If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (22 page)

“What was it like, Mom?” Mark asked me for the first time ever, yesterday. “What was it like when Uncle Terry died?”

I took my son by the hand, into my room. I opened the dresser drawer and there he was, smiling out from above the softly folded scarves, the empty fingers of my own gloves seeming to want to hold him there.

“It was hard,” I said to Mark, as he lifted the picture toward his face. “There is no secret answer. It was terribly, terribly hard.”

W
hen I got to Henry VIII in high school—European history, tenth grade—Molly Denham and I were in the same section. She still had that long, straight hair to her waist, and she wore overalls most days. The rap on her was that she smoked a little dope, but not more than most kids. We weren’t really friends, anymore. And neither of us said a word to the other, not a single word, as the wives were taught, one by one. It was as though we had never spent those hours together. As though she had never held and kissed my hand. Never asked for my forgiveness, which I so freely gave. And neither of us had watched my brother in that dress, pregnant and cooing seductively to his sire.

There are things that go on, I believe, important things that make only an intuitive kind of sense. Silences, agreed to. Intimacies, put away.

“Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.”

Miss Rafferty wrote the rhyme out on the board while Molly Denham and I dutifully copied it into our notebooks, as though we might otherwise forget.

The
History
of
the
World

I.

A
DDING UP THE SILENCES
would be an unkind thing to do.

Still, if Kate Rodgers
were
to add up all the pauses in her brother Arthur’s speech, all of them, over the last nearly sixty years, it would make for several days at least, several days of her own life spent waiting for the creaky gears of his brain to locate the proper word. He’s struggling now to find
tollbooth
, and Kate is again waiting, wanting to give him a chance. And, as she waits, she thinks about his brain in just those terms—like a watch that’s been dropped and possibly stepped on, so the gears still move, but with a hitch. The kind of hitch in the works that makes you lose a few minutes every day.

“Tollbooth.”

She’s the one who says it first. This is an instinct in her as old as any she possesses: knowing when and when not to finish her twin brother’s thought.

“Yes, right. So I was driving up to this tollbooth yesterday and the car in front of me is this enormous what are they called… minivan like everyone drives in the States. But I’d never seen one quite this big, or maybe it’s just because in… in… Italy, in Italy what I’m used to seeing are those toy cars, speeding around. That and the… the…”

“
Motorinos
. Vespas.”

“Motorcycles. But yes,
motorinos. Motorini
? Anyway, this thing was really strange.”

“I’ve seen so many American cars this trip,” Kate says. “Many more than ever before.” But as she speaks, she isn’t sure that’s true. She doesn’t actually remember noticing cars one way or the other since arriving the day before. She’s had other things on her mind.

“I suppose that’s right,” Arthur says, though in fact he has noticed no more than she. “Blame it on the global economy and all. Cable television. American imperialism. All the usual suspects, right?” He lifts yesterday’s
Herald Tribune
to his face. He’s read through it once already on the plane, but it’s better than nothing. “It feels,” he says from behind his shield, “seeing that van, that minivan… it feels…”

Another pause begins its unmistakable stretch.

Peering over the paper, he finds her pale blue eyes, his own pale blue eyes, staring back. These seconds, the empty ones, move slowly for him. Knowing she has what he wants. Preferring to produce the word himself. It’s funny how this, the language thing, has never bothered him as much with anyone else as with her. He squints as though he might find the words written on her face, and Kate, who has lived with this look, with its silent, insistent pressures for over six decades, begins suggesting possibilities to him.

“Wrong?” she asks. He shakes his head. “Not foreign enough?” No. Not that either.

“Sad,” he pronounces—the cloud lifting this time. “It just feels sad.”

“Oh, it is sad,” she agrees, though she barely remembers now what the
it
in question is. So much is sad these days, Kate is willing simply to assent to the word and leave it there.

“So, we’re off to Orvieto today?” he asks, back behind the
Trib
.

“I’d like that. I’m still feeling jet-lagged and not too ambitious. Unless you have work you need to do. I’d like to sit together in the square and watch the passersby. Maybe talk.” She stands, tightening the belt on her travel robe, silk—not for its luxury, but for its negligible weight. “I’d like to talk.”

“I think that sounds perfect,” he says, and puts the paper down. “Work can wait. I didn’t come on this trip to work. I came to be with you. Half an hour?”

“Yes. That sounds right.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing the… the…”

But it’s gone.

“Cathedral?”

He shakes his head and slowly moves his hands together in the air, as if signaling a tighter focus.

