by Mary Gordon
There is the terror that her daughter could die; there is the grief that Pearl didn’t confide in her. She knows nothing of what Pearl has been going through. Her daughter has been planning death and all the while Maria believed she was absorbed in following the contours of the Irish language, and if she had lost herself it was in that. Or because of some new boy who must be, like all Pearl’s boys, a loser. Maria has always wished these boyfriends had been beautiful, like Pearl, or successful, or interesting and lively. But she has never said to her, Why are you with such a loser, why another loser, why again? And she has never said to herself, If these are losers, what is it that is being lost?
She knows herself to be the loser now. She may be losing her daughter; she has already lost access to her. She is frightened, as if she were walking down a dark corridor, aware that there are doors on each side, rows of them, all knobless, none of them responding to her touch. She knows there is a touch that is the right one, but she does not know what it is. Only that it is not hers. Her daughter is acting in a way she can’t understand.
Once Pearl was in the world, Maria quickly understood she couldn’t make her do what she wanted. She said to her daughter: Live only for yourself. What she really meant was, Live for yourself, but in a way that I approve of.
And now, with an urgency she’d never dreamed of: Simply live.
No, Maria thinks, I will not permit you to choose death. No longer the democrat, the rational respectful parent, she says in her heart what she would like to say to Pearl: I don’t care what you want. You are my child. I will not allow you your own life if all you want to do is throw it away. Whatever you believe you want, I will keep you alive. I will press my mouth against yours and keep it there even if you resist my breath. I will breathe into you, with or without your consent. I will consume your wish to die. You cannot resist me. You won’t win. Having once come from my body, you will bend to my superior, my far more ancient will—not only mine but every mother’s throughout history. You will succumb and once again be more mine than your own.
“But I’d never go on another tour again. I’m so tired of those men buzzing around, those widowers. All they want is someone to cook and clean for them. Well, that’s not the only thing; they think they have a last chance for some sex. Of course I like some male attention. I like a man to go to the theater and the opera with. But I wouldn’t get married on a bet. I’ve had five proposals since I retired in ’eighty-nine. All five of them were impossible.”
“I never get proposals,” the other woman says.
“Well, you’re the lucky one.”
The idea that these women might soon be reading about Pearl fills Maria with outrage. What right have you to know anything about my child, of her and my trouble? Of her sorrow? Of her torment?
Trying to look casual, she picks up the newspapers and carries them out of the breakfast room that is, by night, a bar and always smells of beer. She will keep the newspaper from these two women. There is, at least for now, something she can do. Something she is able to prevent.
15
“Due ore in ritardo—two hours’ delay,” the woman at the desk says. She pronounces delay delie, and for a moment Joseph thinks she is saying two hours’ delight, and he wants to tell her he isn’t interested. He tells her it’s urgent that he get to Dublin, but all flights are delayed because of weather.
He has no interest in the drinks at the bar, the luxury goods for sale, even the coffee and snacks that are available. This is torment; this is entrapment: to be here in Leonardo da Vinci Airport when Pearl is in Dublin, perhaps near death. He walks up and down; then, feeling conspicuous, he sits down and tries to read his book, his biography of John Ruskin.
Ruskin, he reads, was so sensually starved as a child that he became obsessed with the pattern in the sitting room carpet. He tries to settle himself with the little boy, hungrily tracing the pattern in the carpet, but he cannot stop thinking, Where is Pearl? What condition is she in now?
He looks at the list of illustrations in his book. She is there, Ilaria del Carretto, elegant in marble, elegant in her deadness. He would like to pray to her, but she is merely a dead young woman, not a saint. Can you pray to beauty, to the ideal of beauty that Ruskin gave his life for? No, you have to pray to a face. He cannot pray to Ilaria’s face, a face without a story, so closed in its deadness. There is no face he can pray to. Not to Devorah, who was certainly not a saint, whom he suspects he no longer loved by the time she caught her heel in the hem of her gray wool skirt, carrying a ficus down the stairway; you cannot pray to someone who has disappointed you. Pearl has never disappointed him. His love for Devorah was diminished, like a sugar figure in the rain. His love for Pearl is not diminished; she has never disappointed him, not one bit. How can he pray to one who was less great for the safety of someone greater than herself?
He feels his heart like a lump of hard fat in the middle of his chest. He feels his terror like a bone caught in his throat. There is nothing to do. Swallow this terror, he tells himself, but he cannot cough it up as if it were a fish bone cutting off his breath.
There is nothing for him to do but wait. In Rome, in the airport of Leonardo da Vinci, whom Ruskin taught us how to see.
He phones Maria to say his plane will be late. She isn’t in her room; the clerk asks if he wants to have her paged.
No, thanks, he says. Just give her my message, please.
