We should be stood up in St Pat’s as a miracle—neither of us said. The flesh dripped, and I marveled. She put her wet cheek in my neck—and I nodded.
Afterward I said: ‘What are they, really. That set of steps?’ She brings things home. They melt into usage. ‘Is it a prayer stool?’
‘Could be. Or else steps to get into one of those high tester-beds.’
Then we laugh, and have ourselves coffee black as the midwinter ice on a lake on an animal farm used to be, and cheese smacking of the best cholesterol, and grapes.
‘You look so pretty,’ I say, mouth full. ‘Maybe I’ll let you leave your hair white.’
She kisses the backs of my hands. She’s always looking at them. She waves at the little ladder. ‘Next time, we’ll kneel.’
HE SAYS I KEEP him from seeing himself, and us, as too heroic. ‘I always did think the old were the real heroes,’ he says.
And now—they’re us. I think that for both of us.
‘To be under imminent sentence,’ he says. ‘And threading a needle.’
Sewing the button, I smirk. My eyes are good. None of our family has ever had cataracts. ‘That’s our function. Women.’
‘To thread? Or to be antiheroic?’
‘To be antiheroic—heroines.’
Repartee!
But now and then we sly out each other’s hurts—at least the old chronic ones. I am a great complainer on the subject of the neck. He knows each of my muscle crackings and is a connoisseur of the heat lamp and the traction apparatus, as well as an amateur masseur. But that other inner Babel of body sounds and heart tricks—all new arrivals crashing the tap-dance rehearsal without their union cards—these I keep to myself. And so, I suppose, does he. Or I assume he has five years less of them.
Until one day, when we are standing between two reflecting mirror-walls in a gallery show of environmental art—dribbled earth, bow-tied walls, and quicksand views of us spectators—I find out that he too has a neck.
He has stopped dead in his tracks, though we are supposed to tread across that earth—and spoil our shoes in it if we are wearing uptown suede. We aren’t. In the silly-mirror I see him touch his forehead. His head is alop.
‘Rupert! What?’
That’s all we appear to have to say these days: What?
He only told me because he was caught off his guard—by the environment. ‘Like a black-and-white parasol. Opened right between my eyes. And shook out its frills like Op-art. Moving in ripples.’
‘Oh—that—’ I manage to say. ‘Dead between the eyes? Like a paramecium in drag? I’ve had it. Stand still. It’ll go.’
The line of people behind us moved on without us, not sparing us some dirty looks. We are from another constituency of the environment—I thought of telling them. One foot out, one foot in.
‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘I’ve had it before.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He knew I knew why, so didn’t answer.
But now I am the amateur.
I took us home in a cab—ten blocks. Those minor habit changes—sudden cabs, untoward purse-fumblings, a sense that one has talked too much, or else been silent without knowing it—these are the scariest.
Nothing—Rupert’s CAT scan said, and the doctor also. What they call an ‘incident.’ Not the same, I gather, as—an event.
Rupert does not remember any of it.
I have always been greedy for events. Recently, it has seemed to me, and even to Rupert who has always been less dependent on them, that what with our one remaining daughter so far off and friends going for good—we haven’t had enough of them.
Now—I don’t know.
FOOD HAS ALWAYS BEEN our joint responsibility. She has taught me to cook a little at her side, and now that she can’t carry I often shop alone, though on occasion she likes to come along to help select.
