The Mermaid Chair (27 page)

“I think the Nativity of John the Baptist would be best,”

Dom Anthony said.

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“I’m sorry, Reverend Father. I can’t set the date now.” Whit lifted his chin. He crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet in that wide, commanding stance he’d always used in court during his closing summations. A court reporter had compared him once to Napoleon standing on a ship bow, dug in for battle.

“I can’t because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to take my vows.

I don’t know if the desire of my heart is God.”

The room filled with silence, a perfect silence. It pressed heavily in his ears, popping on his drums as if he were descending from the clouds in an airplane. Dom Anthony walked to the window and stood with his back to Whit.

Minutes passed before he finally turned around. “You are to give yourself over to the dark night, then. You are to stay there as long as it takes you to find your faith and come to your decision.

May God be with you.” He raised his hand in dismissal.

Walking to his cottage, Whit thought of the countless small things on the island he would miss. The alligators cruising the creeks submerged except for the great humps of their eyes. The oysters in their shells at night, how they opened when no one was looking. But mostly the egrets lifting out of the marsh carrying the light on their backs.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-eight

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Ibegan to go alone to the marsh island in the rookery, paddling there in Hepzibah’s old canoe, arriving well before Whit appeared on his rounds. I created a place for myself, a place where I felt hidden away with the blue crabs and the wading egrets. All through the rest of March and the first two weeks of April, I went to the island nearly every day, hungry for Whit but driven, too, by an insatiable need to be alone.

I told Mother the truth, at least partially—that I was paddling around in the creeks, needing time to think through some things. She immediately leaped to the conclusion that I was thinking about my marriage. She had noticed my wedding rings on the pincushion in my room and asked repeatedly why Hugh had left the island so quickly, why he didn’t call anymore. It was only Dee I spoke with now, weekly on the phone, and if
she
was suspicious about my sustained absence from Atlanta, she didn’t mention it.

“Your marriage is in trouble, isn’t it?” Mother prodded, and before I could form an answer, she said, “Don’t deny it. It’s written all over you, and I don’t see how you expect to fix things if all you’re going to do is stay here and loaf around in the creeks.”

She had carried on about this for days.

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Even when Kat and Hepzibah dropped by one day, Mother brought it up, launching into the details of my daily absences.

“Really,” she said to them, “how much piddling around can a person actually do out there all by herself ? It’s like she’s reverted to her childhood, back when she and Mike stayed out there the better part of the day.”

Hepzibah and Kat exchanged glances.

“I’ve been going out there to think and be
alone,
” I rushed to say.

When the two of them left, I followed them onto the porch.

“I do meet him,” I said. “Every afternoon for a couple of hours.

But most of the time that I’m out there, I’m alone; I don’t know why—I just need to be by myself.”

“Sounds like you’re
traveling,
” Hepzibah said.

I stared a moment, wondering what she meant before remembering what she’d said on the tour that day about the Gullah people going off to the woods.

I’m sure my solitary visitations to the rookery represented some kind of migration, but I doubt they were as lofty as the visits the Gullah people made. Mine were decidedly sensual, a kind of affair with myself and with the island. And, of course, with Whit.

I do know this: They obscured everything else—all my concerns about Mother, why she’d been reading the books from the monastery library, the notion that she’d been involved in some kind of white martyrdom. It was easy to overlook now because of how much better she seemed. Cooking for the monks, busy, industrious,
normal.

It was
I
who began to indulge in strange behavior—

outrageous, extravagant acts that would’ve been unthinkable two months earlier.

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One afternoon right after the spring equinox, I sat beside Whit’s hermitage watching a willet build a nest in the marsh and listening to David Bowie sing “Let’s Dance” on a Walkman I’d found at Caw Caw General. The day was almost sultry, and the periwinkle snails sat along the cordgrass in their little stupors.

Egrets, oystercatchers, and herons were crowded into the shallows, so thickly it looked like an Audubon parking lot. Noticing a small diamondback terrapin nearby—what Mike used to call a

“cooter”—I got up and followed it.

