Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  "Oh."

  "What else? He's twenty-six --" (Twenty-six? But, my child, you're only nineteen.) " -- and he's a yoga teacher." (Yoga? How could he expect to support a wife and family with yoga?)

  "We met a good while ago, before you left for Europe, but I didn't want to say anything till..."

  "Are you..." My voice was as casual as I could make it. "Em... seeing a lot of each other?"

  Tadpoles of rain swam in wavy lines across the glass of the booth.

  "I guess."

  So she was sleeping with him, this twenty-six-year-old. This father figure. This stranger was now intimate with her body. Just thinking about that -- not going so far as to imagine it, I couldn't even imagine imagining it -- brought on a glut of panic. Oh my Star, be careful.

  "I don't know what else to tell you, Mom. He's a really sweet guy."

  "That's wonderful, darling." It didn't sound any more convincing the second time.

  There was a silence, in which I felt like I could hear her eyebrows draw together. I took a deep breath.

  "I hope he's not making you neglect your studies."

  "Oh, Mom, for goodness' sake! But listen, guess what, I've lost weight. I don't even know how. He's always cooking."

  Love, my darling. Filling up that space you used to cram with food. Filling up the space that I couldn't fill.

  "Shando means 'New Way'. It's a Buddhist name. He's a --"

  "Oh dear, honey," I said, cutting her off. "Is that the pips?" The warning sound that we had just sixty seconds left. I knew it wasn't but I couldn't bear to hear any more about him. I couldn't go on pretending I was happy for her when I was so full of fear. Or some more loathsome feeling.

  "I'll call again on Saturday," I said, still in my breezy voice. "Have a great time with...er...Shando. Tell him I said hi."

  "I will. Thanks, Mom. We're going to..."

  I put the receiver down on her voice.

  I stood in the booth, staring, my hand still on the telephone. If he was putting healthy meals in front of her and making her happy, I should be pleased. I was pleased. I was. Any guy able to see beyond her body shape to the darling girl beneath couldn't be all bad.

  Or did it mean that he was dysfunctional too?

  No.

  Stop.

  Star had her first boyfriend. And high time too. It was a good thing.

  A good thing.

  I stepped outside the phone box, into the rain. The street lamps shone above, their orange glows diffused, a row of blurry suns. I pressed on towards the restaurant, to my table for one.

  I want you to know, Star, that for years I resisted writing like this: the autobiographical, confessional, first-person narrative so beloved of Freudianism and feminism. The insistent I. I-I-I-I. It still feels self-indulgent, but nothing else will do. This is the only literary home that has room for us all: you, me and Daddy. The only method that allows me to reach into the secret space.

  Whenever somebody started to tell Henry James an anecdote that ignited his storytelling instinct, he'd stop them before they were finished, saying, "Don't tell me too much." I know why. He wanted the freedom and insight that can only come from the imagination; too many facts would constrain him, inhibit his ability to shape the tale.

  I understand. Truth above facts is my motto still as I sit in this study, so many years later, beneath a window that throws a greenish light across my hand, working through this reworking.

  I use the tools of fiction I taught myself back then -- selecting incidents, re-ordering time, plotting and orchestrating, representing speech, winnowing the chaff words and chopping and changing others -- because I want the truth of story.

  But I also want what is known to have happened to be accurate.

  Pulled between diaries and letters and memory on one side and my imagination on the other, I cross and recross the frontier of what was and what might be, like a demented double-agent.

  My father seems to have suffered none of these difficulties in writing about his life. His childhood seems to have always returned to him in clear, bright lines. Marbles in his pockets, games on the streets, dinner on the table, devilment with his brothers: a happy boy, by his own account. It's idealized, it has to be – he grew up in a tenement house in what was then the poorest city in Europe – but I can feel a truth in it, remembering how, when he recalled those early days, his words softened, his sentences lengthened. It was like he was leaving out a breath. And so I can imagine that as a boy, he was different to the man he became, the man in the later diaries, further on in life.

