Free Men and Angels by Mary Gordon Page A

her sister, “I am one of the best in my class.” The proud daughter of a proud father. Was there any residue, Anne wondered, of what was siphoned off by pride, by dull, domestic tyranny, hurt feelings, spirits quenched? Some durable tough skin that kept love safe and fresh and lively? As a young woman, Caroline had been proud of her father, with a pride only remoteness could inspire. Something in her drew up straighter in her love for him, this successful lawyer, club member, community face. He was a Philistine, a despot, yet he gave her the money to go abroad and study. From him she learned her love of sailing, of the sea itself; it was he who taught her to ride. She wrote him, after a bad fall from a horse in the Bois de Boulogne: “For this I have you to thank. The one skill you saw fit to impart to a daughter has not left me with a broken neck only through God’s grace and the stubborn stuff I’m made of, for which, I suppose, I am also in your debt.” Did Caroline know her father? He was the only member of the immediate family whom she never painted. The lovely early Impressionist canvases recorded a universe exclusively female. The Breakfast Party implied a summer world of women left in the country with their children, while the men sat, hot in their wool suits, unable even to strip to their shirt sleeves, traveling on the weekend to the husband’s and the father’s role.
    Anne thought of her own father, that loving and yet vague man whom she felt she knew, even now, as a figure of romance. What was his place in the mess of the family life? She could never cast him as a villain. Even to call his face into her mind made her smile. His face had something goofy about it: his cheeks were round; his chin disappeared into his neck; he was six feet four, two hundred and fifty pounds. He’d been bald as long as she had memory of him. She was sure that his success as a lawyer was due to his goofy look: he appeared too simple to be planning something underhanded. Yet in court he could be eloquent. She had heard him plead, had watched him, overcome with pride. He believed in justice and reason; he lived justly, reasonably. He had defended blacks in the segregation years, demonstrators, draft evaders at the time of Vietnam. She’d always been proud of him in a way she couldn’t ever have been proud of her mother. There was distance between them; he left the family in the morning, bringing them at night, as if they were in quarantine, news of the world.
    That romance of the distant father, which in their different ways both she and Caroline had shared, would be utterly foreign to her children. Would they have lost anything, never having lived beside a stranger in the family? Michael had tended his children in illness, changed their diapers, fed them, come home, when they were little, every day for lunch. She could have wept, sometimes, at his tenderness toward the children when he performed for them what to her were ordinary tasks. He had no memory of a father’s tenderness; his father was a cipher, less than that, a hole, a wound. Impossible to know if he was even living. Michael had no memory of him, and his mother kept no pictures. Her descriptions of him Anne always believed untrustworthy, rendered as they were in the language of fan magazines or romance novels. Could he really have been so perfectly the stage villain? Was “tall, dark and handsome” really the way to describe him? Did he really twirl a black mustache? She would never know, and more important, neither would Michael. But his success as a father was a product of his history; whether he was successful because he had no model for paternity, or because he was trying to overshadow one, she never knew.
    She put Caroline’s letters away. Now she would go down to her family. She could explain to no one that opening the door of her study (Michael’s study, really), she reentered the temperate climate, walked again on land. She felt as if, opening the door,