by Mary Gordon
“And like anyone who wants to commit suicide, she believed her life wasn’t meaningful. At least not as meaningful as her death. A suicide is essentially overwhelmed by feelings of hopeless passivity. Suicides can’t imagine that anything they do matters at all. So when a suicide looks at something horrible, or a series of horrible things, she’s not the only one to see it, but to her it has a force that blots out anything else in life. All of us have our days when life doesn’t seem worth it, but we usually get over them. A suicide has no other kind of day. It’s as if she’s always looking directly at the sun or at some sort of unfiltered light. Not that the light isn’t there, the rest of us retain our vision by a series of filters that block things out and protect us. A suicide can’t protect herself from the things that most of us protect ourselves from. It’s not that what she says about the world is wrong, it’s not that she’s seeing things that aren’t there or that the rest of us have never seen, but we push them out of our field of vision because we have to.”
He sees Pearl on a desert landscape, parched, burned by a relentless sun. There are caves she could seek shade in, rocks she could shelter behind, if only for a moment. But she won’t. She won’t get out of the light. Is there no one who will say that there is reason for this, even courage in it? He dare not say it here, not in front of these women.
“She’s going to need extended treatment. I assume you’ll be taking her home to New York; I hope you’ll be in support of that.”
“Of course,” Maria says.
Who will treat her? Joseph wonders. How will she be treated? He worries about a rough touch on this skin that has been seared by the too-bright sun, from which she has refused shelter. Her burnt skin needs soothing, protection. What if the hand is clumsy? He looks at Hazel Morrisey’s square hands. They have shoved tubes in Pearl against her will; they have sewn things into her flesh. If the touch that thinks of itself as treatment, even cure, is too harsh, what will happen to the wounded, abraded skin?
“You see, the drugs and the nutrition we’re giving her will help temporarily. But what we need to do, or what she’ll need to do for herself, is to have some sense of her own strength to choose to live her life, some ability to forgive herself for the death she thinks she’s caused so she doesn’t believe she deserves to die. It’s a lot easier to prescribe medication than to track the course of her guilt. She’ll need a great deal of support.”
Hazel Morrisey knows this is a clumsy attempt to put into words the questions that take up her mind: What is the relationship between psychotropic drugs and real inner change? Yet she has to make things clear to Pearl’s mother; she has to say what she believes: that both are needed, both medication and the slow cure of the soul. A soul she cannot, as a scientist, prove the existence of and therefore cannot publicly call by name.
“It goes without saying that we’ll give her all the support she needs.”
“It will need to be on her own terms and at her own pace.”
“Of course,” Maria says.
Joseph wants to say to Maria, I’m afraid to leave her in your hands. But he doesn’t know what his own hands—lacking, as he does, authority or any kind of leverage—could keep Pearl from.
“There’s nothing much to do, now, but wait.”
“If you asked me to do anything else,” Maria says, “run a hundred miles, move a mountain, it would be easier.”
“I understand,” the doctor says. “I wish I could say something different.”
They understand each other, Joseph thinks. What, he wonders, does Pearl understand?
31
“Your mother’s a real piece of work,” Tom says. It’s the first time Pearl’s seen him laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“They wouldn’t let her in to see Morrisey, so she just stood in the lobby and screamed until they sent Morrisey down to talk to her. I see where you get your determination.”
“I’m nothing like my mother.”
“Well, I don’t know her, and I don’t even know you. I was just thinking of my mother. My mother wouldn’t stand up to anyone, she’s terrified if anyone says boo to her, and she’s always letting people get ahead of her on the bus queue or at the supermarket. I guess I’m like that too. We’re a pretty quiet family.”
“How many are you?”
“Six brothers and sisters, my father, and my mother. We all live on a farm down in County Clare.”
“It’s just my mother and me.”
“Well, we’re pretty ordinary.”
“You’re lucky,” she says.
