The Passion of Mary-Margaret

by Lisa Samson

  I’m so very sorry to hear about Aunt Hattie. Poor dear. I know you two have always been good friends as well as sisters-in-law. Tell Uncle Gerald the brothers and I are praying for them.

  I don’t have time to write a detailed letter as the drought has been terrible this summer and a steady stream of patients rolls through the clinic. I did want to tell you to pray for a girl named Tengetile. She is fourteen, head of household, and her uncle is raping her regularly. We’re doing all we can for her, but this culture fails to protect these girls. Pray for her safety and that we can show her a little kindness in the name of the Lord. I’m sure she has AIDS and if she isn’t pregnant already, she soon will be. At times like these, as you might well guess, I feel utterly inadequate.

  You are always beside me in my thoughts and prayers. I hope you’ll come next summer. We sure could use the help, and I’d love to see you.

  Much love,

  John

  If John is still alive as you read this, sisters, please offer up a prayer for him.

  Well then. Let’s pick up where we left off with Jesus dropping that whopper of a request on me! Marry Jude? Lord have mercy!

  I called Angie first after I landed back on the island, still shell-shocked at the marching orders Jesus had given me. She still lived in Bainbridge though the school year had ended, helping to set up the new school.

  “You don’t do stuff like this, Mary,” she said. “Not even close. What’s gotten into you?”

  “God told me to do it.”

  “How?”

  “He has his ways.” I rested my feet up on the secretary’s desk again. It was amazing the woman didn’t kick me out of her office. But Patty was a nice enough lady who, I can tell you right now, almost always eavesdropped on the conversations anyway, and the fact that she found them so interesting just proved how boring life at St. Mary’s could be.

  “Care to tell me?”

  “I can’t. Just suffice it to say I know it for sure. Do you really think I’d be doing this of my own accord, Angie? Jude Keller? Captain VD as you’ve so taken to calling him?”

  She chuckled. “That wasn’t very nice of me, was it? But I swear, Mary, I didn’t think he’d end up as your darned husband.”

  “Don’t jump ahead of it all. He may refuse.”

  “Are you nuts? The guy’s been cuckoo over you for years.”

  The bulbous black receiver began to feel heavy in my hand. I sighed. “You’re right. I was just clinging to the hope he’d think I was too good for him.”

  “Well, he’d be right about that!” she snapped.

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Why should I be? We had plans, Mary! Big plans and now you’re telling me God’s told you to give up everything you’ve ever wanted to be, all your entire life, from practically the cradle—”

  “Not the womb?”

  “Have it your way. The womb. And you’re going to find one of the most . . . disgusting men ever to walk the face of the earth and marry him? Did God say anything about having sex with the man?”

  “No.”

  “Well, at least there’s that.”

  “Angie!” Boy, would Patty get an earful now. “The Church encourages sex within marriage and you know as well as I do they deem it a sin not to procreate if it’s possible.”

  She blew a big breath into the phone. “Yeah, yeah. I know, I know.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t really want to do this. I mean . . .”

  “You do love him, though, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but not like a wife should.”

  “But, okay—how to say this delicately—you feel excited by him, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, but that was—”

  “The devil? You’ve said that before, but I’m not so sure. So he excites you and you feel love in your heart for him.”

  I had to say it. “It’s a pity love, Angie! What kind of a marriage is founded upon pity?”

  “Apparently yours.”

  Apparently so.

  “And probably more marriages than we realize,” she snickered. She paused. “Okay, cut the crap, Mary. It isn’t pity and you know it. I don’t know what it is. I don’t even think you know. Heaven knows it’s confused and convoluted. But is it enough?”

  “Will you pray for me?” I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  “Of course. Probably more than I have time for now, so thanks for that. Have you told the higher-ups?”

  “No. I called you first.”

  . . .

  “Angie?”

  . . .

