The Mermaid Chair (26 page)

Last night, desperate to alleviate his anguish, he'd tried to look at what Jessie had done not as a husband but as a psychiatrist. The impulse was ludicrous, but the analytical thinking had given him a hallowed hour or two of distance from his torment. It had aerated his emotions, generated a measure of perspective. He was grateful for every small mercy.

What he'd done was go to his study and flip around in various books, reading and jotting notes. Over and over he'd come across the same idea—not the least bit unfamiliar to him—that when a person was in need of cataclysmic change, of a whole new center in the personality, for instance, his or her psyche would induce an infatuation, an erotic attachment, an intense falling-in-love.

He knew this. Every analyst knew it. Falling in love was the oldest, most ruthless catalyst on earth.

But typically you fell in love with something missing in yourself that you recognized in the other person, yet he couldn't grasp what Jessie had seen in this supposedly spiritual man that could capture her so profoundly.

After almost an hour of this kind of thing, he'd shoved his notes back in the drawer and returned to bed. It had suddenly felt like a lot of abstract drivel. He didn't want to apply any of it to Jessie. He didn't want to bring the grace of understanding into it. Her reasons were unforgivable, no matter how powerful they were.

His wife had been with another man. She had betrayed him, and even if she came to him begging, he didn't know if he could ever take her back.

“Dr. Sullivan?” his patient said.

He had pivoted away from her toward the window, his elbow on the chair arm, his chin on his fist, and was staring at the outline of the Bradford pear tree flowering profusely against the pane. His eyes were burning with tears.

Turning toward the woman, he felt intense embarrassment. She handed him the tissue box she'd been cradling, and he took one and awkwardly dabbed at his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he said. He shook his head, astonished at himself.

“No, please,” she said, crossing her hands one on top of the other at her neck. “Don't apologize. I'm…I'm touched.”

She thought his tears were for her. For her dachshund. She was smiling at him, awestruck by his godlike heart. He didn't know how to tell her his emotion had nothing to do with her, that in fact he was being the worst possible psychiatrist at the moment.

“We all fail one another,” he said.

The woman's eyes widened as she cast around for his meaning.

“I have failed my wife,” he added.

Jessie had failed him, yes, horribly, but he'd failed her, too. He had carelessly glossed over her. He had not given her the small kindness of letting her grow into herself.

“I have failed…people,” the woman said, as if he were trying out an innovative new approach, and she was joining in.

“You mean your brother?” he said gently, and heard the sob break loose in her and fill the room.

I
brought Mother home from the hospital on St. Senara's Day, Saturday, April 30, a day flooded with brightness.

After thirteen days in the hospital, Mother had made enough progress to come home, which seemed to mean she was medicated enough not to hurt herself again. According to the nurse, she'd been pleasant without exhibiting aberrant behavior but had refused to open up. “These things take time,” the nurse had explained, then given me a slightly patronizing talk on the importance of Mother's coming back weekly to see her psychiatrist and faithfully swallowing her pills.

As I boarded the ferry early that morning, preparations for St. Senara's Day were already under way. One of the monks was on all fours at the edge of the dock laying out a rectangle of coral-colored carpet on which the mermaid chair would sit after its winding procession from the abbey. When I was a girl, the carpet had invariably been red, though one year it had turned up pink and fringed, with the suspicious look of a bath mat, which set off a small controversy.

A folding table had been set up, and Shem's wife, Mary Eva, was setting out boxes of Mermaid Tears, which would be thrown into the sea during the ceremony.

Crossing the bay, I thought of the Mermaid Tears I'd kept on top of the crab trap in Whit's hermitage. I hadn't been out there since Mother had gone to the hospital, nor had I seen Whit—not once in two weeks. I'd sent him a note, passed along by Kat, explaining I would be spending my days at the hospital with Mother and wouldn't be able to see him for a while.

He had not sent a note back. He had not walked to the edge of Mother's backyard and looked over the brick wall and called me out of the house. I was there alone each night, and he didn't come. Maybe he suspected that my note didn't tell the whole story. Perhaps he'd detected the sadness beneath my words.

The morning after I'd confessed my affair to Hugh, I'd found his wedding ring on the pincushion along with mine, and no trace of him in the house. I'd rushed out, wanting to catch him at the ferry dock before he left the island, but by the time I reached the slave cemetery, I thought better of it. I remembered the way he'd recoiled, almost violently, when I'd reached for him, the rage in his voice when he'd told me to get away. He had said it with his teeth clenched. His eyes had looked so pained, so shocked, I did not recognize him. It seemed now I could at least spare him the fresh sight of me. I could do that much for him. Depression had descended then like a great fatigue, and I'd sat down beside the graves and watched a dove scratch the dirt, making small, neglected sounds that were heartbreaking to me. It was as if someone had suddenly handed me a huge stone, the weight of all the suffering I'd caused, and said,
Here, you must carry this now.

