Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  “My third,” says Jane. “Our Lady really wanted me to come. I had no money, but I knew if I prayed and asked and she wanted me to come she’d arrange it. Mr. Kane—he was a Protestant like me—visited Conyers and never left. His wife divorced him last year. He really wanted to come to Medjugorje, and one day—I hadn’t said a word to him—he comes up to me and says, ‘Would you like to come to Medjugorje? I don’t want to go alone. I’ll pay your way.’”

  “Our Lady is so generous. I manage a bank and I couldn’t leave,” the heavy woman tells us. “I’m Beatrice Day, by the way.”

  “You’re my roommate,” I say to her.

  “Oh, how do you do?” She sounds polite but not enthusiastic. “My assistant manager had been transferred,” she continues, “and I was training a new girl, but I prayed to Our Lady. I knew she wanted me to come. I bought the ticket, even though I couldn’t leave, and a week before our departure date, the old assistant manager came back. Just till after the New Year.”

  “Our Lady is so wonderful.” Jane smiles.

  It’s my turn, but I don’t want to play; and Our Lady must have been watching out for me, because I am rescued by the appearance of three other women stepping out of the house, followed shortly by the hectic woman with the smudged glasses and messy hair who’d been yelling at Bruce at the airport. In a minute, Bruce and eight or so others, holding bobbing flashlights, walk down the lane toward us.

  Bruce leads us through vineyards to the base of a hill that has a wide path cobbled with juttings of limestone. We climb about the length of a football field before we reach the top, where a tall, slender, homemade wooden cross stands to mark the spot where Mary first appeared to three of the six kids. We sit on the rocks and I close my eyes. The wind has begun to pick up and the air smells clean and good; people begin to pray. A lovely woman with fine features and a melodic voice begins, “Thank you, Mother, for the blessings you have generously bestowed on each one of us. We are so thankful for this opportunity to be near you, we hope that—”

  “Oh, dear God, look—look over on Mount Krizevac!” Jane interrupts.

  Over on the mountain, lights streak the air. “Heavenly Mother, thank you, thank you for this sign. We love and adore you. We are so grateful to be near you. Help us open our hearts to hear your wishes. We—”

  Could those jagged links of light really be a sign?

  Now everybody’s jumping onto the end of everybody else’s prayer, impatient to begin her own. Then they begin singing some song I don’t know. I switch from one uncomfortable rock to another and note that there are three men among us, but it’s the women leading the prayers—straight from the heart, the way the women have probably always led the prayers when it’s religion at the grass roots, outside of the physical and doctrinal walls of the Church. I also notice that the heavy hectic woman from the airport stands apart, not singing, like me.

  “Look,” someone says. “There are more lights coming up the mountain.” Then there’s a flash, obviously from a camera. “It’s flashlights and cameras,” someone says. Then Jane begins to pray again: “Thank you, Blessed Mother, for allowing us to believe it was a miracle,” and is followed by a chorus of “Amen”s.

  I’d been to apparition sites around the United States for the radio documentary and I should have been used to this. Almost to a person, the people I’d interviewed had been given signs: they’d seen gold dust rain, rose petals fall, rosaries and medals turn gold, the sun spin and change colors, flocks of doves appear in the sky, smelled the air fill with the fragrance of roses.

  I’d seen their golden rosary beads, their Polaroids of what appeared to be a door in front of the sun with rays shooting around it that they called the “Doorway to Heaven.” And at my first apparition site, I’d seen doves fly. It was the previous February, near the Unisphere on the grounds of the 1965 World’s Fair, in Queens. Two hundred people had gathered around a makeshift stage on which a five-foot-tall, pure white statue of the Virgin Mary stood, on a night dark as ink. Little bursts of icy wind made people’s scarves flap as they hugged their coats to them and huddled around votive candles they’d lit and placed on the ground around pictures of loved ones at their knees.

  I’d gazed up at the sky, searching for a sign of anything. Planes crisscrossed low, landing or taking off at JFK and La Guardia as the Long Island Expressway roared a few hundred yards to the right.

