The Virgin Mary sure as hell was no stranger to Joanna. Her mother had always maintained a special devotion to the saintly woman who was also a Jewish convert and mother of an only child and with whom Joanna’s mother must have identified. Even her mother’s name, Myra, was a derivative of Mary — and probably Mary was a derivative of the Hebrew Myra. A foot-tall statue of Mary in the image of the Immaculate Conception sat on her mother’s bureau.
It was in that likeness that Joanna’s mother had dressed Joanna one Halloween, putting a white cotton bathrobe on her backwards in an exact replica of the gown the statue wore. Next she sewed gold trim on a piece of blue silky fabric and draped it around Joanna’s head and shoulders. Seven-year-old Joanna had been the laughingstock of the neighborhood when she knocked on doors and when asked who she represented answered: “The Blessed Virgin Mary.” “That’s-a so nice,” the little Italian grandmothers said, pinching her cheek, while the parents of Joanna’s friends could hardly contain themselves.
***
Home from the hospital site, Joanna searched online for those familiar images of her mother’s patron saint and printed them out along with their legends. First was Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mary, hands together in prayer, wore a full-length greenish cape that covered her head and shoulders and a pinkish gown dotted with gold; she was bathed in a golden aura. Next she found Our Lady of Fatima, who repeatedly appeared to three children in Portugal to preach about the necessity for peace after the First World War. Joanna printed out the picture of Mary clad in a dress not unlike the one she had donned that infamous Halloween, but it was a white — not blue — cape edged in gold that this Mary wore. Joanna agreed with the Italian man’s wife that the apparition couldn’t be the Madonna of Mount Carmel since her pointed crown — like the one on the statue she remembered seeing paraded through the North End of Boston during Italian feasts — did not fit the rounded edges of the one on the mountainous smudge. She typed in “Our Lady of Lourdes”, who appeared 18 times to the poor 14-year-old French girl Bernadette and asked her to have a chapel built on the spot. Her solid white gown with a blue sash was a possibility.
Joanna took the printouts up to her studio. Ever since Jill’s death, she’d become a visitor there, a tourist trying to imagine the life of a talented artist who had abandoned the space. Joanna breathed in the scent of oil paint, but her fingertips no longer tingled with possibilities. She removed the canvas she was currently working on from her easel: a scene of the villa she and Elliott had stayed at on their last trip to Italy, a sprawling stone edifice amid a backdrop of hills — the place where she had found little Elisabetta, whom she believed to be the reincarnation of her daughter. She was working from a photo Elliott had taken on an early morning walk their first day there, but the image in lugubrious brownish green tones could be taken for twilight or dawn — the most ambiguous times of day, when even the sky is ambivalent about its intentions and the improbable becomes possible.
Her earlier work had depicted surreal landscapes with people flying over water and birds plowing fields. But it was the psychological situation that she came to find more surreal: the tenuous balance of the conscious and the unconscious, between people’s dreaming and waking states.
The villa was the first painting she’d attempted since the accident, and she refused to place figures in it. A life-sized painting of a 12-year-old Jill seated on a stairwell reading a book graced a wall of the newly renovated middle school. In bold colors — blacks, greens, and reds — Joanna had captured the internal struggle between childhood and adolescence, and now it hung as a memorial to her daughter. Unbeknown to anyone except Elliott, Joanna had begun a portrait of her father, using a photo Elliott had taken of him at a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. But her distinct psychological acumen had failed her. What stared back at her was a stiff, embalmed visage from which she recoiled. No, she would not portray people to whom she could not give a soul.
Today she used pastels in order to work faster, and fleshing out the texture and folds of the fabrics, the composition and gleam of the gold threads. Oddly enough, everything ended up in the same greenish brown hues that suggested an impending storm.
***
“How long have you been working on these?” Elliott asked when he found her in the studio. Four large pictures hung on a clothesline stretched across the white walls of the room.
“All day.”
“What are they?”
“Different images of the Virgin Mary. Can’t you tell?”
“I’m an atheist, remember?”
“They’re horrible.”
“No.”
“Don’t indulge me, Elliott. It makes me feel like I’m killing time in a therapeutic craft center for the insane.”
“Fine. Did you get a commission from the Pope?”
“I just couldn’t stop.”
“She had quite a wardrobe. Wonder who her tailor was.”
“In the church I went to as a kid, she even wore jewelry,” Joanna informed him.
“Carpentry must have been lucrative in those days.”
“You’re really bad, you know.”
“I’m so bad I think I’ll eat the green one of your pictures for dinner.”
“Sorry. I lost track of time.”
“I can grab a bite on my way to the hospital.”
She wanted to make him something. He’d kept his promise to stop stuffing himself with junk as a means of dealing with his grief, and he was back to his trim self, maybe even better.
“Do you feel like breakfast or dinner?” she asked.
“I guess I wouldn’t mind something substantial. The five-minute sandwich break in the ER storage room is getting old.”
“Got time for something out of the freezer?” She turned off the studio lights; she had worked nonstop into darkness.
“What should I take out, Jo?”
“I’ll get it. You’ll never find anything in there. Frankly, I don’t even know what I’ve got.”
