The Mermaid Chair (21 page)

I stared at an illustration of a mermaid whose fingers were depicted as dolphins, seals, fish, whales.

“What
is
this?”

“Her name's Sedna. She's an Inuit sea goddess.
All
of her fingers were severed. All ten.”

I read the text under the picture, a magical if slightly horrifying story. A young woman sends word to her father to come rescue her from a cruel husband. They are fleeing in his boat when her husband pursues them. Fearing for his life, the father throws his daughter overboard, but she grabs on to the side of the boat and refuses to let go. Panicked, her father cuts off each of her fingers. One by one.

I read the last couple of sentences out loud. “‘Sinking into the ocean, Sedna became a powerful female deity with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish or a seal. She came to be known as “Mother of the Ocean,” her severed fingers becoming the sea creatures that filled the waters.'”

There was a sidebar accompanying the story, about the number ten, I supposed because she'd lost ten fingers. I skimmed it. “‘Ten was considered the holiest number. Pythagoreans deemed it the number of regeneration and fulfillment. Everything sprang from ten.'”

I stared at Sedna's image, her hair in long braids, her strong Inuit face. “She's not exactly a Catholic saint.”

“But she could've reminded Nelle of St. Senara,” Whit said. “Before she was converted, when she was still Asenora, the mermaid.”

I shuddered, and he slid over and drew me against him. We sat in silence for a while. I couldn't talk about it anymore, this martyring side of my mother.

A breeze had come up and was flapping the sides of the blanket. I noticed that the light had dissolved a little.

Whit said, “I hate to say this, but I need to go.”

He tucked the books back into his bag, screwed the top onto the thermos, folded the blanket that I was sure had come off his bed. He did this without speaking, and I watched his hands, how they scissored through the air, the skin tanned like parchment, the fingers long and roughened with small calluses.

I put my hand on his arm. “Will it be hard going to choir now and praying after…after this?”

“Yes,” he said, not looking at me.

When we got to the water's edge, I saw that it was slack tide, those few suspended moments between ebb and flow. My father had called it “the turn'bout.” He'd beckoned me and Mike out of the yard one day and marched us down to Caw Caw Creek so we could see it. We'd stared at the rising tidewater, utterly bored, Mike throwing mud snails across the surface, making them skip. When the current finally reached the end of its striving, the whole creek grew perfectly still—not one floating blade of spartina grass moved, and then, minutes later, as if some maestro had gestured, all the water began to roll in the opposite direction, moving back out.

Whit steered the boat into the tributary that crooked left into the creek. Overhead, gulls wheeled through the sky, and behind us the small marsh island tilted away. I could feel him slipping again into his monk's life, the ocean turning around us. The ruthless ebb and flow.

Whit

W
hit stood outside the abbot's office on the first day of spring, clutching a note that had been placed in his hands by Brother Bede, the abbot's diminutive secretary. He'd passed it to Whit just before the office of terce, whispering, “The abbot wishes to see you immediately after choir.”

Whit had folded it up with a hot, tremulous feeling in his stomach. After prayers were over, he'd followed Bede through the transept of the church to Dom Anthony's office. Though he'd tried to read Bede's face when they reached the door, scanning the impossibly small forehead and the pea-size green eyes, he could see nothing telling in them.

“The abbot will call for you in a moment,” Bede told him, and ambled away, the hem of his robe dragging on the hall carpet.

Now he waited, the kind of waiting that is crusted over with false calm but underneath tosses around violently.

He heard a sharp, serrated buzzing and walked to the window in the corridor. One of the monks was taking down a dead crape myrtle with a chain saw. Had he been summoned because of Jessie? Because Father Sebastian had read his notebook that night he'd come to his cottage?

When Dom Anthony opened the door, he nodded once, his Irish face stern and chafed cherry pink across his cheeks. Whit gave him a little bow before stepping inside.

There was a painting behind the abbot's desk that Whit loved—an annunciation in which Mary is so shocked by Gabriel's news of her impending motherhood that she drops the book she's reading. It spills from her hand, which hangs suspended in the air. Her lips are parted, her eyes shocked and deerlike. Whit glanced up at the picture, seeing for the first time the look of complete dread on her face. He felt sorry for her suddenly. Bearing God. It was too much to ask.

