by Mary Gordon
Is she anxious for his future? For his life after her death?
Is she proud, touched by his kindness to her parents? It is he, after all, who planted the garden. Without him, only the perennials, and not these zinnias, nasturtiums, marigolds, would have appeared.
Is she tempted to bend down, to touch his head in memory of his childhood hair?
None of these things. She is thinking: One night he will kill us in our beds.
Ray Dooley is looking at his wife and son. He thinks: I always failed him. I didn’t protect him from her. I never gave him what he needed. How else could he be?
John hears his mother’s voice. He understands he has to try to hurt her. It’s the only way to stop her. She has to be stopped. No one can stop her. But he has to try. This will please him. This is the only thing that he can think of that would please him in this life.
“I can’t think why you left it so long,” she says. “Nope. I guess you can’t.”
Ray wants to step between them. Walk away from her, he wants to tell his son, she’ll always win.
“I hope your grandfather doesn’t find out about your latest stunt. This fiasco at the new job. I hope it can be kept from him for a day or two.”
He bares his bad teeth at her.
“Well, I guess he won’t find out if you keep your fucking mouth shut. Which, let’s face it, is probably out of the fucking question.”
“Lovely language,” she says, turning away from him. “I just thank God your grandmother can’t hear you. I thank God your grandfather’s not around.”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” he says.
She turns away from him, walks in the house. Something in her is satisfied. She feels she has shed light on something in the world, properly exposed it. It has described itself in its true colors. Something has been cleansed: stripped bare. She is happy now; at peace. What she has done has made a kind of truth. She can rest now. Everything is open. Nothing is covered up.
Ray Dooley wants to say: “Why did you let her?”
Marilyn wants to take her brother’s head, cradle it in her arms, and let him cry. But he wouldn’t cry. He is wounded; he is poisonous; he would bite and claw and try to wound her; they would both be covered soon by fresh, deliberately drawn blood.
Everyone walks into the house. Except for John. He stays out in the garden, on his knees.
He pulls ten more weeds. He counts them: ten. He throws the last one on the ground. Then he stands up.
He gathers up the weeds and throws them in a fury down into a basket in the dark garage. He walks out of the yard. He won’t wait for his grandfather. He’ll go somewhere, he doesn’t know where yet, but he won’t come back.
He gets into his car and drives, to give offense, too fast up the short street. He slams his brakes on at the stop sign.
They shape themselves around his loud departure. It is the fissure around which they walk, carefully measuring each step. They group themselves around the dangerous rupture of the adolescent male. He will come back and act against them. Nearly forty, he is still the boy they fear, the male with strong limbs, quick reflexes, the fist that can at any moment raise itself against them, bring itself down, cause a death.
Marilyn is ashamed. If I hadn’t picked the weed, she thinks. I started everything.
Ray Dooley thinks, They see how I have failed to be a father to my son.
Sheilah thinks, Now they know, they see how I have always been much better than my brother.
Dan, ashamed of his own fear, thinks, I have never known what to do.
Theresa thinks, Now they see how I have suffered. Now they know.
And in the silence, shaped around the cleft, the guttural, inhuman noise of Ellen’s cry boils up. Speech without communication, words unmoored from meaning, thrown out, an offense. I will remind you how frail your grasp is upon what you determine to be human. At any moment you can be the animal I am.
None of them knows who should go to Ellen.
Marilyn, who has the training?
Theresa, the closest to her in blood?
Dan, the most beloved?
Sheilah and her father know that it cannot be them. They move to the outside of the oblong borders of the room.
The other three hesitate. None of them wants to make the point.
If Cam were here, she would move quickly. And this would make Theresa move. Marilyn and Dan would be relieved of the responsibility to act. They feel this at the same moment: the absence of the forceful presence. Dan fears that in another moment Theresa will feel what they have felt and realize that, to spite Cam, she must go in. He walks towards his grandmother’s room, hesitates a final moment in case one of the others has been seized by need or impulse, then walks in.