‘You two are the most selecting parents I know,’ Christina said, walking through our odd series of rooms again after so long, the year she came back from Italy to live with us and attend the Lincoln School a last year before college—for neither of which her father would pay. The elder child is not always the brightest, but she is—although to her father the infant son he and Gemma lost prematurely will always be in question.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘we are very select.’ Naturally she didn’t get the pun, being so rusty in English, but it wouldn’t take that girl long. I could see how our bare floors, small rugs, some of them only rag, and windows full of sky at the top half and showing the genre scenes of our side street at the bottom, must seem to her, after her father’s place, or rather her grandparents’, which I imagine as all leftover gilt, mock-antique damask, and the rippled ‘waterfall’-effect furniture of the 1940s Italian middle class. Although that was Rome as I knew it, not Tuscany. Our paintings are good, two or three thin-framed oils or watercolors to a room, each bought on installment until it was ours to hang. And often the work of a friend. Funny—how of all our group it was invariably the painters who became most famous, though of course not beyond their just deserts. Even at fifteen, Christina approved of their works in an awed way that made me suspect she already knew how much too good for us—for our means, that is—our little collection now was.
Of course she might already have known the names of some. Her father had an American crony over there who supplied all the art historians with slides of US art, and living here and the Lincoln School would do the rest. We allowed her to choose a picture for her own room, and she chose the Reginald Marsh—one of his lovely tarts striding the avenue, full of loose joy. Quiet girl, Christina; I doubt that she would have told her father about it. But the younger girl, Francesca, after her brief Christmas here, must have done so, and he promptly increased the amount of that ransom which has continued almost until this day. Even so, Gemma had always let him hang on to them for longer than he strictly should. ‘I will not have them bothered!’ And he gave them much, she said—a second language and sky, good butter and fruit as well as good manners, schools virtually without drug or sex problems, if otherwise too stringent, and the open heart of Italy itself.
‘And the tight purse?’
I only said it that one time; I do not grudge him anything except his fatherhood. The children were a great gift to me, who had none. And the rare fight Gemma and I had at that point did clear the air. Arturo himself, then on the edge of coming here to stay for God knows how long in one of our small spare rooms—for he is shameless—has never since dared. Christina, who heard all, must have shamed him, or even refused to let him use her and her sister as leverage—for after that Francesca too more or less came back to us.
They did have lovely manners. I think of Christina out there now in Saudi Arabia, almost in purdah with the other wives of the oil company’s executives, and how those manners must stand her in good stead, not only with them and such Saudi people as she might meet, but with herself. Having the baby will help. But is that—and charm—enough for a smart woman? Perhaps—when just remarried at almost forty. Though I have noticed that women museum curators tend to stay younger than their age. Lovely reticent girls like her to begin with, they stay enshrined in those cool halls, maybe tended by the very artifacts under their care, in some sympathy that streams from the long quiet of art.
As for our collection, much of it later went to pay the girls’ school fees, when my teaching and Gemma’s commissions lessened, and Francesca, as expensively vain as her father, became a problem we paid to stay away. What few artworks I have saved are for Gemma if I die. When I die. But the Marsh is in my will for Christina. Perhaps I should write and say it is hers, when the baby comes. I would have done so long since. But Gemma was so easily wheedled by Francesca. And the good child never asked.
The bad one, all sugar on top, often excused her demands by saying that one may ask anything of those who are lucky in love. I suppose many think that this is really all there is to Gemma and me. No doubt Arturo had so taught the girls—or had tr
ied. Though when Christina did remarry she asked me to give her away—the only reason she was married in church, she said, adding to me in the vestry beforehand, and to Ethan at her side: ‘He raised me.’
Francesca wasn’t pressed to come for that second wedding. Her jobs were always shaky at best, even for Rome—if they existed at all, which her mother believed in more than I. But of course she phoned: ‘Doesn’t my sister want a bridesmaid? And I’m dying to meet Ethan.’
Recalling Christina’s first wedding at home here, and Francesca’s sexy monkey-face—and body—tipped outrageously toward all the young men, including the groom, with whom she may have been at a later date successful, I hoped against hope that Gemma would not accede. But of course she did, saying with the deprecation that always hid her joy, ‘She’ll probably arrive without a stitch to her name.’ Whereupon they would shop for her—Gemma all aglow with that intense mother-daughter intimacy for two days awarded her—as if Francesca was to be the bride.
