But it wasn’t that simple, was it? As long as Papa had lived in the big house on Chambers Street there’d been a center. But Papa had sold the house, the only place I’d ever called home. The center hadn’t held. If I hadn’t answered Papa’s letters since he’d moved to Texas in March, if I hadn’t called him, if I couldn’t bring myself to call him now, maybe it was because I wanted to punish him. For selling “the only place I’d ever called home.” I liked the phrase and let it roll around on my tongue: “the only place I’ve ever called home.”
*
Have you ever walked down New Bond Street from Sotheby’s to the Burlington Arcade with a quarter of a million dollars in your purse? Two hundred thirty-six thousand one hundred eighty dollars, to be exact, after Sotheby’s commission and a cash advance of two hundred pounds. It’s quite a heady experience. I felt light headed, dizzy. A sum of money like that changes the way things look in shop windows, and what shops! Jewelers and antique dealers that buzzed you in; Chez Boulanger with its leaded glass windows through which you could catch glimpses of waiters in frock coats gliding among the crowded tables with silver trays held effortlessly above their shoulders—this was where the queen stopped for lunch when she went shopping; couturiers and vendors of luxury goods: Asprey, Carder, Vuitton, Hermès, Chanel, Cardin, W. Bill, Loewe, Frank Smythson, Courrèges, Balenciega, Lanvin, Sulka. You could pay fifty or one hundred pounds for a pair of shoes at Ferragamo across from the Royal Arcade; twenty or thirty for gloves; next to Ferragamo was a shop—Sac Frères, I think it was called—that sold nothing but amber—Chinese amber, Burmese amber, Russian amber—hairbrushes and toilet articles in every shade from straw yellow to blood red. Next to Sac Frères was a marriage bureau, promising discreet service.
I’d walked up and down New Bond Street several times, of course, but it had always seemed like a museum, where you couldn’t touch anything. Now it had been transformed, by Sotheby’s after-sale advice in my purse, into a gallery: everything was for sale. Not just to be looked at and appreciated but to be bought, owned, possessed.
I’d decided to allow myself a ten percent commission for handling the sale, and though twenty-four thousand dollars (almost) wouldn’t go very far on New Bond Street, it seemed like a lot to me, and I thought I’d be able to find something special for Molly’s wedding, something out of the ordinary, something that would link us together through space and time, not just Molly and me, but our whole family, some thing with enough mass to counteract the centrifugal forces that had pulled us so far apart.
I didn’t go into any of the shops, however. I just looked in the windows. I was feeling a little off balance—not exactly nervous but agitated in a pleasant sort of way, as if the after-sale advice were a small animal scrabbling about in my purse, which I clutched tightly, or a bird that might fly away if I wasn’t careful. Under the circumstances it would have been so easy to let go, to start to spend, but to tell you the truth, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
Mama had always wanted to come to England, but Papa’d always been a little too busy, and there’d never been quite enough money. But even though she’d never actually been to London, her study was full of art books and slides and museum guides, and she’d talked about the Tate and the National Gallery and the British Museum—and even the little museum at the Walthamstow Water Works—as if they were just a short bus ride away like the Museum of Science and Industry, or the Field Museum, or the Art Institute of Chicago. I meant to visit all these museums, but I kept putting it off. Instead of going to see the Turners at the Tate, the Rembrandts at the National Gallery, and Anglo-Saxon pennies at the Walthamstow Water Works, and, especially and above all, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum (which I could see from the front steps of my bed-and-breakfast), I found myself hanging around Sotheby’s, watching the river of things—mightier than the mighty Mississippi—flow through the salesrooms. There were no more book sales that week, but on Wednesday evening Tony and I watched from a side gallery as Peter Wilson himself—the man who had made London, rather than Paris or New York, the center of the international art market—knocked down the Tintoretto Adoration to Constantine Niarchos for seven hundred fifty thousand pounds, almost as much as the Metropolitan Museum paid for Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer.
