Florence Gordon (14 page)

“Are you discovering things about your grandmother?” Daniel said. “Getting to know her as only a granddaughter can?”

He had his ironic voice on, so that he seemed to be disavowing the question at the same time as he was asking it. But she knew him well enough to know that he was asking it.

“I’m discovering many things about her, Dad.”

“Such as?”

“She’s very clean. Which is something you like to see in an old person. We had a sandwich together and she snatched the plate out from under me before I was done.”

“Maybe she just likes to take people’s plates away. Anything else?”

“Have you been going through her medicine cabinet?” Janine said. “Snooping around?”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing good there.”

She had, in fact, gone through Florence’s medicine cabinet. She was surprised by how little was there. From her babysitting days she had wide experience of the medicine cabinets of grown-ups, which were usually stocked with antidepressants, antianxiety drugs, and supplements that promised to keep you young. Florence took Lipitor, but nothing else: nothing to stave off sadness, nothing to stave off time.

“She’s really getting to be the toast of the town,” Daniel said.

“Yes. So she tells me.”

“Did you get an invitation for that symposium thing?”

“I did.”

The following month, NYU would be hosting a symposium on the women’s movement, which was going to feature a tribute to Florence: Martha Nussbaum was going to talk about Florence’s contribution to modern feminist thought.

“Did you see that thing of her on YouTube?” Daniel said. “That movie?”

“It’s not a movie. And yes, I saw it.”

Florence had sent—apparently to everyone she knew—a link to a YouTube video of a talk she gave at the “Modern Lives” series at the 92nd Street Y. First she talked about herself for almost an hour, and then, in the question-and-answer period, she talked about herself a little more. There was something off-putting about the way she talked about her life, her thoughts, her intellectual development. She sounded as if these were topics that every literate person should be familiar with, and she were merely presenting a little refresher course.

Emily would never criticize Florence in front of her father, but when she was alone with her mother, she felt free to gripe.

“She’s just an old windbag,” Emily said.

“Oh, come on. She may be an old windbag, but she’s not
just
an old windbag. She’s written a lot of good things.”

“Also she’s a hypocrite.”

“How is she a hypocrite?”

“She’s a feminist, but she took Grandpa’s name.”

“First of all, would it have been more feminist to keep her father’s name? Second of all, everybody took their husband’s name back then. Third of all, when you have a chance to trade in ‘Silverblatt’ for ‘Gordon,’ you make the trade first and worry about the politics later.”

“And you know what I figured out about her?” Emily said. “You know what occurred to me? She’s a
guy.
”

“She’s a guy?”

“When anybody talks with her, she’s always got the conversational right-of-way. If she and somebody else start talking at the same time, Florence always keeps going. She expects
you
to stop. It’s a total guy thing.”

“Well, she’s a grand old lady. She’s earned the right to talk over people.”

Emily didn’t think it was a right you earn. She thought it was a habit you grow out of, and it was pathetic that Florence had never grown out of it. If Florence
had
been a guy, she would have been a guy who’d never outgrown the habit of leaving the toilet seat up after he peed.

The one enviable thing about Florence was that, as irritable as she was, she seemed, when all was said and done, to be enjoying her life.

“Was your mother always happier than your father?” Emily asked her father.

They were on Broadway. She was heading toward her class; he was meeting some old friend of his at . . . she actually didn’t know where they were meeting.

“He used to seem pretty jolly when I was a kid,” Daniel said.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Something must have happened.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of anything that happened to either of them. It’s a matter of who they are. My mother’s always had a cause. She always had something to believe in. He only had himself.”

“I don’t really understand what that means.”

“Yes you do.”

“I don’t! I’m not as wise as you think I am!”

“Saul just has his career. So when his career is going badly—like, for the past couple decades or so—as far as he’s concerned, everything in the universe sucks. Florence has always thought of herself as participating in something that will outlast her.”

“What?”

He knocked lightly on her head with his knuckles.

“Women’s history. Feminism. Man-hating.”

“Dad!”

“I’m joking.”

“They say there’s a grain of truth inside every joke,” she said.

“How do they know that?”

“They take tiny little X-rays,” she said. “So what about you? Do you have something larger than yourself? What do you believe in?”

“I don’t know. Yoko and me.”

She didn’t get the reference, but it didn’t matter. She had known as soon as she asked the question that he’d never give her a straight answer.

“And you?” he said. “What do you believe in?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

What she thought she believed in was something she’d been thinking about since she’d read
Middlemarch:
the idea that each person is the center of a world. She didn’t know what to do with it; she didn’t know where it led; but it kept coming back to her mind.

Emily had set a stack of books on Florence’s kitchen table, and Florence was looking through them. Florence had asked Emily to find some good studies of politics in New York during the era when she, Florence, was growing up.

“Before my time,” Florence said, pushing one of the books away.

A Hazard of New Fortunes,
William Dean Howells, 1890.

“Now I know what you think of me,” Florence said. “You feel like you’re doing research about the horse-and-buggy days.”

“That’s just something I’m reading,” Emily said. “Not every thought I have is about you, believe it or not.”

She felt bold as she said it—Florence’s self-regard was so high that she might find the news a shock—but to her surprise, Florence laughed. It was the easiest laugh Emily had ever heard from her.

“You’re supposed to think about nothing but me. That’s why I’m paying you so handsomely.”

Emily didn’t bother responding.

“So what’s he got that I haven’t got? William Dean Howells?”

Emily thought she actually detected a trace of rivalry in her voice.

“He was more of a radical than you are, for one thing.”

“William Dean Howells?”

It occurred to Emily that she might know more about the subject than Florence did. If so, it would be a first.

“Did you read him in some class?” Florence said.

