by Lisa Gornick
The day after your sentencing hearing, I attempt to resume my work. There’s a pencil lodged in the album of newspaper clippings at the page where I was reading the morning Rena called to tell me about your arrest. I reread an article from a Mexico City paper that describes Carmelita as a seventeen-year-old girl from a pueblo outside Oaxaca who claimed to have conceived, like Our Blessed Virgin, without sexual relations. The article is dated February 21, 1955—a few days after the drowned baby was found by a group of women scrubbing their wash on the flat rocks at the edge of the stream. Carmelita, wakened in her hut, said the devil had killed her Jesus.
I flip forward to the account of the trial in the Oaxaca daily. A priest was called to testify on the religious validity of Carmelita’s statements that God had spoken to her, telling her that the devil had murdered her baby. In the transcript of the trial, there’d been nothing short of a philosophical debate about the meaning of the concept of religious validity until the judge called a halt to the exchange, stating that in his courtroom all that was to be determined was whether other Catholics would believe that God might speak to a girl of seventeen about why her baby was dead—not whether there is a God or such a God speaks or whether there is a devil and such a devil could sink a baby to a bottom of a stream. A psychiatrist came from Veracruz to report on an outbreak of religious hallucinations among girls in rural areas. Asking for a blackboard, he drew a diagram of the brain to show the sector where hallucinations originate. What the jurors thought of all of this, it was impossible to say, since not a one of them was interviewed and they all disappeared within hours of the end of the trial back to their plots of rocky land, but we can conclude not much since Carmelita was convicted of infanticide. Twelve days later she was found dead. A suicide, the authorities stated, despite the absence of rope burns on her neck and her sisters having declared it impossible, Carmelita loved life too dearly.
I review my introduction in which I outline three frames through which the case can be viewed: the psychopathological—the girl as psychotic, perhaps even a postpartum psychosis on top of an already existing delusion about the conception; the cultural-relativist—why would we accept the story of Mary’s virginal pregnancy but not a modern-day story of miracles?; the sociological—the disruption of traditional family life by the opening of an American-owned copper mine outside the town. Reading over what I’ve written, I see that I’ve given extra weight to the third explanation, the shift from families working side by side to the creation of public and private spheres, the separation of fathers from children, the unspoken humiliations of the male workers, having to ask permission to use the toilet, the men responding with a denigration of their wives, the wives retaliating by an assertion of their own power via the virgin birth fantasy.
I have no idea if this materialist lens is right or any more right than the other interpretations. As a child, I didn’t know it was a lens; it seemed natural that everything would be seen as a piece of politics, as part of the inexorable struggle between workers and owners. Now it seems uncomfortably close to my own father’s situation, to Merckin’s harping from his throne behind the couch about the triumph I’d felt watching my father crushed by the capitalist machine.
Usually, I determine the truth value of my ideas by visceral conviction—are they tepid or insistently, heart-poundingly “right”?—but today everything seems flat and two-dimensional, my inner sense turned tin. Asked today, I could not say if a painting is banal or luminous, if a piece of music is clichéd or haunting, if Morton is leveling with me or sugarcoating the facts.
If you are a soul turned evil or a person traumatized by life’s tragedies.
If my ministrations toward your wife are for my benefit or yours.
6 Rena
On the plane to Denver, Rena sits next to a plump woman in a yellow jogging suit and white sneakers who is headed out to help her third daughter after the birth of her second child.
“She had an awful time of it, upchucking everything, and I mean everything, those first twelve weeks. She was so tiny to start with and she lost so much weight, they thought they’d have to put her in the hospital. But the baby was nine pounds! So the Lord has his miracles. And you, dear? Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“What does your husband do?”
For a split second, Rena imagines saying, He’s an inmate at a federal prison. “He’s a doctor.”
