The Mermaid Chair (30 page)

A
s the ferry nudges against the dock on Egret Island, the captain blows his horn a second time, and I go out to the railing. I remember the flowers spilling into the water as the boat pulled away last May. The sad little bon voyage party. It seems now like a piece of history starting to sift into dust and, at the same time, as if I have only just been here. As if the petals will still be floating on the water.

It is February now. The marshlands are floods of golden yellow. The color settles on me like the heat and light of the sun. The island will always be the fixed point of the migrating world.

Out there on the dock, Max is barking. I think of the mermaids hanging from the ceiling in Kat's shop, the egrets flying above Caw Caw Creek, the bare rosebushes in the monastery garden. I picture the mermaid chair alone in the chapel. The whole island rises up to me, and I have a moment when I honestly don't know if I can step off the boat. I stand there and let it pass,
knowing
it will pass. All things do.

When I told Hugh I needed to come and see Mother, to be here on Ash Wednesday, he said, “Of course.” Then a moment later, “Is it just your mother you're going to see?”

Not that often, but once in a while, the sorrow and mistrust will form across his eyes. His face will close in. And he will be gone. His mind and body will still be there, of course, but his heart—his spirit, even—will go to the outer banks of our marriage and camp. A day or two later, he will be back. I will find him cooking breakfast, whistling, bearing more forgiveness.

Each day we pick our way through unfamiliar terrain. Hugh and I did not resume our old marriage—that was never what I wanted, and it was not what Hugh wanted either—rather we laid it aside and began a whole new one. Our love is not the same. It feels both young and old to me. It feels wise, as an old woman is wise after a long life, but also fresh and tender, something we must cradle and protect. We have become closer in some ways, the pain we experienced weaving tenacious knots of intimacy, but there is a separateness as well, the necessary distances.

I have not told him yet about the knot I tied in my thread that day in the ocean. I talk to him instead about the mermaids. They belong to themselves, I told him once, and he frowned in that way he does when weighing something he's unsure of. I know at times he's afraid of the separateness, my independence, this abiding new loyalty I have to myself now, but I believe he will come to love this part of me, just as I do.

I tell him, smiling, that it was the mermaids who brought me home. I mean, to the water and the mud and the pull of the tides in my own body. To the solitary island submerged so long in myself, which I desperately needed to find. But I also try to explain they brought me home to
him.
I'm not sure he understands any more than I do how belonging to myself allows me to belong more truly to him. I just know it's true.

“No, no, I'm not planning to see him,” I said to Hugh that day. “You can come with me if you want. We'll both go.”

“It's okay. You should go by yourself,” he said. “You need to go back and face the island and be done with it.”

Now, stepping onto the island, I feel myself bracing, feel my need to gather everything up so I can finally lay it down.

Mother's house has been repainted cobalt blue. It is practically radiating when I arrive, chauffeured by Kat in the golf cart. She lays on the air horn in the front yard, and the rest of them come out onto the porch. Mother, Hepzibah, Benne.

Inside, sitting at the kitchen table, I look at them and see how everything continues and equally how it changes.

Mother tells me how Kat takes her across the bay every month to see the doctor, that she is on much less medication now. Her finger is still in the jar of alcohol on her dresser. Last August she went back to her passion for feeding the monks, abandoning Julia Child for James Beard. “The monks miss Julia's food,” she tells me. “But they'll get over it.”

When I ask Hepzibah about the Grand Gullah Tour, she sits straighter in her African print dress and tells me it's listed these days in all the tourist magazines in Charleston, that she may have to offer it every single day by the time summer comes around.

Kat surprises me most. She has written up her own booklet to sell along with Dominic's in the Mermaid's Tale. Called
Island Dog,
it's the legendary story of Max meeting the ferry every day with unfailing precision. Shaking her head and causing her precarious hairdo to slide out of its combs, she announces that she and Max will be on the television news next week.

Benne adds that Max is excited and not at all nervous.

They want to talk about my paintings, so I let them. I've lost my shyness about all that. Kat chirps about my “Diving Women” show at the Phoebe Pember Gallery in Charleston last October. I had
her
to thank for it. She was the one who packed all the paintings I'd left behind and took them to the gallery owner herself. “I knew she would want them,” she said.

I hadn't come for the opening—I wasn't ready to come back then—but the Egreteers had gone and stood in for me. I am working now on a series of island landscapes. Once in a while, though, I stop and paint one of my quirky mermaids for Kat, just to make her happy. The last one was of a real mermaid, working as a saleswoman inside Kat's own shop. She stands behind the counter selling mermaid trinkets to the tourists, wearing a T-shirt that says
THE MERMAID'S TALE.

When Mother asks about Dee, I don't know how much to say. The truth is that Dee was shaken by what happened between Hugh and me. There was a brief period at the end of last summer when she talked about withdrawing from school, taking a semester off. I think she only wanted to be near us, to protect us somehow, as if she bore some responsibility in it all. We had to sit her down and tell her we would be okay, better than okay, that our problems had had nothing to do with her, only with ourselves. In the end she'd gone back to Vanderbilt, more serious, more grown up. Despite that, she called before I left home to say she was writing Hugh's birthday song: “If Sofas Could Talk.”

What I tell Mother is that Dee has switched her major from English to premed, that she has decided to be a psychiatrist like Hugh. Mother wants to know if Dee's decision has anything to do with what she did to her fingers. “No,” I say. “I think it has more to do with what
I
did.” I laugh, but there's truth in it.

