by Mary Gordon
Quite early in their marriage, Joseph and Devorah agreed they would not have children—because of her work. And then, later, when she told him she had made a mistake, how could he believe her? How could he understand that she had always wanted to be the mother of children but had suppressed it, in favor of the music that she loved? He told himself that Pearl was enough, more than enough; he couldn’t imagine having a child he would love more than Pearl. He couldn’t imagine, given his heritage, his unlovely mother, his deserter father, fathering a child who could in any way come up to Pearl.
Everyone acknowledged that Devorah gave up everything she came from to sing the music she considered irreplaceable. No one ever considered: What had Joseph given up?
So Joseph and Devorah married. They lived in Cambridge, then New York. They devoted both their lives to her gift. She studied voice; she performed the music she loved. Then she came to believe it was too hard a life; she wanted something easier.
Perhaps in the end her gift was rather small, too small for all Joseph’s devotion. Too small a vessel for the amount of love he poured into it. Or is it not that the gift was too small but that the price it exacted was too high for her to pay?
She told him one day in 1994 that she was unwilling to martyr herself any longer. “I just want a life,” she said. Joseph wanted to say to her, What do you think you’re having? What is this thing that you call life that you think you haven’t got, or that you have to hoard?
Was he wrong? Was she? Must the world be divided between martyrs and misers? What would be the appropriate reply to someone who said, as Devorah said to Joseph, only two years before she died at forty-eight, “My life is all I have.” She said it, as most people would, as if it were self-evident, as if they were saying, “The universe is all there is.” Devorah didn’t say it this way, but what people usually say is, “You have only the one life,” using the pronoun you and the definite article the. You have only the one life.
But do you? Well, of course, in one sense yes, in that you don’t get more than one. In that the universe is, of course, all there is. But isn’t it possible to say, “You have your life, and the idea of your life, and what your life stands for”? Stands for. Stands where?
Pearl believes she is standing somewhere. Right now she believes that the idea of her life is more important than her life itself. Of course we do not agree with her. But because we do not agree, does it follow, then, that there is nothing worth dying for? Or against? And if there is nothing worth dying for, what is worth living for? This is the kind of question that has led Pearl to where she is now, chained, lying on the freezing pavement in front of the American embassy, while the police wait to decide the right thing for them to do and Pearl waits for the death that she has summoned, planned.
But when Devorah said she was unwilling to martyr herself any longer, she didn’t mean she’d been planning to die. What had she been martyring, her desire for comfort, for ease? Earlier, if she’d given up her desire to sing, she would have had to martyr her ambition. These would, of course, have been little deaths. Joseph has often wondered if she shouldn’t have martyred her ambition, her desire to sing. But he believed it wasn’t even that. She would have had to martyr her desire to be heard, her desire for performance. And he wondered: Was that such a very great thing, that desire, that it should have been honored at the expense of her family’s happiness and peace? Is it greater than a person’s duty toward her people? And was her desire for ease and comfort so important that it should have killed his dream of her?
. . .
In 1967, 1968, the idea of not using your gift was considered a betrayal of the highest sort. In those years, you did not give up your gift to satisfy your parents—certainly not if you were someone like Maria. Joseph always knew that something terribly important had been lost. But if he had said that, he would not have had a certain kind of joy, the joy of loving a woman he considered gifted and miraculous, and she would not have had a certain kind of joy—a joy that is irreplaceable—the joy of performance.
He has never understood it very well, the impulse to perform. He doesn’t have much sense of his own visibility. The impression he makes on people is something he has to screw himself up to a pitch of unnatural attention to think of; he does it only for business. He has never understood the desire to be seen; he’s always supposed it was part of the artistic process. But he wishes it wasn’t. He wishes there could be, at least somewhere in the world, at least one artist who doesn’t care if anybody sees his work.
So after twenty-five years of devoting herself to her music, when Devorah said she was giving up her dream of being the kind of singer she had always wanted to be, that she was content to have the occasional private student and teach voice at Westchester Community College, that she just wanted to be happy, he felt terribly let down. Does this mean he never really wanted her to be happy?
He had thought he understood her. He thought she was the woman he loved, the great love of his life. He thinks he will not love another woman in that way; he is past that kind of belief.
He believed she would shape her life so it was devoted to the gift of her voice: the pure gift of a pure voice. She had an extraordinary voice; he knows he was right in that. He wasn’t the only person who thought so. Teachers, coaches—even some critics—praised Devorah’s voice. What he didn’t understand at first, what she might not have understood at first but came to understand long before Joseph, is that many people are greatly gifted. It’s not as unusual as we might think. Oh, it’s unusual, of course, or we wouldn’t notice it at all, but it’s not unusual enough. There are, particularly now, at the end of the century—I should say at the end of the millennium—simply not enough places so that all the people in the world who are gifted in singing the serious music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be listened to with the kind of attention they crave. The kind of attention that makes all the effort worth it.
