Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  The apparition lasts for about two hours and then the figures vanish, still without having said a single word.

  Soon miraculous healings are taking place regularly at the little church, especially for those who have scraped bits of concrete from the wall and eaten them. Pilgrims come by the thousands and the church wall becomes so weakened by people chipping away at it that it must be reinforced and covered with wood.

  Today, Knock is still a small town but it has its own airport, built to accommodate the annual onslaught of more than a million pilgrims. Housed now in a basilica large enough to hold two thousand people at a time, the sacred wall of the old church is displayed behind a sheet of unbreakable glass to protect what is left of it from the unflagging enthusiasm of the faithful.

  Truth

  When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

  —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

  On Friday it rained all day. In the morning we followed our usual routine. After breakfast and coffee, we got dressed and retired to our respective rooms.

  —Now this is my idea of the perfect vacation, Mary said with satisfaction. At last I have a chance to catch up on my reading. So many books, so little time.

  She shook her head regretfully and went into her room, quietly closing the door behind her.

  I went into my study. I settled in at my computer, checked my e-mail, and sent the necessary replies. I wrote several letters to be dispatched later in the regular, nonelectronic way. I took out the red spiral-bound notebook in which I had been jotting down ideas and images for my next novel. I read over what I had written the day before:

  I went to the gallery early in the morning. I rode my bicycle through the fog. I have always been partial to fog. I like the way it hides a multitude of sins. I like the way it makes me feel invisible and safe. I like the picture of myself emerging from the fog with shreds of it still hanging off me like skin.

  I made spaghetti and salad for dinner. By the time the food was ready, I could not eat.

  —I have never understood the nature of coincidence, I said. It was Sunday evening. I was washing the dishes and he stood beside me, drying and putting away.

  —You will, he said, smiling in a superior way and moving the dish towel in slow circles around the face of a blue and white plate.

  I had begun to notice how lately all of my sentences started with “I.” I was always thinking or talking about my problems, preoccupied with the shortages of money, love, and peace of mind that seemed to chronically plague me. I was always describing, explaining, and justifying myself, both to myself and to others.

  I said I did not love him anymore.

  He said he did not love me anymore.

  What it all boils down to is this: Who said it first? Therein lies the story.

  Imagine this sentence is a secret: tell nothing, tell no one: tonight.

  Although I had written these lines just twenty-four hours earlier, they now made no sense to me at all. I remembered writing them. I remembered liking them. I distinctly remembered being excited by them. But now I could not remember where I had imagined they might be leading, what I had thought they might eventually amount to.

  This was akin to having one of those earthshaking, life-altering epiphanies just as you are falling asleep and then in the morning it is lost, gone, forgotten, the earth is not shaken, your life is not altered, and you have no choice but to go on without knowing whatever miraculous truth it was that you knew for that one precipitous moment in the luminous darkness of the revelatory night before.

  Without making a conscious decision to do so, I put aside the red notebook and took a new blue one from my stationery cabinet. Centered on its first page, I printed in large block letters: OUR LADY OF THE LOST AND FOUND. In smaller letters below I printed: This is a work of fiction.

  I sat and stared at these words for a long time.

  For lunch we had cheese and mushroom omelettes with fruit salad for dessert. After we had finished eating, neither of us was especially inclined to get up from the table. Outside it was still raining. Inside, all the lights were on, glowing yellow and warm, inviting laziness, a leisurely afternoon, another pot of coffee, a long conversation filled with confidences and confessions.

  During the earlier days of her visit, Mary had been more than generous in telling me the stories of her life. On Friday, it seemed only natural that now it was my turn, that now I should tell her the story of mine.

  Mine, of course, is a much shorter story. And if there are miracles in it, they are much harder to see.

  I have already told you the facts. Now I will tell you the truth. In one way or another.

  Over the centuries, a great many things have been said and written about truth. Some of them might even be true.

  It is an inherent and inevitable characteristic of human nature, I think, to go looking for the truth. We use the word truth in the same ways we use the word history: both with and without a capital letter. We seek both the truth about ourselves as individuals and the Truth about the universe at large. Deeply ingrained in each of us is the expectation that someday we will indeed figure it out. We share the belief that finding the truth will ultimately bring the seeker only and all good things: peace, love, justice, joy, safety, and salvation.

  To our way of thinking, the words true and good are synonyms.

  We envision Truth as a magical set of laws by which the universe and all things and creatures in it are governed. It is as if Truth were a sophisticated and invisible system of checks and balances operating behind the scenes of daily life, a system that keeps us (well, most of us anyway) from running completely amok.