So I had. These thirteen days.

It is still hard for me to understand, much less explain, the descent that comes with necessary loss, how requisite it is. It came to me like the darkening of the day.

It wasn't that I rued what I'd done, that I wanted a reversal of some kind; I would not have taken back the way my loving Whit had impregnated me with life, with myself, the hundred ways I'd been broken and made larger. It's that I
saw
the effect of it. I saw it in the immortal hurt in Hugh's eyes, in the bracelet Dee had woven for him, in the unbearable ceremony our rings were performing on the pincushion.

Each morning I'd left the island and returned in the late afternoon. I'd sat with Mother in what they called the dayroom. With its television and sofas and strange, shuffling people, it had reminded me of Dante's
Purgatorio,
which I'd read in school. The only part of the story I remembered was the inhabitants lugging huge stones around a mountain.

I'd watched the medicines make Mother docile, watched everything from a place of fallowness and grief, always going back to the moment when Hugh saw through it all and posed his question. It stupefied me daily that I'd answered him without hesitation, using Whit's monk name. As if underscoring his spiritual credentials. As if that somehow made what we were doing loftier.

Mother had sat each day with her body slackened on the chair, moving her fingers around the Rubik's Cube that I'd brought her from home. She'd asked me so many times about her finger I'd finally brought that, too. I'd washed it under the faucet one night, forcing myself to hold the lost piece of her in my palm and scrub the bloodstains. I'd brought it to her in a mason jar, submerged in rubbing alcohol so it wouldn't putrefy. I'd gotten permission for her to keep it in her room, but just in case, I'd written
DO NOT THROW AWAY
on the side of the jar.

In the evenings I'd given progress reports to Kat and Hepzibah on the phone, warmed soup from the cans in the pantry, and listened to the endless soliloquy of sadness and blame that went on and on inside me. Whenever I thought of Whit, I'd longed to be with him, but I didn't know anymore whether my wanting came from love or the simple need to be comforted.

Despite that, I couldn't let myself be with him yet. It seemed perverse to make love with him given the freshness of the pain Hugh was in, that we were both in. No doubt it was illogical, but I felt I was abstaining out of respect for the death of my marriage.

Mother seemed excited as we left the hospital that afternoon. Inside the rental car, she pulled down the sun visor and dragged a comb through her white hair, then astonished me by dabbing on her old fire-engine red lipstick. She blotted her lips on a gas receipt she found on the seat. It was a gesture of such normalcy that I smiled at her. “You look nice,” I said, worried for a moment that she might respond by wiping the color off her lips, but she'd smiled back.

The ferry was crammed with tourists; not even standing room was left. Mother clutched the jar that held her finger like a child bringing a goldfish home from the store. I had wrapped it in a paper towel fastened with a rubber band, but she still got a few curious looks from the passengers.

As we got closer, I could see the line of shrimp trawlers already forming on the southeast side of the island, out on the Atlantic. “It's St. Senara's Day,” I said to Mother.

“You think I don't know that?” she snapped.

She had not gone to the festivities since Dad died. As she had with the All-Girls Picnics, she'd simply eradicated them from her life. Her abolishing this one, however, had genuinely puzzled me. Senara was, after all,
her
saint.

Kat met us at the dock, smelling like the lavender lotion she used. Not Benne, just Kat. She kissed Mother on the cheek.

I hadn't expected her.

Mother inspected the dock, the boxes of Mermaid Tears, as well as a small table from the monastery with a silver cruet on top—the one used year after year to splash seawater across the mermaid chair. I watched her eyes search for the coral carpet at the dock's edge. Max was stretched out on it as if the rug had been put there specifically for him.

She stared at the wedge of carpet with something like revulsion in her face, and I imagined she was picturing the mermaid chair sitting on top of it.

“Let's take a walk,” Kat said, grasping Mother by the arm. “You, too, Jessie.”

She whisked Mother across the dock, down to the sidewalk where I'd left the golf cart. I was about to slide behind the wheel, but Kat guided Mother on past it. I set her suitcase down on the seat and followed.

I remember being aware of a small passing dread and pushing it aside. I didn't ask where we were going; I think I was under the impression Kat wanted to distract Mother from the moment on the dock when she'd seen the rug. I trailed behind them, along the row of shops, past Caw Caw General and the Island Dog B&B, listening to Kat ply Mother with harmless questions. The smell of fried shrimp coming from Max's Café was so thick the air felt oily.

