The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  Right, I said. The ambiguity was deliberate.

  Well, Linda asked, what do I really think?

  It was clear I was being tested, in some way. Pre-interviewed. I think I might have been willing to mislead Linda Tripp, just to gain her confidence. But I didn’t know what she wanted to hear about little Audrey Santo, and the possibility of God. So I gambled and told her what I really thought.

  It was the last I heard from her.

  July 19, 1998

  IN THE BED at the center of the room, beside a pink heart-shaped pillow, beneath a crystal chandelier and a cheerful bouquet of red, white, and blue balloons, lies the child. Her dark hair is shiny and fragrant, gathered at the crown by a red satin bow, cascading onto the pillow and 3 feet beyond. Her complexion is alabaster, without bruise or blemish. She is toasty to the touch. Her gray eyes have the luster of wet pearls. They are open. They march back and forth, slowly, as though she is reading Scripture.

  She reads nothing. She says nothing. She does nothing. Her jaw lolls open in flat, dreadful stupor. From time to time spittle must be mopped from her lips and tongue. A breathing tube enters her neck, attached to a ventilator.

  Eleven years ago, when she was not yet four, this little girl fell into the backyard swimming pool. She nearly drowned. Much of her brain died.

  Upon the foot of the bed are letters. They have been mailed by people around the world, people sick in body or in spirit, pleading for a cure. Later, these will be opened and read aloud to the child, one by one. She will not respond. Against the far wall is a dresser cluttered with religious statuary: crucifixes, Sacred Hearts, Virgin Marys, bleeding Jesuses with crowns of thorns. Scotch-taped beneath the chins of many of these effigies are little Dixie cups, to catch the weeping oil.

  Yes, weeping oil. You can see it, hanging from plastic chins, beading up on wooden cheekbones, painting ceramic tunics with a bright, damp sheen.

  Mysterious events have been occurring in this home. Communion wafers have been said to ooze blood. Statues have been said to move on their own when no one is looking, pivoting to face sanctified objects. Chalices have been said to suddenly fill with sweet-scented oil. Sick people who have come here say they have been healed.

  The girl’s family claims to be mystified. For years, word of these events has been slowly leaking out, like the oil that puddles on the eyes of the painting of Our Lady of Medjugorje out in the garage. The garage has been converted into a chapel. Now tens of thousands know of this place. It has its own Web site, and a committed cadre of Roman Catholic volunteers who answer correspondence, organize masses, and call themselves the Apostolate of the Silent Soul. No money changes hands. No one’s getting rich.

  The events here have not been officially embraced by the Worcester diocese, but several area priests have become something of a kitchen cabinet to the girl’s family, celebrating masses before groups larger, and more needy, and more enthusiastic, than they have otherwise known.

  Today is Wednesday, so it is Pilgrim Day. Eighty people who made reservations as much as a year and a half in advance arrive at the simple one-story frame house. In groups of ten, they are escorted into a small room beside the girl’s bedroom. In the dividing wall, a picture window has been installed. Venetian blinds are drawn. The pilgrims wait with hushed expectation. The blinds are opened, and she appears.

  Children crowd wide-eyed to the front. Someone points a disposable drugstore camera and clicks.

  Inside the bedroom, the girl’s grandma fusses with the sheets.

  “They have come to see you, Audrey,” she coos. “Don’t you look beautiful?”

  Audrey does not respond.

  Grandma takes a vacuum hose and suctions mucus from Audrey’s nose. In the room next door, people fish for their rosaries and hold them out. The beads drizzle against the windowpane. A woman with haunted eyes and a twist and swing in her step approaches a padded kneeler placed beneath the window and painfully sinks to her knees.

  After five minutes, the blinds are drawn again. This group shuffles out, and another is ushered in. At the end of the tour, each pilgrim will get a souvenir, a ziplock bag containing a little cotton swab, daubed in the oil of this holy home.

  Spend time in the house at 64 South Flagg Street and you are likely to be either appalled or inspired. One of two things is going on here: a monstrous fraud that exploits a grievously injured child, or a startling declaration by God Almighty that He exists—is here, right now, in this very place, working miracles.

  One or the other. No in-between.

