House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  When I was seven, still too young to be part of the May Day court, my mother gave me a smooth bisque statue of the Virgin. Her hands were open at her sides and her face was so peaceful and good that, after I had gone to bed, her image would float behind my closed eyes like a protective circle of light. In the enthusiasm of my first religious awareness, especially being enthralled with the folklore of Mary, I decided to make a retreat for her in my bedroom.

  The service was my own innovation: I would spend the entire weekend shut away; I would only eat soda crackers; there would be a rosary involved. But I didn’t have the monastic discipline required, and with so many hours to bear, I gradually relaxed, rather than giving up. I got off my knees. Later, I decided I could even nap as long as I lay next to the statue in bed. I’m sure I didn’t last past dinner, but even a day is a long time for a child to be alone, and by the end I was in an almost trancelike state. I remember talking to the figure next to me, not as a friend—though her hands were kind and her face sympathetic—but as if I could indeed talk to light, and I remember feeling so grateful. There was no doubt in my mind that there was another presence in my room, that it heard me, even cared for me, and would never leave me alone.

  Today, it seemed, they were incorporating some of the May Day traditions into the wedding ceremony itself. There was a considerable thumping of kneelers as a group of people in the front row got out and walked down the center aisle to the back. An offertory hymn began; two violins and a flute accompanied the awkward choruses of the congregation. Two girls, perhaps Kathy’s sisters, brought baskets of daffodils and gave them to her. She in turn put them with the rest at the shrine of Mary.

  This made me feel cynical and then somehow sad. I remembered that when I was finally old enough to be in the May Day procession in my own parish, I had grown too sullen to participate. As the other girls walked by my pew with their flowers that May when I was thirteen, I hadn’t felt as superior as I would have liked. There was a part of me that shriveled in humiliation to think anyone might know how dependent I had actually been on the Virgin Mary.

  “Holy Mother, take me safely,” was a charm I used to have ready on my lips for any time of risk. It became so well used I eventually shortened it to just “Safely.” “Safely?” A girl friend shouted at me one day as we ran across the street. I had said it too loudly, and even though I’m sure she had no idea what it meant, it was if she had flung open a door I’d been hiding behind.

  The last offertory song was a solo by Kathy’s brother. With a clear but soft voice he sang,” ‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple.” The dark-haired girl, at this point, was gregariously pointing out the verses in the program to the mother of the group who stood next to her. The whole family seemed to stiffen, and the woman nodded perfunctorily but did not bother to find the page. Though the girl didn’t appear wounded, I felt a sudden protectiveness for her. Doesn’t she see the girl is rather remarkable? I thought. And yet during the greeting of peace, when everyone shook hands with the people around them, and the girl turned to me smiling, offering me hers, every fingernail painted a deep red, I felt my own demeanor turn very cool and guarded.

  I was weary of the long proceedings. The bridal party was standing together, waiting to receive communion. Somehow, Steve had recruited the extra two groomsmen. I flipped to the front page of the program to get his last name set in my mind. Wasserman—I remembered he was doing graduate work in chemistry. Kathy, who was working toward a degree in psychology (as many of our past receptionists had), spoke of Steve and his field with a reverence for something incomprehensible but complete. “Dr. O’Keefe,” she said to me once when we went out on the street for lunch, “everything they have to work with is absolutely empirical. And in psychology nothing is—not really.”

  I have had a similar issue with the sacrament of the Eucharist. The more my religious instructors stressed that my entire faith hinged on the belief that this small white wafer was not merely a symbol of the body of Christ, but that, indeed, it was the body of Christ, the less I was able to accept it. Why was it necessary to choose such a clearly impossible phenomenon for us to embrace?

  I felt numb as I watched the others go up the aisle, and most of them looked as numb coming back. Watching each face as they returned from the altar, I played the old guessing game: where do they have it—left cheek, right, already swallowed?

  The girl, once she had reached the priest where he stood at the foot of the altar, took the host in her hand in the modern way. But instead of putting it in her mouth, she covered it with her other hand as if it were alive, like a grasshopper, and might escape. She walked away like this, and then, rather than turning down the aisle to return to her pew, she went straight ahead and pushed through the side door with her shoulder.

  Though no one seemed to notice, it was a mildly outrageous act. In grammar school the nuns used to tell us stories of people taking the host home and cutting it with a knife to see if it bled, and how these defilers were inevitably punished in a supernatural way—being struck by lightning, or having their hands catch spontaneously on fire. It was made clear: though the host was given to us, it wasn’t really ours.

  I had already speculated about the girl’s eccentricities. Now I began to scan my mind for the various psychological reasons she might do such a thing. But I found that I just didn’t know enough about her.

  The reception was held in a hotel across the street from the basilica. There was champagne, and then we were seated for brunch. I hadn’t expected to see her again. Somehow the departure with the host had had a ring of finality. But I had no sooner placed my napkin in my lap than she was standing by my side.

  “Oh, good, you saved me a seat.” She had removed her jacket and was wearing an ivory lambswool sweater that, in contrast to the rest of her outfit, looked elegant.

