Pearl (22 page)

14

Maria is finding it difficult to pull herself up from sleep. She has dropped down or has been dropped—by her friend’s Halcyon pill—yet it seems to her that she has willed it, as if she had jumped through a hoop, like a show dog or a showgirl, but not triumphantly, not to applause, but to silence, deep snow, darkness. And because she has dropped down so far, it is a struggle for her to respond to the flight attendant’s voice. “We’re landing in Dublin.”

Dublin. Pearl. Pearl is in Dublin, trying to make herself die. Maria is here to stop it.

She must get to her instantly. Every step of the way is a torment: passport, customs. She wants to scream, Don’t you know that this is an
emergency
! Why hasn’t someone from the embassy cleared her way? Why is no one here to help her?

She gets through customs. Walks down a hall and through a series of doors. Sees the sign, in Irish and in English:
WELCOME TO DUBLIN
. She was never tempted to travel to Ireland; she’d had too much to do with too many Irish priests, been irritated by their provincialism, their puritanism. Dublin in her mind was a city whose life finished in 1922, the year of
Ulysses
. A city in literature, in history. Her daughter, maybe, is becoming a part of history. She hears the words from
The Wizard of Oz:
“You’ll be history. You’ll be history. You’ll be hiss, you’ll be hiss, you’ll be history.” Munchkin voices, mad-sounding, frantic. The words wheel and circle in her brain. Then another voice, calmer: “One by one we are all becoming shades.” “The Dead,” her favorite story, from the collection named for the city she’s about to enter. That was the point, wasn’t it, that the living were turning into the dead? All right, but not her daughter. It doesn’t help to think like that. That was why she gave up that kind of reading. It won’t help her daughter now for her to have visions of souls whirling in snow. It probably isn’t even snowing.

.  .  .  

Maria hails a taxi to the embassy. It takes her to an area that is beginning to look suburban, and she thinks the driver must be mistaken. “Are we going to the American embassy?” she asks, and he says, “We are so,” and she wonders if he resents her lack of faith. He stops the car in front of a building that is not what she imagined any embassy could be. No grandeur here, no imperial display, no suggestion of men in elegantly cut suits making decisions that could reinvent the globe. This is a building badly thought up, an ill-digested, circular misunderstanding of the modern. She has expected crowds: spectators, policemen, surrounding Pearl. But the area around the entrance is empty; there are the usual guards but no throng of onlookers. Pearl isn’t there. She runs up the shallow stairs. Should she ask the guards? What would it be, polite? “Excuse me, my daughter was chained to the flagpole here; would you happen to know what’s become of her?” Or frantic? “If my daughter is dead, you must tell me instantly.”

A guard asks her business. She tells him she is here to see Caroline Wolf, the woman for whom she was told to ask. She gives her name and is told to wait.

She wants to rush at the guard and say, I cannot wait! I need to know this instant if my daughter is alive! But she sits down, sweating with the effort of inaction. Breathe in, breathe out. Hope for the best. Believe the best. Believe that she is not among the dead.

She trains her eye on the double glass doors, as if fixity of focus can make something happen. A woman in a red knit suit with brass buttons and hard-sprayed blond hair approaches.

“Ms. Meyers? Caroline Wolf.”

Another southern accent. Maria doesn’t at the moment have the impulse to overcome regional prejudices. Or to make small talk or ordinary polite exchanges.

“Where’s my daughter? Is she all right?”

“She’s been taken to the hospital. She’s in good hands. Would you like to come into my office?”

“I want to see my daughter.”

“Please come into my office. I have some information for you.”

Maria would like to scream,
Just tell me which hospital. Don’t waste my time!
She digs her nails into her palms, ordering herself to be obedient, something she hasn’t had to do in thirty years. Obedience was something she gave up when she left the world of the Catholic Church for the secular universe. Now it’s a skill she must reemploy. Is it something you never forget, like riding a bicycle? Walk slowly. Keep your mouth shut. Do exactly as she says.

Maria follows her into a small bare office. A minor diplomat. Where is the ambassador? Then she remembers: it’s Sunday, two days after Christmas: skeleton staff. She sees a skeleton staff. She sees a skeleton. She wills herself to stop seeing it.

