said with a rueful expression, “but my son doesn’t. He’s dealing in the absolute. The technical.”
“Phillip has led a sheltered life. It’s time for him to grow up, and stop judging you. He’s been angry at you for too many years. He needs to try and understand what you were doing and why, and realize that you’re quietly involved with a married man who won’t leave his alcoholic wife. It would be a great deal more immoral if you dragged him away. For me the criterion is always if someone is getting hurt. We all have our moral compass, and we all make compromises, but that’s where the buck stops for me. Phillip needs to have more compassion. How does he know he wouldn’t do the same thing in your shoes? That’s the reality here. We all get angry at our parents. I think you were angry at me for a while because of Ansel, and now look, the dial turns, the years march on, Joe is gone, and you’ve found a man who makes you happy who happens to be married to an alcoholic. How different is that from what I did with Ansel?
“Sooner or later we all do the same things our parents did, no matter how much we criticized them, because in the end we’re all human beings, and subject to the same frailties. We all make the same mistakes, or similar ones in the end. And what it teaches us is to be forgiving, and not so quick to judge. Every one of your children will wind up making some of your mistakes. It’s human nature. So who are they to judge you harshly? ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is true in the end. Who’s to say that Phillip won’t do the same thing one day? It’s a long life. At sixty, you did something similar to what I did, when I was younger. And maybe one day Phillip will understand that you’re not immoral, you’re human, and so is he.” As she listened to her, Olivia felt a huge wave of relief wash over her. She had thought more or less the same things, but having Maribelle express it so succinctly, from the vantage point of another generation, made it even clearer for her.
“Thank you, Mom,” she said, as she leaned over and kissed her. “I’m glad we talked about it.” She had answered the questions of a lifetime and clarified some important things. She had thought her mother didn’t care about marriage and was some kind of libertine, but as it turned out, they had been engaged and hoping to get married, and he had died before they could. She was as conventional as anyone else, just struggling to make morality and reality meet, which wasn’t always an easy task.
“I’m glad you brought it up,” Maribelle said peacefully, fingering Ansel’s ring again. He had been a good man. And so had Olivia’s father, although they had been married for such a short time before he was killed in the war. Maribelle had been with Ansel Morris for many, many years. Just as Olivia had been with Peter now. Ten years was a long time. Maribelle repeated then what she had said earlier. “Phillip needs to grow up. Life has a way of making us do that, whether we want to or not. It did for both of us,” she said, smiling at her daughter. “And he needs to stop whining about your being gone when he was a boy. He was fine. And if you hadn’t built the business you did, he wouldn’t have the job he has now. You can’t have everything in life. And you were there for him, part of the time, and the rest of the time, he had me and Joe. Liz and John have understood that. Phillip will have to come to it in time.”
“I wish Cass would get there too,” Olivia said wistfully. Her relationship with her youngest child was so badly damaged and such a loss.
“She will. The biggest problem you two have is that she’s so much like you. She fights it all the time. She’s young. She’s a wonderful woman, just like you.”
“I hardly know her anymore. At least she comes to see you.”
“Whenever she can,” Maribelle said, smiling, and with that Olivia stood up. She had been there for a long time and didn’t want to wear her mother out, although that was hard to do. She was probably