Excerpt from Absolution by Alice McDermott, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Absolution

THERE WERE SO MANY COCKTAIL PARTIES in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading, writing letters home—those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds; evidence, I think now, of how exotic distance itself once seemed.

I'd do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging—wedding stationery with my still-new initials, real ink, and cunning turns of phrase, bits of French, exclamation marks galore. The fan moving overhead and the heat encroaching even through the slatted blinds of the shaded room, the spice of sandalwood from the joss stick on the dresser.

Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my afternoon nap, damp hair on my neck as I removed the shower cap, a haze of talcum. Still wrapped in the towel, I could feel the perspiration prick my skin. Face powder, rouge, lipstick. And then the high-waisted cotton underpants (I hope you're laughing), the formidable cotton bra, the panty girdle with the shining diamond of brighter elastic at its center. The click of the garters. Stockings slipped over the hand and held up to the light, reinforced toe and heel and top.

We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run.

You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband's career, even to his affections), ready to go home.

Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I'd be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself.

And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful.

It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We'd only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed.

I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor's from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I'd taught kindergarten at a parish school in Harlem, but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband.

That was the word I used. It was, in fact, the word my own father had used, taking both my gloved hands in his as we waited for the wedding guests to file into our church in Yonkers. This was in the bride's waiting room, a small chamber well off the vestibule. I recall a tiny stained-glass window, a kneeling bench (for last-minute prayer, I suppose), a box of tissues (for last-minute tears) on a shelf under an ornate mirror, and the two brocade chairs where we sat. The cool odor of old stone and the fresh flowers in my bouquet. My father took both my hands and held them together on the wide tulle skirt of my wedding dress, which even in the dim light of the tiny room was winking with seed pearls.

Copyright © 2023 by Alice McDermott