There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  All the windows are made of small panes of wavy, unclear glass divided by mullions. When she was a child, Amelia thought “mullions” must be the wrong word: mullions sounded like something you ate, something in gravy, savory, melting in the mouth. Each year when she arrived, she counted the separate panes of glass: twelve in the front window of the living room, sixteen in the rear, twenty in each window of Meme’s study. She was always afraid that when she was gone, something might be added or subtracted. But nothing ever changed, and the opposite of a fairy tale, the very lack of transformation—that she had gone away, had grown, had lived her life, and it had stayed the same—rendered it, for her, magical.

  Most magic for her were the panes of red glass that bordered the front door. Each year, Amelia sat there for hours, looking out at a world grown wonderful. People would pass on the street; they were not themselves, however, but bejeweled royals. Cars were carriages transporting precious cargo. Trees were precious, too: their leaves were rubies. It was then that the word “precious” itself became precious to her. She understood its meaning: what she would give things up for, what she would hold fast, whatever came.

  The objects in Meme’s house seemed much more valuable to her than the objects in the California house, although later she learned that, in fact, they were not—that the black pyramidal sculpture in the living room, the brown-and-grey Indian blanket in Westwood were much more costly than the blue-and-rose Turkey carpet in her grandmother’s bedroom and the blue-and-white plate that hung on the kitchen wall. She thought it therefore wonderful that things were left around in Meme’s house, not a sign of crowding or disorder but of a friendly willingness of things to be of use. But so many of the things she liked weren’t really of use, unless you counted comfort and the pleasures of familiarity useful. The piano that no one played; a window of frosted glass in her grandmother’s bedroom that revealed only the dark hallway that led to the bathroom. She had felt hurt on the house’s behalf when her mother spoke of a slice of the room she and Amelia’s father slept in as “wasted space.” To make it up to the room, Amelia asked her grandmother if, when her parents weren’t using the room, she could make it into a space where her dolls could entertain each other, serve each other tea, lounge and read. Her grandmother, of course, agreed.

  The California house never seemed to have any smell, except the smell of a hard-won cleanliness earned by the various cleaning products leaving behind the serious proof of a job well done. Everything in Meme’s house had a scent that seemed to blend into all the other scents. Even the bathroom had a smell of a soapy, nourishing dampness, as if the afterthoughts of mildly scented baths had saturated the white walls with an unassuming essence that was proof of nothing.

  The kitchen smelt of Meme’s cooking; she baked bread every week, and she hung herbs from the ceiling to dry. Often the smell of sage pervaded, or lavender or thyme. When Amelia was a child, she associated the word “sassafras” with her grandmother’s kitchen, not knowing what it was—but it sounded like the name of the smell she met every time she opened the kitchen door.

  Nothing in her grandmother’s house is exactly even or straight. The living room floor slants dramatically, the staircase lists a bit to the right. When in high school Amelia read a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” she thought of her grandmother’s house. She has never felt out of place in this house, as she always has in the house in California; she’s more comfortable with the limitations of the architecture of the East. This is the house she belongs in. And now it will belong to her.

  What will it be when Meme is no longer in the world? Will the house take up the job of her presence, will it take over the job of unquestioning protection that has always been Meme’s job?

  But when her grandmother dies, it will no longer be Meme’s house; it will be hers. She will be the owner. Perhaps what had charmed her will be a worry. She will have to think of things like gutters and foundations and sills; she will have to monitor the smells for signs of mildew; the sound of rain on the roof—always so comforting—will it be a source of agitation then?

  What does it mean to be a homeowner at twenty-four? No one her age she knows owns anything. Will it make her a different person, older than she wants to be, older than she’s ready for? Is Meme right, is this gift in fact a burden?

  No, it’s what she needs, the required push out of an endlessly prolonged, prolongable childhood, the collision with the real. But the house will make her someone she does not yet know.

  She wonders if her face, which is not good, she knows, at rendering itself illegible, has revealed her anxieties, because Graham says, “You’re not on your own with all this, Amelia. I’m good with everything connected to houses, legal and physical, and, of course, Josh will be around to help if things need fixing, or fixing up.”

  But you’re old too, Graham, she wants to say, and how will I pay Josh, or suppose he moves away, or something happens when he’s on one of his long surfing holidays?

  She smiles the smile—her father’s—that she knows is meant to please whomever she directs it at, to please without promising anything specific, only a general good outcome, a sense that everything will turn out fine.

  “This is wonderful. Thank you, Meme. You know how much I love this house.”

  When Graham leaves, it’s ten o’clock. Amelia turns out the porch light when she hears his car door close; she sees the moon, a fingernail in the blue-black sky. The stars, she thinks, are brighter than they’ve been for months, scoured by the first chill of September.

  She and her grandmother clear the dishes from the table. Amelia tells Meme to go to bed; she’ll be happy to see to the dishes.

  “I guess I’m an heiress now,” she says.

  “An heiress. Well, that’s something I gave up; I probably could have been pretty well off now if I hadn’t been disinherited.”

  “Disinherited.” A word from another age, burnished, encrusted, dusted over with unlovely pollen, toxic-looking spores. Something in the word presses a spring in Amelia’s mind, and words come out of her mouth before she can locate their source.

