Pearl

by Mary Gordon

  A lifesaver, she thinks. That’s what I must figure out now: how to save my own child’s life. She says goodbye to the mother, who is gingerly trying to get back into her seat. The other two children have fallen asleep too. She imagines that the lucky mother will sleep now with the baby in her arms.

  She thinks maybe she will take the pill her doctor friend prescribed: Halcyon. She is amused for a moment at the lavish outcome promised by the name.

  8

  Pearl is lying on the freezing ground. Around her they have set up a series of propane lamps: six-foot-high columns, two feet around. At the top of each column, a dishlike shape, made of black metal, from which a flame flares up; it looks like a torch on top of a tree. In the darkness, she cannot see the base: only the flame shooting up, seemingly out of nowhere. The lamps were in the basement of the embassy. One of the staff who had once worked in a restaurant in Big Sur had ordered the lamps from California. The weather in Dublin was often unseasonably cold for outdoor receptions; the lamps had come in handy, and the staff was grateful for them now. No one wanted to force the girl; they would only use force if it became absolutely necessary. For the meantime, they would keep her warm.

  The flaming torches cast a livid light on the cold stone where Pearl is lying. They make her think she is in a jungle, in a movie about a jungle. The sound of traffic on the road comes to her like drums, or like a wind blowing itself up into a typhoon, a tornado. The voices of people buzz around her. It seems strange to her, very strange: the flickering of the torches, the buzz of the voices, the moon a fingernail in the gray, starless winter sky. She is thinking of blue. The blue of the sky, of the sea, a blue that is an idea of blue, a cold color, desirable in its coldness. The color of emptiness. She has worked at emptying herself. The work of emptying, of getting to the essence. Of making of her life only the essential sentence, the one she can know to be the truth. The framed figures that she sees seem to her essential; the rest, which she considers unessential, comes to her as blocks of darkness.

  . . .

  She is lying on the ground; she is chained; she is starving; she is warmed by propane torches; blankets have been placed on her by the embassy staff. She thrashes them off; someone replaces them; she thrashes them off; they are not put back again.

  “If she wants to freeze to death on top of everything, it’s her funeral, ” a woman says.

  “Nice choice of words, Mulcahy,” a man says, and the others, two or three of them, begin to laugh.

  9

  Joseph crosses the Tiber at the Ponte Fabricio, not looking at the heads carved into the white stone of the parapet. His eye is on the synagogue: an Eastern-looking glass-roofed building that overlooks the river. Is this the place, he wonders, that he should go, if not to pray, at least to think about what is happening to Pearl? All the people he has said he loved—excepting his mother, whom he is not sure he loved—have been Jews. What does Pearl think about her Jewishness? Maria had seen to it that Jewishness was no part of who Pearl knew herself to be—or, rather, has failed to help her come to terms with it. What is a Jew? What is it not to be a Jew? Dr. Meyers, Maria, Pearl, Devorah. All among the chosen people. He has always known himself to be unchosen, not among them.

  The feeling of being unchosen in this way came to him first on Yom Kippur in the year 1960, when he was twelve years old: the Day of Atonement. Pearl is giving her life in atonement for something whose lines none of them yet know. She would not have the word atonement in her vocabulary. But why, he wonders, would anyone have imagined that an impulse so deep, so ancient, would evaporate because it had not been nourished by the proper word?

  He is in Rome, it is December 1998, he is waiting to travel to a girl who may be dying in atonement for something he doesn’t understand. He travels from that place of terror, of incomprehension, thirty-eight years back. To Yom Kippur of 1960. Falling late that year, October. He and Maria are twelve.

  Maria had decided she must go to synagogue for Yom Kippur. She had been talking about it to Max Diamond, who ran the candy store near Sts. Cosmos and Damian School. Maria was Max’s favorite customer; they often talked about religion. She had tried to explain to him her desire to be a contemplative nun. So she told him about the two orders of nuns she thought of joining: the Good Shepherds and the Carmelites, both of whom she had written, saying she would be with them after she graduated from high school. During that period, it was all she thought of: her religious vocation. She talked about nuns endlessly to Max Diamond; at that point, she didn’t have many friends her own age to talk to—most of the girls in her class found her too competitive, too intense, and boys didn’t easily talk to girls about serious things.

