The Rest of Life by Mary Gordon

First published: 1993

Type of work: Novellas

Form and Content

“Immaculate Man,” the first of the three novellas in this collection, is a monologue by the unnamed female protagonist, a forty-eight-year-old social worker and divorced mother of two teenagers. Set in the early 1990’s in New York state, Manhattan, and Paris, the story focuses on the protagonist’s unexpected relationship with Father Clement [Frank] Buckley, the last active priest of the now-disbanded Paracletist order whose motherhouse has been turned into a battered women’s shelter that Buckley keeps in repair and directs. The protagonist meets the boyishly handsome forty-five-year-old priest when she is called in as a consultant for his diocese’s organization of the shelter. Clement, she observes, is a guileless man, both a poor judge of character and highly intuitive about human suffering.

An Illinois-born daughter of lackadaisical Congregationalists, the narrator initially has no guilt about their hidden relationship and little knowledge of what the Catholic church represents to priests of her and earlier generations. She is not a believer, but she assumes that worship should entail comprehensible rites that banish the dark mysteries to which Clement is devoted. Moreover, she equates the love of light with women’s sexuality and, conversely, the love of dark entrances into mystery with men’s desires to enter women’s bodies.

Their relationship begins three months after she starts commuting from Manhattan to the shelter, where, one day, she becomes ill. It is then, in a former cell decorated with “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” that they make love. The narrator feels that Clement has brought her back to faith, not in God, but in sexuality. Because he has never made love, touched a woman, or looked at pornography, she knows that his delight with her middle-aged body is rare. She also knows that he chose her when he found himself without a priestly order or work, and she understands why they will never marry. As the protagonist gradually learns from Father Boniface Lally, Clement’s Paracletist mentor and best friend, their marriage would strip Clement of everything he has loved since age thirteen. Moreover, Clement’s harshness with her son and daughter would rupture her and her children’s loving, healthily chaotic relationship. Even without marriage, however, she cannot imagine life without him. The elderly, seriously ill Boniface, who approves of their relationship, shares her feelings, and to her he confides his never-intimated sexual attraction to Clement. Her narration ends when she and Clement are in Paris, a romantic trip he insists upon paying for with the first money he has ever earned. He vows again that he will never leave her; she remains unsure.

“Living at Home,” the middle novella, is a first-person narration by an unnamed, British-born female protagonist who, since the mid-1980’s, has lived with Lauro, a fifty-seven-year-old, Italian-born foreign correspondent who is compulsively interested in Third World trouble spots and revolutions. The narrator is a respected, forty-five-year-old psychiatrist who directs a London school for autistic children. An only child of German Jewish parents who left Germany for London in 1935, the narrator—previously married three times (to a medical student, a doctor, and a half-Russian charmer) and a loving mother of two almost-grown sons—has lived with Lauro for five years. A tactful, intuitive, and kind (except to his mother and family) man, he frequently leaves on self-chosen, dangerous assignments. Seemingly impervious to a fear of death except when facing routine medical work, Lauro shares the narrator’s need for “entrances and exits.” Still, their relationship and London flat are their oases. As does the protagonist’s voice in “Immaculate Man,” this woman speaks with modest candor about Lauro, who makes her feel “that he is opening up life.” Similarly, she recognizes their passionate, strong relationship as the final love of her life.

As her narration unfolds, she reveals an ability to enter autistic patients’ obsessively closed worlds and to help them attempt openness with safety and without shame. Paradoxically, her medical specialty in dealing with children terrorized by change and fragmentation is intimately related to her personal life. Trying to cope with her widowed mother’s decline, the psychiatrist is shamed and disoriented by the changes in her mother. The narrator also reveals radical aversions to her mother’s reactions after having to flee Germany and to leave London for ten years—reactions embodied in obsessive fixations on a home, fastidiousness, and objects brought from Germany. Thus, the protagonist, despite concern for her sons, leaves each marriage when her husband at the time settles into a fixed relationship with a place and objects. When she and Lauro go to Italy for his sister’s wedding, the narrator recognizes in Lauro’s petulance toward his mother his similar need “to be away from her [his mother] to feel he breathed air as a man.”

The novella ends late at night as the pensive narrator expects Lauro to wake up. Like the children with whom she works, she and Lauro fashion their life together around no future tense, no looking back; the present is all each claims, an open, permeable claim that admits her fear of his death and their mutual appreciation of being “mated, but in the way of our age, partial.”

