The Mermaid Chair (14 page)

The mermaid chair sat on a raised platform that was carpeted in a dark wine color. The carpet, I noticed, had thinned down to patches of thread in several places. On the wall behind the chair, a narrow clerestory window let in a stripe of musty, sawdust light that fell across the seat.

I walked over and laid my hand on the back of the chair. It was carved with an intricate Celtic-knot design. The mermaids that made up the chair arms were still painted in green, gold, and red, though some of the brightness had faded since I’d seen them last.

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I hadn’t thought the sight of it would affect me, but my eyes welled up immediately. My father had sat on the chair and patted his knee for me to climb into his lap. Laying my cheek against the rough corduroy of his jacket, I’d whispered to him,

“Are you praying?” Because that’s what you did when you sat in the chair. You prayed for things, usually impossible things, and your prayers were supposed to be answered. Before Mother had acquired her odd aversion to the chair, she used to sing a verse to me, a rhyme every child on the island knew by heart.

Sit in the chair,

Say a prayer.

An answer tomorrow

From St. Senara.

My father had whispered back, “Yes, I’m praying, but don’t you dare tell your mother. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“What are you praying for?”

“For you.”

I’d sat up, electrified by this. My father was saying a prayer for
me,
and whatever he asked—it would happen. “What are you asking?”

He’d touched the tip of his finger to my nose. “That you’ll stay my Whirly Girl forever.”

I noticed Brother Thomas still in the entranceway, looking uncertain about whether to stay or to leave me alone. I let my hand glide over the wooden locks of the mermaid’s hair, then along her wings.

“I always wondered why she has wings,” I said. “I never heard of mermaids having them. Do you know why?”

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He took it as an invitation, which it was, and came to the other side of the chair, stepping into the dim, powdery light from the window. It made a streak on his robe. “The thinking around here is that she’s part siren. Sirens have fish tails
and
wings.”

Her wings reminded me suddenly of plumage. Of mating dances. “But I thought sirens were terrible creatures.”

“You’re probably thinking of the
Odyssey,
how they lured the sailors onto the rocks, but before that they were sea goddesses.

They brought messages from the deep. Kind of like angels, but they didn’t come down from heaven, they came up from the sea.

Supposedly their messages would inspire or heal—so sirens weren’t always bad.”

I must have looked surprised that he knew so much about it, because he grinned slightly and said, “I fill in for Brother Bede sometimes; he’s the one who leads the guided tours.”

I heard a shuffling noise in the corridor, just outside the chapel, and looked around, expecting to see a monk step in, but no one did, and we went on talking a few more minutes about the mermaids on the chair. He told me he liked the idea of them having both wings and fish tails, because it meant they could carry on in two completely different worlds, that they belonged equally to the sky and sea, and he envied that. He talked at length about it, but I didn’t find it high-minded, only intriguing, and, to be honest, it excited me that he possessed this kind of ar-cane knowledge.

I let my gaze travel to the chair arm again, pretending to be engrossed in the mermaid, the whole wing–fish tail conundrum, aware that he was still looking at me.

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“Do you believe the story that anyone who sits in the chair and prays will be granted an answer?” I asked.

“Not in the magical sense, no.”

“I take it you
don’t
sit in the chair like the tourists and pray?”

“I suppose I pray in other ways.”

“What ways?” I asked, realizing after I’d said it how intrusive it sounded. I was sure I’d never asked anyone about his prayer life before.

“Thomas Merton wrote that the birds were his prayers, and I guess I feel that way, too. I pray best by just being out in the marsh. It’s the only praying my soul seems to really respond to.”

Soul.
The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I’d pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person—a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person’s experiences—a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we’ve ever known. I might have asked him about it, but a bell began to ring in the belfry overhead. He stepped into the corridor, then turned back to me, and I could see the sharp blue in his eyes even from over there. “I don’t pray in the mermaid chair, but, for the record, that doesn’t mean it lacks power.”

The bell clanged again. Smiling at me, he tucked his hands into his scapular with Max’s tennis ball and walked away.

C H A P T E R

Fifteen

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When he’d gone, I sat down in the mermaid chair. It was hard and uncomfortable; some said it was made from a single piece of birch, though I imagine that was just more apocrypha. I pushed my spine to the back of the seat and felt my toes lift off the floor. At the other end of the church, the monks began to chant. I could not tell if it was in Latin. Their voices came in waves, flooding into the arched chapel.

My thoughts must have been spiraling up near the ceiling for a few minutes, soaring around with the chant, because all of a sudden I felt my concentration yanked downward into my body, which I realized was aroused and alive. I felt as if I were running, but I was perfectly still. Everything around me seemed to blaze up and breathe—colors, edges, the crumbs of light falling obliquely over my shoulders.

My hands were resting on the chair arms, the place where the curving backs of the mermaids blend into their fish tails. I moved my fingers around and underneath until I was gripping the nubby carving of the tails like a pair of reins. I had the sensation inside of wanting to stop myself and at the same time to let myself go.

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My feelings about Thomas had been such a muddle. I’d let them slosh around in me like dirty water in the bottom of a boat, but now, sitting in the mermaid chair, I felt the sediment settle to the bottom, and everything was very clear to me. I wanted him with an almost ferocious desire.

Of course, the second I allowed myself the thought, I felt a reverberating shock, complete disgust, and yet my shame was in-consequential next to the force of my heart. It was as if something had come bursting through a wall. I thought of the Magritte painting, the locomotive thundering out of the fireplace.

The antiphons rocked back and forth in the air. I made myself take a long, slow breath, wanting the chair to live up to its reputation and do something, to work a miracle and make the overwhelming feelings evaporate. My desire, however, only seemed to grow. A desire for someone who, I reminded myself, was not Hugh. I didn’t even know him, really. And yet I felt as if I did. As if I knew the deepest things inside him.

