Gospel (50 page)

“This place has been here since Ignatius Loyola,” said O'Hanrahan as they found a table in the back, amid a crowd of black-robed ecclesiasts, S.J.
Spaghetti all'amatriciana
to start—without the bacon for the rabbi,
per favore
—then Roman
saltimbocca
for Lucy and the professor. O'Hanrahan after lunch led them to a corner bar where he insisted, Lucy's protests aside, that they all have a Roman
sambuca,
that clear anisette, served flambé with a few Ethiopian coffee beans floating in the lambent blue flame.

“It tastes like mouthwash—”

“
Drink it,
Luce.”

And then Giolitti, bastion of Roman gelato. Lucy smiled at the visage of two patriarchs eating ice cream out of little paper bowls with miniature spoons. “Rabbi,” she asked, “can you eat ice cream after having fish in the meal we just had? Isn't that not kosher or something?”

“Hey Paddy, you listening to this? I'm getting
halakhah
from the little girl here…”

“And now,” announced O'Hanrahan, depositing his paper cup and the dregs of half-melted
malaga
in a stuffed trashcan, “the Vatican!”

St. Peter's in Rome, atop the Vatican Hill.

The Superdome of Churches, thought O'Hanrahan standing before it—empty, vast, overdecorated mammoth that it is. St. Peter's, however, does a brisk trade in awe: awe as one approaches it from the via della Conciliazione, awe as one passes into the Bernini colonnade in Piazza San Pietro, awe as one climbs the steps beneath the balcony from which popes present themselves after the wisp of white smoke, delighted to hear
Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus papam!
and then, at last, awe upon passing through the overscale portals and into the largest church in Christendom. O'Hanrahan looked over his shoulder to watch Lucy, open-mouthed, approach this once-in-a-life-time experience. As for himself, he sighed, he knew Rome too well to be taken in by the plunder. And yet it was this spot on earth that had shaped and harassed his life!

All around O'Hanrahan, also in awe, were prelates and monks and nuns, all living out the greatest moment of their lives, the pilgrimage, the impending audience with the pope, herded through the turnstiles like sheep. Look at them, sighed O'Hanrahan. From third world countries, from poor and hopeless conditions, from loneliness, from family exile, here it all pays off for them. This was not the religious life I longed for. Oh, let's admit it: the swish of skirts, the whispers in the back offices of the Vatican … What will
Stato
say to His Holiness? Is
Propaganda
conspiring against the Curia? Whose ambition shows too clearly? And under what quiet, ameliorative cardinal's exterior lurks another John XXIII, another John Paul I, a man who might sanctify this squalor? It was that world of Vatican politics I should have seized for my own.

(You didn't do so well with Theology Department politics.)

No, that's right. But that was only late in the game when my guard was down, and I was drinking after Beatrice and Rudy died and I let myself get unseated in 1974. Me and Nixon, out on our asses that summer. Until then, I was creating utopia! My cocktail parties were legendary, the faculty I brought in was first rate, we had our choice of students, there was travel and lavishly funded sabbaticals—I was beloved and reelected three times!

(That you were.)

I should have used that pulpit like Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung. I should have rocked the Eternal City with tract after tract. Oh, with my diligence and argumentative skills, I bet I could have toppled the pope after Vatican II, done away with the papacy! Or got myself excommunicated, which would have pleased me a lot.

(It sounds like you would have done anything to make Rome notice you. To make a mark, to engrave your name but once somewhere upon this city of marble.)

Yes, true enough. And what nonsense! O'Hanrahan reacquainted himself with the sight of St. Peter's, now nearly up to the portals. This church is only here because of the stupidity of Pope Julius II, who felt the original basilica built by Constantine in 326 wasn't big enough to house his tomb. Made senile by his syphilis, His Holiness wanted a place to house his monument designed by Michelangelo: three stories high, featuring forty statues, all dashed and racked with grief at Julius's passing. But he couldn't properly afford either his tomb or a new St. Peter's to put it in, so he sold indulgences … the ones that so angered Martin Luther. O'Hanrahan couldn't help but smile: my dear, ludicrous Rome! You tore down the foremost church in Christendom and built yourself the Reformation!

