Pearl (19 page)

Her family hated Gerry Adams, for having been an IRA soldier who turned to politics, who negotiated the peace treaty, who worked with his enemies for what they believed was a pusillanimous surrender. They thought he had betrayed his history, the blood of the past. Breeda admired Gerry Adams. “They used to call him ‘the big lad,’” she told Pearl, “and then suddenly he was the lowest of the low.” But she believed in him. When he said, “No more violence,” she felt, for the first time in her life, a little hope. Hearing his voice, seeing his face on the television, she confessed to Pearl that she was going to do it. She was going to vote in favor of the peace agreement like Gerry Adams said. Her family would never know. She would live with the knowledge that if they knew they would think she had betrayed her brother and the blood of all the brothers that had been shed down the years.

We forget that there are moments, public moments, what could be called moments in history that change a life. By
we
I mean those of us who have been brought up, as Pearl had been, in safety and prosperity, whose lives have been shaped by private moments, private acts. We forget, or believe it distantly, as we believe in the orbiting of the planets, the working of DNA. Pearl saw that the peace agreement vote was a moment like that for Breeda. She was doing the first thing she’d ever done that would make her family angry. That they would never know was neither here nor there. Breeda knew it, and she knew herself cut off, for good, or cut away from something. And the cutting away gave her, for the first time, a sense of her own strength. And she was not alone: she could talk to Pearl about it. Pearl admired her for it, and Breeda loved feeling admired by her beautiful intelligent kind friend from America, whom she did not quite understand, but who wanted to listen to her and thought that what she said was important.

Pearl admired Breeda because Breeda had lived in the world, in history, through history; she had no choice but to think about important things that were not just about herself. And so Pearl felt Breeda would help her think about important things. And she could say to Breeda, “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand who is right, who is wrong, what is right, what is wrong,” and Breeda would say, “I don’t understand either,” and they would talk and talk and try to understand the world, the world that was not just their lives but a part of history.

Good Friday 1998: a crucial day in Irish history. A good Friday, it is believed by many, but not by all. Two elections are held simultaneously, one in the north, one in the south. Both elections ratify the treaty. Breeda and Pearl toast the victory; they buy champagne, which neither of them has ever drunk much; they toast “the big fella” and John Hume, a liberal, a pacifist, once Gerry Adams’s enemy and then his colleague in the architecture of the peace agreement, who, not being handsome, they have no nickname for.

Finbar and Mick and the boys toast nothing; they believe they have been betrayed. Mick understands from Pearl’s silence during the rants of betrayal and sellout that Pearl does not agree with them, though she never says so. He begins to be critical of her, to make snide comments on her seriousness, her lack of imagination. And then he asks if Joseph and her mother ever “played doctor” when they were growing up.

And what was Stevie doing when his mother and his friend sat by the TV and talked and talked? He did not talk with them. He listened. He was confused. Pearl and his mother (whom he loved) thought one thing; his father and Finbar and the lads (whom he admired, whom he thought exciting, who included him in their drinks and games and jokes and made him feel alive, part of the world) thought the opposite. His mother called Gerry Adams a wonderful fella and his father called him a motherfucker. He knew you could not be both. He was confused. His confusion caused him to suffer. And he suffered, too, as the women spoke more and more to each other as Good Friday and the election approached; talks that did not include him. Pearl seemed not to want to work so much on his stories as to talk to his mother. When the three of them watched movies, the women hardly got through them without talking about the peace agreement. When his father and the boys talked, they shouted, they raised their fists, they lit cigarettes and poured beer into glasses and threw things on the floor and walked around in heavy boots and sang loud songs. They laughed loudly, through cigarette smoke (except for his father, who didn’t smoke), they slapped each other on the back to stop themselves from choking with laughter; their laughter heated the air in the room, seemed to tear a hole in something thick and gray. Pearl and his mother rarely seemed to laugh; they would laugh quietly and shake their heads, but their laughter tore through nothing, made no mark. He would visit his father at Finbar’s, play cards, walk home in the dark, late, to his mother, to the room that was too warm in places, too cold in others, ashamed of the origami birds he’d made, ashamed of the stories about horses and farm animals, and saw they weren’t quite so interested in him anymore, not as interested as they were in each other’s talk or what was going on in the world. And when his mother would say to him, Would you have more tea, pet, would you have another biscuit? he felt she was tearing herself away from something, that for the first time in his life he was not the focus of her attention (though she wouldn’t have put it like that; she would have said, “the apple of my eye”).

