One True Thing

  “You never told me this!”

  “You never asked.”

  “Oh, Mama, that’s a smartass answer,” I said.

  “Was it?” my mother said, brightening. “Smartass?”

  “Definitely smartass. And are you saying that that’s it, that that’s why he married you, because you asked him?”

  “Oh, Ellie,” she said ruefully, as though she was surprised I didn’t understand something so simple, “I imagine he married me because I reminded him of his mother.”

  I thought back to my Gulden grandparents, who had run a summer camp in the mountains of New York State. Both of them were dead now, but when I was a little girl I had gone to them for the two weeks before school started, after the children from Long Island and Manhattan and Connecticut had gone home from camp, sunburnt and covered with mosquito bites. I had wandered through the reeds around the horseback-riding paddock picking up the arrows gone astray from archery and bringing them to my grandfather, a strong, quiet man with forearms that stretched the seams on his short-sleeved Banlon shirts so the stitches showed.

  My grandmother was different. She looked like my father, lithe and fine-featured, and she sat on a rock while I hunted for crayfish in the creek and let me bake baking-powder biscuits with a thumbprint filled with jam in the center of each one. She smelled of roses and flour, sang Christmas carols at bedtime, braided my hair each morning and tied it with bits of yarn left over from arts and crafts.

  “I guess I can see that,” I said.

  “I remember liking what I read of Pride and Prejudice, only wishing that it could be told from Jane’s point of view. Your father said that would have made for a very dull book. Your father never really liked to talk shop when he got home. Except with you, of course, but that’s different. I think he thinks of that as part of your education. Sometimes when I listen to the two of you I feel like a Little League player listening to the Yankees.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I don’t mind. It’s interesting.”

  “That’s not how I would describe it.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “It’s tiring,” I found myself saying, “staying on top of your game.”

  The breeze was stronger now, blowing the pages of the book and lifting one corner of the quilt. Downstream I could see two children playing beneath the footbridge as I had done when I was small, pitching stones into the water.

  “It’s a mistake to base your entire life on one man’s approval,” my mother added quietly.

  “It was the way women lived when you got married,” I said.

  “I was talking about you, Ellie,” she said.

  “Jonathan and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Jonathan,” she said.

  We grew quiet again. The carillon across the river that Samuel Langhorne built to foster a sense of spirituality on campus rang out “Amazing Grace.” When it stopped, “was blind but now I see,” hung in the air for a moment like a cloud.

  “Why didn’t you finish the book the first time?” I finally said, the notes dying like the sun going down.

  My mother wrapped her hand around the paperback in her lap and held it to her chest. Her knuckles gleamed like four round white stones in the pale yellow light. “I left my copy at City Hall the day I married your father,” she said. “It was a library book, too. I had to pay to have it replaced.”

  “I’m not sure how this book-club thing works,” I said. “When we’re done, do we set up some time for discussion?”

  “Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” my mother said.

  “No, I mean about theme and character and that sort of thing.”

  “Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” she repeated.

  “So we talk as we go along?”

  “Why not?” my mother said.

  “And when do we move on to the next one?”

  “Ellen,” she said, laughing, putting the book down and picking up her needlepoint, “for an intelligent girl you need an awful lot of direction. We’ll go on to the next one when we’re finished with the one we have.”

  My parents met and married in 1967, and though we later came to think of the 1960s as a time of great upheaval and liberation, the truth was that for them the upheavals came later, in their everyday lives. They were married at City Hall, took the subway downtown to Chambers Street, and were back in time for my father’s four o’clock tutorial.

  My mother went back to work in her parents’ dry cleaners on Broadway, but after she locked up that night she went up to my father’s one-room apartment at 135th Street, climbed into his bed, and next morning began to make curtains out of sheets. She cooked casseroles on a hot plate. They even had dinner parties, my mother once told me, chili and garlic bread balanced on the laps of half-a-dozen starving students.

  By the time the Upper West Side was rife with consciousness-raising groups and faculty members were shedding their twin-set Smithy wives in favor of graduate students with short skirts and long hair, my parents were on their way to Princeton and then Langhorne, one a place in which change came slowly, the other a place in which it came hardly at all.

  I was a clever child, with the ceaseless goad stabbing away deep inside me that comes from being the eldest child of a clever parent. While my mother drove us to swimming lessons and taught us to string stale cranberries for the Christmas tree and scolded us for using vulgar language and laughed at our knock-knock jokes, my father’s distance was as seductive as his smile.

  Nothing changed when my mother became sick. If anything my father was more distant than ever, and more mannered in his manner when he arrived. “What ho, crew?” he would say, putting his briefcase on the bench near the door. Or “You’ve never looked lovelier,” he would say to my mother, bending over her hand, and she would reply, as she always did, “Oh, Lord, Gen,” the pet name she had invented years before, shorthand for Gentleman George. Often my mother was already in bed when he got home. Sometimes, when I heard him quietly close the kitchen door long after night had fallen, I felt as though I was losing both my parents at the same moment, although I did not feel in the slightest like a child. I saw them with the cold eye of the adult now.

