by Mary Gordon
Now there is someone else for Amelia to know. A great-grandmother. Fragile. Needing smelling salts. Smelling salts: she’s heard about them. Perhaps not heard: only read about them. Now they are connected to her. If she ever encounters the words “smelling salts” again she will think immediately “my great-grandmother.”
“I was frightened. We were always told that our mother was fragile, heroic for having borne nine healthy children, a true Catholic mother, but it had taken its toll. I asked her in that particular whisper we used in church if she was all right. She closed her eyes and waved her hand.
“Later at home she said, ‘It was simply not possible for me to take Communion from a black hand. I may be wrong, but I simply couldn’t do it. It would have been an offense against my ancestors.’
“I knew with everything in me that what she had done was an offense, not only against a higher moral good, but against the law of the Church, and that I would be wrong—that my soul would be in danger, you see, I’d absorbed their thinking in my own way—not to speak out. I had that impulse to martyrdom in me, too. I’d loved reading the lives of the saints; I was very big on virgin martyrs. Do you know what the word ‘martyr’ means? It’s the Greek word for ‘witness.’ And I was ready to be martyred as a witness to the truth.”
“Since 9/11, Meme, everyone knows what martyr means. Of course, it has a bad name now.”
“It’s why I understand the 9/11 bombers—of course, the martyrdom I was interested in didn’t have any victims. But I understand that kind of outrage you believe to be the only right response. I felt myself filled with it, like a balloon that is just going to have to pop.
“I told her that if taking Communion from a black priest was an offense against her ancestors, not taking it was an offense against God. I had all the legal language under my belt, and I used it with that real satisfaction you feel, that click, when the word perfectly fits the situation. ‘Ex opere operans, Mother,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember the law of the Church: Not the worker but the work?’ I reminded her that it didn’t matter if the priest was drunk, insane, a criminal. The sacrament was still valid. ‘The priest did nothing wrong, except to be born in Africa. How could you have so little regard for the sacrament of the Eucharist as to refuse it from a lawfully ordained priest?’
“There was silence at the table. My mother crumbled her bread. My father wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘I think Marian might take her luncheon in her room,’ he said.
“Thank God I didn’t cry. I walked out of the room with my head held high, but as soon as the dining room door closed, I could hear the sound of male laughter. My brothers, especially Vincent, thought my performance was hilarious.”
Something new is in the room’s air now. A crack, a flash. Anger, perhaps, she thinks, something powerful, direct, and sharp.
“What I want you to understand, Amelia, what I want you never to forget, is that there is a malign force in the world, the desire to humiliate, which you must always be on your guard for, which you must always resist.”
Does this girl have it in her power to resist, having had to resist nothing? The world has been made comfortable for her, a world in which she could feel safe putting one foot in front of the other. Then Marian remembers Amelia’s father’s death. But that was nothing that could have been resisted. Did you have to have been the victim of some kind of tyranny to have the power to resist? No tyranny has been allowed to touch Amelia. What, then, could resistance mean to her?
“You must resist.” The words: thick, shining, fall on Amelia’s head; she feels herself anointed, ready for anything. Meme has trusted her, Meme has singled her out. But of everything her grandmother has said, Amelia knows what the most important thing is.
“Will you tell me more about your brother?”
“Fairest of them all is my winsome, handsome Johnny.”
Her grandmother is singing, and her grandmother is not singing well. It’s a family joke that Meme is tone-deaf. But the toneless melody is piercing, like a song from a dream.
“He never lost patience with me. Only once, when I said I didn’t like Bartók. His eyes were a grey color, a color I’ve never seen on any one again. He had light brown hair, ‘dirty blond,’ we called it in those days, it was always falling in his eyes. That always annoyed my mother. One day, with her long red nails, she pushed his hair out of his eyes and left him blinded for a moment. A scratch on the cornea. But he couldn’t say, ‘You hurt me. You can’t do that.’ We could never say anything like that to our parents.
