Within Arm's Reach (33 page)

You’re the one behaving inappropriately,
my mother says.
You’ve been
looking forward to this party all week. You had a hard time falling asleep last
night because you were so excited. You should be talking to Gracie and your
daughters right now, not to me. Take care of them.

You’re right,
I say. She is right about that much. I should concentrate on the present and stop listening for the cries of children who are grown or dead for fifty years. I turn to Gracie, who is unwrapping the gift that I made and that Noreen wrapped in bright blue paper. It is a two-part gift, and she unwraps the small box first.

It is a framed picture of Gracie and Lila as girls. They have their arms around each other’s shoulders. Gracie is smiling, Lila is not, but they look linked together, two Irish faces, bodies entwined, fitted like two pieces that belong in the same puzzle.

Gracie smiles in the same soft, polite manner she has in the picture, as if she doesn’t know what to make of this. “Thank you, Gram,” she says. “It’s sweet.”

“I remember that afternoon,” Lila says. “We had just finished fighting over the last cupcake. I threw up right after the picture was taken.”

Kelly says, “I remember that day, too. You were both a piece of work. No sooner was I done being angry at one of you than the other would act up.” She laughs, and sets down a tray of cookies on the coffee table. It’s her first moment of stillness all afternoon.

You see,
my mother says to me,
you are doing something now. It’s not
too late. You’re showing them what to do, what to hold on to. Catharine, you’re
not as hard or as useless as you think you are
.

The room feels lighter now. Meggy hasn’t said anything negative in at least ten minutes. The boy with the crew cut sitting by my knee has turned Lila into a kitten. Mary is leaning against her mother on the couch, allowing Theresa rare contact. Gracie is ripping open the second present, the larger box. It is the baby blanket that I knitted out of the softest yarn I could find. Gracie holds it up for everyone to see and then drapes it over her belly, as if to warm the baby inside her.

“I didn’t know you could knit, Mother,” Kelly says. “It’s lovely.”

“I taught myself,” I say.

“Gram, I love it. It’s perfect,” Gracie says, and then she starts to cry.

She cries into the blanket first, and then into Grayson’s handkerchief, and then into a sheet of paper towel someone gets from the kitchen. Her pale cheeks are wet in no time. She cries as if she’ll never stop. At first everyone just stares at her, and then at the floor and the ceiling and one another, trying to give her some privacy. I can see that this is something that she needs to do, so I just leave her be, but I can see how much her tears upset the others in the room.

The McLaughlins are not big criers, but when one of us is moved to cry, it is done alone, the noise muffled into a pillow. The way Gracie is crying, unabashedly, tears pouring down her cheeks, her breath caught in sobs, is completely unfamiliar. It bothers me at first, too, I have to admit. She should pull herself together at least until the party is over, but she doesn’t seem to be even trying to find control. She has completely let go and forgotten we are here. I can’t tell for certain what kind of tears she is shedding. She appears to shift from almost laughing to sobbing so hard, I worry that it is bad for the baby.

“Gentle,” I say, “gentle.”

Grayson still has his hand on her shoulder, and Kelly crosses the room and rubs Gracie’s back in the smooth circles a mother uses to comfort an upset child. Gracie doesn’t seem to notice.

“Do you want to go outside for some air?” Grayson says.

“Is she all right?” Meggy says.

“The baby,” Angel says.

Gracie doesn’t seem to hear anything. She does not respond. Her eyes are shut and she rocks back and forth slightly. Her cheeks are shiny and the tears keep falling.

It occurs to me then that this is how I should have cried when I lost my baby girl, and again when I lost the twins. I should have released my tears instead of holding them in. I shouldn’t have been embarrassed or worried over appearing weak. I should have given my children, my babies, that much. And besides, as the tears go on, Gracie does not look weak to me. She looks honest. There is something of my mother and my first child in her eyes, and I can see the unborn child that she already loves there, too. In that moment I can see everything, everyone, the entire McLaughlin family, shining out of her tear-stained face.

“Oh dear,” Angel says. She looks next to my chair, and I notice that that is the direction Meggy is looking in, too. And Theresa. And even my mother. They are all looking at Lila, their eyes beseeching. Asking for something.

“What?” Lila says. “What do you think I can do?”

“Go see if she’s all right,” Meggy says in a low voice.

Lila shrugs, but she walks over to Gracie. She crouches down in front of her and puts her hands on her sister’s knees. “Are you in pain?” she asks. “Has labor started? Gracie, open your eyes. Look at me.”

