SOURCE: Bennett, Alma. “A Serious Person's Stories: Temporary Shelter and Others.” In Mary Gordon, pp. 89-107. New York: Twayne, 1996.

[In the following essay, Bennett explores major themes in the stories of Temporary Shelter.]

Some months after the 1987 publication of Temporary Shelter,¹ an interviewer suggested that Gordon didn't write many short stories, to which she replied, “I actually write quite a few. Not all of them do I consider publishable. So I have many of them in folders.” Mentioning that Temporary Shelter has “twenty, written over the course of a lifetime, over twelve years,” she then commented on the selection process for the collection, “I've only recently gone back over things I'd written ten, twelve years ago, reworked some, and thought, maybe—that's okay. Some were actually published, and I had to make decisions that I didn't want to include them in the collection” (Keyishian interview, 70). The effect of those decisions had already become apparent. In a 1987 review of Temporary Shelter, Paul Gray admitted that “Gordon's formidable reputation has not been won through short stories.” But then he added a crucial revision, “At least until now.”² Within a year of its publication, the collection appeared in Dutch and Japanese translations; in 1990, Gallimard released its French translation.

The stories vary in length and narrative voice. The shortest, “The Imagination of Disaster,” is four pages; the longest, the five-part “Now I Am Married,” is nineteen pages. Seven of the stories have first-person narrators, while the others (with the exception of the omniscient advice-giver in “A Writing Lesson”) have third-person voices. Of the twenty stories, fourteen had been published earlier in a wide range of magazines and journals, such as Ms., Mademoiselle, Redbook, Woman's Day, Atlantic, Antaeus, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. But six of the collection—“Temporary Shelter,” “Delia,” “Watching the Tango,” “Agnes,” “Eileen,” and “Billy”—appear for the first time. The stories in Temporary Shelter do not follow, as some readers mistakenly have assumed, any sort of chronological order. For example, in a 1988 interview, M. Deiter Keyishian wondered if the five-voiced story “Now I Am Married” “was an earlier version of The Company of Women or something you did after,” to which Gordon had to explain that the story was “very, very early. … I think I wrote that in 1974” (Keyishian interview, 75). Likewise, in a review of Temporary Shelter, Rachel Billington, assuming a chronological sequence, erroneously second-guessed several of Gordon's technical and stylistic intentions.³ For these and other reasons, it is unfortunate that either Anne Freedgood, Gordon's editor at Random House, or Gordon herself decided not to clarify the publication or completion date of each story. Those dates (which, if available, will be indicated in this chapter) reveal an important chronology of Gordon's themes, techniques, and career. For instance, “Now I Am Married,” which was published in 1975 by the Virginia Quarterly Review, was Gordon's first fiction publication and her first prizewinner: it received the Balch Award in 1976.

AN OVERVIEW

The year 1975 marks a starting place from which one can track Gordon's career in prose. For her, the ensuing decade was productive, rewarding, and complex. By the end of 1987 she had published some eight poems, nineteen short stories, twenty-seven articles, twenty-four reviews, and three novels, the first of which had been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and had been named as one of the outstanding books of 1978 by the New York Times Book Review. Both Final Payments and Gordon's second novel, The Company of Women, had been given a Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel written by an American woman. And all three novels were critical and popular successes. Another of her short stories, “The Only Son of the Doctor” (1982), won an O. Henry Award in 1983. A year later, Gordon had received her first honorary doctorate, and in 1985, she was given a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library Award. By 1987, five of her stories and essays were in anthologies. During the same twelve-year period, as Gordon has described it, “Years passed, marriages, and babies; I found myself living in the country for many years” (“Coming Home,” 136). What Gordon's summary does not include, of course, is the word “writing”—and a lot of it.

Because this chapter also will discuss her more recent stories, perhaps a brief review of the subsequent years in her career will provide a helpful context for those discussions. Since the publication of Temporary Shelter, Gordon's work has earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, three more honorary doctorates, a Barnard Woman of Achievement Award, and appointments as Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing at Barnard College as well as Adjunct Writing Professor at Columbia University. In the meantime, Gordon's intense work pace has continued. She has published a fourth novel, The Other Side; a collection of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays; a book of three novellas, The Rest of Life; a memoir-biography, The Shadow Man; as well as some three dozen articles, essays, and book introductions; one poem; nine reviews; and five short stories: “Vision” (1989), “At the Kirks” (1990), “Separation” (1990), “Walt” (1994), and “City Life” (1996). “Separation” was included in Best Short Stories of 1991, and, despite her protests (which I discuss later), “The Important Houses” (1992) was one of twenty works selected from U. S. and Canadian magazine publications and included in Best American Short Stories 1993.⁴ This cursory list of her work during the first two decades of her career would be incomplete without some mention of Gordon's numerous guest appearances on television and radio shows as well as a number of important lectures and some eighty readings throughout the United States.

