by Mary Gordon
“I’m going back to Rome tonight,” he says. “Everything’s fine here.”
“Oh, Joseph, please don’t,” she says, then looks repentant. “Oh, I know. I’m being selfish. I have to get used to your not being around all the time. You’re going to move to Rome, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I think I am.”
“Are you seeing someone there?”
“Yes,” he says. He is seeing someone: himself, a well-dressed middle-aged man in a wide Roman piazza. The sun falling straight and indiscriminate. Young people laugh and smoke and ride their Vespas. Tourists enter churches; old couples walk arm in arm; Asian and African nuns walk in pairs; Japanese teenagers in groups of twenty pose for photographs before a fountain. He isn’t part of it, but he watches, and no one wonders, Who is that man? because he isn’t someone who is looked at, he is one who looks.
“Pearl will be fine,” he says. He believes it because he must.
“I hope,” she says, and he knows she believes it because she is a person of hope, and so she hopes.
50
The doctor says, “I’m lowering the dosage of your medication. I’m going to trust you.”
Pearl nods. She is trusted. Forgiven. Once again.
51
Pearl’s eyes are closed when Joseph walks into the room. The room is dark; her white bed is brilliant in the darkness. There is discoloration under her nose. There is a tube attached to her hand. Her hands are ringless and her nails, unvarnished, are nevertheless luminous in the darkness, like moons.
He sits in the turquoise plastic chair and waits for her to open her eyes. She is very beautiful, silvery in her cone of darkness, transected by the rectangle of her bed.
“Oh, Joseph, things have been so strange. I’ve had all kinds of things happen, and then these strange dreams. Some of them were beautiful, some were quite disturbing, and I have no idea, because of the drugs and what’s going on with my body, what things have really happened and which were dreams. I’ve given up trying to figure out what really occurred. It doesn’t seem terribly important.”
What is she saying, that she doesn’t believe he said what he said? That it was a nightmare she can relegate to the world of useless nightmare images: the winged creatures with talons and teeth, the bottomless well, the door that will not open? Is that what she’s saying? Does she believe it, or is she trying to let him off the hook?
She mustn’t let him off the hook; hanging from the hook of her blame is where he belongs. He has harmed her. He has betrayed her. He wanted her for himself. He suggested marriage, when that would be a terrible betrayal; he didn’t see it as the betrayal it would be. He only saw what he wanted. He looked harmfully. He wanted to make sure she would never suffer, so he committed the sin of idolatry. He wanted her to be a creature he could worship, a treasure, hidden in a tabernacle, hidden from the world. He committed the sin of greed. He committed the sin of theft. He stole from her the belief that there are in the world safe corners where nothing jumps out, where there is no possibility of ambush or destruction in the form of unexpected visitations.
How can this be forgiven? He doesn’t want any forgiveness from her, and certainly not forgiveness that is only a mistake. She must know what he has done, so that she isn’t haunted by it, so that in future it won’t rise up, another ambush, and in a vulnerable moment cut her down.
“It wasn’t a dream, Pearl. I said what you think I said. I can’t explain it. I can only offer you—I don’t even know what the word is; apology is far too light. I am terribly sorry. I can only ask your forgiveness. I wanted so to protect you.”
Never has she seen a face so taken up by its distress. This distress, the absolute giving over to it, makes him seem innocent and, as her mother seemed to her a short time earlier, very young. Young in his suffering, defenseless. How can she defend him? It is himself that he must be defended from, and she has no idea how to do that. She knows what it is like: to feel that you must be defended from yourself. She would like to help him. She knows how much he needs her help.
“It’s not important, what you said. You’ve been good to me all my life.”
“I don’t understand,” he says. “I hurt you.”
“It’s not important. I’m all right.”
He is abashed by her generosity, by her kindness, but also angered by it. He would rather have her blame. Does she really believe what she’s saying, that what he said wasn’t important? Or is she just being kind? He feels shaken, clumsy, like a fumbling, dangerous animal, dangerous in his largeness, in his maladroit lunges toward the human world. He thinks of a poem by a Polish poet, about a bear who is afraid neither of men nor fire. He steals meat off the porches of houses. The friend of the poet shoots the bear under the shoulder—only understanding the bear’s odd behavior when he tracks him down and sees his jaw half eaten away by abscess. The poem acknowledges that the problem of the bear was insoluble. The bear had to be shot. He was a danger. The fact that his behavior was explicable did not mean he didn’t need to be destroyed.
But she has said his dangerous lunge was not important. That she’s all right. How can that be? He has lunged dangerously, like the wounded bear, and failed to do harm. What, then, protected her? Certainly not himself, with his pathetic passion for protection. What was it that has kept her safe?
He would like to say, Look out for me. In both senses of the term. He would like to ask her for her protection. He has already asked her forgiveness and been given it. How will he live with that? Forgiveness for betrayal. Judas the betrayer. He remembers a brother in Portsmouth Priory, Brother Luke. “Poor Judas,” he always said. “He didn’t know how easily he could have been forgiven. He was overcome by despair. By shame.” As if he were telling a slightly obscene story, he nearly whispered into Joseph’s ear, “I believe he is forgiven. I believe he is beside Jesus in Paradise. Along with the Good Thief. Because despair can turn you deaf, and he couldn’t hear the word that would have been his consolation. He was deafened by despair; all he had to do was ask. But I think he was forgiven anyway, even without asking.”
