by Mary Gordon
He has always thought of Pearl as pure. A white flower hidden in a cool green sheath of leaves. Did she think she was emptying herself of all excess? Did this emptying mean she would become one of the dead? She has approached the territory of the dead, intending to give herself to it. He looks at the white sky with the whiter sun pressed into its surface and thinks of the desire to be part of it. That whiteness. That quietness. Withdrawn, set apart from the world. Of course Maria can’t understand that. She is sated, clotted. Pearl is a white flower without fragrance, or the fragrance only of leaves, nearly toneless, a pale green sheath. Maria wants to force the sheath. To force the flower with her sharp nails, her thick fingers. People did that with flowers. Devorah did it—in the name of what? Paperwhite narcissus, the bulbs were called; she had forced them, as if that were a good thing. And the flowers overfilled the air of the winter room with their insistent smell—was it supplication? protest? He didn’t know what it smelled of, only that it had made him sick. Forced. They forced things because they wanted them for themselves, in their own time. They wanted what they wanted now. That was all they saw, all that was real to them. Paperwhite narcissus. Butter.
He remembers a story Professor Stivic told him: Professor Stivic, whom he had had to disappoint; Professor Stivic, in his crowded, chaotic office, with his caterpillar eyebrows that became completely vertical when he was excited or alarmed. Or distressed. This day he was distressed, because Joseph was apologizing for the mediocrity of his work. They both knew what he had written was mediocre. “You are forcing it,” the teacher said. “You mustn’t force things. Forcing is always a mistake. I must tell you about forcing. A story about forcing, the story of the worst thing I ever did. I was very young, but not so young as to justify it.”
Joseph was frightened. Was he going to hear a story of a murder covered up, of a rape, of pointing the Nazis to a hideout of hidden Jews?
“I was with my best friend, we were walking in the woods, and we saw a butterfly about to hatch from a cocoon. For a while we watched it, but I got impatient and took it in my hands, the cocoon, and I breathed on it, to provide warmth to hasten the course of things. It worked, the butterfly hatched, but because the time was wrong, because it had been forced, its wings withered and it died in the palm of my hand. It died because of my impatience, because I forced something that should not have been forced. Go home to your beautiful new wife, let her sing to you, walk with her in the sunlight. What will come will come in its own time. Never force.”
Professor Stivic. Each year a Christmas card; from Champaign-Urbana, lately Krakow. Joseph did go home; he and Devorah walked by the river; they made love. He did no more work that day. But eventually he did write a thesis, his thesis on medieval reliquaries, that he knew was very good.
Pearl must not be forced. How can he protect her—from her mother, from this doctor, from other doctors who most certainly are to come? What is the difference between force and protection? The doctor has said she needs protection in order to be kept alive.
Pearl could die. Her body could consume itself, because she would rather be a skeleton than be part of this life, a life she feels is unbearable. Because of what she did to that boy. The will to harm, she calls it; he calls it the unreasonable appetite. The hot breath, gasping Mine, now. Whatever they call it, he and Pearl mean the same thing. Both of them have felt themselves torn at, eaten up, by the hand that grabbed and grabbed, the mouth that chewed and chewed. What they have both understood is the real nature of the world. But he hadn’t understood before that he was feeding the maw with the substance of his own life.
Only now does he understand that he has given too much. He has given too much because others had felt free to take too much. He has given too much to the wrong ones, the ones who wanted the wrong things: Maria and Devorah and his mother and Dr. Meyers; they wanted sensation and position, safety and placement, attention, the demands and the desires of the flesh. What about his desires? He desired beauty and fineness; he gave over his substance to others, who wanted what would perish, what the moth would eat, what rust would turn to nothing, what would go in their mouths and end up in the drain. Wasn’t that what Jesus was saying, that this sort of desire was wrong? Where your treasure lies, there will your heart lie; hadn’t Jesus said that too? He and Pearl were alike. They did not desire what the moth could eat or what rust could consume. What they desired was not consumable. He remembers her telling him, and begging him not to tell Maria (and he did not), that she decided not to apply to Harvard because she didn’t want it enough and her friend Luisa wanted it so much, and she knew the difference between really wanting something like that and not, knew she could never want something like Harvard the way Luisa did, and she was afraid that because her mother was an alumna and because Pearl had two 800s on her college boards, she would get in before Luisa when it wasn’t something she wanted nearly as much. Luisa is hungry for it, she had said. I’m not.
The hunger of the world. He has fed the hungry. That’s how he’s lived his life, feeding Maria, feeding Devorah, feeding his mother, feeding the hunger of the world for ugly objects thought of as a type of god. Idolaters. Appetite and ugliness and force. He and Pearl are talking about the same thing. They are talking about the real nature of the world. It might have killed her. And then what in life would be pure, would be lovely, would be worth his life?
Feeding others, he has allowed Pearl to starve. The prospect of losing her is unbearable. He sees now what the shape of his life must be: to protect her. The doctor has said people like her need protection. He has not protected her; he has not kept her safe. Now he must live his life to keep her someplace where she will be safe from the assault of the world’s force. A life where she need not suffer, where she won’t be afraid to live. So she won’t die.
