There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  Except for their moments in each other’s arms, increasingly infused with desperation as the situation of the war becomes more desperate, it is the darkest of dark times. The International Brigades leave: what could be more a sign of hopelessness? Supplies become even more scarce as the Russian provisions arrive less and less frequently, and are less and less abundant when they do arrive. Many of the medical volunteers leave when the Internationals leave, so the hospitals are more and more short-staffed, but one supply that never slackens is the wounded.

  And then Carmen, who has arranged to meet a beau in Valencia, does not return. She bought a new pair of high-heeled shoes, which Marian warned her would be a nightmare on the Valencian cobblestones, but she said she didn’t care; she didn’t have Marian’s long legs, so she needed high heels so she wouldn’t look like a fat cow. Marian and Ramón hear, in the distance, the noise of a prolonged raid, and when Carmen isn’t on the ward in the morning, Marian runs to Ramón and says, “She didn’t come back, she didn’t come back last night.”

  Carmen is not seen again; and there is no way to find her body, or the pieces of her body, in the bombing wreckage. Marian wants to go into the city to search for her in the rubble: she would recognize her, she knows she would; she would be able to identify her new high-heeled shoes.

  Ramón holds her. He tells her it is not possible, what she imagines. She knows that he is right. Her friend, everything about her friend, is lost for good.

  Her pregnancy is barely visible, and she feels almost nothing but disbelief at the prospect of a child. No one remarks on her condition. Occasionally, Ramón urges her to rest, but he himself is too pressed to watch over her. And, although he urges her to get off her feet, he prefers her to anyone else as a surgical assistant, and so she is there when it happens.

  He is operating on a soldier who has suffered a compound fracture of the femur, the bone grotesquely protruding through the infected flesh, looking more like a spoiled roast unfit for the oven than a human limb. Is it because they’re both tired, or because the gloves are inadequate? One of the jobs she used to be in charge of before, when there was time enough, people enough, was the blowing up of the rubber gloves used by the surgeons to make sure there were no holes. But it is a job that has been done away with, for lack of people to do it, and a splinter of bone pierces Ramón’s skin.

  Everything happens with terrifying speed. By nightfall, he has collapsed and taken to his bed. He is drenched with sweat, his body convulsed with shaking chills. He begs for water, he is given it, he vomits it up, and begs for more.

  “The wound was septic,” he says to her in one of his last lucid moments. “And I am septic now. Bring a pen and paper.”

  Without saying the words to her—“I am dying”—he writes to his parents. He tells her, “You are only weeks away from giving birth. It’s too late for you to go home. You must go to my parents. My mother will be harsh, but she will take you in. My father will be kind.

  “Mi tesoro,” he says, “how can I be leaving you like this?”

  By morning, he is delirious, calling for her but not understanding that she is there, that it is her hand he holds. By afternoon, he is dead.

  •

  Like a gleaner, this shock gathers in all the other shocks that she thought had been absorbed.

  Dr. Bethune, in charge of the medical personnel in Valencia, arranges for a truck to transport her to Ramón’s family in the village of Altea, also in the province of Valencia, but fifty miles north. The roads are nearly destroyed, but she doesn’t worry that the roughness of the ride means her child will be in danger. Her child is nothing, someone she doesn’t know. Ramón, whom she knew and loved, is gone. There is only numbness. She knows now that she was wrong to believe that public suffering could eclipse private sorrow. Rather, the two shed a garish light on one another, bathing each other in a lurid glow. The war is lost, the fascists will triumph, her brother is dead, her beloved Ramón is dead. There is no one whom she loves who seems able to stay alive.

  They reach the village. The truck drops her off. The driver, forgetting himself, tells her to go with God.

  There is no color in the things she sees. The steep streets with their dark, sharp stones, the extreme whiteness of every wall, the wrought-iron gates in front of every window, the old women in black sitting in their open doorways. She’s grown used to raising her fist as the sign of greeting; she must unlearn that. Now she makes her fist knock lightly on the door; but then she notices the door knocker, in the shape of a pineapple. The Ortizes’ door is not left open, like the doors in which the old ladies sit, but Señor and Señora Ortiz must have been waiting behind it, because the door opens a second after her knock.

