by Mary Gordon
“I’m coming to the hospital. I’ve waited long enough.”
“As you wish, but you won’t get in to see her. I think you’ll be more comfortable where you are.”
“I don’t think comfort is the point.”
“No, your daughter’s life is the point. It’s in the best possible hands.”
Why are your hands better than mine? she wants to say, but says instead, “Speaking of hands, I find your attitude quite high-handed.”
“I can see that you would,” the doctor says, “and I know how difficult this is. But right now you’ve no choice but to trust me.”
“You’ve a hell of a bedside manner, doctor.”
“It’s not your bed I’m beside.”
They don’t say goodbye to each other before they hang up. Maria doesn’t know whether or not it’s a point in the doctor’s favor, the unwillingness to paper over difficulties.
“Jesus Christ, that was some performance,” Maria says.
Joseph thinks the same thing—that it was a performance, an extraordinary one—but he’s only heard Maria’s half of it. He would have to imagine what the doctor said, but he isn’t willing to do that; it isn’t his nature to imagine something that he knows may turn out to be wrong when by waiting he may learn the truth. Whereas if Maria had been listening to one side of the conversation, she’d have invented the other.
“She says Pearl doesn’t want to see me.”
He’s never seen her so downcast, so without plans, alternatives.
“I just don’t understand,” she says, sitting down heavily on the man-made fabric of the bedcovers.
. . .
Joseph does understand. He understands perfectly why Pearl doesn’t want to see her mother. He understands the press of Maria’s relentless force: the sound of a running engine when all you can tolerate is silence; the assault of bright lights, noonday sun, when your abraded eyelids can stand only twilight or a neutral rain-gray sky. How often he has wanted to cover his ears and shield his eyes when he felt her rushing at him, heedless of her impact.
“This doctor, this shrink, she thinks she knows my daughter better than I do. She’s known her—what, ten hours?—and she thinks she’s the expert. Because eating disorders are her subspecialty. Subspecialty! What does that have to do with Pearl? She needs someone who knows her, she needs someone who loves her; that’s what she needs. The doctor just wants to say she’s crazy. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t know what to think, but I know the doctor’s wrong.”
Joseph understands that a psychiatrist would think what Pearl is doing is insane, because it is threatening her life. He understands that Pearl wants to die and that this desire must be thwarted. He doesn’t want her to die; he’s terrified at the thought of her death. Yet he refuses to disallow the value of her impulse to lay down her life. He can’t understand this in himself. He thinks her giving up her life is a terrible idea, an idea that is unbearable, yet he understands its value. But as an idea to be lived out by someone else, not her. Not Pearl. Beloved. Irreplaceable.
He dislikes the doctor for automatically denying the possibility of value in an idea that ends in death. He understands that she is probably right to do so—he may even agree with her—and he is grateful to her because possibly, with her coldness, her science, her tubes, her withholding of permission, she will keep Pearl alive. But he won’t grant the automatic rightness of her refusal to question the idea that life itself is the most important thing in life. Her insistence that what Pearl is doing is a sign of illness. Her determination to invoke the category health.
Perhaps you are impatient with Joseph’s train of thought, believing that of course life is the most important thing in life and Pearl must be kept alive and to think in any other way is to be, in the language of Joseph and Maria’s youth, not part of the solution but part of the problem. Perhaps you are more comfortable with Maria’s way of proceeding: her desire to make something happen, get something done.
Joseph sees that Maria, in her insistence on casting the doctor as an enemy, is being Maria. But then he doesn’t believe that anyone really changes. Pearl was always Pearl; her first words were deliberately chosen. He remembers her determination to climb a tree whose height terrified her, to run more laps when her heart was bursting, her stoicism when she stumbled into a hornets’ nest on a porch in Connecticut and was stung, over and over, on the arms, the neck, the lips. She did not cry out. She was no more than ten years old.
