The Rule of Four (6 page)

My father’s claim to fame in all this was a document he found during the summer I turned fifteen. That year—the year before the car accident—he brought me with him on a research trip to a monastery in southern Germany, then later to the Vatican libraries. We were sharing an Italian studio apartment with two rollaway beds and a prehistoric stereo system, and each morning for five weeks, with the precision of a medieval punishment, he chose a new Corelli masterwork from the compilations he’d brought, then woke me to the sound of violins and harpsichords at exactly half-past seven, reminding me that research waited for no man.

I would rise to find him shaving over the sink, or ironing his shirts, or counting the bills in his wallet, always humming along with the recording. Short as he was, he tended to every inch of his appearance, plucking strands of gray from his thick brown hair the way florists cull limp petals from roses. There was an internal vitality he was trying to preserve, a vivaciousness he thought was diminished by the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, by the thinking man’s wrinkles across his forehead, and whenever my imagination was dulled by the endless shelves of books where we spent our days, he was always quick to sympathize. At lunchtime we would take to the streets for fresh pastries and gelato; every evening he would bring me into town for sight-seeing. One night in Rome, he led me on a tour of the city’s fountains, telling me to toss a lucky penny into each one.

“One for Sarah and Kristen,” he said at the Barcaccia. “To help mend their broken hearts.”

My sisters had each been in a painful breakup just before we left. My father, who never took much to their boyfriends, considered it a blessing in disguise.

“One for your mother,” he said at the Fontana del Tritone. “For putting up with me.”

When my father’s request for university funding had fallen through, my mother kept the bookstore open on Sundays to help pay for our trip.

“And one for us,” he said at the Quattro Fiumi. “May we find what we’re looking for.”

What we were looking for, I never really knew—at least, not until we stumbled onto it. All I knew was that my father believed scholarship on the
Hypnerotomachia
had reached a dead end, mainly because everyone was missing the forest for the trees. Thumping his fist on the dinner table, he would insist that the scholars who disagreed with him had their heads in the sand. The book itself was too difficult to understand from within, he said; a better approach was to search for documents that hinted at who the author really was, and why he’d written it.

In reality, my father alienated many people with his narrow vision of the truth. If it hadn’t been for the discovery we made that summer, my family might soon have found itself relying entirely on the bookstore for its livelihood. Instead, Lady Fortune smiled on my father, hardly a year before she took his life.

On the third-floor branch of one of the Vatican libraries, in a recessed aisle of bookshelves that even the monkish dusters had not dusted, as we stood back-to-back searching for the clue he’d been pursuing for years, my father found a letter inserted between the pages of a thick family history. Dated two years before the
Hypnerotomachia
was published, it was addressed to a confessor at a local church, and it told the story of a high-ranking Roman scion. His name was Francesco Colonna.

It’s difficult to re-create my father’s excitement when he saw the name. The wire-frame glasses he wore, which slunk down his nose the longer he read, magnified his eyes just enough to make them the measure of his curiosity, the first and last thing most people ever remembered about him. At that moment, as he sized up what he’d found, all the light in the room seemed to converge inside those eyes. The letter he held was written in a clumsy hand, in broken Tuscan, as if by a man who was not accustomed to that language, or to the act of writing. It rambled on and on, sometimes directed at no one in particular, sometimes directed at God. The author apologized for not writing in Latin or in Greek, which were unknown to him. Then, at last, he apologized for what he had done.

Forgive me, Holy Father, for I have killed two men. It was my own hand that struck the blow, but the design was never mine. It was Master Francesco Colonna who bid me do it. Judge us both with mercy.

The letter claimed that the murders were part of an intricate plan, one that no man as simple as the author himself could have contrived. The two victims were men Colonna suspected of treachery, and at his direction they were sent on an unusual mission. They were given a letter to deliver to a church outside the walls of Rome, where a third man would be waiting to receive it. Under pain of death the two men were not to look at the letter, not to lose it, not to so much as touch it with an ungloved hand. So began the story of the simple Roman mason who slew the messengers at San Lorenzo.

The discovery my father and I made that summer came to be known, in academic circles, as the Belladonna Document. My father felt sure it would revive his reputation in the scholarly community, and within six months he published a small book under that title suggesting the letter’s connection to the
Hypnerotomachia
. The book was dedicated to me. In it, he argued that the Francesco Colonna who’d written the
Hypnerotomachia
was not the Venetian monk, as most professors believed, but instead the Roman aristocrat mentioned in our letter. To bolster this claim, he added an appendix including all known records on the lives of both the Venetian monk, whom he called the Pretender, and of the Roman Colonna, so that readers could compare. The appendix alone made believers of both Paul and me.

The details are straightforward. The monastery in Venice where the false Francesco lived was an unthinkable place for a philosopher-author; most of the time, to hear my father tell it, the place was an unholy cocktail of loud music, hard drinking, and lurid sexual escapades. When Pope Clement VII attempted to force restraint on the brethren there, they replied that they would sooner become Lutherans than accept discipline. Even in such an environment, the Pretender’s biography reads like a rap sheet. In 1477 he was exiled from the monastery for unnamed violations. Four years later he returned, only to commit a separate crime, for which he was almost defrocked. In 1516 he pled no contest to rape and was banished for life. Undeterred, he returned again, and was exiled again, this time for a scandal involving a jeweler. Mercifully, death took him in 1527. The Venetian Francesco Colonna—accused thief, confessed rapist, lifelong Dominican—was ninety-three years old.

