The Mermaid Chair (26 page)

I pulled him back down beside me. We lay there and listened to the small, searching sounds of the world. “If we do this, there will be suffering,” he said. “We’ll be damned and saved
both.
”

“I know,” I told him.
“I know.”

He rose up on one elbow and drew me hard against him. I knew he was giving himself over. To me, to us, to whatever would happen. He clutched me, holding the back of my head with his hand. His fingers pressed into my scalp, and his heart pounded, filling my body.

We made love in the sun, and afterward, lying on the blanket, I began to cry. A shuddering cry that alarmed Whit at first, but I kept smiling at him with my wet face, saying, “No, no, it’s all right, it’s because I feel so happy.” I hadn’t said,
so complete,
though I’d wanted to.

We got dressed, and he arranged the blanket beneath the hermitage roof, out of the sun. As we settled on top of it, he handed me an old-fashioned metal thermos filled with water, then rummaged deeper in his canvas bag.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, pulling out two books:
Legenda Aurea: Readings on the Saints
by Jacobus de Voragine; the other title I couldn’t see.

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

221

“I looked up some of the saints—the ones who took Jesus too seriously when it came to cutting off the ‘offending member.’ ”

It pleased me that he wanted to be involved, to help me with Mother. It was only later that I remembered how thoroughly I’d been against Hugh’s involvement, and I couldn’t account for the difference.

“I found a St. Eudoria in the twelfth century who cut off her finger,” he said. “She was a prostitute until she was converted by a Franciscan friar.”

“A prostitute?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the interesting part,” he said, though to be honest, I wasn’t so sure.

“Supposedly after she cut off her finger, she planted it in a field, and it sprouted into a sheaf of wheat. Nelle could’ve been
planting
her finger, not burying it.”

The thought jolted me a little.

“You think Mother was copying her?”

“In Ireland there used to be something called ‘white martyrdom,’ ” Whit said. “Our abbot is always preaching sermons about it—I’m sure Nelle must’ve heard some of them. It means following in the footsteps of one of the saints, imitating what he or she did.”

“That sounds like Mother—cutting off her finger and planting it because some saint did it six hundred years ago.”

Legenda Aurea
had a worn, outdated jacket with a hideous picture of Jesus wearing what looked like a British crown. He lifted a scepter over a throng of kneeling, haloed men.

“When I first started looking for this book,” Whit said, “I couldn’t find it on the shelf, so I went and asked Dominic. He
222

s u e m o n k k i d d

opened his desk drawer, and it was in there along with this book.” He held it out to me:
Indigenous Religious Traditions.

“Dominic told me Brother Timothy had found both books in the kitchen right after Nelle cut off her finger. Apparently she’d taken them out of the library. She marked a page in each of them—the one on St. Eudoria and then this.” He flipped open the second book to a dog-eared page and laid it across my lap.

I stared at an illustration of a mermaid whose fingers were depicted as dolphins, seals, fish, whales.

“What
is
this?”

“Her name’s Sedna. She’s an Inuit sea goddess.
All
of her fingers were severed. All ten.”

I read the text under the picture, a magical if slightly horrify-ing story. A young woman sends word to her father to come rescue her from a cruel husband. They are fleeing in his boat when her husband pursues them. Fearing for his life, the father throws his daughter overboard, but she grabs on to the side of the boat and refuses to let go. Panicked, her father cuts off each of her fingers. One by one.

I read the last couple of sentences out loud. “ ‘Sinking into the ocean, Sedna became a powerful female deity with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish or a seal. She came to be known as “Mother of the Ocean,” her severed fingers becoming the sea creatures that filled the waters.’ ”

There was a sidebar accompanying the story, about the number ten, I supposed because she’d lost ten fingers. I skimmed it.

“ ‘Ten was considered the holiest number. Pythagoreans deemed it the number of regeneration and fulfillment. Everything sprang from ten.’ ”

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

223

I stared at Sedna’s image, her hair in long braids, her strong Inuit face. “She’s not exactly a Catholic saint.”

“But she could’ve reminded Nelle of St. Senara,” Whit said.