“No, I didn’t read him in some class. I found him on my own. He was a friend of Henry James.”

“I know he was a friend of Henry James. He was a friend of Henry James and Mark Twain, and he was an editor of the
Atlantic Monthly.
That’s the only reason anybody remembers him.”

“Well, it shouldn’t be. He was a better writer than either of them.”

“Oh, please. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Have you read him?”

“I probably read him in some survey class. I’m sure I must have read him at some point.”

“You’re sure you must have, but you don’t remember. So you’re
not
really sure if you’ve ever read him. But you’re telling me that he can’t possibly be as good as some other people you
have
read. I’m disappointed in you, Florence Gordon.”

“You’re right. I don’t know anything about him. There’s no way I can pass judgment on him.”

This was dizzying. Florence was paying attention to her. Florence was enjoying being teased by her. Florence had admitted being wrong.

“That’s one good thing about you,” Emily said. “You’re old but you’re still learning. That’s what I tell your detractors.”

A change. Florence wasn’t kicking her out as soon as she got there. And rather than simply accepting the notes Emily made about what she was reading, she was asking Emily questions about what she’d read.

They started having coffee together. Coffee for Florence, herbal tea for Emily, which she provided for herself. “I have no intention of going out and buying special tea for you,” Florence had said. “But if you want to, you can leave something in the cabinet, and I’ll supply the hot water.”

And she was obviously trusting Emily more. She’d asked Emily to put aside the research for the memoir and do some work that would help Florence with her talk at the NYU symposium. Her talk was going to be about feminism before the First World War, and she wanted to draw on Tamiment’s collection of letters and diaries from turn-of-the-century suffragists. These were things that hadn’t been published and that couldn’t be checked out. “I don’t have the time to go through it all myself,” Florence said. “But you’ll be able to get me everything I need.”

It wasn’t as if everything had changed between them. Sometimes it felt as if nothing had changed at all. Occasionally Emily wondered if Florence was giving her more time only because she liked to insult her. When Florence mentioned a book or a historical event, she would ask Emily if she’d heard of it, and if Emily hadn’t, a look of irritation would pass over Florence’s face. Emily was tempted to pretend she knew about books and events she didn’t actually know about—but it was a good thing she never did, since she soon found out that if she said she knew about a subject, Florence would start quizzing her.

Why was she like this? Florence was a teacher, but this wasn’t very teacherly. Emily’s best teachers, at least, had never been like this. They didn’t expect you to have been born with a particular set of facts in your head. But Florence, when she found out that Emily didn’t exactly know what the Seneca Falls Convention or the Port Huron Statement was, would go silent for ten seconds or so, as if holding herself back from giving Emily the tongue-lashing she deserved. And then she would content herself with saying something like, “Sometimes I think you young people believe that all the rights you enjoy every day just sprouted up by themselves.”

But Emily was comfortable enough with Florence now to give it back. One day, after Florence asked her to take a look at her computer, Emily said she was going to clean the cache and get rid of some of the cookies, and when Florence said that she didn’t know what that meant, Emily put her head in her hands.

“Sometimes I think you people just expect your cookies to get rid of themselves,” Emily said.

When Emily looked up at her, although she couldn’t be sure, she thought for a moment that Florence almost smiled.

Sometimes Emily felt as if she were engaging in a summerlong research project about how to be a human being, or, rather, about what kind of human being to be.

The two models of humanity that were the most vivid to her at the moment were her grandmother and her ex-boyfriend. If that’s what he was. Maybe he was her former ex-boyfriend. It was hard to tell.

Justin might have been the dearest person she had ever known. The kindest, the most considerate, the most thoughtful. He was a wry, quiet, funny boy whose ambition in life was to design toys and parks and playgrounds.

Emily had met Justin during her junior year in high school. She’d first noticed him in the public library. An old woman was trying to get onto the Internet, and the librarian was nowhere to be seen, so this elflike, curly-headed boy took it upon himself to help. The woman was trying to read her email, but didn’t know what email provider she used, and he had sat there with her patiently, without sighing, without wincing, without rolling his eyes. Witnessing such kindness put Emily in a good mood, and when she found out he went to her school—she saw him in the lunchroom a few days later—she knew they were going to be friends.

Justin had gone to Emerson when she went to Oberlin, and for a while it had seemed as if they were growing in different directions. It didn’t feel like a bad thing; it felt a little sad, but mostly it felt natural.

But now he’d begun to show up again, Facebooking her, Gchatting her, sending thirty-second videos of toys he’d made for a design class, toys that marched for a few steps and then fell down. She didn’t know what she wanted with him, ultimately, but she found this very endearing.

When a teacher in high school once asked the class about people they admired, he chose not a real person but the Tom Hanks character from
Big,
who gets a job at a toy company and dreams up toys that no grown-up could ever have imagined. Justin’s aim in life was to make things that would bring people joy.

Florence offered a rather different model of how to be human. Much had changed, over the years, about Florence’s beliefs and the manner in which she expressed them, but Emily was coming to think that in the most important ways, she hadn’t changed at all. Florence had always been a feminist, and she’d always been a fighter.

In an essay that Florence had written about a historian named Gerda Lerner, Emily had come across the phrase “a militant ethic of overcoming.” The phrase, Emily thought, could have described Florence herself. She was always outraged, always indignant about something she’d read or heard or seen, yet there was something about her that was forever hopeful. She seemed truly to believe that she was taking part in a struggle that might yet end with the power of universal sisterhood and brotherhood winning out against the forces of sexism, exploitation, greed. In another essay she’d quoted a passage from Chekhov in which he’d imagined writing a story about someone who “squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop.” Florence had said that such an effort could be a lifelong project, and Emily had the sense that she’d described her own.