by Mary Gordon
I used to tell her that, Maria thinks, with shame.
“This day, then, we came up with the idea. It seemed a great bit of gas at the time. I think we were all downhearted about how the other side seemed to be winning so big, almost everyone being behind the treaty. And then after the Omagh thing, we seemed to be losing all support. No one wanted to hear about our side. We thought we needed to change the tone. That would be really radical, we thought. Introduce comic irony, you know. You know how you can do wild things when you get downhearted.”
Yes, she thinks, oh, young man, you don’t know how well I know!
“So Mick comes up with this idea. He says it’ll be great street theater. We go down to one of the new sex shops, we buy a whole bunch of these dildoes. . . .”
She sees he’s blushing and looking over to see if she’ll censure him. She wonders what his mother’s like.
“Well, we tied all these dildo things up in a ribbon and wrapped them in a parcel: brown paper, string. We talked Stevie into leaving it in the hallway of the Central Gardai Station. We called in a bomb threat, saying the package was left in the name of those who wouldn’t stand by for the selling-out of our history. Then we called the media, to make sure there’d be coverage. Stevie was supposed to leave it and get right out. But for some reason, he just hung about.”
Finbar sounds like a miffed first-grade monitor whose slower charges haven’t responded properly to his directions about a fire drill.
“I’m not saying it was exactly his fault. I know he was disabled. All the same, what he did was daft. They ask him if he has anything to do with the package and he says yes, so they arrest him and his mother comes and they find out about him being the nephew of his uncle, and it got in the papers—well, not the whole thing, but parts that made Stevie look bad. One bad part about Pearl helping him with his reading was he promised her he’d read the paper every day. So he took the whole thing in. Especially the headline: THE BLOOD RUNS THIN.
“He was let go, of course, they could see he was disabled. When Pearl found out about the dildo thing, she went berserk. And Stevie was very upset. Mick gave him and his mother money to go to his house in Mayo. I don’t know how it happened. He was walking down a country road, Stevie—in the rain, or the fog, maybe—and the fella that hit him said he didn’t see him at first, then he beeped his horn, but Stevie didn’t get out of the way and he just couldn’t stop in time. Then his mother—you know, Breeda—came around, and she just lost it. I think Pearl started to go crazy after that.”
“Why didn’t she get in touch with me? I didn’t know anything about any of this.”
“I told her to, Mrs. Meyers, I told her maybe she should go home. But she didn’t answer me. She just sat by the window all day, writing in her notebook. She wasn’t eating, but I didn’t think much of it at the time, maybe just that she was upset over Stevie.
“Then one day when the mates were over she came in with this strange look on her face and said she’d show them guerrilla theater, but she’d do it right. She had a kind of funny smile, I can’t forget it. She told us about not having eaten for six weeks and planning to chain herself to the embassy. We couldn’t believe she hadn’t eaten for six weeks, but she said she’d planned it very carefully and we should do just as she said. She wanted us to call the media just as she was doing it. I’m not accusing her of anything, but she deliberately misled us. We thought it was about our movement, in memory of Stevie, like she said, but because of who he was. His family, you know, his uncle’s history, his roots. When I said that to her she said, That’s right, memory and blood and roots.”
He looks at Maria with those eyes that are like stones, wanting forgiveness and wanting to hurt. He’s waiting for her to say something. But what can she possibly say?
“I wish she’d called me. I wish I’d been able to do something.”
“There was nothing you could have done. It had nothing to do with you.”
“I’m her mother. Everything she does has to do with me.”
Both of them are shocked at what she’s said, the utter lack of modesty and restraint. And yet Maria can’t take it back, pretend she didn’t mean it. They sit and look at each other; appalled at the chasm that has opened up. Now he will need to punish her; she waits to see its shape and extent.
But it doesn’t come, the punishment. He looks at her with pity, as if she were a child who’d heedlessly run into a wall. She thinks he might be a good father someday. But not for Pearl’s child, no.
“Well, it’s a terrible thing,” he says, and she is touched by the largeness, the indefiniteness of the reference.
“She doesn’t want to see me,” Maria says.
“Me either.”
“Maybe when she’s stronger.”
“I don’t think she’ll ever see me again,” he says simply, scientifically, as if he were talking about the extinction of a species of wildflower. “I mean, like, she has to see you, you’re her mother. She can perfectly well get by without seeing me. I guess that might be better. Too much has gone on. Some things that can’t be fixed. Not if the boat was a little rocky to start with.”
“Wait and see,” she says.
“I’ve put her things together, books and clothes. If you want to collect them. You could come over to the place. Only not today. One of the blokes is there with some company.”
“Tomorrow, then,” she says.
“Tomorrow, teatime.”
He writes the address on a paper napkin. The edges of the letters blur into the softness of the paper, become a pattern rather than a message, hard to read, abstract.
“What time, exactly?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Could it be morning? I see the doctor every afternoon at four.”
“We tend not to be early risers.”
“How about eleven?”