  “That’s all I needed to hear, Mary. You say the word, you need anything, I’ll drop everything. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I hung up and walked to the graveyard of St. Francis. I had no flower to lay upon my mother’s grave, no white rose to express the sorrow I felt at not fulfilling her dream and my own. My loyalty felt shattered and spread like pulverized glass upon the grass over where she lay, but I had a greater loyalty. And surely she would understand that. I tried to picture her, reaching forward and comforting me. But I could not.

  I sat cross-legged next to her as the day waned, until Sister Thaddeus found me and sat beside me as the night set in.

  After withdrawing from the order of the School Sisters of St. Mary, a day that still hurts my back teeth so much I hate to think about it, I cried in the arms of Sister Thaddeus. I had visions of my mother, whose dreams were shattered by that seminarian, and now, mine were shattered by Jesus. The irony was inescapable. I thought I knew what Jesus meant when he told me I was his bride.

  Apparently I jumped to the wrong conclusion. But I could share none of this with Sister Thaddeus.

  She sat me down and made me a cup of tea. She appeared so fresh in her gray habit and white veil, her long skirt and shirt pressed perfectly, a far cry from my habit that always ended up wrinkled, underarms circled with perspiration.

  “Let me tell you what I left behind to follow God’s path for me, Mary-Margaret.” She eased down onto a hard chair, her back pin-straight, sitting ladylike yet at ease. Still, there was always a bit of a nervous twitter to her fingers. “My father was a very rich man. Very busy too. He owned one of the shipbuilding companies in Baltimore.”

  “My goodness.”

  “Yes. He gave me this good education here at St. Mary’s and planned on enrolling me into university and handing the company over to me someday.” She picked up her teacup and stared into the reddish brew. “He was very forward thinking.”

  “You gave up the life of wealth and privilege?”

  “Oh no! More than that. All that wasn’t what I was looking forward to. I was looking forward to working alongside my father for a couple of decades, learning what he loved, and what I loved too, and giving him peace of mind in his old age. But mostly, just being with him. You’d had to have known him to know what I mean. I had no other siblings and my mother was always ill. She was delightful but highly delicate.”

  “Do you ever have moments of regret?”

  “Not regret.” Her eyes softened. “But sadness at what never could have been. It’s sad to leave behind what we love, what we thought we were going to do, even for the best of reasons.”

  “Do you understand, Sister Thaddeus?” I leaned forward, feeling the edge of the table knife into my belly.

  “I believe you when you say this is from God. If you really know that, then I believe you.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I shook my head, heart in two pieces.

  After that, I looked at myself in the mirror for at least thirty minutes so I could examine my own head. Then I packed my suitcase once again, took the ferry to the mainland, hopped the bus to Salisbury, got on the Greyhound, and made the pilgrimage of my life. I was finding God’s lamb, and hopefully he was still on The Block and not in Europe. Talk about going from one world into another! Our Mother Superior thought I was as crazy as Angie did because why would God call someone out from a religious vocation to a marriage
with the scum of the earth?

  Only she said it much nicer than that. And I knew she just wanted the best from me.

  Marriage to the scum of the earth.

  Isn’t that what God called Jesus to do? I wanted to ask her. But I held my tongue. Still, she hugged me to her and I sniffled and teared up and she rested her olive-skinned hand atop my head in blessing. She told me she’d pray for me, and she held true to that promise.

  Once in Baltimore, I hopped onto a streetcar outside the bus station, wishing I could be doing anything else at that moment other than heading into red lights and sordid lives. But there was no use in putting off the inevitable. Perhaps somebody there could give me some information about Jude’s whereabouts in Europe. I remembered a woman he mentioned, a friend who billed herself as LaBella. So, arm in arm with the Spirit of God, I stepped onto Baltimore Street in plain street clothes I bought at Epstein’s. A calf-length black skirt and a yellow blouse. I kept the sensible shoes for good measure. I guess I didn’t realize then I was ahead of the times in general “nun-wear” as Jude would have called it. The thought makes me smile as I write.

