Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  All I knew was I felt as bad as I’d ever felt in my life, and I started to cry.

  In the back of the church, an organ struck the first chords of some Mozart. The music was so powerfully moving that it shook me out of myself. I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my shirt and looked around. An open dark-mahogany confessional stood at the back of the church, in which a handsome priest with salt-and-pepper hair sat with his chin in his hand and his head bowed, listening. He was lit from above, like a painting. Next to him, talking into his ear, was an elegantly dressed woman with her dog, a little terrier, staring longingly up at her. I couldn’t tell if it was the dog’s devotion or the woman’s faith or the priest’s compassion, or all of these things, but the vision of them filled me with so much longing, I doubled over weeping, remembering now the kittens in the dream I’d had that morning. They were, of course, the kittens in my backyard, and they were also the kittens that a stray cat had had in my kitchen one freezing-cold winter evening back in Connecticut, the winter after my husband, Ray, had left. There were six kittens in that kitchen. I didn’t know what to do with them, swarming underfoot, overwhelming me with a feeling of being out of control. Did the need of the helpless make me feel out of control? Could I ever love if this was true? A brick hit me in my chest. I found myself remembering that baby I’d aborted, the one I’d had with Nigel. I’d never thought much about the abortion, not even as I lay in the recovery room, awaking from the anesthesia, hearing the moans of the woman next to me, “My baby, my baby.” I did not cry. I refused to be sad. I would not have regret. I was controlling my own body; I was doing the only thing I could at the time. But inside, I must have suffered at the loss, and had never confronted my true feelings. Until I entered that church. Weeping, I calculated my baby’s age, eight, thought she’d been a girl like the baby in the dream, and wept, mourning for the first time the loss of her.

  When I came up for air, I found myself staring at the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the side wall. There was sadness in her face, and love. After Kip and I drove home that night, I dug her out of the closet and hung her on our dining-room wall above the yellow roses.

  I mourned the baby I’d killed back then, I’ve mourned my baby since, and I don’t want to mourn anymore, especially not as a result of Father Jozo’s finger-pointing sermonizing.

  Back in bed that afternoon, trying to keep warm, I’m exhausted from all the crying and churchgoing, the “salty tears in bleeding flesh,” the lectern pounding, all this regret. I do not want to be a crazy, sign-seeing, rose-smelling, rigid, right-to-life Catholic. I do not want to participate in this pilgrimage anymore. I’ve had enough. I will attend Father’s Slavko’s lecture this afternoon, but I won’t attend mass at Saint James. I will go for a beer.

  After the lecture, I pull on my black coat, wrap a scarf around my neck, yank my beret over my ears, and head for the door. But the moment I reach the door, Father Slavko, who has hung back uncharacteristically, reaches the door, too. “Going to church?” he asks.

  “No. I don’t know.” Suddenly I don’t.

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  In the car I say, “I’m a journalist. I don’t believe.”

  He looks at me and smiles, but not kindly exactly, more like he’s waiting for the punch line to a joke.

  “I’d like to interview you,” I say.

  “What for?”

  “To hear about miracles, cures—to get the history straight.”

  “These are not important things. You come in the side door with me. Get a good seat.”

  I sit three rows from the front and wait. This night in church is different. It’s the first time Father Slavko will lead the service. Someone has hung a screen up high to the left of the altar, on which the phonetic pronunciations for the Serbo-Croatian words to the hymns are projected. Father Slavko plays the piano and a group of kids plays guitars and sings around him as the rest of us, numbering thousands, sing too. Then, when the little concert is done, the screen remains for the hymns we sing after every ten Hail Marys, but Father Slavko has left the piano.

  He is kneeling at the altar, his forehead bent to the ground for an hour and a half, the microphone at his lips, leading the rosary in a voice that comes from someplace I know I have never been.

  I wonder if it’s a place I could ever get to—if I had the courage, if I had the faith.

  Mary gives monthly “messages for the world” from Medjugorje. In one of her messages this is what she said: “If they can’t believe in God, they should spend at least five minutes a day in silent meditation. During that time they should think about the God they say doesn’t exist.”

  Mary shows herself the way people would like to see her. In Africa she is black. In Mexico she has dark skin. Our Lady speaks all languages, is indescribably beautiful, and dresses in amazing costumes, which she changes for special occasions—on holidays she favors gold. Wherever she is, she announces her presence by perfuming the air with roses. Her apparitions are like visits, at which she comes for a period of time, tells you things you need to hear, then listens. And like any visiting mother she worries about you and tells you what you need to do to feel better. Basically, she tells you to pray, and not just for yourself but for one another. She asks you to pray for the whole world.

  She weeps when she sees us fighting or going to war. Tears fall during her visits; they fall from her face frozen in a statue, they fall from her face painted on canvas, masonite, and wood. Violence makes her cry blood sometimes. Violence killed her son. “Love one another,” Mary says. “Pray to heal the world.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before confession, I sit outside Father Freed’s door and shiver through bouts of anxiety as I wait. Terrified of revealing my heart, I begin to resist. Am I buying all this religious stuff lock, stock, and flaming heart? People on this retreat even believe in the literal location of a heaven and hell. They believe your guardian angel leads you to the only empty parking place in a parking lot. And they believe the closer you get to God, the more hotly the devil pursues you. Father Slavko says that Satan’s biggest triumph is getting people to believe he doesn’t exist.

