Florence Gordon Read Online Free PDF Page B

that?”
    “Your surprise party. I heard you say something about it to someone before you disappeared.”
    “The famous surprise party,” Daniel said. “Good going, Mom.”
    “Thank you,” Florence said.
    Janine thought she saw a hint of embarrassment in Florence’s face, but she was probably wrong. I’m probably only thinking that because I’d feel embarrassed if I’d done that.
    “‘Thank you all for coming,’” Daniel said. “‘Now leave me the hell alone.’”
    “Isn’t that what people usually say at their birthday parties?” Florence said.
    “Those could be your last words,” Emily said. “‘Leave me the hell alone.’”
    “What’ll be your last words?” Florence said.
    “Emily’s?” Janine said. “‘Give me another minute to finish this page.’”
    “So about this memoir,” Emily said. “Are you going to write about my dad?”
    “Maybe in a footnote,” Daniel said.
    “Maybe in a footnote,” Florence said.
    “She’s got a much bigger story to tell,” Daniel said. “She can’t be troubled to write about distractions like her son.”
    “And you just got a medal, right?” Emily said.
    “Right.”
    Florence had received a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters that spring.
    “That must’ve been exciting.”
    “It was,” Florence said. “It’s not that you sit around hoping for that kind of recognition. But it’s nice when it comes.”
    Janine, though she was aware that she analyzed her mother-in-law’s every utterance too eagerly, found something refreshing in this—in what she said and the way she said it. If any other woman Janine knew had been honored in this way, and were asked what she thought about it, she would profess herself unworthy, downplay her own achievements, downplay the honor itself—she would find some way of denigrating herself. She admired the way that Florence simply allowed herself to enjoy it.
    “You’re my mother’s hero,” Emily said, with that frightening way she sometimes had of reading Janine’s thoughts.
    “I hope not.”
    “You are. She thinks you’re the very model of a feminist intellectual. She thinks every woman should be more like you.”
    “That’s enough,” Janine said.
    But after she finished her glass of wine, she couldn’t help herself. She’d been excited to learn that Florence was working on a memoir, and, now that her tongue had been loosened, she couldn’t stop herself from asking about it. Would she write about the Town Hall debate between Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer? Would she write about the year she spent in England in the 1970s? Was it true that she got into a quarrel with Juliet Mitchell? No? Because—
    Florence, who’d been answering in monosyllables, cut her off.
    “What about you?” she said. “How’s
your
work? I mean, do you feel like you’re a member of a dying species?”
    “Why?”
    “Psychology. Isn’t psychology as we’ve known it pretty much over? Everything comes down to brain chemicals. Doesn’t it?”
    “Does it?”
    “That’s what I keep reading. The talking cure is finished. You can spend thousands of hours on a couch talking about all the terrible things your mommy and daddy did to you, and it won’t help you half as much as taking a pill.”
    Florence, obviously, didn’t have the slightest idea of what Janine’s work was all about. The curiosity that had brought Janine to pursue a fellowship in New York was precisely about the complicated relationship between our intentions and our impulses, between the parts of ourselves that seem to be under our control and the parts of ourselves that don’t. Janine
was
a believer in the talking cure—in the end she believed that there was probably no substitute for the classical analytic relationship, in which one person talks and another patiently listens—but the entire reason she was in New York was to explore the question of how newer and more scientifically based ways of looking at problems of will and