Heaven Is Paved With Oreos

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  What’s most amazing to me, though—and to the tour guides who I was not-listening to who I learned a lot from, especially the British tour guide, who would sound smart no matter what he said—is what’s not in the picture. The reason St. Paul is lying there is that he’s having a vision of Jesus—a vision so huge that it knocked him right off his horse. The other man can’t see the vision, though. Neither can we. Neither can the horse. We can’t even see St. Paul’s face! Maybe he isn’t actually seeing anything. Maybe he is simply hallucinating. But he believes he is seeing Jesus Christ. And the real-life St. Paul believed it so much that he wrote all those books of the Bible that changed millions of people’s lives.

  I even like how the painting is hard to see because it’s in a corner. You have to work to understand it, but then when you finally see it you appreciate it more. It’s kind of like Miss Hesselgrave’s sentences.

  I can understand now how someone looking at this painting could fall in love.

  Wednesday, July 17

  We are on the plane. We got up extremely early and walked our last walk to the train station, and now we’re flying to Chicago. Then we have to go through customs and get on another plane to Minneapolis, where Mom will pick us up, and then we have to drive to Prophetstown to drop off Z, and then all the way to Red Bend! All in one day!

  I used to complain about how far it is from Red Bend to Prophetstown—ha.

  Z has her new journal out and her special expensive Roman fountain pen. She’s staring at the first page like she doesn’t know where to start. She looks at me:

  “I’m going to write down what happened.”

  “Okay,” I say. I don’t need her to explain what she’s talking about. We both know.

  Thursday, July 18

  Everything in America looks different—the people and the signs and even the trash cans. Isn’t that odd? My seven (There’s that number again! Pilgrimage churches . . . hills of Rome . . . days of the week . . . deadly sins—what is it with the number seven?) days in Rome have turned me upside down! Perhaps I was expecting things to be different in Rome so I was prepared for it, but back in the United States I thought that everything would be the same. And that, Miss Sarah Elizabeth Zorn, clearly isn’t going to happen.

  Mom and Paul picked us up—Paul came all the way from Planet Paul to be there. Mom said I must be coming down with a cold because everyone gets sick on airplanes. Normally I mind her feeling my forehead, but this time I was too tired to care.

  The drive back to Red Bend took forever. Mom and Paul kept asking questions, and Z was telling them funny stories and describing the pizza and our breakfasts and the bossy tour guides, but I didn’t say much. I mentioned the poached egg on my pizza, and the stationery store that I fell in love with. I said I found the store all by myself.

  Mom sat up: “You walked around alone?” She asked me, but she was looking at Z.

  “It was fine—” I began.

  “You don’t speak Italian! What would have happened if you got in trouble?” (“In trouble?” I thought. Oh, I know all about that.) “How would you explain yourself to the police? What if you got robbed?”

  “Wendy darling, she wasn’t going to get robbed—”

  “How would you know? Where were you when this transpired? Was she carrying her passport? Was she carrying cash? How could you let this happen?” Mom frowned at me: “How could you be so irresponsible?”

  Well, that was awkward. Then Mom asked what we did for Z’s birthday, and Z said we’d had a nice quiet dinner together. Obviously she wasn’t going to mention what really happened, which is fine with me.

  After a while we talked about something else. I told Paul about the pilgrims singing in the St. Paul church and how much he would have liked it. I didn’t say that it was the saddest song in the world. Paul said he was glad to have me back, and I don’t think he meant just for the rides with D.J. I didn’t ask, though.

  We dropped off Z. Just before we got to her apartment, Z handed me her expensive journal-notebook from the stationery store. Every page was covered with her expensive-fountain-pen writing. She put it in my hands and gave me a kiss. “Keep this.”

  I took it because Mom was watching and I didn’t have any choice, and I thanked Z for the amazing adventure and I waved goodbye.

  Once we were back on the road, Mom asked, “How was the trip really?”

