by Mary Gordon
Certainly not the staff of the hotel Santa Chiara, who had known him for many years and might be pleasantly surprised if he didn’t return one night to sleep in his bed, assuming, as Italians always do, some amorous situation. Or perhaps they didn’t think him capable of it.
He had been happy, alone and uninvolved in the holiday activity, the festivities that all the life of the streets prepared for. He wondered who would believe him if he told them he was happy. He thought it might sound pathetic, like something a girl might say who hadn’t been invited to a dance, trying to convince you that she’d had her opportunities but she preferred to stay at home and wash her hair. But in his case it was true. He did have invitations. He had lied (this was unlike him) to get out of them. He could have taken a short train trip to a house in the campagna, to warm hearths, large tables, rooms full of firelight, children with dark eyes and cheeks red from the fire, young, thin, fashionable mothers without the unease of American mothers toward their young. Or he could have gone skiing in Zermatt and eaten Christmas dinner at midnight, the moon a blue disk on the frozen snow, with a private mass in the morning said by a bishop, also the guest of his excellent hosts, who would not be displeased to see Joseph attentive to their plain, shy, intellectual daughter of whom he was fond and about whom (they were not wrong) he occasionally speculated, but entirely without desire, considering the possibilities of a quiet, decorous, but not unstylish Roman life.
Joseph was a widower, you see, understood to be Catholic and to have sufficient money. For someone like him, invitations would never be lacking.
He had lied to several groups of friends, suggesting a Christmas spiritual in its overtones, perhaps spent in a monastery, perhaps turning to God for consolation in his grief over the loss of his wife. In fact, he was not feeling grief. He was, after two years, unable to describe the nature of his feelings. Perhaps because he believed he wasn’t grieving. Simply, he wanted to be alone.
Now, alone, he walks near the Tortoise Fountain in Piazza Mattei, thinking of his mother, in the Regina Caeli Home for the Aged on the West Side of New York City. She has been there for six years.
Her days are a fog. What will she do on this day after Christmas, after she eats her breakfast? Will she wear a Santa Claus pin on one of her polyester shirts? Polyester is required in the Regina Caeli Home: all patients’ garments must be able to withstand laundering in large machines that shrink, fade, and eat up natural fabrics. Are her lips still stained red and green from Christmas candy? Does she have a Santa Claus hat? Do the nurses? He pictures the dining room with everyone wearing a Santa Claus hat: the aged nodding, openmouthed, or sitting with their eyes closed, or trying to make conversation, the nurses passing out food, wiping mouths, chins, wheeling patients toward their tables and then away from them, back to bed.
Each day, Marie Kasperman makes herself a pirate’s hat out of a paper towel. She smiles more than formerly; it is not a false smile. Joseph wonders if, for the first time in her fog, his mother is happy.
Why not, then, he’d thought on that earlier day when he’d walked to the Fountain of the Tortoises, move to Rome? He could do everything he needed for the business by fax and e-mail and on the Internet. He could be someone who woke every morning to the prospect of a silence nourishing as manna, living for what his eye would fall on, in high rooms, nearly empty, in a flat that was only his. The sheen of the marble floor, the white and yellow light on the red roofs. He could plan his days around what he would see. One beautiful thing in the center of each day, easy in a city where you had only to turn a corner to see a beautiful and unexpected sight.
He could become a man without close human connections, only acquaintances, Europeans who would be happy to speak of what they’d seen that day without the unseemly American avidity for personal details. Most days, he would speak to no one. Most days he would be silent. He’s imagined the silence, liquid, seeping down to the dryness of what he would once have called his soul, a word he now refuses to use, even for want of something better, because he is sick to death of the endless call-up of false terms, the hunger for the food of the pseudo-sacred, the word spiritual as much a staple of the TV talk show as the words child abuse or drug addiction.
