The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 19

And how could she name the thing whose absence made her feel so utterly bereft. It wasn't something with one name- and if it was impossible to name, it must be irreplaceable. She couldn't resist the impulse any more: she must look at herself in the mirror to see if the loss was visible.

She patted her hair. Of course it looked the same, of course her face was identical to the one she had seen only a few hours before. She need not feel humiliated; humiliation was a trick of the eye, and she would be sure, always, that when eyes fell on her they would see something admirable, something fine. She could do that. It might not even be so difficult; she might even make it into something of a game she played with herself: this covering up, this patching over.

She made her way into the living room, the room her mother had made so delightful, had made her own, so high and airy and refined, and yet so simple, so easy to be one's self in. One's best self.

In a little while, her mother would walk in, fresh, rested from her nap; together they would set the table for an early dinner, beginning with the soup her mother had made, that Eleanor had bought the ingredients for. Things would go on; life would go on.

Above all, she must not let her mother know what had happened, that she was suffering. It was beautiful, her mother's world, and Eleanor knew that the most important thing that she could do now would be to play her part, so that her mother wouldn't know that the world she still believed she was inhabiting had disappeared. Had been stolen.

There would be no need to tell her mother what had happened to her today. There would be no need to tell anyone. No one in the chorus knew anyone she knew- and Billy would never say anything. It suddenly occurred to her that there might be a difficult moment the next time she and Billy met. Perhaps it would be better to say nothing of what had taken place today. As for the other people, her friends, her colleagues, she would simply say that she had decided to resign from the company. And when people asked her why she'd say, "The time has come, the walrus said." Something light, something amusing. The kind of thing her mother would have said.

Three Men Tell Me Stories.

About Their Boyhoods.

Three different men have told me these stories, if they can be called stories. Perhaps it's better to say: three men have told me these things, and when I heard them, each of them was bathed in the same light. Yes, I heard them, but the words created pictures- or perhaps not pictures, it is better to say an atmosphere. And so it's not wrong to say the words were bathed in a particular light.

Everything these men say has to do with boys moving in rooms of adults. Uncomprehending boys, trying to understand. Rooms with no or little natural light. Rooms lit by lamps. Lamps lit by adults, dimmed by adults.

Has any child ever performed the action of dimming a light? Has any child ever felt he has had too much of brightness? Even if a blinding light were shone in the eyes of a child, he would only cover his eyes. A gesture adults think of rarely. They close their eyes, but they don't cover their eyes with their hands. Not as a rule.

The beginning of what the first man tells me happens in Belgium in the 1920s. A wealthy house in the city of Antwerp. A house owned by Americans living in Europe. The man is an American now, living in America, but he began his life as an American boy brought up in Europe.

His father is the European representative of the Swift meatpacking company, based in Chicago. But the family is far from Chicago, far from the smell and noise of the stockyards, of the elevated trains. They are in Antwerp, in a house where you can hear the click of civilized, decorous heels on the outside pavement, a house of wealth where servants move noiselessly up and down carpeted staircases, where the light, in every season, always falls through drawn curtains and always takes on something of their brown. Whatever season, whatever the texture of the fabric, the curtains are always brown.

No one is happy in the house because at the center of it is a tyrannical father, who sits in a chair that the son thinks of as something like a throne. Later, when the son, a grown man, inherits the chair he will see that it is not very large and is nothing like a throne at all. But that will be much later.

The son knows that his father is the source of all the misery in the house, although his father is always nice to him. He admires his son's lightness of body, which is like his own. But to everyone else, the mother, the older brother, the sister, the servants, he is a humiliator. Many days he opens his mouth only to humiliate. He fires servants, particularly young girls, for minor infractions, and then the mother has to hide them, until he forgets and it is all right to bring the servant back out to the light of day.

In this dark house, the only source of light for the boy is his sister, with whom he plays upstairs in the nursery, supervised first by nannies, then by governesses. When the sister is ten and the boy is seven, she is. .h.i.t by a car on the streets of Antwerp and killed. After her death, no one in the house speaks of her and only forty years later does the boy, middle-aged, realize how deeply the loss of this sister has affected him. How everything, every decision in his subsequent life, has flowed from that.

