39
Maria is only fifteen minutes early at Dr. Morrisey’s office, not so early as to be embarrassing, she tells herself. She sees that Dr. Morrisey is harried, distant. She is the professional again, and in her case that means, if not cold, then cool.
“There’s nothing much to report. I think she’s gaining strength; she’s less agitated; she’s more alert, as we’ve cut down on the sedative; it’s a crucial moment, and I don’t want to put it at risk by having her see you before she’s ready.”
“I can’t see her yet?” Maria says. She wants to say, This is what I’ve been waiting all day to hear? But she’s weaker than she was yesterday; she has lost some of her fight. The encounters with Joseph and Finbar have exhausted her.
“Not just yet. Another twenty-four hours of medication, of nutrition, could make an enormous change. Let’s give it twenty-four hours. The prospects could be entirely different.”
Maria wants understanding from the doctor, compassion: she needs to be listened to. Particularly after what happened with Joseph. I’m sure you can see why this would be the case.
“I keep trying to go over my part in it,” Maria says. “What I did wrong. I just thought if I loved her enough, everything else would take care of itself. Maybe I wasn’t attentive enough, maybe I was too much the animal mother, maybe I loved her too much as a cub. Oh, I loved her body so much as a baby. I loved being the mother of a baby, I never understood people who didn’t. I never got impatient. She seemed so good to me. She always seemed so good. So surprising in her goodness, a kind of goodness I could never have had any hope of. She’s very different from me, you know. She’s very reticent and I’m, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, talkative. She could do things I could never do. Sew. And be quiet. But even as a little child, she couldn’t defend herself very well. I came to understand she didn’t want to. Once someone in school said to her, ‘People like you, Chinese people, have no eyelids.’ And she just crumbled in the corner. I told her she should fight back, I told her that so many times. And the last time, the time when that child insulted her about her Asian eyes, she said to me, ‘Fighting back is not what I do.’ As she might have said, ‘Cornflakes are not what I like for breakfast.’”
“All this will take time to sort out,” Dr. Morrisey says. Maria feels she is distracted, not really interested. Not really interested in
her,
not even as Pearl’s mother. That she has been chattering, wasting her time. What she doesn’t know: Hazel Morrisey’s daughter, six years old, is about to celebrate her birthday. Hazel Morrisey must be home before the party starts. Her husband, also a doctor, has done the preliminary work, but she mustn’t fail her daughter, not today, not as she has already done too many times in favor of a patient whose needs seemed more pressing to her than her own child. She likes Maria Meyers; she is even sympathetic to her, but she cannot give her any more time.
“We just have to give Pearl time,” the doctor says. “Which I don’t have much more of today, I’m afraid.”
There is nothing to say. Hope for better prospects. Wait and hope. Wait and see. Give it time.
What is time? What can it do of itself, that giving it to something would make a difference? Maria feels time stretching out in front of her, dark and empty, growing larger instead of smaller as it is eaten up. She goes to her hotel room and orders a sandwich and a drink. Tries to watch television. Tells herself her daughter is out of danger. She orders a brandy to be brought up. She wonders if she seems disreputable to Orla at the desk, a pathetic older woman with nowhere to go. Every ten minutes she phones Joseph’s room. There is never an answer. It is more than twenty-four hours since he left the restaurant. Where can he be? Is he in danger too? It’s another thing she mustn’t think about. She has, she thinks, become one of those women grateful to her brandy for dulling the edges of her mind.
. . .
In the morning, she finds Finbar’s street on the map. She walks up two back streets flanked by recently done-up shops. She is passed by many young people; this is an area where students live. The businesses cater to them: chip shops, music shops, and one called Condom-inium which advertises “Something for everyone.” So the church has lost its grip, she thinks with satisfaction. Even here. But the young people she passes seem sullen, worried, ill at ease, like young people everywhere these days. Not like the young Irish in the tourist posters, their red cheeks a sign of their high spirits.
The address Finbar gave her is in a building that looks so new the cement seems barely dry. It could be anywhere in the world, and the young people coming out of it, with their jeans and heavy boots and serviceable coats, could be from anywhere.
