Keeping Faith: A Novel (18 page)

“Everyone thought it was a miracle. Until I found a sewing hook used for ripping out stitches slipped into the hem of Sister Mary Amelia’s habit. Turned out there was a very fine line between religious ecstasy and religious insanity.”

You think she did this to herself. I don’t have to speak the words; he knows what I am thinking.

“Her hands–the sister’s–looked nothing like Faith’s.”

“What are you saying?”

He shrugs. “That this is different. That’s all.”

All in all, Allen McManus figures it’s a cheap trade. A pepperoni pizza and a six-pack for young Henry, who works part-time in production at the Globe, and in return the kid will get on the computer and hack his way into the privileged information of the White family.

“How come it’s taking so long?” Allen asks,

gingerly moving a piece of sweaty athletic clothing so that he can sit at the edge of the bed in Henry’s room.

“My modem’s only twenty-eight-point-

eight,” Henry says. “Cool your jets.”

But Allen can’t. The more he’s learned, the more he’s felt anxious. Lately Allen has been remembering quotes from Revelation, hideous stories told by Sister Thalomena in fifth grade about sinners who went to hell. It has been years since he personally went to confession or took communion, and religion for Allen will always be scarred by the bestiality of the nuns who taught his parochial-school classes. But Catholicism runs deep, and this girl has made him rethink his choices. What if, all these years, he’s been wrong? How many Hail Marys and Our Fathers comprise a penance for turning one’s back on God?

Suddenly the computer screen begins running with a stream of information. “Credit-card purchases. This is the missus’s card.”

Allen leans forward. Lots of groceries, kids’-clothing stores, a couple of L. L. Bean catalog buys. Nothing dicey. “Jeez, they even paid the bill off every month.”

“She did. Let’s check out her husband.”

Henry’s fingers fly over the keyboard, pulling up a business American Express card.

Slowly, he whistles. “Looks like Mr.

White did a bit of socializing on his business trips. Check this out–Lily’s Palace of Dancing.”

Allen grunts. “So he was screwing around on his wife. Big deal.” Infidelity doesn’t naturally lead to setting up one’s daughter as a fake Messiah. You do something like that to make yourself look better, to draw attention. Or else you’re just plain nuts.

“Hey, bingo!” Henry shouts. “The legal search turned up a name. It’s from the records department of the state of New Hampshire. The courts have to file away all the injunctions and crap–just about anything that’s brought before a judge.

Looks here like Mr. White tried to have the missus locked up. No, correction: Looks like he succeeded.”

“Let me see.” Allen sits down and scrolls through the page. “Holy cow! He had her committed to a mental hospital.” He glances at the original order that landed the woman at Greenhaven, at the repeated hearings Millie Epstein instigated to try to get her daughter released.

Henry lounges on the bed, picking pepperoni out of his teeth. “Lots of fucking crazy people in the world, man.”

But Allen does not hear him. A mental hospital. Now it makes sense.

Seven-year-olds don’t just start talking to God; someone puts them up to it. And someone who’s crossed the edge once, he figures, is more than likely to do it again.

Getting up from the chair, Allen reaches into a paper sack for a Rolling Rock and tosses one to Henry. “Cool,” Henry says. “What are we celebrating?”

Allen smiles slowly. “Atheism.”

Somehow word has gotten through the hospital grapevine about Faith. Nurses come on the pretense of checking Faith, only to wind up sitting by her side and speaking to her and,

in one case, giving Faith a medal of Saint Jude to hold in her mittened hands for a moment.

Faith does not seem to know what to do. When she is awake, she politely answers questions about school and her favorite Disney movies; when she is asleep, these strangers touch her hair and her cheek as if even that small contact will preserve them.

My mother has been in a state all day. “This doesn’t mean anything,” she tells anyone who will listen. “Stigmata, shmigmata. Jews have been waiting fifty-seven hundred years for a Messiah; we’re not going to start believing in Jesus now.” At one point, when Faith is asleep, she pulls me aside. “Doesn’t this bother you? This thing with Faith?”

“Well, of course,” I whisper heatedly.

“You think I want her to go through this?”

“I mean the Catholic thing. Catholic, for God’s sake! All these people parading in and out of here like Faith’s some saint.”

“Bleeding from her hands doesn’t make her Catholic.”

My mother nods emphatically. “I should hope not.”

The one good thing that happens is this: My mother is in the cafeteria, in search of Jell-O for Faith, when Father MacReady walks through the door that afternoon.

“Charlotte,” he says to the nurse who’s brushing Faith’s hair–and pocketing strands when she thinks I’m not looking. “How are you? And the children?”

“We’re fine, Father,” the nurse says. “I guess you’ve heard what’s going on?”

“One of the hospital volunteers works in the church’s business office.” The priest waits until the nurse leaves, then sits down in the chair she’s vacated. “Hi. I’m Father MacReady.”

“Why are you wearing that white thing around your neck?” Faith asks.

“It’s a special shirt that says he works in a church,” I explain.

“I thought he was someone’s father,” Faith says,

her brow wrinkling.

The priest grins. “Actually, that’s the most confusing thing of all.” He gently lifts Faith’s bandaged hand. “I hear you speak to God. I like to do that myself.”

“Did she make your hands hurt, too?”

I stare at Faith. Until now, I had not known that this God of hers had told her what would be happening. I hadn’t thought to ask.

“No, Faith,” the priest answers. “God didn’t make my hands hurt.”

Is that regret I hear in his voice?

At that moment my mother walks in bearing a tray of lemon Jell-O. “No red today,

Faithele, but– Oh.” Her gaze rakes over the priest. “Already it’s starting,” she says sourly.

