Pearl (31 page)

She lets herself into her room and takes off her coat, which threatens to overbalance the plastic chair she throws it on. She dials Joseph’s number. There is no reply.

33

Someone Pearl has never seen, a woman in her sixties perhaps, is sitting in Tom’s chair. Then he comes back into the room. “I’m here to relieve you,” he says to the woman. And Pearl thinks, I am relieved that he is here.

“I think the patient’s asleep,” the woman says.

She was asleep but she is glad not to be sleeping now. In her sleep, memories swim up; she is frightened, people are holding her down, they are putting things in her nose. She does not know if this really happened or if it is a dream. She touches her nose. A tube is attached to it. So it was not a dream. Yet she does not remember.

She is very hungry.

34

In the dark, lying on her back, her head entirely flattening the unsatisfactory pillow—made, Maria guesses, of some synthetic material that didn’t exist when she was a child—she tries to understand what happened. What did she do to cause Joseph’s outburst? An outburst in someone who has, as long as she has known him, her whole life, never burst out? Or almost never. Only twice does she remember him losing his temper. There was the time in 1995 when they were speculating about the nature of the response to the millennium. He said it would be hard to celebrate the end of the century because he believed it was the bloodiest in the history of the world. She and Devorah had disagreed with him. They said the numbers might be greater, but that was an accident of technology. The impulse to destroy had always been the same. And the same technology, they had said, the two of them tumbling over each other like good-natured puppies to agree with each other and disagree with him, had saved millions of lives. And what about antibiotics?

The blood had risen to his face. He stood up and grabbed the chair he’d been sitting on, lifting it slightly off the floor. “You do not, do not, do not know what you are talking about!” He banged the chair on the floor with every repetition of
do not
. And he had done the same thing, repeated a phrase three times, when she and Devorah suggested that Maria might become an egg donor for them. “You will not, will not, will not speak of this ever again!” Both times he had walked out of the room. But both times, at least in her memory, it was summer, and his walking out into the leafy daylight did not have the desolating effect of his walking into the bitter Dublin night. And both times Devorah had been with her. She is alone now.

She remembers the time she and Devorah came up with the idea, a foolish one; they were both forty-three and Maria was too old to be an egg donor; any medical student could have told her that. But they didn’t talk to any doctors; they came up with the plan themselves over brunch and burst into the house—no, it wasn’t the house, it was the apartment on 89th Street—one Sunday morning. Joseph and Pearl had just come home from the museum, and Pearl had gone home. I think it’s a good thing Pearl didn’t see what happened: Devorah and Maria bursting in, telling Joseph they’d come up with a wonderful plan; there was no reason why Devorah’s early menopause meant she couldn’t have a child. And then Joseph banged the chair down and said, three times, as if it were a spell, that they weren’t to speak of it again.
Devorah,
she thinks now,
you were my beloved friend, and you are dead. I don’t understand anything: what Pearl’s done, what Joseph did just now. Do you, among the dead, understand things I cannot?

If you understand, you must help me. Help me understand.

Pearl cannot be allowed to become one of the dead. Like Devorah. Like her father.

The thought of her father’s death is, as always, a sheet of slate pressed down on her, hardening her heart. Making it a heart of stone. She will not regret what she did, what she had to do, in the name of justice. She won’t think about her father now. It is Devorah among the dead whom she misses, not her father, tapping the white tips of his fingers together, light bouncing off the glass of his rimless spectacles. Her father and the pope had had the same glasses: Seymour Meyers and Pius XII. She was glad when it had come out that Pius XII had done nothing to save the Jews. Had collaborated with the Nazis and could not be admired in good faith. As she no longer admired her father, had given up admiring him when he allowed her friends to go to jail. She will not think about her father now.

She gets out of bed. A bath is what she needs. She lowers herself into steaming water, almost too hot for her to bear.

