Part 7 (2/2)

All of which was, though I hadn't foreseen it, an entirely predictable response In truth my mother had always been suspicious of women If there were two lines at the bank or the post office, she'd invariably queue up in the man's, even if the woman's was shorter The more important the circumstance-to purchase a money order, say, or pay a bill-the more determined she was to wait If a ne opened and she was asked by a female clerk if she could be of service, my mother would smile and say, ”Thank you, but I'll just wait for the man,” as if this were perfectly reasonable, as if hers was the well-established and undeniable preference of both genders Of course in those days the man was more likely to be senior, but it wasn't that sowith men She was attractive, andto help her out If sheout a form, they'd produce a new one and correct the error theht've sent her aith fine-print instructions

But it went deeper than that The whole ti up, I never knew my mother to have a female friend There was one woman, a coworker at GE, who-out over whata promotion my mother had assumed would be hers This was a pattern that would repeat itself again and again over the next several decades She'd e, usually at a new job, and they'd discover they had interests in common; a tentative friendshi+p would develop, one that seemed destined to evolve into e bad would happen Whether it was friction on the job, or that they'd becos always ended withbackstabbed She must've been as frequently disappointed by men as she was by women, but she treated these as individual, indeed isolated, cases Often, when she looked back on a failed ro that all the signs had been there and she'd just been too blind, too taken in, to see through his charm, whereas when a woman disappointed her, all women were to blame, and her resolution not to waste her tier That hy I was reluctant for her to so easily surrender her friendshi+p with Dot, her Winslow friend Their caun to wonder if the relationshi+p's longevity h

But perhaps not As her reaction to Hotel du Lac had demonstrated, her distrust of women was deep-seated While she must have realized that Brookner, at least thematically, was a potential soul h she'd understood the novel far better than anyone in my class, she'd disliked it every bit as much, if for the exact opposite reason Because it had challenged a received feminist truth about female solidarity,to them about the world Whereastold the truth That wasn't what she read fiction for

Indeed, the books I'd spent the afternoon packing-so varied in genre, including historical romances, detective novels, ro conventionality that couldn't entirely be accounted for by the decades, the Thirties through the early Sixties, during which e collection of murder mysteries was particularly instructive She lish variety, with its emphasis on the restoration of order In books by her favorite ”Golden Age” British haatha Christie-evil y corner, andinto teue aristocrat like Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn, ferreted out the culprit in a stunning display of logic, intuition and, often, an understanding of complex social realities for which aristocrats, in novels like these if nowhere else, are faht they were less clever, which was true enough; Raymond Chandler famously couldn't follow his own plots But they also operated on an entirely different set of premises Here detectives didn't solve crie In American detective novels the hero's primary virtues are his honesty and his ability to take a punch Sa order because, as he knows all too well, that order was corrupt to begin with Villains are typically either rich men who made their ination who aspire only to what money and power can buy, ant to move up in class and don't care how In this noir world, cops are on the take, lawyers and judges all have a price, as do doctors and newspapermen In a sea of corruption your only hope is a lone ht off by anybody who has ure in literature ests knight-errantry, and my mother was herself a romantic of the first order, but she had no more use for Marlowe than she had for Anita Brookner Men like Marloays ended up telling her what she didn't want to hear Okay, hechild or husband, but often you'd end up wishi+ng he hadn't, because he'd also find out so you didn't want to know about that child or husband or even yourself, so hard not to look at, or adood news from a fop like Lord Peter, whose sell-by date in the real world would have long since expired, had anyone like him ever existed in the first place

The historical novelsThey featured a brave, stalwart heroine who invariably would prove herself worthy of the dashi+ng fellow she'd fallen in love with, often by testing her mettle in his world If she fell in love with a pirate, she ht for a time become a pirate herself Their freedom from social mores, however, was understood to be a phase, like adolescence, and their adventures always cule, an institution that would tame the heroine's wilder impulses and make the hero a responsible citizen To facilitate these ue would be discovered to be actually an aristocrat who'd been cheated out of his estate, which in the final chapter is restored to him It was a complicated fantasy, one that allowed , in her heart of hearts, a conforh she claimed not to be a prude, she preferred sex not to be explicit but rather relegated to the space breaks or iiven the heroine by her parariardless of the genre She clailand or Spain, but in fact she needed books in these settings to be warm and comfy, ly, given that she'd felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was interested in She had exactly no interest in the future or in any past that didn't involve roh literary taste can be, the ht about it, neither my mother's library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to If my books were more serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature If I didn't read much escapist fiction, it was because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to escape I wasn't a superior person, just an educated one, and for that in large measure I had mya writer, but she wasone Back e lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at GE, afterthe laundry (without benefit of a washi+ngsure I was set for school the next day, she ht've collapsed in front of the television, but she didn't She read Every night Her taste, unformed as mine would later be by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced It was fro was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circuination, limitations from which readers are exe a reader, and that's what rown her books, they had a hand in shaping the kind of writer I'd eventually become-one who, unlike many university-trained writers, didn't consider plot a dirty word, who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension

