The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 8

The gentleman from Europe had got up from his seat and settled himself at another table. He was reading some book, she wasn't even going to give him the satisfaction of trying to find out what it was. He thought he was smart, but he wasn't going to make a fool out of her. She was the white tiger, standing at the gates of knowledge, keeping guard.

And then it came to her, the words that she would say to him, the answer to his question. It wasn't just ordinary words, it was poetry. A poem she'd learned when she'd studied the poets of the romantic era. William Blake. That poem about a tiger. She'd wished she'd been able to ask somebody why tiger was spelled with a y and if you p.r.o.nounced the last syllable of symmetry"try" or "tree." Probably that was something the European gentleman knew. She shot him a look of pure contempt across the room and spat the words of the poem straight at him: "Tyger, tyger, burning bright," she muttered, "In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

But he did not look up, because of course he didn't hear her. It was a library, after all, and she didn't want to disturb anyone, so she had said it low, under her breath.

Cleaning Up.

When the first man walked on the moon, Loretta's mother, as the town said, "snapped." And it was almost like that, as if you could hear a sound and then see something fly up into the air, not like a bird but like a rubber strap that had broken from too much strain.

"Her life was just too hard for her," Martine Lavin said to Loretta, sympathetically, without a hint of judgment. Loretta understood that Martine was being kind and that she ought to be grateful. So many people avoided talking to her, so they gave her meals and washed her clothes and tried to find a place for her in their homes beside their own children. She wasn't uncared for, the parish saw to that. But as they packed her bologna sandwiches, identical to their own children's, as they poured milk or juice, careful to distribute identical amounts, they rigorously avoided mentioning her mother or what had happened in St. Rita's church on the day of the moon walk.

Martine Lavin never went so far as to bring that up, but she did at least refer to Loretta's mother, didn't erase her from the pages of life, not as if she'd been dead but as if she'd never lived. And Loretta was grateful to her, but only partly, because what she could see in everyone's eyes was how much they loved themselves for doing what they did, how much they loved themselves for their knowledge of their own humility: "Well, I didn't do much. I did what anyone would do."

If one of them, just one, had been without that shadow of self-love, so visible to Loretta, perhaps she would have felt free to relinquish the hard stone she carried beneath the flesh of the palms of her hands. The thin flesh, the pointed stone that had penetrated beneath the skin, causing a new skin to grow up around her hate. She hated Martine Lavin most of all because of her belief that she was different from the others. And she wasn't different, or only in ways that carried the kind of tiny risk that allowed her to think of herself as an adventurer, when really, she had never been in any danger and would never be. She was only different enough to be a problem, because she created the temptation in Loretta to let down her guard. And that was dangerous.

Loretta knew about danger. It was the element her mother lived in and carried with her. The women in the Altar Society (Martine was one of them) had seen it, and they wanted to turn their eyes away from it, but they couldn't entirely, because Loretta was a child, thirteen years old.

Her mother had smashed through the barriers of decency that day in church. Why had she chosen a time when the Altar Society was there? The decent women of the parish, polis.h.i.+ng, arranging flowers, genuflecting with dustcloths in their hands each time they pa.s.sed the tabernacle.

Loretta had seen it all, she had to, she had to follow her mother out into the street. Her mother was raving, tearing at her clothes, shouting out words of the most unbelievable filth, some unrecognizable to Loretta, some recognizable to her as the names of body parts she a.s.sociated with the bathroom.

"Mama, please, Mama come home, be quiet, you're disturbing people, Mama come home with me, we'll eat something, you can lie down, we can lie down together, we can take a nap."

But she didn't listen and Loretta knew she couldn't, knew, really, that her mother couldn't hear her, no matter how loudly she spoke. But she couldn't speak too loudly. She was trying to encourage her mother to be quiet so she tried to keep as quiet as she could herself. It didn't matter. Whatever she said the words were wrong. Her mother's words didn't make sense to her, either. They were speaking to each other in languages the other didn't understand. Loretta recognized the foreignness although up to that time she had never heard a foreign language spoken, except the Latin of the Ma.s.s, and that she knew there was no need to understand.

She had hoped that her mother would be calmed and silenced by being in the church, but she wasn't. Being in the church made her wilder. Or maybe that wasn't it, maybe she was acting the same way she had on the street and it just seemed worse in church.

