The Mermaid Chair (9 page)

T
he next morning I walked to the monastery. The sun, perky and yellow yesterday, had burrowed into a hole somewhere. Fog covered everything. It looked as if soup skim had formed over the entire island during the night. I wore my blue jeans and red coat and a clashing garnet baseball cap I'd found in the utility room with
CAROLINA GAMECOCKS
printed across the front. It was pulled low on my forehead, with my ponytail threaded through the hole in back.

I walked the same path I'd taken a couple of nights earlier when I'd gone searching for Mother. I could smell the dense, primal odor of the marsh carried in by the fog, and it made me think of Brother Thomas. His face formed in my mind, and my insides gave a funny lurch.

I was going to find Father Dominic. If I happened to run into Brother Thomas in the process, that was fine, but I told myself I wasn't going out of my way.

Naturally I had no idea what I would say to Dominic once I found him. I began to play with various strategies to learn what he knew about Mother's cutting off her finger.

What if I talk to Dominic, really level with him, and he goes and tells Mother?
I hadn't considered this. Whatever progress I'd made with her would evaporate then and there. She would probably send me packing again.

I'd left her watching an old Julia Child cooking show on television. Mother loved Julia Child. I mean,
loved
her. She would say to me, “You think Julia Child is Catholic? She would have to be, wouldn't she?” Mother always copied down her recipes, especially anything with shrimp in it. If she wanted to cook one of Julia's shrimp dishes, she would simply send a monk out into the creek with a net.

The monks hand-tied the nets—six-and eight-footers—and sold them not only in the Low Country but in seaside boutiques and fishing stores all along the East Coast. I'd seen one once in a shop on Cape Cod when Hugh and I were vacationing. It'd been packaged with a fragment of Scripture printed on the label: “Cast your net.” From the Gospel of John, I believe the label had said, so there was a kind of mandate from God to buy it. “Shrewd marketers, aren't they?” Hugh had commented. They were priced at seventy-five dollars.

Walking along, I remembered how the monks would sit on the shaved grass in the cloister square with strands of cotton twine and buckets of lead weights, their callused hands moving back and forth in a beautiful, mindless rhythm. I used to think that custom cast nets had to be the most exotic way on earth for monks to earn a living, but then a couple of years ago, Dee had told me about a “really cool monastery” out west that sold hay to movie stars for their llamas. We'd had this whole discussion about which monastery had the more unusual, or more auspicious, occupation. We'd decided it had to be llama feeding. But still, cast nets were a long way from making fudge or rhubarb jelly.

Mike had been a brilliant caster, holding the sides of the net in his hands, the top of it in his teeth, flinging it like a spinning Frisbee into the air. It would sail up into the light, then plunge into the creek with a huge
galump!
and a spray that rose like smoke rings off the surface. He would tug the net up and shake it, and the wiggling gray shrimp would spill around our feet.

As I came through the last clump of trees, I glanced toward the cottages where the monks lived, the red tile roofs glowing pink in the murky light. I was, I realized, wishing for a glimpse of Brother Thomas—hoping that a crack would appear in the viscous morning and he would step out in the same ghostly way he had in the garden.

Approaching the gate to the rose garden, I thought of Mother's finger in there and shuddered, remembering something I hadn't thought of in years. Mother and her
milagros.

When I was a teenager, she'd ordered them routinely from a cheesy Catholic catalog. They'd looked like bracelet charms to me, except they were all severed body parts—feet, hearts, ears, torsos, heads, hands. Eventually I figured out that they were offerings, little prayers in the shape of the petitioners' afflictions. When Mother thought she had a cataract, she'd left an eye
milagro
at Senara's statue, and when her knee had flared with arthritis, she'd left a
milagro
in the shape of a leg.

I couldn't help but wonder if she'd intended her finger to be the ultimate
milagro.

I skirted the back of the church and headed along a tree-lined avenue toward the Monastery Reception Center, near the abbey entrance. It looked like a small cottage. The porch had a sloping roof and was draped with browned honeysuckle. Inside was a monk with a bald head and uncivilized eyebrows that curled over a pair of black-framed glasses.

He nodded as I moved past him to a room the monks called the Gift Shop. I browsed through the display of cast nets, turned a squeaky rack of rosaries and saints' medals. Spotting a stack of teal green booklets, I picked one up, surprised to see it was the booklet Kat said she'd had printed.
The Mermaid's Tale
.

I flipped it open to the first page:

“It's the story behind our mermaid chair,” a voice said, and I looked up from the passage to see the bald monk with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, as if he were battening himself down. He wore a large wooden cross around his neck, and there were droop lines at the corners of his mouth. “One of our monks wrote it. Pretty fanciful stuff, I'm afraid.”

“Yes, I've always loved the story,” I told him, realizing I hadn't heard it in ages. Most of it was fuzzy to me now.