In the hot water, she lets her eyes fall on her breasts, which have lost, she knows, their prized youthful allure. She thinks of when her breasts were, for Pearl, a source of perfect nourishment. And this daughter is dying from starvation now. Loss and loss and loss. She weeps for the consolation, lost, of nursing a child, those moments when it was impossible for either of them to fail, to disappoint. She doesn’t care what her face looks like. If she could catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror it would mean nothing to her. She would not be herself.

In the water, which is cooling in a way that makes her feel her skin belongs to someone else, her tears no longer seem authentic; it is as if someone else has entered the room; it is as if she is being watched. She quickly gets out of the tub.

She dries herself on thin cotton towels, more like diapers, she thinks. She rings Joseph’s room. And once again there is no answer.

35

“Such a shame, such a beautiful girl,” Pearl hears a nurse say to Tom. What does she mean by that? That if she hadn’t thought Pearl beautiful she wouldn’t consider what happened to her such a shame? What, then, would she have considered it?

Words, ideas, are coming into greater focus in her mind. She can think of things following each other. Things leading from each other. Things she understands. She is very hungry.

Beautiful girl.
It is important to be a beautiful girl; she has known for a long time that it was important, that those words made things possible. But did she want those things?
Beautiful girl.
Was it being something or having something? Something she had and her mother had but not every woman had. And something people wanted. Wanted from you if you had it. They wanted it from her mother too. She had got whatever it was from her mother: a way of being looked at, favors granted, allowances made. And some other things, not nice, connected to it. Something people wanted that she might not want to give, that had nothing to do with her, something because of which people would give her things she didn’t want and want things from her that she didn’t want to give.

Such a beautiful girl.

How can this be? There is a tube sewn into her nose, a tube stuck in her vagina. This is not a body anyone could want anything of. It is no longer even hers. It is the doctor’s body now. The doctor makes things happen that she does not want. But she no longer knows entirely what she wants. Starved, she knew exactly her desire. Now she is hungry and afraid.

My mother, she thinks, is in this city now. The city where
I am.

The doctor is speaking to Tom. “We’re cutting the Midazolam way down. She’ll be much more lucid now. She might want to communicate more. But be careful. Her will is very strong.”

36

In the late night air, supersaturated with raw dampness, Joseph walks and walks. His gloves are good and keep his hands warm, but his shoes are wrong for this climate, bought in a different world with a different set of considerations. Yes, it is sometimes cold and damp in Rome—in all of Italy, particularly in the north—but they don’t seem to think of that; it isn’t in the forefront of their minds when they’re designing their shoes or their houses.

He is walking because he can’t think of anything else to do. He doesn’t even know where he’s walking. The city is a closed box to him because he’s refused what he has come to think of as the easy out of maps and guidebooks. He was going, like Ruskin, to depend on the strenuous exercise of his eye. And when he dressed he hadn’t thought he would be walking tonight; he was going to the hospital, the restaurant.

His shoulders ache; his throat constricts from the strain of unnatural effort. Perhaps from all the years of never having said, “But that isn’t what I want, you see, that isn’t what I want at all.”

Never wanting to go along with Maria’s plans, to the synagogue at Yom Kippur, to the Village to buy marijuana, to demonstrations against the war. “Let’s talk about the worst martyrdoms we can imagine,” she would say when they were children. No, he wanted to say. Let’s pray that we’ll be spared, that we’ll never have to think of it. And never saying to his mother, Please be quiet, please don’t talk to me about your skin rashes, your insect bites, your constipation, Maria’s hair in the bathtub, the traces of Dr. Meyers’s shit on his underpants. Please, please, is there nothing you will not say?

And the money. He’d believed it was his responsibility to keep the business going. Of all imaginary accusations, the one he’d most feared was lack of gratitude. He was his mother’s son. He was unable to attach a face to his father’s name. As his mother’s son, his fate ought to have been that of the son of a domestic servant. A laborer. With luck, a minor clerk. Insurance man. Accountant. But he’d been given magnificent opportunities. Access to the highest culture. A splendid education. How could he complain about being placed at the head of a successful business?