The creature reminded me of the turtle skull permanently in-stalled now on top of the crab trap in the hermitage, which in turn reminded me of Kat, Hepzibah, and Mother dancing at the All-Girls Picnics. Picturing them, I began to sway a little. I’d never danced at the picnics; it had been
their
thing. Later, as an adult, I’d felt self-conscious dancing, too inhibited even to do it alone, but that day, with David Bowie insisting in my ear—

“Let’s dance, let’s dance”—I began to do so with complete abandon, the skirt on my white muslin sundress flaring out like Isadora Duncan’s. I loved the feel of my body moving like that, doing what it wanted.

Each day I took the Walkman to the island and danced to whatever cassettes I could find in Caw Caw: Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” Ste-vie Wonder’s “Woman in Love,” the soundtrack to
Dirty Dancing.
I even bought Pink Floyd.

Afterward, breathless and spent, I would lie down beside the pluff mud and pat the shining black muck along my arms and legs—as if I were having a skin treatment at the spa. The goo smelled warm, alive, chlorophyll green, and rotten as the paper mills near Savannah, but I needed it. I cannot even tell you why;
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it was, I suppose, an irrational act. I would actually lie there with mud caked and drying on my skin and luxuriate in it for an hour or more, watching the sky reflected in the water and feeling the enduring breath of the earth moving around me.

One afternoon when Whit failed to show up because of a flooded toilet in the Monastery Reception Center, I watched the sun set and the water’s surface bleed into carnelian and topaz. I heard dolphins pass, spewing their breath, and when the quiet became overbearing, I listened to the crackling advance of fiddler crabs on the mudflats and the tiny pops of pistol shrimp snapping their claws together.

During those times I sank into the compost of the island and became inseparable from it. It was only when my skin began to tighten and itch to the point I wanted to claw it that I would plunge into the water and swim away the mud. With my skin pink and vibrating, I would recline on the tides and let myself float. Once they carried me across the circular pool, along the tributary back into Caw Caw Creek, and I had to vie with a de-ceptively strong ebb to get back to the island.

More than the dancing or the mud bathing, it was the water I reveled in. Traveling water. It was filled with decay and death, and at the same time with plankton and eggs and burgeoning life. It would recede, stripping everything in its path, then turn into a brimming, amniotic estuary. I needed it like air.

I never told Whit about these things, though he had to know I’d been swimming, and maybe he guessed at the rest. Every afternoon he would find me waiting for him with soggy hair and telltale traces of marsh mud in the creases of my elbows.

I look back now at my Dionysian tangent and understand it t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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only a little better, how I was opening to the most rhapsodic thing in myself. To some extent those days were governed by instinct and flesh. When I was hungry, I ate what I’d brought from home, typically gorging myself on apples, and when I was sleepy, I simply lay down on one of Mother’s discarded bedspreads and napped. But at the heart of it all, I believe that Hepzibah was right. I was
traveling.

I took over Whit’s crab trap, draped it with a cast net and gradually gathered a little assemblage of things to go with the turtle skull. Osprey feathers, clusters of blossoming trumpet flowers, oyster and bivalve shells, a crab claw I’d found at the water’s edge. On a whim I added the so-called Mermaid Tears to the mix—the small pebbles I’d picked up in Kat’s shop the first time I’d visited it. There were half a dozen apple peelings on top of the trap, too, my pathetic attempts at making whirly girls, which had ended up as a mass of broken red tendrils. One day while rummaging in my bag for a comb, I took out my father’s pipe and added that to the collection as well.

Each day when I left the island, I stored everything in a plastic bag, which I tucked inside the trap, then faithfully reassembled when I returned. At first I thought I was following Hepzibah’s example and making my own tiny show-and-tell table. Then it occurred to me that maybe I was trying to domesticate the hermitage, decorate it, make it
ours.
Was I playing house?

