Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  All of this is thanks in part to a spread I once saw in a home decorating magazine, which stressed the calming effect of this stylistic approach to interiors. But mostly it is the product of a persistent image I had of myself retiring each night to just such an oasis, hungering for peace, sanctuary, and sustenance. After drinking in its refreshment and redemption while I slept, I imagined that I would open my eyes each morning to discover myself reborn, strong again, safe, serene, nigh unto beatific.

  That afternoon, the white room, as it was meant to, came as a great relief. I took off my glasses and my watch and set them on the night table. I lay down on the bed and pulled up the afghan to cover myself. Flat on my back, I inhaled the scent of lavender and orange that filled the room. This fragrance did not emanate from some divine mysterious source but from a porcelain dish of potpourri on the night table. I read once in an article about aromatherapy that a combination of these two scents can be soothing, comforting, and conducive to a good night’s sleep.

  Who among us is not occasionally in need of comfort, even when our lives are apparently going very well? Who among us is immune to the occasional bout of insomnia? Who among us has not suffered through what the French call une nuit blanche, a white night? Who among us has not recognized that the person we are during those bleached and febrile sleepless hours bears little or no resemblance to the person we become over and over again in the sensible, multicolored light of day?

  I breathed deeply and folded my hands on my chest. I could hear Mary moving around in the next room. I could hear the dresser drawers being opened and closed, the hangers scraping on the metal rod, and then the closet door being shut. I could hear the bed sighing as Mary lay down on it and then there was silence except for the sound of the rain on the roof.

  I tried to gather my thoughts, which were, understandably, ricocheting off each other in all directions at once. I read in a self-help book years ago that it is not possible to have more than one thought in your head at any given moment. This is an interesting theory that might prove useful in any number of ways, but in practice, everyone knows it is not true.

  First I thought about what we would have for dinner. I did a mental inventory of the fridge and the cupboards and decided that we would have Zucchini and Barley Casserole and a tossed green salad with pine nuts and mandarin orange slices.

  But even while thinking about practical matters like zucchini, lettuce, and pine nuts, I had other things hovering in the back of my mind, weightier things like the fact that the Virgin Mary was now napping in the next room and what was I supposed to make of that?

  I intended to think about this as soon as I finished thinking about dinner. But once I had decided on the menu, I fell fast asleep.

  Milagros

  I was roused from my nap by the sound of water running. For a split second I was disoriented and alarmed. But quickly enough I identified the sound as not the basement flooding, the roof leaking, or the whole city being submerged as had those unfortunate cities to the southwest not so long ago. I recognized it as the sound of the shower running. It was Mary, making herself at home just as I had hoped she would.

  I squinted at the red numbers on the clock on the dresser and was surprised to discover that the afternoon was almost gone. I had been asleep for nearly three hours.

  I got up, folded the afghan, and opened the curtains. From the bathroom, I could hear the sound of Mary’s blow-dryer. I went into the kitchen, got out my recipe box, and started the barley for the dinner casserole. It had to cook for an hour before the other ingredients could be added.

  Mary emerged looking much refreshed. She thanked me for the use of the facilities, said she hoped I didn’t mind that she had used the peach-colored towels on the shelf beside the window and also some of my shampoo as it seemed she had forgotten to pack her own. Her dark hair was loose again, full and fragrant. She had changed into a pair of khaki pants, a crisp white cotton shirt, and her chocolate brown cardigan. She was still wearing the silver hoop earrings but not the silver and turquoise necklace. She had put on a bit of mascara and some lipstick.

  I, too, felt remarkably rested and rejuvenated. We agreed that our naps had done us a world of good. She peeked into the pot on the stove in which the barley was bubbling and then skimmed the recipe on the card I had pulled from the box and left on the counter.

  —This sounds delicious, Mary said. I love zucchini.

  Together we made dinner. I chopped the zucchini, a small onion, a green pepper, and a large apple. I mixed them with a can of crushed tomatoes, some oregano, and lots of garlic, put all the ingredients together with the cooled barley in a casserole dish, and popped it in the oven with some grated cheese on top. Mary made the salad and set the table while the kitchen quickly filled with the mouth-watering aroma of the casserole cooking.

  We were hungry and ate happily, chatting easily about inconsequential things. Mary liked the casserole very much and was impressed when I told her it was my own original recipe. She admitted that, much as she loved to eat, she was not much of a cook herself, having so seldom had time to actually do it.

  After we had eaten our fill, Mary insisted, as she had at lunchtime, that I just sit and relax while she washed the dishes and tidied up. So I sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper just as I would have any other evening. I went back to the front-page stories I had skimmed in the morning and read them properly. I checked the obituaries just in case, puzzling as usual over the coded phrases used to describe each person’s demise: Suddenly, After a long illness, and Suddenly after a long illness. I read the names of the charities and associations cited at the end of each, looking for clues. When my time comes, I want the cause of my death to be spelled out clearly so nobody will have to wonder.

  I reread my horoscope for this day now mostly passed: Cancer. Beware of impulse buying. You must get your financial house in order before making any large purchases. Avoid conflict with coworkers and children. No hint there as to the fact that this would be the day on which the Virgin Mary appeared in my living room.

