by Mary Gordon
Perhaps, in a little while, he’ll do it. He’ll say, “Sorry . . . stress.” But not now. Now he wants to walk.
37
Maria wakes at seven in the morning and forces herself to the discipline of brushing her teeth and washing her face before she telephones to see if Joseph is in his room. An old habit: small penances, minor sacrifices, wages offered up to the unseen. So she will brush her teeth before she calls but allow herself to telephone before she takes a shower.
He isn’t there. This means something terrible, something else she can do nothing about. Whatever he does when they see each other, she thinks she’ll be able to respond well. If he’s apologetic, she’ll say, “It’s nothing. We’re all under stress.” If he pretends nothing has happened but leaves her a message naming a time for lunch, for dinner, she’ll say nothing.
But what if he wants to talk about it? That would be quite unlike Joseph. Yet what he did last night was quite unlike him also. If he wants to talk about why he was angry with her, she’ll do that. She can do anything he asks of her. What is unbearable is what is being asked of her now: that she wait. Her only possible act a mental one, to understand the implications of there being nothing for her to do.
She showers. The thin transparent cap is insufficient to protect her hair. Her hair will be wet, and this will be unpleasant in what she imagines is the day’s damp cold. Her window looks out only on the empty—no, rubbish-strewn—courtyard; she has no idea what the weather is really like. She goes down to the breakfast room, still smelling of beer, praying that she won’t run into the women from breakfast two days ago.
She eats oatmeal with milk, butter, and sugar. She butters her toast and adds a thick film of marmalade. What would Joseph say to that? She feels shame at the memory of last night. She knows she is eating like a child, but it’s what she wants.
She doesn’t know what to do with the rest of the day. Dr. Morrisey will speak to her at four. It’s now nine-fifteen. She doesn’t know where Joseph is. She can’t think of anyplace she’d like to go.
When she gets to the lobby, the woman at the desk says, “There’s a young man to see you.”
For a moment, Maria thinks she means Joseph. Then she remembers: Joseph can no longer be described as young.
“I’m Finbar McDonagh.”
You have, I hope you will remember, the advantage over Maria. You know a certain amount about Finbar; she knows nothing. She has been given nothing but a name. The young man says his name as if it were enough. His hair is lank, red, shoulder-length; he’s wearing an army greatcoat—it could be from any army—and black lace-up boots that overbalance his slight body. The fingernails of his childish freckled hands are bitten; he’s tried to grow a mustache but it’s a mistake, a sign not of bravado or virility but of an inner despondency so habitual it’s impaired the growth of his facial hair. When Maria looks into his eyes, she sees blue-green stones, impatient eyes that don’t like to rest too long on any one thing, eyes that reveal that this boy has read many books and wishes it weren’t so, but he will always read many books; there’s nothing he can do about it. His eyes are red-rimmed as if he hasn’t slept or has been crying.
“I’m Maria Meyers.”
“I know. I’m Pearl’s friend.”
Friend. This means lover. They shared a domain. She’s disappointed for her daughter. Another rescue mission, she thinks, comparing this boy’s weedy body, his failed masculinity, with Pearl’s realized beauty, her long legs, straight spine, hair that falls down her back like a shower of dull gold. She wishes that Pearl had picked someone more attractive, so that people would have smiled when they saw them on the street. So that Pearl could have had the fun of that. But Maria has never grasped the idea that perhaps that kind of fun would be to Pearl beside the point. Or not fun at all.
It’s always been difficult for Maria to understand that Pearl hasn’t taken pleasure in being looked at. And you may find it hard to understand: a child whose mother’s eye always fell on her with joy, a beautiful girl, looked on favorably by the eye of the world. I don’t know quite why myself, but from early childhood Pearl felt that being looked at was being stolen from. The actor’s joy in performance—so much a part of her mother’s life—was never part of hers. How do we explain, then, what she’s doing now, insisting that she be looked upon, studied, taken in? I must admit I don’t quite understand how she came to it. Except perhaps that the pain of this visibility was something she thought of as the price she paid for witness. The price of atonement.