When they talked about being afraid, his mother and Pearl, he felt more like them. But he didn’t want to be more like them, he wanted to be like the lads, who never mentioned fear, who mentioned struggle and comrades and the glory of the fight. There was no one he loved as he loved his mother, but he knew he couldn’t stay with her. The world was frightening, but he had to take his place in it. He loved his mother; he loved Pearl. But he admired his father and the lads. He wanted to be like them.

In June it was time for Mick to go back home; he had a summer theater on Deer Island, Maine, where he’d always summered as a boy. In July they’d be doing
Marat/Sade
and
Waiting for Lefty
in repertory.

Pearl and Finbar were finishing up their term and studying hard together; he made love to her in a new way now, like a tired workman looking for release at the end of a long shift. They were happier than they’d ever been. They got on much better without Mick, and Breeda liked making supper for Pearl and Finbar and Stevie and herself, telling them they were too busy to think of cooking for themselves; it was her pleasure after all they’d done for Stevie.

Maria spoke of coming to Ireland for a visit. Pearl didn’t want that. She didn’t want to see Maria’s look of disappointment at the sight of Finbar; she didn’t want to have to explain that Stevie and Breeda’s living arrangements suited them, even though they didn’t have central heating; they didn’t need the kind of flat Maria would have thought essential. She didn’t want Maria’s searching gaze on her: she liked her life; she didn’t want it picked apart by her mother. So when Joseph wrote and told her he was going to Italy in mid-July, just after her term finished, Pearl suggested that the three of them meet up in Rome.

It had been twenty-five years since Maria and Joseph had been in Rome together. Pearl had been to Paris and London and the south of Spain with her mother, but she’d never been abroad with Joseph. Shared vacations had been in rentals on Cape Cod or at the Jersey shore.

Joseph was happy to introduce Pearl to Rome, glad to show her the hotel Santa Chiara, where he had stayed first with Dr. Meyers, then with Maria and Devorah, and later, as a widower, by himself. He enjoyed taking them to his favorite restaurant near the Pantheon, and to the one near the Tritone, and to the little workman’s café, nearly impossible to find, behind the boys’ school in Trastevere. And he was happy to introduce Pearl to the Puglises, colleagues of her grandfather, and to reacquaint Maria with them after nearly forty years. He was proud to be walking with Pearl and Maria down the Via Nomentana, where the Puglises lived. Pearl wore a long flowered skirt and stiff white blouse that made the angles of her shoulders seem heartbreakingly inexpert. How could shoulders like that get through the world? She needed protection; he felt able to provide it. Never had she seemed more like his daughter than when she stood in the doorway of the Puglises’ apartment and he saw the pleased, tender look in their eyes.

Was it his fault that he hadn’t realized how the Puglises had changed over the years? Was it his fault that the night Maria and Pearl came for dinner all they wanted to do was talk about the appearance of the Virgin in Yugoslavia and how a client of Signor Puglise had had a pair of silver rosary beads that turned to gold when he came near the site of the apparition? Certainly, Joseph’s disappointment was disproportionate; he felt as though, not realizing who the Puglises really were, he had stolen from Pearl the vision of Europe that had been, for him, such a vivid, irradiating dream. He didn’t know that Pearl had had no expectations of the Puglises so she could not be disappointed, only saddened because she could see how disappointed Joseph was. And irritated with her mother when she said, speaking much too loudly, Pearl thought, on the street where they tried to hail a cab, “And this is what my father thought of as the real deal, the real European deal we were all supposed to go down on our knees for? Give me Elvis Presley any day.”

