The Rest of Life.

THE REST OF LIFE

Three Novellas 

Mary Gordon 

Viking, $22, 257 pp.

Three stories; three women; four men (one a father) to whom the women are bound by ties of obsession and memory; several children to whom the women are devoted, all but one boys, none fathered by their lovers. Such is the cast of characters in these novellas, Mary Gordon's first fiction since the generational saga of The Other Side, but what really matters here are the voices, in turn confessional, suspicious, celebratory, always questioning but finally, in the concluding story, grateful.

The first two stories, "Immaculate Man" and "Living at Home," echo one another most closely. Both are first-person narratives by women in their forties who have been married and divorced, have achieved professional independence (significantly, as a social worker with battered women and a psychiatrist for autistic children), and have fallen in love, respectively, with a priest and a foreign journalist, men temperamentally unsuited to settling down, or, some might claim, to growing up. What links these two nameless women is their physical attachment to their lovers, their fear of displacement by abandonment or death. Each story ends with the words, "I don't know"; and what they don't know is how they'll live without their men, so binding has the covenant of the flesh become. And yet their voices rarely sound a self-pitying note; indeed, they often reveal a sharp-eyed realism. Father Clement's late sexual awakening restores the narrator's regard for her body, but it becomes wearying in its very devotion: "Sometimes," she reflects, "I want a romp: athletic, careless, and desanctified." The journalist's mortal fear of even the simplest medical procedure mocks his itch to be in the thick of violent revolutions.

At other times, however, the clarity gives way to the moral obtuseness of the age and the peculiar blindness of any egoisme a deux: despite her concern for autistic children, the second narrator has no serious qualms about having an abortion and confines her outrage to the journalist's insensitivity in planning a trip at the time of the procedure.

The perils--and delights--of romantic love experienced in middle age bind these couples together in a way that family or religious community failed to do. What Mary Gordon has so evocatively caught in her narrators' voices is how precious and precarious such late-blooming pleasures can be, like the pleasures of the stories themselves with their shifting promises of meaning.

In the third and most moving of the novellas, "The Rest of Life," the focus shifts to youth and old age, but of the same woman. It is a long and long-resisted exercise of memory by a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother returning to Turin from America six decades after she was sent away in disgrace by her adored father; at fifteen she had fallen in love with a Byronesque youth a year older who subsequently committed suicide in a pact she failed to honor. Guilt, shame, loss shadow her subsequent life as nurse, wife, and mother, for no attachment, even that to her youngest and best loved son, can make up for her infatuation with the teen-aged romantic or her despair at the eclipse of her father's devotion.

Memory for her means something quite different from nostalgia; not the peaceful stream to be navigated at will but "the cataract, the overwhelming flood" she has kept dammed up. Even the city of her childhood becomes a menace when she tries to lead her son and his fiancee on a walking tour. Relieved at first because she finds no incriminating names in the phone book and no buildings remaining that might silently accuse her of youthful crimes, she becomes lost in streets she cannot remember, surrounded by buildings and wires that cast surreal shadows and remind her of Turin 's reputation for black magic and hidden malice. Memory's power to shape and distort the present becomes palpable, but not inescapable.

For memory can also be cathartic, as she discovers when she decides to retrace alone the final journey with Leo to the medieval tower of their broken pact. She finds it half-demolished, marked off with a warning sign: Pericoloso, a place for uncomplicated young boys, so unlike Leo, to play their games. What she discovers and reclaims is her will to live, that deep desire for a shared happiness that led her to offer her life to Leo but stopped her from taking it. What she leaves behind is her guilt, her bitterness at life's unfairness. Coming back to Turin, to her son and his African fiancee, she discovers, like Gabriel Conroy at the end of Joyce's short masterpiece, that the dead absolve more than they blame the living: "the dead, being one and many, knew there was nothing to forgive." And so the story that began in dread ends in gratitude, transmuting memory into a hymn of celebration for "all that has gone before us, everything, all things, the living and the dead .... Si, grazie."

A rather different ending from the agnosticism of the heart that concludes the first two stories. Is it an epistemological advance or simply an idiosyncracy of old age? Perhaps the lyricism of that ending, with all its echoes of "The Dead" ("A boy like you died here. It might have been because of me."), makes most sense as a testament of independence. For the achievement of this reluctant pilgrim has been to become her own woman, freed in memory now from lover and father as she had already been freed by widowhood from a husband she respected but could never love. It is a freedom her sister narrators might well envy but would likely want to postpone.