The Mermaid Chair (11 page)

“Thomas Merton wrote that the birds were his prayers, and I guess I feel that way, too. I pray best by just being out in the marsh. It's the only praying my soul seems to really respond to.”

Soul.
The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I'd pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person—a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experiences—a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've ever known. I might have asked him about it, but a bell began to ring in the belfry overhead. He stepped into the corridor, then turned back to me, and I could see the sharp blue in his eyes even from over there. “I don't pray in the mermaid chair, but, for the record, that doesn't mean it lacks power.”

The bell clanged again. Smiling at me, he tucked his hands into his scapular with Max's tennis ball and walked away.

W
hen he'd gone, I sat down in the mermaid chair. It was hard and uncomfortable; some said it was made from a single piece of birch, though I imagine that was just more apocrypha. I pushed my spine to the back of the seat and felt my toes lift off the floor. At the other end of the church, the monks began to chant. I could not tell if it was in Latin. Their voices came in waves, flooding into the arched chapel.

My thoughts must have been spiraling up near the ceiling for a few minutes, soaring around with the chant, because all of a sudden I felt my concentration yanked downward into my body, which I realized was aroused and alive. I felt as if I were running, but I was perfectly still. Everything around me seemed to blaze up and breathe—colors, edges, the crumbs of light falling obliquely over my shoulders.

My hands were resting on the chair arms, the place where the curving backs of the mermaids blend into their fish tails. I moved my fingers around and underneath until I was gripping the nubby carving of the tails like a pair of reins. I had the sensation inside of wanting to stop myself and at the same time to let myself go.

My feelings about Thomas had been such a muddle. I'd let them slosh around in me like dirty water in the bottom of a boat, but now, sitting in the mermaid chair, I felt the sediment settle to the bottom, and everything was very clear to me. I wanted him with an almost ferocious desire.

Of course, the second I allowed myself the thought, I felt a reverberating shock, complete disgust, and yet my shame was inconsequential next to the force of my heart. It was as if something had come bursting through a wall. I thought of the Magritte painting, the locomotive thundering out of the fireplace.

The antiphons rocked back and forth in the air. I made myself take a long, slow breath, wanting the chair to live up to its reputation and do something, to work a miracle and make the overwhelming feelings evaporate. My desire, however, only seemed to grow. A desire for someone who, I reminded myself, was not Hugh. I didn't even know him, really. And yet I felt as if I did. As if I knew the deepest things inside him.

That's how it had been with Hugh all those years ago. Like meeting someone I already knew. Falling in love with Hugh had been like coming down with a terrible bout of insanity. I'd been consumed with him, almost sick with longing, unable to concentrate on anything else, and there had been no way to cure it, not that I'd wanted to then. There was no assertion of will when it came to falling in love. The heart did what it did. It had its own autonomy, like a country unto itself.

The air was poached with incense, vibrating with medieval singing. I pictured Thomas out there in one of the choir stalls and felt that same sense of being consumed, engulfed with wanting.

Worst of all, I could feel myself giving over to all of this, to whatever was coming. To a Great Ecstasy and a Great Catastrophe.

The realization frightened me, which is too mild a way of saying it. I'd not thought I was capable of falling in love again.

Earlier, when Thomas had asked me about myself, I'd not been able to speak, and I wondered now if that was because my sense of myself had been coming apart. I'd come to the island, and everything had disintegrated.

I closed my eyes.
Stop this. Stop.

I hadn't meant it as a prayer, but when I opened my eyes, I was struck with the idea that maybe it had been, and I had a momentary surge of childish hope that now some power-that-be would be obligated to grant my request. Then it would all stop. The feelings, everything, and I would be absolved. Safe.

Of course, I didn't really believe that.
Sit in the chair. Say a prayer
—it was juvenile.

Yet even Thomas, who didn't believe it either, had said there was power in the chair. And there
was.
I felt it. I felt it as an unraveling of some kind.

What if
that
was the real power in the chair—its ability to undo you? What if it fished up the most forbidden feelings inside a person and splayed them open?

I stood up. Unable to face strolling back through the church in front of the monks, I blundered around in the ambulatory for a minute, opening the wrong doors before I located the sacristy's back door, leading out of the church.

I hurried across the quadrangle, the dense air hitting my face. Instead of the fog's lifting, as it had tried to do earlier when a lone curl of sunlight had appeared, the air had turned to soup.

