Payback

by Mary Gordon

  And then, sixteen months after the miscarriage, her period was late. Then later. Without saying it to each other, she and Pietro had both given up hope. The doctor confirmed that she was pregnant, a healthy pregnancy. After five months, one day spotting, she rushed to the doctor, who ordered her to stay in bed. “You have what is called an ‘incompetent cervix,’ ” she said. “We could do an operation to stitch it up, but that too has risks. So we will keep you in bed and hope for the best.”

  Agnes resented the use of the word incompetent, with its suggestion of carelessness or stupidity.

  It was summer, and everyone flocked to keep her distracted. They didn’t know that what she needed distraction from was not only the fear of losing the baby, but the sense that somehow, from a distance, Heidi was making this happen, or some just god acting on Heidi’s part. Her parents came and stayed for a week; Jo came alone, and was tactful enough not to bring the children, and Christina arrived with a friend in tow; to Agnes’s astonishment it was Jeanne Larkin. Christina was in medical school; Jeanne Larkin, now a graduate student in physiology, was her teaching assistant. It became obvious that they were lovers. She was surprised that Christina was a lesbian; Agnes wondered whether she had always known and hadn’t told her friends, or if it had come on her by surprise. And she worried that if she appeared overeager or overpleased Christina would read it as uneasiness, so she didn’t speak about the subject until Christina said, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t you want to know the gory details, which are not gory at all? We’re very happy, of course.”

  Jasper was not surprised. “Darling, I could have told you years ago…but mum’s the word, I always say.”

  Pietro’s family brought food and sweets and books and puzzles; his nephew hooked up the television so that she could see it comfortably from her bed; his sister washed her hair and provided an endless supply of frivolous nightgowns. Pietro read to her in Italian, in English…they read Proust together in French. He and Jasper played duets for her, but she was restless; terrified that because of one false move she made, her body would fail her again.

  Then it was December, the magic date: she could deliver any time now and the baby would not be considered premature. Her due date arrived and passed. Her doctor urged her to deliver before Christmas so she would not be away. And the hospital staff not be denuded.

  And so, on December 16, when the pains began, Pietro paced like a caricature of an expectant father and his brother came in the car that all the brothers shared. Then, after only three hours and what seemed like an endless series of pushes, the words, bambina, bella bambina. And her child was in her arms.

  A tide crashed over her, wave after wave, of marvel, gratitude, past thought, past language, tears poured out, and she lay in a pool of tears and sweat, almost terrified to hold the little one, because her desire was to enfold her child completely, perhaps to take her back into her own body…did she really have to share her with the world? Pietro came into the darkened room. They hadn’t settled on a name, fearing to tempt fortune and not knowing the child’s sex…agreed that the child not be named for anyone in either of their families, for fear of giving offense to anyone not chosen…and although she assured Pietro that offense could not be taken by her parents, this was a category of behavior in which he could not believe. The name could be neither Italian nor English; they had no appetite for the Germanic, the French and Spanish were too near Italian; they settled on an Irish name, since they both liked the Irish and neither had a drop of Irish blood. Maeve. Maeve di Martini. An alliteration prevented by two innocent letters, always lower case. Many Italians simply could not pronounce the name; incomprehensible to them that a word would end with a consonant sound. For many of them, she was Mahvee.

  * * *

  THE BUS STOPS at the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. The street of the dark shops. Jasper had bound volumes of a literary journal called Botteghe Oscure, one of the jewels of ’50s Rome…there were so many things like those bound volumes whose fate it seemed excruciating to preside on. The past. The relics of the past.

  It’s almost impossible, she thinks, at moments such as this, a major leave-taking, a transition to a new life, not to look back on your life and look for analogies, or similes: my life was like this, my life was like that. The happy years when her life seemed a string of brightly colored beads, the precious, the ordinary, all together, each taking their place. Or to think of your life as one of those pie charts that, when you were in grade school, explained the percentage of manufactured goods or the growth of population. One wedge: the life before the incident with Heidi, then the dark time separating it from the fogged-out period, then the time of her Roman healing, the beginnings of life with Pietro. And after that—is it true, she wonders, of all parents who adore their children—wedges marked to correspond to the stage of the child’s life. The wedge marked Maeve’s birth to age six would be, if she had to color in the chart, and those charts were always colored, a sunny yellow. The time when she rarely thought of Heidi—except in nightmares, where Heidi would demand Maeve, and Agnes would, feeling she had no choice, relinquish her, or those moments when some accident of the body brought Heidi to mind: meeting a friend of Pietro’s whose palms were damp as Heidi Stolz’s palms were always damp. When she thought of Heidi, she prayed for her, although she thought it was likely that there was no God. But she believed in the Madonna, somehow protective, somehow looking out for everyone, and when she was in a church—not to pray, but to look at something beautiful, which made her feel like an intruder when she walked past old women fingering their beads and mumbling incomprehensibly—and saw an image of a tender-seeming Madonna, she would light a candle in front of it and pray…Let her be safe.

