The Other Side: A Novel

PART I

1

WHEN THIS HAPPENED, VINCENT MACNAMARA THOUGHT IT was the end of everything. As things turned out, it was not.

He was a tall old man of eighty-eight, and strong, but he was lying on the floor of his dark living room. He knew he had broken his leg. A thick medal of pain formed on the left side of his thigh, fanned out to thinner ribs, and flashed up and down his leg from thigh to calf. It interested him, as if it were happening to someone else. His leg was light and foolish underneath him and he couldn’t move. But it was important that he move. He could see Ellen, his wife, wandering on the half-lit street, the outlines of her body visible to him through her white nightgown.

He didn’t know how far she’d walk. He could imagine her walking until the land stopped, and then into the water. He couldn’t stop her.

If he cried out, it would be shame for him in the world. Shame in the neighborhood. If he didn’t cry out, then she could wander off and be killed.

She’d begun having strokes six years before. She’d no control left over herself, it had been months since she’d had any. It had been months since she had stood up by herself. And then she did this.

It was because she wouldn’t take her pills.

He’d put her in front of the television. John, their grandson, had hooked up the remote control for her. He was in televisions now. They said he’d found himself. Vincent had put the TV on so she could see the Mass. He knew that she cared nothing for the Mass. But Theresa, their daughter, had told him she might be taking something in. Theresa stood in church now, with her arms spread out, talking directly to the Holy Ghost. She told her father he could talk directly to the Holy Ghost if he believed he could, but Vincent knew he couldn’t.

Theresa wanted her mother in a home.

Swear, Ellen had said, lying next to him when they were each no more than thirty. Her eyes were wild; he could tell in the dark. What had made her think of it? What had put the thought in her, and the wildness, so that her nails bit into his palm, as if she knew the small pain would make him remember? Swear you’ll let me die in my own bed. Not among strangers. He swore. Her nails pressing made dents in his palms, a dull, shallow pain.

He’d sworn. He’d thought he could keep it from happening.

It happened because she wouldn’t take her medicine. He gave it to her, but she kept it in her mouth. Three pills, red and gray, red and yellow, dark pink. He’d gone into the kitchen to get a dish of ice cream for her. He thought he’d make her spit the pills into his hand, then he’d bury them in the ice cream and she’d swallow her pills without knowing.

When he came back into the living room, he saw she’d switched the picture from the Mass to a cartoon show. A zebra family was dancing on the screen. A zebra mother hung a pair of striped pajamas on the line. Ellen was staring at the screen and her mouth was open. Had she opened her mouth to laugh? In opening her mouth, she’d let the pills roll together on her lap. He saw the three of them, wet, stuck together at the center of her lap. He bent to fish them from the valley of her lap so he could hide them in the ice cream.

And then, for the first time in months, she stood up. She put one arm in front of her breasts and raised the other against him, knocking him heavily to the floor. She walked out of the house. He could see her wandering up and down the street in darkness.

2

VINCENT AND ELLEN MACNAMARA HAVE BEEN MARRIED sixty-six years. For sixty-three years, they have lived in one house, 128 Linden Street, Queens Village, ten miles from the center of Manhattan. He is younger than she; she was twenty-four when they were married; he was nearly twenty-three. Already at that time, they had lived other lives, mostly on another continent. Europe, from which they set themselves adrift.

They crossed the ocean to the place, America, that had been called at home the other side. Now Ellen is dying. She is over ninety; no one is surprised but she. She has, of course, expected death, but now that it is near it is a shock, an intrusion, an affront. No one knows how long she’ll live. She is furious in her long dying. She is powerful in her last sickness, in her dying, in the ending of what is still her life.

The thin, translucent skin stretches across her forehead, beautiful, as if the soul were winning visibly over the flesh. You would expect the brain packed down beneath this tight-drawn skin, beneath this skull that has become a feature, this skull of a saint in triumph, you would expect the brain beneath this bone and skin to be serene. But it is not.

Constant words fill the air around her bed. They are terrible words for an old woman taken up in the long business of her dying. Curses. Maledictions. Dreadful wishes. Also simple filth. What kind of life would have brought up these words? She lived a hard life, but not the kind to know these words.

Within the nearly visible skull, the brain, disintegrating fast, reaches back past houses, curtains, out to ships and over oceans, down to the sea’s bottom, back, down, to the bog’s soaked floor, to mud, then to the oozing beds of ancient ill will, prehistoric rage, vengeance, punishment in blood. And all the time, the bars of her hospital bed shake with her rage. She is tied down, has been drugged, but whatever she has been given fails to stupefy. She will not stop telling what she has seen. It is dirty; there is nothing; we should suffer, all of us, for it is all that we deserve.

3

OUTSIDE THE ROOM, SCATTERED around the house Ellen has lived in since 1922, is her family. They are here because they are waiting to celebrate Vincent’s return. It is the summer of 1985, August 14, vigil, for those who note such things, of the Assumption. Vincent would note this; Ellen, furious if he’d brought it up, would not. Since the eighteenth of October of the year before, Vincent has been away from the house. For two months he was in the hospital; it wasn’t his leg that he broke that night, it was (much worse) his hip. After he’d been in the hospital two months, Cam, his granddaughter, who is a lawyer, arranged that he should go to an experimental nursing home. Today he’s coming home.

