Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was one of those problems, simple, or impossible of solution, to which the mind insanely clings in order to avoid the mind's real trou ble. I spent most of that day at the downtown apartment of a girl I knew, celebrating my birthday with whiskey and wondering what to wear that night. When planning a birthday celebration NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 77 one naturally does not expect that it will be up against com petition from a funeral and this girl had anticipated taking me out that night, for a big dinner and a night club afterwards. Sometime during the cour se of that long day we decided that we would go out anyway, when my father's funeral service was over. I imagine I decided it, since, as the fu neral hour approached, it became clearer and clearer to me that I would not know what to do with myself when it was over. The girl, stifling her very lively concern as to the possible effects of the whiskey on one of my father's chi ef mourners, concentrated on being conciliatory and practically helpful. She found a black shirt for me somewhere and ironed it and, dressed in the darkest pants and jacket I owned, and slightly drunk, I made my way to my father's funeral. The chapel was full, but not packed, and very quiet. There were, mainly, my father's relatives, and his children, and here and there I saw faces I had not seen since childhood, the faces of my father's one-time friends. They were very dark and sol emn now, seeming somehow to suggest that they had known all along that something like this would happen. Chief among the mourners was my aunt, who had quarreled with my father all his lif e; by which I do not mean to suggest that her mourn ing was insincere or that she had not loved him. I suppose that she was one of the few people in the world who had, and their incessant quarreling proved precisely the strength of the tie that bound them. The only other person in the world, as far as I knew, whose relationship to my father rivaled my aunt's in depth was my mother, who was not there. It seemed to me, of course, that it was a very long fi.meral. But it was, if anything, a rather shorter funeral than most, nor, since there were no overwhelming, uncontrollable ex pressions of grief, could it be called-if I dare to use the word-successfi.ll. The minister who preached my father's funeral sermon was one of the few my father had still been seeing as he neared his end.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His ears, I think, were nearly deafened by the roar, all about him, not only of falling idols but of falling enemies. Strange people indeed crossed oceans, from Mrica and America, to come to his door; and he really did not know who these people were, and they very quickly sensed this. Not until the very end of his lit e, judging by some of the stories in his last book, Eight Men, did his imagination really begin to assess the century's new and terrible dark stranger. Well, he worked up until the end, died, as I hope to do, in the middle of a sentence, and his work is now an irreducible part of the his tory of our swift and terrible time. Whoever He may be, and wherever you may be, may God be with you, Richard, and may He help me not to tail that argu ment which you began in me. III. ALAS , POOR RICHARD And my record' s clear today, the church brothers and sisters used to sing, for He washed my sins away, And that old account was settled long ago! Well, so, perhaps it was, for them; they were under the illusion that they could read their records right. I am far from certain that I am able to read my own record at all, I would certainly hesit ate to say that I am able to read it right. And, as f(>r accounts, it is dou btful that I have ever really "settled" an account in my life. Not that I haven't tried . In my relations with Richard, I was always trying to set the record "straigh t," to "settle" the accou nt. This is but another way of saying that I wanted Richard to sec me, not as the youth I had been when he met me, but as a man. I wanted to feel that he had accepted me, had accepted my right to my own vision, my right, as his equal, to disagree with him. I nour ished for a long time the illusion that this day was coming. One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his ALAS, POOR RI CHARD 259 face, and say, "Oh, that)s what you mean." And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun. And the great value of this dialogue would have been not only in its power to instruct all ofy ou, and the ages. Its great value would have been in its power to instruct me, its power to instruct Richard: for it would have been nothing less than that so univ ersally desired, so rarely achieved reconciliation be tween spiritual father and spiritual son. Now, of course, it is not Richard's fault that I felt this way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  At the crucial hour, he can hardly look to his artistic peers for help, for they do not know enough about him to be able to correct him. To continue to grow, to remain in touch with himself , he needs the support of that community from which, however, all of the pressures of American lif e incessantly conspire to remove him. And when he is effectively removed, he falls silent -and the people have lost another hope. Much of the strain under which Lorraine worked was pro duced by her knowledge of this reality, and her determined refusal to be destroyed by it. She was a very young woman, with an overpowering vision, and fame had come to her early-she must certainly have wished, often enough, that fame had seen fit to drag its