The Miracle (55 page)

"Maybe," said Amanda.

"Something happened last night, that's for certain." She looked around her. "Do you see a wastebasket anywhere?"

"Wastebasket?"

Liz held up the manila envelope containing the portion of Bernadette's journal. "For this. I can't write it after what I just saw and heard. I'm not saying I've got religion all at once. But I've just graduated from atheist to born-again agnostic. For starters, anyway." She kissed the envelope. "Good-bye to this big story." She blew a kiss at the elevator. "And good-bye to that big story. Poor ol' Liz. I'm going out and get very, very drunk."

Inside the Centre Hospitalier General, traversing the hallway to Ken's private room, Amanda slowed down.

She wanted to see her Ken as soon as possible, but she needed to clarify her muddled mind and take a definite stance about her fiance's future. God knows, witnessing the results of Natale's miracle had rocked not only her but Liz beyond reason. Liz, a skeptic by nature and a perpetual cynic nurtured by journalism, had finally conceded her doubts (in her fashion) about Bernadette's visions, and Natale's as well. But Amanda, although more thoroughly shocked by the Virgin Mary's reappearance, more readily prepared to reassess all her rational beliefs, still clung to some last vestige of logic and reality. Her resistance to turnabout, she knew, came from her career-long conditioning as a psychologist.

Hell, a psychologist knows what is going on in the real world. There were always well-grounded explanations for every form of aberrant behavior. Sure, sometimes there were minor inexplicable mysteries,

but certainly someday they too would be solved. Hadn't Goethe reminded us—"Mysteries aren't necessarily miracles"?

Yet, there had been no mysteries at all in 1858, or last night, if one had faith that puppet man and all humankind danced to the strings of a Master Worker. Of course, all formalized religions had been invented by man to make the miseries of life on earth and the terrors of death—with the promise (and carrot) of the hereafter—acceptable. Still, this knowledge did not negate the fact that human beings, placed on one spinning mudball planet, had not been an accident but had been arranged in an orderly fashion by Something that empowered life itself. If there were evidences of such arrangements and control, then events could happen to humans beyond the reach of human understanding.

What puny man wrote off as miracles could be logical interventions by an indefinable Higher Power.

This would explain Bernadette. This would explain the instantaneous cures at holy shrines. This would certainly explain the restoration of Natale Rinaldi to complete normality. It really came down to a belief in the effectiveness of unlimited faith and not in the restrictions of rationality. This was a new land where the feelings of a being knew a higher wisdom of the mind. Pascal had put it best: "It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason."

Ken had instinctively understood this, perhaps speeded toward his understanding by desperation. And she, in her mental arrogance, had tried to subvert his faith.

Amanda caught sight of a large container, beside a nurse's station. She supposed it was a trash basket. She walked over to it, removed the copy of Bernadette's journal from the manila envelope, with deliberation tore it into tiny pieces and dropped the pieces of paper and the envelope into the trash disposal. So much for dubbing all the mysteries with easy labels like hysteria. Until this moment she had fought Ken. Now she was ready to join him.

Turnabout. Conversion. Whatever it was, no matter. There was an energy force in total belief, and she would clasp hands with Ken in trying to attain it.

Coming away from the container to find Ken's room, she saw Esther, the nurse, thin and efficient-appearing in a long white starched uniform, crossing to the nurses' station. Esther saw her at the same moment.

'There you are," said Esther. "I wondered where you were. I was just going to phone you."

"I—I overslept," said Amanda. "I was positively worn out and didn't hear the alarm. How is he?"

"Mr. Clayton is, well, somewhat better. He's been up for several hours and his spirits seem improved. Dr. Kleinberg has been with him. Dr. Kleinberg is still there, waiting for you." Esther was guiding Amanda to Ken's room, opening the door. "You can go in now. They both want to see you."

Tentatively, Amanda went into the room. A white and antiseptic hospital room, with the smell of disinfectants and alcohol, like a thousand others. But with a difference. Ken was here, her Ken, her life. He was lying on the bed, gaunt but no less handsome, and unaccountably smiling. The older bespectacled man in the white jacket seated in a chair beside Ken came quickly to his feet. "Mrs. Clayton? I'm Paul Kleinberg. Glad to meet you."

