Gospel (54 page)

She felt her cheeks color. “Aw c'mon.”

Lucy let herself be led away as O'Hanrahan fired orders at a devastatingly handsome twenty-year-old
ragazzo
with penetrating eyes, who certainly considered his hair designs as important as Michelangelo did his ceilings. Gay as Michelangelo too, figured Lucy complacently.

Soon the shapeless page-boy was doomed; hair fell on the floor beside her, and through gellings and stylings and much Italian commentary, she was spun around in her chair to behold the mirror.

“Whadya think?” said O'Hanrahan.

Lucy's hair was higher on her head, in a helmet with the ends curling toward her face. She quickly adjusted her face to match such a fashion-model cut … Lucy caught her vulnerable attendant's eyes in the salon mirror and smiled praise at him, wanting desperately to go somewhere private to admire herself and make a true judgment.

Lucy and O'Hanrahan went forth into the Roman sun.

Up to the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere to settle upon a café, to listen to the Roman fountain in the square trickle slowly, to look at the smog-corroded mosaics emblazoned above the portico of the church. A quick dart inside to see the walls of gold and agate, Our Lady enthroned.

“C'mon, have a little drink for me,” suggested O'Hanrahan, helping her with her chair. “A Campari and soda? Hey, ever had a Cynar? Fantastic—lemme get you one.”

“Uh, please no, Dr. O'Hanrahan. I don't object in principle, but before a flight, I might get all nauseated and … All right, all right,” she conceded.

The drinks were ordered and O'Hanrahan, in need of one, began to relax now that booze was on the way.

Lucy: “You know, sir, it's been an unusual time for me…”

“Don't start on the good-bye stuff, Luce. I'll be back in Chicago one of these days and I'll look you up.” Light dawned. “In fact, why don't you tell me your thesis title and I'll wangle it so I can be the chief examiner, how about that? Give you an easy A. What was it about again?”

“Differences in 4th-Century
B.C.
Corinthian versus Athenian script.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, no more impressed than before. Their Cynars arrived. He forced her to take a little sip and she rather liked it.

“Fermented artichoke,” he whispered, as she registered amazement. “They say this church,” meaning Santa Maria across the plaza, “is the first church in Rome, and not, as you might think, St. Peter's. They claim Santa Maria was consecrated in 222, Roman persecutions notwithstanding…”

Lucy stared in her glass. She was going to miss this: the sun, O'Hanrahan's learned exordia, the drink, the food, the sights, each day so many new things, untried things, that amassed to a new, barely tasted life. What would Judy say when she saw her in this getup? Judy was going to have enough to be jealous of for a hundred years, by the time Lucy got through telling it!

She missed her mother. But going home meant going back to mother's complaints and mother's grievings and mother's demands—how much Lucy wished her mother could sit still for an hour, a half-hour even, and
listen
and be happy for her daughter without her mind racing to the most negative implications. You drank what? You're going to be an alcoholic like Uncle Michael! You spent what? Don't cry to me when you're bankrupt! That old man bought you that dress? You know what he was after! But Mom, she'll weep inwardly, I was in Italy—
Italy!

“… Rome was so tolerant of everything,” O'Hanrahan rambled on. “And yet here were these Christians, this communistic prosperous sect that took care of elderly and sick people—and they had such distaste for us! Claudius, a reasonable Caesar, persecuted us, Nero dipped us in pitch and used us for human torches, Pliny hated us, Hadrian hated us, Tacitus too. It's my theory we know nothing about how Christians behaved from 30 to 313
A.D.
Maybe, after reading too many crackpot end-of-the-world books like
Revelations
we did burn Rome down as accused…”

Going back to Chicago, Lucy realized, meant going back to the thesis and the approaching deadline and the word-processing lessons so she could write it and edit it, and back to fighting over who got what cubicle in the Regenstein Library. Human beings didn't have souls at the University of Chicago, no love lives, no passions—they had cubicles.
That's my cubicle,
snarled the dark-haired female grad student with the faint mustache; the science nerd with the thick glasses, looking as if he might cry … But there were no books marking it, Lucy would say.
Doesn't matter,
the creature of the library would insist,
it's mine.
Lucy, fearing a display of mental illness, would back off. God, I wish I weren't going back, back to Judy and arguing over the cat-food piles, the gradual putting on of weight until all her small triumphs had been obliterated by Christmas.

