Anatomy of a Miracle Read online

  Inside the Biz-E-Bee, Ollie was first to notice. Without removing his eyes from the window he let out a violent-sounding moan and grabbed Tanya’s left arm, wrenching her toward him. Horrified, Quỳnh reached across the counter and with a hard yank on Ollie’s big arm shouted, “Stop, why you crazy?” and, with that, the three of them struggled to bust apart their triangle of armholds. All Quỳnh could think was that Ollie’s brain, the fitness of which no one had ever affirmed, had somehow snapped, thereby confirming the apprehensions about Ollie his wife had spent years expressing and sentencing Quỳnh to a pecked eternity of I-told-you-sos. Ollie was bleating, and with his free hand motioning out the window, while Tanya, deploying the box of Cap’n Crunch, was bashing his shoulder and from her mouth firing blue flames of curses. Quỳnh had surrendered his grip in order to come around the corner for a more significant rescue effort when he heard Tanya scream. With both her hands she slapped her own mouth as Ollie, his point finally made, relaxed his grip on her arm and moved her toward the door. “What?” shouted Quỳnh, who as a shopkeeper of sixteen years couldn’t restrain himself from picking the squashed box of Cap’n Crunch off the floor. “What’s out there?” When he saw, the Cap’n Crunch plopped straight back to the floor.

  Tanya remembers the sound of the bell on the door ringing as she exited the Biz-E-Bee, three trebly toy-like chimes, and she remembers the light: the great white-yellow-blue blast of it smashing into her eyes as she stepped outside, a chilled breeze on her back as the air-conditioning fled the store after her. She must’ve spoken her brother’s name, she thinks, because at that moment Cameron turned. Somewhere in her peripheral vision, too, she caught sight of Mrs. Dooley, hightailing it across the parking lot with feebly wizened steps not so unlike her brother’s, wagging her head with church-pew jubilance, her mouth wide open as though to sing. Then her brother, his head still hanging, turned fully Tanya’s way and launched a step toward her. His slight stumble drew Quỳnh a few feet forward from Tanya’s side, to help, but Cameron recovered, and with another step toward his sister lifted his head to reveal a look of pure astonishment—a look unlike any she’d seen on his face or anyone else’s. As the bell announced Hat and Kim joining them outside, Kim pleading, “Nó là cái gì? Nó là cái gì?,” what is it?, what is it?, Tanya raised a hand to the sky to shield her eyes from the sun or perhaps from some other raw and wondrous sky-power her retinas were unequipped to withstand. No one said a word save Mrs. Dooley, who was indeed singing now, as perhaps she’d been singing the entire time: an ancient country hymn about just such an occasion, an occasion that she—and everyone else gathered in that parking lot that afternoon—had neither expected nor even hoped to ever witness.

  two

  Cameron Harris didn’t call his primary care physician at the Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System that afternoon, nor did he call her that evening. He didn’t call her the next day, either, or even the next day. In fact he never called her; she called him. Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas learned about Cameron’s recovery from a front-page article in the Tuesday, August 26 edition of the Biloxi Sun Herald, which her husband, Nap, in accordance with daily routine, had laid on the counter for her that morning beside a mug of chicory coffee and a pint glass of the kale-banana-flaxseed smoothie he’d made.

  “That’s—that’s my patient,” she blurted, before even sitting down. Standing side by side at the counter, they read the article and studied the accompanying photograph, which showed Cameron posed beside his empty wheelchair in front of the house on Reconfort Avenue, Nap punctuating his reading with the same intermittent grunts of skepticism he accords news reports of insurance company benevolence or supposed regulatory crackdowns on the oil industry. Nap Cuevas—the Nap is short for Napoleon, a hereditary flourish he’s never quite appreciated—is an attorney specializing in personal injury litigation. He was already late for a pretrial hearing in Gulfport, so he and Janice exchanged just a few words about the article before he left the house. She doesn’t remember precisely what words, except that “miracle” was not among them.