“The Rest of Life,” the final novella, is a third-person account that is interrupted by the protagonist’s italicized, first-person observations; the voice-shifts usually elaborate on a verbal cue from the preceding narration. The story opens and closes in 1991 in Italy, where Paola, the seventy-eight-year-old Turin-born protagonist, has returned after more than six decades. In 1928, after the suicide of Paola’s sixteen-year-old lover Leo Calvi, Paola’s unnamed father, a widower and professor of entomology, had sent her away to live with relatives in America. Since then, she has mourned for the face of her father, who, despite his love, failed to protect or defend her. Yet she has sealed her mind against remembering Leo’s face, blown away by his suicide. Since she had promised to join him in suicide, the fifteen-year-old Paola left Italy with youthful perceptions of wrongdoing, betrayal, and shame, none of which was ameliorated by her father or shared, not even with her late husband Joe Smaldone, a happy-spirited Sicilian American whom she met during World War II. Still, she has tried to salvage a life that, at age fifteen, she was unwilling to give up. She recognizes that refusing to commit suicide was linked to her not wanting to leave her father and knowing that the brilliant, impetuous Leo did not, as he pretended, know it all; he was as ignorant about sex and death as she. As in her youthful poem, which mistakenly had Eurydice rather than Orpheus look back, Paola had looked back at life and at her father, and Leo had died alone. It is Paola, however, whose life, like that of Orpheus, is torn apart by maenadic women, especially her vicious aunt, whom her father does not contradict in 1928. Conversely, seven decades later, when Paola’s grandson Carlo wants to marry his Nigerian American supervisor, granddaughter of an Igbo chief, Paola stands up for them, introducing Katherine to Joe’s prejudiced family and defying them to injure the young couple’s happiness. Their thanks is the trip back to Milan and Turin, where Paola finds that the accusing names, faces, and buildings have disappeared. Only when she goes to the half-ruined tower where Leo died does she weep because no one consoled either of them, especially Leo and all young men who died when others, such as herself, lived. Finally, she understands that “the dead, being one and many, knew there was nothing to forgive.” Returning to the hotel where the doorman tells her Carlo and Katherine are waiting, she responds “Si, grazie” (“yes, thank you”); something essential has been salvaged.

Context

Like Gordon’s four novels, these novellas employ a feminine perspective to address key issues in women’s (and girls’) lives: parents, surrogate parents, and children; careers; sexuality; autonomy; relationships; and aging. Certainly, Gordon has made a more thorough exposition of adult women’s sexuality in these novellas than she has in any of her novels; she also demonstrates a newfound freedom in describing women’s perceptions of male bodies, sexuality, and intercourse.

Her complex protagonists, somewhat akin to those in Margaret Drabble’s novels, address change—in bodies, minds, circumstances, relationships—in informative ways. Gordon’s contrasting examination of elderly women is particularly acute: For example, Lauro’s and the psychiatrist’s mothers in “Living at Home” have built their lives around refusals to change. By contrast, at the conclusion of the final novella, when the elderly Paola feels something hopeful move within her long-frozen spirit, she is able to celebrate and reapproach things, people, life.

Perhaps Gordon’s most important contribution in these novellas is her depiction of women who have come to terms with the multiplicities and partialities of contemporary lives and relationships. Gordon’s three female protagonists suggest that one’s ability to embrace permeable visions of what it means to be human is essential.

Bibliography

Ager, Susan. “A Trinity of Novellas from Your Best Friend, or Maybe from You.” Detroit Free Press, August 1, 1993, p. 7H. A brief but interesting review.

Gordon, Mary. Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. These essays reflect Gordon’s wide-ranging interests and include commentary on various feminist issues.

Grossman, Mary Ann. “Mary Gordon Wants to Be Known as More than a ‘Catholic Writer.’” St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 27, 1993, p. 10E. Offers helpful and candid comments about Mary Gordon and her work.

Hughes, Kathryn. Review of The Rest of Life. New Statesman and Society 7, no. 287 (January 28, 1994): 38-39. Hughes’s review of Gordon’s novellas is brief but nevertheless useful.

Lurie, Allison. “Love Has Its Consequences.” The New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1993, 1, 25. Lurie’s article provides a thoughtful examination of Gordon’s novellas.

Messud, Claire. “Travelling Hopefully.” The Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 1994, 21. A well-written, extremely useful review of The Rest of Life: Three Novellas.