There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  Now she is sharing food with people her parents would be appalled by. She’s amused by the difference in the first- and third-class menus. One offer on their third night’s dinner: roast turkey, buttered corn. Is this a kind of French snobbery, a sign of contempt for the poorer Americans they know make up the bulk of third class? It doesn’t matter; the buttered corn is delicious. Perhaps, she thinks, it’s the French butter. Only one dessert is provided: fruit and vanilla ice cream. Perhaps a nod to any Europeans who might be traveling: a cheese course, but one cheese only. Port Salut. She and Russell live like cubs in the small cabin—sleeping back to back, enjoying, once they get over the strangeness, the shared animal warmth. On the ship, she is Russell’s wife, the girl who made the medical dictionary.

  She is proud of Russell, of the part he takes in the endless discussions. He never allows the conversations to veer off from the press of circumstance; he is impatient with the infighting among Stalinists and Trotskyites. His explanation for why he is here, why he’s a communist, comes in the form of a story. He says that he is a communist because communists show up. When his family was evicted, the communists—his mother’s colleagues in the hatmakers’ union, the ones who refused, as she did, to compromise with the bosses—arrived and moved their furniture back into the apartment, daring the landlord to throw them out again.

  The others speak only of ideas: “We are here to fight fascism before it spreads. We are here on the side of the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat: factories run by unions, collectivized farms.”

  Russell says that he refuses to discuss Russian collectivization because none of them have been to Russia to see it firsthand, and most of them have never been anywhere near a farm.

  Never before has she so clearly understood the limitations of being a daughter of her family, the product of twelve years of Catholic education: Marymount School, Fifth Avenue; the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Noroton, Connecticut. Then Vassar. Before Vassar, she had never had a non-Catholic friend; except for Mrs. Chamberlain, the librarian, she had never had more than a passing conversation with a Protestant. With all her heart, she believed in the rights of Negroes. She had stood up to her brother when he had said that jazz was the music of the jungle and the brothel. But she had never spoken to a Negro. Now a Negro woman has chosen them as table companions, chosen Russell, really, because they worked together when Russell volunteered at Harlem Hospital, where Rosalie Compton was a surgical nurse. Rosalie Compton makes Marian shrink into herself. She is grand and impatient; for a while she called Marian “little girl.” But she doesn’t anymore; despite herself, she’s impressed that Marian produced the dictionary. She asks Marian for help with Spanish; they laugh because Marian knows the Spanish word for “autoclave.” “I bet that’s something you didn’t think you’d be knowing six months ago,” Rosalie says.

  Before Russell, Marian had never known a Jew.

  Now she is married to a Jew…does that make her a Jew? Certainly, it means that, if asked, she will declare she is. She will not say, she will never say again, that she is Catholic. The Church is the enemy, the Catholic Church. On the ship, they rail against it almost as much as they rail against capitalism. “Crush” is the word they use most often. Everything the Catholic Church wants to “crush.” Unions, democracy, freedom of thought. See who they are in Spain: the handmaid of the fascists, urging from the pulpit that reds be killed, tortured in the name of the Church. They make up lies about priests being killed, nuns being raped. No priests have been killed; no nuns have been raped. Marian is ashamed of who she was, who her family is. Thankful that she is Marian Taylor Rabinowitz, a name not obviously associated with the Catholic Church, like Murphy or Kelly. She doesn’t want anyone to know who she was, where she came from. She makes Russell swear not to tell.

  —

  She doesn’t know what it means to Russell to be Jewish, what it means to any of them. She is close enough to Marge Kaplan, a phlebotomist whose husband is a dentist and who still considers herself a religious Jew, to ask her what it all means: it’s so different from what it means to be Catholic.

  Marge says, “I don’t know what it means to them. If you ask me, they have no idea what being a Jew means, what they even mean by it. They want to pretend it doesn’t mean anything; they’d do anything to get away from it. Pinchus Kaplan becoming Pete Cole…Irving Feldman becoming John Fox. But for most of them, you can’t have two of them in the same room for five minutes without one of them saying the word ‘Jew.’ ”

  One day, a beautiful clear day when it is almost possible to forget they aren’t traveling to a holiday, she and Russell are on deck. She asks him what it means to him to be a Jew.

