He sometimes wonders if he ever loved her. He cannot remember feeling for his mother anything like what he felt for people whom he later said he loved. He hopes for a merciful, preconscious Eden, a time before memory when he was drawn to her out of sheer animal need, a time before distinctions could be made, when her body was the body he needed, to which nothing else had to be compared.
He has no idea how old he was when the difference between coarseness and fineness entered his mind. Knowing his mother was one and not the other, that the Meyerses were the other and not the one. He has tried to be fair to his mother, stopping himself when he said to himself, She had no sense of beauty. She cared about cleanliness. Americans believe there is no beauty without cleanliness. But this, he learned, was not something all the peoples of the world believe. The treasuring of cleanliness above all, which made her buy the chair covered in olive leatherette (
I can wipe it with a sponge; it’ll last forever
), never an ornament (
They’re dust collectors
). You must believe me: Joseph has tried terribly hard not to be unfair to his mother. He told himself that she was tired. That she worked too hard. That she worried about money. That she had no reason to prize beauty when her own lack of it was the cause of her sorrow. He tried very hard to call up times when he was not unhappy to be near her. He would remember that sometimes they enjoyed playing cards. But the meagerness of that sentence—We enjoyed playing cards—would cause him to feel something like despair and then self-pity, and like Maria he believes that of all emotions self-pity is the least acceptable.
Lately he has begun to wonder: If he had never met the Meyerses, could he have been happy with his mother? He could be a blue-collar worker in Detroit, married to a nice Polish girl, taking their many children to a church called St. Kasimir or St. Stanislaus, his patient, kind, ungifted wife caring for his mother in their ranch house rather than leaving her to the care of strangers at Regina Caeli Home for the Aged. The last time he visited her there, she said, “You’re a nice young man, do I know you?” “Mother, I’m your son.” “I don’t remember having a son.” If his mother does not know him, how can he be loved? And is her love something he deserves?
He has often asked himself, Is it possible that a child who never loved his mother is capable of love? Is what he has called love only a form of misapprehension? Perhaps he isn’t capable of love, only of attachment to a creature formed from his own imagination. He asks himself quite often if he is really an idolator—a failed idolator, for his imaginations have disappointed him.
I must tell you, Joseph often thinks of himself as a disappointed man. And yet what, he has asked himself, is disappointment? He has come to many conclusions. He has reckoned that disappointment isn’t one of the great states of mind. Nothing glamorous—like ruin—only a gradual diminishment, a gradual nibbling away of bounty, until what is left is cramped and meager, adequate for livelihood but every luxury, every amplitude, begrudged. At fifty, he has taken stock of himself and found a failed idolator, a disappointed man.
Joseph isn’t thinking of these things now. He isn’t thinking of his past. He walks blindly; his mind can’t settle; his eye falls on things but he cannot be said to be seeing them properly. He is walking, praying, to no face that he can see, “
Just keep her alive.
”
He remembers walks with Pearl in Central Park, walks downtown to look at architecture or just have lunch. The time in the museum when he took her to see some Cambodian sculptures. Both of them silent before the faceless goddesses, not Madonnas, their round hard breasts impossible to think of as a food source, their secret smiles, the girlish narrowness of their shoulders.
He can’t remember one word he and Pearl said to each other. And he wonders, with a kind of desperation, if it would be of help to her if he could remember some of the things she said. He tries and tries; he cannot call up a single word. But he believes, he tells himself that he is right to believe, that they were happy. In all the times with her, he believes he was never disappointed. Except when she chose, for her diary, a purple plastic notebook with a laminated picture of a unicorn on the front. He never told her, though; he paid for it without a word. But he was glad to notice that at some point she had given it up, choosing, instead, a black leather journal with unlined pages.