When I stepped through the gate into Mother's backyard, I stopped, standing in the same spot where I'd lingered that night Thomas had walked us back to the house. I placed my palms on top of the brick wall and stared at the mortar, pocked with holes from the salt air. Across the yard the oleander bushes swayed, their greenness barely visible.

He's a monk,
I thought.

Wanting to believe that this would save me.

Brother Thomas

D
uring the antiphonal chanting that preceded mass, Thomas noticed Father Sebastian looking at him, staring with his small eyes from behind the enormous black-framed glasses. Thomas wished he would stop. Once, Thomas stared pointedly back, and Sebastian had not even pretended to be embarrassed. Instead he'd nodded as if savoring a private thought or perhaps trying to say something.

Thomas was sweltering beneath his robe. He felt as if he were wrapped in pink insulation. Even in winter the wool was too hot, and the furnace continually blasted them with heat. The reason, as the abbot so thoughtfully put it, was that the older monks were “cold-blooded.” Thomas had bitten down onto his back teeth to keep his face straight.

Three years ago he'd begun daily swims in the creek out in the rookery near the makeshift hermitage he'd built on one of the small marsh islands. He did it just to cool off. He swam more determinedly in the winter than in any other season, hurling himself into the frigid water. It reminded him of an illuminated scene in a medieval Book of Hours, called the Mouth of Hell, which pictured poor, scalded people bolting from an infernal opening toward a spoonful of cold water. His place was secluded, walled off by tall, abundant grasses. It had been formed by a tributary veering off from the creek and dead-ending in a hidden basin. His private swimming hole.

There were no such things as swim trunks in a monastery, so he swam naked. It was something he should probably confess during public
culpa
on Friday mornings, which was where they divulged such sins as “I was not paying attention and broke the ginger-jar lamp in the Reception Center” or “I snuck into the kitchen after night silence and ate the last of the cherry Jell-O,” but he didn't really believe he was culpable. When he swam nude, he felt he was venturing out onto an exultant edge. Spiritual people had the habit of closing themselves off, numbing themselves down. He felt strongly about it—people needed to swim naked. Some more than others.

With sweat beading up over his lip, he closed his eyes and dreamed of the cold tide rushing over his bare skin.

The monks stood in choir in order of seniority, or
statio
as they called it: abbot, prior, subprior, novice master, then each monk by the longevity of his time there. Thomas stood in the last stall on the back row, left-hand side of the church.

As the prior, Father Sebastian was in the first row on the right-hand side, clutching his St. Andrew Daily Missal, which had been abolished back in the sixties. His stare had become obvious and glowering.

The reason for the staring became clear to Thomas suddenly. He tightened his fingers on his breviary. Father Sebastian had seen him talking to Jessie Sullivan. There had been that sound outside the chapel. He'd forgotten that Sebastian always came into the church through the sacristy. Undoubtedly he'd eavesdropped.

Certain things Thomas had said to her floated back to him. There had been nothing inappropriate. They'd talked about the mermaid chair. About
praying,
for heaven's sake. He had merely been friendly to the daughter of the woman who cooked their midday meal. What was wrong with that? Monks talked to visitors all the time.

He stood in his choir stall gorged with self-justification, his old attorney self risen like Lazarus. It was startling to feel that instinct alive in him, how easily he deliberated and defended his encounter with Jessie Sullivan, like it was evidence against him.

He stopped singing, and the abbot, noticing, glanced at him and frowned. Thomas began again, then stopped once more, his arms sagging. That he even needed to mount a defense was a revelation.

He let his eyes move slowly toward Sebastian and nodded when the older monk met his gaze. His nod was an admission to himself, a painful acquiescence that he could not defend himself, not truthfully, because he had thought of this woman since he first saw her in the rose garden sitting on the ground. He'd thought of the perfect oval of her face, how she'd looked at him before getting to her feet. Mostly he'd remembered the way her head had blotted out the moon when she'd stood erect. It had been rising behind her, and for one, maybe two seconds, she'd appeared like an eclipse, a thin corona around her head and her face cloaked behind a glowing shadow.

It had, frankly, taken his breath away. It had reminded him of something, though he couldn't say what. He'd walked them back to Nelle's house through the blackened stretch of trees, talking to her mother but in his mind picturing Jessie Sullivan's face behind that luminous darkness.

