There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  “He even let me learn to drive when I asked him. I was fourteen. Luigi was willing to teach me. I promised I wouldn’t go off the property. Of course, my brothers Vincent and George—George was enthralled with Vincent, although he was older, and he’d go along with anything Vincent wanted, anything he said—they thought it was another great joke, another sign of my unfitness for what they considered the proper world. ‘Marian’s going to get her livery license,’ Vincent said. ‘A good thing for her; she’s probably unmarriageable, and she can get a job as a cabdriver, and we’ll always be sure of a ride.’

  “They knew they could use their racism to get at me. Their racism was like some cheap toy that amused them to take out whenever the occasion arose.

  “I’d spent the day working with Luigi, and when it was time for dinner, I noticed there was grease around my fingernails. I was in a panic, trying to make my hands presentable before dinner because I knew black around my fingernails would offend my mother, but I also knew it would offend both my parents if I were late. I sat in my place and bowed my head for grace, leaving my hands in my lap. My father walked over to me and picked up my hands, held them for a second, lifted them to display them to the family, and dropped them with a disgusted look.

  “And Vincent said, ‘Oh, you see, Marian’s sympathy for our suffering black brothers has gotten out of hand. She’s trying to turn herself into one of them; it begins at the fingers, and God knows, sooner or later she’ll be a dead ringer for Mahalia Jackson.’ And he and my other brothers started singing ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.’

  “My father told me I must leave the table. I could take my dinner in the kitchen and perhaps one of the servants could provide something so that my hands could be acceptable again, fit for a civilized table.

  —

  “By then, I wasn’t even hurt by their jokes. I’d lost respect for my brothers. There was nothing in them I admired, in the way that there were still things I admired about my father.

  “So Luigi taught me to drive and told me about all of his cousins who were active in the unions in New York, and his cousins who were anarchists—this wasn’t long after Sacco and Vanzetti, do you know about Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  “Yes, Meme, I know about them.”

  “Well, I never know what you know and what you don’t know. Your education is a mystery to me.”

  Where has this come from, this sharpness, this unkindness? Is her grandmother tired, or does talking about her family make her one of them?

  She goes on, as if this new turn, so painful to Amelia, were nothing.

  “Later, when Luigi trusts me, he tells me that some people in his family are communists and some are anarchists, and they scream at each other about it all night long. He thinks they are both right and both wrong. He is a fan of FDR.

  “He asks if he can bring me to visit his family in the Bronx, and somehow my parents find the whole thing amusing and a source of jokes and stories, also of noblesse oblige—our eccentric daughter, the youngest, the tomboy, but you can’t get her on a horse. I never tell them how much I love it there, that this is what families should be, being urged to eat the food, not to use it as a lesson in deportment, not to show how a fork is properly held, lips properly wiped by the napkin held properly on the lap. The delicious food, so plentiful, and the kissing and the shouting, political arguments ending in more kissing and more shouting, so I always felt, when I came back to Newport, that I needed another sweater, that I’d entered a less temperate climatic zone.

  “The worst of it was that my father fired Luigi because a cousin of his had been arrested in a plot—unsuccessful, it turned out—to blow up a factory in Brooklyn. And then—perhaps I should have known better—I lost my composure completely. I clenched my fists and stood too close to him—it was important in my family to keep the rules of proper distance—and I said, ‘You know Luigi had nothing to do with it, he was nowhere near Brooklyn; he’s been here in Newport for months.’ And I pulled at my father’s cuffs, and he pulled away from me as if I were covering him with filth, and he said, ‘You don’t know those devils. They’re everywhere. Insinuating. Diabolical. I only feel grateful we were able to be rid of him before something terrible happened to us.’

  “I never saw Luigi again. I knew, of course, where his family lived, but I was too ashamed to contact him. But when I was able to say that I’d be of use in Spain because I was an excellent driver and I knew how to fix cars, I thought he’d be happy. That was why the party let me go. That and my Spanish.”

  “The party?”

  “The Communist Party. All the medical aid to Spain was organized by the communists, although they tried very hard not to make that clear.”

  “Were you a communist?”

  Marian laughs. “Was I? I don’t know. I was never what those horrors called a ‘card-carrying communist,’ although Russell was. I never had the kind of mind that could latch on to political ideas the way you were supposed to. What I knew was that it was right to be on the side of the poor, and wrong to be on the side of the rich and the people who were being supported by Hitler and Mussolini. It all seemed very obvious: there was a good side, and a bad side, and communists were on the good side. I didn’t have a lot of patience with people who made it all so complicated. Were you for Stalin or Trotsky? How did you think the revolution would best come to be realized? I didn’t have any appetite for the demand for unquestioning loyalty. It reminded me too much of the Catholic Church. But what would it mean to you if I said I was a communist?”

  “I’d think it was interesting,” Amelia says. “I’d want to know more.”

  “ ‘Interesting.’ Amazing that you would use that word. Amazing how a word and idea—‘communism’—which for generations was one of the strongest words in the world, the purest truth or the greatest evil in the world, now has so little weight, so little force, an anachronism of a word, like ‘astrolabe’ or ‘alchemy.’ I was certainly sympathetic to communism, I still am to the dream it represented, but you would have to be a fool or very wicked not to have seen that it, too, was the source of horrors.”