The list continues to expand rapidly. Some things, however, have not changed. And Gordon's selections for Temporary Shelter are important clues to the constancies that mark her earlier and more recent work, constancies that seem to mandate a triadic approach to the stories in the collection as well as several more recent stories. First of all, these stories provide an evolutionary mosaic of the distinctive thematic preoccupations that characterize all four of her novels as well as her more recent memoir, The Shadow Man. And even though Gordon did not include her early short story, “A Serious Person” (1977), in this collection, the author's thematic interests remain, as this chapter's title suggests, those of a serious person. Second, the stories serve as apertures into Gordon's technical experiments and maturation as well as her implicit, immovable trust in the art of literature itself; as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt has described them, “the shelter of artistic form” is “in Ms. Gordon's able hands … not in the least temporary.”⁵ Third, the stories open up a kind of forum on the nature of fiction itself, and more specifically, on how Gordon blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Gordon herself vigorously resists this sort of inquiry. Despite her resistance, it is a question that her readers need to address if we are to understand the ways in which this writer, in the guise of very traditional approaches, has made some of her most important, radically innovative contributions to contemporary fiction. But we first need to ground that inquiry in a broader study of Gordon's thematic and technical preoccupations in Temporary Shelter.

THEME AND VARIATIONS

A natural segue to the overarching thematic focus of the stories is Gordon's tributes to two women whose friendship and advice continue to give her personal and professional “temporary shelter.” First, the collection is dedicated to Jan Zlotnick Schmidt, an important reader of Gordon's chapters and drafts from her fourth novel to the present. Schmidt, a professor at the State University of New York in New Paltz, has been a friend of Gordon's since graduate school (Bennett interview, 22). Second, “The Headache,” the painting featured on the collection's book jacket, is by Gordon's close friend and confidante, the artist Helen Miranda Wilson,⁶ daughter of Edmund Wilson. Like the literary genre to which it has been attached, the 1978 painting is both small (11″ by 11″) and intense. Moreover, the painting, with its austere, painstakingly selected details and palette, not only narrates a story of a woman with a headache, but its subjective treatment parallels the same kind of pressured concentration that one expects in any masterful short story. What makes the painting most appropriate for Gordon's collection of stories is, of course, that the woman's pain is being temporarily ameliorated by a man's massaging her head. Thus, Helen Wilson's painting serves as a well-chosen visual metaphor for Temporary Shelter on many levels, not the least of which is that the stories in the collection create and reflect a certain constant pressure on the brain or, to borrow a phrase Gordon once coined for another context, “the hum inside the skull.” Gordon's ability to sustain that pressure within each of the diverse stories is, as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt recognizes, “a matter of art, for Ms. Gordon always strives for a point of view that simultaneously envisions the peace and catastrophe implicit in her material” (“Temporary” [“Temporary Shelter”], 25).

Gordon's balancing act of “peace and catastrophe”is reflected in the tension between the words shelter and temporary. What unites the stories thematically is human loneliness and an awareness that nothing or no one can assuage this condition permanently. The characters who come to understand this include children, adult sons and daughters, wives, young mothers, émigrés, widows, divorcées, and elderly persons. For example, in the story “Watching the Tango,” a woman and her married lover rendezvous at a tango performance. Their adulterous secrecy, the woman realizes, leaves them oddly isolated, like “orphans” (and, one notes, like the tango dancers themselves). Emboldened by the sad, violent, middle-aged passion and grace of the dancers, they leave the theater holding hands and kissing publicly, for the first time. Then, the lovers witness a bitter argument between two of the dancers leaving the theater, and she insists, “Let's go now.’ … She doesn't want to have to worry” (64) or to face their realities and her own. Conversely, in the story “The Other Woman” (1976), after a husband has poured out the story of the woman (not his first wife) who had been the great love of his life, the man's second wife soothes him knowing—and facing: “he would never know what she was feeling, and knowing this, she had never loved him so little” (156).

Gordon's more complicated story, “Out of the Fray,” reverses this process. It begins as Ruth, a science writer and divorced mother of two children, flies to London with her fiancé Phil, a thrice-divorced man who works for a human rights organization. Despite Phil's excitement about their impending marriage, Ruth is privately much more detached and bothered; she feels that they will be “standing before a judge, their fingers crossed behind their backs saying, ‘I promise I will never leave you.’ When what they meant was, ‘I will try’” (89). Her detachment begins to shift during the course of their stay in London and their visits there with the Belgian-born Sylvie MacGregor, Phil's close friend, whose life he had saved years before when she tried to commit suicide after her husband Jack, Phil's friend, left her for another woman. The life the now almost fifty-year-old Sylvie has constructed for herself in London is just that: a modest, frozen, smooth construct of piano lessons, theater performances, prematurely assumed elderly clothing and habits, and her work at the institute for the blind. Hoping that Sylvie will give her the kind of guarantees (“You'll be happy now … I promise”) she needs for her second marriage, Ruth realizes that Sylvie, in “the thin present in which she felt herself required now to live” (93) cannot; her life, in a sense, had ended long ago. By the time their last visit with Sylvie ends, Ruth's own ability to stay detached has also ended. In the dark of their hotel room as she watches Phil sleep, “she understood that if he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on” (100). The if and when are a devastating finale. In the equally sophisticated ambience of the story “The Dancing Party” (1986), only one of the two older women has learned to bridge the abysses within relationships and lives; the rest remain caught in them. Gordon, at two points in the story, sets up unusual cataloging sequences of the women characters' various dilemmas, which include “The scientist thinks: I will live forever with a man who hates to dance”; “The daughter of the hostess thinks: I love my mother, but I will not live like her”; “The angry wife wishes she were not angry”; and “Her friend thinks: If this man dies I will be once more alone” (183).

