Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  This new sense of confidence felt good. The experience had been a bonding one. I remember thinking that the three of us might remember this day around the dinner table during some future storm.

  It was dark when we got home, but I’d left a light on, and inside it was a warm and cozy autumn night. We dried off and changed our clothes, and the windows steamed as we made homemade pizza. I rolled the dough, Joseph made the sauce, and Jason sliced mushrooms with a sharp knife, a thrill for a seven-year-old. In the living room afterwards, I sat under a lamp in a stuffed chair and read Middlemarch, which had been assigned for a class, while Jason and Joseph lay at my feet, drawing the log cabin Joe planned to build us. Smoke curled from the chimney and our happy faces smiled in the windows. I remember the wonderful feeling of contentment and how it turned into fear even as I looked at Jason and Joseph drawing on the floor. Joseph had bought land for the log cabin and begun blasting rock to build the foundation, ten minutes from where we’d both been born. But I was at Wesleyan now, and I didn’t want to get married anymore. I wanted the same dream I’d had when I got pregnant: to move to New York City and have an exciting life. The depth of the contentment I’d felt a moment before had turned into a choke hold around my chest. I would not be hemmed in by the boundaries of a family backyard, or stuck reliving my parents’ life.

  I broke up with Joseph on Memorial Day, and I couldn’t make myself tell Jason until a week later. Jason had bathed and changed into his pajamas; I sat on his bed and told him the news.

  “I’ll never see him again?” Jason looked scared.

  I nodded.

  “We won’t get lobsters? He won’t be my dad?”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  His face collapsed and he covered it with his pillow, sobbing. I took away the pillow and pulled him to me, feeling his heart beating behind his bony back, trembling with every sob, this little fragile boy whose life was in my untrustworthy hands.

  I don’t think we ever mentioned Joseph again.

  How scary it must have been to depend on someone as undependable as I was.

  And then, as if that weren’t enough, I’d forced him to live with Nigel.

  I’d thought I was special in college. I hung out with Socialists who were impressed that I was a daughter of a cop—a single mother on welfare who’d finagled her way into Wesleyan. I’d thought that New York, like Wesleyan, would open up like an oyster, but it closed like a rotten clam. Nobody was impressed with me; I worked as a secretary. I sat in bars and played Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” on the jukebox and told people I was a poet, or I recounted the plots of the novels I was going to write. One humbling afternoon, a guy whom I’d just told I was hoping to make a documentary on popular dance made me wither by saying, “Real artists make art. They don’t talk.”

  I got dolled up one night and went with a friend at two in the morning to Studio 54. It was freezing. I shivered behind the rope as Steve Rubell came out and stood directly in front of me. He looked me up and down, smiled, and lifted the rope to let in someone else.

  By my first New York spring, I saw myself as a deluded hick, a desperate, unhip little wannabe—I was ripe for the fall. I believe I made a pact with the devil when I hooked up with Nigel Gunther that spring.

  I went to MiLady’s, my favorite bar, one Friday night after Jason had taken the train to Connecticut to spend the weekend with my parents, and spotted a man with curly blond hair, silver filigree tips on his boots, and a skull ring on his pinky finger, with which he scanned down the racing odds in the Daily News. I sat down at his table and said, “Hi.” He had holes in his T-shirt and an intense Rasputin gaze. I thought he was so cool . . . especially when within a few minutes he let me know he was a painter, photographer, computer visionary, and Mensa Society member, a SoHo-Tribeca pioneer who’d recently lived in a storefront and bathed in a fire hydrant—and now lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid or Nancy tried to burn down their room.

  On our first date Nigel wore aquamarine mascara and told me he was doing a series of photographs of mannequins in store windows and a performance-art piece for which he would take at least one drink in every bar south of Fourteenth Street, all in one evening. Other women would have run screaming. But despite all evidence to the contrary—his calling me twice an hour all through the day, his showing up with a black eye because somebody whacked him with a beer bottle—I was convinced Nigel would be my guide into the world of hip, interesting people, which had so far shunned me.

  And all I had to do was be a little blind, and drunk most of the time, to keep believing this.