16
Dr. Morrisey sits down in the chair beside Pearl’s bed. We have met her already, you may remember. She was the one who cut Pearl’s chains; it was she who was able to start the IV when the others couldn’t. She is youngish, blond, a short woman with a muscular body. Her eyes are gray, the eyes of a candid boy, a boy adept at collection (stamps, rocks) or the minor, nontheoretical sciences (botany, taxonomy). Eyes that would seem to have very little in them of animal warmth, no sign of instinct or of appetite. This is misleading; this is the effect of her glasses, thick but not unfashionable.
“I’m Dr. Morrisey,” she says. “I don’t know if you remember me from the time at the embassy. I’ll be in charge of your case. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
Pearl won’t say a word.
“When’s the last time you had something to drink?”
She turns her head away.
“I’m just going to check on some things.” The doctor moves the sheets back so that Pearl’s legs are exposed; touches her feet, presses them, pinches the skin on her hand. Pulls the sheets up again.
“You could die as a result of dehydration. We need to know when you drank last so that we can help you.”
Help me? There is nothing you can do to help.
“We need to do some tests on you now you’ve had some fluids. Can you stand up at all?”
Pearl closes her eyes.
“I’m going to have to insist that you try to stand up.”
Insist all you want, she thinks. There’s nothing I will do for you.
“I would prefer not to do it this way, but I have no choice,” the doctor says. She comes back with two nurses. They lift Pearl to her feet. She tries to collapse. They force her upright.
“We have to do postural vital signs,” she says to the nurses. “Keep her that way, if you can.”
The nurses hold her up; the doctor attaches a blood pressure cuff to her arm. Squeezes the bulb. The pressure on her arm, the force of being made to stand, the fear that they will steal her death are overwhelming her. She begins to cry. But she can only grimace. Tears will not come. She feels the sense of overflowing, but nothing flows from her eyes.
“You see, the dehydration is so bad she can’t produce tears. I’ve seen tearlessness before, mostly in babies. It’s a dangerous sign.”
They lay her down, cuff her again, squeeze the bulb.
“The pressure’s way different sitting and lying down. The signs both point to acute dehydration. This is very bad.”
No, it’s very good, Pearl thinks, and, closing her eyes, allows herse
lf to smile. Tom, the medical student—the suicide watcher, as she thinks of him—comes back into the room. He sees she is smiling. She sees his worried face, and she is sorry for him. When she dies, when she achieves what she has worked for, he will have been seen to fail.
“I don’t want my mother allowed in to see me,” Pearl says, in a voice that is not a voice but a croak. “I won’t cooperate unless you promise.”
“She’s flown all the way from America. She’s in Dublin now,” Dr. Morrisey says.
“I want her kept out,” Pearl says. The tube in her throat makes it difficult for her to talk.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” the doctor says. “I won’t do anything without consulting you. I promise there’ll be no surprises.”
I don’t promise anything at all, Pearl thinks. I don’t promise that I’ll cooperate as I suggested; there are no questions of honor for me anymore, except to keep the promise of my death. She knows that, up to now, she has always been a person of her word. But now her words are precious; the only real ones are the words that make up the sentence of her death. Death sentence . . . the sentence of my death, she thinks, and smiles again, and worries once more that Tom, who watches her, is troubled by her smiling.
17
Hazel Morrisey is glad that at least she was able to make some connection with her patient, to offer something that might be the beginning of a bond. Even if it is only that she will prevent the mother from seeing her child, something which, as a mother herself, she finds disturbing.
But Pearl Meyers is her patient; Pearl is her concern. She can’t allow herself to consider Pearl’s mother’s feelings or her own. She is a doctor; her job is to heal. In this case, to keep this girl alive.
Since she heard the first details of Pearl’s case, she has known that creating any kind of relationship would be difficult. She is the doctor on call at the hospital. Her primary job is to keep her patient alive. In the best of cases, she will succeed and then pass her on to someone else for long-term care. How can she suggest that Pearl can trust her, can rely on her, when their relationship will be so short?
Hazel Morrisey is a psychiatrist who specializes in teenagers in acute distress, distress unto death. But when she was Pearl’s age and a medical student, she didn’t imagine she would do this kind of work. She is an interesting woman, Hazel Morrisey, with an interesting history.
When she finished her degree, Dr. Morrisey traveled, like many Irish, to Somalia to work in the famine. She was overwhelmed by it, wasted body after wasted body. She would save a life, many lives, but it didn’t seem to matter. There were so many who couldn’t be helped. And even if she saved everyone she saw, there would be more and more. She would hear of shipments of food rotting in warehouses because of bureaucratic errors. She would think of the waste of food, good food in garbage bins behind restaurants, on the sidewalks of suburban towns. She envied people who turned these perceptions into solutions she found oversimple: that there were the greedy and the victims, and the greedy must be punished so the victims could have their share. These people were given an energy by their beliefs, as some of her brother’s friends were given energy by siding with the IRA, but she couldn’t do that either. Temperamentally, she liked to consider things carefully, from all sides, not rush into plans that could turn out to be disastrous. So she didn’t know what could be done about her country, what could be done about the famine in Somalia. And she woke every morning, dead inside, to face dying body after dying body. A wave of them, endless to her.
