Blue Mercy: A Novel. (28 page)

"How did you stand it for so long?" I asked her.

"Whenever it got tough, and self-pity started up in me, I would ask myself: 'Can I bear this moment here and now?' I always could."

Happy in prison. Her Ladyshit, serene in the face of hostility. That's who my mother became.

When they let her out "early" for good behavior, she was forbidden from traveling to the States, and that was the hardest of all for her. She longed to see California again, to drive a top-down Chevy through Ben Sur, to go for a walk at sunset by the Pacific, to admire the soar of a red-breasted eagle, to lie under a moon burnt red by the Santa Ana. It wasn't to be and that, too, she accepted, traveling instead in the opposite direction, to Spain and Italy and the Greek islands, writing more travel books as she went.

Not a bad life.

When she died, a good contingent of prison staff and a few of the prisoners turned up to the funeral and all said they'd never had an inmate like her.

The day she went down, she was not allowed to see us so she explained what she wanted from us in two letters. Seven pages to Shando, another even longer, to me, each of which I can summarise in a sentence:

Dear Zach,
 

I want you to work with Star, to take my father's house and turn it into your centre, to work on it together, to be together. That is my wish.
 

Dear Star,

Your Shando will need your help to make this work so be there for him. Be together, that is my wish.

It was our wish too. We were all so fragile after all that had happened, it gave us a way forward. Even though I was furious with her for appropriating even this. If I wanted him, I wanted him to come on his own terms, his free will, not under my mother's directive.
 
But we settled in together and set to remodelling my grandfather's house, with Mom encouraging us at each prison visit to use as much of "that man's" money as we needed.
 

"What better use could it be put to?"
 

Downstairs we knocked walls to make a large catering kitchen, where Janet and Bríd, two local cooks, came to prepare whole-food. We added a sun-lounge on the south-west façade and a dining area at the opposite end and extended the front rooms into a yoga studio and classroom. The Better World Center we called it, in tribute to Mom and Marsha's café and we carried over some -- big and neat! -- ideas from there. Marsha came across to visit, when she could, more often after she retired and when Mom came out of jail.

At first, we had a struggle to keep going. We were ahead of our time in Ireland and it was a challenge to build a clientele and to win trust among the locals in Doolough. Mom's trial was only part of it. All sorts of crazy rumors flew. We were part of "a cult", we were witches, we were offering orgies and pagan practices. Pauline Whelan, who worked part-time for us in the office, would deliver the latest nonsense to us, shaking her head. I would have given up many times, but Shando never wavered.
 

"You can't control what people think," he used to say. "If we stay true to the vision, everything will work out."
 

He was right. By the mid-1990s, we were thriving.

We used to visit the prison separately, one of us taking out the old Hiace van we had before we got the jeep, to make the drive to Dublin and come back and report to the one left minding the business. She made a great effort for those visits, I know that now from reading her notebooks. I suppose I always knew it, that it couldn't have been easy to seem so pleased to see us, so open to being entertained and amused, as my mother always was for visiting hours.

One day we had big news for her, news we had to go together to deliver. I was so nervous that Shando had to stop the van twice on the way to let me be sick.

Approaching the meshed door of the visitor room, I had balked. "You tell her," I'd said. "I'll wait out here."

"Don't be silly."

"It's not fair to her to have to deal with us both at once for this."

He was having none of it. He made me go in and took my hand in his to tell her the news. She was better than good about it. The smallest flicker, just for a fraction of a moment, then she turned her eyes to hold us both and said, in her mawkish way, "A new life! How wonderful!" As if she was any other prospective grandmother.
 

Exactly how Shando had said she would respond (and in case you're wondering, yes, it is irritating to be married to Mr-Right-All-The-Time, especially when he's so indulgent of your irritation). Still holding my hand, he reached across and took one of hers. I blushed blood-red, but they were smiling. We sat there, a small chain of hands with the two of them looking so serene, while my circuits surged into overdrive.

It was only afterwards that I realized I should have reached over and taken her other hand, to close the circle. I was so young then, not yet able to grasp what Shando instinctively understood: the depths of my mother's need for reparation. Prison was her penance; she opened herself to it, utterly.

My feelings, as always, were more conflicted. The thought of her locked away from us -- from him -- consoled me one minute, plunged me into guilt the next. That day, the hand-holding day, resurrected all. I began to torture myself again with imaginings about what she and Shando said and did during those visits while I was not there. I would boil myself up to a pitch where I had to say something -- usually something stupid. He would respond with his trademark calm and then I would pick a row about his coldness. I would storm and he would be condescending and, in the middle of it all, I lost the baby.

It was to be another nine years and two IVF attempts before I was pregnant again.

That was the hardest thing I ever faced. Life was harder on my mother -- even I can admit that. The final blow was breast cancer, diagnosed two years after she got out of jail. She battled it, as they say, and went on to tour the world, and write more books but six years later, it surfaced again, and this time it had spread. She took treatment for a while, but then gave up and as she weakened, we had no choice, after all she had given us, but to invite her to live with us at the Center. And she had no choice but to accept.

Her illness added daily guilt to my internal swirl of resentments. I even resented her cancer for bringing her back into my daily life. Like she'd arranged to have tumors gnaw at her just to get to me. Shando worked with me to dismantle these rages, which were really most unfair to her and destructive to me.

I did see that, even as I pickled myself in them.
 

Some weeks before she died. I woke around three a.m. to a noise that made me sit up out of sleep, discarding whatever dream I had been dreaming. This movement changed the rhythm of Shando's breathing beside me and I froze still. And heard it again. A cough? A call? With care, I slid from the warmth of the covers, the chill December air pouring across my naked skin. Naked in bed is a privilege I have always allowed myself since losing weight.

