Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  Nick made a face. He thought it very imperfect. Lisette rescued Riordan from further interrogations, emerging from the kitchen with Pamela and Anna Montoya, her nurse, a plump, pleasant woman who had been pressed into service as a sous-chef. She was carrying a tray covered in tinfoil.

  “This will be a binational, bicultural Thanksgiving feed,” Lisette announced and, with burlesqued élan, whipped the foil off five soup bowls. “First course: posole sonorense. Second will be turkey norteamericano.”

  Deferring to his companions’ secularist sensibilities (Anna excepted), Riordan said a silent grace. Lisette poured tequila into small, blue glasses for everyone, and they toasted one another’s health. In his half-starved state, Riordan gulped his soup with the table manners of Oliver Twist in the workhouse. He had to wait a few minutes before the others finished theirs. Then Lisette asked him to carve the turkey.

  “I can do it myself—I’m trained in minor surgery,” she said. “But it’s traditional for the man to carve, and I am in a traditional mood.”

  The ceremony was performed in the kitchen. As he whetted the carving knives, he flashed on a nostalgic picture of childhood Thanksgivings among his populous family, Grandfather Riordan at the head of the table, scraping a blade over the sharpening stone. In his younger days, before he opened Riordan’s Shamrock Lounge, a watering hole for varied species of Chicago wildlife—ward heelers, bookies, cops, newspapermen—Grandfather Riordan had been a meat cutter in the stockyards. He could disassemble a twenty-five-pound turkey before it got cold. Riordan’s skills weren’t up to those standards, but he figured he could do a passable job on Lisette’s smaller bird.

  “You do the breast this way, see…” He cut along the backbone, around the wings and thighs. “You take the breast out whole on both sides, then slice it crosswise.” The smell, the steam curling out from the body cavity made him light-headed. Unable to resist, he snatched a small chunk of white meat and swallowed it whole. “You’ll pardon me, Lisette? I’ve hardly eaten all day.”

  “So what’s with this fast? Are you purging toxins?”

  “No. It’s … it’s a personal thing.” Anna came in with the soup bowls and spoons and stacked them next to the sink. Although she did not understand much English, he waited till she left. “It has to do with someone who came to me for counseling…”

  He checked himself, unable to think how to proceed without violating a confidence.

  “I think I know who.” Lisette lay breast pieces around the edge of a platter. “She told me she was going to see you. What does she have to do with you fasting?”

  “I’m not free to say.” How far could he go, should he go? Had he gone too far already? “There were consequences.… I’m sure you know…”

  “Let’s us both be careful. We’re on thin ice here. Patient-doctor privilege,” she said.

  “I’m worried about her health,” Riordan confided. “That there might be consequences to the consequences. I don’t think she’s as aware of them as she should be.”

  Lisette paused in her preparation and looked at him. Her irises were the color of old pennies.

  “I think she needs to talk to someone besides me. A woman,” he added.

  Lisette piled drumsticks and stuffing between the ring of white meat and lifted the platter. “I’d say we’re out of bounds, Father Tim.”

  “Yes, we are. We’ll drop it.”

  “It’s decent of you to be concerned, but she’s not your responsibility. And not mine, either, unless she comes in and asks. I can’t tell a girl I barely know to come in for a woman-to-woman chitchat.”

  “No, of course not. My meaning was … Oh, I don’t know what the heck my meaning was.”

  “Get the gravy boat, please,” she said, shouldering the kitchen door open into the courtyard.

  They ate yellow rice and black beans, a Cuban specialty, with the turkey. That made it, Lisette said, a trinational Thanksgiving. She told Riordan about the experiences she, Nick, and Pamela had had on the drive from Tucson. Nick jumped in, declaring that he hadn’t been scared, and the arrest of the gunrunners had been a rush. If this was bravado, it was the bravado of ignorance. A privileged American kid had not the haziest notion of what could happen in certain parts of Mexico if you were careless or just unlucky.

