Pearl (23 page)

The girl says, “Terribly sorry, but your room isn’t available quite yet.”

Maria puts down her bag and says, “I see,” but tears come to her eyes, because she cannot bear her luggage anymore, cannot bear her upright skeleton, and cannot, simply cannot, contemplate calling the hospital from a public booth, standing with her luggage, fumbling with unfamiliar coins (she has none anyway, only paper money).

The young girl, catching her eye, is merciful. “Sit here in the lobby. We’ll bring you a cup of coffee and get your room for you as quickly as we can.” A generic mercy, perhaps; she may be a girl who would be merciful to anyone she encountered. She cannot possibly know Maria’s situation—that it is dire, that her daughter is on the edge of becoming one of the dead, that it is up to Maria to persuade her daughter to live. Hold on, she must say to Pearl, but in exactly the right way; her words must be the right life preserver to throw to her daughter. So that she can preserve her life. But now all she can do is wait. The girl knows none of this. She is simply merciful.

Maria drinks weak coffee (instant?) in the lobby of the Tara Arms Hotel. The colors of the carpet hurt her eyes. A background of electric blue, acidic, acrid, on which there are imposed designs (an urn? a series of urns?) the color of fresh blood. Green leaves that remind her of the Pine-Sol or Lestoil (
There’s less toil with Lestoil
) that sat in the bottom of Marie Kasperman’s bucket like the signs of eventual corruption: the proof of original sin. On the carpet, a border of lighter blue. She thinks of an aftershave one of her high school boyfriends used: Aqua Velva. The words of the advertisement come to her:
There’s something about an Aqua Velva Man.
When she needs to think of exactly the right words to save her daughter’s life, why are these jingles for cleaning products and aftershave the only thing her mind will settle on?

Nothing in the lobby is pleasing to the eye except the flames that rise up from the fireplace. The hearth is cream-colored false brick; the mantel is surrounded by imitation stone embedded in the pseudo-wood of the reception desk in an abstract pattern in what appears to be stained glass but is really plastic. Joseph will hate this room, she thinks, and the idea of his disappointed face makes her angry because she knows him, and the first thing registering on his face will be aesthetic displeasure—before sympathy, grief, or a willingness to help. So that the first sight of him will be of no comfort to her. She blames her father for bequeathing to Joseph this curse of relentless aesthetic judgment, as automatic now as sensitivity to heat or cold, that trumps the living humors in their messy flow of grief or pleasure, joy or hate. Some of the best people she knows do not have what her father called “the seeing eye.” But she has the legacy as well; she can’t be indifferent to her surroundings. The lobby of the Tara Arms Hotel can’t help but bring her discomfort.

She walks over to the table where the newspapers are piled. It is impossible for her to refrain from looking. Pearl is not on the front page. On page three there’s a headline,
US STUDENT CHAINS SELF TO EMBASSY FLAGPOLE,
and, in smaller print,
Hunger Striker Supports Peace Agreement
. A photograph of a limp white figure—it could be a corpse—being carried by the police.

We will read the story with her.

An American student claiming not to have eaten in six weeks is under suicide watch at St. Giles Hospital after chaining herself to the flagpole at the American embassy here to protest “the human will to do harm.”

Police said they had forcefully cut through her chains after failing to convince the student to free herself voluntarily. They found a “manifesto” on the ground beside her saying that she was acting against the violence that had followed approval of the Good Friday agreement.

The twenty-year-old woman, Pearl Meyers, had been studying Irish at Trinity since arriving in Dublin last January. Mentioned in her manifesto, police said, was Stephen Donegan, nephew of Reg Donegan, the IRA bomber who is serving a thirty-year term in Brixton prison for his role in a car bomb attack in Leeds in May 1982 that killed two people and injured fifteen others.

The police said they had briefly detained Stephen Donegan three months ago in connection with what was described as a prank involving sex toys at Central Gardai Station. Two weeks after the incident, young Donegan was killed in an auto accident in Mayo.

But Miss Meyers insisted in her “manifesto” that he be “mourned as a victim of the Troubles.” She said she had some responsibility for his death and was offering her life “in witness” to his goodness and to the goodness of the peace agreement and to protest the evil of continued violence.

Maria’s first response is outrage: How do they know she is under suicide watch and I don’t? How have they gotten to speak to the police, the doctors, and I have not? She wants to call the newspaper and demand an explanation. But as she is planning how to do that, the girl behind the desk, the helpful girl, says in her merciful voice, “Your room is ready now.”