At the door, I put on my robe, slipped out to listen down the corridor. All quiet. I paused by one of the corridor windows, made a circle in the condensation-covered glass to look out. Nothing to see, except winter darkness, blanketing us in. Often, on deep blacker-than-black winter nights like these, Santa Paola comes to mind, the warm swirling blue-black night-sky there, that smells of laurel and burnt offerings. I sighed, flip-flopped down the corridor in my slippers, stopped outside her door and put my ear to it. Yes: movement.
 

I stuck in my head. The room was dark.

"It's only me," I said. "I heard a noise. Are you okay?"

"Fine, fine. I just went down for a drink of water."

"You need your sleep, we'll be up early for the trip to Laragh."

"Don't worry, I'll be ready. I'm looking forward to it."
 

"Do you need anything else?"

"I'm fine, Star."

You can see we'd swapped roles by then, which neither of us was much good at, though we managed to keep it civilized.

As I made my way back to bed, I did the work Shando taught me to do, took my focus off my coiling emotions, onto my breathing. Breathe in... and fill the belly with air. Breathe out... and all the badness with it. And again... in. And... out. There. Everything was fine. No cross words, not at all, and tomorrow was Christmas Day.

I slipped back into the warmth of our bed.

"Daddy could sleep for Ireland," Dean used to say, an expression he picked up from the schoolyard, and we all used to laugh, especially Shando.

I arranged myself around the curve of his spine. His heat transferred itself to me and I kissed the knobbly bone at the base of his neck. If I slid my foot along his shin, he would be likely to waken. Our legs would straighten out and he would turn and we would feel the length and center of each other.

I'm sorry but I needed to write that. I know it must it must stir some shade in you of the feelings we've learned to live with.
 
It took us both a long time to allow ourselves to be together in that way and our strange history is always there between us, a ditch we continually navigate, into which we sometimes trip.

We cope by accepting things as they are, by not wishing they were otherwise. In the interest of that, Shando says there's no need for me to be writing any of this about us, together, in bed. But I must. I have to claim him. For all that you have read, it's important that you understand that he is my husband.
 

Mine
.

And that there's a whole story you haven't been told.

So let me impress on you, just once, how I loved slipping back under the covers beside him. He was sound asleep and I decided not to disturb him, just to lay my hand quiet across his chest and enjoy a different pleasure, the feel of my naked front all along his naked back.
 

So unlike those nights I endured after I found out that my mother – who had had so many men – had also taken him. Nights that used to slowly pulse past –
mine – mine – mine
-- each second a throb, a spike of jealous rage.

He was my first love and he will be my last -- I know that. Even if I wanted, I wouldn't have time enough to learn again how to be so free, how to take and give with the mix of abandon and familiarity that only years together can give. Where, I would have liked to ask my mother while she was alive, is the poet who has done justice to that kind of love? The intimacy that takes years to build? The lovemaking that has within it all the other times you've been together?

Not, of course, something I could ever ask her.
 

She and he had only months together as lovers, not even a year, if you put it all together where he and I have had years. Years. We have shared so much, as husband and wife: the efforts of building of the center, of getting and staying pregnant, of having and raising our kids. We have grown into each other. We hold each other up. I am his wife. She was his mother-in-law.

It doesn't work, all this truth, all these facts that I throw at the situation. He loved me but he loved her too, he'd tell you that himself if you asked. You cannot compare two flowers or two works of art, he once said, when I challenged him to choose, when I said loving me meant not loving her. Which wasn't the answer I wanted.
 
As you can imagine. Yes, I was his wife but he shared something with her that we never had, a shared understanding of all that had happened that encompassed everything, including me and the children, in a way that infuriates me still.
 

The day after, Mom and I set out on what was to be our last day out, to Laragh with the kids. Our little miracle babies, born through the wonders of science, by then seven years old.
 

I parked in St Kevin's Church, crunching the gears to a halt -- even after twenty-six years in Ireland, I haven't got used to driving a stick car -- and walked round to the passenger side, to help my mother down. Illness and its treatment had made her frail but she still had beauty. Her tan, faded during her prison years, had been resurrected by travel afterwards in Italy and Greece, so that now, at the end of her life, she looked like a white settler in an African colony, leathery skin against long ashy hair that she twisted into a knot at the crown of her head.
 

Dean was already unstrapping himself and hopping out, poised to run. Are all children always in such a rush? My two can never just wait. "The Hand!" he shouted, leaping to the ground.

Aimee fumbled with her seat belt. Tumbling out, she took up her brother's call. "The Hand! The Hand!" Their name for the water feature in the church grounds, the bronze arm and hand of Saint Kevin.

I walked at my mother's pace, feeling too large as I always did beside her though I am thin now, or reasonably so. By now, I have come to know myself to be what Shando calls present. Myself. A chunk of marble beside a silken gauze. The kids were trying to climb the sculpture.
 

"Don't get wet, you two," I called, one of those useless motherly interjections that nobody expects to have any influence.

I showed Mom the plaque and read the poem aloud for her.
St Kevin and the Blackbird.
The poem that ask us to imagine the feel of the warm eggs in our hand, the beat of the bird's breast, the scratch of its claws. To imagine what it would be like to have trained your whole body to succumb, to "become a prayer, entirely".

"'Since the whole thing's imagined anyhow'," my mother read, sitting on the nearby bench, her legs to one side, like a lady riding side-saddle. "imagine being Kevin..'
 
Nice.
 
We should learn it by heart. Poems have to become the marrow in your bones."
 

All my life, she'd said things like this and ignored how I ignored them.

I saw Aimee was climbing too high, dangling from St Kevin's arm.

"Aimee!" I shouted. "Get down. Now!"

She did and I relaxed and when I looked back, Mom had fixed me with a baleful stare and was putting the manuscript in my lap. "I need you to finish this for me."