“Yeah, well, you’re lucky to have a mother who sticks up for you fearlessly. You’re less alone in the world that way. My parents—they never went to college—they’d be terrified to say the first word to Dr. Morrisey. I’d die a thousand deaths if they ever met her.”
“Do you miss living in the country?”
“I do, yeah. I hope to go back after the training. But who knows? . . . How are you feeling, then. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Just tell me some things about your life.”
“I’m not much of a talker. I don’t think you’d find anything I had to say that interesting.”
“Tell me something about your animals.”
He feels on the spot. He was never good at talking to girls. And now he knows, somehow, it’s terribly important to say the right thing. She’s asked for a story about animals. That’s a good sign; an interest in animals is always a hopeful thing. He’s read about experiments where some depressives were given dogs to care for and others put on Prozac, and the ones who had the dogs to care for did as well as the ones on medication. He feels himself begin to sweat, but he always feels like this when he talks to a girl. Of course, she isn’t a girl, she’s a patient, Morrisey’s patient, and he’s already screwed up once. Frantically, he tries to remember everything about every animal he’s ever known. A story comes to him. Perhaps she’ll like it. People have liked it in the past.
“I’ll tell you this one story, about a dog, his name was Nick, and a cat, his name was Scooter.
“Nick was part collie: long fur, mostly white with gold and brown marks, a beautiful plume of a tail, and ears that stood up halfway and then flopped. He hardly ever walked: he pranced, he bounced; he was always curious, like a puppy.
“One day we saw Nick carrying something that looked like a black rag. One of the barn cats had recently had a litter; it was one of the kittens. Nick had its entire head in his mouth and was trotting proudly about, once in a while setting the kitten down and pawing it gently and cocking his head to watch it. Every day Nick would walk around with the kitten for a while and return it to the litter when he was done playing. Then he would come again when the mood hit, take out the black kitten, and play with it for a while. The kitten flourished. When he was a little bigger, we would see Nick carrying him around by the nape of the neck, the way many animals carry their young. Nick invented a new game—bowling, we named it. He would put Scooter down, trot off a few yards, turn around and charge, knocking the kitten to the ground. Why Scooter put up with it, we couldn’t imagine, but he seemed to think it was his destiny to play bowling pin to bowling-ball Nick. He grew to a size where Nick could no longer carry him, but that didn’t stop the game. Whenever he saw Scooter, Nick would charge; the cat would gather himself into a bowling-pin shape and wait to be hit.
“One day the following spring, Scooter disappeared. He was a good-sized tomcat at that point, so when he didn’t come back all summer we sort of gave up on him. But then one day there was Scooter in the path. I have never seen a cat express joy the way this one did. He purred like a motorboat, rolled around on the ground, took leaps into the air. He jumped into my arms; he felt like a different animal; he was muscular and tough, like a wild animal, not like a pet. Then around the corner of the barn came Nick. He took one look and charged. Scooter just gathered himself up and waited to be knocked down.”
Pearl tries to laugh, but it is difficult with her
tube. Tom is worried about that, and when the nurse comes in he asks her to check Pearl out.
“She’s fine,” the nurse says. “You can take a bit of a break. I’m taking your place.”
Pearl wants to say she’s very sorry someone’s taking his place, but she’s afraid of embarrassing him.
“I’ll be back in a while. You’re all right, are you? You’re in good hands.”
Not as good as yours, she wants to say, but says only, “Thanks. That was a great story.”
“See you soon, then.” His story has been a success after all, and that isn’t the kind of success he is used to.
32
The restaurant the young woman in the hotel recommended is traditional: paneled wood, carved chairs, mahogany tables. For a moment Joseph thinks he should refuse food, out of solidarity with Pearl. But he tells himself his weakness won’t help her. He needs his strength. He still does not know what for.
