by Mary Gordon
Otile encouraged her to move in with Ira, which made Cam feel she understood nothing. “I like his jokes,” Otile said. “You need someone to make you laugh. You can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. All of them will get along fine with you five miles away. Bob won’t notice that you’re gone, your mother will be crazy, but she’s crazy anyway. And she’ll bury all of us, as well we know. Your grandmother wouldn’t know at this point if you were living in Timbuktu.”
“My grandfather would know,” Cam said.
“Your grandfather is a surprising man.”
“Yes,” she’d said, “but he hasn’t stopped being himself. He’d be heartbroken if I left Bob and moved in with a man who’d been divorced twice.”
“You could marry Ira. Go for three.”
“Thanks, Otile. I love it when you’re worldly.”
“You know what your problem is, Camille. You’re just like all the goddamn Irish. You like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. You like standing for something better than being something.”
“Well, what about you, Sister?” Cam said unpleasantly. “You don’t go out in the world just as yourself.”
Otile lit a cigarette. She smoked like a teenager: symbolically. Often she didn’t finish her cigarettes. She smoked badly, as she used profanity badly. She hadn’t grown into it, she’d forced it when she was too old for apprenticeship: the fit was always rough.
“I use what I stand for to my advantage,” Otile said, looking at Cam with hard eyes. “It allows me to do what I want. You use something, an idea, to allow you to do something you don’t want to do. There’s a word for that, you know: ‘fucked up.’ ”
Cam had listened. She always listened to Otile. But in the end, she felt Otile’s advice was useless. There was too much she didn’t know about. Their conversations about Ira had been colored, after a while, by Cam’s sympathy for Otile’s untouched life. She’d told Cam she’d been in love once, and knew herself beloved, but she hadn’t so much as held the hand of her beloved, who’d been married. Otile knew nothing about the unreliability of sexual love, or its deceptive powers. Suppose Cam moved out of her house, dismantled the structure of several lives, and in a year found herself out of love? Or found that Ira was. It happened all the time: Cam had handled hundreds of divorces; it was the most commonplace story in the world. Seeing what Otile had done to Maryhurst, Cam knew that she understood nothing about preservation.
She couldn’t listen to Otile’s advice. Otile had told her that Vincent really didn’t want to go home, that he’d be happier at Maryhurst, but he didn’t want to let the family down. Especially not Ellen.
“Let him off the hook, Cam,” Otile had said. “Tell him he should stay here. Make something up. Let him enjoy his life for once. God knows he’s earned it. He’s finally got a life he can enjoy. He’s a very sociable man and, because of your grandmother, he’s never been able to live that way. Let him live his last days in pleasure.”
Cam felt herself harden against Otile when she’d said that a week ago. She wanted to tell Otile that she’d never got over her early training: like all nuns, she felt exempt from boundaries, she felt it was her privilege to intrude. Cam spoke to her in the voice she’d learned to use with subordinates who’d overstepped the mark.
“I think I know my grandparents better than you, Otile. They’ve lived their lives together. They belong together, these are their last days.”
She turned away from Otile, sorry that she had let her know about her lover.
She drives up the gravel entrance to Maryhurst and parks the car in a lot a hundred yards from the house. She wants Ira. Her longing for him makes her lean her arms on the car roof and lay her head on her own arms to get a moment’s rest. She has no idea what she should do. So many of them: Bob, her mother, her grandparents, Dan and Darci. Ira, of course. Ira especially. All those lives would be re-shaped by her decision. And she has no idea what’s right.
She walks towards the house. She tries to imagine where the heart-shaped flower beds had been. Lovingly, as if she were saying the names of the family dead, she says the names of the varieties she’s been told once formed the flower beds: pinks, lilies of the valley, peonies, moss roses. She touches the pocked shoulder of the statue of the girl whose plumed hat has been eaten into by the weather.
Vincent is waiting in the corridor with all his bags. Sister Roberta, wearing her Sister Power sweatshirt, is sitting on the orange Leatherette couch beside him, crying softly.
Cam gives Vincent a kiss on the cheek. She is always shocked at how young, how lively, his skin feels. Her grandmother has withered; he has stayed intact.
She knows he wants the leaving to be over quickly. She rings the buzzer outside Otile’s door.
Otile says, “You know you’re making a mistake.” She is brusque in her goodbyes. Brusquely, she hands Cam the gray envelope with Vincent’s records.
“I’ll call you, Otile,” Cam says, kissing her disapproving cheek.
“Do that,” she says, not looking at Cam. She walks over to Vincent.
“So, Vincent, you’re leaving us,” she says. “Keep one thing in your mind, though, will you do that? There’s always a place for you here. Anytime. Just call up O. T. Ryan. I’ll come for you in my helicopter.”
“Thank you, Sister,” he says, not looking up, “but I’m glad to say you’ve seen the back of me at last.”
10
HE IS SITTING IN THE car and looking out the window. He is thinking: “It is August, the sky is light still until eight o’clock. But soon it will grow dark much earlier. In no time at all the sun will disappear by five: the air will be that vivid shade of blue I am too old for. Children will be throwing balls, one to another, shouting at each other. Then they’ll realize they can no longer see very well. They’ll begin to miss the balls and blame each other. They’ll walk together toward their houses. ‘Good night,’ they’ll shout, ‘good night,’ but the words will take on distance. They will close their doors. They will become invisible. In seconds, the sky will turn completely dark.”
The thought of the coming winter makes him rub his hands together with anxiety. He thinks of all that could go wrong. Storm windows; burst pipes. The thought of the house’s needs and weaknesses exhausts him. He was glad to be a few months without this sort of worry. He doesn’t trust anyone else to do a proper job. And now he doesn’t even trust himself. He is rubbing his hands together, afraid of the twenty-four wooden storm windows that somehow must be put up. He can’t remember now who did it for him the year before last. He knows he mustn’t ask Cam. Not now.