“But he was safe from them, from everything in the world, in his music. It was safe because my father, for all his monstrosities, was a man of culture. Playing Bach on his gramophone, a bit guiltily because he preferred him to Monteverdi, choosing the Protestant over the Catholic. He liked having one musically gifted son, because music was important to him, but it was also an embarrassment, because it was the weakly son, hopeless on the tennis court, uneasy. Once I heard him saying to our mother, “What the hell’s the matter with the two youngest? Perhaps we were away too much.” But my father couldn’t withhold his regard, because Johnny’s music gave him terrific pleasure. It was a gift he had to acknowledge, and when experts (my father was a great believer in experts), the teachers at Juilliard especially, acknowledged that Johnny had a gift, well, he couldn’t ignore them.
—
What more should she say about Johnny? How much should she let Amelia know about Johnny’s death? She can’t bear to make a scene of it, a little playlet, discovering her brother hanging from the ceiling, cutting him down, feeling the weight of his body on top of hers. No, she won’t do that. No need to create images that will be impossible to eradicate. Some images are too strong; it is best that they be kept back. She will tell the part of the story that will strengthen in Amelia the will to resist.
“My family was absolutely horrified by even the idea of homosexuality. The whole world—all the experts, doctors, psychiatrists—was calling it a ‘disease’ that could be cured. So it was perfectly possible for my brother to be put in a mental hospital because he was gay; being committed was the alternative to going to jail. Perfectly possible to ruin his mind with those primitive shock treatments, perfectly possible to take everything from him that he was.”
She won’t go into details about Johnny’s letter. She doesn’t want Amelia to consider the possibility that life is not worth the living of it.
“And so I don’t want to hear, ever, how much better the old days were. Some things have got much better; you mustn’t ever fall into the trap of that nostalgic nonsense.”
“I would never, Meme,” Amelia says, wondering what in her history might have given her grandmother a suspicion of that. “You’re right not to forgive them. Your family. What they did was terrible, disgusting. I’m glad I never had to know them.”
Marian has a new regard for her granddaughter, the regard of an adult admiring another adult. How did she know how to say exactly the right words? The rightness of abandonment, the proper snap of breaking off the branch, not quite rotten, but rotting at its base. Terrible, disgusting. Not “I’m sorry.” Not “How sad.” The story of Johnny can take its proper place in Amelia’s life, framed by outrage. Terrible. Disgusting. Angels preventing entry to Paradise with flaming swords.
“It was because of Johnny that I went to Spain. He had a lover, Russell, he was wonderful, we were great friends. He was a doctor. He was going to Spain to serve as a medical volunteer. I talked him into marrying me. It wasn’t a real marriage, of course, but in a way, I loved him as much as my real husbands.”
Her grandmother fought in a war. Her grandmother had many husbands. She had asked for her grandmother’s past; she had said she wanted to know who she was, but she had no idea of the extent of what had been hidden, or what was behind the door she’d knocked on, innocently imagining that she would find a set of interesting but unalarming relics: a snood, antimacassars, finger bowls. Instead, she found something she now knows she c
ould never have begun to imagine.
She will ask her grandmother an easier question, something that could be found on an official form. Number of marriages? Husbands’ names?
“How many times were you married, Meme?”
Marian laughs, and the relief is, for both of them, disproportionate. “You’d think that would be an easy question to answer, but actually it isn’t. Probably the only truly proper marriage, both legally and physically, was to your grandfather. Russell and I were legally married, but the marriage was never consummated, so I guess it wasn’t really legal. And my Spanish husband, Ramón was his name, we were married by a judge in Valencia, under the auspices of the government of the Republic, but later, when Franco took over all marriages not performed in the Church, all civil marriages under the Republic were declared invalid. And then I sort of feel I’ve been married to Graham for thirty years, or twenty of them, at least, but of course he was married to someone else, and then, by the time she managed to get herself to the great beyond, it seemed a little absurd. We were both so old.”