Dom Anthony sat down behind the mahogany desk, but Whit went on standing. Waiting. He felt regretful, sorry it would end like this. He wondered how he could go back out there. To Rambo movies and Boy George on the radio. To Tammy Faye Bakker's streaked face on television. How could he go back to all that greed and consumption? The stock market had crashed last October, plunged five hundred points—he'd read it in the papers—and it hadn't even fazed him. If he returned to the world, he'd have to think about the economy, about starting up his law practice again.

Through the window on his right, he glimpsed a wedge of sapphire sky, and it made him think of the rookery, the egrets filling the trees, and the white flames their feathers made on the branches. He thought how much he would miss that.

“It is not too soon,” Dom Anthony was saying, “to schedule your ceremony for solemn vows.” The old man began riffling the pages of a desk calendar. “I was thinking of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June twenty-fourth, or there's St. Barnabas on the eleventh.”

“Solemn vows?” Whit repeated. He'd been so sure he was about to be asked to leave. He'd braced himself for the humiliation of that. He said it a second time. “Solemn vows?”

Dom Anthony squinted up at him. “Yes, Brother Thomas. It's time to be thinking about making your petition.” Exasperation tugged on his voice, the tone of a teacher with an absentminded pupil. He picked up a pencil, holding it loosely, letting it rap on the desk like a drumstick. “Now. As for the ceremony. You're allowed to invite whomever you want. Are your parents living?”

“I don't know,” said Whit.

Dom Anthony laid down the pencil and folded his hands together. “
You don't know?
You don't know if your parents are dead or alive?”

“Yes, of course I know that,” Whit said. “My mother is alive. What I meant is that—” He looked at the annunciation, aware of the abbot watching him.

He'd been on the verge of saying he didn't know if he could take the vows, then stopped himself. He thought of Thomas Merton's prayer that he'd printed on a little blue card and kept taped to the mirror over his sink:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”

“Reverend Father,” he began, “I don't know about solemn vows. I'm not sure anymore about taking them.”

Dom Anthony pushed back his chair and stood with painful slowness. He stared a moment at the junior monk, sighing. “Have you been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer again?” he asked.

“No, Reverend Father.”

The abbot had forbidden him to read any more of the Protestant theologian's writing after he'd found a certain unresolvable quotation of Bonhoeffer's copied into Whit's notebook:
“Before and with God we live without God.”
Whit had liked the searing honesty of that. It had seemed to capture the paradox he was always carrying around inside.

Dom Anthony walked around the desk and laid his hand on Whit's shoulder. “I'm glad to hear you've set him aside. You're particularly sensitive to doubt, so it's best not to feed it. Especially now that you've come to the point of taking vows. It's a dark night of testing that we've all gone through—you're not alone in that. You will be vowing to spend the rest of your life here, to die here, to own nothing at all, to be perfectly celibate, and to give yourself over to obedience. No one does this lightly, but we do it just the same. We do it because the desire of our heart is God.” The abbot smiled at him. “You will come through your dark night, Brother Thomas. Think of the disciple for whom you're named. Why do you think I chose that name for you? He doubted, didn't he? But in the end he overcame it with his faith, and you will, too.”

Dom Anthony returned to his chair as if it were all settled—the dark night, doubt, faith—all of it properly dissected, reassembled, and put in its proper place. Whit wanted to tell him that he should've taken the name Jonah, that he'd been swallowed into the abbey, that he'd been traveling in the dark, luminous belly of this place from the moment he'd arrived, but now he would be spit back into that other life. Phil, Oprah, Sally. Madonna's fishnet hose.
Revenge of the Nerds
movies. Out there where normal people, even bank tellers, used the words “totally awesome” to describe the most banal things.

He heard the chain saw again, more distantly this time. He felt it in his chest. Dom Anthony was brooding over the calendar. Whit noticed the tufts of pale hair on his knuckles. Over his head Mary's book was perpetually tumbling.

What had he
really
been doing here?

What if his being here wasn't about making peace with a God who was both here and not here but more about finding some kind of immunity from life? What if he'd mixed up enlightenment with asylum?

What if holiness had more to do with seizing his life
out there?

The abbot had said he should take his vows because the desire of his heart was for God, and he did want God, but—he knew now—he wanted Jessie more.

