Payback

by Mary Gordon

  One day, Maeve asked if she could go to boarding school in America and Agnes said no. Maeve shouted, “I hate you. I just hate you.” Pietro took her by the shoulders and, looking straight in her eyes, said, “You may not speak to my wife that way.” Maeve, in her turn, was so shocked that her father would refer to Agnes, not as her mother, but as his wife, that she burst into tears, threw herself into her mother’s arms, and said, “Please, let me sit in your lap.”

  Over and over Maeve said that she hated living in Italy, she wanted to be in America. “I live for my summers,” she said, and she burst into tears when Pietro made fun of her dramatic diction, throwing his arms over his head and singing, “I live for my summers.”

  Agnes had to understand that not only did Maeve prefer America to Italy, but that when they were in Rhode Island, she preferred Agnes’s father to Agnes’s mother. To everyone’s surprise he had fully embraced the role of invalid, or, as Agnes’s mother said, “valudetarianism.” The vigorous, demanding juggernaut assumed an identity that seemed both willed and archaic: wandering around the house in slippers, a scarf around his neck in all seasons.

  It was only Maeve’s urging him to accompany her into the woods that released him from the constancy of his role. He dusted off the binoculars he’d bought for himself in college and hadn’t used since Agnes had failed him as a birding partner. She’d tried pathetically hard, but she could never see what her father had just finished seeing and he grew impatient with her…look, for God’s sake…where…just there…just there.

  Christina and Jeanne Larkin were living together and Maeve discovered that Jeanne too was a birder, and so she, Jeanne, and Agnes’s father became inseparable. They made no effort to mask their disinterest in non-naturalists. Once when Agnes was carrying four bags of groceries into the house, not one of them lifted their heads from the specimens they were pasting into the expensive notebooks her father had bought Maeve to help Agnes.

  It was shaming what she felt that summer, and, thirty years later, leaving her Roman life, the shame is still fresh. Shaming to admit that you felt abandoned by a twelve-year-old, jealous of your father and your former student. But she was gripped by jealousy, an emotion she’d never known. There was almost no ease between her and Maeve that summer, and, like the wife whose fidelity is scorned in favor of the mistress’s novelties, she hung, abject in the background, waiting for a kind word, an approving glance.

  Only when they were swimming did their old ease return.

  Despite her devotion to birding and collecting specimens of leaves and lichen and moss, Maeve looked forward to her daily swim. There, Agnes was in the ascendant. Her father had grown fearful of swimming and Jeanne Larkin couldn’t swim. She said she’d never been able to learn although she’d been given countless lessons. Christina said, with a pride that to Agnes’s unease smacked of the maternal, “It’s because she doesn’t have an ounce of body fat,” and Jeanne, who had a tendency to be literal minded, said, “No one can have not an ounce of body fat. It’s that my ratio is quite small.”

  For a change, Maeve seemed happy in her mother’s company, scrambling over the rocks to get to the pond, diving in, the first slow paddles, the first dreamy strokes…which never lasted long. Soon she called out, “Race you, Mom.”

  She had always let Maeve win. Until the day she decided she would not, that she wanted Maeve to know that she, the child, could not always have the whip hand, the child’s whip hand that always had the luxury of withholding love, attention, favor.

  Agnes swam ahead of Maeve, as fast as she could, and kept swimming, feeling herself propelled by some unkind fuel. She didn’t stop to see how far from her daughter she’d gone. And then, she looked back.

  She saw Maeve sitting on the rocks, alone, shivering in her towel. She swam back, much faster even than she had swum away; she clambered up the rocks so quickly that she skinned her knees. She chafed Maeve’s cold body with her dry towel and wrapped herself in Maeve’s wet one and asked herself if she was capable at all of love. Maeve was the person in the world she most loved and yet she had wanted to make her feel bad. She had wanted to assert her own power at her daughter’s expense.

  She believed that her life was taking on a tinge of the perverse.

