Payback

by Mary Gordon

  Longman always seemed surprised to see her, although she always called first to make an appointment. He knew Agnes was checking up on him; he knew she believed he wasn’t doing his job. His response to her was made up of equal parts of defensiveness, contempt, and condescension.

  “What I’ve learned, Miss Vaughan, and you may come to learn it too, is that someone who doesn’t want to be found…well, you’ll probably never find them. It’s harder with someone that age. She doesn’t have a credit card, even a Social Security number. Usually you’d start with friends, but she doesn’t seem to have had any. And you people at the school don’t seem to have a clue.”

  “I think she’s probably in New York,” Agnes had said, and he snorted, “Well, that narrows it down,” enjoying his own wit so much that his laughter ended in a sickly coughing spasm. “New York, New York. Needle. Haystackville. Drug dens…abandoned apartments this kind of kid might find her way to…where would you even begin.”

  “And where did you begin?” Agnes had asked him, taking a bitter pleasure in her unaccustomed rudeness.

  “I made some calls…I went to that neighborhood where they all are. You know, near the Chelsea Hotel, and I showed her picture around…I asked about her…I went to cafés and bars and luncheonettes…no one had heard of her. I have to say no one really cared that much. I left some of my cards around. I did a lot of things you wouldn’t understand. I walked the leather off a good pair of new shoes.”

  She didn’t believe him; she knew she had to look for herself. She didn’t take the sleeping pills Dr. Boyle had prescribed because she wanted to be as wakeful as possible for as many hours of the day as she could. She stayed at her mother’s friend Frances’s apartment. Frances was impatient with her, but she didn’t care. She walked around Chelsea, the Village, the Lower East Side; she printed photos of Heidi from the yearbook. She walked and walked and when she took her stockings off at night they stuck to the blisters on her feet, there was blood inside her shoes, her hands and arms were bloody from scratching. And always inside her head was a buzzing, the whining of a mosquito or a gnat, the words…Your fault…all your fault. No peace, no respite, only the sense that she had to be doing something because no one was really doing anything.

  Three weeks after Heidi disappeared, Agnes wrote Roger, calling off the engagement, but he was in so remote a part of Iraq that the letter didn’t reach him for two months, and when he finally called, it was too late. She was another person, a person he hadn’t known, and she had to force herself to be polite to him, not to be impatient with what seemed to her an egregious lack of comprehension.

  Just after she spoke to Roger, she turned in her resignation to Letitia Barnes.

  “I consider this unwise,” Miss Barnes had said, her diction the oral equivalent of copperplate.

  “I’m not fit to be teaching young people,” Agnes had said.

  “I believe you are quite wrong. You are a very gifted teacher.”

  “If Heidi Stolz is dead, it’s my fault.”

  Agnes knew she sounded brutal, but she wanted to shock Letitia Barnes into admitting the enormity of what had happened.

  Miss Barnes put her hand to the lace at her throat. “You have no reason to think she’s dead. You don’t even know that what the girl said really happened. She’s quite a fabulator. She claimed she was an only child, whereas in fact she’s one of three. She is absolutely starved for attention. That kind of appetite can never ever be satisfied.”

  Hearing those words, Agnes hated Letitia Barnes, and they never spoke again. For years, she had loved Miss Barnes, looked up to her, and with one sentence, it was wiped away. She must be dead now, Agnes thinks, and the whole way of life she represented is dead too. She regrets not having gone to see her again, regrets not having said some sort of goodbye; now she can mourn Letitia Barnes, although it is too late; her mourning does no good.

  * * *

  —

  She’s often wondered what would have happened to her if Frances hadn’t come up with the idea of sending her to Jasper…Jasper, who had always hung in the air above Frances and her mother’s heads whenever they met, for they never met without speaking of him, incandescent, fantastical: Jasper, the third of the glittering triangle—two Mount Holyoke girls, an Amherst boy, inseparable, delighted in each other’s company…a throwback to some girl’s novel of college life. He disappeared romantically from their American lives, relocating to Rome, where he worked as a restorer of paintings…they didn’t know what kind of paintings, only that his clients were rich and he didn’t admire most of what he saved. Jasper—the more alluring for being faceless, for Frances and Agnes’s mother often regretted that they had no picture of him. Agnes had never met him; he had only come to America when Agnes was an infant and he served as godfather. She knew him only as the provider of magic gifts for birthdays and Christmases—a doll dressed as a Neapolitan peasant, a music box with a view of a volcano that played “Santa Lucia,” a toy gondola with oars the color of red lipstick, and a gondolier with a striped shirt and an elaborate hat. For her eighteenth birthday: a cameo that had belonged to his mother. For her college graduation, a Pontormo drawing.

  She had never believed that it was only a happy accident that Frances reported that Jasper was desperate—she showed Agnes the letter—“I am in desperate need of a cultivated young person who can organize the chaos that is my life.”

  But Agnes didn’t question; she was desperate to get away, away from anyone and anything who could remind her of Heidi—and she was so entirely deflated that she couldn’t begin to make a plan for herself.

