by Mary Gordon
He turns and walks again up the street where he and his daughter live; they’ve lived there for two weeks and will for another three months. She is here to study at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, with Lorenzo Perrotti, a master teacher of the violin. She has won a competition: coveted, worried over, prepared for with obsessive intensity and discipline. She has her chance.
The street, usually densely inhabited with work and domesticity, seems null on this Sunday afternoon. He reads the signs: the herbalist is offering consultations, free from a maharishi, assuring you that L’EQUILIBRIO E LA CHIAVE PER UN BUONA SALUTE. Next door, the furniture repairman’s shop is dark, and dark, too, is the shop he never understands, Il Museo di Libro, selling pictures from people’s family albums for five euros apiece. On the pavement outside the store is a sign, the words written, in a mishmash of French and English, in blue marker on a white plastic board, FIGURATION, EXPERIMENTALISM, ART PHOTOS, PHOTO JOURNALISM, CINEMA, MUSIC, FASHION, ARCHITECTURE, NUDES, GREAT PHOTOGRAPHERS, VINTAGE LATER PRINTS, LIFE LOST ARCHIVES, AMATEURS, ANONYMES, AND AUTRES IMAGES.
He passes through the Ghetto, signs in Hebrew, and thinks always of those taken away to their death. He passes the synagogue, its light extravagant façade, its palms and ground-glass roof suggesting a leisurely nineteenth-century urban civilization, a suggestion that must be quickly given up at the sight of patrolling policemen, armed with machine guns. He crosses the Lungotevere, never still, with never even the slightest possibility of Sabbath. He does this to get the benefits of the plane trees’ shade: so un-American, he thinks, these trees, with their wide flat leaves, yellowing now, their high limbs seeming as if they had always found their shape in relation to these bridges, streets, and buildings. The Tiber is a slow jade snake, largely untrafficked, unlike the rivers of other great cities: the Hudson, the Thames, the Seine.
He steps onto the Ponte Garibaldi. His eye is caught by a strange knot of inexplicable color. The river rushes into a man-made waterfall. A vortex. Plastic bottles, trapped, bob up and down in the whirlpool but do not progress downstream, appearing to be tied to something although he knows that they are not. They bob and sink, they sparkle, they wink; they are a clutch of throwaway jewels, delightful but unvaluable, emerald, ruby, sapphire. Yet what are they really? Containers for sweet drinks or carbonated water. Where did they come from? Where do they go? Does someone come and collect them every night, using a special net, a long string bag at the end of a pole or stick? It cannot be a good thing, plastic bottles in the river. It must be a sign of wastefulness, of carelessness, a malign use of resources. They will collect somewhere, do harm, perhaps to innocent animals or birds. But he allows himself to be charmed by them. It is early October, but the sun falls straight and purposeful, hot on his shoulders as an August morning in Connecticut. He walks to the center of the bridge. If he turns to the right, he sees the distant specter of Saint Peter’s, which he has never liked, standing as it does for everything he turns his mind against, that is, he knows quite well, the reality of Rome. Power: imperial, ecclesial. Finished now.
Turning to the left, he sees the older campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, gentler, undemanding. And as if made of another substance, or an entry from another dream, the mountains, covered, even now in snow. What mountains are they? This is the kind of thing he never knows, that Miranda always knew. But what he wants to look at is not the dome of Saint Peter’s or the tower of Santa Maria in Cosmedin or the snow-covered hills. He wants to be looking at the winking bottles: the color, the silly joyful purposeless activity, the vivid game of catching sun. And it seems to him possible in the improbableness of its heat, its lavishness, its wrongheaded generosity, to allow himself to give up the responsibility, the habit of northern judgment, and to enjoy the spectacle of the playful bobbing plastic bottles, the colorful unnatural blues and greens—the temporary pleasure of what, if it must be given its proper name, would be called: detritus in a vortex. But why, he asks himself, why think of what is proper? Why invoke the word “propriety”? Not in this light. Not right now.