The summer that the boy is twelve, the family goes back to America, to visit their families and for a holiday to the Far West. Their first stop is Moline, Illinois, the mother's hometown. While they are there the father, who is known to be suffering from an enlarged heart, dies. An excessively methodical man, he somehow dies without a will, and somehow the family is suddenly poor. The older brother, who played on the Belgian Olympic tennis team, must change his life. By day, he must work in the Swift meatpacking plant and by night play tennis for money with rich men in an exclusive tennis club. He is allowed to be a member, and not to pay, because it is clear that, despite certain circ.u.mstances, he has the right breeding. And it is perfect for the rich men that they be challenged by, and lose money to, someone so well-bred.

The boy and his mother spend the summer in Moline. The boy is not sad, he is happy. He is happy because of the rich, uncultivated trees and the white houses with porches. Most of all, he is happy because of the open doors of Moline. The open doors of a Midwest summer. The screen doors that open and bang shut as children walk in and out of each other's houses, as mothers say, "Go on upstairs, he's in his room playing with his trains. Do you want some lemonade to drink?"

Is he happy because in America the enlarged heart of his father, the tyrant, was made to explode?

He believes nothing is closed to him in America. All doors, like the screen doors of Moline, will always be open to him.

But he is not allowed to stay in America. His mother says they must go back to Belgium where they have, at least, a house. A house he hates as he hates Europe for its closed doors, its locked doors, its frightened children, who must wait in rooms whose light is never clear and never generous, to be taken somewhere, to walk, never alone, on streets that do not look as if they should be dangerous, but where, nevertheless, it is possible for one of them to die.

The second man tells me about being a boy, also in the Midwest, but in the thirties. One day, the boy is standing in a room in the family house, a house of the Indiana dunes, a house built by his father, who is stern but not a tyrant. A house doubtless, with a screen door like that beloved by the first man. The boy learns from his mother (usually smiling but not smiling now) that his father has a brother he has hidden from his three sons.

This frightens the boy because he is not only a son but a brother, the youngest of three, and he loves his brothers, particularly the middle one, his protector. It frightens him more than he can bear to imagine a time when his brothers would not speak of him. When he has this fear, he is standing in brown-stained light. The light that permeated the large prosperous house in Antwerp.

The boy is nine years old, and so his mother doesn't tell him the whole story till he is ready to leave home for the army, nine years later. So for nine years, until he hears the story, when he thinks of his father and his father's brother, he is bathed in that brown light.

Only as he is about to go to the world war, to a possible heroic death (a death which does not come), his mother tells him the story.

The two brothers were orphaned, and they were left a pool hall as their only inheritance. The plan was that they would take turns going to college. One would stay home and manage the pool hall and make sure it was earning properly, and the other would go off to Purdue. The older, my friend's father, went off first. My friend's mother tells him that perhaps this was the natural way of doing things, but that it was too bad the boys were so young they didn't see the possibilities of trouble. Perhaps it should have been done the other way; perhaps running the pool hall was too much responsibility for the younger brother. Perhaps he should have been allowed to go off to college to mature. Especially since he was very handsome and eager to please. Catnip to women, my friend's mother said.

Bad things began to happen. The younger brother fell in love with the landlady of his boardinghouse. He was eighteen and she was thirty-five. He began drinking and gambling. The pool hall had to be sold. The older brother had to come home from Purdue, but by the time he arrived back home the younger brother had run off with his landlady, whereabouts unknown. I can hear the whistle of the train in the air of Illinois as they escaped. When the boy, or the young man, hears this story he can see the landlady's full body, her corsets, her straw or feathered hat. And the young handsome man, reaching in his pocket for a flask, or maybe a pint bottle.

He went from bad to worse. He married the landlady but she left him. He became involved with mobsters. He hit the skids. Then, somehow, my friend's mother didn't know how, he pulled himself together. He got work in a bank as a clerk. Then he was promoted; he became what was known as a repo man, repossessing the a.s.sets of the failed.

Then he met Hazel, who was a buyer at Indianapolis's largest department store. After two years, he told her the story of what he had done to his older brother, and his grief at their estrangement. He loved his brother and he knew he had done wrong.

