There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  “They’re going to give him his first shock treatment this afternoon.”

  Marian grabs Russell by the wrist so hard he pulls away and shakes his arm two, three, four times. “You’ve got to stop them, Russell. You’re a doctor.”

  “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. I’ve got a lawyer on the case, but it seems your brother will be sent to jail unless he’s given shock treatments.”

  “I’m sorry,” says a nurse, not looking the slightest bit sorry. “We have to prepare your brother now.”

  “Prepare him for what?” Marian hisses. “Prepare him to have his mind destroyed?”

  “I’m afraid, young lady, that you are overwrought, and we require an atmosphere of calm for our residents.”

  Johnny looks at them with a glance of stupefied desperation.

  “We’ll do everything that can be done. We’re going to get you out of here,” Russell says.

  “So long, kids,” Johnny says. “I’m awfully tired.”

  Marian goes to the hospital every day. She informs Vassar that there is an emergency, and she will have to be excused for the rest of the semester. The dean of students, hearing the words “Payne Whitney,” with which she is all too familiar, is sympathetic.

  “We’ll be here when you’re able to come back,” she says.

  —

  Johnny now seems like a cheerful, dim child. Occasionally, Russell loses patience when he tries to remind Johnny of some happy memory and Johnny looks vague and says the sentence that is his most frequent: “I’m awfully tired.”

  After a week, they’re told that Johnny will be allowed home for a few days in order to organize the things he will want to have with him for his prolonged stay. Because of Russell, because there will be “a physician on the premises,” the doctor in charge releases him into Russell’s care.

  Russell makes childish, comforting foods, macaroni and cheese, blancmange, French toast for breakfast with real Vermont maple syrup.

  The morning of Johnny’s second free day, Russell kisses him goodbye. “I’ve got to go to work for a few hours. I’ll leave you with the kid. But hers are the best possible hands.”

  “Her hands are beautiful, Russell, don’t you think?” Johnny takes Marian’s hands and turns them over twice, three, four times. “I always said she had the most beautiful hands. When we were little and I was upset, she’d put her hand on my forehead, and it always seemed so wonderfully cool. But sometimes there was grease under her fingernails, because she liked tinkering with cars. She loved cars. We loved our chauffeur, Luigi. Our father fired him because his brother was a communist. Our father did that, didn’t he, Marian? Or am I getting it mixed up? I get so many things mixed up.”

  “No, you’re absolutely right. I remember trying to argue with him, telling him that Luigi wasn’t a communist, that his daughter was a nun, a Sister of Charity. And Daddy said, ‘Thank God she, at least, has been saved.’ But he wouldn’t believe that Luigi wasn’t involved. He said he was suspicious because Luigi never went to church. ‘They hate the Church, they hate the truth, lies are what they love: they are the children of Satan, the father of lies.’ ”

  “I suppose he really believed what he said. I guess that makes it better.”

  “Better than what? Our father has a lot of blood on his hands. Probably more than we know.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get some blood on my hands, that’s what pays the rent,” Russell says. “I’ll be back early for cocktails.”

  —

  It takes Johnny a very long time to shower and dress, but Marian is happy to see him spruced up and shaved, his hair combed, in grey flannel trousers, a light blue shirt, a blue-grey sleeveless vest, even a tie: a darker blue, solid, unpatterned. He hands her a piece of paper. “Listen, my love, I’m sending you out on a shopping spree. I need you to buy me some things at Abercrombie and Fitch. Lots of pajamas—elastic waist, no drawstrings, they think we’ll hang ourselves with them. Try to find some slippers that aren’t hideous: look for ones that are the most unlike Dad’s that you can possibly find. A bathrobe. Don’t let them talk you into a monogram, and, for God’s sake, no paisley, you know I can’t stand paisley, and I’ve been told I look best in blue.”

  She’s happy to see him so animated. He hands her his wallet. “And stop off at Saks and get something nice for you. Take your time, don’t worry about me, I’ll be great.”

