The Mermaid Chair (34 page)

So, I thought, Hugh had stayed in touch with Nelle’s doctor.

Kat and I went over and sat down—me next to Mother, while Shem and Dominic took the last two chairs.

“I didn’t know anything about this,” I told Mother.

“If you don’t hate me already, you will,” she responded.

“Nobody is going to hate anybody,” Kat said. “I realize getting you here wasn’t the most straightforward thing in the world, but the fact is, we need to do this.”

Mother stared into her palms, cupped like small basins on each of her knees.

“Look. I stopped at your house and got your rosary,” Kat said. She reached in her pocket, drew out the red beads, and coiled them into Mother’s good hand.

She closed her fingers around them. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just try to put what happened with Joe into words,” Dominic told her.

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We waited.

My heart began to beat convulsively. I didn’t want to know.

I’d more or less pushed everyone into this, and now I felt un-done at the thought of what “it” might be.

If you don’t hate me already, you will.

Mother turned her head and looked at me, and it was like staring into a dark hatchway, so much black sorrow below.

“I’m not going to hate you,” I said. “You need to talk about it. Whatever it is.”

I could see the chinks in her resistance. We all could. We sat there avoiding one another’s eyes. The silence turned oceanic.

Outside, the St. Senara crowd that had come over on the ferry was beginning to line the sidewalk to wait for the mermaid chair. I could see a cluster of them through the plate-glass window at the front. Imagining them out there doing the ordinary things people did—window-shopping, licking snow cones, lifting their children onto their shoulders, these acts of daily grace—

filled me with the ache one has for such seeming insignificance only when it goes missing. I wanted everything to be ordinary again. To walk around with the glorious nonchalance reserved for oblivious people.

“Your father, he was ill,” Mother said, the words spit into the middle of us like the hard bitter pit of some fruit she’d been eating.

She paused and looked toward the door.

“Nelle,” Dominic said. “Go ahead and say it. We’ll all be the better for it. Do it for yourself. And for Jessie. Do it for our blessed St. Senara.”

Immediately the room filled with brilliance. It was only the sun dropping through fathoms of sky, hitting the window and t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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bombarding us with light beams, but in that way of magical thinking, it seemed as if Senara had lifted her hand to bless Dominic’s words, causing light to rise and scatter. Mother crossed herself.

“It was the same disease
his
father had,” she said. She was resolved now; it was hardened in her eyes. “It’s called Pick’s disease.”

She stared at the hardwood planks on the floor as if directing her story to them, but clearly she was talking to me. “When he was a little boy, Joe watched his own father—your grandfather—

grow senile and die with it. Back then, though, they just called it dementia. It wasn’t till Joe got diagnosed with it that they realized what kind of dementia his father probably had.”

I shut my eyes.
Pick’s disease.
I’d never even heard of it. I could feel the groundswell, the whirling up of grief. In my mind I saw Bone Yard Beach with gale winds surging off the water and ripping into the dunes, knowing that it would rearrange the island into new contours.

“When we first met, Joe told me about his father, how the disease destroyed his brain.” She spoke in a halting, heavy way, each word laid down like a brick she was trying to lift and place just right. “But I don’t think it ever entered his mind that he could get it; there’s just the smallest tendency for it to run in families. He just talked about how there wasn’t a cure, that kind of thing.”

She crossed herself again. Tears were beading up in the gray floss of her lashes. She said, “One time his father got him mixed up with a boy he’d known growing up. It nearly killed Joe. Later his father couldn’t place him at all. The disease completely ate his memory. That’s how Joe always put it, like it was devouring
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his father from the inside out. It got where he couldn’t talk right, and the spit would run out of his mouth. At the end Joe’s mother was always mopping his chin, and finally she put a bib on him.”

She was leaning forward in her chair, her words suddenly pouring out in a turbulent stream. It seemed that finding a crack, the force of the story had thrown the door wide open.

