by Mary Gordon
. . .
This is the kind of child Pearl was. Does it help you understand why she is where she is?
Now she is lying on the freezing ground. She has felt the cold more keenly ever since she gave up eating, but she is not feeling it now. For six weeks she has eaten no solid food. She is an intelligent girl, a modern girl; she has researched the details of starvation in libraries and on the Internet. She has understood, rightly, that the great threat to life is not starvation but dehydration—or a combination of the two. She has taken nothing to drink for six days. She knows it is much easier to rescue a person from death by starvation than from death by dehydration. She planned it so that she would reach the irrevocable point of death from dehydration on Christmas Day: the day she would be most legible. This is what she has told herself to do: to make a sentence of herself, to make of her life one sentence that she knows to be true. She is, after all, a student of language. She has often thought that in the place on her passport where country of origin is written she should put: language.
She would be closer to death now except for a miscalculation: she miscalculated her own health: the power of her youth, her fine nutrition, a strong body trained and disciplined (she was, in high school, a cross-country runner; she swam the quarter mile). It was not mentioned in the data she found that if you were fortunate and disciplined and gifted it would be more difficult for you to die. I cannot but think that we are all grateful for this error. I cannot but think that some of us would call it not an error but grace.
7
Maria can’t think of anything but Pearl; she wishes something else could absorb her mind, just for a little while, and then she castigates herself for the thought. As if, by relinquishing vigilance for a moment, she would place her child in danger. How can it even be imagined that she would watch a movie, read a book? She must keep the image of her child before her. How can someone think she should be watching a movie about an e-mail romance between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks? When the flight attendant offers her a magazine, she would like to throw it back. How could you imagine that I can read a magazine while my daughter is dying? It is the first time in her life she’s ever traveled without a book. But no, that isn’t right; she does have a book with her, but not really to read. She slipped into her purse a small edition of George Herbert’s poems that Devorah had given her for her twenty-first birthday. She brought it as a talisman. So she would have the protection of the beloved dead.
She wants to see Devorah’s handwriting, her name in Devorah’s handwriting, as if she could, by touching the page that Devorah touched, absorb the magic of the dead. She sees her name in a handwriting still childish; at twenty-one, Devorah was not yet her adult self. Pearl is only twenty. What does that make her? And what was I? she wonders, trying to remember this girl who thought she might write poetry in the manner of George Herbert, parson of Bemerton, living a hidden life, a quiet life, devoted to perfection of the form. But she could not do that when Asian children ran in flames, when men like her father were bombing Cambodia. The sound of buzzing wires that was the undertone of every moment in those years, the sound that was quieted when Pearl was born, begins again. It has begun, only she hadn’t recognized it, had not named it for what it was. Buzzing wires. And before her eyes the image she cannot quite form of her daughter, chained, lying on the cold ground. She flips through the book. Stops at a poem that had never been her favorite, “The Collar.” She remembers: it is a poem about restriction, about a rebellious thrashing and then a succumbing to the discipline of the Divine. The poet gives up his struggle when he hears God address him as “Child.” Well, there had been nothing like that for her, would never be. The collar. She feels trapped, caged in this enclosed space where she can barely move. She allows herself to look at the poem, hoping her lapse of attention will not bring her child harm. There is the word cage, which has just been in her mind. “Forsake thy cage, thy rope of sands.” Rope of sands. A wonderful image; she can feel it on her skin, the chafing, the restriction.
Collar. She thinks of a collar she had used to train Pearl’s dog, Lucky, whom they had rescued from a pound. Lucky had become aggressive when he saw black men. Clearly, that was not acceptable. But if they sent him back to the pound he would be destroyed. The vet suggested a shock collar. Every time Lucky snarled at a black man, Maria pressed a button and a shock was delivered to his neck. He never knew where it came from. Now she knows what the dog felt. It is what she feels in her body, a series of shocks, every time she thinks that Pearl might die. The shock lodges first in the deep organs, travels through the blood along the muscles, then spreads its way through the skin, which has become a network of electrified strings, each one thrumming, bearing heat upward to the neck’s bones and then the skull. When the shock subsides an irritation is left, like a rash spreading across the skin, following the path of the strings that had, a moment earlier, borne heat. Irritation, then: a rope of sand. Until the next shock, and the process starts again.