“… mind you, if Christianity was a slave cult, it could have been dangerous. Seventy-five percent of Rome in Paul's time were slaves, so a movement that spread among slaves was going to be trouble. Suetonius mentions that Jews rioted in Rome because of a man named Chrestus, and Chrestus was a slave name, easily confused with Christ, or perhaps it was followers of Christ who led riots and Suetonius got the name wrong…”

Oh, God, and then there was her father. Lucy swore she would talk to him seriously about the NORAID business. And he would tell her she looked like a lesbian—his branding women lesbians was a recent discovery—with her new haircut. And she would say she had the greatest time of her life in Europe. And he would say they were all worried sick and she spent too much and why couldn't she bring in a little more money for herself. And she would get to tell her maiden aunts about Rome and all the churches and show them her photos this coming Christmas. And her father, then imposing a silence from his retirement armchair, would turn up the wrestling or the football game louder to drown them all out, grumbling and uninterested and say something like, Our family spent a goddam fortune trying to get over to this country and here you spent a fortune to go back! And he'd hate her dress, too.

“… there's Excommunication, which is just denying you mass, then Major Excommunication, which means no Catholic can even talk to you, and then if the pope really gets pissed off, Consignment to Hell. Sigismundo Mallatesti got this treatment, though I sort of like his gall. Taking over the town cathedral and dedicating it as a temple to himself! He kept marrying off his daughters to pretty young men so he could sleep with them, sometimes at the same time
with
his daughters. A close family.” O'Hanrahan paused to glance at his watch and frowned. “Well. Time to go.”

Lucy breathed in a slow, painful breath.

She and the professor passed for a last time through the time-softened alleys of Trastevere. And it figured, didn't it. Here she was, halfway home, and two Italian boys—complete jokers, no more than sixteen, swaggering along—pursed their lips at her and gave her a whistle.

“You know what I think you need?” said O'Hanrahan at the door of the Santa Cecilia Hostel. “You need a new roommate, maybe a new thesis topic. Hey, maybe you oughta can the thesis and do something useful, so you won't end up an old academic leftover like me.”

She laughed lightly. “My parents would kill me, if I quit now.”

“You told me yourself, you longed for some kind of service, something meaningful to devote yourself to…”

“Yeah, and you scoffed at me.”

“Now that I know you, I'm not scoffing anymore. You're what? Twenty-six?”

She was twenty-eight, but let it stand.

“Tell Mom and Dad to go to hell. Get out of goddam Chicago if you have to. Go somewhere where you won't lose that tan. Ten years from now I don't want to hear you're still feeding the cats with Janie—”

“Judy.” Desolately, it struck her how unlikely it would be that O'Hanrahan would be around ten years from now.

“There's an adventurer in there somewhere, Miss Dantan, someone not too different from what I am, what do you think?” She smiled hopefully. “As for me, I'll be taking tomorrow night's ferry from Brindisi to Greece, sailing on the S.S.
Argos
—God, it must be the twentieth time on that old rustbucket…” O'Hanrahan trailed off, already spiritually down the road, eyeing the next horizon. “Next time in Europe, you'll have to see Greece.”

Soon the taxi arrived and the rabbi and Lucy put their suitcases—Lucy's unliftable and overstuffed to bursting—in the trunk.

Lucy would have given O'Hanrahan a good-bye kiss, but as she got in the car, he appeared a story above her, waving so-long from his bedroom window. He waved to them both, yelled a see-you-in-the-Holy-Lands to the rabbi, and watched as the taxi pulled away and the silver sedan rounded the corner. He clapped his hands as if to establish a new break, a page turning, and then it was back to work in his room.

But if O'Hanrahan had stayed at the window longer, he would have seen a white luxury car following them, with a German license plate.

