“Perhaps you could both come over for a meal. I could show you some of Stevie’s things. It would help if I could talk to the two of you about him.”
“We’ll do that,” Maria says, putting her coat on.
“God bless you,” Breeda says.
As she runs down the filthy stairs, Maria feels blessed indeed. And she wonders if it’s possible to believe in blessing, in having been blessed, if you don’t believe in blessing’s source. Maybe it doesn’t matter. She can’t think about it now.
. . .
When she gets to the hospital, she encounters her nemesis behind the desk again.
“There was only one pass for you and you’ve used that up.”
“I understand, but I was only gone for a little while. I had to get some breakfast.”
“I don’t know about that. I only know that going out and coming in you’d be needing two passes, and I’ve only the one for you and you’ve used it.”
“There’s another one for my brother, isn’t there?” she says sweetly, concealing her murderous true heart. “Perhaps you could look in the folder and get that one for me.”
The woman knows she’s been outfoxed. Maria won’t take her eyes off her, but she keeps her smile pasted on. The woman goes to the folder. She doesn’t quite have the nerve to refuse the other pass. In two minutes, Maria’s lied to the woman twice: that she went out to get breakfast and that Joseph is her brother. Well, it’s almost true; she has been nourished and Joseph is like a brother to her. In the old days in the Church that was called a Mental Reservation. If you made a mental reservation—if you said to the Jehovah’s Witness, “My father isn’t home” and you meant in your mind, My father isn’t home
to you
—you hadn’t really committed a sin.
She runs into Pearl’s room.
“What did she say?”
“She said there was nothing to forgive. She said you weren’t yourself. She said you spoke out of the heat of anger as she spoke out of the heat of grief. She feels you need to forgive her because none of it was your fault and she made you feel it was; she sees it all as a combination of accident. Stevie wasn’t wearing his hearing aid that night, you know. And something much older, much larger, part of the tragedy of this country. She called it an accident of time: if you’d had time, and had been able to work through time, you’d have worked it out. And she needs you to mourn with her, to be with her in the work of mourning, of remembering. I think she blames Stevie’s father for not mourning. For wanting to forget their son.
That
she finds unforgivable.”
“Then some things
are
unforgivable. How do we know what they are?”
“We know if we’re forgiven.”
“And then what?”
“And then we live our lives.”
. . .
Pearl had been desperate for her mother to find out what she’s found out. And now she doesn’t know if it makes any difference. Because now she has the information, she doesn’t know how to interpret it. Breeda says she’s forgiven her and says that she, Breeda, is also in need of forgiveness. Or is she saying that neither of them needs forgiveness because they were in the grip of anger and grief? What does it mean, then—that anything is forgivable if you’re enraged enough, suffering enough? Breeda doesn’t want to blame her, although she deserves blame. But what happens if blame isn’t cast? Does it disappear? Vaporize like the fog the night Stevie died? Where, then, is justice? Isn’t it lost if nothing is unforgivable?
Consider, if you will, the questions Pearl faces now. If she accepts Breeda’s forgiveness and forgives herself, what will she have lost? What if, rather than saying,
This is itself and nothing else,
the truth says,
That is what you thought to be itself, but it is also other things you may never have thought of
? Is this the more frightening possibility, that we must live with mercy and forgiveness, which may be a series of mistakes, of overpayments, rather than the blame we seize, the blame we believe is shining, singular, the burning brand we use to mark with our own name? These are the things Pearl must consider in her weakness and exhaustion, tied down as she is and drugged.
Her mother sits down on the turquoise plastic chair. She takes her coat off; she is trying to catch her breath. She pats her upper lip with a Kleenex; she is sweating with exertion; there are two deep curves like parentheses cut into her face. Her mother is no longer young.
Suppose Breeda forgives her. What does that mean if she does not forgive herself? Her mother has said, If someone forgives you, you are forgivable. But what if what you did resulted in a death? The dead cannot forgive.
