Family Dancing by David Leavitt Page B

convinced I’m having an affair. “Alden’s still a man,” she says to me. “With a man’s needs.”
    We have been talking so long that the earpiece of the phone is sticking to my ear. “Mother,” I say, “please don’t worry. I’m hardly in shape for it.”
    She doesn’t laugh. “I look at Mrs. Garvey, and I’m moved,” she says. “Such strength of character. You should take it as a lesson. Before I hang up, I want to tell you about something I read, if you don’t mind.”
    My mother loves to offer information, and has raised me in the tradition. We constantly repeat movie plots, offer authoritative statistics from television news specials. “What did you read, Mother?” I ask.
    “There is a man who is studying the Holocaust,” she says. “He makes a graph. One axis is fulfillment/despair, and the other is success/failure. That means that there are four groups of people—those who are fulfilled by success, whom we can understand, and those who are despairing even though they’re successful, like so many people we know, and those who are despairing because they’re failures. Then there’s the fourth group—the people who are fulfilled by failure, who don’t need hope to live. Do you know who those people are?”
    “Who?” I ask.
    “Those people,” my mother says, “are the ones who survived.”
    There is a long, intentional silence.
    “I thought you should know,” she says, “that I am now standing outside, on the back porch. I can go as far as seven hundred feet from the house.”
     
    Recently I’ve been thinking often about something terrible I did when I was a child—something which neither I nor Mother has ever really gotten over. I did it when I was six years old. One day at school my older sister, Mary Elise, asked me to tell Mother that she was going to a friend’s house for the afternoon to play with some new Barbie dolls. I was mad at Mother that day, and jealous of Mary Elise. When I got home, Mother was feeding the cat, and without even saying hello (she was mad at me for some reason, too) she ordered me to take out the garbage. I was filled with rage, both at her and my sister, whom I was convinced she favored. And then I came up with an awful idea. “Mother,” I said, “I have something to tell you.” She turned around. Her distracted face suddenly focused on me. I realized I had no choice but to finish what I’d started. “Mary Elise died today,” I said. “She fell off the jungle gym and split her head open.”
    At first she just looked at me, her mouth open. Then her eyes—I remember this distinctly—went in two different directions. For a brief moment, the tenuousness of everything—the house, my life, the universe—became known to me, and I had a glimpse of how easily the fragile network could be exploded.
    Mother started shaking me. She was making noises but she couldn’t speak. The minute I said the dreaded words I started to cry; I couldn’t find a voice to tell her the truth. She kept shaking me. Finally I managed to gasp, “I’m lying, I’m lying. It’s not true.” She stopped shaking me, and hoisted me up into the air. I closed my eyes and held my breath, imagining she might hurl me down against the floor. “You monster,” she whispered. “You little bastard,” she whispered between clenched teeth. Her face was twisted, her eyes glistening. She hugged me very fiercely and then she threw me onto her lap and started to spank me. “You monster, you monster,” she screamed between sobs. “Never scare me like that again, never scare me like that again.”
    By the time Mary Elise got home, we were composed. Mother had made me swear I’d never tell her what had happened, and I never have. We had an understanding, from then on, or perhaps we had a secret. It has bound us together, so that now we are much closer to each other than either of us is to Mary Elise, who married a lawyer and moved to Hawaii.
    The reason I cannot forget this episode is