Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "Well, did I?" Ezra said. "I assume I must have. Which would explain my dream—"

  "There are altogether too many dreamers around here," Henry said.

  Waldo said, "Since when do you find dreaming so objectionable?"

  "I dreamed I was on top of a tall building and I had to make it lie down on its side so that I could walk to the base. The dogs were there but they stayed inside and watched from a window."

  "That's really interesting, Ez," I said.

  "See, Mom, you don't need that old radio show when you have us," Ezra said.

  "She has you," Henry corrected. "But let's go! It's time for speleology! Stalagmites ho!"

  I wasn't afraid of flying, but because I was irrationally afraid of missing flights, I always made my family leave plenty of time to get to the airport. Which we did for the cave trip. But there was a terrible traffic tie-up on the Whitestone Bridge, and so we arrived at LaGuardia an anxiety-producing fifty-seven minutes before their flight was scheduled to depart.

  "Not to worry, Al. The boys and I have plenty of time. We'll be stopping at the sports bar for a few brews."

  I watched them untie their shoes and await frisking. While one security guard glared beneath beetling brows, the others surveyed the world with studied indifference.

  Twenty minutes later, I was on the Van Wyck heading home when Waldo called me on the cell phone.

  "You know that traffic jam on the Whitestone?" he said. "It wasn't an accident."

  "So?"

  "It was a jumper."

  "How do you know?"

  "A lady in front of us in line told me."

  "How did she know?"

  "She said it happens all the time," Waldo said. "Plus she said he was standing on the railing when she drove past."

  "She didn't see him actually jump, did she?" I said. I was shivering.

  "I didn't ask."

  "Maybe they talked him down."

  "Somehow I think not," Waldo said.

  "Well, it did seem weird to have all that traffic and no sign of an accident. Police cars and the ambulance, but no smashed-up cars, no broken glass."

  "I'm not going to tell the boys."

  "Good thinking. Why did you call to tell me?"

  "I don't know. I must have needed to tell someone. And I thought you'd be interested."

  "It doesn't matter. I like it that you called. Call all you want. Call me lots."

  "Don't push your luck, Al. You don't want me developing an allergic rash."

  "Very funny. Just concentrate on having a good time. And let Ez call and talk to Dandy all he wants. There's no reason not to."

  "Henry just informed me that I should call him Chief."

  "Chief what?"

  "Just Chief," Waldo said.

  "If you like. Just so long as you don't call him Hank."

  "I always liked Hank."

  "We've discussed this," I said. "Ad nauseam."

  "Okay. They're loading our flight. Adios."

  I realized I was crossing the Whitestone again and now traffic was fine, moving smoothly in both directions. In forty-odd minutes, all evidence of the jumper was gone, if you count traffic as evidence. I had read somewhere that most suicide jumpers change their minds midair. Halfway down, the jumper reconsiders the misery that sent him hurtling into the abyss, and it no longer looks so bad. The crushing weight of love lost is lifted from his back. He remembers a loving touch and the taste of a certain food and music that transports the senses, and he wants to give it another try. Then he hits the ground or the water, and blackness falls. How can this be known? Presumably because sometimes jumpers do survive, and then they tell us about their second thoughts. But can it be extrapolated from the testimony of those few that most jumpers regret the leap? This is something we can never know. Ah, the unknowables.

  Chief? Chief, Chief, Chief. Where had I heard this Chief business before? When Henry was born, I'd wanted to call him Felix. Waldo had nixed the plan. He'd said, "What if he's not happy? It could be a terrible burden of a name to live up to." So my son was nameless for a week, Baby Boy Fairweather, until we'd agreed on Henry. We both had Henrys somewhere back in our families. Waldo's Great-Great-Uncle Henry claimed he'd invented the telephone and then been deprived of the glory by Alexander Graham Bell.

  My second cousin Henry was a Jesuit out in California. He was quite radical, and we thought he might have been excommunicated or defrocked or something because he had written scathing articles about the impossibility of certain miracles. His life's work was disproving every instance he could find of purported incorruptibility—those stories about saints whose bodies still smelled like roses after they'd been dead for three weeks. Or three years.

