“It went well, don’t you think?” Barbara asked the banker’s daughter, as she sank her weary body into the raspberry velvet chaise from another lifetime. The spirit’s antics that night had come as no surprise to her. Lately, Barbara had begun to dream that she and Lenny had sold the house. She walked through the echoing rooms that were about to be passed on to new owners just as she had the day they bought the place, and she wept, not understanding why she was giving up the home she loved — the home where she had raised her children and into which she had poured her identity, the home and belongings she would pass on to generations to come. She’d awake face wet and pillow soaked and, relieved to find herself safely ensconced in her Cuban mahogany four-poster with its fishnet-fringed canopy, interpret the dream as a directive from the banker’s daughter never to sell.
The other day Barbara had misplaced her keys and found them hanging from the outside doorknob of the birthing room. Lenny theorized that a neighbor had spotted them in the driveway and put them there, but Barbara believed the spirit had been looking after her.
Before she could fall asleep on the chaise, Barbara forced herself to climb the stairs. She turned the light dimmer down low for guests who might need to get up during the night — and for the banker’s daughter.
***
At one in the morning Barbara heard a distant yet piercing sound. When she realized it was the smoke detector, she jabbed Lenny in the ribs.
“The battery’s probably dying,” he said, pushing off the covers and shuffling downstairs in his boxer shorts to disconnect it before it woke the entire house.
“Barb, it’s a fire!” he yelled within seconds.
She jumped out of bed and struggled to put on the sweatpants at the foot of the bed, but she couldn’t get her legs into the pants. When it dawned on her that she had been fighting with the arms of her sweatshirt, she pulled the shirt over her nightgown and ran to the children’s rooms and then the guest rooms, screaming for everyone to get up and out.
Downstairs, Lenny used a fire extinguisher on a small fire in the birthing room to no avail. They were all down now — Matthew and Elena, Rosemary, Nancy, Jean-Georges and Pierre — watching from the kitchen. Matthew filled a pot with water; Barbara called the fire department. It was at this point that the flames caught onto the curtains and the blaze went out of control. Grabbing random outerwear from the hall closet, they all ran out barefoot into the February cold.
Lenny, his bare legs extending beneath his ski jacket, leapt across the lawn and over the shrubbery to the neighbors’, where he pounded on the door and rang the bell over and over again until a light went on.
“It’s Lenny! My house is on fire!”
***
Barbara had always wondered what she would go for first if she had to suddenly evacuate her home, but as she stood in her neighbors’ backyard, watching the firefighters tackle the flames and smoke in the birthing room, she realized that she had taken nothing except the portable kitchen phone she still held in her hand. Dressed in their high boots and long jackets and wide-brimmed hats, dragging hoses across the lawn, carrying hatchets, and shouting unfamiliar terms, the town firefighters entered her home like aliens from another planet. Larry stood beside her with an emasculated expression and slumping shoulders; she knew he felt he had let them down.
“You kept it under control before they got here,” she reassured him, but she wished he’d run downstairs faster, or located the fire extinguisher quicker, or done something clever that would have put the damn thing out.
By two-thirty, the birthing room was pretty much gone: what the flames hadn’t consumed, the firefighters had destroyed with their chopping. They’d had to smash windows in other parts of the house too, so they wouldn’t explode from the heat. The fire had spread into part of
the kitchen — her new white kitchen. There was smoke
and water damage throughout the house, and water filled the basement; everything would have to be washed, the upholstery steam-cleaned, the cellar carpeting ripped
up and thrown out. The firemen told them it was better
to sleep elsewhere, so they retrieved their shoes and a few belongings and took up neighbors’ offers to house them
for the night. They agreed not to inform the rest of the family about the news; morning would be soon enough to upset them.
***
Like restless children forced to nap, Barbara and Lenny lay on the pullout couch in their best friends’ home several blocks away. They made a mental list of the calls they would make at the first decent hour: the insurance company, client cancellations, contractors and cleaning services. The firemen thought boxes and torn wrappings left on the birthing room heating grate had caused the fire. Bits of paper and ribbon had fallen through onto the burner of the furnace below.
“But I didn’t put the gifts over the grate, Lenny. I’m careful about that. I know I didn’t.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll have the house back together for the twins’ graduation.”
“You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe I didn’t put the boxes on the grate.”
“Maybe you thought you didn’t. You were tired. I only wish you’d come to bed when I asked you. Forget about it now. It could have been a lot worse.”
She didn’t get a chance to protest further because the phone rang and Lenny was told to pick up. It was the fire department; the entire house was now in flames.
That’s how it was with these old houses they said — air in the walls between the laths provided drafts that allowed the smallest hidden embers to take hold. The firefighters couldn’t hack into every wall, but they thought they had checked those of the birthing room adequately. By the time a driver of a passing car had called the department on his cell phone, flames were pouring out of the attic windows as well as every other opening.