He wonders what it signifies. This sound. Ellen’s moaning. Pain? They’ve been told it’s not. The doctor has assured them all that she feels no pain. But why should they believe him?
The doctor said: “You have to understand what pain really is. A message of the nervous system, a collection of impulses signaling some malfunction. This is not what she’s experiencing.”
“What, then?” Dan asked.
He says, “Well, for example, if the fan blew against her arm and caused some of the surface hairs to move, she would experience disproportionate sensation.”
He doesn’t understand.
“Too much sensation,” the doctor says slowly. “Something a normal person wouldn’t register might cause her to cry out like that. But you wouldn’t call that pain. For example, you wouldn’t medicate someone for a thing like that.”
“What would you do?”
“Try to ignore it. It doesn’t mean that much. It sounds terrible, but just don’t take it seriously. It’s just scrambled messages. Just what I said: a disproportionate response.”
“But why not keep her medicated?” Dan had said. “Obviously, she’s experiencing some kind of distress. Why not block or mask that?”
“We’ll save the medication for when she really needs it.”
“How will you know? At what point will you call this pain?”
The doctor gives him a wounded, or exasperated look. How could you doubt my competence? With my training, my knowledge? What do you hold against it? Your sentiments? Your instincts?
The doctor says, “I’m afraid you’ll have to trust me.”
But Dan does not.
If this utterance is not meant to communicate her pain, what is it meant, then, to communicate? Her outrage? Perhaps that. Her outrage that she cannot choose, discriminate among, keep out, the pushing and remorseless random beats, all the impressions that refuse to sort themselves out, as the rules of sanity demand, into the essential and inessential.
Of course she’s outraged. Her outrage is visible. Visible in the clenched lips and toothless gums ground like a prophet’s teeth, in the wet phlegmy consonants of the incomprehensible words, syllables (only you know that they’re curses). In the fists, hardened into weapons, in the thrashing head on the bird neck, what can you read but outrage? But the eyes are calm, as if the mind, cut off from its expression of itself, has seen a serene vision. Not a happy one, but one that brought quiet or the knowledge that to fight is futile: why not rest?
The dead eyes and the utterance of death.
Why should she go through it? What was so wrong with death that it should be kept back? And why this thrashing animal, avid still for its animal life?
Dan has no need of God to explain death. His father, brilliant in his flaming death, the god in the machine grown incandescent, deaths he had known, even unreasonable ones, have not made his spirit rebel like this sight that he sees before him. Even the deaths of children, the terrible violent deaths of victims murdered in their innocent sleep, have not made his heart cry out like this. Those deaths, even the worst of them, had not rendered the dead inhuman. What has happened to his grandmother? He fears that she no longer has a soul.
He wonders how, being the man he is, he can have used t
his word. Living as I live. Doing what I have done. What do I mean by this word? Using it, I know that it has meaning. But what meaning is in this word?
And what would be the thing it represents? Some object or some faculty whose function is to understand the impulses: sights, sounds, tastes, odors, pressures, letting up of pressures, harmony, discord, at least that. To comprehend and to assign a meaning. To take in some impulses and refuse others. To be able to say: I will use this, this other is of no use to me.
And would this faculty go on then to eternal life? His grandmother had not expected it. She fought with the priests. “I’ll not be prayed at by a Coughlinite. I’ll not be in the same room with a fat-faced idiot who thinks Franklin Roosevelt is Satan walking on the earth. What has their God done for them but cause them to cower, sneer, claw at every stranger, every new idea?”
She wouldn’t go so far as to say there was no God. Only that she wanted nothing to do with Him. Dan guessed that for Vincent’s sake she’d never say there was no God. She’d keep that safe for him, knowing her force, knowing that if she spoke all that she suspected with the power of her arguments, her tongue quicker and cleverer than his, he might be forced to give it up. This God that she could see had brought him comfort. She didn’t want him to have to give that up.
