Michael, at fourteen, discovered that his stepfather had gone in for drug pushing in a small way, and was keeping his supplies, mostly speed, in Mary’s chest of drawers. He and Irene discussed turning him in to the police. They finally flushed the stuff down the toilet and said nothing to anybody. How could they talk to the cops when they couldn’t even talk to their mother? There was no telling what she knew and did not know; the word “know,” in this situation, grew hard to define. The one certain fact was, she was loyal. Victor was her husband. What he did was all right with her.
Michael was her first-born son, and what he did was all right too. But he would not accept that. It was immoral. If she had stayed loyal to his dead father, then her loyalty to him would have counted; but she had remarried…At seventeen Michael moved out, having got a job with a construction firm on the other side of the city. Irene had seen him only twice in the two years since.
As children she and Michael, less than two years apart in age, had been very close in spirit, sharing their world entirely. When he got to be about eleven Michael began to turn away from her, which seemed right or inevitable to her and so was a loss but no heavy grief; but as he came into full adolescence his rejection of her had become absolute. He spent his time with a male clique, adopting all their manner and rhetoric of contempt for the female, and sparing her none of it. This, which she could only feel as betrayal, happened at about the same time that her stepfather began to get really pushy, waylaying her on the way to the bathroom upstairs, pressing himself against her when he passed her in the kitchen, coming into her bedroom without knocking, trying to get his hand up her skirt. Once he caught her behind the tractor shed, and she tried to joke with him and make fun of him, because she could not believe he was serious until he was all over her suddenly heavy as a mattress, smothering and brutal, and she got away with a moment of luck and a sprained wrist. After that she knew never to be alone in the house with him and not to go into the back yard at all. It was hard always to be worrying about that. She wanted to tell Michael and get some support from him, a little help. But she couldn’t tell him now. He would despise her for allowing, inviting, Victor to hassle her. He already despised her for it, for being a woman, therefore subject to lust, therefore unclean.
So long as Michael lived at home, if she had actually yelled for help he would have come to her help. But if she yelled then her mother would know, and she didn’t want her mother to know. Mary’s life was built upon, consisted of, her love and loyalty, her family. To break those bonds would be to break her. If she had to choose, forced to it, she would probably stand up for her daughter against her husband: and then Victor would have all the excuse to punish her he wanted. Once Michael left, the only thing Irene could do was leave too. But she could not just clear out, like Michael, so long, been good to know you. Her mother had to have somebody around to depend on. She had had four pregnancies in the last five years, three of them ending in miscarriage. She was on the pill now but Victor didn’t know it because he believed that contraception “blocked the fertile material up in the glands” and forbade her to use contraceptives, which she probably wouldn’t do if Irene wasn’t there to encourage her and make a woman’s mystery of it. She had circulatory troubles; she had pyorrhea and needed major dental work, which she could get cheap at the Dental School, but only if somebody was willing to drive her clear out there every Saturday. Victor hit her around when he was drunk, not dangerously so far, though once he had dislocated her shoulder. Nobody was there with her most of the time but the children, and if she got seriously hurt or ill nobody might do anything about it at all.
She said to her daughter, with the tenderness that had to replace honesty between them, “Honey, why do you stick around out in this old dump? You ought to get a room downtown where you work, and be with some nice young people. It used to be nice out here, but these suburbs, housing developments, trash.”
Irene would defend her arrangement with Patsi and Rick.
“Patsi Sobotny, is that what you call a friend!”
Mary disapproved absolutely of Patsi for living with Rick unmarried. Once, exasperated, Irene had shouted at her, “What’s so great about marriage, according to you?” Mary had taken the attack straight on, without defense. She had stood still a minute, gazing across the dark kitchen at the window, and answered, “I don’t know, Irena. I’m old-fashioned, I think like people used to think, I know. But your father, see. Nick. It was—with him, you know, the sex, that was beautiful, you know, I can’t say it, but it was just one part. There was the whole thing. Everything else, your whole life, the world, see, is a part of it, like it’s a part of you, being a husband and wife like that. I don’t know how to say it. Once you know what it’s like, like that, once you felt that, nothing else makes so very much difference.”
Irene was silent, seeing in her mother’s face some hint of that central glory; seeing also the fearful fact that all the glory can happen and be done with by the age of twenty-two, and one can live for twenty, thirty, fifty years after that, work and marry and bear children and all the rest, without any particular reason to do so, without desire.
I am the daughter of a ghost, Irene thought.
Tonight, as she helped her mother clean up the kitchen, she told her that Patsi and Rick were on the way to breaking up. “So kick out that no-good Rick and you and Patsi find some nice girl to share with,” Mary suggested, enlisting promptly on the women’s side.
“I don’t think Patsi’ll want to. I don’t much want to go on rooming with her either.”
“Better than nobody,” Mary said. “You go around too much by yourself, you never have any fun, my baby. Hiking in the country by yourself! You ought to be dancing, not hiking. Or anyhow get into some kind of hiking club where there’s nice young people.”
“You got nice young people on the brain, mama.”
“Somebody has to have brains,” Mary said with calm self-satisfaction. She came up behind Irene at the sink and stroked her hair softly, making it into a cloudy, twisted mane. “Terrible hair you got. Greek hair, just like mine. You ought to move downtown. This is a dump out here.”
“You live here.”
“For me it’s right. For you not.”
The three boys irrupted into the kitchen and at once made Treese cry by grabbing her box of cereal and stuffing their mouths. They were so cataclysmic as a group that it was always surprising to find that, one at a time, each was a mousy little boy with a husky, mumbling voice. Mary had no control over anything they did outside the house, and they ran wild; indoors her sense of decorum prevailed over all the mindless disorder of their existence, and they obeyed her. She cleared them straight off to watch television, and turned back to her elder daughter. She was smiling, the slow, happy smile that showed her bad teeth and gums. She told the good news, the news too good to tell at once, too good to put off telling any longer: “Michael telephoned.”