Read Online Men and Angels by Mary Gordon - Free Book Online Page A

people had been let go, people she respected, whose work she knew had been praised. But three had been kept on, and she hadn’t been one of them. For months, she’d reviewed her performance and her work: what had she failed to do or done too much of? In the end, she felt she simply lacked distinction, that she was the sort of person no one would be afraid to let go: there would be no need to feel uncomfortable, to feel afraid.
    She had felt shame then, as she had never in her life felt it before. Always, she had been the one who got the prizes, was accepted into the right schools, earned the high honors. For the first time then, she understood the pain of all the children sent down after missing a word in the spelling bee while she had stood on the stage, triumphant; she understood the desire to hide that friends of hers who hadn’t been let into the right schools had felt. She knew, for the first time then, that failure made you feel like a criminal; that it became a part of your physical life, like the convict’s shaved head. For years she’d felt marked by it, and only Ianthe had allowed her to enter the world again, almost naturally. In praising her—particularly since she praised so rarely—it was as though Ianthe had bought her new clothes and allowed her to leave behind her convict’s suit; it was as if she’d built her a house in which she could grow her hair so that she could, once more, walk out into the street unmarked and common.
    Besides all that, Ianthe made her laugh, and she loved to laugh; that was the common thread among her three best friends in town, Ianthe, Adrian and Barbara Greenspan. They made her laugh. She had always known herself to be the perfect straight man; she was like her father in that. It was fine; she enjoyed her friends enormously. And now she could endure Ianthe’s insult, for, after all, she had got her way. She would not go to the gallery until afternoon. She could go back to work.
    She’d taken over Michael’s study. For days she’d hesitated. The room was his; it was the one room in the house set apart, exclusively owned. Even the air seemed of a different quality: cooler, lighter, as if the children’s flesh, the smells of cooking, the fog of argument, the quick dense breath of sex had not come near it. The books were Michael’s, and the furniture; he had chosen the color of the walls—Williamsburg blue—and the Turkish carpet, light blue and red, the best in the house. On the walls were his pictures, the photograph of Colette, a page from an eighteenth-century edition of Candide , the Daumier print she had saved for six months to buy him. She fingered the raised letters on the spine of the bound copy of his dissertation: The Image of the City in Balzac, Zola, and Proust.
    She had been working at the dining room table. That was all right as long as the children were in school or asleep in the evenings. But Laura was around now, and she didn’t feel it was right to limit her free access through the dining room. With Laura around she never felt that she was unobserved.
    Yet she had to admire the job Laura was doing; she was wonderful with the children, marvelous around the house. On one of Anne’s days in the city, the refrigerator stopped running. Laura took care of the melting ice cream, running to the floor like a sticky cartoon rainbow; she saved the stews and casseroles and vegetables Anne had spent days cooking and freezing. She scrubbed the floors and moved the refrigerator, stowed the perishables next door at the Greenspans’, kept the milk safe for the children by filling the sink with bags of ice. When Anne got home, there was only the report of a crisis averted, not the desperate physical evidence. Laura had even called the electrician Barbara had recommended, for she saw that the lights were dimming and there had to be a problem with the wiring. The electrician had come and had concurred; he could fix the problem temporarily, but the house would need