Loretta's mother took her blouse off at the church door. She began raving about the men walking on the moon and saying it was an abomination, an abomination of desolation because the moon was desolate and the astronauts were abominable. She said that G.o.d should not allow it and she was here to punish G.o.d for his abomination and filthy, filthy, filthy s.h.i.+t and filthy p.i.s.s and filthy filthy she was going to punish G.o.d.

The Altar Society ladies got scared, thinking she meant to do something to the Host. One of them went next door to the rectory to get Father Rafferty. He was watching the television, watching like everyone else the sight of the men walking on the moon.

Father Rafferty came in with his red face and red dome of a bald head and said, "Now Margaret, now Margaret," and all she said was filthy filthy and that he was as filthy as the rest of them, particularly the astronauts, they were the filthiest of all, the moon had always been a clean place, she'd relied on that, but now they were going to make it filthy just like they were and how could the Blessed Mother look on and let it be, she was going to tear the Blessed Mother's eyes out to punish her, no not to punish her just so that she couldn't see. She was walking toward Our Lady's altar, she was starting to climb onto it, when Father Rafferty came behind her and pinned back her arms. And then the police came and took her away, and Father Rafferty told the Altar Society ladies not to say anything of what they'd seen and he told Martine Lavin to take Loretta home with her and her family for the night.

She had never before that night slept in a strange bed, since she and her mother didn't know anybody. Certainly not well enough to sleep in one of their guest beds. In all her life Loretta had never slept in any bed but her own. She and her mother had never taken a vacation, and so she had never so much as brushed her teeth in a sink other than the one where she saw her face each morning in front of the accustomed mirror, really the door to the medicine chest. She felt at a complete loss as to how to behave in the Lavins' house. Martine Lavin had driven her home and tried to straighten up the devastated kitchen. Her mother had pulled everything off the shelves, emptied bags of sugar and flour into the sink, saying they were filthy, she knew they had bugs in them, but the stuff didn't go down the drain, it stuck in an igloo shape in the sink, solidifying, to a texture like cement.

Her mother had left the water on and run to the church. Of course Loretta had followed her, horrified at her mother's exposure. Going outside, she went beyond her rights. Loretta felt that whatever her mother did or said in their house was her right, really, she had paid for the house. "My hard-earned money" were the words she always used when Loretta failed to turn the light off in the bathroom or filled the bath too full. She earned her money as a saleswoman in a children's clothing store on Madison Avenue. Her job fed her bitterness. She hated her customers and their children, hated the effort she had to make at tailored suits and coiffure and manicure to be acceptable to them, hated their money and their carelessness and the easiness of their lives.

Loretta confused the term "hard-earned" with "hard labor," words that she'd heard in a movie that had frightened her. It was on The Late Show one Sat.u.r.day night and her mother had fallen asleep watching it, not noticing Loretta, rapt and horrified, looking through the banister rails. The movie was called I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and it made visible one of her greatest fears, that someone could be punished, punished terribly, for something he hadn't done. But she understood why people thought he had, why they wanted to punish him. He had that look, that dark look around his eyes that made people feel in themselves the wish to punish. "That hangdog look," her mother said about her, ordering her out of the room sometimes just for having it. And she understood why her mother did it, why her mother said, "You make me feel hunted with that look." She saw the look in the mirror, saw it again in the Lavins' mirror, a mirror surrounded not by chrome but by white-painted wood with a light on the top that was softer than the one in her own bathroom, but not soft enough to hide the look that she knew would always make people, as it had her mother, want to be in a place away from her.

"Your father was always sickly," her mother would say resentfully whenever Loretta would get a cold or the flu. Only once she was nicer, when Loretta got the croup. Her mother seemed to like the flight from the steamy bathroom to the cold outside, she sang as she ran through the house, her coat open, holding Loretta as she ran, as if the shock of the cold was a delight to her, a particularly pleasant and imaginative game they were playing, not a desperate effort to restore a child's breath.

Loretta couldn't sleep in the sewing room in Martine Lavin's house. She lay much of the night wakeful on the cot beside the headless figure that Loretta supposed represented Martine's body. What was it called? A form? As the hours pa.s.sed, Loretta grew more and more anxious about not sleeping, not about the wakefulness itself but about her fatigue the next morning. Because however tired she was she would have to go to school and school was in the world and the world required alertness. Particularly now when she knew all the children knew about her mother. They had heard it from their mothers, who had either seen it for themselves or heard it from their own friends. She had to keep alert to clarify the smudgy look around her eyes so that she would seem not like one of their potential victims, but a potential danger to them.

