The Mermaid Chair (28 page)

“Do you know what dead finger is, Jessie?” said Kat.

I turned to her, startled.
“What?”
I sat there stupidly thinking she must be referring to Mother's finger in the jar on the counter. The room was utterly still.

“Dead finger,” she repeated. She said it with softness, with kindness. “It's a plant. It's from the nightshade family.” She looked at me quizzically to see if I grasped her meaning. “It's very poisonous,” she added.

I understood instantly—my father had died from ingesting some kind of toxic plant.

I stood up, shaking my head. How do you suddenly revise images and understandings you've carried in the cells of your body for thirty-three years?

I walked to the counter and leaned on the worn wood, lowering my head into my hands. “Dead finger,” I said, realizing the name had started all Mother's warped reasons for mutilating herself.

Hepzibah came and stood beside me. She touched my shoulder. “It used to grow around the slave cemetery. It still crops up sometimes if I'm not careful. It's a shrub with fuzzy leaves and grayish white blossoms shaped like fingers, and it has a terrible rotting odor. You've probably seen it on the island.”

“No,” I said, still cradling my head, not wanting to picture it.

“It's more merciful than other nightshades. Back in the forties and fifties, people here used it to put their pets out of their misery. Your father died peacefully, Jessie. He fell asleep, and he didn't wake up.”

I turned around to Mother, who appeared tranquil but spent. “How did you know what to do? I didn't think you knew anything about plants.”

She didn't answer. What she did was to look at Kat and then at Hepzibah.

They had been part of it, too.

“You helped her,” I said, looking from one to the other.

Kat glanced at the floor, then back at me. “We did it because your father asked us. He came to each one of us—to Shem and Dominic, too—begging our help the same way he did your mother's. We loved Joe. We would've done anything for him, but none of us arrived at this easily.”

I looked at Dominic, confused. Why would my father make
him
part of this? Kat and Hepzibah, I understood. They were devoted to Mother, and Dad would've known how much she would need them afterward. Shem had been his best friend. But Dominic…

He read my expression. “Come, sit down,” Dominic told me, and waited while I went and lowered myself into the chair. “Joe came to me one day and said he was going to die, that it would be a long, horrible death and he couldn't put himself through it, much less his family. He said he would like to leave this life sitting in the mermaid chair. He wanted to sit in the holiest spot on the island, surrounded by his wife and his friends.”

Dominic couldn't have said anything in the world that would've surprised me more—or at the same time seemed more natural, truer to my father.

“Your father was a charming man,” he said. “He had what I would call an imaginative sense of humor, and he used it even then. He told me with a grin that God once sent real live mermaids to his boat, which, he pointed out, was surely a sign that when he died, he should be sitting in the chair holding on to them. But mostly what he wanted was—” Dominic looked at Mother. “He wanted to sit in the chair because it needed to be a holy place for Nelle's sake. I was supposed to be the officiant—you know, preside over his dying, give him last rites, then absolve Nelle and the rest of us. I told him no at first. I was the last holdout.”

I was still trying to reconfigure my father's dying—change the pictures, the accompanying feelings. I tried to imagine him sitting in the mermaid chair, staring into Mother's face, slowly slipping into a coma. Had I been asleep in my bed while all of this happened? Had he come to my room to say good-bye? A fragment of memory hung in my head like a little green fruit that had never ripened: opening my eyes, seeing him standing by my bed. The whirly girl he'd peeled for me earlier that evening sat browning on my bedside table, and I watched him reach out and touch it with his fingers.

“Daddy?” My voice was woozy with sleep.

“Shhh,” he said. “It's okay.”

He knelt on the floor and sliding his arm under my shoulders, held me against his chest, my cheek crushed against the rough nap of his corduroy shirt. He smelled of pipe tobacco and apples.

“Jessie,” he said. “My little Whirly Girl.”

I was sure I heard the soft sound of his crying. He sang my name over and over, soft against my ear, before lowering me back to my pillow, back into the fuzzy world of my dreams.

I'd always known these things had taken place. As a child, every time I'd sung my name across the empty marsh I'd known. I'd just never understood until now that they'd happened on the night he died.

I was holding the sides of my chair. I was trying to keep myself there.

“Why did you change your mind?” I asked Dominic.

“Joe was determined,” he said. “And not just charming but shrewd. He let me know he was going to take his life whether I helped or not, but that it would be so much better for Nelle if I did. I realized I could either stand on dogma and turn my back or I could take something terrible and inevitable and bestow a little mercy on it. I decided to try to help the situation.”

