Pearl (29 page)

Is that it, then? Is his belief in the value of giving up your life the product of his early training in a religion in which he no longer believes? Can you lose your faith and hold on to what that faith insists on? Isn’t that, in fact, the purest faith, faith without faith? Faith without hope? Faith without the possibility of faith’s consolation?

But Pearl was not brought up as a person of faith. What, then, is the source of her conviction that it’s worth giving your life for something? And for what? He tries to understand what she was doing before she was stopped. He senses the taste of what she’s done, but the details are vague: figures in the mist, shadows of the dead in the Greek underworld.

Are they right, these two women, that it is Pearl who doesn’t understand life and they who do? In their conviction that life must be by its nature desirable, good? That life must be preferable to death?

Joseph can’t bear the idea that Pearl might die. The thought of her death paralyzes him, terrifies him. But he doesn’t want her to have to live in a world in which the possibility of dying for something is automatically considered sick or ridiculous. He wants to protect her against their closed pleased faces, the faces of the mother and the doctor, refusing to allow the question “Is it always desirable to live?”

Perhaps you too think this question should never be allowed. Or that the answer is so obvious that the question is simply a waste of time. Or that there is something wrong with Joseph for even considering it. He is asking these things of himself. And yet he does not choose to disallow the question, because he believes that to do that dishonors what Pearl has gone through and what she has seen.

Only now does the doctor acknowledge his presence.

“You must be Joseph Kasperman,” she says. “I read the letter Pearl wrote you. It was forwarded to me by the embassy; I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not.”

“Something interesting: when I first sedated her, she said your name. ‘Joseph won’t make me,’ she said.”

What does it mean? How can it make him feel about himself that he’s important to her by his potential failure to make something happen? Of course she’s right. He has never, he believes, made anyone do anything. Yet she wants something of him. Help in giving up her life. He won’t do it; no matter how much she wants it of him, no matter how much she believes he’s the only one who could.

He’s afraid to look at Maria, to see her disappointed face, that in this area of life that is most important to her, he has won something. That Pearl wanted her mother kept away and suggested there was something desirable about him. But why think of it in those terms, winning or losing, the terms of a game? Yet he feels he
has
won something, some place or placement in the regard of the one who is most important to both of them. Once, he would have said Devorah was the most important, but she disappointed him and she is dead. There is no one who even comes close to Pearl in importance. It is possible to say there is no one else whom he can say, with certainty, he loves. Does he love Maria? Certainly he did, at one time; when he was younger, when he didn’t mind her winning. What has happened is that he has lost so much he now resents her winning what he thinks is more than her share of the prizes. So perhaps we are not as surprised as he that he takes pleasure in this victory over Maria when he has spent a lifetime not competing with her, in no small part because he always knew he could never want to win as badly. Certainly, he tells himself, he doesn’t want to displace her in Pearl’s affections. And when he thinks of his prize, he sees how questionable its value is. His only distinction is that his pressure is light enough so he won’t be in the way. It is simply this: he isn’t forceful enough to keep someone alive.

When finally he looks at Maria’s face, it isn’t disappointment or resentment he sees there but something new, something unfamiliar. Is it humility?

“Could Joseph go and see her then?” Maria asks the doctor.

“Not just now. She’s awfully weak. We want to strengthen her up with some nourishment.”

They mean force-feeding, he thinks; the tube sewn into her flesh. Why don’t they say what they mean? But perhaps it’s better not to. There must be a reason for using language in a way that muffles the truth, that filters it rather than exposing it, a kind of language that is born not of the impulse to tyranny but the impulse to kindness. Is it possible to call it kindness rather than disregard for truth?

Joseph can feel that the atmosphere has changed. But it didn’t break with the violence of a storm. It was a gradual lifting; the sky’s turning from gray to silver, then a hint of blue. Hope has entered. How?

Maria has done something outrageous, unacceptable, something that should have been dealt with by punishment. And she has not been punished. The opposite has happened. She has got what she wanted.

The prodigal son. Always when he heard the story he identified with the older brother, the stay-at-home. How hurt he must have been at his father’s welcome for the delinquent who had done nothing to earn love and had been loved greatly anyway, maybe more greatly.

Maria, though, has never come back for her inheritance. She believes she has given up her share of the fatted calf. Is it a trick or an equivocation that she allows him to spend her father’s money on Pearl? To have used her father’s money to take time off to get her degree in social work when Pearl was small. To have made certain (there was no need for this, but she felt she needed legal certainties) that, even before Devorah died, Pearl was provided for in Joseph’s will. Was this another case of Maria’s having her cake and eating it too?

He wonders about Pearl’s physical state, wonders why Maria hasn’t asked more questions, wonders whether it’s his place to ask. Perhaps Maria doesn’t want to know details; she often prefers not to have too much information; it might get in her way. He thinks, though, that it might be all right to ask one question of the doctor. Only one.

“Is she in any pain?”

