Pearl (17 page)

They left Mayo soon after that; they never saw the old man again. But Stevie and Pearl were friends because they had seen that thing, that terrible thing, that thing with so many terrible parts to it. Because, although they never spoke of it, they knew they could.

She is seeing it now: the huge mare suspended in the air, her eyes rolled back, her teeth visible. But she cannot see Stevie’s face.

They were friends after they came back from Mayo. It was the middle of March and there was warmth in the air; in the garden of Finbar’s parents, primroses were pushing up, and crocuses. Pearl mentioned this to Finbar and he sneered.
Why don’t you just fucking move in with my parents and their fucking garden if you love it so much?
She doesn’t listen; she waits till they are home in his flat, till he is the boy she likes again and they can be the people she likes, sitting across from each other, under the inadequate standing lamps that distort the print they both love, throwing words to each other: Irish words, Cambodian words, quick-quick or in long arcs: words like grain from the hand of a figure in a painting from the nineteenth century. Now she can see Finbar’s face. She has no interest in Finbar. She is trying to see Stevie’s face.

Think, think of the things we did, she tells herself, trying to calm her panic. She must not die without seeing Stevie’s face.

When they got back to Dublin, Pearl began spending time with Stevie and found out that he didn’t know how to read. She asked her mother for advice. Maria advised her to have Stevie (whose name and situation she did not know) dictate stories to her. Pearl typed them up and printed them out, and Stevie began learning to read his own words.

Stevie’s stories were all about a mare from the country who escapes to Dublin and gets a job carrying people from place to place. She learns to read the street signs, although reading is hard for her. She races buses and beats them. She can beat the fastest car. People want to take her to a racetrack but she won’t go because she likes living with a boy who lives in a big house and keeps her in the garden. There are a lot of details about what the horse likes to eat—mainly sweets—although there is the occasional healthful meal of oats and hay. The horse and the boy and his mother have dinner at a table in the garden; the boy and his mother eat theirs off trays. The garden is full of flowers, and the mother and the son pick them and weave them into wreaths for the horse’s neck. The horse is called Princess.

Pearl thought she was teaching a boy to read. She didn’t think what she was doing was about politics or would lead to death. Anyone would have said that what she was doing—helping a dyslexic boy to learn to read—was innocent; what could it be called if not that?

But what do we mean by
innocent
? Presumed innocent. Presumed by whom? And why? Who is the presumer, who the judge? Is it possible for us, ever, to give up the idea of a judge on high, even if we no longer believe in a real presence there?
Real presence.
These words would have a religious meaning for Joseph and Maria—and for Breeda, Stevie’s mother, Reg Donegan’s sister. For Pearl it had none. Yet
innocence
did mean something to her, something important. Where did the idea come from, what was its source, the idea of the purity for which she longed, of which she dreamed, which she sought in and by her death? You may think I can tell you, that my saying I can’t is a willful holding back, but you must believe me: it isn’t. I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I do know she was right to believe in her own innocence. She was doing one thing, and it was a good thing, although in the end it led to a death. So after Stevie died she was afraid to do anything, to have any contact, because potential contact was dangerous and she herself was therefore a vessel of danger.

How did Pearl become friends with Stevie’s mother, Breeda? She can remember the incident of the horse and trace her friendship with Stevie to that vivid moment: the image stays with her now as she is being carried on the stretcher. She knows that she and Breeda were friends, and that Breeda does not think of her as a friend any longer. Breeda’s face? Oh, she can call that up, all right, all too easily.

Breeda’s face: not a face, really; a face implies something composed for the world to see. The face Pearl sees now had given up all composure; it was a face that cared nothing for what people made of it. A mask of grief, of outrage: primitive, unself-regarding. Pushing her way into the room, Breeda, who had lived a life of not making her presence felt, was knocking over furniture. “His blood is on your hands, the lot of yez, but especially on yours—” pointing at Pearl. Breeda’s son was dead. She had no care for what the world thought of her.

