by Mary Gordon
For the first time in her life, Amelia is older than her grandmother. Her grandmother, who has always seemed so solid, so sure, as sure and solid as the stones in the wall around her house. But now she is unsure. Is it because she’s ill, because she’s dying? Are the ill and the dying always our children, Amelia wonders, slightly at large, in need of someone to rein them in and take hold of them, before they wander off?
The responsibility is great and strange. The opposite of most kinds of responsibility, where action is required. Her responsibility is to be still, and yet, in her stillness, to communicate the utmost attention. Of course, she learned to do this in school. But then, nothing was at stake, or very little: a poor grade, at worst a failed exam. But now, a lapse in attention could have real consequences. Fatal, really, because the death of something would be involved, the death of a memory, of a whole swath of the past.
“You’ve always been of use to me, Meme. There’s nothing you could say that wouldn’t be of use. There’s nothing you could say that could possibly be wrong.”
“Well, at least let me sit down,” Marian says. They move to the kitchen table, where they have sat together so often, for so many private meals. The porch light is still on; Amelia had it on so Graham could make his way easily to his car. Its yellow, garish light disturbs Marian.
“Turn the porch light off, will you?” she says. She knows she is stalling for time.
Does this child understand that, in her ability to say the words she said so easily, or at all, there is the evidence of the destruction of a whole way of life, a whole way of being in the world, the world that Marian was born to?
Right and wrong. What can be said, and what cannot be said, words that cannot be tolerated, even for a second, statements, even offered tentatively, that cannot be forgiven. Some things must be laughed at, but, of course, there are some things at which it is forbidden to laugh, words that need to be repeated, repeated, repeated, and other words that cannot even be whispered. Don’t you know, don’t you know, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you know the difference between right and wrong?
And now, this child is saying there is no wrong way.
Because of this, her life has not been, she sees, for all its errors, a mistake.
“But I forget so much, Amelia. So much of what happened when I was involved in the war, the Spanish Civil War. I worked in hospitals, I carried stretchers, sometimes I drove an ambulance. There were bombs. I was horribly afraid.”
“I didn’t know you were in Spain during that war,” Amelia says, swallowing her shock, keeping her tone as light as possible.
“Yes, yes, I was in that war. But most of it I forget.”
“Forgetting is a part of remembering, Meme. I learned that in a psychology course I took. We forget what we need to forget in order to make room for what we need to remember.”
Is this some kind of new-age nonsense she picked up in California? Or can Marian hold on to it, this mercy from a girl she has always considered merciful, in whom she has discovered now a vein of iron?
Lord, have mercy.
Child, have mercy.
“Just begin anywhere, Meme. The first step is the hardest.”
C’est le premier pas qui coûte. It’s the first step that counts. She learned that from Mother Kiley, whom she adored when she was, perhaps, fourteen. The thing is to begin.
The thing, then, is to begin with something that is clear to her, something she knows to be true, that hasn’t disappeared in shadows. Something that she always returns to, from which everything has always started. Johnny. The first love. The purest. Purity, she thinks, is something the young no longer believe in. That must be a good thing. The first meaning it had for her was sexual purity. Don’t touch your own body, don’t even look at it. Later, among the comrades, preserve the purity of the idea. Worth dying for, worth killing for. A good thing, then, that the young have lost it. The ones still looking for it are looking for something from the dead past, as if they’d taken to wearing epaulets.
And yet, she can’t entirely celebrate the loss. Purity of intention: that was something Mother Kiley stressed. A pure line. A pure form. Johnny spoke about it in relation to music. Is all that lost, too? It doesn’t matter. The good and the harmful. Gone. There’s too much mourning. Some things are better let go.