Maria and Finbar look at each other in silence. It’s impossible for them to behave normally with each other. There is too much or too little to say.
From somewhere, a voice tells her that at moments like these, when it’s impossible to imagine the right thing to do, it’s best not to rely on the imagination but to fall back on convention. The habitual or formal gesture is the one that best serves. He is coming here because she is his girlfriend’s mother. What would a girlfriend’s mother do if the circumstances were ordinary? That the circumstances are not ordinary is the part that must be pushed aside.
“Have you had your breakfast?” she asks.
The boy begins to cry. He’s appalled at himself. I think that if he could have done anything else in the world—hit Maria, set fire to the hotel, vomited on the carpet—he would have found it preferable.
From the basketful of gestures in her repertoire she pulls up one and hands him a Kleenex from the packet in her handbag. She doesn’t look at him. She pretends to be fumbling for something at the bottom of her purse.
“You need protein,” she says. “Come upstairs with me to the horrible breakfast room: my treat. You can have eggs and sausages. I’m sure you don’t have to worry about cholesterol, not at your age. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Pearl was a vegetarian for a while. But she gave it up. I must say it made life easier.”
She realizes that this chatter is the wrong thing; she’s losing him. Her first instinct was right. She should be a mother: Pearl’s mother, anybody’s mother. The most typical of her kind.
She is sorry for this boy, as if what he’s gone through had nothing to do with her daughter. She can see he’s gone through a great deal. She remembers something she read once about a knight going through an ordeal. This boy has gone through an ordeal, she keeps saying to herself. The word ordeal presses itself on her shoulders; she feels its heaviness and its extent.
In the tale she’d read, the knight who needed to gain access to magic asked another suffering knight, “What are you going through?” And this was the right question, the one that unlocked magic.
What are you going through? she would like to ask this young man, whom she sees not as himself (she knows nothing about him) and not as anyone connected to her daughter, but simply as a young man standing for all young men who have gone through ordeals. No, not gone through. He isn’t out of the woods yet.
She wonders why she isn’t angry at him. Then she understands it’s because she could never imagine his making Pearl do anything she didn’t want to do. She knows her daughter’s force, and she sees that sitting across from her is a person of no force.
The waitress shows them to a table in the farthest corner of the room. Even from there, Maria can’t help hearing American conversation.
“You from the South?” a man asks the two young women at the next table.
“Charleston, South Carolina.”
“I was in South Carolina once. Not once. I mean, once for a long time. When I was in the Marines. Parris Island. We used to call it ‘the land that time forgot.’”
The waitress brings them tea in a brown pot. “Please fill up,” Maria says. “It’s the same cost no matter how many times you go back.”
“I’m not a vegetarian,” Finbar says. “Pearl loved our sausages. She said she couldn’t stand American ones, they were too fatty.”
“She always hated fat on meat,” Maria says, alarmed that they are both speaking about Pearl in the past tense.
“She said we wouldn’t like each other,” Finbar says, stirring a third spoonful of sugar into his tea. “She never wanted us to meet.”
“I tended to give her a hard time about her boyfriends. I never thought they were right for her.”
“What made you think you knew what was right for her?” he says, and his mouth suddenly looks nasty. She’s tempted to answer him in the tone that his remark and the line of his mouth deserve, but she needs this connection; she needs to learn things from him.
“It’s an occupational hazard with mothers,” she says, hoping she hasn’t lost her power to charm. “Maternal narcissism is a widespread disease.”
“That most don’t want the cure of.”
She likes his syntax but can see that, nevertheless, he’s one of Pearl’s lame ducks. Of the foreign variety, therefore exotic, therefore with more obvious appeal.
She looks into his eyes, smiling, and he blushes.
“Actually, what I’d like is porridge,” he says.
“That’s what I had,” she says, as if this bond between them were profound.
When he walks over to get himself porridge, she sees how young he looks from the back. She wonders how old he is. Hard to tell with the young, she thinks, feeling her own lack of youth.
He piles the overfull bowl of porridge with butter, sugar, and cream. A version of her own bowl, but the boy’s version. A fearful child’s habit, a child who fears that his delight will be interrupted, stolen, or forbidden, arbitrarily kept back.