She stayed her time; she knew that she did good, yet she left feeling a failure. She came home to her mother in Cork City and allowed herself to be cared for like a child. This went on for a month, six weeks. She decided she no longer wanted to treat sick bodies, to patch them up and send them on their way. The prospect of ailing bodies was dissatisfying to her imagination. In some ways it was impossible; in some ways it was too easy. She wanted a different relationship with death and body. Not just to treat a dying animal who would, whatever she did, somehow die of something. She would have a different relationship to illness. She would treat illness of the mind.
Dr. Morrisey retrained in psychiatry and found herself drawn to adolescents. Her time in Somalia had shown her the effects of hunger; it interested her that young people would choose death by hunger in places in the world where this could be a choice. She began treating anorexics, drawn to them in part by vanity, because most doctors didn’t like treating them (for most they were an unsympathetic lot). She sympathized with anorexics. She would keep them alive. Observe and treat their desperation, the desperation of their hatred for their own flesh, which they would burn up, consume, with the avidity of the old saints. Feed them and wean them from an ideal of perfection, which was really the ideal of death.
Pearl is interesting to her. Hazel Morrisey understands her feelings of being overwhelmed by the world, her desire for purity. She is interested in this girl whose language is the body and yet not the body: who wants to use her body, use her death. But she may only say Pearl is an interesting case. Her job is to keep her alive with chemicals: nutriments, psychotropic drugs. To give her, for a little while, the sense that she is not alone. And then give the real work over to somebody else.
She worries, of course, that her identification with the patient will compromise her effectiveness as a doctor. This was not a problem she had to concern herself with when she specialized in internal medicine. But now she’s a psychiatrist, and there is a word for the danger of overidentification: it’s called countertransference. She is the kind of psychiatrist who still believes in this sort of thing, this kind of language. There are others who would say their responsibility is to find the correct drug for the problem that seems to be in the patient’s way, no different from trying to find the right chemotherapy for a cancer patient. She is young enough to have been trained in the usefulness of psychotropic drugs, but she is of a sufficiently complicated nature to believe there is more—that beyond the chemical soup there is something else. A self, a soul? She will not concern herself with the proper naming of this other thing, but she believes in the power of language, if not to cure at least to begin to heal. So how should she talk to Pearl Meyers? She cannot say, What you are doing is quite interesting, in some ways admirable. She cannot suggest a connection between them that will go on for more than a very short time. What she must do is try to make this tormented young woman feel less alone, less helpless—while understanding that, in thwarting Pearl’s plan for her own death, she will have made her feel more helpless than before.
But she’s made a beginning. She’s said she’ll respect Pearl’s wish to keep her mother away. Or at least she’ll consider it. That was something. Something is better than nothing. This is, perhaps, the most important thing her work has taught her.
18
“There’s a message for you, Ms. Meyers,” Orla, the desk clerk, tells Maria, as she passes the desk on the way from the breakfast room to the elevator. Maria’s heart beats hard. Has something happened to Pearl? She doesn’t want to look. No, it is Joseph, only Joseph; his plane is delayed.
She goes up to her room to try the doctor’s office again and is told, again, that the doctor will be unavailable until afternoon. There is no change in her daughter’s condition. Is there any chance the doctor will be available before the afternoon? No chance, the secretary says. I’ll try anyway, Maria says, warning the woman of her determination.
What can she do, alone, trapped in this room (she must not leave it, she must be by the phone), still with nothing to read except the papers she stole and the old copies of The Economist she borrowed from the lobby? She turns on the television: once again, they are speaking about the weather in the west. On another channel, politicians who mean nothing to her are discussing issues in which she has no interest. An episode of Seinfeld. She lets her eye fall on the familiar New York landscape but cannot concentrate; the laugh track irritates her, and she turns it off. She opens the newspaper. Reads abou
t the Middle East. Puts the paper down. Why is the room so ugly? Its smallness, the ungenerous nature of its lines, makes her feel punished, and her punishment, she feels, with her daughter close to death, is already more than she can bear. And what is her sin? Sin, punishment. She thought she had given up those terms.
She turns off the light. Better to lie in darkness than have her eye fall upon the spirit-stealing curtains, the discouraging rug. She will enter a darkness in which she can compose herself. In which she can prepare a course of action. Arm herself. Against what? She must arm herself against assaults she cannot yet see or name. She must prepare a face and a voice that betray no uncertainty, a voice and a face like a fortress. Or turn herself into the tiger mother, using teeth and claws against the thick bureaucracy that keeps her from her cub. There is no one to help her; she must do it alone.
The air in the room is damp. The artificial fabric of the spread insults her skin.
What is happening to Pearl? How can it be that somebody can keep her from her child at this her hour of danger? She is afraid to think of what might be happening to Pearl’s body. Just stay alive, just stay alive, she whispers to her in the dark, pressing her nails into the palms of her hands.