It says something about Joseph, I think, that he asks a question rooted in the present. A modest question, an answerable question, one that doesn’t ask for a dangerous prediction that could be proved humiliatingly wrong. I wonder what he would think if he knew that the doctors believed that because Pearl had no memory of pain, her pain was not real. But Dr. Morrisey wouldn’t think of discussing that with him. I think we can understand why she is relieved to have been asked a question she can answer.

“No, she’s rather heavily sedated at the moment. She’s taking a lot of medication: sedatives, nutriments, antidepressants. They’ll get her out of this crisis. But it’s going to be a long haul before anyone can be sure she’s out of danger as a suicide. Because whatever else she’s doing, whatever else we call it, whatever she calls it, moral witness or political statement, we have to understand it’s at least in part a suicide attempt.”

So the doctor is frightened too, Joseph thinks. This makes him feel safer.

“Come upstairs to my office,” she says. “It’s ridiculous to have this conversation standing in the middle of the corridor.”

The receptionist sniffs. “They’ll be needing passes.”

Dr. Morrrisey signs something. None of the three of them looks at the receptionist.

The doctor’s office is a windowless cubicle. There are a few medical books on the shelves, a picture of her in a rowboat with a dark man and two dark children. None of them fair like her. So we share something, Maria thinks, in having children who do not resemble us. She’d like to mention that but decides against it.

“Pearl has never shown any signs of being suicidal,” Maria says, “so do you really think this is a suicide attempt? The terms of her statement are moral and political rather than emotional.”

“Of course, it’s very complicated, and a political death by self-starvation is not unheard of here in Ireland. You can’t go far around Dublin without seeing some image of Bobby Sands. Some people think he was a martyr, some people think he was a murderer; after all this time there’s still no consensus. But his death is still very much on people’s minds.”

“What sort of sense would it make to call Bobby Sands’s death a suicide?” Maria says. “I mean, to classify it with other suicides, which are a result of some sort of depression or personal despair. It wouldn’t make any sense to call Bobby Sands a neurotic.”

Joseph is glad she’s said that. He remembers thinking of the Buhddist monks during the Vietnam years, setting themselves on fire to witness to the injustice of the war. Had their death had any effect? Was any effect worth Pearl’s death? No, not to him. Yet he would not call what she did a suicide attempt; that would dishonor her.

“Well, what your daughter’s done has a lot of different aspects to it of course, we can’t discount that, but unlike Bobby Sands and other political martyrs she acted entirely alone; she had no community. So that makes it more like a suicide, in my opinion. And then the first reason she gives for her death is to mark the death of the young man for whom she feels responsible. That’s a response of private guilt, private remorse, private atonement—even though the boy had relatives who had political connections, Pearl’s connection to him wasn’t political.

“And like anyone who wants to commit suicide, she believed her life wasn’t meaningful. At least not as meaningful as her death. A suicide is essentially overwhelmed by feelings of hopeless passivity. Suicides can’t imagine that anything they do matters at all. So when a suicide looks at something horrible, or a series of horrible things, she’s not the only one to see it, but to her it has a force that blots out anything else in life. All of us have our days when life doesn’t seem worth it, but we usually get over them. A suicide has no other kind of day. It’s as if she’s always looking directly at the sun or at some sort of unfiltered light. Not that the light isn’t there, the rest of us retain our vision by a series of filters that block things out and protect us. A suicide can’t protect herself from the things that most of us protect ourselves from. It’s not that what she says about the world is wrong, it’s not that she’s seeing things that aren’t there or that the rest of us have never seen, but we push them out of our field of vision because we have to.”

He sees Pearl on a desert landscape, parched, burned by a relentless sun. There are caves she could seek shade in, rocks she could shelter behind, if only for a moment. But she won’t. She won’t get out of the light. Is there no one who will say that there is reason for this, even courage in it? He dare not say it here, not in front of these women.

“She’s going to need extended treatment. I assume you’ll be taking her home to New York; I hope you’ll be in support of that.”

“Of course,” Maria says.

Who will treat her? Joseph wonders. How will she be treated? He worries about a rough touch on this skin that has been seared by the too-bright sun, from which she has refused shelter. Her burnt skin needs soothing, protection. What if the hand is clumsy? He looks at Hazel Morrisey’s square hands. They have shoved tubes in Pearl against her will; they have sewn things into her flesh. If the touch that thinks of itself as
treatment,
even cure, is too harsh, what will happen to the wounded, abraded skin?

“You see, the drugs and the nutrition we’re giving her will help temporarily. But what we need to do, or what she’ll need to do for herself, is to have some sense of her own strength to choose to live her life, some ability to forgive herself for the death she thinks she’s caused so she doesn’t believe she deserves to die. It’s a lot easier to prescribe medication than to track the course of her guilt. She’ll need a great deal of support.”

Hazel Morrisey knows this is a clumsy attempt to put into words the questions that take up her mind: What is the relationship between psychotropic drugs and real inner change? Yet she has to make things clear to Pearl’s mother; she has to say what she believes: that both are needed, both medication and the slow cure of the soul. A soul she cannot, as a scientist, prove the existence of and therefore cannot publicly call by name.