She will phone the newspaper and the doctor from her room. She goes up in the elevator, which is barely large enough for her, the bellboy, and her bag. The boy opens the door to her room. As in the lobby, the light wood looks ersatz and there is another assaultive carpet, but the pattern of this one is different: gray on darker gray. The matching curtains and spread, a floral paisley type chosen by every inexpensive hotel chain in the world, are of a thickness to keep out light but not substantial enough for warmth or comfort. She does not unpack her bag. Instead, she goes back down to the lobby. She is hungry; she will make her calls after breakfast, which the helpful girl says is still being served. Her badge says her name is
ORLA
; she is standing next to a girl whose badge says
TRAINEE
, and for a moment Maria thinks this, too, is a traditional Irish name. She wants to laugh at that, but there is no one to laugh with, and she is tired and afraid of what will happen to her mind if she begins to laugh alone.

She must try to make sense of Pearl’s statement. But she tells herself to eat first. She will not repeat the error of the earlier coffee. She rejects the limp-looking fried eggs and bacon in favor of a boiled egg and toast. The toast comes in a metal rack; it is thin and cold and the egg is underdone, too runny for her taste. She’d asked for three minutes; this is two.

She reads both Pearl’s statement and the newspaper article. Who is Stevie Donegan? And his imprisoned uncle Reg? What does Pearl have to do with the morass of Irish politics, she who had no interest in politics at all?

Maria’s concentration is broken by an overloud American voice. “This is what they call scrambled eggs? It’s rather like a poor omelet, I’d have thought.”

She doesn’t know about American tourists to Ireland. It is often not a pretty sight: Americans assuming, wrongly, a familiarity with a country they think of as a fifty-first state, digging for their roots like fool’s gold.

She looks over at the speaker, a woman in loose-fitting navy blue sweat pants and matching jacket, a red turtleneck underneath. Maria recoils from the too-girlish laugh, the stolen English diction—“rather like a poor omelet”—put on for the benefit, Maria is sure, of the woman’s companion, who actually is an Englishwoman, with a stiff English haircut and bad dentures.

“Not that I’d say anything to them directly about the eggs. I mean, I hate that kind of traveler. I’ve just been on one too many tours for that sort of thing. There’s always one or two who spoil everything complaining about the food. You remember that time I said to that fellow—oh, what was his name, I can’t remember—oh, yes, Thornton, that was his first name; I remembered it because of Thornton Wilder. I said to him, ‘If you’re going to do nothing but complain, just stay home.’ Everyone was really grateful. People kept coming up to me and thanking me. They were all sick of his ruining every meal with his complaints, but I was the only one with the guts to speak up. Well, I always was that way. You know that, Margaret. I really settled his hash.”

Why did you come here? Maria wants to ask. Why don’t you go home? Why don’t you shut up? The skin around her eyes is fragile from fatigue; she’s afraid it will crack if she touches it. Still, she wants to cover her eyes and ears to block out these women and the blaring of the television set, elevated like a worshiped god. But if she could cut out the sensations coming to her from the outside, she would have only what was in her own mind, more seriously tormenting than the chatter of the women or the overbright TV commentators, speaking of the weather in the west.

If she banishes the stimulus of the outside world, she will have to say the words “Who is my daughter?” To come to terms with the strangeness of the idea that her daughter is someone she doesn’t know—as you would have to recognize, lying on the side of the road on which you were being driven in an ambulance, a limb that had been cut off your own body.

Her daughter is doing things, saying things, the meaning of which she cannot even begin to understand. Her daughter is under a suicide watch. Her daughter is saying that because of the death of a young boy of whom Maria has never heard, because of the Irish peace process, in which Maria has only marginal interest, because of the nature of human beings to do harm, she is ready to die. But who has harmed you? she wants to say to Pearl, shaking her by the shoulders impatiently, a prosecutor, not a comforter. Have I not kept you away from harm? If anyone had harmed you, couldn’t you have come to me? The loud woman’s words come to her mind: I would have
settled their hash.
She sees herself stirring up an enormous mountain of hash, and bringing her daughter to it by the hand, so she could watch her mother flattening it down, smoothing it with a shovel.