  When I told Jason we were moving in with Nigel, his eyes bugged out and he dropped onto the daybed in the living room. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “He’s a creep, Ma. Don’t do it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s weird. He’s a show-off. Please, Mom? I don’t want to.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “You’re crazy. He wears makeup.”

  “You are too straight. You’re just like your grandparents.”

  “And you’re too weird.”

  “Thank you for the compliment.”

  Nigel insisted I quit my secretarial job. I was a poet; I should write poems, and he would support me. Jason and I moved into a loft Nigel had sublet, and Jason escaped every chance he got, taking Metro North to his grandparents’ in Connecticut.

  Nigel was very romantic while Jason was away. He bought me a skintight Betsey Johnson black-and-blue, diagonally striped dress, tied a short black silk scarf around my neck, and said, “Just stand there. Don’t move.” Then he took my picture a dozen different ways and sighed, “Sometimes I think I’ll just die.” I wore a waxy orange-red lipstick I can still taste, black eyeliner, a slash of rouge, and I wrote short poems: “I wear black and blue / I turn myself into a bruise for you.” We never went anywhere without Nigel’s introducing me as “This is Beverly, my lover. Isn’t she beautiful?” Nigel photographed me walking, talking, thinking, sleeping, making love, eating, drinking, screaming at him. In exchange for our mounting bar tab, Nigel traded close-ups of my blown-up lips puckering next to a hammerhead, which were hung above the bar at Raoul’s. Those lips were as close as I ever got to the glamour I craved.

  Nigel liked me on display, but he did not like me out of his sight. One night I met my girlfriend Kate for a drink, and when I returned home Nigel had a raging fit, then had a fit every time I tried to slip out again. I had no money for my own apartment. I was a captive; then I was a whore, because unless I wanted to endure a crying, stomping rage, to which Jason was privy through the walls of his room, I had to screw Nigel every morning and every night. Usually I put a pillow over my head during the act, as though my hiding would make me disappear. When I got pregnant, I knew I couldn’t go through with having his baby. I could never have a baby with him. So I had an abortion, never thinking about it much, just knowing it was something I had to do.

  We moved to an old Dutch row house—really an abandoned reconstruction site—far west on Canal. Jason made friends with two kids who’d just moved to the city from California, named Juano and Amaal. He was always at their house around the corner, hanging out and sleeping over. I got him a shoe-shining kit, and sometimes the three of them would come to my new favorite bar, the Ear Inn, and shine shoes for a dollar, then go play pinball at the Cuban fast-food joint down the block.

  I stuck with Nigel for almost a year, until it was spring again. It was a Saturday night and Jason was at his grandparents’. Nigel and I ate dinner; then, at around ten, we went out to the Ear Inn, and there in a corner was a fortune-teller, an attractive middle-aged woman with jet black hair and a red flowered scarf tied on the top of her head, telling fortunes for five dollars. I sat at the table and received another communication from the other side. She rolled three pyramid-shaped dice and said sternly, “Who is the man with light hair and blue eyes?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Who is the boy with light hair an
d blue eyes?”

  “My son.”

  “Leave the man and go to the boy. He’s crying in the dark. He needs you.”

  My stomach clutched and tears sprang to my eyes. Had my need to save Nigel been stronger than my need to save my own son? I’d been in a muck of self-degradation, a haze of drunkenness where Jason existed only as a shadow wavering on the periphery. My poor baby. My anchor, my chain, my sanity.

  On our way home, a few blocks from the Ear Inn, I walked a bit ahead of Nigel. When he grabbed my arm to slow me down, I whirled around and yelled, “Get your hands off of me! I’m leaving you!” He grabbed my other arm, and with unnatural strength I broke his hold, and then I ran. I ran until he stopped yelling, “Beverly, don’t do this! Come back! I love you! All I ever do is love you . . . !” I ran until I could no longer hear his footsteps, and then I ducked behind the tire of a trailer truck and caught my breath. I was in front of a loading dock, so I climbed onto it and huddled in the corner, and slept.