This was how the girl would set her mother up for the next six months of ruinous conduct, from abortion money for what could only be obtained in—was it France?—‘You know Italy, Mother,’ to a disappearance in Ceylon—or was it Nepal?—in liaison with a supposed member of its royal house. Which did not save her from being ejected from that country for unseemly conduct in one of its temples. Finally came the imprisonment—was it originally in West Germany or East?—for what Gemma still believes was a political action, but I do not. She had to believe in Francesca all the way; I understand that. Or else cut her off—which for Gemma is impossible. Even now.
And I approved. In spite of outbursts of temper, my dear one, I knew I had to. Logic could not be urged. But more than that, you wouldn’t have been what you were to me if you had been able to cut people off. The girl herself—lingering on with us for weeks after that first wedding on the excuse that it had snatched her sister from us—I could scarcely address politely. It was her mischief and then her scheme, to make advances to me, in corridors, on picnics, and finally by sneaking into my study nude. I scared her, before I threw her out. ‘You will pretend to like me—just enough,’ I said. ‘From now on. No mischief. No stepfather enmity even, you poor slut. Your mother has had enough to bear.’
But a good kind friend we don’t see anymore had already come to Gemma to report. ‘That girl is driving Rupert crazy; he can’t get away from her. In your small house.’ The friend, who is rich, is said still to hear from Arturo, who at the time was her informant, writing her that Francesca had taunted him that she would get to me. ‘Nonno’—she called her father Grandfather because of his years—‘want to bet?’ She was his favorite. She tortured him too.
So you, Gemma, came to me, to let me hold you, not to reassure you—our faith in each other has been blind, some would say, if well warranted—but to reassure me. ‘You needn’t pretend about her anymore. To like her. Or to conceal from me what she is. I’ve told her. Be decent when you’re here. Or I will cut you off. And I will.’ And maybe it would have come to that by now if not because of me—if that stony-faced lifer now in Lubeck prison for her murder hadn’t done it for you, never revealing why. Her countries confused us until the end.
But that day I said: ‘You needn’t. I’ve scared her off
‘How? Tell me. You smiled your saddest maternal smile, unaware you wore it. ‘It might help me.’
It wouldn’t have. You were never in the army—where killing becomes possible to people like us. Perhaps you knew that. You didn’t press. And knew I spoke the truth, and never asked her.
‘Hate her for me,’ was all you said, shivering into me. ‘I cant.’
So, for that second wedding of her sister’s, Francesca brought her own equipment—a short white dress you were awed to find was from Fortuny—in whose spiral she moved like its black-eyed core, and the slippery young Roman, with a fat Hapsburg lip and a patrimony to match, who had bought it for her.
‘She wants to outshine the bride,’ I said to you. ‘She never will.’ She never could, though Christina was not to blame.
We watched the two of them, each with her chosen man, each of those as different as the two daughters. I saw that you were praying, your eyes blemished with hope. For Francesca was trying to make her friend see the analogy. Of weddings.
But he was watching Christina, straightforward in her gray second wedding-dress, accepting her ring with an upward look that was adornment enough, and I fear he did see what weddings were, his eyes on Christina, his fat lip wet with delight.
‘Today—I don’t hate,’ I said.
By then I was older. Who says the middle-aged don’t grow? Only the middle-aged themselves, who see that period of their lives as stuck in a swathe of life whose broad ribbon will merely advance, bearing them on. Age knows better. But who will speak for age? Do we only regress? Or do we grow too?
I began this entry intending to talk about the two of us as we are. Instead, all this wandering in the past, telling you what you already know. And telling myself. Do I hope that the story will change, mutate, in the telling? Or do I fear that the aged no longer have events—worth the telling?
You and I inhabit a present in which fewer and fewer are intimate enough with us to write or phone. Or if so, not forgetful of it. How does one chronicle that? The phone is so glumly mum now, and we have two. When it rings, we vie for it. How to write this side-by-side libretto, all of whose roles only one of us sings?