  Right?

  THERE IS A scene in the movie Oh, God! in which the deity—in the irresistible person of George Burns—arrives in court to testify as a witness in a trial of a good man accused of slander. The judge is, understandably, skeptical. Burns asks: What, you want a miracle? “I got a cute miracle,” he offers, pulling out a deck of cards. With a pass of the hand, it disappears. Happy now?

  The message is clear. God does not perform parlor tricks.

  But consider this. If God chose to announce His presence one day by appearing in the sky, a face a hundred miles high—a bearded patriarch who waved His arms and turned cats into dogs and dogs into trees and angels descended in gossamer chariots—well, instantly, there would be no agnostics on the face of the Earth. All men and women would embrace the Lord with a fervor built on certitude, and awe, and terror for their mortal souls. Everyone would have God.

  But no one would have faith.

  Faith is the foundation of religion. After His death, Jesus appears to Thomas and chides him for demanding proof of His resurrection. You must simply believe, Jesus says. In your belief is salvation.

  So might it not follow that a God given to tests of faith might choose to say hello to the world through what seems like a cheesy stunt—a stunt so trivial that sneering debunkers have gone on TV to duplicate it? Thus, the believer looks like a fool or a criminal, his piety tested through the derision of others. Isn’t that possible?

  This is the sort of dialogue one has with oneself after leaving the house on Flagg Street.

  As the millennium approaches, there have been reports of an increase in mystical phenomena worldwide, weeping statues in particular. Believers offer this explanation: Mary is crying for humanity because we have become too selfish and secular, distancing ourselves from God.

  Some of these observed mystical events are famously ludicrous: Mother Teresa’s face in a sticky bun; Jesus in a bowl of spaghetti on a billboard. Some have been convincingly exposed as hoaxes: A man in Montreal who drew thousands of penitents was found to have coated religious figurines with a waxy mixture of pig fat and his own blood, so when people crowded around, and the room warmed, the liquid ran. Some alleged apparitions have never been convincingly dismissed. Hundreds of thousands still flock to the hamlet of Medjugorje, Bosnia, where the Madonna has supposedly made periodic appearances since 1981.

  But mostly, in these cases, one is left with proof of nothing, only a feeling of unease: An obscure priest in a Lake Ridge, Virginia, parish briefly became a national celebrity in 1992 when figurines began crying in his presence. Was he a faker? Maybe, maybe not. Journalists discovered that, as a young man, he had once sought a sort of wacko fame by riding for days nonstop in a roller coaster. Soon after this was published, the figurines dried up. Eventually, the priest was moved to another parish. End of story.

  Now comes Audrey Santo, a comatose girl in whose presence statues weep and in whose bedroom thousands congregate.

  What in God’s name is going on here?

  IT IS, AS it happens, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. The back yards on Flagg Street are mostly communal, with few fences, just a broad band of grass with kids’ swings and wading pools and the occasional vegetable garden. Then at the Santo home, a huge Virgin Mary stands sentry in a wooden grotto. The rest of the yard is a checkerboard of plastic folding chairs under a canvas canopy. The deck behind the house has been converted to an altar. Plastic flowers are taped to it. There ar
e portraits of Jesus, and Mary, and Audrey.

  Apostolate volunteer Mary Cormier is welcoming the Wednesday visitors.

  “Audrey has become global. She is booked through 1999. She is beautiful. She is precious. She is not in a coma. She is very alive and alert.”

  In the audience, Joe Jardin, a sturdy man from Providence, Rhode Island, is discussing the pilgrimage he made to Medjugorje in 1988. The woman in front of him turns around, delighted. “I went to Medjugorje in 1988, too,” says Bici Turiano of Phoenix.

  It seems there is something of a miracle circuit. People travel from one apparition site to another. Lourdes, France. Fatima, Portugal. Medjugorje. Audrey’s house.

  One wonders what Jesus might say to these folk, gathered here in drip-dry short-sleeve shirts and pastel trousers, chatting amiably, sucking Tic Tacs, patiently awaiting Proof.

