by Laura Newman
I was shamed, in that moment embarrassed and humiliated. I was a child who had played at grown-up and lost. I ran from the study as fast as I have ever moved, tears destroying my vision, my heart on fire. Father Nicola was shouting after me and I turned to his voice. As I did I slammed into the votive candle rack, every candle burning on this Christmas night. The rack tumbled with my force and burning candles flew from the many red glass containers. I fell into a confluence of iron, shattering glass and tiny fires. The tiny fires took quick hold on my cheap polyester clothes and suddenly … I was Joan of Arc.
I had a dream of white. Perhaps a snowy winter morning. Completely quiet except for faraway cathedral bells or maybe children in a music class playing triangles. Or angels. The lack of color was a comfort, for without color, there is no emotion.
The worst of the burns were on my inner thighs, where the flames had traveled up the seams to the tightest part of my pants. There would also be a scar under one of my new breasts and along a single rib. The other scars would be the remains of flicks of flame, eventually fading to random freckles. I had cuts from the glass on my hands and knees. The pain was bad but the drugs were good. I’d like to blame my behavior on the drugs.
As the days of my recovery went on, it became clear that Father Nicola, who had doused my flames with holy water and called the ambulance, had only said that I had knocked over the candle rack. He said it was his fault; he should have had the rack secured to the ground. The Church would pay my hospital bills.
But we are a family of suspicious people. Liliana of men. Alberto of authority. Mamma of anything that hurts her child. All three of celibacy. The rack was heavy. If I had simply walked into it, it would have shivered and settled. Was I running? Why was I running? Who else was there? Was I running from Father Nicola? Did Father Nicola do something to you? I just wanted to sink into the white. They kept picking at my scabs.
I am ashamed to this day that it was preferable for me to say Father Nicola tried to rape me, almost raped me, than to admit that he declined my offered love and my beautiful silk panties. So I lied. Give me another one of those pills. I’ll say anything.
Alberto filed a lawsuit against the diocese but the only action was that Father Nicola left Santa Bernadette’s. I heard they sent him to Lake Como, where the air smells of flowers.
Life goes on, and so much of it good as biscotti.
With summer, Alberto and Mamma got married. Liliana and I were bridesmaids and Parrot stood best man—on Alberto’s shoulder. When Mamma said, “I do!” Parrot said, “My, what a big boy are you!” Signora Bianchi hosted the reception at the Stella and the party filled the whole piazza. Angelica brought gelato of many colors. Signor Cacibauda brought his fryer and buckets and buckets of eel. By the end of the night, Signora Bianchi and Signor Cacibauda were looking like they were sharing more than recipes. I hold this image of all of us, glasses of Prosecco in sweating flutes, a thousand café lights, everything watercolor soft, pastel. We are happy.
My burns healed and became a part of me. When eventually men did trace their fingers, their mouths over them, I told a different story every time. Never the truth. You think because you sleep with me you have earned my past? Men. They like to possess. My scars are not on the outside. I married the only man who never asked, who never lingered on a mark of me.
July 15, 2006
Dear Vittoria,
All these long years I have been wanting to contact you. Really, I should have sooner. But I think I felt you needed to grow up to understand this letter. I have often worried that you might think that what happened was your fault, as you instigated our contact. I am sorry for allowing you to think that, if you did, for even a minute. You were a child. I the adult. And I doubt you would have approached me if I had not given you signals that made you bold. The biggest thing I must confess, and I believe you know this, is that I would have gone forward if you had been a boy. I know it was embarrassment and rejection that made you accuse me, but I am guilty of your accusation. That’s what I want to tell you. I am guilty. I attacked you.
You changed my life for the better. A few years after the Church sent me to Lake Como, I finally realized that I was a joke of a priest. I had become a priest because I am a homosexual and I thought it was the only way to save my soul. Jesus could not love me. But then I realized He could. It was as easy as that. I quit the priesthood. I am still religious.
My partner Joe and I run a small bar in Bellagio. It’s called Birds of a Feather and we have outside seating with a view of the lake. It’s very beautiful. I hope that maybe someday you will stop in for a drink and I will kiss your feet.
