Pearl (37 page)

49

Maria is lying in the dark, her eyes focused on the ceiling. She is trying to understand, but it is beyond her grasp. She keeps trying to pluck an idea from the dark air, an explanation. No one was with Pearl but Joseph.

The phone’s ringing shocks her.

“Hazel Morrisey here. You may go and see your daughter in the morning. She says there’s someone she’s eager to see, but I’m not going to allow that right now. I’m only permitting you to visit for the moment, and only for a little while. Try to keep things on an even keel.”

“Do you have any idea what precipitated her agitation today?”

“None at all, but I haven’t seen her in person.”

She phones Joseph’s room; he isn’t there. She leaves a message: She’ll be going to see Pearl first thing in the morning, and for the moment she’s the only one allowed.

She rushes to the hospital without breakfast, runs to get a taxi. When she arrives, she has to pass her enemy in charge of hospital passes. She hands Maria hers, holding it at arm’s length with the tips of her fingers as if any contact would be contaminating. Maria thanks her, insisting on a sincere-looking smile. She nods at the hall nurse and makes her way into Pearl’s room.

“Mom,” Pearl says, “I need you to do something.” Maria is shocked by Pearl’s hoarse voice.

“Does your throat hurt? Do you need something for it?”

“Never mind my throat. I need you to do something. Do you know about Stevie?’

“I know what Finbar told me.”

She nods, unsurprised that her mother and Finbar have met. She points to the balloons on the radiator. “Stevie’s mother, Breeda, sent me these. We were friends—I mean we used to be. Then she told me Stevie’s blood was on my hands. That what I’d done was unforgivable. And I knew she was right. What I did
was
unforgivable: I told Stevie he was stupid. Breeda was right. She said she didn’t ever want the sight of me again. Then she sent me those balloons, with that card.”

Maria picks up the card and reads it. “She seems to feel differently now. I’m sure she spoke in a moment of terrible grief. It sounds like she really wants to see you.”

“But she was right. What I did
was
unforgivable.”

“I don’t know what that means, unforgivable. Everything is potentially forgivable. Or unforgivable. If you’ve been forgiven, that means what you’ve done is forgivable. Forgiveness implies a forgiver, after all. It doesn’t come from the sky.”

Forgiveness, Maria is thinking, is a choice. She remembers the words of the gospel, when Jesus gives the apostles the power to forgive sins—or not. “Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven. Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.” Has the woman forgiven Pearl? Maria doesn’t know if she would be able to forgive in the same circumstances.

“Mom, you have to go and see her. You have to ask her if Stevie’s blood is on my hands, like she said.”

And how exactly would you like me to go about doing that? she wants to say to Pearl. Am I supposed to ring her bell, introduce myself, and say, Excuse me, you don’t know me, but do you think your son’s blood is on my daughter’s hands?

She looks at Pearl’s hands, the nails bluish. Thin, useless, tied down to blocks of wood attached to the railings of the bed. Blood on her hands? Her hands are tied.

“OK,” she says. “Give me the address.”

When she gives the cabby the address, he whistles. “You wouldn’t mind me saying I’d advise you not to go there?”

“I have no choice. I’ll just be a minute.”

“Would I wait for you then? You’d never get a taxi in that part of town.”

“That would be very kind. It’s quite important.”

“An errand of mercy, then. So is it an angel of mercy I’m supposed to call you?”

“I’m much too substantial to be an angel,” she says, and he laughs.

“The Lone Ranger, then. Heigh-ho, Silver,” he says, and steps on the gas.

The housing project is called Fatima Mansions. Fatima has an association for Maria, as it did not for Pearl; it is the town in Portugal where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to three peasant children in 1917, warning against the evils of communism. The Virgin dictated a letter to the children—Maria remembers two of their names, the girls, Lucy and Jacinta; the boy she can’t remember. The letter was meant to be opened in 1960. A rumor went around the Universal Church that the pope opened the letter and fainted. The report given to the world, which no one in the world believed, was that the letter said,
Pray for Peace
. This, you see, is the universal aspect of the Universal Church. All over the world, people of Maria’s age (but no younger) heard Fatima and saw a silvery Virgin on a puffy cloud. Now they think of it in Goa, in the Philippines, in Peru, in Latvia. Their children, however, do not think of it at all. And what, I wonder, are we to think of that? The shortened shelf life of truths once sold as eternal, now relegated to the back of the store, the remainder bin, recycled to the third world, the unsavvy consumer.

