Pearl (14 page)

Maria falls on her and says, “You have no choice. You have a gift. The gift that it is death to hide.” Maria is in love with the seventeenth century. “Devorah, we are not of the party of death, we are of the party of truth.”

Devorah adores Maria. She loves it when Maria explains the Magnificat to her. “Oh, yeah, the Magnificat, oh, sure. My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.” Easy for Maria to rattle off, as if she were saying the pledge of allegiance. Easy for people with her kind of Catholic education to impress people with a knowledge of medieval or Renaissance iconography when it was something they’d learned by third grade, like the names of presidents: St. Lucy is holding eyes on a plate, because her eyes were gouged out by the Romans; you prayed to her when you had conjunctivitis. St. Apollonia’s teeth were pulled out by those same Romans; you prayed to her before you went to the dentist. “Oh, sure, the Magnificat,” Maria says. “Mary is saying, ‘I’m a big deal, but not really; it’s not really me, it’s really God. I’m not the important one, it’s only what I make larger, what I reflect.’” Joseph has often thought that of himself, but he never told Devorah that the piece of music that was so important in her history told the story of his life.

Maria goes with Devorah to audition for the chorus. Maria sits with her afterward in the dormitory bathroom while she vomits. Maria says, “You see? They knew when they heard you that you were extraordinary.” Maria gets the money from her father for special voice lessons recommended by Devorah’s teacher, who says Devorah has gone beyond her and suggests somebody in Boston.

It happens so quickly, as things do in romance. Joseph and Devorah begin spending more and more time together. Maria is entirely absorbed in politics; she is almost never in their room; Devorah doesn’t even know where she is on the nights she isn’t in the bed her father paid for. How does it happen that one day he gets the courage to take her hand, to kiss her, to hold her in his arms? He doesn’t even remember which came first, the decision to tell her parents she has to sing the choral music of Bach or his assurance that if they disown her he will take her as his wife. They are twenty years old; the whole thing seems entirely straightforward.

They decide that Devorah must, as Maria said, “confront her parents.” Her parents tell her she cannot devote herself to singing, in public, the choral music of Bach, music that was written in the language of the murderers of her people, music that insists that the Jews killed Christ, and furthermore she cannot sing in public, in front of men, and still be their daughter. She says she will no longer be their daughter, she will be Joseph’s wife. Joseph, a non-Jew. They sit shiva for her; they declare her dead.

It all happens in a matter of three months. They wait until they are both twenty-one. Seymour Meyers, unexpectedly romantic, becomes their protector; he agrees to pay Devorah’s tuition. As Joseph’s wife, Devorah is not under the authority of her parents; they are given space in married-student housing. They are no longer children of a family (although Joseph had never thought of himself as the child of a family); they are on their own. On their own to devote themselves to Devorah’s gift.

Seymour Meyers tells Joseph that the honoring of Devorah’s gift—which he believes very great—will require money. He offers Joseph a place in his business after graduation. Instantly, Joseph gives up his dream of studying the art of the Middle Ages. He had, in his first year, attracted the notice of Professor Stivic, a Polish émigré (pleased that the gifted young man was also of Polish ancestry) whose specialty was reliquaries. There was something about Joseph as a young man that made older men want to train him, to groom him, to imagine him in their place after their death.

Joseph loved the idea of reliquaries, the elaborate casing for the proof of corruption: bone, tooth, sliver of nail, scrap of bloody cloth. Jewels, gold, silver, then the window: peekaboo, the proof—all flesh is grass. No, worse, the saint is nothing but a bone, a tooth, a nail, a scrap of cloth. The embellishment is all.