feet a little. for fame and rec ognition are not synonyms, especially not here, and her fame was to cause her to be criticized very harshly, very loudly, and very often by both black and white people who were unable to believe, apparently, that a really serious intention could be contained in so glamorous a frame. She took it all with a kind of astringent good humor, refusing, for example, even to con sider defending herself when she was being accused of being a "slum lord" because of her family's real- estate holdings in Chicago. I called her during that time, and all she said-with a wry lau gh-was, "My God, Jimmy, do you realize you're only the second person who's called me today? And you know how my phone kept ringing bef ore! " She was not surprised. She was devoted to the human race, but she was not romantic about it. When so bright a light goes out so early, when so gifted an artist goes so soon, we are lef t with a sorrow and wonder which speculation cannot assuage. One's filled for a long time with a sense of injustice as futile as it is powerful. And the vanished person fills the mind, in this or that attitude, doing this or that. Sometimes, very briefly, one hears the exact in fl ection of the voice, the exact timbre of the laugh-as I have, when watching the dramatic presentation, To Be Young, Gifted and Blaclt, and in reading through these pages. But I do not have the heart to presume to assess her work, t(>r all of it, t(>r me, was sutl"u sed with the light which was Lorraine. It is possible, for example, that 1he Sign In Sidne y Brustein 's 760 OTH ER ESS AYS Window attempts to say too much; but it is also exceedingly probable that it makes so loud and uncomfortable a sound because of the surrounding silence; not many plays, presently, risk being accused of attempting to say too much!

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I knew just how his shoulders moved, and how the hairs grew on his chest and at the bottom of his back, and between his legs. I knew where his appendix scar was, and the rings of his vaccination on the upper arm. I knew what he could do with those big limbs in his other life, his love life. In spite of disaster all that still seemed a triumph. You'll think I'm mad. He could have walked over then and arrested me; he saw me weeping in the crowd and maybe didn't know it was not for Orst but for him. He gave me a look, but he didn't betray me." "But he already had betrayed you!" "Well, I don't think he betrayed me to anything like the same degree as I betrayed Edgard Orst, and the blameless people who protected him." "And you can't be sure you were responsible—the house was being watched, you don't know how he died . . ." "But how does one know what one is responsible for? It seems to me a youngster cannot know. He picks up an older person's life and then—he is distracted, self-absorbed, over-zealous, or perhaps quite unreflecting, he's no idea what he's doing—lets it drop." For all the humiliations Paul was owning up to, I felt again his subtle grasp on life, the quick intelligence that was impotent against his own problems, which it could only watch and bemoan. And then the confession itself was so hopelessly belated, kept back, by some begrudging mechanism, until the secret it enshrined had spread and shadowed his existence almost to the end. I felt properly sorry for him, but was aware too that the long perspective of his revelations made him faintly unattractive to me. I sighed and shook my head and wondered if there was some way in which I could politely dissociate our two predicaments. "Now let's go and see this sculpture of his," he said. We waited in silence for the lift to rattle down. I knew I was failing to make the capable response, and sensed his disconcertment—it was tinged with a panic that he overrode with a fresh avowal: "I can't quite explain how it is that you've helped me so much with all this, but you have—oh, you've helped in a dozen ways with the proofs and your patient work, but that's not quite it." He hesitated. "I've sometimes felt like protracting the catalogue even longer, just to keep you busy and looking after me, to keep us looking after each other." There was a ping! and the doors slid open on to an aroma of cigar-smoke, like the still fresh trace of a wanted man. We stood inside, the doors closed, and after a second or two of ascent Paul kissed me on the cheek and flung his arms around me, banging his briefcase against the small of my back.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Paula and I settled in for a heart-to-heart talk that lasted three and a half hours. She told me that her memory of the postdivorce years is “a blur,” but I remembered this little girl and her family quite clearly. The younger of two children, Paula was four years old when her young parents separated. Her father, a handsome, charming man from an affluent family, had been a pharmacist who owned three drugstores. He had been a devoted husband, proud of his pretty, lively wife, and close to his daughters, who resembled him in their looks and gestures. He delighted in the likeness and loved to take them both to the local playground where people admired the children’s high spirits and friendliness. Unfortunately, he made some very bad investments in the market on the advice of a friend who deceived him, and trying desperately to cover his losses and keep the information from his wife and parents, he got deeper into debt. By the time Paula turned three, he could no longer hide his financial ruin. Forced into bankruptcy, he had to sell the three stores and have his other assets frozen. Overcome with guilt, he could not