Our Lady of the Forest Read online

  She isn’t his wife.

  That’s not the point.

  And the Lord doesn’t have to prove anything.

  Anyway, said Carolyn. I have to get busy.

  You didn’t come for mushrooms, insisted Ann.

  Carolyn swung her mushroom bucket. Get help, okay Ann? I think you need professional help. You’re seeing things, okay?

  She turned her attention to the Catholic woman. What was that? Horsemen and tailors? Well who’s the patron saint of lunatics?

  Strange you should ask because I happen to know. Christina the Astonishing, she was called. Her feast day is my birthday, July twenty-fourth. She’s also the patron of therapists.

  Doctor and patient. How convenient.

  The Catholic woman lifted her camera. No one helps himself by hurting another. Those words are ascribed to Saint Ambrose. Now do you think it would be okay, would everyone agree to a group portrait?

  And so they arrayed themselves, if sluggishly. The Catholic woman set her camera on a log and peered for a long time through the viewfinder, making minor adjustments. There, she said finally, pushed the timer button, and hurried into the photograph. They sat there waiting for the click that meant the camera’s shutter had opened and closed and in that interim the Catholic woman said: Thank you all for doing this. Because I like to remember things.

  You know the Simon and Garfunkel song? said the ex-bartender, and the timer clicked. This reminds me of that.

  Which one? asked the Catholic woman.

  Kodachrome. What else would it be?

  I know it well, it’s a song I like. I think Paul Simon is kind of a genius. Anyway, we’ve commemorated this day. We’ve hallowed it with a photograph.

  The song’s sarcastic, Carolyn pointed out. They’re anti-photo, not pro.

  Going back toward the campground, the Catholic woman turned her camera on the rain forest and snapped four photos for her memory book—a bed of rotting vine-maple leaves, a boulder encrusted in hoary lichens, the monstrous foliage of a skunk cabbage, raindrops on a frond of fern. She did not believe in the literal sense that the Virgin Mary had made an appearance, since hers was not that kind of Catholicism; she had gone to church consistently except for a period in her early twenties when, briefly, she’d been attracted to Buddhism, then she came back, immersed herself, had flirted with the thought of becoming a nun—but even in her piety she was cognizant of her skepticism, a deep and quiet current. She did not believe in apparitions and could not believe in apparitions and even to believe in God was an effort for an honest person, just read Saint Augustine. On the other hand, who could be certain? In the girl’s rapture there was possibly some spark of another, larger truth. The point, for the Catholic woman, was that she wanted to believe, which she didn’t tell the diocesan committee or the bishop’s representative when asked sometime later. Instead she described the consecrated atmosphere, the feel of something hallowed in the forest while the visionary knelt in ecstasy. She made no reference to doubt.

  The ex-bartender told herself that the day had already culminated. The expedition with the visionary meant that now it was too late to forage for mushrooms and besides she was wet, she didn’t feel like working, and she felt an obligation to the mother of the lost girl to hike back with her. Also in her car at the campground was approximately one sixth of a bottle of gin and with the engine idling she could run the heater and drink and listen to the radio and clip her fingernails. A little drive first would warm up the car, it was seven miles into North Fork, besides she needed a quart of motor oil, the pistons were worn, which worried her, the car drank a quart every five hundred miles, and she wanted a People magazine and a package of low-tar cigarettes. Now she remembered that on Friday afternoon during happy hour at HK’s Tavern a tap beer was only seventy-nine cents, meaning that for a price almost in her budget she could sit inside and watch television, smoke in peace and ponder what she’d seen—this ragtag girl with the sweatshirt hood who claimed to commune with the Virgin Mary, who claimed she could heal warts with prayer and thwart the power of nicotine. The ex-bartender could already predict what kinds of things she was going to hear, the kind of resistance she was going to meet by talking about the girl at HK’s—Those doper mushroom people in the campground, they’re all on acid anyway, they probably all see things in the woods, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood, Jimi Hendrix, the naked Indian from that movie The Doors. Heh-heh-heh. Haw-haw. They don’t call them mushroomers for nothing.