“Are you a student?” she asks.
“I guess, yeah. I’m doing Irish. That’s how we met—I mean Pearl and I.”
He doesn’t say Pearl and me. He is a middle-class child, despite the excessive helpings of butter and sugar.
“She’s good at it. She’s bloody fantastic for someone who never did it before. I mean, in a few weeks, she was caught up with people who’d done it for years. I’m in the advanced class.”
He is struggling, an age-old struggle not to brag about his intellectual achievements because he knows, he has always known, it won’t win him friends. And friends are what he desperately wants. So he’s trying to pretend it doesn’t matter to him, being in the advanced class.
“It wasn’t meant to turn out like this,” he says, his cheeks flushing in a way that reminds her of Devorah, the one redhead she’d known well.
“How could it possibly have been meant to turn out like this?”
She doesn’t know what her tone conveys; she understands that he wants understanding from her, forgiveness maybe, absolution best of all. She isn’t tempted to withhold it, perhaps because he is so obviously weak.
“What I mean is, she got me confused. I misread her. I thought she was with us in a way she turned out not to be.”
“Us?”
“Our movement. What we call the Real IRA. Those of us—and we’re not a few, and we’re not thugs or madmen as the media would like you to believe—those of us who think the peace treaty is a great betrayal. A betrayal of hundreds of years of sacrifice. Just for the sake of Eurodollars.”
“Go on. I’m a bit lost.”
“Pearl and I were in accord about people all over the world being motivated solely by greed these days. The almighty dollar. We talked a lot about how the collapse of the Berlin Wall meant there was no idea in the world now except the idea of profit. I know she was with me on that. I thought she understood how the whole treaty thing is a part of it. Then she started talking about tales and stories and how we needed stories and not tales. I’d no idea what that had to do with the treaty. I thought it was just literary theory; she was more literary than I was. It’s hard sometimes to know what she’s really thinking.”
“I know.”
“You see, she can do these silences and if you talk a great deal, like me, you can assume those silences are filled up with whatever you’ve just said.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. She understands that this boy loves her daughter, that he feels he failed her and, at the same time, that she failed him. His thin shoulders are bowed down by the weight of all that failure; his babyish chest is narrowed by it.
“So it was only at the very end, after everything went so wrong, after all the business with Stevie, that I realized she wasn’t with us, she was for the treaty, she could only see wanting the violence to stop, not that violence was the only weapon that we had and would lead to less violence in the future. She couldn’t see that. She had no idea that the violence was a tragic but necessary price, she was just listening to me, pretending to agree with me and waiting till she knew just what she wanted to say. But she only made that clear after the whole Stevie business.”
“I don’t know what the Stevie business is.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t, would you,” he says, nasty again. “I don’t think Pearl was exactly confiding in you toward the end.”
“We were three thousand miles apart.”
“Whatever.”
Maria is irritated, as she always is, by the use of that word, a tic among the young. Whatever. Without an adverbial objective. Strange to hear it in an Irish accent, a noxious American import, like Muzak or McDonald’s.
“You were going to tell me about someone called Stevie.”
“He was the son of a very good friend of mine. A sad case, really. My friend did everything he could. He’s American. You probably don’t know him.”
She nods, as if it were surprising that there is an American she doesn’t know.
“The thing about Mick is, he never lost the faith.”
For a minute, she thinks that Finbar might mean that the man is still a practicing Catholic. But he can’t possibly mean that, although it’s the only context in which she’s ever heard the term. Lost the faith. Among her father’s friends, it was a common locution. But this boy must mean something different.
“Stevie came from a noble line. A noble line,” he says, slipping into the language of saga, assuming the bardic tone. “His uncle’s been in prison since 1982. You’ve probably heard of the Leeds Eight. Reg Donegan. Stevie’s mother is his sister.”
Maria doesn’t dare confess that she hasn’t heard of the Leeds Eight or of Reg Donegan. She assumes it’s something to do with an IRA bomb. She notices that Finbar doesn’t give a name to the female he’s mentioned. Someone’s mother. Someone’s sister.