Approach it as a poem must be. It was never written before. My old age has no antecedent. No one’s has. Just as each one’s childhood is brewed fresh for the small, breathless sipper, and to any youth on his first river-haunted night, youth was never down by the river with a lover before, so age must sing its own voluntary, in a chorus of one.
Who speaks for me, sings for me, except this almanac—to an audience of one?
OLD PEOPLE LIKE US are the gardeners of the streets. Old male shoppers like Rupert especially, carrying home eggs as if they were also walking on them, their shoulder bags tremoring. Under the jaunty cap the face is its own beacon. Or sometimes there is an assistant presence, like me. These days I watch Rupert as if he is already alone. In a kind of gymnastic he is not aware of I practice being his companion ghost. Although I don’t believe in ghosts—or perhaps because of that—I feel reduced in size, almost Rupert’s child. Or perhaps because I cannot carry.
I note that the greengrocer is still kind, allowing Rupert to hover over the apples to pick out an especially cheeky flame, the mound of McIntoshes crumbling as he does so. Or to forefinger a scallion bulb with a secret rub, like a lover feeling a vulva. At that I giggle—I’m still alive. Mr Raso, the vegetable man, doesn’t watch us for stealing, as he tells us he has to do now with some senior pensioners. We are long-term customers who he knows shop at the supermarket only for soap powder and other neutrally packaged goods. And he knows I’m Italian, though he doesn’t see me at his church. But one day, when I pass there alone, I may hint to him, as I buy a lemon or so, that Rupert suffers from a slight nervous affliction of the hands. Which is true enough—ever since that day in the gallery.
‘Poor Raso,’ my husband says as we leave. ‘We’re his status now.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘Once he was vegetable king of the neighbourhood, don’t you remember? To have him pick a honeydew for you was like an award. And now he’s only the last non-Oriental vegetable stand on the block. And the young don’t go to him.’
We pass one of those Korean stalls with a salad-bar electric down its center. Neon pimientos, lime and orange melon balls arranged like savory junk, the green fuss of chicory at the ready, sliced mushrooms jigsawed on pillows of bean curd. And at every other barrow of more ordinary produce, one of the anonymous artists of the clan is bent over some lesser nurturing.
We pass without buying anything. Yes, Raso needs us. He too is old. ‘Why did you giggle back there?’ Rupert says.
I tell him, doing it again. He joins me.
&n
bsp; Can older people giggle like that and not be obscene? To that girl just passing for instance, in a swing of marigold hair blowing straight out behind her. It’s not the hair but her jointless ease that I envy.
‘See her?’ Rupert murmurs. And the whole windy street? Ah, I love the Village. You can have your twig-and-sand twiddlers. This—is environment.’
He says Greenwich Village is like parts of Paris, where over and over youth is the crop. But in Europe, much less Paris—I think—is it the only one?
Am I jealous? No—I have been ‘youth,’ and could not be so again, certainly not from within. Possibly not even in the joints, now that I am used to their familiar, even sophisticated grumbling. What youth does is to make me uncertain that I am still in the world. This world.
When we stop at the butcher’s I choose a brisket, savoring the experienced red of that well-salted meat, and I myself carry it home.
WOMEN GET THEIR PAST earlier than we do. And keep it longer. In spite of which they answer the world more from the flesh than we do. And are always answering themselves there.
I have known this almost forever—or since I began to know them. Yet yesterday was a shock to me.
We were just putting down our bundles from the stores. A sweet fragrance—of purchase and stability—rose from them. And I thought: worldliness is all. Enough that the meals spare as ours are, may come on as a clock turns, and rounded with a little sleep—that wakes. To a book lying open, that can expect to be finished. In these rooms where the abiding flame is the apple in the bowl, and the only war is with the ant. While the toilet gurgles toward tomorrow, and nobody in the obits is yours.
Then I see that she is standing with her arms half extended and the butcher’s brown bag still in their crook, in a pause out of Dali, or Magritte. They are not our style of picture.
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