The scene is taken as a major assault on piety, which indeed has come home to roost in a new way. My mother has been banished from the Altar Guild at Saint Michael’s, the club of women who wash the vestments and arrange the flowers; she’s more or less incapable of either task these days, and doubtless an obstreperous presence, too. Her disbarment is a terrific blow to her. She goes to one last Sunday mass, wearing her ecru mantilla, but before the service ends she’s out the door, into the courtyard, climbing the gnarled trunk of one of the old olive trees. When Father Fowler and his attendants arrive at the door, after their procession from the altar, and the people start to file out, blinking in the sunlight, there’s my mother, sitting on a branch and shouting her imprecations at the hypocrites. “Face it,” she cries, “O ye of little faith!”

I don’t go to church with them anymore for the same reason I don’t go along to restaurants. My father tells me about this later, after he’s brought her home. Is he laughing while he tells it, shaking his head?

Returning to church is out of the question now, but she isn’t done with it yet. A few nights later, while my father’s sleeping, she gets up in the middle of the night and goes out of the house, barefoot, in her nightgown, and begins to walk toward Saint Michael’s. I imagine it’s cool, the air alive with crickets and locusts, she’s gliding in the diaphanous white gown past gravel lawns and sprinklers spinning over grass, past clusters of creosote and cacti; then the sidewalk runs out and she’s walking in the road, crossing the arroyo that makes this end of our street impassable in the rainy season, down and then up again, walking the two miles of East Rosewood across Wilmot and then up to the church gate, through the olive grove, scene of her shame, to the church doors. Of course they’re locked, and this scene you must imagine performed by Vivien Leigh: she’s pounding at the church doors and weeping, she’s crying to be let in, her feet bleeding, and she’ll continue till the police come.

Sleepwalking, my father says. My mother buys a large statue of the Madonna, Oaxacan pottery made of black volcanic clay, unglazed but polished to an anthracite sheen. The new icon sits atop the television, and candles burn there day and night. The thwarted Catholicism of my mother’s childhood blooms into icons, and our house fills up with images of the Holy Mother: Mary with her feet on the moon, crushing the head of the serpent. Mary decked in blue cloth covered in stars, just like the Donovan song, with its droning keyboard, that gliding vocal trance: Wear your love like heaven.