Pearl (6 page)

Except that then the boys in their sweaty jackets do things to them, make the girls want them; when the girls leave them they want to take their nightgowns off, take the sheets off their mattresses to feel the rough ticking on their skins, they want the boys’ hands, they can’t stop thinking of them, they are restless in their dormitories, they would like to climb out windows and meet boys in the dark. They would like to give over their bodies, which they are afraid to look at and yet guess somehow are beautiful. That is why they run outside in thunderstorms or jump into Cassie Maguire’s pool at three in the morning. There is something abroad that is dark, something not nice, not kind and benevolent, like the world they easily inhabited six months earlier. Their bodies are pulling them into the world. They see the beautiful white face of Mother Dulcissima and believe, because of what happened when the boys in sweaty jackets touched their breasts (none of them would let any boy, as they said, “go further”), that for the first time there are things they know that she does not. Will never. And so their admiration for her becomes mixed with pity and they understand soon that they need not call it admiration anymore.

They still believe that they will change the world. Rumblings come to them from Southeast Asia, but vaguely, indistinctly. Soon they will hear only that, and they will be able to believe in nothing.

In 1965, the weather changes from high summer to sick dog days; the air is filled with smoke and the sun is never healthy; everything it falls on becomes livid, ill. Everyone is afraid but they don’t say that; they say that they are angry. Anger is the weather of the day. Anger is most often in those days called rage. The president’s face is diabolical; Maria and her friends understand it is the face of all the men who want to hurt them, who they will never allow to touch them, who they would never marry. The president lifts his dog up by the ears; he shows the world the scar on his hairy stomach. He sends children to their deaths, he will send their friends to their deaths; he says he is doing it for them, for Maria and her friends and girls like them. The newspapers are full of death, not the heraldic death of John Kennedy, to the accompaniment of bagpipes, but the deaths of strangers continents away, people who do not look like Maria and her friends, and there is fire in the cities and fear the cities will burn down and perhaps—who knows?—in the name of justice they ought to. Boys their age are dead, buried in pits with hundreds of others. Asian children run in flame.

In 1967, Maria disappoints the nuns, choosing Radcliffe over Manhattanville. She goes to demonstrations. She loses her virginity.

.  .  .  

Then it is 1968. It is the spring of the terrible deaths, King and another Kennedy, and there is no hope, only more rage, more fear, more death. What should be done? Fight or smoke till nothing matters? Turn on, drop out, or forgive nothing? Armed or stoned, which are you? Certainly nothing you thought you were, not the nice girl you thought you were, the loving girl, the hopeful girl. It isn’t so long ago that you were a hopeful girl, maybe only five years, October of 1963.

Maria and her friends have to learn new words:
napalm, friendly fire
. Death is surrounded by lies. They do not know what to believe. The men they thought of as, if not their fathers, then something like their fathers, are lying to them again and again, and people like them, boys like them—or not like them, poorer boys, but boys their age—are dying because of those lies, and if they believe the lies they are with those men in the party of death. The men they thought of as their fathers, men like their fathers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, cannot be believed. No one can be believed. Maria knows her father cannot be believed. He keeps using the word
communism
. She keeps telling him he doesn’t understand communism. The North Vietnamese, Mao and the Chinese he leads, she says, are agrarian idealists, heroes. In years to come, Maria and her friends will discover that they were wrong about the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, but their fathers were wrong too, and their inability to determine who was more wrong will hobble their minds—the parts of their minds that think about the larger world—for years and years.

Colored lights cut through the sickish air. They dance till they fall on their backs, fall in a group embrace; they sing, “Looking for fun and feeling groovy,” and a minute later they see a child running in napalm fire; and
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
is the same time as the March on the Pentagon, where people like Maria and her friends for the first time cannot breathe because the police, who four years earlier they thought of as their friends, are not their friends; they tear-gas people like Maria, who then call them motherfuckers, although Maria and her friends had never heard the word three years before when the weather was different. So which is it, which is real, which is the truth: “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends” or bayoneted children?

