Free Pearl by Mary Gordon Page B

the house too. The police say there’s no evidence she was involved; she’s registered in the Radcliffe dormitories, and there is no record of her presence in that house. She insists she is guilty; they insist she is not. Go home, honey, they say, go home to your father; you’ve got friends in high places, take advantage of it. Go while the going’s good. But the going is not good, and she cannot make it good, and she cannot make them arrest her.
    It is true, I suppose, that she could have done something to make them arrest her. Thrown a bottle through the police station window. Chained herself to something, as her daughter would later do. It is strange that she only railed; Maria did not act, as her daughter is now acting, Maria, whose enduring belief is in the liberating force of action.
    All she did was shout at the police and beg Billy to believe that she didn’t know what was happening. He doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t want anything to do with her. He goes to jail for six months only, because he is a Harvard student, a PhD candidate in microbiology, and the guns and explosives had not been used.
    She begins to be suspicious. “Go home to your father . . . friends in high places.” The name of the FBI agent on the case is Ryan. She remembers that her father’s very good friend, Monsignor Ryan from the chancery, has a brother in the FBI.
    She doesn’t care that her father is weak, that he has just been operated on. She borrows a car and drives, at top speed, to Larchmont. She throws open her father’s bedroom door. Her father is in bed but she knows that whatever else he’s done, he won’t tell an outright lie.
    She says, “Did you know my friends were going to be arrested? Did you arrange to have the operation so I would be with you when it happened?”
    White, his white face against the white pillow, his white hands holding a black rosary, sign of the church. Monsignor Ryan’s church, Maria thinks, church of the FBI.
    “Say it, say you trapped me. Admit you lied to me!”
    “I never lied to you.”
    “Spare me your Jesuitical machinations.”
    Even in her rage, she does not use, with her father, the diction of her friends. She doesn’t say “Jesuitical bullshit,” which is what comes to her mind; she says “Jesuitical machinations.”
    And those are the last words she says to her father.
     
    Pearl knows nothing of all this. Would it be better if she had known? If she had known about her mother’s past, her mother’s anguish and confusion when she was the same age, might she have gone to her in her own time of anguish? It doesn’t matter. Pearl didn’t know. She never went to her mother. She never thought of her mother as someone with a life in history. As a character in a chronicle. Does any child?

5
    We will leave Maria now in her first-class seat. A woman who has always been in love with movement, now in terror for her child, trapped in a severely circumscribed place.
    Joseph, on the other hand, is on the streets of Rome. We have been talking about history, so it would seem appropriate to follow him, in this city where more of the history of the West is centered than in any other place: the history of the West, the history of the Roman Catholic Church, from which, after all, Joseph makes his living. A strange phrase, that,
making a living
. As if living were something that could be made.
    Joseph leaves his hotel, the Santa Chiara in Piazza Minerva, a few feet away from the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where, atop Bernini’s elephant with its heaving saddle, stands an obelisk, found in the church’s garden and preserved by learned monks, a monument to the Egyptian goddess Isis. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva: the Virgin mother atop the Roman goddess of wisdom and, on top of that, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. A mishmash, a mix-up, no pure statement possible; contradictions stacked one on top of the other, no structure, no hierarchy: just a pile. A pile of history, a pile of