“A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better without her.”
“It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman—my poor Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.”
“It would be useless.”
“Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have been a lesson to her—won’t you forgive her and take her back?”
Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent—that is to say, my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance” of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.”
My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least, and it was certainly her pièce de resistance in the scene at Assisi with Mary.
I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it—as they viewed everything—exclusively from the personal angle.
My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return to the house of bondage.
And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn woman, no longer young (but infinitely interesting), courageously undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever—but she was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication to the magnitude of her effort.