The Solace of Leaving Early (16 page)

“For the sake of sense. Okay. Okay. We’ll do it all your way, and on the trip we can speak the Arabic alphabet backward and count fence posts and only make right-hand turns. I swear.”

Beulah turned toward the children. Her purse dangled from her forearm, the way old women preferred. “All right, children. It’s all fixed. Come get in the car.”

The children stood frozen. A panicky look crossed AnnaLee’s face.

“Immaculata,” Langston said. “This is no time to dawdle. Please tell your sister that we have an appointment to keep, and then come get in the car.”

“You call them by those names?” Beulah whispered to Langston, worried.

“Of course I do. Those are the names they’ve been given.” She watched them walk down the steps, carefully, holding hands. “Come, bandits. Come, beauty queens. And wear your seat belts.”

After everyone was safely fastened in and Langston had gotten the old Buick started (it had no air-conditioning and no radio, but ample leg room), they pulled away from the front of the trailer. AnnaLee and Germane stood watching them in a cloud of exhaust. AnnaLee seemed abject, having told Beulah she’d take care of all odds and ends while they were gone. “Wave to Mama,” Langston told the girls, who didn’t move. “We don’t want her to feel guilty. Epiphany, tell your sister it’s polite to wave goodbye.”

The little girl leaned over and whispered something in her sister’s ear, and they both raised their hands in small, unenthusiastic waves. Langston noticed for the first time, looking in the rearview mirror, how very pretty they both were. There was something about Epiphany’s face that was so nostalgic; the heart shape, the curls, the slight overbite. She looked like a little, blond Mary Pickford.

“Thank you for waving. Shall we sing on the way to the Milky Freeze? I know a number of fine songs from the World War II era.”

Beulah leaned over and whispered, “They don’t sing anymore.” She sat back up. “They do count fence posts, though.”

Langston looked at them in the mirror. Immaculata stared back blankly. “You’ll sing, you scallywags. Just wait and see.”

Chapter 15

WHAT THEN WILL
THIS CHILD BECOME?

Amos was on his knees in his garden, digging up an old flower bed, thinking about the sermon he had yet to write. The Incarnation: there was an idea. It was the hardest concept Amos had ever encountered, the true test of faith, and yet Christians talked about it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He knew he could ask anyone with a modicum of knowledge of church history what was decided at the council of Nicea, and they’d say, “Fully human and fully divine,” as if reporting a recipe for cookies. He dug, pulling up old roots, throwing stones toward the pile next to the fence. Amos agreed with Cobb and Griffin, the Whitehead scholars, who wrote, “Whereas Christ is incarnate in everyone, Jesus
is
Christ because the incarnation is constitutive of his very selfhood.” But how to preach it? There was no distance between Jesus and the lure of God toward truth, beauty, and goodness; Jesus didn’t have to stand still and try to feel the tug upon his soul? That, yes, but it was immensely more complicated.
Every event pervades its future,
Cobb wrote, and Amos could see that was the case. For most people, though, the present was banal and full of error and the future it pervaded was without consequence, just more of the same. But the very self of Jesus—as the historical Christ, as opposed to the Christ incarnated everywhere else in the world—Amos forced himself not to go that direction . . . the very self of Jesus was constituted by a past response to the lure of God, which shot into the future like a mathematical vector, and inside every actual occasion until . . . Poor Mike, back in seminary, Amos thought, leaning back on his heels. How he would shudder at this line of thought.

Amos felt in his breast pocket for the pen and small notebook he kept intending to carry there. Why not make the Incarnation a cellular event, constantly occuring? He could vaguely remember, from his whirlwind tour of the world religions, a Hindu concept of Being and Non-Being: the world coming into and going out of existence, a stone moved back and forth in the hand of the god. Amos stood, brushed his knees, looked at his ravaged bed, at the deep black dirt of Indiana. None of his thoughts were very clear or coherent, but it was something like this. Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in
1927
. A fundamental particle—Amos scratched his head, trying to remember the basis of quantum mechanics—could be in one of an infinite number of states or places, until observed. The world remade and made manifest in every moment, in part by our consciousness. The Incarnation of God made concrete in Jesus and in every other occasion, in every cell, every atom; and every particle of being pulled by God (God’s only power, but
a really good one
) toward Beauty; in here, in this line of thought, somewhere, Amos wasn’t sure exactly where to place it, there was room for miracles. They slipped in.

*

Two weeks earlier, before Langston had gotten to them, he and the girls had been sitting at the kitchen table in the sweltering afternoon light, the window air conditioner in the living room running on high, and they told him.

“She speaks to you? The Virgin Mary?” Amos sat very still, trying not to threaten or startle the girls. He addressed Immaculata; all information seemed to both come from and go through her. She didn’t answer and wouldn’t look at him.

