Men and Angels by Mary Gordon Page B

loved. Like a pioneer husband claiming the forest, she must clear through the wilderness. She must create the house entire. She must make sure the structure was sound; but she must also make the details beautiful: the walls must be the right color, the sheets must be perfectly embroidered. Without the house that she would build, the woman she loved, dead forty-five years, unknown to almost everyone, could not be made to live.
    Her feelings of insecurity, always high when she worked in a room with other people, were stronger today because she was about to meet Caroline’s daughter-in-law, Jane Watson. Anne’s first encounter with her, by letter, hadn’t been promising. Anne had written, at Ben’s suggestion, to ask if she could have access to Caroline’s letters that were in Jane’s possession. “I hope,” she’d written, “these will help me understand the progress of Caroline Watson’s work.”
    “You would do well,” Jane had replied, “to look for the explanation of Caroline Watson’s progress in the history of art rather than her own personal history. Far too much is made of the biographical today, particularly in the case of women. Marriage, childbirth, menstrual cycles, hysterectomies: they have nothing to do with the work. Give no more attention to them in the career of Caroline Watson than you would in the career of Matisse.”
    She’d resented Jane’s tone. What was she afraid of? People were hungry for details of the lives of women, and there was an industry that provided them. But she would be writing about the work. Menstrual cycles, hysterectomies—she hadn’t dreamed of including anything like that. Of course she was interested in Caroline’s life, because she loved the painting. Without it, Caroline would have been simply another unhappy woman of a certain period who had made more mistakes than most.
    But that wasn’t quite right, she knew; that wasn’t quite all of it. There was that hunger that she felt, that women felt, to know details: where women stood in relation to their families, as daughters, sisters, mothers. It wasn’t just; it wasn’t creditable. Yet one wanted to know, when the women had accomplished something. Whom did they love in relation to their bodies? Whom were they connected to by blood? Like dogs, she thought, like horses. But it wasn’t the fact of the connection that was interesting; it was how they got around it. The truth of the matter was that for a woman to have accomplished something, she had to get out of the way of her own body. This was the trick people wanted to know about. Did she pull it off? As if a life were a trick, making doves fly out of a hat, turning an egg into a flower. Stupidly, like the watchers of soap operas, people who were interested in the achievements of women wanted the grossest facts: Whom did they sleep with? Did they have any babies? Were their fathers kind to them, cruel to them? Did they obey or go against their mothers? Infantile questions, yet one felt one had to know. It gave courage, somehow. One wanted to believe that the price was not impossible for these accomplished women, that there were fathers, husbands, babies, beautifully flourishing beside the beautiful work. For there so rarely were.
    As she walked she tried to remember everything that Ben had said about Jane Watson. Like most men trying to describe a woman, he began with her looks. His description—beginning with this saying that she had been, in her day, incomparable—made Anne imagine a beauty that was no longer in vogue. It was more than that, a beauty that had somehow ceased appearing in young women. Was it that they were thinner, wore fewer clothes, cut their hair short or left it hanging? Yet Ben had talked about Jane’s hair as if it had been deliberately and carefully acquired, an original possession, rare, trouvé. Chestnut, he had said, and one must think of the silky shell of a chestnut, smooth and polished and resistant to the lips.
    She was a large