From "Althea"

Chapter 1

Muldoon’s Confession

Here goes:

I have never liked women. As a matter of fact, i have usually disliked them actively. To me, women have been the opposite of people. By which I mean human, which people ideally should be.

Well, maybe being Irish Catholic and living with my mother until she died a few years ago didn’t help my spiritual development any. Mel would say so, if he didn’t think I’d punch him in the nose, so just thinks it.

Naturally, I always give his opinion serious consideration, because he’s not only my oldest friend and advisor, but a genuine, ordained psychiatrist. I mean, hands have been laid upon Mel’s that once had hands laid upon them that had Sigmund Freud’s own hands laid upon them. But Mel notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s my mother’s fault.

So, for the sake of making a good confession, let me describe Bridgid Muldoon, my mother.

Short legged and low to the ground the whether walking or sitting, she always looked vigilant, as if poised forward on the edge of a throne, watching for plotters. She was tricky, cold and proud, imperious when she had the chance, and ever ready to sacrifice the well-being of any daughter or daughter-in-law for the sake of her convenience, with no visible remorse. Or invisible.

Really, despite 40 years of service as a domestic, she was very much like a queen. And I mean a real queen, whose one morality was raison d état, and as to her ego, it was like General Patton’s, at least.

Yet, above all, she always considered herself a humble woman from the Old Country, who “knew her place”—unlike a lot of her neighbors and the people she worked for. And because she “knew her place,” she looked down on everybody in this world, including the Pope, since he, after all, was an Italian.

As far as I can tell, she never trusted anyone or anything, deep down. And did not die of a broken heart. As a matter of fact, having learned to drive late in life and unwilling to let anybody else touch the wheel, she took the lives of four others when she went, in a three-vehicle collision involving a gigantic orange bus, in Davis Square, Somerville, where the right of way is usually open to debate.

And yet, I have to admit, I got to like her better than I did most people towards the end, after all was said and done. And I said “like,” and not to “be with,” for long, which is a different issue. It’s true she was relentless. God help you if she had the upper hand. To the end, she could only be dealt with gently after being disarmed—some of my sisters would say dismembered—and she would never give you a break in a fight. But at least you could always negotiate with her, so long as you had a position of strength. And once in a while, unlike most, she was capable of generosity, even if never at the slightest expense to her ego.

But, say what you will about Mrs. Muldoon, and this is why I disagree with Mel, she certainly was a person. A person and a half, which is why her ego required more space, I guess. As she used to put it so often (it was really maternal generosity on her part, preparing me for the world), “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours. Remember that, Jerry.”

Maybe Mel does have a point. Who knows, since it’s supposed to be subconscious. But I can’t buy it. Mostly because sex is supposed to be involved. And it is, when it comes to women, which is why I have my own theory as to why, for me, women and people have tended to be mutually exclusive terms.

What makes much more sense to me is the fact that I grew up with the firm belief that the Devil in Eden worked through Eve, whom I could always associate with sex and femininity much more easily than my mother. It was inculcated in me as a child (with ease, never straining my credulity) that deceitful (and, by definition, false appearing) Eve, her vain head reeling with the golden vapors of fermented apples, gave in to her foolish climbing ambitions and got poor, honest and straightforward Adam into all that trouble we are paying for to this day. This was something Bridgid Muldoon believed in as firmly as Mel does in the Oedipal complex. Maybe more so.

Now that I think about it, Adam never struck me as the ambitious type, at all. Exactly the opposite, poor guy. As my mother would say, “He knew his place.” And I do remember as a kid, seeing those familiar pictures on church walls, and not liking Eve, precisely because she was so treasonous and seductive to poor Adam, who was no match for her, and who was henceforth condemned to work and live from the sweat of his brow.

So, since I’m trying to make the best confession possible, I want to make good and sure to point out that to me Eve was not at all like my mother. After all, my mother “knew her place,” she said so herself, all the time, and therefore looked down on foolish snobs like Eve and the women whose houses she cleaned. Unlike dumb old Adam, my mother would have seen right through Eve in one second flat, because she knew Eve’s kind. And not being a man, Eve couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes. No sir. Hence her basic queenly contempt for all males, a “boobish lot,” she felt, and dirty, too.

But even more important, I always saw Eve as physically very different from my mother, by which I mean gracefully long legged, slender and pretty (prettier if she wore makeup, which she certainly would now, to hallucinate the helplessly susceptible male psyche).

In other words, I’m trying to say that Eve was like “women” while my mother was not. And I always expected I was going to marry a woman, assuming she would be different (please God!) from my mother.

And in case there’s any confusion, I don’t mean this the way Italians (Mel assures me) can say, “All women are whores, except for my mother, who is a virgin.” No question about it: virginity, purity, and kindred utopian ideals (such as an ultimately desired, gloriously wanton, one-woman harem all my own) have to do with sex. I don’t argue with Mel there. What I am saying is that these juicy ideals had no connection whatsoever with the unideal world to which my mother so aggressively belonged, and from which she refused to budge. She was, as I said, very much a person, and therefore unideal to a fault.

