Pearl

by Mary Gordon

  Eat to live. Live to eat. What does this have to do with the question of whether or not she should finish her steak? Why does it seem wrong to eat when something enormous has just happened? What is not eating, fasting? Her daughter is fasting. Days of fast and abstinence: requirements loosened by the Second Vatican Council but never given up by her father: always, he refrained from meat on Fridays, refused to eat between meals during Lent, ate nothing from Good Friday to Easter morning. So what did that mean about him? She tries to make the connection between fast and virtue. My father, she thinks, was a man who could give up meat but not the use of the word mine.

  You should not be surprised that at this moment, by any definition a moment of crisis in her life, the terms of her childhood come up to her: fast, abstinence, sin, virtue. If you had lived in exile, even if you had exiled yourself and had learned or taught yourself a new language, would it be surprising if, in a dire time, the words you grew up speaking were the ones that came to your lips? Maria shakes herself, like a wet dog. She must decide what to do, right now, and not be calling up the old wrong terms of the past.

  And yet they will not go away. The sin of greed, she says to herself. Am I greedy like my father? Joseph has accused her of being greedy. His mother accused her of being greedy: “You are a greedy girl.” She thinks of Marie Kasperman’s face, red, sweating, always reminding her of raw meat. And she is suddenly afraid of the food in front of her. At the same time, her mouth waters from the smell.

  He is his mother’s son. And she is her father’s daughter. Nothing can change that. If she could have, she would have destroyed me, Maria thinks. But I held my tongue. For him.

  She is right to be proud of that because it was a struggle, holding her tongue, her silence a hard-won victory. She will not say this of herself, but I can say it for her: she did it out of love. Because she loved Joseph’s goodness, his restraint, his doing quietly whatever needed to be done. She loved these things, yes, but it is also possible to say she needed them. They were her buckler and her shield. So she kept silence, difficult for her, and he kept silence, a habit that came to him more easily.

  But what was their silence? Was it perhaps only a glass floor laid over a pit? Had they been tiptoeing all their lives on a floor of glass, thinly covered by a silken carpet? And now, it seems, he has stepped hard and broken through.

  What should I do? Maria asks herself, because this is the question she always asks.

  She tells herself she must grab on to something. She must stop her fall. She must concentrate on what needs to be done. Is it possible that everything is centered on the decision whether or not to eat? The food is here; it is still hot; it is less than a minute since Joseph left the restaurant. She must think of what can make a difference. To think of that would be to break the fall.

  For now, strength is required, strength to wait. To endure her own helplessness. To wait for the boyfriend to get in touch. To wait for the doctor’s word. To wait for her daughter’s word. To wait and see what Joseph will do next.

  It’s simple, she says to herself. I should eat. Food brings strength. I require strength. Therefore food.

  She cuts into the meat and salts it, dipping into the pyramid of salt she’s already made. She puts the salty meat into her mouth. Chews, swallows, sips wine. Another taste: bitter. Bites into the potatoes. Soft: pleasantly dull.

  She can do nothing but eat. There is no one to talk to and she has no book to read. She tries to be curious about her fellow diners but cannot attach the slightest importance to any of them. She opens her mouth. Chews. Swallows. Alternates flavors.

  She is full now; she is strengthened. She made the right decision. It was better that she ate.

  She asks the maître d’ if he can call her a cab. “I can so,” he says, and she is charmed by his diction. She’s reminded how much easier it is to be charmed by other human beings if you’ve been well fed.

  Are you appalled by Maria’s finishing her supper? Would you like her better if she couldn’t eat? I understand that possibly you would. Perhaps, though, you should ask yourself: What is the relation between love and appetite?

  The cab drives her across the quay. The water under the electric lights is reptile colored. The whole city, with its flat house fronts, its dark squares of only dimly apprehended windows with the occasional silvered rectangle, suggests nothing of a holiday; she imagines people weary in their beds.

