The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  And this is how it happened, that I met Thomas Mann again. I guess he was coming out of the train station; he was walking with a young woman and a man who was near his age. He seemed unhappy, agitated, on the verge of being angry. But of course, being as young as I was, having thought about him so much, having had him in my mind’s eye so intensely for so long, it didn’t occur to me that he didn’t seem in the mood to be greeted. And I couldn’t get over my good fortune in seeing him just then: I’d be able to tell him that I’d volunteered to drive an ambulance in France. I was sure that he’d be pleased; I’d tell him I was inspired by him to do it.

  I left my post and ran up to him. I grabbed him by the arm. He looked alarmed, then furious.

  “Mr. Mann,” I said. “I’m Bill Morton. I introduced you at Horace Mann School in Gary, Indiana.” He still looked furious, and I could tell that he didn’t recognize me or remember me. But some demon in me pushed me to go on. “Then, remember, I drove you to Chicago.”

  He looked me up and down with a gaze that frightened me with what I knew could be nothing but contempt.

  “Ah, the all-American boy. And now you’re dressed up like a toy soldier in an operetta. Perhaps one day you’ll be in a real uniform, not playacting, but doing your duty, fighting and dying along with all the other young men.”

  The young woman took him by the arm. “Come, Papa,” she said. I think she was embarrassed by her father’s outburst. She didn’t look at me, nor did the man who walked beside her.

  And I never saw Thomas Mann again. I never got to tell him that I was going to Europe because of his words. The only consolation I had was that no one had heard what he said to me, no one had even seen me approach him, no one had seen us speaking on the street.

  Of course this is a part of the story I never tell anyone. But I almost never tell anyone about my meeting with Thomas Mann. I don’t think most people would be interested. It doesn’t make a very good story, not the kind of story most people like to hear. So because I don’t talk about it much, I haven’t thought about it as much as I once believed I would. No, I can’t say I’ve thought about it very much at all.

  But even now I can still feel the hot lashings of shame that I felt when Thomas Mann’s daughter pulled him down the street and I saw his angry back and his stiff shoulders, the three of them making their way down Michigan Avenue, to someplace I was sure was more important than I could imagine.

  From time to time, I’ve taken the books down from the attic to read them, the ones with his name in his strict, formal handwriting, but I always bring them back up here. I keep them hidden. I don’t think of them as I think of other books. Because I don’t think of him as I have thought of any other person I have ever met.

  He was a great man. I knew it then, and nothing has changed my mind. He believed it was his duty to wake us up from our stupid sleep, pulling off our blindfolds, unstopping our ears. The waking was a shock, a laceration, but it was one we needed. His words lanced the infection of our refusal to understand who we were, who we were in the world. That America was not the world and that we, as Americans, had no right to the lulling music which was not of the spheres, not even of the sirens, but the low hum of cave dwellers who didn’t even have the wit to see the shadows.

  When I met him, I knew I was in the presence of greatness. And in some way I can’t explain, I know that I was marked by it. Marked indelibly. Permanently.

  I would like to say eternally, but then I am American, an American man born in the Midwest in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and “eternally” is not a word people like me believe we have a right to use.

  Fine Arts

  ON THE TRAIN from Pisa to Lucca, Theresa looked up the word “weak” in her Italian-English dictionary. Debole. She said the word to herself. Then she made a noun of it. Debolezza. Weakness.

  He was a weak man, he was very weak, she said silently, to no one in particular. Or it wasn’t to no one; it was to many people, to whom she felt an obligation to explain. At twenty-five, she still felt herself a girl, and therefore someone who owed things to people. Especially the ones who believed in her.

  She was a girl in whom many people had believed. The nuns had been the first; her mother had needed the example or the prodding of the nuns in order to believe. Even Yale, it seems, had believed in her. They had accepted her into the doctoral program in art history; she was traveling on a grant they had provided, allowing her a month in Lucca to explore her dissertation topic: Matteo Civitali, a fifteenth-century sculptor, most of whose work was in Lucca.