  Russell says, “You know what it means to be a Jew when an anti-Semite lets you know.”

  —

  Anti-Semitism. She knew about it, but it didn’t strike her forcefully until the night of her brother Johnny’s first Juilliard recital.

  The light makes lozenges or diamonds on the water’s surface, each separate, bounded, with no impulse to connect or merge. She wishes her mind would refuse that impulse to connect; the past comes to her, but she doesn’t want it, not the past of her family, particularly not her father or her brother Vincent.

  Johnny’s recital. Her brother Johnny. With his usual sweetness, he had selected a program that paid homage to people he loved: for their father, the first sonata from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, for Reverend Mother Labourdette, the Chopin she always asked for when he came to collect Marian, the Étude op. 10. For Marian, a loving nod to their childhood, Schumann’s Kinderszenen…and finishing the program, his love letter to Russell: Copland’s Three Moods: “Embittered,” “Wistful,” “Jazzy.”

  —

  She saw that her father wept straight through the Bach; he had tears in his eyes while they waited for Johnny in the lobby. “My son has done me proud. He’s the real thing. I’ll think of that Bach on my deathbed.”

  She saw her brother Vincent open his cigarette case, light two, offering one to his fiancée.

  “Quite wonderful in its way, although I wish he hadn’t tarnished it with the Copland. Forgive me, but I’m out of patience with the claque of crybaby cosmopolites, awash in their self-pity, oh boo-hoo, poor me, the school of Proust and Freud, my mother didn’t kiss me goodnight so I developed asthma, my mother preferred my father to me so I had to kill him. Crying in their beer, no, not beer, beer would be too forthright a drink for them, shedding precious tears into their absinthe or whatever rabbinically approved decoction is the latest fad.”

  —

  “You’re suggesting that this is a Jewish tendency?” Russell said, standing perhaps a bit too close to Vincent.

  “Well, Mr. Rosenberg, you must admit there is a certain identifiable tincture,” Vincent said, stepping backward.

  “It’s Rabinowitz, and it’s Doctor.”

  “So sorry. I’ll be sure to take two aspirin and call you in the morning. But for now, goodbye, Father, Mother, how proud you must be, but Edwina and I are making our way to what I’m sure will be a rather swell party.”

  Vincent linked his arm through his fiancée’s, and Marian shivered. She always imagined that the touch of Edwina’s bare flesh would be like the touch of a freezing iron railing against an ungloved hand.

  —

  Father Cunningham, the latest of what Marian told Johnny were “Daddy’s pet Jesuits,” wiped his mouth with an exquisitely white handkerchief.

  “That young man is wasted in this century. He belongs with the great eighteenth-century wits: Congreve, Sheridan. He has a tongue of gold.”

  “That young man is eaten up with bitterness and he will spread his bitterness wherever he goes,” said Reverend Mother Labourdette, headmistress of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Noroton. “I know vile insinuations when I hear them; my mother is a Jew, and so, under the Law of Moses, I am, too.”

  Two red spots appeared beneath her cheekbones, as if someone had pressed two hot coins into her
flesh—the sign, every Noroton schoolgirl knew, of Reverend Mother’s wrath.

  “Strange words to hear from a Madame of the Sacred Heart,” Father Cunningham said.

  “As I’ve been in the order forty-five years, Father, I would say I am more of an authority on what is strange for a Madame of the Sacred Heart to say and what is not.”

  “Oh, Reverend Mother, a hit, a hit, a palpable hit. Or, perhaps, knowing your antecedents, I should say, touché ma mère. But I can’t joust with you. I am an old man and must be up for the six-thirty Mass.”

  —

  “I’m terribly sorry, Russell. I would like you to know that not all of us are like this,” Reverend Mother Labourdette said.

