Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  That first day I walked down Lexington from Grand Central Station. Was it like taking the early-morning train in for Dream Radio? It was and it was not. I tried to believe I was engaged, employed, that I had a task. But certain realities intervened: the time of day and the uncertainty. My plan was to sit for few minutes in the lovely and manicured Gramercy Park and gather my thoughts before braving the daunting doorman of my imagination. That proved impossible. No one could get in the park without a key, and I had no key. According to a tasteful and discreet plaque, the park had been designed by a Samuel Ruggles, who in 1831 bought the property, drained the marshes, developed the sixty-six lots on it, and then sold them with the stipulation that only residents of the square would have access to the park. Hence the need for keys.

  So instead of sitting calmly and questioning the wisdom of showing up unannounced and unbidden at this hitherto unheard-of place in order to gain the favor of, or redeem myself in the eyes of, or again get to see, Abelardo Llobet, I walked twice around the perimeter of the park, until my toes were almost numb with cold, and then pushed open the heavy door, which offered no resistance. It had the best-oiled hinges I'd ever encountered. Really, they were miraculous hinges. It was a dark wooden door whose grain reminded me of sand dunes in Santa Barbara. I couldn't name the wood. Many elements of the Hagiographers Club would flout my desire to name them.

  The daunting doorman of my mind's conjuring did not appear. There was no doorman, no visible human presence of any kind.

  I stood very still, let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and listened for the guardians of the place, who would surely materialize to challenge my intrusion. My eyes adjusted and no one appeared. I was standing in a large wood-paneled foyer. To my right and left were closed pocket doors; the brass doorknobs resembled the gargoyles outside. Several yards in from the front door there appeared a wide stairway with deep treads and low kickers. The rake was soft and gradual and gave the impression of having infinite time and space. The carpet on the stairs' central pathway was worn smooth in all the logical places.

  There was something mutely irrevocable about the closed pocket doors, so I climbed the stairs. They didn't creak. I wished they would creak and announce my presence, so no one would think I was trying to sneak in. But quiet prevailed. At the top of the stairs was another hall with a vast Persian carpet and more doors. Sooner or later I would have to enter one room or another, or else crawl ignominiously back to Grand Central. I pulled open the door in the center.

  This was clearly the library: a sparsely populated, dimly lit room full of books. The only eyes that even flickered belonged to a handsome bearded man behind a vast table to my left. I assumed he was in charge.

  "Good morning," I said. "Please excuse me for barging in like this."

  "Did you barge in?" he said.

  "Well, yes. The door was open and then I didn't see anyone downstairs."

  "As you can see, most of us idle our hours away here, in the reading room."

  "I'm not a member," I said. "And I don't know any members."

  "We are a rare breed," he said, as if someone might ever suggest otherwise.

  "But a man I know—really a friend of my husband, but my husband wasn't home at the time—he told me about this club. He was going to come here and research his aunt. But then he was laid low by a snowstorm." I never knew how to describe what had happened. I wasn't sure what really had happened. He went mad and made angels in the snow in his underwear? He heard voices? He had a breakdown on my watch?

  "Slow down," he said. "This sounds intriguing. Who was this unfortunate man?"

  "His name is Abelardo Llobet de Carvajal. He's not from New York, he's—"

  "Of course. You are referring to Señor Llobet. We corresponded," the man said. "He was charming on paper. I am dismayed about this laying low. Would you care to elaborate?"

  That was just what I did not care to do. "Not really. You could say he suffered a reaction, an aversion to the snowstorm. Then he went to the hospital."

  "Perhaps another time."

  "Pardon?"

  "You'll elaborate," he said. "And now you are here in his stead."

  "Something like that," I said. "Not really. I just thought I could try to do some reading and find something helpful for him. I thought I might be useful." I closed my mouth, then opened it to say It's more than that. I am desperate. I closed my mouth again.

  "Is he still snowbound?"

  "Oh, no. He's gone back to Nicaragua. He doesn't even know I'm here."