bear coming home to his wife and children. Soon Paula’s parents began to fight, often and loudly. Paula’s mother, a cheerful woman who enjoyed taking care of her home and her children, became increasingly desperate as her husband spent more time away from home. The marriage ended when Paula’s father came home one Christmas Eve too upset and depressed about his financial problems to go to the family party given by his parents. When Paula’s mother accused him of not caring about her and the children, he exploded—hitting her for the first and only time. The children were standing three feet away, eyes bulging in terror. After their agitated father ran out of the house, the children watched their mother as she sat heavily in a chair, her head buried in her sweater, rocking back and forth. Paula wedged herself into the chair beside her weeping mother. “Are you scared of Daddy, Mom?” her mother remembers Paula asking. When her mother nodded, Paula silently took her “Blankie” and wrapped it around her mother’s shoulders. The story of Paula’s family is all too common. Most people are familiar with the fact that nearly half of all first marriages end in divorce. But what they don’t know is that each year an estimated five hundred thousand children under the age of six find themselves in Paula’s shoes—small, uncomprehending, frightened, and vulnerable.1 As they grow up, they retain very few memories of life before the divorce with two parents at home. Most of what they know and remember stems from being raised in the postdivorce family. The family that created them simply vanished.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His blackness had been equiv ocated by powder and there was no suggestion in that casket of what his power had or could have been. He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone either joy NOTES OF A NA TIVE SON 81 or pain. Ye t, his lif e filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the lif e of man. After the funeral, while I was downtown desperately cele brating my birthday, a Negro soldier, in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock, got into a fight with a white policeman over a Negro girl. Negro girls, white policemen, in or out of uni form, and Negro males-in or out of uniform-were part of the furniture of the lobby of the Hotel Braddock and this was certainly not the first time such an incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an unprecedented publicity, tor the fight between the policeman and the soldier ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, flowing immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been shot in the back, an instantaneous and revealing invention, and that the soldier had died protecting a Negro woman. The tacts were somewhat different-f or example, the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this inven tion expressed and corroborated their hates and tears so per fectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Chris tianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. The effect, in Harlem, of this particular legend was like the effect of a lit match in a tin of gasoline. The mob gathered bef ore the doors of the Hotel Braddock simply began to swell and to spread in every direction, and Harlem exploded. The mob did not cross the ghetto lines.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Lisa sobs as she contemplates her mother’s plight and wonders what she should do. Another young woman told me that when she closes her eyes, she sees the figure of her mother “for the sad, repressed woman that she is and I cry and cry and feel that I’ll never stop crying.” Another said, “It used to be that I wasn’t sure where she left off and where I began. I feel more separate now but I pity her and I worry about her.” Another said, “My mother is a fettered person. She has the right tools but she can’t make the shift since the divorce. She’s wandered around in chains.” Most said that they don’t want to be like their mothers because that would be courting failure. They think of their mothers as women who have not been able to keep their dad’s love or to capture the love of another man. And they are terrified of growing up to be like them. The mother evokes an extraordinary mix of love, compassion, and frightened rejection. Moreover, the girl is deeply afraid that she will succeed where her mother failed. Everywhere she walks, the ice is thin. If she follows in her mother’s footsteps, she fears that she’ll end up alone and miserable. If she leaves her mother to pursue her own career, she repeats her father’s rejection and leaves her mother alone and grieving. If she stays at her mother’s side, she’ll give up a life of independence, her career, and the man she wants. If she’s happy in a relationship with a desirable man, then she commits the ultimate betrayal. She has taken what her mother never had and never will have. This dilemma is widespread. In one form or another, it’s the central drama of many sensitive, devoted daughters who grow up in the loving care of an unhappy, lonely mother who has been left by her husband or who may have sought the divorce but failed to fill the void that was left. For example, from age twenty to thirty-two, Denise lived with a man who criticized and humiliated her. “I believed him when he said that I was bad person,” she told me. When I saw her in her early thirties she had finally left him and was dating an eligible, attractive man. “I’ve been on a long detour,” she explained. “It’s long overdue but I’m finally finding my way. I’ve been preoccupied with what happened to my mom when I was ten years old. I think I’m free of her now. My mind and her mind are not enmeshed anymore. I feel separate now, though I still feel guilty.” Denise married her boyfriend of three years when she was thirty-seven. No one in her family, including her mom, was invited to the ceremony, which took place at dawn overlooking Zion National Park in Utah.