I checked my watch. It was five in the afternoon, the light slumping, the clouds veined with red. The day was taking on the first bloodshot look of sunset. The festivities would begin at six, when every monk and islander who could walk would come pouring onto the dock behind the mermaid chair. Leading the parade, the abbot would be decked out in chasuble and stole and carrying his crosier. And somewhere in all that hoopla would be Whit.

Beneath the striped awning of the Mermaid's Tale, Kat paused and, using her key, opened the door. The sign in the window said
CLOSED
. Absurd as this sounds, not even then did it cross my mind that our stroll might have some purpose other than diverting Mother from whatever horrible old memory had settled over her back on the dock.

Stepping inside the shop behind them, listening to the sounds on the street seep away, I noticed Hepzibah, Shem, and Father Dominic standing at the rear of the store near the cash register. Back there with the boat-wreck picture I'd painted when I was eleven—the flames beneath the water, all the happy sea creatures. Dominic was not wearing his robe or his hat, but instead a suit with his priest's collar. Shem, flushed and constrained looking, had his arms folded across his barrel of a chest and his hands stuck under his armpits, as if someone had forced him here at gunpoint.

Apparently catching sight of them at the same moment as I, Mother stopped in the middle of the store. She stood paralyzed, surrounded by Kat's great convocation of mermaids. They hung over her from the ceiling in the form of aluminum wind chimes and flanked her on all sides in an array of ceramic sculptures, necklaces, soap carvings, candles, and beach towels. I watched her begin to take small steps backward across the floor.

Hepzibah hurried toward her with a funny mixture of determination and reluctance in her face, that look of moving toward what
must
be done. She lassoed Mother with both her arms, stopping her in her tracks. “It's going to be all right, Nelle. I promise you. We're just going to have a talk, okay?”

Even now that image never leaves me—Mother standing in the dark circle of Hepzibah's arms not moving a muscle, clasping her jar with excruciating stillness.

There were two sharp clicks, and I realized Kat had locked the door behind us. I swung around to her then. “For heaven's sake. What's all this
about?
”

Groping for my hands, Kat held them tightly in front of her. “I'm sorry, Jessie,” she said. “I haven't been honest with you. I'm an obstinate, know-it-all, damn idiot of a woman who thought I was doing the right thing, and I guess what I've done is to make it worse.”

I drew my head back slightly, taking in her face. It had the look of ice about to break. Her eyes were tightened, her mouth hitched to the side to keep from crying, and I knew what it must've taken for her to say these words. I felt myself bracing for what lay behind them.

“It's just…I swear to you, I didn't think Nelle was as bad off as she was.”

“But why are we
here?
”

“The day we were up there in the hospital waiting room, I realized if I didn't at least try to get everything out in the open, Nelle was going to end up bleeding to death one night. If re-membering is what she needs, like you and Hugh said, then okay, by God, we're going to sit here and remember.”

My mind spun. It was slowly dawning on me: Kat, Hepzibah, Dominic, Shem—all of them knew. They knew the reason Mother had mutilated herself, why my father's death had more or less ended my mother's life, too. Even why his pipe was buried in her drawer and not in the ocean. These things had been like hibernating cicadas that live in the ground for seventeen years and then one day, when the circadian wheel turns, all come crawling up into the light of day.

I glanced back at Dominic, who met my gaze, lifting the sides of his mouth in a tempered smile, trying to reassure me.

They'd known for thirty-three years. When I was a little girl and had painted the boat wreck, when I'd gathered roses in the monastery garden and scattered them like my father's ashes across the island. Every time I'd come back to visit, they had known.

Hepzibah had settled Mother into one of the folding chairs near the counter. The jar, I noticed, had been tugged away from her and stood between the cash register and a display of sugarless gum. Mother sat with what struck me as remarkable resignation.

Hepzibah had not worn any kind of headdress today, but had done her hair in cornrows. I stared at her a moment as she worked a finger along the little hedges, her other hand patting Mother's arm. The last time I'd sat over there, Kat, Hepzibah, and Benne had been eating butter pecan ice cream.

Standing at the door next to Kat, I considered for the first time that what they were doing—this so-called
remembering,
as Kat had put it—might not be good for Mother. I couldn't believe that I, of all people, was thinking this, after everything I'd had to say, but what if the truth overwhelmed her, caused her to break down again, to curl up in a ball on the floor?

I leaned over to Kat, keeping my voice low. “I want Mother to confront things as much as anyone does, but is
this
the right way to go about it? I mean, she just got out of the hospital.”

“I called Hugh this morning,” Kat said.