It had never occurred to him to say, But this isn’t what I want. It had never occurred to him to take seriously the question that preoccupied his generation: What makes me happy? He’d thought a better question, a fuller, finer one, was: What is the right thing to do? Perhaps that was why he didn’t know what to say when Maria had asked him, desperation in her voice, “But Pearl’s always been happy, hasn’t she?” He hadn’t thought of happiness for her, any more than he’d thought of it for himself. It didn’t seem the appropriate category for her, as it hadn’t for him.

He knew he couldn’t be happy if he thought he wasn’t doing the right thing. It hadn’t occurred to him that there were different kinds of rightness. The rightness, for example, of his absorption in the works of art he loved.

Try and imagine, if you will, the nineteen-year-old Joseph, student of art history. Absorbed, taken up, electrified by his mind’s devotion to this new subject: medieval reliquaries. A subject he could think of as
his,
truly his own, perhaps the first possession he could think of in that way, even believing that it might be deserved because it had been earned. He wrote his senior thesis on a reliquary in the Cloisters, a triptych, with lapis and gold angels forming the outer wings and, in the middle, glass revealing the relic lined with pearls. It was meant to have been given to a convent in the city of Buda by St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Do you know about Elizabeth, queen of Hungary in the thirteenth century? I will tell you the story.

Elizabeth was the virtuous wife of a tyrant husband. During a famine, he forbade her to feed his starving subjects. Against his will, she walked into the streets, bread hidden in her skirt. Her husband discovered this and threatened to have her killed by his soldiers as a punishment for having defied his orders. He accosted her at the castle gate. He demanded that she loosen her skirt. She did and behold! There was not bread but roses. He fell to his knees, begged her forgiveness, and became a virtuous benevolent ruler.

Joseph had loved that story from the first time he read it, in one of Maria’s books,
Fifteen Saints for Girls.
He’d read the whole book; he found it fascinating. He remembers a description of a Blessed Margaret Clitherew, an Englishwoman martyred by Henry VIII, or maybe it was Elizabeth. The priest she is hiding in her house says of her, “She is not an English rose but rather a firm white hollyhock.”

When he was a boy, that story generated a kind of proto-arousal, an excitement that was not yet sexual, when he thought of the connection between women and flowers. Roses in a skirt, the firmness of a hollyhock. When he had first seen a woman’s body, Devorah’s, the only one he’s ever seen, he had not been disappointed, just delighted that the metaphors were so apt.

Now he believes he must think of himself as a man who has fallen to imagining sniffing the armpits of waitresses. He is not a specialist in medieval reliquaries but the head of a corporation whose business is the spread of ugliness.

But he believed he had lived his life above reproach. He could not have borne reproach: from Dr. Meyers or from his mother. But Dr. Meyers is dead and his mother is rocking and gibbering and Devorah made a mockery of his idea of the great gift and Pearl has made a mockery of all their ideas of safety. Now he can reproach himself for being a fool and, worse, a betrayer. Just now, over a plate of meat in a restaurant where everything was pink or pinkish, because he thought Maria was eating too much butter, because she asked for more, asked him to get her more, he allowed his anger to break through, the anger he had always hidden, swallowed, killed.

But what if she hasn’t really understood? Or if she’s been able to convince herself, as she often can with uncomfortable truths, that it really wasn’t what it seemed? He thinks of Pearl saying, “My mother is distractible.” He knows she believes that the center of the world is not impenetrable but porous and susceptible to change. That things are not done once and for all. So maybe he can say, “Sorry, I don’t know what got into me. I guess we’re both under a lot of stress.” Strange, isn’t it, the history of the word
stress,
once used primarily by engineers, now called on to explain almost everything.

And perhaps she’ll say, “Forget it. Let’s concentrate on what needs to be done.”

Perhaps, in a little while, he’ll do it. He’ll say, “Sorry . . . stress.” But not now. Now he wants to walk.

37

Maria wakes at seven in the morning and forces herself to the discipline of brushing her teeth and washing her face before she telephones to see if Joseph is in his room. An old habit: small penances, minor sacrifices, wages offered up to the unseen. So she will brush her teeth before she calls but allow herself to telephone before she takes a shower.

