Meet Me at the Museum

by Anne Youngson

  But, said Vassily, she does not know enough to have the right to make this decision. She does not know if, for example, Ben has a mother living in Australia who is being denied, through Karin’s selfishness, the right to know her own grandchild. She might, he said, becoming heated, have been denied grandchildren, to her great sorrow, and now she is old, ill perhaps, and this one piece of news, the chance she could have had to hold a baby in her arms, would have made her last months or years happy. (I had never suspected Vassily of such a vivid imagination, but Mary told me later he had been thinking of his own grandmother, who was at the center of the household he grew up in.) How would I feel, he wanted to know, if I had not been given the chance to know Tam and Sarah’s children, to hold them as babies and enjoy them as individuals? Mary did not leave me space to say what I thought, which is that I am privileged to have this opportunity, but it is not a right; I am not defined as a grandmother and would not be diminished if I had no grandchildren.

  “You are trumping her rights as a woman with the possible rights of another woman,” said Mary.

  Vassily got up and walked about as if worried that his lack of ease in the English language would not adequately allow him to express the energy he wanted to put into his arguments. Karin, he said, was being disingenuous and manipulative in her attitude toward men in general and Ben in particular. She might assert her right to make her own decisions to ignore the rights that society would recognize the father as having, but she needed and used men for her own purposes and could not deny them recognition for the part they played. She had, he pointed out, been quick to use the protection Ben offered in the threatening situation she found herself in. Protection entirely based on his masculinity. Had she met a female friend, she might have felt slightly less vulnerable, but she would not have felt safe, able to stride out with her head up, as she did when Ben was beside her.

  And besides—he sat down again and took Mary’s hand—what about the child? Did he or she not have a right to know his or her father?

  “He or she will have that right,” said Mary. “When he or she is old enough to understand. Rather that than a childhood blighted by belonging in two places at once, traveling from parent and grandparent to another parent and grandparents, never quite understanding why she has to do this, whether it makes her less loved than her school friends, always believing the parent left behind is secretly pleased to see the back of her.”

  They were enjoying this discussion with each other so much that I thought they had forgotten I was there, but then Vassily turned to me and said:

  “You decide. The grandmother with no grandchildren, the child with no father, or the mother’s right to manage her own life.”

  By this time I had come to a conclusion, and I will tell you, as I told them, what it is. We should look inside ourselves for fulfillment. It is not fair to burden children or grandchildren with the obligation to make us whole. Our obligation to them is to make them safe and provide them with an education. Karin can do that alone, if she chooses. She owes no one anything else. She owes it to herself to do what is best for her. When I had said this, Mary kissed me. I can’t remember the last time she did that. Or the last time I enjoyed a conversation more.

  I have some more thoughts on your last letter, but I will save them up so I can send you this quickly.

  With love,

  Tina

  Silkeborg

  August 1

  Dear Tina,

  I knew it was right to look forward to what you would have to say in answer to my last letter. Since I wrote to you, and you wrote back to me, I have been to spend a weekend in Copenhagen with Karin. I read your letter aloud to her. At first, she was cross with me because I had shared her story with strangers. But, I said to her, we can only choose how to act. We cannot choose how other people will judge the actions we take, what they will think, who they will speak to about them, what they will say. If she was not ashamed of her decision to have the baby and raise it alone, she should have no concern about who was told of this, how it was spoken of, these things she has no way of knowing or controlling. She agreed.

  “Of course, I am never going to meet this woman or her daughter,” she said. It made me sad to think this might be so.

  Then we discussed the arguments in your letter, your thoughts and what Mary and Vassily said. This was most helpful. We spoke at length about the other grandparents, about the child’s need to know its father, about Karin herself and the ways in which she, for all her strength, might be vulnerable. Later, when she had had time to think over everything that had been said, Karin told me she had become concerned about what the child would want, when he reached an age to understand the absence of a father, and perhaps to ask questions. For this reason, she said, she had made the decision to stay in touch with Ben, to be sure she was in a position to find him, if it was important to her child’s happiness that she could find him. She had been reluctant to reply to the email he sent her, for fear of implying she might be looking for a longer-term relationship. Now she thought this was selfish. She would reply. Carefully. With that, I am happy. And she is happy. I have never seen her with such a glow, but I am afraid I have not looked at her before as closely as I should have done.

  We had a splendid weekend. She took me to Christiania, and I took her to the Copenhagen Botanical Garden. When she suggested her outing, I did not want to go, but then I thought of the rows of raspberries and the need to pick as many as possible because there will be no second chance to go down the row, and I agreed. It was full of noise and color. Everywhere, the walls were covered with pictures of dragons, faces with mouths wide open, goblins, mountains, all painted in bright, strong colors. In an ordinary street, I might have liked these pictures; they might have seemed bright and cheerful, but here they did not. Perhaps because there were too many of them, or because the buildings were so dirty and broken. This was once a military base, so it has no beauty of architecture—all the buildings are functional, and the people who live here now do not care to make it smarter, or even to keep it as smart as it once was. It was earlier in the evening than when she had met Ben, not dark. Even so, I could see how menacing it would have been. I thought it was depressing, in spite of the colors. And there was too much noise. I lead a quiet life apart from when I choose to indulge myself with music, which is not the music I heard in Christiania. Except for one clarinetist playing Mozart, sitting on a folding chair. I paused to drop a coin into his open music case. A few streets farther on, we came across a girl in a costume so strange I cannot describe it, with tattoos on her face, singing a song it was painful for me to listen to. Karin dropped a coin into the hat she had in front of her. I asked Karin if she preferred the song the girl sang to the tune the clarinetist played. No, she said.