Valerie has given Miranda instructions on how to get from her apartment on the elegant Via Margutta, just off Piazza del Popolo, to Valerie’s place across the Tiber in Trastevere. The streets seem particularly empty to her, like empty aquaria, as if they were not just uninhabited, but drained. According to Valerie, the journey will be easy: you take an electric bus on the Corso, which leaves you at Largo Argentina, where you get a tram. But tickets must be purchased at a newspaper kiosk, and the one in Miranda’s neighborhood was all out of tickets. It was late Saturday night when she had got around to buying them, and today, Sunday, the kiosks are all shuttered. It is one of the times she thinks perhaps it was a mistake to rent an apartment instead of staying at a hotel; in a hotel, the concierge would be of help, telling her where to get bus tickets on a Sunday, perhaps even providing them. But aside from Valerie, there is no one in Rome she knows. The woman who owns her apartment lives in London. Well, there is someone else in Rome she knows. Adam. But that is of no use to her, no use at all.
She will take a cab.
It was Valerie who had found her the apartment, Valerie with whom, somehow, she was still in touch, even though there were people she’d known in college whom she’d been much closer to, much fonder of, who interested her much more. But that was the way with people like Valerie. The energetic, organized ones who sent out Christmas letters and compiled alumnae e-mail lists. And Valerie was goodhearted, oceanically accepting of everyone, and endlessly persistent, so it would have taken a deliberate and quite cruel effort of will to cut her out of your life. And besides, what she had done was not unadmirable. She’d lived in Rome for thirty years. After traveling around, earning her living everywhere and nowhere as a waitress or a nanny or singing in the subway, she met Giancarlo, a painter. Now she made a living brokering apartments for traveling Americans; she had arranged flats for both Adam and Miranda. Valerie and Giancarlo lived with his mother in an apartment overlooking the Tiber. They had not had children.
And it was Valerie who, either not noticing that she was doing something difficult or else knowing perfectly well that it was difficult, had told her about the suicide of Adam’s wife. That he had married again. And most recently, discussed with truly nauseating enthusiasm, his eighteen-year-old daughter, the reason for his being in Rome. She had most likely told Adam about Miranda’s life: that she had married Yonatan, although probably she had no idea of what Yonatan really did in the California Department of Public Health: that he supervised the unit that dealt with epidemiological crises, that they lived in Berkeley, that she had two sons, twenty-five and twenty-three. That she was here without her husband because, although they’d intended to stay in Rome together after her conference, his mother had had a stroke and he was back in California with her, arranging for her care.
She has traveled farther, by cab rather than by foot, but Miranda arrives first. The building where Valerie lives is imposing, monumental; it suggests nothing domestic. It’s the kind of place where ancient lawyers, dressed archaically and charging exorbitantly for out-of-date advice, might offer you sherry when you came to prepare your will. How, Miranda wonders, could anyone think of this as home? She presses the brass button next to the name Rinaldi and hears Valerie’s voice, expectant, cheerful, and her heart sinks. I have made a terrible mistake, she thinks, I can run away now and I will be free, and no one will know about it but Valerie, and if I like I need never speak to her in my life again. But then she thinks: I have to give her back the key to the flat. She will arrange for the return of my security deposit. I have no choice.
And besides, Miranda has always prided herself on her courage in facing up to things, and after all, she thinks, at my age it’s important that there not be people I feel incapable of seeing. Adam had hurt her badly. Was it wrong to say he betrayed her? She is suspicious of words like that now, overlarge words she once lived by, words by which her years with Adam had been marked. She feels tender, mercif
ul toward her young self, for decisions made in good faith that turned out badly. When you are young, she thinks, you never believe that courage isn’t enough. That the imaginative, original decision isn’t always the right one.
She enters the cold marble hallway. A glassed-in booth, military looking, as if a man in a police uniform should be occupying it, takes up a third of the vestibule. But it is empty.
