Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  I hugged him.

  Then, seventeen years later, we heard Ray was dead.

  Ray’s ex-wife had our New York number because I’d spoken to her when Jason graduated from high school and I’d called Greenwood Lake information to invite Ray to the ceremony. Donna and Ray had separated when Jason had visited his father. They were now divorced but she had Ray’s phone number and gave it to me. Before I hung up, we had a nice chat.

  Donna told me she was going to community college to become a nurse, and that her two daughters were real good, smart girls. Donna had been seventeen when she’d become pregnant by Ray, just like I’d been. Her oldest daughter, Jessie, had been nearly the same age as Jason, a year and a half, and Donna had been pregnant with her second child, Jenny, when Ray deserted. “I had pork chops on the stove and he never came home.”

  A few weeks later, she found out Ray had shacked up with her best friend. “She’s a dog. Who could do that, then face me in the supermarket? She should leave town. I’ll be damned if I will.”

  I told her how I wanted Ray to know that his son had been a straight-A student at Stuyvesant High School, and that he’d won a scholarship to a very good college. I wanted Ray to feel proud, and I wanted Jason to have a father at his graduation.

  “Believe me, Bev,” Ray had said when I called, “he don’t want to know his old man. I got bleeding ulcers, pancreatitis. I’m in and out of the VA hospital. When I get my shit together . . .”

  I did not tell Jason I’d reached his father and he’d refused to come to his graduation. I had told him, though, that he had two sisters, and Jason had said that maybe once he got his driver’s license he’d take a ride up there to meet them; but he never did. The time had come for us to meet Donna and her two daughters.

  I’d flown to New York to accompany Jason to the funeral in Greenwood Lake. Jason had a therapist’s appointment in the morning, then picked me up in his VW Rabbit. As we drove through a stretch of bumper-to-bumper traffic on Thirty-third Street, Jason said, “We have to talk.”

  My son had never said those words to me in his life.

  “I’m really angry with you.” He’d never said those words, either. My stomach tightened, even though this is what I’d been praying for. “I’m really angry with you for not saying right away that you’d come with me to the funeral.”

  I’d had a conflict, a reporting assignment for the radio documentary, and it had taken me till the next morning to say yes. Jason was absolutely right. If I’d had a scheduled interview with God himself, I still shouldn’t have even blinked at agreeing to escort my son.

  “I never ask for things, because I’m afraid you’ll say no,” he said. “It’s easier not to ask than to face being disappointed. You’re a selfish person.”

  It was true. My own needs had always been more important than my son’s. This was not the way love acts; this is not what a child deserves. It had taken such courage, I knew, for him to speak. I closed my eyes in the car and asked Mary to show me how to help, to grant me the grace to change and to give to my son in ways I didn’t even know how. I wish I had said, “I’m sorry. I love you. I wish I could do it over again, because I know how I’ve hurt you.” But I didn’t. I said, “It must have been horrible to have a mother who never put you first. Mothers are supposed to do that.”

  His eyes filled with tears.

  In Greenwood Lake we had to stop our car to make way for a jiggly woman in a muumuu crossing the road. Her hair was dirty-blond, long and stringy. Despite the early-spring chill, she wasn’t wearing a sweater. Her belly hung halfway to her knees, and you just knew she had missing teeth. Jase and I looked at each other and said nothing, although we both knew what the other was thinking: Please don’t let that be Ray’s ex-wife. We wanted her and her daughters to be great. I wanted Jase to have sisters whose genes he’d be proud to share.

  The restaurant was constructed of logs and had fake tulips stuck into the ground along the sidewalk. When I pointed them out to Jason, he laughed, which might have been the first time he’d loosened up since I’d come east.

