The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “Then what happens? I mean if you change your mind?”

  “Then there’s got to be a trial. And everybody, including your lawyer, will be thoroughly pissed at you because you’ve been wasting their time.”

  Instead of walking straight home, I turned down Prairie Street toward Saint Clement’s. I was feeling very calm, as if I’d been diagnosed with a fatal illness and had come to terms with it, had been very brave and had accepted it as my cross without complaining. Or as if I’d taken up Zen meditation to calm my mind, or Qigong, or started on a twelve-step program. I kept this knowledge inside me. It sustained me.

  I entered the church from the south side. Father Viglietti’s wisteria had gone into overdrive, and needed a fall pruning. As I was climbing the steps I imagined that the church was the convent up in Wisconsin and that I was visiting my aunt and that we’d soon be drinking tea in the library with Sister Teresa from Father Adrian’s class in Rome. At the same time I saw myself from the outside, as if part of me were standing in the parking lot, and thought, this is a picture of a woman about to enter a convent.

  I was, I suppose, clinging to the idea that the universe itself cares, in some way, about our behavior. That the rules are grounded in something. Natural law. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas. Not just a Lucretian universe of swerving electrons. But something’s got to care, doesn’t it? There’s got to be something at the center. You can’t just do whatever you want. Everybody knows that. Don’t they?

  There was no midweek service. The church was empty, but I’d taken up the piano again, and the music rushing through my head—Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Dr. John—seemed to fill the nave and the side aisles and the little chapel where Father Viglietti had blessed the soul of Stella’s unborn child. I sat quietly by the side exit for a while. Waiting.

  “Frankeska.” Finally. A familiar voice: “Non diu te vidi.” It’s been a long time.

  It was good to hear Latin again, even though God mangled my name, as he always did, with his classical pronunciation. “Paene decem annos,” I said. Almost ten years.

  “Nine years and three days,” he said. “Parata salire videris.” You look like you’re ready to jump.

  “Fere parata,” I said. Just about.

  “You’re doing the right thing.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “You remember what Father Viglietti told you after Paul died? ‘You’re at the threshold of a new and abundant life. You have to go forward or go back’? And he was right, wasn’t he?”

  “I suppose. In a way.”

  “In an important way, Frankeska. But instead of going forward you went back. Look at your life now. What have you been doing? You went right back to teaching a dead language. Even the Church has given it up. You and I are the only ones left in town who can speak it. You got a huge chunk of money for a car that someone left in your garage and what did you do? You drove the car a hundred miles an hour—you could have killed someone, you know. Someone else. You could have done some real good with that money, but instead you turned it over to your daughter so she could turn it into even more money. You’ve kept right on dabbling in Latin poetry that people read only for the dirty bits. How many people are going to read Catullus Redivivus anyway? You’ve been dabbling in astronomy. You can identify thirty major constellations, but you’ve never invested in a real telescope. And you’ve been dabbling at the piano. You can play a few simple Chopin preludes and a Brahms waltz or two, but you’ll never play the Étude in C Minor, and you know it. You’ll be lucky to get your fingers around “C. C. Rider.” Have you ever really examined your life? Have you ever confronted the big questions head on? Have you ever paid attention to the inner religious life that wells up from the unconscious in times of disaster or of great joy? The inner life that began to emerge after Paul’s death, and then after Stella was almost killed? After you murdered your son-in-law? Or did you turn away? Did you try to tamp it down? Murdering Jimmy may be the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life. It took real courage; it grew out of deep feelings. It meant something. But then you ran away from the consequences. You tried not to think about them. You fooled the police with your extra .38. That was clever. You wouldn’t listen to me. But now you have a chance to change lead into gold. Now you’re at a new threshold. You’re standing right where Saint Paul stood when he was arrested and imprisoned in Rome. Boethius, too, and Hugo Grotius, Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan, Sir Walter Raleigh, Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Koestler, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela.”

  “All men,” I said.

  “Kate Richards O’Hare,” he said. “Zarah Ghahramani, Malika Oufkir, Angela Davis, Nawal El Saadawi. You could add your name to the list of women writing from prison.”

