Payback Read online

  ALSO BY MARY GORDON

  Fiction

  There Your Heart Lies

  The Liar’s Wife

  The Love of My Youth

  The Stories of Mary Gordon

  Pearl

  Final Payments

  The Company of Women

  Men and Angels

  Temporary Shelter

  The Other Side

  The Rest of Life

  Spending

  Nonfiction

  Reading Jesus

  Circling My Mother

  Good Boys and Dead Girls

  The Shadow Man

  Seeing Through Places

  Joan of Arc

  On Thomas Merton

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mary Gordon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gordon, Mary, [date] author.

  Title: Payback / Mary Gordon.

  Description: First Edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020000079 (print). LCCN 2020000080 (ebook). ISBN 9781524749224 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524749231 (ebook).

  Classification: LCC PS3557.O669 P39 2020 (print) | LCC PS3557.O669 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020000079

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020000080

  Ebook ISBN 9781524749231

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover images: (center) Miroslav Boskov/E+ (bottom) hatman12/iStock, both Getty Images

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mary Gordon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: Brimston, Arizona

  Part II: New York; New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  Part III: Rome

  Part IV: Brimston, Arizona

  Part V: New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  Part VI: Newport, Rhode Island

  Part VII: New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  Part VIII: New York; New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  Part IX: Brimston, Arizona

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Marvin,

  who is not afraid of getting lost

  PART I

  Brimston, Arizona

  February 2018

  The Arizona sun is strong this February afternoon, but all the women are quite cool and comfortable. You might think that they chose the colors of their shorts and sleeveless tops to match the colors of the fruits they are eating: cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew. Their fingernails and toenails are painted in various shades of opalescence: silver, rose, robin’s-egg blue. This is their weekly ritual: water aerobics, a manicure, a pedicure, then lunch (raw fruits, raw vegetables, whey protein–enriched smoothies) in front of one of their wall-sized TVs. Their children are grown; their husbands are somewhere.

  They are waiting for the show that is their favorite, and for which they feel a proprietary pride because it started as a local cable show here in their own Brimston and has now gone national. But they knew it when.

  “I just love her. I always have.”

  “I’m crazy about everything about her.”

  “When she goes after someone, I just feel good about things, like the world’s on the right track.”

  “Blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo,” they say, imitating Quin’s inflection, toasting each other with their pastel smoothies.

  * * *

  —

  “Good afternoon, lovers of justice. This is Quin Archer. And this is PAYBACK.

  “Today’s show exposes a greedy dishonest father, Winston La Marr. He cheated his daughter Cindy of a legacy left by her grandmother and fled the country with a new woman. Cindy’s loving grandmother, Thelma La Marr, Winston’s mother, created a trust to ensure that her granddaughter would always be provided for…she particularly wanted Cindy to have a college education. But she was too trusting…perhaps not in her right mind…and the trust was set up with only herself and Winston as trustees, not Cindy. She felt secure giving Winston the money to invest, and he invested it in what were called ‘bearer bonds.’ Bearer bonds, my friends, are named as they are precisely because anyone holding them in their hand…or bearing them…can cash them in. And that is precisely what Winston La Marr did. Cashed in the bonds, fled the country, leaving his daughter impoverished.

  “We’ve connected with him in this leafy upscale suburb of Philadelphia, an idyllic setting, my friends, I’m sure you all agree. Observe the wide, quiet street, the lush old trees. But I’m here to tell you that for Cindy growing up, life was far from idyllic. She went from living a comfortable middle-class life to being an impoverished child of a working mother—her mother went back to work as a secretary when her husband left and barely made ends meet—so Cindy was the victim and her victimizer went scot-free. Time and the world healed her; she is a brave, brave woman—married for thirty-six years with two lovely daughters and five sweet grandkids—until today. Because we’re here, all of us, you and I, and finally the victim will no longer be a victim but a payee. When she will get her PAYBACK.”

  On the screen, dark storm clouds brood. Then from somewhere, from anywhere, a golden arrow pierces the clouds, which part like curtains, revealing shining gold letters: PAYBACK.

  The gold letters disappear to reveal the severe face of Quin Archer.

  Standing in front of a large white house with out-of-place Colonial pillars, at the crest of a perfect lawn, is a grim-looking woman, possibly in her late fifties. On the right, slumped, stricken, stands a man in at least his eighties. Quin Archer approaches them. The old man bursts into tears. “What I did was terrible; I was the victim of the disease, gambling…it’s a disease like cancer or diabetes. You throw away everything valuable, for the disease. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t forgive me. By the time I got myself together, I couldn’t find you. I tried, I really tried, but you’d moved, your mother remarried, you took her husband’s name. I tried, I really tried. I only wish I could make it up to you somehow.”

