by Mary Gordon
Magdalene’s bad luck was to have been born into a family, the one, perhaps, in fifteen hundred, where good looks wouldn’t matter enough to see a daughter through. What could Ellen MacNamara treasure in a pretty girl? To Ellen, prettiness was a lure, a snare, at the best a distraction. And to Vincent, who was by nature genuinely intellectual and moral, and by habit practical and interested in the functions of things, his daughter’s looks were merely a confusion. Her prettiness, soft, blonde, white-skinned, and prone to change, seemed insubstantial to him. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t look like her mother; he’d expected her to. Ellen’s was the kind of beauty that he liked, suggesting action or resistance. But Magdalene wasn’t like that; she was the ideal of her age: light, curly-haired, with wide perplexed or indolent blue eyes, a pliant, uncomprehending mouth. She was not her father’s type. Finding her vague, scattered, easily distracted, he turned his attention to the other two children, Theresa and John, whom he found solid, who were able to follow an argument, a plan, a blueprint, the directions on a box, the line of a journey on a map. When he tried to explore his older daughter’s character, he felt as if he’d stuck his hand into a pile of feathers. He couldn’t fully love that which he couldn’t grasp. The soft and shifting substance which he believed made up his daughter’s inner nature caused him to recoil.
Magdalene knew she didn’t please her father, and she was confused, for she could see she pleased all other men. Her failure with her father turned her radically outward. To live her life at home was to acknowledge that she failed. The words, the gestures that made her mother call her a fool and made her father turn away brought her in the outside world friends, laughter, the place of the chosen child. By the time she was eight years old teachers had marked her in this way: Magdalene is sweet-natured and amusing; she will cause no trouble; her sunny disposition is an asset in the class. On her, these words meant, no effort would be expended. She would marry early; there was not much that she need learn.
If she had had a family that made her feel prized, perhaps she wouldn’t have married quite so early. Eighteen. A week after her high-school graduation. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been so obviously foolish in her selection. Was it that her tastes and fantasies, bred in the movies, were bound to mislead her? They did not suggest a recondite, surprising choice. She was the prettiest girl in the class; she married the best athlete. Who could have predicted it would come to such grief?
Magdalene married Jimmy Laughlin in July of 1938. From the beginning sex was bad. The problem was one of misinformation, a sexual education so incomplete that Magdalene believed, and still believes, that her husband was fiendish when in fact he had the ordinary hungers of a young and healthy man. She was shocked by the transition from kissing to intercourse. Or it was the lack of transition that shocked her. The unrushed, silent embraces that were all she had allowed before her wedding turned into a frantic, feverish performance while she lay inert beneath a man she never knew. His face, his voice, his body were all unfamiliar. He became, she felt, possessed, and she herself entrapped beneath a stranger.
He did well enough in his job selling iceboxes so that they could afford, as so few of her friends could, not to live in their parents’ home, but to be independent. Independence is better than a college degree, Jimmy would say, as if he had been tempted for even a minute by the prospect of further education. Living in three rooms above a butcher shop, they felt successful. They felt too that, in living as they did, they had moved one step closer to the America they saw in the movies and had known nowhere in their own lives.
In this spirit they decided they would wait to have children. Defying the pastor, Magdalene lied in confession (later she would see what happened as a punishment for this), they used condoms for a year and a half, then gave them up when Magdalene turned twenty-one. In two months she was pregnant, in another month she lost the child. Their sex life, which had been for him the swift release of some uncomprehended pressure and for her a bafflement, turned into the grim, purposeful friction of two people who felt they must overcome a curse. In 1941 they had Camille, named by Magdalene after her favorite movie.
Before Camille’s birth, Magdalene had worked as a beautician in Mr. John’s House of Beauty, a salon owned by John Impanata, who had begun his working life a barber and switched, in the twenties, to the newly profitable female clientele. Magdalene’s working life had given her the time and money to build a wardrobe, learn to use makeup, find and maintain the perfect hairdo that would make her not just a natural beauty, but an invented one. With her cork-soled shoes, her Marlene Dietrich trousers, her high-maintenance pompadoured hair, she frightened and made humble the young mothers on the street. She made it appear that Camille’s birth was a subtle, highly styled event in opposition to the force of nature the other mothers, still girls, were victims of.
