The Mermaid Chair (3 page)

I’d nearly driven Hugh crazy to buy this big, impractical house, and even though we’d been in it seven years now, I still refused to criticize it. I loved the sixteen-foot ceilings and stained-glass transoms. And the turret—God, I loved the turret. How many houses had one of those? You had to climb the spiral stairs inside it to get to my art studio, a transformed third-floor attic space with a sharply slanted ceiling and a skylight—so remote and enchanting that Dee had dubbed it the “Rapunzel tower.”

She was always teasing me about it. “Hey, Mom, when are you gonna let your hair down?”

That was Dee being playful, being Dee, but we both knew what she meant—that I’d become too stuffy and self-protected.

Too conventional. This past Christmas, while she was home, I’d posted a Gary Larson cartoon on the refrigerator with a magnet that proclaimed me world’s greatest mom. In it, two cows stood in their idyllic pasture. One announced to the other, “I
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don’t care what they say, I’m not content.” I’d meant it as a little joke, for Dee.

I remembered now how Hugh had laughed at it. Hugh, who read people as if they were human Rorschachs, yet he’d seen nothing suggestive in it. It was Dee who’d stood before it an inordinate amount of time, then given me a funny look. She hadn’t laughed at all.

To be honest, I
had
been restless. It had started back in the fall—this feeling of time passing, of being postponed, pent up, not wanting to go up to my studio. The sensation would rise suddenly like freight from the ocean floor—the unexpected discontent of cows in their pasture. The constant chewing of all that cud.

With winter the feeling had deepened. I would see a neighbor running along the sidewalk in front of the house, training, I imagined, for a climb up Kilimanjaro. Or a friend at my book club giving a blow-by-blow of her bungee jump from a bridge in Australia. Or—and this was the worst of all—a TV show about some intrepid woman traveling alone in the blueness of Greece, and I’d be overcome by the little river of sparks that seemed to run beneath all that, the blood/sap/wine, aliveness, whatever it was. It had made me feel bereft over the immensity of the world, the extraordinary things people did with their lives—though, really, I didn’t want to do any of those particular things. I didn’t know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

I felt it that morning standing beside the window, the quick, furtive way it insinuated itself, and I had no idea what to say to myself about it. Hugh seemed to think my little collapse of spirit, or whatever it was I was having, was about Dee’s being away at college, the clichéd empty nest and all that.

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Last fall, after we’d gotten her settled at Vanderbilt, Hugh and I’d rushed home so he could play in the Waverley Harris Cancer Classic, a tennis tournament he’d been worked up about all summer. He’d gone out in the Georgia heat for three months and practiced twice a week with a fancy Prince graphite racket.

Then I’d ended up crying all the way home from Nashville. I kept picturing Dee standing in front of her dorm waving good-bye as we pulled away. She touched her eye, her chest, then pointed at us—a thing she’d done since she was a little girl. Eye.

Heart. You. It did me in. When we got home, despite my protests, Hugh called his doubles partner, Scott, to take his place in the tournament, and stayed home and watched a movie with me.
An Officer and a Gentleman
. He pretended very hard to like it.

The deep sadness I felt in the car that day had lingered for a couple of weeks, but it had finally lifted. I
did
miss Dee—of course I did—but I couldn’t believe that was the real heart of the matter.

Lately Hugh had pushed me to see Dr. Ilg, one of the psychiatrists in his practice. I’d refused on the grounds that she had a parrot in her office.

I knew that would drive him crazy. This wasn’t the real reason, of course—I have nothing against people’s having parrots, except that they keep them in little cages. But I used it as a way of letting him know I wasn’t taking the suggestion seriously. It was one of the rare times I didn’t acquiesce to him.

“So she’s got a parrot, so what?” he’d said. “You’d like her.”

Probably I would, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to go that far—all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one’s childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into
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enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

I did occasionally, though, play out imaginary sessions with Dr. Ilg in my head. I would tell her about my father, and, grunt-ing, she would write it down on a little pad—which is all she ever seemed to do. I pictured her bird as a dazzling white cocka-too perched on the back of her chair, belting out all sorts of fla-grant opinions, repeating itself like a Greek chorus: “You blame yourself, you blame yourself, you blame yourself.”

