by Mary Gordon
But what is he doing, thinking about Ruskin, when he is in Dublin because Pearl is trying to die? Perhaps this is his punishment; he cannot look because it is wrong for him to be looking at all. But what is right? Waiting; waiting and praying. Only he is a person who has long ago given up the possibility of prayer.
The air is raw and damp; it is the end of December. The cold of the pavement seeps through his new Italian shoes. He would like a hot drink. He imagines tea will be good in Ireland.
He walks into a café that beckons him because of its suggestion of Victorian—no, Edwardian—gentility. Cakes and scones sit solidly, reassuringly, on plates with pedestals. They offer a solid comfort without the risk of alarm or surprise. He chooses tea and cheese sandwiches and takes them to the cash register, fumbling with the unfamiliar coins. No one is impatient. The young woman at the register fishes the right amount from his open palm; he is not unpleased by the touch of her warmish fingers, at the slight grazing of her light-pink polished nails.
A waitress in a black uniform and a white maid’s cap wipes the marble surface of his table with a damp blue-and-white checkered rag.
“Desperate, isn’t it?” she says. “Perishing.”
For a minute he wonders if she knows something about Pearl. But then he understands she’s only talking about the weather. He can’t get over her easy, colloquial use of the words or their cognates: desperate, perish.
Desperate: to be without hope. Perish from perdere: to lose, to be lost. To be lost and without hope: such large, truthful ideas about the nature of life. He very much likes what it suggests about a culture, that such concepts can be so domesticated, so simplified, as to apply to weather.
“It’s not so bad,” he says, smiling.
“You’re a brave man,” she says, with a smile and an intake of breath that could be a sigh, a sign of agreement, or disagreement.
He looks around him. He listens to the buzz of talk for what he thinks of as a distinguishing tone. People here are not nearly so good-looking as they are in Italy, maybe because it’s rainy and cold. But no, it’s more than that. No haircut here is a work of art. Teeth do not flash in triumph; eyebrows don’t suggest a later assignation or an upcoming fistfight or a quick, mutually profitable deal. There is laughter, but it isn’t dangerous. No knives gleam in this laughter; no outraged honor bubbles at its surface. Voices aren’t raised. Yet there’s not the fuzzy mutedness of London tearooms; he knows he must imagine bloodlettings here, but such imagination would require work.
Men sit alone at tables and read newspapers; women too. And some of them read books. They regularly light up cigarettes. One woman takes a flake of tobacco off her tongue.
A waitress stands beside him with a brown teapot and offers to fill his cup. The steamy air of the room has made the wisps escaping her chignon go softly curly. Her upper lip, which has a light dusting of down—traces only, bee pollen—is dampened a bit by sweat. He imagines that if he embraced her, the smell of her armpits would be pleasantly rank: an overworked young animal’s. He likes the whiteness of her fingers, and the dark blue stone of her ring, and the greenish vein that travels up the inside of her arm.
So that is what I have become, he thinks, a man of a certain age, a widower, thinking of the details of the body of the young girl who brings me tea.
“You’re American?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’d say Americans have the right end of the stick about most things. I’d love to go over there.”
Does she imagine him as her sugar daddy? A pathetic older man who will usher her into prosperity, a life without a maid’s cap, a damp rag? What is he thinking? What has become of him?
“Many people are disappointed when they actually get to America,” he says.
“I wouldn’t be, I know. I’ve got two sisters there, in Boston. You’re not from Boston yourself?”
“New York.”
“I’d be that terrified of New York.”
“It’s not unsafe, really.”
He thinks of how dull he must be for her to talk to, how disappointing.
“If I went, I’d like to go someplace warm. LA, maybe, or New Orleans. But I won’t go anytime soon. My mother’d be completely destroyed to send another kid there. There’s only me and my brother left. He’s much younger than me. Ten years old, and a right gurrier.”
Joseph has, simultaneously, no notion of what a gurrier might be and at the same time a clear image of a light-haired stocky boy running down a sidewalk, fists clenched, cheeks red, legs pumping, making a roaring noise.
“I have no siblings myself,” he says, and then feels ridiculous at the suggestion that he and she are in a position so that anything about them could be compared.
“Large families are grand, or they can be if you’ve the means. Have you children yourself?”
“No, I’m a widower.”
“Well, then, you’re on your own,” she says, her damp cheeks turning pink. He’s embarrassed her with excessive information, the implied plea for sympathy.
“I travel a great deal.”
“That’s grand for you then,” she says. He can tell she’s eager to get away.
He finishes his tea, his cheese sandwiches. He tips the waitress lavishly. She blushes once again.
“Give my regards to Broadway,” she says, raising her hand as if she were waving him off as he sailed away.
29
Every time Pearl opens her eyes, he is there: Tom, her suicide watcher. He is about her age, maybe a little older. He’s already beginning to lose his hair. He keeps trying to read his medical textbook, but he often falls asleep. If she really wanted to pull the tube out again, she could try when he was napping. But it doesn’t matter what she wants; the tube is sewn to her, and the drug—Midazolam—even in the reduced dosage, makes any action difficult. He opens his eyes and sees her looking at him.
