Payback

by Mary Gordon

  But it’s not true, she thinks, we are not fortunate in 1972. You shelter your baby in a cloth that urges peace, but there is no peace. We are at war. This terrible, this absurd, this evil war. Impossible to put out of the mind for more than a few hours the television images: mothers like this one running with babies, both aflame. Napalm. Unfriendly fire. But you and I are on the same side, she wants to tell the mother. We may have been on the same marches. She remembers her first march. The Pentagon, September 1967, in a yellow bus with Jo and Christina: the three of them the youngest teachers, newly hired. Now inseparable. Friends, they know, for life.

  The headmistress, Letitia Barnes, had hired three young teachers to replace three retirements: Agnes Vaughan, Christina Datchett, and Jo Walsh to replace Miss Hastings and Miss Lloyd and Miss Fuller, all of whom had been there since the last days of the Depression. Agnes taught Art History and Studio Art, Jo taught History and Civics, Christina Biology and Chemistry. An alum had funded a new Chemistry lab. When Agnes was a student there, they made do with out-of-date equipment, it being understood that science was not their strong point. This was something Letitia Barnes was dedicated, now, to changing. And hiring Jo had been a radical decision; her husband was in prison in Danbury for having burned his draft card.

  None of the three new teachers was attached to a man. Jo’s husband was in jail. Christina, the only real voluptuary, had plenty of offers for dates, but she never allowed a second one, saying, “They bore me to crumbs, I just can’t take it.”

  Agnes is engaged, but Roger Jenkins, her fiancé, is on an archaeological dig in Iraq. He has been away for six months; he will be away for another twelve. She is ashamed to admit, even to herself, that what she misses most is the sex. Sometimes she isn’t sure exactly how she became engaged. She loves Roger, she knows she does: his steadiness, his ease in the physical world, his belief that all problems were solvable using a mixture of reason and determination. She loves the hair on his chest and his long narrow feet. But she doesn’t think about him constantly; his image doesn’t swim up to her consciousness whenever nothing else has taken up habitation. She knows they will, together, make a good, perhaps even a rich, life. But sometimes, in the first moments of waking, she must tamp down the suspicion that she agreed to marry him because the estate of daughter, her strongest connection being to her parents, has grown obsolete to the point of being disreputable. Sometimes she is afraid that what she likes best is how they appear, the way they are seen as they walk together. She likes the look of their hands clasped on a table.

  She sees her parents’ happiness, but knows somehow that her father’s passion for her mother has never been returned. So she tells herself it is all right: a love, warm but not incandescent, the prospect of a large and fertile meadow rather than towering mountains or raging seas. And she wants sex, sex on a regular basis without the fraught dramas that finding a comfortable horizontal surface seem increasingly to entail.

  But if she is honest, she enjoys herself more with Christina and Jo than with Roger.

  Roger’s humor is dry and ironical; he is very fond of puns; it has nothing in it of Jo’s zaniness, Christina’s delight in the absurd, her gift for mimicry. The three young, pretty teachers, spending their weekends together, watching the mixed couples at the adjoining tables when they are in restaurants, or down the bar from them at the happy hour they’ve discovered two towns away. With Roger, she never feels this freedom, this full-throated sense of being in the world.

  Being unattached allows the three of them to give extraordinary attention to their students, as the older spinster teachers did, but without the over-genteel (or lesbian) cast that turned off some prospective parents. The three of them spent their weekends together, Agnes the glue that held the three together because Christina could be impatient with Jo’s political earnestness and Jo could be quick to take offense at what she saw as Christina’s “Noël Coward to hell with it all” approach.

  Agnes adored them both and found them more admirable, more exciting than she believed herself to be. On the marches they went on together, they were able (as she is sure the mother with the baby on her back would be) to shout the slogans at the top of their lungs. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many people did you kill today? The most Agnes could do was make the V sign with her fingers. V for Victory. But what would victory entail? She wishes she were more like her friends, more like what she is sure this mother is like. Do you understand, she wants to ask the mother, walking ahead of her, how awful it is to know yourself to be a timid person? Timid. What an awful word. She hates the word. She would like to spit it onto the sidewalk. But that too is something she could never do.

