Traveling with Pomegranates (22 page)

Ann and I move along the ambulatory until we come to the small, circular chapel of St. Anne. I’ve been drawn to her since I discovered the prolific image of her holding her grown daughter Mary in her lap. There’s a legend that St. Anne’s body was brought to France by Mary Magdalene fifty years after her death and her bones were revered at Apt in Provence, but I can’t imagine anyone takes it seriously anymore.

We stare at the exquisite marble altar in her chapel. Someone has left a creased photograph on it of a dark-haired girl around three years old. I point it out to Ann, sure it’s someone’s grand-daughter. Anne is the patron saint of grandmothers. For an instant I try to imagine myself as a grandmother, a woman called Grandma, or Nana or Granny, but it feels foreign and other, like trying to imagine myself as an astronaut.

I look around for an image of St. Anne in the chapel, but there isn’t any. When painted as an older woman, she was often given a green cloak, like the mantle of spring, which is somehow unexpected. Her emblem is a door. Probably because she was the doorway for Mary, but my mind fidgets with the idea that she could represent other thresholds, too. A Grandmother door . . . the Old Woman door . . . some passage to the other side.

Ann photographs the picture of the little girl left here for St. Anne’s safekeeping, while I plop down on a bench and pull out the postcard I tucked inside the back cover of my journal. It depicts Picasso’s
Girl Before a Mirror
. I first saw the painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York many years ago and was affected by it, though I couldn’t have told you then why that was. I bought the postcard in the museum gift shop, but eventually lost track of it. It surfaced again when we moved, and since then I’ve kept it out on my desk.

It portrays a young woman, haloed in light, gazing into an oval mirror. Her pink, unblemished profile merges with a frontal view of her face that’s painted in bright yellow and shaped like a crescent moon. But the mirror is a wrinkle in time, and the image staring back at her reveals the young woman not as she is, but how she will one day be. The woman in the glass appears old and dark, her face shaded in violet and red, her eyes grown hollow, her body beginning to shrink.

What touches me is how the younger woman’s arms reach out for her older self, as if trying to embrace the rather formidable mystery she has glimpsed. And curiously, her older self reaches back to her. Whatever Picasso may have had in mind when he painted this (at the age of fifty, for what it’s worth), I see an aspect of the Demeter and Persephone reunion in it—the reunion of the Young Woman and the Old Woman
within
.

I show the postcard to Ann, who studies it and says, “What is it—two sides of one woman?”

“That’s what I think,” I say and go on for a moment about the young woman with her vitality, fertility, and sense of beginning and the old woman with her wisdom and creative and spiritual powers.

“Don’t you love how they’re both reaching for each other?” As I say this, I understand for the first time that I’m looking at the
I
I want to find. It is not captured solely in the dark older woman or in the bright younger one. It is composed of both of them, conjoined and integrated. It happens in the embrace.

I listen for a moment to voices, females voices, somersaulting along the Gothic vaults. “I have a photograph back home of my mother on her wedding day,” I tell Ann, excited that I’ve suddenly remembered it. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it. She’s sitting at a dressing table in her white gown, looking into a mirror. My grandmother is standing at her shoulder.”

Ann shakes her head.

“It’s Mother’s face the camera catches in the mirror.”

“Like the painting,” Ann says.

Except it’s reversed—the old woman is looking into the mirror and seeing the young woman’s face.

That night in the hotel bathroom, I stand at the sink, exhausted. Tired from the flight and the walking. I just want to go to bed.

I squirt toothpaste onto my toothbrush, and when Ann appears in the doorway with her cosmetic bag, I step over to make room for her at the sink. As we stand side by side and brush our teeth before the mirror, I gradually become aware that despite my fatigue, I am watching her face.

She is so beautiful.

We spend the next morning in the Louvre, gazing at paintings of Mary. There are more paintings of her in the world than of any other woman, and a preponderance of them seems to be right here. They flow along the walls like a moving picture of her life—of both the human Mary and the divine Mary.

What I notice, almost as much as the paintings themselves, is the way certain incidents in her life are repeated over and over: annunciations, nativities, flights into Egypt, pietàs, assumptions to heaven. . . . Each event feels like a universal story, offering points of entry into my own experience.