He does not acknowledge his own disappointment; this is drowned in his new love. Rather, he regrets that he has to disappoint Professor Stivic. He could disappoint either Professor Stivic or Dr. Meyers and Devorah. And what had Professor Stivic done for him? Had he rescued him and his mother from starvation? Had he given Joseph his intact body, left his family, offered him love unto death? There is no question. He must be able to earn money to support Devorah’s gift, which he believes is far, far greater than his own. In doing this, he will also be repaying Dr. Meyers. It was only later that he wondered. Did Seymour Meyers become their protector because he saw that in doing so he would be buying an excellent steward for his business and his fortune, thus ensuring the welfare of his daughter, who had no interest in the business and thought money was an evil thing, having no idea what it provided in the way of the good things of this world?

.  .  .  

Joseph has also often wondered: If Devorah had only spoken to him and not to Maria, what would have happened? Perhaps she would have seen her situation as sad and impossible and stayed with her people. He would never have held her in his arms. He would not have devoted his life to her and her gift; perhaps she would still be alive, the mother of children. He had thought she wasn’t very interested in children. She never seemed attached to Pearl; she was mainly worried that Pearl might be carrying germs, exposing her to sore throats. When Maria and Pearl came to visit, it was Maria who interested Devorah. It was one of the reasons he had spent so much time with Pearl: to free Maria and Devorah for what they called
ladies’ lunches
or
girls’ night out
. He hadn’t minded. On the contrary, when he looks back, the days he spent alone with Pearl are of the greatest value. What will be lost to him if she is no longer in this world! His Pearl of great price. But not really his. There is no name for what they are to each other, no tie of blood or law. That does not mean the bond is not of gold. Only that there is no name for it.

Quite early in their marriage, Joseph and Devorah agreed they would not have children—because of her work. And then, later, when she told him she had made a mistake, how could he believe her? How could he understand that she had always wanted to be the mother of children but had suppressed it, in favor of the music that she loved? He told himself that Pearl was enough, more than enough; he couldn’t imagine having a child he would love more than Pearl. He couldn’t imagine, given his heritage, his unlovely mother, his deserter father, fathering a child who could in any way come up to Pearl.

Everyone acknowledged that Devorah gave up everything she came from to sing the music she considered irreplaceable. No one ever considered: What had Joseph given up?

So Joseph and Devorah married. They lived in Cambridge, then New York. They devoted both their lives to her gift. She studied voice; she performed the music she loved. Then she came to believe it was too hard a life; she wanted something easier.

Perhaps in the end her gift was rather small, too small for all Joseph’s devotion. Too small a vessel for the amount of love he poured into it. Or is it not that the gift was too small but that the price it exacted was too high for her to pay?

She told him one day in 1994 that she was unwilling to martyr herself any longer. “I just want a life,” she said. Joseph wanted to say to her, What do you think you’re having? What is this thing that you call life that you think you haven’t got, or that you have to hoard?

Was he wrong? Was she? Must the world be divided between martyrs and misers? What would be the appropriate reply to someone who said, as Devorah said to Joseph, only two years before she died at forty-eight, “My life is all I have.” She said it, as most people would, as if it were self-evident, as if they were saying, “The universe is all there is.” Devorah didn’t say it this way, but what people usually say is, “You have only the one life,” using the pronoun
you
and the definite article
the. You have only the one life.

But do you? Well, of course, in one sense yes, in that you don’t get more than one. In that the universe is, of course, all there is. But isn’t it possible to say, “You have your life, and the idea of your life, and what your life stands for”? Stands for. Stands where?

Pearl believes she is standing somewhere. Right now she believes that the idea of her life is more important than her life itself. Of course we do not agree with her. But because we do not agree, does it follow, then, that there is nothing worth dying for? Or against? And if there is nothing worth dying for, what is worth living for? This is the kind of question that has led Pearl to where she is now, chained, lying on the freezing pavement in front of the American embassy, while the police wait to decide the right thing for them to do and Pearl waits for the death that she has summoned, planned.

