Payback

by Mary Gordon

  Months of quiet labor, months without praise or even recognition. And then, the thrill of being selected…Professoressa Ford would like Signora di Martini to assist her on the next project…and the gradual earning of regard.

  So theory became conversation, became the laying-on of hands, the scraping-off of paint, the insertion of tiny or large pieces of treated wood.

  They talked about all the different ways things could be destroyed, diminished, degraded…all the different words meaning what was lost…because of…well, Maristella said, because of life. There was nature: damp, mold, dryness; and there was the human touch and its harm: the impulse to redo, to improve, to make something one’s own that was not one’s own; and then there was war…and Maristella had come of age as a restorer repairing the enormous damage of the war…stupid Italians, she said, waiting too long to keep their art safe.

  They asked large questions…was it ever possible to reproduce the original…was the touch of history part of the work of art or should it be removed…however beautiful…in favor of some dream of an original that could only be guessed at…and perhaps never really restored, because that was another thing nature did, some of the elements that made the old colors, the old oils or glues were impossible to reproduce because the plants that were their sources had become extinct. Was the brush of time benevolent or hostile…was there any such thing as a recoverable past, was the purpose of restoration to replicate what the artist had intended or was there a responsibility to the aesthetic sensibility of the present: to create, for the viewers, some simulacrum of what the original viewers might have experienced…replacing the original with what would be in keeping with what people wanted to see? She had read about but never seen an exhibit of classical statues, replicas of white marble figures but garishly painted, as its creators had intended. So disturbing was it to the viewers, whose sense of the classical depended on pure whiteness, that the re-creation of the original created, in most viewers, a response of anger, betrayal, and loss, and only experts were interested, and their interest was an interest only of the mind. So they could talk and talk about ideas, Agnes quiet in the background as Maristella and colleagues shouted and cursed or blessed the name Brandi, the father of conservation theory, his supremacy unquestioned from the ’40s through the ’70s.

  But then they got down to the work of it, and that was what satisfied Agnes most deeply: that what seemed like abstract questions, merely theoretical, became a task—fill in that crack, scrape off those drops of glue, too much red…no, no, let’s leave that. Maristella, like Jasper, loved the word nitty-gritty…you are a good animal like me…and when it comes down to it, spit, touch, smell…it is an animal’s work. Agnes had mastered the techniques of microscopy and ultraviolet photography, the chemical tests for age and decay…but in the end, Maristella said, it was the look of the thing, the smell of the thing, that really often determined the right action.

  Maristella whom I loved. Whom I will always love. Whom I will—except for an accident or miracle—never see again.

  Decades of partnership. “We are a team,” Maristella likes the English word. “Like me, you are a good animal,” admiring Agnes’s sense of smell, her willingness to spit clean with actual spit. “Nothing better,” Maristella says. “But the young ones are too fancy for it.”

  Shared work, and like raisins folded into a batter, the details of a woman’s life.

  Words no men would utter.

  My miscarriage.

  My abortion.

  Maternal pride, important that it not be brought into the light of the workplaces, where it would inevitably be seen as a sign of unseriousness in a world in which it is far too easy for a woman to be called unserious.

  Whispered…in cafés or over drinks.

  My brilliant daughter.

  My beautiful son.

  How we love them.

  How we love them.

  How easy, so easy as to not even merit being spoken of—the thought of dying for them.

  The falsely ironic complaints, really a kind of bragging, on the part of prideful wives.

  “My husband does not know the meaning of the word regret.”

  “My husband does not know the meaning of the word vacation.”

  Once, after her second glass of wine, she said to Maristella, “Sometimes I feel about our sculptures the way I feel about my daughter. That I have to pretend that I don’t believe they’re superior…as I have to pretend not to believe that my daughter is smarter than her classmates or her friends or the children of my friends…I have to pretend not to believe that these images in painted wood are not the most wonderful thing humans have come up with.” And Maristella had said, “Oh yes, oh yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

  The time they giggled when they had to restore a small sculpture of the infant Jesus. Learning that there were many of them around because when highborn Renaissance girls, devout or just unmarriageable, were sent off for convent life, they were given these sculptures, as a substitute for the children they would never have…and they wondered, did these holy or imprisoned women take them to bed, pretend to nurse them?

  “Be careful with the little hard-on…it could easily snap off. You didn’t notice it, did you, that the little penis is erect. Well, you wouldn’t have…you didn’t have a boy child.”

  But never shared with Maristella: the shame of her betrayal of Heidi, the hope that her work was not only a reparation but a sign that what had seemed to be destroyed could be restored, intact, as good as ever, even, perhaps, venerated, loved.

  The younger workers would come to Agnes and beg her to prevail on Maristella not to be so publicly critical. She had to comfort one young woman in the bathroom after Maristella had shouted at her because the lines of her tratteggio were too thick, “It is a likeness of Saint Sebastian, not a pair of Englishman’s pajamas.”

