The Mermaid Chair (5 page)

W
e piled onto Kat's golf cart, parked at the end of the pier. Benne sat on the back with my suitcase, and I climbed into the front seat, glancing warily at the air horn, thinking of the last harrowing ride in her cart.

“Don't worry,” Kat said. “I won't use the horn unless someone is crazy enough to step out in front of me.”

“I hate that odious thing,” I said.

“Yes, well, hate it all you want, but it has saved the lives of countless tourists.”

“Mama used to aim for tourists,” Benne said.

“Oh, I did
not.
”

“I believe it's impossible for Benne to tell a lie,” I said, and Kat huffed as she pulled onto the narrow pavement.

Overhead the sky was turning orange. I had the sense of darkness pressing in, pooling behind the brightness. As we swept past the island shops, no one spoke, not even Benne.

The storefronts all had window boxes gorged with lavender pansies, even the tiny post office. Shem's Bait & Tackle had been painted the color of persimmons, and the carved wooden pelican outside Caw Caw General Store now wore a pony saddle, I imagined so that children could sit on it. We passed a handful of tourists in front of Egret Expeditions, signing up for boat tours and bird walks. Even at the nadir of winter, the place seemed alive.

I pointed to a small store wedged between Max's Café and the Island Dog B&B. It had a blue-and-white-striped awning and a sign in the window that read
THE MERMAID'S TALE
. “Didn't that used to be a fish market?”

“It went out of business,” Kat said.

“That's Mama's store now,” said Benne.

“No kidding? You own it? That gift shop?” I was surprised. I'd known Kat my whole life, and she'd never shown the least interest in shopkeeping. After her husband died—which had to be twenty years ago at least—she and Benne had lived contentedly off his pension and a little Social Security.

“I opened it last spring,” Kat said.

“Who's minding the store right now?”

“When I'm there, it's open; when I'm not, it's closed,” she said.

“I like the name,” I told her.

“I wanted to call it ‘Fin Fatale,' but your mother nixed that. The woman has no sense of humor.”

“She never did.”

“That's not true. Once upon a time, she had a
great
sense of humor,” Kat said.

She lit out down the road, heading into the tinted light. I watched her lean forward as if she were willing the cart to surpass the eighteen-mile-per-hour speed limit, and so many things swam up to me—scraps of my mother's laughter, times when we were still normal and happy. Kat was right—Mother
had
possessed a great sense of humor once. I thought of the time she made coconut shrimp and served it wearing a hula skirt. That time Mike was eight and got his poor penis stuck in a Coke bottle while urinating into it—for reasons none of us ever understood. His penis had, shall we say, expanded somewhat after entry. Mother had tried to act concerned but broke down laughing. She told him, “Mike, go sit in your room and picture Mother Teresa, and your penis will come right out.”

“The biggest sellers in the shop are yellow signs that say ‘Mermaid Xing,'” Kat was telling me. “Plus our mermaid booklets. You remember Father Dominic? He wrote up the story of St. Senara for us, and we got it printed in a little booklet titled
The Mermaid's Tale,
same name as the store. We can't keep them in stock. Dominic is always coming in wearing that damn fool hat of his, wanting to autograph copies. I tell him, ‘For God's sake, Dominic, it's not like you're
Pat Conroy
.'”

I laughed. As a child I'd often bumped into Father Dominic as I played on the monastery grounds, waiting for Mother to finish in the kitchen; he'd always told me knock-knock jokes. But there had been another side to him, something somber I couldn't quite put my finger on. He had been one of the monks who'd come to the house that day bearing the remains of my father's boat, who'd stood there as Mother burned the boards in the fireplace.

“He still wears the straw hat?”

“Same one. The straw is starting to rot,” she said.

We lapsed into silence as we skirted the back edge of the island, most of it an undeveloped tangle of wind-pruned trees. We came around a curve where the trees opened onto a prairie of caramel grasses and, beyond it, the ocean. The water was inking into purple, and something about this brought everything back, the reason I was here, what Mother had done with the cleaver. Her life had gotten so twisted and confused.

