The Mermaid Chair (15 page)

He said, “I know what you're saying, though—that you want your art to jolt people, to create an epiphany.”

“Yes,” I said.

“This is just my own opinion, but I think the real jolt doesn't come because the art is objectionable or because it evokes social critique but because the viewer becomes lost in the sheer beauty of it. It gives a person an experience of the eternal.”

I couldn't speak. I was afraid, in fact, I might embarrass myself by crying, and I didn't even know why I felt the urge. It had been so long since I'd had a conversation like this.

The boat had drifted on the anchor line to the edge of the water, where a brown, parched, dormant scent hovered in the grasses. He leaned back on his elbows against the rail, and the boat dipped a little.

I said, “It sounds very mysterious.”

“What's that?”

“This experience of the eternal you mentioned. You're going to think I'm dense, but what is it, exactly?”

He smiled. “No, I don't think you're dense. I hardly know what it is myself.”

“But you're a monk.”

“Yeah, but a weak, doubting one.”

“But you've had a lot of these…eternal experiences, I can tell. And I don't have a clue what they are. I've spent most of my life being a mother and a wife, taking care of a house. When you said I was an artist…that's a stretch. I've only been puttering around with art.”

He squinted, fixing his eyes on something just above my shoulder. “When I first came here,” he said, “I had the impression that transcending the world was superior to simply being in it. I was always struggling to meditate, fast, detach, that kind of thing. One day in the rookery I realized that merely being out here, going about my work, was what made me the happiest. I finally figured out that what matters is just giving over to what you love.”

He turned to me. “You've done that. I wouldn't worry too much about having eternal experiences. You can't manufacture them anyway. They're just little tastes of something timeless, a moment here and there when you're granted the bliss of stepping out of yourself. But I doubt they're more important than simply doing what you love.”

He reached over the side and grazed the water with his fingers. “You were fortunate to grow up here.”

“Well, I didn't think so for a long time. I stopped loving the island when I was nine. To be honest, it was only when I came back this time that I started to love it again.”

He leaned forward even farther. “What happened when you were nine? Do you mind my asking?”

“My father died in a boat fire. It was a fuel-tank explosion. They said a spark from his pipe caused it.”

I closed my eyes, wanting to tell him how much of a daddy's girl I'd been, how when my father died, it was as if my whole childhood collapsed. “The island changed for me after that. It turned into a kind of suffocating enclosure,” I added.

Sitting in the boat, I reached up unconsciously and touched the place on my skin where the priest always drew the ash in the shape of a cross. It felt like a dead spot.

“And Mother,” I went on, “she changed. She used to be fun-loving, normal, but after he died, she became obsessively religious. It was like she left us, too.”

He didn't say,
Oh, I'm sorry, how terrible,
or any of those perfunctory things people said, but I glimpsed what struck me as sadness fill his eyes. As if a sorrowing place in him had recognized this same sorrowing place in me. I remember wondering what terrible thing might have happened to him.

A flash of blue overhead, and I looked up to see a heron with a fish wriggling in its beak. The bird's shadow slid over the boat, passing between us.

“The thing was, I gave him the pipe for Father's Day. So I always felt like—” I stopped.

“Like you'd caused it to happen,” he said, finishing for me.

I nodded. “The funny thing is that I found the pipe in my mother's drawer the other day. She's had it all this time.” I forced a laugh, and it made a thin, bitter sound in the air.

I didn't want to go into the questions about my father's death or the consequences of it—the gouged-out place inside me that I could not seem to fill up and Mother's long, dark slide. I wanted it to be the way it was a few moments before, when we'd talked about art, about the eternal.

I did have a fleeting impulse to ask him about Father Dominic, what he thought of him, but I dismissed that, too.

I shifted my position on the boat seat, tucking one leg up under me. “So tell me,” I said, “how long have you been here?”

He didn't answer right away. He seemed a little fazed by how abruptly I'd changed the subject. “Four years and seven months,” he said eventually. “I'm to take my final vows in June.”

“You mean, you haven't done that yet?”

“I'm what's called a ‘simple professed' monk. You spend two years as a novice, three as a ‘simple professed,' and then you decide whether you're going to stay forever.”

And then you decide.

The words caused a commotion in me. I watched the wind lift the short ends of his hair. It shocked me how easy this was, how little conflict I felt inside, how enclosed we were in a world that seemed to have nothing to do with my life in Atlanta, with Hugh. I was actually sitting there imagining a future with this man.

“What did you do before?” I asked.

“I was a lawyer,” he said, and for a split second all the self-possession and assurance I sensed in him flared in his voice, in the intense look that passed through his eyes, in the forceful way he sat up straighter on the seat. I had a sudden sense that his former life had been one of great import, yet that was all he said about it.

