Payback

by Mary Gordon

  She showers quickly, pulls on cotton pants, a striped T-shirt, her old rose-colored sandals, bought in her favorite shoe store on the Via del Barbuina near the Piazza del Popolo. She carries the dog to the car and backs out of the driveway, trying not to look across the street at the Dolan house. The Archer house? Quin’s? Heidi’s?

  The Dolan house. She wonders how many times she’s been inside it…she is sure it must be fewer than ten. The Dolans were neighbors, but they moved in after Agnes had left for Italy; her mother said they were “very nice, but dear God, you don’t want to get into a conversation with her. Septic tanks, problems with wiring, problems with storm windows or screen doors, or joints or rotator cuffs…and I don’t think I’ve heard him utter more than ten words.”

  Children Agnes hadn’t known had been young there, then grown, then gone. The Dolans had lived there for forty years…who had it been before that? The Andersons, unmarried sisters whom you could never imagine as anything but old…she remembered that her father would tip his hat to them, and they would invite Agnes and her parents for a glass of sherry and cake on New Year’s Day. But Agnes could not remember one detail of the inside of the house. It had simply been there: a brown-shingled Cape Cod with shutters that were green or white. Now it would be torn down. Why should she feel that as so great a blow, so great a loss, this house she had rarely been in, whose furnishings, the proportions of whose rooms, she wouldn’t be able to describe if her life depended on it?

  The house had been there, but its meaning was simply as a marker, solid, unassuming, with the modest clear righteous (self-righteous) proportions of the best of New England architecture. She had never thought much about the house itself, but she had loved the trees, the beautiful sugar maple, blazing orange and yellow in autumn, lush and opulent in high summer; the hickory, whose branches dipped and swayed; and the copper beech, with its solemn, reserved, wine-colored leaves.

  She wished she had the courage to throw herself in front of the trees and say, You may not, you must take me first. But it was not something she would do, give her life, her one life, for a tree. She had a child; she had a grandchild. Perhaps it would be a worthwhile gesture, but she would not make it. No, she would drive down the road, gunning the engine like a runaway or a thief, barely able to see the road because her tears made her driving, she knew, a danger.

  She had to be away before they were taken down. The cypresses were bad enough, but the loss of the others would be unbearable.

  During a long red light, she pulls down the visor to look at herself in the mirror. She had run out of the house without combing her hair, and she sees that she looks wild, half mad, her hair tangled, her cheeks red and wet from weeping. She feels a shock go through her body, as if a torch had been held to the base of her spine.

  Hate, she thinks. I am hated. She is destroying these trees because she hates me.

  It frightens her to have to say it: I am hated.

  * * *

  —

  Without thought—it is a drive she has made for as long as she could drive—she heads toward Ralston Beach, where she and her family and everyone else she knew went to swim or walk or look at the ocean. She wants to walk and walk where there seems to be nothing but horizon, suggesting nothing or everything, the indistinct far-off that could be the end of the world.

  Only now does it occur to her that there is a dark side to this place that had been, for as long as she could remember, the place that represented nothing but good. It was a private beach; you had to be a member; membership was not expensive, but you had to have been a New Canterbury resident for a long time. She knew that membership was limited—it was a parking issue, the board informed the members in the letter that came with the request for membership renewal—but never before did it occur to her to wonder what the criteria were for inclusion, which, of course, implied exclusion. People who came for a few weeks in the summer were excluded—except for the ones whose families had been coming for a few weeks in the summer for more years than anyone could count. She is thinking of what Quin said: it could be the next Hamptons. But Ralston Beach, at least, would not be vulnerable; it abutted wetlands that the local Nature Conservancy had bought so they would be carefully preserved. Heidi’s plans had nothing to do with Ralston Beach.

  Agnes swerves wildly, pulling into a sandy driveway to turn the car in the direction of the public beach. She drives down streets she hasn’t driven down since she left for Rome forty-six years ago. Because she never thought of going to the public beach. Had Heidi known that? How had she known?

  Turning down South Beach Road, she sees that the houses are well off the road, invisible or only just behind high hedges and large old trees. But as she drives closer to the beach, the look of the place changes so drastically that at first she imagines some blight had struck, and was responsible for the sudden nude expanses, the wide, out-of-place lawns leading up to houses whose unsheltered and insistent self-presentation, in relation to the road, the other houses, feels like an aggression, an assault.

  Every house she sees is an example of some kind of wrongness. Out of scale: three times larger than the older houses, too close to the road, fronted by garish aprons of grass, kelly green—the green, she thinks, of golfer’s pants, a purposely false green to announce itself as a purchased import, rather than a native species. Each house is, most importantly, not a house, but a declaration: of its newness, its refusal to conform to what was expected, what had been, for generations, done. In this part of the world, where architecture is famous for its modesty. Each of these new houses is pretending to be, not a house on the shore of New England, but something else, a barn, a chalet, a docked yacht, Tara.

