A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Do you know why I’m so fascinated by the saints?” she asks.

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  “Because they take me out of my small frame of reference and force me to think about the scope of human history, not just whether my library books are overdue. If you want to know what the human spirit is capable of doing, read about the life of a saint.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Harlan says, which means he must be tired. He rarely passes up the chance for a good didactic argument.

  “Let’s go outside,” she says. “I need some air.”

  She pulls open the cheap sliding-glass door, and he follows her onto the small balcony, which she has furnished with an outlet-store lounge chair and a folding metal chair. She’s only on the third floor, so they don’t get much of a view, just a long line of anemic pine trees. No moon at all.

  She gives him the lounge chair, which has cushions on it. She balances on the folding chair, bringing her knees up to her chin. She closes her eyes and feels as if she is in a play, waiting for the curtain to open, memorized lines at the ready. The dialogue is new, strange in her mouth, and has an air of unreality about it. But it’s Harlan’s turn to speak. She’s waiting for her cue.

  The night air is still, as if it’s holding its breath, waiting for Harlan’s next words.

  “When I was a kid in Tennessee,” Harlan says, “I used to imagine that someday I would have my own house, and it would have a special room just for playing cards, because my parents played cards all the time. I would invite my friends over, and we would play cards all night, and they would never refuse, because I had this special room. Just for cards.”

  “Just for cards,” she says.

  “It had a bar in it, too.”

  “Of course.”

  “And a soda machine.”

  She nods, and they both look up, searching for the moon instinctively, though it’s nowhere to be seen.

  “People don’t play cards anymore,” he says. “Not like they used to.”

  “I’m a little cold,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

  She slides the door open and finds a fleece pullover and a chenille blanket and brings them outside, sliding the door back into place. She hears an unexpected click and tries the door again.

  “It’s locked,” she says. “Help me try it.”

  Harlan gives the door a good tug, but it holds. He tries again but fails. They look around below the balcony, but there are no signs of movement. It’s dark, silent, and cool, a good night for sleeping.

  LUCY ARRIVED a bit early for Mavis’s funeral Mass, knelt down in an empty pew, and prayed that her great-grandmother would find a new life beyond this one, one where she would be healthy and upright again. No more orthopedic shoes. No more arthritis. Rosalee and Bertie arrived, followed by Paul and Cokie and the kids. The rest of the mourners—mostly Rosalee and Bertie’s friends and neighbors—sat behind them.

  The priest spoke movingly—dust to dust—and told a few anecdotes about Mavis’s life: about her arrival in New York City with nothing but a pocketful of seeds from her family’s vegetable garden in Sicily; about her years as a seamstress in Brooklyn, making ladies’ undergarments; about her successful efforts in the 1960s—something Lucy had never heard before—to prevent the government from taking her home in New Jersey by eminent domain for a highway.

  Lucy left the funeral with an entirely new view of Nana Mavis, who had been so old throughout Lucy’s life that Lucy never imagined her having a youth.

  At the cemetery, the soft April sunshine warmed her back as she placed a white rose on Mavis’s casket and saw another white stone Mary a few graves away. Harlan’s funeral came back to her with a vividness that wasn’t there on the day itself, and she was grateful for the friends who had spoken about him with so much wit and warmth, since she had been barely able to speak at all without sobbing. She wondered if the Mary near his grave was still off-kilter, the way she had left it.

  On the way back to her parents’ house, Lucy stopped at the bakery to pick up the napoleons. By the time she arrived at the house, she had to walk an entire block past all the parked cars. She balanced the white cardboard bakery box on one knee while trying to open the front door. To her right, she could see that the garden had been stripped of its large rhododendron, rototilled, and then replanted with bushes that weren’t doing well. They looked as if they hadn’t been watered in days, in the way that the exterior of a house sometimes must defer to what’s happening inside. And inside was a carnival.

