Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  Meanwhile, I was shocked to read again and again of these sexless virgins, so many sexless virgins (yes, a redundancy, but it needs to be said), and also of the chaste marriages. I had no idea there were so many married couples agreeing to never have sex, to never see or touch each other, and I didn't see the point. But I kept going back to the Hagiographers Club, kept following Hubert's delicately pointed finger up and down the stacks.

  In my red leather notebook I kept careful notes. I listed the virgin saints and others in their various categories. There were the saints who cross-dressed in order to avoid the unwanted advances of a man, or men in general. There were the saints who grew beards and became leprously ugly in order to thwart the ardor of a lover. There were saints who married but promised God and each other to live together eternally as brother and sister. There were the saints who ate nothing or survived on the Eucharist only, a form of self-starvation for which there is a special word: inedia. Of course, they would all be diagnosed with eating disorders today. But there they are: sanctified, canonized, sitting in Heaven at the right hand of God, fielding all the prayers that come wafting their way. Sometimes the hardest thing was determining into which category to place a certain saint, because she fit so many categories.

  One night I woke up around two A.M. because I'd had a rotten dream about a chaste marriage and everyone wearing obviously fake wings, Christmas pageant wings. So I did the only thing I could think of. I started fondling Waldo, and soon he was inside me, and I held him tight and raked my nails up and down his back. Images of those chaste saintly couples, rigid and glacial on their separate sides of the bed, would not leave me. I saw Saint Amator and his not-wife, Martha. Theirs was slightly unusual among the saints and chaste marriages, because from the beginning, he was the one to instigate the chastity. They were meant to be married by the aged Bishop Valerian, but in his senile dementia he read the wrong service; instead of marrying them, he ordained them into the deaconate. No one except Amator and Martha realized the mistake. Immediately after the ceremony, Amator convinced his bride to take advantage of the error and take up a life of virginity. Soon she retired to the convent. How had he put it? Oh, what the heck, since we're not married anyway, let's just forgo all that messy sex? Amator became a priest. I found this story especially depressing; I imagined the young woman's longing for a real husband, and the cruel trick life had played on her. I imagined a few nights of co-sleeping, when Martha wakes and stealthily scrutinizes the soft sleeping penis of Amator. She fondles it, watches it grow, and feels it harden. Then she drops it and turns away from what she will never enjoy.

  11

  The Dangerous Ocean

  THE DENIZENS OF THE Hagiographers Club never noticed my presence. I was forever looking up from my pages to watch and wonder; their indifference only increased my curiosity and inflamed my fantasies. The same characters came again and again, though one or two I saw once and that was all. The beautiful woman who had read her text so serenely on my first visit did not reappear. But mostly they were the same ones, there when I arrived and there when I left. I wanted to ask Hubert if the club had rooms on the upper floors for the members. I knew from the exterior that there were two upper floors, but that was all I knew. Perhaps there were monastic cells up there, each one inhabited by a saint in training. Perhaps, like some motels in California, each cell had a different hagiographic theme: the Hermit's Cave (dank and dismal); the Mystic's Chamber (painted black with UV lighting); the Do-Gooder's Leper Colony (foul-smelling and crowded); the Pole-Sitter's Perch (rising from the roofline); the Scholar's Scriptorium (a slanted desk, an inkwell, the de rigueur bad lighting); the Martyr's Den (boiling oil and lions). But Hubert's demeanor did not encourage questions.

  In the matter of the papal nuncio, however, I knew I had to ask. Not that I knew then he was the papal nuncio. I was incapable of not asking.

  Every time I went to the club that first month, I saw him, sitting in the far armchair in the central reading room—a large chair upholstered in cracked burgundy leather—a tall, slender man in clerical garb. And such lovely clerical garb: his collar was magenta silk, and he wore cuff links with fat garnets. Around his neck hung a ponderous golden chain and medallion. I would have happily examined him and his accoutrements, but that was not to be. His clothes were worthy of interest, but not of the most interest. All day long, he read texts in Latin and wept. He wept silently but continuously. He kept clean linen handkerchiefs in what must have been a bottomless pocket in his chasuble.

