Payback

by Mary Gordon

  “Blackout curtains,” Christina says. “Then thick winter drapes.”

  “Pack yourself up, spend a month in the city in Frances’s apartment,” Jo says. “We’ll come and visit.”

  “We’ll send Leo down for a week, at least. He’s dying to be in New York,” says Maeve.

  * * *

  —

  So this is it, Agnes thinks, the only solution. To run from it, until the gate finally closes entirely, shielding from sight what must be kept from sight. We’ll call it landscaping. We’ll call it decoration. We will not use its proper name: concealment. Hiding. Denying. Blocking out.

  “It’ll be all right, Mom, please don’t look like that. It will be all right.”

  “Of course it will. I know that,” she says, because she must say that, to thank them for their love, their goodness, their intelligence, and their imagination.

  But she knows it will never be.

  Not all right.

  Not all.

  Not ever.

  PART VIII

  New York

  New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  October 2018

  It was much harder, having a dog in the city. She was looking forward to not having to get dressed to take the dog out, simply opening the door, making her coffee while Ecco went outside, letting herself in and jumping up on the couch beside her; the pleasure of taking up a book and reading as she drank her coffee, ate her toast. But the room would be different now. Living in the house where she was born would never be the same. There were new curtains; there were new trees bordering the road. Only the back of the house would be light filled; she was thinking of adding a back porch, glassed in for winter.

  She was glad to be going home; she was less at ease in New York than she imagined she would be. It wasn’t that it was a city; she’d lived in Rome for forty years. But it was a Rome that contained her neighborhood. There was no neighborhood on Fifty-Fifth Street between Third and Lexington. She didn’t even know who her neighbors were; they might be pleasant to the dog in the elevator, but they always seemed rushed, and the idea of inviting them in for a coffee was out of the question. She had made a connection with the people she met on Tuesdays and Fridays when she had to move the car to obey the alternate side of the street parking regulations. The exchanges had been pleasant in that light neutral way that marked the talk of citizens engaged in a common, slightly onerous task: having to sit in your car, ready to move it at the last second when the cops arrived—like the driver of a getaway car for a bank robbery. It wasn’t possible to have a conversation with the others; everyone was in her or his car or standing next to it on a cell phone. People waved, nodded, shared their annoyance on the days when the cops didn’t show up, feeling the waste of their time as a personal assault by a hostile government. She had told one woman—about her age, about her level of dress and makeup—that she wouldn’t be around anymore, and the woman wished her well. She didn’t tell her where she was going; that seemed provincial, and appearing provincial was something she’d worked hard to avoid.

  Walking the dog was a task, but she’d miss it, miss the exchanges with other dog walkers, or the dog deprived, who swooned and mourned and talked about the dogs they’d left behind…the impossibility of having a dog, working as they did, living as they did. And she would greatly miss walking the dog in Central Park.

  She knew she’d be back frequently; she felt newly bound to visit Frances in her nursing home, although she sometimes thought it was a fool’s errand—Frances, lost in dementia’s fog, never even recognized her. But she knew that the nurses were aware of what patients were regularly checked up on, and which were abandoned, with no one to report malfeasance or neglect.

  She wished Frances didn’t have to be there; she considered taking her back to Rhode Island. The nursing home was drab; the smell of old age was an assault when you walked through the door; the walls were a sickly green; if she brought flowers, the next time she came they were dead in their vase on top of Frances’s plywood dresser. Occasionally, someone cried out; down the hall a woman regularly shouted, “Margaret, Margaret!” The food was clearly meant only to keep the old people alive; no care was made for its preparation, and Frances lived mainly on Ensure, a liquid supplement that INSURED the necessary nourishment. She sat all day, her head in her hands, rocking back and forth, sometimes moaning. She was incontinent; she couldn’t walk…occasionally she became violent when an attendant tried to dress her. No, it would not be possible for Agnes to take her home. But she mourned her clever, elegant friend, reduced to this remnant of what it meant to be human. Somehow, though, the animal that was Frances refused to give up; and Agnes vowed that as long as Frances wished to go on living, she would visit her regularly.

  She wished Frances would die. She prayed for it, in the only way that she could pray, not to God…she wasn’t sure what that meant, God…if such a one existed, he was the God of countless universes and could not be expected to favor this insignificant bumbling species that happened, through some accident, to have a faculty called consciousness, which meant that it knew it would die. She couldn’t pray to that kind of God for the same reason that she didn’t like looking at the stars with her father, because the size of the universe made her feel unhinged, physically sick.

  She prayed to her beloved dead. To her mother and Jasper, who had been young and happy together, to call their friend Frances to join them…out of this misery, out of this pathetic body to which she seemed, against all odds, to cling. She prayed to Pietro when she could see no prospect but darkness; to her father when the world seemed to have lost its reason.

  Her beloved dead. For so many years, no one she was close to had died. That was because she had been young, and although she didn’t think of herself yet as old—though some, she thought, probably did—she knew she was no longer young. Now her husband was among the dead, and both her parents. She had been present at their deaths, and at Jasper’s. What had struck her was the enormous difference between the living and the dead; the body of the dead was there, but it was not the same; something had departed…and so it must be spirit, and it must, having loved and been loved, she believed, still be somewhere.

