by Mary Gordon
After lunch, he asks if they would like him to play some American songs on his harmonica. Tomas, who loves all songs, says yes; Isabel and Marian share a doubtful glance. Marian hopes he won’t play “Camptown Races” or “Old Black Joe” or “Home on the Range.”
What he plays touches them all. There is no way, of course, for him to have known its place in Marian’s history, sung as a mockery by her brothers: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Asked for another—by all of them, with no reservations—he produces “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Not a hint of American swagger in these songs. This is the music of suffering, mournful but refusing defeat. Marian sees that Isabel has decided to like the stranger. Theo.
He is invited to spend the night, as it is obvious from the bedroll he carries with his knapsack that he was planning to sleep outdoors. He is a real American, Marian sees, unencumbered by the immigrant fear of taking what is not rightly his, of being tricked into thinking it is his right and then humiliated. He says he is delighted to stay with them, delighted with their generosity, delighted with their company. She can tell that delight is, in some way, not surprising to him. Is it the romance of a hospitable Spain, or the reflex of the privileged, assuming favors are due to them, that they have only to open a hand to accept what is rightly theirs? She knows that Isabel and Tomas don’t have these thoughts; it is the work of one American judging another American.
—
He is the youngest person in the room. Marian is twenty years younger than Isabel and Tomas; she is thirty-four, and she reckons Theo to be ten years younger. He seems untouched, unblemished: the fair skin, the straight shoulders, the unbowed spine. He has no impulse to whisper.
—
Marian imagines for him a past of ease: summers of sailing, winters of red-cheeked tobogganing, skating, and hot cocoa, ready for him in a warm kitchen where an old retainer cheerfully presides. She is fighting against his ease; something in her would like to punish it, or at least expose it. She is horrified to recognize in herself the family appetite.
He has been with them for a week, accompanying Marian and Tomas on their expeditions, drawing the landscape and then small, precise renderings of their specimens, ten, twenty to a page. “Tell us about your family,” Marian says, when they are sleepy after lunch, about to separate, she to go home, the others to their room for the siesta. “Are you part of the old Rhode Island nobility?”
“Well, perhaps back a ways, but I’m from the rebellious branch. My mother was a debutante but ran away to Paris to study painting. My father wasn’t American at all. He was English. I was born in London. My parents sent me to Rhode Island to an aunt when the war heated up. They stayed; my father worked for the Ministry of Finance; he felt he was needed. They died during the Blitz.”
Shocked, ashamed at her misperception, she sees over his head, as in a cartoon bubble, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”
“And so, of all of us,” Isabel says, “only you were affected by the Big War. What people think of as the real war, as opposed to our war, which was only a dress rehearsal. You see, we were kept out of it by Franco, it went over our heads, like bad weather in another part of the world. We had our own tragedies to absorb us.”
Isabel tells her story, or a version of it. Tomas says nothing about his wound, which, self-inflicted, must be kept in shadow.
—
Marian no longer needs to fight against Theo’s ease, because it is not ease but resignation. One of the categories that allows, for her, desirability. She is able to enjoy his long strides, so different from the Spanish walk, marked by its verticality. She likes his clothing: what are called dungarees, workman’s trousers, which he tells her are all the rage in America now. A shirt of a tough, blue cloth, the shade of a winter morning sky, which he tells her he buys in an army-navy store. He amuses her by naming the items for sale in an army-navy store; he describes all kinds of knives, compasses, indestructible thermoses, a hundred different kinds of rope. The catalog of abundance makes her, for the first time, homesick.
Does she desire him or only the end of a Spanish life, the threat of starvation, the threat of imprisonment, the threat of betrayal taken in with every breath? For the first time ever, she allows herself girlishness; she combs and pins her hair carefully now. It has been years since she’s owned a lipstick, and she considers buying one, but lipsticks are for sale only in her mother-in-law’s pharmacy, and she will not expose herself to the scrutiny that the simplest purchase—aspirin, witch hazel—inspires in her mother-in-law’s implacable eyes.
She loves the smell of his fresh, young sweat; when he takes off his shoes to bathe them in a stream, she is enchanted by his long, narrow feet. “How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of the messenger of the Lord.” For once, she doesn’t reject the words from the discarded past. He is a messenger from somewhere, some better place, but he has not been sent from the Lord, who has, for her, the slight problem of nonexistence.
Isabel and Tomas are shameless about throwing them together. Marian understands that her desire for Theo is part obedience, and this, mixed with his representation of a freer life, makes her wonder how much of what she calls desire is pure. She makes herself believe that he honestly likes her, he is drawn to her in a way that is not tainted, because sometimes he feels to her like a motherless child, and she is ten years older.
But she has no strength to resist his loveliness, his sweetness, the ripple of her skin, like a horse’s flesh in a light wind, when he puts a hand on her shoulder, her flattered pleasure when he presents her with a pencil sketch of herself in which she can, for the first time in years, imagine herself as beautiful.
“That can’t be me,” she says, mortified by her own coyness.
“I wonder who it could be, then,” he says, with a feigned punch to her shoulder, the American boy’s gesture no one in Spain would dream of applying to a woman.
