by Mary Gordon
He sees her looking over the balustrade. How young she looks, he thinks, in her black jeans and wheat-colored jacket. He imagines that people would think she is five, even ten, years younger than he.
She takes in the city’s expanse. She has not, for many years, lived in a large city. And the two large cities she lived in—Boston and Rome—she lived in with him. She sees that he’s uncomfortable—she recognizes, from a span of forty years, the gesture that marks his unease. His hands are in his pockets; she can’t hear the accompanying sound, but she knows that he is jingling his change. Well, then, it will be up to her. She will plunge right in with wanting the news of his family. Any beginning will be awkward, uncomfortable, the thing is to make a beginning, and as a beginning, she thinks, this is as good as many, better than most.
She can’t bear avoiding saying things that must be said. This is, she knows, her way, a way that those who love and admire her call directness, those who dislike her call brutality. It was always her way, but her marriage to Yonatan has made it her first instinct now. Seconds after they have said hello she asks him about his mother.
“My mother died eight years ago.”
Miranda leans on the stone balustrade, puts her weight on it, presses into it so that the stones abrade her dry palms. She looks over the Roman morning, at Saint Peter’s and the other domes whose names she does not know but vows before she leaves she will be able to identify. The horseshoe of the Piazza del Popolo, with the obelisk that she has learned was built by the emperor Hadrian in honor of his lover Antoninus. But what are those terra-cotta-tiled domes? She will find out. Her father’s daughter: one of her first lessons: “You must know the names of things.”
“I always thought I’d see your mother again. That one day we’d meet, and it would be as it always was.”
“She was sad that you never got in touch.”
“We had a difficult last meeting.”
She will not say what is in her mind: I wanted her to be on my side, to vilify you, to be with me against you. But she wouldn’t. She said, “But you must understand he is my son. He has only one mother. I can never not be with him. I can never be against him. You want me to be against him, and this I can never do.”
Miranda is unwilling to bring up the past, a dark wave that could all too easily drown them. She does not yet know who he is, whom she is with. It is far too soon to know; she has been alone with him only for minutes, if not seconds: time in the elevator, time stuck between the two doors of Valerie’s building, time when he hailed her a cab and made this plan: that they would meet for just as long as she liked to walk in the Villa Borghese.
“My mother loved you very much. She was always happy with you. You were the girl she wanted to be.”
“Perhaps at first.”
“My mother didn’t change the way she felt about someone once she decided they were hers. And you were hers. Nothing could change that.”
Miranda refuses to begin speaking this way.
“Her death, how was her death? I hope it wasn’t difficult.”
“A few difficult weeks. Not much pain because Jo, but you wouldn’t know this, of course you wouldn’t, is a hospice nurse.”
“Jo, it makes me happy just to think of her. She was a perfect little girl. Her life? Has it been happy?”
“Yes, I would say she’s had a happy life. She’s found just the right work for herself. She always knows, she says, that she is doing good. And her husband—well, Phil seems to have trouble holding on to a job. He wanted to be an architect—but, who knows what happened? Once again, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing we talk about. I mean my family. Her son is a sculptor, very charming, though once again we don’t talk about his work. It seems to be all about rubber tires. I think she supports him, too. She was wonderful at the end with my mother.”
Miranda thinks, I would love to see Jo again. Jo, whom I entirely, uncomplicatedly loved. Jo, who was fifteen last time I saw her.
An old woman is holding an ice-cream cone to the lips of an old man in a wheelchair. The breeze ruffles the man’s white hair. She pats his lips with a light blue cloth handkerchief.
“My mother’s mind was clear almost until the end,” Adam says. “A few days of derangement, which had, even in their dreadfulness, a comic aspect. Knowing my mother, it’s not surprising. When one of the doctors or nurses or helpers would come in the room she’d say, ‘Oh, your son plays the piano, too.’ ”
Miranda doesn’t think it’s amusing, doesn’t even pretend to laugh. She doesn’t believe Adam thinks it’s funny, but is used to saying it is, or that it has its comic aspects, because this is a way of breaking up the flat glass sheet of death.
“Do you still play the piano?”
“Not much. I’m much more concerned with teaching my students, directing the chorus.”
So you have lost a very great deal, she wants to say, but only exhales the single syllable, “Ah.”
“And what about your father?” she asks. “He was such a nice man. I don’t think I heard him speak more than five sentences, ever. I don’t even know his first name.”
“He didn’t like it, maybe that’s why. It was Sal. Salvatore. He died soon after my mother. He just had a heart attack, sitting in front of the television. He died the way he lived, not making a fuss, not causing any problems. I think he had no interest in living after my mother died. It was only about six months.”
