The Mermaid Chair (14 page)

A
note had been slipped under the back door in the kitchen, folded inside a sealed, white envelope with a single word on the front:
Jessie.

I found it after I got back from Kat's shop. Picking it up, I studied the writing—a bold, slanted script, but oddly filled with hesitation, as if the writer had stopped and started several times.

Some things you just know. Like Benne does.

I slid it into the pocket of my khakis at the same moment Mother walked into the room. “What's that?” she said.

“Nothing,” I told her. “I dropped something.”

I did not open it right away. I let it rest in the dark pouch along my thigh, pressing like a hand. I told myself,
First I will call my daughter. Then make tea. I will be sure Mother is situated, and then I will sit on the bed and sip the tea and open the envelope.

I was an accomplished practitioner of delayed gratification. Hugh once said people who could delay gratification were highly mature. I could put off happiness for days, months, years. That's how “mature” I was. I learned it from eating Tootsie Roll Pops as a child. Mike would crunch through the candy shell immediately to get to the chocolate in the middle, while I licked and licked, wearing it down in an agonizingly slow process.

I dialed Dee's number in her dorm at Vanderbilt and listened to her chatter about her latest escapade. Her sorority had sponsored “the world's largest pillow fight,” 312 people on a softball field, feathers everywhere. Apparently the event was witnessed by a so-called scrutineer from the
Guinness Book of World Records
.

“It was all my idea,” she said proudly.

“I'm sure it was,” I said. “My daughter—a world-record holder. I'm very proud.”

“How's Gran?” she asked.

“She's okay,” I said.

“Did you find out why she did it?”

“She won't talk to me yet, at least not about that. There's something she's hiding. The whole thing is complicated.”

“Mom? I was remembering—I don't know, it's probably nothing.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It's just that one time when I visited her, a really long time ago, we were walking by that place where the slaves are buried, that cemetery, you know? And Gran totally freaked.”

“What do you mean, ‘freaked'?”

“She started crying and saying stuff.”

“Do you remember what she was saying?”

“Not really. Just something about seeing a dead person's hand or fingers. I guess she was talking about the bodies in the cemetery, but she was real upset, and it kinda scared me.”

“You never mentioned it.”

“But she did crazy things like that. It was just Gran.” Dee paused, and I could hear her U2 tape playing in the background. “I should have told you. Oh, Mom, you think if I'd said something, this wouldn't have happened?”

“Listen to me: It wouldn't have made a bit of difference in what she did. Believe me. Okay? Your Gran is sick, Dee.”

“Okay,” she said.

After we hung up, I made peppermint tea and took a cup to the living room. There was Mother, the television, the Rubik's Cube. The Russians had won an ice-skating medal, and their national anthem was like a funeral dirge weighing down the room. I set the cup on the table beside her and patted her shoulder. The episode Dee had described had only confused me more.

“Are you all right? How's your hand?”

“Fine. But I don't like peppermint tea,” she said. “It tastes like toothpaste.”

I closed the door to my room and turned the lock, then pulled the envelope out of my pocket. I placed it in the middle of the bed and sat down beside it. I sipped my tea and stared at it.

There was never any question I would open it. I was not trying to preserve those last moments of high and aggravated anticipation either—the slow, excruciating pleasure of wearing down to get to the chocolate. No, I was merely terrified. I was holding Pandora's envelope.

I tore it open and pulled out a lined white paper, ragged along one edge, as if it had been torn from a journal.

 

Jessie,

I hope I'm not being too presumptuous in writing, but I wonder if you would like to go for a ride in the johnboat. The egrets aren't plentiful now, but I've spotted a colony of white pelicans, which is very rare. I'll be at the dock in the rookery tomorrow at 2:00
P.M.
, and I would be happy if you joined me.

Brother Thomas (Whit)

Whit
. I touched the word with my finger, then said it out loud, sensing the intimacy that had gone into the act of disclosing his real name. It felt as though he'd offered a hidden part of himself to me, one the monastery did not own. And yet the note had a certain formality about it.
I would be happy if you joined me.

I read it several times. I didn't realize that the teacup had turned over on the bed until I felt the wetness seep against my leg. I soaked up what I could with a towel, then lay down beside the dampness, breathing the smell of peppermint, the sweet cleanness of it drifting from the sheets like a fresh new beginning.

 

A half-dozen seagulls squatted behind me on the dock in the rookery in perfect formation, like a small squadron of planes waiting to take off. I had come early, too early. More out of caution than eagerness. I'd reasoned that if I arrived early and felt I couldn't go through with meeting him, I could simply leave. Unseen.

For almost an hour, I sat cross-legged at the edge of the dock beneath the gleaming, cloudless ceiling of light and studied the water. It looked tawny, the color of mangoes and cantaloupes, and the tide was flooding in, splashing against the pilings as if the creek had lost all patience.

A faded red canoe, almost pink now, lay upside down on one end of the dock, the bottom encrusted with barnacles. I recognized it as Hepzibah's. I'd been a passenger in it at least thirty years ago. On the other end, a spruce green johnboat, practically new, bobbed on the water, sunlight running in hypnotic wave patterns along the side.

I heard a board creak behind me, and the gulls lifted. Turning, I saw him standing on the dock, gazing at me. He wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His shoulders were broader, more muscular than I'd thought they would be, and his arms had the leathery look of someone who worked in the sun. A wooden pectoral cross hung around his neck, oddly discordant with the rest of him.