Stevie can’t forgive, but Breeda has forgiven in his name. Can you forgive in the name of the dead? And must the living always forgive? Breeda said Pearl did what she did because she wasn’t herself, so she must be forgiven. But who is the self who did the thing and who is being forgiven? Perhaps Joseph wasn’t himself when he said what he said. What he said made her feel that nothing on earth was safe, nothing was dependable. Can that be forgiven? Is it possible to say he wasn’t himself because he had suffered too much, maybe from Devorah’s death, maybe for a reason she will never know? If she can be forgiven in the name of the dead, must he not be forgiven by her, in her own name?
And then what? We live our lives, her mother said. What did that mean? And why do it?
Her mother is no longer young. This fills her with a terrible tenderness. Her mother, her strong invincible mother, will one day be weak and old. Her mother will one day be among the dead. Will her mother be lonely, among the dead, without her? Before this moment, she never believed her mother would die. She had always believed that, moving decisively, as she always had, her mother would somehow move quickly out of death’s way. She had never pictured her mother as not alive. She had never imagined life without her mother in it.
It had been easier to imagine life without herself in it. She had imagined her mother mourning her, weeping for her in a dark room. She had not imagined herself weeping for her mother. She had not imagined facing life without her mother. What did it mean, to face life? What was the face?
Stevie’s face flattened; it became featureless, like the moon, like the desert, when she had said, “How could you be so stupid?” He became a creature without a face. How can Breeda believe her to be forgivable, believe she doesn’t even require forgiveness? Because she was not herself? If you are not yourself, who are you?
The silver disks bob in the overheated air. Her mother will one day be among the dead. Some things are unforgivable or everything can be forgiven as long as there is a forgiver. Some things cry out for punishment, or punishment is quite beside the point. There are accidents. It was an accident of time; if they’d had more time, they would have worked things out. He could have forgiven in his own name. Would he have forgiven her? She would know she had been forgiven because she would have had the words of forgiveness from a living mouth. It would have been a great gift. But supposing he didn’t want to give it? Supposing Stevie didn’t think she was forgivable? In the dream he had said, “With so much to be forgiven, it would be strange not to forgive.” But dreams are not life. You have to live your life; a dream is something you wake from. Some things you do not wake from.
How could you be so stupid? We must marry.
And one day, her mother no longer in this life.
Does her mother understand? Her mother doesn’t long for death, doesn’t believe there is a scrim—thin, easily traversable, infinitely desirable in its lightness—between life and death. Wanting life so, she must understand why people resist taking their place among the dead when one day they will have no choice. Her mother, so alive Pearl could not until this moment imagine her dead. Her mother who gave her life. Her mother who said that after forgiveness you must live your life.
She must ask her mother, “Why is it that it’s life we want?”
What do you make of this question? Do you think it’s unanswerable? Do you even go so far as to say it’s a question no one has the right to ask? Do you assume there’s nothing else wantable except for life, and so it is absurd even to ask the question? What would you do if someone asked it of you, would you try to answer on the spot or would you say, “I’ll get back to you” and consult libraries, wise friends, authorities across the disciplines? Maria doesn’t have that luxury. Her daughter has asked her a question. She must answer it.
And she knows Pearl wants a real answer, not a rhetorical one. She is encouraged that Pearl used the word
we
.
She tries to think of the things people live for: Love. Beauty. Pleasure. Virtue. Fame. Friendship. None of these things seems real enough, strong enough, to be a proper answer to Pearl’s question. She knows what the answer is for herself, but this answer she cannot give: “I live for you.” She thinks of Breeda, who must live having lost her only child.
Pearl has asked her a question, Why do we want life? There must be a good answer. She does, she believes, want life. But if Pearl died she would want to die. Yet Breeda goes on living. So perhaps she is the one who should be asked. But Breeda is not here. Breeda has not been asked; she, Maria, is the one who must answer.