  Winston La Marr begins weeping.

  “You well may shed tears, Mr. La Marr. But until Cindy gets her PAYBACK all I can say is blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo. Tears are not PAYBACK, Mr. La Marr, and this is why we’re here. Because it is time for you to make it up. To pay it back. I’m looking at your beautiful home here…and Cindy has provided us with images of the homes she lived in growing up.”

  Drab ranch houses on treeless streets appear on the screen, each one more dilapidated, more dispiriting than the last.

  “And this is the home Cindy and her husband, Tom, have made a home, through sweat and tears and struggle…a home, modest by any standards…no pillars for Cindy, no great lawn and majestic trees. So I would say there is something you could do to make it up to her, because it is obvious that you are enjoying a lifestyle far superior to that of the daughter you abandoned.”

  “It’
s…it’s not mine…it’s…it’s my wife’s.”

  “Let’s see what your wife has to say about all this,” Quin says, walking up the three brick steps to the front door.

  She rings the bell insistently, and the door is opened by a tall woman, her hair a stiff tower of copper red, her arms crossed across her large, heavily corseted chest.

  “I want you off my property,” the woman says.

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s too late for that, as your husband has signed a release.”

  “But it’s my property, not his.”

  “I think, Mrs. La Marr, that this is not the case. The deed, which we have found, is in both your names.”

  The woman tries to close the door, but Quin has wedged her foot against it, so it is impossible.

  “Your husband has said that he wishes he could make up to his daughter for the deprivation he caused her. He says that the money is in your name, but I’m sure you’ll see the injustice, Cindy deserves some PAYBACK.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “Are you sure you want the scandal of your husband being taken to court, exposed for the thief and cheat he is, his past laid out for everyone to see…not just your neighbors, but all the viewers of this show?”

  “Marie,” Winston shouts from the bottom of the lawn. “Marie, it’s only right.”

  The woman pushes the door against Quin’s foot, and Quin, having no choice, moves her foot away, takes off her high black pump, and rubs her foot with the greatest possible expression of inflicted pain.

  “I’ll make it right, Cindy, I swear I’ll make it right,” says Winston La Marr.

  Cindy falls into her father’s arms, and weeps. “Everything happens for a reason, Dad.”

  “And remember, Cindy,” Quin says. “If your father is unable to make his wife act justly, you have legal recourse. You need not be a victim. You will get PAYBACK, I guarantee it, if you just take your life in your hands, the only life you have, Cindy, the life that your father nearly stole from you—if you use the strength that helped you survive, I guarantee that you will get your PAYBACK.”

  Quin Archer turns her back on the embracing father and daughter. “Till next week, then. Remember: Justice may be slow in coming, but together we will bring it home.”

  She walks down the hilly lawn to the sidewalk. She looks into the camera with a fierce intensity.

  “My friends, my real true friends, all of you out here, I’ve never had the courage for this until now. But your love and support have made me feel safe and strong. You see, what I have kept shut inside my heart is the truth that I, too, was a victim. And my victimizer, my betrayer—well, I didn’t have the strength then to confront her, and there was no one to support me—she should have been the one—and so I ran, like so many victims, I ran. Ran into a life of self-destruction, which through so much support and love I was able to turn around. But now, my friends, my community of justice seekers. It’s my turn. I am proud to say that I have helped many to give up the status of victim, and it’s my turn now. You’ve heard me say it: Don’t call yourself the victim, call yourself the OWED. Next week, my friends: you’ll hear my story. Next week my victimizer will be the one to PAY BACK. And remember, my friends, FORGIVENESS WITHOUT PAYBACK KEEPS A VICTIM IN HIS CHAINS.”

  * * *

  —

  In a trailer parked in front of the brick house, two girls, bright and fleet as birds, dab at Quin Archer’s face with a white towel, leaving on it splotches of makeup the color of a pretzel. “Santa Fe Sunset” is the name of the foundation shade Quin favors. She is proud of her even, youth-bestowing tan, and although people warn her of the danger of tanning beds, she doesn’t listen. She mistrusts all doomsayers and believes that if there are consequences to something, she will find a way around them.

  She snaps her fingers for one of the girls to give her a hand mirror. She examines her face with calm satisfaction. With pleasure, she runs her hands over her skin’s firm, wrinkleless texture. She is lean and taut; there is no looseness, no sagging on any part of her body. She wished for years that her eyes were bigger, but now she’s made her small eyes a kind of trademark, emphasizing them with lines of thick black kohl. She worries that perhaps her arms are starting to look ropy, but for now she favors sleeveless sheaths and high heels. She pats with pleasure her signature hair: silver spikes, baffling speculations about her real age.