In the mornings, wakened by her own alarm clock, she would try to lie alert in her bed until Martine's husband Richard had gotten out of the bathroom. And then Martine would use it herself; she'd stay in there until she heard the baby cry. Then she would leave it and only then Loretta knew it was all right for her to use the bathroom.

The house where she'd lived with her mother hadn't had a shower, only a tub, she'd never taken a shower. She knew, somehow, that the Lavins would have thought it strange if they'd heard her taking a bath in the morning. Or even a bath at night. Their children took baths; it was a playful, time-consuming ritual, only in a minor way having to do with cleansing. Loretta felt that, in taking a bath, she was putting herself in the camp of the Lavins' children, suggesting she required the same brand or quality of care as they, suggesting she thought herself ent.i.tled to it.

But she didn't know how to use the shower. She didn't understand what was to be done with the curtain, whether it was to be put inside the tub or outside. And she knew she couldn't ask. She couldn't say the words, "How do you take a shower?" They sounded too pathetic, too deprived, simply too odd. And she knew it was crucial for her not to sound any of those ways. So in the six weeks she lived with the Lavins, she washed only at the sink. She didn't know what they thought of that. But she could be sure that they had not a.s.sumed she was claiming any kind of false position as a child of the house.

Martine wanted Loretta to share her joy in her young children. Four of them, four sons, four blond boys, four perfect angels. John was five, Matthew four, Mark three, and Luke, the baby, seven months. Richard said maybe they'd quit when they'd gone through all the books of the Bible. "Of course Hebbukah might feel a little badly done by." "Or who knows, darling," Martine said, with a reminder, sunny, irrepressible, that all those babies had to do with something bodily between her husband and herself, "we might, one day, between us, actually produce a girl."

Loretta did not like children. She wished she could have been in a house without them, or at least without ones so near babyhood, so full of incessant hungers and incessantly expressed demands.

Of all of them she preferred John, because he was the oldest and the most self-sufficient. Martine remarked over and over what an independent child he was, but Loretta was so disgusted by the endless circle of need and response to need that made up the relations between Martine and her children that she couldn't muster anything like admiration for John's behavior. It seemed the only slightly less reprehensible behavior of someone who understood he had only to express the slightest wish to have it granted by his mother. A wish having nothing to do with whether or not he was capable of accomplis.h.i.+ng what he wanted for himself. She judged those children for their weakness, and Martine for fostering this quality, which, she was sure, would serve them badly later on. She was sure that her mother was right in what she said, in what became, later, one of the few things Loretta could remember her saying, "You've got to look out for yourself in this world, there's no one looking out for you."

No one making you another beautiful breakfast if you didn't like your scrambled eggs, no one making you a placemat out of one of your laminated drawings, no one finding you a wooden napkin ring in the shape of your favorite animal, no one taking you on their lap to hear your side of the story when clearly your behavior had been abominable, no one singing you songs in Spanish or in French or teaching you the words of the Ma.s.s in Latin, which no one used anymore but which you would know because you were special children, and you must remember that, it must be marked.

The Lavin family life made her feel choked and suffocated and disoriented, as if she were in a tepid whirlpool where distasteful objects were constantly being thrown up against her, in her way, then out of her grasp: placemats, napkin rings, foreign picture books. In the vortex she attached herself to one thing which of all the unbearable things seemed least unbearable to her: the five-year-old John.

For she knew she was expected to attach herself to something. People did. Or at least, they had to appear to be doing so. She understood perfectly well the currency of the transaction in which she was involved. She paid her board by seeming to be aware of the superiority of her new situation to her native one, by suggesting tender yearning and a poignant sense of loss, and always always everything backlit by a constant sense of grat.i.tude. It sickened her, but she had no choice. She had to have a place to live. Her house was empty. She was a child; she could not live in an empty house.

So she did a few things, as few, she calculated, as she could do and still pay her rent. She made clay animals with John. She rather enjoyed it. Not very much, but she didn't enjoy anything very much, and at least, shaping the clay with John she could be silent, or nearly. She enjoyed silence. And she almost allowed herself to admire the little boy's ability to be silent for quite a long time. Much more than most people. More than most adults. She almost liked him for it, but she saw the trap of that. She was an employee, a tenant, and it was another thing her mother had taught her: the boss is the boss and whatever he says, at the end of the day he gives you your money or he doesn't, whatever he likes, it's up to him. Loretta kept in her mind that she was a wage earner. And, like her mother, she considered herself overworked.