"Hello, doctor," Amanda murmured, and then practically ignoring him, she ran to the bed, and bent over Ken, awkwardly trying to embrace him without doing him harm, kissing his face and his lips. "Oh, darling, darling, I've been so worried. But you're going to be all right. I know you will, I know it."

Ken weakly tried to return her embrace. "I expect to be better. Yes."

Oblivious of the physician, Amanda had dropped to her knees beside the bed, holding Ken's hands. "Ken," she said urgently, "I want you to know I'm on your side, I'm with you all the way now. No more resistance from me. I beg your forgiveness for that. I'm going every inch of the way with you. We'll fight and win, and we'll do it together. I—I don't know how to explain it fully—but I'll try to, as soon as you want to hear. But something happened to me. I don't want to be corny, but— but somehow I—I saw the light, yes I saw the light. Soon as you can, I'll go to the grotto with you. We'll pray for your recovery together. We'll pray for a cure now, and you'll see, it will happen. I have faith now."

"Well, I don't," Ken said.

Having finished her outburst, her confessional, Amanda couldn't believe her ears. She was certain she had not heard him right. "You— you what?"

"I said I don't have faith anymore," Ken repeated. "I can't depend on faith to cure me. It might work, but it's too risky. I need more."

Astounded once again in this day of astonishments, Amanda stared at him in a daze. "What are you saying?" She wanted to speak of Natale Rinaldi, but remembered her pledge not to do so. She grasped for another proof of faith. "You—you saw for yourself. You were with Edith Moore several times. You saw her. You heard her. Edith suffered

from what you have. But she was miraculously cured. She prayed to the Virgin, she believed, and her faith—it worked, it paid off."

"Edith Moore," Ken repeated from the pillow. 'That's just it. That's exactly what's brought me to my senses. Amanda, maybe faith is good, maybe it can help some—but I want something surer." He looked past the bewildered Amanda toward the physician. "Dr. Kleinberg, you tell her. Go ahead, tell her."

Still dazed, Amanda came slowly to her feet and pivoted to confront Dr. Kleinberg.

"Doctor, what is this?"

Dr. Kleinberg's face was serious, but somehow relaxed. "I think I can explain, Mrs. Clayton. I'll do so briefly. Please sit down."

Confused, her newly ordered world topsy-turvy once more, Amanda took the chair with the stiffness of an automaton. Dr. Kleinberg pulled up a chair next to hers.

His tone was professional, devoid of emphasis, as he began to address Amanda. "When I was able to speak to Ken this morning, aware as I was of the gravity of his case, I urged him to undergo immediate surgery for his sarcoma condition."

"But I refused, as usual," Ken interrupted. "I told the doctor I didn't like the odds on surgery. But I did like the odds on faith healings, such as the one that Edith Moore enjoyed. That was good enough for me, I told the doctor, as I'd been telling you all along. If it could work for Edith Moore, it could work for me." He looked past Amanda. "Now go ahead and tell her, doctor."

Dr. Kleinberg gave an abbreviated Gallic shrug. "The fact is, Mrs. Clayton, it did not work for Edith Moore."

Once more, Amanda could not believe her ears. "It did not?" she echoed incredulously. "Are you saying it did not work, she wasn't miraculously cured? But all those doctors—"

Dr. Kleinberg agreed. "Yes, all those doctors examined her for three years, good doctors, too, and they testified that Edith had been instantaneously and inexplicably cured of a terminal sarcoma condition. I was brought down from Paris to confirm her miraculous cure, and I expected I would examine her, test her, X-ray her and certify her as cured. But I quickly found something was wrong. Just as her sarcoma condition had suddenly disappeared, without reason, I found it had returned, without reason. She had the tumor again. Apparently, faith alone had not offered a permanent cure. I could see that she would soon be in a serious condition, deteriorate rapidly, with her end inevitable."

"But she was a sure thing," said Amanda. "Her cure was on everyone's lips. And, even though I am a scientist by training myself, I've

learaed from experience there can be—well, inexplicable and miraculous cures that could be credited to faith."

"I won't deny the possibility," admitted Dr. Kleinberg. "Like Dr. Alexis Carrel, I don't know. It might be that some cures can be credited wholly to faith. Or maybe none can be. Mrs. Clayton, in the present state of science, we don't know. But as a man of science, I do know one thing for a certainty. Edith Moore, no matter what took place in the recent three years, is no longer a miracle woman. She is not cured. I told her so. Until last night, I had to keep this information confidential while Mrs. Moore considered what to do. Now I am permitted to speak about it. And so I spoke the truth to Ken this morning."

