by Mary Gordon
He saw his wife become a thing he’d never thought she’d be: devoted. The impatient girl he’d loved to watch in argument, her hair falling down, pinning it up as if it was ridiculous to bother, he’d seen this same person holding the old lady’s hands grown swollen and fattish from her idleness, the square nails as tough as any man’s. He saw her make the special foods for her mother and stay by her while she sat, looking at something else, never looking at her daughter, never giving back the daughter’s glance of love.
He’d liked their life that way for a while, but then it seemed wrong to him, the way Ellen wanted to keep back the world. She’d not been born to live like that. And in the winter evenings when he’d come in, he’d feel her cheek hot from the house, he’d hear the sound of children bickering, Magdalene always the wounded and always at fault. And in bed at night, rather than reading with her glasses that he loved, she’d turn the light out, turn to him not, he felt, from ardor but because otherwise she was so bored. Her body slackened in those years. Still it was lovely to him. Always the body of the woman he had loved.
And does he love her now?
Sixty-six years of life together and he can’t say.
He knows only that he doesn’t want to go home.
He likes his life here.
He likes his simple life.
Sister Roberta knocks and comes into his room. In tears. She holds in one hand a tight bunch of marigolds and in another a black plastic bag full of tomatoes and yellow squash. She’s not a pretty girl; tears don’t help her. It isn’t fair, if you were pretty tears never hurt your looks, if you were not they always did.
And by what name can he call her? Strange to comfort a weeping girl and call her Sister. She always says, “Call me Roberta. Bobbi.”
He can’t. She is who she is. A nun, and not like other people. Consecrated. She made promises. That she would never marry.
She thinks her father doesn’t love her.
He knows better than to say that parents always love their children. He doesn’t say, “No, Sister, I’m sure your father loves you. I’m sure you must be wrong.” He knows that she may not be.
“Vincent,” she says. “I feel like I’m losing my best friend.”
She sits down heavily, right on the floor in front of him, and like a child rests her head on his knee.
He wants her to get up. If Cam finds her like this, she’ll be savage to her. At the same time, he relishes his ability to comfort this poor girl, not usually unhappy, but unhappy now that he is leaving.
“Now, now,” he says, patting her head. “Now, now.”
He knows almost everything about her life. More than he knows about any woman in his family. But none of the women in his family was born with Roberta’s simple nature, kind, patient with the difficult people, urging, cajoling, encouraging the ones who want to sit and wait for death. Acting as if she herself doesn’t believe in it, death, or in its strength, its pull for the old and tired. As if she cannot understand this sentence:
I have had enough of this life.
As if it is the last sentence she could ever understand.
She believes, she tells him, in eternal life. But it can wait, she says, the here and now is where I live.
The here and now?
He wants to tell her there is no such thing.
Since he was a child, the idea of the present seemed to him a terrible thing, a shapeless thing. You would grab at it and it would flee from you. As a child, desolate in the simple fact of his alone-ness, he could terrify himself by asking, often standing on the thin border between wakefulness and sleep: “When is now, when is it becoming the not now, the past? Already it is swallowed up as I try to give it substance. And I too am swallowed up. I am nothing. Nowhere I stand is firm.”
He didn’t think of calling for his mother. What comfort could she give him? Already possibly not existing herself, possibly a figment as he was, unplaced. Even as a grown man, when his flesh chilled as the water went down the bathtub drain, as he followed the sound of it and watched its vortex, he couldn’t comprehend his wet cold flesh with certainty. His own wet flesh horrible to him, he wanted and didn’t want to go to Ellen.
What would he have said?
Have you ever thought it is quite possible that all this may not be?
There is no place on earth?
No present, therefore nothing, and therefore no place.
She would have mocked him. Made a story of him.
She would have been right to.
He wondered now why he had never known how she had failed him.
Until now.
But he can’t even imagine another way, a person you could go to, saying anything, expecting to be understood. It’s the difference between him and Sister Roberta: he knows she can imagine such a thing. It’s why she’s here.
He strokes her dull curls (she had got herself, proudly, a permanent); he’s glad to comfort her, she’s free of mockery. In its place is belief.
He wonders how a person comes to have a simple nature.
She believes her father doesn’t love her. But he must have loved her at one time.
Or else, he wants to tell her, you would not have this: a simple nature. At some time in your life you must have felt safe. You still do. Even now, when you’re sad. You always expect that there will be some person near to dry your tears. Some person whom your tears will interest. Or you have made that person up. Or perhaps it’s God. And have you made Him up? But this is why she has a simple nature. She can always imagine someone to dry her tears.
He thinks: My mother had a simple nature. I had one. But for me it had nothing to do with tears. Because I was a man. It was because I could forget myself in the world around me. When I thought, There is no place on earth, I would go to a place like the mill. I would say, Things work. I understand them. Therefore there must be a place.
He wants to tell Sister Roberta about Ellen’s father and mother and to say: Nothing happened to you like that.