Not long ago—I don’t know what possessed me to do it—I’d told Hugh about these make-believe sessions with Dr. Ilg, even about the bird, and he’d smiled. “Maybe you should just see the bird,” he said. “Your Dr. Ilg sounds like an idiot.”

Now, across the room, Hugh was listening to the person on the phone, muttering, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” His face had clamped down into what Dee called “the Big Frown,” that pinched expression of grave and intense listening in which you could almost see the various pistons in his brain—Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Winnicott—bobbing up and down.

Wind lapped over the roof, and I heard the house begin to sing—as it routinely did—with an operatic voice that was very Beverly “Shrill,” as we liked to say. There were also doors that refused to close, ancient toilets that would suddenly decline to flush (“The toilets have gone anal-retentive again!” Dee would shout), and I had to keep constant vigilance to prevent Hugh from exterminating the flying squirrels that lived in the fireplace in his study. If we ever got a divorce, he loved to joke, it would be about squirrels.

But I loved all of this; I truly did. It was only the basement t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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floods and the winter drafts that I hated. And now, with Dee in her first year at Vanderbilt, the emptiness—I hated that.

Hugh was hunched on his side of the bed, his elbows balanced on his knees and the top two knobs of his spine visible through his pajamas. He said, “You realize this is a serious situation, don’t you? She needs to see someone—I mean, an actual psychiatrist.”

I felt sure then it was a resident at the hospital, though it did seem Hugh was talking down to him, and that was not like Hugh.

Through the window the neighborhood looked drowned, as if the houses—some as big as arks—might lift off their founda-tions and float down the street. I hated the thought of slogging out into this mess, but of course I would. I would drive to Sacred Heart of Mary over on Peachtree and get my forehead swiped with ashes. When Dee was small, she’d mistakenly called the church the “
Scared
Heart of Mary.” The two of us still referred to it that way sometimes, and it occurred to me now how apt the name really was. I mean, if Mary was still around, like so many people thought, including my insatiably Catholic mother, maybe her heart
was
scared. Maybe it was because she was on such a high and impossible pedestal—Consummate Mother, Good Wife, All-Around Paragon of Perfect Womanhood. She was probably up there peering over the side, wishing for a ladder, a parachute, something to get her down from there.

I hadn’t missed going to church on Ash Wednesday since my father had died—not once. Not even when Dee was a baby and I had to take her with me, stuffing her into a thick papoose of blankets, armored with pacifiers and bottles of pumped breast
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milk. I wondered why I’d kept subjecting myself to it—year after year at the Scared Heart of Mary. The priest with his dreary in-cantation: “Remember you are dust, to dust you shall return.”

The blotch of ash on my forehead.

I only knew I had carried my father this way my whole life.

Hugh was standing now. He said, “Do you want me to tell her?” He looked at me, and I felt the gathering of dread. I imagined a bright wave of water coming down the street, rounding the corner where old Mrs. Vandiver had erected a gazebo too close to her driveway; the wave, not mountainous like a tsunami but a shimmering hillside sweeping toward me, carrying off the ridiculous gazebo, mailboxes, doghouses, utility poles, azalea bushes. A clean, ruinous sweep.

“It’s for you,” Hugh said. I didn’t move at first, and he called my name. “
Jessie.
The call—it’s for you.”

He held the receiver out to me, sitting there with his thick hair sticking up on the back of his head like a child’s, looking grave and uneasy, and the window copious with water, a trillion pewter droplets coming down on the roof.

C H A P T E R

Two

pq

Ireached for the robe draped on the bedpost. Pulling it around my shoulders, I took the phone while Hugh stood there, hovering, unsure whether to leave. I covered the mouthpiece. “No one died, did they?”

He shook his head.

“Go get dressed. Or go back to bed,” I told him.

“No, wait—” he said, but I was already saying hello into the phone, and he turned then and walked into the bathroom.