  I try to remember when it was, exactly, that I switched to the devil’s camp and lost God, and decide there was no single moment, that it happened more like a shifting of the San Andreas fault. I remember that in the summer after the sixth grade, the same summer I got my period, I busted into the new junior high school under construction, shouting the song from Popeye, “Da da dadada da dada. . . .” I broke windows, slit open bags of cement, tossed the powder in the air, and tap-danced in it. I threw nails everywhere. I didn’t know why I was doing this. But I did know that I was being bad, and it was fun. When I saw the story in the paper, how “vandals” had broken into the school, and that “juvenile delinquents” were suspected, it was official.

  By high school, I was standing in front of the mirror, entertaining myself with the ugly faces I could make and fantasizing that the devil was looking out through my eyes. I daydreamed that I was a devil sitting on girls’ shoulders, tempting them to tell that lie, spread that gossip, steal those earrings, fuck that boy.

  When I got pregnant, I believed I’d received God’s punishment and that he’d betrayed and abandoned me, even though I hadn’t really believed in him since I’d learned about evolution in the seventh grade, and I hadn’t really believed in the devil, either. Or did I believe? Because whenever the world got scary, I still cried, “Please, dear God. . . .” But after I got pregnant at seventeen, I denounced God, the devil, religion, forever. All of it. Lock, stock, and flaming heart.

  And here I am, three decades later, about to confess everything and beg forgiveness.

  A mountain of toilet paper rolls is piled in a corner of the storage room where I sit across from Father Freed on a folding chair to make my confession. The room smells like a sewer, because sewage has backed up into the bathroom next door.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I say. “It
has been thirty-five years since my last confession.” I giggle. Father Freed smiles kindly and waits. I burst into tears. “I feel like I’m going crazy. All these people talking about suffering. Talking about Christ’s salty blood dripping into his wounds. It’s sick. They get off on it. They think suffering is good. Suffering is part of life, but they look for it, indulge in it to be more holy or something . . . it’s sick. I never asked Christ to die for my sins. I never asked him to be crucified. I don’t even like him. He’s a whiner. He says, ‘Look at me. I suffered for your sins. You should be grateful, but what do you do? Sin, sin, sin.’ I feel love for Mary. I really do. But this Christ martyr and his damned suffering—I’m sick of it. I spent my whole life trying not to feel guilty. I’m crippled with guilt. Why would I want to be a Catholic and make it worse? I shouldn’t even be here. I can’t stand this. I’m going crazy. I feel awful.”

  “Christ does not want you to suffer.”

  “But these people . . .”

  “This group is particularly zealous.”

  “Not all Catholics are like that?”

  “No.” He smiles.

  “You’re not? You don’t think you should wear a hair shirt or climb the mountain barefoot or be grateful that the sewage backed up into your bathroom so you can offer it up to God?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, there is sewage backing up into my room, and I’ve requested a transfer.”

  “Really?” I laugh.

  “Honest to God. Now, is there anything troubling you?”

  “I had an abortion. I had to. I can’t even say I wouldn’t do it again, and I’d never take away another woman’s right to choose. Maybe if I’d had faith, like Mary, I wouldn’t have had that abortion. I might have believed everything would work out for the better. But I didn’t have faith. And I still can’t imagine my life if I’d had that child. I was wild. I had sex indiscriminately for many years. I didn’t even enjoy it. It was the times. I was making a political point. Probably I was looking for love and couldn’t even admit it. I have gossiped cruelly. I have hated. I am critical and judgmental. I don’t like people I don’t even know. It makes me feel shitty. I don’t want to do it. I really do want to look with the eyes of love. To love as God loves, like Father Slavko says. But I’m mean. I make fun. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I’ve always been like that. Or at least since I was twelve. That’s really when I stopped believing in God. Do you think I’m possessed by the devil?”

  “I do not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You are not as bad as you think.”

  “I’m selfish. I have said no to love. I was the worst mother. I never once put my son’s needs before mine. I lived with three different men. Disasters. I always did what I needed to do for me, never what was best for my son. I always felt guilty, which made me depressed, which made me resentful. I used to say, ‘I’m like an older sister, and you’re like my younger brother.’ I’m like one of those cats who abandons her litter. I never wanted to be a mother. Not even when I was a kid. I hated baby dolls. I had postnatal depression till my son left for college. And my son suffers for it. He feels like he wasn’t loved. I damaged him. He’s depressed and he’s angry.”

  “Do you speak of these things?”

  “Kind of. A little.”

  “Have you asked for his forgiveness?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It would be good if you could encourage him to speak, to acknowledge his pain.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like you to pray to the Blessed Mother for help. Ask her to help you be close to your son, to help you to mother.”

  “I do all the time. I think that’s why I’m so attracted to her. Because I want to learn to be a mother. That and because I want a mother for myself. I want to learn how to trust, to stop taking every step expecting a pitfall.”

