Men and Angels Read Online Free PDF

lettuce, Kraft French dressing. Having the sandwiches and salad ready for his mother when she walked in the door, home from work, from the beauty parlor where she was astonishingly successful (her house was a hovel but she was always perfectly manicured, impeccably coiffed). She was greatly charming, and her specialty was brief encounters. To the women whose hair she fixed she was a bolster, a beacon, a tower of strength. And to her son she gave much that was important in a mother’s love: a steamy, rich affection, redolent of the cave. Always he knew she loved him; always he knew himself first in her heart. And for that Anne loved her, was able to see her charm, her virtues. It was lucky that she did; Michael would never have been able to marry someone who didn’t like his mother, who didn’t appreciate her, who was shocked at her domestic chaos or interpreted it as a lack of regard. It was all right for him to lament her failures, to call himself an orphan, but had Anne joined him in condemning his mother, he would have drawn away. What he needed was someone who could be different from his mother yet assure him that his mother had not, as a woman, failed.
    It wasn’t difficult for Anne to ignore or see through Lucy’s domestic chaos. She, too, had been brought up in a home bereft of ordinary graces, though its tone was vastly different from the cluttered, sexy, female mess of Lucy’s den. Her mother hadn’t liked home life, so she had not been good at it. Only recently Anne had realized that her mother must have been depressed for years. Only depression could account for her thorough failure, the spiritless performance of a woman of spirit, the gross blundering of a woman whose whole talent was for fineness, for distinction. She thought of the elaborate meals her mother had planned and burned, the dresses she had made and then ruined with her iron, the wallpapers that cried out horribly against the brocade chairs. Then it had changed: she had gone back to school, had got her degree. It was too late for Anne; she was in college by then.
    Anne thought of her mother’s wedding picture. Susan Holliwell, Mount Holyoke, class of ’41, looking more the honor student than the bride, holding her bouquet over her head like a basketball or a torch. She was laughing, and one could see the joke: this dashing girl was going to pretend to settle down. How had that girl turned into the mother Anne remembered, covering her ears and begging her children not to fight, crying when her younger daughter refused, for the fiftieth time, to drink her milk? Seeing her mother like this, it had early become clear to Anne that she had to be the mother in the house.
    That was the secret of her bond with Michael: they had both been, as children, mothers, both involved in the conspiracy at the center of the lives of children of deficient parents, the conspiracy to keep from the world this shame, this failure, above all to make it appear that the life inside the sorrowing house was the same as any other.
    They had married early because they wanted to reinvent domestic life. It was a romance dear to both of them. They never could understand, really, their friends who wanted to live in purposefully ugly places: bare mattresses on the floor, empty tuna cans for ashtrays, posters stuck to the wall with thumbtacks, half falling down. For them a vase of living flowers was a miracle, a loaf of bread they’d made together was a precious vessel holding all they wanted for their lives.
    It was only after they’d done it all, bought the house, had the babies, that they realized that others who’d done what they had done thought they were reinventing domestic life. But by that time it was no longer an invention, it was simply their life.
    Now all that was interrupted. Michael was four thousand miles away. He’d been gone three weeks, and she felt it still, that hesitancy, that waiting, almost as if she heard him, as if, any minute, she might see him in