  If there was one reason that I curried favor with Hubert—and there were many reasons—it was to learn about the weeping cleric.

  On my fourth or fifth visit I watched Hubert and the forlorn cleric in close conversation with each other. The cleric leaned over Hubert's table to ask a question, sotto voce. He leaned over a long way. Then Hubert stood up, and they were eye to eye. They were both tall, aspiring heavenward.

  Hubert's hair was dark, and he combed it back so that it undulated, like wheat in the wind. Were tonsures a thing of the past? Hubert had a small and pointed beard that on anyone else would have been called Mephistophelean, but his blue eyes were too soft and tender to tolerate such a satanic epithet.

  When the whispering ceased and the weeping cleric returned to his chair, I threw caution to the wind, dashed over, and asked Hubert, "Who is that man and why is he weeping?"

  "Who said he was weeping?"

  "Of course he's weeping." I was trying to whisper like them but it came out as a hiss. "Something is terribly wrong. He is so sad."

  "Something is wrong with his lachrymal ducts. He told me what his condition is called, but I've forgotten."

  "You're kidding," I said.

  "I would hardly kid about that."

  "Well, I don't believe you. It's not just the tears. It's his whole face. He is lamenting."

  "He has good reasons to be sad," Hubert said.

  "So can you tell me? Who is he?"

  "You didn't know?"

  "That's why I'm asking you. How would I know?"

  "He's Monsignor Giacometti, the papal nuncio."

  "I didn't know there still were papal nuncios."

  "Of course there are. What else would there be?"

  "But why is he so sad?" I whispered.

  "If you must know, his entire family just drowned. In that storm off Sardinia last month—do you remember?—they were great sailors, I gather. His brother was the Italian champion."

  "His whole family?"

  "Parents, brother, sisters, nieces, nephews. It was a terrible and sudden storm. They radioed for help but nothing was possible."

  "No wonder he's weeping," I said. I could not turn around. How could I ever look in his direction again?

  "That's his condition. I told you," Hubert said.

  At the dinner table that evening, I told Waldo and the boys that I had heard the saddest story that day.

  "It's Monsignor Giacometti, he's the papal nuncio at the club. He weeps all day because his whole family was drowned at sea."

  "I thought priests didn't have families," Henry said.

  "His parental family, his siblings and so forth."

  "And they were all on the same boat?"

  "Maybe something is wrong with his lachrymal ducts," Waldo suggested. "Maybe the stopcock is missing. The lachrymal stopcock."

  "Hubert said sort of the same thing. But I didn't believe him."

  Henry and Ezra looked at each other and erupted in staccato laughter.

  Waldo said, "Cut it out, you two. When Dick and I were kids, Posey and Dad never flew on the same plane."

  Henry stifled his laughter enough to say, "Never?"

  "Not until we were both eighteen."

  "I thought they never left the state of Maine," I said.

  "How come you and Mom don't do that?" Ezra asked.

  "Because flying in an airplane is one hundred and twenty times safer than driving on the Taconic Parkway," Waldo said. "Remember Alaska?" he said to me.

&n
bsp; "But they were on a boat," Ezra said. "All together."

  "Can we go to Alaska? To see the glaciers?" Henry said.

  "It was probably a family vacation. People sail together all the time," I said. "But then there was a terrible storm. Off Sardinia. Do you know where Sardinia is?" I said to Henry.

  "It's a hundred and twenty miles west of Italy and a hundred and twenty miles north of Africa. And it's full of extinct volcanoes," he said.

  "How does he know stuff like that?" I asked Waldo. "Not from me."

  "I read the encyclopedia."

  "Al, why are you telling us about this?" Waldo said.

  "Because it's so sad. That poor man is all alone now."

  "There's always his good friend the pope," he said.

  "That's not funny."

  "I don't think the pope's stand on birth control is funny either."

  "I didn't say it was," I said.

