Pearl (15 page)

One thing, of course, led to another. She spent time in the garden. She became interested in redoing the house. Then she had to learn how to cook all the vegetables in the vegetable garden and how to use all the herbs in the herb garden, and to how make beautiful arrangements of the flowers in the flower garden. Joseph hated that garden. She was right: he didn’t think it was serious. He didn’t believe there was greatness in gardening. A garden didn’t stand for anything. Oh, it might be a source of inspiration for a poet or a painter, Marvell or Herrick or Monet. But he believed that a poem about a garden or a painting of a garden was greater than a garden itself. If Devorah had sung about a rose, he believed that would have been greater than growing an actual rose. She knew what he believed, and it hurt them both.

He did not know, although Maria did, that she got back in touch with her family. Maria went with her on her first tentative visit but did not go back again; she wasn’t needed. She called Devorah’s brother when Devorah died.

Joseph wasn’t there when it happened, when Devorah, standing at the top of the stairs, caught her heel in the hem of her long skirt and fell. He came home to find her. It was six o’clock but still a summer afternoon. The light was beautiful when he walked into the house. He called his wife’s name. And then he saw her, lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face in the dirt of the ficus plant she’d been carrying, smashed beside her.

He called the police. His next-door neighbor, whom he hardly knew, came when he saw the police car. A doctor whom he’d never met came by. He said Devorah had died instantly. There was no pain. He was grateful for that.

He phoned Maria. Maria wasn’t home so he told Pearl, and Pearl came up on the train. He met her at the station. They did not embrace. They sat quietly, and the sun bled out of the day and then it was dark. She made some sandwiches.

When he thinks of Pearl that day, he remembers that everything she did was perfect. She was quiet; every gesture she made was a comfort; there were no abrasions. Her voice had a kind of elegant maternal quality, a quattrocento Madonna of the time of Ruskin’s Ilaria.

He was almost sorry when Maria came, Maria with her loud weeping, her cries of “I can’t believe it! It can’t be!” Calling Devorah’s brother, so that then her parents, who were still living, phoned—he had never spoken to them, not once in twenty-five years—and asked if they could have her body to bury in a Jewish grave. He felt that, having taken so much from them, he had no right to refuse.

.  .  .  

Two years later, on the Via Arenula, Joseph would like to go into the synagogue and—do what?—not say a prayer but perhaps think for a moment of his dead wife. But he feels he has no right. He is not one of the chosen. And he does not know how to mourn a wife whom he will always have to suspect of ceasing to be his before the day that she was—the words come so easily to people’s lips—taken from him.

Now I must tell you about a strange episode in Joseph’s life. It may be more common than we think for a quiet man, a man who lives his life reasonably and honorably, to have a period of irrational obsession. Joseph had several months in which he believed the history of the Jews was a burden he must carry in his living flesh, to expiate the history coiled in the snail shell of his genetic makeup.

He began to be terrified that he had more connection to the sufferings of the Jewish people than simply marrying one of their daughters. He became convinced that his father, of whose face he had no knowledge, who had left no trace in his life, had been a torturer.

His obsession with his father’s role in the Holocaust took shape in 1993, when Joseph was forty-five years old. It began when he read the newspaper articles about Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi guard who’d been hiding out as an autoworker in Chicago. In his face, Joseph saw something of his own: the widely spaced eyes, the arching of the brows, the ears, the forehead. John Demjanjuk, Ivan the Terrible, was born the same year as Adam Kasperzkowski, Joseph’s father. The same date as his father’s date of birth on Joseph’s birth certificate. He became convinced that John Demjanjuk, Ivan the Terrible, was his father. Or that was the first step. It was a multistep operation, a gradual delusion, a split-level obsession.

His father was born in Gdansk in 1919. So was John Demjanjuk. He saw his eyes in the eyes in the grainy newspaper photograph; he would stand next to the mirror looking from his own features to the newspaper clipping; calibrating the width of forehead, the shape of the nose. Why couldn’t it be his father? His father, who had acted barbarously, walking out—“Just going for a pack of cigarettes”—on the infant Joseph and his mother. Why should he have been an exception, one of the few who did not rush to torture the Jews?