“Didn’t you forget something in those pictures?” he asked on their way downstairs.
“What do you mean?”
“None of them have faces.”
In the kitchen she ran a Tupperware container of tomato vegetable soup under hot water, plopped the red chunk of ice into a saucepan, and set it on the stove.
“This still good?” Elliott was pointing to a small baking dish of leftover moussaka in the refrigerator.
“Take off the aluminum foil first and cover it with a paper towel,” she reminded him. “Why didn’t you tell me about the window?” She placed clumps of grated cheddar in two bowls for the hot soup to melt.
“Oh, now I get it. I didn’t even hear about it until this morning, and not much at that. It’s not in my hospital, and even if it was, in my line of work bashed-in skulls take precedence over dirty windows.”
Elliott’s lack of interest irritated her. People’s perceptions, particularly visual ones, fascinated her. The spirit world fascinated her. Neither titillated Elliott, who still refused even to consider that Elisabetta might be Jill.
“The crowd was really something, Elliott.”
“You went to see it? Today? While I was sleeping?”
“Why are you surprised? Life goes on when you snooze. They’re calling it a miracle.”
He laughed and set down two plates on the island in front of two stools. “You know what a miracle is? When the battery that lights up the blade on my laryngoscope doesn’t die while I’m going down someone’s throat, or when I enter a code blue on the floor and all the equipment I need is there and the room isn’t in utter chaos. Mineral deposits in water that gets inside a broken seal between two windows is not a miracle in my book.”
“But is what they see a miracle?” she asked. “I remember learning in catechism class that a miracle was an act of faith.”
“It’s wishful thinking — imagination
.”
“I have a good imagination, and I couldn’t see it. I wanted to see what they saw.”
“Then you have to believe what they believe.”
“Will you go there with me?”
“Joanna, I’m heading out to my third consecutive 12-hour shift.”
“When you get off.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t really care about this window. You do. You have all day to go back.”
“But I’d like you to come with me. I’ve lost my skill, Elliott. The sun in my paintings is cold; the wind doesn’t blow. Or maybe that’s my interpretation. Death. Death to everything! That’s what I see. You said you wanted me to let you in, so I’m asking you to do something important with me. I’m letting you in, and you’re fucking refusing. You have your ER to go to for redemption. You couldn’t save Jill, but you get a chance to make up for it every day. What about me, Elliott? What do I do? Where do I go?”
Joanna threw the spoon she was using to stir the defrosting soup onto the stove; it fell with a clang onto the tile floor and bounced around, splattering red droplets in every direction as she stomped out of the kitchen. She walked upstairs. She fell onto her bed, and she cried. He didn’t follow her. His guardrails were up, caution lights ablaze. She knew she’d hit him hard where he hurt the most. Their fear of one another was the price they now paid for having suffered the painful consequences of unconditional parental love.
When he had left for work, she went to the attic, cluttered with bags of old appliances and boxes of dishes and glasses and silverware she had been saving for Jill’s first apartment. Unable to navigate the crammed space with its low slanted ceiling, she threw her body onto the bags and boxes and began to swim over what her father would call crap — rolled-up rugs and cartons of books, old curtains, space heaters, lamps — until she came upon a carton labeled in blue ink in her mother’s handwriting: “Joanna’s desk.”
She knew it was there, under a basket of two fake furry kittens into whose stuffed bodies Joanna (the creative child, as everyone called her) had once breathed so much life that they seemed to purr. It was there in the pink plastic box with the tarnished brass clasp and the image of a teenager with a long black ponytail on the lid. Holding the box, she executed a reverse breaststroke with her free arm until she landed on the wide pine planks of the attic. She sat on the floor and rummaged through the box, finding letters her cousins had sent about boyfriends and unfair parents, and a note from a boy in high school who told her she was the meanest girl he’d known because she’d rebuffed him in the middle of the school cafeteria. She had hated him for that note, but now she felt sorry that she’d been so cavalier about his feelings — a bitch, really. She picked up a hard-as-a- rock piece of penny candy a boy she had once had a crush on in fifth grade had sent sailing across the classroom onto her desk. There were postcards she had mailed home from her summer abroad in Spain at the end of her junior year. Her penmanship had been impeccable; even that had deteriorated, to the point where now she could hardly read her own script.
Then she found it near the bottom: a piece of white paper with a purple map of the Middle East. It bore no city or country names or labels of any kind, just masses of purple splattered with translucent grease stains. It had hung on her aunt Norma’s refrigerator door for years, and one day Joanna had stolen it, never admitting the theft when her family had decided it had fallen off the refrigerator door, been mistaken for trash, and thrown away.
If you stared at the map long enough, you saw the face of Christ. A few people had taken only minutes, others hours or even days, to decipher the image. Some never saw it. Joanna had detected it within seconds. Whenever she looked at the picture after that, all she could see was Christ’s face. She held up the jagged blob of purple, taped it on the wall, and stood back a few feet. She closed one eye, then the other. She stared until her eyes crossed and blurred. Nothing. Her artistic vision — her ability to make lips suggest a smile, eyes threaten to blink and tear, veins pulsate and skin radiate warmth — had been blinded. Perhaps it had been a mistake to think that, because her mind took her beyond the obvious, she deserved to bring those mysteries back to this world.
