The Mermaid Chair (10 page)

I lay still while the room filled with light, and the whole thing came back to me, how we were floating on the ocean, lying side by side on an inflatable raft. I was wearing a swimsuit, something suspiciously like the two-piece suit Mike and I’d dressed St. Senara in all those years ago. Brother Thomas had on his black robe with the cowl pulled over his head. He rolled toward me, coming up on his elbow and gazing down at my face. The water moved under us with a lulling rhythm, and there were pelicans diving, scooping up fish. He pushed his cowl back and smiled in that same captivating way he had in the garden, a smile I found intensely sexual. Touching my cheek with his hand, he said my name.
Jessie.
He said it in his deep voice, and I felt the curve of my back lift up. His fingers slid beneath me and unhooked the top of my bathing suit. His mouth was at my ear, the heat of his breath rushing in and out. I turned to kiss him, but in that unexpected way of dreams, I found myself suddenly sitting up on the raft in a panic, with the sense of losing all track of time. Around us there was nothing but vast, rolling water as far as I could see.

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I rarely remembered dreams. For me they were frustrating mirages that hovered on the edge of waking, then melted conspicuously the moment I opened my eyes. But this one had stayed with me in grand detail. In my mind I could still see the pearls of seawater beading up on the black wool of Brother Thomas’s robe from the splash of the pelicans. The burning, blue look in his eyes. His fingers sliding beneath me.

I wondered for a second how Hugh, or even Dr. Ilg, would analyze a dream like this, but decided I didn’t want to know. I sat up, letting my feet poke around at the edge of the bed for my slippers. I raked my fingers through my hair, pulling at several tangles, listening for sounds of Mother, but the house drifted in silence.

Mother and I both had fallen into bed last night, too tired to talk. The thought of instigating a conversation with her today made me want to slide back under the covers and make myself into a little curl. What would I say to her?
Do you have plans to
sever any more body parts?
It sounded crass, horrible, but that’s what I really wanted to know—whether she was a danger to herself, whether she needed committing to some place that could take care of her.

I shuffled to the kitchen and poked around in a cabinet until I found the bag of Maxwell House. I had to make the coffee in a twenty-year-old electric percolator with a fraying cord. I wondered if she’d even heard about Mr. Coffees. As the contraption
bloop-blooped,
I crept to Mother’s door and listened. Her snores wafted through the room. Her insomnia, it seemed, had disappeared with her finger.

I went back to the kitchen. The room was dim with waking light, the air chilly. Striking a match, I lit the space heater, listent h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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ing to the gas flames pop with the same little blue sounds as always. Loading two slices of bread into the toaster, I watched the coils down inside glow red and thought about Thomas the monk and how odd that whole encounter had been—how he’d appeared in the garden out of nowhere.

I thought of the two of us out there talking, the severe way his gaze had entered me. The flutter in my body. And then I’d had the kind of dream I’d heard Hugh speak of, in which some great, enigmatic plane flies through your sleep, opening its bombardier doors, dropping a small, ticking dream.

The toast popped up. I poured the coffee, drank it black while nibbling the bread. The heater had turned the room into a Carolina cypress swamp. I got up and snapped it off. I couldn’t explain to myself why I was thinking these things. Thinking about Brother Thomas—a
monk.
And in
that
way, that incendi-ary way.

I imagined Hugh back home, and a terrible vulnerability took over. It was as if the most carefully guarded place in me had been suddenly abandoned, left wide open and assailable—the place that told me who I was.

I got up and walked into the living room, that feeling from the dream returning, the awful sense of losing my moorings. On one of the walls, Mother had as many as fifteen or twenty photographs framed in a disorganized mess, some with that dingy, sepia look around the edges. Most were old school pictures of me and Mike. Hideous hairdos. Half-shut eyes. Wrinkled white blouses. Braces. Dee called it “the Wall of Embarrassment.”

The only photo up there taken after the sixties was one of Hugh, Dee, and me in 1970, when Dee was a baby. I stared with resolve at the three of us, remembering how Hugh had rigged
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the delayed timer on the camera and we’d posed on the sofa, tucking Dee between us, her small, sleepy face wedged under our chins.

The same evening we’d taken the picture, we’d made love for the first time after Dee’s birth. We were supposed to wait six weeks before having sex. It happened, though, two days early.

I’d passed by the nursery and seen Hugh leaning over Dee’s crib. Even though she was sound asleep, he was singing something to her very softly. An amber light was spread across the ceiling from the night-light, sifting down to sit on his shoulders like a furring of dust.

Heat shot through my body, something potent and sexual. It was the tenderness in Hugh that hit me so forcibly—the sight of him loving her without anyone knowing.

I felt suddenly possessed by the intimacy we’d had creating her, the thought of her flesh forming out of the things we’d done in the next room. I went and slid my arms around his waist.

Pressing my cheek against his back, I felt him turn to me. His hands made slow circles over my body. He whispered, “We have two more days to wait,” and when I said I couldn’t wait, he picked me up and carried me to bed.

Loving him had seemed different—more unbridled, deeper, more purely felt. It had something to do with Dee, as if Hugh and I belonged together in some new way, and the thought seemed measureless and intoxicating to me.

Afterward, as we lay across the bed, Dee woke up crying.

While I fed her, Hugh set up the camera. I was wearing a peach-colored housecoat; I hadn’t even gotten it buttoned up all the way, and Hugh—you should see his face in the photo, how content and amused and clandestine it looked. The picture always t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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stirred a secretive feeling in me, followed by a little flourish of happiness spreading open like an exotic paper fan in the center of my chest. I stood there and waited for the feeling to come.