I wondered, if I'd been a better daughter, whether any of this would've happened. Shouldn't I have seen it coming? As far as I knew, she could be home at this very moment lopping off the rest of her fingers.

Why her finger? I thought.
Why that?

Benne was singing to herself on the backseat. I leaned over to Kat. “What happened to her finger? The one she cut off?”

“It's in a mayonnaise jar by her bed,” she answered matter-of-factly.

The spire of the abbey church came into view just as the paved road ran out. Kat didn't bother to slow down, and we bounced a foot in the air as we came onto the hard-caked dirt. Clouds of dust roiled up. “Hold on!” she shouted to Benne.

Kat's hair flew completely out of its bobby pins and fluttered behind her as we sailed by the monastery gate. Just past it sat the Star of the Sea Chapel, the white clapboard parish church where the monks said mass for the islanders and where all Egret Island children, including me, had attended grammar school. Every grade had been simultaneously taught by Anna Legare, who'd told me point-blank when I was ten that I was a born artist. She'd hung my endless sketches of boat wrecks on the chapel wall when I was eleven and invited the whole island to the “show.” Kat had bought one for a quarter.

“Whatever happened to that picture of mine you bought and hung in your kitchen?”

“I still have it. It's hanging in the Mermaid's Tale now.”

As we passed her driveway, I noticed the
MERMAID XING
sign nailed to a post beside the mailbox.

A few seconds later, we slowed in front of Mother's house, built in the style of an 1820s tidewater cottage, like most of the island homes. It stood on stilts in a forest of palmetto palms, with dormers and black shutters and a wide veranda that stretched across the front.

The house had always been some lush shade of green, but at the moment it was washed-out aqua. The yard was infested with yucca bristle and dollar weed, and standing in the middle of it was Mother's appalling bathtub grotto.

Over a decade ago, she'd enlisted Shem to bury an upright bathtub halfway into the ground, and, being slow to grasp the point, he'd left the end of the tub with the faucets on it exposed. Mother had gone ahead anyway and placed a concrete statue of Mary inside the porcelain arch. Now the tub had splotches of rust and some sort of plastic flower wired to the spigot.

The first time I saw the tub, I told Mother that all those tears Mary's statues reportedly cried were because of the extreme tackiness of her devotees. Dee, naturally, had thought the Bathtub Madonna was
awesome.

As we rolled to a stop and Benne leaped off the back, I saw Hepzibah standing on the porch. She wore one of her African outfits, a batik shift in scarlet and saffron colors that came to her ankles and a matching cloth coiled around her head. She looked tall and resplendent standing there.

“Well, if it isn't our Hottentot queen,” said Kat, waving to her. She laid her hand on my arm. “Jessie, if your mother says fish fly, just nod and say, ‘Yes, ma'am, fish fly.' Don't argue with her about anything, all right?”

“Some fish
can
fly,” said Benne. “I saw a picture in a book.”

Kat ignored her. She kept her eyes on my face. “Don't upset her.”

I pulled away. “I'm not planning on upsetting anybody.”

Hepzibah met me halfway on the porch steps, trailing the aroma of okra gumbo, and I knew she'd made us dinner. “We glad fa see oona,” she said, lapsing into Gullah the way she used to whenever she greeted me.

I smiled, looked past her at the window lit from within. I stared at the wooden frame, how it was splintering a little, at a little smear glowing on the pane, and tears came, just enough so I couldn't hide them.

“Now, what's this about?” said Hepzibah, and she pulled me into the dizzying designs on her dress.

I stepped back from her. It struck me as a ludicrous question. I might've said,
Well, for starters, there's a mayonnaise jar in the house with my mother's finger inside it,
but that would have been rude and undeserved, and besides, it wasn't my mother I was thinking about. It was my father.

The last time I'd seen Joseph Dubois, he'd been sitting at that window peeling an apple without breaking the skin—a minor stunt in his renowned repertoire of tricks. He was making a whirly girl. I'd sat on the floor that night in a puddle of lamplight and watched the irresistible way the peel had spun off the blade of his knife, nervous over whether he would make it all the way to the end without breaking it. I'd risen up on my knees as he'd come to the last turn. If he made it, I would get to hang the red spiral in my bedroom window with the other whirly girls he'd created, all of them suspended by sewing thread, bobbing at the glass pane in various stages of puckered decay.

