by Mary Gordon
“I suppose you’re proud of yourself,” the woman behind the desk says.
“I am, rather,” Maria says, smiling pleasantly.
“This isn’t the States, you know. You can’t get away with that kind of behavior here.”
“Yes, I know. In the States we have things like the Bill of Rights. Concepts like individual freedom.”
“There’s freedom and there’s license, and then there’s your kind of carry-on, which there isn’t even words for.”
Joseph thinks the two of them will go on this way until someone makes them stop, and their sniping is much more unbearable for him than the simple assault of Maria’s screaming.
“Insufferable,” the woman says, but Joseph sees she’s running out of steam and is giving up the fight, whereas Maria’s just getting started.
We have to admire Maria, or at least I do, for sheer persistence in getting something done. For a disregard for propriety in the face of what she believes is a larger good. This is why Pearl wants her kept away; her definition of the good is what she believes to be the good. It almost never includes refraining from doing something, and it rarely includes restraining her conviction that she knows what is best.
A woman comes out of the elevator. Young, blond, short-haired, slightly unfeminine, an athlete, a runner perhaps, some kind of track and field event: high jump or javelin, Joseph thinks. We have already encountered Hazel Morrisey, but Joseph and Maria have not. Her youth surprises them; they are uneasy having someone so much younger than they in charge of the most important thing in their lives.
She walks up to the two of them.
“I’m Dr. Morrisey. We spoke earlier.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t call what we did speaking,” Maria says. “You offered pronouncements, and I was meant to submit.”
“As I tried to suggest, Mrs. Meyers—”
“It’s Ms. I’m not married.”
The doctor doesn’t skip a beat.
“Your daughter’s welfare is my concern, not your narcissistic needs. I wonder what you think your performance here has accomplished?”
“It brought you here. I’ve been trying to contact you all day.”
“I can see where Pearl gets her will. I only hope we can use it to keep her alive.”
“You said she wasn’t going to die.”
“I’m doing everything possible. I’ve had to take some drastic measures, measures that might seem barbaric. She pulled the feeding tube out of her throat so we sewed another to her nose, beside her nostril. It’s one reason I don’t want you to see her.”
“I’m her mother. There’s nothing I shouldn’t see.”
“Perhaps if the world were a fairy tale, a mother could see everything, but it’s not. Besides, you don’t know what you shouldn’t see unless you know what it looks like. Your daughter with a feeding tube sewn to her nostril is not a pretty sight, but she can’t afford to be without nourishment anymore. Her friend confirms that she hasn’t eaten any food in six weeks.”
“Her friend?”
“The bloke she lives with.”
Maria hopes it doesn’t register that this is news to her.
But if she doesn’t admit to not knowing who he is, she has no hope of reaching him or even finding out his name. She knows her daughter’s address—or at least the place where mail was sent. But maybe that isn’t where she really lived. How odd, Maria thinks, I’m a person who has been lied to. I am a parent from whom my daughter’s living arrangements were kept. Which means, of course, the details of her sexual life.
For a person of Maria’s age and background, the idea that someone is lying to them about sex is often a surprise. People like Maria and her friends thought they were the deceivers; they couldn’t imagine that they could be deceived, not about sex. Not them.
She’s never felt she needed to know the details of Pearl’s sex life. A sexual person was an adult by the simple of fact of being sexual. She had no more right to know about Pearl’s sex life than Pearl had to know about hers. Pearl had never offered information; Maria had never asked.
She looks into the intelligent uninflected eyes of Dr. Hazel Morrisey. She needs something from this woman; she must calculate how to get it. The gifts that make her good at her job, able to get things she needs from the people she works with, come into play. Dr. Morrisey’s face suggests an amenability that her voice did not. Maria must meet her adversary at the place she is and acknowledge the rightness of her position. Establish a common ground. She has done it so often in the past, it isn’t difficult to do now.
“I know you think I need to be kept away from my daughter,” Maria says, as if a concession has been absolutely and unequivocally made.
“For a time,” says Hazel Morrisey, blinking like a gunman momentarily relaxing his stare at the opposing gunman.
“And I understand you may be unwilling to put me directly in touch with this young man. But I was wondering if you could possibly give him my number and offer him the option of getting in touch with me.”
“I could certainly do that without compromising anything. Pearl’s unwilling to see the boy as well.”
Joseph can see Maria’s shoulders soften with the relief of a competitor who, if she hasn’t yet won, cannot be said to have entirely lost. If Pearl is cutting herself off from everyone, it is far more tolerable than abandoning her mother in favor of a young man. He sees that Maria has begun to win Hazel Morrisey over. Is it just her physical presence? Or is it that, despite herself, Hazel Morrisey was impressed with Maria’s civil disobedience, framed as it has become by a display of reasonableness, an ability to compromise? Whatever it is, he can see that Dr. Morrisey—like everyone else—has lost at least some of her initial will to resist Pearl’s mother.
“I’ll give the fella your number. It will be up to him if he wants to act on it.”
