by Mary Gordon
Sitting in this ugly room, it’s as if a field of force has bloomed around Maria. A line, transparent, sizzling blue, seems to trace the outline of her body.
But she’s getting nowhere. From what he can hear, the bureaucratic buck is being passed. Maria can’t speak like this professionally; she can’t get people to do things by shrieking and cursing at them as she’s doing now.
He’s never seen Maria at work, but I can tell you what she’s like: incisive, jokey, coaxing, able to listen; able to make decisions, even hard ones, and stick to them; able to walk into a room of children and see the problem, think of a solution. People who work with her love her. They are less critical of her than people in other areas of her life. Maria is an excellent boss. As a boss, no one can accuse her of being bossy. She would never talk to a colleague or an employee as she is talking to Caroline Wolf. She is terrified, uncomprehending, frustrated. How would any of us behave in a situation like this? Her daughter may be dying. Her daughter is in the hands of a doctor she doesn’t know, doesn’t like, doesn’t trust. Her daughter refuses to see her.
“What kind of fantastic bullshit is this?” Maria is saying to Caroline Wolf. “What kind of power does the medical establishment have in this country? What is this, Russia under Brezhnev? I’m an American citizen. This is a clear human rights violation. I insist that you give me the names of some lawyers who can help me.”
He sees words clanging against one another, dark blue iron rings in the dove-colored air: citizen, rights, violation. She can do this because she has a tie of blood to Pearl, a legal tie. None of these words would be available to him.
Caroline Wolf, he can tell, intends to resist her. She must be saying, I’ll get back to you with those names.
“What do you mean, get back?” Maria shouts. “Get back from where, Timbuktu?”
He wants to laugh at the use of the name so archaically suggesting the impossible place at the impossible distance. Timbuktu. No one uses that word anymore, no one even thinks of it. What happened to Timbuktu, he wonders? Was it only a place in the mind?
He can tell Maria is frustrated by the shortness of the telephone cord. She has to sit. She cannot pace as she usually does when she talks on the phone. She has no scope, no way to express her physical force except by grabbing at her hair, her remarkable hair, long and curly, gray now. Once it rippled, blue-black; she and Devorah would walk down the street together, and everyone loved them for their hair.
“What do you mean, it’s a holiday? Does this seem like a holiday situation? Are we into chestnuts roasting on an open fire?”
Caroline Wolf must be telling her she has other cases.
“I don’t think any of your other cases can possibly have this urgency.”
Caroline Wolf has ended the conversation. Maria puts down the phone. Caroline Wolf didn’t use the words, but Maria heard them in her voice: There is nothing you can do.
Joseph looks out the window at a courtyard filled with hunks of plaster, rusting lengths of gutter, broken pipe. Maria looks at her watch.
It is only three o’clock. Only ten a.m. in New York. He wonders what she thinks her lawyer friends can do for her, go over the doctor’s head? Insist on the primacy of her rights over Pearl’s?
And it is quite hard to understand, really, that ten o’clock in one place means three in another, that someone (Who is it? Will we ever know?) has sliced the map up like a birthday cake, sectioned the globe like an orange, so that three o’clock and ten o’clock mean the same thing.
It isn’t difficult to see how words spin through her brain like the close-up of a 78 record in a fifties movie about teenagers at a dance. Maria is very frightened; she is very tired. What she is experiencing most intensely, though, is rage at the idea that ten o’clock in one place means three in the place she is now.
25
Pearl hears a sound like horses tramping. Are they bringing horses into her room? They are sewing things to her nose; now they are bringing in horses to look at her. This is the doctor’s voice. She is talking to the trooping horses.
