by Lisa Samson
© 2009 by Lisa Samson
An Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis De Sales, first edition published in 1609.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Samson, Lisa, 1964–
The passion of Mary-Margaret / Lisa Samson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59554-211-3 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3569.A46673P37 2009
813’.54—dc22
2008050890
Printed in the United States of America
09 10 11 12 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Deborah Leigh
With love and prayers and hope
as you enter this exciting new
stage of life. I’m so thrilled
to see the beautiful young woman
you’ve become.
I love you.
Aunt Bee
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
1. The Passion of Mary-Margaret is not a retelling of Hosea and was not written to be read as such.
2. The term religious is used in this work as a noun at times. A “religious” is a priest, a brother, a nun, or a religious sister who is bound by vows to an order or who has received the sacrament of Holy Orders.
3. A religious sister technically is not a nun. A nun is cloistered within the walls of a convent or monastery.
October 2000
Dear Angie,
All these years and it has come to this. You’ve outlived me. I knew it would happen and I knew you’d be the one to find this in my underwear drawer. Why Mary-Francis had to come up with the idea of writing down our lives for the benefit of those who’ll follow us is understandable, but no less annoying. I think anonymity in serving God is crucial to the devout life, so I’m only going to let this be unearthed after my passing. However, I suppose Mary-Francis is right in the long run. We have a history here and it’s part of the new sisters’ story. We all belong to one another, but that doesn’t mean they get to know everything about me while I’m still around. A girl has a right to keep some things to herself. But I do promise to tell this with as much love and grace as I can despite my attitude! (There’s service in a nutshell for you.) So you can breathe a little easier, my friend.
I write for those who will follow us, so they’ll know that sometimes God calls us to do things we may never understand, and that sometimes God calls us to do things we can grasp the reason of right away. Usually there’s a little of both in the mix if you live long enough and develop the capability of recognizing the Divine fingerprint. Holy smudges abound indeed.
I’ve loved serving God with you. I am in good health as I write the following recollections at seventy years of age, and with Sister Pascal due to arrive in a few months, so young and full of the verve we could all use a little of these days, I thought maybe I should heed Mary-Francis’s words. Perhaps we might impart a little of what we’ve learned even when we’re gone. Although, indeed, I’ve never felt particularly wise, just willing. And even then, my brain sometimes protested like an argumentative Sophomore even though my body jumped in the car and took off. Jesus was always at the wheel, but he’s not particularly cautious. In fact, he takes hairpin turns at seventy miles per hour if you want to know the truth of it. But as he is God, I’ve always figured he knows how to drive better than I do. Yes, I’ve left myself wide open for a smart-mouthed comment from you. Refrain yourself, missy. I’m not a slowpoke, I’m simply careful. And I’m not the one who had my license suspended when I was twenty, might I remind you. Oh, Angie, we’ve had fun, haven’t we?
You’ve been my good friend, my companion, and my sister in the faith and in the Lord for so long. And we’ve eaten a lot of ice cream together too, made big messes in the kitchen, and laughed ourselves silly during the monologues on The Tonight Show. Selfishly, I hope you miss me. But you’re not much younger than I am; I bet I’ll be seeing you soon.
Love always,
Mary-Margaret Fischer, SSSM
P.S. You don’t think this will offend anybody, do you? You’ll notice I left out the time you, Jude, and I went down to Aruba. Nobody ever needs to know about that, I assure you!
This little collection of my scribblings is dedicated to the School Sisters
of St. Mary’s who will follow me in this place. God be with you.
I’m praying for you and shall be until we meet face-to-face.
Mary-Margaret Fischer, SSSM,
Abbeyville, Locust Island, Maryland, October 2000
MY SISTERS, IF I BEGAN THIS TALE AT THE END, YOU WOULD know my heart is full of love even though nothing went as planned. I could tell you God’s ways are not ours, but you probably know that already. And I could tell you that his mercy takes shape in forms we cannot begin to imagine, but unless you walked in my shoes for the past seventy years, you could not feel the mercy I have been given. The mercy God gives us is our own to receive, and while sometimes it overlaps with others’ like the gentle waves of the bay on the banks of which I now sit, for the most part, the sum and substance of it, the combination of graces, is as unique as we are.
So I will begin this tale at the beginning, on the night my mother conceived me in a moment of evil, a moment not remotely in the will of God, although some might beg to differ on that particular point of theology. It’s their right and I don’t possess the doctrinal ardor to argue such things anymore. So be it. What you think or what I think on the matter doesn’t necessarily make it true. God is as he is and our thoughts do not change him one way or the other. If you’ve an ounce of intellect, you’ll take as much comfort in that as I do.
My mother, Mary Margaret the First, as my grandmother called her, began cradling my life inside of her when a young seminarian took her against her will by the walls of Fort McHenry. Most evenings after teaching second grade in South Baltimore, she walked up Fort Avenue to the five-pointed star-shaped fort from which the Battle of Baltimore was fought in 1814, rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, and so forth; and those British frigates sailed up the Patapsco River with Francis Scott Key on deck, penning what would become our national anthem.