  To our way of thinking, the words true and evil are antonyms.

  But much as we may sometimes ponder Truth with a capital T, mostly when we talk about truth, we talk about it with a small t. We talk about the many varieties of truth. We qualify and modify the word with circumstantial adjectives and strategic disclaimers. We talk about poetic truth, human truth, scientific truth, metaphysical truth, half-truth, whole truth, plain truth, simple truth, hard truth, gospel truth, the absolute truth. But mostly when we talk about truth, we talk about ourselves. We say:

  —I believe in God. I do not believe in God.

  —I am lonely. I am not lonely.

  —I am afraid. I am not afraid.

  —I am patient and impatient, responsible and irresponsible, rational and irrational, certain and uncertain, faithful and unfaithful, innocent and guilty, lost and found. I am truthful. I am a liar. On any given day, I am any or all of the above.

  —I have brown eyes and short brown hair that is just beginning to go gray. I am of average height and weight. I have worn glasses since I was nine years old. I am the middle child of three. I like coffee. I like Bach and Beethoven. I like a quiet rain.

  When in doubt (as we so often are), our inherent inclination is to stick to the facts. We are so easily led astray by our collective tendency to equate facts and truth, logic and reality. But when all is said and done, human nature is not logical and the truth is more than the sum of the facts.

  Just as we can live quite happily without knowing the momentum and position of subatomic particles, so we can also probably live quite well without knowing the Truth about the general workings of the universe. But can we also live well without knowing the truth about ourselves?

  We have been led to believe, by pop psychology, self-help books, and daytime TV talk shows, that it is our failure to know the truth about ourselves that allows room in our lives for all unhappiness, doubt, pain, and fear. We have been led to believe that once we are wise enough to find our truth and know it, then all doubt and
fear will vanish and everything will be all right.

  Remember that Jesus said: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  But also remember Emily Dickinson: Tell all the truth but tell it slant…/ The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.

  And then there was Friedrich Nietzsche: We have art in order not to die of the truth.

  I have never been to confession in the formal, ritualized manner. My true confessions have not taken place in a darkened booth in a cavernous, possibly chilly, church. I have never sat there, contrite, with my head bowed, my face hidden, and my hands clasped. I have never said: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, addressing myself humbly to a shadowy, benevolent priest, who then listens patiently to my whispered recitation of heinous, mundane, or pathetic little transgressions.

  I have never said: O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee; and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments. But most of all, because they offend thee, my God, who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.

  I have never had a priest bestow absolution upon me and send me on my way with some expiatory homework: Say twelve Hail Marys. Say ten Our Fathers. Get down on your knees and promise you will never do it again. Cross your heart and hope to die.

  I have never been to confession, but still I am no stranger to trying to tell the truth about myself to myself or someone else. I am no stranger to putting my own life into words. But my true confessions have always taken place in less ecclesiastical settings, often with little or no premeditation.

  Often it happens at my computer in my study when I think I’m writing about a wholly fictional character, but the next thing you know she is wearing my clothes, cleaning out my fridge, watering my plants, thinking my thoughts, remembering my memories, and making my mistakes.

  Equally often, I have confessed to all manner of high crimes and misdemeanors while drinking many cups of coffee at a cluttered table in a warm, cozy kitchen and outside it is gloomy and raining and the streetlights have come on though it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon, and I am sure that if only I can tell my story accurately and often enough, I will eventually come upon the truth, either on purpose or by accident.

  I have always thought of myself as an honest person, as a person who is not afraid to look myself in the eye. It is hardly surprising that being a writer, I tend to assume that truth resides in story. But still, it is easy enough to forget that story, like language itself, can both reveal and obscure the truth.

  My penchant for story (and all that it involves: structure, form, order, plot, cause and effect, metaphor, allegory, theme, conflict, crisis, and resolution) has led me to seek and find patterns in my own life where perhaps there are none. When I was younger, I dreamed of starring in my own dramatic narrative. I imagined it would be a romantic story, an inspiring parable of love filled with passion, wisdom, and tenderness. It would have a happy ending, of course, the inevitable ending beside which all other endings would look wrong.

  Much to my surprise, things did not turn out that way.

  Of course there is more than one way to tell this story. I know there are other ways of telling it by which I could make myself look better or worse. But this is the way I most often tell it to myself. This is the way I told it to Mary that Friday afternoon in my warm, cozy kitchen. I talked and she listened patiently, dispensing sympathetic smiles, encouraging comments, and frequent coffee refills. She did not judge, ridicule, or rush me. I kept talking and outside it kept raining and the streetlights came on at only two in the afternoon.