She said he must write to his older brother. But the older brother was not inclined to forgive. He'd been robbed of a college education and forced to work in the h.e.l.lish steel mills of Gary, Indiana, instead of behind a desk, wearing a white collar. But his wife, my friend's mother, said that it was a terrible shame that brothers shouldn't speak. She reminded him that blood was thicker than water. She reminded her husband that the brothers had loved each other. He agreed that the younger brother and his wife should be allowed to visit. He made no promises about what would happen after that.

But when the two men meet they fall into each other's arms like sisters. My friend doesn't know what was said; whether or not forgiveness was asked for and granted.

The families visit back and forth. Usually because the older brother has children and the younger one does not, the younger couple does the traveling. But once Hazel invites the whole family for a slap-up weekend in Indianapolis. She takes them to a restaurant that has a real pond in its lobby, full of live lobsters which are caught, right there, then prepared and served to the guests. Hazel orders lobster and champagne all around. She insists that the three sons of her brother-in-law be given, in her presence, and at her expense, their first taste of champagne.

My friend and his two older brothers are abashed in their stiff shoes, their stiff suits, their stiffly brushed hair. They're overawed at the opulence of this restaurant, the tinkling of c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses, the women with furs slung around their shoulders and jewels dangling from their ears. My friend says he was in love with everything and everyone; he believed his family was the most desirable in the world.

One time the uncle takes them to the racetrack: the whole family, my friend and his brothers and his parents. Hazel doesn't go along. He provides everyone with betting money. Ten dollars apiece for the grown-ups. Five for each child. But it isn't a good time because after his uncle bets he begins trembling, his whole body shakes and his face goes gray. This is when the brown light permeates again; when my friend, aged eleven, observes his glamorous uncle, trembling. They win a hundred dollars, but it doesn't matter. They've seen what they didn't have to see. But none of them ever speaks about it. The visits take up their old pattern: the younger coming to the older, to the house the older built in Ogden Dunes, Indiana, overlooking Lake Michigan, which, particularly in summer, is a pleasant place.

The younger brother prospers as a repo man until he gets bored. He decides to open a little bookie operation, investing his wife's savings. Soon he's wiped out by mobsters. Hazel writes my friend's family that the younger brother has lost all interest in life, that he sleeps most of the day and sits in the living room in the darkness weeping. She says the older brother and his family should stay away until the younger brother pulls himself together.

But he never does. He dies in a year, of a blood clot in the leg. Hazel moves to Florida but doesn't contact the family. Except one letter to the mother saying she has remarried and it was the worst mistake of her life but she deserves her unhappiness for betraying the memory of her own true love. Years later, they learn of her death from strangers who say they found the address going through her papers.

The third story isn't placed in the Midwest. It happens in New York, in the forties, during the war. Like the story of the uncle, this one has to do with mobsters, not the small-time mobsters of Indianapolis, but the big-time mobsters of New York.

The man with mob connections who is the center of the story isn't big-time, isn't even a full-time mobster. His name is Earl and he's a business a.s.sociate of my friend's father; they both work in the garment district. But somehow Earl has much more money than my friend's father. He owns a car. He lives in Manhattan, on Central Park West. My friend admires the way Earl dresses, particularly his black-and-white shoes. He loves it when he and his family travel from the Bronx to eat with him in restaurants. Or sometimes he picks my friend and his father up in his car and they go for jaunts. Often they go to Colony Records in Times Square and Earl buys stacks and stacks of 78s. My friend is impressed; his parents buy only one record at a time, and that rarely.

It is through Earl that my friend, age nine, first hears Billie Holiday and the Ink Spots, and although they frighten him a little, they excite him too. He knows they are the signs of a world more daring and truthful than any inhabited by his parents. When he hears this music, he sees lights and gleaming streets, he hears the slamming of cab doors and the shaking of c.o.c.ktail shakers. Also the silence when these people, these cab riders and c.o.c.ktail drinkers, who have gone too far, and tried too much, are simply made to disappear from sight.

My friend knows that living in Manhattan is the better thing to do, better than living in the Bronx. His parents whisper about the source of Earl's wealth, but they're not specific, and the boy knows they're afraid tobe.

Earl is divorced and this is different from anyone the boy and his parents know. He has a son the boy's age, although the boy has never met him because he lives with his mother. One day, Earl invites them to come to his apartment for his son's ninth birthday party. My friend doesn't want to go for three reasons. He doesn't know the boy, he doesn't want to go to a birthday party with his parents, and he'll have to wear a suit. His parents say he has no choice: they're grateful to Earl, they owe him. They don't say what for.

