The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

  But he did come back. Johnny came back.

  Great children they all are and they’re waiting now. Waiting for him.

  History, the son’s death, the dead Presidents, the pictures of the weddings, graduations.

  The windows he had broken. Fixed now. Johnny’d fixed them, Cam had said. Without his asking; he had been ashamed to ask.

  The house that had been their life.

  Why had she let so few people in the house?

  That was why he liked it here. People came in and out, you talked to them, lent them a magazine, offered them a sweet. They gave you things.

  Why in all the years were there, so few people in the house?

  So few outside the family.

  Martin, Delia, Bella.

  Theresa’s friends, whom nobody had wanted.

  The union people, only for a while.

  He had loved his wife. Now she’s waiting for him. She waits for him to keep his promise.

  He thinks: I always wanted someplace where people could just come in. Someplace to sit down, be themselves, and feel that they were happy.

  Part V

  1

  TWO BLOCKS, OR LESS THAN FOURTEEN HUNDRED FEET, less than five hundred yards, separate the home of Vincent and Ellen MacNamara from the house where Cam lives with her husband and her mother. Cam decides to drive.

  If she didn’t drive her car between the houses, if she walked the distance in her normal way, it would be proof that she didn’t believe her mother would return with her to Vincent and Ellen’s house, where Magdalene has promised that she will appear in honor of her father’s homecoming. Where he will take his place again beside his wife so they will die together in the house, which everyone believes is what the two of them want.

  It’s the last thing Vincent wants. He is happy where he is; he doesn’t want to leave Maryhurst and his friends the sisters and his cronies, who pretend to envy him his homecoming but really don’t. He doesn’t want to leave the simple garden with its easily grown vegetables, perennial spring flowers, and the others that are guaranteed to give no trouble: zinnias, marigolds. He doesn’t want to leave the card games, songs around the white-painted piano, magazines, stashes of food brought to rooms between and after mealtimes among friends, advice easily given, taken or ignored, long days broken by TV sports events or press conferences given by the President, the governor, evening Mass (voluntary, sometimes even some of the nuns can’t make it), and the short sleeps of old age, unfrightening among the furniture where no past life has set its mark.

  His family believe that he has spent his time longing for this day of his return.

  Cam pretends to believe that she will any minute make the two-block journey with her mother strapped into the seatbelt on the passenger’s side, smoothing down the trousers of one of her ten identical pastel trouser suits.

  John is outside in his grandparents’ back yard. Away from his mother, out of her sight, he thinks again that maybe he will sign up for a nursing course.

  Sheilah is in the kitchen, still working on preparations for lunch. She is thinking: Of all of them, only I have a life worthy of unequivocal respect.

  Dan is thinking of his grandfather. He is thinking that the old man is coming back to a dying animal to die himself. He is thinking of his daughters, wondering if it’s good for them to see this. He thinks it may be good; at any rate, he wants them to see it. Whatever it is, it will happen less and less frequently in the world. They may not see it again, two lives, two bodies, together until death.

  Theresa thinks she bears the word of God within her and quite soon she will lay hands on her mother and her mother will be healed.

  Marilyn thinks: If I brought my children back here, if I learned to live without a man, if I started again, but here, where I was known, where I was at least not unknown, it might be better.

  All of them, except for Cam and Dan and Marilyn, believe that they are lucky to have Mary Davenport to look after Vincent now, that she will take the extra burden in her competent and forceful stride.

  Not one of these things is completely true. Some have elements of truth in them; some are wholly false.

  Ellen believes nothing. She lies in her bed sleeping, crying out, cursing, crying, falling back to sleep.

  Cam drives the two blocks hoping that her mother will be getting ready. As she drives, she prepares her annoyance. Her mother will not yet have chosen which of her pastel trouser suits she will wear. She will be walking around her bedroom, still half undressed. Cam stiffens herself in case her mother isn’t wearing her prosthesis, forcing Cam to see her empty chest. She vows she won’t look; her mother should spare her that, but if she won’t Cam knows enough to spare herself.