He nods. She hopes she’s sounded accommodating.
“The doctor thinks she’ll probably be all right.”
He nods again and turns. His brown greatcoat disappears into the brownish air.
Maria tries to understand what has just happened. Do you find it hard to understand? This impatient woman, who is where she is because her daughter is close to death, has treated this boy with compassion instead of turning on him in fury. You now know this about Maria: she is capable of surprising and sometimes erratic kindnesses, ignoring the most likely, most deserving candidates for mercy in favor of the insulting rogue, the ungrateful mutilé de guerre.
She asks herself: What did he come for? What did he want from her? Was it only because the doctor told him she wanted to see him? Did he think he was doing something for her? What did he think he was doing? What does he think he’s done?
What has he done, and how can she understand it? New names swirl in her mind: Mick, Stevie, Finbar. One woman’s name: Breeda, a name she’d never in her life heard. People she didn’t know existed an hour ago, so for her these people did not exist at all. It is as if a sorcerer arrived in the breakfast room of the Tara Arms Hotel and conjured three new people whom she now was forced to know. One a dead boy, dead in mysterious circumstances, all of them involved in a political act so puerile, so anachronistically ridiculous she doesn’t know how to think of it. She can only imagine the rich Yankee with the memory of the glory days he probably never had anything to do with. A trust-fund baby with a dream of revolution, transplanted here so he can’t be understood to be the loser that he is. And a mother with a dead child. “She went crazy.” What does that mean, what does any of it mean, and how can she connect it to her child, who may be on the brink of death? How did these people, these names without faces, bring Pearl to the place she now is? A place she will not allow her mother to be, a place Maria doesn’t understand—nor does she understand her role. What is my place in this place? she says to herself.
The boy, Finbar, believes that what happened is connected to the dead boy, Stevie. A living boy talking about a dead one. What does it have to do with politics? He d
id say that things started to change after the Omagh bombing. But how?
Pearl had phoned to talk about the Omagh bombing. Had she paid enough attention? Had she failed to take in its full significance? Had she passed over it as one more atrocity in a world blood-glutted with them? And this event that she nearly passed over, is it at the center of her daughter’s will to die? And who is Stevie? The dead nephew of an imprisoned revolutionary? The love child of a feebleminded mother and a father whose parents came over on the Mayflower? The Mayflower, she thinks, I’ll bet.
Perhaps Dr. Morrisey knows more. Perhaps she will tell her. But she still has four hours to wait. She tries Joseph’s room again. No answer. She has to get out of the hotel. She will walk. She’ll buy a map and walk all the way to the hospital. This is a task that will absorb her; finding her way will drown out the tormenting voices that she can’t now afford to hear. She will walk. Find the next street. Concentrate on whether to turn right or left and how far to go before the next turn. Do not think of what it is unbearable to think of. Do not see anything before your eyes except the names of streets, the blue lines on the map, the green oblong of the river.
38
In another part of Dublin, Joseph is walking too. He has been walking all night and half the day, stopping only for cups of tea, a bun, a sandwich. He feels worn out, empty. The surface of his mind is like a battered basin, shiny, holding nothing. His mind is a muscle whose existence makes itself felt only on account of, or in rebellion against, overuse.
He has done a terrible thing. That it was only a thing of words makes it no less bad. He doesn’t know what should be done next. He hopes, somehow, that it will come to him, seep into his skin like the cold moisture from this gray sky, weakly underlit from time to time by a sun that is a flat disk of beaten silver.
There is no stopping for him, no sitting down, not on the wet grass, and certainly there is no entering cafés for a warming breakfast. He isn’t ready for that; that would be premature, it might suggest a false answer, a snare. He must keep walking. If he takes tea or something to eat, it must be standing up. He mustn’t stop until he is entirely worn out or has found the answer.
39
Maria is only fifteen minutes early at Dr. Morrisey’s office, not so early as to be embarrassing, she tells herself. She sees that Dr. Morrisey is harried, distant. She is the professional again, and in her case that means, if not cold, then cool.
“There’s nothing much to report. I think she’s gaining strength; she’s less agitated; she’s more alert, as we’ve cut down on the sedative; it’s a crucial moment, and I don’t want to put it at risk by having her see you before she’s ready.”
“I can’t see her yet?” Maria says. She wants to say, This is what I’ve been waiting all day to hear? But she’s weaker than she was yesterday; she has lost some of her fight. The encounters with Joseph and Finbar have exhausted her.
“Not just yet. Another twenty-four hours of medication, of nutrition, could make an enormous change. Let’s give it twenty-four hours. The prospects could be entirely different.”
Maria wants understanding from the doctor, compassion: she needs to be listened to. Particularly after what happened with Joseph. I’m sure you can see why this would be the case.