  Agnes had urged Maristella not to constantly be shouting out “Cretina!” when someone had scraped off too much paint, reminding her that when she, Agnes, had once taken off a splinter of wood and had come to her distraught, she had gone to the back of the statue, shaved off a splinter the size of a third of a toothpick, and told Agnes to attach it and paint over, “It never happened,” she had said. And Agnes had felt the mercy of that. “You have it in you to be kind, Maristella, you have been kind to me. Try to be kinder to the others.” “But you see, you are not an idiot and they are idiots.” Always Agnes kept a generous supply of tissues, because it was part of her partnership with Maristella to smooth over the broken pride of the young people Maristella had insulted, restoring it, as she restored the broken areas of the statues they both loved.

  Years when her work life was more important than her family life. Maeve had decided on university in America, choosing Brown, which had a seven-year program in pre-medicine—chosen in part because she could be near her grandfather, who was ailing. And then his death, coinciding with the millennium. That Christmas Eve her father died, the heart attack he had feared and tried to fob off for years, a good death, quick, rising from the dinner table, saying he needed a bit of a rest, and when Agnes went to wake him, he was, simply, gone. His death was not entirely unexpected—it had been years from his first heart attack—but she was surprised at how unmoored it made her feel. Even after his heart attack, she had always thought of her mother as the fragile one, the one whose breath she feared and invigilated, his solid body, thickly muscled, rooted to the earth, his legs that she’d thought of as tree trunks. And now this man, this great solidity, was simply absent, simply ash, an unlovely chalky substance scattered in the Atlantic. She felt as if the crust of the surface of the earth had suddenly thinned; she was newly aware of the possibility of its giving way and her falling through it into a darkness.

  And then 9/11, unbelievable from the distance of Italy…causing her mother to decide that she would move to Rome. She and Jasper decided they would
live together in what he called “my scandalously overlarge digs.” So Agnes was in charge of two octogenarians, vigorous, but liable any moment to become not so…and always, it seemed, in need of medicine to be picked up from the farmacia at the drop of a hat.

  * * *

  THE BUS LURCHES to a sudden stop in front of the Campidoglio. She remembers a day…not in the first years of her marriage…Maeve had already left home…when she and Pietro had come to the Capitoline Museums to see an exhibit of the statues of Canova, and, a bit tipsy from two proseccos they had drunk in the museum bar, had understood that they were both aroused, hungry for each other, and, without a word, took each other’s hands, ran down the stairs, and hailed an extravagant cab to rush back home for an afternoon of surprisingly ardent lovemaking under the familiar coverlet.

  How is it possible, she wonders now, that it was not long afterward that she could say, knowing it was the only possible truth: “I no longer love my husband.”

  She knew it wasn’t fair; most people considered that what he did was admirable.

  The sudden decision, plucked, it seemed from nowhere, from the sky, or like a remnant of cloth snatched, hanging from the branch of a tree. He was going to sell the business.

  * * *

  —

  For years he pooh-poohed the scientific evidence of the harm of tobacco.

  When Maeve would accuse her father of enabling the deaths of his customers, he would repeat that he had smoked since he was fourteen, everyone in his family had, none of them had lung cancer, no one he knew well had.

  He pointed to his customers in their nineties who flourished, responding with something that was just not glee to joggers and vegetarians who died early and even painfully.

  Until his cousin Lucca, who was five years younger than he and an avid pipe smoker, died of cancer of the lip. Suddenly he remembered the fallout of his customers, victims of lung cancer, the professoressa of linguistics, the barber who still knew how to give a perfect shave with a straight razor and who used Jockey Club cologne on his clients, the columnist for La Repubblica, the dentist he said he would never go to because his fingers were too thick. Agnes firmly believed, although she would never say it aloud, that for an Italian nothing is real until it touches someone in the family. When Lucca died, in the blink of an eye, it seemed to Agnes, Pietro made the decision, consulting no one, presenting it to everyone whose livelihood was concerned: he was going to sell the store.

  He disappeared to the house in the Marche for six weeks. He would speak to no one. He called himself a sinner, a criminal. And then, self-shriven, he came home with his new set of plans: he would give half the proceeds of the store to research for lung cancer. He trained as a hospice worker. He read architectural history and practiced the bowing of his cello, which he played for the dying, accompanying them on their way to death with his music, now believing that it, too, had purpose, had a value that it had not had before.

  Six weeks of sorrow, of grief, of penitence. And then, a clear sense of purpose. Action. Reparation. A new life. And everyone admired him, and something was done, was over, a new page had been turned, or the book closed; he had confessed, and was forgiven; he was willing to do his penance, make his atonement, and the atonement was clearly and finally made.

  He believed he was atoning, and that the atonement counted for something—but Agnes could not imagine how or where. He believed that he had done harm and doing good somehow wiped out the harm as if you had refurbished a house in the town next to the one that had been destroyed in an earthquake, as if there were some kind of currency, liquid and transferrable, that could undo harm.

