Pearl (30 page)

32

The restaurant the young woman in the hotel recommended is traditional: paneled wood, carved chairs, mahogany tables. For a moment Joseph thinks he should refuse food, out of solidarity with Pearl. But he tells himself his weakness won’t help her. He needs his strength. He still does not know what for.

They order a bottle of claret, the best on the menu, twenty pounds. The dollar is good against the pound, Maria says, and besides, we need it. She has always had a talent for indulging herself in small pleasures. Of course she could always do that because her father’s money was always there, whether she acknowledged it or not, to break her fall, and Joseph was always there too, the fireman holding the net. It was true that she wasn’t extravagant, but it was also true that she did not hesitate when she needed something only money could buy; when public school seemed inadequate for Pearl by sixth grade, she could move her to Watson rather than send her to Hunter or Stuyvesant, because languages were better at Watson and the smaller classes meant more personal attention. The bills were sent to him.

The waitress is wearing a straight black skirt that doesn’t cover her distressingly bony knees. She must be in her sixties and should know better, Joseph thinks. Or she should be told by someone to wear a longer skirt. Is it because she’s being paid to serve me, paid to make my life pleasant, that I feel the right to indulge in such anger toward her? He feels her knees are a visual aggression a paying customer shouldn’t be made to endure. Her knuckles pop out of the flesh of her ringless hands. Her teeth are too big for her skull, and when she smiles it can only look false, coming from a countenance of such impoverishment. He believes that if she took off her rubber-soled black shoes he would find bunions on the sides of her fish-flat feet. Her shoulders are bent like crushed coat hangers; she never quite straightens up, and when she takes their order she says yes sir, yes ma’am, thank you sir, thank you ma’am after each item so it comes out many more times than is required. Her servility creates in him an impulse to insult her.

It is a strange impulse, isn’t it, the impulse to insult. As if it would relieve some unbearable pressure, re-create right balance in the world: the unbearable weight shifted once more to its proper object.

But Joseph does not, tonight, indulge this impulse. He wishes, though, that the waitress understood that in a falsely democratic world she must work particularly hard not to appear servile. Her failure, her refusal, calls up in him the old terms: master, servant. His mother was a servant. He is the son of a servant. The waitress calls up these terms because they are her terms. She might allow herself to be insulted and then dream of cutting his throat as he lay in his bed.

The waitress brings the wine, a silver—perhaps tin—basket of rolls, a dish of four butter pats like rosettes sitting on a cube of ice. Maria drinks her wine very fast and he disapproves: it’s a good wine and should not be gulped. She slathers butter on her roll. He knows how much she loves butter; as a child she would eat it plain. In Italy, butter is not brought with bread, and he prefers it so. The pale fat of the northern palate: he has never liked it.

Maria looks at the menu, which the waitress, having taken their order, has failed to remove. “December twenty-eighth,” she says. “Feast of the Holy Innocents. I can’t help it; those feast names pop up when I hear certain dates. Like August fifteenth, Assumption; March twenty-fifth, Annunciation. It happened with Pearl’s father; it’s how we both knew we’d had a Catholic education.”

The skin on the back of Joseph’s neck prickles. Pearl’s father: has Maria ever said anything about him before? He doesn’t even know the man’s name; she never used it.

“Holy Innocents,” she says. “I always hated that day; it was one of the things that made me lose my faith. I didn’t want any part of worshiping a God who could have saved thousands of babies but allowed them to be slaughtered. And then to celebrate that and call it a feast? It’s disgusting.”

An old picture, readily brought to mind: mountains of babies, mothers tearing at their own breasts, tearing at the muscular arms of soldiers who ignore them and throw their babies onto a pile. A pile mixed in his mind with piles of bones and shoes in Auschwitz. And how many others for which he has no pictures and no words. Holy Innocents. If there is holiness he believes that their innocence, their very helplessness, has made them holy.

“I never felt that way about it,” Joseph says. “I always thought it was right to commemorate that kind of horror, rather than pretend it didn’t exist.”

But Maria isn’t listening. “All you had to do to be called holy was to be slaughtered. Without protest. Why are there no feasts celebrating heroic resistance? Or attempts to change the injustice of power?”

