The Miracle (30 page)

the last ten kilometers climbs up a canyon and might slow us down." She glanced at Amanda. "Why'd you pick Cauterets as a place to visit? I'm told it's not much."

"Well—" Amanda hesitated briefly. "If you want the truth—but first I'd better find out something. Are you a Catholic?"

"I'm an out-and-out atheist. Why?"

Amanda was relieved. "I wanted to tell you the reason I'm going to Cauterets, and it would have been difficult to tell a believer. I'm not a Catholic, either, just a run-of-the-mill convert and by profession a clinical psychologist who doesn't believe in miracles. Or in supernatural visions."

Liz grinned. "I think we're going to have a good trip."

"But my husband, Ken Clayton -- well, he's really not my husband yet, he's my fiance—well, he's a fallen-off" Catholic who suddenly got religion again. Not that I fully blame him for reaching for something. You see -- let me explain -- we were in love, were soon to be married, when it was discovered that Ken had a malignant tumor on the upper thigh."

"Sorry about that," said Liz. "That's dreadful."

"He was supposed to undergo surgery. But surgery in that area is iffy stuff". Nevertheless, it was his only hope. Then, in the Chicago papers, he read the story about Bernadette's secret—that the Virgin Mary is returning to Lourdes this week."

"It was probably my story he read," said Liz.

Amanda was surprised. "You're a reporter?"

"With the Paris Bureau of Amalgamated Press International of New York. I filed The Reappearance Time story that ran in most U.S. papers. Your Ken probably read my story."

"Probably," agreed Amanda.

"Anyway, go on," urged Liz. "What happened to Ken after he read my piece?"

"He got religion, put off the important surgery, and hightailed it here to Lourdes to see if the Virgin Mary could cure him."

"And you came along?"

'To try to bring him to his senses. The longer he puts off" surgery, the less chance for survival he has. I'm trying to convince him he's wasting his time here. I don't think the Virgin Mary is coming back, because I don't think she was here in the first place."

Liz shot her companion a look of delight. "Hey, Amanda, you're a girl after my own heart."

"That's why I wanted to go to Cauterets. I want to prove to Ken that Bernadette herself did not believe the grotto could cure. I heard a

rumor to that effect, that when Bernadette was ill, she didn't pray at the grotto. Instead, she went to Cauterets to take thennal baths. If I can verify that's true—"

"It is true, I assure you," intemipted Liz.

Amanda sat up. "You know it's true? For sure?"

"I can guarantee it's a fact, as given to me by the best Bernadette authority in Lourdes. That's Father Ruland, a bigwig priest there, close to the bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, and a sort of an expert on our grotto girl." She laughed. "Now I can tell you why / am going to Cauterets. You won't believe it, but it's true. I'm going for the same reason you're going. To prove Bernadette was a phony."

"Well, I don't know if she was a deliberate phony. She may have believed she saw all those apparitions. She may have been hallucinating."

"Whatever, what difference?" Liz sang out. She pointed from the open driver's window. "It's a beautiful day out there, and getting more beautiful. Look at that scenery."

They had been driving through a wide river valley, the ripe green hillsides dotted with chalets. A bit of Switzerland in France, Amanda thought, especially with those snow-capped mountain peaks, like irregular sentinels rising in the distance. She had noticed that they had passed through a village named Argeles-Gazost, and now they were entering another village called Pierrefitte-Nestalas.

Liz was speaking again, as she maneuvered the BMW through the town. "I interviewed Father Ruland in Lourdes this morning, and he's the one who told me that Bernadette did not believe her grotto could cure, or at least she had no interest in its curative powers. When she felt ill, she traveled to the spa in Cauterets to take the thermal baths and hoped to be healed. So it is probably a true story, coming as it did from Ruland. But still, when you're writing an expose you want to be superpositive. I made a telephone call to Cauterets and arranged to interview Father Cayoux, the parish priest there." She paused. "Yes, I'm trying to do what you also want to do. Expose this Bernadette for what I suspect she was. A sicky or a liar, one or the other. People have wanted to believe her for so long that nobody's really looked carefully at the facts. Everybody takes her story—well, on faith. I want to do a big number out of here, a big blast, and if ever, this is the week to do it. But when you go worldwide like that, you'd better have the goods. And I hope to find it, some of it or all of it, in Cauterets." She gave Amanda another grin. "We have the same purpose. Only different motives. So it's going to be a fun day. Can't wait to get there. Oops, we must be in the home stretch, because we're climbing."

