Payback

by Mary Gordon

  “I guess I looked pretty prosperous compared to the rest of them…they were a ragged and filthy lot, and I still had my middle-class clothes…I remember I had this pair of red boots that impressed everyone…I guess they thought they could steal them while I slept.

  “Anyway, I go home with this guy and this girl…I’m thrilled, as you can imagine, like I have my own gang, some kind of made-for-TV movie…they take me to this loft…the first thing they do is roll a joint, I’d never smoked marijuana before and I get sort of scared, but really hungry. I had only eaten candy bars…and I think, oh, this is my new family. And they ask me if I have ‘bread,’ and I think they want to make sandwiches, but they laugh and pinch my cheek and say, money honey and they start singing, money honey, and I’m so stupid I tell them yes and I can pay rent. And they say cool, we’re all artists, we’ll share…they convince me that I’m a poet and I participate in the endless readings they give. One of them makes films…he has some kind of camera he stole from his father, another one takes pictures with a Polaroid…he panhandles to get money for film, and the girl draws…wispy figures of nudes, until she moves into actual pornographic renderings. Artists. Phooey. Rembrandt was an artist. Victor Hugo was an artist. These were just a bunch of lazy self-indulgent spoiled brats, ‘just kids,’ and they refused to grow up.

  “And that period of my life begins. I console myself that basically they drugged me, because the first thing we did in the morning was smoke pot and the last thing we did at night was smoke pot. And the squalor we lived in. There was no plumbing in the loft. We had to pee in cups. We took showers maybe once a week at the Y. I remember there was a stove, not connected, and a refrigerator, not connected, and when you opened the doors they were just infested with roaches so we just closed the doors and sprayed roach spray…God, I can still smell it. The thing is, when you’re dirty, you attract animals…mice, and then…I have to admit everyone seemed to be having sex with everyone…there were always strangers sleeping on the floor…but there was nothing exciting about it, it was just something you had to do to prove you weren’t square…and then one day I woke up and my private parts were covered with what looked like little shellfish…crabs, they were called. And then we all came down with lice. I had very long hair at the time…I wore it in a braid down my back…and when we all got lice, in one of my stoned hazes, I decided to just cut my braid off, and one of the artists said, ‘Can I have it? I can use it.’ And he made an ‘art piece’ of my braid, with lice, he polyurethaned it and put it in Plexiglas. He called it Lousy Braid…that was art. So one of the lies people tell about marijuana is that it leads to creativity. That was the kind of creativity it leads to. Fake self-indulgence; no great art ever came from marijuana.”

  “What about Dylan,” says Willow.

  “Dylan Thomas was an alcoholic, not a drug addict,” says Quin, playing the “I’m so refined I don’t take any notice of popular culture.”

  “No,” Willow says, as if she were correcting a slow child. “Bob Dylan. He won the Nobel Prize.”

  Quin knows she is an excellent mimic. So she growls out, in her Dylan Voice, “She aches just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl.” That’s poetry? That’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’…‘Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art.’ ”

  “Well, everyone has their own idea of what makes art,” Willow says.

  “Yes,” says Quin, “that’s the problem.”

  “So, Quin, how did you get from here to there?”

  “Well, you could say it was a lucky accident, but you know what I say, you make your own luck. Luck is a horse and it comes galloping by your house and either you jump on its back or you let it run off. It was winter…I’d been living with these people or some version of them, we kept moving from squat to squat, and I was always the one that tried to make some order, and one day I’d just spent the morning trying to get rid of the roaches and the mouse droppings, and I came back and someone had just left plates of food on the floor and I saw mice heading toward them, and I just got furious, but no one was supposed to care about these things, so I walked out, I thought, Just walk it off, we’re all friends, we’re all family…but I couldn’t get over my anger, my sense that I was sacrificing myself for…for what? I asked myself. It was very cold and I kept walking. And I passed this store that sold ski equipment and clothes and all of a sudden I realized I’d been a really good skier and I missed it terribly at that moment, and there was a sign in the door HELP WANTED…and because I knew a lot about skiing I got the job. And my boss was the one who encouraged me to read Ayn Rand…he gave each of his employees a copy of Atlas Shrugged when they were hired. And that, you can say, was the beginning of everything.”