The two girls are still in that position for a long time. Lila almost on her knees, her hands on her sister, her eyes on her face. Gracie leaning toward her. I think of the framed picture that now lies on the floor by Gracie’s feet. I glance over at the couch to make sure my mother is still here, to make sure she is still within arm’s reach of my daughters.

In the same calm voice, Lila says, “Tell me where the pain is, Gracie. Tell me you’re all right.”

Gracie half-opens her eyes, like someone reluctantly waking from a deep sleep. She says, in a voice so soft it is almost a whisper, which seems meant only for Lila’s ears but which everyone present hears: “I think our baby is coming.”

After an intake of breath, the entire room erupts in pandemonium. Meggy makes a beeline for the front door. Angel starts weeping. Kelly runs into the kitchen, whether to boil water or use the phone I don’t know. Mary moves to the far side of the room, where she stands with her back to the wall. Grayson keeps saying, “Are you sure? It’s too soon.” Weber offers to use his beeper or cell phone or some special fireman’s device to call the paramedics. When no one answers him, he pulls a black box out of his pocket and speaks into it. He speaks in what must be code, because it sounds like he repeats over and over, “I love you, I love you.”

Lila stays on the floor in front of Gracie. Together the two girls start breathing oddly, in rhythm with each other. They sound like the old-time train Patrick and I took from St. Louis to New York after our wedding. The huge black train puffed and chanted as it climbed over hills, straining each time as if it would never make the top. The two girls, my grandaughters, chant, their young voices clear, “Hee hee hoo. Hee hee hoo.”

Noreen comes in and almost falls on me, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining. At first I think she is there because she has something important to say. She has the look of a woman who has made a discovery. But then she pulls her stethoscope out of her purse and presses it to my chest. It is a full minute before I can make her understand that I am fine and that Gracie is the one who needs attention.

I don’t tell Noreen that I am terribly tired and unsure whether I can stand of my own accord. I want her to leave me be, and besides, those things don’t matter in this moment. In this moment I am seated in a miraculous room that is singing with the voices of the people I love. My babies cry out to greet the next infant, the one that will grab hold of life and this family and turn everything around. My husband is standing in the doorway beside Louis, both men helpless with relief. Noreen is now giving orders, and kindly allowing everyone something to do. Mary calls the hospital. Angel is in charge of Gracie’s purse. Meggy makes sure there are no appliances left on in the kitchen. Kelly finds a blanket in an upstairs closet so her daughter doesn’t have to lie under an itchy hospital-issued one.

My oldest child, my poor girl, gives a sharp cry of thirst from the back room. The twins seem to have disappeared, knowing that I will see them in a few short hours in the newborn’s dewy face. Lila and Gracie continue to breathe together, the only still figures amid all the chaos. I catch my mother’s eye across the room, and I wink. I have never winked before in my life, because it is not a ladylike thing to do. But there’s a first time for everything. For everyone. Besides, I want to reach across the space between my mother and me with some kind of gesture. If I were able, I would weave my way to the other side of the room and take her hand. The boundaries, the squabbles, and the resentments have dropped away. Time has dropped away. I am lucky enough to recognize this for what it is: one of those perfect, full-to-bursting moments you wait a lifetime for, when it all comes together.

Within Arm’s Reach

ANN NAPOLITANO

READING GROUP GUIDE

About the Book

Grace has a secret with the power to unhinge her precariously balanced family. Years of repressed anger and buried grief have forged a fault line through the McLaughlins, an Irish-American clan whose dysfunction simmers under a patina of carefully controlled propriety. Now the unthinkable has happened: Grace is pregnant out of wedlock, the father of the baby is nobody special, and she’s planning to keep the child. As the scandal reverberates through the family, each member is forced to a reckoning point: Will the wreckage of their past and the deafening silence of their present strangle what little sense of family bond remains? Only one woman, Grace’s grandmother and the clan matriarch, Catharine McLaughlin, has a plan. In Grace’s unborn child, Catharine sees the potential of a brand-new life to resuscitate her failing family, dispel the ghosts that haunt her waking hours, and unlock the decades of stunted dialogue that have squelched them all. Meanwhile, as her pregnancy winds to its conclusion, Grace searches desperately for a path that will lead her to herself after years of relying on the comfort of strangers for fulfillment.

Lyrical and satisfying,
Within Arm’s Reach
skillfully taps into the guilt, loyalty, betrayal, and misunderstanding that preoccupy and distort families. Told from six points of view, this unforgettable first novel traces three generations as they grapple with their commitments to both the living and the dead—and explores the often beautiful improvisation necessitated by crisis.

