by Mary Gordon
Stevie’s face flattened; it became featureless, like the moon, like the desert, when she had said, “How could you be so stupid?” He became a creature without a face. How can Breeda believe her to be forgivable, believe she doesn’t even require forgiveness? Because she was not herself? If you are not yourself, who are you?
The silver disks bob in the overheated air. Her mother will one day be among the dead. Some things are unforgivable or everything can be forgiven as long as there is a forgiver. Some things cry out for punishment, or punishment is quite beside the point. There are accidents. It was an accident of time; if they’d had more time, they would have worked things out. He could have forgiven in his own name. Would he have forgiven her? She would know she had been forgiven because she would have had the words of forgiveness from a living mouth. It would have been a great gift. But supposing he didn’t want to give it? Supposing Stevie didn’t think she was forgivable? In the dream he had said, “With so much to be forgiven, it would be strange not to forgive.” But dreams are not life. You have to live your life; a dream is something you wake from. Some things you do not wake from. How could you be so stupid? We must marry.
And one day, her mother no longer in this life.
Does her mother understand? Her mother doesn’t long for death, doesn’t believe there is a scrim—thin, easily traversable, infinitely desirable in its lightness—between life and death. Wanting life so, she must understand why people resist taking their place among the dead when one day they will have no choice. Her mother, so alive Pearl could not until this moment imagine her dead. Her mother who gave her life. Her mother who said that after forgiveness you must live your life.
She must ask her mother, “Why is it that it’s life we want?”
What do you make of this question? Do you think it’s unanswerable? Do you even go so far as to say it’s a question no one has the right to ask? Do you assume there’s nothing else wantable except for life, and so it is absurd even to ask the question? What would you do if someone asked it of you, would you try to answer on the spot or would you say, “I’ll get back to you” and consult libraries, wise friends, authorities across the disciplines? Maria doesn’t have that luxury. Her daughter has asked her a question. She must answer it.
And she knows Pearl wants a real answer, not a rhetorical one. She is encouraged that Pearl used the word we.
She tries to think of the things people live for: Love. Beauty. Pleasure. Virtue. Fame. Friendship. None of these things seems real enough, strong enough, to be a proper answer to Pearl’s question. She knows what the answer is for herself, but this answer she cannot give: “I live for you.” She thinks of Breeda, who must live having lost her only child.
Pearl has asked her a question, Why do we want life? There must be a good answer. She does, she believes, want life. But if Pearl died she would want to die. Yet Breeda goes on living. So perhaps she is the one who should be asked. But Breeda is not here. Breeda has not been asked; she, Maria, is the one who must answer.
She tries to remember once again why people have said that life is good. Love. Friendship. Beauty. Pleasure. Virtue. Fame. Fame is irrelevant. Virtue may be its own reward, but is it real enough for Pearl, who has always been virtuous, to prize? Even the virtue that relieves suffering comes up against the reality that the number of the suffering is overwhelming; there are always more, no matter how many are relieved. She has never wanted to die, but she can’t imagine that the good she has done for children would be enough to make her want to live. And what about beauty? Can you say, “You must live for Beethoven, for Vermeer, for the Alps?” Friendship? “You must live for your friend Luisa.” Love? Certainly the boy in the breakfast room in the Tara Arms Hotel, the boy in his peanut-butter-colored bathrobe, wouldn’t make the difference between life and death. Pleasure, then. What has Pearl enjoyed? Food, weather, physical movement. She sees Pearl running with her dog, Lucky; Pearl sitting with her head on Lucky’s head; Pearl next to Lucky, eating ice cream. It is a ridiculous thing to say, Life is worth living because of ice cream and your dog. But it seems preferable to saying, Life is worth living because you must live for me.
Maria sees two scales: one with the horrors of life, one with its goodness. The first is much, much heavier. Only some trick could make them seem equal, some thumb placed on the tray of goodness to give false weight. She sees a butcher’s bloody thumb; her eye falls on a butcher’s bloody apron. She hears the words false weight. She sees a thumb. An apron. But she does not see a face.
