The Mermaid Chair (2 page)

SUE MONK KIDD

The Mermaid

Chair

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P E N G U I N B O O K S

penguin books

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2006

Copyright © Sue Monk Kidd Ltd., 2005

All rights reserved

Page 337 constitues an extension of this copyright page.

publisher’s note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business estab -

lishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Kidd, Sue Monk.

The mermaid chair / Sue Monk Kidd.

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4295-8058-5

1. Married women—Fiction. 2. Catholic women—Fiction.

3. South Carolina—Fiction. 4. Spiritual life—Fiction. 5. Benedictines—Fiction.

6. Islands—Fiction. 7. Monks—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.I44M47 2005

813'.54—dc22

2004061233

Set in Adobe Garamond

Designed by Francesca Belanger

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purhaser.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

To Scott Taylor and Kellie Bayuzick Kidd

with much love

Acknowledgments

It is a privilege to thank those who have made this book possible. I begin with my superb editor, Pamela Dorman. I cannot say enough about the importance of her magnificent editing or her ardent support of me and my work.

I am grateful to my literary agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. A writer could not wish for a more brilliant guide or passionate ad-vocate. My deep thanks also goes to Virginia Barber, a literary agent of extraordinary measure, who has been there for me from the beginning.

I am grateful to all the wonderful people at Viking Penguin: Susan Petersen Kennedy, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, Francesca Belanger, Paul Buckley, Leigh Butler, Rakia Clark, Carolyn Coleburn, Tricia Conley, Maureen Donnelly, John Fagan, Hal Fessenden, Bruce Giffords, Victoria Klose, Judi Powers, Rose-anne Serra, Nancy Sheppard, Julie Shiroishi, and Grace Veras.

Thank you to the phenomenal sales department: Dick Hef-fernan, Norman Lidofsky, Mike Brennan, Phil Budnick, Mary Margaret Callahan, Hank Cochrane, Fred Huber, Tim McCall, Patrick Nolan, Don Redpath, Katya Shannon, Glenn Timony, and Trish Weyenberg.

I owe much to the following people for taking time to re-xii

a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

spond to my questions: Greg Reidinger, for sharing his expertise about boats and for his helpful ideas; Dr. Deborah Milling, for her generosity in assisting me with medical matters in the book; Tim Currie, for helping me grasp the intricacies of hand-tying cast nets; Trenholm Walker, for background on cases of environ-mental law; Dr. Frank Morris, who kindly provided me with Latin translations.

I cannot imagine having written this book without the loving community of friends who offered me much wisdom and encouragement: Terry Helwig, Susan Hull Walker, Carolyn Rivers, Trisha Sinnott, Curly Clark, Lynne Ravenel, Carol Graf, and Donna Farmer.

I’m grateful to Jim Helwig for friendship and laughter.

Thanks to Patti Morrison for always being available with help and good coffee.

I would like to thank my family. My daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, assisted me with research and also read each chapter as I finished it, offering excellent literary insights and story ideas.

There is no doubt that
The Mermaid Chair
is a better novel because of Ann. Scott Taylor, my son-in-law, has been my ingenious computer and Web consultant, a strong promoter of my work who helped me find information about everything from baseball to the true color of shrimp. My son, Bob Kidd, and my daughter-in-law, Kellie Kidd, have cheered me on with avid en-thusiasm and support. Roxie Kidd and Ben Taylor both came into my life as I wrote this novel and remind me every day of what really matters. My parents, Leah and Ridley Monk, have been true champions of my work and filled my life with love and goodness.

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My deepest love and gratitude go to my husband, Sandy.

During the writing of this book, he bestowed on me an abundance of love, humor, perspective, sound advice, patience, and the best of his culinary skills, threatening
only once
to join a support group for Spouses of Writers.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain dark things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

—Pablo Neruda

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They’re in each other all along.

—Rumi

The Mermaid

Chair

Prologue

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In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh’s wife and Dee’s mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk.

It happened during the winter and spring of 1988, though I’m only now, a year later, ready to speak of it. They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.

My name is Jessie Sullivan. I stand at the bow of a ferry, looking across Bull’s Bay toward Egret Island, a tiny barrier island off the coast of South Carolina where I grew up. I see it almost a mile out in the water, a small curve of russet and green. The wind is spiked with the smell of my childhood, and the water is ultramarine blue, shining like taffeta. Looking toward the northwest tip of the island, I can’t yet see the spire from the monastery church, but I know it’s there, pricking the white afternoon.

I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they’re capable of. At forty-two I’d never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose
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now that was part of the problem—my chronic inability to astonish myself.

