That weekend, Catherine began taking Theresa to the movies. From then on, on Saturday afternoons, they walked up to Eighth Street or across to Delancey, wherever there were children’s matinees—Porky Pig festivals, old Koko the Clowns, an occasional feature-length Disney cartoon. The second time they saw Bambi, Catherine was crying by the end of the opening credits—but Theresa showed no emotion. Nor was she visibly moved when Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen sang, “There once was an ugly duckling,” to that poor bald boy. When Robin Hood played the Essex, they went every Saturday for seven weeks; each time, Catherine searched her daughter’s face for some sign of recognition that romance in Sherwood Forest was a lot more exciting than making your first communion.
And then one afternoon when Theresa was eight, she came home and told her mother: They were showing a movie in school that weekend. It was something she wanted to see.
“In school?” Catherine imagined some short about the art treasures of the Vatican, a documentary about missionaries in Bolivia. “What kind of movie?”
“A Hollywood movie,” said Theresa. “Miracle of Fatima.”
That Saturday afternoon, the parish hall basement was almost unrecognizable as the place in which Joseph and Catherine were married. It was lined with folding chairs, buzzing with children, smelling not of flowers and champagne, but of sneakers and contraband bubble gum. Catherine and Theresa had just found two chairs in a back row when the lights went out and an image appeared on the folding screen.
Years later, Catherine would wish that she had watched the movie more closely; it was information she should have had. But at the time, she was too busy watching Theresa. Ten minutes into the film, Theresa had inched forward to the edge of her seat and was staring with her mouth open, her chin tilted up. An hour later, Catherine had to touch her to make sure she was still breathing. Watching her, Catherine had the strange sensation that Theresa was a character in a film which had reached that moment, near the end, when the camera pulls away, and the person gets smaller and smaller, sailing backward through space.
4
Little Flowers of Jesus
ON A WARM MAY morning in 1917, three Portuguese children were tending their parents’ flocks in a meadow near Fatima. As the sheep grazed, the children—running in circles, alternately flapping their arms and blowing trumpets of grass stalks stretched between their fingers—played angels at the Last Judgment.
Suddenly the sky grew dark and lightning struck so near that they felt the charge in their hair. The children were terrified, as children are at those moments when their games of pretend threaten to turn real. Hearing a woman’s voice behind them, they spun around to see what looked at first like a white bird hovering over a cypress. As the bird swooped toward them, they saw that it was a beautiful woman: Our Lady. The children tried to look at her, as if it were a contest to see who could stare longest at the sun, but her radiance hurt their eyes.
Speaking softly, so slowly that even the youngest could follow, Our Lady predicted another world war, the insidious growth of international Communism, and—after much suffering and the martyrdom of many Christians—the eventual conversion of Russia. She made them repeat her words several times to make sure they got it right. Finally she told them a secret—far more important than any of these revelations.
Ten years later, the eldest of the children—by then a nun—wrote this secret in a letter which she sealed and gave to the Bishop of Fatima with instructions that it be handed on to the Pope. It was Our Lady’s wish that this letter be opened in 1960, on the anniversary of her first appearance at Fatima.
In 1960, the girls in Theresa Santangelo’s fourth grade class began dividing into groups they thought of as “good” and “bad.” After school, the bad girls walked two blocks, safe beyond the sisters’ X-ray eyes, then rolled the waistbands of their pleated skirts till the hem was twice the regulation three inches above their knee socks. The good girls left their hems alone and lingered in the classrooms, asking their teachers if they could help. And the very best, like Theresa, not only stayed on washing blackboards and clapping erasers, but practiced walking home on the balls of their feet, like nuns.
Yet all of them, good and bad, spent that year waiting for Our Lady’s message.
Oddly enough, the sisters didn’t seem to know about the letter, and the information that it would be opened that May had come from one of the worst girls, Cindy Zagarella, who’d read about it in her mother’s National Enquirer. Nearly all of them had seen the Fatima movie when it had been shown years before in the parish hall; now, with Cindy’s news, the memory tugged at them like a dream they’d forgotten, like the chorus of a jumping rhyme which had gone out of style.