They order a bottle of claret, the best on the menu, twenty pounds. The dollar is good against the pound, Maria says, and besides, we need it. She has always had a talent for indulging herself in small pleasures. Of course she could always do that because her father’s money was always there, whether she acknowledged it or not, to break her fall, and Joseph was always there too, the fireman holding the net. It was true that she wasn’t extravagant, but it was also true that she did not hesitate when she needed something only money could buy; when public school seemed inadequate for Pearl by sixth grade, she could move her to Watson rather than send her to Hunter or Stuyvesant, because languages were better at Watson and the smaller classes meant more personal attention. The bills were sent to him.
The waitress is wearing a straight black skirt that doesn’t cover her distressingly bony knees. She must be in her sixties and should know better, Joseph thinks. Or she should be told by someone to wear a longer skirt. Is it because she’s being paid to serve me, paid to make my life pleasant, that I feel the right to indulge in such anger toward her? He feels her knees are a visual aggression a paying customer shouldn’t be made to endure. Her knuckles pop out of the flesh of her ringless hands. Her teeth are too big for her skull, and when she smiles it can only look false, coming from a countenance of such impoverishment. He believes that if she took off her rubber-soled black shoes he would find bunions on the sides of her fish-flat feet. Her shoulders are bent like crushed coat hangers; she never quite straightens up, and when she takes their order she says yes sir, yes ma’am, thank you sir, thank you ma’am after each item so it comes out many more times than is required. Her servility creates in him an impulse to insult her.
It is a strange impulse, isn’t it, the impulse to insult. As if it would relieve some unbearable pressure, re-create right balance in the world: the unbearable weight shifted once more to its proper object.
But Joseph does not, tonight, indulge this impulse. He wishes, though, that the waitress understood that in a falsely democratic world she must work particularly hard not to appear servile. Her failure, her refusal, calls up in him the old terms: master, servant. His mother was a servant. He is the son of a servant. The waitress calls up these terms because they are her terms. She might allow herself to be insulted and then dream of cutting his throat as he lay in his bed.
The waitress brings the wine, a silver—perhaps tin—basket of rolls, a dish of four butter pats like rosettes sitting on a cube of ice. Maria drinks her wine very fast and he disapproves: it’s a good wine and should not be gulped. She slathers butter on her roll. He knows how much she loves butter; as a child she would eat it plain. In Italy, butter is not brought with bread, and he prefers it so. The pale fat of the northern palate: he has never liked it.
Maria looks at the menu, which the waitress, having taken their order, has failed to remove. “December twenty-eighth,” she says. “Feast of the Holy Innocents. I can’t help it; those feast names pop up when I hear certain dates. Like August fifteenth, Assumption; March twenty-fifth, Annunciation. It happened with Pearl’s father; it’s how we both knew we’d had a Catholic education.”
The skin on the back of Joseph’s neck prickles. Pearl’s father: has Maria ever said anything about him before? He doesn’t even know the man’s name; she never used it.
“Holy Innocents,” she says. “I always hated that day; it was one of the things that made me lose my faith. I didn’t want any part of worshiping a God who could have saved thousands of babies but allowed them to be slaughtered. And then to celebrate that and call it a feast? It’s disgusting.”
An old picture, readily brought to mind: mountains of babies, mothers tearing at their own breasts, tearing at the muscular arms of soldiers who ignore them and throw their babies onto a pile. A pile mixed in his mind with piles of bones and shoes in Auschwitz. And how many others for which he has no pictures and no words. Holy Innocents. If there is holiness he believes that their innocence, their very helplessness, has made them holy.
“I never felt that way about it,” Joseph says. “I always thought it was right to commemorate that kind of horror, rather than pretend it didn’t exist.”
But Maria isn’t listening. “All you had to do to be called holy was to be slaughtered. Without protest. Why are there no feasts celebrating heroic resistance? Or attempts to change the injustice of power?”
Because that is not hopeless, not helpless, and this feast honors helplessness; that is its greatness, he wants to say. But he knows that whatever he says she’s not listening.
She butters another roll, puts down the knife, puts a piece of roll into her mouth, chews, swallows. “The canonization of victimization. Une spécialité de la maison catholique. It’s not hard to sympathize with victims. Victims don’t change anything. It’s what disturbs me most about what Pearl’s doing. It’s such a weak act; it denies the possibility of change. Of standing with others and putting up a fight. That’s what changes things, not somebody wasting away. Solitary acts like that are always hopeless.”