“Stevie was Mick’s child, but of course he couldn’t marry the mother.”
“Why was that?”
“He has a family in the States. She knew it all along. But he never abandoned Stevie, he always acknowledged him and sent her money and came over here to be with them one month of every year. There’s not many men would do that.”
He takes a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, a few sips of tea.
“There was something slightly wrong with Stevie, not quite the full shilling. A bit slow. Pearl said she thought he was dyslexic. She was trying to help him. They got on great, the two of them. She was devoted to him, and he to her.”
Maria remembers Pearl asking her for advice, materials, for dealing with a dyslexic kid. “How old is he?” she asks.
“Fifteen at the time of his death.”
Always, this is a shocking sentence. The conjunction of the word death and a number so near the beginning of life.
“You see, Stevie’s mother, Breeda, couldn’t take it in the north anymore. The Gardai were always ripping up her place in Belfast whenever there was any trouble, on account of her brother, even though she’s never been involved, not the least little bit. She’s not so much on the brain power herself. So she came down here, works as a char in an office building. They seemed to be doing all right. Stevie loved it. Mick would come over and take him everywhere. Stevie loved sitting around with all of us. We didn’t think he got the political stuff, but he seemed to like being one of the blokes, you know, sitting about, having a few jars. It made him feel a part of things. I think it was hard for him at school. I’m not sure he could actually read before Pearl
came along and started working with him. When we’d all be together in the sitting room—the blokes, I mean—the two of them would be in the kitchen working at the reading. I thought it was great at the time, but it probably wasn’t a good thing for Stevie. As Mick said, it raised unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic hopes. And he wanted to be a big man in front of Pearl. Stevie, I mean. And then we all got carried away that one time and the whole thing became unfortunate.”
She pours more tea into his cup, nudges the sugar bowl toward him.
“Mick was very big in the antiwar movement in the Vietnam days. Pearl says you were involved, but I’m sure not to the extent that Mick was.”
Maria wants to say, You have no idea of my past, no idea about what price I’ve paid. But it is not the time for this kind of talk, and she doesn’t want to think about her father now.
“Mick was close to Abbie Hoffman. He was with him in the Yippies. At the beginning part, particularly.”
I’ll bet, Maria wants to say, thinking of all the people who claimed to be close to Abbie Hoffman, or on the Pentagon March, or at Woodstock, or to have seen Hair while it was still off-Broadway.
“Mick’s story is really remarkable. He comes from a wealthy New England family. I believe they came over on the Mayflower. He left his family over Vietnam. It wasn’t till much later that they were reconciled. He really lives poor; he gives vast sums to our fellows over here. He’d give more, only he has to provide for his own family—well, the two families, the biological families, he calls them, which we all understand, of course. We cod him about being part of the Protestant Ascendancy. I don’t know if you know what that means over here. It’s the English-born Protestants who have all the land and the money.”
She almost says, You are simply going to have to stop condescending to me. But she needs to keep his favor. She still hasn’t heard Stevie’s story, which seems to be connected, somehow, to Pearl’s. Without this information, she’s paralyzed.
“So this one day, Mick’s telling us about one time with the Yippies. About how they brought down the war machine with laughter. He started talking about the spirit of carnival, how the only real challenge to the bourgeois was guerrilla humor. He showed us this picture of a demonstration he was in, during the Gulf War. Him and his mates had made these huge lips out of red satin, and hundreds of them appeared in front of the White House with these six-foot satin lips tied to their heads. All of them, men and women, were wearing pink slips over their clothes. They were carrying signs: GEORGE BUSH, READ OUR LIPS. OUT OF THE GULF OR GET A PINK SLIP. And of course, you know, after that, Bush was defeated. We were all passing the picture around, laughing; I guess we were all a bit jarred by then. Pearl wasn’t around. I don’t know if things would have got so out of hand if she’d been around. She tended to keep a lid on things. I think Mick sort of resented that. He used to tell her she didn’t know how to enjoy herself, she should let herself go more.”