VIRGIN IN A TREE

VIRGIN IN A TREE

Long ago on Long Island there lived two brothers.  They were Hispanic, and their names were Roberto and Geraldo, though they always went by the Americanized versions of their names once they started going to school--Bob and Jerry.  The brothers were always at war with one another, being very close in age, only a year apart.  Their later years were foreshadowed for them by their ancient grandfather, who used to sing a ditty he made up about their always fighting.      Eastern Long Island was very sparsely populated in those years, and they lived further east than most, on a sod farm which their father owned and worked mostly by himself.  In those years, their father also raised small crops of potatoes and tomatoes and sweet corn which he would sell from the back of his battered old pickup on the side of the highway which tourists took to go east to the Hamptons and to Montauk Point.  Once in a while the father tried to raise melons, but these seldom panned out for him, for the vines took up too much space in the little acre he devoted to them, and the melons never sold fast enough anyway to avoid spoilage, and the price was never enough to make up for the losses.  Sod was his cash crop, and from this he earned the family’s bread and butter and their few luxuries. 

     Their home was nestled up against a pine barren near the shore, and so the boys always had a wilderness for a playground, and the bay was a dream world in which they swam and fished and boated.  In the yard of the old farm compound, up against the trees, was a gazebo that was screened all round to keep the bugs out.  Here, the old man, the ancient grandfather, would sit and smoke his pipe and sing his ditty to the boys:

     Roberto and Geraldo were out catching flies.

     Roberto punched Geraldo between the eyes.

     Said Roberto to Geraldo, “Wanna fight anymore?” 

     Said Geraldo to Roberto, “No, me eyes are too sore!”

Roberto was exactly that way.  He beat up his brother mercilessly, often with little or no provocation.  It was provocation enough that Geraldo existed. 

     During these early years, Geraldo would take his beatings as though they were a natural part of life, without resentment or ill will towards his brother.  The next child to come into the family, though, was a girl, and Geraldo was thus deprived of a younger brother to beat up in his turn, for both boys were taught, as a matter of religion, almost, that girls were to be cherished and protected.  So Geraldo had no one to beat up, but he had instead something better, a baby sister with whom he developed a compensating relationship.  And he protected this relationship with the ferocity of an animal against all intrusion by his older brother.  And soon, Roberto learned to leave them alone, for he came to fear that Geraldo would probably kill him if he played too many tricks on them.  So, in the end, Roberto became the outsider in the family, resented by his little sister for pounding on Geraldo, and avoided by Geraldo whenever that was possible. 

     The school years were good ones for all three siblings.  They lost their Hispanic ways by the time they reached high school age, and their parents were very proud of their successes in school.  Roberto, now Bob, had become very serious about college and their parents were happy that he wanted to study, to make something of himself, to get off the farm and leave tilling the thin soils and baking in the sun and sweating in the humidity.  Roberto wanted to become a doctor, though this first ambition changed as he learned more and more about himself and the world.  The brothers’ enmity did not change, however, and whatever Roberto wanted to be, Geraldo would rather drop dead than be himself.  Since Roberto wanted to go to college, Geraldo chose the military. 

     The decade of the fifties were good years for their father, and he had become prosperous and expanded into the nursery business, which boomed because of the growth of the population and the enormous pace of building that took place on the Island in those years.  It fell to the sister, Paulina, to follow in the father’s footsteps and run the business.  When her time came, she took up business in high school, and then went to a junior college for additional courses.  She was just the right person to succeed her father, for she had the best head for doing business, and by the time she had reached her middle twenties, she had bought enough land to begin building homes and strip malls and commercial buildings to fill the needs of the growing population.  She was already a millionaire!  Though it was mostly on paper.  Nevertheless, she created from her father’s modest beginnings a great fortune and was a person of account, more prominent by far than her older brothers. 

     But when the boys were still small, they would play on the edge of the pine wood, in summer, chasing butterflies or shooting grasshoppers with their beebee gun, and arguing and fighting.  The old man, sitting in the shade of the screened-in gazebo, puffing on his pipe, would watch them, careful not to let the older one do too much harm to his younger brother.  To this end, whenever they would begin to squabble, he would call to them and ask if they wanted to hear a story, and they would come, for he always had a big thermos of lemonade and cups for all three, and when he told a story, they would sit and sip the lemonade and listen.

     As they sat in the gazebo, he would tell them stories from the lives of his own grandparents, the boys looking into his rheumy eyes and wrinkled face as they attended to his old raspy voice.  And in their imaginations, they saw a healthy, vigorous young woman named Vitoria, who always carried a rosary wrapped around her wrist when she went into the fields with her parents to tend the sheep.  He told them the story of how Vitoria always prayed to the Virgin, and how one day she saw an apparition in a tree.  They would leave the homestead in a wagon, the mother, the father, and the daughter, and go into the pastures on the slopes of the mountains, and gather the sheep in order to count them, separate the young ones from the old ones, sheer them all for their wool, and then drive the ones they would send to market back to the ranch. 

     It was hard, hot work, and the country was vast and empty of people.  They would go sometimes weeks on end without seeing a soul.  One morning, Vitoria, sitting beside a stream, was blowing on the embers of the night’s fire, trying to raise a flame to start a new fire for the morning’s cooking.  She was blowing hard, her cheeks getting all puffed, when she noticed a shadow in the tree beside which they had set their camp.  But she kept on blowing, not yet looking up to see who or what it was making the shadow. 

     The two boys listened to this story many times.  In Roberto’s mind, this great, great grandmother was a special person, very beautiful and brave, and he imagined her stooping over the old fire, poking at it with a stick to find the embers, and being watched as she did this by the mother of God.  Geraldo imagined her as he thought of his own mother, short, tending to plumpness, with big eyes and a warm and inviting breast. 

