Tell Me the Truth About Love

by Mary Cable

  I asked the librarian to bring me material on Caterina Cornaro, a fifteenth-century Venetian girl. The daughter of an important merchant prince, she was married at eighteen to the King of Cyprus. Four Venetian galleys conveyed Caterina and her dowry of gold and jewels to her new kingdom, but the marriage was ill-starred. The following year, she gave birth to a weakly son, who promptly died, and then the king died as well, and very soon another aspirant to the throne of this rich little island murdered most of the young queen’s relations and supporters, and kept her a prisoner in her castle. After fifteen sad and lonely years, during which she paced the high parapets and surveyed but never visited her rocky kingdom, she was brought back to Venice by the Doge, who then established her as ruler of the tiny hill-town of Asolo. Here, she lived on for years as “La Regina Caterina,” presiding over a miniature court that attracted poets, musicians, philosophers, and other persons versed in the culture of the times. But Venice was declining, losing territory, and in the end Queen Caterina was obliged to withdraw into the city itself, where she died in 1510.

  While I sat in the library, reading about Caterina, my own unhappiness dwindled. It was hers I cared about. I learned that she grew fat, but was still considered beautiful; that she enjoyed elaborate clothes; and was generous to the poor but not too bad poets and mediocre painters. So wealthy and exalted a lady must have been courted, yet she remained a widow. If she had love affairs, they were conducted so discreetly as to leave no record. How sensible (I thought) to substitute learning for love.

  Through the winter, I voyaged now and then to the Lido, warmly dressed, and walked on the deserted beach. I sensed that some of the passengers on the little ferry that took me there wondered about me, and that there was an element of concern in their wondering. They were not simply- curious or nosy. They were solicitous. I felt that if I told my true story to one of them, I would hear sympathetic sighs and commiserations. Italians, in their ancient society, have seen everything, and can accept most of it with a shrug or an understanding smile. I knew that I had come to the right place, and therefore I wrote Ginevra that I would be having the baby there and to so advise the prospective parents.

  Only Dr. Simoni evinced a touch of disapproval. Why, he wanted to know, did I not go to the Navy hospital in Naples, where I could be among my fellow Americans? Because, I said, I had heard how good Dottore Simoni was, here in Venice. I doubt if he believed that, or any of my story, but he took good care of me, and in April, a baby son was born, without long labor, in the hospital. My brother-in-law in the Munich Consulate-General shepherded the adoptive parents through a great deal of red tape. Sergeant and Mrs. Frank Costanza arrived in Venice without delay, and I only saw the baby once. I did not see the new parents at all, but I signed the papers they brought with them and then they whisked their son away. That was when I lost the sympathy of my doctor and the nurses. No matter what my story, how could I give up this beautiful bambino?

  Back at the pensione I packed my bags, and told the Signora chat relatives had arrived to help me and the baby travel to join my husband. The Signora, who had counted on cooing over my baby and dressing him in the little blue and pink sacque she had been knitting, suddenly went very grim and said goodbye without an embrace.

  I went back to New York, which had come to mean home to me, up to a point, and I went to work for another magazine. Then I found a roommate, who wanted to share her big, sunny apartment on the West Side, and gradually I felt able to close the door on the events of the year before. Well, almost. I looked in the telephone book to see whether David was listed, and he was. But I didn’t dial the number. At Christmastime, on impulse, I sent a card to Oz, and he immediately answered with a letter saying that he was coming to New York.

  And so we got back together. I was glad to see him and to hear him say, in his matter-of-fact and unloverly way, that he would still like to marry me. We were having dinner in a restaurant when he broached this subject.

  “We need to have a long talk,” I said, “in private.”

  “About what?”

  “You don’t know enough about me. Before you ask somebody to marry you, you ought to know all about her.”

  “Why? I know you all I need to.”

  I thought: how easy it would be not to tell him anything. Maybe I could tell him only that I’ve had a baby and given it away. I don’t believe he could stand knowing the father is David. But if I don’t tell him how can I live with it?

