Florence Gordon (2 page)

“My friends,” she said, “I’m touched that you decided to do this. I’m touched, and I’m honored. What was it Yeats said? Something like ‘Think where our glory begins and ends, and say my glory was, I had such friends.’”

There was a murmur of appreciation.

“One of the things that I find beautiful about you all is that you understand me. I know I’m not easy to be with. I’m a difficult woman.”

“You’re a gloriously difficult woman,” Vanessa said—she always gushed too much—and others made noises of agreement.

“Well, thank you. But whether I’m gloriously hard to get along with or just plain hard to get along with, each of you has found ways to get along with me. Which is a tribute to your generosity, tolerance, and ingenuity. Because I’ve asked you to put up with a lot.

“And now I’m going to ask you to put up with one more thing. I’m delighted by this surprise party, but I’m going to leave you now, because I need to get back to my desk. I hope you know that I truly do appreciate this, and that I’ll be here in spirit. And I hope you have a wonderful evening.”

She turned and left. It would have been nice to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, but it was more important to keep her head up, and therefore she saw the faces of several friends as she passed them. They looked as if they weren’t sure whether she was serious.

She’d left her computer on, and as soon as she got home she sat back down in front of it. It took a while for the fog to burn away—the fog of embarrassment or ambivalence or whatever she was feeling—but after a time she found that she was not so far from where she’d left off. She worked for the rest of the night with satisfaction, and didn’t give her friends and well-wishers another thought.

After she left, no one knew what to say. Nobody even seemed to want to look at anyone else.

“Now you understand why I divorced her,” Saul said.

People laughed, and went back to eating and drinking.

“What the hell,” Vanessa said. “Let’s have a party. Let’s celebrate Florence in absentia.”

“I think I’ll ‘celebrate’ her some other time,” Saul said. “I’m out of here.”

“Did
he
divorce
her
?” Emily said to her mother.

“Other way round,” Janine said.

“That’s what I thought. I can’t even imagine them married.”

“Why?”

“She’s so independent. And he seems like he needs somebody needy.”

Janine was constantly surprised by the things her daughter came out with. But parents always are.

For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine’s mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, “Where did she learn that?”

“We’ve got the evening free, at least,” Janine said. “Wanna go to the movies?”

“But can we not see anything self-improving tonight? Can we go to something fun?”

“Only if you promise . . .”

But Janine couldn’t think of anything to make her daughter promise. There was nothing she wanted Emily to change. This hadn’t always been true, and wouldn’t always remain true, but it was true right now.

The next time Janine and Emily saw Florence, it was in an even less intimate setting.

The two of them were in the audience at Town Hall, waiting for the panel discussion to begin.

“Is it unhealthy to have an intellectual crush on your mother-in-law?” Janine said.

“Not if it’s only an intellectual crush,” her daughter answered.

Janine’s relationship with Florence was an unusual one for a woman to have with her mother-in-law. It was an unusually strong relationship, though it existed mostly in Janine’s mind.

Janine had heard of Florence before she’d ever met Daniel, and when Daniel told her who his mother was, she couldn’t believe it.

Not that Florence was in any sense famous. She was a feminist writer—an essayist and, as she called herself, a seat-of-her-pants historian. She’d had a little flare of literary glory in the seventies, which had vanished, as flares of literary glory tend to do, and since then she’d continued, calmly and patiently and entirely out of the limelight, to do her work.

But though she wasn’t famous to the world, she was famous to Janine. Janine had read a book of essays by Florence in college. She read them for a class in modern American feminism, and Florence’s voice on the page was unlike anything that Janine had encountered before. By turns eloquent and chatty, confident and self-questioning, it was the voice of a real person. It was a style Janine later encountered in other writers—Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Katha Pollitt—and though all of them were better known than Florence was, Florence had been the first member of this tribe whom Janine encountered, and, maybe for that reason alone, Florence had always meant the most to her.

Janine had never wanted to be a writer—after a few years spent “finding herself” after college, she went to grad school in psychology—so Florence wasn’t a role model for her in any direct sense. But Florence remained an inspiration. She continued to represent Janine’s idea of a free woman.

The collection of essays that Janine read in college was called
Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life,
and the idea that there
were
such opportunities—the idea, in the words of a psychologist whom Florence quoted, that one is constantly confronted by situations in which one must make either a growth choice or a fear choice—conferred a new significance, first, on Janine’s life, and then, the longer she thought about it, on the lives of everyone she knew or came in contact with.

Janine and Daniel were on their third or fourth date before she found out who his mother was. She couldn’t believe it. She tried to tamp down her excitement—she limited herself to saying something like, “Your mother’s Florence Gordon? I’ve heard of her,” and when Daniel seemed surprised, she said, “Yeah. I’ve read some of her stuff. I liked it.” The funny thing about all this was that because she was determined to play it cool when she first found out (it seemed weird and somehow risky to let a new boyfriend know that she had an intellectual crush on his mother), Daniel never understood, and probably still didn’t understand, how important his mother was to her. She’d told him about it since, but she had the feeling that he’d never really revised his first impression.

“Here she comes,” Emily said, as the lights went down.

The event was a panel discussion commemorating the revolutions of 1989, on their twentieth anniversary.

What revolutions of 1989? Emily thought.

Florence was seated at a table with two men, both much younger than she was. One of them had a gleaming shaved head; the other had luxuriant brown locks that obviously received a lot of tending. Both of them radiated testosteronely confidence. Emily felt almost afraid for her grandmother, a bony, brittle woman in her seventies, flanked by these cocksure boys.

Emily was there to keep her mother company. She had no interest in listening to people theorize about revolution and social change. She had once heard a psychologist give a long, ponderous talk about why jokes are funny; theorizing about revolution had the same appeal.