     When Vitoria got her flame and started some dry twigs burning and piled on these some larger ones, she felt certain of a presence beside her and, leaving off fanning the fire with the edge of her skirt, turned to face the tree full on.  She was only sixteen when this happened.  The presence was indeed the Virgin, or so Vitoria always swore.  It was there, in the flesh, standing in the tree and looking exactly as she is portrayed in the pictures in the church, with the shawl over her head, the mantle over her plain shift, sandals on her feet.  She was a flesh and blood presence and not a shadow or a ghostly immaterial image.  

     “What do you wish, Mother?” Vitoria spoke out loud.

     But the presence did not speak to her as a physical body would.  Instead, she heard in her mind a voice, a very lovely woman’s voice, say that she, Vitoria, was especially blessed and that her children and her children’s children for many generations would be also blessed, if they only retained their devotion and the simpleness of their hearts.  The voice said that out of her would come in time a great person, one who would renew the blessings of the Lord on all who worshipped.

     And then the old man would look at the two boys and say shame on them for fighting the way they did.  Didn’t they know that they were blessed and that the fighting and screeching and punching and bleeding was wearing the blessedness away and that from going to heaven they would end up going to hell if they didn’t learn to love one another?  But these lessons all went for naught, for though Roberto always felt contrite and apologized to his brother for hating him, he couldn’t resist punching him again ten minutes after they left their grandfather.  

     Paula also knew the story of their great, great grandmother.  But after they all three grew up, they stopped believing in the apparition, attributing the story to their grandfather’s strategy to get the brothers to stop fighting.  But that was before Paula saw the apparition herself.  This momentous event took place on the night that her brothers came home to the old farm, long after they had established their careers, and took up with especial ferocity their old ways of beating on each other.  This time it was over politics.  When they were boys, fighting needed no excuse.  But once they had become men, excuses were necessary.  This time they battled over the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Richard Nixon.  Jerry was a stout Republican and Bob just as stubbornly and unrepentantly a liberal.  This difference between them seemed to their sister almost a matter of fate, decreed from the day the great voice in the chaos said, “Let there be Light!”

     It was summertime, and the brothers were standing one evening at the back door of the family home, each holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  It had been a warm and humid day, and the evening was cool and very pleasant.  The brothers were looking across the yard to where the gazebo sat.  In former days it jutted right up against the pines that made up the huge barrens along the bay shore.  But the forest was gone now, replaced by homes, roads, and stores.  The family had profited mightily by this change, since over the years their father bought first one piece and then another of the old pine forest until he owned most of it.  And their sister’s business acumen saw the possibilities for development.  Now, the old farmstead resided in a suburban neighborhood, and Roberto was most unhappy, and said so to Geraldo, and added also that the light had gone out of their father’s eyes as his business expanded and became more and more impersonal.

     Geraldo, a beefy and strong-limbed adult now, took this attitude on the part of his brother as an implied criticism of his beloved sister, and he would not tolerate such insinuations.  He said harsh words to his brother, and this probably, more than anything else, started what was to become a major rift in the lives of everyone in the family.  Already tense, when they got round to discussing politics, they exploded.

     “What do you know about the world?” Geraldo said, “All you intellectuals live in a cocoon called a university.  You think that McGovern is a moralist, a good man, and will lead the country to a new utopia.  Bull, pure bull!”

     “Not bull, no sir!  McGovern will change all the equations by which the world works and the world will be a safer place because of him.”

     “You know nothing, Bob, you’re an egghead dreamer.  God save us from the Sandman.”

     “Maybe I am a dreamer.  But you’re army, look at all your decorations, they make you lean when you walk.  You have military interests to protect.  Those are the interests that McGovern will bury.  That’s why you’re afraid of him.  I’m interested in world peace, but you’re interested in world war.  That’s the difference between us.” 

     The brothers were getting agitated, no longer sipping their drinks but chug-a-lugging and swirling the ice and lemon slices round and round, and pouring one drink after another.

     It was precisely at this moment that Paulina, now and then overhearing her brothers raising their voices, lost her patience with them both and, to get out of earshot, went out the front door to sit in one of the lawn chairs they kept under the trees.  She, too, had fixed herself a drink and lit a cigarette, and, glancing up at the stars as she crossed the lawn, sat with a heavy-hearted sadness over her brothers.  She had taken in a long breath and sighed as she let it out.  It wasn’t long before she was asleep, dropping her cigarette in the grass beside her.  The dream, when it came, was so real to her that, although she wakened from it realizing she had been sleeping, she was never certain about it.  What she was certain of was that she had heard a voice calling her name, and the voice seemed to come from the old gnarly maple just behind her. 

     “Paulina,” the voice said, “Paulina, don’t despair.  Your brothers need you.”

     “Who is that?” Paulina asked, as she turned round in her chair to look over her shoulder.  That’s when she saw the Virgin, precariously perched on a limb overhead that shot straight out from the side of the great tree.

     “Who are you?” Paulina asked, feeling a bit dizzy over the tenuous grasp the woman seemed to have on her balance.

     “I am the Virgin, Mary, don’t you recognize me?”

     “Come down from there.  It makes me dizzy to look at you.  You want to kill yourself?” Paulina demanded in a commanding voice, a voice she learned how to use to get her way with contractors and politicians she had to best in her day-to-day business affairs.

     “I don’t know that I can,” the Virgin said, a bit timidly, looking down at Paulina and holding on to a branch rising up from the one she was standing on.  “I always seem to end up in a tree when I try this.  I don’t know why.  Anyway, I’m here to talk about your brothers.”

     “They’re out back arguing, as usual.  That’s why I’m here, so I can’t hear them.”

     “Every day they wear away their blessedness,” the Virgin said.  “Soon, like peeling an onion, there will be left only nothingness.”

     “So why are you so interested in them?” Paulina asked, not really believing the woman in the tree was the Virgin, though she did look like her.

     “Not them, him, Roberto.  He is the one who has to beget the child--you know, your grandfather told you!--who will continue the line I have been, how do you say? ‘breeding’? to bear a new prophet.  I’ve been working at it now for almost five hundred years.”

     “And Roberto is the one?” Paulina asked incredulously, her voice rising in bewilderment and excitement, certain that the woman was a crackpot.  “Then grandpa’s stories about our great, great grandmother Vitoria are true?”

