by Mary Gordon
He didn’t have to ask her why, knowing it was a habit from the time she felt the mother must be kept from sight. But this habit of hers didn’t make it easy for the children to have friends. He felt that it was to spite her that Theresa had used her music and her looks to bring people around. She never seemed to like the people.
So when, in 1935, Ellen agreed to use the house as a meeting place for the five fellows from the shop who needed a place to talk about their plans, their ideas, fears, procedures, he was doubly grateful, knowing it didn’t come easy to her. But she seemed happy with them there. They’d all sit at the kitchen table. She’d stand at the sink, holding back at first, then entering into the talk. They saw her brains and appreciated her. Except for Martin, who’d become one of the group, though the others were from the shop and he was still in Signals. “My advice, Vince, for your own good, is keep the wife from butting in.” He was thinking of asking Martin not to come after that crack, but the others valued him. They thought he could be useful in recruiting signalmen. He wasn’t, though. They were a strange lot, signalmen, and snobbish too. They didn’t want to mix with the unskilled workers. Funny, because the machinists, who really were the skilled ones, were happy to mix with everyone. When Martin reported his failure in recruitment Ellen lost her temper and said he must not be trying. Vincent saw his friend go white around the lips. He knew that they’d never liked each other. She’d been right in seeing through some things in Martin, the drinking, the big talk. And he was still mad IRA; she said she didn’t believe in causes that were strictly national. Though probably that was Bella talking through her.
They’d fought about it once, Ellen and Martin.
“Have you forgotten it’s your nation,” Martin said. “And what John Bull’s done to it.”
“Ah, the bull’s got into the cow, is that it? I say, burn the place down. Good riddance to it. The Irish have a talent for two things and two things only, getting drunk and stepping on their own two feet.”
After that, there’d been nothing but hardness between the two of them. Martin told Vincent he thought it shameful that a mother would not kneel beside her children in church. Seeing the hardness between Martin and her mother, Theresa curried Martin’s favor. He bought her an expensive prayerbook for her Confirmation. As her Confirmation name she took Martine.
Martin stopped coming to the group, warning Vincent that the leader of the group, John Hogan, was a Communist. Of course Vincent had known it all along. After Martin stopped coming, Theresa took up her disapproving air when the fellows came by.
“Godless Communism,” she’d say with her sharp, beautiful lips. “At Fatima, the Blessed Mother begged us to fight to the death against it. To pledge ourselves to the conversion of Red Russia. To give our lives to return it to her arms.”
“Russia was not a Catholic country,” said Bella, who was there, hearing it all. “If you’d tell the Orthodox priests the Pope was on their side they’d turn Red faster than you could say ‘Ash Wednesday.’ ”
And Ellen laughed, joyous in her ally’s victory against her daughter.
Every Friday night when the groups met, Theresa, looking her best, dressed up to kill, made a great show of passing by the men—of course they stared at her, she was a stunning girl—people thought Magdalene was better-looking, but he’d take Theresa anytime—saying in a loud voice that she was on her way to church.
“On Friday night?” Ellen would say, unable to keep silent.
“Devotions,” Theresa would say, tilting her stylish hat.
And Magdalene, made sick by the turmoil, the anxiety of having strangers in the house, by the anger of her mother and her sister, took to her bed. John, young, indifferent, listened to the radio in the front room.
What were the things they talked about? He can’t seem to remember now. Something about a new kind of squeegee the company wanted to force on the men so they could work more quickly and more of them be laid off. Some workers in the Jerome Barn refusing to do whitewashing. A 10-percent pay cut. The demolition of the Sixth Avenue El. All this is vague to him. What he remembers is his pride in Ellen, in himself and in his fellow workers, their courage, the ideas they had, the important things they talked about, the sense that they could change things in their lives. That they would see things change.