  The mother and the baby turn, head off the avenue, west, Agnes thinks, and disappear into the park. She wonders if she should follow them. No. Suppose the mother turned and showed a menacing or angry face. A sneer, a grimace. Suppose she was scarred or deformed. What then would be required? No, it was best to let them go.

  * * *

  —

  Fifty-Ninth Street. The Plaza. Memories of afternoon sweetness. Her mother and her mother’s best friend, Frances Fletcher. Always college girls with each other, roommates, although they hadn’t lived together for thirty years, but in their minds, perhaps, they always had. Christened Henrietta and Frances, they called each other “Hank” and “Frank.”

  Frances had not married. Frances was what was called then a “career girl.” One of those glamorous jobs teenagers could dream over: an editor at House and Garden magazine, although she had neither house nor garden but was urban, a New Yorker to her fingertips (always the same blood red). And her mother always said, incomprehensibly for Agnes at the time, but later sensible, “A shame really, she was a first-rate poet.” Frances, her cigaretty voice, her red-painted nails, her high heels (a reference point for Agnes, whose mother would risk nothing more than a medium heel, “It’s no accident they’re called spikes”). Frances, who had not married but specialized, Agnes’s mother confided later, in affairs with unsuitable married men. Frances, large boned, presenting an image of health that was only just not aggressive, in contrast to Agnes’s mother, who had suffered asthma since she was a child.

  Her trips to New York with her mother, culminating in drinks with Frances, were always about seeing art. The Metropolitan, where she is today. The secret jewel: the Frick with its polished, pricey quiet; the courtyard, the quietly plashing fountains, her mother’s favorite Bellini, Agnes’s secret favorite, the Ingres in the blue satin dress. Her mother had wanted to be a painter. “But if you aren’t great, you may as well be useful.” She became a medical illustrator. She took a pride in her own hardheaded common sense, painting only with Agnes: watercolors of flowers, this is how to put in shadows, how to blur a line.

  Agnes started college believing that she would be a painter because she was the artist of her class at the Lydia Farnsworth School. Lauded among her friends for her ability to capture their faces. Rewarded by neighbors who want her to render the view of the sea from their back porch. Her self-portrait hung in her parents’ bedroom, “Look, Paul, how she got the arch of the eyebrows.” Then at Brown she is told she is hopelessly conventional; realism is dead, even abstraction. One teacher praises her “delicate eye, and delicate hand,” but then, leaning over to correct a line, he rests his not-delicate hand on her breast, and she understands that it is time to give up painting.

  She had her own lunches with Fran at the Palm Court, without her mother, uneasy at the exclusion but unwilling to give up the pleasure. A gimlet. You must know how to drink and not get drunk.

  Sometimes she spent the night with Frances. Her apartment: a source of crucial information. A shelf of cosmetics and small deliberate brushes, mascara, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, eyelash curler, lipstick, lip brush, liquid rouge, solid blusher. “I have to put my face on,” Frances says in the morning, as if after closing the bathroom door she will be shedding her unadorned face for
a new one.

  But Agnes was drawn to Frances as the cavemen had been drawn to the one among them who realized that meat was better salted, cooked.

  Frances was romantic, not about her own romantic life, which she described with a brittle cynicism, but about Agnes’s parents’ marriage. They had all met in college; Frances and Agnes’s mother at Mount Holyoke, her father at Amherst. “I’ve never seen anyone as taken by anyone as your father was by your mother. For a long time, she didn’t accept his attentions, his obvious devotion. I think she knows that he loves her more than she loves him. Oh, she loves him, they are one of the few genuinely good matches I know. But he’s not the love of her life. You are. I’ve heard her make a joke of him…his earnestness, what she calls his ‘moral finickiness.’ But she’s never made a joke of you. Not for a minute. I think perhaps you have been perfectly loved.”

