The Voiceover Artist (20 page)

“Wait. Jeanne called a few weeks ago?”

“Yeah,” Helen says.

Not once has it occurred to me that Rose Marie was given her diagnosis more than a few days before.

“Okay,” I say. “So, who should I tell that I'd like to bring dinner for Jeanne one night this week?”

“You just told her.”

“You're running the meal planning, then.”

Helen laughs. “No, honey. You are.”

“There's nothing set up for her?”

“Just the dinner you promised.”

“I found out
yesterday
that Rose Marie was sick! What has Jeanne been doing for food?”

“I don't know,” Helen says. “Cooking it herself, I guess.”

I recall Rose Marie's line about the sisters splitting the duties of slicing and dicing and imagine the terrifying aloneness, after all those years of making dinner as a twosome, that Jeanne has experienced each time she opened a can of soup and poured it into a cold saucepan while Rose Marie slept fitfully in her sickbed.

“I don't understand,” I say. “Why didn't you set something up for Jeanne if you've known about Rose Marie's diagnosis for three weeks?”

“That's your department,” Helen says, sharpening her tone. “Not mine.”

“I was in Africa!”

“That's right! And I was
here
, doing my job, which covers pretty much everything else that needs doing around here!”

I am speechless. In the brief silence, I try to absorb the facts: for three weeks, Jeanne has been caring for her dying sister and, because I was away, no one at St. Asella's has done a damn thing but add her sister's name to a prayer list.

I hear the echo of Simon Davies telling me that the community at St. Asella's is no community at all, just a cult of loyalty to—or dependence on—one woman. But I tell myself he isn't right. I tell myself that people in a community have roles. Part of my role is to organize volunteers to cook meals for people who need them. And Helen, if she wishes, is free to limit her role to writing names on prayer lists.

“All right,” I say. “If I find any volunteers, can they store the meals in the rectory freezer for a few days if need be?”

Helen lets out a sigh that reverberates in the speaker of my mobile phone. “Before we go any further, Catherine,” she says, “let me apologize. I didn't mean to snap at you.”

“It's fine, Helen,” I say, clipping the words.

“It hasn't been a good morning around here.”

Suddenly, Helen does not sound like herself. She sounds as if
she
is the one who has received the cancer diagnosis.

“How so?”

“The Archdiocese called,” she says. “They've named nine parishes they're closing in three months to cut costs. St. Asella's is on the list.”

Speechless again. But it isn't Helen who has silenced me this time. It is Nicola. The big, institutional Church—the same body I told Nicola had nothing to do with what we were doing at St. Asella's—is shuttering the parish. In the judgment of the Archdiocese of Chicago, whatever community we may have created at St. Asella's is not worth preserving. On this point, Nicola Hayes and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church are in complete agreement.

 

•••

 

JILL AGREES WITHOUT
 hesitation to make and drop off chicken soup for Jeanne. Doreen donates another lasagna. Though both Jill and Doreen know Jeanne and Rose Marie well enough to say hello, neither has heard the news of Rose Marie's illness.

“Did Fr. Dunne read her name from the prayer list?” I asked Jill.

“He might have,” she said. “I guess I haven't been listening that closely.”

As it turns out,
no one
I call knows Rose Marie has cancer. And this casts doubt, from an entirely different direction, on the legitimacy of community at St. Asella's. It seems that, once she called Helen, Jeanne didn't tell anyone else at St. Asella's—her parish for decades—that her sister was dying. She just waited for me to return.

I make a pot of vegetarian chili and ladle it into ten, two-serving plastic containers. I pick up Doreen's lasagna and deliver it, along with my chili, to Jeanne's apartment. The donated food is more than enough to feed Jeanne through Sunday, when I should be able to find additional volunteers. But my doubts about the community at St. Asella's erode the sense of purpose that attended my past efforts to help its troubled members. Now, in this, too, I'm just going through the motions.

I tell no one that St. Asella's is closing—because Helen has asked me to, but also because there's nothing to do about it. I know enough about Catholicism to know the Church, like Franco's Spain, is no democracy. There will be no referendum or real debate. The rest of St. Asella's may as well hear this news when they're together. The most any of them can do is commiserate. But I will not need their commiseration. For me, the closing will be a relief. I'll see out my obligations, maybe exchange phone numbers with a few more members and, if they call to request my help, I'll do what I can. But I know already that without Sunday gatherings to span the chasm that separates my world from theirs, they won't ask me for anything.

The sense of obligation that gets me out of bed on Sunday morning is not enough to make me hurry, so I arrive at St. Asella's later than usual. When I walk through the main doors, Helen is standing in front of them. We exchange rueful smiles.

“Waiting to see who'll be here when the news breaks?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “Recruiting a lector, if I can. Simon Davies called up and quit. Just the beginning of our dismantling, I guess.”

I tell myself that Simon's quitting is nothing more than another display of immaturity, but I can't quite fight off the idea that after just a few weeks here, Simon sees St. Asella's more clearly than I did after more than a year.

At the start of his homily, Fr. Dunne makes the announcement that only Helen and I know is coming.

“My friends,” he says, “I received a call this week from the office of the Cardinal. I was told that the Archdiocese plans to close our parish in three months.”

In the pews, there are none of the courtroom-scene gasps and tittering I have been expecting. The parishioners are silent, except for one among them—an older woman I hear but cannot see—who cries out, “Oh, no!”

She seems to be asking,
Now this, too?

After mass, the sidewalk crowd hums with the nervous energy of residents displaced by an apartment fire. The realists are asking one another where they'll go to mass once St. Asella's doors are closed. Predictably, many make arguments for the parish next closest to their own home. Urging others to travel further, they tout the preaching abilities of priests they've only heard about and the architectural beauty of churches they've never entered. When they ask me what parish I'll choose, I say, “I really don't know,” and I ask them to cook a meal for Jeanne. I don't tell them the truth: that I have decided that my dalliance with Catholicism ends with my obligation here. The last mass at St. Asella's will be my last mass. My father's wisdom worked for him. It isn't working for me.