She doesn’t know what he wants her to say to this. Her eye falls on a dog with the body of a golden retriever and the head of a cocker spaniel. She’d like to draw his attention to it, so they could take their minds off sadness, but it seems, she knows, wrong: she doesn’t want him to think her unserious, unable to hold dark thoughts. And besides, she remembers: he doesn’t like dogs. He’d been bitten by a dog when he was only three. There was a small scar on his right thigh. Was it still there? Were scars one of the things that escaped time? Or had age covered even that mark, that sign of history.
The dog’s master whistles; he runs off on his disproportionately long legs.
“I’d heard about your parents’ accident,” Adam says. “From my mother, of course, who was very saddened by it. She liked your mother. I think they went on seeing each other afterward … but I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have kept from me.”
“I blamed my father for the accident. I still do. He had no business driving those icy roads.”
“Well, we don’t know.”
“No, I suppose not. But my father and I never came to terms. Not after what happened with my brother.”
“I was frightened of your father. I never got over that.”
“I think he liked frightening people.”
“He didn’t frighten you. And I think he liked that, too.”
“It’s hard for me to credit him with anything. But I guess my powers of observation—which after all is what I do with my life—well, I guess he gave me that. On those walks in the woods. His teaching me the names of trees and birds.”
“And Rob, how is he?”
“I’m hardly in touch with my brother now. He’s still farming in Manitoba … he’s become quite bitter, quite isolated. He thinks I’m soft and frivolous, I know it. Like many people who live entirely honorable lives he has no problems being judgmental and openly critical. It makes being with him unpleasant … and it’s difficult to get there and, well, so many difficult things. I learned from him the pain of being the victim of that kind of righteousness. I like to think it made me less tempted by self-righteousness.”
“You’ll forgive me if I find the idea of you being soft and frivolous almost hilarious.”
“Well, you’d be surprised. And you don’t know Rob.”
“Did your mother live to see your children?”
“She died when Jeremy was three and Benjamin eight months. But seeing her with them made me kinder to her, I think. You were kind to my mother. Kinder than I, I think.”
“I wouldn’t say you wer
e unkind, but you could be impatient.”
“Your constant kindness to her gave me leave to be impatient.”
“I knew that it annoyed you when I sat and listened to her when she offered me tea at the kitchen table.”
“I was bored out of my mind. I thought you were encouraging each other to be boring.”
“How you hated being bored! More than anyone I’ve ever known! You fled from boredom as if you were fleeing from infection.”
“The plague of boredom. It does make me feel like I’m about to suffocate. Death by drowning. Death by boredom.”
“I never found your mother boring.”
“No one ever bored you.”
“It’s true. I find almost everyone interesting. Perhaps because it always strikes me as quite strange that any of us is alive.”
She thinks this is a wonderful thing to have said, and it is the kind of thing people she knows now do not say. She wonders if he always said things like this, if they were always talking this way to each other.
“So now we are both orphans,” she says. “I wonder how common that is, if we are statistically unlucky. Orphans: it sounds like something we’re too old to be. What it means is there’s no one between us and—what would you call it?—the hereafter.”
“Shall we walk?” he asks.
They walk down a lane bordered by large old trees, their leaves turned nearly bronze from autumn dryness, but no less lush for that. They walk between rows of white marble heads, busts of the famous, many of whose identities they do not know. Someone has drawn, with Magic Marker, a mustache on Petrarch.
“Your mother had beautiful hands,” he says. “They always seemed very soft and cool to me. They smelt of a very light perfume. I think it was her lotion: Jergens. When I smell that almond fragrance, I always think of her.”
“I think about the way your mother cooked. Those wonderful thick soups. The sauces: those enormous pots of tomato sauce going on the stove all day and we’d come in and she’d dip a piece of bread in the sauce and hand it to us on a plate, and we’d eat it with a knife and fork. It was so simple, so delicious. So entirely satisfying.”
“Well, she was Roman. I guess that’s why I’m happy here.”
“The mother country.”
“Have you been in Rome since …” He doesn’t want to say, since the time we were here together. He says instead, “Since 1969?”
“No, I’ve only been to Europe for conferences since then. And not here. Paris, Berlin, London, but not here. Not Rome. As a family we traveled in the West. Hiking and camping trips. My boys liked that. I had a horror of trooping them through churches and museums. And if we went abroad it was to visit my husband’s family in Israel.”
Her husband is a Jew, he thinks. Are her children? Can they be Jews if she is not: the maternal line being the important one.
“I know the city very well,” he says. “I still have family here. There are things I’d like to show you. Things we didn’t see when we were here. Things you wouldn’t think to see when young, or living poor, as we were then, or thought we were, although of course compared to those living quite near us, it was a joke. And we were working hard here, both of us, and there were all those terribly long dinners at my cousins’.” He doesn’t say, And in the hours when we might have been sightseeing, we were making love, but they both understand this.
“There’s a lot of Rome you haven’t seen,” he adds. “Well, of course there’s always a lot no one has seen, but I want to propose something to you.”
The last time you proposed something, she wants to say, we were sixteen years old and what you proposed was marriage.