“We’re very lucky in our ambassador. She’s a mom herself, you know.”

Maria wants to say, Of course I know, do you think I’ve been on Pluto? Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of the more famous brothers. She thinks, The ambassador will understand me. She wants the ambassador. The 1960 pull. The Kennedys are on our side. And therefore we shall overcome.

“The ambassador has seen to it that criminal charges aren’t being pressed against your daughter. It was a wonderful thing for her to do.”

“I’m very grateful,” Maria says, barely able to stop herself from lunging across the desk and grabbing the papers in Caroline Wolf’s hands, shuffling them wildly, throwing them around the room till she finds the doctor’s name, the hospital. She understands that Caroline Wolf has no sympathy for Pearl, whom she thinks of as a girl who has spoiled her holiday.

“The ambassador would have been well within bounds to allow criminal proceedings. I can think of many another ambassador in her position who would have dealt with it as a criminal matter. After all, your daughter was trespassing on United States property. But the ambassador’s not that sort of person. And it was quite a scene: the police having to cut the chain, carry her out. It’s a shame the media got hold of it, but I guess that’s what she wanted, your daughter. I think our people here are going to be able to softball it. I mean, everyone seems pretty committed to keeping it pretty low key.”

“Thank you,” Maria says again.

“This was on the ground next to your daughter. A sort of statement.” She hands Maria a piece of typewritten paper in a plastic see-through envelope, also two regular envelopes: one with Maria’s name on it, one with Joseph’s. Maria begins to read the statement; she will not open the envelope addressed to her in front of this woman.

You and I already know what the statement says; we have already read it, but it is new to Maria and the effort to understand strikes her like a speeding truck, like a boulder rolling toward her from the top of a mountain, like a roaring fire that consumes her mind. How can she understand what these words say? Her daughter wants to mark the death of a boy she has never heard of? Her daughter wants to die for a peace agreement she hadn’t given a thought to ten months earlier? Her daughter wants to die because human beings want to harm one another? Her daughter is insane? Is a fool? Is speaking the truth? Which is the right interpretation: insanity, folly, or the truth? But what does her understanding matter? The thing is, she must get to Pearl, and she must use the power of the American government to do it. She must use Caroline Wolf.

“May I have this, please?” she asks, holding Pearl’s statement.

“You may have a copy of it. We’re keeping the original for our file.”

“Thank you,” Maria says, wondering what the file is. Will it do Pearl future harm? She does not consider what you and I might think: If she has a future. She does not allow herself that thought.

Caroline Wolf goes into another office and comes out a minute later with a copy of the page for Maria.

“On our end here, we’ve pretty much signed off on this. We’ve written a report that pretty much gives our position. You’re welcome to read it. It should be viable in a day or two.”

“Thank you.”

“Right now it’s the hospital’s issue. Your daughter is in the psychiatric ward. I don’t know the doctor in charge, but here’s her name; I’m turning you over to her at the hospital.” She hands Maria a piece of paper with a phone number.

Over and out, Maria wants to say, but simply says
thank you
again. It’s occurred to her that she hasn’t said
thank you
so frequently in this short a space of time in her whole life.

“May I use the phone?” Maria asks.

Caroline Wolf gestures but makes no move to leave the room.

Maria dials the number. “Dr. Morrisey is unable to speak to you until this afternoon,” the secretary says. “She’s expecting your call. She’ll certainly get back to you.”

“I’ll just come to the hospital.”

“The doctor will be unavailable until this afternoon. Please settle in and try her again then.”

Caroline Wolf has been listening. “Why not check into the hotel we’ve booked for you? You don’t want to carry your luggage around all day. Everything possible is being done for your daughter. There’s nothing for you to do.”

There is a dotted line of rage at the top of Maria’s skull, as if someone were stitching a line in black thread. There is nothing for her to do because no one will let her do anything. No one will let her see her daughter. They are keeping Maria in chains. Her daughter, they told her, has been in chains. Pearl’s chains have been cut; hers have not. She must calculate; she must keep everyone’s goodwill in case, somewhere down the road, she needs their help. She refuses even to contemplate the possibility that there will not be a road on which to need help.

