The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  Father Emmanuel Charles looks like Santa Claus. A former attorney, he speaks with the engaging gravitas of a theologian-philosopher. He doesn’t buy the “victim soul” thing, the notion that God would cripple a child to serve His purposes.

  That turns God into a monster, he says. “God is not a monster.”

  The message of Audrey has been somewhat misunderstood, he says. She is not about physician-assisted suicide, or abortion, or gambling, at least not primarily. He says she represents a thunderous condemnation of war and murder.

  This message—that Christians should not kill—is Father Emmanuel Charles’s life’s work. He first became interested in Audrey when he learned that her accident occurred on August 9, 1987.

  He explains: August 9, 1945, was the date that an American bomber crew incinerated Nagasaki. Ground zero was a Christian church. The bomber crew was all Christian. “No Jews, no atheists. Christians killing Christians, y’see?”

  August 9 was also the date, during the Holocaust, that a nun named Edith Stein died. Sister Edith has since been canonized; in fact, one of the miracles ascribed to her was the recovery of McCarthy’s own infant daughter, Benedicta, from a massive accidental overdose of Tylenol a few years ago. Edith Stein died at Auschwitz. “Auschwitz was totally run by Christians,” McCarthy says. “The Nazis had Gott mit Uns on their belt buckles, y’see? ‘God is with us.’ Christians using the church to justify killing!”

  It all fits in, says Father Emmanuel Charles: Nagasaki, Nazis, Audrey Santo. Plus, August 9 also happens to be the date of his own ordination.

  It’s his life’s work, and it all fits in.

  BOGUSLAW LIPINSKI IS a Boston biochemist who appears on the Mercy Foundation tape, testifying to the mysterious nature of the oils. He says he ordered a chemical analysis and discovered it to be without the characteristic chemical signature of any known commercial oil. As the legend of Audrey has grown, the description of this oil gets more and more supernatural. “Not of this world,” is how pediatrician Harding now describes it.

  This is not exactly right. According to Barbara Rybinski, the Kraft Foods chemist who supervised the analysis, Audrey’s oil did not have the signature of any pure commercial oil. But it could have been a simple mixture of commercial oils, Rybinski says, and it could have been a partially hydrogenated oil, available under many labels.

  Lipinski disagrees. His own analysis of the test results suggests that the oil would be hard to duplicate through ordinary means. It is strange, Lipinski says, but he has seen stranger things. His hobby is scientifically documenting paranormal religious phenomena. A few years ago, he says, he went to Medjugorje and tested the air with a type of Geiger counter. He was surprised to discover an unusually high concentration of ions.

  He tested the air in Audrey’s house, too. Elevated ions, again.

  Lipinski is a scientist, so he won’t engage in conjecture as to what this all means. But like anyone, he has a suspicion: It is the thumbprint of God.

  FINALLY, THERE IS the Reverend George Joyce, retired Catholic priest from Springfield, Massachusetts. Father George is eighty-three, a kindly man with liquid eyes. Of the four communion wafers that are said to have bled in the Santo home, only one occurred directly in front of an independent witness. That was Father George, who was in the middle of a mass in 1996, as the Mercy Foundation cameras were rolling.

  In truth, when you rewind and replay the tape, you cannot actually see the wafer bleed. It is lying on a plate beneath another wafer. When the top wafer is lifted, the one with the wet red cross can be seen. Tests would later show it was human blood.

  Father George says everyone denies having tampered with it, and he believes them.

  What is happening in the Santo home, he says, is pure good.

  He knows evil when he sees it. “I have dealt with the Devil,” he says.

  One day five or six years ago, the priest says, he trapped a man into revealing that he was demonically possessed. He did this by secretly blessing the salt in the man’s home. That night, the man’s wife used the salt on his food, and the man “ranted and raved” and ordered her to throw the food out. In a subsequent ritual, Father George says, he drove Satan away.

  A priest can reliably tell when people are possessed, Father George says, because “when you throw holy water on them, they start screaming.”

  Audrey Santo, he says, is a victim soul. Of this, he is “100 percent certain.”

