The Mermaid Chair (20 page)

A feeling of profound belonging, of intimacy, washed over me. I pictured him on the marsh island pressed against me, loving me, the breathing world around us again, the inviolate bond we'd made. I went and laid my face against his shoulder and felt his arms, the voluminous sleeves of his robe, come up slowly to enfold me.

“Jessie,” he said after a moment. “The library is usually empty now, but we need to be careful.” He glanced at the door, and I realized the enormous risk he was taking. “I only have fifteen minutes before choir, but I had to see you.”

I lifted my head from his shoulder and looked up at him. Even in the half-light, I saw the tiny smudges of shadow beneath his eyes, and his posture seemed oddly stiff, as if his lungs had expanded and gotten stuck.

I was, I realized, terrified of what was going on inside him, his monkness, the power of what had brought him to the abbey. If we were going to be together—and I wanted this now with something close to desperation—he would have to want it, too, in that same way he'd wanted God, and I didn't know if I could compete with that. I didn't want to be one of those mythological sirens who lured sailors onto the rocks or, more to the point, like the mermaid Asenora who lured monks to their fall. I wanted to touch his face, to find the opening to his robe, but I made myself take a tiny step backward.

“Could you meet me tomorrow at two, at the dock in the rookery?” he was saying.

“Of course. I'll be there,” I told him.

Silence again. He had left his hand resting loosely on my waist as we'd talked, but he withdrew it, and I watched him brush his finger across the front of his robe, at what I realized was one of my own long brown hairs.

“It's wonderful having your mother cooking for us again,” he said. “I suppose that's a sign that she's mending.”

So we were going to make common talk. We were going to stand in this little room—no longer suffused in wan, romantic hues but only in ordinary dimness—and use innocuous conversation as a defense.

“Her hand is nearly mended,” I said, “but I worry that her mind may never be.”

He glanced at a digital clock on the desk, sitting beside a little stack of Dominic's booklet,
The Mermaid's Tale.
There was a painfully conspicuous pause in which he cleared his throat. What
was
this heaviness in him? Caution? It could not be easy for him. Or was his demeanor, this tepidness, a reversal of some sort? Had he been so decimated by guilt that he was trying to return things to the way they were before? Was he simply scared?

“After Nelle did what she did,” he said, “many of us couldn't help but think of the Scripture where Jesus talks about cutting off one's hand.”

His words startled me. “There's a verse in Scripture about that?”

He scanned a wall shelf, retrieved a Bible, and began flipping the pages. “Here it is. It's part of Christ's Sermon on the Mount: ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.'”

I took the book out of his hands and read the words silently to myself, then snapped it shut. “That's it, isn't it? That's where she got the idea. Better to cut off her finger than have her whole body cast into hell.” I shoved the Bible back onto the shelf. It was illogical, but I felt mildly indignant.

“Jesus was speaking symbolically. Obviously he didn't mean for anyone to take his words literally,” Whit said.

“Well, don't you think he could've allowed for the possibility that a few crazy people might misinterpret his point? I mean, really, it's not the most responsible thing someone could say.”

His lips twisted as if trying to hold back laughter, and his whole body seemed to release its grip and breathe again. Finally the laugh slipped out of him.

“What?”
I said, starting to smile.

“I've heard Jesus referred to as a lot of things, but that's the first time I've ever heard anyone suggest he was irresponsible.”

He reached over and touched my hair, let his knuckles brush the curve of my cheek. His eyes were lit up, but not only with amusement; they glistened in the way I remembered from our lovemaking. As I leaned up to kiss him a spark of static electricity leaped between us, and both of us jumped backward, laughing.

“See what happens when you call Jesus irresponsible?” I joked. “You get shocked.”

“Seriously,” he said, “there are some bizarre accounts of saints mutilating themselves. They seem to get the inspiration for it from this verse.”

“I've been saying all along Mother was doing some kind of penance, even though Hugh thinks I'm wrong.”

“Hugh?” he said.

And the room went still.

I'd said his name automatically, stupidly. Why had I brought him into it? I'd assumed then it was a thoughtless moment, but I wondered about that in the days that followed. Had I
wanted
to say Hugh's name? To throw the worst at Whit and see what he'd do? Was I lining up the hurdles, the secret realities that lay between us? He had brought up Jesus; I had brought up Hugh.

