scandalous price of the drinks. They pointed out to one another the locations of the bathrooms. Failures in the company of failures, they became kinder. Almost womanly, they shared domestic troubles; they gave advice.
For the first day of the vacation, the children were amused. But he had rented the hotel rooms not for one day, but for a week. The children fell into a pattern of bored fighting. Fights like brush-fires that started from nowhere, were quenched, and started up in the same place, for no r
eason, again. It was Darci who dissolved in tears. What she wanted, Dan could see, was her father to herself. And Staci wanted no part of either of them. She drew back into the armor of her discontent, disliking everything, but silently, or saying why didn’t they just stay in the hotel room and watch television, everything was so expensive. “Such a rip-off,” she kept saying, “Dad, you’re being so ripped off.” Then Darci would say, “Jesus, Staci, you have got to be the world’s most boring human being.” Staci would walk out of the room, as if responding to such comments was beneath her. Dan agreed with Darci; he felt they should keep trying to enjoy this place where others of their kind so famously had enjoyed themselves. But they didn’t enjoy it. Everyone was happy to go home.
Dan and Cam walk on a street that’s changed entirely within their lifetime. They link arms. Male, female, but children together.
They can walk, their arms together; they’re no danger to each other; in this difference of sex there’s nothing of fear, desire, contempt. They share blood. Memory. A childhood. They were brought up by people who were old when they were young, whose death they had to fear each morning, whose love had too much in it of anxiety. They were fatherless children of mothers who were absent or useless in their love. They have only to look at each other and all this is understood.