Pearl (28 page)

29

Every time Pearl opens her eyes, he is there: Tom, her suicide watcher. He is about her age, maybe a little older. He’s already beginning to lose his hair. He keeps trying to read his medical textbook, but he often falls asleep. If she really wanted to pull the tube out again, she could try when he was napping. But it doesn’t matter what she wants; the tube is sewn to her, and the drug—Midazolam—even in the reduced dosage, makes any action difficult. He opens his eyes and sees her looking at him.

“How’s it going?” he says.

She smiles.

“That’s a stupid thing to say, I know,” he says. He blushes and comes over to straighten her sheet.

“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”

“Nothing I won’t recover from. Dr. Morrisey reamed me out good and proper. She’s a tough one. Brilliant doctor, everyone wants to train with her, but she scares the bejeezus out of most of us. And she’s got a real stake in your case. How is it with the lower dosage of Midazolam?”

She doesn’t want to tell him that she has become more fearful of death now that she is moving farther away from it, as if it is punishing her by replacing love with fear. Love casts out fear. Fear casts out love. She says instead, “I think I’m hungry.”

“Well, you would be, you see. The ketones start kicking in. I’m sorry, that’s technical, but the odd thing is, the more you’re nourished, the hungrier you feel. And you’re probably more depressed, because you’re losing the anorectic euphoria.”

Losing anorectic euphoria. That’s how they think of it then. She would like to tell him that she was happy and now she is not, that she knew what was right and now she doesn’t, that she was in love with death and now she fears it. And that she is hungry for her mother’s rice pudding and wants to see her mother. But this last she feels she can resist. In case it’s not too late and she can still become the one thing, the one sentence, as she had planned when she was not a hungry person or a person of fear.

“Just try and rest,” he says to her. “Dr. Morrisey will be in pretty soon. She’ll want to hear what you’re going through.”

Through to where? she wants to say.

There is a knock on the door and it opens. Seeing it’s Dr. Morrisey, Tom begins to blush again. He backs out of the room, as if he feels he has no right to be there.

“You seem more alert,” Dr. Morrisey says. “How does that feel?”

She doesn’t want to tell the doctor that she’s hungry.

“Tom O’Kelley’s a fine young man, very sensitive. He’ll make a good doctor.”

“My father was a doctor,” Pearl says. Once the words are out, she wishes she could take them back. She doesn’t want to give the doctor anything.

“What kind of doctor is he?”

“I don’t know, I never met him. And it’s
was,
not
is
. He’s dead.”

That, Pearl thinks, will shut her up. It is a new impulse in her, the impulse to be rude. She wants to make the doctor know that she is nothing to her and she can make nothing happen.

“You were studying the Irish language here. I understand you’re a student of linguistics.”

Pearl turns her head away.

“What I find interesting about the decision you made is that, for a person devoted to language, you seemed to have so little faith in it.”

Pearl turns her head toward the doctor, interested despite herself.

“What do you mean?”

“You seemed to think that action, your taking your life, was the only way to communicate what you believed. As if your body were stronger than words.”

Pearl would like to snort, make some sign of derision, but the tube makes that impossible. She will have to use words, words only, for that. “I did write a statement. It was on the ground next to me; I think you read it. Suppose I’d just written that and passed it out on Grafton Street. Would anyone pay attention? There are too many words spoken by too many people.”

“But what you’ve done: not many have done that. You really have got people to pay attention.”

She would like to accept this as a compliment, assert her pride.

“But for how long? If you die, there’s no chance you’ll be able to change anything in the world. There’ll be nothing you can do.”

“There’s nothing I can do anyway.”

“Nothing?”

“Not enough. Not enough to make it worth it.”

“Life, you mean.”

“Yes. I mean
my
life.”

Hazel Morrisey is silent for a moment, heartened that at least there is some conversation, worried that the next thing she’ll say will be wrong.

“You must be in a great deal of pain to believe that. I understand that nothing might seem worthwhile. But you didn’t want to die just to be free of pain; you wanted to be saying something by your death—and that, I feel, is a sign of hope.”

“Hope for what?”

“Your hope that communication is possible, that perhaps something can be changed. That you have some interest in the work of the world: what you can do in it.”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“We do what we can,” Dr. Morrisey says.

“You sound like my mother,” Pearl says.

“I’m going to assume you didn’t mean that as a compliment,” Dr. Morrisey says.

