Pearl (8 page)

The airline schedule dictates that he has another day in Rome. He will take a longer walk: he knows where he wants to end up: a place of rest, of contemplation, a cloister in Trastevere known to him and few others, concealed in the center of a building that suggests nothing of its hidden treasure. You press a bell that says
SPOSINI
, and a reluctant watchman lets you in to the cloister of the Order of St. John Hospitalers.

It is winter and nothing will be in flower; it is the quiet, the enclosure, the geometric rightness of the space that he craves.

He sits, hearing the plashing of the fountain that refreshes nothing. Dusty bushes eat up light; some hardy winter birds swoop lightly for a drink. He allows his mind to remain a blank. He tries not to think of Pearl, or to allow only a kind of thought that rockets straight past credibility: she will be all right, she will be all right. The weak sun warms the top of his head; the stone begins to chill his spine. He will move on.

6

Pearl hears someone saying her name, softly, in an Irish accent. She opens her eyes. A man and a woman, faces without features, kneel down, put their featureless faces next to hers. They are holding something, a cup of something. Something hangs over the edge: oh, she thinks, a straw. The straw brushes her lips. “Just take a sip of this,” the woman says, in a voice that is pretending to be kind. Pearl clamps her jaws down, thrashes her head. And then the voice no longer even pretends kindness. “If you think you’re a bloody martyr, little girl, you don’t even know you’re born.”

What would Maria Meyers think if she had to consider at this moment, as her child is lying on the ground and she is flying first class on Aer Lingus 865, that Pearl knew many of the things she’d kept from her. Knew saints’ lives, the lives of martyrs, because she’d found her mother’s childhood book,
A Girl’s First Book of Saints,
by Jerome Lowery, OSB, the letters cut in gold into the purple spine. Reading her mother’s book, she had to understand that some deaths were said to be a good thing. It went against everything else in her life to think that a death might be what your life was leading up to all along. She had never had the slightest hint that death might be a good thing. What would Maria say if she knew Pearl’s first thought about the death she is pursuing now came to her from a book with Maria’s childhood signature on the flyleaf, girlish loops and curlicues Maria excised from her adult signature, a sign, treasured by Pearl, that her mother had also once been a child, reading this same book?

What Pearl could not know was that the child that was her mother did not read the book in the same way, not in the same way at all. Maria, a Catholic child of ten in 1958, would have read the book as if her life were at stake. And not just her life but what she would have found it very easy to call her immortal soul. She read not from curiosity but as a model her salvation depended on. She read the lives of the martyrs and believed with all her heart that she had to pray for a martyr’s death. She would say to Joseph, “Let’s think of what we’ll do, exactly, if the Communists put a gun to our heads and tell us they’ll shoot us unless we say God doesn’t exist.” And he would say OK and let her talk.

In Joseph’s mind were terrifying images of men in brown coats, their faces distorted by hatred until they were hardly faces anymore, stretched mouths, pig stubs of noses, blood-red eyes. He knew they wanted to kill him. He felt the terror in his flesh; he imagined himself reneging at the last minute, saying, “All right, God doesn’t exist,” and then having to live a shamed life. Maria, on the other hand, always imagined herself glorious, triumphant, welcomed in paradise by throngs of fellow martyrs. So Maria savored the gruesome details of the deaths of virgin martyrs: St. Lucy with her eyes gouged out; St. Anastasia with her breasts chopped off; St. Apollonia, her teeth pulled out by rusty Roman pliers.

How could Maria have imagined that her daughter would be in Dublin reading
One Day in My Life
by Bobby Sands, which her group thought of as one of the Lives of the Saints? That they followed the weeks of his death by starvation, the cramps, the coma, as their parents and their grandparents followed the Way of the Cross?

Are you surprised at the gaps of knowledge that exist between this mother and daughter? You shouldn’t be. If you asked Maria what she wanted for Pearl, she would have said, “I just want her to be happy.” And what did Pearl want? She would have said she wanted to live in her own way. And Maria would have said, “Of course, that’s exactly what I want for you; we want the same thing, you see.” And Pearl would have said, like many daughters, “My mother doesn’t have a clue.” But what clues was she given? What cues did she fail to take?

Perhaps you would like some clues from Pearl’s childhood to help you unravel the mystery of why she is doing what she is doing now. Would it help you to know what kind of child Pearl was? Or—a related but not identical question—what kind of childhood she had? If we say, What kind of childhood did she have? and use the verb we have chosen, don’t we have to ask another question, What kind of childhood was she given? But given by whom, her mother? The world?