  And there they are, the parents of her beloved. Her in-laws? Señor Ortiz’s face is marked with the scars of some pox; it might have been smallpox or the more innocent chicken pox. His face is pitted; his eyes, though kindly, are forced into a squint on account of his scars. His shoulders are stooped in what she guesses is his customary posture, a posture of apology; he seems apologetic for the air he breathes, as if he isn’t sure he has the right to claim it for his lungs. She recognizes the thinning hair of Ramón—his father’s head is as bald as Ramón’s would have been had he been allowed to age. She sees, even marred by the scarring, Ramón’s thick lashes, his tender, doglike eyes. He takes Marian’s bag, then takes her hand and presses it; the kindness makes tears come to her eyes. He steps into the street to make room for his wife.

  A stone woman. An iron woman. A high, masculine forehead and thick, black hair collected at her nape in a bun so thick Marian can’t imagine any cool air penetrating it. Her dress is of coarse black wool. Her eyes are heavy lidded, a part of what must be, Marian sees, an attitude of general refusal, showing itself in her refusal even fully to open her eyes. Refusal, too, incised in lines on each side of her surprisingly fresh, full mouth, in the perfectly cut fineness of her nose, in the dark circles like punishing thumbprints below her eyes, as if she has refused, even, the proper amount of rest. She is taller than her husband, and her frame is larger. Ramón, Marian sees, inherited his father’s height and his mother’s broad skeleton.

  Señor Ortiz shows Marian to her room, Ramón’s old room, monkish: a single bed with an iron bedstead, a grey wool blanket, a small table (his desk, she thinks, the place he read and wrote, therefore precious), a black gooseneck lamp. “I am glad that you know Spanish,” Señor Ortiz says. “I hope you will be comfortable. I hope that you are well.”

  The mother says almost nothing. She provides a thin towel, tells Marian she may rest if she likes, that dinner will be at nine, not much, a thin soup. “It is a time of war,” she says.

  Does she imagine this is something Marian doesn’t know? Does she imagine that Marian doesn’t understand that the mother begrudges her every spoonful of scarce food?

  Ten days of near silence except for Señor Ortiz’s comments about the weather and inquiries about her health. The midwife, also nearly silent, comes once to examine Marian and to say her time is close. She’s right; the pains begin—shocking—but what did she expect? She expected nothing, and, having seen so much pain, she is, somehow, surprised that she is experiencing what she has seen others experience so often, and is humbled by the ordinariness of her experience. She remembers her father saying that when you’re in labor, you must not cry out, and she remembers being angry with him for that, sure that he was nowhere when her mother went into one of her endless labors, somewhere far away from any cry, preparing to give out cigars. But now, she thinks, it is somehow important, in honor of the bravery of the wounded men she tended, the dying men, not to cry out.

  Fifteen hours, and then the final tearing push. “A boy.” Healthy, he is taken from her, washed, given back. She puts him to her breast. She feels for this new person…nothing. Because she has been, since Ramón’s death, unable to feel.

  No one asks her what the child will be named. Señora Ortiz says, “He will be named Ignacio becaus
e he was born on the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a great Spanish saint, a great soldier of the Church. I suppose you would prefer to name him Marx or Lenin.”

  “Ignacio is fine,” she says. She has no impulse to argue. She turns away and says to the wall, “Ignacio, Ignacio,” but the words have no resonance; they are absorbed into the plaster of the wall and disappear. Bitterly, she thinks: My father would be pleased. Ignacio, Ignatius, hero of the Church Militant, the Church Triumphant, which she knows will triumph now against everything she believes in, every idea she treasures.

  Again and again, she puts the baby to her breast, but he howls in enraged frustration, because her milk is not coming in. Señora Ortiz, with grim satisfaction, takes the baby away after two days and says, “We will give him to Luisa down the street, she has a male child. You have the red poison in your breasts, the child must know it. I thank God it will not be his first food. Luisa knows how to be a natural mother. It is clear that you do not.”

  Marian passes the baby to his grandmother, with no will to resist. You’re right, she wants to say, I don’t know how to be a mother. Everything I once knew is of no use to me. You’re right, she wants to say, I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything at all.

