The Passion of Mary-Margaret (2 page)

My mother came home to Locust Island to grow a healthy baby inside of her as she strolled by the shore and prayed in the chapel here at St. Mary's, feeling at home among the sisters. My grandmother's house was just down the street from the school. She prayed hours and hours on a kneeler, spending more time on her knees than at home. Aunt Elfi most likely joined her frequently because Aunt Elfi knew being present was the first way of helping anyone.

Grandmom said my mother would sit on Bethlehem Point every evening and stare out over the waters of the Chesapeake, her gaze pinned to the spider-legged lighthouse out on the shoals. And she'd cry. Grandmom didn't ask her to expound or emote. Grandmom was second-generation German. The chill had yet to dissipate completely.

I imagine Mary Margaret the First took hope in that whirling light of the lighthouse out on the shoals, as I always have. It makes me think that somehow there's somebody capable of warning you of danger, and if you find yourself in it, that person will climb into a lifeboat and come to get you. It's difficult to take your eyes off the piercing white beam when you sit here on a dark night.

We all want to be rescued and we'll look in the craziest places for that rescuer, won't we? We all want to be found.

Mary Margaret the First sat beneath the same tree under which I'm sitting now. It's one of the reasons I always end up here. The way the tangled roots protrude from the ground perfectly cradles my lawn chair, and on afternoons in late July or August, the canopy of leaves stifles some of the sun's heat. Only when my mother sat here, it was young, a tree with more hope than wisdom.

Conceived in sin, birthed in sorrow, I entered the world in a flow of blood that failed to cease once I had been released into my grandmother's hands. After fifteen minutes or so, Grandmom knew the bleeding wouldn't stop on its own; my mother was dying. Aunt Elfi fetched Doctor Spanyer, who said with an aching stutter that by the time they'd deliver my mother to the h-h-hospital, having to procure a boat to the mainland and then ride two hours to Salisbury, she'd be d-d-dead. The poor doctor died a year later on the way to the very place my mother couldn't go, his wife refusing to believe he'd bleed out when his son Marlow ran over his foot with the lawn mower. He did. She moved away after the funeral.

The inhabitants of Locust Island formed a hardy, scrabbly sort of people back then because every person knew in their core that if something traumatic happened physically, the nearest hospital more than two hours away, there was nothing to be done but die. And if death was the only outcome, well, the sooner the better and heaven above let it be something massive and quick: a fall from a roof onto your head, a fatal heart attack or stroke, a smash on the skull with a sledgehammer. A lawn mower accident. Postpartum uterine hemorrhaging.

Aunt Elfi then slipped out into the rain and fetched Father Thomas, our parish priest. Tears in his eyes, for he was my mother's confessor, he anointed my mother's forehead, eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet and prayed the prayers of extreme unction, the first prayers my new ears ever heard. Aunt Elfi said he then picked me up and said, “The final puzzle piece in Mary Margaret's redemption.”

I still don't know what that means. I can't say my life is completely explainable, that I don't have a lot of questions. God willing, the answers will be unearthed before I die.

My grandmother named me Mary-Margaret the moment my mother passed away. I've always liked the hyphen she gave, as if somehow it serves as a bridge between my mother and me, a gentle, silent “and so on and so forth.” And it is my own hyphen.

Had my mother lived, I most likely would not be writing in this notebook. She planned on giving me up for adoption, wanting me to have both a mother and a father, and returning to her order, teaching, most likely farther away, leaving the entire ordeal behind her. And I wouldn't have blamed her. Of course Grandmom said she always planned to raise me there in the little apartment with one couch and too many straight chairs; that she would never have let me go to another family when ours was well and good and fully capable of raising a child. And I can only believe her as she never did pass me on to anybody else.

The main players in this morality tale have passed on: Jude, my mother, Grandmom and Aunt Elfi, Brister, Petra, Mr. Keller, and even LaBella. Except for John, Gerald, and Hattie, and myself. Actually, if you're reading this,
I
am dead too. I assume the raping seminarian passed away as well. I never knew what happened to him. Who among us would have the spirit to embark on such a search?
I don't even know his name, if anyone discovered his crime, or if he slunk away into the arms of the Church.