A sharp turn out of the village had brought them up a steep road, a winding mountain road, along a precipitous cliff, and past a few miniature waterfalls. Liz was driving at a slower speed. They crossed a high bridge over a gorge through which a river—the map told them it was the Gave de Cauterets—rushed. The valley before them was widening now and they could make out the village of Cauterets, resembling a French resort town, nestled beyond.

Soon they were in the town, and passing two thermal-bath buildings identified on their more detailed map as Thermes de Car and Neothermes.

"There they are," said Liz, "the places Bernadette considered more useful for her health than the grotto."

Next, they found themselves in the Place Georges Clemenceau, the main square. Over the rooftops and beyond they sighted the spire of the church, Notre-Dame de Cauterets, their destination.

Liz indicated the spire. "That's where we're headed."

"In the footsteps of Bernadette," Amanda said almost gayly, filled with optimism at finding what she wanted to know.

They reached a narrow one-way street. Rue de la Raillere, that wound up to the church. At the top, they realized that the tiny square in front of the church also served as a parking lot. They emerged from either side of the BMW, both stretching as they studied the church. The church was encircled by a wrought-iron fence built into dirty-white stone blocks.

Liz was reading her watch. "On time," she said, "actually five or ten minutes early for my appointment with the parish priest. Might as well go in and find him."

They walked in step across the square, which they saw was the Place Jean Moulin, noted the statue of a French soldier and the plaque listing the names of the town's dead in World Wars I and II, and continued on up a steep flight of steps and into the church entrance.

Indoors, there was a handful of worshippers, and Mass was coming to an end. They held back, and Amanda surveyed the interior. The altar area ahead, past the pews, was surprisingly bright and modern, circular marble steps leading to a beige-carpeted platform and a cheerful blond-painted square altar.

The Mass had ended, the parishioners and tourists leaving, when Amanda saw Liz step out to intercept a downy-cheeked youngster, with the look of a choir boy, who had come up the aisle.

"We have an appointment with Father Cayoux," Liz said in French. "Is he around?"

"I believe he is in the presbytery, madame."

"Would you be kind enough to tell him that Miss Finch is here from Lourdes to see him?"

"Gladly, madame."

As the boy hurried off, Liz, followed by Amanda, began to inspect the decorations along the inner walls of the church. Beside a doorway near the altar area, Liz halted to examine a curious old Vierge—a four-teen-inch-high statue of the Virgin Mary—blue and peeling, set under a glass bell on a wooden ledge.

Amanda pointed to the plaque beneath it. "Look at that."

Bending to the plaque, Amanda translated aloud in English. "In the year of our Lord 1858, between the seventeenth and eighteenth apparition, the little Lourdaise, the humble prophet of Massabielle, Bernadette Soubirous, came to Cauterets for her health, said her rosary before the statue of this Vierge."

"Well, that confirms it all right, what Father Ruland told me," said Liz with pleasure.

The downy-cheeked boy had reappeared. "Father Cayoux is in the presbytery. He will receive you. I will show the way." But he did not move, instead pointed his finger to the statue of the Virgin Mary on the ledge. "You are interested in Saint Bernadette's visit?"

"Very much so," said Amanda.

"Here, I will let you see the room dedicated to her."

The boy hurried up some carpeted steps through a doorway, and Amanda and Liz followed him.

"Chapelle Sainte Bernadette," the boy explained.

It was a narrow, starkly modern room, with patterned carpeting, maroon-covered armless bench chairs, a few small sculptured holy figures on the plain light-brown walls.

"Very nice, but very nothing," Liz said to Amanda. She put her hand on the boy's shoulder. "Take me to your leader." When the boy looked puzzled, she added, "Let's see Father Cayoux."

A few minutes later, they entered the presbytery and found the priest on his feet, at a table that served as his desk. He was pouring hot tea into three Limoges cups.

Liz went to him, extending her hand and addressing him in French. "I'm Liz Finch from the American syndicate in Paris. And, Father Cayoux, this is my friend who has accompanied me, Amanda Clayton, also an American visiting Lourdes. Her husband is ill."

