The Mermaid Chair (7 page)

I gouged out the opening she'd made at the base of the statue until the hole was about six inches deep. She unscrewed the jar and pulled out her finger. She held it up, and both of us stared at it, Mother with a kind of dark reverence on her face and me subdued, almost numb.

We are burying my mother's finger,
I told myself.
We are out here in a garden burying a finger, and it has something to do with my father. And with Father Dominic.
I think we could have lit the tip of her finger and let it burn like a taper and the moment wouldn't have seemed any stranger to me.

As Mother laid her finger in the hole, she turned it knuckle up and brushed the fingers on her good hand along the length of it before covering it with the spooned-out dirt. I watched it disappear, an image in my head of a small mouth opening and closing in the earth, swallowing a part of my mother that she could no longer endure.

The ground was spattered with dried rose petals, as if all the red flames had fallen off their candles. I raked up a papery handful. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” I said, and pressed a petal onto Mother's forehead, then one onto mine. “So now you have your ashes.”

Mother smiled at me.

The garden became absolutely still and quiet, yet neither of us heard him approaching until he was almost beside us. Mother and I both looked up at the same moment and saw him step from behind the statue, materializing out of the shadows in his long robe, very tall, his face shining in the bright-lit night.

I
scrambled to my feet, while Mother continued to sit on the ground. The monk looked down at her. He had to be at least six-one or-two and had the lean, possessed look of an athlete, a swimmer perhaps, or a long-distance runner.

“Nelle?” he said. “Are you all right?”

He didn't ask what we were doing sitting on the ground in the dark with a soup ladle, an empty Hellmann's jar, and a fresh mound of dirt.

“I'm fine,” Mother told him. “I came to see the saint, that's all.”

He pushed back the cowl from his head, smiling at her, such an easy, infectious smile, and I saw that his hair was dark and impeccably short.

He glanced at Mother's bandaged hand. “I'm sorry about your injury. We prayed for you at mass.”

He turned toward me, and we stared at each other for several seconds. In the sharp light of the moon, I noticed that his eyes were pale blue and his face deeply tanned. There was an irresistible look of boyishness about him, but something else, too, that struck me as serious, intense.

“Brother Thomas,” he said, smiling again, and I felt an odd catch in my chest.

“I'm Nelle's daughter,” I replied. “Jessie Sullivan.”

Later I would revisit that encounter again and again. I would tell myself that when I met him, all the dark little wicks in the cells of my body lifted up in the knowledge that here he was—the one you wait for, but I don't know if that was really true, or if I only came to believe that it was. I'm sure I've burdened our first meeting with too much imagining. But I
did
feel that catch in my chest; I saw him, and something happened.

Mother struggled to get to her feet, and he offered her his hand, tugging her up, and didn't let go until she had her balance.

“Who's cooking your meals?” she asked him.

“Brother Timothy.”

“Oh, not him!” she exclaimed. “I think he's a very good refectorian—he does a good job setting out the dishes and filling the milk pitchers—but he can't cook.”

“Of course he can't,” said Thomas. “That's why the abbot chose him. He made a very mysterious casserole today. We've all been forced into a Lenten fast.”

Mother gave him a playful shove with her good hand, and I caught a glimpse of the affection the monks had for her. It surprised me. I'd thought of her as the nettlesome monastery mascot, but perhaps she was more to them than that.

“Don't worry,” she told him. “I'll be back in the kitchen in a few days.”

“No, you won't,” I said, too abruptly. “It could take weeks for your hand to heal.” Her eyes flared at me.

Thomas said, “Weeks! We'll all be starved by then. We'll be sanctified and purified from fasting, but we'll be completely emaciated.”

“I'll bring Jessie with me,” Mother said. “She'll help me do the cooking.”

“No, no, you take your time getting well,” he said to her. “I'm only teasing you.”

“We need to get back,” I muttered.

