by Mary Gordon
Theresa had been musical. He’d loved that in her, it was why she’d been his favorite. He felt that of the three of them she was the only one he knew. He heard her singing to herself as she played with her dolls, as she dug in the garden, and he asked her when she turned seven (the age of reason) would she like piano lessons. He had not asked Ellen first. He knew that if he did, Ellen would convince him of the folly of it. It was a terrible aspect of her, the jeering side of her, her hardness at what she called his foolishness. “Your damn ideas,” she’d call them. “They’ll put us in the poorhouse.” She liked to think she was the practical one, the one who knew the world. But most of the ideas she thought were right had come to nothing. She never knew that about herself; he was glad of that.
“Your damn ideas,” she’d said when he told her about the piano lessons. “Perhaps she’ll play the piano for us all when we’re on the street. We’ll be in need then of some entertainment.”
But he held out against her. One day he told her to make a place in the living room, there would be a piano in the house next day, some friends of his were bringing it around. He’d kept an ear out at the station for news of a piano, and had heard, finally, of an aunt of somebody, her only son a priest, who’d died out in Bay Ridge. The family was selling up her things. “Would there be a piano? I’ve been keen for my girl to start with lessons,” he’d said to the fellow and was told that he could name a price. They’d both been pleased. That fellow knew another who’d transport it if you gave him a day’s notice and a drink or two on either end. Vincent had been uneasy about that; they kept no drink in the house except for holidays. But he bought a bottle. It was right to do. His girl would be able to play piano and make use of her God-given gift. It was America, where you used your gifts.
Ellen wouldn’t stop her dreadfulness about the business until he faced her with the rage he knew she feared. And she was right to fear it; when it came upon him he knew himself to be fearsome. No, that was the thing: he didn’t know himself. A thousand times he had confessed it to a thousand priests. His temper. Again and again it had led him to the mortal sin of anger. It surprised people too, who thought him easygoing. It surprised him in himself. He’d seen himself raise up his fist, as if it were another person’s, and bring it down on something. He’d never struck a person in his anger, thank God. But no, that wasn’t right. He’d struck his son. The shame of it still. To strike a boy. And John dead now, a boy in his plane, landing in trees, they told him. For a moment he could see it among the leaves, and it seemed beautiful, the plane, light, resting in the trees, the branches holding the resting boy, his eyes closed, not in death. Like Jesus said to the sisters about their brother Lazarus: He is not dead but sleeping. He always thought that one day John would simply wake up, open his eyes, and clamber down unaged, out of the plane, back into the house, where they would still be waiting.
He’d struck his son, his son would not come back, his son was dead. He could see the War. He saw it gray-faced, crushing. War was the raised fist (his fist) that loved itself as it came down.
At the time of Ellen’s bad behavior about the piano he had put his fist through glass. “This is my home. If I say we’ll be having a piano, we’ll be having it.” He’d frightened Ellen. She could see his bloody hand, the hole in the center of the windowpane. She took a look at his bloody hand, and then went silent. And said nothing again, not a word, about Theresa and the music.
What a thing to fight about so bitterly, a child and her piano music, a fight so bitter that nearly sixty years later he can still remember it. It had brought out the hateful side of Ellen, the trampler, the destroyer. They’d fought too, he remembered now, about a gramophone and about John McCormack. She’d made fun of the Irish songs that gave him pleasure. “Kathleen Mavourneen.” “Molly Bawn.” The greenhorn cod, she called it and made faces, pretending to mouth the words, as he sang the songs. He broke the records, smashing them on the floor when she mocked him. She’d not done it again, but he’d never had the heart to replace the records, they’d never again had John McCormack in the house. Great the things now they could do with music. John was telling him. Compact discs, they were called. You’d never believe the fellows weren’t in the room with you.
It was terrible to think of fights. Why had they fought? “You’re not in charge of the world, Ellen,” he’d shouted at her once. “You’re not the head of the Holy Roman Empire.” He’d raised his voice, he’d shouted, he’d wanted to hurt the woman that he’d shared a bed with, watched in childbirth, in the nursing of children. But there was that part of Ellen that could hate things so. Music and dressing up for church. Things you couldn’t understand a person hating. Certain types of flowers. Some she liked, the ones they grew themselves: sweet peas, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, dark blue or white. The pinkish ones she hated. She hated petunias. “Look at their prissy faces; I’d never have one around me if it was the last living thing on earth.” Hothouse roses could put her in a rage. She hated certain foods. The word hors d’oeuvres could drive her mad. She said she hated things that weren’t of use. But that wasn’t really true. There were some useless things she loved: the figurines of Presidents, cordial glasses she would fill with sherry every New Year’s Day. A golden thimble she’d brought with her from home. Display was what she hated. You kept things to yourself. You kept them hidden. You took them out in privacy, you hugged them to your body. You did not show off. You kept your feelings to yourself. Anger only was allowed.
