The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  Her years at Cornell: 1958–1962. Ten years later it would have been different. Twenty years later, unrecognizable. But she had been born when she had been born. She could only be of her time. It was all anyone could be. Except the unusually gifted, the unusually courageous. And she had known that she was neither of those things.

  And after she came back, after “that year,” it was easier for her to take a job in Stanley Probst’s lab. Stanley Probst, a colleague of her father. Working with mosquitoes, working in an infectious disease lab. Dealing with terrifying illness. Malaria. Dengue fever. Even now, she couldn’t hear the words without an accompanying sense of doom.

  And yes, Erika was right. She was a high-level technician in a way, B.S. Cornell, the servant of her betters. But she’d liked her work.

  Lately Erika had been kinder about it, understanding now that she herself had children and was rubbed raw with exhaustion. “I think you made the wise choice, Mom, particularly for the time. Why get involved in that macho rigmarole? For the glory. Well it’s true, you never got the glory, but you made important work possible and that’s the real thing, isn’t it? Maybe we need to start questioning ‘what price glory.’ ”

  Jocelyn wished she could have been entirely pleased with what Erika had said. But she knew that underneath her daughter’s loving words there was a brackish stream of condescension that in its turn activated Jocelyn’s shallow stream of cynicism. Erika had begun meditating and taking yoga. She talked a lot about compassion. In many ways, Jocelyn preferred the older, harsher version of her daughter. She wanted to say to Erika, “Why are you saying things like ‘what price glory’? It sounds like a movie starring Victor Mature.”

  She’d never liked to talk to anyone about her work, and Johnny and Linnet were the last people she would have wanted to talk to about it. It had always been difficult, even when people were genuinely interested, which she was sure these two were not.

  “I work with mosquitoes.” The minute she said that, whatever the season—it could happen in a dinner party in January, at a formal dance in March—the sentence would cause the people across from her to reach under their protective clothes and scratch.

  No, she couldn’t possibly say what she really felt. That she loved mosquitoes. Found them beautiful. The delicate wings. The complicated mouths. The fragile, articulate legs. The multiple sensitivities. And yet, along with rats, they were the most despised species in the world. A pest. Responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. How could she explain what she felt when she went on the Internet looking for popular sites about mosquitoes when an expert opined, “No one would mourn the complete disappearance of the mosquito from the face of the earth.”

  But I would, she had wanted to write in to the chat room. How relieved she’d been when an entomologist asserted that the disappearance of mosquitoes would be disastrous to the ecosystem.

  Her mosquitoes made her feel protective, maternal, as if someone had suggested that her juvenile delinquent son be sent to the electric chair.

  And yet she could never forget that they were responsible for the deaths of millions, and had always been. She had read somewhere that our primate ancestors were recognizably malarious before they were recognizably human.

  Malaria. The labs she worked for had concentrated on studying malaria; she was faced daily with its devastations. Once a conference speaker, an epidemiologist, had appeared onstage standing before a blank screen. “I am now going to show you,” he had said, “the image of the person responsible for more African deaths than any dictator.” He pressed a button, and on the screen appeared the face of Rachel Carson. Because of her campaign to ban DDT, he said, the number of deaths from malaria in Africa had increased tenfold.

  This was the kind of thing that made Jocelyn glad she had decided to retire. She often wondered if most people were tormented by these thoughts as she was, or if she was unusual. Because these weren’t the kinds of things people talked about. And while she was doing her work, breeding the mosquitoes, providing their food, or their blood meal from the rats she also tended, recording their movements—she wasn’t thinking about these ideas. But when she wasn’t directly performing the tasks connected to her work, and when the labor of tending young children was over, she had become, for many years, almost obsessed with what her poor, beautiful, murderous mosquitoes suggested about life.

  They supported life; they destroyed life. They could cause the death of some splendid person and then minutes later die themselves, replaced by indistinguishable millions of their species. They were the necessary food of songbirds. She had often thought, after that conference, of the face of Rachel Carson, who, when Jocelyn was a young girl, she had thought of as a hero. But was that wrong; was the right thing to consider her a villain? And who was right, the environmentalists who said it was wrong to grant the human species a privileged position in the civilization and so opposed DDT and other large-scale measures to extinguish the mosquitoes, or the epidemiologists, with their images of the stricken dead, of suffering children? Nothing, they insisted, nothing should get in the way of preventing this.

  “So because I’m retired and Richard is sort of semiretired, we kind of divide our time between this house and his family’s house on Nantucket and our place in New York.”

  She felt ashamed of her own prosperity. Deeply ingrained had been the Yankee sense of thrift. There was no luster now to being a WASP. She was all too aware of the horrors perpetrated by her forebears. But if there was something admirable in the stock, it was a horror of waste, a commitment to keeping your word. Well she had flown in the face of both of these. Holding on to the house was an extravagance.

  She, or she and Richard, was the owner of three abodes. The apartment on East Sixty-Seventh and Lexington. The house on Nantucket—Richard’s, left to him by his stepmother; it had been in her family for years. Richard was clear that no Jew would have owned a house on Nantucket before quite recently. But it had been wonderful for the children, and Richard loved to sit on the deck and read, watching the light on the ocean. He’d majored in philosophy, and now, not quite retired, but almost, he reveled in the difficult large questions he had given over when he’d taken up the law. His secret, shared only with her: he was writing a book on the Renaissance philosopher Giambattista Vico. His ideas of time.