But before that, the eyes behind the glasses, swimmy blue, almost overlarge, those eyes, almost too much expression. So sometimes, depending on your mood, you wanted to look and look and sometimes you only wanted to look away. Breeda Donegan, known to Finbar and his friends as the sister of Reg Donegan. Thought of that way by Mick Winthrop, was her body penetrated for that reason? Or was it because she was young and slender and compliant? Could everything that happened have been predicted, was it so predictable as to be almost a cliché? That was Stevie’s genesis—a child fathered by an admirer of the brother via (almost accidentally) the body of the
hero
’s sister. And so Breeda was thought of as someone’s sister, someone’s mother, a body without a name, a pair of relationships (sister, mother) and what would be called
herself
an empty circle, a container for those other things (sisterhood, motherhood). She was faceless to them (as Stevie has no face to Pearl now). Breeda, who was her friend, who said to her, “His blood is on your hands.”

But it was not like that at first. I can tell you what it was like at first, those late afternoons in Breeda and Stevie’s flat in Fatima Mansions. And I must tell you what Fatima Mansions were: four-story blocks of flats built in the Stonybatter section of Dublin in the 1930s, built hopefully, very hopefully. Slum clearance, they were called. Flats without central heating, even in the year 1998. Considered a failure now, an urban disaster, a breeding ground for crime and drug use and depression.

Pearl had been working with Stevie for a couple of weeks, having him write stories as her mother had advised, when Breeda sent a message with Stevie. “My mam wonders if you’d come to our place for tea.”

It is more difficult to trace the course of a friendship than a love affair, a friendship that consisted of drinking tea and telling things about themselves, quiet stories, details of childhood. What is the critical mass, the point at which the thin material thickens so that a solid has been formed, and you can call it, without overstating anything, a friendship? That is what they had.

The first shy afternoon: three shy people, Pearl, Breeda, Stevie, drinking tea, talking about cookies—biscuits, they were called. “Mrs. Reilley told me these were on sale and as I knew you loved them I bought five packets of them. I think they’ll be good in the freezer.” “That’s a great thing, mam,” and they really did seem happy about the purchase; they went on talking about it for what seemed to Pearl an excessive amount of time, but she would learn it was not excessive. Their life was made up of small events, small triumphs like that: packets of biscuits gone on sale, the opportunity seized, the memory hoarded, as were the biscuits, for future delectation.

Pearl and Breeda were drawn to each other by a net of likenesses and differences. They were both shy, they both liked to be quiet, they both looked more than they spoke. And yet Pearl felt she’d never known anyone like Breeda, someone who thought of herself as so much in the hands of fate, someone to whom things happened, rather than someone who made things happen. She wondered if that was what it was to be American, that you thought of yourself as someone not in the hands of fate. Certainly, the people she had known in America, her friends, her mother’s friends, but most especially her mother, had thought of themselves that way. She and Joseph had been unusual among the people who surrounded them because they watched others moving rather than move themselves. When she was with Breeda she felt the same sort of peacefulness drop on her that she felt when she was with Joseph, when they would walk or go to museums, often for long periods in silence.

They didn’t speak about things that were important to them at first. For a while, there were patches of silence that were not comforting but uneasy, broken, perhaps by talking about Stevie’s stories, almost as if the stories were a guest that had been invited for his social skills, his ability to start a conversation. Then Breeda would let something drop—“I miss my friends fiercely since I’ve come to Dublin”—and ask Pearl about
her
friends. And Pearl would say something without much detail, and Breeda would say something with a little more detail; they built the edifice of their friendship slowly, bit by bit, as if they were building a stone wall, each stone chosen deliberately, carefully, for its shape and size. So that when Pearl had heard some stories about Breeda’s friend Paulie and his sister Rosalie who won dancing competitions, Pearl told her about Luisa and Luisa’s family and how her aunts could dance no matter how old they were (but not about Uncle Ramón), and Breeda told her about her Uncle Joe who liked to dress up as Elvis for family parties (but not about Uncle Tom, who’d been shot by the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or Uncle Will, who’d been interned without trial). So they made, at first, a pastel-colored world of each other’s childhoods, and then soon they understood that as children they had both been, quite often, afraid and ashamed of that among others around them who seemed never to be afraid: in Pearl’s case, her mother and Luisa; in Breeda’s, nearly everyone she knew. They didn’t tell each other the things that had really frightened them, they didn’t need to, perhaps; it was enough that each knew the other had been frightened by things that most people didn’t think were frightening.

