by Mary Gordon
“And what does it mean to you if I say you’re right?”
“It means I’m right.”
“That’s always been so important to you.”
“Of course, to whom would it not be important?”
“To me. Because to me, ‘It is all a darkness.’ ”
“Who said that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Someone, maybe in the seventeenth century. Or maybe I made it up. I’m very drawn to the darkness. You see how the whiteness of Cecilia gets its power from the darkness. She’s ready to enter the darkness at any moment. To be swallowed up. By a blankness that has nothing in it of ordinary liveliness. And yet, it’s very beautiful. And that’s why this thing of right and wrong, this whole business of understanding, what is it, what are we getting but glimpses in or from the darkness?”
“And the darkness, what is that?”
“Everything we don’t know or can’t know or understand.”
“Yes, but we’re not being swallowed up yet. We haven’t been absorbed yet. And so now we fight the darkness. We do everything we can to understand.”
“I don’t want to fight the darkness. I want to understand its place in our lives. I understand that there are things I can’t understand. And I think to pretend otherwise is a kind of dishonesty. Because in the end we’ll be going into a darkness. And I think that’s all right.”
“Doesn’t it scare you, Adam? Where will Lucy be, when you disappear, when you’re absorbed into the darkness?”
“That’s where my courage fails, so I don’t think about it. Not what’s outside the darkness, not what I leave behind.”
“So you’re not afraid?”
“Oh, often, and of many things. But of that darkness? No.”
They sit again on the marble bench surrounding the urn, the bushes each with a single rose. Neighborhood children are running up and down the courtyard. They run up a set of shallow steps leading to a small wooden door. At the top of the steps: a wounded bird, flapping, taking some comic and pathetic steps, trying to fly, failing, flapping. The children are taunting the bird. Miranda wants to stop them, and then she sees from the sky, like fighter planes, six gulls swooping down, nearly grazing the children’s heads. The children are frightened, delighted.
Sitting near the fountain is a slim African woman and her baby son. Miranda calculates he must be nearly two. He is about to fall asleep. The gulls continue swooping, diving, their cries, coarse and threatening, pierce the light calmness of the place. The mother speaks to her son in French but, hearing Adam and Miranda, switches to English.
“Those birds frighten me,” she says.
“No, no,” Miranda says. “They’re nothing to be frightened of. Or we have nothing to be frightened of. They’re just trying to keep the children away from the wounded one. They’re just protecting one of their own.”
“Still,” says the woman, “I am frightened by the noise. And that they seem so close.”
“Nothing to be afraid of, really. It’s those children who should be afraid. But they of course are not.”
A nun appears from inside the wooden door, claps her hands, shouts at the children, and they run, screaming, through the archway.
“It’s quiet again,” says the woman, putting her sleeping baby in his stroller. “Nice. I like the quiet.”
“Yes, we’re lucky to be here in the quiet.”
“Yes,” says the woman. “Lucky. Yes.”
Miranda would like to ask her where she comes from, hoping that might help her to understand what the word “luck” might mean to her. But then she thinks: Perhaps Adam is right. This task of understanding, which she feels so often burdened by, is perhaps better let go, for now. Here in the quiet. In the dove-colored light falling on the rose-colored stone.
Tuesday, October 16
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“I Wish We Had Realized That We Were Beautiful”
A group of young men and women, ten of them, by Miranda’s count, perhaps fourteen to sixteen years old, are throwing a plastic ball at one another, running to catch it. The sun is vibrant in a hot blue sky; many trees seem to have turned overnight; the leaves are lemon yellow now. And the light falls through the lemon-colored leaves onto the boys and girls who are running, laughing, catching, or failing to catch a turquoise or perhaps aquamarine ball.
“They’re so beautiful,” Miranda says. “I wonder if they know it.”
“Do we hope they do, or hope they don’t?”
“Of course we hope they do.”
“But part of their beauty comes from their being unself-conscious.”
