The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 28

"I have, of course. You're a great poetry lover, aren't ye? I seen ye with the Yeats. I'm from the Yeats country myself."

"That's where I'm going," I said, excitedly. "To Sligo."

"Yer takin' the ferry?"

"Nine o'clock."

"What a shame. I won't have much time to show ye Swansea. But we could have a drink or two."

"Okay," I said, anxious for talk. "You must have traveled a lot of places."

"Oh, all over," he said. "It's a great life, the sailor's."

He brought us drinks and I tried to encourage him to talk about himself, his home, his travels. I don't remember what he said, only that I was disappointed that he wasn't describing his life more colorfully, so I was glad when he suggested going for a walk to show me what he could of the town.

There really wasn't much to see in Swansea; he took me to the Catholic Church, the post office, the city hall. Then he suggested another pub. I said I had to be going, I didn't want to be late for the boat. He told me not to worry, he knew a shortcut; we could go there now.

I don't know when I realized I was in danger, but at some point I knew the path we were on was leading nowhere near other people. When he understood that I was not deceived, he felt no more need to hesitate. He must have known I would not resist, he didn't have to threaten. He merely spoke authoritatively, as if he wanted to get on with things.

"Sit down," he said. "And take that thing off your back."

I unbuckled my backpack and sat among the stalky weeds.

"Now take yer things off on the bottom."

I did what he said, closing my eyes. I didn't want to look at him. I could hear the clank of his belt as it hit the ground.

"What's this," he said. "One of yer American tricks?"

I had forgotten I was wearing a Tampax. Roughly, he pulled it out. I was more embarra.s.sed by the imagination of it lying on the gra.s.s, so visible, than I was by my literal exposure.

"Yer not a virgin?" he said worriedly.

I told him I was not.

"All right then," he said, "then you know what's what."

In a few seconds, everything was finished, and he was on his feet. He turned his back to me to dress.

"I want ye to know one thing," he said. "I've just been checked out by the ship's doctor. Ye won't get no diseases from me, that's for sure. If ye come down with something, it's not my fault."

I thanked him.

"Yer all right?" he said.

"Yes," I told him.

He looked at his watch.

"Ye missed yer ferry."

"It's all right," I said, trying to sound polite. "There's another one in the morning." I was afraid that if I showed any trace of fear, any sense that what had happened was out of the ordinary, he might kill me to shut my mouth.

"I'll walk ye to the town."

I thanked him again.

"I'm awful sorry about yer missing the boat. It's too bad ye'll have to spend the night in this G.o.dforsaken town." He said this with genuine unhappiness, as though he had just described what was the genuine offense.

We walked on silently, looking at hotels blinking their red signs FULL.

"I'll be fine now," I said, hoping now we were in public, I could safely get him to leave.

"As long as yer all right."

"I'm fine, thank you."

"Would you give me yer name and address in the States? I could drop you a line. I'm off to South America next."

I wrote a false name and address on a page in my notebook, ripped it out and handed it to him.

He kissed me on the cheek. "Now don't go on like all these American ladies about how terrible we are to ye. l.u.s.t remember, treat a man right, he'll treat you right."

"Okay," I said.

"Adios," he said, and waved.

I stepped into the foyer of the hotel we were standing in front of and stood there a while. Then I looked out onto the street to be sure he was gone. There was no sign of him, so I asked the hotel clerk for a room. I wanted one with a private bath, and he told me the only room available like that was the highest priced in the house. I gladly paid the money. I couldn't bear the idea of sharing a bathtub. It wasn't for myself I minded; I cared for the other people. I knew myself to be defiled, and I didn't want the other innocent, now sleeping guests, exposed to my contamination.

I traveled through Ireland for ten days, speaking to no one. It wasn't what I had expected, a country made up of bards and harpists and pa.s.sionate fine-limbed women tossing their dark red hair. Unlike the other countries of Europe, there was nothing one really had to look at, and the beauty of the landscape seemed to wound, over and over, my abraded feelings; it made me feel even more alone. The greasy banisters of the urban hotels I stayed in sickened me; the glowing pictures of the Sacred Heart in the rooms of the private houses that, in the country, took in guests, disturbed my sleep. I felt that I was being stared at and found out.