Gordon's 1994, twenty-page story “Walt,”⁷ which opens and closes in the female narrator's famous food store, moves back for most of the story to the narrator's youth and struggle to get out of her working-class world and family and to her odd, unhealthy relationship with another N.Y.U. student, Walt, obsessed with Marxism but more intensely obsessed with the narrator. In the story's opening, Walt has suddenly shown up at her store; by the time the story ends, the reader knows enough about their long-ago relationship and about Walt to understand the narrator's fright: her fears are altogether different from the ones that conclude the previous paragraph. Hers are based on the ominous possibility that Walt (unseen for all these years) will never leave her life: “He might have pretended to have gone. But he was there, even if I couldn't see him at that moment. He was there; he was waiting for me. He always would be” (“Walt,” 77).

Such impasses and juxtapositions reflect, as I suggested before, a serious premise, one that gains seriousness in Gordon's self-declared purpose for her short stories and novels: “What I want to accomplish is to tell stories about real people, to tell the truth about human beings in human situations, the way in which people live their lives” (Bannon interview, 275). Not surprisingly, Gordon's perspective on humanity has drawn critical fire. In her review of Temporary Shelter, Rachel Billington complains that “the keening of a frightened and suffering woman is never far from the surface of Mary Gordon's writing.” Billington then goes on to describe the stories as carrying “the same atmosphere of fatalistic depression, of lives lived with at best lack of hope and at worst something dangerously threatening” (“At Bay,” 8). Other reviewers, while acknowledging the profound loneliness within the stories, have recognized the other half of Gordon's human equation, the other factor that unites the collection: what Carolyn See describes as “the absolutely extraordinary heroic attempts that human beings make to alleviate that condition. … It's just that pain, that loneliness, that makes the decision to love so amazing.”⁸

A COTERIE OF DUALITIES

Critics and scholars have not yet discussed the dualities within which Gordon's characters reveal their deprivations and brave, sometimes foolhardy, always poignant decisions. This sort of dualistic approach is certainly nothing new. Ancient oral and written epics, psalms, parables, proverbs, tragedies, and comedies, as well as more recent novels, poems, plays, films, and short stories alike reveal storytellers' and writers' adroit manipulations of the tensions and narrative economies inherent within oppositions. However, with the exceptions of the stories of Turgenev, Hawthorne, Poe, and O'Connor, I can think of few short story collections (especially those selected by their authors) that utilize and sustain dualities any more consistently than Gordon does in Temporary Shelter. And she does so, as Paul Gray has noted, by returning “habitually, hypnotically, to a small number of predicaments” (Gray, 74). A list of her predicament pairings in these stories includes various and often layered combinations of the following dichotomies: female-male; child/children-adults; child-parent(s); elderly-young; Jew-Catholic; Protestant-Catholic; immigrant-established; crippled-noncrippled; unmarried/divorced/ widowed-married; underpriviliged-privileged; and unsophisticated-sophisticated.

What transforms this listing exercise is the possibility that it catalogs not only the thematic dualities within the collection but also the majority of the fictional and nonfictional preoccupations that Gordon has explored so far in essays, interviews, novels, stories, novellas, and the memoir-biography. For instance, because of Gordon's preoccupations in all four of her novels, we recognize (almost as old friends) Gordon's interest in Bad Mother/Parent types in the stories “Billy,” “Temporary Shelter,” “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year” (1983), “The Magician's Wife” (1978), and “The Only Son of the Doctor” (1982). In the first of these, Billy's mother, Veronica McGovern, whom the female narrator loved, nevertheless “had ruined her son's life as certainly as if she'd starved him in infancy; he would probably have been much better off if she'd abandoned him at birth” (158). It was a case of Veronica's cloistering her son, telling him “the truth … too early, and too much,” warning him that the world was hurtful, all of which he believed because “She was telling the truth; she was his mother” (168). But the narrator, whom Billy had always furtively and hopelessly loved, knows that she cannot be so truthful with her own sons. Like the young mother in “The Imagination of Disaster,” who knows she “cannot pervert her [daughter's] life so that she will be ready for the disaster” (26), this mother explains Billy's death and life's cruelty to her frightened sons in a manner “that will let them live their lives” (168).

In the title story, “Temporary Shelter”⁹ (1987), Gordon creates an intriguingly contradictory duality between a Bad Mother (who tells too much, too early) and a Good Father (who tells too little, too late). The contrast is between young Joseph Kaszperkowski's tough, foul-mouthed, Polish immigrant mother, Helen, and the widowed, erudite, wealthy, gentle, Jewish convert to Catholicism, Dr. Meyers (perhaps a fantasy version of Gordon's own father), who hired Helen as his and his infant daughter's live-in housekeeper when Joseph was two. Dr. Meyers showers on his daughter Maria and Helen's son Joseph equal love, education, and attention. He teaches Joseph about Cimabue and Simone Martini, table manners, poetry, history, and taste in clothing; he provides for both children those essential accoutrements of sophistication: piano, French, and tennis lessons; he takes them to movies and teaches them the art of eating cream puffs: “You must eat many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut” (9). Helen, on the other hand, calls young Maria “a pig, a slut, a hussy, a disgrace” for being so sloppy and then, when Joseph takes Maria's side, tells him too much (like Gordon's character Veronica McGovern): “They're all alike. Fine ladies, with someone like me to clean up their shit. … They'll leave you in the end, don't you forget it. In the end I'll be the only thing you have” (7), a threat that leaves Joseph permanently wracked with terror and guilt. As the two young people enter puberty (at which point Joseph is going to be sent away to school and Maria wants desperately to become a nun), both adults—in their wildly disparate styles—acknowledge to Joseph not only the potential sexual problems but that Maria will never be allowed to be a nun because she is, in the Church's eyes, still a Jew. The latter is a truth that young Joseph knows he must protect Maria from; taking on a parental role himself, he silently vows to “make her want to marry him … before she could find out that because of her blood they would keep back from her heart's desire” (24). Gordon makes the reader fear that such sheltering intentions will prove to be tenuous, at best.