  “I think that you are not. I believe you’re the exception. But thank you. I couldn’t have done it. They think they can say anything, any anti-Semitic garbage, as long as it’s cloaked in gentility. I hate it, and you always look like a fool if you confront it. They’d say it’s part of your fevered Jewish imagination.”

  Reverend Mother put her hand on Russell’s arm. “Don’t let Johnny know you’re upset. This is Johnny’s night. We have to do everything to make it perfect for him.”

  —

  She and Johnny had a special fondness for each other. Everyone knew Reverend Mother was a pianist; sometimes she could be heard playing fierce music when the others were at dinner: Rachmaninoff, Liszt. But she always asked Johnny for Chopin. “Your brother is a gentle, gentle soul. I worry for him,” she had said once to Marian. “I’m very glad the two of you are so close.”

  Mother Labourdette would probably not be happy that Marian is on her way to Spain. But Marian would never have told her. If she had urged Marian not to go, it might have made her hesitate. As her father’s request had not.

  It was easy for her to reject everything having to do with her father, with their family. More difficult was the rejection of the values of the nuns she loved and was drawn to. But she did not believe in God. She had been told he was a God of love, a God who looked out for the sparrows, but the world was too full of terrible things for her to believe it. She had tried, tried to pray as Mother Kiley had taught her to pray—for the poor, the suffering of the world. “Lay their sufferings at the foot of the cross of the suffering Christ,” Mother Kiley had said. But that, she felt, would be of no help to the poor. She had tried going with Phyllis Curren to the Catholic Worker. That had been tempting; she was drawn to Dorothy Day, to her fierceness, her dedication. Russell and Johnny had taken Phyllis and Marian to lunch at the Plaza afterward and Phyllis had said, “They’re very nice, but they seemed tied to worldly pleasures. I’m sure Dorothy wouldn’t approve of spending all that money on a lunch when it could have been given to the poor.” What Marian heard was: Dorothy Day would not approve of Johnny. She did not go back to the Catholic Worker.

  Her father had begged her not to go to Spain. He had arrived at the Patchen Place apartment two days before she and Russell were to sail.

  She was shocked to see him at the door.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I hear you’re going to Spain?”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re my daughter; you should know a man like me has ways of finding things out.”

  “I’m sure you do. You always have.”

  “I’m begging you, Marian. I’ll give you whatever you want, I’ll let you go wherever you want, if you won’t do this mad, this wicked thing.”

  “I don’t believe it’s mad or wicked.”

  “Marian, this is your immortal soul we’re talking about. An eternity of torment…should you die fighting for the enemies of the Church, that is what you’ll earn. We have had our differences; I often think your mother and I left you alone too much, you and Johnny. I regret that now, but you are my beloved daughter, and I always admired your guts and your brains. It’s eternity we’re talking about, Marian, don’t risk eternity to make a point against me and the rest of the family. Don’t you see, the reds hate all that is good and beautiful and valuable and true, everything that the Church keeps alive in the world, they will tear it all down in favor of a sewer way of life in the name of justice, but it isn’t justice, it’s vile envy and self-indulgence.”

  Her father’s eyes blazed; his thick curls, plastered against his skull with brilliantine—almost incandescent with the urgency of his message. How handsome he is, she thought against her will. She walked over to the mantel and picked up the photograph of Johnny.

  She handed it to her father, pleased to see him flinch. “There is nothing you can say to me about a father’s love. His death is on your head.”

  “I was trying to save his soul.”

  “Trying to save his soul, you took his life. And I will ask you to leave now before my husband comes home. I wouldn’t want to upset him.”

  She closed the door, then moved to the couch, her head in her hands, the old Johnny gesture. Despite herself, she understood her father’s terms. Eternal life. Eternal damnation. If she believed as he did, would she have acted the same? But she would never. She would never. She would never harm anyone she loved. Not for any idea in the world. Because, if she knew anything from her prayerful days, she knew that, if there is a God, he honors love above everything.

