Strange Fits of Passion (5 page)

I touched the prickly needles of a nearly invisible pine tree. Already the cold had begun to seep into my boots. I thought I could smell, on the thin air, the ocean, or the scent of salt flats at low tide. Far off I could hear the cry of a gull or an animal, something inhuman.

My insides felt hollow. I was still hungry despite the coffee cake. When I looked at the motel, the baby seemed far away. The distance caught me by surprise, as if I had just discovered that the boat I was on was moving away from the dock. I saw an angry, rigid face, a woman hitting the wall with her back, her arms outstretched to protect her head. I heard a baby cry and was momentarily confused: Was the cry coming from the motel room or the waking dream?

I remembered then a woman I had been in labor with when Caroline was coming. She had occupied the cubicle next to mine on the labor-and-delivery floor, and I hadn't seen her face, but I had never forgotten the sound that had come from her room. It was an otherworldly sound, heard through the wall, like that of an animal afraid for its life, and if I hadn't known that this cry, this howling, had to come from a woman, I would not have been able to identify the sound as belonging either to a male or to a female. The cries grew deeper and louder, and seemed to rock the woman from side to side. The nurses on the labor floor were quiet. Even the other women, in their own cubicles, who had been moaning with their own pains, became silent out of fear and respect for the sound. The woman's doctor, who sounded frightened himself, tried to bring his patient back to reason by calling her name in sharp, angry bursts, but you could tell his presence was nothing to her, less than nothing. I heard the howling and began to shiver. I wanted to talk about the woman, but no one would discuss her with me, as if the howling were too personal to be shared with strangers.

Yet it was pain, pure pain, and nothing more. And it was, I thought then, a useful measure against all future pain, a standard against which I would always be able to quantify my own, even though I knew I would not be able to howl with the freedom of the woman I heard that night. I never saw the woman, but I knew I would never forget her face as I had imagined it to be.

I stomped my feet in the snow and pulled my coat tightly around me. It is possible I heard, on the edge of the silence, the ceaseless ebb and flow of the ocean against a rocky shoreline. I looked across at the motel and pictured my baby sleeping behind the pine-paneled wall.

I have been wondering—you won't mind my asking you this?—are you the sort of writer who changes the quotes? In the early days, when we used to talk, Harrold and I would debate this question endlessly. I was, I suppose, more literal-minded than he was. I thought one ought to report what a person had said, exactly as the person had said it, even if the words were awkward, or had no rhythm, or didn't fit, or didn't precisely say what you knew the person actually meant. But Harrold, who was more used to entitlement than myself, believed in license. He would find the nuggets in a transcript or a file, and keep these kernels, but would embroider the rest, so that his quotes, and thus his stories, would have insight, wit, momentum, even brilliance. Yes, especially brilliance, like rough-cut stones made into polished gems. And only he, and possibly I, and certainly the person whom he was writing about, would ever know that what was written had not been said.

I used to marvel that he was never caught. Indeed, the reverse was true: The more license he took, the more successful he became. The license gave him a style, a pungency, that other writers envied. I think that perhaps the people he interviewed were at first stunned to see their words misstated in print but, after the initial shock, came to like the charming, more intriguing voices Harrold had created for them.

Ironically, it was myself, precise notetaker that I was, who had more complaints from the people I wrote about. For their quotes, though accurate, would sound prosaic, seldom witty, and, even if important, rarely intriguing. Such people would want to disown their quotes. I would, of course, have my notes. I could tell them, if they asked: This had been put just this way; that word had, indeed, been used. And yet I knew exactly what it was they objected to. What had been written wasn't what they had meant to say at all.

And this was the question Harrold and I would debate: In his writing, did the truth get lost? Or did he, with his license, preserve it better than I did?

You asked, when you were here, about my background. I'm not sure what to tell you, what will be relevant.

