by Mary Gordon
He walked to the Piazza Navona, festooned with tinsel strung from palazzo to palazzo (this too for tourists). He was killing time until he could return to the Campo. Killing time (as he is now), looking at Bernini’s great male gods who obviously cared nothing about the birth of a baby in a stable. What he wanted to see was the cleanup of the Campo, the moment of transformation, of transition from color and activity and bustle to the matte palette of black cobblestone and whitish marble, the harsh puritanical figure of Giordano Bruno. Joseph wondered, every time he entered the Campo, what Bruno made of it all: the fruit, the flowers, the cheap toys and plastic buckets, the machine-knit woolen hats, the numbers called out: cheerfully? mendaciously? What can he be thinking? Joseph would wonder, looking up at the hooded statue, its face invisible, Bruno burnt by the church for insisting on our right to tell the truth. Was this, Joseph wondered, Bruno’s last punishment, to be placed amid this friendly chaos, the amorality of easily satisfied appetite?
How happy Joseph had been—was it only two days earlier?—watching the peddlers pick up, put away, sweep up. He was there when it happened. He saw it. He made note of it: the end of bustle and tumult, the return of calm, the pale moon barely visible in the whitish sky, the harsher yellow-white of the electric streetlights.
He cannot be happy now. The sellers are putting out their wares, their colorful fish and fruits and vegetables. But what he wants this morning isn’t there. He walks behind the Campo to the Piazza Farnese. He is surrounded by palazzi that suggest judgment cruelly or carelessly meted out. He wonders if Pearl will be judged by official forces. She has broken the law, chained herself to a government building. He looks at the harsh palazzi of the Piazza Farnese. At the streetlamps, too bright when illuminated, as if placed there for interrogation. Will Pearl be interrogated? Is she protecting someone? Is she someone’s pawn? Is there vital information she will not give up? He wonders where these questions have come from, how they have entered his brain. Whether they’ve come from some book, a boy’s book, an adventure he would have thought had nothing to do with his life, the kind of book he’d never liked, not even as a child.
He loves the beautiful streets of Rome; nothing in his life has brought him more joy than the contemplation of beautiful things. But he can’t concentrate on anything, his eye can stay on nothing; his mind can only go to Pearl. She is in danger. He sees her on a stretcher, white and flat, her eyes closed. He cannot banish this image. He can’t do what Maria would do. Don’t think of it, she would say. I can’t help it, he would answer. Or no, he would say nothing. But he would be unable to do as she said.
And when his mind makes the image of Pearl, lying flat and white, it cannot banish another image that rises up alongside it—as if his mind were a book and on one side there was the image of Pearl and on the other side: Ilaria del Carretto, the fifteenth-century white marble figure on the top of a sarcophagus he had seen in Lucca.
He had made a special trip to Tuscany to see the figure. He had come across a desciption of it by Ruskin in a biography he had picked up for $2.50 from a table on Broadway at 72nd Street. The book was beside Low Fat Cooking for One, an anthology of Russian poetry, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
It was one of the things he liked best about New York, the surprise encounter, the odd juxtaposition, coming upon a book he really wanted to read when he thought he was out shopping for his dinner: a trip to Fairway for a salmon steak, a head of broccoli, two whole wheat rolls, a carton of raspberry sorbet. And then this book, which he calculated would be perfect for his upcoming trip to Italy. He always took one large paperback with him, an experienced traveler’s strategy he’s proud of. A serious book, a book he wanted to read but might not get around to in his ordinary life. So that he could mark each journey not only by a business trip successfully completed but by a book satisfactorily read.
He hadn’t thought about Ruskin since college. He had been an art history major and had very much liked Ruskin’s embellished descriptions, his exact, perhaps obsessive prose. Poor Ruskin, father of art history, patron saint of careful looking. If you ask the average man about him he will say he’s someone who went berserk on his wedding night because he discovered women are not statues and have pubic hair. No. If you ask the average man about him, he will never have heard of him. Yet it is possible that no one in the history of the world has known better how to look than this man. Madman, eunuch, genius eye.