It is a difficult life. A great deal must be given up. Joseph was perfectly willing to assume his share of the difficulties: to watch out for his wife’s voice, to be silent for days, to be alert to drafts and changes in temperature, to pay large sums for lessons with great teachers, to put up with lousy accommodations in lousy hotels in third-rate cities, to have her away from him for weeks at a time, to have her refuse to answer him on the day of her performance when he asked if she’d bought any jam. Of course, she had to endure much more, he knew that: the anguish of believing she hadn’t got it right, she hadn’t done it well enough. For an hour, two hours, three hours of being responded to? It’s not enough, she said. No, he wanted to tell her, you’re not doing it for the response. You’re doing it to bear witness to the greatness of your gift and the greatness of the music.
After twenty years of what she called martyrdom, Devorah felt it was no longer worth it. Afterward, he believed he should have seen it coming when she wanted to move into the Larchmont house that had been rented out for twenty years, the house Dr. Meyers had left to him and not to Maria: Dr. Meyers and Maria were estranged at the time of his death. He should have seen it coming when Devorah began talking about a garden.
“Why a garden all of a sudden, why now?” he asked her.
And she said—it may have been the first time she really hurt him—“I’ve always been interested, but I knew you wouldn’t approve. You wouldn’t think it was serious.”
He was hurt because she’d kept something from him, possibly for years, and because he got a hint for the first time that his love might be something of a burden to her.
But he wanted her to be happy. And if she said a house and garden would make her happy, she was too old for the apartment on the air shaft, she wanted space and light, it would be good for her voice—well, how could he refuse her?
One thing, of course, led to another. She spent time in the garden. She became interested in redoing the house. Then she had to learn how to cook all the vegetables in the vegetable garden and how to use all the herbs in the herb gard
en, and to how make beautiful arrangements of the flowers in the flower garden. Joseph hated that garden. She was right: he didn’t think it was serious. He didn’t believe there was greatness in gardening. A garden didn’t stand for anything. Oh, it might be a source of inspiration for a poet or a painter, Marvell or Herrick or Monet. But he believed that a poem about a garden or a painting of a garden was greater than a garden itself. If Devorah had sung about a rose, he believed that would have been greater than growing an actual rose. She knew what he believed, and it hurt them both.
He did not know, although Maria did, that she got back in touch with her family. Maria went with her on her first tentative visit but did not go back again; she wasn’t needed. She called Devorah’s brother when Devorah died.
Joseph wasn’t there when it happened, when Devorah, standing at the top of the stairs, caught her heel in the hem of her long skirt and fell. He came home to find her. It was six o’clock but still a summer afternoon. The light was beautiful when he walked into the house. He called his wife’s name. And then he saw her, lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face in the dirt of the ficus plant she’d been carrying, smashed beside her.
He called the police. His next-door neighbor, whom he hardly knew, came when he saw the police car. A doctor whom he’d never met came by. He said Devorah had died instantly. There was no pain. He was grateful for that.
He phoned Maria. Maria wasn’t home so he told Pearl, and Pearl came up on the train. He met her at the station. They did not embrace. They sat quietly, and the sun bled out of the day and then it was dark. She made some sandwiches.
When he thinks of Pearl that day, he remembers that everything she did was perfect. She was quiet; every gesture she made was a comfort; there were no abrasions. Her voice had a kind of elegant maternal quality, a quattrocento Madonna of the time of Ruskin’s Ilaria.
He was almost sorry when Maria came, Maria with her loud weeping, her cries of “I can’t believe it! It can’t be!” Calling Devorah’s brother, so that then her parents, who were still living, phoned—he had never spoken to them, not once in twenty-five years—and asked if they could have her body to bury in a Jewish grave. He felt that, having taken so much from them, he had no right to refuse.
. . .
Two years later, on the Via Arenula, Joseph would like to go into the synagogue and—do what?—not say a prayer but perhaps think for a moment of his dead wife. But he feels he has no right. He is not one of the chosen. And he does not know how to mourn a wife whom he will always have to suspect of ceasing to be his before the day that she was—the words come so easily to people’s lips—taken from him.
Now I must tell you about a strange episode in Joseph’s life. It may be more common than we think for a quiet man, a man who lives his life reasonably and honorably, to have a period of irrational obsession. Joseph had several months in which he believed the history of the Jews was a burden he must carry in his living flesh, to expiate the history coiled in the snail shell of his genetic makeup.
He began to be terrified that he had more connection to the sufferings of the Jewish people than simply marrying one of their daughters. He became convinced that his father, of whose face he had no knowledge, who had left no trace in his life, had been a torturer.
His obsession with his father’s role in the Holocaust took shape in 1993, when Joseph was forty-five years old. It began when he read the newspaper articles about Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi guard who’d been hiding out as an autoworker in Chicago. In his face, Joseph saw something of his own: the widely spaced eyes, the arching of the brows, the ears, the forehead. John Demjanjuk, Ivan the Terrible, was born the same year as Adam Kasperzkowski, Joseph’s father. The same date as his father’s date of birth on Joseph’s birth certificate. He became convinced that John Demjanjuk, Ivan the Terrible, was his father. Or that was the first step. It was a multistep operation, a gradual delusion, a split-level obsession.