  In my life so far, I'd seen Cousin Henry only twice, once at a wedding and once at a funeral.

  5

  A Sus Órdenes

  I STOOD ON THE chilly platform. The train's beams first appeared as specks of distant stars in the gray dusk, then snaked forward along the track I knew so well. In seconds they grew and became less like disembodied lights; they muted as they sank into the larger reality of the proboscis engine of Metro-North. The train roared in, and then stopped. In every car a door opened—the magic of a control panel. Exodus ensued. They stepped onto the platform, my neighbors, my friends, the parents of Ezra's and Henry's friends, some strangers, and one foreigner. The men and women in their dark suits and colorful scarves, the women stepping firmly in sensible shoes and sometimes in high heels. They stepped out with a purpose and direction. Almost all of them stepped out through the sliding doors of the train and kept moving in a seamless gait, not missing a beat. Only a few stepped out as if into the glare of the footlights. These few had slept all the way from Grand Central and for just an instant had forgotten what they were doing here; who were all these people sidestepping around them?

  I recognized Abelardo immediately. And I instantly knew that I had never met him before. Our previous meeting, at Quincy House or elsewhere, existed only in Waldo's imagination.

  "What a surprise!" I said, which wasn't what I meant at all.

  "A sus órdenes,"he said, with an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

  Yet how easy it was to recognize him. Was it because he appeared to be from another climate? I will never know. Of course, he was much better groomed than anyone else getting off at VerGroot. That must have been it, and not some lingering scent of mangoes. His suit was so smooth, so achingly unwrinkled that I wondered if he'd spent the last hour standing up in the aisle. His shoes glistened in the fading light. I remembered my father cleaning his shoes on Sunday evenings, rapidly buffing them to that businesslike luster—the movement just a bit too quick to see, like the sharpening of his carving knife. It dawned on me that I'd never seen Waldo polish his shoes, had no idea if he'd ever polished his shoes, and I was sure he'd never taught our sons to polish their shoes. Neither had I. Abelardo's suit was dark blue, a shade of blue I immediately coveted, and his tie was patterned a tropical oceanic blue with not a hint of hyperbole. My neighbors must have spent their entire commute in awe of Abelardo's sartorial splendor; his first-class haircut and his demeanor that made it all seem so easy.

  I should not have brought Dandy. The car smelled like dog, and Abelardo's was not a suit that should ever smell like dog. But of course my car always smelled like dog, whether Dandy and Flirt were in the back or not. All day long I'd been checking the color of Dandy's gums, so I couldn't leave him behind; if the train had been late, I'd have ended up sitting by the station itching to pull back his upper lips and see the hopeful pink color. One of the great things about dogs was that they didn't mind my gum-checking. Henry wouldn't have put up with it, not once, never mind all day. Ez would not have complained, but even he eventually raised his eyebrows when I took his temperature for the third time in as many hours.

  It began to snow as we drove home from the station. In the space of the less than half an hour since I had left the house, the sky had become as opaque as a catarac
t. There would be no pointing out the sun plummeting over on the western shore of the river, as I usually did for new arrivals from the city. No sunset, and the snow fell. The flurries were large, and there was something serious about the way they landed on the windshield, each flake clinging to its individual uncloneable shape.

  "You're in for a treat, Abelardo. It looks like we're going to have a little snow," I said.

  "I've never been very fond of snow. And you must please call me Lalo. It is the tradition."

  "Perhaps you'll change your mind this evening. I think the woods look lovely with snow, and we'll make a fire."

  Naturally, Abelardo did not mention the fecund odor of moist dog, and I kept my window cracked open a bit.

  Our driveway was uphill but not terribly so for the first one hundred feet. Then it flattened out and turned left toward the kitchen door at the western side of the house. The top of the incline was in the deep shade of two old hemlocks, and that was where ice patches always formed and ambushed me. But I was not thinking of ice as we drove to the house, and for once, I did not skid or lose traction.