I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they’re being kind. I didn’t fall—I dove.

Long ago, when my brother and I used to row his small bateau through the tangle of salt creeks on the island, back when I was still wild and went around with Spanish moss braided into my hair, creating those long and alarming coiffures, my father used to tell me that mermaids lived in the waters around the island. He claimed he’d seen them once from his boat—in the pink hours of the morning when the sun sat like a bobbing rasp-berry out on the water. The mermaids swam to his boat like dolphins, he said, leaping through the waves and diving.

I believed any and every outlandish thing he said. “Do they sit on rocks and comb their hair?” I asked him. Never mind that we didn’t have rocks around the island, just the marsh grass turning with the wheel of the year—green to brown to yellow back to green—the everlasting cycle of the island, the one that also turned inside my body.

“Yes, mermaids sit around on rocks and primp,” my father answered. “But their main job is saving humans. That’s why they came to my boat—to be there in case I fell over.”

In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved
me.
I know this much: The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.

They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms out-stretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself.

They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up.

As the ferry approaches the island dock, the air hits me, laden with so many things: the smell of fish, the disturbance of birds, the green breath of palmetto palms, and already I feel the story loom like some strange creature surfacing from the water below.

Perhaps I will be finished with it now. Perhaps I will forgive myself, and the story will hold me like a pair of arms for as long as I live.

The captain blows his horn, announcing our arrival, and I think,
Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the
bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves
and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

C H A P T E R

One

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February 17, 1988, I opened my eyes and heard a procession of sounds: first the phone going off on the opposite side of the bed, rousing us at 5:04 a.m. to what could only be a calamity, then rain pummeling the roof of our old Victorian house, sluicing its sneaky way to the basement, and finally small puffs of air coming from Hugh’s lower lip, each one perfectly timed, like a metronome.

Twenty years of this puffing. I’d heard it when he wasn’t even asleep, when he sat in his leather wing chair after dinner, reading through the column of psychiatric journals rising from the floor, and it would seem like the cadence against which my entire life was set.

The phone rang again, and I lay there, waiting for Hugh to pick up, certain it was one of his patients, probably the paranoid schizophrenic who’d phoned last night convinced the CIA had him cornered in a federal building in downtown Atlanta.

A third ring, and Hugh fumbled for the receiver. “Yes, hello,”

he said, and his voice came out coarse, a hangover from sleep.

I rolled away from him then and stared across the room at the faint, watery light on the window, remembering that today was Ash Wednesday, feeling the inevitable rush of guilt.

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My father had died on Ash Wednesday when I was nine years old, and in a convoluted way, a way that made no sense to anyone but me, it had been at least partially my fault.

There had been a fire on his boat, a fuel-tank explosion, they’d said. Pieces of the boat had washed up weeks later, including a portion of the stern with
Jes-Sea
printed on it. He’d named the boat for me, not for my brother, Mike, or even for my mother, whom he’d adored, but for me, Jessie.

I closed my eyes and saw oily flames and roaring orange light.

An article in the Charleston newspaper had referred to the explosion as suspicious, and there had been some kind of investigation, though nothing had ever come of it—things Mike and I’d discovered only because we’d sneaked the clipping from Mother’s dresser drawer, a strange, secret place filled with fractured rosaries, discarded saint medals, holy cards, and a small statue of Jesus missing his left arm. She had not imagined we would venture into all that broken-down holiness.

I went into that terrible sanctum almost every day for over a year and read the article obsessively, that one particular line:
“Police speculate that a spark from his pipe may have ignited a leak in
the fuel line.”

I’d given him the pipe for Father’s Day. Up until then he had never even smoked.

I still could not think of him apart from the word “suspicious,” apart from this day, how he’d become ash the very day people everywhere—me, Mike, and my mother—got our foreheads smudged with it at church. Yet another irony in a whole black ensemble of them.

“Yes, of course I remember you,” I heard Hugh say into the t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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phone, yanking me back to the call, the bleary morning. He said, “Yes, we’re all fine here. And how are things there?”

This didn’t sound like a patient. And it wasn’t our daughter, Dee, I was sure of that. I could tell by the formality in his voice.

I wondered if it was one of Hugh’s colleagues. Or a resident at the hospital. They called sometimes to consult about a case, though generally
not
at five in the morning.

I slipped out from the covers and moved with bare feet to the window across the room, wanting to see how likely it was that rain would flood the basement again and wash out the pilot light on the hot-water heater. I stared out at the cold, granular deluge, the bluish fog, the street already swollen with water, and I shivered, wishing the house were easier to warm.