The Other Side Read online

  Vincent has enjoyed Maryhurst. He’s liked playing with the children. Although the mothers make him nervous: he can’t imagine what life holds in store for them, or he can imagine, and it makes him afraid. One of the mothers, Alvira Scott, asked him to teach her how to read. He tried, but couldn’t do it. After he spent time with her, he himself found it difficult to read. He wanted her to read with all his heart, but she couldn’t seem to learn. He told her to tell Sister Otile or Sister Roberta, they could help her, but she said she was ashamed and didn’t like people to know and if he couldn’t do it no one could. He felt that because of meeting him she was worse off. Her son is nine years old; her husband tried to kill her. Vincent knew she didn’t believe him when he said she was a wonderful mother with a lot of excellent qualities and it didn’t matter if she couldn’t read. Before he leaves, he’ll tell her she must let someone know, one of the nuns, or someone. He’ll say it’s his fault, his eyes are bad, sometimes he can’t concentrate, he’s too old, he wasn’t the one to come to, there is someone who can help her out. He has no idea if she’ll listen.

  One of the children made a poster for him. It said “We love you, come back soon.” But he knows he’ll never come back. He won’t make another trip from his house to a place that means something to him. He’ll go places to do business—the bank, the doctor’s. But Cam will have to take him, and stay with him while he does whatever it is he went there to do.

  He knows that he will die. Soon, relatively soon, he’ll leave his life. He will travel from the world to somewhere. He has a sense of what it will be like. He’ll be watching his body. What is not his body, but still himself, will be spinning through a tunnel or a corridor. The wind will rush around him; the part of him that is watching his body will be hurled through darkness hearing the sound of rushing wind. At the end of the tunnel, the corridor, there will be silver light. He doesn’t know if there will be anything to see in that light, or if it will be wholly quiet, or if he’ll be alone. In the quiet, will he hear the voice of God? And then will he be joining others? Or will he stay alone?

  Now he’s not alone. He’s got used to people. He fears the quietness of the house on Linden Street after this noisy life. He wonders how he’ll eat his meals. By himself? At the kitchen table? In the dining room? He won’t take his meals with Mary Davenport. He knows she stole from them, but when he’d asked her if she’d seen the silver gravy ladle, the pie fork, she’d told him she was sure there’d never been anything like them in the house. Then she said: “I hope you’re not accusing me. Because if you are I’m out of here.”

  He doesn’t know why Ellen likes her. She’s the kind of person Ellen would have hated if she’d been herself: big-faced and loud, making herself important. Religious, yes, but Protestant. It was different, they believed in different things. The Ellen he knew would have hated her. It makes him feel that he’s outlived his wife; she’s still there, in the house, but she’s a person he doesn’t know.

  He has to go back to her. She frightened him, crying out like she did, and the bad language. He kept wanting to tell people she hadn’t been like that. He thinks sometimes if he could just talk to her, just the two of them. If he could ask her: Is it death that makes her talk like that, is it seeing death? He doesn’t know what her eyes see anymore. In sixty-six years it’s the longest time he’s been away from her. He doesn’t want to go back.

  He doesn’t want to go back to the family, the furniture, the old wood that needs care, the roof that is a worry to him, the dark carpets, and the pictures on the big piano. To his single bed down the hall from where she sleeps (she’d sent him there in the fifties, when she’d come back from the hospital after her gallbladder was taken out). He wants to ask her what it was that she’s seen, to tell her not to worry, he’ll be there with her on the journey. But no, that isn’t what he wants. He wants to stay here with the sociable people who like a good conversation, with the mothers and the children who dart on the surface of the common life, with the nuns who believe in the future, on the grounds he has no responsibility to care for, watching while the gardener, a Spanish fellow, rides the lawn mower around the grass.

  In the family they were always saying, I love, I hate, do this for me, you never did this, you forgot, I’ll never forget it, I am happy, I am so unhappy, why are you like you are. He’ll walk into the house and everything he knows about the lot of them will make him feel old and tired and out of hope. They believe in the future at Maryhurst; that’s why he likes it. He doesn’t know what his family believes.

