The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

  He sees the dark piano with its clutch of photographs. Only Theresa had played the piano. Poor Theresa. Now he can feel pity even for her. For you could see what she had been. She had her mother’s angry quickness but without Ellen’s vision of a better world. Surer than Ellen, but not brought up with nature, she had none of Ellen’s physical softness, her tenderness for the. male. Theresa could have become something. She could have run a corporation, sent men to their deaths. Would she have been happy? Better than now. Armed to the teeth with God. Her children were impossible for her. Unfortunate Sheilah, ruined John, and Marilyn, who had a sex life Theresa could not forgive.

  He sees his own heart suddenly watching himself watching others. He dislikes himself. The porous surround that held the whole of humankind, his love, dissolves, and all of it is hateful to him now. Watching himself watching, he disbelieves his own benevolence. He sees himself incapable of one authentic act. Everything he does seems to him simulated. Purporting to love humankind, he sees now that he was loving only the vision of himself loving.

  He turns his mind back to Magdalene on the phone.

  “Maybe Cam just went shopping,” he says. “Maybe she’ll be back soon.”

  But he’s lost interest and Magdalene knows it. She is hurt by her quick fall from grace. He cannot rouse himself to praise her or to joke in some way that would do her homage. He thinks: She’s worse off now than before she called.

  “I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to make it, Dan. The heat is brutal, they say. And the humidity. That’s what gets me, Dan. Not so much the heat as the humidity.”

  “All of us, Magdalene, it gets us all.”

  “What do you think, Dan? Do you think I can make it?”

  “You know I’d love to see you, Magdalene. You’re always a sight for sore eyes.”

  He hears her giggle. She believes him.

  “Dan, you’re too much.”

  Dissembling, simulating, he has made her, for another moment, whole.

  “I’ve got to go, Mag. Here comes Darci. Running like a banshee, for a change.”

  “Great to be young, Dan. She’s a great girl you have there.”

  He listens to Magdalene, who hasn’t spoken, he reckons, a sensible word in thirty years, as if she were the possessor of a deep, abiding truth. “She’s a great girl you have there.”

  He thinks, Yes, yes that’s the truth. Nothing I’ve done has crushed the life from her. He sees her running up the stairs, her comical red hair, his as a child, though it was never allowed to be wild as hers is. Weighted down, slicked, threatened, cut, you’d never have known it for the same hair that springs out of Darci’s head, exuberant and vivid, stubborn, full of life. And the large limbs they got from Vincent, long, thick legs and arms. The heavy torso. And the round breasts. He can see his daughter has become voluptuous. Do men see her as that? He hopes and does not hope so. He would like her to be desired. But what father wants to think of his daughter as the object of men’s lust? Never mind, now. He’ll put the thought from his mind.

  She leaps onto the front porch. The screen door, challenged by her forceful entry, squeaks reluctantly and bangs. He sees Theresa register her disapproval. He would defend his daughter to the death. But how can he defend her from Theresa and her kind? The tight-lipped, fine-boned, sharp-eyed calculators and recorders of faux pas, excesses, errors of good judgment. Their accusations always are just. If Theresa should say, “My goodness, Darci, there’s a sick woman in this house. You should come in more quietly. That door won’t stand rough treatment, it’s as old as I am,” if she should say that, no one would be able to accuse her of injustice. And if he should say to her, “You and your kind are murderers. Your cold breath puts out life. You’ve done it to your children. You will not to mine,” he would appear fanatical. Absurd.

  He won’t say it. Theresa, after all, has said nothing. She has only pursed her lips over her porcelain teeth. He sees it in the tight mouth. The instinct to crush the beating heart, snap the fluttering wing, muffle the tender gesture. In her silence it is there.

  He will defend his big child with his body.

  He leaves the hall and runs, as heavily as Darci has, to meet his daughter. He half-lifts her off the ground in his joy of embracing her. In her buoyant flesh he feels her faith. What she believes in she is right to pour her soul into. Like the dying animal, her grandmother, she hungers, she is avid, simply for life.

  “Can I see Gran?” she whispers to her father.

  He takes her hand and leads her to the room.