“What made you give that up and come here?”

“I'm not sure you want to know. It's a long, sad story.”

“Well, I told you
my
long, sad story.”

I'd wondered what terrible thing had happened to him, but I hadn't imagined it would be as awful as it was. He told me about a wife named Linda with fine blond hair and about their unborn baby whose nursery he'd painted the color of pumpkins because Linda craved pumpkin bread morning and night. They'd both died when a truck slammed into her car. Whit had been home at the time, putting the baby's crib together.

He talked about them in a voice that changed perceptibly, the volume sinking so low that I had to tilt my body forward to hear him. His eyes trailed off, too, traveling to the floor of the boat.

Finally, looking at me, he said, “She called me before getting in the car that day to say she was sure we were having a girl. That's the last thing she said to me.”

“I'm sorry,” I told him. “I can understand why you'd come here.”

“Everyone thinks I came here out of grief, because I was running away. I'm not sure if I was or not. I don't think so. I think mostly I was running
toward
something.”

“You mean God?”

“I think I wanted to know whether there actually was one.”

“And is there?”

He laughed like I'd made the ultimate joke. “As if I would know.”

“Even a weak, doubting monk must have some idea of that.”

He was quiet a moment, watching a small egret fishing in the shallows at the edge of the water. “Sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing,” he said. “And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it's just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we're meant to step into it, that's all. Do you know what I mean?”

I told him I did, but that was mostly a lie. Still, I sat there with a rush of desire for his Beautiful Nothing, for his dance. But mostly for him.

A cloud bloused across the sun, and the air dimmed around us. As we sat in the changing light, the tide bulged under the boat and bumped it against the reeds. It rocked like Moses's basket on the waters of the Nile.

I became aware that he was staring straight at me. I could have turned away. I could have let it be another disposable moment in a whole lifetime of them, but I made a conscious decision to stare back, to let my gaze pierce the air like a blade and meet his. We stared a long time, perhaps a whole minute. Our eyes fastened like that. There was an unspoken intention in it. A kind of fierceness. I was aware of my breath coming faster, that something exhilarating but dangerous was happening, that we were
letting
it happen. He as much as I.

It became unbearable finally. I had to look away.

I think we could have been honest with each other right then and said what we were feeling. I believe we came very close. But the moment passed, the transparency of it hardened, and propriety set in.

“I'm sorry, it doesn't look as if the white pelicans are going to appear,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “And I need to take you back so I can make my rounds through the rookery.”

He began to pull on the anchor line. He nosed the boat through the little finger of water back into the creek, where he kicked the engine wide open. The noise from the motor filled my head. Looking back, I saw the white wake flow out behind us like the contrail of a jet, Whit sitting there in his blue shirt holding the rudder, big scallops of cloud overhead.

Then I saw them. The white pelicans were coming up behind us, flying low just above the water. I shouted, pointing up at them, and Whit turned the instant they rose sharply and sailed directly over us. They were drenched in light, the black tips of their wings gleaming. I counted eighteen of them moving in their synchronized way in one single, dazzling line. Then they were gone.

After Whit tied the boat up at the dock, he offered me his hand as I stepped from the boat, and I took it. He squeezed before he let go. I thanked him for the ride.

I left him standing on the dock. I could feel him watching me as I moved down the splintery planks of the walkway. When I reached the edge of the marsh, just before stepping into the silence of the trees, I looked back.

What matters is giving over to what you love.

W
hen we arrived at Max's Café the following Saturday, Mother refused to go inside. She balked on the sidewalk like a spooked horse and wouldn't move. Kat, Benne, Hepzibah, and I tried to coax her to the door, but she was adamant. “Take me home,” she said. “I mean it, take me home.”

It had required all my tactics of persuasion, plus heavy-handed phone calls from Kat and Hepzibah both, to get her this far, and now it looked as if our well-meaning plan to reintroduce her into some kind of normal existence was going up in smoke. She didn't want to face the whispers and stares of people she'd known her whole life—and who could blame her? We'd finally convinced her that she'd have to face them sooner or later, and why not get it over with?

But that was before we stood on the sidewalk and saw the crowd through the café windows. It was only March 4, but there was a tinge of springtime in the breezes, and the place appeared jam-packed, not only with islanders but with tourists.

“If
you
were the village idiot instead of me, would
you
go in there, inviting everybody to make fun of you?” Mother demanded.

“You're damn right I would,” said Kat. “And I'm not so sure I'm
not
the village idiot. You think people don't talk about me? About my big mouth or the air horn on my cart? Or about Benne—you don't think they talk about her? And what about Hepzibah—they have a field day with her, how she communicates with slave spirits at the cemetery, going around dressed up more African than the Africans?”