  “Amazing, truly amazing,” Valerie says.

  “Quite a journey,” Willow says. “I guess you arrived where you were always supposed to be.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” says Alicia, grudgingly.

  “Quin Archer…our very own Quin Archer, I know you’re all eager to find out about the secret she’s kept all these years. Keep your eye out for her special program…airing when?”

  “Not sure…there are still a lot of loose ends.”

  “But knowing you, Quin, they’ll be nicely tied up.”

  “You can count on it,” Quin says. She mimes tying a bow and pulls the ends of it tight.

  Tight.

  PART V

  New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  April 2018

  She lets the dog out.

  The sun is white in a veiled sky. It is seven o’clock; the twenty-third of April 2018, as Jasper would have said, “the year of, if not our Lord, then someone’s.” She has awakened on her own; no need for an alarm; there is no need for her to be anywhere until three thirty, when she will pick her grandson up from school, take him to karate, prepare dinner for him; tonight, he will sleep at her house, and tomorrow she will take him to school. His parents, after a long day’s work, will have a night out. Date night, they call it. She is of use, most importantly to Maeve and Marcus and Leo. She is of use as a volunteer, a word she dislikes and is uncomfortable using to describe herself; when she was young, it was a synonym for a woman who valued herself so little she refused to ask for payment. But she tells herself, she had her work, she earned her money, it is all right to volunteer. At the library, she mostly mends books, a shocking number about to be thrown away because of rough treatment. Sometimes, if one of the real librarians hasn’t shown up, she works at the desk.

  The library is in the same building as it was when she was growing up, a Federalist architect’s dream of chaste abundance, large, high rooms, insisting on seriousness. But in other ways it is radically different. As a child, it never would have occurred to her that a library meant anything else but books. Some of her happiest childhood memories were made in this library; walking through the high arched door, at first holding her father’s hand, “Good morning, Miss Hilbury.” Miss Hilbury, the librarian with her blue-gray or taupe cardigans in all seasons, her distressingly bitten nails, her cat’s-eye glasses, Miss Hilbury abashed by Agnes’s father, the professional librarian, trained as she is not, the head of the Providence Public Library, in love with him, perhaps. The smell of books, a bit unfresh, but precious in its unfreshness, the colors of the bindings, the first turn of the first page.

  At first, her father helped her choose books, but soon he was careful to let her roam, to make no suggestions, and by the time she was ten, he would leave her alone and make his way to the local history section. It was a different kind of pleasure to hear Miss Hilbury say, “Agnes, I was thinking this book might interest you.” Knowing that she was thought of by an adult not tied to her by blood. Most often, the books Miss Hilbury chose were biographies of nineteenth-century reformers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Dorothea Dix, Jane Addams. Her parents made fun of Miss Hilbury, who always answered your question
s in the quintuple affirmative, “Yesyesyesyesyes.” She had perhaps never been known to say no; they were sure she dreamed of Agnes’s father “in her lonely narrow bed.” They giggled every time Agnes presented a new biography of a new reformer, but Agnes loved those books: they made her believe that she one day would do something courageous, DEFIANT, SURPRISING ALL THOSE WHO HAD THOUGHT SHE WAS ONLY WELL BEHAVED. By the time Agnes was twelve, she was going to the library alone, and her secret with Miss Hilbury was her appetite for a series called “Career Romances for Young Moderns.” The careers were different; the romances always the same. Nina Grant, Pediatric Nurse, Ardeth Livingstone, Cub Reporter. Always the young, feisty, terrifyingly competent young woman has to work “under” a sarcastic demanding man who gives her a hard time…but she gives as good as she gets, until some act of nature…a slip in the hospital corridor, a storm forcing a car to the side of the road, forces the supervising male to come to the rescue, admitting, under the pressure of the blow nature has dealt the career girl, that he has always loved her…and she admits that she loves him. There was no sense that after marriage, the career gal would be only a wife. But it was hinted at.