It would be three weeks before I could collect the money for the Aretino, but Sotheby’s was happy to set up a line of credit for me, and I started casting my own line into the river of things, bidding—tentatively at first and then more assertively—on potential wedding presents. I was the underbidder on a Greek vase with a wedding scene on it, and that frightened me. I’d almost spent five thousand dollars for a vase, a piece of pottery. But instead of withdrawing sensibly I threw caution to the winds and bid against the British Museum for an Etruscan bronze that had originally come from the excavations outside Sulmona in the Abruzzi. I paid forty-five hundred pounds, but it was so beautiful I had no hesitation. I would have gone to my limit, which I hadn’t established very clearly, and maybe beyond.
Picture a young girl naked, seated, one leg folded under her, the other outstretched. In one hand she holds a bird. She’s twenty-six centimeters high and weighs 1.043 kilograms. According to the catalog she’s been hollow cast in seven parts, “with an alloy of 60% Cu, 2% Sn, 1% Zn.” On her outstretched leg “is a deeply incised inscription”: flereś . tec . sanśl . cver, “to the god Tec Sans, as a gift.” (Tec Sans is the protector of children.) Like a child flying a model airplane, she holds the bird out in front of her.
“You’ll be a rich old woman,” Tony told me when he saw what I’d done.
“It’s for my sister’s wedding,” I said.
“Then your sister will be a rich old woman.”
I took it to the packing room immediately after I’d shown it to Tony, so I wouldn’t be tempted, like Lady Boston and her jewels, to keep it for myself.
On the morning of my last day in London—I’d been there a week—I called Papa from the post office in Russell Square.
As usual I’d calculated the time wrong. It was four o’clock in the morning in Texas, not six o’clock in the evening. But Papa was used to getting up early. He’d always gone to work at four o’clock when I was growing up.
“Margot? Is that you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Papa. Don’t worry. I just sold the book I told you about for eighty-nine thousand pounds. That’s two hundred forty-nine thousand two hundred dollars.”
It took him a while to digest this. I could picture him sitting on the edge of the bed, could picture the familiar face, the familiar broad head, the familiar scar where he’d fallen off a loading dock and hit his chin, the familiar reddish-gray hair, pale, almost translucent.
“You sold an old book for a quarter of a million dollars? Are you sure you got that straight?”
“I’m sure, Papa. I wanted you to know. I wish you could be here.”
“That would be nice. Mama always wanted to go to London. I’m sorry I never took her.”
“Papa, I want to fix it up so that the convent—the mother superior—gets complete control of the money. What do I have to do?”
“Why don’t you just give her the money? Endorse the check and hand it over to her?”
“Technically she can’t own anything. The bishop has the final say, but he can’t touch the endowment.”
“You’d have to talk to an Italian lawyer. The convent must have a lawyer. If they’ve got an endowment, somebody has to look after it.”
“Actually I think it’s mostly land. They get rental income, proceeds from the sale of honey and wine and olive oil.”
“Then you could set up a trust.”
“How would I do that?”
“You want to get an institution to handle it, not just a lawyer. You can’t trust a lawyer. Go to the trust department of a really good bank. You can set it up any way you want to so it goe
s on in perpetuity.”
“Like, just for the library at the convent? The bishop wants to get his hands on the library and transfer it to San Marco. If the income for the trust went for the care and maintenance of the library . . .”
“You can set up an eccentric trust. You can have cash delivered to the abbess on the first of the month if you want to.”
“A bag full of lire? It would have to be a pretty big bag!”
“That’s what I should have done for you girls, set up trust funds. I was always going to get around to it, but . . . who’d have thought in 1950 that I’d be broke in ten years? I had three hundred thousand easy that I didn’t know what to do with. By now, sixteen years, you know money doubles in seven years at seven percent? A hundred thousand, that’d be almost four hundred thousand a piece. You’d be set. You wouldn’t have to worry about a job.”
I saw two women crowd into another booth and thought for a minute that they were Ruth and Yolanda. I looked at the big clock on the wall; I’d been on the phone for three minutes.
“Papa, I’m not worried.”
“Ah, t’hell with it.”
“You know, Papa . . .”
“They say you’re better off without it. I dunno.”