  She lets herself into her room and takes off her coat, which threatens to overbalance the plastic chair she throws it on. She dials Joseph’s number. There is no reply.

  33

  Someone Pearl has never seen, a woman in her sixties perhaps, is sitting in Tom’s chair. Then he comes back into the room. “I’m here to relieve you,” he says to the woman. And Pearl thinks, I am relieved that he is here.

  “I think the patient’s asleep,” the woman says.

  She was asleep but she is glad not to be sleeping now. In her sleep, memories swim up; she is frightened, people are holding her down, they are putting things in her nose. She does not know if this really happened or if it is a dream. She touches her nose. A tube is attached to it. So it was not a dream. Yet she does not remember.

  She is very hungry.

  34

  In the dark, lying on her back, her head entirely flattening the unsatisfactory pillow—made, Maria guesses, of some synthetic material that didn’t exist when she was a child—she tries to understand what happened. What did she do to cause Joseph’s outburst? An outburst in someone who has, as long as she has known him, her whole life, never burst out? Or almost never. Only twice does she remember him losing his temper. There was the time in 1995 when they were speculating about the nature of the response to the millennium. He said it would be hard to celebrate the end of the century because he believed it was the bloodiest in the history of the world. She and Devorah had disagreed with him. They said the numbers might be greater, but that was an accident of technology. The impulse to destroy had always been the same. And the same technology, they had said, the two of them tumbling over each other like good-natured puppies to agree with each other and disagree with him, had saved millions of lives. And what about antibiotics?

  The blood had risen to his face. He stood up and grabbed the chair he’d been sitting on, lifting it slightly off the floor. “You do not, do not, do not know what you are talking about!” He banged the chair on the floor with every repetition of do not. And he had done the same thing, repeated a phrase three times, when she and Devorah suggested that Maria might become an egg donor for them. “You will not, will not, will not speak of this ever again!” Both times he had walked out of the room. But both times, at least in her memory, it was summer, and his walking out into the leafy daylight did not have the desolating effect of his walking into the bitter Dublin night. And both times Devorah had been with her. She is alone now.

  She remembers the time she and Devorah came up with the idea, a foolish one; they were both forty-three and Maria was too old to be an egg donor; any medical student could have told her that. But they didn’t talk to any doctors; they came up with the plan themselves over brunch and burst into the house—no, it wasn’t the house, it was the apartment on 89th Street—one Sunday morning. Joseph and Pearl had just come home from the museum, and Pearl had gone home. I think it’s a good thing Pearl didn’t see what happened: Devorah and Maria bursting in, telling Joseph they’d come up with a wonderful plan; there was no reason why Devorah’s early menopause meant she couldn’t have a child. And then Joseph banged the chair down and said, three times, as if it were a spell, that they weren’t to speak of it again. Devorah, she thinks now, you were my beloved friend, and you are dead. I don’t understand anything: what Pearl’s done, what Joseph did just now. Do you, among the dead, understand things I cannot?

  If you understand, you must help me. Help me understand.

  Pearl cannot be allowed to become one of the dead. Like Devorah. Like her father.

  The thought of
her father’s death is, as always, a sheet of slate pressed down on her, hardening her heart. Making it a heart of stone. She will not regret what she did, what she had to do, in the name of justice. She won’t think about her father now. It is Devorah among the dead whom she misses, not her father, tapping the white tips of his fingers together, light bouncing off the glass of his rimless spectacles. Her father and the pope had had the same glasses: Seymour Meyers and Pius XII. She was glad when it had come out that Pius XII had done nothing to save the Jews. Had collaborated with the Nazis and could not be admired in good faith. As she no longer admired her father, had given up admiring him when he allowed her friends to go to jail. She will not think about her father now.

  She gets out of bed. A bath is what she needs. She lowers herself into steaming water, almost too hot for her to bear.