I caught Whit staring at the arrangement once, the way it sat beneath the palmetto-leaf cross he’d nailed on the wall. “Is it an altar?” he asked, startling me.

I would often set up my palette and canvas inside the hermitage and paint one diving woman after another. I painted her
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from different angles, capturing her in progressive stages of the dive. The water around her changed colors with each canvas, going through a succession of violet-blues, greens, yellow-oranges, and finally, fiery Pompeiian reds. Sometimes the diving woman—always nude—was done with Pre-Raphaelite realism and attention to detail, and other times she was a black shape rimmed in gold, primitive and stylized, but always, to me at least, radiant in her descent. Some paintings showed her letting go of an odd stream of paraphernalia that floated back to the surface as she plunged deeper. Spatulas, refrigerator magnets, kitchen bric-a-brac, wedding rings, crucifixes, charred wood, apple peels, a tiny pair of plastic kissing geese.

Yes, of course I realized that the paintings were a series of self-portraits—how could I not?—yet I didn’t control them. They came like eruptions, like geysers. I didn’t know when the diving would stop, what spectrum of the rainbow the water would turn next, where the bottom was or what might happen when the woman reached it.

Around midafternoon each day, I would begin to watch for Whit. By the time he arrived on the island, I would be in a frenzy of desire. We would twine ourselves together in the hermitage and make love, growing more and more fluent with each other’s bodies, muttering our love over and over. I felt drunk with happiness and passion during those meetings, with the sense of having come home, but at the same time of making an exodus, of flying away to an eternal place.

After making love, we talked until he had to leave. Lying in his arms, I told him once about Chagall’s
Lovers in the Red Sky,
how the pair—some thought Chagall and his wife, Bella—were wrapped in a glorious knot, how they floated above the world.

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“But they can’t stay up there forever,” Whit had said, and I’d felt a slight deflation, an unease.

Only now and then did we talk about any kind of future. We both assumed there would be one, but we weren’t ready to act on it. That seemed precipitous to both of us. Part of him, a quiet, concealed part that I loved and feared at the same time, was saying a grievous good-bye to the monastery, to his life there. And somewhere inside of me, I suppose I was saying good-bye, too, to twenty years of marriage, though in all honesty I consciously tried not to think about it.

What I
did
think about relentlessly during those hours on the island was my father. He seemed like a ghost hovering over the hermitage roof and everywhere in the needle rush. Again and again I would go back in my mind to the day the monks came to the door bearing the burned remains of his boat, the stoic way Mother had built the fire in the fireplace and tossed the boards on the flames. Watching them burn had been the first time I’d felt the deep crevice his dying was to make in my life.

During Easter week I saw Whit only once. His work in the rookery was suspended while he assisted Brother Bede with Pas-siontide, all the high and holy preparations that had to be carried out between Palm Sunday and the Easter vigil. The matter of Easter lilies, holy oil, Paschal candles, the basin and pitcher for the foot washing, black vestments, white vestments. He did not get there until Thursday, Maundy Thursday, or as Mother had said that morning, reverting to her Catholic Latin,
“Feria
Quinta in Coena Domini,”
the Thursday of the Lord’s Supper.

Wearing the aqua shirt he loved, I met him at the edge of the water and waited while he anchored the johnboat. I’d fixed a picnic on a red-and-white floral tablecloth that I’d spread nearby:
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Mother’s Wadmalaw tomato pie, strawberries, Market Street pralines, a bottle of red wine. Clusters of wild white azaleas that I’d picked in Kat’s front yard filled the center of the cloth.

When Whit saw what I’d done, he bent over and kissed my forehead. “This is a surprise. What’s the occasion?”

“Well, let me see.” I pretended to be racking my brain. “It
is
Maundy Thursday. Plus, it happens to be our six-week-and-one-day anniversary.”

“We have an anniversary?”

“Of course we do. February seventeenth, the day we met. It was Ash Wednesday. Remember? It hasn’t always been the most cheerful day of the year for me, so I thought I’d turn it into an anniversary.”

“I see.”