I followed them through the wrought-iron gate, down the path toward the house, Thomas holding Mother's elbow, guiding her along. She was chattering to him. I held the jar and ladle in one hand and aimed the flashlight with the other.

He walked with us all the way to Nelle's Gate. Mother paused before slipping through it. “Give me a blessing,” she said.

He looked unnerved by the request, and I thought,
What an uncomfortable monk he is.
He raised his right hand over her head and traced a clumsy cross in the air. It seemed to satisfy her, and she strode off across her yard toward the house.

I stepped through the gate and looked at him from the other side of the wall. It was made of brick and came to my waist.

“Thanks for walking back with us,” I said. “You didn't have to.”

He smiled again, and the lines on either side of his mouth deepened. “It was no trouble. I was glad to.”

“You must be wondering what Mother and I were doing out there.” I set the jar and the dirt-crusted ladle on top of the wall, then put the flashlight down, too, pointing the stream of light off into the trees. I don't know why I suddenly felt compelled to explain things, probably out of embarrassment.

“She wasn't just visiting St. Senara. I found her on her knees beside the statue, trying to bury her finger in the dirt. She was so bent on doing it that I ended up digging the hole for her myself. I have no idea whether that was a good idea or not, whether I was helping her or making things worse.”

He shook his head a little. “I probably would've done the same thing if I'd found her there,” he said. “Do you think she was offering her finger to St. Senara?”

“To be honest, I don't know
anything
anymore when it comes to my mother.”

He let his gaze settle on me, the same absorbing stare as before. “You know, a lot of us at the monastery feel like we should've seen what was coming. We're with Nelle every single day, and not one of us had a clue she was so…”

I thought he was going to say crazy. Or demented.

“Desperate,” he said.

“‘Desperate' is putting it mildly,” I told him.

“You're right, I suppose it is. At any rate, we feel bad about it.”

There was a moment of silence when the chilled air rose up around us. I looked back for Mother. Yellow light poured out of the windows, drenching the air around the house. She had already climbed the back stairs and disappeared into the kitchen.

I realized I didn't want to go inside. Arching my neck, I looked up at the sky, at the milky smear of stars, feeling a momentary sensation of floating, of becoming unmoored from my life. When I looked back down, I saw his strong, browned hands resting on the bricks inches from my own and wondered what it would feel like to touch them.

“Look, if you need anything, if we can help somehow, call us,” he said.

“You're only a wall away,” I responded, and patted the bricks, trying to make a little joke, to ease how self-conscious I suddenly felt.

He laughed and pulled his cowl up over his head. His face disappeared into the dark pocket.

I gathered up the objects on the wall, turned quickly, and crossed the lawn, hurrying. Not looking back.

T
he next morning when I woke in my old room, I realized I'd dreamed about Brother Thomas.

I lay still while the room filled with light, and the whole thing came back to me, how we were floating on the ocean, lying side by side on an inflatable raft. I was wearing a swimsuit, something suspiciously like the two-piece suit Mike and I'd dressed St. Senara in all those years ago. Brother Thomas had on his black robe with the cowl pulled over his head. He rolled toward me, coming up on his elbow and gazing down at my face. The water moved under us with a lulling rhythm, and there were pelicans diving, scooping up fish. He pushed his cowl back and smiled in that same captivating way he had in the garden, a smile I found intensely sexual. Touching my cheek with his hand, he said my name.
Jessie.
He said it in his deep voice, and I felt the curve of my back lift up. His fingers slid beneath me and unhooked the top of my bathing suit. His mouth was at my ear, the heat of his breath rushing in and out. I turned to kiss him, but in that unexpected way of dreams, I found myself suddenly sitting up on the raft in a panic, with the sense of losing all track of time. Around us there was nothing but vast, rolling water as far as I could see.

