The Liar's Wife (41 page)

“What time is that?”

“Think Margaritaville.”

She rang the convent bell. At first no one seemed to be answering the doorbell. But then she heard slow, light footsteps; she knew it was Sister Imelda. And the look on her face was one of unalloyed, unmodulated joy. She opened her arms and took Theresa to her with such a delighted intake of breath that Theresa let herself (although she was much taller) fall onto Sister Imelda's breast and cry. “I've made a mess, Sister,” she said. “I've really made a mess.”

“Well, I'm sure you haven't, you couldn't possibly, you're such a wonderful girl. But let's hear what Sister Maureen thinks. And come and have some tea and cookies; Sister Maureen and I were just going to have some and then watch Dr. Phil. He's got a show today about the fattest bride in the world. This girl whose goal was to be eight hundred pounds at her wedding. And her fiancé was all for it; it seemed to be what he wanted.”

Sister Maureen appeared at the door. “Yeah, Theresa, I'm sure that's the thing you most wanted to see just off the plane. So you've made a mess. You're not the first in the history of the world; I'll bet you're not the last.”

She followed Sister Maureen up the stairs. “Do you want a shower first? Maybe you just want to sleep. Why don't you shower, we're having BLTs for supper, then you can just crash. You can tell us everything in the morning. Or tonight if that's what you want.”

“BLTs with mayonnaise?”

“Specialty of the house.”

She couldn't think of a more desirable meal. It was so American, so much the food of home, so entirely unlike anything she'd eaten in Italy.

She hadn't realized how hungry she was, and to her embarrassment she had finished her sandwich before the other two were half done. Sister Imelda stood up and made her another without her asking. She felt like the indulged, perhaps even spoiled child of the house, but she craved the indulgence, like a balm on abraded skin.

They took their iced tea out to the back porch and sat on identical white wicker chairs with identical red and yellow striped cushions. She told her story. Sister Imelda just kept blinking, as if Theresa were speaking in a foreign language. Sister Maureen whistled.

“Well, you have made a mess. I don't quite understand the implications for your future, which you are so convinced are dire. I think the best thing is to call Joan Gallagher. I'm out of my depth.”

Theresa nodded, as though a doctor had just told her that she needed a course of treatments that would be painful and expensive, and whose usefulness he couldn't guarantee. Sister Maureen went into the room where the telephone was, and came back in less than five minutes.

“She's coming over now. I told her the outlines.”

“What did she say?” Theresa asked, her throat dry with anxiety.

“She laughed,” Sister Maureen said. “She couldn't stop laughing.”

When Joan Gallagher walked into the room, Theresa remembered what Maura always said about her: she looked much more like what people thought nuns looked like than Sister Maureen or Sister Jackie. Sister Maureen had simply been born a beautiful woman; she had
those blue-violet eyes people associated with Elizabeth Taylor, and in the years in which Maura and Theresa had invented exotic pasts and romantic histories for the nuns who taught them, they were convinced that those eyes would have made her susceptible to a grand passion. “They're almost wrong on a nun, okay for Elizabeth Taylor, but you've always got to be thinking of sex somehow when you think of violet eyes, and, hey, you're not supposed to be thinking about sex when you're thinking about nuns,” Maura had said. Sister Maureen's hair curled softly and naturally; she wore it simply, but there was no severity to the simplicity, and today she had on simple black cotton pants and a white cotton shirt. Joan Gallagher was nearly six feet tall. “You just have to think of the word ‘beanpole' when you see her, you just don't have a choice,” Maura had said.

Tonight, she was wearing a khaki skirt that fell two inches above her ankles, a short-sleeved madras shirt, and Birkenstocks. Her hair was a clench of tight, almost furious curls, which had once been blond but were now turning half gray, and the turn was not in Joan Gallagher's favor.

“Sit down, honey, let me get you a glass of iced tea,” said Sister Imelda. Theresa found it astonishing that anyone would think of calling Joan Gallagher “honey.” She had very little sweetness in her; she was rigorous, demanding, honest, ironic. The word people used about her most often was “tough.” Theresa could never imagine her as the mother of children. Sister Maureen and Sister Imelda were a hundred times more maternal. With Joan Gallagher, you always had to watch your step.