  She tells herself to look at her great-grandmother, keep her eyes open, not to look away. She tells herself she has to, it will help her to know something about life. She has to be open to the whole world, afraid of nothing. That’s what she has to do if she wants to be a great actress. Great actresses know about life, they aren’t afraid of it, so they can play everything: queens, wanted women, war nurses, Greek heroines, Shakespeare. Everything. That’s what she wants. So she has to look at her great-grandmother; she has to make herself not be afraid: she can’t allow herself to look away.

  She takes Ellen’s hand. It’s light, a death hand, a bone, paper, a hand full of its dying. When the hand grips, she grips back. I’ll learn something from this, she says to herself, it’s important. And these words I can’t understand, they have something to teach me. I can’t be afraid to learn what it is. I can’t afford to be someone on whom something is wasted.

  Ellen raises her head. She bares her gums and clenches them together. She says something, no one can understand it, but Darci knows it is a curse, and she’s afraid of it: she doesn’t want to be cursed, it’s too strong for her, it’s too strong to do her any good. And then it happens to her, that thing that happens to her often now: in the middle of an experience, she turns from being the person that she wants to be—interested in everything, learning from everything, afraid of nothing—and becomes the child she was. She wants her father to take her away. She wants to burrow in her father’s large, safe body. She wants to turn away from her grandmother, with her clenched gums and her cursing nobody can understand, and run to her father’s arms, saying, as if she were the child she doesn’t want to be, “Save me. Save me from this.” But she knows that she must not.

  Dan sees that Darci wants to leave but cannot find the way to break the grip, the grip of death on life. He thinks she is afraid that, if she lets go Ellen’s hand, Ellen will fall into her death. Yet more than anything he sees she does not want that hook hooking her into death. He sees all this. And he will make it stop. He can; it is in his power to do this.

  She is a big girl, but he is much bigger. He can stand behind her so that she knows there are some things she need not do. He is her father. He can say, “Let’s go now,” and allow her to be free to go.

  He does say this. And she looks up at him, the child’s pure gratitude, saying nothing, but she lets him take her hand, lead her away.

  He will take her away, through the room of people. Theresa, whose looks he will not allow to touch her. Marilyn, who will be kind. Ray, who can alter the course of nothing. Sheilah, whose instinct is to ruin happiness. He will take his daughter to a cool place selling sweets. They will sit across from each other talking seriously. They will let sweet liquid slip down their sad throats. He is her father. He can make this happen.

  He walks into the living room with his arm around Darci’s shoulder. Staci is sitting on the couch, reading the TV Guide.

  “Want to come to Howard Johnson’s with us, Stace?” he asks.

  “Unh, unh,” she says. “But you can drop me off at the running store. They said they might have a job for me. Part time.”

  “Sweetie, you have your lifeguard job. You don’t need another job,” Dan says.

  “I just hate vegging out,” Staci says. “So if you can just drop me off there. You don’t need to wait. I’ll walk back.”

  “Sure,” Dan says. In the car, the three of them are silent. When Staci gets out, Darci begins singin
g. “Mairzy doats and doazy doats, and little-lambs-ee-divey.”

  “A kidd-le-ee-divey too, wouldn’t you?” he joins in.

  They hold hands walking into Howard Johnson’s. After they order, she takes his hands and looks into his eyes.

  “Daddy, does it make you very sad?”

  He wants to tell her everything. Simply to have her understand his life. Yet he does not want to be the yearning boy, the child who watches every woman in the supermarket and from details—the movement of the skirt, the click of the closing pocketbook—tries to invent the solid mother. To replace the vaporous unbodied image from the photographs he hides, the ones he knows he’s not supposed to have. If Darci believes that he is suffering, he fears that it will stop her flight. Instead of telling her his sorrow, he tells her how his grandmother rang the doorbells of strangers for FDR, refused to talk to neighbors who wouldn’t join her in denouncing Joe McCarthy, all the colorful boycotts and feuds which led to nothing but made Ellen feel she lived a vital life. He tells Darci about her great-grandmother’s fierce reading, and her friendships with Bella, with Delia, and about her fear of meeting the teachers on Open School night, but how she then charmed them, she and Great-Granddad. He does not tell her of his shame that on those nights he was not represented by young, confident parents, joking with the teachers, saying, “Don’t forget to give him what for if he opens his mouth in the wrong place.” Instead his grandmother, reverently stroking the textbooks, caused him to choke back tears of mortification. He doesn’t tell this to Darci. He tells her only stories of courage, pride, and tenderness, so she won’t be discouraged about life.

