The Miracle Part 37

Amanda's room was 503, and Liz had arrived before it. Amanda's note had promised that she would be back from the hospital and waiting in her room, ready to give a full explanation of the fantastic Bernadette journal before Liz wrote and phoned in the headline story.

After that, this dreary town would be blown away, blown off the face of the map forever and all time, as it deserved to be.

There was almost a lilt in the rhythm of Liz's knocking on the door. She waited for the door to open, and when it didn't, she rapped harder, hoping that Amanda was in and had not been delayed at the hospital with Ken, whatever had happened to him.

Abruptly, the doork.n.o.b rattled, and the door swung wide, and there was Amanda in her silk nightgown, sleepy-eyed, her hair a mess, her expression confused.

"Liz, it's you?"

"Who else? Did you forget?" She held up the manila envelope. "You left this super dynamite, and made a date for me to meet you here."

"G.o.d, what time is it?"

"Eleven-thirty on the nose, as agreed."

"Dammit, I overslept. Yesterday exhausted me. I must have slept straight through when my alarm went off. I was supposed to be up at eight, and at the hospital to see Ken's doctor at nine-thirty. But mainly to see Ken and get him back to Chicago. Come in, Liz, come in while I get dressed in a hurry."

Liz went gaily inside, shutting the door as Amanda padded across the room to the bureau to pull out the drawers in search of clean pantyhose and a fresh bra.s.siere.

Liz plopped into a chair, hoisting the manila envelope. "You ain't going to have no trouble with dear Ken, once he sees this. Say, what's he doing in the hospital anyway?"

Amanda was tearing off her nightgown. "He left me a message that he'd become worse and was carted off to the main Lourdes hospital in the Avenue Alexandre-Marqui. I went to see him right away, when I came in from Bartres, but he was sedated and out of it."

"How is he?"

"That's what I was supposed to find out at nine-thirty." She shpped her milky-white b.r.e.a.s.t.s into the bra.s.siere cups and was fastening the bra in back. "h.e.l.l, I wish I hadn't overslept. I don't even have time for a bath."

But Liz Finch was again devoted to the copy of Bernadette's last journal that she had removed from the envelope. "Amanda, you're going to have no more problem with Ken once he sets eyes on this. He'll never be a believer in any of that Lourdes nonsense any more. He'll see how soundly, or unsoundly-unwittingly-Bernadette branded herself a fake. Imagine that little peasant hysteric seeing the Virgin Mary and Jesus all over the place-time and again among the sheep in Bartress- and then, after that dress rehearsal, doing her act all over again a month later in Lourdes. Wow, Amanda, the story of our time. But you didn't want me to phone it in until I talked to you, and I wanted every backup detail of how you laid your hands on it, anyway. How did you, Wonder Girl, how in the devil did you ever do it?"

"Got to go to the bathroom," Amanda said, fluttering the pantyhose she had in her hand. "Got to hurry."

"Amanda, please," Liz implored as Amanda disappeared into the bathroom, "you asked me not to file my story till I heard how you pulled it off. Will you tell me?"

"Not this second, Liz," Amanda called out. "Soon as I finish dressing, I'll tell you what I know on the way downstairs. If that's not enough time, you can drive with me to the hospital. Then I'll tell you the rest."

In a minute, Amanda darted from the bathroom, yanked on her blouse, stepped into her skirt, fastened it, was into her low-heeled shoes, s.n.a.t.c.hing up a second copy of the journal in its manila envelope on her way through the door. Liz was right behind her, skipping to keep up as they went to the elevator.

Waiting for the elevator, Liz pleaded, "Father Ruland gave you Eugenie Gautier's name in Bartres, right?"

"Right."

"How'd you know there was an earlier part of the journal?"

"Sister Francesca mentioned it in pa.s.sing at Nevers. Father Ruland admitted that it existed but insisted that he wasn't interested in it. Actually, he'd never seen it. Madame Gautier confirmed its existence and showed it to me. She didn't want money, she simply wanted me to arrange to put her nephew through an American college. When I read the pages Bernadette wrote about her stay in Bartres, how she was sheep-tending and seeing Jesus and then the Virgin Mary monthly among the woolies-how many times?-"

"Jesus three times. The Virgin six times among the sheep in Bartres, and starting a month later, eighteen more times in Lourdes, only in Lourdes she had witnesses and her playlet went public. What a seductive nut."

"We get them often enough in clinical psychology. The flight from reahty syndrome. We treat older children who've experienced hallucinatory eidetic imagery-colorful, vivid, but unreal imagery that the subject has come to believe in."

The elevator had arrived.

"Can I quote you, Amanda?" Liz wanted to know. "The eminent psychology professor from Chicago, Dr. Spenser says."