She had not loved Magdalene, and Theresa, and would not pretend to. John she had loved. And later, the surprising love for her grandchildren: Cam and Dan. She loved them because she respected them. Theresa she had feared, and she had been right to. Vincent knew the hardness of his daughter’s heart. Theresa didn’t love, though she said she loved God now. He hoped it brought her comfort. Everybody needed that.
Theresa you could not touch.
She’d been so musical. Fine-looking too. Her mother’s skin and eyes that looked right through you. Not like Ellen, though; Ellen was fiery. You wouldn’t say there was anything warm about Theresa; no, warmth was not a quality of hers. He’d liked her best of all the children. Her containment. She could keep things to herself. He believed now she kept these things because she grudged them.
It had pleased him to see a girl of his at a piano: her straight back and her clear high voice. Sometimes after supper he would ask her to play for him. He’d hear the angry banging in the kitchen: Ellen furious that Theresa had got out of drying dishes, knowing it was her job. It was Ellen’s time to read, while the girls did the dishes; Theresa playing the piano cheated her of that. She knew better than to cross Vincent directly, though; she’d seen how much the music meant to him, and that she wouldn’t win.
He loved the sad words of the songs Theresa sang for him and the music that went deep. It brought back everything, the greens of the woods around the river, the river itself, his leaving his mother forever. Once Theresa agreed to learn for his sake a song called “The Old Bog Road.” There was a part in it about a mother dying that he lets himself cry over now, though he hadn’t let himself when he was younger, a father of a family, a husband, he didn’t feel right letting himself go then. But now he’s alone in a room that will allow him anything. So he can cry thinking of the words. My mother died last spring. When Ireland’s fields were green. Then something, something, and something about snowdrops and primroses piled up beside her bed. He’d lost it now. He’s an old man. Many things were lost.
It was a dreadful thing, Theresa and her mother. Ellen in the kitchen banging pots and muttering “Lazy good-for-nothing.” He could hear her angry words and see Theresa playing on as if she hadn’t heard. Then getting up when she had finished, closing the piano, turning to her father with a smile that he knew to be terrible: she had vanquished her mother and she hadn’t turned a hair. He pitied Ellen then, but still he loved his daughter, loved the coolness and the sureness of her. He hoped that she would marry a good man. She had, Ray Doo
ley was a good man, you’d always say that of him. But she hadn’t loved him. He knew his daughter couldn’t give a man that thing that Ellen had given him.
Perhaps he, as a father, had been at fault. Perhaps he’d frightened her about men and the way they could be to a girl. He knew he ruined the music for her. She began having friends over. They would stand at the piano and sing. He saw the way the boys looked at Theresa. And the songs she sang he thought were trouble. The sad songs she sang for him, the songs he’d heard standing outside the houses with the great lawns and the trees, the songs the bands played in the parks when the girls walked together with linked arms, the songs he’d bought her the sheet music for: she never played that kind of song for the young men. The songs she played for them were hard, and dangerous. Some words didn’t make sense. One he had hated: “Ja-da, Ja-da, Ja-da Ja-da jig jig jig.” And he didn’t like the idea of a young girl singing “Body and Soul.” He’d get cross with the young men staying late and filling up the ashtrays. One night he lost his temper. The young men did not come back. To punish him, Theresa gave up the piano. How they loved giving out punishment, his wife, his daughter. Masters at it. He could see their joy.
As a young man, he’d not known the side of women that could punish. His mother hadn’t been like that. His sisters and the girls he dreamed about, their pale long dresses sweeping the damp grass: where was the punishment in them? Hardness, he’d thought, came from the world of men, the world he worked in. The men were terrible in the subways. His first job had nearly killed him with the hardness of the labor and the sense he had that if this was life he should die and get it over with.
Terrible days at first, he couldn’t get used to working underground. The heat, the stink. Exhaustion in the bones and worse: filth you could never get away from. The zinc bucket with its two inches of greasy water. Hateful. Who’d wash up in that? And the beast’s work that required no mind: digging, nothing to understand, no complicated thing you held and turned around and got the knack of. Nights you were too tired to get the good out of the country. Only Martin was never tired and Martin’s enthusiasm bucked him up. He dug the IRT. He said it to himself each time he rode it. I dug this out. Not his usual pride. His usual pride was: This I understood.
But he didn’t have to do the unskilled work for long. Perhaps he’d never have had to if he hadn’t followed Martin’s lead taking the first job going, a job Martin’s cousin put them on to and helped them get. If he’d waited and considered all his possibilities he might have lived a while on the money he’d brought and saved himself for work commensurate with his skills. But Martin Ferris was not your man for waiting. “Jump in” was his motto. He was like Ellen in that. Though Vincent only did this work for two months he’d never forget it, and understood from it that men could be made to labor like animals. He saw what it did to them, and yet it didn’t take their lives. Which he had never understood: it would have taken his if he had stayed. But he saw the ad in the newspaper and answered it.