  The mother of the lost girl walked behind Ann and asked herself repeatedly what to tell her husband. That she’d followed this penniless waif into the woods while he was at work, earning their keep, and searched for Lee Ann’s ghost? That this waif had seen the Virgin Mary and been assured that Lee Ann was in heaven and had promised to make further inquiries into the mystery of Lee Ann’s disappearance? Jim would sit with his head between his knees, fingering the bristles on the nape of his neck, gray now but not unattractive in the way they contrasted with the deep red crevices in a patchwork below his hairline. His neck had the raw painful look of sunburn even in the middle of winter and he wore white t-shirts and black plastic glasses without realizing they were sort of hip. If he’d known he would have done something about it. That was one of the differences between them. It was all convoluted over many years but even the marriage counselor agreed that part of the problem was selfishness, that Jim cared moderately about how she felt but more about preserving a status quo in which there was sufficient equilibrium to ensure fairly regular sexual encounters—at this point twice a week was adequate to keep him satisfied. It would have been nice if somehow the result had been another child to raise but after Lee Ann she was utterly barren; they’d been lucky, in fact, to have Lee Ann. An upright tree in winter with no leaves, was how she thought of herself. Or as old and weathered like a shed or barn, or like a starving sow with empty teats. Anyway, their marriage had improved. It was all calmed down like torpid water. Stirring it would only corroborate Jim’s unarticulated but obvious suspicion that she harbored permanent hope. She did like to think that it had happened before—strange teenager knocks on the door, says I’m the child you lost years ago—every time she heard a knock, which almost never happened in North Fork, that was the thought that rose in her, a flighty little leap of hope. No, she just couldn’t tell Jim anything, divulge to him her enthusiasm for what had unfolded this day. Jim would sit there shaking his head and maybe turn on the television, telling himself he didn’t need to shave, didn’t even need to jump in the shower, they were back in sullen contentiousness, there wouldn’t be sex tonight. Of course, that was just one big question. The other—less personal but more spiritual, or maybe more personal because it was spiritual—was what she was going to do about it if the Virgin Mary was real.

  They walked together but separately, a small group weaving through monumental trees, insects threading through blades of grass, Ann silently in the lead. Even Carolyn had not branched off. I want to pick somewhere new, she told Ann, catching up to her. What I want to find is the mother lode, not the Mother Mary.

  I have to go see the priest in town.

  See a shrink.

  Come on, Carolyn.

  Get a ride with what’s-her-name. The woman who lost her daughter over there. And have her stop at the drugstore for you so you can get some cold medicine.

  Ann stopped and pulled off her hood. Now she appeared to be twelve years old, somebody’s little sister. What if I asked you to take me? she said. I can give you gas money for it.

  If you asked me I guess I’d have to say yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m helping you because I still think this is psychotic behavior. And what’s-her-name would do it right now because she has to get home anyway so why not just go with her?

  I don’t have a reason.

  That isn’t an answer.

  If you’re going to pick I’ll wait for you.

  Well I don’t want you giving me gas money. And after the priest, listen t
o me, we hit the psycho ward.

  I’m not psycho, said Ann.

  At six-fifteen they knocked on the door of Father Collins’ trailer home in the North Fork Mobile Home Court. There was something unseemly about the notion of a priest who lived in a mildewed trailer court, in part because it seemed to them that the church must provide for its clergymen a rectory or permanent lodgings, in part because the trailer court was known to be a place of discords. Drunks and criminals lived there. It was regularly visited by the sheriff. Vast puddles stood in lieu of landscaping outside Father Collins’ door, and his car, a worn station wagon made in Japan, had a bent coat-hanger antenna. His trailer sat at the end of a row of trailers closely resembling it and was difficult for Ann and Carolyn to find, their journey starting at Saint Joseph’s of North Fork, where they’d rattled the doorknob, peered through the windows, and noted his name on a placard. At MarketTime they’d found no information in the white pages cabled to the telephone booth but asked around until a boy stocking shelves said he thought Father Collins lived in the trailer court. Carolyn bought Ann a package of Sudafed to go with her antihistamine; then in the rain they knocked on trailer doors, more than one person noting, concurring, that it was odd for a priest to be living there, something you wouldn’t assume or expect; nevertheless, he did. Doesn’t even look like a priest, one man had added suspiciously. I’ve never seen him in that collar getup priests are supposed to wear.