  “Daddy, did you talk to Cam?”

  “She talked to me.”

  “And will you do it? Will you talk to Mommy?”

  “Sweetheart, your mother will be terribly upset. It’s your last year with her. She’ll want you home for that.”

  “Believe me, Daddy, she’ll be mostly glad to have me gone. Daddy, I belong here. Not there. I belong with you. You know that. Just stand up to Mommy. You know I’m right. We’ll all be happier. She just has to stop pretending she likes having me around. With me gone, they’ll be happy as clams. Up at six in their jogging suits cleaning the bathroom tiles with toothbrushes and bleach. Come on, Dad, you know I belong with you. We deserve to have one year together. Just admit it, you adore my company. And I adore yours. Cam’ll talk to Mommy if you don’t want to. If you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid, Darci. But I don’t want your mother to be hurt.”

  Darci snorts. “Believe me, Daddy, she’ll get over it. Daddy, just admit it’s a perfectly brilliant plan, that I was perfectly brilliant to have thought of it and that I’m your favorite person in the entire world.”

  He raises his hand, as if he were a witness in the box.

  “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” he says.

  “Does that mean you’ll talk to her? Soon? Right now? There’s a phone back there. Go on, while you’re psyched.”

  He takes her face in his hands. “I promise I’ll do it, my love. But not in Howard Johnson’s. Not in front of all those thirty-seven flavors.”

  “Tonight, then.”

  “Yes. After we get Great-Granddaddy settled in. I’ll call tonight.”

  She jumps up and crawls into his side of the booth. She covers his face with cool sweet kisses.

  “If you’d only understand that you are the most perfect person in the history of the world, Dan MacNamara, if you’d only listen when I tell you, you’d be a hell of a lot better off. And the other lucky thing: you have the perfect daughter for you. Right? Admit it. Nobody makes you happier than me.”

  The extravagant words frighten both of them. The truth of the words (they know them to be true) brings them great pleasure. But little help. There are all those others. Mother. Daughter. Sister. Lover. All those who should have equal claim. And the slight shame of it—they are happiest with each other—excites them. It shines like a glimpse of lightning in the dense air of ordinary life.

  He thinks: I could leave Sharon. Let her have the house. Rent a small apartment in Manhattan. Live there with my daughter. Walk on the streets with her. She loves life. Like Cam, like Ellen, she has the gift to find life interesting. To be avid for it. I have not had this. But with her perhaps I could.

  But then the other faces, hurt, justly angry in their accusations—Sharon, Staci—bulk and thicken in his mind. Of course he never could. He and Darci must live as if she’d never said that sentence. But something will change. She will be near him this last year, before her life apart from him. The rest of her hopeful life. He’ll make Val see the rightness of it. She’s always been a woman who believed in justice. She’ll see that this is right. And Darci can live with Cam, her favorite. How will Darci’s presence make that heavy, dark house change? The vivid presence of a girl. Can it cut through the heavy atmosphere? The weighing depression, offense, shame? The lie of all their lives that they are better off like that, together.

  Something new will happen.

  At least that.

  Leaving Howard Johnson’s, on their way back to Vincent and Ellen’s, Darci is thinking: I am happy, I am perfectly happy. She knows she can’t touch her father’s sadness for long, but for moments, she knows, she can. She is the favorite. She is her father’s favorite person in the world. Knowing this, she thinks she can do anything. She thinks to herself: As an old woman, I’ll remember this, that I walked beside my father, I was seventeen, and I knew nothing was too much for me to do.