In the stories “The Magician's Wife” (1978) and “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year” (1983), Gordon depicts parents whose love for each other excludes their child. As the first two sentences of “The Magician's Wife” set forth, Mrs. Hastings “did not think of herself first as the mother of her children. She was proudest of being Mr. Hastings' wife” (77). Despite her son Frederick's success as an architect and his kindness to his now elderly parents, she is upset that Mr. Hastings (who, after all, had once performed his magic for the Roosevelt family) is now known only as the son's father. For the narrator-wife, Mr. Hastings' magic tricks represent the specialness of her husband and of their life together, a metaphor that took shape on the fourth day of their honeymoon when he bought the materials for his first magic trick. But when his grandchildren and son Frederick insist that the now increasingly blind and feeble Mr. Hastings perform his magic show for the town's Fourth of July Town Fair, Mrs. Hastings becomes terrified that he will be humiliated. When, as she feared, the performance is full of failed tricks, she turns on her son in rage, despite and because of the sympathetic audience's standing ovation for Mr. Hastings. It is at this final point of the story that we suddenly become aware of the finesse with which Gordon has moved the story's tensions and details along; that recognition comes when Mrs. Hastings' son, for the first time, confronts her. Reacting to her fury, he remarks, “You know, Mother, Father is twice the person you are … Three times”; only then, with her son's compliance in her all-exclusive love, can Mrs. Hastings take his arm and look “at her son with something like love” (86).

The 1983 story, “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year,” contains a complicated nucleus of parental neglect and damage around which Gordon eventually developed her fourth novel, The Other Side (1989). By the time the novel was published, the elderly parents' names had changed, and their surly son Tom (who had always known that he had not been the best-loved, “most prized” son) had disappeared, only to be replaced by unloved and damaged daughters. Yet the elderly Mr. Cassidy's promise to his wife is unchanged, as is the death of their adored firstborn son, John, and the foulmouthed ragings of the now senile Mrs. Cassidy who, as in the novel, pushes her husband down and breaks his leg. In the short story, Mr. Cassidy understands his son Tom: a “self-made man, … Good time Charlie. Every joke a punchline like a whip” (198); he understands Tom's wounds, “Tom for whom there had been no time” (199). Even now, however, Mr. Cassidy will not allow Tom to intrude into his immovable commitment to his wife or to interfere with his promise made years before: that he will guarantee that she can die at home and not be taken “away” (198). As unattractive as Tom and his wife's personalities are, it is difficult to ignore the pain of this son who brings dinner each night to his parents and who, finally, is the agent for bringing his wandering mother back to her home and to his father, her now injured, but invincibly loyal husband.

Like these two stories, “The Only Son of the Doctor” (1982), which was reissued in Fiction Magazine in 1985 and in Cosmopolitan (London) in 1987, makes a circuitous approach to neglect. The story only gradually reveals that Henry Cosgrove's obsessive, philanthropic advocacies for the elderly and other causes have driven away his wife and shut out his son, Eliot. The story, narrated by Louisa Altiere, Henry's lover, begins like a love story in its first celebratory stages. The idyll is interrupted by a visit from Eliot, Henry's rebellious, drifter son, whom Louisa resents. That resentment begins to erode when she realizes, “What would a child have thought, seeing that back turned to him, listening to the typewriter? For Henry needed no one when he was at his desk, writing his letters for the most just, the most worthy, of causes” (49). Eliot's understanding that “nobody's good enough” for his father leads to Louisa's recognition that “such a moderate man” as Henry “had to inspire radical acts” and a life posture like Eliot's (49). The story ends with her own little cosmetic rebellion against the tyranny of Henry's myopic, exclusive goodness. These rebellions are quieter but as inevitable as those of Isabel and Felicitas who, in Final Payments and The Company of Women, respectively, must react in radical ways to impossible, unlivable, radically exclusive love and standards.

The Good Mothers who narrate the stories “The Imagination of Disaster” (1985) and “Safe” (1982) remind us of Anne Foster in Men and Angels, as well as several of Gordon's essays (such as “On Mothership and Authorhood,” “Explaining Evil,” and “Raising Sons”) and interviews. In the first of these stories, the young mother is obsessed with a sense of impending political catastrophe from which she must protect her children. It is an obsession that Gordon herself has voiced. In 1985, for example, immediately after the publication of Men and Angels, Gordon told an interviewer, “I think about it all the time. … If I were in Germany, what would I have done? … My husband thinks I'm insane to think about these things all day, but I've made him promise that if he's ever in the situation, he will save the children—never me or him” (Bolotin interview, 232). Yet Gordon and the narrator in “The Imagination of Disaster” know genuine nurture of a child precludes the child's being made aware of such dire possibilities; a mother, in other words, must give up one thing for another. This kind of essential sacrifice is the lesson another young mother learns in the story “Safe.” After a frustrating afternoon get-together with her infant daughter and her sophisticated former lover, she returns home and comes to understand that any such liaison is dangerous, that safety is the fragile, single gift she can offer her husband and child; moving into her husband's embrace, she silently acknowledges, “I must live my life now knowing it is not my own … it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them” (177).