But one thing stays: she knows she had a brother whom she loved. I don’t know who you are. Well, I am Johnny Taylor’s sister. Everything is measured against that, against the questions. What would this mean to Johnny? Would Johnny have enjoyed that? How would this person react to Johnny? One of her earliest certainties: that cruelty was so often directed at him, and that he couldn’t bear it. That she could bear it better, and therefore must protect him. Cruelty dropped on his head like a bucket of filthy water dropped from an overhanging window. Because it could be done, it was done. Her understanding of the world was formed by this. So she can say something now that she knows is true.
“I had a brother whom I loved. He was very musical, a very gifted pianist. He was gay. He killed himself. It was because of my family that he killed himself. I will never forgive them.”
It is impossible to do anything but sit still, in silence. Something enormous has happened in the room, a birth—Amelia has a great-uncle she never knew of—and a death—he killed himself, and it was because of his family. All of them related to her. All of them, until seconds ago, unknown.
“I didn’t love my family. You think that’s a terrible thing to say, but they were cruel people, and if you loved them, you would have to love cruelty. And I refused.”
Does she have the right to ask a question? Her grandmother has gone silent. Perhaps, then, a light question, one easy to answer, so that she’ll keep going.
“Were they cruel to you when you were little?”
“I didn’t see much of them when we were little. My brother and I were the youngest of nine, and by that time, I think my parents had gotten tired of the whole idea of children. They traveled a lot. My father had lots of business enterprises. His fortune, or his first fortune, was made in the sulfur mines of Ontario. And then there were the years in Argentina; he raised beef cattle. That was where they hired Pablo and Jacinta, they were our cook and our gardener. Our parents brought them to America. I learned Spanish from them. They were more parents to me than my parents. In the evenings, we would be brought down to my parents—if they weren’t traveling—to say good-night. We had to be clean and quiet, not too affectionate—they didn’t like what my father called ‘slobber’—and then we would be sent to bed. I have no idea what my mother did all day: we never saw her before sundown; she may have been a vampire for all I know.”
“I don’t know where you lived.”
“New York. New York and Newport.”
“Newport, Rhode Island? Close to here, then.”
They could be near, Amelia thinks. Rhode Island is a small state; she could have been bumping into relatives at any time, none of them having the slightest idea. Not that it was likely that people from Newport would come to this part of the state. South County is poorer, less glamorous. But they might have come down in the world, or they might, for example, have read about Amelia’s cupcakes and made an outing on a rainy day to try them. Amelia might have been baking for her family and never known it.
“Imagine my distress when your grandfather told me we’d be moving to Rhode Island. The smallest state in the Union.”
“Did you ever run into them? Did you ever go back to your old house?”
“No, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it, and anyway, I wouldn’t have been welcome. It isn’t far from here, though, you’re right. Beech Haven, it was called. It was surrounded by beautiful beech trees, that’s where the name came from. But even the name was chosen because it could make a fool of some people. ‘You live near the beach?’ ‘No, dear, not that kind of beach.’
“I suppose I could take you. But I won’t, of course. It’s a bunch of condos now…I read about it in The Providence
Journal; it was a big deal when it was sold. Because of my brother Vincent. Did you know Vincent Taylor was my brother?”
“I don’t know who Vincent Taylor is.”
Marian hoots. “Well, that’s a good one, wouldn’t it kill him, if he weren’t already dead, to know that his fame was so limited. I guess that’s the benefit of being brought up in California, among people like your parents and their friends. But in certain circles, my brother was quite a celebrity. The thinking man’s conservative. He had his own radio show; this was before all this talk radio; he’d like to think he was different from that lot, the Rush Limbaughs, but he wasn’t really, he only had a better vocabulary. A lot of famous people went on it to debate with him, mostly to be humiliated by him. I don’t know why; he actually wasn’t that intelligent. He had only two ideas: the virtue of the free market and the evil of communism. Oh, yes, and the absolute superiority of the Roman Catholic Church; he didn’t bring that up much on the radio, however. But he had a lot of what used to be called ten-dollar words. I wonder what they’d be called now, with inflation.”
Amelia knows that she will Google “Vincent Taylor” when she leaves Meme. A conservative celebrity. Not what she would have chosen…she’s more comfortable with the gay uncle who killed himself.