“Oh,” I said. “Hugh is…he's my husband. He's a psychiatrist.”

Whit looked away, back toward the day-blind window. He reached over and flipped the light back on, and we were plunged into a stinging brightness.

Desperate to smooth over the moment, to usher us around Hugh's name, I kept on talking. “It's just that he…well, he thinks Mother's impulse to cut off her finger was a meaningless, random obsession.”

He tried to smile, looking at me as if to say,
All right, then, we'll go on as if nothing happened.
He said, “But
you
think it was penance for something particular?”

“Yes. I just don't know what for.” The casualness I was forcing into my voice sounded desperate. “I believe it goes back a long time. Actually, I suspect that Father Dominic knows what it is.”

“Dominic?” he said sharply, then, glancing at the door, lowered his voice. “What makes you think that?”

“First tell me what you think of him.”

“He's very genuine. A natural jokester, but he has a serious side, too. He tends to follow his own version of things, but I like that about him. Now. What makes you think he knows anything about this?”

“Mother implied as much,” I said. “And a while ago in the kitchen, I heard Dominic ask her if she was ever going to forgive them. ‘Us,' he said. ‘Aren't you ever going to forgive
us
?'”

Whit shook his head, plainly bewildered. “Forgiveness? For what?”

I shrugged. “I wish I knew. I tried to talk to Dominic about it earlier, but he was very secretive. And Mother…well, she's not going to tell me anything.”

He looked again at the clock. “I'm sorry, but I should've left five minutes ago.”

“Yes, go. I'll wait here a few minutes and then leave.”

When he'd gone, I stood in the middle of Dominic's office, in all that brittle light, and my mind went back to the moment when Whit had opened the Bible and read the verse to me out loud, the harsh words about severing one's hand in order to save the whole body. Had that reading been entirely about my mother? Or had he been thinking about the way he'd caressed my breast, my hip, tugged me against him? Was he, in his way, telling me something? About us?

A
brown pelican perched on the bow of the monastery's johnboat like a hood ornament, the S of its neck slumped onto its white breast. As I approached the rookery dock, the bird unfurled its wings—the span of them outlandish—and held them wide open, air-drying its feathers. Whit stood on the dock staring at the spectacle. He did not see me until I called his name, and as he turned, the pelican flapped her wings and took to the air.

I didn't know what to expect, whether we would get in the boat and go back to his hermitage, or remain on the dock. Whether he would pull me into his arms or sever me from his life. I'd sat up in bed the night before, jerked awake by a nightmare of amputated hands and fingers. There were piles of them in the rose garden at the monastery heaped around St. Senara's feet, all of them still wiggling, still alive.

“Can you believe how beautiful the day is?” he said in a carefree way.

Do not talk about the weather. If you talk about the weather, I'll start screaming.

“Yes, beautiful,” I said. It was actually the most splendid day you could imagine. Brilliant, warm, that feeling of spring taking hold around us.

I'd worn my jeans with a long-sleeved white shirt, and I was already hot and perspiring. Strands of hair were spit-plastered, as Dee would say, to my neck. I reached into the side pocket of my purse, pulled out the garnet baseball cap, and yanked it low over my forehead, then dug out my sunglasses.

“How about a ride?” he asked, and when I nodded, he began untying the dock line. Climbing into the boat, I noticed he'd already tucked his canvas bag under the seat.

“Where's Max?” I asked.

He looked back at the walkway and shrugged. “I guess he's abandoned me today.”

“Maybe he's miffed that I horned in last time.”

“As I recall, it was
you
he was cuddling up to after—” He stopped abruptly, unable or unwilling to say the words, letting the sentence hang in the air.

He guided the boat slowly through the creek while I sat in the bow seat, gazing straight ahead, aware of the thin scum of guilt and hesitancy that had formed—and knowing that the mention of Hugh's name the day before had helped create it.

It had been two weeks since Hugh had walked away from me at the slave cemetery, and he hadn't called once during that time. He was bound to be hurt, and of course, angry. But I had a feeling he was also waiting me out. Hugh was the most patient person, always the champion of letting things settle, run their course, come slowly to a head—all pet phrases of his. I'm sure it was the psychiatrist in him, presiding as he did over the age-old mysteries of the human psyche. He'd told Dee a story once about a girl who'd found a cocoon and snipped off the end of it to let the butterfly out, how the poor creature had emerged with deformed wings. “You can't force things,” he'd said to her.

