One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Page B

my father to believe that his world would be effortlessly cared for because she had, seemingly effortlessly, cared for it. I was beginning to understand the effort in the care now, and that made me angry, to know how she had pretended that he had a job and she had something so much less. And it made me fearful, too, of the future. The essential differences between my mother and me seemed less essential, now that I could see her sitting in the library at Columbia, reading her way through the classics. She had given that up for my father, and she had deferred to him ever since, it was true. But now I understood how easy it was to do what he required, particularly in the service of what seemed a worthy cause.
    I looked down at the three of us in the photograph, frozen in brilliant color beneath a sunny blue Cambridge sky. And I wondered how much I, too, had made possible my father’s unthinking primacy. Or was it their marriage I safeguarded, my mother ever sweet-tempered without the demands of my father’s intellectualarrogance, my father still enamored of his wife because he had another companion for his life of the mind? How providential that most children left home when they did, before they were wise enough to understand their parents.
    “You’ll feel better in the morning,” I said aloud, and as I stared at the picture it became abstract, a blur of color and light, subject to a hundred interpretations. Then I stepped back and it rearranged itself into what it had always been, a still life of happiness. My eyes were dry and sandy. I felt tired and sapped, as though I had been living here like this my whole life. As indeed I had, looking for myself in the space between the two of them.

 
     
    I felt undone by that night’s exchange with my father, as undone as I had been the day, years before, when I first began to understand that it was not only his work that kept him on the Langhorne campus long after classes were done for the day. Langhorne, too, had a library, though not as large and distinguished as Columbia’s. There was something churchlike about it, with its long and narrow stained-glass windows commemorating Shakespeare’s heroines and its plain benches flanking the big oak tables. I, too, went there to fill in the gaps in my public school education with ambitious social studies projects and papers on Conrad and Melville that were half cribbed from literary criticism texts.
    I don’t know what brought my father to the library one afternoon when I was working there, at a table with a gaggle of girls doing a group project deconstructing T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. But I heard them clearly once he had stalked down the center aisle and into the stacks: the divine Professor G, one said, and who is it now, said another, since his teaching assistant went to Colby?,and I’d do him, said one with curly black hair and a big gap between her front teeth.
    No, they squealed, and a boy scratching away at a legal pad with a stack of reference books in front of him turned to glare at them. He’s old, he’s married, he grades so hard, they whispered.
    He’s my father, I thought.
    I could imagine the man he was to them, because I had seen that man myself, though rarely at home, where, it occurred to me, he rested up for the hard work of becoming that George Gulden, the lover, the dazzler, the charmer. I find it difficult to talk about my father’s charm today without reducing it to something akin to a snake in a basket and a fakir with a flute, talking about it the way you talk about drinking when you’ve been sober for years and all you can remember about a beer is what it was like to wrap your arms around the toilet at three A.M . and catch the sanctifying smell of bowl freshener as you threw up.
    But it was a real true thing. My father was cordial to men, albeit intent on making his word known, his word law, but to women he was courtly and so warm he appeared to be courting even the elderly and the very young.