Payback

by Mary Gordon

  Even now when Agnes thinks of them, it is their physical beauty she thinks of first, her daughter, the tall, fair, lithe beauty, and Marcus, taller, larger than she, and darker. Calmer, kinder too. A landscape architect with whom Agnes was able to share what she could not with Maeve or Pietro: a hunger for what the eye found beautiful. Walking with him through Rome she learned not only architectural details she’d missed for nearly half a century, but also, walking with a black man, how little she had thought of race in her years away from America.

  She hadn’t thought he and Maeve would have a child; Maeve was so absorbed in her work as Christina’s partner in her family practice, and as the doctor in charge of a facility for abused children in Providence, that neither Agnes nor Pietro had given thought to her having a child.

  The joyous ringing of the telephone: “He is here, Agnes, Pietro, he is here. Leo. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Perfect,” Marcus says.

  They fly—and it feels like they are literally flying—across the ocean to greet the new life. They take turns holding the baby, marveling together at the new strand of the new connection, jointly amused at the difference between American and Italian hospitals. When she had given birth to Maeve, hordes of Pietro’s relatives had arrived with whole meals, served on china and cutlery they had brought from home, new sheets they had bought, changing the bed themselves so Agnes would be comfortable. In the Providence hospital, only two visitors were allowed at a time; if you had told a nurse or someone in charge that you were bringing special sheets, you would have been thought at best eccentric, at worst someone with an entirely culpable, even dangerous ignorance, of the ways of hospitals, and you would no doubt be refused.

  How is it possible, she thinks, her heart lifting at the knowledge that she will see Leo in a matter of hours, that he is seven years old now.

  Leo: she says the name to herself, knowing without the slightest doubt that he is now the greatest love of her life. She doesn’t know how to find the words for a passion whose very name—grandmaternal—worked against the idea of passion, a word coupled inevitably with the scrapbook, the rocking chair, the ball of knitting wool. But she knew it as a passion, with its accompanying fears, different from a parent’s. Now she had to worry that if he needed her she would be unable to help him, because she was too old. Worry without the same inexorable responsibility of a parent’s, and she was relieved to be free of the parent’s narcissism, and so felt that the passion for this child was the purest of any of her life. She had no ambitions for him, only that he be good and happy. No more than that. But those, she knew, were no small things, and perhaps no more likely than accomplishment, riches, fame.

  She was very glad that the distance she had felt from Pietro had vanished, and, holding their grandchild, they could stand together, in joy, in wonder, in gratitude…for what seemed a certain sign of the goodness of life.

  Because it was less than a year after it had happened, what everyone used the same word for: the accident. The definite article, as if there were only one, had always only been one.

  They were staying in their country house. Pietro had gone back to Rome for a niece’s graduation. Agnes had expected him home around ten, and when he didn’t arrive by eleven, she went to bed, putting his lateness down to traffic or his family’s inability to make a timely exit.

  At two, she was awakened by the doorbell. Two policemen shyly made their way into the foyer. Pietro had been in an accident; a drunk driver had pushed him off the road and he crashed into a stone wall.

  She didn’t know how to ask the question in a way that wasn’t horribly crude. But there was no other way of asking it.

  “Is he dead?”

  And no other way of answering it.

  “Sì.”

  Yes.

  They took her to his body, in the hospital in Urbino. His body was still warm. It gave her a false hope and she held his hand and whispered, “Don’t be dead, caro, please, don’t be dead.” And for a moment she believed that if she concentrated hard enough he would sit up, and tease everyone for being foolish.

  She began howling…she couldn’t recognize her voice, and she couldn’t stop herself. The doctors pulled her away from the body and held her, trying to comfort her as if they were not strangers.

  When she said, “I must call the family,” she felt that the doctor was surprised that she said the family rather than my family, and that he was prepared for whatever strange behavior an American would exhibit. And she felt her foreignness. Straniera. Strange.

  But she had always found Italian grieving strange. She realized there was no Italian word for “grief,” only words for the observable act of mourning, lutto, in lutto, in lutto stretto, or the visible expression of it, piangere, but for the inner emptiness, the ongoing invisible state that cannot be assuaged by any human connection—she looked in vain in the language that she felt she knew quite well, noticing that when an Italian wants to express sympathy for a death, often he says, Ti sono vicino nel suo dolore. I am near you in your sadness. As if the worst possible thing in grief is to be unaccompanied.

  And perhaps, she thought, they were right, because as quickly as she could she acted so that she was no longer unaccompanied. She phoned her daughter from the hospital, and Maeve got on the next plane. Pietro’s sister drove from Rome—it was terrifying to think how fast she must have driven…Agnes had hardly had time to bathe and dress when she was walking through the door. They held each other’s hands…as they wept, they picked up and put down the things Pietro had only just been holding: his pen, his reading glasses…and Giulietta kissed them, like the little sister she would always be. They drove back to Rome at breakneck speed and she played Beethoven in the car: the crashes, the heroics, were what they both knew they needed. And then the crowds descended, and although Agnes wished for more solitude, it was the one gift she would not be granted.