How do we trace the roots of this strange flowering? How do we explain this sort of thing in a man we would have said was normal in every other way? A successful businessman. A loving husband. For three years at least, Joseph believed himself to be the son of a war criminal. He told himself that someone like his father would surround himself with edifice after edifice of lies. By the time Ivan the Terrible had hit the newspapers, Joseph’s mother had disappeared into the fog of her senility.

Was it that if Joseph imagined his father a torturer he would have been able to describe abandonment by him as a lucky break? Better to have been abandoned by a torturer than to have been brought up by him. How lucky: the torturer left him, so he could be taken up by the fine hand of Seymour Meyers. What a lucky boy. How wrong his mother’s cry: “Both of us have always been unfortunate.”

And then the fever broke. There was no more reason for its breaking than for its onset. One day, he realized he wasn’t thinking about Ivan the Terrible anymore. Wasn’t looking at himself in the mirror, comparing his features with the pictures in the papers. It was over. He stuffed his newspaper clippings into a large green plastic bag and tied it shut with the yellow tie that came in the same box. It was over. He never spoke to anyone about it; he’s grateful at least for that. What took its place? Simply a mistrust of stories, a desire that history be made up not of stories and not of the personal but of large forces: like the Pantheon, the music of Bach.

It is eight o’clock, the Roman time for dinner. Then it will be time for him to head back to the hotel and check out, as he must leave very early the next morning, bid goodbye to the clerk (who will pretend to look forward to his return), and ask that he book, for five-thirty (Joseph is always early at the airport), a taxi to Termini Station. Termini. The end. He is traveling to something whose end he cannot imagine. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to. He is a different person from the person who took a cab from that station ten days before. He may be a different person yet again when he returns.

And who is Pearl? He must believe she is still one of the living. He will travel to a living woman; he will not allow the possibility that he is traveling to the country of the dead.

10

A policeman kneels on the ground beside her. “We’ll try all of these, see if any of them works,” he says, to someone Pearl cannot see. He is holding a huge ring of small keys. He keeps trying to unlock her cuffs. She thrashes. Another policeman holds her down. “It would be better if you’d cooperate,” he says. She closes her eyes. The policeman with the keys keeps trying to find one that will fit, but he cannot. The handcuffs are Japanese; none of the available keys will work. Pearl didn’t do that purposely; she simply bought the most expensive pair available at a sex shop not far from where she lived.

“Should we go for the cutters?” one policeman says to the one with the key ring.

“Not until the doctor gives her approval. This is an American we’re dealing with, remember. Lawsuits are their middle name. If we should hurt her, we’d be the ones to blame. . . . I don’t suppose there’s a chance you’d give us the key,” he says to Pearl, almost pleasantly.

His pleasantness makes her want to be pleasant. She would like to say, I swallowed it, which she did, and laugh with him. Because it is funny, she thinks, isn’t it, that the only thing she’s swallowed for a rather long time is a key? But she keeps her eyes closed. She will not smile or laugh.

“If you do it the hard way, we’ll have to cut the cuffs open. You could be injured. We’d rather not do you any harm.”

She keeps her eyes closed. Harm, she wants to say. Yes, I know about that.

But she says nothing, and the policemen walk away.

11

The flight attendant removes Maria’s tray: so different, she thinks, from what’s being served in economy. She was given fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, yogurt and blackberries, a warm croissant. Maria hadn’t eaten since she’d heard the news of Pearl: almost twenty hours without food. She’d cleared her plate quickly. “You enjoyed your meal, I’d say,” the flight attendant says, and Maria feels ashamed. How can she be eating when her daughter is starving herself? How can she fill herself when her daughter is empty?

