The Metropolis (10 page)

“Do you think he’d want to hear you say that?” It was now Hank’s turn to act hurt. “He’s a smart kid, Jane—he can think for himself.”

“Hank, how can you say that when he’s spent his entire life playing hockey, just to make you happy?”

A heavy sigh from Hank seemed to conclude the discussion. “I think you should take a look at who’s really being selfish here.”

Martin was both disturbed and—though he didn’t like to admit this—oddly exhilarated to see this unprecedented fissure, particularly
when he knew that there was no longer any compromise he could make—short of dividing himself in two—to keep them both happy. He was beginning to detect the existence of some chthonic vein of truth—though whether in himself, the world, or both, he could not have said—that could be mined only away from his parents, so that he sometimes viewed their discord with satisfaction, as though they deserved the misery they inflicted on each other; but then he would feel disgusted with himself, and it would occur to him that he had already been split in two, just not in the way anyone could appreciate.

Worn down, Jane eventually agreed to visit. On a winter day in February 1975, they left a Pittsburgh still euphoric from the Steelers’ first Super Bowl win over the Vikings, and five hours later arrived at the school—Cranbrook, about twenty miles north of Detroit. Founded in 1928 by a newspaper baron and designed with an unlimited budget by the Finnish modernist Eliel Saarinen, the campus looked like a piece of Versailles that had been transported to Michigan via Fallingwater. While Hank remained oblivious to the artistic splendor—except to express admiration for the obvious cost of building and maintaining it—Martin knew from his mother’s quiet gasps that it resonated with her in exactly the same way it did for him; except while he observed the passing landscape with a remote and barely elucidated pleasure, she discreetly cried when confronted by the serene juxtaposition of snowy woods and hulking works of abstract sculpture. Even the hockey rink, situated outdoors in a small wooded ravine, exuded a last-century utopian charm, as if you expected to see ladies in petticoats skating arm in arm with gentlemen in tails and top hats, and so it seemed impossible—until you heard the sharp crack of the sticks against the ice and saw incongruously large and fast boys brutally hurling each other into the boards—that it actually housed a hockey team that was one of the best in the state.

By this point, however—after they had toured the Tudor dormitories on the boys’ campus, complete with verdigris roofs and slender iron-casement windows, and an art museum that would have been at home on Albert Speer’s Unter den Linden—Jane’s reservations about hockey were beside the point. Aesthetically, everything—even the sleek, neoclassical fountains where water nymphs reposed and dripped small icicles from their languid mouths and fingertips—“worked” here, and Martin knew that to be confronted with such a magical combination of extremes meant that his mother had lost the battle on her terms. The school was exactly what she would have wanted for herself and, as a result, she had no choice but to join her husband in offering it to him.

B
ACK IN
N
EW
York City, Martin’s car thudded to a stop at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. He signed for the fare and stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds to cool off in the dry September air. The car pulled away, and he was distracted by an eight-story video screen across the street, where flocks of dotcom-branded seagulls careened in circles above a white beach before evaporating over the thousands of midtown commuters. As he walked toward his building, his thoughts returned to his parents, and he noted that in his memories they were very close to the age he was now, which made him smile wistfully as he imagined them—Hank and Jane Vallence of Cedar Village, and the suburban sheen of perfection that implied—plagued by the same doubts and longings he associated with his own life (Exhibit A: the malaise with which he had been afflicted after waking up just a few hours earlier). He had long considered his parents so different from himself, if not exactly dissimilar in certain limited ways, but now—as he placed his hand on the cool metal handle of the revolving glass door—it seemed that to
be a decidedly nonheterosexual (and single) attorney in Manhattan did not create such a wide gulf after all.

PITTSBURGH, 1972. Maria transferred to Honus Wagner Junior High—the public school in Castle Shannon—where some former classmates who had already made the move promptly rechristened her Morticia, a name that seemed even more appropriate in light of rumors about her having slit a nun’s throat at St. Anne’s. She remained as ostracized as ever; even her teachers were reluctant to engage her—and vice versa—for while she never made trouble and received passing—if unremarkable—grades, they were busy with more vocal students or intimidated by the way she towered over them. At home, she closed down her musical productions with Gina and Bea and spent time in her room, where she stared at the ceiling or mutilated her old prayer books, crossing out the contents line by line until the books were filled with brittle pages of lead.