Now he walks to Piazza Mattei, where just a few days before he saw a
FOR SALE
sign in the window of a flat. Right there, in one of his favorite squares in Rome,
VENDERSI
, the stone of the building just the right shade of sunburnt yellow, the trailing ivy just the right mix of ornament and camouflage. It is the district, historically, of woodworkers. On the wall of one of the buildings in the square is a sign listing the craftsmen represented in the woodworkers union of 1624: makers of barrels, casks, tambourines, cabinets, drums, whips, boxes, chairs, and clogs; inlayers; sawyers; lathe turners. Only a few days ago, he imagined himself protected by those skilled, industrious ghosts, so near to the playful seductive bronze boys who stand below the tortoises of the Fontana delle Tartarughe. Why not? Why not wait till a few days after Christmas and call the number and see how much the flat costs? He has a house worth $750,000 in Larchmont, a house he doesn’t want. A house whose old trees and leaded windows and deep lawns would be free of resonance for someone else.
He is aware that it is winter, but the cold doesn’t press on his limbs or cause him to think about going inside. Why not walk all night, why not walk until dawn? What would it matter if he were murdered by some large-featured boy from a painting by Caravaggio, murdered on the Via Giulia or one of the streets that leads from it, one that turns and turns and may lead nowhere?
It had given him a feeling of great luxury, of leisure, to know that it was no longer necessary to prevent himself from being murdered. It meant that no place was closed to him. He could go wherever he wanted, but it wasn’t any specific action or activity that interested him, only the possibility of wandering anywhere with no need to check in. No place to which it was necessary that he report back.
Certainly not the staff of the hotel Santa Chiara, who had known him for many years and might be pleasantly surprised if he didn’t return one night to sleep in his bed, assuming, as Italians always do, some amorous situation. Or perhaps they didn’t think him capable of it.
He had been happy, alone and uninvolved in the holiday activity, the festivities that all the life of the streets prepared for. He wondered who would believe him if he told them he was happy. He thought it might sound pathetic, like something a girl might say who hadn’t been invited to a dance, trying to convince you that she’d had her opportunities but she preferred to stay at home and wash her hair. But in his case it was true. He did have invitations. He had lied (this was unlike him) to get out of them. He could have taken a short train trip to a house in the
campagna,
to warm hearths, large tables, rooms full of firelight, children with dark eyes and cheeks red from the fire, young, thin, fashionable mothers without the unease of American mothers toward their young. Or he could have gone skiing in Zermatt and eaten Christmas dinner at midnight, the moon a blue disk on the frozen snow, with a private mass in the morning said by a bishop, also the guest of his excellent hosts, who would not be displeased to see Joseph attentive to their plain, shy, intellectual daughter of whom he was fond and about whom (they were not wrong) he occasionally speculated, but entirely without desire, considering the possibilities of a quiet, decorous, but not unstylish Roman life.
Joseph was a widower, you see, understood to be Catholic and to have sufficient money. For someone like him, invitations would never be lacking.
He had lied to several groups of friends, suggesting a Christmas spiritual in its overtones, perhaps spent in a monastery, perhaps turning to God for consolation in his grief over the loss of his wife. In fact, he was not feeling grief. He was, after two years, unable to describe the nature of his feelings. Perhaps because he believed he wasn’t grieving. Simply, he wanted to be alone.
Now, alone, he walks near the Tortoise Fountain in Piazza Mattei, thinking of his mother, in the Regina Caeli Home for the Aged on the West Side of New York City. She has been there for six years.
Her days are a fog. What will she do on this day after Christmas, after she eats her breakfast? Will she wear a Santa Claus pin on one of her polyester shirts? Polyester is required in the Regina Caeli Home: all patients’ garments must be able to withstand laundering in large machines that shrink, fade, and eat up natural fabrics. Are her lips still stained red and green from Christmas candy? Does she have a Santa Claus hat? Do the nurses? He pictures the dining room with everyone wearing a Santa Claus hat: the aged nodding, openmouthed, or sitting with their eyes closed, or trying to make conversation, the nurses passing out food, wiping mouths, chins, wheeling patients toward their tables and then away from them, back to bed.
Each day, Marie Kasperman makes herself a pirate’s hat out of a paper towel. She smiles more than formerly; it is not a false smile. Joseph wonders if, for the first time in her fog, his mother is happy.