The boy is thrilled by entering a building on Central Park West, with its suggestion of Europe. By being shown in by a doorman who acts as if he thinks they're rich. But above all by walking into the sunken living room in Earl's apartment, something he has seen only in movies.

Because none of the children know each other, they attach themselves to their parents, particularly their mothers. My friend focuses on these mothers' hair, piled high, their filter-tipped cigarettes with lipstick prints left on the b.u.t.ts in the ashtrays, their finely made shoes. They speak more quietly than his mother and he knows it is money that makes them quiet and different. The adults barely speak to each other. Each family inhabits a discrete solar system, no one knows what to say or what to do because although there is cake in the middle of the table, which is set with party hats, horns, and snappers at each place, the birthday boy has not arrived.

Because of this, the light in the elegant apartment, with its thick, gravy-colored drapes, is darkish brown. The boy stands in the brown light, near his mother, and says nothing.

Earl stays in the kitchen, shouting into the telephone. He is shouting at his ex-wife, shouting because the boy has not arrived. Occasionally one of the men disappears into the kitchen to say something to him, but comes out quickly and whispers something to his wife. n.o.body says anything to any of the children.

Eventually, one by one the families leave. My friend doesn't remember how this happened. Only a few words picked up from his parents' conversation on the subway home. Words entirely new to him: Reno, alimony, custody. And a way of referring to a person he has never heard: "his EX."

What do these stories have in common, beyond the fact that they happened to boys of about the same age in America?

That's it, you see. America! Where the light is always meant to fall clear, straight down to the plain wood of the floor, straight from the sparkling windows. Oh, the Puritans, the Shakers. Oh, the Federalist Builders, spurred on by the light of the Enlightenment. The truth shall make you free. Stand in the light and take your place in it.

As if there were nothing that could not be brought to light.

What the parents of these boys work for, what all parents brought up in, or believing in, or hoping for prosperity work for, is this: that there shall be a curtain, always shut, between light and darkness. That boys will play, grow, flourish in the light that travels through the sparkling gla.s.s. And on the other side, the curtain will be fixed and always drawn.

But on the other side of what? The s.p.a.ce where their children live? The other side of living s.p.a.ce? The parents never understand that such boundaries don't remain fixed. That what they think of as a boundary is only an envelope of brownish light. And that whatever they do, behind the curtain they think of as so concealing, there are stirrings, rumblings. Rumblings that the boys- drawn by the pull away from their own childhood- will approach. They must look. Or not look, glance. Or peer.

With half-closed eyes, the boys approach the small rent in the blackout curtain, which is not black after all, but darkish brown. Peer through. As they continue to peer, the rent will seem to become larger. They will keep their hands still at their sides, as they've been told. They will touch nothing, move nothing.

They are good boys.

Peering, they will see only shadows moving in half darkness, certainly a danger to themselves. Moving in sadness, in disorder. Speaking words that can only cause harm.

The boys stand still as if they have been shot. They cannot move away and they will not move forward. Not yet. The grace of immobility. This much will be allowed them.

They can change nothing; nothing they do can touch all that goes on. One day they will have no choice but to inhabit the abode where those things happen. But for now their feet are placed on the hardwood floor, and although they are standing in a brownish light, the sun still strikes their s.h.i.+ny hair, slicked down, out of politeness. For now, they may stand where they are. They know it is just for now.

They know some things but do not know them fully. They know that they have been deceived and that they can no longer trust their safety to the ones who have deceived them. Yet they must. They have no choice.

Something is in store for them. This is the only thing they understand.

Vision.

Temporarily, my vision is impaired. This is of no importance to the story.

It is of no importance to the story; it is not a permanent affliction; it will pa.s.s. But while it does not pa.s.s, the act of sustained looking, which more than I knew was central to my life for- what? joy, information, solace, rest- is now a difficulty. So I do not do it much. Vision has become abstract. Seeing as idea. While I am thinking of seeing, rather than seeing, a memory floats up into the area behind my eyes where I need not see but may see if I wish. Also the memory in this case is a story, so I can choose to put aside the whole matter of seeing: I can hear.