“Before she was converted, when she was still Asenora, the mermaid.”

I shuddered, and he slid over and drew me against him. We sat in silence for a while. I couldn’t talk about it anymore, this martyring side of my mother.

A breeze had come up and was flapping the sides of the blanket. I noticed that the light had dissolved a little.

Whit said, “I hate to say this, but I need to go.”

He tucked the books back into his bag, screwed the top onto the thermos, folded the blanket that I was sure had come off his bed. He did this without speaking, and I watched his hands, how they scissored through the air, the skin tanned like parch-ment, the fingers long and roughened with small calluses.

I put my hand on his arm. “Will it be hard going to choir now and praying after . . . after this?”

“Yes,” he said, not looking at me.

When we got to the water’s edge, I saw that it was slack tide, those few suspended moments between ebb and flow. My father had called it “the turn’bout.” He’d beckoned me and Mike out of the yard one day and marched us down to Caw Caw Creek so we could see it. We’d stared at the rising tidewater, utterly bored, Mike throwing mud snails across the surface, making them skip.

When the current finally reached the end of its striving, the whole creek grew perfectly still—not one floating blade of spartina grass moved, and then, minutes later, as if some maestro had gestured, all the water began to roll in the opposite direction, moving back out.

224

s u e m o n k k i d d

Whit steered the boat into the tributary that crooked left into the creek. Overhead, gulls wheeled through the sky, and behind us the small marsh island tilted away. I could feel him slipping again into his monk’s life, the ocean turning around us. The ruthless ebb and flow.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-seven

pq

Whit

Whit stood outside the abbot’s office on the first day of spring, clutching a note that had been placed in his hands by Brother Bede, the abbot’s diminutive secre-tary. He’d passed it to Whit just before the office of terce, whispering, “The abbot wishes to see you immediately after choir.”

Whit had folded it up with a hot, tremulous feeling in his stomach. After prayers were over, he’d followed Bede through the transept of the church to Dom Anthony’s office. Though he’d tried to read Bede’s face when they reached the door, scanning the impossibly small forehead and the pea-size green eyes, he could see nothing telling in them.

“The abbot will call for you in a moment,” Bede told him, and ambled away, the hem of his robe dragging on the hall carpet.

Now he waited, the kind of waiting that is crusted over with false calm but underneath tosses around violently.

He heard a sharp, serrated buzzing and walked to the window in the corridor. One of the monks was taking down a dead crape myrtle with a chain saw. Had he been summoned because
226

s u e m o n k k i d d

of Jessie? Because Father Sebastian had read his notebook that night he’d come to his cottage?

When Dom Anthony opened the door, he nodded once, his Irish face stern and chafed cherry pink across his cheeks. Whit gave him a little bow before stepping inside.

There was a painting behind the abbot’s desk that Whit loved—an annunciation in which Mary is so shocked by Gabriel’s news of her impending motherhood that she drops the book she’s reading. It spills from her hand, which hangs suspended in the air.

Her lips are parted, her eyes shocked and deerlike. Whit glanced up at the picture, seeing for the first time the look of complete dread on her face. He felt sorry for her suddenly. Bearing God. It was too much to ask.

Dom Anthony sat down behind the mahogany desk, but Whit went on standing. Waiting. He felt regretful, sorry it would end like this. He wondered how he could go back out there. To Rambo movies and Boy George on the radio. To Tammy Faye Bakker’s streaked face on television. How could he go back to all that greed and consumption? The stock market had crashed last October, plunged five hundred points—he’d read it in the papers—and it hadn’t even fazed him. If he returned to the world, he’d have to think about the economy, about starting up his law practice again.

Through the window on his right, he glimpsed a wedge of sapphire sky, and it made him think of the rookery, the egrets filling the trees, and the white flames their feathers made on the branches. He thought how much he would miss that.

“It is not too soon,” Dom Anthony was saying, “to schedule your ceremony for solemn vows.” The old man began riffling the pages of a desk calendar. “I was thinking of the Nativity of St.

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

227

John the Baptist on June twenty-fourth, or there’s St. Barnabas on the eleventh.”