She tries to remember once again why people have said that life is good. Love. Friendship. Beauty. Pleasure. Virtue. Fame. Fame is irrelevant. Virtue may be its own reward, but is it real enough for Pearl, who has always been virtuous, to prize? Even the virtue that relieves suffering comes up against the reality that the number of the suffering is overwhelming; there are always more, no matter how many are relieved. She has never wanted to die, but she can’t imagine that the good she has done for children would be enough to make her want to live. And what about beauty? Can you say, “You must live for Beethoven, for Vermeer, for the Alps?” Friendship? “You must live for your friend Luisa.” Love? Certainly the boy in the breakfast room in the Tara Arms Hotel, the boy in his peanut-butter-colored bathrobe, wouldn’t make the difference between life and death. Pleasure, then. What has Pearl enjoyed? Food, weather, physical movement. She sees Pearl running with her dog, Lucky; Pearl sitting with her head on Lucky’s head; Pearl next to Lucky, eating ice cream. It is a ridiculous thing to say, Life is worth living because of ice cream and your dog. But it seems preferable to saying, Life is worth living because you must live for me.
Maria sees two scales: one with the horrors of life, one with its goodness. The first is much, much heavier. Only some trick could make them seem equal, some thumb placed on the tray of goodness to give false weight. She sees a butcher’s bloody thumb; her eye falls on a butcher’s bloody apron. She hears the words
false weight
. She sees a thumb. An apron. But she does not see a face.
And then she does: the face of Aldo Osani, the Italian butcher whom her father liked because he seemed old-fashioned. He had one of those old-fashioned scales: two trays hanging from a chain, two trays that needed to be balanced. There was meat on one tray, lead weights on the other. He would give Joseph and Maria a piece of bologna while Joseph’s mother waited for the order. His fingers were beautifully shaped, and yet his nails were rimmed in blood. Aldo Osani, she is sure, did not give false weight. But now this is what she needs: a belief in the possibility of false weight on the side of goodness. She needs a bloody thumb to tip the scale.
But even if the scale is tipped, she doesn’t know who does the tipping, or why the tipping happens, or if at any moment it might stop. And she must say only what she knows. Pearl has asked her, “Why is it that it’s life we want?”
She can only answer, “It seems we’re meant to.”
Pearl is frightened when she hears her mother say this. Her mother doesn’t know any more than she does. “It seems we’re meant to.” But why and by whom? Who is the one who means and what is the meaning? This is what her mother doesn’t know. Is the answer only “We want life because we’re afraid of dying”? When she wanted to die, she was not afraid of death. When she became afraid of death, she wanted life.
She thinks of Breeda, Breeda who has lost everything, who has refused to blame her, who has sent her balloons that bob in the overheated air, who is sitting, Pearl is sure, in her aqua robe drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in front of the television, Stevie’s birds hanging from their strings, a paper jungle. Why does Breeda want to live? How can Pearl understand it? She can’t understand it; she thinks of Breeda and she is stupefied.
There is no reason for Breeda to forgive her. Pearl has hurt her son, perhaps done something to lead to his death, and now her son is dead. Because of this Pearl has wanted to die. But Breeda goes on living; Breeda has said there is nothing to forgive. There isn’t any way of understanding it. It isn’t sensible, it isn’t reasonable: therefore incomprehensible. What Bobby Sands’s sister Bernadette did was comprehensible. Her brother died; she planted a bomb in revenge. Revenge is comprehensible, she thinks, forgiveness is not. Comprehensible.
Comprehend
means to include.
Claudo, claudere, clausus,
Joseph had said. Include means to enclose. I cannot include this, I cannot enclose it with the power of my mind. I cannot comprehend.
Comprehension. Incomprehension. She feels the pressure of her incomprehension, a weakness that is at the same time a force. Whatever Breeda is or does, it is greater than Pearl’s comprehension. Or her incomprehension. I cannot comprehend. Meaning, I cannot take it in. Does
it
take her in then: does
it
surround her, include her, enclose her, the way she thought death would enclose her, the enclosure Joseph wanted, that would save them from the world? Is that what saves us, then, the incomprehensible?
After everything, Breeda has forgiven her. Breeda wants life.
This is incomprehensible. It cannot be taken in. Yet to refuse to take it in, to refuse to look at it, to refuse to acknowledge its force, to choose death because you are unforgivable when she says you are forgiven, to choose death when she refuses it—this cannot be done. It dishonors Breeda. It cannot be done.