by Mary Gordon
Maria wants to say, Of course I know, do you think I’ve been on Pluto? Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of the more famous brothers. She thinks, The ambassador will understand me. She wants the ambassador. The 1960 pull. The Kennedys are on our side. And therefore we shall overcome.
“The ambassador has seen to it that criminal charges aren’t being pressed against your daughter. It was a wonderful thing for her to do.”
“I’m very grateful,” Maria says, barely able to stop herself from lunging across the desk and grabbing the papers in Caroline Wolf’s hands, shuffling them wildly, throwing them around the room till she finds the doctor’s name, the hospital. She understands that Caroline Wolf has no sympathy for Pearl, whom she thinks of as a girl who has spoiled her holiday.
“The ambassador would have been well within bounds to allow criminal proceedings. I can think of many another ambassador in her position who would have dealt with it as a criminal matter. After all, your daughter was trespassing on United States property. But the ambassador’s not that sort of person. And it was quite a scene: the police having to cut the chain, carry her out. It’s a shame the media got hold of it, but I guess that’s what she wanted, your daughter. I think our people here are going to be able to softball it. I mean, everyone seems pretty committed to keeping it pretty low key.”
“Thank you,” Maria says again.
“This was on the ground next to your daughter. A sort of statement.” She hands Maria a piece of typewritten paper in a plastic see-through envelope, also two regular envelopes: one with Maria’s name on it, one with Joseph’s. Maria begins to read the statement; she will not open the envelope addressed to her in front of this woman.
You and I already know what the statement says; we have already read it, but it is new to Maria and the effort to understand strikes her like a speeding truck, like a boulder rolling toward her from the top of a mountain, like a roaring fire that consumes her mind. How can she understand what these words say? Her daughter wants to mark the death of a boy she has never heard of? Her daughter wants to die for a peace agreement she hadn’t given a thought to ten months earlier? Her daughter wants to die because human beings want to harm one another? Her daughter is insane? Is a fool? Is speaking the truth? Which is the right interpretation: insanity, folly, or the truth? But what does her understanding matter? The thing is, she must get to Pearl, and she must use the power of the American government to do it. She must use Caroline Wolf.
“May I have this, please?” she asks, holding Pearl’s statement.
“You may have a copy of it. We’re keeping the original for our file.”
“Thank you,” Maria says, wondering what the file is. Will it do Pearl future harm? She does not consider what you and I might think: If she has a future. She does not allow herself that thought.
Caroline Wolf goes into another office and comes out a minute later with a copy of the page for Maria.
“On our end here, we’ve pretty much signed off on this. We’ve written a report that pretty much gives our position. You’re welcome to read it. It should be viable in a day or two.”
“Thank you.”
“Right now it’s the hospital’s issue. Your daughter is in the psychiatric ward. I don’t know the doctor in charge, but here’s her name; I’m turning you over to her at the hospital.” She hands Maria a piece of paper with a phone number.
Over and out, Maria wants to say, but simply says thank you again. It’s occurred to her that she hasn’t said thank you so frequently in this short a space of time in her whole life.
“May I use the phone?” Maria asks.
Caroline Wolf gestures but makes no move to leave the room.
Maria dials the number. “Dr. Morrisey is unable to speak to you until this afternoon,” the secretary says. “She’s expecting your call. She’ll certainly get back to you.”
“I’ll just come to the hospital.”
“The doctor will be unavailable until this afternoon. Please settle in and try her again then.”
Caroline Wolf has been listening. “Why not check into the hotel we’ve booked for you? You don’t want to carry your luggage around all day. Everything possible is being done for your daughter. There’s nothing for you to do.”
There is a dotted line of rage at the top of Maria’s skull, as if someone were stitching a line in black thread. There is nothing for her to do because no one will let her do anything. No one will let her see her daughter. They are keeping Maria in chains. Her daughter, they told her, has been in chains. Pearl’s chains have been cut; hers have not. She must calculate; she must keep everyone’s goodwill in case, somewhere down the road, she needs their help. She refuses even to contemplate the possibility that there will not be a road on which to need help.