  “Speaking of inheritance, Meme, you’ve kept some of my inheritance from me. And I want it.”

  “What’s that?” Marian asks, waiting for the punch line to one of Amelia’s rare, mild jokes.

  “Your past,” Amelia says. “I don’t know who you are.”

  SPAIN, 1946

  THE DAY BEGINS as all the others have begun. Five knocks. Insistent, accusatory. No words. She almost forgets that words are customary. “Good morning.” “It’s seven o’clock.” “The sun is shining.” “Rain today.”

  Each morning, the same thought first: “Johnny, if only I could be with you. But I am not like you—brave. I can’t think how to do it. It seems much too hard. The details are beyond me. Everything is beyond me. Everything has been lost. Ramón, my great beloved. The war. Our dreams. The people we fought beside. The ones we loved.”

  She wakes each morning envying the fortunate dead, freed of the burden of living, the demand that one foot be put before another, one breath taken, then another breath. Free of the horrible pretense of being human when it is no longer possible to say what being human means. The constant dissimulation of pretending to live a life.

  —

  The pull of the bed. Hard, narrow, the rough blanket. The thin pillow. The coarse sheets. Nevertheless the one object of desire. The only lovely thought: When will it be time to be here again, in bed? The yawn: voluptuous. The single joy: the giving over, the giving in.

  No matter how much she sleeps, she never wakes rested. Her dreams will not release her from the images she carries: her brother, hanging from a rope; a child’s leg in his ration of bread and milk; the child whose sex she covered to spare its shame; her friend Carmen buried under rubble, her graceful foot in her new high-heeled shoe. Ramón, writhing, begging her to slake a thirst that nothing she could do would slake.

  Always she wakes in fear. She k
new fear in the days of the war, of course, but this was a new kind, a different flavor. The fear she felt during the war was a fear of something definite: an enemy that could be named and, more important, shared. Weapons that could be seen. Now this is like a duel with invisible weapons. A duel with a vapor, a fog, a poison gas that might or might not be inhaled at any moment. But hidden within the fog, the faceless one who threatens, “I will take everything, everything that makes you know yourself.”

  In war, a death, a reasonable death, was not unthinkable. And to try to avoid it would be to betray what you were there to do. But she would do everything she could to avoid this faceless one. He risked nothing, and you were nothing to him. What was the right word for the punisher who risked nothing, the enforcer of the law? The punishment not death, but something worse. Torture, imprisonment.

  Often she tells herself that she is not afraid of death. She imagines it as something relatively quick. But torture and imprisonment are different; they can go on and on. For years. There are whispers, there are rumors. The war has been over for seven years. People disappeared, others were released and sent home, broken, unrecognizable. Hidden by frightened family. Unaddressed. Shunned. Pilar takes pleasure in repeating the rumors. Shaking her finger under Marian’s nose. Do you understand that we are keeping you safe here? That you must do exactly as I say, not just to save yourself but to save your son.

  And that is another kind of fear. She fears her child. She fears him most for what he makes her understand about herself.

  She cannot bear to touch him or to be touched by him.

  How quickly he was taken from her. Only days after his birth. She didn’t have the strength then to resist. She believed they were right to take him from her when her breasts could not produce the nourishment he needed to stay alive. She still believes it now. There is nothing of hers that would be, to this child, her child, of the slightest use. There is only one thing she can do for him: if she can keep herself from the attention of the authorities, she might keep him from being taken away, the child of a Rojo—placed, who knew where, given a new name, never seen again.

  For his first six months she barely saw him, and when she saw him she was discouraged from holding him. “The smell of you would confuse him,” said the woman who nursed him, who Marian believed knew far better than she did, having already nursed seven strong sons.

  Marian knew nothing about babies. She had never even held one. Always, she had been the youngest.

  She was frightened, always, when she held him, and probably he felt it; from the beginning, he screamed when she took him in her arms. She was always afraid of dropping him, because she was weak, weakened from the hunger that plagued them all, and not nursing the child she felt she had no right to ask for more food than anyone else, even though she had just given birth. But she knew that the woman of the house, her mother-in-law, mother of her beloved, begrudged her every bite.

  She didn’t want anyone to touch her. Her skin was dry and flaking, she felt its cover insufficient, like an old overused envelope that might disintegrate at the slightest touch. And so when she held her child, she felt the pressure of his body was a danger to her. When she walked with him, she wanted to put him down almost immediately. His weight oppressed her; she felt his health, his strength, not with pride, as a mother should, but as a crushing force that might, quite easily, rob her of breath.

  Every morning she forces herself to get up if for no other reason than to diminish the fear. But there is nothing to get up for. Nothing to look forward to. Opening the door to the dark hallway, making her way through the sitting room, a jungle of obstructive furniture. A dim light from the gas lamp, but there is nothing she wants to see.

