The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  My father harbored a lot of anger towards the late Mr. Ferguson. “He died without a penny of insurance,” my father would say, pounding his fist on the table every time, in a tone of disgust that suggested that dying without insurance was equal to dying in a whorehouse or on the Bowery or running away with the underage maid. So Mrs. Ferguson was poor. Poor but middle class. Poor but genteel, and somehow she was able to support herself and her mother and her daughter by teaching Expression Lessons.

  Her daughter’s name was Celestine Lavonne. Mrs. Ferguson insisted that the accent be placed on the second syllable, Ce-LES-tine. I thought the name very romantic. I imagined it was French. But Celestine was anything but romantic. She was a stocky, good-natured redhead, and it was to Mrs. Ferguson’s credit that she accepted her daughter’s lack of dramatic talent, entire lack of romance, with a generous grace. Celestine went to business school. She became a bookkeeper. I don’t know what happened to her. I assume she married someone. I assume she had a happy life. There’s no reason to assume otherwise. Or maybe there is; maybe it’s true that most people don’t have happy lives. But it’s not the way I like to think about people like Celestine.

  The apartment they lived in was very small and very dark. I took my lessons in the living room, two thirds of which was taken up by the piano, so there was no room for a couch, only two berry-colored overstuffed chairs. There was a statue of the Venus de Milo on the top of the piano; its whiteness shone out like a small moon in the room that was always dark. The curtains were heavy, plum-colored; velvet. They were lined with a satiny material the color of rich cream.

  When I say that my Expression Lessons with Mrs. Ferguson were a product of a vanished America, I mean it in more ways than one. That kind of emphasis on being “a good speaker,” the very word “elocution,” is something that was disappearing even as I came of age. But there was another way in which what happened in the Ferguson apartment was a vanishing America. Mrs. Ferguson’s mother, whom we called Grandmother Geer, was in her nineties when I was taking my lessons. She spent most of her time in bed, lying on a cot in the back room. But she liked seeing people, and I was a nice boy, old ladies tended to love me, and Mrs. Ferguson would bring me in to say hello when our lesson was done. She loved telling stories, and her favorite one was to say that her father had shaken George Washington’s hand and had put her up on his shoulders to hear the Lincoln-Douglas debates. She made the point that her father was very old when she was born—in his sixties, she said, with a shy pride in his late virility, I now understand. I’ve calculated the dates, and they work: if she was born in the 1840s and her father was in his sixties when she was born, then he was born in the 1780s, and Washington didn’t die till 1799. So there I was, with the history of America embodied in an ancient old lady, with a face that looked like a walnut shell, but a pleasant one, lying on a cot in the back room of an apartment that was paid for by Expression Lessons, taken by people like me, because of mothers with some half-baked idea of a higher culture.

  But when I think of what Mrs. Ferguson gave me as the poem that was meant to be my pièce de résistance, that I performed for the women’s clubs and the Rotary Club and the Lions, I am appalled and ashamed for all of us. Was there any excuse for the kind of ignorance we all lived in? Could you call it innocence? If you did it then, you can’t now. This is nothing I’ve talked to my children about.

  The poem was called “The Glory Road.” I wish the words weren’t in my brain, but that’s the curse of early memorization: it’s cut in the grooves of the mind forever. “The Glory Road” is about a black man being visited on his bed by God himself.

  O I lay upon mah pallet

  Till about one o’clock

  And de lawd came a-callin

  All his faithful flock

  And he called Hooee

  And he called Hooee

  And I cry Massa Jesus is you callin me

  And I riz upon my pallet and I cry

  Ere’s me

  Mrs. Ferguson made a point of my emphasizing the difference in tone and emphasis as the “hooees” are repeated. This was a way of using my vocal exercises, showing my vocal range. Up to this point, except for the insult implied by the imposition of uneducated dialect by a person of a different culture and a different diction—there’s not so much to object to. But the objectionable enters quite soon.

  Nigger, you must travel back

  To help poor sinners

  Up de glory track

  To help poor mourners

  And de scoffing coons

  By shoutin loud

  Halleluiah tunes

  I now understand that it fell under the category of white people’s appropriation of black folk material. I suppose they thought it was a kind of homage, a kind of sympathetic attention. But now it’s impossible to see it as anything but grotesquely insulting.

  Can we be excused for this, pardoned on the grounds that we meant no harm? I sometimes think that we cannot be pardoned. It’s why I’m not patient with people my age who bathe in the warm stream of nostalgia. That stream had horrible breeding creatures on the bottom, and if we happened not to be attacked and destroyed by them—well, that was luck, or privilege. But there is no sense pretending that the killing creatures weren’t there.

  So do I have to say that the people whom I loved and lived among were poisoners and if not killers then implicated in the killing that went on? Do I have to say that about my mother, whom I adored?

  My poor mother. It must have been confusing for her, trying to understand me in those years. Trying to figure out the right way to deal with me. God knows I was confused. I loved my mother; I loved her till her death at ninety-six, and all through my childhood I loved her unequivocally. I knew I was the favorite of her sons, and that it was a secret we both felt bound to keep, so that we were only entirely free when we were alone and could express our delight in the other’s company. But then I became a teenager and feared that my love for my mother was not quite manly. That I had to create a distance between us, a distance I wanted only half or perhaps less than half the time, to escape a closeness that I loved and feared … so I was often saying things to her I didn’t mean and acting in ways I didn’t want to.