  The man said, "He will."

  I took a deep breath. There were exactly three other people in the room. One ecclesiastic-looking man, pale and excessively forlorn. Another man in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. And a beautiful woman I could only glimpse obliquely, as she sat in a chair much bigger than herself angled to catch what little light came through the large colored-glass window. I said, "I am wondering if you will let me do some reading here. Some research?"

  "Why not?"

  "Because I really have no qualifications, and I'm not a member," I said.

  He said, "It was a rhetorical question."

  "Oh."

  "My name is Hubert van Toots," he said. "You can direct your questions to me, and I imagine I will know the answers to many of them."

  So Hubert became my guide at the Hagiographers Club. Hubert ran the club, was the head librarian, was the director; he also repaired the plumbing and screwed in the light bulbs, such as they were. But if you asked him what he did—as on at least three occasions I heard others ask him—he would reply, "Very little, but I like it here."

  Years ago Hubert had been Brother Hubert, a Trappist monk. Then he left the monastery and fell in love with a man, the mysterious Martin. Or perhaps he fell in love and then left the monastery. He was not forthcoming with details. Martin was now dead, and Hubert lived in the Sutton Place apartment that had once belonged to Martin's mother, then to Martin's brother, and then to Martin. Aside from the saints and their relics, the things that most excited Hubert were his efforts to track down the original paint colors and original wallpaper of the apartment. He often spent his evenings repairing threadbare draperies and regluing chair rails. But I learned all of that later.

  I told Hubert that because Abelardo's Tía Tristána had been an unmarried female suspected of performing miracles, I thought I should read about female saints who refused to get married and about their miracles. He raised his eyebrows and said, "There are always miracles."

  I searched all my pockets for my favorite pen. To no avail. "How's your Latin?" Hubert asked me.

  "Dominus vobiscum. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres."

  He nodded sadly, knowingly. This lamentable state of affairs was only to be expected. Then, making a balletic arc with his hand, he pointed me toward the twelve volumes of Butler's Lives of the Saints. "Start with January," he said. "And read all the virgins." Then he added, "For God's sake, don't restrict yourself to virgins." From the beginning, I figured out that—rhetorical questions notwithstanding—when Hubert said "For God's sake," he did not use the expression glibly.

  I followed his instructions and quickly intuited that hagiographers did not need much light in order to read. Perhaps it was the grace of their intentions or the saintliness of their research that illuminated the pages for them. But not for me. I found myself squinting and angling the book to catch any stray sunbeams that infiltrated the reading room, wondering how the only other female, the beautiful woman in the large chair who had not once looked up from her book, managed to perform this task so serenely.

  The first appropriate virgin I found was Saint Pharaildis of the eighth century. She "secretly consecrated her virginity to God," but her parents gave her away in marriage to a wealthy suitor anyway. She refused to have sex with him, and as a result he treated her very badly. But "God protected her, until at last the husband died." Pharaildis shared her feast day, January 4, with Blessed Oringa, whose brothers beat her be
cause she refused to marry. So she ran away and was guided to safety by a hare. Was it then that I noticed the quasi-miraculous appearance of hares in the lives of virgins? No, not then. It must have been later.

  It was definitely later when I tried to connect hagiographical hares with the recurring incidence of harelips in a certain branch of the Llobet family, the Parrillas. They believed that the harelips were a direct result of the pregnant mother's interaction with the hare.

  Somewhat more to the point was Saint Apollinaris, who disguised herself as a man and ran away to the desert and there led an ascetic life. Not until she was dead was her sex discovered.

  A bit later in Butler's January volume I found Saints Julian and Basilissa, who were married to each other but lived "by mutual consent in perpetual chastity."

  I was not overwhelmed by evidence of good deeds.