  When he took me home, my roommate was out, so I tried again.

  “I absolutely have to tell you something.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he said, and I could see that he was beginning to feel annoyed. “I don’t want to hear any secrets and I don’t want to tell mine.”

  I hadn’t thought about his secrets. If he had secrets, maybe I could have mine without feeling guilty.

  “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” I said. “It’s just that I’m nervous about skeletons falling out of the closet sometime in the future.”

  He was silent and I took that to mean that he would listen. I took a deep breath and said, “Oz . . .”

  “No!” he interrupted, almost shouting. “We should begin right here. Begin by setting a wedding date. If you’ve done something you regret, I certainly have, too. I can’t see any point in the world in hashing things over. They’re finished.”

  I never did tell him. He never told me. Sometimes I wondered what his secrets were, but I was unable to imagine anything important. He was good old Oz, reliable and sweet-natured. He was also only tepidly interested in sex. Anything so disheveled, so out of control, troubled him. For making love, he liked the light to be out and he liked to wear pajamas. And he has always preferred twin beds, so that after the rather brief event, he could leave me and get a good night’s rest.

  Eighteen years later, we were still in the same house where we first set up housekeeping. At first, I resisted the notion of living so near my in-laws, but Oz quite reasonably pointed out that the house was a good one and the rent was low. I took the liberty of planting a lot of lilac bushes, for privacy, between our house and the kitchen side of the main house. I explained to Lydia that I didn’t like looking from our living-room window to a view of her garbage cans, and she said she could understand that, but that I had chosen the wrong shrubs. Evergreens would have been more practical, she said.

  “But I love lilacs,” I said. “I wanted a forest of them, and that’s what I’ve got.”

  “Lilacs are perfectly splendid in Santa Fe when they have a good year,” Lydia said. “But too often they get snowed on when they’re budding, and then they look terrible.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. When the spring is kind to them, these lilacs are the most beautiful of all my flowers. The bushes have grown tall and thick and, even in winter, form a good screen, and make me feel protected. Without them, we’d be seeing Mrs. Martinez and Filomena, stolidly sitting on the kitchen portal waiting for their employers to be ready to eat dinner. The dinner hour has grown later and later over at the main house, as Lydia and Deck have moved from social drinking to heavy drinking to alcoholism. Mrs. Martinez and her daughter have a lot of waiting around to do.

  During the first year of my marriage, Lydia tried to involve me in her social and charitable interests. In those days she had many: besides ladies’ lunches and bridge parties, she was a member of many boards and committees, where she was not only very good at getting things done, but reveled in the opportunity to tell people what to do. For a while she drew me into three of her favorite projects, Friends of the Sea Otter, Save the Whale, and Adopt a Burro. When Lydia took up a cause, she moved like a natural phenomenon of great force: an earthquake, a sandstorm, a tidal wave. It may have had something to do with being rich and politically very conservative. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt, she had felt her way of life threatened and could therefore identify with a sea otter strangling in a fisherman’s net, or with a whale struck down in its happy
ocean by mechanical harpoons. She became the otter and the whale.

  About three years after Oz and I were married, David and Bishy bought their cattle ranch in central New Mexico, about a two-hour drive from Santa Fe. The first time they came to visit the parents, Oz told me it would be nice if we invited everyone to dinner. I had realized that this would happen, sooner or later, so I didn’t try to resist it. I saw to it that our house looked very attractive and that the dinner was delicious, and I tried to look like a devoted, happy wife.

  The last time I had seen David, we had said a deeply sad goodbye at the Eighty-ninth Street apartment. (Oz and I had not asked any family to our wedding, which was hardly a wedding at all, just a trip to City Hall, with two friends as witnesses.) When David and Bishy arrived at our house that evening, he gave me a big, long hug and kissed me on both cheeks, and I was shocked at how good it felt to be close to him. So I made an excuse to hurry off into the kitchen, where I gave myself a stern talking-to. Pretend this is a diplomatic dinner, I told myself. If all goes well, Oz will get a promotion, and it all depends on his wife. Don’t burn anything, don’t forget anything. Don’t give an opinion or say anything in the least meaningful. And, above all, don’t even look at David.