  Neither of them wants to go on talking in this way.

  “What were you saying about uniforms?”

  “I suppose in a way it is rather funny,” Marian says, and Amelia hears her pronunciation of the word “rather”—RAH-thah—and thinks again that her grandmother has no idea how her diction and her timbre give her away as the daughter of privilege.

  “Except that they didn’t think it was funny, they thought it was dead serious, and, of course, that makes it funnier, though it was, as I’ll tell you, a terrible breach to think it wasn’t dead serious. You see, it’s all about some fantasy of the past, some glorious past that never existed. I’ve always thought that’s the difference between the extreme right and the extreme left. The right has a fantasy of an impossible past, the left has a fantasy of an impossible future. And, of course, no one can know either one. But I’ve always gone with the left because at least there’s some hope. If you romanticize the past, the present will always be a disappointment. And disappointment makes people punitive. The future has the advantage of not yet existing. But, of course, there’s always the possibility of punishment because of an imagined blockage of the nonexistent future. You see, I believe there’s an endless appetite for punishment, one of the strongest appetites of our species.”

  Of all the things her grandmother has said to her, this is the strangest. Amelia doesn’t recognize in herself an appetite to punish. Perhaps it’s because she has no connection to the past. And no sense that the future is anything on which she can make a mark.

  “I’ve never seen you give up hope, Meme.”

  “Because I have in the past, and I know what it’s like, and I will never allow it in myself again. But we were talking about uniforms.

  “The time I realized I had lost all respect for my father had to do with uniforms. But my very saying I lost respect means that at one time I had it. To lo
se something, you have to have had it first. I guess I did have it, and my first step toward losing it happened because I laughed at the wrong thing.

  “They all knew when it was all right to laugh, and they knew when laughter would be a punishable offense. What was called kidding, and what was called downright rude. Some of the things they thought were funny upset me a great deal. Like the time they got into trouble for what they did in the Episcopal church. Vincent and Bridget and Laurence and George. They broke into the Episcopal church and spread a thin layer of honey over the pews. The honey was the same color as the wood, so it wasn’t visible. Only when, as Laurence said, ‘the Prots put their fat backsides down and got quite a surprise when they tried to get up.’

  “The police came to the house; nobody knew how they found out. My guess is that my brothers, who were great braggarts, probably went to a bar to celebrate and recounted their exploits, not realizing how many people disliked them in the town. They were fined and told to spend the day cleaning the church, which they did, raucously scrubbing and singing Latin hymns, while the priest looked on. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll call him a priest,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s a minister; he has nothing to do with apostolic succession.’

  “Poor Reverend Chamberlain; he was a very gentle man, and he was probably too afraid of my brothers to suggest more quiet in the house of God. When they got home, my father ordered lobsters and champagne and at dinner everyone was in a marvelous mood. But all I could think of was Mrs. Chamberlain, the Episcopal priest’s wife, who was the librarian in the local library that I loved. She always saved books for me, she knew I liked biographies of nineteenth-century women. A proof of how nice she was is that she didn’t change the way she treated me, but I never felt comfortable in the library again, and that was a great loss to me.

  “There must have been a time when I still thought I could kid my father. Does that mean there was a time when I thought I knew the language, could speak it as the others did? It must have been part of a time when I still respected him. Now I guess I have to understand that, as a loss, there was a time when I respected my father, and a time when I did not. But no, I won’t call it a loss; it was a mistake ever to have respected him. He was never worthy of respect. I guess the loss of respect was gradual, but the last step—the final chord so you know the symphony is quite done—wasn’t gradual at all.

  “I was always getting things wrong…or, I guess, when I was still a little child, I didn’t get things wrong, or they let me get away with it—I guess my getting things wrong and getting called on it coincided with my no longer being a child. So, I guess I was still a child, or believing myself to be one, and that ended after I thought it would be okay to kid my father about his Knights of Malta regalia.

  “ ‘Regalia.’ That’s a word I haven’t used in seventy-five years. Thank God for some things. What a ridiculous word. ‘Regalia.’

  “The Knights of Malta. Crackpots, a bunch of foolish, dangerous crackpots. Or maybe they’re not even dangerous anymore. Maybe they just like to dress up and pretend they’re in the Middle Ages. Oh, I can tell you all about them; we had to be knowledgeable about anything pertaining to my father’s glory. They were founded in the Middle Ages, a combination of going out to kill Muslims in the Crusades and providing care for lepers and plague victims. I can see my father repeating the words of their criteria for membership: ‘Catholics who practice altruistic nobleness of spirit and behavior.’ My father would have put a strong accent on nobleness.

  “In reality, they were, probably still are, a bunch of rich guys who filled the Vatican’s coffers. But it was all about dressing up.

  “So one day, my father came downstairs in his ‘regalia,’ a black silk tunic with a white cross embroidered on the front. I still respected my father, and I couldn’t imagine he’d take such a ridiculous outfit seriously.