How can her daughter be doing this to her body now? And why? Starvation: a female tactic of self-punishment, Maria thinks, and then, more desperately: What does she think she needs to be punished for? She thought she had protected Pearl from the idea of punishment, the presence so pervasive in her early life: punishing surveillance. Who is my daughter now? she asks herself. I thought I knew. She is tormented by the false security of her former false understanding.

Perhaps all mothers think they know their daughters better than they do. And perhaps (this would be like her) Maria was too hopeful about the ability of the human species to absorb quick change. Is it possible that, in one generation, centuries of a way of thinking can be wiped out? The idea of chastity, the purity Maria was brought up believing she embodied and must defend with her life—could it have disappeared from the human mind in thirty years? She doesn’t think of her daughter as having a meaningful category in her imagination under the heading Purity. Because of her history and the history of Ya-Katey, she has seen to that. She imagines that Pearl has been spared more, perhaps, than she has. She doesn’t know for instance (and a good thing too) that at one time Pearl was obsessed with hatred for her mother’s body. Was it born of hatred for her own? And what is the source? We can blame the world, but that would not be of much use. Whatever the source, Pearl Meyers, at twelve, hated her mother’s body.

Something happens to some girls at a certain age, a kind of madness, as if their own bodies were too powerful or too busy or too changeable; they are appalled. They indulge peculiar hungers; they want to stick their noses, their tongues into the filth of the world, maybe to reassure themselves that it doesn’t all come from themselves.

That year, Pearl would come home from school and eat horribly sweet things, things whose sweetness had no goodness in them, sweetness that turned to acid, cakes with frosting made entirely of chemicals, neon-colored icing, cream fillings white as toothpaste. Half-liquid fats: melted cheese, margarine out of the tub. Orange drinks with a touch of blue in them, chips whose coatings made her fingers looked diseased. Afternoons hating the company of her own body, wanting only to get into her unmade bed, where she’d explore what she believed were the disgusting parts of her own body: conjuring sights of huge-breasted women being pierced by men whose hungers were insatiable, who spoke humiliating orders: put this in your mouth, put that over your face. That year she went through all her mother’s clothes, wanting to touch them so they’d be defiled. That year she found, in her mother’s underwear drawer, the “adultery diary,” a notebook with sentences she read over and over as she fingered her mother’s lingerie. The sentences she can’t forget:
I thought of myself as a poet. Now I’m someone who reaches into her pocket and finds a pair of underpants, taken off in a taxi so I can be finger-fucked.

That was her punishment, that knowing. Maria doesn’t know what Pearl knows, what her daughter read in the diary she thought was always hidden. Pearl reading her mother, who would have said she was committed to the sisterhood of women, calling another woman
the walking vulva,
talking about wanting to take all the clothes out of the woman’s closet—the closet that was next to the bed where she had sex with the woman’s husband—and burn them in the driveway. Saying of her lover, Jack Rappaport, that it was
nothing but sex
. A sentence that Pearl hated, yet that thrilled her as if she were being shown into the real life women lived:
When he traces the curve of my breast, I feel in the league of women who’ve done stupid things for what they call love, but what they mean is sex.
Excited when she read:
There is no man whom I admire as I admire P., no one whose company satisfies me entirely as hers does.
So her mother loved her best. Then, cast down, having to understand there were times she passed out of her mother’s sight:
I think of P. and that she is not with me and that I do not miss her.

Her mother’s body, loved a year before, now horrifying. As her own, ignored a year before, becomes the site of revulsion.

Maria had believed that because of the way she’d brought Pearl up, and because of the way the world had changed, Pearl had been spared a sense of the hatefulness of the female body. And she shivers now, in anguish that she had been so wrong!

Of the malignities Maria traces to her upbringing, among the most heinous is the habit of thinking herself impure by virtue of femaleness. The female: insufficiently fine. The female: overfleshed.

There was nothing in her life to suggest that the female body was anything but something to be overcome. Who was there to say otherwise? She was a girl without a mother. Pearl Meyers, the first Pearl Meyers, dead at thirty-one of ovarian cancer, diagnosed a year after she had given birth.

