Pearl

by Mary Gordon

  At first she didn’t understand that her relationship to the languages she’d studied—Spanish, French, Latin, Cambodian—was different from Finbar’s relationship to Irish. She loved studying language as a thing removed from human beings, like a mathematical theorem. She came to study Irish because it was difficult and complicated. But she would have been quite happy with a series of abstract sounds.

  For Finbar, the Irish language was the vehicle that could transport him and transform him into the man he longed to be. He was a well-bred boy and he hated that, as he hated so many things about himself: the well-mannered son of well-mannered parents, both doctors. He hated his house in Dun Laoghaire with the high windows whose glass seemed thicker than American glass, more like water with a few drops of darkness in it, so that the leaves seen through it wavered, wobbled in the air that always seemed silvery in that garden, as if his parents’ prosperity had saturated the light that surrounded their house. He hated it that his parents liked Pearl, that she liked his parents. He took her home only twice and wouldn’t take her again; he wanted to show her off and then he wanted to deprive them of her. He begrudged them every ounce of pride and pleasure they could take in him. Finbar, the least successful son of a spectacularly successful family: the smallest boy, always the smallest boy, the clumsy boy, pale, with red hair and brown eyes so that he always looked a bit anemic, his skin bluish like skim milk. Believing always, though he could never admit it, that boys like his brothers and his brothers’ friends, whose skins were penetrated by the sun, boys who could catch balls and throw them and shout to one another in an easy way, as if words were not precious, as if words counted for nothing: those were the right kind of boys to be. Boys like his brother Seamus, his brother Rory, who could run and run and never get tired and joke with people, who were always glad to see them, and tease their mother out of giving them a punishment: Seamus, a doctor like his parents; Rory, making his way up in the bank. Finbar couldn’t catch or throw or run or joke, but he could put his mind to words. Pearl did not love him, but she loved what he could do with words, how he could catch words like coins; no boy could catch words like Finbar. He believed at the same time that words were the most important thing in the world (he despised people for their slowness or carelessness with language), that his mind was the finest thing on earth, and at the same time, helplessly, he despised himself for not throwing and catching and running and joking, for not having a skin that absorbed the sun.

  She had never seen anyone so clumsy. If there was a table to bump into, he’d bump into it. What he did to a piece of fruit with a knife was terrible to watch. And she didn’t know whether it was just the light in his bedroom, the naked lightbulb in the room without windows, but the hair around his cock always looked yellowish, like the leaves of the plant he got from his aunt. The plant he always overwatered. The plant he kicked over with his heavy boot when she told him he was overwatering it. Then, when she swept up the dirt and tried to repot it, saying to her, “Well, aren’t you the fucking lovely little housewife.”

  He was often bad-tempered, but they were happy together for a while, particularly when they studied. And she was even happy for a time among his friends: Wendy to his Peter Pan, the prize among the loser boys in their tie-dyed shirts and ponytails, all of them wanting to be other people in another time, wanting to be IRA soldiers in the great days of the seventies and eighties, a time when events and situations were given names that became part of the language. And one of them not a boy but a man, Mick Winthrop, and then his son Stevie, Stephen Donegan, whose name you have already heard, whose death Pearl feels responsible for, whose death she is giving up her life in witness to.

  One night, February 13, 1998, when she went to the meeting of the Gaelic Club, she met Mick Winthrop, Michael Revere Winthrop, another American, older than the boys, of their fathers’ generation, yet one of them in his desire for a connection to a more heroic time, a more heroic identity. I understand now, and you can understand it too: if she hadn’t learned about Bobby Sands, if she hadn’t met Mick Winthrop, father of the bastard son Stevie, she would not be where she is now, lying on the frozen ground, chained to the flagpole of the American embassy. You and I can see it, and she may even be seeing it too; she did not see it then. She was excited to be learning new things, meeting new people. She had friends. She was no longer feeling so alone.

  Was it just another symptom of homesickness that Pearl was susceptible to Mick Winthrop for so long? It did seem wonderful at first: Mick, so American, so healthy, with skin that looked like it absorbed what little sun there was in the dark climate and took in the good of it and used it to manufacture health. As if he were a tycoon of health, had made his fortune on it, and would spread its benefits wherever he might be. His gray hair was cropped short. His face was always—well, not tan—a kind of russet color, like a healthy apple just off the tree. His clothes fit him as if the cloth had been woven with him in mind. It was a pleasure to watch him walk. He could walk miles over mountains and play the game of hurling with boys half his age. He could build things, fix things; his hands were comfortable with tools; they were short and broad and the hair on them was dark and fine. He ate as if the goodness of food were no surprise to him, as if he’d never had to worry about having enough or getting fat. She’d never seen a man eat like Mick ate. When he was passed something—a basket of bread, a platter of meat—he took it, almost smiling at it, as if it were an old trusted servant or a faithful animal, just the right amount, not too much, not too little, consuming it happily, readily, with no sense of hesitation or of shame. When Joseph was passed a dish of something he would always hesitate, look to be sure there was enough for everyone, and calculate the amount he considered his due. Finbar shoveled food onto his plate as if he were afraid someone would beat him to it if he weren’t desperately fast.