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  pended in Jell-O. Depending upon their colors, they were called “Life,” “Soul,” “Etheric,” or “Serenity.” He also made mobiles, the same blobby shapes cut from cardboard boxes, painted with Day-Glo acrylic and hung from twisted coat hangers—the air flowing between the forms, he said, was Spirit directing their movements. For our second date he picked me up at five a.m. in his cab and we drove to the Bay to watch the sun rise. Steven shuddered, remembering the rats in Viet Nam, rats as big as cats we were souls inhabiting human bodies, we told each other, with enough spiritual discipline we could breaks the bonds of this plane, visit the wisdom temples, the white deserts of Venus my heart, like the horizon, turned golden, pink, extravagant. I had a master’s degree, but I was still a child, I’d had sex maybe twenty times with fifteen men, but never a boyfriend. When, after a couple of months, Steven announced he no longer wanted to fuck me, I started crying. I’d always been willing, I even kind of liked it why why why why why why . . . “Steven,” I pleaded, “what did I do wrong?” “Nothing, Carla, you did nothing, it’s just that after Anya, Earth women just don’t do it for me, or not for long, that’s all.” Anya, Anya, Anya! Long ago she’d moved to Berlin, Anya didn’t even send him postcards anymore but he would never move on to me, how bland I must seem how nothing beside Anya’s Venusian tantra, her extraterrestrial tricks. I sniveled, my lower lip trembling like the San Andreas fault. He pulled a hanky from his pocket and handed it to me, it was large and white and so soft. “Steven!” I wailed. “Don’t worry,” he said, taking me in his arms, “there’s no reason we still can’t sleep together, we just won’t fuck, and I’ll wear my Jockeys.” And that’s just what we did, sort of. I hated those Jockeys, standing between me and his creamy flesh vile cotton like Tristan and Isolde’s sword. I continued to sleep naked, to spite them. Steven would wait for a perfect moment of unwillingness, when I was asleep or pissed off—the jockeys would vanish and he’d crawl on top, force my legs apart and bang into me so hard my guts sloshed upward squishing my lungs BREATH as he climaxed he yelled out, “WHAT IS HAPPENING ... TO ME!!!!” Then he rolled over and we never talked about it. Once I inadver tently came too. “That was great!” I exclaimed to his back. Steven turned around, his face skewed with disgust. “You treat me like I’m your stud.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And so the nonce-world, which became my world, closed about me, offered me its pitiful comforts, and began to reveal its depths—now murky, now surprisingly coralline and clear. My guide and companion in this was a young man I met after a week or so, a well set-up, rather tongue-tied little chap called Bill Hawkins. I had noticed him early on, and was not surprised to find that he spent a lot of time in the gym: he had a fine torso and packed shoulders. We played a few games of draughts together on my first Sunday evening. He clearly wanted to talk to me, but was uncertain how to go about it, so I drew him out. It transpired that he had been for over a year the lover of a teenage boy who trained at the sports club in Highbury where Bill was employed. They saw each other every day, and were blissfully happy, though Alec, as the boy was called, avoided his old friends and caused concern to his parents by his singular behaviour. Twice Bill and Alec went to Brighton and spent the weekend in a guesthouse owned by a friend of the sports club manager: if anyone asked questions they were to pretend to be brothers, for Bill himself was only eighteen, and Alec was a couple of years younger. After a while, though, Alec became more distant, and it soon became clear that he was involved with another man. Bill, in all the torments of first love, took precipitately to drink, and would make a nuisance of himself banging on the door of Alec’s parents’ house. Then foolish, intimate letters were written: and found, by the parents. They showed them to Alec’s new friend, an insurance salesman with a Riley whom they, in a fine hypocritical fashion, considered more suitable and respectable than poor, passionate, uncontrollable Bill. Together the salesman and the parents took the letters to the police. Bill, when questioned, did nothing to conceal his feelings. He was sent down for eighteen months with hard labour. Bill and I became great friends, and he, who was regarded as a kind of mascot by many of his fellows, and entrusted with secrets in the way that one might pour out one’s feelings to one’s dog or cat, knew a great deal about almost everybody, and seemed to feel keenly their various trials and tragedies.