     “Sure,” the Virgin replied.  “She was very cooperative.  Did everything I told her to.  I wish people now-a-days were so easy to convince and work with,” she said, in a slightly sarcastic tone.

     “Everything,” Paulina repeated, fascinated, watching the Virgin trying to shift to a more comfortable position on the limb and at the same time keep her view of Paulina unobstructed by the leaves.

     “What?” the Virgin responded, puzzled.  “What do you mean?”

     “I don’t know,” Paulina said.  “Roberto?” she queried again.

     “Yes, your first brother.  He’s the one.”

     “But Roberto is not the type.  Now Geraldo.  He’s the savior type.  He must be the one you’re working on.  You have their names mixed up, their birth order.  Haven’t you seen all his medals?”  She took a drag on her cigarette and, letting out the smoke, dropped the nearly finished butt into the grass and stepped on it.   

     The Virgin was angry at Paulina’s lack of deference and the manner in which she questioned her judgment.  For a long time she just stood there, holding onto the branch.  But patiently she continued with her task, explaining that Roberto was to find a woman who was not connected in any way with academia to take to wife.  When Paulina asked why, the Virgin said because she said so, that’s all, why all the questions?  She must get involved in Roberto’s life as she has done in Geraldo’s.  Geraldo is a hardened type now who does not need caring for, but Roberto is not.  He is a confused and lost soul and needs guidance, and she, Paulina, must step in to provide that guidance.  The Virgin insisted that Paulina arrange the marriage, and Paulina said that people don’t do that anymore, she just couldn’t.  But the Virgin angrily insisted, extracting a solemn vow from Paulina to do “everything” she asked her to and putting her soul at risk in case of failure. 

     In her dream, Paulina knew that the difference between herself and her great, great grandmother should have been a concern to the Virgin.  But who are we to question? she thought.  The powers that reckon our destinies seldom ask our approval.  Their ways are mysterious, even when they reveal them to us.  The Virgin had to know, Paulina said to herself in her dream, that her own attitude was an expression of the great change in the Mother of God’s fortunes in the world.  “I am,” she thought in her dream, “Vitoria’s great, great granddaughter, but I am also Paula, and Paula is a different being, indeed.  And as for me, playing matchmaker to Roberto is an impossible task, for he is, as he has always been, cold and indifferent, arrogant, superior, distant, aloof, and, and,” she wanted to add more, but the dream moment passed, and as it did, all the adjectives in her head dried up. 

     The Virgin had disappeared, leaving Paula gasping and gaping, without even so much as a flash of light or cloud of smoke, and without saying if or when she might return.  The gasping and gaping were such strong emotions that they woke her, and when she realized she had been sleeping and dreaming, she couldn’t believe it.  She could still hear the Virgin’s voice in her ears, could still see her in the tree. 

After sitting and thinking for a while, Paula finally began to feel the incredible meaning of what she had experienced, the miraculousness of it, and the implications--for so many things.  For one, the Virgin was rather plain.  She had a nose that was so tiny that, if she wore glasses, she’d have to walk with her head tipped backwards as though she were always on the verge of sneezing.  And she didn’t seem at all young, not as young as Paula was herself.  In fact, she seemed more like her own mother than the beautiful young maiden we see in the churches.  And then getting stuck in that tree!  What did that mean about the power of souls in the afterlife?  Ah, Mary! Mary! she thought.  She wanted to say a rosary but had forgotten how.  Besides, as a true American, she never had a sense of reverence for the Virgin.  Why did she come to her, she wondered?  And just then she heard the great ruckus being roused in the back yard by her brothers, who were engaging in a sudden and titanic battle, all their lifelong enmity being released like energy arching from an electric cable.

     When she ran through the house and came into the back yard, she could see, some distance across the old compound, her brothers rolling over one another and a fist rising and falling and she could hear the thudding sound on each fall, or a split second after each fall.  The noise she heard out front was the sound of the gazebo going over on its side, and the brothers, in their mindless physical exertions, rolling it out into the street.  It was now slowly tumbling down the long gentle slope of the road toward the curve at the bottom and would undoubtedly end up crashing into the front of the house below. 

     “Jerry, Bob!” Paula shouted, “Stop!  Stop now!  You idiots!  Look what you’ve done to papa’s gazebo!  Stop it, I tell you.  Stop!”

     But they were not listening to her.  They were concentrating on each other.  Geraldo was viciously pounding on Roberto’s face, and Roberto was kicking up with his knee trying to catch his brother in the crotch, but Geraldo knew that trick and knew how to avoid it.  Roberto was unable to land any serious blow on his brother, and this made him more and more furious as he took one punch after another on the sides of his face.  His nose was bleeding and his eyes were puffed, and he tried biting and scratching his brother, kicking up into his crotch all the while with a ferocity made more intense by his desperation.  But nothing availed.  Geraldo, almost calmly and with the deliberation of a craftsman concentrating on his work, in quick short blows punched him in the face again and again.

     Paulina, however, when she saw that they would not stop, had run into the house and come out with her mother’s old broom, the one which, over the years, their mother had pounded on the heads of the boys whenever they began to fight in her presence.  She came up beside them and, raising the broom up straight in the air, came down with it right on top of Geraldo’s head just as he was ready to deliver another punch to the pulpy face of the unconscious Roberto beneath him.  The broom stunned him for a few seconds, and when he came to his senses, he saw his sister, her eyes running with tears, and then his brother between his knees bleeding profusely.

     “Oh, my god!” he said in a whisper.  He rose up and took his sister by the hands and said, urgently, “We’ve got to get him to a hospital!  God, I hope I didn’t kill him.”

     Roberto was badly beaten, and in the emergency room of the hospital Geraldo and his sister had great difficulty with the doctors.  They had to speak with a policeman, who made a report, but in the end, after Roberto came to and told the authorities that it was all his fault and would not press charges against his brother, everything was dropped.  Roberto was moved to a ward, where he had to be kept awake for fear of the concussion he had received from the many blows he suffered to the head.  He also had two broken ribs, a broken nose, black and blue eyes, constant ringing in his ears, and extreme weakness from loss of blood.  He would not be going home soon.