That night, October 18, 1984, lying on the floor of his dark living room, in pain, he thought he wouldn’t be able to keep the promise he’d made to his wife nearly sixty years before. That he would let her die in her own bed. But they had kept it for him. Cam had stood up to her aunt Theresa, did the things, interviewed nurses, hired people to be there around the clock so Ellen could stay home, so she could be waiting for him. Waiting till today, when he would come home to her. Only he doesn’t want to go home.

4

NEARLY ALL THE SURVIVING members of the MacNamara family are in the house now, waiting for Vincent to come home. Almost all of them live within forty-five minutes of Queens Village, where all of them spent their childhoods: an oddity in mobile, shifting America.

One of Vincent and Ellen’s children is dead; John, their only son, killed in the War. His son, Daniel, born after his death, stands outside his grandmother’s bedroom, waiting to see if she’s asleep. Dan’s daughters, Darci and Staci, Vincent and Ellen’s great-grandchildren, are expected by the middle of the afternoon.

Vincent and Ellen’s older daughter, Magdalene, is in her room, two blocks away, a room she has left only rarely in the last fifteen years. Her daughter, Camille, is upstairs, working on a legal brief. The only one of Vincent and Ellen’s children in the house is Theresa, their second-born, a medical secretary who speaks to the Holy Ghost. Her husband, Ray Dooley, is here, and her son, John, and daughters, Sheilah and Marilyn. Marilyn is the only one of the family to have moved far away. She is a registered nurse, taking her vacation here so she can supervise her grandfather’s settling in. When he is settled in, tomorrow, or the next day, she’ll go back to Los Angeles, to the clinic where she is director, serving a largely Chicano population, to her three children and a house without a husband now. It’s another thing she’s here for: she must tell her parents her third marriage has failed.

She checks the IV that leads into Ellen’s arm. She sees her family arrange themselves in various positions in Vincent and Ellen’s small, tree-darkened house. The net of kinship spreads around them, spreads and draws. There is a place for everyone, she thinks, but not all places are equal and not everyone is happy with his place.

Theresa and Ray Dooley are sitting in the living room watching one of their favorite TV shows, The People’s Court. As a family, the MacNamaras have an interest in the law. Dan and Camille are lawyers, specializing in divorce; Ray Dooley is a retired cop.

Idly hypnotized, Dan sits down beside his aunt and uncle on the couch. Despite himself, he is interested in the case: a woman has been given a bad permanent—a quarter of her hair fell out and the rest will take six months to return to normal. She wants restitution from the man who owns the beauty shop. She wants enough money for wigs, hats, and scarves, six months’ worth of them, and two hundred dollars for emotional duress. She wins.

Ray turns to Dan. As a lawyer yourself, Dan, what would you think of the verdict of the judge?

I’d say it’s fair, Ray. I’d say I’d do the same thing in his shoes.

But Dan isn’t thinking of the judge’s verdict, he is thinking of his grandfather, of what will happen in the house when Vincent walks into it, of who each of them will be then.

He thinks what he has often thought: My grandfather is an honorable man. He tries to understand what he means by the word honor. He’s always imagined Vincent’s life as a line, stretching back, emanating from Vincent’s body, back to a time Dan can’t imagine, through this house, curving through his descendants to him, Dan, and through him to his children, Darci and Staci, living with their mother in Seattle. But for the summer they are with him in Quogue, near the Long Island Sound, in the house he shares with Sharon Breen, whom he has lived with for twelve years, but never married.

He thinks of the differences between him and his grandfather. His life isn’t a single line that stretches back to history and forward through the generations, through one house, through a life lived beside one woman, through children going out and coming back to do him honor.

His children live a continent away. One of them will never let him know her. To allow herself to be known would be to forgive, and she will not forgive her father for leaving her mother, for leaving her.

Dan walks into the room where Ellen is lying asleep. Her hair is done in two thin braids, imprisoned now beneath the sharp blades of her shoulders. He releases the braids and places them carefully one on each side of her shoulders, on the blue nylon case of her pillow, specially designed, its package said, for long-term patient care. He rolls one of the braids between his thumb and second finger and he thinks: At least I was able to do that.

Don’t cut her hair.

He’d said that to the practical nurse, Mrs. Davenport, and to his aunt Theresa. They were about to cut Ellen’s hair. It was a nuisance long, they said, another thing to care for.

He used on them a voice he’d learned, a voice he’d used in court, to make someone afraid of something. He almost never used it in private life, the voice that suggested that if it were defied there would be consequences. He looked at Mary Davenport, who kept opening and closing the scissors as if by cutting Ellen’s hair she could be through with something, and for good. He looked at Theresa, whose interest was in punishment. Theresa drummed her shell-pink fingernails on the white plastic armrest of Ellen’s hospital bed. Mary Davenport put down her scissors. He had won.