When Barbara and Lenny neared their block, they found it cordoned off while trucks from six neighboring towns feverishly worked to put out the conflagration. They skipped over hoses that resembled giant boa constrictors, running past the crowd of mesmerized spectators, many in bathrobes, who might have been watching the filming of some big budget movie. The firefighters were hosing down the houses on either side of Barbara and Lenny’s in the hope of saving them. Fortunately, the air had been calm — not the slightest breeze. Water was being directed into the open roof and the windows from hoses connected to cranes on two trucks, one parked in front of the house, the other in the driveway of the house directly behind theirs. The fire raged on.
In her old sweatshirt and nightgown, Barbara stood like a sculpture of a mad bag lady on the lawn across the street, hair sticking every which way, holding a steaming mug of coffee a neighbor had handed her. They had run out of the house as ill-prepared the second time as they had the first.
“It was supposed to rain,” Barbara said. “Why doesn’t it rain, goddammit, Lenny?”
“Those fuckers are always wrong.”
Helpless, she watched the years she had put into documenting, refurbishing, and polishing objects dear to all of them being consumed in an evil paroxysm. This is it, she told herself, this sick feeling in the gut, nothing but darkness and emptiness beyond the present moment; this is how it feels. This is ill fate.
***
The stench of a building fire is different from any other, Barbara thought as they walked around what was left of their home in the daylight. It didn’t have the odor of a hearth after a fire has died out, or of the left-over wood that the kids carefully extinguished when they camped. It didn’t even stink like a dirty ashtray, though it did stink.
They all stood before a partial shell surrounded by trampled flowerbeds and shrubbery — Barbara and Lenny and the twins, Joe and Norma, Marco and Myra and the rest of the Ficola brothers and wives, Angie and Roy and Rosemary, Nancy and Jean-Georges and Pierre, Joanna and Elliott. The roof was gone, yet the front steps flanked by two stone urns remained
intact. The wicker rocker in which Barbara had nursed the twins sat in perfect condition on one side of the property; someone had placed a pot of yellow mums on it. The back staircase still stood, only now it led nowhere. Window sash lay atop scorched piles, framing nothing but splinters of wood, twisted metal, upside-down couches, and appliances thrown on their sides. A floor lamp with a Tiffany shade stuck out of the pile, miraculously unscathed. The trellis door that had led to the plant room behind the birthing room was also intact, except that the plant room now held nothing but burnt bits and pieces. Evidence of their existence, it appeared, had turned into a pile of charred rubble.
The fire chief suggested they demolish what was left of the unstable structure: curious children and thrill-seeking teenagers might get hurt poking around; animals could get trapped inside the debris. So they agreed that the walls of their home would be pushed in and all of it gobbled up by a mechanical Godzilla and spit out into a giant dump truck. Evidence of their existence would be whisked away as easily as Barbara’s vacuum cleaner had sucked up any signs of Lenny’s birthday festivities.
“I’ll get the Tiffany lamp,” Lenny said.
“No.” Barbara stopped him. “I don’t want it.”
“You’ll build in the spring, sweetheart. A brand-new house,” Norma reassured her daughter, seeming excited at the thought.
Tightly clasping the warm hands of her children and with Lenny’s arms encircling her from behind, Barbara took in the devastation. She was shocked by her shift of emotions and by the realization that in fact nothing horrific had befallen them. Rather, something very good had occurred. They had survived. Something powerful and catastrophic had taken place, yet they had been spared. Good fortune had prevailed, and Barbara felt an overwhelming sense of being lucky — and liberated.
She tightened her grip on Matthew and Elena, fully aware that no matter what precautions she took, she would always be as susceptible as anyone else to losing those she loved. Flurries spangled the air, and she became aware of the stillness that comes before a good snow. The nursing rocker rocked ever so slightly. Why don’t you go? Barbara thought. There’s no more house holding you back. You’re free too.
Barbara looked down at the white-dusted ground and noticed she was still in her nightgown and sweatshirt and was wearing only one shoe. For the first time since the fire had begun, she was shivering. Before she knew what had happened, she was torn from her children’s grasp and on her knees, hands spread to break her fall.
“Barb!” Lenny cried, bending to help her up.
“Careful! Something might be broken,” her father warned.
“Oh shit!” her mother said, conceding the ultimate end to a very bad night.
Barbara had not slipped out of her family’s hands, nor had she succumbed to stress and fainted. She had most definitely been shoved to the ground. Yet Lenny had been the only one behind her. Now she was certain that she hadn’t put the boxes on the grate and that the jealous banker’s daughter would never allow herself to be free, no matter how many houses on the property she burned down. The keys on the door, the dreams about moving, Lenny’s birthday cake candles, had indeed been a message from her to Barbara — to pack up her intolerable good luck and get going.
Joanna had always possessed the gift. As a child she lay in bed at night and, with the aid of the lamplight shining through her bedroom window in the three-decker in Boston’s North End, stared at the picture of Jesus on the wall. It was a peculiar picture her mother had chosen — a print of a blond and blue-eyed hippie-looking Jesus draped in a white robe, seated in an idyllic garden. A boy wearing jacket and tie and short pants sat on Jesus’ lap; other youngsters in their Sunday best surrounded him. The blue eyes of the placid Christ peered with delight not at the adoring children but were cast downward at the dressing table that Joanna’s mother had decorated with a hand-sewn yellow voile skirt to match the walls. Arranged on top of the table was a supply of bobby pins, curlers, hair spray, pale pink lipstick, cologne and matching scented bath powder: all meant to encourage her daughter’s femininity and what her father’s family referred to as la bella figura, a good image or beautiful appearance.