“Well, isn’t that nice. Lucky you.” She pokes Rena in the ribs. “You probably have a real nice house with a pool. My oldest boy, Joey, we always thought he’d be a doctor, but those chemistry courses killed him. Do you have children? Don’t tell me, I know, not yet, but you want them, right?”
“I suppose.”
“See, I can tell. You have that look. Just don’t wait too long. My middle daughter waited till thirty-eight and she had a dickens of a time.”
“If you’ll excuse me.” Rena takes her tote bag and heads toward the back of the half-empty plane. Spotting an open pair of seats, she sits in the one next to the window. She leans against the glass, staring out at the spidery haze.
After her visit in March, Saul had written that she could visit as often as she wished but he wouldn’t harangue her to come. That was the word he had used: harangue. She spent a long time on the word, first because it was impossible to imagine Saul haranguing anyone, but also because it has always fascinated her the way he slides up and down within the language, adjusting his vocabulary to the listener, not in a way that seems condescending, but rather a kind of transposition, more like moving from A minor back to C major. On the surface, his letter suggested self-possession; he would allow her to work out her own feelings and visit or not visit as she wished. Beneath (though there was nothing she could point to in the sentences, not even after many readings), there was panic, his awareness that in the realm of the emotions, repairs are few and far between.
Not until the pilot announces their approach to Denver and she returns to her own seat does she realize that it’s not the busybody she’s angry with, but Saul. Saul for ruining everything. Saul for making her hide again.
HER FIRST NIGHT in Denver, she cannot sleep. At three in the morning, she gives up and runs a tub: the soak she’d abandoned yesterday after Leonard’s call. Watching the water rise, she wonders if Leonard’s tone, the implication that the sentencing was a victory, that there was nothing for them to discuss about it, had been affected for her benefit—she who couldn’t even manage a car trip with him. It occurs to her that her remark about taking the bus had been not only hurtful but also unfair. Certainly, Saul never expected idle chitchat. He was the one who’d taught her the many moods of silence: the enraged homicidal mood that afternoon driving back from Sylvia’s but, more often, the companionable possibilities, reading together in bed, walking with their feet in the surf. It had been a revelation after Ascher, who’d never left room for silence, who, having seen her at Alil’s serving drinks in the front room while Sammy and the other girls danced in the back, the men’s lips flattened like fish mugs against the glass, had left her with no self to protect.
She lowers herself into the water, sinking down so she has to lift her chin to keep her mouth from being submerged. The first night she spent with Ascher, in a motel outside Monterey, they talked until the sky turned silver. Ascher told her how his green eyes were the heritage of a white horse trader who’d raped his great-grandmother, the thirteen-year-old house slave of a Louisiana farmer who’d taken one of the trader’s horses as payment for touching “one of my niggers.” He told her about his father, who’d been in the black infantry that crossed from Calais to Normandy, and what it was like when the Panthers first came to Oakland and he’d been faced with trying to square the ethos of dignity within he’d learned from his father (forty years working for the Pacific Railroad, never challenging a system in which all the conductors were white and all the porters were black but never, either, letting anyone call him boy) with the ideas of black separatism and smash whitey a
nd their liberal do-goodism.
He told her about his wife, Delia, with the face of a Nubian princess, the first black graduate of her pharmacy school, her voice a balm to the elderly customers whose prescriptions she filled, some of whom she called daily to check that they’d taken their pills—the woman from whose bed Rena, nineteen, had taken him. How he could not remember Delia ever losing her temper with either of their boys or ever going to bed with the dishes not dried and put away or without a scarf wrapped around her processed hair, how she seemed never to age so that at thirty-five she looked little different than she had at twenty and would, he imagined, remain so until she tumbled down the precipice to the frailty of real old age.