I’m sorry for all the scars I caused you.
Geno Nicola
Around the time I received this letter, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost were looking like the Three Little Pigs in a house made of sticks. The sexual abuse scandals were going to huff and puff and blow that house to kingdom come. I didn’t think much about it, but Alberto did. He refiled my lawsuit.
About a year later he and Mamma came to our house, two streets over in Trastevere. It was normal for them to knock on our door and come in, wine and Parrot in hand. But tonight the Prosecco was already open, riding precariously in Alberto’s lap. Mamma handed me an envelope. I opened it and inside was a check in my name for 1,357,000 euros. We called Liliana, come over now, bring Matteo and the kids! It was undoubtedly bad for Alberto’s system, but that night we partied like millionaires.
The next morning, quick before I changed my mind, I sent half to Geno.
Pink Flamingos and the Good Friday Massacres
Inspired by a Smithsonian magazine article.
The Klondike. Small-animal taxidermy.
A girl with a plaid accent.
And are those pink flamingos out on the iceberg?
Los Angeles 1985—Evan
Evan Sterling-Gutierrez wanted to move to Alaska because Los Angeles was too shirtless for him. He had a bit of a pigeon chest. While he would never deny the beauty of L.A. women in bikinis, all that sun-spangled flesh tended to give him asthma attacks. He conjured a soft-edged hope of a dark-haired girl (no chemical blondes, please) in an Eskimo coat, bare on a bear rug. Fire in a stone settle. All fur and flame, forget the bikini wax. He was self-aware enough to know this stereotype erotica was probably a Prudhoe pipe dream. And it was just a sidebar anyway. His primary goal in moving to Alaska was to be near the northern lights and to compose, not a concerto, but a singular piece for violin to be played only by polar light or, alternatively, in view of the extremely rare Alaskan pink flamingo. Evan chose Valdez because a certain Dr. Eloise Holden, renowned violinist, retired, lived in Valdez, and had agreed to tutor Evan for a startlingly large monthly retainer.
Evan began to build his bridge to nowhere.
One Hundred and One Years Previous
Isle of Skye, Scotland 1884—Grace
Grace Budge was born on the Isle of Skye in 1884. Her mother died during that event. Dougal Budge had survived many an indignity in his twenty-three years, including acne and poverty, but losing Clare was the saddest bagpipe song of all. He submerged himself in a gallon of Talisker’s that tasted of peat and rot and matched his mood until Clare’s closest friend, Geillis, slapped his face and the drink from his hand and replaced it with a baby bottle. And a baby. “You’re an embarrassment to Clare! And I’ve my own to-dos. She’s your bairn, get on with it!”
Bless the man, he did. Nappies and smashed peas, bedtime stories—The Cattie Sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning. Pink indulgences. Dougal loved the wee girl. None would say otherwise.
Because her father was so often afield with his sheep, Grace grew into a solitary soul. They lived in a whitewashed croft inherited from Clare’s father near a loch in Elishader. When Grace looked out the wavery window glass onto the small waves of the loch and out to the vast sea beyond, she believed she would always dwell in the m
eadows with the faeries and could never see her future otherwise.
At about age four a confusion came to Grace that cleared with time, but she chose to keep. On Sundays she and Dougal would attend the stone church with the clear-sounding bell and bend the knee to God. It was one of the few Catholic churches still in Scotland and did not sound its bell but five quick rings each Sunday to keep attention from itself. When the congregation recited the prayer Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee, the young girl would look to the small plaster statue of Mary set in a corner alcove. Grace would recall what her father told her when she asked, as every child eventually does, Where did I come from? and Dougal provided the usual answer, Your mother’s tummy. Thus it seemed to Grace that Mary, who was full of Grace, must be her mother. This confusion gave her great confidence and power. She never told anyone that she was Mary’s daughter; she would never brag. But when she wanted her mother’s advice or closeness she would say her rosary, skipping the Our Fathers, as her father was in the next room, and in this way talk with her mother.