It had set off a longing in him that had not diminished as he'd hoped but had grown so acute he couldn't sleep some nights for thinking about her. He would get up then and read the poem by Yeats about going out to the hazel wood with a fire in one's head. Yeats had written it after he'd met Maude Gonne, a woman he'd glimpsed one day standing by a window and fallen hopelessly in love with.

Thomas had felt increasingly foolish about it, at how enmeshed he was in wanting her. As if he'd been snared in one of the monastery's own cast nets. He'd been doing fine, for five years carried along on the rhythm of the abbey:
ora, labora, vita communis
—prayer, work, community. His life rested in this. Dom Anthony gave sermons sometimes on what he called acedia, the grueling sameness that could snare monks in tedium and boredom, but Thomas had never suffered from it. The cadence and measure of this place had consoled him through his terrible doubt, the profound anguish he'd felt at being left alive when those he'd loved were dead.

And then that one innocuous moment: this woman getting to her feet in a garden without flowers, her face dark and beautiful, and turning to him with light daubed around her head. It had shattered his deep contentment, the whole perfect order.

He felt her even now like something returning, flooding around him like the hidden waters where he swam.

He knew hardly anything about her, but he'd seen the ring on her finger, and that had been reassuring to him. She was married. He was grateful for that.

He thought of her deep blush when she'd talked about the egret mating dance. He'd foolishly gone with her to the mermaid chair, and now he would lie awake tonight with a vision of her standing in the chapel, her blue jeans tight across her hips.

The abbot led them into the mass, and at the moment when the host was raised, Thomas felt the onrush of longing, not for Jessie but for his home, his monastic home, this place he loved beyond all places. He looked at the wafer, asking God to satiate him with that little bite of Jesus, and resolved to put her out of his mind. He would shake himself free of this. He would.

As the monks filed from the church toward the refectory for lunch, he slipped away from them, following the path to his cottage, not wanting to eat.

Father Dominic was sitting on the porch in an Adirondack rocker that had once been painted green. He wore a brown-and-red-plaid afghan draped around his shoulders, not rocking the way he typically did but motionless, his gaze fixed on a clump of Spanish moss on the ground. Thomas realized he had not seen him at mass. For the first time, Dominic appeared old to him.

“Benedicite Dominus,”
Dominic said, looking up, using the old-fashioned greeting as he often did.

“Are you all right?” Thomas said. Except for the spring when Dominic had spent three weeks in the infirmary with pneumonia, Thomas couldn't remember the monk's ever missing mass.

Dominic smiled, his expression a little forced. “I'm fine. Just fine.”

“You weren't at mass,” Thomas said, stepping up onto the porch.

“Yes, God forgive me, I was taking my own communion here on the porch. Have you ever thought, Thomas, that if God could dwell in the host, he could just as easily dwell in other things, too, like that moss over there on the ground?”

Thomas regarded the ball of moss that had blown up beside the steps. It looked like a tumbleweed. “I think that sort of thing all the time. I just didn't know anyone else here did.”

Dominic laughed. “And neither did I. So we are two peas in a pod, then. Or maybe two heretics in a pod.” He pushed against his feet, coaxing the chair into a gentle rock.

Thomas listened to the creaking wood. Impulsively he squatted down beside the chair. “Father Dominic, I know you're not my confessor, and the abbot wouldn't approve of this, but…would you hear my confession?”

Dominic stopped rocking. He leaned forward, giving Thomas a quizzical look. “Right here, you mean? Right now?”

Thomas nodded, his body tightened with urgency. He was racked with a sudden, powerful need to unburden himself.

“All right,” Dominic said. “I've already missed mass, so I'm on a roll. Let's hear it.”

Thomas situated himself on his knees beside the rocker. He said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession.”

Dominic stared off into the yard. From the angle of his eyes, Thomas guessed he was focused again on the moss.

Thomas said, “Father, something has happened. I seem to be falling in love. I met her in the rose garden.”

The wind lifted around them, and they sat in the ruffling quietness, in the welcome, elegant cold. Simply saying the words—such unbridled, imperiling words—released a groundswell of feeling in Thomas. They ushered him to a place from which he could not return.

And there he was. Kneeling on the small porch beside Dominic. His head bowed. The day milk white. Loving a woman he hardly knew.