     Paulina and Geraldo finally left the hospital, and when they got home, their parents were still sleeping.  They had not been wakened by the tumult, and Paulina worried about how to tell them that their beloved sons tried to kill each other during the night.  Paulina had not said anything to Geraldo about the dream of the Virgin, fearing that he would not believe her, since that old story always came up whenever he squabbled with his brother. 

     She was bone tired and emotionally exhausted and wanted to go to bed and think about the night.  But when she crawled in between the sheets, the first thing that came to her mind was the new strip mall she was building in Center Moriches, a little town that was beginning to grow and promised to yield no few dollars in rents.  She had always to battle the contractors and the inspectors, who, if they had their way, would triple the cost of building without adding anything appreciable to the quality of the structures.  She was involved just then with an intermediary who was attempting to pay off the officials so she could finish her project as planned.  She hated the way those men extracted money from her, and then left her as the guilty party for offering and paying bribes.  They always kept themselves clean.

     But she also loved the game, for she was good at it.  And she knew how to use sex.  Especially the scents associated with it.  She was very skillful at applying these, making them barely detectable, so that one had to get very close to smell them, but the closeness multiplied their effectiveness manyfold.  She enjoyed the way men responded to these subtle manipulations.  For Paulina, with her black hair and dark eyes and light complexion, sex was a tool, one that she used deftly.  And just as she was beginning to drift, the image of her own slim form at the building site bargaining with the inspector fading into numbing darkness, there came into her mind the Virgin’s plan to have her make a match for her brother.  And it occurred to her, as the one image replaced the other and as she felt herself slipping further and further into oblivion, that she really was the wrong person to matchmake, for any woman that she might choose for her brother could hardly be the type that the Virgin would approve.  And on that note, she thought no more.

     The next day was filled with agonizing explanations to their parents and the changing of plans for the day, making new appointments, and arranging to spend the afternoon at the hospital with Roberto.  Once there, their mother and father were outraged by his appearance, Geraldo getting yelled at and slapped by his mother and having his father’s fist shaken under his nose.  His father called him a merciless butcher and his mother called him a battle tank with no more feeling than gunmetal for his brother.  After all, Roberto was first born, and in their old fashioned ways, that meant the place of honor in the family, and what Geraldo did was, to them, a rebellion not only against tradition but against life itself. 

     While all this was transpiring, Paulina was sitting at the bedside, trying, in spite of her indifference to Roberto, to seem comforting and commiserating.  As he slept, she could see how broken he was.  He really was black and blue, and she did feel sorry for him.  Her parents’ whispering voices drifting across the room put her into a waking slumber as she tried to imagine the provocation Roberto had given Geraldo.  He could be, she thought as she succumbed—for she had had so little sleep—, insufferably superior, and she wished sometimes she could have done such a job on him herself.  As she was trying to stay awake, shaking her head and listening to her parents, she caught the glance of a nurse who had stood in the door of the room and was trying to catch her eye.  The nurse was a short dumpy woman with a fat round face and narrow eyes and thick auburn hair that was caught up in a bun which sat just a bit too high on her head, for on top of it sat her nurse’s cap, which made her look ridiculous.  This woman kept casting knowing glances at Paulina, and she, Paulina, was becoming curious, though she was also a bit shocked at both the appearance of the woman and her assuming such familiarity with her.  Finally, Paulina edged her way from the side of the bed and around her angry parents, slipped passed the contrite-looking Geraldo and out into the corridor.  Once there, she was immediately joined by the dumpy nurse.

     “Well, what do you think,” the nurse said, displaying herself as though she were a swimsuit model, one arm and hand pointing straight down, the other aiming up at the ceiling, while the body gave a little twist, “am I appropriate?”

     Paulina looked at her with wide, astonished eyes and an expression of utter bewilderment.  “Appropriate for what,” she thought, “the glue factory?”  Trying to remember if she had ever seen her before, she became more and more bewildered. 

     Leaning in towards Paulina, the nurse added, in a knowing conspiratorial tone, speaking as though from the side of her mouth, “Am I pretty enough, do you think?”

     “Who the hell are you?” Paulina whispered, trying to contain her wonderment.

     “It’s me, Mary, remember last night?”

     “God, no.  I don’t believe it,” Paulina said.  “Is it you, for real? or am I still dreaming?”

     “Well, not exactly.  I’m here temporarily.  This woman,” and as she said this, she swept her hand across her body, “is just the one to marry Roberto.”

     “No, oh, no, no,” Paulina said, still wide eyed and only half believing her senses, “it won’t happen.  Never in a million million years.  Roberto would sooner throw himself off a cliff than marry that woman.”

     “But that’s why I need your help, why do you think I came to you?” Mary replied, her face getting a hang-dog sad look as she reached out and took Paulina’s hands.

     These Paulina jerked away from her.  “I can’t help.  I just can’t.  This woman has no appeal, no appearance at all, she’s ugly, in fact, and she will never fit into his life at the university.  He’d have to hide her in a closet.  What’s the matter with you?  You’ve been out of touch for too long.”

     “I’m never out of touch,” Mary said sternly, “You’re the one who’s out of touch.  Are you willing to trade enjoyment of the illusions of physical existence for the bliss of eternity?”

     Paulina paused as though she were actually considering the trade, and then she made up her mind.

     “I can’t do it.  It’s hopeless.  Roberto hates me as it is, and he’d only think I was trying to make his life miserable.  Which, now that I think about it, isn’t such a bad idea.  But, no, I can’t.  It’s impossible.”

     “Listen, Paulina,” Mary said with some urgency in the voice and body of this round unpleasant looking woman, “this woman has all the characteristics I need for the next generation.  She’s patient, loyal, dedicated, sincere, loving, capable of unconditional devotion, uncomplaining, good hearted, generous, in short, she’s an exceptional human being.  Few like her are born in each generation.”  Then, after a pause, she continued in a threatening tone, “Remember your vow and remember your soul.”