Rena lets the water out, climbs shivering from the tub, remembering how at dawn Ascher turned his face to the wall and whispered that Delia was a saint and he couldn’t make love to a saint, and then told her how ashamed he’d felt when a bachelor party brought him to Alil’s and he’d first seen her in a black cocktail waitress uniform, the tops of her breasts visible over the neckline, her eyes fixed straight ahead like a mannequin staring out from a department store window. He couldn’t get her face out of his mind, he told her, like a song that goes round and round in your head until you want to shoot your own ears, an obsession leading him to lie for the first time in his fourteen years of marriage to Delia about where he’d been the night he went back to Alil’s.
She gets into bed with a towel still wrapped around her wet hair. She pulls the blankets up to her eyes. Two good men brought to their knees.
RETURNING AFTER COLORADO to the apartment, she feels oppressed by the magnitude of Saul’s things: the books overflowing the shelves, the framed posters covering the walls, the file folders, records, tapes and CDs crammed everywhere.
When she first moved in, she’d urged Saul to undertake a purging and reorganization, but she’d given up after seeing how painful it would be for him to devote the precious little time he had after his seventy-plus hours a week of residency to sorting and weeding, tasks that seemed to him unnecessary given that he could always, well, nearly always, find what he needed. She’d comforted herself by undertaking a judicious pruning of Saul’s ragtag furniture, keeping the better pieces he’d taken from Klara’s basement collection of discards and replacing the shabbier items with the few warehouse sale purchases she’d made during her early years at Muskowitz & Kerrigan. Only now does it strike her as odd that she’d never thought to hang any of her own things, so that the two watercolors she’d inherited from Rebecca and the black-and-white city photos she’d bought after Gene moved back west (when, for the first time, she’d had a little extra money) had remained all these years wrapped in brown paper under the bed.
Her first morning back, she recalls her first dream since Saul’s arrest. She’s in a cage, like the glass enclosures at Alil’s, and she and Braner are dancing together. Cassen stands by the door collecting money. She wakes with the thought I have to quit. All week, the idea grows. When she goes to Ruth and Maggie’s for dinner, she talks to them about it. Maggie gets a pad of paper, insists they write out a budget. Surveying the list of numbers, she circles the huge rent payment.
“You could move,” Maggie says, placing an asterisk next to the circle.
Rena must look startled, because she can feel Ruth studying her face. Maggie takes her hand. “Four years is a long time.” Had it been Ruth who’d spoken, Rena knows she would have said something like Christ Almighty, no one expects you to pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment out of loyalty.
She takes a cab home, the driver heading south on Riverside Drive. Frederick Law Olmsted, Saul once told her, had designed the drive to follow the shoreline. A piece of frozen choreography along the riverbank. She remembers, now, that she’d been thinking about this the evening before Saul’s arrest, how the drive does not so much mirror the shoreline as suggest the movement of the water in the river below. Then, too, she’d gone to dinner at Ruth and Maggie’s, taking the bus that night north along this same arbored sweep of road. Between the apartment buildings with their limestone façades and the street stretched a sloping field covered with snow that after two days of freezing rain had turned to a slick of ice. The hillside was cast pale blue from the streetlights and etched with the shadows of the branches above. Before coming east, she’d never seen frozen earth. In San Francisco, there’d been cold snaps—damp and chill, an occasional sleet storm. In the Sierras, there’d been heavy snowfalls in late winter. But never had she seen the ground crusted with ice. It had struck her as something horrific, like a frozen finger or a charred piece of flesh.
Eerie—the massive trees rising from the frozen slope, the grand apartment buildings like sentry guards at the edge of the city, the empty drive—and she recalls now, a season later, the sense of foreboding, prescience of the bang on the door to come.
AT NIGHT, SHE STILL hears the echo of the police bullhorn coming from the garden, thinks how relieved she would feel to move.
She yearns to be Klara, to do what she wants without concern for what it means. When she tells this to Ruth the following Sunday while they bike in the park, Ruth laughs and says, “Yes, in my next life, I’m hoping to come back as one of these trees.” She points up at an oak overhanging the walkway. “Waving my branches in the breeze, looking out at the river.”
Rena cannot help feeling slightly chastised.
