CHAPTER ELEVEN
COUNTING DOWN
FOR A TIME after Ma and I arrived at Temple Magdalen, I enjoyed a kind of edgy peace. At first I hourly expected Peter or James to show up and stand belligerently at the gates of Temple Magdalen; then I expected them daily. When two Shabbats had passed without so much as a word from the ecclesia at Jerusalem, I warily began to relax. I experimented with hopeful explanations: The apostles had decided the baby couldn’t possibly be Jesus’s since I was such a notorious slut. Or perhaps it had dawned upon them that the best hiding place for a scion of the House of David and the heir of the Jewish Messiah (upon whose existence the Romans would surely frown), might be a pagan whorehouse. Beats bulrushes, if you ask me. But no one was asking me, and after a while I did not find my own speculations reassuring. They tended to engender counter theories in the middle of the night. Jesus was right: there was enough trouble for each day and I was better off as a blooming lily of the field, so to speak.
So I gave myself over to blooming, or ripening might be a better analogy. I got rounder and rounder as the weeks passed. Grapes squished under my weight as I helped with the winemaking; I also lent my bulk to pressing olive oil. I did my part at the clinic, too, but the fire did not flow as freely through my hands. It re-directed itself to my womb where it gently rocked and swirled, more like water than fire.
The only aspect of Temple Magdalen life I did not resume was serving as a whore, receiving the god-bearing stranger, which omission felt strange to me, despite my advanced pregnancy. If you want to know the truth, it was not my idea to refrain, but Dido and Berta’s. They decided it would upset Miriam if I returned to fornication, however holy, while her son was not yet cold in his grave, (which he wasn’t in anyway), and while I was carrying his baby. They probably had a point, although as you may have noticed Ma didn’t have much concept of conventional morality.
For myself, I had no notions about proper behavior for the widow of a savior. All through the years as a whore, holy and unholy, I had received all men as if they were my beloved in disguise. He himself had said: if you give food to someone who is hungry, you have fed me. How is lovemaking so different?
Maybe you think I should have stumbled upon the principle of transcendence by now? Become more spiritual, less physical, if you insist on making such distinctions. Listen, pregnancy is an intensely embodied state. Inside my body, taking its substance from my body, another body was growing, another soul becoming incarnate. Transcendence was just not on, as far as I was concerned. But I was too languid to make a fuss about the niceties Dido and Berta wanted to preserve.
And if I was not a practicing whore, I was still a priestess, and at times almost an object of veneration. Every morning and evening after the hymns to Isis, the little girls liked to plait flowers in my hair. Instead of vesting me, as we did the statue of the goddess, they would ask me to take off my tunic, so they could see my belly. The whores loved it, too, and massaged my breasts and belly with oil to prevent stretch marks. I enjoyed these ministrations for the most part, but I could never forget how upset the young Esus had been when the other students at druid school paid the same kind of homage during my first pregnancy. “It’s as if they’re worshipping you!” he had protested. And the witch Dwynwyn also had once warned, “Some people will want to worship you. I’d nip that in the bud if I were you.”
But really what everyone worshipped was new life, new possibility, something hidden yet whole, unbroken, mysterious, round. What else is an Easter egg?
I was in just such a posture one morning when a visitor came to see me.
“Priscilla!” I called out to a small, dark woman with a face lined from long squinting out at the changeable lake weather. Peter’s wife—yes, Peter, the rock, the erstwhile Galilean fishermen. You never hear about her in the Gospels, but she existed.
“Don’t get up!” she laughed. “You look like a beetle on its back.”
She came and knelt beside me, giving me a kiss and patting my naked belly herself before the girls could bring me my tunic.
You might think that the wife of the Rock on which the Church was founded would be more reticent with a gentile woman of questionable reputation, even if I had somehow managed to marry a nice Jewish man. But our relationship, while based on discretion, had little to do with reticence.
I have mentioned that many people came to Temple Magdalen for healing. Women, especially, sought us out, including desperate, otherwise respectable wives. We had a reputation for being able to cure infertility, which could be a source not only of sorrow but of ruin in a woman’s life. In Priscilla’s case, my healer’s hands quickly told me that she was healthy, fertile and in need of no herbal tonics. One day I put it to her straight, and told her exactly how we might help her. And so in the name of Yahweh—Isis, I am happy to say, is not a jealous goddess—Priscilla put on the veils of a whore-priestess and received the man the Most High picked out for her. And, lo, a son was born.
And when light dawned—or lightning struck—and Peter figured out that there had been some intervention, divine or otherwise, to his everlasting credit he did not put aside his wife or repudiate the child. If Peter found it helpful to hate me, I didn’t hold it against him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you before,” Priscilla said.
“You knew I’d come back?” I asked. For if she knew, then Peter had to.
“Of course. Everyone on the lake knew within a week,” she said. “Word travels faster on the water than anywhere else.”
“True,” I sighed. “I suppose that’s why Jesus spent so much of his time in a boat. At least at first.”
“Not a boat,” she said a little sharply. “Peter’s boat.”
I looked at her, and noticed that she was not just weathered by wind and sun; she was tired, strained.
“It must be hard, having Peter gone so much.” I patted the ground beside me, inviting her to sit.
“I’m managing,” she said shortly. “Peter sold his share in the boat to one of my brothers. Did you know? He’s made provision for me, but….” She stopped herself.
“But he’s not here,” I finished the sentence. “He hasn’t been for a long time. Not really. It’s Jesus’s fault.”
I stopped wavering between statement and question, wondering if I should apologize for my husband or if it would be absurd and presumptuous. In either case, I knew whatever I said would be inadequate.
“Don’t get me wrong, I loved Jesus, too,” she said quickly. “You know I did. I would have done anything for him. I did, too. In the early days I would put them all up on a moment’s notice, cook for them, deal with the crowds pressing into the yard, pissing everywhere, trampling my kitchen garden. I did it gladly, I tell you.”
“You put up with a lot,” I said. “Remember when I tore apart your roof, so we could lower the paralyzed man?”
“And Peter finally had to fix the leaky roof after that,” Priscilla said wryly. “But I mean it, Mary, I didn’t mind about any of that. What I minded is the leaving. He—I know this is going to sound terrible—he didn’t ask me if he could have my husband. Not that any man ever asks a woman anything, but when I was with him, well, it felt like I wasn’t just a woman, I wasn’t just Peter’s wife. I felt as though I mattered as much as anyone. Do you know what I mean?”
I
