Pearl (32 page)

“Stevie was Mick’s child, but of course he couldn’t marry the mother.”

“Why was that?”

“He has a family in the States. She knew it all along. But he never abandoned Stevie, he always acknowledged him and sent her money and came over here to be with them one month of every year. There’s not many men would do that.”

He takes a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, a few sips of tea.

“There was something slightly wrong with Stevie, not quite the full shilling. A bit slow. Pearl said she thought he was dyslexic. She was trying to help him. They got on great, the two of them. She was devoted to him, and he to her.”

Maria remembers Pearl asking her for advice, materials, for dealing with a dyslexic kid. “How old is he?” she asks.

“Fifteen at the time of his death.”

Always, this is a shocking sentence. The conjunction of the word
death
and a number so near the beginning of life.

“You see, Stevie’s mother, Breeda, couldn’t take it in the north anymore. The Gardai were always ripping up her place in Belfast whenever there was any trouble, on account of her brother, even though she’s never been involved, not the least little bit. She’s not so much on the brain power herself. So she came down here, works as a char in an office building. They seemed to be doing all right. Stevie loved it. Mick would come over and take him everywhere. Stevie loved sitting around with all of us. We didn’t think he got the political stuff, but he seemed to like being one of the blokes, you know, sitting about, having a few jars. It made him feel a part of things. I think it was hard for him at school. I’m not sure he could actually read before Pearl came along and started working with him. When we’d all be together in the sitting room—the blokes, I mean—the two of them would be in the kitchen working at the reading. I thought it was great at the time, but it probably wasn’t a good thing for Stevie. As Mick said, it raised unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic hopes. And he wanted to be a big man in front of Pearl. Stevie, I mean. And then we all got carried away that one time and the whole thing became unfortunate.”

She pours more tea into his cup, nudges the sugar bowl toward him.

“Mick was very big in the antiwar movement in the Vietnam days. Pearl says you were involved, but I’m sure not to the extent that Mick was.”

Maria wants to say, You have no idea of my past, no idea about what price I’ve paid. But it is not the time for this kind of talk, and she doesn’t want to think about her father now.

“Mick was close to Abbie Hoffman. He was with him in the Yippies. At the beginning part, particularly.”

I’ll bet, Maria wants to say, thinking of all the people who claimed to be close to Abbie Hoffman, or on the Pentagon March, or at Woodstock, or to have seen
Hair
while it was still off-Broadway.

“Mick’s story is really remarkable. He comes from a wealthy New England family. I believe they came over on the
Mayflower
. He left his family over Vietnam. It wasn’t till much later that they were reconciled. He really lives poor; he gives vast sums to our fellows over here. He’d give more, only he has to provide for his own family—well, the two families, the biological families, he calls them, which we all understand, of course. We cod him about being part of the Protestant Ascendancy. I don’t know if you know what that means over here. It’s the English-born Protestants who have all the land and the money.”

She almost says, You are simply going to have to stop condescending to me. But she needs to keep his favor. She still hasn’t heard Stevie’s story, which seems to be connected, somehow, to Pearl’s. Without this information, she’s paralyzed.

“So this one day, Mick’s telling us about one time with the Yippies. About how they brought down the war machine with laughter. He started talking about the spirit of carnival, how the only real challenge to the bourgeois was guerrilla humor. He showed us this picture of a demonstration he was in, during the Gulf War. Him and his mates had made these huge lips out of red satin, and hundreds of them appeared in front of the White House with these six-foot satin lips tied to their heads. All of them, men and women, were wearing pink slips over their clothes. They were carrying signs:
GEORGE BUSH, READ OUR LIPS. OUT OF THE GULF OR GET A PINK SLIP
. And of course, you know, after that, Bush was defeated. We were all passing the picture around, laughing; I guess we were all a bit jarred by then. Pearl wasn’t around. I don’t know if things would have got so out of hand if she’d been around. She tended to keep a lid on things. I think Mick sort of resented that. He used to tell her she didn’t know how to enjoy herself, she should let herself go more.”

I used to tell her that, Maria thinks, with shame.

