Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  The sun disappeared again; she felt drowsy as she walked to the funicular. Had she ever, she wondered as she walked, visited another city where it was so difficult to cross a street? She felt it was entirely possible that the cars would not, in the end, stop for her. The scooters put their brakes on inches from her feet. She waited for the light to turn, hyperalert, as if she were waiting for the shotgun blast to signal the beginning of the race. She thought the light was very long. As she stood waiting for it, a boy on a scooter passed in front of her, carrying a sheet of glass over his head. His hands held the glass; he balanced on the scooter without holding on. Cars veered around him; annoyed at having to slow down, even a little, they honked their horns. His hair was dark and curly and he showed his beautiful white teeth in his smile of defiance and pleasure at this risky task. Delivering a pane of glass through the city of Naples on a motor scooter.

  Suddenly she saw how it would happen: a car would not stop for him or would stop too fast, the glass would break and then, as if a line had been drawn across his neck, he would be beheaded. His beautiful head, the curls bloodstained, would lie in the street and cars would drive around it. She would have to pick it up, cradle it in her arms. And then put it where? What would she do with this treasure of a beautiful severed head?

  She was trembling as she waited for the funicular. The boy was far away now, she would never know if he'd made his destination safely. Don't think of it, she said, or think of him delivering the glass, think of him sitting with his girl, having a caffe. But she could not stop thinking of herself holding the beautiful head.

  The funicular started up with a frightening grind. Her eye fell on a mother and a child. The child was lively, unusually fair, she thought, for this part of the world. The mother was much darker. Her frizzy hair looked unclean; her skin was marred by blackheads; she wore rings on each finger, several with large stones; her nails were bitten and her cuticles were raw.

  It seemed to Lorna that she talked to the child strangely, as if she didn't know her very well. No, Lorna thought, as if she were pretending to know her well, as if she wanted everyone on the funicular to believe she knew the child well. She could not be the child's mother. She had kidnapped the child, but the child didn't know it yet. She thought she was being brought back to her real mother. But Lorna knew that she would not be brought back. She imagined the dark room where the child would be taken; a bucket would be given to her so that she wouldn't have to go to the toilet; she would be given crackers, warm soda in cans, stale candy bars to eat. How could Lorna tell someone what she knew to be the case? The woman and the child got off. Lorna knew she had left the child to her fate, as she had left the boy on the scooter to his. She had left them to their fate because she had no other choice.

  She thought of the beautiful child, the beautiful boy. Left to their fate, left to their fate, kept going through her head. And she could do nothing but get off the funicular, walk to the museum.

  It had been a wealthy monastery, closed in the eighteenth century, a museum for thirty years. She bought her ticket, asking for the directions to the presepii, excited at the memory of the Englishwoman's words.

  “Chiuso,” said the guide, a somber blonde, clicking her silver fingernails, as if Lorna's request had been ridiculous. “Chiuso perche?” Lorna asked. “Non so,” said the girl. “Forse in ristauro.”

  It would be ridiculous to go back to the hotel, although that was what she wanted to do, go back to her room, close all the blinds, lie in her overlarge bed with the lights turned out. Sleep for a while, then read her book on the Bourbons and order dinner from room service. But this was her last day in Naples, her last day in Italy for who could tell how long. Perhaps the rest of her life. The Englishwoman had said the cloisters were extraordinary, the views spectacular. She had obviously been a person of taste.

  She walked around the cloisters saying to herself, “I am an old woman now. I will never come back to this place.”

  The Englishwoman was right, it was a beautiful cloister, but it was beautiful in a way that seemed to Lorna wrong for a cloister. A cloister should be in relation to something growing at the center, grass, or roses, or something lively, natural: the water splashing in the central fountain. But this was a cloister whose referents were classical. The walls were gray, the borders white, the statues were not fragmented saints but white ivory reliefs of heroes. It reminded her of the Place des Vosges in Paris, which she had loved, because it seemed a tribute to geometry, to lines, angles, and planes. But a cloister shouldn't feel like that; a cloister should be a place of prayer. She felt as if she'd put her lips to a child's forehead and had felt cold stone. She pulled her coat closer around her, but she knew that she hadn't dressed warmly enough for the weather, and that nothing she could do right now would make her warm enough.

  The guidebook said the chapel was a triumph of the Baroque, that there were paintings by Ribera and Pontormo. But she couldn't find them. The paintings were too high up, too far from their labels. She couldn't tell which painting went with which label, and none of the paintings seemed distinguished enough to be immediately identifiable as a masterpiece. She knew it was the genius of the Baroque to suggest movement, sweep, but she wasn't swept up, she was overwhelmed. Now her coat was too hot; the colors on the wall— mostly reds— were too hot and her head pounded. She nearly ran out to the courtyard, to the open air. She would go and sit on the terrace, where there was the spectacular view of the bay.

  But she couldn't find the door that led to the terrace. She kept walking through rooms of maps, none of which had any meaning for her. None of the doors seemed to lead to the open air. Finally, not knowing how she did it, she was back in the cloister. One of the doors of the cloister led to the terrace, the guidebook had said.

