Absolution

by Alice McDermott

You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home.

downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved,

our first month in Saigon.

suit—another engineer,

I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount.

helpmeet

Who, in fact, the child told me, sometimes wore a tweed suit with a matching pillbox hat exactly like the one pictured in the catalogue, an outfit called “Career Girl.”

Charlene

I’d noticed this before, among girls of her tribe: they knew an easy mark, a girl of lesser means who would be reflexively—genetically—disposed to do for her whatever she asked.

“Poor Mrs. Kelly here,” my companion said—

And then her eyes went to the cocktail dress hanging from the screen behind me. I saw a ferocious curiosity, perhaps envy. “Isn’t that lovely? For Mrs. Case?”

And now I was reduced to a child’s playmate.

“My name,” she said sweetly, laughter in her eyes, “is Ly.” She drew in the air. “L, Y. Just Ly.”

“It was Mrs. Kelly’s idea. She’s been working with Lily. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”

“I gave you the credit for the idea because everyone here is so tired of smarter-than-they-are me.”

But Lily seemed puzzled, and certainly there was no mistaking the tears that stood in your eyes. Briefly, I thought I was the only one who noticed this, but then

Charlene introduced me as Tricia. I had been Patty as a child, Patsy in college, Pat to my colleagues at school, and Miss Riordan to my students. Always Patricia to my father. I had no idea how to correct her politely, so Tricia I became.

My decision to teach at the kindergarten in Harlem, for instance, had not been an arbitrary choice, even though it had annoyed and disappointed my father. (“Do something for the disadvantaged,” he’d said, “and get it out of your system.”) Preferential treatment for the poor was not a matter of debate, or even nuance, to my mind.

“How much does your husband make?” she asked me. Across all these decades, you cannot imagine how rude and inappropriate, even startling, the question was. She

might just as well have asked me how I enjoyed oral sex.

Charlene introduced me as “Peter Kelly’s

In response, Charlene ducked her head in much the same way her daughter had just done: aware of the attempt to diminish her in front of a new friend. Acquiescent but not happy.

about my friend Stella Carney.

christened it FIFAL: Freedom, Independence, Flight, At Last.

Shouting above the traffic that roared through the stuck-open window, above Fifal’s farting engine, she quoted Stalin at me, “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that is a statistic.”

with no children, I was free to be somewhat ruthless about all we had acquired. First when we moved from our house to the condo, then from the condo to this place.

I suppose all this—this saga or whatever it is—is my way of making amends. And, of course, of answering your question about Dominic. Small world, right? Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.

Dominic was one of these.

Dominic Carey—although I would not have been able to recall his last name. From what you say, Charlene predicted right.

straight. Peter and I were married in June of 1962. Moved to Arlington in November, and Peter told me we were going to Saigon in early December.

We left for the West Coast in February 1963. Arrived in Saigon right after Tet. Early March, perhaps,

palm. She wet the fingertips of her right hand and made the sign of the cross over the tiny thing. Softly, she said, “I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Then she bent her head and whispered an Our Father.

“Girl spends a fortune on clothes,” Charlene said. “But not successfully. It’s all higgledy-piggledy. She doesn’t want the clothes. She just wants her husband to pay for them.”

“It’s Jizo in Japan. Dizang here. A bodhisattva. Protector of travelers, but also of stillborn or miscarried children. Very sweet of her.”

it burn. The smell of sandalwood overtook the room, and the brief flare of the flame caught the sweet stone face of Dizang, protector of my little sufferer, companion of my brief and ill-formed hope of a child.

Stella Carney

Stella complained that she was always cleaning, but I only saw her moving through the rooms in a pretty shirtwaist, waving a soft cloth—an old baby diaper—over every surface, the lemony smell of furniture polish following her like a dowager’s Chanel No. 5.

What’s the line from Emily Dickinson? “While we were fearing it, it came.” That’s a joke. Born of this old lady’s nostalgia for a lost world, flawed as it was.

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.’”

And then she looked at me with her

smarter-than-everyone smile. “But don’t you know, Tricia,” she told me, “the Buddhists say, ‘Mend yourself.’”

It was June as well when the first Buddhist monk set himself on fire in front of the Cambodian embassy. I was at home when it happened, but Peter was nearby. He heard the nuns praying, caught a whiff of the gasoline, even saw

the black smoke rise above the crowd.

imprecation,

But what Marilee said, after a dramatic pause, was “The poor you will always have with you.” She said it gravely, but also with some smug condescension. Which I suppose is exactly the way Christ said it, too. And everyone since. I was taken aback but—my own default position—simply

smiled.

large. “There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.” She paused, as if to admire the way she’d put this. She might have grown a little cross-eyed. “A real danger,” she said again. After she’d let that sink in, she added, “It encourages self-righteousness in the one even as it destroys self-determination in the other.”

That perfectly reasonable impulse to turn away, to gag, you might say, to close your eyes at the sight of this suffering is, to my mind, Marilee, a kind of evil.”

“We are,” Charlene said, utterly patient. “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.”