The event seemed so long ago. Like some glorious ship inside a bottle. I did not know how it got in there, or how to get it out.

I picked up the phone and started dialing.

“Hello,” Hugh said, and his voice seemed to rise under me like solid ground.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I was just thinking about you. Are you all right? I tried to call last night. No one answered.”

Oh, great, I was going to have to buy a Mr. Coffee
and
an answering machine.

“We were at the monastery,” I said. “I found Mother over there burying her finger.”

“As in digging a hole in the ground and covering it up?”

“That’s what I mean.”

There was a long pause. “I think that might actually be a good sign, at least for the moment,” he said. “It could mean she’s settling down, that her obsession is going underground, so to speak.”

I lifted my eyebrows, intrigued by this, almost hopeful. “You think so?”

“Could be,” he said. “But, Jessie, she still needs professional help. She should’ve been admitted to the psychiatric unit. With time the pattern could start all over again.”

I stretched the phone cord over to the table and sat down.

“You mean she might cut off another finger?”

“Well, yes, or it could be something completely different.

Obsessions like this are ego-dystonic, just random thoughts.”

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There was a little tapping noise, and I knew he was on the portable phone at the bathroom sink, shaving as we talked.

“But I don’t think cutting off her finger was random. I really think it relates to something particular,” I said.

“Oh, I doubt that,” he said, dismissing the idea, dismissing me.

I sank back in the chair, letting out a sigh. “I’ll talk to her today and see if—”

“I suppose that won’t hurt, but I was thinking. . . . I’m going to come to the island this weekend. You shouldn’t handle this by yourself.”

He’d interrupted me.

“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come,” I said. “I think she would be more apt to—”

“It’s too complicated for you to handle by yourself, Jessie.”

It was, of course. It would be like my sitting down to solve a math equation that was two feet long; what was going on inside her was a conundrum so far beyond me it was pathetic. I was considering saying to him,
Yes, yes, you come fix things.
But it still felt wrong to me. Part of it was the feeling that I—the nonpsy-chiatrist in the family—really could help Mother better than he could. That I could figure things out better by myself.

And maybe, too, I didn’t want Hugh here. I wanted this time for myself, to be on my own—was that so awful?

I told myself it had nothing to do with the monk and what had happened the night before. I mean, nothing
had
happened.

No, this was about me for once, following my own idea about something. Later, though, I would wonder about that. Are motives ever that clear?

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I stood up. “I
said
I will handle it. I don’t want you to come.”

It came out angrier than I’d intended.

“Jesus,”
he said. “You don’t have to shout at me.”

I looked back toward Mother’s bedroom, hoping I hadn’t awakened her. “Maybe I
feel
like shouting,” I said. I didn’t know why I was picking a fight.

“For God’s sake, I was just trying to help. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I snapped. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Well, apparently there
is,
” he said, raising his voice.

“What you mean is, if I don’t need your help, there’s something wrong with me.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said, and his tone was lacerating. “Did you hear me? You’re being ridiculous.”

And I hung up. I simply hung up. I refilled my coffee cup and sat with my hands wrapped around it. They were shaking a little.

I waited for the phone to ring, for him to call me back.

When he didn’t, I became anxious, filled with that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don’t see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

After a while I bent down and peered under the table. The crucifix was still nailed beneath it. The storm-tent Jesus.

C H A P T E R

Ten

pq

That morning when I changed the bandage on Mother’s hand, I had to look away from the wound more than once. Mother sat in the brown wicker chair at her dressing table while I cleaned the skin around the sutures with hydro-gen peroxide and dabbed antibiotic ointment on a sterile pad.

The cut was just below her knuckle on the “pointing finger,” as she always referred to it. I kept thinking what a violent burst of energy it would’ve taken to bring the cleaver down with enough force to sever the bone. She winced when I placed the pad over the tender, swollen nub.

I glanced at the photograph of my father, wondering what he would’ve thought of her now, the dreadful turn she’d taken after his death. What he would have thought of her slicing off her finger. Mother turned and looked at the photo, too. “I know what I did seems crazy to you.”

Was she talking to him or to me? “I just wish you’d help me understand why you had to,” I said.

She tapped the glass on the frame with her fingernail. It made a clicking sound in the room. “This picture was made the day he started his charter business.”

I’d been five at the time. I didn’t remember him as a t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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shrimper, only as captain of the
Jes-Sea.
Before he’d bought the boat, he’d worked for Shem Watkins, “scrimping for shrimp,” he said. He would take one of Shem’s trawlers out for a week at a time and come back with four thousand pounds of shrimp in the hold. But all he’d wanted was to run his own business, be his own boss, with the freedom to be out on the water when he wanted and home with his family when he wanted. He’d come up with an inshore fishing charter idea, saved and bought his Chris-Craft. Four years later it had exploded.

He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He’d told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless mud snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious. He told us we could make wands out of stingray barbs and, by waving them a certain way, cause the waves to sing “Dixie,” something that had occupied us for fruitless hours. If we dreamed of a great egret, he said, we would find its feathers beneath our pillow the next morning. I woke more than once to white feathers in my bed, though I could never recall the egret dream that had brought them. And of course the ne plus ultra of all his stories—how he’d seen an entire pod of mermaids one dawn, swimming to his boat.

I could not remember a single time he’d attended mass, but he was the one who’d first taken me to the monastery to see the mermaid chair, who’d told me the story behind it. I think he’d only pretended to be a reprobate.

Though he refused to share Mother’s religion, he seemed to admire it. Back then she was not pathological about it. Sometimes I think he married her because of her boundless capacity for faith, how she could swallow every preposterous doctrine,
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dogma, and story the church came up with. Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple—Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc—but it’d worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of that.