  AVONDALE, RHODE ISLAND, 2009

  ON AUGUST 14TH, when Amelia comes home from work, her grandmother is in bed. It isn’t unusual for Meme to take an afternoon nap, but today, at three, when Amelia stands at the open doorway of her grandmother’s room, she sees that Meme isn’t just napping. She hasn’t been up all day. The covers are drawn up to her chin, she’s still in her nightgown, her hair is in the single braid that Amelia has almost never seen: her grandmother unplaits her hair first thing in the morning and pins it in a knot at the nape of her neck.

  “I’m a bit under the weather,” Meme says, holding her hand out, and Amelia hears, for the first time, a wet, deep cough. It frightens her. She grew up with illness, and her instincts had been sharpened: she can tell a dangerous symptom from a trivial one.

  She would never have thought of herself as “the child of an invalid,” although, from the time she was nine, she understood that her father was fragile, that he needed to spend some days in bed. On those days, she made sure she was quiet because those were the days he needed to sleep and sleep. But because he loved her so much, because he so craved her company, he woke himself up so he could be with her. Despite the days in bed, and the days when his breath was short and labored, frightening to hear, despite the visits to the doctors and the trips to the hospital, her father was always hopeful and always, it seemed to her, in good spirits. She never thought of her childhood as blighted by her father’s illness. Illness was simply a frequent guest, unwelcome but so regular that it came to be taken for granted. She knows that, underneath the countenance of equanimity that most people see when they look at her, there is a layer of vigilance that can rise to the top at a moment’s notice: a servant who lives in the basement but can be summoned, at the touch of a button, to the living quarters.

  Amelia phones Helga to suggest that they take Meme to the doctor’s together. Meme has the habit of not listening to people if she doesn’t like what they have to say. She waves her hands in the air as if she were brushing away an irritating insect and goes her own way, doing what she wants, believing what she wants to believe. But she doesn’t do that with Helga. She always listens to Helga. Amelia understands that it’s because of something Meme once said about her friend: she faces things.

  What was the opposite of facing things? Turning your face away? Turning your back?

  Amelia imagines that her grandmother divides the world into people who face things and people who don’t. What’s remarkable is how many of the people she loves would probably be counted by her as people who turn their face. Rosa, for example. The Nordic surfer god at the nursery, Josh. And—what did you call it when one of the people is ninety-two and one in his eighties—her boyfriend? Her lover…but probably there was no more sex. Graham, who had loved her for nearly thirty years, unable to be with her openly for twenty of them because he was married to a hypochondriac—who finally, as Amelia’s mother said, had the good manners to glamorously die. Graham, Marian’s lawyer, the lawyer who defended people who got arrested for protesting (Marian and Helga among them), but he was so sweet, so soft-spoken, that Amelia couldn’t imagine him in court, facing down judges and opposing counsel. And she knows that her grandmother, although she loves Graham with unshakable devotion, doesn’t take him quite seriously. And Amelia knows that he knows it, and allows her, in his love for her, to underestimate him. Once, before Amelia moved in with Meme, she’d heard her grandmother say, “The reason I like living alone is that if I find a hair in my soup, I know it’s mine.” Graham was in the room, and Amelia worried that he might find this wounding. But he only laughed and said, “Well, I can literally say, Marian, that I missed out on something by a hair.”

  Her grandmother probably doesn’t think of Amelia as someone who faces things. But she had faced things: that life could take from you the person you most valued. I have faced it, Meme, she wants to say, I knew my father would die early, and when it happened, I never pretended it wasn’t terrible.

  And so she understands that Helga will have to be the one to insist that her grandmother go to the doctor.

  —

  Dr. Anderson, who was Marian’s doctor after she moved to Avondale in the 1950s, has been retired for five years. His practice has been taken over by a husband-and-wife team. Helga and Marian will only see the wife.

  “She’s the brains, he’s the beauty,” Helga said once.

  “I believe he’s very good with computers,” Marian responded. She is always tender toward handsome young men. “And he has humility.”

  Humility is a quality that Amelia knows her grandmother admires. Sometimes she uses it to explain the fate of someone she likes—the Nordic god surfer Josh—who might be considered unsuccessful by the larger world.