  * * *

  WITH THAT PRICKING of the ears that accompanies, always, for her, the sound of English words folded into Italian, like sharp rocks sticking up in a silver stream, she hears the woman in the seat behind her saying, “C’è un perfect storm.”

  She is trying to remember when the phrase “the perfect storm” came into common usage. It was sometime in the ’90s, she thinks, a book and then a movie about a shipwreck. Did Italians use it? She hasn’t heard it…perhaps it’s a vision most Italians would prefer not to incorporate into daily life.

  There’s no phrase, she thinks, for what would be the opposite of the perfect storm, a fortunate coming-together of events that enables, not disaster, but great good fortune.

  Chance, or you might call it accident or fate, she didn’t know which…chance seemed too frivolous, fate too portentous, accident suggested carelessness or a lapse of attention. If you were religious you might call it grace, but that was wrong too, because of what it might imply about a being who cared anything about a particular human life.

  So the accident, the fate, the luck, the grace of her finding life’s work restoring polychrome wooden sculptures. She’d given up, trying to find the right word for it. Only not given up the gratitude that made her wish that there was, in her life, a prayable being to whom she could render thanks.

  A whole way of life, a way of living, a métier, a mestiere, floods her now, bobbing up in fragments. In restauro. Restoration. She wonders why a work life should come back to her in fragments only, not in stories with a clear beginning, a hard-to-trace middle, a definable end.

  Because there was no form for it, there were no romances honoring a life of work, no chronicles, no ancient epics. And there were not enough words for all the different loves. The common loves, the love of man and woman, of parent and child, of God, of country, had exhausted the word love so that too often it didn’t fit, like a wineskin that had stretched or shrunk, and had no real relation to what it was meant to hold. The love of work: the wind at your back each morning propelling you from your bed, reassuring you that it made a difference whether you lived or died, whether you were well or sick, your presence was required, and invested with a meaning. It must be common, she often thought, this kind of love, you could see it when people were one with their work; her butcher had it, and Roberto, who sold her cheese; welders had it, and seamstresses, and sailors, and the women who polished the brasses on church altars and the men who fixed their shoes.

  One night Benedetto Fedele, a guest at one of Jasper’s musical evenings, wrung his hands (she would learn that he would literally wring his hands at the first sign of difficulty): his assistant was leaving because she’d gotten pregnant and didn’t want to be exposed to what might be dangerous chemicals. More hand wringing, more desperate, quicker claspings and unclaspings…projects were unfinished…projects were unstarted…and did he pick up from the air the flicker that emanated from Agnes’s skin…the idea that perhaps she could work with him…or did Jasper pick it up, and was that what moved him to offer Agnes as a temporary help?

  * * *

  —

  Benedetto’s studio, dark and serious, with none of the sense of play that had been part of Jasper’s. The objects to be repaired nearly always sacred…nearly always once the object of prayer…the sense that they contained in them the urgencies and needs of people year after year, asking for help.

  Her first tratteggio. “Tratteggio, my dear,” Benedetto said. “A kind of sleight of hand…a way of pretending that what is missing is not missing.” Tratteggio, a word that was in her mind, on her lips every day. A technique of filling in what were called lacunae, paint that had been
lost, using tiny brushes, first you lay down neutral background and then a series of thin lines, layer over layer, until from a distance the lacunae seemed to have disappeared, visible only up close and only to the discerning eye. Skill: the sound of the word not conveying what it contained; skill, a joke sound, like a kind of game, whereas a skill was acquired slowly, it was about repetition and boredom and enduring the boredom and the shame of failure, looking squarely at what was wrong and forcing yourself to go on, go on when you had no real idea of where you might be going. And the pleasure when the skill was realized and you understood: this is mine, no one can take it from me. A deep rich pleasure unlike any other, unlike sex, or the love of friends or children, unlike the joy of the natural world or the elation of great art. Simply: the satisfaction of a firm ground, earned, and, she had thought…unable to be lost.