But she will go to the hotel. Joseph said he’d meet her there; he may be there already. Yes, this is the best thing to do. She knows it is the best thing and hates that the best thing to do is to do nothing except wait. Waiting is penitential to her, a hair shirt. Penance for what? What sin? She has no choice.

Maria doesn’t want to be grateful to Caroline Wolf for anything, but she’s glad someone has booked her a hotel. And called her a cab.

As soon as the cab takes off, Maria opens the envelope and reads the letter addressed to her. She reads it as if it were on fire, as if the words would disappear if she didn’t absorb them with terrific speed. What does Pearl mean? That she knows she was loved, but that it didn’t matter. That she wants to die because she has no hope, but that she knows her mother to be more hopeful than she? How can it be, that her daughter is a person of no hope? She has failed, she has failed in the most important thing a mother can do for a child: to give her hope in life. How can she understand this? She leans her cheek against the cold window of the taxi; she closes her eyes.

Her hotel, the driver tells her, is “on the key side.” On the key side of what? she wants to ask, and then realizes she is very tired. She cannot make a picture from these words until she reads the word
quay
on a sign attached to the wall, pronounces it first
kway,
then reminds herself that the sound is not long
a
but long
e
. Quay: a word she has never in her life spoken, only read.

Tall gray buildings that seem to have no windows loom along treeless streets. Practical. Censorious. Structures bereft of comfort, of forgiveness. Always there is so much to be forgiven, so much to forgive. She castigates herself for sentimental phrasing. She has nothing to forgive Pearl for. She has committed no offense. As for her own offenses—well, she won’t think of them right now. I did what I could, she says to the slate-colored water, to the stones drained of light. I did my best.

She wonders what, to Pearl, seems unforgivable.

Do we agree with Maria, that she did her best and Pearl needs no forgiveness? Are we tempted to say that Pearl needs to be forgiven for failing to appreciate the gift of her life, for putting her mother through this terror, perhaps even for dramatizing her own suffering in a world where suffering is the norm? It doesn’t matter what we think. Maria believes her daughter is in no need of forgiveness. She always has. Maria, so quick to judgment, so quick to cut off, to condemn, has never felt it necessary to accuse her daughter. Her daughter has seemed to her entirely innocent, entirely good. So it would not occur to her now, for the first time, to think of Pearl as someone who needs to be forgiven.

And yet this is not quite the case. There were times when, although she never doubted that she loved Pearl, she didn’t really like her. There were even times when her presence was repellent: the years when Pearl would sleep nearly all day on the weekends and then sit in filthy pajamas eating junk food in front of the television, not rousing herself till the sun went down. When she wanted to say to her, You’re not even quite clean; don’t you know you need a shower, your hair is dirty, you smell bad? Days of monosyllabic answers to the questions: How’s it going? What’s up? Everything all right in school? Days when their eyes never met and she thought, My daughter is lazy, my daughter has no imagination; at her age I was up, out, doing things all the time, with lots of friends. Not just one. Not just Luisa, whom Maria admired but felt had too much power over Pearl. The sight of them, eating cereal out of the box or leaving their dishes, three quarters full of milk, with flakes or o’s floating on the top, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands on the way into the living room to watch more MTV, could put her into a rage. Did she think these were things that needed to be forgiven? No, she wasn’t thinking that then, and certainly not now.

As her for idea that she has done her best, we know Pearl does not think that. But do we take the mother’s or the daughter’s side? It depends, I guess, upon whether we see ourselves in the position of parent or child.

The taxi leaves Maria at the Tara Arms Hotel. The desk clerk is a young girl whose hair will not lie flat and yet cannot come up to the ambitious height the girl is trying for. It’s awkward hair, Maria thinks, a girl’s hair masquerading as a woman’s, hair that wants to run down the girl’s back like water, but she won’t let it; she has set it in stiff rollers; she has sprayed it to a fare-thee-well. What does that mean? Maria wonders. What would it mean to spray something to a fare-thee-well?