Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

The Bathtub Mary by James T. Shannon

I got the call a little after four in the morning. Trouble. At that time it had to be trouble, I thought groggily as I reached out to stop the damned cell phone beeping. I remembered I was on vacation, so the call couldn’t be coming from the station. No, at this time it had to be family. Sondra, my wife, was muttering something in her sleep. Ashley and Jason, our two kids just pushing into their teens, were in their rooms down the hall. My mother, then. Or one of my sisters. Or... and I picked it up to hear that familiar scratchy voice rasping, “Gilbert, I need to see you.”

“Now?” I said, hearing in my own voice the whiny kid she always managed to bring out in me.

“Of course now! You think I’d call you this early in the morning if I didn’t want to see you now?”

“But, Vo, it’s four o’clock.”

“Young people sleep too much, Gilbert. You get to be my age, you begin to see what a waste of time all that sleeping is.”

“And you live fifty miles away.”

“I know where I live, Gilbert Souza. And I certainly wouldn’t have called such a big-deal Boston police detective if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay, Vo,” I said with a sigh that I didn’t much try to hide. And I’d learned a long time ago that it was no use correcting her about my job. Putnam, where I live and work on the force, is a suburb of Boston, but not a big city, not by a long shot. “What’s so important?”

“It’s the Blessed Mother statue,” she said. Then she added cryptically, “Somebody’s going to die.”

Knowing she had me about as hooked as any trout in the stream, my grandmother hung up.

I called back, of course, and since she was the woman she was, and had caller ID, she didn’t answer the phone, although I filled about two minutes on her answering machine asking her to pick up. Which left me with no alternative but to dress as quickly and quietly as I could in the dark, leave a note on the kitchen table for Sondra, and drive the fifty miles down to Fall River wondering all the way what the hell my vo was up to now.

Vo isn’t actually my grandmother’s name. It’s the diminutive form of the Portuguese word for grandmother, avo, which is about right since my vo is the diminutive form of a grandmother. Barely five feet tall, even in her thick-soled sneakers, my vo was the only grownup I could look down on by the time I was thirteen. But no one, child or adult, priest or policeman, ever dared look down on my vo.

My grandmother never treated me with the adult condescension that all kids learn to hate early on, but she also didn’t realize that she could embarrass a grandchild, who knew that when you stood out from the crowd, you only became a better target. Much of the embarrassment she caused me came out of her attachment to that Blessed Mother statue she had mentioned in her call, the bane of my youth, the Bathtub Mary.

As common as backyard gardens or pastel-sided triple-deckers in the Portuguese-dominated city of Fall River, the Bathtub Mary is what irreverent Catholic kids called those small shrines people placed in their yards. The shrines celebrate the appearance of the Blessed Mother to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.

As I’d always heard it, the Bathtub Mary actually began life decades ago as an old porcelain claw foot bathtub tossed out during an apartment renovation. Someone got the idea of burying the tub upended half in the ground, then placing a statue of the Blessed Mother in the resulting niche, so it sort of looked like a grotto. Landscape the back and sides of the tub and plant flowers in the front, and you’ve got yourself a shrine.

They became so popular that later innovators came up with precast cement grottos, which still managed to look pretty much like upended bathtubs. They later added statues of the kneeling shepherd children, resulting in a kind of year-round creche.

But that wasn’t good enough for my grandmother, whose own triple-decker was two streets away from her second home, Our Lady of Fatima Church. My vo’s statue of the Blessed Mary was life-sized — well, life-sized if Christ’s mother had been the size of my grandmother. But back when I was eleven, she couldn’t find any life-sized statues of the three kids to go in front of it. She solved that problem by inviting the family, her three sons and two daughters and all of her grandkids, over for her semiannual meal of a sopa, which my cousins and I called “swamp soup” because it was full of spearmint and soggy bread. Since I was the only grandchild with guts enough to admit I hated this sopa, she told my parents, “Oh, and tell Gilbert I’ll have lots of chourico pizza for him. And I’ve baked raisin squares for dessert.”