Irish Lib

By Martha Duffy

FINAL PAYMENTS by Mary Gordon Random House; 297 pages; $8.95

Things are a little out of the ordinary at 50-12 Dover Road, Queens. For eleven years, Isabel Moore has been nursing her widowed father through a series of debilitating strokes. The first occurred when she was 19, and she has done the dirty, exhausting job all by herself. She is aware that almost no one of her generation would make the choice that she did, but she likes the "balletic routine" of caring for an invalid. There had been an ugly, whining housekeeper named Margaret Casey, but Isabel loathed her and summoned the force to throw her out.

Final Payments, the best first novel in many months, begins at old Joe Moore's funeral. At the graveside are weeping priests. Mary Gordon knows the Irish Catholic enclaves of New York lethally well. The priests had been her father's companions, drinking for hours in his house and arguing about baptism of desire. Moore himself was a militant soldier of Christ and a right-wing fanatic: "His sympathies were with the South in the Civil War and the Spanish Fascists." But if his opinions were unfashionable and possibly barbaric, he knew something about the nature of his God's love for man, something his child has to learn.

Isabel skips eagerly out of her eleven-year retirement. Helped by two old Dover Road pals who have since quit the neighborhood, she soon has smart clothes and a social service job in upstate New York. She sells the house, moves, and falls lyrically in love with a married man.

Then everything turns inside out. She realizes that what interests people most about her is her bizarre and medieval past. The do-gooder work helps no one. Her lover's wife confronts her, screaming, "You're a good person." Isabel flees her whole new world. There will be another job and another man for her, but before that she must go back to Margaret Casey. It was not the old woman's spiteful tongue, her sloth, her mawkish novenas or her copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger that Isabel hated. It was that her father loved Margaret, with an engaged love for the wretched of God's earth, those who spend their lives trying to keep a little space at the edge of the table. From the opening rites of burial, laced with fine Irish malice, the reader relaxes, secure in the hands of a confident writer. That assurance lasts right through the book, although Final Payments is an ambitious debut. Gordon goes beyond any formulas about sheltered young women entering the churning world and learning through suffering. Isabel is a sympathetic but varied character. What she says of her father applies to her as well: "His mind had the brutality of a child's or an angel's."

If Gordon is to be linked with her elders and betters, the closest is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen. In some ways, Final Payments is a lower-class Death of the Heart, in its controlled structure and in the daring with which both writers force collisions of conscience and will. But perhaps the most heartening aspect of the new book is one that is almost incidental to it, the passages about Isabel and the two women friends who help her. The moments of warmth and the strains that gradually heal are written with openness and unselfconsciousness. It is as if the painfully aggressive voices of the past decade had finally been heard, understood and absorbed.

Mary Gordon's Dover Road was actually a heavily Catholic section of Valley Stream, L.I. Her mother, "a nice Catholic girl" and now a legal secretary, has lived in the same house for 58 years. Mary, who is 29, sometimes feels, like Isabel, that the most interesting part of her life is her past. Her father's family were the only Jews in Lorain, Ohio. They managed to send their son to Harvard, but he dropped out and knocked around Europe for a few years. Says Mary: "He once started a girlie magazine called Hot Dog. When I was a teen-ager I found one and tore it up. Now I'd give anything for a copy." Her father then converted to a rather strenuous Roman Catholicism and spent the rest of his life (he died when Mary was eight) starting right-wing religious magazines, "things like Catholic International," that lasted for an issue or two.

"When he was alive, I was O.K., I was terrific," says Mary. "Afterward I was a mess. What I secretly knew was important was not important to anyone else." A world of intellect and glamour seemed enragingly beyond grasp. There was certainly no trace of it in parochial schools. Mary Gordon recalls the chants of chemistry class: "What does covalent bonding remind us of?" "The mystical body of Christ."

She fought her family and her teachers to go to Barnard, and later did post-graduate work at Syracuse University. Four years ago, she married a British anthropologist. The idea for Final Payments came from the old neighborhood. "I thought of women of my mother's generation who led sacrificed lives for someone in their family. There is a terrible human need when the body conks out, but no one in my generation gives over his life. I began by wondering what would happen." After the book was turned down by a couple of publishers, Gordon took it around to her Barnard teacher, Critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Her advice was to switch the narrative from the third to the first person. It took three months and transformed the book.

Mary Gordon is frightened about the money that she is making--$300,000 from the paperback sale, for example. "I deserve something, but not all that," she muses. She will take a trip to Spain, teach a course on the religious novel at Amherst next year, finish a new book and "look into causes that need help" if that money piles up too high. First, like Isabel after her liberation, she will buy some clothes at Bloomingdale's.

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