Read Online I'll Let You Go by Bruce Wagner - Free Book Online Page A

newsprint and magazines. There was a sheaf about the child-goddesses of Nepal that told of a Special Council of Selectors, who went from village to village looking for little girls. If the parents agreed, the child was plucked from the family house and put in a palace. Her face was painted and her body adorned with golden robes and she was then called the Royal Kumari. The Royal Kumari was allowed out only during holy festivals. The Royal Kumari couldn’t play with other children, because if she cut herself, her godly powers seeped away with the blood. Amaryllis thought she would like to be chosen, but when she read that the Special Selectors wanted a child with unblemished skin, she cried. They would probably want the girl to be virginal, too.
    She reread another brittle bundle—this one about Audrey, the Massachusetts girl who’d been asleep with open eyes for the past elevenyears. She had fallen into a backyard swimming pool when she was three and had been in a magical coma ever since. Audrey never spoke, but seemed aware of her surroundings; when the family said mass in the house, they noticed that blood sometimes appeared on communion wafers and light-colored oil dripped down statuary. Soon, people made pilgrimages to gaze at her through a big window. Audrey had become a “victim soul,” who took on the suffering of those who came to ask for intercession with God to hear their pleas. Though she would be performing a valuable service without having to do much—without having to do anything, really—Amaryllis didn’t relish the idea of being half asleep, stared at by strangers all day. She looked up at her mother, imagining for a moment that Geri was Audrey and they were separated by candles and a pane of glass.
    She kept her very favorite at the bottom of the pile: the dossier on Sister Benedicta, formerly known as Edith Stein, a “Jewish” who converted to Catholicism and was killed at a place called Auschwitz. The article said that Edith Stein was on a “fast track” to sainthood. When she first read about her, Amaryllis didn’t understand. For one thing, she didn’t even know saints came from people; she thought they came from angels or myths. When she read about this mere girl, this Jewish who the pope wanted to canonize—which, to Amaryllis, meant shot into sainthood—whole worlds opened up. The orphan was smart enough to know there wasn’t such a thing as a Jew saint (her mom had told her), so when she learned Edith was “eligible,” it was confusing. But then she grew hopeful; she wanted in. If a Jewish who died not so long ago—a
girl
—could officially become a saint, why not Amaryllis Kornfeld, a half-Jewish herself? Was not the name of their very motel—corner of 4th and Los Angeles—the St. George? Was this not a sign and a wonder? (St. Amaryllis Motel would have been more of a sign, but it was still something.) A quotation read in a
Reader’s Digest
left in the lobby clinched it:
If they, why not I? If these men and women could become saints, why cannot I with the help of him who is all-powerful?
A man named Saint Augustine had said it, obviously before he’d been shot through the canon. Amaryllis’s father was a Jewish and her mother, part African, but maybe none of it even mattered.
    One of the
Times
religion articles was long and detailed, and she set about learning the rules and regulations by heart. Inside the Vatican lived a Congregation for the Causes of Saints, somewhat like the SpecialSelectors for the Royal Kumari. In the Congregation for the Causes of Saints there was a “postulator,” who did the nominating. The postulator was the one who needed to come up with evidence of the holiness of whoever was elected. He needed to find examples of what they called heroic virtue and did that by interviewing people who knew the nominee. Once the person was found to have heroic virtue, they received