The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

  And his.

  On the train to Cork City, he is once again the young free man he’d been there, full of projects. But he doesn’t linger on in Cork. He goes right to Limerick, from there to Gort, and then by farmer’s cart to Tulla. The familiar look of all the vegetation presses him hard.

  She’d told him not to go and see the father.

  “Tell him nothing,” she said, pulling at his hands. “Speak to Anna Foley only.”

  She told him to take the mother away by night.

  He knows he can’t do it in that way. Although to honor Ellen he will see the mother first.

  The morning breaks while he is in the cart. The stars, covered with mist, seem smaller to him than they had been in America. He tries to calculate the time. In New York, he’d be closing up the house, walking from room to room, turning off lights, smoothing pillows. He cares more for the furniture than Ellen does. She said it was simply that he got away from it all day. By six o’clock, she said, the furniture became her enemy. He sees her with her hair braided for sleep, but she herself is not ready for sleep, fiercely reading by the inadequate light, the rosy glow of the lamp with its soft pink lampshade. Her vanity: she does not like the hard light on her undressed skin. For this she sacrifices her eyes’ health. And because of this, he imagines, she has to wear spectacles. He’d found it funny that he had a wife in spectacles. He knows she likes herself in them. She needs them only for her reading, and, wearing them, she is stamped by them, known as a person who reads. He never told her how she charmed him in this way, her spectacles, her nightgown, and her braid. She doesn’t like to think he watches her. Reading, she likes to think she is alone.

  He doesn’t want to think of her now with this tenderness.

  But how can he not think of her so? Here on the roads she’d walked on as a child, how could he not allow her to become part of it all?

  He will not. He tries. She will not be kept out.

  The child on the white road.

  He knows at once which is the house. Hidden behind a copse of dreadful trees, cruel firs, dead-looking grasses with their clutching roots. The farmer in him sees the land impossible for cultivation. The firs let through a puff of smoke and a glimpse of the house’s stone. No care here for this house, but it is Ireland, there’s no care for many of the houses.

  The dead heart of the house makes itself visible as he walks up the road. Why would you enter? says the air around the house. This is a place of punishment.

  He knows he must break through this curtain of dead air, must enter the place. And with no weapon but his healthy body. For a moment he fears that he cannot. All his youth, health, joy in life, belief in the benevolence of fortune urge him back. And what, in opposition to all this, would press him on? He fears the face of the now ruined mother. And the face of Ellen, mocking him: “I needed a young man and you were willing, though I had to make you think I loved you. So that you would do this thing.”

  But as he stands where she’d stood he knows her terror, the defeat she feared each morning stepping out of that house. Her courage and, each evening, her terror once again. About to enter that house, he feels that he is standing on one side of his life and that when he sees the mother’s face he will cross over to the other side. But he knows he can do it. He is overcome with tenderness for his wife, Ellen, for all that she has been. Her history rises up before him, the child, girl, woman, the first blood, childbirth. Looking up, seeing the mist that rises from the brown grass and the smoke between the trees, he hears the sound of Ellen’s laugh, her voice discussing an idea, sees her eyes that shine, in pleasure and in anger, and he knows despite everything she has loved life, she has loved him.

  He knocks at the door. Who will answer. What will he see?

  A voice behind the door asks who he is. He gives his name and the door opens.

  He is not afraid. He knows this.

  He is no longer afraid.

  A woman like the women he has always known looks out at him. “You’ve come,” she says.

  He takes off his hat. The house is dark, the trees purposely left to block the light. And in the darkest corner sits the mother, silent, looking as if she were made of stone.

  “I’m Miss Foley,” Anna Foley says.

  She offers him a stool so he can sit beside the mother.

  “I’m Vincent,” he says to the mother, “I’m Ellen’s Vincent.”

  The mother is looking into darkness. No part of her stirs.

  He takes photographs out of his pocket. Ellen. The two children. He puts them in her hands.

  She doesn’t look.

  They sit.