  Oh, there were many reasons it took Pearl so long to come to the understanding that she finally did of Mick. Some you may be sympathetic with, some not. Bear in mind she was a fatherless girl; she hadn’t known many men. The fathers of her friends tended to be fatigued or brash, kind or aloof, but none of them had the animal vitality of Michael Revere Winthrop. She’d never heard a man sing as he did; none of the fathers of her friends sang, and she’d never heard Joseph sing. All this combined with a set of maternal gestures, upon which was layered a habit of seductiveness—surely he walked barefoot in the house because he knew his feet were beautiful; surely he noticed the way Pearl’s eyes followed his unbuttoning of his long-sleeved shirt, rolling up his sleeves to reveal the silky black hair that covered his forearms. Surely he understood that it would mean something to her when he bought her little presents: books, mainly, but then a scarf, a pin, a traditional Irish cookbook. He would not have known that it hadn’t happened to her before, a man, not a boy, giving presents in homage to her as a woman. She liked his gratitude when she’d bring him a cup of tea; she was pleased when he said “Outstanding” when she made brown bread from the recipe in the cookbook he’d given her. She was comforted when he cooked for her, Irish oatmeal, which took nearly an hour, ethnic dishes with lots of garlic—the smell of which had always permeated her mother’s kitchen but which she’d got no hint of since she’d been in Ireland. “I want to enact the cuisine of diversity,” he said. “If there’s anything valuable about America, it’s diversity.” He said he’d made friends with lots of different people by asking them to teach him to cook their favorite dish from home. She was impressed by that: Joseph had never cooked; none of her friends’ fathers cooked.

  At first it seemed to her that she had finally met a man who was the way men were supposed to be. Who looked like he’d always had all the citrus fruit he needed, all the sports equipment he wanted, whose accent was like hers, who could recite Make Way for Ducklings and Goodnight Moon.

  And then it stopped—the presents, the cooking—when she began to suspect that his ideas were not the ones she wanted to go along with. No one had ever censored her reading, but when sh
e read a history of Ireland he didn’t approve of he told her to “put down that counterrevolutionary crap.” She was entirely shocked; in her whole life no one had ever told her to put down a book.

  He could tell, she knew it, that her mind wandered when he began to talk about his big ideas. He was American, so he loved big ideas. He had big ideas about himself and Ireland; he mixed ideas with magic, or really it was superstition: he was always meant to be here, his parents had kept him from his roots, never told him he’d had an Irish great-grandmother. It wasn’t just an accident that he’d met his IRA friends when he was looking for his ancestors in county Tyrone. He’d always known his roots weren’t just American; he’d felt himself part of the Irish soil the minute he’d stepped onto it. And then to meet, right away, the brother of Reg Donegan! It had to have been meant to be.

  Mick had a theater company based in Roxbury, in Boston. Street theater, he called it, guerrilla theater, people’s theater. Scenes played out in what he called “public spaces”—supermarket parking lots, in front of abandoned buildings. Actors improvising, actors in masks, actors with painted faces and bodies: everything connected to what Mick called “the life of the people, the life of the street.”

  When Pearl heard him talk about this work she was embarrassed; it was an old idea, one that had been seen not to work, a reminder of a past that hadn’t kept its promise. He said he was into the idea of life as performance and performance as life. He said that people talked about performance artists, but what you needed was life artists, people who made an art form of their lives. Finbar and his friends lapped it up, but Pearl resisted. She didn’t say what she thought: that art was not life because the material of life is unrevisable. That at the end of a work of art there is another work of art. At the end of life there is death. She wanted to say, Surely you see the difference. But she said nothing.

  There was no one she could speak to about her misgivings. It’s too bad she didn’t think of speaking to her mother. I believe things might have turned out very differently if at a certain moment Pearl had called Maria. But if she’d spoken to her mother, she would not be the person she is, in the place she is now, chained to the flagpole of the American embassy in Dublin, Ireland, where she came for the first time in January, less than a year ago.

  4

  We will leave Pearl for a little while, because this is not her story only but the story of three people, and we have not attended to Joseph and Maria for quite some time.

  Maria is in the first-class cabin of Aer Lingus Flight 865, New York to Dublin with a stopover at Shannon, hoping she is in time to save her daughter’s life. She is trying to understand why her daughter is where she is, why she has done what she has done. She is terrified.

  But she must stop being terrified. She has six hours in the air, six hours in which there is no possible action she can take to help her daughter.

  The plane takes off into a black sky. She is nowhere; the sky turns from black to greenish, a thick weaving over of cloud. Useless to note the number of miles piling up, the figures on the screen in front of her. The pilot, who is Irish, says, “Keep your seat belts fastened, we may be experiencing some light chop.” Light chop, what does that mean? she asks herself. She wishes someone she knew were sitting beside her so she could laugh at the pilot’s language. But she’s afraid the fattish blond man beside her would take it as encouragement if she laughed. He might think she wants to talk. She does not want to talk, to him or anyone else. She does not want to explain why she is traveling to Dublin first class, the day after Christmas. What could she say when there is nothing that she understands?

