The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [114]
She walks a bit away from him, stands in the middle of the road. She thinks that it is possible that she has never heard anything so disturbing. What could be a worse sentence: It would have been better if my child had not been born.
And most disturbing to her is her own reaction. Her stripe of satisfaction: that what he and Beverly did ended not in beauty or in consolation, did not justify the thing they did. Did to her. But what can that possibly mean: “did to her.” What was done was done to a young girl. Twenty-two years old. She is now nearly sixty. What was done marked her, but if she is truthful, she must ask herself: did it mark her as much as having a talent for statistics, or having met Yonatan and lived with him for nearly thirty years, being married to an Israeli, having two sons, sons instead of daughters, being chosen for the grant that has shaped her work for a decade or more. Of course what happened, happened to her. She thinks of the word “her,” and it buzzes around her head, turning meaningless. Her is me. But her is not me. Her is not this woman, standing here in this dim light on an afternoon in Rome, looking at a man whose life has, far more than hers, been marked by suffering.
She sees him sitting, his head in his hand, as the light thickens around him. And she cannot feel anything but sorrow.
“We’re close to November now,” she says, “the early end of light.”
She sits beside him and the streetlamps, art nouveau, that flank the road turn gradually pink, then yellow, then a yellow-white.
“Time to go,” he says. “My daughter.”
“Yes. And so you see it is the right thing to have no regrets.”
“Tomorrow I would like to bring you to the one place I can mourn my wife.”
His voice is strange to her; it is not his own. He is speaking and not speaking to her. What he has said about his son has emptied him of something. The flatness of his tone is, she understands, a substitute for weeping. Tears, though, would have brought relief; the emptying would be a kind of cleansing. The dryness in his voice alarms her; it can lead to nothing.
They are terrible words, those words “the one place I can mourn my wife,” and she can only guess the effort it has taken him over the years to say them. To say them in a tone that comes close to the ordinary. To say them in a way that has anything at all to do with the way he said, “We’ll go see the paintings of Caravaggio, the view of Rome from the orange garden.”
They agree to meet in the morning at the top of the Capitoline Hill.
Tuesday, October 30
THE CAPITOLINE, THE MEDUSA
“The One Place I Can Mourn My Wife”
She climbs the many shallow steps, her eye on a huge equestrian statue, Marcus Aurelius, colossally astride the universe as he is colossally astride his horse. The horse, free of the responsibility of rule, seems far more eager than his rider. At the far end of the piazza, two reclining gods, meant to indicate the Tiber and the Nile, hold what she tells herself can’t be gigantic penises: they must be some fertility symbol, she tells herself. On the other hand, they do seem quite relaxed, much more relaxed than the emperor or the stone twins, the Dioscuri, flanking the staircase: the emperor, the twins, so tense with the responsibilities of empire.
She worries that the steps were difficult for Adam and wonders if he arrived before her so she wouldn’t have to observe his effort. She tells herself that the steps are shallow, the climb gradual. He stands between the stone twins, his hand shielding his eyes from the pure Roman sun, which, unlike yesterday, is now doing its good work of plain illumination. It bleaches the stones pure white; it nourishes the pinks and yellows of the neighboring walls. All possibility of cloudiness has long ago been burned away.
He nods to her, and even this greeting, she sees, is difficult for him to give. She doesn’t know what he wants to show