His mother is wrapped in silence now, but it is not the beautiful silence he dreams of and craves. The silence that surrounds his mother is heavy, blank. After Marie Kasperman eats, she puts her hands over her stomach, which is more huge than ever, suggesting not self-indulgence but disease. But Marie Kasperman has no disease in her. “The dear soul is, thankfully, very healthy,” says Sister Theresa, the pastoral counselor at the home. Sister Theresa is eternally grateful for the plastic statuettes Joseph regularly brings her by the gross. “Mr. Kasperman, you are always in my prayers.” Sister Theresa assured him it was all right for him to leave his mother for a Roman holiday. “Mr. Kasperman, she wouldn’t know Christmas from the Fourth of July.”
So why not leave for good? Why not leave her to the nuns who care for her, the nurses who answer her for the hundredth time when she says, “Did I ever have any children?” Why not leave all that for the clear dimensions of the Piazza Navona, the Piazza Farnese, the Piazza Mattei?
But that was his past life. What Pearl has done has divided his life inexorably. He is not the same man he was yesterday. His past has no importance to him, and the future is something he dares not contemplate. He walks in the present, in a present as foggy as his mother’s, in this city of clear light, this city of history in which he now feels no part.
Joseph goes back to the Santa Chiara. He stays at this hotel, as Dr. Meyers stayed there before him, not for the Pantheon or the synchronistic evidence of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, but because it is in the district where religious articles are sold. Unlike the windows of other piazzas (those shrines to minor commercial gods, windows filled with beautifully wrapped chocolates, beautifully tailored suits, gloves in every shade), the windows of the streets leading from the Piazza Minerva are filled with vestments and sacred vessels with singular, evocative names taken from their ancient use: chalice, pyx, ciborium, monstrance, censer, thurifer. And the sad clothing shops for nuns: mannequins in veils, mannequins meant to be unalluring, so unlike other mannequins with their prominent nipples. The nun mannequins are overlarge and wear neutral-colored nightgowns—white, gray, baby blue—bed jackets and booties testifying to the graying of the religious population and their need for clerical garments suitable for life in an invalid’s bed. This morning, as every morning when he leaves his hotel, he looks away from the windows full of ten-foot-tall statues of Pope John Paul II, averting his eyes until he comes to the window of vestments: silk embroideries and embossments, rose, green, white, purple. Some ugly, but not all. There is so much in his business he cannot look at. But he does his work well; he makes money, not only for himself but for Maria and Pearl, who have never had to worry about what anything costs because, at Maria’s father’s request, Joseph took up the business.
He phones the ticket agent from his room and discovers that there is only one flight a day from Rome to Dublin. It leaves at 8 a.m.; he has already missed it. But he tells himself this is all for the best. It would not be a good thing for him to arrive first. Maria is, after all, Pearl’s mother; they are tied by blood, bound in the law. The ties that bind. He is free of ties. He is bound to no one (except his mother); there is no name for what he is to Pearl. Therefore, whatever it is—this love he has for her, this love he has had since the moment of her birth—it is a thing unrecognized by the world and therefore a thing of no force.
The airline schedule dictates that he has another day in Rome. He will take a longer walk: he knows where he wants to end up: a place of rest, of contemplation, a cloister in Trastevere known to him and few others, concealed in the center of a building that suggests nothing of its hidden treasure. You press a bell that says SPOSINI, and a reluctant watchman lets you in to the cloister of the Order of St. John Hospitalers.
It is winter and nothing will be in flo
wer; it is the quiet, the enclosure, the geometric rightness of the space that he craves.
He sits, hearing the plashing of the fountain that refreshes nothing. Dusty bushes eat up light; some hardy winter birds swoop lightly for a drink. He allows his mind to remain a blank. He tries not to think of Pearl, or to allow only a kind of thought that rockets straight past credibility: she will be all right, she will be all right. The weak sun warms the top of his head; the stone begins to chill his spine. He will move on.
6
Pearl hears someone saying her name, softly, in an Irish accent. She opens her eyes. A man and a woman, faces without features, kneel down, put their featureless faces next to hers. They are holding something, a cup of something. Something hangs over the edge: oh, she thinks, a straw. The straw brushes her lips. “Just take a sip of this,” the woman says, in a voice that is pretending to be kind. Pearl clamps her jaws down, thrashes her head. And then the voice no longer even pretends kindness. “If you think you’re a bloody martyr, little girl, you don’t even know you’re born.”