  “It’s useless,” Anna Foley says. “She’s past all that.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to see the pictures.”

  “Well, I would of course,” she says, smiling for the first time. “Though she’s sent a lot.”

  She looks at the three photographs. Theresa at her baptism and Magdalene hanging on to her mother. Stand up straight, he tells Magdalene in the picture. Even in the photographs she is unhappy. He speaks to the child in the picture. It will get you nowhere, you can see it’s what your mother doesn’t like.

  “You’ve done well by her,” Miss Foley says.

  He nods, to thank her.

  “Mrs. won’t be a trouble to you. She’s as still as anything. And clean too, you can see that. She would never soil herself.”

  His young man’s modesty is outraged at these words. He wants to say: You shouldn’t say these things to me.

  He weeps that night in the commercial traveler’s room in the hotel in Gort. For Ellen, for the picture of the young clear-eyed mother on the dresser in New York, and for the ruination of a mother that took all the joy from Ellen’s girlhood, hollowed it out, and put in horror, terror, courage, black remorse, the tearing, scalding shame. He understands everything. He knows why she lied to him. It was the business of her life to keep the mother from the world.

  Inside the house he sees the moist stone walls, he feels the stone floor’s coldness through his boots, he knows it is a house built to shut out warmth and lightness. The old woman sits in darkness by the window, or is walked by Anna Foley to the table or the privy. She’s grown enormous, like a statue, ancient, gray, the white clear skin of the young mother darkened now, with patches beneath the eyes, around the mouth. And like a man she has the makings of a beard, a mustache.

  He wants to kneel before the mother, so like a statue. Pray to her.

  He can smell the death on Anna Foley’s skin. She holds her side when she walks over to the table with the teapot.

  “Can I help you, Miss Foley?”

  “Thank you, no, you’ve done enough.”

  Suppose she grows unmanageable on shipboard? He prays to the benevolent God he thinks of as an honorable landlord, a good boss. “I have done this thing. My duty. Now You must help.”

  He walks, terrified at the thought of going to the town to see the father.

  “The man could kill me,” he thinks, “he would not be wrong to try.”

  How could he not fear?

  A man feared mortally by Ellen. She, who was fearless. A man who shut up one wife in a house designed for darkness, and who took another wife. “Common law,” he believed, was the word for it. Common to whom? And whose law? He tries to understand there is an underside to things he has no knowledge of. Of course he knows about it, as he knows of drunkenness, but he’d lived his life to keep himself back from it. No one he knew had practiced vice.

  But Ellen’s father, a practitioner of vice, could be capable of having lived as he had lived, of any act. It was like what they said: after the first mortal sin the rest was easy. One letting go and the boulders rolled, side over side, and never stopping until death and the sinful body racked by endless torture but the worst torture the soul’s knowing it was kept forever from the face of God.

  But in this life the vicious father clothed still in his living flesh could raise his hand, bring down the fist, the hammer, presen
t the loaded gun, the knife.

  He knows that it is possible that he will have to fight the father to the death.

  He is given a lift once more in the cart. Into the town this time, to Tulla. No different from a hundred Irish towns. He is lucky to be there on market day: there’ll be more people on the streets. More witnesses in case the father tries to kill him.

  All the years in America had made him forget the treeless Irish towns. They’d a lesson to learn from the Americans, though of course they never would. He thought of the great trees even on Main Street, Flushing, trees even near the Elevated. Planted, perhaps by Protestants. But Thank God for them.

  And there were trees in front of their own house, his and Ellen’s. The maple, so full in spring and lush in summer. In the fall a burning bush, a torch, a flame above their heads. The chestnut in the back in summer offering up its flowers, white and ceremonial, like candelabras, or like chalices.

