When she finally looked up and met his eyes, he smiled and said, “Thank you.” Sophie smiled back.
Now it was her turn. The person who knelt before her in a starched white shirt was Latino, about eleven-years old. He had rolled up his sleeves. The first thing the boy did was to look up and smile—no, grin—right at her. Yi. This kid is cheerful about doing this.
He didn’t just wash, he scrubbed her feet with the water. It took him some few minutes. Then, guiding her feet out of the basin, he dried them—he rubbed with vigor. He dried between her toes. When he was finished, he smiled again.
Sophie smiled back at him and said, “Thank you.”
“You are welcome.” He grinned.
She wished she could wash his feet. All of a sudden, she wished she could wash the feet of everybody in the place and keep on going; go right out the door onto River and Campbell and ask people if they’d like to have their feet washed.
She could continue south, then, right down to the border at Nogales where Paul Theroux had gone. She could cross that border and join the other Arizonans who went, daily, to serve the recently deported persons by washing their sore and cut feet.
The Reverence Bump
Finally, Dr. Darwin perceived that his son did not want to be a physician. He picked this idea up from his daughters, to whom their brother wrote. A reluctant physician was clearly no physician at all; Charles would be a failure.
It wasn’t long before Dr. Darwin got the idea that, as an alternative, Charles could go to Cambridge and study to become a clergyman. A country clergyman. That way, he could continue his shooting and staring at rocks and plants and fish and earn a living and no one would think it odd.
Charles did go to Cambridge with this in mind, but Sophie knew enough to know that in the scheme of things, he would change his viewpoint. He eventually wrote that the clergyman idea “died a natural death.”
He also said that after he became famous, some German psychologist asked for a photograph of him The Germans in a meeting had examined the picture and then discussed the shape of his head. One man “declared that I had the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests.”
Later Charles would write: “If the phrenologists are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a clergyman.”
Wherever her own reverence bump was, Sophie thought it was developed enough for twenty nuns. A whole choir full.
The difference between Sophie and Charles was that she had been raised Roman Catholic and he had been raised in somewhat tepid Anglican and Unitarian milieus. But it was not only that.
Sophie’s sister had been raised Catholic, too, but it hadn’t set Judith’s imagination spinning as it had Sophie’s, who had thought about entering the convent. Being a nun would prolong her romance with the power of image and the power of service in the love of God.
As an eighth grader she’d mentioned her interest in the convent to her father. That maybe she’d like to go there.
“The convent.”
“Yes. Maybe the Maryknolls. And life in Africa. All those exotic animals.”
She figured her father would like that part of it. In the evenings he would read and re-read the National Geographic. “You know, Dad. Giraffes, elephants. Orangutans. Zebras. Antelopes.”
“I see,” he said. “And you’d also, perhaps like to work with people?”
This embarrassed her. He had her number.
“Oh, of course, people.”
He said, “Okay.”
Her mother said, “Ralph. ‘Okay’ ? Did you just say, ‘Okay’ ?”
“But whatever you do,” he said to Sophie, “think about going to college first. Just try college.”
And that was how Sophie ended up in Chicago, a student at Mundelein College—Sheridan Road at the Lake. It was the “Skyscraper College,” an Art Deco building; the first classes had been held in 1930.
She chose it because it was in Chicago, which sounded magical and sophisticated; she could live with her Aunt Lucy on the far north side as the college was mostly a day school. And, yes of course, because it was Catholic but also because it was supposed to have a theology department of the liberal persuasion (the order of nuns who owned and ran it had close ties to the Jesuits) and she wanted to expand the reverence bump there, if not in the convent.
And that, in turn, was how she came to read Teilhard de Chardin and Henri de Lubac and Gabriel Marcel and Karl Rahner. And with astonishment, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber.
Years later, she jumped when she read in Humboldt’s Gift that Rinaldo Cantabile—that crook!—liked to boast about the fact that his wife taught at Mundelein. What? Cantabile wanted Charlie to know that his wife was smart, classy, a brain; besides teaching, she was working on a doctoral thesis at Radcliffe. She didn't sit around at home all day.”
Sophie thought that Bellow chose Mundelein because its name smacked of a certain respectability; she wondered if Mr. Bellow knew what was really going on there. That it was a kind of time-machine propelling bright young women—called “Mundel Bundles” by the boys at Loyola—into the expanding future. Even in the ‘40s, the fourteen-story college had one of the country’s highest observatories containing a telescope and the longest Foucault Pendulum in existence at the time. Saul Bellow probably didn’t know that or he surely would have used it to comic advantage.
Mundelein was where she met Richard, who was teaching a course she took: Geography. Wouldn’t you know, the “liberal” Mundelein College would hire a youngish man as a faculty member and that he would be a Protestant—the kind of person from whom Catholic girls should stay apart. On top of that, she heard that he had just been divorced. Had she known any divorced persons in St. Paul? Maybe one or two.
