The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  She would have to explain the significance of the thumb and third finger. That would require a lot of research, perhaps culminating in an article. But what she couldn’t write about, because there was nothing to be said about it because it was fleeting, an accident, a trick of light, was the shadow cast by the Madonna on the plain, stone wall. She kept looking at the shadow, feeling herself drawn to it, and wished there was some way to mark that, as Fra Angelico had marked the shadow behind the Virgin in his less famous Annunciation fresco. But that kind of marking was not her work. No one, though, could stop her from focusing on the shadow for as long as it was here.

  She felt the slow, deep pleasure of knowing she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to do. Her breath came easily; the damp coolness seemed to refresh the fragile skin around her eyes, abraded from fatigue and the dryness of plane travel. She felt lapped in a nourishing, consoling air. I am here, she kept saying to herself. I am here, and the word “here” seemed to her the most beautiful, the most desirable word imaginable.

  She took the binoculars out of her bag and looked at the mosaics on the wall across from where she sat. She became aware of the sound of weeping. She lowered the glasses guiltily, tracking the sound. A young woman, probably about her age, was sitting in the darkness, her head in her hands. The church’s emptiness freed her to sob without restraint, like a child, holding nothing back, with no sense of shame or exposure. Theresa felt that looking at her was a violation. She put her glasses back into her bag.

  The door of the church banged, and she heard the parade of loud feet and the sound of German. It was over. She would leave.

  Tom had written to the curator of the art museum, the Villa Guinigi, and the curator had written Theresa urging her to be in touch as soon as she arrived: she would be glad to be of help. But Theresa didn’t want to meet her yet, to present herself, as if she were a diplomat presenting credentials to the court. She wanted more time alone with the work; she wanted to know what she thought before she had to say anything to anyone, before anyone asked her anything. She wanted to be looking innocently, as she had looked innocently at the Rose Annunciation. She would go to the museum as an ordinary tourist.

  But not just any tourist; she had a destination in mind. She would bypass the Romans, the trecento crucifixions, and make her way to the Civitalis. She knew that there were four of them in one room alone. Probably more than in any other room in the world.

  She made her way into the room, past a guard who seemed nearly asleep, opening his eyes to look at her neutrally, then going back to his cell phone to text. She knew that she would be seeing the suffering Christs, so different from the Rose Annunciation she had seen the day before.

  The largest of them was a standing figure, nearly six feet high. Life-sized, she thought, but it was not a representation of life. The place where the spear entered Jesus’ torso was a thin line, the width of a pencil mark. The loincloth was simple, nearly colorless, making almost no contrast with the flesh.

  Her first glimpse of the Rose Annunciation had filled her with delight, and she was able to move from that place to a position of close scrutiny, her training taking its place easily beside her visual pleasure. But what she felt looking at the figure of Jesus was not pleasure, but shock. Because this Jesus was, himself, shocked, unable fully to understand what had befallen him. His face expressed a stricken incomprehension. His arms, open at his sides, his palms facing upwards, said most clearly, “How can this be happening? To me? In this world? Here? Now?”

  She thought of the uncomprehending look that sometimes took over her father’s face. His bafflement at what his life had become.

  And for the first time in all the years since her father’s accident, certainly the first time since his death, Theresa wept. She looked around, hoping the guard hadn’t seen her. He seemed to be absorbed in his texting. She knew she could not weep here. She wished that she were in the dark church where she had heard the girl freely weeping. You could weep freely in a dark church; this was one of its last public functions, one of its last civic services. But in a museum, you might be thought mad if you wept, seen as a danger, perhaps asked to leave. She was glad that Chiara wasn’t on duty. She would go back to her room without speaking to anyone. She would weep.

  She woke after a three-hour nap. She hadn’t realized how tired she was. Was it too late for lunch? The day stretched ahead of her, its openness luxurious and threatening. She had a month. Thirty days, and she had to determine the best way to use them. What Tom had written in the recommendation for the grant was that she would use the month in Lucca to solidify a dissertation topic. But what did that really mean, “solidifying a topic”? It could mean anything or nothing.

