Men and Angels (40 page)

The priest asked to speak to her alone. “These are the ashes,” he said, handing her a parcel done up in newspaper. “The funeral director said you were to have them.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said, smiling at him with pity. Never had she seen anyone look so unhappy. “Thank you, Father, you’ve been very kind.”

She had told Michael what she knew she must do. She signaled to him, and he took the children away.

She walked into the woods. She walked in an envelope of greenish light; the sun slanted between the branches, coins of shadow lay upon the forest floor. What she was doing was itself a crime. The funeral director had told her it was against the law to scatter the ashes of the dead. But what I don’t know, he said shrugging, won’t hurt anybody. So rarely had she done an illegal thing that she couldn’t stop herself looking over her shoulder to make sure no one followed.

She came to the spot near the brook where she had sat with Laura and the children. She undid the parcel. Inside the newspaper wrapping was what looked like a silver coffee can. She opened the lid. She had promised herself that she would look. Ash and bone. Nothing that could come to life. The spirit could breathe and breathe over it, but there would be no quickening.

This was what was left of the girl who died because she could not love her. With a quiet motion she emptied the can onto the ground. A mound of ash with tiny bone splinters lay in a hillock on the earth. Quickly, the wind took them.

I did not love you, she said, not to the ashes that the wind took but to the girl, whose going out and coming in she had been told was blessed now. But I brought your ashes here because here at least I knew I wished you well. That was something. There was something in me at that moment at least that was not of death. I did not love you. But I mourn you. I will always mourn you. I can give you that.

She waited till the wind had taken the last of the ashes. A few bone splinters still remained upon the ground. Anne brushed them into the creek, carefully, with the side of her hand. Then she walked back to her husband and her children, waiting for her in the car.

P
ETER HAD BEEN HAVING
bad dreams every night in the month since Laura’s death. They happened shortly before dawn. Anne would hear him scream, and then he would appear next to her bed, shaken, ghostly, in the gray, translucent light. At first, after Michael had gone back to France, she had let him get into the bed with her, but then there was a fight with Sarah in the mornings. Sarah claimed that Peter was being rewarded for not sleeping through the night while she was being cheated and cut off. There was something to what she said. Anne didn’t want to reward her son for being troubled. And she knew it wasn’t good: a mother and a son to share a bed, however briefly, in the early morning. It had to stop. Yet she could not leave him comfortless. He looked so alone in his thin pajamas, so frail, like a bird whose ardent heart seems nearly visible. Without saying anything to Peter, she moved the rocking chair from the living room and placed it by her bedroom window. It looked over the white lilac bush, over the lilies of the valley.

How much, she wondered, was her son having bad dreams for her? She didn’t mind the interruption of her sleep, she suffered for her son’s distress, for all that he had suffered, but she was happy there with her boy in her arms, rocking as if they were suspended in the insubstantial light. The light kept the white lilac leaves in a deep shadow, only gradually did they reveal themselves. Solid, bluish, somber, they held up the white flowers which absorbed light for an hour before they took on brightness. Below, the lilies of the valley opened up like paper stars unfolding from their cone of darkness. White and green and blue-gray tones abounded: before her eyes a landscape for the wounded eye, the invalid’s view, the palette of consolation. A cool sobriety was in the air those hours of the morning, a sweetness, a regret, a stillness, as if life happened under water. It was the only time that she could think of what had happened.

She covered her son with a blanket. He was sweaty after his night terrors, and his hair was damp, as if he had been in a fight or a fever; his hair smelled acrid, overripe, like stored grain; she put her lips to it and got a yeasty taste. They never spoke about the dreams; he didn’t remember them, he said, only that he was frightened, too afraid to be alone. She held him to her, both of them knowing there was something a bit ridiculous in the posture. He was too big to be held so; his legs dangled and his arms had no place comfortable to go. In this chair she had nursed him, but he was in no way her baby anymore. His long legs hummed with an animal life in his sleep. Soon he would leave her.

