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By Root 694 0

had enabled her restraint. Now, with Rose, who loved her, whom she loved, Rose, the mother of the man who she had said was her whole life, she turned into the animal she felt she had the right to be. She allowed sobs to be ripped out of her body. She made no effort to be quiet. She shouted words without a thought of their propriety. “Traitor. Liar. Coward. Thief.” It couldn’t have been long, that she shouted those words, that she pulled at her hair and lost the center of her breathing. It couldn’t have been long before Rose put her hand over Miranda’s mouth, a hand that was not cool, as Miranda’s mother’s hands were always cool, and was not smooth or cared for, as Miranda’s mother’s hands were smooth and cared for. Her vanity about her hands was the one vanity Miranda’s mother felt she was allowed. Miranda felt the rough, overwarm pressure of the palm of Rose’s hand, making her words impossible, stifling her wild, furious sobs. And then Rose’s own words, “But you must understand. He is my son.”

And she understood what this woman required of her: silence. Having no choice, as David had no choice, murdering something (her love for Rose, her belief that the ideal of justice was more powerful than the accident of blood) as David murdered the gross giant. Just feet from Bernini’s willful murderer is Caravaggio’s version: a luscious boy, desirable, remorseless, holds by the hair the pathetic head of Goliath—his eyes shocked, his mouth appalled—far more sympathetic than the brash boy killer.

And on that day when Rose put her hand against Miranda’s mouth, Miranda put her lips together in this way and silently composed herself and left the house, the house where she believed she learned how possible it was to be exuberantly and yet securely happy. She never saw Rose again. And never again was she the child of any house.

How long ago it seems, she thinks, those scalding tears, those sobs raised from what she had believed would be an endless well of sorrow.

Adam takes her elbow and leads her back the way they came, through the ornate room of the monumental heads which, minutes ago, she found threatening, and now finds consoling. Huge. These gods, she thinks, are unsusceptible. Beyond us. And the possibility of unapproachableness sluices her hot brain.

He brings her to another room, the walls, the floors, devoted to the stories of the violent gods; a sculpture, white against a blur of color, commands everything. A man, bearded, not young, his biceps perhaps not as impressive, not as threatening, as they once were, is grabbing a much younger woman by the waist. His face is the face of nothing but appetite. His fingers press into the flesh of her thighs, denting them, dimpling them. He can’t see her; he sees nothing but his future pleasure or, perhaps, simply, future release. She is miserable. The face of plain abandonment. Despair. On her face, sculpted tears. The position of her feet, the distortion of her toes, signal that she has given up the fight.

“Pluto and Proserpina,” she says, reading the brass plaque. “How can I not know who they are?”

“But you do know. I know you know. I remember a paper you wrote about the story in college. Pluto and Proserpina are Hades and Persephone. Hades, the lord of the underworld, who abducts Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the earth. She says that if he doesn’t send her daughter back she’ll arrange for eternal winter. Demeter and Hades come to a compromise. The girl will live half the year with her mother and half in the underworld with him.”

“My God, Adam, you remember that?”

“What you wrote was beautiful. It taught me something. About a woman’s desire for the dangerous male at the same time that she’s just longing for her mother.”

“Was I really that smart then? I’ve lost that way of thinking. I read much less now. No poetry at all.”

“Your life is full.”

“Overfull, you mean.”

“No, Miranda, I said what I meant.”

“Of course, now I understand much more about Demeter and her destructive rage. The bereft mother threatening eternal winter. The death of everything. Give