The Mermaid Chair (6 page)

The abbot spoke in his Irish brogue, not one bit of it flaked away after all these years. “I hope it was productive time.”

“Yes, Reverend Father.”

“Not too harsh, then?”

“No, Reverend Father.”

Thomas didn't know how old Dom Anthony was, but he looked ancient gazing down, the skin of his face drooping from his chin and cheeks almost like ruffles. Sometimes the things he said sprang from such a timeless old world. Once, during a Sunday-morning chapter meeting, sitting on his thronelike chair holding his crosier, he'd said, “The same time St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, he changed all the old pagan women into mermaids.” Thomas had thought that quaint—and a little bizarre. Could the abbot really believe that?

“Go to bed now,” Dom Anthony said.

Thomas lifted himself from the floor and walked out of the church into a night that was heaving about in the wind. He flipped his cowl over his head and crossed the central cloister, headed toward the duplex cottages scattered under the whorled oaks near the marsh.

He followed the path toward the cottage he shared with Father Dominic. Dominic was the abbey librarian and also the monastery prankster (“Every court has its jester,” Dominic liked to say). He had aspirations of being a writer and kept Thomas up nights with his typing. Thomas had no idea what Dominic was working on, on the other side of the cottage, but he had a feeling it might be a murder mystery—an Irish abbot who turns up dead in the refectory, strangled with his own rosary. Something like that.

The path was lined with cement plaques announcing the stations of the cross, and Thomas moved past them through spiky bits of fog that had blown in from the ocean, thinking now of Dominic, who'd once drawn smiley faces on several of them. Of course Dom Anthony had made him scrub the plaques and then the choir stalls, while the rest of them got to watch
The Sound of Music
on television. Why couldn't
he
get into trouble the way Dominic did, for something droll and comic? Why did it have to be for the existential bullshit he wrote in his notebook?

He'd thought for a while he might get into trouble over the baseball card that he used to mark pages in his prayer book, but apparently no one, including the abbot, seemed to care. It surprised Thomas how much he missed simple things like baseball. Once in a while he got to watch a game on television, but it wasn't the same. Dale Murphy had hit forty-four home runs last year, and he'd seen only one of them.

Linda had given him the baseball card their last Christmas together. Eddie Matthews, 1953—there was no telling what she'd paid for it.

He envied Dominic, who had to be eighty at least and went about in a tattered straw hat everywhere except choir. He'd been the one who'd convinced the abbot to put a television in the music-listening room. Once Dominic had tapped on Thomas's door after the Great Silence and tried to convince him to sneak over and watch a special program about shooting the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue. Thomas had not gone. He regretted it to this day.

He was nearly at his cottage when he stopped abruptly, thinking he heard a voice, a woman's voice calling in the distance. He looked east toward the rookery, his robe beating around his legs.

A whip-poor-will sang out. The Gullah woman on the island, Hepzibah Postell, the one who kept up the slave cemetery, had told him once that whip-poor-wills were the departed spirits of loved ones. Of course he didn't believe this, and he was pretty sure she didn't either, but he liked to think it was Linda out there singing. That it was her voice calling in the distance.

Thomas pictured his wife—or was it merely the generic woman?—posing in a swimsuit. He imagined the place inside her thigh, just above her knees, the softness there. He thought about kissing that place.

He stood beneath a bent tree in the Great Silence, and he thought about falling into life and then about flying far above it. Then he heard it again—a woman's voice calling out. Not a bird singing or the wind moaning but a woman.

T
he smell of gumbo hung inside the house in thick green ropes, like something you could swing on to get across the kitchen. I set my suitcase on the beige rug and walked down the hallway to Mother's bedroom. I called out, “Mother? It's me, Jessie,” and my voice sounded grainy and tired.

She was not in her bed. The blanket was thrown back, and the white sheets were wadded up in a mess, as if children had gone berserk jumping up and down on them.

The bathroom door was shut, and fluorescent light leaked out from the bottom edge. As I waited for her to come out, I stretched my achy shoulders and neck. A pair of worn-out terry-cloth slippers had been tossed upside down on the rug, which was beige like its sibling in the living room. Mother did not believe in unbeige rugs. Or in walls or curtains in any color other than white, cream, and ivory. She
did
believe in green paint outside, but inside, things had to be more or less the color of tap water. The color of a life bled completely out.

I regarded the old-fashioned dressing table with the gathered skirt—was it beige or was it white with a case of old age? In the center of the dresser, Mother's ceramic Madonna had a chubby Jesus hoisted onto her hip and a look of postpartum depression about her. Beside it was a photograph of my father on his boat. The water was navy blue and traveled behind him forever.

I was not thinking about how noiseless Mother was behind the bathroom door; I was preoccupied with the sense of wading back into her life, into this room, swimming in the contradictions she always stirred in me, the tangle of love and loathing. I scanned the bedside table: her old red-beaded rosary, two prescription bottles, a roll of gauze, tape, scissors, a digital clock. I realized I was looking for the mayonnaise jar. It was nowhere in the room.