It was as if he'd been residing in an obscure place in my heart and suddenly stepped out of it. A real man, but not quite real either.

“You came,” he said. “I didn't know if you would.”

I got to my feet. “You promised white pelicans.”

He laughed. “I said I'd
spotted
white pelicans. I can't promise we'll see them.”

He climbed into the boat and, taking my hand, helped me step down into it. For a moment his face was close to mine. I could smell soap on his skin, starting to mingle with a slight muskiness from the warmth of the day.

I sat down on the front bench—Max's seat, I imagined—facing backward and watched as Thomas started the small outboard motor. He sat beside it as it churned the golden brown water, holding the rudder, easing us into the middle of the creek.

“Should I call you Thomas or Whit?” I asked.

“I haven't been called Whit in years. I wouldn't mind hearing it again.”

“I assume your mother named you that. As opposed to the abbot.”

“She named me John Whitney O'Conner and called me Whit.”

“Okay, then, Whit,” I said, trying it out.

We plied through the ebb-tide delta on the back side of the island at an idle. We threaded coils in the creek so narrow and lush in places I could almost stretch out my arms and touch the grasses on either side. We didn't try to converse anymore over the engine. I think we were both trying to get comfortable with the strangeness of what was happening, of being together in a little boat disappearing into the aloneness of the marsh.

He pointed to a flash of mullet, to several wood storks lifting out of the grass, to an osprey nest perched atop a dead pine.

We wound through the loops in the creek for a while before Whit sharply veered the boat into a tributary that eventually dead-ended in a circle of water surrounded by a wall of tall grass six or seven feet high. He cut the engine, and the silence and seclusion of the place welled up. I felt as though we'd passed through the eye of a tiny needle into a place that was out of time.

He slid the anchor over the side. “This is where I saw the white pelicans. I believe they're feeding near here, so if we're lucky, they'll fly over.” He glanced at the sky, and I forced myself to do the same, to look away from his face. It was mottled with sunlight and a hint of beard stubble.

“What's that?” I asked, pointing to a wooden structure protruding above the brush on a tiny island some twenty or thirty yards behind him.

“Oh, that's my unofficial hermitage,” he said. “It's basically nothing but a lean-to. I use it to read or just sit and meditate. I've been known to take naps in it, too. To be perfectly honest, I've probably napped in it more than I've meditated.”

I clicked my tongue, teasingly. “Napping on the job.” I felt ridiculously lighthearted.

“My napping wouldn't surprise the abbot, but I'm afraid the lean-to would. He isn't aware it exists.”

“Why?”

“I'm pretty sure he wouldn't allow me to have it.”

I liked that there was a hidden part of him he kept separate from the monastery, a tiny bit of dissidence.

“Did you know white pelicans don't dive for food like the brown ones?” he said. “They work as a team. I've seen them sit on the water in a big circle and corral the fish to the center of it. It's ingenious, really.”

“I think I must be a brown pelican,” I said, and the moment it left my mouth, I thought how silly it sounded. Like one of those quizzes in women's magazines. If you were a color, what color would you be? If you were an animal…

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“I don't know, I guess because I work alone.”

“I don't even know what you do.”

I was not good at saying, “I'm an artist.” The words tended to get lodged in my throat. “I have an art studio,” I said. “I fool around in it a little.”

“So you're an artist,” he said. I wasn't sure if anyone had ever called me that before. Even Hugh.

“What medium?” he asked.

“I do—I used to do a watercolor-tableau thing. I don't know how to describe it.”

“Come on,” he said. “Try.”

I was surprised at how badly I wanted to tell him. I closed my eyes, trying to say it as eloquently as I could.

“I start with a wooden box, kind of like a shadowbox.” I paused. I couldn't believe I'd said “shadowbox.”
God.
I hated when people referred to it that way. “Wait, not a shadowbox; it's more like a Mexican
retablo.
And I paint a scene inside it. It could be a landscape, people, anything. Then I arrange things in front of the scene, like it's extending out of the painting—sort of a diorama effect.”

I opened my eyes, and I remember how I was caught by the sight of him. How handsome he looked leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, listening so intently to me. In the strong light, his blue eyes were the exact color of his denim shirt.

“They sound wonderful,” he said.

“Believe me, they're not that wonderful. I thought they were in the beginning. They started off being really satirical and quirky, but they became much more planned and…” I fumbled in my head for the word. “Unobjectionable,” I heard myself say.

“That's an interesting way to put it.”

I stared at him. Everything I was saying was coming out wrong. I didn't even know what I'd meant by “unobjectionable.” “I guess I mean art should evoke some kind of reaction in a person, not just look beautiful. It should disturb people a little.”

“Yeah, but look around.” He threw out an arm, gesturing at the marsh grass, the water in quiet motion, the light floating on top of it like bits of froth. “Look at
this.
What about beauty for the sake of beauty? Sometimes I look at the trees out here, full of egrets, or a piece of art like Bernini's
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,
and I lose myself. Sometimes it explodes my notions of order and conduct, much more than if it were ‘objectionable.'”

He spoke with passion and authority, gesturing with his hands so vigorously that the boat rocked at one point and I reached for the side to steady myself. It was almost as if I were experiencing the very thing he was trying to explain—this state of losing oneself.