  She took door after door. None of them led anywhere but to dark rooms. Rooms of maps, of antique silver, of eighteenth-century carriages. She asked the guards for the terrace, and they answered politely, but she had lost all the Italian she once had and their words meant nothing to her. She knew they kept watching her walk into the wrong doorways, come back to the central passage, and take another wrong doorway. She couldn't imagine what they thought. Finally one guard took her by the hand and led her to the terrace.

  She thanked him, she tried to laugh, to pass herself off as a silly old woman who couldn't tell her right from her left. But it was true, she seemed unable to tell her right from her left. She was grateful for the white marble bench, where she could sit, where she need choose nothing, make no decision. She looked out over the marble balustrade. Nothing was visible. There was no bay, no city, only a sheet of mild dove gray.

  The rain fell softly on her tired face, on her abraded eyelids, her sore lips. It was cool; the coolness was entirely desirable. This gray was what she wanted: this offering of blankness, requiring no discernment. Nothing demanding to be understood. She leaned over the railing. A moist breeze wrapped itself around her like a cloak. She leaned further into it. It was so simple and so comforting, and as she fell she knew that it was what she'd wanted for so long, this free and easy flight into the arms of something she would find familiar. A quiet place, a place of rest, where she would always know exactly what to do.

  Intertextuality

  My grandmother was serious, hardworking, stiff-backed in her convictions, charitable, capable, thrifty, and severe. I admired rather than liked her, though I always felt it was my failure that I couldn't do both. I was named for her, but I believed that I did not take after her. Now, when I trace something in myself to her, it is always a quality I dislike. Most frequently the righteousness that does not shrink from condemnation, and that feasts on blame.

  And so you can imagine how surprised I was that she came into my mind when I was reading Proust. A passage describing a restaurant in the town of Balbec, modeled on Trouville, a town that existed to arrange seaside holidays for the prosperous and leisurely citizens of the Belle Epoque.

  What could be further from my grandmoth
er, who never had a holiday until, perhaps, she was too old to enjoy it? Her last, her only holiday, happened in the year of her eightieth birthday. One of her sons and his wife invited her to join them in Florida. They would spend two weeks there, she would spend another two with her sister, who lived in Hialeah.

  Just mentioning her sister makes me think of the effective and unsentimental nature of my grandmother's charity. Her sister was eighteen years younger than she, only a year old when my grandmother left her Irish town and crossed the ocean by herself. Twelve years after my grandmother's arrival in New York, having unshackled herself from work as a domestic by making herself a master seamstress, having married a Sicilian against everyone's advice, having borne a child by him and become pregnant with another, my grandmother paid for her mother, four sisters, and two brothers to come across to New York.

  When the ship docked my grandmother was in labor, so she couldn't meet it. This meant she couldn't vouch for the new immigrants. So she sent her sister-in-law whose name was identical to hers. My grandmother was a strapping woman, nearly six feet, with large, fair features. My Sicilian great-aunt was a small dark beauty of five-two with the hands and feet of a doll. When my great-grandmother saw my great-aunt pretending to be my grandmother she refused, the story goes, to set foot off the ship. “If that's what happens to you in America, I'm not putting a foot near the place,” she said.

  Of course this story must be exaggerated, if not completely untrue. My great-grandmother wouldn't still have been on the ship, she would have had to go through the horrifying ignominy of the many examinations at Ellis Island. But the sense of ignominy was not the kind of thing any of my family would include in their stories. I am used to saying it was because they hadn't the imagination for it. I am used to saying they were a hardheaded, hard-hearted, unimaginative lot. But the story of my grandmother that came to me when I was reading Proust makes me think that I have never understood her. Who knows what follows from that failure to understand. What closing off. What punishing exclusions.

  My family liked stories that were funny. If a story wasn't funny, there didn't seem to them much point in telling it: life was too hard and there was too much that was required of them all to do. They would never, for example, have told the story of my grandmother's sister and her children, and my grandmother's part in keeping that family intact.

  Unlike my grandmother, all of her sisters seemed to have some taste for the feckless. One married a drunk; two married Protestants. My youngest great-aunt had more children than she could afford, although there was nothing to complain of in her husband. He was a good Catholic and had a steady job with the Sanitation. Nevertheless, they couldn't seem to make ends meet. My great-aunt told my grandmother she had no choice but to send her three youngest to an orphanage until things turned around. My grandmother told her sister she'd do nothing of the sort. The children would come to her house to live.

  Her sister allowed this to happen, and my grandmother added her sister's three youngest children to her nine. The arrangement went on for two years, until it seemed the time (I don't know what made this clear) for the children to go home.

  This wasn't a story told in the family, it was something my mother whispered to me, and it had to be dragged out of her. She had no joy in the telling of it. It was the kind of thing she was ashamed to be taking from where it belonged, that is to say under wraps.

  And they would never have told the story of my grandmother's vacation to Hialeah.

  The year was 1959. My father had died two years before and my mother and I were living with my grandmother in the house the family had been in since 1920. They had come to Long Island from New jersey, a move made, I can only imagine, in crisis, although the story when it was told never mentioned crisis, or anxiety, or the alarm of forced change.