And did he take refuge in the arms of Christ? Did he seek forgiveness? Did he, perhaps, turn into something more?

See? Questions. Never to be answered. Most likely I've waited too long. He'd be long in his grave by now.
I'm
old!

Well, my Aunt Elfi said my mother's soul passed into me as lightning trilled the air around us. Grandmom said she was crazy, we were all Catholic, we didn't believe in that sort of thing; surely the soul entered the baby well before she was born and would she please be quiet and help her wash her only daughter's body and clean up the blood?

The blood she gave for me. Yes, I'm painfully aware of the symbolism.

Aunt Elfi would have carefully rolled up her sleeves, donned an apron, and pulled back her long, white hair. She would have lovingly dabbed each rose-bloom of blood away, leaving a comet of iron-red across my mother's thighs as she wiped her clean. Aunt Elfi moved in a gentle, patting way, her voice never much above a whisper.

My mother, by the way, was the product of an indiscretion between my twenty-eight-yet-still-unmarried grandmother and an island tourist from Belgium. Though completely out of character for my thick-jawed grandmother, even less understandable was that he found her horsey, Germanic face attractive. So sex seemed to be something unredeemed in and of itself in my family of females, but somehow taken up and looped around the fingers of the Almighty and put to rights in the aftermath.

Well, Aunt Elfi never misbehaved like her sister, but it only took one look at her to realize someone scrambled her brain with a fork before it was fully cooked.

Later on that September afternoon in 1930, the sky clear and the orange sun gilding the fallen rain, men and women walked home from the dock, from their fishing boats or the seafood cannery at the western edge of our island. Cans and cans of oysters were shipped out from Locust Island every day. Abbey Oysters. The company used a monk as the logo even though many of the islanders were Methodists. As you can imagine, Friday was the best day for sales, a fact that did not escape even the most Methodist of Methodists. Sometimes I walked by the cement block building and looked through the grimy window, watching as the shuckers' hands darted like minnows extracting the smooth, precious meat from the rough, prehistoric exterior. Rounding the corner, the pile of shells grew with each day, only to be carted away and ground into lime.

Those men and women passed by, oblivious to the tragedy as they scuffled down Main Street in front of our building.They didn't know the bell from St. Mary's Convent School that called the girls to dinner served as a death knell for Sister Mary Margaret Fischer as well as a ringing in of a new life, proof, some wise person once said, that God desires the human race to continue. They figured another day had passed, much like the one before and the one before that, back to the day one of their parents or siblings or children passed away or someone was born into this world. We always remember days when something begins or ends.

And as those two women washed the bloody legs and the pale, fragile arms of my mother—pictures of her display lovely, wavy, dark hair and dark eyes—I lay bundled on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. That's what Aunt Elfi told me. I didn't cry until Father Thomas returned to comfort us in our sorrow and he gathered me into his fragile arms, crying with me. He was a tender sort until the day he passed away.

I was two days old when Father Thomas, the older members of our parish, and our family, consisting of my grandmother, my aunt, and myself, committed my mother to the earth at St. Francis Church's graveyard. Afterward, they walked right inside the church, stood by the simple, stone baptismal font, and I was baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sister Thaddeus, whom I'll tell you more about later, an older schoolgirl at the time, said she watched from the shadows, listening to the Holy Spirit telling her to pray for me every day. And she did.

Afterward, Aunt Elfi brought me to Bethlehem Point, this very piece of land on which I now sit, beneath the same tree, and she held me as the sun went down for good over my mother. She walked back home with me in her arms, fed me a bottle, and laid me in my bassinette, where I slept through the night. Exhausted, they both deserved that little ray of grace. I never gave them any trouble either.

SO, MY SISTERS, I FIGURE I'LL TELL YOU WHAT'S GOING ON these days while I jot down this little history, that way if something of note happens to me, this is all recorded and I won't have to scrape my brain to locate the information. I can tell you what happened forty years ago with little problem, but last week sits somewhere between the equation for finding the angles of an isosceles triangle and the name of the main character in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. Am I killing two birds with one stone or robbing Peter to pay Paul by doing it this way? Feel free to be the judge of that.