  I have his small books in front of me on the desk. He kept them diligently, a new one for every year, though, as far as I know, only these five (1924, 1925, 1937, 1951, 1960) survived. They tell me things like how he cut back the ditch at the bottom of the garden on Friday, July 16, 1924; that rain prevented him from finishing the job the next day; that he wrote poetry, sporadically and badly; that he never forgot the war.

  The entries in the large book, the one was started in France, during the war, were much longer and he added to it all his life, in spurts. One break between entries, from 1926 to 1937, is almost eleven years long. Anyone else would have started a new diary but not my 'waste-not, want-not' father.

  It was against regulations for him to write in this book as he did during the war, as he was summoned by a whistle out of his trench, to march across open grass, rifle cocked, part of a line of men that included Irish, English, Scots and Welsh, Australians and Indians, Africans and Canadians, all faithfully or resentfully trudging up and over. Mule was his family's name for him and the quality that gave him that nickname stood to him, as he leapt out and roared forward, straight into the worst that the enemy could do.

  Rat-a-tat-tat. All round him, clusters of hot bullets burst into shins and knees and thighs and hips and stomachs and chests and necks and cheeks and eyes and brains and hearts. The explosions tore at the earth and the skies, as if trying to bring down the heavens.

  He hurled himself over the top, offering his body, the only thing he owned, to be hacked like a blade of grass. Men fell beside him, and before him and behind him, urged on by their captain, 'Come on lads. We'll be all right. Come on, then.' Mangled by bullets and bombs, some sent up by their own side, missiles that fell short or long. Killed instantly but cleanly, by concussion. Blown apart by direct hit, sliced into segments.

  Somehow, through it all, he was missed. Forward he marched until given the order to retreat, then back across a carpet of the dead, their flesh plucking at his boots, their smell thick at the back of his throat.

  And next day out to do it over again, and the next, and the next. Day heaped upon day, laced by rum, and adrenaline, and shouts from his Captain. Day upon day, on and on for months, knowing it was happening in all the other regiments too, gouging place-names onto the map with soldiers' blood. Places I visit now, on my war tourism trip. I write them out again: Ypres. The Somme. Passchendale. Salonika. Suvla Bay.

  Between the moment of flinging himself forward to the moment of his panting return to the trench, only fragments stay with him clear enough to write. Floating limbs, hands and feet and arms and legs torn away. Forsaken helmets and gas masks. Rats who always make away first with the softest tissue of the dead, the eyes and lips. Heads, exposed teeth grinning beneath the hollowed out sockets of evacuated eyes.

  He found God in the killing fields, my father. A harsh disciplinarian God, the One that was fashionable at that time. A God who believed in discipline, like a Sergeant Major or Head Corporal, who held out no promises of rewards in this life, but for the duly dutiful, bliss in the next.

  His big journal turned into one long prayer to this new God. Not to be spared, no. He expected now to die. The prayer, day upon day, was that when his time came, it would be in the form of a bullet somewhere vital. Heart or head, please.

  Not dismemberment. Not pulping.

  Please God.

  Please.

  Then, a lucky injury. His leg was broken by a
piece of shrapnel and he waited out the rest of the summer in a hospital bed. Through all this activity, the Allied front slid only five miles forward on its wave of blood.

  I know what Star cannot know and also what she knows too well, the double-barreled story we carry in our heads. The dance of what is, the disruption of what might be.

  On the third day of March 1990, I was once again at my desk and having a good writing day. The weather had improved, the cloud cover finally breaking into high columns of white fluff marching across a blue canvas. The thread connecting now to then, me to my father, Star to Zach, was twitching strong and all I had to do was run after it, taking dictation. Alone in Doolough, I was able to put writing first as I hadn't since those days in Europe. No daughter, no job, no father, no lover. The book was repaying that commitment and when I was frozen by worry, unable to know which foot should go in front of the other, I knew that by finding my way to the desk I could type my way into a day that worked.