Lucky had changed as the result of a series of shocks whose source he could not determine. How will she be changed? The collar. Shocks, and the chafing of restriction. Her situation is unbearable: she is in the air, unable to get to her daughter, who may be dying. Her mind spins with fatigue. She is very tired, but she dares not sleep.
In the confusion brought about by her fatigue, it takes her a while to determine that the noise her brain is trying to respond to is the sound of a child crying. It is in economy; there are no babies visible in first class. She wonders if babies aren’t allowed in first class and is prepared to be outraged by that. She has no evidence that babies aren’t allowed in first class, only what she knows of the world from working for twenty years with children. The false claims of allegiance to the young and the real failures to provide for them make her think it’s possible that babies are excluded from first class; thinking it’s possible, she quickly moves to believing it is really the case. Outrage is strikable in her: a flint always ready to catch fire, and the actual, potential, or remembered treatment of children is always able to inspire her outrage. Our children, people say, but she knows they mean only their own, only the ones who live in their houses or similar ones.
My treasure, her father had called her; it made her bristle. Treasure to be protected, hidden, like his fourteenth-century French ivories, his icons of the Madonna dark against their backgrounds of burnished gold. When she was a teenager, seventeen perhaps, she said to him, “I want a world where everyone’s children are as important as our own.” And her father had said, “That’s impossible. It’s against the Natural Law.”
The Natural Law. It was something Seymour Meyers invoked, she’d come to see, to justify all kinds of tyrannies. But now, flying to her daughter who is at the edge of death, she knows he was right. If someone said to her, Choose, you must choose now, right this moment; we will sacrifice a hundred children to keep your child alive, what would she say? She knows what she would say, and she knows what it means about her. She has cast her lot with those who say my own and mean something connected to themselves, the radius of the circle that surrounds their own bodies: nothing larger, nothing as large as the whole world.
The baby’s cry breaks up these thoughts, and she’s grateful for the breakage, or there would only be a solid wall that she must beat her head against until her brains were bloodied. Nothing is worth your life, she wants to say to Pearl, thousands of miles away from her, inaccessible as she flies through the green-black air.
Maria moves her mind to the sound of the baby’s crying, more frantic now. She stands up, shakes herself like a wet dog, bursts through the curtains separating first class from business and then the curtains separating business class from coach. She pushes the curtains aside like a great actress in a tragic play: she is Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Phaedra. No, not Phaedra. Phaedra was not a mother.
Her eyes fall on the frantic baby. The mother is young and overwhelmed. She has two other children. Maria, an expert, calculates their ages: three and four
. They are tugging at their mother, trying to crawl on her as she tries, futilely, to comfort the infant. Maria sees that the mother is not much older than Pearl, and she is filled with the kind of desperate tenderness that often comes over her in the course of her work at the sight of a young mother in despair.
She makes a quick calculation: how can she offer help without suggesting to the mother that she is a failure at the thing all successful women are born knowing how to do.
She touches the young woman’s shoulder. The young woman jerks her head toward Maria, ready to defend herself, ready for a rebuke.
“Hello,” Maria says. “I don’t mean to intrude, but you seem to have your hands full and I’m bored out of my skull. I run a day care and I’m used to crying children. Why don’t you let me walk the baby up and down the aisle, and you can pay attention to the other kids and get a little break yourself?”
The mother—Maria is right, she is very young—begins to cry.
“I couldn’t ask you,” she says. Maria hears that she is Irish.
“Believe me, you’d be doing me a favor. I love babies and I hate sitting still.”
