by Mary Gordon
She picks up the phone. Perhaps she’ll call the embassy. But what would she say? She puts the receiver in its cradle. She looks at her watch. It’s only twenty minutes since she’s called the doctor. Five-forty-five a.m. in New York. It’s Sunday; no one is awake; no offices are open. There is nothing for her to do but wait. She closes her eyes. Opens them. Turns the lights on. Pours herself a glass of lukewarm water from the sink. Drinks it. Starts the newspaper crossword puzzle. Puts it down. Turns the lights off again. The tiger mother. Caged.
19
“Just checking on a few things for a moment,” says a young doctor, looking at the tubes coming from Pearl’s arm, her throat, uncovering her legs, pinching the skin on her hands and feet. “Very good,” he says.
She wonders what he means by that. What is the difference between good and bad? He turns away from her, toward Tom, who has not moved from his seat beside her bed.
“So you pulled the suicide watch? I guess that means you’re one of Morrisey’s fair-haired boys.”
“It’s fine. I can get my reading done.”
“Don’t screw up. If you get the rough side of Morrisey’s tongue you might not live to tell the tale.”
Suicide watch. So that is how they think of her: a suicide. In all the ways she has thought of what she is doing, she never thought of it as suicide. Suicide seems a private thing, a simple ending. She is making a sentence of her life, a sentence she wants others to read so that something can be learned. She’s thought of herself, always, as a witness, never a suicide. Her anger at the violation of her body takes on a new tone. She has been misunderstood, misnamed. She understands for the first time the rage of Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners at being misnamed—in their case, as criminals rather than political prisoners; in hers, as suicide rather than witness. There is a difference, she wants to tell them, using all her force, between a witness and a suicide. But what force has she now, attached to tubes, compelled against her will to take in nourishment? She would like to say to this young man, her watcher, “Don’t you understand the difference between a witness and a suicide? Is it possible you will not understand my death?”
This possibility, which had at no time occurred to her, fills her with dread. As the idea of death itself has never, till this moment, done.
20
Joseph’s plane left Rome two hours late. It is eleven-fifteen. Maria decides to wait till he arrives to call the doctor. The idea of sleep and the word sleep come together in her mind, so that the letters seem, each of them, full of meaning, distinct and at the same time indistinct, like writing against a whitish sky. Images form behind her eyes, geometric shapes that change and change again when what she most needs is the stability of lines and angles that are always only themselves. She allows her eyes to close. . . .
There is a knock on the door. “Yes?” Maria says, from the bed.
“It’s me.”
Foolish, of course, it’s foolish to say, “It’s me,” the words revealing no fixed identity. But how dear the words are, assuming a familiarity, a singularity stronger than a name. “Me.” The voice is enough, the sound of it; it is the dear voice, the voice that has always meant safety.
When Maria opens the door, Joseph is shocked to see that she is no longer young. It isn’t only that she’s tired, jet-lagged, worried. It’s that, since he last saw her, she has given up her youth. Under her eyes there are olive-colored pouches. Were they there before? Before Pearl did this thing that has changed their lives?
He will do what he has come for. He will provide her with comfort as false as the fibers of the bedspreads, the rug. But if she takes comfort from his attempt at comfort, is he right to call it false? I believe that he is not.
“Oh, God, Joe, I’m so tired,” Maria says, laying her head against his chest. As if this were the problem he has flown here to address: her tiredness.
“You’re all right now.”
She believes him. Everything is no longer up to her. She is not alone, the tiger mother, grasping her daughter—but is she grasping Pearl with her jaws or with the jaws of some other? And whose jaws would they be, if not Pearl’s own? She can’t make an image now. The jaws of death. The jaws of life. Isn’t there some machine used in car wrecks to extricate people called the jaws of life? She must be the jaws of life seizing her daughter from the jaws of death. And then, after she’s done it, after she’s succeeded in saving her child, Joseph will be the ground on which they both rest. Rest, she thinks, what a beautiful idea. Joseph has always been a man she could walk beside, unjudged, given the benefit of the doubt. When the world is a field where bullets whiz over her head, she has only to be near him to be safe. So when he tells her, “You’re all right,” she believes it.
“Have you had breakfast?” she asks.
“On the plane.”
“Good. The breakfast room is a horror. The abomination of desolation.”
He hears “the abomination of desolation” from the Gospel of one of the Sundays of Advent, and he is a boy in stormy November. The rain drips from the hems of everyone’s coat onto the stone floors of Sts. Cosmos and Damian. The year galloping desperately, menacingly toward darkness. Advent, winter, the slice of lightlessness before the candles are lit, the time when everyone and everything can easily be lost. There are poisonous fires that cannot be seen from where you are, and rushing winds that have cast down buildings, and lights in the sky, green-black, sulfurous, and we will all die, all of us, but especially he, Joseph Kasperman, unmourned and unlamented by the Avenging and Destroying Creator God.
That is the abomination of desolation. But Maria is using the words to describe the restaurant in the Tara Arms Hotel. She is describing a restaurant when her daughter is at the edge of death. Like so much in her speech, the gap between what is said and what is being described is enormous. His mind rejects her habit of exaggerating. And yet he knows that when he sees the room he’ll say to himself, Oh, yes, the abomination of desolation. Her words can force him to believe something he knows to be untrue. And he resents it.