And that, of course, was the last thing I wanted, to be found out. I've never said anything about the incident to anyone, not that there's much reason to keep it from people. Except, I guess, my shame at having been ravished, my dread of the implication, however slight, that I had "asked for what had happened," that my unwisdom was simply a masked desire for a coupling anonymous and blank. And so I have been silent about that time without good cause; how, then, could I ever speak of the second incident, which could, if I exposed it, unravel the fabric of my family's life?

My Uncle William was my father's only brother. He was two years older, handsomer, more flamboyant, more impatient, and it was said that though he lacked my father's steadiness, my father hadn't got his charm. Their mother had died when they were children, and their father drowned before their eyes when my father was seventeen and William nineteen. They agreed between them, teenage orphans, that my father should go off to college- he would study engineering at Purdue- and my uncle would stay home and run the family business, a successful clothing store my grandfather had built up and expanded as the town's prosperity increased and its tastes became more daring. When my father left for school it was a thriving business and it was a.s.sumed that with William's way with people, women especially (he planned to build his line of women's clothing; his first move was to enlarge the millinery department), it could only flourish. But in two years, everything was lost and my father had to leave college. The truly extraordinary aspect of the affair, to my mind, is that it was always my father who was apologetic about the situation. He felt it had been unfair, a terrible position to put Uncle William in, making him slave alone in the hometown he had never liked, while my father had been able to go away. William was really smarter, my father always said. (It wasn't true; even my mother, a great fan of Uncle William's and a stark critic of my father, corrected him, always, at this point in the story.) My father and my uncle agreed that it would be better for my uncle to go away; he'd put in his time and it was my father's turn; there was no reason for Uncle William to stick around and endure the petty insults and suspicions of uncomprehending minds.

In five years, my father had paid all the debts, a feat that so impressed the president of the local bank that he offered him a job. His rise in the bank was immediate, and it led to his move to Cleveland and his continued steady climb and marriage to my mother, the daughter of a bank president. I've never understood my father's success; he seems to trust everyone; wrongdoing not only shocks but seems genuinely to surprise him; yet he's made a career lending people money. I can only imagine that inside those cool buildings he always worked in, he a.s.sumed a new ident.i.ty; the kind eyes grew steely, the tentative, apologetic yet protective posture hardened into something wary and astute. How else can I explain the fact that somebody so lovable made so much money?

In the years that my father was building his career, my uncle was traveling. We got letters from around the country; there was a reference in one, after the fact, to a failed marriage that lasted only sixteen months. And occasionally, irregularly, perhaps once every five years, there would be a visit, sudden, shimmering, like a rocket illumining our ordinary home and lives, making my father feel he had made all the right decisions, he was safe, yet not removed from glamour. For here it was, just at his table, in the presence of the brother whom he loved.

I, too, felt illumined by the visits. In middle age, William was dapper, anecdotal, and offhand. He could imitate perfectly Italian tailors, widows of Texas oilmen, Mexican Indians who crossed the border every spring. In high school, my friends were enchanted by him; he was courtly and praising and gave them a sense of what they were going away to college for. But by the time we had all been away a couple of years, his stories seemed forced and repet.i.tious, his autodidact's store of information suspect, his compliments something to be, at best, endured. For my father, however, my Uncle William never lost his l.u.s.ter. He hovered around his older brother, strangely maternal, as if my uncle were a rare, invalid jeunefille, possessed of delicate and special talents which a coa.r.s.e world would not appreciate. And while my father hovered, my mother leaned toward my uncle flirtatious and expectant and alight.

Once, when I was living in New York, his visit and my visit to Ohio coincided. I was put on the living room couch to sleep since my uncle had inhabited my room for two weeks and I would be home for only three days. At twenty-five, any visit home is a laceration, a gesture meanly wrought from a hard heart and an ungiving spirit. No one in town did I find worth talking to, my parents were darlings, but they would never understand my complicated and exciting life. Uncle William, in this context, was a relief; I had, of course, to condescend to him, but then he condescended to my parents, and he liked to take me out for drinks and hear me talk about my life.

