Madonnas of the Cape

by Channing Kaiser

On the tip of Cape Cod, at the end of a park, at the end of a road, next to a pond is a camp called Nazareth. It is a place with kayaks and firepits and weather-beaten cabins. Snapping turtles float in the pond and deer roam through the woods. It is a place of laughter and merriment. Nothing about the camp says Death.

Nazareth on the Cape isn’t a normal summer camp. Yes, it has archery. Yes, it has repeat-after-me songs. Yes, it has a mealtime bell that rings stoically as campers yank on its cord, an ongoing prelude to children storming the steps. But it also has fireproof mattress toppers for when a camper sneezes, and nets strung up between the treetop canopy in case one of them floats away.

If I were a different person, this would be a story about my time with magical children at camp. It would have fireworks, and sing-alongs, and at least one metaphor involving s’mores. I would be the protagonist. But I am a person obsessed with drowning and what lies at the bottom of the pond. I went to the Cape to create my own story of adventure and sunshine, but what I learned is that the story was never about me and that most of it has little to do with sun. So this is what I have. A story about water and women. This is for them.

Gospel Lesson

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. Only it wasn’t Jerusalem but a cathedral made of sand. And it wasn’t Samaria and Galilee but a floating dock and the gentle spot at the bottom of the pond where turtles nibble peanut butter sandwiches and drink tea. And it wasn’t Jesus but a woman with a face and a spirit and an upward floating heart. 

No one remembered her name.

I’d agreed to come to Nazareth as a camp counselor as a last-minute decision. I was young, and a summer at camp seemed like something out of a book, a story threaded with adventure, and romance, and sunshine. Worry-free, right? Isn’t that how the story goes? So I said yes and left my tangled-ribbon life behind, venturing to the lone cluster of conifers on an otherwise sandy cape where the scent and sparkle of magic awaited.

Everything was new that summer, but I prepared as well as I could. I learned the songs, the skits, how to T-rescue a canoe from the pond. I even learned all I could about magical children. But I wasn’t prepared for the Madonnas.

You may have seen a Madonna before. Maybe you recognized her for who she was, or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you simply thought she was a woman with a fantastic pair of earrings and a contagious laugh. Or maybe you could see the glow above her head and not mistake it for sunshine. Maybe you are better than I am at seeing people for who they really are. Even now, there is still so much I don’t know.

Most paintings and iconographies show Madonna with her child. She is unsmiling and solemn in most of them, as if she were thinking about when insurance would kick in to cover the cost of colostomy bags or why snow is plowed onto the sole handicap parking spot in the lot. She is unsmiling because she is a mother and mothers are good at worrying. She is solemn because her child is not like most children. Her responsibilities are different. She can never forget this.

Most paintings and iconographies don’t show Madonnas at the beach. In fact, they are rarely depicted near water. But they are spectacular swimmers; they can hold their breath for up to three years and swim the length of the Pacific Ocean without feeling fatigue.

Madonnas never drown.

If Madonnas are the main characters of this story, then the villain is Death. Death was a lingering presence at Nazareth, a feeling, a figure, a spectral mist that floated above the docks at twilight. If I tried, I could forget Death was there. But often I didn’t try. Wind would blow as I lay in a hammock reading to the kids, and I’d bristle with life, and it was precisely that bristling that made me think of Death and what its hands must feel like. People without magic dream of it the most.

Death had a face. Its face was a clock. Death had hands. Its hands were every doctor’s diagnosis, every prescription, every insurance quota given to that child. Death was never invited to camp, but it came anyway.

Death was a distant presence in my life, an unsingable birdsong only heard in dreams. We were friendly in memory, the way you’d imagine a person if all you knew was the scent of their cologne, spinning an entire existence from that single thread of smell. I’d never once had to shake its hand. I was a girl from the suburbs who grew up between the pages of a book, feeding off a pith of Plath and Woolf. Death was dark. Death was theoretical. I wanted to know more of something I couldn’t understand.