“A whirly girl for my Whirly Girl,” he'd said, calling me by his pet name and dropping it into my open palms.

Those were his last words to me.

I'd dashed to my room without looking back, without letting him know that what I loved best about this ritual was the part where he called me his Whirly Girl, how I imagined myself one of his perfect creations, the apple skins in my window a strange still frame of self-portraits.

Seeing my tears, Kat clattered up the steps in her heels and hovered over me with her arms flapping around her sides. She reminded me of a clapper rail, one of the noisiest birds in the marsh, a big hen of a bird, and I felt my anger at her melt before she spoke. “Jessie, I talk too much and can't keep my damn foot out of my mouth. Of course you wouldn't go in there and upset your mother. I—”

“It's okay,” I said. “It wasn't that. Really.”

Benne plodded up the steps, lugging my suitcase. She set it at the door. I thanked them all and said they could go, that I would be fine. I said the tears were because I was tired, that's all.

They drove away in the golf cart, lumbering over a series of tree roots—“island speed bumps,” Kat called them. I told myself I should go inside, but I stood on the porch for a few minutes in a breeze that had chilled and darkened and smelled of the marsh, finishing whatever had come over me earlier—that little baptism of sadness.

Brother Thomas

H
e lay prostrate on the floor of the church with his arms stretched out on either side in the shape of the cross, punishment for the things he'd written in a small, leather-bound notebook. Father Sebastian, the prior at the monastery, had found it on the counter inside the abbey gift shop, where he'd left it for a few moments while he pointed a tourist to the restrooms at the rear of the store, then answered questions from another about the cast nets that were for sale in the shop. How long had the monks been making them? Had they learned the art from the islanders or had they brought it with them from Cornwall? Did they really sell enough of them to support the monastery? He wished now he hadn't taken so much time with the man.

It was February, Ash Wednesday, and the floor felt cold, even a little damp, through his black robe. He lay in the aisle between the choir stalls, which stood on either side of the nave facing each other, and listened as the monks sang evening prayer. Brother Timothy was crooning like a lounge singer, “O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.”

When they finished the Salve Regina, he heard the hinged seats built into each stall squeak as they were lifted, then a tired shuffling of feet as the monks lined up to be sprinkled with holy water by the abbot. Finally the lights went out, except for the one near the abbot's stall, and Brother Thomas was left in the near dark, in a luxuriant silence.

He was the youngest monk at forty-four, and also the newest, a so-called junior monk with temporary vows. His solemn vows—
usque ad mortem,
until death—were only four months away. What had he been thinking—giving a lecture to the man in the gift shop as if he'd been here half his life? He'd gone on and on about the cast nets.

He lay there and cursed himself. It had given Father Sebastian, who really should have been a marine and not a monk, an opportunity to thumb through his notebook and grow alarmed for the state of his soul. He'd taken it to the abbot, who was very old school about things and thoroughly Irish. Thomas had been summoned to his office, into the dreaded papal enclosure, as he sometimes thought of it. Now here he was on the floor.

He'd been lectured by the abbot a dozen times at least, but this was the first time he'd been punished, and it didn't seem so bad really, lying here. He would stay until the abbot felt he'd meditated long enough on the perils of doubt and sent someone to release him. He'd been here like this an hour, perhaps longer.

The floor of the church smelled of Murphy's oil soap and something else sour and slightly manure-ish that he realized was a mixture of pluff mud from the marsh and fertilizer from the garden. It was clogged and hardened into microscopic crevices in the wooden boards, having been tracked in on the monks' shoes for the last fifty years.

Here in this rarefied place—where they all imagined themselves marinating in holiness through their ceaseless rounds of chanting and prayer—was all this hidden mud and cow shit. It was hard to overestimate how much this pleased him. Brother Thomas had dreamed once about Christ's feet—not his crucifixion or his resurrection or his sacred heart but his
feet.