He couldn't dismiss that. Neither his body nor his heart would let him, but neither would his
soul.
It was trying to tell him something. He was certain of it. One thing he'd learned from being here was how incessantly the soul tried to speak up, and usually in maddeningly cryptic ways—in his dreams, in the jumble of impressions and feelings he got when alone in the marsh, and occasionally in the symptoms in his body, that way he'd broken out in hives the time he was taken off rookery duty and made to help in the Net House. Nowhere, though, did the soul speak more insistently than through desire. Sometimes the heart wanted what the soul demanded.

“I think the Nativity of John the Baptist would be best,” Dom Anthony said.

“I'm sorry, Reverend Father. I can't set the date now.” Whit lifted his chin. He crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet in that wide, commanding stance he'd always used in court during his closing summations. A court reporter had compared him once to Napoleon standing on a ship bow, dug in for battle. “I can't because I don't know if I'll ever be able to take my vows. I don't know if the desire of my heart is God.”

The room filled with silence, a perfect silence. It pressed heavily in his ears, popping on his drums as if he were descending from the clouds in an airplane. Dom Anthony walked to the window and stood with his back to Whit.

Minutes passed before he finally turned around. “You are to give yourself over to the dark night, then. You are to stay there as long as it takes you to find your faith and come to your decision. May God be with you.” He raised his hand in dismissal.

Walking to his cottage, Whit thought of the countless small things on the island he would miss. The alligators cruising the creeks submerged except for the great humps of their eyes. The oysters in their shells at night, how they opened when no one was looking. But mostly the egrets lifting out of the marsh carrying the light on their backs.

I
began to go alone to the marsh island in the rookery, paddling there in Hepzibah's old canoe, arriving well before

Whit appeared on his rounds. I created a place for myself, a place where I felt hidden away with the blue crabs and the wading egrets. All through the rest of March and the first two weeks of April, I went to the island nearly every day, hungry for Whit but driven, too, by an insatiable need to be alone.

I told Mother the truth, at least partially—that I was paddling around in the creeks, needing time to think through some things. She immediately leaped to the conclusion that I was thinking about my marriage. She had noticed my wedding rings on the pincushion in my room and asked repeatedly why Hugh had left the island so quickly, why he didn't call anymore. It was only Dee I spoke with now, weekly on the phone, and if
she
was suspicious about my sustained absence from Atlanta, she didn't mention it.

“Your marriage is in trouble, isn't it?” Mother prodded, and before I could form an answer, she said, “Don't deny it. It's written all over you, and I don't see how you expect to fix things if all you're going to do is stay here and loaf around in the creeks.” She had carried on about this for days.

Even when Kat and Hepzibah dropped by one day, Mother brought it up, launching into the details of my daily absences. “Really,” she said to them, “how much piddling around can a person actually do out there all by herself? It's like she's reverted to her childhood, back when she and Mike stayed out there the better part of the day.”

Hepzibah and Kat exchanged glances.

“I've been going out there to think and be
alone,
” I rushed to say.

When the two of them left, I followed them onto the porch. “I do meet him,” I said. “Every afternoon for a couple of hours. But most of the time that I'm out there, I'm alone; I don't know why—I just need to be by myself.”

“Sounds like you're
traveling,
” Hepzibah said.

I stared a moment, wondering what she meant before remembering what she'd said on the tour that day about the Gullah people going off to the woods.

I'm sure my solitary visitations to the rookery represented some kind of migration, but I doubt they were as lofty as the visits the Gullah people made. Mine were decidedly sensual, a kind of affair with myself and with the island. And, of course, with Whit.

I do know this: They obscured everything else—all my concerns about Mother, why she'd been reading the books from the monastery library, the notion that she'd been involved in some kind of white martyrdom. It was easy to overlook now because of how much better she seemed. Cooking for the monks, busy, industrious,
normal.

It was
I
who began to indulge in strange behavior—outrageous, extravagant acts that would've been unthinkable two months earlier.

One afternoon right after the spring equinox, I sat beside Whit's hermitage watching a willet build a nest in the marsh and listening to David Bowie sing “Let's Dance” on a Walkman I'd found at Caw Caw General. The day was almost sultry, and the periwinkle snails sat along the cordgrass in their little stupors. Egrets, oystercatchers, and herons were crowded into the shallows, so thickly it looked like an Audubon parking lot. Noticing a small diamondback terrapin nearby—what Mike used to call a “cooter”—I got up and followed it.