  The origins of the word, like its liturgical evocations, are Latin: It derives from the noun miraculum, meaning an object of wonder, which itself sprouted from the verb mirari, meaning to marvel, or to be astonished. And Janice was astonished that morning—astonished most of all that Cameron, whose leg muscles after four years of disuse were in a severely atrophied state, had summoned the power to stand upright and walk. Slightly less astonishing was his spontaneous recovery from paralysis, which she felt certain would prove clinically explicable, though at the moment, as she marveled at the photograph, she was bankrupt of any theories. But the word miracle in its current, divinity-soaked usage, defined with elegant concision by the British novelist and theologian C. S. Lewis as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power”: This was not among her theories, despite the Sun Herald’s exuberant quotations from a local priest, nor was it a factor in her astonishment. Setting aside her belief or disbelief in any supernatural power (Janice tilts hard toward the latter), the concept of “interference” struck her as antithetical to science—a concession to the idea that the known laws of nature were not laws at all, but instead mere precedents. Subscribing to the possibility of miracles forced one to concede that scientific ordinances could be warped or at least eluded. To Janice’s thinking, this concession actually negated those ordinances, because in science the exception does not prove the rule; it disproves it. That nature still retained mysteries, she believed, was both a temporary and temporal condition. Whatever remained inexplicable about nature was simply waiting to be explained, like patients thumbing golf magazines before their scheduled appointment.

  Not surprisingly, hers is a minority opinion in Mississippi, which the polling organization Gallup in 2012 deemed the most religious state in the United States. “Religion exerts more than mere influence in Mississippi,” says the historian Reagan C. Jones, who’s written extensively about faith in the South. “It is a primary force in the state’s politics, in its culture, in the particulars of its residents’ daily lives. It’s a crucial component of the state’s very atmosphere.” Perhaps more surprisingly, however, Janice’s is also a minority opinion among physicians nationwide. Polls commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City reveal that roughly three quarters of doctors believe in miracles; in one poll, more than half of the 1,100 physicians surveyed claimed to have witnessed treatment results in their patients that they deemed “miraculous.” Allowing for semantic imprecision—miraculous is often used as a hyperbolic synonym for extraordinary—this remains a remarkable finding: that even among clinicians, steeped in the rigors of empiricism, a far squishier doctrine pervades.

  Nothing about Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas, mentally or otherwise, is squishy—almost. Her physical diligence, for instance, mirrors her mental assiduity: A devout runner (she tries to clock at least fifty miles a week), she maintains a marathon time hovering around two hours and fifty-five minutes, and in 2013 she competed in a fifty-mile trail run near Laurel, Mississippi, finishing in nine hours and forty minutes, fourth among the female racers. This exercise regimen—which she appends with Pilates classes and yoga sessions—announces itself in her appearance: in her taut, sun-polished skin, its deep tan subject to constant refreshment during her runs along the beach; in the way she keeps her licorice-colored hair almost always ponytailed, lest the opportunity for an impromptu jog arise; and in her tight, brisk, erect carriage, which suggests an asceticism at odds with the Margaritaville vibe of the Mississippi Coast, where residents tend to approach life with much the same laissez-faire attitude one finds a short ride down the interstate in New Orleans. At thirty-three, she exudes the discipline and glowy vigor of a young Olympian. But she also exudes something else: a hardened prosecutor’s aura of certitude, a density of conviction that seems bricked, mortared, and immaculately leveled. One finds a clue to this mindset in a quotation from Václav Havel that’s framed above the
desk in her home office: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” She is the antithesis of squish.