And what do you believe? Which are you: fatalist or progressive? How much do you believe is over before we leave the womb, the crib, our mother’s arms? Joseph would say, A great deal. Maria would say, Don’t underestimate the power to change. What do you think? And which side, you may wonder, am I on? I am on both sides.
But let’s get back to the room.
“This is intolerable, this behavior. This imperiousness. I’m her mother. She’s not twenty-one yet. There must be legal issues here.”
Maria is calling the embassy; she is phoning lawyer friends in New York. People are away for the holidays, but she’s leaving messages on machines. Fiercely, she presses the buttons on the flimsy gray phone as if she were pushing buttons to activate bombs that would detonate, explode, and then destroy her enemy the doctor.
She is walking around the room, up and down the pebble-colored carpet, making a fist and grinding it into the palm of her other hand. Anything rather than be still.
It’s Sunday, so her New York friends are not in their offices, and there is nothing for her to do but wait. He knows that waiting, of all things, is for her the most intolerable.
Her movements, her relentless pacing, are swallowing the room’s air, already inadequate because of the curtains, the spread, the carpet. He coughs a few times, uselessly. But sometimes he too prefers a useless action. So he coughs again, lightly, shallowly, as if that would clear his lungs. She’s making him feel tired. The prospect of his own darkened room, a little sleep, seems to him if not desirable then at least more bearable than being in the room with her.
He says he will go up to his room for a nap. She turns on him, one of her whirling motions.
“What for? You’re not the one who’s jet-lagged.”
These words echo what she said on the day they went to Yom Kippur services, when she wanted to leave and he didn’t. When he said he’d like to stay and she turned on him and said, “What for? It’s not your religion.”
Always asserting the primacy of her own experience, her own situation. And what does she want now? He knows she wants him to be in the room with her so she won’t feel alone. Trapped, she wants to trap him too.
“Let me just go upstairs and take a shower,” he says. “Why don’t you lie down for ten minutes? You must be tired.”
She nods her head. Permitting him, he thinks, to leave.
. . .
Once Maria is alone, there is nothing for her to do but wait. Why has no one ever told her that waiting is itself work? Well, someone must have told her, of course, one of the nuns, someone urging patience on her, but she never believed them or was never interested. If waiting was work, it was someone else’s, not hers. She sees herself standing in front of a blackboard in a large, empty old-fashioned classroom, perhaps a Victorian one. Her hair is in a single plait. She is wearing a navy blue dress that has a white collar and reaches halfway down her calves; she is wearing black stockings and ankle boots. Perhaps it is a classroom in an orphanage, some harsh charitable institution funded by a philanthropist dedicated to the shaping, the re-formation, of the ill-born young. Re-formation. Reform school: perhaps it is a reform school; she is being punished for her crime—unnamed—by writing over and over, till her arms ache with fatigue, There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can do. Is it an I she’s writing, or is it a you? Is even the pretense of self-determination stripped, is she merely taking dictation? There is nothing you can do. Whose is the voice, who is the dictator? She hears it in her brain now. She doesn’t know whether to turn the light
on. Dark, the room takes on the aspect of a cell but, illuminated, the absolute wrongness of every line, form, color, and texture implies a prison of another sort: a modern one, meant to look rehabilitative but in fact as deadening as concrete walls and iron bars.
There is nothing you can do. She feels she must wait near the phone, just in case. In case the doctor summons her or Pearl changes her mind and will see her. In case Ambassador Smith has come back to Ireland and will give her an interview (after Maria reminds her how much the Kennedy family has always meant to her), and the two of them can storm through the barricades the doctor has set up. In case one of her friends gets home and has some plans or good advice to offer. In case of the worst. But she won’t think about that now. She has to stay in the room. Anything else is unthinkable.
