by Mary Gordon
Everything is extreme. They can’t imagine it being any other way. When they think of weather, it’s blazing hot or freezing cold. Some days all they do is sleep. The way they sleep! Sleep seems to fall on them hard, like a safe falling from a cartoon sky. So tired, they say to themselves, just exhausted. They drop down to filthy sleep; their dreams are perverse, murderous; they wake and say they had terrible dreams but they don’t remember them. On weekends, the nuns won’t let them sleep enough. The girls who live close enough go home to their mothers on weekends just to sleep. They sleep and sleep. In their dreams they beg people to allow them to sleep, not to force them to wake up. To allow them to wake at two in the afternoon to roam a mother’s spotless kitchen and make combinations of sweet foods, followed by salty ones, then savory, then back to sweet. They crave sweets and sometimes take them from the kitchen back to their beds.
Maria does not go home. She does not have a kitchen stocked with sweets by a mother who would allow her to sleep until two in the afternoon. Her kitchen is spotless but is presided over by Joseph’s mother, and there are no snacks there: Maria’s father does not believe in snacks, as he doesn’t believe in sleeping late. So she doesn’t go home much; she goes to her friends’ houses, where their mothers are kind since she is motherless (not knowing she is punishing her father by being with them), and where they sleep and sleep and then take the commuter train into New York City and go to the Village and talk their way into bars and talk to men who frighten them, but they go home with one another and tremble a little on the train at what they might have done. They hear Ravi Shankar play the sitar; they listen to Allen Ginsberg chant his poetry. They love Monet’s Water Lilies and Shakespeare, but only performed outside where the poor can see it.
They love everyone, they hate everyone; their school is heaven, is a prison; Mother Perpetua is a mental case and Mother Emmanuel is a saint; and they adore and envy Mother Dulcissima because of the berry color of her full lips and because she went to Selma and their parents wouldn’t let them. She is the nun they all want to be. Except that they would like to marry. Someone like Bobby Kennedy or Harry Belafonte. They imagine what their parents would say if they came home with Harry Belafonte. They are not afraid of their parents. Mother, Father, they would say, this is my fiancé, Harry Belafonte. Harry, don’t worry about my parents or race prejudice. Everything will be fine because we are very much in love.
They, of course, know they have no race prejudice. The two black girls in the class are the same as everyone else, Maria and her friends are sure of that. When do Maria and her friends start calling them black? They cannot imagine a time when they used the word Negro. One of the black girls, Barbara, is a little prickly, a little unfriendly, but they know it has nothing to do with being black. She must know they are on her side. They are Democrats and anti-Communists. They will be virgins on their wedding night. None of them has had her breasts touched. They know they will love being pregnant. They will each have many children. They will all live together. They will raise their many children together on a sheep farm in New Zealand. First, though, they will teach children in Harlem, like Mother Dulcissima in the summers.
Except that then the boys in their sweaty jackets do things to them, make the girls want them; when the girls leave them they want to take their nightgowns off, take the sheets off their mattresses to feel the rough ticking on their skins, they want the boys’ hands, they can’t stop thinking of them, they are restless in their dormitories, they would like to climb out windows and meet boys in the dark. They would like to give over their bodies, which they are afraid to look at and yet guess somehow are beautiful. That is why they run outside in thunderstorms or jump into Cassie Maguire’s pool at three in the morning. There is something abroad that is dark, something not nice, not kind and benevolent, like the world they easily inhabited six months earlier. Their bodies are pulling them into the world. They see the beautiful white face of Mother Dulcissima and believe, because of what happened when the boys in sweaty jackets touched their breasts (none of them would let any boy, as they said, “go further”), that for the first time there are things they know that she does not. Will never. And so their admiration for her becomes mixed with pity and they understand soon that they need not call it admiration anymore.
They still believe that they will change the world. Rumblings come to them from Southeast Asia, but vaguely, indistinctly. Soon they will hear only that, and they will be able to believe in nothing.
In 1965, the weather changes from high summer to sick dog days; the air is filled with smoke and the sun is never healthy; everything it falls on becomes livid, ill. Everyone is afraid but they don’t say that; they say that they are angry. Anger is the weather of the day. Anger is most often in those days called rage. The president’s face is diabolical; Maria and her friends understand it is the face of all the men who want to hurt them, who they will never allow to touch them, who they would never marry. The president lifts his dog up by the ears; he shows the world the scar on his hairy stomach. He sends children to their deaths, he will send their friends to their deaths; he says he is doing it for them, for Maria and her friends and girls like them. The newspapers are full of death, not the heraldic death of John Kennedy, to the accompaniment of bagpipes, but the deaths of strangers continents away, people who do not look like Maria and her friends, and there is fire in the cities and fear the cities will burn down and perhaps—who knows?—in the name of justice they ought to. Boys their age are dead, buried in pits with hundreds of others. Asian children run in flame.
In 1967, Maria disappoints the nuns, choosing Radcliffe over Manhattanville. She goes to demonstrations. She loses her virginity.
. . .
