by Mary Gordon
“Only you would have this kind of luck,” said Barbara, not kindly. “The rest of us, when we’re twenty, get picked up by wholesale rug dealers. Anne gets picked up by a famous art historian.”
“Barbara, it was hardly a pickup,” Anne said. She rarely defended herself from Barbara’s attacks, but her friendship with Ben was precious to her in a way that heightened its fragility. She’d known Ben longer than anyone in her life she still kept up with, except her family.
She thought of the time that she had met Ben, eighteen years before, in London. The English summer had seemed strange to her. Strange for it to be July and not to feel the sun at noon with the American insistence that suggests that some appropriate new action, seasonable, transitory, must at that one moment be performed. At home she had never felt totally relaxed in summer. She was incapable of those long sustained torpors that American teenagers who like their summers are born to inhabit. So she was happy walking the London streets, a sweater over her shoulders, wearing stockings, as she had never been entirely happy in the summers at her parents’ home.
She had been to college for two years, but in London she felt that she was really alone for the first time. The other Radcliffe girl who had got the same grant she had, but whose course was on Constable and Turner, had moved out of the room she had next to Anne’s in the Bloomsbury student hostel. She had met a Lebanese student at the Tate who had invited her to share his flat in Kensington. So she didn’t see the other girl again until they sat together on the plane ride home, and the girl, guilty at having deserted Anne for greater luxury, sat silently reading The Fountainhead (the Lebanese had been studying architecture) throughout the seven-hour flight.
For two weeks Anne spoke to almost no one. The people in her class, also foreigners, were as reticent as she. And she knew after a week that she hated the Elgin Marbles, all that cool perfection, that imperial restraint, and she was afraid that if she talked too much to her colleagues this would be discovered, and her feeling that she was fraudulently taking money—studying something that she had no interest in, that she would never pursue—would be exposed.
The days were very long, and she often felt that if someone, even a shopkeeper, said a kind word to her, she would burst into tears and beg the person to take her home for supper. Her room at the hostel was bare and anonymous. She bought postcards of the museums she went to and propped them up against the deal-framed mirror, but they didn’t help. Her bed was too narrow, the chenille spread had been mended too often, the knobs on her dresser looked menacing if her eyes fell on them in the middle of the night.
The evenings were the worst. She didn’t have much money, and her meals were paid for at the YWCA on Great Russell Street. But sometimes she went out anyway—she would go to one of the trattorie run by Sicilians for spaghetti and a glass of wine. That summer, she read Faulkner—it was Absalom, Absalom! the first two weeks, and she would bring her book with her to the dark restaurant, thinking how grateful she should be for this opportunity. Once a week she went to a movie, often an American film she would never have dreamed of seeing if she were home. But it was comforting to hear the accents, to see New York or Chicago backgrounds. Often she cried at the movies, wondering how she could endure six more weeks of this life, the life her friends were, perhaps at just that moment, envying her for leading.
Her only real pleasure was the reading room at the British Museum. She had been issued a reader’s card because of the course, and every day, after eating her sandwich on a bench in Tavistock Square, she would come back to the museum. Sitting under the high blue dome, she felt happy. The air was light, the atmosphere of concentrated attention made her feel attached once more to things; the smell of the books, the look of the eccentrics—the woman who ordered twelve books a day on Scottish farming and spent her time sleeping on the pile of them, the tiny Indian whose books were all on Jewish history—made her feel less marginal. They were young, handsome men and serious-looking women, mostly American, who seemed obsessed with some terribly important work. They wrote things fiercely on index cards and walked with small, frantic steps to the catalogue. They never looked at Anne, and she wouldn’t have thought of trying to catch their eyes; they were engaged in something essential, and she was merely sitting there, only just legitimately, taking dilatory notes on Roman history and reading a biography of George Eliot.
One afternoon, instead of going to the reading room, she went to a gallery that was having a small exhibit of the watercolors of Raoul Dufy. In the large, rectangular room the paintings glowed on the walls, the blue skies, the silvery green olive trees. She stood in front of one of them and imagined herself in that landscape, imagined the fragrant air, the smell of lemon, of basil, the bright pink streaks of sun in the evening sky. She was interrupted by a voice, shockingly loud, behind her.
“Are you at all interested in pictures?”
It was the first personal question that had been addressed to her since she had left America. She turned around to see who had spoken to her. It was a tall man in his late fifties with a large head, light blue eyes and a long thin nose, the kind of nose she had, in her imagination, granted only to Europeans. He told her he had organized the show and walked her around the room, stopping not at every painting, only at the ones he gave her to believe merited her singular attention. He knew everything about the pictures, and about Dufy’s life. For the first time she had the sense of what it was to be intimate with a painter, and a painter’s work, as intimate as one was with one’s family. There was no formality in the way this man spoke about the paintings; he didn’t change his voice, as so many of her professors did, he didn’t get the glazed look they adopted to indicate reverence. Everything he said was spoken in that same rather embarrassing boom with which he had first addressed her. She thought how unfair it was that people accused Americans of being loud when no tourist could have come near the volume of this man’s voice. But she knew, although she couldn’t say why, that his loudness was proprietary, rather than unconscious, the loudness born of giving orders, not of shouting over the noise of machinery. She wanted him to go on and on. But they came to the last of the paintings, and he turned to her and said, “Quite enough of that, don’t you think?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “it’s been such a long time since I’ve been so happy.” And she began to cry.
