Immaculate Heart

by Camille DeAngelis

  “She and my sister got along very well,” I said. “I do remember that.”

  Brona regarded me sadly. “If only you hadn’t lived so far away.”

  I looked back at the newspaper article on the wall. Fourteen-year-old Síle Gallagher smiled at me out of 1988, and I felt something whisper, You let them think you came back here for a funeral, but that’s not why.

  “I’d like to know more about this whole thing,” I said. “Do you think I might be able to speak with the priest?”

  Paudie shot me a squinty look. “Would you be thinking of writing about the apparition?”

  I finished my Guinness and licked my lips. “Maybe.”

  Maybe meant yes, of course. Writing about the weird things that might have happened to them gave me a reason to see them again—Tess and Orla and Síle. Síle, too young to flirt, and she did it anyway.

  There was another pause around the table before Paudie said, “You might want to talk to Tess first. I’ll ring her in the morning and see can she speak to you.” He made a valiant attempt at a smile. “Sure, you’ll be wanting to see her again regardless. The two of ye were great friends that time you were here.”

  They didn’t seem disapproving, exactly, but I caught their uneasiness flickering like a subliminal message on a movie screen. Leo glanced at me as he lifted his glass, and quickly looked away.

  Then they fell into talking of other things, and I got up to buy another round. At one time the pub had done double duty as a grocery, and a shelf behind the bar was lined with tins of “coffee whitener” that looked older than Paudie and Brona and Leo put together. Napper Tandy’s was their local, through and through—I gathered they never drank anywhere else.

  I shouldn’t have ordered that last pint. Sometimes I caught an anecdote and chuckled along, and other times I almost forgot where I was. I was too tired to be good company, but they forgave me.

  * * *

  Brona set me up in her spare room, but even with a space heater there was a dankness and a mildewy smell clinging to the bedding and towels. I almost felt as if I were entombed in this little room where the brown floral bedspread matched the draperies, and yet I was as unencumbered by my own life as I could possibly be: the uncertainty of my position at the magazine, the certainty of Laurel. The light had never gone out of her eyes, not even on that last night when I’d left to sleep on a friend’s couch. Maybe she was still hoping I could be the man she’d mistaken me for.

  I got into bed and turned out the lamp, but I was too restless to sleep. There were basic things about that childhood visit I genuinely couldn’t remember. Had we stayed here or at John’s house, and what had we eaten besides Turkish delight, and had John played any card games with us? Had we seen any ring forts or castles? How had we occupied ourselves when it rained?

  And yet the most ordinary moments had never lost their clarity: Mallory throwing a pebble at me on the beach, Mallory asking our grandmother if our parents were getting a divorce, Mallory crawling behind a sofa in search of Gran’s gaudy fake-gold clip-on earring. Maybe the memories of Mallory were clearest only because there would never be any more of them.

  The silence weighed on me in that damp little room. I was alone, and yet there was a weird air of expectancy, the way it is when you’re in the midst of a difficult conversation and you’re just sitting there, fool that you are, waiting on the other person to speak.

  2

  NOVEMBER 6

  The mattress was worn, the springs digging into my ribs whenever I surfaced out of a dream, but I told Brona I’d slept well. The narrow bathroom still smelled of her husband’s aftershave, and the electric shower yielded little more than a trickle.

  After breakfast I drove out to “Apparition Hill,” where a brown sign marked GROTTO led up a gravel track from the main road. The level ground at the top was punctuated by a crag wreathed in thorny brush, into which the shrine was set. It hadn’t changed much since the newspaper photograph: in her niche the Virgin clasped her hands, eyes rolled heavenward in that signature expression of vacant serenity, and bouquets of faded synthetic flowers and pillar candles brimming with rainwater lined the cement ledges on either side. There was even a crutch propped against the ledge—but only one, as if the Mother of God had started on a miracle before changing her mind. I was pretty sure my grandmother hadn’t brought us up here.