  With time they’d been led to the proper dwelling, but only after a series of mistakes—knocking on the wrong doors, misunderstanding what they were told, once even leaving the trailer court for another three miles up the highway. We’re looking for a Father Collins, Carolyn said to everyone, until finally someone answered, I’m him.

  You really are?

  I’m the guy.

  Where’s your collar?

  I don’t wear it all the time.

  You’re really the priest from the Catholic church?

  I pinch myself sometimes. But yes.

  He was slight of build, maybe thirty years old, with thin hair like cornsilk. With his index finger tucked into a book he looked more like a graduate student studying for final examinations than a priest at home for the evening. He wore sweatpants, a t-shirt, a button-up sweater, wire-rimmed glasses, and slippers. While he spoke he looked with curiosity at Ann, whose face was concealed under her hood—he even bent at the knees a little, to peer more closely at her features. A little lost soul with a cold, he thought. And a rather stunning immaculate complexion. Hello, he said. Obviously it’s raining. I’m losing my heat with the door open like this. So if this isn’t a quick question, something quick I can do for you, it’s probably better if you come in for a bit, except that the place is a mess.

  This isn’t quick, warned Carolyn.

  Then, okay, come in.

  The heat was on very high in his trailer, which smelled of mold and fried onions. They sat on his sofa. He turned off a lamp. I was reading but I’m not right now and I think that lamp is just too bright. It blinds my many visitors, the endless parade of guests.

  We got your name off the church door. Father Donald Collins.

  I could show you my ID if you want.

  You just don’t look like a priest is my point.

  Well what’s a priest supposed to look like?

  Like Karl Malden, said Carolyn.

  Father Collins smiled broadly, revealing that his teeth weren’t straight. I think of him, he said, from The Streets of San Francisco. His partner was Michael Douglas, right? Back when Michael Douglas was young. Michael Douglas was the young tough guy. Karl Malden slowed him down. But a priest? Was he ever a priest?

  He played a priest in On the Waterfront. Also—kind of—in Pollyanna. That was Karl Malden. The Reverend Paul Ford.

  I don’t remember seeing Pollyanna. But you’re right about On the Waterfront. He was superb in that.

  I coulda been somebody too, said Carolyn, and her Brando was not that bad.

  Father Collins sat in a ratty reading chair with one leg hooked at a feminine angle across the knee of the other. With his plate of orange slices on the table beside him, their membranes dry and hard in the swelter, he seemed to be a homebody. His hands were small and looked fragile and pale. He had bitten a few nails to the quick. So what’s this about? he asked now. Are you with the Karl Malden Fan Club?

  Not quite, answered Carolyn. She turned to Ann and touched her knee. My friend here wants to tell you something.

  I’m happy to help if I can, said Father Collins. But is this an emergency?

  Not like a nine-one-one emergency, if that’s what you mean, not like that, but as far as my friend here is concerned, this couldn’t wait for your church to open.

  The priest took in the girl again; she hadn’t yet removed her hood. Please, he said to her. Speak.

  This is hard, Father, said Ann.

  The priest didn’t think of himself as “Father,” and the word persistently surprised him. He thought of himself as Donny Collins, a boy growing up near Everett, Washington, the name he’d been given to distinguish him from Don Collins, his father the machinist and Cub Scout leader, Jack Russell terrier enthusiast, remote control glider airplane hobbyist, church treasurer and Rotarian. Much has been made in psychoanalysis of the son burdened with his father’s name, of the name that is like a noose or straitjacket or the utterance of a willed fate, for to be named for one’s father makes more desperate the struggle to subdue and kill him. As a result, the priest had not been among those boys who rolled their eyes at their tenth-grade English teacher as she explicated Freud’s embarrassing theory in accompaniment to Oedipus the King. Don Junior didn’t desire his mother, or didn’t believe he desired her, his denial consistent with the theory of the unconscious—with the father of psychoanalysis you couldn’t win either way—but he knew he wanted to kill Don Senior: for him, Freud was half right.