“This case, Pearl Meyers, twenty, is a complex one and brings together a lot of elements in your training. Clinically, it could be described as anorexia. As physicians specializing in psychiatry, I would ask you to understand that the psychological issues are more complex. We won’t go into them here; I’m assuming you’ve read the literature and we’ll discuss this case later in detail in that context. But we must remember that in anorexia the connections between the mind and the body are inextricable. I would draw your attention to the acute physical symptoms, mostly a result of severe dehydration. Although the patient won’t cooperate by giving us a full history, she writes that she hasn’t eaten in six weeks and hasn’t drunk in several days. It’s no wonder that she had trouble producing urine. Also tears. I’ve not seen this extreme a case before except in an infant. What would be some of the side effects of such severe dehydration?”
One of the horses speaks. “Kidney failure,” he says.
“Right,” says the doctor. “Anything else?”
“Drop in blood pressure.”
“Yes. You’ll note that the blood pressure dropped drastically when she moved from a standing to a sitting position. What risks would go along with hydration?”
“Risk of severe arrhythmia followed by cardiac arrest.”
“Very good,” the doctor says.
The horses take their fences quickly; they fly over and do not knock down any of the bars.
“We’ve had to take extreme measures with Ms. Meyers. She pulled the feeding tube from her throat; you can imagine the determination that took. We originally had her in restraints, but I’m very opposed to restraints; I’ve seen too much long-term trauma from them. But we did sew a narrow feeding tube to the side of the right nostril so she can’t pull it out, an extreme measure to be sure. It’s too easy for us to forget that anorexia can be a fatal disease. Starvation is starvation, whether it’s in the developed world or in an African country.”
“Yes, but starvation in a poor country is never voluntary. This kind of anorexia is always a disease of the affluent.”
The doctor puts her hand on Pearl’s arm. “Perhaps you’d be happier in another specialty, Mr. Lenehan. Orthopedics. Dermatology.”
The horses make a snickering sound. One of them, Mr. Lenehan, has knocked the bar. The doctor’s hand is cool on her arm. Her nails are square and short. She wears a wedding ring. The horses troop away.
“I know you’re no stranger to stupidity,” the doctor says. “I’ll try to keep you from that sort of thing ever again.”
What is she saying, that she will keep the horses away? She thinks of the horse she saw with Stevie in Mayo; its legs in the air, its dead eyes open, its teeth exposed. So that is death too. Her death is moving farther from her. No longer the companion at the clear end of the white road. Harder to get a glimpse of. Vaguer now.
26
They lie on the twin beds, side by side, reading. Joseph is reading his biography of Ruskin, Maria her weeks-old copies of The Economist. She would like to ask him to lend her his book, but she restrains herself. She has always found any book he was reading more appetizing than anything she might be reading at the same time, and the old Economists provide no savor at all. She congratulates herself for not even hinting that he give her the book.
Joseph knows, too, that she would like to read his Ruskin book; he retreats into a pocket of what he knows is selfishness, but he will not give it to her, not this book he is so enjoying, this life he has entered into, so absorbing, so puzzling, so admirable and tragic—no, he won’t give it up for her, even though it is possibly the thing he could do right now that would be of most help.
“I feel so trapped here,” Maria says. “I don’t dare leave the phone, but I can’t get anyone in New York. Jill Kiernan’s in the fucking Caribbean. She’s my lawyer friend with the Irish connections. Jesus Christ, the Caribbean. Everyone’s a goddam yuppie now. We slept in youth hoste
ls with knapsacks, for Christ’s sake.”
“I have an idea,” Joseph says. “I swear I won’t tell anyone in New York. It’s five o’clock, you’re jet-lagged; let’s go have dinner downstairs. They can get you if anyone calls. Our first early bird specials.”
Joseph, as you see, has not much gift for lightness. When he tries to make a joke, it often falls flat. People who aren’t taken with Joseph and Pearl often think they have no sense of humor. Maria, who is good at jokes, has never said that, never even allowed herself to think it. On the other hand, she doesn’t even notice that he’s tried to be funny. “All right,” she says, “we might as well.”
They go down to the room where Maria had breakfast, the room that at all hours smells of beer. They order grilled salmon, baked potatoes, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio in which neither of them has faith.