“Of course.”
“You see, Ms. Meyers, if Pearl is going to trust me, she has to trust me to respect her wishes. I’m already going against her by taking the measures I feel it’s vital to take. I’m trying to let her know I’m really with her.”
“I understand.”
“She’s never been on any kind of psychotropic medication? Prozac, or anything like that?”
“She’s never been particularly depressed. Ordinary adolescent ups and downs but nothing like this.”
“No anorexia or bulimia? Her relationship to food was normal?”
“She loved to eat and is naturally slender. She didn’t think about food much, other than liking certain things.”
“And politics?”
“I never thought she was very political. When I was involved with things like school board elections and city council races, she took no interest. She wouldn’t go to demonstrations with me after she was quite young, and I didn’t force her. She said she didn’t care about voting because the whole system was corrupt. This made me very angry, so we didn’t talk about it. I guess I was disappointed that she wasn’t interested in politics, that we couldn’t share that.”
“I was wondering if maybe she thought she was pleasing you by doing something political. That this was a way she could please you and please herself.”
“By giving up her life?”
“I’ve observed that some young women seem to have a special impulse toward martyrdom. I think of it as the Antigone complex.” The doctor blushes; for the first time she is girlish. “Although you mustn’t go looking for it in the medical journals. It’s only the way I name it for myself.”
Martyrdom. Antigone. Joseph is surprised to hear the doctor using those words to describe Pearl’s situation. He wonders if there isn’t another name, more clinical, more professional, used in countries less steeped in the history and language of the church by doctors who haven’t had the accident of a classical education.
He watches the two women, Maria and the doctor. They are leaning toward each other. They understand each other, and they both believe they understand Pearl. The basis of their conne
ction, he realizes, is this: they have both rejected, quickly and automatically, the concept of martyrdom as a useful idea. Thrown it out of the sphere of the acceptable, as you would throw out dirty water or sour milk.
He is not so ready to throw it out. Again he wonders if we must necessarily believe, before we can begin to speak with the assumption of a common language, that nothing is worth dying for. Is it one of the things we must all agree on as civilized human beings, like the idea that slavery is always evil?
He watches the two women talking, nodding in agreement, their heads bobbing up and down. Their nodding discomfits him. What is it to be human if you are unwilling to give up your life?
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. . . . Those who want to save their life will lose it.
Is that it, then? Is his belief in the value of giving up your life the product of his early training in a religion in which he no longer believes? Can you lose your faith and hold on to what that faith insists on? Isn’t that, in fact, the purest faith, faith without faith? Faith without hope? Faith without the possibility of faith’s consolation?
But Pearl was not brought up as a person of faith. What, then, is the source of her conviction that it’s worth giving your life for something? And for what? He tries to understand what she was doing before she was stopped. He senses the taste of what she’s done, but the details are vague: figures in the mist, shadows of the dead in the Greek underworld.
Are they right, these two women, that it is Pearl who doesn’t understand life and they who do? In their conviction that life must be by its nature desirable, good? That life must be preferable to death?
Joseph can’t bear the idea that Pearl might die. The thought of her death paralyzes him, terrifies him. But he doesn’t want her to have to live in a world in which the possibility of dying for something is automatically considered sick or ridiculous. He wants to protect her against their closed pleased faces, the faces of the mother and the doctor, refusing to allow the question “Is it always desirable to live?”
Perhaps you too think this question should never be allowed. Or that the answer is so obvious that the question is simply a waste of time. Or that there is something wrong with Joseph for even considering it. He is asking these things of himself. And yet he does not choose to disallow the question, because he believes that to do that dishonors what Pearl has gone through and what she has seen.
Only now does the doctor acknowledge his presence.
“You must be Joseph Kasperman,” she says. “I read the letter Pearl wrote you. It was forwarded to me by the embassy; I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, of course not.”
“Something interesting: when I first sedated her, she said your name. ‘Joseph won’t make me,’ she said.”
What does it mean? How can it make him feel about himself that he’s important to her by his potential failure to make something happen? Of course she’s right. He has never, he believes, made anyone do anything. Yet she wants something of him. Help in giving up her life. He won’t do it; no matter how much she wants it of him, no matter how much she believes he’s the only one who could.
He’s afraid to look at Maria, to see her disappointed face, that in this area of life that is most important to her, he has won something. That Pearl wanted her mother kept away and suggested there was something desirable about him. But why think of it in those terms, winning or losing, the terms of a game? Yet he feels he has won something, some place or placement in the regard of the one who is most important to both of them. Once, he would have said Devorah was the most important, but she disappointed him and she is dead. There is no one who even comes close to Pearl in importance. It is possible to say there is no one else whom he can say, with certainty, he loves. Does he love Maria? Certainly he did, at one time; when he was younger, when he didn’t mind her winning. What has happened is that he has lost so much he now resents her winning what he thinks is more than her share of the prizes. So perhaps we are not as surprised as he that he takes pleasure in this victory over Maria when he has spent a lifetime not competing with her, in no small part because he always knew he could never want to win as badly. Certainly, he tells himself, he doesn’t want to displace her in Pearl’s affections. And when he thinks of his prize, he sees how questionable its value is. His only distinction is that his pressure is light enough so he won’t be in the way. It is simply this: he isn’t forceful enough to keep someone alive.