When I visited Mary’s House in Ephesus, during Ann’s and my first trip, the theological polarization I felt about how to relate to Mary began to be resolved. Over the past year, I have been slowly coming to understand her not only within a biblical and human context, but also as a living symbol of the Divine Feminine, a spiritual presence able to hold large archetypal mysteries. Why then shouldn’t the paramount occasions in her life create a guiding story for women?

As I move through the Louvre, I begin to record notes about the paintings and what they might be suggesting:

Annunciation—the summons from within to bring forth something new, particularly one’s own spiritual and creative life
.

Pregnancy—the season of waiting, incubation, holding the tensions of the process
.

Visitation with Elizabeth—seeking community and support from other women; telling the story
.

Nativity—the labor to bring forth what has been conceived from within
.

Flight into Egypt—protecting the new life from threat, within and without
.

Nurturing the Child—reordering everything in order to feed and tend the new life
.

At the Cross/Pietà—descent, embracing necessary loss, surrender, and grief
.

Mary’s Death—dying of an old self or way of being; the dark night
.

Assumption into Heaven—ascent; rising of new self; crossing threshold into new realm
.

Coronation—the realization of new life; its fruition and impact on others
.

My speculations click with me. Each event possesses a core of generic feminine meaning along with the possibility of interpreting it personally.

In the Louvre gift store, I scour the racks for postcards portraying each of these pivotal dramas. I spread them along the counter in the right biographical sequence, compelled by the idea that each one could be a window into my own experience, allowing me to glimpse it through the lens of a grand maternal matrix. Even in the busy shop, I can see that it’s no longer the annunciation image that defines where I am right now with my creativity or with my spiritual life. Nor is it the picture of the pregnant Mary who waits, who incubates and bears the tensions. It’s the nativity image that grabs me—the necessity of labor, the lonely beauty of birthing.

“Don’t let me wear a pink dress to your wedding,” I say. Ann and I sit at a table in the café below the Louvre’s glass pyramid and talk not about all the sublime art we’ve just seen but about wedding outfits. “Not powder-blue either. And no jacket with shoulder pads.”

“I promise,” says Ann.

The wedding date is set—June 3. Seven months away, but we’ve already spent a lot of Sunday afternoons making wedding plans. As I tell my friends, I have rented the tree. I love that she picked out a five-hundred-year-old moss-laden oak to be her “church.” We have a guest list of a hundred and twenty, which is about all the people we can fit beside it. She will walk to the tree down a path that cuts through a rose garden. Floral arrangements would be redundant.

I am sincerely happy about the wedding and I adore Scott, but several times since Ann called me with the news, I’ve felt a small wrench at the back of my heart when I think about it. I know it isn’t about her, it’s about me, but I don’t know precisely what the feeling is—a longing? a sadness? the baton passing again?

I’m eating some sort of sandwich that I fear could be spread with goose liver. I push it aside and drink my
demi pression
. Last summer when I brought up
her
dress, she announced she wanted to wear my wedding gown. “No kidding?” I said, taken by surprise. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “I’m sure.”

I should have guessed this. When Ann was a girl, every time we visited her grandparents, she would beg my mother to take my wedding dress from its storage bag in the back of my old bedroom closet so she could put it on. It did not take a lot of begging; my mother was her willing accomplice in most everything. I have a memory of Ann at five with the skirt billowing out around her on the floor like a melting vanilla cone.

It was the first wedding dress I tried on. I fell in love with it at first sight, but when I noticed the price, my heart sank. Six hundred dollars, a fortune. I tried to be stoic about it, and Mother and I kept looking, trudging from shop to shop, until finally she proclaimed she didn’t care what the dress cost, we were going back to get it. “It’s only money,” she said, as if steeling herself.

When I walked down the aisle in it, it was August 1968 and I was barely twenty years old. My “church” was an actual church. It was packed with everybody from our small town. I had seven bridesmaids, who wore white dresses and wreaths of blue flowers in their hair. Wired to my bouquet was the small white Bible I carried to Sunday school as a child. In my shoe was the 1947 dime my mother wore in her shoe when she got married. There were years and years stretched ahead of me.

I close my eyes and try to picture myself as I was on that day, to be that girl again, to be at the beginning. Across the table, Ann is talking about the so-called “acid treatment” we will have to subject the wedding gown to in order to remove the yellow tint.