  Waldo was kind enough to pick me up at the train that evening and asked me how it had gone. From the very beginning, from almost the minute he'd come back from the caves, he'd expressed doubts about the Hagiographers Club. He suggested it didn't exist at all but had been conjured up by Abelardo in a snow-induced dementia. I reminded him that the Hagiographers Club plan preceded the storm and the front lawn full of adult-size snow angels. Then Waldo took another tack: depending on what kind of day he was having, he suggested the club was either a sinister front for Luddite Soviet-style communists or else a meeting place for ultra-rightist papal minions intent on reintroducing hair shirts, cilices, and self-flagellation, assuming those had ever gone out of style. To contradict Waldo in one of his moods, to deny his quasi-paranoid fantasies, was only to encourage them.

  Still, he'd agreed we should be concerned and even helpful. He just didn't see any way of being remotely useful, according to his inventive notions of what that constituted. Carmencita's letter had convinced him we had to actually do something. The Hagiographers Club was the only something we could think of. He warned me, "Don't think of this as atonement, Al. You have nothing to atone for."

  Atonement had in fact crossed my mind. As a concept, it was anathema to Waldo, who was raised Episcopalian by Posey and Waldo Three. "The Fairweathers have been Episcopal since Henry the Eighth had his brouhaha with the pope over divorcing that Spanish wife of his, and she probably had an appalling accent. Before that we were Druids," Posey told me once, a long time ago, before I knew enough about the Fairweathers and their ilk to get the joke. I was from California; what could I be expected to know? Since then I have learned that the Episcopalians of Catamunk do not believe in guilt or atonement.

  The Ewens had been Catholic, but we'd stopped going to church and Sunday school after the business with Mami's irate letters about birth control in the diocesan newsletter. By the end of that heated correspondence, everyone in the diocese knew that she had three daughters and in her opinion they were all three in need of access to birth control. This may have been a generally acknowledged truth, but it was not popular when said aloud at sodality and altar guild meetings. So I retained very little Catholicism from my youth. But of what remained, guilt was preeminent. I had naturally glossed over my lapses when I applied for the teaching position at Precious Blood. Not that it should have mattered.

  I told Waldo that it was almost impossible to read in the Hagiographers Club. On the way north I had been thinking about those long-dead virgins, Apollinaris, Oringa, and Pharaildis, and how their sainthood seemed to be all about what they didn't do. Noting the possibility of rhyming, I had tried to make up a limerick, but it was hopeless. Even the boys had a better fighting chance at composing five-line doggerel than I did. After my years in New England, I had developed a theory that Episcopalians were much better at writing limericks than Catholics, and not just because of Waldo. I had no scientific or empirical basis for this assertion. Just that their knowledge of Latin was unencumbered by the Latin mass and this freed them up to concentrate on five-line doggerel with feminine rhymes that often included words like Nantucket, bucket, and fuck it.

  "But what is the place like?" he asked me.

  "Dark. It's very dark. Actually, next time I may bring a reading light."

  "You could borrow Ezra's headlamp. If you ask him nicely. He's very fond of it."

  That night in bed, I couldn't hold my tongue any longer. I said to Waldo, "What do you think of the merits of virginity?"

  "Are there any?"

  He sank deeper into his pillow, and the length of his left leg against the length of my right leg was sexual and enticing in a way I knew I had to resist. I said, "I asked you first. All the saints I read about today were virgins. That's really their only claim to fame. Lalo's aunt was a virgin."

  "Maybe there were no takers."

  "No. That's not it. Among the saints, the virginity seems to matter most especially if you're very beautiful and there are lots of takers. Then you reject them in favor of the Heavenly Spouse."

  Waldo turned off his light and rolled over into his spoonable position.

  "I'm worried that we've neglected the boys' religious education," I said.

  "Their religious education or sex education?" Waldo asked.

  "Aren't they the same thing?"

  "Can we talk about this in the morning? Or never. How about never?"

  I turned my light off and curled myself around Waldo's warm, smooth back. It never ceased to amaze me how warm his back was.

  Two days later I was once more at the Hagiographers Club. It was only my second time there and already it seemed meet and right to be wrapping my gloved hand around the brass doorknob and pushing forward. Already it seemed meet and right to go directly to the palatially dimensioned stairs and climb. Of course, I could barely see a thing. I had forgotten the dimness of it all, and I had forgotten to ask Ezra about his headlamp.

