Free Men and Angels by Mary Gordon Page B

walking into the hallway, she should shed some clothing or equipment, like an astronaut. Walking into the hallway, she put on weight; one foot went in front of the other. Only when she was out of it could she realize her different life behind the door. She was with Caroline there, a woman dead for forty-five years. She knew, she felt, a tremendous amount about her. Yet she knew nothing, or it could all be wrong. She didn’t know, for instance, how her voice had sounded. Had Caroline Watson walked into the house and, standing at the bottom of the landing, called her name, she would not have known who was calling. She would have come out fearfully, expecting a stranger.
    And yet I know her, Anne thought; I know her almost as I know my own children. I know her eighteen-year-old drawings, her watercolors of her dogs, her sisters, her charcoal sketches from antique casts, her first dark oils. I feel, although I cannot say it, what would have pleased her in this room, what on the street would have caught her eye. I understand what happened, how her blood raced, when, seeing the canvases of Manet, she felt the nature of light had been revealed. How, later, looking at Japanese prints like everybody else in Paris, she believed she had been wrong to crowd her canvases, learned something of the airiness of simple space. I know what she felt seeing the colors of Kandinsky, of Matisse. I know why she envied her friend Bonnard: his calm exuberance, his simple joy. I know all this, and looking at a painting, at the curve of a girl’s neck, I am drawn to this woman. I am connected. Because alone, like someone on the moon, I have looked again and again in silence. I have read her handwriting, learned the names of her friends. Because alone in silence slowly I have thought about her many hours, putting from my mind all other things I love. And now we are connected. In the bone. This woman, whom I know and do not know at all, is part of my life like my own children.
    Yet, she thought, walking down the stairs of her house, hearing her heels on the wooden floor as if they were somebody else’s, it is nothing like life with the children. In the room with Caroline she was weightless. Sometimes it frightened her, the speed of her blood, the giddy sense of being somewhere else, in some high territory, inaccessible. With the children, there was never any flying off, flying up. A mother was encumbered and held down. Anne felt that she was fortunate in that she loved the weighing down, the vivid body life the children lived and gave her. Yet it was always a shock—walking into her kitchen, seeing her stove, her pots, real fruit in a real bowl, not one of Caroline’s still lifes. There was a moment always, when she saw the children, when her body gave a start as if she had missed a step. Then there was a click, and her mind slipped into a smooth familiar track. She thought about meals, about laundry; the names of her children’s teachers appeared, replacing the names of Caroline’s friends in Paris. The children came to her, and in a still, heavy heat she entered once more the life of their bodies, her body. She put back on her skins; she embraced, was embraced. She put on, once again, that other life, beautiful and heavy-scented as a dark fruit that grew up in shadow, the life of the family.
    But that day when she came downstairs, no one was in the kitchen. Laura had left a note saying she had taken the children for a walk to look for leaves. It was November now. She worried that the children weren’t warm enough. But Laura was entirely dependable. She knew she ought to be glad that the children were with her, doing something enjoyable, something interesting. Yet she felt let down. She wanted the presence of her children, their voices, the feel of their skin, their clothes. The house seemed too large, and chill and damp. She made herself a cup of coffee she did not want.
    Suddenly she felt a failure. She ought not to want the children now. If she