It was easy for Pearl to understand why Breeda had been frightened; she’d been brought up in a time and place of violence. She’d been one year old in the year of Bloody Sunday 1972, the killing of thirteen unarmed civilians in Belfast by British troops, and had no memory of a life before the Troubles. Breeda, though, didn’t understand why Pearl would have been frightened. She didn’t understand Pearl’s relationship to her mother, who seemed so strong and so energetic. When Pearl finally told Breeda the story of Luisa’s Uncle Ramón (after they’d begun to darken the pastel palette of their memories of childhood and tell each other the details of what had frightened them), Breeda didn’t understand why Pearl wasn’t grateful to her mother, why she was so angry at what her mother did much later, when Pearl was well out of danger, when she’d been safe for years.

“My mother has no idea that some things aren’t hers to tell; she has almost no sense of privacy. She’ll sing at the top of her lungs right on the street.” Breeda wanted to ask why that was so bad, but she didn’t want to seem not to understand. It was then that Pearl told the story of Uncle Ramón. She’d told Breeda all about Luisa, that they’d been friends since they were three; that she loved going to Luisa’s house, because there were always so many people there, and Luisa’s mother was so kind and liked to cook and dance, and that her mother liked to come, too, and cook and dance with Mrs. Ramirez. But that Luisa didn’t like Maria, because she thought Maria had no right to think she understood Luisa’s parents, when she’d never been poor. Luisa, who was never frightened and often angry (just like my friend Eileen, Breeda said), and always had the courage to do or say exactly what she wanted—which was why, Pearl told Breeda, the situation with Uncle Ramón was so hard for her.

Uncle Ramón lived with the Ramirezes for months. He slept on the living room couch. Every night he drank quarts of Corona beer and got drunk, and all day he slept in his stained underwear and snored with a noise that Pearl and Luisa knew meant nothing good. Those snores, that underwear, his hairy legs, his black socks with the holes: Luisa and Pearl knew they would never go near that kind of man.

“He kept calling me Chiquita Rubia, Little Blondie. Little Blondie, he’d say, almost growling it. I was eleven years old. Whenever he saw me he would find some excuse to brush against me, saying Rubia, rubia, Chiquita Rubia, and whenever Luisa went to the bathroom he would stand behind me and rub himself against me, and when I tried to get away, he’d say, What’s the matter with you, blondie, little chink blondie, you think you’re too good for me, with your Jew mama? You’re nothing but a little chink Jew. Then he would rub up against me and say Rubia, Chiquita Rubia.”

For some time, Pearl told Breeda, she didn’t think there was anything she could do about it. She was afraid of embarrassing Luisa’s mother. Afraid if Luisa got embarrassed she’d get mad and then she might not be her friend. She began having nightmares, and one night she told her mother. Maria understood everything—why Pearl felt afraid to say something—and said Leave it to her; she’d take care of it.

“And she did take care of it. She had a friend, a guy who worked in one of her day-care centers. Great with kids but scary-looking. Leshawn was really huge. She told him what Uncle Ramón was doing. She waited with him by the apartment house till Ramón came out. Leshawn went over to him. He twisted Ramón’s arm and took him to the back of the building, shoved him against the wall, and told him if he ever went near Pearl Meyers again he’d be wearing his balls for a bow tie. Uncle Ramón went back to Santo Domingo the next day.”

Pearl told Breeda she found out about it only a year ago when Leshawn died of a heart attack. “He was only forty. My mother told the story at his memorial service. And when she used his words, ‘You’ll be wearing your balls for a bow tie,’ everybody laughed. I was furious at her. It wasn’t her story to tell. My mother will do almost anything for a good story. She had no sense that she’d invaded my privacy. And if I told her, she would have said, ‘You have to have a sense of humor about things. It’s the only way to live with them.’”