  After David Isay, my producer in the radio documentary, had set up his recording equipment, a little lady in a fat down coat, named Mrs. Sabatini, walked over to tell us her story. “I got a sick daughter I take care of. And one day I started to bleed. You know, down there. Bleeding and bleeding. So I go to the doctor. He says I’m hemorrhaging and I got to go to the hospital. ‘I can’t go to the hospital,’ I says, ‘I got to take care of my daughter.’ If I don’t go to the hospital, he says, I’m gonna die. I got to talk to the Blessed Mother, ask her what I should do. So I come here on a bus all the way from Hartford. I get off and crawl on my belly to the Blessed Mother, I’m so weak. I say, Mary, what should I do? And the bleeding stops. The doctor said he never seen anything like it. Says I should’ve been dead. And there ain’t nothing wrong with me. I’m cured.”

  When David walked off with his microphone to record ambient sound, Mrs. Sabatini leaned toward me and asked, “Why are you here, honey?”

  I answered as honestly as I could. “I don’t know. I began to collect her—you know, at yard sales—and the next thing I knew she was all over my house . . . beautiful paintings and statues. I liked her when I was a kid. Then I got the idea for this story.”

  “She’s calling you.” Mrs. Sabatini squeezed my arm. “Pray the rosary. It’ll change your life. Here.” She took a string of blue plastic rosary beads out of her pocket and handed the rosary to me.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Go on. We make them, my girlfriend and me.”

  “The graces,” said Mr. Schiavone, a friend of Mrs. Sabatini’s who’d been listening in.

  “What do you mean exactly by ‘graces’?” I asked him.

  “Gifts. Like peace. I feel peace,” said Mr. Schiavone. “I pray to her. I go to church every day. I’m not mad at anybody anymore. I don’t hate.”

  “Hate feels awful, honey. And you’re not afraid no more,” said Mrs. Sabatini. “Our Lady is wonderful,” she said as she led me to the scapulars and pulled one from a box. “Wear this every day. You want it on when you die; that way Our Lady will protect you. Nail a cross to your door facing out so the earthquakes won’t touch your house.”

  I gratefully draped the scapular on my neck, and before I could say thank you there was an explosion of camera flashes as people pointed to the sky and called, “The doves—it’s the doves! Thank you, thank you, Blessed Mother. Oh, they’re beautiful. Look at them. Look!”

  A flock of doves swooped above the statue of Our Lady, circled once, and flew off; then another flock, and another, did the same.

  “They were pigeons,” David said at a diner we stopped at before driving back to New York.

  “Pigeons are part of the dove family. And besides, they don’t fly at night.” I surprised myself by how much I wanted to believe I’d seen a miracle.

  Afterwards, at my friend Robin’s, where I was staying while in the city, I told her what had happened and she screeched, “My God, what if it’s real? Oh, Beverly . . .” Robin suddenly looked wistful. “I could use a mother.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “the people I talked to had maxed out on pain; they’d hit rock bottom, and then they surrendered. I wonder if pain, terrible need, is the only path to God.”

  “What I want to know is,” said Robin, “if Mary wants people to believe and pray, why doesn’t she just appear on the evening news?”

  We both laughed at the image of Our Lady’s gorgeous form filling a TV screen.

  Then it occurred to me: “But Mary has been on the news. They showed her on a bank building in Florida. She’s been there for three months. At fir
st they thought the image was formed from the residue of cleaning fluids. But they couldn’t wash her off. My mother’s girlfriend took a picture and sent it to me. You should see it. Mary’s three stories high—she looks like a cubist painting in pastels. Then I heard on the news—they show this stuff all the time in L.A.—that she appeared on a billboard and tied up traffic on the Washington interstate for four hours. She’s appearing metaphorically, you know? It’s like she’s requiring that you have some sort of faith to believe she’s actually there. I think she’s saying, ‘Remember me? I’m your mother. Pray, be nice to one another. Come. Listen to my son.’ But even if they saw Mary, most people wouldn’t believe it. There’s this C. S. Lewis quote about how a nonbeliever could be swimming in the lake of fire of the apocalypse for all eternity, and for all eternity he’ll believe he’s in a dream from which he never wakes up. You’ve heard, ‘To a believer there are no questions; to a cynic there are no answers,’ right?”

