Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

emerge from the fiasco? And any time I want to test it or bring it to resolution, that option is only two inches away. What’s the big hurry? There may be red-eye gravy for dinner.

And there may be other ways to woo the darling Suzy. Indeed, no sooner had he relaxed his posture and settled back into his seat, with a long breath and a frangible whimper, than he began to formulate . . . well, if not a cunning strategy at least a fresh approach. He would, he told himself, concentrate his energy upon assisting her with her term paper. In the process, he’d open the charm taps, let her see how vigorous and entertaining he could be, treat her to displays of pith and pluck that would gradually dispel any image she might have of him as sickly or incomplete. He’d turn her pity inside out, kick it off its ivory perch, feed it to the foxes of ecstasy, and, while he was at it, feed Brian baby to the pterodactyls of oblivion. And if that course went awry, if it backfired, if the fact that he was no longer pantingly petitioning for consensual copulation succeeded only in confirming to Suzy that his “injuries” had rendered him feeble and fruitless, then he would consider telling her the truth. All of it: Sailor Boy to penis poke.

He sighed again, massaged his arms, and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat from his brow.

After dinner, under the semiwatchful eye of his mother, her stepmother, Switters and Suzy huddled in the den to discuss her paper, the subject of which was to be Our Lady of Fatima. Since there was a gap in Switters’s erudition where this particular virgin was concerned, Suzy filled him in.

It seems that on May 13, 1917, three shepherd children from Fatima, Portugal, were visited (allegedly visited, though Suzy did not qualify it thusly) by a woman (Suzy said lady) in a white gown and veil while tending their sheep in the hills outside of the village. The children said that the woman—the vision of the woman—told them to return to that place on the thirteenth of each month until the following October, at which time she would reveal her identity. The kids complied, she dropped in on them briefly each month as promised, and on October 13, she spoke dramatically and at some length, disclosing, among other things, that she traveled under the name of the Lady of the Rosary. She bade the little sheepherders to recite the rosary every day and asked that a chapel be built in her honor. Switters suggested that this last smacked of raw egoism, but Suzy only frowned at him and went on.

Although the Roman Catholic Church never officially proclaimed the children’s rosary-touting visitor to be a reappearance on earth of the Virgin Mary, it authorized devotion to her in 1932, and had a shrine with a basilica erected at Fatima, to which thousands of pilgrims were still attracted each year. “Maybe that’s where I’ll take you on our honeymoon,” whispered Switters, and for a second he could have sworn he saw a flicker of excited expectation in her eyes.

The best was yet to come. At some point during the October visitation, the Fatima Lady issued to the children three sets of predictions and warnings, two of which she urged them to immediately make public. “Warnings! Predictions! This is more like it,” said Switters. “You be nice and listen,” said Suzy.

There wasn’t a great deal more to hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”

“That figures.” Switters nodded. “Death and destruction are a prophet’s bread and butter. Nobody ever grabbed much ink predicting bountiful harvests, lovely spring weather, or that a good time would be had by all. Even the Second Coming is billed as ‘Doomsday.’ “

“She said that some great war was going to end in the next year. That was nice. But that if people didn’t heed her words, another greater one would come along soon.”

“Those would have been World Wars One and Two.”

“Whatever. She was right, wasn’t she?” In the Early American rocker angled next to his wheelchair, Suzy maneuvered a bare shin beneath the other knee so that she was balanced, more or less, on one of her lean, tanned legs, a position that thrust her upper body slightly forward until he could feel her breath upon his neck. She smelled both clean and dirty, sour and sweet, like a child. The reverie of childhood—its seamless daydreams, its gamelife and toylife, its timeless aura of magic happiness—was there in her aroma. Whatever that little bastard Brian might be doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a nursery rhyme. “She couldn’t be wrong,” Suzy continued. “She was Mother Mary.”

