She grossly underestimated the zeal of the faithful in Massachusetts. She was driving along, paying more attention to Camilla’s directions than to the snow-banked road, certain she’d missed a turn and looking for a place to pull off, when, coming around a bend, she slammed on her brakes and fishtailed down the mercifully dry pavement, skidding to a halt three feet from the last car in a good half-mile-long line of cars ahead of her. The traffic jam wasn’t the reason she’d stopped. She hadn’t even seen it till after hitting her brakes, and so the shrine could chalk up another miracle right now—Josephine’s being alive. She’d stopped because an incredible rainbow radiance was shimmering in the gray sky behind the skeletons of the trees, as though a saint were materializing that moment in the sunken cow pasture off to the right, or men from outer space—who probably were the saints to begin with—were landing their saucer there.
The driver she’d almost rear-ended was cursing Josephine in his mirror. His kids were turned around in the back seat, making faces at her. She straightened her car and got in line, and inched along until she saw that the expanse below the road was not a cow pasture but a huge asphalt lot with hundreds of cars parked in it. The only miracle was the amount of electricity being used for the galaxy of colored lights strung along every tree limb and roof peak and window frame of the sprawling complex of buildings down there. They had a big canvas tent set up alongside the parking lot, next to acres of snow-covered lawns and a frozen duck pond with a promenade stretching into the middle of it. Then she saw the castle. It was up on the hill, the monastery where the brothers lived. It was bigger than some real castles she’d seen on TV, big enough for hundreds of people, and its storybook façade was encrusted, like everything else, with countless Christmas lights.
Josephine didn’t see where they got off calling this a shrine. Jesus Land, maybe. God World. It made her upset, but so did religion generally. She’d had plenty of priests and nuns in her life, especially nuns, and she could live just fine without the Church, which had no monopoly on God so far as she was concerned. She wouldn’t have been going to a shrine at all except that her house had been on the market for more than a month and she hadn’t had a nibble. Nobody had come back for a second look. Granted, it was a sad piece of property, a two-bedroom box with no character whatever, not even shutters—workmen had taken them off years before to install the ugly vinyl siding and had never put them back. The front yard was a joke, the back yard an only slightly larger joke. But people did buy and sell such things. Her realestate agent, Mary Jane, had assured her that someone would buy hers, too. A cardinal rule of real estate, Mary Jane had said, is that everything sells eventually.
Unfortunately, Mary Jane had grown disenchanted with Josephine, who was not cooperating with her. Josephine refused to put a FOR SALE sign on her front lawn, or to list her address in the paper so that people could drive by. The problem wasn’t that she wouldn’t do those things for Mary Jane; she couldn’t do them, or explain why she couldn’t, so she simply refused. She couldn’t do them because her son, Ricky, didn’t know she was selling the house. She was selling it behind his back, and as soon as she’d sold it, she was going to run away to Florida.
She drove around the big lot three times looking for a space, and finally parked all the way over by the duck pond, at the base of the hill, the fairy-tale castle looming above her, spooky and fundamentally beyond belief. Yesterday, when she was crying on the phone about nobody buying her house, Camilla told her the old Saint Joseph trick. Camilla thought everybody knew about it; she’d assumed Josephine had done it already. When you want to sell a piece of real estate, you bury a statue of Saint Joseph in the lawn and he brings you a buyer. She ordered Josephine to go immediately to the famous shrine forty minutes south of Boston on I-95, where they had all kinds of saint figurines, and which was a beautiful sight to see at Christmastime anyway. Camilla said it was unholy that Josephine, raised Catholic even if she never went to Mass anymore, had never been to the shrine in all her years of living in the area, and this made Josephine smile because Camilla had once told her—in the midst of Josephine’s divorce—that the only unholy thing in life was bad matrimony.
