“Don’t you remember, in Vermont?”
“I remember we walked to the top of a hill, through an old orchard. That time in Dublin I wanted to jump out my window and get on a train and go anywhere.”
“Alone?”
“I guess that was the point.”
“This room is too cut off.”
“But it’s worse,” she said, “when someone is here.”
At that the song began, with a shout. She looked at Stephen sharply.
“I brought you the mail—a magazine, and three bills.” He turned away, opening his briefcase. “Also, your beer.” When he brought out the bottles, she touched his hand.
“You can’t hear anything, can you? I know you can’t.”
“I’m going to turn that damned thing off.”
She snatched his arm. “No, don’t. It’s not the song I mind, it’s the voice underneath and that’s stopped now.”
He smiled at her. “I always thought one voice was enough.”
“Oh no! You’ve got to have a tune, as well. The voice keeps saying I’m no good.” She made a face like a sad clown and they both laughed.
At nine o’clock, the speaker over Mina’s bed announced that visiting hours were over, and Stephen stood up and uncapped a bottle of beer. “For night sadness,” he said, patted and kissed her and left Mina to drink all the beer as quickly as she could. Then she lay back in the nest of her pillows. After a while, she began to feel flushed and easy, and she feasted on something Stephen had said: “You make such a pretty mother.” He’d said it quickly, embarrassed by such obviousness. She wished she had forced him back to repeat and elaborate, to examine her face, her breasts, her thin slack body and tell her that she was all pretty, and well equipped for the task. How surprised he would have been, surprised and, she imagined, a little disappointed that she needed so much reassurance. He would have stared at her, seeing the mauve ribbons in her bed jacket and the mauve ribbon in her hair.
The baby was carried in at ten o’clock and fastened to her breast by a brisk nurse with red iron hands. Mina’s nipples stung, and the baby drew and drew in a frenzy; he did not seem to get a drop. Mina knew that if she asked, they would give him a bottle, and felt beforehand her guilt at her choice. Failure lay on all sides and her successes were as thin as ribbons. The baby would be brought again at two and there was nothing she could do to prevent it except give up, abandon the whole nursing thing. The tight silence in the room molded itself to her body, and she longed for the song of the air conditioner. It purred instead, mechanically tranquil. At last the baby was taken away and she turned out the light and lay waiting for the two o’clock feeding. It seemed to her that she was being eaten alive.
At two, the night nurse snapped on the lamp and dropped the baby like a small bomb on Mina’s bed. “Just ten minutes, each side,” she warned. “I’ll be back for him.” This time, the baby’s eyes were open, and he was not crying. He looked up at Mina calmly, his hands in the flannel mittens, folded on his chest. She looked at him for a while, aware of the way they were enclosed in the yellow bell of light from the lamp. She began to feel, against all reason, the baby knew her; he looked up at her so confidently, waiting to begin. Cautiously, she took his left hand and peeled back the mitten.
She had not seen his hands since the night he was born and for a moment, she was afraid. Then she peeled back the other mitten and held his hands closely, as though to prevent him from doing some harm. Finally, she let them go. His left arm lifted, and the hand unfurled slowly. His fingers were thicker than she had expected, with a flake of skin at the corner of each nail to remind her of the way he had grown, week by week, inside her.
Then the air conditioner began to sing. She groaned and caught his hands again, waiting for the voice to start. After a while, she heard it far off, chanting venomously. Anybody can. Anybody can. Anybody can have a baby. Then the air conditioner’s song rose, drowning the voice, which finally went down with a shriek. “Over the seas!” the air conditioner shouted.
Mina put the baby to her breast and lay back in the pillows. He sucked and sucked and then, for the first time, he began earnestly to swallow. She listened to his long hard gulps and saw a bubble of milk forming at the corner of his mouth. His bare hand waved as though to set the beat for his delight, and his face, suffused, flushed pink. She looked at him with amazement. At the same time, she noticed something new, a creamy warmth at the front of her body. Something feels good, she told herself cautiously. She did not want to examine the feeling too closely, and for a while, she just savored the baby’s warm head, pressing against her arm. The air conditioner’s hum rose a little, and she fell asleep before the baby had finished.