“This day, then, we came up with the idea. It seemed a great bit of gas at the time. I think we were all downhearted about how the other side seemed to be winning so big, almost everyone being behind the treaty. And then after the Omagh thing, we seemed to be losing all support. No one wanted to hear about our side. We thought we needed to change the tone. That would be really radical, we thought. Introduce comic irony, you know. You know how you can do wild things when you get downhearted.”

Yes, she thinks, oh, young man, you don’t know how well I know!

“So Mick comes up with this idea. He says it’ll be great street theater. We go down to one of the new sex shops, we buy a whole bunch of these dildoes. . . .”

She sees he’s blushing and looking over to see if she’ll censure him. She wonders what his mother’s like.

“Well, we tied all these dildo things up in a ribbon and wrapped them in a parcel: brown paper, string. We talked Stevie into leaving it in the hallway of the Central Gardai Station. We called in a bomb threat, saying the package was left in the name of those who wouldn’t stand by for the selling-out of our history. Then we called the media, to make sure there’d be coverage. Stevie was supposed to leave it and get right out. But for some reason, he just hung about.”

Finbar sounds like a miffed first-grade monitor whose slower charges haven’t responded properly to his directions about a fire drill.

“I’m not saying it was exactly his fault. I know he was disabled. All the same, what he did was daft. They ask him if he has anything to do with the package and he says yes, so they arrest him and his mother comes and they find out about him being the nephew of his uncle, and it got in the papers—well, not the whole thing, but parts that made Stevie look bad. One bad part about Pearl helping him with his reading was he promised her he’d read the paper every day. So he took the whole thing in. Especially the headline:
THE BLOOD RUNS THIN
.

“He was let go, of course, they could see he was disabled. When Pearl found out about the dildo thing, she went berserk. And Stevie was very upset. Mick gave him and his mother money to go to his house in Mayo. I don’t know how it happened. He was walking down a country road, Stevie—in the rain, or the fog, maybe—and the fella that hit him said he didn’t see him at first, then he beeped his horn, but Stevie didn’t get out of the way and he just couldn’t stop in time. Then his mother—you know, Breeda—came around, and she just lost it. I think Pearl started to go crazy after that.”

“Why didn’t she get in touch with me? I didn’t know anything about any of this.”

“I told her to, Mrs. Meyers, I told her maybe she should go home. But she didn’t answer me. She just sat by the window all day, writing in her notebook. She wasn’t eating, but I didn’t think much of it at the time, maybe just that she was upset over Stevie.

“Then one day when the mates were over she came in with this strange look on her face and said she’d show them guerrilla theater, but she’d do it right. She had a kind of funny smile, I can’t forget it. She told us about not having eaten for six weeks and planning to chain herself to the embassy. We couldn’t believe she hadn’t eaten for six weeks, but she said she’d planned it very carefully and we should do just as she said. She wanted us to call the media just as she was doing it. I’m not accusing her of anything, but she deliberately misled us. We thought it was about our movement, in memory of Stevie, like she said, but because of who he was. His family, you know, his uncle’s history, his roots. When I said that to her she said, That’s right, memory and blood and roots.”

He looks at Maria with those eyes that are like stones, wanting forgiveness and wanting to hurt. He’s waiting for her to say something. But what can she possibly say?

“I wish she’d called me. I wish I’d been able to do something.”

“There was nothing you could have done. It had nothing to do with you.”

“I’m her mother. Everything she does has to do with me.”

Both of them are shocked at what she’s said, the utter lack of modesty and restraint. And yet Maria can’t take it back, pretend she didn’t mean it. They sit and look at each other; appalled at the chasm that has opened up. Now he will need to punish her; she waits to see its shape and extent.

But it doesn’t come, the punishment. He looks at her with pity, as if she were a child who’d heedlessly run into a wall. She thinks he might be a good father someday. But not for Pearl’s child, no.

“Well, it’s a terrible thing,” he says, and she is touched by the largeness, the indefiniteness of the reference.

“She doesn’t want to see me,” Maria says.

“Me either.”

“Maybe when she’s stronger.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever see me again,” he says simply, scientifically, as if he were talking about the extinction of a species of wildflower. “I mean, like, she has to see you, you’re her mother. She can perfectly well get by without seeing me. I guess that might be better. Too much has gone on. Some things that can’t be fixed. Not if the boat was a little rocky to start with.”

“Wait and see,” she says.