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One reason, of course, is that I thought for a very long time that I had hastened him to his death. Yott)re a poet, and you don)t believe in love. But, leaving aside now this hideous and useless speculation, it is from the time of my friend's death that I resolved to leave America. There were two reasons for this. One was that I was absolutely certain, from the moment I learned of his death, that I, too, if I stayed here, would come to a similar end. I felt then, and, to tell the truth, I feel now, that he would not have died in such a way and certainly not so soon, if he had not been black. (Legally speaking. Physi cally, he was almost, but not quite, light enough to pass.) And this meant that he was the grimmest, until then, of a series of losses for which I most bitterly blamed the American republic. From the time of this death, I began to be afraid of enduring any more. I was afraid that hatred, and the desire for revenge would reach unmanageable proportions in me, and that my end, even if I should not physically die, would be infinitely more horrible than my friend's suicide. He was not the only casualty of those days. There were others, white, friends of mine, who, at just about the time his indescribably colored body was recovered from the river, were returning from the world's most hideous war. Some were boys with whom I had been to high school . One boy, Jewish, sat with me all night in my apartment on Orchard Street, telling me about the camps he had seen in Germany and the Germans he had blasted off the face of the earth. I will never forget his face. I had once known it very well-shortly before, when we had been children. It was not a child's face now. He had seen what people would do to him-because he was a Jew; he knew what he had done to Germans; and not only could nothing be undone, it might very well be that this was all that the world could do or be, over and over again, forever. All polit ical hopes and systems, then, seemed morally bankrupt: tor, if Buchen wald was wrong, what, then, really made Hiroshima right? He shook his head, an old Jew already, an old man. If all visions of human nature are to be distrusted, and all hopes, what about love? The people I knew found the most extraordinary ways of dealing with this question; but it was a real question. Girls 662 OTHER ESSAYS who had been virgins when they married their husbands-and there were some, I knew them-sometimes had to have abor tions befi:>rc their husbands returned from overseas. The mar riage almost never survived the returning pressures, and, very often, the mental equilibrium of the partners--or ex-part ners-was lost, never to be regained.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I had a poignant image in my head of a tearful young man sitting alone in the back of a dark church, leaving hurriedly after the funeral service—the dead man’s only son, unrecognized. The longing and sadness that underlie a son’s attachment to an absent father never ceases to move me. When several of the fathers in the divorce study died unexpectedly of heart attacks or strokes, the grieving of the fatherless children was passionate. They wept bitterly and clung to siblings, all crying for a man they had had little contact with over the years. I had the sense in hearing them talk and watching their tears that they were crying not for the father they knew but for the father they never had—the father they had hoped for and dreamt about as children. Billy soon joined me at the table, placing a platter of freshly baked pastries between us. According to my records, he was now thirty-five; he still had the same slight build but his face looked older. As he smiled and extended his hand, I saw deeply etched worry lines between his eyebrows and down both sides of his mouth. “I’ve been through hell,” he announced as he sat down. “I think that I’m finally climbing out, but I’m not sure. I think there may be trouble ahead.” My heart sank. “What trouble do you mean?” “My girlfriend Kristi has a son who is moving in with us. We’re going to get married as soon as my divorce comes through and Kristi’s divorce is final.” “And this worries you to be a stepfather?” “It sure does. Basically I’m scared and unhappy. I hope that my attitude will change. I never saw myself with kids. I never liked little kids or babies.” “You’d prefer not to have kids?” “I’m worried about money. But it’s more than money. Being a dad has very little appeal. Look at my experience. Up until the time that he died I was still hoping for a dramatic change in my dad, that somehow he would become a guy who wasn’t ashamed of me because I couldn’t run or swing a bat, who would say, ‘Go for it. Do what you can. I’m behind you.’ As a kid I had this great image of him as a powerful man who would win the Olympics and build business empires. I used to wait for him to visit me like you wait for rain. After he died, I began to think a lot about him and I realized that never once did he encourage me to make something of myself. He weaseled out of paying my college after he promised. When I was really sick and so depressed I tried to commit suicide, he told me that my problems were all in my head. So you might say being a father is not something that comes naturally to me. How can you give somebody something you never had or saw?”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. All of sudden, I felt stronger. I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I shared their quiet pleasure that I was in on the secret; as well as feeling the initiate's disadvantage, the tacit admission of how clueless I had been before. I got up more suddenly than I'd meant to, and in my customary reflex stared out of the window, at the fog which annihilated the street and at the same time cast a faint illumination. "I nearly told you before," Helene said, "when we went for that walk, do you remember? But you know they never talk about it—Daddy and Lilli don't—and so it never seems quite right for me to either." "I'm just so glad they're here at all," I said after a moment, though with a sense that I shouldn't now pretend to like Maurice more than I did. I saw how the schoolboy role