I am not a good enough historian to say whether or not there were other periods in history like those ten years, eleven maybe, 1962 to 1973, the year before the death of John Kennedy to the year of Watergate, years in which so easily, so quickly, you became a person you would not have recognized. The Maria of 1962 would not have recognized the Maria of 1968. The Maria of 1962 was a hopeful girl; the Maria of 1968 was not. Perhaps this uncertainty marks my failure as a chronicler. Nevertheless, this is the way I must tell the story of those times.

It is May 1970: Kent State. The girl, kneeling, outraged, shocked, beside her dead friend. Students like Maria and her friends, shot by the Ohio National Guard. People like Maria and her friends who did not believe that people in American uniforms would shoot people like them. People in uniform were their fathers in the good war. But not Maria’s father. Too frail. His eyesight.

A week after Kent State, Maria’s father calls her and asks her to come home. He says he’s been a bit ill but he didn’t want to worry her; she has seemed so absorbed in her studies.

She has not been absorbed in her studies. She sleeps through her classes. Everything important happens at night: she goes to meetings all night, night after night; that semester everything is pass/fail and nearly everybody passes everything doing the absolute minimum, one night spent doing a term’s work, another all-nighter after months of all-night meetings, shouting, raising their fists. They turn their attention to metaphysical poetry, the sonata form. They pass through the university, the university which, they think, perhaps should be burnt down because it can exist only if it takes money from defense contractors. Wasn’t napalm invented at a university, doesn’t the company that invented it support the university?

Yes, Papa, she says, I’ve been very absorbed in my work. Lying to her parents like everyone does in those days. I’ve been very busy. She must spare him. He has been ill.

It is difficult for her to call him Papa, her childhood name for him, given the facts of her life (the filthy room, the filthy dishes, the sheets that don’t fit the mattress, the new knowledge that men like her father are murderers, the smell of Ortho-Gynol jelly that clings to her clothing). But she can only call him Papa. What else can she call him? Not only is she frightened of the evil of the world, the death machine, she is frightened of the weakness of her father’s body. She does not want to be his treasure, but she is. His treasure, the rest of which is made up of things that her boyfriend, William, says are produced by the death machine. But because her father has said to the world: Preserve, preserve my treasure, she has always felt that, whatever else happens, she will be preserved.

Her father says he needs an operation, that his heart has a little squeak and needs to be fixed: not an emergency but something that must be dealt with. He’s set a day for the operation. Will she be there beside him?

Of course, Papa, she says. She doesn’t know what she will say to William Ogilvie, who shares the mattress and the greasy sheets, William, who may be hiding guns in the basement. Violence is the only language they understand, he says. You know that, don’t you? And she says, Yes, of course I understand. She understands because he’s said that if she doesn’t agree with him it’s her weakness. But she will not give in to her weakness, and she will refuse her privilege. She believes what he says, partly because it makes her afraid, and she knows she must get over fear; that is the only way to be strong; she must love truth more than comfort, justice more than mercy; she must cast her lot with those who will give their lives to end injustice and oppression. She is afraid all the time, but she thinks it’s right to be afraid, it’s the only honest thing, because the times are evil and in the presence of evil the honest are afraid.

What will William Ogilvie say if there’s an important meeting or an important demonstration on the day she’s said she’ll be at her father’s side at the hospital? She tells him she has to go somewhere, but she can’t give him the details. She hints that she’s going away with another man, thinks he will admire her for that, call it independence, but in fact he barely notices that she’s gone; he is busy smashing the war machine, he is busy with the revolution.

William Ogilvie—Billy—knows nothing about her father.

The night before her father checks into the hospital, Joseph and Maria and he have a peaceful, harmonious, enjoyable dinner. For the first time in years they don’t argue about politics.