Pearl didn’t understand how her mother could fail to see the pain Joseph was in. The two of them sat very still in the cab; Joseph declined Maria’s offer of a drink and Pearl said she too was tired. She pretended to be asleep while her mother, lying in the twin bed five feet from hers, spoke to her assistant in New York, gave orders, listened to what had gone wrong in her absence, cried out “Shit!” and “Jesus, fuck.”

She was glad to be leaving her mother the next day; glad to be leaving Joseph too, because she felt she had failed to comfort him, and she felt him very much in need of comfort; glad to go back to Finbar’s flat and to plain, uninspired Irish food, to the TV and the VCR and the hanging origami birds in Breeda’s small living room, and to the demanding grammar of the Irish language.

Then came August 15, 1998, one of those days that marks a cleft in the rock of the world—it did so, certainly, for the Irish nation—the day of the Omagh bombing. A bomb placed in a car on a shopping street in a small city in county Fermanagh, a border county in Northern Ireland, exploded on a Saturday morning, the busiest shopping day of the week. Twenty-nine were killed; hundreds were injured.

Pearl and Breeda were coming back from shopping; they’d bought some lovely pears at an open-air market and decided to make a tart. They were walking into Fatima Mansions when a friend of Breeda’s, Loretta Shaunessey, came running up with tears in her eyes—“Have ye heard about the bomb?”—so they ran into Shaunesseys’ and watched the television for a while, and then they went back to Breeda’s flat and sat and watched some more. They did what we all do at the moment of a large disaster—sat hypnotized, watching the details over and over. They learned that five hundred pounds of explosives had been placed in the trunk of the car, detonated from long distance. The day the bombers had chosen—August 15—made it likely that the majority of the victims would be women and children; it was a prime day for back-to-school shopping. Many Catholic children would, that day, be fitted for their uniforms. It was a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics: the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin.

As the hours pass, Breeda and Pearl watch, transfixed; they can scarcely do anything else. They tell themselves they should move away from the set; they tell themselves how awful it is: TV newsmen and women saying to those who have just lost husbands, wives, children,
Tell us what happened, tell us how you feel.
Simultaneously wanting to say to the newscasters,
Leave them alone; for God’s sake leave them alone!
and yet avid to know the details of the dead.

Over the days and weeks, Pearl collected images. Faces. James Barker, who was twelve, and Sean McLaughlin, his friend, both killed. Philomena Skelton, killed, and her daughter, who lived but whose face would be permanently scarred. Lorraine Wilson, seventeen, who died beside her best friend, Samantha McFarland; they were both volunteering at the Oxfam shop. The Omagh dead, not the heroic dead of the Greek friezes, but pathetic in their ordinariness, with their squints and lantern jaws and double chins.

The stories of the survivors. The sister whose last words with the sister who’d been torn to pieces by the bomb had been a fight over taking too long in the shower. The mother who’d encouraged her son to go out to the stores because he seemed unaccountably depressed that morning and she thought just hanging around would make it worse. “I feel so lucky he came back all in one piece. That was more than some others had,” the mother said.

The stories of the wounded: the twenty-year-old girl who looked over to see her leg on the street ten feet away from her, the man who heard a child in a wheelchair screaming, the woman who saw a little girl running with no hands. “No one was talking to the child,” she said. “Everyone was afraid to look at her.” And Pearl thought, Yes, that is what we do: we are afraid to look. And so she would make herself look—past her fear. Make herself hold on to images: The broken main that streamed water so that body parts came sluicing down the street. Downed electric wires sizzling beside the bodies of the dead. The RUC officer who turned over a young woman to find the naked body of an infant underneath her, the baby’s arms crossed in front of its chest as if it knew the formal pose for death. The officer’s words: “I pronounced extinction on her and, as it turns out, on her mother. When I look at my own daughter’s face, I see their faces.”
Pronounced extinction.
Pearl thought those were terrible words to use. And then she thought, But what are the good words?

She and Breeda didn’t want to talk to anyone. She couldn’t bear hearing what Finbar might say. Breeda, who knew Omagh and its shops because she had a cousin who lived there—thank God she hadn’t been in town that day—Breeda said, “They knew it would be the day for mothers and children shopping; they knew it and they did it deliberately. It was a diabolical thing.”