Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  Melanie would eat only grilled fish and salad. She said the vegetables were drenched in oil. “I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.” Lorna tried not to be irritated as she ate her farm, the thick Tuscan soup she and Richard always enjoyed. She wanted to hold the bottle of olive oil to the light and ask Jonathan and Melanie to share her pleasure in its greenness. She wanted to have wine with lunch, but she felt she couldn't because she didn't want to appear a drunkard or a glutton to her daughter-in-law, so slender, so chic, with her long legs and complicated braid.

  “Florence is supposed to be a great place for leather. Where's the best place to look for bags?” Melanie said.

  Lorna felt that, in confessing that she didn't know where to shop for bags, she was letting Jonathan down, revealing herself as provincial, dowdy, and out of touch. But she didn't remember having shopped when she and Richard were in Florence.

  And she didn't remember that, at this time of year, the Piazza del Duomo was so crowded with tourists. In summer, yes, at Christmas or at Easter, but they had purposely avoided those times; it was February now. Why was the square so full of buses? And wasn't this a new kind of tourist, a new kind of American, people in their sixties, abashed couples dressed in matching leisure suits in various shades of blue, new white sneakers dragging themselves across the cobblestones. Were there always so many of the nearly elderly? she wondered. She had read that people were retiring earlier now. Were they traveling because they had too much time and too much money and didn't know what to do with either? Had they always been here and she just hadn't noticed them? Or was it that they were younger than she was now, but seemed older? Herded through the Duomo, the Uffizi, they looked stunned, like oxen that had been struck with a mallet. They weren't seeing anything, they looked miserable; they made stupid jokes to each other. Melanie was right; they did spoil Botticelli's Venus, Michelangelo's David.

  “Jesus, Americans are unbelievable,” Melanie said. “The obesity is epidemic. Look at them, men and women, they all look like they're in their third trimester of pregnancy.”

  Lorna wondered if Jonathan and Melanie would have a child. She rather thought they wouldn't.

  On the morning of the third day, Jonathan knocked on Lorna's door.

  “Mom, we've had some bad news. One of Melanie's clients is losing his shirt. You know how all the dot corns are tanking. Mel's got to leave immediately and see what can be salvaged.”

  “Of course,” Lorna said.

  “Sweetheart, can you manage here alone? She wigs out when she's stressed. I need to be with her.” “Of course,” Lorna said.

  Dot corns are tanking, wigs out when she's stressed. The words made pictures her mind had to ingest; there were entities, ideas she'd never had to know about that she now had to try to understand. Talking to her son made her feel old. And crotchety. I am becoming a crotchety old lady, she told herself. So she was extra careful to make it clear to Jonathan and Melanie that she'd be just fine on her own, that they mustn't think about her.

  “Mom, you're a great sport,” Jonathan said.

  Go with God, she wanted to say, which she thought odd. It was a thing she never before would have thought of saying.

  She told herself it was a blessing in disguise that Jonathan and Melanie had to leave. It was the kind of push that did a person good, particularly a person of her age. What kept a person young was doing new things; what aged a person was giving in to the fear of the unaccustomed. Now she would be traveling alone, like the women she'd admired but had feared to be. Now she would be going, entirely on her own, to places she hadn't been with her husband. And how generous Jonathan and Melanie had been. Jonathan had put an envelope on her bed, full of lire. Fifteen hundred dollars it would come to. And the hotel bill had been taken care of.

  It was not the kind of hotel she and Richard would have chosen: the art deco grandeur would have made them feel, as a couple, fearful and at sea. Her room was larger than any she'd ever stayed in with Richard; it was larger than their bedroom in Cincinnati. She looked over all the roofs of Naples. Vesuvius crouched in the distance, and if she stood by the window, the blue slice reminded her that she was near the sea. No, not the sea, she told herself, the bay. The Bay of Naples.