Reading Ruskin’s description of the figure of Ilaria del Carretto, Joseph had decided to take a day trip from Rome to Lucca. Why not? He had planned enough time so that he could do his work—buying vestments, clerical linens, chalices, and ciboria from the stores surrounding the Piazza Minerva—and still have the kind of holiday he liked. Why not? No one was waiting for him in New York; he was president of the company. He could please himself.
And he had pleased himself in the quiet, orderly Tuscan city, following Ruskin’s lead to the tomb of Ilaria. There he fell in love with the white, peaceful girl, so comfortable on her marble pillow—her elegantly carved curls, her small breasts, her narrow waist, her slender folded hands perfect in a beauty that would never change. Ilaria would not grow old or thick or coarse. Ilaria would remain perfect.
It distresses him to think of Ilaria as he thinks of Pearl. Pearl is alive; Pearl will remain alive. She must. It is only art that finds a beautiful stillness in death. Pearl must not die. With Pearl dead, there would be nothing in the world worth seeing. Today, thinking of her, his eye can take in nothing. His eye is useless; no images on the streets—that only yesterday brought him such joy—can penetrate his mind. No image can banish the one of Pearl: white, flat, on the stretcher, close to death.
He feels his spine has been hollowed out. A glass tube has replaced solid bone; inside it, thick, black, electric, a wire thrums at the thought of her image: pale, stretched out, no longer alive. He doesn’t understand. He imagines she thinks he understands. His failure to understand shames him; mixes the terror with a thicker, duller residue. He must walk; there is nothing else to do. It’s seven-thirty. The ticket office won’t open till ten. He walks, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, saying to no one whose face he can imagine: Please, please keep her alive. The closed eyes of Ilaria come to him, and he wills them away. And then the words again: Keep her alive.
. . .
As a child, there was a face he might have imagined responding to such a request. He would have called it prayer. Then he would have prayed simply; now he cannot. Some things of the child have, of course, endured in the man, but not this habit, not this ability to call up a prayable face.
What kind of child was Joseph? A good child. A grateful child. A child who was told with his every breath, “You must be very grateful.”
He has never been without this sense of obligation. He knew, always, who he was: a servant’s son. A servant’s son who had been plucked out of the gray dead world he’d been born into, plucked by shapely fingers and cradled in the fine white palm of Seymour Meyers, given what had not been his birthright: education and access to the highest things men have created, treasured, prized.
This is Joseph’s story. Is it part of the chronicle? Joseph has never been representative of his time as Maria was. Never has he asked himself the question so important to his generation: What will make me happy? Instead, he has asked himself, What should I be doing now?
“You are a lucky boy,” his mother told him repeatedly. By lucky she meant the recipient of good luck. If good luck is nothing but the benevolent hand of chance, we’d have to say it was a series of lucky chances that brought Joseph and his mother to the house of Seymour Meyers in the spring of 1951. And if we place these lucky chances in the cup of history, Joseph’s story is part of the chronicle not of the sixties but of the thirties and the forties: the history of the Second World War.
It wasn’t until he was in his thirties that Joseph learned the story of his parents’ marriage. During a period when he was desperately trying to find out
about his father, he tracked down his mother’s cousin, a machinist living near Rochester. “I know this sheds a bad light on your mother’s family, but don’t think of it that way. Think of the times.” The suggestion, by a decent man, of the details of an indecent act.
Adam Kasperzkowski, Joseph’s father, was a distant cousin of Marie Wolinski, Joseph’s mother, from the same town in Galicia as her parents. Poor farmers. They feared the Communists. The Communists were devils. Adam needed to be sent to America to keep his faith.
And who was Adam, in America, to the Americans? A young man who became Marie Wolinski’s husband. A young man who had been starving in postwar Poland. Adam Kasperzkowski, changing his name in New York at the suggestion of the Wolinski family—so difficult, those z’s, don’t show yourself too foreign—to Adam Kasperman. Adam, the first man. Brought to America. Bought by America. And how was this bargain made? “Marry this woman, this unmarriageable because unbeautiful woman, and you will buy yourself prosperity.”