Partly, it was something to talk about; partly, curiosity. They were dying to know what the letter said. Most of the good girls expected a perfect and infallible program for universal peace; the more bloody-minded predicted that Our Lady would issue a call for repentance and set a specific date for the end of the world. The bad girls, too, were of different opinions. Some claimed that the letter would contain something powerful enough to make Nikita Khrushchev drop dead; the girls with skeptical fathers said that it didn’t matter what the letter said, the Pope would never tell.
Only Theresa had no desire to speculate. Because for her the letter was not a matter for conversation or curiosity, but rather, pure emotion—the excitement a child might feel on hearing that there is buried treasure in the backyard. For Theresa, the letter was a kind of heavenly alarm clock. Already, unopened, it had rung for her. Wake up. Wake up.
Later, Theresa would tell herself that she should have known better and followed the example of the nuns, who actively discouraged all discussion of the letter and turned it into a heresy of recess and after school. But at the time, Theresa could hardly sleep for counting the hours till this mystery would be revealed.
By Easter, the tension was nearly unbearable. Dressed in her pastel finery, she was all set to accompany her parents to the Fifth Avenue parade, when she was overcome with dread: Suppose the letter were being read and opened while she was off beholding the latest in little girls’ straw bonnets? Faking a stomachache, she sent her mother and father on without her.
Finally the morning came, dawning, Theresa imagined, as bright as the sun on the meadow near Fatima. She awoke at five and put on her best clothes—white socks, a yellow angora sweater stitched with seed pearls and a tartan skirt with accordion pleats which her mother had set by hand. Later she would have to change into her school uniform, but she wanted to start this special day off right. She buckled her patent leather Mary Janes, then sat on the edge of the bed with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap. She heard her mother in the kitchen, but stayed where she was.
“If I don’t move a muscle for five minutes,” she thought, “maybe the message from Our Lady will be good news.”
Smelling coffee, she ventured out to find her mother at the stove. Catherine bent to kiss her forehead, but Theresa squirmed out of her embrace.
“I’m going out,” she said. “I’ll be back in two seconds.”
“Out?” said Catherine. “Out where, in your party clothes at six in the morning?”
“To get the paper.” After a stop in her room to empty her piggy bank, Theresa hurried out the door. At the corner of Elizabeth and Hester, the blind man was just rolling back the shutters on his stand. Theresa waited (God was watching, she had to be patient) while he cut the strings on the stacked papers. Then she took one from each pile—The Times, The News, The Post, The Enquirer, The Herald Tribune, Il Progresso, and even a Chinese paper, just in case.
Before she got home, she’d already read the front pages. The Times featured photos of President Eisenhower and Sherman Adams, The News bannered a triple suicide-murder in the Bronx, while The Enquirer proclaimed in bold letters: MAN BECOMES WOMAN AND DIES IN CHILDBIRTH. Theresa couldn’t understand why none of these papers considered the Virgin’s message front page news.
&nbs
p; She spread the papers out on the kitchen table, where her father was drinking his coffee. Joseph looked them over.
“You investing in the stock market? Or maybe it’s the daily double at Belmont?”
“Daddy,” said Theresa, in her primmest, don’t-tease-me tone. She picked The News first, because it had the most pictures and the largest print. Licking her thumb, she leafed through it, searching for a sign, a word, an artist’s rendering of Our Lady, or even (who knew what miracles might have happened) an actual photo. But after she had passed the entertainment pages, the want ads, the sports news, and still found nothing, she pushed The News aside and opened The Post.
“That’s last night’s,” said Joseph.
“Oh.” Theresa reached for The Tribune.
“What are you looking for?”
“The letter.”
“What letter?” asked Catherine.
“The letter with the secret message from Our Lady of Fatima. The Pope’s supposed to open it today.”
“Check the Dear Abby.” Joseph and Catherine exchanged smiles over Theresa’s bowed head. But when the difficulty of handling The Tribune’s unwieldy pages brought tears to Theresa’s eyes, Joseph stopped teasing her.
