The Solace of Leaving Early (21 page)

When Amos saw it, he knew. His favorite, the most reliable sorrowful composition on his personal soundtrack. He put in the CD and hit the repeat function so that it would play through the night, if necessary. Stood too quickly and nearly lost his balance, then had to make his way back to the screened porch with the aid of doorframes and chairbacks, but no matter.

He sat down heavily; his bones seemed to have added some density in the past few months. Two or three mornings a week he liked to go for a run just as the sun was coming up, out past the edge of town. A farmer out that way kept donkeys, and Amos loved to study the foals. He’d seen only a few, but surely they were one of the hallmarks of God’s benevolence: their eyes, their absurdly long ears, the swing of their tails. But running had hurt the past few times Amos tried. He couldn’t find his stride and his chest began to ache almost immediately.

This wine is
good,
Amos thought, raising his glass, what the hell, it was a drunken, dramatic gesture, the sort of thing one might see in a movie or onstage. No one was watching him. “Blood of Christ,” he said aloud, the way one might say To your health. His church had a Love Feast (a meal, a foot washing, and Communion), but no consubstantiation, no transubstantiation, no mystery of the Host. Suddenly the gesture didn’t strike him as either funny or acceptable.
You don’t believe them,
Langston had said, and that was the real reason he attacked her, wasn’t it? It wasn’t because she threatened to steal the children; they already belonged to her. She saw right through him. Amos could say anything he wanted about Incarnation, God in the world, the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit, Sophia. He learned it all, and could recite it: God as Mother, God as Lover, God as . . . he couldn’t remember the rest . . . Postman? Undersecretary? And he’d read
The Chalice and the Blade,
his intentions were good, he recognized the difference between the cult of the goddess and the cult of death. And yes, yes, Yahweh was a warrior and Job’s suffering was unaccountable, and there was something in the story of Jesus of Nazareth that rang of cosmic child abuse. It was a cult of death: in the end there was no symbol in human history more disconcerting to Amos than Jesus on the cross. Amos was drunk, okay, he would admit it, but he loved Jesus, he loved the doomed baby and the serious little boy in the temple addressing his elders, and he adored the man Jesus became, the crafty magician sneaking into villages and healing the least of his brethren and whispering
Tell no one I was here
. Amos could think about Jesus for hours, how he inverted the status quo and begged us to lay down our weapons, how (and this is a stunner, as far as Amos was concerned) one of the tests scholars apply to the Gospels, in trying to determine what might be legitimately ascribed to Jesus, is this: what speech, what gesture, is the most
unlikely
in first-century Palestine? Find those, and
ecce homo,
you’ve found the Man.

Amos loved the character of Jesus, but there was no question in Amos’s mind that Jesus was dead and had been dead for two thousand years. He died just like any other man, and he never rose again, and there wasn’t a shred of historical evidence to suggest that he did, regardless of what fundamentalists liked to pretend. (They row as fast as they can, just like the rest of us.) And any time one of the faithful had suggested to Amos that Jesus had appeared, or spoken, or guided, or touched, Amos feigned happiness, but in his mind he asked, “What is at work in this person? What need, what sort of imagination? How can I help them?” The dead return, oh yes they do. They come in dreams, and in fits of memory so potent they can double a grown man, but that wasn’t the same thing as an apparition.

And Mary? Amos knew nothing about Mary, even after all his reading and contemplation. She seemed less real to him than a thousand other women, much less real than Ariadne, abandoned at Naxos, or Medea, boiling up her children. At one point in seminary he became convinced that the trick of Mary is precisely that: to be nothing, to be an empty canvas on which the hopeless faithful can paint the portrait they need. She is the woman dreamed in every orphan heart, and Amos didn’t need her, he didn’t know her, he didn’t believe.

That crafty Langston,
Amos thought, stretching out on the wicker loveseat, dangling his legs over the end. All that masterful denial of her own past, her own damage, and she looked right into Amos’s life and called him by name.
No doubt about it,
Amos closed his eyes and began to drift, his favorite music mourning in the background:
she nailed me. I am finished
.