Why not, then, he’d thought on that earlier day when he’d walked to the Fountain of the Tortoises, move to Rome? He could do everything he needed for the business by fax and e-mail and on the Internet. He could be someone who woke every morning to the prospect of a silence nourishing as manna, living for what his eye would fall on, in high rooms, nearly empty, in a flat that was only his. The sheen of the marble floor, the white and yellow light on the red roofs. He could plan his days around what he would see. One beautiful thing in the center of each day, easy in a city where you had only to turn a corner to see a beautiful and unexpected sight.
He could become a man without close human connections, only acquaintances, Europeans who would be happy to speak of what they’d seen that day without the unseemly American avidity for personal details. Most days, he would speak to no one. Most days he would be silent. He’s imagined the silence, liquid, seeping down to the dryness of what he would once have called his soul, a word he now refuses to use, even for want of something better, because he is sick to death of the endless call-up of false terms, the hunger for the food of the pseudo-sacred, the word
spiritual
as much a staple of the TV talk show as the words
child abuse
or
drug addiction
.
His mother is wrapped in silence now, but it is not the beautiful silence he dreams of and craves. The silence that surrounds his mother is heavy, blank. After Marie Kasperman eats, she puts her hands over her stomach, which is more huge than ever, suggesting not self-indulgence but disease. But Marie Kasperman has no disease in her. “The dear soul is, thankfully, very healthy,” says Sister Theresa, the pastoral counselor at the home. Sister Theresa is eternally grateful for the plastic statuettes Joseph regularly brings her by the gross. “Mr. Kasperman, you are always in my prayers.” Sister Theresa assured him it was all right for him to leave his mother for a Roman holiday. “Mr. Kasperman, she wouldn’t know Christmas from the Fourth of July.”
So why not leave for good? Why not leave her to the nuns who care for her, the nurses who answer her for the hundredth time when she says, “Did I ever have any children?” Why not leave all that for the clear dimensions of the Piazza Navona, the Piazza Farnese, the Piazza Mattei?
But that was his past life. What Pearl has done has divided his life inexorably. He is not the same man he was yesterday. His past has no importance to him, and the future is something he dares not contemplate. He walks in the present, in a present as foggy as his mother’s, in this city of clear light, this city of history in which he now feels no part.
Joseph goes back to the Santa Chiara. He stays at this hotel, as Dr. Meyers stayed there before him, not for the Pantheon or the synchronistic evidence of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, but because it is in the district where religious articles are sold. Unlike the windows of other piazzas (those shrines to minor commercial gods, windows filled with beautifully wrapped chocolates, beautifully tailored suits, gloves in every shade), the windows of the streets leading from the Piazza Minerva are filled with vestments and sacred vessels with singular, evocative names taken from their ancient use: chalice, pyx, ciborium, monstrance, censer, thurifer. And the sad clothing shops for nuns: mannequins in veils, mannequins meant to be unalluring, so unlike other mannequins with their prominent nipples. The nun mannequins are overlarge and wear neutral-colored nightgowns—white, gray, baby blue—bed jackets and booties testifying to the graying of the religious population and their need for clerical garments suitable for life in an invalid’s bed. This morning, as every morning when he leaves his hotel, he looks away from the windows full of ten-foot-tall statues of Pope John Paul II, averting his eyes until he comes to the window of vestments: silk embroideries and embossments, rose, green, white, purple. Some ugly, but not all. There is so much in his business he cannot look at. But he does his work well; he makes money, not only for himself but for Maria and Pearl, who have never had to worry about what anything costs because, at Maria’s father’s request, Joseph took up the business.
He phones the ticket agent from his room and discovers that there is only one flight a day from Rome to Dublin. It leaves at 8 a.m.; he has already missed it. But he tells himself this is all for the best. It would not be a good thing for him to arrive first. Maria is, after all, Pearl’s mother; they are tied by blood, bound in the law. The ties that bind. He is free of ties. He is bound to no one (except his mother); there is no name for what he is to Pearl. Therefore, whatever it is—this love he has for her, this love he has had since the moment of her birth—it is a thing unrecognized by the world and therefore a thing of no force.