She placed my paper before me, quizzically. I stared at it. It was typed, as she had asked, double-spaced, as she had required, folded neatly, obligingly, lengthwise down the middle. There was nothing else on it, no marks, no comments. Nothing. I looked up in despair.
“Hmm,” she said, apologetically.
Reflective, pregnant pause.
“I think you can write,” she said. “But try this assignment again.”
At first I was stung, insulted. It had been the rosary, obviously. Italian Catholic girl, not fitting Barnard stereotype, being hammered, if ever so nicely, Massachusettsly, into the intellectual mold. But it was too late to resist. I already loved her, and seemed to know what she was, who she would be for me, from her brilliant questions in class, from the way she had of silently, patiently stroking meaning out of a text, out of us. And from her streaky wood-grained hair and skin-and-bones body in dry, dark blue spinsterwear.
She was right: the thing had been carefully observed, but I had not observed the mind observing it. I knew this, suddenly. I loved knowing it.
7
Lou had graduated from Columbia College with honors, ambitious to be a doctor. But it was one thing for an Italian American kid who’d worked summers, nights, and weekends trimming cutlets and sirloins, scraping blocks and sweeping up sawdust in his father’s butcher shop, to apply to medical schools, another thing to get into one. Try telling a medical school admissions committee in 1952 that nothing could be better training for hip surgery than dismembering a side of beef.
After sweating out rejection after rejection, he was finally admitted to Long Island University Medical School. This was exceptional, a coup. Most of the aspiring doctors among his Italian American classmates, including his best friend, Mario, would have to go to Italy to train. Mario used to drop over with Lou’s other buddies on holidays and flirt with me, in a careless, God’s-gift sort of way. God gave me fair warning, I think, the day Lou and his friends came in and found me on my knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, and Mario said in what sounded like all seriousness that “it was just the way he liked to see a woman.”
Lou himself would never have said such a thing. At least I thought not, and I loved him the more for it, the more because I already felt for him something approaching awe. Coming out of his teens he had grown into his own kind of good looks—never tall, but square-jawed and handsome in a tough, Georgie Raft sort of way, athletic, physically powerful, a strong swimmer. A lifeguard for a time, he had made varsity track. Judy was mad for him. If he’d had the time and money to date that other boys had, I thought you’d have to peel the girls off him.
But there was another side to Lou, a kind of sleeping beast, given to lightning surges of feckless anger. He would abruptly pull away, come back as suddenly as sunlight after a storm, tenderhearted and all duty and discipline again, every inch the first son. The truth was, for all his determined push toward medicine, he’d actually wanted to be a geologist. But they wanted a doctor. He’d resisted at first, cried when Mom pleaded, and in the end obeyed, as I had.
As for Carlo, duty had never been his strong suit. He’d finished New Rochelle High School academically just getting by, doing some things well in typical fits and starts, periodically showing up in the principal’s office. He was a jokester, good for a laugh, good for a good time. He could crack you up if he didn’t go all sarcastic and mean. But his soul seemed too blocked with anger to care what anybody thought. He finally earned enough money doing summer jobs to buy himself a motorcycle. My parents gave him a struggle, but he won.
He loved to cut a swagger on his bike, like Uncle Joey before him. “He even looks like Uncle Joey,” my mother would say. She tried to accept, to vocalize acceptance and make peace, to make herself believe that now that the discussion was done it was done. But I know she died every time he vroomed off and careered around the curve of Sickles Place toward Lockwood Avenue. I know she had a vision of him dead, smashed and bloody under the El like Joey, but not coming back.
Carlo and Lou both built their bodies with weights. It might be either of them I could hear heaving and grunting in their bedroom across the hall, the leaden rings clanking as they pressed, followed by the sudden thud as they brought them to the floor. Carlo used to stretch himself on a horizontal bar, longing to be an inch or two taller. He’d dreamed of becoming a pilot but the dream had died when he’d found himself blocked by his bad eyesight, and it only made him more bitter. Why, besides being short, did he also have to be blind? Lou’s bad eyes had hurt his vanity but Carlo’s hurt his soul. Whenever he put his motorcycle goggles on over his glasses, and then the black leather fitted helmet and tight black leather gloves, he put a meanness on him you could’ve walked into, if you’d been reckless enough.
So you could sense it was coming even before he got in with a bad bunch and slammed into trouble with the law. It was kept very hush-hush, even at home, but there was a court appearance. The judge went easy—seeing he came from a good family, as my parents said—and made a point of repeating. But the experience shook him, turned his ambition around. He began to work hard, suddenly yearning to know what it was he was good at, finding, amazingly, that it was math, calculus, geometry, trig. He was beginning to see himself, who he was. He must already have been preparing to take his community college degree back to Tucson and try for an engineering B.S. at the University of Arizona, by the time I entered Barnard. He amazed us. He amazed himself.
Ann would have been entering her second year at New Rochelle High School by then. She was smart, diffident, artistic, scared of her own talent, lagging behind it. She’d begun in her soft, shy way to be just as beautiful as her sweet baby looks had promised—my mother, without really meaning to be hurtful, had come to describe her to people as “the pretty one” of the two of us. She was right. Ann seemed never to have had to pass through my awkward ages, to suffer being all doughballs, as I had before I’d finally shed my fat, or looking into the mirror and seeing nothing but mouth, teeth, eyes, nose, all too big for my face. Her hair, cut short a year or two after me, had kept all of its fine curl and softness of color and hand, while mine had lost its chestnut lights and gone almost blue-black. A little vain of her tender, brown-blossom eyes, she would refuse to wear her glasses and squint toward you on the street until you got close enough to be seen, and then her gaze would take on that strangely liquid, vulnerable look of someone straining through tears. I loved the long brown lashes that needed no help to curl like a doll’s, the mouth that had never been swollen with scar tissue like mine and that bowed perfectly when she smiled, dipping up into her dimpled cheeks.
I was a rough Maggie Tulliver to her sweet Lucy Deane, I suppose. Or so, when I read The Mill on the Floss, I liked to think. And yet I doubt Maggie ever wanted to hug Lucy as I did Ann. If conscious envy ever tainted my envious-seeming comparisons, I don’t remember feeling it. Except once, when we were drying off after a swim and Ann, who was possessed by an exquisite parochial school shyness even with me, let down her towel for a moment, and out flashed a killing glimpse of two perfect breasts, pearly and round as the Venus’s at the Met. Till then I had grudgingly accepted my own cone-shaped pair, their areolas as big and brown as those of a fertility fetish, now I despised them.
But Ann could never appreciate her own beauty. She’d have been appalled to know how I felt about her desirable, innocent, wary sexiness, which she only feared. She had developed no miraculous moral muscle out of the banal cruelties of our childhoods. She’d been told too often that she was the cause of all our mother’s pain to make it to the first grade of self-love. The summer reign of terror with Carlo that had left me sore had left her scarred.
By now she and I had necessarily grown somewhat apart, even in our shared tower, our twin beds placed long ago on opposite sides of the room. Even had she known how much I’d suffered the lie I’d lived all through high school—and how could she? I had hardly let myself know it—she had every right to envy me. Of the two of us, I was