of know-all and competitor had lasted and soured like a tough old jacket. It was hateful of me, but I began to be irritated by the ubiquitous power of the unsaid, and by the generous little enactment of Helene's gratitude, the stooping hug that said for them the crisis was over—not still waiting to happen, somewhere along the invisible roads. "Any news of Luc?" said Matt, in a tone that for the first time admitted tender concern and caught me unawares. My voice cracked under the light pressure of sympathy. "Nothing," I said, and walked away from him, my mouth turned down at the corners like a child in the silence before a wall. I stood looking over his twisted bedding, sucking in deep breaths; wondering abstractly who'd been sleeping here. Matt kept away from me, stacked up tapes with the noisy briskness of someone pretending to do housework. After a while I went over to him and gave him a kiss. "Actually I'm terribly hungry," I said. He gave his crooked smile of relief. "Run out and get some burgers." "Okay. I don't have any money." And I dug with an inverted kind of pride into my jeans pocket and displayed a palmful of coins that would buy nothing, the change one expects a beggar or busker to be grateful for. Matt did something similar, though he brought out a bookie's roll of banknotes with large rudimentary sums jotted on the top one. He pulled a couple of thousands off and tucked them into my waistband, as if I were a stripper; then kissed me again. When I got back with the warm polystyrene boxes, he was on the phone. "Yeah . . . that's right . . . the American guy . . . Yes, really sexy . . . he's not a jerk . . . oh, a jock . . . Yeah, he's a jock all right . . . " He gave me a wink, head cocked to hold the receiver whilst he tipped the packeted condiments out of the bag. "Okay, here he is. . . Ed, yeah . . .

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  When their marriages fail there is no way most mothers can maintain the same level of physical and emotional involvement with their children. As Paula and every other young child of divorce told me, the biggest loss they faced was the loss of their mother. One day she was there, giving hugs of encouragement, fetching and carrying as needed, and the next day she was out the door, giving orders as she exited. For young children, the sudden loss of mommy’s attention is unimaginably traumatic—akin to slowly freezing after being plucked from a warm, balmy climate. Your mother is your whole world. She provides food and comfort. Under her watchful approval, you experience growth and joy in your own development. And then you’re placed in the care of strangers. Tragically, in their thankless task of providing everything to keep the family afloat, mothers often lose the ability to keep their primary emotional investment in their children. The focus of divorce policy and intervention has centered on the loss of the father, which is profound for many divorced children. But the loss of a mother pervades and forever changes the way a child, especially a young child, experiences the world. For the preschool children in our study the loss of their mother was central and their suffering was enduring. Twenty-five years later they cried as they remembered, “My mother was really not there. No one was there.” Talking to these children at that time and as they recalled their childhoods made me think of the song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” This emotional cut-off—from feeling that you are the center of your mother’s attention to feeling that you are a peripheral appendage—remains an enduring part of mother-child relationships in many divorced families. While mothers desperately struggle to raise their children alone, many enriching parts of their shared lives must change. Mothers no longer have the time to witness and participate in their child’s everyday life. They don’t have the luxury to plan playdates and have friends to the house. Baking and cooking are abandoned for convenience meals. There is no time to monitor a child’s small ups and downs, their worries and achievements; there is no other parent with whom to share and to strategize the child’s future. Budding talent and potential trouble areas are overlooked in the mad rush to get out of the house and to get to bed in order to have the energy to meet another day. Overseeing table manners and teaching the niceties of life give way to making sure clothes are washed and the house is presentable. Fatigue and anxiety consume tolerance, softness, and cheeriness. There arises a harsher, stricter personality in which smiles are often forced and irritability reigns. The transformation of one’s mother and the loss of her availability is abrupt and, for many children of divorce, permanent. It is the hidden but most significant loss for young children following divorce, and we have almost completely overlooked its impact.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "No, she's been wonderful with the baby, much more than with the other two"—as if that was the only reason for her coming round. "Here's a good long life to Ralphie number two," I said, chinning my glass. "A new Dawn, you might say." Perhaps there were unhappy implications to this. "He was the first of our schoolfriends to go—that's why I chose his name." This wasn't true, or it depended what you meant by friends; our old boys' magazine now had two epochs to its obituary page—the steady professional deaths of the pre-war generations, and the cluster of pinched-off careers, nothing much to say about them yet, dead at twenty-four or twenty-nine, or thirty-three, no causes given, where before it had been climbing accidents. "It was a very sweet idea. I'm so confused by the shock of this death, having started in a way to prepare for a different one. But if he'd gone as it were knowingly, he'd have been very touched at what you've done. He rather loved you, you know." "Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome." Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end. "I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing." "We're all a bit left-wing, dear." "Mmm." "I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable." Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever." "You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?"