  That worked pretty well, but the conversation at table went slowly. David was taciturn, and Bishy, who was pregnant after two miscarriages, had none of her old school-girlish chatter. I thought perhaps the transition from the East to the high plains of New Mexico had been too drastic a change.

  “Bishy, my dear, you need to get into environmental concerns,” Lydia told her.

  “Well, I’m going to,” Bishy said, “just as soon as I get used to things here. Things like centipedes crawling around the house.”

  “Centipedes are necessary to ecology, darling, but I can understand you not liking them. When you are settled, I’d like you on my Bring Back the Wolf committee.”

  “Wolves kill livestock, Mother,” David said. “And I have a cattle ranch.”

  “They don’t attack healthy stock,” Lydia flashed back. “They only cull out the old and sick, and that’s useful. I’ll send you the literature.”

  “I don’t want any literature,” David said. “If I see a wolf I’ll shoot it.”

  David was still his mother’s darling and she didn’t want to argue with him.

  “Davey, you know how I am about protecting animals,” she said. “I can’t help it, I have always been a kind person. I was the only girl in my class at Farmington who burst into tears and had to leave the room when they showed us a movie of Roosevelt and his trophies. I always hated that man.”

  “Franklin?” Oz asked.

  “Of course not. Nobody liked Franklin, but I’m talking about Theodore. He hunted. He even brought his disgusting bison heads into the White House, so I’ve heard. Dripping with blood, no doubt.”

  “So you were a nonconformist at school,” I said. “I never thought of you as that.”

  Deck said admiringly, “She always has been. She makes things spin, that one.”

  Lydia looked pleased by this endorsement.

  “I make things happen,” she said.

  “We know you do, Ma,” Oz said cheerfully.

  But the mention of hunting had reminded her that Oz was a hunter.

  “One thing I’d like to make happen now,” she said, glaring at Oz, “is, to get you to stop hunting. I feel disgraced, especially since I’m trying so hard to save animals from cruelty and death, that my own son is out there in the woods with a big rifle.”

  Oz always looked depressed when his mother scolded him. I knew that nothing she said would ever make him give up hunting, which was one of his few enthusiasms, but after she frowned at him he said nothing more for the rest of the meal.

  Before David and Bishy went back to their ranch, I found an opportunity to get David alone for a minute, and I handed him a sealed manila envelope, containing the adoption papers.

  I said, “I thought a long time about whether to give you these. It will be a shock. But I guess I just need to do this and I’m hoping that it’s best for you.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “You’ll see. And wait till you’re alone to open it. Nobody in this family knows about what’s in that envelope, and nobody in the world knows, except the people directly involved. It’s a dead secret, and I’m trusting you to keep it that way.”

  I didn’t wait to see him open the envelope. The papers gave the baby’s new name and that of his new parents, but I had taken a pair of scissors and carefully cut out my name. David’s did not appear at all.

  A few days later, he called me. It was during the day, when he knew Oz would be at work. I told him right away that there was no point in our discussing anything.

  “Then why did you decide to tell me at this particular time?”

  “I was always going to tell you sooner or later, and this just seemed like a - well, a convenient opportunity.”

  “Convenient! Alex, my God - why wasn’t it convenient when you found out you were pregnant? When you were going through something terrible and I should have been there?”

  I felt a lump in my throat, so I was silent until I had pulled myself together. Meantime he said, “Did you suppose I wouldn’t care?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “You couldn’t have done anything about it.”

  Now it was he who was silent. “I could have been there for you,” he finally said in a low voice.