  The doctor has insisted that Marian and Helga call her Annie. Marian does; Helga does not.

  “Annie wants to see me tomorrow morning.”

  “We’ll pick Helga up on the way.”

  Both Marian and Helga have given up their licenses, wisely no longer trusting their eyesight. Amelia knows that one of her most important jobs—besides helping with computers—is driving Marian and Helga. Railing against the paucity of public transportation, they organized a group called “Elders Need a Ride.” They traveled to Providence; they saw the governor. A limited bus service had been organized. They considered it a victory, although neither of them ever uses the bus, because it runs at inconvenient hours and never seems to go where they want.

  Amelia and Helga sit in the waiting room while Marian sees the doctor. When she is paying her bill at the counter, the doctor catches Amelia’s eye and makes the sign for a telephone, holding her thumb against her ear, her pinkie to her lips.

  —

  Amelia sees that the trip to the doctor has exhausted her grandmother. She suggests a nap, and Meme doesn’t reject the suggestion, as she normally would (she allows herself naps, but only if they’re her own idea). This alarms Amelia, or, rather, increases the volume and duration of the continuous low buzz of her alarm.

  When she’s sure her grandmother is asleep, she phones the doctor.

  “I don’t like the look of the X ray, but I’m not a specialist, so I’m sending her to the hospital in Westerly. We’ll schedule her for an MRI. She might fight me on this one, so I’m counting on you and Helga to make it happen. Of course, in the end, it will be up to her.”

  “Of course,” Amelia says, wondering how she can make her grandmother have an MRI if she doesn’t want one. She never understands how anyone can make anyone do anything. She calls Helga, but Rosa answers the phone.

  Rosa’s voice is so tender, so willing to express or expose whatever she’s feeling, withholding nothing, as the voices of everyone else have learned to withhold. Amelia heard this even as a child,
the extravagant sweetness, like a chocolate filled with an additional treat—pineapple, marzipan. Even as a child, it worried her, Rosa’s enactment of too little self-protection, too much eager need.

  “Helga has told me that your grandmother will be just fine.”

  “We hope so, yes,” Amelia says. It has always been that way: Helga protecting Rosa, Helga keeping things from Rosa. It’s possible, Amelia knows, that Helga will be angry with her for having said, “We hope so,” instead of, “Absolutely, yes.”

  “Annie says we have to convince Meme to have an MRI.”

  “It will be so,” Helga says. Amelia hangs up the phone, feeling stronger because she and Helga will be facing this together.

  But Marian doesn’t resist the idea of an MRI. Helga says, “I am relieved that there is no need to argue.” She mispronounces words only rarely, only when she is under stress. Amelia notices that she pronounces the word “argue” as if it were a French word, a word of one syllable, arg.

  As they drive to the hospital, Marian says to Amelia, “You have to understand. I have no wish to die. Even at my age, I haven’t had quite enough of life. I’m greedy for it.”

  “And I’m greedy for time with you. All the time in the world.”

  What could that mean, she wonders as she says it: all the time in the world? How much would that be?

  She wonders if her grandmother has the same thought because she says, “Not all the time in the world, but as much as we can.” She kisses Amelia’s hand with small, dry kisses, leaving behind the print of her red lipstick. “Cherries in the Snow”—Amelia knows that’s its name. It’s a name, an image, she has always loved, always connects with her grandmother.

  —

  Marian disappears behind a blond-wood door with a small window at its center. She waves, as if she were boarding a train.

  “Don’t go, Meme,” Amelia wants to cry out, as she had cried when her grandmother left to fly home after her visits to California. But she knows that what she really wants to cry out is, “Don’t die.” The thought that, perhaps soon, her grandmother will be going through a door and will not return falls on her with the weight and shock of thoughts that are always there, but somewhere out of sight, above you—and now fallen on your head, preventing understanding. She waits until she’s sure her grandmother is well inside wherever she’s going before she allows herself to cry. Helga says nothing but passes Amelia a cloth handkerchief, snow white and perfectly ironed. In one corner, Helga’s initials have been embroidered in red. Amelia thinks it’s likely that Rosa did the embroidery.