I started to say the obvious, that gathering around a holy relic, and Dominic's absolution of Mother, hadn't helped her much in the end, but how did I know? Maybe it had kept her saner than she would've been otherwise.

“The boat,” I said. “Was he even on it?”

Shem, who'd not said a word since we'd sat down, looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “He was on it. I took him to his boat myself—that old Chris-Craft of his—and laid him inside it. It was tied up at my dock.”

The
Jes-Sea.

It occurred to me suddenly that Shem had been involved not because he was a close friend but because he knew how to make the boat explode, to make it seem like an accident.

Shem looked at Mother, as if asking whether he should go on. The last few minutes, she'd been quiet and drawn into herself, sagged down into the chair. “Nelle?” Shem said, and she nodded at him.

I watched him take a breath. As he exhaled, his chin quivered. “Joe had already filled the bilge with gasoline and tied the steering wheel so it would take him straight out into the bay. That night after I laid him down inside it, I cranked the boat and left it in neutral while I disconnected the battery cable. Then I throttled it up to ten miles an hour and untied the boat cleat. When it hit choppy water, the loose cable began to bounce around and threw a spark. The boat exploded before it got two hundred yards.”

“But why go to all those lengths just to make it look like an accident? That's crazy.”

Mother glared at me like her old combative self. “That was the most important thing to your father. He wanted it that way for you, so don't you dare say it was crazy.”

I walked over and squatted beside her chair.

It was a relief to me that she could be angry, that there was something left inside her.

“What do you mean, he wanted it that way for
me?
”

She tilted her face down to mine and I saw her eyes filling up again. “He said his dying would be hard on you, but living with his suicide would be a thousand times worse. He couldn't bear your thinking he'd abandoned you.”

The room grew quiet.

Somewhere in the mangled remnants of childhood that were left inside me, I knew that what my father had done had been for
me,
for his Whirly Girl, and I didn't know how to bear the weight of that—the merciless blame of his sacrifice.

I closed my eyes and heard my father singing my name soft against my ear. Singing his good-bye.

Jessie Jessie Jessie.

As long as he lived, he did not forget my name.

I dropped my head straight down onto my mother's lap and sobbed my grief into her thin cotton skirt. I could feel the hard, lacy border of her slip press against my forehead. This was supposed to be about Mother emptying out all the dark pockets inside and sorting the contents. It was supposed to be about her remembering things and maybe somehow putting her broken self back together. And it had come to this. To me bent over her lap, her maimed hand coming up to rest on my head.

 

When we stepped outside onto the sidewalk, the dark blue haze of dusk was everywhere. The mermaid chair's procession had already coursed along the street onto the dock. Climbing into the golf cart, I could see the crowd massed along the rails. I imagined the shrimp boats passing by out on the water with colored lights wound along the raised nets. I pictured the mermaid chair perched on its scrap of coral rug in all that soft, glittering light, freshly splashed and blessed.

Mother sat beside me in the golf cart as we drove through the falling darkness and did not remember she had left her finger on the counter in the store.

I
n May the tides went to work hauling away the dead marsh grass. It drifted along the salt creeks like a constant flotilla of rotting, hay-brown rafts. Early in the mornings, when I knew I would be alone, I stole out to the dock in the rookery. I would stand there with the light soaring across the marsh, filling my nostrils with the egg and sperm smell, and watch the great floating exodus, the immaculate, scouring way nature renews herself.

After I'd learned how my father had died, there was a lifting away of sorrow. I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.

Mother seemed relieved to have the truth come out of its long hibernation. She went on confessing pieces of it to me, usually in the evenings when the day turned dark and grainy and sifted past the windows. She told me that Kat and Hepzibah had boiled batches of the plant leaves and chunks of the root, cooking them down to the consistency of pea soup. My father had insisted on drinking the brew from one of the chalices used during mass. I'm sure he was trying to help my mother understand that dying is a sacrament, too, that there was holiness in the sacrifice he was making, though I'm sure she never understood it.

I'm not at all sure
I
understood it completely. I didn't know if my father had horned in on God's territory and cut the thread that belonged to the Fates…if he'd usurped what wasn't rightly his—the terrifying power to say
when.
Or did he only usurp God's deep heart, laying his life down as a sacrifice, wanting only to take away our suffering? I didn't know if it was hubris or fear or courage or love or all of them.

In the night I dreamed of whales thrusting their sickly bodies onto the shore to die willful deaths. At first I stood there bewildered, screaming for them to go back to the ocean, but in the end I simply walked among them, running my hands along their mountainous backs, easing them toward the mystery they'd chosen.