     Turning up her nose as Mary pressed in close with her threat, Paulina said, “You left out the fact that she smells.”

     The round face grew livid with anger, and sparks seemed to fly from its slitted eyes.  Mary whispered in a tense undertone, “Don’t underestimate me.  For I can do to you what I am doing to this woman.  And if I do, I will make you poor, Paulina, and keep you that way until your end, and then send you to hell.”

     Paulina gasped at that and turned white.  She realized she had no choice.  She was bested.  She would have to play matchmaker between this woman and Roberto.  She felt trapped, caught between her sense of fatedness and destiny on the one hand and her desire for things to go on as they were on the other.  “All right,” she gave in, “I’ll do what I can.  But don’t blame me if Roberto laughs himself to death.  I can’t see him ever making love to this woman, and that’s your whole point, after all.  How’re you going to succeed if he won’t?”

     But at the question, the nurse looked up at her with a puzzled expression on her face, as though to say, “Do I know you?” and Paulina woke up, all confused, only to find the nurse standing beside her.  Her flesh crawled with goose bumps.  Was it just coincidence the dumpy woman had come at that moment to look in on her brother or had they been talking quietly at the bedside?  She reached into her purse and pulled out one of those little bottles of bourbon like they serve on airplanes, twisted off the cap, and said, “Here’s to the future.  Let it come in the grace of God, or Mary.”

* * *

Discrete inquiries led to the following information:  The daughter of a mixed marriage that didn’t take--German and Italian--the nurse was an only child.  Her name was Gretchen Sforza, she was thirty years old, never married and had no prospects.  She lived with her mother for a short while after her parents divorced, but then moved in with her father’s family who raised her, though her father left to pursue a craving for gambling, and neither she nor her grandparents had any idea where he was.  She was independent now, living on her own in a little apartment near the hospital where she worked.  She was much beloved by her patients, respected by her co-workers, and thoroughly professional, fated, as her co-workers believed, to rise in the hospital bureaucracy.  Gretchen Sforza, Paulina realized, was no slouch and no one to fool around with.  Her job was not going to be easy.  She thought, naturally enough, her problem was going to be to get Roberto to accept her as a wife.  But she saw, quite alarmingly, that this woman would not suffer fools patiently, and selling Roberto to her may well turn out to be more difficult yet.  “Impossible,” she said to herself.  “It’s not going to happen.” 

     Her first attempt began on the second day Roberto was in the hospital.  She had come early, without the rest of the family, with the hopes of being able to flatter the nurse in private and make some kind of offer to her to home care Roberto when he was released.  But Gretchen said that home care would be unnecessary, he wasn’t sick or anything, and in another day or so he would be able to go back to his daily routine.  So, Paulina was stymied at the outset.  She thought and thought and thought, and nothing came to her remotely resembling a plan.

     Sitting beside her brother, she asked him what he thought of the nurse, and he said, “She’s very able, she’s a good nurse.”  Ah, Paulina thought, that’s a beginning.

     “Don’t you find her attractive?” she said, half as an afterthought, half as an assertion of what she thought about the nurse herself.

     Roberto, sitting up, reading the newspaper, his hospital gown hanging open across his back and dropping off his shoulder, didn’t bother to look at his sister as he replied, “Not really.”

     “I think she has a very special kind of loveliness, you know.  Not the obvious kind, not the Elizabeth Taylor loveliness, you know--dark hair, beautiful eyes, clear smooth creamy complexion, all that kind of stuff.  This nurse has that deep down loveliness, the kind that lives in the bones.  You know what I mean Roberto?”

     He was only half listening to her at first, paying more attention to the editorials he was reading, but as she went on, he lowered the paper and looked directly at her, and by the time she finished her little observation on the beauty of the nurse, he had a look of incredulity in his eyes. 

     “Paulina,” he said, gently, like he was humoring a child who needed to be told not to do something that was dangerous to herself, “Paulina,” he went on, after another  pause during which he took a hard look at her, “that nurse is a very good nurse, but she’s no beauty.  She is the existential opposite of beauty, she is, Paulina, the very ground of being of ugliness itself, posited as such from the beginning of time.  She is ontologically and metaphysically ugly, which might imply a certain distinction about her and lend her a certain appeal in some quarters of this crazy world we live in.  Paulina, are you all right?  Is something wrong?  You want to tell me something?”

     How could the Virgin have worked five hundred years manipulating human genes through selective breeding only to produce Roberto? she thought.  “I must be totally deluded,” she added, aloud.  He looked at her and shrugged his shoulders.  Oh, how she hated him when he spoke to her like that!  What is it about him, anyway, that the Virgin wants to pass on to future generations?  Right now he was all bruised and swollen out of shape, so that one could hardly tell who he was.  But she knew him, and she was intrigued and puzzled and upset and angry.  Geraldo would have been a better choice, she thought.  He was stable, normal, rational, socially adept, usually kind and generous--“forgive him for bashing his lousy brother,” she thought--and had all the virtues, really, that Roberto lacked.  

     However, fortunately for him, Geraldo does not have to marry this nurse, this Gretchen Sforza.  She needed to get this job done, and the sooner done, the sooner she could get back to her own life and her own interests.  She patted Roberto’s hand, smiled, said that he was being unkind to the dear thing, he really should take a second look at her, and won’t he do that, just for her, so they could talk about her when he comes home?  It’s just a hobby she has developed recently, trying to determine all the varieties of beauty in the female form.  She was sure that Roberto could contribute to her understanding, if he would only pay more attention to the subtleties of the female form and personality.  Won’t he teach her?  At that she rose and said good-bye and that she would come back this evening with the rest of the family.

     When she left, he stared at the empty doorway in her wake, wondering about the tone of voice she had just spoken in, for it was so unusual, so odd, and her concern was so bizarre, that he was nonplused.  A feeling of queerness came over him, and he shuddered.  “What the hell is she up to?” he wondered.  He knew her well enough to know she was up to something.  Ah, well, he shrugged, he hoped whatever it was it made her happy. 

