The Liar's Wife (30 page)

It wasn't long after Confirmation that she developed breasts. Breasts that she believed were an embarrassment to everyone. When she was twelve, her mother took her shopping for her first bra and she felt her mother was mortified. “I didn't mean for this to happen,” she wanted to say to everyone, as she now wanted to say to everyone, “He was a weak man.”

None of the women she admired had large breasts. Joan Gallagher was straight and slim and boyish. She wore trouser suits and flat shoes and her hair was cut very short. You wouldn't say that she was mannish, only that her femaleness didn't get in the way. You didn't have to think about it. But Theresa knew that how she looked was something she had to attend to. Making sure people weren't thinking about her body. She deliberately bought clothes that were too big for her. Once Sister Ann Claire, who Theresa would never have believed thought about clothes—all she ever wore were navy blue skirts and white shirts or sweaters—said to her, “Theresa, you should wear clothes more appropriate to your age. You're a lovely girl, it's a gift from God, don't try to hide it.”

But if all that started up, “all that” was the way she thought of it—boys coming around, boys wanting her attention—it would be one more thing for her mother to contend with. And with Theresa's father, they had their hands full. There wasn't room in their lives for one more difficult thing.

She had some memories of a healthy father. Being held in strong arms, being pushed on a swing. Her father had been a construction worker, and a beam had fallen on his spine. He'd walked out of the house in the morning a healthy man, a strong man, husband of his wife, father of his four-year-old daughter. He had come back ruined, a cripple, a child.

He was away from them a long time, two years in rehabilitation, where they were teaching him to walk or walk a bit with the aid of a walker, so at least he could take himself back and forth to the bathroom.
Or they would never have sent him home. If he hadn't been able to take himself to the bathroom, they would have kept him there forever.

He had the mind of a child, a pleasant cheerful child. They had no idea what he understood. He was almost wholly silent.

They'd longed to have him home, the both of them. She was nearly seven the day they went to pick him up. For two years, her weeks had been shaped by Sunday visits. Wake up now, you don't want to be late for Daddy, don't wiggle while I braid your hair, Daddy wants to see a pretty girl. She'd dreamed of a life not shaped by those Sunday visits and their accompanying dread. Wards of grey-skinned men, their legs disgustingly bare in short hospital gowns, tubes coming from their arms or noses, bags full of liquids whose source and provenance she didn't want to know.

For a while, just having him home made everyone happy. For a while. But only for a while. For a while, he was her mother's prize, her big child, whom she would help dress and help to settle himself in front of the television. For a while they believed he would get better. Theresa was happy just to be in his presence. But after three months, or six months was it, she and her mother realized that the happy time of their life was over. Without saying it, they both knew that they missed their leisurely breakfasts, just the two of them, without the father to be tended to, their evenings of watching TV in a living room that was a living room, not something dominated by a hospital bed. Days when they could go shopping or to a movie without the fear that he had fallen, hurt himself, died.

Her mother, never a patient woman, now grew chronically short-tempered. The part-time nurses were undependable; some days they wouldn't show up and Theresa's mother would have to stay home. The insurance company she worked for was understanding, but Theresa's mother knew her husband's needs jeopardized her position. “I've given up all hope of job advancement. I'll just stay where I am till I die. If I'm lucky enough that they keep me.”

Theresa knew her mother wished there was some way to send her husband back to rehab, some way that wouldn't lead the parish, especially Father Anstey, who was strict about family obligations, to think of her as an unloving woman, a monster of selfishness. A failure as a
Christian and a wife. But Theresa didn't want her father to go away again. His presence nourished her; she always felt his goodwill towards her was unequivocal, as her mother's was not. They would often sit quietly, watching television. She would talk to him about what she'd learned at school. She had no idea what he understood. But he smiled and nodded, and she told herself that he was pleased. Sometimes if she came home early, she'd see him with his head in his hands. He might have been crying; she didn't want to know.

“Your mother's a saint to keep everything up,” Sister Peg had said to her, when she was ten years old. She was the first to tell her, but by no means the last, “You must never let her down.”