  IN THE BACK yard, the Reverend Mike McNamara is celebrating mass. Linda Santo takes a consecrated wafer on a brass plate and disappears into the house with it. Every day she gives communion to Audrey. (Audrey has a feeding tube; the wafer is the only solid food she receives by mouth.)

  A few minutes later, Linda returns. There is a peculiar look on her face. She is holding the empty communion plate gingerly, and replaces it on the altar.

  Liquid sloshes out and onto the tablecloth.

  “Sorreee,” she whispers to the priest.

  After the ceremony, four priests crowd around the communion plate. It is filled halfway with opalescent yellow oil, maybe three or four tablespoons of it, and on top of that is a large, floating bead of clear liquid. It smells of pure roses, eerily strong. It wafts up and out into the sweltering summer air.

  Linda Santo meekly explains that the plate quickly welled up with this substance as she walked alone from Audrey’s bed to the back porch, a trip of some 30 feet.

  The priests nod. It is a miracle, everyone agrees.

  WHEN PARANORMAL PHENOMENA are reported, lay people sometimes expect that Catholic church leaders will eagerly embrace them. After all, anything that brings people closer to God cannot be bad, right?

  Actually, these things make the diocese uneasy. The Vatican is wary of lending its imprimatur to something that may, ultimately, be exposed as a chimera. The church wants to be the voice of reason, caution, restraint.

  The Reverend F. Stephen Pedone is the judicial vicar from the Worcester diocese. He is overseeing an investigation, ordered by the bishop, into the events occurring at the Santo home. The investigation is headed by John Madonna, a local psychotherapist who has been asked not only to try to verify the occurrences, but also to see if there are any human pathologies afoot in the household that might explain what is going on. (Madonna says he and a team spent several days at the house, and even slept there overnight. So far, he says, he has found nothing to indicate deception or sociopathy. In fact, he says, he has observed physical events involving religious icons that cannot be readily explained.)

  Father Stephen is a trim, square man with orange hair and piercing eyes. He says he does not want to prejudge, or prejudice, the investigation. He has, however, been to the Santo house, and has an observation.

  “I was uncomfortable. The house was filled with people. A little girl was on display in a bed. One priest was bending over her, whispering intercessions in her ear.” That means the priest was reciting the names of sick people, on whose behalf Audrey was to speak with God. “The grandmother kept saying, ‘You remember Father Steve? Father Steve is here!’

  “My impression,” says Father Stephen, “was that it bordered on the bizarre. It seemed like an invasion of her privacy.”

  But isn’t it good that the events in this house are giving people hope?

  Father Stephen smiles painfully. Yes, he says, people are desperate for reassurance, and reassurance is good. “The downside is, if the faith lacks basis, it is going to quickly evaporate. The church is looking for more long-term faith. You don’t draw a circle and say, ‘Okay, God, dance for me.’”

  Sometimes, he says, people are so desperate for tangible miracles that they get blinded to miracles happening every day: “We wake up in the morning. That is a miracle.”

  OUTSIDE AUDREY’S BEDROOM is a sign, made to resemble an old-fashioned needlepoint sampler. It says SHH—I’M TALKING TO GOD.

  Inside, with Audrey, is Pat Nader, Audrey’s grandma. She is small and slightly stooped and determinedly cheer
ful, a woman who lost her favorite grandchild one day in August 1987, and then discovered she didn’t lose her at all. Pat Nader found that Audrey was still around. Just different.

  Nader spends hours every day at Audrey’s bedside, as she is right now. She talks to her constantly.

  “She is what you call a typical teenager,” says Grandma Nader. “She is spoiled. She doesn’t have to do anything for herself!”

  Friends and family contend that Audrey is completely aware of her surroundings, alert, perks up when priests or family members are around, gets agitated when someone says something of which she disapproves. They say medical experts support this.

  “They told us she understands everything,” says Grandma Nader. “She’s perfectly healthy. She’ll come out of it one day.”

  A newspaper photographer bends and focuses.

