Men and Angels by Mary Gordon

were really gifted, really meant to do distinguished work, she wouldn’t be missing her children. She’d feel freed to go back to work. But for her it was impossible. Having thought of the children, having desired them, she couldn’t now go back into the room to Caroline. She sat at her kitchen table watching the sky turn vivid, turn colder. She walked over to the window, listening for voices.
    The children came in with Laura, already beginning, as they saw their mother in the kitchen, to fight over the leaves they had collected, over who saw what first and who owned which specimen. Laura hung back as they strove toward Anne: grievance flickered round their heads like haloes.
    “The thing is,” Peter said, “I saw this copper beech leaf in the book, and we don’t even have any in the neighborhood. It’s a miracle. She doesn’t need it. She doesn’t have a real collection like I do. I’m the one that needs it.”
    “I saw it first,” said Sarah.
    “Tell her I’m the one that needs it.”
    Need. Would he always be saying that to women? “ I’m the one that needs it. ” And would Sarah, stuck in the track of a useless justice, always be saying no through pride of claim? And now they turned to her.
    “Peter,” she said, “part of having a collection is the difficulty of completing it. It’s the satisfaction of getting something after you’ve waited for it.”
    “But I need it, and she doesn’t.”
    “But I saw it first.”
    “Couldn’t you trade her something for it, Peter?”
    “I don’t want anything else,” said Sarah.
    “Well, then, Peter, if you’ve found one , surely there must be others.”
    “No. There are no copper beeches around here. It’s a miracle that it was there. I’ll never find another one.”
    “It’s awfully important to Peter, Sarah. Couldn’t you give it to him this once?”
    “No, because I found it. And you’re always on his side.”
    Was it true? Did she favor one over the other? For her, each incident was discrete. But for them, the decisions were a Persian carpet, the Bayeux tapestry, mercilessly telling some complicated sibylline tale.
    “There are no sides, Sarah,” she said.
    “Yes there are. There’s his and mine.”
    Exasperated, Anne took the leaf and put it in the high cabinet where she hid things from them.
    “You’re both being awful. Neither of you can have it.”
    “You stink,” said Peter to his mother.
    Sarah began to cry. Anne took Peter by the shoulders and shook him. “You may not speak to me like that. Go upstairs until I call you.”
    Sarah sat on the floor, rubbing her eyes with her fists; Laura was still holding back, holding the children’s coats, watching their mother. Ashamed, aware that she was being watched, as if she had been caught in some indecent petty crime, Anne smiled at Laura, granting her the complicitous look she hated: adults locking eyes in knowing, close agreement over the deficiencies of children, their injustices, their wrong proportions. She hated it because she understood how children thought, what it was that cut their issues out for them, a diamond knife on glass. Justice. Property. What they fought for was not trivial. Yet it could not be allowed. They couldn’t keep their knife-hard edges or all life would be impossible. And it had an astonishing power to ruin life for her, when her children fought. It broke up everything, destroyed all hope. Alone with the children, she could understand all this, her part in it, their part. But it was a business like an adulterous love affair that should never be made public; opening it to outsiders could only coarsen the grain. She smiled at Laura, and Laura smiled back at her, that odd smile with its mixture of amusement and unamusement, with its cool, withholding certainty, and, just possibly, with its contempt.
    Anne bent over and took Sarah in her arms. She must stop attributing these complicated things to Laura, finding messages in her looks like a soothsayer