  In the hot water, she lets her eyes fall on her breasts, which have lost, she knows, their prized youthful allure. She thinks of when her breasts were, for Pearl, a source of perfect nourishment. And this daughter is dying from starvation now. Loss and loss and loss. She weeps for the consolation, lost, of nursing a child, those moments when it was impossible for either of them to fail, to disappoint. She doesn’t care what her face looks like. If she could catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror it would mean nothing to her. She would not be herself.

  In the water, which is cooling in a way that makes her feel her skin belongs to someone else, her tears no longer seem authentic; it is as if someone else has entered the room; it is as if she is being watched. She quickly gets out of the tub.

  She dries herself on thin cotton towels, more like diapers, she thinks. She rings Joseph’s room. And once again there is no answer.

  35

  “Such a shame, such a beautiful girl,” Pearl hears a nurse say to Tom. What does she mean by that? That if she hadn’t thought Pearl beautiful she wouldn’t consider what happened to her such a shame? What, then, would she have considered it?

  Words, ideas, are coming into greater focus in her mind. She can think of things following each other. Things leading from each other. Things she understands. She is very hungry.

  Beautiful girl. It is important to be a beautiful girl; she has known for a long time that it was important, that those words made things possible. But did she want those things? Beautiful girl. Was it being something or having something? Something she had and her mother had but not every woman had. And something people wanted. Wanted from you if you had it. They wanted it from her mother too. She had got whatever it was from her mother: a way of being looked at, favors granted, allowances made. And some other things, not nice, connected to it. Something people wanted that she might not want to give, that had nothing to do with her, something because of which people would give her things she didn’t want and want things from her that she didn’t want to give.

  Such a beautiful girl.

  How can this be? There is a tube sewn into her nose, a tube stuck in her vagina. This is not a body anyone could want anything of. It is no longer even hers. It is the doctor’s body now. The doctor makes things happen that she does not want. But she no longer knows entirely what she wants. Starved, she knew exactly her desire. Now she is hungry and afraid.

  My mother, she thinks, is in this city now. The city where

  I am.

  The doctor is speaking to Tom. “We’re cutting the Midazolam way down. She’ll be much more lucid now. She might want to communicate more. But be careful. Her will is very strong.”

  36

  In the late night air, supersaturated with raw dampness, Joseph walks and walks. His gloves are good and keep his hands warm, but his shoes are wrong for this climate, bought in a different world with a different set of considerations. Yes, it is sometimes cold and damp in Rome—in all of Italy, particularly in the north—but they don’t seem to think of that; it isn’t in the forefront of their minds when they’re designing their shoes or their houses.

  He is walking because he can’t think of anything else to do. He doesn’t even know where he’s walking. The city is a closed box to him because he’s refused what he has come to think of as the easy out of maps and guidebooks. He was going, like Ruskin, to depend on the strenuous exercise of his eye. And when he dressed he hadn’t thought he would be walking tonight; he was going to the hospital, the restaurant.

  His shoulders ache; his throat constricts from the strain of unnatural effort. Perhaps from all the years of never having said, “But that isn’t what I want, you see, that isn’t what I want at all.”

  Never wanting to go along with Maria’s plans, to the synagogue at Yom Kippur, to the Village to buy marijuana, to demonstrations against the war. “Let’s talk about the worst martyrdoms we can imagine,” she would say when they were children. No, he wanted to say. Let’s pray that we’ll be spared, that we’ll never have to think of it. And never saying to his mother, Please be quiet, please don’t talk to me about your skin rashes, your insect bites, your constipation, Maria’s hair in the bathtub, the traces of Dr. Meyers’s shit on his underpants. Please, please, is there nothing you will not say?

  And the money. He’d believed it was his responsibility to keep the business going. Of all imaginary accusations, the one he’d most feared was lack of gratitude. He was his mother’s son. He was unable to attach a face to his father’s name. As his mother’s son, his fate ought to have been that of the son of a domestic servant. A laborer. With luck, a minor clerk. Insurance man. Accountant. But he’d been given magnificent opportunities. Access to the highest culture. A splendid education. How could he complain about being placed at the head of a successful business?