The seminarian knew about what my Aunt Elfi called my mother’s “evening constitutional” and sometimes he would join her in the gaslit, city twilight, hands clasped behind his back—at least I picture him that way—bent a bit forward at the waist and listening to her talk about her students perhaps, maybe the other religious sisters, for she had just taken her final vows as a School Sister of Notre Dame. Perhaps she talked about her pupils’ parents, or how she enjoyed listening to the radio shows in the evenings in the cramped apartment she shared with her friend, fellow sister, and coteacher Loreto; how their school had been seeking ways to provide at least one good meal to the children a day, considering how many of their parents were out of a job after the
crash on Wall Street.
I don’t know what my father must have said in return, but I’ve always wondered. She must have been caught by surprise, surely, because Grandmom said my mother was sharp and quite a good reader of people. He must have fooled her somehow. Grandmom said he was the seminarian at nearby Holy Cross Church. Perhaps he’d even heard her confessions. Not that they’d have been shocking. Grandmom said my mother didn’t give her much trouble.
Perhaps as they walked, the sun slanted its rays against the faces of the buildings, turning the stones and bricks from gold to crimson, the sky blazing with magenta and violet as though sheer scarves were waving behind the clouds. Maybe the cobalt night soaked into their clothing during the chill months, deepening the black of their coats, drawing the color out of their scarves and the character out of their features until they happened by a lamplight.
One evening something evil entered into him and he entered into her and I resulted. Did Grandmom tell me? If so, she certainly didn’t employ that terminology. My age necessitated more delicate, obscure phrasing, perhaps something about the things only husbands and wives should do being forced on someone else. I can’t recall exactly when I found out, but it feels like something I’ve always known and preternaturally understood. I might have overheard a conversation. I don’t know. That my mother was a religious sister in an unwanted pregnancy threw fate completely out of balance. When I was thirteen, I figured I could put things aright somehow, maybe justify my existence by picking up the torch my own birth snuffed out.
It’s bad enough to be born from the sin of two consenting adults. But I resulted from rage and control, from one person overpowering another in the assumption his right to take was more important than her right to give. That takes “man meaning it for evil but God meaning it for good” a giant step further. Yet blaming God for the lies of an Egyptian nobleman’s wife who didn’t succeed in getting Joseph to succumb to her hardly subtle sexual requests and that wine steward’s selfish forgetfulness is somewhat different than giving him wholesale credit for rape. You have to draw the line somewhere or pretty soon Ted Bundy truly couldn’t help himself and that terrorist they’re talking about these days, Osama Bin Something or Other, really is on a holy mission, and who knows where that will end up? That sort of theology shouldn’t sit well with anybody, whether you’re from Geneva or Rome, so perhaps I have more doctrinal ardor than I realized ten minutes ago! Goodness me. I suppose I’ve grown slightly opinionated now that I’ve entered my eighth decade. So sisters, forgive an old woman a little ram bling at times. Not that seventy is that old, mind you. Indeed not.
My mother came home to Locust Island to grow a healthy baby inside of her as she strolled by the shore and prayed in the chapel here at St. Mary’s, feeling at home among the sisters. My grandmother’s house was just down the street from the school. She prayed hours and hours on a kneeler, spending more time on her knees than at home. Aunt Elfi most likely joined her frequently because Aunt Elfi knew being present was the first way of helping anyone.
Grandmom said my mother would sit on Bethlehem Point every evening and stare out over the waters of the Chesapeake, her gaze pinned to the spider-legged lighthouse out on the shoals. And she’d cry. Grandmom didn’t ask her to expound or emote. Grandmom was second-generation German. The chill had yet to dissipate completely.
I imagine Mary Margaret the First took hope in that whirling light of the lighthouse out on the shoals, as I always have. It makes me think that somehow there’s somebody capable of warning you of danger, and if you find yourself in it, that person will climb into a lifeboat and come to get you. It’s difficult to take your eyes off the piercing white beam when you sit here on a dark night.
We all want to be rescued and we’ll look in the craziest places for that rescuer, won’t we? We all want to be found.
Mary Margaret the First sat beneath the same tree under which I’m sitting now. It’s one of the reasons I always end up here. The way the tangled roots protrude from the ground perfectly cradles my lawn chair, and on afternoons in late July or August, the canopy of leaves stifles some of the sun’s heat. Only when my mother sat here, it was young, a tree with more hope than wisdom.
Conceived in sin, birthed in sorrow, I entered the world in a flow of blood that failed to cease once I had been released into my grandmother’s hands. After fifteen minutes or so, Grandmom knew the bleeding wouldn’t stop on its own; my mother was dying. Aunt Elfi fetched Doctor Spanyer, who said with an aching stutter that by the time they’d deliver my mother to the h-h-hospital, having to procure a boat to the mainland and then ride two hours to Salisbury, she’d be d-d-dead. The poor doctor died a year later on the way to the very place my mother couldn’t go, his wife refusing to believe he’d bleed out when his son Marlow ran over his foot with the lawn mower. He did. She moved away after the funeral.