She woke when he was lifted out of her arms. Opening her eyes, she saw the nurse pulling the mitten back over his hand.
In irritation, she sat up. “I’d like those mittens left off, please.”
The nurse glanced at her and smiled. She started to pull on the second mitten, propping the sleeping baby against her hip.
“I want those things left off,” Mina said, this time raising her voice.
The nurse looked at her again.
“He should be able to suck his thumb if he wants to.” She was beginning to tremble.
“Don’t you know he can’t get his hand to his mouth?” the nurse asked kindly. “You want something to help you get back to sleep?”
“No!” Mina shouted. “I want those things off!” A great blush of satisfaction spread over her face.
Sighing, the nurse uncovered the baby’s right hand. Mina watched while she freed the other. The baby’s hands curved inward like little cups. “Now he’ll scratch his pretty face for sure,” the nurse said.
Mina was so surprised she laughed. It had never occurred to her that there was a reasonable explanation for the mittens. “Never mind,” she said, catching her breath as the nurse looked at her uneasily. She watched the baby go and remembered that in two more days, she would take him home.
After that she lay awake for a long time, listening to the air conditioner croon. She knew that sooner or later the old voice would break through, but she was not afraid: the song and the voice were finally braided together. Among the strands, she thought she would be able to find her own voice, magnified, intense and brilliant as a streak of blood.
Grand Canal
You thought you knew the painting so well you’d never see it fresh again, no matter how many more nights you spent sleeping in the bed right beneath it: a big painting, the one collectors were said to hanker for, would pay any price for a decade after it was exhibited. It was the ethereal blue of the canal they wanted, the tilted head of the woman wearing a white hat in the gondola, the golden glow of the distant bank of houses—realism, but realism with a varnish of magic. Now, that painting is “whereabouts unknown.”
There have been times when you should have sold it but the thought never crossed your mind.
Not that you valued it.
How can you value something you can no longer take in or appreciate?
This is what you value: outside your window, your garden, this August, the shrill blue of the sky, the mountain range now hidden by pines planted years ago, nourished by everything that passed through your irrigation pipes. They grew and grew and you lived from then on in the core of your creation, the place you, Matilda, made with your own heart, brains, money, and blood (or at least sweat),
… the beautiful little house, all air and light, built on the plateau you discovered on a downward drive into the arroyo, a plateau to which your house was so perfectly fitted by your friend the furniture maker who cut down only two trees for the foundation, and those trees, stripped and varnished, became posts for your portale;
… outside, sunflowers, yes, but also hollyhocks and lavender and even roses where before there was only gravel, sand, and the stone points chipped by the tribe stopping there, to watch for game passing through the bottom of the arroyo; and you gathered those points and put them i
n a pueblo pot, honoring the past you recognized but knew nothing about;
… and the coyotes still yelled at dawn and dusk, and in spite of the neighbor’s cruel leg-shattering traps, managed to survive and even flourish, now and then crossing the road with a swagger as though they owned it.
You made your creation and lived in it, reverently, among things you carefully assembled, or grew.
So why did you keep your father’s painting, Matilda? Why does it still hang, disregarded, over your bed?
“The past,” you often say to whoever will listen, “is not worth remembering,” sententious and probably not even true.
Years ago, you examined the painting every night in the semi-darkness, how it poured its azure and golden colors down into your dreams, as well as its waters and rigid rooftops. But now the time has come to deal with that, something about the end of summer, cold weather: the reckoning.
So, take the unscented beeswax candle, Matilda, since you woke up long before light, kneel on your bed and by that breeze-blown flame, study the painting.