And they had. But before the great strike it had been finished for him. He had had a heart attack and had to leave his job. No more commuting for him, the doctor said, and no more of this union excitement. “Not unless you’re interested in seeing your good wife a widow and your children orphans. If you’re interested in that, go on doing what you’re doing. The good lady will look lovely, I can see, in black.”
The doctor said this in front of Ellen, who looked back at him in terror. He was surprised. It had not occurred to him that his death would mean so much.
When it happens he is at work in the shop. Sitting at his bench, looking at plans the engineer has given. He feels a tightness in his chest. Fire. The surprise of pain. And the conviction: Now I see. No one is there around him. He doesn’t want to call out. His helper will be by in time. In a strange calm he calculates the chances of his death. He concentrates on going towards something. A shape. A dark circle. But desirable. Not undesirable, the end of everything. Whenever this time has come back to him, he recollects that at that moment there was only the circle, dark, but shining in the distance. Shimmering. Disintegrating at the edges as if it has been touched by some corrosive thing. Yet beckoning. And he is anxious to approach it. It takes up his attention, the circle that can be disintegrating. He has no sense of regret for what was left behind or of a yearning for a life to come. Only of the shining, dark, disintegrating circle in the distance drawing his life from him. Drawing him to itself. It is more interesting to him, more arresting than his pain.
The helper comes and he is taken to a hospital. Saint Clare’s—he tells them he prefers a Catholic hospital. The fellows in the shop see him off as if he were leaving for a cruise. All the time he knows he will not be back.
Ellen comes in to be beside him, not forgetting to make a bad face behind the nuns’ backs to make him laugh. She doesn’t bring the children with her for a while. She says she doesn’t want to disturb him but he knows she wants him to herself. She is taken up by the idea that he was almost snatched from her by death; and that he will not die now, but will be with her. The girls know they are being kept away, and it grows into one more thing for which they never will forgive her. He can see this as it happens, from his bed he sees it. He knows they store up her offenses. Even now, women in their sixties, they take them out, examine them like jewels, precious for having endured. Shining, intact. Their grievances against their mother.
In bed for three months, he reads all about the strike. A triumph for the workers. The Kent Avenue Power Plant in Queens. The BMT too, a surprise that it should happen on the BMT, the organizers hadn’t done nearly as much as they had with the IRT. The union men took up their stand in front of a panel of circuit-breaker switches. If they pulled the switches, the lines that they controlled could be put out of service in the twinkling of an eye. People could be killed, hundreds of people injured. A brave plan, an audacious plan. It worked. No one was hurt. Not one hair on a worker’s head was harmed, or on a passenger’s. Thousands of men braved it to support the sit-downers, risking their lives, their jobs. And then, triumphant, the union was recognized. All the dreams, plans, words that had taken shape around hundreds of kitchen tables just like theirs had been realized. They had their strength.
But he was not a part of it. And though the fellows came to visit in his three months’ convalescence, and told him enthusiastically what he’d missed, that he was one of them, he knew he wasn’t one of them and wouldn’t be again. He followed the doctors’ orders! He quit the Transit Authority.
His body had prevented him from taking part in the one event in history he could have said he’d helped lay groundwork for.
He remembers now, they came to
tell him all about it in the hospital. He’d been feeling all right, coherent, but when they begin to talk to him he feels himself move away, as if he were sick with a fever. He is lying in a state that seems between wakefulness and sleeping although it has nothing to do with sleep. His bafflement makes him feel that he is standing off, far from them, watching. He can see what they are telling him about, but it doesn’t touch him. He hears the roar of the men’s voices, he knows all about the building. The power plant. Power. It is an idea and the exact opposite of an idea. The impulse is obedient, you have only to flick a switch. Darkness, the cessation of movement or its opposite—light, movement—occurs. A hum like the hum of the race itself emanates from the center of the plant. The wires that are everywhere are dangerous, death-dealing. Men stand, shifting from foot to foot, ready perhaps to die. All of it becomes only an idea to him, and his friends, who had spoken in the same way at his kitchen table of the world ruled by the workers, tell him what went on. But they believe they are describing a real occurrence. To him it is abstract. His pain in having been kept back from it makes him believe that it has not been real. He allows himself luxurious infirmity. He drifts into an invalid’s thin sleep. The power plant hovers above the ground like a palace in the Arabian Nights. At any moment it can cease to be. He does not want to come out of this. He is alone; the building moves above him, light and insubstantial, signifying nothing. Causing nothing to begin to be.