Martine could be said, Loretta knew, to work very hard. Yet there was nothing in her that conveyed the strained, burdened sense that had been so much a part of Loretta's mother's posture. Martine sang while she worked; she played the record player while she cooked; she told Loretta it was a way of keeping up with the music. She'd majored in music in college, had played the piano, although she knew that because of the children these were not her years for "the instrument." At Christmastime, or teaching the children, yes. "But those days," she told Loretta, "of hours upon hours of practice, hours lost in, given up to music, those are in my past. Maybe in my future. My family is my present tense," she said, with a smile that Loretta turned against, feeling herself excluded from what the smile suggested, and glad to be.

After six weeks with the Lavins, Loretta was sent to her uncle and his wife in Hartford. They didn't want her and they made it clear that they had money and would send her to boarding school at the Madames of the Sacred Heart when she graduated from eighth grade the next year. She could spend her holidays with them. Christmas and Easter. Other arrangements would be made for summers, as their summers were for traveling. Loretta's uncle was eighteen years older than her mother; he'd just retired from Hartford Accident and Indemnity; they'd had no children, they'd saved for years for their new freedom, and they weren't going to let Loretta get in their way. Brother and sister had not been close; Loretta hardly knew her uncle, and she understood his position.

Her years in the Convent of the Sacred Heart were better than any that had gone before. She excelled in foreign languages, particularly Latin. The Latin teacher, Mother Perpetua, arranged for her to attend summer programs at the Sacred Heart Convent in Rome the first three years of high school. The last year, she was sent to a summer program at Harvard to learn Greek. "My smattering's not good enough for you," Mother Perpetua said. "You can do better than me."

She liked Mother Perpetua, although the other girls were afraid of her. She liked her white hands, and the unhealthy pallor of her face beneath her wimple, liked the fact that she didn't change out of her old habit when the younger sisters modified or discarded theirs. She admired Mother Perpetua's deliberate and unwavering impersonality. Unlike the other nuns, she didn't lapse into jokes or slip in some details of mothers, sisters, mischievous younger brothers, schoolgirl episodes, lovable teenage pranks. Loretta and Mother Perpetua met only in the high, unfinished rooms of a language which, being spoken by none of the living, being not at all part of the mess of daily life, was high and calm and beautifully inhuman.

Mother Perpetua sent her to Bryn Mawr for college. She graduated with highest honors in cla.s.sics. From there she went to Berkeley, where her thesis on Horatian odes was given highest honors as well. Jobs in Latin were scarce, the young had little interest in this language of the imperial-minded dead, so she was lucky, very lucky to be hired at Peabody College, so near Boston, so near New York, arguably the most prestigious small college in America, where the tradition of the cla.s.sics was honored even if the cla.s.ses were nearly empty.

She had had no training in what might be called personal life, and so friends.h.i.+ps with her colleagues were difficult for her. Friends.h.i.+p didn't tempt her; she mistrusted most people, and they bored her. She was fond of Mother Perpetua and she knew it would have pleased the nun if she'd joined the order. Loretta guessed that Mother Perpetua's thinking of her being part of the community was the one fantasy, the one indulgence she'd allowed herself in a life made up of strict self-discipline. But Loretta knew the convent, living in a circle of women, even, as the life was const.i.tuted now, living in apartments in university towns or in the poorer parts of cities, was impossible for her.

She learned that there was one connection that was possible. She craved the bodies of men. Not their love or even their attention, or not the kind of attention that could go on over time. What she wanted was an unclean place she had to travel to, treasured, a place of truth, the other side of the light, high truthfulness of the Latin language, of the surgical precision of the Horatian line. This low, dark place pleased her, made her smile, secretly, because it itself was secret and a home to her in a way no home had ever been. It pleased her because it was such a transgression to invest in this place the word "home." She knew what she thought of when she thought of the word "home," and she compared it with what came to other people's minds: dining tables covered with rich foods, soft furniture, a predictable cast of characters- mom, pop, brother, sis, grandma, gramps. Her idea of home was silent and anonymous, populated only by furtive creatures taken up only with their own drives, frozen in the postures of their striving toward each other, toward satiation and the oblivion to which it would inevitably lead.

