But somewhere along the way, my mind drifted. Pleas for holy intercession died a natural death as I found myself staring—fascinated and appalled—at the gigantic broken body of Christ that floated in the air above and behind the altar. I could never look at a crucifix without thinking about the Easter story, which I hated. I hated that they nailed his hands and feet to the wood. It must have hurt so bad. How could people be so mean? I discreetly rubbed one knee and then the other, chilled by thoughts of an angry mob jeering at our Lord. And then it dawned on me that this particular cross—one that I had seen in Mass on many Sundays past—did not look like a man-made torture device. Not at all. This crucifix was backbone and blood. Something fleshy spun by angels. Maybe Gabriel himself. Yes, that’s exactly right, I decided. Those people only thought they nailed him to the cross. But that was a trick God played. The crucifix was actually a pair of wings. Christ wings. He could fly anywhere. And I bet he did. I secreted my hand between my legs—I had to pee—and I thought about Jesus flying over us, gazing down and offering comfort to anyone who felt crummy.
I imagined him zooming over me, his long hair wild on the breeze. He winked, which was his signal that he was well pleased with my behavior. I squirmed and pressed harder at the spot between my legs. Maybe he loved me more than he loved Mother. What would I do then? Mother would never forgive me.
The women broke into song. I jumped, stunned by the sudden sound, and turned toward the loft. Their voices rose in unison—one magnificent hairy dog—unfurling and spinning along a single melody, filling every nook and cranny and spidery shadow. Nothing was left untouched. This was not just music. The ladies were giving voice and form to a full-blown haunting. The sound pierced the rough-hewn beams of the cathedral and seared itself to my bones, causing me to rattle and shake.
There was no being still in the presence of such sound. Their chant swirled through me and about me. My brain felt on fire. I tried to lift my hands to my head, but I was shaking too hard.
And then I left this earth. My body remained bent upon the prayer bench, jerking. But my soul darted upward, spiraled the length of the crucifix, and came to rest in the cold marble cleft of the Savior’s chest. All it took was one more swollen refrain and he and I flew. We swept past the women in the choir loft—I waved at Mother, but she did not see me. With the crucifix wings beating hard and sure, we ascended into heaven.
It was there, on that day, at that moment, amid a vacuum of stars, that I first saw the face of God. His eyes, like my mother’s when she prayed, flashed with the hollow light of faith, and all of him—his forehead, lids, lips, nose, chin—scintillated beneath a living blanket of ladybugs. My ladybugs. They flourished in his presence. They crawled and flitted and tried their wings, which caused his face to shimmer perpetually, like votive flame. I reached out to him, hoping that one of his holy creatures would light on my arm, thus conveying they had forgiven me for sending them to their deaths in that sealed glass jar. But just as my finger was about to touch his cheekbone, the plainsong ended. And in one silent blink, God and Christ vanished. I tumbled from heaven. My spirit crashed hard onto the pine pew. I peed on myself. And I cried. I floundered in a puddle of tears and piss.
That was vision number one.
Over the next few weeks, the visions piled up, one atop the other, like the dead orange beads in my savage jelly jar. Sh, sh, sh.
Mother, who was of the mind that I’d peed and cried simply to embarrass her, barely spoke to me. In fact, immediately after the incident, she didn’t bother to contain her rage. The ladies in the loft looked down upon us as Mother made me clean up the puddle with paper towels she had retrieved from the old woman who ran the gift shop. She grabbed me up from the pew by a single arm, which caused me to whimper, although to little effect, and hustled me from the church, into the daylight and our Mustang. Displaying a strength that inspired awe and fright, she shoved me into the backseat and, with shaking hands, removed my soiled skirt and panties. “Honestly, honestly!” she kept spitting.
I wanted to try to explain that nothing that had happened in the church was my fault. But my five-year-old brain could not muster a believable defense. So I crouched, naked from the waist down, behind the driver’s seat while my mother sped down A1A toward home, shouting over the sound of the wind, “What is wrong with you? How could you embarrass me in front of the entire choir?”
