Aberration of Starlight

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Present a small verbal graph describing the Tom Thebus that existed in Marie’s mind.

A modern Apollo in white ducks; the manly source of aromatic pipe smoke redolent of the exotic; bronzed limbs; a ready laugh; flashing white teeth; very smart; Ronald Colman; sweet on her; a magazine illustration; a small wheel turning; somewhat like the handsome and collegiate teller lost in the mists of time; a man with a secret hurt carefully buried but often apparent in his deepset and poetic eyes; strong and silent; a go-getter; absolute opposite of shanty Irish; possessor of a glamorous and mysterious name; the driver of a glittering and classy car; good family man fatefully thwarted by dark elements beyond his control; expansive personality; singing, head high, down the road of life; a real gentleman.

On what foundation was Marie’s personality built?

The young daughter as white goddess; sudden onslaught on the ego with the arrival of maturity; subsequent decay of the invented white-goddess state, also known as the gift that maims.

Who were the people most responsible for this subsequent decay of the role of white goddess given her to play in her childhood and adolescence?

John McGrath; Bridget McGrath; Anthony Recco; Billy Recco; Margie.

Note one semi-incantatory phrase that came to Marie, in whole or part, at odd times and unbidden.

O Lord I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.

Was her soul ever healed?

It seems unlikely.

List some other literary fragments stored in her mind.

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?

Do you know you have asked for the costliest thing

Ever made by the Hand above?

Oh, where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy?

My hand is lonely for your clasping, dear;

My ear is tired waiting for your call.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

A cheer for the boy who says “No!”

The boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

Shone round him o’er the dead.

Crying, as I floated onward, “I am of the earth no more!

I have forfeited Life’s blessings in the streets of Baltimore.”

Chisel in hand stood a sculptor boy

With his marble block before him.

The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done.

‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

Make me a child again, just for tonight!

Behold this ruin! ‘Twas a skull

Once of ethereal spirit full.

Who fed me from her gentle breast

And hushed me in her arms to rest,

And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?

My Mother.

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,

A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam—

Afore ye really ‘predate the things ye lef behind.

Suppose, my little lady,

Your doll should break its head.

Tho’ th’ door wuz saggin’ from its hinges

An’ th’ rats wuz long as muh arm,

Still, I git those melancholy twinges

When I think o’ home on th’ farm.

During periods of stress, were any of these remarkable lines of use to Marie?

Many of them.

Give the titles of some other poems that Marie had, in whole or fragments, by heart.

To My Unborn Son; Among the Beautiful Pictures; If—; Where There’s a Will There’s a Way; The Rose Still Grows Beyond the Wall; When Your Eyes Do Burn With Salty Flood; Lord, Make a Regular Man Out of Me; The Land of Beginning Again; The House By the Side of the Road; The Face Upon the Floor; The Humble Midgets Speak; Abou Ben Adhem; Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight; Even This Shall Pass Away; Recessional; Poor LiP Brack Sheep; Roses in December; Somebody’s Mother; Then His Hard, Stern Lip Did Tremble; Home Is Where There Is One to Love Us; Lullaby Town; Breathes There the Man; In Flanders Fields; ‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer; Drifting Sands and A Caravan; ‘Twas His Face on the Golden Shore; Barbara Frietchie.

The names of some of her favorite poets?

Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff; Captain Cyril Morton Thorne; Burleson St. Charles MacVoute; Dinah Maria Mu-lock Craik; Edgar A. Guest; Josiah Gilbert Holland; Lorna Blakey Flambeaux; H. Antoine D’Arcy; Emma Simpere Furze; Alaric Alexander Watts; Mary Artemisia Lathbury; Blanche Bane Kuder; Jean Ingelow; Carruthers Sofa-Jeudi; Maltbie Davenport Babcock; Nixon Waterman.

Was Marie afraid of men?

Sexually, yes.

How had Marie really felt about her mother?

She had feared and despised her and was relieved at her death. She denied this last to herself and the subsequent emotional pressures caused her to suffer excruciating gas pains, much like those at the time she had ascertained, beyond all doubt, the illicit affair between her husband and Margie. At that time she suspected that the “evil eye” had been put on her or that ground glass was being mixed into her food.

Why did she not realize Margie’s intentions toward Tony? And vice versa?