Because that is not hopeless, not helpless, and this feast honors helplessness; that is its greatness, he wants to say. But he knows that whatever he says she’s not listening.

She butters another roll, puts down the knife, puts a piece of roll into her mouth, chews, swallows. “The canonization of victimization.
Une spécialité de la maison catholique.
It’s not hard to sympathize with victims. Victims don’t change anything. It’s what disturbs me most about what Pearl’s doing. It’s such a weak act; it denies the possibility of change. Of standing with others and putting up a fight. That’s what changes things, not somebody wasting away. Solitary acts like that are always hopeless.”

All the time Maria is talking, she is chewing. She has ordered steak, bloody-rare, and she is dipping pieces of it into a little pyramid of salt she’s made at the edge of her plate. She’s put butter on her potatoes and her roll. The blood from her steak makes a pinkish pool on the white plate. The tablecloths are pink; there are pink shades on the small lamps that sit on every table. He is revolted by the pinkness all around him, by the heavy, too-rich food, the overheated air, the noisy conversation all around him, no words distinguishable. Gesturing, Maria has spilled some of her wine. It makes a dark rose blot on the pink cloth; she spills salt onto it: a housewife’s instinct. She plays with the salt, pushing it around with her fingers until it looks like pink snow. Diamonds of grease swim in the blood that oozes from her steak. She dips a forkful of potato into it.

“We can change things, people can, by thinking clearly and cooperating with one another. But no one can do anything alone. People must stand together, or the darkness wins.”

He has kneaded his roll into crumbs. His fingertips are dry, abraded by the sharp crusts. He feels the blood pool at the top of his skull, collect in a dark clot, a caul between his brain stem and his neck. The thick blood boils up, creates a pressure that makes him feel the shape of the bones that make up his head.

Maria picks up the empty butter dish, looks over her shoulder, puts the dish back down.

“Where the hell is that waitress?” she says, and looks around again. “I need more butter. Joseph, can you get me more butter?”

He sees his mother’s face in the dining room of the Regina Caeli nursing home. She is wearing a hat made of a paper towel, the hat she makes for herself every day at lunch and wears all afternoon until it’s taken off her head at bedtime. He sees the spittle at the edge of her lips when she says “Filthy, filthy!” to Maria. And Maria’s hands, wringing themselves, pressing her nails into her palms, her hands red with hatred as if she’d dipped them in cold water or in blood. He sees Dr. Meyers’s fine white hands, counting out bills and coins into the hands of his mother: large, red, and pawlike. His mother the servant.

He has been a servant to Maria, to her father, to his mother, to Devorah. He has been a servant all his life. And Maria knows, she must always have known, although she has pretended to forget it. But she has never forgotten it, not for a minute, and now it strikes him as unbearable; he will not put up with it anymore.

He takes the butter dish from her hand and bangs it, hard, onto the table.

“You’ve had enough butter,” he says. “You’ve had more than enough.”

She blinks at him; she doesn’t understand. He is refusing her something. It may be the first thing he has refused her. The waitress scurries over. “Is everything all right with your dinner here? Can I get you something else?” Wearing a wholly wrong, false, ingratiating smile. Maria wonders what she’s heard, what she makes of it.

“Nothing for me,” Joseph says to the waitress. “I’m afraid I’ve been taken ill.” He gets up and leaves, saying nothing to Maria, as if the waitress were his hostess at a dinner party and she’s a guest he’s been seated with, whose name he hasn’t caught.

She watches him put on his coat and his scarf, one she had bought him as a Christmas gift, as he walks out between the tables. He’s accused her of greed. He’s said she’s eaten too much. And Pearl is starving. The irregular oblongs of meat, the ovals of potatoes, less than half consumed, stare up at her reproachfully. She knows she mustn’t follow him, so what should she do? She looks down at her food. The salty smell of the excellent meat rises up to her. Her mouth fills with water. It’s terrible, she knows, how much she wants to finish her dinner. The waitress is waiting to see whether she’ll follow the man out of the restaurant or go on with her meal. She must decide right now. Should the food be taken away or left? Joseph has fled, hungry, into the gloomy night. On an empty stomach, she thinks. Ridiculous, he isn’t crawling on his stomach. She feels helpless, and the churning juices of her own stomach make her feel worse. Something enormous has just happened, and all that is open to her is the decision of whether or not to eat.