  “Wow, Bev.” Robin hugged her knees. “You sound like you really believe.”

  “I do? I don’t. I want to, though, I think. I just love the stories. I love Mary. I mean, don’t you?”

  “Hell, yeah. You know some more stories?”

  I had to go to the bathroom and excused myself.

  The light in the bathroom flickered harshly a few dozen times before it went on. Then, when it flickered off, I yelled to Robin that the lightbulb had blown. She came in and flicked the switch off, then on, and the light calmly stayed lit.

  In the morning, after my shower, I hung the scapular Mrs. Sabatini had given me around my neck, and the lightbulb flickered on and then off again. Was Mary talking metaphorically, the way spirits do? “Come out from the darkness. I will be a light unto you.” Was Mary talking to me?

  I found this intensely scary.

  I used to be spooked by my own shadow. When I was nineteen, Ray worked the four-to-twelve shift at the factory and I was alone every night. I was convinced that all night, every night, some man peeked through the gaps left between the shades and the dark windows. I stayed glued to the one chair that could not be seen from outside. I darted from the room when I had to go to the bathroom; I starved rather than risk being watched while going to the refrigerator.

  Then, one day, I heard a loud noise and made a dash for the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find. With my heart beating so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, I slammed my back against the wall beside the back door, the knife over my head like in Psycho. I stood there for five minutes and then I grew furious. Why was I standing here like this? What good did being scared do? I made a vow right then: “I will never be scared ever again.” And I never was—at least not of robbers or dangerous situations, and I was never scared at movies, either, not even The Exorcist. But I could not stop myself from being scared by a sudden gust of wind, or an undulating shadow in a parking lot. It was the unseen—not person, but spirit—that still scared me. I wondered why, at forty-seven years old, when those lights blinked on and off in the bathroom, I was thinking I’d just had a communication from the Divine, and I was as spooked as I’d have been if the devil stood in front of me with fire in his eyes.

  Was it fear of that which I cannot know, or loss of control—an illusion, anyway? Fear that if Mary began to communicate with me, my life would never be the same, that all my old habits and the friends I chose and my way of being in the world would change? Fear of acknowledging the neediness that had drawn me to Mary? That people would think of me the way I was thinking of these people in Medjugorje: that I was delusional?

  At least at the other apparition sites, I’d been an outsider, dropping in for a one-shot deal. But this time I’m a member, one of the tribe, and there’s no getting around it: the tribe’s weird. So what does that make me?

  It’s three in the morning on Apparition Hill in Medjugorje, and the members are not flagging; they’re probably charged by the Holy Spirit and will keep praying and singing till dawn. I, on the other hand, have been yawning painfully for half an hour and am freezing. I decide to head back. If I get lost, at least I’ll be moving and warm.

  The heavy hectic woman from the airport has beaten me to the foot of the hill. I introduce myself, and she tells me her name is Annie. “I hate that.” She shakes her head. “I like prayer to be private. I couldn’t even hear myself think with all that praying and singing. How long they gonna stay up there listening to each other. Dawn?”

  “I would say that’s a good bet.”

  “Hell. Excuse my French.”

  “Maybe we could get a cab.”

  “And tell them House Number 2? That Bruce should take responsibility. He should’ve given us a map. He should notice two of us are missing and come down.”

  That may have been what happened, because just then we begin to hear Hail Marys and to see flashlights winding toward us down the hill.

  The first verse of the Hail Mary was prayed in the year 1000, but it really caught on in the fifteenth century, when the Franciscans and Dominicans began to encourage the illiterate to repeat it over and over as a substitute for more sophisticated prayers. It was called the Psalter of Our Lady, and by the end of the century virtually all Christians recited the prayer. The second verse was added in the sixteenth century.

