Consuming love: Edna O'Brien's "A Rose in the Heart of New York."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by Frances M. Malpezzi

It would be something as slight as that the mother had a splinter under

her nail and the girl felt her own nail being lifted up, felt hurt to

the quick, or felt her mother's sputum, could taste it like a dish. (393)

Emotionally ambivalent, she wants to kill her mother, dreams of drowning, choking, suffocating her; yet, she also wants a reconciliation. She plans a holiday for the two of them at a sea-side resort. The mother is 78, the daughter 38. In the midst of tourist attractions and casual conversation, the daughter feels their failure to connect emotionally. She tries to elicit her mother's recollections, especially about an amatory relationship the mother had when she was a young immigrant in New York. The mother, however, is reticent to discuss her past, asserting: "there was no such thing as love between the sexes and that it was all bull. She reaffirmed that there was only one kind of love and that was a mother's love for her child" (399). An uncomfortable and intense dinner follows: "They were speaking out of turn and eating carelessly, the very food seemed to taunt them" (399). After an emotionally turbulent scene, the mother retreats to her room and the daughter is left downstairs, "remembering a woman she most bottomlessly loved, then unloved, and cut off from herself in the middle of a large dining room while confronting a plate of undercooked lamb strewn with mint" (400). The undercooked lamb is a fitting symbol for the reconciliation that is never effected on this holiday.

The narrative collapses time, hurtling us from the daughter's dismay at the failed attempt to find the long lost mutuality to the actual loss of her mother in death. The abrupt move to this death reinforces the narrator's insight that death is as much a surprise as birth, linking the opening and closing scenes of this work. Shocked, deprived of her mother, the daughter finds food has no taste for her: "Coffee, bread, whiskey, all tasted the same, tasted of nothing, or at best of blotting paper" (401). After the funeral, she finds an envelope with her name on it in her mother's house, but she is disappointed to discover only money and trinkets within when she longs for a letter, for communication with her mother, hungers for her words. The story ends with their irremediable separation, with the daughter's unsatisfied hunger for the woman she loved and unloved:

A new wall had arisen, stronger and sturdier than before. Their life

together and all those exchanges were like so many spilt feelings and

she looked to see some sign or hear some murmur. Instead, a silence

filled the room, and there was a vaster silence beyond, as if the house

itself had died or had been carefully put down to sleep. (404)

The second part of O'Brien's story deals with emotional loss and ends with the final loss through death. Darcy O'Brien has noted that most of Edna O'Brien's novels have been "about breaking away--from home, family, marriage or love affair--and yet each is also testimony to the impossibility of the clean or permanent break. Childhood, family, husband, and lover live on to haunt heart and memory" (179). Certainly that is the case with this story that concerns both the mother and daughter's consuming love for each other and the daughter's need to separate herself from the mother lest she be totally consumed in the relationship. Yet she finds there is a terrible price to pay for that severance. Now feeding on grief for the reconciliation that eluded her through death, the daughter feels doomed to a hunger never to be appeased. If, as Adrienne Rich has written, "The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy" (237), then Edna O'Brien's "A Rose in the Heart of New York" provides us with two tragic heroes who experience reversals of fortune as they lose the deep mutuality of their love in a painful estrangement made permanent by death.