Kyra Read online

  I laughed, went over to the fridge, took out a bottle of Pinot Grigio, and poured two glasses. “It’s a deal. Let’s put on some music and eat in the living room.” The kitchen table was buried under papers and mail.

  She added the kale, turned up the heat, waited for it to wilt, and then lowered the flame. “Salud,” she said, clinking my glass, and went to choose a record. The sound of classical guitar preceded her as she came back holding the cover—a photograph of Segovia, a heavyset man with jowls, smoking a pipe. “Does he remind you of Papa?”

  “Let me see.” I added the pasta to the boiling water along with a handful of salt. He did. I turned over the cover and discovered that “Lilliburlero,” a song our mother used to sing to us, was an Irish revolutionary song.

  The spirit of our parents came into the room. They would have liked this, the two of us together, no revolution in sight.

  I drained the pasta, added the kale and some Parmesan, and carried it out, the Tuesday night special. Anna brought the salad and bread. She looked tired. I turned the music down.

  “I dreamed about Papa last night,” she said, pushing away her plate. I got up to fill a pitcher of water. She waited. “I haven’t done that for a long time,” she said. She studied her hand. “We were in the kitchen, sitting at the long table, you and me and the two of them. In the dream, the ceiling of the room was low. Friends started coming in, Yoni with his green shorts and sandals, and Elektra, elegant in a long skirt. Papa was telling one of his stories.” She looked across the room.

  I remembered those summer evenings, the windows open, the stories, the friends. But something in the dream was troubling Anna. I poured water into her glass.

  “I took a spoon from the cup on the table, one of those mismatched silver spoons that Mommy picked up at flea markets. I looked into the bowl of the spoon, and it began to tarnish until I couldn’t see anything. Then we were outside, standing by the sea. The water was rising, someone was missing, and Papa was looking up and down the beach. He said ‘We have to get a boat.’ There was more, but I can’t remember the rest.”

  “Who was missing?”

  “Maybe that boy, whatever his name was, who came that summer with Mommy’s friends from Vienna, the one Anton must have picked on or something because he took off down the beach and it was a long time before we found him. I think the dream was about Anton, how I couldn’t see what was coming. And I should have seen it. The signs were all there. I of all people should have known.”

  I knew she had tormented herself over this. I looked across the table at Anna, her face taut. She had always looked out for me, and at times I had resented this, found it patronizing. I liked to think now we looked out for each other.

  “Mommy always worried about Anton,” I said, “but then Papa would reassure her, ‘It’s just a phase, Katya, he’ll get over it, our marriage, it’s hard for him. Give it time,’ he’d say. But it wasn’t a question of time.”

  “But it was Papa who insisted we get a boat,” Anna said. “He must have had a premonition.”

  Segovia was playing “Lilliburlero.” We listened to the song.

  “Such a sweet song for a revolution,” I said, getting up to clear the table.

  “If only we had photographs from that time,” Anna said,

  “then we could see from the faces.”

  “See what?”

  “Who knew.”

  I plunged into the corridor between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the tunnel of time leading to the end of classes, then winter break, followed by reading period and exams. Going in, there were leaves on the ground, brown and crisp, picked up by the wind, and in the late afternoons, a startling light. Coming out, there was the solstice, the pastels of winter taking over the sky, red-pinks and streaky yellow-greens against the inky blue.

  I looked out the window one afternoon and saw the ash tree bare across the street. I remembered the chess game, the yellow leaves of the maple tree, the blue-gray of his eyes, and wondered if mine were still green. Otherwise, I didn’t think much about him, or if I did, I was careful to redirect my thoughts. He had left. In a way I was relieved. I was on leave that spring. I had a small grant to go to Thailand with Randy, my anthropologist friend, who was studying the Akha. He was the one who had told me about the design of their villages. I wanted to see them for myself.

  Faculty meetings were consumed by fights over appointments, arguments about curriculum. For my colleagues, I was something of a conflict-free zone, an academic not seeking tenure, a woman not looking for commitment. The age of anxiety had followed the age of Aquarius, a virus having put a stop to free love. And maybe Freud was right about sublimation, the advantages of channeling unruly desires into something socially constructive. Sex went underground, people talked about publishing. “Lover” had given way to “partner.” Reagan was in the White House. What could you say?

  Anna and I had agreed to meet at Cafe Pamplona on the Thursday before we were to give the talk. We had exactly one week to prepare, which underscored the gravity of the situation. A reddish-gray haze hung low in the sky, blurring edges, the straight black lines of the wrought-iron fence outside the café came as a surprise. I looked up, wondering if it was going to snow again, and I thought of Andreas. What was he doing now? The air held a feeling of expectation. I headed down the stone steps into the steamy interior.

  Anna was sitting at the table below the high window. She had her back to me, her green sweater, her dark hair absorbing the light. She had cut her hair short to signal her intention to change her life. It changed her face, her features at once sharper and more delicate.

  She took out her knitting, a wildly colored sock, spools of color dangling from the needles. She was making the pattern up as she went along.

  “Next Thursday is the ides of December. It’s a bad omen. We probably should cancel,” she had said that morning.

