Florence Gordon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian Morton

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-30986-9

  eISBN 978-0-544-30928-9

  v1.0914

  For Heather

  1

  Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: she was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual?

  Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as “strident” and “shrill.”

  If you’re an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill.

  She closed her laptop.

  Not much point, she thought.

  But then she opened it up again.

  2

  She didn’t feel strident or shrill. She didn’t even feel old.

  And anyway, old age isn’t what it used to be—or at least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  This was her reasoning. Florence was seventy-five years old. In an earlier era, that would have made her an old lady. But not today. She’d been a young woman during the 1960s, and if you were young in the sixties—“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—there’s a sense in which you can never grow old. You were there when the Beatles came to America; you were there when sex was discovered; you were there when the idea of liberation was born; and even if you end up a cranky old lady who’s proud of her activist past but who now just wants to be left alone to read, write, and think—even if you end up like that, there’s something in your soul that stays green.

  She wasn’t—this seems important to say—a woman who tried to look younger than she was. She didn’t dye her hair; she had no interest in Botox; she didn’t whiten her teeth. Her craggy old-fashioned teeth, rude and honest and unretouched, were good enough for her.

  She wasn’t a woman who wanted to recapture her youth. In part this was because she found the life she was living now so interesting.

  So she was a strong proud independent-minded woman who accepted being old but nevertheless felt essentially young.

  She was also, in the opinion of many who knew her, even in the opinion of many who loved her, a complete pain in the neck.

  3

  She was writing a memoir that began with the early days of the women’s movement—the modern women’s movement, her own women’s movement, the one that had been born in the 1970s. If she could finish it, it would be her seventh book.

  Each book had posed its own difficulties. The difficulty with this one was that she was finding it impossible to bring the past to life. Her memory was efficient; she could recall the dates and the acts and the actors. But she was finding it hard to remember the texture of the past.

  Tonight she had finally begun, she thought, to crack the code. She’d remembered a moment that she hadn’t thought about in years. It was just a moment, not important in itself. But precisely because she hadn’t thought about it in so long, she was able to remember it now with a sense of freshness, and she was hoping she might have finally found the door that would lead her back into the past.

  She was free for the rest of the night. She’d had dinner plans with friends, but with a secret glee she’d canceled so she could stay home and work. It was seven o’clock on a Friday in early May; she was through with her academic obligations and her mind was clear. And this evening, in which she’d finally, finally, finally begun to make some progress—this evening was the happiest one she’d had in a long time.

  Except that Vanessa kept calling.

  Her friend Vanessa kept calling, and Florence kept not picking up. After the fifth call, she thought Vanessa might be in some sort of trouble, and on the sixth, she finally answered.

  “Thank God you’re home,” Vanessa said. “I’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing big. Nothing terrible. It’s just that I got pickpocketed, evidently, and I don’t have anything except my phone. I need some money to get back home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “That’s why I called you. I’m three blocks away.”

  She named a restaurant.

  “Well I’m right here,” Florence said. “Just come up.”

  “That’s nice of you. But it’s a little bit complicated.”

  “Why?”

  “Ruby and Cassie had to run, and I stayed to pay the check, and that’s when I found out my purse was gone. So the owner doesn’t want me to leave. He wants to be sure I’m not going to skip out on him.”

  “Vanessa, you’re a very respectable-looking woman. You’re a very old woman. You’re obviously not skipping out on him. Tell him you’re not Bonnie Parker.”

  “That’s just what I told him. That’s exactly what I told him, in fact. I told him I’m not Bonnie Parker. But he’s not being very understanding. I think he thinks I am Bonnie Parker. I’m really sorry. But it’ll just take a minute.”

  People, Florence thought as sh
e put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?

  He’s afraid she’ll skip out on him. As Florence waited for the elevator, she was muttering to herself. She reminded herself of Popeye the Sailor Man.

  She crossed the street, still muttering. Muttering, and clenching and unclenching her fists.