In light of these two stories' emphases on mothers' awarenesses of danger, it is an interesting exercise to study Gordon's exploration of a child's perceptions of danger and violence in the story “The Murderer Guest” (1981). The ten-year-old Elizabeth is a child who measures everything and everyone against her already fierce coterie of absolutes, but these mask her fears of the Other, personified in her mind by German soldiers who haunt her dreams and by her half-German schoolmate, Judith Lowery. The threat of danger becomes more invasive when Mrs. Delehanty flies from Lincoln, Nebraska, to stay with Elizabeth's parents for a while. Elizabeth's mother's friend since childhood, Mrs. Delehanty had killed her drunken husband Stan, evidently in self-defense; now Stan's parents have her two children and she is being ostracized by her friends in Lincoln. Elizabeth sees that this murderer is a woman no different from her own mother; remembering her own murderous reaction to Judith Lowery, she also recognizes in herself the possibility of such an act. Still, her rational perceptions hold no sway against her irrational terrors when she is in Mrs. Delehanty's presence.

Gordon's prizewinning story “Separation” (1991)¹⁰ explores the intersection of danger and motherly love in an entirely different and more devastating way. Gordon has explained that “the genesis for this story was watching mothers leave their children each morning in my son's nursery school class. One particularly extreme case suggested an even more extreme situation to me. But it was clear to me that the extremity was only another part of the story of all mothers and all sons.”¹¹ In the story, JoAnn, whose obsessive devotion to their baby boy drove off her husband, moves from town to town, running away from every agency or attempt to socialize her young son Billy, to suggest that both mother and child need counseling, to separate him from a mother who knows, “But we are happiest alone. But never say it. She knew what people thought. Children need other children. They believe that, everyone believes it. Only I do not believe it. Only he and I” (187). Attempts to get Billy to stay in school without her end with his running out and back to his mother's car; they drive away “Happy, singing” toward yet another “better place to live in,” and toward what the reader recognizes as a future in which young Billy (who might be compared with the male protagonist of the story “Billy”) will never leave his mother, despite her final sentence disclaimer: “He will leave me soon enough” (193). A tomb of sorts for both of them has already been sealed.

An entirely different type of Mother—and a good one, at that—appears in the unlikely guise of a slovenly, “Ireland Irish” neighbor, Mrs. Lynch, in the story “The Neighborhood” (1984). Mrs. Lynch's own family is an abusive chaos, and their home is a pigsty, both of which are embarrassments to the settled, second-generation Irish-American neighborhood. Nevertheless, her silent, nonegotistical ministrations to the young narrator (whose grief for her dead father has turned into a phobia) heal the child in a profound way—in sharp contrast to the absence of any such healing mediation in Gordon's 1977 story “The Thorn.”

Gordon's interest in relationships within slovenly messes is something she also addressed in Isabel Moore's own housekeeping and in her later professional housecalls to invalids in Final Payments, each visit of which forms a memorable vignette. Another example is the 1990 story “At the Kirks',”¹² which, like “The Murderer Guest,” is narrated by a young girl whose perceptions are close enough to Gordon's autobiographical essays and comments to give one pause. Like the stories “The Murderer Guest” and “The Neighborhood,” this story is full of a young person's observations (and severe judgments) of class and ethnic differences, of the Kirks' daughters' sexuality. Mrs. Kirk, like Mrs. Lynch in “The Neighborhood,” is a slattern at home but presentable outside the home; both stories' husbands, likewise, are inarticulate nonentities, in the young protagonists' minds. However, in “At the Kirks',” Gordon makes us far more attentive to the child's own sexuality, to her obsessions with her and her parents “not” being like the Kirks, to her own secret understanding that she is a child who is not a child. Gordon also includes a very funny but painfully revealing exercise in differentiation through words when the young girl finds a love letter the Kirks' daughter Monica had written: “‘Dear Darling,’ it began. … It was the final proof I needed that I was a creature so different from Monica that I would never have a chance at an experience resembling hers. I knew that you said ‘dear,’ or you said ‘darling.’ I knew that you did not say both. No feeling I would ever have for any man would cause me to make that error. And I felt that, knowing that, I would not be chosen …” (52)—an awareness that adds a particularly ironic twist to the final paragraph of the story.