  Yet here she was, at the table, my sister, the rebel, sitting with her knitting, in a steamy café.

  The lecture series was called In Tandem. The idea was to bring faculty from different fields together and hear how they would converse. We had decided to talk about Gothic cathedrals and psychology as the twelfth and the twentieth century’s answers to the problem of mystery—how to reveal the presence of the invisible.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said, “I don’t know about this. Both the spiritual world and the psyche are in trouble but I’ve forgotten how to speak psychologese. They say if you don’t learn a language early, it doesn’t stick. I clearly learned psychology too late.” She turned the heel of the sock.

  A waiter in jeans and a black turtleneck appeared at our table, pencil and pad in hand.

  “Let’s have tea,” I said. “Do you have any scones?”

  He shook his head.

  There was a vast array of teas to choose from, a new addition to the espresso and caffe latte that were the staples of the Pamplona crowd.

  “Do you have Typhoo?” Anna asked. She knew you could only get Typhoo tea in England. She really did not want to do this—that much was clear.

  On the ides of December, at five o’clock on the following Thursday, a crowd gathered in Boylston Hall. People stomped in in winter coats and boots, leaving a trail of slush down each of the aisles. Like snails, said my friend David, the architect of outdoors who had come to provide moral support. He followed me in and to the front, his bushy hair ensconced in a voluminous hood. It had snowed again the week before, and the thinnest of paths were shoveled, as if the local inhabitants had given up on clearing the sidewalks, even before winter really began. The Christmas hum was in the air—“Good King Wenceslas” on constant replay. Homeless people lined streets filled with Christmas shoppers.

  “I was right,” Anna said. “This sister show is irresistible. It hardly matters what we say. Just appearing together is like proving the existence of God—it shows that sisterhood exists.”

  Divisions among women had begun to appear like cracks in a new building. A majority had t
urned into minorities, seemingly overnight, the seventies giving way to the eighties. Who engineered this, I wondered, I who lived with my sister, for whom sisterhood was a fact of life.

  We tuned to each other, affinity flowing wordlessly between us. The student organizer climbed the steps to the platform and began her introduction. I liked her earrings, made of stained glass, perfect for the occasion, one with a long silver thread hanging down, a blue bead at the end.

  “Whatever you can say,” I whispered as the introduction ended, “this has not been overplanned.”

  We stood together at the podium; we had worked out a counterpoint. We would go back and forth rather than following each other like buses. I began with a slide of the Abbey of St.-Denis, followed by one of Chartres. I would take this audience out of words, into the realm of shape and space. Anna began with a metaphor: therapy is a cloud chamber, the psyche revealed through free association. I talked about light, its use in cathedrals, the unique relationship between structure and appearance, the decision to turn walls into windows. Stained glass showed that the windows were intended not to see through but to reveal the relationship between inside and outside, light filtering in as the spiritual world enters the material world, a revelation of the divine.

  The Gothic builders had made the cathedrals porous, and this was Anna’s point: the psyche is porous, permeable, in a constant relationship of exchange with the world. The transparency of the spiritual world, the transparency of the psyche, unseen but manifest, essential to life.

  I glanced at my sister, we had found a rhythm. The tightness was gone from her voice. She glanced at me, I took the cue.

  The cathedrals were built in a way that seemed to reverse the force of gravity, the verticalism startling. Light became the active principle. I cited the scholar Von Simson, who had described it as transparent, diaphanous architecture, and showed more slides of Chartres. Then Anna reminded us that we are breathing air that Cleopatra exhaled: we live in a state of constant exchange. I can’t remember now if she actually used the example of the placenta to convey the psychic filtering of the world around us, like breathing in and out. The psyche, she said, depends on this ongoing process of exchange between inner and outer worlds, and trouble comes when people start, psychologically speaking, holding their breath. When they cannot take in what is going on around them or let out what is inside them.

  I wondered how people were taking this in, given that we were in the world of “good fences make good neighbors.” I flashed a slide of a Romanesque church on the screen, relying on the academic staple of compare and contrast. Thick walls covered with murals were intended to distract attention from the weight of the building and remind the faithful of the existence of a world beyond this one. The mosaics in Byzantine churches did the same thing. But with the Gothic, the form of the building was integral to the religious experience. Anna said that the therapy relationship also dissolves form and function. The relationship is not a container for healing but is in itself therapeutic. At least that’s the ideal. With the therapist, people enact the problems of relationship that brought them into therapy, but if the therapy relationship itself is problematic, then therapy only compounds the problem.

  I showed architectural drawings from the thirteenth century, the Reims palimpsest, a drawing made over a partially erased older drawing, revealing the underlying geometric pattern, lines ordered according to true measure, a geometry based on the proportions of the human body. Villard de Honnecourt had taught people how to halve the square for the purpose of determining the proportions of a building, and the façade of Notre Dame was composed of four squares, developed according to true measure. It was a science of modulation, a system of proportions translated by purely geometrical means.

  Anna raised the question: What was true measure within the therapeutic situation, is there a good measure of relationship? Was there an underlying geometry, so to speak, of relationship that bridged architecture and psychology, the outer and inner structures of human life?