“Oh, God, Joe,” Maria says again. “I feel so much safer with you here.”
He wants to say, There’s no reason for that. Instead, he simply says, “All right,” and then, to avoid a cruelty, “I’m glad.”
The abomination of desolation. The false words and the false colors of the carpets in her room both sicken his soul. Of the two, the carpets disturb him more profoundly. Seeing those carpets, and the dingy wallpaper with its pattern of olive-colored reeds, he feels despair for the world. And more: a sense of deep estrangement because he knows that the designers, the manufacturers, and the purchasers of this wallpaper and this carpet are people so different from himself that they could be another species. It cannot be good, he thinks, to feel less and less commonality with more and more of my kind.
“These were on the ground beside her,” Maria says. “There’s the statement, a letter to you, and one to me.” She hands him all three.
Joseph reads the letter to him first, straining his eyes in the gravy-colored light. He reads the statement, then the letter to Maria. He wishes he could rush to Pearl and say, I understand exactly what you mean. Her feeling of powerlessness distresses him most of all. What she says makes perfect sense. And yet he can’t bear the fact that she might die. She mustn’t die. In this ugly room, the ersatz fabric of the spreads and curtains an irritation to every sense, he is anguished by his own powerlessness. There is nothing he can do. He can’t imagine anything that would change anything. Would it help if he said Pearl, “I know exactly what you mean”? Or would she take that as a sign of his approval of her wish for death?
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” he says.
“Yes, it’s that old Watson training. Lucid prose. Nice to see all those tuition dollars didn’t go down the drain.”
He knows she has no idea of how much the Watson tuition was. It was paid not out of Maria’s salary but by the estate of Seymour Meyers, of which he is executor.
H
e shows Maria his letter from Pearl.
She begins to cry. “I just don’t understand it. Has she always felt this way about the world? I never thought she was unhappy. Did she seem unhappy to you, Joseph?”
“I never thought of happiness in relation to Pearl. Or unhappiness. I thought she was serious. I never thought she was lighthearted. But I didn’t think she was in torment. She seemed calm and stoical. Optimistic, no. But not tormented either. I would never have said that.”
“You think she was pessimistic.”
“She could get very upset by things.”
“Not more than most kids, though. Do you think she got more upset by things than most kids? Was I just not seeing it?”
He doesn’t want to say this is indeed what he believes. That she always sees only what she wants to see. He says instead, “You have a lot more experience with kids than I do.”
“Well, adolescents tend to take things very hard.”
He doesn’t want to argue, he doesn’t want to say, She always took things hard; it wasn’t adolescence. And he doesn’t want her to think she did something that led Pearl to where she is now. Because above all he wants to say to Maria, as Pearl said in her letter, “This has nothing to do with you.” He believes that. He takes Pearl at her word. That she is acting as a witness, that she has seen what she has seen. He wonders who Stephen Donegan was and how he died.
“It’s not that I don’t understand,” Maria says. “Who could have lived through the sixties and not understood?”
What Pearl has seen has nothing to do with a particular time in history, he wants to say. What she sees has always been there and always will be.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about her life here,” he said. “Who her friends were. Whether she became politically involved. Who this person is, Stephen Donegan, whose death she says she’s marking.”
“She keeps so much to herself.”
“Well, that was always the case.”
“I always respected her for that. Her reticence. But now I feel I never knew her.”
You never did, he wants to say. Instead he says, “What is it to know another person? Who knows anyone else?” He wants to say, I thought I knew my wife. But it is not the time to talk about himself.
21
They are stealing her lightness. They are making her doubt the truth. They are filling her with gravity. She will resist their force. They have held her down. They have put a tube the thickness of a pencil down her nose, her throat. She was sickened; they did not stop. She tried to resist; they were irresistible. They insist upon nourishing her. Did they do this to Bobby Sands, shove food down his throat? Did he resist? Pearl read nothing about his being force-fed. Why is she forced when he was not? Because they wanted him to die and they want her to live, so they insist that she be nourished.
As she is nourished, her despair returns. With the return of her despair she must not lose her will not to be part of it. Not to be a part: to be apart. She is interested at the similarity of those terms. She will not be a part of it. She will not be pulled down. They have forced things into her, but she will resist them once again. She will be exalted once again. And her lightness; she will rise again. She must wait for the moment.
She touches the tube that goes into her nose and down her throat. It is plastic, but inside her it feels like bone. A bone in the throat. She would like to reach into her throat and pull out the bone, as her mother did once when Lucky swallowed a chicken bone in the park: just reached into his mouth and down his throat and pulled it out. Her mother saved his life. Now Pearl must act to save her own death.