  At dawn I wandered around, then sat on a bench and stared at my dirty fingernails; I touched the motor-oil stains on my pant legs. How had I become this person? When I looked up, I saw people walking into a church. It was Sunday. I walked in too and sat in the back. I realized it must be almost Easter. It was a Protestant church and there were no statues, but the sun shooting through the stained-glass window at the same moment a magnificent organ blasted its first chord filled me with awe and a familiar but long-ago emotion. It felt like something powerful and kind was wrapping me in an embrace and pulling on my heart at the same time. I’d had this feeling before, almost every time I’d stepped into a church. It was as though every dead relative I’d never even met was watching over me, wanting to hear me, as though the air itself was a balm of sympathy. As tears of gratefulness made tracks on my grimy face, I believed I would find some way to leave Nigel. I had to.

  When I went back to him that morning, he wept for forgiveness, promised he would change. A week later, he said he would baby-sit Jason, and I could go out with Kate. So I went out.

  At the end of the night, Kate and I pulled to the front of the building in a cab. The windows were black and jagged, like punched-in teeth. Glass covered the sidewalk. “My God,” Kate gasped.

  “Jason’s in there.” My heart thudded against my ribs. “Call the police.”

  Nigel was huddled in a corner, crying in the dark. He’d thrown a wrench through the TV. The makeup mirror he’d bought me, with round colored bulbs surrounding the glass, had been stomped to bits. The slides he’d taken of me were strewn all over the floor.

  I brushed past him and through the mess without saying a word. I ran up the stairs as he yelled, “Look what you made me do! I’m so sorry. Beverly? Where’re you going? Come back.” His voice was getting closer. He was following me up the stairs.

  Jason jumped out of bed and ran to me.

  “Mom! I was so scared. I was afraid you wouldn’t come home.”

  “I’ll always come home, Jason. Put on your coat and your shoes.”

  Nigel was in the room. He grabbed my arm. “What are you doing? You’re not leaving.”

  “The police are on their way. Let go.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “Jason, run outside. Kate’s there.”

  Jason ran.

  Nigel’s fingers squeezed my arms so hard they bruised. I tried to breathe deeply so I wouldn’t start screaming and flailing and kicking and biting—which would only escalate the craziness. Nigel cried and shook me, saying over and over, “Why are you doing this to me? All I ever do is love you. I love you so much. You can’t leave me. Don’t leave. . . .”

  Luckily the police arrived in minutes. “Take it easy, buddy,” one of them said. “Let her go.”

  I never felt safe with you. . . . My son’s words haunted me in Medjugorje as I pictured him up in that room, hearing Nigel stomping around, crying and smashing, glass crashing onto the sidewalk; Jason upstairs with the blanket over his head, wishing and wishing, but not believing I would ever come home.

  I never really recovered from that descent into hell, and neither did Jason. We slept on Kate’s living-room floor until I’d saved enough for us to move to Avenue A, where I sank into a depression I didn’t come out of until Jason was away at college. I was terrified of how low I’d sunk with Nigel, and because I didn’t know how I could have ever let such abuse happen, I could never trust that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

  Jason couldn’t, either. I think something broke in us. And it was still broken.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” I cry, the blanket over my own head, wishing it never had happened. Wishing I could go back and change things. How could I ever repair the damage? I weep and I pray: “Please, please, dear Mary, be the mother I never was. Heal my son’s heart. Mother him. I didn’t. I don’t. I don’t even know how to.”

  If only Jason were a child now, I could do it over again, I would try harder, I would love him and protect him . . .

  I think of paintings of the Assumption, where Mary floats up through the clouds, angels at her feet, the world down below, and up above are God on the left and Jesus on the right, holding his cross, waiting to welcome her. But then there are the other paintings of Mary as Queen of Heaven. After she has floated up, she’s crowned queen and sits on a throne or stands on a cloud holding her infant son, Jesus. The sequence is illogical; it’s not linear. If life were like that, I could hold my baby now.

  The first recorded apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary occurred in 270. Since then there have been hundreds, maybe thousands; in this century alone, in a span of less than fifty years, from 1928 to 1971, there were 210. But in all time only ten have been sanctioned by the Church, three of them in this century. It’s popularly believed that the Church fosters these spectacles to increase faith and to be able to make shrines at which they can hawk relics, but apparitions have always been imposed from below on the Church authorities, who dread having to deal with them.

