by Mary Gordon
“But I think we saw you and we thought, Well, maybe something will last from the old ways. We weren’t thinking of the cost to you. We never worried about Joan. For one thing, she came from a wealthy family, and, for another, she never seemed much affected by what people thought about her. I’m not sure she even notices; it might be the money, I don’t know. But she’s always done exactly what she wanted, and what she wants now is to teach here, to teach the kind of people she’s teaching, which she knows she’s good at, is happy to tell you she’s better at than anyone she knows. But you’re a different case. You don’t have her self-confidence. You don’t have her money. I think we may have served you very badly. It’s not enough that I have to ask God’s forgiveness. I ask you to forgive me now.”
“Forgiveness? Of all the people in the world, you have nothing to be forgiven for. You always took me seriously. I’ll never be able to repay that.”
“Well, maybe you need to be a bit less serious for a while,” Sister Maureen said, and Theresa knew her words hadn’t meant much to Sister Maureen, and she felt like a parent who hasn’t been listened to by a recalcitrant child.
“You always have a place here, Theresa,” she said. “Please know that you always have a place.”
The days that made up her life on Tortola were unlike any she had ever lived. She read almost nothing, she became a runner, training herself to run on the beach, working up to six miles a day. She took long swims in the turquoise sea. That year, the hurricanes were not a devastation, the storms dramatic and interesting rather than life-threatening disasters. She almost never thought about Yale, and, when she did, she quickly changed her clothes … into a bathing suit or running shorts or a sundress, as if a change of costume might banish the thoughts of graduate school, which it seemed again and again to do. She got a job in a wine bar owned by a friend of Maura’s boyfriend, a young Dutchman who appreciated her knowledge of French and Italian, and insisted that she wear a black sleeveless dress and high, strappy sandals to work every night. She learned a great deal about wine; she began to consider that it might be a sensible way to spend a life, becoming an expert in wines, using her talents for discrimination in a way that would bring immediate pleasure, a way that had been honorable for centuries.
She and Maura lived together easily; Maura was happy to have Theresa to share the rent, since she had thrown out the anesthesiologist with whom she’d got the apartment. It turned out he had a gambling problem, and was stealing drugs from the hospital to pay his debts. He hadn’t been sent to jail, but he’d lost his job and was now back home in Arkansas, refusing any kind of help.
After Theresa had been there nearly three months, she opened her email to find a message from a lawyer in Italy. He asked her to phone in relation to the estate of Gregory Allard, who had died in an automobile accident.
At first she thought it was some kind of trick, something Ivo had thought of to entrap her, a way of finding out where she was so he could send the police after her. But Maura said, “He said you were left something in a will.”
“Poor Gregory,” she said. “I hope he died a good death. He was a good man. I don’t know how old he was. In his eighties.”
“Call the lawyer now. Don’t you want to know what he left you? Maybe one of the Civitalis. Or maybe it’s just a set of teaspoons.”
Notario Lambrino spoke perfect English. He told her the details of Gregory’s death. It was an automobile accident; the young signore was driving; both of them were killed instantly. It was a wet night, and they crashed into a stone wall on the road outside Signore Allard’s villa.
Theresa’s first thought was: That was where we saw the white horse, and her second was rage at Ivo. Driving too fast, his carelessness taking the life of his father, who was ten times the man he would ever have been.
“Well, signorina, Signore Allard has provided very handsomely for you. The villa and its contents belong to you; he has arranged that the staff be kept on, that they be paid an annuity only as long as they continue to work there. And he’s left you a very large sum of cash because he makes a point that you will be responsible for the upkeep of the villa as he left it. Except for this and a bequest to the Lupus Foundation, you are his sole heir. I hope you can come to Lucca as soon as possible. There will be some complicated negotiations.”
“The villa and its contents?” Theresa said, sitting down heavily on her bed. She had put the phone on speaker, so Maura could hear everything. Maura was jumping on the bed, running in circles, taking Theresa’s hands and twirling her around.
But Theresa didn’t feel like dancing. She felt frightened. A villa and its contents. A fortune. A fortune she knew she didn’t deserve, in a foreign city, a foreign country famous for the Byzantine incomprehensibility of its laws.
She told the lawyer she would be in touch with him when she had made travel plans, and assured him it would be very soon.
“You are a very fortunate young woman,” the lawyer said. “Very fortunate indeed.”
“I don’t understand. We’d only just met.”
“He changed his will two months ago. When I asked him why he was making this change—one has to, of course, with persons of a certain age—he said you were a person of courage, taste, and standards. Of course, you would only inherit in the case of his son’s death. And, by the way, his son had made no will.”
She wrapped her arms around her torso and sat on the bed rocking.