  “I think they want to take a pretty picture,” Grandma tells Audrey. “Remember that you are gorgeous, remember that.”

  Audrey does not respond.

  Grandma kisses Audrey’s face. The camera clicks.

  “I’m the one she loves the best,” says Grandma Nader. “I am the grandmother. She is the love of my life, aren’t you, Audrey?”

  Audrey does not respond.

  EDWARD KAYE IS a pediatric neurologist at St. Christopher’s Hospital in Philadelphia. For eight years, beginning a short time after the accident, Kaye was Audrey’s doctor. He has done extensive examinations of the girl’s brain.

  How injured is she?

  “The cell death is about as bad as you can get and still be alive,” he says. “Her EEGs are profoundly abnormal. She has brain stem activity, but very, very little above the brain stem.”

  Is she conscious? Aware of her surroundings?

  “There is little objective evidence that she can respond to external stimuli. There is no evidence to suggest that something gets through and gets processed.”

  Dr. Kaye says he understands how a loving family, ministering selflessly to a terribly injured child, might take comfort from what it interprets as subtle signs of cognition.

  What is Audrey’s prognosis?

  In such cases, the doctor says, “the prognosis is abysmal.”

  Is he saying she is dead?

  “She is not brain-dead because she has brain stem activity. From a cognitive standpoint, she is dead.”

  IT IS THURSDAY morning. The Santo family and some apostolic volunteers have assembled in the garage chapel for a mass officiated by Father Mike. Mass is a daily event at the Santo home.

  First, a brief, homey sermon. Father Mike tells an amusing story, at his own expense. He says he was about to host a family birthday party one Sunday when he realized there was not enough ice-cream cake for all the children. So he stopped at a bakery. Several of his parishioners were there. He was caught red-handed, violating the Sabbath!

  Linda Santo pipes up, offering the opinion that this is a forgivable transgression.

  “It is like if you have kids in a burning house,” Linda says. “You have to get them out, but they want to stay. So you tell them there are toys outside. So you lied to them, but it’s okay.”

  There are two seconds of absolute silence.

  “I’m not sure I like your example!” Father Mike says finally.

  Everyone laughs.

  “I KNOW I seem insane,” says Linda Santo. “I’m in good company. Half the saints were insane.”

  In fact, Linda does not seem remotely insane. She seems delightfully solid. Her youngest son, who still lives with her, is a happy, boisterous teenager who appears well adjusted, close to his mom, joyfully teasing her at every turn. It is a bracingly normal relationship.

  Linda is seated in her side yard. Beside her is her husband, Steve. Steve came home to his family two years ago, after an eight-year absence.

  Steve Santo is the sort of guy you would describe, affectionately, as a big lunk. He is cinematically handsome, thick through the chest, square-jawed. His accent makes Linda’s seem like Masterpiece Theatre. He, too, is instantly likable. Asked if anything in the house other than religious artifacts has ever wept oil, he laughs and says, “Yeah. The top of a pizza box.”

  He says at first he strongly suspected that his wife was doctoring the statues, until he saw some things he could not explain. Once, he says, an effigy hemorrhaged oil. Linda, as he recalls, was nowhere around.

  Steve Santo had years when he abandoned God. But he is back for good, he says. “I like to say the rosary now.”

  He has to leave for work. But first, he has a question: What sort of results can he expect from this newspaper article? “Will it be a made-for-TV movie?”

  Well, maybe. Publicity is starting to pick up; 20/20 is planning to film the August 9 mass.

  Linda says it is amazing, and a little sad, that God had to go to this extreme, to do this miracle thing, to attract attention. “If there weren’t four bleeding hosts,” she asks, “if there was just a child in a bed, would anyone pay attention to this?”

  In retrospect, she says suddenly, all of it seems foreordained.

  When Audrey was born, she says, she prayed not for a healthy child but for a saint. “I can give life, but only God can give eternal life,” she explains.

  Linda also says that doctors once X-rayed Audrey’s ovaries, expecting to find a tumor. Instead of a tumor, she says, they were astonished to find, literally, right in the X-ray, the figure of “a little angel.”