  I parked my rented Micra behind a bench scored with the testimony of ancient teenage romances. From here you could see the little town laid out like a forgotten game of checkers, beyond it a muted green patchwork receding into hills and fog. The grass was strewn with potato chip bags, crumpled cider cans, and empty packs of cigarettes.

  On the far end of the lot, I found a little white truck with a counter along one side, facing the grotto to keep the wind out. Rosaries and prayer cards spilled out of the window on hooks and display racks. I came a few steps closer and saw someone hunched inside—closer still, and I found a gaunt little lady I guessed to be nearly ninety, if not past it. Her skin was crinkled like twice-used tissue paper, and her jutting chin gave her the air of a witch in a fairy tale. I could tell before she opened her mouth that she had dentures, and also that she wasn’t wearing them.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  She stared at me, then remembering herself, fumbled for a jar on a shelf by her elbow. “Beg pardon,” she said as she plucked her teeth out of the container and fitted them in. “I’d a pain in me jaw.”

  “Toothache?”

  She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. “If you live long enough, you’ll have none of yours, either.”

  I replied with a smile as I looked around at her inventory. A fluorescent light buzzed and flickered overhead. The old woman drummed her yellow fingernails on the counter, inspecting my face through her dusty bifocals. “Now, what is it that brings a nice lad like you up here on such a filthy morning?”

  I picked up a prayer card, gave it a glance without reading any of it, and put it back. “Fresh air,” I replied. “You get much business up here?”

  She shrugged. “Enough.”

  I looked at her, and she parted her lips in a gummy grin. She knew I knew she was lying. “You’ve heard the stories?” she asked.

  “About the apparition?”

  The old woman nodded, and leaned forward on her stool as if she were about to divulge something juicy. “Did they tell you about the miracle?”

  “What miracle? I thought the church decided the apparition wasn’t real.”

  “Oh, aye, they always do. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t.”

  “You think it was real?”

  “If it was or it wasn’t, what I think makes no difference a’tall.”

  I laughed. “There’s a slippery answer.”

  The lady gave me a sideways look as she pointed to a rack of cross pendants and religious medals in what passed for gold and silver. “Now, you’ll be wanting a souvenir from your time here. Something for your gran?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you know my gran?”

  “I know everybody’s gran that was born in Ballymorris, and that’s a promise.” Again she seemed to be sizing me up. “I remember you, lad. You came back with her, ah, let’s see, ’twas a good few years back.” She nodded to herself with a weirdly satisfied look on her face. “You came in the summertime.”

  I laughed. “You can’t possibly remember me. That was twenty-five years ago, and we were only here a week.”

  The old woman stared at me in mock contempt. “Sure, you’re only sayin’ so because you don’t remember me.”

  She had me there.

  “Let’s see here,” she went on, “I’ve Saint Anthony, Saint Patrick, Saint Joseph—ah!—and I’ve this miraculous medal as well—that’s the Blessed Virgin, y’see—now wouldn’t this make a lovely wee gift for your granny?” She plucked another box from the rack. “Saint Christopher, here’s the one you’ll be wanting, for he’s the patron saint of travelers. This one’s forty, but I’ll give it to you for t
hirty-five, so.”

  “I did make it across the Atlantic without any help from Saint Christopher,” I pointed out.

  “Ah, but who’s to say what might happen on the return journey?”

  I raised an eyebrow, and she answered with another shameless grin.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “These rosaries have been blessed by the bishop,” she went on, running a crooked finger along the rows of plastic beads. “I’ve rosaries from Medjugorje and Fatima and Lourdes, and I’ve holy water all the way from Rome as well as Saint Brigid’s Well just down the road. What about a bottle of holy water to bring home to your gran?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Then she saw me glancing over her tiny army of statuettes. “This one’s my bestseller,” she said as she thrust a five-inch image of the Virgin into my hand. “Wait and see. She glows in the dark.”

  I couldn’t imagine she sold enough of anything up here to have a bestseller. I replaced the statuette on the counter, and she pressed another laminated prayer card into my hand. Save a dozen souls in the time it takes to boil an egg. The prescribed prayer followed in small print. “I think you’ll find this one very useful.”