What would Maria Meyers think if she had to consider at this moment, as her child is lying on the ground and she is flying first class on Aer Lingus 865, that Pearl knew many of the things she’d kept from her. Knew saints’ lives, the lives of martyrs, because she’d found her mother’s childhood book, A Girl’s First Book of Saints, by Jerome Lowery, OSB, the letters cut in gold into the purple spine. Reading her mother’s book, she had to understand that some deaths were said to be a good thing. It went against everything else in her life to think that a death might be what your life was leading up to all along. She had never had the slightest hint that death might be a good thing. What would Maria say if she knew Pearl’s first thought about the death she is pursuing now came to her from a book with Maria’s childhood signature on the flyleaf, girlish loops and curlicues Maria excised from her adult signature, a sign, treasured by Pearl, that her mother had also once been a child, reading this same book?
What Pearl could not know was that the child that was her mother did not read the book in the same way, not in the same way at all. Maria, a Catholic child of ten in 1958, would have read the book as if her life were at stake. And not just her life but what she would have found it very easy to call her immortal soul. She read not from curiosity but as a model her salvation depended on. She read the lives of the martyrs and believed with all her heart that she had to pray for a martyr’s death. She would say to Joseph, “Let’s think of what we’ll do, exactly, if the Communists put a gun to our heads and tell us they’ll shoot us unless we say God doesn’t exist.” And he would say OK and let her talk.
In Joseph’s mind were terrifying images of men in brown coats, their faces distorted by hatred until they were hardly faces anymore, stretched mouths, pig stubs of noses, blood-red eyes. He knew they wanted to kill him. He felt the terror in his flesh; he imagined himself reneging at the last minute, saying, “All right, God doesn’t exist,” and then having to live a shamed life. Maria, on the other hand, always imagined herself glorious, triumphant, welcomed in paradise by throngs of fellow martyrs. So Maria savored the gruesome details of the deaths of virgin martyrs: St. Lucy with her eyes gouged out; St. Anastasia with her breasts chopped off; St. Apollonia, her teeth pulled out by rusty Roman pliers.
How could Maria have imagined that her daughter would be in Dublin reading One Day in My Life by Bobby Sands, which her group thought of as one of the Lives of the Saints? That they followed the weeks of his death by starvation, the cramps, the coma, as their parents and their grandparents followed the Way of the Cross?
Are you surprised at the gaps of knowledge that exist between this mother and daughter? You shouldn’t be. If you asked Maria what she wanted for Pearl, she would have said, “I just want her to be happy.” And what did Pearl want? She would have said she wanted to live in her own way. And Maria would have said, “Of course, that’s exactly what I want for you; we want the same thing, you see.” And Pearl would have said, like many daughters, “My mother doesn’t have a clue.” But what clues was she given? What cues did she fail to take?
Perhaps you would like some clues from Pearl’s childhood to help you unravel the mystery of why she is doing what she is doing now. Would it help you to know what kind of child Pearl was? Or—a related but not identical question—what kind of childhood she had? If we say, What kind of childhood did she have? and use the verb we have chosen, don’t we have to ask another question, What kind of childhood was she given? But given by whom, her mother? The world?
I suppose the first and truest thing to say about Pearl as a child was that she was very quiet. She seemed almost afraid of excessive noise. Her mother once took her to a Thanksgiving parade, and the noise of the marching bands terrified her. She liked to look at books, to draw; she liked to sew. She very much liked animals. As a matter of fact, some of the most important things she treasured were connected to dogs. By which I do not mean the ordinary doggy lessons of fidelity and joy in life.
