by Mary Gordon
When they arrive, the teacher says: “I think Billy's ready for a regular day today. I think the time's come definitely.”
She doesn't look at JoAnn when she says this. She takes Billy's jacket off and hangs it on his hook below his name. She does not let go of his hand. “Billy, I heard you played with Danny yesterday. That's so terrific He brought in the truck today, for you to play with while you're here.”
The teacher leads him into the class, closing the door behind her so JoAnn can't see them. So that he cannot look back.
She stands in the hall. Her hands are freezing. She pulls the fake fleece collar of her plaid coat around her ears. Her heart is solid and will not pump blood. She walks into the parking lot. She gets into her car and starts it. She does not know where she will get her air, how she will breathe. The engine stalls. She pumps the gas pedal and starts the car again.
And then she hears him. He is calling. He is running toward the car. She sees that he has put his coat on by himself. She sees him standing at the car door, opening it, getting in beside her.
She can breathe, the air is warm and helpful for her breathing. They are driving, singing. They are happy.
She says to him: “Let's pack up all our things. Let's find another place, a better place to live in.”
Happy, singing.
He will leave me soon enough.
Death in Naples
It was wonderful of Jonathan to have invited her. How many sons, her friends kept asking, would include their mother on a vacation with their wives? You could see it, her friends had said, if there were children: invite granny— a built-in babysitter. But there was nothing in it for Jonathan and Melanie but pure goodness of heart. How fortunate she was, her friends all told her, to have a daughter-in-law she was fond of.
And she was fond of Melanie, really she was, although she wasn't a person Lorna felt she could relax with. Certainly she was admirable, the way she dealt with everything: her job as a stockbroker, keeping their apartment beautiful, regularly making delicious meals. And she always looked splendid; she kept her hair long, done up in some complicated way that Lorna knew must take time in the morning. Braids or curls or a series of barrettes or clips. And beautifully cut suits and beautifully made high-heeled pumps. Lorna remembered when she had worn heels that high, and remembered how she'd loved them. But she remembered, too, how uncomfortable they had been and what a blessed relief, a consolation even, it had been to kick them off at the door. To give them up for something softer, slippers or loafers or tennis shoes. But Melanie didn't kick her heels off at the door. She kept them on even to cook her careful dinners. It occurred to Lorna that she'd never seen her daughter-in-law in slippers. She assumed that she must have a pair, but Lorna couldn't imagine what they might look like.
Lorna could be of use to them on their holiday in that she had some Italian and they had none. Don't overestimate my ability, she warned them: I'm not very good and I'm easily flustered. And when I'm flustered I lose the little proficiency I've had. Possibly, had she started younger, or lived in Italy for extended periods, her Italian would have been quite good.
That was what Richard kept telling her. They traveled to Italy every year the six years before his death. His death that was brief, composed, a line that completed itself effortlessly. He'd slipped into his death as a letter slips into an envelope, and is sent off, or as a diver, seen from a distance, enters the dark water, and swims into a cove from which he can't be seen again. Like the letter or the swimmer Richard had, she was sure, reached some proper destination. Only she could not name it or locate it. But she was sure there was such a place.
When they were in Italy, he was terribly proud when she could talk to waiters, and said it was nothing, nothing, when failures of comprehension occurred on either side. When a fruit vendor would say “come,” scrunching his face up when she had said perfectly clearly, she had thought, uove or pere, when she would have to say “mi displace, no ho capito” after someone had told her the directions to a museum, or when an Italian, losing patience, would lapse into English, Richard would say, “Relax, you're doing great.” She knew she wasn't doing great, and even though Richard was right to tell her that no one in their conversation group could do half so well, she wasn't comforted. She knew that when real situations arose, she often failed.
The Italian conversation class was one of the things she and Richard did together after Richard's retirement. They'd hired an Italian student from the university to teach a group of them, four retired couples, or rather four retired men and their wives, because none of the women had ever worked. They'd planned to study all year and then travel, four couples, to Italy in the spring. The study had continued; the travel happened only once. For in reality the other couples hadn't really enjoyed themselves in Italy, had behaved dutifully rather than joyously, and were unable to conceal their real joy at returning home to Cincinnati. To their own bathrooms, their own beds.