  “I grew up a lot,” I said. I didn’t say anything more. I mean, I can say St. Peter’s is huge and I liked Maria Maggiore and it’s freaky how Romans put poached eggs on their pizzas, but that’s not what happened.

  At one point Mom asked, “Did Z have any wine?” Hmm, Mom, what are you really saying?

  “Sometimes. Everyone did. People drank wine with lunch.”

  “Did you?” As if a fourteen-year-old drinking wine with lunch could be the worst thing ever to happen. I had to laugh.

  “I tasted it once. It was fizzy, but it wasn’t champagne—it’s a European thing.”

  “Oh, a European thing.” Mom raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes. It is. But I only drank pop. Which is a European thing too. I had pop with lunch and supper.”

  Mom didn’t even really hear me because she was so busy with her next question. “Was it fun?”

  “Parts of it were.”

  “Was it safe?” she asked. Again.

  “Yes! Mom, I’m really tired . . .”

  Then we were home and I sleepwalked into the house and fell into bed and slept for hours and hours and hours. Today I woke up extremely late. I had some breakfast—a boring American breakfast of Cheerios from a box; no more tables of scrambled-egg pie—and I washed my clothes. They needed it.

  I am thinking about calling Curtis, but I won’t. I want to ask about Boris, but I won’t do that either. Boris is fine or he isn’t; that is the way it is sometimes with science.

  I am going to put this journal away and I don’t think I’m going to look at it for a long, long time.

  I have put Z’s notebook under my bed, under my box of American Girl clothes. No one will ever look for it there. I won’t look there. I will definitely not read it.

  But maybe I should read it. Right? I mean, I know what happened—that’s what Z talked to me about on the Spanish Steps on the night of her birthday—talked about and cried. But I have a huge feeling that there’s more to the story than what she told me. The giornale will have lots more of the story, probably . . . But maybe I don’t want to know. I am conflicted.

  Thursday, July 18—LATER

  Z’s journal is still there.

  Dear Paul and Sarah:

  I am writing this because you need to understand where you came from. Sarah, you deserve it especially because of our trip to Rome, and Paul . . . you will see why you do. I hope I can be honest. I have never been honest about this—not to your father or his father and certainly not to myself. I am terrible at explaining and terrible at apologizing—but I am very good at making mistakes! I hope that by writing this down, honestly, I will begin to make up for some of my mistakes.

  Goodness, isn’t that a depressing way to begin!

  As you know, I was born in Two Geese, Wisconsin. Two Geese is a small town now, but it was even smaller in 1949. Smaller in a lot of ways. Good girls ironed their skirts and crossed their legs and did what their parents and teachers told them. Bad girls—well, no one talked about bad girls. Everyone warned us about bad girls, but no one talked about them. I didn’t know what bad girls did, but I knew I never wanted to be a bad girl. Terrible things happened to them!

  Grandma Ann had me and Johnny and Janie and Ruthie and then eight years later—oops!—little Tommy. (That’s what “oops!” meant back then: pregnant.) As the oldest girl, I spent the first seventeen years of my life as a maid. A second mother. I washed and I changed (this was before disposable diapers!) and I cleaned and I minded . . . I ironed enough clothes to cover Wisconsin. Who cared if a toddler’s shirt was ironed? Grandma Ann, that’s who. Grandma Ann and every other w
oman in Two Geese. Every woman and every good girl. (Possibly every bad girl too, but I did not know any bad girls then. I befriended many “bad girls” later in life, and some of them were remarkably conscientious about ironing. The world is full of surprises.)

  Every girl I knew married a boy I knew. They stayed in Two Geese or close by, and they popped out babies like gumballs. I wanted to get married like everyone else, but I didn’t want babies to pop out of me. Not immediately. I wanted to know what I wanted first.

  And then I saw the Beatles. They first appeared on American television when I was your age, Sarah, and my life changed forever. This was music I had to have; this was an experience I had to be part of! I had three girlfriends in Two Geese who loved the Beatles as much as I did, and we would plot how to meet them and buy their records and marry them. Not necessarily in that order.