The Holy Mother was Grace’s invisible friend.
Dougal hated sheep. The way they smelled when they were wet, the insipid bleating. The fact that sheep are morons. He felt he was meant for greater tasks, for he was of Viking stock and a sheepherder’s staff is no long sword. Sometimes while fire gazing, he wished to have lived a hundred years before, to have been a Jacobite, even to have died in the ravage at Culloden. Dougal could have taken the at-hand adventure of a new wife. Some liked his red hair. But Dougal was cheap. He was saving, thinking on a grand escape he knew not yet where to.
While Dougal made and discarded plans, Grace had the luck to attend an exceptional school in Elishader thanks to Professor Wolcott, an English transplant and true Victorian. He was a man of science and a naturalist of independent means. He purchased a two-story croft with a large farmhouse kitchen and opened his doors to the local children three days a week to run experiments and generally amuck. He shared his library, although the children were required to wear white cotton gloves and sit very, very still when reading. Sometimes he would do watercolor paintings of them while they read. It was basically a home of free thought, and some were not allowed to attend the queer school, which perhaps was justified, as Wolcott was at heart a pedophile. But like many an Englishman of his day, he was never one to take action. To paint Grace in the easy chair, legs slightly parted, Audubon’s tome heavy in her lap, her hummingbird eyes. To paint little Jesse, mouse in hand, face of a fox. That was enough for him. His paintings were quite good.
Wolcott was fond of the Grand Expedition! They tromped Mealt Loch clear to its suicide leap over the basalt cliffs into the oblivion of the ocean. The wind blew the explorers back from the edge. Below them the water was so clear they could see the boulders beneath, all of a similar oblong shape. With her wind-teared eyes, Grace felt the boulders looked like a school of dolphins on their own expedition come to see the strangers who lived in the aerie. They tromped through the meadows with the wildflowers and every shade of green that ever lived. The students found real dinosaur bones, which Wolcott sent to Edinburgh for classification. Wolcott had the students build cages of sticks and they caught otters, pine martins, mice. And once a red-winged faeriewren, but the children let her go when Wolcott wasn’t looking, she was so far from home.
Wolcott brought the captives back to his house, and depending upon the animal, they dissected, skinned, tanned or stuffed with cotton wool, boiled down to study bone structure, or ate. The students found all this deliciously gross or, sometimes, delicious. Blackbird pie in a rosemary crust. They even did Ouija, as Wolcott also considered the spiritual world a science, but only once when the rain was so heavy the day was gray as a ghost. Wolcott lit seven candles and played the séance as a joke and told the children to keep it secret.
The students read Dickens and Darwin and never talked of God except to agree that Scotland was a godly place and that church on Sunday was his due. Grace still said her Hail Marys, still chose to believe her mother was the Lady in Blue with sad eyes and lily breath.
On the days that Wolcott kept for himself, and Grace’s father was most often at work, Grace was prone to hiking on her own through the Highlands just outside their croft. In spring the meadows greened clear up to the distant tops of the Quirang, where clouds would catch and fray like spider webs. She found the faerie glens where folk had built up circles of cairns for a thousand years. In August she walked through the bristly heather, as tart a color purple as purple can be, in bloom for miles. She collected the tiny flowers for tea and saved some dried in cotton wadding simply for the joy of smelling the color in damp September. October turned all seeds loose, willy-nilly, never giving up hope of a new year even while the month dulled to brown and gray. January brought snow and the whisper of hush, mend your clothes, rest. Smudgy peat smoke in every chimney.
Through the seasons and years as Grace grew older, she became more adept at the things she learned at the Wolcott school. She caught her own animals, mice and small birds, skinned them at home, stuffing them with seed-pod wool and straw. Then she took a skill she leaned from Geillis (who saw to the more mundane schooling of Grace) and sewed tiny clothes for the animals, giving them personalities. Minstrel mice. An otter in a sea-green dress and wire glasses holding a tiny book with the first line of a Robert Burns poem written with a straw for a pen. Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie.