  Hubert was at his desk. Opened in front of him was a book of Brobdingnagian proportions, written in an unidentifiable language. Hubert was engaged in an intense, whispered conversation with the forlorn clerical man, at the end of which conversation Hubert handed him a key dangling from a rubber-chicken keychain. The man loped away, and Hubert looked up.

  "You again?" he said.

  "I said I'd be back."

  "But I didn't believe you," he said. "More virgins?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  Blessed Jutta of Huy wasn't a virgin but wished she were. At thirteen, she was forced by her father to marry. Five years and three children later, she was widowed. After that she longed for an especially austere and deprived existence, so she had herself walled inside a small room right next to the lepers' house. She lived there until she died, in 1228.

  Saint Agnes was another adamant virgin. She was beautiful and in great demand, but her inclinations were higher. Her rejected suitors denounced her to a governor of Diocletian—he whose very name evokes vivid scenes of lions mauling Christians—and after failing to convince her to relent by means of the usual tortures, he remanded her to a brothel. But even there her virginity prevailed. Many young profligates made advances, but they were "seized with awe" in her presence and backed off. Only one young man persisted, but at the instant of penetration, he was struck blind. As if by lightning from Heaven. Agnes later cured his blindness with her prayers. (Concerning his sexual trauma, nothing was written.) She was ultimately beheaded. Now she's the patron saint of cleanliness.

  Ezra came with Waldo to pick me up at the train that evening. "Ez," I said. "I have a giant favor to ask you."

  "I refuse to wear that blue sweater from Grams. I'm sorry, Mom, but I just can't do it."

  "That wasn't it. I didn't know you felt so strongly about it."

  "Then you aren't paying attention. Her sweaters get worse with every birthday."

  "They're not as bad as the ones she gives me," Waldo said. "The red one with moose? I think that was a particularly low point."

  "It's the Maine motif," I needlessly explained.

  "She's never given you anything with purple mice on it," Ezra said.

  "She means well
. She doesn't think I clothe you properly. But it's about your headlamp."

  "I love my headlamp."

  "I know. So it is with some trepidation that I ask to borrow it. And I promise to treat it well."

  "Don't be silly, Mom. Of course you can. You know that it's the Cadillac of headlamps? Three light levels and five LEDs for superior versatility."

  "I believe you, Ez," I said.

  With the invaluable aid of Ezra's headlamp, and as signs of spring—pollen, rain, and awakening flies—crept up on us, I read about Saint Catherine of Vadstena, Saint Werburga, Saint Maxellendis, Saint Paula the Bearded, and Saint Uncumber (who probably never existed).

  After settling down with my stack of books I would put on the headlamp, adjust the tension, and then switch on the light. I didn't make a show of it or try to draw attention to myself and this brilliant device; I didn't want to give the impression that I craved attention or approval. Yet I thought someone might ask about it. No one did. Once, a young nun looked my way and tilted her head slightly. I thought she was about to speak. She thought better of it. When she departed the library, I saw her ascend the narrower stairs that led to the upper floors. I could only speculate about what lay above. I would have been pleased if anyone had taken this opportunity to start a conversation; I would have happily told him or her all about Ezra, or Abelardo and his aunt; I would have happily exchanged pleasantries about the usefulness of lighting. But the opportunity never arose.

  In order to convince her lascivious and warmongering brother, Enda, to change his ways and convert, Saint Fanchea promised him a beautiful maiden in marriage. The maiden, however, was dead; Enda was presented with a pale and rigid corpse. Strangely enough, this did the trick, and he became a monk. I could imagine a very amusing limerick telling this story. I could imagine it, but I couldn't write it. Waldo could, but Waldo was keeping an amused distance between himself and anything hagiographical. Surely someone in the English-speaking world had written limericks about the lives of the saints. One day I would ask Hubert, but not yet.