     He did, however, take a long look at Gretchen when she next came in to give him his pills to relieve the pain of his bruises.  She said that he would probably be released the next morning, joked with him about being bored, told him he should get up and go down to the cafeteria for a smoke and a cup of coffee, because sitting in bed was unnecessary.  She asked him what he did and he told her he was a university professor, and that started the conversation on another track.  After several more minutes, she took her leave and said that she would look in on him later in the afternoon for his next dose.  She made a few marks on his chart and departed. 

     He thought about Paulina and what she was up to.  This nurse figured in her scheme, he realized, but he couldn’t figure how.  She seemed all right to him.  A nice person.  Very good at what she does.  But damn, he thought, she was far from being beautiful, as far as a woman can get.  He liked her though.  She had an open and airy way about her, a confidence as well, that made up for her dumpiness and her piled up hair and narrow eyes. 

     The next day, Roberto went home.  At first, he planned on staying only another day with his parents.  Geraldo had left already, not even stopping in at the hospital to say good-bye.  His parents were too angry with him to tolerate his presence any longer and told him to leave.  He did so, in a huff, going to the city for a few days before returning to duty.  It took a long time for his mother and father to get over the brutal beating he had given his older brother.  So when Roberto came home, only his sister and parents were there.

     Paulina was plotting to put him back in the hospital, in order to assure a continuing relationship between Roberto and his “intended.”  But that proved unnecessary, and from the way things turned out over the next two days, she began to wonder about the power of the Virgin. 

Events moved very quickly.  They arrived home with Roberto by nine o’clock in the morning, and by eleven they were preparing Paulina’s boat for a cruise on the bay.  It was a Saturday, so the bay would be active, but they planned to cruise out east, where it was less developed and fewer people sailed or fished.  They planned to cruise through the Hampton Bays and into the Great Peconic Bay and perhaps go as far east as Shelter Island.  They would put up and swim here and there, and their mother would man the galley, for she was as good a cook in that boat as she was at home.     

     They had rumbled out of the slip and were heading for the channel when they saw a runaway craft, a twelve foot speedboat with a single person aboard, bearing down on them.  They slowed to a near stop to give the boat room to pass, but it was out of control and came at them again, so they sped up to try to get by it, but the crazy craft changed course again as though deliberately to collide with them.  They could see the boat’s pilot, a dumpy woman with hair flying in the wind, wearing sunglasses and seemingly hysterical, trying to steer but unable to, and trying to pull down with all her weight on the throttle shaft that seemed to be stuck.  She was waving and yelling, cutting through the water at blinding speed, coming right at them.  Roberto had taken the controls of Paulina’s boat from the bridge, and was trying to steer a neat little circle, to keep his bow pointed at the speed boat in order to diminish the chances of a collision.  When the two boats reached each other, his strategy worked, for the speed boat’s gunwales just slipped along the bigger boat’s hull and rocked out into deeper water towards the channel.  As she went by, they heard the woman shouting for help.  So Roberto throttled up and began to chase her.  But he fell behind almost immediately as the speedster ripped through the water in a crazy zigzag. 

     But soon the woman got her rudder all the way to starboard, and she began to swing round in a long arc and came straight at them again.  This time Roberto stopped his craft and let it float freely, figuring that the woman would have to aim at them in order to hit them, which is just what she seemed to be doing.  She passed them, though, with a hair’s breadth between, and when she was nearest, Roberto made a sign to her to cut the gas, and they saw her try to stand and make her way to the stern where the big gas tank stood feeding the engine.  She slipped and keeled over and rose and fell again as the boat continued to cut its arc, and finally, on her knees in the stern, they saw her working furiously at the tank, and then they saw the prow drop and heard the engine die at the same time. 

     Roberto motored over to her, sitting dead still in the water and looking terrified and exhausted, and as they came near, Gretchen rose and hollered out her thanks.  They still hadn’t recognized her.  But when she took off her glasses and shouted “Hello, Mr. Brito, nice to see you again!” they were all amazed.  Paulina the most so, for she hadn’t expected events to turn in her favor, thinking that she had to work out this match all on her own.  She made a little sign of the cross, then, and asked Miss Sforza if she wanted a tow, and, of course, that was the only thing that would do.  So they got her aboard and Roberto tied the speedster to their stern and they dragged it back to the docks.  Along the way, Paulina got Gretchen to agree to join them on their cruise.  And so everything seemed to be working out happily enough.  Even Roberto was glad about the chance encounter.

     Of course, Gretchen had no idea what happened to her.  All the controls got stuck at once, paralyzing her with fear.  Nothing like it had ever happened before.  She was just out for a little spin, she said, something she does on weekends to relax, whenever the weather permits.  She’s actually quite competent, she assured them, having her pilot’s license for years now and knowing these waters very well.  Roberto made light of it all, saying that things happen and that they were honored to have her aboard. 

     They changed their plans and decided to stay in the Hampton Bays, and at sunset they laid out a grand table and feasted, and then sat in the cool night on the stern deck, looking at the stars, talking, sipping wine, and dreamily wafting, rocking gently to the slow rhythm of the waves.  It was a night made for romance.  Paulina tried to coax her mother and father into the cabin with the excuse that she wanted to play cards, but they wouldn’t listen to her, enjoying their son’s company and the conversation of Miss Sforza. 

     There was a long silence, when everybody seemed to drop into his and her own thoughts.  This silence continued for longer than was comfortable to those gathered and sitting together, but nobody seemed to want to break it.  Paulina was just about to say something intended to make Gretchen think about Roberto in a romantic way, when Gretchen herself observed to Roberto that floating on the water at night made her think about the passing of time. 

     “At times like this,” she said, “I feel like I live with time rather than in time.  Do you ever get that feeling, Roberto?  It’s like all time is an eternal present and the past and future are illusions.  People spend too much of their lives living for the future or in the past.  It’s like they step out of life and it passes them by without their even knowing it.”