  Anger rises up, beginning in the backs of her knees, traveling upward, settling for a moment in her pelvic floor, then moving with a toxic effervescence to her mouth and throat; the urge to vomit, which she knows has no physical cause, is impossible not to take notice of. Anger is something she’s felt rarely; it took its place alongside other unusual sensations—like sexual arousal at the image of something she considered perverse—something she knew must be hers but that she barely recognized.

  Two words flash against the inside of her skull, which has become a kind of screen. Hatred and ugliness, hatred and ugliness. She had been spared them her whole life. Now, because of Heidi (or was it Quin?), they would be her daily bread.

  * * *

  —

  She hears, as if it were on this street, not miles away, the noise of the chainsaw, and she sees the sight of the fallen trees. She doesn’t even get out of the car; she has no impulse to walk on the beach now.

  She must go home. She cannot simply run away. If the trees are to be taken down, taken away, she must be there—to what? To witness, to accompany? At least not to spare herself the most brutal evidence of what hatred had done.

  She drives up the road to her house. In the driveway of the Dolan house—Heidi’s house, the Stolz house, or was it Quin’s house, the Archer house—a truck is being filled with amputated branches, their playful leaves bristling, unconscious of their doom, like children singing on their way to the guillotine.

  What has been left behind: stumps, each the size of a round dinner table, planed raw in the afternoon sun. The sign of brutality, of brutalization. Impossible to believe they were ever connected to something lovely, something desirable.

  Now her home will never be the same. She will perhaps give up using the front door entirely; the door her mother had always insisted be painted a shining red, the dolphin knocker her father had found—for a song, he said—in a junk store in Providence.

  Her home has been stolen. She will never be at ease again; no step, no gesture will ever again be quite natural.

  She sits at the dining room table and beats her fists on the polished wood. “Hatred and ugliness. Hatred and ugliness,” the two words circle her mind like a rabbit circling a racecourse.
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  Hatred and ugliness. Hatred and ugliness. And there is nothing I can do.

  Heidi knew how ugliness would torment Agnes; she had listened as Agnes had spoken to her students about beauty, the importance of beauty, its protection from the ugliness of the world, which was a form of death.

  And hatred, Heidi hated her…and did the hater know the hated as the lover knew the beloved? For the beloved and the lover, she thinks, there is no more precious sentence than “Knowing, I am known.” But for the hater and the hated—the sentence is indeed a sentence…a life sentence…the punishment capital and never done.

  Being hated. It was a shock, as if an electric current ran through her body. And then she understood: Heidi hated her because she had loved her. When she went over the words of the interview, she had to realize how many times Heidi had used the word love…“my beloved teacher,” “everyone loved you.” And she realized that by “everyone,” Heidi had meant herself.

  Heidi had loved her. But she had not loved Heidi. Heidi had interested her; she even respected her for being unconcerned—so unusual in a teenager—with what people thought of her. But she hadn’t loved her. Was that an accident…if she had not stood too close when she spoke to people…if she hadn’t raised her hand before everyone else in the class and waved frantically if one of her classmates gave an inadequate answer…if her laugh had some other tone than that of mockery…if her eyes were larger, if the palms of her hands weren’t always damp…would she have been more lovable? Was there any world in which Agnes Vaughan could have loved Heidi Stolz…in which Agnes di Martini could have loved Quin Archer?

  And she knows the answer.

  Never.

  No.

  * * *

  IT IS nearly dark when she hears a car pull into the driveway. There is no one she wants to see; there is no one who can be of help to her. But now, she must try to understand how to live a new life; to answer the door, to open her house, which is not her house—to pretend that it is a normal thing to be living here.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened over there?”

  The sight of Marcus, his plain young strength, the depth of his voice—loosens what had been clenched, and she allows herself to weep.

  “She bought the Dolan house. She cut down the trees. She cut down the trees so I would have to look at what she knew I couldn’t bear to look at.”

  “Who, Agnes, who did that? Who cut down those beautiful trees?”

  “Heidi,” she says.

  “Heidi?”

  “Quin Archer.”

  He reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. “I’m calling Maeve.”

  “Don’t call her…don’t bother her. It’s not her problem.”

  “Of course it is. It’s all our problem. She’d be furious with me if I didn’t call her right away when I saw you were in distress. But it’s not really a problem. It’s an assault. Everyone in the neighborhood, everyone who drives by, has to look at those hideous stumps where there were beautiful trees.”

  “I don’t know, Marcus…I don’t know…do you think anyone cares that much?”

  “I don’t know. And neither do you. But I’m getting everyone together. You’re not alone, you know. Order pizzas. I’ll bring beer. We’ll meet here tonight. We’ll fight this. You’ll see. We won’t let her win.”

  “What would winning be, Marcus…hasn’t she already won?”

  “We have to do something, not just nothing. Remember, Agnes, it’s not just for you. Do it to protest about what was done to those wonderful trees.”

  She feels herself able to stand straight for the first time. It’s not just about her. It’s not just about Quin hating her and punishing her. It’s about the trees.

  “I’ll order pizzas,” she says.

  “She doesn’t know who she tangled with. She won’t get away with it.”

  “Probably, Marcus, she already has.”

  * * *

  ANGER FILLS the room, righteous anger: lit and hot like a summer storm.