  The Church’s stand is that the word of God is in Scripture, period. Apparitions belong in the realm of private revelation, and it would be preferable to keep them private. It’s dangerous to spread words from Mary’s mouth, channeled through the mouths of fully fallible (potentially even crazy) humans.

  The first apparition sanctioned by the Church occurred in Mexico City, where Mary appeared as the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was 1531. Mexico had been conquered by the Spaniards, and the people were demoralized, ravaged by disease, instantly made to feel oppressed and inferior by the white men who now ruled. Juan Diego, an Indian peasant and recent convert to Catholicism, was walking by a hill, where he saw a beautiful lady calling to him. When he approached her, she told him to please go to the bishop and tell him she would like a cathedral built on this hill in her honor. The hill covered the temple of an Aztec goddess named Tonantzin.

  Diego did as the lady asked, but the bishop threw him out. So the lady made beautiful Castilian roses grow all over the hill, then asked Diego to please pick them and place them in his shawl. “Go my son,” she said, “and give these to the bishop. This time he’ll listen.”

  Castilian roses were the bishop’s favorite flower and did not grow in Mexico. No roses grew in Mexico City in December. When the bishop unwrapped the shawl, he saw not only the roses but an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s cape, and was forced to believe the peasant.

  When word spread of the miracle, the Mexican people knew their mother had come to save them. She had chosen one of their own people—not a Spaniard—to carry her message to the bishop. And the bishop had been forced to pay him the respect of listening to him. Mary’s action reflected her promise in the Magnificat: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.”

  What the Franciscans had been trying to accomplish for a decade happened overnight: an entire nation converted to Catholicism. A basilica was built on the hill, to which millions still walk in pilgrimage every year, many of them o
n their knees. Juan Diego’s shawl has hung in the basilica for over four hundred years; it was made of cactus fiber and should have disintegrated after forty years. It has survived an explosion set off underneath it, gunshots, fire, and acid. Scientific testing was performed in the 1970s, and the scientists concluded that since it would be impossible to paint such a fine image on such a roughly woven surface, the painting could not be of human origin. When a photo of the Virgin’s eyes was blown up, the image of Juan Diego could be seen in her pupils.

  Guadalupe’s image decorates every town in Mexico and almost every home. To the people, she is the Virgin Mary with dark skin, affectionately known as La Morena. She is the Mother of Jesus; she is generous and courageous and fiercely loves her children. People ask for favors and promise Guadalupe what they will give in return if the favor is granted. One woman promised that if her infant daughter was cured of a life-threatening disease, she’d carry her daughter all the way to the basilica of Guadalupe, two states and a hundred miles away. The girl was cured, but the woman wasn’t able to make the journey until her daughter was ten years old. She carried her daughter and walked for three months to get there, but she fulfilled her promise.

  Emblazoned on a banner, the Virgin of Guadalupe led the rebel army into the revolution that won Mexico its independence from Spain. The Mexican people love Mary with such passion that in procession they will explode with loud cries like at a soccer match, “Viva la Virgen! Viva la Virgen!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  With all of my past life radiating around my heart, I go to mass at Saint James, I pray Hail Marys with three thousand people, I sing, I kneel, and I weep shamefacedly for who I was, the cruel things I’ve done, but I weep from relief too. I’m looking into my own face; I’m pointing to my own heart. It’s pierced with a dagger. It’s bleeding regret, and I’m giving it to Mary. Saturated with her compassion, baptized by that sweet pained expression, I feel love for all the people I’ve hurt, and I feel love for all the people crowded around me at Saint James, Mary’s children. I love all the pilgrims gathered every day in our own little chapel for mass. As a group we sing off-key; half of the people stay kneeling through the whole service; and half of the people say their petitions out loud when Father Freed comes to the part of the liturgy where he says, “Let us pray”: “For my aunt who is diagnosed with cancer,” let us pray. “That my children come back to God,” let us pray. “For the end to abortion,” let us pray. “For all the priests and religious,” let us pray. I say my petitions in my heart, “Please, dear God, help me heal. Help me love. Heal my son.”