  "It's criminal, is what it is."

  "You're not going to get me to defend it," I said. "You and Mami would have been unstoppable."

  It was dinner again—funny how meals occurred with such regularity, how insistent they were—and we ate enchiladas filled with leftovers from the past week. The game was to guess the single mystery spice that transformed said enchiladas from rolled-up detritus into something rather delicious.

  "Allspice," Waldo suggested. Correctly, as it happened. "And when do we get to meet this Hubert?"

  "Meet him? I hadn't thought of that. What a good idea."

  "Bring him home for dinner."

  "I can ask. He's at the Hagiographers Club. All day. Every day, as far as I can tell."

  "Does he have a halo?" Henry grinned and held up his plate to hover just above his unkempt head.

  "Only on formal occasions," I said. Yet again, I lamented the deficiencies in the boys' religious education. I had become aware of everything I had not taught them about their Catholic background. Even if they were never likely to darken the door of the local Catholic church, St. Hilda's, this seemed like neglect on my part. Sometimes we took them to the Episcopal church, St. David's, and they enjoyed the hymns. But without the lingering threat of mortal sin and eternal damnation, I found myself without the motivation to get them properly dressed every Sunday. Meanwhile, Waldo informed them that God resided in every living thing, including rats and leeches. Full stop. Posey used to be active in the altar guild at St. Barnabas-by-the-Sea, but she had never forgiven the rector for his oration at her husband's funeral, in which he had referred slightingly to Waldo Three's appalling golf swing. "It was so unnecessary," she said. Then Posey married Mr. Cicero, who was a Unitarian Universalist. He called himself a U-U, a yew-yew, a you-you, all of which the boys loved. Mr. Cicero informed me that U-Us don't believe in saints. Full stop.

  Henry scarfed up a single pea that careened around his plate, pointed his thumb toward the kitchen door, and then, in synchronized motion that would have done credit to an Olympic water-ballet team, he and Ezra got up from the table, put their plates in the sink, and headed off in what we knew to be the direction of The Simpsons.

  Waldo said, "Do you remember when Ez got that pea up his nose?"

  "How could I forget?"

  Waldo aligned all the silverware on the table and said, "Does any of this have to do with Abelardo?"

  "Any of what?"

  "The club you love so much. Hubert. The lives of the saints."

  "Most of them didn't even have lives," I whispered. "They're legends. They were invented to fulfill some need we have." I wasn't answering him. Or was I? What did I, could I, possibly need with the stories of mystic virgins and medieval miracle workers?

  "You know what I mean," Waldo said. I did. The extent to which reading in the club kept me linked to Abelardo, I wasn't thinking about, or even acknowledging. The thing about the saints was the impossibility of them, their lives and acts, and those impossible wonders were dryly recounted by Hippolyte Delehaye and Jacobus de Voragine and Alban Butler and countless others. These men were not fabulists. I was the fabulist. I read of those martyred virgins—going bravely and chastely to the stake, the lions' den, the hatchet—and I fantasized about sex. Mostly with Waldo. But not always. Sometimes it was a young man I had known briefly in Barcelona. Sometimes it was Audrey's high school boyfriend. And then others. What would I go to the stake to preserve? The boys. Not my long-lost virginity.

  But it wouldn't be fair to say the hagiographies were merely a trope to translate the believers from their short brutish lives to the unknowable eternal. Because of the details. The details were profoundly rooted in the quotidian. The hares and the stags, the little boys in pickle barrels, the lechers and jilted suitors, the beer-swilling monks. It was the details I kept going back for, the details I scoured for in those pages—some brittle, some supple, all touched by the natural oils of many fingers.

  "Not much," I said. "To do with Abelardo. Some. A little bit."

  Waldo said, "There's something about Abelardo. There always was."

  "He's a good dresser," I said. "I don't mean in a fey, metrosexual kind of way. He just fits his clothes perfectly. Except when he's in the snow. But besides that. When I saw him I realized how you and the boys wear your clothes like a foreign language."