“The façade?”

“Yes. That’s it. Thank you. The façade. I’m looking forward to seeing the famous façade.”

A
s a child Kate suspected that it was her own umbilical cord, and not his, that had wrapped itself around Arthur’s neck, depriving him of oxygen for just long enough. No one ever told her this. No one ever told her much of anything about why Arthur spoke the way he did, why his otherwise razor-sharp brain seemed to have these holes in it, lacunae into which words would disappear. Their parents chose silence on the subject of Arthur’s odd silences as the kindest and maybe the easiest course, and left it to their daughter to glean what little she might from bits of private conversations slipping out from under closed doors, or from relatives who gossiped, neighbors who thought they knew. The cord had gone around him three full times. An older cousin whispered this when Kate was five, maybe six. And he had been completely blue at birth. As blue and as silent as a blueberry.

Kate pictured it, a single image of the rope, thick and twisted, the kind sailors use, uncoiling from out of her own infant stomach, twirling itself around, around, around his neck.

I
n the shower upstairs, she soaps her body, wishing she’d remembered the razor still in her suitcase, by the bed. Not for her legs. The hairs come in finer and sparser now; and anyway, she’s quite sure no one is paying much attention to her solid, matronly legs or, for that matter, to the area between them, where the hair has grown strangely lush in the months since Stephen left. Untended. Unseen. But under her arms there are bristles, sharp among the pale, pouching skin, and standing there, in a just too cold shower, she cannot bear the thought of herself as a woman of a certain age, deserted by her husband, traveling with her brother, a woman whose underarms have grown visibly unkempt.

There is no way around it. It would have been so much less painful had she lost Stephen to death, rather than to Rita. It wouldn’t have been a referendum on her, on her marriage, her sexual worth. It wouldn’t have been fun or easy; but it would have been possible—in a way that this is not.

The pressure is low and it takes some chilly minutes to rid herself of suds, step out, towel off. Before she dresses, she slips the razor from her bag. Standing naked at the sink, Kate lifts first one, then the other hand above her head, and shaves. Her breasts, slack and neither practical nor pleasurable anymore, stare out at her from the mirror like uninvited guests.

A
rthur prefers to drive and Kate lets him, though the rental car is in her name, as is the two-week lease on the small farmhouse. In the elaborate, sixty-five-year-long allocation of traits between them, she has long been acknowledged as the practical one, which at times strikes her as odd, since
he
has gone out into the world and made a good living doing whatever it is he does with stocks, while she has moved seamlessly through the decades, dependent first on her parents and then, without pause, on Stephen, and even now, even discarded, is still dependent on the monthly checks Stephen sends. Yet with Arthur, when they are together, she is the practical one, the roles of the nursery, early ascribed, early learned, proving immutable despite what other truths a greater world may have revealed.

The July day is hot and still. The dove-gray sky seems to be holding its breath, ready to exhale a storm. Arthur speeds and Kate tells him not to. Like a wife, he thinks, aware of his own unkindness. A nagging wife. The kind of wife who gets herself left. He denies speeding while slowing down, and then of course speeds up again.

“Just try not to kill anyone,” she says as they pass the emptying buses just outside the town.

“I’ll do my best.”

He finds a parking space, though the lot appears to be full and Kate has told him it isn’t worth a try. And now, he notices, Kate withholds all comment. She sits there beside him, frowning.

These are the moments at which it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for old Stephen.

“Do we have enough gas to get back?” she asks.

“Yes. I think we do. If I am reading the… the… well, the thing, that thing.” He points to the dashboard, but Kate’s attention is now directed to her purse.

“I don’t suppose you have change?” she asks.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

They are silent as she deciphers the mysteries of the parking meter. They are silent as they climb the outdoor steps from the lot to the cathedral, then continue their way alongside the vast white building, silent as they weave through groups of other tourists, silent until they reach the front.

“Jesus,” Arthur says. “I never saw such a thing. It’s… spectacular.”

Kate says nothing, only looks. Bright gold and blue and red, it
is
spectacular. A part of her knows that he’s right, though to her, on this day, it looks more improbable than beautiful, sparkling against the darkened sky as if lit from within. She thinks it looks
fake
. That’s the word in her head, though she questions the thought even as it appears. What can it mean? The word makes no sense. Yet the cathedral seems like confection to her, spun sugar. Sprinkle water on it, and it will melt. Like a promise that can’t possibly be kept.

“Does it still look the same?” Arthur asks.

“Yes. It does. Strangely so. Just the same.”