  Mavis, she found out, was something of a legend in the nursing home. She had been there only nine years—a short tenure compared to some—but had managed to charm and insult everyone connected with the place. And funerals, apparently, were big occasions for the residents. Rosalee’s house was teeming with the superannuated, lurching awkwardly across the carpeting in wheelchairs or being shuttled to the bathroom by nursing aides. The home must have bused them in. Add to that all of Rosalee and Bertie’s friends, and the friends of Rosalee’s deceased parents, and the result was an undulating sea of teased hair, in many bluish tones of gray, through which bobbed the occasional bald head.

  Lucy suddenly felt young, flexible, brimming with health. It seemed as if she were back in school, walking among the relatives as she collected checks for her various passages of life: First Communion, confirmation, graduations, birthdays. She gently touched sloping shoulders—may Saint Anthony of Padua protect you—and inched toward the dining-room table, where three cakes on the sideboard spelled out 1-0-1, as if this were Mavis’s birthday.

  Lucy stood in the dining room, remembering birthdays capped by Rosalee’s exceptionally dense homemade cake, as her childhood selves filed in. In their own way, each had a relationship with Mavis and had come to say good-bye. There was the four-year-old Lucy asking Mavis to braid her hair, make it red, and give her freckles; the seven-year-old Lucy crying on Mavis’s knee because she couldn’t do a cartwheel; the nine-year-old Lucy singing “Delta Dawn” into a fork for Mavis, who told her she was good enough for the radio; and the twelve-year-old Lucy, standing with her arms crossed in front of her emerging breasts, not wanting to grow up and make Mavis feel even older. They all offered condolences to the thirty-eight-year-old Lucy, who wished she could give each of them a napoleon. Instead, she poured herself a glass of red wine and downed it on an empty stomach, because the food all around her looked too perfect to be eaten.

  The dining-room table was invisible under Rosalee’s weekend efforts: antipasti glistening with red roasted peppers, artichoke hearts, and olives; vast bowls of couscous; piles of oranges and lemons; trays of cannoli; and an enormous tuna, with the head on, on a platter at the center of the table. On the sideboard, to the left of the cakes, sat Lucy’s plaster-of-paris model of Sicily’s Mount Etna. Rosalee or Bertie must have dug it out of the basement. Did she make that in third grade or fourth? Back then, she wouldn’t have known anything about Sicily’s Saint Agatha, wouldn’t have suspected that a human being was capable of surviving imprisonment and torture before dying on a bed of hot coals. But Mavis would have known about her, maybe even have seen Saint Agatha’s veil carried in processions to prevent the volcano from erupting. Lucy wished she had asked her more about Sicily when she was alive.

  Inside the kitchen, clutches of women in shapeless black dresses stood arranging food on platters and sipping ginger ale, smiling with their too-perfect dentures. Rosalee towered above them with her dark puff of hair as Lucy reassessed her place in the world, as people do at funerals, and realized that the kaleidoscope had twisted—she was no longer a kid, and her mother fit in with the older crowd. Rosalee hesitated as she bit into a piece of celery, Lucy noticed with sadness, closing her lips around it as if her teeth weren’t strong enough to be trusted.

  But there was someone else in the room who stood above the rest, someone bending an ear toward a cheese-plate organizer with a riot of bobby pins protruding from a wispy bun on the back of her he
ad; someone whose youth pulsed even more than Lucy’s, but who nevertheless looked comfortable amid the deafness and the humped backs and the inelastic skin all around him, drooping from necks and arms and earlobes. It was someone Lucy hadn’t anticipated seeing at her great-grandmother’s funeral.

  ten

  * * *

  The shrine of the unintended consequence. This was where Lucy led Louis after discovering him in the kitchen. Her old bedroom was now a gallery for Rosalee’s inadvertent collection of vintage lunchboxes. It was the only room in the house with a lock on the door, besides the bathroom, which was being monopolized by dozens of people with bladder-control problems. The room had no furniture. Bertie had purchased white plastic cubes, two feet high, which were stacked in various configurations to display the lunchboxes. A low-pile Berber covered the floor, and track lights cast a fluorescent glow on the white cubes. The room had a reverential feel to it, as if the lunchboxes were just placeholders for the real art that was to come.