  This is the story I can live with.

  When I taught writing, I was always telling my students that they must hone their powers of observation, that they must never underestimate the importance of concrete details in a story. I would often emphasize how precision in the details helps create atmosphere, character, and verisimilitude; how the color of a bedroom wall, the dirt on a third-floor window, the drape of a black silk skirt can all be used to draw the reader deeper into the fictional world, a world that should be, as John Gardner advised, a “vivid and continuous dream” in the reader’s mind.

  I have scrupulously followed this advice in my own writing. I have become addicted to details. I can never get enough of them and if, as they say, God is in the details, then surely he should have shown up by now. I have put my faith in the transformative power of the telling detail, however small and apparently insignificant. I have never doubted the omnipotence of objects, innocent or otherwise, and yet I cannot explain how or why the most ordinary object becomes extraordinary in the process of observing it and putting it into words. Bearing in mind Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the writer is the observer and all of reality is the system. Both are forever altered in the process of their exchange.

  I can always see what Italo Calvino described as the “web radiating out from every object.” I absolutely believe his theory that any object—a table, a suitcase, a statue—can serve as the starting point, the seed of a story, just like the famous mustard seed of faith. And, if the writer pursues the ever-multiplying network of details, digressions, and meditations to which it gives rise, the result may in the end encompass the entire universe.

  Many of the details I have used in my fiction were drawn from my own life, bits and pieces of autobiography transplanted into or grafted onto the lives of my fictional characters. I discovered early on that I could not write the stories of their lives without also writing something of my own. But I am not writing about myself. Paradoxically, putting some part of myself in the story draws me out of myself, toward something greater, deeper, and very far away.

  I have also discovered that writing about an incident from my own life and calling it fiction often seems to make it more true. Sometimes I have piled detail upon detail until I can no longer remember what is real and what I have embroidered, exaggerated, or invented altogether. Now I have to wonder how much of my own history has been revised and rewritten, amended and appended, misremembered and misrepresented, by accident or on purpose. Now I have to wonder about the difference between honesty and truth.

  I am either the victim or the villain of this story.

  Contrary to John Gardner’s advice and my own practice, in this part of my story, the details don’t much matter now. Dates, times, places. Weather, wardrobe, food. The color of shirts, rooms, eyes. The look on a man’s face or mine, somebody always saying goodbye, the sound of another door closing (softly, sadly, or with a resounding and immensely satisfying slam). Promises, lies, disappointments, and betrayals.

  In this part of my story, all the chapters end up the same, never mind about the details along the way. When I taught writing, I also always told my students that what you leave out can be just as important as what you put in.

  When I was in my twenties, I put my faith in love. I was a product of my place and time, a middle-class girl who had been led to believe that romantic love was the most important thing in the world. I saw no reason to question this received wisdom, no reason to doubt that I would eventually find it. When I was in my twenties, I thought I had all the time in the world to get it right.

  I had several relationships in those years, each of them short, exciting, and doomed. I was an old hand at obsession. I always had to have some man’s name in my head like a chant, an incantation, a constant tintinnabulation, the subtext beneath everything I said and did, a one- or two-note song I sang silently to myself in bed at night even when the man in question was right there beside me, sweaty and snoring and hogging the blankets. It is only in retrospect that I understand that obsession has nothing to do with love and everything to do with anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty, and fear.

  At first I was most often attracted to men with the names the Ouija board had spelled out to me the summer I turned fourteen: Andrew, Robert, David, John. But I didn’t stop there. I was attracted to men who w
ere married, gay, or chronically afraid of commitment. I was often attracted to men who were not attracted to me. I was attracted to men who were bad for me, men who were dangerous, men who were not very smart, men with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.

  I was a devoted proponent of the idea that opposites attract. I had first encountered this theory back in Grade Nine Science class when we studied the law of electrical charges: while like charges always repel, unlike charges always attract. I do not remember why learning that this is a law of science led me to believe that it must also be a law of love. Nor do I remember my Science teacher ever warning us that, much as this law is a true thing, that does not necessarily make it a good thing.

  I did not see any of these men for who they really were. I saw them only for who I wanted them to be and for how they might play into my desire to live out my own romantic story. I always thought I was in love and then it always turned out that I wasn’t. I hurt them or they hurt me. I betrayed them or they betrayed me. I left them or they left me.

  It may well be true what Tolstoy said, that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But as far as love and romance go, I would beg to differ. It has been my experience that the opposite is true: the happiness I felt at the beginning of each new relationship was different, and I was always certain that, finally, this time I was feeling feelings I had never felt before. But the pain at the end was the same every time.