"But if faith can't cure a tumor—" Amanda said helplessly.

Dr. Kleinberg finished her sentence. "—then science, thanks to a recent medical advance, science can cure this tumor."

"It is the surgery you always wanted, Amanda, only newer, better."

"Better?" Amanda echoed.

"The one in Chicago offered a thirty percent chance of success," said Ken. "This one offers a seventy percent chance, right Dr. Kleinberg?"

"That is correct." Dr. Kleinberg turned to Amanda once more. "It is surgery combined with genetic engineering, which a colleague of mine. Dr. Maurice Duval, has been experimenting with for some years. He arrived in Lourdes from Paris last night. He will perform the operation on Edith Moore. Since he is here, he has agreed to operate on Ken also."

Amanda jerked toward Ken. "You've consented?"

Ken nodded. "It's our best chance, honey."

It was going too fast for Amanda. "When?" she wanted to know.

'Today," answered Dr. Kleinberg. "Dr. Duval must be back in Paris tomorrow. Therefore, he is undertaking the surgeries, both of them, in this hospital today. We cannot wait for morning. It must be done now. Shortly, in the afternoon." Dr. Kleinberg rose. "Mrs. Clayton, I assume you will wish to remain here in the hospital until the operation is over. We must prep Ken for surgery now. Let me show you to the waiting room."

Amanda came to her feet, and bent to kiss Ken. "Oh, darling, I—"

"It's what we both want, Amanda."

She shook her head as she went to the door. "I don't know what I should do anymore. Pray to Saint Bernadette or to Dr. Duval?"

"Do both," Kleinberg said with a smile.

In the main section of Madame Moore's Miracle Restaurant, all of the tables at this hour of the afternoon were empty save one. At the single occupied table, a woozy Liz Finch sat trying to interview Edith Moore.

Liz had tried to get drunk earlier, drown her sorrows in a series of Scotches, and had only succeeded in getting a mild buzz on and a headache. She had failed at everything else, and so she was not surprised that she had failed to earn a real hangover, the right of every veteran reporter. Then she had decided that it was just as well. She had this appointment with Edith Moore, and reluctant as she was to keep it, Liz knew that she must follow through. She had to file something from Lourdes and this dismal twice-told tale was the only bare-bones of a story left for her. Edith Moore, miraculously cured, the next-to-be-announced miracle woman of our time.

Arriving at the restaurant, Reggie Moore had served up dull Edith and some tea, and left them alone. And Liz had brought out her notebook, peeled it open, and proceeded with the leaden interview.

In the last half hour they had covered all the famihar ground, Edith spouting her never-ending cliches, and Liz's cramped hand writing them down. Now it was almost over, the interview as well as Liz's future.

"All right, so you're fully cured by the wonder of Lourdes," Liz was saying wearily, "so soon you'll be announced as the latest miracle woman. How do you feel about that?"

There was no answer.

Liz, head bent over her tea and notepad, repeated her question. "Well, Edith, how does it feel -- being a miracle woman?"

Still, no answer.

Liz looked up sharply, and to her surprise, the bland English-woman's cheeks were streaked with tears. She was crying, fumbling for a handkerchief, dabbing at her eyes.

Liz was startled. She'd never seen a show of emotion in this turnip, this pudgy brussels sprout, this vegetable of some sort, before. This was more than a show of emotion. It more closely resembled a nervous breakdown.

"Hey now," said Liz, trying to stop the torrent, "what's going on here?"

Edith's voice was a sad gargle. "I—I—I'm not a miracle woman. I'm a fraud. I'm a nothing. I can't go on with this talk. It's no use, I can't."

"Wait a minute, wait a sec," said Liz, suddenly interested. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"My -- my sarcoma came—it came back. I'm not cured, not at all. The new doctor, he just found out. I'm sick again, and I'm going to die, but he can save me, he can save my life with a new surgery. But I don't want to hve because I won't be the miracle woman anymore. I'll be nothing and so will Reggie."

"Ye Gods," said Liz, "at least you'll be saved, you'll stay ahve. Are you crazy?"

"Can't you hear?" sobbed Edith, wiping at her eyes again. "I won't be a miracle woman anymore, and that's all Reggie and I wanted."