  Lucy closed and locked the door, shutting out the funeral-party din. She had no plan, just a need to be alone with Louis. He looked around the room.

  “Somebody likes lunchboxes,” he said, bending to examine a Roy Rogers in mint condition.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she said. “My mom got one for a present about five years ago, and she faked her enthusiasm so effectively that everyone gives her lunchboxes now. Then she got caught up in the buying and the selling and realized she was good at it. She has at least one for every year between 1950 and 1985. You wouldn’t believe what some of them are worth. That one you’re looking at, the 1953 Roy Rogers, is worth almost a thousand.”

  “Dollars?” he said, moving back to where Lucy stood near the door. He put his arms around her and bent his head down until his forehead gently touched hers.

  “I can’t believe you’re h—” she said, swallowing the “here” as Louis covered her mouth with his, pressing her up against the door. They slid down to the floor. The sounds of the funeral faded as they faced each other, kneeling.

  “So you do like me,” Louis said, brushing her hair away from her face.

  “I do,” she said.

  “And you won’t send me away? Even if your life is complicated?”

  “I won’t send you away,” she said.

  Louis put a hand on either side of her head and kissed her for a long time. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be kissed that way. It seemed to eradicate all the doubt, all the second-guessing. It seemed like the only logical thing that had happened to her in months and months, and now that the fences were down, she wondered why she had thrown them up in the first place.

  Then Louis, shifting on his knees, accidentally kicked one of the plastic cubes, knocking several lunchboxes to the floor. The din of the party ceased. Someone came to the door and rapped on it loudly.

  “Who’s in there? What’s going on?” Rosalee said.

  “It’s me, Ma. Everything’s fine,” Lucy said. “I just tripped.”

  She and Louis sat with their backs against the door, waiting for the talking to resume. They both looked straight ahead until Louis threaded his fingers through hers, which she took to mean they were together in this, equally awkward and equally elated. A few minutes later, she stood up, unlocked the door, and left, leaving Louis to sneak out after her. Rosalee had moved away but must have had her eye on the door. She walked over, took Lucy’s arm, and whisked her into the master bedroom.

  “Who is that young man?” Rosalee asked. “He said he was a friend of yours, but I’ve never heard you mention him.”

  Lucy could feel the redness creeping down her neck. “He is a friend. I work with him, sort of. But I’m sorry about the lunchboxes. We were just—” she started, but Rosalee stopped her.

  “Never mind all that.” She turned toward the mirror on her bureau and straightened her necklace. “I need to check on my lunchboxes.”

  “I understand.” Lucy sat down on the bed, sinking into the too-soft mattress, and pulled her hair around her neck. Rosalee hadn’t left yet. As she rearranged her bangs in the mirror, Lucy saw her expression soften.

  “Oh, doll,” Rosalee said, coming back to sit down on the bed. She could tell that her mother was in some way grateful to know that Lucy was capable of sneaking a man into a room and locking the door. It meant she was putting her grief behind her.

  “Lunchboxes can be replaced. They can,” her mother said. “I want you to be happy. Look at me, Lucy. That’s all that really matters. So why didn’t you tell me about him before?”

  “There wasn’t much to tell,” she said. “Honestly.”

  Rosalee gave her a look of disbelief. She stood up to go, then turned back.

  “He’s not one of your students, is he?”

  “He’s thirty-two, Ma,” Lucy said, flipping over to bury her face in the mattress.

  “I’m sorry; he looks like a boy. Now go out there and talk to some of these deaf people. I’m already hoarse from shouting.”