“I keep trying to go over my part in it,” Maria says. “What I did wrong. I just thought if I loved her enough, everything else would take care of itself. Maybe I wasn’t attentive enough, maybe I was too much the animal mother, maybe I loved her too much as a cub. Oh, I loved her body so much as a baby. I loved being the mother of a baby, I never understood people who didn’t. I never got impatient. She seemed so good to me. She always seemed so good. So surprising in her goodness, a kind of goodness I could never have had any hope of. She’s very different from me, you know. She’s very reticent and I’m, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, talkative. She could do things I could never do. Sew. And be quiet. But even as a little child, she couldn’t defend herself very well. I came to understand she didn’t want to. Once someone in school said to her, ‘People like you, Chinese people, have no eyelids.’ And she just crumbled in the corner. I told her she should fight back, I told her that so many times. And the last time, the time when that child insulted her about her Asian eyes, she said to me, ‘Fighting back is not what I do.’ As she might have said, ‘Cornflakes are not what I like for breakfast.’”
“All this will take time to sort out,” Dr. Morrisey says. Maria feels she is distracted, not really interested. Not really interested in her, not even as Pearl’s mother. That she has been chattering, wasting her time. What she doesn’t know: Hazel Morrisey’s daughter, six years old, is about to celebrate her birthday. Hazel Morrisey must be home before the party starts. Her husband, also a doctor, has done the preliminary work, but she mustn’t fail her daughter, not today, not as she has already done too many times in favor of a patient whose needs seemed more pressing to her than her own child. She likes Maria Meyers; she is even sympathetic to her, but she cannot give her any more time.
“We just have to give Pearl time,” the doctor says. “Which I don’t have much more of today, I’m afraid.”
There is nothing to say. Hope for better prospects. Wait and hope. Wait and see. Give it time.
What is time? What can it do of itself, that giving it to something would make a difference? Maria feels time stretching out in front of her, dark and empty, growing larger instead of smaller as it is eaten up. She goes to her hotel room and orders a sandwich and a drink. Tries to watch television. Tells herself her daughter is out of danger. She orders a brandy to be brought up. She wonders if she seems disreputable to Orla at the desk, a pathetic older woman with nowhere to go. Every ten minutes she phones Joseph’s room. There is never an answer. It is more than twenty-four hours since he left the restaurant. Where can he be? Is he in danger too? It’s another thing she mustn’t think about. She has, she thinks, become one of those women grateful to her brandy for dulling the edges of her mind.
. . .
In the morning, she finds Finbar’s street on the map. She walks up two back streets flanked by recently done-up shops. She is passed by many young people; this is an area where students live. The businesses cater to them: chip shops, music shops, and one called Condom-inium which advertises “Something for everyone.” So the church has lost its grip, she thinks with satisfaction. Even here. But the young people she passes seem sullen, worried, ill at ease, like young people everywhere these days. Not like the young Irish in the tourist posters, their red cheeks a sign of their high spirits.
The address Finbar gave her is in a building that looks so new the cement seems barely dry. It could be anywhere in the world, and the young people coming out of it, with their jeans and heavy boots and serviceable coats, could be from anywhere.
She rings the bell and is buzzed in. Finbar doesn’t come to the door. It’s answered by a man about her own age, wearing jeans and a fawn-colored corduroy shirt. His thinning gray hair is cropped close: a good concealing device, she thinks. He’s barefoot; her eyes are drawn to his bare feet, which are, as she imagines he very well knows, beautiful, slightly golden, a sign of grace in this climate where she has not yet seen real sun.
“I’m Mick,” he says. “You’re Maria. Finbar’s showering. This is the crack of dawn for him.”
He takes her coat; he actually helps her off with it. She smells his soap and shaving cream. Her eye falls on the dark hairs on his squarish hands. She wants to keep looking at his feet.
“He doesn’t need to trouble himself. I’m just here for my daughter’s things.”
“Sit down. I’ve made some good coffee. You can actually get it here if you know where to shop. Don’t tell me you’re not dying for a good cup of coffee. Sit down for a minute, for God’s sake. You’re going through hell. Is there anything I can do for you? It’s horrible to be alone in a strange city and have to go through this kind of thing.”
“I’m not alone.”
“Is Joseph with y
ou?”
“How do you know about Joseph?”
“Pearl talked of him so fondly. And of the relationship you and he had. Children together, all those years. It always sounded so very very unique. And now the two of you here together, in this crisis.”
“Don’t make a Kodak moment of it,” she says, congratulating herself for her restraint at not telling him that nothing can be very unique. And particularly not very very unique. I can tell you that for Maria this was no easy thing.
“I have no one left from my early life. Too many changes, too many roads not taken, I guess. Theirs or mine. But our generation made a lot of big journeys, when you think about it.”
The smell of the coffee is difficult to resist. And the sound of American speech, even if its content is foolish, seems somehow benevolent, comforting. Is this compromising her mission, to sit and talk and drink coffee? Pearl and this man had some sort of conflict. Perhaps she shouldn’t be talking to him. But she can’t think about it now.
“I’m so terribly sorry about what happened to Pearl. It’s a crazy outcome. I must say we were all surprised.”