The housing project’s atmosphere, made up of children’s cries and adult acrimony and shouted greetings and snatches of music, is familiar to her from the projects in New York she’s entered hundreds of times on home visits to children’s families. Empty whiskey bottles and beer cans border the entry. She has no hope that the buzzer will work, but she presses the button next to the name
B DONEGAN
anyway. It doesn’t work. She walks up three flights of dark dangerous-looking steps.

She’s out of breath when she gets to Breeda’s door. She knocks and hears a woman answer. What can she possibly say to this woman? She can’t think about it now. She’ll just ask Pearl’s question and take whatever answer the woman gives. Whatever the woman thinks of her, if she gives her the information Pearl needs, Maria will have done her job.

The door is opened by a small woman with over-permed blond hair, large blue eyes with sandy lashes, teeth destroyed by smoking and bad food. Her slight body is muffled in a turquoise quilted robe; she wears fuzzy turquoise slippers. In the background, Maria can hear the television: an American show called
Friends
that some of the younger people she works with habitually watch. They’ve urged it on her, and she’s tried, but she can’t pick up the thread. Perhaps she could say to the woman, Oh, I see you’re watching
Friends.
Well, your son and my daughter were friends. She understands, as she did with Finbar, that it’s best in an impossible situation to rely on formula. Cliché.

“I’m Maria Meyers. I’m Pearl’s mother. I’ve come from the United States.”

“Come in.”

The room is dark, although it’s only ten in the morning. It is a room entirely without natural light. And Breeda has not put most of the lights on; she has been watching television at ten in the morning in the semidark. Something is hanging on a string from the ceiling—many things. In the dim air they seem more colorful than they would be in full light. Maria can’t comprehend them at first, but gradually it comes to her: they are paper birds, origami. Pearl had said she taught Stevie origami. The room is a jungle of paper birds; his mother had allowed him to hang them everywhere. Red, orange, yellow, blue. Light, so light, the slightest breeze moves them.

Or they move of their own lightness at the end of their nearly invisible strings. Maria understands that Breeda was right to let him hang them; they make the room come alive, even though it’s difficult to walk there; you have to keep parting them in front of you, like Moses at the Red Sea. The waves of colorful birds part, rustle, fly lightly on their strings, return. Without them the room would be merely dispiriting, with its ceramic figures of cats with wagging heads and aqua eyes, a painting of a baby seal, and several of uprearing horses. Maria knows she must move carefully. She is aware that the waves of birds on strings may be all that is left to Breeda of her son.

“Will you have a cup of tea?”

Maria is anxious to get the information that Pearl needs, but she will not be inhumane. Tea, of course; probably there will be cookies, called here, as in England,
biscuits
. In the corner of the room, where the television blares, there is a table with a wooden base and Formica top, blond-colored. Breeda takes a cloth and wipes the table quickly. She fills the electric kettle; in seconds steam appears. Neither woman has said a word.

“She’s all right, Pearl, is she?”

“I don’t know. She’s in the hospital. They’ve been feeding her with tubes.”

“Force-feeding? They did that to some of the hunger strikers.”

A thrill of fear goes through Maria. The Irish hunger strikers died.

“I think she’s willing to eat now.”

“Thank God,” Breeda says.

Maria thinks that she probably means it literally, and this is both a comfort to her and a source of estrangement. Breeda believes in a prayable, thankable being. This makes her, at the moment, more fortunate than Maria herself. Yet Maria has a living child; Breeda does not. She cannot, therefore, be counted among the fortunate.

“I’m terribly sorry about your son.”

Breeda nods. Her eyes overflow with tears that come effortlessly from her body, like sweat, as if weeping were her habitual and ordinary state.