  Only in the treeless streets of Tulla does he understand he has become a man of property. And that there’s no reason to doubt things, or to be regretful. He’d been right to leave. The too-wide streets, the endless stone and mortar, the dark faces of the poor children, and the resignation of the women waiting for nothing to happen while the men make deals, bad deals for somebody, and then celebrate in the pub, giving their money to the likes of Thomas Costelloe, his Ellen’s father. T; Costelloe, publican. He thinks of Jesus: publicans and sinners. Well, the man was both a sinner and a publican. His father-in-law. In what law?

  He’d never understood the love some people had of pubs. And Costelloe’s was one of the worst type. In the dark air, the smoke, the smell of beer makes him unable to believe in his own breath. Men spit on the stone floor, then drag the sawdust over their own spits with heavy boots, as if to cover up.

  He asks for the proprietor. Some farmer points to a man sitting morosely at the table. “Thomas Costelloe,” the farmer says.

  He thinks the farmer must have misled him, or that he himself misheard. He knows the kind of man the father is. Large, Ellen had spoken of his size; handsome, she had said that too, with stiff black hair that grew up like a brush. That was what she had told him. He asks another farmer to show him Thomas Costelloe, the owner of the pub. The farmer points to the same man.

  Vincent had never thought himself quick-minded, but this rupture of his imagination makes him ill. He wants to lie down somewhere.

  Right there before him sits the father, neither large nor handsome, neither fearsome nor eaten up by vice. Light-boned, narrow, with the stooped shoulders of a man grown middle-aged in business, largely bald, with tufts of grayish hair and tawny eyebrows that seemed as if they ought not to belong to him. A gray mustache covers the too-dark lips of the drinker and the Irish smoker’s yellow broken teeth. High cheekbones, the fine beloved cheekbones of his Ellen, give the face a harsh air but the dark eyes (Ellen’s) with their dirty-looking whites make him look sickish, as if his digestion has not for some time been good. As if he once had been a judging man, but has given it up, as he has given most things up, and settled into disappointment.

  How can this be the father? He sees nothing to fear about the man. He even feels a bit apologetic for his youth, his looks, his life with the man’s daughter in the fortunate country they were thousands of miles away from, so obviously the superior of this. He feels understanding saturate him, the slow stain of it spread unevenly through his conscious mind. He sees the pity of his Ellen’s life, the loss involved in it, the admirable woman she became. And he is saturated too with tenderness for her and pride in what she is. He knows her then as the girl who thinks this wretched fellow, doubled over by regret, is someone, is a force that could even imagine lifting up a hand to stop her in her will.

  The man knows who he is. Still, he feels the need to say: “I’m Vincent MacNamara. Ellen’s Vincent.”

  Just to say their names. To hear their names in this room.

  The man nods, indicates they should go across the street to another of his establishments, the Feed and Grain. He allows Vincent to lead the way, like a condemned man, knowing that the verdict has been reached and is out of his hands.

  The Feed and Grain is high and light and open. Thomas Costelloe lifts up the counter and they walk to a back room where all the books are kept. The records. The two men sit across from each other on high black stools.

  “Ellen feels it’s time now that her mother should be with us. Miss Foley, her caretaker, has notified us that she herself appears to be in failing health.”

  He hears himself talking like a newspaper. He doesn’t know where he has got the words.

  He sees the father’s shoulders fold into themselves. The chest, hollow itself, contracts. Then the man shakes himself like a dog ridding itself of dirty water. And Vincent sees Ellen’s gesture when she is determined to get on: the head, lifted, he knows, in false confidence. And he prepares himself to argue with this man.

  But no, once more he has misjudged.

  “Ellen would know,” he says. “I’d have to be giving you something to cover my wife’s expenses. You didn’t get here on a magic carpet.”

  Vincent does not know what to say. What would Ellen want?

  He says, “It’s not required, sir. We’re comfortable in America.”

  “It’s Ellen’s due. It’s all hers after I’ve gone. Not that she’d take it. But you’re to tell her that it’s coming to her. Now that she has children, she might see things in a different light.”

  Moved to pity for the man who he believes deserves none, he presents the children’s photographs. The father covers the images as if they hurt his eyes.

