Books: Meditations on Motherhood Men and Angels

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Many subjects, in life and in art, do not automatically arouse emotions of terror or pity. High on any such list must be the spectacle of people complaining about how impossible it is to get good help nowadays. Yet that is the fundamental problem faced by the heroine of Mary Gordon's third novel. Anne Foster, 38, has just about everything, including a Harvard Ph.D. in art history and what one of her many adoring friends calls "the only decent marriage in America." Her bright and handsome husband Michael, a professor at a Massachusetts college, is due to spend an academic year teaching in France. Ordinarily, the wife and the children, Peter, 9, and Sarah, 6, would go with . him. But Anne has been asked to write the catalog for a new exhibit of the works of Caroline Watson (1864-1938), an American artist whose once lustrous reputation could now stand some repolishing. The job requires regular trips to Manhattan and periods of peace and quiet about the Foster household. Michael flies off to France, and the first sitter Anne tries turns out to be churlish and unsuitable. What to do with the kids?

The fact that this dilemma is pertinent to the lives of millions of working women and, increasingly, men does not necessarily guarantee its success as the subject of gripping fiction. And Gordon appears determined to make her novelistic task as difficult as possible. The temporary solution to Anne's child-care quandary is introduced in the person of Laura Post, a large, drab woman in her early 20s who is hired as a live-in helper chiefly because no one else becomes available. Anne does not realize that Laura is a religious fanatic who believes she has been touched by the Spirit and whose mission in life is to convince others that "human love was not important."

Once this plot is set in motion, Men and Angels seems to promise, at most, some domesticated chills: Laura and her hidden zealotry may be a menace to Anne or the children. Can the babysitter be stopped before she does something awful? In fact, violence does occur near the end, but the real focus of the novel has long since shifted elsewhere. With considerable skill and subtlety, Gordon has constructed a series of intertwined meditations questioning the nature and even the value of motherhood.

At the beginning of her research project, Anne feels certain that one area of her life is fixed and unchanging: "No one would ever know the passion she felt for her children. It was savage, lively, volatile. It would smash, in one minute, the image people had of her of someone who lived life serenely, steering always the same sure, slow course." Yet the more she learns about Caroline Watson, the more troubled Anne becomes. The artist had been, by any standards, a miserable mother. She had borne an illegitimate son in Paris and then, under parental pressure, abandoned him to the care of relatives back home in Philadelphia. This unhappy child had grown into a drunk and failure who died at age 28. His widow became the artist's closest friend and companion; she survives as the head priestess of Caroline's cult. Jane Watson ultimately confesses to Anne that she married the son "I didn't love so I could have his mother for my mother." She adds: "Between the two of us we crushed that poor boy into the ground. We killed him as surely as if we'd poisoned him."