Having welcomed them both. Father Cayoux waved them to two of the three straight-backed chairs near his table. As he passed out the cups of tea, and a plate of cookies, Amanda took him in. Father Cayoux was quite fat in his black clerical robe, rotund and short. A fringe of

black hair detracted from his partial baldness, and he had a carbuncle of a face dominated by protruding yellow teeth. Amanda guessed that the frown he wore was perpetual. Although friendly enough. Father Cayoux gave her the impression of someone who might be irritable and fussy. Setting the plate of cookies on the table, he selected one, and balancing his own cup of tea, he settled with an exhalation in the chair beside Amanda, with Liz next to her.

"So," he said to Amanda, now speaking in English, "you are in Lourdes to see your husband cured. How do you like Lourdes?"

Amanda was at a loss. "I—I haven't had time to find out. Well, it is rather unusual."

Father Cayoux snorted. "It is awful. I dislike it. I rarely go there."

He had an abrupt manner, and seeing Liz beaming at him, he addressed her. "On the telephone, Miss Finch, you said that Father Ruland had told you that the petite Bernadette had gone not to her grotto but came to our thermal baths hoping for her cure. You wondered if the story was true. That you could speak of this interested me, that you could wonder even for a moment whether our well-known Ruland was being truthful."

"As a newspaperwoman, I had to be—"

"No, no, I understand," said Father Cayoux. "And every abbe cannot be trusted, to be sure, and you would have a right to wonder about a salesman like Ruland. When you questioned that story of his, I decided to see you. As to Bernadette and her visit here, you will recall I said come here and see for yourself. Now you have seen?"

Liz bobbed her head. "We have seen the Vierge, Father, and the inscription below."

Father Cayoux tasted his tea, then blew on it, and spoke. "In Bernadette's time our Cauterets was a fashionable spa, with the best of healing springs. You have seen the thermal baths?"

"Yes," said Amanda.

"They are less of an attraction today, but in Bernadette's time they made our town a resori of importance. In contrast, Lourdes was a minor impoverished village. But that petite peasant girl changed it all, made the world turn upside down. She made Lourdes an international center, and reduced us to a half-forgotten way station. Actually, her own role in this was innocent, perhaps -- perhaps. Her promoters saw the opportunity and took advantage." He blew on his tea once more, sipped, nibbled his cookie thoughtfully. "No, Bernadette did not believc in the curative value of her grotto. She was always ill from the start, touched by a cholera epidemic that had taken others, a pitiful child with secondhand clothes, underfed and weakened by chronic asthma. She

could not imagme, I suppose, that she could be healed by her own creation, the holy grotto, so in a period between her last two visions, after sufferimg a serious and lingering cold, she came here to Cauterets for treatments, to bathe in the water, to pray. In fact later that year, when the apparitions had finally ended, she came here a second time still hoping to be healed." He snorted, placed his empty cup on the table. 'The inventor did not believe in her invention."

"What do you mean by 'her invention"?" Amanda quickly asked. "Are you being literal, Father?"

"I'm not sure," Father Cayoux mused. "I'm not quite sure," he repeated, staring into space. "I am a devout priest, a Marianist, perhaps closer to my faith than some of those ringmasters and publicity seekers who wear the cloth in Lourdes. I believe in God, His Son, His Holy Mother, and all the rites of our church, beyond question. I am less certain about miracles. They exist, have happened, I would imagine, but I have yet to see one in my time, and I wonder if Bernadette saw one or any m her time. You see—" His voice drifted off, and he was silent, lost in thought.

Amanda was excited, and a glance told her that Liz was, also. During Father Cayoux's recital, Amanda had perceived what was responsible for his crustiness and skepticism. He resented Lourdes, the big show, the brassy big time, the success, that overshadowed his parish and caused his good works to be overlooked. He was jealous of Lourdes, and he was angry with its high-riding hierarchy. All because of a httle girl's fancies. His own obscurity, the changed character of his parish, was due to a -- possibly—unbelievable little scamp, and the machinations of a cabal of church promoters.

There might be much here, Amanda thought, indeed everything that she and Liz wished for, if Father Cayoux could be persuaded to continue. Perhaps, what he had been saying, had been about to say, had firightened him, made him think that he had better cease and desist. But no, Amanda told herself, this was a man who did not frighten easily.