But she will go to the hotel. Joseph said he’d meet her there; he may be there already. Yes, this is the best thing to do. She knows it is the best thing and hates that the best thing to do is to do nothing except wait. Waiting is penitential to her, a hair shirt. Penance for what? What sin? She has no choice.
Maria doesn’t want to be grateful to Caroline Wolf for anything, but she’s glad someone has booked her a hotel. And called her a cab.
As soon as the cab takes off, Maria opens the envelope and reads the letter addressed to her. She reads it as if it were on fire, as if the words would disappear if she didn’t absorb them with terrific speed. What does Pearl mean? That she knows she was loved, but that it didn’t matter. That she wants to die because she has no hope, but that she knows her mother to be more hopeful than she? How can it be, that her daughter is a person of no hope? She has failed, she has failed in the most important thing a mother can do for a child: to give her hope in life. How can she understand this? She leans her cheek against the cold window of the taxi; she closes her eyes.
Her hotel, the driver tells her, is “on the key side.” On the key side of what? she wants to ask, and then realizes she is very tired. She cannot make a picture from these words until she reads the word quay on a sign attached to the wall, pronounces it first kway, then reminds herself that the sound is not long a but long e. Quay: a word she has never in her life spoken, only read.
Tall gray buildings that seem to have no windows loom along treeless streets. Practical. Censorious. Structures bereft of comfort, of forgiveness. Always there is so much to be forgiven, so much to forgive. She castigates herself for sentimental phrasing. She has nothing to forgive Pearl for. She has committed no offense. As for her own offenses—well, she won’t think of them right now. I did what I could, she says to the slate-colored water, to the stones drained of light. I did my best.
She wonders what, to Pearl, seems unforgivable.
Do we agree with Maria, that she did her best and Pearl needs no forgiveness? Are we tempted to say that Pearl needs to be forgiven for failing to appreciate the gift of her life, for putting her mother through this terror, perhaps even for dramatizing her own suffering in a world where suffering is the norm? It doesn’t matter what we think. Maria believes her daughter is in no need of forgiveness. She always has. Maria, so quick to judgment, so quick to cut off, to condemn, has never felt it necessary to accuse her daughter. Her daughter has seemed to her entirely innocent, entirely good. So it would not occur to her now, for the first time, to think of Pearl as someone who needs to be forgiven.
And yet this is not quite the case. There were times when, although she never doubted that she loved Pearl, she didn’t really like her. There were even times when her presence was repellent: the years when Pearl would sleep nearly all day on the weekends and then sit in filthy pajamas eating junk food in front of the television, not rousing herself till the sun went down. When she wanted to say to her, You’re not even quite clean; don’t you know you need a shower, your hair is dirty, you smell bad? Days of monosyllabic answers to the questions: How’s it going? What’s up? Everything all right in school? Days when their eyes never met and she thought, My daughter is lazy, my daughter has no imagin
ation; at her age I was up, out, doing things all the time, with lots of friends. Not just one. Not just Luisa, whom Maria admired but felt had too much power over Pearl. The sight of them, eating cereal out of the box or leaving their dishes, three quarters full of milk, with flakes or o’s floating on the top, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands on the way into the living room to watch more MTV, could put her into a rage. Did she think these were things that needed to be forgiven? No, she wasn’t thinking that then, and certainly not now.
As her for idea that she has done her best, we know Pearl does not think that. But do we take the mother’s or the daughter’s side? It depends, I guess, upon whether we see ourselves in the position of parent or child.
The taxi leaves Maria at the Tara Arms Hotel. The desk clerk is a young girl whose hair will not lie flat and yet cannot come up to the ambitious height the girl is trying for. It’s awkward hair, Maria thinks, a girl’s hair masquerading as a woman’s, hair that wants to run down the girl’s back like water, but she won’t let it; she has set it in stiff rollers; she has sprayed it to a fare-thee-well. What does that mean? Maria wonders. What would it mean to spray something to a fare-thee-well?
The girl says, “Terribly sorry, but your room isn’t available quite yet.”
Maria puts down her bag and says, “I see,” but tears come to her eyes, because she cannot bear her luggage anymore, cannot bear her upright skeleton, and cannot, simply cannot, contemplate calling the hospital from a public booth, standing with her luggage, fumbling with unfamiliar coins (she has none anyway, only paper money).