“Is it Mary, the Mother of God?”

Immaculata looked Amos in the eye, nodded. Of course, Amos thought. Mary as a virgin would mean little to her, but Mary as a mother—

“She ascended into Heaven whole and without degradation where she is seated with her son on the right hand of the Father, in Heaven.” Immaculata spoke in one quick, intense whisper, and Epiphany closed her eyes and began to whisper, too, as if she’d been taught to do so. “All these things were given unto Mary and she treasured them in her heart—”

“—and she treasured them in her heart,” whispered Epiphany.

“And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior—’ ”

Amos very quietly reached into his bag on the floor and took out his notebook and pen. Resting it on his knees, he wrote,
The Magnificat, Luke
1:46
–
55
.

“‘—Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy—’ ”

“‘—holy is his name.’ ”

Amos tried not to breathe as they repeated the declaration to the end. The only sounds in the trailer were the air conditioner and Beulah’s knitting needles ticking from the glider rocker in the living room, where she was watching
Wheel of Fortune
with the volume low. If Beulah was alarmed or surprised by the conversation in the kitchen, she didn’t indicate it.

There was a moment of silence, and then Immaculata began again, her eyes closed, her hands clasped in front of her, “‘And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.’ ”

“‘—and then returned to her home.’ ”

Amos wrote,
Home
. He leaned forward and whispered, “Tell me how this started, Immaculata.”

“Oh, Immaculate heart of Mary, our Queen and our Mother, we seek refuge in thee. We prayed without ceasing, as You have taught us, and Aunt Gail says Not just at night but with every breath. Every breath a prayer and a heartbeat. And You told us I am coming with the clouds and Look into the place where the tree grows straight and neither the branch is bent and there I shall be also. And You said Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to Thy Word, but that was not to us but to God You said that.”

Amos wrote,
The Fiat
.

Immaculata opened her eyes and looked at her sister. “Mary is the model of what. You say.”

Epiphany blinked and rubbed her nose with her folded hands. “Mary is the model of . . .”

“You have three seconds or else something very bad will happen.”

Amos thought he should say something, but was afraid to disturb the fragile atmosphere. He sat silent. Epiphany’s eyes began to shift from right to left, looking for what was coming. “Help me,” she whispered.

“Mary is the model of,” Immaculata began, “Faith, Epiphany, say it.”

“Mary is the model of Faith she is the model of Confidence Charity Towards God Charity Towards One’s Neighbor and . . .”

“Good, go on, what’s the next one?”

“Is the bad thing gone?” the younger girl asked, pressing her hands against her lips.

“Yes. What’s next?”

“Union of Charity of those Performing Good Works Model of Humility of Prudence of Justice of Fortitude of Tempance.”

“Temperance. Don’t say them so fast next time.”

Beulah confessed to Amos that the first two nights were terrible. The girls shook so hard she thought they might be seizing; they refused to sleep, and when they did fall asleep, woke up screaming and tried to crawl under the bed, eventually ending up in the corner of the closet, having thrown coats and scrapbooks and old toys wildly out in the hallway. Lillian Poe had prescribed tranquilizers for them, but Gail threw the prescription away, believing that their acute pathological state was actually a profound state of grace. Beulah had been forced to call Jolene, the nurse who lived down the street. Jolene came in the middle of the night in her robe and slippers, carrying a brown paper bag filled with tranquilizers. The girls now took two and a half milligrams of Valium before bed, and half that much at lunchtime, and the nights had improved. Eloise was almost always sleepy and would have taken a long nap every afternoon, but Madeline wouldn’t allow it, and Lillian Poe had suggested that they not interfere with Madeline’s authority in her sister’s life.

“And then You guided us to the Tree, And blessed art thou who has believed, because these things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord. Father Leo said that. And we knelt before the tree and prayed without ceasing and Epiphany wanted to stop because she is a baby but I said no and on the third day You appeared in Your divine grace and beauty, Mother of Jesus to whom it is given to bring forth to the life of glory all God’s elect Amen.”

“Amen. Do you have any gum?”

“Oh!” Amos took it out of his pocket. “Yes, look here, as a matter of fact I brought you some of the gum with the moose on the package.”

“It’s a zebra,” Immaculata said.

“Right, here it is, then.”

They each took a piece. Amos thought the gum tasted very, very good, maybe better than any other gum in his life. His piece was green, and the wrapper included a temporary tattoo. He put the rest of the pack on the table, so they could have some later.

“And then she began to speak directly to you?”

Immaculata nodded and chewed her gum. “Yes, she tells us things, and then we talk about them at the sandbox where we play Do This In Remembrance of Me and also on our walks we talk about it. And soon we’ll have lessons.”

Amos sat back in his chair and tapped his pen against his leg. “Would you like me to write down what she says to you every day? Are you allowed to repeat it?”