  “Me?”

  “You, Frankezka. Why not? You’re at the beginning of a great spiritual adventure. Don’t turn back. Don’t let yourself get distracted. Go to Rome, if you need to. Make your confession to Father Viglietti. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Pater,” I said. “Make that sound again. The music of the spheres.”

  He laughed, and then he made the sound again. I could still hear it rumbling in my ears as I left the church.

  I don’t suppose anyone expects very much from a new translation of an old poet—I know I didn’t—but before the classical journals had a chance to weigh in, Catullus Redivivus received a “briefly noted” review in the New Yorker that stunned me. New Yorkers continue to arrive, as they’ve done for years. They disappear for a while and then resurface, sometimes years later. So I didn’t see the review until I got a call from my editor at Hausmann in Brooklyn, who read it aloud to me over the phone. But I wanted to see it with my own eyes. I couldn’t locate my current issue, so I went to the public library. And there it was. “High-minded and fine,” it said. I was blown away. I’d never thought of myself as high-minded and fine. Nor Catullus. “Everything about this translation is high-minded and fine, even the naughty poems, which snap off the page and sting like nettles . . . and Godwin breathes new life into the long epithalamia . . .” I made a copy. I didn’t have any change, didn’t have any money at all, didn’t have my purse. I borrowed a dime from the reference librarian, who knew me, at least knew my face. I got the magazine positioned the wrong way on the copy machine and had to borrow another dime.

  This good news did not distract me. In fact it strengthened my resolve. I was acting from strength, not weakness.

  When I got home there was a bill from David in the mailbox. He was an old friend, but he charged me three hundred dollars. I hadn’t realized we’d talked for two hours. I sent him a copy of Catullus Redivivus, inscribed with a line from number 49, originally addressed to Cicero: “optimus omnium patronus,” the best advocate of all.

  I flew to Verona on my way to Rome. I left Chicago on the last Friday of September and arrived in Verona the next day, after a long lay­over in Frankfurt. I wanted to go back to Verona because Paul and I had been so happy in Verona. We’d been as happy in Verona as we’d ever been—as happy as any two people could ever be. Things were conspiring to make us happy—the success of Paul’s book—Shakespeare and the Invention of the Inner Life—the publication of my own translation of Catullus 62 (“Vesper adest”) in the New Yorker, the maturing of our love into a relaxed and companionable marriage, the bright promise of our daughter, Stella, who came to visit in December and stayed till we all went home together for Christmas.

  I wanted to taste that happiness again. One more time, if only in memory. Before making my confession. In Catullus’s hometown. Romeo and Juliet’s hometown, too. I wanted to look for the Catullus codex in the Biblioteca Capitolare. No doubt I would find it where God had told me to look. I wanted to visit Sirmio, the Catullus family estate on Lake Garda. I wanted to sit on a bench looking out at the lake. I wanted to wait for Paul where we’d waited for each other so many years earlier: the bookstore at the end of via Capello, or at a table in Piazza delle Erbe, or in the Caffè Dante in Piazza Sig
nori, or in the courtyard of the university library. I wanted to wait for Paul’s spirit on the balcony of Juliet’s house on the anniversary of his death, as I’d waited so many times in our own living room, eating lamb chops coated with Parmesan cheese and drinking some of the Barolo, and then saving some for later, to drink with Stella and Ruthy, though we’d already drunk the last bottle. And I wanted to say good-bye.

  Goethe was thirty-seven years old when he arrived in Verona in September 1786, and he already felt at home in Italy. I was sixty-six when I arrived for my second visit, but I felt like an adolescent—insecure, anxious, inadequate, disoriented, unable to make a simple phone call from the airport because I couldn’t get the new smart phone that Stella had given me to work. I was reminded every time by the newspaper headings that the global financial market was collapsing, taking Paul’s TIAA-CREF and my TRS savings with it; I had to remind myself that I had sold a car for more than seven hundred thousand dollars and that I could expect to be earning close to eighty thousand dollars a year, in quarterly installments, from my investment in Gagliano Produce, Inc.