The precise logic of that declaration eluded Switters, but he thought he knew where it was coming from. Many human females, as they approached puberty, as the first hormonal waters—the precursor of the adolescent geyser—began to bubble up through their private earth, became enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, with horses and/or the Virgin Mary. Unlike human males, whose fixation on sports figures, explosions, horsepower, and vulgar comedy could muddle their minds into early middle age, and in hard cases, even beyond, the equine and Marian fantasies of healthy girls tended to wane and then peter out (so to speak) altogether once they became sexually active. The most cursory familiarity with Freudian psychology could explain the girlish preoccupation with horses; the infatuation with Mary, particularly on the part of non-Catholics, was more complicated, although he guessed it could be attributed to her status as Super Virgin: she conceived without coitus, gave birth without pain, commanded the affection and admiration of men without being corrupted by them; which was to say, she triumphed gloriously over the terrors, dangers, and uncertainties facing young females as they came “of age.” The fact that Mary broadcast a monstrously mixed message—motherhood is divine, sex a sin—could not be underestimated for the damage it was capable of inflicting on a developing psyche, but given the discrepant nature of reality, the myth of the Virgin Mother might be said also to provide basic training in the acceptance of life’s contradictions; and most girls did eventually escape her misogynistically generated web, though frequently secretly scarred.

That Suzy was bright and spunky, that she had an open heart and generous spirit, that she was physically attractive and therefore did not have to retreat into doctrine as a form of compensation, all indicated that she would soon outgrow Marianism. For the time being, however, especially as they prepared her term paper, he would accept it just as he accepted her limited vocabulary and imprecise speech. Hey, Mary might have been his own patron saint had not her innocence been commandeered as a front for a rapacious institution. He tried to picture what Mary (known then as Miriam or Mariamne) must have been like before she was hijacked and haloed by the patriarchs, back when she was Suzy’s age, a dusty-footed, chocolate-eyed Jewish filly, swelling with a fetus of suspect origin —but the Virgin that unexpectedly filled his mind’s eye was the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters, a scruffy dory bearing him ever farther up a steaming jungle river toward a destiny almost too queer to comprehend.

He shook it off. “Very well, cupcake,” he said, “here’s what we must do. First, we’ll take the broad overall view. Research the subject generally but thoroughly. Then, we’ll narrow our focus down to something manageable and particular and original. For example, the significance of the number thirteen in the Fatima visitations. We’ll research that specific area with even greater thoroughness. Then we’ll organize our material, make an outline of the salient points we want to cover. After that, we’ll write a first draft. Submit it to ruthless scrutiny. Edit it to perfection. And bingo! Final draft. An A-plus paper. Scholarship to Stanford.”

“Wow! Hello? Sister Francis didn’t tell us all that. Sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure that’s how people write term papers?”

“Absolutely. Some novelists even write books that way. The more dronish ones.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “You’re the brain.”

“You’ve got a brain, too, and don’t forget it. If you develop it, it’ll be around to enrich your life long after your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy.”

“Switters!” His mother looked up from her fashion magazine and shook a crimson-nailed finger at him.

“It’s cool,” Suzy assured the older woman. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s, like, the smartest person anywhere.” She planted a vigorous kiss that very nearly slid off his cheek and onto his lips.

“I don’t know about that,” grumbled Eunice, although whether the source of her uncertainty was Switters’s intellect or Suzy’s kiss remained unclear.

Cranking up the search engine on the family computer, they commenced their investigation that very evening, discovering, to their mutual astonishment, twenty full pages of entries relating to Fatima. They failed to make a dent in the list, however, because when Suzy noticed that her Tweety Bird wristwatch read ten o’clock, she insisted that Switters go to bed. He protested energetically. “I was riding herd on these domesticated electrons before you were potty trained,” he said. “As much as I loathe computers, I can drive them all night long. I mean it. I’m good until dawn.”

“No, you’re not,” she responded. “You need lots of rest and stuff. I’m in charge here. I’m the nurse, and I’m going to take care of you, no matter what you say.” She switched off the computer. “We can, like, do this