He thinks of Ellen’s mother.
Five years she lived with them. The years of Ellen’s false simplicity. Her slackness. Then the mother died. Sitting up, she died, and, dead, her face showed no change of expression. Ellen buried her in peace. Then she became herself again.
She read the newspapers. He’d come home, not to the warm flaccid cheek, but to the heated one, inflamed by her proof of public injustice. She’d wave a newspaper at him before he had his coat off. “Read this, read this. The common criminals.”
The house piled up with newspapers. Yellow clippings proliferated like spoor. The false years of her caring for the house were over. You would think he would have minded. He did not. He felt he’d got his wife again, and wanted her again. Her fine-cut nostrils flaring as she called out, “Herods, thieves.”
Only when he became a union man did he begin to understand the world.
“Come back, come back,” he urges the far past. He knows his mind is undependable. But now he wants it to work. He wants to say, I am old now but I see the lit-up past. He is sitting in a chair covered with olive-green plastic: A chair he doesn’t like. He is stroking the hair of a girl, a nun, who is kneeling at his feet, her head on his knee, weeping because he is going home. To the house he has lived in over sixty years, so that the woman who has been his wife for sixty-six can die beside him.
But he doesn’t want all that. He wants the lit-up past. And it comes back. The darkness of the subways and his fear, skill, comradeship, loneliness in the work, horror of darkness. The first days come back to him. His greenness when he has to ask for help.
“The diagrams, the ‘prints’ we call them, are up on the walls. You teach yourself here, before you go out,” Bill Walsh said.
He’d no experience with anything electrical; Martin’s cousin said a smart fellow could pick it up.
He is in anguish now, because he needs a certain book and he cannot tell Sister Roberta that he wants her to get up so he can find it. That he wants to stop comforting n
ow so he can lay his hands on something, on a sixty-year-old book whose title would make her think that he had lost his mind. He knows he brought it with him; no, he hadn’t, but Cam had. She was good at finding the things he wanted, bringing them, not saying it was foolishness. A good girl. She stood up in court for people. You had to do that. People needed that.
She’d brought the world in to them; she’d gone out to it, both she and Dan. Ellen had sent them out. She’d not go herself but she would send her grandchildren as messengers. Each piece of news, fact, accolade, accomplishment was in part her treasure. Like a miser’s, her face lit up with all the gold they brought her from the world.
He hadn’t brought that book with him at first. That was the terrible time, when he could think of nothing he desired except his death.
His memory goes back now, not to the lit-up time but to the dark room where he has fallen; no, not fallen, Ellen has knocked him down. His leg is broken. He has broken every window in the front of his own house.
Theresa comes.
Then Cam comes to the hospital.
In their hating they try to cut him up. He is mine. Mine.
They say, “I think that I had better…” or “It seems obvious to me.”
The ambulance boys strap him to a flat plank. Like a corpse. As they do this, he wishes: If only, this were my death.
And in the hospital he can think only that she always meant to hurt him and show him the mockery, the trickery, of all their life. That promises mean nothing. That he’d been a fool to believe in a promise. She had known it all along but covered it to hide her strength.
And then one day Cam said: “Granddaddy, I’ve found such a good place for you. On the Island. You can feel the ocean in the air.”
Be polite, you mustn’t hurt….He had thanked her. He could see her tears.
“What shall I bring you? Any books?”
“No, nothing, no. They’ll have the television.”
Life had come back to him here at Maryhurst. After some time he realized he didn’t want to die.
Has he enjoyed his life? Parts of it have been enjoyable.
You could look back at your own life and see it broken into parts, divided like a field cut up for different crops. But when you were living any part of your life, that was the whole of it. You didn’t say, Eventually there will be another part of life from which this will be separated. Even the breaks, the new starts, terminations, crossings over. You didn’t let go of the part of your life you were living. Nothing became the past while you were living it.
Things bled from one part of your life into the new part so that it seemed a piece, and when the terrible times came that was the trouble. You believed it never would break up. The past became the past only when it could no longer wound you. And then you lost some kind of interest in it. It became less real to you. You could no longer recognize it as your life. Only some thread reminded you that you were always the same person. Birth to death, you were the same.
He’d always thought that. Now he thinks he may be wrong.
He may not be the same man who was brought here eight months ago intent on working on his death.
He keeps trying to look back on how it happened, if he’s a different man from the man who’d come here eight months ago. He feels his understanding darken with his failure to make sense even of his own life.
Perhaps if he tries to go over the events.
First this happened, and then this. Then this.
But what he never can call back, never has been able to, is whatever it is between the pieces of the past. Between the then this and then that. The separation. The connection. How can things be separated but connected?
Had Ellen understood all that?
He pities her, in her silent fog.
He pities the girlhood they had stolen.
But he doesn’t want to live with her again. He doesn’t want to be in the house with her.
He’d thought he had a simple nature. But now all these things make him see that he has not.