  “And there’s no need getting Declan O’Fallon to drive you up the Gort road in the cart. I’ve men enough to help you out with that. And with the other transport. One of them will see you get to Queenstown safe. That far at least.”

  He allows the father to spend money on arrangements, a motorcar. (In one week he has forgotten that American streets are full of cars, but in the whole town of Tulla only Thomas Costelloe owns one. He hired someone else to drive him.)

  Vincent allows the father, the transgressor, to spend money. He picks up the suitcase full of underclothing that has been bought new. (By whom? Costelloe’s other wife? Vincent has had no glimpse of her, and is grateful for it.) Anna Foley packs the underclothing with a tight-lipped, disapproving face. “That’s the first I’ve seen of linens for her that’ve not been sent over from America.”

  He thinks of Ellen secretly packing up underclothing for the mother, who has turned herself into a man.

  He will not tell Ellen about the money he allowed the father to pay out. But in the iron bed in the hotel in Gort, under the gray bedspread, greasy, smelling of cooked cabbage, he feels he has been delivered. He can have a first-class compartment: he can close a door. Keep her from sight, from company. He need not have the dread of the stone-eyed gibbering woman on a ship’s deck crowded with voyagers. He need no longer fear the public beds, facilities. But still he fears what he will have to see of her. Anna Foley assures him that she can see to herself, will dress herself with some encouragement. How much encouragement and of what kind he doesn’t know.

  They make the journey home.

  He is American now, a citizen, there is no fear that they will fail to let him in. No reason for the old terror, of making a mistake and then being sent home a fool, a laughingstock, a failure. The memory still comes to him, of the journey over, the sea air and Martin chatting up the girls, Martin, too, sneaking above deck to first class for just a glimpse, then down before they catch him. And their lives ahead of them. He remembers that he thought perhaps he’d join the merchant marine. A great life, looking at the sea all day, all you could learn about it: winds, tides, the movement of the stars, the working of the engine. He’d longed then to know it.

  It is years later, he is older, much that he had hoped for has taken place. He is better off than he dreamed; he has more than he would then have known to ask for. But
on this trip his skeleton is rigid with anxiety. The mother, whom he cannot now afford to regard as human, could do anything. Anything, and he could never stop her. The idea itself is mad, his taking her. Sometimes she speaks: “Who are you? Where are we going?” He says, “I’m Ellen’s husband. We are going to America.” She stops listening, or else does not believe him. Perhaps she believes that he is carrying her off to her death, a death she would not raise a hand against. Dying would be so easy for her. He can see that. Natural.

  He never leaves her. Only when she sleeps he walks ten, fifteen minutes at a time around the deck. First class, his dream, but he cannot enjoy it. Thomas Costelloe has given him a fortune so that he can pay the stewards. And more money so that all her meals can be brought to the cabin. Ellen’s father had thought of that. The stewards call Vincent “sir.”

  On rough days she is sick. He holds the basin for her, washes her vomit down the sink, puts out a change of clothes, then disappears. When he comes back she has done it, dressed herself. He could go on his knees to her in gratitude.

  At home Ellen has grown afraid of him. He does not tell her: I was moved to tears for the childhood that was stolen from you. He does not say: I took a fortune from your father. It would not have been possible to bring the mother to you without his help. He does not tell her, till years later, that the father planned to leave everything to her. When he does tell her, she turns from him, as if even his knowing taints him.

  She was happy with the mother in New York. Those were the years that she was quiet in herself, and settled in. She paid attention to the house. She gave up reading. John was born then, the one of the three she liked. An easy baby. For two years, three, while the mother lived with them, life went on inside the house the way it must, he thought, for sailors in a submarine. They were lulled as if they slept and rose each morning to the murmur of the water. Outside was nothing they could live in, nothing to do with them. It was terrible for the girls, though, Theresa and Magdalene. The mother frightened them. Ellen saw that and it made her turn from them once more. It was another thing for which they never could forgive her.