I hear my mother's best friend telling a story as my mother and I sit beside her on a stone front porch. The situation of the story indicates I must know something about s.e.x; the flavor of the memory reveals that I am still a child. I must be twelve years old.

What do we need to know about my mother and my mother's friend? Their looks? Their voices? Harder, impossible, perhaps, to describe voices. Always, one must go outside the frame to other issues: money, history. Between my mother and her best friend there are schools, dollars, rooms, linens, doctors, a variety of forks, musical instruments. My mother's friend grew up in privilege, and this explains her voice. But now she has sometimes less money than we do, sometimes as much, but never more. This can make her sometimes inaudible but never adds to her buffed consonants an edge. My mother's voice, shaped in a house of scarcity, impatience, anger, pa.s.sions laid out like the evening meal, hurts me sometimes because it can provide me with no bolster, sometimes strengthens me because it lets me know that all my life behind me and within my blood there is the brute, inflexible, impermeable force of instinct, given in this case the name of mother love.

What are they wearing? My mother's friend is wearing some garment signifying a genteel, overdetermined recoil from s.e.x. It will be flocked, or lightly dotted. Printed without distinction blue and white. I will dress my mother in one of the two dresses of my childhood love. Apple green cotton with a print of branches and a durable round flower- zinnia, hollyhock- the branches and the flowers both in white. Or perhaps her bluish purple sundress so I can see her buoyant upper arms. Both dresses are wonderfully resistant to the touch: starched, ironed by her, they cry out their bifurcated cry: we are delicious, we will not succ.u.mb.

It must be summer. We are sitting on a porch. The porch is not familiar, so we must be on vacation.

My mother is a widow and I am her only child; we always take vacations with at least one of my mother's childless friends. The cynical contemporary reader says: the mother takes another grown-up to spare her the boredom of enforced aloneness with her child. But it is not this; it is the opposite of this. It is her pity for her childless friends that presses on my mother's always originally constructed sense of duty. It urges her to share me with her friends. Most of her friends seem never to have married or to be older than she, so that their children could be my parents. She is old to be the mother of a child herself.

We always have a very happy time. We choose places with lakes or mountains, sometimes both. A drive six to eight hours in duration, long enough so that we feel the glamour of a journey, but not so long that we turn upon each other with sour questions, accusations, or regret.

My mother's friend is speaking now. "We didn't have a porch on our house; I was looking out the windows of the living room. There was a window seat. The people across the street had just moved in and didn't seem to want to know the neighbors; I had never seen the woman, she had no children, and she never left the house. We'd seen the husband leaving in the mornings. Well, he looked like any other husband, and at that age I did not give men a thought.

"It was August when she started coming on the porch. I know that it was August; in July mother and I went to my grandmother's. Every summer we did that; that's how I know that it could not have been July. Each morning she would come onto the porch wearing her wrapper. I was very shocked by that: no woman I had ever known would have dreamed of appearing even at her breakfast table in a wrapper. And her hair was down, down on her shoulders. No woman I ever knew would have done that. Her wrapper was light pink with a pattern of large red birds: peac.o.c.ks, I guess. Or they might have been herons. Herons, yes. She was behind the screen and I looked out through the window. I could see though that on her lap she held a paper sack. Slowly throughout the morning she'd take pears out of the sack and eat them. Perfectly still she sat, except to reach inside the sack and get a pear, and then of course to eat. Other than that she was motionless. The trees were wonderful in summer on that street: tall, wide old elms. Beeches. All the houses were quite cool even though it was southern Illinois, which has a southern climate, and if you stepped out from the shelter of the trees the heat was killing. So there was not at all a great deal of activity out on the street, no reason to be looking out there. But she just sat there looking, eating. And I noticed she was getting bigger. So I kept watching her. All the time that she sat there, I sat and watched her. On the window seat I sat. I brought a book with me so when my mother asked I could say I was reading.

"One day my mother said: 'You know that woman is about to have a baby'

"I was innocent; I must have known that children came from the body of a mother. Yet I hadn't seen a hint of it, and so I hadn't thought of it. It was all hidden; everything was hidden in those days. When women were pregnant you couldn't tell; it was the way they dressed. But once I found out the woman was going to have a child, it was one of those things like a key to a puzzle so everything begins to make sense, you see everything, you can't imagine why you didn't see it. Every day I felt I could see her getting bigger and bigger. It was almost as if she grew as I watched her, like one of those speeded-up films where the flower blooms before your eyes. Except of course we didn't have them in those days.