  There was a funeral mass, even though Pietro hadn’t entered a church since Maeve was baptized. It had nothing much to do with God or with religion, it was simply what people, his people, had always done: in a way, it was impersonal, and that seemed right.

  A moment of particular and unrepeatable tenderness, unique to Agnes and Maeve, wife and daughter, when they discussed what to do with his ashes. They agreed that they should be scattered in places that he had loved and been happy, and they laughed almost uncontrollably when they agreed that there were so many places he had loved and been happy that they might not have enough ashes to go around. They settled on four: the Tiber at the Ponte Sisto; the house in the Marche; the sidewalk in front of the Fountain of the Tortoises in the Piazza Mattei; the courtyard of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the Borrominio church that was his favorite place in Rome to hear music. It was that this was his favorite place, though so unlike him: austere, and geometrical, a monotone white refusing, with a Northern deliberation (Borromini, after all, was Swiss), the slightest hint of color.

  She had never thought of Pietro dying before her, as he was clearly the livelier one. And his death was not only his death but a sign of everyone’s mortality: if Pietro could die, then anyone could die. Agnes was glad that she’d howled when she realized Pietro was dead; it was a clear memory, a vivid memory, and after a while nothing seemed clear. For months after Pietro’s death, she felt nothing but the slackness of everything, its nullity, as if she were participating in the un-aliveness of the dead. She found it hard to make her hands work. She grew clumsy—and she had always prided herself on being adroit with her hands. She dropped things. She seemed always to be sweeping up bits of broken glass or crockery. The food she cooked was either raw or burned. The house became a kind of negative space: everything surrounding an emptiness that was the only real, the only important shape. She missed the conventional signs of Pietro’s masculinity: his wood-backed hairbrushes; his change on the top of the bureau; his shoes in the closet, serious with the wooden trees that kept their shape but clownishly lar
ge next to hers, which became, beside them, Cinderella’s slippers.

  Pietro’s death had a particular effect on Jasper and Agnes’s mother. The wrongness, that he, young, should be dead and they, old, should be alive, weakened them physically. They aged dramatically in the weeks after he died. And it was less than a year after “the accident” that Jasper was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was a painful death, but he did not linger as an invalid, which he would have loathed. “I want to die before I’m either terribly boring or terribly unattractive.” He didn’t get his wish: he was not lovely in his last days; the indignities of age and illness—shit and spit and stink—he, who was so fastidious, could not be spared them. He was not sorry to die. He said he believed that heaven was a fabulous party where he would see everyone he’d ever loved, eat all his favorite foods, and be treated to endless performances of Bellini’s operas.

  Agnes and her mother held his hand when he died; he was in a coma. “Do you think he knew we were there?” her mother asked, and Agnes said yes, though she wasn’t sure; she wanted to believe that he knew he was not alone.

  And quite soon afterward her mother said, “I want to go home now. I need to be back in America. I need to be around familiar trees. And I need to find a church to be buried from. I am, after all, Protestant; in a Catholic church I am always a tourist and to be a Protestant in Rome is to place yourself among genteel spinsters collecting for abandoned cats.”

  But Agnes put her mother off because she was unwilling to give up her work, which had been the basso continuo, the dependable constant that had kept her steady through the losses, shocks, and upheavals she had had to live through.

  * * *

  —

  Maristella Ford and Agnes di Martini. A team, which she had never thought of not existing, or only in the vague way that you imagined your own potential nonexistence after death.

  And then, one day, as if it were nothing, “I have put in my papers for retirement. We are moving back to my husband’s home in Australia.” Laurence Ford. A banker from Australia…and so, when it is time for him to retire, she cannot possibly refuse him: the return to the home of his childhood. They longed for vistas. The tended hills of Italy, the skies so interrupted by habitation, the small European expanse always a poor substitute.

  Their son is in America, in Silicon Valley. But Maristella loathes Silicon Valley; insists that Lauro, the son, travel to Australia to see them. So it was likely they would not see each other again, and Agnes worried that she wouldn’t—not being kin, and never having met Maristella’s husband—be informed of her death.

  Were women always making decisions based on ties of blood? How much more likely that women would make decisions touching work based on ties of blood.

  And yet it had not been only blood. They had both seen that their way of doing restoration was being seen as passé, “boys and their toys,” expensive holograms as a substitute for standing and looking. Maristella’s anger at the mania for laser technology as a way of removing layers of paint. “Do they care nothing for the damage these lasers could do…and if we said to them, the best solvent for cleaning off centuries of dirt is spit, they would probably run outside and vomit and suggest to the authorities that we should be sent to a nice facility for the elderly deranged.”

  And there seemed to be less and less money from the state for restoration, more pressure to do things quickly, with a lack of thoroughness that Maristella found difficult to endure.