     “Yes, yes,” Roberto said, in a tone of recognition, understanding immediately what she was saying.  “I know that feeling.  It comes on you and you wish you could hold onto it forever when it comes.  But, unfortunately, it passes, and we become creatures of illusion once again.  Yes, I feel like that now, too.”

     Paulina looked at them and had an instant feeling of disgust.  How phony, she thought.  What monsters, playing with such ideas!  Time!  Phew!  They were drifting on the water, being blown by the wind.  She was surprised to see that Gretchen was a kook, but maybe, she thought, Gretchen was not so kooky after all, maybe she was going fishing.  Good for her.  I wish her a big catch, the biggest, bigger than a marlin.  A fish with a really big sail for a fin.  Because that’s her brother, she thought, a fish with a really big sail for a fin. 

     “When I feel this way, I lose all sense of anxiety,” Gretchen continued, “for then I can’t observe myself, I just am, I flow with rather than in,” and as she said this she made lovely motions with her arms, swimming motions and floating motions, that seemed to mesmerize Roberto.  “Do you know what I mean?”

     “Yes, yes, of course,” he responded animatedly.  “That’s a natural consequence of the experience.  It’s like being and time are one and the same thing.  Anxiety comes when we forget that, and we detach ourselves from the flow and observe ourselves as an other.  That’s what causes anxiety.”

     Bah! Paulina shriveled inside.  “I can’t observe myself, I just am.”  What kind of idiocy is that?  To say “I just am” requires you to observe yourself.  Any fruitcake can see that.  She was getting that throw up feeling. Whenever she spent long periods of time with her brother she felt like that.  What nuts.  But, if it made them feel comfortable with each other, let them go at it.  Get him, Gretchen, she thought.  He’s biting.   

     Gretchen was saying something about what it means to feel free, free to make choices without having to think about them, when something fell from the sky and hit the water only a few yards from the stern of the boat and made such an unimaginable mighty splash and thundering clap of noise that for the instant everybody thought the world had ended.  They were all of them looking exactly in the direction of the tumultuous event when it occurred, and as the eruption of water showered over the boat and pushed it up stern end in the air and shot it forward, they all screamed and raised their arms over their heads, Paulina and her mother losing their footing and falling to the deck, and Roberto managing to grab his father round the arms and chest and holding on to him.  Gretchen, on the other hand, had gone overboard.

     The boat had rocked wildly and spun sideways to the rush of water in the first moments after the splash and then began to list dangerously as a huge wave threatened to turn her on her side.  The water was in a furious roil, and amid the din of its raging upheaval they could faintly hear a voice crying for help.  Roberto came to his senses first, and looking around, saw that Gretchen was gone.  Assuming she had gone over, he raced to the bridge and turned on the boat’s floodlight and began tracing the water, up one side of the boat and down the other.  But Gretchen was nowhere to be seen.  He could still hear her cry, ever so faintly over the sound of the roiling, boiling water, but could not echo-locate, because all sounds seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.  He was alarmed, overanxious, and too excited to think clearly.  He should have got Paulina and his parents listening from either side of the stern to make out the direction of Gretchen’s cries.  Instead, he started the engines and began slowly trolling the area, searching with the floodlight, which only made the water darker and drowned out the sound of her voice.  After a while he cut the engines and settled into a dead float and began once again to listen.  But Gretchen could not be heard.  Whether they were out of range of her voice or she had drowned they didn’t know.  But Roberto was not going to give up.

     “Gretchen,” he shouted, “Gretchen, where are you?  Shout out so we can hear you!  Gretchen!  Gretchen!”  But no answer came.  Roberto called to Paulina to bring him the binoculars in the cabin and told his father to call the Bay Constable on the radio and ask for help finding Gretchen, and, together with Paulina, continued to search the bay round about, she shining the light in long slow sweeps further and further out, and he scanning the lit-up water with the glasses, looking for the half-submerged form or for the living, swimming form of the fat nurse.  The water was beginning to calm down, returning to normal, as though nothing had happened.  So far, none of them had speculated on what had hit the water so close to them, having all their minds and efforts concentrated on the search for Gretchen.  But as everything became still, and as their efforts to find the nurse had become more systematic after they were joined by the Shore Patrol, Paulina began to think. 

     “Gretchen can’t be dead, for obviously this is a plot, another part of Her scheme.  Surely, killing the woman would be counterproductive, unless the Virgin had come to her senses.  What does she need me for anyway?  She’s doing just fine on her own.”  But then it came to her that the Virgin is just a woman, after all, a single person, and the universe is large and unimaginably complex, and some things may just be beyond her or even her son’s control.  Whatever it was that fell from the sky and nearly killed them may just have been something she couldn’t anticipate.  What if Gretchen were dead?  How did she feel about that?  She looked at Roberto and saw the worry lines in his face, the look of anxiousness, and the tension in his body.  He was frightened for Gretchen and determined to find her, dead or alive.  This was commendable of him.  She began to think a little more positively about him.  And she actually began to feel a little sorry, for both of them, and sorrow was an unfamiliar feeling to her.

     They had been searching for several hours and by now had lost their bearings.  They had no idea where they were relative to the place where the impact occurred.  None of them had realized this would happen unless they first noted their position, either by taking bearings on the shore or by carefully monitoring the compass and their speeds and times from the bridge.  They were hysterical in the first moments and acted mindlessly, and now there seemed to be no hope.  But Roberto persisted, trolling slowly up and down, trying now to be systematic, coordinating his movements with the other boats.  Every once in a while he cut the engines and let the boat sit so he could call and hear her if she answered.  It was all very pathetic.  They continued this way until dawn, when Roberto could see a virtual flotilla of rescue boats spread across the calm, glassy water.  They had to admit she was gone, then.

     And so, heavy hearted, they made their way back to the docks.  They called the Shore Patrol and told them the whole story, and they assured him the search would continue for Gretchen’s body.  Her grandparents were informed, and Roberto stayed on with the Shore Patrol to identify her when she was found.  Paulina took her parents home, both of whom were exhausted and grieved by the calamity.  The mother had prayed all night, and the father made himself useful by spelling Paulina at the floodlight and bringing them all coffee and trying his best to be optimistic, signing the cross every five minutes and saying a little prayer himself for the missing woman.