Miranda enters the left of the two elevators. Valerie’s instructions on how to get to her apartment once you were in the building were precise but complicated, and Miranda sees now that both the precision and the complications had been necessary. She enters the elevator, a small brass cage inside a box of glass, and presses the button for the third floor. And the second she arrives Valerie opens the gate, Valerie, whom she hasn’t seen in fifteen years, blonde, as she is blonde, but very thin as Miranda knows she is not, in a short, wool loden skirt and brown alligator pumps, the heels so high Miranda can’t imagine walking in them, a fawn-colored silk shirt, a beautifully tied scarf that seems to melt into different shades, different interpretations of red or rust. I could never tie a scarf like that, Miranda thinks. Never in my life. She doesn’t know if this makes her feel superior in relation to Valerie (I don’t have time for that kind of thing) or deficient (I will always look, beside you, inexpert).
“Well, if you’re not a sight for sore eyes,” Valerie says.
Miranda remembers that Valerie’s from Omaha. “How do you say that in Italian?” she asks.
“You’re not here to be educated, you’re here to enjoy yourself. Come in, come in, we’re thrilled to have you.”
Miranda had expected formal rooms, more imposing. Larger, darker furniture, less natural light. But the apartment is as bright as outdoors when she passes through the hall. There seem to be two living rooms abutting each other, both overcrowded with many small upholstered chairs, half rose-colored brocade, half striped white and peacock blue. Every surface is covered with photographs, most in silver frames, or small objects. She sees a bronze tortoise, the size of a walnut, a ceramic cupid she could fit easily into the palm of her hand and hide in the pocket of her skirt. One table, whose top is brass, is completely devoted to toy soldiers. She thinks perhaps it is the army of Napoleon, and she believes, though she can’t say why, that the soldiers have been recently played with. Each living room opens to a terrace, and beyond the balcony she sees the high hill she knows is the Janiculum, which she intends one day (not soon) to climb.
Seated in one of the rose-colored chairs is Giancarlo, Valerie’s husband, who has not aged in fifteen years. His hair is still dark; his face, covered by a fashionable stubble, seems untouched by middle age. He rises, almost reluctantly, as if he’d rather be sitting, and he kisses Miranda on both cheeks. She sees that between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand he is holding one of Napoleon’s soldiers.
Not rising, her bird face taken up entirely by dark glasses, is Giancarlo’s mother who, directionlessly, indicating her lack of inclination or perhaps it is her failing sight, extends a clawlike but beautifully manicured hand. On the fourth finger of her hand there are three rings: a gold wedding band, a circle of diamonds, an emerald baguette. Miranda is glad the woman can’t see her nails; she never gets a manicure; she clips her nails in the tub: short, round, and serviceable.
Giancarlo asks if his mother is comfortable. She says nothing. Valerie presents prosecco. The doorbell rings and Miranda is sick with fear. It is too late, and she knows she is wrong to be here. Let the past go, her husband would have said, if she’d asked him if she should do it. Let it go unless you know that it can help you.
Why did she think that seeing Adam could do her a blessed thing but harm?
Strange to use the phrase, she thinks. A blessed thing. What’s the opposite of “blessed”?
“Cursed.”
No, that’s too strong.
Perhaps, “difficult.”
But because a thing was difficult, it did not mean it shouldn’t be attempted. Fear must be got past.
She is afraid now.
It is ridiculous.
She’d gone years without thinking of him. Yonatan and her children don’t know about him. If she’d mentioned his name, they’d have said, Who?
• • •
And yet he had been for some years the most important person in her life.
But their question would be right. Who? It is her question now as well. Perhaps the answer would be: The love of my youth. But where, she wonders, should the accent fall? On which word? “Love”? Meaning both an experience and a person. Love: she has loved others, loved again. But he had been her first love. And he had gone on with his life after they were no longer in each other’s lives. But if you put the accent on youth, that, certainly, was gone. Gone for good.
She has no idea whom she’ll be meeting now the door opens and it has become too late.
She hears his voice as he walks down the hall with Valerie. The voices of the dead. She thinks of what happened when her friend Richard died and she called his number by mistake and heard his voice on his answering machine. She was first horrified. Then comforted. She hung up and called again and then again. As if she could, by doing this, keep him with her.
