His great-aunt had disapproved of Mercy. She hadn’t actually said so; she’d merely spoken against marriage in general. “I just want to warn you,” she’d said, “that the quality you marry a person for will end up being what you hate them for, most often.” Robin knew she was referring to Mercy’s “high-class manner,” as she called it, but that was not what he was marrying her for. What did he care about class? No, it was Mercy’s quiet dignity that first attracted him—her upright posture and her composure as she stood behind the counter. She was so different from the clingy, flirtatious, giggly girls he was used to. It was Aunt Alice—a lifelong cannery employee—who was concerned with questions of class. He had lived with Aunt Alice since the age of fourteen, after his mother died of cancer. Although really, Aunt Alice said, she had died of a broken heart. “If it wasn’t for that father of yours, she’d be alive and well to this day,” she told him. His father was a long-haul trucker who met some woman up in New Jersey and filed for divorce when Robin was six years old. “Divorce”—a word like a knife, in Robin’s opinion: hard and sharp and vicious, the cause of his mother’s eternal mute, damp misery. She went to work after that for a dry cleaner, doing alterations, but when Robin thought of her now he pictured her endlessly at home, endlessly slumped in a comma shape on the living-room sofa. Possibly, he allowed, there were some factors—physical cruelty, for instance—that could justify divorce, but otherwise, no. Couples who divorced were shirkers. They were simply not grown up.
From” French Braid” by Ann Tyler
Ann Tyler shows magnificent skills in recounting the life of a family—one that she thought would be an average one. Unfortunately, such a thing does not exist. The authors touch on many issues that we confront every day. One is divorce. I am sure there are quite a few opinions about it, and Robin’s is one: “Possibly, he allowed, there were some factors—physical cruelty, for instance—that could justify divorce, but otherwise, no. Couples who divorced were shirkers. They were not grown up.” There are quite a few more reasons to get divorced, but I hope that if the couple has children, the little ones will also be better off and not be victims of adults’ egoism