“You must be Mrs. Epstein,” Father MacReady greets her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

My mother purses her mouth. “I wish I could say the same.”

“Mother!”

“Well, it’s true. I’m living life one day at a time now, you know, and I’m not going to cozy up to a man who’s trying to convert my granddaughter.”

“Believe me, I have no intention of converting your granddaughter–“

“Of course not! You think it’s half done already, what with the bleeding from the hands. Stigmata,

my Aunt Fanny!”

I roll my eyes and take the priest’s elbow. “Ma, maybe you could watch Faith and help her with the Jell-O.”

“Good,” my mother announces. “In the meantime,

you get rid of him.”

As soon as Father MacReady and I are in the hallway, I apologize. “I’m so sorry.

My mother isn’t exactly taking this well.”

“And you?”

“I’m still getting used to the idea of Faith talking to God. Taking it a step further–

well, I can’t even get my head around that.”

Father MacReady smiles. “Stigmata–if that’s what they are–are a gift.”

“Some gift. To leave you in constant pain, and make you a freak show.” There is a reason, I know, that the word “stigmata” is rooted in “stigma.”

“Millions of people would say your daughter is blessed.”

“She doesn’t believe she’s blessed.”

To my embarrassment, my voice wavers. “Do you know she put on dark gloves when it first happened? She was too ashamed to show me that she was bleeding.”

Father MacReady seems interested by this. “From what little I know of stigmatics, they don’t show their wounds to the world. They hide them.”

After a moment of silence, I stop walking.

We have wandered to the end of the pediatric ward, to the infant nursery where I stood with Ian Fletcher. “I have a confession to make.”

“I seem to bring that out in people.”

“I sneaked into confession once.”

“A confession about confession?” Father MacReady laughs.

“I was only ten. I wanted to see what it was like. But I thought some buzzer would go off, you know,

some sensor to show I wasn’t Catholic.”

“Nah, the Protestants are the ones with the fancy technology.” Leaning against the wall, he grins. “Actually, I’ve always admired the Jews for their lack of confession. You can pass that along to your mother, as a matter of fact.”

“I just might.”

“See, a Catholic sinner confesses, says a few prayers, and gets the shame wiped away.

It seems to me Jews carry guilt like camels, forever. Which do you think is the more effective deterrent?” Sobering, Father MacReady turns. “I don’t know if God is speaking to Faith, Mrs. White. I’d like to believe it, though. I don’t care what other clergymen say; I’ve never believed that spirit comes from religion. It comes from deep inside each of us; it draws people to us. And your daughter has a lot of it.

“Okay, so it’s not Judgment Day. There’s no Lake of Fire yawning in front of the green at the town hall. No Book of Life with a list of names in it. So she’s a Jewish child with wounds that might be stigmata; so she happens to see a female God. I have to tell you that,

although my superiors would probably disagree, I don’t find it all that shocking. Maybe this is God’s idea of a winning ticket–a way to get many different personalities to worship Him at once. To worship Him at all.”

“But she never agreed to it,” I say. “She’s not anybody’s savior, or anybody’s martyour. She’s just a scared little girl.”

Father MacReady stares at me for a long moment. “She’s also God’s child, Mariah.”

I cross my arms to hide the trembling. “You know, that’s where you’re wrong.”

Father MacReady locks the door that leads from the rectory to his private quarters. He walks slowly into the kitchen, sitting down at the scarred table and watching the sun play through the dust motes on a thin spotlighted ray. On second thought, he stands up and gets a bottle of Sam Adams out of the refrigerator. He’s not one to overdrink, but he feels that his dinnertime beer might be better served right now, in the middle of the afternoon.

The hell of it is that Father MacReady really,

truly likes Mariah White.

But he also really, truly loves his church.

“I’m not doing this to them,” he murmurs to himself. “I’m doing it for everyone else.” Then he finishes the entire beer.

In the decades he has been a priest,

he’s counseled on visions twice. The first time was in Vietnam, a soldier who said that the Virgin Mary had come to him in the jungle. The second time was much more disturbing–a sixteen-year-old inner-city girl who claimed that the Holy Ghost had impregnated her. That time Father MacReady had called in the authorities,

who all waited with bated breath until the girl delivered a perfectly ordinary baby with a DNA match to the recently hired choir director.

He’s never run across stigmata.

With a sigh he removes a battered book from a shelf beneath the telephone and looks up the number of the Chancery in Manchester.

From The Boston Globe, October 17, 1999 Mother of Visionary “Mentally Unbalanced”

New Canaan, NH–IF you see it, they will come.

Or so might be the slogan of the seven-year-old New Canaan girl who is allegedly envisioning God. The pious and the curious have flocked to the small New Hampshire town for a glimpse of the child who can work miracles.

But the basis for such heavenly sightings might be far more earthbound than these onlookers might imagine. Sources have revealed that the mother of the girl was hospitalized for mental illness several years ago. A psychiatrist formerly employed by the private psychiatric institution Greenhaven, who wishes to remain unnamed,

confirmed that Mariah White was a patient at the Burlington, Vermont, facility for four months during 1991. When asked the nature of her illness, the psychiatrist declined to comment.

According to Dr. Josiah Hebert, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Harvard University, some of the most common adult psychotic delusions involve religion. “If Ms. White’s illness involved hallucinations about God, it does not necessarily follow that her daughter would experience the same sorts of things,” Hebert said. “However, in the normal parent-child relationship, parental approval is key, and the behaviors that bring it about are infinitely varied. What we have may not be a case about a visionary, but about a little girl desperately trying to gain her mother’s attention.”