  —

  She grips the deck’s polished brass railing as if to stop herself falling in, falling over. But it’s too late, she should never have allowed them, the first memories; she should have cut them off, closed the sluiceway fast, fast, because now there is no closing it, the water is too high now, the current is too strong, no force of hers can any longer hold it back. So often now, two noises fight for prominence in her boiling brain. The beep beep of the alarm: close the sluiceway, do not let the water in, don’t think, don’t think of that, and covering it over, so the alarm is only just audible, the roar of the breaking wave. You must remember.

  She knows she should turn her back on the seductive ocean, with its all-too-available associations, find Russell, help someone with Spanish, wash her hair. But to banish the memories is to banish her brother, to leave him to the charge of the faceless, insubstantial swaying dead, who have no purchase on the history of one who is, to them, one only among many. If she refuses memory, she has refused him; she will not allow him to wander abandoned. It is one of the reasons she is here, so that her actions will be so entirely demanding that she will not be able to remember, therefore not guilty of the crime of banishment. But she will be with him now.

  —

  October 1, 1936, only seven months ago. How is that possible?

  She has just taken the train from Poughkeepsie, the first time since she’s been at Vassar that she has found the time to visit Johnny in New York. She still can’t believe that there’s no one whose permission she has to ask; she’ll be away for the weekend and has to notify the dormitory, but no one can tell her she can’t go or ask what is taking her away.

  Before Vassar, she had weekends in New York, stolen weekends of cigarettes and cocktails and jazz, away from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut. These were made possible because of Johnny’s best friend, Russell, who is a doctor and sends a letter to Reverend Mother saying that Marian is under his care, undergoing an experimental treatment for her allergies. Does Mother Labourdette know that it’s a hoax? Perhaps she does and doesn’t care because Johnny always comes to Noroton to accompany her, and Mother Labourdette is very fond of Johnny. Marian guesses that Reverend Mother prefers Johnny to her parents, his Juilliard shyness to her parents’ bluster, their triumphalist pomp.

  On this bright day in October, for the first time in her life, she thinks she looks splendid. It began as a lark, a favor to her roommate, Gwen. Gwen is going to major in Art History; she’s crazy about Merovingian stained glass, but to relax, just for fun, she says, she loves designing clothes. She enjoys matching outfit to personality, or her fantasy of personality, which the object of the fantasy is obliged as her friend to assume, later even to wear. She c
alls Marian “Maid Marian” and always links her to Robin Hood. “You are gamine, but you don’t want to be too gamine, and, for God’s sake, never cut your fabulous hair.” She shows Marian the drawing she’s been working on in secret: a narrow skirt of a rusty, gold color, a long jacket, sea to olive green with a velvet collar of chestnut brown. The hat: part of the Robin Hood joke, boyish down to the jocular feather. She invites Marian home to Boston for the weekend where she will buy the fabric and where a dressmaker she knows will “whip it up in a couple of hours.” While she’s doing that, they’ll concentrate on shoes. Marian demands that they be shoes she can walk in easily; Gwen insists that they find something to draw attention to her legs, “which are, dearie, your best feature, as you are entirely without embonpoint.”

  Marian has never paid much attention to her clothes. The ethic at Noroton, never stated by the nuns because it never needed to be stated, was to pretend you were above all that. Only the foreign girls rebelled, but silently. Particularly the ones from South America, one of whom, thrillingly named Lupe, was Marian’s particular friend.

  Marian was determined, when it came to fashion, to be nothing like her mother, whose clothes made her appear breakable, or her sisters, whose tailored suits and dresses seemed, Marian thought, a kind of armor, impermeable, plated. Every detail of her mother’s wardrobe suggested that nothing could be asked of her; everything about her sisters made it clear that no one must dare ask.

  Marian’s new friends at Vassar, who are political or scientific, pretend not to be interested in clothes. But they make an exception for Gwen’s creations because they are not fashion but art, because the Boston dressmaker is Italian, and Gwen hinted (they were eager to believe her) that she had some connection to Sacco and Vanzetti, and, therefore, they would be putting money in her pocket, not the fat pockets of the owners of department stores, possibly their relatives, whose names they can’t bring themselves to speak.