And she knew she had lost her step, lost her footing, fallen on her face. She would have to prostrate herself now—but she was already in the abject position. She would have to confess, and humbly, almost helplessly, ask for advice.

“No, thanks, Sister, I'm taking Theresa out for a drink.” She turned to Sister Maureen. “We'd invite you, but I've given up on teaching you how to drink properly. You'd probably order Baileys Irish Cream and I'd have to move to another city from the mortification of it.”

“You forget my M.Phil. year at Oxford, Ms. Gallagher, when I became quite discerning in the matter of beer.”

“Oh, yes, the brew that made Milwaukee famous. How do I know you're not just reliving your riotous youth?”

“Well, you just have to trust me.”

“I have, and where has that gotten me? Oh, wait I forgot. It all worked pretty well.”

Theresa had never imagined that Joan Gallagher had it in her to be playful; she could see how she and Sister Maureen enjoyed this smart girl banter, and she wished she could just listen to them for the rest of the night instead of having to sit through this required tête-à-tête with Joan Gallagher. She wanted to take Sister Maureen's hand and say, “Come with me. Don't leave me alone.” But Joan Gallagher was jingling her car keys. “I have two hours' leave, and then Michael puts some bloody masterpiece on the table. God, his experiments in the kitchen are exhausting. Of course it takes me seven hours to clean up.”

“Oh, you're a pitiful woman. A man who cooks for you, what a curse.”

“Yes, and you encourage him, although God knows you've never done anything above a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“I'll have you know we had some excellent BLTs for supper.”

“My son Jeremy would say, ‘Oh great, dead pig.' ”

“Pigs are not high on my list of worries,” Sister Maureen said. “I don't like the look in their eyes. Shifty.”

“Neither do I,” said Joan Gallagher. “But I don't tell Jeremy that.”

They were silent in the car, and then Joan Gallagher said, “Shall we go to Valentino's? It's a bit quieter than other places.”

Valentino's was an upscale pizzeria that had some tables outside. Theresa knew Joan Gallagher went there often and they would probably find her a quiet spot.

She ordered a bottle of Nero d'Avola and without a pause looked into Theresa's eyes and said, “You'd better tell me everything.”

She would not tell Joan Gallagher everything. She would not tell her about Tom Ferguson, who theoretically was her friend. She told her about Gregory Allard's collection, and his helping her get access to the Civitalis. She told her what she believed was available in the archives if she decided to pursue that kind of thing for her dissertation.
She described her possible dissertation topics. Only then did she talk about Ivo, about his show, and about what she'd done to it.

“Well, to be completely practical, you really didn't ruin anything irreparable. You probably didn't even hurt the photographs, just the glass in the frames that was covering them. And from what you say, this little shit probably doesn't want to take any legal action. The father sounds like a nice, sad man; he probably fantasizes that you're the daughter he never had and always wanted, so I bet in time he'll take you back to his bosom. But what you need right now is a little time off. You've never taken time off in your life. Take next year, go somewhere fun and different, let your dissertation ideas simmer, or bake, or whatever cooking metaphor you want to use, or that my husband would be happy using.”

Something about Joan Gallagher's straightforwardness gave Theresa a kind of courage, the courage to be straightforward herself. “The thing is, I don't know if I want to go on with a Ph.D. There are so many things against it.”

“Like?”

“Like, even though Ivo was completely disgusting, he made me have to think about the connection between the kind of art I love and the money that goes into its preservation and display. And then there's the way you have to talk about things in the academy nowadays. You can't use the word ‘beautiful.' You can't use the word ‘value.' I can't stand the theory, and other kind of stuff bores me to tears. How the pattern of the wormholes proves some kind of dating. Or the influence of A on B. And who's going to read what I write? Three Ph.D. students, two of whom have private incomes, and one who's married to a hedge fund owner.”

“Everything you say is right. We are an endangered species, people who like to look at beautiful old things, not because we can make money off it, but out of love. ‘Love'; oh, ‘love,' it's another word like ‘beauty' you can't use. But love and beauty, yes, that's why we do what we do.”