  Like the day I was going to introduce Thomas Mann when she was brushing off my shoulders. I was enjoying it very much but felt I had to say, “Cut it out, Mom, it’s no big deal.”

  Did I say that so she would have to say, “No big deal? No big deal. Why, Billy Morton for land sakes, what’s a big deal if not interviewing onstage the most famous writer alive in the world today? A winner of the Nobel Prize. Shoot, Billy, you were the one chosen to interview Thomas Mann. It’s a very great honor. It shows how highly everyone thinks of you. Your teachers. The principal even told me he couldn’t think of anyone who would be more of a credit to the school.”

  And as she said that, as she was running the bristles of the brush over my shoulders, I was thinking, If they only knew what I was really like. If they only knew I am really a monster.

  And then came the thought of Laurel Jansen, who had not chosen me, the girl of my dreams, the thought that maybe I was the choice of Mr. and Mrs. Hauptmann and all the teachers and even the principal, maybe even the whole student body would have chosen me, but Laurel did not. And I thought of Laurel and the smell of her hair, and, even as my mother was running the bristles of the silver brush over my shoulders, I got a hard-on. And I knew myself to be a monster. But then the thought of Dolph Johnson, whom Laurel had chosen over me, Dolph who was playing halfback for Purdue and wouldn’t have known Thomas Mann from Tom Mix, and my hard-on went down. I hated Dolph Johnson with a ferocity that made me suspect I was another kind of monster, and I hated myself because I thought that maybe Laurel, who was the smartest girl in our class, had chosen that chucklehead over me because she thought I was not quite manly. And then I thought, If that’s what being manly is, I want no part of it. I will have to think of another way of being a man. But what I really believed was
that I would have been willing to be any kind of man at all if Laurel would have chosen me. Would have loved me. And sometimes I hated her because she could make me feel these things, and I had fantasies about doing terrible things to her, tying her up, hitting her, and sometimes that would arouse me and then I knew I was truly a monster and it was only a matter of time before everyone would know.

  It was enormously helpful to me when Mr. Hauptmann said, “The most important thing to remember about Death in Venice is that it’s about the impossible paradox of having both a mind and a body.” But that was much later, and it didn’t seem to help for long.

  A mind and a body. Because of my mind, my body was more and more a source of anguish to me now. There would be times when my body was the pleasure to me it had always been. But more and more it was unruly, shameful. I almost thought I should talk to the doctor about it, but I would never have made a special appointment to do that. I was glad to have to have a tetanus shot when I stepped on a rusty nail, glad that it was he who brought it up. “Old Man Sex getting you down?” he asked, after I’d put my shirt back on. I didn’t know what to answer. He was a good man, Dr. Larkin, and he said, “Just remember a lot of things that seem troubling are entirely normal. Entirely normal.”

  Do you mean that I am not a monster? I wanted to ask. But I said nothing and finished buttoning up my shirt.

  Then when I got home I worried that there was something about me, some telltale sign that had given me away: that sex was giving me trouble. I’d heard it called self-abuse. I knew some of the things I’d heard couldn’t be true: that it could make you blind. But I also knew that when I’d spent whole days in my room doing nothing but masturbating I could see a kind of pasty look when I looked in the mirror, and I was pretty sure there were dark circles under my eyes even though I’d got plenty of sleep. I wanted to ask Dr. Larkin if it was a sign of mental illness that I masturbated so much. That I woke up every morning in a pool of my own semen no matter how many times I’d jerked off the day, or even the night before. Was I afflicted with some sort of excess fluid that could lead to a future of invalidism, perhaps an early death?

  This is another story I told my children, that I’ve even told my grandchildren (they’re old enough for it now) that makes them understand the kind of foolish boy I was. I’d been very worried that my mother would know about what I considered my obsessional masturbation because she’d discover the caked handkerchiefs in the laundry. That she couldn’t possibly ignore the stained sheets. But of course nothing was ever said.

  There was a laundry chute that led from the second floor, where the bedrooms were, to the basement, where the washing machine sat. You simply threw your dirty laundry down the chute and it landed in the basement, right into a basket that my mother could carry to the washing machine. Sometimes, for some reason, some of the laundry would miss its mark and would land on the concrete floor and my mother would have to bend to pick it up and I could hear her—if I happened to be in the kitchen—saying “Oh shoot” and something about old bones.

  One night at supper, she said to my father, “Dan, the strangest thing. You know how sometimes the laundry misses the basket and falls onto the floor? Well today I bent to pick it up from the floor and every single thing I picked up was full of little holes, little holes with brown rings around them as if something had eaten into the clothing some way. Luckily it was just a pile of handkerchiefs and so it’s no big loss.”

  My children, my grandchildren now get almost sick with laughter as I reenact the panic that I felt when I heard my mother say those words. I was terrified; what I’d feared was true. There was something inside me, some toxic substance that was dangerous and poisonous and destructive to anything it touched. Here was the proof.