Each night Joanna, refraining from blinking, concentrated hard on the picture, until Jesus’ limp hand rose to bless the children who now animatedly frolicked around the garden, picking daisies and zinnias that swayed in the summer breeze. Her gift was not limited to religious representations: with minimal effort she could turn a wallpaper pattern three-dimensional; she could enter a painting and wander through a building or along forest paths not rendered by the artist.
Yet on this wintry day she could not conjure up the apparition of the Blessed Mother seen on the hospital window by the devout. Insensitive to the frigid temperature, some knelt transfixed, clasped hands supplicating heaven, while others made the sign of the cross or moved their fingers across crystal rosaries, chanting the Hail Mary.
***
She had read about the window in the Boston Globe, over her morning bowl of granola and cup of coffee. The faithful were flocking to the delivery entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital to pay homage to the image discovered by a man waiting to drive his friend home from a routine colonoscopy.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a sinner, because I don’t go to church. Maybe that’s why God showed her to me,” the man was quoted as saying. “Who says it’s the Mary? I can come up with several dozen explanations,” a bystander claiming to be a high school physics teacher and a lifelong Catholic had argued. “Besides, other apparitions come with a message for people to repent and turn their hearts to God. Where’s the message here?” A Harvard psychology professor had reported that such apparitions were classic examples of Gestalt psychology — the mind making sense of a random image. “You are organizing it in a way that is familiar to you, that’s meaningful to you,” she had said. “It makes sense of that in a familiar way, and a familiar way is faces.”
Standing next to Joanna at the site, a short man with an Italian accent and wearing a worn leather jacket and fur-lined hunter’s hat outlined to his wife with a gloved finger what he was seeing. In great detail he described a cascading white veil; hands extended outward in an embrace; the shadow of a face. Joanna could make out nothing but a large fogged area that resembled a mountain — narrow at the top, wider at the bottom — nearly covering the entire first-story window.
“It’s the Madonna of Guadalupe!” someone shouted from behind.
“Do you know the story of the Guadalupe?” a Hispanic woman on the other side of Joanna whispered to her. The woman wore a leopard-patterned chiffon kerchief knotted beneath her chin and a brown quilted parka. Middle-aged, she was probably not much older than Joanna, with a serene but lined face that invited speculation about what had given this woman joy in life and what had caused her despair. Joanna’s mother would have approved of her perfectly applied makeup. This woman in her elegant kerchief would never run out of the house as Joanna sometimes did, looking slovenly and hoping not to bump into someone she knew. The spiciness of her perfume reminded Joanna of benediction after High Mass.
“Not really,” Joanna admitted. She knew little about the legend, except that back in the 80s she and her husband, Elliott, had seen the image hanging in every dusty bar and bus stop in Mexico.
“A very long time ago Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to a peasant in the countryside near what is now Mexico City. She asked him to have a church built in her honor, to prove the people’s love. When the peasant told the bishop, the bishop asked for a sign of proof of this story. He sent the peasant to a place where roses couldn’t possibly grow, yet he found them there nevertheless. He filled his tilma (the woman described with her hands a blanket worn over the man’s front and back) with them. When he emptied the tilma of roses in front of the bishop, they saw that the Virgin had left her image on it. The tilma and the image still exist today.”
A man in front of Joanna turned and correcte
d the woman: “I believe it’s Our Lady of Fatima.” He was tall and distinguished-looking, with glistening hair combed straight back; in his trench coat he could be a Burberry ad in the New York Times. The confidence he exuded reminded Joanna of Elliott.
The Italian man disagreed, said it was the Madonna of Mount Carmel. Every Little Italy in America had a church and school and social club named after her, Joanna thought. “But then where’s the infant Jesus?” the Italian man’s wife asked.
As an artist, Joanna knew about the illusions light and shadows could cause. Still, her trained eyes could see nothing that resembled the detailed descriptions being offered. According to that newspaper psychologist, shouldn’t her brain have been organizing the information she’d been gathering about the image to produce a familiar shape when she looked at the window?
“I see it!” A young woman called out to Joanna’s frustration. “I’m praying and I’m seeing it.”
Joanna no longer prayed. She had rejected the tenets of Catholicism in her 20s. She had prayed to God when her daughter Jill’s life was on the line, but her prayers had been ignored.
She stayed there for about half an hour, more intent on the onlookers than on the supposed apparition. Mothers held gold and silver medals bearing the Virgin’s image next to children in wheelchairs. A cluster of women, most likely nuns, given their clean-scrubbed faces and angelic voices, sang: “Ave Maria our hearts are on fire … Ave, Ave, Ave Maria.” People took pictures with their phones. Joanna preferred to use a 35 millimeter camera, but she had forgotten to bring it — left it on the kitchen counter, along with her cell.
“Do you see it? It’s a miracle,” someone said.
***
Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Page 8