Ruth reaches out to touch Rena’s handlebar. “You don’t have to quit in order to move if moving is what you really want. As I tell my students with their mangled term papers, S.I.S: keep separate ideas separate.”
“He has so much stuff. I don’t think I could even fit into a smaller place.”
“Put his stuff in storage.”
“Oh my God, how could I do that? It seems so brutal. Besides, if I move anything, he’ll never be able to find it again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Finding his college notes about Hegel or his Louis Armstrong recording will be the least of his problems four years from now.”
Once Ruth has planted the idea of storing Saul’s things, of living without his possessions, Rena’s mind keeps coming back to it. When she first got to know Ruth, shortly after she and Gene moved to the city, she was struck by how streamlined Ruth keeps her affairs. While Rena routinely donates her old clothing out of fear of appearing shabby (her preference to make do with two new sweaters rather than a drawerful with stretched-out necklines and little stains, the kind she’d worn as a child), Ruth does so due to her belief that it’s a drain to have more than one needs. While Rena usually feels as though the weekends are barely long enough to do the food shopping and the laundry and clean the apartment and write the bills, Ruth has an abundance of time. Every day, she works, she bicycles, she reads, she spends time with friends.
“When do you clean your tub, when do you wash your stockings, when do you do your taxes?” Rena once lamented.
“Look at our tub,” Ruth said. “There’s primordial soup creeping up the edges. Housework is the real cancer. You scrub the tub and two days later it’s dirty all over again. My mother has a mop squeegee permanently attached to her hand. All her life, she’s been trying to get caught up, to reach that mythical moment when the housework will all be done and she can do what she really wants. Only now, if she does have a free half-hour, her nervous system is so shot she can’t concentrate or think about anything other than the next thing she has to do. Once you opt out of the American antiseptic ideal, you have loads of time. By not making the bed, you gain two and a half hours a month. Think what you can do in two and a half hours. You can read half a book. You can see an exhibit. You can have a love affair.”
Like Ruth’s mother, Rena has lived with the illusion that after she “gets through” the next thing, then she’ll be able to do what she wants. Only there’s been an endless progression of things to get through: her mother’s pregnancy, her mother’s depression after Gene’s birth, the breakup with Ascher. Joe’s death, settling Gene first in New Haven and
then in New York, adjusting to Muskowitz & Kerrigan, adjusting to Gene moving back west, adjusting to living with Saul. Adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. Her marriage, the merger with Cassen & Silvano. Now, Saul’s arrest. Twenty years. It could go on and on until her death, past that, until her funeral and the headstone were set.
SHE GIVES NOTICE at her job that she will be leaving at the end of the month and to her landlord that she will stay through June. A farewell party is planned for the evening after her last day at work. A couple of people give her little winks and her secretary whispers that the office rumor is that she is leaving because she’s pregnant.
Cassen arranges for Rena’s farewell party to be held in a private room at a restaurant where reservations are usually required months in advance. Men in tuxedo shirts announce the hors d’oeuvres as though they’re special guests: prawns infused with vanilla bean oil, carpaccio stuffed with red caviar. As Cassen supervises the uncorking of the wine, it dawns on Rena that he’s treating her departure as a grand celebration, the removal from his life of a source of frustration.
Throughout the cocktail hour, Cassen watches her. Her neck bristles from his gaze. When, right before the dinner is served, she goes to the rest room, he follows her downstairs. She turns, her back to the ladies’ room door. He stops so close she can smell the Macallan on his breath. In the flats she is wearing with her gray silk pants, they are exactly the same height. Knowing that this is the last time she will have to see him, that she will no longer have to manage him, she does not avert her eyes: a body shaped by boyhood games, college athletics, a social life centered on tennis and skiing and sailing—the sort of physique that will turn, perhaps in fifteen years, perhaps, if time treats him well, in twenty, from lithe to scrawn. A face etched with the marks of a million deceptions.