The young girl, catching her eye, is merciful. “Sit here in the lobby. We’ll bring you a cup of coffee and get your room for you as quickly as we can.” A generic mercy, perhaps; she may be a girl who would be merciful to anyone she encountered. She cannot possibly know Maria’s situation—that it is dire, that her daughter is on the edge of becoming one of the dead, that it is up to Maria to persuade her daughter to live. Hold on, she must say to Pearl, but in exactly the right way; her words must be the right life preserver to throw to her daughter. So that she can preserve her life. But now all she can do is wait. The girl knows none of this. She is simply merciful.
Maria drinks weak coffee (instant?) in the lobby of the Tara Arms Hotel. The colors of the carpet hurt her eyes. A background of electric blue, acidic, acrid, on which there are imposed designs (an urn? a series of urns?) the color of fresh blood. Green leaves that remind her of the Pine-Sol or Lestoil (There’s less toil with Lestoil) that sat in the bottom of Marie Kasperman’s bucket like the signs of eventual corruption: the proof of original sin. On the carpet, a border of lighter blue. She thinks of an aftershave one of her high school boyfriends used: Aqua Velva. The words of the advertisement come to her: There’s something about an Aqua Velva Man. When she needs to think of exactly the right words to save her daughter’s life, why are these jingles for cleaning products and aftershave the only thing her mind will settle on?
Nothing in the lobby is pleasing to the eye except the flames that rise up from the fireplace. The hearth is cream-colored false brick; the mantel is surrounded by imitation stone embedded in the pseudo-wood of the reception desk in an abstract pattern in what appears to be stained glass but is really plastic. Joseph will hate this room, she thinks, and the idea of his disappointed face makes her angry because she knows him, and the first thing registering on his face will be aesthetic displeasure—before sympathy, grief, or a willingness to help. So that the first sight of him will be of no comfort to her. She blames her father for bequeathing to Joseph this curse of relentless aesthetic judgment, as automatic now as sensitivity to heat or cold, that trumps the living humors in their messy flow of grief or pleasure, joy or hate. Some of the best people she knows do not have what her father called “the seeing eye.” But she has the legacy as well; she can’t be indifferent to her surroundings. The lobby of the Tara Arms Hotel can’t help but bring her discomfort.
She walks over to the table where the newspapers are piled. It is impossible for her to refrain from looking. Pearl is not on the front page. On page three there’s a headline, US STUDENT CHAINS SELF TO EMBASSY FLAGPOLE, and, in smaller print, Hunger Striker Supports Peace Agreement. A photograph of a limp white figure—it could be a corpse—being carried by the police.
We will read the story with her.
An American student claiming not to have eaten in six weeks is under suicide watch at St. Giles Hospital after chaining herself to the flagpole at the American embassy here to protest “the human will to do harm.”
Police said they had forcefully cut through her chains after failing to convince the student to free herself voluntarily. They found a “manifesto” on the ground beside her saying that she was acting against the violence that had followed approval of the Good Friday agreement.
The twenty-year-old woman, Pearl Meyers, had been studying Irish at Trinity since arriving in Dublin last January. Mentioned in her manifesto, police said, was Stephen Donegan, nephew of Reg Donegan, the IRA bomber who is serving a thirty-year term in Brixton prison for his role in a car bomb attack in Leeds in May 1982 that killed two people and injured fifteen others.
The police said they had briefly detained Stephen Donegan three months ago in connection with what was described as a prank involving sex toys at Central Gardai Station. Two weeks after the incident, young Donegan was killed in an auto accident in Mayo.
But Miss Meyers insisted in her “manifesto” that he be “mourned as a victim of the Troubles.” She said she had some responsibility for his death and was offering her life “in witness” to his goodness and to the goodness of the peace agreement and to protest the evil of continued violence.
Maria’s first response is outrage: How do they know she is under suicide watch and I don’t? How have they gotten to speak to the police, the doctors, and I have not? She wants to call the newspaper and demand an explanation. But as she is planning how to do that, the girl behind the desk, the helpful girl, says in her merciful voice, “Your room is ready now.”