In the pictures Jimmy Laughlin took of those days, Camille, a smiling, photogenic baby, radiates her parents’ well-toned pleasure. Her mother in shorts and a midriff top lifts Cam, incandescently laughing for Daddy-Papa-look-at-Daddy in the camera. Or muscular, smiling Jimmy holds his treasure like a basketball. In these pictures it is summer, always clement weather. It is also 1941, but to look at the photographs, you would imagine that the War in Europe was a bad joke that the pessimists made up to stifle the good times of the fun-loving and clean-limbed Americans at home, who obviously knew the score.
But then it was March 1942, and Jimmy was drafted. All the noble, sentimental feelings Magdalene saw in movies actually grew up in her breast. She thought her husband looked heroic in a uniform, though even this sight didn’t transform itself into desire. Photogenically, they parted at the railroad station, holding between them their adorable child. When Jimmy spoke to Magdalene sentences that began “If I don’t come back from all this,” his words lacked conviction. He believed himself immortal, and she knew it and resented it, wanting him to throw himself upon her in real, if only temporary fear.
During the eight months that Jimmy fought in Burma, Magdalene went back to work as a beautician. John Impanata sold Magdalene Mr. John’s House of Beauty, which she rechristened Maison Magdalene. Having seen her behavior, knowing her nature, people predicted ruin, chaos, joked about disasters, scenes of Magdalene begging bank managers for a reprieve in a tableau of flutterheaded supplication and distress. But Magdalene made money. It turned out that she had a gift for money. She was excellent at managing her business, hired two more girls, Betty and Myrna, who did manicures as well.
When Jimmy came back, he observed Magdalene’s achievement with the pride of a dog owner who has left home and returned to find his pet performing in a circus, wearing a crinoline, a sailor’s outfit, a beret. He expected that Magdalene had had her fun and would quit now, stay home full-time now he was back, take care of their miracle daughter. She did not. She went on, facing her husband’s anger and his scorn, leaving her daughter with her mother. Ellen felt a satisfaction in her daughter’s making money, it was the one thing she could like her daughter for, and she fell in love with the girl child in whose baby eyes she saw what she had not seen in her daughter’s: something of herself.
So, every morning, dressed in stockings and high heels, while the other mothers slopped in housedresses and slippers, her clothes crisp, exciting to her daughter, Magdalene got into her blue-gray Buick, pressed her high-arched, polished shoe on the accelerator, dropped her daughter at Ellen’s, said no to coffee, she was busy, she was rushed, the child had dawdled. But the truth was that she didn’t want to be detained for a second longer than need be in the domestic world her mother’s house embodied. She loved the moment when she put her key into the lock of the shop, smelt in the dark the strong, dangerous smell of permanent-wave lotion, stood alone and turned the light on with a sense of awe. Seeing it then—the empty chairs, the sinks, the dryers, the trays of nail polish and emery boards—she thought every morning: I own this, this is mine.
Jimmy had to understand that his wife was well off. The baffled
look with which she had, before he’d left, greeted everything from the male orgasm to the size of the telephone bill had smoothed itself out. He could see she wore that look now when it could be useful to her. It could help her get something from a man. But he watched her sitting over the salon’s books and he saw the secure, serene face of a mystic. She seemed to have nothing to do now with domestic life, that dream he and his friends had dreamed together in the Burmese jungle. She wouldn’t cook. It wasn’t that she refused to. She simply indicated that they would be eating dinner at her mother’s, and if he wanted a hot meal he should turn up there. He could see that he was of no interest to her, except to be beside her with the other young couples, and to be her partner in the fox-trot or at bridge. Whereas she had been abashed before him sexually, she was indifferent now. He felt she humored him. He saw that she regarded sex as the childish preoccupation of the childish gender, the male. The men whom she admired, like her father, she believed had reached maturity and given it all up.