“In the beginning he said it was mostly his father’s personality that started changing. He did things, real odd things. He’d shout at people on the street for no good reason or blurt out something crazy. A lot of times, it would be something lewd.

Like he’d lost all his inhibitions. But the part that got stuck the worst in Joe’s head was the day his father knocked him onto the floor. When he saw what he’d done, he started crying, ‘I’m sorry, little boy, I’m sorry.’ Like he didn’t know who he was. Joe broke down every time he remembered it. I think it was a relief when his father finally died. He was ten years old. And his father just forty-eight.”

Her eyes looked shrunken, tiny almonds in her face. The big crucifix on the end of the rosary hung off the edge of her lap, swaying slightly as she worked the beads with her fingers in the accomplished way of old nuns.

Hepzibah reached over and patted her arm, her hands, the lumps and dough of her skin, wanting, it seemed, to mold her back together. “Go on, tell the rest, Nelle.”

Mother wiped at her eyes. “Joe came to me one day and said he was sure he had his father’s disease. He’d been out in the boat, and when he’d tried to throw out the anchor line, he couldn’t remember where he kept it or even how to say the words
anchor
line
in his head. He was so confused he came straight back to the t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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dock afraid he’d forget where
that
was. I can still see his face when he walked through the kitchen door, how pale and scared it was. He said, ‘God help me, Nelle, I have the disease.’ He knew it, and I think I did, too. There’d been other signs—little things slipping his mind, plus he’d been losing his temper over nothing and just not thinking straight. A few months later the doctors in Charleston told us what we already knew.”

She did not look at us. She made a little altar of the floor, of the light shafts, of the granules of dust illuminated inside them, and concentrated her eyes upon it.

“Your father did not want to forget your name,” she said, and I could hear the desperation in her voice, the ragged way it sounded in her throat. “He did not want to forget Mike’s name either, but it was
your
name, Jessie, that he would wake up shouting. Sometimes he would bolt out of his sleep crying, ‘I’m sorry, little girl! I’m sorry!’ ” She rocked her body back and forth, and I knew in my bones that’s what she must’ve done when he woke like that—taken him in her arms and rocked back and forth with him.

I couldn’t bear watching her. My mind went to the time I found my mother and father in the kitchen dancing without music. They had poured so much love on each other.

“I told him a thousand times, ‘You
won’t
forget your children’s names; I won’t let you. God will cure you.’ ” She had begun twisting the rosary in her hands. I slid forward and reached out to touch her. I wanted my mother. I wanted to bend over and kiss her the way a mother kisses her injured child. My love for her was such a rubble.

The rosary fell onto the floor. She began talking to my father as if he were sitting in the room with us. “Don’t ask me to do
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this, Joe. Please, don’t ask me. I’ll walk on my knees across the island if I have to. I won’t eat. I’ll sleep on the floor, on the dirty ground. I’ll
make
God hear me.
Jesus and Mary.
Don’t ask me to do this. It would be damnation for us.”

Her face was blazing.

The light on the floor had disappeared as if it had boiled away. Mother stared at the darkness rising around our feet, the quiet way the shadows pooled out from under the chairs.

Kat reached down and picked up the rosary. None of us said a word. I had the blurred, disoriented feeling of floating, waving like an eel in the ocean. I could grasp nothing. What was she trying to say?

I believe, though, part of me knew. I began pulling air down the chute of my throat, into my lungs, like stuffing cotton batting into a pillow that would soon absorb an unthinkable blow.

Mother turned slowly to face me. “He wouldn’t listen to me.

Every time I refused to do it, he smiled and said, ‘Nelle, it’ll be okay. God won’t blame you. Why, it’s God’s tender mercy you’ll be dispensing. Let me have my dignity. Let me go the way I need to.’ ”

I understood then.

I think I must have made a sound, a moan. It caused them all to turn and stare at me. Even Mother. I felt awe at the sight of her.

