Disgrace: Murmur Lee Harp Reveals the Apex of Her Sainthood

I was a fat little kid until my mother, with the help of Father Jaeger, who so wanted a saint on his hands, turned me into a freak show. There’s nothing quite like regular doses of brain electricity zipping through your body, contracting every muscle, to turn the chubby into the buff.

But first, let me tell you about that letter: dribble, dribble, and more dribble. Keep the wolves at bay! Protect me from the blessed hordes! Ha! My dead ass!

The world has rarely seen a duo such as my mother and Father Jaeger. Their egocentric piety, fed by a hunger for limelight and power, propelled them into a brand of ecclesiastical madness that my own vision-seeing insanity couldn’t hold a stick to.

For instance, they put me on display three times a day. “The people have a need and you have been gifted by God,” my mother said as Father Jaeger stood serenely by her side. Morning and noon sessions were held at my house. The evening gathering took place in the cathedral. The faithful would gather, their rosaries in constant movement, inching silently—like beaded snakes—through miracle-seeking fingers. Candlelight fed and sucked the dancing shadows. Prayers curled about, mingling with the ascending trails of incense and votive smoke. Lame adults, cross-eyed children, and people who should have known better waved crucifixes, crossed themselves like muttering medieval hermits, and doused their tear-stained cheeks with the cool burn of holy water—all of them kneeling and genuflecting and supplicating and crying and sloshing Hail Marys into the Christ-crowded air.

To this extent, I was a willing coconspirator: How astounding to be the focus of my mother’s ecstatic passion, how bone-breaking delicious to be the object of her approval! So participate I did, no whining, no squirming tantrums. With all the dignity and simplicity one fully expects from a blessed child, three times a day I dutifully pulled on my plastic underpants and frilly dress and lay down on a mattress covered in white silk—a rosary clutched in my tiny hand, eyes closed as if in prayer, listening to the faithful file in (some started sobbing as soon as they saw me lying there in my lace dress, holding rosary beads).

The sessions were eerily predictable. The insistent drone of prayers scratched the thick air as I, motionless, waited for someone to balance the needle in the proper groove of the vinyl album, waited for the polyphonic chords of plainsong to rise like fog, thus obliterating both prayer and smoke, waited for my veins to grow plump and wild on the juice of ancient chant, waited, yes, for my body to seize and for my soul to be stomped upon by angels.

Oh, how I remember those angels. Their wings sharp, their feather tips as finely hewn as scalpels.

I bled. I know I did.

         

For reasons I really can’t fathom, Father Jaeger never mailed that nauseating letter to the bishop. Why didn’t he send it? Wouldn’t he have gotten extra credit for having a child saint in his flock? Maybe he decided to catalog more miracles (in the child’s presence, two bunions, one backache, and three warts were healed), build a stronger case, and it all got away from him. Or maybe he simply lost his nerve.

All I know for sure is that things changed once a certain Father Arturo Vincenzo Parisi arrived from Maryland—simply a short layover, a courtesy visit before continuing on to his new post at the newly created archdiocese in Miami.

Father Parisi was a skinny man—I liked that—and, according to the adults hovering about me, barely old enough to drink (now that I was virtually a saint, they held grown-up conversations in my presence). His deep-set blueberry eyes (nearly black, that’s what they were) glared out at the world as though he had been flogged as a boy and no amount of Christian forgiveness would wash away his need for revenge.

Children have crushes, you know. This idea that we don’t become sexual beings until puberty is hogwash. And I, in my rubber panties and sweet ruffles, took one look at Father Parisi and fell head over heels. I wanted him. And I wanted him bad, with all the passion that children possess but usually successfully hide from adults. His rakish blackbird hair, those glowering black-blue eyes, that sharp blackbird nose, his thick lower lip, which had nothing in common with a blackbird at all: He was my boyfriend. Crick, crack, easy as that!

         

What a fine saint I would be. And Parisi would love me with such true fire that he would wait for me to grow up, and then somehow God would allow us to marry and I would be so unbelievably beautiful (they would redo Barbie in my image) that we’d be graced with a houseful of sweet babies.

These were my thoughts as I laid there in the cathedral in my ruffles and lace and plastic panties—eyes closed, hands clasped, rosary wrapped tightly between my fingers. I knew Parisi was gazing at me. How could he not?

I could hear Father Jaeger scurrying about, whispering orders. And then my mother’s voice and her hand on my forehead: “Sweetheart, we’re ready.”

This is what I remember. The choir began to sing (oh, yes, they brought in the choir to impress Parisi) and then Parisi started shouting in a thick Italian accent full of vowels that seemed to dance, “Stop! Stop! You crazy fools! You are going to kill the bambino! Towel, give me a towel! Oh sweet Jesus!”

Parisi knelt beside me and wiped my face with a towel damp with holy water. I gazed up at him—he was prettier than God, with that narrow little face and fat lips—and tried to look saintly, even though I was lying in my own piss and he was mopping up that and my drool. “This child! She needs a doctor! This is no vision. This is epilepsy!”

         

The only miracle in all of this was that the good priest was well acquainted with musicogenic epilepsy. A man in his village back home went into fits every time he heard a particularly sad, high-pitched Andalusian folk song about two ill-fated lovers. According to Parisi, everyone thought the man’s fits stemmed from a broken heart that had been administered to him at the tender age of seventeen by one of the village’s most amply hipped girls. It was spring—the time of festivals—and music was in the air, according to my lover-priest. And as fate would have it, a physician with the Royal Institute of Medicine happened by the village on his way to somewhere more important and witnessed the villager suffer a grand mal seizure in the courtyard while a street singer wailed about love gone wrong. The doctor suspected immediately what was afoot, being that he was a student of rare and obscure maladies. Now I ask, was that—the doctor’s presence in that two-bit village—a miracle, too?

Or do we sometimes just get lucky?

         

Two trips to Maryland and Johns Hopkins later (Parisi insisted, as he held Johns Hopkins in high esteem, having lived in Maryland just prior to accepting his post in Miami), my mother and Father Jaeger were finally convinced that, indeed, I was not special in the eyes of our Lord, was not experiencing and never had experienced anything remotely akin to a religious experience, and that I should be kept away from people for as long as it took for everyone to forget about this embarrassing incident.

As a result of my fall from grace, my mother retreated back into prayer, with nary a glance my way. My father remained his distant good self. My pastor, Father Jaeger, never spoke to me again. My visions withered into painful memory. My physicians at Johns Hopkins instructed my mother that never, never, never was I to hear plainsong again. My crush on Father Parisi would have followed my visions into painful memory except for the fact that I was forever grateful and only superficially bitter that he’d found me out. And, I must say, the experience really did conjure in me a hunger for God. It was a hunger that would stay with me up until my teen years, when it was supplanted by my appetite for sex.