She will phone the newspaper and the doctor from her room. She goes up in the elevator, which is barely large enough for her, the bellboy, and her bag. The boy opens the door to her room. As in the lobby, the light wood looks ersatz and there is another assaultive carpet, but the pattern of this one is different: gray on darker gray. The matching curtains and spread, a floral paisley type chosen by every inexpensive hotel chain in the world, are of a thickness to keep out light but not substantial enough for warmth or comfort. She does not unpack her bag. Instead, she goes back down to the lobby. She is hungry; she will make her calls after breakfast, which the helpful girl says is still being served. Her badge says her name is ORLA; she is standing next to a girl whose badge says TRAINEE, and for a moment Maria thinks this, too, is a traditional Irish name. She wants to laugh at that, but there is no one to laugh with, and she is tired and afraid of what will happen to her mind if she begins to laugh alone.
She must try to make sense of Pearl’s statement. But she tells herself to eat first. She will not repeat the error of the earlier coffee. She rejects the limp-looking fried eggs and bacon in favor of a boiled egg and toast. The toast comes in a metal rack; it is thin and cold and the egg is underdone, too runny for her taste. She’d asked for three minutes; this is two.
She reads both Pearl’s statement and the newspaper article. Who is Stevie Donegan? And his imprisoned uncle Reg? What does Pearl have to do with the morass of Irish politics, she who had no interest in politics at all?
Maria’s concentration is broken by an overloud American voice. “This is what they call scrambled eggs? It’s rather like a poor omelet, I’d have thought.”
She doesn’t know about American tourists to Ireland. It is often not a pretty sight: Americans assuming, wrongly, a familiarity with a country they think of as a fifty-first state, digging for their roots like fool’s gold.
She looks over at the speaker, a woman in loose-fitting n
avy blue sweat pants and matching jacket, a red turtleneck underneath. Maria recoils from the too-girlish laugh, the stolen English diction—“rather like a poor omelet”—put on for the benefit, Maria is sure, of the woman’s companion, who actually is an Englishwoman, with a stiff English haircut and bad dentures.
“Not that I’d say anything to them directly about the eggs. I mean, I hate that kind of traveler. I’ve just been on one too many tours for that sort of thing. There’s always one or two who spoil everything complaining about the food. You remember that time I said to that fellow—oh, what was his name, I can’t remember—oh, yes, Thornton, that was his first name; I remembered it because of Thornton Wilder. I said to him, ‘If you’re going to do nothing but complain, just stay home.’ Everyone was really grateful. People kept coming up to me and thanking me. They were all sick of his ruining every meal with his complaints, but I was the only one with the guts to speak up. Well, I always was that way. You know that, Margaret. I really settled his hash.”
Why did you come here? Maria wants to ask. Why don’t you go home? Why don’t you shut up? The skin around her eyes is fragile from fatigue; she’s afraid it will crack if she touches it. Still, she wants to cover her eyes and ears to block out these women and the blaring of the television set, elevated like a worshiped god. But if she could cut out the sensations coming to her from the outside, she would have only what was in her own mind, more seriously tormenting than the chatter of the women or the overbright TV commentators, speaking of the weather in the west.
If she banishes the stimulus of the outside world, she will have to say the words “Who is my daughter?” To come to terms with the strangeness of the idea that her daughter is someone she doesn’t know—as you would have to recognize, lying on the side of the road on which you were being driven in an ambulance, a limb that had been cut off your own body.
Her daughter is doing things, saying things, the meaning of which she cannot even begin to understand. Her daughter is under a suicide watch. Her daughter is saying that because of the death of a young boy of whom Maria has never heard, because of the Irish peace process, in which Maria has only marginal interest, because of the nature of human beings to do harm, she is ready to die. But who has harmed you? she wants to say to Pearl, shaking her by the shoulders impatiently, a prosecutor, not a comforter. Have I not kept you away from harm? If anyone had harmed you, couldn’t you have come to me? The loud woman’s words come to her mind: I would have settled their hash. She sees herself stirring up an enormous mountain of hash, and bringing her daughter to it by the hand, so she could watch her mother flattening it down, smoothing it with a shovel.