“Will you tell me your problem, for Christ’s sake?” Maura said. “You look like someone told you you have to have your leg cut off without an anesthetic.”
“It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong. I hardly knew him. He hardly knew me.”
“I guess he thought he knew you well enough. Jesus, T, you’re an heiress. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d be saying. My friend is an heiress. My friend owns a villa. My friend is rich.”
“I don’t know what to do. You’ll come with me, won’t you, to straighten it all out?”
“Of course.”
They rented a car at the Pisa airport, and Maura drove while Theresa read the map and translated the road signs. Theresa kept telling her to slow down. Gregory’s accident had made her nervous every time she got in a car.
“I wonder where it happened, exactly,” Theresa said. “I wonder where he died.”
“I wonder how much of this is yours,” Maura said.
“I guess we’ll find out. The lawyer said he’ll meet us here at one, but Italians aren’t famous for punctuality.”
Maura stopped the car in the drive in front of the double stairway. They walked down the hill and sat on a green iron bench in the garden that Theresa remembered from one of the times she’d been here with Gregory. The valley spread out like a lap; stuck into the various shades of green, like the heads of pins, were the pinks and yellows of the small farmhouses, an insistence of sheer colors among the black cypresses, the silver olives.
The colors spun; the shapes grew indistinct. She knew she ought to be feeling joy, but what she felt was dread. Was this another one of those gifts that the giver failed to see was also a great burden? It was all too much. She had owned almost nothing in her whole life. She hadn’t even owned a car. She tried to think what she had owned. Her clothes, her books, a computer, a cell phone. And now she was meant to be the padrona, a great landowner. She felt overwhelmed. Why had he given this to her? Why hadn’t he just given her the Civitalis? Even that would have been too much, but it would not have been the burden that this was.
“I bought champagne at duty free and I stole these plastic cups from the plane,” Maura said. “They won’t make much of a satisfying clink, but we’ll do what we can. And of course the champagne won’t be cold. But look at this, we have to celebrate, and we have to do it right now. Look at all this. It’s all yours.”
“But suppose I wreck it, suppose I destroy it, suppose it falls to ruin in my hands. Suppose it catches fire or the pipes burst and everything is destroyed in a flood.”
&nb
sp; “Jesus, T, get a life. This is a fairy tale. Do you think Cinderella spent a lot of time worrying that glass slippers could lead to plantar fasciitis?”
“I don’t know what it all means. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I don’t think you have to. Not right now. The lawyer will be here in a little while and he’ll tell you where to begin. And then you’ll do the next thing, and then something else.” Maura raised her plastic cup. “Here’s to not knowing what to do,” she said.
Theresa took a sip of champagne. She knew that there was one thing she would do. She was thinking of Tom Ferguson, that she hadn’t been in touch with him at all since she had read his email telling her he wouldn’t be joining her. She wondered if he had ever heard from Gregory or even knew that they’d met. She imagined the words she would use when she wrote to tell him what had happened.
“Dear Tom,” she would write. “I wanted you to hear my news. It seems that I am Gregory Allard’s heir. He has left me his villa and its contents. You won’t be seeing me for quite some time. Details to follow.”
Afterword
Simone Weil
Simone Weil was born in Paris on February 3, 1909, the daughter of assimilated Jewish parents; her father was a doctor, her mother a homemaker ambitious for the intellectual achievement of her two children, Simone and her brother, André, who grew to be a world-class mathematician. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. But from an early age, her astonishing intellectual commitment (she became fluent in ancient Greek by the age of ten) was joined by a heartfelt identification with the poor and suffering. Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow student at the École Normale, encountered Simone Weil weeping after learning of the deaths of victims of Chinese famine. Simone Weil told Simone de Beauvoir that the most important thing in the world was the coming revolution that would feed all the starving people of the earth. Simone de Beauvoir responded that the most important thing was to help people find a reason for their existence. Simone Weil snapped back: “It’s easy to see that you’ve never gone hungry.”
She saw herself allied with the politics of the left, but always on her own terms. At the age of ten, she declared herself a Bolshevik, but she earned the enmity of committed Communists when she repudiated Stalin in the early 1930s, among the first to see in him the same tyranny of force that marked Hitler and Mussolini. Also as early as the 1930s, she was writing against the evils of French colonialism, meeting with Vietnamese and Algerians working in Paris for the liberation of their homelands.
In 1931 she got her first job as a teacher in the lycée of Le Puy, a small city in the Haute-Loire region in the south of France. This is where I locate the first meetings of Simone Weil and my fictional character Genevieve.
In 1933, convinced that she had no right to speak about the lives and conditions of workers unless she had shared their lot, Simone Weil worked for a year at a series of factories owned by the Renault company. In 1936 she joined the forces of the Anarchists in fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Unlike most of the participants on both sides of that war, she was able to see the horrors inflicted not only upon but by her comrades, whose casual brutality shocked her. She felt compelled to bear witness to the lust for violence which appalled her on both sides—but it was particularly painful to her when she observed it among the Anarchists, whom she had idealized.