  “She’s an unusual girl, Mrs. Riordan; uncommonly intelligent. But it’s more than that. She has tremendous powers of concentration.”

  She’d heard Sister Patricia say that to her mother when she was only nine years old. Was it a gift or a burden? Normally, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to pose that as a question. Normally, belief, confidence was thought of as a gift.

  But now, she’d been through something. It was natural that she’d look at things in a new way. She’d gone through something with a man. A kind of thing neither her mother nor the nuns would understand. When people thought of nuns, they thought of censorious, judgmental, even sadistic joke figures, holding a ruler and a rosary, laying down the law. But the nuns in her life had not been like that. They hadn’t worn habits. They didn’t seem angry, not nearly so angry as her mother, as most of the mothers she knew. They had seen that her family was troubled, and that Theresa had promise. They had stepped in.

  But they wouldn’t understand what she’d been through.

  Their special girl. Their prize.

  From the train she saw the fields and towers she’d seen in five-hundred-year-old paintings. She was surprised that her heart lifted as she’d always thought it would at her first sight of Italy. That even after what she’d been through, her heart could lift. Despite everything, she could still write the postcard she’d always imagined writing to Joan Gallagher, the professor who had trained her, who had singled her out and arranged her passage from Divine Word College to Yale. A postcard of the countryside. And on the back, she would carefully print one word: “Beautiful.” And she would write one to her friend Maura, with whom she’d fantasized about traveling to Europe. Maura had got there before her; a week in Paris with a boyfriend whom she ditched when she arrived home. “I made it,” she would write. “I’m here.”

  She looked out at the olive trees and cypresses and the calm hills, some bare, some cultivated. At first she was delighted. There they were: the trees of her imagination, trees she’d only seen, not in actual paintings, but in reproductions before which she sat in the libraries that she believed were her real homes, the places where she felt safe and strong and certain of herself and her own right to speak. But there they were now, these trees. Real, solid. If she jumped off the train she could touch them, lean against them, smell them. But then she began to be disappointed. There they are, she said to herself, using the present tense. There they are. They were there for everyone. They weren’t hers anymore. Anyone looking at them could make anything of them they wanted. And being only themselves, they were vulnerable. They could be burnt, cut down, their bark made ugly by lovers’ initials, their leaves the victims of disease, something to be turned away from. And as soon as she saw them, they were gone, as the train sped forward, lost to her forever. Looked at through the window, one was indistinguishable from another. Not placed in a work of art, they were only themselves. Interchangeable. Then gone.

  She could hardly believe that cypresses were trees like other trees she’d known: oaks, maples, pines. Slim and self-enclosed, they seemed not really natural; they had more in common with the campaniles, and the towers, which, you had to remind yourself, were about onslaught and attack.

  She did feel she was riding through a dream. But she was not a dreamy girl. “Dreams are a luxury the likes of us can’t afford.” That was the kind of thing her mother always said. “Dreamy” took its place in her mother’s mind with oth
er words like “vain,” and “frivolous.”

  Theresa knew very well that she wasn’t dreamy, although sometimes the way she looked at things gave them the intensity of things seen in a dream, the intensity that stemmed from the force of having been seen so closely, looked at for so long that the trees in the pictures she loved seemed to melt, to surround themselves with haze. She was a city child, born and raised in Milwaukee, and, except for the occasional view of the lakes, nature hadn’t meant much to her. The first things she remembered looking at with the kind of intensity that made their borders melt were the holy cards Sister Imelda had given her.

  Sister Imelda must have been in her eighties then, still wearing her habit, cared for but condescended to, Theresa would learn later, by the younger nuns. She helped with the cooking, answered the phone. She gave Theresa a holy card every time she got a good report card. Slipping it to her as if it were a kind of pornography, knowing the younger nuns she lived with didn’t approve of that kind of pious bad taste. Later Theresa would come to think of the holy cards as in bad taste. Guido Reni. Carlo Dolci. Sugar-sweet Madonnas. Jesus pointing to his sacred heart that looked like a pimiento, the Good Shepherd leading sheep that looked like marshmallows or stuffed toys.

