Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  The atmosphere has the intense burn of a rock concert combined, impossibly, with the tranquillity of a gurgling stream. The incense is pungent; the candles flicker; and as my insides feel all lit up and glowy, I realize this sensation I’m having feels like love.

  I bump shoulders with Annie as we walk back home together. “Don’t feel bad,” she says. “We were all where you are. I thought the same about women priests when I was younger.”

  “Thanks.” I’m touched by her generosity. “But you always had faith?”

  “Yes. I was given that gift. But you will know. Jesus will enter you and you’ll know.”

  Back at the house, I go into my room and feel so safe and loved that my edges melt, the tension pours out, and I weep, thinking of my parents. A few years ago, my cousin died of lung cancer, and on our way through the cemetery to bury him, my parents pointed out the car window: “Look, there’s Mary Devito”—my father’s aunt. “There’s Franny Vansky”—my mother’s good friend. “The shiny stone over there . . . see it? Uncle Red.” And as we rounded a bend, they pointed to a large stone near the road and said, “That’s ours.”

  “Yours? You bought a headstone? A grave?”

  “We didn’t want you kids to have to worry,” said my father.

  “Your father’s on one side. I’m on the other.” They would share the same headstone and lie in opposite directions, head to head, probably to save money.

  I cry harder in Medjugorje feeling my parents’ essence, their kindness: my father hammering in the basement, building things; my mother sipping coffee and smoking in the kitchen, the sweet aroma from a pie in the oven, the floor shiny from waxing. Good, loving, hardworking people, who had sacrificed so much for me, for their kids. Why had I never let them know I appreciated this? All they ever did was give. Even now, when I visit, my mother tries to give me the sneakers off her feet, the new sweater she just bought that would go so nice with my skirt. I can’t leave without taking a piece of cake, a container of leftovers. For twenty years my father has waited at train stations and ferry terminals, arriving a half hour early, to pick me up. He gives me relish he makes from his garden, afghans he’s crocheted; and lawn ornaments and birdhouses he’s built and painted, which have dotted my lawns and hung in my trees.

  I’ve been given so much and am selfish, while my parents received so little and offer the shirts off their backs. When my mother’s mother died, her family blew apart like a pile of leaves. My mother had landed with an aunt who had two children of her own, whom she made no secret about preferring. My mother did housework while her cousins played. As soon as she was old enough to quit school, she got a job and left, living in an attic of a married friend, helping her with her children while her husband was away at war.

  When she married, my mother had hoped her husband’s mother would replace the mother she’d lost. But she was stuck with Philomena, who referred to herself in the third person and liked to remind you, lest you forget, “Grammy doesn’t get along with people; she likes to be left alone. She was born with a bad disposition; Grammy’s natured that way.”

  When I was a kid my mother would burn with resentment after we’d brought my grandmother a quart of milk or dropped her off after ferrying her around to the doctor and the pharmacist and the grocery store. “Me, me, me. Thinks she’s the only one with aches and pains.” My mother would whack the blinker as we turned onto Colony Road. “Think she’d call and ask me if I needed something? Never in a million years. If my mother were alive, things would be different.”

  The final insult came when my grandmother began to fall down, and even though she gave my father ulcers and made my mother’s blood boil, my parents offered to build her a room so she could move in and they could take care of her.

  My grandmother demurred. “A woman belongs with her daughters. A woman’s daughters should take her in.” Meaning, of course, that my mother did not rate as a daughter. And when Philomena’s three real daughters failed to invite her to live in their houses, my grandmother checked into a nursing home and threatened to take poison.

  Philomena, like me, had been a teenage mother, and because she felt like she’d been robbed of so much, she never gave anything. She’d been a beauty, the life of the party; but the father of her unborn child fled to the First World War, and she was forced to marry Big Mike Donofrio, a marriage arranged by her mother. Philomena never loved Mike, and he knew it. He was a bootlegger and a brawler, jealous of any man who came near his beautiful wife, whom he considered he had a God-given right to control. But I suspect that like me, Philomena had a problem with the word “obey.” I have heard rumors about my grandmother and a handsome housepainter from Puerto Rico, a rich Jew who gave her jewels; I’ve heard of afternoons spent sipping highballs at the Moose Club, alone.

  Philomena had four children, and even though she was a devout Catholic, she divorced Mike and remarried, then continued to receive Holy Communion every Sunday with impunity. When I was a kid, Philomena still had her hair done at the beauty parlor every week, wore red nail polish and a mink stole, and never once invited any of her children or their families to Christmas dinner, or Easter, or Thanksgiving, or anyone’s birthday. She did, however, invite me on occasion to accompany her to mass, for which I was and still am grateful. She led me to the statue of Mary, where I sat next to my grandmother, fingering through the pages of her missal, pulling out holy cards to look at the gorgeous pictures.

  Mike died when I was an infant, and Philomena was left his property, which included a house with two apartments. When I was four years old the house my parents rented was sold and we were evicted. My mother was convinced beyond reason that she would lose her second family just as she’d lost her first, and that we’d all end up in the poorhouse. She could not eat and shrank to ninety pounds; she screamed bloody murder at the slam of a door, cried constantly for her dead mother, and warned me over and over, “You don’t know what it’s like when your mother dies, you’re nothing, you’re nobody, you wish you could die too.”

