by Mary Gordon
But of course no one would have to search for clues, the doctor never tried to hide that he was a Jew, or had been born a Jew, as he would say. He would tell the story of his conversion calmly, unfurling it like a bolt of cloth, evenly, allowing it to shine, allowing the onlooker to observe, without his saying anything, the pattern in the fabric. He had converted in the 1920s, when he had been studying art, in Italy, in a city called Siena. Joseph had looked up Siena in Dr. Meyers's atlas. He had been pleased when Dr. Meyers came into the library and found him there, rubbing his finger in a circle around the area that was Siena, touching the dark spot that marked it, as if he were a blind child. He was seven then, and Dr. Meyers took him on his lap. How comfortably he fit there, on Dr. Meyers's lean, dry lap, a lap of safety.
Not like his mother's lap, which he had to share with her stomach. Holding Joseph on his lap and not afraid to kiss a little boy the way all of Joseph's uncles were, Dr. Meyers showed him the pictures in the book of Cimabue and Simone Martini and explained to him the silence and the holiness, the grandeur and the secrecy. He used the pictures for his business now, his business in liturgical greeting cards, holy pictures, stationery. The business that had bought him this house and all these things. And Joseph understood why he had left his family (his family said he could never see them again) and all he had been born to. For the quiet sad-faced mothers and their dark commanding baby sons.
He understood it all; so did Maria. They had loved it all, the silence and the grandeur, since they had been small, before they went to school when Dr. Meyers took them with him to Daily Mass, the only children there, kneeling together, looking, very still as every other person rose and went up to Communion. They made up lives for all the people, and they talked about them even when they no longer went to Daily Mass; when they were older, in the parish school, they talked about those people. The woman who was always pregnant (they said “expecting,” thinking it more polite) and the crippled woman, and the Irish man who wore a cap, and the old, the very old Italian lady dressed entirely in black who sat at the very back of the church and said the Rosary out loud, in Italian, during the whole Mass, even during the silence of the Consecration. But the person they thought of most and considered most theirs was the very small woman who was extremely clean. They imagined her in her small house alone (they were sure she lived alone), brushing her hat, her black felt hat with the feather band around it, brushing her purple coat with its velvet collar and buttons of winking glass, polishing her old lady's shoes till they looked beautiful. Then putting on her hat without looking in the mirror because if she did she would have to see the horror that was her face. For on the side of her nose grew a shiny hard-skinned fruit, larger than a walnut, but a purple color. Joseph and Maria talked about it, never once mentioning it to Dr. Meyers. They thought that the woman must be a saint, because, despite the terrible cross God had given her, her face was as sweet as an angel's.
Joseph thought that Maria, too, must be a saint because she never lost her patience with his mother, although she lost patience with everything else. His mother was terrible to Maria; every day of her life she was terrible. If he didn't know how good a woman his mother was, and how much she loved the Meyerses and how grateful she was to them, he would think she hated Maria. That was how she acted. It was mainly because Maria was sloppy, she really was, his mother was right, much as he loved her, much as he thought Maria was a saint, he knew his mother was right. She left the caps off of pens so that the pockets of her skirts turned black; she threw her clothes around the room, she dropped her towels on the floor, she scrunched up papers into a ball and threw them into the waste-basket, and missed, and didn't bend to put them properly into the bin; she made her bed with lumps, sometimes the lumps were just the blankets or the sheets, sometimes they were her socks or underwear or books she'd fallen asleep reading. As if she didn't understand you made a bed for the look of it, not just so that if someone (Joseph's mother) asked if you had made your bed you would be free to answer yes.