He took her into his office and had his secretary make her a cup of tea. She told him about the girl who had taken up with the Lebanese, about her bedspread, her hatred for the Elgin Marbles, and the greengrocer who wouldn’t speak to her.
“What a perfectly wretched little life,” he said. “We must do something about that.”
He invited her to dinner. But first, he said, he would show her London.
He was always making large insupportable statements like, “London was nothing after the eighteenth century,” and “There’s no sense ordering anything to eat in the West End but an omelette.” He took her to the Wallace Collection, to George Eliot’s house in Cheyne Walk, to Regent’s Park to look at the Nash buildings. Every day they had their sandwiches together. He seemed interested in every part of her life; he learned her sister’s name, the name of her street, the names of her professors and her dog. Early on he had explained about his wife. “We’ve no end of respect for each other, but we lead quite separate lives.”
Four weeks after she met him, it was time for her to go home. She spent hours wondering how she would do it, how she would declare her love on their final evening. Or perhaps she would wait till she got home and then write him, passionately but with measure. On that last night, he was more than usually talkative. He suggested that she turn in early so she wouldn’t be tired for her flight. He gave her an ivory miniature, a likeness of a fair woman in a low-cut blue dress; he said it had been in his family since the 1780s. He kissed her cheek, as he always did; he told her she must write to him faithfully, must work on her French, must have a wonderful year and have ten smashing boys fall in love with her before Christ
mas.
She said she would work on her French, she would write him, she would miss him very much. She gave him her farewell gift: a collection of Emily Dickinson. It was the only American thing she could think of that seemed good enough for Benedict. Then she embraced him, kissing him shyly just above the collar.
“I must say you do make the world warmer and brighter,” he said.
She wanted to say, “I am dying with love for you,” but said instead, “Do you really think you’ll have the time to write me back?” He was going to Paris in September to research his next project, an exhibit of Vuillard.
“Of course. Now, you really must turn in,” he said, and headed toward a rank of taxis.
Because of Ben, she signed up that fall for a course on nineteenth-century French literature, where she met Michael. As soon as she knew she was in love with Michael, she began mentioning him in her letters to Ben. Two years later, when she married him, Ben sent them a Georgian silver teapot. It was by far the most valuable gift anyone had given them: she wanted to protect it from the toasters, the irons, the electric knives that sat on her mother’s dining room table, waiting for the ceremony, waiting to be of use.
She often wondered if Ben had been in love with her that summer. She understood now, though it had taken her many years to get over feeling grateful to him for his friendship, that she must have been a pleasing companion: she was pretty; she knew enough about painting that he didn’t always have to be explaining himself; she was cheerful, she laughed at his jokes. But they had seen each other every day; it was possible to say he was devoted. But had he been in love? Had he wanted to go to bed with her? Perhaps he was waiting for a sign from her, a sign, being the kind of twenty-year-old she had been, she could in no way have given. If she had been another kind, she would have been able to express her desire: she might have put her hand on his thigh under the dinner table, she might have closed the door to his office and taken off her blouse, she might have sent him—as a student of Michael’s had once done—a pair of her underpants in the mail. At the very least, she might have written him an explicit letter. Now, because she had been the kind of twenty-year-old she had been, she would never know.
She thought of Laura, who was not much more than twenty now.
“What do you and Laura talk about when you have coffee?” she asked Adrian. “I can hardly imagine a more unlikely combination.”
“There’s no such thing as Adrian being an unlikely combination with anything in a skirt,” Barbara said.
“There’s nothing like the bitchiness of approaching middle age,” Adrian said. “I think it’s got to do with a loss of estrogen.”
Anne looked around the table at her friends. She felt she hadn’t missed them. In a few weeks’ time, she had changed. Her generosity was less now, and her patience. She felt she barely had time now for these friends; she felt it was only as a favor to them that she sat there. Was she going to become one of those women who made impossible demands on everyone because they had too much to do? Perhaps what she had thought of in herself as good nature was only youth, leisure, the need to take and give affection because she lacked the work that could engage her heart.
She tried the front door of the house and found it locked. She had told Laura to lock the door if she was alone with the children, although she herself never did. She felt that she was safe in the house but Laura wasn’t. Was it because Laura was younger, a stranger, not connected to the house life by necessity or blood? Was it because Laura seemed to lack discrimination, that she might let in a killer disguised as a Bible salesman? Or, Anne wondered, was she making a point: this is my house; it is not yours.