“What?”
“I suppose it’s a favor to me, and of course I understand I’m the last person in the world to whom you owe a favor. But walking with you, talking with you, well, we can have conversations unlike any others. The last time I saw you I was a young man. Now, well, I’m not an old man, but today a young woman got up to give me a seat on the bus. And I took it. You’re here for three weeks. If we could meet to walk, and I could show you the city, my mother’s city, the city I love most, and we could talk a little every day … well, I think it might be wonderful.”
What, she wonders, is at stake in his offer? What has she got to lose? She has three weeks in Rome, she has paid an exorbitant amount for the apartment, and it’s a city where there is no one she knows, except for Valerie, whom she has no wish to see. She had thought her sightseeing would be solitary or in the company of some colleague as unlearned as herself.
And if she agrees, what will she be giving up? Her position as a victim. The pleasure, like a sharp taste in the mouth, like the taste of vinegar, ginger, arugula, the darkest chocolate: the deep satisfaction of a cherished bitterness. He would like her forgiveness. Well, she wants to say, it’s too late. Because the truth is: forgiveness is irrelevant now because the pain he caused her is long gone and, painless, forgiveness is not difficult, therefore perhaps not worth much. But, then, if it is painless, why not give it? And there is that thing for which she needs forgiveness, the thing he doesn’t even know.
Most probably, it is a very bad idea. She doesn’t even know exactly what it is to which she is agreeing.
But she does agree. Partly because she is more off balance than she imagined she would be, more at sea. Yonatan, having lived many places, spoken many languages, never feels a stranger; she has depended on him to root her in a new place. When she’d thought of being alone here she’d considered it a luxury, one she’d been promising herself since the children were old enough not to need her.
Having felt at home in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, she hadn’t imagined that in Rome she would feel overwhelmed by strangeness. But in those other places, she’d had a job; she was doing something that was of use, something she knew how to do. In a strange culture without work, she’d come to realize, you are a child. She doesn’t consider going to meetings at a conference real work. Talking and listening to people, foreigners themselves, in a hotel that could be anywhere on earth: it isn’t being part of the life of the city. You’re just a different kind of tourist.
And as a tourist, there is nothing you can do for anyone, except perhaps give them your money. You must depend, like a child, on people doing things for you. And not being able to be of use made her feel she didn’t know herself. She had no place to stand. She didn’t like feeling inexpert. She couldn’t bear the idea of herself as TOURIST, couldn’t stand the image of herself on a street holding a map, standing in front of a monument, paging through a guidebook. And even what at first had seemed exciting and charming to her in her apartment now oppressed her. The cool excessive space. The huge door with the knob as big as a cantaloupe. The marble floor where the sound of her heels seemed somehow meaningful, portentous. The window with a view onto the street, whose complicated shutter had delighted her, now seemed encumbered and unwieldy. She hadn’t lived in a large city for a quarter of a century. The traffic menaced her; often she found herself getting lost. Yonatan was never afraid of getting lost; he thought it was an adventure. He had no problem looking like a tourist. “I am a tourist,” he would say, “why shouldn’t I look like one?”
And so, the possibility that Adam offered struck her as more desirable than it might in other circumstances. She wasn’t pleased with herself, that the idea of a man to accompany her made such a difference. Of course she’d tell Yonatan about it. He knew about Adam, but it was possible he didn’t remember. Yonatan’s relationship to the past was radically different from hers. He had left Israel because he felt smothered by “an excessive past.” Too much history, too little geography, he said. He loved America: he loved the idea of starting over. It was another thing he didn’t like about Israel: everyone knew everyone, he said. So you had to be whoever everybody thought you were. He loved the idea of being a stranger in a strange land. So of course he would say, “It’s a wonderful opportunity, to see Rome with someone who really knows the city. It would be ridiculous no
t to.”
She is Yonatan’s wife; she has been for more than a quarter of a century. She is Yonatan’s wife; she is the girl betrayed by Adam. She is a woman, nearly sixty, who has earned the right to do something like this. But something like what? she asks herself. Of all the voices in her mind, Yonatan’s is the clearest. “It would be foolish not to,” she hears him say.
“Yes, all right,” she says to Adam. Yes. “I’d like that.
“Some days we’ll have only a little time. We can meet here, and take short walks. Then some days, we may perhaps see something, or get something to eat and drink. What I would like is to promise you that we will see one beautiful thing every day. What that thing will be I don’t know. We’ll play it by ear.”
“Play it by ear? What can that mean to a trained musician?”
“You forget that’s how I learned. By ear. I listened. Everything followed from that.”
“All right,” she says. “We’ll meet. We’ll walk and talk. We’ll see what happens.” She is happy with the imposition of rules, of limits. Only one thing per day. Only walking and talking.
“I think my mother would like it,” he says.
She wants to cool the temperature, as if what they were doing were an ordinary thing. She doesn’t want the invocation of his mother.