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I pushed the door open and she went ahead of me into the house, going just a few feet before she dropped onto the tile of the entranceway, a spot she claimed as if it had long been hers, and gave a quick deep sigh as she laid her head on her paws. She kept her eyes on me as I tossed my keys in the little dish by the door, her tail more subdued but still striking the wall beside her as I put my bag down, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Okay, Mama, I said again, you sleep there, we’ll sleep and in the morning we’ll feel better, though I feared I wouldn’t feel better, in body and spirit both I thought I would likely feel much worse. And then, because the dizziness didn’t pass or maybe because I wanted her warmth next to me, I lowered myself to the floor, I stretched myself out beside her and laid one hand on her flank. We’ll sleep, I said again, and she rolled onto her side, her stomach toward me, and placed one of her paws against my chest. It would leave a mark, I knew, I would have to scrub it out in the morning, but what did it matter, I thought as I closed my eyes, what does it matter, why not let it stay. DECENT PEOPLE But it isn’t serious, he said, waving his hand at the snarl of traffic on the boulevard leading into the center, of course not, if it were serious we would be part of it, nie shofyorite , taxi drivers he meant, we would blockade the streets like we did during the Changes, everyone would be on strike. You could be proud in those days, he said, meaning 1989, when Communism fell, we were proud, we were organized. I was young then, it was a wonderful time. I could have left, he said, I could have gone anywhere, Europe, America, but I didn’t want to go anywhere, I wanted to stay here. We thought it was the most exciting place to be, we thought we would make something out of our country, we had so much hope, do you understand, we felt so much hope because finally we were free. Free, he said, then sucked hard on his cigarette, turning to the window to blow the smoke away from me, we thought we would make something new but we didn’t.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  He is surprised he has never noticed it before. “The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those. But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child’s mound———” “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,”she cried. With that, the wife slips past him, goes downstairs and turns on him “with such a daunting look,” and heads for the front door. Puzzled, he asks, “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?” “Not you!” she answers. Nor perhaps can any man, she adds, reaching for her hat. The farmer, asking to be allowed into her grief, continues with these unfortunate words: “I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably—in the face of love. You’d think his memory might be satisfied———” When his wife remains aloof, he exclaims, “God, what a woman! And it’s come to this, / A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.” His wife responds that he doesn’t know how to speak, that he has no feelings. She watched him through her window as he briskly dug their son’s grave, “making the gravel leap and leap in air.” And after finishing digging, he went into the kitchen. She remembers, “You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.” The wife insists that she won’t have grief treated in this fashion. Nor let it be lightly dismissed. “No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretense of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand. But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!” The husband responds patronizingly that he knows she will feel better for having said these things. It’s time to end grief, he suggests. “[Your] heart’s gone out of it: Why keep it up?” The poem ends with the wife opening the door to leave. Her husband tries to block her: “Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—” Enthralled, I read the piece straight through, and at the end I had to remind myself of the reason I was reading it. What key to Irene’s inner life did it hold?