  One of the great pleasures of their marriage was sitting next to each other, each absorbed in reading. Perhaps occasionally saying, “May I read you this?” He was interested in Renaissance philosophy, she, increasingly, in the nature of language, its acquisition, its implications. But five years ago, she had had to have skin cancers removed; from her forehead, her shins. They had returned; she’d had them removed again. So she didn’t feel quite safe on Nantucket anymore; she felt protected by the trees in the backyard here that had been her place of safety in childhood. But Richard loved the ocean, and she felt ridiculous saying, “Can’t you come to New Canaan so we can read under my trees?”

  She could say to herself that actually two of the houses had been inherited: they hadn’t actually gone out and bought anything, except the apartment, which they needed, because New York was where they worked. So it was not a luxury, nothing to have to explain. People had to live near where they worked.

  “Where’s your place in New York, then?” Johnny asked. She was grateful that neither of them had remarked on what they must think of as excessive real estate holdings.

  “East Sixty-Seventh Street.”

  “Oh, East Sixty-Seventh Street,” Johnny said. “That’s very posh.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised, Johnny. When we were young the Upper East Side was the big thing. Now it’s considered rather dowdy, a grey lady. All the young people want to be downtown. They have all these new names for places you’d never have heard of, Johnny. Soho. Noho. Dumbo. And young people all want to live in Brooklyn.”

  She knew she was babbling. It was because she was ashamed. These were people driving loads of potato chips across the country, who c
ouldn’t afford proper dental care.

  “And have you children, Jocelyn? That is to say, are you a mother?”

  “Yes, I have two,” she said, not wanting to give details of her children’s lives for fear of exposing more prosperity.

  “Boy, girl?” asked Linnet.

  “One of each.”

  “The king’s set,” said Johnny.

  “That’s not an expression we use in America, Johnny,” Linnet said. “We don’t have a king. What would you say, that’s the president’s set?”

  Jocelyn wondered if children were a sore subject between them.

  “I have only the one, a daughter,” Johnny said. “I’m afraid I had not much to do with her rearing. Her mother didn’t want me to have anything to do with her after we split. We weren’t a good match, Ashley’s mother and myself. She was a woman with no sense of humor. Now Linnet here is a woman with a fantastic sense of humor. Fantastic.”

  “Oh, Johnny,” Linnet said, with a girlish tone Jocelyn found mortifying.

  “No, I’m afraid I hadn’t much to do with Ashley’s bringing up. But then a miracle happened. Just two years ago, she found me. She friended me on Facebook. Are you on Facebook, Jossie? I’d like to friend you.”

  What could it mean, she wondered, to friend someone, to use “friend” as a verb? Did it mean the same thing as “befriend”? No: friending meant nothing, or it meant that what happened seemed to happen with no one taking the lead, just some sort of vague mutuality, housed in cyberspace.

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “You must, Jocelyn, you really must. You never know who’ll turn up, like me and Ashley. So Linnet and I visit her whenever we’re on the West Coast. She lives in San Francisco. She and her husband are both in computers. I have three grandchildren, Jocelyn. Can you imagine? Three little girls.”

  “Mine are two boys,” Jocelyn said.

  “Ah well, we must arrange a betrothal before too much more time is lost,” Johnny said.

  Grandparents. They were grandparents. They had been young lovers.

  Her eyes fell on Johnny’s hands. They were battered, damaged. The nail on his left middle finger was split down the middle; the others were ridged and cracked. His knuckles were overlarge—was it arthritis? They were not the hands of a young man. She remembered his hands, hairless, girlish even, how they had given her pleasure that had astonished her; she’d learned on her skin, from his hands, the meaning of the word “swoon.”

  Were these the same hands now? Was her body the same body? The skin had been long ago sloughed off. Many times. Was it every seven years you got a new skin? Or was that an old wives’ tale? She should know better than this, with her training; she should know better than even to entertain such a thought.

  They were grandparents. They’d been young lovers.

  And at once, like the seven skins she’d shed in fifty years, the past fell from her and she was back again in that first summer, twenty-two years old, in love with Johnny. In love with Johnny and his miraculous hands.

  It wasn’t possible that in that summer they had never been indoors, but that is how she remembered it. He met her every day for lunch; they walked west to Central Park; he brought sandwiches, every day the same, ham on white bread with butter. Never had any food seemed so delicious to her, sweet and salty, the thick yellow butter, the soft gluey bread, and they would lie in the grass after they’d eaten their sandwiches, quickly, very quickly, and then kiss for forty minutes straight until it was time to go back to work. Now work was a trial to her; only an enforced waiting, four hours to be lived through till she could see him again, when there would be more kissing and then parting in Grand Central, her body sluiced with pleasure, dreaming of him the whole way home. Unless he was performing somewhere that night and then she would stay to see him sing. But never once had she spent the night with him. She actually had no idea where he lived. When she asked him where he lived, he said only “here and there,” and gave no particulars. Soon he was spending the weekends with her family in New Canaan. Her parents were delighted with him. Or her father was.