But Richard and Lorna had gone back every spring for six springs. They had not been able to wean themselves from Tuscany, landing in Florence, spending a week there in the same hotel, where, after the fourth year, and because they were never there in high season, they were given a room with a view of Piazza San Marco. She was grateful that Richard didn't mind driving in Italy; she could never have; the speeds on the autostrade terrified her. So they visited Siena, Civietalla, Pisa, Lucca. Gentle weeks during which they could digest the beauty they had seen in Florence, avoiding what she had read in a guidebook was called Stendhal syndrome. The novelist had suffered a nervous breakdown, overwhelmed by the pressure of having to assimilate so much greatness, so much human achievement in so short a time.
During the long wet winters in Cincinnati, she would regularly place a postcard of something they'd loved next to Richard's breakfast plate: Donatello's saucy David in his feathered hat, Michelangelo's Evening languidly waiting for something to be played out.
And then Richard had died, and she hadn't been back to Italy since. Six years, could it have been? She was seventy-four now, unarguably an old lady. Some women she knew, but no one she knew well, traveled alone at her age. A friend of a friend had made, at seventy-five, a trip to Thailand on her own. She envied such women, wished she could be like them, but she was not. She kept her life full; she wouldn't sell the house or get help with the garden, she was a docent at the museum; she kept up with her Italian and her women friends— widows and divorcees. The couples had, somehow, stopped including her. But she met with her friends, regularly, to cook elaborate meals. They swam together at the health club. Three times a year, she traveled to Chicago to see Jonathan and Melanie, staying only a few days at a time, going to the Art Institute, to the symphony, to see some experimental theater, priding herself on keeping out of their way and not staying too long. She believed them when they said they were sorry to see her go; she believed their friends when they told Jonathan how lucky he was to have a mother who was so “low maintenance.” Low maintenance. It amused her how many phrases had become common that hadn't existed when she was young— or even ten years later.
That was the world, that was language: it was a product of change. Change was a good thing; when you stopped believing that, you'd got old, you might as well chuck the whole business.
After a deprivation of six years, the prospect of seeing Italy with Jonathan and Melanie was particularly delightful. They were young and vigorous and full of curiosity. How strange that neither of them had been to Italy. Melanie had never been abroad. But Melanie's life, before she'd met Jonathan, had been difficult. Her parents had been killed in a car crash just after she started college; they'd seemed to leave her nothing. Lorna respected Melanie's reticence about her late parents; she saw her unwillingness to talk about them as an attractive fastidiousness— she was always uneasy at the modern tendency to reveal too much. She'd been surprised when, just before the wedding, Jonathan had said to her and Richard: “Melanie wants me to talk to you about what she's going to call you. She just d
oesn't feel comfortable calling you Mom and Dad; she says that's what she calls her own parents in her mind. Is it OK if she just calls you Richard and Lorna?” Lorna had never expected that Melanie would do anything else; she wondered what that suggested about Melanie's background, but as she thought there was no way of knowing, and as she was moved by Melanie's protectiveness of her parents’ memory, she warmly agreed that Melanie should go on just as she had, calling them by their first names.
So it wasn't surprising that Melanie had never been to Europe; she had no indulgent parents to treat her; she'd had to augment her scholarship with a series of menial jobs. She'd gone to work at a bank a week after graduation. And Lorna and Richard had often remarked to each other that going to Europe, the whole idea of Europe, didn't mean to Jonathan's generation what it had to theirs. She and Richard had gone to Paris on their honeymoon, saving up a year for it, feeling that on the rumpled sheets of their Left Bank hotel, scene of so much illicit, such artistic love-making, they could legitimate their sexual union without its losing its allure. Jonathan and Melanie had gone to St. Bart's for their honeymoon. They both worked so very hard. Eighty-hour weeks sometimes. Who could blame them for wanting to lie on a beach, rest up in the sunshine.