She rings the bell and is buzzed in. Finbar doesn’t come to the door. It’s answered by a man about her own age, wearing jeans and a fawn-colored corduroy shirt. His thinning gray hair is cropped close: a good concealing device, she thinks. He’s barefoot; her eyes are drawn to his bare feet, which are, as she imagines he very well knows, beautiful, slightly golden, a sign of grace in this climate where she has not yet seen real sun.
“I’m Mick,” he says. “You’re Maria. Finbar’s showering. This is the crack of dawn for him.”
He takes her coat; he actually helps her off with it. She smells his soap and shaving cream. Her eye falls on the dark hairs on his squarish hands. She wants to keep looking at his feet.
“He doesn’t need to trouble himself. I’m just here for my daughter’s things.”
“Sit down. I’ve made some good coffee. You can actually get it here if you know where to shop. Don’t tell me you’re not dying for a good cup of coffee. Sit down for a minute, for God’s sake. You’re going through hell. Is there anything I can do for you? It’s horrible to be alone in a strange city and have to go through this kind of thing.”
“I’m not alone.”
“Is Joseph with you?”
“How do you know about Joseph?”
“Pearl talked of him so fondly. And of the relationship you and he had. Children together, all those years. It always sounded so very very unique. And now the two of you here together, in this crisis.”
“Don’t make a Kodak moment of it,” she says, congratulating herself for her restraint at not telling him that nothing can be
very unique
. And particularly not
very very unique
. I can tell you that for Maria this was no easy thing.
“I have no one left from my early life. Too many changes, too many roads not taken, I guess. Theirs or mine. But our generation made a lot of big journeys, when you think about it.”
The smell of the coffee is difficult to resist. And the sound of American speech, even if its content is foolish, seems somehow benevolent, comforting. Is this compromising her mission, to sit and talk and drink coffee? Pearl and this man had some sort of conflict. Perhaps she shouldn’t be talking to him. But she can’t think about it now.
“I’m so terribly sorry about what happened to Pearl. It’s a crazy outcome. I must say we were all surprised.”
“All?”
“Me and some of the lads I work with politically. Finbar and his friends.”
“What politics are we talking about?”
“Well, the group we identify with is known as the Real IRA. The group opposed to the treaty. I’m sure you know better than to believe what the media says, we all learned that during Vietnam, and it’s particularly true of this group. Not that we’re really involved that closely. We’re really more anarchist revolutionary ourselves. But we don’t want to see the commitment of centuries, the poetry of history, generations of sacrifice and honor, a long tradition of resistance to colonialism thrown down the drain for consumer greed. There’s got to be more to life than money.”
“Nobody believes there’s nothing to life but money. They call it other things. Security. Quality of life.”
“Yeah, well I’m against it. Down with quality of life,” he says, raising the espresso pot over his head. “At least in the sixties, we knew there was more to happiness than consumer goods. A lot of us put a lot on the line for that.”
She follows the line of his arm as it travels, admires the corduroy of his well-cut shirt. She can’t imagine his putting anything on the line for anything. He is prosperous, healthy, well fed. A hero to a bunch of wannabes, one of whom was her daughter’s lover.
She thinks of Ya-Katey, her daughter’s father. Her lover once. She thinks of Billy Ogilvie, jailed because of her father. She thinks of her father. She will not allow this buffoon to include her in any category he might consider himself part of.
“The sixties weren’t the same for everyone. They involved a lot of irreparable loss. It wasn’t one big love-in.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve come to believe that history as it’s given to us is a tragedy, and it’s up to us to turn it into a comedy. That’s what I try to do with my politics and with my work in theater.”
“What happened to your son wasn’t comic.”
“What happened to my son was very sad. But it was just an accident. I think it knocked Pearl off her center. Of course with the Omagh bombing, she started to get a bit unbalanced, I think, really fell for the whole media deal hook, line, and sinker, stopped thinking for herself, in my opinion. She bought the media’s interpretation that it was a terrorist act. Not understanding that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s violence is another man’s liberation. Or woman, for that matter. And that in revolution there are always tragic errors.”