“How’s it going?” he says.
She smiles.
“That’s a stupid thing to say, I know,” he says. He blushes and comes over to straighten her sheet.
“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”
“Nothing I won’t recover from. Dr. Morrisey reamed me out good and proper. She’s a tough one. Brilliant doctor, everyone wants to train with her, but she scares the bejeezus out of most of us. And she’s got a real stake in your case. How is it with the lower dosage of Midazolam?”
She doesn’t want to tell him that she has become more fearful of death now that she is moving farther away from it, as if it is punishing her by replacing love with fear. Love casts out fear. Fear casts out love. She says instead, “I think I’m hungry.”
“Well, you would be, you see. The ketones start kicking in. I’m sorry, that’s technical, but the odd thing is, the more you’re nourished, the hungrier you feel. And you’re probably more depressed, because you’re losing the anorectic euphoria.”
Losing anorectic euphoria. That’s how they think of it then. She would like to tell him that she was happy and now she is not, that she knew what was right and now she doesn’t, that she was in love with death and now she fears it. And that she is hungry for her mother’s rice pudding and wants to see her mother. But this last she feels she can resist. In case it’s not too late and she can still become the one thing, the one sentence, as she had planned when she was not a hungry person or a person of fear.
“Just try and rest,” he says to her. “Dr. Morrisey will be in pretty soon. She’ll want to hear what you’re going through.”
Through to where? she wants to say.
There is a knock on the door and it opens. Seeing it’s Dr. Morrisey, Tom begins to blush again. He backs out of the room, as if he feels he has no right to be there.
“You seem more alert,” Dr. Morrisey says. “How does that feel?”
She doesn’t want to tell the doctor that she’s hungry.
“Tom O’Kelley’s a fine young man, very sensitive. He’ll make a good doctor.”
“My father wa
s a doctor,” Pearl says. Once the words are out, she wishes she could take them back. She doesn’t want to give the doctor anything.
“What kind of doctor is he?”
“I don’t know, I never met him. And it’s was, not is. He’s dead.”
That, Pearl thinks, will shut her up. It is a new impulse in her, the impulse to be rude. She wants to make the doctor know that she is nothing to her and she can make nothing happen.
“You were studying the Irish language here. I understand you’re a student of linguistics.”
Pearl turns her head away.
“What I find interesting about the decision you made is that, for a person devoted to language, you seemed to have so little faith in it.”
Pearl turns her head toward the doctor, interested despite herself.
“What do you mean?”
“You seemed to think that action, your taking your life, was the only way to communicate what you believed. As if your body were stronger than words.”
Pearl would like to snort, make some sign of derision, but the tube makes that impossible. She will have to use words, words only, for that. “I did write a statement. It was on the ground next to me; I think you read it. Suppose I’d just written that and passed it out on Grafton Street. Would anyone pay attention? There are too many words spoken by too many people.”
“But what you’ve done: not many have done that. You really have got people to pay attention.”
She would like to accept this as a compliment, assert her pride.
“But for how long? If you die, there’s no chance you’ll be able to change anything in the world. There’ll be nothing you can do.”
“There’s nothing I can do anyway.”
“Nothing?”
“Not enough. Not enough to make it worth it.”
“Life, you mean.”
“Yes. I mean my life.”
Hazel Morrisey is silent for a moment, heartened that at least there is some conversation, worried that the next thing she’ll say will be wrong.
“You must be in a great deal of pain to believe that. I understand that nothing might seem worthwhile. But you didn’t want to die just to be free of pain; you wanted to be saying something by your death—and that, I feel, is a sign of hope.”
“Hope for what?”
“Your hope that communication is possible, that perhaps something can be changed. That you have some interest in the work of the world: what you can do in it.”
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“We do what we can,” Dr. Morrisey says.
“You sound like my mother,” Pearl says.
“I’m going to assume you didn’t mean that as a compliment,” Dr. Morrisey says.
Pearl smiles. “I’m feeling hungry,” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s decided to tell the doctor this. It seems less personal than telling her something about what she would call her self. Yes, I do think the body is stronger than words, she wants to say to the doctor, but I don’t want to talk about that. If I tell you I’m hungry, that’s saying something about my body. That will shut you up.
“The paradox is, nutrition makes you hungrier. Ketones,” the doctor says.
“I know all about it,” Pearl says, in a childish voice, a bratty voice, a voice I had never heard her use to anyone.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re very angry at me for thwarting your plan. You felt you were in charge of your own life by deciding to take it. Then I come in and make you live, as if I had no respect for your wishes. As if I believed I knew better than you did. I want you to know that’s not the case. I do want to keep you alive, because I have faith and hope that in time you’ll find you want to live. I believe your death would be the waste of a valuable life. I believe you have many things to live for.”
“I already told you. Not enough.”
“We’ll talk more later,” Hazel Morrisey says.
What the doctor says has interested her despite herself. It has been a long time since anything has made her mind feel lively rather than paralyzed. She wishes the doctor would never come back.