  “When you see him, you won’t entirely believe him,” Frances had said. It would have been easy to write him off as absurd, his unruly hair, sticking straight up, as if he’d been permanently startled or electrocuted, his muttonchops, his watch on a watch fob, his three-piece English tweed suit. All his clothes, even the most casual, looked as if they had originally belonged to a much larger man who’d lost a great deal of weight, although Frances and Agnes’s mother assured her that he’d always been “Falstaffian in girth.” His teeth were large and square and a bit yellowish—he smoked a pipe—and his lips were surprisingly youthful, full and red, surprisingly healthy looking, because he gave the impression of a lifetime of unwise eating, an entirely indoors existence. When he was alone, walking from room to room, he often seemed to be conducting an invisible orchestra. He enjoyed saying that there was no place for him in the twentieth century, and his entertainments seemed to come from another age: sherry parties, afternoon teas, musical evenings. Often when you were with him you felt like you’d walked into some costume drama, perhaps a local production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

  That first day, when he answered the door, he stood for a moment and then said, “So here you are, then,” which she would learn was his customary greeting. But she felt it had been perfectly designed for her, and his words gave her such a sense of safety, of repose, that she had to hold herself back from falling into his arms.

  “You must put yourself entirely in my hands…no one knows Rome as I do, not even Romans,” he said. Later, knowing him better, she thought that she must have been a trial for him in those first weeks, when she was nearly mute and covered with unsightly red blotches. He did all the talking at meals; what he said was always interesting but required no response.

  “There is only one rule for guests of my establishment,” he had said. “You must see one beautiful thing every day and tell me about it at dinner.

  “I’ve arranged some things so that your days won’t be quite empty,” he had said. Every morning they bought the day’s fruit from the market. He arranged for daily Italian lessons with the impoverished countess, who, he had said, fled an unhappy marriage by night with only the clothes on her back and her little dog. Agnes never knew whether or not his descriptions of people were true, but she always chose to believe them. The co
ntessa was a demanding teacher, and it was a relief to swim in the temperate lagoon of verb tenses and noun-adjective agreements in her company. She insisted that Agnes also read newspapers and fashion magazines so she would have an up-to-date vocabulary.

  Jasper would leave for his studio, which was a few streets down the Viale Trastevere on the Lungaretta, they would lunch, Jasper would nap, and then they would walk, avoiding the famous great sights in favor of cloisters and chapels and private parks that tourists rarely visited.

  And then she would accompany him to his studio, where he and two assistants restored paintings…it was rich with the smell of turpentine; the windows were high and let in enough light to make the paintings’ imperfections all too visible. Sometimes Jasper seemed charmed by something he was working on, but often he would say—and she didn’t know whether his regret was real or put on for her benefit—that once, just once, he would like to feel he had restored something great. “But there’s not nearly so much money in greatness as there is in flattering the vanity of the aristocracy, or, more important, the newly rich.”

  He was right about the details of his records being in chaos. She began to realize that it was the result of his reluctance actually to charge people for his work. In one corner of the studio was an old roll-top desk; it was overflowing with bills and invoices. The task of creating order for Jasper—whose kindness made her feel the only brightness she had known since the night Heidi had run off—was the perfect occupation for her. Because she knew it troubled him—the disorder of that desk. Everything in the apartment was perfectly chosen and properly placed. Hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the living room was a polychrome wooden angel from the fourteenth century; one wall of the room was a display of antique keys, another a series of Piranesi etchings. The rugs had come from his family in Delaware. He was an only child, and his parents had died young. He was vague about their deaths. “Let us just say that they conform to my favorite writer—E. M. Forster’s—idea of plot. The king died and the queen died of grief.” He was indulgent to Maria Rosa, who cooked and cleaned for him, but he could fly into a rage if she put the toilet paper on in the wrong direction. “It must be pulled down, not over.” Sometimes when he was bored, he would straighten the towels in the bathroom so that they were exactly level.

  It was such an orderly abode that the jarring note (his disorderly desk was kept in exile in the studio) was even more jarring to Agnes than it might have been in a home that had anything in it of the ramshackle. Regularly, he brought home boys. Agnes was mortified trying to decide how to place herself when she heard them at the dining room table. She would hide in her room, afraid even to walk into the bathroom. She dreaded embarrassing him. But he was not embarrassed. One day he said simply, “There is no need for you to tunnel into your wardrobe, like some abashed mole. There is no need for you to hide. I have nothing to hide. It is all quite simple. They want money and I want sex. Often, there is fondness between us. Sometimes misunderstandings that more money usually smooths out. You needn’t join us for chitchat if it makes you uncomfortable, but you can if you like. Sometimes they are quite amusing, and they are always lovely.”

  She never joined them, and she never quite understood. Paying for sex. Prostitution, that ugly word, suggesting nothing of pleasure and everything of tinctured commerce. And Jasper, at fifty, seemed to her too old for that sort of thing; she was twenty-four and most of the boys were younger than she.