“You had a Spanish husband? During the war? You were telling me you got to Spain because of marrying Russell. What happened to Russell, did you stay in touch?”
“Well, after he left Spain, I didn’t know where to find him. And then, in 1955, when the Salk vaccine, the polio vaccine, was announced, I saw his picture in the paper among the doctors who were working with Salk. I found out that after he left Spain, which was before I left, Russell volunteered in the American Hospital in Paris, then he was in the army…then he went to work with Salk. He moved to California, and we didn’t see each other much; when he came to New York or Boston, I’d go and visit him, but he never came here. I think he didn’t want to know the details of a life I had after Johnny. We spoke on the phone every year on the anniversary of Johnny’s death. Russell died of lung cancer. Imagine, a brilliant doctor smoking himself to death.”
“But you went to Spain, to the war, together,” Amelia says, impatient now, although it was she who’d asked about Russell. But the war, the war: as a subject, it looms and presses its demands too heavily to be ignored.
“I talked Russell into marrying me. I had to get away. I was shattered because of my brother’s death. I couldn’t bear to have anything to do with my family, and the only way I could be sure of being outside their control was to be married. I had no money; I had never worked a day in my life; if I stayed at Vassar, it would be taking something from them.
“Of course, when I first mentioned the plan to Russell, he thought I was kidding. He said, ‘Honey, what can I say, you’re not my type. You’re missing a vital part of anatomical equipment.’
“But I wouldn’t give up…I guess I was relentless—yes, I know I was—and he hated my family for what they’d done to Johnny, and the thing with Russell was, he always had a deep strain of dark irony, and his marrying me appealed to that.
“Russell was going to Spain and I was determined to go with him, determined to do something I knew was important, where I knew I could be on the side of unquestionable good, where I could be of definite use. Russell knew he could be of use; he was a doctor, and they needed doctors badly. But he said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything for you there.’ I told him he was wrong. I had Spanish—which he didn’t—because of being brought up by Argentine servants. And I was a whiz at cars. Driving them. Fixing them. I loved cars.
“I guess it was a rebellion against my family, to prefer cars to horses. And Johnny was really afraid of horses; he’d had a bad experience on one, and he never got over it. So, you see, everything in my life goes back to Johnny. I got to Spain because of Johnny. Marrying Russell and being good with cars, those were because of Johnny. I went to Spain because of Johnny’s death, and Johnny died because of the way our family was. And that had a lot to do with horses. Horses and uniforms. It sounds like some kind of nineteenth-century operetta, but that was how my family would have liked to live, in a nineteenth-century operetta—or, no, an opera. Shedding blood for the faith and singing triumphant arias, sword in hand. When I turned against horses, it was the first turn away from the family, and when I first lost respect for my father, it was about uniforms.”
Horses. Uniforms. Operas. Operettas. Amelia is losing the thread. She wants to hear about the war, the Spanish husband, and her grandmother is talking about horses and uniforms. She begins to be frightened. Suppose it’s too late, that her grandmother’s mind is just too old.
Marian sees that Amelia’s attention has wandered. “Am I being a bore? Of all the things I fear—believe me, death is nothing to it—I most fear being a bore. You know how I hate being bored; it makes me feel like someone’s holding my head underwater, trying to drown me. Graham says being bored turns me into a savage.”
“Of course you’re not boring me, Meme. I’m just a little confused, about the horses and the uniforms.”
She sees that her grandmother is struggling not to be irritated because Amelia has confessed to being confused. Marian pats her hair, as if to straighten it, but it is perfectly straight, as always, absolutely in place. She opens her hands and closes them.
“Well, horses,” she says, and Amelia sees that she’s forcing herself to be patient. Perhaps she should ask if her grandmother wants to stop. But having just got to the point she finds most interesting, she won’t give her grandmother the option of not going on, and she fears that she’s becoming cruel, as the Taylor family—her ancestors, after all—were cruel.