I can still remember Papa showing us his will, once a year. One at a time. Meg, then Molly, then me.
“But what do these nuns do? What are they trying to accomplish? Aren’t they supposed to be poor?”
“The choir nuns say their office every day.”
“Their office?”
“It’s a series of services throughout the day. Prayers.”
“And that’s it?”
“There are lay sisters, too, who spend more time working.”
“You ever think of trying it?”
“Not exactly, but it’s a good place.”
“Why don’t you come to Texas and stay with me?”
In my imagination I could see him leaning forward as he sat on the edge of the bed.
“Forget the nuns for just a minute. They’ve gotten on all right for however many hundreds of years. They’ll get on all right now. With a quarter of a million dollars we wouldn’t have to borrow. We could start with a clean slate. No creditors. We could get through a bad year, which I hope to God we don’t have, but you’ve got to think about these things. I think about them all the time. I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about them. What if? What if? What if? Root rot, cankers, sunblotch, wilt, the Water Regulatory Commission . . .” The list was familiar from his letters. “If you’re not ready for water when it’s your turn, bingo, that’s it. I’ve got no cushion. And it’s lonely. But with you here it would be okay. And Mission is a nice town. You could meet people. There’s a public library. Maybe you could get a job there. And it’s a wonderful place for the dogs. They love it. They can run free. And we could build a place up on the bluff, so you could look down at the river. I didn’t tell you about the river, did I?” He had told me, but he wanted to tell me again. “I mean, I told you about the river, but did I tell you about this radio show I heard the night before? This fundamentalist group thought the Second Coming was going to take place at sundown in Jerusalem. That was eleven twenty-five Texas time. About eleven o’clock I told the real estate agent I had to take a leak and I went up on the hill, just to think. I don’t mean I thought it was really the Second Coming, but I wanted to be alone for a minute. I walked up to the top of the bluff and there’s the river. It’s on the map, Margot, the Rio Grande; it’s the reason I wasn’t standing in a desert, but I’d never given it a thought. I wish you could see it. I thought it was the River of Jordan, the Promised Land. You don’t have to decide this minute, but think about it. At least consider it. The nuns will be all right. God will look after them, but who’s going to look after us if we don’t look after ourselves?”
I felt myself blushing, the way I always blush when someone propositions me out of the blue. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. I pretended to myself not to understand, and then I said the first thing that popped into my head: “Papa,” I said, “you should never have left Chicago. You shouldn’t have sold the house. That was the only place I ever called home.”
I’d intended to wound him, and I knew I’d succeeded because he didn’t say anything for a long time. I watched the second hand eating up the minutes. It was going to be an expensive phone call.
On the morning Mama died Papa just sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, waiting for the doctor to come. That’s the way I pictured him now, sitting on the edge of the bed, his nipples thick and flat on top, as if they’d been punched out of a thick slice of ham with a paper punch, the elastic of his underpants giving way. Waiting.
Try as I could, I couldn’t imagine Texas. The river, the bluff, the tumbledown house were all ciphers. Even the dogs. Bruno and Sasky. What would happen to us now? I wanted to call Meg and Molly, but it was the thought of the dogs that bowled me over. I had my defenses in place against Papa, but I’d forgotten about the dogs, I’d forgotten how happy they’d been to see me when I came back from Italy after Mama got sick.
“Margot,” he said finally, “do you think it was easy for me to sell the old place? Do you think I did it to spite you? I put up the for sale sign as a kind of joke. Meg and Dan were talking about having Christmas in Milwaukee; Molly’s car was broke and she was going to stay in Ann Arbor with her boyfriend; you were in Italy; you never called, not till Christmas Eve. I put the sign up to give your sisters something to think about, and then I got to thinking about it myself, when I went outside to take it down. I realized it was time to move on. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it. That’s when you called, right after that. I was sitting at the kitchen table filling stockings. You told me you were in love, and I was happy for you, even though it was a married man. I’ve hardly heard from you since.”
