by Mary Gordon
—
Rosa and Amelia have caught up to Marian and Helga, who are standing at the foot of a high dune.
“I don’t like this wind, let’s continue alongside the lagoon,” Helga says.
Amelia walks with her grandmother. Helga and Rosa link arms.
Something is going on in the lagoon.
“Whatever is that?” Rosa asks.
A man is standing in a canoe, wielding a paddle against a swan who flaps his wings with real, aggressive intent.
“I’ve always heard that swans could be dangerous, but I’ve never believed it,” Marian says. “That fellow must be doing something to provoke him.”
“Someone said a little boy had his arm broken by a swan in another part of Watch Hill,” Rosa offers tentatively.
“Nonsense,” say Helga and Marian, in unison.
But it’s impossible to deny this swan’s attempt to hurt the man in the canoe.
“I wonder if he is protecting something,” Helga says.
The swan flies off and settles in the water.
“Look at him,” Rosa says. “Something has made him ashamed.”
“I don’t think birds feel shame, my dear,” Helga says.
Marian walks closer to the water. “Whatever are you doing?” she shouts to the man in the boat. She has never lost the diction, the timbre of privilege; always, her voice has been one that assumes it will be listened to. But Amelia knows that if anyone suggested that to her Marian would react with furious denial.
The young man in the boat takes his cap off. Amelia thinks he might be ready to bow. “It’s an environmental project, ma’am. The mute swans here are overpopulating, and they’re a threat to the native species, particularly the wild geese. The swans are overeating the various flora, so they’re starving out several other species and upsetting the ecological balance. They’re not native, you see, the swans, they were imported when this place was first turned into a resort, and they’re very clever, very cunning, so they’ve pushed the natives out.”
“Whatever were you doing with that paddle?” Marian asks.
“Well, we’re approaching the nest so we can addle the eggs.”
“ ‘Addle,’ ” Helga says. “I don’t understand that word.”
“If we can get to the eggs and just shake them a little, or sometimes coat them with mineral oil, or just puncture their shells, the mother will sit on them, but they won’t hatch. This controls the population without any harm to the adults. They only lay eggs once a year, and if you can control the eggs for one year, you’ve controlled the population for that whole year.”
“Control,” Helga says. “Oh, yes, your kind is very fond of control.”
Rosa stands behind her, looking frightened.
“Control usually means the use of some kind of force against a weaker creature,” Marian says. “I would say your brandishing the paddle is proof of that.”
“Ma’am, I’m a wildlife specialist. I’ve devoted my life to birds. I don’t do this work so I can hurt them.”
“And yet,” Marian says, “you are.”
“It’s a controversial enterprise,” the young man says. “You’re welcome to come to our headquarters and read our literature.”
Amelia looks at the young man. He’s blushing; he’s beginning to stammer. She feels sorry for him. She feels sorry for the swan, looking so abashed. She’s worried about Rosa. She’s worried about the Canada geese, whose flight she loves to watch, their strong V such a sign of ardent, steadfast progress. She likes what she’s heard about them, that every flock has leaders by turns, that the lead bird, the one at the narrow point of the V, only leads until she’s tired, and then she’s replaced. She likes what she’s heard about swans, too, that they’re monogamous, that the males are involved in the incubation and rearing of the young. She wishes they’d never come to this place, that they’d walked somewhere else, or at some other time. But she knows what her grandmother would say: “You can’t pretend not to have seen what you’ve seen.”
She remembers seeing a swan dead by the shore, stretched out, its whiteness sullied by the sand, its neck no longer beautiful in its length, but snakelike in its deadness, not suggesting dance or flight, but an excess, an asymmetry, an imbalance. Its beak was orange and ugly; its dead black eye stared: baleful, accusing, stupid. She had wanted something, someone, or a huge wave to take the bird away, out of her sight.
For a moment, no one speaks, and the young man twists his cap in his hands in what seems to Amelia an almost clichéd show of unhappiness. She doesn’t know what will come next, but she knows that Helga and her grandmother won’t let go. Until something has happened upon which they have left their mark.
Marian is all for driving immediately to the wildlife center at Kettle Pond to protest in person what they’ve seen. Helga says they’re better off “doing their homework,” which means they’ll need Amelia. Although Amelia is hardly adept with computers, Marian and Helga are so easily frustrated when they go on the computer that they refuse to use it for anything they consider important. Rosa has never even turned one on. The three women will spend some days in the library first; there, they are comfortable, particularly in one room they are all fond of, with a stained-glass window of an Indian in a canoe, oak-paneled walls, and carved refectory tables for reading and writing.
A week later, they’ve organized a thick folder. Helga spreads it on her dining room table; Rosa has made a leek and potato soup. She doesn’t sit with Helga and Marian at the table; she carries things back and forth from the kitchen, and Amelia stands at the stove, stirring zabaglione, which will be served with raspberries Helga froze the summer before.
“How to think about this,” Helga says, “without being sentimental. The damn swans, all the romance around them, all that encrusting of the dim romantic past.”
Amelia hears the sound of breaking glass. And then a scuffling of chairs, and then the sound of weeping.