One night, I had gone to dinner at a high school friend's. She had recently married, and I had all the single woman's contempt for her Danish Modern furniture, her silver pattern, her china with its modest print of roses. But it was one of those evenings that is so boring it's impossible to leave; one is always afraid that in rising from the chair, one is casting too pure a light on the whole fiasco. I drove into my parents' driveway at one thirty, feeling ill-used and restless, longing for my own bed in my own apartment and the sound of Lexington Avenue traffic. In five minutes, I was crankily settling onto the made-up couch, and I must have fallen instantly to sleep. I have always been a good sleeper.

It was nearly four when I realized there was someone near me, kneeling on the floor. Only gradually, I understood that it was my uncle William, stroking my arm and breathing whiskey in my face.

"I couldn't sleep," he said. "I was thinking about you."

I lay perfectly still; I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't wake my parents, I could see behind my eyes years of my father's proud solicitude for the man now running his hand toward my breast, scene after scene of my mother's lively and absorbed attentions to him. As I lay there, I kept remembering the feeling of being a child sitting on the steps watching my parents and their guests below me as they talked and held their drinks and nibbled food I didn't recognize as coming from my mother's kitchen or her hand. A child transgressing, I was frozen into my position: any move would mean exposure and so punishment. At the same time that the danger of my situation stiffened me into immobility, I was paralyzed by the incomprehensibility of the behavior that went on downstairs. Could these be people I had known, laughing in these dangerous, sharp, unprovoked ways, leaning so close into one another, singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of songs, then breaking off to compliment each other on their looks, their clothes, their business or community success. My childish sense of isolation from the acts of these familiars now grown strangers made me conscious of the nerves that traveled down my body's trunk, distinct, electric, and my eyes, wide as if they were set out on stalks, now lidless and impossibly alert. Twenty years later as I lay, desperately strategizing, watching my uncle, I knew the memory was odd, but it stayed with me as I simulated flippancy, the only tactic I could imagine that would lead to my escape. My uncle had always called me his best audience when I'd forced laughter at one of his jokes; he'd say I was the only one in the family with a sense of humor.

"Well, unlike you, Uncle William, I could sleep, I was sleeping," I said, trying to sound like one of those thirties comedy heroines, clever in a jam. "And that's what I want to do again."

"Ssh," he said, running his hand along my legs. "Don't be provincial. Have some courage, girl, some imagination. Besides, I'm sure I'm not the first to have the privilege. I just want to see what all the New York guys are getting."

He continued to touch me, obsessive now and furtive, like an animal in a dark box.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I could make you happy. Happier than those young guys."

"What would make me really happy is to get some sleep," I said, in a tone I prayed did not reveal all my stiff desperation.

But, miraculously, he rose from his knees. "You really are a little prude at heart, aren't you? Just like everybody else in this stinking town."

And suddenly, he was gone. In the false blue light of four o'clock, I felt the animal's sheer grat.i.tude for escape. I kept telling myself that nothing, after all, had happened, that I wasn't injured, it was rather funny really, I'd see that in time.

My great fear was that I would betray, by some lapse of warmth or interest in the morning, my uncle's drunken act. I longed for my parents' protection, yet I saw that it was I who must protect them. It had happened, that thing between parents and children: the balance had shifted; I was stronger. I was filled with a clean, painful love for them, which strikes me now each time I see them. They are gallant; they are innocent, and I must keep them so.