  We entered a wood-paneled bar, beyond which was the dining room with big windows facing the lake. The moment we stepped in the door, three attractive women arose from a table in the dining room, smiling. Donna was nothing like the woman we’d seen on the road. She was slender and lively and had a lovely smile. “Well . . .” We looked at each other.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “This is my youngest.” She pulled on Jenny’s arm. Jenny looked at me, then at Jason, and giggled. Her large green eyes slanted downward like her father’s—like Jason’s—only more so. I’d been told by her mother that, at eighteen, she’d just had a baby six months ago. It had been her idea to look up her father, and they’d found him, one hundred pounds, stricken with AIDS, and dying in a hospital a few towns away.

  Jenny’s older sister, Jessie, seemed relieved to release her hand from my handshake. She looked away as soon as our eyes met. Her coloring, her nose, her cheekbones, her chin were exactly Jason’s. But she seemed to be trying to tamp down her beauty. Her hair was pulled severely into a bun, but you could see hundreds of little kinks that gave away its lush curliness.

  They’d reserved a table at the far end at a window overlooking the lake. Jenny’s fiancé, a short, handsome young man, took off his baseball cap and joined us. They looked like high-school kids and were still living in Donna’s house. Jessie had a job in a bank but still lived at home too.

  Jase and I, in our expensive haircuts and fashionable city clothes, polished by our elite educations, could hardly speak to each other. We’d left the working class while Donna and her daughters hadn’t. But they were close and warm with one another, a family. How much had I sacrificed for my ambition?

  We all ordered drinks, then food. And we talked.

  Jessie had not wanted to visit her father in the hospital, but Jenny and her mother had visited Ray every three weeks for the last six months of his life. Jenny had brought her baby to meet him. By the time he died, Ray was incoherent. He’d had a girlfriend, who had taken his few possessions from the hospital, including a crocheted comforter that Jenny wanted. She was planning on tracking the girlfriend down. They were all wondering if the woman would show up at the funeral tomorrow.

  “I doubt it.” Donna sounded a little jealous.

  “I’m pissed at him.” Jessie broke her silence. “When I was around seven my mother was going out with a friend of my father’s. My father traveled all the way across the state to stand in the street and scream up at the window, ‘That’s my woman, that’s my woman.’ And there I was, his own daughter, right under his nose. And he didn’t even look.”

  I looked at Donna, and she looked at me and shrugged.

  Jason told us the story about hunting his father down and that he used to want to find out if his father was dead because then he could get social security.

  “Jessie used to say the same thing,” Donna said. Brother and sister looked at each other and smiled. “There was this girl,” Jenny said. “It was probably Juice. She used to go around school saying that Ray wasn’t her father but he loved her more than me. So one day I just had to beat her up.” She sat taller in her chair and grinned.

  Donna wanted to go to the bar for a smoke, and Jenny and I went with her. “One thing,” I said, “you have to hand it to Ray: he chose great women and he had great kids. It’s amazing he got you pregnant at seventeen, too.”

  “Oh, no. I can’t blame him for that. He didn’t want to. He said I was too young. I was a virgin and there was a lot of pressure to have sex. I seduced him. I convinced him. I refuse to be mad at him. It doesn’t do me any good, and he was incapable. He was.”

  He was incapable of not lying; he was incapable of being good to himself or to anyone else. It was true.

  When we returned to the table, Jessie and Jason seemed to be enjoying themselves. Donna said, “One time Ray called out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from him for a couple of years. He needed
a hundred dollars to get to Florida. He’s a caddie and it was winter. He swore somebody owed him money and as soon as he got it he’d pay me back. You know how that goes. So I says, ‘I don’t know, Ray. That’s one hundred dollars less of a Christmas your daughters are going to have. I’ll have to ask them.’ I asked them and they told me to do whatever I wanted. ‘It’s up to you, Mom,’ they said. But he never called back. And I’d be damned if I was going to hunt him down.”

  How does a person get to be like Donna? Generous, kind, warmhearted, forgiving. Keeping that man in her life when he’d done her so wrong. Had she been a girlfriend of mine, I would have told her to get her head examined. I would have said, “You don’t owe him anything—he got himself in the jam, he can get himself out.” I’d have said, “Think of your kids and their Christmas, not that no-good waste-of-a-human-life junkie ex-husband. I don’t know how you can even speak to him.” But maybe then her kids wouldn’t have learned kindness, compassion, selflessness. Maybe they would have felt good sacrificing for their father, even a father who’d left them in the cold. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, except that somehow Ray had found a good woman, who’d loved him till he died.