The darkness that she knew was in and around her eyes, the darkness that her mother saw and hated, that made her mother drive her from the room, was the sign of her true homeland, and the sign by which she could be recognized by other inhabitants. She was small and dressed, as befit the academic fas.h.i.+on beginning with the midseventies, almost entirely in black: close-fitting but unrevealing knits, overlarge shoes or boots that made a joke, a parody of her smalm ess.

In the decla.s.se bars where she liked to go, no one had college degrees and Horace was the name of somebody's cracked uncle. They played Kenny Loggins and Kenny Rogers on the jukebox, and she stood out among the women because of her short hair and boyish clothing. She gave the signal to these men, who at first could not understand her, that she might be easily approached. She might have been in danger, but she had known danger once, with her mother, and she knew its smell. Nothing bad had ever happened to her at the hands of one of these men, or in their beds, the motel beds where they met for what it was they both knew they wanted, leaving an hour, two hours later, not meeting again. Thirty years earlier this kind of behavior might, if it were found out, cause a kind of nontenurable scandal, but by the eighties such activities were commonplace in the academy, the ordinary fare of faculty dining-table talk, and she risked nothing. Most of the people who would judge her fitness to be among them were men, and although she was careful not to approach them physically or allow herself to be approached, she knew that she suggested to them an allure far from their comfortable wives, women of large amber beads and madrigal groups and Birkenstock sandals. And so, craving what they only guessed at, they would want to keep her close to them. So that, if ever, or in case ... Meanwhile she attended their dinner parties, and gave a couple a year of her own, and produced work that earned their respect, that they couldn't ignore (for fear of lawsuit). She had, she believed, everything she wanted. She had chosen what she wanted in a life.

She had seen his name first on the roster. It had jumped out at her: "John Lavin." An intrusion, an eruption, a penetration into the matte backdrop of her life, of the thunderous, and violent, unmanageable past. In three days, the days between the first sight of his name on the roster and the first meeting of the cla.s.s, she allowed the form of the intrusion, the propulsion, to recede. John Lavin was, after all, not an uncommon name, it was unlikely that it would be he.

She knew everything when she saw him seated at the seminar table- one of only six students in a course on Horace in the original Latin- the only stranger in cla.s.s, the rest having been brought to this rare level of proficiency by Loretta herself. It was not his face she saw but a boyish version of Martine, the same thin, light gold curls, the skin, milky white with an undertone of bluing, transformed only a little by a residual, not yet manly beard. When she saw the slope of his shoulders as he bent over his notebook, the combination he had learned from his mother of uprightness yet devotion to a task, the shoulders of a supplicant who would never fully abandon himself to his pet.i.tion, when she saw the shape of his hands, the thumbnail, more recessive than the ordinary, heard the hesitation when she asked them for a sight translation and he paused after what she understood was a false semblance of puzzlement or frustration, when he put his hands on his head, a girlish gesture, that she had seen his mother perform, especially if she knew herself to be in the range of her husband's appreciation- she knew there was no doubt.

For a brief while she wondered if he knew her connection to his life. But her name- Moran- was no more unusual than his. And she had disappeared entirely from the life, not only of his family, but of the parish. Martine had for several years sent copies of a Christmas letter to her at her uncle's address. "John has made us all proud playing Bach solos at his school recital. Mark, our athlete, continues to astound us all as the perfect shortstop. Luke began by playing with his Daddy's movie camera and did what we think of as the Lavin version of A Child's Christmas in Wales- it had us all in st.i.tches. Matt loves to garden, and seems able to make anything grow."

But she had last seen them thirteen years ago, and after many years of nonresponsiveness, Martine had stopped writing. Loretta wondered if Martine had ever talked to the children about her time with them. Which would have meant, of course, that she had talked to them about Loretta's mother, the "scandal," the "performance." It was then that her bitter protective heart contracted to a point under the thin bones of her chest. "How dare they?" were the only words that came into her mind. "How dare they speak of her?" Her mother had made a performance of it, insisted on an audience, insisted upon being watched, and, then, of course, spoken of. It was then that she was steeped in her dark pool of unforgiveness that spilled over onto everyone. Her mother should have kept herself hidden. And she, herself, Loretta, thirteen years old, what should she have done? The torrent of her mother's madness was too strong for her, a hurricane of disorder and discrete force. And yet, in the thousand times when she replayed the scene, focusing on her non-silence, then her timid, pitiful, half whimpers of suggestions, "Mama, go in the house, Mama lie down, Mama don't go outside," it was herself she hated, for her weakness, and her failure to think boldly or at all.