  “You see, Max,” she would say, “what I like about the Good Shepherds is, they’re cloistered but they do good for the world. People—you know, like judges and policemen—send wayward girls to them, girls who stay with them in the convent for a while till they can get their lives under control. They send them there instead of prison.”

  “So that’s what you want, darling,” Max said, “to put yourself in a prison? A beautiful young girl like you? Excuse me, but I don’t get it.”

  “You must lose your life in order to gain it, Max,” she said to him. I don’t know what he said. He might have just made her another egg cream.

  It was after one of her conversations with Max that she first talked to Joseph about wanting to go to Yom Kippur services at Max’s synagogue. She needed him to go with her. He told her he didn’t think he could; it might be a sin.

  She invoked Pope John XXIII and opening the windows of the church.

  “It’s a very important day, the Day of Atonement,” she said. “Of course maybe it’s not important to you. You can feel free to say it’s not important, but I can’t. I mean it doesn’t happen to be your heritage.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t important,” Joseph said.

  “If it’s important, we have to do it,” Maria said. “Think of Anne Frank.” She was obsessed with The Diary of a Young Girl. She carried it with her everywhere. She underlined it in the turquoise ink she liked that year.

  Max got them two tickets to the synagogue. Maria said people wouldn’t understand, so they couldn’t tell anyone, not her father, not Sister Berchmans or Father Lynch. She knew they wouldn’t have liked it, though those were the years when ecumenism was in, even if they’d invoked Pope John XXIII. That year the word ecumenism was as fashionable as Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hats: there were interfaith services all over America, perhaps all over the world. What had been considered a sin months before—entering a Protestant church, a synagogue—was suddenly encouraged, accompanied by an exchange of baked goods. Maria was inspired by all that.

  I don’t know why Max failed to tell her that she’d have to sit upstairs with the women, separated from him and Joseph. I can tell you, though, that she was quite unhappy.

  Downstairs with the men, Joseph was not. He loved the music of lament, of sorrow for sin that was rooted in the sinning flesh, not like the music he knew, which must be rooted in the dreams of angels. He loved the long elaborated lists of sins, each named, each dwelt upon in its particularity, loved the rocking, the beating of breasts, the drone of the prayers, the incomprehensible words. He wanted to sway with the men, cover his head and shoulders with a shawl as they did. But of course, he didn’t know what to do; he didn’t know any of the words. So he just stood and sat when Max did and was thankful to be there.

  Then the usher came up to him and said his friend had gotten sick and needed to be taken home. And there was Maria, pretending to be sick: not really sick, he could tell, but furious.

  “We’ve got to go home,” she said. He didn’t ask her why, in case it might be something female, mortifying.

  When they got a block away from the synagogue she said, “I don’t ever want to talk about it. Let’s just forget we went.”

  She gave him her hat, a black straw pillbox, and he had to carry it all the way home, because she wanted to
run, she needed to run, she said, and she couldn’t run holding the hat. He prayed nobody in his class would see him, walking on the street on a Saturday morning carrying a girl’s hat.

  And they didn’t ever talk about it again.

  If he had asked Maria what happened to her at the Yom Kippur service, if he had asked anytime in the nearly forty years since they were there, would she have told him the truth, that she was going through what we would now call some kind of panic attack? At the time we would have said that she got very nervous, she had always been high-strung. A few years later, we would have said she freaked out.

  . . .

  Maria had been full of herself as Anne Frank’s alter ego and convinced—oh, I don’t know what she was convinced of, maybe that she’d have some experience that would connect her to Anne Frank while creating no problems in her life. But suddenly she began to fear that she was putting her immortal soul in danger. In the middle of the service, she saw herself in confession having to tell Father Lynch what she’d done.

  She was sitting beside Max’s wife, who clearly didn’t approve of her being there. None of the girls or women talked to her. She tried to follow in the prayer books, but she was completely lost. She just read some prayers in English, having no idea if she was at the same place as the cantor.

