by Mary Gordon
They head back to the house. Once inside, they walk into their grandmother’s room. For this moment, she sleeps, her mouth open, miraculously not grotesque, her hair in two thin plaits under her shoulders. Dan stands on one side of the bed and Cam stands in the doorway. Ellen wakes. Her eyes focus on nothing. Are they terrified or angry? Who can tell? She cries out: the sacrilegious cry of someone who has lost her place among her kind.
Cam hears this sound and feels terror first, then anger. She can’t do anything for her grandmother. She doesn’t know what her grandmother sees. She’s horrified by the avidity for life those eyes express; as if simply to be not dead was what she craved with a hunger that was unseemly in its plainness. What could inspire the look behind those eyes, that terror, that anger, that unmediated request for deliverance? But deliverance from what? Cam feels that if she could simply name the thing her grandmother sees, could describe in solid language what goes on behind her grandmother’s eyes, those eyes that aren’t dead but are perhaps not quite human, she could help her. Not knowing how to name the thing, she’s helpless. Her helplessness makes her angry. She hates that, being of no help.
John, Theresa’s son, comes and stands beside her in the doorway. He’s been in the garage, doing the repairs he’d promised to do months ago. On the last day, working too hastily, Cam sees, he’s bungled. She worries what this will do to Vincent on his first day home.
“I’ll sit with her a while,” John says.
Cam nods. She never knows what to say to John. His life is ruined. He is a wreck, Cam thinks, thirty-seven, sitting in a wrecked life. She wonders who is to blame. She’d like to think it was Theresa, but her work has made her chary of the automatic blame placed on mothers by everyone from Ann Landers to the Family Court judge. John was one of those boys living on the margin all their lives. Should you look to coded genetic messages: did something in John’s body program him for marginal living? Should you look to the neighborhood, the schools, and say: If not this friend, if only this teacher? Or should you look to history and say: Drugs, Vietnam, the dropout generation, they despaired, or they were lazy, they lost heart. In the end, what did it matter, Cam thinks, looking at John. She sees that somehow sitting beside Ellen—she’s quiet now—John is happy. She wants to thank him for all the time he’s spent with Ellen this year. But she doesn’t thank him; she could never talk to him, and it’s dangerous, with someone like John, to interrupt some moment not devoted to making his life worse. She won’t say anything to him now; he seems happy.
John holds his grandmother’s hand. He is thinking that perhaps he’ll study to become a nurse. He checks his grandmother’s pulse, as if for practice. He looks up at the IV tube sending glucose to her arm as if he could discern its proper function or its failures, be the one to rightly raise alarm. His sister is a nurse. He likes his sister. He has always liked his grandmother. She left him alone. So he is almost happy and he thinks he’s had a good idea: he’ll study and become a nurse. He thinks he’ll work in a veterans’ hospital. Or else a nursing home. He sits, holding his grandmother’s hand, a claw. In his mind, he performs perfectly at two interviews: one at a veterans’ hospital, one at a nursing home. He tells the interviewer that he’s had so many offers, he’ll have to sleep on it, be sure he’s making the right choice.
He wants to tell his grandmother he knows what he’ll do now. He will study, he’ll become a nurse. He thinks that this would please her. It will please his sister Marilyn, whom he likes. He could have a job like her. Sitting beside his grandmother, he has already done it, gone to school, trained in the hospital. It looms before him, solid as a house, all this accomplishment. Accepting it as fact, he now refines, in great detail, all the particulars.
Outside the door, John’s father, Ray Dooley, is thinking: My son, my ruined son. He doesn’t know how to begin to understand him. How can he understand this son, how can he understand himself, how can he recognize himself as a father? He’s so different from his own father that they should call themselves by other names. How can he understand this son? The refusals, the sleeping until three o’clock on filthy sheets, the joblessness accepted like a natural fate or a deformity, the anger if someone suggests that he should do something, anything, the freedom this son feels to say dreadful things to his parents, profane or wounding. To the parents in whose house, at thirty-seven, he still lives, and shows no sign of leaving, or wanting to leave. And watching all of it, as he has always done throughout his family’s life, Ray Dooley stands back, puzzled and uncomprehending, certain that his wife knows something he doesn’t know, she must know something about this son, something that he does not. Ray stood at the side for all the family life, clumsy, balked, and silent, frightened by his wife’s clenched-teeth anger, by her punishing cold gestures to the children, whom he could see wither in her presence, whom he did not see prosper beside her. They should do that, he thought, mother and children, prosper and be pleased. But she was the woman, she must know about the children, he knew nothing, his world was the world outside, the precinct, money, the silent life of men.