He never told them what her hair had been to him, let down, washed outdoors once a year, on the first warm day of spring. Once a year he would come home from school and she would be there in the fenced-in yard, her presence public but only for him, shocking, sitting in the open air, her hair undone, let down, loose on her shoulders. Her hair was gray; she must have been in her fifties. She combed it with a gray comb; its wide teeth raked her scalp that he could see a hint of: pink. Even then her hair was thin.

She was jubilant, her wet hair down, and young, an outlaw. She didn’t say anything but he knew what she meant: Celebrate with me. Feel the sun. Underneath the earth things stir. You and I know this. We mark it now.

She waited on those days till he came home, till the others were away. He was completely happy then. Music rose up, fantastic music, like the music of angelic singing showgirls, forming themselves in movies into the shape of a violin, a piano. Curves of music, rising, curving up.

She never said anything about what she was doing.

He would come near her, kissing her. He’d smell her clean wet hair. You’re home, then, she would say.

Yes, Gran.

Your school all right today?

Yes.

She’d close her eyes, the both of them would close their eyes to hear the music, to feel properly the warmth that drew the wetness from her hair. In half an hour, saying nothing, she’d comb her hair, braid it, pin it up once again into the irreproachable pile at the top of her respectable, now law-abiding head.

Don’t cut her hair, he said, and they had listened.

He’d been able to do that.

5

AT MARYHURST, AN EXPERIMENTAL catholic residence on the East End of Long Island, people keep coming into Vincent’s room to say goodbye. Mothers and children knock at the door; usually, the children are allowed to knock; Vincent keeps getting up from his green Leatherette chair. He knows everybody’s name. Well, then, he says, opening his door to each of them. Isn’t this a fine surprise. Some of the mothers and children bring him presents—candy or drawings; there isn’t much at Maryhurst that can be bought, and only the old people have money. The old people are there because they’re old, the mothers and the children are there to be hidden, or rescued, to add life. At Maryhurst, welfare mothers and their children are mixed in with the old who can’t care for themselves entirely, but don’t need much help in getting through a day in which their food, their warmth, their safety is insured.

It’s not easy to get into Maryhurst, particularly for the old. Vincent got in right away because Cam is a close friend of Otile Ryan; they work together on the board of a shelter for battered women. Otile Ryan, a Sister of the True Cross (formerly Sister Benedicta), runs Maryhurst. It was her idea.

Maryhurst, originally called Bower House, was built in 1887. It was the house of the O’Connell family. The O’Connells, Cam had learned, were one of those Irish families who’d come over early enough to make a fortune and manifest it by building a great house. A family trip to England had made Gerald O’Connell fix on Victorian architecture, and he built for his family, in the fashionable seaside town of East Hull, on Long Island, a mansion built of pale yellow stone with green roofs; he put gingerbread trim around the porches and windows and walls, and it was said he made heart-shaped flower beds of pinks, lilies of the valley, moss roses, peonies, and poppies in the fashion of the day. In 1934, Gerald’s granddaughter, Gertrude Rose, unable to keep up with taxes, gave the house to the Order of the True Cross, who had educated her in their school for Catholic Young Ladies on Fifth Avenue.

Gerald O’Connell’s mansion became the Order’s Motherhouse. But by the time Otile Ryan had become Superior in 1981, the order had dwindled to fifty members, whose median age was sixty-two. Financial advisers urged her to sell the property, buy something cheaper, easier to heat and to maintain for the housing of the older sisters and send the younger ones, who could be self-supporting (they were equipped with MSWs and Ed.D.’s), out to the world, meeting like other sisters in informal consortiums, spiritual communities that involved no real estate and were free from the horrors of failing boilers and French doors whose hinges could no longer be properly replaced.

But Otile Ryan, who preferred to be called O.T. (her middle name was Therese), was interested in social experiment. She decided to turn Maryhurst into a place for the aged and for battered wives seeking shelter with their children.

She’d got a quarter-million-dollar grant from a foundation to re-do Maryhurst more functionally. Each large bedroom was broken into three. The parquet floors were covered with linoleum. The money that she got from selling the antique furniture she spent to have a swimming pool and sauna installed in what was once the billiard room. She’d done it all like a sansculotte dismantling a chateau. When she understood that Cam disapproved, Otile turned on her. What was I supposed to do, spend a hundred grand so some fat interior decorator could tell me how to preserve the door frames? Or pay one of the mothers three bucks an hour to get on her knees to clean the marble fireplaces with a feather dipped in oil, like I did when I was a novice? Forget it. Look around you, Camille. People are happy here. They’re living their lives without worrying all day about where they live. That’s something. They’re a hell of a lot happier than the people who lived here when this place was a shrine to its own woodwork. I say thank God for Formica. I’d be glad to offer my morning prayers for the inventor of Formica. If I only knew his name. I’d have him canonized if I thought he was a Catholic. But I’m sure he’s not one of ours.

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 because 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, were 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