The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

“I’m hoping to see you later, Pop, at the house.”

  “Well, that would be nice,” he says but she can tell that he doesn’t believe her. She hasn’t been in the house for fifteen years, but that doesn’t mean anything. If she says she’s going to come, he should believe she’ll come.

  “It’s only that the heat is terrible, and the humidity. I feel so dizzy in this kind of weather.”

  “Don’t push yourself,” her father says. “Remember your health.”

  “No, I’m not as strong as I used to be,” she says.

  “You do wonderfully well for yourself,” he says.

  “It’s twenty years, Pop, that I’ve had to live with this. A death sentence for twenty years. I never said this to you, Pop, but it’s the truth. I looked into the face of death. Do you know what that’s like?”

  Her father doesn’t say anything.

  “Every day of my life I have to face the fact that I could die.”

  “It’s true of all of us, Magdalene,” he says.

  This makes her angry. “You never looked into the face of death,” she says. “None of you know what it’s like. Especially Camille. She has no sympathy for me. She just tries to make me look in the wrong.”

  “That’s not true, Magdalene. She’s very good to you.”

  “That’s my cross, Pop. That’s what you think, that’s what everybody thinks. My cross is nobody sees what she does to me. Always wanting to make me look in the wrong.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, Magdalene. I think I’d better finish packing. You take care of yourself.”

  “You too, Pop. Maybe I’ll see you later.”

  “Fine,” he says. She knows that he doesn’t believe her.

  None of them knows what it’s like. “I’ve looked into the face of death,” she says, aloud, to no one. The worst thing about it she doesn’t say, that she looked into the face of death, and she prepared herself, submitted herself, not just to having her breasts cut off, but to the thought of death, which she awaited like a just and longed-for punishment. But then it didn’t come, and the failure of the sentence she had believed in made her see death as untrustworthy. That was the worst. It could be anywhere, and could appear at any time, and she might not be ready.

  Alone in her room, Magdalene imagines her daughter in Vincent and Ellen’s house. She knows what Cam is thinking. She knows the words behind the thoughts. Hearing the words makes her angry. Her anger has no lightness; it weighs down her limbs. Could she walk anywhere with legs like these? Her legs are like lead. The lead rises up her legs, it fills her ribs. Her ribs are leaden straps around her lungs. How can she breathe? She sees herself on the street. There is no self there, no shape, nothing to keep her from spilling over into air, into life, into anybody’s life. Outside this room she can fly off, she will, there will be no more her, nothing will press down on her to create a shape. The room creates the shape. Outside the room, everything will be lost. Nothing will stay, she will be terrified, alone: she knows that she will not be able to hold together. She sees a picture of herself on the street: organs flying off, limbs here, there. And falling, everything is falling, but not falling into shape.

  How painful the straps around her lungs are. She can’t get her breath. She stinks from terror. How can my daughter make me do this? she thinks. She wants me to feel like this. She tries to make me do what I can’t. I’m sick. I am a woman who could at any time be dying. I can’t leave this room.

  She can’t possibly be expected to go outside. How can she, when she is as she is, when she can’t be looked at, when she can fall apart? The space where her breasts were throbs like a burn. She is loathsome; she is mutilated. Her body, hacked so it must be hidden, is the true sign of herself. She has to hide. She is ugly; and she can fall apart. Cam must know this. She won’t be angry. Or she will be angry whatever is done. So nothing can be done.

  Magdalene thinks about her father and mother. Better not to see her mother as she is. Better remember her. No need to see her now. Think of her as she was.

  She knows her father never made her do what she couldn’t do. He never wanted that. He understands, or doesn’t understand, it doesn’t matter.

  She decides that she’ll stay here, in her room.

  Nothing is that important.

  No one cares enough.

  Part IV

  1

  VINCENT IS SITTING IN a room that pleases him as much as any he has lived in. He is packing up his things. In his shaving kit he puts his razor, shaving brush and soap, an orange tin of foot powder, a cake of soap (Cashmere Bouquet) which he has rewrapped in its original paper. He folds the cotton rug that lies beside his bed. Sheilah his granddaughter brought it to him from Mexico, where she went once on vacation. There are pink, turquoise, and scarlet animals cavorting among branches. Their paws and haunches intertwine. He has never liked the rug, but kept it on the floor to please poor Sheilah, who’d never had the knack for pleasing. When Cam visited, her eye would fall down to the rug. Vincent could see Cam weighing the two possibilities: Perhaps he likes the rug, I mustn’t spoil it for him; or he’s doing this for Sheilah to be nice.