I'd told Hugh I wanted time apart, and by God, he was giving it to me.

“We're separated, you know,” I said, turning to Whit. “Hugh and I. We're taking time apart.”

He looked down into the flat bottom of the boat, then back at me, his face very grave, but I think grateful as well. He slowed the boat to idle speed, and everything grew much quieter.

“How long have you been married?” he asked.

“Twenty years.”

He was fingering his cross, unaware he was doing it. “Happily?”

“Yes, happily at first. But then—oh, I don't know. It's not that we were unhappy. People looking at us would've said it was a good marriage—‘Hugh and Jessie, they're so compatible.' It wouldn't be untrue.”

I pulled off my sunglasses, wanting him to see my face, my eyes, wanting nothing between us. I listened a moment to the water gently slapping the boat. When he didn't comment, I went on. “You know how couples always say, ‘We just grew apart'? That's what I wanted to say at first. To believe that my discontent came from the distance between us. It's logical to think that after twenty years. But I don't believe that was it. We didn't grow apart, we grew too much together. Too enmeshed and dependent on each other. I guess I needed—” I stopped. I didn't know what to call it. “What comes to my mind are ridiculous things like ‘my own space,' ‘my independence,' but they sound so shallow. They don't capture it.”

“I know, it's hard to explain an impulse like that. The day I told my law partners I was coming here, they laughed like I was joking.” He shook his head and smiled a little, as if the memory amused him. “I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean.”

As he'd talked, his gaze had been on the twists and turns in the creek, but now he leveled it on me. “Around here they call it ‘a solitude of being.'”

My eyes slowly began to fill up. Because I
did
understand what he meant, because he was offering these words to me—
a solitude of being
—and they were perfect.

Sliding my sunglasses onto my face, I turned back to face the creek, the bulging inrush of tide.

Ten minutes later Whit angled the boat off the creek into the tributary that led to the marsh island where we'd made love. I recognized it right away and looked over at him. He smiled in that way I'd come to love, the corners of his lips barely lifting. It seemed to me then that something had changed in him, something had broken. I felt it in the air around our heads.

When the tributary opened upon the pool of water hedged perfectly by the marsh grass, Whit steered the boat into the very center of it and cut off the engine. The sound died around us as he dropped the anchor line.

“Let's go swimming,” he said, and began unbuttoning his shirt. I sat speechless as he stood in the boat and stripped completely naked, the most disarming boyishness taking over his face. Then he jumped cannonball style over the side, rocking the boat so hard I grabbed on to the gunnels.

He came up, laughing, shaking his head, the droplets flying off his hair like fracturing glass. “Why are you still sitting there?” he cried, and broke into an accomplished crawl.

I peeled off every stitch I had on and jumped.

The creek was absolutely freezing. Like smacking into a glacier. For a moment all I could do was tread water, my body shocked wide open. There had been a December a few years earlier when Hugh had looked up from the television set and proposed that we go to Lake Lanier on New Year's Day and take part in a Polar Bear Plunge. It involved otherwise-normal people throwing themselves into a body of shivering water. I'd looked at him with complete incredulity, unwilling even to consider it. And now here I was in this bright, cold water.

I finally began swimming, not Whit's controlled, athletic movement but playfully diving, just splashing around. The water was turgid, like milk coffee, and deeper than I'd thought, fifteen or twenty feet perhaps. It was exhilarating, as if my body were emphatically awake and singing after a long silence.

I caught sight of Whit in the boat, with a ragged white towel around his waist. I hadn't realized he'd climbed back in. I dogpaddled over to him, and he pulled me up and draped me in a towel that was only slightly less frayed than his own. “Is monastery linen always so austere?” I joked.

“It's part of our overall Body Negation Program,” he said.

He maneuvered the boat to the edge of the island, and we made our way to the hermitage still wearing our towels, clutching our clothes. He spread a brown blanket in the sun, next to the little hut. Peering inside it, I saw Hepzibah's turtle skull sitting on the crab trap, exactly as I'd left it.