And then she does: the face of Aldo Osani, the Italian butcher whom her father liked because he seemed old-fashioned. He had one of those old-fashioned scales: two trays hanging from a chain, two trays that needed to be balanced. There was meat on one tray, lead weights on the other. He would give Joseph and Maria a piece of bologna while Joseph’s mother waited for the order. His fingers were beautifully shaped, and yet his nails were rimmed in blood. Aldo Osani, she is sure, did not give false weight. But now this is what she needs: a belief in the possibility of false weight on the side of goodness. She needs a bloody thumb to tip the scale.
But even if the scale is tipped, she doesn’t know who does the tipping, or why the tipping happens, or if at any moment it might stop. And she must say only what she knows. Pearl has asked her, “Why is it that it’s life we want?”
She can only answer, “It seems we’re meant to.”
Pearl is frightened when she hears her mother say this. Her mother doesn’t know any more than she does. “It seems we’re meant to.” But why and by whom? Who is the one who means and what is the meaning? This is what her mother doesn’t know. Is the answer only “We want life because we’re afraid of dying”? When she wanted to die, she was not afraid of death. When she became afraid of death, she wanted life.
She thinks of Breeda, Breeda who has lost everything, who has refused to blame her, who has sent her balloons that bob in the overheated air, who is sitting, Pearl is sure, in her aqua robe drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in front of the television, Stevie’s birds hanging from their strings, a paper jungle. Why does Breeda want to live? How can Pearl understand it? She can’t understand it; she thinks of Breeda and she is stupefied.
There is no reason for Breeda to forgive her. Pearl has hurt her son, perhaps done something to lead to his death, and now her son is dead. Because of this Pearl has wanted to die. But Breeda goes on living; Breeda has said there is nothing to forgive. There isn’t any way of understanding it. It isn’t sensible, it isn’t reasonable: therefore incomprehensible. What Bobby Sands’s sister Bernadette did was comprehensible. Her brother died; she planted a bomb in revenge. Revenge is comprehensible, she thinks, forgiveness is not. Comprehensible. Comprehend means to include. Claudo, claudere, clausus, Joseph had said. Include means to enclose. I cannot include this, I cannot enclose it with the power of my mind. I cannot comprehend.
Comprehension. Incomprehension. She feels the pressure of her incomprehension, a weakness that is at the same time a force. Whatever Breeda is or does, it is greater than Pearl’s comprehension. Or her incomprehension. I cannot comprehend. Meaning, I cannot take it in. Does it take her in then: does it surround her, include her, enclose her, the way she thought death would enclose her, the enclosure Joseph wanted, that would save them from the world? Is that what saves us, then, the incomprehensible?
After everything, Breeda has forgiven her. Breeda wants life.
This is incomprehensible. It cannot be taken in. Yet to refuse to take it in, to refuse to look at it, to refuse to acknowledge its force, to choose death because you are unforgivable when she says you are forgiven, to choose death when she refuses it—this cannot be done. It dishonors Breeda. It cannot be done.
She sees Breeda, sitting in the dark apartment under the origami birds, the television blasting, the pictures of uprearing horses, of white seals. She looks down the dark road: windless, treeless: there is nothing. Is this the choice then, or is there no choice: the incomprehensible or n
othing? Is there no choice, or is there only one, the one Breeda has made, the one Breeda has offered her? It would seem impossible to refuse her. It would seem dishonorable to say no.
She thinks of Breeda’s face, her thin eyelashes, her ruined teeth, her eyes almost too large, too undefined. Breeda says she needs her, for the work of memory. Breeda has said she is forgiven. If she has been forgiven, she must do the needed work. Work that is needed to be done by her. By her. By her and no other. Done by her or left undone. The work of memory. Work.
She remembers the definition of work from physics class: “Work is the product of force acting upon a body and the distance through which the point of application of force moves.” She got an A in physics; she liked physics very much, but she never thought it would come back to her in this way. Force and movement. Work uses force for change. Forgiveness opens the door to believing that work can be done, that you can do it, that it matters if you do it. That you, a body that possesses a force, can move through space to touch something, move something else.