And I must do it once again today. They are coming to lunch with my uncle William. I will be alone with them: my husband is working; my children are at school. In twenty years, I've only seen him twice, both times at my parents' house. I was able to keep up the tone: jocular, toughminded, that would make him say, "You're my best audience," and make my father say, "They're cut from the same cloth, those two." It was one of those repayments the grown middle-cla.s.s child must make, the overdue bill for the orthodontists, the dance lessons, the wardrobe for college, college itself. No one likes repayment; it is never a pure act, but for me it was a possible one. Today, though, it seems different. Today they are coming to my house, they will sit at my table. And as I stand at the kitchen window where I have been happy, where I have nurtured children and a husband's love and thought that I was safe, I rage as I look at the food I'd planned to serve them. The vegetables which minutes ago pleased me look contaminated to me now. Without my consent it seems, the side of my hand has moved toward them like a knife and shoved them off the cutting board. They land, all their distinction gone, in a heap in the sink. I know that I should get them out of there; I know I will; for I would never waste them, but for now it pleases me to see them ugly and abandoned and in danger, as if their fate were genuinely imperiled and unsure.

What is it that I want from Uncle William? I want some hesitation at the door, as if he isn't sure if he is welcome. I want him to take me aside and tell me he knows that he has done me harm. I want him to sit, if he must sit, at my table, silent and abashed. I don't demand that he be hounded; I don't even want him to confess. I simply want him to know, as I want the Irish sailor to know, that a wrong has been done me. I want to believe that they remember it with, at the least, regret. I know that things cannot be taken back, the forced embraces, the caresses brutal underneath the mask of courtship, but what I do want taken back are the words, spoken by those two men, that suggest that what they did was all right, no different from what other men had done, that it is all the same, the touch of men and women; nothing of desire or consent has weight, body parts touch body parts; that's all there is. I want them to know that because of them I cannot ever feel about the world the way I might have felt had they never come near me.

But the Irishman is gone and Uncle William, here before me, has grown old and weak. I can see him from the window, I can see the three of them. Him and my parents. They lean on one another, playful, tender; they have been together a lifetime. In old age, my parents have taken to traveling; I can hear them asking my uncle's advice about Mexico, where they will go this winter, where he once lived five years. They are wearing the youth-endowing clothing of the comfortably retired: windbreakers, sneakers, soft, light-colored sweaters, washable dun-colored pants. They have deliberately kept their health, my parents, so that they will not be a burden to me; for some other reason my uncle has kept his. Groaning, making exaggerated gestures, they complain about the steepness of my steps. But it is real, my father's muscular uncertainty as he grabs for the rail. They stand at my front door.

What happened happened twenty years ago. I've had a good life. I am a young and happy woman. And now I see the three of them, the old ones, frail, expectant, yearning toward me. So there is nothing for it; I must give them what they want. I open my arms to the embrace they offer. Heartily, I clap my uncle on the back.

"Howdy, stranger," I say in a cowboy voice. "Welcome to these parts."

Mrs. Ca.s.sidy's Last Year.

Mr. Ca.s.sidy knew he couldn't go to Communion. He had sinned against charity. He had wanted his wife dead.

The intention had been his, and the desire. She would not go back to bed. She had lifted the table that held her breakfast (it was unfair, it was unfair to all of them, that the old woman should be so strong and so immobile). She had lifted the table above her head and sent it crashing to the floor in front of him.

"Rose," he had said, bending, wondering how he would get scrambled egg, coffee, cranberry juice (which she had said she liked, the color of it) out of the garden pattern on the carpet. That was the sort of thing she knew but would not tell him now. She would laugh, wicked and bland-faced as an egg, when he did the wrong thing. But never say what was right, although she knew it, and her tongue was not dead for curses, for reports of crimes.

"s.h.i.thawk," she would shout at him from her bedroom. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of a wh.o.r.e." Or more mildly, "Pimp," or "Fathead fart."

Old words, curses heard from soldiers on the boat or somebody's street children. Never spoken by her until now. Punishing him, though he had kept his promise.

He was trying to pick up the scrambled eggs with a paper napkin. The napkin broke, then shredded when he tried to squeeze the egg into what was left of it. He was on his knees on the carpet, sc.r.a.ping egg, white shreds of paper, purple fuzz from the trees in the carpet.

"s.h.i.tsc.r.a.per," she laughed at him on his knees.

And then he wished in his heart most purely for the woman to be dead.