“But I wish we had, at that age, realized that we were beautiful. Why was it, at that age, we never thought of it, or thought it was an impossible category for us? You were very beautiful, Adam, a beautiful young man. And when I look at pictures of myself from that time I think, My God, what a lovely girl. I wish I’d enjoyed it.”
“I felt sometimes grotesque as a young man in that body. You helped me with that.”
She doesn’t want to acknowledge what he said. The implications would tear something open that she wants sealed up. The implications of his gratitude. And she doesn’t want to allow the question: do I still find him beautiful?
“How would we have been different if we’d known how beautiful we were? Would we have been more confident? More generous? Kinder? More unkind?”
“Perhaps we would have felt free to do whatever we liked. That we, for instance, didn’t have to be studious, or decent, or honest,” Adam says.
“So you think beauty is a danger, then?”
“No, I don’t. I walk the streets here, early in the morning, sometimes when no one is up. The street sweepers are clearing the incredible debris from the night before. They spray water on the stones, a mist comes up over them, it all seems quite unreal, the mist, and then suddenly these great stone figures, those statues—does anybody even know who they are anymore—suddenly they come alive. Everything my eye falls on is beautiful, the color of the walls, the detail on a doorway, a marble slab with ancient writing on it in the middle of a patch of weeds, and I think, How beautiful this is, and when I’m thinking of that I can’t think of anything else. Or I don’t allow myself to.”
“But I wonder: are Romans happier than other people? I know they can’t be, because if they don’t have work, if they have no access to justice, if there are problems in their families, if they’re ill or mad, no fountain in the world, no sun on stone, can make it seem worthwhile.”
“At the hardest moments of my life, I listened to Beethoven’s sonatas. And they brought me to a place that allowed me to believe that life could be otherwise than the way I was living it.”
“I wish I knew what made people happy,” Miranda says.
“Why do you think it’s just one thing?”
“Well, what kinds of things. Then we would know how we should live, how the lives of people should be organized.”
“Those kinds of ideas frighten me. I’d rather listen to the plashing of a fountain.”
“Isn’t it funny, the word ‘plash.’ A word used for only one quite limited situation. Water in a fountain. But Adam, we must think of how to make a better world or the worst people will make a worse one.”
She hears a new impatience in his voice. “If I am kind to the people I encounter,” he says, “if I help my daughter to add to the world’s beauty, if I introduce my students to a sublime music they might otherwise not have known, haven’t I made the world better? Are you saying that I don’t have the right to the sound of the fountain? The joy of watching these young people?”
“But what will happen to the young people if we who aren’t young aren’t paying attention?”
“If we had known we were beautiful, would we have been paying attention only to ourselves?”
“I wish someone had said just once, some stranger, it would have to be a stranger, seeing the two of us, How beautiful you are. Because if it were a stranger I might have believed him.
And if it had been said of the two of us, not just me alone.”
“Do you tell your sons they’re beautiful?”
“I did, when they were younger. I felt I couldn’t when they became men. Do you tell Lucy?”
“Again, like you, I can’t, now that she’s no longer a child.”
“And do you want it for her? That she knows she’s beautiful?”
“I want her, like these young ones throwing the ball and laughing, to be thinking of something else, or not thinking about anything, just enjoying throwing a ball to each other on a sunny day, just living a life. How wonderful, though, never to have felt that you were undesirable,” Adam says.
He is disturbed that he’s used the word “desirable”: at the same time he’s glad of the risk; he enjoys the heedlessness, a young man’s luxury, in which, even when he was young, he rarely indulged.
“Desirable, undesirable. To whom?” Miranda asks.
“In the eye of others.”
“And then what?”
“There’s no ‘then.’ Simply to know. Always to feel worthy.”
“I think that might be impossible,” she says.
“Even for the beautiful? The truly, the unquestionably, beautiful? I think they’re a different order from us. We’ll never know.”
“Isn’t it odd, though, that beauty, real beauty, whatever form it takes, stimulates, somehow, an impulse to praise? Where does it come from?”
