The Mermaid Chair (24 page)

“How nice that she made it for you,” I said. “What was the occasion?”

He looked uncomfortable. “April tenth.”

His birthday.
I'd forgotten. But even if I'd remembered, I doubted I would've called. Considering. “Happy birthday,” I offered.

“I missed our Follies this year,” he said. “Maybe next year.” He settled the full force of his gaze on me. It was laden with the unspoken question of
“next year.”

“Follies?” Kat said. “Now, that sounds fascinating.”

“We need to talk about Mother,” I said with obvious discomfort, such a transparent evasion tactic that he smiled slightly.

I glanced at the blank commitment papers lying in the empty chair next to mine. They carried the presence of a full-blooded person sitting there, a dismal, menacing person needing attention.

Hugh reached over and picked them up. There were small Band-Aids on the insides of both his thumbs. Tiller blisters. Proof he'd been trying to plow through. I watched as he skimmed the pages, staring at his hands. For a strange second, it seemed my whole marriage was visible in them. In the tufts of hair near his wrists, the lines on his palms, his fingers filled with memories of touching me. The mystery of what held people together was right there.

“Okay,” he said, lowering the papers to his lap. “Let's talk about her.”

I started at the beginning. “The night I arrived on the island, I found Mother burying her finger beside St. Senara's statue—you remember me telling you about that.”

Hugh nodded.

“I asked her why she'd cut it off, and she started to tell me—you know, the way you say something before you remember it's a secret. She mentioned Dad's name and Father Dominic's and then, realizing what she'd said, stopped and wouldn't go on. So obviously Dominic is involved somehow.” I glanced at Kat. “Of course, Kat disagrees with me.”

She didn't defend herself; in part I'd said it just to see if she might. She merely stared back at me, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

“Did you ask this Father Dominic about it?” Hugh said.

“Yes, and he suggested to me that some things are better off left secret.”

Hugh was leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Okay, forget Dominic for the moment. Why do
you
think she's cutting off her fingers? You've been with her for over two months. What's your gut say?”

My gut?
I was momentarily speechless. Hugh was asking
me
for a gut feeling, and on something about which he was the expert. Before, he'd always brusquely given me his clinical opinion—very textbook, right out of the
DSM III
—and dismissed what I'd thought.

“I have a feeling it goes back to something she thinks she's done,” I said, measuring my words, wanting so much to say it right. “Something having to do with my father, and it's so awful it has driven her crazy, literally. I believe that her insane need to butcher herself is a way of doing penance. She's trying to atone.”

I remember how Kat looked away and shook her head slightly, like people do when they're disbelieving.

I was determined to convince her, as much as Hugh. I quoted the Scripture that says if your right hand offends you, it's better to cut it off than to have your whole body cast into hell.

“Do you have any idea what sin Nelle is trying to expunge?” Hugh asked.

Kat brought her hand to her forehead and rubbed a patch of redness into her skin. I saw that her eyes looked wide and, yes, scared.

I started to answer that it had occurred to me more than once that Mother and Dominic might have had an affair, but I caught myself. There was no way I could say that. It was too close to my own truth. And what evidence did I have anyway? How Dominic had asked my mother if she would ever forgive them? That he'd written an unmonklike paragraph in his little booklet, suggesting that erotic love was every bit as spiritual as divine love? That St. Eudoria, whom Mother may have been emulating, was a prostitute?

I shrugged. “I don't know. But penance is only part of it. I think she believes she can bring about some kind of redemption by doing this.”

“What do you mean, ‘redemption'?” Kat asked.

I told them about the two books Mother had gotten out of the monastery library. The stories of St. Eudoria, who cut off her finger and planted it in a field, and Sedna, whose ten severed fingers fell into the ocean and turned into the first sea creatures.

As I talked, I kept looking at Hugh to see if he was taking what I said with a grain of salt or whether he thought it really had merit. I didn't want to care what he thought, but I did. I wanted him to say,
Yes, yes, you have seen through to the truth. You have done this for your mother.

“That's what I mean about redemption,” I said. “I think all this dismembering she's doing is really about her need to grow something, or make a new world, to re-member herself back in a new way.”

Dismembering and re-membering. The idea had only just occurred to me that moment.

“Interesting,” Hugh said, and when I rolled my eyes, thinking he'd dismissed me, he shook his head. “No, I mean it
is
interesting, more than interesting.”

He offered me a sad, disappointed smile. “I used to say that, didn't I, as a way of glossing over what you said?”

Kat got up and wandered to the other side of the room, where she rummaged purposelessly through her purse.

“We both did things,” I told him.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

I didn't know what to say. He wanted me to reach out to him, to say,
Yes, next year we'll have the Follies…. I've made a vast mistake. I want to come home.
And I couldn't.

I had thought our life together was vouchsafed. It was one of those unpremeditated facts I'd lived with every single day. Like the sun going through its motions—coming and going, an automaton. Like the stars fixed in the Milky Way. Who questions these things? They just are. I'd thought we would be buried together. Side by side in a nice cemetery in Atlanta. Or that our cremated remains would sit in matching urns in Dee's house until she found it in herself to go out and scatter them. Once I'd imagined her hauling the urns all the way to Egret Island and tossing handfuls of us in the air on Bone Yard Beach. I'd pictured the wind whipping us together in a blizzard of indistinguishable particles—Hugh and me flying to the sky, returning to the earth, together. And Dee walking away with bits of us in her hair. What was the mysterious and enduring thing that had made me so certain of us for so long? Where had it gone?