  “I preferred the Mozart, but I thought the girl performed the song better than the clarinetist performed the Mozart. She was interpreting the music she had chosen to perform with more skill and imagination.”

  He was not a good clarinetist, I realized that. I had rewarded him for playing a piece of music I like, but I could not have told you whether the girl was good at what she was doing or not.

  “Could I learn to appreciate the sort of song the girl sang?” I asked Karin.

  “You don’t need to,” she said. “You have enough pleasure from the music you do understand; you don’t need more.”

  Perhaps this is right. There are only so many raspberries a man can eat.

  We ate some food from a stall, sitting on a bench. I did not much like the food and have no way of describing it. A man—or possibly a woman—dressed as a clown, on stilts, walked past and leaned down and plucked the last of whatever it was I was eating from my hand and carried it off. Karin laughed very much, and this made me happy.

  When I suggested going to the Botanical Garden, I could see Karin hesitating, as I had hesitated over Christiania, before she agreed. I was thinking of the unfurling fronds of ferns, but of course it is the wrong time of year for that
. I had not understood how much else there would be to see and smell. The place was a surprise for us both. We had no idea what we were looking at, which, as you know, makes me uneasy. I like to be able to name things, and I knew the names of nothing in the garden. Like the best museums, though, there were labels, full of information. Almost too much information. Each label told me what family the plant belonged to, and I started to compare one plant of the Rosaceae family with another, quite dissimilar plant, and to speculate on what aspects of their taxonomy led to them being classified in the same family. Karin told me to stop doing this, because the plants were beautiful and what did it matter? But then she, too, became impatient when something she liked appeared to have no name. You see, I told her, names do matter.

  “Names, yes,” she said. “Otherwise I would have to say ‘the small tree with the soft green leaves and the lovely scented dark red and white flowers.’”

  We came across someone working in the garden who told us this was a Clerodendrum trichotomum var fargesii. He wrote it down for me. What is the family? I asked, and he told me there was some disagreement about that. Do you have such a tree?

  We went into the conservatory. It was warm and humid and the foliage and flowers of the plants in the conservatory were lush (is that the word?). There was a spiral staircase leading to a gallery under the roof, and the feet of people going along this gallery looked like the shadows of birds flitting round the tops of the palms, but they were not. They were only feet. For all the efforts of the plants and the people who care for them to create the impression of a natural jungle, this was obviously indoors. I came to the garden in pursuit of the outdoors. We were too tired, by this time, to see all the outdoors. I will go back. When the fern fronds are unfurling, if not before.

  Write soon.

  Anders

  Bury St. Edmunds

  August 10

  Dear Anders,

  I do have a Clerodendrum trichotomum, and I love it. It does not like our harsh winds, so I have it planted in a sheltered corner and it has grown into a lovely specimen. It is, as you say, a glorious thing, with a wonderful scent. It is very late to break, in the spring. The leaves are among the last in the garden to appear, and then they emerge slowly, so each year I fear my plant has been killed by the frost. But it is just reluctant to put on a show too early, I think. It is saving its strength to deliver up this great rush of flowers, holding them up above the leaves as if it is offering you bouquet after bouquet. I know nothing about plant families, but I am not surprised this plant is hard to pin down to one family or another. It is an individual.

  Now I just want to say a word or two about music. We are different in this; music obviously matters to you, but it is one of the raspberries I have missed on my way down the row. There is no music in my house, and day to day, I don’t feel the lack of it, having never learned to value it. But I have been conscious of having let it pass me by on the few occasions when it has been impossible for me not to notice it. (I hope you can pick your way through that double negative.) I can describe these times—two of them. There have been others but none so memorable.

  I went to La Scala in Milan with Bella when she was living in Italy and I was visiting. We had neither of us seen an opera before, or listened to one, but she was trying to let me experience Italy and, at the same time, trying to keep herself from plunging headlong into despair over the situation she was in—manipulative ex-husband; tantalizingly close but only rarely seen daughter; living with a strange language, food, customs, smells—and buying tickets for the opera seemed like a good idea. It was a good idea, as far as I was concerned. We had seats near the top of the theater, where they were cheaper, but we wore our best frocks. Mine was a sleeveless dress—it was a hot evening—I had made myself from a black-and-white fabric bought in Norwich market. I was proud as can be of that dress: the way I looked in it, the careful construction of it, how it made me feel. I mention all this because it was part of the excitement of the occasion. We had our bottoms pinched several times before we reached our seats, and the people around us when we reached them were boisterous, noisy, and exuberant, and altogether unlike the audience of any theater I had been in before. The orchestra tuned up, and the conductor was applauded onto the podium, and before the overture even began I was as excited by the evening as if the main event were already happening. The first chords of the overture were almost an unwelcome interruption of my enjoyment of all these other sensations.