Pearl smiles. “I’m feeling hungry,” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s decided to tell the doctor this. It seems less personal than telling her something about what she would call her
self
. Yes, I do think the body is stronger than words, she wants to say to the doctor, but I don’t want to talk about that. If I tell you I’m hungry, that’s saying something about my body. That will shut you up.

“The paradox is, nutrition makes you hungrier. Ketones,” the doctor says.

“I know all about it,” Pearl says, in a childish voice, a bratty voice, a voice I had never heard her use to anyone.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re very angry at me for thwarting your plan. You felt you were in charge of your own life by deciding to take it. Then I come in and make you live, as if I had no respect for your wishes. As if I believed I knew better than you did. I want you to know that’s not the case. I do want to keep you alive, because I have faith and hope that in time you’ll find you want to live. I believe your death would be the waste of a valuable life. I believe you have many things to live for.”

“I already told you. Not enough.”

“We’ll talk more later,” Hazel Morrisey says.

What the doctor says has interested her despite herself. It has been a long time since anything has made her mind feel lively rather than paralyzed. She wishes the doctor would never come back.

She wonders what it can mean about words if the body is stronger than words. Which she believes it is. She would like to tell the doctor, Don’t you see what I was doing? Turning my body into a sentence, a sentence everyone would have to understand.

But the doctor wouldn’t understand. All she wants is for Pearl to live. She doesn’t ask: for what. She is one of those people who believes the answer is obvious. She doesn’t understand.

30

Joseph unwraps sandwiches for the both of them.

“You’re good, Joseph.”

He frowns. She knows he doesn’t like to be reminded of his goodness.

“I can’t just sit here doing nothing. Let’s go to the hospital. Maybe there’s a chink in Dr. Morrisey’s armor.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t think anything’s a good idea. But I want to be there.”

“Let’s walk, then. You need some exercise, or you won’t have any chance of a normal night’s sleep.”

“Normal,” she says. “What would be normal in this situation?”

He understands that she wants him to take charge of things.

He asks the woman at the hotel desk for her advice on getting taxis; she recommends that they walk to a taxi rank half a mile down the quay. She has so thoroughly understood his wishes—a little exercise, but not too much, and then conveyance—that for a moment he would like to take her in his arms.

They give the cabdriver the hospital’s name and he starts off, as all cabdrivers do, gunning his engine as if he were digging his spurs into the sides of a reluctant horse.

“No one too sick, I hope,” he says. “Although I suppose you wouldn’t be in hospital unless you were that sick. What I mean to say is, I hope it’s not critical. Terrible time of the year for sickness.”

“What’s a good time?” Maria says, determined, Joseph can see, to cut short his professional garrulity. But she fails.

“Now, in the good weather, like—I mean to say, spring or summer—the old don’t go popping off the way they do in winter. Particularly around the New Year. It must be some kind of stress for them. Where’re you from in the States?”

“New York,” Joseph says. Maria looks out the window.

“Never been there. Went once to Orlando, Florida. Disney World was a great gas, I’ll say that for it. Nothing like that over here.”

“Why is Viagra like Disney World?” Maria says.

“Beg pardon?” says the driver.

“Because you have to wait an hour for a ten-minute ride.”

This silences the cabby. Joseph isn’t sure whether he didn’t get the joke or was shocked that a woman told it. Whatever the reason, Maria’s tactic worked. There’s no more chattering. They drive through the Dublin streets in silence.

The woman behind the desk in the psychiatric section of the hospital has tight blond curls that sit on her scalp like snails on a rock; when she smiles, her eyes narrow and there is no welcome in them when she says “Welcome.” Perhaps that’s why they hired her, to discourage visitors. Her dentures look as if they might be made of bone; the gums are the pink of new pencil erasers.

“I’d like to see my daughter.” Maria says Pearl’s name.

“You’d need a special pass for that, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s one for you.”

Maria knows that Hazel Morrisey has not issued her a pass. She knows there’ll be no indication of permission beside her name, and she knows that when the woman sees it she’ll be glad.

“I’m afraid the patient is restricted as to visitors,” says the woman, flashing her eraser-colored gums. There are drops of spittle at the corners of her mouth; when she smiles they shine like bits of broken glass. Maria imagines that her power to prevent has made her literally salivate.

Maria recognizes the woman’s style; it’s similar to the nuns in grade school who refused you recess or permission to go out to the school yard after lunch. Joy in refusal has dried this woman’s skin; it has cut ridges into her square fingernails.

“I’d like to speak to your supervisor,” Maria says.

“The supervisor’s gone home for the day. You may consult her on the morrow.”