“In this case the tragic errors resulted in dead children. A dead child is not an error. She refuses to deal with life and death as an abstraction. That’s why she’s done what she’s done.”
“I know, the personal is political—particularly for young women, I’ve found. I have two of my own, and God knows I find them hard enough to understand. They’re in their mid-twenties, but sometimes I think their understanding of things is very adolescent. I’ve read they’re changing the definition of adolescence to include twenty-five-year-olds now. Stevie, my son Stevie—well, his death got all mixed up for your daughter with politics and her eating issues, which is a big thing for young women these days. My Caitlin went through a little bulimia phase in high school.”
“My daughter does not have an eating issue. She was experiencing despair about the nature of the world, she wanted to mark a tragic death, she wanted to bear witness to a larger tragedy, a public one. She wasn’t worried that she was fat. It had nothing to do with how she looks.”
“But let’s face it. The stage she played everything out on is the stage of her own body. It’s what I do: theater. I have my own company in Roxbury. A lot of the women are involved with pieces acted out on the stage of their own bodies. I mean, as theater what she did was very potent. Everyone looked, which was obviously the point.”
“She didn’t want people looking at her. She wanted people to listen to what she said. There was nothing theatrical about it. It isn’t a performance. It’s life and death to her: what she believes in seems worth her life. She wants to bear witness.” Maria knows she is using Pearl’s words, not her own, that she is expressing what Pearl believes, not what she herself thinks. But she will not allow this man to misinterpret her daughter so carelessly, so foolishly.
“I can’t support that kind of martyr trip,” Mick says. “Maybe it’s your Catholic background, it makes you more sympathetic.”
Maria feels a band of heat spread across the back of her neck. I think you’ve seen that Maria’s relationship to Catholicism is, to say the least, quite vexed. No one is more critical of the Catholic Church than she; she has left it—unequivocally, she believes—in protest against aspects she considers repressive, heinous even. Yet she hates it when someone feels free to make an assumption about Catholics—especially when she is one of the ones being assumed about—that she considers coarse, clichéd, or overlarge. Is this just a version of defensive tribalism, is the band of heat on the back of the neck just that? Yes and no. Maria would say no, absolutely. I would not be able to entirely agree.
“I’m sure your ignorance of Catholicism and my relationship to it is near absolute,” she says, “but I have no impulse to go into that now.”
“Look, I don’t want to argue with you either. I can imagine you’re feeling incredibly overwrought.”
Like many women, Maria reacts to the word
overwrought
as if a gauntlet has been thrown down and she must pick it up and perhaps choke the thrower with it. She doesn’t want to spend any more time with this man. But she can’t resist saying something to his accusation that she is
overwrought,
a word she knows he would never think of using for a man.
“I am not overwrought. Nothing I have said or done justifies that adjective. I am not overwrought simply because I don’t go along with some male version of the world.”
“Don’t gender it, OK?” he says. “I’ll get Finbar. You just sit here and enjoy your coffee.”
She refuses to sit down, refuses to touch her coffee mug. She stands behind her chair, black plastic, easily overturned. She would like to turn it over; she would like to break something, simply to make a point: that she could.
Finbar comes into the living room wearing a terry-cloth robe the color of peanut butter and yellowish suede slippers with fleece cuffs. She’s sure his mother bought those slippers for him, as she is sure his parents are paying for the apartment, which is entirely featureless. Books and papers spill everywhere; full ashtrays and beer cans cover the black plastic coffee table. There are cigarette burns on the tan corduroy couch and chairs. The lettering on the posters is in Irish, so she doesn’t know what anything means, but she imagines they’re proclaiming solidarity with the Republican cause. Pride of place belongs to a poster of a young man in pageboy hair, a dazzling smile. Finally something is legible: the name Bobby Sands.
Finbar must know she and Mick have had words. He’s no abashed, ingratiating, wounded boy now; she’s the enemy, the woman here to ruin male peace.
He hands over a box that’s taped on the top. It’s remarkably heavy; she doesn’t know how she’ll get it down the stairs.