She didn’t mind being here, though. She had her copy of
Middlemarch;
she had her keychain flashlight. She had everything she needed.

The gleamingly bald man pulled the mike closer and began to speak.

Lately Emily had been thinking about writing a novel. She knew she was a little young for it, but a lot of her friends had participated in National Novel Writing Month, and she was thinking that when it came around again this year, she might participate too.

If I were writing a novel, Emily thought, I wouldn’t want to write a description of a panel discussion. I’d just skip over it.

After the panel discussion, Emily and her mother joined Florence and two of Florence’s old friends at a restaurant.

“How’d I do?” Florence said.

“‘How’d I do?’” one of her friends said. “You sound like Ed Koch.”

“Do I really?” Florence said. “Jesus.”

Emily smiled (to look as if she knew who Ed Koch was) and looked down (to avoid being called on).

Emily had no idea who Ed Koch was. Normally she would have asked, but there was something about her grandmother that made her reluctant. Emily couldn’t remember Florence scolding anyone for not knowing something, yet she felt certain that Florence was the kind of person who would.

Florence’s old friends were Vanessa, whom Emily had met, and Alexandra, whom she hadn’t. Florence introduced them as “two fifths of my study group.” They’d been in a study group together for thirty years.

As she ate her salad and listened to the conversation, Emily was feeling very meta. On the one hand, she was just listening to a few older women talk. On the other hand, she was witnessing the miracle of Women’s Friendship.

One of the few things she’d ever read by Florence was an article about women’s friendships. Florence wrote it in the 1970s, in the early years of her career. Florence had pretty much made the case that the term “women’s friendship” was redundant, because only women really knew what friendship
was.
Men, from what Emily remembered, were described as being roughly on the level of apes or moose: they could stand around and grunt together, or they could compare antler size, but they could never experience, to the degree that women could, the pleasures of sympathy and compassion and conversation.

Emily had no idea whether Florence still stood by them, but she couldn’t help but listen to the conversation in the light of the arguments Florence had made back then.

The grown-ups were on their second pitcher of sangria. Emily, below the drinking age, had ordered a Shirley Temple—partly as a joke, partly because she liked Shirley Temples.

“Would you put that down?” Florence said.

Alexandra was looking at her BlackBerry, thumbing the keys rather haplessly.

“Billy’s coming in tonight, if he . . . He’s bringing Alison.”

Something about Alexandra’s voice made Emily sure that she was talking about a son and a granddaughter. How do we know these things? Somehow, we know.

“They should ban texting in restaurants,” Florence said. She tapped Alexandra on the knuckles. “Put it away.”

“Some restaurants do,” Vanessa said—and they were off. Florence and her friends and Emily’s mother started talking about the Internet, and the conversation grew ever more predictable. Why was it that at every grown-up function, the exact same conversation had to take place? Sometimes Emily felt as if she could hand out scripts, to save everybody the trouble of thinking, except that there would be no point, because they weren’t thinking—they were just saying the same things they’d said the last time. The adults would talk about how silly Twitter was, and then one of them would speak up for it, saying that Twitter had helped people organize protest movements around the world, and then they would talk about Facebook, and some of them would talk about how useless it was, and then most of them would guiltily admit that they were on it. At about this point Emily would usually go to the bathroom, because she knew what was coming, namely that someone was going to turn to her and ask her, as if she were a representative of the Young, if she had any attention span for reading, or if she was on Twitter, or if she was on Facebook (they would actually ask her that), or if she used Gmail—it was enough to make you scream.

Emily was a generous person, but it was hard to put up with the fatuousness of older people sometimes.

“So how’d I do?” Florence said, after they had exhausted the Facebook/Twitter conversation. “No one is answering my question.”

“You did brilliantly, Florence,” Alexandra said.

“You did,” Vanessa said. “And did you see how many nose rings there were in that room? You’re a hero to the young.”

Florence looked like a cat in the sun. It was strange, Emily thought, to see someone who was so old and so supposedly wise fishing for compliments like this. But the fact that she was doing it so openly and cheerfully made it endearing in its way.

“You surprised me, though. For a minute there you sounded like a cockeyed optimist,” Vanessa said.

“The doom-and-gloom stuff annoys me,” Florence said. “Have you read
The Country and the City
?”

For some reason she was looking at Emily, who had never heard of it.

“Raymond Williams,” Florence said, as if that meant anything. “Williams quotes a contemporary of his—I think it’s Leavis—saying that life was better thirty years ago, when England was a real community. Then he quotes someone from thirty years earlier, saying that the sense of community in England had died out thirty years before
that.
He keeps going back, all the way to the Roman Empire, with Pliny or somebody, who’s pining for the way things used to be when
he
was young.”

“That’s not really relevant,” Vanessa said, and she said something about Raymond Williams, and Florence countered with something about Joan Scott, and Emily was lost.

“Would you stop that?” Florence said.

Alexandra was peering at her BlackBerry again.

“Just a minute. I need to . . .”

That seemed to be the end of the sentence. Whatever she was looking at had sucked her in.

“My God,” Florence said. “What are we coming to?”

Florence leaned across the table and slapped her friend’s hand—slapped the BlackBerry out of her hand. She picked it up and dropped it in the pitcher of sangria.

Emily was the quickest person there: she plucked it out of the pitcher, turned it over on her napkin to dry it off, and passed it back to Alexandra.

“You’re going to have to expect that sort of thing,” Florence said. “Until they extend the anti-texting laws, concerned citizens are going to be taking matters into their own hands.”

The conversation went on. Somehow Alexandra forgave her, with not much more than an exasperated shake of her head.