  She would like to use this time well, or at least not badly. She would like to begin to understand what her daughter is doing, what she has said.

  Witness. Against what? For what?

  And why?

  There is only one thing she knows, one thing she would tell her daughter: Nothing is worth your life. You are my child. Nothing is worth your life.

  Would she say that first? Or would she say kindly—or angrily—Why are you doing this? What has happened means she does not know her daughter. Which means she does not know herself. Which means she is a different person from the one she was twenty-four hours ago.

  The prospect of her daughter’s dying is a burning place she cannot stand on, must run from, but must return to, just in case—in case being there might stop the fire. In case she can think of something. But it is impossible; simply to form the thought is impossible. Pearl could die. It is unendurable. She is drawn back to the place and then must run from it; no stillness is possible, no stable plane. Fire and avalanche and flood: she cannot catch her breath and yet she must, for it will only make things worse if she can’t catch her breath, if she can’t find the piece of ground that will support her weight, that will allow her to take the first step. She has always believed in the first step: that taking it is better than not taking it. But she is on an airplane. Her scope of movement is radically small. There is nowhere for her to go.

  What did I do wrong, what did I do wrong? she keeps asking herself, seeing Pearl’s face, the high forehead she put her lips to when she checked her child for fever, the beautifully cut nostrils, the dark eyes that demanded, always, that nothing be kept back.

  She hears Lynne Craig’s words, witness, politics, thinking of Pearl lying on the freezing ground chained to a flagpole, seeing chains around her wrists, hearing her say, “Mother . . . Mama . . . Mommy . . . Mom,” but she isn’t calling her; her mother was not the one she called. And why not? Why didn’t her daughter call her if she needed help? What has she done wrong? Was she too indulgent? Not indulgent enough? Was she too much the animal mother, thinking all her child needed was warmth and food and a place under her arm, near the warmth of her side, that licks and nips and hugs would take the place of something else, something she needed more, some kind of knowledge, some kind of discernment or attention? Had she had too much faith that this overwhelming, drowning love, as natural as breathing, as sleeping, was the thing that would get her daughter through? Or was she not enough the animal mother; was she too judgmental, not accepting enough, did she fail to cook enough, did she assert her own opinion too vehemently, too often? Did she spend too much time at work? Should she have only worked part time, should she have been more available? Or was she too intrusive, not giving her daughter enough distance, not keeping the space between them inviolate, pristine? Does she think I don’t love her? Maria wonders. Isn’t my love enough to keep my child alive? What did I do wrong, what did I do wrong? What else can she say? Because it is impossible, of course it is, for a mother not to blame herself if something has gone wrong with her child.

  It is always complicated, it is always difficult to raise a child. But I would say it was a particularly complicated project, a particularly new endeavor, to have led a life like Maria’s and to be the kind of mother she wanted to be to Pearl. Maria wanted to protect her child; at the same time she wanted to give her freedom.

  Perhaps if you knew more about Maria you would understand how the questions she has asked herself might begin to be answered. So as there is not much to say about Maria in the present, not much action on an airplane flight unless there’s an emergency (and this is a perfectly normal flight), I will use the time to tell you about her past, to sketch in her background.

  I want to set the story of three people in its time. I want to tell their stories as a part of history. Because sometimes a story is not just a tale but a chronicle: “In the reign of A, B begat C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J.”

  I’m now going to take up the form of the chronicle. To talk about a time in history, a person in history, focusing on particular years rather than on an individual.

  Maria Meyers was born to Seymour and Pearl Meyers in Larchmont, New York, on November 14, 1948. When she was two, her mother died of colon cancer. A priest found Seymour Meyers a housekeeper, Marie Kasperman, who came with her son, Joseph. The four of them lived in a house in one of the wealthier
suburbs of New York City.

  Although the chronicle centers on Maria’s life, to understand things properly we must go back to the years before her birth, to the youth of Maria’s father, Seymour Meyers, a young Jewish man who in 1938 received his PhD in art history from Columbia University, where he had completed his undergraduate education three years earlier.

  The year is important: 1938. An important year for Jews. The year of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Synagogues and Jewish businesses smashed, the sound of breakage in the streets largely unheard. That sound traveled to New York, where Seymour Meyers, rather than fearing for his people, rather than hearing in the air the sound of broken glass, hears something else, a tone that is in the localized air around Columbia University, something heard clearly by the kind of young man moved by the example of the conversion of Thomas Merton. Something that pulls a certain kind of young man to a vision of the past formed by the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the poetry of Dante, the music of Gregorian chant. Conversions become—I do not want to say fashionable, but there is a sort of—what shall I say?—trend toward conversion to Catholicism in those years among intellectuals of a certain—do I want to say nondemocratic bent? No, that would be too strong. Let’s just say of a certain nondemotic, nonpopulist bent. So Seymour Meyers does not hear the sound of boots marching in Germany, of glass breaking on the streets, but the sound of Tantum Ergo, a hymn written by Thomas Aquinas himself. A question that could be asked: Did he not hear the marching, the falling glass, or did he turn to music to drown those noises out? I will not answer for Seymour Meyers; it is not a question he ever asked himself, and he is now among the dead.