I rarely remembered dreams. For me they were frustrating mirages that hovered on the edge of waking, then melted conspicuously the moment I opened my eyes. But this one had stayed with me in grand detail. In my mind I could still see the pearls of seawater beading up on the black wool of Brother Thomas's robe from the splash of the pelicans. The burning, blue look in his eyes. His fingers sliding beneath me.

I wondered for a second how Hugh, or even Dr. Ilg, would analyze a dream like this, but decided I didn't want to know. I sat up, letting my feet poke around at the edge of the bed for my slippers. I raked my fingers through my hair, pulling at several tangles, listening for sounds of Mother, but the house drifted in silence.

Mother and I both had fallen into bed last night, too tired to talk. The thought of instigating a conversation with her today made me want to slide back under the covers and make myself into a little curl. What would I say to her?
Do you have plans to sever any more body parts?
It sounded crass, horrible, but that's what I really wanted to know—whether she was a danger to herself, whether she needed committing to some place that could take care of her.

I shuffled to the kitchen and poked around in a cabinet until I found the bag of Maxwell House. I had to make the coffee in a twenty-year-old electric percolator with a fraying cord. I wondered if she'd even heard about Mr. Coffees. As the contraption
bloop-blooped,
I crept to Mother's door and listened. Her snores wafted through the room. Her insomnia, it seemed, had disappeared with her finger.

I went back to the kitchen. The room was dim with waking light, the air chilly. Striking a match, I lit the space heater, listening to the gas flames pop with the same little blue sounds as always. Loading two slices of bread into the toaster, I watched the coils down inside glow red and thought about Thomas the monk and how odd that whole encounter had been—how he'd appeared in the garden out of nowhere.

I thought of the two of us out there talking, the severe way his gaze had entered me. The flutter in my body. And then I'd had the kind of dream I'd heard Hugh speak of, in which some great, enigmatic plane flies through your sleep, opening its bombardier doors, dropping a small, ticking dream.

The toast popped up. I poured the coffee, drank it black while nibbling the bread. The heater had turned the room into a Carolina cypress swamp. I got up and snapped it off. I couldn't explain to myself why I was thinking these things. Thinking about Brother Thomas—a
monk.
And in
that
way, that incendiary way.

I imagined Hugh back home, and a terrible vulnerability took over. It was as if the most carefully guarded place in me had been suddenly abandoned, left wide open and assailable—the place that told me who I was.

I got up and walked into the living room, that feeling from the dream returning, the awful sense of losing my moorings. On one of the walls, Mother had as many as fifteen or twenty photographs framed in a disorganized mess, some with that dingy, sepia look around the edges. Most were old school pictures of me and Mike. Hideous hairdos. Half-shut eyes. Wrinkled white blouses. Braces. Dee called it “the Wall of Embarrassment.”

The only photo up there taken after the sixties was one of Hugh, Dee, and me in 1970, when Dee was a baby. I stared with resolve at the three of us, remembering how Hugh had rigged the delayed timer on the camera and we'd posed on the sofa, tucking Dee between us, her small, sleepy face wedged under our chins.

The same evening we'd taken the picture, we'd made love for the first time after Dee's birth. We were supposed to wait six weeks before having sex. It happened, though, two days early.

I'd passed by the nursery and seen Hugh leaning over Dee's crib. Even though she was sound asleep, he was singing something to her very softly. An amber light was spread across the ceiling from the night-light, sifting down to sit on his shoulders like a furring of dust.

Heat shot through my body, something potent and sexual. It was the tenderness in Hugh that hit me so forcibly—the sight of him loving her without anyone knowing.

I felt suddenly possessed by the intimacy we'd had creating her, the thought of her flesh forming out of the things we'd done in the next room. I went and slid my arms around his waist. Pressing my cheek against his back, I felt him turn to me. His hands made slow circles over my body. He whispered, “We have two more days to wait,” and when I said I couldn't wait, he picked me up and carried me to bed.