She was the one that spent all day with them. He came in only after they were fed, dressed, ready for sleep. How could he know them? On the weekends he held another job at a box factory as a security guard. And then, when the kids were grown, Theresa went to work, as Larry Riordan’s secretary. For a while she made almost as much as Ray. Now that he was retired, she made more. She runs the place, Larry Riordan had said, before he, too, retired. Now she works for a group practice, knows computers, everything. The things he doesn’t know.
He saw how the cold knot of her contempt and her indifference froze the family life. He saw it but did nothing, could not raise his hand to cover or to shelter the three children, his and yet not his, whom he had loved in silence, in confusion, in despair. He’d loved them paralyzingly from birth, and couldn’t say it; he’d watched them grow into their unhappiness like some dark coat passed down, one to another. And the youngest, John, had never given it up. The girls seemed all right now. But John was drowning in his life. Ray saw it, and said nothing. He watched and he grieved.
John is not unhappy now. He is thinking of comradely jokes about bedpans and midnight shifts. The young girls, fellow student nurses, are wonderfully impressed with his other experiences before finding this work. They are shyly grateful, honored when he asks them out. His grandmother interrupts his dream by opening her wild eyes that see nothing. She screams and bares her gums. He doesn’t see this as he formerly did, in horror, in terror. Now he sees her with a professional’s eye. Professionally, he moves her blanket half an inch. He smooths her pillow. She settles down, as if he did the things she wanted. And he takes it as a sign.
He thinks that after a while, he’ll quit the job in the nursing home (he’s decided that he’ll choose the job in the nursing home rather than the V.A. hospital: he likes working with old people), he’ll move somewhere warmer. To the Sunbelt, out West, maybe, not down South: he hated that, it makes him think of being married and he doesn’t want to think of that. Arizona, he thinks, New Mexico, or maybe Colorado, maybe he’ll learn to ski. He wishes he hadn’t thought about the time that he was married. First it was a good time, then it turned bad.
Everything started making him sick. The way she looked—he can’t call her his wife, even to himself. And then the way she kept apologizing all the time. It wasn’t his fault that things ended that way with the job. He was installing and repairing air conditioners. It was all right, he’d liked it at first, but he got sick of it. He was ready to walk out. But not like that.
The day it happened, he was fixing a central air system in one of those fucked-up houses like Gone With the Wind, with the pillars. It was a big job, but he was on top of it. Then the bitch came over and said would he turn down the music, it’s disturbing her. Like she owns music, like she owns him, his life’s not his own, she bought it when she paid the installation charges. He just turned the music up louder. She asked him again—I said the music is
disturbing me, I have to have it off. He just kept working on the system like he was deaf. The next thing he knew his boss, that guy Lannie that he always got along with, was on top of him. I guess you didn’t hear the lady. Well, listen up. Turn the goddamn music off. So he laid him out on the broadloom and just took off in his car, he doesn’t remember where. He didn’t take a thing from the apartment, never ever went back, just kept driving. Till he landed up here.
He knows it’s ridiculous, his idea of being a nurse, he’ll never do it, he’s never made anything work, he’s ruined everything in his life. His grandmother begins thrashing, but he doesn’t try to quiet her. She cries out; he gets up to look for Marilyn. He sees his mother. At the sight of her he knows that he will never be a nurse, or anything. He hates himself for all the details of his happy dream. And then he hates his mother.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Out,” he says.
“That’s a good answer,” she says. “You finished up that work in the garage?”
He pushes past her, out of the house, banging the screen door to offend her.
She refuses to show she is offended. Instead, she holds her body so its posture can be read as a reproach.
