first. Maria is, after all, Pearl’s mother; they are tied by blood, bound in the law. The ties that bind. He is free of ties. He is bound to no one (except his mother); there is no name for what he is to Pearl. Therefore, whatever it is—this love he has for her, this love he has had since the moment of her birth—it is a thing unrecognized by the world and therefore a thing of no force.
The airline schedule dictates that he has another day in Rome. He will take a longer walk: he knows where he wants to end up: a place of rest, of contemplation, a cloister in Trastevere known to him and few others, concealed in the center of a building that suggests nothing of its hidden treasure. You press a bell that says SPOSINI , and a reluctant watchman lets you in to the cloister of the Order of St. John Hospitalers.
It is winter and nothing will be in flower; it is the quiet, the enclosure, the geometric rightness of the space that he craves.
He sits, hearing the plashing of the fountain that refreshes nothing. Dusty bushes eat up light; some hardy winter birds swoop lightly for a drink. He allows his mind to remain a blank. He tries not to think of Pearl, or to allow only a kind of thought that rockets straight past credibility: she will be all right, she will be all right. The weak sun warms the top of his head; the stone begins to chill his spine. He will move on.
6
Pearl hears someone saying her name, softly, in an Irish accent. She opens her eyes. A man and a woman, faces without features, kneel down, put their featureless faces next to hers. They are holding something, a cup of something. Something hangs over the edge: oh, she thinks, a straw. The straw brushes her lips. “Just take a sip of this,” the woman says, in a voice that is pretending to be kind. Pearl clamps her jaws down, thrashes her head. And then the voice no longer even pretends kindness. “If you think you’re a bloody martyr, little girl, you don’t even know you’re born.”
What would Maria Meyers think if she had to consider at this moment, as her child is lying on the ground and she is flying first class on Aer Lingus 865, that Pearl knew many of the things she’d kept from her. Knew saints’ lives, the lives of martyrs, because she’d found her mother’s childhood book,
A Girl’s First Book of Saints,
by Jerome Lowery, OSB, the letters cut in gold into the purple spine. Reading her mother’s book, she had to understand that some deaths were said to be a good thing. It went against everything else in her life to think that a death might be what your life was leading up to all along. She had never had the slightest hint that death might be a good thing. What would Maria say if she knew Pearl’s first thought about the death she is pursuing now came to her from a book with Maria’s childhood signature on the flyleaf, girlish loops and curlicues Maria excised from her adult signature, a sign, treasured by Pearl, that her mother had also once been a child, reading this same book?
What Pearl could not know was that the child that was her mother did not read the book in the same way, not in the same way at all. Maria, a Catholic child of ten in 1958, would have read the book as if her life were at stake. And not just her life but what she would have found it very easy to call her immortal soul. She read not from curiosity but as a model her salvation depended on. She read the lives of the martyrs and believed with all her heart that she had to pray for a martyr’s death. She would say to Joseph, “Let’s think of what we’ll do, exactly, if the Communists put a gun to our heads and tell us they’ll shoot us unless we say God doesn’t exist.” And he would say OK and let her talk.
In Joseph’s mind were terrifying images of men in brown coats, their faces distorted by hatred until they were hardly faces anymore, stretched mouths, pig stubs of noses, blood-red eyes. He knew they wanted to kill him. He felt the terror in his flesh; he
The airline schedule dictates that he has another day in Rome. He will take a longer walk: he knows where he wants to end up: a place of rest, of contemplation, a cloister in Trastevere known to him and few others, concealed in the center of a building that suggests nothing of its hidden treasure. You press a bell that says SPOSINI , and a reluctant watchman lets you in to the cloister of the Order of St. John Hospitalers.
It is winter and nothing will be in flower; it is the quiet, the enclosure, the geometric rightness of the space that he craves.
He sits, hearing the plashing of the fountain that refreshes nothing. Dusty bushes eat up light; some hardy winter birds swoop lightly for a drink. He allows his mind to remain a blank. He tries not to think of Pearl, or to allow only a kind of thought that rockets straight past credibility: she will be all right, she will be all right. The weak sun warms the top of his head; the stone begins to chill his spine. He will move on.
6
Pearl hears someone saying her name, softly, in an Irish accent. She opens her eyes. A man and a woman, faces without features, kneel down, put their featureless faces next to hers. They are holding something, a cup of something. Something hangs over the edge: oh, she thinks, a straw. The straw brushes her lips. “Just take a sip of this,” the woman says, in a voice that is pretending to be kind. Pearl clamps her jaws down, thrashes her head. And then the voice no longer even pretends kindness. “If you think you’re a bloody martyr, little girl, you don’t even know you’re born.”
What would Maria Meyers think if she had to consider at this moment, as her child is lying on the ground and she is flying first class on Aer Lingus 865, that Pearl knew many of the things she’d kept from her. Knew saints’ lives, the lives of martyrs, because she’d found her mother’s childhood book,
A Girl’s First Book of Saints,
by Jerome Lowery, OSB, the letters cut in gold into the purple spine. Reading her mother’s book, she had to understand that some deaths were said to be a good thing. It went against everything else in her life to think that a death might be what your life was leading up to all along. She had never had the slightest hint that death might be a good thing. What would Maria say if she knew Pearl’s first thought about the death she is pursuing now came to her from a book with Maria’s childhood signature on the flyleaf, girlish loops and curlicues Maria excised from her adult signature, a sign, treasured by Pearl, that her mother had also once been a child, reading this same book?
What Pearl could not know was that the child that was her mother did not read the book in the same way, not in the same way at all. Maria, a Catholic child of ten in 1958, would have read the book as if her life were at stake. And not just her life but what she would have found it very easy to call her immortal soul. She read not from curiosity but as a model her salvation depended on. She read the lives of the martyrs and believed with all her heart that she had to pray for a martyr’s death. She would say to Joseph, “Let’s think of what we’ll do, exactly, if the Communists put a gun to our heads and tell us they’ll shoot us unless we say God doesn’t exist.” And he would say OK and let her talk.
In Joseph’s mind were terrifying images of men in brown coats, their faces distorted by hatred until they were hardly faces anymore, stretched mouths, pig stubs of noses, blood-red eyes. He knew they wanted to kill him. He felt the terror in his flesh; he
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