Happiness

In Damascus

In Damascus Mrs. Mulholland sat under the catalpa tree in her pale straw hat, in a double layer of shade, watching her daughter Vic's eyes. Vic's glance seemed to pick up each one at the table in tum and stitch them together-Mrs. Mulholland's granddaughter, Jane, her older daughter, Alex, Mrs. Mulholland herself-three generations in some intricate, unreadable pattern, embroidered by the shade of the trees that sheltered one comer of the museum terrace. Victoria, Alexandra. Mrs. Mulholland had given her daughters spacious, queenly names, perhaps in reaction to her own name, Nan, so heavy and square, like a pair of sensible shoes. But her daughters had remodeled their names to suit the people they'd become; and Alex, closing the circle, had named her own daughter Jane. Once, Nan 1 Mulholland had thought that she herself might eventually, grown old, shrink to fit her name. It hadn't happened yet, at sixty-eight, and eight years a widow. Leaning back in her cushioned metal chair, in her unseasonable white gauze dress-flecked now with grit from the city on the other other side of the shrubbery, held off by iron palings like a beast at the wo--she looked neither old nor sick. Though her hair was white now, her skin, suffused with a heart patient's rosiness, was still as fine as lawn, her eyes still that startling blue. Her son-inlaw had remarked more than once that it was too bad Alex and Vic took after their father-Tod's brown hair, brown eyes, thick pale skin. Only Vic's long hair was bushy and wild, particularly when, as now, she left it unconfined, whereas Alex had the sleek oval head of an otter. At the empty chair across from Alex, Vic's glance hesitated before moving on, forcing Mrs. Mulholland to count the additions and subtractions since earlier Sundays: Tod, her husband, gone; George, Alexandra's husband, added (or would be if, for once, he got away from the hospital in time); and Jane. Mrs. Mulholland allowed her own gaze to rest on her granddaughter in delight. Jane sat, absorbed, folding her paper napkin into an origami rabbit. Her pale caramelcolored hair was caught tightly on top of her head in a rubber band decorated with blue plastic flowers. Her bare forehead shone, giving her a prim, anxious look. The plan had been to walk around the museum, a Venetian palazzo implausibly set in the middle of Detroit (Was it, then, the palazzo, the same place? So transplanted, was it a place at all?), and afterwards have lunch. But Jane was hungry; and so here they were on the terrace, which at this early hour they had almost to themselves. One other table, in the opposite comer next to the palazw entrance, was occupied by two languidly beautiful young men in bright-colored turtlenecks, who looked as if they'd been lacquered. Traffic sounds on a Sunday morning were fewer but more noticeable, each passing car whistling individually through the dense laurel and rhododendron. In any case, the hour was of no importance, nor the small distractions of the setting. Mrs. Mulholland had an agenda. Revelation was what she had in mind-revelation and, with it, a place of re-entry, a way back into the past. Age had shown her that no matter how much she forgot, she would not be able to forgive herself. If she could tell Alex and Vic about Jack-if they could talk about that time, the three 2 In Damascus of them together-that, Mrs. Mulholland felt, would be absolution of a sort: as close as she could come to it, at any rate. There was no one else left now to forgive her. As if to help her, the air on the terrace, warm as tea, was clotted with the scent of some old-fashioned shrub whose name Mrs. Mulholland couldn't remember. Laburnum? It was not quite, but almost, the smell of apricot blossoms heavy on the spring air in Syria, when Tod was First Secretary at the embassy. Across a gap of thirty years, the fragrance put her on the stone pavement of Suleiman's tariJa with Jack the last time they were together, when they met to say goodbye, looking out at the wide, shallow pool that reflected the minarets on the monks' quarters one after another, as delicately...