“I bet the Pope won’t tell,” he said. “Seriously. I mean, the guy’s got to be pretty smart to get elected Pope. And if he’s that smart, he’ll keep that kind of information private. Six months from now, he’ll come up with the big secret, pretending like he’s thought of it himself.”
“He’s got to tell,” said Theresa. But he certainly hadn’t told the papers. She read each one twice, even searching the Chinese paper and Il Progresso for some kind of hint, and would have read them all again if Catherine hadn’t ordered her to change for school.
She dressed very slowly, like an amnesia victim trying to remember which clothes go on top of which. It was a miracle that she got to school. Twenty minutes late, she walked in on the middle of a history lesson.
“When was the conversion of Constantine?” asked Sister John Xavier.
“Three hundred and twenty-four years after the birth of Our Blessed Lord Jesus,” the girls chanted in unison.
Theresa wondered: If the Virgin’s message had just been revealed to the world, would they still be going on with these same lessons? But there was no way to ask till lunch, when the girls unwrapped their sandwiches and were permitted to whisper.
“Psst.” Theresa hissed so loud that Sister Jerome threatened to suspend her whispering privileges. “What about the letter?”
She could tell from the way that everyone looked at Cindy Zagarella, they’d discussed this thoroughly before school.
“He’s opening the letter today.” Cindy fancied herself an authority on everything because her mother bought The Enquirer. “It won’t hit the papers till tomorrow.”
This sounded so reasonable that Theresa felt nearly faint with relief.
Again the next morning, she went out for the papers, though this time she skipped Il Progresso, the Chinese paper, and The Times. Again she spread them out on the kitchen table, searched for a revelation, and was late for school.
Cindy’s new explanation for the Pope’s mysterious silence was less convincing than the day before’s: “There’s a time difference, dummy. In Rome, it’s yesterday morning, and the Pope’s still sleeping.”
“Oh,” said Theresa. “That’s right.”
A long night, another morning, and still no word from the Vatican. Even Cindy Zagarella was at a loss, and the girls were so fidgety that Sister John Xavier threatened them all with a week’s detention unless they told her what was going on.
“It’s the letter from Our Lady of Fatima,” said Cindy. “The Pope was supposed to read it three days ago, but he hasn’t said a word.”
Sister John Xavier thought for several minutes before coming up with an answer which, it was later agreed, made even less sense than Cindy’s: “If that’s what the Pope decides, the Pope knows best.”
At lunch, dozens of sandwiches were unwrapped and immediately stuffed into the wastepaper basket with prayers for forgiveness for the sin of wasting food. That night, countless plates were pushed aside, and mothers knew better than to nag their daughters about eating.
“What’s wrong with her appetite?” asked Joseph.
Catherine knew exactly what was wrong, but let it pass till after the meal, when she and Theresa were doing the dishes. Then she nodded at the pile of creased newspapers on the floor near the garbage and said, “No letter, sweetheart?”
“No.” Theresa rubbed vigorously at a plate which was already dry.
“Theresa, when I was a little girl, much younger than you, I heard a story about the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel.”
Theresa put down the dish towel and stared. Since when did her mother know stories like that?
“It was just after the Annunciation,” said Catherine. “Gabriel had finished his speech, ‘Fear not, the Lord art with thee, et cetera et cetera.’ He was just about to fly out the window when Mary grabbed the tip of his wing and held him back.
“‘Sir,’ Mary said. ‘Can you tell me something? This thing that’s happening to me—is this what you would call a miracle?’
“‘I would,’ said the angel.
“‘And the baby’s birth? Will that be a miracle too?’
“‘That is always a miracle. But this birth will be the greatest one of all.’
“‘And the child’s life?’
“‘That too. Miracle after miracle.’ Again the angel turned and shook his wings to fly off. But now he stopped on his own, and looked at Mary. And you know what he said?” Catherine was stalling till she was sure she had the punchline right.
“What?”
“‘Madonna,’ he said, ‘there are plenty of miracles in this world. But life is too short to sit around waiting for them.’”