Jonathan hadn't been to Europe since college; she and Richard had taken him to the South of France for a pregraduation gift. It hadn't been a success; Jonathan didn't seem to enjoy it as they did; Lorna thought he missed his friends. But now he'd be with Melanie; they were so perfectly matched; she knew that when Jonathan was with his wife, he felt no need for other company. She only hoped she wouldn't be in the way.
“We want to take you back to the old haunts, your old haunts with Dad, they're new for me and Mel. But we thought it would be fun for us to see something new to all of us. I've booked us into Naples, and from there, we'll tool around the Amalfi coast.”
“Marvelous,” said Lorna. “And maybe we can take a side trip to Pompeii.”
“Archaeology's not Mel's thing,” said Jonathan.
Lorna told herself it didn't matter that she'd miss Pompeii; they'd have more than enough to see.
For three months, she read and reread guidebooks, trying to select a few things that would spark for Jonathan and Melanie the love that she and Richard had felt. Not too much, not too much, she kept saying to herself, cutting back her plans as she would prune a vine or a bush that could choke out fragile life with its overeffulgence. One beautiful thing a day, we'll see what we see, they're young, they'll come back. She would leave them to themselves in the afternoon; she remembered the sweet sleepy afternoons of lovemaking with Richard in Italian hotels, in beds that weren't really double beds at all but twin beds pushed together, a sheet stretched tight over the top. And of course, they worked so hard, they'd need their afternoon siesta. One beautiful thing a day, she said, pleased at her own modesty— they'll have love, and rest, and delicious food as well.
She'd never traveled business class before; the luxury quietly delighted her. She knew Jonathan was uncomfortable about being thanked for upgrading her fare; he seemed impatient that she should think it was anything to mention. “Mom, for heaven's sake, everyone flies business class. It's no big deal. Mel and I have so many miles we don't know what to do with them. She's the queen of the upgrade, my wife, aren't you, babe.”
“Jesus, yes,” said Melanie. She reached into the tapestry bag at her feet and shyly handed Lorna a box wrapped in violet paper with a teal ribbon. “This is your survival kit for the airplane,” she said. Lorna opened the box; there was an inflatable neck pillow, a set of earplugs, a lavender sachet that went over your eyes like a mask-sized pillow— it was supposed to induce a gentle sleep. There were Victorian tins of pastilles: one black currant, one lemon, with pictures of little girls holding parasols. Tears came to Lorna's eyes at Melanie's thoughtfulness— all the more touching because she seemed so uncomfortable at being thanked. She put her lavender sachet— hers was a paisley print of dark blue and magenta— over her beautiful gray eyes. She'd taken a sleeping pill.
“She's also the queen of the sleepers. Just watch, five minutes, she'll be dead to the world.”
Dead to the world, Lorna thought, what a terrible expression. If you were dead to the world, what, then, were you alive to? She opened her map of Florence. She'd left map reading to Richard and she was afraid she'd forgotten everything, and Jonathan and Melanie were depending on her to lead them around.
She watched the young people sleeping. Beautiful, she thought, their health, their wholeness. They shared a kind of sleep that she and Richard had never shared, because she had never worked as hard as Richard. Melanie and Jonathan were together in feeling they had earned their rest, that it was equally hard-won, equally precious, because rare, to both of them. She thought of Jonathan's sleeping body when he'd been a little boy, how nothing had given her the pure peace and joy of holding her child's sleeping body. He was hers then. And now he was— what? The world's? Melanie's?
Melanie woke cranky; everything made her impatient. Their room in the hotel wasn't ready. Gingerly, Lorna suggested a coffee at a cafe in Piazza San Marco.
“What options do I have?” she asked.
“Chill out, babe,” said Jonathan.
“Jonathan, I'm wondering what could possibly make you think that was a helpful comment,” she said, snapping shut the lid on her blusher.
