Words that do not speak themselves: Mary Lavin's 'Happiness.'

In the short story "Happiness" (1969) Mary Lavin constructed a text in which the characters', and especially the narrator's, bewilderment over and confusion of the signification of key words points both to the arbitrariness of the words themselves and to the narrator's inability to understand the story that she tells. The narrator's attempt to account for her mother's enigmatic use of the word "happiness" illustrates the futility of trying to comprehend verbal constructs; the speaker's original construct and the narrator's reconstruction of what she thinks that construct signifies negate each other in such a way that the reader must accept that, in the final analysis, words cannot communicate. If "the main purpose of the narrative ... is to capture and evaluate Vera's philosophy of life" (Peterson 123), Lavin has made the inability to communicate a major part of that purpose.

Lavin unabashedly based the story on her own experience: like Vera, she was left after the death of her husband in 1953 with the responsibility of raising her three daughters; during the first years of her widowhood, Lavin, like Vera, took the girls to Florence. Nevertheless, Lavin's narrative seriously alters her experiences: the story is narrated by an unnamed daughter, and Vera, who dies at the end of the story, does not marry Father Hugh despite the neighbors' thinking that their relation is too intimate. In 1969, Lavin married Michael Scott, who had applied for and was granted laicization (Bowen 20-21). These deviations from Lavin's autobiographical experience should warn us that the story is more complex than it appears at first, even while it provides a striking picture of her own despair and renewed commitment after William's death.

Vera, the widowed mother who teaches the enigmatic lesson that happiness is the essence and goal of life, seems at first to be a truth-sayer. Her name derives from the Latin verax, "truthful," and she seems earnest, however unclear her lesson. As a librarian (13), she works with words, an occupation also suggested by her study and the sheaf of paper that preoccupies her as if she were, like Lavin herself, a writer. But if she is truthful, her inability to communicate clearly suggests that truth cannot easily be shared: neither Father Hugh nor her three daughters understand what she means by "happiness." Her name also suggests the Latin ver, "youth" or "springtime," a reading that Lavin supports in repeated references to spring, spring flowers, and the rejuvenation of spring following winter's desolation. As youthful or springlike, her name carries an obvious double or paradoxical meaning: she is old (and getting older as the story progresses), yet she is youthful in her attitude and springlike in her ability to bounce back from despair. As her name suggests, she is a fulcrum that contains opposites without fully embracing the contradictions that those opposites define.

As in the case of the main character, the narrator frequently uses words that can be read with contradictory significance, thus generating what Augustine Martin called "vibrations in the mind and the imagination which continue in the reader's mind long after the story has been put down" (396). Twice, for example, she uses the word "rhetoric" in such a way that the reader cannot distinguish whether it signifies Vera's skill in using language effectively or an insincerity concealed behind a grandiloquent barrage of words. The first use of "rhetoric" occurs just after Vera declares that "Happiness drives out pain, as fire burns out fire," a cryptic statement obviously beyond the understanding of her daughters who, nevertheless, "thirstily drank in her rhetoric" (12; emphasis added). Here the word seems to denote the narrator's distrust of her mother's glib reply, but in the second use of the word, there is no hint of glibness: here Vera, on her deathbed, speaks of the nun and the daffodils in such a way that the daughters are mystified, Vera's language seeming to conceal a secret that she cannot or will not communicate (32). In the first passage Bea is skeptical, trying in vain to understand but failing because she takes Vera's statement too literally, but in the second Bea recognizes Vera's signification, a comprehension of Vera's "rhetoric" that makes her joyous and strong in facing her mother's death, the very reactions that Vera had wanted in the passage in which the narrator first uses "rhetoric."

Likewise, "father" means both the priest - as in Father Hugh - and the father of the family, but this particular distinction becomes blurred when Father Hugh takes on the role of the father of the family, growing to play an intimate role in the three girls' childhood even while he remains chaste and faithful to his priestly vows. If we have no trouble seeing the priest as a spiritual father, Father Hugh's role takes on broader domestic implications that have generated gossip even though he has remained fully faithful to his priestly vows. In other words, though he is not the gifts' natural father, he becomes their father in every other way.