  “So I piped up with, ‘Papa, you can star in the family production of Dracula in that outfit,’ and I made a vampire face, pretending I had fangs and saying, ‘I need to suck your blood,’ in a Bela Lugosi voice.

  “I expected him to laugh, or pretend to be offended, and then we could play at that for a while. But there was no pretense. Towering rage. There are times when a metaphor seems literal. He was a burning tower that might or might not collapse on me. I felt I could hear rumbling. I saw the top of the tower rumbling, and I thought, This will annihilate me. I will be crushed.

  “He literally spat the words at me; I felt his hot saliva. He called me a little snot-nosed brat and said I knew nothing of the greatness of tradition, of faith, honor, nobility, service. He said, ‘You know nothing, and you never will.’

  “Who got me out of that room? Was it Johnny? How did I make it up to Aunt Dotie’s room? Was it Aunt Dotie who got me out? Surely, she wouldn’t have been allowed to absent herself from one of my father’s command performances. Maybe it was both of them. Johnny and Aunt Dotie. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think that was the time she told me tears were sacred. I think she said, ‘Some things are important to some people, and we don’t always know why.’

  “I was told by Vincent that I was required to make a formal apology to my father in front of everyone who’d heard my words. My God, how he enjoyed delivering that news. He was gloating. He was glowing with his gloating. You could see it on his face. It was shining; he was anointed by his gloating. I don’t think I was made to kneel before my father, but I felt as if I was. And then I felt his hand, the wide, dry palm on the top of my hand. And it felt wonderful. A blessing. A solace. The end of anguish. I had never loved him more.

  “But later when I thought of it, I realized that I understood the voluptuous appeal of tyranny, in a way most of my comrades never could, and so I feared the fascists in a different way. Perhaps I feared them more.”

  More than anything, Amelia wishes she could have been there to comfort that little girl, so humiliated by an egomaniacal…well, tyrant was her word for it, and she was right. She can’t see the humiliated little girl, she has disappeared; a fearless girl is in her place, because somehow, she has turned the poison into something that can’t harm her. She has inoculated herself, and the inoculation has made her stronger. Stronger, Amelia knows, than she herself will ever be. And she wonders, if she had been in the room with all of them, would she have had the courage to stand up to her great-grandfather, defend her grandmother, the humiliated child? Or would she have been too frightened, too weak, letting it all happen without lifting a hand. “Fascist”—how easily, how loosely people used the term. But to her grandmother, it was a reality that it could not have been for any of her own generation. Her grandmother had fought the fascists. Her grandmother had lost.

  “By the time of what I think of as the second regalia episode, I knew how to keep quiet, to savor my contempt. I was in my senior year at Noroton, I knew I was going to Vassar, I’d spent time in New York with Johnny, I had friends who took me to the Catholic Worker—I still wanted to be a Catholic then—well, anyway, I had friends whose parents voted for Roosevelt, and even that was a revelation; that my family wasn’t in charge of the world.

  “My father was insisting that he show us his latest. He’d been vested as a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus. Of course, you probably have no idea what the Knights of Columbus are. I didn’t really either, except that it was a bunch of men who liked marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in their outfits and being militant about what they considered the enemies to the Catholic Church.

  “So, we were all waiting in the living room. My father walked down the stairs like he was minor royalty. Wearing his tuxedo and, across his chest, a white sash and, at his waist, I could hardly believe it, an actual sword. The hat, you can’t imagine it, a tricorn with white plumes. My father’s chest was puffed out, and he couldn’t stop fingering his sword. My God, he loved that sword, that hat, that sash. And I thought, This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. But then he said the words that were the proof I needed that he was worthy of my contempt: ‘
We Fourth Degree Knights have earned the right to address each other as “Sir Knight.” ’

  “By this time, I knew better than to say, ‘What are you talking about, Sir Knight, nobody was ever called Sir Knight, you’ve got it all wrong, somebody has some half-baked understanding of some tradition that they invented, that never existed. It is embarrassing. You are embarrassing.’

  “But I said only, ‘Congratulations, Papa.’

  “And with those words, all my respect, most of my fear, dissolved.”

  —

  Amelia is doing something with her phone, and Marian is annoyed that her granddaughter, who is never rude, seems to be taking a phone call while her grandmother is telling her something important.

  She hands the phone to her grandmother. “Look, Meme, I’ve got them. I’ve Googled them. The regalia. The Knights of Columbus. The Knights of Malta. I can see exactly what you’re talking about now.”

  Marian looks at the picture: an image of what she’d been trying to describe. She had been afraid that her words weren’t sufficient, but that the insufficiency should be made up so easily by this troublesome device is something she can’t take in without displeasure.

  “I think I understand what you were trying to get away from, what you had to escape.”

  But did the words create the understanding, or the picture on the phone? It would be childish to ask, childish to care…But Amelia is laughing, the kind of laughter Marian wanted from her father, the kind of laughter she was forbidden.

  Men prancing in uniforms. Ridiculous. Nothing to fear. “I was right. They are ridiculous.”

  “Yes, Meme, you were absolutely right.”

  “I’m not sure I was right about the horses.”