by Mary Gordon
“She doesn’t like you either,” Miranda had been told.
And she had seemed genuinely surprised. He thinks she might have even asked, “Why?”
He understands that he will actually have to explain, a task that makes Miranda seem endearingly young to him.
“Maybe she was so mortified by what happened when we were at her apartment, or maybe she’s horrified that we know what her life’s really like.”
Miranda shrugs, unconvinced, still puzzled. They both agree that they won’t take their place in the line of tourists putting their hands in the open mouth of the appalled or outraged god. The Bocca della Verità. The mouth of truth.
“You remember that moment in Roman Holiday? Where Gregory Peck pretends to have his hand cut off in the god’s mouth? Because the lion is supposed to snap off the hands of liars. It’s a moment of complete charm, when Audrey Hepburn screams: she knows she’s a liar, too, pretending she’s not a princess.”
A wire thrums in the space separating the two sections of Miranda’s rib cage. Does not saying something that should have been said still constitute a lie?
She wants to bring the conversation away from anything like this.
“I wonder,” she says, “how many people have their first, maybe their deepest, impressions of Rome from the movies. How many people thought of Rome first as the place where Anita Ekberg jumped into that fountain. They might only learn later that it’s called the Trevi.”
They make their way to the large covered Testaccio Market. “There used to be many more of these,” he says. She is happy, he sees, going from stall to stall, looking, tasting. Being elbowed by ordinary housewives who insult one vendor’s tomatoes, praise the plums of another. She points to the different cheeses in the showcases: he names them to the salesman, and she is given taste after taste. She takes a bite, then passes it to him. She hopes he hasn’t grown nervous about germs; but she sees that he’s content to share the morsels with her. She wipes his lips with one of the rough napkins that the salesman offers. As she does it, she thinks perhaps it’s something she shouldn’t be doing: it’s infantilizing; he’s not a child. But she enjoys the fondness of the gesture, the plain tenderness. If you start worrying about this kind of thing, she tells herself, you’ll never be spontaneous; you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. For whom? Afraid of what?
They reach the top of a hill, a long climb; he is breathing with effort. She is worried for him: his weak heart. On each side of the street are prosperous, heavy-looking villas, some of them, she guesses—seeing a sign on the door of one, 1932—built by Fascist grandees.
At the highest point, they pass the church of Santa Sabina (for after lunch, he tells her) and walk through a square arch. The park, she sees, is dedicated to the memory of a minor comic film star. The scent of oranges surrounds them. A sign forbids playing with balls, but all around them children, teenagers, even old men, are throwing and catching a great variety of balls.
This seems to be the place where brides are photographed. She wonders: Are they all getting married in the church? All today? There is one spot—before the splendid view of Rome—that all the couples covet. They are literally lined up in the few feet before the balustrade. She finds the assembly-line aspect of it all mildly saddening: she is disappointed for the brides. If she were one of them she would resent the erasure of her singularity on this day when a young woman wants to believe herself particularly singular.
She remembers the time that she imagined she would wear a long white dress and walk down the aisle to marry Adam. Is he thinking of that now, too?
She hadn’t been married in a long white dress; she’d worn a sleeveless purple silk sheath, a scarlet shawl, high strappy black sandals.
She and Yonatan were married in the house of one of their friends; twenty people were invited; there was champagne, canapés, then everyone went home. She and Yonatan had lived together for two years; they were both too busy for a honeymoon.
The day was nearly spoiled for Miranda because of her father’s grim face; he hated that his daughter was being married under a chuppah, by a rabbi. Her mother had asked if she wouldn’t consider having a minister as well; she had stubbornly refused. Now she regrets that she didn’t do something that would have made the day, if not happier, then easier for her mother. That would have softened her father’s wrath. But she didn’t think he deserved to be humored; she found his responses insupportable. “I’m not an anti-Semite,” he’d said. “I’d just like my traditions honored, too.” When Yonatan’s father raised his glass and said, “L’chaim,” her father had said, “Doesn’t anyone speak English here?” mortifying Miranda and her mother. She was almost as angry at her mother for standing silent, wringing her hands. Her brother had declined the invitation, as she knew he would.
She imagines what the day would have been like if it had been her and Adam’s wedding. Probably they would have married in his parish church. It would have been a day of easy happiness; everyone’s believing their marriage a sign of something hopeful in the world, a new beginning, a fine fresh start. Forty years later, she feels cheated of a day that never happened: that she had been denied the moment of being seen as the perfect embodiment of an old idea.
Adam is remembering his and Clare’s wedding in the Hartford City Hall. They very well understood that to some people, not the least Clare’s parents, their marriage was an embarrassment.
Miranda notices that, among the couples, one pose seems to be popular: the bride stands, wraps the long train of her gown around the groom, down on one knee like Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” She wonders what this means: I’ve got you now, for good? We are entwined forever? Wrapped in the train, the couples hold hands, leaning back, looking up at the sky. Miranda doesn’t understand why this pose might be appealing. She notices the dresses: none seems well made or expensive. One bride, pushing a baby in a stroller, is wearing a dress that is entirely see-through. Another, very young, her dark hair piled on her head with an elaboration Miranda feels ill equipped even to consider, stands simply beside her new husband, who is four inches shorter than she. The family, speaking Spanish, take what seems to Miranda to be the same photograph twenty times. Some feet away, at the balustrade that marks the frame of panoramic Rome, the tallest of the brides has the most trouble managing her train. She has just married someone who is clearly a captain of industry: older than she by at least twenty years. They are photographed by a professional who moves them around with no enthusiasm, as if they were stiff, expensive dolls.