And Marian seems willing to go on. “Their world, the world of my family, was very much centered around horses. I think it was because they really feared and despised the modern world.
“I think they thought if they were horse people, they were putting down stakes in the camp of the past. And, of course, taking a place in what they called the Yankee world, which tried to keep them out, but couldn’t quite if they could ride well and owned the right horseflesh. Oh, the to-do about the Newport hunt. The hunt breakfasts, and the outfits and the saddles and bridles and bits and all the talk about bloodlines. It bored me to crumbs. I never wanted to be any part of it.
“And the people my father hired to attend to the horses weren’t kind. Johnny was afraid of the horses, but the man in charge, an Englishman, Stillingworth was his name, made Johnny ride when he was afraid and tried to make him get up on the horse again after he was thrown off and badly hurt. Well, I stopped that.”
Amelia sees that her grandmother is proud; she has the face of a girl talking about executing a perfect dive from the high board.
“I was seven years old, and Stillingworth was afraid of me, because I reminded him that my father had the power to fire him, and I suggested that with one word from me, he’d be out of a job. Which was the opposite of true…but it was my first lesson about the power of money, how false it was, and how unjust. It was one of the most important things I ever learned.
“It just occurs to me now that maybe I was wrong. Isn’t it one of the oldest clichés in the world: that you’re supposed to get right back on the horse? Supposing Johnny had, and it had gone all right. We might have had a very pleasant life with horses. We might have been able to find some place for ourselves in the family, instead of being the outsiders we were. Maybe everything would have been different then. Maybe a life with horses would have made Johnny stronger, and I wouldn’t have always felt I had to protect him from the family. Maybe they wouldn’t have felt free to do what they did to him. Maybe he’d still be alive. He’d be ninety-four. A lot of people are still around at ninety-four. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so desperate to get away from the family. I might never have gone to Spain.”
“The butterfly effect,” Amelia says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s part of chaos theory, or random causation. A butterfly flaps its wings, and it changes the air around it, so there’s a tornado two continents away.”
“I like that,” Marian says. “I like that very much. It’s as good a way of explaining lif
e, or of acknowledging that there’s no real explanation—none that you can trace, anyway. So what would have happened if my father had hired someone kind to run the stables and someone unpleasant to be in charge of the cars, instead of Luigi?”
“Who was Luigi?”
“Oh, Luigi was an angel, although no one ever looked less like one. He was very small and very dark, and he moved very clumsily. He often looked angry, but it was because he was nearsighted, and he didn’t like to wear his glasses. I told you he was in charge of the cars. He would drive our parents back and forth from New York and Newport, and then drive them around New York, and he took care of all the cars in our Newport garage. How did we ever make our way down to the garage? I can’t imagine. It was at the far end of the property. I have no memory of meeting him for the first time, none at all. I have no memory of his not being one of my favorite people. I have no memory of how I discovered that I loved cars instead of horses, which was what I was supposed to love.
“Every day in the summers when we were in Newport, Johnny and I would make our way down to the garage to be with Luigi. He never made us feel we were in the way, and although Johnny had no interest in cars, he was happy with Luigi, he felt safe with him, and Johnny didn’t feel safe with many people. Luigi sang snatches of opera, and Johnny would sing along with him, and all the time they were singing, I was learning about how engines worked.
“I was just crazy about cars. I cut pictures of cars from magazines like other girls cut out pictures of dresses or movie stars. I loved the names. Bentley. Rolls-Royce. Aston Martin. Hispano-Suiza. I don’t know why I was allowed to do it; I guess no one was really paying attention. And I guess, despite himself, my father admired my interest—my father was an engineer, and none of my brothers and sisters had the slightest interest in anything mechanical. For all his faults, my father never suggested that there were things I couldn’t learn because I was a girl. It’s difficult for me to give my father credit for anything, but to be fair, I have to give him credit for that.