Absolution

by Alice McDermott

Looking back on those glorious first months of my married life, I confess I do wonder what ease, what pleasure, women have sacrificed since. Something to be said, I suppose, for the luxurious life of a contented concubine.

In class, whenever anyone asked if she was a Democrat or a Republican, she said neither. She was irritated.

You have your children to pass the most precious, or perhaps the most practical, items along to—although a friend once said giving such stuff to your children is only a shifting of responsibility (let the kids be the ones to finally toss the thing when they come to their own sorting)—but with no children, I was free to be somewhat ruthless about all we had acquired.

But, in truth, they were all great with the kids, these playful American boys, even when they were giving shots or taking blood. We women were welcomed by the children, the papa-sans and the mama-sans, mostly, we knew, for the gifts we brought. But the young GIs were thrilling to them, even the bedridden kids. They were superheroes, movie stars. And were always greeted as such. We felt no envy, we do-good American ladies. We liked men better than women as well.

And then the professor whispered, “Tikkun olam.” He smiled at us all. An ancient midrash, he explained. “Your Mr. Tannen would know it,” he told me. “It means ‘repair the world.’”

I was beginning to suspect that Marilee was the kind of woman, numerous in those days, who strove to parrot her husband—not as an act of fealty, not even of admiration or love, but as an attempt, I think, to appear masculine herself. Strong and wise. A kind of verbal cross-dressing. Talking down to other women in this husbandly way was just a part of it.

“Turning away,” a gentle indulgence now in her voice, “it’s an honest reaction, isn’t it?” As ever, she did not pause for reply. “But it’s an indication nevertheless of what we’re capable of, it seems to me. We’re capable of turning away. We’re capable of despising the sight of something so awful, something so incongruous to the good order we prefer. The beauty we prefer. I mean, Marilee,” she added with a huff of breath, “suffering.” She made the word itself sound like a fashion faux pas: like white shoes after Labor Day. An ill-fitting Guy Laroche. “Honestly, Marilee. Who wants to gaze at suffering?”

“It’s just that you said there’s very little good we can do. In this place. And I agree, I do. But that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil—that impulse to turn away.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She let out one of her softest Forgive me for laughing at you laughs. “I let myself get way ahead of you.” Classic Charlene.

A sound to spark some primitive—or maybe only childish—fear. A flash of ancient, ignorant panic, tickling your spine. A brief awareness of how the natural world might, in an instant, reduce you to a brief, trembling, and utterly inconsequential detail of its larger machinations.

Stella and I slowly lost touch—that mostly unintentional dwindling of correspondence that can happen with the friends of our youth. I

Moments before, Douglas had been disgruntled, as whiny as a child, much as he always was after cocktail parties where he hadn’t eaten enough to call it dinner but had eaten too much to want a real dinner once he got home.

Doug complained when I offered to throw some steaks on the grill—it was too late, he’d be up all night with acid reflux—and complained again when I suggested scrambled eggs: “I enjoy dinner. I hate missing dinner.”

I found myself thinking during these first few days in the finished house that I would be much fonder of the place if it held some memories. As you say, no such thing as a life without regret. Maybe because we fortunates have far too many options.