  Because that really was the question: What was the relationship between inner and outer worlds? The Gothic cathedral had emerged from the religious experience, the metaphysical speculations, and also the political and physical realities of twelfth-century France. It reflected the cult of Mary, notre dame.

  Psychoanalysis and its offshoots in the twentieth century, said Anna, originated in the psychological experiences and the culture of late-nineteenth-century Vienna—they came out of the study of hysteria, inspired by a woman, Anna O.

  Was there a clue here, Anna asked, in the link between Gothic architecture and the cult of Mary on the one hand and psychoanalysis and the study of hysterical women on the other? Had a new spiritual or psychological connection with women spurred a new understanding of the relationship between inner and outer worlds? I ended with a question: Does the exploration of the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the seen and the felt presence, hinge on men coming into a new spiritual or psychological relationship with women?

  The audience seemed in shock. They had expected a lecture on architecture and psychology. Who knows what they thought we would say. The organizer with the stained-glass earrings couldn’t contain her delight.

  A biologist stood up to ask the first question, but instead he began a mini-lecture on the correspondence between the ground plan of the cathedral and the proportions of the human body. I decided to treat it as a question and said that I wondered whether this grounding in the body and its proportions was partly what had sustained people in building cathedrals over generations. Since life, although contained in the body, continues through time, the cells of one generation forming another.

  A historian got up and said that his specialty was the tenth century. Prior to that time, people all over Europe had lived in mud huts, except of course that then there wasn’t anything we would now recognize as Europe. In the twelfth century, people were building Gothic cathedrals in a Europe that is recognizable. His question was: Could anyone tell him anything that had happened in the intervening century to bring this about, or did the cathedrals just come out of nowhere?

  “Out of nowhere?” Anna said, her voice rising. Hadn’t we just suggested that they had come out of a new relationship with women, the cult of Mary, notre dame? As psychoanalysis would come from the study of hysteria, Anna O.?

  “I think we have time for one more question,” the organizer said, her face tight, tension building in the room. I watched her look for a woman’s hand, a futile search. Not a single woman had raised her hand.

  She settled for Sandro, who taught Roman architecture. A good choice, in my book, and he asked a real question. Given the contrast between the Romanesque churches with thick walls you couldn’t see through and the way Gothic architects had used line and light to dissolve the true volume of the supports into bundles of frail, soaring shafts, did I see a correspondence between these two religious visions and the different visions of cities represented by Rome and Carthage?

  It was right up my alley, I said. I spoke for a few moments about the contrast between imperial Rome, eight hundred years of nearly uninterrupted war, and Carthage, which at least in the beginning represented a frail, soaring possibility, a city devoted to arts and commerce rather than to conquest and imperialism. Then I concluded by saying that this was the subject for a new talk.

  There was wine and cheese. Friends and colleagues had come, along with students and the anonymous crowd that shows up at five in the afternoon for the free buffet of education, the array endless at a university of this size. Now the silent women came up to speak. “You know,” one said, “even in that last question the connection with women was implicit, because Carthage, you know, was ruled by a queen.”

  I found myself wishing Andreas had been there. I thought he would have loved it, thick walls turning into Notre Dame, like Roma turning into amor.

  Afterward we went to a restaurant in the North End. A friend of Anna’s knew the owner and had reserved a small ro
om. David and Sarah came, he from the north of England, she from South Africa, as black as he was pale. His bushy hair, released from the hood, exuded warmth, her gold hoop earrings accentuated her beauty. They had met in London, where he was teaching landscape architecture and she was studying set design. She came over to where I was sitting. “Chekhov said that the artist’s task is to state the problem correctly, and you did that brilliantly,” she said, her accent lilting, her smile conspiratorial. A sisterly act. Relief pulsed through my body. I caught Anna’s eye across the table. It had been fine.

  That Saturday the Design School students held their annual masked ball. Two members of my studio class headed the committee and I had promised I would come, forgetting until the last moment that this meant finding a costume, one more thing to do before classes ended. Reading period began after the holiday break, exams didn’t start until mid-January. For the students, it was a moment of elation. I found the darkness of December oppressive. I rummaged through my closet, irritation mounting. “No” was a one-word sentence I thought I had mastered, but students were my soft spot. I fished out a long white dress and a pair of gold sandals. Anna had found a Venetian mask for me at a shop in the North End. I put it on, looked in the mirror. I could have been anyone. I stared at the white commedia face and found the anonymity enticing. I had become someone I never intended to be.

  Torches lit the steps of the Fogg Museum. Inside, a band was playing. I hung my cape in the coatroom and walked through the Renaissance arches into the interior courtyard, turned into a forest for the occasion—a respite from Christmas decorations. Tree branches hung from the pillars, yellow and green lights dappled the paper leaves. David was playing the drums, and I headed over to him, straightening the mask over my eyes. People were dancing, some shapes recognizable, but for the most part the costumes held. Good. If you couldn’t see, did that mean you couldn’t be seen? Child logic. The music took over—the unmistakable sound of the Beatles, “Octopus’s Garden.” I noticed the sea creatures climbing the walls. The students had done a terrific job.