She wonders what it can mean about words if the body is stronger than words. Which she believes it is. She would like to tell the doctor, Don’t you see what I was doing? Turning my body into a sentence, a sentence everyone would have to understand.
But the doctor wouldn’t understand. All she wants is for Pearl to live. She doesn’t ask: for what. She is one of those people who believes the answer is obvious. She doesn’t understand.
30
Joseph unwraps sandwiches for the both of them.
“You’re good, Joseph.”
He frowns. She knows he doesn’t like to be reminded of his goodness.
“I can’t just sit here doing nothing. Let’s go to the hospital. Maybe there’s a chink in Dr. Morrisey’s armor.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I don’t think anything’s a good idea. But I want to be there.”
“Let’s walk, then. You need some exercise, or you won’t have any chance of a normal night’s sleep.”
“Normal,” she says. “What would be normal in this situation?”
He understands that she wants him to take charge of things.
He asks the woman at the hotel desk for her advice on getting taxis; she recommends that they walk to a taxi rank half a mile down the quay. She has so thoroughly understood his wishes—a little exercise, but not too much, and then conveyance—that for a moment he would like to take her in his arms.
They give the cabdriver the hospital’s name and he starts off, as all cabdrivers do, gunning his engine as if he were digging his spurs into the sides of a reluctant horse.
“No one too sick, I hope,” he says. “Although I suppose you wouldn’t be in hospital unless you were that sick. What I mean to say is, I hope it’s not critical. Terrible time of the year for sickness.”
“What’s a good time?” Maria says, determined, Joseph can see, to cut short his professional garrulity. But she fails.
“Now, in the good weather, like—I mean to say, spring or summer—the old don’t go popping off the way they do in winter. Particularly around the New Year. It must be some kind of stress for them. Where’re you from in the States?”
“New York,” Joseph says. Maria looks out the window.
“Never been there. Went once to Orlando, Florida. Disney World was a great gas, I’ll say that for it. Nothing like that over here.”
“Why is Viagra like Disney World?” Maria says.
“Beg pardon?” says the driver.
“Because you have to wait an hour for a ten-minute ride.”
This silences the cabby. Joseph isn’t sure whether he didn’t get the joke or was shocked that a woman told it. Whatever the reason, Maria’s tactic worked. There’s no more chattering. They drive through the Dublin streets in silence.
The woman behind the desk in the psychiatric section of the hospital has tight blond curls that sit on her scalp like snails on a rock; when she smiles, her eyes narrow and there is no welcome in them when she says “Welcome.” Perhaps that’s why they hired her, to discourage visitors. Her dentures look as if they might be made of bone; the gums are the pink of new pencil erasers.
“I’d like to see my daughter.” Maria says Pearl’s name.
“You’d need a special pass for that, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s one for you.”
Maria knows that Hazel Morrisey has not issued her a pass. She knows there’ll be no indication of permission beside her name, and she knows that when the woman sees it she’ll be glad.
“I’m afraid the patient is restricted as to visitors,” says the woman, flashing her eraser-colored gums. There are drops of spittle at the corners of her mouth; when she smiles they shine like bits of broken glass. Maria imagines that her power to prevent has made her literally salivate.
Maria recognizes the woman’s style; it’s similar to the nuns in grade school who refused
you recess or permission to go out to the school yard after lunch. Joy in refusal has dried this woman’s skin; it has cut ridges into her square fingernails.
“I’d like to speak to your supervisor,” Maria says.
“The supervisor’s gone home for the day. You may consult her on the morrow.”
Her use of on the morrow infuriates Maria. “Let me put it another way,” she says. “Either you let me talk to someone who can help me see my daughter, or I’m going to stand here and scream at the top of my lungs until someone takes me to the psychiatric ward.”
Joseph is wondering if she’ll do it. He doesn’t know if he wants her to. He too dislikes the woman behind the desk and he has always found Maria’s transgressions compelling, even when he hasn’t approved.
The woman behind the desk doesn’t know how to predict what will come next. Maria steps back. She plants her feet apart firmly so that the ground will give her as much support as possible; she leans her head back, closes her eyes, and puts her hands on her hips. Screams come from her mouth—one, two, three jets of water from a hose—a shock of color in the neutral-colored, anonymously furnished lobby, as shocking as if a fox or a leopard had run through. Joseph wouldn’t be surprised to see claw marks on the leather of the chairs and the couches. Will someone come now? Surely someone must come, someone in uniform, a policeman or a guard, to silence her, to lay on hands. But no one in uniform appears. Maria goes on screaming. He doesn’t know where she gets the strength, the voice.
“Stop that. Stop that at once!”
The woman behind the desk has risen to her feet. Her face is drained of color, except for two circular red spots on her whey-colored cheeks, like the circles on the cheeks of a cloth doll.
Maria goes on screaming.
“I’m going to call someone in authority!”
Maria doesn’t stop screaming until she hears the woman on the phone reporting what she’s doing to someone she’s referring to as doctor.
“You can give over now. Dr. Morrisey’s coming down.”
“That’s all I asked for,” Maria says, wiping the corners of her lips with a tissue as if she’s just finished a petit four.