Payback

by Mary Gordon

  Her mother had died as she wished: in the sight of her own trees. Agnes hopes they will live after she herself is dead, but she is afraid they won’t, because the fate of the earth seems so clearly in jeopardy. When people say, “We have been through dark times before and gotten through them,” she thinks always, but nothing like this where the earth itself could turn against us, and it will have been our fault.

  Will Leo have to use his karate skills to kill other children for drinkable water? Would it be better to kill someone for drinkable water or to die of thirst? Is this what we have done to our children…is this the kind of thought it is now reasonable to contemplate, the kind of choice?

  * * *

  —

  She had come back three years ago, April 2015. She often wonders if she would have made the move…if her mother would have…if they had known what the outcome of the election of November 2016 would be.

  She had come back not only because her mother wanted to, but because she knew that here, and only here, she could be of use. As a restorer, she was quickly becoming an anachronism. More and more friends were dying; she would not have wanted to be a young person in Italy now: its future seemed hopeless or trivial: a country whose major industry was tourism, with its inevitable falsities and corruptions.

  And, in the end, she had come back because, for her, the personal weighed most. The people she most loved were here. She was grateful for the meagerness of her gifts; had she been greatly gifted—an artist, a scientist, a politician—she would have had to put people aside, would not have been able to put people first. It is right for someone who has a great gift to put the gift first. But she has always been aware that whatever gifts she had were decidedly minor. A negligible weight in the balance of the great weights of the world.

  She knows that she is very lucky. And yet, she finds herself thinking, “It would be quite all right to die.” These thoughts happen in the time between waking and getting dressed; usually they are gone by the time she has had her first cup of coffee, showered, taken herself to the couch with more coffee and the book she is reading so that when the dog jumps up on the couch beside her, the enveloping darkness has begun to lift.

  Sometimes she is astonished about how much of this is due to the dog.

  She would not say to anyone one of the things she—not believes, perhaps, but guesses at—that her dog suggests more strongly than anything else that there is a benevolent force somewhere, above, beyond…inaccessible, unconnected to thought or language, unknowable but present, nonetheless. The dog sleeps beside her, conforming her position to Agnes as she moves in the night. She would be mortified if anyone heard her talking to the dog: I love you, I love you so much, you’re the best dog in the world, I am so lucky to have you, you are the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most intelligent dog in the world. Nonsense words, a little language nearly devoid of meaning.

  The dog arrived one day, in a snowstorm, a blizzard, really, shivering on top of a six-foot drift. She’d heard, in that pure silence that comes at the very end of a snowfall, something crying out, a whimpering, and she saw the dog: pathetic, unprepossessing, utterly in need. At the time, her mother was still alive. “There’s a dog stranded out there.” Agnes puts on boots, snow pants, parka, mittens, hat. She picks up the whimpering matted creature, takes him in, wraps him in blankets. “Whiskey,” her mother says, “and broth.” The dog laps the warm mixture. A female. Brown and white. Small. Smelly…but she must be warmed and fed before anyone can think of cleaning her.

  After the snow is plowed, Agnes takes the dog to the vet—calling Jeanne Larkin, who always knows what to do, to find the name of the vet who cares for her horse. The vet says, “You can put up signs, put an ad in the paper, but she had no collar and she’s hardly a candidate for the American Kennel Club. But she’s healthy; I put her at about two years old, she’ll have a good long life, I predict. I’ve never seen a more thoroughgoing mutt.”

  The vet is right. The parts not quite fitting together; one brown eye, one gray-blue, a tail much too long for the squat body, effulgent, luxurious, but in the middle an incongruous black stripe.

  She and her mother do their part: they put up signs, they take an ad out in the paper, hoping, praying that no one will respond. No one does. After two weeks, they take the sign down. They get her licensed; they give her shots. She is theirs. They decided to call her Eccomi. Here I am. Ecco for short. People think it’s Echo…but Agnes and her mother know.

  Ecco spends her days at Agnes’s mother’s feet, except when it’s time for a walk, in which she pretends to feign interest. She does sniff the ground, but no small wildlife arouses her attention. She is their dog; only Agnes and her mother interest Ecco…and it begins, this ridiculous love, this indefensible love. (A child in the developing world could be fed on what they spend on Ecco’s food; a child could have a year’s medical care on what it cost when the dog got into chocolate at Christmas and ran around like a demonic creature, nearly poisoned, force-fed charcoal, her stomach pumped, to keep her alive.) There was no defending it; there was no explaining it. How happy this dog made her. How good life seemed, after her morning’s dread (making the dread seem false, self-indulgent, though it had not been), sitting on the couch with Ecco, with her coffee, her fruit, her toast, reading the Russians, reading George Eliot and Trollope and the Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare she had never gotten around to in all the years, art books whose text she had skipped. She relishes the large leisure, the open days, but not too open, because she is warmed, she is hedged, she is bounded by the love of her daughter, her son-in-law. Her purest passion: Leo, ten years old now, her delight.