The five of us talk all afternoon. Till the sky darkens and the palmettos make pronged shadows at the window.

As they are leaving, Kat tugs me aside, over to a private place in the yard beside the bathtub Mary. She hands me a tan canvas bag, which I recognize instantly. It is the one Whit carried in the johnboat on rookery rounds.

“Dominic brought this to the shop a couple of weeks ago,” she says. “He asked me to give it to you.”

I do not open it then, but wait until Mother is asleep and I am alone in my room.

I take everything out and lay it across the bed. Four dried brown apple peels tucked inside a plastic bag. A battered box of Mermaid Tears. White egret feathers. The turtle skull. My father's pipe.

All the things I'd left inside the crab trap in Whit's hermitage are here. During the past year, not a week had gone by that I didn't think about them, wishing I could've managed to go back for them.

Whit's letter is at the bottom of the bag.

 

Dear Jessie,

I am returning your things. I have kept them all this time in my cottage, thinking I would give them to you myself when you returned to the island. I didn't want to intrude on your life in Atlanta by sending them in the mail. I felt when you were ready, you would return for them.

I am not here, however, to give them to you in person. I will leave the monastery February 1. I took solemn vows last August, but, ironically enough, decided at Christmas that I would not stay after all.

I want to be in the world again. I understand now that a large part of me is not so much hidden here with God but hiding. I have decided to take back the hazard of life. I came here wanting God, but truthfully I was also looking for some kind of immunity from life. There is none.

And, of course, I may find that God is out there, too. Dominic reminded me that “God is the one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” I'll go see if he's right.

At first it was difficult for me to go back to the hermitage, to remember you there, to realize I would know you only as a memory or a longing. But finally I'm able to think of our time together without regret. You brought me deeper into life—how could I regret that?

I want you to be well. Please be happy.

Your Whit

I sit in my Mother's blue house and cry into my hands. When that is done, I close the long year of my life, knowing it will stay with me like the turtle skull worn down by the sea, shining and white-boned.

The last thing Hugh said to me when I left was this: “You
are
coming back this time, right?” He was smiling, teasing, wanting to lighten the tension we both felt at my returning.

I look toward the window. I want to tell him,
Yes, I'm coming back, Hugh. When I die, it will be your face I see hovering over me, whether in flesh or in memory. Don't you know? What I want is you. What I want is the enduring. The beautiful enduring.

T
he Mermaid Chair
is a work of fiction. The story, the characters, and the setting come purely from my imagination.

I've imagined Egret Island as part of the beautiful necklace of barrier islands along the coast of South Carolina, but you will not find the island on a map. It's not a real place. Nevertheless, it's similar to existing South Carolina islands when it comes to its beach, maritime forest, tidal marshes, estuaries, creeks, birds, and animals. I drew on numerous natural history and nature guidebooks; Todd Ballantine's
Tideland Treasure
was particularly useful. All the plants, trees, and flora referred to in the book are real, though I took the liberty of inventing one fictitious plant that you will be able to distinguish in retrospect.

I've explored numerous barrier islands in South Carolina, but it was Bull Island—an uninhabited and pristine place—that was often in the back of my mind as I wrote. Not only did I position Egret Island geographically where Bull Island is located on South Carolina's coastline, I also borrowed the name of Bull Island's magnificent beach: Bone Yard.

St. Eudoria is not a real saint in the Catholic Church, as far as I know, though I based her story on accounts of saints who mutilated their bodies in the pursuit of holiness.

The legend of Sedna is a genuine Native American tale from the Inuit people, which has several variations. In recounting the story in the novel, I've attempted to be true to its source.

The monastery of St. Senara is nonexistent. In writing about it I've relied on a list of books too long to enumerate and on my years of study of contemplative spirituality and the monastic life.

The Gullah culture, which is referred to in the novel, is a distinct heritage belonging to African-American descendants of slaves who settled along the southeast coast. The culture contains its own customs, food, art, and language, some of which appear in the novel. The Gullah phrases that I've used are part of the Gullah language still spoken in parts of South Carolina. I'm indebted to the wonderful book
Gullah Cultural Legacies
by Emory S. Campbell.

This novel began one summer day in 2001 when my friend Cheri Tyree mentioned that she'd seen a “mermaid chair” during a visit to England. I'm deeply grateful to her for this chance comment, which led me to the chair that sits in St. Senara Church in the ancient village of Zennor, in the beautiful and magical land of Cornwall. The chair is made from two fifteenth-century bench ends, one of which is carved with a mysterious mermaid. The carving is associated with the fabled Mermaid of Zennor, who fell in love with one of the church's choristers, then lured him into the sea.

Little historical information is available about St. Senara, the saint for whom the Cornish church is named, but I was intrigued by a legend suggesting that before Senara's conversion, she was a Celtic princess named Asenora.

Armed with these two morsels of inspiration—the historical mermaid chair and the bit of lore about Senara and Asenora—I began to weave my own story. I created a distinctly different mermaid chair for the novel—different in appearance, in history, and in the mythology that surrounds it—though I did use some fragments from the Mermaid of Zennor myth. I am indebted and grateful to St. Senara Church in Cornwall, for without its famous chair, this novel could not have been written.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge two books that became my companions as I immersed myself in the symbolism, mythology, art, and history of mermaids:
Sirens
by Meri Lao and
Mermaids,
compiled by Elizabeth Ratisseau.