  From the Beatles, I discovered folk music, and rock and roll, and Motown. (Did you know you couldn’t buy Motown in Two Geese? I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but to this day I am appalled. The record store would not sell certain records because of the color of the performers’ skin!)

  I cannot say if it was the music or the era or me, but even before I fell in love with the Beatles, I knew that I could not remain in Two Geese. I could not live in my parents’ home working as an unpaid slave (I did not phrase it like this back then, but I felt it) until I became the slave of the man I married. I had to get out. And the only way a girl—a good girl—could get out of rural Wisconsin was with beauty or with brains. Well, I didn’t have much beauty, but I certainly had the will to study. I won a scholarship—beating a number of boys who had never once paused to think that a girl could actually best them in calculus and biology. (Sarah, you’re my granddaughter!) All while also serving as president and corresponding secretary of the Two Geese, Wisconsin, Beatles Fan Club.

  I left Two Geese for a fancy East Coast women’s college. I spent my freshman year going to classes and attending student teas and ironing my skirts, all while listening to folk music and doing what I could for civil rights (which was very little, but at the time I thought I was making a tremendous difference—I couldn’t wait for Martin Luther King, Jr., to thank Alice Zorn!). Oh, there was a lot of gum flapping back home about how the Zorn girl would get herself in trouble and how she was aiming above herself—but I didn’t care. I was going to prove them wrong. I listened to so much Bob Dylan that I practically wore out the album. We all did. We were all of us rolling stones.

  The summer after my freshman year, a professor offered a tour of Italy for art history majors. I wanted that tour so badly I could taste it. I wanted it almost as much as I wanted Paul McCartney, the very cutest and most talented Beatle. When I was in Italy, I might even meet Paul McCartney! Italy was on the same continent as England, after all. We could meet in a Tuscan church while discussing the early Renaissance . . . perhaps he would even kiss me. In fact, I was almost sure I’d meet him somewhere in Europe. It was fate.

  Every weekend night I spent baby-sitting to earn money for the trip. Perhaps that’s why I had so little energy for the civil-rights movement; I was too busy teaching professors’ children the words to “The Times They Are A-Changing.” I talked my way onto that tour. Ten of us girls plus one fusty male professor who was probably very relieved to see us go to bed each night. I don’t think he could have been older than thirty, but he certainly seemed old to us. Old and out of touch—he listened to jazz! He didn’t even smoke. If he even realized the times were a-changing, he kept that realization to himself.

  We visited Florence and Venice and Siena—the Italian cities of history and art. Our first day in Rome, we went to the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona and the Forum—all the classic sights. We visited St. Peter’s Square, where that old man really did dance with me. I discovered a couple of other girls had also read Lillian Hesselgrave, and they adored her as much as I did. Grouchy Miss Hesselgrave—she was the crazy lady who said things no one else dared to say. She would have been appalled by my impromptu St. Peter’s dance. And yet in touring Rome “unescorted,” Miss Hesselgrave did things that were equally radical and appalling. We needed to follow in her footsteps!

  We begged our professor to let us take the next day off—who wanted to spend a glorious sunny day stuck in the Vatican Museums? Not us! He agreed, finally—frankly, I think he was glad to see our backs—and so three of us spent the day marching through Rome, either ignoring the oogling men or oblivious to them, taking turns reading Miss Hesselgrave aloud at frequent café breaks. That’s why I can’t remember the churches—when we weren’t drinking coffee, we were drinking wine! Three giddy college girls, mad with freedom and amused to no end by this bossy Victorian pilgrim. We saw St. Paul’s (here’s to you, Paul!), St. John’s, Santa Croce, Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo . . . but we simply hadn’t daylight and energy enough to make it to San Sebastiano. Also, by that time I believe we’d lost our map. We vowed to finish the next day.