  Now more people come to use the computer, or to take out DVDs, than to look for or read books. And she has had to learn that even in the genteel and pristine town of New Canterbury, the library is the much-needed sanctuary for a group of homeless men and women who squat in an abandoned motel made up of separate cottages. Many attempts have been made to get the owner to sell the property, but the owner—he or she is never given a name when spoken about, known only as “the owner”—is waiting for the right time, for the right price…and refuses to allow the authorities to turn the homeless out, which must not be the real reason, because the price of land in New Canterbury is unbelievable, shockingly high. There is no heat in the motel cottages, and no water, but twenty-five or so people live in them year-round, and, particularly in the winter, four or five of them make their way every day to the library. The head librarian, Laurel Janssen, a young woman Agnes very much likes, says she makes it a point to have a lot of paperback Westerns, because that’s what the homeless men like most. They all seem to be veterans of one of the endless wars—Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan.

  Two homeless women visit the library regularly, and Agnes finds them more disturbing than the men. One habitually takes to her place three or four Edith Wharton novels, but she never seems to read more than a page or two. She is a large, shambling woman; winter or summer, she wears a black wool dress that covers her from neck to mid-calf. Her shoes are black cloth with a strap; in warm weather, her white waxy legs are disturbingly visible; in winter, they are hidden by several layers of wool socks. Her face and neck are covered with a foundation much too dark for her; she wears bright blue eye shadow and navy-blue mascara, and it is obvious that she leaves her makeup on for days. Once Agnes came upon her in the bathroom, wiping her armpits with wet paper towels.

  Of course, Agnes understood that it was difficult for these people to bathe…although the YMCA allowed them in to shower…this is something arranged for by Maeve and Christina…with Jo’s help on the town board. All the people she loves can be of help to these people, but she cannot. For one reason: their smell was a torment to her, and once, the woman in the black dress saw Agnes cough and put a handkerchief to her mouth as she passed by. Her eyes met Agnes’s; never had Agnes seen such defeat, a look that dropped straight down into darkness, like a stone dropped into a well…a look too defeated even to signal an accusation…but Agnes accused herself…what kind of person are you…what kind of person are you. It was not a gift, to have a sensitive nose…she’d inherited it from her mother, who was the one who told her it was a curse…bad smells, she told her daughter, were much more disturbing than good smells were delightful. Agnes can’t say to anyone, “I simply can’t be near these people, my body revolts…I do not judge them, I do not, I understand, as Laurel says, how very easy it is to slip off the ladder. But my body will not allow me to be near them…the animal I am flees for its life.”

  As an act of reparation, she keeps in her bag a pair of rubber gloves, and each morning when she arrives, she walks around the property picking up the cigarette butts, the food wrappings, the dirty Kleenex whose provenance she doesn’t want to think about, and puts them in a plastic bag, which she leaves in her trunk until she leaves, when she takes it to the town dump with a relief that she knows is disproportionate.

  She admires Laurel Janssen; she trained as a librarian, but now her job is part social worker, part nurse. Which Miss Hilbury would never have dreamed of.

  She is glad to be of use. It would be very possible for her to be of no use in the world at all.

  She’s glad that Leo is taking karate, although it was something she would never have thought of for a child of hers. But he is half black, and, as his father reminds her, he has to live with the knowledge that there are many people who, seeing him on the street, would prefer him dead. Leo is small of stature and by nature a conciliator; it assures her that if a bully approaches, Leo could, at least possibly, cause him physical harm.

  What does that mean about her, that she approves of the possibility of her beloved gentle grandson doing physical harm? It is something she would never have imagined about herself. Since Maeve’s birth she has known that it is impossible to be a truly moral person if you have a child, because you always wish the child’s happiness, well-being, more than anything in the world, and you know that, if it came to it, you would sacrifice the lives of any number of strangers’ children to protect your own. And that does away with any ideal of objective goodness; yet the opposite would be a monstrosity.

  At least once a month, she drives to New York and spends two or three days. Frances, her mother’s friend, has moved into a nursing home; her apartment is empty; she urges Agnes to make use of it; she assures her that when she dies it will be hers anyway.