As she sat in the living room, turning the pages of a magazine under a light too low for actual reading, she felt the luxury of Laura’s absence. She could not enjoy any of the rooms in her house if Laura was in them, and for the hundredth time she asked herself why. The girl had done nothing to earn dislike. She had been careful, punctual, dutiful. She had gone out of her way to make the children happy. Anne knew that it was her fault.
She sat back and looked at her living room in the insufficient light. Only rarely had she been alone in this room so late. The dark, uncut silence pleased her. The clock that had belonged to her grandmother said twelve-thirty. She was not tired. She touched the chairs, the lamps as she turned off the lights. Thank you, thank you, she said to her things, her furniture. They had soothed her, smoothed the scratches that the day had made, allowed her, in the silent hall, to think of walking into her study comforted, quieted, to turn the light above her desk on fearlessly, knowing the house would close around her and the children, sleeping.
In the packet of letters Ben had given her, there were three to Jane and Stephen from Caroline’s apartment in the Rue Jacob, where she had lived from 1920 to 1924. Anne read the first:
Dear Children:
I am worried you are not spending enough money, not eating well, that Jane, with her perverse Yankee pride, is spending her days stewing horsemeat on a gas ring when she ought to be in the library. Here is a cheque; buy yourselves some fruit, some flowers; pretend you are here in a civilized country, where one expects to eat well as one’s due as a human being. I wish Stephen had your health, Jane, which is mine. Of course the two of us could pull a wagon over the prairies after the horses gave out, but we can’t expect that of the rest of mortals.
This reminds me of a story that will amuse you, Jane. A very rich American whose husband’s fortune, I believe, was made in the rendering of lard (which explains his taste in wives) stopped by the studio with the view to adding one of mine to her collection. She saw nothing to suit her fastidious tastes; my mothers and children, she said, looked as if they didn’t like one another, and my fruit looked not quite fresh. She kept coming back to the picture of you in your black Worth suit. “Your model,” she said, “is unworthy of her clothes.” “Go on,” I said, “tell me what you mean. What do you make of the model?” “A peasant,” said Mrs. M. “Now, I know, Miss Watson, you go in for health and strength and all that, but it’s ridiculous to imagine a girl like that in such an elegant getup.” I was interested in letting her hang herself. “Not everyone,” I ventured, “has the same criterion of beauty.” “Yes, but this girl’s beauty is of the coarsest type,” said my guest. Only then did I tell her that the model was my daughter-in-law, that while she was posing she was reading Thucydides in the original, that she was Radcliffe College’s most brilliant student, that the only reason my son was able to win her from the hordes of young men of America’s first families who would have died for her hand was that he stole her from the cradle while the rest of them waited to make their move.
The months are slow until I see you. How do you bear it in that barbarous country, and especially the odious Boston which sits on its haunches like a great stuffed bear? But I have been told I do not understand the young. Jane, do not overwork. Perhaps you could pass some of your ambition to your husband. Stephen, are you still trying to paint? Give it up, it’s a mug’s game.
Anne put the letter down and thought of Stephen, of Caroline’s letters to Stephen in comparison to this one. Her letters to her son had been perfunctory and short. None of the pride, the private jokes, the motherly concern, she showered on Jane had come through when she wrote to her son.
Whenever Anne thought of Caroline’s treatment of Stephen she came upon a barrier between them that was as profound as one of language. She could speak of her feelings about her children in sentences they themselves might have formulated: they are the most important things in all the world, she could say; there is no one I care more for. Some deep encoded pattern drew her to her children and made her circle them: her body itself was a divide between them and the rest of the human world. She couldn’t imagine Peter or Sarah marrying anyone she would prefer to them, as Caroline had preferred Jane to Stephen.
You have done wrong, she always wanted to tell Caroline. Caroline, the ghost who had taken over her life, hovering, accepting wors
hip. She had made Anne feel that veil after veil had been removed; seeing what Caroline had seen had made her feel she lived on the underside of a wave that furled and revealed treasures. But then she came upon a letter such as this one, which the woman she worshipped had written, in perfect cruelty, to her son. And she drew back, and the drawing back made her doubt everything she did. Only if she lived with Caroline as a beloved presence could she come close to her in understanding. To do justice to the dead required an intimacy in which justice had no part. So far away they were, and so removed: you needed to embrace them with the unquestioning love with which you embraced an infant. You needed to be always on their side.
And even as she wanted to tell Caroline, “You have done wrong,” an anger rose up in her as if the accusation had come from someone else. No one would have pored through a male artist’s letters to his children as she had through Caroline’s to Stephen. It was that Caroline was a woman and had a child and had created art; because the three could be connected in some grammar, it was as though the pressure to do so were one of logic. Then she wanted to defend Caroline from the accusation she herself had laid against her. What did it matter, she wanted to say to the shivering ghost whom she had left unsheltered. You were a great painter. You did what you had to do. Yet even as she shielded the ghost, she could not still the accusation: “You should not have let your child die young.” For as a mother, she felt it was the most important thing in the world. You did not hurt your children. You kept your children safe.