My mother was the first in her family to make it to the suburbs and to the middle class simultaneously—though it seems to me now, looking back, that this had more to do with geography than with economic status. My mother was a single parent, a working mother, when all the other mothers were at home. She had never had a husband; my father, barely out of his teens, had abandoned her on the day she told him she was pregnant, and he had joined the army within the week. I don't think she ever heard from him again, and he died, in France, before I was born. My father's parents owned a bar on the south side of Chicago, not far from the tenement in which my mother had grown up, and they gave her money after my father died, so that she would not have to work to support me. Instead she used the money as a down payment on a small white bungalow in a town twenty miles south of the city. She went back to work then, as secretary to the president of a. company that distributed office supplies. Until I went to school, I was cared for during the day by a neighbor, at the neighbor's house. My mother was determined that no matter what the cost, her own child would not be raised amid the perils of the city, as she had been.

At five-ten every evening, I would walk down the narrow street on which we lived to the austere wooden train station at its foot and meet my mother, who would alight, in her hat and her long woolen coat, from the high top step of the second car on the train. She would be carrying her pocketbook and a satchel, in which she took her lunch to work, and would have come from her office building in Chicago, a trip that took her forty-seven minutes. Our suburb, barely a suburb, was a cluster of prewar bungalows, each like the other, so that the streets had about them an ordered and tidy quality noticeably missing in the city from which my mother had so recently escaped. Our walk up the street—the pastel houses lining each side—was my favorite time of the day, a time out of time, when I had my mother to myself, and she had me, and there were no distractions. My mother would be animated, smiling, and might even have a surprise for me—a gum ball wrapped in cellophane, a paper strip of caps—and if she was tired, or her day had gone badly, she did not share this fact with me. She kept to herself whatever hardships she had to endure in the city, or perhaps her train journey home to her child had erased any discomforts of her job.

During this walk up our street—she would walk slowly to prolong our time together; I would walk backward or twirl around her or, when she was speaking to me in a serious way, would put my hands in my pockets and try to match her stride—she would ask about my schoolwork or my friends or tell me stories of her "adventures," as she referred to them, in which I would be expected to find the hidden homilies. She was also given to heartfelt lectures on various essential lessons of life, which I listened to as though receiving the word of God. There was a hierarchy in the universe, she told me, and I would be happy only if I found my place. Things happened to a person; one must learn to accept those things. One must not rebel too much against the natural order; the price one had to pay would be too high—a life of guilt or loneliness.

I would savor the twelve or fourteen minutes we had together each evening from the station to our bungalow, for I knew that when my mother crossed the threshold, she would be burdened by her chores. She did not complain, but she would become quieter as the evening wore on, like an old Victrola winding down, until it was time for me to go to bed. Then she would come into my bedroom—a tiny room connected by the bathroom to her own—and brush my hair. It was a characteristic that we shared, the color and texture of our hair, and this practice, the faithful hundred strokes, sometimes spilling into another hundred when she was lost in a story or an anecdote, was a ritual we never failed to observe, even when I had grown older and could certainly brush my hair myself.

When I had been tucked into bed, she sat in the living room, on the sofa, and sewed or watched TV or listened to the radio. Sometimes she read, but often when I got up to get a glass of water or to tell her that I couldn't sleep, I would find her with her book or her sewing in her lap while she stared at a distant point on the wall. I don't know what she dreamed of.

When my mother had removed her long coat and her hat, and had changed from her suit or her work dress into something looser, I thought that she was beautiful—the sadness of which I will not dwell upon, for I did not think this sad in my childhood, only now. Maybe all daughters think their mothers beautiful; I don't know. There was her hair, and the color of her eyes, a light green that I did not inherit, and a complexion that has not betrayed her, even in her older years. She was most beautiful, I always thought, on a muggy evening, resting in the middle of her chores, on an aluminum-and-plastic chair on the small screened-in porch off the back door. She would have on a sundress, and her skin would be faintly damp from the heat. Her hair, an untidy but voluptuous mass, would be falling loose from the pins, and she might be smiling at a juicy bit of gossip about our neighbor that I was telling her while we sipped a lemonade. I knew my mother liked me to gossip about our neighbor; it eased her jealousy, the fear that someone else had been a mother to her child.