  She walks into the house, already prepared to be angry. She turns on the light in the front hall. It’s still afternoon but this house always seems to need more light. She and her mother argue every day:

  “Turn the lights off, Cam. Why make the lighting company more millions than they have?”

  “I pay the bills, Mother.”

  “If you love to waste, then waste. I thought you were the one that was big on this energy crisis.”

  Above the light switch is a photograph. It is a picture taken in the twenties of a mother standing in a garden with her little girl. The child is small, two or three years old. The mother bends above her in an arc of intimate instruction, leaning and about to pick a blossom from a flowering tree.

  The light falls, straight and plain, on the figure of the child. The child is obviously dressed for the picture. Or perhaps she is always dressed like this. The dress is bell-shaped, stiff and frilled, made up of rows of tender lace. There are hundreds of small buttons, tiny as milk teeth, opalescent or covered in some version of the cloth that made the dress. The mother’s hair is collected into bunches at her ears; it must be morning, perhaps this is how she does her hair for sleep. She’s wearing a peignoir trimmed at the neck and sleeves with velvet, or it may be fur, some trim it’s impossible to name for certain in the dark hallway where the photograph is hung. And Cam would never move the picture to a better light. She hates the picture. She would be happy if it fell and smashed. She has no idea where her mother got it; it seems always to have been around. If it fell and smashed, she would be pleased to see the shards around the floor. She wouldn’t see to it that it was re-framed. For a while her mother would keep asking her when she was going to get it re-framed, and she would say “Soon,” pretending she’d just forgotten. But she wouldn’t have forgotten; she would have refused. Her mother would almost stop asking; three times a year, perhaps, she’d bring it up. She would put the picture in a conspicuous place, and Cam would put the photograph back in the closet, where it would lean against the dark back wall. She would know that she could keep the thing a ruin, that it was in her power, and she would.

  But the photograph won’t fall. It will stay where it is, kept there by the mother as the representative of what she would like to have been and believes she was. It will be kept there by the daughter as a proof of her mother’s ability to deceive herself. Neither of them need say anything to the other. They never speak about the picture. They both know everything about it.

  Each day, Cam wants to tear the picture from the wall, shake, literally shake it underneath her mother’s nose, and say, “I know what you think. You think we were like that. We were never like that. There was no tree like that. You wanted nothing to do with gardens. You hated gardens, because your mother was good at them. Nothing grew beside our house. One thing: a lilac bush you had no right to, that flowered every April, the envy of the neighborhood. It was just like you to have a tree like that.”

  Each day, Magdalene sees the picture and thinks: This is exactly how it was. We Were like that. I remember, we were lovely. I remember every morning we were just like that. I never understood: we could have been like that forever.

  Cam flicks on every light between the front door and her mother’s room. One in the dining room, two in the upst
airs hall. She even turns the light on in the bathroom, though she has no thought of going in.

  “Ready, Mother?” she calls out.

  Of course, Magdalene has known for several seconds that it is her daughter walking through the house. She knew it but allowed herself to hope that it was someone else. Bob, Kevin, one of her friends. A burglar. Someone resolved to do her definite and final harm. A harm that people will feel sorry for.

  She imagines the killer’s face. He has no face; he’s wearing a black mask. He ties her to her chair; he gags her. She knows she could die at any minute. But he doesn’t kill her. He hits her on the head with his gun. She blacks out. When she wakes up, her room is empty, ransacked. She touches her hair and feels patches of sticky drying blood. She’s helpless until Cam comes home. Cam sees her and starts crying. She unties her, bathes her, dresses her in nightclothes, puts her to bed. The police come. They interview her in her bed. She can’t remember anything, she says. They understand. They tell her she was very brave.

  “Mother, it’s me.”