  She enjoys shopping at Abercrombie; it’s so comically serious, so obviously about durability rather than fashion. When she buys the pajamas, the salesman says, “We had a call today from a woman who was complaining that the pajamas she had bought her husband had worn out. I asked when they’d been purchased. She said they were a wedding gift, so she guessed it was 1912. My supervisor said we should replace the pajamas immediately; we pride ourselves on being indestructible.”

  She doesn’t know whether the salesman is telling her this because he thinks it’s funny or because it’s a point of pride.

  At Saks, she treats herself to a pair of fur-lined ankle boots, the cuff a beautiful, soft black. It takes the salesman a long time to find the right pair; she wants the boots she’s seen Myrna Loy wearing in a movie whose name she doesn’t remember. Finally, he produces the boots of her dreams, and Marian leaves with a sense of her own discrimination and perseverance, her boots under her arm, Johnny’s clothes to be delivered.

  “YOO-HOO, Fashion Plate,” she calls, closing the door with her foot, feeling the part of an actress in a screwball comedy.

  He doesn’t answer. She assumes he’s sleeping, but she’s eager to show him her new boots. She opens the door to his room.

  He is hanging from a rope tied to the light fixture on the ceiling, the chair beneath his feet kicked away. She rights the chair and stands on it. She slaps the soles of his feet, as if he has fallen asleep and this will wake him up. “Johnny, wake up, Johnny, wake up,” she screams over and over. And then she goes silent and steps down from the chair.

  Her first thought is a concern for the problem of getting him down. The rope is thick; that’s the first problem. She goes into the kitchen and gets the sharpest knife, the one they used to carve the Thanksgiving turkey, can it only have been a few weeks ago?

  She believes it is essential that he not fall to the ground, that his face not be injured, that his beauty not be marred. She stands on the chair once again. She must saw through the rope carefully, so she won’t hurt him by cutting his neck. She saws through the rope. What she doesn’t reckon on is that, when the rope is cut, the body will be attached to nothing. She is holding him around the waist. The weight of his body knocks them both over, and they fall to the ground, he landing on top of her. Heavy. Dead weight. For a moment, she doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to leave him lying on the floor.

  Then she begins screaming. But her father’s voice comes to her: “You must never cry out.” She turns her brother’s body on its back and covers him with a blanket. She phones Russell, who arrives, in seconds, it seems, with an ambulance.

  They say nothing. They stand by the body, holding each other, rocking back and forth, a parody of a slow, amorous dance.

  The ambulance drivers say that they can’t take the body until the police arrive, and when they do, they enter the room slowly, tentatively, not at all like the policemen in movies. A minute later, they are followed by Marian’s father.

  He removes his hat and stands over the dead body of his son.

  “Coward,” he says. “He was never anything but a coward.”

  “Make him leave,” Marian screams at the policeman. “Make him leave. He has no business being here.”

  “I have all the business in the world. I’m his father.”

  “You’re his killer.”

  He turns to the ambulance drivers. “I believe my daughter has experienced a terrible shock. Perhaps you could administer a sedative.”

  “We’re not doctors, sir,” one says.

  “I am,” Russell says. “I’ll take care of her.”
<
br />   “Just like you took care of my son,” Patrick Taylor says through his strong, large teeth.

  “We should get out of here,” Russell says.

  “I’m not leaving,” Marian says. “I’m not leaving my brother alone with him.”

  And so they stand, like ice figures, until the medical examiner comes and Johnny’s body is taken away. The absence fills the house, and Marian feels she will go mad with longing for the dead body of her brother. Her father says nothing as he follows the policemen down the stairs.

  Then Russell hands her an envelope. “It’s for you.” He holds another in his hand, and puts it in his pocket.

  “Where was it?”

  “On the kitchen table. I didn’t want it confiscated as evidence.”

  On the outside of the cream-colored vellum envelope, she sees her name in the beloved handwriting. She slits the envelope with her finger, making a ragged, inelegant opening: something Johnny would never do. But she can’t imagine asking Russell for a letter opener.

