Gospel (47 page)

Man, thought Lucy, do I ever know how to pick 'em.

Lucy walked him back to the basilica, and was rewarded with a firmly clasped hand, was told how “special” she was repeatedly, a chaste kiss on the cheek.

Good night Gabriel and good-bye, thought Lucy; a certain expectation and piece of the heart will be laid to rest, here in Assisi. With the moon rising and with the aid of the infrequent light spilling into the alleys from a door or window, she began trudging back downhill, careful not to slip on the steep cobblestones, polished slick by the centuries of faithful pilgrims. Assisi's white stone was cold and lunar, the back alleys threatening and inscrutable, but it wasn't fear she felt as much as isolation, the loneliness of being in too foreign a country, the feeling that precedes the turn for home.

Once back at her hostel, Lucy checked herself in the dresser-door mirror. This, she told her reflection, could be your future
yet,
Lucille. Finish your doctorate, join an order, and then park yourself at some Catholic seminary or some ritzy parochial school. You could be the
fun
sister, the one who goes out for burgers with the students, the cool Catholic broad whose theology classes are popular, Bridgeport's answer to Sister Marie-Berthe, the sister with the wisecracks and offbeat perspectives, a toned-down O'Hanrahan in drag. If you hated sisterhood you could leave. But you'd probably like it. It wasn't as if you were headed toward romance anyway. And Mother. Oh, Jesus, would Mother be happy:

Mom … Yes, it's Lucille … I'm in Assisi! Mom, the connection's bad I know, but guess what? I'm going to take the vow to be a Minoress, a Poor Clare … no, I'm not kidding, really … And then Mother would go into a patented mixture of laughter and disbelief and thanking God, thanking nuns who had raised Lucy, now departed, thanking Mary, thanking the Blessed So-and-So … She always knew! Didn't she always say her daughter would take the vow, hm? Didn't she? Like her own dear sister, her daughter's Aunt Lucy, a family tradition! Yes, Mother did in her own little way prod and push, but let's be careful not to take credit for that which Our Lord Jesus is most responsible for …

(That's right, My dear. Your mother would never be happier with you if you were to make this decision. To her discredit, you would completely and proudly be her daughter, maybe for the first time.)

Lucy hung her habit upon a hanger on her closet door. She stroked the wrinkles out of it, gently. She glanced more critically at the reflection of herself undressed.

She turned out the light and got in bed.

It certainly would be a stable life, she thought, Lucy Dantan and an ancient order, a rule of simplicity, of service, not open to the whims of the very human and impermanent hearts of others.

(It is a shame, My child, that you didn't make the journey to the Eremo delle Carceri, Francis's mountainside hermitage. It is a simple place, more or less as he left it, a small cell where he would sleep, while outside is an altar where he would pray and rejoice with the birds and animals that wandered from the woods. Around the hermitage is the forest he loved so, quiet and dark now, where you could listen to the faint wind in the upper branches, a gentle rustle causing the solitary candle in the saint's cell to flicker.
“Thou wishest to know why it is that God has raised me up,”
said Francis to a jealous brother.
“It is because He has not found among sinners any smaller man, nor any more insufficient and more sinful; he chose me because He could find no one more worthless and He wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength, the beauty, and the learning of the world.”
His conscience led him to oppose his followers who raised a monastery in his honor—are the sick eased in their suffering? Will the poor be served? Francis was not listened to. So as Lucy and Gabriel and all the other children of Mine spend the night in serious thoughts, dreaming of the security of rules, orders, traditions, habits, the set routine from
matins
to
nones,
they would do well to consider the first Franciscan to resign his place in the order to continue the search for God: in 1220, St. Francis himself.)

ROMA

J
ULY
4
TH

Lucy decided that she would never listen to any more nonsense from her parents suggesting that old age slowed you down. Dr. O'Hanrahan, back in his priest's suit for convenience, and his itinerary verged upon the insane and Lucy was feeling the effects.

“I didn't get any sleep last night, Dr. O'Hanrahan,” she muttered as they got off their night train, now arrived in Rome at seven
A.M.

“You're weak, Dantan,” he barked, two steps ahead. “Now keep up the pace.”