Unnerved by her daughter’s bleak intensity, the way she could look right through her and make her feel like she didn’t exist, Gina tried to lull the old Maria out of this new one; she cooked her favorite lasagna, played her favorite records, and with Bérénice even pulled out some of their old costumes—made of plastic bags and thousands of paper streamers—and tried to reprise some of the former hits in the backyard. To Maria, these numbers appeared juvenile and wooden, and it embarrassed her to see her mother and grandmother
dancing around outside with lipstick smeared all over their faces and mops on their heads, never mind the awful singing.

This frustration sometimes boiled over, such as on the night Gina asked Maria if she wanted an extra helping of her grandmother’s meatballs. “Nonna Bea made them just for you,” Gina added. “And they’re reallllly good—”

“I don’t care,” Maria interrupted.

Gina’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t care that she made them, or you don’t care if I serve you more than one?”

Maria looked up and knew that a line had very clearly been drawn, but it was one that she was more than ready to cross. “Does it matter?”

Gina took the plate and moved it several inches to the side of the table. In a fluid gesture that recalled the vengeance of Tosca, she thrust it toward the floor, where it landed with less of a shatter than a thud. “That’s what I think of that,” she declared, before turning on her heel and exiting the scene. Bérénice cast a gleam of approval toward John, who was already trudging back from the kitchen with a towel and a garbage bag.

He glared back at his mother-in-law and shook his head—he hated fights—before he addressed Maria. “I want you to go apologize to your mother.”

“Why—what did I do?”

“You mouthed off.”

“I mouthed off?”

“Maria, I’m not fighting with you. All I’m saying is that you need to apologize to your mother. And it wouldn’t hurt if you cut her some slack.”

“Fine.” Maria backed down with a grunt before she pushed her chair away from the table and tromped down the hallway to the closed door of her parents’ bedroom.

“Ma, I’m sorry,” she began, straddling the thinnest line between sincerity and sarcasm, at least until she heard sobs on the other side of the door and felt an unexpected pang of remorse that led her to try to remember why she had been so angry. “Ma, I mean it. Come back to dinner. I don’t know what I was saying. If you want, I’ll eat twenty of Nonna’s meatballs.”

Gina opened the door, her expression hopeful, as if Maria’s promise to eat meatballs were a vow of unconditional love. She threw her arms around her daughter for several seconds—something that instantly depleted most of the small reserve of goodwill and patience Maria had just put aside for her—and together they went back to the dinner table.

L
ATER, ON HER
way to bed, Gina could not resist a detour past Maria’s bedroom, for in her mind the storm clouds of so many months had broken. “Good night, honey,” she said.

“Good night,” Maria replied automatically. She noticed that her mother had crossed the threshold and now hovered inside her room. “What?”

Gina cleared a spot on Maria’s bed and sat down. “I want you to know that I was once your age, too, and I thought the world was a horrible place—kids at school called me fat, and I never could imagine a boy liking me. And I stopped talking to anyone because I figured that things might be easier if nobody ever noticed me.”

Maria stared at the floor as the outer edges of her vision began to kaleidoscope. “I’m not you.”

“Of course not, honey. That’s not why I brought it up.”

“Then what?”

“One day after school, Nonna Bea took me aside and we had a little talk, sort of like this, except she said, ‘Gina—this moping, she starts to get on my nerves, but if you want to mope, then mope!
But you still have to help me in the kitchen because we are not rich.’ ”

Maria suppressed a smile at the thought, but she still suspected that Gina was about to allude to some allegedly happy event from their shared past—one of their old backyard theater productions, or how Maria used to sing along with the Callas records—with the implication, as Maria saw it, that she was now somehow inferior to what she had once been. “So you want me to do more dishes?”