  “I’ll help you put the food out,” Marcus says.

  It comforts her to see him moving so slowly, so deliberately, making piles of forks and knives and napkins, putting them out on the wooden tray she’d used to bring tea and meals to her mother in her last, weak days.

  “I keep thinking of something I heard in Sunday school,” he says. “ ‘The children of the darkness are wiser than the children of the light.’ ”

  “The worst thing about it, Marcus, is to know that someone hates me so much.”

  “You’ve never had anything like this in your life?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  He turns away from her and closes the silverware drawer with his hip.

  “Black folks know it from the first minute we walk into the big world. It would never surprise us.”

  She feels deeply ashamed; she feels her face grow hot and red.

  “One good thing about being black is you don’t blush, so no one has to know you’re embarrassed. I embarrassed you, didn’t I. I didn’t mean to. I just…well, it just struck me hard, the difference.”

  She doesn’t know if she’s glad he said what he said. Because she has to feel it once again, that pain in the front of her forehead, as once again, she bangs her head straight against the pillar of her own limitations. She wants to ask, “Does Leo know it? Does he know it already?” But she’s afraid of what the answer will be.

  Marcus puts the tray on the dining room table. Maeve sets out place mats, lays pizzas on them, opens the boxes, and prepares to serve.

  “Okay, everyone gather around. As my grandmother would say, let’s put on our thinking caps.”

  Hearing her mother’s words, Agnes eyes are pricked by tears. It is obvious that Maeve and Marcus are in charge of the evening. How beautiful they are. “She has your eyes,” people always said, but they were not just hers but her mother’s, gray in some lights and, depending on what she wore, sometimes blue, sometimes green. “Thank God she has your fortunate nose,” Pietro had said, but she was glad Maeve had his springy hair, his high domed forehead, definite chin, the full lips, the large strong white teeth. How beautiful they are, she thinks, and will they make less of a mess of it—their lives, the world—she wonders. Of course, she thinks. How could they not.

  “Mom,” Maeve says, handing her mother a plate with pizza on it. “Don’t get that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. You remember what Papa used to call it, Il viso della Protestanta congelata.”

  “The face of the frozen Protestant,” Jeanne says. “I’ve been studying Italian on an app on my phone. That’s a pretty funny thing to say about your wife. Very funny.”

  Agnes had noticed before that Jeanne was one of those people who said, “That’s funny” as an alternative to laughing.

  * * *

  —

  “All right,” Maeve says. “So this is the deal. Quin’s bought the house. She says she’s going to tear it down and build what she says she doesn’t like to call a ‘McMansion.’ She says she sees that our town is all ready to become the next Hamptons.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s where she’s wrong. Not this part of the town, anyway,” Jo says. “Remember, it’s been designated a historic zone. And if the Dolan house was built before 1850, she won’t be able to tear it down. As you know, I’m on the planning board. There are more rules here than in Leviticus. Why do you think it took us seven years to get affordable housing approved? Height, for instance. No house can be more than fifty feet high. So that’s not on the table. Quin just said that to upset you. And she must have known that—Heidi, Quin, whoever she is. No realtor would have let her buy without knowing it. She was just yanking your chain.”

  Yanking your chain. Another expression that had come to America while she was away. A good one…entirely apt for what Heidi did to her…she feels herself a chained an
imal, trapped behind bars, and Heidi—what, the zookeeper?—just pulling the chain around Agnes’s neck for the pleasure of it. Just because she could. She thinks Jo must be right that Heidi knew that she couldn’t carry out the plans she mentioned to Agnes, that everything she said was possible was not possible. Was a lie. She had lied during the taping of the TV show about the circumstances of her rape. Letitia Barnes had called Heidi a “fabulator.” Fabulator. Liar. The effects were the same. Heidi had probably lied, or fabulated, from pathetic motives. But what were Quin’s motives? Did she know the difference between a lie and the truth? Did she have any moral consciousness at all? Was there anything Quin Archer wouldn’t do, if she could get away with it? Agnes knows the answer to this: there is nothing she wouldn’t do, and the chilling knowledge of this diminishes the comfort of what Jo has just said.

  * * *

  —

  “Those McMansions near the beach are outside the historic zone. But the frozen Protestants did some good things. There’s no way this part of New Canterbury is going to be McMansioned.”

  “I don’t think you can use McMansion as a verb,” Jeanne says.

  “Your English teacher would be proud of you,” Jo says. “Poor Florence Gould.”

  “She liked my limericks,” Jeanne says.

  “Your limericks were wonderful,” Christina says, kissing the top of her wife’s head.

  “Even if she can’t do any more than she’s done, she’s still cut down the trees and left those horrible stumps,” Marcus says.

  “That’s probably why she did it so quickly,” Christina says. “Just to get her licks in as early as possible in case she can’t do any more.”

  “I’ve been doing research,” Marcus says. “There are things we can do. Quick, remarkably quick growths. I’ll plant a row of larches…you won’t believe how quickly they grow…so people curse them, call them invasive…I hate it when people call plants ‘invasive,’ but in three months you won’t be able to see the house from your windows, you won’t be able to see it at all.”