Joseph and Maria wait six hours in the hospital while Dr. Meyers is operated on. Even while her father’s chest is an open cavity, she listens to the news; when the doctors speak of invasive surgery she hears the word
invasive
and thinks of the invasion of Cambodia; even while she is worried that her father is at the door of death, she reads the newspaper, she traces the location of the troops.

The operation is successful. She sees her father, pale in his white bed. She holds his beautiful fine hand. She stays with him a week; she misses classes, but it is the year of Cambodia, the year of Kent State, after all, and regular attendance no longer seems important.

When she gets back to Cambridge, she is met with the end of everything. The filthy house is empty and, in its emptiness, no less squalid. While she was away, the FBI came in the night and found boxes of guns in the basement and material for making bombs. Billy has been arrested; he is in jail with some of the other people who were staying in the house, people whom she’d met but whose real names she was not allowed to know.

She tells the police she should be in jail; she lived in the house too. The police say there’s no evidence she was involved; she’s registered in the Radcliffe dormitories, and there is no record of her presence in that house. She insists she is guilty; they insist she is not. Go home, honey, they say, go home to your father; you’ve got friends in high places, take advantage of it. Go while the going’s good. But the going is not good, and she cannot make it good, and she cannot make them arrest her.

It is true, I suppose, that she could have done something to make them arrest her. Thrown a bottle through the police station window. Chained herself to something, as her daughter would later do. It is strange that she only railed; Maria did not act, as her daughter is now acting, Maria, whose enduring belief is in the liberating force of action.

All she did was shout at the police and beg Billy to believe that she didn’t know what was happening. He doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t want anything to do with her. He goes to jail for six months only, because he is a Harvard student, a PhD candidate in microbiology, and the guns and explosives had not been used.

She begins to be suspicious. “Go home to your father . . . friends in high places.” The name of the FBI agent on the case is Ryan. She remembers that her father’s very good friend, Monsignor Ryan from the chancery, has a brother in the FBI.

She doesn’t care that her father is weak, that he has just been operated on. She borrows a car and drives, at top speed, to Larchmont. She throws open her father’s bedroom door. Her father is in bed but she knows that whatever else he’s done, he won’t tell an outright lie.

She says, “Did you know my friends were going to be arrested? Did you arrange to have the operation so I would be with you when it happened?”

White, his white face against the white pillow, his white hands holding a black rosary, sign of the church. Monsignor Ryan’s church, Maria thinks, church of the FBI.

“Say it, say you trapped me. Admit you lied to me!”

“I never lied to you.”

“Spare me your Jesuitical machinations.”

Even in her rage, she does not use, with her father, the diction of her friends. She doesn’t say “Jesuitical bullshit,” which is what comes to her mind; she says “Jesuitical machinations.”

And those are the last words she says to her father.

Pearl knows nothing of all this. Would it be better if she had known? If she had known about her mother’s past, her mother’s anguish and confusion when she was the same age, might she have gone to her in her own time of anguish? It doesn’t matter. Pearl didn’t know. She never went to her mother. She never thought of her mother as someone with a life in history. As a character in a chronicle. Does any child?

5

We will leave Maria now in her first-class seat. A woman who has always been in love with movement, now in terror for her child, trapped in a severely circumscribed place.

Joseph, on the other hand, is on the streets of Rome. We have been talking about history, so it would seem appropriate to follow him, in this city where more of the history of the West is centered than in any other place: the history of the West, the history of the Roman Catholic Church, from which, after all, Joseph makes his living. A strange phrase, that,
making a living
. As if living were something that could be made.

Joseph leaves his hotel, the Santa Chiara in Piazza Minerva, a few feet away from the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where, atop Bernini’s elephant with its heaving saddle, stands an obelisk, found in the church’s garden and preserved by learned monks, a monument to the Egyptian goddess Isis. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva: the Virgin mother atop the Roman goddess of wisdom and, on top of that, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. A mishmash, a mix-up, no pure statement possible; contradictions stacked one on top of the other, no structure, no hierarchy: just a pile. A pile of history, a pile of understandings. Chockablock.