  She has this X-ray somewhere, she says, but when asked to locate it, she cannot.

  Linda also says she once saw two moons in the night sky. That was in 1988, when she took Audrey to Medjugorje. There was a clamor out in the street, she says. The townspeople were shouting that the little American girl’s face had appeared in the moon. Linda looked up in the sky, she says, and there, unmistakably, in the face of the moon, was Audrey.

  Then she looked again, she says, and there was a second moon, beside the first one. This one had the face of an old nun in it.

  Linda does not apologize for, or explain, these things. God works in mysterious ways, she says.

  And so Linda is asked this: Let’s say that someone in her house, unknown to her, is making these mysterious events occur. Let’s say that this person looked around at the sorry state of the world and saw good people far from God, facing eternal damnation, a billion children in burning houses without the sense to rush outside to safety. Could a little lie be so bad? Would such a person be a bad person?

  “God might say that’s not a lie,” Linda says. “God might forgive it.”

  Silence.

  But it would still be wrong, she says. “A lie is a lie,” she says.

  Silence.

  If someone were doing it, she concludes, it would be a betrayal. She would probably forgive this person, but she would still have to dismiss him or her from her home ministry, she says.

  Then she offers you lemonade.

  LINDA SANTO PERMITS the Washington Post to remove a small sample of the mystery oil, to send to a lab for analysis. “I’d like to know what it is, too,” she says.

  According to Microbac Laboratories of Pittsburgh, the sample contained 80 percent corn or soybean oil, and 20 percent chicken fat. Microbac chemist Tom Zierenberg says it is a simple mixture, reproducible in any American kitchen.

  Which is interesting, but hardly evidence of deceit.

  God, after all, makes corn. And soybeans. And chickens, too.

  THE TRIAL IS over. God has given his testimony.

  “I’m not sure how this whole miracle business got started,” George Burns tells the courtroom, “that idea that anything connected with me has to be a miracle. Personally, I am sorry that it did. It makes the distance between us even greater.”

  He walks to the door.

  “I know how hard it is in these times to have faith. But however hopeless, helpless, mixed up, and scary it all gets, it can work. . . . If you find it hard to believe in me, maybe it would help if you know I believe in you.”

/>   And then the door swings shut, and God is gone.

  IT IS AUGUST 9, 1987, at 11:03 in the morning. Linda Santo is at home. Her sixteen-year-old daughter Gigi is upstairs, on the phone. Matthew, twelve, is on the floor, sorting laundry. Outside, three-year-old Audrey and brother Stephen, four, are playing in the driveway with a new toy, a remote-control truck.

  Audrey is a lively little girl. She is already reading Garfield comics. She is all mischief and moxie. “I’m gorgeous,” she says all the time. And she is.

  Like all young mothers, Linda is doing twelve things at once. Suddenly, she looks up with a vague sense of dread. What?

  Gigi is coming down the stairs from her bedroom.

  Matthew is still on the floor.

  Stephen is coming in from outside.

  The German shepherd, Sting, is usually patrolling the yard. Sting protects Audrey. When Audrey strays off the property, Sting grabs her butt and yanks her back. But Sting, for once, is inside the house.

  Where is the baby?

  “She’s outside,” says Stephen, out in the driveway.

  But she is not in the driveway.

  Matthew and his mother race out back, toward the pool.

  No. No.

  It is a 36-foot aboveground pool. There are retractable steps leading from the top to the ground. The steps are supposed to be up. But someone left them down.

  No. No.

  Two seconds. Three.

  Matthew is in the air, spread-eagle, launched toward his baby sister, who is face down, at the far end, floating, arms spread, like a snow angel, motionless.

  Linda hears a bloodcurdling scream.

  It is, she realizes, coming from her.

  ELEVEN YEARS LATER, Linda is preparing for a gigantic mass of the faithful in honor of her daughter, who is not a dreadfully brain-injured child, but a living saint, selected from birth, anointed by God, nestled in His lap, whispering in His ear.