But when Devorah said she was unwilling to martyr herself any longer, she didn’t mean she’d been planning to die. What had she been martyring, her desire for comfort, for ease? Earlier, if she’d given up her desire to sing, she would have had to martyr her ambition. These would, of course, have been little deaths. Joseph has often wondered if she shouldn’t have martyred her ambition, her desire to sing. But he believed it wasn’t even that. She would have had to martyr her desire to be heard, her desire for performance. And he wondered: Was that such a very great thing, that desire, that it should have been honored at the expense of her family’s happiness and peace? Is it greater than a person’s duty toward her people? And was her desire for ease and comfort so important that it should have killed his dream of her?

.  .  .  

In 1967, 1968, the idea of not using your gift was considered a betrayal of the highest sort. In those years, you did not give up your gift to satisfy your parents—certainly not if you were someone like Maria. Joseph always knew that something terribly important had been lost. But if he had said that, he would not have had a certain kind of joy, the joy of loving a woman he considered gifted and miraculous, and she would not have had a certain kind of joy—a joy that is irreplaceable—the joy of performance.

He has never understood it very well, the impulse to perform. He doesn’t have much sense of his own visibility. The impression he makes on people is something he has to screw himself up to a pitch of unnatural attention to think of; he does it only for business. He has never understood the desire to be seen; he’s always supposed it was part of the artistic process. But he wishes it wasn’t. He wishes there could be, at least somewhere in the world, at least one artist who doesn’t care if anybody sees his work.

So after twenty-five years of devoting herself to her music, when Devorah said she was giving up her dream of being the kind of singer she had always wanted to be, that she was content to have the occasional private student and teach voice at Westchester Community College, that she just wanted to be happy, he felt terribly let down. Does this mean he never really wanted her to be happy?

He had thought he understood her. He thought she was the woman he loved, the great love of his life. He thinks he will not love another woman in that way; he is past that kind of belief.

He believed she would shape her life so it was devoted to the gift of her voice: the pure gift of a pure voice. She had an extraordinary voice; he knows he was right in that. He wasn’t the only person who thought so. Teachers, coaches—even some critics—praised Devorah’s voice. What he didn’t understand at first, what she might not have understood at first but came to understand long before Joseph, is that many people are greatly gifted. It’s not as unusual as we might think. Oh, it’s unusual, of course, or we wouldn’t notice it at all, but it’s not unusual enough. There are, particularly now, at the end of the century—I should say at the end of the millennium—simply not enough places so that all the people in the world who are gifted in singing the serious music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be listened to with the kind of attention they crave. The kind of attention that makes all the effort worth it.

It is a difficult life. A great deal must be given up. Joseph was perfectly willing to assume his share of the difficulties: to watch out for his wife’s voice, to be silent for days, to be alert to drafts and changes in temperature, to pay large sums for lessons with great teachers, to put up with lousy accommodations in lousy hotels in third-rate cities, to have her away from him for weeks at a time, to have her refuse to answer him on the day of her performance when he asked if she’d bought any jam. Of course, she had to endure much more, he knew that: the anguish of believing she hadn’t got it right, she hadn’t done it well enough. For an hour, two hours, three hours of being responded to? It’s not enough, she said. No, he wanted to tell her, you’re not doing it for the response. You’re doing it to bear witness to the greatness of your gift and the greatness of the music.

After twenty years of what she called martyrdom, Devorah felt it was no longer worth it. Afterward, he believed he should have seen it coming when she wanted to move into the Larchmont house that had been rented out for twenty years, the house Dr. Meyers had left to him and not to Maria: Dr. Meyers and Maria were estranged at the time of his death. He should have seen it coming when Devorah began talking about a garden.

“Why a garden all of a sudden, why now?” he asked her.

And she said—it may have been the first time she really hurt him—“I’ve always been interested, but I knew you wouldn’t approve. You wouldn’t think it was serious.”

He was hurt because she’d kept something from him, possibly for years, and because he got a hint for the first time that his love might be something of a burden to her.

But he wanted her to be happy. And if she said a house and garden would make her happy, she was too old for the apartment on the air shaft, she wanted space and light, it would be good for her voice—well, how could he refuse her?