Old Friends

I’ve spent some happy and instructive hours recently with two old friends, one of whom I met in college, the other I’ve known since we were both twelve years old. Reflecting on our long and precious friendship which has lasted even during decades when we didn’t see each other—we live far apart—I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned from both of them.

One, whom I’ll call C, was a beautiful, delicate and largely silent young girl when I met her in a hotel in Normandy. She was the daughter of my parents’ friends and they had decreed that we would be roommates during a summer vacation in France. Always a solitary creature, I dreaded the prospect—I was not consulted— but C’s gentle sadness and timidity won me. Because we were both confused and anxious near-children, we were able to go back in time together, playing on the beach and buying a toy sailboat we both loved. It was a strange last glimpse of the childhood rapidly retreating behind us.

A few years later, now teenagers, we were again roommates on a trip to Dublin where we stayed in a shabby rundown country house as what were called “paying guests.” Our host was a Caliban of a man who one evening came pressing into our bedroom. I was grateful that C, nearly as outraged as I was, helped me to drive him away; there was no lock on our door and so our fierceness was doubly important. He never bothered us again.

Looking back, I realize that C’s mother’s cruelty and her father’s ineffectiveness led her to reject the man she loved (whom her mother disliked for some reason) and accept a socially respectable monster who made their long marriage a misery, finally kicking her in the back in a drunken rage, injuring her for life and leaving her bedridden. When I visited her, she was able to get out of bed for lunch; we chatted and joked for an hour about our shared memories, but then she had to go back to bed.

My other old friend, F, is a far different story. Although I foolishly advised her not to marry the older man she met shortly after college, they had a long and apparently happy relationship and a son. When I visited her, she was living in the cottage where they had both spent so many years, his sketches and paintings—he was a successful painter—hung everywhere, her well-worn piano occupied a place of honor, and many photographs of their artist friends as well as of an extensive family were everywhere.

We chatted about her mother, a transplanted Southerner I remember as beautiful, until F reminded me that it was her charm and warmth that made her seem beautiful. To me, she was a goddess of generosity who allowed me to use a room in the family house when I was desperate for a quiet escape for my writing.

C is wealthy; her husband left her a great deal of money as well as an enormous apartment and his collection of paintings.

F lives modestly and simply in the cottage she shared with her husband their son.

In the next generation, C’s adult children are creating and encountering the familiar problems of the rudderless entitled.

F’s is apparently trouble-free, pursuing his career and about to be married.

Mothers are blamed for far too much, fathers escape scot-free, but in the stories of my two old friends, both equally dear to me, I see a reflection of the problems of our country. This is worth reflecting on in the midst of the sentimental outpourings of Mother’s Day.

In Women, My Family