  The way it had come about: another instance of Jasper’s kindness. Jasper, deliberately unheroic in his presentation, in his understanding of himself, but heroic in his instinct to open the closed hand…letting her go, Of course, dear girl, of course, what a relief, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for you to release me to a life of leisure. Suggesting that her breaking the news that she wanted to stop working for him and start working for Benedetto was something he’d wanted. A heroism of good manners. Good manners—the words making impossible a linkage with heroic, but perhaps they did more good than the obvious brands of heroism. So there were no medals given for good manners, but, she thought, there should be, because what were good manners but a leveling of the insurmountable cliffs, a filling-in of the brutal cracks? For how could she say, without being brutal: I prefer Benedetto’s studio to yours because I love what he works on as I do not love what you work on, I find it more beautiful, more precious, more worthy of being preserved. How could she say, without being brutal: I am more comfortable with the moral implications of working in Benedetto’s studio, repairing works that were made from the most natural, least costly of materials: wood, works that were prayed to, kissed and caressed and believed to cure plague or infertility or heartache. That no painting could replicate what these works achieved: the etched grief on the mourning mother, the lift of the hip of the young Madonna carrying her child, the child’s playful grasping of the mother’s chin…these sculptures she felt were unparalleled in what they said about life’s fragility, and in the face of it an unquenchable vitality. Forgiving in their half-ruined state as paintings could never be: if there was a hole in a canvas, it could only be destroyed; marble sculptures, even in their ruined state, could not allow for peeling back and replacing, could not present the evidence of human touch or retouch. But missing hands or gaps or abrasions…her sculptures could absorb them and still present to the viewer the possibility of elation that came from great works of art humbly conceived. And how she revered the artists who did not feel the need to leave their names, who worked with assiduousness on the unseen backs of pieces that would be attached to a wall or placed so high that no eye could see the perfection of detail.

  But after two years of Agnes working for him, it was clear that there was less and less work in Benedetto’s studio, as he was aging and refusing more and more commissions. And she felt the limitation of repairing works that only a few people would see, whose value was connected to a marketplace, to money, and more and more she wanted to be part of something larger, something available to everyone, rich or poor…that could be visited by anyone in a museum or perhaps even a church and so, slowly, she determined that she wanted to train as a conservator who could be hired by the Italian government to work on public projects…which meant applying to the Istituto di Restauro, admission to which was known to be impossibly difficult.

  And would they take someone her age?

  “Yes,” Benedetto told her. “But you must study very hard. Because the entrance examination is brutal, brutal.” It had three parts: a practicum in which you would have to show your skills; a test to see your sensitivity to color; and (least daunting to her) a written exam in art history.

  Once again, her good fortune at having at her side, at her back, people whose love was effective and constant. Benedetto, instructing and then judging her tratteggio, Jasper testing her on colors…Pietro and Maeve drilling her on chemical formulas and the history of solvents and glues.

  She is accepted. A sense of triumph she had never felt before, because never before had she competed for a prize she desperately desired, competed against almost impossible odds. She must silence the nagging suspicion: Was she accepted because the head of the Istituto had for years gotten his cigars from Pietro, that Pietro’s sister’s husband’s cousin had been for years the bursar of the Istituto? She knew that she would not have been able to do this in America, but living in Italy had given her the skill of pretending that human connections were a deciding factor in nothing.

  * * *

  SHE TIES the scarf around her neck a bit more tightly. Maristella. Maristella gave me this scarf…when was it, Christmas, my birthday, or did we see it in a shop window and Maristella insisted on buying it, “You must have this. It suits you. You must.”

  Must…it was a word Maristella had no trouble using, and no hesitation.

  The first sight of Maristella. Professoressa Ford. How, Agnes wondered for the thousandth time, did European women do it? The straight skirt, gray or black, the jacket or cardigan, gray or black, the discreet scarf, olive or dove colored. Perfectly tied as the hair is perfectly colored…pulled back or cut to just the right length.