He isn’t there. This means something terrible, something else she can do nothing about. Whatever he does when they see each other, she thinks she’ll be able to respond well. If he’s apologetic, she’ll say, “It’s nothing. We’re all under stress.” If he pretends nothing has happened but leaves her a message naming a time for lunch, for dinner, she’ll say nothing.

But what if he wants to talk about it? That would be quite unlike Joseph. Yet what he did last night was quite unlike him also. If he wants to talk about why he was angry with her, she’ll do that. She can do anything he asks of her. What is unbearable is what is being asked of her now: that she wait. Her only possible act a mental one, to understand the implications of there being nothing for her to do.

She showers. The thin transparent cap is insufficient to protect her hair. Her hair will be wet, and this will be unpleasant in what she imagines is the day’s damp cold. Her window looks out only on the empty—no, rubbish-strewn—courtyard; she has no idea what the weather is really like. She goes down to the breakfast room, still smelling of beer, praying that she won’t run into the women from breakfast two days ago.

She eats oatmeal with milk, butter, and sugar. She butters her toast and adds a thick film of marmalade. What would Joseph say to that? She feels shame at the memory of last night. She knows she is eating like a child, but it’s what she wants.

She doesn’t know what to do with the rest of the day. Dr. Morrisey will speak to her at four. It’s now nine-fifteen. She doesn’t know where Joseph is. She can’t think of anyplace she’d like to go.

When she gets to the lobby, the woman at the desk says, “There’s a young man to see you.”

For a moment, Maria thinks she means Joseph. Then she remembers: Joseph can no longer be described as young.

“I’m Finbar McDonagh.”

You have, I hope you will remember, the advantage over Maria. You know a certain amount about Finbar; she knows nothing. She has been given nothing but a name. The young man says his name as if it were enough. His hair is lank, red, shoulder-length; he’s wearing an army greatcoat—it could be from any army—and black lace-up boots that overbalance his slight body. The fingernails of his childish freckled hands are bitten; he’s tried to grow a mustache but it’s a mistake, a sign not of bravado or virility but of an inner despondency so habitual it’s impaired the growth of his facial hair. When Maria looks into his eyes, she sees blue-green stones, impatient eyes that don’t like to rest too long on any one thing, eyes that reveal that this boy has read many books and wishes it weren’t so, but he will always read many books; there’s nothing he can do about it. His eyes are red-rimmed as if he hasn’t slept or has been crying.

“I’m Maria Meyers.”

“I know. I’m Pearl’s friend.”

Friend. This means lover. They shared a domain. She’s disappointed for her daughter. Another rescue mission, she thinks, comparing this boy’s weedy body, his failed masculinity, with Pearl’s realized beauty, her long legs, straight spine, hair that falls down her back like a shower of dull gold. She wishes that Pearl had picked someone more attractive, so that people would have smiled when they saw them on the street. So that Pearl could have had the fun of that. But Maria has never grasped the idea that perhaps that kind of fun would be to Pearl beside the point. Or not fun at all.

It’s always been difficult for Maria to understand that Pearl hasn’t taken pleasure in being looked at. And you may find it hard to understand: a child whose mother’s eye always fell on her with joy, a beautiful girl, looked on favorably by the eye of the world. I don’t know quite why myself, but from early childhood Pearl felt that being looked at was being stolen from. The actor’s joy in performance—so much a part of her mother’s life—was never part of hers. How do we explain, then, what she’s doing now, insisting that she be looked upon, studied, taken in? I must admit I don’t quite understand how she came to it. Except perhaps that the pain of this visibility was something she thought of as the price she paid for witness. The price of atonement.

Maria and Finbar look at each other in silence. It’s impossible for them to behave normally with each other. There is too much or too little to say.