  “One down, eleven to go,” I said, and this time I decided to humor her. She sold me the card for a euro fifty, and I tucked it in my wallet. “Now that you’ve made your sale, will you answer my question?”

  The old woman looked up at me, her pale eyes wide and mocking. “And what question would that be?”

  “Do you actually believe in all this?”

  “You might ask Martina McGowan,” the old woman replied. “Sure, weren’t the doctors about to take her leg above the knee before the Blessed Mother healed it, and with the waters of this very well?” She jabbed a finger toward the row of little plastic bottles of holy water.

  “Is that true?”

  “Course it’s true.”

  “Nobody mentioned it to me before. I feel like that’s the sort of thing they’d have told me.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” she asked, suddenly sharp. “Who told you?”

  “Paudie, who owns the bookstore on Shop Street, and Leo, and my cousin Brona.”

  “Ahhh,” she said slowly. “They don’t speak of it, y’see. ’Twas Martina’s own daughter, Paudie’s niece, who took part in the visions.” She cocked her head, and I saw a brightness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “’Twas Síle did the healing. She saw things none o’ the rest o’ them could see.”

  It was beginning to rain. “And how would you know that?” I asked.

  “Ask the girl—if you can,” said the old woman, just before she pulled out her teeth and redeposited them in the jar by her elbow. “They say she doesn’t know what’s real, but I knew her better than most. I’ve a notion they don’t like what she saw, and they’ve hidden her away for it.”

  * * *

  “Paudie rang a wee while ago,” Brona said when I came back from the hill. “He says Tess has agreed to meet with you, but he’d like to speak with you before you ring her.”

  I had borrowed John’s old cell phone, and found Paudie’s number in his contacts while Brona fixed us tea and sandwiches for lunch. “She’ll meet with you tomorrow morning, if that suits,” Paudie said. “And have you any plans for the afternoon?” When I told him I wanted to go to the library to read up on the apparition in some of the old newspapers, he said, “No need for the library, lad. Joan, my wife, she kept a scrapbook of all the news articles from that time. It’s still here somewhere. I’ll have it ready for you by the time you call over.”

  I told him I’d stop by the bookshop after lunch. Then I called Tess—I found her number, too, already in my phone. “Paudie mentioned you were coming back,” she said. “I saw you at the funeral, but there were so many people I thought perhaps I should give you my condolences another time.”

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. “You mean … you remember me?”

  She paused. “I do, of course. We’d a lovely day together at the beach.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do remember that.”

  Something shifted on the line, and when Tess spoke again, her tone was friendly but brisk. “Paudie says you wanted to speak to me about the visitation. I don’t know that I have much to say at this stage, but you’re welcome to call round for a cup of tea.” We arranged for me to come to her office at the youth center the following morning, and she hung up.

  McGowan’s bookshop was only three doors down from Napper Tandy’s pub, and though both signs were missing apostrophes, I doubted there was much overlap in the clientele. The two rooms, front and back, offered that crammed and cozy feeling a shop can have only when it’s as old as it looks, with the proprietor living upstairs. Paudie put the kettle on in the tiny kitchenette off the back room, its only window looking out onto a muddy yard, and I had a quick browse while he made the tea.

  NEW OLD AND RARE read the hand-painted sign outside, but it seemed the only new books were corralled on a small table near the entryway. I pulled down a clothbound hardcover called Permissive Society in Ireland and caught a hint of pipe tobacco as I opened it, taking one more sniff from the gutter before putting it back on the shelf. This was the best thing about secondhand shops, coming upon proof of lives that would never intersect with mine apart from this one simple object.

  Paudie drew up another stool for me behind the counter, poured the tea, and began rummaging through a pile of newspapers and magazines on the shelf beneath the cash register.

  “I went up to the hill this morning,” I said as he frowned at the clutter. “You know the woman up there who runs that little shop out of a truck?”