The scent emanating from the church floor, even God's feet in his dream, made him think more highly of religion somehow. The other monks, Sebastian for instance, would have impugned the buildup in the floor crevices as profane, but Thomas lay there knowing suddenly that what he smelled was a fine patina of the most inviolate beauty, and shockingly holy. He was smelling the earth.

He'd been at St. Senara abbey on the small South Carolina island for nearly five years, each one of those years a bone of darkness that he'd gnawed.
And still no marrow of light,
he thought, though now and then he felt an occasional beam of it dart out of nowhere and hit him. Just as it had a moment ago when he'd caught that scent.

After his other life had ended, the one with his wife and his unborn child, he'd been incurably driven. Sometimes his quest seemed impossible, like an eye trying to look back and see its own self. All he'd discerned so far was that God seemed surreptitiously about and wrenchingly ordinary. That was all.

His real name was Whit O'Conner. Before, in that other life, he'd been an attorney in Raleigh thwarting developers and industrial polluters on behalf of various conservation and environmental groups. There had been a brick house with a landscaped yard, and his wife, Linda, seven and a half months pregnant. She'd worked as an office manager in an orthodontist's practice, but she'd wanted to stay home and raise their child, even though that wasn't fashionable. He'd liked that about her—that she wasn't fashionable. They'd met at Duke, gotten married the Sunday afternoon following her graduation in her family's tiny Methodist church near Flat Rock, North Carolina, and they'd never been apart until the tire came off the truck in front of her car on I-77. The medic who'd responded to the accident told him over and over that she had gone quickly, as if her leaving sooner would console him.

His sense of abandonment had been bottomless—not just by Linda and the promise of family but by God, whom he'd actually believed in. The kind of believing one does before immense suffering.

Linda had called him from work the day she died to tell him she was sure they were having a girl. Up until then she'd had no feeling either way, though he personally had believed all along it was a boy. The impression had come over her while standing in the shower that morning. She'd touched her abdomen and simply known. He smiled now, remembering this, and his lips brushed against the floor. After the funeral he'd learned from the coroner that she'd been right.

He couldn't remember precisely when it had first occurred to him to come here, but it had been around a year after her death. He'd sent his baptism and confirmation records, recommendations from two priests, and a long, carefully constructed letter. And still everyone, including the abbot, had said he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he'd refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

Sometimes he couldn't fathom why he'd thrown in his lot with these aging men. Some were grumpy to the point he went out of his way to avoid them, and at least four inched about with walkers and lived permanently in the infirmary. There was one monk, Brother Fabian, who was always writing letters of complaint to the pope about things the rest of them did, and posting copies in the corridors. Brother Basil had a bizarre tic, shouting out “Meep!” during choir or other odd, sacrosanct moments.
Meep.
What did it mean? It had driven Thomas nuts at first. But Basil was at least kind, unlike Sebastian.

Thomas had not been one of those people who romanticized monasteries, and if he had, that illusion would have evaporated the first week.

Simply, his grieving had opened into a larger abyss.

“I have come here not to find answers,”
he'd written in his notebook that first year,
“but to find a way to live in a world without any.”

To be honest, he'd been turned away three times over the course of three years before the abbot, Dom Anthony, finally accepted him. Thomas was sure it was not because the abbot had changed his mind, but because he'd finally worn him down. Because, too, they'd needed a younger man, someone who could climb the ladder into the timber buttresses of the church and change the lightbulbs, who knew about computers—that the word “reboot” did not necessarily mean putting on your shoes again, as several monks seemed to think. Mostly they'd needed someone who could take their small boat into the creeks and measure egret eggs, count hatchlings, and test the water for salinity—work the monastery had been contracted to do for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to bring in extra income. Thomas was happy to do it. He loved disappearing into the rookery.

His arms had begun to ache a little around the elbows. He changed position and turned his head in the other direction. He saw the church as a mouse would see it. As a beetle. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling without moving his head and felt he was lying at the bottom of the world, looking up. The place where all ladders start—wasn't that what Yeats had said? He had spent a lot of his time here reading—especially the poets, systematically going through the volumes in the library. He loved Yeats best.