  I liked the old habits, if you want to know the truth. Angie, on the other hand, wanted to have a habit-burning bonfire after Vatican II. I told you she was an upstart.

  Hoping against hope I wouldn’t have to walk by too many clubs and peep show parlors with the notorious leering doormen, I strode up to the first doorman/bouncer I saw, hugging my purse against my breasts. I suppose now’s a good time to tell you that they’re ample. Not overly ample, but enough to be classified as “full.” I never really thought too much about them until that moment in front of the Gayety. The doorman handed me a flyer. I still have it. It reads:

  GAYETY

  Coolest Place in Baltimore

  PEPPY BURLESK

  MATINEE DAILY

  FRENCH FROLICS

  With

  FRITZI WHITE

  TOMMY MILLER, Your Favorite Funster

  EXTRA! EXTRA!

  PARISIAN ART MODELS

  My first thought? French! LaBella! Glory be to God, my prayers were answered!

  “I’m looking for a . . . dancer. She goes by LaBella?”

  “Do she or don’t she?” the doorman, obviously a hunk of muscle overlaid with the fat of too much drink, too much sitting around, and too much all-you-can-eat prime rib, said, his voice low but strung with a nasal twang.

  “Let me take that back and make it a statement then. I’m looking for a dancer named LaBella. Have you heard of her?”

  He nodded appreciatively and tipped his cap back a little. “Yeah, sure. She works down at the Two O’Clock Club. Blaze’s place.”

  Blaze Starr. I hadn’t heard of her then. She’d yet to have her famous affair with the governor of Louisiana, or was just beginning it. I don’t know the exact dates of that. As if that’s a big surprise.

  “Thank you.”

  “Uh, if you don’t mind my askin’, what’s a gal like you doin’ down here? You need to be careful.”

  I stepped back into the middle of the sidewalk and began strolling toward the club. “I’m not alone!” I called over my shoulder.

  “Suit yourself!”

  There’s not too many sadder locales than places that are supposed to be all lit up and fancy-looking just sitting there like every other building during the day. All the cracks are exposed, the dirt, the smears, the graffiti. Nobody cares enough to make them presentable by sunlight like the lawyers’ offices do, the banks, the clothing stores, the grocers. Those establishments operate with God and everybody looking on and not thinking a thing. But right now, these places aren’t allowed to be hidden by the dark night, or obscured by the neon lights and flashing bulbs. You see it truly naked. I do believe that’s why so much sin happens in the dark. You can’t really get a good view on it for what it is.

  Blaze Starr was out getting her hair done when I walked into her club, thank goodness, and wouldn’t be back for at least another hour. I’m sure religious sisters and strippers have some things in common. Chiefly, doing something that is and always will be a mystery to most other women. I asked the doorman, a skinny guy with zinging black eyes and bark brown hair that skimmed the edge of his collar, if LaBella was in. He said she didn’t get there usually until around nine p.m.

  “Could you give her a call?” I asked. “I’d like to see if I could come around and ask her a few questions about a mutual friend of ours.”

  He got a “knowing” look on his face. But he couldn’t have known.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “His name is Jude.”

  “Jude!” He snapped his fingers. “I remember him. Nice enough kid when he first got here. But—man, he toughened up but quick.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  Honestly, I just didn’t want to know what it was like in there.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Mary-Margaret.”

  “Figures.”

  While I stood outside, I was actually propositioned by two men. “In these shoes?” I hollered at them where they sat in their car. “You’ve got to be joking!”

  “What’s your angle then?” the passenger, a man in a yellow sport coat, said.

  “I’m a nun! God loves you!”

  They sped off. I laughed.

  Did I lie? Nope. In my heart, I was a religious sister. And somehow I always would be. It didn’t make any logical sense. It was just the way it was. Jesus, he would always be the one I was really married to. I couldn’t have even considered doing as he asked with Jude if that hadn’t been the case.