They traversed the huge expanse of Roma Termini, a dwarfing stadium of a train station in which, Lucy noted, you could buy anything, televisions, cameras, have your hair done, and probably pick up drugs. She was accosted the next minute by a pleading gypsy woman with her dirty child. Lucy shirked away.

“You can tell we're farther south in Italy,” O'Hanrahan said, before excusing himself to the men's restroom. Lucy in the interim bought a cheap 4000-lire guide of Rome, nothing special, just a small map and some suggested walking tours.

After much haggling with the driver about unannounced “special fees” and a death-defying cab ride, Lucy and O'Hanrahan were across the Tiber at an institution much beloved of the professor, the Hosteleria Santa Cecilia. The cab ride had taken Lucy past fountains, avenues that had magnificent churches beckoning at the ends of them; there were glimpses into market plazas, sun-warmed remainders of Ancient Rome, all mixed into the contemporary bustle of Roman life. Let her at it!

“We can go sightseeing in a minute, so calm down,” O'Hanrahan said to Lucy upon checking in at the Hosteleria. “And remember to look pious. This hostel is for religious only. You'll have to be careful sneaking Farley up to the room.”

“Stop with the jokes about Farley. He's a hayseed.”

“You're gonna settle down and raise farm animals together.”

O'Hanrahan and Lucy checked into adjoining rooms on the second floor that overlooked, uninterestingly, the front of the hotel and a bus stop. O'Hanrahan knocked on Lucy's door when he was ready to depart and she met him, camera, sunglasses, guidebook, and giant handbag all rearing to go.

“Ready for the Whore of Babylon?” he asked as they rounded the marble steps to the ground floor. “St. John, in my opinion, was entirely unfair to Babylon in his famous description of Rome. If it weren't for the Babylonian exile, we never would have the Bible—Isaiah, the prophets, Hebrew poetry—or the Talmud, or dozens of great, free-thinking Islamic philosophers, in the days when there could be such a thing. And while Christians persecuted Jews, Babylon was generally a haven for the Chosen, especially in Islamic times. Babylon always got bad press.”

O'Hanrahan turned into the lobby, keys in hand, when they ran into Rabbi Hersch.

Surprise, surprise.

Rabbi Hersch: “Why aren't you in Assisi?”

O'Hanrahan: “Why aren't you in Jerusalem?

Rabbi Hersch: “Where's the scroll?”

O'Hanrahan: “What business would
you
have in Rome?”

Rabbi Hersch: “What's
she
still doing here?”

Ten minutes of summarizing the events in Florence and Assisi managed to placate the rabbi that the scroll was secure for the moment, kept in a safe by the Franciscans and on its way to Rome with Father Vico. O'Hanrahan mentioned the break-in but didn't mention the Mafia by name, so as not to frighten Lucy. Lucy, who'd be leaving soon anyway.

“In fact,” the rabbi considered, “it may be just as well that the Franciscans guard it. We were sure to get it stolen from us. You actually
saw
the scroll, didn't you?”

“Yes, yes,” O'Hanrahan said. “It's very secure,” he insisted, despite a clear picture of the silly little safe on wheels. He turned to Lucy and gave her the keys and asked her to return them to the sister at the reception desk.

“What's the goil still doing here?” asked Rabbi Hersch in a Brooklyn
sotto voce,
Lucy out of earshot. “Tell me the truth. You having an affair with her?”

“Morey,” he said, putting a hand on Rabbi Hersch's arm. “Maybe in the past I … Look, she's leaving from Rome,” he offered, curious why he should be so adamant. “Just look at what Chicago sent me, Morey, look…” He took out his VISA credit card. “It arrived in Ireland after I left and Lucy brought it to me.”

“Jesus,” admired the rabbi, “I couldn't get one of these outa Jew U. if I spent a year on my knees.”

“What are
you
doing here, Morey?”

He explained slowly as if to a child: “My flight went by way of Rome, so I decided I'd stop off and follow some hunches. You don't mind me working your turf, do you?”

Actually, O'Hanrahan minded it intensely. He thought: I am going to solve this mystery, and
I
am going to translate this scroll. But he pushed the pettiness aside.

“So, Paddy, gonna join me today in the libraries?”

“Nawwwww, come on,” O'Hanrahan nudged him, not wishing the rabbi to get any closer to the solution before he got there. “We're going to play tourist. You've never been in Rome with me before. Look, I chaperoned Chicago's student group over here for four summers, I can
do
Rome.”