Adam and Miranda eat their cheese, their tomatoes, their rolls: thin crust, then air. Furtively, he chews on his salami, which Miranda would never eat. The brides, the grooms, their families, make them feel intruders, so they don’t linger, but walk quickly toward the church.
“These wooden doors are very old,” Adam says. He takes her hand and tells her to tilt her head way back. It is still unnatural for them to touch, and the same wire that she felt thrumming when she considered the implications of her past untruth starts up between her ribs again.
“There,” he says, “at the very top, there on the left, that panel is meant to be the oldest depiction of the unclothed Christ.”
She takes steps frontward and backward. She bends her neck back, then straightens it. She squints. She makes a frame of her hands. Then a tunnel. She closes her eyes. Shakes her head. Opens her eyes again.
“I can’t see anything,” she says, not concealing her annoyance. “What’s the point of all that work, just for the sadistic pleasure of letting people know there’s something they can’t see? What’s the point of something that’s there for us to see that can’t be seen?”
“Perhaps we’ve lost a certain way of seeing,” he says.
Her neck hurts. She’s afraid she’s twisted something in her back and will suffer in a minor way that will intrude on her last days. This, she knows, is a function of age. This, too, annoys her.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” she says. “Perverse.”
S
he walks ahead of him, clicking her heels aggressively on the stone pavement of the courtyard.
They make their way down the hill. In a garden, alongside a small brick church (Why do they need another church so close to the basilica? she wonders), three homeless men sit at the edge of a fountain. They are smoking cigars and washing their clothes in the fountain. They have constructed a clothesline by hanging a rope between two orange trees; under the leaves socks, underwear, T-shirts, flap recklessly in the light breeze. The men wave at Adam and Miranda, comment on the beauty of the day, and cheerfully ask for money.
Miranda gives them five euros each. Adam would like to stop her, but he sees that, in giving them money, her good temper has been restored.
Sunday, October 28
THE GALLERIA BORGHESE
“My Head Aches and I’m Tired”
It is a brilliant day; the sun has no inflection, no modulation, and it falls like a fist on the white obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo, the bemused lions, the lounging gods. The bright light is only a trial to Miranda; the night before she went to a dinner party given for her new German friend, given by Germans. She ate and drank too much, woke in the night with an overwhelming thirst, and when the alarm rang in the morning, she was headachy and nauseated. If she’d known how to telephone Adam, she would have called to cancel. All she wants to do is spend the day in bed. She misses Yonatan: he would bring her oranges and herbal tea and provide aspirin and cool cloths for her head. She wishes she were home with him. She’s tired of it all, the crowded noisy city where she does not understand and is not understood, the endless talk with Adam, full as it is of unanswerable questions. Am I the person who I was? What has become of me?
A creature, man or woman, it is impossible to tell, has silvered him- or herself and is standing stock-still in the middle of the piazza, representing the Statue of Liberty, at whose base is a paper cup with some paper euros and some coins.
“What a ridiculous thing to do,” Miranda says. “Why would anyone think that was interesting or amusing? Worth paying money for?”
“I have great news,” Adam says, as if he hasn’t heard what Miranda has just said, or the tone in which she said it. “I’ve got us tickets for the Galleria Borghese.”
“Without asking if that’s what I wanted to do?”
She is pleased and not pleased by his dashed look. A taste, a delicious remembrance, of her old power. The quick slice, the quick blow, she always had a feel for it. But in the end it was he who delivered the blow that was, if not mortal, then nearly. It had not been quick and it had not been over quickly, as her blows were. But unlike her, he hadn’t meant to hurt. After all these years, she is still sure of that.
“I’m sorry … I just thought …”
“No, Adam, that’s just it. You didn’t think. You just went ahead. As it happens, I’m not feeling well today. My head aches and I’m tired. I ate and drank too much last night and I slept badly. The last thing I want to do is go to a museum and push my way through a crowd of retired Americans and Germans looking like oxen struck by a mallet, longing to be back home so they can use their own toilets.”
“I’ll make a deal with you.” She hears the old, patient, conciliating voice. She is determined to resist the pull of its comfort. “We’ll just look at three things. Three Bernini sculptures. We can leave as soon as you like after that.”
She would like very much to childishly refuse. But she knows there’s a chance that she’ll regret it later. So they cross the piazza, navigate the death-defying street beside the church, and climb the stairs into the park. She hears herself making the sighing noise her boys make when she asks them to help her to carry groceries.
They are at the opposite end of the park, and she walks beside him sullenly. When they get to the Galleria, she sees that the line for collecting their tickets is endless. Then there is another for required checking of all bags, and a third to present their tickets to enter the museum.