Magdalene was right to see her husband a boy. Defeated by his wife’s prosperity without him, he grew every month more into the child she thought him to be. He tried to pick up the thread of his pre-war success, the shining high-school years when he courted Magdalene, impressed and won her. It was embarrassing to see him with the teenagers. He coached the CYO team, but ruined the practices by hogging the ball and showing off. He trained his daughter to be an athlete. Flattered by her status as the chosen girl, proficient in the world of males, delightedly Cam let herself be tutored in sports that were her father’s calling and his pride. She became a girlfriend to her mother; she became her father’s pal. All this was established before she was six years old. Her two good-looking parents knew they had more to say to her than they did to each other. She assumed that was the way with all parents. She was close to no children but Dan, who had no parents, and she had no way to verify what she simply took to be the norm.
Then the news, the policeman at the door at 3:00 A.M. Jimmy Laughlin was dead, drunk, off the highway with a parish girl.
Eighteen years old and dead too, drunk like him. Because of Jimmy, her heartbroken parents took up in the town the honorable position of the shamed bereaved. But Magdalene turned all her shame to gold. Betrayal gave her stature. She became the movie image of the gallant widow, prematurely middle-aged. Without comment, offering no one an explanation (none was needed), she gave up her husband’s name and changed her own name and her daughter’s, legally, to MacNamara. In fact, she’d loved her name, loved the alliteration, “Magdalene MacNamara,” She had thought it distinguished; now she thought it would be good for trade.
Camille saw that her mother did not mourn, and closed part of her heart against her. One room she kept cleansed and sanctified for the handsome young man who had pretended, all along pretended, to have been her father, and now, dead, seemed in fact to be. She clung to Dan, who had always been the one child she’d enjoyed. She clung to her grandparents.
Thinking of all this makes Magdalene feel trapped. She feels her clothes have conspired against her. Punishingly, she pulls the string on the light bulb at the center of the closet that is the size of a room. The string sways back and forth; the little metal flower at the string’s end clanks against the bulb like a lost soul. She feels she has nowhere to go. Nothing is of interest to her. She thinks angrily of her daughter. How could she be a happy woman with a daughter who’s always treated her the way Cam has? She feels like she needs to calm down. She decides to pour herself a drink. It’s Cam’s fault that she’s drinking at this hour. Thinking of her daughter’s defections, beginning at Jimmy’s death, makes her feel that her nerves poke through her skin, and she needs something to put them back, take them away from the surface, where they are too susceptible to hurt.
She pours herself a drink. Sherry, she thinks, will be a nice drink, a light drink for this hour of the morning.
Magdalene begins to drink. Whenever Magdalene admits she drinks (which isn’t often—and when it occurs it happens only when she is alone) she tells herself that she does it because her daughter always wanted to make her feel bad. She was so upset at that time, after her husband died, that she couldn’t sleep. If Camille had just been nice to her then, it would have made all the difference. But Camille turning against her kept her up at night. She wouldn’t even let Magdalene put her to bed; she wouldn’t let Magdalene unbraid and brush her hair. “That’s OK, Mom, I can do it. You’re tired.” But she wasn’t tired. When she lay down all kinds of things came into her head, things it wasn’t any help to think about. Somebody suggested she take sleeping pills. But when she asked Larry Riordan, the doctor, he said, “I’d hate to see you getting caught up in dope. Just have yourself a good stiff drink, that’ll bring sleep on you.”
Camille did everything to turn against her. She shortened her name to Cam, she spent all the time she could with her grandparents. On Saturdays, she didn’t wake Magdalene up in the morning, she dressed herself and walked to her grandparents’ for breakfast. “Why didn’t you wake me, I told you I’d take you to the luncheonette for breakfast? We talked about it last night, you said you’d get French toast.”