“I just don’t understand,” she whispers in the dark, helpless. When something was incomprehensible, indecipherable, she has throughout her life felt a chafing, building from scorn to outrage at the knot the world has presented to her. Jack Rappaport, her lover, once told her, “You say ‘I don’t understand’ as if you believe you were meant to.” “Of course I believe I am meant to,” she said, impatient with what she considered his perverse, pseudosophisticated neutrality. “Why else were we put on earth if not to understand, or try to?”
“What makes you think we were put on earth? By whom?” He liked to remind her—unkindly?—of what he called her “religious default setting.”
“There doesn’t have to be a first cause in order for us to believe in our obligation to understand. It’s just another excuse for your laziness,” she said.
Maria is often tempted to accuse other people of laziness because, in fact, she does work very hard, loves activity, is impatient with rest. So this enforced inactivity is more anguishing to her than it might be to another temperament. Jack was a man who enjoyed leisure, and she enjoyed herself with him a great deal. He could make anything a pleasure—lunch, a walk, choosing a melon, a tomato, not just sex—the sex, as she called it to herself and her friends, acknowledging how much she misses it. But she tells herself, she’s told her friends, it wasn’t worth it. When she was explaining to Devorah why her relationship with Jack was so unsatisfactory she said that when she would try to lean her spirit against him, she felt she was leaning on a cloud. And then he wanted to get married. Wanted that domestic life—“Time for a drink, darling. . . . When did you say dinner was? Maybe we’ll walk around the block afterward. . . . And where will we go for vacation this year?”—which made her feel she was in a rifle sight, ready to be shot dead. She thinks how little good Jack Rappaport would do her now. What would be good for her now? What would be good for Pearl?
23
“Midazolam,” the doctor says to the nurse. “It’s best for the purpose. Takes away pain, induces amnesia. Sewing the tube to her nose will be quite a difficult procedure. She may remember something of it, but the memory, if any, will be vague.”
A needle in her arm. Midazolam. Let us dazzle madame with Midazolam. Pearl smiles at the joke she’s made.
Her lightness is returning. Nothing matters. “Not to be trusted,” the doctor says. She is not be trusted? “Remarkable,” the doctor says, “the strength, the determination. All used against herself.” Myself, do you mean my life? Oh, that. “We can’t have you pulling the feeding tubes out anymore,” the doctor says. “You’re very weak. You’re very dehydrated. We’re trying to keep you alive.” Are you speaking to me? How odd that someone would be speaking to her. “That’s why we’re sewing this tube to your nose so you won’t be able to pull it out.”
The doctor must be joking. They could not do anything so funny. She used to sew. You sew cloth to cloth; you might embroider. You did not sew things to noses. It was not a thing human beings did to other human beings, sewing things into their flesh. Yet they seem to be doing it. She understands it ought to be hurting, but it doesn’t matter; it ought to hurt. A needle breaks through the skin of her nose. A sound like crunch. In and out the needle goes. A stitch in time saves nine. They are coming at her once again. Another tube, this time soft, like a piece of spaghetti. Why are they putting spaghetti in my nose? She feels she has become a cartoon character, a joke figure. Spaghetti in her nose, thread in and out. Well, noses are a funny part. Her lightness is back again. She swims above them; she sees herself on a bed, or what they think is her real self, the one they are sewing something into. But she knows she is above them. They are doing this thing to someone who is not the real her.
The amnesia will be a blessing, the doctor says. But Pearl knows there is no need for amnesia. There is nothing to remember, therefore nothing to forget.
Remembrance. Forgetting. The theory that pain is real only if it is remembered. This is a troubling paradox. Hazel Morrisey believes it, she has to believe it, or she wouldn’t be able to do what she does. Sometimes she wonders about the connection between pain and memory. It is always said that if women remembered the pain of labor there would never be any second children born. Yet she remembers the pain of her labor. She has tried to determine the nature, the quality of her memory.
But we can ask the question: When the sufferer is suffering, isn’t it an eternal present, like the mind of God? Would suffering be diminished if the sufferer were able to say, But I know I won’t remember this, after all, so it must be all right?