  The next morning Jason and I were the first to arrive at the church and sat silently in a pew toward the front. When Jason’s sisters arrived, they told him to move over and sat next to him. I could feel Jason kind of melt beside me. I imagined him the older brother. His sisters would tease, maybe fuss over him. Tell him what to wear, to grow his hair longer, let it go curly. They’d tease him about his J. Crew catalog taste in girlfriends. He’d hassle them about their guys. Finally, Jason would have a family.

  Donna sat behind us between two of her relatives. She patted her girls’, then Jason’s, shoulders. Donna and I held hands for a second.

  Besides us, Ray’s widowed sister-in-law, her son, and a few people from Donna’s family were all who attended Ray’s funeral. Ray’s mother was still alive, and living in a nursing home in Connecticut, but she didn’t come.

  The priest looked drunk as he wove to the top of the aisle for his eulogy. He tucked his hands inside his vestments and said grimly, “Animals were put on the earth to serve humans. Humans were put on earth to serve God. And believe me, I know about sneaking a bottle of scotch into the veterans’ ward, and I’m not talking about when I was a priest. God rest Ray Budrow’s soul. He is at peace.” He nodded and turned back to prepare the host. The mass took all of twenty minutes.

  On our drive back to the city, I asked Jason how he felt.

  “I don’t feel anything,” he said abruptly.

  Alone with me again, my son was a million miles away, buried in an avalanche of ice. I was in agony; I did not know how to melt his anger.

  The next morning, back home in LA, it was a Sunday and spring and the wisteria was in bloom. I felt light and filled with energy and stepped out into the sun first thing. I went to a service at a New Agey church I’d been to before. The five hundred people at the service smiled in that California-dreamy sunshine way. The minister was black and charismatic, and the rock-and-roll gospel music sublime. The minister told of a boy whose fingers grew back through prayer. He said God was in us and through us and with us. We should not pray through a sense of lack but in the knowledge that everything we want is already there, inside us, where God lives. He said we were God’s instruments of love in the world. We all stood and sang a song that began, “I surrender, I surrender, I surrender. . . .” It felt so good. As soon as I got home I planted a cherry tomato plant and a basil plant in pots, then set them in the sun on the terrace. I baked chocolate-chip cookies and called some friends. Only after they’d left and the sun began to set and I was walking on the beach, saying a rosary, which I had managed to do almost every day for maybe a month, did I remember that this day was my anniversary. That twenty-eight years ago I married Ray Budrow. I also remembered that I had been depressed on every April 27 for twenty-eight years.

  And now here I am, in bed in Medjugorje, remembering and crying at the same time. I do not cry for the man Ray might have been or the man he had been. I don’t cry for my son, who never knew his father, or for the stone-cold anger in my son’s heart. I don’t cry for the coming together of two people, for the bed we shared, for Ray so young and all dusty and tired from work, for the laughing we couldn’t stop, high on marijuana, for the breeze through a van with an American flag painted on its side, and Ray and I clutching each other in the back of it high on horse tranquilizers, the world slow as syrup and our son at home asleep in his crib, us holding on tight, dizzy and high, the music on the radio a trigger to yell at the top of our lungs, “Holy Christ!” holding on for dear life. I don’t cry for Ray’s life, so pain filled, so short. I don’t cry for him. I don’t cry for me, or his son, or his other wife, or his daughters. Instead, I say a rosary, and the images of those two girls and my son at dinner come to me. There was something the same in the three of them, something sweet and warm, something good and kind, and it was in their father, too. Ray, at his core, was a sweet and dear person. Ray was damaged, and he’d suffered more than anyone he ever hurt. I feel a deep well of sorrow for him, which I knew to be the beginning of forgiveness. It had taken twenty-five years.