There is the terror that her daughter could die; there is the grief that Pearl didn’t confide in her. She knows nothing of what Pearl has been going through. Her daughter has been planning death and all the while Maria believed she was absorbed in following the contours of the Irish language, and if she had lost herself it was in that. Or because of some new boy who must be, like all Pearl’s boys, a loser. Maria has always wished these boyfriends had been beautiful, like Pearl, or successful, or interesting and lively. But she has never said to her, Why are you with such a loser, why another loser, why again? And she has never said to herself, If these are losers, what is it that is being lost?

She knows herself to be the loser now. She may be losing her daughter; she has already lost access to her. She is frightened, as if she were walking down a dark corridor, aware that there are doors on each side, rows of them, all knobless, none of them responding to her touch. She knows there is a touch that is the right one, but she does not know what it is. Only that it is not hers. Her daughter is acting in a way she can’t understand.

Once Pearl was in the world, Maria quickly understood she couldn’t make her do what she wanted. She said to her daughter: Live only for yourself. What she really meant was, Live for yourself, but in a way that I approve of.

And now, with an urgency she’d never dreamed of: Simply live.

No, Maria thinks, I will not permit you to choose death. No longer the democrat, the rational respectful parent, she says in her heart what she would like to say to Pearl: I don’t care what you want. You are my child. I will not allow you your own life if all you want to do is throw it away. Whatever you believe you want, I will keep you alive. I will press my mouth against yours and keep it there even if you resist my breath. I will breathe into you, with or without your consent. I will consume your wish to die. You cannot resist me. You won’t win. Having once come from my body, you will bend to my superior, my far more ancient will—not only mine but every mother’s throughout history. You will succumb and once again be more mine than your own.

“But I’d never go on another tour again. I’m so tired of those men buzzing around, those widowers. All they want is someone to cook and clean for them. Well, that’s not the only thing; they think they have a last chance for some sex. Of course I like some male attention. I like a man to go to the theater and the opera with. But I wouldn’t get married on a bet. I’ve had five proposals since I retired in ’eighty-nine. All five of them were impossible.”

“I never get proposals,” the other woman says.

“Well, you’re the lucky one.”

The idea that these women might soon be reading about Pearl fills Maria with outrage. What right have you to know anything about my child, of her and my trouble? Of her sorrow? Of her torment?

Trying to look casual, she picks up the newspapers and carries them out of the breakfast room that is, by night, a bar and always smells of beer. She will keep the newspaper from these two women. There is, at least for now, something she can do. Something she is able to prevent.

15

“
Due ore in ritardo
—two hours’ delay,” the woman at the desk says. She pronounces
delay
delie, and for a moment Joseph thinks she is saying
two hours’ delight,
and he wants to tell her he isn’t interested. He tells her it’s urgent that he get to Dublin, but all flights are delayed because of weather.

He has no interest in the drinks at the bar, the luxury goods for sale, even the coffee and snacks that are available. This is torment; this is entrapment: to be here in Leonardo da Vinci Airport when Pearl is in Dublin, perhaps near death. He walks up and down; then, feeling conspicuous, he sits down and tries to read his book, his biography of John Ruskin.

Ruskin, he reads, was so sensually starved as a child that he became obsessed with the pattern in the sitting room carpet. He tries to settle himself with the little boy, hungrily tracing the pattern in the carpet, but he cannot stop thinking, Where is Pearl? What condition is she in now?

He looks at the list of illustrations in his book. She is there, Ilaria del Carretto, elegant in marble, elegant in her deadness. He would like to pray to her, but she is merely a dead young woman, not a saint. Can you pray to beauty, to the ideal of beauty that Ruskin gave his life for? No, you have to pray to a face. He cannot pray to Ilaria’s face, a face without a story, so closed in its deadness. There is no face he can pray to. Not to Devorah, who was certainly not a saint, whom he suspects he no longer loved by the time she caught her heel in the hem of her gray wool skirt, carrying a ficus down the stairway; you cannot pray to someone who has disappointed you. Pearl has never disappointed him. His love for Devorah was diminished, like a sugar figure in the rain. His love for Pearl is not diminished; she has never disappointed him, not one bit. How can he pray to one who was less great for the safety of someone greater than herself?

He feels his heart like a lump of hard fat in the middle of his chest. He feels his terror like a bone caught in his throat. There is nothing to do. Swallow this terror, he tells himself, but he cannot cough it up as if it were a fish bone cutting off his breath.

There is nothing for him to do but wait. In Rome, in the airport of Leonardo da Vinci, whom Ruskin taught us how to see.

He phones Maria to say his plane will be late. She isn’t in her room; the clerk asks if he wants to have her paged.

No, thanks, he says. Just give her my message, please.