They married and moved to Detroit. Adam got a job in a Ford automotive plant. Joseph was conceived. Joseph was born. And then, while he was still an infant, the cliché line: Adam said he was just going out for a pack of cigarettes; Adam was never seen again. He disappeared into the fog of America.
Father Lipinski, an uncle of Adam Kasperman, was the chaplain in a home for blind children in the Bronx. He hired Marie as a cook: the workings of the fostering, manipulative hand of Holy Mother Church, a wise and practical housewife, keeping her children alive and healthy. And then another manipulation: a colleague of Father Lipinski, Monsignor Ryan, friend of Dr. Seymour Meyers (such a fine man, such a tragedy, his wife’s death to cancer, the two-year-old child). Seymour Meyers needed a housekeeper. Marie Kasperman was put to work for the grief-stricken Seymour Meyers, in need of someone to watch his house and care for his two-year-old daughter, nearly the same age as Marie Kasperman’s fatherless son, Joseph.
His mother, a servant. Marie Wolinski Kasperman, a girl born in western New York State to Polish farmers, raised on an ungenerous soil. Dirt poor, she liked to say, though we had our self-respect; we always kept ourselves clean. Her battle a fight to the death with dirt and disorder. Wasn’t there something admirable in that? But there was no love bestowed on what dirt was kept from. Only enmity. Only a confusion between dirt and life.
He remembers there were some things she liked. A teacup: white, thin, with red roses. She liked her needlepoint hassock, on which she would rest her aching, tired feet. He wished he could have been the kind of boy who took tired feet in loving hands and said, “Mother, let me rub your feet. What can I do for you, Mother?” Instead of always the recoil from her presence, the polite, abashed, always guilt-ridden dutifulness, the self-hate born of unease around her body. Who do you think you are, he would ask himself, that your flesh crawls at the nearness of your mother’s flesh? Do you think you’re something better? No, he knew that he was not. If he is his mother’s son, he must be her. Whenever he began to think that he might be something else, he didn’t know how to name it, so he decided it was impossible.
Beauty and fineness. “Your father had looks, I’ll give him that.” This was said reluctantly, as if she’d take away his father’s visibility if she could, as she had tried to do by cutting his face out of photographs. Instead of his father’s face, an empty oval.
Joseph has often wondered what his life would have been like if he had not been set down by some merciful and tender hand into the palm of Seymour Meyers, devoted to the beautiful, the fine. How could he fail to be grateful? He was a child abandoned by his father, a gifted child born to an ungifted mother and introduced to a greater world. An introduction that meant he would always place himself at an uneasy distance from his mother.
He sometimes wonders if he ever loved her. He cannot remember feeling for his mother anything like what he felt for people whom he later said he loved. He hopes for a merciful, preconscious Eden, a time before memory when he was drawn to her out of sheer animal need, a time before distinctions could be made, when her body was the body he needed, to which nothing else had to be compared.
He has no idea how old he was when the difference between coarseness and fineness entered his mind. Knowing his mother was one and not the other, that the Meyerses were the other and not the one. He has tried to be fair to his mother, stopping himself when he said to himself, She had no sense of beauty. She cared about cleanliness. Americans believe there is no beauty without cleanliness. But this, he learned, was not something all the peoples of the world believe. The treasuring of cleanliness above all, which made her buy the chair covered in olive leatherette (I can wipe it with a sponge; it’ll last forever), never an ornament (They’re dust collectors). You must believe me: Joseph has tried terribly hard not to be unfair to his mother. He told himself that she was tired. That she worked too hard. That she worried about money. That she had no reason to prize beauty when her own lack of it was the cause of her sorrow. He tried very hard to call up times when he was not unhappy to be near her. He would remember that sometimes they enjoyed playing cards. But the meagerness of that sentence—We enjoyed playing cards—would cause him to feel something like despair and then self-pity, and like Maria he believes that of all emotions self-pity is the least acceptable.