  When Sheilah visited, she always said, “It really livens up the place.” Under those words, though, he could hear what she was saying: “I have traveled. I have given you something the others never would have thought of. Now let me be first.”

  Able to hear the words below the words, how could Vincent take up the rug, which he dislikes? Even when she was gone and would not be back for a month, how could he? It hurts his eye. The room is square and plain and institutional. This is why he likes it. Sister Otile and Sister Roberta covered the decaying wooden floors with squares of tannish vinyl tile. Slabs of sheetrock they hung themselves cover the exposed laths and deranged plaster. They took a house that was the ruin of great beauty and made a place where people could be comfortable and live their lives. He honors them for this, and for their labor, whose full scope he knows. At the same time he honors the house for its loss, as you would honor a woman, formerly beautiful, who has lost her money and been forced to take a useful job.

  Without the rug, the room was only what it was: a place where people could enter and collect themselves. The room would disappear around them. What they made of their lives was theirs; the room would never help or stop them. Vincent likes this state of things, he likes its possibilities. His friends had come into this room and sat and talked and smoked their cigarettes. They had played cards, traded magazines, shared the advice and homemade things the families brought. They didn’t admit that it was pleasant when their families left again, and they could come back here, to Vincent’s room, or to another, where no one looked at them with the heavy eyes that said, “I have abandoned you. Forgive me.” Vincent is grateful to have had a room where people could come and enjoy themselves. Now he is leaving. But he doesn’t want to leave. They have done everything so he can go back home. He can’t tell them that he wants to stay here; he can’t disappoint them. He’s been a man who didn’t disappoint. At this age, you could only finish the life you’d led, and be the person you had been. Otile Ryan, Sister Otile, he can’t help but call her, thinks it isn’t so. She believes in change. They all do, all the sisters. On Sister Roberta’s desk is a framed card, the message written in the slant, well-known handwriting of someone who had been a nun, but had got famous and had left the convent. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” it says. For these last months, he’s believed them.

  He thinks of Ellen now. Sitting in her chair, up out of bed an hour, two hours a day, muttering curses, cursing offenders for their seventy-year-old crimes. Nothing is forgotten. Now her heart and brain have grown gelatinous, transparent. You can see the old slights, the offenses, come together and the punishments beside them. It is as if you could see them when you saw her eyes.

  Neither of them had believed much in change. You are who you are, they’d always said. But were you? Who was Ellen now? He had to admit, she’s changed. But has her c
hange changed him? Does it mean he isn’t the person he has been? Who, then, is he?

  He remembers a road in Ireland: white; flat; and walking on it in hard boots. His heart was hardened against his wife. But then his hardness left him. He became Ellen. He became the girl that she had been. He’d thought that after that he would never again not know her, since she was a person he had, for a moment, been. He’d thought it was a thing you wouldn’t lose. He’d lost it now.

  Nothing more would change for Ellen. Or only one thing: she would die.

  The biggest change for him had happened when he’d left his home in Dromnia for Cork City, thirty miles away. He lost his home. If he told the truth, that was the biggest thing that ever happened to him; bigger than losing his son in the War. Bigger than meeting Ellen? Maybe. Yes.

  Even leaving for the other side, crossing the ocean to America, wasn’t as hard as the day he left home to be apprentice to O’Donovan, the ironworker who’d learned from Leary at the mill in Dromnia that Vincent had a talent with his hands. He hadn’t wanted to leave home. Except he knew his older brother and he knew the younger brother’s place that was his own. He didn’t want it to be his place for good.

