Payback

by Mary Gordon

  This is what she felt on the bad days when all at once doubts, like fast-growing weeds, sprang up from nowhere, when the room was staticky with minor malice, overheated with the girls’ pent-up animality or unmoored with the distraction of their dreams.

  But mostly, she believed that she was doing something fine. She could use without self-consciousness the plain word beauty, on its own, and not linked to some other word: parlor, pageant, queen, a connection that implied it was a currency. She could suggest that beauty was of no clear use at all, but something luminous, some added luster that could neither be explained nor explained away. She could give them this, and if they took it, it might be thought to last. Sometimes her heart broke at their naïveté—she was only seven or eight years older than they, but she couldn’t remember having been so naïve. They believed that they could simply approach life like a temperate ocean whose waves would carry them but would never, ever overwhelm them, never be the cause of their destruction. Sometimes their beauty pierced her, when the light fell on their shining hair, or the bones of their wrists, or the napes of their necks as they bent, absorbed, unconscious, to a task she had given them that they desired, above all, to finish well. When one of them took an interest in an artist she believed they never would have known if it had not been for her—Vuillard, Morandi, Caspar David Friedrich—it was as if they shared a family treasure, secret and quite rare. She feared that in her love for them, there was a generous measure of self-love. But she knew that she loved them, although she worried that they were, perhaps, too easy to love.

  One of them was not easy to love, and it made Agnes believe that her love was worthwhile, precisely because of its difficulty. Heidi Stolz. Of all of them, the least obviously lovable, certainly the least generous, the cruelest, the most begrudging. Of all of them, the true original.

  She thought of Heidi’s final project, which was a direct slam at Margaret and Joan, who had papered the school with copies of a poster: a daisy with childish lettering that spelled out “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.”

  Whereas most of the girls were anchored firmly in the impressionists, arguing among themselves whether Monet or van Gogh was the greatest painter ever, Heidi was devoted to pop art. She had made a presentation that would have shocked the other girls if they hadn’t long ago written her off as “a weirdo,” “just too conceited,” “a big drag.”

  Pop artists, Heidi said, were the only people who were really honest about what most people liked looking at. They were the only non-snobs, and they didn’t pretend not to care about money. Everybody wants money, she said, they just pretend they don’t. She said that their refusal to draw a line between high art and low art, between the commercial and the purely beautiful, was one of the most important ideas in the history of thinking.

  Her final project was so openly antagonistic to Margaret and Joan that Agnes didn’t display it. It was a comic strip. In the first frame were two girls, direct and nearly perfect likenesses of Joan and Margaret. They were holding posters that said “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” The second frame included the character Steve Canyon from the comic strip that appeared in the Sunday paper. The square-jawed, impossibly muscled pilot was saying, “You’re right, girls. War is not healthy.” The third frame showed Steve walking among hideously mutilated corpses, their guts spreading out, their unattached limbs randomly spread around the field where they lay. The fourth frame was a Vietcong soldier throwing a grenade. The fifth frame revealed who he was throwing the grenade at. It was Margaret and Joan, being blown to smithereens, along with their posters.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi Stolz. Even her name was ugly. It was a terrible word, ugly. Laide, the French, was kinder…sometimes her mother referred to someone as jolie laide, a woman whose looks were not conventional but still somehow appealing. Was Heidi Stolz appealing? It would be kind to call her a jolie laide, probably because of her eyes, which were unusually small, the color of olive pits. Their smallness and colorlessness was exaggerated by her dark, thick brows, which she took pride in not plucking, and her thin lashes, which even on the way out of school when makeup was allowed she would not enrich with mascara. She had a fine, high forehead, and distinguished cheekbones; her chin ended the reversed triangle of her face in a graceful end-stop. Her lips were full and well formed; they might have suggested generosity, but their perpetual position was a smirk, or, when she was distracted, an almost stupid slackness. She had a slight overbite, which Agnes imagined a certain kind of man, perhaps older, discriminating, might find sexy.

  She was, Agnes often thought, the one real rebel in the Lydia Farnsworth School. The ones who thought themselves rebels were really conforming to the spirit of the times, in which to be rebellious was to be fashionable, in the swim. A true original was never in the swim. A true original would be struggling against the tide, as Heidi was, and often the sight would not be pleasing, the strokes awkward, the swimmer choking and sputtering and rising up covered with flotsam and jetsam that might not always be easily lovely to behold. Jo and Christina loathed her, Jo because she had no time for anyone whose politics were not far to the left of Hubert Humphrey, and Christina because she distrusted anyone whose approach to the world suggested anything of hiddenness, anything not straightforward, anything indirect. “She reminds me of a coyote. She slinks around the corner—even if there isn’t a corner she makes one to slink around, she fixes those mean little eyes on you, and she’s ready to pounce if you make the slightest error. And the mother, oh my God, hasn’t she heard the Anita Ekberg look is out of style?”