He wondered what Maria thought about his mother. They never spoke about her. No, once they had spoken about her, and it would have been much better if they'd never had the conversation. Once his mother had said such awful things, called Maria a pig, a slut, a hussy, a disgrace, and she'd just stood there, going white. Although she always had high coloring, this day she had gone dead white and made her body stiff and clenched her fists beside her body as if she wanted, really very badly wanted, to hit Joseph's mother and all her life was put into her fists, keeping them clenched so they would not. She had excused herself and left the room, walking slowly as though she had to show them, Joseph and his mother, that she didn't need to run. And Joseph for once had shouted at his mother, “Why are you so horrible to her?” And his mother had shouted, opened her lips, showed her strong yellow teeth; her tongue spat out the words, “How dare you take her part against me. The filthy, filthy pig. They're all alike. Fine ladies, with someone like me to clean up their shit. And you too, don't forget it. You're not one of them, you're my flesh and blood, whether you like it or you don't. They'll leave you in the end, don't you forget it. In the end I'll be the only thing you have.”
She couldn't be right, the Meyerses would not leave him. So he left his mother sobbing in the kitchen and went upstairs to where he knew Maria would be sitting, still and white as if she had shed blood. He knocked on her door and then walked in. He saw her sitting as he knew she would be, and he sat down beside her on her bed.
“I'm sorry she's so mean. You should do something. You should tell your father.”
“No,” she said. “If I say something, he might say something to her, and she might want to leave, or he might make her leave, and you'd leave too.”
He should not have come into her room; he wished he hadn't heard it. And wished later that he hadn't heard, been made to hear, the conversation at the table, Dr. Meyers talking to them both, Maria and his mother, calmly, saying that he understood both sides and that they must be patient with each other. Our Lord had loved both sisters, Martha and her sister Mary, there was room for all beneath the sight of God.
What he said made nothing better. His mother said she just did it for the girl's own good, these things were important in a woman's life, she, Helen Kaszperkowski, knew that. And then Maria said she would try to be better at these things. And Dr. Meyers lifted up his knife and fork and said, “Good, good.” And Joseph knew he had no home, there was no place that was his really, as Maria's place was with her father. He was here or he was there, but it was possible, although he felt himself much happier beside the Meyers, that his mother had been right and it was beside her that he must find his place, must live.
But what was it, that happiness he felt beside the Meyers if it was not where he belonged? He thought about the things the three of them did together. The train into the city and the dressing up, the destination always one of those high, gray-stoned buildings with the ceiling beautiful enough to live on, carved or vaulted, and the always insufficient lights. The joy those buildings gave him, the dry impersonal air, the rich, hard-won minerals: the marble and the gold, where no wet breath— of doubt, of argument or of remorse— could settle or leave a trace. And how the voice of Dr. Meyers came into its own; the thick dental consonants, the vowels overlong and arched, belonged there. Everybody else's speech offended in those rooms, seemed cut off, rushed, ungiving and unloved. But Dr. Meyers's voice as he described a painting or a pillar wrapped around whatever he called beautiful and made it comfortable and no longer strange. It belonged then to Joseph and Maria; Dr. Meyers had surrounded it with their shared history and let its image float in slowly, like a large ship making its way to harbor, safely to its place inside their lives.
And then there were the treats, the lunches at the automat, the brown pots of baked beans or macaroni, the desserts at Rumpelmayer's and the silly games, the game they played with cream puffs. “It is important,” Dr. Meyers would say in Rumpelmayer's, in the room that looked just like
a doll's house, pink and white and ribboned like a doll, “it is important,” he would say, making his face look pretend-serious, “to know exactly how to eat a cream puff. When I was in Paris, very great ladies would say to me, ‘C'est de la plus grande importance savoir manger une cream puffcomme il faut’ He would keep on his pretend-serious face and cut into one cream puff deliberately, carving up pieces with the right mix of pastry and cream, then popping them into his mouth like Charlie Chaplin. “But, my children,” he would say, “it takes a lot of practice. You must eat many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut.”
Then he would order one cream puff for each of them and say, “That's good, you're getting the idea, but I don't think it's quite yet comme ilfaut.” So, with a pretend-serious face he would order another for them, and then another, then when he could see them stuffed with richness and with pleasure at the joke he would say, “Ah, I think you're getting there. You are learning the fine art of eating cream puffs comme ilfaut.”