The poor child, kneeling to receive his comfort and yet consecrated all the time the bride of Christ, he’d thought she had a simple nature. But perhaps no one did.
Sister Roberta had helped when he arrived. At first her happiness had been a grievance to him. Too much life when he was wanting to prepare for death. As if she’d walked into the room of a headache patient singing cheerful songs, when every loud note on the brain pulp was agony.
But her belief had saved him, her belief in life. That it was worth it.
He thought even now that she believed because she knew no better. Still, he could say that she had saved him.
Didn’t Jesus say that to a blind man or a leper, somebody like that, “Go thy way, thy faith has saved thee”?
He sees now that people, he did not exclude himself, appeared to need the idea of faith. It couldn’t be a lie.
This is the lie: life is worth the living. This is the lie you needed.
What was truth?
Pilate had asked that. Vincent had been told from the pulpit that he asked this because his pride had made him blind. Jesus right there before him and he had to ask. But Vincent understood Pilate. He praised him for the courage of the question. Most people didn’t want to know.
He’d always thought he had been one who did want to know. But now he knows that there is only one thing he wants: life. He wants now to go on living. He is hungry for it. Every aspect of it interests him. He could use another hundred years.
He wants to enjoy his life.
No one he knew had ever lived like that. It was a thing the young had thought up, not his children or their generation, but the generation after that. Camille and Dan.
Did this interest in enjoying life actually make them enjoy it? How did you tell? How did you ever tell with people? So much for us, he thinks, was what we had to do. And yet we thought about the world.
Suppose he turned to Ellen and asked her. Suppose that she could understand, even though he knows this won’t be the case ever again. Everybody tells him that. But suppose there are moments when the fog lifts and she can understand. Suppose he turned to her and said: “Have you been happy?” He’d never done it. Never once in all their lives. He doesn’t know what she’d say.
If she’s the woman that she always was, she’d tell him he was nothing but a fool. Her scorn for him would make her lively once again. She throve on it and treasured it. Without it he imagines she could never feel her heart pumping its blood, the volumes of it he’s read about, to her limbs, her lungs, her brain. Scorn made her feel real to herself; contempt assured her she drew breath.
High-colored. Beautiful. She’d sweep her hair up from its tender place of exile, its escape, there at the part of her neck he loved best, the nape, the hollow where the two muscles formed a cleft. She’d turn to him, made lively by her scorn, and say:
“I’ve always feared I’d inadvertently connected myself to a crackbrain but mostly you were clever and kept it hidden until times like this, when it’s all up. There’s no more hiding it. You’re cracked. Happy. And who’d be happy in a world like this?”
She’d turn political. She’d say they wanted to keep you busy with soft thoughts I like that—are you happy—so you’d turn your eyes away from their thieving tricks.
And yet, knowing all this, now that it was too late, he longs to ask her: “Were you happy? Did you much enjoy your life?”
Although if he were asked he’d say: I didn’t think about it. What I did seemed at the time the only thing to do.
But is she the woman that she was? Sister Loretta, who had a master’s degree for studying old people, says it’s impossible to think of her that way. But suppose she is. Then why did she do that to him? Knock him down like that. But if she isn’t, who is she, then?
He feels his brain harden around the problem. He’s heard that the brains of old people, which aren’t fed by the quantities of blood that rush up when the brain is young, grow hard. He knows that he s
hould understand. But he can’t.
Now Sister Roberta’s unhappiness begins to weary him. I am an old man now, he wants to say to her. I get tired.
But the truth is not that he’s tired. It’s that he’s curious. He wants to be looking at his old book.
But he’ll sit still for her. He’ll do that much.
He doesn’t think they’re wrong to be concerned about their happiness. Perhaps if he and Ellen had done more of it, more for the children, thought about their happiness, it would have done some good.
It never seemed to him his children had been happy. It didn’t seem that they’d enjoyed their lives. The two living ones, Theresa, Magdalene. The hard, resentful mouths of women in their sixties who haven’t got what they once wanted. The presence of Theresa makes him wince. The furious stiff hair. The tight lips, lightly colored in. The nails that longed to tear, polished bright pink. As if, so colored, they could appear kind. And Magdalene, deformed now with her missing breasts. Her drinking. All those late-night calls. “Neither of you ever loved me.”
She was partly right. He wished that he could tell her that “We tried but we didn’t love you enough. We did what we could at the time.”
Too late now, the damage done, and he can see his daughter eating up her own child’s life. Only he thinks now Cam is happy. He doesn’t know why. For many years she held herself with the posture familiar to him in so many women: I will do what must be done. Now he sees something in her movements, in the way she walks, that reminds him of something Ellen had when she was younger. As if moving weren’t just a duty. He doesn’t know what to call it.
He hopes that Cam has happiness, now that he believes in it.
He keeps his body still.
He’d love just a look at the book before they pack it up, pack all his things for the trip home in Cam’s new car. A Jeep. A Land Rover. He admires the car, the name. He’ll like that, driving home in a new car. He’ll keep his mind on that.