Grace, of course, did not invent the attribution of human traits to animals. She had seen examples of this in Wolcott’s periodicals and knew that even Queen Victoria, queen of lace and violets, loved the little taxidermy tableaux. Dougal, ever one to seek a profit, took Grace and her anthropomorphics to Portree and, to the delight of both of them, sold the animals at Highlander Gifts and Biscuits. They did quite well. Dougal pocketed most of the proceeds with Grace’s approval, but she did buy a wheel of Isle of Mull cheddar, her grand indulgence.
It was in Portree that Dougal met his destiny in the form of a penny flyer that made its way to Isle of Skye one knows not how:
VALDEZ TRAIL: THE ALL-AMERICAN TRAIL TO KLONDIKE GOLD!!
The flyer was caught in an updraft, pushed down the street in a wake of dust and almost fluttering into Dougal’s fingers. The ink was travel-weary, the paper veined. But the words may as well have been ablaze. Klondike!
When Grace walked out the door of their little croft for the last time she was fourteen years old, worldly belongings winnowed down to a few traveling cases. Oh, to have taken such a thing as Scotland for granted! She turned and faced the wind that smelled of salt and sheep and meadow muck. Grace was a slight girl with a whiskey-red braid to her waist and a face covered more in freckles than not. How could she belong anyplace else? She had never thought the world need be bigger than Elishader. Professor Wolcott came in farewell, handing her a book on North American wildlife. “My, what a fine expedition!” he encouraged, seeing she was about to break under the weight of her own history. Dougal picked her up like a wee bairn and placed her in the wagon.
All the schoolchildren had come with Wolcott, but they had closed ranks on Grace weeks ago when the croft went up for sale. They didn’t truly come to say goodbye so much as to solidify their collective memory of Grace Budge, the girl who went to Alaska, for if they thought of her at all it would be in that way. Geillis brought them food for the day’s journey, her husband taking them on the first leg south where they would ferry off the island and then train to the port of Southampton. Geillis gifted Grace her best bonnet with the heather-sprigs embroidered on the ribbons. “Make ye mum proud,” she counseled. Grace never knew that Geillis had begged Dougal to let her keep the girl—”You’re going to a place for men!”
Good-bye! Safe journey!
They would never return.
But, then, a new horizon is an intoxicant. Who could not be entranced by the sound of a train at night, red leather seats, food in a box? Bread
basket fields. Cities of stone and soot. And at last the ship, Good Hope, a flexed muscle ready to take on the vast Atlantic.
First class may have been a murmur of music and crystal, beef Wellington for lunch, but third class was an enclosed pen of human livestock. Within a week the stench was enough to make a soul believe in original sin. When allowed on deck, Grace looked over the railing and considered jumping, a mercy to die with nothing but the scouring smell of salt water. She resurrected Mary, her old childhood invisible friend, and then embodied her in the Statue of Liberty when at last they arrived at New York harbor. Hail Mary, full of Grace.
Still they traveled on. Now by train, always rocking. Grace looked for buffalo, that symbol of the American West, but by 1898 there were fewer than a hundred left in the wild and she never saw a one. Nor an Indian. But she did see wild mustangs and the fractured ribs of a Conestoga carcass. It was a vast land with haughty mountains—yes they were purple, lakes of salt, basins of alkali. Forests thick as thieves. Rivers too wide to understand. It was a land that would just as soon kill ya as take ya captive. When at last they pulled into the Oakland Pier Station, San Francisco glittering across the bay, Grace and Dougal were exhausted. It was September. They would stay until spring, maybe they would sleep till spring.
Dougal took cheap rooms in the Bowery. It was honky-tonk at night but Grace could hear doves in the morning. Dougal found work on the docks. Grace reached the Mission District in her wanderings and there it was: Woodward’s Gardens. Garden, amusement park, museum, art gallery, zoo, and aquarium built by Robert B. Woodward with his forty-niner gold. Look what gold can build! Grace imagined going back to Scotland and building such a place. She became a ticket girl. But after her shift she once again became a naturalist.