Rome, you old harlot, the Whore of Babylon! Faded though you are, and past your prime you still apparently have your way with men, you have made many mortals forget your livelihood, resplendent city of temple and cupola and ruin and monument, piled atop the bodies of sacrificed Christians, swindled Jews, enriched by the suppression and persecution of the known world and the harassment of Patrick O'Hanrahan! Silent beneath your makeup, the shimmer of your gleaming mosaics, seethes the anguish of the ages, the deaths of martyrs, saints unknown by name, innumerable bones.

And how I adored you, nonetheless!

*   *   *

Dr. O'Hanrahan, for Lucy's sake, agreed to be dragged around all the art of the Vatican. O'Hanrahan, Rabbi Hersch, and Lucy saw the Pietá, then trudged ever onward to the Vatican Museums, all the greatest rapine of Western Civ and Art History 101, the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, room after room of Greek and Roman statues, chamber after chamber of crosses and candlesticks, halls one can't see the end of they are so long, map rooms, library rooms, each twist and turn revealing another infinity of wealth and ornament and gilt, not an inch of wall left unfrescoed. Lucy was speechless before such a hoarding, such beautiful obscenity.

Her two older companions showed their age, turning cranky, trashing all the great art, soiling the experience for Lucy, who was moved by what she saw—and the more sacrosanct her reaction, the more irreverent they sought to be. After a burlesque of the Raphael frescoes, dismissed as derivative hackwork by O'Hanrahan, they entered the humbling glory of the Sistine Chapel to the sounds of the taped message that plays continually:

“
Silèuzio per favore
 … Silence, please …
Sei still, bitte
…”

Nothing could wreck the sacred atmosphere more than that silly message, thought Lucy, gazing around at the newly cleaned and restored ceiling, the frescoes of electric yellow and hot pink and neon blue, the supporting work by Botticelli and Signorelli—

“Signorelli's a real
buttocks
man, you can tell,” said O'Hanrahan.

Lucy, escaping him, drifted toward the Last Judgment, Michelangelo's swirling rhapsody on the final moments, the Damned never looking more damned—even Mary looks as if she can do nothing for them, Our Lady anxious at the coming ferocity. Her son Jesus, the still center of this divine storm of recompense, is resolute, darkly serene, the moment after every possible mercy has been allowed.

“It may be difficult,” O'Hanrahan said to the rabbi, craning to see the ceiling, “having seen Michelangelo's
Creation
in countless books and reproductions to the point that we yawn when we see it, to remember that once someone turned to Michelangelo and said, Here's the assignment, kid: paint creation, the making of Man, God and Adam.”

Lucy gaped at it. Michelangelo's depiction is the moment immediately after the touch of Creation is broken off. On the right is God the venerable, lifted by angels in the whirl of His pink gown, and on His face a fierce look of concentration, focusing all His divine energies into the supreme imperative: BE. To the left is Adam, postcoital, looking longingly at God as one would a lover, his hand limp and languid, aroused from an eternal sleep, awakening to Paradise—

“I see,” said the rabbi, “Michelangelo knew about the small Jewish
pisher.
”

“You'da thought,” added O'Hanrahan, “that God might have done a little better by the prototype. Michelangelo's David back in Florence isn't exactly hung like a horse either, come to think of it.”

“Here's a theory. Maybe, if you're like Michelangelo, if you like for to be shtupped up the wazoo, you're not looking for a schmucke the size of Aunt Goldie's pot roast—”

“For God's sake,”
hissed Lucy. “Is this the
best
you two can do? Before the greatest work of art ever done? This is as
high
as your thoughts can reach?”

O'Hanrahan pretended to be chastened. “You tell me, Luce. You like 'em large or small?”

“I'm not having this discussion.” Lucy walked as far as she could get from them.

“Excitable girl,” said the rabbi.

“Virgin,” said O'Hanrahan simply. “Sure of it.”

“Don't guess they're gonna let me smoke in here, huh?”

*   *   *

Nighttime in Rome on a summer evening:

The night was to be devoted to piazza-sitting, paying too much for drinks, eating a series of Roman delights—champagne ice, the famous
tartufo,
the Immaculate Heart of chocolate. The rabbi was fond of espresso ice, packed into a cold metal tankard drenched with fresh rich sweet
fior di latte,
the mouth delighting in the chill, confluent textures of fine ice and velvet cream. And what better place to end up than the Piazza Navona, staring at the tourist throngs and the Roman riffraff—plenty of it out tonight, observed Lucy—some beautiful people, some extremely loud and ugly people.