The inhabitants of Locust Island formed a hardy, scrabbly sort of people back then because every person knew in their core that if something traumatic happened physically, the nearest hospital more than two hours away, there was nothing to be done but die. And if death was the only outcome, well, the sooner the better and heaven above let it be something massive and quick: a fall from a roof onto your head, a fatal heart attack or stroke, a smash on the skull with a sledgehammer. A lawn mower accident. Postpartum uterine hemorrhaging.
Aunt Elfi then slipped out into the rain and fetched Father Thomas, our parish priest. Tears in his eyes, for he was my mother’s confessor, he anointed my mother’s forehead, eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet and prayed the prayers of extreme unction, the first prayers my new ears ever heard. Aunt Elfi said he then picked me up and said, “The final puzzle piece in Mary Margaret’s redemption.”
I still don’t know what that means. I can’t say my life is completely explainable, that I don’t have a lot of questions. God willing, the answers will be unearthed before I die.
My grandmother named me Mary-Margaret the moment my mother passed away. I’ve always liked the hyphen she gave, as if somehow it serves as a bridge between my mother and me, a gentle, silent “and so on and so forth.” And it is my own hyphen.
Had my mother lived, I most likely would not be writing in this notebook. She planned on giving me up for adoption, wanting me to have both a mother and a father, and returning to her order, teaching, most likely farther away, leaving the entire ordeal behind her. And I wouldn’t have blamed her. Of course Grandmom said she always planned to raise me there in the little apartment with one couch and too many straight chairs; that she would never have let me go to another family when ours was well and good and fully capable of raising a child. And I can only believe her as she never did pass me on to anybody else.
The main players in this morality tale have passed on: Jude, my mother, Grandmom and Aunt Elfi, Brister, Petra, Mr. Keller, and even LaBella. Except for John, Gerald, and Hattie, and myself. Actually, if you’re reading this, I am dead too. I assume the raping seminarian passed away as well. I never knew what happened to him. Who among us would have the spirit to embark on such a search? I don’t even know his name, if anyone discovered his crime, or if he slunk away into the arms of the Church.
And did he take refuge in the arms of Christ? Did he seek forgiveness? Did he, perhaps, turn into something more?
See? Questions. Never to be answered. Most likely I’ve waited too long. He’d be long in his grave by now. I’m old!
Well, my Aunt Elfi said my mother’s soul passed into me as lightning trilled the air around us. Grandmom said she was crazy, we were all Catholic, we didn’t believe in that sort of thing; surely the soul entered the baby well before she was born and would she please be quiet and help her wash her only daughter’s body and clean up the blood?
The blood she gave for me. Yes, I’m painfully aware of the symbolism.
Aunt Elfi would have carefully rolled up her sleeves, donned an apron, and pulled back her long, white hair. She would have lovingly dabbed each rose-bloom of blo
od away, leaving a comet of iron-red across my mother’s thighs as she wiped her clean. Aunt Elfi moved in a gentle, patting way, her voice never much above a whisper.
My mother, by the way, was the product of an indiscretion between my twenty-eight-yet-still-unmarried grandmother and an island tourist from Belgium. Though completely out of character for my thick-jawed grandmother, even less understandable was that he found her horsey, Germanic face attractive. So sex seemed to be something unredeemed in and of itself in my family of females, but somehow taken up and looped around the fingers of the Almighty and put to rights in the aftermath.
Well, Aunt Elfi never misbehaved like her sister, but it only took one look at her to realize someone scrambled her brain with a fork before it was fully cooked.
Later on that September afternoon in 1930, the sky clear and the orange sun gilding the fallen rain, men and women walked home from the dock, from their fishing boats or the seafood cannery at the western edge of our island. Cans and cans of oysters were shipped out from Locust Island every day. Abbey Oysters. The company used a monk as the logo even though many of the islanders were Methodists. As you can imagine, Friday was the best day for sales, a fact that did not escape even the most Methodist of Methodists. Sometimes I walked by the cement block building and looked through the grimy window, watching as the shuckers’ hands darted like minnows extracting the smooth, precious meat from the rough, prehistoric exterior. Rounding the corner, the pile of shells grew with each day, only to be carted away and ground into lime.
Those men and women passed by, oblivious to the tragedy as they scuffled down Main Street in front of our building.They didn’t know the bell from St. Mary’s Convent School that called the girls to dinner served as a death knell for Sister Mary Margaret Fischer as well as a ringing in of a new life, proof, some wise person once said, that God desires the human race to continue. They figured another day had passed, much like the one before and the one before that, back to the day one of their parents or siblings or children passed away or someone was born into this world. We always remember days when something begins or ends.