“At the Kirks'” and “The Murderer Guest” include characters' prejudices against Germans and non-Catholics. “The Neighborhood,” on the other hand, is one of several stories that cluster around dualities and complications within first- and second-generation Irish-American families and neighborhoods, all of which come together in Gordon's complex fourth novel, The Other Side. Three of these stories (“Delia,” “Agnes,” and “Eileen”¹³) form what Carolyn See has described as the “most elegant set” of the collection. In the stories, the character Nora (crippled, we note, like Gordon's mother) learns incrementally, as a child, as a youth, and then as a working adult, about the rewards of love: death in varying degrees. First, her beautiful aunt Delia, who also loves beautifully (unlike the rest of the family), but whose husband is a Protestant, dies in childbirth; then, Nora's bootlegger uncle's faithful, self-effacing mistress, Agnes, hangs herself when he breaks off all communication with her; finally, Nora herself faces a living death. Because of being crippled, the highly intelligent young woman is not allowed to teach, as she has planned, nor will she find a love, as she has dreamed of so long. Like the broken immigrant Eileen, who leaves to return to Ireland like “one of the dead,” Nora recognizes the life ahead of her: it has “no real prospects that could lead to pleasure” (119). She must endure what she had come to understand long before, after Agnes's suicide, “if you had a girl child growing up like that you'd be best drowning it straight off, … so you'd save it all the pain and trouble later on” (75)—words we recognize from the narrator's comment about the son's plight in the story “Billy.” Gordon's decision to scatter the three “Nora” episodes throughout the collection is astute, for we only gradually put together the whole story, at which point our recognition, like Nora's, is intensely painful.

Not all the story clusters are so deadly serious. Written some six years before the seven monologues that conclude Gordon's novel, The Company of Women, the five first-person narrations in “Now I Am Married” introduce us to the tenuous and highly distinctive shelter-constructs of five women characters. The story begins with the first-person narration of an American who has just become the second wife of an Englishman who is bringing her to visit his family for the first time. The narration then shifts to four women she visits: Marjorie, Doris, Elizabeth, and Susan, in the order of their first-person monologues. Although it is not conspicuously marked, the narration returns to the American in the last three pages of the story.

Gordon has dismissed this five-part story, her first published work of fiction, as an early, very romantic take on marriage. But the reasons it was chosen for the Balch Award (and for her including it in the collection) are obvious. The story, which was written only about a year and a half after Gordon had shifted from poetry to prose, embroiders the patterns of the women's minds and lives in rather astonishing detail. What's more, Gordon juxtaposes these details with stylistic finesse and, occasionally, with adroit humor. An instance of the latter is the narrator's describing the visit to her husband's family: “We do not make love here as we do at my mother's. She thinks sex is wicked, which is, of course, highly aphrodisiac, but here it is considered merely in bad taste” (120). It is the same droll mastery that, some eight years later in the story “Safe,” Gordon employs to describe the narrator's former English lover: “Only centuries of careful marriages could have produced, for example, his nose. There are no noses like it in America. … He is the blondest man I have ever been with—this, in combination with his elegant, well-cut clothes, made him a disappointment naked. Really fair men always look foolish without their clothes, as if they ought to know better” (171).

Two typical examples of Gordon's early stylistic surprises might include, first, comments by Susan, an exhausted young wife and mother who has given up a scholarly career: “You shouldn't listen to me either,” she tells the narrator. “I'm probably half-mad talking to babies all day. Only there's something sort of enormous and grey and cold about marriage. It's wonderful, isn't it, being a part of it? Or don't you feel that way?” (135); and second, the closing comments of the narrator who savors her husband, his body, their life together, like “a new exotic food. Does this mean everything or nothing? I stand with him in an ancient relationship, in a ruined age, listening beyond my understanding to the warning voices, to the promise of my own substantial heart” (139). A little vaulted, the latter, but there's no mistaking the art in it and the other “Gordonesques,” just as there's no mistaking the mnemonic power in her placing side by side ancient relationship and ruined age.

While exploring any story in the collection or her more recent ones, we can recognize that one technical factor of her art is the way in which Gordon sets out a barrage of details, usually disparate, and then, without warning, parries the blow, the punch, of them; this device, of course, signals the next round and, at the same time, simultaneously delays and intensifies the plot's unfolding. When the time arrives for the final punch (or what one, more formally, might call the recognition scene), Gordon delivers it in an intense sequence in which she usually still manages to encapsulate disparate details.

All this is a part of what Gordon describes as “the craft of concealment” (209) in “A Writing Lesson” (1978), the rather odd little story about writing a story with which she concludes Temporary Shelter. Gordon's decision to put this early didactic story at the end of the collection is both calculated and risky. By considering the similarities and differences between a fairy tale and what she describes as “the kind of fiction we are more used to,” she risks opening up for formulaic inspection the previous nineteen stories. But the risks are worth taking, for as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt has pointed out, “‘A Writing Lesson’ … could just as well have been called ‘A Reading Lesson’” (“Temporary,” 25). His point is well taken; the story is more valuable to Gordon's readers than to those who want to write well. The most valuable instructions have to do with our learning to follow Gordon's craft of fictional cues, understatement, delaying mechanisms, control of paired and triadic characters, and, of course, details. The final instructions of the story suggest a methodology for fiction writing and reading as well as for fictional explication and analysis: “Once you have decided upon the path of your narrative and have understood its implications, go back to the beginning of the story. Describe the house” (213).

“THE GIFT OF … CONJURING”

The blurred demarcation zones that Gordon opens up within the genres of fairy tale and short story serve as reminders of how Gordon blurs an even more important demarcation: the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Occasionally, when asked specifically about her use of autobiographical material, Gordon has approached the blurring; for example, in 1980, she said, “I feel more free to be autobiographical in short stories than in novels. Somehow talking about yourself for ten pages is okay, but talking about yourself for three hundred pages is a bit much” (Cooper-Clark interview, 272).