“You looked tired, Mama. I wanted to let you sleep.”
Sometimes she could catch her daughter off her guard by making some warm, female nest, not womanly, but girlish: a lush refuge where two equals could retreat and settle. The two of them could sit on Magdalene’s bed with its varieties of pillows and watch the Late Show and eat foods of great comfort and pleasure with no nutritive value at all. Modern foods Ellen would never serve. She could take her daughter out to lunch. For a while, they could go shopping. But as Cam grew older, she took on her grandmother’s asceticism. “Don’t spend money on a restaurant,” she’d tell her mother. Or: “Let’s not go shopping, I don’t need more clothes.” More and more, Magdalene was pushed out of the life her daughter lived by day. Vincent worked with Camille on her homework; he made her and Dan the stars in the school science projects, coached them for spelling bees, and drove them anywhere for oratorical competitions which they nearly always won. With her grandmother, Camille talked politics. Together they campaigned for Stevenson, together they cursed—the real untrammeled curses Ellen encouraged in her granddaughter—they cursed the fools who voted for a mediocre bald golfer when they could have had such an obviously great man for President.
Magdalene thought Camille despised her. Camille was always trying to make her look bad, to punish her. For what? She’d worked hard, worked her fingers to the bone, to get the best for her daughter. She didn’t know what else Camille wanted. What else could she have done? Whatever she did, it wouldn’t be enough. You’d never satisfy Camille. She never understood what Magdalene had been through, what she had to go through every day of her life. Even now, forty-four years old, she doesn’t have the maturity to understand her mother. Even today, she wants to put her through it. Doesn’t she understand how hard it would be for Magdalene to go to her parents’ house? In this weather, with this humidity and her trouble breathing? It’s like she doesn’t know a thing about Magdalene’s health, after everything the doctors told her. She doesn’t see how she can be expected to do the things Camille expects her to do. Her hands start shaking just thinking of getting dressed and going out. Suppose she fainted on the street. When she gets shaky like this, anything can happen.
Another drink will steady her. Maybe, she thinks, with another one she’ll be steady enough to get herself dressed and go outside, The sherry bottle is empty. She walks over to the place where she keeps unopened liquor. The lower cabinet, violet enamel, with its white scalloped trim. Sherry is a light drink for the morning. Soothing. She pours herself another half-glass and sits down on the purple chaise longue.
It is twenty years after Magdalene’s first sickness, twenty years after her operation, which was a complete success. She is in her room now, August 14, 1985, knowing they are waiting for her, her family, knowing they think she won’t show up. It would please some of
them if she should fail her father: Theresa, Sheilah would be pleased. Dan would sympathize with her but he would sympathize more with Cam. Her mother won’t notice. Her mother doesn’t notice anything anymore. She wouldn’t recognize Magdalene even if she came. John wouldn’t notice; Marilyn would be kind either way. Her father would understand. Nobody’s like her father. She knows he’ll understand. It’s Cam, Cam’s the one. The only one it’s important to is Cam. She knows that Cam believes that if she shows up they’ve proved they’re all right, the two of them, and if she doesn’t they’re shamed.
She doesn’t want to go. She’s full of dread. She blames her daughter for this dread. Why does her daughter make her feel these things? Nobody else has daughters that make them feel these things, these terrible upsetting things Cam makes her feel. Someone should know about Cam, the way she really is. She wants to tell someone, about everything Cam does to her. Cam never understands. Cam’s never on her side. She needs to call someone. She decides to call her father. She has the number, somewhere; though she’s never called him at that home. She fishes in her drawer for her telephone book. The number is there, written in Cam’s hand. The problem is that she’s never confided in him. He hasn’t understood because she’s been afraid to tell him. But now she’s not afraid. He’s got to know. He’s got to know the score, the way things are.
“Hello, dear,” he says to her, uncertainly. She didn’t remember his voice sounding that old.
“So, you’re all ready to hit the road, Pop?” she says.
“Right you are,” says Vincent.