  Not much had been written on Civitali. There were articles; one book, a hundred years old, was in French, and the most recent one was in German, which she couldn’t read. Would she have to learn a new language to read one book? Not having an army of scholars ahead of her was both a gift and a burden. She didn’t have to sift through mountains of dullness or misinformation. On the other hand, she felt she had no hand to hold.

  Tom had told her she must find a special pizzeria that made a special pizza; instead of tomato sauce, the thin crust was covered with a paste made of chickpeas, oil, and garlic. It was near the Cathedral of San Michele. She wouldn’t open her map on the street, so she wouldn’t leave her room till she felt confident of her route. She had a glass of wine with her pizza, and then made her way across the square to the statue of Civitali.

  It wasn’t a good statue: bronze, imposing, seventeenth century, with nothing of the tenderness and delicacy that marked his work. It didn’t make him look anything like what she’d imagined; she was sure this wasn’t how he looked; for one thing he was a fifteenth-, not a seventeenth-century man. It pleased her that there was a statue in a large town square dedicated to an artist that most of the world hadn’t heard of. But she also resented it. People passing him every day, leaning against him as they smoked or kissed—this made him less hers. They don’t know him as I do, she thought, and she laughed out loud at herself. I sound like a possessive wife in the face of a parade of casual lovers unworthy of the beloved husband. Who would always be, most importantly, hers.

  She walked up the Via Roma. I am pleased, she heard herself saying. I am so pleased. The word sounded wrong, but she knew it was the right one. “I’m so pleased” sounded false, affected, a hostess’s words or something from an English movie, and you knew the person saying the words—it was always a woman—wasn’t really pleased at all. But she didn’t care, she kept repeating in her mind, “I am pleased.” She felt that everything had been arranged, not to make her happy, “happy” seemed too risky a term, implying some expectation of continuance. This, this being pleased, was happening right now and it might never happen again. But the things that unfolded before her eyes, that pleased her, seemed like the work of good manners, the product, not of a particular affection, but of a sense of what was right.

  The windows of the shops of the Fillungo were a sign of something, of a way of living she had never experienced, but had somehow intuited. How, she wondered, how did I always know? They had, she thought, been waiting for her. The candied violets, the marzipan fruits, the cakes as beautiful as fashionable ladies’ hats, the artful pyramids of oranges and lemons in the markets, green-gold grapes resting on a bed of dark leaves, carefully arranged trays of cheeses, even the meat in the butchers’ windows (chops decorated with white collars or parsley necklaces), the children’s clothes, lace, crocheted, embroidered, all spoke of a care for the look of things that was somehow free of the element of punishing exclusion or self-aggrandizement that she associated with American commercial display.

  I am in Europe, she kept saying to herself. I made it. I’m here. And all at once, the word “pleased” wasn’t enough. She knew that what she was experiencing was delight.

  She was very glad that she was by herself, because she could allow the word
s that she knew were clichés without banishing them for fear of someone accusing her of a cliché. Thank God Tom wasn’t here. If the thought of ordering cappuccino after noon was an abomination to him, what would he have thought if she’d allowed the words that were now going through her mind to slip out? “Things are so old here, so much older than in America.” “I have never seen stones this color. I love the way the light falls on the sides of the buildings, and I remember the names of colors I knew in my first Crayola box. Ochre. Burnt sienna. The stones are kinder here.”

  There was a life lived in the open, on the streets, but, unlike on the streets of Milwaukee, where almost no one walked except as a sign of some kind of ruin, or the streets of Chicago, where everyone walked in response to weather that was nearly always insupportable, the street life here was elegant and leisurely. People spoke to each other, kissed each other—men and women—on both cheeks. They carried flowers or you could see the tops of vegetables—the complicated asparagus, the mathematically precise carrot leaves—peeping like well-behaved schoolchildren out of cloth market bags. She thought that everything she saw must be some sort of sign, some hint of a larger connection, and she believed she would, eventually, put the pieces together. But she knew she couldn’t will it; it would have to happen on its own.