Breeda has said she is forgiven. Needed. To do the work of memory, which only she can do. None of this is comprehensible. But to deny its force, its power: that would be dishonorable. That would be a lie.
She has always wanted to tell the truth.
Breeda’s face. Her face. Incomprehensible.
Pearl sees Breeda’s face. She understands that you cannot see a whole face at once, even in memory; she focuses on one feature at a time. Mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, forehead. And, for the first time since the news of his death, she sees Stevie’s face. No longer flat, white, dish-shaped but a set of features: the light-blue eyes, the full lips, the mole the size of a dime on his left cheekbone, the light wheat-colored hair. Feature by feature, Stevie’s face is hers again; he has come back to her. He has come back to her when she was looking for his mother. His mother who has sent her a bouquet of Mylar balloons: “I hope you’re fine. I’m fine. I miss you.” His mother who has said that she needs Pearl to do the work of memory with her. His mother who, despite everything, has said that they are friends.
“Breeda is great,” Pearl says.
“Great,” Maria says. “Absolutely great. God, the place she lives in is a nightmare. You know, Pearl, I was thinking maybe she’d like to get away from Ireland, too many sad memories for her here. Maybe she’d like to come to America. We could find her a job in New York; there’s a big Irish colony up by the Cloisters. I know people up there; we could get her a green card eventually, I’m sure we could. I mean, I know a million people, there must be a way. Then we could see her a lot and she could have a whole new life. I’m going to start calling some people I know.”
Pearl laughs. It’s the first time she’s laughed hard for a very long time, and it hurts her throat. Her mother is absurd. She met Breeda for—what was it?—ten minutes, and she has a plan for Breeda’s whole life. And if she tells Breeda, Breeda will be taken up with an idea she’d never have thought of before her mother walked into the room with the force that makes you think the only good thing is to go along, or you’ll be missing something wonderful. Ridiculous, her mother’s sense of possibility, her endless belief in the goodness of change. An old instinct tells her that her mother must be wrong. But what if she isn’t? What if change is, as she always says, “much more possible than people are willing to think”? Her mother is a person of faith and hope. Her mother believes in change.
Her mother believes in change; her mother will never change. This is the sort of thing, this inconsistency, that in the past had made Pearl angry with Maria. But now her mother’s combination of constancy and inconsistency amuses her, delights her. The spectacle of her mother’s life, this lively life, these habits of hers, this headlong rushing ahead, tickles Pearl’s palate like the imagination of a tart dessert. She had said to her mother: Go and do this thing for me, and her mother had done it. She hadn’t hesitated; Pearl had known she would not hesitate. Her mother is her mother. My mother is my mother and I am I. This seems quite amusing; she could repeat it to herself just for the pleasure of the words.
My mother is my mother and I am I.
Of course, her mother is wrong about Breeda. Breeda can’t be taken up, seized in her mother’s beak on one of her swooping flights. How can she trim her mother’s beak and not curtail her flight? Her mother is a swooping bird, a galloping horse, a ship in full sail, an airplane soaring, barely visible, a black dot in a wide blue sky. Her mother is not death, but sometimes she moves too fast.
Pearl looks at Maria. The eagerness in Maria’s eyes makes her seem to Pearl terribly young. How can this be when just moments ago she saw her mother as not young at all? How can it be that she now feels herself much older than her mother? Her mother is running headlong, running too fast; she may crash into something, she may hurt herself, hurt someone else. Pearl can see that. Her mother cannot.
“Mama,” she says. “Slow down.”
Maria looks at her daughter and blinks, as if she’s just heard the most intriguing sentence of her life. And then they both begin to laugh. They laugh as if what Pearl just said was the best joke in the world. They feel they may never stop laughing and it doesn’t matter, because it’s the best thing to do.
. . .