He took a job in Queens so that he wouldn’t have to commute. It was a good job, Patent Scaffolding. The problems he worked with interested him. How to set up an outside structure that modeled itself on the eventual inside. Holding the workers as they made the thing becoming itself. Scaffolding was all function. There was nothing beautiful about it, that was not the point of it, to look beautiful. But you couldn’t make mistakes. Men’s lives depended oh you. He admired engineers. He wished Dan had become one. But ideas were what the boy liked. He’d seemed to have no love for things.
Vincent had thought himself a shallow person because only palpable things won his greatest love. He was never sure whether he’d loved the body of his wife, or the idea of her. Would he go on loving her dead? He’d wondered about that. Now he would never know. Her body goes on, but he no longer loves her.
For more than twenty years he took the plans the engineers came up with, making models of the scaffolding that they designed, Good work, he liked it. But the pride he’d had when he worked for the subways, like you were a part of something great, that had been lost. Some days he felt a child could do his work. And sometimes just to ride the subways hurt him.
Ellen understood that. When he got sick the company offered her a job in one of the change booths. She refused, knowing it would be painful for him: her a part of it, him not. Her able to join the new union and him not. He knew at the time that she’d have liked to join the union, would have taken the job for that alone, but she said nothing to him. He was grateful. She was not like other women. She’d known that about him. Perhaps another woman wouldn’t have.
Bella got her a job with her at the millinery. Ellen had lost her skills for fine sewing, but the work was too simple for her, it tired her, and the commute tired her. But she was happy seeing Bella, having lunch together made everything up to her. She never made a new friend. And never told him she’d joined the Milliners’ Union. His eyes fill, remembering the time she was taken to the hospital with gallbladder, and he’d gone into her wallet to find the card that told her blood type and found the union card. She’d never said a word about the union, and never gone to the meetings, though Bella was active and he knew it would have pleased her, given her something to take her mind off John’s death. John’s death changed everything. She’d closed a door down and shut it for good. She never forgave him for stopping her grief. Or was it that she blamed him for helping her bring to the world one who would be lost? Or was it that she knew he’d never been a father to his son?
The War ended. She stopped working so she could be home with Dan. They became parents again, slower, more patient, better to Dan and Cam, he thought, than they’d been to their own. She kept on at the Democratic Club, but after Roosevelt’s death her political attachments never were as strong.
With John’s death they became old people waiting for their greater age. Not fifty yet, they softened to the expectation of their death. After Roosevelt’s death she turned her passion to the children of her children. Into Dan and Cam, seeing them gifted, she poured her fearful love of the outside world. They would go out to it. She’d make them ready as she had not made ready her own. She’d shelter the gifts and the gifted children.
She took no interest in Theresa’s children. He’d tried to make it up to Sheilah and to John. But he found their pain exhausting: he was too old for children in such pain. He’d liked Marilyn. He’d liked the ease of her, the way she took pleasure in things. It hurt him that she’d been foolish in her life. Sex was her downfall, he could see. Still, she was lovely. He’d been proud when she came to visit here at Maryhurst. The whole place had brightened up. It disturbed him to see that his friends had liked her being there better than Cam. That wasn’t fair, although he understood it. Marilyn had only to walk into a room. That was her gift.
But if they’d been in trouble, it was Cam they’d have gone to. He knew that.
After his work ended he did not know how to say what his life was. His life had been his work.