  She hears the accusation in her daughter’s voice. She hasn’t done a thing and already Cam is angry with her. It takes all her strength away from her just to hear that voice. Cam never believes in her, never has. She never thought that Magdalene would make it to her parents’. Magdalene thinks now that she could have done it if only somebody had been there beside her, having faith in her, encouraging her when she felt bad. But nobody encourages her. Nobody believes in her. Nobody knows how hard it is for her to do the simplest things. Things that are simple for other people aren’t for her. She has her dizzy spells. Her trouble breathing. Nobody understands all that, because she doesn’t tell them. That’s why they won’t understand why she can’t make it to her parents’. Because she keeps things to herself. That’s why nobody understands. That’s why she’s all alone.

  She sees Cam in the doorway. She can’t stand to look at her, she looks so angry.

  “You’re not dressed,” Cam says.

  Magdalene shrugs. She stands up and walks over to her vanity table. She sits down, looks in the mirror, and puts on an earring. She’s wearing her bathrobe; she put it on over her clothes because she didn’t want to soil them when she put on her makeup. She takes the earring off. She looks at her daughter’s angry face in the mirror. In the mirror, Cam looks back at her.

  Neither of them knows who will speak first. Which one will say the words. The accusation. The excuse. They look at each other in the mirror. Cam shifts her weight from foot to foot. Magdalene sits still. Neither of them says anything. And then the time comes and they understand that Cam will say it:

  “So you’re not going after all.”

  Underneath her bathrobe, Magdalene is dressed. At any moment she could change her mind. It isn’t over yet, the possibility that she could change her mind.

  “I thought I would, Cam. I honestly thought I was going. You see how far I got. Though it wasn’t easy, even to get this far. Just to get dressed made me so out of breath. And dizzy. Spots in front of my eyes everywhere. I had to keep stopping for drinks of water. Only little sips. I was just terrified of throwing up.”

  The words Cam won’t say are blooming in her throat like knives. Faithless. Inconstant. User. Parasite. You can’t do anything. Not even for your father. Or for me.

  She doesn’t say these things to her mother, who is crying. She swallows the blooming knives and says instead, “Maybe you’d better just lie down.”

  Magdalene toddles over to her bed, unsteady, as if she were drunk. She isn’t drunk, although she has been drinking; when she’s drunk her gait is steady. Drunkenness focuses her mind. One step follows another. Her desires shine before her and solidify. Drunk, she reaches out. Each thing she touches is the object of her dreams.

  Now she lies down on the bed. She points to her feet, indicating that Cam should remove her shoes. Cam does, with such revulsion she can hardly breathe. She lifts the lavender cloth pumps off the veined puffy feet, the feet with twisted toes, crippled from the cruel shoes of fashion, the toenails painted pale, their yellow hidden under polish the shade of evening shells. Magdalene’s eyes are closed, she covers them with her right hand. She can’t bear to see her daughter but she calls it migraine. Blindly she hands over the lavender pearl paste earrings.

  “In the zipper bag,” she says.

  “You told me once, Mother. About the zipper bag. I heard you fine the first time.”

  Magdalene becomes contrite. She becomes a child. She says, “I know you did. I’m sorry, Cam, I know you did.”

  Cam puts the earrings in the zipper bag. She puts the wooden trees into the high-heeled shoes. She doesn’t understand this care, this choosing, and this maintenance of clothes that go nowhere, clothes that Magdalene wears for minutes, then takes off. These costumes of deception, self-deception. These hours of selection, preparation, garments put on, judged, adored. And then what happens? This is where Cam’s mind always darkens, where the shutter closes and the images go black. What happens then? What could possibly happen? What goes on between the admiration there before the mirror, the last loving pat, and the final decision: I cannot.

  Mother, she thinks, seeing Magdalene, one arm over her eyes, one up above her head, as if she lay on a beach, waiting for something wonderful. And then, Not my mother.

