Mother Love
Happy Endings.
by Margaret Logan.
Houghton-Mifflin. 164 pp. $7.95.
One by product of the women’s movement has been the re-evaluation of their mothers by women of raised consciousness. No longer looked upon as merely the purveyors of discipline and clean underwear, mothers have come to be viewed, with rage, as co-conspirators in the male scheme of oppression, or alternatively, with compassion, as fellow victims of that same conspiracy. But the movement is growing up; the daughters of the revolution now have daughters of their own to whom the torch must be passed. Margaret Logan, who teaches English at Boston University, has undertaken to do just that, as well as to examine her own feelings as a mother, on a bicycle trip with her daughter. Happy Endings is her account of that “journey of discovery.”
As she explains in the opening pages of Happy Endings, Miss Logan has something in common with the whooping crane. Like that fast-vanishing breed, whose neglected eggs perish unless removed to the nest of the more nurturing sandhill crane, Miss Logan had entrusted the spiritual care and feeding of her daughter to others: “teachers, playmates, parents, anyone who’ll pick up the slack.” Yet, generous as they may have been in taking on the child-rearing burden, these human sandhills did not have quite the sort of sensibilities one might wish for one’s daughter. Some of them were rather narrow creatures who could not tolerate “ambiguity, uncertainty, challenges to accustomed loyalties.” What is more, among sandhills, “snobbery is both common and freely permitted.” Imagine Miss Logan’s dismay, then, on discovering that her seventeen-year-old daughter showed signs of becoming a true child of her “foster culture,” that she “emulously” craved the sandhill life—BMW’s, ocean views—and showed a decided preference for “vanilla boys”—blond, bland, and “ominously rich.” Most horrifying of all to Miss Logan was her daughter’s admiration for the female sandhill uniform: “The assertive, unyielding cut. Those discreet little A-lines . . . a plumage whose stiff geometry satisfies snobbish requirements but will tempt no lover to strip and ravish her.”
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Desperate measures, clearly, were in order. Nothing—as the best people have always known—broadens the adolescent mind like a continental tour. Miss Logan herself, when in her early thirties, had found Rome, with its “October sunlight brilliant on Bernini’s fountains,” a profoundly illuminating experience, and it now occurred to her that a European trip in her own company—extended exposure, so to speak, to great art and good example—would be just the thing to open the “kid’s” mind to the “ironies and iconoclasms of whooper life.” This would entail no small personal sacrifice on Miss Logan’s part; for one thing, just being in France was likely to evoke memories of a recent jaunt there with her lover of many years, her main man since the divorce from the “kid’s” father. Traveling without “Adam” would be lonely; but then, what’s a mother for?
And so, one summer’s day, mother and daughter land in Paris to begin a six-week bicycle trip through France, Switzerland, and Italy—final destination, Rome. France is a veritable University of Whooperism. From Versailles to Chartres to the vineyards of Burgundy, with here a judicious quotation from Colette, there a trenchant analysis of the love life of a medieval queen, everywhere an uninhibited response to the thrill of beauty, Miss Logan wastes no didactic opportunity. But her pupil, sadly, is all too often unresponsive. At Chartres, for example, Miss Logan’s sensitive rumination on the stained glass (“Their radiance. The mildness of their radiance. A graphic, no, plastic representation of grace and faith.”) elicits no more than a blank-eyed shrug from her benighted child.
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Resist as she might, however, Miss Logan’s daughter—whose name is never disclosed in the book—inevitably softens to the subtle magic of her surroundings and her guide. By the time they leave France, she has unbent enough to engage in “her first foreign flirtation”—with some decidedly un-vanilla boys. Sensing in this development a chance to “procure an evening alone for my own renewal,” Miss Logan looks on with bated breath. “They’re strangers,” she notes, “but that risk seems small compared to the clear and present danger of being sucked dry.” When the flirtation fails to develop into anything more serious, Miss Logan observes that her daughter has missed out on one of life’s great lessons: “a disquieting truth about pleasure—it is rare, fugitive, and comes in its own time, not according to our cravings.”
Switzerland is barren ground for disquieting truths. Even Logan mère finds it hard to keep an open mind in that “apotheosis of sandhill,” and no passing male stranger offers himself as an alternative educational aid. The Swiss experience is redeemed, finally, only by “the spiritual and recreational clout of the Alps.” Miss Logan vows to “hold in my mind the image of her [daughter’s] happy sprint up the Simplon [Pass], not her snobbish shortcomings.”
These shortcomings rise to the fore during the first few days in the great illuminator, Italy. Sexual assaults, verbal and physical, from roving motorcyclists threaten to negate all the beneficent effects of France and the Alps. Having visualized “elaborately beseeching Italian men who would playfully tease her out of her distressing sandhill prissiness,” Miss Logan is unprepared for her daughter’s terrified reaction. But things gradually do improve, thanks, in part, to the helpful roadside beseechers, who expose their penises for the daughter’s benefit. Such behavior, Miss Logan reflects, may not speak well for Italian society, but she cannot but applaud the effect on her daughter of “so much exposed cock.” “Curiously good. An approximation of what I hoped Italy would do for her.” By journey’s end, she can declare with joy and relief, “the trip worked, she’s corrupted.”
What is the precise nature of this corruption, the salvation of seventeen-year-olds? It is not really sexual. Even Italy, in the end, does not persuade the daughter to embark on “life’s only adventure reliably worth any price” with a simpatico fellow camper. Nor has she been cured of the aspiration to sandhillery. Safely back in the U.S., she continues to insist that “It’s the best life I can think of.”
But appearances are misleading. A significant, if subtle, transformation has indeed occurred somewhere along the bikeway. Miss Logan’s daughter may not have lost her tolerance for the “good” life, but she has lost her intolerance of her mother. And more than she fears the consequences for her child of solid stability, Miss Logan fears her disapproval. Miraculously, that disapproval, freely voiced in Boston and France, has disappeared by Florence. Early attempts to involve the “kid” in her amatory difficulties had yielded Miss Logan a “selfish, bratty response”: “ ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it,’ ” or “ ‘Don’t ask me to meet this new guy. I never want to lay eyes on him. That way I won’t mind when you dump him too.’ ” By Italy, the revelation that this particular “new guy” is married provokes only a mild remonstrance: “ ‘You ought to have your head examined.’ ”
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Clearly, then, Miss Logan has accomplished something by exposing her daughter to the “corruption” of Europe: by multiplying examples of the “ironies and iconoclasms of whooper life,” she has shown that her own life, in its chaos and promiscuity, is not so reprehensible as her daughter has made her feel. And having thereby shown, as well, that she is not to be held accountable for her daughter’s anxious retreat—past or future—into stuffiness, Miss Logan can hardly be blamed for feeling triumphant. “My daughter,” as she puts it, “untangled me from my own mothering. . . . I’m running free in latitudes where I once banged futilely about in irons.” Thus freed from the maternal burden, Miss Logan can even accept her daughter’s reawakened craving for BMW’s and ocean views with an open-minded, “I wish you well. I’m skeptical, but I wish you well.”
With mothers like these, who needs social workers?