Still, as I mentioned earlier, Gordon resists this sort of inquiry. On the most apparent level, we can understand her avoidance of the subject: writers use what and who they know best for their subjects, characters, language, imagery, and foci. Gordon's blazing debut as a novelist is a case in point, one that attests to her mastery of the American Catholic world view, manners, and mores she had absorbed in her life up to that point. When she began to enlarge and complicate that arena as she matured, the newly absorbed perspectives and subjects of her third and fourth novels, Men and Angels and The Other Side, included those of art, fundamentalism, secular worldviews, motherhood, and immigration, the latter of which is her heritage from all four of her grandparents as well as her father. Thus, one naturally expects that her essays, stories, novels, novellas will share, to a certain degree, her evolving interests and views. But when one opens up The Shadow Man, Gordon's memoir-biography of her father as well as her mother and their respective families, certain alarm bells start to go off. We already know much of this “real,” factual material; we recognize it; we've read it in her stories; we've met these characters in her novels. We know the young narrator of the story “The Thorn,” the child grieving for her dead father, is young Gordon herself after her father's death. We remember that the narrator repeats to herself the father's almost identical words—“I love you more than anyone will ever love you. I love you more than God loves you” (103)—that Gordon includes in the memoir. And all the details of Mary's childhood are a part of the short story. We also recognize the details, family life, work, dress habits, skin, wit, crippled leg, and candor of Mary's mother in Nora, the narrator of “Delia,” “Agnes,” and “Eileen,” and in the narrator's mother in “The Neighborhood” and in “The Murderer Guest.” Gordon has confirmed biographical details of the “Nora” stories in a 1988 interview, “Well, actually my mother is a polio victim and a lot of that stuff is family stories. Some of them are my family and some the other. That's the thing that was good about my family. They were good storytellers.” Then she moves to more specifics, “That little girl [Nora] is really a version of my mother. She grows to be an adult in “Delia,” where the husband comes back. That actually happened to my mother. And the episode of being turned down at normal school actually happened to her. And I did have this uncle who was a bootlegger that did have this extremely plain mistress who supported him, whom he then left for somebody else” (Keyishian interview, 75).

Gordon adds more, but these comments are enough to introduce the factual resonances that occur in these and other stories. For example, by the time we read the memoir, we already know from the story “The Neighborhood” that Mary's mother moved out of her family's home after sixty years, just as we know about her broken friendships and difficult filial relationships from the “Nora” stories, The Other Side, and the 1991 article “Snapshot: A Parting of Friends.”

And there's more: we already know the memoir's streets, boroughs, and houses, its neighbors, sounds, crucifixes, kitchen tables, bedrooms, arguments, class distinctions, priests, nuns, and women's retreat groups. Gordon's fiction has already introduced us to them. And other interviews have clarified additional crossovers between fact and fiction. For instance, Gordon has confirmed being raped in Wales during the summer after she graduated from Barnard, a trauma that eventually surfaced in the story “Violation” and in the essay “George Eliot, Dorothea and Me: Rereading (and rereading) ‘Middlemarch.’” Similarly when asked about the description of a first husband in the story “Safe,” Gordon has said simply, “That's Jim [Brain, Gordon's first husband]. … He is an impressive man, but he was totally wrong for me” (Bennett interview, 18). In light of this and other comments about her first husband, their divorce, and her second husband, one pays special attention, for example, to such episodes as a lovemaking scene in the story “Safe,” during which the narrator-wife muses about her second husband, “Because of this, because of what I feel for him, what he feels for me, of what we do, can do, have done together in this bed, I left another husband. Broke all sorts of laws: the state's, the church's. Caused a good man pain. And yet it has turned out well. Everyone is happier than ever. I do not understand this” (171).

If such genre crossovers sometimes become confusing to Gordon's readers, we're not alone in our confusion—and our fascination. For instance, an autobiographical essay, “The Important Houses,” published first in the New Yorker in 1992, was included, despite Gordon's protests, in Best American Short Stories 1993. In the contributors' notes at the end of the volume, Gordon is forthright about it: “The story of this ‘story’ is that it is not a story. It is part of a project I am working on, a sort of biography, a sort of memoir—a history of my father.” After describing the work's oblique angle, which her father's “fantastical character” seemed to mandate, she continues, “I have to suppose that it read like ‘fiction’ because I am primarily a fiction writer, and I create a character using the techniques of fiction: an accretion of detail, a penetration to the inner life, a series of scenes” (Best American, 367). When asked about this genre confusion in an interview, Gordon added to the saga, “I told Louise Erdrich, ‘I can't take this!’ But she told me I'd won it.” Then Gordon began laughing and admitted, “Well, I was not going to turn down being in the Best American Short Stories. And I did tell her—if you noticed my author's comments in the back” (Bennett interview, 19).

For her part, Erdrich's introduction to the volume discusses and praises Gordon's “eidetic and detailed” work which, because of its having “the most devastating last line in the collection,” she placed at the edition's conclusion. But Erdrich continues, and her perspective on Gordon's “story that is not a story” is intriguing. Erdrich proposes, “The description here is so meticulous and compelling that it verges on memoir, and yet the line blurs [my italics], for Gordon's powers to recreate are so profound. ‘The Important Houses’ has the gift of deeply imagined conjuring and presents the presiding genius of a place or person in every sentence” (Best American, xviii). I agree. It is not simply a case of what Gordon has explained away as “If you use the real names it's nonfiction. If you change the names it's fiction. The rest of that is total crap” (Bennett interview, 19).

