Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  After the workshop at which my ménage à trois story was discussed, we all went across Broadway to the West End Bar to get drunk. We did this every week. We drank through sunset; we drank through dinner. I shared a cab ride home with my teacher, who told me, “You’ve had a life, Bev. You have material to write about. But you got to be honest, you got to be merciless. You got to say how it really was.” He got out in the West Village, and as the cab headed east, I thought about that boyfriend in the story I’d written, the one I’d left in the cold on Valentine’s Day: how smart Martin was, how beautiful his slate-blue eyes. I thought about the time he bathed me, kneeling at the side of the tub, his hands cascading warm water over my skin; the apple pancakes he’d made for breakfast; the silky emerald-green bathrobe, a gift for my birthday that we kept hanging on the door in his room.

  He couldn’t trust me again after that Valentine’s Day.

  In the backseat of the cab, I doubled over. My chest felt like a vacuum, a sucking hole in the middle of me. I hugged my arms to stop the terrible emptying; I dropped my head to my knees and wailed. The cab stopped at my door, and I stumbled out, choking on my saliva, wobbling up the stairs to bed. Jason was watching TV in his room with the door shut. I called, “’Night, Jase, I’m going to bed,” and then didn’t get up for sixteen hours. When I finally dragged myself onto my feet, I called Beth Israel Hospital, four blocks away, and asked if they had a psychiatric clinic.

  I was assigned Dr. Sprinkle, a no-talk, all-eye-contact Freudian-in-training. Sitting across from Dr. Sprinkle, twice a week, my demons turned into a chorus that could break windows in a concert hall: life sucks, love hurts, watch out, beware, don’t trust, everyone’s out for themselves, on the other side of every corner is a pitfall.

  As I burrowed deeper into despair, Jason tripped toward adolescence. He came back the next summer after camp, fourteen years old, a foot taller, and a few inches taller than I. We were living in the same tiny apartment, where the walls were as thin as cardboard and our beds as close as a whisper. Without consciously making the decision, I gave up men for five years, because I didn’t trust myself with them, and because I needed to make room for the man my son would grow into.

  I wore black all through my thirties; and one day, remarkably, Dr. Sprinkle, my no-talk shrink, felt compelled to comment on my shoes. “They look like a nun’s,” he said one afternoon.

  They were black leather, laced up the front, had round toes, sturdy heels, and squeaked when I walked. I’d bought them at a secondhand store; I think they were a nun’s. I confessed that I did fantasize about being a nun sometimes, but it was only a fantasy about wearing the same cool outfit every day, and being cloistered away from the world, safe, and man-independent. It was not about anything spiritual. I was not obedient, and did not like following rules, and certainly would never marry a here-in-spirit-only Son of God, born of a virgin, impregnated by a bird.

  It did not escape me that I’d become like Mary: a mother who didn’t have sex. Born-Again Virgin was what I called myself for laughs.

  During those five years in therapy, I found writing-related part-time jobs such as proofreading and copyediting. I published a few short pieces; I made connections. Jason won a scholarship to Wesleyan, and his sophomore year, I published a memoir in the Village Voice called “Sons and Lovers: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” It earned me a contract to write my first book. By then I was thirty-eight, and Jason was twenty.

  Before I flew off on the pilgrimage to Medjugorje, I’d laid over in New York for a few days to spend time with my son. Jason hadn’t invited me to stay in our old apartment, so I stayed at my friend Robin’s.

  The one time he did agree to go out with me, we went to dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant and could barely eke out small talk. “So,” I said. “How’s your pool team doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “You think you’ll make the nationals again this year?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you practice every day?”

  “Sometimes. I don’t really want to talk about this.”

  “Have you seen any good movies lately?”

  “Not really.”

  Afterwards, he raced ahead on the street, making me trot to keep up. Payback for when he was little and I’d done the same to him? Then, instead of escorting me two more blocks to my door, he dropped me on a corner and didn’t kiss me goodbye.

  I stood on the corner watching him walk away. His hands in his pockets, his coat switching with each step, and his head bent a little to the right: Jason’s walk.

  I didn’t know why it had been so hard for me to ask him what was wrong or why he was so mad at me. But safe now, watching my son walk away, I knew I didn’t want to face what he would say. He’ll come out of his snit, I thought. Just give him time.

  But then I thought, He may never speak to me again. I could lose my child. And I’d deserve to.

  Mary’s birth and childhood are not mentioned in the Bible. But her life is told in a few of the apocryphal books. These weren’t included in the Bible by the Church fathers, who were, obviously, all men.

  Like the births of most legendary heroes, Mary’s is an auspicious beginning. Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, pray all their lives for a child and, to their disgrace, are never blessed with one. An old man now and despairing, Joachim goes out to the desert for forty days to pray and ask God why he’s been denied what he’s begged for all his life; he just wants to understand. Twin angels come to him in the desert and to his wife at home. The angels tell the old couple, “Don’t despair. Anna will be given a child.”

  In gratefulness Joachim dedicates his future child to God.

  The child is Mary. And when, at six months old, she walks her first four steps, Anna swoops her up in her arms and vows that her daughter’s feet will not touch earth again until she walks into the temple of God.