  “Yes,” I said, playing along. I felt strangely relieved to see her and then quite sure I was making a mistake.

  We sat at two of the eight places at a round table. There were three couples already seated, and I hadn’t yet introduced myself. My name card was there and then the place with no name card that she had taken. I supposed it had been reserved in case I had brought a date.

  “I’m Tiffany Perrier.” She held out her hand to the gentleman on her left.

  “Like the water?” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Jack Murphy.” He leaned forward to also smile at me. “And this is my wife, Ann.”

  “Peg O’Keefe,” I said.

  Soon Tiffany had solicited everyone’s names, and we had moved on to occupations. Jack was a lawyer. “Oh, I’ve read the law extensively.” She sipped from a glass of tomato juice.

  “Really?” He smiled, blinking at a girl who couldn’t be older than fourteen.

  “Really.” She blinked back at him. There was a faint line of tomato juice over her lip. “Criminal, Family Relations, and Constitutional,” she said. “That’s the most interesting—especially when it comes to freedom of religion. Church and state and vice versa. How about you?”

  “Corporate law,” Jack said. “You need to narrow it down a little if you want to make a living of it.”

  “Tell them what you do, Peg,” Tiffany asked, not looking in my direction as she reached for a roll.

  “Perhaps you could tell them, Tiffany.”

  “Oh, no, I never get it quite right.” She finally wiped her upper lip with a finger.

  “I’m a clinical psychologist; I have a private practice.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” the whole table seemed to say at once, and then, as was customary, some of them began to tell me about friends and relations who were having certain “problems.”

  “I have a cousin,” Ann Murphy said, “who gets pregnant, has the baby, goes through a horrible postpartum, so she gets pregnant again right away. She has eleven children, and now her doctor tells her that her uterus is caving in.”

  “Like an old building,” Jack Murphy said.

  �
��Like an old launching pad,” Tiffany said.

  After we had eaten some sort of variation on chicken breast and rice, the bride and groom began to make their rounds from table to table. When Kathy finally came to us, she had that shell-shocked look of anyone on her wedding day. This was the encounter that I felt would end my obligation. “Dr. O’Keefe, I’m so glad you came.” And then she looked at Tiffany. “I don’t believe I know you.”

  “I’m with Peg.”

  “Yes?” Kathy said, still questioning.

  “Visiting,” Tiffany said, almost impatiently. “Her niece.”

  “I can see the resemblance,” she said.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” I said.

  I was ready to leave, but Tiffany talked me into standing on the sidelines to watch the dancing. I thought it would be worth a few minutes to penetrate the sham she had created.

  “Do you crash many weddings?” I asked.

  “Only when it works out. Sometimes there’s no place for me to slip in. You were great though. I knew you would be the minute I saw you in church.”

  “What’s your usual routine?”

  “I read the announcements in the paper. If the church is nice, I’m especially interested. I’m never quite sure about the reception. A lot of the time it’s a sit-anywhere sort of banquet. I knew this would be tough because it was at a hotel.”

  “What if I hadn’t cooperated?”

  “You were watching me, though. You have freckles like mine—that makes you game. And your red hair—that makes you passionate.”

  We looked out onto the dance floor filling up with the first young couples. “Do you think they’ll get to any polkas here?” she said, swaying a little to the music. “I bet they’re too tight-assed. If they got into some polka, even you and I could dance.”

  “I don’t plan on drinking enough to polka,” I said.

  ‘“We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced.’ That’s Matthew,” she said.

  “Just what I thought,” I replied. There was something in me that wanted to get the best of her. “What did you do with the host?”

  “The host?” For the first time she looked uncomfortable.

  “With communion. You left with it in your hand.”

  “I went outside and ate it there. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “You are a shrink, aren’t you? Okay, try this—sometimes I want to be alone with it. I want to eat it and feel what it does.”

  “What do you feel then?”

  “I feel better.”

  “Better?”

  “Yes. It may not be obvious, but I’m a pretty sad person.” And then she seemed to detach herself from our conversation, even from the noisy stimulation of the wedding party around us, and her exquisite eyes glazed over in the manner I had seen with countless clients in my practice—a look when all of an individual life becomes an event to be reviewed. What an actor, I thought.

  “Tiffany?” I said.

  “I’m dying. She tucked her hands into the pockets of her culottes. I looked at the back of her delicate neck and the lambswool over her shoulders. For a moment, I felt we were alone in a room, and I was her therapist. I could feel my eyes on her become still and attentive and guarded in the way they do when a client tells me something new and significant but not wholly believable.

  “Tiffany?” I said.

  She shrugged her shoulders, looked everywhere but at me, and then at me. “I have cystic fibrosis. Everything gets clogged up, especially my lungs.”

  “I know about it,” I said.

  But then she looked past me, as if disregarding that I knew anything at all, said, “Hey!” to a boy in oxfords and a blue suit, terror all over his face at the sight of her. And she asked him to dance, going directly to him and taking his hand. The words cystic fibrosis clattered to the floor in front of me, like large coins.

