Pearl by Mary Gordon Page B

imagined himself reneging at the last minute, saying, “All right, God doesn’t exist,” and then having to live a shamed life. Maria, on the other hand, always imagined herself glorious, triumphant, welcomed in paradise by throngs of fellow martyrs. So Maria savored the gruesome details of the deaths of virgin martyrs: St. Lucy with her eyes gouged out; St. Anastasia with her breasts chopped off; St. Apollonia, her teeth pulled out by rusty Roman pliers.
    How could Maria have imagined that her daughter would be in Dublin reading
One Day in My Life
by Bobby Sands, which her group thought of as one of the Lives of the Saints? That they followed the weeks of his death by starvation, the cramps, the coma, as their parents and their grandparents followed the Way of the Cross?
    Are you surprised at the gaps of knowledge that exist between this mother and daughter? You shouldn’t be. If you asked Maria what she wanted for Pearl, she would have said, “I just want her to be happy.” And what did Pearl want? She would have said she wanted to live in her own way. And Maria would have said, “Of course, that’s exactly what I want for you; we want the same thing, you see.” And Pearl would have said, like many daughters, “My mother doesn’t have a clue.” But what clues was she given? What cues did she fail to take?
    Perhaps you would like some clues from Pearl’s childhood to help you unravel the mystery of why she is doing what she is doing now. Would it help you to know what kind of child Pearl was? Or—a related but not identical question—what kind of childhood she had? If we say, What kind of childhood did she have? and use the verb we have chosen, don’t we have to ask another question, What kind of childhood was she given? But given by whom, her mother? The world?
     
    I suppose the first and truest thing to say about Pearl as a child was that she was very quiet. She seemed almost afraid of excessive noise. Her mother once took her to a Thanksgiving parade, and the noise of the marching bands terrified her. She liked to look at books, to draw; she liked to sew. She very much liked animals. As a matter of fact, some of the most important things she treasured were connected to dogs. By which I do not mean the ordinary doggy lessons of fidelity and joy in life.
    She may not have been given the right kind of childhood for the child she was. Perhaps this is because her mother gave her the kind of childhood she would have wanted for herself. Maria had hated the surveillance of her own childhood, the privileged enclosure, being kept from the world as if she were a fragile and precious object. She detested what she knew about her father’s feelings for her: that she was a work of art, always in progress, always potentially revisable. Her father watched her with the tyrannical eye of the camera or the iconographer: waiting to freeze the moment, preserve it, make it stand not as itself but as a type of something. Like the time she tried on her First Communion dress. She could see he was disappointed at the crinoline, the lace. “A bit ornate, wouldn’t you say?” And then his revision on the day of the ceremony: “My Goya Infanta.” So by his naming her a type of something, she could be his again.
    There was a right way of doing everything, tied to eternal reward. A right way of turning a page, of walking across the room, of saying thank you, of holding a rosary, of lighting a blessed candle, of curtseying (particularly to priests), of thinking about Europe versus America, the past versus the present, the cheap happiness of the present as opposed to future gold. She felt she was constantly being watched and was often a disappointment. She loved running, swimming, braving thunderstorms, hailstorms, blizzards, high waves, long jumps, deep drops down into nothing. Her father wanted her at his side. At his feet.
    She would not do that to Pearl: make her feel she was being looked at. She felt she had grown up in a rifle