Something terrible had happened. He had seen a dreadful thing. A dead girl lying in her own blood. What would it do to him? To Sarah, who had not seen it, who had in that month grown sullen and impatient, at six cynical and full of scorn? Soon what had happened would disappear into their lives; it would no longer be the thing they thought about when silence struck, when no act or job pressed upon them. Michael would come home for good. Life would go on. Soon he would no longer be marked as different from them, spared from the event that shaped them, the escaped member, the traveler away when the plague struck or the enemy invaded. They would feel sometimes that he was different from them, unmarked, unwounded. But the children would grow up different from her, too, would grow up knowing life was terrible and they were never safe. They would grow up like the children of the poor. Not for them the images in stories of small animals and houses decorated with light colors, of adventures where the dangers would be vanquished and the bleeding hero make his way back home. The children of the poor knew something—you could see it in their faces, on the city streets, in grainy pictures in the papers, in news footage of the dusty dead towns. And they were waiting, the children of the poor, it was the thing that they were good at, waiting, and they would not be surprised. Yet this early news of sorrow did not always bring them wisdom. It could bring despair, the heart’s death, the empty hopelessness of the young killer who knows anything might happen and so anything is possible to do. Children should not know violence, she thought. When they did, they stopped being children. Childhood was a middle-class invention, a luxury the poor knew better than to try to hold too long. But she had had a childhood: a false spring, an everlasting summer. And Michael, too, for all that he had suffered, knew it, they had had it in mind for their children, they had shaped their lives to give it to the two that they had brought into the world. Now the children had lost their patrimony. Lost the blessing of their parents’ house: the confidence, the safety they could wear into the world like a gold ring, a sign.

What would they wear now into the world? What would replace what they had lost? Would kindness replace safety, like a richer cloak, or would they wear the bloody skins of the impossible-to-think-of poor, or would they go half-naked, like the freezing Lear, with no fate for them but an animal’s bad luck?

If it were true that sorrow brought with it the guarantee of virtue, that would be the kind of economy anyone could live under. Only the superficial would rebel; the rest would live in peace, in comprehension. But there was no guarantee. Some grew in the face of sorrow, and some were undone. Some opened and enlarged, and some were ground to dust. Some became, only in sorrow, truly human; some were turned to animals who bit and snarled and lay in wait, who killed the weaker, in contempt, for nourishment and from a natural obedience to force.

She kissed her son’s damp head. She knew nothing about him, nothing of what he would become. Yet no one knew him better. He was hers, for now at least it was to her he brought his terrors and the dreams he could not people yet or name. She would die for him in an instant; it would not even be hard. And yet she could not say of either of her children: this is what they feel, this is what they will remember. It was the strongest love she knew, this mother love, knit up of blood, but it knew nothing, and it could keep nothing back.

And what could you say of it that was true? She used to think it was, of all loves, the most innocent, but now she knew she had been wrong. There were mothers who loved their children in a way that cut the children’s breath and stopped their hearts; there were mothers who, in a passion of love, took their children and pressed them to their bosoms and in the next moment threw the children screaming from them, covered them with blows. There were mothers for whom the sight of their children meant nothing: no love stirred, no part of the heart lifted. There were mothers who hated their children from the moment of their births, who hated the first touch of flesh on flesh and went on hating. There were mothers who loved their children but could not love them, for they bent to kiss the children’s flesh and felt the flesh stop up their mouths and make them fear for their next breath. And children throve or starved, and no one knew why, or what killed or saved.

And there was the other part of mother love: it was not all of life. And that was wonderful; it was a tremendous mercy. For there was so little you could do for them, even if you spent every moment with them, gave them every waking thought, there wasn’t much that you could do. You gave them life, you loved them, then you opened them out to the world. You could never protect them; so you left them to themselves. That was the mercy, that you could turn from them to something else, something they couldn’t touch or be a part of. You could turn, sometimes, from the sight of them, making their way in the world, so dangerous, so treacherous; you could put down the burden of that mother love, could swim up from it, passing the exhilarating sights, the colorful quick fish, the shining rocks and bubbles. And pass, too, the clumps of weeds. There was all that in the world that was apart from them: intractable, too, and difficult, eluding what you wanted to say of it, impossible to compass or get right. This morning she could turn to the work of a woman forty-five years dead. Possibly what she said would matter very little; possibly she would get things wrong. Yet she would take her mind, sharpen it, make it single; she would take the facts that she had learned, the words that there were for them. Join them together. She would make decisions on the dates of paintings. She would write, “It should be noted,” and “The style demands.” Hard words, formed words, white stones that she could hold and separate. And then, refreshed, she could dive back down to the dense underworld, to her children, and say, “This is life. What shall we make of it? For it is terrible, and shining, and our hearts are sore. Something dreadful has happened to us; more will happen: terrible, beautiful, there is no way of telling. And anything might lie and then uncoil and strike, in silence, in the darkness.”

Peter began to stir. He got to his feet; he was ready to go back to his own bed. There was a light wind. Clouds moved in the sky that had begun to take on color. She brought her chair up closer to the window and looked out.

C
AROLINE WATSON IS A
fictional character, but in creating her I have drawn upon details of the lives of actual painters, particularly Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, and Suzanne Valadon. Of great help to me were Cecilia Beaux’s autobiography,
Background with Figures
, and the letters of Mary Cassatt and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

In addition, my deepest thanks go to Linda Nochlin for her advice on art history and art historians, and to Alexander Martin for helping me to understand how a painter paints.

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.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1945 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.