  One night shortly after my mother and I had had our picnic and formed our book club, my father and I found ourselves together in the dark and sweet-smelling living room, with its bowls of homemade potpourri. Looking up from Pride and Prejudice and the circle of golden light cast by the reading lamp, I finally said, “Why am I doing this alone?”

  “Doing what alone, may I ask?”

  “Tending to your wife.”

  His mouth got very thin, and his voice very English, a prelude to meanness. “My wife? My wife? That woman is your mother. I have sat here hundreds of times watching her do for you, care for you, cook for you—”

  “And for you,” I said, refusing to be shamed.

  “Ellen,” he said, “I have to earn a living. To pay the mortgage. To pay the medical bills. Your mother understands.”

  “Is reconciled, you mean.”

  “You know nothing about it.” He picked up my book and raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you read this a hundred times?”

  “Apparently this is the book your wife gave up to marry you,” I said.

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “We’ve formed a book club. Mama wanted to read Pride and Prejudice. She started it at Columbia and stopped reading it the day you two got married.”

  “I don’t recall that she liked Austen very much.”

  “That’s not really accurate. She thinks Austen is condescending to women. Especially women with more conventional characters and expectations than those of Elizabeth Bennet.”

  My father shrugged. “Jane Bennet is as satisfied with her lot as any young woman in nineteenth-century fiction, as you well know.”

  “I’m not sure I remember,” I said. “Now that I’m a housewife I’ve got other things to think about.
Floor wax. Ironing. Which brings us back to our original discussion.”

  “Which seemed to me particularly futile. You and I have different roles to play here.”

  “I don’t like mine.”

  “It won’t last forever.”

  “That is a low blow,” I said.

  “Ellen, there is no reason for the two of us to be at cross-purposes. Your mother needs help. You love her. So do I.”

  “Show it,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Show it. Show up. Do you grieve? Do you care? Do you ever cry? And how did you let her get to this point in the first place? When she first felt sick, why didn’t you force her to go to the doctor?”

  “Your mother is a grown woman,” he said.

  “Sure she is. But wasn’t it really that you didn’t want your little world disrupted, that you needed her around to keep everything running smoothly? Just like now you need me around because she can’t. You bring me here and drop me down in the middle of this mess and expect me to turn into one kind of person when I’m a completely different kind and to be a nurse and a friend and a confidante and a housewife all rolled up in one.”

  “Don’t forget being a daughter. You could always be a daughter.”

  “Oh, Papa, don’t try to make me feel guilty. What about being a husband?”

  “That is none of your business. That is between your mother and me.” He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands. “These days at the beginning of term are very tiring. And I don’t have the energy for anger.” And he disappeared into the dark of the hallway and up the stairs. His voice came out of the black, disembodied, a kind of Cheshire Cat without the smile. “Don’t forget,” he added, “I take the night shift.”

  As I stood up to turn out the lights and go to bed I glanced at the picture of the three of us on the piano. I saw my mother’s glowing face, and thought of how she had made it possible for my father to believe that his world would be effortlessly cared for because she had, seemingly effortlessly, cared for it. I was beginning to understand the effort in the care now, and that made me angry, to know how she had pretended that he had a job and she had something so much less. And it made me fearful, too, of the future. The essential differences between my mother and me seemed less essential, now that I could see her sitting in the library at Columbia, reading her way through the classics. She had given that up for my father, and she had deferred to him ever since, it was true. But now I understood how easy it was to do what he required, particularly in the service of what seemed a worthy cause.

  I looked down at the three of us in the photograph, frozen in brilliant color beneath a sunny blue Cambridge sky. And I wondered how much I, too, had made possible my father’s unthinking primacy. Or was it their marriage I safeguarded, my mother ever sweet-tempered without the demands of my father’s intellectual arrogance, my father still enamored of his wife because he had another companion for his life of the mind? How providential that most children left home when they did, before they were wise enough to understand their parents.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” I said aloud, and as I stared at the picture it became abstract, a blur of color and light, subject to a hundred interpretations. Then I stepped back and it rearranged itself into what it had always been, a still life of happiness. My eyes were dry and sandy. I felt tired and sapped, as though I had been living here like this my whole life. As indeed I had, looking for myself in the space between the two of them.

  I felt undone by that night’s exchange with my father, as undone as I had been the day, years before, when I first began to understand that it was not only his work that kept him on the Langhorne campus long after classes were done for the day. Langhorne, too, had a library, though not as large and distinguished as Columbia’s. There was something churchlike about it, with its long and narrow stained-glass windows commemorating Shakespeare’s heroines and its plain benches flanking the big oak tables. I, too, went there to fill in the gaps in my public school education with ambitious social studies projects and papers on Conrad and Melville that were half cribbed from literary criticism texts.