“If you're here for the guided tour, I'm afraid you've just missed it, and there's not another one until three o'clock this afternoon, though quite honestly I don't see the big attraction. Just a lot of ‘Here is the church where the monks pray, and here is the Net House where the monks tie nets, and over there is the laundry where the monks wash their socks.'”

I thought he meant this to be funny, but when I laughed, he glowered at me a little. “No,” I said, “I didn't come for the tour.” I dug around in my jeans pocket for the ten-dollar bill I'd stuffed inside it and bought the book. “The author, Father Dominic—where could I find him?” I said. “I'd like to have him sign this for me.”

“Sign the book?” He shook his head. “We won't be able to live with him if he starts autographing books. We can barely live with him now.” Again, I wasn't sure whether he was being serious; he had that kind of sour way that made it hard to tell. “I imagine he's in the library somewhere,” he said. “That would be the white stucco building next to the church. It's open to visitors, but some areas aren't. You'd be surprised where people end up. Yesterday a lady came wandering through the refectory while we were eating lunch. She took a picture of the salad bar!”

A woman roaming through prohibited areas struck me as amusing, as did his offense at it, but actually more amusing was the fact that the abbey had a salad bar. I wondered if Mother had come up with that. It was so implausibly
current
of her.

“I know the places that are off limits,” I told him. “My mother is Nelle Dubois. I'm Jessie. I used to come here as a child.” I don't know what made me tell him this; he wasn't the most welcoming person. I was even thinking how peculiar that he, of all the monks, would get assigned to the Reception Center. Perhaps it was part of a conspiracy to discourage visitors.

He said, “We're sorry about her troubles.” It came out like an automated recording on an answering machine.

“And you are…?”

“Oh, sorry. I'm Father Sebastian. I'm the prior here.”

I tried to remember the monastic hierarchy. I was pretty sure the prior was the second in command, the one who, as Mother put it, kept the monastery on the straight and narrow.

 

Strolling to the library to find Father Dominic, I got a monumental case of cold feet.
What am I doing?
My steps slowed until I was just standing there, stymied with doubt. I considered going back to the house and calling Hugh.
On second thought,
you
come fix Mother,
I'd say.
I do not have the balls—or the ovaries, or whatever anatomical part is required.

Glancing behind the church, I noticed the foot trail that led to the edge of the marsh. I followed it to a stone bench that sat beneath an oak.

Coward.

I didn't sit on the bench but instead plopped on the ground and sat there staring at the creek plaited with mist, the way it moved like a living vein, doglegging into the bay. I'd often come to this spot after my father died, the times I'd felt sad or lost. I'd shouted my name across the marsh, listening to the way it was magnified over the water, as if the spartina grasses were singing it, and how sometimes the wind would hoist it like a gull out toward the ocean. “Jessie,” I would call, over and over and over.

I was holding the booklet I'd bought and opened it to the passage I'd been reading when Father Sebastian interrupted me.

When my father used to tell me that part of the story, he talked about Asenora's “tragic fate”—losing her tail and getting stuck with a halo—and I got the impression, though it was only reading between the lines, that Dominic felt the same way. And, frankly, something about Father Dominic's writing this story at all caused an uneasiness in me.

I thought of Mother and her crazy love for St. Senara, and I couldn't reconcile it with what I was reading. Senara was a saint who sneaked around looking for transportation back to her nefarious past. It had never really occurred to me how incongruous this was.

Both?
I hadn't expected him to write something like that—being a monk. I closed the booklet—sort of slapped it shut, to tell the truth. The tension was vibrating again in my chest.

Dampness from the grass had seeped through my jeans. I got to my feet, and when I turned around, I saw Father Dominic coming along the path toward me. He stopped on the other side of the stone bench. He was wearing the straw hat, and Kat had been right—whole sections of it had sprung loose. It was taking on the farcical appearance of a bird's nest.

“Knock, knock,” he said, his eyes filled with amusement.

I hesitated.
So he remembers me.

“Who's there?” I felt immensely awkward saying it, but I didn't see how I could
not
play along.

“Zoom.”

“Zoom who?”

“Zoom did you expect?” he said, setting loose an opulent laugh that seemed oversize for the joke. “I don't think I've seen you since you were a girl. I hope you remember me?”

“Of course, Father Dominic,” I said. “I…I was just—”

“You were just reading my little book, and from the way you closed it, I'm not sure you liked it very much.” He laughed to let me know he was teasing, but it made me uncomfortable.

“No, no, I liked it.” Neither of us spoke for a moment. I looked off at the marsh, embarrassed. The tide was receding, leaving plats of mud that looked tender and freshly peeled. I could see the holes of dozens of hibernating fiddler crabs, the tip ends of their claws barely protruding.

“Father Sebastian said you were looking for me. I believe you are in need of an autograph for your book.”