On weekends off when the campers were gone, I’d go to the floating dock in the middle of the pond. Four of us counselors would paddle out there, hauling chairs and towels and a cooler of Grey Lady beer in our aluminum canoes. We’d sun ourselves like fair-skinned reptiles and play drinking games with the empty cans. We’d laugh and tell stories as the pile of beer cans grew. And even though Death had left along with the campers, I swore I could still see the skein of it clinging to the lake.

I never said anything, though. I never grabbed the hand of my friend and pointed at the water, saying, do you see it? Do you see the darkness? This was summer camp. A place of snow globe perfection for those who tried hard enough to ignore the glass around them. And wasn’t that why I had come here? For camp? For carefree afternoons? For a slip of sunshine in my otherwise waterlogged life? 

So I drank beer and laughed and pretended I wasn’t obsessed with what lived at the bottom of the pond.

Floating docks, sinking bodies. Drowning is a lonely metaphor. 

Once Jesus arrived at Jerusalem, it began to rain. It rained for forty days and forty nights until all the land—the mountains and the rivers, the valleys and the cliffs—was submerged. But he was Jesus. His story was already inked. Fated to die, the prophecy foretold, and die he would, nailed to the cross at the bottom of the ocean that used to be the world.

Simply being around them was enough.

I would linger at the breakfast tables, the docks, by the hammocks as the Madonnas talked to one another, unfolding their complicated lives like delicate origami cranes. I felt like a child in their presence.

New families came every Sunday and stayed until Friday. It was long enough to get to know them, to dip a toe into their swirling lives but never enough to be part of the narrative. I both appreciated and despised the distance. Part of me wanted to be a savior, the best-loved camp counselor whose hilarity and wit would be a beacon of the summer. But that was never me. I was too busy thinking about Death and seaweed and the darkness at the bottom of every quiet lake. I was never the savior, never the priest; I was the parishioner in the pews, singing the hymns beneath stained glass windows, sitting in a vast cathedral wanting only to touch the cusp of something greater than myself.

Every week we’d take the children and their families to the beach. We’d pack up our dump truck with beach toys, floaties, and sand-roving lounge chairs, and meet the families bayside. There were always some children whose magical abilities didn’t let them go to the beach—one girl would accidentally cause the water to boil every time she laughed, and another boy would simply drink the entire thing. But for some kids, the undulation of the waves, the gentle splashing of the water, that was the pinnacle of the summer, the moment every intubation tube, every false positive blood test was leading up to.

One afternoon at the beach, I stood with a Madonna as her son snorkeled around our legs, his dark hair floating behind his head like seaweed. I watched him as he swam. He looked greenish in the slanted sunshine. His skin faintly shimmered. 

The Madonna caught me watching. He’s turning, she said.

Turning? I asked. Turning to what?

She shrugged and smiled, the type of smile you get when the Christmas decorations go back into the attic but the scent of pine and cinnamon still lingers in the air.

We’ll see, she said. I don’t know. No one does. None of the doctors can tell us.

It looks like he’s growing gills, I said.

It does.

He continued swimming in circles, picking up shells off the ocean floor. We watched. We were quiet.

What will happen when he, I paused. Turns?

He’ll leave me, she said. He won’t be able to survive on land anymore, and besides, she gestured to the water around us. He already loves it there so much. We’ll make the most of the time we have together, plenty of things to do before then. He hasn’t left me yet. We’re both still here.

This, this moment right here. Crystallized, set in amber, if I had to distill the summer into a single moment it would be this one. Me and the Madonna. Standing in the ocean. Undertow forgotten as we watched her child swim.

If this story had a plot, it would be about me and the Madonnas, a heartwarming tale of a young woman who goes to summer camp for fun, but instead finds sagely female mentors who change her small, sparrow-boned life. But this story doesn’t have a plot. What it has is a question: How do you live knowing your child may die? How do you shape your faith? Which prayers do you whisper as the waters surge?

Tell me, Mary. Please. The water is rising, and I think you control the tides.

Jesus lost consciousness as he remained nailed to the cross at the bottom of the ocean that used to be the world. The water that swirled around him was no longer stained red. The nails inside of him grew rusty. People passed by him with averted eyes, not wanting to bear witness to his pain.