  6

  IN VINCENT AND ELLEN’S HOUSE, Camille isn’t downstairs with the rest of the family. By simple majority, those she can’t bear outnumber those she loves. She’s upstairs, in the room she often slept in as a child, sitting up in the small, single bed, reading a blue-backed brief, working on someone’s divorce.

  She sits on the single bed, her legs stretched straight out, like a child afraid of being caught in illicit reading. She’s frowning when she reads; she’s always frowned when reading. As a child she did it so as not to appear to be enjoying herself too much. She was amazed from the moment that the letters of the alphabet unlocked themselves into a tray of meaning she could sample and re-combine, certain that others who read—who pretended to be reading—weren’t experiencing what she did. Either it wasn’t the same thing, or they were cleverly making their faces blank so that no one could guess the value of what was happening behind their eyes. At a young age, she suspected that anything you possessed of value was in danger of being taken away. Dissimulation seemed a duty. She began then to frown when she was reading so that no one would suspect her joy.

  In three generations of MacNamaras, only Cam and Dan read easily, with no sense of constraint. Cam’s mother, Magdalene, didn’t read, nor did Theresa. Daniel had no memory of his real parents. Vincent and Ellen read hungrily, desperately, stealing time from something, needing to know something: the nature of the world. Only Cam and Dan read for pleasure. Reading was a smooth ribbon of road stretching before them. They could follow it at their leisure, or race down it, dizzily and rushed. Their grandparents always allowed them to read; they were never told, as other children in the neighborhood were, other children they knew in school, that they should be doing something else.

  When they were reading they didn’t want to be doing anything else. They knew this was unlike other children. It was the secret mark that first bound them; it had to be kept secret—from other children, from most adults—particularly in summer, when they were expected to want to do something else: climb trees, run, play ball, look in puddles for the signs of life. Their grandmother was happy to work in the kitchen or in the garden, while they sat on the screened-in side porch, on the blue glider with its rough upholstery and consumed their secret feasts of words. They could feel the mercy in the trees whose branches hung around the house. The breeze low to the ground cooled their toes. They read. Little Women, Little Men, Jane Eyre, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Dickens, George Eliot, a series of nurse heroines, Willa Cather, Ivanhoe, Captain Horatio Hornblower, The Hardy Boys, Dr. Tom Dooley in Laos, in Cambodia, Thomas Merton, Sinclair Lewis, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, We the Tikopia, Latin American or Canadian stigmatists. All these passed through their hands, and they could revel in the lush growth that is the territory of the untaught, unsupervised, unguided reader. At twelve Dan read Moby Dick and didn’t understand it. Not until college did Cam know that Two Years Before the Mast was not a great book.

  Today Cam is reading the testimony of Lorraine Barnabas. Lorraine Barnabas is filing for divorce; she claims that for twenty years her husband has regularly beaten her. Cam no longer asks women like Lorraine Barnabas why they stayed with their husbands for twenty years. She knows. They were afraid, they had no money, they thought they would be destroyed in the world alone. She understands this, sitting on the bed now, reading the deposition. When she’s tired or has lost too many cases, when one of the welfare mothers she trusted loses custody of her children once again becau
se she’s gone back once again on drugs, when she has just spent time with her own mother, Cam has no patience with women like Lorraine Barnabas. Sometimes she imagines victimized women rising around her head like polluted water. She remembers once turning to a friend of hers at a meeting, one of the endless meetings she attends, on one of the endless boards she is a member of, and saying: “Victims. Jesus Christ, I’m sick of victims, I wish I’d never invented them.” But today she isn’t tired, and she hasn’t spoken to her mother yet. So she is patient with Lorraine Barnabas. She says: At fifty it can’t be easy to start in the world. Better late than never. She knows that Dan never has mixed thoughts like this about his clients. She knows that if Lorraine Barnabas had told Dan, weeping, that her husband had beaten her for twenty years, and said it with those startled eyes that still can’t understand it, he would pity her with no impatience: his pity would be pure. Perhaps she would misunderstand this; she would want him to take her to bed. Which is why Cam thinks it’s better that she should handle the case.

  Cam and Dan are partners in the firm of MacNamara and MacNamara. They specialize in divorce. Their offices are in Kew Gardens, ten minutes from Cam’s house in Queens Village, and an hour and a half from Dan’s in Quogue.