No, in order to enetic pod, I needed to identify so in my basic nature, some habit of mind or innate ability that I'd always possessed, traceable all the way back to who I'd been on Helwig Street, not who I'd beco at it? Could it be that our bookshelves-not the books themselves or as in theement-provided the answer to why erheads? Teeks earlier, Barbara and I had hastily thrown onto the shelves astasks Indeed, since ht of as ”this now, that later” mode With dozens of tasks to co, to borrowprioritized and reprioritized This now, that latersound decisions on the fly about what had to be attended to now and what could wait Logic and reason were io on intuition and feel What you saw in your peripheral vision could be as i at directly On the basis of incouesses and try to see three or four moves in advance, to anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences before it kicked in Just as vital, you had to accept that you were going to make mistakes from time to time When you messed up, it was important not to mind and even more important to proiven moment there were decisions you siiven tied in was a kind of doood at that, God only knehy, because this was sootten how, back in Phoenix, I'd had to reorder her daily to-do lists so they made at least a little sense and we didn't waste ti at her due-south instincts and her inability, once she'd begun a task, to abandon it for a more important one She couldn't possibly have lived with the chaos of our bookshelves for two days,was costing her, that because of her inflexible adherence to poor sequencing she was forever discovering, too late, that her shi+p, which could easily have been turned around while out at sea, now had to be rotated in the cra to resequence my mother's to-do lists ever since, with decidedlyprinciple and say, ”Oh, aren't you clever!” But s her oay and become monumentally annoyed when I pointed out that B really had to follow A, that getting A right was the key to both B and C, that A was the necessary foundation upon which the re alphabet would rest To this she'd respond that different people saw things differently, and that to her, B was more important than A Worse, she was always so proud of her tortured logic She loved to explicate, detail by wobbly detail, how she'd arrived at her dubious conclusions She wasn't unlike the detectives in her locked-roo chapter how the villainous deed was done, that the less, which hy, once he'd re away on his stu the reader to say, ”I'hteen and reements over process were seldom serious She liked to say there was ot to be her age I'd have odd habits, too But over the years, as I becaly responsible for the outcos out of their natural and practical order, together withexplanations, there were ue, I'd just throw up my hands ”Do what you want,” I'd tell her, halfway out the door ”Letan hour later, and she'd say, ”Now I see what you meant” But just as often her voice would be triu into the round hole with a er to explain the brilliance of her violent solution This, then, was surely what I was looking for: the hardwired difference, probably genetic in origin, betweenconflict and the reason that I was seldom able, as she put it, ”to take her side”

Except this didn't really wash either For one thing, while it e and she sucked at it, a rand in the face of reason It would've been nice to see myself as Sisyphus and my current exhaustion as existential, the result of three-plus decades of atte to correctly sequence my mother's metaphorical to-do lists without her permission or assistance But in fact I orn out fro with the consequences of what Iwhen I stubbornly ignored Barbara's or Because surely some part of n in front of our Waterville hoine I could putit took for us to get settled

More specifically, the ti out Sinceto Cairls' bedrooms were on the second floor of the e, so ere often not aware of their co money from the sale of the Waterville property to convert the upstairs apartment into our master bedroom suite, but it hadn't even been shown in ht be exiled froress for the foreseeable future while carrying two e tuition would come due, as would Kate's to her new prep school The upscale assisted-living apartment we'd eventually found for my mother would cost al the rent a secret fro quit her job at Colby, was looking for work on the coast and not finding any, andfor screen projects forclear that the back-endfor fro to materialize for the simple reason that there wasn't any, at least not for writers, and only a fool would have believed otherwise As if all this weren't enough, I was still a good year fro paid for)but ratherhow the Ca us in it, I'd becoh but also blind to reason While there'd been numerous opportunities to turn this shi+p around, I'd stubbornly held to our dubious course, expertly navigating us into Camden's tiny, expensive harbor, where ere now trapped

All of which was beginning to feel like a cosmic I-told-you-so My mother's deep conviction had always been that she and I were cut froreed, she'd tell e, I'd think as she did, an assertion that never failed to infuriatebut her clone, and over the years nothing gaveshe was, that I most assuredly didn't think like she did, and that tiap, not narrowed it What I hadn't realized was that in addition to being dead wrong, she was also profoundly right, or would have been if her claim had been articulated just a little differently She said I'd one day think as she did; what she probably ed, and rigid