It excites her to be speaking in this way, a way she no longer speaks. Did she ever speak in this way? Or is it a kind of unreal talk, dream talk … as their time together is unreal, a kind of dream. She is carried by the wave of their talk; she doesn’t want to be let down onto the shore of ordinary speech.
“Praise, yes, a verb, intransitive, objectless. Leading somewhere. Nowhere.”
He is raking his fingers through his hair; she recognizes the gesture. It’s something he did when he was troubled. So whereas their talk is enlivening to her, she sees it is disturbing to him. And that his hair is much much thinner than it was in the time they were together. His hands, though, haven’t changed. The fine dark hair on them has not coarsened or lost color.
She doesn’t want him to be troubled. She wants him to be with her, enjoying the freedom of this talk, so different from the conversations of what she can only call their real lives.
“I prefer something graspable, like that ball flying through the air,” she says, pointing.
“Until the game ends, and the darkness falls.”
“Adam, it’s eleven in the morning!”
Wednesday, October 17
THE VIA ARENULA
“Were We Wrong to Be So Hopeful?”
She has asked him for some help with shopping. Not the kind of shopping most people do in Rome; she is not buying shoes or handbags or jewelry, or even olive oil or pasta or wine. She is shopping for her mother-in-law, who has just had a stroke. Her mother-in-law is adamant about having only cotton, linen, wool, or silk next to her body, and she disliked the cotton nightgowns that Miranda had been able to find in Berkeley; she was too old, she said, to look like Little Bo Peep. Miranda keeps passing a store with many nightgowns and bathrobes; they appear to be pure cotton, but she depends on Adam, with his mastery of the language, to ascertain that the cotton is quite pure.
“I like my mother-in-law. I’ve always liked her, even when I thought she didn’t like me. Or for a long time she wouldn’t even think in terms of liking or not liking me; she just didn’t approve of me. I wasn’t Jewish. I had a career. I sometimes think all mothers just want their sons to marry someone who will make their lives easier. Sometimes even I feel that way. When I see one of the boys with an interesting, complicated girl, I want to say, Oh no, don’t do it.”
“But like everyone else, Miranda, I’m sure your mother-in-law came around to you.”
Miranda isn’t pleased that the compliment pleases her. She feels it’s something she should be finished with, at her age: taking pleasure in being liked, especially by Adam. But yes, she had won Hannah over, difficult Hannah, demanding Hannah, critical Hannah, who lived half the year in Tel Aviv and half the year in Berkeley: her greatest luxury, being near her son, her grandsons. Yonatan’s father had done well in the electronics business; in retirement, living two places was something they could afford. And finally, when she realized that it was only Miranda who would make the boys’ bar mitzvah possible (Yonatan had no interest in it; he said all that religious stuff was only superstition) she and her mother-in-law were allies forever. Miranda stood up to Yonatan and said, No, there are threads that must not be broken. There are threads I will not break.
And now alone, a widow, her fierceness collapsed on itself because of a blood vessel gone awry, Hannah will be a difficulty in Miranda’s life. One she is glad to be away from for three weeks. Glad, and grateful, to be leaving her, for the time, to Yonatan.
“She’s a wonderful grandmother. I’m glad the boys have at least one grandparent.”
“Clare’s parents are very good to Lucy. They live quite near us. Quite near: we all live on the campus, in faculty housing. Clare’s father was, as a matter of fact, a colleague of mine. A friend. It was difficult because, well, we were friends, and he’s only ten years older than I and he didn’t want Clare to marry me. He thought she was trying to rescue me. ‘I don’t want a rescue marriage for my daughter, Adam, no thanks. Not for my only child.’ But then, well, I guess everyone comes around. Lucy’s their only grandchild.”