But he was not forgotten. Mother Mary came to him. She came to him and pulled the nails from his hands and pulled him down off the cross. She tended to his wounds. She healed him. Once he was healed, she kissed his forehead and let him go, and he floated up and up to rejoin the world at the surface, to be resurrected within a cave.

As Jesus drifted away, Mary watched him go. Her child. Her son. She stayed at the bottom as he went up and up.

She stayed at the bottom.

I stood on the floating dock, hair damp, bathing suit clammy. Like all my time in Cape Cod, I was there but not there; I was somewhere else, lost in my head, in a book, in the raindrops that cascaded from the sky. I stood on the dock and for the first time I looked down.

Who was she? Who was that woman staring back? Eyes and hair and pearl-glinting teeth. Her lips moved, and I thought she was talking to me. I thought she was saying my name. But I couldn’t hear her because she was at the bottom of the pond and I didn’t know how to swim. Her lips kept moving, and I thought she was telling me the most important secret I could ever learn. Tell me how to save you, I screamed to the water. But I don’t think she needed saving. I don’t know what she needed.

She pointed, she gestured, and I was lost, I was lost.

It is hard to write about Madonnas because I am not one of them. I am an outsider looking in, a spectator at a museum looking at flecks of paint, wondering if Mary always had that glow behind her head or if it only appeared once she had a child. And if it appeared once she had a child, was it there all along only invisible? And can she feel it glowing, feel the heat upon her shoulders, upon the nape of her neck, like midmorning sun?

No matter how often I look at it and squeeze it between my fingertips, that summer on Cape Cod never feels quite real. Maybe memory is a sort of worship and maybe worship stems from mystery. Did I really watch fireworks shoot out of a child’s nose? Was it me who slept in a sun-bleached tent dreaming of mothers and Marys and Virginia Woolf? Was it my own childish hands that tried to hold the pond-bottom silt?

This is the point in the story when something should happen. Someday is saved. Somebody is dead. The end credits queue up to roll.

But nothing happened. And that’s the story. I worked at a camp for magical children who were always on the cusp of disappearing, and then the summer ended and I left. Their lives continued being magical and mine was not. I returned to my life of tangled ribbons, to the comfort and safety of my ordinary existence with the knowledge that something so much bigger lay just beyond reach.

I left. I don’t know how the story ends.

I left. Did the boy turn? Is he now swimming in the ocean?

I left. What a privilege. What a curse.

Mother of the Tides, they called her. Woman of the Water. 

Pilgrims left her offerings. Offerings for the woman at the bottom of the world. Crowns of seaweed. Ships carved from driftwood. Baby rattles filled with broken glass. They left her offerings on the beach and every evening she came to claim them with hands of sand and foam.

There are no cathedrals built for her. No temples dedicated in her honor. But if you head to the lone copse of trees on a salt-licked cape and listen to the quiet noise of the water, she will tell you her name. And her name alone is salvation.

Learn her name. Whisper it to the waters. Listen as she tells you that when she looks up, all she sees is people drowning in sky.

You’re disappointed with the story; I can see it in your face. There wasn’t a clear beginning, middle, or end, and Death was a very paltry villain. For a story with magical children, it lacked a lot of excitement.

But the point of this piece is not to entertain. It is to tell you that there are Madonnas in the world—women with names like Mary and Felicia, Hwa-young and Paola—who dine with Death, and swim in oceans, and face the darkness of the world with laugh lines and mirth. It is to help you remember that divinity walks among us, and their faces are of mortal women. It is to remind you that before Jesus there was Mary, and after Jesus there was still Mary.

You will never see a group of Madonnas in a painting. But at Camp Nazareth there was a group of Madonnas, and a group of Madonnas is called a motherhood. A motherhood of Madonnas at Nazareth on the Cape, on the end of Massachusetts, at the end of a park, at the end of a road, next to a pond. This is where they gathered in a place devoid of lab coats and stethoscopes. The motherhood would gather on the shore as their children sat in adaptable kayaks, paddling with counselors around the small private pond. They would gather, and they would laugh, and they would throw bits of hot dog into the water for turtles to snap up.  

Published February 9th, 2020