That’s how it had been with Hugh all those years ago. Like meeting someone I already knew. Falling in love with Hugh had been like coming down with a terrible bout of insanity. I’d been consumed with him, almost sick with longing, unable to concentrate on anything else, and there had been no way to cure it, not that I’d wanted to then. There was no assertion of will when it came to falling in love. The heart did what it did. It had its own autonomy, like a country unto itself.

The air was poached with incense, vibrating with medieval singing. I pictured Thomas out there in one of the choir stalls and felt that same sense of being consumed, engulfed with wanting.

Worst of all, I could feel myself giving over to all of
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this, to whatever was coming. To a Great Ecstasy and a Great Catastrophe.

The realization frightened me, which is too mild a way of saying it. I’d not thought I was capable of falling in love again.

Earlier, when Thomas had asked me about myself, I’d not been able to speak, and I wondered now if that was because my sense of myself had been coming apart. I’d come to the island, and everything had disintegrated.

I closed my eyes.
Stop this. Stop.

I hadn’t meant it as a prayer, but when I opened my eyes, I was struck with the idea that maybe it had been, and I had a momentary surge of childish hope that now some power-that-be would be obligated to grant my request. Then it would all stop.

The feelings, everything, and I would be absolved. Safe.

Of course, I didn’t really believe that.
Sit in the chair. Say a
prayer—
it was juvenile.

Yet even Thomas, who didn’t believe it either, had said there was power in the chair. And there
was.
I felt it. I felt it as an unraveling of some kind.

What if
that
was the real power in the chair—its ability to undo you? What if it fished up the most forbidden feelings inside a person and splayed them open?

I stood up. Unable to face strolling back through the church in front of the monks, I blundered around in the ambulatory for a minute, opening the wrong doors before I located the sacristy’s back door, leading out of the church.

I hurried across the quadrangle, the dense air hitting my face.

Instead of the fog’s lifting, as it had tried to do earlier when a lone curl of sunlight had appeared, the air had turned to soup.

When I stepped through the gate into Mother’s backyard, I t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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stopped, standing in the same spot where I’d lingered that night Thomas had walked us back to the house. I placed my palms on top of the brick wall and stared at the mortar, pocked with holes from the salt air. Across the yard the oleander bushes swayed, their greenness barely visible.

He’s a monk,
I thought.

Wanting to believe that this would save me.

C H A P T E R

Sixteen

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Brother Thomas

During the antiphonal chanting that preceded mass, Thomas noticed Father Sebastian looking at him, staring with his small eyes from behind the enormous black-framed glasses. Thomas wished he would stop. Once, Thomas stared pointedly back, and Sebastian had not even pretended to be embarrassed. Instead he’d nodded as if savoring a private thought or perhaps trying to say something.

Thomas was sweltering beneath his robe. He felt as if he were wrapped in pink insulation. Even in winter the wool was too hot, and the furnace continually blasted them with heat. The reason, as the abbot so thoughtfully put it, was that the older monks were “cold-blooded.” Thomas had bitten down onto his back teeth to keep his face straight.

Three years ago he’d begun daily swims in the creek out in the rookery near the makeshift hermitage he’d built on one of the small marsh islands. He did it just to cool off. He swam more determinedly in the winter than in any other season, hurl-ing himself into the frigid water. It reminded him of an illumi-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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nated scene in a medieval Book of Hours, called the Mouth of Hell, which pictured poor, scalded people bolting from an infernal opening toward a spoonful of cold water. His place was secluded, walled off by tall, abundant grasses. It had been formed by a tributary veering off from the creek and dead-ending in a hidden basin. His private swimming hole.

There were no such things as swim trunks in a monastery, so he swam naked. It was something he should probably confess during public
culpa
on Friday mornings, which was where they divulged such sins as “I was not paying attention and broke the ginger-jar lamp in the Reception Center” or “I snuck into the kitchen after night silence and ate the last of the cherry Jell-O,”

but he didn’t really believe he was culpable. When he swam nude, he felt he was venturing out onto an exultant edge. Spiritual people had the habit of closing themselves off, numbing themselves down. He felt strongly about it—people needed to swim naked. Some more than others.

With sweat beading up over his lip, he closed his eyes and dreamed of the cold tide rushing over his bare skin.

The monks stood in choir in order of seniority, or
statio
as they called it: abbot, prior, subprior, novice master, then each monk by the longevity of his time there. Thomas stood in the last stall on the back row, left-hand side of the church.

As the prior, Father Sebastian was in the first row on the right-hand side, clutching his St. Andrew Daily Missal, which had been abolished back in the sixties. His stare had become obvious and glowering.

The reason for the staring became clear to Thomas suddenly.

He tightened his fingers on his breviary. Father Sebastian had
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seen him talking to Jessie Sullivan. There had been that sound outside the chapel. He’d forgotten that Sebastian always came into the church through the sacristy. Undoubtedly he’d eaves-dropped.

Certain things Thomas had said to her floated back to him.

There had been nothing inappropriate. They’d talked about the mermaid chair. About
praying,
for heaven’s sake. He had merely been friendly to the daughter of the woman who cooked their midday meal. What was wrong with that? Monks talked to visitors all the time.

He stood in his choir stall gorged with self-justification, his old attorney self risen like Lazarus. It was startling to feel that instinct alive in him, how easily he deliberated and defended his encounter with Jessie Sullivan, like it was evidence against him.

He stopped singing, and the abbot, noticing, glanced at him and frowned. Thomas began again, then stopped once more, his arms sagging. That he even needed to mount a defense was a revelation.