But now he can’t do anything for her, because he has no legal standing. Her mother is the only one with legal standing. Only her mother can invoke the law. In Pearl’s name, for her protection, he must be able to invoke the law. So that she will live. He must be able to do it, not her mother. Her mother doesn’t understand her. Her mother and the doctors can save her body; only he understands what will save her soul. If her soul isn’t saved, she’ll find another way of destroying her body.
Joseph is thinking in ways that he has never thought before; in his mind he is using words that have not, until now, been his. Never before has he said must in relation to something he wanted to do. Never before has he thought only he could do something. But no, that isn’t true. He had thought only he could give Devorah the life she wanted; only he could help her honor her gift. Only he could protect her. In losing that conviction, he lost the habit of thinking himself singular in any way.
He had not been able to protect Devorah, but he must protect Pearl. He knows this is most important; he must not fail, as he did with Devorah. Pearl must be protected. Something must be invoked that will protect her. He tries to think of a suitable law. But what law can help him guard her? Guard, he thinks, and then the word comes to him: guardian. To become her legal guardian, he would have to have her mother declared unfit, and no one would think that of Maria. But if he were her guardian, he could protect her. Her mother and the doctors don’t understand what she needs. Life, they keep saying, more and more life. But what of the flowers that wither in the sharp wind, the burning sun? What of the butterfly, forced outside? Some need enclosure. A garden enclosed is my sister, my love. The Song of Songs: what greater love poem has there ever been than this? He sees lilies of the valley, unprotected, turning brown exposed to air. She is in danger. How can he keep her from danger? Her doctor said it: she needs protection. How can he provide protection?
It comes to him: he will protect her. By marriage. He will invoke the law that is invoked by marriage. A man and a woman, kept by marriage from the encroachments of the world. He sees it now, he sees it: they must marry. She must take his name; they must have it as the visible sign of his protection of her. What is marriage but a story of th
e law? It goes without saying that he will never touch her, but if they tell the story of a marriage, she will be protected. He is the one who will be called; he is the one who will have to give consent; the doctors will have to abide by his decisions should she ever need a doctor.
When he was married to Devorah, she was connected to him by law. When she died, the decision of what to do with her body was his. Her parents had had to call him for her body; it was up to him.
He looks up at the white sun in the white sky. The whiteness is illumined now; it spreads itself, a sheet of silver whiteness. He can look at this sun without danger; nothing in it seeks his harm. Pearl must not be forced. She must be protected. This, he knows, is the right thing. He will find a place for them, a quiet place, a sanctuary. Old stones to take the sun’s heat, the splashing of a small fountain. Days drenched in peace, shaped by silence. Their meals as plain as she likes. Everything will be simplified. She can study her languages. He imagines a plain white table piled high with dictionaries and grammars. No poetry or novels, no history or science, no politics or philosophy. It will mean he will give up some things important to him, a kind of reading by which he has understood himself and his place in the world, but of course, he tells himself, he can make this sacrifice in the interests of simplicity. He will cook for her. He doesn’t know how to cook, but he will learn. He is sure she will eat properly if he presents her with this plan to keep her from the force of her mother, the force of the doctor, the force of the world.
He will devote his life to her. To her protection. Her claustration. From the Latin claudere, clausus: enclosed. The enclosure of the sacred: tabernacle, temple, shrine, sanctuary. The sanctuary of marriage, the safe place, the inviolable place, the locked door that keeps out danger.
. . .
I want to tell Joseph that he’s made a mistake, it’s not the sanctuary of marriage, it’s the sanctity. But you might want to cry out: Why of all the wrong things that he’s done would I choose to remark on a mistake of language? Perhaps it is because I am aware of how little I can do, how little I can change. Don’t you imagine that if I could have stopped Joseph from thinking in this way I would have?
What Joseph understands is this: Pearl will be kept safe by their marriage, which will be a good story, a strong story, a story that explains the shape of things, even if the explanation isn’t true. Finally, a story that doesn’t sicken him, that does its proper work.
He will go to her with this plan, this plan to keep her from force and ugliness and fear and sorrow. To live a life of quiet, of the contemplation of beauty, under the sign of the law. She has looked too long and too hard at the unfiltered sun. That’s what the doctor said. He will keep her from all that. He will provide sanctuary for the contemplation of the beautiful. He will see to it that these things, these things alone, will make up her life. He will live his life for that. She will no longer be subject to her mother, to her doctor. He and she will be alone together.
Joseph is lost to himself, but he doesn’t know it. “He’s gone round the bend,” we might say, and those words would indicate what has happened: we have lost sight of the man we knew, as he has lost sight of himself. He, of course, doesn’t know this, so he is exhilarated by the new man he has become. He feels he has been born again. A new life will be his: of freedom and of beauty. This is what he calls it, these are the words he uses: freedom and beauty. What words would we use? Would we say, instead: This is a kind of madness? He would tell us that we cannot see, as he sees, the vision that came to him while he was looking into the white circle of the early sun.