Mother said my father had held the chalice with both hands and gulped quickly. Later Dominic had sent the cup with Shem to be placed on the boat, fearing that the poison might never be washed out of it. She told me that as he drank, she started to sob, but he'd gone on swallowing until there was no more, and then, looking at her, said, “I didn't just drink my death, Nelle. Try to remember that for me. I drank my life.”

What I most wished was that my mother could somehow have remembered that, as he'd wanted her to.

Hepzibah showed up at the door one day with the jar containing Mother's finger. Mother placed it on a lace handkerchief atop her dresser, between the Mary statue and the photograph of Dad on his boat. Gradually other objects appeared around it—three scallop shells, an old starfish, a sand dollar. It began to look like a small shrine.

I didn't ask her what it meant—it seemed wrong, somehow, to intrude—but I felt she was, in some obscure way, offering her finger to the ocean, hoping it might be transformed into something else, the way Sedna's fingers were.

One night, as the breezes off Bone Yard pulled the scent of the sea through the open windows, I went to Mother's room to say good night. She sat at the dresser, gazing at the finger jar. I let my hand brush across her thumb, touching the scar on her index finger. “I wish you'd tell me why you felt you had to do this to yourself,” I said.

When she looked at me, her eyes were as clear as I'd ever seen them. She said, “Last February, right before Ash Wednesday, I found dead finger growing on the side of the house by the water spigot. I smelled it from the porch. Two little plants. The next day there were three of them. I'd
never
had it grow in my yard once since Joe died, and then there it was. I couldn't stop thinking about it, Jessie. I dreamed the leaves were growing through the windows into the house. I had to do something to make it stop. To make everything stop.”

She lifted her hand to Dad's face in the photograph, and her eyes welled up. “I wanted to make up for what I did. To undo it. I just wanted him back again.”

That was all she said about it. All she would ever say.

She wanted to undo it. She wanted him back.

I don't know if I'll ever understand it. Whatever it was she was trying to do by planting her finger in the rose garden and adorning the jar with sea trinkets, it was more than a sad gesture of atonement. It was a last, desperate reach for him. I believe that what she wanted was to regrow him from all the cleaved, tortured places inside, to re-member him the way he'd been, the way
they'd
been, before everything happened. She wanted to make the guilt and longing stop.

During those days I compulsively painted my father as I imagined he looked that night sitting in the mermaid chair having just drunk his death and his life. Using the photograph on Mother's dresser as a model for his face, I painted him with squinting eyes, his face engraved with weather lines, browned and tough as boot leather—that “old salt” look visible on so many island faces. He sat very tall and regal, as if on a throne, holding the winged mermaids on the chair arms and gazing out at me.

Directly beneath the chair, at the bottom of the canvas, as if down in a subterranean realm under the floor, I painted a rectangular chamber, a secret, magical room. Inside it I painted a little girl.

I worked in the living room and occasionally on the porch, unwilling to hide what I was doing from Mother, who would sit for hours and watch with squeamish wonder as his image came forth, as if observing the birth of a baby.

I felt that way, too, but for different reasons. What I realized was the amazing degree to which my life had been shaped around my father, around his living and dying, the apple peels and the pipe. I saw it clearly as he streamed out from my brushes: Joe Dubois, the hidden, pulsing nucleus around which my life had taken form.

“Who's that in the box under the chair?” Mother asked, peering over my shoulder at the painting.

“I suppose it's me,” I told her, slightly irritated at her use of the word “box.” I hadn't thought of it quite like that, but I saw how true it was.
The little girl was not in a magic room, a lovely room. She was in a box. The same girl who would grow up to express herself through diminutive art boxes.

When I was finished with the portrait, I hung it in my bedroom, where it became almost iconic in its presence, in its ability to speak to me of invisible things. It had never been a secret that I'd idealized my father, that I would've done anything to please him—to be the apple of his eye (to use the worst and most obvious cliché)—but what I didn't quite get until the painting was the sadness of all that trying. I hadn't understood the small, powerless places it had taken me. But even more than this, I had never completely realized how this same thing had gone on with Hugh. I'd accommodated myself to him for twenty years without any real idea of what it was to have possession of my own self. To
own
myself, so to speak.

I felt as if I'd found the fairy-tale pea hidden under the mattress, the thing that had kept the princess tossing all those nights, that had quietly made her black and blue.