  It would have been Richard who had read the history of the place they were visiting, but she had done that part too. He would have learned about the dynasties, the wars, the politics. Now it was her responsibility; she hoped she hadn't skimped. But if she had, what difference would it make now? Who would know? And if something was missed, there was no one to judge her. The loss was only hers.

  From her bed she could push a button that opened and closed the blinds. Another turned the lights on and off, a third started the television. She kept mixing them up, and she tried to laugh when, attempting to close the blind, she brought into her room the Simpsons in Italian. She supposed she could learn something from watching it, but she didn't want to. She wanted the darkness. The bed was overlarge; she had not been sleeping well.

  On the Neapolitan streets, she had to work very hard not to lose her way. Every few seconds she would look down at her map, then look up at the street signs, saying to herself if Via Chiara is to my left, if left is west, then I am all right, I am not lost. But it was very tiring, this kind of concentration, and she felt as if the part of her brain that had the words for things was being taken up with trying to find her way. She felt she could either get lost or remember the words for things, and she was more afraid of being lost than of being speechless. But it alarmed her that the simplest sentence seemed beyond her now; what she would once have found easy now seemed to her impossible.

  She kept telling herself that she wasn't disappointed in Naples, not really, that the weather was really bad luck, that was it, that was what was keeping her heart from its Italian soaring. She very much admired what she saw in the great Baroque churches; she was charmed by the majolica cloister of Santa Chiara, there was a fresco in San Domenico Maggiore that came near to the Giottos in Santa Croce for the freshness of its blues. And beside it was a Magdalene, her gold hair covering her rosy flesh— it was miraculous, really miraculous. She was more tired than she remembered being anywhere else in Italy, and there seemed to be fewer cafes to rest in. She liked that it was a real city, a working city, not some hopped-up showcase for tourists. She remembered a poster in Florence protesting the banning of cars in the city center: “This is our home, not your museum,” the poster said. And she had understood. But Naples wasn't Florence; it was a place where people went about their business, and their business was not tourism.

  It was wonderful that she hadn't seen a single American in the streets, hadn't heard a word of English spoken. It made her feel proud of herself that she was negotiating this really foreign territory. She ordered her meals competently. On the street of the presepii, where figures for elaborate nativity scenes were sold, she had no trouble getting the sellers to show her the pieces that she wanted. Her trouble came in choosing; she was attracted to the elegantly costumed bisque angels hanging on wires from the ceiling— but what difference did it make whether she chose the peach one or the teal, the one in the coral robe with the serene expression, the one with the striped wings and impish grin? And did she really need a fancy Christmas ornament? Who would see it? They weren't expensive; they were lovely, every one of them had its own appeal. Leaning her head back to look up at them had made her dizzy. All the angels seemed to swim into each other, and blur into a wave of indistinguishable colors, features. She left the street of the presepii having bought nothing.

  One waiter in a restaurant had been kind to her, telling her with a gruff paternalism that she had to have dessert, it was customary, and she needed her strength. She had probably overtipped him, but when she went back the following night she was glad she had. He took her arm and escorted her to her table and told her she must leave the ordering to him. She enjoyed his kindness as she enjoyed the pasta with mussels and clams, but by the time she was back in bed the pleasure
of both had worn off, and she felt her body rigid, a supplicant for sleep, which did not come. Was she becoming one of those people she and Richard had secretly condemned: people like Jane and Harry, or Albert and Jean, who could only sleep in their own beds? She must get over this. She was in one of the places history had marked as great; she would get the good of it, she would expend herself, test her limits. For once, she was doing what no one she knew had ever done. No one she knew well had been to Naples. She realized that for her whole life, she had walked in the footsteps of others. Now she would be breaking her own trail.