“This is absurd,” she says. “Can it really be true about the Italians having no talent for organization? Maybe Mussolini was right; maybe they should give up their pasta.”
“On the other hand,” he says, pointing to the view from the balcony, the long avenue of trees, the statues flanking.
“There is no other hand,” she says. “Let’s try to get to the front of the line so we don’t have to wait another half hour to be let in.”
The guard opens the doors and they are shown to the first room, each surface covered, embellished. What she might have thought of another day as richness strikes her now as assault.
“My head aches so,” she says. “This is not a good room for me right now.”
“Just do what you can,” he says, taking her elbow, steering her past the monumental heads, the allegorical walls and floors. They stop before Bernini’s David.
This David is not young, not boyish, not in the slightest delicate. He is tall, well muscled, anything but innocent, adamantly unpoetic. Miranda’s eyes go to his mouth, the lips rendered invisible by resolve; this is a mouth not used for love or speech or the taking in of food; it is a mouth that finds its purpose in one thing only. Resolve. Resolve to beat the odds. No one can stop the damage he will do, gripping the slingshot, his body torqued by the determination to do harm.
From her past, a memory swims up. Of a clenched mouth. That tightness. The resolve against all impulse. She remembers: it was her own mouth. And she remembers that her mouth went like that because someone had put a hand against it, had put a hand before her mouth to silence her. And she had acceded to the silencing. But the will, her will, had not succumbed.
She knows very well whose hand it was. Rose’s hand. The hand of Adam’s mother.
Out of her mind, beside herself. The phrases overused had become real. She felt herself watching herself from another place, a place of wildness where any words or actions were allowed. With Adam, she had been silent. Her vanity had enabled her restraint. Now, with Rose, who loved her, whom she loved, Rose, the mother of the man who she had said was her whole life, she turned into the animal she felt she had the right to be. She allowed sobs to be ripped out of her body. She made no effort to be quiet. She shouted words without a thought of their propriety. “Traitor. Liar. Coward. Thief.” It couldn’t have been long, that she shouted those words, that she pulled at her hair and lost the center of her breathing. It couldn’t have been long before Rose put her hand over Miranda’s mouth, a hand that was not cool, as Miranda’s mother’s hands were always cool, and was not smooth or cared for, as Miranda’s mother’s hands were smooth and cared for. Her vanity about her hands was the one vanity Miranda’s mother felt she was allowed. Miranda felt the rough, overwarm pressure of the palm of Rose’s hand, making her words impossible, stifling her wild, furious sobs. And then Rose’s own words, “But you must understand. He is my son.”
And she understood what this woman required of her: silence. Having no choice, as David had no choice, murdering something (her love for Rose, her belief that the ideal of justice was more powerful than the accident of blood) as David murdered the gross giant. Just feet from Bernini’s willful murderer is Caravaggio’s version: a luscious boy, desirable, remorseless, holds by the hair the pathetic head of Goliath—his eyes shocked, his mouth appalled—far more sympathetic than the brash boy killer.
And on that day when Rose put her hand against Miranda’s mouth, Miranda put her lips together in this way and silently composed herself and left the house, the house where she believed she learned how possible it was to be exuberantly and yet securely happy. She never saw Rose again. And never again was she the child of any house.
How long ago it seems, she thinks, those scalding tears, those sobs raised from what she had believed would be an endless well of sorrow.
Adam takes her elbow and leads her back the way they came, through the ornate room of the monumental heads which, minutes ago, she found threatening, and now finds consoling. Huge. These gods, she thinks, are unsusceptible. Beyond us
. And the possibility of unapproachableness sluices her hot brain.
He brings her to another room, the walls, the floors, devoted to the stories of the violent gods; a sculpture, white against a blur of color, commands everything. A man, bearded, not young, his biceps perhaps not as impressive, not as threatening, as they once were, is grabbing a much younger woman by the waist. His face is the face of nothing but appetite. His fingers press into the flesh of her thighs, denting them, dimpling them. He can’t see her; he sees nothing but his future pleasure or, perhaps, simply, future release. She is miserable. The face of plain abandonment. Despair. On her face, sculpted tears. The position of her feet, the distortion of her toes, signal that she has given up the fight.
“Pluto and Proserpina,” she says, reading the brass plaque. “How can I not know who they are?”
“But you do know. I know you know. I remember a paper you wrote about the story in college. Pluto and Proserpina are Hades and Persephone. Hades, the lord of the underworld, who abducts Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the earth. She says that if he doesn’t send her daughter back she’ll arrange for eternal winter. Demeter and Hades come to a compromise. The girl will live half the year with her mother and half in the underworld with him.”
“My God, Adam, you remember that?”
“What you wrote was beautiful. It taught me something. About a woman’s desire for the dangerous male at the same time that she’s just longing for her mother.”
“Was I really that smart then? I’ve lost that way of thinking. I read much less now. No poetry at all.”
“Your life is full.”
“Overfull, you mean.”
“No, Miranda, I said what I meant.”
“Of course, now I understand much more about Demeter and her destructive rage. The bereft mother threatening eternal winter. The death of everything. Give me my child back or there will be no grain.”
“I can imagine you might like that kind of power.”