“I’ve put her things together, books and clothes. If you want to collect them. You could come over to the place. Only not today. One of the blokes is there with some company.”

“Tomorrow, then,” she says.

“Tomorrow, teatime.”

He writes the address on a paper napkin. The edges of the letters blur into the softness of the paper, become a pattern rather than a message, hard to read, abstract.

“What time, exactly?”

“Four o’clock.”

“Could it be morning? I see the doctor every afternoon at four.”

“We tend not to be early risers.”

“How about eleven?”

He nods. She hopes she’s sounded accommodating.

“The doctor thinks she’ll probably be all right.”

He nods again and turns. His brown greatcoat disappears into the brownish air.

Maria tries to understand what has just happened. Do you find it hard to understand? This impatient woman, who is where she is because her daughter is close to death, has treated this boy with compassion instead of turning on him in fury. You now know this about Maria: she is capable of surprising and sometimes erratic kindnesses, ignoring the most likely, most deserving candidates for mercy in favor of the insulting rogue, the ungrateful
mutilé de guerre.

She asks herself: What did he come for? What did he want from her? Was it only because the doctor told him she wanted to see him? Did he think he was doing something for her? What did he think he was doing? What does he think he’s done?

What has he done, and how can she understand it? New names swirl in her mind: Mick, Stevie, Finbar. One woman’s name: Breeda, a name she’d never in her life heard. People she didn’t know existed an hour ago, so for her these people did not exist at all. It is as if a sorcerer arrived in the breakfast room of the Tara Arms Hotel and conjured three new people whom she now was forced to know. One a dead boy, dead in mysterious circumstances, all of them involved in a political act so puerile, so anachronistically ridiculous she doesn’t know how to think of it. She can only imagine the rich Yankee with the memory of the glory days he probably never had anything to do with. A trust-fund baby with a dream of revolution, transplanted here so he can’t be understood to be the loser that he is. And a mother with a dead child. “She went crazy.” What does that mean, what does any of it mean, and how can she connect it to her child, who may be on the brink of death? How did these people, these names without faces, bring Pearl to the place she now is? A place she will not allow her mother to be, a place Maria doesn’t understand—nor does she understand her role. What is my place in this place? she says to herself.

The boy, Finbar, believes that what happened is connected to the dead boy, Stevie. A living boy talking about a dead one. What does it have to do with politics? He did say that things started to change after the Omagh bombing. But how?

Pearl had phoned to talk about the Omagh bombing. Had she paid enough attention? Had she failed to take in its full significance? Had she passed over it as one more atrocity in a world blood-glutted with them? And this event that she nearly passed over, is it at the center of her daughter’s will to die? And who is Stevie? The dead nephew of an imprisoned revolutionary? The love child of a feebleminded mother and a father whose parents came over on the
Mayflower
? The
Mayflower,
she thinks, I’ll bet.

Perhaps Dr. Morrisey knows more. Perhaps she will tell her. But she still has four hours to wait. She tries Joseph’s room again. No answer. She has to get out of the hotel. She will walk. She’ll buy a map and walk all the way to the hospital. This is a task that will absorb her; finding her way will drown out the tormenting voices that she can’t now afford to hear. She will walk. Find the next street. Concentrate on whether to turn right or left and how far to go before the next turn. Do not think of what it is unbearable to think of. Do not see anything before your eyes except the names of streets, the blue lines on the map, the green oblong of the river.

38

In another part of Dublin, Joseph is walking too. He has been walking all night and half the day, stopping only for cups of tea, a bun, a sandwich. He feels worn out, empty. The surface of his mind is like a battered basin, shiny, holding nothing. His mind is a muscle whose existence makes itself felt only on account of, or in rebellion against, overuse.

He has done a terrible thing. That it was only a thing of words makes it no less bad. He doesn’t know what should be done next. He hopes, somehow, that it will come to him, seep into his skin like the cold moisture from this gray sky, weakly underlit from time to time by a sun that is a flat disk of beaten silver.

There is no stopping for him, no sitting down, not on the wet grass, and certainly there is no entering cafés for a warming breakfast. He isn’t ready for that; that would be premature, it might suggest a false answer, a snare. He must keep walking. If he takes tea or something to eat, it must be standing up. He mustn’t stop until he is entirely worn out or has found the answer.