Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005
The Bathtub Mary
by James T. Shannon
I got the call a little after four in the morning. Trouble. At that time it had to be trouble, I thought groggily as I reached out to stop the damned cell phone beeping. I remembered I was on vacation, so the call couldn’t be coming from the station. No, at this time it had to be family. Sondra, my wife, was muttering something in her sleep. Ashley and Jason, our two kids just pushing into their teens, were in their rooms down the hall. My mother, then. Or one of my sisters. Or... and I picked it up to hear that familiar scratchy voice rasping, “Gilbert, I need to see you.”
“Now?” I said, hearing in my own voice the whiny kid she always managed to bring out in me.
“Of course now! You think I’d call you this early in the morning if I didn’t want to see you now?”
“But, Vo, it’s four o’clock.”
“Young people sleep too much, Gilbert. You get to be my age, you begin to see what a waste of time all that sleeping is.”
“And you live fifty miles away.”
“I know where I live, Gilbert Souza. And I certainly wouldn’t have called such a big-deal Boston police detective if it wasn’t important.”
“Okay, Vo,” I said with a sigh that I didn’t much try to hide. And I’d learned a long time ago that it was no use correcting her about my job. Putnam, where I live and work on the force, is a suburb of Boston, but not a big city, not by a long shot. “What’s so important?”
“It’s the Blessed Mother statue,” she said. Then she added cryptically, “Somebody’s going to die.”
Knowing she had me about as hooked as any trout in the stream, my grandmother hung up.
I called back, of course, and since she was the woman she was, and had caller ID, she didn’t answer the phone, although I filled about two minutes on her answering machine asking her to pick up. Which left me with no alternative but to dress as quickly and quietly as I could in the dark, leave a note on the kitchen table for Sondra, and drive the fifty miles down to Fall River wondering all the way what the hell my vo was up to now.
Vo isn’t actually my grandmother’s name. It’s the diminutive form of the Portuguese word for grandmother, avo, which is about right since my vo is the diminutive form of a grandmother. Barely five feet tall, even in her thick-soled sneakers, my vo was the only grownup I could look down on by the time I was thirteen. But no one, child or adult, priest or policeman, ever dared look down on my vo.
My grandmother never treated me with the adult condescension that all kids learn to hate early on, but she also didn’t realize that she could embarrass a grandchild, who knew that when you stood out from the crowd, you only became a better target. Much of the embarrassment she caused me came out of her attachment to that Blessed Mother statue she had mentioned in her call, the bane of my youth, the Bathtub Mary.
As common as backyard gardens or pastel-sided triple-deckers in the Portuguese-dominated city of Fall River, the Bathtub Mary is what irreverent Catholic kids called those small shrines people placed in their yards. The shrines celebrate the appearance of the Blessed Mother to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
As I’d always heard it, the Bathtub Mary actually began life decades ago as an old porcelain claw foot bathtub tossed out during an apartment renovation. Someone got the idea of burying the tub upended half in the ground, then placing a statue of the Blessed Mother in the resulting niche, so it sort of looked like a grotto. Landscape the back and sides of the tub and plant flowers in the front, and you’ve got yourself a shrine.
They became so popular that later innovators came up with precast cement grottos, which still managed to look pretty much like upended bathtubs. They later added statues of the kneeling shepherd children, resulting in a kind of year-round creche.
But that wasn’t good enough for my grandmother, whose own triple-decker was two streets away from her second home, Our Lady of Fatima Church. My vo’s statue of the Blessed Mary was life-sized — well, life-sized if Christ’s mother had been the size of my grandmother. But back when I was eleven, she couldn’t find any life-sized statues of the three kids to go in front of it. She solved that problem by inviting the family, her three sons and two daughters and all of her grandkids, over for her semiannual meal of a sopa, which my cousins and I called “swamp soup” because it was full of spearmint and soggy bread. Since I was the only grandchild with guts enough to admit I hated this sopa, she told my parents, “Oh, and tell Gilbert I’ll have lots of chourico pizza for him. And I’ve baked raisin squares for dessert.”
She had the pizza, all right, covered with slices of chourico, the hot sausage I liked so much. And the raisin squares that I’d do almost anything for. Almost anything did not, however, include what she had in mind, a surprise for me and two of my cousins, Natalie and Norbina Oliveira. She had sewn costumes for us so we’d look like the three kids from Fatima. Now these were shepherd kids. From 1917. In the newspaper pictures taken of them, the two girls have these huge, dark scarves that fall halfway down their backs. The boy is wearing some kind of weird, overblown turban-like affair that hangs off the back of his head like a sack that he’s using to steal a watermelon. Besides the headwear, my grandmother had been historically accurate with the girls’ ballooning dresses and the boy’s dark little jacket. Slick maybe for shepherd kids in Portugal in 1917, but not the fashion statement for an eleven year old in the early ’80s who wanted to dye his black hair blond so he could pass for a midget version of Sting.
My mom, Vo’s daughter, gave me up like a Spartan mother sending her son off to the army, and she didn’t even flinch when I came out of Vo’s spare bedroom practically radioactive with embarrassment. My grandmother, followed by the obedient herd of everyone else in the family, marched me and my cousins out to her back yard and had the three of us kneel in front of the statue. Then my chubby, tech-crazy cousin, Victor Medeiros, seventeen and safely out of the running for shepherd boy, stood off to the side braying like a mule. Over and over he asked me to throw in a prayer for him while he took our pictures with his brand new Nikon F3 35 millimeter.
But my mortification didn’t end there. My vo decided one of Victor’s pictures was so nice that she sent it in to the local Portuguese weekly, where in what must have been a very slow news week it ended up on the front page.
For months after that it seemed to me that every kid in Our Lady of Fatima school came up with variations on Victor’s tired “Pray for me, Gilbert” line, and since they all knew that the Blessed Mother had supposedly told the three children of Fatima predictions about the course of events in the world, they kept asking me if Mary had told me anything worthwhile.
“Hey, Gilbert, any chances I’m gonna get a ColecoVision for Christmas?”
“How ’bout the Red Sox, Gilbert? Was one of her miracles the Sox finally winning the World Series?”
You get the picture. I got the picture, all right. I got the picture taped to my desk and my locker, taped to the back of my coat, taped to any schoolbook I happened to leave lying around.
It could’ve been worse, I suppose. If I’d been older, my classmates would probably have come up with more creative forms of torture. But this was bad enough, and though I knew most of the attacks were stupid, that still didn’t keep them from bothering me.