  As her parents promised, three-year-old Mary is given to the priests, and as soon as her feet touch the temple step, she jumps into a little jig, and all of Israel falls in love.

  The priests adore Mary, but when she reaches puberty she has to leave; menstrual blood defiles the temple. It is time to push Mary from the nest. In those days celibacy for a woman was not an option, so the head priest sends out word for all widowers to come to the temple so the priest can choose a husband for Mary.

  As Joseph stands among the crowd of men, a dove flies from his staff and lands on his head, making it clear to the priests that Joseph is the one.

  But Joseph does not want a twelve-year-old bride. He’s already had children; he’d become a laughingstock for taking a wife who could be his daughter. But the priest orders him to accept his fate, and Joseph takes Mary to his family, then leaves immediately to return to his carpentry job, probably building at a construction site some miles away.

  When Joseph returns and finds Mary pregnant, he accuses her of lying. Mary begs him to believe her, but Joseph can’t. He goes to bed in a fury, not knowing what to do. That night in a dream, Joseph is visited by an angel, who tells him to believe Mary. She is having a child, but she is also still a virgin.

  When a priest drops by and sees how pregnant Mary is, he orders Mary and Joseph to drink the bitter waters of conviction, which will kill them if they are lying. They don’t die, and so are feted with a great feast and a grand celebration.

  In the Apocrypha Mary does not travel to Bethlehem but has her child in her little house in Nazareth. The midwife who attends the birth runs out of the house in amazement. Even after the child is pulled from her womb, Mary remains a virgin. The midwife’s friend Salome refuses to believe her. So the midwife tells her to see for herself: Mary is only twelve years old and a carpenter’s wife; she’d never have the guts to refuse Salome. But when Salome puts her hand up Mary’s vagina, her hand bursts into flames.

  Yes. The Church needed Mary to be a virgin. She was chosen by God, and her womb must be the home of Jesus only. Mary would never have the ecstasy of, and so be defiled
by, sex. Her ecstasy would be reserved for God. Mary was the original lay nun.

  Her womb may have been a walled garden, but it was graced with fertile soil where something new and unexpected could grow; her abiding virginity was a sign that even the impossible is possible with God.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At breakfast they announce that English mass at Saint James is at eleven and that community mass will begin at five. Our day is our own, so naturally I go shopping. The air smells sweetly of earth, and the sun lights up the low scrubby trees as I happily head down our red dirt path toward the church steeple in the distance. I pass cows grazing near a peeling barn; a rooster hops from the top of a fence and chases a few chickens into a vineyard; and in a small garden at the side of a little brick house, the last red peppers of the season hang low on a leafless bush. It is fall, I’m in the country, the fresh air is kissing my skin, and I think how I want to run to the top of a mountain and spin like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Then I realize: my hands are not itching. They’re still bumpy and peeling and covered with brown scales, but I can’t remember them itching since I arrived in Medjugorje. How could I not have noticed? I think it may have happened two nights before, while I slept next to Father Freed on the bus.

  As I reach the main road, a bus filled with pilgrims groans by before I cross to a cafe and sit at an outdoor table. I order a cappuccino and look down the length of the main road, which is lined with restaurants and religious stores, at which shopkeepers are hauling revolving racks of rosaries onto the sidewalks. Not far in the opposite direction are the twin spires of Saint James Church. When we walked through its courtyard last night on our way to Apparition Hill, a group of punky Irish kids sat on their haunches smoking cigarettes and staring at a tall bank of votive candles as though it were a campfire. As I sip my watery cappuccino, I wonder what it would have felt like to visit a place like Medjugorje when I was a teenager. People still harvest their own grapes to make the wine for their tables; they milk cows, gather eggs from their chickens, herd goats. It’s easier to experience the sacred when the texture of daily life is so close to nature, when the air smells sweet and the silence is so deep.

  But then I overhear some Australians next to me say that two hundred Parisians are making camp at the edge of town, and as I see thirty or so Koreans wearing Day-Glo lime-green scarves hurry by, I wonder if I’m experiencing the spiritual equivalent of an optical illusion. How can the village contain so many foreigners and still feel so quaint and rustic—and impossibly uncrowded? There are Americans and Canadians, but most visitors are European—Spaniards, Italians, Irish, Germans, quite a few of them surprisingly young and beautiful and stylish. The place feels like a small village but with a spark of excitement, like an outdoor music festival is about to happen. You have the sense of there being tourists, but not couples on romantic weekends or small clutches of friends strolling leisurely around. People stroll, but with an air of anticipation, or purpose. Almost everyone dangles rosary beads from their hands, and many wear big crucifixes bouncing on chains or strings of leather against their chests—a style too forbidding for me to take up, but I’m thinking the right rosary beads will make a fine necklace, and I’m eager to take up the hunt.