My hand went involuntarily to my mouth. I looked at Hepzibah, who had on a gorgeous caramel-and-black African print dress and turban and a necklace made from ostrich eggshell. She was the only person I knew more fearless than Kat, someone who could, if she wanted, clean Kat's clock, as they say.

She looked down at Kat's signature black heels and lacy socks and just stared. The socks were a light shade of
pink.

“If you must know, I washed them with Benne's red nightshirt,” Kat said.

Hepzibah turned to Mother. “If you aren't giving people around here something to talk about, Nelle, you've become too dull.”

“But this is different,” Mother said. “The people in there think I'm…insane. I would rather they think I'm dull.”

“Bite…your…tongue,” said Kat.

It killed Mother that the people she knew believed she'd lost her mind, but it bothered her much more that I might believe it. The day before, at breakfast, I'd screwed up my courage and asked her in the kindest voice I could, “Do you ever hear voices? Did a voice tell you to cut off your finger?”

She'd shot me a withering look. “I'm hearing a voice right now,” she said, mocking me. “It's telling me you should pack your suitcase and go back to Atlanta. Go home, Jessie. I don't need you here. I don't want you here either.”

I felt tears collecting. My bottom lids became bloated with them. It wasn't just her words but the look on her face, all the bright red bitterness in it.

I turned away, but she saw the tears, and the pressure that had been expanding around our heads broke. “Oh, Jessie,” she said. She let her fingers brush against my arm and stay there with the tips resting near my elbow. It was about the tenderest gesture she'd made toward me since I'd left home for college.

“Don't mind me,” she said. “I can't stand you thinking I've gone insane, that's all.” She looked down at her bandage. “There weren't any voices, okay? I was feeling tired and distraught. I was holding the cleaver, and…it just seemed like it would be such a relief to bring it down on my finger.”

For a moment she looked almost as bewildered by what she'd done as I was. Now, though, standing outside Max's Café, she just seemed scared.

Kat wore a scarf covered with yellow and red hibiscuses tucked around her neck. Whipping it off, she began winding it around Mother's hand, covering her old gauze bandage, which looked like a big white boxing glove. When Kat was finished, it looked like a big
floral
boxing glove.

“The best defense is a good offense,” she said.

“I'm not wearing this scarf around my hand,” Mother said.

Kat placed her fists on her hips. “Listen to me. Every single person on Egret Island knows you cut off your finger, and when you walk in there, every person with eyeballs is going to stare at you. So go in with a little pizzazz, why don't you? This will be like shoving it right back in their faces. You'll be saying,
Yes, this is the infamous hand with the missing finger. I've highlighted it for you with this colorful bandage. Take a good look.”

Benne giggled.

Mother turned to Hepzibah for a second opinion.

“I hate to admit this, but I agree with Kat,” Hepzibah said. “If you go into Max's and poke a little fun at yourself, you might defuse the whole thing.”

I couldn't believe that Hepzibah had been sucked into Kat's screwball idea. “I don't know about this,” I said.

“That's right, you don't,” said Kat, and, latching onto Mother's arm, she guided her to the door. More to the point, Mother
let
herself be guided, and that was the marvel to me, to see the power these women still had over her.

The door of the restaurant had one of those annoying tinkling bells attached. It jangled as we came through, and Bonnie Langston, who was plumper than I remembered her, rushed over, pressing her dimpled hand to her lips and suppressing a grin when she spotted the scarf tied around Mother's hand.

“I find white gauze boring,” Mother told her.

Bonnie led us to a table in the exact middle of the room. And yes, every islander in there twisted around to stare at Mother's hibiscus-covered hand. Conversations died in midsentence.

And then, like Bonnie, people began to smile.

After we had studied our menus, Kat said, “Jessie, you've been here—what? Two weeks?”

“Two and a half.”

“I was wondering if Hugh might be coming for a visit anytime soon.”

“No,” I said, remembering what Benne had told her and feeling monumentally awkward. “He has his practice, you know. He can't just leave.”

“Even for the weekend?”

“He's usually on call then.”

I narrowed my eyes at Benne. For all I knew, she might clink her spoon on her water glass and announce to a hushed room that I was in love with a monk from the abbey.
St. Sin.

Kat gestured at a mason jar that sat on the table beside the salt and pepper shakers. Half filled with quarters and dimes, it was labeled
DOG FOOD DONATIONS
. “Would you look at this? Bonnie is collecting money for Max's dog food.”

Gazing around the room, I noticed a jar on every table.