She touches the tube again. It isn’t a bone, it’s too thin for a bone. She imagines that if she could see inside her she would see a thick black straw, not a drinking straw but the straw animals eat or sleep on, a black straw, stuck, embedded in her flesh. She could put her fingers around it; she could pull it out. It would leave a gap, a wound, but she would have it once again, the thing she has worked so hard for. This strong death. They think this thing, this tube or bone or straw, is giving her back her strength. It is not; it is making her weak again, insisting on her weak life. She will resist its insistence. She will reach in, grab it, take it out, and in doing that take back her strength. Refusing her weak life; regaining her strong death, the death that makes a sentence of a life that everyone can understand: “This is the truth. Hear me.”
The moment comes when Tom, the watcher, gets up and walks into the bathroom. She hears him close the door. She knows what she needs to do, and that she must do it quickly. Using all her strength, she pulls the tube, the hard thing, the bone, the straw, the thickness of a pencil. Violently she tugs. The pain is shocking. A needle to her brain. But it is done. Blood is coming out of her nose. It is streaming down her face. Blood, vivid and dark. How can such a dark thing come from a body she believed had grown so light?
The watcher comes back into the room. He shouts, “Oh, my God!” There is running. They wipe the blood from her face.
“Restraints,” one of them says. “Get Dr. Morrisey!”
Her hands are tied to blocks of wood. Her arms are tied to the metal of the bed.
“Yes, just now, Dr. Morrisey . . . just for a fraction of a minute, just to go inside.”
“Midazolam,” the doctor says. “Two hundred fifty cc.”
22
Joseph and Maria know nothing of this. They sit together on Maria’s bed. “I’m going to call the doctor. They said this afternoon. It’s two o’clock. I’m not waiting any longer.”
It is a pleasant voice, a soothing voice, the voice of the doctor’s receptionist, without judgment. But in a moment, the doctor’s voice enters. A different tone: business, all business.
“Hazel Morrisey here. Your daughter’s under my care. At the moment she’s very weak and quite dehydrated, but we haven’t given up hope of stabilization. She’s been given IV fluids and nourishment and some tranquilizer. It’s a dicey thing; we think she’s had nothing but water for six weeks. We’re fortunate she took water or we wouldn’t be speaking now—or only in the past tense. I’d say she planned things carefully. She’s a very intelligent woman; her statement shows that, doesn’t it? But then it’s often the very intelligent who’ll do something like this.”
“Something like what?” Maria asks. “You can’t tell me you’ve seen anything like this before.”
“I’m a psychiatrist. I specialize in adolescents. My subspecialty is eating disorders. I’ve seen all sorts.” She doesn’t tell Maria that her field of expertise is suicide in the healthy young.
Maria hears the words specialize, subspecialty, eating disorders. She hears no tenderness in the doctor’s voice, no tenderness toward her weak child, who is in need of tenderness. Is it possible to form from these words a safe place where she can leave her daughter? They seem so sharp, with edges, not like knives or scissors but like razors or box cutters. She feels her child is not safe alone with those words. But this doctor is her only hope; probably Pearl is alive because of her. A psychiatrist. She understands that the woman who has used the words specialize, subspecialty, and eating disorders must believe that a girl who is starving herself is insane. Surely there is a great deal wrong with this. Surely it’s wrong to call what Pearl is doing an eating disorder. Surely this is a misuse of language, and in Pearl’s name, Pearl to whom language is paramount. She must make note of this. Yet beyond words, beyond ideas, there is something that can properly be called life that can end because of lack of nourishment. This loss of life, than which nothing could be less abstract, is something it seems to be in Hazel Morrisey’s power to prevent. But Hazel Morrisey cannot understand her daughter; she cannot provide her with a tenderness she doesn’t feel. Pearl needs her mother for that.
“Is she going to die? When can I see her?”
“I can’t promise you what you want. And I must tell you now: She doesn’t want to see you. She refuses.”
“How can she refuse? She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“She knew you’d be coming. She said she didn’t want to see you. You need to know what she’s done. She’s pulled the feeding tube out of her nose and throat. Do you know how much will that takes? It’s a very painful thing, what she did to herself.”
Maria feels the pain in her throat; as always when she hears of Pearl’s physical distress, she feels it in her own body. But she can’t think about that now; she has to get to her.
Rage crawls over her skin like mites; it begins on her arms, then over her skull, settles at the nape of her neck, enters the soft spot there, liquifies, spreads, coats the skeleton. Do you like your power? she wants to shout to Hazel Morrisey, whom she now sees as the enemy. Do you like being able to say a mother must be kept away from her own daughter? Do you like saying yes and no, invoking the words life and death as if you had the key to them? My daughter’s life is in this doctor’s hands, she says to herself, trying to make an image of what a life might be if it were something to be held in one’s hands.
“I want to see my daughter,” Maria says, in her most unassailable voice, the voice that has always worked to get her what she wanted. And she has never wanted anything in her life as much as this.
But Hazel Morrisey isn’t moved. She meets Maria, unassailable tone for unassailable tone.
“If I’m to have her trust, she must believe that I’ll do as she says when it’s essential to her.”
“And it’s essential to her that she not see me?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll come to the hospital in any case.”
“Of course I can’t prevent you. But I’d recommend against it. I won’t allow you to see her. You can sit in the lobby, but it will accomplish nothing. She’s safe with us. She’s watched round the clock. I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do for her but respect her wishes by staying away. I’ll phone you regularly.”