They were inside the elevator and riding down to the lobby.

"The Church'll have me burned at the stake," said Amanda, "but no matter, the truth will out. Go ahead."

Liz was jotting notes furiously. Finishing, she stepped into the lobby at Amanda's heels. "Wowie, you've made my day, my week, my life. Good-bye to miracles. This is an absolute international headliner."

As both spun away from the elevator, preparing to rush out of the hotel, they found themselves face to face with Natale and Hurtado, who had just come into the hotel and were about to get into the elevator.

Amanda looked blank for a moment, but Liz recognized the couple at once. "Mr. Mikel Hurtado," she said. "And Miss Natale Rinaldi. Aren't you lovey-dovey, though." They were close to one another, holding hands, beaming happily.

Natale said to Liz, 'This is the first time I've seen you, but I recognize your voice. You're Liz Finch, the press correspondent."

"Hey, now-" Liz started to say, but her voice trmled off as she stared hard at Natale. At the same moment, Amanda had become aware of what Liz was aware of. The pretty Italian girl was no longer wearing sungla.s.ses, no longer hiding her blindness. Her large dark eyes were shining, taking in Liz and then Amanda.

Amanda spoke first, quickly. "Did I hear you say to Liz, This is the first time I've seen you'? Are you telling us you can see?"

Natale nodded with intense pleasure. "Yes, I can see perfectly now."

Liz was puzzled. "But I'm sure you told us, when we dined together, that you were totally blind, and the ophthalmologists in Rome gave you no hope of having your sight restored."

Natale agreed. "I did tell you that. It's true. Medical science had given me up as a lost cause. So I had to pray and hope for something more than science, something supernatural, and I told you that's why I came to Lourdes."

Liz was blinking unceasingly now. "When did it happen, your regaining your sight?"

"Late last night at the grotto."

Liz's voice quavered. She pushed out one word, "How?"

"Yes, how?" Amanda wanted to know.

Natale hesitated and cast Hurtado a sidelong glance. He caught it and responded with a definite nod, adding, "Go ahead, Natale, you're allowed to tell six people the truth about it-I'm one -- your mother and father will be two and three-your Aunt Elsa will be four-and telling Liz and Amanda can make it five and six. After that, no more."

Natale's eyes went from Liz to Amanda. Her countenance was solemn as she made her quiet announcement. "I saw the Virgin Mary last night. Everything was black before me, then a brightness of light, and an apparition of the Blessed Virgin stood above me. She restored my sight, and I could see Her, and everything else. The Virgin did it. She reappeared as She had promised Bernadette that She would, and She gave me back my eyesight."

Amanda reeled under the impact of the announcement. Her jaw was agape. She was shaking her head.

Liz was also thrown off balance, blinking more furiously than ever, scowling. "Wait a minute, wait a minute," she stammered. "You're sure this is true?"

Natale said simply, "Look at me."

Liz stared at her in silence, and tried to formulate words. "Natale, if this is true, and you'll support it, this is one of the biggest stories to come out of Lourdes in the century and a half since Bernadette. You- you've got to give me the details, every detail, at once."

Natale shook her head slowly. "Not if you're going to print it. I'm not allowed to have my miracle printed."

Hurtado stepped forward as if to protect Natale. "She's trying to tell you that this is one of the promises the Virgin Mary extracted from her last night. The Blessed Virgin told Natale, 'Your miracle and the way you came by it are for you, and six others whom you wish to tell about it. My reappearance before you, which had been intended as a secret in that earlier time, is meant to be a secret still. I trust you never to let the truth of your miracle ever to be known. Keep the trust, and I promise you happiness in this world, in Heaven thereafter.' "

Natale was listening to Hurtado, and nodding concurrence with every word he spoke. Natale faced Liz and Amanda. "I gave my vow to the Blessed Virgin that She could trust me."

"But-" Liz was too dumbfounded to continue.

"You both must pledge your word to me," said Natale. "You will not speak of this ever, or write of it, but keep it in your hearts. I told you as friends, meaning only to reveal to you that faith is worthwhile and miracles never cease happening. We have just been to the Basihca to give thankful prayers for our good fortune. We leave for Italy this afternoon. So this is good-bye, and good luck to both of you."

Their hands more tightly entwined than ever, Natale and Hurtado skirted around the speechless Liz and Amanda. The pair entered the elevator, and soon the two of them were gone.

Liz and Amanda stood rooted in their places, unable to speak or move for long seconds.

At last their eyes met.

Liz's voice caught in her throat until she could articulate words. "Amanda, maybe she-maybe she made it up?"

Amanda was shaking her head. "No, no, Liz. She can see."