The Roman Francesco, on the other hand, appeared to be a model of every scholarly virtue. According to my father, he was the son of a powerful noble family, who raised him in the best of European society and had him educated by the highest-minded Renaissance intellectuals. Francesco’s uncle, Prospero Colonna, was not only a revered patron of the arts and a cardinal of the Church, but such a renowned humanist that he may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero in
The Tempest.
These were the sorts of connections, my father argued, that made it possible for a single man to write a book as complex as the
Hypnerotomachia
—and they were certainly the connections that would’ve ensured its publication by a leading press.

What sealed the matter entirely, to me at least, was the fact that this blue-blooded Francesco had been a member of the Roman Academy, a fraternity of men committed to the pagan ideals of the old Roman Republic, the ideals expressed with such admiration in the
Hypnerotomachia
. That would explain why Colonna identified himself in the secret acrostic as “Fra”: the title Brother, which other scholars took as a sign that Colonna was a monk, was also a common greeting at the Academy.

Yet my father’s argument, which seemed so lucid to Paul and me, clouded the academic waters. My father hardly lived long enough to brave the teapot tempest he stirred up in the little world of
Hypnerotomachia
scholarship, but it nearly undid him. Almost all of my father’s colleagues rejected the work; Vincent Taft went out of his way to defame it. By then, the arguments in favor of the Venetian Colonna had become so entrenched that, when my father failed to address one or two of them in his brief appendix, the whole work was discredited. The idea of connecting two doubtful murders with one of the world’s most valuable books, Taft wrote, was “nothing but a sad and sensational bit of self-promotion.”

My father, of course, was devastated. To him it was the substance of his career they were rejecting, the fruit of the quest he’d been on since his days with McBee. He never understood the violence of the reaction against his discovery. The only enduring fan of
The Belladonna Document,
as far as I know, was Paul. He read the book so many times that even the dedication stuck in his memory. When he arrived at Princeton and found a Tom Corelli Sullivan listed in the freshman face-book, he recognized my middle name immediately and decided to track me down.

If he expected to meet a younger version of my father, he must have been disappointed. The freshman Paul found, who walked with a faint limp and seemed embarrassed by his middle name, had done the unthinkable: he had renounced the
Hypnerotomachia
and become the prodigal son of a family that made a religion out of reading. The shockwaves of the accident were still ringing through my life, but the truth is that even before my father died, I was losing my faith in books. I’d begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don’t follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame.

No one ever said it that way, exactly, but when my father’s friends and colleagues—all but Vincent Taft—came to see me in the hospital, looking sheepish about the reviews they’d written of his book, mumbling little eulogies for him they’d composed in the waiting room, I began to see the writing on the wall. I noticed it the moment they walked to my bedside: every one of them brought handfuls of books.

“This helped me when
my
father died,” said the chairman of the history department, placing Merton’s
Seven Storey Mountain
on the food tray beside me.

“I find great comfort in Auden,” said the young graduate student writing her dissertation under my father. She left a paperback edition with one corner clipped off to remove the price.

“What you need is a pick-me-up,” another man whispered when the others left the room. “Not this bloodless stuff.”

I didn’t even recognize him. He left a copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
which I’d already read, and I could only wonder if he really thought revenge was the best emotion to encourage just then.

None of these people, I realized, could cope with reality any better than I could. My father’s death had a nasty finality to it, and it made a mockery of the laws they lived by: that every fact can be reinterpreted, that every ending can be changed. Dickens had rewritten
Great Expectations
so that Pip could be happy. No one could rewrite this.

When I met Paul, then, I was wary. I’d spent the last two years of high school forcing certain changes on myself: whenever I felt the pain in my leg, I would continue to walk; whenever instinct told me to pass by a door without pausing—the door to the gym, or to a new friend’s car, or to the house of a girl I was beginning to like—I would make myself stop and knock, and sometimes let myself in. But here, in Paul, I saw what I might have been.

He was small and pale beneath his untended hair, and more of a boy than a man. One of his shoelaces was untied, and he carried a book in his hand as if it were a security blanket. The first time he introduced himself, he quoted the
Hypnerotomachia.
I felt I already knew him better than I wanted to. He’d tracked me down in a coffee shop near campus just as the sun began to set in early September. My first instinct was to ignore him that evening, and avoid him ever after.

What changed all that was something he said just before I begged off for the night.

“Somehow,” he said, “I feel like he’s
my
father too.”

I hadn’t told him about the accident yet, but it was exactly the wrong thing to say.

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“I do. I have copies of all of his work.”

“Listen to me—”

“I even found his dissertation. . . .”

“He’s not a book. You can’t just
read
him.”

But it was as if he couldn’t hear.

“
The Rome of Raphael,
1974.
Ficino and the Rebirth of Plato,
1979.
The Men of Santa Croce,
1985.”

He began counting them on his fingers.

“ ‘The
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
and the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.’ In
Renaissance Quarterly,
June of ’87. ‘Leonardo’s Doctor.’ In
Journal of Medical History,
1989.”

Chronological, without a hitch.

“ ‘The Breeches-Maker.’
Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
1991.”

“You forgot the
BARS
article,” I said.

The
Bulletin of the American Renaissance Society
.

“That was in ’92.”

“It was in ’91.”

He frowned. “’Ninety-two was the first year they accepted articles from non-members. It was sophomore year of high school. Remember? That fall.”

There was silence. For a second he seemed worried. Not that he was wrong, but that I was.

“Maybe he wrote it in ’91,” Paul said. “They only
published
it in ’92. Is that what you meant?”