  She wants only to look at the black marks on the cream-colored paper, as if they were calligraphy in an alphabet she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to read the words, if reading means taking in, interpreting. These are the last words he will say to her, the last of him in the world.

  My dearest girl:

  I am so sorry that it will be you who finds me, but I must do this now while I am alone for the amount of time I need. Life is not good enough for me to live it. I have calculated the balance. Sorrow and suffering make up 90% of life. Joy or happiness, the other 10. But the materials aren’t equal or even similar. Sorrow is rock, bedrock that forms at the bottom of the soul and cannot be dislodged. Happiness, joy are winds, unstable, fleeting. They have no durance. Sorrow is made of stuff that endures. My heart is burdened. Forgive me, my dearest little sister, I have thought of the pain to you. But asking me to live is like asking someone whose hand is in the fire not to pull it out. I must pull out my hand. You will have a rich life, I know it. You have always been the stronger of us two. The braver. Goodbye, brave girl. If I had another life, I would save it, just for you. But I have only this one life, and they are about to steal and destroy the thing I value most: my mind. When they are done with me, there will be no more music. I will be unable to concentrate, and concentration, endless concentration, is what a musician needs. I would stay alive for you and Russell if I could, but it is too difficult. Father has always said I was a coward; he must be right. But I have always loved you fully, purely, and above all things. I close with this, the best of a coward’s love. I know that it will hurt Russell that our love was not enough. But love is not enough when you no longer believe that you are real. I am unreal and a coward, and they are about to take my mind. I hope that somehow you and Russell will be a solace to each other.

  Marian reads these words and knows that the life she has thought of as her life is over now, that the person she was is dead, as dead as her brother, and she wonders who she will be, how she will know herself, by what name she will be called that she can answer to, what the flavor will be of this thing she once called life, that she will have to live, although right now she has only one wish: to be with her brother, wherever he is. But he needs her now, to keep his memory, the true image of him, which she must fight now to preserve. Fight against the two enemies: forgetfulness, distortion. He has always needed her. She is the stronger one. Which means, she supposes, that she is required now to live.

  •

  She feels a hand on her arm, not gentle but not unfriendly. It is Marcia Leavitt, almost a friend, a nurse from Pittsburgh.

  “There’s a meeting in the dining room now. Of all the women. You need to be there.”

  “Yes, of course,” Marian says, not saying what she would like to say: Thank you, thank you, she wants to say. You have pulled me out. You have set me on dry land.

  There are twenty-four women on their way to Spain on the ship, and they are gathered in the dining room, six tables of four. Marian is grateful that Marcia Leavitt has saved her a place.

  Ruth Lipsky, head nurse of the largest hospital in San Francisco, stands and claps her hands for silence. “Ladies, shall we all agree that, before we leave, we will present to the workers on the ship the lovely coats that our comrades, the furriers, have so kindly given us? It will be better not to have fur coats in Spain, and we will be bringing happiness to the wives or mothers or sweethearts of the workers who have made our journey so pleasant.”

  All the women clap. Not one disagrees. How wonderful they all are; Marian has never met people like them. Her new friends are the most wonderful people in the world. Once again, she knows the rightness of her choice in a new way, from the happiness she feels, the sense of rightness in her skeleton, in the sparkling nerves at the tips of her fingers. She is with people who look closely at the suffering of the world, with people who take the ideas she had, the vague ideas of a privileged girl, and make them real, turn them to actions.

  —

  But a few days before they land, Ruth says, “Let’s face it, girls, the coats are falling apart.”

  Marian didn’t want to admit it; at first, she wore the coat on deck in the early mornings or when the sun went down, all the girls did, and then, one by one, they stopped. No one spoke about it, but Marian assumed that what had happened to her coat had happened to the others’.

  It is three in the morning, and she wakes from one of her dreams of Johnny. Not one of the frightening ones; a sad one this time. She’s learned that she must, must get out of bed when the sadness overtakes her, or there will be no hope of getting back to sleep. She’s taken to walking on deck; it’s lovely there, watching the stars, the moon reflected in the ocean, making a path of light whose end stretches past the horizon. Her sadness stays but takes its place among the other sadnesses of the world, of all people who have mourned.