The creature reminded me of the turtle skull permanently installed now on top of the crab trap in the hermitage, which in turn reminded me of Kat, Hepzibah, and Mother dancing at the All-Girls Picnics. Picturing them, I began to sway a little. I'd never danced at the picnics; it had been
their
thing. Later, as an adult, I'd felt self-conscious dancing, too inhibited even to do it alone, but that day, with David Bowie insisting in my ear—“Let's dance, let's dance”—I began to do so with complete abandon, the skirt on my white muslin sundress flaring out like Isadora Duncan's. I loved the feel of my body moving like that, doing what it wanted.

Each day I took the Walkman to the island and danced to whatever cassettes I could find in Caw Caw: Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson singing “To All the Girls I've Loved Before,” Stevie Wonder's “Woman in Love,” the soundtrack to
Dirty Dancing.
I even bought Pink Floyd.

Afterward, breathless and spent, I would lie down beside the pluff mud and pat the shining black muck along my arms and legs—as if I were having a skin treatment at the spa. The goo smelled warm, alive, chlorophyll green, and rotten as the paper mills near Savannah, but I needed it. I cannot even tell you why; it was, I suppose, an irrational act. I would actually lie there with mud caked and drying on my skin and luxuriate in it for an hour or more, watching the sky reflected in the water and feeling the enduring breath of the earth moving around me.

One afternoon when Whit failed to show up because of a flooded toilet in the Monastery Reception Center, I watched the sun set and the water's surface bleed into carnelian and topaz. I heard dolphins pass, spewing their breath, and when the quiet became overbearing, I listened to the crackling advance of fiddler crabs on the mudflats and the tiny pops of pistol shrimp snapping their claws together.

During those times I sank into the compost of the island and became inseparable from it. It was only when my skin began to tighten and itch to the point I wanted to claw it that I would plunge into the water and swim away the mud. With my skin pink and vibrating, I would recline on the tides and let myself float. Once they carried me across the circular pool, along the tributary back into Caw Caw Creek, and I had to vie with a deceptively strong ebb to get back to the island.

More than the dancing or the mud bathing, it was the water I reveled in. Traveling water. It was filled with decay and death, and at the same time with plankton and eggs and burgeoning life. It would recede, stripping everything in its path, then turn into a brimming, amniotic estuary. I needed it like air.

I never told Whit about these things, though he had to know I'd been swimming, and maybe he guessed at the rest. Every afternoon he would find me waiting for him with soggy hair and telltale traces of marsh mud in the creases of my elbows.

I look back now at my Dionysian tangent and understand it only a little better, how I was opening to the most rhapsodic thing in myself. To some extent those days were governed by instinct and flesh. When I was hungry, I ate what I'd brought from home, typically gorging myself on apples, and when I was sleepy, I simply lay down on one of Mother's discarded bedspreads and napped. But at the heart of it all, I believe that Hepzibah was right. I was
traveling.

I took over Whit's crab trap, draped it with a cast net and gradually gathered a little assemblage of things to go with the turtle skull. Osprey feathers, clusters of blossoming trumpet flowers, oyster and bivalve shells, a crab claw I'd found at the water's edge. On a whim I added the so-called Mermaid Tears to the mix—the small pebbles I'd picked up in Kat's shop the first time I'd visited it. There were half a dozen apple peelings on top of the trap, too, my pathetic attempts at making whirly girls, which had ended up as a mass of broken red tendrils. One day while rummaging in my bag for a comb, I took out my father's pipe and added that to the collection as well.

Each day when I left the island, I stored everything in a plastic bag, which I tucked inside the trap, then faithfully reassembled when I returned. At first I thought I was following Hepzibah's example and making my own tiny show-and-tell table. Then it occurred to me that maybe I was trying to domesticate the hermitage, decorate it, make it
ours.
Was I playing house?

I caught Whit staring at the arrangement once, the way it sat beneath the palmetto-leaf cross he'd nailed on the wall. “Is it an altar?” he asked, startling me.

I would often set up my palette and canvas inside the hermitage and paint one diving woman after another. I painted her from different angles, capturing her in progressive stages of the dive. The water around her changed colors with each canvas, going through a succession of violet-blues, greens, yellow-oranges, and finally, fiery Pompeiian reds. Sometimes the diving woman—always nude—was done with Pre-Raphaelite realism and attention to detail, and other times she was a black shape rimmed in gold, primitive and stylized, but always, to me at least, radiant in her descent. Some paintings showed her letting go of an odd stream of paraphernalia that floated back to the surface as she plunged deeper. Spatulas, refrigerator magnets, kitchen bric-a-brac, wedding rings, crucifixes, charred wood, apple peels, a tiny pair of plastic kissing geese.