It was a little frightening for Theresa to hear Joan Gallagher speak that way. She wasn't sure she liked the heating up it implied, the melting of the cool surface she had come to depend on for its very coolness.

“You're worn out, or burnt out, something like that. You need a bit of a rest.” She looked at the man's watch on her thin wrist. “And now, I must go back home to my husband. How long will you be in Milwaukee?”

“I don't know, exactly. My friend Maura is working as a nurse on an island in the Caribbean. I might go there for a while.”

“Sounds perfect. Have a drink with an umbrella for me.”

They drove back in silence. As Theresa got out of the car, Joan Gallagher took her hand and kissed it. “You'll make it,” she said. “You've got the stuff.”

Once, she would have been thrilled by this kind of praise from Joan Gallagher. But now it just seemed like another burden.

Sister Maureen was sitting on the back porch. She was holding a very thick book. “I'm rereading
War and Peace
,” she said. “I think I was too young for it when I read it first. I may just be old enough for it now. How was Joan?”

“She was great. She was very encouraging. She thinks I should take time off.”

“And will you?”

“Yes. You remember Maura Shaughnessy? She's working as an emergency room nurse on Tortola, it's an island in the Caribbean. She's invited me to come down there for a while, just get some kind of simple job.”

“Sounds great. I've always had great regard for Maura. The two of you were so important to each other. Two brave girls, given not a very good hand of cards. She was an excellent poet, you know. Remember I was your English teacher before I was your principal. Is she still writing poetry?”

Theresa felt ashamed that she didn't know. In high school, they had been the editors of the literary magazine, Maura bullying their classmates into submitting poetry and stories and essays, and Theresa coaxing drawings out of them, and finding images that were striking but not controversial for the cover. But since she'd decided to do nursing, Maura didn't talk about her poetry anymore. And Theresa hadn't asked. Once Maura had settled on becoming a nurse, the attention had shifted to Theresa, and her move into the great, dangerous, larger
world. She would ask Maura about her poems as soon as she saw her. Or maybe not right away. But it would happen; she would see to that. She hoped it wasn't too late.

“You know, Theresa, you never had a youth. I think it's time you get one, or use what you have before it's past its sell-by date.”

She knew that Sister Maureen was trying to be helpful, to give her some kind of permission, but she felt her words as another weight on her shoulders, as she had felt Joan Gallagher's “You've got the stuff.” Would she never get away from the sense that people wanted something from her, were waiting to see what she had “made of” whatever they had in mind: her intellectual gifts, her well-trained eye, and now her youth? She didn't want to make anything of anything. She didn't know what she wanted. She felt she had never known less about more in her life.

“I sometimes feel that we did you a very great disservice keeping you here at Divine Word. That we should have pushed you out to an Ivy League school, or maybe UW Madison, someplace where you'd be in a crowd of peers, introduced to new things, challenged, trying your wings. I think we wanted to keep you in our nest because we liked our nest, and we never considered that it might be too small for you. You probably didn't belong here. You were grateful to us, and, yes, in the very hard times when your father was so ill we were good for you, we gave you a place to go. But we probably kept you here out of nostalgia, out of a remembrance of things past and a hopeless hope in a nonexistent future that we didn't even believe in, maybe didn't even want, but couldn't give up because for us it represented a past that for us had been beautiful. And had a kind of luster, simply in its pastness.

“We didn't want things to end with Joan Gallagher. She was the last of something, one of the last classes of smart girls who didn't think, or whose parents didn't think, that they belonged in the big, scary secular colleges. In those days, our biggest majors were English and philosophy and art history. And the sisters teaching those things—I count myself among them—had very good training. Jackie went to Berkeley, I went to Oxford, only for graduate school, of course, but never mind; we came back with very good training. And we'd been smart girls ourselves. So we really believed, in the days after the Second Vatican Council, God,
we were so young then, that we could do something that would allow us to hold on to the best of the past but open some new windows. But you see, it didn't work. When the smart girls knew they could go other places, they didn't come to us. And why should they? We got their point, even though it hurt us. We knew something had come to an end.