  We were a long way from the stage and we had not bought the program (which I would not have been able to read in any case), nor did we have the coins necessary to release the little opera glasses from the back of the seat in front. So I had no idea what was going on, which possibly made the spectacle and the music even more overwhelming than they would have been if I had been trying to follow the story. As it was, it mattered not at all that the story was unknown to me, or that I could not see the performers’ faces. The sound was like a jet of cold, clean water scouring out an old feed bin; it was all that existed in the space it occupied. You will have better ways of describing the sensation of listening to such music, I’m sure. You have left yourself open to it, where I have not.

  The opera was Madama Butterfly, which was an unlucky choice, not musically but as regards the story. We were all right for the first act, which neither of us understood, and we drank the wine we had brought with us in an old water bottle in the first intermission and it seemed we were having a good time. I mean, I was definitely having a good time, and Bella managed to behave as if the same were also true for her. In the second act, opaque as the plot was, we realized that Butterfly was an abandoned wife and, worse, she had a child. By the second intermission, Bella was in a state, and the rest of the lukewarm wine only made it worse. She was being assaulted by the music, she said. It was teasing her with its beauty and mocking her with its sadness. When the lights went down again, the final act—you probably know the opera—began with a wordless, hummed chorus while Butterfly waits for news of her faithless husband. I could feel Bella starting to shake, beside me. Her head fell forward, and when I took her hand, it was wet with the tears she had been wiping away. Cold tears, raising goose bumps on my warm, bare arms. I had no option but to help her past the half-dozen very irritated Italians to the end of the row and down the stairs to the street. We sat on the steps of the opera house, Bella sobbing and me outwardly calm but inwardly yearning after the music I had been snatched away from. We were still sitting there when the performance ended and the doors opened and bursts of excited Italian drove us to our feet.

  I promised myself, as we walked back to Bella’s flat, that I would go, as soon as I could, to another production of Madama Butterfly. I never have. I have never been to another live opera. I bought a CD, but the first time I put it on, Edward was in the room. He could see no possible reason why I should want to listen to “that noise,” and I could not even pretend, in the face of his disapproval, in my own living room, that I was enjoying it. I played it sometimes in the car, on my own, but I began to think I had been utterly misled by the occasion, by the dress, the Italians, the heat, by Bella, and in truth I would hate an opera if I went to one in dull, cold England as much as Edward thought I would. So I have never tried.

  My experience of live pop music is just as limited. Bella and I went to some pubs with live bands playing a few times, and were as fervent as any other teenagers in our devotion to the groups or singers we saw on television, but I had not been to anything approaching a pop concert for decades, until a couple of years ago. My second son, Andrew, has a sideline in providing straw bales to events. We have always sold a few of the small, oblong bales, ones the size a man (or a woman—me, for instance) can lift, to local fairs for seating, and to backyard chicken farmers. Andrew, though, has built up quite a business hiring out bales for big occasions—weddings, pop festivals, and so on. He builds structures, at a cost: straw castles, forts, cottages. He is the mechanical one in the family. He looks after all the machine
ry. When Tam is reading about crop rotation, Andrew is looking at the specifications of the latest in harvesting equipment. He is more of a mystery to me than the other two, and heaven knows they are mysterious enough. I assume Andrew is happy: he never appears to be unhappy, and his enthusiasm for complex pieces of engineering is real enough, but is it enough to sustain him? I wonder. He is very private. He lives in the farmhouse still but has constructed a separate entrance for his room, which is over the kitchen and approached by its own staircase. He has turned a window into a doorway and erected a wooden ladder up to it, so it can be reached without even entering the house. So I know almost nothing of what he does with himself when he is not in a tractor cab or the machinery shed. Except that he goes off with a low loader and a trailer full of bales, from time to time, with a couple of mates and any other equipment he needs to move the bales into position.

  On this occasion, it was a pop festival not too far away, but far enough that they wanted to camp out there, so they needed someone to follow them in a car with all their camping gear and food and so on. I think I went because I was the only person available who was insured to drive the only car available. Although Andrew might have chosen me as the person he wanted to come along. I can’t be sure. I was quite intimidated at the idea of the enormous site and all the young people, as I drove toward it. I had an image of what it would be like, from television reporting of festivals, and I could imagine the confidence and bounce of the festival-goers, their air of knowing all they needed to know to control their own destinies. Older people go to festivals, too, older than I am, but none of them, I felt sure, would be wearing a fleece with the name of an agricultural feed merchant on it. I would have felt happier in a handmade patchwork skirt and my hair in braids, but I don’t own one, or have long enough hair.