  Her last meetings with Quin Archer had troubled her belief in the endurance of the ties of love. Because if love went somewhere after death, where, then, was hate? She had understood, in Heidi’s case, that it was the other side of the coin of love. Even after death would Heidi’s hatred follow her, spoiling eternity, the cracked note in the harmony, the dark spot in the radiance? Since Heidi had come back into her life, Agnes had, for the first time, been truly afraid to die. She had to make herself believe that the love of those who loved her would surround her always, like the cloak of the Madonna on the first statue she had restored, keeping her from the hatred and ugliness that Heidi had shown her. She had to believe it; otherwise…the otherwise was too unbearable even to name. The otherwise was a wall of briars, like the briars that the hero and heroine in fairy tales were challenged to hack through, blinding, occluding, light, and beauty, and the possibility of joy. Some days it was impossible to believe that there was any getting through. That must be fought, that must with every strength be refused, resisted. You hacked a small hole through the briars; you got glimpses only, inches only, of clear light.

  And today the light was very clear. October light: the clearest of the year. The sky seemed rinsed and drenched with color. Last night’s wind—at times exciting, but you were glad to be indoors, not subject to it—had scoured the air, and every atom that might block light had been stanched, absorbed. Today it will be a joy—the kind of joy that must be clasped and held, tight—to walk in Central Park.

  She’s proud of Ecco. Although she pees in the street just outside their building, she holds her bowels till she gets to the park, considering grass the minimum necessity. It takes some discipline on Ecco’s part, because the walk to the park is three
long cross-town blocks. Agnes regrets that Frances’s apartment is in one of Manhattan’s least appealing districts, and not conducive to the noncommercial aspects of human habitation. There are no food stores; if she wants a quart of milk, she has to go to the Duane Reade drug store on Madison; there are shoe stores, high-end restaurants for the people working in the high-end offices, a storefront offering Chinese massage. Only two buildings are worthy of her notice: a synagogue with peacock-green Moorish turrets and Stars of David carved into its brick façade; and a building on Madison and Fifty-Fifth that is said to be a postmodern masterpiece but to her is only depressing, a ghost house abandoned by its tenants, a landmark, the signs say, welcoming all to relax in what is called an atrium, but the space is anything but welcoming: too large, too metallic…the shops that once tried to make a go of it have given up, leaving behind them the trail of their failure. The pride indicated by the plaque describing the atrium seems only pathetic: “This space contains the following: 8 planters with trees, 104 tables and seats. Green restrooms.” But everyone there seems as if they’d rather be somewhere else, they just happened to stop there, too tired or too rushed to look for some place really pleasing. Even disliking it, she always walks past it because to walk to Fifth, the entrance to the park, to pass by Trump Tower, with its phalanx of armed guards.

  Walking in Central Park, she misses Rome, misses the Villa Borghese with its pavilions and formal statues; most of all she misses Pietro. Sometimes when she hears someone speaking Italian, she wants to join in their conversations, but she doesn’t, and he would have, and most likely something pleasant would have happened. She would have liked to tell him how odd it was that Europeans and Asians took picture after picture of gray squirrels, whom Americans considered at best ordinary, at worst a pest. How amused he would have been by the couple today…twenties, early thirties…arm in arm…“Is it source of irreducible meaning or irreducible source of meaning?” she asks him, but the dog stops to sniff something and Agnes doesn’t hear the answer.

  She has time to walk the twenty blocks so she can wave goodbye to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, she congratulates herself, she has visited several times a week during her time in New York. She concentrated on African art; because of Leo she had a stake in learning about it, and she felt shame that she had never made her way to the parts of the museum that housed art whose sources were not European. That knowledge had been daunting; there was African art, which she could know only superficially, and there was the Chinese, the Indian, the South American…and located next to the African, the art of Oceania…a name, a designation she had never, before this, heard of. She felt overwhelmed, as she had felt overwhelmed looking at the stars, at the things that would be marvelous to know that she would never know…looked at another way, things it was her responsibility to know if she were to have any kind of genuine understanding of the world…and it was impossible. Even what she knew of the Italian art of the Renaissance was superficial. She understood this because she knew the pleasure of knowing something, one thing thoroughly, as she knew the elbow or the fingernail of the statue she was restoring. The problem was: if you were going to know one thing thoroughly, there was no time even to know the names of what you would never know.

  She had determined that it would be a good use of her time to learn at least something about African art. She was most drawn to a wooden statue from Ghana: a mourner bent over, his back scarified, his head buried in his hands…she wondered what went into its restoration, and, for the first time, she missed her work with a dull, spreading loss. She created a routine: walk the dog, drink coffee, have breakfast, read one of the books on African art she had invested in. Leo came for a week, and his company was the sheerest pleasure: she took him not only to the Metropolitan but also to the Museum of Natural History, and to the precious, semisecret Frick. They went to Shakespeare in the Park and Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center. They ate ice cream at tables set out on the sidewalk. Then he was gone, and she realized, after a few days, that she was genuinely lonely. She found eating by herself depressing; her dinners were meager—cut-up vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, tuna salad—quickly consumed, something merely to be gotten through. She was too old to make new friends; she had no work, so there would be no natural way of meeting people. And, despite the satisfaction of learning something new, she needed people…she needed the nourishment—or was it the protection—of the ones she loved. She knew she was not a person for whom the mind is dominant, or even the eye. Was it too crude to say the heart?