***
She went to bed wishing she had contracted the wicked bad cold from the man who sat next to her on the T the other day on her way home from Macy’s winter clearance sale. She longed for a good flu, a fever that would not only garner sympathy but also excuse her from all obligations for a week or two — such as talking to Elliott. She was sinking farther into the place to which she had traveled after Jill died.
She got up and checked her e-mail, then her voice mail. Maybe she’d missed a message from Nancy or Barbara while she was swimming in the attic. But it wasn’t only from her cousins or friends she needed to hear. Elliott alone bore witness to the burden of her craft — to her sixth sense, her third eye. Elliott alone shared Jill’s absence in the quiet of the night while they lay side by side, barely breathing.
She returned to the studio and studied the facial features in the printouts she’d taped to the corners of her pastels. The generic button nose in every image was so unlike her mother’s prominent yet attractive Sephardic version. The eyes were lackluster, and the parted rosebud lips wanton for someone who should have been grinning from ear to ear to have a son who turned out to be God. But these artists hadn’t seen the Virgin, so what had given them the right to depict a woman who looked spaced out in orgasmic ecstasy or on a heroin high? She went back to bed.
***
“Take the T in and meet me here at the ER in an hour,” Elliott said on the phone, waking her at six the following morning. “We’ll drive over to St. Mary’s. Gotta run,”
She didn’t ask why he had changed his mind. Thoughts of cutting up his favorite shirt, never cooking him another meal, or telling his mother on him evaporated. On the 11 o’clock news the night before, an interview with St. Mary’s senior vice-president of marketing had revealed that the window would be dismantled in two days. Detailed inspection by glass experts had determined that a vacuum seal had broken, allowing water to seep between the panes, which was nothing unusual. What was unusual, however, said the bishop of the archdiocese of Boston, was the well-defined outline the seepage pattern had produced.
“The church is very, very cautious in situations like this,” he said. “The window will be examined for perhaps years before a decision about its validity can be determined.”
“Regardless of whether or not the image is that of the Virgin,” the hospital’s spokesperson confirmed, “it must be removed. It’s hampering the functioning of the hospital, even though the crowds have been quite orderly.”
***
The parking garage was full. Elliott found a spot several long blocks away; as they carefully trudged over uneven, icy sidewalks, Joanna waited for him to regret his decision to accompany her.
At St. Mary’s, more onlookers than had been there the day before jammed the delivery entrance and lined both sides of the street. Bouquets and hundreds of candles had turned a dumpster below the window into an altar, with more bouquets several feet deep around it. Hospital security guards tried to keep the crowd from spilling into the street, while police directed traffic. Joanna and Elliott made their way through the murmuring worshippers to get a better view.
“Well?” Joanna asked. The sun was brighter than yesterday, bringing more color on the pane.
“Honestly, if I tell myself it’s an impressionistic image of the ones you showed me of her, I guess I could convince myself that that’s what I’m seeing, especially given the fact that I’m exhausted and headed to dreamland. But since I don’t believe in those images in the first place, what I see is something that could look like anything from Mount Washington to a pile of mashed potatoes.”
“Then I should also be able to see her if I tell myself that’s what it is, but I still can’t. What the hell is wrong with me, Elliott? I don’t even see t
he outline of the veil everyone talks about.”
A woman inclined her head toward Joanna and spoke softly. “You can argue about what is in the window, but señora, there is no arguing about the faith of the people who are gathered here because of their love for her.”
Joanna recognized the voice and scent of the woman with the leopard kerchief who had spoken to her about the Guadalupe the day before. She turned, amazed that they had managed to land beside each other again, but the woman had moved on as quickly as she had arrived.
“Had enough?” Elliott asked.
Joanna was about to accede when a man climbed onto the dumpster, crushing flowers and knocking over candles. He was in his 20s or early 30s, of average height, with a red beard and shoulder-length dreadlocks. His hair matched the fiery sky on his sleeveless sweatshirt, which left his muscular arms exposed to the freezing cold. The crowd gasped, then fell silent.
“They’re going to take the window tomorrow morning. Are we going to stand for that?” the man shouted. “This is our Blessed Mother. They should build a chapel so more people can come. Are we going to let them take her away?”
“No!” a voice called out, followed by another and yet another, until the no’s reverberated through the crowd.
“Over my dead body!” cried the young man, his arms outstretched as if to guard the window.
“Build a shrine! Build a shrine!” the crowd began to chant.
“It’s Jesus! Look! He’s Jesus!” someone yelled.
“I think it’s time to ask for the check,” Elliott said.
“Get down!” someone called out to the man. “Go home!” more voices cried.
Two security guards, one black and one white, set out for the man. Trampling the makeshift shrine, they climbed onto the dumpster.
“Go home!” half the crowd was yelling. “Build a shrine!” the other half screamed.
An unopened can of Coke sailed above Joanna and Elliott’s heads, missing the guards and the man, and hitting the window. It left a hole in the upper left corner.
Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Page 9