  But even reading along in the prayer book, the extent and variety of sins overwhelmed her. The Catholic confiteor was brief and general; in the prayers of Yom Kippur, all the particulars of human failure were named. Some scared her because she was afraid of the standard they implied: a strictness that could not be predicted or guarded against: “the sin that we have sinned before you in the matter of extending a hand, and for the sin that we have sinned before you in confusion of the heart.” But wasn’t it good to extend a hand? And her heart seemed so often to be confused. She tried to find a connection between the Hebrew letters and the sounds. She could not follow the music, or she would not follow where it led her. The music at mass was light and high and elevating: pure. This music was pulling her to the center of the earth, the center of accusation and lament, where she would see the face of God, a face in the whirlwind, not the face of Jesus holding children in his lap. This was a face that said a child could be carried up, thrown out of the whirlwind, lost.

  In the middle of the service it occurred to her that her father had listened to that music as a child, and she felt ashamed of him for having left it. Her father had denied his people. He had abandoned Anne Frank. He never talked about the concentration camps, or Hitler, or the Jewish dead. At that moment, she was ashamed of her father but also frightened of being ashamed of a man she knew was much finer, much purer, than she could ever be. She longed for the cool disembodied air of Sts. Cosmos and Damian Church, where she could forget she was of a people who, fifteen years earlier, had been nearly destroyed.

  The Jewish people. She was one of them; Joseph was not. She became ashamed about that: that she could, if she chose, claim her place in the synagogue and Joseph could not. So she convinced herself it was for Joseph’s sake she had to leave. For the sake of justice. But I must tell you: it wasn’t justice, it was terror.

  She ran away into the October air. She ran and ran until she got home, and then she lay on her bed and closed her eyes and made herself think of something else. Of herself as a contemplative nun. And she never spoke to anyone about it.

  Afterward, she has always told herself, with pride in her restraint (a rare pride in a nature not often given to restraint), that she refuses the false alliance with Jewish suffering. That she isn’t a Jew because she hasn’t suffered as a Jew. If anyone asks her, she says, “Ethnically I am a Jew. My parents were Jewish. But Jewish culture has made no mark on me.” She will not claim more kinship than that. And Pearl? Maria, of course, told Pearl that she was half Jewish and half Cambodian. But she said those sorts of things weren’t very important to her. Pearl could explore them on her own if she wanted, but as for herself, she wouldn’t claim attachment to things that didn’t attach her. She did not say to her daughter, I am who I name myself to be. But she lived as if this were something they both understood.

  Joseph will not go inside the synagogue. In all the times he has passed it, he has never once gone in. He hasn’t been inside any synagogue since the time he went with Maria. No doubt this is because, of the Jews in Joseph’s life, not one was observant. Of course when he met Devorah, his late wife, Devorah, she was practicing. A strictly observant, strictly Orthodox girl. It occurs to him that when he married Devorah she was twenty, the same age Pearl is now. He thinks of her white skin. The white marble of the statue of Ilaria. And Pearl, flat, white, stretched out. About to be carried off. To death? Don’t even think it, he tells himself. Maria, he knows, is able to stop herself from thinking of something that is too difficult. But he cannot. He must contemplate the possibility that Pearl might take her place alongside his wife, Devorah. Her place among the dead.

  . . .

  It is not surprising, is it, that the face of his dead wife should come to Joseph now as he passes the synagogue? The white skin, green eyes, red hair of his late beloved wife. For a while, twenty years perhaps, he thought the story of his life was a love story, a great romance. But lately he has begun to think it was a tragedy, even a crime, that Devorah ran into Maria and him, that she became Maria’s roommate and friend, and then his girlfriend and his wife. How can a story change form so radically? How did he come in the end to understand that his wife, whom he thought rare and extraordinary, was quite a conventional person? Now he believes that she ended up being the kind of conventional person she was always meant to be, only in the process she suffered and caused a great deal of suffering, to say nothing of upheaval.

  He often wonders: if she’d never met him and Maria, if she’d never talked about her love of Bach with anyone, her need of Bach, or only talked about it with people of her own kind—who would have advised her to sit tight and it would pass, like a fever—she very well might have ended up with children and a husband who had no desire for her to be anything but a simple wife. People in the Orthodox community would have discouraged her. He knows people like Maria are used to believing that burying a gift is the wrong thing. They forget the price paid for exposing it to the harsh winds, the torrential flooding, and they forget that some lights are extinguished by a force that is, after all, greater than themselves. Quite often now, he believes that his late wife would have been better off if she’d never met him. He does not allow himself to say that perhaps he too would have been better off.