As we stretched out on the blanket, side by side, the sky rose over us, marbled with remnants of clouds. I felt woozy for a moment, that sensation you get as a child when you turn in circles and fall over in sweet dizziness. I lay there with wet hair, with mud caked on my feet, and said to him, “All I want is for us to be honest with each other, brutally honest.”

He said, “Brutally?”

I smiled. “Yes,
brutally.
”

“All right,” he said, his tone still teasing. “But I'm generally against brutality in any form.”

I fixed my eyes on a fleck of glinting cloud. “I've fallen in love with you,” I said. “I wouldn't be out here otherwise.”

His hands had been tucked behind his head in the most casual way, and he moved them slowly to his sides. He said, “I know we should be honest about what's going on, but—I felt like it would open a door we couldn't close.”

“Why would we have to close it?”

He sat up, staring ahead with the curve of his back to me. “But, Jessie, what if you walk away from your marriage because of me and then—” He stopped.

“And then
you
can't walk away from the abbey? Is that what you're saying?”

“That's not what I'm saying.” He pushed a breath through his mouth. “Okay, you want to know how I feel?” He sounded provoked, as if he'd been forced out onto a little ledge and seen how far he would have to jump.

My throat burned, down in the notch where my collarbones came together.

“I love you, too,” he said. “And it scares me to death.”

The air around us stilled. I could only look at him. His body was shingled with bits of shadow coming from the hermitage behind us.

“But we both know it isn't that simple,” he said. “What I meant before was, what if you left your marriage and then later you regretted it? I know you said you're separated from Hugh, but how are you going to live with ending your marriage completely? My God, Jessie, how am
I
going to live with it?” He sighed, and his breath fell across my face.

I pulled him back down beside me. We lay there and listened to the small, searching sounds of the world. “If we do this, there will be suffering,” he said. “We'll be damned and saved
both.
”

“I know,” I told him.
“I know.”

He rose up on one elbow and drew me hard against him. I knew he was giving himself over. To me, to us, to whatever would happen. He clutched me, holding the back of my head with his hand. His fingers pressed into my scalp, and his heart pounded, filling my body.

We made love in the sun, and afterward, lying on the blanket, I began to cry. A shuddering cry that alarmed Whit at first, but I kept smiling at him with my wet face, saying, “No, no, it's all right, it's because I feel so happy.” I hadn't said,
so complete,
though I'd wanted to.

We got dressed, and he arranged the blanket beneath the hermitage roof, out of the sun. As we settled on top of it, he handed me an old-fashioned metal thermos filled with water, then rummaged deeper in his canvas bag.

“There's something I want to show you,” he said, pulling out two books:
Legenda Aurea: Readings on the Saints
by Jacobus de Voragine; the other title I couldn't see.

“I looked up some of the saints—the ones who took Jesus too seriously when it came to cutting off the ‘offending member.'”

It pleased me that he wanted to be involved, to help me with Mother. It was only later that I remembered how thoroughly I'd been against Hugh's involvement, and I couldn't account for the difference.

“I found a St. Eudoria in the twelfth century who cut off her finger,” he said. “She was a prostitute until she was converted by a Franciscan friar.”

“A prostitute?”

“Yeah, but that's not the interesting part,” he said, though to be honest, I wasn't so sure.

“Supposedly after she cut off her finger, she planted it in a field, and it sprouted into a sheaf of wheat. Nelle could've been
planting
her finger, not burying it.”

The thought jolted me a little.

“You think Mother was copying her?”

“In Ireland there used to be something called ‘white martyrdom,'” Whit said. “Our abbot is always preaching sermons about it—I'm sure Nelle must've heard some of them. It means following in the footsteps of one of the saints, imitating what he or she did.”

“That sounds like Mother—cutting off her finger and planting it because some saint did it six hundred years ago.”

Legenda Aurea
had a worn, outdated jacket with a hideous picture of Jesus wearing what looked like a British crown. He lifted a scepter over a throng of kneeling, haloed men.

“When I first started looking for this book,” Whit said, “I couldn't find it on the shelf, so I went and asked Dominic. He opened his desk drawer, and it was in there along with this book.” He held it out to me:
Indigenous Religious Traditions.

“Dominic told me Brother Timothy had found both books in the kitchen right after Nelle cut off her finger. Apparently she'd taken them out of the library. She marked a page in each of them—the one on St. Eudoria and then this.” He flipped open the second book to a dog-eared page and laid it across my lap.