It is not simply that Gordon's mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, becomes, for example, Nora in the stories “Delia,” “Agnes,” and “Eileen”; then Charlotte Taylor in The Company of Women; then the young narrator's mother in “The Thorn” and “The Neighborhood”; then her now elderly, invalided self in Gordon's stunning 1995 essay, “My Mother Is Speaking from the Desert.” In Gordon's hands, her mother and all other nonfictional materials are transformed. They become as much a conjured and a conjurer's art as her fiction. And so, if we ask of Gordon's writing: who or which is her mother, really? or her father?, we must answer: they are the mother and father of her life and, equally important, of her artist's mind. In other words, hers is a conjurer's mind that gives her permission to cross back and forth between worlds without a passport, to bring back whomever and whatever she chooses to transform. In explaining about a single descriptive sentence a friend relayed to her that led to her story “Out of the Fray,” Gordon has inadvertently sketched out the transformative process: “that absolutely grabbed me. But I made up the central people. I had no interest in what they were in real life actually. … But, you know, this is a sort of terrible thing because I don't actually want their story. I want to use parts of their story and retell it in my own way. I might even need a couple of their lines, but then, you know, they can just go off” (Keyishian interview, 75-76). It is in such transformations, her seemingly instinctive breaking down of the traditional differentiations between the genres, that Gordon continues to make some of her most innovative contributions to contemporary fiction. These blurred, arbitrary boundaries are her real “writing lessons,” her most intriguing instructions in artistic imagination and freedoms.

AN EPILOGUE ON SHELTERS

In a dizzyingly truthful sequence readers come to expect from Gordon, the narrator of “Now I Am Married” (discussing the precarious nature of contemporary marriages) offers a kind of manifesto-in-miniature for the Temporary Shelter collection: “It is the satisfaction of a dying civilization: one perfects the form, knowing it has the thrill of doom upon it. … It is harder than art and more dangerous” (137-38). It is just this sort of sequence that lingers on in one's mind after reading Gordon's stories and that probably leads critics, such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, to suggest, “What one remembers most acutely is the voice of the narrator—by turns warm, knowing, angry, ironic, self-lacerating, cynical, but ultimately healing and forgiving. Most of all, what this voice conveys is a moral commitment to seek the shelter of civilization and decent behavior, no matter how temporary it may prove” (“Temporary,” C25). Knowing that Gordon was grouping together the twenty versions of this narrative voice at the same time she was writing her fourth novel, The Other Side (with its complex narrators and commitments and its illusory happinesses), gives added weight to the “temporary shelter” and fictional considerations of her stories. What's more, we learn much from Gordon's work in the short-story genre, with its inherent concentrated vulnerability, about how she has attempted to perfect this form and the novel's as well. In a technologically driven world, her work and that of other fiction writers stubbornly reflect both the headaches and (like the narrator's comments on marriage in “Now I Am Married”) “the satisfaction of a dying civilization … knowing it has the thrill of doom upon it” (138).

Notes

1. Mary Gordon, Temporary Shelter (New York: Random House, 1987).

2. Paul Gray, “Temporary Shelter,” Time, 20 April 1987, 74.

3. Rachel Billington, “Women at Bay,” New York Times Book Review, 19 April 1987, 8; hereafter cited in the text as “At Bay.”

4. See Gordon's comments for “Contributors' Notes” section in Best American Short Stories 1993 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 367; hereafter cited in the text as Best American.

5. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Temporary Shelter” [“Books of the Times”], New York Times, 9 April 1987, C25; hereafter cited in the text as “Temporary.”

6. Gordon dedicated “Living at Home,” the second novella in The Rest of Life, to Helen Wilson. See also Gordon's comments about Wilson in Bennett interview, pages 22, 28.

7. Mary Gordon, “Walt,” Fiction XII, no. 1 (1994): 58-77; hereafter cited in the text as “Walt.”

8. Carolyn See, “Temporary Shelter,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 12 July 1987, 10.

9. In late March of 1995, Gordon mentioned that her next novel, Pearl, would develop the adult lives of the two children in the story “Temporary Shelter.” See page 36 of the Bennett interview. During an off-the-tape conversation, Gordon added that she planned to portray Maria as a single-parent mother of an illegitimate daughter, and Gordon laughed while pointing out its obvious echo of Hester and her daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.

10. Mary Gordon, “Separation,” Antaeus, nos. 64/65 (Spring-Autumn 1990): 208-17; hereafter cited in the text as “Separation.” This story was included in Best American Short Stories 1991, selected by Alice Adams with Katrina Kension (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 184-93.

11. See Best American Short Stories 1991, the “Contributors' Notes” section, page 402, for Gordon's comments.

12. Mary Gordon, “At the Kirks',” Grand Street IX, 2 (Winter 1990): 41-53; hereafter cited in the text as “Kirks'.”

13. Mary Gordon, “Eileen,” first published in Temporary Shelter. The story was anthologized in Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land, edited by Wesley Brown and Amy Ling (New York: Persea Books, 1992), 55-63.