What differences had it made in their lives? Of the two, he was the more at peace, she the more seeing. She had force; the steadiness was his. If you wanted the truth of something, you would go to her. If you needed comfort, though, you’d stand just near him. The closeness of his body meant the world was safe.
But it wasn’t a safe world. She would tell you that. Yet she relied on her husband to give her safety. And sometimes in her haste she’d fail to see him. Sometimes in rooms you’d see her little flick of panic if she couldn’t get him, in an instant, in her line of sight. The sight that now saw nothing.
Or what did it see? The face of God approaching, reassuring as her husband’s? No, she’d have fought that. Faith, she’d said to Dan once, is throwing good money after bad. Faith for Vincent was one more steady, honorable investment, like the workman’s pension fund, an allocation from a dutiful and careful life.
Now, watching Ellen sleep and grateful for her momentary peace, he thinks: What is my faith? Faith of our fathers. Probably a hoax but one the world did not seem better off without.
He doesn’t want to be a person who dislikes the modern world. He knows what went before it was no better. The sorrows of the past were terrible. Yet people yearned to copy the past, as if it were the thing that could make them whole. Around him at every turn, it seemed, shopping malls were being built to look like Williamsburg or Boonesbaro. He could hardly go into the house of a friend of Sharon’s without seeing a dreadful reproduction—a plywood veneer only, held together by glue and two-penny nails. Come see our dry sink, they would say. In the middle there would be an arrangement of silk flowers which the wife herself had made. Touched by their blunderings and wounded by the bad design of the objects among which they lived, he spent whole evenings in houses struck dumb by the furniture. He kept wanting to say to these people, friends, relatives of Sharon’s, How are you trying to live? It wasn’t like that. What do you believe you have bought with your furniture? The past was terrible. It wasn’t what you think.
In college, when he studied primitive societies, he’d not been optimistic enough to go on with the work. Yet he loved in them what he had loved about his grandparents: the sense of keeping the thread you were born holding between your fingers. Of not letting go.
Even now she won’t let go.
Even today he will come back to her.
But who will Vincent be coming back to?
And who will he, Dan MacNamara, waiting for his death, look around the room to see?
Not Sharon. No.
His daughters? Nearly strangers to him. He had tried to make them not feel tied to him, to keep the passion of his yearning for them secret from them. He was always leaving, or they were leaving, the point was not to make the leaving agonizing. So you kept back the scalded feelings and the longings. You did not cause them to think that in your old age they must make a home for you. You let them be free. At least that. Yes. That most of all.
What did his two daughters have faith in? Staci tells him that in her high school, affluent, suburban, all the kids steal from each other.
He doesn’t ask: Do you steal? He assumes the disgust with which she speaks of the events means she doesn’t. Yet he would never ask.
And if she doesn’t, why doesn’t she?
Better not to ask.
Darci believes in everything. Poetry, drama, art, the stirrings of the soul. Above all, in the great urban centers of the world. Paris, London, New York, Rome. Her tears spill over for a beggar, her fist comes down on the table at the treatment of the Nicaraguans, she loves her new best friend, Rebecca. She loves Camille. She says she loves him. “Daddy, I adore you,” she says at least once a day.
When she says this, what does she mean? He is afraid to believe that she means simply what she says.
Staci believes in keeping herself safe. He wonders if it was he who did that to her. Would she have always been that way?
No, it was his fault. He made her unable to believe in life.
