Keeping Faith

  That morning Father MacReady accompanied him to the medical center. While the parish priest visited members of his congregation who were recuperating on the patient floors, Father Rampini spent hours reading the reports about Millie Epstein, with no firm conclusions. Medically, the woman had died. Certainly she was alive and kicking now. And yet rumor had it that Faith touched the woman to bring her back--a laying-on of hands smelled a little fishy.

  The only way to prove that Faith White was an out-and-out liar would be to interview her directly. And that is what he's slated for today. Father Rampini has decided on a three-pronged attack: First, he will narrow down the truth regarding this female vision--Mary maybe, but certainly not God. Second, he will prove that the vision is inauthentic. Finally, he'll examine the alleged stigmata and list the reasons they aren't the genuine article.

  Father MacReady asks him to remain silent during his introduction to Mariah White, and out of professional courtesy Father Rampini agrees. "If you wait here," the woman says, "I'll get Faith for you."

  Father MacReady excuses himself to use the bathroom--Lord knows, he eats enough breakfast sausage to fell a horse, much less upset his bowels--while Rampini idly glances around. For a farmhouse, it is in remarkably good shape, the exposed beams of the ceiling straight and sanded, the floors buffed to high polish, the steely milk paint and flocked wallpaper meticulous. It looks like a residence featured in Country Home, except for the glaring evidence that real people abide here: a Barbie doll wedged between the bananas of a decorative fruit bowl, a child's mitten snugged like a skullcap over the knob of the banister. He sees no Palm Sunday crosses tucked behind mirrors, no Sabbath candles on the dining-room table, no evidence of religion whatsoever.

  He hears footsteps on the stairs and draws himself erect, ready to stare down this heretic.

  Faith White skids to a stop three feet in front of him and smiles. She is missing one of her front teeth. "Hi," she says. "Are you Father Rampenis?"

  Mariah White's face goes scarlet. "Faith!"

  "Rampini," he corrects. "Father Rampini."

  The parish priest appears in the doorway, laughing. "Maybe you should just call him Father."

  "Okay." Faith reaches for Rampini's hand, pulling him toward the stairs. Rampini is aware of two things at once: the rasp of Band-Aids against his own palm, and the extraordinary magnetism he feels when their gazes connect. It reminds him of being a child and seeing the first big snow stretch over his family's Iowa farm--so diamond-bright and pure that he could not tear his eyes away. "C'mon," she says. "I thought you wanted to play."

  MacReady folds his arms across his chest. "I'll stay down here. Have a cup of coffee with your mom."

  Rampini can see by the look on the woman's face that she believed she'd be present for the interview. Well, good. It will be easier to get out the truth in her absence.

  Faith leads him to her bedroom and sits down in the middle of the floor with a Madeline doll and a collection of interchangeable outfits. Pulling out his notepad, Rampini jots down several ideas. If he remembers correctly, Madeline lived in a parochial school. It is possible that this so-called religious innocent knows more than people think.

  "Do you want her skating clothes," Faith asks, "or her party dress?"

  It has been so long since he's played with a child--since he's done more than examine hoaxes and heretics and write lengthy dissertations on his findings--that for a moment he is nonplussed. Once this might have come easily to him. Now he is an entirely different man. "What I'd really like is to play with your other friend."

  Faith's mouth pinches shut. "I don't want to talk about her."

  "Why not?"

  "Because," she says, and jams Madeline's leg into a set of tights.

  Well, Rampini thinks, surprised. The visionary who chatters away about what she's seen is usually lying. Genuine seers, in fact, often have to be coerced into discussing their visions. "I bet she's very beautiful," he urges.

  Faith peeks up from beneath her lashes. "You know Her?"

  "I work in a place where a lot of people study and learn about God. That's why I wanted to talk to you so badly, so that we can compare what we know. Does your friend have a name?"

  Faith snorts. "Duh. It's God."

  "Your friend told you this. She said, 'I am God.'"

  "No." Faith slides a shoe onto the doll's foot. "She said, 'I'm your God.'"

  He writes this down, too. "Does she come whenever you need her to?"

  "I guess."