Then they would go to the afternoon movies, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, movie after funny movie, and Dr. Meyers laughed the hardest, laughed till he coughed and they hit him on the back, then laughed at how hard they were hitting him. And then they would walk outside. Outside, where, while they had pleased themselves in warmth and darkness, the sky had grown somber. And quickly, sharply, they left behind the silly men who fought and shouted just to make them laugh. They'd wend their way through the commuters to St. Patrick's for the five thirty, the workers’ Mass. And pray, amidst the people coming from their offices in suits, the women, some in hats, some taking kerchiefs from their handbags, all of them kneeling underneath the high dark ceiling where the birettas of dead cardinals hung rotting; always they chose a pew beside the statue of Pope Pius, waxy white, as if he were already dead. Then, blurred by the sacraments and silenced, they walked to Grand Central, boarded the train, too hot or too cold, always, and looked out the windows, pressed their cheeks against the glass and played “I Spy.”
And at home Joseph's mother waited, served them dinner when they arrived, served them in anger for she knew they had left her out. Once they invited her to come with them to the Metropolitan Museum. Dr. Meyers showed her the Ming vases and her only comment was “I'd hate to have to dust all those,” and Dr. Meyers laughed and said it was extraordinary how one never thought of all the maintenance these treasures took, and then his mother smiled, as if she had said the right thing. But he could see Maria look away, pretending not to be there for his sake, and his heart burned up with shame, and he was glad that Dr. Meyers never asked his mother to come along again, and he knew it was one more thing he would have to make up to her when he was grown-up and a man.
What was Maria thinking when she pretended not to look and not to be there? Sometimes he couldn't keep the thought away, the thought that those two hated each other. It must not be true. His mother said she was doing things for Maria's own good, and Maria never said a thing about his mother. But could they both be lying to him? No, not lying, but the sin, as Father Riordan called it, of concealing truth. A venial sin, but did they live it? It was more likely that his mother lived in sin, in venial sin of course. God forbid that she would live in mortal sin. But was her unkindness venial sin? And the way she found wrong everything about Maria? Why did she hate Maria's hair?
As far as he could see and understand there could be nothing in Maria's thick black hair to hate. His mother acted as if Maria's hair were there to balk, to anguish, to torment her. “Nobody thinks of me,” she would say after she had begun, “and that disgusting hair. Nobody thinks of what it means for me, that hair all over the place. In the shower, in those brushes. Think of it, she never cleans them out. I tell her and I tell her, and she leaves it in there, that disgusting hair until I don't know what use it is to her, a brush in that condition, and I clean it out myself. Because he likes things right, likes her to have things right, although he don't mind if somebody else does it for her. To tell the truth, that's the way he likes it best, some fat Polack cleaning up after the princess.”
How could she stay with them, the Meyers, hating them so? She did it for him, so he could grow up here, in this house, with these “advantages.” The large house with its high walls full of pictures. Scenes of European streets and buildings. Drawings by people hundreds of years dead. Velasquez. Goya. The house with its green lawn and dark enshadowed garden and its vivid shocks: the daylilies, orange-yellow; purple lupins; columbines with veins like blood. And the things that Dr. Meyers taught that she knew she could not teach her son: poetry and how to use a fork, the names of emperors and which tie went with which suit, and all the lessons. All the lessons that Maria got, Joseph got too: piano, French, and in the summer, tennis. “The teacher comes for one, he comes for two,” said Dr. Meyers, shrugging. “Still he has to come.” He said it as if it were a joke, the statement final and yet supplicating, and the lifted shoulders. Joseph knew, though no one had told him, that Dr. Meyers learned this kind of sentence, how to say it, from his grandfather the rabbi. Joseph heard the words like that, the tone of them, when he and Maria sneaked into the synagogue for Yom Kippur.