  5

  SHEILAH IS TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT SHE’LL fight with her mother. Often a kind of hunger comes on her, an itch, a compulsion to unravel the tight weave of her mother’s presentation to the world. She thinks she is the only one who understands her mother, who really knows what her mother is made of, as if she had made her herself, as if her mother were a construction Sheilah has assembled. But it isn’t that, she isn’t the creator, the assembler. Her interest does not lie there, in building up. Her attention, her ambition focus on demolishing her mother. Her mother is the house she would bring down. Her life has been a hammer with which she taps, looking for the stone that, touched, will crack, and cause the edifice to fall. Sometimes she has touched the weak stone: her mother’s vanity. Resisting, watchful, she has seen her mother grow exasperated with her failure to have molded a daughter who could in any way do her credit in the world. On occasions when she knew her mother wanted a demonstration of family rigor, family smartness, Sheilah would malinger, dawdle, hang behind. Then she could see—once, twice in her childhood—that underneath the stone facade that everyone thought was the complete woman there was not only the arsenal they feared but, below that, one level down, pile after pile of mousy dust, where even rot would be impossible, where nothing bred. Spiritual vanity was the last shield for what Sheilah alone understood was at the bottom of the structure that was known in the world as her mother. Despair. The sin against the Holy Ghost. The sin that denied life.

  Vanity of spirit. She’d been counseled on it in the convent; she had not been able to root it from herself. She hadn’t tried. It was too valuable, and what it covered unimaginable. She understands her mother’s vanity of spirit. She knows that this is the vulnerable spot. Slowly, for she has all the time she needs, all the time in the world, she raises her precise, her specialized, her expert tool.

  “Gran’s not much better. Did you notice a difference in the time you were alone with her? I mean, were there changes in that time?”

  She sees her mother freezing over, and recognizes what she sees: the dangerous black ice of troubled pride.

  “Not for the moment, Sheilah. Not much change that I could see. What were you fussing over in the kitchen? Aren’t we going to have lunch?”

  Theresa sees her daughter and her mother trying to entrap her. Weak, the both of them; she always was the strongest. Her daughter cried and fell and constantly caught colds. Her mother lived in filth. She bred filth,
disorder. Her underwear slopped over the backs of chairs on tops of piles of newspapers she’d never read. You had to wash every dish that came out of her cupboard before you’d dare to use it. She wouldn’t use hot enough water on her dishes: you couldn’t talk to her. She chose the filth she lived in, as Sheilah chose her drooping shoulders, the curve of her spine, her lank, dull hair. Theresa looks down at her nails. Pink, shining, perfect. She has learned from the Scriptures what she always knew: weakness, illness of the body, is not the body’s, it is weakness, illness of the spirit. Theresa suspects her mother knows her to be powerful, but resists, in order to refuse to give her credit. And she knows that Sheilah sees her failure, and wants more than anything to expose to the world that she can’t heal her mother by her laying on of hands.

  “What were you doing in the kitchen all that time?” Theresa says to Sheilah. “I thought I’d go mad with the sound of that electric knife. God knows what it did to your grandmother. What were you doing with it?”

  “I was cutting up some cheese, Mother. I was cutting Muenster cheese.”

  “Muenster cheese? With an electric knife.”

  Theresa starts to laugh. She puts her hand over her capped teeth to hide her laughter. Then she stops trying to hide. She sits down on the kitchen table and rocks back and forth, holding her sides. She says: “People are supposed to be right-brained or left-brained. You hear that all the time. I wonder what you are, Sheilah? Something we haven’t heard of yet.”

  Sheilah sees her mother: confident, victorious, rocking with laughter, sitting in what was Ellen’s chair. She understands the ridiculousness of her every act. She knows her mother knows this about her, and she’s right. Her mother has always been right. She’d wanted to make a nice luncheon spread for Dan. There are so few people in the world she likes, or who she feels like her. She worked a long time to cut the slices of cheese so she could spread them in a pleasing shape. A fan, almost a flower, a tomato at the center, the cold cuts radiating out. But Dan forgot that he’d said he would stay for lunch. Darci came and he forgot that he told Sheilah he’d love her to fix lunch for him. His daughter came, that noisy, clumsy, horrible girl, and he was taken up by the pleasure of her existence. No one had ever looked happier than he did with his daughter. They forgot everyone. He forgot her.