I suppose the first and truest thing to say about Pearl as a child was that she was very quiet. She seemed almost afraid of excessive noise. Her mother once took her to a Thanksgiving parade, and the noise of the marching bands terrified her. She liked to look at books, to draw; she liked to sew. She very much liked animals. As a matter of fact, some of the most important things she treasured were connected to dogs. By which I do not mean the ordinary doggy lessons of fidelity and joy in life.

She may not have been given the right kind of childhood for the child she was. Perhaps this is because her mother gave her the kind of childhood she would have wanted for herself. Maria had hated the surveillance of her own childhood, the privileged enclosure, being kept from the world as if she were a fragile and precious object. She detested what she knew about her father’s feelings for her: that she was a work of art, always in progress, always potentially revisable. Her father watched her with the tyrannical eye of the camera or the iconographer: waiting to freeze the moment, preserve it, make it stand not as itself but as a type of something. Like the time she tried on her First Communion dress. She could see he was disappointed at the crinoline, the lace. “A bit ornate, wouldn’t you say?” And then his revision on the day of the ceremony: “My Goya Infanta.” So by his naming her a type of something, she could be his again.

There was a right way of doing everything, tied to eternal reward. A right way of turning a page, of walking across the room, of saying thank you, of holding a rosary, of lighting a blessed candle, of curtseying (particularly to priests), of thinking about Europe versus America, the past versus the present, the cheap happiness of the present as opposed to future gold. She felt she was constantly being watched and was often a disappointment. She loved running, swimming, braving thunderstorms, hailstorms, blizzards, high waves, long jumps, deep drops down into nothing. Her father wanted her at his side. At his feet.

She would not do that to Pearl: make her feel she was being looked at. She felt she had grown up in a rifle sight. Sometimes you remembered and that was all right: you knew you were being watched, you did what was required. But sometimes you forgot, you were running somewhere, singing something, and—
blam!
—the gun went off, the shot right to the heart. She would not do that to her child.

It might be possible to say that, refusing to keep her eye on her daughter as an eye was kept on her, she wasn’t looking closely enough. Or that, believing she was looking at her daughter, she was really looking at herself. But the way she thought was this: surveillance was entrapment. She had no impulse to trap her daughter: she felt no need to catch her out. She believed in her daughter’s goodness. She believed in her daughter’s essential safety in the world. But her daughter did not feel safe. Does the fact that Maria never knew that, or never allowed herself to believe it, mean she wasn’t paying attention, and so her daughter was more unsafe than she might otherwise have been? Doubly unsafe? Is Pearl where she is because her mother wasn’t looking closely enough? Or looking at an image of her child that was her own reflection? You may draw these conclusions if you like. I think Maria was trying to bring her child up as a child of hope. That she did not succeed is not, I think, her fault.

Maria wanted a life of freedom and openness for her daughter; she wanted a life that denied the power of privilege or at least denied its scope. So she chose to live with Pearl in a racially mixed neighborhood among the working poor. And she chose to educate her daughter first in the Washington Heights day-care centers where she worked. She could have Pearl with her every day, and Pearl would grow up knowing everyone was not just like her, wasn’t blessed with her blessings. And she wanted Pearl to grow in her own way, at her own pace, not checked on every minute, questioned, tested.

I will not say that all these things were mistakes. Pearl was never snobbish or exclusive. In the day-care center, which was sometimes a torment to her (she was not a scrapper and found it hard to fight for a place), she met, when she was four years old, her best friend, Luisa Ramirez, whom she has loved from that day to this. She learned Spanish at three; her love of languages was fostered without effort, without the hideous self-conscious deliberateness of her neighbors forty blocks to the south, taking little Amanda, little Oliver, to lessons at the Lycée Français to impress the admissions office of Dalton, Chapin, Horace Mann. But Pearl was often afraid, often overwhelmed, often guilty, because she knew she and her mother had more money than the other families and could do things the others could not, or avoid things the others had to do. Perhaps this story, which I would like to tell you now, will give you a better sense of things. This is the story of the beginning of Pearl’s and Luisa’s friendship.