  Terrible, the way it was in families. He’d never understood it. Why they weren’t what they were meant to be, what they could almost be so easily. Children grew up there, little children, and were never difficult. The faces of children come before him now, parades of them, Julia and Margaret, his two younger sisters whom he’d barely known, dead now, both of them. Julia in the blitz of London, where she’d worked as a trained nurse. She’d been the one who had been sensible, though it was Margaret that he’d preferred, in trouble all the time for giggling at nothing, but she was affectionate, warm in her preferences, and candid. She’d married a farmer, a boy from a nearby town he’d never met, and died a mile from home at fifty-six, of a ruptured appendix. In America she would have lived. He should have brought her. But she wouldn’t have come. They liked their home; they had no wish to leave it.

  Then his own two girls. Magdalene, never sure what was her place or if there was even a place for her. Her prettiness gone to her head, or maybe not: she’d been unhappy. He’d always felt he had nothing to say to her. Their conversations flooded up and then evaporated, senseless, and with nothing left behind.

  He preferred Theresa. Even her looks were preferable to him. Had she ever loved him? She was religious now, the only one of them so pious. Probably to spite her mother. She said, “I thank God every day for the gift of the faith you gave us all in spite of Mother.” He’d liked Ellen’s derision of the faith, though he himself had been devout, not knowing why. It had seemed right to be. He could see Theresa now, her head bent over some acquisition. She liked collecting, then discarding. Keeping straight. She’d come behind her mother, cleaning where she had just cleaned, reproachful. Ellen would turn on her: “If you’d an idea in your head, or an interest worth a shilling in the world, you wouldn’t have the time to be behind me with a dustcloth.” When Ellen sat down to read something, Theresa would destroy her peace in it. She knew how to torment her mother, it gave her pleasure to torment.

  Vincent knew why. Her mother had felt nothing for her, nothing for either of the girls. The son alone was her treasure. Of course the girls were upset by it. Yes, of course. He used to think they could all stop it if they wanted. They could all say: “Now we will love each other. And our unhappiness will end.” As he grew older, he thought he’d been wrong.

  In his own home, in the town of Dromnia in County Cork, there had been hate. Even now, an eighty-eight-year-old man, he is frightened by the memory of that hate. I am weak, a child, there is nothing I can keep back.

  His brother always meant him harm. And why? Because the mother had loved Vincent best. And because the father wouldn’t listen to the older brother’s thoughts about the farm. (It was the brother who was right. When the old man died it was the brother who made money. The brother died a bachelor with the richest herd for miles.)

  When they were boys, the brother did him damage. Little cruelties, abandonments, exposures to the world from which he needed, as a younger child, some shielding. Older, the brother used his strength to hurt. He need not have. But why think that way? He was born as he was.

  He remembers them on the road to school, his terror of his older brother’s strength. His pride in it.

  They’d once raised together a lamb whose mother had jumped off the rocks to her death. They’d found the mother smashed up below and the lamb wandering on the cliff above. Each morning Vincent and the brother, friends for once, came out to nurse the lamb. Secretly, knowing the father’d think it soft. Bluebell, they called her, cradling her. They’d even sing, some song of their mother’s to calm down a baby. Then one day the thing was done, the father never mentioned it. It wasn’t the father’s idea. After all the years of thinking the thing over, Vincent was sure of it. (Did other people do this to their lives? Go over them like this, nothing changing in the details of it, the picture coming out the same, it had to, of course. Over and over he’d shuffled the things that had happened, as he shuffled cards the slow way that made Ellen so impatient when they played. As if it wasn’t worth it. Still, he kept it up. He felt he owed the past that much, at least to go over it. Ellen didn’t do it that way. She cut up the past, she recombined it, in false ways that shocked him. Colorful new ways, any way she liked, as if the things that happened were just furniture, you changed this or moved that. Then you were satisfied.)

  He’d tried to make himself think, when the thing first happened, that the brother’d done it because he thought it was the father’s wish. But what he knew, had always known, was that the brother did it for the pleasure of it, because he’d liked to hurt.

  Vincent had come home late from school. He’d received special praise from Mr. Boyle, the schoolmaster, on his sums. That was what had set the brother off. He’d walked up the road, his heart singing with the praise he’d got from Mr. Boyle. (Who’d later been murdered by the Black and Tans. No one had known he’d been political. He was stalwart and taciturn until his rage flared up when a boy would not meet his eye, would not answer. It had mattered to him that the children learn. “D’ye think in the Midlands of England there are boys full of dumb insolence like you lot?” he would say.)