  Agnes knows that she is very lucky. She is close to those she most loves. She is of use to them, of use to the books in the library and the people who want to read them. She is over seventy, and it is of the greatest good fortune to be loved, to be of use. And to live in a lovely place.

  And yet, the world has never seemed so terrible to her, so ugly and so cruel. Insult was the norm; crudity, the acceptable tone and diction. Last week, she parked her car in front of the library quickly, and it stuck out into the street. When she got into the car in the evening, there was a note under her windshield wipers: “Learn how to fucking park or stay home.” She had been shocked; it made her feel dirty and vulnerable. Her less-than-ideal parking had hurt no one, had taken nothing from anyone. And yet someone had been angry enough to tear a sheet from a notebook, write a note, and place it underneath the wiper.

  It is because of the president, everyone knows it is because of the president. He has poisoned the air; he has darkened the sky; the horizon seems threatening or unapproachable.

  She is ashamed of her country, although she had never thought of herself as particularly patriotic; being American had never been an important part of her knowing who she was. Her earliest memories include the conviction that Europe was the superior place; her most cherished objects were what would be called “foreign”: of course, Jasper’s perfectly chosen presents: a ceramic doll with soft black hair, dressed in the costume of an Italian peasant; a wooden music box, with a yellow boat on a blue lake on its cover, which, when lifted, played “Santa Lucia.” Souvenirs of Frances’s many trips abroad: a wax model of London Bridge, a snow globe from the Alhambra, a pair of wooden shoes, handkerchiefs of crisp Irish linen bordered in real lace. Her father drove a Volkswagen; her mother’s scent was called Ombre Rose. The books she loved most had illustrations in colors that she knew were European: mauves and teals and soft dove grays. What could America offer that would measure up? Pilgrim figures in joyless black and white, crepe-paper turkeys, punitive Uncle Sams, stories of prosperous,
energetic kids—not children, no, always kids—in loud primary colors that made her want to turn the page. Briefly, when John F. Kennedy was president, she knew what it was to be glad about where you’d been born. But those days were so short, a thousand only, before the day on which almost everyone in her generation knew where they were (not the younger ones, of course): November 22, 1963. The end of brightness, the end of pride.

  And she had come of age politically in the years of Vietnam, years in which it was impossible not to be ashamed of your country, the country that murdered its best, that basked in its own superiority like a fat, greased wrestler strutting the ring while his opponent bled beneath his foot. People, mainly Europeans, would insist that she glory in the achievements of American culture. Baseball, they would say, and jazz. Skyscrapers. Abstract expressionism. There were higher skyscrapers now; there was no canvas by Rothko, who moved her deeply, or Pollock or de Kooning, whom she grudgingly respected, that meant a tenth as much to her as the smallest corner of a Bellini, a Filippo Lippi, a Morandi. She had no interest in baseball and had to pretend to care for jazz. She had not been sorry to leave America; had been glad to call Italy her home. It was a relief to pretend to be a citizen of a country no one hated.

  But even in the terrible time of Vietnam, it was not this bad. Johnson had seemed diabolical; Nixon a hideous avatar; there had been hatred and violence between those who believed in the war and those who believed it an abomination. And there had been the thousands upon thousands of dead: killed for nothing. Black men shot in their beds in the name of the government. But it was possible to believe that change was coming, inevitably for the better. That was what had changed since then: the belief in possible change.

  She was afraid that she was of a people so cruel, or so stupid, or so unconcerned with the fate of the earth, that even her one small patriotism seemed in danger now. She had loved, even more than the great beauties of Rome, the trees of America, the trees she had grown up with. After her sister-in-law Giulietta came to visit, she wrote Agnes, “Thank you for the days of tall, strong trees.” Pignut hickory, the largest, her favorite. The purple-red copper beech. The ash and elm, vulnerable to diseases, the stewartia with its silver bark. Her mother had wanted to die looking at these trees, and Agnes had made that happen. It is something she can feel, if not proud of, at least good about, something she can know she has done that is unequivocally good…never to weigh as much on the scale as the thing she had done to Heidi…that was unequivocally bad.