She may not have been given the right kind of childhood for the child she was. Perhaps this is because her mother gave her the kind of childhood she would have wanted for herself. Maria had hated the surveillance of her own childhood, the privileged enclosure, being kept from the world as if she were a fragile and precious object. She detested what she knew about her father’s feelings for her: that she was a work of art, always in progress, always potentially revisable. Her father watched her with the tyrannical eye of the camera or the iconographer: waiting to freeze the moment, preserve it, make it stand not as itself but as a type of something. Like the time she tried on her First Communion dress. She could see he was disappointed at the crinoline, the lace. “A bit ornate, wouldn’t you say?” And then his revision on the day of the ceremony: “My Goya Infanta.” So by his naming her a type of something, she could be his again.
There was a right way of doing everything, tied to eternal reward. A right way of turning a page, of walking across the room, of saying thank you, of holding a rosary, of lighting a blessed candle, of curtseying (particularly to priests), of thinking about Europe versus America, the past versus the present, the cheap happiness of the present as opposed to future gold. She felt she was constantly being watched and was often a disappointment. She loved running, swimming, braving thunderstorms, hailstorms, blizzards, high waves, long jumps, deep drops down into nothing. Her father wanted her at his side. At his feet.
She would not do that to Pearl: make her feel she was being looked at. She felt she had grown up in a rifle sight. Sometimes you remembered and that was all right: you knew you were being watched, you did what was required. But sometimes you forgot, you were running somewhere, singing something, and—blam!—the gun went off, the shot right to the heart. She would not do that to her child.
It might be possible to say that, refusing to keep her eye on her daughter as an eye was kept on her, she wasn’t looking closely enough. Or that, believing she was looking at her daughter, she was really looking at herself. But the way she thought was this: surveillance was entrapment. She had no impulse to trap her daughter: she felt no need to catch her out. She believed in her daughter’s goodness. She believed in her daughter’s essential safety in the world. But her daughter did not feel safe. Does the fact that Maria never knew that, or never allowed herself to believe it, mean she wasn’t paying attention, and so her daughter was more unsafe than she might otherwise have been? Doubly unsafe? Is Pearl where she is because her mother wasn’t looking closely enough? Or looking at an image of her child that was her own reflection? You may draw these conclusions if you like. I think Maria was trying to bring her child up as a child of hope. That she did not succeed is not, I think, her fault.
Maria wanted a life of freedom and openness for her daughter; she wanted a life that denied the power of privilege or at least denied its scope. So she chose to live with Pearl in a racially mixed neighborhood among the working poor. And she chose to educate her daughter first in the Washing
ton Heights day-care centers where she worked. She could have Pearl with her every day, and Pearl would grow up knowing everyone was not just like her, wasn’t blessed with her blessings. And she wanted Pearl to grow in her own way, at her own pace, not checked on every minute, questioned, tested.
I will not say that all these things were mistakes. Pearl was never snobbish or exclusive. In the day-care center, which was sometimes a torment to her (she was not a scrapper and found it hard to fight for a place), she met, when she was four years old, her best friend, Luisa Ramirez, whom she has loved from that day to this. She learned Spanish at three; her love of languages was fostered without effort, without the hideous self-conscious deliberateness of her neighbors forty blocks to the south, taking little Amanda, little Oliver, to lessons at the Lycée Français to impress the admissions office of Dalton, Chapin, Horace Mann. But Pearl was often afraid, often overwhelmed, often guilty, because she knew she and her mother had more money than the other families and could do things the others could not, or avoid things the others had to do. Perhaps this story, which I would like to tell you now, will give you a better sense of things. This is the story of the beginning of Pearl’s and Luisa’s friendship.
Pearl is four years old, the only one in the day-care center with blond hair. There is another little girl there; Mariposa is her name: Butterfly. She wants to touch Pearl’s hair. That’s what she wants to do all day: touch the blond hair. She walks into the room, throws off her coat and her backpack, runs over to Pearl, touches her hair. Plays with it. Every day she brings in barrettes and hair elastics, so she can put them in Pearl’s hair. Pearl doesn’t like it, but she thinks that if Mariposa wants to do it so much, she has to let her. So many people seem to know what they want better than she does, so she lets them have her things; their wanting something so much makes her feel exhausted, defeated. Are you surprised that a prosperous, loved four-year-old should feel exhausted, defeated? We don’t like to think of those words in relation to young children. But I think perhaps we should.