Then it is 1968. It is the spring of the terrible deaths, King and another Kennedy, and there is no hope, only more rage, more fear, more death. What should be done? Fight or smoke till nothing matters? Turn on, drop out, or forgive nothing? Armed or stoned, which are you? Certainly nothing you thought you were, not the nice girl you thought you were, the loving girl, the hopeful girl. It isn’t so long ago that you were a hopeful girl, maybe only five years, October of 1963.
Maria and her friends have to learn new words: napalm, friendly fire. Death is surrounded by lies. They do not know what to believe. The men they thought of as, if not their fathers, then something like their fathers, are lying to them again and again, and people like them, boys like them—or not like them, poorer boys, but boys their age—are dying because of those lies, and if they believe the lies they are with those men in the party of death. The men they thought of as their fathers, men like their fathers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, cannot be believed. No one can be believed. Maria knows her father cannot be believed. He keeps using the word communism. She keeps telling him he doesn’t understand communism. The North Vietnamese, Mao and the Chinese he leads, she says, are agrarian idealists, heroes. In years to come, Maria and her friends will discover that they were wrong about the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, but their fathers were wrong too, and their inability to determine who was more wrong will hobble their minds—the parts of their minds that think about the larger world—for years and years.
Colored lights cut through the sickish air. They dance till they fall on their backs, fall in a group embrace; they sing, “Looking for fun and feeling groovy,” and a minute later they see a child running in napalm fire; and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the same time as the March on the Pentagon, where people like Maria and her friends for the first time cannot breathe because the police, who four years earlier they thought of as their friends, are not their friends; they tear-gas people like Maria, who then call them motherfuckers, although Maria and her friends had never heard the word three years before when the weather was different. So which is it, which is real, which is the truth: “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends” or bayoneted children?
I am not a good enough historian to say whether or not there were other periods in history
like those ten years, eleven maybe, 1962 to 1973, the year before the death of John Kennedy to the year of Watergate, years in which so easily, so quickly, you became a person you would not have recognized. The Maria of 1962 would not have recognized the Maria of 1968. The Maria of 1962 was a hopeful girl; the Maria of 1968 was not. Perhaps this uncertainty marks my failure as a chronicler. Nevertheless, this is the way I must tell the story of those times.
It is May 1970: Kent State. The girl, kneeling, outraged, shocked, beside her dead friend. Students like Maria and her friends, shot by the Ohio National Guard. People like Maria and her friends who did not believe that people in American uniforms would shoot people like them. People in uniform were their fathers in the good war. But not Maria’s father. Too frail. His eyesight.
A week after Kent State, Maria’s father calls her and asks her to come home. He says he’s been a bit ill but he didn’t want to worry her; she has seemed so absorbed in her studies.
She has not been absorbed in her studies. She sleeps through her classes. Everything important happens at night: she goes to meetings all night, night after night; that semester everything is pass/fail and nearly everybody passes everything doing the absolute minimum, one night spent doing a term’s work, another all-nighter after months of all-night meetings, shouting, raising their fists. They turn their attention to metaphysical poetry, the sonata form. They pass through the university, the university which, they think, perhaps should be burnt down because it can exist only if it takes money from defense contractors. Wasn’t napalm invented at a university, doesn’t the company that invented it support the university?
Yes, Papa, she says, I’ve been very absorbed in my work. Lying to her parents like everyone does in those days. I’ve been very busy. She must spare him. He has been ill.
It is difficult for her to call him Papa, her childhood name for him, given the facts of her life (the filthy room, the filthy dishes, the sheets that don’t fit the mattress, the new knowledge that men like her father are murderers, the smell of Ortho-Gynol jelly that clings to her clothing). But she can only call him Papa. What else can she call him? Not only is she frightened of the evil of the world, the death machine, she is frightened of the weakness of her father’s body. She does not want to be his treasure, but she is. His treasure, the rest of which is made up of things that her boyfriend, William, says are produced by the death machine. But because her father has said to the world: Preserve, preserve my treasure, she has always felt that, whatever else happens, she will be preserved.
Her father says he needs an operation, that his heart has a little squeak and needs to be fixed: not an emergency but something that must be dealt with. He’s set a day for the operation. Will she be there beside him?
Of course, Papa, she says. She doesn’t know what she will say to William Ogilvie, who shares the mattress and the greasy sheets, William, who may be hiding guns in the basement. Violence is the only language they understand, he says. You know that, don’t you? And she says, Yes, of course I understand. She understands because he’s said that if she doesn’t agree with him it’s her weakness. But she will not give in to her weakness, and she will refuse her privilege. She believes what he says, partly because it makes her afraid, and she knows she must get over fear; that is the only way to be strong; she must love truth more than comfort, justice more than mercy; she must cast her lot with those who will give their lives to end injustice and oppression. She is afraid all the time, but she thinks it’s right to be afraid, it’s the only honest thing, because the times are evil and in the presence of evil the honest are afraid.
What will William Ogilvie say if there’s an important meeting or an important demonstration on the day she’s said she’ll be at her father’s side at the hospital? She tells him she has to go somewhere, but she can’t give him the details. She hints that she’s going away with another man, thinks he will admire her for that, call it independence, but in fact he barely notices that she’s gone; he is busy smashing the war machine, he is busy with the revolution.