Maria called with the news of Pearl at 6 a.m. Joseph knew he couldn’t book a flight till ten and he couldn’t bear waiting in his hotel, so he went out into the street. Now he walks from the Piazza Minerva to the Campo de’ Fiori. He is terrified. He walks stiffly, as if any wrong step could bring about disaster.

Two days earlier, Christmas eve, Joseph took the same walk, under a Roman sky that suggested nothing of the implacability of northern winter. The sky was frothy, like the bay before a storm; it made you think of water more than air, its movement more textured than air and less abstract. The night sky was white, and everywhere he went there seemed to be the scent of carnations and mimosas, of peeled oranges, of celery, apples, violets, discarded Christmas roses like stains or blood against the gray cobblestones.

He walked to the Piazza Navona, festooned with tinsel strung from palazzo to palazzo (this too for tourists). He was killing time until he could return to the Campo. Killing time (as he is now), looking at Bernini’s great male gods who obviously cared nothing about the birth of a baby in a stable. What he wanted to see was the cleanup of the Campo, the moment of transformation, of transition from color and activity and bustle to the matte palette of black cobblestone and whitish marble, the harsh puritanical figure of Giordano Bruno. Joseph wondered, every time he entered the Campo, what Bruno made of it all: the fruit, the flowers, the cheap toys and plastic buckets, the machine-knit woolen hats, the numbers called out: cheerfully? mendaciously? What can he be thinking? Joseph would wonder, looking up at the hooded statue, its face invisible, Bruno burnt by the church for insisting on our right to tell the truth. Was this, Joseph wondered, Bruno’s last punishment, to be placed amid this friendly chaos, the amorality of easily satisfied appetite?

How happy Joseph had been—was it only two days earlier?—watching the peddlers pick up, put away, sweep up. He was there when it happened. He saw it. He made note of it: the end of bustle and tumult, the return of calm, the pale moon barely visible in the whitish sky, the harsher yellow-white of the electric streetlights.

He cannot be happy now. The sellers are putting out their wares, their colorful fish and fruits and vegetables. But what he wants this morning isn’t there. He walks behind the Campo to the Piazza Farnese. He is surrounded by palazzi that suggest judgment cruelly or carelessly meted out. He wonders if Pearl will be judged by official forces. She has broken the law, chained herself to a government building. He looks at the harsh palazzi of the Piazza Farnese. At the streetlamps, too bright when illuminated, as if placed there for interrogation. Will Pearl be interrogated? Is she protecting someone? Is she someone’s pawn? Is there vital information she will not give up? He wonders where these questions have come from, how they have entered his brain. Whether they’ve come from some book, a boy’s book, an adventure he would have thought had nothing to do with his life, the kind of book he’d never liked, not even as a child.

He loves the beautiful streets of Rome; nothing in his life has brought him more joy than the contemplation of beautiful things. But he can’t concentrate on anything, his eye can stay on nothing; his mind can only go to Pearl. She is in danger. He sees her on a stretcher, white and flat, her eyes closed. He cannot banish this image. He can’t do what Maria would do. Don’t think of it, she would say. I can’t help it, he would answer. Or no, he would say nothing. But he would be unable to do as she said.

And when his mind makes the image of Pearl, lying flat and white, it cannot banish another image that rises up alongside it—as if his mind were a book and on one side there was the image of Pearl and on the other side: Ilaria del Carretto, the fifteenth-century white marble figure on the top of a sarcophagus he had seen in Lucca.

He had made a special trip to Tuscany to see the figure. He had come across a desciption of it by Ruskin in a biography he had picked up for $2.50 from a table on Broadway at 72nd Street. The book was beside
Low Fat Cooking for One,
an anthology of Russian poetry, and Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth.