The woman hands the baby over, along with a bottle and a blanket and a rattle that makes a jingling noise. The baby, Maria calculates, is six months old. She doesn’t know its name or sex: it is simply a child, a child in distress. Maria clasps the baby to her. And the long drowning that began when she first held Pearl, the remembered swoon that comes over her when she holds a baby, is now hers. She puts her mouth to the baby’s skull and breathes in the milky salt.
Walking the baby, feeling its dampish warmth at the front of her body, its heaviness against her chest, she thinks of Pearl’s babyhood, of the day of her birth, after the mess and blood and shouting and pushing were over, and she heard, “It’s a girl,” and thought, Thank God. She hadn’t wanted to admit that she was afraid of having a boy, afraid of bringing up a boy without a father. But she was not thinking of Pearl’s father at that moment: only of the two of them. Her baby. Mine.
When she was in the recovery room with her clean wrapped baby, alone with her for the first time, she knew that never in her life would she need anyone as she needed Pearl.
Alone with her. Her baby. Mine.
Nothing had ever been so quiet, nothing had ever been so purely sufficient to itself. A perfect circle. A circle as pure and powerful as the white Host.
Miraculous, mysterious, common as dirt. She knew in that moment she had more in common with any woman who had just given birth—with the most venal Hollywood starlet, with the wife of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan—than she did with her closest friend. Tentatively, Pearl put her mouth to her mother’s breast, both of them inexpert. Only later would the urgency of real hunger strike. For now they were alone and silent. Hello, my own, Maria said to Pearl. She has been saying that to her with every sentence since that moment, believing (what Pearl does not believe) that no one will ever know her so well and she will never be known so well. I am the beloved and the beloved is mine. The ellipse of the most ecstatic sex is ragged, partial, next to this. This moment of knowing. Knowing I am known.
You may be curious about the details of Pearl’s conception.
Well, to understand Pearl’s conception we must go back and take up our chronicle once again, go back some years before her birth, to 1971, the year of Maria’s graduation from college, the year after her break with her father.
She told her father there would be no conversation between them; she seemed not to notice that he paid her last year’s tuition. She tried to get Billy Ogilvie to forgive her; she tried to get the police to arrest her; she would not go home; she worked as a waitress in a café on Massachusetts Avenue that summer; she finished at Radcliffe with her class. Maria was always someone who liked finishing what she started. She did not, however, attend her own graduation; nor, of course, did her father.
A month later she took a plane to Guatemala, where she worked in a clinic. She helped deliver babies; she bathed the sick; she bound their wounds. She was, however, not very good at it.
She didn’t like the care of broken bodies, but she found she was very good at teaching children. She was often impatient with the mothers who gave their babies rice water instead of milk, but she was rarely impatient with the children, who seemed beautiful to her, their small hard dirty hands, their reedy voices sounding the letters of the alphabet, their lively songs, their colorful drawings. She was touched when she walked into the room and they cried out, proud of their one English sentence, “We lof ar titcher.”
And she did love them back, so it was easy for her to tell them the same thing again and again, to tell them any number of ways until they got it. But some of them never got it, and those were the ones she did not love, the ones whose eyes were dead. Perhaps that meant she did not love the ones most in need of loving, the ones for whom nothing could be done. But she didn’t think that way. She focused on the ones for whom she could do something: no sense, she told herself, worrying about the ones she couldn’t reach. And no sense regretting that she couldn’t help the sick, that she couldn’t be patient with her children’s mothers, who beat them, or their fathers, who beat both the children and their mothers. They seemed hopeless. Maria couldn’t love anyone who made her feel they were hopeless. Perhaps no one can.
The news of her father’s death came to her in Guatemala. Her father died without asking for her. When Joseph called Guatemala to tell her the news she could not weep, would not, because she knew if she allowed herself to grieve she would become a mourner, which would dilute her sense of righteousness, her sense of acting in the name of justice.