  It had never occurred to him to say, But this isn’t what I want. It had never occurred to him to take seriously the question that preoccupied his generation: What makes me happy? He’d thought a better question, a fuller, finer one, was: What is the right thing to do? Perhaps that was why he didn’t know what to say when Maria had asked him, desperation in her voice, “But Pearl’s always been happy, hasn’t she?” He hadn’t thought of happiness for her, any more than he’d thought of it for himself. It didn’t seem the appropriate category for her, as it hadn’t for him.

  He knew he couldn’t be happy if he thought he wasn’t doing the right thing. It hadn’t occurred to him that there were different kinds of rightness. The rightness, for example, of his absorption in the works of art he loved.

  Try and imagine, if you will, the nineteen-year-old Joseph, student of art history. Absorbed, taken up, electrified by his mind’s devotion to this new subject: medieval reliquaries. A subject he could think of as his, truly his own, perhaps the first possession he could think of in that way, even believing that it might be deserved because it had been earned. He wrote his senior thesis on a reliquary in the Cloisters, a triptych, with lapis and gold angels forming the outer wings and, in the middle, glass revealing the relic lined with pearls. It was meant to have been given to a convent in the city of Buda by St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Do you know about Elizabeth, queen of Hungary in the thirteenth century? I will tell you the story.

  Elizabeth was the virtuous wife of a tyrant husband. During a famine, he forbade her to feed his starving subjects. Against his will, she walked into the streets, bread hidden in her skirt. Her husband discovered this and threatened to have her killed by his soldiers as a punishment for having defied his orders. He accosted her at the castle gate. He demanded that she loosen her skirt. She did and behold! There was not bread but roses. He fell to his knees, begged her forgiveness, and became a virtuous benevolent ruler.

  Joseph had loved that story from the first time he read it, in one of Maria’s books, Fifteen Saints for Girls. He’d read the whole book; he found it fascinating. He remembers a description of a Blessed Margaret Clitherew, an Englishwoman martyred by Henry VIII, or maybe it was Elizabeth. The priest she is hiding in her house says of her, “She is not an English rose but rather a firm white hollyhock.”

  When he was a boy, that story generated
a kind of proto-arousal, an excitement that was not yet sexual, when he thought of the connection between women and flowers. Roses in a skirt, the firmness of a hollyhock. When he had first seen a woman’s body, Devorah’s, the only one he’s ever seen, he had not been disappointed, just delighted that the metaphors were so apt.

  Now he believes he must think of himself as a man who has fallen to imagining sniffing the armpits of waitresses. He is not a specialist in medieval reliquaries but the head of a corporation whose business is the spread of ugliness.

  But he believed he had lived his life above reproach. He could not have borne reproach: from Dr. Meyers or from his mother. But Dr. Meyers is dead and his mother is rocking and gibbering and Devorah made a mockery of his idea of the great gift and Pearl has made a mockery of all their ideas of safety. Now he can reproach himself for being a fool and, worse, a betrayer. Just now, over a plate of meat in a restaurant where everything was pink or pinkish, because he thought Maria was eating too much butter, because she asked for more, asked him to get her more, he allowed his anger to break through, the anger he had always hidden, swallowed, killed.

  But what if she hasn’t really understood? Or if she’s been able to convince herself, as she often can with uncomfortable truths, that it really wasn’t what it seemed? He thinks of Pearl saying, “My mother is distractible.” He knows she believes that the center of the world is not impenetrable but porous and susceptible to change. That things are not done once and for all. So maybe he can say, “Sorry, I don’t know what got into me. I guess we’re both under a lot of stress.” Strange, isn’t it, the history of the word stress, once used primarily by engineers, now called on to explain almost everything.

  And perhaps she’ll say, “Forget it. Let’s concentrate on what needs to be done.”