The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (30 page)

In the Mercedes with the chauffeur she remembered that when she was younger she’d
loved hearing the story about how her father, the young consulate in Morocco on his
first foreign service assignment, had rescued her mother, a twenty-two-year-old Peace
Corps volunteer raised in Fulton, Missouri, from imminent injury and perhaps a thousand
deaths at the hands of tribal heathens massing outside the mud-walled house where
she lived. She was staying with a family of eight in a backroom without windows and
ventilation and just a squat hole in the yard for a toilet and was served her breakfast
of bread and cheese and yogurt and her dinner of couscous and cauliflower by a silent
wife watched over by an ever-changing number of teenage boys who, when the mother
wasn’t looking, rubbed their groins when she made eye contact with them. This disgusting
tableau was garnished with a soundtrack of cackles emitted from an ancient grandmother
covered head to toe in blue robes, planted on her cushions in the corner of the kerosene-smelly
kitchen. In truth, these heathens were no more of a threat than can be posed by a
well-behaved room of doe-eyed Berber schoolchildren who mechanically repeated every
syllable of English that left her mouth six days a week, including, after just two
months in the country, the declaration,
I think I’m losing it
.

It was well-known throughout the expatriate community in Morocco that her father exercised
an open-door, open-phone policy at his villa for any volunteer in from the countryside
for R & R or medical treatment, plus use of his chlorine-saturated swimming pool and
the twenty-four-hour attention of his three domestics who came with the lease (there
was no getting rid of them). On the day he returned home from the consulate to the
panting sobs of an attractive young midwestern girl in the throes of a nervous breakdown,
he ordered his housemaid to soothe her with an almond oil massage and his houseboy
to supply food, drink, and, should she want it, a pipe of hashish (she wanted it,
but being stoned only magnified her distress), then walked down to the city center
and had his supper irrigated with several rounds of gin and tonics. He walked back
up the cobbled streets to the villa to find the volunteer on the phone in his study,
hyperventilating transatlantically to her parents in Missouri, and he took the phone
from her grip and spoke calming, reassuring words to her family and replaced the receiver
in its cradle and asked,
What can we do to make you feel better?
She said she wanted to go to church, and he said do you want to wash up first and
she nodded tearfully and it took the rest of the night for her to scrub herself free
of the germs of hysteria and disorientation. By Sunday dawn they were side by side
in a pew at St. Eusti’s, celebrating first mass, the immediate bond of their devout
Roman Catholicism overshadowing the differences that would make them an unlikely couple.
By noon they had changed into bathing suits to retire poolside for a service of tea
and fruit. By twilight her father-to-be had discovered what her mother-to-be most
needed, which was to be held in the tender unquestioning arms of the familiar.

That was how the story of her mother began, she thought, noticing that the driver
had begun to circle past Hagia Sophia a second time, and only God could say how the
story would end, though the ending already seemed to have taken place some time ago.
You could not conceivably pack more irony into a life than had been stuffed into her
mother’s, a woman who desperately wanted to escape the exoticism of faraway worlds,
yet she had guaranteed her exile from her own by falling in love with the one person
who would keep her from returning home. And how could her mother ever live in the
States again, her daughter thought unkindly, without her legion of servants, without
the accumulated privileges that only came from living overseas, the viceroy’s wife.

They had married, one had to think too hastily, in Casablanca, her father undoubtedly
expecting her to be the virgin that she was, her mother having never given procreation
a thought. Then he surprised her on their honeymoon in Paris by leaving her there
in a walk-up apartment on the Left Bank, a war bride and freshly pregnant, and flying
away to his new assignment in Saigon. She liked Paris but despaired of being alone,
found the student riots thrilling but almost everyone she tried to talk to was an
insufferable snob (she had only to mention she had a husband in Vietnam to be held
personally responsible for the war), and often she forgot that she was pregnant and
imagined instead that she had contracted some awful African disease. After her son
was born, her husband visited his new family like clockwork for ten days every other
month, for a year, then three months in, one month out, and then she reclaimed him
full-time, starting with his recovery from a bullet he had taken to his left shoulder
during the Tet offensive. Then eleven months back in the States in the suburbs of
Washington, DC (where her father purchased one of the new town houses mushrooming
through the cow pastures of Vienna, Virginia), followed by two years in New Delhi,
where their daughter was born and her mother stuck her with the name she would come
to abhor, Dorothy—Tell Daddy there’s no place like home, baby—as if to punish them
both for not being somewhere else where they belonged. Soon afterward she sunk into
a postpartum depression, withdrawing to a room she took as her own at one end of the
sprawling humid house where she lived in bed all day, listening to American folk music
and smoking vast quantities of pot out of a chillum. When she finally emerged she
had, in her husband’s words,
gone hindu,
wearing saris, visiting gurus, making a pilgrimage to the Ganges and returning to
an infant and a small boy who seemed, perplexingly, as much a part of the house as
the servants and rented furniture and peacocks in the yard and just as removed from
her sense of responsibility. Her brother remembered the
ammas
and nannies—even the ambassador’s teenage daughter, Maura—and sometimes their father
changing diapers and dressing them but never their mother.

Cairo, her mother was fond of saying vindictively in the years ahead, made her come
to her senses—she might pretend to
go hindu
but she’d never
go muslim—
and for the first and only time she fled all the way back to her parents’ cozy redbrick
bungalow on a quiet maple-lined street in Fulton, arriving thoroughly exhausted, international
travel with two small children clearly a message from God that God hates you. Her
alcoholic but good-natured father an agricultural extension officer for the university
in Columbia and her book-loving but narrow-minded mother tenured in the poli-sci department
at Westminster College offered their
tsk
ing admonitions and unplacating concerns—
But honey, this is the life you’ve made; I would think an annulment is not something
the Vatican makes easy. What is it you want? First it’s save the world, now it’s ruin
yourself.
She answered always with two minds, self-doubt the only common trait between the pair—
But you don’t know the things he does,
she’d say direly, unable or unwilling to explain, and then in the next breath,
He’s the most altruistic, dedicated man I’ve ever known,
and then she’d wedge in a half-formed unconvincing diatribe on American imperialism
that would cause her parents to shake their heads at the naïvéte that had driven her
overseas in the first place
.