Chapter 20

THE LONG LOST AND
THE NEWLY GONE

Taos, when you and I were little. Once upon a time, when you and I were little, we were in Daddy’s truck, we were seven and five, or eight and six. We were on our way to Jonah to . . . pick something up from the hardware store? to buy groceries? I wish I could remember. I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It’s just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading. I know it was summer, but not whether it was late or early, I don’t know if we’d just finished the school year or were about to start. Where was Mama? What was occupying her? You and I, Taos, were an army of two. You were my playmate, my constant companion, strange, wavy hair that Mama called blackandyellow, and green eyes, like a cat. And a face like a cat. A narrow chin and broad cheekbones. A scar in the middle of your forehead shaped like Italy, from when you fell on the corner of the coffee table, and a strawberry birthmark on the back of your neck that brightened when you were mad. I could be scared of you, you weren’t above scaring me with your temper, I could be scared of your slightest displeasure. When you were mad at me I had no one, and I would never have anyone, because we were all alone, but I was the most alone. Mama had Daddy, and you had Mama (so she had two), and to some extent you had Daddy, you were men together. And you had Nan Braverman who told you you hung the moon, and Grandma Wilkey, who adored you. I don’t believe she ever loved another. But I didn’t have Daddy, and I didn’t have Mama, certainly not. The whole of her heart belonged to you. You argued at dinner, you sat on the swing and talked and talked, all hours, she would read a book in a day and give it to you and you would read it in a day and you would talk and talk. Charles Hartshorne and Teilhard de Chardin, Augustine, Proust, Hegel, linguistics, Restoration drama, until I thought I would weep or drown or run away, but I didn’t, there was no end to your conversation, I can almost hear it now, although I thought I had forgotten. Most of those books are gone now—she donated them to the library in Hopwood. And once we were in the grocery store, Mama and I, and ran into her high school physics teacher, an old man, and he stared and stared at her, he was looking for a clue and I wanted to say,
Forget it, you’ll never find it.
“Your mother,” he said to me, “understood physics the way other girls understood knitting.” I nodded. I nod. I know she did, and so did you, once when you were sitting at the table surrounded by dirty dishes and open books, arguing about something, Mama tipped her head back and howled—was it happiness, or grief, or laughter?—and said, “You are a mind without end, Taos.” She didn’t want to go to college, that’s all, she said, she didn’t want to, and you understood, you didn’t want to either. You didn’t want to go to elementary or middle or high school, but you made your way through, you eased through.
What did you want, what do you want?
I used to ask Mama, exasperated, and it was always the same answer: I just wanted to think, and to talk, with no one telling me what to do. You could be mean, Taos, and you were growing tall, getting muscles from running running running everywhere you went, and pounding a hammer, and climbing ropes and ladders and trees, and although mostly no one ever talked to me, sometimes at school I heard things about you, about how you were reckless and would take any dare, how you were itching to get going or get somewhere, and I’d see you walking down the street ahead of me in your striped T-shirt and old blue jeans, your body hard and unforgiving, that crazy loping walk you had. And I worried, but I didn’t know what worried me. They named you Taos because that’s where they went on their honeymoon, and there was something in it, something beyond the sentimental or nostalgic, they were trying to say: once we went so far. And you were how far they went. There is no more distant star, I now believe. You were sweet, too, and tireless if you loved someone, you bought thoughtful gifts, oh you were a surprise. You were the greatest surprise of my life. My lying down and rising up, my all in all. I’ve forgotten, or thought I had, nearly everything, and which is worse? To forget it, or to remember, as I fear I might? Because, well, like this. I didn’t know I knew, I didn’t know I could remember that truck ride with Daddy when we were sitting side by side, two years apart, some year, in the summer, and there was a stretch of straight country road, broad fields on either side, just a slight rise where the road approached a railroad track. A hawthorn tree before the tracks, and a falling-down fence, a stand of trees in the distance, and just as we approached the tracks, a bird fluttered down out of a tree, we both saw it at the same time, a bluebird, a bluebird was dipping toward the road, and then we were on the tracks and you and I turned and looked behind us, and there was the bird in the road. Daddy drove right on like nothing had happened, or more likely as if he didn’t know that something had happened, but I felt faint, my stomach simply flipped upside down, and the first thing I did was look at you, I looked at you to tell me what it meant, but you just stared straight ahead, your jaw clenched. Nothing had ever scared me more, not the swirl of blue feathers in the road, not the fact of the bird, but that look on your face, Taos, as though you were collecting evidence against the world and here was an exhibit. It’s what we do, Epiphany does it too, the younger, the lesser, the least qualified, looking to the elder, the bitter straight and smarter one, to tell us, just in case—just in case we’re the only ones left someday—precisely what the
fuck
we’re supposed to think.

