The Passion of Mary-Margaret

by Lisa Samson

  “Mary-Margaret?”

  “And you are?”

  “Mrs. Keller.”

  “You mean Petra Purnell? I’m Mrs. Keller.”

  Let me take a moment to describe Petra. Her hair still jumped around her head in curls, and now behavior I once thought was so carefree I could see for someone acting girlish, someone acting younger than she was, someone trying to get her son’s attention.

  It made me sick too.

  She wore a tight-fitting sheath dress, cut low enough for an inch or so of cleavage to peep over the top of the scooped neck line. Her eyes were lined on top in the Egyptian fashion and she’d painted her lips a cotton candy pink.

  Still and all, it couldn’t beat my youth or my emerald green, satin nightgown. With my red hair, well, I hate to sound prideful, but I sizzled. LaBella would have been proud.

  “I took back my original married name,” she said, eyeing my chest. So the larger breasts were finally coming in handy.

  “I’d like to kindly ask you to stop beating our door down day in and day out. If Judey wanted to see you, he would have opened it by now, don’t you think?”

  She winced, then her eyes flickered up and focused over my shoulder. Her quick intake of breath told me all I needed to know.

  He stood just behind me and I felt his fingers curve over my collarbones and the length of him press itself behind me.

  “Mother.”

  She pouted. “Oh, Judey, I’m your mommy. Why have you been ignoring me like this?”

  Jude moved me aside, lightly pressed his mother onto the landing as if he was going to speak to her, and as he shut the door, leaving her alone on the hot iron steps, he said, “I’ve forgiven you, so leave it at that. If you come here again, I’ll hate you for the rest of my life.”

  He latched the door and leaned against it, staring down at the floor. “I wanted to say, ‘I’ll kill you,’ but I don’t think I would. I feel like it sometimes. Some of the dreams I’ve had.”

  He shook his head.

  I approached, placing my arms around him, laying my head against his chest. He was sweaty and yet cold.

  Her heels clicked on the metal steps, sending a hollow ring down the length of the staircase and her sickening wails filled the neighborhood. She didn’t go back to the lighthouse. In fact, nobody knew what happened to her after that until ten years later when Brister told us a friend of his saw her obituary in the Baltimore Sun. She had lived in Dundalk, was survived by a husband, Forrest Blanchette, no children. I thanked God he kept her away.

  I just finished up with Samkela for the day. I brought out the watercolor paints, and he started giggling. I want to take him home with me!

  Today I’m going down to Siphewe’s house. I’m taking her some laundry soap, a sack of rice, a sack of beans, and other nonperishable items from the little grocery store about a mile away.

  Siphewe has a story that made me laugh the first time I heard it, although it isn’t at all funny.

  She was much like Jude as a young man, I think, only with a violent streak. John had been ministering to her, had invited her to Mass on Sunday at the small chapel on the grounds of the mission. She was dating a young man and they were quite the wild couple and she started bringing him, said she liked the quiet for once during the week, loved the soft chanting of Father Luke (who grew up in the Eastern Rite), and John said she’d sit there with her eyes closed.

  During the week she might as well have been a demoniac, she got in such fights with her boyfriend. Fistfights, knife fights, and they’d come back together and do all the things they shouldn’t have. She was lucky she didn’t get pregnant.

  Finally, her boyfriend left her and she was so angry, she stormed over to his house and hacked at his legs with a machete. I’m telling you, she was a mess!

  Now the poor fellow can barely walk. He can’t work and to top it all off, a windstorm ripped across the plains about a month ago and Siphewe’s house, about fifty years old and not in good shape whatsoever, lost its roof and its western wall. Now she lives in a tent the Red Cross set up.

  Of course the priests at the mission have helped her out during this time, bringing her food and caring for the bruises and gashes she sustained during the storm.

  Her boyfriend is furious at John and the others and won’t come to church anymore. But Siphewe, well, she’s changed. She saw love in action, believed, repented, was baptized, and will take her first Communion next week just after she is confirmed. It will be a big day for John, Luke, and Amos. Father Ignatius too.

  I’m back from Siphewe’s. She was thankful for the food and made me a cup of tea and a coarse but delicious corn bread. You don’t refuse the offer of food here. I learned that several trips ago. She doesn’t speak English, but somehow we understood one another. John doesn’t know this yet, but she’s taken in three orphans whose mother died, most likely from AIDS, a few days ago. The father has been gone for two years at least. I’ll tell him when he’s finished looking at patients for the day.

  So much to do here. This is a country that crawls along on the backs of its women. But maybe that’s another story as well. It’s a beautiful evening and the sky would look much better with a colorful kite looping and diving across its expanse.

  Kites became very important to Jude and me. After we set about the cure for syphilis.

  We booked ourselves in a cheap hotel in Salisbury near the hospital for our penicillin treatment, a seven-day round for me, ten for Jude. With each injection, he seemed to change for the better emotionally. Death left him in stages and I gladly watched it go. We took long walks during the day and began to dream about what life could be like with the past truly behind us.

  That we would have children was assumed and the sooner the better. Neither of us were teenagers anymore.

  We ate ice cream in the evenings and dreamed out loud.