  At 3 a.m. there was a terrifying clap of thunder. You are perfectly safe, she told herself. Nothing can happen to you here. Yet the sight of Vesuvius, which she had only to prop herself on her elbows to see, suggested that the idea of safety was the most fragile of illusions. Flashes of silver lit the heavy mountain with what she thought was a capricious show of force. Then the mountain would hide itself behind gray and become invisible. It was easy to see its malevolence, its carelessness. She thought of the Pompeii mummies, turned to stone embracing, or foolishly trying to run. But was that so bad? What would be lost if she met her end in this way rather than some other? Why not be crushed by a huge, indifferent fist, squashing her insignificance? The idea of her insignificance didn't bother her; she found it comforting— the notion that she would not be very much missed. Richard had gone before her, and Jonathan— well, Jonathan had Melanie. He would grieve her passage, but his grief would not leave much of a mark.

  The next day it was cold and rainy; she decided on a visit to the Archaeological Museum; she didn't need good weather for that. She rented a taped guide to the museum, a thing she ordinarily would not have done, but her guidebook had warned her that the museum might be overwhelming, and she felt that, as she was alone, she didn't want to be overwhelmed. But the machine confused her; she seemed unable to find what the voice told her was in the rooms; the spoken descriptions seemed to match nothing before her eyes. Reliefs, vases, tiles: what people had lived with and amongst before their lives were extinguished in a blink— none of it seemed connected to any human experience she could understand. After a while she realized that for half an hour she'd been walking up and down the same corridor, in and out of the same rooms. She sat down on a stone bench in front of a showcase displaying drinking vessels and she wept. There is nothing I understand, nothing I understand, nothing I understand, nothing I will ever comprehend, she heard her own voice saying. She put on her sunglasses, hailed a taxi in the freezing rain, went back to the hotel, and went to bed. She kept pressing buttons trying to close the blinds; she didn't want to see Vesuvius through the rain. But every button that she pressed was wrong; the lights went on and off; the television blared. She got out of bed and tried to pull the blinds shut, but only a button could effect a change, and she couldn't make the buttons work. She got back into bed, covered her head with blankets, and listened to the outlandish beating of her heart.

  She had two days left in Naples. There were many enjoyable things to do. But if she was honest with herself, they didn't seem enjoyable enough to justify the effort. Everything seemed too difficult. Life itself was too difficult, not just life but what life had become. Buttons and audio guides and dot corns tanking. And travel so comparatively cheap and easy, and people with too much money and too much time. Things that used to be simple seemed too taxing now. Taxing. Tax. What was the tax that was paid, what was the rate, and what the currency? And to whom was the payment made? Was it flesh or blood or spirit that was demanded? She thought of Caravaggio's St. Matthew in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The last time she and Richard were there, even seven years ago, they had had to worm their way into a knot of tourists, all of whom looked bored and oppressed to be there. St. Matthew was a tax collector. He gave it all up to follow Jesus. What was it he was giving up, and what was it he was following? She remembered the mysterious light coming through the window, and Matthew's expression of shocked surprise at being called. She remembered her own joy at the painting, a joy that made her heart beat hard, perhaps dangerously so for someone of her age. There were many Caravaggios in Naples. Tomorrow she would begin in earnest to seek them out.

  But the next day was Monday. The Caravaggio Flagellation was in the Museo di Capidomonte, and it was closed on Mondays. Well, she would look elsewhere. The guidebook said that the Seven Mercies of Caravaggio was in a still active charitable institution, the Pio Monte della Misericor-dia. The sun seemed weakly, tentatively, to be coming out. She would take a taxi to Piazza Jesu and walk down the Via Tribunali. She hadn't been getting enough exercise; at home she swam three times a week. Perhaps that was the reason for her low spirits.