  Looking back I realize that I always feel this way when I come to Italy, and I’m happy to recall that even the great Goethe was sufficiently concerned about fitting in that he stopped wearing his high boots in Verona when he noticed people staring; he was also concerned about the rate of exchange, about changing money, about paying bills, and even about finding a bathroom.

  I took a cab to the apartment that Stella had found for me on the Internet, on via Vipacco, across the street from the university library, and sat on the steps for two hours, wishing I were someone else in some other city, Florence, Bologna, or Rome, or even Galesburg. How had I wound up on these hard steps? My bladder was about to burst by the time the padrona came home. The padrona, Samantha, was younger than I had expected. She was beautiful in a hard European way, and she was in a hurry, but not in too much of a hurry to collect the rent. In cash. Eight hundred expensive euros that I’d had to special order at the bank in Galesburg. Samantha was in a play that night, she explained. She had to leave immediately, but she promised to come by in the morning. All this in English. I was too tired to argue or to force the conversation into Italian.

  Instead of taking a nap I walked down via Capello—the old Roman cardo or main street—to Piazza delle Erbe, which would have been the Roman forum when Catullus was a boy in Verona, and where Romeo undoubtedly killed Tybalt, and then over to the apartment where Paul and I had lived, on via Pigna, near the Ponte Pietra, the oldest bridge in the city.

  On the way home I stopped at the Casa di Giulietta. I had to push my way through a crowd of young people who were scribbling messages to Juliet on the walls of the corridor that opened into the courtyard. Along one wall of the corridor people were listening to recordings on machines, holding receivers—like telephone receivers—up to their ears. The shop in the courtyard was full of unbearably cute gifts: dozens of little books on love, little plastic purses with Juliet or Giulietta printed on them, bright red aprons with I LOVE JULIET embroidered on them in white thread. Guide books. Postcards. Romeo-and-Juliet key chains. Romeo-and-Juliet earrings. Romeo-and-Juliet salt and pepper shakers. In the courtyard people were lining up in front of a large bronze statue of Juliet to rub her right breast. For luck, or for a new lover. Would-be Romeos stood in the courtyard and photographed would-be Juliets up on the famous balcony. Paul had taken my picture on that balcony, which had been added in the 1930s to look like the balcony in the George Cukor film.

  I didn’t go into the house itself—because it was getting late—but I bought an Italian translation of Romeo and Juliet in the gift shop.

  That evening I was going to read for a while and then cobble together a dinner from some spaghetti and garlic Samantha had arranged on the kitchen table, along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, a packet of bread sticks wrapped in cellophane, and a large bottle of red wine. The table was covered with a bright yellow cloth.

  But after a second glass of wine, sitting alone in the empty apartment on via Vipacco, my copy of Romeo e Giulietta unopened on the kitchen table, I began to fantasize that Paul’s spirit would show up in Verona. I didn’t want it to go to Lois’s.

  “Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said aloud, surprising myself, as I peeled a clove of garlic. “What an adventure this would be if you were here. Not the way you were at the end, but . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence, but I was thinking, remembering Paul at his sixty-third birthday party, before the cancer, when we first talked about returning to Verona. You couldn’t see the top of the harvest table for all the dishes and wine bottles, but I could see Paul presiding at the far end: bawdy, Falstaffian. The whole department was there, and Paul was singing:

  No more dams I’ll make for fish

  Nor fetch in firing

  At requiring;

  Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish

  ’Ban, ’Ban, Cacaliban

  Has a new master: get a new man.

  Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom,

  high-day, freedom!

  “Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said again, as if I were sitting on the edge of his bed again on the day that he died. “You know what I really want? I want to set things right again. All this time I’ve blamed you. Maybe Dr. Franklin was right. I should have been more understanding. I see now that there was plenty of room for the books and for the piano. But I’ll have to leave that for someone else. And Jimmy. I killed Jimmy, you know. He had it coming, but I’m sorry anyway. I’m going to confess to Father Viglietti in Rome. He doesn’t know it yet. You remember Father Viglietti, of course you do. He spoke at your memorial service at the college.”

