“So the retreat was successful?” the abbess inquired gently.
“It was extraordinary.”
“Good. So all is as it should be,” the abbess replied as she laid the wreath onto a nearby grave. Suddenly Clarissa noticed the name inscribed on the simple tombstone.
“Maria Stelopolis!”
“Of course. She was my aunt, didn’t you know? And she led a very full and happy life,” the abbess said without missing a beat, then winked at her.
That night, alone in her cell, Clarissa pulled out the photo of Joseph. The toddler was still visible, standing slightly out of focus in the illuminated cave. She propped the photo against the wooden crucifix and stared at it until morning.
The next day Clarissa went back to the cannery. At the end of the counseling session she walked out the back and was gazing across the small harbor when Georgio ran toward her, dragging his sister by the hand.
“Ask her,” he said to his sister, pushing her purposefully toward Clarissa.
“Bless me again, for I see that now you have the touch,” she said to Clarissa in Greek.
“Nothing has changed,” Clarissa replied in English, but the young girl leaned forward and looked closely at the nun. Over her shoulders she thought she could see the faint outline of wings, or could it be the sunlight behind her? Either way the childless wife was determined to bear the son she had promised her husband.
“Bless me anyway,” she said in English.
Reluctantly Clarissa laid her hands over the girl’s womb, then closed her eyes to conjure up an image of Joseph, his face smiling down at her.
Time passed and Clarissa threw herself into setting up a women’s health-care center on the island, raising funds and organizing for a gynecologist from the mainland to consult two days a month.
Then one day, as she was walking with Pater Dimitri through the town, she noticed that the village women were staring at her and whispering among themselves. Doors opened as she walked by and a small bunch of housewives gathered and followed her as she continued toward the church.
“What is it?” she asked Dimitri, nervous that she might have unwittingly offended the community somehow.
The priest turned toward the villagers. “We shall see,” he said in a low voice.
One of the women, the butcher’s wife, a strident creature, stepped forward. She approached Clarissa and kneeled in front of her. “O, holy sister, bless me and cure me of my barrenness,” she murmured. The other women nodded in silent approval.
Pater Dimitri raised the woman to her feet. He spoke to her, then turned to Clarissa. “It seems you have cured Christina, Georgio’s sister, of infertility. They say you have the holy touch.” He grinned, then whispered, “Even if you don’t bless them, don’t worry—faith manifests in many forms.”
Clarissa paused for a moment, then reached out to place her hands gently on the woman’s womb, and felt life flow from herself into others.
The Snore
Aaron Solomon Gluckstein hurried along to the Fulton Street subway, his cumbersome body bent into the icy November wind blowing straight off the Hudson. His shoulders shook with unnatural urgency as he fought the temptation to look to his left and take in the gaping hole on the horizon visible since September 11 that year. May the Rebbe save us all, he thought as the ghost of his cousin rose up before him. Reuben Gluckstein had perished when the second tower fell. He was one of the volunteer medics who had worked for the Hatzolah ambulance—the ambulance service supplied by the Lubavitch community. Reuben’s death had been a great jolt to Aaron’s awareness of his own mortality, a vulnerability compounded by the trauma of the disaster that thrashed daily like a recurring nightmare in the souls of all New Yorkers.
“Armageddon would be a breeze after this shit,” Aaron muttered, then looked behind him nervously. He’d had the sense of being followed, ever since he’d left the massive granite offices on Fifth, a prickly feeling that burned the back of his neck. A man in a brown anorak and jeans turned a corner sharply; Aaron wondered if he’d seen him earlier, when he stepped out of Safecom.
Aaron was a claims assessor for one of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Having completed half a medical degree, before training as an accountant, he’d found himself naturally slipping into insurance. He’d worked for the same company for over twenty years and was considered one of their most loyal and reliable employees. Tenacious with regard to his cases, he was feared among lawyers, many of whom had lost against his evidence in court. And he was fiercely proud of his ethical record…until today.
What could they do? Kill him? It was a throwaway comment, until he remembered the mysterious disappearance of a colleague several months before. Aaron tried to dismiss the churning fear that had suddenly transformed his stomach into an uncomfortable soup. Hinkel. What case had he been investigating? Aaron racked his brains, but the cold was numbing. Hinkel had been due for retirement; he’d talked about living in Taos, New Mexico, he’d even bought himself a rundown hacienda, but it was strange how one day he suddenly just wasn’t there. His desk had been cleared and made devoid of anything that had marked it as Hinkel’s. Aaron had never heard from him again.
Come on, Aaron told himself now, this is the civilized world, shit like that only happens in bad films, surely? But his accelerating walk betrayed his fear. Sucking the wind in between his teeth, he tucked the file he was carrying farther under his arm. As he descended into the steaming subway entrance he deliberately switched his thoughts to a pleasanter image: Miriam, his wife, waiting for him at home. Married for only one year, just to sound out the word wife made Aaron, a corpulent man who tended to disguise his shyness with aggression, smile.
The tight-knit Lubavitch community in Crown Heights had all but despaired of seeing the only son of their oldest matriarch—ninety-year-old Myra Gluckstein—married. At fifty-two years of age, Aaron’s timidity was legendary. It was rumored he never took his clothes off in front of another person, even at the Mikvah in front of other men. Of Hungarian descent Aaron stood at six foot five inches and weighed in at twenty-five stone. He was blessed with a jutting chin and the kind of nose you could imagine leading an army, but Aaron seemed only to employ his testosterone for business. He was useless in the pursuit of women. He also displayed an unfortunate revulsion for women pursuing him—of which there had been many. After all he was a desirable male: a God-fearing Jew who took the Rebbe at his word, knew his Gemara backward and his Mishnah off by heart and, most importantly, was a man of means. In short, an honorable individual; a mensch. And an unmarried mensch living with his ninety-year-old mother in one of the largest brownstones in Crown Heights was naturally an attractive commodity.
By the time Aa
ron had reached thirty the community was rife with rumors that he was (a) maybe homosexual, God forbid; or (b) a virgin.
Luckily for him, by the time he hit forty most of the mothers had forgotten he was single at all. Even the widows had stopped pointing him out from the women’s balcony at temple and the supply of loaves of fresh-baked challah ceased appearing on his doorstep. Aaron Solomon Gluckstein had become invisible…until Miriam.
His meeting with Miriam was a secret arrangement Myra Gluckstein made for her son via the Internet. The community had their own special Website, www.mitmazel.com, for such needs. Peering through her bifocals the matriarch screened dozens of profiles until she arrived at Miriam. Myra stared thoughtfully at the black-and-white photograph of the mousy thirty-year-old whose dark eyes seemed cursed with the same painful shyness as her son’s. The fact that the young woman listed poetry as her hobby and Rilke as her favorite poet clinched it for the older woman, who, in the 1930s, had taught philosophy and European literature at New York University. She was still a radical atheist then, before Abraham Gluckstein seduced both her body and her soul into Orthodoxy.