Pilgrimage
نویسنده : mary Gordon
قالب : داستان کوتاه
تاریخ :18 april
My parents got the idea for our only vacation from a priest. Their marriage was based on shared devout Catholicism; our days were shaped and colored by it. They were middle-aged when I was born, my mother forty-one, my father fifty-five. My mother had polio, but she supported us by working as a legal secretary because my father didn’t have a job.
In the spring of 1954, when I was five years old, a priest suggested that we make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré, in Quebec, where prayers were said to be very powerful, particularly if the petitioner made his request while climbing up the stone steps to the basilica on his knees. We would also visit a nearby shrine dedicated to the Virgin: Cap de la Madeleine. We would pray for my father to get “a good job.” We knew that the jobs he got, and lost—bartender, taxi-driver—were beneath him. We knew that “a good job” would involve words. He was a writer. An editor.
To save money on hotels, we would make the trip from New York to Quebec in one long twelve-hour drive. We would eat all our meals in the car. My mother packed ham sandwiches, Ritz **********ers, a special juice for me whose name I loved: apricot nectar. I was happy in the large back seat. I could see my parents’ heads, turning pleasantly toward each other; she would pass him a bite to eat, a sip of something. I pretended that the back seat was my hotel and that the window crank was a phone, and I ordered room service: champagne and caviar. We crossed the border into Canada and I was disappointed that people weren’t speaking French. I loved the sound of French words, and I especially liked the name Cap de la Madeleine, which sounded to me like a dancer tapping down a flight of stairs. And I was disappointed that we were staying not in a hotel but in a motel, with wallpaper that was meant to look like knotty pine.
In the morning, when we got to the basilica, my mother and I stayed in the lower chapel, praying as my father made his way up the stairs on his knees. I said my prayers in a French accent, pretending that I was praying in French. My mother held her silver rosaries. When my father came down to get us, he looked refreshed, young, triumphant. Back at the motel, my mother bathed his raw and bloody knees with iodine, then bandaged them. I was proud, but confused; I thought my father brave in his wounds, but my mother’s unaccustomed tenderness seemed strange, as did my father’s lofty, calm acceptance of her ministrations.
As a treat for me, when we had finished visiting the shrines, we would stop at Storytown, a recently constructed poor man’s Disneyland that was north of Albany. I don’t know how my parents learned of it; it was not the sort of thing they usually knew about. It was as if they’d suddenly become interested in space travel.
I slept until we got to Storytown. Now I realize it wasn’t much, just some painted cement monuments to various fairy tales and nursery rhymes: the Old Woman’s Shoe, Cinderella’s Pumpkin, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare. It was newly opened; there were piles of red dirt alongside the cement paths pristine in their recent dryness. Most children in America were in school that day. Was that the reason we were the only ones there? Or was it that people hadn’t heard of Storytown yet, or didn’t think it worth a visit? In any case, we had it to ourselves, and the emptiness felt sacred. I believed that the place had been created entirely for me, that my parents had thought this place up, then actualized it only to delight me. The figures were much larger than I. Slowly, reverently, I went from spot to spot, climbing up on them, sitting down, having my picture taken. It wasn’t as if I thought I was part of the stories—rather, I was honoring them, honoring their place in my life as my parents had honored St. Anne and the Virgin. But I had nothing to ask for in this place, no favors needing to be granted, because I was entirely happy. I felt that my parents and I were admirable, enviable: my father with his bandaged knees, my mother serving apricot nectar, me on Miss Muffet’s Tuffet, smiling as they told me to say “Cheese.”
I believed it was a sure thing that my father would get a job. Then everyone would realize our superiority. But he did not; he died a year and a half later. And after that, for a very long time I didn’t go anywhere at all.
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