  But as a nine-year-old, she’d loved them. Perhaps because there were, in her house, no pictures at all. A crucifix on the wall. Her First Communion photo, her parents’ wedding photo. A wooden board for hanging keys, with little girls in polka-dot bonnets painted around the hooks, and in polka-dot script the words “Don’t forget.”

  And perhaps Sister Imelda’s shame and secrecy about the holy cards had made them doubly precious to her, made her look at them only in secret, in the privacy of her room. She loved sorting them, arranging them into categories. Crucifixions. Agonies in the Garden. Resurrections. Annunciations. Visitations. Nativities. Virgin Marys. So when her colleagues at Yale marveled at her facility in spotting iconic patterns, they thought it had been achieved through a kind of scholarly grunt work. They didn’t know that she’d learned it sitting on the shag carpet of her bedroom in Milwaukee, hoping her mother wouldn’t shout that she had to set the table. Or do something for her father. That was how she’d found herself, what she believed would be her life’s work: looking carefully at images, being carried to a past which at first was lodged in her imagination but now, because of her training, was propped up by a firm knowledge of the time, the technique that the images represented.

  But Sister Patricia had found her out and said, “Theresa, it’s very nice that Sister Imelda gives you these things, but let me show you some other images that are really much more interesting.” She gave her a book of images of Joan of Arc, and holy cards with slanted script by another nun, Sister Corita, that said things like “Hope,” and “Our Hearts Are on Fire.”

  “That’s the kind of thing you want to keep in your mind, Theresa,” Sister Patricia had said. Being hopeful, being on fire, like Joan of Arc, who stood for what she believed in, stood up to powerful men, afraid of nothing. A girl, only a girl, just like you, poor and uneducated, much poorer, much less well educated than you, but powerful because of her own belief in herself and what she knew to be right. That’s the kind of thing you should be thinking of, Theresa, not these martyrs.

  She’d taken Joan as her confirmation name, and so, when she met Joan Gallagher, it seemed another confirmation: of the rightness of her choice.

  She was here because of them, she could trace everything to them. The nuns, who had sent her when she was still in high school to Joan Gallagher.

  For the medieval section of her world history class in junior year, Sister Jackie had allowed her to write on Giotto. They had spent a very long time studying St. Francis, the Franciscan movement, much longer than they spent on the Crusades. Sister Jackie loved St. Francis; the Crusades upset and shamed her. She told her students that the Crusades were a blot on the history of the Church, but St. Francis was a pure flower. Pure. It was a word they were not afraid to use, the nuns, and afterwards Joan Gallagher. Sister Jackie and Sister Maureen often spoke of purity of intention; Joan Gallagher spoke of purity of line and form. But when she lectured about Giotto and his work on the Assisi basilica, she pointed out that if Francis’s followers had followed his lead, his insistence on austerity and simplicity, there would be no basilica. If Francis had been obeyed, she said, there would have been no Giotto.

  They had sent her paper on Giotto to Joan Gallagher, who taught art history at the college run by the order: Divine Word College. Joan Gallagher had invited her to come to the college for a day. She had been offered a full scholarship, including room and board. Joan Gallagher had assured Theresa that she would give her very full attention. And she had, insisting she learn Latin, reading her papers with a demanding exigent eye that Theresa would learn only later was extraordinary for an undergraduate teacher. Working with her hour after hour on her application to Yale, where Joan Gallagher had determined she should go. To work with her old friend, Professor Tom Ferguson.

  A heart on fire. Purity of intention. Purity of form. What a joke it was now, their faith in her. They’d be ashamed of her if they knew. They’d be terribly disappointed. Their prize a fraud: Theresa Joan Riordan. Well, she was hardly Joan of Arc. What name should she have taken for confirmation? Magdalen? No, that would have been too grand for what had happened, which had been, after all, quite a small thing, undistinguished.