Blue water, yes, obviously blue, although you remember it as a little murky (didn’t all the sewers and drains of Venice empty into it?), lined on both sides with the peach, melon, lemon, and linen gray of the old three-story houses, their balconies hung with unnamable flowers (not your hollyhocks, Matilda, not your lavender, sunflowers, roses), their peaked tile roofs crowding the sky, for in his wisdom, the painter had only allowed room for a slice of sky since it was, to tell the truth, uninteresting, interrupted here and there by those cocky, crooked chimney pots;
… and now you can’t avoid it, Matilda, you must lower the flickering flame and study those shapes he painted on the water, seven of them, gondolas, yes, you must name them, there’s no avoiding it now.
With the gondolas comes the stink of sentimentality, striped shirts across brawny shoulders, leghorn hats with fluttering ribbons, some sort of song tossed onto the water, and whether you want it or not, Matilda, you are fifteen again, standing on that bridge, the old bridge, the Ponte Vechio, with your little camera slung from your neck and held, proudly, in both hands, and he is beside you.
You never thought of his age, then, but now, calculating, you think he must have been fifty, you his last child, the others cast to the four winds along with their mothers, none of whom, mothers or grown children, you would ever know; they were always far away, in Israel, Egypt, Australia,
… and your mother, Matilda, for whom you were named, where is she? Not a question to ask, or to ask yourself, as you stand on the old bridge in Venice with your little camera in your hands, beside your father, who is setting up his tripod.
Do you remember, Matilda, how you felt about that tripod, long-legged, awkward as a crane, difficult companion on all your journeys, too large, too fragile, too important to be easily accommodated?
You used to watch him extricate the thing from its specially made satchel, which he had designed himself to protect it during all those trips. And did he protect you as assiduously, Matilda? Should the question have been asked then, on the old bridge, the Ponte Vechio, arching over the Grand Canal in Venice?
Not then. Not now. Some other time. Or, probably, never.
Once planted, the tripod claimed its space in the hurrying or loitering crowd.
Then, squatting, he raised the cumbersome camera from its leather case (you carried it sometimes, when he trusted you), clamped it on the tripod, and started the process that took him far away, farther and farther each month, each year.
Because no one ever saw his photographs and yet they were essential.
Adjusting, flicking, his gestures small and specific as when he worked a comb through your snarled hair, made sections, braided; you watched once in the mirror and wondered who had taught him to do that and did not want to know;
… and would not allow you to wear bows. Too silly. Too jeune fille. Rather, rubber bands, dun-colored, like your hair;
… and, at night, always made you take it down—“So the hair can breathe”—and spread it, in kinks, over the shoulders of your cotton nightgown.
Enough of that now, Matilda. Raise your wavering flame, again, study those seven boats (unfortunately, gondolas), the girl with her leghorn hat, the man twisting to point at something, the child, girl or boy, trailing her or his hand in the too-blue water.
What you would give, now, to see a torn leaf of newspaper, a bottle, floating there, but “No garbage,” he said, about the canal, and other things: your longing for ice cream, not gelato, your fatigue at the end of the day, head down on the café table, whining about the August heat.
“No garbage.”
You knew what he meant. You were floating too, Matilda, out of a house, a yard, a school and all that went with it, floating out from under your needy mother’s hands. “She’ll be my apprentice,” he’d told your mother. “August in Italy, an education.”
Was she, finally, Matilda, ashamed of holding you back from this “great opportunity”? (And he was paying for it, as well.)
Perhaps someday you’ll know.
So, she packed your suitcase, slipping in everything she deemed your favorites, the sandals with beads, the little pink camisoles, the flowered shorts—but when he saw those things he called them “inappropriate, suburban,” and bought you jeans and shirts and hiking boots like his,
… the boots awfully hot in the Venice summer but he said you were both adventurers and laced his up high over wool socks no matter what the temperature. And so you did, as well, and every night hung your sweaty socks off the headboard of the bed in the small hot room you shared in the pensione, until your socks were stiff and crusty and you had to wash them in the sink and wear them next morning damp: one of the small pieces of garbage you chose not to complain about but he never would have noticed.