  The doorman returned with a slip of paper. He held it out.

  “Highland Avenue?” I asked. “What kind of stripper lives on Highland Avenue? In Highlandtown, for heaven’s sake?”

  “She’s not like you’d imagine. You’re going to be surprised.”

  And why not? It wasn’t like I wasn’t already overwhelmed by the unexpected.

  “Her real name is Rosalie.”

  “Thanks.”

  He scootched back up on his stool. “Be careful out there. This isn’t the place for a gal like you.”

  “I know. Why are you being so nice?”

  “My sister has red hair. What can I say?”

  I asked him if he knew which bus would get me there and he said the number eight. He pointed me to the closest corner. “It’ll come by near the top of the hour. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  So I waited there, glued to the pavement, and I looked up at the heavens and I thought, Jesus, what have you done?

  I felt silly entering Jude’s world like that and my heart was shrouded in a cloud of doubt. Of course Jesus knew what he was asking. But I didn’t know what I was doing. Because I had no doubt I would find Jude. The problem was in picturing myself asking him to marry me. How in the world was that going to go?

  But I wouldn’t need him. I would be married to him. I would love him as a Christian loves the lost lamb. I might even be excited by him if I could get past the fact that he’d slept with multiple men and women (and I doubted I’d ever really get past that), but I would never need him. I would only be there because I wanted to save him, and I only wanted to save him because Jesus told me to.

  That, to be perfectly honest, stank to high heaven.

  Maybe I was really crazy, a stark-raving lunatic, Jesus just a figment of my imagination, and I was listening to my deep-down craziness, or worse—there it was again—the devil. In fact, maybe the whole religion business was just a worldwide delusion, that the moving of the Holy Spirit wasn’t anything but events and coincidences and happenings we knit together on our own as having some kind of cohesion to make it seem like Divine intervention.

  And yet, I got on the number eight bus.

  Rosalie answered the door to her row house, a two-story, narrow affair covered with postwar Formstone in the block between Eastern Avenue and Fleet Street.

  I imagine she puttied on a fair amount of makeup for h
er act, but standing there behind the screen door, she looked sixteen, her brown hair feathering around her shoulders, her pale skin a perfect ivory expanse but for the pink blush of her cheeks. Her greenish grey eyes, hit from the side by the sunlight, glowed with gold flecks. An older baby sat on her hip.

  “Mary-Margaret!” she said, her smile broad and baring pleasingly crooked teeth that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn’s. “The club called and let me know you were coming. Come in!”

  “Thank you.” I felt large and oafish when I stepped into her home. I’m not a large woman by any means, but Rosalie wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d taken off her pink sweater and shown me a pair of shimmering wings. Ethereal didn’t begin to describe her.

  And yet, her home was quite the opposite. A heavy old wood-framed couch upholstered in gold and white damask, once likely her grandmother’s or, well, somebody’s grandmother’s, was set against the green sidewall. Dime-store prints hung on the walls, mostly depicting opaque flowers in bulbous vases against dark backgrounds, what Morpheus calls “Almost Flemish.”

  “Come keep me company while I make dinner.”

  I skirted the television—she must have done pretty well to have afforded one back then—and followed her back to the kitchen as she chattered about Jude.

  “I’ve known him for almost ten years now and he’s told me so much about you, Mary-Margaret! I feel like I know you already!”

  We could have been women meeting at the park, or at church.

  She set the baby, dressed in a light blue dress, white tights, and black patent leather Mary-Janes, into a mahogany Jenny Lind high chair. “Just a minute, Alice, and I’ll get you some din-din.”

  Alice was almost bald with bright blue eyes—the picture of vulnerable innocence, naturally. I wondered if she’d ever find out what her mother did for a living or if Rosalie would quit by the time Alice could figure out something wasn’t quite normal around their home. People have kept secrets far longer, I suppose, and double lives aren’t so uncommon that nobody’s ever heard of one before.