Camilla knew that Josephine was running away. More than that, she approved completely. The idea was partly hers, in fact, and that was sad, because Camilla was the one person Josephine was really going to miss. The truth was, Josephine always liked Camilla more than she had liked Camilla’s son, Sal, her ex-husband, who took after his father just the way Ricky took after Sal. Josephine had divorced Sal six years before, when Ricky was thirteen, and though most Italian mothers-in-law would have considered Josephine dead after that, the divorce brought Camilla and Josephine closer. The old lady knew her son was no good—she’d stopped crying over him long before Josephine did—and now, considering the way Ricky had turned out, Camilla had no use for her grandson, either.
The bad genes of men wove themselves through human generations like a corrosive thread, tainting the goodness of women. That was the thing you had to remember when you married a guy, Josephine thought. You were really marrying his father. And when you had a guy’s son, you were having the guy.
Camilla, however, thought Florida was too far away, not to mention that Josephine didn’t know anybody there. But that was one of the things Josephine liked about it: she wouldn’t know anybody. The other thing was something she’d read in a magazine—that Florida was the leading edge of the United States, the first part of America to enter the twenty-first century. Florida was already in the twenty-first century, the magazine article had said, and that sounded pretty incredible to Josephine. And besides, she was tired of being cold eight months of the year.
She was cold right now. The temperature was below freezing as she stepped out of her car into the aurora borealis of the Christmas lights. The vehicles looked like ornaments on a gigantic tree as she walked past them into the headache-inducing wind. A great many pickup trucks seemed to be visiting the shrine today, most of them with rifle racks in their rear cab windows. The racks were empty, but you got the idea, and if you didn’t get it, the bumper stickers helped you out. To judge from the bumpers, the Eastern Seaboard’s spiritual nodes were Disney World, South of the Border, and this very shrine, and things did not look good for people who wanted to ban the handgun or burn the flag.
Were other countries like this, or was it just the U.S.A.? Josephine didn’t know. She’d never been to another country. Well, Florida was practically one, according to that magazine, and she’d be there soon, in the holy land of Mickey and Minnie. She felt slightly blue. She would have liked to take Ricky to Disney World when he was a kid, but she never had. She’d never had the money. Lately, she spent a lot of time looking back on Ricky’s youth, trying to figure out just where he turned bad, what might have prevented it, which things she might have broken her back to change. It was one of those mental games she was always playing, the kind that make you crazy.
She stumbled into the Information Center with her eyes full of tears from the wind. An automobile was parked in the lobby—a brand-new Ford Taurus, stickers still in the windows, sitting on the linoleum floor. Josephine glanced around at the various doorways, but she didn’t see any way they could have gotten it in. A young brother in a cassock sat at a table beside the car, with a stack of flyers and a gray metal box. He was raffling off the Ford to benefit the shrine.
“Excellent car,” the brother said as Josephine picked up a flyer to read. “Automatic. Moon-roof. Cruise control.”
“It’s so strange that you’re raffling a car,” Josephine said. “I just almost had a terrible wreck in my own.”
“Driver’s-side air bag in this one,” the brother said.
“I wasn’t paying attention and I came around the bend, and I would’ve been killed except I saw all these lights and slammed on my brakes. That’s what saved me, all your Christmas lights. This shrine just saved my life.”
The brother shook his head in wonderment.
“Of
course,” Josephine went on, “I was coming here in the first place, so you could also say this shrine almost just got me killed.”
“That makes us even,” the brother said.
Josephine examined the flyer describing the car. “What I really need is a convertible,” she said. “I’m moving to Florida soon.”
“Convertibles are death traps,” the brother said. He looked at her sincerely. “You in particular shouldn’t have one.”
The tickets were a dollar fifty apiece, and the drawing didn’t take place for four more months. Josephine hoped to be long gone by then. “How come you’re raffling off a car now,” she asked, “when you’re not holding the drawing until April?”
“So we can sell a lot of tickets,” the brother said.
“Oh,” Josephine said. She hadn’t expected him to be so forthright about it. He had a nice direct personality and a pleasant voice. He was pretty good-looking, too. “But you’re lowering my chances of winning,” she said.
“How much do you figure we’re lowering them by?” the brother asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic.
“Well, I figured you’d do the drawing in, you know, maybe a month.”
“So we’re cutting your chances by four. But if you bought four tickets, you’d be right back up there again.”
