Week after week, Linda is visited by admiring priests.
Week after week she is applauded by a hundred penitents.
To some, she is a modern-day Mary.
Statues are weeping. Oil is flowing. Wafers are bleeding.
It’s a miracle, says Father Mike.
It’s a miracle, says Dr. Harding.
It’s a miracle, says chemist Lipinski.
It’s a miracle, says Father George.
Linda Santo has defied conventional wisdom and kept her child alive through heroic love. She has stayed strong and resolute in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Her joy and spirit have inspired thousands. She has given solace to the sick and dying. Her fortitude outlasted her husband’s despair, triumphed over it, brought him back to the home, and to his faith.
Okay.
It’s a miracle, says the Washington Post.
Postscript: The Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester ended their investigation without an official verdict on whether the events occurring in the house on Flagg Street were miraculous. The report complimented the Santo family for the love and care they gave Audrey, but pointedly cautioned parishioners not to pray to the girl or worship the unconsecrated oil from the house.
Audrey lived almost nine years longer. She died on April 14, 2007, at the age of twenty-three.
If You Go
Chasing Rabbits…
I’ve never been a fan of stories linked to holidays—they seem opportunistic and contrived. But I proposed this one, in time for Valentine’s Day. The idea was to find the girl I’d had a crush on in second grade and hadn’t seen since. I would take her out on a date.
Thanks for asking, but, no, I didn’t score. Yet I’ve never walked away from a story feeling quite so naked.
February 11, 2001
THIS LOVE STORY, which is about science and not emotion, begins on November 17, 1947, in an electronics lab in suburban New Jersey, when a man dunks a silicon wafer into a beaker of water and invents the modern semiconductor. Thus would become possible not only the storage of vast quantities of data, but its nearly instantaneous retrieval from remote-access sites such as the personal computer at which I sat one day in January 2001 and idly fed the name Shari Basner into an Internet search engine. (Nonspecific curiosity is a Darwinian adaptation of the human species.) Approximately 1.4 seconds later, the computer informed me that Shari lived a mere twenty-five miles away, precipitating an involuntary secretion of norepinephrine from my adrenal glands, which are located above the kidneys. Norepinephrine stimulates the heart.
I knew Shari Basner in 1958 and 1959, in Miss Endler’s second-grade classroom in P.S. 26 in the Bronx. I was a very small and very bashful little boy, and Shari was the loveliest girl on Earth. She had silken chestnut hair and eyes like a fawn and a guileless smile of Crayola Red. Her physical presence awakened in me urges and longings as overpowering as they were indecipherable. I knew certain things, however: that I wished to spend eternity with this person, that we would have children through some mysterious and frightening process, and—I remember this specifically—that she would call me “darling.”
I was only seven, but not without savvy. And so I promptly developed a two-tiered strategy to deal with these feelings: flight, and paralysis. I never spoke to Shari unless it was unavoidable, and on those occasions I exhibited the conversational skills of a Pleistocene hominid.
I was relieved of this hideous burden after second grade, as I recalled, when Shari and her family moved away. I never saw her again.
And here she was, on my computer screen. A single hit, but a solid one—nailed by an account of a conference she’d chaired in 1998. Shari appeared to be an expert in business communications: diversity awareness, team building, consensus forming, that sort of crap. She is married with kids—as I am. She lives in Columbia, Maryland. And this gave me an idea. I would call her up and invite her to dinner. A date.
Once we were together, I would ’fess up to my crush, forty-two years late. We’d laugh and laugh. And I’d write about it, for Valentine’s Day. It would be a dispassionate examination of the origins of romance and the phenomenon of juvenile infatuation. You know, for science.
I dialed Shari’s phone number, but before the first ring, I hung up.
No, that’s not why. I am a grown-up now, for cripes’ sake, not a bashful schoolkid. I simply decided I had not done enough research. I wasn’t… ready.
THE EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS between human males and females can be a complex and imperfect thing, a fact I discovered when I telephoned Professor Robert Billingham at his home. His wife answered. When I told her that I wished to interview her husband as an expert on the subject of romantic love, she burst out laughing.
At Indiana University, Billingham teaches adolescent and preadolescent human behavior. My crush on Shari, he said, was completely normal and ordinary, even at age seven. This sort of behavior is a matter of evolution and adaptation.
As recently as the 1400s, Billingham said, the median life expectancy was twenty-four years. “As soon as sexual maturity was in place, it was time to reproduce, or humans would cease to exist. The problem is that human biology hasn’t changed one iota since then.” We are still genetically programmed to have intense sexual curiosity at twelve or thirteen. Ages seven through eleven, he said, are a “practice period. The biology is being primed.”
But why is it so awkward?
“Have you ever primed a pump? The water doesn’t come out in a rush. There are false starts—gurgles and burps and hiccups.”
Yep, that’s me, at seven. Some kids will take my shy route. Others dip pigtails in the inkwell. Either way, it’s inept.
“That’s also explainable in Darwinian terms,” Billingham said. Nature, he said, wants us to practice, but fail. You don’t want seven-year-olds communicating their desires competently, because then they might act them out. Not good.