  Now, as I watched Tiffany destroy every attempt that her partner made to lead her, I realized how unnaturally white her skin was—this, I knew, was one of the symptoms of the disease. It was too easy for me to look for the lies in people. And I resolved, at least for the next few minutes, that I would believe what she told me.

  “I understand how sad you must be,” I said later.

  “I plan on making the most of it,” she almost shouted, since the band and the noise of the crowd had become louder. And she reached over to the buffet table for a plastic glass of wine that was sitting there. “I think I’ll get drunk.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  “Yes, I do.” And she proceeded to gulp down three glasses in succession. If this was a way of showing off, I thought it lacked savvy.

  I wanted to leave. She said, “Nice knowing you.” Her face was flushed, and she already seemed to weave a little on her feet.

  “Why don’t I give you a lift?” I said, regretting my own words.

  “Great.” She picked up another glass of wine, but then left it once she saw I didn’t intend to wait.

  I asked her about the fur on her coat as we drove. She said it was wolverine, that it was good for not frosting up. And was her real name Tiffany Perrier? “Not the last one,” she said. “My mom named me Tiffany after the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve seen it thousands of times. My mom thought Audrey Hepburn’s name was Tiffany. But it’s the name of the store. That movie is full of good stuff—like that goofy party where they’re going up and down the fire escape, Andy Williams singing, ‘Moon River, wider than the sea…’”

  “Does your mother know you crash weddings?”

  “My mother is mentally ill,” she said. “Crashing weddings wouldn’t seem like a very big deal to her.”

  “How about your father?”

  “No such thing,” she said.

  “I suppose you’re in school?”

  “Yeah, I’m known as the Jesus freak there. I say to them, ‘Don’t leave out Buddha and Mohammed.’ I figure if I’m going to be a freak, I might as well not limit myself.”

  “Tiffany, where am I taking you?”

  “Hennepin and Lake. I have some things to do.”

  “I mean, where do you live?”

  “Not far from there—just a few blocks.”

  I realized I was acting too concerned, and that this was probably what she wanted, drinking three glasses of wine and telling me that she was dying.

  The intersection of Hennepin and Lake is recognized as the hub of Uptown. It’s one of the trendier areas of Minneapolis, with its art and coffee and neon-lamp shops. The faces of the shops change every year to suit people’s current tastes. Many fashionable people were sitting out on the sidewalks under café umbrellas and watching each other. And ironically across the street there was also a gathering of punks, most of them teenagers, most of them from the wealthier suburbs. There was a mob of them in front of the McDonald’s, indulging in their own sort of café scene. Girls with the sides of their heads shaved and long feathers hanging from their earlobes; a boy sitting on top of a phone booth dangling his steel-toed boots over the side. It occurred to me that Tiffany might be dressing in their style.

  “McPunks,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “Right,” she said, which I took to mean no.

  I pulled over at the red light. She looked out of her window and didn’t move to leave. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I’m having guests for dinner. I expect I should get things ready.”

  “What are you having?” she asked.

  “Salmon. But, Tiffany, I shouldn’t hold up traffic here.”

  “Give me your number,” she said so authoritatively that I immediately went to my purse and found myself ripping a deposit slip from my checkbook.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “It’s not like I could be a rapist,” she said. “It’s not like you couldn’t hang up on me if you wanted to.” She seemed to be settling in for an argument.

  Peopl
e were honking their horns behind me. I was sorry I had driven her.

  “Okay,” she said, and left the car. The boy on the phone booth across the street drummed his hands against the Plexiglas and seemed to be shouting at her. She ignored him and walked in the direction of the library. She didn’t blend well into the café crowd as she passed through them, but she seemed unconscious of this, as if the whole fashionable scene was having little effect on her. She waved at me as I turned the corner, but I pretended not to see.

  I was out of town the next weekend at a conference. When I returned to my answering machine on Sunday night, there were many messages from Tiffany. With every one she gave me a different last name. “This is Tiffany D’Arc” she’d say, or Currie, or Martin. She liked French names. And then she called me again before I’d finished with my messages.

  “Peg?” she said, sounding older than she had on the machine. “What’s new?”

  “I’m not good with those sorts of questions, Tiffany.”

  “You sound mad.”

  “It’s just that I’ve hardly been home.”

  “Well, then I’ll call you back when you’re ready,” and she hung up.

  I was irritated. It was Sunday night, and I faced another week of clients just as needy as this girl. I’d spent the weekend at a conference, addressing several different approaches to the treatment of pathological narcissism, and every method was as muddled and futile in my mind as the next.

  I’d slept there with a longtime acquaintance, a man I had always thought of from the first time we’d met as charismatic and untrustworthy. But it turned out he was as ordinary as I. We weren’t especially compatible—found ourselves unable to go very far with our lovemaking. Instead, we got up in the middle of the night and poured ourselves enormous brandies. We sat for an hour or more across from each other in front of the closed drapes of the hotel window.