  My father delivered soda from a truck and sometimes worked at his friend’s gas station. My parents had little money, and when my father approached his mother to ask if she’d rent us one of her apartments, she refused him, saying, “I don’t rent to families with children.”

  I knew the story and I clearly saw my grandmother’s selfishness, her troublemaking, her meanness, but I still liked her. My grandfather was a hot-blooded Italian from the old country. He’d slapped Philomena around, so she left him; for a woman of her culture and generation, leaving took guts. I admired her for ignoring the Church’s rules and continuing to take communion. Once, when I asked her why she never remarried after her second husband, she said, “Ech. Who wants to iron pants? You can have it. And why don’t you get remarried?”

  “Never found anyone who could dance good enough,” I answered, only half facetiously.

  “I always knew you were smart.”

  My picture was the only photo of a granddaughter she’d hung on her nursing-room wall. And ever since I was little, she’d promised to leave me her engagement ring when she died.

  One Christmas, when I was maybe thirty-five and Grammy was eighty-five, I picked her up at the nursing home to bring her to my parents’ for Christmas Eve. My mother was frying smelts in the electric frying pan at the kitchen table, and tins of Christmas cookies she had been baking for a week were stacked on top of the hutch my father had built. My mother kissed Grammy on the cheek; then I walked her into the bedroom to help her off with her coat.

  We sat at the table and had coffee, and my grandmother told us how her oldest grandson, Timmy, had stopped by the nursing home to invite her to Christmas. “I didn’t want to go,” Grammy said. “And he says, ‘But Grammy, I don’t want you to be alone on Christmas.’”

  My mother’s chest filled and tightened. “What do you mean, nowhere to go on Christmas? You knew you were coming here.”

  “Nobody asked me.” Grammy shrugged.

  My fa
ther, who’d been standing in the doorway, closed his eyes and shook his head. My mother took the bait. “We asked you. You know that. Letting everybody think we don’t invite you here . . . that we’d let you stay alone on Christmas . . . ! See?” My mother turned to me. “This is what she does. Drives me crazy. Where have you been every Christmas for the past fifteen years?” she yelled at my grandmother, who was hard of hearing but not that hard.

  There was a smile on Philomena’s face.

  After Christmas dinner, the next day, I sat next to Grammy on the sofa and held her hand. She said, “I’ve been thinking; I’m going to leave my diamond to Janet,” my younger sister. “You don’t think she’ll hock it, do you?”

  I didn’t take the bait. Later my father took me aside and said, “Don’t worry. You’re getting that ring.”

  But then, a few months later, I found a box in my parents’ basement where my father had stored the jewelry my grandmother didn’t take with her to the nursing home. In it I found a beautiful thin wedding band delicately engraved with tiny roses. It fit, so I took it—or perhaps “stole” is the word.

  The next year, when I came home from New York for Easter, I decided on Good Friday I was going to visit my grandmother at the nursing home and fess up about stealing her ring.

  I heard a faint snoring before I walked in her door and felt a little panicked. Grammy was lying propped on her pillows, her eyes closed and her mouth open, in a deep sleep. I’d been told by the nurse at the desk that if I found her sleeping I should wake her up, because she was due to take her medications in half an hour anyway. I sat on the edge of her bed and watched my grandmother. The closeness of this, the intimacy, made me want to run away. Her white hair framed her face in ringlets. She was wearing a pink nightgown and hadn’t taken off her pearl necklace and earrings. I could see the crevice where her breasts began. I marveled at how smooth and clear, how beautiful, her skin still was. Her face, almost like a man’s now, could have been a Roman bust: big eyes, straight nose, strong chin.

  This was my grandmother, who used to take me to church. She was old and would die soon. To awaken her seemed unbearably intimate. I took a deep breath and touched her upper arm. She sprang up like a ventriloquist’s dummy, but her eyes would not open. They looked like a cat’s, like shrunken almonds. “Who? Who?” she said. “Oh, Beverly . . . it’s you. Oh. When did you get in?”

  “A few hours ago.” I knew it would make her feel good to know I’d come directly to her. “So, how you doing, Gram?”

  “Oh, my legs. I have to use that damned cane wherever I go. I hate it here. Grammy loves your letters. She’s sorry she doesn’t write back, but Grammy’s got nothing to say. Nothing ever happens. Grammy’s so miserable. She prays the good Lord will take her, but he doesn’t listen. . . .”

  This could go on forever. I changed the subject to the stolen ring on my finger. I was not being noble. This was my reasoning: if I told her about the ring, it wouldn’t be stolen anymore, and I was planning on her being forced to give it to me. “Look, Gram,” I said, offering her my hand so she could look. “It’s your ring. I found it in your jewelry box.”

  “Oh, my ring,” she said. “I forgot all about it. It was from your father’s father. Let me see.” She did not pull my hand closer, but expected me to take the ring off and hand it to her.