She began to realize that he didn't know that she had a connection to his past. And with that understanding grew the struggle in her mind. Should she deal with him justly, a gifted first-year student with a pa.s.sion for the Latin language, and attend to him as his gifts deserved, as she would any other gifted young man in his place. Or should she reveal their connection and say that she was unable to work with him, he should find someone else. But there was nothing to justify that; the connection would seem too weak, too tentative, too far in the past, and then she would have to bring her mother and her mother's fate to light. Her mother, whom she went months without thinking of, still in the hospital in Central Islip where she'd been brought fifteen years before, whom she had not seen after that, not even once, her mother whom the doctors agreed was too far gone, even, for de-inst.i.tutionalization. And that had been a blessing, if not for her mother, Loretta knew, then for herself; it allowed her to think she was right not to think of seeing her mother again. There was no real mercy for her mother but the mercy of death.

She tried to behave justly or at least professionally, but the darkness underneath the thin bones of her breast sharpened, then hardened to a solid point. John Lavin would be punished. She would punish him. She would punish him in his place as representative of the people of the parish. And in her mother's name.

He made it easy for her, he made it easy by being completely himself, blond, quiet, with a series of identical Bic pens clipped to the pocket of his short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt, always some variety of blue (to match his eyes?), some plain, some with a white stripe, or a yellow. His translations were always on time and always nearly perfect, yet not so perfect as to render them unlovable: there were one or two words crossed out, never an infelicity, but occasionally a slight swerving away from the most desirable nuance, the word's best, truest sense.

And he helped by the way he looked at her, adoring, and yet with a calmness none of the others, particularly the young men, could muster. It was only the young men she gave her attention to; the young women, reminding her too sickeningly or too pathetically of herself, were never candidates for her full regard, with their implied dreams of palhood, confidences exchanged, cuddle-ups under quilts with the inevitable redolence of domestication.

Sometimes he came carrying an instrument in a small black case.

She had heard a cla.s.smate ask which instrument it was and he said, simply, "Oboe" with the confident person's lack of need for further explanation.

And yet, because, after all she was his teacher and possessed of a knowledge and accomplishment he clearly valued, because she was female and young and small of stature, with a hint of the fas.h.i.+onable in her close-to-the-skull hair, the multiple silver studs in each of her earlobes, she knew she could, if she chose, exercise what all this had given her: the power to intrigue him, John Lavin, a young heteros.e.xual man.

At first, she was undecided as to what her path might be. Would she keep him at arm's length, be hypercritical, hyperdemanding, and in the end order s.e.x from him as her due, as a privilege he ought to think of himself as fortunate in having been asked to exercise? Or should she start this way and gradually soften, suggesting that everyone who had preceded him had been a disappointment and that he, only he, had fulfilled the promise which made her feel less futile, less alone.

She had no desire for him. He was all transparency, there was no place that was fecund or capable of the dense growth that was the only environment in which desire and then satisfaction could, for her, take root. His lightness was repulsive to her. But taking the place of a darkness emanating from him was the sense of stain she would impose from her own body onto his, his blondness, his fairness, his quiet sense of his own worth, his embodiment of the notion of right doing, of having got things straight once and for all and living that way, with no sense of any future need of emendation fueled her purpose. A purpose not s.e.xual in its flavor but which, she knew, could only be worked out on the unused, pure body of this boy. She would approach him and leave him unfresh; his sweet skin would nevermore be lovable in quite the same way. The vessel of dreams would be not only scratched and flawed, but its surface invaded with a growth.

She knew it would be easy, but circ.u.mstances made it easier still. He told her that the next year he was going to Rome, taking a year off to study with his oboe teacher, who had relocated there.

"Well, then," she said, handing him his final paper, on the shape of the Horatian line, which she had graded A+, "Your grade's in, I have no more power over you, I'd like you to join me for dinner, so I can wish you bon voyage, and congratulate you for your first-rate work."