  She moves to the closet to throw on some clothes; she doesn’t want to turn the lights on, doesn’t want to wake Russell. She reaches for her fur coat, which she will wear over her pajamas. She feels for her shoes.

  Then the sole of her bare foot touches something that makes her scream in fear and disgust. She jumps back onto the room’s one chair. Russell wakes. “What the hell?” he asks. She is mortified that he has discovered the one fear she has not been able to keep back: she has been horrified by rodents ever since, in her uncle Bill’s cabin in the Adirondacks—she was eight or nine—she bent down to get something from the bottom drawer of a dresser and a mouse jumped out at her face. Since then even the sight of a rodent turns her into the kind of girl she has always despised. And now Russell knows.

  “There’s a mouse in my shoe.”

  He turns on the light, walks to the tiny closet, and takes her sensible brown penny loafer in his hand.

  “Not a mouse, sweetheart. Nothing living. I’m afraid it’s your coat.”

  He hands her the coat. She sees he’s right.

  The fur is falling out in patches, as if it had caught some disease on the ship.

  “Go back to sleep,” she says. “I’m going up on deck.”

  “Another dream?”

  “Another dream.”

  He kisses the top of her head. But she sees that he’s ready to fall back to sleep, and she’s glad. Maybe he’ll think he dreamed the fur in her shoe. Maybe he’ll forget it. She won’t mention it.

  —

  She throws the clump of fur into the ocean, so distressed that the kindness, the generosity of the furriers has come to this. And what of the plan of presenting fur coats to the workers on the ship, the lovely idea of giving them something they could use to surprise their sweethearts, their wives, their mothers? A lovely idea disintegrating, like the clumps of fur thrown overboard when no one was watching.

  —

  “I wonder what the hell animals they used,” Marcia Leavitt says when Ruth acknowledges the problem with the coats. “Maybe they collected dead cats or sick rabbits.”

  Irene Rothman bangs he
r hand down hard on the table. “Our comrades did what they did from the nobility of their hearts, from their devotion to the revolution. Remember, you are here because you are on the side of the workers.”

  “I’m here because I’m a nurse,” Marcia says.

  The way Irene Rothman looks at Marcia frightens Marian. Growing up in her family, she knows a hunger to punish when she sees it.

  “Enough, girls,” says Ruth Lipsky. “Bring your coats here tonight, all of you, just after midnight. They will be redistributed.”

  At midnight, stealing away from their husbands’ beds—those who have husbands—they drop their coats in a pile, saying nothing to each other, and then silently make their way back to their cabins, hoping they’ve not been seen.

  —

  No one wants to ask what Ruth Lipsky meant by “redistributed.” They will present a united front.

  Because they are united, in their devotion to the idea of a great new world, in their devotion to the cause of Spain.

  AVONDALE, RHODE ISLAND, 2009

  MARIAN won’t hear a word against her granddaughter.

  She’s fond of her daughter-in-law, but Naomi, Amelia’s mother, can be harsh. It’s the other side of her remarkable gift for organization, the dark by-product of the fuel that powers her accomplishments. When she says to Marian, “Amelia’s just so indecisive. It’s not that she’s lazy, no, I would never say that. It’s just that she lacks—well, I don’t know what to call it. Maybe force.”

  And Marian says, “Well, is it all so wonderful where it’s gotten us as a species? Force.”

  And Naomi doesn’t argue. She knows she won’t win and, at ninety-two, Marian is just too old.

  —

  Amelia moved in with her grandmother a month after she graduated from UCLA. It seemed natural that when she graduated with no idea of what she would do next, she would move to Rhode Island to live with Marian, who was ninety at the time, but strong and vigorous, who welcomed the prospect of her granddaughter’s moving in with a delight that made her clap her hands and say, “Oh, goody”—and she was a woman who would not ordinarily have taken up the words and gestures of a child.