  She was glad when she had visitors; she cooked elaborately for them, asked them to stay the night. Christina came with a book of samples; they needed to choose the fabric for the new blackout drapes.

  She was astonished at Christina’s excitement; Christina, usually so ironical, so suspicious of strong feeling, of strongly expressed emotion—Jo’s extravagant diction always annoyed her. But, stroking the fabric, page after page, Christina herself grew extravagant, showed a delight in the world of the senses that Agnes had never seen. So, Agnes felt, it is more important to me than to her, I will let her choose.

  It was obvious she had already chosen. “Just feel this, just feel this,” she said, taking Agnes’s hand and placing it on a rectangle of purple velvet. “And we’ll line it with this”—she flipped the pages of the sample book—“just feel this creaminess…it’s expensive, but every day you’ll feel like you’ve just popped a perfectly ripe fig into your mouth or eaten blackberries and cream.”

  Agnes knows how important it is to Christina that she share her excitement, so she pretends to be excited. What she wants to say is, You don’t understand. Nothing can make up to me for the reality that these drapes are needed…nothing will take away what has been done.

  “Well, what’s money, anyway…the planet will probably be uninhabitable in twenty years. I might as well have nice drapes.”

  “That’s my cockeyed optimist,” Christina says.

  Marcus and Maeve come…Marcus shows picture after picture on his phone…as excited as Christina at the quick-growing trees. “When you come back, at the end of October…they’ll be six feet high…and next year…we’ll have to be pruning them like mad.”

  And because Agnes knows that his pleasure in the new trees is engraved with the mourning of the great old trees destroyed, her gratitude is twofold: he wants to help; he understands the loss.

  She and Jo go to undemanding movies; the one they like best is about women stealing a jewel from her beloved Metropolitan Museum. But it’s the part of the museum she doesn’t like…the Fashion Institute. The part rich women feel most drawn to…the part that pays all the bills.

  There is no part of her that considers moving full-time to New York. Nothing makes up for it; the love of those she loves that shelters and nourishes. Shelters and shields. But today, her last day, she will not fail to enjoy the light, wafers of light falling through branches. The yellow leaves…aspen, elm, maple, beech…taking in light, presenting light, transforming it into tangible lightness.

  She tells the doorman she will be coming down soon with heavy suitcases. Ramon, the doorman, whom she loves in an easy way that carries with it not the smallest obligation—a tip, perhaps lavish, some might say…but if he were sad or ill or impoverished, it would not be to Agnes that he would bring his troubles. Ramon, elegant and yet lighthearted…Nicaraguan…what had he seen of horrors…had he been on the side of the tyrants or the rebels, who, it seems, had turned into tyrants. There was, she was grateful to believe, no need to ask, no need to know.

  “I hope we’ll be seeing you soon. Tell Leo this year the Knicks will make a comeback, and I want him to be here to see it.”

  “Oh, we’ll be back. We’ll be back.”

  He scratches the dog’s head; the dog sniffs a cuff, lifts her head to give him what Agnes thinks of as Ecco’s famous farewell smile.

  * * *

  CROSSING THE HUDSON is a sig
n, as if, once you’re over the bridge, you show your passport to another country. The country of Not New York. She was going home.

  But what home was she going to? Its shape, its texture, its nature had changed. Quin Archer had changed it; it was possible to say that she could not destroy it, but it was not possible to say that it had not been changed.

  How did the dog know, a quarter of a mile before their exit, that they were nearing home? Ecco stood up; she sniffed at the window so that Agnes knew she wanted it open. As they approached their own street, she started whimpering, but it was a whimper not of distress but of pure joy. She had missed it all, Agnes thought…she’s happy to be home. There is no mixture in Ecco’s feelings; what does it matter to her that there are ugly stumps where there had been grand trees, that there are velvet drapes where there were muslin curtains…new plantings where there had been a view of the road.

  Turning into the driveway, Agnes forces herself not to look across the street.

  The dog jumps out of the car, runs to the backyard, sniffs the ground as if she’d been starved for something all these weeks.

  Agnes goes in the back door, the kitchen door…the one she will now use exclusively.

  Leo runs to her. “Nonna,” he cries, “I’m so glad to see you.”

  She can no longer lift him up. He loves measuring himself against her. “I’m up to your chin now. I’ll be taller than you when I’m twelve.”

  “We keep telling him not to grow, but he seems to do it in his sleep,” Maeve says, taking her mother’s bags. “I’ll put them in your room. I know you, you probably want to unpack right now; I honestly think you believe clothes rot in a suitcase if you don’t expose them to the air within ten minutes of arrival.”