  “What would you do if you could do anything you like?” he asked me.

  “I’d be an artist. Just an artist. I’d do my crazy sculptures again and I’d make them bigger than ever. Outdoor installations.

  I’d love to try doing a bronze. And I’d like to do something like Brother Joe does, but maybe with runaways or something. What about you? What makes you happy?”

  “You’re going to think this is crazy, Mary-Margaret. I love to fly kites. I made some great kites when I was a kid. Remember those?”

  I used to watch him out of my window at school sometimes, out there on the point, flying his kites. And from off the lighthouse when he was smaller.

  “It always made me feel like I was doing something so amazing. Why is that?”

  “Because it’s attached to you and it’s flying and soaring and you’re holding on. It’s the closest you can get to flying and still be on the ground.”

  He closed his eyes as we sat on a bench downtown, licking our ice-cream cones.

  Finally, I said, “Do you like the beach? The ocean?”

  “I do. I almost packed up and went to Ocean City instead of Baltimore. I wish I had, but, anyways, it’s water under the bridge now.”

  “Do you think Brister would lend you some seed money for a business?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “A shop on the boardwalk. A kite shop. People fly kites at the beach all the time, and if they don’t they should. And you can make kites too, good kites, not those cheap things you get at the dime store.”

  “They’re such a waste of money.”

  I pulled a notepad out of my purse along with a pen.

  “Get planning.”

  He began to jot down ideas, supplies, other items we might sell. By the end of the trip, he had it all planned. I’d never seen this side of Jude.

  I only knew one thing, people like Jude needed to fly; you just had to help point them in the right direction. It sounded like a good life. And it was.

  I put my notice in at the school and they were sad to see me go, but, like most everyone else on Locust Island who were well acquainted w
ith us, thought it was the right move.

  The next September, almost a year after our wedding, we rented a furnished efficiency apartment on Wicomico Street and leased a storefront space on the boardwalk between Division and First Street, just down from the Plim Plaza where we honeymooned.

  Behind the apartment house, I rigged up my pulleys and chains and prayed that somehow I’d find wood from someplace. We had no truck and it wasn’t as if trees were aplenty there on that strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Assawoman Bay.

  Jude ordered the materials he needed for kite making: cane and hardwood, stripwood, crepe paper and nylon, glue, twine, and paints for me to decorate the kites. He ordered manufactured kites to begin selling right away. “I’ll make up some kits for people to assemble themselves. Family projects or what have you.

  And we’ll sell them for less.” I told him that was a fine idea.

  We called our business The Kite Shack. I tried to come up with all sorts of plays on words, High Hopes, The World on a String, and such, I can’t remember them now, but Jude would have none of it. “Let’s just keep it simple, Mary-Margaret, so folks will remember.”

  All winter long he worked on his kites and I helped him as the wood I needed had not yet shown up on our doorstep. I asked Jesus about it, but he remained silent. So. Kites it was, then. I painted some beautiful butterflies that winter, dragonflies and birds, stingrays and colorful, fanciful fish. Peacocks too. I thought the peacock kites would be best sellers, and they were.

  By December I was expecting, happy to think about a September baby. Good things seemed to happen to me in September. We both had such hope wrapped up in this child. For me, that blood connection; for Jude, the chance to break the family’s dark line of abuse.

  So while we made kites, God made our baby inside of me, cells collecting upon one another, forming this human child.

  Of course, we didn’t have ultrasounds in those days, but both of us felt the child was a boy. And no, Jesus didn’t give me the scoop ahead of time. But he did tell me one night John had a specific mission. “He will help save a nation.”

  Sounded pretty big to me, and I couldn’t quite imagine what he would do.

  For twenty years we lived in Ocean City and Jude made and sold kites and helped found a mission with a Jesuit missionary, and we both became part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The Oasis ministered mostly to prostitutes and Jude became a street worker, gentle and loving, but able to say, “I know where you’ve been. So let’s not pretend, okay?”

  Oh, we had some crazy meals around our table once we bought a small house on the other side of Ocean Highway, last house on the left, Bayview Avenue. The sunsets we watched over the water of the bay, the sails on the sailboats, turgid silhouettes against the flaming sky, as if someone drew them in India ink. The boats skimmed by, always adding a peaceful benediction to the day. There we’d be, sitting with the rabble of the town, laughing and picking crabs Jude caught in his traps off our dock, then steamed himself, or smelling the aroma of grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. Summer lasted so long there at the beach. Or maybe we just engineered it to be that way.

  God allowed my marriage to Jude to last twenty-seven years. I wondered at times if I was sent to Jude, or Jude was sent to me, or we were both given each other to make John. Then again, limiting God like that is never good. Knowing him, he had something up his almighty sleeve for all three of us. He’s quite thrifty, you know.

  Jesus took to showing up on my birthday, early in the morning before anyone else was up, just to tell me how glad he was that I was born.

  When I gave birth to John, I realized this was more than just one human being giving life to another; this was a holy calling, every bit as holy as being a religious sister. Yes, I knew that was the traditional teaching of the Church, but when I held that little boy in my arms for the first time, I knew it in every square inch of my frame.