  Inside, I led Abelardo up to the guest room, otherwise known as Ezra's room. Henry's and Ez's rooms were each tiny and magical little kingdoms, as different from each other as the boys were. For reasons that had more to do with the resident's personality than the room's cleanliness, I had deemed Ezra's the more appropriate for stranger occupation, and I'd tidied it up. But as soon as I entered it with Abelardo and saw it with foreign eyes, saw the chart on the wall that named all the parts of the eyeball, and the neatly labeled collection of dried tree fungi on the top shelf, and the birds' nests cradling reconstructed pale blue eggshells on the shelf just below, and the well-thumbed Tintin comic books under the bed, and the lava lamp, and the cardboard box with pennies glued to every inch of its surface, both inside and out, I wondered if I had misjudged. But it was too late. He was gracious. I pointed out the bathroom, the only bathroom.

  I had neglected to ask Waldo what Abelardo actually did, or what I should do with him, or anything at all about him. Had he said something about coffee? At Harvard they had rowed crew together, and later were roommates. They were close in that way that men become close when they struggle together against the same arbitrary physical difficulty: a river, a mountain face, a storm at sea, an opposing team. Through Abelardo, Waldo had gotten to know several other wealthy and amusing Central Americans. And they, apparently, found Waldo's pale winter-loving Yankeeness appealing. According to Waldo, they all went home to Guatemala or Nicaragua or El Salvador and dated one another's sisters. He'd always regretted that he had had no sister to enter into that social intertwining. I'd told him it all sounded a little too feudal and arranged to me. I'd told him it wasn't like that in Spain, where my mother's parents were from and where she had spent her early years cavorting among the olive trees. The truth was: I had no idea. Waldo had just laughed. Now I didn't know what to say to Abelardo. I didn't even know if he liked dogs.

  For dinner that evening, I made carrot soup, chicken, and salad. My plan was to eat carrot soup all week long, along with my tinned oysters. I was eagerly awaiting those tinned oysters.

  "You're not by any chance a vegetarian," I said before putting chicken on his plate.

  "No, we have a cattle farm."

  "That's nice," I said. "So you don't have a problem with chicken."

  "We also have chickens. The granjas are near Chinandega and the matadero is in Tipitapa. That's an abattoir to you."

  "That's nice too," I said. "I was a vegetarian for a long time, but then I found myself craving protein." It seemed more elegant to say protein instead of flesh, although that was what I had found myself craving. "And of course boys need protein. Lots of protein."

  "There is also the coffee finca. Caffeine also is very healthy for young people, for blood flow."

  It was only when Abelardo was chewing his food that I noticed the size of his ears. They were not nearly so pronounced as Waldo had led me to believe. But they were a long way from Henry's tender little apricots that I used to nibble after reading him The Runaway Bunny. And having noticed them, I needed to look away and examine the salad greens on my plate, the pale green spine of the romaine lettuce, the dark green spinach, the spermlike tendrils of alfalfa sprouts. What if Nicaraguans didn't eat alfalfa sprouts? What if they didn't consider alfalfa sprouts to be appropriate for human consumption?

  Think of it as broadening someone's horizons. Think of Waldo eating garlicky frogs' legs in Paris and olivey rabbit in Provence, both worthy cultural experiences. So with my alfalfa sprouts.

  "I am most grateful for this opportunity to visit with my dear friend Waldito," Abelardo said. "And so of course I am sorry he is not here."

  "I'm sorry too," I said. You don't know how sorry.

  "But what a pleasure to visit with his wife. It is a terrible shame about missing your wedding. Our national bird, Aëdes aegypti, intervened," he explained, and chuckled gently.

  I laughed too rather than reveal my complete ignorance of the reference. Something about the pyramids? Didn't the Mayans build pyramids too?

  Abelardo continued, "In college, we all thought that Waldo could do anything. That he would do anything. Naturalmente, we didn't know exactly what that would entail."

  "But Waldo still can do anything," I said, thinking of his fingers, his tongue, his penis—surely not what Abelardo was referring to. "He doesn't always know what that anything should be. You'll have to come back when he and the boys return."