“I thought my love would keep her safe,” Maria says. “I thought if I just loved her enough, she’d be all right. God knows I love her enough. But she’s not all right, Joseph, because she thinks life is terrible and she wants to die.”
“She won’t die,” he says. “I think the doctor knows what she’s doing.”
“The doctor!” Maria snorts. “Dr. Congeniality.”
“She seems competent,” he said. “Anyway, Pearl’s safe for now.”
“For now?”
“That’s all we can hope for. For now she’s OK. Have another glass of wine. You need to sleep tonight.”
. . .
When Maria gets into bed, she’s surprised at how much she wants to give in to her fatigue. How much she wants sleep. But only the right kind. Clean sleep. Not too much, not so that, waking, she’s groggier than before she slept. She needs to be rested to fight for Pearl. And for her own rights, her right to be with her daughter. Her daughter who needs her. Fatigue will weaken her; fatigue will dilute her force. Fatigue kills hope. And she must act from hope. She must breathe hope back into her child. Hope breathed in through love. Absurd, the professional hygienics of the doctor, believing that with her skill, her training, she can provide an alternative to love. It is love and life that are at issue. Not specialty, subspecialty, eating disorders, invasive procedures, feeding tubes. Yet these are what is keeping Pearl alive.
Maria knows that if she falls into one of her poisoned sleeps, one of the ones that is a vision of what is behind the scrim of our words, our civilized habits, she will be paralyzed. She will be in the place she needs to rescue Pearl from, and she cannot allow that to happen. She will not sleep.
. . .
Upstairs in room 436, Joseph has no impulse to sleep at all. He wonders whether Pearl is able to sleep. He reads about John Ruskin. Ruskin traveled through Europe with his parents, carrying with him a portable England: tools for geological expeditions, equipment for drawing, an instrument for measuring the blue of the sky, called the cyanometer. He wonders in what terms the blue of the sky is measured. What is the measure for intensity?
What is the intensity of Pearl’s suffering? What does she need him to do? What can he offer her that will be of help, that will be strong enough to pull her back into the orbit of life? How can he protect her? He couldn’t protect Devorah from her own failure of spirit, from the heel that caught in the hem of her skirt. He thinks that in all his life he has prevented nothing, he has made nothing happen. He would do anything for Pearl, anything that would keep her safe. But he can’t think of a thing.
27
“The potassium levels are much better,” a doctor says to a nurse. “You might want to take a look at this,” he says to Tom. Tom comes toward the bed. The doctor moves the sheets; they are looking at the bag attached to the tube coming from Pearl’s vagina. She is embarrassed that Tom is seeing this. “We’ve got a nice urine output here; it’s brilliant.”
Pearl would like to laugh. Brilliant to be producing urine.
“Morrisey’s cut the Midazolam down. She’ll be more with the program now. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re getting there.”
Out of the woods. Out of what woods? What woods has she been in? There are no trees; there have never been trees. She has been here in this room that is not white but that feels white, windowless, dim, the lights making a bluish haze over everything, so that she has no idea of season or of time. Christmas. It’s Christmastime.
But what does time mean to her, since the medication—Midazolam—has turned her into a being without memory? What is time without memory? Who is the I without a past? Is it possible to have an I for whom the present is continuous, eternal, like the dead, or God, or Joseph’s mother, rocking and gibbering in the Regina Caeli Home for the Aged and Infirm? Pearl is not the same person that she was several hours ago. Her memory has been robbed. Who, then, is she now?
There are tubes in her arm, her nose, her vagina. She is seeing things more clearly: the horses are doctors. And something new is happening: something she hasn’t felt for many weeks. She is hungry. She is thinking of the rice pudding her mother makes, creamy and sweet, with raisins and cinnamon. How can she be thinking of raisins and cinnamon when she is so close to death? Her companion at the end of the white road has disappeared. There is only a blankness that she fears, a windless, treeless plain. They say they are giving her back her life. What they call her life she knows by another name: hunger, it is called.