  She was doing this with her fists because she’d been having some trouble with her left hand. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Her fingers sometimes jumped around as if they had five little minds of their own. A neurologist had told her to get an ergonomic keyboard and an ergonomic mouse and an ergonomic splint for her wrist; she’d gotten all of it, and she’d faithfully done the exercises he prescribed, but none of it was working so far.

  Muttering, clenching, unclenching: I must look, she thought, like a madwoman.

  4

  The restaurant was on Sixty-seventh Street, between Columbus and Central Park West. She went inside, couldn’t see Vanessa.

  It was a fancy, expensive, somewhat full-of-itself restaurant. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where the owner would hold you hostage.

  The greeter, a somber-looking man, asked her if she needed help.

  “I’m looking for a friend. Woman my age? Couldn’t pay her bill?”

  “Oh, yes. I know who you mean. She’s in the back room.”

  They’ve got her in the back room, Florence thought. They’re working her over.

  He led Florence down a hall and gestured toward an entryway, behind which the room was unaccountably dark. She stepped in, and the lights went on, and the room was filled with people shouting “Surprise!”

  Surprise.

  Friends from NYU, friends from the movement, friends from the writing world. Even her family was there: her daughter-in-law, her granddaughter.

  Vanessa was embracing her.

  “This was the only way we thought we’d be able to celebrate you.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  “I thought if we did it too close to your birthday, we’d lose the element of surprise. You’d know what was coming and you’d never show up. It was a delicate operation. Like trapping the mythical yeti. We wanted to celebrate you. And we wanted to get you out of your apartment so you could have some fun.”

  It was astonishing how little people know each other, even old friends. I was having fun, Florence thought. I was having fun sitting in my apartment and trying to understand our life, our collective life. I was having fun trying to make the sentences come right. I was having fun trying to keep a little moment in time alive.

  And now that was gone. She had been so close to seeing things clearly, but it had felt so precarious, so fragile. Who could know whether that little flicker of clarity would still be there in the morning.

  Janine, her daughter-in-law, and Emily, her granddaughter, were at her side. They’d been in New York for months now, and she hadn’t arranged to see them. She felt guilty for a moment, then realized that the guilt was merely a sort of tribute she was paying to convention—in fact, she simply hadn’t wanted to see them—and she stopped feeling guilty.

  “Happy birthday, more or less,” Janine said.

  “Not that you look that happy,” Emily said.

  “I wish someone had nipped this in the bud.”

  “I tried. I tried to nip it,” Janine said. “I told them it was a bad idea. But . . . Vanessa. She’s almost as much of a force of nature as you are.”

  Oh Christ. Even Saul was here.

  He put his arm around her shoulder. He seemed to be half drunk.

  “I couldn’t not be here,” he said. “And I mean that literally. Your friend wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Someone Florence half remembered materialized at her side and told a long story about how hard it had been to get there from Rockland County. Someone else told Florence a story about how hard it was to tear herself away from her adorable but not yet housebroken puppy. As Florence smiled and nodded and pretended to listen, all she was trying to do was hold on to the moments of clarity she’d experienced at her desk, and all she wished for was to go back home.

  In the women’s room, she looked at the window. It was ten feet off the ground. Maybe if I stood on the toilet seat I could lift myself up to the top of the stall . . .

  No. Too craven. Too undignified.

  She returned to the room where the celebration was in progress, picked up a glass, and tapped a knife against it until she had everyone’s attention.

  “My friends,” she said, “I’m touched that you decided to do this. I’m touched, and I’m honored. What was it Yeats said? Something like ‘Think where our glory begins and ends, and say my glory was, I had such friends.’”

  There was a murmur of appreciation.

  “One of the things that I find beautiful about you all is that you understand me. I know I’m not easy to be with. I’m a difficult woman.”

  “You’re a gloriously difficult woman,” Vanessa said—she always gushed too much—and others made noises of agreement.