  It was up to her to get in touch with Gregory Allard, the American collector whose name Tom had given her, and she had let a week go by without doing it. She told herself that it was all right, that this was her first time in Europe, her first time anywhere by herself; she could allow herself a little latitude. But she knew the truth: she dreaded making contact with Gregory Allard for reasons that had everything to do with who she was, and where she felt she had no right to be.

  The problem with any sentence she could imagine saying to him overwhelmed and paralyzed her. “I would like to look at your Civitalis. I am a student of Tom Ferguson.” And what if he asked what would be normal questions: “Why do you want to look at my Civitalis? Why isn’t Tom here now?”

  She spent most of her days in silence, and she was happy in that silence, happy even in her growing ease speaking her simple Italian. But this made the prospect of phoning Gregory Allard all the more daunting. Words were so rare in her life now that they seemed newly precious and significant. The ordinary polite lies—I’m planning to do my dissertation on Civitali, I don’t know why Professor Ferguson cancelled his trip—well, they weren’t lies, but the truth they yielded was so partial she felt she was misusing the words in saying them. Misusing or wasting.

  But eventually she began to feel ashamed that she was squandering the university’s money. She knew that wasn’t really right; she was looking at Civitalis every day and she had made an appointment with the curator of the archives. The curator seemed to be away for two weeks, a gift. Theresa told herself it was another sign, but of what? And her being here was really a gift of Tom’s. “A wonderful opportunity, you must always be very grateful.” That was the kind of thing her mother would have said. She hadn’t talked to her mother. She knew she could buy a phone card and speak to her mother in Arizona very cheaply, but it was another thing she couldn’t bring herself to do. She spent a whole morning trying to find the right postcard to send her mother. Her mother, who wouldn’t have the slightest interest in anything depicted on any postcard she could find. For her mother, Europe was pretension and discomfort. Italians were Mafiosi or pizza makers. At least she had said that she was sure Theresa would be eating some delicious food. And so Theresa was relieved when she found a postcard showing many different kinds of pasta. “You were right, Mom, the food is great. It’s beautiful here.” She knew the words were empty, but they had no falseness to them.

  She was paralyzed whenever she thought of contacting Gregory Allard. And then she thought of a way out of her paralysis. She needed to be in touch with Maura.

  They had been friends since they were thirteen. A friendship that was encouraged, nurtured, possibly engineered by the nuns who taught them. Maura and Theresa were invited by the nuns to help them after school in the office; they felt it as a signal honor, being trusted to file receipts and run various errands. It was only much later that they realized the sisters could have done it themselves. But they asked this favor of Theresa and Maura because they knew how depressing and painful their home lives were, and they understood that the girls could be a solace to each other. Theresa’s misfortune was public knowledge, but only the sisters knew about Maura’s troubles: two alcoholic parents, and a brother three years younger for whom she had the primary responsibility. Maura told Theresa that she guessed the nuns figured it out because they noticed that Maura was coming to school without lunches, and with unmatched socks and unmended clothes. And that the Shaughnessy parents came to teachers’ conferences—when they came—smelling of alcohol, with bloodshot eyes and broken veins.

  And so the nuns made a place for the two children of affliction, afflicted themselves but refusing to admit it. It took five years for Maura to confess her problems to Theresa, and after that she spoke about her parents only with contempt and rage. Her tenderness was saved for her brother, Rory, who wasn’t half the student Maura was, although Maura insisted, to Theresa’s sadness, that he was “really, really bright. He just has a different learning style.”

  And so both girls knew they couldn’t go away to school; they were needed at home, Theresa because she wouldn’t leave her father to her mother’s care, for both their sakes, but particularly for her father—she understood her mother’s position, but didn’t trust what outcomes her harshness might engender. And Maura because she wouldn’t leave Rory to those two “assholes who can’t even take care of themselves.”