  Sitting on the grass is a woman named Laurie Wilkinson, from Wakefield, Rhode Island. Her limbs betray a tremor. She is maybe thirty-five, but she walks with a cane. Around her neck and dangling down as far as her hips is a handmade necklace of religious medallions, each commemorating some site where a saint is said to have appeared. Her expression seems forever caught between euphoria and despair. This is Wilkinson’s second visit to Audrey’s home. She carries a scrapbook of Polaroids taken from her first visit. In photos of the outside of the house, Wilkinson has detected the face of a kindly man—maybe the pope—in an angle made by the rain gutter and the roofing tiles.

  Wilkinson is here to be healed.

  “I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia,” she says. “Also, I broke eight of my toes. I have autoimmune problems, and my sisters have dermatic myositis and endometriosis and chronic fatigue syndrome and my husband has a bad disk and a bad knee. And I get head-to-toe muscle spasms and I get broken blood vessels, see?” she says, presenting the back of her hand. “I feel very close to Audrey.” Wilkinson arranges religious icons about her in the grass, facing the deck-turned-altar, where Mary Cormier is wrapping up.

  “And now, this is our movie star!”

  Linda Santo pads out from the house, to enthusiastic applause. She is a tiny, sprightly woman in her forties, 4 feet 11 in bare feet. In fact, her feet are, at the moment, bare. She wears stretch pants and a loose blouse and her chestnut hair has been hurriedly cinched in a banana clip. She walks low at the hip, the no-nonsense bustle of a harried mom. She warmly welcomes the visitors to her home.

  In Audrey, she says, there is a central message: “God doesn’t make junk—all life is valuable.

  “Sometimes you will see Audrey crook her finger,” she tells the visitors. “She is saying, ‘Come, see my Jesus, come adore Him.’ And He will bless you, maybe not as profoundly as He blessed Audrey, but He will bless you.”

  LINDA SANTO RUNS this house. She is everywhere. She was there when the strange manifestations began occurring more than four years ago. If there is deliberate deception, she is almost certainly complicit. Yet, to many, she seems beyond duplicity.

  She is aggressively likable. Twinkly. Funny. Self-deprecating. Down-to-earth. Above all, she is joyfully aware of how absurd this all must look. She tells how people have arrived at her home unannounced, having driven all night from places like Nova Scotia. “Nova Scotia!” she brays. “Why not call first, are ya stupid? I’m washing the toilet, gimme a break.”

  She sometimes watches, bemused, as pilgrims kneel and pray and then furtively pocket a scrap of carpeting or a clod of dirt from the back yard.

  “Ya gotta roll with it,” Linda Santo says. She speaks with the unpretentious blue-collar New England accent that sounds like a happy amalgam of Boston Brahmin and Brooklyn bleacher bum. “We’re an ordinary family,” she says. “This is a home, not a shrine. Nobody levitates here.”

  Linda says she has no idea why these things are happening. She knows it looks suspicious. But, she says, the quarts of oil that have been oozing into her home are from no source known to her. And she would have to know, she says reasonably, if someone else were doing it. Someone other than God.

  In the shattering weeks after the accident, Linda’s husband left her. Steve Santo was not a bad guy; he was an ordinary guy, a strapping loading-dock laborer whose little girl would never be the same. He just could not handle it. He spiraled into alcoholism, he lost jobs, he drove drunk, he went to jail. Linda was alone with her three other children, and Audrey.

  “Where are you going to put her?” doctors asked, meaning, what institution?

  “I will put her in my arms,” Linda said.

  And she did. She took Audrey home and lovingly administered round-the-clock nursing care. For years. Eventually, she lobbied successfully for free twenty-four-hour nursing assistance from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. Audrey has lived longer and with fewer health problems than anyone expected. Her arms and legs are stunted, but she continues to grow—last year, she entered puberty. She is kept immaculately clean and beautifully groomed. At least once a day she is propped up in front of a TV.

  Supplicants come to this house almost every day. Mondays are reserved for people with terminal disease. Many are children. Linda welcomes them herself.

  August 9 is the eleventh anniversary of the near drowning. For the occasion, Linda is organizing a huge open-air mass in a stadium at nearby Holy Cross College. As many as 20,000 people from all over the world are expected to attend. Audrey will be brought out, in an ambulance.