Inevitably, then, the first kiss, the first chaste embraces. How different his body is from Ramón’s. Ramón’s solidity, his closeness to the earth, and this, this creature whose bones are light and palpable under their less ample covering of flesh, whose muscles are long and smooth, whose hair is straight and fine and fair, who towers above her with the vitamin-fed height of North America.
Slowly, they tell the stories of their lives.
“My aunt is a lovely woman,” he says, “my aunt Amelia. One of those women who always has a little piece of fine lace at her neck. I always felt that I had to be careful that my presence in the house wasn’t too much for her: too noisy, too dirty, too male, too healthy. She’d never expected children in her life; she had arranged her life so that it was very orderly, there would be no surprises. And then she had the surprise of me. How anxious she was. Every time I left the house, she imagined a disaster, a broken leg, a car crash, a kidnapping. I think it was a relief to her when I went off to Choate; oh, I know she missed me, but I think it was a relief. When I came back from the summers, I couldn’t help chafing against her anxieties, and I felt like a monster for feeling like that. I’ve been away for a few months now and I write her all the time. I think she doesn’t sleep nights, imagining me being knifed and my body cut up into small pieces and thrown into the ocean. You’ll like each other, I think. She’s serious, and she was a mad Roosevelt supporter. Now all her energy goes into hating the Wisconsin senator who’s created the communist witch hunt.”
“McCarthy,” Marian says. “Our papers call him ‘America’s Savior.’ ”
How different from her imagination: the orphan boy raised by a gentle aunt, sent away to school, home for summers of watchful, anxious indulgence, tentative, half-fearful ministrations, left to himself in honor of the space needed to mourn his loss. And what was it he said, “You’ll like each other”? Does that mean he thinks they will see each other in America? Foolish boy, she wants to say. I am trapped here for life.
Remarkably, he seems to understand the crashing aggression of the Taylo
rs. “I did spend six years in boarding school,” he says. “I understand bullies.” She had been reluctant to tell him about Johnny—you never knew how people would react to an announcement of homosexuality; recoil could come from the most unexpected places. But his anger at her family’s treatment causes her to make a fist and pound it against a tree. She confesses her false marriage to Russell.
“Well, that was a pretty damn smart way of getting to do what you believed in.”
“I guess you’re still legally married to Russell,” he says one day, blushing as she has seen no one in Spain blush.
“Well, I suppose I am. I don’t know where he is.”
“What would you do if you wanted to get married again?”
“I never thought about it.”
“I would like you to think about it now.”
She understands he is proposing.
“Of course, I would be willing to adopt your son.”
Ignacio. She hadn’t thought about bringing him to America before Theo said he would be willing to adopt him. But there is no question in her mind what her response will be.
“No,” she says, “Ignacio will stay here.”
They understand she has accepted his proposal.
“Are you sure you can live with that?”
“Perhaps, Theo, this will make you love me less. But I feel nothing for my son.”
She sees that he is pretending to understand, but he has no will to make a judgment. They have decided on a life.
—
The rest of their love affair, which they keep secret, even from Isabel and Tomas, consists of letters back and forth between America and Madrid. She believes it will be impossible for her to get a passport, impossible for her to leave the country. He says he knows that it will not be. What he hadn’t told her is that he’s named for Theodore Green, the senator from Rhode Island, his mother’s uncle.
“He likes me,” Theo says. “He was thrilled that I chose Brown over Harvard.”
“Well, everyone likes you, honey, that’s your problem. I suppose it will be mine.” It feels luxurious to take a teasing tone, unused since the first days of Russell’s anger.
“But I’ll never be able to get a passport, even if I weren’t married to Russell, with the political climate in America, all this Red Scare hysteria, all this McCarthy mess.”
“I don’t think you understand my great-uncle’s position. The things he can make happen. Besides, the Spanish and Americans now have to pretend to be in love so the Americans can build submarines here and Franco can take Eisenhower’s dollars. They’re about to sign a cooperation pact.”
She could never travel from Altea to Madrid without arousing her mother-in-law’s suspicion. So Theo travels back and forth to Madrid. He has meetings with the new American ambassador, a crony of his great-uncle Theo.
—
Everything is done in secret. It will not be difficult for her to leave Spain, but to leave Isabel and Tomas will tear her heart. She and Theo speak endlessly about what to tell them and when. Marian doesn’t want them to be harassed by her mother-in-law with her connection to the Guardia, pumped for information, threatened for withholding it by some force that her protectors cannot keep her from.
And then it comes to Marian: a strategy foreign to Protestant Theo. She will tell Tomas in confession; he will be bound by the seal to reveal nothing.
She begins with the familiar form: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and I am about to sin. I’m not here for absolution; I don’t believe that what I have done will be erased. But I need your help, and the help of the authority of the Church. Theo and I want to get married.”
How wonderful, he says, and claps his hands. She wonders if that is the only time anyone has ever applauded in the confessional.
“But to get married he’ll have to be baptized. So will you baptize him?”
“My dearest friend, I can’t do that, even for you, unless it’s something that he wants.”
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll make him want it.”
“No, you can’t make him want it. We have to find something about it that will have meaning for him, that will not make it a farce.”