  Mr. Boyle had given Vincent a book of Irish poems. “To Vincent MacNamara. For proficiency in Mathematics,” he had written on the flyleaf. And Vincent had shown his brother. And the brother had done that thing.

  “It’s done, then,” the brother had said, staring at Vincent to show he had nothing in his mind to be ashamed of. “I saw no sense in waiting for you. Who knew when he’d let you out?”

  He pointed to the place behind the house where he had done it. The dead animal, his throat open, red and revealing where the knife had gone in. The fresh blood oozing into the wool. He must have waited till he’d seen Vincent coming to begin it. Must have stood up on the rise and waited. Then rushed down. And taken up the knife. The lamb would have come out to him, thinking it was milk he carried. He’d have taken the lamb on his lap, as they’d always done to feed him, and then taken out the knife and done the thing.

  While Vincent looked down at the animal’s body, he knew everything. The first thing he took in with calm; it was simple: the animal was dead. The second made him frightened: he could see the remnants of life still within the animal. What happened had just happened. The third thing he knew made fear and anger grow inside his brain, like trees that grow from the same root beside each other, harmful and competitive, yet bound. His brother had done this to harm him. It was Vincent’s throat, not the poor animal’s, he would have liked to cut.

  He should have struck the brother. But he was a child. Tears blubbered up. Shameful and undistinguished tears, fat tears that dripped, and his nose running and his throat too fat and hot for speech. Nothing in him was to the purpose; nothing in him could punish or revenge. His weakness was the truest thing about him. It was the
only thing.

  And then the mother came, saying she’d heard the screaming (he must have screamed, although he had no knowledge of it), his mother walking with the baby, walking to the back of the house, where they stood, crying out: “In the name of God, what happened?” He could only run to her, out of his formlessness. His shame made him the shape he was: legs without sinews, body without shoulders, boneless feet infantile as his sister’s, still a suckling. He’d let himself be taken on his mother’s lap, because he lacked the shape and force to stop it. He let the mother cradle him, knowing that for his age the place that he was in was shameful.

  “What else?” the brother cried. “Run to your mother. Go tell Mr. Boyle. Both of you can write a poem about it. Sell it to the newspaper. For myself, I’ll savor every bite of the meals the animal makes, and so will all this family if they’re honest. As if we could afford the cost of feeding it. Strapped as we are.”

  He threw the knife down. The point of it stuck in the dirt.

  “Pick that up, now,” their mother said, but Vincent could hear the fear inside her anger and he knew the brother never would pick it up.

  The father had whipped the boy, but he’d not repented. And there hadn’t been a soft word spoken between Vincent and his brother from that time until the last day they saw each other, the day that Vincent went off to America knowing that his brother would always be happy only at his harm.

  He’d been right to go to Cork, and it was shocking to remember how quickly the pain of leaving home had passed. In some ways it had been the best time of his life. Had he been wrong to leave there? Blind ambition. He remembered Father Sullivan warning of it from the pulpit, how it was the curse of Irish life. The countryside stripped of its youth by the ambition that considered only self. He spoke of emigrants, “the type, of course, who left their homeland for selfish, materialistic reasons, not carrying with them one single reminder of their nationality, not a shamrock, not a ribbon, as if they were casting off all allegiance to the motherland.” He told a tale about a priest friend of his who’d come back from America. He’d walked one night, fresh from the bed of a dying child, to see a woman of ill repute walking behind him. Intoxicated, flaunting herself in the most lascivious manner, without the shame, even, to conceal her intent from a priest. He turned round to warn her sharply of the jeopardy in which she was placing her immortal soul and the immortal souls of others. To his horror, he heard the name Eileen spring from his lips. It was a girl from his own town in Kerry who had been the treasured playmate of his youth. She wept, recognizing her old friend. Thank God he’d been able to talk her into returning home, and she worked now in Killarney, a respectable and happy seamstress, able to put the horrors of America behind her in the clean and bracing air of Erin, her true home. Ask that Eileen about the streets they pave with gold, the priest had thundered, bringing down his fist hard on the pulpit wood. And she will tell you not the honeyed lies of lucre-loving wretches whose great fortunes have been made by the foolish credibility of the young who cannot wait to leave their homes.