  I tried to concentrate on the clove of garlic I was trying to slice with a dull knife. I poured a little olive oil into a saucepan that weighed about two ounces—the sort of saucepan you find in vacation cottages—and turned the gas on.

  I tried again to call Stella, but there was no land line in the apartment and I still couldn’t get the new cell phone she’d given me to work. There were too many options, too many buttons. I tried several times, following her written instructions, dialing the code for the U.S. number over and over again, but before I could enter her cell phone number, a voice in Italian would interrupt and explain why this call couldn’t be made. My Italian is pretty good, but I couldn’t understand the explanation.

  I had brought with me a CD that Stella had made for Paul and me, a Christmas present, with recordings that she’d transferred from old cassette tapes to GarageBand and from GarageBand to iTunes and from iTunes to the CD. It contained a short version of the story of our life as a family, or at least one version of that story: Stella reading some of her early poems and playing the piano; me playing Chopin and reading my translations; Paul reading Shakespeare sonnets and playing the piano.

  I inserted the CD into the slot on the front of my laptop computer and waited, while the computer made grinding noises, for the CD icon to appear on the screen. When it did, I double clicked it, and suddenly Paul’s voice filled the room: “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.”

  I thought about Paul and Lois. “You always were a dark-lady guy, Paul, weren’t you. Couldn’t keep your hands off Lois when I went to Rome that summer. You thought I didn’t know.”

  But I managed to stop myself right there. Who was I to talk? Besides, I hadn’t come to Verona to scold Paul.

  I added a handful of coarse salt to the pasta water and then a handful of thick spaghetti. There was no scale to weigh the spaghetti and no timer to time it, but I had an inner scale, and an inner timer.

  I gave the spaghetti a stir with a wooden spoon. I was on my third glass of wine. Paul was on sonnet 138. I repeated the words along with him. “‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her though I know she lies.’ It was a mid-life crisis,” I said. “I was very understanding. I took a certain pleasure, in fact, in being very understanding. And I really was understand
ing. I wasn’t faking it. That was twenty-five years ago, ancient history. And then one day I come home from school—the last faculty meeting of the year—and you’re dead and Lois is sitting on the bed next to you.

  “Ah, the hell with it . . . What am I doing here? Talking to a ghost? Not even a ghost!”

  By the end of the evening, and of the bottle of wine, I had no idea.

  I woke up with jet lag aggravated by a terrible hangover. I was still disoriented. I was confused and depressed. I’d crossed a line the previous night. Made a fool of myself. At least no one had been there to see me. I didn’t see how I could go back, didn’t see how I could go forward, either, couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do in Verona. Or Rome. The prospect of confession to Father Viglietti now seemed like a foolish pipe dream.

  I tried to make coffee in the espresso pot, but the espresso pot leaked from the center, where the top screws onto the bottom. The coffee ran down the side. The gas flame sputtered and went out. I turned off the stove. I hadn’t unpacked my suitcase and didn’t intend to. I was going home ASAP.

  I tried again to call Stella but got the same calm voice explaining that this call was not possible. I tried calling from different parts of the apartment—from the balcony off the kitchen, from the window in the bedroom, on the north wall. Always the same voice explaining why the call couldn’t be completed. I listened to the explanation, but I still couldn’t understand.

  I got some clean clothes out of my big suitcase, something suitable for confronting a padrona—a simple sheath dress, gathered at the waist, and a pair of flats. I was trying to get a brush through my tangled hair when the bell rang. I hadn’t cleaned up the mess on the stove. I didn’t care. I wanted my money back. Most of it, anyway. But there was no confrontation. Samantha returned the money, eight bank notes, which were still in her purse. Eight crisp one-hundred-euro notes, each with a picture of a Renaissance palazzo with receding arches. She agreed to help me change my return flight, and apologized about the coffee pot. It was a special pot, she said. You needed only a small amount of water.