She had understood that. She had never given offense, never failed, taken every honor. She treasured the half smile on her mother's face with the news of every prize, every time her name was called for special recognition. Her abashed pleasure when Joan Gallagher had said to her mother, “She's the real thing, your daughter. The real thing.”

It was Joan Gallagher who had put her in the path of Tom Ferguson. They'd been graduate students together at Penn. Sometimes she wanted to shout at Joan Gallagher, “You ought to have kept me from him. You ought to have known.”

But it was no one's fault but her own. Tom Ferguson was a weak man; she'd been the one to make things happen. It was all over now and no one was the wiser. She was grateful, at least for that. And if she'd gone through what she'd gone through because Joan Gallagher had put her in Tom Ferguson's path, well, she was here for the same reason, on the train from Pisa to Lucca.

When, leaving for New Haven, Theresa had thanked Joan Gallagher for everything she'd done, she'd said, “It's in my interest. You'll come back here, teach in the department next to me, we'll keep something going. We'll make sure it's not all lost. But you'll go farther than I, I can tell. You're not so distracted by ordinary life as I am.”

Theresa had been hurt by that. She had wanted to say, “Ordinary life was a luxury my mother and I couldn't afford.” She had read Tom Ferguson's
Italian Sculpture 1300–1500
, in awe of the daring, the bravado,
so different from Joan Gallagher's careful exigent prose. She couldn't believe she would be studying with him.

“First of all, Theresa, you're a wonderful student, fantastically well qualified. And second, Tom Ferguson will do anything I tell him. I've known him since he was twenty-two, straight out of the University of Illinois. Before he met the lovely Amaryllis. He was the son of someone who owned a stationery store in Normal, Illinois. Parents who loved him but thought it would be better if he went in for something practical. Oh, how he rails against his parents, even now, twenty years later, compares them with Amaryllis's fabulous forebears. It makes me quite sick, and I tell him that. I think he likes it that I keep him in line. When he doesn't resent it, that is. He's made all the right moves, married a rich woman, tenure at Yale. The fact that he's lost his soul in the process seems to be, to him, neither here nor there. Nevertheless, he has a first-rate mind. Nothing's affected that.”

“I've come a long way, a very long way. You and I, we know about something that a lot of these others don't,” he'd said to her in bed one night. Perhaps he was tired, or had had too much wine. Usually, he made no allusion to his past.

For a while, she believed the choices he'd made had rendered Joan Gallagher's pathetic. He'd pushed his way to the front. Were his initial gifts superior to Joan's? She knew they weren't, but they weren't inferior, she couldn't diminish his accomplishments, his learning. His Latin was the envy of all the classicists. His memory for images was so great he could use it as a party trick. And he could understand all the theoreticians, although, on the whole, he dismissed them. Learning that there were treasures to be explored in Budapest, he was teaching himself Hungarian, a language everyone agreed was impossible.

And yet everyone sort of knew that the kind of career he had was partly due to his marriage.

The face of Amaryllis Ferguson is suddenly on the Italian train.
Leave now. Don't you see what I've done to be away from you. I am in Italy. You can't follow me.
But the words didn't sound right in her ear. Theresa wasn't the kind of person for this overwrought diction. For crying out, even in the privacy of her own mind. Particularly crying out to a woman sitting comfortably in her living room in Stonington,
Connecticut, listening to bluegrass while she sat at her loom. “We can't afford that kind of dramatics,” her mother would say if Theresa ever seemed upset about something.

She made herself focus on the silver leaves of the olive trees. She made herself listen to the women gossiping in the seat behind her, trying to make out their Italian. I will not, will not, she told herself, think of Amaryllis Ferguson. Or her husband. Because that is who he is.

“You can't imagine how impressed I was by her family,” he'd said, when they had hardly been lovers for two weeks. “I owe them so much. I was a lump when I met her, a lively lump, but a lump nevertheless. The original overachiever. The original overachieving boy. My God, then I thought everything was exciting.”

And now, she wanted to say, you think nothing is.