“Don’t you hear it, don’t you hear it, what they’re saying about the swans? Doesn’t it remind you of what they said about…about us…? Don’t you remember when I danced the swan, and then we had to leave, they wanted to destroy me, they wanted to destroy us all, it was the same things they said about us, what they’re saying about the swans: we were clever, we were exotics, we were stealing the natives’ proper birthright.”
Amelia has seen it before: Rosa’s past can descend on her, crashing around her, and she is lacerated by the shards. Helga’s life has been devoted to protecting her. She says something in German and Rosa quiets down.
“They hate what is beautiful,” Rosa says. “The brutes of the world, they hate what is beautiful, what they cannot buy or sell or put to use.”
Marian stands up. “Well, we’re not going to let them, are we, honey? We’re going to keep the beautiful birds safe.”
—
And so begins the organizing of the usual willing few, the signs, the picketing of the wildlife sanctuary, contacting the local newspapers, the local television. The three old women carrying the beautiful posters Rosa made: art nouveau swans surrounded by teal-colored reeds and mauve beach roses. The three old women shaking their fists, Helga and Marian shouting, Rosa politely murmuring, “Save the swans.”
Amelia feels sorry for the workers at the wildlife sanctuary. Alongside the three striking old women, they can only seem coarse and callous. Amelia has grown fond of the young man, Scott Ricardi, who stammers and blushes when the microphone is put in front of him. She believes that he has a point. She also believes that the old women have a point. She doesn’t know who she believes is right. But she knows she will stand with her grandmother.
—
One night, Amelia expresses her disquiet to her grandmother. It is the first warm night of the year, and she has unwisely opened a window, but she can’t bear to close it—that seems such an unhopeful gesture.
“Of course, I know what you mean,” Marian says, “but I learned a very long time ago that if you wa
it for the perfect action, you’ll never act. In a situation like this, all you can do is the least bad thing. And be truthful about the cost of what you’ve done, of what’s been brought about, or allowed to come about, for which, you must also understand, you are responsible. And besides, ideas aren’t things that float in the air, they’re connected to people. So, for Rosa, there is no question: the swans represent the whole of her past to her, what was destroyed, what she lost. And the sides are no longer equal, because someone I love weighs in on one side.”
Amelia sits on the floor at her grandmother’s feet. She puts her head in her grandmother’s lap. I will never be as good as you, she thinks, as wise, as courageous. I will never be the woman you are. I may never be anything but some version of a child.
“Meme, I only hope I can be like you someday.” She has always had only one name for her grandmother, the name from her childhood—Meme, pronounced may-may, which later seemed appropriate because whatever she asked her grandmother for was easily given.
Marian, not gently, moves Amelia’s head from its position on her lap. “Nonsense, you don’t want to live the way I’ve lived. You don’t want to make the mistakes I’ve made. You don’t want to cause the harm I’ve caused.”
“Harm?”
“That’s for another day. I’m rather tired.”
Amelia is curious, but she won’t ask anything. For as long as she can remember, her mother has told her that Meme doesn’t like to talk about herself, that Naomi knows very little about her background. “That generation has a fetish for privacy. They resent any intrusion on it.”
And she knows that when you live with someone, it’s important to know what not to ask.
SPAIN, 1937–38
LANDING AT LE HAVRE, Marian and Russell board a train, still in the company of comrades, to Paris. They will stay in Paris for five days, and Russell is delighted, because he’s never been abroad. But Marian’s been abroad too many times with her parents, and she doesn’t want to be anyplace where she has been with them. This is a new life, a new way of being alive; to be seeing the sights she saw during the old life is a penance, an encumbrance. She tells Russell it is her first time, too, and she pretends she’s seeing things only through his eyes, and she believes she isn’t lying when she says she’s never been to Paris because the person who went to Paris is not the person she is now; that old self, that old body, that old skin covering the old heart, heavy and full of anger and sadness: she has sloughed all that off. That sort of lie is called, in the language of the catechism, a “mental reservation.” So, for example, if, when the Fuller Brush man rings the bell and asks, “Is your mother home?” and, knowing your mother is home, you say, “My mother isn’t home,” if you say in your mind, “She isn’t home to you,” it’s not a sin. Because you have made what is called a “mental reservation.” But all that is her past; now she is named Rabinowitz, and she is going to Spain to save the world from fascism. She is not her parents’ daughter. Perhaps she has never been.
They travel with two English journalists to Valencia. First by train to Toulouse, and then by bus over the Pyrenees, then to Barcelona, then they will be met and travel by truck or jeep or some other kind of motorized vehicle to Valencia.
They make their way over the Pyrenees. She thinks she has never seen a more beautiful place. The sea comes right up to the mountains, and, more than ever, she knows she is right to be here, to do what she can to save this beautiful country. She tells herself to look closely, to remember a landscape unravaged, because soon she will be seeing nothing that has not been ravaged. She hopes for a time when she won’t have to be telling herself what to think, what not to think, what to remember, what not to remember. A time when there will be no time for thought: only one action after the other, each one important. She is here because there is a war, a war in which one side is the side of justice and one the side of brutal greed.
