A Prodigal Daughter Returns

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE COMPANY OF WOMEN by Mary Gordon; Random House; 291 pages; $12.95

American fiction in 1978 rang with two strong young voices: John Irving's in The World According to Garp and Mary Gordon's in her first novel, Final Payments. Both books dealt with the unavoidable responsibilities and equally unavoidable satisfactions of family, though the world according to Gordon was quite different from Irving's literary Astrodome. Readers of Final Payments found themselves in a small house in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, Archie Bunker country without one-liners. The heroine, Isabel Moore, had spent all of her 20s caring for her invalid father, a man impacted with hatred for liberalism and the non-Catholic world.

Old man Moore is dead, but his flagellating spirit lives on in Gordon's second novel. So, too, do Isabel's intelligence, spunk and moral seriousness. Father Cyprian and Felicitas Taylor of The Company of Women extend the author's exploration into the value of sacrifice and tradition. The novel's structure is as formal as Gordon's sense of the hierarchy that governs the lives of her characters.

Orbiting around the book is the Roman Catholic faith. Its influence is inescapable, especially on Father Cyprian, a priest whose asceticism and reactionary views make him unwelcome in a liberalized church. He has, instead, a private, unofficial congregation: five single working women.

Felicitas, daughter of one of the women, is the group's only child. With her own father dead, the 14-year-old girl seeks paternal affection and security from Cyprian. He gives her that and more. He guides her education in Latin and Greek and arms her with orthodoxy: "This beauty all around us modern man mistakes for God," he tells her on a drive through the countryside. He denounces the love of nature as pantheism, "a particularly American error," and goes on to warn Felicitas that she will come to know the rottenness of the age.

By 1969, Felicitas is knee-deep in the age. She has left her mother's house in Brooklyn to study classics at Columbia. There she is seduced by a knavish political science professor of the Herbert Marcuse persuasion; she moves into the apartment he shares with two other women and a toddler named Mao; she is encouraged by her lover to sleep with a downstairs neighbor; she becomes pregnant by one or the other and heads for the abortionist's waiting room.

What is a nice Catholic girl doing in a situation like this? Is she simply rounding out her education with a cram course in profane love, radical politics and the impersonal ritual of feticide? Not quite.

Felicitas, "called after the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness," decides to give birth after all, then takes her place in the company of women. As a mother, she pursues a career in ordinariness with a grudging acceptance.

Part III, the concluding section of the novel, finds Felicitas, her mother, baby Linda, Father Cyprian and his faithful band living near one another in western New York. Prodigal daughter and priest now talk about home improvements, not theology. For physical comfort, Felicitas has Leo, a kind, oxlike hardware store owner to whom she proposes marriage while killing bats. Here is Gordon's prose at its finely detailed, rhythmic best: "There were 16 bats, trying to lift themselves off the ground, trying, failing, bringing their wings together in desperation, raising themselves an inch, two inches, then falling. They moved their heads around, following me as I walked, as if they could see me. I thought of Linda's feet, her round translucent toenails, rose-colored, like shells, the perfect circle of her heels, her soles, tough but no match for all this."

The Company of Women has the same strengths and weaknesses as Final Payments. Both novels succeed on the durability and intelligence of central characters who command respect. Both novels have a tendency to slip into lugubriousness and slick schematism. Felicitas' college days contain too much stock footage from the dopey '60s, and though Cyprian's followers illustrate the spiritual dependency of women in a male-dominated church, they remain only illustrations -- sketches of romanticized stoicism.

By contrast, Felicitas refuses to subordinate herself to any father figure, including the Almighty. "I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness," she declares. "God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there He's a poor contender." With such ideas, this Catholic woman could be a hero in a Jewish novel.

Excerpt

"I suspect that being fatherless leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical. Having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe. I don't want that for Linda. I had Cyprian, but he fathered me as if we were both bodiless, for our connection had nothing in it of the flesh. But I will sleep with Leo, Linda will know that. And Leo will --know that Linda is an ordinary child, a child of flesh and bone.

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