  In my book, I was looping back towards where I"d started. I had only to write out the events that had brought me back home and then, so quickly spun me back across the Atlantic to Ireland, for the third time in four years. I was in the middle of a sentence when the telephone jangled beside me, making me jump. It was Mags Halloran, my lawyer, whirling in. How was I doing? The date for the trial had come through, rather earlier than expected. She needed to see me. When could I come up to Dublin again?

  I felt like someone slapped out of sleep but I managed to answer. I was doing fine, fine. Yes, I would come. Tomorrow? All right then, tomorrow.

  I replaced the phone in its cradle. I was Mercy Mulcahy again, back in my father's bedroom, with the chair under me, the old mahogany of the desk smooth under my fingers, the tips of the trees outside the window and, beyond them, the boughs and budding stalks of other branches and, through them, shards of grey lake water. The lake is only visible from the house in winter and then only in slivers. In another few weeks, the leaves would be fully out and the water and all around it would be hidden from view for another nine months.

  I was here, back in this strange limbo between my old life in Santa Paola and whatever lay ahead. Maybe back home to California, maybe into an Irish jail. I needed to clutch hold of the two sides of my mind and draw them back over the fissure that opened whenever I considered this. If I was to fight for my freedom, the time had now come to tell all I knew.

  To allow Mags to point up other possibilities.

  To let life decide, not me.

  The two sides went at it again in my head, slicing each other to ribbons. The writing about the past which had seemed so powerful before Mags's call was diminished. A poor sticking plaster on a gaping wound.

  Double vision disorientated me. I have come to know there is no "what-might-be", there is only "what-is". What a lot of suffering I would have saved myself if I had known that then.

  "Mom...Oh, Mom."

  I knew at once, the second I heard her voice.

  "Darling, is it...?" Her boyfriend's ridiculous name stuck in my throat.

  "Oh, Mom, I want to die. Just die."

  So, it had come to pass. Already, in just a few months, he had let her down.

  "Darling, don't say that. Of course you don't."

  "I do, I do. I don't think I can bear it. I just want to die, that's all."

  Panic gripped me. "Star, listen to me. Don't do anything, just wait. I'll be home on the next plane. I'll ring tomorrow with the details."

  Once I had made the decision, loneliness vanished and I began to instantly think of all the things I would have liked to have seen and done. I had walked the streets, crossed the bridges, gazed at the churches, admired the art, eaten in the restaurants, explored the war fields, yet I spent the whole time writing about me and Daddy and Star.

  It frustrates me now, as I sit here, trying to remember, not to have written details to draw on. The sun rose and set on me there for sixty-five days and I retain so little of it all. It feels like a sin now, the sin of preoccupation. At the time, held beside Star's need, these objections were nothing. It never occurred to me to stay on for an extra few days, never mind leave her to recover alone. I believed her too insecure to cope with rejection

  The tremor of her voice on the telephone had been like a finger jabbing into a bruise, reviving the days after Brendan left. I hated to think of her stumbling around that dark well, straining to break out while drawing the walls in around her. Conflicting efforts pulling her apart. Oh, I remembered. I remembered.

  Fear. That was the sensation firing me as I packed my bags and hurried a cab to the airport. My little girl, so big and fat and yet so fragile. My prayer was that I would be in time to save her.

  I went to her student dorm. Unwashed dishes stacked themselves on the table and high in the sink, dirty clothes lay in heaps across the floor. Sprawled across the bed, face down in the recovery position a paramedic would put you in if you'd had an accident, lay my unkempt daughter, only her ample, duvet-draped bottom facing out.

  "Star, it's me."

  "Oh, Mom, you came..."

  She sat up, she held me, she let me pull her close. A hot spurt of tears stung my throat. I sent forth thanks to this...Shando. For the first time since she was – what age? In how many years? Oh, too long to remember -- I was allowed to properly hold her. I felt her soft shoulders under my fingers, sunk my chin on the pillow of her neck.

  "My poor darling," I murmured. "My poor, poor darling."

  After a time we separated, though I held onto her hands.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "He dumped me."