  "Could she come now?"

  Faith glances over her shoulder. "She doesn't want to."

  Against his better judgment, Rampini looks toward the same spot. Nothing. "Is she wearing a blue dress?" He struggles for a term for Mary's mantle that would be familiar to a seven-year-old. "One with a hood?"

  "Like a raincoat?"

  "Exactly!"

  "No. She wears the same thing over and over. It's a brown skirt and top, but it's all together in one piece, and it looks like the things people from olden times wear on TV. Her hair is brown and comes to here." Faith touches her shoulders. "And she has those shoes that you can wear on the beach and even into the water and everything without your mom getting mad. The ones with Velcro."

  Father Rampini frowns. "She has Tevas?"

  "Yeah, except hers don't have the Velcro and they're the color of throw-up."

  "I bet you wanted to see this friend of yours for a while, before she first appeared to you."

  But Faith doesn't answer. She rummages in the closet, returning with the Lite-Brite box. Father Rampini feels a pang of sentiment--he remembers giving the toy to his own son, long before he was ordained. Has it been around so many years?

  Faith is watching him curiously. "I'll let you do the yellows."

  Rampini shakes his thoughts back to center. "So...you asked to see her?"

  "Every night."

  Father Rampini has seen enough alleged visionaries to make comparisons. The religious devotees who pray to see Jesus for years and then have Him suddenly appear are always the ones who've simply gone off their rockers. Even, sad to say, in the case of that very sweet elderly nun from Medford whom he was sent to evaluate the previous winter. Compare that to the Fatima children, who were simply tending sheep when Mary appeared, unexpected. Or Saint Bernadette, who was gathering wood near a garbage dump when Our Lady materialized.

  Heavenly visions come from heaven, but out of nowhere. Yet, according to Faith, she'd been asking for one--religiously, one might say.

  "I wanted a friend really bad," Faith continues. "So every night I wished on a star. Then she came."

  He hesitates before writing on his notepad. Desiring a friend wasn't quite the same thing as praying for a miraculous appearance, but there were cases of child visionaries who'd played, so to speak, in the fields of the Lord. Saint Herman-Joseph romped with Mary and a boy Jesus; Saint Juliana Falconieri had visions where the Christ Child wove her a garland of flowers.

  His eyes fall on Faith's hands, grasping the tiny pegs and stuffing them into the gridded holes of the Lite-Brite. "I heard that you hurt yourself."

  She quickly hides her fists behind her back. "I don't want to talk anymore."

  "Why? Is it because I asked about your hands?"

  "You'll make fun of me," she whispers.

  "As a matter of fact," Father Rampini says gently, "I've seen other people who have the same kinds of cuts you do."

  This catches Faith's attention. "Really?"

  "If you let me take a look, I can tell you if yours are the same or different."

  She takes one hand and places it on the floor between them, uncurling her fingers like the petals of a rose. With her other hand she peels back the Band-Aid. In the center of her palm is a small hole. The flesh around it isn't mangled on either side of the hand, and neither are there protuberances such as Saint Francis of Assisi had, as if nails were stretching the skin from beneath its surface. "Do they hurt?" Rampini asks.

  "Not now."
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  "When your hands are bleeding," he asks slowly, "do you sometimes think about Jesus?"

  Faith frowns. "I don't know anyone named Jesus."

  "That's the name of God," the priest explains.

  "No it's not."

  A seven-year-old can be very literal. Is Faith saying this because God specifically told her He is not Jesus? Or simply because He hasn't said His name at all? Or is it because this vision, far from being heavenly, is satanic?

  Rampini wants to ask her more about God's name--like the story Rumpelstiltskin, guessing until he gets it right. It is not Mary, not Jesus. But is it Beelzebub? Yahweh? Allah? Instead he hears himself say, "Can you tell me what it feels like when God talks to you?"