But Adam hadn’t died. And yes, it is a voice she knew, a voice she remembers, and the sound of it stirs her, lights a match between her ribs, the two of them located below her breast bone, to the right of what she knows to be her heart. Something has kindled. A sharp-edged spot of heat, painful but not unbearable.
She would not have known him.
They are trying to compose their faces so that they are blanks. Giancarlo half rises from his chair; Adam comes toward him, and shakes his hand.
“So, here we all are,” Valerie says.
“Valerie, that is a stupid thing to say,” Giancarlo’s mother hisses. “As if we were not here. Or could not be here if we are here.”
Miranda knew that what Valerie said was stupid, but the old woman’s saying it is hateful, and it makes her feel hateful for sharing the thought. For it isn’t true, what the old lady said, at least not completely. They are here. But they could quite easily not be.
“You’re blonde,” he says, holding his hand out to her.
“Among other things,” she says. So her first words to him are harsh. Is it that she wants to strike a blow? It’s not a good beginning. But no beginning would have been good.
Adam blushes. She remembers now how easily he colored. It was meant to be genetic, she had learned. There was no helping it; it was like perfect pitch, which he had also been born with. He hated it, that because he blushed so easily his inner life was readily visible. She had suffered with him for it. She had loved him for it, too.
He sees that she has kept her freshness. She has not diminished. She is lovely still. He wonders if she thinks him old. If she’s surprised that he’s no longer thin. What I said was stupid, he thinks, and he hates the loop of time that will not allow him to unsay.
Valerie hands him prosecco.
The old lady crosses her birdy legs.
• • •
“We are only the five of us,” she says, “and only I am a stranger to you two. Please understand that I have been apprised of everything in your past. Also understand that I was educated in America. Rosemary Hall. Vassar. You read a novel called The Group by Mary McCarthy? I was there then. A stupid novel, still it got the flavor of the times. I mean to say that I believe, above all, in plain speech. It is a waste of time pretending this is an ordinary evening. You should learn about one another’s lives, what has happened to you. I mean, of course, Adam and Miranda. Because to Valerie and Giancarlo nothing of importance has happened, or will happen. Then you will see if you have interest in knowing each other once again.”
Her distressingly thin legs, her feet, fish flat in canvas shoes, her hands with their resplendent rings, her eyes, invisible behind dark glasses, further hidden by a sun shade—something Miranda had seen women wearing in Ame
rica when they play tennis—render this woman if not un-, then extra-human. Oracular. Imperious. Someone to be obeyed.
“To break the ice, as you Americans say, I will tell you about my life. It has been very interesting to anyone intelligent enough to be interested in what really happened to the world in the twentieth century. You understand that I am ninety-five years old, but my mind is perfect. I prefer that my body disintegrate before my mind, and this is happening, but I am ready for that, it is all right.
“I was born just before the First World War, at the end of the Old World. You are Americans, and so history is to you an abstraction.”
“Mama, that’s a bit of a generalization, wouldn’t you say,” Giancarlo says, barely audibly. Miranda realizes it’s the first word she’s heard him say in fifteen years. Giancarlo is very quiet. Reticent son of a voluble mother. Perhaps that’s why he married Valerie. For her chatter. For some reason she knows the Italian word for chatter. Chiacchiere. A good onomatopoeia. Valerie’s chattering, the mother’s chattering, are like a thorny maze she must walk through, abrading her skin, catching the edges of her clothing. But where must she get through to? To an understanding of what she is to do. With Adam.
He is still beautiful, she thinks. He is the first man of whom I used the word “beautiful.” Still apt.
Adam looks at her, ascertaining the shape of her strong legs beneath the silk of her long skirt. I always thought she was stronger than I, he thinks, but that last day when she wept and wept without making a sound, I thought I’d broken her heart. I could do nothing else. No other path was open to me. I believed that at the time. What good can it do to question it now? I should not have come. But of the mistakes I’ve made, agreeing to see her again is not a great one. Nothing will come of it, nothing will lead from it. Except, perhaps, the satisfaction of a curiosity. And the reassurance: she was not destroyed. I did not destroy her. Life went on. The harm I did was not so great, was covered over by events. Time. Good fortune. Her own gifts. Her strength.
