Ma Parker cleans the house of a “literary gentleman”, and we meet them both on the day after she has buried her grandson, Lennie. Ma Parker has had a life of almost unimaginable suffering – her knees ache from years of relentless work, and her spirit is bruised by infinite small injustices and the loss of her husband and seven of her thirteen children – but it’s the death of Lennie that brings her, finally, to breaking point. The moment has come, she realises, to let out the years of misery – “but to have a proper cry over all these things would take a long time”.
I suspect (and fear) that some people find this story mawkish or unsubtle. Admittedly, the characters sometimes teeter on the edge of caricature, but to me, the wonder of it is that it although the story could slide into sentimentality, it doesn’t. There are terrible, unexpected shards of observation, such as the way that Ma Parker’s childhood memories have been reduced to a just a couple of fleeting images and stock phrases, as if she’s been deprived even of the right to tell her own history.
The story doesn’t resolve or offer any sort of redemption, and the ending is brutal. It seems simply to bear witness to the fact that, much as we wish it weren’t the case, life can be like this. Sometimes there’s a strange, small comfort in that.
First published in The Garden Party and other stories, Alfred A. Knopf 1922, and widely collected. Available to read online at the Katherine Mansfield Society here
A Personal Anthology 