Then Matilda, the camera he bought for you—you hadn’t asked—unwrapping and assembling it with a patter the whole time to instruct you (he wouldn’t let you read the manual) of which you remembered almost nothing, yet you set the aperture, adjusted the focus (never on automatic, he wouldn’t permit it), lined up your shot the obvious way and then when he showed you all the other options—crouching, leaning, stepping back—you learned gradually to shift the lens a fraction to the left or right, to lengthen or shorten it, to catch a tile, the turn of a wall, the stone wet from last night’s rain (but never a spire, never a vista), and from that to insinuate the whole of it, canal, boats (gondolas), balconies, old houses, without “the obvious,” as he called it, until one day two and a half weeks out he said, “You’ll do. You have talent. And you listen.”
Then you knew you were no longer what people in the cafés and on the streets observed, a daughter, but instead, one of two artists, working together.
After that you never called him Daddy.
Now the glass candleholder is hot in your hand, Matilda, the wick is burning down into a pool of wax; you could turn on the light, you know, it’s almost morning.
Instead you come back to the painting with a jerk and go over its elements again: water, sky, pastel houses, gondolas, and their shadows and reflections. “Too sweet,” he once said, “should be the garbage scow,” and you understood that kind of garbage was distinct from the one he railed against, and had more to do with attitude.
Now you see what you’ve never seen before, Matilda, up there near the top of the canvas, and you hold the candle high and strain to see better: a bit of gray, not sky, not cloud, and how is it that in all these years you’ve never noticed it?
Could the paint, aging—it’s been five decades—have started to peel?
He wouldn’t approve of that, would he, Matilda, if he was still alive and standing beside you now (and you in your nightgown), holding his cane. The photographs on which you have built your reputation do not flake, do not peel or fade.
The old camera on its tripod only a humble way to record the scene so that he could transform it, later, in his studio, the coffee cans of brushes, some
only one hair, the squashed and squirming tubes of oils with their delicious names: Carmine. Ochre. Sienna.
No.
Paint can never betray, flake, age, to reduce that sky to a scrap of tattered gray.
Yet there it is, and he no longer beside you or anywhere else, to explain.
Are you vindicated at last, Matilda? Will you admit to yourself if to no one else that the failure, in this instance, of his medium has restored you to primacy? Your photographs do not flake or peel.
But how unworthy: to mount your primacy on the happenstance appearance, fifty years later, of a patch of tattered gray in what he had intended to be blue sky.
No.
It won’t do.
Leaning closer, you see the gray is only a wisp of cobweb the cleaner missed. So blow out your wavering candle and go to fix your breakfast. It’s almost eight, high time. The others will be stirring.
Instead, you take another five minutes, hesitating, before you fire up the percolator and pour your cereal and do all those other things that are part of your invincible routine, five minutes you would prefer to forgo, for they bring back, not the feel of your little camera between your hands on the Ponte Vechio but the day some time afterward when you came to his studio unannounced because of some emotional knee scrape for which you wanted comfort (even knowing, as you did, that he never gave comfort of that kind).
And stumbled in, blurry with tears (was it your first boyfriend?) and found him painting, as you expected but had never witnessed—he was secretive as an owl—and discovered the transparency illumined on his canvas. Yes, there it was, the Grand Canal in all its candy perfection, blue, peach, melon, lemon, linen gray, the girl in her leghorn, and the gondolier in his striped shirt. And your father, filling in the colors, directly on the big canvas.
Did you say anything, Matilda? You may regret it now, you may have regretted it for fifty years, but you did.
You stood there and stared until he felt the weight of your eyes and said, without turning, “What is it? What do you want?”
Treason Page 3