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "The loop?" I nodded. This was the basic family walk, followed times out of number, that avoided the far end of the common, and brought one gently down through patches of alder and thorn towards Blewits, before turning back sharply and running home parallel with the road. I said, "I rang Dawn's parents this morning." "I ought to. I don't really know them." "She seemed quite calm." She had spoken in a slow, drugged, but practical way. They thought he died instantly, but then with the fire . . . well, what was left of him? "She didn't say so, but I got the feeling she wasn't sorry he'd gone like this, rather than . . . in a few months' time perhaps. And then he came on, I've never known how to cope with him at the best of times, he actually said, 'Well, no one can say he died of AIDS, Edward.' I suppose it will strike them in a day or two, some griefs are too big to take in all at once." "Poor things." I knew my mother had a sick worry about me not being careful—not having been careful. One of my candid moments had been when I told her my negative test-result. "She asked me to choose something to read at the funeral. It's rather difficult . . . not 'Dawn' by Gordon Bottomley, anyway, I think." After a pause, she said, "I love the end of Gray's 'Elegy', I remember I read that a lot after your father died. It reminds me of all our walks. Or you could do a bit out of Lycidas." "That might be too moving. I've got to get through it." "And what's happening about his friend from the antique shop?" "She didn't say. She may not know. People are often rather miffed if there's another death at the same time—it's as though it's been done deliberately, to steal their thunder." "Who wants thunder?" my mother said. I wasn't in the same house as Dawn; I was in Raleigh, which had a strong tradition of smokers, beauties and abstract expressionists, while he was hidden away in Drake, a dour, disciplined house that smashed everyone at rowing and rugby sevens. The school wasn't old or great, which perhaps explained why it had chosen such creakily historic house-names—Sidney, Frobisher: portraits of these ruff-necked adventurers hung in the stale air of the dining-hall. There was something touchingly childish about it.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The cars bearing the family nudged their stately way out across the abashed, resentful traffic for the drive northwards to the crematorium. The rest of us gathered loosely on the gravel, I ran over to Edie and we clutched each other in a brief agony of sobbing and stifled shouts. The de Souzays were to give a reception later and she said to come with them now. I clambered into the back of their long senatorial Daimler and into the hushed, complex atmosphere of this other family. We crept forward giving sympathetic smirks to the people who hardly heard the car. Gerald lowered the window and called out, "Come to us at one, you know where it is", though the Sindon boys looked a bit at a loss. The lad with the motor-bike seemed to have made friends. Others straggled along the road into the centre of town, advised of the fire and mulled wine at the George IV. Out ahead of them was a brisk stooped figure in a dark grey coat and trilby, flicking his walking-stick forward at each stride. "Can we fit him in?" murmured Anne, and her husband slowed as she lowered her window in turn. "Can't we give you a lift, Perry?" she called out. But he kept on walking, merely raising his hat and hooting back, "I'm fine, thank you!" "See you later, then." "He's nearly ninety, you know," she said as we moved on. "How very sweet of him to have turned out." I glanced back at him, wondering if he'd remembered our meeting as he heard me read, now that I was fatter and older and never wrote poems. He still looked about him in the same way, as if anticipating greetings, still had that air of redundant youthfulness. There was something moving and irrelevant in his having come, as though Georgian England must be represented at these end-of-century exequies. Later, much later. Five and twenty to midnight the greeny-white figures dimly showed. The day doused in drink and almost out. I rambled home from someone's house, alone but charged up by intense communings with virtual strangers, the compulsive unity that follows a funeral and its unambiguous end. The night was damp and still, the street-lamps hazed among the nearly bare trees, a moment I recognised when no one was about except barmen from pubs walking their Alsatians, taxis bringing passengers from the last train and leaving their perfume of burnt fuel. I turned into Fore Street and saw an unusual phenomenon: across the far end a great roll of pearly fog that gave the lamps at the common's edge the air of a promenade at a melancholy lakeside resort. Fog had become so rare in my adult years that I looked on it as something miraculous, lucent but opaque, unaccountable in where it lay. I walked towards it slowly, down the middle of the road, and when I got to the low fence, stepped over and into its drizzly embrace.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome." Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end. "I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing." "We're all a bit left-wing, dear." "Mmm." "I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable." Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever." "You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?" "Well, I don't know about that. It could be quite lonely at times, and I felt a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. In the dorm I pulled the sheets over my head or pretended to sleep if ever naked figures went scampering past. I did feel I was missing out." "I don't think you missed out on much. I don't remember much of all that. They might have wanted to do things, but you know they were all too bourgeois and inhibited. I used to long to be at some great ancient school, with a real rigour of vice." "Well, you and Ralphie did okay." "That wasn't vice, darling, it was love." I saw Willie's almost instant mastering of the surprise of being called darling, watched him as he sprawled a fraction more unguardedly on the sofa, as if to deny the intrusive intimacy of my tone and absorb the jolt of grief that must account for it. Perhaps at that moment I saw how isolated I felt in losing Dawn, though he hadn't been mine for . . . sixteen years.