It was something Maria had wanted badly. She was not like him. When something rose up before her eyes as if it were a figure on a road she was approaching, she would run to it the way she always ran, headlong and holding nothing back, the way she ran in games, and in the garden on a summer night, just for the pleasure. How beautiful she looked then after running, her hair falling out of her barrette, the sweat that beaded in the cleft above her lip like seed pearls, her white cheeks flushed as if a wing had touched them, a wing dipped in roses. Or in blood. No one could beat her when she ran; it was one reason why the other children in the neighborhood didn't want to play with her. She had to win, and she held nothing back. It didn't bother Joseph; he was glad to let her win. He understood her rages when she lost; the things she said were horrible; sometimes she hit him hard, wanting to hurt. He knew just what she felt. She felt that it was meant for her to win, so when she lost it was as if some plan had been spoiled or some promise broken. And then she was so sorry afterward, she came to him with such important gifts, wonderful gifts, thought up in heaven. Sometimes they were too good; what she had done was not so bad that she should give them. Like the time she went into her savings to buy him a fountain pen just like her father's, from the jewelry store in town. Because when he had beaten her in tennis she'd hit him on the back so hard he'd fallen over, and his teeth had bitten through his lip.
“It's too much,” he said, though she knew how he loved it: the black shiny bottom and the silver top. “Real silver,” she said, “here, look at the mark.” And then they both got scared. “Don't use it where anyone can see it. Not your mother and not anyone at school. The nuns will ask you where you got it. Keep it someplace secret.” And he had, for he was good at that, was best at keeping secrets. No one had ever found the pen. Or found the thing she had no right to give him: the gold necklace with the Jewish star that was her mother's mother's.
Maria's mother had been Jewish too, but renounced it to marry Dr. Meyers. She'd died soon after Maria was born, puerperal fever, it was called; Joseph imagined she had turned completely purple. He and Maria often looked at her pictures. It was the only thing he envied that she had: pictures of the absent parent. He had no pictures of his father; his mother talked with happiness about the day she burnt them up. “I held a match to them and— pfft— goodbye.” One day Maria said, “Maybe one of my mother's sisters had a baby in Milwaukee on the day that you were born. Then the hospital had a mix-up, you know you hear of these things all the time. And that baby was you, and the baby that your mother had is living now with my aunt.” She spat on the floor. “It serves them right.” She'd never seen her aunt, her mother's favorite sister, who had told Maria's mother that she had no sister, her sister was dead.
Joseph had been frightened when she'd made that story up, frightened that she really be
lieved it. Frightened too, because he wanted to believe it. And knew what that meant: he wished his mother not his mother. And he wanted to run downstairs, run down to his mother, ask was there something he could do to help her, sit beside her, tell her about school, remind her Dr. Meyers said he had the seeing eye, the clever hand, that Dr. Meyers said he was training him to take over the business one day, so the Lord would be honored with things of beauty. See, Mother, Joseph wanted to say, I have the seeing eye, the clever hand. You will never have to worry about money. I will take care of you, and everything you suffer now I will make up to you when I become a man.
But he did not do that; he sat instead beside Maria, looking at the photographs, thinking about the dark, sad-faced woman who had never held her child, who left her brothers and her sisters and her parents to marry Dr. Meyers. His people, too, had refused to speak to him, but he could bear it, Dr. Meyers could, you could see it in his eyes that could go cold. Maria's, too, could do that. She didn't have her mother's eyes, light brown as if they had once been Maria's blazing color, but she had wept so for her family that they had faded.
It was after Maria had given Joseph her grandmother's necklace that she got the idea: they must go into the synagogue. He could imagine how she'd thought it up, alone, at night in bed, her eyes wide open in the dark, awake and lying on her back in the first cold of autumn. It must have been then she decided that she would ask Moe Brown. Moe Brown who owned the candy store and loved her. He always gave her an extra soda free, and he gave one to Joseph too. She'd told Moe both her parents had been born Jewish. “But they gave it up,” she said, as if it was a car they had got tired of. It frightened Joseph to hear her say it like that, so lightly, when it was the most important thing Dr. Meyers had ever done, had won for himself the salvation of his soul, the fellowship of Christ, a place in heaven.