Lately he has begun to wonder: If he had never met the Meyerses, could he have been happy with his mother? He could be a blue-collar worker in Detroit, married to a nice Polish girl, taking their many children to a church called St. Kasimir or St. Stanislaus, his patient, kind, ungifted wife caring for his mother in their ranch house rather than leaving her to the care of strangers at Regina Caeli Home for the Aged. The last time he visited her there, she said, “You’re a nice young man, do I know you?” “Mother, I’m your son.” “I don’t remember having a son.” If his mother does not know him, how can he be loved? And is her love something he deserves?
He has often asked himself, Is it possible that a child who never loved his mother is capable of love? Is what he has called love only a form of misapprehension? Perhaps he isn’t capable of love, only of attachment to a creature formed from his own imagination. He asks himself quite often if he is really an idolator—a failed idolator, for his imaginations have disappointed him.
I must tell you, Joseph often thinks of himself as a disappointed man. And yet what, he has asked himself, is disappointment? He has come to many conclusions. He has reckoned that disappointment isn’t one of the great states of mind. Nothing glamorous—like ruin—only a gradual diminishment, a gradual nibbling away of bounty, until what is left is cramped and meager, adequate for livelihood but every luxury, every amplitude, begrudged. At fifty, he has taken stock of himself and found a failed idolator, a disappointed man.
Joseph isn’t thinking of these things now. He isn’t thinking of his past. He walks blindly; his mind can’t settle; his eye falls on things but he cannot be said to be seeing them properly. He is walking, praying, to no face that he can see, “Just keep her alive.”
He remembers walks with Pearl in Central Park, walks downtown to look at architecture or just have lunch. The time in the museum when he took her to see some Cambodian sculptures. Both of them silent before the faceless goddesses, not Madonnas, their round hard breasts impossible to think of as a food source, their secret smiles, the girlish narrowness of their shoulders.
He can’t remember one word he and Pearl said to each other. And he wonders, with a kind of desperation, if it would be of help to her if he could remember some of the things she said. He tries and tries; he cannot call up a single word. But he believes, he tells himself that he is right to believe, that they were happy. In all the times with her, he believes he was never disappointed. Except when she chose, for her diary, a purple plastic notebook with a laminated picture of a unicorn on the front. He never told her, though; he paid for it without a word. But he was glad to notice that at some point she had given it up, choosing, instead, a black leather journal with unlined pages.
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Now he walks to Piazza Mattei, where just a few days before he saw a FOR SALE sign in the window of a flat. Right there, in one of his favorite squares in Rome, VENDERSI, the stone of the building just the right shade of sunburnt yellow, the trailing ivy just the right mix of ornament and camouflage. It is the district, historically, of woodworkers. On the wall of one of the buildings in the square is a sign listing the craftsmen represented in the woodworkers union of 1624: makers of barrels, casks, tambourines, cabinets, drums, whips, boxes, chairs, and clogs; inlayers; sawyers; lathe turners. Only a few days ago, he imagined himself protected by those skilled, industrious ghosts, so near to the playful seductive bronze boys who stand below the tortoises of the Fontana delle Tartarughe. Why not? Why not wait till a few days after Christmas and call the number and see how much the flat costs? He has a house worth $750,000 in Larchmont, a house he doesn’t want. A house whose old trees and leaded windows and deep lawns would be free of resonance for someone else.
He is aware that it is winter, but the cold doesn’t press on his limbs or cause him to think about going inside. Why not walk all night, why not walk until dawn? What would it matter if he were murdered by some large-featured boy from a painting by Caravaggio, murdered on the Via Giulia or one of the streets that leads from it, one that turns and turns and may lead nowhere?
It had given him a feeling of great luxury, of leisure, to know that it was no longer necessary to prevent himself from being murdered. It meant that no place was closed to him. He could go wherever he wanted, but it wasn’t any specific action or activity that interested him, only the possibility of wandering anywhere with no need to check in. No place to which it was necessary that he report back.