She hadn’t wanted to hear anything about her. Clare. But now, hearing that she’s younger, rather than feeling competitive or jealous, Miranda says, Yes, that’s right, that’s good. She sees that Adam needed an attention and devotion you had to be young to provide. Maybe this attention had to do with sex, maybe it was estrogen level; or maybe it was based on the anxiety that you might not be chosen, that you might miss out on something essential if you weren’t listening in the right way, if the man didn’t feel you were. Yes, she thinks it is about being chosen. An older woman has either lived with not having been chosen or learned that having been chosen doesn’t shape a life as much as she’d once thought.
She has watched younger women listening to men talk about themselves: the women rapt, entirely attending. And she’s watched older women: their eyes flicking to another corner of the room: a handsome man, a woman friend, the drinks, or the hors d’oeuvres. It’s a good thing, she hears herself saying to herself, surprised that the thorn in her flesh that had been Adam’s wife has suddenly and simply fallen out. As if it dropped on the sidewalk and she had kicked it onto the street. Run over, stepped on by strangers. In any case, entirely gone.
They are shown cotton nightgowns. Miranda insists that Adam extract a surety from the saleswoman: that they are looking at nothing but 100 percent cotton. The saleswoman—her hair sprayed in a stiff helmet, her lips outlined in a dark, almost-black outline, her eyes shadowed in greenish gold—looks displeased. Then Adam says something to her, shrugging, and they both laugh.
“What did you say?” Miranda asks.
“I noticed the calendar on the wall. The lettering is Hebrew; the photograph is a Jerusalem skyline. I told her you were buying these for your mother-in-law, who’s Israeli. And that we all understood that Israelis are people who have the highest powers of discrimination. I told her that if you gave your mother-in-law anything but pure cotton, she’d make you get right on the plane, come back here all the way from California, to return them.”
When did it happen, Miranda wonders, that Adam had acquired the skill of joking with salespeople? When they were young each purchase was an agony for him. She wonders if he is more at ease when he is speaking Italian.
She smiles at the saleswoman. But she still cannot entirely relax.
“Read the tags, Adam,” she says, “make sure they’re pure cotton. Read the washing instructions.”
He reaches into his pocket for his glasses. He bends his head to read the tags. Leaning, reading, fingering
the cloth, their faces, their hands, are closer than they’ve ever been. Suddenly he is overcome by a scent that is emanating, he thinks, from her face, rather than her body. It is light, unpowerful. A powdery scent of roses. It is familiar; he knows it from somewhere else, somewhere in his past. It isn’t a scent that he associates with Miranda, but with someone else. It isn’t his mother. Or hers. An arousing, unplaceable memory.
“One hundred percent cotton. Of the highest quality. You can bet the farm on it.”
“Thanks, now I just have to get myself a farm.”
Miranda is pleased with her purchases. Each of the nightgowns clearly different from the others. Hannah would be annoyed if she thought Miranda had not been attentive and imaginative in her selection. If she suspected Miranda had done it perfunctorily, as a duty, not taking into consideration who Hannah was. She very well may ask how much Miranda spent. Miranda will refuse to tell her at first, and then lie. She will tell her that the saleswoman was Jewish. This will please Hannah. Hannah will tell Yonatan, and Yonatan will be annoyed. He’ll say, If you’d crossed the street and bought from an Indian or a Chinese, you’d have got a much better deal. Then Hannah and Yonatan would argue, and Miranda would understand (although it had taken many years) that this kind of argument, troubling to her, was something they enjoyed. They had taught her something important, very important for her life: that you could argue, you could raise your voice. Everyone in the room could see and hear and feel your anger. And the world didn’t end. The world continued on its course. The world was, even, perhaps, refreshed, cleansed. In her house, the house of Harriet and Bill, really Bill’s house, anger had smoldered, then burst into annihilating flame. Yonatan and his family danced around the fire of argument. And then moved on.
On the busy Via Arenula, they see three young people riding in what looks like a rickshaw with a red and yellow hammer and sickle painted on the back. Advertising their allegiance to the Communist Party, trying to gather votes for an election that will take place later in the week.