It was not believing in anything that made her eyes blank. Her blankness hurts him and makes him feel ashamed. Nothing interests her. As a young child she had been petulant, withdrawn, easily bored, and easily provoked to hot, uncleansing, and unsatisfying tears. This tendency, perhaps it was a decision, to find nothing in the world desirable, transformed itself in adolescence to a gift. She became the model teenager. She understood in every situation what was wanted, who was wanted: she became that person or that quality. Infinitely variable or infinitely on her guard, she had the sensitivity to change of children brought up starving, or nocturnal animals unnaturally introduced to light. Dan felt she could become a criminal; sometimes, seeing that nothing within her was durable or passionate or fixed, he saw in her eyes the same look he’d found in the eyes of criminals he had defended, whose clear guilt he knew. He feared for her, and each success reported from two thousand miles away made him fear more. She was selected for new, special computer classes; she won yet another trophy for high jump; she made cheerleading squad. “That’s great, honey,” he’d say, and his heart would freeze, the hollow in his throat would fill with air. He would see that by his leaving he had taken from the cradle that first ordinary gift of youth, belief, and cut its throat.
There was nothing in Staci’s behavior you could fasten on as worthy of correction or of blame. She’d seen Sharon’s weakness, and understood that it was in her interest to please her, particularly since Darci would do nothing to please her. And she worked to please her, though each time she succeeded Dan saw the contempt behind her eyes. Dreadful, he thinks, dreadful. My daughter’s eyes are dreadful to me. And I have planted the dread.
4
MARILYN COMES TO THE door to tell him it is Magdalene on the telephone. She wants to speak to him. She cannot for the life of her imagine what’s become of Cam. I simulate, he thinks, more than the plywood furniture, more than the plastic shillelaghs and the papier-mâché turf. I simulate the idea of the good, caring man. He knows that Magdalene thinks she can trust him. He can comfort her. In her mind, her daughter, who has left her house two hours ago, is on the highway, splattered dead. He knows he has to simulate concern.”
Yet in the process of his simulation he begins to feel concern for Magdalene. He hears the game, flirtatious voice.
“How’s my best boyfriend?”
“Over the hill, Mag. I’m too old for you.”
The satisfied laugh. Cigarettes and whiskey. You, a man, remember what I was.
“Listen, my fine bucko, where would that daughter of mine have gone to? She left hours ago. I thought she’d be there.”
“Maybe she went to the office. Maybe she’s left from there to get Granddaddy.”
“No
, she said she’d come back. She said she’d come back to check if I’m feeling better. I’m hoping against hope, Dan, you know that, to have the strength to be there when my father comes home. You know how hard I’m trying, don’t you, Dan?”
“Of course, dear, everybody knows.”
“Cam seemed so annoyed with me. But I just wasn’t up to it. So I thought after a little rest I’d try again. She said she’d come to see if I’m feeling better. If she’d just give me a hand. But she probably won’t, she was so aggravated with me.”
Dan realizes the nature of his faith. He believes in human frailty. He sees the wholeness of all life, the intricate connecting tissue. It is this, this terrible endeavor, this impossible endeavor. Simply to live a life. Magdalene, trying to live her life, presses on Cam, who turns then to her lover, leaving her mother terrified. Cam is happy in a man’s arms, but she must leave the arms to go to her mother, who will fail her. To the grandfather, whose body fails. To bring him to his wife, the avid animal who refuses to fall into her death. He sees his aunts, uncles, his cousins, children, Sharon, and his clients, battered, battering, divorcing and divorced, enclosed in a thin porous globe. He would like to embrace them all. He would like to say: You must believe this. I understand you all.
Standing in the hall of his grandparents’ house, holding the old black telephone, he is in love with humankind. He looks at all the ornaments, the figurines. His grandmother collected them. He remembers all the ones that Vincent broke, flinging them through the windows to get help that awful night. He mourns the lost figurines. But there is Franklin Roosevelt, intact. An eagle of the Bicentennial. A scroll shape of the Constitution. Among these significant social-historical remembrances there are other puzzling objects. A beaded-glass Florentine slipper with a dark-blue cuff of plainer glass. Maroon vases with borders of gold depicting scenes of eighteenth-century pastoral fantasy: the lords and ladies hatted and bewigged. What had they been thinking of, his grandparents, treasuring these? What dreams, divorced from everything they lived by? Simply to be lighthearted. Simply to be concerned with having a good time.