She did stay strictly apart from him until after she graduated and then she couldn’t bear the thought of living without him. He asked her to marry him. She said yes.
When Sophie went back to St. Paul and spoke to her parish priest about it, a web of complications appeared. Father Finn put his fingertips together. “Was your—er—friend, baptized?”
“Yes. His name is Richard. In the Christian Church. The Disciples of Christ.”
Father Finn considered this and then smiled in an indulgent manner. “Was his wife baptized?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Ah. May I ask why your friend was divorced?”
“His ex-wife is mentally ill. He sometimes feared for his own life when he was with her.”
Father Finn was interested. “Ah. Mentally ill.”
“Yes.”
“Then there is some hope.”
“Hope?”
“For annulment. Was your friend’s wife ill at the time they were married?”
“I think so, but Richard didn’t grasp the depths of it. He was young. She was brilliant.”
“Ah. Then there is the possibility of annulment. The matrimony would be invalid when one of the parties was not mentally competent. Of course the woman in question would have to be notified—served, if you will, with the papers. But we could set the process in motion.”
“I don’t believe we would want to do that.”
Father Finn raised his eyebrows. “No?”
“No. I’m quite sure that we do not want to be serving Rosalind with annulment papers.”
“Rosalind.” Maybe her name sounded hopeless; Father Finn tried a new tack. He wanted to know how Richard had been baptized.
“I beg your pardon?
“How he was baptized?”
“How?”
“Yes. To begin: was he baptized with water?”
What else? “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Secondly. Was he baptized by immersion or by sprinkling or by means of water poured over the forehead?”
“Immersion.”
“Now. Was he baptized in the name of the Fa
ther and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost?” Father Finn leaned forward. Then, since he perceived that Sophie was thinking, he shook a cigarette out of his Salem package and lit it.
“I don’t know about that.”
He inhaled and then exhaled. “I would ask him. Because often Protestants are not baptized in that fashion—often the name of the Holy Ghost is left out—and if the name of the Holy Ghost was left out, your friend is not actually baptized.”
“He isn’t?”
“He is not. Which means his first marriage would be invalid.”
“Oh, but—”
“Marriage is only valid in Mother Church’s eyes if it is contracted between two baptized persons. We find this in the Code of Canon Law, Section 1055. Marriage,” he said, “is after all a sacrament.”
Was it a sin to think of a priest as fatuous? Probably. On the other hand—the poor man. Just doing the right thing; taking Holy Orders and then just doing what he had been taught to do.
“And—” He was working his way to a dramatic conclusion. He tapped his cigarette carefully on an engraved ashtray. “If your friend was not really married, then the two of you could be married in Holy Mother Church.”
Sophie sat back in her chair.
“Of course, he would need to take Instructions and promise to raise the children in the Catholic Church.”
Richard’s response to the details of the rite of baptism was that he at the age of ten he was so self-conscious about his immersion that he neither heard nor understood what was going on. “But if you like,” he said, “I think we could say I didn’t hear the Holy Ghost mentioned. The word ‘ghost,’ if I heard it, would have gotten my attention. On the other hand,” he said, “it would be hard to say, difficult as it was, that I was never really married to Roz.”
“You could come to Mass and sit,” Father Finn said when Sophie told him the news: Richard would not deny that he had been married. “But you could not receive communion. Because—”
“Because I would be excommunicated if I married Richard outside the Church.”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
Sophie had the reverence bump but it did not include that squishy subsection that would sit still for excommunication. She would not go to Mass and stay in her pew at communion time. They were married outside the church.
After Richard died her Aunt Lucy had said, “Now. You can come back to the Catholic Church.”
Nuts.
Cambridge
Sophie ended up with a theology/philosophy minor and so could more or less follow the ins and outs of Charles Darwin’s views on religion. His honest feeling was that he could or would not truthfully say “yes” when asked in the ordination service if he was “inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit.” On the other hand, he more or less felt comfortable with the natural theology embraced by his professors in various forms.
William Paley’s works on moral philosophy and the natural world led some to believe God was the source of design in the universe. Charles read his Paley, whose clear prose gave him “…as much delight as Euclid.”
More progressive than Paley were those professors who simply said the investigation of the natural world was an investigation into the divine creator’s works. Charles’s mentor and friend at Cambridge, the scientist Professor Henslow, was deeply religious.
“Polly,” Sophie said. Polly looked as though she were smiling, head atilt, eyes shining.
“Polly, that was the way I looked at things by the time I was a young adult, by the time I left Mundelein.”
Polly rose and sat on her haunches. Her tail moved to the left and back again.
“No, Polly, not outside right now. When I was in college whatever was, on earth, was right. And we would only see more deeply into the mystery of the world as time went on.”
The rough white tail drooped at what might have sounded like the beginning of a discourse rather than a walk. But instead came poetry.