“Solemn vows?” Whit repeated. He’d been so sure he was about to be asked to leave. He’d braced himself for the humilia-tion of that. He said it a second time. “Solemn vows?”

Dom Anthony squinted up at him. “Yes, Brother Thomas.

It’s time to be thinking about making your petition.” Exasperation tugged on his voice, the tone of a teacher with an absent-minded pupil. He picked up a pencil, holding it loosely, letting it rap on the desk like a drumstick. “Now. As for the ceremony.

You’re allowed to invite whomever you want. Are your parents living?”

“I don’t know,” said Whit.

Dom Anthony laid down the pencil and folded his hands together. “
You don’t know?
You don’t know if your parents are dead or alive?”

“Yes, of course I know that,” Whit said. “My mother is alive.

What I meant is that—” He looked at the annunciation, aware of the abbot watching him.

He’d been on the verge of saying he didn’t know if he could take the vows, then stopped himself. He thought of Thomas Merton’s prayer that he’d printed on a little blue card and kept taped to the mirror over his sink:
“My Lord God, I have no idea
where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know
for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the
fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so.”

“Reverend Father,” he began, “I don’t know about solemn vows. I’m not sure anymore about taking them.”

Dom Anthony pushed back his chair and stood with painful
228

s u e m o n k k i d d

slowness. He stared a moment at the junior monk, sighing.

“Have you been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer again?” he asked.

“No, Reverend Father.”

The abbot had forbidden him to read any more of the Protestant theologian’s writing after he’d found a certain unre-solvable quotation of Bonhoeffer’s copied into Whit’s notebook:

“Before and with God we live without God.”
Whit had liked the searing honesty of that. It had seemed to capture the paradox he was always carrying around inside.

Dom Anthony walked around the desk and laid his hand on Whit’s shoulder. “I’m glad to hear you’ve set him aside. You’re particularly sensitive to doubt, so it’s best not to feed it. Especially now that you’ve come to the point of taking vows. It’s a dark night of testing that we’ve all gone through—you’re not alone in that. You will be vowing to spend the rest of your life here, to die here, to own nothing at all, to be perfectly celibate, and to give yourself over to obedience. No one does this lightly, but we do it just the same. We do it because the desire of our heart is God.” The abbot smiled at him. “You will come through your dark night, Brother Thomas. Think of the disciple for whom you’re named. Why do you think I chose that name for you? He doubted, didn’t he? But in the end he overcame it with his faith, and you will, too.”

Dom Anthony returned to his chair as if it were all settled—

the dark night, doubt, faith—all of it properly dissected, reassembled, and put in its proper place. Whit wanted to tell him that he should’ve taken the name Jonah, that he’d been swallowed into the abbey, that he’d been traveling in the dark, luminous belly of this place from the moment he’d arrived, but now he would be spit back into that other life. Phil, Oprah, Sally.

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

229

Madonna’s fishnet hose.
Revenge of the Nerds
movies. Out there where normal people, even bank tellers, used the words “totally awesome” to describe the most banal things.

He heard the chain saw again, more distantly this time. He felt it in his chest. Dom Anthony was brooding over the calendar. Whit noticed the tufts of pale hair on his knuckles. Over his head Mary’s book was perpetually tumbling.

What had he
really
been doing here?

What if his being here wasn’t about making peace with a God who was both here and not here but more about finding some kind of immunity from life? What if he’d mixed up enlightenment with asylum?

What if holiness had more to do with seizing his life
out
there?

The abbot had said he should take his vows because the desire of his heart was for God, and he did want God, but—he knew now—he wanted Jessie more.

He couldn’t dismiss that. Neither his body nor his heart would let him, but neither would his
soul.
It was trying to tell him something. He was certain of it. One thing he’d learned from being here was how incessantly the soul tried to speak up, and usually in maddeningly cryptic ways—in his dreams, in the jumble of impressions and feelings he got when alone in the marsh, and occasionally in the symptoms in his body, that way he’d broken out in hives the time he was taken off rookery duty and made to help in the Net House. Nowhere, though, did the soul speak more insistently than through desire. Sometimes the heart wanted what the soul demanded.