  "Perhaps, but I am only in New York for a few days of research. It will depend."

  "What are you researching, Abelardo?"

  "My Great-Aunt Tristána. We believe, it is believed, she should be canonized; that is to say, she should be beatified first, but ultimately canonized. For the good of all. So I am here to see what I can do," he said.

  "Your aunt was a saint?"

  "Of course," he said. "That is why I am here."

  "In New York?" I said. "What can there be in New York?"

  "Oh, you have the Hagiographers Club, and I have been corresponding with the librarian there. His name is Hubert van Toots. They have the best library outside of the Bollandists in Belgium. And the weather in Belgium is even worse than it is here."

  "I've never heard of this Hagiographers Club," I said. "In New York City? What exactly is it?"

  "Never? How remiss of you. Neither have I ever been there, but that will all change soon. They have a wonderful library, thousands of books and treatises, all about saints and their lives. Of course, much of it is in Latin."

  De gustibus. Amo, amas, amat. Dominus vobiscum.

  "But can you eat there? What would a library about saints serve?" I said. I imagined oysters on halo platters, oysters in triptychs. How little I knew.

  "Mr. van Toots and I never discussed food. Although I am sure he eats somewhere. The food in some monasteries is excellent. Though not all, no, not all."

  "Your friend is a monk?"

  "Not anymore. That is all I know. Oh, and he mentioned he was writing a monograph on the cephalophores—those are saints who carry their heads. After they've been cut off. Which is very interesting, but not pertinent to my Tía Tristána."

  "It sounds like something a rock star would do."

  "First that rock star would have to be decapitated."

  "Well," I said. "This is all over my head." I checked, but no, Abelardo was not chuckling. Then he was.

  "You are delightful," he said.

  I was silenced, briefly. "So where is this place?"

  "The address is on Gramercy Park. Do you know Gramercy Park?"

  "Not really. Not at all. They have material about your aunt?"

  "I am afraid not. All her things are in Nicaragua. But they do have everything about the canonization process. We need to study that, to master it. And then research other saints. Saints, like her, who never married. Who refused to get married because they had other plans. It is always good to find a patt
ern."

  "Didn't you go to the seminary for a while? That's what Waldo told me," I said.

  "They barely taught us anything about saints. It was an out-of-favor time for saints."

  "Did Waldo know about your aunt? Did he know her?"

  "He may have met her when we were in school, when he came to visit us at the finca, Las Brisas. She was very old, of course, but she hardly seemed to age at all. Because of her sanctity, I believe."

  "He never told me anything," I said.

  Abelardo said, "I find that shocking. He should have."

  It was time for Waldo to call so I could tell him about Dandy and say good night to the boys. I had trained myself not to panic when he didn't call, because of his telephone aversion. Like his whole family, Waldo felt ripped off by Alexander Graham Bell's claim to the telephone's invention. Righteous indignation, he would call it. But that animus had never stopped Posey. (Of course, she'd been born a Pinchbeck.)

  The phone was not ringing. After scraping off the bones, I gave the plates to Flirt and Dandy. There wasn't much, but they enjoyed what there was. Then I donned the latex gloves and measured out the cyclosporine.

  "Are you diabetic?"

  "No, this is for Dandy, the dog. See, it's an oral syringe."

  "Is he diabetic?"

  This struck me as humorous, although God knows he hadn't meant it that way. "No, he has anemia, aplastic anemia. That's why I couldn't go with Waldo and the boys."

  "And you love him very much."

  "Well, he's our family's dog. Flirt too, but she's indestructible."

  "You must tell me all about it. We have always loved dogs, in our family."

  "It's kind of a long story," I said. "Or maybe not. But I usually make it long, I warn you."

  Once I'd done the dishes, and made coffee with the beans Abelardo had brought from his family's finca, we went into the living room and lit a fire. Abelardo said fires were one of his fondest memories of college life.

  I was just a bit incredulous. "You had fires in the dorms?"

  "My senior tutor did. He was a very kind man."