“It goes without saying that we’ll give her all the support she needs.”

“It will need to be on her own terms and at her own pace.”

“Of course,” Maria says.

Joseph wants to say to Maria, I’m afraid to leave her in your hands. But he doesn’t know what his own hands—lacking, as he does, authority or any kind of leverage—could keep Pearl from.

“There’s nothing much to do, now, but wait.”

“If you asked me to do anything else,” Maria says, “run a hundred miles, move a mountain, it would be easier.”

“I understand,” the doctor says. “I wish I could say something different.”

They understand each other, Joseph thinks. What, he wonders, does Pearl understand?

31

“Your mother’s a real piece of work,” Tom says. It’s the first time Pearl’s seen him laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“They wouldn’t let her in to see Morrisey, so she just stood in the lobby and screamed until they sent Morrisey down to talk to her. I see where you get your determination.”

“I’m nothing like my mother.”

“Well, I don’t know her, and I don’t even know you. I was just thinking of
my
mother. My mother wouldn’t stand up to anyone, she’s terrified if anyone says boo to her, and she’s always letting people get ahead of her on the bus queue or at the supermarket. I guess I’m like that too. We’re a pretty quiet family.”

“How many are you?”

“Six brothers and sisters, my father, and my mother. We all live on a farm down in County Clare.”

“It’s just my mother and me.”

“Well, we’re pretty ordinary.”

“You’re lucky,” she says.

“Yeah, well, you’re lucky to have a mother who sticks up for you fearlessly. You’re less alone in the world that way. My parents—they never went to college—they’d be terrified to say the first word to Dr. Morrisey. I’d die a thousand deaths if they ever met her.”

“Do you miss living in the country?”

“I do, yeah. I hope to go back after the training. But who knows? . . . How are you feeling, then. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Just tell me some things about your life.”

“I’m not much of a talker. I don’t think you’d find anything I had to say that interesting.”

“Tell me something about your animals.”

He feels on the spot. He was never good at talking to girls. And now he knows, somehow, it’s terribly important to say the right thing. She’s asked for a story about animals. That’s a good sign; an interest in animals is always a hopeful thing. He’s read about experiments where some depressives were given dogs to care for and others put on Prozac, and the ones who had the dogs to care for did as well as the ones on medication. He feels himself begin to sweat, but he always feels like this when he talks to a girl. Of course, she isn’t a girl, she’s a patient, Morrisey’s patient, and he’s already screwed up once. Frantically, he tries to remember everything about every animal he’s ever known. A story comes to him. Perhaps she’ll like it. People have liked it in the past.

“I’ll tell you this one story, about a dog, his name was Nick, and a cat, his name was Scooter.

“Nick was part collie: long fur, mostly white with gold and brown marks, a beautiful plume of a tail, and ears that stood up halfway and then flopped. He hardly ever walked: he pranced, he bounced; he was always curious, like a puppy.

“One day we saw Nick carrying something that looked like a black rag. One of the barn cats had recently had a litter; it was one of the kittens. Nick had its entire head in his mouth and was trotting proudly about, once in a while setting the kitten down and pawing it gently and cocking his head to watch it. Every day Nick would walk around with the kitten for a while and return it to the litter when he was done playing. Then he would come again when the mood hit, take out the black kitten, and play with it for a while. The kitten flourished. When he was a little bigger, we would see Nick carrying him around by the nape of the neck, the way many animals carry their young. Nick invented a new game—bowling, we named it. He would put Scooter down, trot off a few yards, turn around and charge, knocking the kitten to the ground. Why Scooter put up with it, we couldn’t imagine, but he seemed to think it was his destiny to play bowling pin to bowling-ball Nick. He grew to a size where Nick could no longer carry him, but that didn’t stop the game. Whenever he saw Scooter, Nick would charge; the cat would gather himself into a bowling-pin shape and wait to be hit.

“One day the following spring, Scooter disappeared. He was a good-sized tomcat at that point, so when he didn’t come back all summer we sort of gave up on him. But then one day there was Scooter in the path. I have never seen a cat express joy the way this one did. He purred like a motorboat, rolled around on the ground, took leaps into the air. He jumped into my arms; he felt like a different animal; he was muscular and tough, like a wild animal, not like a pet. Then around the corner of the barn came Nick. He took one look and charged. Scooter just gathered himself up and waited to be knocked down.”

Pearl tries to laugh, but it is difficult with her tube. Tom is worried about that, and when the nurse comes in he asks her to check Pearl out.

“She’s fine,” the nurse says. “You can take a bit of a break. I’m taking your place.”

Pearl wants to say she’s very sorry someone’s taking his place, but she’s afraid of embarrassing him.

“I’ll be back in a while. You’re all right, are you? You’re in good hands.”

Not as good as yours, she wants to say, but says only, “Thanks. That was a great story.”

“See you soon, then.” His story has been a success after all, and that isn’t the kind of success he is used to.