*

Now she wrote to him only in her head, which saved time and paper. She was still lying on top of her quilt in her clothes, as Amos had left her, except that her mother had taken off her shoes and socks, and Langston knew he’d meant it, she knew Amos was going to take the children away from her and just as well, but there was something she wanted to do before she left in the morning with Germane.

She got out of bed quietly and turned on the light on her desk. There was a book somewhere in the west eave she wanted to look at; she needed to confirm something that had been gnawing at her, a nameless thing. She dug around in the dark, trying to locate the book by its spine: a tall, thin, coffee-table edition with a gold cover,
Images of Mary in the Old Masters
. She took it to her desk and sat down, turning the pages slowly. There she was, by Raphael, Mantegna, Botticelli, and Rubens, just an introduction, these pictures, the standard stuff, her face flat, her eyes downcast in utter humility and patience. Amazing. And the baby Jesus with the face of an old man. Langston couldn’t imagine that the artists had gotten him right; some of the infants looked like exhausted, angry little bankers.

Carpaccio’s
Birth of the Virgin:
Mary, conceived without original sin (that’s the actual Immaculate Conception, not the conception of Jesus); Mary as a young girl, rosy-cheeked, in the temple, by Titian. Her wedding to Joseph, a middle-aged widower who had to be convinced, in Raphael’s
The Marriage of the Virgin
.

The Annunciation: Gabriel announcing to Mary the hard fact of her fate. She was, what have scholars decided, twelve? Certainly no more than fourteen. In the Fra Angelico, Mary and Gabriel could be twins; in the beautiful Rossetti, Mary is shrinking into a corner, perhaps because Gabriel’s feet are on fire. And a lovely rendering of the time Mary spent with Elizabeth,
The Visitation,
by Jacopo Pontormo, in which the women are mirror images of one another, old and young, and stand grasping one another in the classical pose of the Graces.

The Nativity, lots of paintings of this event, of course, by La Tour and Dürer and Botticelli. The flight into Egypt; beautiful, some of those.
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple,
by Jouvenet, in which mother and son are surrounded by sacrificial animals. Mary searching for Jesus, and finding him in the temple, preaching; the wedding at Cana, where she said, like a good mother, “Hello, Jesus? They’re out of wine. Could you do something about that, Mr. Smarty Pants?”

And oh. It always happens, even when you forget its inevitability: the Crucifixion. (Once on a flight to Seattle with Jacques, Langston read a new biography of Sylvia Plath. They got caught in a holding pattern above the airport, and she was able to finish the whole book, and she remembered so clearly how she felt when she realized Sylvia was going to do it, she was actually going to kill herself and no one was going to catch her in time. Langston had been deeply shocked that the story turns out the same every time.) Mary at the foot of the cross, old now—although she would have been only forty-five, younger than AnnaLee, aged decades in the hours it took her son to die. In Perugino’s
The Deposition from the Cross,
Mary’s face is shades of green and gray, in stark contrast to the bright red robes and pink ribbons around her. The Apostles fled, but the women remained at Golgotha until the end, Mary the Mother and Mary the Other, and who knows how many more. In every picture the women are there, in Pontormo and Bouts. Ghastly. Jesus’s broken chest and upturned eyes, his bloody hands and feet, she hadn’t looked at any of these paintings in years. And then Caravaggio’s
Deposition;
no one in history ever had his vision, or his touch, Langston thought. Caravaggio gives the scene a black background, and in this painting Jesus is no metaphor, he’s A Man, with a carpenter’s broad chest and muscular arms and great, thick hands. He isn’t saintly or fey, he’s huge, three days on the cross couldn’t bend him. Jesus is being lifted off a table or a stone slab, his head turned, his eyes open, his veiny right arm reaching for the ground. And yes, Caravaggio got him right, in this painting he does look like a man who could turn history upside down, but it’s the mourners Langston found most interesting: the complete devastation revealed in the faces of the men, who looked just like men you’d see anywhere, like Herschel Lewis in the diner, or Walt Braverman, or AnnaLee’s high school physics teacher. A beautiful girl with a strawberry-blond braid wrapped around the top of her head is there, and Mary. Langston wondered how Caravaggio could have finished this painting, in the way she didn’t understand how Tolstoy could have written the end of
Anna Karenina.
Doesn’t it, at some point, just become too hard, witnessing the agony of your characters? Who would have blamed Caravaggio if he’d left Mary’s face a blank white egg on the canvas, if he’d simply said:
I can’t. You have a mother, fill in the blank.
After many minutes, Langston turned the page. In Bellini’s
Pieta,
Mary’s eyes are bruised with grief, and there’s something in the way she supports her dead son’s body that caused Langston to look away, as if she’d walked in on a scene of shocking intimacy.