They strolled toward the the Bar Tre Scalini.

Lucy had observed that O'Hanrahan, after a drink, liked to touch and clasp his companions, and his hands were not above … above her waist, for that matter. She politely detached herself, assuming that his freshness was some remainder from his misspent middle years of womanizing. I could see how he'd pull the grad students, Lucy thought, a few years back, more hair, thinner … yeah, why not? All those kinky tales of his, all that brainpower. Probably worked like wildfire in 1969. There was a great warmth and generosity to the man, once you got him to the café. Aw, hell. She walked up beside him and allowed him to keep his hand around her waist for a brief, friendly moment, happy to have been approved of in their final days together.

They spied a trio leaving a café table and lunged for it, garnering a perfect view of Piazza Navona.

The rabbi: “Eighty-year-old man rushes into the confessional, he says, Father, Father! I just made love three times in one night to a woman one-fourth my age, I swear to God! Ooooh, says the priest, well, pal, you better say four Hail Marys and ten Pater Nosters. I can't, says the man, I'm Jewish. Priest says, What the hell you telling me this for? Man says, Are you kidding,
I'm telling everyone!
”

Groans all around.

“Moses,” said O'Hanrahan, “came down from Sinai with tablets with that joke on it. John says in the beginning was the Word, but that joke,
that
joke, Mr. Catskills, is older than the Word.”

“I got one,” said Lucy, having allowed herself two whole glasses of amaretto. “What do you get when you cross an Irishman and a deck chair?”

Pause.

Lucy: “Paddy O'Furniture.”

The men's stares consigned her to the outer darkness.

“Awwwww come on,” she said, “that's
funny!
Sort of.”

The rabbi, shaking his head, got up to use the restroom at this famous establishment. Lucy and O'Hanrahan watched him ungracefully scoot between the scores of little café tables as he made his way inside.

“Beautiful night,” O'Hanrahan said.

“Yep, and no German white Cadillac either. Yet.”

“Yet,” O'Hanrahan repeated. “So you won't go on suspecting the rabbi has some ulterior designs here, let me inform you that the Man in the Cheap Suit knew we were in Assisi thanks to
you.
”

“To me? I don't even speak German.”

“The Man in the Cheap Suit is American.”

She waited for the explanation.

“Last night in Assisi, as I was telling you before, I left the basilica around eleven
P.M.
and what should I find in the parking lot but the white Cadillac. The Cadillac is an
automatic.
No European drives an automatic. Also, on the windshield there was a sticker from Hertz Rent-a-Car. It's some American who's naive enough to want to drive a big gas-guzzling automatic-transmission car all over Europe. Now think hard, who was in Florence and Assisi that you told your plans to?”

Lucy winced. “Nawww…”

“It's a strong possibility.”

“Farley? Associated with international black marketeers?”

The rabbi was seen in the vicinity, wending his way back. Lucy popped up, “My turn,” making her way to the ladies' room.

Rabbi Hersch sat at the table and greasily laughed from deep in his chest, not quite out loud.

O'Hanrahan: “What?”

“Paddy O'Furniture,” said the rabbi.

When Lucy returned from the toilet, O'Hanrahan was quoting something to Rabbi Hersch: “
Then shall begin the great Empire of the Antichrist in the invasions of Xerxes and Attila.
That's what the line is.”

“So whadda we got?” asked the rabbi. “Iran or Iraq is Xerxes and Attila could be, one supposes, either China or Russia—”

“Or both, maybe. That would spell the end of the West: a coalition of Moslem powers, with the Chinese and Russians behind them, versus Europe and the U.S. and Israel.”

Lucy took her seat. “What are you guys talking about now?”

Rabbi Hersch: “The End Times.”

“Oh, not again!”

O'Hanrahan was quoting Nostradamus's prediction of the End, in a year with two eclipses in Leo, rising waters, and great natural disasters. Lucy asked, “And is a year with two such eclipses coming up?”