Men and Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

marriages were bad.
    But Laura was unlike any of the young women she knew. It was her fault for not liking Laura, she told herself. If she felt reproached by someone wearing a darned sweater and fasting one day a week, it was something in her that was amiss. Yet she really couldn’t hire her. She’d have to make do with Mrs. Davenport. And Sally Devereux, who worked in the college employment office, had told her that if she would just hang on, something would turn up. People were always deciding they hated their roommates, or they went broke or their fathers lost their jobs. It was just a matter of time, Sally had assured her. Meanwhile, she could hold off going to the city more than one day a week; there was still a lot she could do at home.
    She wondered what she would have done about Laura if Michael had been home. The decisions about the course their lives would take had always been made jointly, so their individual positions had been concealed, as the parts of a machine are concealed when it works. Married at twenty-two, they’d had no experience in dealing with the outside world separately as adults.
    You’d done nothing yet at twenty-two, she thought, knew nothing. And yet, she thought, they’d been right to marry. What else could they have done? Gone off somewhere, each separately? Taken up with others? They’d thought of it, of course, for it was unfashionable, highly unfashionable, what they’d done: one simply didn’t get married at twenty-two in 1968. But anything else would have been false. They were in love; they were going to be in the same graduate school; it would have caused some unease to her family if they’d lived together. And so why not marry?
    For, ashamedly, she’d recognized that what she wanted went with marriage. She’d wanted a home not her parents’ and yet not quite a student’s either. She wanted to be an adult. And since she had no money, no profession, only a student’s status, which she was weary of, marriage was a way that she could feel she had closed a chapter of her life—childhood, you could have called it—that she was eager to be rid of and that otherwise she might feel she had indecorously prolonged.
    Michael, too, had wanted to close a chapter of the past, which had wounded him, though he was gallant about it. You never would have known what he’d come from. He’d waited a year before he’d brought her home, to the shambles of a house, the nearly ruined mother tipsy every night by eight, so he never felt safe inviting people for dinner. He’d got a motel room for Anne that first visit, and kept her there as much as possible, bringing her to his house for breakfast and lunch only, bringing hamburgers to her room in the motel, in Akron, near the airport so he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew, making love to her over and over, hungrily, gratefully, for he was grateful to her for still wanting him after she’d seen his home, and she was grateful that he’d shown her, grateful for the trust. Grateful for allowing her to understand him, for there was no knowing him without his mother. Poor Lucy, whom she’d genuinely loved but whose death, she must be honest, had been a relief.
    Lucy, too, had been gallant, in her way, but her way wasn’t sufficient, not for the mother of a son. Abandoned by her husband at thirty, left with a four-year-old boy, she’d simply turned her back on domestic life, or turned over in the face of it, like a wounded animal, declaring itself helpless, out of the running, everything in its posture expressing its desire to be left alone, simply to be allowed not to take part. Anne often wondered how Michael had physically survived his early childhood. As early as possible, Lucy had abdicated; at eight, Michael had told her, he’d done all the shopping, the cooking such as it was, the little cleaning that got done. She’d thought of him so often, that bookish little boy, going down to the corner store, buying bologna, white bread, iceberg