Her use of
on the morrow
infuriates Maria. “Let me put it another way,” she says. “Either you let me talk to someone who can help me see my daughter, or I’m going to stand here and scream at the top of my lungs until someone takes me to the psychiatric ward.”

Joseph is wondering if she’ll do it. He doesn’t know if he wants her to. He too dislikes the woman behind the desk and he has always found Maria’s transgressions compelling, even when he hasn’t approved.

The woman behind the desk doesn’t know how to predict what will come next. Maria steps back. She plants her feet apart firmly so that the ground will give her as much support as possible; she leans her head back, closes her eyes, and puts her hands on her hips. Screams come from her mouth—one, two, three jets of water from a hose—a shock of color in the neutral-colored, anonymously furnished lobby, as shocking as if a fox or a leopard had run through. Joseph wouldn’t be surprised to see claw marks on the leather of the chairs and the couches. Will someone come now? Surely someone must come, someone in uniform, a policeman or a guard, to silence her, to lay on hands. But no one in uniform appears. Maria goes on screaming. He doesn’t know where she gets the strength, the voice.

“Stop that. Stop that at once!”

The woman behind the desk has risen to her feet. Her face is drained of color, except for two circular red spots on her whey-colored cheeks, like the circles on the cheeks of a cloth doll.

Maria goes on screaming.

“I’m going to call someone in authority!”

Maria doesn’t stop screaming until she hears the woman on the phone reporting what she’s doing to someone she’s referring to as
doctor
.

“You can give over now. Dr. Morrisey’s coming down.”

“That’s all I asked for,” Maria says, wiping the corners of her lips with a tissue as if she’s just finished a petit four.

“I suppose you’re proud of yourself,” the woman behind the desk says.

“I am, rather,” Maria says, smiling pleasantly.

“This isn’t the States, you know. You can’t get away with that kind of behavior here.”

“Yes, I know. In the States we have things like the Bill of Rights. Concepts like individual freedom.”

“There’s freedom and there’s license, and then there’s your kind of carry-on, which there isn’t even words for.”

Joseph thinks the two of them will go on this way until someone makes them stop, and their sniping is much more unbearable for him than the simple assault of Maria’s screaming.

“Insufferable,” the woman says, but Joseph sees she’s running out of steam and is giving up the fight, whereas Maria’s just getting started.

We have to admire Maria, or at least I do, for sheer persistence in getting something done. For a disregard for propriety in the face of what she believes is a larger good. This is why Pearl wants her kept away; her definition of the good is what
she
believes to be the good. It almost never includes refraining from doing something, and it rarely includes restraining her conviction that she knows what is best.

A woman comes out of the elevator. Young, blond, short-haired, slightly unfeminine, an athlete, a runner perhaps, some kind of track and field event: high jump or javelin, Joseph thinks. We have already encountered Hazel Morrisey, but Joseph and Maria have not. Her youth surprises them; they are uneasy having someone so much younger than they in charge of the most important thing in their lives.

She walks up to the two of them.

“I’m Dr. Morrisey. We spoke earlier.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t call what we did speaking,” Maria says. “You offered pronouncements, and I was meant to submit.”

“As I tried to suggest, Mrs. Meyers—”

“It’s Ms. I’m not married.”

The doctor doesn’t skip a beat.

“Your daughter’s welfare is my concern, not your narcissistic needs. I wonder what you think your performance here has accomplished?”

“It brought you here. I’ve been trying to contact you all day.”

“I can see where Pearl gets her will. I only hope we can use it to keep her alive.”

“You said she wasn’t going to die.”

“I’m doing everything possible. I’ve had to take some drastic measures, measures that might seem barbaric. She pulled the feeding tube out of her throat so we sewed another to her nose, beside her nostril. It’s one reason I don’t want you to see her.”

“I’m her mother. There’s nothing I shouldn’t see.”

“Perhaps if the world were a fairy tale, a mother could see everything, but it’s not. Besides, you don’t know what you shouldn’t see unless you know what it looks like. Your daughter with a feeding tube sewn to her nostril is not a pretty sight, but she can’t afford to be without nourishment anymore. Her friend confirms that she hasn’t eaten any food in six weeks.”

“Her friend?”

“The bloke she lives with.”

Maria hopes it doesn’t register that this is news to her.