Dr. Morrisey comes in while they are laughing. Of all the responses she would have predicted, laughter was not among them. Words of anger, gestures of recrimination, anxious sobbing, clinging, followed by a push to separate: all these and many others had occurred to her. But laughter? No, she had not thought of that. She wonders what this means about her, what it means about the body of her knowledge, that this common act, one of the most common in the world, the act that some philosophers said make humans human—man is a laughing animal—is one she hadn’t thought of. She is humbled by the sight of them, mother and daughter, holding hands, laughing.
But when we think about it, how can we blame her for being surprised? In the iconography of mothers and daughters, laughter has not taken much of a place. Desperate loyalties; struggles to the death, struggles against death; bosoms of comfort, choking hands; get out of the house, stay in the house; find yourself a man, no man will ever love you; this is the way to bake bread, to clean, to keep your body beautiful: in all this lore, who has mentioned a mother and a daughter laughing? Why not? I don’t know.
Dr. Morrisey can’t stop to think about it. She checks Pearl’s vital signs and is satisfied. Later, she will try to discover the cause of Pearl’s agitation of the day before: the thrashing and the panic, the call asking for Stevie’s mother, then her own mother, who has done something, changed something, so that they sit here laughing. Later, she will speak to Pearl. But for the moment she will let it be. Tomorrow, she will act once more as a doctor, as a scientist. She knows how troubled Pearl must be to have acted so radically, to have planned her own death. As a scientist, she knows better than to believe in the miraculous once-and-for-all turnaround, the bend in the road irrevocably taken, that leaves the path of sickness far behind for good. But for now, looking at Pearl and her mother, she can hope: that things will be all right. That there is enough health here to have faith in. What, she wonders, scientifically speaking, is the place of faith and hope?
“Sorry to break this up, ladies, but my patient needs her rest.”
“Dr. Morrisey,” Pearl says, “can I see Joseph later?”
Hazel Morrisey makes a calculation: Is she pushing it again, is she taking a risk? Wasn’t it Joseph who precipitated the last crisis? She has no scientific basis for her judgment, but she believes her instinct: Pearl has turned a corner. She is better than she was. The road is long, she knows that, but a corner has been turned.
“You can see him for a little while.”
“Mama, will you send Joseph over? So I can talk to him alone.”
“Of course,” Maria says. At last, an easy request: no plunging into the lives of strangers with impossible questions, impossible requests. All Pearl wants is for her mother to deliver a simple messa
ge: Pearl would like to see you now, alone. But really, Pearl could ask her anything. She can do anything now; the reign of terror is lifted, life is possible once again, knives cut, clocks can be believed, the earth can be stepped upon with confidence.
She walks home, enjoying the damp air. Joseph can see that she is happy.
“She seems much better. I think she’s going to be all right, Joe, I really think it. She wants to see you alone. And I’ve done something celebratory, maybe a little rash. I can’t stand this place anymore. It’s just too depressing: the spread, the curtains, the fake stained glass. I’ve booked us into the Shelbourne. It’s madly expensive, but I’m in love with the naked ladies on the art nouveau lamps. And it’s just across from St. Stephen’s Green, so we can walk somewhere nice and not be run down by trucks. Don’t say we can’t afford it.”
So Pearl has told her nothing; Maria knows nothing of what came between them. He is grateful for that, of course, but Pearl’s good behavior makes his bad behavior stand out even more. Just a few hours ago, the sight of her was the most desirable thing on earth to him. Now he dreads it as he has dreaded nothing in his life. But he must take his punishment. What will she say to him? Whatever she wants to say, he must listen.
He looks at Maria, her eyes lively with the prospect of her new luxurious hotel, and realizes she has no idea of how much money she has. Of what shape the business is in. Of what the nature of their investments is. And this knowledge makes him feel, for the first time in three days, undefiled. This is what he can do: he can make sure that Maria and Pearl will never have to worry about money. Will be free of its press and its entrapment and corruption all their lives. Yes, he will do that. From Rome, occasionally from New York, he will guard their fortune, the fortune provided by her father. He will be the good steward: a Judas who kept the purse. What if he had gone on keeping the purse instead of hanging himself?
They will live as they always have, without thinking about money. He won’t see them often, but he will guard their prosperity.