So, here is the basic reason, I believe, why I found women the opposite of people, one with which Mel would agree. In a word: Fantasy. Almost at once, like it or not, they reek of it upon being sighted. And like it or not, they always tend at once to become humanly invisible, cloaked in the inevitable jungle steam of men’s Oedipal fantasies, cultural or personal, or both, it doesn’t matter. And the more ruthless ones haven’t wanted to give up this power. They’ve encouraged the male psyche to lose itself in its own fumes, while the others, even when they wanted to be perceived as people, beyond fantasy, couldn’t be, for the same reason. Because the male psyche needs no encouragement anyhow.

And I was never so uppity that I presumed to be above this. How could I, when I could never forget from my childhood how even the best of men—and surely Robin Hood was one of them—could be fooled. And was. I may never get over (more painfully disillusioning to me than Eve, from whom I expected nothing) discovering that sweet Maid Marian ended up working for the Sheriff of Nottingham, bleeding good old Robin to death in the name of some false decency, because all of a sudden (always those social ambitions, I guess) Maid Marian had decided, without telling any of Robin’s Merry Men, that she wanted to move along and belong to the righteous Establishment. Incredible, I read. And reread. And reread. But it was so. Always the same. Even as Robin lay dying, growing paler by the hour, he was always glad to see her (that sweet, oval-faced vision of hope!) as she came in the door, and brought the silver bleeding-bowl and the razor to his bedside, with a smile as merciless as it was sweet. It nearly killed me.

Robin never, ever caught on to her. I don’t believe he could bear to, of course. Frankly, sad as I was to see him dying, I was glad he died without the pain of knowing, because, to put it simply, if you can’t trust Maid Marian, who can you trust? The world would have died before him. Withered before his eyes.

Of course, the “smarter” and crueler readers might observe that they were never fooled because Maid Marian is simply a variant telling of Eve, with Robin another dumb old Adam in a Sherwood Eden, and that therefore we should not have been surprised. But all I would have said to that was: yes, that may be so, but some things one never gets used to. Not the true-hearted. And as inelegant and unsophisticated as it may be, I believed that a real man, one noble in spirit, was always fooled, by definition, and that, as far as I could see, only scoundrels or defused males, cynical in their poverty, could possibly have seen through Maid Marian’s lovely veils and then smiled with thin-lipped, knowing amusement. A true man could only remain blind, or weep inconsolably.

And so I thought because, I confess now, mine was the greatest cynicism about women. If, let’s say, my mother had done Robin in, I might not really have been surprised. After all, that would have been just people for you. An unreliable lot, sometimes, yet forgivable, humanly speaking. But what I could not forgive was the behavior of the Maid Marian Impersonators (sadly accepting that there were no real Maid Marians) who suckered me every damn time. And anyway, say what you might about Bridgid Muldoon, who might have been, perhaps, capable of slaughtering a generation if she’d seen the need, she’d never come at you with any hallucinating nonsense any more than Little John or Friar Tuck would. As she held the bowl and razor before you, you’d know the executioner at once. There’d be no ethereal glitter there. No sweet illusion. No false hope. And the same if she was actually trying to cure you.

Which is why any Robin, I’m certain, even knowing secretly that Maid Marian meant his death, and that Bridgid was a genuine medical attempt to rescue him, would pick Maid Marian every time. But that’s precisely the trouble, of course. What man wants to live with a real Bridgid, when he can die with a false Marian? All that is required is that he, Robin, never perceive Marian as people. Only as his most childish illusion. And that is easy. Even inevitable.

But anyway, to finish my confession, which I never expected to cover me with glory: whosever fault it was, my mother’s or my culture’s, it always turned out the same. To me, women were consistently the opposite of people. Less than human, by definition.

And, if they did metamorphose into people, which of course happened very often, then they ceased to be Women for me.

I’ll even go so far as to admit that sex with women has always been enormously attractive to me, satisfying and quickly mythic. In other words: sex. However, the notion of sex with people, even female people, always struck me edging distastefully toward perversion, thoroughly un-mythic, and possibly admissible only if there were no women available. And even then, not expected to be very appetizing. Because, of course, my real appetite was for myth. Colors. Perfume. Incredible hair I could see only with my eyes closed. That is to say, theater. The eternal. The archetypal.

To which women, for both good and ill, tended, as far as I could see, as if answering some innate and implacable natural law. Maybe being closer to Nature at that, they only resembled the human the way archetypes do.

Which is, of course, why I needed so much help from the Unseen and Mysterious Forces. To navigate not only through the blinding hallucinations of the materialistic modern world but through the biological ones filtered up through my own male fantasy. Otherwise, I would never have seen that Light in all its quintessential human clarity, nor perceived Althea as the most unarchetypal, people person I would ever know, poor thing.

For which my own inner Light, obviously, needed considerable development.