But if she doesn’t admit to not knowing who he is, she has no hope of reaching him or even finding out his name. She knows her daughter’s address—or at least the place where mail was sent. But maybe that isn’t where she really lived. How odd, Maria thinks, I’m a person who has been lied to. I am a parent from whom my daughter’s living arrangements were kept. Which means, of course, the details of her sexual life.

For a person of Maria’s age and background, the idea that someone is lying to them about sex is often a surprise. People like Maria and her friends thought
they
were the deceivers; they couldn’t imagine that
they
could be deceived, not about sex. Not them.

She’s never felt she needed to know the details of Pearl’s sex life. A sexual person was an adult by the simple of fact of being sexual. She had no more right to know about Pearl’s sex life than Pearl had to know about hers. Pearl had never offered information; Maria had never asked.

She looks into the intelligent uninflected eyes of Dr. Hazel Morrisey. She needs something from this woman; she must calculate how to get it. The gifts that make her good at her job, able to get things she needs from the people she works with, come into play. Dr. Morrisey’s face suggests an amenability that her voice did not. Maria must meet her adversary at the place she is and acknowledge the rightness of her position. Establish a common ground. She has done it so often in the past, it isn’t difficult to do now.

“I know you think I need to be kept away from my daughter,” Maria says, as if a concession has been absolutely and unequivocally made.

“For a time,” says Hazel Morrisey, blinking like a gunman momentarily relaxing his stare at the opposing gunman.

“And I understand you may be unwilling to put me directly in touch with this young man. But I was wondering if you could possibly give him my number and offer him the option of getting in touch with me.”

“I could certainly do that without compromising anything. Pearl’s unwilling to see the boy as well.”

Joseph can see Maria’s shoulders soften with the relief of a competitor who, if she hasn’t yet won, cannot be said to have entirely lost. If Pearl is cutting herself off from everyone, it is far more tolerable than abandoning her mother in favor of a young man. He sees that Maria has begun to win Hazel Morrisey over. Is it just her physical presence? Or is it that, despite herself, Hazel Morrisey was impressed with Maria’s civil disobedience, framed as it has become by a display of reasonableness, an ability to compromise? Whatever it is, he can see that Dr. Morrisey—like everyone else—has lost at least some of her initial will to resist Pearl’s mother.

“I’ll give the fella your number. It will be up to him if he wants to act on it.”

“Of course.”

“You see, Ms. Meyers, if Pearl is going to trust me, she has to trust me to respect her wishes. I’m already going against her by taking the measures I feel it’s vital to take. I’m trying to let her know I’m really with her.”

“I understand.”

“She’s never been on any kind of psychotropic medication? Prozac, or anything like that?”

“She’s never been particularly depressed. Ordinary adolescent ups and downs but nothing like this.”

“No anorexia or bulimia? Her relationship to food was normal?”

“She loved to eat and is naturally slender. She didn’t think about food much, other than liking certain things.”

“And politics?”

“I never thought she was very political. When I was involved with things like school board elections and city council races, she took no interest. She wouldn’t go to demonstrations with me after she was quite young, and I didn’t force her. She said she didn’t care about voting because the whole system was corrupt. This made me very angry, so we didn’t talk about it. I guess I was disappointed that she wasn’t interested in politics, that we couldn’t share that.”

“I was wondering if maybe she thought she was pleasing you by doing something political. That this was a way she could please you and please herself.”

“By giving up her life?”

“I’ve observed that some young women seem to have a special impulse toward martyrdom. I think of it as the Antigone complex.” The doctor blushes; for the first time she is girlish. “Although you mustn’t go looking for it in the medical journals. It’s only the way I name it for myself.”

Martyrdom. Antigone. Joseph is surprised to hear the doctor using those words to describe Pearl’s situation. He wonders if there isn’t another name, more clinical, more professional, used in countries less steeped in the history and language of the church by doctors who haven’t had the accident of a classical education.

He watches the two women, Maria and the doctor. They are leaning toward each other. They understand each other, and they both believe they understand Pearl. The basis of their connection, he realizes, is this: they have both rejected, quickly and automatically, the concept of martyrdom as a useful idea. Thrown it out of the sphere of the acceptable, as you would throw out dirty water or sour milk.

He is not so ready to throw it out. Again he wonders if we must necessarily believe, before we can begin to speak with the assumption of a common language, that nothing is worth dying for. Is it one of the things we must all agree on as civilized human beings, like the idea that slavery is always evil?

He watches the two women talking, nodding in agreement, their heads bobbing up and down. Their nodding discomfits him. What is it to be human if you are unwilling to give up your life?

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. . . . Those who want to save their life will lose it.