From somewhere, a voice tells her that at moments like these, when it’s impossible to imagine the right thing to do, it’s best not to rely on the imagination but to fall back on convention. The habitual or formal gesture is the one that best serves. He is coming here because she is his girlfriend’s mother. What would a girlfriend’s mother do if the circumstances were ordinary? That the circumstances are not ordinary is the part that must be pushed aside.

“Have you had your breakfast?” she asks.

The boy begins to cry. He’s appalled at himself. I think that if he could have done anything else in the world—hit Maria, set fire to the hotel, vomited on the carpet—he would have found it preferable.

From the basketful of gestures in her repertoire she pulls up one and hands him a Kleenex from the packet in her handbag. She doesn’t look at him. She pretends to be fumbling for something at the bottom of her purse.

“You need protein,” she says. “Come upstairs with me to the horrible breakfast room: my treat. You can have eggs and sausages. I’m sure you don’t have to worry about cholesterol, not at your age. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Pearl was a vegetarian for a while. But she gave it up. I must say it made life easier.”

She realizes that this chatter is the wrong thing; she’s losing him. Her first instinct was right. She should be a mother: Pearl’s mother, anybody’s mother. The most typical of her kind.

She is sorry for this boy, as if what he’s gone through had nothing to do with her daughter. She can see he’s gone through a great deal. She remembers something she read once about a knight going through an ordeal. This boy has gone through an ordeal, she keeps saying to herself. The word
ordeal
presses itself on her shoulders; she feels its heaviness and its extent.

In the tale she’d read, the knight who needed to gain access to magic asked another suffering knight, “What are you going through?” And this was the right question, the one that unlocked magic.

What are you going through? she would like to ask this young man, whom she sees not as himself (she knows nothing about him) and not as anyone connected to her daughter, but simply as a young man standing for all young men who have gone through ordeals. No, not gone through. He isn’t out of the woods yet.

She wonders why she isn’t angry at him. Then she understands it’s because she could never imagine his making Pearl do anything she didn’t want to do. She knows her daughter’s force, and she sees that sitting across from her is a person of no force.

The waitress shows them to a table in the farthest corner of the room. Even from there, Maria can’t help hearing American conversation.

“You from the South?” a man asks the two young women at the next table.

“Charleston, South Carolina.”

“I was in South Carolina once. Not once. I mean, once for a long time. When I was in the Marines. Parris Island. We used to call it ‘the land that time forgot.’”

The waitress brings them tea in a brown pot. “Please fill up,” Maria says. “It’s the same cost no matter how many times you go back.”

“I’m not a vegetarian,” Finbar says. “Pearl loved our sausages. She said she couldn’t stand American ones, they were too fatty.”

“She always hated fat on meat,” Maria says, alarmed that they are both speaking about Pearl in the past tense.

“She said we wouldn’t like each other,” Finbar says, stirring a third spoonful of sugar into his tea. “She never wanted us to meet.”

“I tended to give her a hard time about her boyfriends. I never thought they were right for her.”

“What made you think you knew what was right for her?” he says, and his mouth suddenly looks nasty. She’s tempted to answer him in the tone that his remark and the line of his mouth deserve, but she needs this connection; she needs to learn things from him.

“It’s an occupational hazard with mothers,” she says, hoping she hasn’t lost her power to charm. “Maternal narcissism is a widespread disease.”

“That most don’t want the cure of.”

She likes his syntax but can see that, nevertheless, he’s one of Pearl’s lame ducks. Of the foreign variety, therefore exotic, therefore with more obvious appeal.

She looks into his eyes, smiling, and he blushes.

“Actually, what I’d like is porridge,” he says.

“That’s what I had,” she says, as if this bond between them were profound.

When he walks over to get himself porridge, she sees how young he looks from the back. She wonders how old he is. Hard to tell with the young, she thinks, feeling her own lack of youth.

He piles the overfull bowl of porridge with butter, sugar, and cream. A version of her own bowl, but the boy’s version. A fearful child’s habit, a child who fears that his delight will be interrupted, stolen, or forbidden, arbitrarily kept back.

“Are you a student?” she asks.

“I guess, yeah. I’m doing Irish. That’s how we met—I mean Pearl and I.”