  Today people still fervently pray the Ave Maria all over the world—collectively, fifty million times a day. Most of these Hail Marys are prayed as part of a rosary, a circular string of beads that looks something like a jewel necklace with a cross dangling off a little tail at one end. Rosaries are divided into five decades (or sets of ten Hail Marys), separated by a single bead on which is said an Our Father and a Glory Be. They are actually a bit like worry beads.

  To say a complete rosary one must go round the circle three times, fingering the beads, praying, and meditating on one “mystery” per decade. (Mysteries describe the events of the lives of Mary and Jesus, beginning with the Annunciation, through Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, and ending with the Coronation, in which Mary is crowned Queen of Heaven. A complete rosary makes a grand total of 159 Hail Marys—including the three you say at the beginning of each go-round, for faith, hope, and love. But in common practice, once around the beads is sufficient.

  The frequent repetition of words, like saying a mantra, can put you into a trancelike state, which helps you be more receptive to God. And rosaries help you keep an accurate tally of how many prayers you’ve said. Our word for “bead” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for prayer, “bede,” which comes from the word “biddan,” to beg. The practice of praying on beads—at first knots on a string—did not start with Christians but with priests in the Middle East, in 500 B.C. In early religions it was believed that the frequent repetition of prayers gave one’s petition a better chance of being heard than if you said just one, and Catholics still believe this.

  These days people say rosaries in organized groups, in halls and churches and one another’s homes to pray, or beg, mightily for world peace. And they pray while they’re alone, too. They ask for the prosaic—money and things—but they also implore Mary to heal them physically and spiritually, to help them feel peace, to know love, possess faith, and be close to God.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back in Medjugorje, my roommate, Beatrice, says, “I would get the youngest, prettiest woman for my roommate.”

  “I’m not young. It’s the black velvet skirt and the Harley-Davidson boots.” It’s true. I’d seen on Oprah where they took three definitely middle-aged women, gave them good haircuts and hip clothes, and they dropped fifteen years. “You’re prettier than I am.”

  Her face turns a surprising crimson at my compliment. “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not true.”

  “You’re beautiful. I noticed you at the airport. I was trying to guess your age.”

  “I’m forty-six.”

  “No kidding. I’m forty-seven.”

  We grin at each other.

  “I have four beautiful sisters. Cheerleader
s, queens of the prom. And we’re from Texas, so you know the competition was fierce.”

  “But you’re as pretty as that, just chubby.”

  “My whole life. I gained forty pounds last year, though. I had this cancer thing. Had to take medication. Just put it on.”

  “You okay?”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. I had to stay home from work for a couple of months. Near the end I was lying on the sofa praying to Mary with my leg up the sofa back; it was the only way I could be comfortable. I’d had a disk condition for years. I was praying, I think for my kids, lying there with my eyes closed, and I felt this shift in my spine, like someone poked me there, and the pain left. It’s never come back.”

  There it was again: pain. It brings people to God; then God relieves pain—or faith in God at least makes pain bearable.

  Beatrice and I talk all night. Confess, really. We are in a purgatory of mother guilt. She’d had a career, too, and felt guilty that she hadn’t been home enough for her kids. Beatrice had been rejected by a child, her youngest, a rebellious, pregnant teenage daughter, who’d recently made contact after several years.

  And Jason, my only child, and I were estranged. Something I never would have imagined could happen, not in a million years. Would we ever find our way back to being the best friends that we’d once been?

  Jason broke away when I accepted an invitation to live in a cottage two blocks from the Pacific, after I’d been in Orient five years. The movie of my first book, Riding in Cars with Boys, was nearing production after many years. I’d thrived in my little village by the sea and was itching to spread my wings. So I’d put tags on everything I’d bought from other people’s houses and hosted my own contents-of-house sale, at which I’d sold virtually everything except for my books and my Marys, which I’d shipped to California UPS.