The girls looked at each other. Epiphany chewed her gum with her mouth open, then pushed her hair out of her eyes. Her hand looked to Amos as it must have when she was a toddler, except for the broken fingernails and streaks of dirt. She was just a baby. Immaculata was not; she was dexterous, in control of her movements, and capable of intense concentration. She had been in the third grade at Sacred Heart. Beulah told Amos, long before he’d ever met Alice, that Madeline had never made less than perfect grades, and had not missed a day of school in either first or second grades. Alice, Amos knew, had been confounded by her firstborn, by Madeline’s love of order, her perfectionism, her faith in hierarchy. Alice had been a hapless child herself. She hadn’t excelled at much and never seemed to blend in with her peers: she was outside. Eloise had been more like that, and in fact, her teachers had suggested she repeat first grade. And now here they sat, trying to decide whether to reveal the secrets entrusted to them by the mother of God.

“I won’t tell anyone, I promise,” Amos said, holding up two fingers in a Scout’s pledge. Something had gone wrong in the tone of his voice; he sounded condescending, as if he were brokering some arrangement that would end with trinkets, or a day at a carnival; Immaculata looked at him as if he were transparent. Of course he wouldn’t tell. The girls belonged to The Church, and Immaculata, for one, was aware of what that meant. Visitations, even those hundreds left unconfirmed by the Vatican, were a form of currency. Look at how zealously the pope had guarded the information revealed to the children at Fatima; the ceremony attached to the consequent publication of the predictions; the industry grown up around the cult of Mary in places like Medjugorje. What if word did get out, even in a decidedly un-Catholic place like Haddington? How long would it take for the information to spread?
Two little girls can see the Virgin Mary in the trunk of a dogwood tree. Every day Mary speaks to the children, and they answer.
First, pilgrims would begin flocking to Beulah’s front yard. They would build a shrine around the tree, and keep candles lit there day and night. Father Leo would hear, and he’d activate the chain of command. Eventually, a committee would review the testimony and the physical evidence and make a preliminary report to the local bishop. . . . Amos lifted his glasses and pressed his fingers against his eyes.

He’d looked at the tree and he could see her, too—the shape of a woman—and while he was not prepared to make an objective judgment on the supernatural nature of the figure, he was willing to say the girls were not delusional, at least not about that one aspect. Millions of people see Mary on the side of a building in Clearwater, Florida? Then she’s there. Mary is witnessed
daily
on a hillside in Bosnia. The scent of roses is detectable
daily
at apparation sites, and with no scientific cause. Thousands of people report having seen her image in the sky, or in the window of an abandoned house. Statues of her weep, or bleed. When Amos, looking at the outline of a robed woman in the straight, flat part of the dogwood trunk, asked Immaculata what she and her sister saw, Immaculata said: “She’s in a blue robe with a white veil and her head is surrounded by stars and there are roses at her feet.”

“Is she an old woman, or young?”

Immaculata answered without hesitation, “She’s nineteen.”

In seminary, Amos read every account he could find of both Jesus and Marian sightings—the eschatological, the apocalyptic, the optimistic—and not with an eye toward debunking them. He was not the Twin; Amos had no need to thrust his hand in Christ’s wounds. He just wanted to . . . there was a pattern, wasn’t there? and something great seemed to be at stake. What is at the bottom of all this, that’s what he wanted to know, what is being said by the millions of faithful about motherhood, the future, our capacity to suspend our otherwise unassailable belief in the physical laws of life on earth? The conundrum he found himself in (those years in seminary) was this: If someone had written a book answering those questions, and had done so from a faith perspective, Amos would have had to dismiss it, at least partially. And if the book had been written from a nonfaith perspective, Amos would have had to dismiss it.
There is no place to stand,
he thought, struggling to keep his thoughts in order. He couldn’t approach this impulsively or intuitively; he knew he had to call upon all his powers of discernment.

Amos and Immaculata began to speak at the same time.

“I—”

“I—you go first,” Immaculata said.

“Don’t tell me, Madeline. Because . . . you want to know why? Because I really don’t know what to think of all this. And besides, Mary came to you, didn’t she, to you and your sister. If she’d wanted to talk to me, well, I’ve got plenty of trees of my own.”

Immaculata sat back in her chair, her face unreadable. “It has nothing to do with the tree.”

“No. I know that.”

“And that isn’t my name.”

The screen door opened before Amos could answer, and in the living room Beulah struggled to stand up. Her legs were swollen and causing her problems. AnnaLee walked in with the day’s groceries. “Am I early?” she asked, looking at Amos and then at Immaculata. Amos knew AnnaLee was nervous around the children. She couldn’t determine how to be herself; she was moved by the desire to save them, to rescue them from the flood. But she’s just like the rest of us, Amos thought. The water is wide, and her boat is so small.