  “Watch yourself while you’re here, Nick,” Riordan said, feeling obliged to offer counsel. “How you act, what you say.”

  “Hey, I’m cool.”

  “I’m sure you are. I’m also sure you’ve never been cut. My old boxing coach at Notre Dame taught us how to throw jabs and hooks and an axiom: ‘If you’ve never been cut, you don’t know shit.’ I’m quoting.”

  He grinned to show that he meant no insult to Nick’s intelligence. No offense intended, none taken. Nick merely laughed at hearing a Franciscan friar utter a four-letter word.

  Lisette nudged the conversation to the church’s refurbishment. She seemed eager to establish Pamela’s credentials in art restoration, while Pamela was no less eager to play down her expertise. She had not worked for museums, as Lisette had claimed, but for a company that repaired murals in municipal buildings, and that had been years ago.

  “A lot of the stuff we did was what you see in city halls and county court buildings—you know, big agricultural or industrial scenes, dreck, imitation Diego Rivera or Thomas Hart Benton.”

  It had grown twilit and chilly. Lisette lit candles in small jars and switched on the electric heater, which stood over them like a tall, mechanical servant awaiting orders.

  “But surely the techniques, the materials are the same, no matter what,” Riordan said.

  “They are, but I’m way out of practice. I wouldn’t feel confident taking on the paintings in your church.”

  “Nonsense!” Lisette cried. Then, to Riordan: “Pam is afflicted with acute self-effacement. It’s her Waspy upbringing.”

  Pamela scowled, but not at the comment about her upbringing; she disliked being spoken of as if she weren’t present. “How would you feel if you had to do an appendectomy when it had been years since your last one?”

  “Actually, I’ve never done an appendectomy, except on cadavers,” Lisette said. “But I wouldn’t let that stop me if I had to do one.”

  Riordan, following his instinct to play peacemaker, stepped in to avert a quarrel. “Why don’t you stop by the rectory tomorrow?” he said to Pamela. “I’ll show you the church. You can tell me what you think. No pressure. Around ten?”

  “That would be all right,” she answered as they took up forkfuls of pumpkin pie with far too much whipped cream for a man on a fast. Later, as Riordan left, Lisette planted another wet kiss on his cheek, and when he went to erase the lipstick, she grabbed his hand.

  “Don’t rub it off, Padre,” she said flirtatiously. “Like Bonnie Raitt sang…” She belted out the lyric in a mock-bluesy voice, her abundant chestnut hair flying as she swung her head from one side to the other. “‘Let’s give ’em something to talk about!’”

  There seemed to be something altogether excessive about this merry parting. “But not about that,” he said. “We don’t want them talking about that all over again.”

  She flicked her eyebrows comically at Nick and Pamela. “Once upon a time, there was gossip in town that me and the padre were gettin’ it on.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Nick groaned.

  Riordan walked home, feeling bloated and more out of sorts than he should have after a fine meal in good company. Entering the rectory courtyard, beyond the plaza lights’ glare, he looked up and saw Jupiter, as big and bright as a headlamp. On one of his morning vigils, he had spotted Callisto, the outermost of the four Galilean moons, with his naked eye. Poor Galileo, persecuted for daring to propose that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Riordan had resolved, within himself, the mossy conflict between science and faith. The church wasn’t as hidebound and intolerant as she had been four hundred years ago; she was capable of progress, though her pace was often glacial. The father of t
he big bang theory had been a Belgian priest named Georges LeMaître, and now astronomers from the Vatican observatory were charting the big bang’s first children: galaxies so distant it had taken twelve billion years for their light to reach the observatory’s scopes.

  He went to his room, turned on the desk lamp, and began to read from his worn leather-bound breviary. He couldn’t keep his mind on his evening prayers; it was fixated on that number, twelve billion light-years. A single light-year equaled more than six trillion miles, so the distance to those galaxies was twelve billion multiplied by six trillion. He could not grasp such a staggering figure. No human could, no more than a dog could grasp quadratic equations.