So bumbling, inarticulate, doofuslike childhood crushes are a dirty trick by God?
“Precisely.”
Rummaging through old photographs, I found the one that appears with this story. It is from a P.S. 26 Easter play. I am the petrified-looking rabbit standing immediately at left of the seated rabbit. That’s Shari beside me. The exquisite one.
I recall this theatrical production not at all. My only thought, upon seeing the photo, was astonishment that I had actually once been that physically proximate to Shari Basner and not fainted dead away.
I did remember the name of one other person in the picture. The constipated rabbit at the table, spectacles askew, is Clayton Landey. He and I were friends. Again, the Internet came through. I found Clayton at his home in L.A.
It’s funny about memory. Clayton remembered me only vaguely. He remembered Shari not at all. But when I described the photograph, he was there.
“I played Papa Bunny! It was my first stage appearance!”
Clayton Landey, it turns out, is a successful Hollywood actor. He had small roles in the movies Norma Rae and A Civil Action. He’s had big roles off-Broadway. He appeared on Knots Landing for three seasons, as Donna Mills’s attorney. He was on an episode of The Practice, playing a rich guy charged with the hit-and-run of a homeless person. His is one of those faces you recognize, kinda.
(“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I’m finally going to get my picture in the Washington Post, and it’s in the [expletive] bunny suit?”)
I asked: How could you possibly not remember Shari?
“Back then,” Clayton said, “I was aware females were attractive, but I was focused on older women. The kindergarten teacher was a battle-ax, but her assistant was beautiful. I had hot dreams about her.”
At seven?
“At six. In the dreams, she would have to walk through my neighborhood to get home, and I would save her from the bad guys.”
Pump priming.
WHEN I TOLD colleagues what I planned, most had the same question. It’s the same question you would have if you are married, or have ever
been married, or are seven years old hoping that someone, someday, will call you darling. The answer is, no, the wife didn’t mind.
Apart from the unnerving idiosyncrasy of getting dressed sock-shoe-sock-shoe instead of sock-sock-shoe-shoe, my wife of twenty-one years is the most self-confident and levelheaded person I know. She is a lawyer, a prosecutor by training, and she doesn’t believe in building cases out of nothing. There is no room in her psyche for an emotion as foolish and self-destructive as jealousy. Plus, she is a looker who is married to an eyesore, and this combination tends to militate against jealousy.
So, yes, my wife said fine when I asked her about Shari. (Or, as she referred to her, without a hint of resentment, “your bunny girl.”)
Armchair ethicists might well pose the question: Shouldn’t Shari’s husband also be given the opportunity to weigh in on this subject prior to our date?
The hell with armchair ethicists: The answer is no. Shari has no moral obligation to inform her husband of our date because I have her on the phone right now, and I am not telling her it is to be a date. I am telling her I want to interview her for a story, over, um, dinner at a fancy restaurant.
“What is the story about?” she asks.
“I can’t tell you,” I say.
I was counting on her curiosity. But I was not counting on this:
“Do I know you? I grew up with a Gene Weingarten.”
It had not actually occurred to me that Shari would remember my name. Yes, I tell her, same guy.
Why would she remember some weenie whom she knew for a year and who could not look her in the eye? And what did she mean by “grew up with”? And why, when she somewhat dubiously agreed to do this, did I put down the phone and go for a long walk in the cold?
I DECIDED TO wear a suit without a tie because, since Shari didn’t know it was going to be a date, she might be comparatively underdressed and that might make her feel bad. I decided that I would quickly work in a reference to my wife, kind of casual-like, so that later, when I explained what I was doing, she would understand the totally innocent and hilarious nature of this event and not think that I was some sort of creep with a shrine to her in a dank basement lit by candelabra. I decided that maybe it was better to wear the tie, after all, because I could always take it off if we were incompatibly attired. I decided to use my daughter’s car, because it is clean, as opposed to my car, which is filled with old newspapers and soda cans and stray bits of food products decaying in aluminum foil. I decided I had not prepared this rigorously for my interview with George W. Bush.
In second grade, I never confessed to anyone my longing for Shari. The closest I came was the day our class picture came out. My mother was commenting how attractive a certain girl was. I forget which one. One of the Others.
And I said, “I think Shari is sorta pretty.”
And my mother said something that I never forgot. It was a pronouncement I simply accepted because grown-ups knew all kinds of stuff. My mother said, “Shari is pretty now, but she won’t be pretty as an adult.”
Dear Ma:
How are things in Heaven? I miss you.
Listen, remember when you predicted that I would wind up regretting my choice of roommate in college? Well, you were right.
But you were really, really, really wrong about Shari. Just FYI.
So, we sat down to dinner, Shari and I, me feeling like an eyesore with warts. At least I am taller than she is. Finally.
The first thing I did, right after sliding in the obligatory and entirely casual mention of my wife, was to ask her to volunteer everything she remembered about me. I was going to tell her how I remembered her—the dancing cherubs and symphonies—but only after establishing, for the record, for humorous effect, that I was barely a mote in her memory.