  It wasn’t long after Confirmation that she developed breasts. Breasts that she believed were an embarrassment to everyone. When she was twelve, her mother took her shopping for her first bra and she felt her mother was mortified. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she wanted to say to everyone, as she now wanted to say to everyone, “He was a weak man.”

  None of the women she admired had large breasts. Joan Gallagher was straight and slim and boyish. She wore trouser suits and flat shoes and her hair was cut very short. You wouldn’t say that she was mannish, only that her femaleness didn’t get in the way. You didn’t have to think about it. But Theresa knew that how she looked was something she had to attend to. Making sure people weren’t thinking about her body. She deliberately bought clothes that were too big for her. Once Sister Ann Claire, who Theresa would never have believed thought about clothes—all she ever wore were navy blue skirts and white shirts or sweaters—said to her, “Theresa, you should wear clothes more appropriate to your age. You’re a lovely girl, it’s a gift from God, don’t try to hide it.”

  But if all that started up, “all that” was the way she thought of it—boys coming around, boys wanting her attention—it would be one more thing for her mother to contend with. And with Theresa’s father, they had their hands full. There wasn’t room in their lives for one more difficult thing.

  She had some memories of a healthy father. Being held in strong arms, being pushed on a swing. Her father had been a construction worker, and a beam had fallen on his spine. He’d walked out of the house in the morning a healthy man, a strong man, husband of his wife, father of his four-year-old daughter. He had come back ruined, a cripple, a child.

  He was away from them a long time, two years in rehabilitation, where they were teaching him to walk or walk a bit with the aid of a walker, so at least he could take himself back and forth to the bathroom. Or they would never have sent him home. If he hadn’t been able to take himself to the bathroom, they would have kept him there forever.

  He had the mind of a child, a pleasant cheerful child. They had no idea what he understood. He was almost wholly silent.

  They’d longed to have him home, the both of them. She was nearly seven the day they went to pick him up. For two years, her weeks had been shaped by Sunday visits. Wake up now, you don’t want to be late for Daddy, don’t wiggle while I braid your hair, Daddy wants to see a pretty girl. She’d dreamed of a life not shaped by those Sunday visits and their accompanying dread. Wards of grey-skinned men, their legs disgustingly bare in short hospital gowns, tubes coming from their arms o
r noses, bags full of liquids whose source and provenance she didn’t want to know.

  For a while, just having him home made everyone happy. For a while. But only for a while. For a while, he was her mother’s prize, her big child, whom she would help dress and help to settle himself in front of the television. For a while they believed he would get better. Theresa was happy just to be in his presence. But after three months, or six months was it, she and her mother realized that the happy time of their life was over. Without saying it, they both knew that they missed their leisurely breakfasts, just the two of them, without the father to be tended to, their evenings of watching TV in a living room that was a living room, not something dominated by a hospital bed. Days when they could go shopping or to a movie without the fear that he had fallen, hurt himself, died.

  Her mother, never a patient woman, now grew chronically short-tempered. The part-time nurses were undependable; some days they wouldn’t show up and Theresa’s mother would have to stay home. The insurance company she worked for was understanding, but Theresa’s mother knew her husband’s needs jeopardized her position. “I’ve given up all hope of job advancement. I’ll just stay where I am till I die. If I’m lucky enough that they keep me.”

  Theresa knew her mother wished there was some way to send her husband back to rehab, some way that wouldn’t lead the parish, especially Father Anstey, who was strict about family obligations, to think of her as an unloving woman, a monster of selfishness. A failure as a Christian and a wife. But Theresa didn’t want her father to go away again. His presence nourished her; she always felt his goodwill towards her was unequivocal, as her mother’s was not. They would often sit quietly, watching television. She would talk to him about what she’d learned at school. She had no idea what he understood. But he smiled and nodded, and she told herself that he was pleased. Sometimes if she came home early, she’d see him with his head in his hands. He might have been crying; she didn’t want to know.