  This thought led him to lay down his breviary and pull a volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s writings from his bookshelf. He flipped through it to a passage he recalled underlining some time ago:

  Humanity with its pompous pretensions sinks to complete nothingness when viewed in relation to the unfathomed abysses of infinity and eternity which yawn about it. Man, so far from being the central and supreme object of Nature, is clearly demonstrated to be a mere incident, perhaps an accident, of a natural scheme whose boundless reach relegates him to total insignificance. His presence or absence, his life or death, are obviously matters of utter indifference to the plan of Nature as a whole.

  Riordan squinted at a note he’d scrawled in the margins: “The Holocaust? 6 million Jews murdered? Not significant in the grand scheme of things?”

  Quite a few people these days, some very bright people, shared Lovecraft’s view, and they reacted to it with a kind of insouciant despair that Riordan suspected was a pose; they went on living their lives as if they meant something. Lovecraft’s response was more honest: his perception of a cold, limitless void, empty of love and purpose, terrified him. Riordan knew he could not live in such a universe; he doubted that many could. Absent the divine fire of God’s love, which conferred value on human life, singly or in multitudes, it would be as toxic to the spirit and the heart as Pluto’s atmosphere was to the body. Of course, that didn’t prove God’s existence, only the human need to believe in Him.

  More of his notations, beginning at the top of the page, running down the right margin: “You might be vanishingly small, yet you are not nothing. What you do or fail to do does make a difference, even if the celestial bodies perform their usual motions with no regard to you or for you.”

  Those words snatched his mind out of the galactic, back to the tiny corner of the middling planet he inhabited and, finally, to the suffering microbe named Cristina Herrera. She was the source of the jangling discontent that continued to plague him, the sense of failure. Which brought him to the question he never could answer: Why do I think it’s my responsibility to save people from the wrongs that are done to them?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pamela knocked at the office door while he and Domingo Quiroga were searching the Web (when they could get online) and (when they couldn’t) the Hermosillo phone directory for a roofer to repair the cracked dome.

  He rose from his chair and let her in. She was dressed as if she meant to go to work that morning: a khaki shirt worn outside faded jeans, her hair pinned up under a bandanna. A straw tote bag swung from her shoulder.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” Riordan said, smiling.

  “You said ten.”

  “Around here that could mean any time between now and noon.”

  “Lisette calls me pathologically prompt—another condition from my Wasp upbringing.”

  Her hand made an awning over her mouth, apparently to hide the one blot on her beauty: teeth needing a good orthodontist. Odd, Riordan thought, that she hadn’t had them fixed. He told Domingo to carry on with the search and led her outside, around the church, then into it through a side entrance, the front doors being locked.

  “You’ve already started?” she asked, gesturing at the scaffolds.

  “I had four people in here. They commuted from Hermosillo. They quit on me a few months back. Because of the narcos. They were afraid of being kidnapped.”

  “That’s encouraging. Well, can I see?”

  When he flipped the light switches, illuminating the twenty-four bulbs in the silver chandelier, she flinched.

  “I know: it’s a bit—well, more than a bit—busy,” he said.

  Her glance darted up, down, to each side. There was too much for the eye to settle on any one thing: trompe l’oeil tiles low on the nave walls; depictions of pomegranates, bells, Franciscan cords, vines, angels, and grotesques higher up; the ephod symbolizing Aaron, the first priest; murals portraying the four evangelists; the gilded, baroque estipites above the altar, looking like giant candles dripping golden wax.

  “Busy? Busy?” she said, with a lift in her voice. “It’s overwhelming.”

  “It is at first, and there’s more in the transepts. But it’s really quite harmonious. If you sit in here and meditate, you can feel the harmony seep into you.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.” She italicized the statement with a skeptical look.

  “The harmony comes from mathematics. Mission churches in Mexico were built on mathematical principles. The idea is that mathematics leads you to God.” He’d fallen into his donnish mode. “It comes from the Spanish, and they got it from the Muslims, from the Moors.”

