Madonna & Child

LENA: One Sunday morning when Paula was four I was preparing lunch for half a dozen friends – bread, pasta, lots of garlic, gallons of wine – and I took this giant pot I found at a street sale in the East Village, mammoth, straight out of a Dickens’ workhouse, and I filled it with water and put it on to boil then left the kitchen to open up another bottle of wine – I was drinking back then, too much, I was also probably high, whatever – but I left Paula coloring in her playbook and the water boiled over. She wanted to help, I imagine, so she pulled the pot off the burner – (a brief silence) – I was in the bathroom and I heard this odd, high shriek, like a kettle going off. I was curious so I headed to the kitchen, no hurry, and there she was, standing at the foot of the stove, open-mouthed, soaking wet, very funny if it weren’t for the polyester t-shirt that had melted to her chest. The neighbors heard me scream, floors below. (a beat) God heard me too, I think. The next year He answered my prayers with a challenge – He gave me a son.

JACK: What is this – a top-the-abortion story? What kind of guilt-trip are you trying to send me on?!

LENA: (exploding) Why does it always have to be about you?! (A beat. She’s fierce:) I held her for sixty-seven hours in the hospital. That’s how long it took for her to die. I never slept, I drifted, I came back seconds, hours later with her little limp body still in my arms, still heaving for breath, still trying somehow to stay with me here. And in those sixty-seven hours I felt – (pointing to the Virgin Mary in the painting) – what she felt. Her son became my child in my delirium, because I can’t imagine that he suffered any more than Paula. And she became my friend, my anchor, she kept me, frankly, from killing myself. But I don’t want to talk about that, I won’t so much as cast breath on that lake of guilt – you can only imagine how deep it goes – I won’t stir those waters with even the slightest wind, except to say that that was the beginning of my belief. Every time I held a dying someone after that, I felt Mary’s grace, and Paula’s weight.

JACK: Why didn’t you ever tell me this?

LENA: I didn’t want to burden you, Jack.

JACK: Ha! At least now it has a name.