Jonathan and Melanie drank their coffee silently. Melanie kept looking at her watch. The girl at the hotel desk had said the room would be ready in half an hour. Melanie crossed and uncrossed her legs. Lorna noticed that her brown boots were very beautiful. She supposed Melanie would want to shop for shoes.
She took a sip of cappuccino. Her eyes closed with pleasure. “Isn't it wonderful, isn't it wonderful,” she wanted to say, “isn't the coffee delicious, aren't the waitresses’ uniforms charming, isn't the chandelier elegant.” But Melanie was elaborately, ostentatiously making fanning gestures in front of her face.
“Haven't they ever heard of a nonsmoking section,” she said.
“I'll bet there's no Italian word for secondhand smoke,” said Jonathan.
“Unbelievable,” said Melanie, and they moved closer together, united, a couple once again.
The bellman showed them to their rooms. Melanie didn't even open the shutters. “Don't wake me for lunch,” she said.
“I think it might be better if you just took a short nap, and tried to get on Italian time,” Lorna said.
“Look,” said Melanie, in a way that Lorna knew was more polite than her impulse. “I'm just not up to it.”
“I'm with you, Mom. I'll just snooze for an hour, then we'll meet for lunch and do some sightseeing.”
“Whatever suits you, dear,” Lorna said.
“One o'clock then, it's a date,” Jonathan said, cocking his hand like a gun.
It was February, off-season. They had said it to each other time and time again, congratulating themselves for their cleverness— warning themselves in advance about disappointing weather and doors seasonally closed. But Lorna's heart was entirely light when she said the words to herself— off-season— approaching Cappella San Marco, home of the Fra Angelico frescoes. She dreamed that she and Jonathan would have the place to themselves. The silvery disc of sun that fell onto the flat leaves of the plane trees did not have to pass through throngs of tourists or buses; the square wasn't empty, but the traffic seemed normal, native, workaday. There were no lines at the ticket window and no one was ahead of her on the dark staircase that culminated in the famous fresco of the Annunciation.
She hadn't said anything to Jonathan about it; she wanted him to be taken entirely by surprise as she had been— could it have been half a century ago?— when she'd seen it for the first time. Nothing had prepared her for it; no one she'd known had spoken to her of it, perhaps because no one she knew well had ever seen it. The sweetness of the virgin's face, the serious blue of her skirt, the vibrant expectant lunge of an angel, as if he'd only just landed, as if
he hadn't given over yet, completely, the idea of flight. And those miraculous wings: solid, sculptural, wings the colors of fruits or jewels, peach, emerald, rust red, the shade of blood but with no hint of blood's liquidity. Tears came to her eyes, as they always did when she saw the fresco. She was not a religious woman, nor a tearful one, but always when she saw it, she wanted to thank someone, she did not know whom. When she and Richard were together they would squeeze each other's hands.
But Jonathan was yawning when she looked back at him with what she hoped was not too expectant a smile.
“Great colors, Mom,” he said. “You don't see something like this every day.”
Now she must try not to make her smile disappointed. What had she wanted him to say? She wondered if it would have been better if he'd said nothing. And the guards chattered so that it was noisy: the place might as well have been full of tourists. She remembered the Italian word for chatter, which had pleased her for its onomatopoeia. Chiacchiera. But now the word didn't seem pleasing; it suggested restless, pointless busyness— not the atmosphere she wanted for Fra Angelico. Jonathan was walking down the corridors, stopping only seconds at each cell, each of which had its own fresco. At the opposite end of the corridor from her, she could see him stretching, doing exercises to loosen the tension in his neck.
Melanie complained that the room was noisy, that the beds were hard and the towels were thin. And Lorna told herself that all Melanie's complaints were justified and wondered why she hadn't noticed. It wasn't that she hadn't noticed, of course she'd noticed, but it hadn't mattered. Be honest with yourself, she said, it's not that you don't understand why it didn't matter to you, you can't understand why it would matter to anyone when there was so much out there, so much of beauty, of greatness. Why would it matter that the beds were hard, the towels thin. She simply couldn't understand.