But Shari began talking and did not stop for some time. She wasn’t Clayton. She remembered I was shy. She remembered that she sat next to me, which was news to me. She remembered once visiting the home of my cousin Margaret, who was also in our class, and that I had lived in the apartment below.
(Actually, I remembered that day, too. I hid in my room, terrified that the girls might come downstairs and that I, forced into casual physical congress with Shari, might toss my cookies.)
“There’s something else,” Shari said, “but I’m not sure you want to hear it.”
Sure, I said.
“One day we had an assignment to cut out paper flowers, and…”
Well, I knew where she was going. I was back in my second-grade classroom, where I was the youngest kid. I entered second grade at age six—too young, but my mother had pulled strings. She believed, strongly, in a popular educational theory that smart kids foundered if they were not adequately challenged, and so they should be taught at their level of academic competence even at the cost of some awkward social adjustments.
“. . . and you were having trouble, and getting frustrated…”
As I look at the picture of my second-grade class, I am astounded by its size. Miss Endler had to deal with nearly forty children every day; I remember her as a witch, but that doesn’t seem fair, in retrospect. She was an overburdened teacher with an impossible job. She could not permit any sort of discipline problems to get out of hand, particularly an immature kid who was always… crying.
“. . . and you couldn’t cut out those flowers the right way, and you started to cry…”
The school year 1958–59 was a time when I was forever losing control of myself in class, and Miss Endler was forever dealing with this in a manner less understanding than one would expect of, say, one’s kindly old aunt. The humiliation brought more tears. I recalled the flower-cutting moment as one of the bad episodes in a series of bad episodes in a year that to my memory consisted entirely of loving Shari and crying in class.
“. . . and I was so upset that you were so upset that I leaned over and cut out your flowers for you.”
A waiter came for our order. I waved him away.
“You did?” I stared at her. I had no memory of this.
“Yes.”
Shari has beautiful eyes.
Journalists are fascinated by, and skeptical of, theories of personality that place great weight on the impact of past events. We love this stuff because it permits us to believe that if we root around deeply enough in someone’s history we can figure out the single reason he is the person he is. (And because, so often, when we do discover such things, the fit seems right.) On the other hand, we are wary: We know that there is seldom a single reason that explains anything. These historical theories can be incomplete at best, and total hooey at worst. So sometimes, in writing stories, we report what we find, and leave it to the reader to weigh its significance.
At the end of the school year 1958–59, my mother came to me with wonderful news. I and five of my classmates had done so well on a test that we were going to skip third grade. Soar right over all those ordinary ninnies, right into the fourth grade! The school system had objected in my case on account of my age, but she had written letters, and they relented.
So, now, at seven, I was to be two years younger than most of the kids in my class.
Dear Ma—
One other thing…
“I SKIPPED THIRD grade with you,” Shari said. “We went into fourth grade together.”
Again, the waiter came. Again, I waved him away.
Shari was showing me other photographs now, pictures she had brought with her, ones I didn’t have. Here was my fourth-grade class picture, and fifth, and sixth. I was in every picture. So was she.
How was this possible?
We realized that some of the other kids in the bunny picture were not from our second grade at all—they were from our fourth-grade class. Clayton was there because he had skipped with us, too. This picture was a fourth-grade Easter production, not second.
Shari said she didn’t move away to Queens until after sixth grade.
So she was right: I had “grown up” with her. Somehow, I didn�
�t remember her in those last three years. And now, sitting across from her forty-two years later, I was beginning to remember why not.
During the summer between second and fourth grade, I spent a lot of time alone in a hammock behind our family’s cheerfully decrepit summer house in Hopewell Junction, New York. I remember squinting into the afternoon sky, swatting mosquitoes and hashing things out in my head.
I was, I told myself, at a crossroads. If I remained a crybaby, I was doomed. In this new class of really old kids, my immaturity would stand out like a sucked thumb. And yet I had been handed a gift, in a way. Almost no one would know the second-grade me. If I tried, I could become a different person altogether—any person I wanted to be. And so I did, with the sort of melodramatic intensity only a seven-year-old can muster. What I decided was that I was simply going to erect a barrier between the part of me that felt things and the part of me that interacted with other people.
And so that summer, I built it, brick by brick. I remember thinking sad thoughts—that my dog had died, for example—and then practicing holding back tears. I worked at it until it was a different kid who walked through the doors of Mrs. Nolan’s fourth-grade class.
It proved easier than I’d thought. I carved out new friends, new relationships, all constructed around the premise that I was a worldly, even cynical, individual. And the love of my life? A guess: She was part of the past from which I had to disassociate myself. She, more than anyone else, knew my weakness. She was not part of the new program.
I never cried in school again.
I felt things. Tears would come. But never in front of another person.
Never. Didn’t cry at my own mother’s funeral, thirty years later.
OF COURSE, THIS is about Shari, and she has been waiting patiently for nearly an hour to find out why the hell I have asked her to dinner. So we order our food, and I tell her. I tell her about the silicon wafer, and how I am going to explore the biochemical nature of juvenile crushes, and how I was in love with her at the age of seven, and how I never told her about it, and how I was now, as an adult who is able to confront such things with humor and maturity, taking her out on a date. For Valentine’s Day.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 16