  On one of their visits, Frances said, “Has your mother talked to you about contraception? It’s no good blushing, not knowing could have hideous consequences. I remember a girl in our class at Mount Holyoke, a few of them, really, over the four years, they’d leave for a weekend and never come back, and you didn’t know if they’d died or just had a baby. Barbaric. But should you ever need anything like that I have a very good doctor friend who could help you.”

  * * *

  —

  Agnes approaches Fifty-Seventh Street. Fifty-Seventh Street was only one thing: Carnegie Hall. And only one person: her father.

  It had been another kind of adventure when her father took her to New York. It was always to Carnegie Hall, and their route was always the same. They got off the train at Penn Station and walked east to Fifth Avenue so her father could make his pilgrimage to the New York Public Library. His cathedral, his Vatican, his Taj Mahal. Not surprising: he was a professional, Paul Vaughan, head librarian of the Providence Public Library.

  Agnes and her father would walk up Fifth Avenue from Thirty-Fourth to Forty-Second, a stop in at the library, “just to see how the old girl’s doing,” and then lunch at Schrafft’s. And then, the arrival at Carnegie Hall, the trip up the red-carpeted staircase, the buzz and then the hush, the high, lustrous whiteness of the auditorium, the beams of light, as if they’d been trained to it, falling on the brass of the balcony railings, but they didn’t sit in the balcony, they had box seats, always the same, and the thrill of the maestro entering the stage. Leonard Bernstein: a god to her father, the sacred personage as the Forty-Second Street Library was the sacred space. She could never recall what she had heard, only the sharp, anxious thrill of anticipation, the first shocking notes, and being carried up to a level where she and her father could, momentarily, soar together. But even in that magic space there were rules: Do not tap your foot, do not clap at the end of a movement. The worst sin possible: to fall asleep.

  And then, their trips to New York were over, like some traceable moment in a chronicle: the beginning of a war, the end of the plague. The destruction of Penn Station. Her father had taken it as a personal affront. He made one trip to the new facility and came home in a tearing rage. “I will never set foot in that city again. I am grievously disappointed.”

  * * *

  —

  She crosses to the west side of Fifth at Fifty-Seventh. She looks in the window of I. Miller, the shoe store that takes up nearly the whole block. And, there, right in the window, there they are: the wonderful red boots that the mother of the baby wore.

  There’s nothing in her that resists the impulse to try those boots on, and she knows it’s unlike her, she was never very interested in clothes; she didn’t want to stand out…although she didn’t want to be one of those words that ended in y: dumpy, frumpy, dowdy, homely. But something about these boots made her heart race in the way that certain songs did—songs that her father would call vulgar but that she loved to dance to. (It was a secret she kept from her parents, that she loved to dance; loved, particularly, girl groups—the Supremes, of course, but even the ones whose names she had to admit were embarrassing: the Dixie Cups, the Shirelles.)

  A tall blond young man with a red carnation in his buttonhole approaches her. Even before he opens his mouth, she knows he’s gay; gay, the word she’d learned to be comfortable with halfway through college because so many of her friends were. Pete, her closest friend in college, had said, “Watch it, lovie, you’re well on the way to being everybody’s favorite fag hag.” Her father, who was quick to say he had no problem with homosexuality, refused to use the word gay, saying he loved it too much to see its meaning diluted. Maybe, she thought, that meant he really did have a problem.

  * * *

  —

  The salesman shows her to a seat, but before she sits down she tells him she wants to try on the red boots in the window.

  Looking around the store, she is convinced that she is the youngest of the customers, and the poorest. She feels herself begin to sweat with her own sense of unfitness; it was fortunate that her salesman was quick, because she was on the verge of sneaking out.

  He kneels before her and helps her with the boots.

  Never before has any article of clothing given her such a sense of rightness. She’s embarrassed at her response: she giggled, giggled in a way that would have been mortifying for one of her students.

  “Stunning, absolutely stunning,” he says. “Take a look.”

  She stands in front of the full-length mirror, afraid to meet her own reflection.

  * * *

  —

  They look as wonderful as they feel. She’s almost hypnotized by the rightness of everything about them.