On that tape Sheilah expressed surprise. “If you came here, Granddaddy, as a skilled machinist, why did it take so many years to get a job commensurate with your skills? Was it your Irish heritage that held you back? Statistics show the Irish don’t achieve as they could be expected to. As a nationality, they don’t live up to their potential.”
“I did what I felt I had to. They were hard times. You didn’t have so much choice.”
He took the job digging because he could get it right away. He took the job with the German because he was fed up and he’d seen the ad. He took the job in Signals because Martin worked in Signals, and after the time he’d taken off to get the mother, he couldn’t afford to wait around.
But he had asked himself, and after sixty years he didn’t know the answer, if Danny Clark hadn’t died, would he have stayed in Signals all his life? Or would he have pushed ahead to get the job that he was trained for? The job that he deserved.
Someone is knocking at the door. It’s Sister Otile. “Well, Vincent,” she says. “Ready to go?”
And to his shame, before a woman, he begins to cry. He walks to the wardrobe so she won’t see him, pretending there’s something he needs to get. He says, “Be there in just one minute, Sister.” She says nothing.
She says, “You know, I could say something to Cam.”
She and Cam are friends. This is the reason he is here. Cam met Sister Otile, whom she calls simply Otile because they worked together for some women who were beaten up by their husbands.
The two of them, to spend their time on that. Generous of them.
Wonderful, the both of them.
He says, “The family’s expecting me. Cam’s worked her fingers to the bone setting things up so that I can go home.”
“Vincent, you’re an old man. You’ve got certain rights. The right to live the way you want.”
“But what about my wife’s rights?”
“In my professional opinion, Ellen would be just as well off here as home. I’d put her into a room just down the hall. What’s she got going for her there? Some crackpot who steals the silver? We’re not big on silver here. It doesn’t turn our heads. No class.”
“She’s happy with that Mary Davenport.”
“She’ll be happy here. She wants to be with you. Being with you is what makes her happy.”
“You don’t know her,” he says, and then, fearing that he sounds rude, adds, “She’ll be together with me when I go home.”
Sister Otile is not sympathetic. “Vincent, you know what I think. You like it here. We like to have yo
u. For one thing, you save us money. If you leave, we’ll probably have to put Roberta back into therapy. Think of it this way: if you stay you’ll be saving the community thousands of dollars. To say nothing of my own life. No one but you likes to hear my John McCormack records.”
Vincent smiles.
“In my opinion, your happiness should come first. Not some sixty-five-year-old promise that has no meaning anymore.”
Vincent nods.
“You know I could talk to Cam. Cam will do anything you want.”
He looks up at her. “I told everyone I was going.”
“Untell them, Vincent. Let Cam deal with the family. She’s a lawyer. People pay her to do this kind of thing.”
He shakes his head. Refusing.
“Vincent, I always said it. You’re a stubborn mick.”
He isn’t listening; she is still talking but he isn’t listening.
He is thinking about his house.
When he retired in 1961 from the job at Patent Scaffolding, his life took on the rhythm of a woman’s. Seasons, meals, the house itself became important.
He would go back to the house.
In honor of the years when the house had been the center of his life. Their lives.
Years watching the apple tree turn pink, then yellow-green, then somber green in the high summer, in the autumn seeing the heavy fruit streaked yellow and red. The darker, later red. They’d gather it, he and Ellen, even when the grandchildren were gone. In summer there were mulberries. She was clever with the windfall fruit. She loved the ease of the collection and the growth free from her care.
Slow years and always in each other’s company. An hour or two apart from each other, him in the basement, her cooking, the two of them eating their big meal in the afternoon and after it the sweet sleeps in the rooms now at opposite sides of the hall, far from each other. Their serious reading: tearing articles from the newspapers. Colored people beaten, kept from schools, John Kennedy, Vietnam, where Johnny went but Ellen refused to see him off. “Suppose he dies there,” Vincent had said. “He’ll die, then, from his own stupidity,” she said. She turned her back on a boy she’d been at least kind to.