“Mother?”

I tapped on the bathroom door. Silence loomed back, and then a thin, sticky anxiety seeped from behind the door. I turned the knob and stepped inside. There was nothing but the minuscule bathroom. Empty.

I walked into the kitchen—a room so changeless it seemed magically frozen in place; entering it was like strolling back into the 1950s. The same can opener attached to the wall, the canisters with the rooster motif, copper teakettle, tin bread box, dingy teaspoons mounted on a wooden rack. The wall clock beside the refrigerator was a black cat with a swinging tail pendulum. The immortal Felix. I expected to see Mother sitting at the Formica table eating gumbo, but this room, too, was empty.

I hurried through the dining room, checked the two extra bedrooms—Mike's and my old rooms. She had to have been here while Hepzibah was in the house—what, ten minutes ago? I returned to the kitchen and looked up Hepzibah's number, but as I reached for the phone, I noticed the back door ajar.

Grabbing a flashlight, I stepped onto the back stairs, swinging the beam across the yard. The sash to Mother's blue bathrobe lay in a coil on the bottom step. I went down and retrieved it. The wind had picked up. It took the sash right out of my hand. I watched it jerk and flail into the darkness.

Where would she go?

I remembered the time Dee, five years old, had slipped away from me in Northlake Mall, the seizure of panic I'd felt, followed by an almost preternatural calm, by some voice inside telling me the only way to find Dee was to think like her. I'd sat on a bench and thought like Dee, then walked straight to the children's shoe store, where I'd found her among the Sesame Street tennis shoes, trying to lace Bert and Ernie onto her small feet. I knew only one thing Mother loved the way Dee had loved Bert and Ernie.

I found the path that led to the monastery at the back of the yard. It wasn't a long path, but it twisted through overarching wax myrtle and sweet bay and snags of dewberry vines. The monks had cut a crude opening for Mother in the monastery wall so she wouldn't have to go all the way around to the entrance when she came to cook for them. They called it “Nelle's Gate.” Mother, of course, ate that up. She'd told me about it at least fifty times.

As I stepped through it, I shouted her name. I heard an animal of some sort rustle in the brush, then a whip-poor-will, and when the wind died momentarily, the distant pitch and tumble of the ocean, that endless percussion it makes.

Mother had worn a foot trail to the main path that ran between the cloister and the monks' cottages. I followed it, pausing once or twice to call out to her, but the wind seemed to bat my voice right back at me. The moon had risen. It hung low out over the marsh, a startling orb of glassy light.

When I saw the back of the cloister enclave, I cut off the flashlight and began to run. Everything flowed past me—the little markers with the stations of the cross, the plumes of mist, the sea wind, and the knotty ground. I swept past the stucco house where the monks made their nets, the sign over its door reading
FORTUNA, MARIA, RETIA NOSTRA
—Bless, Mary, Our Nets.

The statue of St. Senara was in an enclosed garden beside the church. I stepped through the gate into a dense haven of rosebushes, their limbs bare and reaching, forming candelabra shadows against the far wall. The monks had designed the garden with St. Senara's statue in the center and six evenly spaced paths leading in to her. She looked like the hub of a magnificent floral wheel.

I'd played here as a child. While Mother slaved in the monastery kitchen, I would come out here and pull dozens of rose heads off their stems, filling a sweetgrass basket with petals—a whole mishmash of colors—which I disposed of in secret ceremonies, tossing them into the marsh behind the church, around the trunks of certain venerable bearded oaks, and onto the seat of the mermaid chair, for some reason that being the most honored spot. It was my funeral game, a solemn play I'd indulged in after my father died. The petals were his ashes, and I'd thought what I was doing was saying good-bye, but it may have been just the opposite—that I was trying to hold on to him, tuck him in private places only I knew. I would find the petals weeks later, lumps of brown, dried rose chips.

The night seemed paler now, as if the wind had blown some of the darkness out of it. I stood still, letting my eyes roam across the tops of the rosebushes, along the paths plowed with moonlight. There was no sign of my mother.

I wished then I'd called Hepzibah and Kat instead of dashing over here, wasting all this time. I'd just been so sure she would be here, much surer than I'd been about Dee and the shoe store. Mother had made herself the Keeper of the Statue about the same time she'd started to work in the kitchen. She often trudged out here with a bucket of soapy water to wash the bird shit off it, and four times a year she waxed it with a paste that smelled like orange peel and limes. She came here to pour out the various and sundry torments of her life instead of going into the church and telling them to God. Senara was practically a nobody in the hierarchical world of saints, but Mother believed in her.

She loved to recount the story of my birth as proof of Senara's potency, how I was turned backward in her womb and became stuck during the delivery. She'd prayed to Senara, who'd promptly flipped me upside down, and I'd wriggled headfirst into the world.