*   *   *

An hour later at the airport, the rabbi contributed a strained smile and shook Lucy's hand and said: if you should ever be in Jerusalem one day, should you be so blessed, look me up. Yeah, right, she thought. And brusquely he was off to check in for his ticket. Lucy waited an annoying half-hour in a line, confirmed her departure, picked up her boarding pass, and decided not to check through her bag until the interminable line for that service lessened. She went to sit in a passengers' lounge.

It was just 2:45
P.M.
The taxi was fast.

You had to check in by 3:30
P.M.
for the five o'clock flight. Well, if that will keep another massacre from happening: this is the airport, Lucy couldn't help reminding herself, where the Arab terrorists shot that little American girl. Every summer it seems something awful happens here. Great. Here she is stuck in Terrorism Central for another two hours. She wondered if the rabbi's flight left earlier … That's odd, thought Lucy, staring at the
PARTENZE
board, which listed departing flights: there's not a flight to Tel Aviv this afternoon or tonight.

Lucy supposed she had better call Judy in Chicago and get her to meet her at O'Hare tomorrow. She dragged her suitcase with the unworking tiny wheels to the Telecommunicazione desk, where she was assigned a booth to call from, the payment to be made when she was done. It would be … five, six,
seven
hours earlier there, so it would be 7:45-ish in Chicago, which was early, but Judy got up on Saturdays to do volunteer counseling at the Hyde Park Women's Clinic from 8:30
A.M.
, so she'd be awake.

“Hello Judy? It's me!”

Judy started in with a litany of concerns—

“Yeah, I know but Judy … Judy, I … Look, I'm calling from
Rome
 … Yeah! Rome, Italy. Do you want to pick me up at O'Hare? Tomorrow night at midnight, but call and see if it'll be late before you drive out…”

Judy didn't say yes. Maybe Lucy's dad could drive out. Her father had been calling nightly.

“Yeah? Uh-huh … Well, you know my father.”

And for variety there was her mother.

“Well, Mom'll be happy when she sees the stuff I bought for her.”

Did she buy Judy a present?

“Uh, yeah, sure, Judy…”

She hadn't! Maybe there was time to hit the duty-free store and get something, anything.

“What? What about the cats? Judy I'm not going to buy a present for … No, it's expensive, I … Judy, come on, I—” It was no use. “Helllloooo, Paws. I love you pussy cat, and tell Cattus Mommy's coming home tomorrow night, okeee? Judy…”

Judy had some more comments. The rent was due, what about the electricity, what about the gas, and there was a bowl of something involving tuna in the back of the refrigerator that, one might have thought, Lucy would have had the decency to throw out before she left on a trip—

“Yeah, when I get home I'll deal with it…”

Judy had some questions, Was it hot? Did Lucy go everywhere? How about Romance?

“Uh, well, yeah, I do have … I have some stories to tell, Judy. But of course in person, when it doesn't cost a fortune.” Judy was going to be so jealous! “What? Who? What about Vito Campanella?”

Vito, the resident Theology Department god.

“… Vito, the guy in my seminar? That Vito, the guy with the behind, yeah … But how'd you ever … Really. Dinner and then you two went where? Did you have him back for coffee or did you … You had him back. To our place?”

Lucy listened.

“That's just great, Jude. Congratulations. Oh, I see. Yeah, if you two are doing something tomorrow night, I don't wanna mess anything up, I can take a cab … No, I don't—I don't really mind, no … Yeah sure, I understand and hey, it's costing a fortune, I'll see you tomorrow night when I get back. Heh heh, yeah, I won't wait up for you. Hope you guys have a good time.”

And Lucy hung up and went back to the lounge to sulk.

Well, what do you know?

Judy finally got someone. Lucy got out of town and the next week, wham-blam, Judy got brave and asked Vito, Vito the cute Italian-American hunk with the Soloflex machine, the boring and shallow guy, the guy about to be flunked out of the department but Vito of the cheekbones and dimples, Vito who went out for dinner with Judy. Good for Judy.

Then Lucy thought: I want to die.

Not the note she would have ended her European adventure upon.

Lucy decided, in homage to O'Hanrahan, to go have a drink, a last drink of wine, just a glass, one little glass, which she hoped would calm her down, nervous about the flight, nervous about her parents and Judy and … Judy and
Vito
—just doesn't that beat all?