He explained to her, making sure that she understood the significance, that when he met Amaryllis her father was the Sterling Professor at Princeton. “Author of the landmark, and I mean the landmark, Theresa, you can't understand how important his work was then, the landmark book on the Rococo. A period that still isn't given its due: He was a real pioneer. A most remarkable man, my father-in-law. After a while, I think, he grew to like me, though I know for a long time he thought I was a pretentious upstart. Just before he died, he said to me, ‘You know, Tom, I've spent a life studying the decorations of a frivolous and wasteful people. Was it a frivolous and wasteful pursuit, would you say? A frivolous and wasteful life?' I think it meant a lot to him when I said, ‘Oh now, John, what you've done will live after you. Will live forever.' ”

But would it? Theresa wasn't sure what would live forever; she wasn't sure if anyone would even be reading books in twenty years, by the time she had children, to say nothing of grandchildren. And was it something that was worth a life, analyzing the social implications of things almost no one cared about? But she wouldn't say that. Not to Tom Ferguson, whom she so admired. With whom she was in love.

“And of course the marriage was a great romance,” Tom said. “You know who Amaryllis's mother was?”

“I don't,” Theresa said apologetically. Although she didn't know why he was telling her all about his wife's parents when he was in bed
with her. When he had just become her lover. Her first lover, though she believed he didn't know that. What had happened to her hymen? She'd been afraid of the pain of her first encounter, but it hadn't arrived. Had she fallen off a bicycle? Had she been born a freak? Or was it just a lifelong habit of stoicism that made her not notice what other people would call pain?

“You've heard of Millicent MacCarthy?”

“I'm afraid I haven't,” she said. Shame at her ignorance caused her to cover her breasts with the sheet.

“I'm sure you'd recognize her face. She was a great star in the thirties. British of course. Playing opposite Alec Guinness and that lot in the early Ealing films.”

“The Alec Guinness that was in
Star Wars
?”

“God bless your limited little brain. Is it that you haven't seen anything produced before nineteen seventy? No, that's not true, you've seen quite a lot produced before sixteen hundred. But my God, my darling, there are serious gaps. Which I'm thrilled to be filling in.” He made a comic lascivious face.

“Of course,” he said, “you're streets away from some of your cohort, who believe that because they've seen every film noir ever made, it doesn't matter that they haven't read Dante.”

“I've read Dante in the original,” she said, and then was mortified at how she sounded, how ridiculous it was to be saying this when she was naked in her lover's bed.

“Of course you have, my darling,” he said, nuzzling her. “I used to think they'd done you a terrible disservice, keeping you in that backwater little college. But I had to understand that, intellectually, you're better prepared than almost any student I've had. But it's as if you were some sort of princess of a minor country, educated in the palace, but forbidden to walk the streets. Joan, of course, crammed you with an incredible amount of good stuff. But you've never taken part in the rough-and-tumble, the scrimmage with your peers that's so good for sharpening and toughening the mind. So in some ways you're a sort of innocent savant, aren't you. Luckily, you have the skin and breasts of a Titian so I'm entirely at your feet.”

“Rapture” was the word that went through her mind as he put his
mouth on her breasts. I am feeling rapture. And she could hear her mother's voice saying, “Rapture is not something the likes of us can afford.” But her mother's voice was quite soon very easy to drown out.

She had never been happier. Part of her joy came from the element of surprise. She had never thought of this happening to her. When she thought of her future in relation to men, she felt hopeless. She had no model into which she could fit herself in relation to a man. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to be married to someone like Harrison Ford. But what would it mean to be married to Harrison Ford? She hardly knew any men. Her father hardly qualified as a man. And she'd gone to school apart from men and boys until Yale.

She knew she didn't want a marriage like Joan Gallagher's; she was married to someone she couldn't talk to about her work. Her husband was a podiatrist. Tom had said she'd married him just because she had an instinct for the perverse. “I think it's because her father was an undertaker. Actually made a fortune in funeral parlors.” Theresa didn't know what the connection was. But she would never have wanted to be part of a marriage that anyone could so easily mock.