When finally he looks at Maria’s face, it isn’t disappointment or resentment he sees there but something new, something unfamiliar. Is it humility?
“Could Joseph go and see her then?” Maria asks the doctor.
“Not just now. She’s awfully weak. We want to strengthen her up with some nourishment.”
They mean force-feeding, he thinks; the tube sewn into her flesh. Why don’t they say what they mean? But perhaps it’s better not to. There must be a reason for using language in a way that muffles the truth, that filters it rather than exposing it, a kind of language that is born not of the impulse to tyranny but the impulse to kindness. Is it possible to call it kindness rather than disregard for truth?
Joseph can feel that the atmosphere has changed. But it didn’t break with the violence of a storm. It was a gradual lifting; the sky’s turning from gray to silver, then a hint of blue. Hope has entered. How?
Maria has done something outrageous, unacceptable, something that should have been dealt with by punishment. And she has not been punished. The opposite has happened. She has got what she wanted.
The prodigal son. Always when he heard the story he identified with the older brother, the stay-at-home. How hurt he must have been at his father’s welcome for the delinquent who had done nothing to earn love and had been loved greatly anyway, maybe more greatly.
Maria, though, has never come back for her inheritance. She believes she has given up her share of the fatted calf. Is it a trick or an equivocation that she allows him to spend her father’s money on Pearl? To have used her father’s money to take time off to get her degree in social work when Pearl was small. To have made certain (there was no need for this, but she felt she needed legal certainties) that, even before Devorah died, Pearl was provided for in Joseph’s will. Was this another case of Maria’s having her cake and eating it too?
He wonders about Pearl’s physical state, wonders why Maria hasn’t asked more questions, wonders whether it’s his place to ask. Perhaps Maria doesn’t want to know details; she often prefers not to have too much information; it might get in her way. He thinks, though, that it might be all right to ask one question of the doctor. Only one.
“Is she in any pain?”
It says something about Joseph, I think, that he asks a question rooted in the present. A modest question, an answerable question, one that doesn’t ask for a dangerous prediction that could be proved humiliatingly wrong. I wonder what he would think if he knew that the doctors believed that because Pearl had no memory of pain, her pain was not real. But Dr. Morrisey wouldn’t think of discussing that with him. I think we can understand why she is relieved to have been asked a question she can answer.
“No, she’s rather heavily sedated at the moment. She’s taking a lot of medication: sedatives, nutriments, antidepressants. They’ll get her out of this crisis. But it’s going to be a long haul before anyone can be sure she’s out of danger as a suicide. Because whatever else she’s doing, whatever else we call it, whatever she calls it, moral witness or political statement, we have to understand it’s at least in part a suicide attempt.”
So the doctor is frightened too, Joseph thinks. This makes him feel safer.
“Come upstairs to my office,” she says. “It’s ridiculous to have this conversation standing in the middle of the corridor.”
The receptionist sniffs. “They’ll be needing passes.”
Dr. Morrrisey signs something. None of the three of them look
s at the receptionist.
The doctor’s office is a windowless cubicle. There are a few medical books on the shelves, a picture of her in a rowboat with a dark man and two dark children. None of them fair like her. So we share something, Maria thinks, in having children who do not resemble us. She’d like to mention that but decides against it.
“Pearl has never shown any signs of being suicidal,” Maria says, “so do you really think this is a suicide attempt? The terms of her statement are moral and political rather than emotional.”
“Of course, it’s very complicated, and a political death by self-starvation is not unheard of here in Ireland. You can’t go far around Dublin without seeing some image of Bobby Sands. Some people think he was a martyr, some people think he was a murderer; after all this time there’s still no consensus. But his death is still very much on people’s minds.”
“What sort of sense would it make to call Bobby Sands’s death a suicide?” Maria says. “I mean, to classify it with other suicides, which are a result of some sort of depression or personal despair. It wouldn’t make any sense to call Bobby Sands a neurotic.”
Joseph is glad she’s said that. He remembers thinking of the Buhddist monks during the Vietnam years, setting themselves on fire to witness to the injustice of the war. Had their death had any effect? Was any effect worth Pearl’s death? No, not to him. Yet he would not call what she did a suicide attempt; that would dishonor her.
“Well, what your daughter’s done has a lot of different aspects to it of course, we can’t discount that, but unlike Bobby Sands and other political martyrs she acted entirely alone; she had no community. So that makes it more like a suicide, in my opinion. And then the first reason she gives for her death is to mark the death of the young man for whom she feels responsible. That’s a response of private guilt, private remorse, private atonement—even though the boy had relatives who had political connections, Pearl’s connection to him wasn’t political.