“You poor thing, I’ve gotten you up at daybreak,” a woman’s voice said. “But so you know, it wasn’t deliberate. I’ve been up so long, I simply forgot how early it is.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Lord, I’m such a blooming optimist, I thought you’d recognize me. It’s Kat. Egret Island Kat. Your godmother Kat. The Kat who changed your damn diapers.”

My eyes closed automatically. She’d been my mother’s best friend since forever—a petite woman in her sixties who wore folded-down, lace-trimmed socks with her high heels, suggesting a dainty, eccentric old lady whose formidability had thinned along with her bones. It was a great and dangerous deception.

I lowered myself to the bed, knowing there was only one
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reason she would call. It would have to do with my mother, the famously crazy Nelle Dubois, and judging from Hugh’s reaction, it would not be good.

Mother lived on Egret Island, where once we’d all been a family—I would say an “ordinary” family, except we’d lived next door to a Benedictine monastery. You cannot have thirty or forty monks for next-door neighbors and claim it’s ordinary.

The debris from my father’s exploded boat had washed up onto their property. Several monks had brought the board with
Jes-Sea
on it and presented it to Mother like a military flag. She’d quietly made a fire in the fireplace, then called Kat and Hepzibah, the other member of their trinity. They’d come and stood there along with the monks, while Mother had ceremoniously tossed the board onto the flames. I’d watched as the letters blackened, as the board was consumed. I remembered it sometimes when I woke in the night, had even thought about it in the middle of my wedding ceremony. There had been no funeral, no memorial, only that moment to call back.

It was after that that Mother began going over to cook the monks’ midday meal, something she’d now done for the last thirty-three years. She was more or less obsessed with them.

“I do believe our little island could sink into the sea, and it wouldn’t faze you,” Kat said. “What’s it been? Five years, six months, and one week since you set foot here?”

“That sounds right,” I said. My last visit, on the occasion of my mother’s seventieth birthday, had been a disaster of biblical proportions.

I’d taken Dee, who was twelve, and we’d presented Mother with a pair of gorgeous red silk pajamas from Saks, very Orient h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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tal, with a Chinese dragon embroidered on the top. She’d refused to accept them. And for the dumbest reason. It was because of the dragon, which she referred to alternately as “a beast,” “a demon,” and “a figure of moral turpitude.” St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, she said. Did I really expect her to sleep in such a thing?

When she got like that, no one could reason with her. She’d hurled the pajamas into the trash can, and I’d packed our bags.

The last time I’d seen my mother, she was standing on the porch, shouting, “If you leave, don’t come back!” And Dee, poor Dee, who only wanted a seminormal grandmother, crying.

Kat had driven us to the ferry that day in her golf cart—the one she drove maniacally around the island’s dirt roads. She’d blown the air horn on it incessantly during the ride to distract Dee from crying.

Now, on the other end of the phone, Kat went on playfully scolding me about my absence from the island, an absence I’d come to love and protect.

I heard the shower in the bathroom come on. Heard it over the rain driving hard against the windows.

“How’s Benne?” I asked. I was stalling, trying to ignore the feeling that something was perched over my head, about to fall.

“Fine,” Kat said. “Still translating Max’s every thought.”

In spite of my growing anxiety, I laughed. Kat’s daughter, who had to be forty by now, had been “not quite right” since birth, as Kat put it. The correct expression was “mentally challenged,” but Benne was also peculiarly gifted, given to premoni-tions of uncanny exactitude. She simply knew things, extracting them out of the air through mysterious antennae the rest of us
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didn’t possess. She was said to be particularly adept at decipher-ing the thoughts of Max, the island dog who belonged to no one and everyone.

“So what’s Max saying these days?”

“The usual things—‘My ears need scratching. My balls need licking. Why do you assume I want to fetch your idiotic stick?’ ”

I pictured Kat in her house perched high on stilts as all the island houses were. It was the color of lemons. I could see her sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen where over the years she, Hepzibah, and my mother had cracked and picked ten thousand blue crabs. “The Three Egreteers,” my father had called them.