The children wanted her to grieve and the parents wanted her to grieve, so eventually she left Guatemala because she had become unknowable to the people she was working among. They couldn’t understand a daughter who did not grieve for her father, a daughter who was dry-eyed at his death. They didn’t understand that she had replaced filial love, which she believed to be inferior and cheap, with a love of justice. In those days she called up the words of the psalms but changed them for her own needs. Take this heart of flesh, give me a heart of stone, she prayed. But she did not use the word prayer; rather, she sent up into the galaxy a wish she sealed with all the strength of her intention to stand for justice. “Give me a heart of stone.” And she has kept it all these years. In the place where there was love for her father: stone.
If you ask your father for bread, you will not be given stone. And if you ask for a stone, will it not be given you?
You want to know about Pearl’s birth. The line of Pearl’s birth isn’t a straight line but a series of intersecting circles.
It is 1973, Watergate. The evil face of Richard Nixon, the mad face, is known by everyone to be evil, mad. The bad guys are visibly bad; you can see their badness by the way they look, especially their hair.
One day on the 72nd Street subway platform, Maria, staying with Joseph and Devorah while she tries to figure out what to do after Guatemala, meets two old friends from Cambridge. They invite her to dinner. Jeanne is working on her PhD in history; she is writing on Queen Elizabeth. Rosemarie is an assistant at Ms. magazine.
Rosemarie and Jeanne introduce Maria to women who work at hopeful jobs: legal aid, social work, clinic medicine. No one has money; everyone eats together: large plates of spaghetti, which is not yet called pasta. Some women are part of female couples; some speak apologetically (but not so apologetically as they would have the year before) about planning to get married. Maria has no impulse to be mated: not at all, she says. During one dinner she dramatically proclaims that she’d rather have her labia sewn together than get married.
In those years, for people like Maria, life moved very fast. Everything was rapid. Rapid, rapids: white water. Boulders. Some boats were overturned and wrecked. Many were not. For those who felt the goodness of the ride, it was exciting to get together in fragile boats. It was a cataract-filled rush, but there was a thrill in it compared to the dead
stink of the swamp, the distorting light, the choking vines, perfect for camouflage. How the light seemed to clear when the swamp had been left behind! And if, to keep their crafts light, they had to throw out some things that were of value, some things they didn’t realize couldn’t be recovered? Well, they would say, that was sad. But there was the exhilaration of being set free.
One of the women in Maria’s consciousness-raising group decides to move to California and offers Maria her job, assistant at the Independent Organization for Refugees, a human rights organization. She is paid almost nothing; she types and files and is told she is saving lives by placing the right piece of paper in the right folder. Her friend who gave up the job no longer believes this. She says the work depresses her, the endless need to protect the innocent from mindless evil. She wants to move to California and make pottery in the mountains, a plan for which Maria has contempt. The word burnout, you see, is not yet current.
The Independent Organization for Refugees was founded and run by Clelia Roberts, an old-style Yankee idealist in her sixties with hair on top of her head in a Gibson girl knot, a navy blue suit, a series of identical light blue blouses that tie at the throat, flesh-colored stockings, and Hush Puppies that lace. She travels to the terrible places of the earth, comes home and writes about what she has seen, and sends it to newspapers and to powerful men: friends of her family. She raises money for heroic people to take back to their own countries. And then, for two months every year, she retreats to her family’s camp in Maine to look at the sea and pick blueberries.
Clelia likes Maria and Maria likes Clelia. Born an aristocrat, Clelia has no trouble showing her favoritism. She admires Maria’s speed and decisiveness and the style of her prose; soon she has Maria writing important reports. Maria doesn’t mind Clelia’s sharp tongue; when Clelia is rude, Maria tells her so and Celia is instantly abashed, shocked at her own behavior. In the five years Maria works for Clelia, ten other assistants come and go. Clelia keeps promoting Maria, but the raises in salary that accompany the promotions are quite small. Clelia doesn’t notice and Maria doesn’t mind because she doesn’t need much. A bohemian girl from the twenties, Clelia invites Maria to Maine and to badly cooked dinners in her town house in the Village. The two share the unease of knowing themselves as favored daughters, but they would never dream of speaking of it.