  She hadn’t looked too closely at what her mother thought of Johnny. She hadn’t asked. She hadn’t, perhaps, wanted to know. She and her mother would be in the kitchen, making supper, doing dishes, whispering like girls, and they would hear Jocelyn’s father laughing as they had never known him to laugh with them, and get almost sick with laughing at dinner over Johnny’s stories. Story after story; they poured out of Johnny like grain from a sower’s hand, or from a chute. But she couldn’t now remember a single story. Not one. Oh, yes, she could bring one up now. Something about some IRA soldiers who were lying in ambush to kill a wealthy Anglo Irishman, only to find out he wasn’t coming out; he’d been laid up with a cold. “The poor fellow,” the soldiers had said to one another. “Terrible thing, a summer cold. Please God he’ll be all right tomorrow.” Tomorrow would be the day that they would shoot him. Yet for tonight, he would be in their prayers.

  Later, when she’d tearfully asked her mother, “Why didn’t you warn me?” her mother had said, “I hoped for the best.”

  Certainly, her parents had been welcoming. Too welcoming? Had her father offered her up on the altar of his own desire for a lively son? He took him to the country club; he taught him golf. Johnny seemed to learn the game instantly. “A natural,” her father said. “As if he’d been born to it.”

  “Well I’d hardly say that,” Johnny had said.

  And there was the music. When he came to New Canaan he always brought his guitar. And after dinner he would sing for them. It was summer; the evenings were long, the light stretching out, it seemed, forever. “I’ll sing the darkness in,” he’d say, sitting on the back porch, and they were all at peace, and happy, but she was enormously aroused and couldn’t wait for her parents to go to bed so she could be in his arms. Right there on the couch; was it this couch? She had remained a virgin. She can’t imagine now how that could have been. She can’t imagine that she thought it normal that she would wear a girdle when her stomach was perfectly flat.

  The music. She was for that summer, for the whole next year, the singer’s girl. Gigs they were called; it was a word she heard for the first time then. An endless series of Irish pubs that seemed to her indistinguishable from one another. The Shamrock, the Blarney Stone, Paddy’s Galway Bay. Smelling of beer, the bartenders not knowing quite what to make of her nursing a single gin and tonic—she’d do better now, she thought. As she aged, she’d learned to like drinking more and more. But then, she was the girl at the table, sitting, holding her drink, smiling, but full of anxiety—would they like him, they had to like him, she would kill them if they didn’t like him, how could they not like him, he was entirely lovable, entirely desirable, entirely gifted. Or if they didn’t like him enough, enough for him to say, “It was all right, then,” he would be cast down, his lower lip thrust out, his upper lip tucked behind it, in need of endless reassurance. “You were great, Johnny, they loved you.”

  It was hard, sitting at those tables, to keep her face in what she imagined was the right way. She’d tried to remember the faces of the girlfriends of singers in movies. But they had it easy: they were only required to keep their faces right for a minute or two. She felt the responsibility of it, sometimes for hours. Fifty years later, she can remember the strained muscles in her face. Trying to keep it right.

  She remembers the music, not the people he gathered around him, droves of them, not the people, not the stories. Because even then she didn’t quite believe the stories. Sometimes she was embarrassed to see some of the people again, because he’d told them things about her that weren’t true. At first she thought he’d misunderstood when he told people her ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. That her father had been one of the soldiers to land on D Day.

  He’d ended each of his sets with the same song, which he dedicated to her each time.

  “To my very special lass here, who puts up with me.” He’d strum
a few chords and then warn the audience that this was the last song of the evening. Then he’d put down the guitar and step forward and begin Prospero’s speech from The Tempest, “Our Revels now are ended,” pausing a moment after “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep,” to say, “This is Shakespeare’s way of saying, ‘Have ye no homes of your own to go to?’ ” Then after the laughter, a few more chords and the song that brought tears to everyone’s eyes, even hers, genuine tears, every single time.

  Will ye go, lassie, go

  And we’ll all go together

  To pull wild mountain thyme

  All around the blooming heather.

  And the second verse, even more beautiful:

  I will build my love a bower

  By yon pure crystal fountain

  And on it I will pile

  All the flowers of the mountain.

  It was only later that she discovered the third verse, the one that made a mockery of eternal love. “If my true love will not come / I will surely find another.”

  He never sang that verse. She didn’t know about it till years later, after she’d left him. She heard a record of the Clancy Brothers on the radio. That was when she discovered that he’d stolen the “Revels now are ended” bit … and have ye no homes of your own to go to … from the Clancy Brothers, a straight-out theft. How could he have done it, riding as he did on the coattails of the Clancy Brothers, riding the wave of the craze for folk music? But in 1962, she’d never heard the songs before. She thought they were original with him because she thought everything about him was miraculous. And so it seemed a miracle to her when he told her he loved her and when, that September, he asked her to marry him. Who would refuse a miracle? Would she, he asked (he was literally on bended knee), go back with him to Ireland?