He thinks of his friends at Maryhurst. He thinks of Ellen and her curses months ago, the night of his fall. They say she’s failed; she can’t walk now. They say she’s heavily sedated and she might not know him. They say he must be prepared.
He’s going back to keep his promise.
He doesn’t want to go back.
Cam watches her grandfather looking out the window. She wonders what he’s thinking, if he’s unhappy, expectant, but she would never ask. His profile is beautiful in the car’s unclear light. Strong, princely. She’d like to say: “You look like a handsome prince, returning to his kingdom.” But he wouldn’t know how to respond to something like that. She holds his hand, undeformed by age; the high blue veins are signs to her of his masculinity, not hints that he is aged or infirm. She’d like to pull the car over to the side of the road, put her head on his shoulder, and say: “Tell me what to do.” She’d like to tell him about Ira, ask his permission to move in with him, to marry him, to leave her husband and her mother in the house without her. He tears his gaze from the outside and smiles at her, squeezing her hand.
“You’re the finest in the land,” he says to her.
“And the music is something grand,” she teases back.
“It’s good of you to come and get me.”
“Granddaddy, as if I’d even let anybody else.”
They both laugh. He pats her hand, and take
s his hand away. She can see he’d be happier if she had both her hands on the steering wheel.
“So, everybody’s waiting for you with bells on,” she says.
She realizes that there’s almost nothing she can say about anybody in the house that wouldn’t upset him. She’s afraid that if she starts talking about Marilyn, the news of Marilyn’s divorce will slip out of her mouth. Theresa, John, Sheilah, and Ray are out of the question as a topic. She doesn’t like to think about Staci, ever; when Staci’s face comes into her mind, she tries to make it disappear. “Did your grandmother seem peaceful?” he asks.
“Yes, fine, she’s having a good day,” Cam says. She has no idea what that means, what would distinguish a good day from a bad for Ellen. Sleep, terror, rage: she knows her grandmother’s life is lived only in these three states. She doesn’t want him to be worrying about Ellen on the ride home. She tries to think of something to distract him.
“I think Darci’s going to be with us next year. I think she’ll go on living with me till she goes to college.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Vincent says.
Cam realizes she’s confused him; he’s trying to figure out why a child would not be living with her mother in her customary home. Or at least with her father, who has a home as well.
“You know, Granddaddy, she wants to be an actress. She’s been doing very well in her classes in the city and if she lives with me she can be near to them. It’s a great opportunity for her.”
“Well, that’s fine, dear. It’ll be good company for you.”
“And Dan will be glad to see more of her.”
“Yes, of course, that’s something too, isn’t it.”
“She’s such a delightful kid, Granddaddy, really. She enjoys her life so much: she’s living it to the hilt. I think every day is an adventure for her. It’s great to watch.”
He tries to remember being young, what it was like to think of each day as an adventure. But he can’t do it now. He’d like to just look out the window, to think of simple things, the growth along the roadside, when the trees will lose their leaves, to try to push away from him the idea of Ellen knocking him down, cursing at him, walking down the road like that, just in her nightgown, with the car horns honking, and his breaking all the windows to get help.
Cam pulls the car in front of the house. She comes around to help him out. He notices the blue hydrangeas, purple at the center, and wonders when this happened, this turning color. He wonders why the color changed. Is it that they are fairly near the sea and the salt air, as he’s read, turns the flowers? Or is it some new poison in the air, some chemical, so that what looks interesting is only the first sign of blight? This is the kind of question he can’t answer anymore; he no longer even knows where to look for the answer. He didn’t think this way at Maryhurst, among his friends, among the mothers and their children, with the quiz shows and the President’s news conferences, with the white piano and the shiny furniture that never needed care. He remembers that he didn’t think this way, the way he was just thinking. He can’t remember now what he did think about there, but he knows it was different. He can’t think which is a better way to think.
He looks at the sharp marigolds. Their leaves, he thinks, are like the leaves of carrots. And their flowers are carrot-colored. He wonders if there’s a relation, if there even could be, between the two species. He hears the creak of the last porch step. It brings him back to himself.
And he knows he is right to be there, that there never was a choice.
He walks through the living room, waving his hand at people, like a politician. He waves at his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren. He has no time for them now. He is on his way to his wife.
She hears his step in the room and opens up her eyes.
He believes that she can see him, but he’s not quite sure.
About the Author
Born in New York to a Catholic mother and a father who converted to Catholicism from Judaism, Mary Gordon was raised in a strict, religious environment and at one time considered becoming a nun. She attended Barnard College and in 1978 published her first novel, Final Payments. She followed that with The Company of Women (1981), both books exploring the challenges faced by young Catholic women as they make their way in the larger, secular world. Her other novels include Men and Angels (1985), The Other Side (1989), Spending (1998), and Pearl (2005), the story of an Irish-American mother forced to reexamine her faith and political ideals as her daughter slowly starves herself during a hunger strike in Ireland.
With the The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father (1996), Gordon turned her attention to her own family, examining the mysterious and complicated life of her father, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who died when she was seven, leaving behind a web of lies and half-truths about his past.
Gordon is also the author of three novellas, collected in The Rest of Life; a book of short stories called Temporary Shelter (1987); and two collections of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls (1992) and Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2003). In 2000, she published a biography of Joan of Arc.
She has received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a three-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. The Company of Women was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1983.
Gordon currently teaches literature and writing at Barnard College.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Mary Gordon
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-1501-0
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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