  Faith looks down into her lap, not speaking. Father Rampini stares at her and thinks of the time he first saw his son. He remembers watching the baby fingers spider over Anna's breast as she rocked him. Although he has learned, in ascetical theology training, that feelings are not important, and that celebrating mass and administering the sacraments are the moments one is closest to God, he is not thinking about it now. That fullness of heart, a divinity spilling over, he's only felt twice in his fifty-three years. Once watching his wife after childbirth. And then again six years later, when the Holy Spirit settled over him like one of those early Midwestern snowstorms, numbing him to the pain of the car accident that had taken his family, and leaving forgiveness in its place.

  It takes Father Rampini a moment to notice that Faith has taken one of the Lite-Brite pegs, a red one, and pushed it into the hole on her right hand. The peg sticks at the halfway point. The wound doesn't reopen, though, and as Faith flexes the muscles of her hand, it eventually falls out. Then she plugs in the Lite-Brite, and Father Rampini is jolted by the incandescent blaze of the flower. "When She talks, I feel it here," Faith says, making a fist and bringing it up to his heart.

  Father Rampini has known for a long time that he moves in a world skeptics consider to be impossible, but, to him, Catholicism--specifically, its theology--has been a haven of logic. The world makes no sense--what other reason could there be for the drunk driver who picked his family's station wagon to plow into, instead of the other three hundred cars he passed that night? Religion, with its godhead, its order, and its salvation, has literally been Rampini's saving grace.

  He runs the cold water in the bathroom sink and splashes it on his face. As he dries himself off and looks up into the mirror of the medicine cabinet, he hesitates for a moment. What is he going to say about Faith White? On the one hand, she has the humility of the blessed, and she's not gaining anything but a notoriety she does not seem to want. On the other hand, she's spouting heresy.

  He begins mentally to chronicle the pros and cons. Rampini has yet to see a verified case, but Faith may indeed suffer from stigmata.

  However, she's also seeing something that no one else has ever seen. Technically, God isn't a man. But that does not mean He is a woman.

  He sits back down on the lid of the toilet and stares blankly at the collection of naked Barbie dolls in the bowl of the tub. Faith White is, for all intents and purposes, a perfectly ordinary secular girl. She doesn't structure her life around prayer; she probably couldn't tell a Hail Mary from the Pledge of Allegiance. It is in her favor that verified visionaries like the Fatima children and Saint Bernadette weren't likely candidates for visions either.

  But at least they were Christian.

  Rampini sighs. Father MacReady was correct--there are many compelling things about Faith. But, ultimately, her vision isn't one of them. She's saying things that quite simply are completely out of line.

  Father Rampini opens the bathroom door and starts back down the hall, his decision made. Yet with each step he thinks of the saints of the sixteenth century, who were scorned and vilified for their radical beliefs. Saints whose autopsies, years after the persecution, revealed strange scars etched onto the walls of their hearts that looked like the letters of Jesus' name.

  Malcolm Metz looks at the beat-up Honda that belongs to Lacey Rodriguez, one of a battalion of excellent private investigators his firm has used over the years. He points to a tiny statue of Mary glued to the dashboard with a piece of double-edged tape. "Nice touch."

  "Yeah, well." Lacey shrugs. "I didn't know if someone might see the car."

  "From the way it sounds, you'll probably have to park a mile away. You'll be in touch with me later?"

  "This afternoon, when I get there. And twice a day after that."

  Metz leans against the rusted hood of the car. "I don't need to tell you how imperative it is for you to dig up dirt on the mother."

  Lacey lights a cigarette and offers one to Metz, but he shakes his head. "How hard could this be?" she says, exhaling. "The woman was in a freaking mental institution."

  "Unfortunately, possession is nine tenths of the law, and the child is still living with her mother. I want to hear if she keeps the girl up too late or feeds her something with Red Dye Number Two or talks on the portable phone too close to the tub when the kid's in it. I want to know what the hell she's saying to those priests and rabbis who keep coming to the house."

  "You got it."

  "Just don't do anything that won't be admissible in court. No dressing up like the plumber's assistant and going to check the pipes, only to come out with evidence seized without a warrant."

  "I only did it once," Lacey says, chagrined. "Are you going to bring it up forever?"

  "I might." Metz claps her shoulder. "Go to work." He watches the Honda weave down the street, and then walks toward the building that houses the law office. His eyes flicker toward his name, carved on the stone plaque outside. The glass-and-chrome doors swing open on sensor, as if they have been waiting for him all along.