John Lavin blushed. The boy is blus.h.i.+ng, she said to herself, seeing his heart, the red tight muscle in the center of his chest, overflowing with blood from the presence of- what, she wondered- astonishment, embarra.s.sment, desire, shamed desire, grat.i.tude, the apprehension of a pleasure?

At dinner, in the town's best restaurant, which offered oversmall portions of pasta or fish, she insisted that he talk about his family. He was glad to, she could see the pleasure, greater than the one with which he approached his meal, at the prospect of opening up his family's life to her.

"I guess I'm proudest of my mother," he said. "She was trained as a musician, but she really gave it up for us. She went back and got a social work degree, she's working in the hospice movement. I mean, she does what I think of as the hardest thing in the world. She's with dying children and their families.

"My father works in insurance, but I don't think that's really where his heart is. But he had all of us to support, and he was great about it."

Loretta realized she never knew what Richard Lavin had done, she had never cared; he was hardly present, only as Martine's husband, or the children's father; for himself, he was nothing.

"His real love is woodworking, that's what makes him happy. He's set up an amazing workshop in the bas.e.m.e.nt. And my mom's even got him to learn the recorder. I have three younger brothers, and we have a family recorder group. My mother really has to lean on the younger ones to practice. I'm the only one she didn't have to force, but everyone's glad she did it, because we always have our music. I'm the most grateful to her, she gave me my music, what an incredible gift. But we're really a happy family, I think it's because my mother's so incredible. All my brothers feel good about themselves. My brother Luke's into acting, Matt's a great organic gardener, I sometimes think Mark thinks of nothing but soccer, but my mother says I should get off his case. He's the least musical of us all.

"Sometimes I feel bad about my mother's music. She has a lot of talent as a pianist, but it's been so long since she's practiced. Sometime I'd try to get her out of the kitchen to practice, but she'd just laugh at me, and say she'd made her choices, and she knew they were right."

Loretta saw the kitchen. She would have liked to ask him if the kitchen had changed, but of course she knew she couldn't. She saw the shower that she was afraid to use, and the cot she slept in in the sewing room, and the form in the shape of Martine's body.

Then she saw her mother in the church, and what she imagined was the look on Martine's face, although she'd allowed herself to see nothing when her mother was doing what she did. But it was Martine who came over afterward, when her mother was taken away, came to where she was standing near Our Lady's altar, which her mother had attempted to destroy. She leaned down toward Loretta, putting her arms around her shoulders. And, meeting Martine's eyes, Loretta didn't know what she needed to find there but she knew it had to be exactly the right thing.

What she saw was relief. She saw that Martine was relieved that it was Loretta's mother who had done this thing and not Martine and not anyone connected to her. And Loretta knew that Martine believed that because she'd seen it up close, but not so close that it had touched her, that she'd been spared.

But she had not been. Loretta would see to that now.

He accepted her invitation to come back to the apartment. She told him to sit on the couch while she made coffee.

In the kitchen, she put the coffee into the espresso pot and lit the flame. Then she walked into the living room. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his hands folded at the top of his head. She ran the top of her thumb around the outline of his lips. She allowed him to initiate the kiss, then she took over.

He was overwhelmed by his own ardor, and for a moment the simplicity of what he was so visibly experiencing made her want to send him home. But she thought of his mother's face, and of her mother's- wild, defeated- her mother whom she had not seen again after that day. Because of this she did not give in to her impulse to end the whole thing right there. She made herself go on.

She took his hand and led him, like a child, into the bedroom. He seemed willing to leave everything up to her. She unbuckled his black belt and pulled his jeans down but did not take them off completely. She left his shoes on but kicked off her own. She took off her skirt and panty hose and underpants. She unhooked her bra but did not take it off and she kept her s.h.i.+rt on. She climbed on top of him. It was important to her that she felt she was doing something to him, that nothing was being done to her. It was she who was planting the seed, a seed which, without her, might never have taken root in the pure soil that could have been his understanding of the world. He would know now that it was not a sure thing, not a guarantee that he would remain spared. That the darkness that invaded Loretta's mother and taken her over and made her do shameful things, a darkness stronger than anything that could be fought against, was not something to which he was impervious. And if he knew this was true of himself, he would know it was true of the people connected to him. Perhaps he might think there were people in the world who were impervious, who were safe. But he would understand that they were people very unlike himself, so unlike himself as to be unrecognizable.

