Barbara believed she recognized the woman, but she wasn’t going to say anything. The reporter was busy anyway, checking a light-meter and then switching on her spot. The chapel tent ran longer than broad, with rows of dull folding chairs facing a riser on which stood a low table. The walls were strung with wraps and scarves, from blush-purple to grape-blue, polyester or even silk. What with the heat, the flutter, the color, a visitor seemed to have arrived at the sacred campsite of God’s chosen refugees. It seemed like sunset, time for worship, so much so that Barbara enjoyed a mild wave of spirit-tension, a tremor or two. Ahead, front and center, a low table held a burning oil lamp, a willowy flame that sweetened the camp’s dank and sent glimmers along the first row of chairs. Before this makeshift altar sat a dark girl in a wheelchair.
Dark, but not African. A gypsy, rather, the girl had features of a near-Asian sleekness, and her skin matched the color of the heavy liquid in the lamp. Someone had fitted her legs into limp black jeans, and topped these with a flamboyant wrap, its indigo flecked with tassels and in-sewn coins. The wheelchair itself was a one-woman gypsy caravan, draped along the arms with gilded velvet.
In the next minute the camerawoman was asking for a shot of Barb and the girl together. The invalid made excellent copy, a pretty face and a crumpled body.
Barbara ignored the request. If she started striking poses she’d be no better than Kahlberg back in his print facility, gussying up the family photos. Anyway the press would have a Suzy Spotlight soon enough, after Jay’s mother arrived. The wife, with her back to the camera, fished her rosary out of her purse. Propping herself against one of the locked chair wheels, she went down on one knee. From that angle, in the false twilight, the eyes of the cripple beside her appeared almost supernatural. The eyes of a Mongol goddess. La Mama Americana kissed her beads and began — but how could she have failed to realize that prayers made terrific television? While she worked through the first Hail Mary, trying to get to the bottom of her rage, the camerawoman went into a crouch and began looking for the best angle, spider-legging now left and now right in glamour jeans. She paused only to gesture go on. Barbara got the picture, another Nativity scene, even as she kept up her murmuring. She was never comfortable stopping mid-rosary. Her mind’s eye however returned to profane business. Wasn’t this young woman with a camera a ghost from that first dusty morning downtown? Wasn’t she the one who’d taped the attack and the healing? The camera had been a smaller model, that morning, but this was the woman, all Cher-hair and bold moves.
Barbara finished her Ave and stumbled back, up then down, seating herself with a thump on the riser. The curve of her spine brushed the rim of the coffee-table altar. When the reporter lowered her camera, for a moment Barb couldn’t distinguish between the two flashy younger women. Then the reporter started to ask questions. Had Mrs. Lulucita always known such faith? What sort of a churchgoer was her mother?
Barbara eyed the gloves, accessories of a career girl. “I don’t know how to talk to you,” she said.
“Tell me about Paul, signora. A woman of the Church, you must wonder about Paul. What do you make of him, the miracle?”
“Make of him…” Barbara tugged at a seam.
“Is it a miracle, do you think? What do you think?”
“Oh, listen. If you learn anything as a mother, you learn that once a kid gets out of the house, sooner or later they’re going places you never dreamed of.”
Tough Mama. Barb let her dress alone and sighed.
“I know you,” she said. “You were there that first morning.”
The woman’s smile was the last thing Barbara expected, a grin straight off the playground. “Yes, si.” Her nod came from the waist. “I was there, I was. After that I am having this new position.”
She hoisted the camera, the light briefly blinding. “Yes,” she went on, “your son does good for many people that day.” And she introduced herself, Maddalena.
“Really? You’re saying, you got this job because…?”
“Oh yes. Before then I am always looking, looking, with my little camera. But that morning, colpo d’oro.”
A stroke of gold. And if anyone seemed made for media work it was Maddalena, chic and electric right down to her cobalt fingernails. “Beato lei,” Barbara said, blessed are you. Blessed was any woman who knew what she wanted.
“Beato lei, Madonna Americana.”
Barbara wasn’t that bewildered. “The American Madonna,” she said evenly, “is someone else. She’s a pop star.”
Maddalena showed she deserved her job, recovering fast. “But the mother of jesus,” she declared, “she too is a pop star. The American Madonna, she takes for herself what is already for a pop star. La Madonna dijesu, for two thousand years she has all the songs. She has the merchandise. In Naples you see her ojetti votivi.”
Barbara dropped her gaze. “Listen, all right but…listen. I can’t do this, all right? I didn’t come here for an interview.”
“Per carita. You didn’t come here simply to pray.”
What’s your answer to that, Owl Girl? As Barbara slid her beads over her open palm, she was relieved to hear a different voice in the tent.
“C’e qualcuno? Is there someone to help the girl?”
The voice was a man’s, vaguely familiar, but the mother couldn’t see through the light from the video-cam.
“To help the girl, someone?”
It was a pair of men, coming around the rows of chairs. One wore a coat and tie, he had a goatee, and the other wore all-purpose khakis and revealed a shiny bald dome. After a moment Barbara recognized Dottore DiPio.
“Please,” the doctor said, “wait for me for the girl.” Then, blinking at Barbara blinking at him: “Ma si! Signora Lulucita. Where else would I find you?”
The other man was the first to extend a hand. Still young for someone so hairless, he had a German name, something like Interstate, and he served as the Center’s chaplain. “Well,” he said, “chaplain, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, and general errand boy for that force of nature you call a husband.”
His English smacked of Middle America. Around his neck hung the Franciscan T, the italicized wooden capital, very different from the doctor’s elaborate silver clatter. Also the chaplain kept calling everyone a saint, first the Jaybird, “a saint of energy,” and then DiPio, “very generous, a saint.”
The doctor bent over the girl, shining a penlight into her black eyes.
Interstate went on, “If I weren’t able to stay with the doctor here, who knows? I might be living in a tent myself.”
He was setting up the altar, lifting the oil lamp, tossing a purple cloth across the tabletop. There didn’t appear to be a cross. Maddalena withdrew up the aisle between the chairs, trying to get a shot of the group. Barbara closed in on the chaplain.
“You live with him?” she asked. “With DiPio?”
“Yeah. He’s got a big old place up on the hill, in the Vomero. You know the neighborhood?”
“I — know it, yes.”
‘Yeah, you take the funiculare. The doctor’s family has lived up there for a hundred years. He’s got a garden out back, a veritable hermitage.”