Category: Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva’s sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father’s ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother’s first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn’t been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn’t beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.

Alice McDermott

If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prarie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to each other, “There’s someone at the door,” in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment – that they have spent their lives being stalked.

Alice McDermott

But Mrs. Meany, see, the women went on, leaning forward, despite how her heart was broken, pulled herself together, anyway, to put on a good face for the rest of the family at home. And she went back, Sunday after Sunday, right up until the Sunday before she died. Mrs. Meany put her beautiful love – a mother’s love – against the terrible scenes that brewed like sewage in that poor girl’s troubled mind. She persevered, she baked her cakes, she hauled herself (the goiter swinging) on and off the ferry, and she sat, brokenhearted, holding her daughter’s hand, even as Lucy shouted her terrible words, proving to anyone with eyes to see that a mother’s love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish.

Alice McDermott

It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife – that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, ‘You’re going to get tired of hearing from me. I’ll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you’ll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.’ And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, ‘Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She’s in heaven, after all.’It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception…There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life – hadn’t that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?