“If you saw the house, Beech Haven, you’d probably think it was beautiful. Was it beautiful? I was so uncomfortable there, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. It had a lovely view of the bay, and real old stone walls…like mine, but much, much more extensive. So many rooms, Amelia, eighteen rooms. Do you know what it is to live in a house and feel it doesn’t want you there? More than feeling that you don’t belong, that it refuses to do its job of sheltering you. For as long as I could remember, I had a sense of shame about that house, about its excesses; the excess of rooms, of land, even the excess of air, made me feel I would suffocate. I know what you think: you should feel suffocated because you feel constricted. But I felt I couldn’t breathe because the ground I was standing on was too thin, that I could fall through it at any moment, that it was like a crust covering over some pit I could fall into, that I could break through the crust with one false move. So I was always holding my breath.
“I don’t know where it came from, the idea, but for as long as I can remember, I knew we had too much. That the Taylors had too much. That it was wrong to have so much when some people had too little. I felt it even before the Depression, but when the Depression began—I was eleven in 1929, Amelia, you can’t begin to understand the despair most people lived with then. They were terrified that they would literally starve, and, worse, they were ashamed, ashamed, some of them, to the point of death, at having to admit that they had nothing now, that they might be ‘on relief,’ or seen as a shiftless pauper, a bum. We never saw any of that in Newport, but when I went back to New York, I had to see the bread lines, and the people selling apples, selling anything. I couldn’t not see it; I didn’t understand how my family could. Then I really knew that my family, having so much more than other people, was the wrongest thing in the world, and that all the wrong things in the world were connected to that.
“If I took you to my old house, you’d be impressed. Modest, certainly, it was, in comparison with the great houses, the great mansions, the Breakers, Rosecliff, built to look like châteaux, ridiculous in New England, fortunes spent on houses to be lived in six weeks of a year. No, Beech Haven wasn’t like that. It was a working farm. And it wasn’t made of stone, it was made of cedar shingles; my father saw that it conformed to the landscape, my father had more taste—he said it of himself all the time—than the Vanderbilts. Oh, it was perfect for him, an Irishman living in Newport beside the wealthy Yankees, feeling he’d outdone them in good taste.”
So now she has told the child about Johnny, and she has described the house. The first step has been taken. What now? So much needs to be explained. What should she work to make her see, and what can be left out? Should she try to make her feel the atmosphere of the house, and hope that will explain things? Silver pheasants on the table set for thirty, gold-rimmed plates and cups, candlelight, damask, priests with their white hands, their special white towels. Furniture polished till it shone like mirrors, little tables covered with pictures of monsignors and bishops, gilt-framed. The view in winter from the dining room window, the white expanse of snow, the moonlight falling straight onto that flat whiteness, the famous trees, budding, then lush, all of it, she knew from a very young age, was for her, and she wanted no part of it. But is that the case now? Now that she’s started to tell—if not a story, whatever it is—she’s not so sure.
How can she possibly re-create a world so entirely alien to everything Amelia knows? The Catholic Church, really the Holy Roman Empire. A way of being in the world, a system based not only on the belief that what was at stake was life and death, but eternal life, eternal damnation. Can she even convey what it was to believe in eternity? To believe in an eternity of flame, burned flesh, a thirst without end? The fear that if you ate a hot dog on Friday or overslept on Sunday, so that you missed the last Mass, that fate would be yours. Can she really convince her granddaughter that perfectly intelligent people lived their lives like that? And believed that the Church, the Church, was the bulwark against all the evils in the modern world. But if Amelia is going to understand her, going to understand the war in Spain, she will have to understand the power of the Church, something most of her comrades didn’t understand. The war was so much about the Church. The Church that was hated because it had always been on the side of the rich, so that the burning of churches, the killing of priests, was justified, was celebrated. Franco and his followers killing in the name of God, in the name of the Church, justifying everything because the reds wanted to destroy the Church. In defense of their brutality, they quote Bakhtin, who they believe is a hero to all communists—although like so much else, they got that wrong. The communists had no use for Bakhtin. Only the anarchists invoked him. “No one will be free until the throat of the last priest is strangled in the guts of the last king.” Half of the Spanish people seeing the Church as the monster devouring the poor, the other half seeing the modern world as a fire-breathing dragon wanting to annihilate all truth, all purity, all that is eternally valuable—whose embodiment was the Church—and so it is worth the lives of however many it took to safeguard it.