  But what constitutes a proper judgment of something like that? Could you not say that Devorah Blum Kasperman made a journey, learned things, and for a while loved deeply and was loved in return; that for twenty years Joseph Kasperman was a happy man because he believed in his wife’s gift for music and believed in the absolute rightness of the way he lived his life, so that the gift could be honored, preserved, amplified? It is certainly possible to say they would have been better off if they’d never met. But what I have just said is also possible. I must tell you I believe both are possible, therefore both are true.

  . . .

  Let us go back to September 1967. For many years, Joseph believed that the story of his life began in September 1967, when he met Devorah, and that his life up till then was only preparation for this great event. It is proper for me to begin telling this story using the strong tones of romance.

  September 1967. Dr. Meyers drives Maria and Joseph to Cambridge, their trunks in a station wagon he’s borrowed from some priest. People are arriving in jeans with guitars, in pin-striped suits, in tweeds; with long hair or crew cuts; in penny loafers, in desert boots. All frightened, all with their special brands of fear, Joseph with the fear of the scholarship boy, in a herringbone jacket bought for him by Dr. Meyers at Brooks Brothers. It is too warm for a proper September day, and he is sweating; he is sure he stinks.

  Only Maria does not seem afraid. She wears a long flower-printed dress and shoes that loo
k like a child’s, with a strap, a round toe, and a flat heel. They are introduced to their roommates—his a mathematician from Georgia, Maria’s a music major from Worcester, Massachusetts: Devorah Blum. And so Devorah and Joseph meet that first day, and he is drawn at once to her shock of flame-colored hair, pulled back, as though she could contain a fire. If the story of Joseph and Devorah’s life together were a tale: simple, consistent, beginning “Once upon a time” and ending “And they lived happily ever after,” this would be a good place to begin it. But I haven’t begun it here, as you see. I began it earlier. I began it so you would know, from the beginning, that it would end not happily, not well.

  Soon the three of them are having dinner together all the time. Devorah explains the rules of kosher eating and Maria says to Devorah, “You see, I’m a Jew, but not a Jew.” She is still going to mass—folk masses, they are called—still singing “Kumbaya” at the Sanctus.

  Joseph is miserable. His roommate never speaks to him. He doesn’t know how to make friends. Maria seems to belong everywhere: the third day after they arrive, she signs up to tutor ghetto children; by the end of the first week, she’s made twenty friends. She begins wearing a wooden pendant in the shape of a peace symbol, given to her by a boy from Choate with hair down to his shoulders. They play their guitars and sing till all hours, “The Times They Are a Changin’,” sung like a battle cry, over and over again.

  One night, Maria gets drunk on beer and phones Joseph and he helps her when she gets sick in the bushes in front of her dorm, Cosgrove. She doesn’t want Devorah to know she got drunk, in the same way she doesn’t want her boyfriend from Choate to know she lost her virginity to him. Joseph doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t want her to tell him the details, any more than he wants his mother to tell him the details of her constipation, or her disgust at finding Maria’s hair in the bathtub drain or a thread of shit along the seam of Dr. Meyers’s underwear. But Maria wants to tell, just as his mother wanted to tell. And so he has to listen. She wants Joseph to know everything, needs him to listen to her regretful weeping because her boyfriend from Choate doesn’t love her, but she shouldn’t be crying, she knows better; you don’t need to be in love to have sex. Then she forgets him, begins to go to SDS meetings, hangs on her wall a quote from George Sand she’d hand-lettered: HUMANITY IS OUTRAGED IN ME AND WITH ME. WE MUST NOT DISSIMULATE NOR TRY TO FORGET THIS INDIGNATION WHICH IS ONE OF THE MOST PASSIONATE FORMS OF LOVE. It suits her very well, this connection of love with indignation. On his wall, Joseph has hung the Eric Gill woodcut of the Madonna that Dr. Meyers had had framed for him. (He’d had a Gill crucifixion framed for Maria, but she’d hidden it in her closet.)