  She applies a thick coating of her signature orange lipstick—“Tangerine Sunrise”—and outlines it with a darker pencil: “Blood Orange.” She swivels around on her chair and says to her two birdlike assistants, who pretend to understand, “Well, that almost didn’t work…I hate it when they fall into each other’s arms. Thank God for the wife. But wait and see, girls, this next one, the one I was just talking about. I’m going to nail this one. I’m going to nail her to the wall.”

  PART II

  New York

  New Canterbury, Rhode Island

  April 1972

  Halfway down the wide stone staircase she stands still. Just for a moment, then she walks down three steps and is still again. Fifth Avenue. She looks to her right—or south, as she believes. It opened, the avenue, and that was just the right word for it: avenue, not street or road, but avenue, with its suggestion of expanse. The tallest buildings show themselves in mist, thin as needles, then rise up, dissolve in silver.

  She knows that she must turn around; she has to look behind her for the girls—the meek, abashed ones trailing close behind her, the daring ones who chafed and tried to flee, calculating the possibility of wild escape. But there would be no escape: there was the yellow bus a hundred paces from the bottom step, and there was Mrs. Golding, tapping her clipboard with a light green mechanical pencil, come along, girls, come along. Kind Mrs. Golding had agreed to take the girls back to Rhode Island without Agnes, leaving Agnes in the city, on her own to do whatever she wanted. Take a holiday or half a holiday, for goodness’ sake, kind Jane Golding had said.

  Agnes waves the bus off till it is entirely out of sight. She hasn’t moved; she doesn’t know how long it’s been, long enough to be noticed if anyone was watching. But no one is watching. She’s completely on her own.

  Is that the problem? That no one was watching. No one expecting, no one requiring. Was this what immobilized her? Because she just can’t decide. Here she is, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, and she is an art teacher—the art teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School for Girls, New Canterbury, Rhode Island. A school to be proud of, founded by bluestockings, suffragettes before the First World War; she herself had been a student there, an atmosphere of deliberate but genteel tolerance, an unspoken insistence on decorum, mixed with an insistence on intellectual freedom, laced with a New England asceticism that despised, in equal measure, cheap luxury and received ideas. But now there would be no girls trailing, no masterpieces to explain, no passing by the Carpaccio she would have preferred for the Titian she felt they ought to know about. The whole of the world’s great art, and she had only to go back up this staircase, into the building and up the truly grand stairs, and it was all hers.

  But just as easily, she could go down the stairs, turn right, and make her way down Fifth Avenue.

  She can’t stand there any longer. It’s making too much of it to stand like this, as if the question were a great one. Even if she put the matter in large terms—art or life, the past or the present—she knew that was ridiculous. The great questions were not for her, to put it in those large terms was nothing but vanity, and vanity was one of the faults she knew she was susceptible to and therefore must fear.

  Go on, then—up or down.

  Down it was, and to the right.

  * * *

  —

  And after two short blocks all doubt is done. This was the right thing…the budding trees make her breath light and easy. Wasn’t it possible to say that observing these was as goo
d as looking at the Turner sunsets or the Goya boy? Wasn’t it, after all, another kind of learning?

  Is it possible that everyone she passes is as interesting as they seem? Even the dogs look clever, ready to discriminate, their wedge-shaped or triangular heads full of information picked up as they sniff the sidewalks or each other’s trim behinds. The doormen raise their white-gloved hands and whistle for the yellow cabs. Possibly the people getting in the cabs don’t bother thanking the doormen, or perhaps they do. The new babyish leaves are slight but prosperous. The sky is not quite brilliant but in no way overcast.

  In front of her, a mother carries a baby on her back: a complex frame, steel tubing, but the cloth that makes the pouch through which the baby’s legs poke is a tie-dyed blue-red-green, and in the center, a yellow peace symbol. The baby’s head lolls to one side; he drools; his lips make little sucking motions. The mother’s hair catches the light: gold, curly wires that rise and fall with each step that she takes in her high red boots. Her skirt is very short, but Agnes thinks she must be comfortable in her purple tights, and the skirt, though short, is sturdy corduroy. Wonderful hair, she thinks, and she would like to tell the mother, Your hair is wonderful; your baby is beautiful; and do you know how lucky you are that it is 1972 and you can let your hair be as it is? Kinky, we might have called it five or seven years ago. Frizzy. It would have been required that you sleep all night in hard, excruciating rollers so that you could appear acceptable in the morning, in the world, with bone-straight hair. Like mine, Agnes thinks, touching with regret her thick hair, shoulder length, the longest she has courage for. Because she is Miss Vaughan, the Art Teacher. At the distinguished Lydia Farnsworth School, which has, it must not be forgotten, standards.