  She disappointed her parents by saying she didn’t want to go home for Christmas; she wanted time away from anything that might remind her of Heidi; there were whole days in Rome when Agnes didn’t think of her.

  “Oh, dearie me,” her mother had said with a sharp intake of breath when she told them she wasn’t coming, but her father quickly insisted, “Then we shall come to you.”

  It was an uncomfortable visit. Agnes’s father was at his worst, his most stiff backed, his most puritanical. He found Jasper’s way of life appalling—and he didn’t even know about the boys. When he discovered that Jasper didn’t take a newspaper, his face got very red and he clenched his hands into fists. It didn’t help when Jasper said, “I deliberately don’t take any newspaper and when I happen to lay hands on one, in a café, for instance, I put it down instantly, as if I’d stopped myself biting into a particularly nasty confection, artificially colored. I keep myself from politics because I want to be able to invite all sorts of people to my home: it is often the case that people who are fascists at heart have marvelous things in their homes to look at, dress well, and are wonderfully witty. And the same thing is true of the most militant communists. It’s better not to know.”

  She saw that her father was enraged. It was a relief to everyone when he left the apartment in search of a newspaper. She saw her mother brushing her father’s bad mood away, like buzzing flies that you resented because they made you go inside on an otherwise beautiful day, spoiling the perfect picnic.

  Guiltily, she and Jasper admitted that it was a relief when they were gone: “We’ve become quite the settled couple, I suppose.” When Christina and Jo came in the spring, it wasn’t a success either. Jasper liked young women to be quiet and decorous; it wasn’t difficult for Agnes to fit the bill. But in different ways, Christina and Jo did not. Christina seemed to have brought with her only overalls and what looked like the tops of men’s long underwear. And Jasper’s adamant refusal of political consciousness bothered Jo, in a different way from Agnes’s father. She insisted on trying to engage him in conversations about the Red Brigades, kept asking if he knew anyone who was involved, or knew where there were bookstores that could give her access to the kind of literature about the Italian situation that she couldn’t get in America. “Oh, my dear, I’m sure I don’t know…it’s not the sort of thing people in my circle would have a purchase on.” Agnes wished he hadn’t used the words “have a purchase on,” she saw the look on Jo’s face—the kind of look, she thought, that Savonarola must have had when a bejeweled lady crossed his path—but Jo had good manners. And she could see that Agnes had been in terrible shape and was better and that was because of Jasper. Jasper was a tough sell for anyone whose only terms were ethical. He and Jo would never be at ease with each other.

  “I understand exactly,” Agnes said to her friend. “And yet I have never known anyone to do more good.”

  “I see that, I do,” Jo had said. “But it’s a tough one.”

  Christina said of him, “I feel like I’m an animal who’s wandered onto entirely alien terrain, but the food is succulent and we just inhabit our separate lairs. And besides, the strange creature that he is, he’s healing you…I can see you’re healing. Take it from me; I’m in med school now.”

  When Christina said that, Agnes began to understand that something was happening to her, something was changing, and healing was as good a name for it as any. It was impossible for her to point to a time when the healing had begun. She knew it had to have been a gradual thing, but when Christina said those words, she realized that she was better, but she had no idea how it had happened or what the turning point had been. It was, she thought, like one of those experiments she’d been fascinated with as a child: someone lifts a calf who gains a few ounces every day until one day the calf is simply too heavy to be lifted. Healing, she thought, was something like that, only in the opposite direction.

  The second year she was in Rome, Jasper invited “a few hundred of my closest friends, well, my dear, thirty,” for an “American Thanksgiving.” He cooked a turkey and sweet potatoes and creamed onions, to the horror of Maria Rosa, who called him a savage and held her nose when she wrapped the leftovers, saying that only savages would eat such food.

  He decorated the table with pumpkins and Indian corn—he was vague about where he’d gotten them and Agnes didn’t want to press—and there seemed to be no unifying principle behind the people at the table: at-large ex-pats, distinguished ladies in reduced circum
stances, wealthy clients.

  It was only when Jasper toasted America and said we must all think of something we were thankful for but by no means say it aloud that Agnes realized how much better she was. That Christina had been right; she had been healed by something as the calendula ointment that Maria Rosa had brought back from her village in Umbria had cured her eczema. That she no longer woke every morning thinking of Heidi; no longer went to sleep with Heidi’s face behind her eyes; she dreamed of her much less frequently, and the dreams were sometimes merely neutral.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T until the following June when Jo and Christina were visiting that Agnes first paid attention to Pietro di Martini.

  Looking out the bus window, she twists her wedding ring around her finger. It is hardly possible to believe that there was a time when the words my husband did not apply to him.

  He was there for one of Jasper’s musical evenings; he was part of Jasper’s string quartet. Jasper’s quartet was made up of his dentist and an ex-priest, who played violin; Jasper on viola—the instrument, he liked to say, of the dim-witted; Pietro, the cellist, sold Jasper his tobacco from an elegant shop on the Via dei Coronari.