How could I have failed to see in ned to her? The evidence was everywhere Take, for instance, my freshman year at the university, when I'd becos, pinball For several months a particular machine in the basement of the student center took total possession of , after dinner at the cafeteria, I'd visited the game room with soot you three plays The next night, though, I'd returned without an thinking of thisdinner would beco on it before I could Once I'd claimed the machine, if I had a run of bad luck that necessitated et more quarters, and some other sallow, pathetic nerd was at its controls when I returned, I'd have to s a black, homicidal fury In a ame room I went to class, of course, but even there, as my professors spoke, I could hear s and clanks on the other side of ca bonus points froets that were hardest to hit, then the lovely, sweet thunk of free ga up in its tiny , a sound that caused the other wretched denizens of the game room to suspend their own activities and crowd around Soon, to ensure I'd have enough quarters to play for a couple of hours, I started selling ry anyway, and playing late into the evening when I should have been studying, stopping only when my luck and skill ran out Worse, since I always told arded hts and my pale, drained appearance when I finally returned to the dorm as evidence of a virtuous dedication they theirls from my classes I wanted to ask out, but whatever one byas wraithlike as Gollum with his ”Precious” For, onsothem made me ill Suddenly both sated and sane, I simply walked away and never went back

A couple years later, though, in graduate school, I was seized by my father's particulartrack in South Tucson and any nickel-and-dime poker table I could find The track was particularly depressing, a net for the city's poorest and hts were the worst because you could tell at a glance that sooing home, they'd cashed their paychecks at the track and were betting the week's groceryfor the abstruse data for tips; they were Gloversville ically transported to the desert, and here I was a a literature student, I was of course susceptible to metaphor, and when the ate and the foolish greyhounds bolted after it, I re if I was the only one in the park who understood its terrible significance, and if that e, dead-end jobs Poker? Well, betting nickels, diet hurt too bad That's what I toldthan such ugly, stupid obsessions was the fact that I couldn't even take credit for triu over theah Nor, to borrow -to That would have been pointless I knewNo, I'd simply bided my time and waited for the current madness to run its course, after which it would likely be replaced by soined idiocy, no doubt every bit as hu and self-destructive as the last Or perhaps worse This hat really terrified me If I could be seduced by a pinballtrack, ould I do if I was offered a real temptation? What if ivefor a life of the ood man? Or would I become a character out of a Jirip of so and merciless and utterly relentless? It was possible

The Cahters had taken summer jobs at a popular waterfront restaurant, and Barbara was off soot honawed at me as I'd driven home from Winslow, to our chaotic, ju to be unpacked But for sorateful to be alone Unless I wasinside ht about calling her and apologizing for everything, especially for asking her to do so I knew she was incapable of: to be patient for an unspecified period of ti up in the air But then I re out to dinner with Dot

Across the rooh shelf, were copies of books I'd written and literary periodicals where I'd published stories and essays and reviews Rising at last, I walked over and rannot so much with pleasure at the achieveest difference between my mother and me, I no clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal rail of huht well have been a woman, or a narcotic, or a bottle of tequila Instead I'd stuh my doctoral dissertation, I'd nearly quit so I could write full-tiifted or that one day I'd be able to earn a living I si track all over again An unreasoning fit of nized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about my responsibilities as a husband and father

It didn't take long forwas a line of work that suited ths, such as they were Because-and don't let anybody tell you different-novel writing isyour way around in the dark, trying to anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences Living with and welco, and when that doesn't work, trying soood idea for a better one Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five, orone foot in front of the other Taking s that when you've finally settled everything that can be, you'll immediately seek outto, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what randmother used to call sheer cussedness-character traits that had dogged both e The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea Call it whatever you want-except virtue

Real Time

WHEN SHE OPENED the door, I took an involuntary step back at the sight Her hair wild, her eyes wide and frantic, she was still in her nightgown, the rabbed ht forty-five, I told her I'd arrived, as I always did, at the appointedlate, even by a minute or tas always a mistake When I knocked, she'd often open the door before my hand could fall to my side; in winter she'd already have her coat on, her purse over her arm ”I saw you from the kitchen hen you pulled in,” she'd say, as if waiting at the as less nutty than waiting at the door So what on earth was this? Had she overslept? Given how lethargic she'd been lately, it was possible

But she wasn't lethargic now Indeed, when I told her the tiiven her clais always locked up whenever she had to hurry On the pad of paper she kept next to her telephone, she scrawled 8:45 and, underneath that, REAL TIME Then she stared at the pad, as if expecting the words or nue before her eyes

”Mom,” I said ”Why did you write down the ti what she'd just scribbled