  * * *

  —

  She’d loved being the mother of a young child. It wasn’t isolating, as it would have been had she been in America, she wasn’t just the mother of a young child; she was the mother of a young child in Rome, where a baby’s father could kiss and croon at her with no self-consciousness, where everyone on the street could join in their adoration, like the shepherds at the Christmas manger, where an endless series of arms and laps would be not only available but longing to be of use.

  Maeve was an easy baby, then an easy child. Mother and child—they were each other’s favorite person; no other company measured up. It was the purest pleasure for Agnes to walk the beautiful city pushing her beautiful baby in her stroller. She always felt a fool saying anything about Rome because so much has been said, but silently, she allowed herself to share with Maeve the most extravagant similes as she walked the streets: a baby in a stroller would never criticize you for saying, “Today the sky is the color of blue grapes, today the sky is the color of a peacock’s head.”

  The fountains never ceased to lift her heart, the plash (no one ever uses the word plash for anything but fountains, she often thought, and it was a perfect word for that sound); every corner you turned brought the eye some joy: the light on a building, the white of the marble, the vines climbing the cracked walls, the moss untidy on the ancient heads or limbs.

  She was lucky that Maeve didn’t mind being in a stroller till she was three, so for those years she could walk and walk with her, long, extravagant walks, some would say ridiculous, walking across the river from Trastevere, heading to Pietro’s shop on the Via dei Coronari, her daughter’s playroom, her private gallery, the place where Maeve was petted, treasured…there was a separate corner of the back office where a child-sized table had been set up for her…the finest paper, French crayons, pastel chalks…coloring books from around the world, and Maeve knew no other child would ever touch them. Lunch with her father in the trattoria where he lunched every day, carried like a princess, told to ask for whatever food she wants and it will be prepared for her. Che desidera, Mahvee, what do you desire, Maeve: that promise that any desire can and will be immediately fulfilled.

  Then down the Corso, averting
her eyes so she didn’t have to see the sturdy or elegant shops turned into outposts for the cheapest American consumer junk. A quick peek into some church with its singular masterpiece…the steep climb up the Pincio (a challenge with a stroller) to the Villa Borghese, park of princes, the pocked busts flanking the paths, the identity of the heads she never learned though she always told herself she would, pleasant conversations with other mothers whom she wouldn’t see from one day to the next for months on end, so they could speak lightly and without fear of offense. The kind of conversation, the kind of relationship, that made her glad to be living in a large city.

  She still worked for Jasper three afternoons a week: there were times she could use her brain without leaving Maeve, who played on the floor beside her mother’s desk, Jasper providing scraps of fabric, spools, paper, scissors…and the young assistants who were happy to take a break and play with the lovely child.

  And then Maeve started school at five. Jasper, who always looked at Agnes closely, said, “You’re always complaining of being tired, darling, and you never were when you had too much to do. Now you have too little, and it’s bad for the complexion.”

  She knew he was right: she knew she was living her days stupidly, that it was taking much too long to do the ordinary things; she spent far too much time making the bed; she started experimenting with makeup and moving the furniture around.

  “It’s time for you to engage your mind, your very good eye, more actively. I want to train you as I’ve been trained; time for you to learn the nitty-gritty of restoration. I can imagine what the gritty is…but the nitty—does one have to conjure little baby lice?”

  And so he began to teach her what he called “the exacting and in some way housewifely art of restoration.”

  “Always remember,” he said, “that ours is a dangerous profession. Capable of doing irreparable damage. The most important quality for a restorer is humility. And never forget that the picture you are restoring is not yours, it has, really, nothing to do with you, with your tastes, your standards. You have to make yourself disappear; you are the servant of an object.”

  She and Jasper could share the satisfactions—impossible to convey to anyone who hadn’t had the experience of getting exactly the right tonality of a belt buckle, a leaf, a fingernail, the moustache of a nineteenth-century nobleman. She learned that his deprecation of the work he did was just a kind of placating of the gods; he did have to do his share of fifth-rate portraits of ancestors and their dogs, but more often what he restored had the appeal of all well-made things, and many had a sense of a place. But she had to silence in herself the idea that there was an inherent unseriousness, perhaps even frivolity, in their work.

  * * *

  THE BUS MAKES a special stop for a boy in a wheelchair, accompanied by a man Agnes imagines is his grandfather. The driver gets out to help the boy; he arranges the mechanism that will clamp the wheelchair safely, the passengers move aside with a graciousness that she can’t imagine in America. The boy’s body is twisted, folding in on itself; his face is contorted in what Agnes imagines is a perpetual grimace.

  I have been lucky, I have been spared terrible physical afflictions, she thinks, as she always does seeing someone disabled. She wishes she could do what Donatella, her cleaner for thirty years, does when she sees a tragic case like this one: she crosses herself, she prays for the afflicted one. But those are not gestures Agnes could take on as her own. She cannot even address her gratitude to any being she can imagine possessing a listening ear.