They arrive in Barcelona, and there is no more exaltation; there is horror at the sight of the devastated children wandering a bombed-out city looking for parents, old people looking dazed, carrying all their possessions in a tied-up tablecloth. One old woman carries a teapot as if she is looking for a safe place to put it down. Marian sees another kneeling in what must have been the courtyard of her house, digging for something with a silver fork.
There are barricades everywhere. The streets are full of rubble, covered with a rust-red dust the color of the inner organs of animals she refused as a child ever to eat.
Now the arguments she heard on the ship become not trivial but life and death. Literal life and death, because everyone talks of people they have seen killed: anarchists killing communists, communists killing anarchists. There are anarchist cafés in which some of her friends insist that the structure of everything—work, art, love—must be changed or else you will only replace one form of oppression with another. In other cafés, Stalin is toasted, and the anarchists are suspected of being secret allies of Franco. Most of her friends are communists; she meets anarchists who also seem like friends, but the communists call the anarchists enemies and the anarchists call the communists tyrants. “Feverish” is the word that comes to her mind when she listens to conversations. All of them begin benignly: friends are toasted, the fascist name is mentioned, and everyone spits on the ground. But the good spirits gradually heat up, and this frightens her: We are all fighting the same enemy, she thinks. Why, she wants to ask, why are you wasting time on what are only family squabbles?
But she says nothing because she is a woman, a wife, an American, and she has just arrived. She wonders whether it happened when she became someone’s wife, that she became reluctant to speak, she who always prided herself on saying the difficult thing, who was not afraid of standing up to anyone, saying her piece, holding her ground. Or is it that, here in this world where so little now is comprehensible, she has become the docile child she never was?
—
Russell isn’t silent; he has no patience with the anarchist argument. He’s with his fellow communists: “We’re fighting a war, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “The other things will follow when we win. If we win.”
“Don’t you see,” says a young man named Juan, with small hands and feet that do not match them: they are large and clumsily booted. He has just bought them drinks. “Don’t you see, here we have created a worker’s paradise; see, no one is dressed in suits or high heels, no one calls anyone Señor or Señora, everyone is wearing simple, comfortable clothes, there is no more tipping. And by the way, my dear American friends, I would get rid of those hats.”
“Why?” asks Russell, impatient, indignant.
Their new anarchist friend Juan begins to plead. He has tears in his eyes. “Please, please don’t wear those hats. This is a very anarchist city. People can be shot for wearing hats; it’s considered a sign of bourgeois hierarchy, a betrayal of the new worker’s state.”
—
That night, they walk hand in hand through the ruined city, carrying, not wearing, their beautiful hats.
Russell’s mother’s matching hats. She made them herself. Her wedding gift.
Perfect hats.
What a lot of hats Russell had…many more than she did. But, of course, his mother was a hatmaker. And he cared about clothes much more than she did. She teased him about it, and he made fun of himself. “Beau Brummelberg,” he said. “The Jewish Marxist dandy.”
Shantung straw, Russell’s mother had said, foldable. She wanted them foldable so they could be packed easily in the one bag they would take to Spain, could be carried in their pockets when they got there. “It will be important when things are really grim to have one beautiful thing, one elegant thing that you can put on, get courage from. Wear them in good health; I’m proud to call you my daughter,” she said.
They were married in city hall in their matching hats. Only Russell’s family was there; his sister and brother-in-law were the witnesses. When they got home to Patchen Place, Russell insisted on carrying her over th
e threshold, and they giggled at the absurd spectacle. They were a little drunk; they took everyone out for steaks and martinis.
When they walked in the door, they saw the letter from Marian’s father saying that she was disowned, and her only place in his life was in his prayers. They put the letter in the big amber glass ashtray and set fire to it, and Russell made them more martinis, and they fell into bed laughing: this was their wedding night.
“Do you think Juan might be exaggerating about the hats?” Russell asks now.
“Let’s not take the chance,” Marian says.
The next day, they walk to the beach. At the shore, they stand on the seawall. They take off their perfect hats, their beautiful hats. They kiss their hats goodbye and throw them into the sea. They watch them floating for a minute, so jaunty and playful, as if they’re just going for a little swim, and then, suddenly, they are gone. Marian cries, although she loved the hats less than Russell did, and Russell says, “Forget it, toots. It’s our first sacrifice for the cause.”
She is exhausted and numbed by the ride in the truck over the rough roads to Valencia. This is where her real life will begin; she doesn’t have time to worry about comrades fighting among themselves as she did in Barcelona. Now she will be helping Russell treat the wounded in the hospital named after the heroine La Pasionaria. Marian likes the idea that the name of the hospital brings to mind: the Hospital of Passion, the Passionate Hospital. Bobbing up is the flotsam of an old, violently discredited life: the Passion of Christ. Which she will not allow to penetrate the surface of her brain; it is an infection that must be drowned, burned, or cut out.
She never learns, because she doesn’t know whom to ask, what the hospital was before it was a hospital. A school? A convent? Something institutional, the large open windows letting in sometimes too much sunlight—you don’t want to see too clearly what you have to see, the wounds, the ruined faces.