In 1937 she had experiences of a mystical and visionary nature, in which she felt herself penetrated by the presence of Jesus Christ. Deeply drawn to Catholicism, she would not submit to baptism in the Catholic Church because, she said, of its history of “anathema sit,” of excommunication on intellectual grounds—the Church’s insistence that Catholicism had a monopoly on truth. She said she could not be part of an institution which deprived anyone of intellectual liberty.
Devoted to solidarity among the oppressed and suffering of the world, she nevertheless failed to identify with the plight of Jews under Nazi persecution. She would not wear a yellow star; threatened with the loss of her job, she wrote to the Ministry of Education explaining why she did not define herself as a Jew, since she had had no contact with the Jewish religion and considered her intellectual formation Christian and French. But her alienation from Judaism was more thoroughgoing. She was deeply critical of Jewish tradition, referring to Yahweh as a God of force and punishment, and the Jewish people as a people devoted to exclusion and persecution of the other. She traced all the evils in Western thought back to the Jews and the Romans, the following of whom, she believed, led to the rejection of the tradition of the Greeks, which stood, in her mind, for purity and freedom.
In 1942 she and her parents had the opportunity to flee occupied France for America, where André Weil had a position at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She lived in New York City for a time. After three months she sailed to England, where she worked in the Propaganda Department of the Free French. There, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and hospitalized. Always uncomfortable with many kinds of food, with everything having to do with eating, she worsened her condition by refusing to eat what the doctors recommended, insisting that she eat only what she imagined was the ration of those suffering in occupied France—an amount that she had arbitrarily determined. She died in Ashford, Kent, in August 1943, at the age of thirty-four. The circumstances of her death were as controversial as the rest of her life: some, particularly her doctor, believing she starved herself, others insisting that there was nothing that could have prevented her death by tuberculosis.
The work on which her reputation is based was published posthumously. Among the strongest supporters of the publication of this work was Albert Camus. Camus paid a visit to the Weil apartment on his way to receive the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, asking Simone’s mother if he could have some time alone in Simone’s writing room. Camus referred to Simone Weil as “the only great spirit of our age.”
Thomas Mann
By the time of Hitler’s rise to power, in the 1930s, Thomas Mann was indisputably the most famous, most honored, most “German” of German writers. He could have supported the regime and lived comfortably and safely in Nazi Germany but, urged and inspired by his son and daughter, outspoken anti-Fascists, he criticized the regime and paid dearly for it. His luxurious and privileged life was threatened; he fled first to Switzerland and then, in 1939, to the United States, where he made numerous broadcasts and tirelessly spoke to American audiences about the dangers of Nazism and the threat to democracy. He did not, in fact, speak at the Horace Mann School in Gary, Indiana, but he was in Chicago in the early forties, as his son-in-law was a professor at the University of Chicago. Disgusted by America’s failure to live up to its promise and appalled by the rise of phobic anti-Communism, he returned to Europe in 1952 and died in Switzerland in 1955.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Gordon is the author of six novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received numerous other honors, including a Lila Wallace—Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
A Pantheon Reading Group Guide
The Liar’s Wife by Mary Gordon
This guide is designed to enhance your reading group’s focus on some of the main concepts in these novellas and to enable readers to explore and share different perspectives. Feel free to wander in your discussions, and use this as a guideline only.
Discussion Questions
1. What links the four novellas? Are there any themes that are present in all four? Why is The Liar’s Wife used as the title of the collection?
2. Why do you think the author has set two novellas in the past and two in contemporary time, bookending the collection with the contemporary pieces and placing the two histor
ical stories in the middle?
3. Each of the four protagonists learns something important from pivotal moments that shed understanding on their lives and affect their futures. For each novella, what is this moment? And what has the main character learned?
4. What is the significance of lying and performing in “The Liar’s Wife”? How are lying and performing connected? And how are they connected to Johnny’s love of language and stories?
5. What does it signify that Jocelyn can’t say “I love life” as Johnny can?
6. How does Jocelyn know that Johnny isn’t good for her and why? Looking back now on her life, do you think she made a good decision to leave him?
7. What is the importance and meaning of the monologue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest with which Johnny ends all of his sets? What does it say about him and the way he lives his life?
8. What is the importance of house and home for all four of the protagonists? What does home mean for each? In the first novella, why will Jocelyn never sell the house?
9. What is the role of science in these novellas? Jocelyn is a scientific technician who works in a lab. Why doesn’t she pursue science further? Why is she interested in mosquitoes, and what does this say about her personality?