All the time Maria is talking, she is chewing. She has ordered steak, bloody-rare, and she is dipping pieces of it into a little pyramid of salt she’s made at the edge of her plate. She’s put butter on her potatoes and her roll. The blood from her steak makes a pinkish pool on the white plate. The tablecloths are pink; there are pink shades on the small lamps that sit on every table. He is revolted by the pinkness all around him, by the heavy, too-rich food, the overheated air, the noisy conversation all around him, no words distinguishable. Gesturing, Maria has spilled some of her wine. It makes a dark rose blot on the pink cloth; she spills salt onto it: a housewife’s instinct. She plays with the salt, pushing it around with her fingers until it looks like pink snow. Diamonds of grease swim in the blood that oozes from her steak. She dips a forkful of potato into it.
“We can change things, people can, by thinking clearly and cooperating with one another. But no one can do anything alone. People must stand together, or the darkness wins.”
He has kneaded his roll into crumbs. His fingertips are dry, abraded by the sharp crusts. He feels the blood pool at the top of his skull, collect in a dark clot, a caul between his brain stem and his neck. The thick blood boils up, creates a pressure that makes him feel the shape of the bones that make up his head.
Maria picks up the empty butter dish, looks over her shoulder, puts the dish back down.
“Where the hell is that waitress?” she says, and looks around again. “I need more butter. Joseph, can you get me more butter?”
He sees his mother’s face in the dining room of the Regina Caeli nursing home. She is wearing a hat made of a paper towel, the hat she makes for herself every day at lunch and wears all afternoon until it’s taken off her head at bedtime. He sees the spittle at the edge of her lips when she says “Filthy, filthy!” to Maria. And Maria’s hands, wringing themselves, pressing her nails into her palms, her hands red with hatred as if she’d dipped them in cold water or in blood. He sees Dr. Meyers’s fine white hands, counting out bills and coins into the hands
of his mother: large, red, and pawlike. His mother the servant.
He has been a servant to Maria, to her father, to his mother, to Devorah. He has been a servant all his life. And Maria knows, she must always have known, although she has pretended to forget it. But she has never forgotten it, not for a minute, and now it strikes him as unbearable; he will not put up with it anymore.
He takes the butter dish from her hand and bangs it, hard, onto the table.
“You’ve had enough butter,” he says. “You’ve had more than enough.”
She blinks at him; she doesn’t understand. He is refusing her something. It may be the first thing he has refused her. The waitress scurries over. “Is everything all right with your dinner here? Can I get you something else?” Wearing a wholly wrong, false, ingratiating smile. Maria wonders what she’s heard, what she makes of it.
“Nothing for me,” Joseph says to the waitress. “I’m afraid I’ve been taken ill.” He gets up and leaves, saying nothing to Maria, as if the waitress were his hostess at a dinner party and she’s a guest he’s been seated with, whose name he hasn’t caught.
She watches him put on his coat and his scarf, one she had bought him as a Christmas gift, as he walks out between the tables. He’s accused her of greed. He’s said she’s eaten too much. And Pearl is starving. The irregular oblongs of meat, the ovals of potatoes, less than half consumed, stare up at her reproachfully. She knows she mustn’t follow him, so what should she do? She looks down at her food. The salty smell of the excellent meat rises up to her. Her mouth fills with water. It’s terrible, she knows, how much she wants to finish her dinner. The waitress is waiting to see whether she’ll follow the man out of the restaurant or go on with her meal. She must decide right now. Should the food be taken away or left? Joseph has fled, hungry, into the gloomy night. On an empty stomach, she thinks. Ridiculous, he isn’t crawling on his stomach. She feels helpless, and the churning juices of her own stomach make her feel worse. Something enormous has just happened, and all that is open to her is the decision of whether or not to eat.