The doorbell rang. His son and his son's wife. Shame that they should see him so, kneeling, bearing curses, cursing in his heart.

"Pa," said Toni, kneeling next to him. "You see what we mean."

"She's too much for you," said Mr. Ca.s.sidy's son Tom. Self-made man, thought Mr. Ca.s.sidy. Good-time Charlie. Every joke a punch line like a whip.

No one would say his wife was too much for him.

"Swear," she had said, lying next to him in bed when they were each no more than thirty. Her eyes were wild then. What had made her think of it? No sickness near them, and fearful age some continent like Africa, with no one they knew well. What had put the thought to her, and the wild-ness, so that her nails bit into his palm, as if she knew small pain would preserve his memory.

"Swear you will let me die in my own bed. Swear you won't let them take me away."

He swore, her nails making dents in his palms, a dull shallow pain, not sharp, blue-green or purplish.

He had sworn.

On his knees now beside his daughter-in-law, his son.

"She is not too much for me. She is my wife."

"Leave him then, Toni," said Tom. "Let him do it himself if it's so G.o.dd.a.m.n easy. Serve him right. Let him learn the hard way. He couldn't do it if he didn't have us, the slobs around the corner."

Years of hatred now come out, punishing for not being loved best, of the family's children not most prized. Nothing is forgiven, thought the old man, rising to his feet, his hand on his daughter-in-law's squarish shoulder.

He knelt before the altar of G.o.d. The young priest, bright-haired, faced them, arms open, a good little son.

No sons priests. He thought how he was old enough now to have a priest a grandson. This boy before him, vested and ordained, could have been one of the ones who followed behind holding tools. When there was time. He thought of Tom looking down at his father, who knelt trying to pick up food. Tom for whom there had been no time. Families were this: the bulk, the knot of memory, wounds remembered not only because they had set on the soft, the pliable wax of childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, closeness to death. Wounds most deeply set and best remembered because families are days, the sameness of days and words, hammer blows, smothering, breath grabbed, memory on the soft skull, in the lungs, not once only but again and again the same. The words and the starvation.

Tom would not forget, would not forgive him. Children thought themselves the only wounded.

Should we let ourselves in for it, year after year? he asked in prayer, believing G.o.d did not hear him.

Tom would not forgive him for being the man he was. A man who paid debts, kept promises. Mr. Ca.s.sidy knelt up straighter, proud of himself before G.o.d.

Because of the way he had to be. He knelt back again, not proud. As much sense to be proud of the color of his hair. As much choice.

It was his wife who was the proud one. As if she thought it could have been some other way. The house, the children. He knew, being who they were they must have a house like that, children like that. Being who they were to the world. Having their faces.

As if she thought with some wrong turning these things might have been wasted. Herself a slattern, him drunk, them living in a tin shack, children dead or missing.

One was dead. John, the favorite, lost somewhere in a plane. The war dead. There was his name on the plaque near the altar. With the other town boys. And she had never forgiven him. For what he did not know. For helping bring that child into the world? Better, she said, to have borne none than the pain of losing this one, the most beautiful, the bravest. She turned from him then, letting some shelf drop, like a merchant at the hour of closing. And Tom had not forgotten the grief at his brother's death, knowing he could not have closed his mother's heart like that.

Mr. Ca.s.sidy saw they were all so unhappy, hated each other so because they thought things could be different. As he had thought of his wife. He had imagined she could be different if she wanted to. Which had angered him. Which was not, was almost never, the truth about things.

Things were as they were going to be, he thought, watching the boy-faced priest giving out Communion. Who were the others not receiving? Teenagers, pimpled, believing themselves in sin. He wanted to tell them they were not. He was sure they were not. Mothers with babies. Not going to Communion because they took the pill, it must be. He thought they should not stay away, although he thought they should not do what they had been told not to. He knew that the others in their seats were there for the heat of their bodies. While he sat back for the coldness of his heart, a heart that had wished his wife dead. He had wished the one dead he had promised he would love forever.

The boy priest blessed the congregation. Including Mr. Ca.s.sidy himself.