  My mother was surprised when I excused myself before dessert and said I had to study for a math test. But of course I couldn’t concentrate on math or anything, I was so appalled at myself, at what had been discovered or revealed. Then I heard my parents laughing downstairs, laughing in that way that reminded me that they had a life outside me, that had nothing to do with me or my brother, that had begun before we were born, that would go on after we’d all left the house. Too often now they argued. It was always about money. The Depression. My mother was tired and disappointed. My father was tired and ashamed. But now they were joyous, light. They were laughing. My mother was laughing louder than my father. My mother was famous for her laugh. People who liked her loved her laugh, they said it was infectious, but they employed the metaphor of infection in a positive sense, as if she were without their will infusing joy into their bloodstreams. But people who didn’t like her—some of the women in the church—said she was loud. She’d been terribly hurt when she’d overheard the minister’s wife saying: “Why is it that wherever Mae Morton is, there is always a noise?”

  I went downstairs to see what they were laughing about; I needed the relief from my own misery and self-loathing and terror at being exposed.

  “Your father’s solved the mystery. The mystery of the small holes in the laundry.”

  I was terrified again. Why were they laughing at what so clearly was not a laughing matter?

  My father explained that he’d left an old car battery in the basement, absentmindedly putting it in a place where it shouldn’t have been (that wasn’t like him. A place for everything and everything in its place was one of his favorite sentences). The clothes had fallen on top of the battery and the battery had been leaking acid. The little holes in the handkerchiefs came from the leaky acid. “End of mystery,” he said.

  I heard a sound come out of my mouth, the same mouth that had, only minutes before, tasted of ashes, the ashes of shame, and now was sluiced with a wonderful, cool relief. I think the sound I made could only be called a hoot.

  “It is pretty darn funny,” my father said.

  It had been a long time since I had loved my parents so much.

  But I was still worried about what I felt was excessive masturbation, and since Dr. Larkin had raised the topic, I asked him if he thought there was such a thing.

  “Not a tall, not a tall,” he said. “You’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly healthy. In time, it will sort itself out. The important thing is not to worry. You have a fine healthy body. The least you can do is to enjoy it.”

  And when Dr. Larkin said that, I remembered that there were things I loved, things I loved about being Bill Morton, about being alive and seventeen years old. Things I loved on the surface of my skin and in the depths of my muscles and in the speed and strength and lightness of my limbs. That I loved all kinds of weather, the cold, blue-white snow, the slow light summer breezes, carrying the wonderful smells, my mother crushing some herbs in her fingers and saying, This is thyme, this is the mountain thyme, Billy, and even thunder and lightning, and the feel of the cool sand under my bare feet. And swimming, how I loved swimming—jumping into the cold lake, knowing my body would forget the shock soon and the cold would be exhilaration only. Making my way so easily, simply through the water, effortless, and putting my head under the water and seeing the colors changing as the light fell differently, and made shadows and patterns on the sand below, and the sun’s rays striking straight down through the bottom like gold spokes and the reflection of the trees when the lake was still, like a sheet of lime-colored spun sugar, so you were surprised when you tasted it that it wasn’t sweet at all, only the complicated lake taste that reminded you that somewhere you couldn’t see some rich life was going on and now you were part of it and it of you. And the light on the water, wonderful, at any time, in any weather.

  That was what I talked to Mrs. Hauptmann about—the light on the water—when she gave me that passage from The Hairy Ape to read. I had no idea that this would be the beginning of a conversation that would blast a hole right through my easy life, my easy happiness.

  In her copy of The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Hauptmann had underlined one of Paddy’s speeches for me to deliver. Paddy the old Irish sailor, a foil for Ya
nk with his dreams of force.

  “The Irish are the true poets of the English tongue.”

  I’d never thought of the Irish in that way. Jimmy Riley and Mike Costelloe were Irish. I thought they were great guys, imaginative, interesting, with good senses of humor. But poets … No, I would never have connected the word with them. Their fathers worked in the steel mills and they didn’t seem to have a whiff of romance about them. They were always kidding me for being too much of a dreamer. “Billy has his head in the clouds so he falls on his ass. I have my nose to the sidewalk, and someday I might find a diamond.” That was what Jimmy Riley said to me one day. I didn’t think of that as poetry.

  I’ve never seen a production of The Hairy Ape and I can only imagine that some people would find the language overwrought, but I thought it was wonderful; it was thrilling to me that what I felt about the water—although it was only Lake Michigan and I had never been on a boat that could hold more than four people—had been written about by someone acknowledged to be a great writer. I can call the words up in a second, three quarters of a century later.

  “Oh, to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and the days! Full sail on her! Nights and days! Nights when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire, when the sky’d be blazing and winking wid stars. Or the full of the moon maybe. Then you’d see her driving through the gray night, her sails stretching aloft all silver and white, not a sound on the deck, the lot of us dreaming dreams.… And there was the days, too.… Sun warming the blood of you and wind over the miles of shiny green ocean like strong drink to your lungs.”