He doesn’t say Pearl and me. He is a middle-class child, despite the excessive helpings of butter and sugar.

“She’s good at it. She’s bloody fantastic for someone who never did it before. I mean, in a few weeks, she was caught up with people who’d done it for years. I’m in the advanced class.”

He is struggling, an age-old struggle not to brag about his intellectual achievements because he knows, he has always known, it won’t win him friends. And friends are what he desperately wants. So he’s trying to pretend it doesn’t matter to him, being in the advanced class.

“It wasn’t meant to turn out like this,” he says, his cheeks flushing in a way that reminds her of Devorah, the one redhead she’d known well.

“How could it possibly have been meant to turn out like this?”

She doesn’t know what her tone conveys; she understands that he wants understanding from her, forgiveness maybe, absolution best of all. She isn’t tempted to withhold it, perhaps because he is so obviously weak.

“What I mean is, she got me confused. I misread her. I thought she was with us in a way she turned out not to be.”

“Us?”

“Our movement. What we call the Real IRA. Those of us—and we’re not a few, and we’re not thugs or madmen as the media would like you to believe—those of us who think the peace treaty is a great betrayal. A betrayal of hundreds of years of sacrifice. Just for the sake of Eurodollars.”

“Go on. I’m a bit lost.”

“Pearl and I were in accord about people all over the world being motivated solely by greed these days. The almighty dollar. We talked a lot about how the collapse of the Berlin Wall meant there was no idea in the world now except the idea of profit. I know she was with me on that. I thought she understood how the whole treaty thing is a part of it. Then she started talking about tales and stories and how we needed stories and not tales. I’d no idea what that had to do with the treaty. I thought it was just literary theory; she was more literary than I was. It’s hard sometimes to know what she’s really thinking.”

“I know.”

“You see, she can do these silences and if you talk a great deal, like me, you can assume those silences are filled up with whatever you’ve just said.”

“I know what you mean,” she says. She understands that this boy loves her daughter, that he feels he failed her and, at the same time, that she failed him. His thin shoulders are bowed down by the weight of all that failure; his babyish chest is narrowed by it.

“So it was only at the very end, after everything went so wrong, after all the business with Stevie, that I realized she wasn’t with us, she was
for
the treaty, she could only see wanting the violence to stop, not that violence was the only weapon that we had and would lead to less violence in the future. She couldn’t see that. She had no idea that the violence was a tragic but necessary price, she was just listening to me, pretending to agree with me and waiting till she knew just what she wanted to say. But she only made that clear after the whole Stevie business.”

“I don’t know what the Stevie business is.”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t, would you,” he says, nasty again. “I don’t think Pearl was exactly confiding in you toward the end.”

“We were three thousand miles apart.”

“Whatever.”

Maria is irritated, as she always is, by the use of that word, a tic among the young.
Whatever.
Without an adverbial objective. Strange to hear it in an Irish accent, a noxious American import, like Muzak or McDonald’s.

“You were going to tell me about someone called Stevie.”

“He was the son of a very good friend of mine. A sad case, really. My friend did everything he could. He’s American. You probably don’t know him.”

She nods, as if it were surprising that there is an American she doesn’t know.

“The thing about Mick is, he never lost the faith.”

For a minute, she thinks that Finbar might mean that the man is still a practicing Catholic. But he can’t possibly mean that, although it’s the only context in which she’s ever heard the term. Lost the faith. Among her father’s friends, it was a common locution. But this boy must mean something different.

“Stevie came from a noble line. A noble line,” he says, slipping into the language of saga, assuming the bardic tone. “His uncle’s been in prison since 1982. You’ve probably heard of the Leeds Eight. Reg Donegan. Stevie’s mother is his sister.”

Maria doesn’t dare confess that she hasn’t heard of the Leeds Eight or of Reg Donegan. She assumes it’s something to do with an IRA bomb. She notices that Finbar doesn’t give a name to the female he’s mentioned. Someone’s mother. Someone’s sister.