Earlier today Sister Angie (given name Angelica) opened a blue and green webbed folding chair and set it beside mine. We've been together a long time. My mother's sugar maple tree blared that beautiful orange-red. Sugar maples get a bit braggy in the fall.

“What's in your lap?” She pointed to this notebook open to the passage you just read, my pen resting in the fold.

“Just writing down some memories.”

She sat in her chair, stretched her legs straight out in front of her, and folded her hands atop her tummy. “Mary-Francis is on my case too. I need to get moving, I guess.”

I agreed. During Angie's years as a school sister, she was surrounded by a pack of wild dogs in a remote school in Alaska, was chased by revolutionaries in South America, and picnicked in France with rich schoolgirls. Angie was even arrested down at the School of the Americas, but that has nothing to do with our order. She's just an upstart when she finds the time. She taught in eight different schools and we ended up back here together at St. Mary's. She lived the life I thought I was going to. (Right, Angie? Yes, I can see you rolling your eyes.)

She adjusted the back of her chair, setting the teeth of the arms to recline a little. “I went to see Gerald and Hattie a few minutes ago,” she said.

“How's Gerald doing?” I snapped shut this notebook and slid it into my tote bag.

“Not well. Hattie's so upset about his condition they had to give her a light sedative. But she told me that Gerald had something to tell you and to get on over there.” Angie leaned forward and whispered, though no one else was around. “She said you wouldn't like it in the long run. She said it was about your mother when push came to shove.”

My mother?

I stared at the old lighthouse out in the bay off the southern point of the island. Hattie and Gerald lived there for years, the last lightkeepers on the Chesapeake Bay. If you are reading this, I hope you've come, or will come, to love these waters as much as I always have. They are like a mother to me, the home to which I've always returned eventually. Jude would have gone crazy out on the waters had he lived there all those years like his older brother, Gerald; this island made him crazy enough.

Oh and by the way, this is Jude's story as well. You cannot hear mine without hearing his.

The light circled around inside the plastic lens. The great Fresnel lens, an artistic, graceful beehive of beveled glass, was smashed years earlier by a baseball bat held in Jude's hands.Jude's soul frothed and foamed, stirred by an anger that began fermenting well before the day his mother left the light and took him with her. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. Jude and I had mother issues in common, indeed. Most likely, it drew us together. Unfortunately, back then, Jude was wont to concentrate on the mercies he thought he was
denied
.

“Poor Gerald. The last of the Keller men.” I waved to Glen Keesey sailing by in his Sunfish. Glen waved back and held up his book, my copy of
Bluebeard
. Between March and November, Glen sails out to Hathaway Island, a small, uninhabited, marshy speck half a mile east of the light, so he can sunbathe in the buff. He joins us for a glass of wine every once in a while too, while we watch the sunset.

“Yep. All gone but Gerald.”
Angie nodded, removing a barrette from her hair and replacing it, retightening the entire arrangement. Her knuckles have become knobby, but she always keeps her nails so nice. She's prissy. Tough, but prissy. I've rarely seen her without some makeup, and her shoes, while comfortable, are never ever called sensible. “It's the end of an era, Mary.”

The sisters all call me Mary. Mary-Margaret's a mouthful.

She looked upon the lighthouse too, a structure that seemed somehow less for all the automation going on inside. Aunt Elfi used to say that people dignify most structures, enliven them. Without us, what is the need? If you think I'm wrong, just imagine nobody ever going up and down the Eiffel Tower again. And why do ruins make us yearn to go live there?

I pointed to the lighthouse. “Mr. Keller saved many a life. Hard to believe the place is empty.”

She harrumphed. “I'm sure the ghost of Mr. Keller got back there somehow. I think that lighthouse was the only thing he ever really loved.”

Angie and I differ on what Mr. Keller should have done when his wife, Jude's mother, contracted cabin fever. I say he couldn't have possibly known what was going on. She says any man worth his salt should have figured all was not right, that he had to have known somewhere deep in his soul something was horribly wrong with his wife.