“She probably uses it to buy all those damn Precious Moments figurines she has all over her B and B,” Kat went on. “I mean, where
is
all this imaginary dog food she supposedly buys with it?” She put her hand on Mother's arm. “Nelle, you remember that time about a hundred years ago when we ordered six cases of dog food for the first Max? It was from some pet place in Charleston, and they sent all that
cat
food over on the ferry?”

Mother tilted her head, and you could see the memory break the surface of her thoughts and spill into her face. I watched the sheen in her eyes grow, beaming around the table like a sweep of brightness from a lighthouse. She laughed, and all of us stopped to admire the sound.

“Max ate every bit of it,” she said. “He loved it, as I recall.”

Kat leaned in close to her. “Yeah, he started acting very feline after that. All independent and condescending, chasing mice and spitting up hair balls.”

Mother said, “Remember that time the first Max ate a piece of rope, and Kat and I ran down to the ferry and told Shem he had to take us across right then, because we had an emergency. You remember that, Kat?”

She was almost chirping. The floral bouquet of her hand waved in the air. I sat there in a state of confused wonder—we all did—as if we were witnessing the miracle of birth happening to someone we didn't know was pregnant.

She went on, “Shem said he couldn't make an unscheduled ferry run for a dog. I thought Kat was going to assault him. So he says, ‘Okay, ladies, calm down, I'll take you,' and halfway across, Max threw up the rope and was perfectly fine.”

Her face was aglitter.
Who is this woman?

No one moved. Mother took a breath and picked up the story. “Well, we had made such a big deal about it, we hated to tell him, ‘Oh, never mind,' so we pretended it was touch and go and spent a few hours walking Max around McClellanville before catching the ferry back.”

Bonnie appeared then and took our lunch orders. After she left, Hepzibah said, “What about that time, Nelle, we went over to the abbey to help you wash and wax St. Senara's statue, and Max came along—I believe it was the Max before this one. You remember that?”

Mother tossed back her head and laughed with the most breathtaking hilarity, then said to me, “After we got St. Senara all cleaned, Max hiked his leg on her.”

She seemed to have dropped through a crack in time, and it was the Nelle from thirty-four years ago. The one she'd lost or killed off.

I didn't want the reminiscing to stop. “Remember the All-Girls Picnics?” I said.

“The All-Girls Picnics!” Kat cried. “Now, that was the most fun any three women ever had.”

Hepzibah said, “This is the second time today I've agreed with you, Kat. I'm starting to worry about myself.”

“And that time you found the turtle skull out in the water—remember that?” I said, looking at Hepzibah.

“Of course I do. I'm just surprised you do.”

“I always loved that skull,” I said, then slapped my hands together. “We should do it again—have an All-Girls Picnic.”

“We
should,
” Kat said. “What a fine idea!”

Benne, who was sitting next to Mother, leaned over to her and, cupping her hand around her mouth, whispered loud enough for everyone at the table to hear, “You said you would never go to an All-Girls Picnic again.”

Mother glanced around the table. The glint, I noticed, was beginning to leave her eyes.

“That was a long time ago, Benne,” said Hepzibah. “People change their minds. Don't they, Nelle?”

“I can't,” she said.

I reached for her hand as if I might pull her back to us. “But why?”

Benne piped up again. “She didn't want to have fun after your daddy died. Remember? She said, ‘It's a travesty for me to be out there dancing and carrying on after what happened.'”

I shot Kat a look as if to say, Would you shut her up? Kat reached into the breadbasket and handed Benne a biscuit.

“Dad would've
wanted
you to keep having the picnics,” I said.

Mother ran her hand up and down her glass of sweet tea.

“Come on, Nelle, do it for us. It'll be a hoot,” said Kat.

“We'll invite Max,” Hepzibah added.

Mother shrugged. I could see a sequin or two of light still floating in her eyes. “But no dancing,” she said. “I don't want any dancing.”

“We'll sit on the blanket and just talk, like we're doing now,” said Kat. “If anybody dances, we'll shoot her.”

Bonnie appeared with our lunches, plates of fried oysters and shrimp, crab cakes, red rice, and the black-eyed pea and grits cakes she was famous for. As we ate and talked, the old Nelle receded completely, but I knew that some remnant of my bygone mother still existed, and I felt for the first time that she might be fished up out of her madness, at least partially.

Across the room the door opened, and the little bell made a spangly sound that rippled across the room. I turned instinctively.

He stood just inside the door, his almond-brown head bowed toward the tiles on the floor as if he'd dropped a coin. He looked up with his eyes half closed and scanned the tables, and I felt my heart tumble and crash.

It was Hugh.