On an empty stretch of highway between Crescent Beach and Iris Haven, she tossed my soiled clothes out the window. I watched the way they flew—ripplelike—in the clutches of the wind and I wondered where they would land and if some other little girl would one day walk around in my brown cotton skirt and white panties, or if a rattlesnake would come upon them and make a nest.
To make matters worse, one of the choir ladies gave Mother a tape of that blasted rehearsal. She favored one song in particular. I made out the word Alleluia, but other than that, it was just sound to me, a sound so enthralling that it made even a five-year-old believe she had a soul.
Mother played it during her morning prayers. She would sing it at random moments throughout the day. Yes, she acquired an immediate obsession with plainsong. I suppose the ancient chant was one more way to express her religious piety. It gave her yet another avenue to avoid me, to escape my father’s indifference. And now—in death—I know that this cathedral built from penitent voices and pure song provided an auditory refuge from pain.
But hear this: I don’t want to give a false impression; my father was not a mean man. I have no way of knowing how deeply wounded he was by an act of violence exacted upon my mother by a depraved stranger, or how it must have felt to raise the seed of that rape, or the depth of his loss when my mother turned away from him and hid inside the crepe-paper drapery of the Catholic church. All I know is that familial involvement—if it required any effort beyond superficial niceties—was beyond him. I don’t think he was really raised, having been a boarding school child from the age of seven. His parents were busy spending their money on European trips and great art. By the time they died in an auto accident on the Taconic in upstate New York—this was years before I was born—they had spent nearly their entire estate. And I guess my father didn’t want anything to do with their lifestyle. Or his decent education. Because day after day, hours on end, Clement Harp guided hordes of behatted, sunburned tourists through the dark rooms and astonishing vistas of the old coquina fort, known officially as the Castillo de San Marcos. By the time he traveled the half hour home to Iris Haven, his feet hurt and he was, I believe, fed up with humanity. So he would turn on the TV, drink a few beers, and go to bed. Sometimes I wondered if he knew my name. Or my mother’s. Whenever he spoke to her, he called her Mrs. Harp. Never Lily. “Well, Mrs. Harp, what’s for supper tonight?”
So it was to the Catholic church that my mother directed her passions—a Catholic church that my father refused to acknowledge in any manner discernible to a small child. He never went to Mass. He never bowed his head in prayer over our supper table. He never took God’s name in vain or praise. Perhaps the rape had burned God out of him.
So. For a blessedly short time, in the spring of 1971, while half a million antiwar protesters descended on Washington, D.C., and South Vietnam invaded Laos, and Charles Manson was sentenced to death, and Lieutenant Calley was court-martialed for the massacre of twenty-two people at My Lai, my mother’s passions centered on plainsong. Every morning during the month of May, she flung open the windows of our white clapboard house, which was built by Great-Great-Grandfather Harp; the Atlantic breezes swept through the rooms, dispelling dust and shadows, lifting the polyphonal strains of plainsong from the tape player to corners unknown.
And every morning, I succumbed to ecclesiastical visions. I saw the face of God—daily. I felt the fires of hell—daily. Saint Francis and Saint Martin took me shopping and instructed me that blackbirds, like God, always knew what we were thinking. Christ told me that every time I saw an ant, I should eat it. Angels picked lice off my tongue. Me
rmaid saints sang, but when they opened their mouths, there was no sound. Only rain.
The bodily manifestations attached to my God sight wavered with the light. A simple shaking fit would sometimes escalate into something more violent. But how violent, I am unsure, since I could never sit on my own shoulders and watch events unfold. But I do know I bit my tongue. My muscles grew sore. And I almost always peed a river.
For the first couple of weeks, my bouts with religious ecstasy remained a secret. Only God, Christ, and the saints knew. Mother hadn’t a clue. Avoiding me and praying the rosary while listening to her music was all-consuming. And while she prayed, I grew ever more convinced that God loved me best. How else to explain my visions? I may have been a little girl, but not a stupid one. Clearly, there was a connection between my visions and my mother’s morning insistence on playing plainsong. I never jerked and spazzed and went shopping with the saints any other time.