  The salesman stands behind her. “I think they’re very fine, though they’d probably be better with a shorter skirt.”

  “I’m a teacher,” she says, feeling foolish at the response.

  “You’re not a teacher all the time.”

  “In the town I live in, I’m afraid I am.”

  “Then, sweetie, you need to get out of town more.”

  She isn’t sure whether he’s kidding her or insulting her, but she decides to make a rueful face, one she had learned while dealing with challenging students. It threw up a barrier, but low enough so that it could be climbed over, if the inclination arose.

  “I’ll take them,” she says.

  “Do you want to wear them? I think you love them that much, if I’m not presuming.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I would like that very much.”

  “Listen, they’re great on you. Wear them in good health. I see by your ring that you’re engaged. I’m sure your fiancé will be pleased.”

  “My fiancé is in Iraq. On an archaeological dig.”

  She sees that his opinion of her has risen. She wasn’t just a provincial schoolteacher, engaged to an accountant or the town lawyer who drew up everybody’s wills.

  “All the more reason to live a little, no?”

  * * *

  —

  She turns west onto Sixth Avenue. On the corner of Fifty-Fifth and Sixth was the character everyone seemed to know about: a mountain of a man dressed in a red cloak, his legs bare in lace-up sandals, on his head a Viking helmet, complete with horns. He was blind, one eye bleached of color, almost turned in on itself. Moondog was his name. Two of her students had come back from a weekend in the city full of excitement after their encounter with him; had invited him to join them at Shakespeare in the Park—As You Like It—and he had nodded, silently, and followed them. “He’s kind of like a god, kind of like Homer, Homer was blind, right, and kind of like Jesus, but kind of like a Viking hero.” Nearly unable to contain themselves, they presented her with copies of his poetry. He sold the poetry for pennies. She remembered two of the poems; they were easy to remember, rhymed couplets, but she had made the mistake of showing them to Jo and Christina, who were less prone to sympathize with student silliness.

  An armored knight fe
ll off a ship and sank into the blue.

  He looked a lobster in the eye and said, “You’re armored, too?

  We have to buy new cars each year or we’ll be classified

  By all the Joneses in our town, who must be pacified.”

  Agnes wanted to use her father’s word, ridiculous, because that’s how the poems seemed to her, and when they said they thought he was like Homer, they thought he was like Jesus, she had to work doubly hard to silence her father’s voice…those sweet, silly girls. Margaret Kiley and Joan LeBeau. They said they didn’t know whether they wanted to be painters or poets; they said they wanted to live together after college on a sheep farm in New Zealand.

  She was relieved that she wasn’t their English teacher, because she thought their poetry was trite and sentimental. She was grateful that she was their art teacher; she could teach them some skills: perspective, shading…which didn’t require her to voice judgments on their subject matter, which was as trite and sentimental as their poetry—although their triteness and sentimentality moved her as it expressed itself in their lives.

  Often, she asked herself: What can you really teach anybody? She could let them know that Fra Angelico came before Goya; she could explain the techniques of each, and place them in the context of their culture. But if the student thought the paintings weren’t worth her interest, Agnes couldn’t do anything at all. Too often she realized that they said they loved the paintings because they loved her, because they wanted to please her. Once they were out of her sight, and she of theirs, would they ever go to a museum or a gallery, or put a mark on paper to record something they found engaging or arresting?

  She knew they loved her, or that they believed they did. She enjoyed the love, but she didn’t deceive herself that it was real in the way other loves in her life had been, and she had learned quite quickly that it was not long lasting. Sometimes she thought it was like the frosting on a cheap birthday cake: sugary, succulent, but of no nutritive value whatever; the colors false, the decorations hard and tasteless. So she could teach skills but she could not teach vision; she could not impart the seeing eye. And, looking at the decay of New York, of the horror of the war, of the cities on fire with race hatred, she wondered whether what she was doing was of the slightest value. She knew she was good at it, she was better at it than she’d been at anything else, and her life had not been devoid of successes, of achievements. But she wondered whether doing it was of any use at all.