  I don’t know what brought my father to the library one afternoon when I was working there, at a table with a gaggle of girls doing a group project deconstructing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. But I heard them clearly once he had stalked down the center aisle and into the stacks: the divine Professor G, one said, and who is it now, said another, since his teaching assistant went to Colby?, and I’d do him, said one with curly black hair and a big gap between her front teeth.

  No, they squealed, and a boy scratching away at a legal pad with a stack of reference books in front of him turned to glare at them. He’s old, he’s married, he grades so hard, they whispered.

  He’s my father, I thought.

  I could imagine the man he was to them, because I had seen that man myself, though rarely at home, where, it occurred to me, he rested up for the hard work of becoming that George Gulden, the lover, the dazzler, the charmer. I find it difficult to talk about my father’s charm today without reducing it to something akin to a snake in a basket and a fakir with a flute, talking about it the way you talk about drinking when you’ve been sober for years and all you can remember about a beer is what it was like to wrap your arms around the toilet at three A.M. and catch the sanctifying smell of bowl freshener as you threw up.

  But it was a real true thing. My father was cordial to men, albeit intent on making his word known, his word law, but to women he was courtly and so warm he appeared to be courting even the elderly and the very young. “My dear Mrs. Duane,” he would say as he stepped to the counter in the bookstore, “where might I find In Cold Blood) Your help will serve, not only me personally, but an entire generation of impressionable students who think of Truman Capote as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. And, by the by, if the jacket of that new Norman Mailer stacked in the window fades, will you consider pitching them all as a service to mankind, or, in deference to the head of women’s studies, who buys those copies of Germaine Greer you persist in ordering, a service to humankind?”

  Mrs. Duane was a sophisticated woman, the widow of a former State Department official who had remarried and moved to the country from an apartment on one of the museum blocks off Fifth Avenue. But she was helpless before the stream of pleasantries that my father could pour from the pitcher of that personality. I had watched her once shift a huge stack of The Canterbury Tales from one wall to another because my father had complained about finding them in the short-story section. “I would say, George, that you had the gift of blarney if only you were Irish,” she had said more than once. “I have gemütlichkeit,” said my father, “that’s what it is, whatever it is, be it some rich fruit dessert with clotted cream or a disease of the pancreas, I have it and it is yours. Have you the book?”

  “I have,” Mrs. Duane said. And if she hadn’t, she would have gotten it.

  He did this with me, too, when he remembered, although never once after I had come home to care for my mother. I can still remember how he taught me the ABCs in the evening before bed, when we were living in a small two-bedroom apartment on a back street far from the university in Princeton and I saw him on weekdays only when I was bathed and brushed and perfect in my long eyelet nightgowns. (My mother made those nightgowns. “I cannot for the life of me find a decent nightgown for a little girl anywhere!” she would say to her small group of faculty wives, who were perfectly satisfied to put their own children into Mickey Mouse pajamas or Doctor Dentons.) “A is for Aaaah-aaaah-aaaah-CHOOOOOO!” he would sneeze. “B is for blunderbuss. C is for cancan dancers kicking up their heels for Toulouse-Lautrec in the fin de siècle.” And so on until we got to Z, which was for Zsa Zsa Gabor. No one said Zsa Zsa like my papa.

  Sometimes, particularly if one of my girlfriends was in the car, he would sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” or recite slightly dirty limericks or compliment the girl extravagantly on an ACT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY T-shirt
(“Can human understanding surpass the sentiments now beating within—whoops, atop—your breast?”) Of course, they loved it all. “My father sits in the car and farts and tells me to shut up while he gets the sports scores off the radio,” said Jennifer Buckley, whose father owned a company that built supermarkets and public schools. “Your father knew one day that I was wearing Giorgio. Excuse me, but no contest.”

  But a man who can identify perfume on an eleventh grader sitting in the back seat of his car may have certain shortcomings as a father. One night in December, home for Christmas my first year at Harvard, I went to his office, high in one corner of an old limestone building that houses the English department and its classrooms. Grandma Nina had called from Florida, telling my mother in Polish that Grandpa had had a stroke and that the doctors believed he was going to die. The phones at the college were out of order because of a winter ice storm, some cables down, and so I took the footbridge, holding tight to the railings as the wind made the walkway sway, trying not to look at the cold river below, the water high on its banks.

  The guard waved me through, and when I got to the fourth floor the office door was closed, but I could hear sounds from within, moans, the thump of the old springs on my father’s shabby leather couch. “God, Beth,” I heard, even through the closed door. “Jesus Christ, Beth.” Beth was the name of a fierce feminist American history professor who was visiting from Rutgers. This is so banal, I thought to myself, using one of my father’s favorite words, so banal, people do this all the time. Carefully and quietly I took a sheet of stationery from the desk of the department secretary and wrote “Your wife wants you.” But I stood there and listened for a long time before I slid it under the door. Even now, all these years later, it gives me a sick feeling to think of it.