  She has no idea what will happen after death. She thinks it will be either nothing, something like sleep, or something quite wonderful that our brains are too small to comprehend, since we will not have our bodies, and so will not be what we think of as ourselves. She finds it a useless endeavor to speculate on what will happen. Only, she would like to die before she does something unforgivable. Or no, she has already done that. Something else unforgivable. Something even more unforgivable than what she did to Heidi.

  * * *

  —

  The house is very quiet, entirely quiet except for the sounds that are so customary that they are no longer taken in: the settling of the house, the light wind in the branches. Her life is quiet, and she is grateful for that…but sometimes the house’s quiet shifts its shape, is no longer a balm, a sheltering cloak, but an open pit that could swallow her up, an abyss into which she could disappear, a black sky into which she could be taken up and whirled, boundaryless, forever. She never felt this when her mother was here with her. It’s nearly two years since her mother’s death, her mother’s dying. Her mother had been standing beneath the arbor where her father had planted Concord grapes. She reached up, just above her head, to pick a bunch. And then she fell down…and Agnes heard the crash and rushed out to see her mother on the ground, her hands purple from the grapes she’d crushed in her fall. A blank efficiency took Agnes over; she called 911; in a minute, two minutes, the ambulance arrived, but it was over. The EMTs lifted her mother, gently, reverently, and placed her, at Agnes’s instructions, on her bed. Agnes called Maeve, and Maeve somehow stepped into the blur and made arrangements for her grandmother’s last exit from her home.

  In so many ways Agnes feels her mother’s presence. When she opens the drawer of what had been her mother’s dresser, what she uses now to store the linens only rarely used: cloth tablecloth, cloth napkins, the green cloth bag of silver napkin rings, the embroidered runners Pietro’s sister Graziela made, linen hand towels, a clear plastic box of rose-scented sachets, her mother’s scent. And the drawers lined with a pink quilted material were saturated with the scent of roses, she is determined that it will be there always: her mother’s ghost, friendly, as her mother was, discernable, but finally apart.

  She had loved her mother…there
had never been a time (the commonplace for daughters) that she had not. But when she tried to grasp her mother, to say to herself, “My mother was like this,” she disappeared, as if Agnes had tried to grasp a handful of smoke. Death and distance had made her mother no more comprehensible.

  When she tried to make a single picture of her mother, she always failed. Her mother was vague, yet she was scientifically precise in her anatomical drawings; gentle, yet an aggressive driver, capable of shocking language if someone cut her off on a highway or took a parking space she had her eye on. Acutely sensitive. Reserved, famously reserved, yet capable of the occasional disturbing confidence whose effect on the listener she seemed entirely unaware of. “My greatest romance was not your father, but my time in college with Jasper and Frances”—not realizing that what she was saying to her daughter was, “There were people whose company was more pleasing to me than yours.” The death of Agnes’s childhood romance that her mother had always loved her best.

  Her mother had always been hopeful, despite the world’s evidence. “Things have gotten better, things have gotten better, don’t forget that. When I was young, Maeve marrying Marcus would have been a scandal…at best, a great anxiety. Now, I’m not saying it’s nothing now…but it’s much, much easier than it was. And Christina and Jeanne…unthinkable even when you were young.”

  Agnes is very grateful that her mother died in June 2016, believing there would be a woman president.

  Agnes misses Pietro in a completely different way, a way that is at once more and less physical. He spent very little time in the house, and so he left no scent, no fingerprint. But she had slept beside him for forty years, and sometimes she awakes in the night, cold, or aching, and reaches for him; then she feels the loss of him with an acuteness that robs her of sleep. And night after night for years they had made love. She dreams of sex with him, but waking, sex seems so remote that she thinks it might be something she only dreamed or imagined. She knows that she desired him passionately, but it is hard to call up the sensations those words suggested.

  Because he was less reserved than her mother, it would seem that he was more knowable, but, as he had spoken very little about what might be called an inner life, he was, in some ways, even more difficult to comprehend. She misses him at breakfast or when she needs the stepladder to reach something she would have asked him for, or when Leo says something that would be their shared joy.

  Thinking of her dead mother, her dead husband, she feels what she so often felt: the impossibility of understanding anyone. The futility of saying, “This person is this, this person is that, this person is not this, this person is not that.” The wall that surrounded every life, so that it seemed impossible even to understand yourself, to acknowledge the creature that lurked in the mud, that raised its head in the moments between sleep and waking…that, too, was yourself. Was it that no one, even yourself, could ever be entirely known? And yet, you had to try, you had to try to understand, you had to try to determine what in your actions would do harm, what might, just possibly, be of some use. When Heidi Stolz had woken her from sleep, that was what she had failed to do: that faculty of discernment, however partial, had been stolen from her by her unawake brain. You had to try. So often you were wrong, but without the attempt, humans were only brutes, far worse than animals whose inflicted harm seemed to contain no other possibilities.

  But even if you tried, there were moments when the vile or careless beast broke through the covering of—what was it, she wondered…civilization, consciousness or conscience, with its ragged claws, its broken teeth?

  The public terrors and the private ones. That the planet will destroy itself, that the world’s hatreds will destroy it, and that if or when this happens she will be too old or ill to be a help to those she loves, but instead will be a burden to them, that she will learn that Heidi Stolz is someone whose life she has destroyed.