  * * *

  —

  Christina was right about Heidi’s mother. She swanned into her parent-teacher conference in a black mink coat, her husband and Heidi trailing behind her like tugs behind an ocean liner. Her husband stood listlessly, waiting to take her coat. She didn’t sit at one of the student desks, as the other parents did, but, after looking around for a second, took Agnes’s chair, requiring that Agnes place herself alongside Heidi and her father, as if Liesel Stolz were, in fact, in charge. Which of course she was. She reached into her red leather clutch, took out a pack of cigarettes and a small gold box the size of two postage stamps. She put a cigarette to her lips and snapped her fingers. Heidi’s father jumped to his feet and lit the cigarette. Liesel Stolz opened the small gold box, and Agnes saw that its purpose was to collect the ashes from the cigarette. Liesel was wearing a heavy perfume, and the scent, mixed with the cigarette smoke in the small classroom (was smoking even allowed in the Lydia Farnsworth School…it was possible, Agnes thought, that no one had ever even attempted it), made Agnes feel dizzy and nauseated. She coughed, and brought her handkerchief to her lips.

  “Your daughter is very, very gifted. A pleasure to teach. I might even say a privilege. She has a real eye, a real sense of form and color, and a fine critical sense.”

  Liesel snorts. “Yeah, well, that and a dollar will buy her coffee and a donut.”

  Agnes is anguished for Heidi, but Heidi seems to be taking all this in stride, and this adds to Agnes’s sadness: She’s used to it, Agnes thinks, it’s all she knows of a mother.

  * * *

  —

  The following Monday, Heidi arrived early in class and said, “I’m sorry about my mother. I mean, the cigarettes, the perfume. Joy, she calls it. Her perfume. Supposed to be very expensive. But it literally makes me sick. I’m very sensitive to smells…I’m wondering if you are too.”

  Agnes was touched at Heidi’s observation.

  “Well, yes, I am, Heidi, and as my mother says…she’s sensitive to smells too…it’s not a blessing, it’s a curse, because bad smells are more disturbing than good smells are delightful. Not, oh, no, not that I mean to say that your mother smelled bad…I mean…”

  “Relax, Miss Vaughan, I know what you mean. It’s just another thing we have in common. L
ike on the ski trip when we realized we wore the same size shoes.”

  Agnes talked about Heidi and her mother to Letitia Barnes, the headmistress. “Yes,” Miss Barnes said. “Yes, I agree with you entirely. When I saw her with her parents, I could see that their eye never fell on her with…well, not only with love, but with pleasure in what they saw. I’ve seen a lot of parents looking at their children, and I know the difference between the look that feeds and the look that starves. There’s something pathetic in Heidi’s trumped-up vanity. Like the time she came in to tell me that she’d been admitted to Mensa, and I was actually embarrassed for her. I wanted to say, Mensa is just a moneymaking operation, no one who is really intelligent needs to join an organization that certifies their intelligence. But I didn’t want to take anything away from her; she seems to have so little. The very prototype of the poor little rich girl.”

  * * *

  —

  So Heidi Stolz was no one’s favorite. Was it vanity that inspired Agnes to take Heidi under her wing, to make the girl hers? It wasn’t supposed to happen, that teachers had favorites, but of course they did, it was part of the job, one of its dangers and its strengths—you saw the gifts of your students, saw which matched your own, and moved to cultivate them: watering here, pruning there, feeding, propping. It had not been easy to convince Heidi Stolz that Miss Vaughan was on her side, was singling her out for special recognition. Agnes asked Heidi to come speak to her after class after she had made her presentation on pop art.

  Agnes said, “It was a very fine job. You worked very hard on it; you did a great deal of real research.”

  “Is that your way of saying it’s not quite your thing?” Heidi said, with that look that made Agnes remember what Christina had said about Heidi and coyotes.

  “To be honest, it’s probably not ‘my thing,’ but I’m always interested in trying to find out about something not immediately congenial to me, and I always respect a well-considered opinion, even if it’s not my own. I’m impressed that you had the sophistication to be interested in a movement that’s not…well, usually accessible to people your age.”

  Agnes dislikes her own tone; she hears its falseness, its condescension. She hopes that Heidi takes of her words what can be of use…she is too aware of Heidi’s perceptiveness to imagine that she doesn’t pick up the unnaturalness of the tone…but perhaps she expects unnaturalness from her teachers. And so takes it as the norm.

  “I had a friend…she lived next door for a year…she was house-sitting for the people who really lived there…she was a RISD student, and we really got along. She was really into the pop art movement and she took me to some exhibits at RISD. She said all the best people in her class were working in this way, and…well, it just made sense.”

  “That was very lucky for you, making such a friend.”

  “I don’t really see her anymore. She moved to London.”

  Agnes saw the sorrow that Heidi was trying to conceal behind a look of nonchalance.

  “Well, perhaps you’ll go and visit her someday.”

  “No,” Heidi said, pulling on a ripped cuticle. “When people are gone, they’re gone.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Heidi. It hasn’t been my experience.”

  “But that’s just your experience.”

  Agnes felt chastened, but it was as if a child had slapped her, just to show she could.