He wanted work that would use what he knew. And so he left Martin, and took a job at Acme Tool and Die, a dark stone room in a warehouse in Long Island City. His boss was German, a grunting, silent man. Words he used only to find fault. The two of them were alone in the stone room without a window. Nine years of it: every morning he was sick to death with the idea of that room.
But because he hated the room and the German it wasn’t so impossible to leave the job when he agreed to get the mother.
He’ll let the image of the mother, the horror, come into this room where nothing dark can be absorbed. He’ll think about it now. Usually, he makes the image go away. But now he understands that it may be the most important thing about him: that time, what happened to them all.
He came home one day, to find Ellen in the dark. She’d pulled down the shades; the children were off with her friend Delia; she lay under the covers trembling.
She’d always told him that her parents both were dead. But now, refusing, to look at him, refusing to let him look at her, she tells him everything about the mother. Then she tells him about Anna Foley, who cares for the mother; Anna Foley has written; she herself is dying; Ellen must get the mother now or there’ll be nothing for it, the father will have to be in charge.
She rocks from side to side beneath the covers. He’d like to hold her but he can no longer hold himself. Who is this woman in his wife’s body, his wife who feared nothing, her beauty gone, the light no longer in her eyes, her white skin coarse and ill-looking?
She begins to beg him. She, who prided herself on having to ask for nothing. Her eyes are wild, like the mad women at the dockside offering everything for anything a man will give.
“Why did you never tell me?” he asks her; far away from her, standing across the room.
She doesn’t answer him. She tells him only she’s afraid to go back home. She, who was afraid of nothing. She says her father will have her arrested. She tells him that if the mother stays in the town, the father will kill her.
She rocks herself, crying, and to stop her he’ll do anything. He can’t have this for her, this self she’s become. But he will close himself up from her. When he sees her face he will grow cold.
But he will do the thing for her. He would never not do it.
He makes the plans for the journey: He is young. His body and his life hum with health. He says to his good friend Martin, high up, it seems to Vincent, in the subways: “Do you think there’d be a place for me in a month’s time, a month or so, I’d say?”
“Any time, Vince. A man like you. I have friends in Signals. They’d give their eye teeth for a fellow with your knowledge.”
He doesn’t tell his friend Martin the full tale of it. He says: “There’s trouble in the family. I have to be taking a trip home. Ellen has to stay here with the baby.”
“Vince. With your brains, you’ve only to walk up to the foreman and say, ‘Take me on tomorrow.’ You’d be taken on.”
“And if it didn’t happen right away, Martin, could you give me a leg up?”
Martin is a bachelor. Doing no one knew what with his wages. Still in the boarding house and still no entertainments, despite all his talk at home about the opera, the lectures, the night classes for the workingman.
“Vince. I would, of course.”
He goes off with Martin’s promise. He tells Frank Bremer, the hard German in the stone room where he has worked, that he won’t be coming back. He takes his wages from the silent, furious man. And he allows his wife to pack his bag. He doesn’t write his family to say he’s coming home, to his own country. Theirs. He doesn’t see them, so as not to show them Ellen’s shame. For her he keeps it in the dark, away from sight.
On the boat he remembers the promise of the first trip over and the hopes. He looks back at his life in America. Good luck. Jobs, a wife. Children. But it is built on nothing. He’s been made a fool of. It was all for nothing. She’d used him. The woman he had loved had never loved him. She’d have married any man she thought that she could fool.
All right, then. He’d close his heart. He’d go on living. It was what you did.
Even with all these things on his mind, out at sea his pleasure in his body rises up, breaks through. The sorrow, the betrayal, all he had thought impermeable can give way for moments to his pleasure in the sea air in his lungs, his lungs filling and emptying, marvelous things, a great machine, the body. He is stirred by the prospect of open ocean. He wants to take one of the pretty girls and tell her his predicament, talk love to her, squeeze her warm fingers, tell her how he’s in need of pity, and then take her, right in the open air, in all her clothing, take her in hunger, anger. And to spite his wife.
Even though she’s deadened all that was the center of her, her real self, still, the thought of her body, ardent for him, stirs him as he stands and looks out at the water or walks up and down the deck. Ellen. The dark bright thing that is her wanting of him, growing and then satisfied but never over, both of them wanting each other.
“Ellen,” he says to her, looking out at the black water, “knowing me so, how could you have done this thing?”
He vows that he will close himself forever from her. He’ll not be near her again.
He’s back in Queenstown. His mother is dead now. He thinks of the last time he was here with her, his mind not on her, but on the scaffolding, still in place ten years later. The father is nothing in his mind. The brother’s hardness still keeping him away. He’d have gone back to see the sisters, Julia, Margaret, the cheerful one he hardly knew. And the boy child he had never seen. He’d go back for the place itself. The river and the bridge. The mill and Mr. Flannery. He’d be glad to tell Des Flannery about his progress in America. But no, he won’t go. He’ll remember the brother’s hate and Ellen’s shame. No one’s affair but hers.