  —

  The tomblike closeness of the Ortiz household makes her scalp itch; her ribs press against her lungs like the tines of a fork. She longs to rip the pictures from the walls: the bleeding Christs, the bleeding saints, the bleeding bulls. In her bed, she hatches elaborate plans to smash the picture above the blood-red brocade sofa, the picture that is the pride of the home, Pilar’s prize. In it, a child—Pilar—sits on what must be the same sofa, in what must be her First Communion dress. White, ruffled, a wide satin sash bisecting her unbending trunk; a veil, topped by a wreath of flowers. It must have been one of the first things Pilar told her, one of the only things: that the photograph commemorated Pilar’s winning of a diocesan competition. In the whole diocese of Valencia, Pilar Ramirez answered correctly the most questions about the catechism. She was given, as her prize, a medal, which she holds out to the camera, almost belligerently, as if she’s daring someone anyone to take it from her. Her face has taken on what will be its characteristic expression: a closed, aggressive smugness, the challenging proud mouth, the thick censoring eyebrows. On one side of her is a bishop, bald, with black glasses that seem too large for his narrow face and thin fingers that seem too delicate to bear the heavy weight of the Episcopal ring. On the other side of Pilar sits the parish priest, his hands folded on his lap, his feet planted indecisively on the dark floor: is he ready at any moment to leap to his feet, to fall to his knees to kiss the bishop’s ring? On one side of the bishop, Pilar’s mother in an elaborate black mantilla; next to the parish priest, her father, dwarfing both clerics, his chest puffed out, his brush cut bristling.

  She remembers Ramón talking about the Spanish love of blood. Sangre, sangre, sangre, she can hear him saying. Nearly all the pictures in the Ortiz house have something to do with blood. The Sacred Heart, blood shooting out in diagonal needles from what seems like a pimento in the center of the Savior’s chest. On the wall above a small round table on which a candle inside a red glass has been placed—not a painting, but what she first thought were framed slats. But then, Ramón’s father, also Ramón, showed her with pride that if you tilted your head one way, you saw Jesus’s head, crowned with thorns, blood streaming into his half-shut eyes; tilt your head the other way, and it was Jesus scourged at the pillar, his bloody back torn open by the grinning soldiers’ whips. She didn’t hate this picture as much as she hated the photograph of the child Pilar—she was always willing to be gentler in her judgments of Ramón than of his wife. He showed her the only kindness that came to her anywhere in the house; even the servant girl seemed an extension of Pilar’s implacable contempt. Marian couldn’t begrudge his delight in the marvelous trick picture he so proudly showed her. She didn’t need to close her eyes against it, as she had to close her eyes against the photograph of Pilar, surrounded by her family, the clergy, her medal clutched in her gloved hand. And against the image that greeted whoever came into the front door: the huge photograph of Franco, framed in gold.

  —

  The house was always dark, and she often barked her shin on the overlarge furniture. She knew there was no space for her anywhere in the house. It had been made clear to her, not gently, that she was in every way incompetent. Incompetent in all the ways that went into making a proper, even an acceptable, woman.

  The preparation of food was entirely beyond her. Once, the servant Lucia was ill and, with her customary pleasure in humiliation, Pilar said, “Perhaps you could take on some of her work?” But how was that possible? Marian’s eyes fell with despair on the open fire where food was prepared: the implacable black hook from which the huge soup pot hung. The grill, supported by two brackets on squat legs. “What, have you never cooked before, my lady?”

  She had to tell the truth: no, not really. She does not say, although it is obvious that this is what Pilar understands, that she was brought up with servants. Sent to boarding school. Then college. Then the war: she was better at carrying stretchers, at driving ambulances, at assisting at surgery; cooking was left to ordinary women. Acceptable women. Which she was not. She knows she is not an acceptable woman. A daughter of privilege. A little sister. There is no place for her in any normal home.

  “At least you can set the table. At least you can sweep the floor.” Grateful that she is of any use at all.


  —

  Soon, she is told that she is incapable of caring for her son. She is home with him all day, warned against going outside, she might say something to someone, she understands nothing, she has no idea what word could land her in prison, her son in the orphanage. But being alone in the dim house all day adds to her overwhelming fatigue. The only children’s books here in the house, he cannot bear to look at: they are pious, saccharine. There are almost no toys. A few empty spools denuded of their thread, and something that looks like a sock, but the servant who knit it tells her it is a monkey. She feels foolish sitting with her son on the floor making the monkey hop, dance, scratch itself, and the child looks at her as if to say, “You are a fool.”

  On one of the first warm days of spring—Ignacio is two and a half—she decides that she will walk with him down to the sea. The Ortiz house is at the top of the hill; there is a glimpse of the sea from the plaza that surrounds the church—only steps away from the house—but to get to the water, hundreds of steps must be descended, then climbed to return. She takes her mother-in-law’s warnings seriously: she vows to herself that she will talk to no one; if someone tries to engage her in conversation, she will turn to her child, whisper something to him, point to something on the ground.

  Ignacio does not like walking. After a few steps he whimpers and asks to be picked up. He is a large child, heavy for his age. She tries to cajole him to walk by himself, but he refuses, and she can carry him only a few steps before she feels exhausted. She tries to make it a game: I’ll carry you while I count to fifty, then you walk while I count to fifty. Then she realizes that numbers mean nothing to him; he is confused and begins to cry.