Here is Mary at the tomb, the first to realize Jesus’s body is gone, and then many images of the Assumption; Mary being carried into the sky by the angels; Mary crowned the Queen of Heaven; Mary among the cherubim. And isn’t it interesting that in all the Assumption images, in Titian and Velázquez, in Botticelli’s
Madonna of the Magnificat,
she is no longer old enough to be the mother of a grown man? Her youth has been restored to her.

Langston turned back to the work that interested her the most. The editor had chosen to devote an entire spread, both pages in the center of the book, to a single painting: da Vinci’s
Annunciation
. Langston studied it a long time, then sat back in her chair and looked out at the night sky. She wasn’t sure she’d found what she was looking for, but it was a start. Gabriel is on the left, with the high forehead and pouting lips of a Renaissance man or woman, either one. Protruding from his shoulder blades are small but very dense and muscular gray wings. He’s kneeling on the ground, and has one hand before him as if he might be offering a proposal, as if he’s saying, “No wait, just hear me out.” Mary is sitting at an outdoor table in a stone courtyard, dressed like royalty; she’s blond and regal, and looks to be nineteen or twenty. The expression on her face is priceless. She’s neither alarmed nor surprised. The news of her imminent liaison with God seems to mean nothing to her. She’s just listening politely to what the angel has to tell her, as any well-bred young woman would have done; she’s maybe even humoring Gabriel. That’s the look on her face. She’s waiting for him to finish his spiel and move on. Her left hand is raised as if to make a point of her own, but her right hand is poised above the book she was reading before she was interrupted, one long, thin finger saving her place.

Langston rubbed Germane with her bare foot, and thought of how much she’d like to show this painting to Taos, and to Amos, and to the little girls, to AnnaLee and Beulah and Alice. To Taos she would say,
There was also
this. She would tell Immaculata and Epiphany that by one very grim yardstick, they were lucky. Because we’re bound to lose our parents—we may even lose our children—but we should get to keep our siblings to the end, and they got to keep each other. Langston would put Amos and Beulah and Alice together, a little trilogy, and she wouldn’t say anything, because they would understand. Alice would understand. But Langston would give this painting to her mother, if she had the original she’d hand it right over to her, and she’d say,
I’m so sorry that if one of us had to go, it was your beautiful, perfect son. It should have been me. I wish it had been me, instead.

*

She must have drifted off to sleep, because when the children first began to scream, she was sitting at her desk with the book open and the light still on. She jumped up so fast she slammed her kneecap against the underside of the desk, but couldn’t feel any pain. Germane was already down the steps, and Langston went running after him. By the time she got the attic door open and hit the hallway in the second floor, the light was on in her parents’ room, and before she could knock, they both came running out the door, pulling on clothes. There wasn’t time to say anything. They nearly tripped down the staircase, all three of them without shoes. Langston could hear the children through the opens windows of her house, screaming something unintelligible, and then she and her parents were through the living room and out the front door. Langston had never seen anyone run as fast as her father did, and right past the girls—who were in the middle of Chimney Street, clinging to each other and turning around in circles, wailing like sirens—straight to Beulah’s trailer. He jumped, landed on the top step, and opened the door, all in a single, fluid motion.