  “Not even that, I’m afraid. Look, David, it’s over. Don’t worry. I’m fine now and so are you and so, I’m sure, is the baby.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “Oh, no!” I said instantly, beginning to be apprehensive. “David, if you really feel like doing something to help me, just do nothing. Don’t try to see me, don’t talk to me, don’t tell anyone. Especially not Bishy,”

  “Of course not. But-”

  “Just put it all aside. Forever. Everybody’s fine now. Goodbye. I’m going to hang up.” And I did.

  Then I sat there by the telephone, looking out the window at the aloof mountain peaks, and cried hard. I knew I had done the right thing and I felt pleased with myself for having behaved in an adult manner. But the tears were for matters much more profound than proper behavior: lost love, lost passion, and the tenderness I had heard in David’s voice.

  When I first went to Santa Fe to live, the only thing that felt normal about it was the fact that I had moved, once again, into a new and puzzling atmosphere. Moving had always seemed like a giant eraser, rubbing out the life before. In this case the eraser rubbed out New York, rubbed out David, rubbed out Venice. A similar eraser had served my mother, who had prided herself on leaving every house where we had lived exactly as she had found it, just as though the Burrows family had never been there at all.

  Foreign Service people had one advantage when they moved. Wherever they went, they already had membership in an exclusive club - the Foreign Service - and they were united by their flag - the Stars and Stripes. When I was a child, the sight of that bright flag gave me a comforting feeling when I saw it flying over one of our embassies or consulates, or at the stern of a motorboat in Bangkok, or on the fender of our ambassador’s official car. Poor foreigners, I would think. They are not American. Then I grew up and discovered that millions of people did not share my views and that some of them actually wanted to set fire to that flag or burn down those embassies. It took me a long time to perceive that the United States had drawbacks. When I finally grasped that basic fact, I was able to say goodbye to certain arrogant illusions, but I still liked being American.

  As a little girl, I used to hear my mother’s friends complaining about life in hardship posts - Saudi Arabia, say, or Cambodia, and other places where the State Department sought to mitigate the hardships of its representatives with twenty per cent more pay. Now, in my post at Santa Fe, I wondered whether it was more of a hardship trying to communicate with people whose native tongue was Arabic or Khmer than with
a husband like Oz, who understood English perfectly but did not enjoy communicating.

  One reason that Oz and I got along as well as we did was that we both disliked a fuss. We kept our darker sides firmly locked away. I figured out that his fondness for hunting was due to the freedom it gave him to be aggressive. In all areas of his life - with his mother, with me, and with people in the bank - he was a nice guy. But in the woods, I was sure, the bullets he fired at the deer also served to annihilate difficult bank customers, schoolteachers he hadn’t liked, and (could it be?) close members of his family.

  I don’t know how much Oz minded that we never had children. For a while we tried all the recommended medical procedures for conception, but nothing happened. I would have liked to adopt, but Oz said no, perhaps influenced by Lydia, who was dead against it. “Blood will tell” was one of her mottoes. And no waif or stray, up for adoption, could possibly measure up to the aristocratic Smithsons, especially since Smithson blood had been enhanced by that of Lydia Aspinwall.

  I tried to please Oz and to be easy to live with. I cooked a lot, sewed on buttons, even shined Oz’s shoes. I knitted sweaters and needle-pointed waistcoats. And in the rest of my time I gardened and took courses. Perhaps I became addicted to learning while in that Venetian library; it seemed to do for me what alcohol does for some people. Through the years I’ve studied Spanish, Birds of the Southwest, Eighteenth-century Antiques, Chinese Cooking, Haiku, Belly-dancing, Creative Writing, How to Understand Your Car, Italian, and Beginning Watercolor. As a matter of fact, all my courses except Italian have been for beginners; I seldom seem to become Advanced. In addition, I have attended probably a dozen seminars. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Jane Austen, Nineteenth-century Lyric Poets, all now faded in my memory like yesterday’s sunsets, except for vivid bits from here or there that have lasted with me. Dante, for instance: “. . . The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”