  “Well, thank you. But whether I’m gloriously hard to get along with or just plain hard to get along with, each of you has found ways to get along with me. Which is a tribute to your generosity, tolerance, and ingenuity. Because I’ve asked you to put up with a lot.

  “And now I’m going to ask you to put up with one more thing. I’m delighted by this surprise party, but I’m going to leave you now, because I need to get back to my desk. I hope you know that I truly do appreciate this, and that I’ll be here in spirit. And I hope you have a wonderful evening.”

  She turned and left. It would have been nice to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, but it was more important to keep her head up, and therefore she saw the faces of several friends as she passed them. They looked as if they weren’t sure whether she was serious.

  She’d left her computer on, and as soon as she got home she sat back down in front of it. It took a while for the fog to burn away—the fog of embarrassment or ambivalence or whatever she was feeling—but after a time she found that she was not so far from where she’d left off. She worked for the rest of the night with satisfaction, and didn’t give her friends and well-wishers another thought.

  5

  After she left, no one knew what to say. Nobody even seemed to want to look at anyone else.

  “Now you understand why I divorced her,” Saul said.

  People laughed, and went back to eating and drinking.

  “What the hell,” Vanessa said. “Let’s have a party. Let’s celebrate Florence in absentia.”

  “I think I’ll ‘celebrate’ her some other time,” Saul said. “I’m out of here.”

  6

  “Did he divorce her?” Emily said to her mother.

  “Other way round,” Janine said.

  “That’s what I thought. I can’t even imagine them married.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s so independent. And he seems like he needs somebody needy.”

  Janine was constantly surprised by the things her daughter came out with. But parents always are.

  For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine’s mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, “Where did she learn that?”

  “We’ve got the evening free, at least,” Janine said. “Wanna go to the movies?”

  “But can we not see anything self-improving tonight? Can we go to something fun?”

  “Only if you promise . . .”

  But Janine couldn’t think of anything to make her daughter promise. There was nothing she wanted Emily to change. This hadn’t always been true, and wouldn’t always remain true, but it was true right now.

  7

  The next time Janine and Emily saw Florence, it was in an even les
s intimate setting.

  The two of them were in the audience at Town Hall, waiting for the panel discussion to begin.

  “Is it unhealthy to have an intellectual crush on your mother-in-law?” Janine said.

  “Not if it’s only an intellectual crush,” her daughter answered.

  Janine’s relationship with Florence was an unusual one for a woman to have with her mother-in-law. It was an unusually strong relationship, though it existed mostly in Janine’s mind.

  Janine had heard of Florence before she’d ever met Daniel, and when Daniel told her who his mother was, she couldn’t believe it.

  Not that Florence was in any sense famous. She was a feminist writer—an essayist and, as she called herself, a seat-of-her-pants historian. She’d had a little flare of literary glory in the seventies, which had vanished, as flares of literary glory tend to do, and since then she’d continued, calmly and patiently and entirely out of the limelight, to do her work.

  But though she wasn’t famous to the world, she was famous to Janine. Janine had read a book of essays by Florence in college. She read them for a class in modern American feminism, and Florence’s voice on the page was unlike anything that Janine had encountered before. By turns eloquent and chatty, confident and self-questioning, it was the voice of a real person. It was a style Janine later encountered in other writers—Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Katha Pollitt—and though all of them were better known than Florence was, Florence had been the first member of this tribe whom Janine encountered, and, maybe for that reason alone, Florence had always meant the most to her.

  Janine had never wanted to be a writer—after a few years spent “finding herself” after college, she went to grad school in psychology—so Florence wasn’t a role model for her in any direct sense. But Florence remained an inspiration. She continued to represent Janine’s idea of a free woman.

  The collection of essays that Janine read in college was called Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life, and the idea that there were such opportunities—the idea, in the words of a psychologist whom Florence quoted, that one is constantly confronted by situations in which one must make either a growth choice or a fear choice—conferred a new significance, first, on Janine’s life, and then, the longer she thought about it, on the lives of everyone she knew or came in contact with.