  She is most particularly grateful for what she thinks of as her ten shockproof years. The years spanning Maeve’s birth to her tenth birthday. Maeve grew and prospered; Agnes was happy in her work with Jasper, although sometimes she felt a certain laxity to her days, and her work with Jasper, though absorbing, seemed sometimes distressingly frivolous. She was happy in her marriage…not the greatness of a great passion but the pleasure of a shared life…grateful for being part of the di Martini family, spared the cliché of conflict with her mother-in-law; she and Signora di Martini—she could never call her by her first name or—unthinkable—Mama—shared a love of quiet that seemed to escape everyone else in the family. One summer afternoon in the house on the lake when Agnes had stayed home from the beach to help her mother-in-law restore the house from the morning’s chaos, Signora di Martini said to her, “You are like our lake, smooth, cool on the surface, but not chilling, no, the springs are warm, and underneath many variations, many surprises perhaps, none of them dangerous, if you would look for them, but my son would not be one who would do that sort of looking. None of my children would.”

  Then the shockproof years were over; time took its toll. When Maeve was ten, Agnes’s father had a slight heart attack, and he informed everyone that he would never cross the ocean again. She could no longer refuse to travel; there was no way any longer to avoid her fear of running into Heidi—even of someone mentioning Heidi, or her family…or her fate. Occasionally she would realize that, in Rome, anywhere in Italy, she thought of Heidi much less frequently than she would ever have believed possible. But in Rhode Island, she would always be looking over her shoulder, listening for the sound of the voice she could hardly remember but knew she would instantly recognize.

  Pietro had never been able to understand why she was reluctant to visit her parents in the place where she was born. Their visits to Rome were clearly unsatisfactory; her mother abandoned her father for Jasper and her father wandered, abashed as a cuckold, gripping his guidebook and binoculars with a heroic resolve and a martyred look.

  She had never told Pietro about Heidi and none of the Italians she met asked her about her past. She was grateful to be in Italy, where privacy was treasured. She learned that in Italian, there is no word for privacy. She came to understand that although so much of Italian life was lived in the open there was a deep impulse to secrecy, to secretiveness, that all Italians shared.

  The American summers: she believed that America had stolen her daughter from her. She could see Maeve taking on a new liveliness, a liveliness she disliked herself for being unable to enjoy. Agnes felt her daughter move away from her, a necessary separation, she kept telling herself, a proper one: nevertheless, a loss. Before the American summers, she had taken unadulterated pleasure in being Maeve’s mother, she and Pietro were proud, happy parents, delighted with their child: her acute social conscience, her hours looking at and classifying rocks, her taking samples of her parents’ blood and saliva to examine under the microscope they bought her for her eleventh birthday. Pietro, being Italian, had no impulse to curb what Agnes feared might be thought of as bragging, fearing punishment from some northern god who looked askance on a parent’s pride and pleasure. Neither Agnes nor Pietro had any aptitude for math, and they found it remarkable to watch their child snapping up the math prizes, making her way to the stage when her name was called, skittish and shy like a colt jumping its first fences. It was strange for Agnes to see her daughter doing something she could never have done, excelling at something she would never even attempt. She couldn’t imagine what was going on in her daughter’s mind as she sat in front of papers filled with numbers that made her mother’s head swim. She had never liked thinking about things that she couldn’t touch or that were—the stars, the planets—so far away and so numerous that they made ordinary human life seem like nothing.

  * * *

  THE BUS STOPS at Teatro di Marcello and a mother and daughter make their way to the seat across from Agnes. The daughter, nine or ten, Agnes guesses, is dressed for school in black running pants, a white stripe up the side, a fleece jacket, aquamarine. The mother is dressed for work in a navy pinstripe suit, black stockings, patent leather pumps. The daughter’s hair is French-braided—Oh, I know how long that takes, Agnes wants to tell the mother, and the pleasure of it. The daughter unhooks her backpack and without even asking plops it in her mother’s lap. She yawns, stretches, lays her hea
d on her mother’s shoulder, and closes her eyes to sleep.

  Enjoy it now, she wants to tell the mother, it will be over before you know it.

  She remembers the years when she believed her daughter hated her.

  When Maeve decided that her mother was someone whose presence was an irritation, an annoyance, someone to be avoided whenever possible, endured at best, when Maeve’s catalog of gestures consisted entirely of eye rolls and exasperated cluckings…which Agnes was not sure were preferable to overt insults. The sweet water of Maeve’s need for her mother evaporated, replaced by some astringent gel, ice-cold and biting.

  She remembers—with a pang that reminds her that it will be a long time till she sees Giulietta again—her sister-in-law, who had had three daughters, saying to her, “With these girls it is death by a thousand cuts. But you must believe me. It will be over in a decade or so.”

  A decade or so! Agnes had heard that with a sinking heart. But Giulietta had been right. It is difficult to remember that the present Maeve, competent, compassionate, solicitous of her mother, was the brash girl who could devastate her mother with a quick curl of her lip. At one point, Agnes understood that Maeve found her mother’s physical existence revolting; she insisted on doing her laundry separately from her parents’, but then Agnes understood that it wasn’t Pietro’s dirty clothes that were the problem, because occasionally Maeve would say, “I’m doing a load of laundry, Papa, can I put in anything of yours?” Once Agnes saw Maeve moving her mother’s toothbrush far from hers, as if even that proximity was a contamination; she held the toothbrush between her thumb and index finger as if it were a filthy specimen.