Theresa studied her mother, who, as far as she knew, had never cared about anything but the sew-it-yourself patterns in Family Circle. What did she know about angels and miracles?
“What’s that got to do with the letter?” she said.
“Maybe there was no letter,” said Catherine. “Maybe the souvenir shop owners at Fatima concocted the whole thing to keep the pilgrims coming. Maybe there was nothing in the letter, maybe it was written on cheap paper and fell apart after thirty years. Or maybe the Virgin was trying to teach you girls the lesson she learned from the Angel Gabriel, that life is too short to waste expecting miracles.”
Theresa considered her mother’s explanation for as long as it took to dry the dishes. Then she dismissed it. For already she had come to her own conclusions, answers which seemed more logical—more probable—than any she had heard.
It turned out that no one had ever promised that the letter’s contents would be revealed—only that the letter would be opened. It turned out that the Pope had read the letter and decided, for the good of the world, to keep Our Lady’s message a secret.
By the time this news filtered down to the classrooms of St. Boniface, Theresa was convinced that the whole thing was her fault. With the monumental egotism of an eight-year-old, she had come to believe that God, the Virgin, the Pope, and even the children of Fatima had engineered the entire incident to remind her of her sins.
One night, when her disappointment was still fresh and almost constant, Theresa closed her eyes and begged God for a sign. When she opened them, the first thing she noticed was a spelling paper from school, more red pencil than black, topped with an angry-looking C-minus. Next she saw the zebra plant which her mother had given her and which, in her anxiety over the letter, she’d neglected and nearly killed.
Signs, evidence, positive proof—and all of it pointing to her. It stood to reason that the Virgin might hesitate to squander the key to salvation on a world full of sinners too lazy to water a plant. Theresa had always dreamed of becoming a nun, but now she asked herself: Why would God want a bride who couldn’t spell?
She couldn’t remember a time
when she hadn’t wanted to join the convent. It was as if she were born with her vocation, the way other children came into the world with a fear of dogs, an allergy to watermelon. But it was stronger than any allergy or fear. Once, when she was very small, her father had shown her how to raise the hair on her head with a comb rubbed along her sweater; that pull on her scalp was the closest thing she’d ever felt to her attraction for the cloister. She’d longed for it, even before she knew what it was, the way children who have never been to the circus long to run away and join one; in school, she discovered that the life which the sisters described was what she’d been longing for. At meals, while Joseph and Catherine talked butcher shop gossip, Theresa imagined the refectory with its noiseless chewing, its silent forks and spoons. Saturdays, at the movies, she watched Robin Hood marry Maid Marian and thought of taking her final vows in a wedding gown which would make Maid Marian’s look plain as a housedress. At night, she lulled herself to sleep by conjuring up a convent choir singing the Te Deum in high, clear harmonies.
Only now, with the silence from the Vatican in her ears, did she realize how this dream had already removed her from the world—not to any higher, more contemplative plane, but down into sloth and pride. Vain in her calling, she did poorly in school; drifting away from her fantasy-refectory, she left her mother to clear the dishes alone; off in her imaginary convent, she had let the zebra plant die.
That night, Theresa vowed to spend the rest of her life repenting and, like so many eight-year-old penitents, decided to begin with her homework. From that night on, she studied with the zeal of a fanatic. No medieval monk transcribing the Holy Writ could have taken his job more seriously than Theresa recopying her math problems till the columns hung straight as plumb lines, Theresa drafting a wall-sized map of Italy with colored pencil on the regional boundaries, a little green star for Rome and a big gold one for the Vatican.
Meanwhile she asked herself: Is this enough? Is this enough? She told no one that she was doing her schoolwork to atone for the confusion over Fatima, but in confession, agonized over every spelling mistake. Though the priests could find no penance to assign her, they recognized that she was headed for trouble and warned her about scruples. Yet these well-meant lectures only added doubts to her scruples. Uncertain of ever finding the way, she could only keep on going, while praying for God to turn her in the right direction.
Household Saints Page 12