Theresa knew from childhood how to hold her body so it would be a reproach. She took her father’s admiration in like moisture, without the slightest gratitude or sense of having been marked by it. Her movements, swift, deliberate, yet drawn out, he looked on with delight. He loved her singing voice, her size-five shoe. Ellen looked into her child’s heart and found it empty, and this left her terrified and punitive, eager, in her fear, to inflict upon her daughter any quick, surprising hurt. As if she always wanted some ambush of her daughter so that she could find her, in the glance of her surprise, comprehensible and alive.
Theresa’s coldness has been helpful to her in her life. It helps her, daily, in her job. She is a medical secretary. She is the one who hands the patients a form clipped to a clipboard; if they ask her for a pen or pencil she provides it. Many of the patients feel their spirits shrivel as they are passed the pencil or the pen. But should the patient know that he is dying, or discover herself unhappily pregnant, Theresa will behave as if she didn’t know or hadn’t noticed, as if she weren’t the kind of person who could take the trouble to read a patient’s chart. This can be helpful, if the patient’s need is for privacy, rather than fellow feeling. It often is.
In her fifties, she became taken up by the charismatic movement of the Catholic Church. She is one of those people who stand in churches where there are still highly colored leftover statues of the Virgin, still plaques that represent the fourteen stations of the cross. She is one of those people who lift up their arms and cry out, lay their hands upon the sick and dying, expecting to be healed or that they themselves will heal. These people, mostly in late middle age, brought up on a ritual impersonal and formal as a face of stone, then told to leave all that, feel moved to stand and cry out “Praise the Lord” as if they had just been given the good news of their salvation from a wild-eyed preacher holding in his hands his oversized and rusty hat. They stand together in these churches built with bingo money or with dollars that parishioners thrust in the basket, dollars sealed in numbered envelopes recorded by the pastor for his records and the IRS. They stand together in these churches, crying “Praise the Lord,” “Amen,” “I hear it, brother.” If they are teenagers they sing and play the tambourine.
At the age of sixty-four, Theresa Dooley’s days are shaped by morning Mass (in which she stands at the Consecration with her arms outstretched), lunchtime prayer meetings (attended by local housewives or people employed in local businesses who give up their lunch hours to hold hands together in a circle and to pray for guidance, healing, world peace, the end to pre-marital sex, abortion, homosexuality, divorce). Two evenings a week, after she has dried the dishes from the modest, pre-frozen meal she slipped into the microwave for herself and Ray, and John (if he decided to come down), she gets into her car and travels to the house of one of her group members for Bible study. She remembers that until the Council she, a Catholic, had been told it was a sin to read scripture by yourself without the guidance of a priest. They laugh, Theresa’s group members, to think that they might need the guidance of a priest.
Her group believes in healing. Every day they pray for Ellen, whom they call only “Theresa’s mother.” Hearing this, Theresa feels a flame of inward joy that her name in the group has blotted out her mother’s name. And as she sits beside her mother, she turns her mind to God and readies herself to lay her hands upon her mother so that she may heal.
But she does not lay on hands. She looks at her mother, sees her mother’s eyes, which wildly focus upon nothing, hears her mother mutter words of unimaginable filth, hears her cry out with no sense that someone might be listening, like an animal who lives for herself only. Hearing all this, seeing this, she is satisfied. She says in her mind: This is the will of the Lord. She does not touch her mother. Deliberately, she folds her hands.
5
DAN GOES TO THE TELEPHONE, more public on the hallway table than he would like. It occurs to him that his grandparents never felt the need for privacy on the telephone. Nothing important was communicated by them over the telephone; they always answered uncomfortably, anxious to get off.
He is phoning Sharon Breen, whom he lives with. She works as a paralegal for a law firm in Riverhead. Even answering the phone “Macintosh, Canino and DeFries,” even with her professional upbeat timbre, he can hear the underlying weariness. He hears her voice and thinks: “I’ve failed to make her happy.” They haven’t married after all this time.
“How’s it going?” she says.
“Nobody’s killed anyone yet. Not bad for the house of Atreus.”