I must tell you something strange, strange yet a scientific fact. The paradox: as a starving person is given nutrition, she becomes aware of hunger, an awareness that was blocked when the starvation progressed to a critical state. Like other starving people, Pearl had not felt hunger; now, fed, she has begun to crave.
How can we understand this? Don’t we believe, hasn’t everything we’ve experienced taught us to believe, that nourishment diminishes hunger rather than increasing it? Is appetite fed on food? Must we make the one-to-one equation between appetite and life?
I find it fortunate that Pearl isn’t thinking of these things. She is thinking only of the arrival of hunger. And its companions: fear and shame.
28
Maria waits till seven the next morning, which is when she knows breakfast is served, to phone Joseph. Ridiculous how meals have become the major events of her day. Like a prisoner, she thinks, or a mental patient, or a person in an old-age home.
After breakfast, Joseph asks Maria if she’d like to go for a walk; he’ll man the phones. She refuses. He asks if she minds if he goes. No, of course, she says, go on.
He comes back with a book by Ngaio Marsh and two decks of playing cards. She cannot seem to read, but she can play gin rummy.
He thinks of playing cards with his mother.
Every hour, Maria phones Dr. Morrisey. And every hour she is told the same thing: The doctor is unavailable. There is nothing to report. The doctor will return your call when she is free.
“I’m going to go out and get us some sandwiches for lunch,” Joseph says. “That hotel bar is just too grim. Even this room is better.”
“I’ll be here,” Maria says.
Joseph walks out of the hotel, his book heavy in his pocket. Odd, he thinks, to be reading about John Ruskin in Dublin. The Irish humor, the Irish generosity, the Irish sense of chance and miracle would have exasperated him. And why would anyone, he imagines Ruskin thinking—he for whom the eye was all—go to a country he believed populated by dirty, superstitious beggars, a country whose great buildings could be counted on one hand, a country whose mountains lacked sublimity, a country with only minor ruins?
Joseph has only three hours for a glimpse of Dublin, a situation Ruskin would have thought barbarous. Most likely it is, he thinks, but then I am a barbarian. Unrefined. “That’s very fine,” he hears Dr. Meyers’s voice saying, a phrase that had the power to abash or to exalt him. He wonders what Seymour Meyers would think of what his granddaughter has done. He would applaud the impulse—martyrdom—but not the terms in which it was expressed—human despair. He would have thought despair a sin. So much, of course, is in the terms. The terms determ
ine what we see. For the first time, he makes the connection between term and determine.
What is knowing? What can be known, really known? What does it mean to know well? Ruskin knew some things well, and yet his blind spots made much of his knowing unreliable. And is knowing living? What is living? How do you understand a life? What does Pearl understand by this thing she seems so willing to give up?
He is tormented by the idea that he doesn’t know what to do for her. Maria has been told she can do nothing, but she knows what she’ll do when she’s allowed. Maria wants him here to help keep Pearl alive. What does Pearl want? He is here to do whatever it is she wants, and whatever Maria wants. Suppose the two are different?
The air is wet and tastes of iron, or of coins. There is a smell to it that he knows he has never smelled before, yet it seems deeply familiar: sweetish, smoky, something like wood or coal yet with more soil to it. A smell with a deep brown color: is this peat? As he walks, the smell seems curative, quieteningly modest. He feels it slowing his pace.
He will ask the way to Trinity College. No, he will not. He will look at the jade-colored river, the scarlet and sapphire doors.
But as he walks, his heart drops with the sense of his own failure. He doesn’t know how to look without guidance. Without an idea anterior to sight, without a context provided, not from his own imagination or experience but from the imagination and experience of someone else, he doesn’t know how to look. He doesn’t know what to look for. This makes him seem pathetic to himself. How can he become a person with a greatness of response, like Ruskin? When something pleases his eye here, he has no words for the terms by which he is pleased. The gold lettering on a store window, the shiny-green blue or red paint on a door: how should he compare these to other things that have pleased him? The things that please him here seem merely pleasant, and his inability to see more in them makes him feel that he has failed.