     Paulina didn’t know what to think; she didn’t know what was dream and what was real anymore.  She couldn’t wait to be alone in her room, hoping she would be visited by the Virgin and find out how things stood.  But the Virgin didn’t come.  Paulina waited and said little prayers herself, scornfully, almost, on the surface, but deep down inside feeling overpowered and not a bit humbled.  She looked in the mirror, and instead of the instant sense of admiration she got when she saw her reflection, she saw herself as an empty shell, as a body of a certain size and mass, merely-- flesh and bone--that would age and rot when it died and that had no glory in it at all, nothing admirable to wonder at--she was physically just meat.  The impression depressed her miserably, and with a sigh for her brother Geraldo, whom she wished was with her now, she sank onto the bed and fell asleep.

     When she woke, Paulina went downstairs and found her brother sitting morosely in the living room, everything still unresolved, and her parents trying their best to cheer him up.  His face was all misshapen by the beating and had a look of such strangeness that she felt she didn’t know him anymore.  He was changed.  She sat by him, and he looked at her and said, “You know, the other day when you said that Gretchen had a deep down loveliness, I laughed at you.  Never again, Paulina.  You are a wise and perceptive woman, something I never believed about you.  I always thought you were a crass materialist devoid of all sensitivity.  But I see I was wrong and I apologize.  No one but you could have opened my eyes to the beauty of that woman.  And now she’s gone.”  He had such a forlorn expression as he spoke that Paulina almost laughed.  And it’s a good thing she didn’t, for he went on.

     “Only a woman could see so deeply into the nature of another.  A special and rare woman.  You have that capacity.  And to think that all these years I never appreciated you.  My own sister!”

     She had to struggle to keep from bursting, but she managed.  Instead, she sighed, seeing the direction things were going in.  She thought, “Oh, I just know Gretchen is going to walk in any moment,” and applauded the subtlety of the Virgin’s scheme.  She saw, now, how she fit into it, and had nothing but admiration for her.  Her sense of expectation was thick and intense, and when the phone rang, she leaped in her seat and gave a little yelp.  But the message they received was the last thing she could have imagined.  She saw her brother’s face fall and his shoulders crumble as the phone slid from his hand.  His father helped him to a chair beside the window, and he sat, dully gazing without.  The Shore Patrol had finally found the body.  Gretchen was dead!  She was dead, awfully drowned all alone at night on that wide water, while they cruised around hysterically, never seeing her.  Paulina was in shock.

     “Now what?” she thought.  Oh, grief, all that planning, all those centuries.  All laid waste by some mysterious object falling by chance from the sky and hitting the water by sheer accident right near their boat.  She shivered in fear at the implications of human helplessness in face of the stark arbitrariness of the immense and ageless universe.  Even the bodiless souls in the afterlife were helpless in its grip.  If it was a stone that fell from the sky, for how many millions of years had it floated out there, now coming near and nearer, and now drifting further and further away, and then coming near again, only to get caught in its mindless spill out of the vast emptiness just at the moment Roberto was falling in love?  She shivered again and felt once more overpowered and humbled.

     Roberto stayed on until after the funeral, and then returned to his own home in Garden City.  So, it was all over.  Paulina went back to her strip mall in Center Moriches, overseeing the work, managing to keep off the greedy inspectors and the contractors who always want to add this and that useless alteration to pad their bills.  Some of the zest with which she threw herself into her affairs had gone out of her, and she had not paid much attention to her appearance for some time.  She missed Geraldo more than ever, and called him on the phone more than was usual for her.  He consoled her just by being himself, for she never told him about any of the doings involving Roberto.  And Roberto himself was more attentive to her, driving out one weekend a month to spend time with her, for he looked at her differently now.  He saw her through a new lens, as it were, as though she were a rare and special person, someone of exceptional wisdom.  He began to listen to her and to heed her advice, and he himself had changed.  He was so much less pretentious that Paulina began to enjoy his company for the first time in their lives. 

     Things went on like this until summer passed and fall was well under way.  Then, one day, Paulina was visiting the site of another new building that she was putting up.  This one was going to be a four-bedroom home, the first in what she was planning as a new subdivision.  Little by little, she had got the lots platted and the streets surveyed, the sewer and water lines put in, the land all cleared and made ready for the rows of foundations.  This building was to be the first of three models planned for the subdivision.  She was wearing work pants and boots and had a flannel shirt on and was standing near the front of the house, which was already framed and was now having its roof put up. 

     A dark blue pickup truck with a big generator in it was parked in front, and from this went out the lines that carried power to the tools of the men on the roof.  A ladder was propped against the frame right where the front door would be, and on this stood a thin little man with a bushy mustache and short blond hair, wearing dirty white jeans and a sweatshirt, beneath which, just below his belly, hung a pouch with three compartments in it for things he needed to carry and keep at his fingertips.  He was busily at work, whistling, wrestling into place a large piece of plywood and getting ready to use his nail gun to fasten it.  But just then Paulina, looking up at him, saw something inexplicable happen.  As he raised up the gun to position it for the first nail, his arm flew backward as though someone had caught at it, and the nail gun dropped from his grip and came tumbling down.  Then, almost at the same moment, the ladder gave a twist, just as though someone were trying to spill him off of it.  And just so, the carpenter gave a shout and pitched over sideways and came falling down into the pile of sand beside the front door, right where Paulina was standing.  He fell at her feet.  Dropped, so to speak, right out of the sky!  He lay on his back looking up, dazed, and the first thing he saw was Paulina’s face, bent down to gaze at him.  He thought he was dead and that what he was seeing was a spiritual being come to guide him to the afterlife.  And he wasn’t far wrong.  For they lived all the rest of their lives together, and she did die before him, with the promise on her lips that she would be there, waiting when his time came.  But she was properly mourned, not only by her husband but by her children as well, and by her brothers, neither of whom ever married.