“Leave it to me.”
“No, Marian, leave it to me.”
Tomas meets privately with Theo for many hours, behind closed doors. He gives Theo books, which Theo reads with the concentration of a schoolboy preparing for an exam. Marian is a little annoyed that he is taking the whole thing so seriously. Tomas arranges with his uncle, the bishop, that the banns be published in another parish, far from Pilar’s eyes.
The eyes that Marian cannot meet are Tomas’s. Their separation will be a grief to both of them, and she knows how he lives with grief. This will be a separation forever. What would you call the kind of love we have? she wonders. Brother and sister, no, she wouldn’t put herself in the place occupied by Isabel, not even in a back corner of it. They are partners in something: a work, the living of a life. She knows that she will never have a love like this again.
Isabel refuses to express sadness; she absorbs herself in the legal details and says, not entirely kindly, “Once again, we are saved by our connections to the powerful.”
—
Marian takes nothing with her from her in-laws’ house. Theo says he’ll buy her everything she needs in Madrid. A friend of Isabel’s, a comrade, probably has access to a car. Marian slips out of the house at three in the morning. She takes one last look at her sleeping son. No feeling accompanies the look. The wish that the body of her sleeping child engendered some ripple of tenderness remains a wish only.
The car is waiting for her behind Isabel and Tomas’s house. The parting, they all know, will be final. Isabel allows herself tears. “Now I will have no one to talk to,” she says. And Tomas says, “Only your poor old brother.”
“Oh, you,” she says. “Sometimes you’re just too good to talk to. I mean I have no one to talk to about all the terrible things I think about people.”
“I’ll try to be more terrible,” Tomas says.
“Yes, Tomas,” Theo says. “You work on that.”
Marian is afraid that if she opens her mouth to speak, she will release a howl of grief so loud it will wake the town and ruin their escape.
Tomas puts his good left hand on her head. “Go with God,” he says.
Marian is surprised that Isabel makes no objection.
—
In Madrid, they stay in the luxury of the Palace Hotel. They drink in the elegant bar. Over their heads is the fabulous glass dome: sparkling blue-green glass, as if you sat beneath a peacock’s fan, spread full, shot through with silver. She knows that this room, because of the plentiful light shining through the glass dome, was used as an operating room during the war. How strange, a bar is an operating room and is then a bar again, a bar where the wealthy raise their glasses to each other, perhaps the same wealthy men whose guns ruined the bodies of the men operated on under the high, light-giving dome. She is pretty sure that Theo doesn’t know the room’s history, and she doesn’t want to tell him. The war is over. The war is in the past.
After years, ordinary married love. For the first time, clean sheets and a soft bed. The boyish body of her new, third husband. Passage booked on a ship, not now in the company of ardent comrades, thinking they would change the world, but leisured Yanks, on their way home from holidays newly available to them in the New Spain, now a friend of all Americans.
AVONDALE, RHODE ISLAND, 2009
MARIAN walks out of her bedroom and into the living room, where Amelia is sitting. How slowly she walks. In only a few weeks, she has become what she has never been: an old woman. A dying woman. She is carrying two shoeboxes, and they are a burden to her.
“Can I carry these for you, Meme?”
“Please, my dear, I’m not quite that pathetic yet. The worst thing you can do is to make me think I’m weaker than I am.”
Then she sits down and Amelia is safe, because her grandmother laughs.
>
“What I mean is that you mustn’t make me understand that I’m as weak as I am. You’re very good to me, Amelia. I hope it isn’t too difficult. Though you wouldn’t say if it were.”
“It’s not difficult, Meme. I’m quite happy.”
Marian wonders how she can believe this. But how can she not believe? Amelia has never developed the habit, or skill, of lying. Lying puzzles her; it disturbs her; she doesn’t quite understand its place in the world. This, Marian thinks, is the luxury of being a child not raised on a diet of shame. Raised almost without censure, a censure so rare and so light that it need not be questioned much or fought against.
She opens the boxes. The cardboard looks insubstantial. It has done its work, and now it wants to give up, to fall apart, to crumble into uselessness. She takes a pile of letters and puts them on the floor. “This isn’t what I want. I was looking for pictures.”
Amelia sees that her grandmother is ready to talk about her past again. She’s longing to ask, “What happened to your baby?” but she knows she can’t. There is nothing to do but wait.
Trying to fix her eyes, her mind, on anything else, she sees her own past handwriting with unease, as if she were watching herself rise from the dead. A pile of envelopes tied with a light blue ribbon. Letters from her to her grandmother. At the flap of each envelope is a blood-red spot, and she remembers now her devotion to the seal that her father gave her for her tenth birthday.
She found it in a flea market in Davis, California. What ugly places they were, those flea markets, how ugly most of the things were, except the rare ones that were beautiful, and some people who were selling things cared enormously about them. Everyone set their tables out on the hot asphalt. Packages of batteries, car parts whose function she couldn’t begin to imagine, leather coats and jackets that frightened her with their suggestion of criminal or wrongheaded ambition, mugs with pictures of dogs, of cats, of birds, of rainbows, beads that were the color of nothing you’d ever seen anywhere else.