“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” Mother said. “Why did I listen to him?”

Dominic’s eyelids were opening and closing repeatedly, and all I could think was how thin they seemed, two bluish white films.

I sat in amazement, the translucence that comes when life t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there—life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.

Mother had started to sob. Her head drooped toward her chest, heaving up and down with her shoulders. I reached for her hand, because it was there and it had to be taken. Because I both loved and hated her for what she’d done, but mostly I pitied her.

Her hand was leaden and damp. I touched the veins twisting toward her knuckles. “You did the only thing you could,” I said.

It was all I could manage—this concession, this forbearance.

I wasn’t sure if she would tell me how she did it, whether I wanted to know.

I began to feel the first traces of relief. I looked at Dominic silently moving his lips and thought it was a prayer of thanks-giving that Mother’s surrender to the past was finally over. I believed that as ghastly as the truth was, it was at least
out.
I believed it could not get worse. These were my mistakes.

Hepzibah brought Mother a glass of water. We watched solemnly as she found her composure and drank it, the sound of her swallowing exaggerated in the silence. A picture came into my mind: rummaging through her dresser drawer, finding the pipe.

“It wasn’t the pipe that caused it,” I said to her. “It was never the pipe.”

“No,” she said. The skin on her face was rubbery and pouched, like small, deflated balloons beneath her eyes. There was an expression in her eyes, though—the empty calm that follows catharsis.

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“Do you know what dead finger is, Jessie?” said Kat.

I turned to her, startled.
“What?”
I sat there stupidly thinking she must be referring to Mother’s finger in the jar on the counter. The room was utterly still.

“Dead finger,” she repeated. She said it with softness, with kindness. “It’s a plant. It’s from the nightshade family.” She looked at me quizzically to see if I grasped her meaning. “It’s very poisonous,” she added.

I understood instantly—my father had died from ingesting some kind of toxic plant.

I stood up, shaking my head. How do you suddenly revise images and understandings you’ve carried in the cells of your body for thirty-three years?

I walked to the counter and leaned on the worn wood, lowering my head into my hands. “Dead finger,” I said, realizing the name had started all Mother’s warped reasons for mutilating herself.

Hepzibah came and stood beside me. She touched my shoulder. “It used to grow around the slave cemetery. It still crops up sometimes if I’m not careful. It’s a shrub with fuzzy leaves and grayish white blossoms shaped like fingers, and it has a terrible rotting odor. You’ve probably seen it on the island.”

“No,” I said, still cradling my head, not wanting to picture it.

“It’s more merciful than other nightshades. Back in the forties and fifties, people here used it to put their pets out of their misery. Your father died peacefully, Jessie. He fell asleep, and he didn’t wake up.”

I turned around to Mother, who appeared tranquil but spent.

“How did you know what to do? I didn’t think you knew anything about plants.”

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She didn’t answer. What she did was to look at Kat and then at Hepzibah.

They had been part of it, too.

“You helped her,” I said, looking from one to the other.

Kat glanced at the floor, then back at me. “We did it because your father asked us. He came to each one of us—to Shem and Dominic, too—begging our help the same way he did your mother’s. We loved Joe. We would’ve done anything for him, but none of us arrived at this easily.”

I looked at Dominic, confused. Why would my father make
him
part of this? Kat and Hepzibah, I understood. They were devoted to Mother, and Dad would’ve known how much she would need them afterward. Shem had been his best friend. But Dominic . . .

He read my expression. “Come, sit down,” Dominic told me, and waited while I went and lowered myself into the chair. “Joe came to me one day and said he was going to die, that it would be a long, horrible death and he couldn’t put himself through it, much less his family. He said he would like to leave this life sitting in the mermaid chair. He wanted to sit in the holiest spot on the island, surrounded by his wife and his friends.”

Dominic couldn’t have said anything in the world that would’ve surprised me more—or at the same time seemed more natural, truer to my father.