  But Agnes could not believe in that currency. If she had, she might have done something like what Pietro did—volunteered at a home for runaway children to make up for her betrayal of a child who had trusted her—but she believed the exchange was an illusion, a cheat. She wanted to tell Pietro that the people who died because he had sold them tobacco had died terrible deaths, and were permanently dead and that nothing he did for some other dying person had been or could be of any use to them: the harm was the harm and could not be undone. The harm she had done to Heidi could not be undone. She wanted to force him to understand that harm was not like coins that could be passed from hand to hand, exchanged. Harm left a scar, or should: the harmed one had been wounded, and a scar was left behind on the wounded flesh, and so, in justice, the one who had done the harming should be similarly and permanently marked.

  The whole time she was back in Rhode Island, she longed for news that Heidi was still alive. Everything in her wanted Heidi in the world, but she had an equally strong desire: never to see her again, because she dreaded seeing once again the look in Heidi’s eyes before she turned and ran down the path. And she feared that any reparation Heidi would ask would have to continue until both of them died.

  No thoughts like that occurred to Pietro, and because of this she could no longer love him. She knew that it would be possible to believe that the knowledge that atonement was required of both of them might forge a new, a stronger, a more precious bond. But she also knew that it could not. She couldn’t forgive him for not having been marked, darkened, hardened, as she had been. For not understanding that some damage could not be undone and so atonement was a delusion. She had never told him about Heidi; it was too late now. And so, in her silence, in her isolation, she envied him to the point of something like hatred, because he believed in the possibility of atonement. She didn’t know if he felt the distance between them…he behaved no differently. She had no impulse to leave him, though; she had loved him, and she could never explain to anyone why she no longer loved him; they were the adoring parents of an adored child.

  He didn’t question her taking a job in Urbino…quite near where the family’s summer house was. She stayed away for weeks at a time, only returning to Rome for the occasional weekend.

  It was easy and almost too predictable for her to begin an affair with her colleague, the project supervisor, an Englishman named Michael Forbes. It was unlike any sex she had ever had in that it was just sex, with no pretense of love or future involvement. And he was unlike any man she had known well. Vain (he ran three miles a day, despite the weather; he ate sparingly but as a connoisseur, and she was bored by the amount of time he spoke about food, the purchase of it, the preparation, the analysis of restaurants as if they were theatrical events or items on the stock exchange). But she knew it was precisely his vanity, his incessant connoisseurship, that made him an accomplished and exciting lover.

  She learned that there was a part of her that was a very good actress, that even though she was her own audience was an adept at playing the part of the great, the sophisticated, the worldly, even worldly-wise, lover. Which she certainly was not.

  But then it was the very aspect of performance, of artifice (sex as art, therefore artifice, therefore artificial), that suddenly almost sickened her. Her mouth and tongue seemed irritated and abraded as if she’d been living on a diet of crystallized ginger and Campari, and all she wanted now was the good plain local red wine and a thick soup made of local vegetables.

  She and Michael Forbes worked together for six months, but her desire for him was over a month before the project ended and he went back to England. She rarely thought of him, her time with him took its place in the world of the useless, irrelevant past, tie-dyed shirts, cassette players, transistor radios. It was, she thought, like a summer storm that cleared the thick, fetid air of her resentment of Pietro. She would never again love him as she had, but she began once again to relish his presence. She was grateful that he never suspected, that she had done nothing to mar his happiness: he was a happy man, and she believed she was a good or good enough wife. She knew that Pietro was born to be a happy man and almost anyone would have been a good wife to him. But she understood, in a new way, why she had required him, that, unlike him, she could have been married to no one else. To b
e whole, to have some sense of health, of not having been irreparably disfigured by what she had done to Heidi, she required Pietro di Martini, with his lightness, his sweetness, his intelligent good humor, his aversion to self-analysis, his hopefulness, his faith in the goodness of life that had brought her back to life. He was wonderful with Jasper and Agnes’s mother, doing more than his share in helping to care for them.

  They went to concerts, to exhibitions; they spent much more time in the country house; they cooked elaborate meals. There were four years that were like a level plain, a tended meadow, when nothing terrible happened and nothing wonderful. There were difficulties: she was the caretaker for two old people, and it required a lot of attention to get them to the places they wanted to go and arrange their increasingly frequent trips to the doctor, the pickup of prescriptions from the pharmacy.

  And then the meadow suddenly flowered; the peaceful green monochrome bloomed with joyful color: Maeve told them she was going to have a child.

  Agnes remembers the call: the day outstanding, not interchangeable, as so many days are, with any other day. “Mama, Papa, we’re going to have a baby.”

  It came as a surprise, because Maeve wasn’t married. Of course, none of their friends’ children seemed to be married; they lived with each other, had multiple children without, as people used to say, benefit of clergy. Maeve had been living with Marcus for six years.