  The exception to that—and perhaps the explanation for it, though she waves off this line of conversational inquiry—is her family background. Janice is the eldest child and only daughter of Winston Lorimar, whose name might ignite sparks of recognition among readers of Southern literature in the 1970s. Born into a mildly prosperous but socially negligible family in Greenwood, Mississippi (his father did the accounting for a cotton broker), Winston Lorimar failed out of the University of the South in Sewanee before bouncing his way through a sequence of colorful jobs of the sort that used to pepper “About the Author” bios: circus hand, clam digger, piano player, gameshow contestant, ballroom dance instructor. In 1974, at the age of twenty-seven, he moved to Manhattan on a quixotic, bourbonized mission to rescue Esquire magazine—“by force if necessary,” he later wrote—from what he saw as the craven overseers who’d forced out the legendary editor Harold Hayes. The mission fizzled—Lorimar never even made it as far as Esquire’s offices on Madison Avenue—but he funneled that same quixotic zeal (with bourbon chaser) into another endeavor: writing fiction. In this he was egged on by the author Truman Capote, whom he met through a mutual friend. For the next three years, Capote—often baroquely intoxicated during that era—served as a sporadic and oblique mentor to Lorimar. The novel that emerged, in 1978, was Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band, the story of a Confederate cavalryman reincarnated as a psychedelic rock guitarist whose discovery of the aphrodisiacal effects of kudzu inspires him to resurrect the ancestral plantation as a kind of viny, carnal, Southern-fried commune. Critical reception was lukewarm at best, and snide at worst (the critic Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the Village Voice, wrote that the effect was of “Hermann Hesse reincarnated as a pork rind”), yet, commercially, the novel proved a minor sensation. Perhaps owing to a fascination with the New South that bloomed during the early years of the Carter administration, or possibly to the notoriety of a seven-page, three-sentence description of a kudzu-turbocharged orgasm, Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, spent twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was eventually adapted into a network television movie starring Bruce Boxleitner in a somewhat tragic-looking rainbow wig. In the three years following its publication, Winston Lorimar rode high: When he married his publicist, Jacqueline Hernnstein, the reception was held at Elaine’s—a gift from Elaine Kaufman herself. When Jacqueline gave birth to a daughter they named Janice, the former Harper’s editor (and fellow Mississippi Delta native) Willie Morris sprawled beside Winston in the waiting room with a cigar clamped between his teeth. Less than a year later, however, Winston Lorimar had all but disappeared.

  “I just wanted to come on home,” is the way Lorimar explained it back then, and it’s how he still explains his retreat—not only from Manhattan, but also from writing and publishing. His courteously firm refusal to expand upon this statement, however, plus its over-rehearsed luster and the syrupy smile with which he concludes it, conveys an aspect of deception, or at least evasion. But it’s an oddly avowed deception. The smile doesn’t pretend to correspond to the cornpone simplicity of the words; it’s a flagrant overlay of facial irony, a wink of the mouth, a silent admission of something—but of what? Friends from his New York days received much the same unsatisfactory explanation at the time, and each of them nurtured his or her own pet theories: that the pressures of writing a follow-up novel crushed him; that he’d fallen in love with another woman at life’s most inopportune moment and, hewing to some Ivanhoe-inspired code of decency, fled south to escape her; or that Capote had secretly written Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band, and stoked by its success was threatening to unmask himself as its author. “He left without so much as goodbye, so long,” says Brock Meadows, a retired 60 Minutes producer who frequently occupied a barstool next to Lorimar’s at Elaine’s. “The theory we all settled on was gambling debts with the mob. It made as much sense as anything else. Or as little sense, as the case may be. Whatever did happen, anyway?”

  What happened—on a skeletal level, at least—is this: Winston Lorimar whisked his family from the Upper West Side to the outskirts of Greenwood. He bought a tumbledown farm and went about town in expensive Scottish bird-hunting attire. He drove rural backroads in a Chevrolet convertible while wearing antique leather aviator goggles. For ten years he zealously maintained the high score on the pinball machine at a Leflore County juke joint known as Como’s. He drank prodigiously and entertainingly, though, for the era and for the Mississippi Delta, rarely to notable extremes. In immodest moments, which were many, he likened himself to Shakespeare gone silent after The Tempest, nestled into his retirement at Stratford.

  To literary New Yorkers—fewer and fewer of whom remained curious about Lorimar, as Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band faded from bookstore shelves—he might’ve appeared a recluse, a trippier version of Harper Lee, but down in Greenwood he cut a voluble, boisterous figure. He gave readings to luncheon groups, judged high-school writing contests, and edited a collection of mawkish vignettes about the Delta for a local publisher. When asked if he was working on anything new, however, Lorimar would contort his face into an expression of horror, according to one resident, and exclaim, “Work? Why ever would I want to work?”