The idea of illicit sex, and indeed, of licit sex of certain kinds that she refused to imagine, terrified her. She could conceive of no one that she knew involved in any of these activities, certainly not her husband and his secretary.

What of Marie’s feelings toward both Margie and Tony in terms of their relationship with Billy?

Their delight — especially Margie’s — in Billy, a delight that Billy returned, made their adulterous affair seem utterly monstrous and perverted to Marie. Although there was no reason why they could not carry on their affair and still love Billy, this combination, to Marie, seemed hideous.

Perhaps it sprang from their smiling betrayal of her affection for them?

Perhaps. But it seems deeper than that. She thought of Billy as somehow soiled. Although the Tony-Margie affair was banal in the extreme, Marie turned it, for her son, into a passage of spectacular depravity. Her stories, for instance, of giant rats perching on Margie’s shoulders in her filthy cellar flat were, for Billy, the stuff of nightmares.

How did Marie regard herself?

As a little girl with golden braids in a crisply starched, knife-pleated dress with matching knee stockings and hair ribbons, crying bitterly as her mother beat her Cousin Katie with a belt for some job left undone; as a bride removing her wedding gown following the wedding breakfast and blushing as she looked at the lingerie in her trousseau, packed neatly in luggage not yet closed; as a young woman of seventeen in country tweeds and a sweater, sitting on a rock in a field, the sky grey and lowering; as a strong woman, jaw set, mouth firm, head high, standing behind her son, her hand on his shoulder, Facing Life; as the bride of Tom Thebus, boarding a train with him for an extended honeymoon trip on his fabled yacht at berth in some equally fabled marina; as an old woman with carefully powdered silver hair and a beautiful heirloom diamond brooch at her throat, surrounded by loving and beautiful grandchildren, her dear husband in a rocker puffing on his crusted old briar, its aroma still the same one of rum, maple, and chocolate.

How did John McGrath exercise his hold on Marie?

Via sadness, as in “I’m not needed anymore.” Via bitterness, as in “I’m the butt in this family.” Economically, as in his giving Marie $1000 (in two installments of $500) after Bridget’s death — enough not to be thought of as cheap or heartless, but not enough to allow Marie even the illusion of independence. Via lies, as in his not telling her that her mother had left her $5000, which gift sheds a new and surprising light on Bridget, although it may have been prompted by her final feelings of guilt, remorse, and gratitude. (This seems unlikely.) Via generosity, made to seem even more generous by its unexpectedness, as in his giving Marie his wife’s diamond dinner ring and offering to pay for a new setting of its “three nice stones.” Via veiled threats, as in his references to the goodness, kindness, loneliness, and understanding of Helga Schmidt, fully aware of Marie’s intense dislike of this aggressively forward woman. Via suggestions of ill health, as in his arrival at their apartment after work in the performance of one of the following acts: heavy panting; heavy panting mixed with deep groans; heavy panting, occasional deep groans, and a random “oh Jesus” or “Jesus Christ”; heavy panting and exhausted “collapse” against the wall of the hallway; a total lack of both panting and groaning but an exhausted “collapse” with martyred look against the wall of the hallway; heavy panting, deep groans, “Jesus Christs” plus an exhausted “collapse” against wall, followed by deathly silence ultimately shattered by a bone-deep groan, a slow and heavy staggering walk down the hallway into the living room, a trembling fall into the nearest chair, hat and coat still on, a roll of the eyes to “heaven,” a slow flutter of the eyelids followed by the closing of the eyes, and the gentle placement of the right hand on the chest in what John took to be the vicinity of the heart.

Is it possible to know a little of Marie’s feelings toward her father?

They were wildly ambivalent. She despised him because she knew that he had bent all his powers toward making her feel responsible for him. Yet she loved him because, despite his cowardice in the face of the fierce and bitter woman whom Bridget had gradually become, he had done what he could to make her life and Billy’s somewhat bearable after her separation from Tony and Bridget’s subsequent triumphant crowing over the marriage’s failure.

What were her feelings toward Tom Thebus?

At this time they seemed to be love, admiration, attraction, fascination, and the old familiar sexual fear, the last courtesy of the Sisters of Charity, especially one Sister Vincent.

What about her feelings toward the WigWam?

It evoked a bittersweet nostalgia and, like most, one but tenuously attached to facts.