“Mnyeh,” squirmed his friend, preferring work.

Lucy soon reappeared to hear O'Hanrahan pleading for the rabbi's company for lunch. Lucy hoped Rabbi Hersch would go to the library and leave Rome to just the professor and herself, but out of politeness Lucy suggested, “C'mon, Rabbi, sir, it wouldn't be the same without you.”

“Wellll,” said Rabbi Hersch, “if the little girl insists, who I am to refuse? I have a price, Paddy, and that's lunch. Take me to one of the good places you know about. Good Italian you can't get in Jerusalem.”

Another enticing, scenery-glimpsing taxi ride brought Lucy and her companions to the Piazza di Spagna, bounded on one side by the famous Spanish Steps. Everyone quietly wondered what everyone else was
really
doing there. But the cab ride wasn't the time to discuss any of it, and maybe not even today, this wonderful simmering day, not yet an inferno, the Roman
ponentino
lightly dipping down into the ochre streets, caressing the crumbling churches, softly assuring the ancient monuments, the wind that has turned the many pages of Roman history imperceptibly.

Lucy fumbled with her camera, trying to fit in her frame the hillside stairway laden with flower vendors and guitar-toting Euroyouth and bored American kids. She beheld the Spanish Steps, forcing their reality into her brain, trying to officially replace the image engendered by TV travel shows and Father Kennedy's slides of his two-week summer Italian vacation to meet Pope Paul, viewed in the gym at St. Eulalia.

“Wow, Dr. O'Hanrahan,” said Lucy, walking alongside O'Hanrahan with her nose in her guidebook, “it says … it says that John Keats, the poet, John Keats—”

“Yes, I know who John Keats is.”

“It says in the book he died in this square, I mean, a building here in this square—”

She had the book seized from her hands. “Yes, he died. He died waiting in the lines at the American Express, right over there. One day, but not today, you can return to Keats's house and pay to see where he croaked. Come back with your backpack and guitar and unshaven legs.”

“Hey, I shave my legs.”

“Ah, c'mon, Paddy,” said the rabbi, “let her stay here with her own kind. We'll go to a bar and talk about the gospel—”

“I refuse to acknowledge this … this schism!”

Lucy, tripping on a cobblestone, stumbled along behind. “Uh, can I have my book back?”

O'Hanrahan stopped an oncoming American backpacking couple and put the cheap guide into the boy's hands:
“Here,”
he said, “here, take this, learn something. And stop talking so loud.”

The rabbi and Lucy were herded toward a subway entrance.

“Look, there's a McDonald's,” Lucy dejectedly pointed out.

“I'm going to make you eat there if you don't be quiet and let me talk!” said the professor.

The Golden Age of Spanish Catholicism. 1480s–1520s.

O'Hanrahan, prompted by the Spanish Steps and the Roman Catholic ministry of Propaganda, built with the gold of the New World, expounded upon the ascension of Their Pious Majesties, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, uniting by their blessed union two-thirds of Spain.

“Oh, yeah,” said Lucy. “They're thinking of sainting the queen, right?”

“An absolute outrage!” said Rabbi Hersch. “She was responsible for an orgy of Jew-killing.”

O'Hanrahan narrated. Isabella made for one hell of an Inquisition, led by Isabella's confessor, the fanatical Dominican, Tomas de Torquemada—alas, Mordechai, from a converted Jewish family—who in a decade would exterminate 300,000 citizens. Tens of thousands of Jews were burned at the stake, with minor tortures and maimings and wholesale confiscation of goods and property reserved for the 250,000 whose apostasy was correctable.

(Not surprisingly all inquisitees, We recall, forfeited their land and fortune to the Crown.)

“No one was immune from God's Holy Will,” recounted O'Hanrahan, as they moved through the subway turnstiles.

Spanish Catholicism was spread by racks, pendulums, rats gnawing on various tender bodily appendages, hot coals, pincers, dismemberments, knuckle and finger breakers, and screws applied to spinal cords, recounted the professor. “Spain's sadism,” O'Hanrahan continued, “was about to be exported to the New World, because the year is 1492 and Columbus is about to claim the New World for Spain—”