  “I’d also like you to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Do you know who she is?”

  “Of course. I lived in Mexico.”

  “I have a special devotion to Guadalupe. My church is called the Virgin of Guadalupe. She’s the saint of the unborn. She has two tassels on her dress. That’s the symbol for the unborn. Pray to her to help you heal from your abortion. You need to forgive yourself. God forgives you. He loves you exactly the way you are . . . not the way you think you should be.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “I would also like you to go to the chapel and sit with Jesus.”

  “I have adoration tonight. For an hour.” I nearly shouted in my panic. “I haven’t done it yet.”

  “Good. I want you to go to adoration and not pray prayers. I want you to just sit there and tell Jesus exactly what you told me. Confess everything and tell him exactly how you feel about him. Then just sit, and listen.”

  The adoration room looks like a room in a community center that’s been donated to shelter people during a flood. There are twenty people on their knees praying, lying in their sleeping bags in corners, or sitting cross-legged with blankets wrapped around them, staring at the monstrance containing the body of Christ. This has been going on the whole time, and I’d no idea.

  Since I began doing Mary research, I’ve read many times that Mary is the intermediary between her son and us. She brings us to her son. That is her role and her job. She is the conduit between the human and the divine. She was human herself but gave birth to God. It is through her that Jesus has his humanity. And by continually giving birth to faith, she continues to give birth to her son.

  I promised Father Freed to talk to Jesus, and I want to do it for Mary. He is her son, and she would like this. So I sit there and I repeat in my mind what I said to Father Freed, which takes much less than an hour. So while I’m sitting there, I ask Mary to help me understand why I should love her son and to help me give up my prejudices against him for being a man, and all that manhood conveys: judge and ruler, oppressor of women, testosterone driven, boss and superior.

  I close my eyes and picture Mary taking both my hands and pulling me to stand. She leads me to her son, who takes my hand, and I stand between them, one hand in Mary’s and one hand in Jesus’.

  I do not think this is a true adoration. But it is a beginning.

  In bed that night I think how wonderful and light I will feel if I can really feel forgiven.

  And then I wonder whom I can forgive.

  Ray. My husband. I’d never even learned to call him my ex-husband, and now he’s dead. Four months before I came to Medjugorje, Jason called me in California. He’d received a phone call from Ray’s second ex-wife, Donna. Ray had died at forty-seven of AIDS-related symptoms. Jason and I were invited to the funeral.

  Jason had seen his father only once after Ray left when Jason was thirteen months old. Jason was eleven, and we were living with Nigel, when he suddenly became interested in his father. “Where is he? Could we find him?” he asked one afternoon. And so I tracked Ray down through his mother. Ray was living two hours away, in Greenwood Lake, and he invited Jason to come visit.

  Jason woke me up before dawn, and as we ate English muffins, watching the sunrise through our windows, I asked, “Are you scared?”

  “How will I know what he looks like?”

  There’d never been a picture of his father in Jason’s, or in any, room. My box of pictures was stored in my parents’ attic. “Don’t worry, Jase.” I patted his hand across the table. “He’ll recognize you.”

  Jason withdrew his hand, put down his English muffin, and stared at the middle of the table.

  “You’ll be the only kid stepping off the bus alone. He’ll come to you. Just stand there. . . . He has black hair. He’s not tall, and he’s not short—he’s medium. I’m giving you money. If he doesn’t come, call me up. I’ll wait at home. I’ll come and get you.”

  “Does he look like me?”

  “A little. Not much.” There was a downward slant of the eye, a slouchiness in the shoulders, an occasional slant of the head or way of careening around
in the middle of a step. These similarities were subtle and over the years had been easy to ignore.

  At Port Authority, Jason put his backpack on, took the ticket from me, and climbed the stairs of the bus. He was so small; the backpack so huge. It was dark in the station, and the windows in the bus were tinted, so I couldn’t see which seat he took or if he was waving. I waved to them all.

  Climbing back down the bus steps on Sunday, Jason seemed shy. He was carrying a Baggie of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. We kissed hello. “What’s this?” I said, pointing to the cookies.

  “He lives with a woman named Linda. She baked them for me.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “Um-hmm.” He nodded. “She has a daughter named Juice.”

  “Juice?”

  “Because she likes it. She was only a baby. She couldn’t talk yet.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was nice. His teeth were bad.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We went to the bar. He gave me quarters for pinball. Sunday we went to see Rocky II.”

  “Did you like your father?”

  “Yeah. He gave me twenty dollars.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Save it, maybe.”

  “You going to see him again?”

  “Yeah. I want to.”

  Jason never heard from his father again.

  The next year, we were living on Avenue A when Jase had his twelfth birthday. Juano and Amaal came and we had an ice cream cake; then afterwards Jason brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink, our only sink, before bed. After he wiped his mouth with a towel he said, not looking at me, “How will we know if my father’s dead? We should find out. We could get social security.”

  “What would you prefer, Jase? Social security or a birthday card?” I asked.

  “A birthday card.”