As she expected, it was over quickly. So quickly that she ought not have been surprised at the speed and completeness of his transition from abandonment to shamed regret. She put on her skirt, leaving her panty hose in a coiled lump at the side of the bed. He didn't know what to do about covering himself.

"I haven't done this before," he said.

"Well, you have now," she said, stepping into her underpants.

She could smell the coffee, which had boiled over; she imagined the mess that had been made. She had stopped thinking of him. She was thinking of how angry it would make her to clean up the coffee which would have spattered all over the white surface of the stove, maybe onto the walls and floor, that the pot would be ruined, that the kitchen would be full of the dark, bitter, ruined smell of burnt coffee for days, perhaps.

"It's time you left," she said, and he obeyed her.

She was glad of his obedience. It made her feel that she had done her job and done it well.

As she wiped the brown spots from the stove, the walls, the floor, imagining all the time what he might be doing as she scrubbed, she knew that she was feeling something like what others might call happiness.

She thought it was unlikely that he would say anything of what had happened to his mother, and too bad she could say nothing to hers.

I Need to Tell Three Stories.

and to Speak of Love and Death.

I want to tell someone these stories that have come together as one story in my mind. There is no reason to connect these stories. Only one of them happened to me, not in the sense that it was done to me, but I was there when it happened. The other two were told to me by a friend who was dying at the time we spoke, but neither of us knew that he was dying.

The person who told me the stories has been, for forty years, the lover of one of my closest friends. I will call the lover of my friend N. You should know that both of them are men.

We were sitting at the dining table, a long refectory table, in my friend and N.'s London flat. The flat is very beautiful; a place of elegance and order. N. and my friend are close to many artists; on the walls of the living room, or sitting room as they would call it, are paintings and drawings and some sculptures by the artists who are their friends.

N. is famously fastidious. Guests are warned: There are twelve rules for the bathroom alone. The toilet paper must unroll upward and not downwards. The towels must be two inches apart. The showerhead must be replaced exactly. There are more rules, but I do not remember them. I would like you to remember this, this fastidiousness, the lapse from which you will witness when you hear the third of the stories. I believe that there is an ideal of fastidiousness in the world. An ideal of impossible purity in a world that is, in its very essence, impure.

I don't remember why N. was telling me these stories, why he began telling me the story of his friend and her father. We must have been talking about fathers. I don't remember why or what we said. I am very often thinking about my father, but I work hard on not talking about him as much as I would like. In part, I think I can't talk about him because I have written about him so much that I'm afraid all talk about him is not real talk but literature. I do not want to turn my father into literature. So I talk about him rarely, when I'm sure that what I'm saying is something simple, something I have not gone over and over in my mind.

My father died when I was seven.

My father, whose love for me s.h.i.+nes always on the horizon of who I am: pure, glowing, unblemished. The moon of my father's love over the lake surface of my life. Like a romantic painting: the black or purple sky, the black or dark green sea, the wide moon slinging spears of light across the darkness.

It is possible, of course, that I didn't mention my father at all, perhaps N. only mentioned the woman, only told her story because he was about to meet her for supper that night. I don't remember, I really don't. The story is so powerful that it obliterates the lead-up, like a wave that would obliterate a path to the sh.o.r.e. This was the story as he told it: "My friend loved her father very much. He was a scholar and she herself became a scholar in the very field where he had achieved his eminence. Her father was very handsome and very charming and her mother was beautiful but cold. She did not love her mother and she believed her father did not love her mother. She believed, although they never spoke of it, that her father loved her more than he loved her mother. She was actually quite sure of that.

"Her father died when she was twenty-four. Some months after he died, her mother said she had something that the daughter must see. She took her daughter up to the attic of their house and opened an old trunk. In the trunk there were many notebooks.

" ? found these after your father died,' the mother said. ? think that you should see them.'

"When my friend opened the journals and began reading she discovered that they were the record of explicit p.o.r.nographic fantasies that her father had had about her from the time that she was a very little child. My friend had a nervous breakdown. She has never recovered."

When N. tells me this, I try to make a heading under which to file this story in my mind. I have several from which to choose: Moments that are never recovered from Causes of rage and hate Unspeakable desires Ugliness that should be hidden or destroyed She thought she had what I have with my father: pure, unblemished love. Safety, clarity, a place as clean and sheltering as my friend's flat. Fastidious.