Strange Fits of Passion by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page A

city and who would come out to the house on a Sunday afternoon for a meal. But once there was a man whom I think my mother loved. He worked as a supervisor for the company that employed her, and she got to know him well at work, for she would sometimes talk about him, in passing, in the middle of a story, and I would notice the pleasure that referring to him, even in this small way, gave her. His name was Philip, and he had dark hair and a mustache and drove a shiny black Lincoln. For a time, he came regularly on the weekends for a meal, after which he would take my mother and me for a drive in his car. I would sit in back; my mother would sit beside him. He would reach over and squeeze her hand from time to time, a movement I never failed to notice. We would go for ice cream, even in the dead of winter. When we got back from these drives, I would go to my room to play, or outside to find my friends. I was eight then, or nine. Philip and my mother would be alone in the living room. Once I came around a corner; Philip was kissing my mother on the sofa. I thought his hand was on her breast, but she moved so quickly away from him when she heard me that the motion is blurred, and I am not sure now what I saw. She blushed and he stood up, as if I were the parent. I pretended I had seen nothing, asked the question I had blundered into the room with. But I hated the moment, and I cringe even now when I think about it. I did not hate the fact that Philip had kissed her—I was glad that she had someone to love after all those years. I hated myself instead, my burdensome presence.
    As it happened, however, Philip also abandoned my mother, after a time. For months, I thought that Philip had left my mother because of me, because he did not want to love a woman who was "saddled" with a child, as the expression went then. When other men came to the house—and there were not too many after Philip—I went to my room and would not leave it.
    My mother was Irish and Catholic and had been raised in a crowded apartment, one of seven children. She was devout and attended Mass every Sunday of her life, and I am certain that she viewed my birth out of wedlock as the most serious moral lapse of her life. I could not be persuaded, from a very young age, to accept the Church as wholeheartedly as she did, and I know that this minor rebellion on my part was a source of aggravation to her. If we had fights—and actually I remember very few—it would be over this, my irregular attendance at church. But in later years, when I was working in New York City, and when I was already in trouble, I passed each morning, on my walk to the office, an age-darkened brick Catholic church called St. Augustine's, and I would sometimes be overwhelmed by a desire to go inside it and kneel down. I never did, however. I was plagued by the notion that I did not deserve comfort from a church I had scorned, and in any event, I was almost always late for work.
    We had other visitors to our bungalow. My mother had many relatives, most of whom still lived in the city. Our tiny suburban house was far enough away to seem like an excursion on a Sunday afternoon. My grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins would arrive by train at the bottom of the street, and the entire entourage would noisily make its way up the hill to our bungalow, where my mother would have prepared a meal. She knew they did not approve of her single-parenthood, approved still less of her determination to live outside the city and support herself and her child by working as a secretary—a
private
secretary, she always said, as a point of pride—but she invited them faithfully to the house every other week, even cajoled them when they balked. I would not have any brothers or sisters, she knew; and she wanted me to feel that I belonged to something larger than just the two of us. The noisier and more crowded our house became, the happier she appeared to be.
    She urged me, too, to