Hazel Morrisey must believe that this drug, Midazolam, will make the pain nonexistent. That the eternal present will quite soon be nothing but a blur, an absence, the self gone from the self, the sufferer an empty vessel, without language and outside of time.
She makes herself see Pearl in ten years, coming back to Ireland, showing the doctor her beautiful children, saying, Thank you for keeping me alive. This is what she is thinking with the part of her brain that is not sticking a needle, threaded with catgut, into the nostril of this girl whose eyes are closed, who she has to believe is feeling nothing of what she does.
24
After his shower Joseph cleans, with a traveling nail brush, the immaculate space between the flesh of his fingers and his nails. He flosses his teeth. He picks up his coat and closes the door of his room behind him. He takes the stairs, rather than the elevator, down to Maria’s room. He knocks lightly on the door. Once, twice, no answer. He uses the key, which isn’t a key, just a plastic strip. He hears that she is in the shower. He answers the ringing phone, not really a ring but something between a buzz and a purr.
It’s Caroline Wolf from the embassy. Her voice sounds neutral, pleasant. Nevertheless he asks, “Is anything wrong?”
Instead of answering, she asks, “Are you a family member?”
The question makes him feel exposed and he resents it, yet he is conscious of the paltriness of his answer.
“Not exactly. A close family friend.”
There is only one legal member of his family now—his mother—with whom he has the connection that grants—what? Access, the right to information, the right to exert your will. He had it once with Devorah: that was marriage, the law taking the place of blood. But he had very little real knowledge of her; he didn’t understand the person she had come to be, he didn’t know she’d gone back to her family. So what good did the force of the law do him? It meant he had the right to dispose of her dead body, but he had given it back to her parents; he had felt he had no moral claim. Certainly, Caroline Wolf would think he had no claim to Pearl, no authority. Friend of the family. Close family friend. Invited to dinners and ceremonial occasions. Counted on in times of emergency or distress.
Maria, wrapped in a towel, runs out of the bathroom toward him. He gives her the phone, saying to Caroline Wolf, puzzling her perhaps (who is this man in the hotel room?), “Here’s Ms. Meyers now.”
Caroline Wolf gets the full brunt of Maria’s rage. He is sorry for her, but this is what she’s trained for. She’s a diplomat; she probably dreams of standing patiently while Yasir Arafat rages, or Ian Paisley. Maria is, after all, not much compared to them.
“For God’s sake, Joseph, get some light in here.”
The lights are harsh, embittering the room’s unnatural colors. She gestures to him, pointing to pencil and paper. She snaps her fingers. As if he were a servant. Like his mother.
He excuses her incivility. Would we excuse it in his place? Would we tell ourselves, like him, that she’s upset, exhausted—that’s why she pointed, snapped her fingers—she wouldn’t behave like this under ordinary circumstances? In all the years he’s known her, she’s never snapped her fingers or pointed for him to do something, get something. Yet he knows the inclination has always been there: the impulse to give orders, to be served. As the impulse to serve is in him.
Joseph doesn’t want to think what this means. It is for us, not him, to consider. But we don’t like to think about it. Servants and masters: it seems an old idea, neatly disposed of, like a defunct factory once devoted to the manufacture of corsets. But Joseph knows his mother prepared the food that Maria and her father ate, washed the clothes they wore. He remembers her holding up a pair of Dr. Meyers’s underwear, with a thin line of shit along the seam, and saying, “He thinks he doesn’t even have to wipe his ass because he has some dumb Polack to clean up after him.” And holding one of Maria’s brushes, combing the strands of hair out and saying, “Filthy, filthy,” loud enough for Maria to hear. He knew she wanted Maria to hear. How can he forget this? It is even kinder of him than it might be for one of us to forgive Maria for snapping her fingers and pointing at the thing she wanted fetched. We must ask ourselves: Burdened by the memories, the scenes, the images that Joseph carries, would we be capable of such kindess, such understanding? I fear that we would not.