"But I just watched her sitting, looking out at the street, the street that was nearly always empty, watched her eating those pears, one after another, growing bigger before my eyes.

"Then one day she didn't come out on the porch, and we could see a great commotion going on across the street there. I don't know if we heard anything: I don't remember. Just the doctor going in and once the husband on the porch to smoke a cigarette. And then the doctor leaving. I sat the whole day watching. I kept thinking she would come back out, but with the baby now, not eating pears, not now she had a baby, and not looking out at nothing on the street, but feeding the baby, tending it, seeing that it was comfortable.

"But she died. She died and the baby was born dead too. We didn't see them take her out; they must have done it in the night. And then quite soon the man sold up the house and moved away. We always thought that there was something shady there."

Now I can remember that at this point in the story I became dissatisfied. My mother's friend's voice changes. The rapt, clouded, reverent tone turns coy: she makes the thing a joke. She giggles. "After that I was afraid of eating pears. I thought the pears had done it, made her pregnant, killed her and the baby. For years, you couldn't get me to go near a pear."

As I listen to her speaking, I do not believe her; I do not believe her now. I do not know how much she could have known, a lonely child on a street of heavy trees, holding her book as a deception, looking, looking. But I know she did not think it was the pears.

Here are the things I do not know: What did the woman see as she looked at the empty street?

Was she happy with the child within her womb? Was she trying, filling herself with pears and staring down the empty street, the street down which her husband walked to work each morning, was she trying to connect the secret child, whose face she could not know, with the whole outside world?

Did she know the girl across the street looked at her? Was she grateful?

Did she speak English?

Was she really married to the man?

If she had lived to her new status as a mother, would she have spoken to the neighbors?

Did every aspect of the episode take place in silence?

Did the girl think she had killed the woman and the baby by her failure to keep them in sight?

Did the girl invent the whole thing? Was there a pregnant woman who came on the porch each morning and ate pears and looked out to the empty street and died in childbirth, giving birth to a dead child? Or was it the girl's vision of the life of women which so frightened her that, sitting on a porch herself, fifty years later, she must turn it to a joke: the rapt girl looking, and the woman growing large looking at nothing, knowing or not knowing she is seen, invisible in death, taken away, out of the sight of the so faithful watching girl who as a woman will not marry, will tell the child of someone else about it, and will turn her vision to a joke for fear of disappearing, being made to disappear?

from TEMPORARY SHELTER.

Temporary Shelter.

He hated the way his mother piled the laundry. The way she held the clothes, as if it didn't matter. And he knew what she would say if he said anything, though he would never say it. But if he said, "Don't hold the clothes like that, it's ugly, how you hold them. See the arms of Dr. Meyers's s.h.i.+rt, they hang as if he had no arms, as if he'd lost them. And Maria's dress, you let it bunch like that, as if you never knew her." If he said a thing like that, which he would never do, she'd laugh and store it up to tell her friends. She'd say, "My son is crazy in love. With both of them. Even the stinking laundry he's in love with." And she would hit him on the side of the head, meaning to be kind, to joke, but she would do it wrong, the blow would be too hard. His ears would ring, and he would hate her.

Then he would hate himself, because she worked so hard, for him; he knew it was for him. Why did she make him feel so dreadful? He was thirteen, he was old enough to understand it all, where they had come from, who they were, and why she did things. She wanted things for him. A good life, better than what she had. Better than Milwaukee, which they'd left for the shame of her being a woman that a man had left. It wasn't to be left by a man that she'd come to this country, that her parents brought her on the s.h.i.+p, just ten years old, in 1929, when they should have stayed home, if they'd had sense, that year that turned out to be so terrible for the Americans. For a few months, it was like a heaven, with her cousins in Chicago. Everybody saying: Don't worry, everyone needs shoes. Her father was a cobbler. But then the crash, and no one needed shoes, there were no jobs, her mother went out to do strangers' laundry, and her father sat home, his head in his hands before the picture of the Black Madonna and tried to imagine some way they could go back home.