The only other female in the house, Marie Kasperman, Joseph’s mother, revolted her: the thick greasy curls under the thin hairnet, the visible pores of her perpetually reddish, perpetually shining nose, the hands that always reminded Maria of raw meat. There was no time Maria didn’t flinch from her touch, and she knew Marie Kasperman understood and hated her for it. When she brushed Maria’s hair and braided it, Maria wanted to be sick. It was bad, this thing between the two females in the house. Perhaps Seymour Meyers should have seen it, should have stopped it. But he was a man. Even if he’d seen it, he wouldn’t have known how to name what he’d seen. Perhaps no man would.

And besides, Maria tried to keep it from him, because she’d endure anything rather than lose Joseph. She was proud of her silence, like one of the martyrs: Isaac Jogues refusing to deny Christ even when the Indians pulled out his fingernails. She was particularly afraid of having her fingernails pulled out or having bamboo stuck under them, which Catholic children in the fifties were often told was something regularly done to priests by Chinese Communists. Later, when she read in the lives of the saints about what were called
silent martyrdoms,
she saw herself. Like St. Thérèse of Lisieux putting up with the nun who deliberately splashed muddy water on her when they were scrubbing the floor on their knees side by side. She thought there could be no greater mortification than not flinching when Marie Kasperman braided her hair. Sister Berchmans encouraged her in this habit of mind with one of the catchphrases she could so easily reach for—all the nuns could, as if it were candy or a holy card at the bottom of the enormous pockets of their habits—and hinting at her own experience (thrilling for any girl: the sense of being given an encoded glimpse of convent life): “Quiet martyrdoms are the most trying.” The cult of martyrs. Maria remembers now:
martyr
means witness in Greek. Pearl says she is a witness. Does she think she is a martyr? Maria can’t imagine where she would get such an idea.

Maria couldn’t learn about being female from the nuns, their bodies hidden, praying to be delivered from the heaviness of the flesh. She could learn only from Marie Kasperman, both of them trapped in their interlocking hatred of the other.

Forty-two years later, Marie Kasperman afog in dementia, Maria Meyers, on a plane to save her daughter’s life, still hears the word
filthy
.

“Filthy,” Marie Kasperman would say, picking Maria’s underwear up off the floor, holding it away from her with two fingers.

Maria had loved her body, but there were so many voices telling her this was wrong; it was a danger and could, by its very nature, hurt itself and hurt the world. Corrupting and corrupt. So she considered the joy that she took in her body’s life a mystery: and a victory over all the forces she would keep her own child far away from. But she has kept her child from nothing. Her child wants to die.

.  .  .  

Maria’s eyes fall on the woman in the seat across from her. The woman stretches, raises her hands above her head, intertwines her fingers, circles her neck three times, puts her arms down, refolds her hands in her lap. As tired as she is, Maria feels the woman’s pull. The woman stands in the aisle and raises her arms again; her breasts are lifted, and her skirt reveals just a little of the flesh above her ruby-colored boots. Her hair is copper curls, her sweater—soft cobalt wool—shapes the curves of her breast and waist, and the skirt, light gray, has a slit up the back, perhaps (but Maria suspects not) set there for easy walking. The men’s eyes fall upon her because they want her; the women’s because they want to
be
her. I was once the one, Maria thinks. I could stand up, raise my arms above my head, show the red inside of my mouth in a fine yawn, and pull them toward me, everyone, the eyes of everyone: I knew I could make them fall on me. Not anymore, she thinks. I am no longer young.

She thinks of all the bodies she has had: the little girl’s body, the desiring and desirable body, the childbearing body, the body that moved through space, that swam and danced and ran and ran, and now the aging body, feeling the first bites of the inevitable bad news. None of the bodies lost, all contained in the same envelope, reliving their histories, sometimes insistently, sometimes muted for long periods, dormant but not quite asleep.