“Life was hard for Stevie, always hard. The thing with Pearl was, I felt she got the good of him. She got his goodness, she was able to enjoy him, to understand that he had gifts, you know, even if most people couldn’t see them. She could see them. We’d have good times here, you know, just watching the TV or chatting or having a take-away meal.”

“She loved him. His death was shattering to her. I think she feels in some way responsible.”

“That’s probably my fault. I need forgiveness of her too. She wasn’t to blame, not the least little bit. But you see, I was out of my head when Stevie died, out of my head. He’s all I have. All I had. And they made a fool of him with the parcel at the Gardai station. A laughingstock was what he was. And then what Pearl said to him—well, I understand she was just furious at the stupidity of it, only she turned on him, and she shouldn’t have done that. It took the last heart out of him. But the other thing is, he was a boy the sun never shone on. What happened to him was an accident. It was an accident that he was killed before he and Pearl had a chance to make it up. It was an accident of time.”

For the second time, Maria feels a thrill in her spine. If what Breeda has said about Pearl and Stevie is true, that it was an accident of time, is it possible that this could be true of her father and her? If they’d had more time, if he hadn’t died when she was away, if Pearl had been born . . . is it possible that things could have been different? Was it only an accident that death and circumstances butted up against each other in a way that was unfortunate? If Breeda can say it about her own dead son, can’t Maria say it about her dead father? She would like to tell Breeda the story of her and her father and ask her if what she just thought of could possibly be the case. But she isn’t here for herself. She is here for Pearl, who has given her a great gift: she has asked Maria to do something, something she thinks her mother can do, rather than just wait.

“He was deaf in one ear, Stevie,” Breeda says. “He covered up a lot, he wouldn’t wear his hearing aid, no one knew about his bad hearing, really, and the night was foggy—he just didn’t hear the car beeping its horn. It was an accident, in one way, But I can’t help thinking in another way he’s another victim of the Troubles. And I wanted to scratch the eyes out of them. Out of his father. Because when I went over there, and he was just so calm, that American kind of calm, you know, and I was raving, and all he said was, ‘Get hold of yourself. It was a terrible thing, but it happened.’ Like I didn’t know it happened. Like he had to tell me that. And Pearl was there, saying nothing. I guess I wanted her to stand up to him, and when she didn’t I turned on her. Because it
had
upset me, what she’d said to Stevie. But later, I was able to understand. She couldn’t stand up to Mick because she was shattered herself. She’d lost heart too. There wasn’t much left to her, but I couldn’t see that. All I could see was that she was one of them, and she wasn’t standing up to Mick for saying ‘It happened.’ So I said the thing I did.

“But then when I read about what she did in the paper, when I read that she talked about Stevie and said Stevie was great, then I understood. She was mourning Stevie just as I was. We were the only ones. Like she said, she was marking his death. I didn’t want his death marked with another death. I didn’t
want
another death, and yet the fact that she wanted to mark my boy’s death meant something to me. Now, if she died, it would just be another dead child, and there’s been too much of that.

“I needed her. I need her now. She’s the only one I can talk to who really got the good of Stevie. She’s the only one I can remember things with. My family never got the good of him: he wasn’t political; he wasn’t strong, you know, or quick. I think that’s one reason he wanted to do the thing they put him up to, being the son of his father, coming from my family. And when I thought of Pearl so near to dying, I thought, No more dead. No more dead children. Because she’s only a child herself, isn’t she?”

Maria leans her head back in the dimness. She watches the birds fly in the quiet air—the air that would be quiet but for the blaring of the television. She lets her eye follow the gentle movement of the birds. Real birds, living birds, would not move so gently. They’d be getting somewhere. She thinks of the words used to describe the flight of birds.
Soar, swoop, hover.
But that implies a wingspan. Stevie’s birds have folded wings. Moveless movers.

“She wanted me to find out from you: Do you forgive her?”

“Of course. We were both out of our heads with grief. We weren’t neither of us ourselves. You must ask her to forgive me too. You must tell her she’s got a special place in my heart. And in my prayers.”

“I want to get back to her now. What you’ve said will mean the world to her. It means the difference between life and death. We’ll see each other when she’s well.”