  Mariah takes refuge in the basement workshop. With determination she picks up a thin block of maple, intent on turning it into a miniature kitchen table, but she is too distracted to do it well. Frustrated, she sits beside her half-finished dollhouse and rests her head in her hand.

  She can see the tiny bathroom fixtures and the knotty-pine floors in the bedrooms and the kitchen cabinet that is still ajar. She can see into the most private parts of this house without even having to try.

  This is what it's like, she thinks, to be God.

  She considers this for a moment, thinking of all the young girls who play so easily at being a divine being--able to put their dollhouse families through their paces. Mariah glances up at the ceiling and wonders if God is doing the same thing to her and Faith.

  She remembers, suddenly, why as a child she never had people in her dollhouses. The family dog would butt up against the house and the miniature baby would tumble down the stairs before Mariah had a chance to grab him. Or the mother figurine would be facedown on the bed, and Mariah would think that the doll had been sobbing her heart out all night while she herself slept. It made her feel guilty--she couldn't play with all of the dolls at once, couldn't take care of all their needs. It was no great bargain to be godlike, to have the power to help and soothe and comfort and know that she couldn't save everyone all the time.

  So she grew up to build houses without dolls, places where furniture was bolted down and glued into position, homes where nothing was left to chance. And yet, Mariah realizes that she still didn't make a clean escape.

  Manipulation, responsibility, watchfulness. It is not so different, really, from being a mother.

  From the Manchester Diocese of the Catholic Church

  Manchester, NH, October 29, 1999--His Excellency the Bishop of Manchester has issued a notice in response to the queries by priests, religious, and laity regarding the activity of Faith White, resident of New Canaan, NH, who claims to be allegedly hearing and seeing heavenly revelations.

  A serene and attentive examination of the matter was undertaken by the diocese, and Faith White's visionary claims have been ruled false. It is our duty to underline one major doctrinal error: erroneous language regarding Christ, who is not
and should not be referred to as a woman or mother of any kind.

  The MotherGod Society, which has been primarily responsible for transmitting the message of Faith White via pamphlet and preaching, is spreading teachings which are not regarded as Catholic dogma and which must be ignored.

  That night, when the MotherGod Society first hears of Bishop Andrews's official denunciation of Faith White, they hand out apples. They dispense more than three hundred Jonagolds from a local orchard and invite people to take a bite out of the myth of male religion. "The Garden of Eden was just the beginning," they shout. "Eve didn't cause the fall from grace."

  The woman who has become their leader, Mary Anne Knight, mills through the crowd shaking hands. She knows this is not as radical and new a movement as people might think. Twenty years ago, she'd studied at Boston College with Mary Daly, who went on to leave the Catholic church after saying it was rooted in sexism. But Mary Anne loved Catholicism too much to renounce it. One day, she prayed, there will be room for me in the Church.

  Then she heard about Faith White.

  She stands on an overturned apple crate, her cohorts gathering around and waving half-eaten cores. Pulling her fleece jacket tighter, she covers a T-shirt provocatively printed MY GODDESS GAVE BIRTH TO YOUR GOD. "Ladies," she cries out, "we have the pastoral letter from Bishop Andrews here." She extracts a Zippo lighter from her pocket. "And this is what we have to say in response." With a flourish, she sets fire to the corner of the missive and lets it burn all the way to her fingertips.

  As the crowd of enthusiastic women cheers, Mary Anne smiles. Let the Manchester diocese think that a gaggle of women are just letting their petticoats hang out; let the stuffy old bishop write warnings till he's blue in the face--there are some things His Excellency hasn't taken into consideration. The MotherGod Society still has Faith White. And two representatives en route to the Vatican, planning to launch a formal protest.

  Mariah is brushing her teeth and flipping through the late-night channels on the television when she sees Petra Saganoff's face, and the backdrop of her own house. "Hollywood Tonight! has uncovered a new development in the case of Faith White. In an unexpected move, the father of the child, Colin White, has reappeared in New Canaan to seek full custody of his daughter."