“Oh, ho, what a salesman.”
He pulled a stapled sheaf of tickets from his box. “We have booklets of five tickets for five dollars. You save two fifty, plus your chances go up to better than they’d have been if we held the raffle in a month.” He smiled winningly. In civilian life this would definitely be flirting. “Did I mention the sound system?” he said. “AM, FM, auto-reverse cassette?”
Josephine was feeling lucky. If she actually won, she could always take a cheap one-way flight back from Florida to get it. Or a drive-away agency could have some college kid bring it down. Saint Joseph’s hand would be strengthened, she thought, if she demonstrated a little faith and bought a book of tickets. She gave the brother the money and wrote her name and address on the coupon. “I’m looking for the gift shop,” she said.
“Down below,” he said, pointing at the floor.
Josephine laughed. “In the Other Place?”
The brother laughed, too. “You wouldn’t joke about that if you ate in the canteen down there.”
She looked for a set of stairs.
“You have to go back out and around,” he said. “Stupid design.”
She followed the sidewalk into an underpass, where the wind wasn’t blowing. The cold stopped hammering its fist on her skull. She was about to walk down the concrete steps when she saw that the complex of brick buildings wasn’t the shrine at all. The real shrine was an esplanade enclosed by the mounds of two more suburban hills, a park-like place full of shrubs and statuary and garden beds that must have been something in the spring. Josephine loved parks and public gardens. Even covered with snow, the landscaping made her happy—the winding stone walls, marble stairs like pearl inlay in the hills, rhododendrons as large as trees. She stepped out of the underpass into the mouth of this place. Most of the visitors were here, it seemed, strolling around among statues that turned out to be Jesus at the Stations of the Cross. In their heavy winter clothes the worshippers were hard to match up with the trucks outside. On top of one hill towered a marble crucifix at least twenty feet tall. A wide staircase led up to this gigantic Jesus, with a sign that said THE HOLY STEPS.
An elderly man in a blue suit and tan raincoat was climbing the Holy Steps on his knees. The stairs were strangely shallow—each one just a baby step—and it took Josephine a minute to understand that they’d been designed for this purpose; even the aged gentleman could do it while clasping his hands beneath his chin. At every step he stopped and crossed himself, and said another prayer. The Holy Steps numbered at least a hundred, and Josephine could now feel the cold through her fleece-lined boots.
The gift shop had the holy smell that made her feel ill, the smell Church buildings always had, no matter where she went. Perhaps some essential oil, the Essence of Holiness, was distributed worldwide by Religious Supply, purveyors to the trade. Josephine didn’t know, but she should have, growing up the way she did in a Catholic orphanage. Not that she’d been an orphan. That would have been too simple. That would have been normal, almost. No, Josephine had had two living parents and she was still raised in an orphanage—a Catholic home for young women, actually, which housed orphans, bad girls, and plain unfortunates such as herself. From the age of nine, when her parents split up, to the age of fifteen, she lived there because her father was a bum who didn’t give her mother any money, and her poor mother, just a girl herself, couldn’t make enough on her own to raise Josephine.
Inside the shop’s door an alcove decorated with bales of hay was labeled STABLES and held a dozen mangers of various sizes, each containing a Mary, a Joseph, and a baby Jesus, along with three Wise Men and a farm animal or two. The big mangers were half-life-size and beautifully done; they must have cost a fortune. Past the alcove, antiquity became the present, like switching a channel on TV. The store was big and modern, and full of pastel Post-It notes printed with chapter and verse, 3-D holograms of Jesus carrying the cross, religious desk-blotters, religious penholders, religious paperweights, religious fluffy troll-dolls in fluorescent colors, religious picture frames filled with sample photos of happy families who didn’t exist.