  Neither of them had planned to work in any of the circumstances in which they now find themselves. They’d planned to do adventurous things, politically active things with their law degrees: Dan planned to work among rural blacks down South. But in 1965, during Cam’s last year in law school, her mother developed cancer of the breast. Within two months, Cam married Bob Ulichni in a trance and in the same trance gave up her plans to work for Legal Aid: her focus was directed towards her mother’s death. Jack Morrisey came forward and offered her a job working for him.

  The MacNamaras had known Jack for twenty years. He’d run the Democratic Club; he’d adored first Ellen, and then Cam. He’d given Cam five thousand dollars for law school, no strings attached. And he had meant it, about the strings; he’d have watched Cam take a job in Manhattan Legal Aid without a hint of reproach or demand for re-payment, but when the situation arose, he could, reproachlessly, have the return of his gift; it would have been unnatural for him not to take the opportunity. He was one of those bachelors—chaste, political, idealistic—with more money than they need and an incoherent sense that they would like to do some good. The scope of his political imaginings was local; if he were a Jew, he might have been a Communist, but he was Irish; his personal chastity extended to the public view; the immodest vision of an international solution caused him to recoil, as if he were observing an endless series of random couplings.

  Jack had lived, since his mother’s death, on the top floor of a house owned by the sister of a former pastor of the parish. No one had ever seen his rooms. Many people spent time imagining them. The reality was a room of iron bedsteads, bookcases made of white-painted shelves, the books arranged by alphabet or subject, a mirror by the door for a last professional man’s look, a crucifix, a clothes rack, a white chenille spread. He arrived at the office every day after the seven o’clock Mass, and he left each night at seven. He took his meals at the Night Cap Bar; each evening he ate the heavy, indiscriminate dark stews Herb Kennedy, his friend and fellow Democrat, served up. There were three women in his life, his secretary, Mary Dolan, who had worked for him since 1936, Ellen, and Cam. Ellen was for him the beloved past, the primitive life he glamorized and savagely cut out. Mary Dolan was the present, the law and order which made the world the barely livable place it was, and made his office the only home he treasured. And Cam was the future. Nothing of the vain, inflating, self-important, trivializing tendencies he saw as female did he see in her. If he was hurt when she married Bob Ulichni, hurt that she stooped to marriage at ally he didn’t admit it to himself. Had she had children, demonstrating to his eyes that she beyond doubt was physical, things might have changed. But her infertility left her intact. Therefore, of undiminished value for him.

  Jack Morrisey, along with Edith Blake, Cam’s Latin teacher, had advised Ellen on Cam and Dan’s education. Ellen had seen Magdalene trying to pervert her daughter’s nature by attempting to teach deference and pretty ways. Ellen wouldn’t have it. She said to Cam: Speak up in class, tell them what you know and that you know it. She told Cam always to defend a great man (she meant Roosevelt) when his name or memory was under attack. Cam had watched her grandmother leave a card party when one of her partners called Eleanor Roosevelt a pinko. Ellen stood up in the middle of a hand, threw down her cards, and walked away. Ellen saw that Dan didn’t have Cam’s courage for direct attacks; she saw her husband in her grandson, and encouraged him as she’d encouraged Vincent. Both the children ran to her with their report cards; they flowered beneath the glow of her unqualified and hungry praise.

  They obeyed, though it frightened them, when she yanked them from the parish school. “I’ll never trust a nun,” she said. To her they were covered up, removed. She liked combat and engagement. You exposed yourself to the world of force; you didn’t hide behind the weakness of your nature, or your privilege. The nuns’ emphasis on deportment, submissiveness, their conviction that, especially for girls, the appropriate response to a challenging question was silence made Ellen fear for what she understood to be Cam’s gifts. She wanted her granddaughter to live in the world; she was afraid the nuns would stop her. That Ellen secluded herself almost entirely in her house, invited no one in, went out only to electioneer—all this she never saw as withdrawal from the world. If you had told her that her kitchen was her cloister, she’d have raised her hand against you. She saw herself as living in the thick of things, because she read the newspaper with passion and discussed with Vincent from her heart the fate of the nations of the world. She thought she wasn’t like other women. Although she rarely left the house, she believed herself not bounded by it. She didn’t want Cam to live her real life in a house.