I was a trial to our neighbor, deliberately so, I think now, and the woman, whose name was Hazel and who had three rebellious children of her own, didn't like me much. The dislike was mutual, or perhaps it was that I disliked living out my childhood in someone else's house. As soon as I was old enough, I begged my mother to let me stay alone at our bungalow after school, and she allowed this privilege, trusting me not to drink or to smoke or to do the other things she sometimes heard that girls my age were trying then. Of course, in time, with my friends, in my house and out of it, I did participate in the wildness she feared—I smoked, I drank some beer—but she was wrong to think that these essentially innocent pastimes would be the traps that would ensnare me.

Sometimes my mother invited men to the house. I did not think of them as her boyfriends, do not even now. They were men who had befriended my mother in some way—single or unattached men who plowed a driveway for which we had no car, or mended broken windows; or men whom she had met in the city and who would come out to the house on a Sunday afternoon for a meal. But once there was a man whom I think my mother loved. He worked as a supervisor for the company that employed her, and she got to know him well at work, for she would sometimes talk about him, in passing, in the middle of a story, and I would notice the pleasure that referring to him, even in this small way, gave her. His name was Philip, and he had dark hair and a mustache and drove a shiny black Lincoln. For a time, he came regularly on the weekends for a meal, after which he would take my mother and me for a drive in his car. I would sit in back; my mother would sit beside him. He would reach over and squeeze her hand from time to time, a movement I never failed to notice. We would go for ice cream, even in the dead of winter. When we got back from these drives, I would go to my room to play, or outside to find my friends. I was eight then, or nine. Philip and my mother would be alone in the living room. Once I came around a corner; Philip was kissing my mother on the sofa. I thought his hand was on her breast, but she moved so quickly away from him when she heard me that the motion is blurred, and I am not sure now what I saw. She blushed and he stood up, as if I were the parent. I pretended I had seen nothing, asked the question I had blundered into the room with. But I hated the moment, and I cringe even now when I think about it. I did not hate the fact that Philip had kissed her—I was glad that she had someone to love after all those years. I hated myself instead, my burdensome presence.

As it happened, however, Philip also abandoned my mother, after a time. For months, I thought that Philip had left my mother because of me, because he did not want to love a woman who was "saddled" with a child, as the expression went then. When other men came to the house—and there were not too many after Philip—I went to my room and would not leave it.

My mother was Irish and Catholic and had been raised in a crowded apartment, one of seven children. She was devout and attended Mass every Sunday of her life, and I am certain that she viewed my birth out of wedlock as the most serious moral lapse of her life. I could not be persuaded, from a very young age, to accept the Church as wholeheartedly as she did, and I know that this minor rebellion on my part was a source of aggravation to her. If we had fights—and actually I remember very few—it would be over this, my irregular attendance at church. But in later years, when I was working in New York City, and when I was already in trouble, I passed each morning, on my walk to the office, an age-darkened brick Catholic church called St. Augustine's, and I would sometimes be overwhelmed by a desire to go inside it and kneel down. I never did, however. I was plagued by the notion that I did not deserve comfort from a church I had scorned, and in any event, I was almost always late for work.

We had other visitors to our bungalow. My mother had many relatives, most of whom still lived in the city. Our tiny suburban house was far enough away to seem like an excursion on a Sunday afternoon. My grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins would arrive by train at the bottom of the street, and the entire entourage would noisily make its way up the hill to our bungalow, where my mother would have prepared a meal. She knew they did not approve of her single-parenthood, approved still less of her determination to live outside the city and support herself and her child by working as a secretary—a
private
secretary, she always said, as a point of pride—but she invited them faithfully to the house every other week, even cajoled them when they balked. I would not have any brothers or sisters, she knew; and she wanted me to feel that I belonged to something larger than just the two of us. The noisier and more crowded our house became, the happier she appeared to be.