It was one of the things he liked best about New York, the surprise encounter, the odd juxtaposition, coming upon a book he really wanted to read when he thought he was out shopping for his dinner: a trip to Fairway for a salmon steak, a head of broccoli, two whole wheat rolls, a carton of raspberry sorbet. And then this book, which he calculated would be perfect for his upcoming trip to Italy. He always took one large paperback with him, an experienced traveler’s strategy he’s proud of. A serious book, a book he wanted to read but might not get around to in his ordinary life. So that he could mark each journey not only by a business trip successfully completed but by a book satisfactorily read.

He hadn’t thought about Ruskin since college. He had been an art history major and had very much liked Ruskin’s embellished descriptions, his exact, perhaps obsessive prose. Poor Ruskin, father of art history, patron saint of careful looking. If you ask the average man about him he will say he’s someone who went berserk on his wedding night because he discovered women are not statues and have pubic hair. No. If you ask the average man about him, he will never have heard of him. Yet it is possible that no one in the history of the world has known better how to
look
than this man. Madman, eunuch, genius eye.

Reading Ruskin’s description of the figure of Ilaria del Carretto, Joseph had decided to take a day trip from Rome to Lucca. Why not? He had planned enough time so that he could do his work—buying vestments, clerical linens, chalices, and ciboria from the stores surrounding the Piazza Minerva—and still have the kind of holiday he liked. Why not? No one was waiting for him in New York; he was president of the company. He could please himself.

And he had pleased himself in the quiet, orderly Tuscan city, following Ruskin’s lead to the tomb of Ilaria. There he fell in love with the white, peaceful girl, so comfortable on her marble pillow—her elegantly carved curls, her small breasts, her narrow waist, her slender folded hands perfect in a beauty that would never change. Ilaria would not grow old or thick or coarse. Ilaria would remain perfect.

It distresses him to think of Ilaria as he thinks of Pearl. Pearl is alive; Pearl will remain alive. She must. It is only art that finds a beautiful stillness in death. Pearl must not die. With Pearl dead, there would be nothing in the world worth seeing. Today, thinking of her, his eye can take in nothing. His eye is useless; no images on the streets—that only yesterday brought him such joy—can penetrate his mind. No image can banish the one of Pearl: white, flat, on the stretcher, close to death.

He feels his spine has been hollowed out. A glass tube has replaced solid bone; inside it, thick, black, electric, a wire thrums at the thought of her image: pale, stretched out, no longer alive. He doesn’t understand. He imagines she thinks he understands. His failure to understand shames him; mixes the terror with a thicker, duller residue. He must walk; there is nothing else to do. It’s seven-thirty. The ticket office won’t open till ten. He walks, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, saying to no one whose face he can imagine:
Please, please keep her alive.
The closed eyes of Ilaria come to him, and he wills them away. And then the words again:
Keep her alive.

.  .  .  

As a child, there was a face he might have imagined responding to such a request. He would have called it prayer. Then he would have prayed simply; now he cannot. Some things of the child have, of course, endured in the man, but not this habit, not this ability to call up a prayable face.

What kind of child was Joseph? A good child. A grateful child. A child who was told with his every breath, “You must be very grateful.”

He has never been without this sense of obligation. He knew, always, who he was: a servant’s son. A servant’s son who had been plucked out of the gray dead world he’d been born into, plucked by shapely fingers and cradled in the fine white palm of Seymour Meyers, given what had not been his birthright: education and access to the highest things men have created, treasured, prized.

This is Joseph’s story. Is it part of the chronicle? Joseph has never been representative of his time as Maria was. Never has he asked himself the question so important to his generation: What will make me happy? Instead, he has asked himself, What should I be doing now?