  Lucy sat on the bed for another five minutes until the redness receded. Then she straightened her own hair in the mirror and left the bedroom. As she walked down the hallway, she could see Louis putting on his coat near the door. He left with the muted wave of a co-conspirator, and now she only had to get through the rest of the afternoon, which she did by deciding that Mavis would have forgiven her. You’re too sensitive. Get over it. It had been right there in her letter, a reminder that we all humiliate ourselves from time to time. But then we move on.

  FOR THE NEXT WEEK, Lucy and Louis spent every day together, blocking out the world. They ate meals together, watched old movies on television, and sat on Lucy’s couch reading the newspaper, their legs intertwined. Then the pressure of her precarious job status intervened.

  With only a month before the end of the semester, she had to come up with a topic, research it, and write an article, a task on the order of reading the complete works of Shakespeare in a week. Louis offered to let her use his data on the study of gender differences in religious devotion, but she refused.

  “I can’t take your research,” she told him.

  “But I haven’t written it yet. It’s just the raw numbers,” he said.

  “It’s not even my specialty.”

  “But if it means your job, don’t you think that takes precedence?”

  “I just can’t do it that way.”

  Finally she withdrew to the library to gather data on Pope John Paul II’s extraordinary rate of beatification. This papacy, she decided after reviewing the numbers, was Saints-R-Us. You still needed to be a martyr for the faith, or live a life of sacrifice, plus have your miracles verified after death. But John Paul II had lowered the requirement from four verified miracles to two and had dropped the Devil’s Advocate appointed by the Vatican to argue against sainthood. She would compare it to an earlier era of church history.

  After three days of seclusion in the library, she called Louis and asked him to come over for dinner. She was chopping carrots for a salad when he arrived.

  The rhythmic slicing, the thunk of the knife on the cutting board, kept her mind from wandering. Louis opened a can of seltzer and sat on the stool, watching her chop.

  “What can I do?” he said, and she glanced up from her carrots to see a look on his face that was unmistakable: the gratefulness of belonging. The knife dropped from her hand, then she walked over and placed her forearms on Louis’s shoulders.

  He tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear.

  “Poor thing,” he said. “Those saints must be torture.”

  “Some people say anyone who makes it to heaven becomes a saint,” she said.

  “Sometimes I get the feeling you believe it yourself.”

  “Not all of it, of course. Some saints aren’t even based on real people.”

  “So you don’t believe in them. You don’t pray to them.”

  “Technically, you’re supposed to pray with a saint, although I don’t think of
it that way. I guess I just leave open the possibility of intercession because there’s so much genius in the idea that these humans somehow created pathways to God based on the way they lived their lives. If you’d done the research I have, you might be swayed. Some of the miracles are impossible to explain.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Well, there are a few studies that show greater improvement among sick people who were prayed for. No, I’m serious. You can look it up. And if you want a specific case, a woman was cured of leukemia in 1978 after asking for the intercession of Saint Marie Marguerite d’Youville. Doctors testified at the Vatican. They called it miraculous.”

  “But how does that prove anything? It just means they don’t understand it yet. There could be a hundred scientific explanations.”

  “How were you raised?” she asked.

  “Roman Catholic. But I never made my confirmation.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I thought it was all bunk by the time I was twelve.”

  The real miracle, she wanted to tell him, was the life of a saint. Marie Marguerite d’Youville had persevered with everything against her: a husband who died early, extreme poverty, the loss of four of her six children in infancy. But she who had nothing found it necessary—necessary—to be charitable. Every setback only renewed her need to serve the poor. How could anyone hear about her and the Grey Nuns of Montreal and fail to be moved? And what about the pervasiveness of the saints in modern society?

  Most Christian churches and schools were named after saints; they were immortalized in books, movies, songs. Beyond that, small groups devoted themselves to particular saints, supporting shrines and societies that offered hope to people who couldn’t live without it. And those people came week after week, even day after day, to petition, say novenas, move rosary beads swiftly through practiced fingers. They didn’t make the news, even if their prayers were answered, but that never stopped them. Lucy could accept the argument that it was all a human construct, but it couldn’t be called bunk.