  How can you have become this to us both? You are everything I never want to be.

  Does Cam say, when the sweat breaks on her upper lip, when the salt taste of her revulsion rises up in her dry throat, when all this comes upon her every time that she has contact with her mother’s flesh, does she say: Yes, of course I understand. I must despise this which was once my home.

  Does she say: Mother. Of course now there is horror, you betray me by the softening and drying out of that firm flesh I loved. You show me what I will become, each falling vein reminds me of my ruin. I will become you.

  She says nothing to her mother. She would never say such things. Even if she knew them, she would never say.

  2

  PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEM both say how remarkable it is that two people, a mother and a daughter, could be so unlike. Cam responds to this observation, casually. “I often wonder myself,” she says. “How can I have been brought up by someone and be so different. The truth is I wasn’t. Brought up by her. I was brought up by my grandparents.”

  The daughter denies the mother. Not for her the fashionable romance dragged up, patched together, by her friends and fellow feminists. Mother and daughter reunited after years of misunderstanding and discord, discovering each other in the nick of time. Mother. Darling. We are the same. Only the wicked system made us push away.

  She listens to her friends saying how they’d been taught to downplay the mother’s value. Dangerous, of course, the adored object of babyhood tending the house and solitary in her indoor life. Of course you felt the father was exciting, out in the world, bringing home the bacon, news, contagion of the world. Of course the father was the hero and the mother the poor second best.

  We understand it all now. And, thank God, in time.

  When her friends speak like this she doesn’t even pretend interest. When they talk about their mothers she feels like a Bolshevik listening to White Russians talk about the old life. She listens to them in another city, where they all now live. But it is a city of strangers, it is not her home. The lost past, this idyll that they mourn she had no part of.

  Sometimes she lies about her mother’s glamour. Or she believes she’s lying, but in concealing her mother’s present, she is telling a kind of truth, the truth of Magdalene the young widow staring the public pity for her state right down, out in the car each morning in her suit, perfumed, her smart foot light on the gas pedal of the Buick she bought herself.

  Songs. Show tunes. The permissive and luxurious night outings of the single mother and her only child.

  The child as escort. Boon companion. Ornament and prize. Out. Out on the mother’s arm.

  There are some things
they’ve always loved. Musical comedies, movies with dancing. Across the brackish water of their years of failure they can meet and join hands over the songs and dances of the beautiful and tender movie stars, their only real relatives. They are sisters watching in the dark. Humble sisters to near gods. They watch, sing, join in, and forget: They forget Magdalene’s hacked breasts, and her drunken accusations, her self-publications and displays, Cam’s silent reproaches, her turning away. Even now they can sit in the dark eating the treats of movie darkness: bonbons, malted-milk balls, caramels. Even now, on the mother’s bed, an island, they can sit in front of the huge television Magdalene bought. Sixty-five inches. Fifty channels. All remote control. They watch Top Hat, Babes in Arms, Three Coins in the Fountain, Gilda, Daddy Long Legs, Born to Dance. And they are happy as they were always happy, watching, singing, each illumined and protected by the glowing pictures of impermeable lives.

  But when these images are needed—the luxuries, the faces, the bodies that flicker and then disappear, the luscious melodies, words that are lozenges of joy—when they are needed do they come to hand? Now, covering her mother with a cotton blanket, the same shade of purple as her trouser suit, trying to cover her mother and yet not have a moment’s contact with her flesh, the flesh that makes her sweat break out, now do the words of songs, even the name of one, one sentence they have dreamed of from the movies, come to their lips?

  Not one.

  At the door Cam shouts over her shoulder, “I’ll be back, I don’t know what time.”

  She goes down to her room.

  She raises the receiver of the phone. She calls Ira. She will ask him if they can live together. Anywhere. Her house, the empty house, or his apartment. Or somewhere else. She has money. Other people do these things, she’ll tell him, other people do them, we could too.