William Ogilvie—Billy—knows nothing about her father.
The night before her father checks into the hospital, Joseph and Maria and he have a peaceful, harmonious, enjoyable dinner. For the first time in years they don’t argue about politics.
Joseph and Maria wait six hours in the hospital while Dr. Meyers is operated on. Even while her father’s chest is an open cavity, she listens to the news; when the doctors speak of invasive surgery she hears the word invasive and thinks of the invasion of Cambodia; even while she is worried that her father is at the door of death, she reads the newspaper, she traces the location of the troops.
The operation is successful. She sees her father, pale in his white bed. She holds his beautiful fine hand. She stays with him a week; she misses classes, but it is the year of Cambodia, the year of Kent State, after all, and regular attendance no longer seems important.
When she gets back to Cambridge, she is met with the end of everything. The filthy house is empty and, in its emptiness, no less squalid. While she was away, the FBI came in the night and found boxes of guns in the basement and material for making bombs. Billy has been arrested; he is in jail with some of the other people who were staying in the house, people whom she’d met but whose real names she was not allowed to know.
She tells the police she should be in jail; she lived in the house too. The police say there’s no evidence she was involved; she’s registered in the Radcliffe dormitories, and there is no record of her presence in that house. She insists she is guilty; they insist she is not. Go home, honey, they say, go home to your father; you’ve got friends in high places, take advantage of it. Go while the going’s good. But the going is not good, and she cannot make it good, and she cannot make them arrest her.
It is true, I suppose, that she could have done something to make them arrest her. Thrown a bottle through the police station window. Chained herself to something, as her daughter would later do. It is strange that she only railed; Maria did not act, as her daughter is now acting, Maria, whose enduring belief is in the liberating force of action.
All she did was shout at the police and beg Billy to believe that she didn’t know what was happening. He doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t want anything to do with her. He goes to jail for six months only, because he is a Harvard student, a PhD candidate in microbiology, and the guns and explosives had not been used.
She begins to be suspicious. “Go home to your father . . . friends in high places.” The name of the FBI agent on the case is Ryan. She remembers that her father’s very good friend, Monsignor Ryan from the chancery, has a brother in the FBI.
She doesn’t care that her father is weak, that he has just been operated on. She borrows a car and drives, at top speed, to Larchmont. She throws open her father’s bedroom door. Her father is in bed but she knows that whatever else he’s done, he won’t tell an outright lie.
She says, “Did you know my friends were going to be arrested? Did you arrange to have the operation so I would be with you when it happened?”
White, his white face against the white pillow, his white hands holding a black rosary, sign of the church. Monsignor Ryan’s church, Maria thinks, church of the FBI.
“Say it, say you trapped me. Admit you lied to me!”
“I never lied to you.”
“Spare me your Jesuitical machinations.”
Even in her rage, she does not use, with her father, the diction of her friends. She doesn’t say “Jesuitical bullshit,” which is what comes to her mind; she says “Jesuitical machinations.”
And those are the last words she says to her father.
Pearl knows nothing of all this. Would it be better if she had known? If she had known about her mother’s past, her mother’s anguish and confusion when she was the same age, might she have gone to her in her own time of anguish? It doesn’t matter. Pearl didn’t know. She never went to her mother. She never thought of her mother as someone with a life in
history. As a character in a chronicle. Does any child?
5
We will leave Maria now in her first-class seat. A woman who has always been in love with movement, now in terror for her child, trapped in a severely circumscribed place.
Joseph, on the other hand, is on the streets of Rome. We have been talking about history, so it would seem appropriate to follow him, in this city where more of the history of the West is centered than in any other place: the history of the West, the history of the Roman Catholic Church, from which, after all, Joseph makes his living. A strange phrase, that, making a living. As if living were something that could be made.
Joseph leaves his hotel, the Santa Chiara in Piazza Minerva, a few feet away from the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where, atop Bernini’s elephant with its heaving saddle, stands an obelisk, found in the church’s garden and preserved by learned monks, a monument to the Egyptian goddess Isis. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva: the Virgin mother atop the Roman goddess of wisdom and, on top of that, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. A mishmash, a mix-up, no pure statement possible; contradictions stacked one on top of the other, no structure, no hierarchy: just a pile. A pile of history, a pile of understandings. Chockablock.
Maria called with the news of Pearl at 6 a.m. Joseph knew he couldn’t book a flight till ten and he couldn’t bear waiting in his hotel, so he went out into the street. Now he walks from the Piazza Minerva to the Campo de’ Fiori. He is terrified. He walks stiffly, as if any wrong step could bring about disaster.
Two days earlier, Christmas eve, Joseph took the same walk, under a Roman sky that suggested nothing of the implacability of northern winter. The sky was frothy, like the bay before a storm; it made you think of water more than air, its movement more textured than air and less abstract. The night sky was white, and everywhere he went there seemed to be the scent of carnations and mimosas, of peeled oranges, of celery, apples, violets, discarded Christmas roses like stains or blood against the gray cobblestones.