  "Finnish," Waldo suggested. "Or Urdu. And that's not remotely what I meant about Abelardo."

  "I didn't think it was," I said. "I just wanted to tell you."

  "I just wanted to say that since you like it so much you should keep going. Maybe you could find a saint back in your family history to study up on. No Fairweathers though, I'm afraid."

  The other day I'd asked Hubert, not for the first time, if he believed—concretely, tangibly—in these saints he kept leading me to. He'd said, "I believe some of them existed, and some of them were very good. Many were what we would now call masochistic or anorexic or hysterical. I believe in prayer. Do I believe those things are connected? Not today."

  12

  Not Another Snowstorm

  WHILE I WAS READING about Saint Brigid, who'd specifically requested a deformity so that she would be repellent to suitors, Waldo was getting news from Nicaragua. While I was reading about how Brigid's eye had split open and melted in her head, Waldo was speaking with Abelardo's sister Carmen, who he now admitted was the most beautiful of the beautiful sisters. While I was reading about how Saint Brigid, in what seemed to be a frat-party variation on the Miracle at Cana, had supplied beer for eighteen churches from one barrel, Waldo was hearing that Abelardo squinted whenever confronted with anything white but refused to be given a prescription for glasses. Carmen said to Waldo, "Our brother has always been dramatic. Of course you knew that already. But I think this has gone too far." While I was learning that Saint Brigid had cured a leper and two blind men, and the blood flowing from her head wound had caused two dumb women to recover their speech, Carmen was saying to Waldo, "He's taken this Tía Tata business to an obsession. But apparently I am the only one in this family who doesn't think we need a saint. I think we need a minister for tourism who isn't corrupt."

  I returned by train from the Hagiographers Club, innocent of Waldo's conversation with Carmen. I was incredulous. "You actually spoke with her?"

  "I had no choice. She called."

  "How is Lalo? Does she blame me for the snow-blindness event? Does she think I wasn't being properly vigilant? Is she wondering why I don't have a job?"

  "Al, Al, slow down," Waldo said. "She's not into blame. That's not Carmen's way. She couldn't care less if you have a job. She wouldn't recognize a job if it bit her lovely behind."

  "You didn't tell me you knew Carmen so well," I said. "Anatomically and otherwise."

  "A figure of speech, Al. A figure of speech."

  It would not be impossible to be ambushed by a figure of speech.

  Then the days got cold all over again. I dropped Ezra and Henry off at school and took the train into the city. By the time I'd walked the twenty blocks to Gramercy Park, my toes and fingertips were
past feeling.

  I went through the foyer and stood still, waiting to thaw. One of the pocket doors was slightly open; there was a gap of perhaps a foot, and of course I looked in. It was a dining room, and the table was set for a formal dinner. The walls were red. A brass chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling, a ceiling painted with grinning cherubs. No, they were leering. I peered closer into the room because I wanted to assure myself they really leered. But I heard a door close on the second floor, and then I heard footsteps, so I jumped back and started up the stairs.

  The warmth and bad lighting that laconically greeted me as I entered the library triggered a shudder of almost sensual delight. I was happy to be there. I had initially come to this place as a kind of atonement (never mind what Waldo had said about atonement) for allowing Abelardo to go mad on my watch, for neglecting a fellow human while ministering to my sick dog, and also out of curiosity, but by now I relished it. I loved the chairs, with their cushions molded to bottoms long gone, and the faded paintings of heroic saints, and the burgundy velvet draperies that exhaled ancient dust. And I was very fond of Hubert.

  On that chilly day Hubert was looking exceptionally dapper, in a way that showed no effect of the frigid air outside. I imagined that he had been beamed directly to the club from his walk-in closet at Sutton Place.

  I sank into my favorite chair, pleased to be someone who had a favorite chair in this place, picked up Butler's, and read of Saint Austreberta, who, after the usual ups and downs (threat of forced marriage, flight in the night), entered the convent, where she was miraculously immune to the flames in the bread oven.