And I was desperate not to be found out. While we were healing leper children in downtown Jacksonville, Christ himself told me that our meetings were top secret. And although Mother wasn’t a woman who flaunted her emotions, I feared she might fly into a jealous rage if she knew my relations with the Holy Trinity and all the saints were more intimate than hers.
The only part about all of this that proved tricky was my soiled underwear. Because I was old enough to be able to clean my own bottom, I could more or less take care of myself once I rallied. But the evidence remained on my ruffled cotton panties. So I told God that this particular bodily manifestation confused me and I prayed to him to make that part stop. But he didn’t. He did keep Mother shortsighted, though. Each time she did the laundry, she fretted to herself that it made no sense I had started to wet myself again and that perhaps she needed to take me into town to see Dr. Sinclair.
So I became a morning hermit. I skipped breakfast and stayed in my bedroom, with its pretty chenille sailboat spread and matching blue curtains and waited patiently, daily, to be swept away by plainsong.
I developed a ritual. Upon waking, I recited the alphabet, counted to one hundred, prayed for the souls of my parents, and listened for the sounds of my mother making breakfast, Father attending to bathroom chores, and finally the revving engine of his pickup. The tires’ crunch against the oyster-shell drive was my signal that it would soon be time. I would crawl out of bed and lie on the floor—I didn’t want to mess the sheets. There, while staring at the ceiling, I would try to push away my anticipation, joy, dread, and fear by thinking pious thoughts. There wasn’t much else to do, since I wasn’t in charge.
Mondays always presented a slight alteration to my ritual. That’s because it was Father’s day off and I would have to pick up other signals that Mother was about to crank the chants.
One particular Monday, the clue was the annoying drone of the lawn mower. Father had decided to cut the grass in the cool of the day. To be utterly honest, we didn’t have much to mow. Iris Haven was not, and is not, a place where you’d find a sodded yard. But we did have to knock back the sand spurs on a regular basis. So that’s what he was doing on an early blue morning in May, trying to get a head start on the sticker burrs on his day off, leaving Mother to attend to her devotions in private.
I threw back the covers, shimmied down to my panties, lay on the floor, and clasped my hands in prayer. Within moments, the mower noise receded as our house filled with the strains of chant. The voices of the monks mushroomed all about. My muscles contracted, spurting my spirit into the air. Before I could say squat, Saint Francis and I were walking on water, right in front of my house, and he was telling me that fish hated little boys with red hair. I told him I did, too.
Unbeknownst to me, while I tripped over the waves, Father stood outside my window, contemplating sand spurs, and the wind blew open my curtains. I guess his disinterested gaze must have followed the wind, and that’s when he saw me jerking and frothing to beat the band.
He did not come running. There was no scooping me up, no carting me to the truck and speeding to the hospital. No hand-wringing supplications to science or God. No. Nothing like that. According to a confession Mother made to me when I was twelve, Father—sweaty and burr-pricked—tapped on her bedroom door (this must have killed him) and said, “Sorry to bother you, but there is something wrong with your daughter.” That’s how he always referred to me, as my mother’s daughter.
Mother, as it turned out, had a different opinion about my condition, one that I surely did not anticipate. First, when she saw me sprawled and floundering in the middle of my bedroom floor, her maternal gene flashed into action, erasing the anger she had discreetly aimed my way for the last two weeks. I know this because I came to in her arms and was amazed at the sight of tears trickling down her worried face. She told Father—who, to his credit, hovered in the doorway—to phone Dr. Sinclair. But I, despite my condition, let loose with a mighty wail.
“We have to. We have to find out what is wrong with you,” she said, brushing my sweaty brown bangs out of my eyes.
“No, Mama, no. Nothing is wrong with me.”
“Well then, what just happened here?”