  Sometimes it feels like another work: to remind herself each day of her good fortune, to enjoy the moments when the joy of the world brims over—with Leo, in the pond where she swims each day from late May to October with her friends, whom she is lucky enough to live beside. They often congratulate themselves on being able to still take pleasure in each other, although Christina notes that they drink more than they did when they were young. “Let’s face it,” she says. “Alcohol is the new sex.”

  Agnes wonders when the shape of that sentence came into vogue. Orange is the new black. Something is the new something. Suggesting a need for, or is it the possibility of, replacement or replaceability.

  * * *

  QUIN HAD FORGOTTEN how much she loathed New England. Their pride at their impossible climate: freezing in the winter, summer days soaked in humidity. Oh, the autumns, they would say, don’t you miss having a real fall. Two weeks of color for fifty unlivable ones. Her contempt for fall-foliage week, when people drove for hours to look through their car windows at trees they had no interest in at any other time of the year, staying at bed-and-breakfasts that advertised a fireplace in every room, only most often it was a fireplace with a gas or electric log…the talked-over, coveted breakfasts, homemade muffins, homemade popovers—what were popovers, an eggy crust surrounding air. Then maybe a lunch of New England clam chowder—a bowl of white glue with pieces of tough, tasteless mollusk. The trees. The huge, oh-so-prized trees. Choking the clarity of whatever blue sky might occur. What she loved about the desert was its dryness: a landscape violent and broken and exposed, not perpetually sloping and sloppy. How much more preferable were the cactuses she cultivated: clean, sharp needles rather than leaves that grew null and bland and fell, and collected in damp piles year after year, each year’s deposit covering the last, becoming what: mulch, mealybugs and worms crawling in and out. If you got through the top layer, damp dead leaves sticking to the bottom of your shoes in that disgusting way. But our trees, our trees, they swooned, in their L.L. Bean boots and L.L. Bean flap hats and L.L. Bean plaid jackets they walked through the woods, adoring the leaves in fall, tapping the maples in spring for inedible syrup.

  Self-love hung in the air like a vapor, covered the windows and the railings like scum. Our Pilgrim fathers (she had loved reading about the Salem witch trials when she was a girl), now the PCers had discovered that all the wealth was built on the slave trade and boo hoo hoo, breast beating, oh, we’re so sorry that our wealth was from the skin of our brown brothers, nevertheless, we will continue to enjoy it all…while saying it’s been spoiled for us, but nothing had been spoiled, they’d do it again in a minute if they had the chance.

  Everything too small, everything too cold or overheated. She thought of the Christmas parties in her upscale neighborhood. Oh, they loved her mother…the blond athlete, the Northern goddess—the poster girl for what they secretly, ashamedly, adored, what they would have jumped on the bandwagon for in the ’30s. Her mother would wait till she was sure she was the last to arrive, and as she stood at the door and looked at them, looked down on them, a hush came over the room, and the hostess would rush up to her and kiss her and the host would hand her a cup of eggnog—mostly rum, don’t tell Reverend Sykes—oh, Liesel, how lovely, how lovely, your perfect blond hair, your perfect white skin, your perfect red lips, your perfect long legs (which so many of the hosts had seen in all their glory or at least had dreamed of seeing). Oh, Liesel, oh, Liesel, oh, tell us about Switzerland…tell us about the mountains, the wildflowers, the blue, blue skies. Eggnog and cookie parties from one end of the street to the other, and the wives vying with each other for the most absurd Christmas sweaters, perfectly matching their absurd names that would have been fine for a pug or a Pekingese but not these pigeon-breasted, thick-calved matrons…still calling themselves Muffy and Sissy and Pokey…their bursting pride in the presents they’d specially wrapped for each family: one year Pebble Prothero had gotten everyone a wind-up toy: tin mice at a piano playing “Silent Night.” In every den of every man, a team photo of their g
lory days on the prep school football or lacrosse or tennis team: nothing would ever live up to the days of Andover, of St. Paul’s, of Choate or Groton…and then Harvard, or for some of the more nativist: Brown. Maybe Princeton, which they said was, “let’s face it, really a southern school.”

  The Lydia Farnsworth School had convinced itself that it was different, that it was open-minded, forward looking, un-hidebound. But that was another lie. Everything was done to prepare “our girls” for one of the prized colleges…or, for the ones who didn’t have the brains to write their name on an application, a genteel face-saving alternative: a year abroad, some college in Virginia or Pennsylvania, “which Buffy insisted upon because she could bring her horse.”

  She’d had contempt for it all as long as she could remember, but occasionally, breaking through, a sickish desperate desire to be part of it, to be given a place. That was what Agnes Vaughan had taken advantage of: the soft weak spot where she put her gently manicured hand—colorless nail polish, a modest engagement ring—the touch that broke through the precious scab that had kept Heidi Stolz safe from grieving over what she could not have, what she knew she was far too good for, but that the sickish spot yearned for, like the spot on a sore throat yearning for the soothing honey, that healed nothing, fed nothing, but provided a temporary palliation.