Liz's head was going up and down. "Yeah, you're right." Then, ahnost to herself, "For Chrissakes, she can see. I-I don't know what to think anymore."

"Maybe we should both stop thinking. Maybe Shakespeare was right-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know that one. h.e.l.lo, Horatio. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

"You better believe it, Liz. I-I'm beginning to."

"Yeah, maybe Bernadette did see Jesus and the Virgin Mary in Bartres, and maybe Bernadette did see the Virgin eighteen times here in Lourdes, and maybe the Virgin did tell her that she would return to Lourdes in this week of this year, and maybe Natale did see her encore."

"Maybe," said Amanda.

"Something happened last night, that's for certain." She looked around her. "Do you see a wastebasket anywhere?"

"Wastebasket?"

Liz held up the manila envelope containing the portion of Bernadette's journal. "For this. I can't write it after what I just saw and heard. I'm not saying I've got religion all at once. But I've just graduated from atheist to born-again agnostic. For starters, anyway." She kissed the envelope. "Good-bye to this big story." She blew a kiss at the elevator. "And good-bye to that big story. Poor ol' Liz. I'm going out and get very, very drunk."

Inside the Centre Hospitalier General, traversing the hallway to Ken's private room, Amanda slowed down.

She wanted to see her Ken as soon as possible, but she needed to clarify her muddled mind and take a definite stance about her fiance's future. G.o.d knows, witnessing the results of Natale's miracle had rocked not only her but Liz beyond reason. Liz, a skeptic by nature and a perpetual cynic nurtured by journalism, had finally conceded her doubts (in her fashion) about Bernadette's visions, and Natale's as well. But Amanda, although more thoroughly shocked by the Virgin Mary's reappearance, more readily prepared to rea.s.sess all her rational beliefs, still clung to some last vestige of logic and reality. Her resistance to turnabout, she knew, came from her career-long conditioning as a psychologist.

h.e.l.l, a psychologist knows what is going on in the real world. There were always well-grounded explanations for every form of aberrant behavior. Sure, sometimes there were minor inexplicable mysteries, but certainly someday they too would be solved. Hadn't Goethe reminded us-"Mysteries aren't necessarily miracles"?

Yet, there had been no mysteries at all in 1858, or last night, if one had faith that puppet man and all humankind danced to the strings of a Master Worker. Of course, all formalized religions had been invented by man to make the miseries of life on earth and the terrors of death-with the promise (and carrot) of the hereafter-acceptable. Still, this knowledge did not negate the fact that human beings, placed on one spinning mudball planet, had not been an accident but had been arranged in an orderly fashion by Something that empowered life itself. If there were evidences of such arrangements and control, then events could happen to humans beyond the reach of human understanding.

What puny man wrote off as miracles could be logical interventions by an indefinable Higher Power.

This would explain Bernadette. This would explain the instantaneous cures at holy shrines. This would certainly explain the restoration of Natale Rinaldi to complete normality. It really came down to a belief in the effectiveness of unlimited faith and not in the restrictions of rationality. This was a new land where the feelings of a being knew a higher wisdom of the mind. Pascal had put it best: "It is the heart which perceives G.o.d and not the reason."

Ken had instinctively understood this, perhaps speeded toward his understanding by desperation. And she, in her mental arrogance, had tried to subvert his faith.

Amanda caught sight of a large container, beside a nurse's station. She supposed it was a trash basket. She walked over to it, removed the copy of Bernadette's journal from the manila envelope, with deliberation tore it into tiny pieces and dropped the pieces of paper and the envelope into the trash disposal. So much for dubbing all the mysteries with easy labels like hysteria. Until this moment she had fought Ken. Now she was ready to join him.

Turnabout. Conversion. Whatever it was, no matter. There was an energy force in total belief, and she would clasp hands with Ken in trying to attain it.

Coming away from the container to find Ken's room, she saw Esther, the nurse, thin and efficient-appearing in a long white starched uniform, crossing to the nurses' station. Esther saw her at the same moment.

'There you are," said Esther. "I wondered where you were. I was just going to phone you."

"I-I overslept," said Amanda. "I was positively worn out and didn't hear the alarm. How is he?"

"Mr. Clayton is, well, somewhat better. He's been up for several hours and his spirits seem improved. Dr. Kleinberg has been with him. Dr. Kleinberg is still there, waiting for you." Esther was guiding Amanda to Ken's room, opening the door. "You can go in now. They both want to see you."

Tentatively, Amanda went into the room. A white and antiseptic hospital room, with the smell of disinfectants and alcohol, like a thousand others. But with a difference. Ken was here, her Ken, her life. He was lying on the bed, gaunt but no less handsome, and unaccountably smiling. The older bespectacled man in the white jacket seated in a chair beside Ken came quickly to his feet. "Mrs. Clayton? I'm Paul Kleinberg. Glad to meet you."