Loving him had seemed different—more unbridled, deeper, more purely felt. It had something to do with Dee, as if Hugh and I belonged together in some new way, and the thought seemed measureless and intoxicating to me.

Afterward, as we lay across the bed, Dee woke up crying. While I fed her, Hugh set up the camera. I was wearing a peach-colored housecoat; I hadn't even gotten it buttoned up all the way, and Hugh—you should see his face in the photo, how content and amused and clandestine it looked. The picture always stirred a secretive feeling in me, followed by a little flourish of happiness spreading open like an exotic paper fan in the center of my chest. I stood there and waited for the feeling to come.

The event seemed so long ago. Like some glorious ship inside a bottle. I did not know how it got in there, or how to get it out.

I picked up the phone and started dialing.

“Hello,” Hugh said, and his voice seemed to rise under me like solid ground.

“It's me,” I said.

“I was just thinking about you. Are you all right? I tried to call last night. No one answered.”

Oh, great, I was going to have to buy a Mr. Coffee
and
an answering machine.

“We were at the monastery,” I said. “I found Mother over there burying her finger.”

“As in digging a hole in the ground and covering it up?”

“That's what I mean.”

There was a long pause. “I think that might actually be a good sign, at least for the moment,” he said. “It could mean she's settling down, that her obsession is going underground, so to speak.”

I lifted my eyebrows, intrigued by this, almost hopeful. “You think so?”

“Could be,” he said. “But, Jessie, she still needs professional help. She should've been admitted to the psychiatric unit. With time the pattern could start all over again.”

I stretched the phone cord over to the table and sat down. “You mean she might cut off another finger?”

“Well, yes, or it could be something completely different. Obsessions like this are ego-dystonic, just random thoughts.”

There was a little tapping noise, and I knew he was on the portable phone at the bathroom sink, shaving as we talked.

“But I don't think cutting off her finger was random. I really think it relates to something particular,” I said.

“Oh, I doubt that,” he said, dismissing the idea, dismissing me.

I sank back in the chair, letting out a sigh. “I'll talk to her today and see if—”

“I suppose that won't hurt, but I was thinking…. I'm going to come to the island this weekend. You shouldn't handle this by yourself.”

He'd interrupted me.

“No, I don't think it's a good idea for you to come,” I said. “I think she would be more apt to—”

“It's too complicated for you to handle by yourself, Jessie.”

It was, of course. It would be like my sitting down to solve a math equation that was two feet long; what was going on inside her was a conundrum so far beyond me it was pathetic. I was considering saying to him,
Yes, yes, you come fix things.
But it still felt wrong to me. Part of it was the feeling that I—the nonpsychiatrist in the family—really could help Mother better than he could. That I could figure things out better by myself.

And maybe, too, I didn't want Hugh here. I wanted this time for myself, to be on my own—was that so awful?

I told myself it had nothing to do with the monk and what had happened the night before. I mean, nothing
had
happened. No, this was about me for once, following my own idea about something. Later, though, I would wonder about that. Are motives ever that clear?

I stood up. “I
said
I will handle it. I don't want you to come.” It came out angrier than I'd intended.

“Jesus,”
he said. “You don't have to shout at me.”

I looked back toward Mother's bedroom, hoping I hadn't awakened her. “Maybe I
feel
like shouting,” I said. I didn't know why I was picking a fight.

“For God's sake, I was just trying to help. What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I snapped. “Nothing's wrong with me.”

“Well, apparently there
is,
” he said, raising his voice.

“What you mean is, if I don't need your help, there's something wrong with me.”

“Now you're being ridiculous,” he said, and his tone was lacerating. “Did you hear me? You're being ridiculous.”

And I hung up. I simply hung up. I refilled my coffee cup and sat with my hands wrapped around it. They were shaking a little.

I waited for the phone to ring, for him to call me back. When he didn't, I became anxious, filled with that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

After a while I bent down and peered under the table. The crucifix was still nailed beneath it. The storm-tent Jesus.