Now she remembers, in her discomfort in the closed space of the plane, how as a child she would run and run, for the plain joy of running; she would make Joseph race—he never wanted to—and she would always beat him. She loved her boyish body then. It never occurred to her that her body was different from his. She loved the pumping of her blood against stretched ribs, loved that her legs would slice through space, sail over roads. And she wanted to win; she couldn’t bear not winning. She would have died trying to win. Afterward, after she’d won, she loved lying on the ground, flat on her back, dizzy with the aftermath of effort, loved her fast breath, her breath matching Joseph’s, and the sky wheeling above her, the hint of moon in a sky still glazed with daylight, loved chewing blades of grass or leaves, the harsh, unfleshly taste. For a long time she believed that if something was growing and it looked good, it would be good to eat: it would taste like what it looked like. She ate an iris once; she thought it would be sweet and crisp with a soft, confectionery coating; she imagined the yellow centers would taste of cinnamon. She was shocked when the flower hurt her throat. After that she no longer ate plants.

When she and Joseph ran, they were a pair of running animals. Then she’d put on the final push and he wouldn’t. She knew he wasn’t trying, but she couldn’t stop. He could have beaten her if he’d wanted to. Later, when they were grown, she asked him why he never did. He said, “You wanted it so much. I could never want it as much as you.” She was touched by that—ashamed, a bit—but she didn’t dwell on it for long.

Maria hasn’t had a lover in more than a year. The long adulterous affair with Jack Rappaport, judge of family court, came to an end when his wife died and Maria perceived that he thought of her as a potential replacement. She liked adultery; even the accoutrements amused her: phone calls from public booths at freezing hours, fake accents,
Can’t talk to you now.
She could see that as an adventure. But she has never wanted to be married; she dreaded the stasis, the old feeling of being fixed in a rifle sight, right in the middle of the crosshairs. Trapped. What she told the young mother of the crying baby was the truth: she can’t stand being still. The stillness of marriage felt to her like incarceration, incarceration under the name of protection. So now she is fifty years old, unmated. All the years of a desiring body, the intoxicating longing, foolish headlong yearning muted now. She wonders sometimes if it is possible that she will never be a man’s lover again.

The woman with the copper-colored curls is slipping now into her seat and buckling her seat belt. The trick, Maria thinks, not for the first time, of the female body. Here it is, the prize above all others prized, only you must hide it, call it dangerous or something worse.

She wonders what the state of Pearl’s body is now. She thinks of all the ways she’s known that body, all the bodies it has been (as her own has been many bodies), none so loved as the earliest, the infant’s; then the child’s skin, desired to the point of swooning, the point of exhaustion, a tenderness far more complete, more heartbreaking than the love for any man. Then the child’s body taking on its competence, charming, comic with the comedy of animals. The fear, then: I send this body on its way (because I cannot stop it) into a world on whose hard surfaces these beautiful feet, barely articulate in their new bones, must walk. Then the body more the world’s than mine: rounded breasts, lengthened limbs. To be a mother is to be perpetually stolen from.

The starved body of her child. The shock of the word
starved:
the dry hard single syllable, formed at the roof of the mouth.

If she could see Pearl’s body now, unclothed, she would be shocked. There is a sprinkling on her arms and legs and breasts of a fine coating of light hair—lanugo, it is called—the starved body’s protection, the same hair grown by babies. Pearl’s teeth now are too big for her face; her hair is dull and brittle, her nails broken, her skin tinged yellow-green. Maria doesn’t know any of this, but she knows enough to be afraid of seeing her daughter now, the sight of whom was always the most desirable thing she could imagine.

The copper-colored beauty, bored, looks in a mirror she takes from a bag at her feet. She plays with a comb, rearranging her lush hair.
Devorah,
Maria thinks, remembering the red curls of her beloved friend, now dead. Grotesquely dead, catching the heel of her shoe in the hem of her skirt, facedown in the dirt of a ficus plant. Copper hair. Red hair. Devorah’s.