  “You have to admit, Miss Vaughan. You have to admit, you have to admit the pop artists are onto something,” Heidi said, her eyes gimlets now, intent and, for the first time in Agnes’s experience, alive. “About the way we look at the world.”

  “That’s exactly what you helped me to see, and I’m grateful,” Agnes said.

  * * *

  AGNES TURNS SOUTH. She wouldn’t stop at the Forty-Second Street Library; last time she’d been there, she’d been disheartened by what had happened to her father’s sacred place. The surrounding park was full of drug dealers and derelicts; when she went into the building and looked around, at first it seemed itself, only a bit shabbier, but when she approached the great staircase she saw a person asleep in the phone booth—man or woman, she couldn’t tell—muffled in newspapers and giving off a stench of filth and misfortune. Had there been so many beggars when she came with her father? Only one had caused her to stop and drop coins into his hat. He was a young man, filthy but not unhealthy looking, sitting on a filthy blanket beside an equally filthy but equally healthy-looking dog. His sign said simply, “The dog comes first.”

  She would make one gesture in memory of the pleasant times with her father: she would stop for a bite to eat at Schrafft’s. The truth was, she didn’t know places to eat in New York, except for Schrafft’s and the Plaza, and Schrafft’s was, above all, a place of comfort and safety where nothing unexpected, including the menu, would even think of approaching.

  She orders what she had always ordered: a BLT and a Coke, for dessert a butterscotch sundae. The waitress is a version of all the waitresses at Schrafft’s, Irish, encouraging but not intrusive in her black uniform, with a white lace collar, which suggested that she was serving as one’s personal maid. Agnes takes out her copy of The New Yorker and turns to “The Talk of the Town,” which always makes her feel like a foreigner, or an orphan with her nose pressed up against the window of the candy store that was New York, a candy store full of confections whose names were unfamiliar to her but which, she was sure, if she got up the courage to taste them, would be delicious.

  Her sandwich is perfect and so is her butterscotch sundae. But the place itself seemed to have lost some sheen. Was it always peopled only by old ladies, brooding over creamed chicken and a too-early cocktail? She remembers thrillingly fashionable young women lunching here with stable but successful-looking dates; there isn’t a man in the place now, and she is the youngest woman in the room by thirty years. One of the black-and-white tiles on the floor is chipped.

  She has just enough time to make her way to ugly Penn Station. Her father was right; it was a monstrosity, no one would want to spend one extra moment there. She would use the Schrafft’s bathroom. She knew it was always clean; a dirty bathroom could plunge her into a hopeless state.

  After she washes her hands, combs her hair, and applies fresh lipstick, she looks around the ladies’ room; no one else is there. She stands in front of the full-length mirror and does something she would have been mortified for anyone to see. Something the moderately rebellious girls did on their way out of school: she rolls down the waistband of her skirt to make it shorter. She had taken seriously the salesman’s opinion that her boots would take on their full value with a greater proportion of visible leg. She walks up and down the small space; she turns looking over her shoulder at her reflection. And is pleased.

  The heavy door opens. A woman in a peach-colored suit with a fur collar, a hat of a darker peach, maybe it was apricot, in the shape of a crescent moon. The woman looks her up and down; Agnes is sure she notices the rolled-up waistband. She looks contemptuously at Agnes’s raincoat, flung carelessly on the counter near the sink. Her back as she approaches the toilet is full of reproach, and Agnes knows that she deserves it. But it’s her father’s voice she hears.

  Ridiculous, she hears him say. You’ve made yourself ridiculous.

  * * *

  —

  She runs up the stairs to her table—she’s left a bit of her Coke and would like to finish it; shame has turned her whole body hot, she’s sure that her face is flushed. It’s another thing she dislikes about herself, how prone she is to blushing.

  She pays her check and walks outside. All the well-being that had been hers before she entered Schrafft’s is gone now. She is only one thing: ridiculous. What made her think that buying those boots was the right thing, that they had anything to do with who she was, with how she lived? They weren’t for her; they were for the young mother with her
baby in the peace-symbol pouch, for someone freer, more at ease with the attention boots like that would inevitably bring. She thinks of all the beggars on the street; perhaps she would take the boots off on the sidewalk and give them to some poor wreck of a woman, who would be delighted with a gift from the usually begrudging gods.

  And then it comes to her: there is something she could do that would make sense of the whole enterprise, that would make it not ridiculous but an opportunity for real good.

  She would give them to Heidi Stolz. She remembers that they wear the same size shoe, because Heidi had remarked on that, with a childish simplicity that touched Agnes because it was so unlike her usual cutting slashes.

  What Heidi needed was to know that she was regarded with favor, was thought about, considered, singled out.

  * * *

  —

  There is no one sitting beside Agnes on the train. She takes off the boots and places them in their box. She puts on her sensible black low-heeled pumps.

  Her father is waiting for her at the station. He had said to be sure she called him as she was leaving New York; he didn’t like her driving herself in the dark. It would make her mother a nervous wreck.