  Go right ahead, he told the girl. But maybe—first—you should take off that hood. Because I’d like to see your face while you’re speaking. It makes it easier for me.

  He didn’t want to be overbearing. He knew that overbearing didn’t work and was of the opposite school. Father Collins’ father had been overbearing, which in combination with his doting mother was supposed to produce a Stalin or Hitler but in his case produced a priest. In college Father Collins had mulled that irony, read Mein Kampf and the accounts of Hitler’s life, the library of psychological theory, read about Stalin, then about Mao, who suffered a similar family dynamic, a fact little known in the West. Father Collins was dismayed to find that like all three members of this mad triumvirate he’d grown up ashamed of his provincialism—in his case a lower-class, suburban, American, West Coast, blue-collar provincialism—but relieved to note that unlike them he hadn’t suffered in the crucible of a terrifying war. Perhaps, he’d speculated, but for that element he might have annihilated his own millions, though at the same time he understood that nothing really worked that way and that causal theories about the deeds of men were often completely facile. He was a total physical coward, for one. He could not have taken the life of another, even by an abstract command. Look, with a spot I damn him was, to his way of seeing things, the most chilling line in his eleventh-grade reading of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. With Hamlet in the twelfth grade, Donny identified utterly.

  The girl before him slid back her hood and her pale young face emerged from it, a white chrysanthemum. It seemed she had barbered her own hair without the fundamental assistance of a mirror, scissoring it off in hanks. She was slim, wet, and plainly ill, and she evoked in him both professional pity and a burst of sexual desire. The latter was more than incidental, as it always was for Father Collins, whose vow of celibacy was in part a life sentence to struggle with carnal yearnings. The girl’s youth was highly disturbing, a girl of her age was clearly off limits, the ineluctable craving he felt for a girl just recently of childbearing age must not be consummated. The irony being that for a priest like him, all people
of all ages were off limits.

  Father Collins didn’t desire Ann Holmes any more than he desired most other women, which is to say that as best he could he put his corporeal desire aside from the moment she pulled back her sweatshirt hood with her cold, pink, small fingers. Thank you, he said. I can see you now. Why don’t you tell me what your name is?

  I don’t know if I should give it or not.

  This sounds like it might be complicated.

  It’s the most complicated thing that’s ever happened to either one of us.

  Except that it hasn’t happened to me yet.

  In a way it has. I guess you could say that.

  Okay, said Father Collins. Whatever it is. Have you committed some kind of crime?

  No.

  Is there something you feel you have to confess?

  I’ve been sent to you, said Ann.

  The priest had to ask a great variety of questions, so they were there for a long time. At first he sat with an elbow on his knee and a hand clamped over the lower half of his face, as though afraid that but for his hand he might be compelled to interrupt. He was a good listener, his posture intimated, though at the same time he appeared eager to retort at any point. At moments in the narrative most outlandish—the attack of the ball of light, the advent of the Virgin, Our Lady’s six-point bulletin—he pressed his hand even harder to his mouth in order not only to maintain his composure but to keep himself from responding in a fashion derisive or prosecutorial. Father Collins had a modest familiarity with prominent apparition narratives like those that unfolded at Lourdes and Fátima and was aware that in their standard tellings the local priest was an insular bureaucrat, at odds with the inexorable groundswell of sentiment in support of the peasant visionary. Given this, he did not interrupt. He would not play the role of ecclesiastical authority. His view of himself was adversarial. He wanted to reform the church.

  He had wanted to reform the church, in fact, ever since middle school. He’d incited concurrently running arguments with the instructor of his confirmation class about the pope’s positions on abortion and birth control, the existence of the devil and hell, and the nature of the Holy Trinity. He was one of those pent-up sensitive boys whom classmates mistake for a homosexual because he did not express himself crudely, was open about his intelligence, wore saddle shoes and corduroy slacks, and was passive during gym class. Faggot, other boys said to him. I’m not a faggot, he answered. But why would you care if I was anyway? How come you’re thinking about faggots constantly? Why is it such a big deal to you? What is this weird obsession you have with faggots all the time?