Think of the children,
her mother would tell her quietly as they stood at the kitchen sink, washing up after
meals.
But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,
she’d say back in a rebuke to her own mother.
These places we have to live, they’re no place to raise children. It’s their attitude
about things. Poverty doesn’t have to be so dirty, does it?
And the way the men treat women—don’t get me started.

Well fine,
said her mother. There was no lack of decent folks here in Calloway County who would
appreciate a helping hand. But she had felt called as a freshman at Washington University,
watching television when JFK, campaigning in Michigan, had said if he were president
he would create an agency for young people just like her, bursting with unshaped idealism
but ready to help, bit by bit, to make the world better, and now here she was, knowing
the call had been a mistake, crossed wires, and she felt her life had been misassigned
and she was doomed to be forever remorseful that she had not succeeded in her callow
passion to make a better world, or make even one life easier. Instead, she had made
her own worse.

Dottie knew what she was meant to know about the story, knew her mother’s point of
view, her father’s, her grandparents’. Her brother’s, who could only remember that
mom cried often and that their grandfather had taken them fishing in the Ozarks and
that their grandmother had pulled from the oven tray upon tray of oatmeal raisin cookies,
which she distributed parsimoniously. She herself only recalled the golden image of
their father showing up at the door, come to retrieve them from what came to be known
in the family as the Vacation. Although he had phoned his wife frequently during their
separation, he assiduously avoided probing her thoughts and did not ask the questions
she was not ready to answer, and so had left her alone for three months, three months
being the limit, he liked to say, on losing touch with your old life and creating
something new. Three months was long enough to have thought about everything and discuss
it with her parents and decide what she wanted. Now that he was here she saw her error,
not in leaving him but coming to Fulton, realizing her parents were going to see him
as God’s gift to mankind, not solely because of his princely good looks or unstoppable
charm or provenance in the world but because walking into church together to attend
mass as a family they were, in everybody’s eyes but especially her parents’, the ideal
family, a blessed family, and any failure to appreciate this condition surely meant
that you were yourself a dismal failure, without virtue or hope. They had raised her
to be grateful for her blessings, and honey, what in the world did you think a blessing
was, if not this husband, these children?

But he had come with a secret, a real secret, one that it was against the law to share,
he explained, as he initiated them into the government’s intrigue. The president was
going to China. Part two, you can tell anybody, he said: So are we. Not the mainland,
naturally. Hong Kong. Her mother, this once but never again, enjoyed the posting—the
overlay of British culture, urban amenities, rational people, Filipino domestics,
clean beaches, the flocks of snow-white cockatiels in the air, excellent shopping.

And the rest, as her family liked to say with the tacit understanding that they had
been swept away into its current, is history.

She loved her mother but her mother was not lovable; if that paradox didn’t exactly
make sense, she did not want to think about it anymore tonight, definitely not tonight.
The driver was trying to edge around a stalled dolmu
ş
and force back into traffic past the Topkapi Gate, apparently to skirt Hagia Sophia
for a third time. Dorothy knew to be patient and trust the game and not second-guess
her father even if his behavior sometimes puzzled her girlfriends Elena, Yesho, and
Jacqueline (whose name she envied), who understood most everything about her. Finally,
she couldn’t keep herself from saying, with a slight tone of annoyance, Excuse me,
and the driver’s glass-covered eyes jumped to meet hers in the rearview mirror.

How many times are we going to go around the
cami
?

Not
jammy,
he said, correcting her pronunciation of the Turkish word for mosque.
Jahmy
. And it hasn’t been a mosque for fifty years. Please, you can speak English, he said
to her, and already she was interested in his schooled British accent.

But Muslims go there to pray.

And Christians go there to pray, but it is a museum.

Shouldn’t we just go to the Kumkapi? she asked.

He took his right hand off the wheel to pull back the cuff of his woolen jacket and
tap his ostentatious wristwatch. Faulex, she thought immediately. It’s fake.

There’s a problem, he said. No, not a problem, sorry. There is a delay.

We have to kill time.

Is that how you say it?

It’s a funny expression, isn’t it?

It makes good sense, he said. Killing is wasting. He twisted around to look at her
and offered a cryptic modification of his axiom—but when it is necessary to remove
waste, this is different—and then asked if she wanted to park and go inside and she
said no thank you and he nodded and turned back to his driving.

Have you ever been inside? he asked.

Yes, she said. Several times.

He was silent for a while, maneuvering through the swarm of cars and pedestrians and
pushcart vendors, and her mind drifted inside the elephantine dome, through the ancient
majestic spaces of the cathedral that soared above Istanbul like a stony rose-colored
knob of mountaintop, goose bumps rising on her arms as they did when she first saw
the Pantheon in Rome, the other place where she truly began to comprehend the words
sublime
and
mystical,
the basilica a mysterious world of its own floating between earth and heaven. Standing
within the Hagia’s echoing mysteries, she had to admit, made her want to pray, but
it also spooked her, its magical sweating column and holy hole and, worst of all,
the column with the power to reveal whether or not you were a virgin—she wouldn’t
go anywhere near it.

Your father will not pass through the gates of Hagia Sophia, the driver said, interrupting
her thoughts.

Really? she said. You’ve come here with him then?