Pearl is four years old, the only one in the day-care center with blond hair. There is another little girl there; Mariposa is her name: Butterfly. She wants to touch Pearl’s hair. That’s what she wants to do all day: touch the blond hair. She walks into the room, throws off her coat and her backpack, runs over to Pearl, touches her hair. Plays with it. Every day she brings in barrettes and hair elastics, so she can put them in Pearl’s hair. Pearl doesn’t like it, but she thinks that if Mariposa wants to do it so much, she has to let her. So many people seem to know what they want better than she does, so she lets them have her things; their wanting something so much makes her feel exhausted, defeated. Are you surprised that a prosperous, loved four-year-old should feel exhausted, defeated? We don’t like to think of those words in relation to young children. But I think perhaps we should.

Pearl allows Mariposa to touch her hair.

This is how Pearl and Luisa become friends. Luisa knocks Mariposa to the ground one day and says, “Leave her fucking hair alone, you fucking little freak.” The director takes the three children into her office and asks Pearl if she minds Mariposa playing with her hair, and Pearl says, “It doesn’t matter,” which makes Luisa furious all over again. The director, Maria’s boss (who she thinks is an idiot), suggests that Luisa needs to learn other choices than inappropriate language and might need a time-out.

That night, Pearl cuts her hair off, liking the sound the scissors make, liking her hair in a pile on the floor, more pleased with it there than on her head. And her mother comes into the room, begins to cry, stops herself, holds Pearl’s head against her breast. “My poor little lamb,” she says. “My poor shorn lamb.”

.  .  .  

Perhaps Maria might have made wiser choices. Seen to it, for example, that Pearl had some experiences—if only in the summer—of the wilderness, the woods. A garden of her own. Maria told herself that Pearl was quiet and reserved and did not demand from her (this was a mercy) a more outgoing approach to classroom life. But she didn’t see, until Pearl was eleven, that her daughter might have done better in a smaller, quieter classroom, where little Amanda and little Oliver might inflict spiritual harm but probably spoke in lower tones and might not be so prone to pocket loose change or desirable accessories. It took Maria a while to give up her dream of public school education, but when Pearl was twelve she did see, finally, that her daughter wasn’t thriving and arranged for her to take the test for the Watson School, a private girls school on the Upper East Side. They were eager to have her. Maria arranged for Luisa to be tested too. She was accepted on scholarship. Maria could therefore convince herself that she had bleached the experience of the stain of privilege. Pearl never imagined that the stain was lighter than it was, and Luisa, who flourished at Watson, resented it as well and rails to this day (from her Harvard dormitory room) about the fucking white girls and the fucking old-maid teachers who taught her the Latin she adores and majors in, picketing the administration building in support of the creation of a major (good for others but not herself) in ethnic studies.

Luisa Ramirez, who loves Pearl fiercely, felt her always in need of protection. She did not like Maria, hated that Maria believed she understood Luisa’s parents, thought it a sacrilege that Maria should even speak of an experience she had no knowledge of. Maria and Luisa: similar in nature, forceful, loving Pearl, who from childhood had disliked and feared even the idea of force. Feeling herself a person of no force, except, now, in this one act: her forceful death.

Things would happen to Pearl that gave her an inkling of a kind of life she knew she was protected from, but which, she feared, was truer than the version created by her mother. These things all involved random malignity, so it is possible to say that as a child she was distressed by a pattern she inchoately perceived, which she believes now has come together in a truth that makes room for no other. That demands her death. But she was very young when she began to be distressed by things she saw, so distressed that she believed the floor of the world was breaking through. She would feel herself falling. Then the world, or her mother, would catch her. Now nothing has broken her fall. But the experience of falling: this is something she has known for as long as she can remember.

Pearl saw things in the apartment building where she lived all her life. She knew that it was a very nice apartment building, a fortunate apartment building, and that the people in it were very nice. So the fact that terrible things could happen there made her even more distressed. For example, what happened to Miss Alice Stevenson, the year Pearl was six.

I am going to tell you the story of Miss Alice Stevenson to explain what Pearl calls her witnesses; it is their faces that appear behind her eyes, cut out against cold blue, telling her she is right to do what she is doing. That is why I tell these stories: so you can see the faces Pearl is seeing.

Miss Alice lived in the same building as Maria and Pearl. She took in typing. Pearl and Maria met Miss Alice when Maria gave Miss Alice her thesis to type when Pearl was three. She always called herself Miss Alice, and that’s what she wanted to be called. She loved Maria and Maria found her interesting. Maria was always saying she liked people on the edge; she said they had imagination. Often these people frightened Pearl. She thought her mother didn’t see their desperation, and this frightened her too: what her mother didn’t or wouldn’t see. When she was older and had the words for what had been a feeling, she wanted to say to her mother, What you call lively I call chaotic. But she never did, because she knew how much it would cause her mother to give up.