  Despite being a Long Island Jewess, Jacqueline alighted gracefully in the Delta. By all accounts, she was a fluent and decorous hostess, an attentive and agile mother (three boys trailed Janice into the family), and a benevolent sort of nursemaid to her husband, whose literary chops seemed to exonerate him from the standard strictures of husbandhood. That those chops went unexercised never appeared to bother her. In fact, nothing her husband did or didn’t do seemed to bother her: Her friends and children recall far more complaints about the lack of decent pizza in the Delta than any marital laments. But then, in 1991, when Janice was ten and her youngest brother was three, Jacqueline Lorimar commenced a swift and sudden decline. Day after day, in perceptible measures, she weakened. After a while, fatigue gripped her so tightly that even her eyelids couldn’t muster the strength to stay open. The cause, finally established via neuroimaging in Jackson after a fumbly string of misdiagnoses by local physicians, was brainstem glioma, a catastrophically cancerous brain tumor. Her life expectancy forecast, even with chemotherapy, was twelve months; she managed to eke out only five.

  It was years before Winston Lorimar divulged the bare facts of their mother’s illness and death to his children. For a time he blamed gremlins that he said were creeping into his and Jacqueline’s bedroom at night and sucking her energy out through little cocktail straws (“but don’t worry,” one of Janice’s brothers, Randy, recalls him saying, “kids’ energy tastes like raw liver to them”). In lighter moments, he ascribed her fatigue to hours of strenuous dancing that she did after the children went to sleep, mock-scolding her for overdoing it with the Lindy hop. Her hair loss, he told them, was an avant-garde fashion statement that was currently all the rage back in New York, which was also where he said she’d gone when she died. “It took me years to shake the idea that New York City was literally a ghost town,” says Randy Lorimar. One might conclude, sympathetically, that Winston Lorimar, however clumsily, was trying to shield his children from an abominable truth that he himself couldn’t quite accept—if a pattern wasn’t already in place.

  Because while Lorimar might’ve abandoned writing, he has never forsaken fiction. The sign at the entrance to the family home reads LORIMAR PLANTATION, CIRCA 1848, which is about as bald as a lie can be shaved: Donovan Lorimar, Winston’s grandfather, arrived in the Delta from Ireland in 1907 to work on the railroad, and the farm itself dates back only to the Great Depression. (A clue to Lorimar’s career withdrawal might lurk inside a comment he once made to a friend in G
reenwood: “As an Irishman and a Southerner, I ravenously suckle defeat.”) The farm’s history, much like his daily life appears to be, is an act of imagination. After writing a novel, he began living one. His fictions can be small (“If you see him at the diner,” says one local, “he’ll tell you how fine the chicken that he just ate was, with a big steak bone sitting right there on the plate”) or large (to get out of a dinner engagement, he once left a friend a voicemail saying he’d been stabbed in the neck by an intruder). They can also be strikingly self-aware, even meta: He’s claimed himself the inspiration for Edward Bloom, the tall tale–spouting protagonist of Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel Big Fish. (Wallace, who’s never met Lorimar, denies this, though he regards Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band as an “unfairly forgotten classic.”) Even before her death, and more so afterward, Jacqueline provided a steady canvas for exaggerations: “You know he was married to a former Miss America, right?” asks an impressed young clerk at a downtown boutique, when Lorimar’s name arises. By the turn of the century, wearier and more skeptical residents were placing his claims to have once authored a book somewhere alongside his assertions that he’d been second-in-command of New York City’s branch of the Irish Republican Army and that he’d once shot an irregular thirty-one-point buck through the kitchen window of a trailer whilst having tabletop intercourse with a Choctaw woman: filed, that is, under bullshit. “Oh, every word that comes out of his mouth is a whopper,” says Junie Taylor, the town’s longtime librarian. “And we adore him for it.”