  With what seemed to Agnes unseemly speed, their work life was over and Agnes had to understand that she was no longer a person with work…and would never be again. Her mother’s joy at the prospect of returning home made her feel that she had been unkind in postponing her wishes. Often she thought of a philosophy professor who posed the question, “What have you done today to justify your existence?” Was it enough to be the daughter of your mother, the mother of your daughter, the grandmother of your grandson, with the attendant needs of each that you could meet? Why not say that was enough? But she knew that always, there would be an emptiness that had been filled with work…something requiring expertise, something, above all, that was done and could be pointed to. You could not point to meals cooked, beds made, clothes washed, even tears dried. Because always there would be more, and always they would be washed away, a message in the sand, which you would be a fool to think could ever be remembered.

  * * *

  BUT DISENGAGING FROM a life was not so easy. No one had ever told her that; she had guessed at the difficulty, but had not imagined its depth. Jasper had left his apartment to her, as had Pietro. She was suddenly burdened by property, by things. It would take, she calculated, three or four months for her to get rid of everything. But her mother was impatient. “At my age, I think in terms of months, not years,” she said. She and Maeve worked out between the two of them that Maeve would take her grandmother home, that her grandmother would live with her until Agnes had sorted out the real estate.

  She gave the furniture to Pietro’s nephew, newly married, and to his sisters her beloved dishes and vases, her embroidered counterpane, her perfume bottles. To the community who cared for the homeless she gave two-thirds of her clothes…she would not, she understood, be dressing up much in New Canterbury, Rhode Island.

  * * *

  —

  Can it have only been this morning that she made what would be the last of her daily rounds?

  She went to the market early as she always had. She said goodbye to Giuseppe, from whom she had bought fruit for twenty years, and before that from his father (she had, she realized, never known their last name). He always asked for Maeve, and for Leo…and since she left, for Agnes’s mother.

  “I’m leaving, Giuseppe, I’ve moved out. I’m off to America for good on the next plane…for good.” What did that mean, and was it for good? He embraced and kissed her. Some days he gave her a kiss as they exchanged fruit for lire and then euros and some days he did not—and she could never determine why some days she got un bacio and some she did not.

  She stopped into the store where she bought cheese, prosciutto and salami, olive oil. Roberto…the owner whom she could truthfully and easily say she loved.

  He said he did not believe that she would be leaving Rome forever. He said he knew she would be back.

  “Oh, I’ll be back,” she told him, “but I won’t be living here again.”

  “Chissà!” Who knows? The Italian hope, she thought, for a kind fate.

  He made up a package of cheese and salami for her to eat on the plane because he said it was a sin…un peccato…to eat airplane food. Si brutta. And his embrace was heartfelt, singular, in a way that Giuseppe’s was not.

  “You must promise me to send postcards and pictures…particularly of the little boy…I want to see his progress.”

  * * *

  —

  She came back to the empty apartment, put the packages on the counter as she always had, but there was no chair or even stool for her to sit on. She leaned against the wall and sank down onto the floor with her back against the wall and her legs straight out, a position or posture taken by no one but a distraught child. She wept like a child, tearing loud sobs, she didn’t try to dry her tears; they wet the front of her shirt straight through; she knew she’d have to change it; she was glad she’d packed a change of clothes in her carry-on in case of a delay. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “What are you crying for what are you crying for,” she berated herself, as she would berate a child whose tears seemed to connect to no visible, no comprehensible source. But then, she thought, that’s always a ridiculous question: What are you crying for…as if tears could be explained, articulated…weren’t they more like sweat than thought?

  But she knew what she was crying for. She was crying for the passing of dearness. Of those moments in a life that show its goodness, that have nothing to do w
ith, have not the slightest tincture of, greatness. What might pejoratively be called habit. She was crying because never again would she swim in that gentle sea of small pleasures whose repetition is so nourishing. She knew there were many people who hated repetition and routine, but she wasn’t one of them. It was, she knew, because of living in a beloved city, you did the same things every day, shopped at the same stores, had a coffee in the same café, passed the florist on the street and thought while you’re doing your shopping, which flowers you’d select. There was always movement, were always new faces, strangers more than likely, construction, changes in window displays, notices of sales. Distractions, and for Agnes distractions had always been the antidote to grief. It was what made her different from her father and Maeve: nature could not console her in the way the streets of Rome could. Because for her, nature was never distracting; in nature, she felt whatever she was feeling more intensely. Sadness was sheer darkness. Elation felt like flying.

  So often, when thoughts of Heidi took her over, she could be distracted by walking the streets. Distraction, she thought, has a bad name, but she had often found it a blessing.

  She knew she would not have it now. She will drive to a supermarket, the size of a small village, hand money over to someone who will more than likely not be there the next time, carry heavy bundles to the car and drive home…unpacking will be another chore because who wants to go to the supermarket more often than they have to: one stocks up.

  And she was crying because she could not stop time. Time…when people say time what they really mean, she thought, is aging, what they really mean is death. And what is the right response to it? She thought if she could name what she was feeling she could get some control over it. But the words wouldn’t come. It wasn’t fear; fear was alive, electric, and what she was feeling was dull and grave. Dread was too strong a word for it. Disappointment too weak.