But he believes Pearl will see as he sees, what he sees. She will share his vision. He will tell her everything, and then he will leave for Rome, where he will search out the place where they will live. Perhaps an abandoned convent: he has heard there are many such now in Italy. He sees a cloister. He sees them walking around the cloister in the afternoons, digesting their light lunch. He hears the plashing of the fountains, sees the slim silver-barked trees.
He knows now what must be done. All at once, the burden of his dirtiness, his soiled shirts and shorts, becomes intolerable. He longs for a shower and a shave. He can imagine the hot coursing water, reassuring him that everything he’s thought of is possible and right. He looks up at the white sun. Light without heat. Light without color. Light without force. Pure light.
42
“I want to see my mother now,” Pearl says to Dr. Morrisey.
“You’re sure you’re ready?” Dr. Morrisey says.
“I want to see her.”
“She may have a strong response. There may be tears, reproaches. You need to be ready for a variety of things.”
“My mother’s not like that.”
The doctor touches the tube sewed to Pearl’s nose. “You’re ready for me to take this out of you? You’re ready to say you are committed to leaving the other tubes in?”
Pearl makes the OK sign.
Dr. Morrisey cuts the stitch under her nose. The sound of snipping is a shock but there is no pain attached. “I hope this will be the last bad thing I’ll be doing to you,” she says, and pulls the tube out of Pearl’s throat. Pearl feels a bit bereft at first, and her throat feels raw, robbed of its newly comfortable false vein.
“I didn’t want your mother to see you that way. I’d say she’s a powerful person to have in your corner.”
Pearl nods her head.
“I’ll stay around. If it seems too much, or you want to be alone again, ring the buzzer and we’ll do whatever you want. You’re in charge: remember that.”
Pearl says, “You don’t know my mother.”
“I’ve met her,” Dr. Morrisey says, “and you’re still in charge. You probably don’t want to hear this, but your mother loves you very much. She very much wants you to get well. None of that means she’ll know how to behave. So you must call the shots.”
The shots, she thinks. What shots? Bang bang, you’re dead.
But who dies? she wonders. She or her mother?
Neither, she thinks. We are both alive.
43
Maria answers the phone that sits on the table beside her bed. It is Dr. Morrisey, whose voice is, for the first time, warm.
“She’s ready to see you now.”
“She wants me?” Maria says humbly, a rejected lover, a cast-off wife invited back.
“She’s asked for you.”
. . .
Maria leaves a message for Joseph but doesn’t wait for Orla to call her a cab. She runs down the road to the taxi rank and tells the cabby to take her to the hospital. Pronto. Where did that word come from? What movie? Whatever it is, the taxi driver has seen the same movie. “Pronto it is,” he says, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
. . .
Maria hears her heels and the doctor’s heels on the linoleum of the corridor; she feels they aren’t walking fast enough, but she can’t think of a way of making the doctor walk faster. Maria knows she must follow the doctor: her low-heeled tan shoes, her blond head, the thin white cloth of her jacket. They don’t speak.
The doctor goes into the room first. Maria stands a bit apart from her. The light in the room is dim and Maria thinks of the words twilight sleep, a drug she seems to remember that was intended to anesthetize women in childbirth. The light is bluish, the lamp beside the bed the only illuminating source; the far wall can only be sensed, not seen. She is entering a split cone of darkness, in the center of which only one spot of the visible emerges: the bed, its white sheets only a plane blocked by the doctor’s back.
“Your mother’s here.”
There is no sound and then, Maria sees, Pearl is weeping. Tears are coming down her cheeks, but there is no sound coming from her.
“It’s all right now, love,” Maria says. Her eyes fill with tears too. She sits beside the bed in a turquoise plastic chair and slips her hands through the bars, in between the tubes, and takes Pearl’s hand, gingerly, because a needle is attached to the skin with a Band-Aid.
“I’m hungry,” Pearl says at last. “I want to eat something.”
“Not so fast,” Dr. Morrisey says. “Not immediately.”
She pronounces it immijitly, and Maria feels the warning in her voice.
“What would you like to eat when the time comes?” Maria asks.
“Rice pudding,” Pearl whispers.
“A shark-infested rice pudding,” Maria says to her, thinking of a children’s book they both liked. She can’t remember a thing about it but the title. Most children’s books bored her; she couldn’t wait for Pearl to get past them, a secret she hopes she successfully kept. She hated the coyness, the archness, the creation of a falsely pristine or falsely jokey world. She couldn’t wait till it was time for Jane Eyre. But Joseph liked children’s books; Joseph read to Pearl a lot when she was little. When Joseph comes, Maria thinks, swallowing her fears for him, she’ll remind him of a shark-infested rice pudding.
“We’ll think about rice pudding in a few days,” the doctor says, and leaves the room.
In the half-light, Maria closes her eyes, lightly holding her daughter’s hand, cool, damp, the nails bluish, or perhaps it is only the light. I am, she thinks, strangely happy. She remembers being happy when she nursed Pearl as a child with a low-grade fever. The same feeling of purposely useful action perfectly completed, and the peace it brought, comes back to her now. A stillness that seemed immaculate because there was nothing else that could possibly be done. An island, a cutting off.