  “Ah, that would be Margaret O’Grady. Old Mag, they call her.” I watched his eyes light up as he produced his wife’s scrapbook from the bottom of the stack. “Now! Here we are. Knew it was here someplace.”

  “She said something about Tess’s mom having her leg cured,” I went on. “She was supposed to have it amputated?”

  Paudie laid the scrapbook on the counter and seated himself on his stool before answering, and he didn’t meet my eye as he spoke. “Aye, that’s so—my brother’s wife, Martina. ’Twas a miracle, by all accounts.”

  I was watching his face. “Why do you say it like that?”

  The old man ran his fingers over his dead wife’s handwriting. The Ballymorris Visions, 1987–1988. “Discomfort in the face of the great mystery, I suppose. You want to believe, but it never sits easy with you.”

  “How does Martina feel about it?”

  Again Paudie hesitated. “She was very grateful, of course. It renewed their faith.” There was something awkward in all this miracle business. He was talking around it, but I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when to bide my time.

  He opened the binder and we paged through it together, Paudie patiently sipping his tea as I read each article and jotted down names and details in my pocket notebook. The apparition headlines didn’t vary much from one day to the next—Blessed Virgin Appears to Ballymorris Teens; Messages of Love and Hope from Ballymorris to the World—nor did the content of the articles themselves, though they appeared in the Connaught Daily almost every day in February and March, 1988. Each article was clipped and pasted onto its own page, complete with header and date. “Your wife was very neat,” I said. “She must have been a big help to you here.”

  “She was—ah, she was!” When Paudie sighed, I sensed a hole in the stillness of the shop, a vacancy that hadn’t been there until the moment we spoke of her. “Do you remember my Joan, lad? She made the sandwiches for the picnic that day. Helped you choose a novel for your summer reading.”

  “I think I remember that,” I said, because I wanted to please him. The ham-and-cheese sandwich recalled itself with greater clarity than the book selection.

  “We met at the library at UCD. I found herself behind the reference desk, pestered her with every question I could think of while I gathered the courage to ask her out to lunch.” He
cocked his head, glancing around at his bookshelves. “’Twas her idea to come home again and open this shop. Not her home,” he amended. “She was from Wexford, only she hadn’t much family left to go back to.” Paudie seemed half sad and half content, which I suppose was the only way you could feel after a long and happy life with someone you loved.

  They say you can’t possibly know the shape of your own future, but that’s not true. Sometimes you do. And I would never know anything close to what Paudie was feeling now, not for anyone, not ever.

  I turned the page and found the article accompanying that picture on the wall at Napper Tandy’s: More Visions for the Ballymorris Four.

  An apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to four local teenagers. The young people, Orla Gallagher (16), Síle Gallagher (14), Teresa McGowan (16), and Declan Keaveney (17), attend secondary school at St. Brigid’s College in Ballymorris. The apparition initially appeared on the first of November, and has continued to reveal Herself most afternoons at the same time and location.

  “It was an ordinary day,” Miss McGowan explained. “We like to go up to the hill above the Sligo road for the view, so that’s where we were. It’s hard to describe what happened. It was like the air around us changed.”

  Miss Síle Gallagher elaborated: “Declan was telling a story, but all of a sudden his voice sounded very far away. The air felt thick, like we were in the middle of a great rolling fog, but there was no fog; and all the lines and colours around us softened, and there she was.”

  The Blessed Virgin offered a message of forgiveness, repentance, and universal love. The teens agree that whilst they did not hear Her speak aloud, Her words were clearly felt, and that the message was the same for each of them. The Blessed Virgin also asked that they share Her words with all the world’s faithful. “We’ll begin with Ballymorris, and continue from here,” said Miss McGowan.

  The pastor of St. Brigid’s Church, Father Michael Dowd, has interviewed each of the four youths, and is currently compiling a report for Bishop Scanlon of the Diocese of Ardagh. “These young people are all from very devout Christian families, and very earnest in speaking with me as to what they saw,” Father Dowd said. “I cannot doubt their sincerity.”