Josephine grew more unsettled with every pious article she passed. She was starting to have an attack of her old religious asthma, when she looked up and saw a sign that said SAINTS. A whole wall was devoted to the miracle-workers, in alphabetical order, beginning with Anthony. She walked along until she got to Joseph, recognizable partly because he came right before the popular Jude, but also because he was holding the Baby Jesus, his son—or his stepson, or ward, or whatever their relationship was supposed to be, theologically. Josephine couldn’t remember how it worked anymore. She glanced at the spot preceding Joseph, expecting to see Joan, but there was no Saint Joan. Only the men saints were there, no women, and no instructions on what to do with any of them, either. She’d expected lists of the powers each saint had, thinking that as long as she was here, she might get a few more to help with her other troubles.
In a corner of the store, racks of magazines bristled up the wall, heaps of sharp-looking periodicals with pictures of people playing guitars, going to flea markets, helping the poor in other countries. You could hardly tell they were religious magazines at all. They said nothing about sex being wrong, or the guilt and shame you were supposed to feel about everything. Josephine’s entire childhood seemed to have disappeared. But then, off at one edge of the rack, she spotted the pamphlets printed on cheap paper in loud, bleeding colors to match the things they were saying. This was the world she remembered. The pamphlets offered instructions on having the right kind of marriage, on raising your kids to be believers, on casting the Devil out of your home. One brochure was intended for a person thinking of becoming a monk—perhaps the very tract that had snared her friend upstairs.
She dug around a bit, and sure enough, she found a series on the powers of the saints. One saint was known as “The Heart Saint”; another was “The Cancer Saint.” There was a saint you prayed to if you had arthritis, and a saint for mental illness. She expected but failed to find “Joseph, the Real Estate Saint.” Physical maladies seemed to be the thing, so she flicked through every gaudy cover, hoping to see “The Dope Addict Saint” for Ricky, or even “The Cigarette Saint” for herself—she’d buy that one—but they didn’t have those, either.
On her way back to the figurines, she passed through the children’s section. Religion was a sunnier thing for kids today than it had been for Josephine. She could see where kids would like these books and games and jigsaw puzzles. An old-fashioned children’s book about the saints called An Half-Hour with God’s Heroes looked like something Josephine might herself have read back in Catholic school. She picked it up. It didn’t contain the i
nformation she desired at this juncture in her fallen life—how to get a saint to bring people with money to your home. It was a storybook full of sweet little tales about the saints and the miracles they had performed, with ancient cartoon paintings to go along. It was great. Kind of great. She liked it. It was the kind of thing, she thought, that Camilla would like, too, and she decided to buy it as a present for her.
She put it under her arm and went back to the statues. If you wanted a dinky little Saint Joe for forty-nine cents, they had that, but such a thing was not going into Josephine’s lawn. On the other hand, she wasn’t springing for the $30 hand-painted ceramic number, either. The plastic Saint Joseph for $4.99 was a bland beeswax color, semi-translucent and perfectly hollow, but a good ten inches high and decently molded: you could make out the baby’s features, whereas on the cheaper models the Saviour’s face was kind of a smudge. She balanced it in her hand and discovered that she was having difficulty breathing. Religious asthma, for real this time. She practically ran to the checkout, where, under the suspicious eyes of the lady at the computerized cash register, Josephine clawed money from her wallet like a Saint Joseph junkie scoring a fix.
She ascended a different flight of concrete steps and found herself back at the Stations of the Cross, staring across a flagstone terrace at the Holy Steps. The old gentleman was almost to the top—all the way up on his knees. Dizzy, Josephine turned toward the parking lot, nearly knocking down a nun in a light-blue habit. The nun gave her the bad, scolding look of nuns everywhere, and Josephine was time-shifted back to the Catholic home, where a girl didn’t simply live, she worked, and the nuns were her masters. Josephine had scrubbed the floors there a thousand times, and polished them once a month with Butcher’s Wax from a can, buffing away the adhesive haze with a cloth-wrapped brick until her arm almost fell off. Yes, they would hit her hands with rulers if she didn’t do it right; they really did that. She had worked outside for entire sweltering summer afternoons in her starched school uniform and dark knee socks, picking iridescent Japanese beetles off the roses and dropping them into coffee cans full of kerosene, where they died instantly, according to the nuns, though Josephine had seen them suffer intensely with her own two eyes.
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