  Their freedom came at just the same time, their sophomore year of college, when Theresa’s father died and Rory joined the navy. The next year, Theresa’s mother married George Hoffman, a man she’d worked with for years, whom Theresa thought of as a Coors drinker who combed his one existing strand of hair over his bald spot. His crudity hurt Theresa, and she felt it an affront to her father, who, whatever he had been, had never been crude. And she had to wonder if her mother had been sleeping with George for years, coming home from assignations with him to check her husband’s oxygen. She and Maura moved into a room in the dorm, provided, of course, by the sisters. By that time, Maura, who had thought of herself as a poet, had decided she would major in nursing because it would give her the freedom to travel, which was her romance, as the study of art history was Theresa’s.

  But it was Maura’s only romance, because she was determined to be hardheaded, practical. Having lived with alcoholics whose ordinary register was exaggeration, she refused extremes of language, even of thought. Having endured the hourly swerves—“I love you/I hate you/you are the devil’s child, you can’t be mine/why did I ever have you?/you are my angel girl and I don’t deserve you/you’re goddamn lucky to have us as parents, you ungrateful little shit/how can you ever forgive us for what we’ve done to you?…”—she was determined to inhabit a solid unmoving ground, a temperate, coldish climate. Unlike Theresa, she was determined not to take things too seriously. And to trust to luck.

  Maura had an instinct for pleasure, as Theresa did not. Sitting on her bed in the warm air of Lucca in July, Theresa thought of her only happy Christmas, one she’d shared with Maura. It had happened her first year at Yale, when Maura won a raffle—she had bought an environmentally friendly fire extinguisher from a friend who was selling them on a pyramid scheme. The prize was a round trip to Disney World, and Maura figured out how to make a good thing of it. She and Theresa would take the airline tickets and the three days at the motel in Orlando. They would not go near Disney World. They would sit by the pool and drink, and eat pizza in their bedroom, watch movies on the TV, play cards, maybe go outside a bit if it was warm. It was the first Christmas either of them had enjoyed; Christmas with alcoholics was always a nightmare, and there was never room for a Christmas tree in a room that was completely taken over by a hospital bed
. And now that her mother had married George and moved to Arizona, Christmas would be another kind of nightmare, which Theresa was grateful to be spared.

  The second night they were there, two men came to them at the side of the pool carrying extra beers, clearly on the prowl. When one of them asked if the girls would like to come to their room for more drinks, Maura said, “We’d love to, but we really can’t. We know what you have in mind, and it would be great, but we both have these terrible vaginal discharges. It might be a yeast infection … it might be chlamydia,” and the men were waving goodbye before she could finish her sentence.

  And the two of them ran to their room so they could lie on their beds giggling in the way that had always been the sign to themselves and to each other of their liberation, their victory over what might have been considered impossible odds. And because of this, because they had been children together, trying to discover a way out to a larger life, but with no one to help them, stitching together the hints they had picked up accidentally from the accident of being alive, having got out … Theresa to Yale, Maura to the island of Tortola (where she was working as an emergency room nurse), Theresa knew she could make any atavistic, embarrassing request with complete freedom. There was no shame in traveling with Maura to the place they had once been, repeating patterns that were fine for a fourteen-year-old (“make an appointment with the doctor for me, I’m embarrassed to call him and tell him I have to pay cash because we have no health insurance … Open this envelope for me, it’s from Yale, I can’t stand it if I haven’t got in”). The only gap in the utter safety of their friendship had occurred because Theresa never told her about Tom Ferguson. Maura wouldn’t approve, not only because he was married but because she knew that Maura would include Tom in her overlarge category of “asshole” or, more lately, “pretentious asshole.” But her fear of calling Gregory Allard was something Maura would be more than ready to help with; Theresa didn’t doubt that for a second.