  Maristella Sabbatini Ford…colleague. What an unsatisfactory word, she’d always thought, too dry and narrow to contain the idea of a kind of love. She loved Maristella Ford.

  The ideas she’d first encountered in Maristella’s lectures, the honor of working on objects of heart-stopping beauty: once trees. The wood specially chosen…dual in its meaning, connecting the practical and the symbolic or transcendent…poplar or pearwood or walnut for crucifixion…tradition naming them more spiritual than other wood; willow for the Magdalene, known to weep and bend. The properties of each wood she could have recited in her sleep, or in the moments coming out of sleep: limewood, easiest for carving; willow, the most flexible.

  Sometimes she tried to imagine the living trees that had to be cut down. The sacrifice of living beauty for what was meant to transcend time.

  Telling no one, sometimes she laid her hand on the wood and thanked the trees that had given up their lives. The ancients believed that trees had bodies like human beings; she always remembered the words of one of them…though she forgot the writer…wood was like the human body in that it could suffer, rot, or be blessed, and it could be infested with worms.

  Trees had always been to her the proof that whatever else nature provided, it provided safety and benevolence, grandeur and delicacy. Shelter. Shade. Her eye falls on the plane trees, common to Rome, unknown in America: their plate-sized leaves, their formal bearing. She will miss the trees of Rome, urbane and cultivated as the trees of Rhode Island are not. She remembers her walks with her father learning the names of trees, then coming home, with samples of bark and leaves and needles and acorns. She hadn’t walked in the woods with her mother…pollen and mold triggered her mother’s asthma…but it was with her mother that she made the tree book, the early tree drawings and watercolors. Nature and culture. It was as if this work combined the best of what her parents had given her. Pietro and his family are proud that Agnes is making a contribution to the patria. And even Maeve admires her mastery of the science involved. A work that pleased everyone, that excluded no one, that opened conversational doors with everyone she knew.

  At first, her relationship with Maristella had the formal circumscription of not only teacher and student but also professor and apprentice…and remembering her own error with Heidi, her failure to create a proper distance, she was admiring of Maristella’s tone of a formality not unsympathetic yet with no suggestion of the intimate.<
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  The first project she worked on with Maristella: a six-foot Madonna della Misericordia, sculpted in the Marche in the fifteenth century, holding her cape open to shelter a random collection of men, women, and children. The Madonna was mostly intact, the sheltered ones not sheltered enough: their features chipped or abraded, their clothes worn down to nearly bare wood. Thirty years later, her body recalls the sensations that accompanied the first days of her first restoration under Maristella’s eye. She remembers the cold hard stone…she had to be kneeling to get to the little pilgrim who was her charge: only one, others might say, of a collection of random figures under the Madonna’s cloak, but he was hers; he was not one of many to her, he was himself, irreplaceable. His hair was blond, he had only half a nose, his cloak was an olive green, his peasant shoes gray-gold. It will be her job to replicate as nearly as possible the tone of the original paint. How fresh it still is, the memory of the terror that thrummed and throbbed as she held the surgical scalpel—first used by ophthalmologists in surgery on the eye—that she would use to scrape off the paint, with the same sense of the fragility of what the knife touched as she was sure a surgeon had. She remembered the beads of sweat like a band of seed pearls collecting at the roots of her hair where it touched her forehead, the dry throat that made her afraid of the coughs that might escape, the dry lips she licked and licked like an animal sizing up its prey. It was all the more difficult because she was so moved by the idea of it—the Mother of Mercy, the Merciful Mother, the possibility of a generous protective enfolding…a safety from the buffeting of a cruel world. Later she and Maristella talked about how hard it was to remember exactly what you did after you had finished the project; what she remembers is Maristella saying, “Look inside the ear; when they repainted, they usually didn’t take the trouble to go there, you have the best chance there of finding the original paint.”