I couldn’t go to the doctor. He’d know that I was completely healthy, and then my secret would be splayed out for all the world to see. It wasn’t fair. God was forcing me to break my agreement. But perhaps if only my family knew the secret, I would be okay. What a world—shatter my promise to Christ or lie to my dear mother. Either way, I was going to burn. And when I told her the truth, she was going to hate me with a vengeance that would make the past few weeks look like a birthday trip to Weeki Wachi. I burst into torrential tears, the sort only a confession can unleash. And once I started crying, there was no turning back. The words rushed out of me before I could cork them. “I’ve been talking to God.”
Mother’s face went blank. She exhaled hard. “What?”
I stuttered through my tears, “Every time you play that music, I talk to God. And Christ. And all the angels. The saints, too.”
Mother pulled her rosary from the back pocket of her Bermuda shorts, grabbed my chin, tipped it upward, and asked, “What do they say?”
Aha! Here was my chance not to rat out Christ totally. I would tell her only bits and pieces. But not everything. Just enough to get by. I looked into her blue eyes, which were identical to my own, and said in the tiniest voice I had ever used, “They love us.” I gulped, searching for the right words. “They love everybody.”
Mother brought her rosary-clutched hand to her mouth and gasped. That perpetual dull, haunted light in her eyes bounced around. “Really?”
I nodded yes. Never before had my mother spoken to me so earnestly. I loved her. More than anything, I wanted to please her. God was giving me this chance. I could see him, in the clouds, pointing the way, whispering to me that the water was clear and pure and deliciously cold. “You can do it,” I heard him say. “Make her love you.” So I dived in.
“Christ says you’re special.”
Mother squeezed her eyes shut and pulled me hard against her. Her breasts smelled like talcum powder. Then she pulled away, grabbed me by my shoulders—now she was the one crying; tears streamed across the bright bruise of her rouge—and said, “Show me. Show me what happens when you talk to God.”
I couldn’t. I was exhausted. I didn’t want to wet myself again. And for the second time in my life, I was truly scared of God—perhaps he and Christ needed some time to get used to the idea that Mother was in on our secret. I stared at the ceiling, widened my eyes as much as possible, and tried to think of a way out. God wasn’t offering any advice this time. So I took my best shot. I looked into my sweet mother’s face and said with angelic solemnity, “God wants me to wait until morning.”
Mother almost stopped believing right then. I could tell by the twitch. Her upper lip shook when she smelled a rat. But, ultimately, her faith did not fail her. That unearthly smile resurfaced and once again her countenance grew distant, beatific. “Oh, yes, sweetie, of course. I�
��m sure he’s . . . well, terribly busy. In the morning, then, yes?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She stroked my cheek. This was not something I was accustomed to. I pulled away. “You are”—her face collapsed into what I thought was a mixture of sadness and grudging love—“good.”
I nodded shyly and looked over her shoulder. Father was gone. I slipped my hands into hers. She squeezed. The rosary beads dug into my right palm. I knew if I hung on long enough, they would leave little dimples in my skin and that I would like that. Mother tilted her head and gazed at me with an expression I had never seen: something rich and dangerous, maybe pride.
Forgetting for a moment about my missing front tooth, I shot her my most winning smile. Finally! For the first time in my life, I thought, Mother and I are in cahoots.
I swear to you: Seeing the face of God was not as thrilling.
Charleston Rowena Mudd
When we were five years old, I tried to kill Murmur. I mean it. I really did. Everybody thought she was such hot stuff—having visions, seeing God, healing the sick. The responsibilities of a child saint are huge. She simply didn’t have time for me, so she stopped being my friend.
Truth is, no one had time for me. Not even my own mother. She was always saying Murmur Lee this and Murmur Lee that and running up to the cathedral every time Murmur put on a show. She never missed a Murmur event, even though she exhaustively explained to my father that the whole thing was a farce and a crime against God. But whether they were believers or not, Mother wasn’t alone. Everyone—even people who weren’t prone to insanity—went Murmur-mad for a few weeks in the spring of 1971. I suppose I was among them.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 7