  —When is your birthday? I asked her.

  —September the eighth, she said. I’m a Virgo.

  Well, of course she was.

  I read aloud: Virgo. You are in a period of great energy and ambition in your life. There’s no time like the present to make your dreams come true. Be careful around ladders.

  —Would that be Jacob’s ladder, do you suppose? Mary asked. Or just your run-of-the-mill regular ladder?

  We were laughing when the telephone rang and this time I answered it without thinking. With scripted enthusiasm, a woman tried to convince me to schedule a carpet-cleaning for every room in my house. I told her, truthfully, that I had no carpets, just hardwood floors throughout. Undeterred, she said they would come and clean my furniture instead.

  —I have no furniture, I said. Practicing the fine art of mental reservation, I silently added: That needs to be cleaned, stretching the technical definition a little.

  Flustered, the woman apologized for having bothered me, obviously convinced that I had far greater problems than a good cleaning could possibly solve. She hung up in my ear. I stood there smirking at the receiver. As it turned out, she was the only telemarketer I heard from all week.

  Mary finished the dishes, left the casserole dish to soak in the sudsy water, and then she made tea. Again she arranged the pot, mugs, spoons, honey, and milk on my black lacquered tray. I carried it into the living room and set it down on the coffee table between two overstuffed armchairs upholstered in a geometric pattern of many shades of green. Scattered across the green are black shapes and figures, spirals and slashes that might be the letters of an undiscovered alphabet or a code of secret symbols just waiting to be deciphered. Behind the chairs are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves running the whole width of the room. Along the adjoining wall is a long couch in solid hunter green. On the opposite wall are more built-in bookshelves and the grandfather clock which was just then chiming seven o’clock.


  I went back to the kitchen and returned with a plate of chocolate wafers, store-bought, probably a little stale. Mary waved aside my apologies and took two. She had settled herself in one of the armchairs.

  Left to my own devices, I would probably have turned on the television and then, being chronically unable to watch television in an upright position, I would have sprawled on the couch with the remote control in one hand and my trusty TV Guide in the other. As comfortable as I was with Mary by that point, still I felt that some less insouciant behavior was in order. I put on my current favorite CD, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, performed by Glenn Gould, and sat down in the other armchair.

  While the tea steeped, we listened to the music and nibbled on our cookies. Just as I was about to pour, Mary stood up.

  —There is something I could use your help with, she said, and left the room.

  I suffered an immediate paroxysm of alarm. Having now lulled me into a false sense of complacency, was she indeed going to ask me to perform some superhuman feat of devotion after all?

  She returned to the living room carrying the dress she had been wearing when she arrived. I must have looked as puzzled as I felt.

  —I need to wash this dress, she said. But first I have to remove these.

  These, it appeared, were the tiny metal objects fastened to the skirt that I had at first mistaken for embroidery. Mary shook out the dress and it jingled. I moved the tea tray to the floor and she spread the dress on the coffee table.

  —What are they? I asked.

  —They’re called milagros, Mary said. That’s the Spanish word for miracles.

  I leaned forward and looked more closely. Most of them were made of cast or stamped nickel or tin, a few of real silver, brass, or gold. Most were flat, a few were three-dimensional. There were hundreds of them, in the shapes of people, animals, and objects of all kinds. They were attached to the fabric with tiny gold safety pins, the kind I would use to fasten a broken bra strap, the kind my mother had hundreds of in a clear plastic box in her sewing cabinet and which I had once, on an interminable rainy Sunday afternoon, pinned all together in a chain that stretched the full length of the living room.

  —What are they for? I asked, quite astonished.

  —As I said, Mary explained, I’ve just been in Mexico. It is the custom there for the faithful to bring these milagros to the shrines. There, the statues of Jesus, myself, and the other saints are often dressed in real clothes to which the milagros can be easily attached. They’re a kind of votive offering, some from people praying for something, others given in thanks for prayers already answered. Once they were individually hand-made but now they’re mass-produced, sold at religious and jewelry stores or at booths set up by street vendors near the shrines.

  Many of them, I could see, were miniature human figures: men, women, children, and babies, kneeling, praying, standing, sitting, crawling, and lying down, sleeping perhaps or dead. Just as many more were individual body parts: heads, ears, eyes, arms, legs, hands, feet, breasts, stomachs, kidneys, lungs, lips, teeth, and tongues.

  Mary carefully unpinned a pair of pointy silver breasts.

  —This one was from a new mother who was having problems breast-feeding, she said, cradling it in the palm of her hand. She was praying for more milk.

  Next to the breasts was the figure of a plump, smiling baby.

  —The same woman offered this one in thanks after her prayers were answered.

  Then she removed a man’s head with a large bulge and a deep wound on the left side.

  —This one was given in thanks by a man who had recently undergone surgery for a brain tumor. I get a lot of heads, for headaches, mental illness, memory loss, learning disabilities. I get a lot of hearts too. There are so very many maladies of the heart.

  She pointed out several kinds: hearts sprouting flames, hearts pierced by swords, and hearts encircled by crowns of thorns. There were striated hearts, anatomically correct hearts, and perfect plump valentine hearts. Literal hearts, figurative hearts, diseased hearts, lonely hearts, broken hearts.