It was my turn to be silent, to watch the snow come down as he nails up the for sale sign to the round pillar on the portecochere, to keep my eyes on the Rio Grande as he takes a leak on the top of a bluff. I’d always known and loved him as my father, but I’d never known and loved him as a man, someone with his own agenda, his own plans, his own future to worry about. Wherever he was was still the place where, when I had to go there, they’d have to take me in, but I knew I wasn’t going to go. Not now, not to stay, not without a round-trip ticket in my purse.
“You still in love?” he asked.
“Not any more,” I said.
“He go back to his wife?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Papa. Everything’s all right. But I’m sorry I said what I said. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“That’s okay.”
“Are you in trouble, Papa? How bad is it?”
What made it so hard was that it was the first time he’d ever asked me for something that he needed. It was the first time I’d ever had anything he needed. And I couldn’t give it to him.
“Nah,” he said, “not too bad, if everything doesn’t go wrong all at once.”
That afternoon Tony and I made love for the first time—in the bed-and-breakfast. Our imaginations had been fired up by the sale of the Aretino, and our bodies by the long, slow buildup. Well, slow by modern standards. Who knows what erotic peaks we might have scaled if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hoyle, who kept tapping on the door every five minutes: “Has your visitor left yet?”
“Not yet,” I’d say, trying to suggest by the tone of my voice that Tony and I were struggling with the Times crossword puzzle.
“I’m sorry,” Tony would whisper.
“It’s not your fault.”
It was a Sisyphean experience, rolling the ball of our pleasure up the hill only to have it rolled back down on us by Mrs. Hoyle’s tap-tap-tap.
“Not yet, Mrs. Hoyle.”
&nbs
p; We finally made it to the top, just as Mrs. Hoyle was tap-tap-tapping at the door for the sixth or seventh time: “Has your visitor left yet?”
I couldn’t completely stifle a cry of ecstasy, but I did my best to conceal it in Italian: “La sua voluntade,” I blurted out, “è nostra pace.”
“What’s that?”
“God’s will is our peace, Mrs. Hoyle. God’s will is our peace. Now, would you leave us alone for a few minutes? My visitor will be leaving shortly.”
About four o’clock we walked across the street to the British Museum. It was my last chance to see the Elgin Marbles. It was raining a little, so we borrowed an umbrella from the stand in the foyer. Mrs. Hoyle was nowhere to be seen. Both of us had a touch of indigestion—too much hot curry—and by the time we got oriented in the museum, it was time to head for the rest rooms. I mention this only because the ladies’ room, which had been converted from a men’s room (there was a row of urinals) had parquet floors and the widest toilet stalls I’ve ever seen. I could hardly reach from one side to the other.
Tony was waiting for me when I came out, and we made our way through the Egyptian sculptures and the Nereids to the Duveen Gallery. Mama had always pronounced ‘Elgin’ with a soft g, like Elgin, Illinois, or an Elgin watch, but Tony pronounced it with a hard g, and I’d realized that Mama had never heard the word, she’d only read it in books.
By this time I’d realized why I’d put off visiting the museums. I was a little afraid to put myself in Mama’s place, to look for her. I was afraid I’d be disappointed, afraid I wouldn’t be able to see, with my own eyes, what she had seen so clearly in her imagination. And that is more or less what happened.
Mama always devoted two full lectures to the Elgin Marbles in her Introduction to Art class at Edgar Lee Masters. I’d attended those lectures more than once and thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared for the fragmentary nature of the exhibit or of the marbles themselves. In Mama’s lectures the marbles depicted a solemn but festive ceremonial procession in which the entire community took part, in which the story of each individual merged with the story of the community, in which the wound of individuality was healed. This was the healing power of great art that she used to talk about. It was what I wanted, something to heal the wound of individuality. But in the Duveen Gallery it was hard to find a whole individual, much less a whole community. Arms and legs had been lopped off, penises too. Faces had been torn away or smashed. I knew I was supposed to be overwhelmed, as every person who’s ever seen the marbles has been overwhelmed, at least the famous ones Mama used to discuss, but I wasn’t. I was, as I had feared, disappointed.
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 30