Yes, of course I realized that the paintings were a series of self-portraits—how could I not?—yet I didn't control them. They came like eruptions, like geysers. I didn't know when the diving would stop, what spectrum of the rainbow the water would turn next, where the bottom was or what might happen when the woman reached it.

Around midafternoon each day, I would begin to watch for Whit. By the time he arrived on the island, I would be in a frenzy of desire. We would twine ourselves together in the hermitage and make love, growing more and more fluent with each other's bodies, muttering our love over and over. I felt drunk with happiness and passion during those meetings, with the sense of having come home, but at the same time of making an exodus, of flying away to an eternal place.

After making love, we talked until he had to leave. Lying in his arms, I told him once about Chagall's
Lovers in the Red Sky,
how the pair—some thought Chagall and his wife, Bella—were wrapped in a glorious knot, how they floated above the world.

“But they can't stay up there forever,” Whit had said, and I'd felt a slight deflation, an unease.

Only now and then did we talk about any kind of future. We both assumed there would be one, but we weren't ready to act on it. That seemed precipitous to both of us. Part of him, a quiet, concealed part that I loved and feared at the same time, was saying a grievous good-bye to the monastery, to his life there. And somewhere inside of me, I suppose I was saying good-bye, too, to twenty years of marriage, though in all honesty I consciously tried not to think about it.

What I
did
think about relentlessly during those hours on the island was my father. He seemed like a ghost hovering over the hermitage roof and everywhere in the needle rush. Again and again I would go back in my mind to the day the monks came to the door bearing the burned remains of his boat, the stoic way Mother had built the fire in the fireplace and tossed the boards on the flames. Watching them burn had been the first time I'd felt the deep crevice his dying was to make in my life.

During Easter week I saw Whit only once. His work in the rookery was suspended while he assisted Brother Bede with Passiontide, all the high and holy preparations that had to be carried out between Palm Sunday and the Easter vigil. The matter of Easter lilies, holy oil, Paschal candles, the basin and pitcher for the foot washing, black vestments, white vestments. He did not get there until Thursday, Maundy Thursday, or as Mother had said that morning, reverting to her Catholic Latin,
“Feria Quinta in Coena Domini,”
the Thursday of the Lord's Supper.

Wearing the aqua shirt he loved, I met him at the edge of the water and waited while he anchored the johnboat. I'd fixed a picnic on a red-and-white floral tablecloth that I'd spread nearby: Mother's Wadmalaw tomato pie, strawberries, Market Street pralines, a bottle of red wine. Clusters of wild white azaleas that I'd picked in Kat's front yard filled the center of the cloth.

When Whit saw what I'd done, he bent over and kissed my forehead. “This is a surprise. What's the occasion?”

“Well, let me see.” I pretended to be racking my brain. “It
is
Maundy Thursday. Plus, it happens to be our six-week-and-one-day anniversary.”

“We have an anniversary?”

“Of course we do. February seventeenth, the day we met. It was Ash Wednesday. Remember? It hasn't always been the most cheerful day of the year for me, so I thought I'd turn it into an anniversary.”

“I see.”

We sat down on the tablecloth, and he reached for the wine. I'd forgotten cups, so we each took a swig straight from the bottle, laughing when it dribbled down my chin. As I sliced the tomato pie and placed the thick wedges on paper plates, I went on talking, caught up in my delirious chatter. “The first year we'll celebrate our anniversary monthly on the seventeenth, and then we'll mark it annually. Every Ash Wednesday.”

When I looked up, he was no longer smiling. I set the plate down. I had the terrible feeling he was going to tell me we would not be having annual anniversaries, that he'd decided to stay at the abbey. What if Easter had gotten to him? God resurrecting. I went cold.

He reached for me, holding me almost painfully close. “We could live near Asheville,” he said. “At the end of some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. And hike on weekends. Or go to Malaprop's Bookstore and sit in the café.” I realized then that he was simply affected by the thought of having a life in which there would be small domestic details and a flow of days, of anniversaries. It was as if it had all somehow just become real to him.