  She walked down the Via Tribunali, her money pouch tucked inside her coat, her collapsible umbrella in her pocket. It was a shopping street; it could have been in any minor city in the world. But not a great city; there was no place that lifted her heart with displays of unattainable beauty. She passed a section that specialized in bridal gowns. But all the lace on the dresses had an unfresh look, as if it had been worn before, but in the recent, ungenerous past, by an unsavory groom and unfortunate bride. Everything seemed made of cheap-looking synthetic material, surely not the right thing for a girl's great day. The mannequins seemed squat and fat and middle-aged. She could only imagine that shopping in such stores would be a lowering experience for the girl herself, and surely for her mother. And there was something about store after store of bridal gowns that made the possibility of uniqueness seem out of the question. People got married, as they were born and died; the species must be propagated and the ceremony ensuring the propagation must be marked by something that was meant to be special but, by virtue of its very frequency, could not be. She remembered her own wedding; she'd worn a navy blue suit; it had been a morning in November, a small wedding, but the day had been very happy. Jonathan and Melanie's wedding had been lavish; they'd taken over the Spanish consulate in Chicago; they had paid for everything themselves; it had cost, they told her later, fifty thousand dollars. No synthetic lace for Melanie. It had been, she remembered, quite a happy day. Except that Melanie had lost her temper at the photographer, and had burst, quite publicly, into tears. Richard had settled things somehow, and Melanie had collapsed into Lorna's arms. She'd been touched by the glimpse of the child in Melanie; the orphan child, gamely coping on her own for much too long. For the first time, she wished the young people were with her. She would spend time looking for a postcard that would please them both.

  She came to the Pio Monte della Misericordia. The heavy oak door with its embossed studs was fastened shut. Chiuso, a sign said, unnecessarily. The guidebook had said it was a functioning charitable institution. But the place seemed so tightly, so permanently shut, it was impossible to imagine anything functioning inside there in the locatable past.

  She walked back up the street, as quickly as she could, not wanting to look at the bridal dresses. She wasn't hungry, but she made herself have an early lunch.

  The day was warmish now, with a weak sun. A few people were eating at outdoor tables. This seemed such a good idea, here in the land of sun, the mezzogiorno. She ordered an insalata caprese. The cheese was good, but the tomatoes were unremarkable. She wondered why she thought it would be good to order fresh tomatoes in March. Over coffee she caught the eye of a woman near her age at another table. The woman's formal dress pleased her. She was wearing a royal blue woolen suit, a white blouse that tied in a bow at the neck, plain black pumps, gold earrings. Her hair was pulled back in a French twist. Lorna didn't think that the new informality— dressing down it was called— had been successful. She wondered why everyone liked it so much. Didn't this woman look lovely? Wasn't it better that people should take this kind of trouble than that everyone wear sneakers? She thought with pleasure of her own outfit; her charcoal pants suit, pink silk shirt, black Ferragamo oxfords. She hoped that her appearance pleased the woman as the woman's had pleased her.

  “Enjoyi
ng Naples?” the woman said, in an English accent.

  “Oh, yes, very much,” said Lorna. When she told the woman what she had actually seen, it seemed so scant that she felt ashamed. Yet she wouldn't make excuses for herself, for in doing that she'd have to express her disappointment in Naples, her annoyance that so many things had been closed. And she didn't want to do that.

  “You must see the monastery of San Marco. Splendid cloisters, spectacular views, a great collection of eighteenth-century presepii. A glimpse of that particular Neapolitan mix of elegance and tenderness. And you must take the funicular to get there. You'll see the Neapolitans at their most natural. And you'll think of it whenever you hear the song ‘Funiculi, Funicula,’ which is written about it.” Lorna wondered if the woman would begin singing, which she did not. She was a little sad that the woman, who had seemed to be taking her under her wing, did not invite her home for a cup of tea. She could imagine her apartment. It would be large and dark; there would be a cavernous sitting room with shabbily elegant, uncomfortable sofas and chairs; the light would be dim; on the walls would be etchings of nineteenth-century Neapolitan street scenes, darkish oils depicting the campagna. A small, silent servant would bring them coffee in small, gold-rimmed cups. If she was honest, she was more than a little sad that the woman had left without her. She wondered what would happen if she ran after her, caught up with her, started a conversation as they walked. You mustn't do that, she said to herself. The woman would think you were very peculiar if you did that. She ordered another coffee so that she would be sure not to get up, follow the woman, pretend to bump into her by accident. But the loss of the apartment she had conjured in her mind made her feel outlandishly bereft.