Questions for Discussion

The novel opens with Gracie’s version of the harrowing day her grandfather threw his stillborn twin infants in a trash can, first carrying them past his four horrified children. Gracie goes on to say, “The story of the twins’ birth is a strange comfort to me” (p. 5). What does she mean by this? Throughout the rest of the novel, Gracie identifies consistently with her grandmother—even, at times, worships her. Why, then, does this opening passage focus instead on her grandfather?

Catharine claims she stayed home with her parents late into her young adult life because “It seemed clear that I would have to give up my entire life in order to prove I respected my mother. And I was prepared to do that” (p. 17). Why does she feel respect for her mother requires such dire proof? Does Catharine ever forgive herself for failing in this mission? How does the encounter between the two women during Catharine’s stroke alter the dynamic between them?

Gracie describes her passion for her job this way: “I love to come up with the right phrase, and to pinpoint the stories that have made people who they are. I enjoy working out other people’s problems. I like to come up with the final word, the right answer, and to see that printed indelibly in black and white” (p. 6). Yet as her pregnancy evolves, Gracie loses her knack for “the right answer,” and her boss begins rewriting her column behind her back. What is the symbolic significance of this shift in Gracie’s power of perception? Does the author present the change as a loss, or a gain?

Louis struggles with “something inside me that keeps me from reaching out, keeps my wheels from turning in the direction they should. That something is rock solid and unmovable, and it sits on my chest. It makes me sink down on the couch, sink down in the grass beside Eddie’s still body, sink down under the heaviness of the air in this room” (p. 33). Does this “something” transcend Louis’s depression over Eddie’s death and over his contentious marriage? What else is at play in his crisis? To what extent does Louis recover in the course of the novel?

The great pathos of Gracie’s character is that she feels whole only under the gaze of strangers: “I always go back to wanting the same thing: to . . . sit next to some strange man at the bar. I want to sip beer and flip my hair and feel my eyes come alive under his gaze. I know who I am in those moments. I recognize my reflection in the eyes of men who are interested in me. They have to be strangers, and it only lasts the first night, but it is the most wonderful night” (p. 37). Does Gracie ever fully kick this addiction? Is she able to recognize herself without assistance by the end of the story? What effect does Grayson’s gaze have on her?

Lila soothes herself by reading about epidemiology and fantasizing about contracting a chronic illness: “I am a fan of these kinds of diseases, which are vague in their symptoms, heavy in fatigue, capable of blurring the edges of the people they strike. These illnesses dull everything—personality, skills, drive, memory” (p. 56). What is Lila trying to escape? Does she read as a tragic figure, or as comic relief? Is her relationship with Weber a sign of healthy transition or an embrace of the kind of oblivion she has watched her sister achieve around men?

Catharine convinces herself that “the visions I’ve been having are a gift from Patrick . . . He had always seen things . . . now he has given his sight to me” (p. 58). However, the vision of the Ballen children tied to a tree is terrifying enough to qualify as a curse rather than a gift. What do the children represent? Is Catharine eventually able to untie them in some way?

Kelly has passed on to Gracie a heavy dose of Catholic guilt. While Gracie recalls that her abortion left her with “a very Catholic ache that told me I had sinned” (p. 46), Kelly struggles with the morality of her affair: “I want to believe that what Vince and I are doing is decent and right and pure . . . but the Catholicism that I grew up with, that I raised my children with . . . rears its ugly head when it smells guilt” (p. 243). Both women’s guilt stems from a perceived misuse of the body, and both ironically seek redemption through fulfilling their bodies’ needs. Where else does the author comment on the conflict between Catholicism and sensuality?

Each character in the novel has a unique and specific relationship to death. Kelly, for example, blames the memory of her sister’s death for her enduring sense of shame and anger within the family. How does the author use death as a vehicle for character development and to set up the impending birth?

Catharine’s dead mother reprimands her for instilling in her children a guilt-inducing and unrealistic sense of self-reliance: “You thought you could control everything, and make happy endings all on your own. You taught your children that that was what was expected of them. How could you do that? They thought they had to make their own lives right with no help or good luck or charity, and that if anything went wrong, it was their own fault. . . . They all think they’ve failed you, and just plain failed life” (pp. 303–304). Is this a fair assessment of Catharine, or is her mother, in turn, holding her to unfair standards? How do the two women reach a détente about their divergent mothering styles?

Catharine muses, “I’m not sure any child really wants to know their parent, or vice versa. Maybe that knowledge and that truth are too much” (p. 68). By the end of the novel, have Gracie, Lila, Kelly or Catharine come any closer to knowing their mothers? Have Kelly and Catharine understood their children any better?

What is the significance of the book’s title?