“You are a lucky boy,” his mother told him repeatedly. By
lucky
she meant the recipient of good luck. If good luck is nothing but the benevolent hand of chance, we’d have to say it was a series of lucky chances that brought Joseph and his mother to the house of Seymour Meyers in the spring of 1951. And if we place these lucky chances in the cup of history, Joseph’s story is part of the chronicle not of the sixties but of the thirties and the forties: the history of the Second World War.

It wasn’t until he was in his thirties that Joseph learned the story of his parents’ marriage. During a period when he was desperately trying to find out about his father, he tracked down his mother’s cousin, a machinist living near Rochester. “I know this sheds a bad light on your mother’s family, but don’t think of it that way. Think of the times.” The suggestion, by a decent man, of the details of an indecent act.

Adam Kasperzkowski, Joseph’s father, was a distant cousin of Marie Wolinski, Joseph’s mother, from the same town in Galicia as her parents. Poor farmers. They feared the Communists. The Communists were devils. Adam needed to be sent to America to keep his faith.

And who was Adam, in America, to the Americans? A young man who became Marie Wolinski’s husband. A young man who had been starving in postwar Poland. Adam Kasperzkowski, changing his name in New York at the suggestion of the Wolinski family—so difficult, those z’s, don’t show yourself too foreign—to Adam Kasperman. Adam, the first man. Brought to America. Bought by America. And how was this bargain made? “Marry this woman, this unmarriageable because unbeautiful woman, and you will buy yourself prosperity.”

They married and moved to Detroit. Adam got a job in a Ford automotive plant. Joseph was conceived. Joseph was born. And then, while he was still an infant, the cliché line: Adam said he was just going out for a pack of cigarettes; Adam was never seen again. He disappeared into the fog of America.

Father Lipinski, an uncle of Adam Kasperman, was the chaplain in a home for blind children in the Bronx. He hired Marie as a cook: the workings of the fostering, manipulative hand of Holy Mother Church, a wise and practical housewife, keeping her children alive and healthy. And then another manipulation: a colleague of Father Lipinski, Monsignor Ryan, friend of Dr. Seymour Meyers (such a fine man, such a tragedy, his wife’s death to cancer, the two-year-old child). Seymour Meyers needed a housekeeper. Marie Kasperman was put to work for the grief-stricken Seymour Meyers, in need of someone to watch his house and care for his two-year-old daughter, nearly the same age as Marie Kasperman’s fatherless son, Joseph.

His mother, a servant. Marie Wolinski Kasperman, a girl born in western New York State to Polish farmers, raised on an ungenerous soil. Dirt poor, she liked to say, though we had our self-respect; we always kept ourselves clean. Her battle a fight to the death with dirt and disorder. Wasn’t there something admirable in that? But there was no love bestowed on what dirt was kept from. Only enmity. Only a confusion between dirt and life.

He remembers there were some things she liked. A teacup: white, thin, with red roses. She liked her needlepoint hassock, on which she would rest her aching, tired feet. He wished he could have been the kind of boy who took tired feet in loving hands and said, “Mother, let me rub your feet. What can I do for you, Mother?” Instead of always the recoil from her presence, the polite, abashed, always guilt-ridden dutifulness, the self-hate born of unease around her body. Who do you think you are, he would ask himself, that your flesh crawls at the nearness of your mother’s flesh? Do you think you’re something better? No, he knew that he was not. If he is his mother’s son, he must be her. Whenever he began to think that he might be something else, he didn’t know how to name it, so he decided it was impossible.

Beauty and fineness. “Your father had looks, I’ll give him that.” This was said reluctantly, as if she’d take away his father’s visibility if she could, as she had tried to do by cutting his face out of photographs. Instead of his father’s face, an empty oval.

Joseph has often wondered what his life would have been like if he had not been set down by some merciful and tender hand into the palm of Seymour Meyers, devoted to the beautiful, the fine. How could he fail to be grateful? He was a child abandoned by his father, a gifted child born to an ungifted mother and introduced to a greater world. An introduction that meant he would always place himself at an uneasy distance from his mother.