  “The Mudejars,” she said. “And they picked it up from the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras, Plotinus, that bunch of geniuses.”

  He’d never met anyone who wasn’t a scholar of early Spanish architecture who knew this. “That’s right! Right, right!” he gushed. “All numbers come from one, and the Creator is the One from whom all things come.” He pointed at powder-blue cherubim flying across the white cupola toward its apex. “Under there are the trusses and beams that … what’s the word I want? That come forth from the ridgepole. The trusses and the beams from the center of the circle are the radii. They represent the way God bestows being on his creation. The divine will is expressed in the radius. I’m boring you?”

  She shook her head. “Confusing me maybe.”

  “I like people to know that all this in here isn’t decoration, and the building itself isn’t merely architecture. It expresses praise to God.”

  “Uh-huh. Can you show me what needs doing?”

  “Everything. Which would take a team of skilled people three or four years. I’m hoping you might be able to fix up the murals, those and those.” Waving his arms, he indicated Matthew and Mark, peering through the scaffolds in the left side aisle toward Luke and John on the right. She handed Riordan her tote bag, then scaled the rungs to the narrow platform fifteen feet above and sidled along it, examining flakes in the paint, the blotches marring Saint Mark’s face, like a skin disease. Riordan called to her that he couldn’t join her because he was afraid of heights. As she climbed down, he found it impossible not to notice her shapely bottom, not to feel an attraction. On home leave a few years ago, as he was driving with his father down Michigan Avenue, the old man—he was then seventy-eight—ogled a woman young enough to be his granddaughter and almost ran a red light. “Lord, Dad, does it ever stop?” Riordan asked. “When you’re dead,” his father replied. “And if it stops before then, you might as well be dead.”

  Crossing to the opposite side, Pamela went up again, nimble as a gymnast, and studied the damage to Luke and John.

  “He was the best writer of the four, Saint Luke was,” Riordan said. “Acts reads like an adventure novel. Shipwrecks. Imprisonments. Dangerous journeys in distant lands.”

  He turned aside as she came down to keep his eyes off the tight curve of her rump.

  “What Acts?”

  “The Acts of the Apostles.”

  “You’re talking to an arch-heathen. I haven’t seen a Bible since my parents forced me to go to Sunday school, and I don’t remember a word of it. Another reason I may not be the one you want for this job.”

  “Competence, not faith, is the requirement,” he said, heartened by the
“may.”

  “Yeah. Like I said yesterday, I’m not too sure about that, either.”

  “To further disincentivize you, I couldn’t pay you a penny or a peso. We had a modest restoration fund, but most of it was used up. The rest of it and then some is going to fix a crack in the roof.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything,” she said airily. “If I come down here, and if I decide to take it on, it would be for Lisette’s sake. She seems to think I’d go bonkers without some big project that would get me out of the house. And maybe she’s right.”

  “I hope you decide to help out. Someone with your eye, your talent, a painter of your caliber—”

  “Could I hire you as my publicist?” she said, with a wink in her voice.

  “I once taught art history in high school,” he said. “Might have been a painter myself, but I’ve been told that to be a great artist, you need to have had an unhappy childhood. A cliché, I suppose.”

  “Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re true.”

  “I was the victim of a happy childhood,” he said, aware that he was talking too much. “Oh, my dad drank too much before he quit. But he was a functional drunk. A fun-loving drunk. There were eight of us. He used to say that he and my mother practiced the rhythm method so all their kids would know how to dance.… Sorry,” he added when she winced at the stale joke.

  He brought her to the transepts to show her, on the west wall, the fresco of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her blue-mantled figure surrounded by an almond-shaped sunburst. Pamela squinted at it through the scaffold’s lattice, the corners of her lips dropping to form pockets in her jaw, like dents in a walnut. Strange how he found even this sour look charming.

  “The gold leaf in that halo—” she started to say.

  “Mandorla, it’s called.”

  “Restoring that would take a lot of work,” she said, and sat down in the transept’s front pew, placing a notebook from her tote bag on one knee.