A few parishioners cannot accept the closing.

“Can we fight this?” Doreen asks me. She appears as dulled and weakened by terror as she was the time I took her to the clinic.

“We can try.”

She nods, waiting for me to say something more. I shrug and shake my head. After a few moments of silence, she leaves.

I begin my walk home. When I reach the stretch of sidewalk from which I made my impassioned defense of the St. Asella's community before Simon, my face reddens at the humiliating thought that he'd seen right through a lie I hadn't even realized I was telling.

 

•••

 

I AM WAITING 
for a client in the small, unattended lobby of her building the following Tuesday, the thirteenth of July, when my phone rings.

When I answer it, a woman's voice says, “Catherine Ferrán, please.”

Despite my women-in-small-business pride, I feel a little embarrassed to be answering my own phone.

“This is she,” I say.

“This is Claire Weber, calling on behalf of Daniel Shadid.”

I'm not sure if Claire realizes she's speaking to the person she has asked for, or if she's on auto-pilot and answering a question I haven't asked:
Can I tell her who's calling?

“Hello, Claire.”

“Hello, Catherine.”

I move to the glass façade of the lobby. I am
not
letting this call drop. “How can I help you?”

“I'm calling because Mr. Shadid—”

I briefly indulge my fantasy that the great Claire Weber hates herself for selling her agency and taking a cushy, in-house job that requires her—publicly, at least—to refer to her boss as “Mr. Shadid.”

“—has acquired a new property, and he would like me to consider you for the project.”

“Oh,” I say. “I'm flattered.”

In her long pause, Claire lets me know that I should be.

“Mr. Shadid has not yet closed on the property, but I have been granted access for a two-hour walkthrough this Sunday at noon. You will have the first hour to assess the space. In the second hour, you will share with me your initial impressions and recommendations. You're available to meet this Sunday?”

The conflict in the timing is as evident to me as it was when Nicola invited me to the conference session. I understand that taking this meeting with Claire will mean missing mass at St. Asella's. And this time, the decision is easy. Life is too short to keep going through the motions.

What I say to Claire Weber is, “I will be there.”

 

•••

 

SHADID'S LATEST ACQUISITION
 is a penthouse just east of the Magnificent Mile. At
4
,
200
square feet over two floors, it's the largest of his guesthouses for the famous and famously philanthropic.

I meet Claire Weber in the marble-floored lobby, and she leads me past a small army of doormen to a private elevator. Standing with one foot inside the elevator car, she swipes a fob in front of a black pad and presses the button next to the letter
P
on the control panel.

“You have an hour,” Claire says, stepping out of the car.

“Okay,” I say.

As the doors close and the elevator begins its forty-eight-floor ascent, I take a deep breath and try to forget how important the next hour is for my career. I tell myself that the same design principles that have served me so well in smaller units and in less impressive buildings will stand me in good stead in Daniel Shadid's new penthouse. But I cannot make myself believe that's true.

The elevator slows to a stop, and the doors open into the penthouse. I enter a long, narrow hallway with gently bending walls and walk toward the daylight reflected in the finish on the mahogany floor at the far end. When I reach the edge of the wall, I peer around it into the unit's great room. That the room is lined on three sides with floor-to-ceiling windows makes it seem somehow infinite. I take in the westward view. Looking out over the sprawling Chicago suburbs, I'd swear that I see the curve of the earth.

Daniel Shadid has found a space that might impress George Clooney.

Before I allow myself to consider recommendations, I walk the entire floor plan. The penthouse is fully built out but unfurnished. The walls have been painted a matte eggshell white. I count three bedrooms, each with a master bath. I open every closet to assess its space's potential as a humidor or a sauna or a sky-high, climate-controlled wine cellar. Off the largest bedroom is a vast, south-facing terrace. A glass door slides easily on its clean, lubricated track, and the air rushing out of the unit takes my breath with it. The terrace has a wrought-iron railing taller than my waist, but I approach it with caution. I've never been this high above the earth in open air before. Like a child, the first thing I do is look for my apartment building, but it's obscured by the reflective-glass façade of a boutique hotel one block north and another block east of it. My eyes pan right, and I recognize, in a gap between two skyscrapers, the green copper patina of the St. Asella's spire. My sense of obligation rises but doesn't put up much of a fight. By the time I'm standing inside the silence of the penthouse again, re-taming strands of hair the wind has pulled from bobby pins, I'm thinking only of the task I have less than an hour to complete.

There is a phenomenon in which a person who reaches the highest echelon of her field experiences insights that eluded her at its lower levels. In the hour I spend alone in the space, my talent somehow expands to encompass the penthouse and envision it as a conceptual whole. The penthouse is Gibraltar—the narrow entrance to the deep blue of the Mediterranean seascape, the gateway to my father's Spain, Shadid's Lebanon, and the Morocco of my travels. I see a distressed North African tapestry cut into four strips and hung horizontally on a wide white wall, posing an organic contrast to the cool modernity of the aluminum frames of the floor-to-ceiling windows. In each bedroom, I'll demand a subtle seascape—a color photograph or a rendering in oil—recasting the blue sky that surrounds the penthouse as the Mediterranean itself. For the great room, I'll commission a long table of reclaimed cedar, rough-hewn but carefully constructed to allow for the easy addition and subtraction of leaves. And on the wall of the largest bedroom, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for Shadid's most honored guests and a secret tribute to my father and the Spain he loved: a Picasso from Shadid's private collection.