She laughs. Once, when she was taking a course on Greek tragedy at the community college where she got her associate degree, she read The Oresteia. She said she’d enjoyed reading it because it was a relief to find a family that was worse off than hers.
He wants her to come today, he’d like her to be there with him; it’s an important moment, he thinks, his grandfather’s coming home, and he’d like her to be there beside him. But he knows she won’t come. She’ll never come to Vincent and Ellen’s house. She’s too ashamed. Shame, he thinks, that unmodern emotion, stains Sharon’s life like a dye. It weakens her, it slows down the growth of muscle, bone. She’s still ashamed of what happened twelve years ago, in June 1973.
In January 1973 Cam hired Sharon Breen as a secretary, causing scandal in local legal circles by announcing that secretaries were exploited and underpaid and giving Sharon a salary a third higher than the highest-paid secretary in town.
Sharon had graduated from the nuns’ school that Ellen had refused to allow Cam to attend. She was the child of an electrician and his Irish-born wife, one of eight children. Her good grades in high school didn’t mean that she’d go on to college; she went, instead, to Wood Secretarial School on a scholarship and married, at nineteen, the boy she’d one year earlier danced with at the Senior Prom. She was attentive, quiet, naturally sweet; she’d been told she was pretty, but she had no idea what that meant.
She liked herself in the mirror—her light-brown hair, her wide blue eyes, her skin with its high color—but it seemed to her to count for nothing in the world. A melancholy hung around her, but she told herself her life was good, and there was nothing to explain why she seemed to herself unhappier than other people. She moved into an apartment six blocks from her parents and was happy to be hired in an office near her home; it meant that she need not commute and so would have more time for household occupations. She enjoyed her new apartment, enjoyed decorating it; she was fond of her husband and assumed most wives discovered they had married boys. She worshipped Dan and Camille MacNamara; she loved her job. She would do anything for either of them.
Cam was delighted with the arrangement. Sharon was a satisfying slap in the face to Mary Dolan, Jack’s secretary for thirt
y-seven years, who had known Cam all her life and insisted upon calling her, even in private, Mrs. Ulichni, although it was Camille MacNamara on the letterhead and on the door. Each morning when Cam walked into the office, the sight of Mary Dolan, always there before her, made Cam feel petulant, resentful, in the mood to pick a fight. Sharon seemed to have all Mary Dolan’s virtues and none of her lacerating faults. Her efficiency was rich and maternal where Mary, Dolan’s was deprivational and dry. Sharon blushed easily and seemed overcome when praised; at the same time, she soon felt free not to ask permission or advice on every detail. Cam began inviting her to lunch and then to family functions. To Cam this was proof of the success of democracy and justice in the workplace. No need to treat your employees like lepers or like slaves; there was a place for everyone and everyone could be happy in his place.
But then Cam noticed that Sharon and Dan had fallen in love. She saw that Mary Dolan knew it, and watched her eyes sharpen in joyous recording of Cam’s error, and in expectation that Sharon would neglect her work. She never did; it was Dan whose work suffered.
There was no way that Cam could talk to Dan. He’d moved away into a state where he’d become unrecognizable, carried out of reach. He floated in some atmosphere of sexual intoxication, absorbed, oblivious, addicted: closed. She saw him float away from her and from his work. And from the family. She saw that he was happy and that made it worse. She felt as if he’d been picked up by the nape of the neck, seized in the beak of some predatory bird: swirled through an atmosphere of confusion and disregard.
Dan was amazed at what had happened to him. He thought he was the most fortunate man in the world, and the most cursed. His adolescence had been free entirely of coupling: the school life of the Jesuit academy, where females were kept out with rigor, with contempt, made it unlikely that he would come into normal contact with girls. Overlarge and awkward, he believed himself so undesirable that he pitied in the abstract any girl he might attract. Pitying them, in advance he spared them, spared himself. Morosely he attended dances sponsored by the CYO; he stood in corners with his buddies, smoked, desired silently, went home. He joked with Cam’s friends but they were older. They thought he was wonderful and wished there were somebody their age like him that they could talk to. He understood.