Payback by Mary Gordon

Author:Mary Gordon [Gordon, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Maristella Ford and Agnes di Martini. A team, which she had never thought of not existing, or only in the vague way that you imagined your own potential nonexistence after death.

And then, one day, as if it were nothing, “I have put in my papers for retirement. We are moving back to my husband’s home in Australia.” Laurence Ford. A banker from Australia…and so, when it is time for him to retire, she cannot possibly refuse him: the return to the home of his childhood. They longed for vistas. The tended hills of Italy, the skies so interrupted by habitation, the small European expanse always a poor substitute.

Their son is in America, in Silicon Valley. But Maristella loathes Silicon Valley; insists that Lauro, the son, travel to Australia to see them. So it was likely they would not see each other again, and Agnes worried that she wouldn’t—not being kin, and never having met Maristella’s husband—be informed of her death.

Were women always making decisions based on ties of blood? How much more likely that women would make decisions touching work based on ties of blood.

And yet it had not been only blood. They had both seen that their way of doing restoration was being seen as passé, “boys and their toys,” expensive holograms as a substitute for standing and looking. Maristella’s anger at the mania for laser technology as a way of removing layers of paint. “Do they care nothing for the damage these lasers could do…and if we said to them, the best solvent for cleaning off centuries of dirt is spit, they would probably run outside and vomit and suggest to the authorities that we should be sent to a nice facility for the elderly deranged.”

And there seemed to be less and less money from the state for restoration, more pressure to do things quickly, with a lack of thoroughness that Maristella found difficult to endure.

With what seemed to Agnes unseemly speed, their work life was over and Agnes had to understand that she was no longer a person with work…and would never be again. Her mother’s joy at the prospect of returning home made her feel that she had been unkind in postponing her wishes. Often she thought of a philosophy professor who posed the question, “What have you done today to justify your existence?” Was it enough to be the daughter of your mother, the mother of your daughter, the grandmother of your grandson, with the attendant needs of each that you could meet? Why not say that was enough? But she knew that always, there would be an emptiness that had been filled with work…something requiring expertise, something, above all, that was done and could be pointed to. You could not point to meals cooked, beds made, clothes washed, even tears dried. Because always there would be more, and always they would be washed away, a message in the sand, which you would be a fool to think could ever be remembered.

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