Out here in the middle of the garden, the statue appeared like a stamen protruding from the center of a huge, winter-blighted flower. It occurred to me that the saint had presided the same way over my childhood, her shadow hovering above the emptiness that had come when I was nine.

The worst punishment Mike and I had ever received had come because we'd dressed the statue in a two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses, and a blond wig. We'd cut the bottom of the suit in half and pinned it together around Senara's hips. Some monks had thought the getup was funny, but Mother had cried over our disrespect and sentenced us to write the Agnus Dei five hundred times a day for a solid week:
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Instead of being contrite, I'd merely felt confused about it all, as if I'd betrayed Senara and liberated her at the same time.

As I stood near the back of the garden, trying to think what to do now that Mother plainly wasn't here, I heard a thin scratching sound drift from the general vicinity of Senara's statue, like a small bird raking the ground for grubs and insects. I came up behind the statue, and there was Mother sitting on the ground with the mayonnaise jar, her white hair a neon splotch in the dark.

She wore her practical navy coat over a long chenille bathrobe and sat with her legs splayed out in front her, the way a child might sit in a sandbox. She was digging in the dirt with her left hand, using what looked like a stainless-steel soup ladle. The bandage on her right hand appeared the size of a child's baseball glove and was speckled with dirt.

She didn't see me; she was utterly absorbed in what she was doing. I stared at her silhouette for several seconds, my relief at finding her shifting into some fresh new dread. I said, “Mother, it's me, Jessie.”

She reared back with a sudden jerk, and the ladle fell into her lap.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
she cried. “You scared me to death! What are you doing here?”

I sank down beside her. “I'm out here looking for you,” I replied, trying to sound natural and unalarmed. I even tried to smile.

“Well, you found me,” she said, then picked up the ladle and resumed work on the mouse hole she'd made at the base of the statue.

“All right, we've established what
I'm
doing here. Now, what are
you
doing here?” I asked.

“It doesn't really concern you.”

When I'd found Dee that day in the shoe store I'd grabbed her by the shoulders, wanting to scream at her for scaring me, and the same irrational anger flared in me now. I wanted to shake my mother till her teeth tumbled out.

“How can you say that?” I demanded. “Hepzibah must've told you I was here, and you took off before I could even get into the house.
You
scared
me
to death, too.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, I didn't mean to scare you. I just needed to take care of this.”

This.
What was
this?
I turned on the flashlight and directed a beam of light onto the mayonnaise jar. Her dismembered finger lay inside it. It looked very clean, and the nail appeared to have been filed. Lifting the jar level with my nose, I could see the shriveled edge of skin at the severed end with a piece of white bone protruding.

A sick feeling passed through me, similar to my nausea that morning. I closed my eyes and didn't speak, and Mother went on scraping at the cold ground. At last I said, “I don't know what you're doing out here, but you're not well, and you need to get up and come back to the house with me.”

I felt suddenly bleary with exhaustion.

“What do you mean, I'm not well?” she said. “I'm perfectly well.”

“
Really?
Since when is purposely cutting off your finger considered perfectly well?” I sighed.
“Jesus Christ!”

She whirled toward me then. “Why don't you call on someone you
know?
” she said in a scalding tone. “Nobody asked you to come back.”

“Kat asked me.”

“Kat needs to mind her own business.”

I snorted. “Well, fat chance of that.”

I heard the beginnings of a laugh down in her throat, a rare melting sound I hadn't heard in so long, and for some reason it knocked my little wall of anger flat.

Sliding over so that our shoulders touched, I laid my hand on top of hers, the one still coiled around the spoon, and I thought maybe she would jerk it away, but she didn't. I felt the tiny stick bones in her hand, the soft lattice of veins. “I'm sorry. For everything,” I said. “I really am.”

She turned and looked at me, and I saw that her eyes were brimming, reflecting like mirrors. She was the daughter, and I was the mother. We had reversed the natural order of things, and I couldn't fix it, couldn't reverse it. The thought was like a stab.

I said, “Tell me. Okay? Tell me why you did this to yourself.”

She said, “Joe—your father,” and then her jaw slumped down as if his name bore too much weight for her mouth. She looked at me and tried again. “Father Dominic…” she said, but her voice trailed off.

“What? What about Father Dominic?”

“Nothing,” she said, and refused to go on. I couldn't imagine what sort of anguish was stoppered inside her, or what Father Dominic had to do with anything.

“I didn't get my ashes today,” she said, and I realized I hadn't either. It was the first Ash Wednesday service I had missed since my father died.

Picking up the ladle, she scooped at the ground. “The dirt is too hard.”

“Are you trying to bury your finger?” I asked.

“I just want to put it in a hole and cover it up.”

If your mother says fish fly, just say, Yes, ma'am, fish fly.

I took the digging tool from her. “All right, then.”