  I did not want to do this, because I knew my grandmother and was sure she wouldn’t give it back. But I had no choice.

  “Oh, it fits,” she said as she slipped it onto her finger. “You can’t wear it. You’re not married.”

  “I wear it on my right hand. See? I use it to hold on this ring.” It was an amethyst I’d found in a thrift store, very cheap because its band was so wide and misshapen. “Look, Gram, I’ll show you.” I held out my hand for my grandmother to return the ring, but she wasn’t budging. She’d Indian-given me her diamond.

  “Grammy,” I commanded. “Give me the ring.” One teenage mother, feeling forever deprived and so forever owed, to another teenage mother feeling exactly the same.

  Looking like she was bidding a long-lost friend goodbye, Philomena handed me her ring.

  “Thank you, Gram,” I said.

  “Don’t lose it,” she said.

  I’ve heard that the second half of your life is the opposite of the first. In the first half, you are the sun as it’s rising, the earth growing smaller below you. But in the second half, you are the sun as it’s setting, watching the earth grow large as you near it.

  I do not want to think of myself as the pinnacle of all things; I do not want to be so self-centered anymore—and I don’t want to have to be forced before I can give, like my grandmother. My family, my friends, the people I love are important. I want to come back down to earth, plant my feet firmly on the ground, and be with them.

  I picture myself moving into my parents’ house to take care of them, running errands, cooking, nursing, pulling up shades to let in the light. My old life would be history. No more eating out almost every night, no more great food in ethnic restaurants. No movie or two or three a week. I see my women friends and their ambitions for careers and relationships, faces and bodies, spin into thin air without me.

  It’s grown late. I’m in bed with the lights off and Beatrice still hasn’t come in. I think I will sleep now but am haunted by a documentary I’ve seen about Mother Teresa. The cinematographer who lived in my courtyard in Santa Monica had shot the film in 1978 and said that Mother truly believed that when she washed worms off of flesh, or hugged a man who’d been dying so long his skin had begun to stink like rot, she was wiping the wounds of Jesus, she was holding Jesus in her arms and giving him love. I watched the film on video back in LA, and for a few days fantasized about joining Mother’s Sisters of Mercy. The sisters were instructed to bring joy through their smiles, because joy was the best medicine. The sisters were never idle even for a moment, unless they were praying, or sleeping (on the floor).

  I could not get one sequence from the documentary out of my mind. Mother is sitting at a conference table in Beirut. Bombs are exploding in the distance and she is speaking to a table of men. “I am going to the orphanage tomorrow to rescue the children,” she says.

  “But Mother,” the leader of the men replies, “it’s too dangerous. There are bombs out there. I cannot allow it.”

  “I have prayed to Our Lady, and the bombing will stop.”

  The man smiles condescendingly. “If the bombing stops, I will personally escort you.”

  Cut to the next morning. The sun is shining, birds sing, and Mother Teresa rides in a van to the other side to rescue the children.

  I asked the cinematographer if it was a cheat, if it was perhaps a few days later or even a month; but she assured me that it was indeed the next morning. The implication being, of course, that Our Lady had cleared the way.

  The orphans the nuns rescued had been severely neglected, and most were physically deformed. A nun carried one boy who looked hardly human into a clean white bed. His body was coiled and twisted, his face scrunched like a knot. The sister slipped her arm under his shoulders, then began to touch him all over, running her hand round and round his face, patting his heart, stroking his arms. Slowly, so slowly, the boy’s body released then unwound. His eyes opened. He looked up at the nun, and then, with the back of his hand, he touched her.

  It had made me cry to see love literally, physically, open a person up. And the memory of it makes me cry again in Medjugorje.

  Just then I hear Beatrice walk in. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose as she turns on the light, then opens her purse and hands me a medal, saying, “It came from Padre Pio.” Pio was a stigmatist, who would certainly be canonized a saint.

  Beatrice tells me how in 1967, a year before Padre Pio died, her friend’s mother had passed away. And after her mother’s burial, her friend returned to her car, which was parked at the curb in the cemetery, and found Pio waiting in the passenger seat. Beatrice’s friend got in the car, and Pio said nothing, bless
ed her with his hand in the sign of the cross, then disappeared, leaving three medals of the Virgin Mary on her car seat. And now Beatrice has given me one.

  How have I deserved such a kind and generous person as Beatrice for my roommate? I’ve been blessed by having so many generous people in my life, all of my life—and all of my life I’ve noticed only what I lacked, like my grandmother. She hated the nursing home and had completely forgotten that my parents had offered her their house; Philomena was too determined to believe as she’d always believed: the world is an unkind and very disappointing place.

  Like Philomena, I’ve been refusing to notice what I’ve been given.

  And when I’ve found out how much I haven’t acknowledged, will I ever forgive myself?

  Mary’s death was never written about, and there is no historical record of it. But legend has it that she never actually died; she experienced her Dormition—a falling to sleep. And as she was about to depart this earth, she summoned all the apostles to her side, even those who were already dead. Doubting Thomas arrived on a cloud.

  Then, as Mary breathed her last breath, Jesus came down to pull her up. Her ascent into heaven is called the Assumption.