“If I’m going to tell you who I am, I have to explain a whole way of life that has, thank God, vanished. The world of the Catholic Church, the way my family knew themselves before anything. They saw themselves as Catholics, not really Americans. Oh, we lived among Americans, but we had THE TRUE FAITH and so it was our mission to convert everyone in the world. They were right in some ways; the way we lived wasn’t exactly American. We didn’t celebrate holidays like the Fourth of July or Memorial Day or Thanksgiving. Those holidays were for Protestants. No, we had feast days. Ash Wednesday. Pentecost. Assumption. Immaculate Conception. Oh, I can’t even remember them all, thank God. The ‘Church Militant,’ they called it, with so much pride. They loved the idea of being always ready for a fight. They wouldn’t have recognized a God of love; theirs was a warrior God, a God of righteousness; heaven was known as the ‘Church Triumphant.’ They loved having enemies. They loved naming something, someone, some group as outside the fold. Their greatest pleasure was humiliation. They believed they had the right to punish anyone anytime they wanted and for anything they thought deserving. Do you know what it was like always to feel you were in the center of a rifle sight, which could blast you—as it did blast my brother—to smithereens, whenever they thought it was the right time? Sometimes, they would speak in a civilized, sorrowful tone. ‘I regret this deeply, but I am acting in the name of truth, in the name of eternity. It is necessary, in the name of truth, in the name of eternity, that you be entirely destroyed.’ Or sometimes they hissed at you, ‘You are in the devil’s grip, I am destroying you in order that you will be saved.’
“Oh, they thought they were more European
aristocracy than Americans, but at the bottom of it, there was a particular kind of Catholicism that was uniquely American. They combined the worst prejudices of the worst Americans with the worst of being Catholic—the conviction that whatever you did was in the name of the one true faith.”
Slow down, slow down, Meme, Amelia wants to say. This is all too much. This is all too fast. But she’s afraid that if she says anything, her grandmother will just go silent, think she can’t handle it, that she’s not quick enough, is perhaps too young, too weak. She clasps and unclasps her hands.
“I think I was about thirteen when my mother did something that upset me terribly. Racism. There wasn’t even a word for it then. You could say ‘prejudice,’ but it wasn’t a very strong word. I don’t think they came anywhere near many black people, but they were obsessed with the corruption that contact with Negroes brought about. Oh, it had a lot of faces, from my mother’s physical reaction, as if she could be infected, to my brother’s genteel protectionism of Western culture.
“With my mother, it happened in the church we went to in Newport. My father had a lot of contempt for it; he was right, it was ugly. He said it was built by and for ‘Greenhorns.’ His life in Newport was devoted to differentiating himself from the Greenhorns, the Irish who didn’t share his taste, or even his money, and the Yankees, whose wealth he believed had nothing to do with their having deserved it.
“That Sunday there was a visiting priest, an African missionary. I remember the name of the order: the White Fathers. Even then I knew that was a problem, because the priest was black, an African priest, one of the first ‘native clergy’ to be ordained. Of course, he was there to ask for money. He moved beautifully; I remember feeling a little guilty because you weren’t supposed to have such thoughts about a priest. He spoke about his village, about children who were starving but who brought their pennies to church and sang out their catechism. At Communion time, my mother didn’t join the others at the altar rail. She stayed in her pew, a handkerchief to her mouth, then holding her silver bottle of smelling salts to her nose.”