  "Why? Did you guys have a fight? Maybe --"

  "No, no, no fight. Just...he doesn't want me." She waved a hand in front of her face and body, as if that was an explanation. Then detached herself from my hands, pulled a pillow over her face, and wailed into it: "Knew he wouldn't. Knew it from the start. Out of my league."

  "Oh, Star...honey...don't..."

  I made her get up and dressed and brought her out for dinner and she told me all over a plate of food that she fiddled with while she talked, talked, talked, like she used to do years ago, when she was afraid to let me go. Afterwards, I brought her back to my hotel room and she spent the night in my bed and, next morning, I encouraged her into the shower and then onwards to her lectures. To my surprise, she obeyed. She didn't know what else to do. By the time she came back to her room that afternoon, I had it sparkling clean, everything in its place and a bunch of sprightly daffodils in a new vase on the table. "You shouldn't have," she said, shrugging her book bag off her shoulder.

  I brought her to dinner that evening but again, she barely ate. At the end of the meal, she said: "Mom, I want to give up college. I want to come home."

  "What about your degree?"

  "I'm not studying anyway. I cut two classes today. I can't concentrate. I can't stop crying."

  "You'll get through it, sweetheart. You're not going to be like this forever."

  "You don't want me either."

  "Don't be silly, Star." It was actually one of my motherly fantasies. Star asleep in her bedroom, home with an illness. Nothing serious, a flu or suchlike, nothing that a few days in bed and a little tenderness wouldn't fix. I'd bring her books and magazines, the kind I despised but she liked. I'd set her up with lots of pillows and the TV remote control. I'd fix her lemon remedies and a little food, nothing heavy on the stomach. Soups, custards, plenty of fluids. "You do know it's not that, don't you?"

  "Yeah, Mom, sure. Whatever."

  I left her, with money and presents and a promise to take a phone call every night. I left her because I was sure it was the right thing to do and had, in a stronger moment, won her agreement on that.

  So I arrived back to Santa Paola, months early. Marsha was disappointed for me but pleased for herself, she said. She had missed me.

  I slotted back into my life, everything the same, except a nightly phone-call from Star. She was not coping but she was managing to f
orce herself through her days, often giving me a hard time on the phone but always calling again the next night. We hadn't been so close in years.

  And then, right in the middle of this sensitive time, Zach arrived back to Santa Paola.

  Early one Wednesday afternoon, during that lull time in the café between lunch and afternoon coffee, I headed out for my break. I had two chores to do that day: to go to the library to exchange my books and to Brown's Healthfood Store to get my supplements. Both were on Ocean Avenue, close enough to walk, so off I swung, out into the sunshine with my book-bag over my shoulder, heavy but not weighing me down.

  For seventeen years now, I had lived in this college town -- population 50,000 -- swollen in term time by the student population to almost double that. Sixteen years of basking in its sunshine (325 days a year is its boast), of tending my house, running my business, raising my kid and living out my life.

  Here was where I knew best; here was where I was best known. I was Mercy Mulcahy, the Irish woman. I lived on Westcliff in the smallest house on a lovely road, almost in view of the ocean. And, in that little house, it could be said, I had lived the life I'd chosen sixteen years ago, negotiating its clear spaces and islands of homely furniture, nurtured by its books and music, comforted by its cushions and blankets.

  I was also one half of Better World Cafe, still known as the "new" cafe down on the boardwalk, one of the minority of the town's businesses that were run by women. Nice place, and the food was good, if you didn't mind things a bit hippy-dippy.

  And I was Mrs Mulcahy, single mom, mother of Maria, more commonly known as Star. Such a sad case, that girl...They remembered seeing her around town as a girl, riding her bike along the boardwalk, or strolling the stores with her friends, such a pretty little thing before she put on all that weight and started wearing those awful clothes. Drink and drugs, it was said. An eating disorder? Probably, yes. And my, so aggressive. Remember her walking down this very street with that friend of hers? One hand held inside their leather jackets, some sort of affectation. Stomping like a pair of off-duty soldiers, angry eyes up front.