His father was born in Gdansk in 1919. So was John Demjanjuk. He saw his eyes in the eyes in the grainy newspaper photograph; he would stand next to the mirror looking from his own features to the newspaper clipping; calibrating the width of forehead, the shape of the nose. Why couldn’t it be his father? His father, who had acted barbarously, walking out—“Just going for a pack of cigarettes”—on the infant Joseph and his mother. Why should he have been an exception, one of the few who did not rush to torture the Jews?
How do we trace the roots of this strange flowering? How do we explain this sort of thing in a man we would have said was normal in every other way? A successful businessman. A loving husband. For three years at least, Joseph believed himself to be the son of a war criminal. He told himself that someone like his father would surround himself with edifice after edifice of lies. By the time Ivan the Terrible had hit the newspapers, Joseph’s mother had disappeared into the fog of her senility.
Was it that if Joseph imagined his father a torturer he would have been able to describe abandonment by him as a lucky break? Better to have been abandoned by a torturer than to have been brought up by him. How lucky: the torturer left him, so he could be taken up by the fine hand of Seymour Meyers. What a lucky boy. How wrong his mother’s cry: “Both of us have always been unfortunate.”
And then the fever broke. There was no more reason for its breaking than for its onset. One day, he realized he wasn’t thinking about Ivan the Terrible anymore. Wasn’t looking at himself in the mirror, comparing his features with the pictures in the papers. It was over. He stuffed his newspaper clippings into a large green plastic bag and tied it shut with the yellow tie that came in the same box. It was over. He never spoke to anyone about it; he’s grateful at least for that. What took its place? Simply a mistrust of stories, a desire that history be made up not of stories and not of the personal but of large forces: like the Pantheon, the music of Bach.
It is eight o’clock, the Roman time for dinner. Then it will be time for him to head back to the hotel and check out, as he must leave very early the next morning, bid goodbye to the clerk (who will pretend to look forward to his return), and ask that he book, for five-thirty (Joseph is always early at the airport), a taxi to Termini Station. Termini. The end. He is traveling to something whose end he cannot imagine. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to. He is a different person from the person who took a cab from that station ten days before. He may be a different person yet again when he returns.
And who is Pearl? He must believe she is still one of the living. He will travel to a living woman; he will not allow the possibility that he is traveling to the country of the dead.
10
A policeman kneels on the ground beside her. “We’ll try all of these, see if any of them works,” he says, to someone Pearl cannot see. He is holding a huge ring of small keys. He keeps trying to unlock her cuffs. She thrashes. Another policeman holds her down. “It would be better if you’d cooperate,” he says. She closes her eyes. The policeman with the keys keeps trying to find one that will fit, but he cannot. The handcuffs are Japanese; none of the available keys will work. Pearl didn’t do that purposely; she simply bought the most expensive pair available at a sex shop not far from where she lived.
“Should we go for the cutters?” one policeman says to the one with the key ring.
“Not until the doctor gives her approval. This is an American we’re dealing with, remember. Lawsuits are their middle name. If we should hurt her, we’d be the ones to blame. . . . I don’t suppose there’s a chance you’d give us the key,” he says to Pearl, almost pleasantly.
His pleasantness makes her want to be pleasant. She would like to say, I swallowed it, which she did, and laugh with him. Because it is funny, she thinks, isn’t it, that the only thing she’s swallowed for a rather long time is a key? But she keeps her eyes closed. She will not smile or laugh.
“If you do it the hard way, we’ll have to cut the cuffs open. You could be injured. We’d rather not do you any harm.”
She keeps her eyes clo
sed. Harm, she wants to say. Yes, I know about that.
But she says nothing, and the policemen walk away.
11
The flight attendant removes Maria’s tray: so different, she thinks, from what’s being served in economy. She was given fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, yogurt and blackberries, a warm croissant. Maria hadn’t eaten since she’d heard the news of Pearl: almost twenty hours without food. She’d cleared her plate quickly. “You enjoyed your meal, I’d say,” the flight attendant says, and Maria feels ashamed. How can she be eating when her daughter is starving herself? How can she fill herself when her daughter is empty?
How can her daughter be doing this to her body now? And why? Starvation: a female tactic of self-punishment, Maria thinks, and then, more desperately: What does she think she needs to be punished for? She thought she had protected Pearl from the idea of punishment, the presence so pervasive in her early life: punishing surveillance. Who is my daughter now? she asks herself. I thought I knew. She is tormented by the false security of her former false understanding.
Perhaps all mothers think they know their daughters better than they do. And perhaps (this would be like her) Maria was too hopeful about the ability of the human species to absorb quick change. Is it possible that, in one generation, centuries of a way of thinking can be wiped out? The idea of chastity, the purity Maria was brought up believing she embodied and must defend with her life—could it have disappeared from the human mind in thirty years? She doesn’t think of her daughter as having a meaningful category in her imagination under the heading Purity. Because of her history and the history of Ya-Katey, she has seen to that. She imagines that Pearl has been spared more, perhaps, than she has. She doesn’t know for instance (and a good thing too) that at one time Pearl was obsessed with hatred for her mother’s body. Was it born of hatred for her own? And what is the source? We can blame the world, but that would not be of much use. Whatever the source, Pearl Meyers, at twelve, hated her mother’s body.