“As in, ‘The world,’” Sophie began,
“‘…is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed…’”
She did not even have to pull out her Hopkins. She was confident, from memory, about the indentations of the lines on the woodsy-smelling pages of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets page.
She had always thought she would try some counted cross-stitch calligraphy on linen with these lines from the poem and a few images scattered around. But she daydreamed that she would update the images. Modernize them. The shook foil could be Reynolds Wrap? Maybe use an oil derrick? Prada pumps for the shod foot not feeling the soil? Wings, of course, and some sort of back-lit blackening sky. And for all this how to represent the breast of the Holy Spirit. A warm breast. Perhaps the puffy breast feathers of a Passenger Pigeon, since many people now thought of the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit in that way—flat-out extinct as far as they were concerned.
Once upon a time at the Smithsonian the last known Passenger Pigeon, Martha, had been displayed in a case with the inscription:
MARTHA
Last of her species, died at 1 p.m.,
1 September 1914, age 29, in the
Cincinnati Zoological Garden.
EXTINCT
Before she died, she trembled from a palsy and had never laid a fertile egg. No longer was the dead Martha on display; she is somewhere in the back rooms.
That was it; Sophie would create a cross-stitch Passenger Pigeon with cross-stitch eyes:
x x
And it would be the female of the species whose breast had been, reportedly, a light cinnamon-rose color.
Polly lay back down. She snapped at a fly, a rarity in the little house in the desert. She did not miss her prey.
Apart from his reading in natural theology, Charles was thoroughly enjoying himself in many ways, one of which was collecting beetles. One beetle that he loved was Panageous or Panagaeus crux major: the Crucifix Ground Beetle. Charles would refer to it as “sacred.”
Sophie laughed out loud and Polly briefly raised her head. Just think of how many Darwin scholars these days would want to qualify that.
Like Lucy in Peanuts, one and then another scholar would say, “SACRED! Now don’t take it that Darwin meant SACRED in a RELIGIOUS sense. He didn’t REALLY mean, even then, SACRED! Don’t get any IDEAS!”
She looked from where she had found the beetle on Clip Art to the ground outside her study and scanned the small stones for movement. Could she find one in the desert? She longed to do just that. Never in her life had she so much as given a thought to collecting a beetle. And now, of all times, when she was aging and had chosen a small space in which to live—where in the world would she put a beetle collection-case?
The answer was that for the moment she could forget about that; short of a miracle, she would not find a crux major. “Only known,” Arkive.org reported, “today from four sites: the Lower Derwent Valley in Yorkshire, Pembrey Burrows in Dyfed, Wales, Saltfleetby and Theddlethorpe Dunes National Nature Reserve in Lincolnshire, and the Rother Valley in Sussex. The beetle was once more widespread in its distribution, being recorded over much of eastern England and parts of the midlands.”
“Polly. Listen to the wonderful names. Saltfleetby. Theddlethorpe. Theddlethorpe.”
And the Arkive also said that the beetle was classified as “Vulnerable” in the United Kingdom and that the last species was seen in Wales in 1998.
Sophie read that Charles could remember from the Cambridge days, the “exact appearance of certain posts, old trees and banks” where he had made a good capture of beetles. It was just like her memories of indentations for poems on the printed page. The indentations were her posts, trees, and banks.
But now. What if she set herself to memo
rize the indentations and extrusions in the earth, in the desert itself. A new occupation. Going outside. Getting up out of her chair. All because of the fleeting memory of a cramped but beautifully organized cabin.
At Cambridge, there was the joy of beetles but also the enjoyment of the countryside and of music and art. Hearing an anthem on walks past King’s College Chapel made his “backbone shiver.” And he frequently went to the Fitzwilliam Gallery.
Sophie didn’t mention to Polly that there were beloved dogs during those days: Fan and Dash. Better to keep her in the dark.
Charles was also a member of one of the many eating clubs that existed. Depending on which version of his son Francis’s recollections she looked at, it was called The Gourmet Club or the Glutton Club. Sophie herself liked “Glutton.”
One member of Charles’s club told Francis that they set out to eat things they thought might not have been exactly savored at table before: a hawk, a bittern, and finally an old brown owl. The dinner parties often ended with a game of vingt-et-un. Drinking was involved and though he mentions being ashamed of some of these evenings, he also says he couldn’t help looking back on them with “much pleasure.”
The hawk, the bittern, the old brown owl. Sophie remembered something that William James’s friend, Benjamin Blood, had said or written and she went through notes in her James folder looking for it.
She found it. “Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not, save to bring the different.”
And here she was, she thought, a secret member of the Glutton Club. She was doing the same now in the wild Sonoran desert: setting out to absorb things she could not have found at East Coast tables.
These fun-loving Glutton Club Cambridge young men ended up—where? A man named Whitley became Honorary Canon of Durham; some others were:
Mr. Heaviside—eventually Canon of Norwich
The Crossings Page 8