He felt less consequential down here on the floor, and it struck him that all self-important people—the ones in Congress, in the Vatican, at AT&T perhaps—should lie down here for a while. They should lie here and look up, and see how different everything seemed.

He'd had an overly important sense of himself before coming here, he admitted it. The cases he'd tried—so many of them high profile—had often put him on the front page of state newspapers, and sometimes he still thought about that life with nostalgia. He remembered the time he'd prevented a big landfill company from trucking in sewage sludge from New York City, how it'd landed him in the
New York Times
, and then all the television interviews he'd given. He'd basked in that.

On the boat, the day he'd come here to stay, he'd thought of the river Styx, of the ferryman ushering him across the last threshold. He'd imagined he was dying to his old life and coming ashore to a new one, one hidden out here in the water, hidden from the world. It was silly and overly dramatic, but he'd liked the analogy. Then it had turned out that it wasn't so much the water but the trees that had impressed him, how the branches were warped and curled in extravagant spirals from the ocean winds. The moment he'd seen them, he'd known that it was a place of harshness. Of enduring.

Of course he'd taken the name Brother Thomas because he was the resident doubter, and it was practically a cliché, but he took it anyway. He doubted God. Perhaps he would find there had never been a God. Or he would lose one God and find another. He didn't know. Despite this, he felt God the same way the arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only the hint of him.

On the first page of the notebook, he'd written “Disputed Questions” in honor of Thomas Merton, the monk who'd written a book by that title. He'd pointed this out to Dom Anthony as some sort of defense, but it had not saved him. If you were going to be heretical and get away with it, you needed to be dead long enough for people to get over the heresy and rediscover you.

He tried to recall the most damning parts of the notebook. Probably the questions that woke him in the night. He'd sat with his window open, listening to the buoys out on Bull's Bay make their sonorous music, and he'd written them all down. Questions about evil and whether it could exist without God's collusion, about Nietzsche's claim that God is dead, even theories that God is not a being in heaven but merely some guiding aspect in the human personality.

He felt a rush of dismay at the thought of the abbot's reading this. He wanted to get up and find him, to explain. But what would he say?

The wind rose outside, sweeping in from the bay, flapping over the roof. He imagined it tearing the surface of the water. The monastery bell clanged, calling the monks to sleep, telling them the Great Silence was beginning, and he wondered if the abbot had forgotten about him.

The church had filled up with shadows, the long slits of pale glass in the windows completely dark. He thought of the chapel behind the chancel, where the mermaid chair sat on a carpeted dais. He liked to go and sit in the chair sometimes, when no tourists were around. He always wondered why Senara, their famous little saint, had been carved on the chair in her mermaid form, a
half-nude
mermaid at that. He didn't object to the portrayal; he rather appreciated it. It was just so unlike the Benedictines to highlight her breasts.

From the moment he'd seen the mermaid chair, he'd loved Senara, not just for her mythic life in the sea but for how supposedly she'd heard the prayers of Egret Islanders and saved them, not only from hurricanes but from golf courses.

In the beginning he'd sat in the mermaid chair and thought of his wife, of making love to her. Now he could go weeks and not think of her. Sometimes when he thought of making love, it was simply with a woman, a generic woman, not Linda at all.

Back when he'd arrived as a postulant, it had not been hard to give up sex. He did not see then how he could make love to anyone but Linda. Her hair spread across the pillow, the smell of her—that was gone. Sex was gone. He'd let it go.

He felt a tightening at his groin. How ridiculous to think sex would stay away. Things would hide out in an underground place for a while, they would sink like the little weights the monks tied on their cast nets, but they wouldn't stay down there forever. Everything that goes down comes up. And then he almost laughed at the pun he'd made without intending to.

The past few months, he'd thought of sex too much. Doing without had become an actual sacrifice, but it didn't make him feel holy, only denied, more of a normal monk chafing at celibacy. In June he would take his last vows. And that would be that.

When the footsteps came at last, he closed his eyes, then opened them again when the sound stopped. He saw the toes of a pair of shoes, Reeboks, and the hem of a robe brushing against them.