  “I want one and a half million people!” Linda says, laughing, leaping nimbly onto a dining room chair. “Let’s shut down Worcester. It’s a Sunday! It’s the Lord’s day!”

  If you have ever dealt with loss and have seen how it can break the spirit, if you value spit-in-your-eye stubbornness, if you are awed by selfless sacrifice, if you admire those who can find humor in the face of pain, then it is impossible not to like Linda Santo.

  But what if she were making all this happen? Would you still like her, then?

  “If people only knew,” she says, “what was in our Dumpsters! Audrey makes five or six bags of trash a day. If I wanted to make a million dollars on this, I could sell the garbage!” She throws her head back and laughs, loud and cackly and unrestrained, straight from the gut.

  Well, if she were making this up, could you dislike her, then?

  “Ya want a sandwich?” she says.

  THE HAGIOGRAPHY OF Audrey Santo has spread largely through word of mouth, but it got some help from the religious media. For years, Linda Santo permitted no publicity. But in 1996 she opened her doors to a producer from the Mercy Foundation, a nonprofit Catholic organization that filmed a slick one-hour documentary called Audrey’s Life: Voice of a Silent Soul.

  The tape has sold 2,000 copies, and has been broadcast several times on the Eternal Word Television Network, a religious cable channel. The video is clearly partisan. Inevitably, it points out that Santo means “holy one.” It argues that Audrey is almost certainly a “victim soul,” a person chosen to suffer for others; victim souls are said to speak to God, interceding on behalf of supplicants who petition them with prayer.

  The documentary quotes a Boston chemist who says he analyzed the oil and found it to be a mysterious substance, not any known commercial oil. It interviews Audrey’s pediatrician, John Harding, who says that her relatively good physical health cannot be explained by conventional medicine. Harding says the biopsy of an angry skin condition that once appeared on her legs revealed a rash typically suffered by persons undergoing chemotherapy, even though Audrey never had chemotherapy. The implication is that Audrey assumed into her own body the pain from some visitor being treated for cancer. And, most dramatically, the Mercy Foundation cameras actually filmed a mass at which a priest held up the host—a communion wafer—to discover it had a wet red spot on it roughly the shape of a cross.

  His astonishment is captured right there, on tape.

  IN SOME WAYS, religion is like abstract art. There is beauty and spectacle, but in both cases, one must reach into onesel
f to find meaning. And so it is that when outsiders behold the events at 64 Flagg Street, they tend to see different things.

  The Reverend Mike McNamara, a priest from the Boston area, says Audrey’s survival speaks against the evils of abortion, birth control, and government-sanctioned gambling. Father Mike has no doubt that what is happening on Flagg Street is divine. He says he has seen a chalice in the home well up with oil, spontaneously; it was out of his sight for seconds only, and no one approached it.

  Father Mike believes in miracles. He himself has traveled to Medjugorje. He stood on a hillside, he says, and watched as the sun spun in the sky like a pinwheel, giving off sparks. Then he felt some energy pierce his heart, so strong he doubled over and let out a yell. He felt it was “waves of God’s love for me.”

  John Harding, the pediatrician, believes Audrey’s message is meant for doctors. Her survival speaks against physician-assisted suicide, proclaiming that there is value in all life, and dignity in suffering.

  Harding—former chief of pediatrics at Hahnemann Hospital in Worcester—notes that he first met Audrey not as a doctor but as a penitent, when he came to her house to pray and say a rosary. He once sat at her bedside and asked her to help a friend who had cancer.

  Once, he says, a priest asked him to examine one of Audrey’s communion wafers allegedly containing blood. He brought his microscope, he says, but at the last minute he decided not to use it. Catholics believe the consecrated communion host is literally the flesh of Christ, and Harding says he felt uncomfortable “putting our Lord under the microscope.” Instead, he says, he used a small magnifying glass.

  He knows this sounds strange, but he is a straightforward man, and he is not embarrassed by his faith. What he saw in the bleeding host, he says, was “a Madonna and Child.”

  The Reverend Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a genial Eastern Rite Catholic priest, was the cleric initially summoned by Linda Santo when she first reported the leaking oil. He remains a close family friend.