I would sit cross-legged on the bed staring at the painting and listening to my tapes on the Walkman, thinking what an ideal father Hugh had been, not just to Dee but to me.
God,
to me, too.

I couldn't imagine what it would be like if I took that away. If I tried to relate to more than his fatherly side. Let him be Hugh. Just Hugh.

On Mother's Day, Dee called. I stood in the kitchen holding the wall phone, leaning against the refrigerator. At first the conversation was all about happy Mother's Day and summer plans. She told me she would not be taking classes but going home to be with her father.

At the mention of Hugh, there was a pause, and then her voice rushed at me, full of anger and incomprehension. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” It was such a stupid thing to say.

“You know what I mean!” she shouted. “You left him. And you didn't even tell me.” I could hear her crying, these horrible muffled sounds far away.

“Oh, Dee, I'm sorry.” It became one of those songs you sing in rounds.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

“Why?” she pleaded. “Why?”

“I don't know how to explain any of this to you.”

In my head I could hear Whit in the boat that day, the precise words he'd used.
I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean.
He'd called that aloneness
a solitude of being.

“Try,”
she said.

There was only so much I could say to her. I drew a breath. “This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren't really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn't dig down to it.”

Her silence after I'd spoken was a relief to me. I let myself slide down the refrigerator until I was sitting on the floor.

Back there, somewhere, I'd lost the solitude of being that told me who I was. The whole mystery of myself. I'd been incapable of wearing the earth on my arms and legs, of diving and surfacing in my own erotic depths.

“Don't you love Dad anymore?” Dee asked.

“Of course I do. Of course. How could I not love him?” I didn't know why I was saying this to her. How much of it was placation, how much true.

Hugh and I had gone through our days with such good intentions, but with the imagination leaking out of our togetherness. We'd become exceptionally functional partners in the business of making a life. Even in the hidden business of being what the other one needed: good father, good daughter, little girl in a box. All those ghosts that hide in the cracks of a relationship.

It seemed right to have destroyed all that. Not to have hurt Hugh; I would always be sorry for that.

“Are you staying there all summer?” Dee asked.

“I don't know,” I told her. “I just know that I—” I didn't know whether to say it, whether she wanted to hear it.

“That you love me,” she said, which was exactly the thing I was going to say.

 

I showed up at the monastery in the middle of May. The heat had descended in typical fashion—all at once, an oppressive, woolen canopy pitched across the island overnight. It would not be lifted until October.

Approaching the Reception Center, I saw a dozen monks sitting on the wide lawn in the abbey quadrangle hand-tying cast nets. They were spread out in orderly exactitude like chess pieces on a great green board, each with a heap of cotton twine in his lap. I paused, taken back momentarily to my childhood, those days when the monks fled the scourging heat of the Net House for the breezes coming off the marsh.

“The air conditioner quit on them,” a voice said, and I turned to find the bald monk I'd met that day in the gift shop when I'd bought Dominic's book. He frowned at me from his huge Jack Benny glasses. It took me a moment to remember his name. Father Sebastian. The humorless one. The one who kept the monastery on the straight and narrow.

“I don't know how you get through the summer in these robes,” I replied.

“It's a small sacrifice we make,” he said. “People don't want to make sacrifices anymore.” The steady way he gazed at me, emphasizing the word “sacrifices,” gave me an odd feeling, and I thought suddenly of my father.

I turned to stare again at the monks on the grass.

“Are you looking for Brother Thomas?” he asked.

I whirled around. “No, why would I?” I was stunned by his question, and I'm sure it showed on my face.

“You don't really want me to answer that, do you?” he said.

How could he possibly know about Whit and me? I couldn't believe Whit would have confided in him. In Dominic maybe, but not Sebastian.

“No,” I said, and it was barely a whisper. “I don't.” I drew back my shoulders and walked away, out into the cloister square toward the abbey church.

The wind had blown snipped-off bits of twine all over the place. It looked as if the Fates had come through on a binge of cutting. One of the monks was chasing a strand, repeatedly reaching for it just as the wind snatched it away. Something about this filled me with sorrow and longing. I began picking up pieces of thread as I walked, whatever little scraps were in my path, tucking them into my pocket. I could feel Sebastian still there, watching me.

I hadn't lied to him. I had not come to see Whit. I was here because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't resist the morbid fascination of seeing the mermaid chair again in light of what I now knew about my father's dying. But it was also true that I'd come in the morning when I knew that Whit would be on the abbey grounds and not in the rookery. I had washed my hair. I had worn the aqua shirt.