“No—it’s not that,” Gina spoke with deliberation. “I understand why she said it, because in her case it was true—she couldn’t afford to have me moping around, with my father and brothers to take care of—even though I really hated her at the time, you know? I don’t even know why I’m telling you this, Maria, except I don’t want you to give up. You have something in you that—someday, somehow—is going to come out. I don’t want you to ever forget that.”

“Forget
what
?”

“That you love music, and if that sets you apart from everyone else, that’s the way it is.”

“So?” Maria responded, though more tentatively because she knew there was something different about her and that it involved music, the way it took her to mountains and lush islands and most of all great, teeming cities. It was not just when she sang, either, but when she listened, so that she still craved the operas her mother played in the living room after school, and she would surreptitiously crack her door to hear, at least until Bea walked by and accused her of doing just that. Or on Saturday afternoons, during the Met broadcasts, when she would sit on the end of the couch and flip through a magazine—or absently blacken in the eyes and teeth of the people in the ads, which she knew her mother hated—as though it were a punishment to be there. She could hear melodies in the flipping pages of a book or the scuffing of her feet against the floor, and could feel music
in the midst of her sexual fantasies, in the warm caresses of unknown hands and fingertips that would ultimately deliver her away from her angry restlessness for a few seconds.

Gina paused and took a deep breath. She felt fragile and lifeless and barely intact, like an egg whose insides have been blown out through a pinhole. It did not occur to her that what she said to Maria was truer than she could have imagined, and that, as long as she wanted Maria to escape, there was a part of her that would not resist pushing her daughter away in the most effective way possible. “Maria, you can be so much more than I was.”

Though moved enough to wrap her arms gingerly around Gina, Maria felt shocked and even a little affronted. Did this mean that Gina’s effusive cheeriness was just an act? Was she really miserable? And even if she was, was it Maria’s fault? Why couldn’t her mother just leave her alone? Or better, why couldn’t her mother just acknowledge the ambivalence Maria now felt toward everything—including, or especially, music—particularly if she felt the same way? Maria was suspicious, as if she had recognized a complacence in her mother that would have to be overcome in herself.

M
ARIA WAS HALFWAY
through tenth grade when the music teacher was replaced by Kathy Warren, a trained soprano who created a sensation thanks to her straight blond hair, bell-bottom blue jeans, and turtleneck sweater. It was unimaginable to the student body that someone so young (in truth twenty-eight, despite a rumor that she was seventeen) could be a teacher, and they watched her every movement in collective astonishment until she was officially introduced at assembly, after which most of them vacantly stared at their shoes or at the cotton-ball-size snow flurries floating around outside.

Later that day, Kathy stationed herself outside the chorus room, where she stopped students to lobby them to sign up for her class.
Maria—late for geometry but in no rush to get there—drifted past, and Kathy did not hesitate to step in front of her to make a pitch. No longer as thin as she had been, Maria at sixteen possessed a body that called to mind the sleeping hills and valleys of Western Pennsylvania; her hair was as black as her skin was pale, while her large eyes had been transformed into pools of jade. If her fellow students still hated her, they left her alone; there was a sense that if sufficiently provoked, she might ignite their own pubescent insecurities into wisps of smoke she would brush away with a flick of her outcast wrist. Maria gritted her teeth and glowered at the petite and slender Kathy, whose cheerful expression repulsed her. “What? Really? No.”

“Come on! A bunch of other kids have signed up—including a few cute guys—”

“I don’t like music,” Maria uttered, being more deceptive than untrue, given that it never left her alone.

“Okay, what about guys?”

Maria scowled. “In chorus class?”

“Yeah. You’ll see, it’ll be fun—singing is good for the soul!” Kathy leaned in and spoke in a more conspiratorial tone: “Plus I told everyone else if they don’t like it after two weeks, they can drop and go back to study hall—no questions asked.”

Maria’s lips creaked into something closer to a smile. Whether it was Kathy’s diction or her posture—or even that “good for the soul” business—Maria suspected that a “real singer” might finally help her to understand what made her so different, and the temptation to find out was more than she could resist.