  I went into my bedroom and took my old charm bracelet from the top dresser drawer. It was cold in my hand as I passed it to Mary. She admired the charms one by one: the Christmas and birthday ones, the typewriter, the bicycle, the horse, the diploma, and the rest. There was a winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder. And yes, there was a perfect silver valentine heart.

  I remembered the extreme joy of receiving this one from a boy I dated when I was eighteen. I remembered the feel of his hand on my neck, his tongue in my mouth, but I could not make his face come clear.

  What kind of heart would I choose now to pin on Mary’s dress?

  She continued unpinning and explaining: a set of teeth (prayer for relief from a toothache), an ear (thanks for a hearing aid), a stomach (thanks for relief from ulcers), a pair of lungs (prayer for help to quit smoking), a second pair of lungs (thanks for having been saved from drowning), a pair of closed eyes (thanks for a good night’s sleep after six months of insomnia), a pair of open eyes (prayer not for a cure for blindness, as you might expect, but prayer for hope from a woman who said she had lost sight of the light at the end of the tunnel).

  Soon Mary’s hand was full of little body parts and safety pins.

  —We’ll need a box to put these in, she said.

  Being something of a pack rat, I have an extensive collection of cardboard boxes of all sizes stashed in my basement. But an old shoebox did not seem appropriate in this instance. I had recently bought a beautifully carved wooden box with a hinged lid. I had not yet decided what I was going to keep in it. I got this box from my study and, from the kitchen, a plastic container for the pins.

  Mary dropped the milagros into the box, the pins into the container.

  —I was able to bring these ones away with me, she said, but over time they number in the thousands at any given shrine, and eventually the priests have no choice but to remove them to make room for more or to clean the statues. Sometimes they’re kept in storage or buried, but other times they’re melted down or simply thrown away. Myself, I just don’t have the heart to dispose of people’s prayers that way.

  Neither did I.

  I have since done some reading about milagros. I have learned that, between October 1988 and March 1993, the number of whole-body milagros left at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena in the town of Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, Mexico, was 20,670. During the same period, 22,664 body-part milagros were also left at Magdalena. Among these were 1,312 hearts, 3,524 heads, 8,989 legs, 1,069 hands, 160 breasts, 193 navels, 140 stomachs, 93 kidneys, 26 lips, and 6 tongues.

  We settled down to our task. The fabric of the dress was a thin, gauzy cotton that was soft and cool between my fingers. We unpinned the milagros one by one and dropped them into the box. Apparently sharing an inherent inclination toward orderliness, by unspoken agreement we removed them by categories: first, human figures and parts, then animals, then food, and finally miscellaneous inanimate objects.

  There were horses, cows, donkeys, dogs, pigs, sheep, cats, turkeys, geese, peacocks, chickens, and snakes. There was a scorpion (prayer to ward off being bitten), a sow with six suckling piglets (thanks from a pig farmer for his animals’ fertility), an elephant (thanks from a circus owner for the complete recovery of an ailing elephant).

  There were apples, tomatoes, cucumbers, an ear of corn, a stalk of bananas, a sheaf of wheat, and a bunch of grapes.

  —The fruits and vegetables are usually from farmers praying or giving thanks for a good crop, Mary said. But sometimes they’re from hungry families too.

  There were houses, cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, motorcycles, and buses.

  —The houses, Mary said, are often from people praying for a mortgage from the bank. The boats are usually from fishermen. They pray for abundant fishing and calm waters. They give thanks for having survived bad storms. The cars are from people praying for money to buy a new one or to have the old one
repaired. Sometimes they’re from people who have survived car accidents.

  One of the airplanes was three-dimensional, with the initials M.S. carved one on each wing.

  —This was from a woman praying for a trip to Europe, Mary said, a trip she’d been dreaming of all her life but could never afford before, and now that her three children had grown up and moved away from home, surely she and her husband deserved a holiday before they got too old to enjoy it. I’m pleased to report that today for lunch they had the Terrine of Rabbit in Tarragon Aspic at a lovely little bistro on the Left Bank. Afterward they went to Notre Dame Cathedral and then they took a boat along the Seine to see the Eiffel Tower. Tomorrow they will be going to the Louvre. On Wednesday they will travel to Lourdes. On Friday they will fly to Rome.

  I held the airplane in the palm of my hand. It was almost identical to the one on my charm bracelet, the one that I did not remember receiving, the one that made me think that when I was younger, anything had seemed possible, that I might indeed someday fly to Mexico, France, or Kathmandu.

  There were two baseball bats and a football, given by people praying for success in sports. There was a martini glass, given in thanks by an alcoholic to mark the first anniversary of his sobriety. There was a pair of golden handcuffs and a jail, both of these, Mary explained, given on behalf of the same person, a young man who claimed he had been unjustly accused of murder. The handcuffs were given by his wife with a prayer that he be found innocent. When he was not, she returned with the tiny jail and a prayer that the appeal being launched would eventually be successful and that he would be returned to her and their six children who missed and needed him very much. So far this had not happened.