  The next day, however, we couldn’t. We were supposed to have a special guest lecture from a famous professor, an expert on the great Italian painter Caravaggio. But the professor canceled—I believe his wife was sick, or he had better things to do in July than speak to a bunch of giggling American girls. So he sent one of his students, a thin young man with light brown hair and blue eyes and the softest smile. He spoke softly, too, in wonderful English. I do not remember a word he said about Caravaggio that morning, but I will never forget his face as he talked. I was mesmerized. We all were.

  You can be sure there was a fair amount of jostling as to who would get to stand next to him and who would get to walk next to him as we went from church to church to see the paintings. I remember a girl from Virginia with false eyelashes and a dangerous smile who had the honor of sitting next to him at lunch. It was July 14, Bastille Day, my birthday—I was eighteen years old—and several of the girls wanted to buy me a birthday cake. They couldn’t find one, however, so they presented me with a cream puff with a ridiculously large candle stuck in it—they may have pinched the candle from a church. There was a fair bit of laughter about that. The Italian student was delighted by this ritual, and by the song “Happy Birthday.”

  Then we went to Santa Maria del Popolo—the very same church that Sarah and I visited. I don’t know if it was the painting or the cigarettes or my birthday, but there was most definitely an atmosphere! All of us silly American girls lined in front of The Conversion of St. Paul, and no sooner did this young man start talking than I began to cry. I tried not to show it, but I was truly moved. He noticed.

  After he finished lecturing, he took me aside to ask how I was—he was deeply impressed by how the painting had affected me—and we began to chat about my birthday and other things, and somehow it emerged that he was also a Beatles fan.

  You must understand that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out the month before. It was the Beatles’ new album, and it was . . . it was an earthquake. Nothing like Sgt. Pepper had ever happened in the history of music. It was crazy. I even took the album with me to Italy in the bottom of my luggage. Mind you, this was a huge vinyl LP, and we didn’t have a record player—I had no way to play it! But when we were in hotel rooms, four to a room, I would take the album out, and we would gather around and study the cover. We would sing it. We all had it memorized. We weren’t that bad, either.

  On an impulse I decided to confide in this young man. I explained my predicament: after two weeks in hotel rooms, I needed to hear Sgt. Pepper sung by real Beatles. Did he have a record player? He didn’t; he was only a poor student—but he could sing the songs to me.

  “But you’re not Paul McCartney,” I said—quite the flirt!

  “No,” he said softly. “But my name is Paolo. I am the Paul McCartney of Rome.”

  Well! From that moment, I was his. I was utterly, completely, engulfingly mad for Paolo Sanpietro, the Paul McCartney of Rome.

  We were under the strictest of curfews—we had to eat dinner in the h
otel, just to be safe!—but that night several of the girls honored love over virtue and helped me sneak out. Paolo said he would meet me on the Spanish Steps, and he did. He had a guitar and the loveliest singing voice, and we sat for hours discussing art and life and religion (we were both quite against religion’s constraints) and singing our way through Pepper. He wanted me to explain the more obscure lyrics. I’m not sure how good a job I did—there are parts of that album that I’m not sure even the Beatles could explain—but I did my best. He hung on my every word, and I on his.

  It was the kind of night you read about in fairy tales, when the fairy godmother grants the cinder girl one evening of happiness. Of course, fairy tales don’t mention what happens later . . . but at that moment I didn’t care. I was in the most romantic spot in the world, with the tenderest, smartest, most interesting man I had ever met. Granted, at that point in my life I’d met depressingly few men—Paolo would have cut a wide swath through Two Geese—but even with hindsight, I can say he was special.

  We were convinced we were in love. That we, after only a few hours, were already in love. Perhaps we were—who can say what love is? We must have sung “When I’m Sixty-Four” twelve times! And each time we sang it, it felt more like a love song. We made a pact that night that we, too, would be together when we were sixty-four. That we would be together when I turned sixty-four. Oh, it was so romantic. We promised each other that no matter what else happened (and what could possibly happen that would interfere with love?), we would meet on the Spanish Steps on the evening of my sixty-fourth birthday. “And I will kiss you and tell you you are beautiful,” he said, as only an Italian can.