Almost forty years ago, Stephen declared this structure his favorite in all of Italy, while Kate said it was a little gaudy for her taste. She felt more kinship with the dark weight of the cathedral in Siena. She could have hidden for hours in the twilight of that building. But this was an optimist’s façade, and Stephen was an optimistic man.

“I could use a drink,” she says.

“Go ahead. I’ll just be a minute. Pick a café, any café. Somewhere around the square. I’ll be right there.”

“Take your time.” And then, “Stephen loved this place.”

“When you were here?” he asks, his gaze fixed ahead. “You and Stephen? When was that? Exactly? Was that your honeymoon?”

“No.” She steps toward the cathedral, so he sees only her back as she speaks. “The honeymoon was a long weekend in Maine. We were still poor. Italy was the year before Martha was born, our last hurrah before the children began to arrive.”

She doesn’t say any more than that. The word that occurs to her next is
happy—
but she can’t bring herself to say what she might. That they had been happy then, and she had thought it would last. That’s all. It doesn’t need to be said.

When she turns around, her brother sees the sadness on her face, the eyes seeming only to stare backward, the trembling mouth, and he takes pity on his sister, throws his arm around her back. “Come on, lady,” he says. “Let’s go find ourselves a table and tie one on.”

A
rthur knew that Stephen was leaving long before Kate learned. For nearly a month he kept the secret, believing she should hear it from Stephen himself and trusting his brother-in-law of nearly forty years, a man he had always rather liked, to handle the thing as well as it could be handled.

“As much as I hate doing this to her, I just can’t agree to being unhappy for the rest of my life,” Stephen told him over lunch. “I have no desire to hurt her. But I haven’t loved her, not in any real way, for many years. I’ve puzzled the thing through and through, but I just can’t see what’s to be gained by giving up on, well, on moving on.”

And Arthur knew what his sister would want him to say. He could feel her words in his mouth—condemning Stephen, urging for counseling, for second and third honeymoons if that’s what it would take. But his brother-in-law’s eyes, gray and narrow, were already devoid of any hope. His voice was saturated with the rather cool directness that had always characterized him. Only when he spoke about the new woman in his life did he exhibit any animation. She was everything Kate was not—he never said that, not in so many words, but the message was clear. She was largehearted, loving, fun. Always on the lookout for an excuse to be kind. She was admirable in her generous spirit. And Arthur knew it had been years since his sister had been anything of the sort.

“I thought if I told you first, you’d be better able to help Kate when it happens,” Stephen said. “She and I aren’t happy. She may not know that, but we’re not. I’m not denying that we were, but not for many, many years.”

For most of the lunch, Arthur only listened. But before the meal was over, he cleared his throat. Looked away. “You know, Stephen,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re… given everything… I know I shouldn’t say this, but I think you’re probably doing the right thing.”

And as if Stephen understood that for this to be expressed, it must fade as rapidly as possible in the air, he only quickly nodded and said nothing in response.

T
he girl who brings them their carafe of local wine takes them for a married couple. “Will you and your wife like to eat?” Neither sibling corrects her. It’s a natural enough assumption: a couple, not a pair. As children, they had unmistakably been twins, their matching blue eyes large on their faces, both with almost white-blond hair, often dressed in coordinating clothes. People always knew. But adulthood had soon distinguished them, blurring the likeness with more obvious contrasts. Kate, short and somewhat squat, took to dyeing her hair a reddish brown, while Arthur grew tall, very tall, took up tennis and squash, stayed lean. His hair turned silver early. They no longer matched; though now, on this trip, Kate has noticed odd similarities resurfacing. Arthur’s older-man arms sport the same clusterings of moles and freckles as hers. Her hair, no longer colored, has emerged the same bright silver as his. His eyelids droop at the outer corners with an identical, sloping crease, exactly her own, as though time, which made them different, decided to change its course and erode those distinctions, revealing the ways in which their very textures are the same.

The waitress’s English is good. Kate offers up her own guidebook Italian, but the girl seems to prefer the play of a foreign tongue. “No, no, I can do English. You will see.” Something—maybe the sight of the cathedral, maybe the emergence of the word
happy—
has solidly soured Kate’s mood, and she can feel the familiar tension, the
Arthur
tension, each time the waitress has to struggle for the right word or phrase; and indeed when Arthur himself can’t come up with the word
bread
it seems almost like a pretense, a chivalrous gesture on his part to make the girl feel less self-conscious, the host dropping his own fork on the floor. “Could you please bring us a basket of… of…”