He has asked her forgiveness and has been given it. He doesn’t yet know what this might mean. He knows he must go away. He will stay away.
“Joseph,” she says, “I’ve had all these ideas, my brain’s a little wild, I know that, but one idea keeps coming back to me, and I need your help. I was thinking that after a while, after I’m better, what I’d like to do is go to Cambodia. Look for something connected to my father. Try and find records, something. I don’t know what there is but I’d like to try; in any case I’d like to see the place. I know that would cost a lot of money. Do you think we have enough money for that?”
In all the years he has been in charge of the Meyerses’ money, in all the years he has seen to it that Maria and Pearl—and Devorah, of course—had everything they wanted, none of them ever asked what Pearl has just asked. The question allows him to give an answer that lightens the burden of what he has done to her. He has been clever with her money; there is more than enough. And he can tell her that: with pride, with pleasure. Yes, he can say, there is enough money to do what you want. He has protected her wealth; he will continue to protect her wealth. The Judas who kept the purse.
“You’ve had a windfall with one of your mutual funds,” he says.
Windfall. Mutual funds. She sees dollar bills twirling like leaves; she sees figures dressed as dollar bills, dancing, holding hands. She smiles. He doesn’t know what she’s smiling at. He hopes it doesn’t mean she’s lost her understanding.
“I’ve had a lot of ideas, things I’d like to do before I go back to school. After I go to Cambodia, maybe I’ll travel around Asia. And then I think I’d like to work on a farm. I’d like to learn about animals. Maybe I’ll come back here, I have a friend whose family has a farm.”
He’s never heard her talk this way: chattery, girlish. She seems younger to him than she has for years.
“Slow down, kiddo,” he says.
&nb
sp; “That’s what I said to my mother,” she says. “Slow down.”
“I’m going to leave you now. I’m going back to Rome.”
They both know what he means. That he is distancing himself from her, that he is keeping himself away from her, exiling himself in reparation for what he has done. Is the price too high? He made a misstep, a grievous misstep. Maria has made many; Pearl at least one. And yet they will go home. He will live a stranger in a strange land. Isn’t there any other way, some slow process of return? He doesn’t think so. He believes, unlike Pearl, unlike Maria, that, although forgiven, he will not be given a second chance.
“Rome,” Pearl says. “You love Rome. That will be good for you.”
Does she mean that? Or does she mean, It will be better for me? Whatever she means, neither of them will question her words. And so, I suppose, we will not either.
Maria knocks lightly, shyly, at the door, then enters, although no one has told her to come in. She stands beside Joseph, puts her hand on his arm, leans awkwardly over the bed so she can touch Pearl’s hand.
“I’ve got to get my plane now,” Joseph says. Maria kisses him goodbye.
He bends over the bed to put his lips on Pearl’s cheek. She pats his head. Like a mother, he thinks, and feels the cool light touch his own mother never gave him. She moves her hand so that her fingers come to rest on his forehead. Her fingers are far cooler than his forehead, as if he were feverish, the kind of fever he hasn’t had since he was a child, the kind of fever that makes the touch of a cool hand feel like a poultice. What does a poultice do? It draws poison into itself. Ringless, these fingers, resting on his forehead, not moving at all, but still and cool on his thin skin, and he thinks: the skull beneath the skin, the brain beneath the skull. Brain fever. The fever broke. Those were the words used; that was what people said. And something in him does break, or break up, at the touch of her cool fingers, wonderfully still, drawing—what can it be?—the poison of his harm into themselves. She might have been harmed by him, but she does not seem harmed; he feels the strength in her cool fingers, the competence. Not delicate, those fingers, perhaps a bit too short for the wide palm. Her fingers on his forehead make it difficult, terribly difficult, to leave her, but he must go. He walks to the door. Maria blows him a kiss, and Pearl waves her one free hand.
“Bon voyage,” Maria says. She would like to say, Go with God, but she won’t allow herself.
He closes the door. They are together. They are safe. He hears his heels on the mole-colored linoleum and thinks of them holding hands lightly in the damp and overheated air.
52
We will leave Joseph walking down the corridor. We will not follow him; he would not wish to be followed.
And we will leave Pearl and Maria to themselves.
We will hope for the best.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Gordon is the author of the novels The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, and The Other Side, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir, The Shadow Man, among other books. Winner of the Lila Wallace– Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1996 O. Henry Award for best short story, she teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
Also by Mary Gordon
FICTION
Final Payments
The Company of Women
Men and Angels
Temporary Shelter
The Other Side
The Rest of Life
Spending
NONFICTION
Good Boys and Dead Girls
The Shadow Man
Seeing Through Places
Joan of Arc
Copyright © 2005 by Mary Gordon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gordon, Mary, [date].
Pearl/Mary Gordon.
p. cm.
1. Students, Foreign—Northern Ireland—Fiction. 2. Upper West Side (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Americans—Northern Ireland—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Protest movements—Fiction. 6. Northern Ireland—Fiction. 7. Hunger strikes—Fiction. I. Title.
ps3557.o669p43 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004048537
www.pantheonbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-42358-1
v3.0