I looked at his hands. The silence was terrible.

He ended it himself.

“If you're right about Nelle, Jessie—and you really could be—then maybe the key is simply remembering, recalling the past in a way that allows her to face it. That can be very healing sometimes.”

He placed the commitment papers back on the empty chair. “Are you going to sign?”

When I scrawled my name, Kat held her head in her hands and didn't look at me.

 

Hugh came back to Egret Island with me that evening, taking his suitcase into Mike's old room while I went straight to the bathroom and filled the tub with steaming water. Kat had insisted on staying overnight at the hospital, that I be the one to go home. Tomorrow Mother would be transported to the psychiatric unit at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Hugh had agreed to be there when I checked her in and met with the psychiatrist. I felt grateful to him.

I slid down into the water, going all the way under, and lay as still as I could, so motionless I began to hear my heart resounding through the water. I held my breath and thought of those World War II movies where the submarine hides on the bottom of the ocean, shut down except for the
ping, ping
of the sonar, everyone holding his breath, waiting to see if the Japanese would hear it. I felt like that, as if my heart might give me away.

Maybe next year,
Hugh had said. The words made my chest start to hurt.

The Follies—the “Psychiatric Follies,” as we facetiously called them—were Hugh's favorite birthday present. In some ways I think they were the highlight of his year.

I'd overheard Dee trying to describe the Follies once to Heather: “See, Mom and I put on a show for my dad. We make up a song about his work, about hypnotizing somebody and not being able to wake them up, or having an Oedipus complex, something like that.”

Heather had screwed up her nose. “Your family is weird.”

“I
know,
” Dee had said, as if this were a great big compliment.

Surfacing, I lay in the tub with the water just under my nostrils and felt the wrench of knowing that even though Dee was away at college this year, she'd probably remembered the Follies but hadn't mentioned them to me when we'd talked, for reasons I was afraid to know. Hugh had told her about us, I was sure of it. And yet she'd said nothing.

Dee had been the one who'd started the Follies, though I'd been her inspiration, I guess you'd say. It began when I'd gotten my hair cut at a salon over in Buckhead. There had been a bowl of Godiva chocolates at the entrance, and, standing beside it, I'd fidgeted with my watch, an inexpensive Timex with an expandable band. I did that sometimes, sliding it on and off my wrist the way someone twirls her hair or taps a pencil. Later, when I left, I'd reached for a chocolate, and there it was: My watch was in the candy bowl.

“Isn't that odd?” I'd said at dinner that night, relating the incident to Hugh and Dee, only making conversation, but Hugh had perked right up.

“It's a Freudian slip,” he said.

“What's that?” asked Dee, only thirteen then.

“It's when you say or do something without being aware of it,” Hugh told her. “Something that's got a hidden meaning.”

He leaned forward, and I saw it coming—the god-awful Freudian-slip joke. “Like when you say one thing and mean
a-mother,
” he said.

“That's funny,” Dee said. “But what did it mean when Mom took off her watch like that?”

He looked at me, and I felt momentarily like a lab rat. Pointing his fork in my direction, he said, “She wanted to remove herself from the constraints of time. It's a classic fear of death.”

“Oh,
please,
” I said.

“You know what I think?” said Dee, and Hugh and I sat up, expecting something precocious. “I think Mom just left her watch in the candy bowl.”

Dee and I burst into conspiratorial laughter.

It had escalated from there. Fear of Death became FOD, and we teased him without mercy. That year Dee wrote a farcical song about FOD and enlisted me to sing it with her on his birthday, to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and so began the Psychiatric Follies. No one loved them more than Hugh.

Around March he would start bugging the hell out of us to reveal the theme. Last year Dee had written an opus to her own original tune, called “Penis Envy: The Musical.”

We performed it in the living room, pregnant with sofa pillows that were stuffed under our shirts, doing choreographed steps and gestures worthy of the Supremes. An hour later Hugh was still laughing. I'd felt then there was so much glue between us that nothing could splinter it.

Now, in the little bathroom, I rubbed the bar of soap over my arms and studied the square pink tiles on the wall. Mike had hated sharing what he'd called “the girly bathroom.” The same pale pink organdy curtains hung in the small window, dingy now to the point of appearing orange. I shampooed my hair, scrubbed my skin.

When I'd signed the commitment papers, I'd had to write the date. April 17. It had made me think of Whit.
The first year we'll celebrate our anniversary monthly on the seventeenth,
I'd told him.

I wished I could call him. I knew that earlier today, even though it was Sunday, he would've been at the rookery. I pictured him arriving at the dock, spotting the red canoe, and glancing around for me. I wondered if he'd waited awhile for me to show up before setting out, whether he'd sat on the bank where he'd washed my feet and listened for the quiet sound of my paddle. Perhaps by vespers, before the rule had folded them all back into wordless silence till the morning, the news about Nelle had spread across the island and spilled over the brick abbey wall. Maybe he knew why I hadn't come to him.