  I open the Bible to Corinthians: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. . . . It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. . . .”

  I so want to try.

  Then, next morning, at my first communion in thirty-five years, after the host has been turned into the body of Christ, I kneel and say the same words I’ve said at masses twice every day in Medjugorje: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

  Only, this time I really hear them. This time when Father Freed walks from person to person offering communion, I do not bow my head to refuse it but raise my face to him. As the host melts on my tongue, I imagine forgiveness like a warm stream, flowing to my heart and bathing it with love, healing it. My tears fall, and fall, like rose petals from heaven.

  Mary is a woman who gets what she wants.

  When Mary appeared in 1858 to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, one of the world’s most renowned apparition sites, the Church and Mary herself were under siege by French atheists and rationalists. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which had just been made dogma a few years earlier, was being ridiculed.

  Fourteen-year-old Bernadette was not a very bright child; perhaps that’s why Mary chose her. Bernadette said that when she asked the beautiful Lady who she was, as the bishop had instructed her to do, the Lady said, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” words Bernadette had been afraid she’d forget, and so had repeated them over and over until she returned to the bishop. No one who knew Bernadette could believe that she had come up with the words on her own.

  Almost three decades before she appeared to Bernadette, Mary had appeared in Paris to a young nun named Catherine Labouré. Mary gave Catherine a vision of a medal Mary wanted minted, on which she called herself the Immaculate Conception. After hundreds of healings were reported by people wearing the medal, it was declared miraculous, which put some heat on the powers that be to make Mary’s Immaculate Conception dogma. (The Immaculate Conception does not refer to Jesus’ being conceived without the act of sex, but to Mary’s having been born without the stain of Original Sin, making her a perfect vessel to receive the Lord.)

  The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was instituted in 1854, but four years later it was still under fire, so Mary appeared again, this time to Bernadette, to bring attention to and to defend her doctrine.

  The clergy and the town government were skeptical, and some were downright hostile, but the people followed Bernadette in droves to the dump where Mary appeared. When a large crowd had gathered, Our Lady asked Bernadette to dig in the dirt, which released the underground spring that became the famous healing waters of Lourdes.

  Bernadette went to live in
a convent in nearby Nevers, where she was not embraced by her fellow sisters, who were jealous of all the attention she had received. During outings, Bernadette would be seen walking all alone, yards behind the other nuns. Our Lady had told Bernadette, “I do not promise you happiness in this life, but in the next.”

  Bernadette died at thirty-five, and some years later her body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt. I believe she also smells of roses. Bernadette was canonized as a saint and in a glass coffin in the little church in Nevers, her body is exhibited, as fresh as the day she died.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It’s our last morning of fasting, after which we move back to the private houses and are set free for lunch. Later in the afternoon we will pile onto a bus and hike up Mount Krizevac.

  We’ve been told that the Virgin Mary will appear to Mirjana the next day on a hill, and that when Mary appears, she automatically blesses everything you bring to her. I shop like I’ve won a raffle and the prize is to be let loose in a store for an hour. I buy a hundred Medjugorje medals with Mary on one side and Saint James Church on the other. I buy refrigerator magnets of the Virgin, and Saint Benedict medals I’m told will drive away evil and cure animals of illness. I buy a thin, delicate-looking Virgin and also a crucifix made of white pressed marble, which I plan to hang on a white wall. And I stock up on rosaries: I buy a hundred plastic Day-Glo rosaries, a dozen made of small gold beads connected by a thin strand of silver, and six made of crushed rose petals. I am planning to bring them all to the apparition tomorrow; and then back home when I hand them out as souvenirs and good-luck charms, I will say that they’ve been blessed by the Mother of God, and let everyone make of it what they like.

  I have become converted to the use of the rosary as a weapon against evil, a magic ring of words that helps you to meditate on peace and to feel it—a magnet that draws Mary into your heart. My friends and acquaintances will all have a rosary in their houses, and if they ever feel the desire or need to pray on one, they’ll be prepared.