  I love the baby-blue plastic rosary Mrs. Sabatini gave me, but my head is too big to fit through its loop, and I want some beads made of semiprecious stones that will look more like jewels. I pay for my cappuccino with American dollars, then begin combing through the shops, to discover that there are thousands of beads to choose from. As I finger my way through red, blue, pink, purple, amethyst, and clear crystal beads on revolving racks, I’m tempted by a rosary made from crushed rose petals, but finally settle on a string of large, round, faceted stones that refract all the colors of the rainbow and, according to the tag, are called aurora borealis. As I leave the tiny shop I pass three men in military uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders, who’ve just climbed out of a UN peacekeeping-force van and are gazing at a row of about twenty foot-high Mary statues. I gaze too, but the Marys are too saccharine, too much like Little Bo Peeps. Somewhere in this village, I know, I will find exactly the right Mary to begin my true statue collection back home, which so far consists of only two beautiful twin (a pink and a blue) Mary candles.

  As I string my new rosary beads around my neck, I realize it’s well past noon and that I’ve completely forgotten about, and missed, English mass. But I don’t beat myself up about it; the day is too glorious to spend inside, and I can feel God more easily gazing at a mountain than at a crucifix. I head out toward the hills that edge the town and think, What if Mary really is here, and looking down at me this minute? How wonderful it would be to really believe that Mary has taken me under her wing—or folded me into her cape—and has plans for me! And perhaps these would involve the kind of self-knowledge that causes pain, but as a reward or a healing balm, Mary would give me glorious sunny, breezy days like this, a feeling of blessedness. But to have the Holy Mother paying constant attention to me, I’d have to be paying attention to her. Or was it vice versa? Only if I paid attention to, or focused on, Mary would I notice the gifts and communications she was giving to me. This kind of attention, I knew, would require a daily practice of meditation and prayer.

  I’d called my old religion professor at Wesleyan when I was doing research for the radio documentary to ask him about prophets and seers. He told me that in Christ’s time miracle workers were a dime a dozen and that apocalyptic prophets, forewarning the end of the world, were as old as the Bible itself. Then he told me about a colleague who claims prayer cured him of depression.

  I e-mailed this professor and asked him what he means by the word “prayer.” He said, “A dialogue with God. It’s easier if you can actually picture someone. In my case, it’s Jesus. Typically, such a dialogue would begin with ‘Show yourself to me,’ or simply ‘Help me.’”

  The person I’d chosen to commune with was Mary. For the nine months before I’d come to Medjugorje, I’d meditated, picturing her holding me in her lap; sometimes I pictured myself sitting on the floor, leaning into the folds of her dress. I asked the Blessed Mother to help me. “Please,” I said, “show me the way.” I prayed Hail Marys. I memorized the Memorare, then prayed that too.

  And during those nine months, when I was also reporting for the radio documentary, I’d been given personal messages from Mary through two different seers.

  The first was Gianna Sullivan, a pharmacologist in Maryland, who receives a message from Mary every Thursday night in her local church.

  Gianna’s spiritual adviser, a priest, had forbidden my producer, David, to use recording equipment. When Gianna invited us to come anyway to receive a blessing from Our Lady, we agreed not to record, but on the phone I’d said, “But if I have an experience that I feel compelled to talk about, I’ll have to include it for the integrity of my work—”

  “Do what you feel you must,” Gianna had interrupted. “But I’d imitate Our Lady. Be patient and obedient like she is. And you won’t believe the graces you’ll receive.”

  I hadn’t decided whether I’d be patient and obedient or not, but I did know that David and I had to go get that blessing. I had to know what a blessing felt like. I wondered if it would be the same as being under a lucky star.

  Right away, I spotted Gianna in the front pew and was put off by her Catholic-schoolgirl outfit—kelly-green sweater, white Peter Pan collar, long tartan-plaid pleated skirt. During the apparition she smiled and nodded up at the air where Mary was supposedly standing, then pulled out a yellow legal pad and took dictation. I just knew she’d been the type of kid who always did her homework, the type who’d tell on you when you knocked her book off her desk as a tiny torture.

  Then, when we walked into the room behind the altar to meet with her afterwards, and I observed how she stood so close to her big burly husband she could have been an appendage, I reverted even more to adolescence and felt competitive: Mary talked to Gianna and not to me; Giann
a knew how to be obedient and devoted, and so, of course, also how to lean on a man. I’d hated thinking like this, especially when Gianna took both of my hands and said, “Beverly, Our Lady says you are a beautiful person.”

  “Thank you.” I blushed.

  “Inside.”

  Gianna had obviously sensed I’d actually been thinking of the other kind of beauty. Caught in my superficiality, I flushed deeper. Then she added, “Our Lady says your work is just beginning.”

  In Phoenix, Arizona, I’d sat at the feet of Estella Ruiz as she had her vision. Estella was a mother of seven kids who’d put herself through college at forty years old. She’d received a master’s degree, and after all her education she couldn’t believe in God anymore. But then one morning on her way to work as a school administrator, Mary appeared in her living room.

  “Will you help me, my daughter?” Mary said.

  “When you see her, you can’t refuse her—no way,” Estella explained. “She’s so beautiful, so peaceful, you’ll do anything she asks.” Mary asked Estella to bring her message to the world, and in exchange Mary would help Estella’s family. Her youngest son, who was addicted to crack, quit in two weeks.

  “Our Lady is very sneaky,” Estella said. “That’s how she works. She sneaks into your heart.”