Eat to live. Live to eat. What does this have to do with the question of whether or not she should finish her steak? Why does it seem wrong to eat when something enormous has just happened? What is
not eating,
fasting? Her daughter is fasting. Days of fast and abstinence: requirements loosened by the Second Vatican Council but never given up by her father: always, he refrained from meat on Fridays, refused to eat between meals during Lent, ate nothing from Good Friday to Easter morning. So what did that mean about him? She tries to make the connection between fast and virtue. My father, she thinks, was a man who could give up meat but not the use of the word
mine
.

You should not be surprised that at this moment, by any definition a moment of crisis in her life, the terms of her childhood come up to her:
fast, abstinence, sin, virtue
. If you had lived in exile, even if you had exiled yourself and had learned or taught yourself a new language, would it be surprising if, in a dire time, the words you grew up speaking were the ones that came to your lips? Maria shakes herself, like a wet dog. She must decide what to do, right now, and not be calling up the old wrong terms of the past.

And yet they will not go away. The sin of greed, she says to herself. Am I greedy like my father? Joseph has accused her of being greedy. His mother accused her of being greedy: “You are a greedy girl.” She thinks of Marie Kasperman’s face, red, sweating, always reminding her of raw meat. And she is suddenly afraid of the food in front of her. At the same time, her mouth waters from the smell.

He is his mother’s son. And she is her father’s daughter. Nothing can change that. If she could have, she would have destroyed me, Maria thinks. But I held my tongue. For him.

She is right to be proud of that because it was a struggle, holding her tongue, her silence a hard-won victory. She will not say this of herself, but I can say it for her: she did it out of love. Because she loved Joseph’s goodness, his restraint, his doing quietly whatever needed to be done. She loved these things, yes, but it is also possible to say she needed them. They were her buckler and her shield. So she kept silence, difficult for her, and he kept silence, a habit that came to him more easily.

But what was their silence? Was it perhaps only a glass floor laid over a pit? Had they been tiptoeing all their lives on a floor of glass, thinly covered by a silken carpet? And now, it seems, he has stepped hard and broken through.

What should I do? Maria asks herself, because this is the question she always asks.

She tells herself she must grab on to something. She must stop her fall. She must concentrate on what needs to be done. Is it possible that everything is centered on the decision whether or not to eat? The food is here; it is still hot; it is less than a minute since Joseph left the restaurant. She must think of what can make a difference. To think of that would be to break the fall.

For now, strength is required, strength to wait. To endure her own helplessness. To wait for the boyfriend to get in touch. To wait for the doctor’s word. To wait for her daughter’s word. To wait and see what Joseph will do next.

It’s simple, she says to herself. I should eat. Food brings strength. I require strength. Therefore food.

She cuts into the meat and salts it, dipping into the pyramid of salt she’s already made. She puts the salty meat into her mouth. Chews, swallows, sips wine. Another taste: bitter. Bites into the potatoes. Soft: pleasantly dull.

She can do nothing but eat. There is no one to talk to and she has no book to read. She tries to be curious about her fellow diners but cannot attach the slightest importance to any of them. She opens her mouth. Chews. Swallows. Alternates flavors.

She is full now; she is strengthened. She made the right decision. It was better that she ate.

She asks the maître d’ if he can call her a cab. “I can so,” he says, and she is charmed by his diction. She’s reminded how much easier it is to be charmed by other human beings if you’ve been well fed.

Are you appalled by Maria’s finishing her supper? Would you like her better if she couldn’t eat? I understand that possibly you would. Perhaps, though, you should ask yourself: What is the relation between love and appetite?

The cab drives her across the quay. The water under the electric lights is reptile colored. The whole city, with its flat house fronts, its dark squares of only dimly apprehended windows with the occasional silvered rectangle, suggests nothing of a holiday; she imagines people weary in their beds.