Daughters Temporary Shelter

By Paul Gray

Author Mary Gordon's three novels (Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels) offer expansive looks at the intricacies of family life, particularly the gifts bestowed and debts incurred by daughters, wives and mothers. The subject would seem to require the ample space that Gordon has devoted to it in each book, not because domesticity is so panoramic but rather so long, such a matter of daily minutiae, small increments of knowledge, feelings and guilt that gather from infancy to death. This process yields itself up grudgingly to the summary or the sketch; Gordon's formidable reputation has not been won through short stories.

At least until now. Temporary Shelter presents 20 tales, a number of which have previously appeared in publications ranging from the highbrow (Antaeus, Granta) to the mass market (Redbook, Mademoiselle). The quality is uneven, the good mixed with occasional bits of fluff. No single story in this collection seems automatically destined for anthologies. Yet the book as a whole is a good deal more powerful and absorbing than any of its individual parts.

That is because the pieces echo each other in odd, intriguing ways. Gordon returns habitually, hypnotically, to a small number of predicaments. There is the pain and bewilderment felt by young girls who have lost their fathers, either through death or abandonment. One such victim remembers being forced to attend birthday parties and dreading them "as I did the day of judgment (real to me; the wrong verdict might mean that I would never see my father)." Other stories rehearse the misgivings of women who have fallen in love with previously married men. They wonder what the departed wives found objectionable, impossible to live with. Louisa is passionately devoted to Henry, but "it troubled her that she could not predict in Henry the faults that would cause her one day not to love him."

For Gordon's diverse heroines share a common perception: love does not last; it is, like life itself, a temporary shelter. In such a context, wedding vows become highly problematic, promises made in defiance of experience and reason. Still, the women take the risk. The narrator of Now I Am Married concludes, "He is my husband, I say slowly, swallowing a new, exotic food. Does this mean everything or nothing? I stand with him in an ancient relationship, in a ruined age, listening beyond my understanding to the warning voices, to the promise of my own substantial heart." In Safe, a wife and new mother suddenly realizes exactly what she now owes to her husband and child: "I know that I must live my life now knowing it is not my own. I can keep them from so little; it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them."

By its very nature, Gordon's subject matter flirts with sentimentality, but the author avoids the danger in several ways. The stories are rooted in two carefully observed social landscapes; one involves working-class Irish Americans and their children (the setting of Final Payments), the other a contemporary circle of sophisticated and slightly aimless East Coast women (the world of Men and Angels). Life in both places can be harsh and unforgiving, an effective antidote to pieties or posturings. And Gordon uses laconic humor to keep the emotional impulses of her plots in check. One character muses on her first husband, "who thought of me as if I were colonial Africa: a vast, dark, natural resource, capable, possibly, of civilization." Another woman, a city lover, thinks of all the unpleasant weekends she has spent visiting friends in the country: "On the whole, she had found it to be to her advantage to decline invitations to any place where she would be obliged to wear flat shoes."

Although feminism is mentioned only once in these stories, it is clear that the women in Temporary Shelter are far more important and interesting than the men. But Gordon, 37, never gives the impression of writing to an agenda or a bill of grievances. Her stories do not argue; they display admirable quantities of sympathy and intelligence.