  The family moved from Hoboken to a small town in the southern part of the state called Mount Bethel because there were nine children and my grandfather, a jeweler, couldn't support them in a city. My grandmother had been raised on a farm in Ireland, or that was the story. But I've seen the house she lived in. You couldn't say the family owned a farm, possibly a few acres, possibly a cow, some chickens, possibly a pig. This was the situation she replicated in Mount Bethel, and this situation was the source of the stories about that time. They were stories about animals, the pigs Pat and Patricia, the goats Daisy and Blanche, the chickens, the endless dogs. All these animals seemed to be in a constant state of adventure or turmoil: they were getting sick or getting lost, or getting hurt, or giving birth, and my grandmother presided over everything, and everything always turned out well.

  Then one day the landlord decided he didn't want them there anymore. It was never clear to me exactly how this came about: was it a capricious decision, a vengeful one, had he come to dislike my grandparents, or had they failed to pay the rent? This part of the story was never told. The part they liked to tell (perhaps their favorite story of all because it contained one of the elements they loved to live by, Punishment) was the story of what happened to the house after the family left. After they'd been gone three months, the house burned down. And they were better off, much better. They'd moved to Long Island, which was farm country then, and very anti-Catholic. A cross had been burned on the rectory lawn. But they were able to buy a house there with just enough land to keep chickens. What happened, they liked to say, proved that God's will was in everything, and everything happened for the best.

  In 1959, the year that my grandmother took her vacation to Florida, she'd been living in the house for nearly forty years. The house had gone from sheltering nine children to only one, my unmarried aunt, who'd grown to middle age there. Then my mother and I moved in, and there was once again a child for my grandmother to care for: me. I never felt that the house was a good place for a child or that my grandmother was a good person to be taking care of me. I was used to my father, who was playful and imaginative and adoring. My grandmother was busy, and she was a peasant: she didn't believe in childhood as a separate estate requiring special attention, special occupations, to say nothing of diversions. A child did as best she could, living alongside adults, taking what was there, above all doing what she could to be of help because there was always too much work for everyone.

  My grandmother's mark was everywhere in the house. She'd sewed slipcovers for the furniture and crocheted endless afghans and doilies. She'd knitted trivets and braided rugs. She'd laid the linoleum on the kitchen floor and patched the kitchen roof in a bad storm. Every decoration was hers: the pictures of the saints, the pious poems, the planters in the shape of the Madonna's head, the dark iron Celtic cross. Inexplicably: the lamps with scenes that might have come from Watteau or Frag-onard, the glass ladies’ slipper, the tapestry sewing box with the girl in yellow reading by her window in the sun.

  The house was my grandmother's and everything in it was hers. Then, one day, my aunt came up with an idea. The children, all nine of them, would chip in to renovate the house. To modernize it. Walls would be knocked down to create a feeling of space and openness. The back porch, which nobody really used, would be collapsed. The front porch would be added to the living room to make a large room, the side porch would become a downstairs bathroom with room for a washing machine. My grandmother would no longer need to go upstairs to the bathroom or down to the cellar to wash the clothes in the machine with its antiquated wringer. She was getting older, my aunt said: it was time she took things easy for a change.

  They planned to do the renovations while my grandmother was in Florida, so that when she came back she would be greeted with this wonderful surprise. They hired a contractor who agreed to do all the work in a month. The house was full of busyness and disarray. And full, for once, of men. We teased my aunt that the electrician was in love with her, the contractor's unmarried brother, the man who installed the washing machine.

  Miraculously, everything was done on time. One of my uncles picked my grandmother up at the airport. This had been her first airplane f
light. The family— nine brothers and sisters, twenty-one cousins— gathered to celebrate her safe landing and the wonderful surprise that would greet her when she opened the door.

  It was a new door that she opened, in a new place. She walked into the house and looked around her in shock and pain. Her kitchen, a lean-to that had been lightly attached to the back of the house, had simply been chopped off, carried away. All the appliances were new and all the kitchen cabinets. Her dining room was gone, and her carved table, replaced by what was called an “eat-in kitchen,” and a “dinette.” She walked around the rooms looking dazed. Then she began to cry. She excused herself and walked into her bedroom, which had been left untouched. We all pretended she was tired, and went on with the party as if she hadn't yet arrived. After a while she came out to join us, but she said nothing of what had been done to the house.

  What were they all, any of them, feeling? This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.

  But the new house weakened my grandmother. It turned her old.

  Why could none of her children have foreseen this?

  Why was I the only one who noticed that she didn't like the new house, that it had not been a good thing for her, it had done her harm?

  But perhaps I wasn't the only one who noticed. Perhaps other people noticed as well. I'll never know, because it's not the sort of thing any of us would have talked about.

  The memory that was brought to life by my reading of Proust happened the summer after the renovation of the house. It must have been a Saturday because my mother and my aunt, who both worked all week, were home.

  My grandmother called us all out to the side steps. She had leaned six green-painted wood-framed screens against the concrete stoop.