  The birth was grueling, the uterine bleeding so intense a surgeon was called in to perform an emergency hysterectomy. It could have turned into a situation that mirrored my own birth, but we’d chosen to have the baby at the hospital just in case.

  Jude gave me a bag of bulbs the day John was baptized. Oh yes! Now I remember, white daffodils, for new beginnings, renewal. Resurrection. “I’ll plant them someday, Mary-Margaret.”

  But as happens with some things, they ended up under an old flowerpot in the garage and got pushed back in a corner, then covered with junk, and there they sat until I unearthed them when I moved away from Ocean City. I will plant them as soon as I get back to the island. We all need new life, fresh beginnings, renewal and resurrection. Now is the time. Now is always the time.

  There, I just wrote Plant Bulbs on my palm again! Let’s hope it works this time. I’ll keep refreshing it until I’m back in the States.

  I could tell John was special from the beginning, understanding the importance of our faith from an early age, talking about God in such intimate ways, referring to himself not just as a Christian but God’s friend. He began doing that at five and I had no idea from where he heard the term. Perhaps Jesus appears to John too and he’s not allowed to tell either! Sometimes I truly have to wonder about that.

  Jude never became overly vocal about his faith; he showed it by his actions, however, down at the mission, at the shop where he kept some kites he made out of scraps to give to kids with no pocket change. And Jude could spot them somehow. His ability to discern people was so much keener than mine, as well as his inherent knowing of who was down and out.

  No wonder Jesus wanted him for his own.

  John came to me one night as I sat out on the dock behind our house at sunset, plopping down next to my lawn chair. He was already almost six feet, all elbows and knees. “I wanted to tell you first, Mom.”

  “Did you fail your English test?”

  “No, I got a C.”

  “Not bad.”

  He was definitely more the science/math type.

  “I feel like God is calling me to the priesthood.”

  If the heavens had opened, spilling their light upon us, and if angels themselves had sung the Gloria, the moment wouldn’t have felt less holy.

  “And . . . I think he wants me to be a missionary.”

  “So, not a diocesan priest?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll pray God shows you.”

  As if that was doubtful, but sometimes God does seem to wait until the last minute and that, sisters, can be so utterly frustrating, can’t it?

  OH MY, I WANTED TO START WRITING ABOUT MY MOTHER yesterday, and don’t you know, John came squealing up in the Rover to the mission and jumped out in a cloud of dust. Precious there in the hospital had finally passed away and because no family came to claim her, he volunteered to take the body and bury her here at the mission.

  I’d gone into Manzini with John twice a week these past four weeks to feed her, and we even arranged for a woman who attends the Cathedral of the Assumption downtown there to come in once a day to feed her supper. She lay there getting weaker, unable to speak but to say, “Amen,” and I read to her from Scripture, particularly the Psalms, as well as from her copy of The Imitation of Christ, and a little Thomas Merton always did a soul good. My father provided me with writings that would encourage a dying soul and John did his part too. I was able to bring Communion to her as well.

  “She definitely had AIDs, Mom,” John said as we drove down the highway, him honking and waving at the kids as usual. “But at least her last few weeks weren’t filled with starvation.”

  “It makes me want to cry how that can happen.”

  “Don’t move over here, then.”

  Don’t worry, I thought. I was more than happy to be with my folk on Locust Island. Although the people in this nation would be lovely to live with.

  I wanted to ask him how his view of God has changed since he arrived in this land, but the Spirit stayed me. Perhaps another time. And certainly his faith seemed rock solid.
John’s stories and thoughts are his own to tell.

  So anyway, we brought Precious back, and Luke and Amos built a casket out of spare planking in the shed. I took some leftover room paint and decorated the outside because I had a feeling Precious liked bright colors.

  We gave her a Mass of Christian burial and lowered the box by ropes into a hole John and some of the neighbor boys dug together. Women who didn’t even know her gathered and cried. They knew her story. They were her story. Or would be soon enough.

  IT’S LATE NOW. I JUST TUCKED MY FATHER IN AND I SUPPOSE I’ll tell you this, because by the time anyone reads this, he’ll be dead and so will I. He has AIDS as well. Being a medical worker here, it seemed to be inevitable. Nurses are dying too fast to be adequately replaced. I fear for John, but since it doesn’t seem to bother him, I say nothing.

  We’ve had a good time in the past month, my father and I. I simply call him Joe. At our ages, it does seem a little silly to be all starry-eyed and call him Daddy. I’ve had a Father all my life and he’s been wonderful to me. I see that now.

  But Jesus told me deep inside of us is a need to know what is true. The truly true, not what we’ve convinced ourselves is true. And I had done a lot of convincing myself over the years as to who my father was.

  So, here’s the tale, what truly happened, according to my father, back in 1929. Mary Margaret Fischer (my mother) left Locust Island after high school and graduated with a teaching degree from the College of Notre Dame, according my grandmother. She’d procured a job teaching in South Baltimore and continued to move forward toward her final vows. This was a point of great pride for my grandmother due to the fact that she bore her daughter out of wedlock and that same progeny ended up a college graduate. Who would imagine?

  Indeed.