"h.e.l.lo, doctor," Amanda murmured, and then practically ignoring him, she ran to the bed, and bent over Ken, awkwardly trying to embrace him without doing him harm, kissing his face and his lips. "Oh, darling, darling, I've been so worried. But you're going to be all right. I know you will, I know it."

Ken weakly tried to return her embrace. "I expect to be better. Yes."

Oblivious of the physician, Amanda had dropped to her knees beside the bed, holding Ken's hands. "Ken," she said urgently, "I want you to know I'm on your side, I'm with you all the way now. No more resistance from me. I beg your forgiveness for that. I'm going every inch of the way with you. We'll fight and win, and we'll do it together. I-I don't know how to explain it fully-but I'll try to, as soon as you want to hear. But something happened to me. I don't want to be corny, but- but somehow I-I saw the light, yes I saw the light. Soon as you can, I'll go to the grotto with you. We'll pray for your recovery together. We'll pray for a cure now, and you'll see, it will happen. I have faith now."

"Well, I don't," Ken said.

Having finished her outburst, her confessional, Amanda couldn't believe her ears. She was certain she had not heard him right. "You- you what?"

"I said I don't have faith anymore," Ken repeated. "I can't depend on faith to cure me. It might work, but it's too risky. I need more."

Astounded once again in this day of astonishments, Amanda stared at him in a daze. "What are you saying?" She wanted to speak of Natale Rinaldi, but remembered her pledge not to do so. She grasped for another proof of faith. "You-you saw for yourself. You were with Edith Moore several times. You saw her. You heard her. Edith suffered from what you have. But she was miraculously cured. She prayed to the Virgin, she believed, and her faith-it worked, it paid off."

"Edith Moore," Ken repeated from the pillow. 'That's just it. That's exactly what's brought me to my senses. Amanda, maybe faith is good, maybe it can help some-but I want something surer." He looked past the bewildered Amanda toward the physician. "Dr. Kleinberg, you tell her. Go ahead, tell her."

Still dazed, Amanda came slowly to her feet and pivoted to confront Dr. Kleinberg.

"Doctor, what is this?"

Dr. Kleinberg's face was serious, but somehow relaxed. "I think I can explain, Mrs. Clayton. I'll do so briefly. Please sit down."

Confused, her newly ordered world topsy-turvy once more, Amanda took the chair with the stiffness of an automaton. Dr. Kleinberg pulled up a chair next to hers.

His tone was professional, devoid of emphasis, as he began to address Amanda. "When I was able to speak to Ken this morning, aware as I was of the gravity of his case, I urged him to undergo immediate surgery for his sarcoma condition."

"But I refused, as usual," Ken interrupted. "I told the doctor I didn't like the odds on surgery. But I did like the odds on faith healings, such as the one that Edith Moore enjoyed. That was good enough for me, I told the doctor, as I'd been telling you all along. If it could work for Edith Moore, it could work for me." He looked past Amanda. "Now go ahead and tell her, doctor."

Dr. Kleinberg gave an abbreviated Gallic shrug. "The fact is, Mrs. Clayton, it did not work for Edith Moore."

Once more, Amanda could not believe her ears. "It did not?" she echoed incredulously. "Are you saying it did not work, she wasn't miraculously cured? But all those doctors-"

Dr. Kleinberg agreed. "Yes, all those doctors examined her for three years, good doctors, too, and they testified that Edith had been instantaneously and inexplicably cured of a terminal sarcoma condition. I was brought down from Paris to confirm her miraculous cure, and I expected I would examine her, test her, X-ray her and certify her as cured. But I quickly found something was wrong. Just as her sarcoma condition had suddenly disappeared, without reason, I found it had returned, without reason. She had the tumor again. Apparently, faith alone had not offered a permanent cure. I could see that she would soon be in a serious condition, deteriorate rapidly, with her end inevitable."

"But she was a sure thing," said Amanda. "Her cure was on everyone's lips. And, even though I am a scientist by training myself, I've learaed from experience there can be-well, inexplicable and miraculous cures that could be credited to faith."

"I won't deny the possibility," admitted Dr. Kleinberg. "Like Dr. Alexis Carrel, I don't know. It might be that some cures can be credited wholly to faith. Or maybe none can be. Mrs. Clayton, in the present state of science, we don't know. But as a man of science, I do know one thing for a certainty. Edith Moore, no matter what took place in the recent three years, is no longer a miracle woman. She is not cured. I told her so. Until last night, I had to keep this information confidential while Mrs. Moore considered what to do. Now I am permitted to speak about it. And so I spoke the truth to Ken this morning."