  Ellen and Jack decided, without consulting Magdalene or Vincent, whom religion touched, that Dan would go to the Jesuits and Cam to public school. Dan won a scholarship; he took the bus and subway, traveling an hour each way into Brooklyn, where he got an education, Jack Morrisey said, as good as the sons of Presidents of Banks. Cam shocked the parish by her progress; she graduated second in her class, salutatorian, beat out only by Robert Glickman.

  Jack Morrisey watched over them. He watched Dan and Cam and watched Ellen watching. In Dan, he saw too much of himself, the native fearfulness, the shy politeness he had worked to cut out of his nature and his presentation to the world. His regard for Dan was mixed with unease. But there was no dark spot on the lens of his admiration for Cam. A man unused to strong desire, he kept secret the fervor of his wish that Cam would one day be his partner, in his office, her name on the door right next to his. He kept secret, too, his fear that Edith Blake would win her from him to study classics, though he kept no secret of his ironic man-of-the-world distaste for Edith’s old-maidish ways. But in the end he won Cam to the law, to Ellen’s ideal of the active, useful life, and in the end both of them, Dan and Cam, came home to his office above Whelan’s drugstore with its bad light and its stained, respectable Venetian blinds.

  They made their journey to the outside world; they met and mixed with people born far from them, people different from themselves. Then they came home to live.

  In her law-school class of 1966, Cam was one of thirteen women in a class of over eight hundred. She didn’t like her oddity, but it did not induce paralysis. Merely accommodation. She missed the naturalness of other women around her. But she was able rather easily to adopt the role of pal. She enjoyed her inclusion in the fraternal exclusivity that argued, sat in bars. She could almost forget the question underlying their acceptance of her: “Why are you here?,” meaning “What’s wrong with you?” She saw her colleagues marry, purposefully, women they couldn’t talk to, but it didn’t bother her. She didn’t want to marry any of them; she didn’t even desire them. Her desires, the rare times she felt them, wer
e reserved for distant, monkish figures she knew better than to approach. Her friendship with her classmate Anne Redmond was a free zone, in which she could be herself, without the unspoken tolerant exception generously made in her case. But she didn’t realize that at the time, and since she wouldn’t have dreamed of sharing her personal life with anyone outside her family, she didn’t feel that she was missing anything. She shared with her friends a professional plan pointed towards service to the poor. Everything they argued and studied was geared towards this belief of theirs, that they would go into the crowded cities, to the countryside, where injustices bloomed like tough-rooted growth.

  Two years after Cam, Dan went to law school out of fear, kindness, accommodation, and through comfort with the posture of defense. He would tell you, even now, he still believes it, that he went to law school to please Valerie, his wife. It’s true that Valerie’s father, Jim O’Keefe, had made a fortune in the building trades and was clear when he talked to his prospective son-in-law, the twenty-year-old Dan, that money was important, that he hadn’t sent his girl back East to Manhattanville to marry a poor man. Dan was in love with Valerie O’Keefe, astonished, shocked, and frightened that she returned his love. She had the certainty he’d known and prized in Cam and in his grandmother, but she was small and dark, while their bodies seemed light and massive to him. She felt a commitment to domestic life, where they despised it, and Dan wanted a home. The lashings out of anger in his cousin and his grandmother, the tempers that flared up like dangerous, consuming flames, the terrible hard words, the brooding visible as smoke—there was none of all that in Valerie. Coolly she knit him sweaters while her classmates panicked in the week before their exams. She made candy for him on a hot plate in her room; and she returned his starved, shamed embraces with a steady ardor but no seeming need. Each day he knew her he believed he had to earn her by grueling, honorable labor in no way natural to him. He never felt that he deserved her. She in her turn felt, though she would never tell him and he never knew, inadequate before the love that flowed from him to her: so easily, like milk, like rain that soughed down to dry sand and was absorbed in silence. She feared the dry silence of her heart; she saw how people came to Dan and stood in the circle cast by his presence, the comfort of his large, loosely muscled body, maternal almost, and were quietened and reassured, fed, and restored to life. In her spare way she almost worshipped him. She felt she never measured up.