The Chapel
Copyright © 2015 Michael Downing
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
Cover design: Faceout Studios
Interior design: Domini Dragoone
Photos and illustrations courtesy of the author except: pg. 51 from Giotto by Francesca Flores d’Arcais; pg. 166 and 198 (top) © BananaFish/DollarPhotoClub; pg. 167 and 195 courtesy of Matt Hobbs/Public Domain Archive; pg. 171, 172, and 265 courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston; pg. 193 and 198 (bottom) © Roman Sigaev/DollarPhotoClub; pg. 194 and 199 (top) © Salvo77 Na/DollarPhotoClub.
Counterpoint Press
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-634-6
Contents
Part I: Padua
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Part II: Padova
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Acknowledgments
for Peter Bryant,
per tutto questo—assolutamente tutto
Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head.
—HAROLD BRODKEY
PART I: PADUA
I
The first time I got lost in Paris, I was not alone. Mitchell was holding my hand, a habit he’d suddenly acquired while we were boarding the airplane in Boston to begin our belated honeymoon. We’d never flown together, so I initially chalked this up to nerves. But he latched on for the entire taxi ride from the airport to our hotel, and during the next few days he often reached across a café table and squeezed my hand or laced his fingers into mine as we left a museum, pulling me nearer to him, as if he wanted to reassure me, as if our three-year marriage had been a trial period and this trip signaled his decision to stay and brave the future with me at his side. Despite the city’s amorous reputation, most of the hand-holding I noticed among Parisians that week involved teenage girls or children under the age of six, but that was true of short pants and white socks, too. Mitchell had packed only one pair of full-length trousers. He did bring a suit, his wedding attire, which came out for a fancy dinner and never saw Paris again.
After that trip, neither did we. But we got lost together that breezy blue day in the Marais.
We had set out from the Louvre to find a famously cheap bistro recommended by one of Mitchell’s colleagues at Boston College. However, the promise of a hot pile of pommes frites receded block by block as we passed window displays of increasingly pricey petits fours, perfume, and pearls. Finally, Mitchell said, “I don’t think any of these places would serve French fries.”
I said, “These places wouldn’t serve us.”
“You look like a native,” he said. “I look a little too beatnik.”
More Boy Scout than Left Bank, I thought. Mitchell was a handsome, barrel-chested man with a close-cropped mat of wavy dark hair slightly receding at the top of his big head. When he put on a sport coat and tie, he looked pensive and strong, but he was only a few inches taller than I was, so he was not quite as big as the sum of his parts. In short pants, he looked top-heavy.
But if Mitchell’s legs were exposed on that warm June day, so were my pretensions. I was wearing one of three Marimekko shifts I’d purchased for this trip. It was still the ’70s. For the newly appointed interim assistant reference librarian at the Cambridge Public Library, I looked rather chic. In the better neighborhoods of Paris, I looked like a bolt of upholstery.
“I’m not sure I’m up to asking for directions,” I said, knowing he hoped I would take the initiative.
“I love your accent,” he said. “Indulge me.”
I could get us safely through a menu, and to boost my confidence about speaking in French, Mitchell had taken to pointing quizzically as he lay down on le lit in our hotel room, or raising his stylo bille before he signed un Travelers cheque at a restaurant or jotted something down in his cahier—words I would speak and he would repeat as many times as it took for me to approve his pronunciation. He surely knew more French vocabulary than I did, so this pretense should have been annoying or demeaning. But Mitchell had just finished a rough semester, and I wanted him to know that I was game for anything, that I’d be on his side whether or not he got tenure, that wherever we went, we were in it together. So I decided to believe what Mitchell had repeatedly told me, that he was a competent reader but could not speak or follow a conversation in French. And after a few days, those language lessons turned into something more rewarding, something like flirting in public.
I also guessed that Mitchell couldn’t tolerate some shopkeeper calling him out on his pronunciation. He didn’t want to be chastened again. I didn’t blame him. At his year-end tenure review that spring, he had been rated “underperforming” in the scholarship category. This was a man who regularly lectured in Italian, was fluent in Spanish, and taught illiterate undergraduates to read Latin. He had written his dissertation on De vulgari eloquentia, a treatise on the virtues of plainspoken Italian, which Dante, ironically, wrote in Latin. Mitchell had always been happy to expound on this irony and all things Dante until one night a few months before we left for Paris, when we had dinner at our apartment with a college classmate of his.
Tom Moulton had come to Cambridge for a medieval-history conference. He was on the tenure track at Princeton and had just published his first book, “just under the wire,” he said a couple of times, until I finally asked what that wire was, and he said, “Thirty.” His emaciated, viciously polite wife, Kitty, spent most of the evening squealing words and phrases—Galley kitchen! Ham roll-ups! Venetian blinds! Blush wine! You two! No car? Fondue! When she finally exhausted her supply of astonished nouns, Kitty excused herself for a minute, and Tom seized the opportunity to grill Mitchell about his long-overdue book.
“I’m calling it Who Stole Dante?”
Tom glanced at me and said, “Catchy title.”
Mitchell had a knack for titles, perhaps because he’d written more titles than pages in the last three years.
“It’s probably going to need a subtitle,” Mitchell added, “much as I hate writers who spell out the whole thesis on the cover.”
“When can I get my hands on a few chapters?” Tom hadn’t shifted his gaze away from me yet. He knew there was no book. “Or is Liz your only trusted reader?”
Mitchell said, “Liz is a dynamite reader. And don’t forget, she’s a researcher of sorts, in her own way.”
Tom pulled a folded-up piece of stationery from his blazer pocket. “Before I forget,” he said as he bent back the creases, exposing an embossed Harvard logo. He handed the sheet to Mitchell. “They want someone with a Ph.D., and it’ll definitely help that you have teaching experience.”
Mitchell said, “This is the job listing?”
Tom said, “I know someone on the search committee.”
Mitchell was st
ill reading when he said, “It’s not a faculty position.”
“It’s in FAS,” Tom said argumentatively. He shot me an accusatory glance, as if I ought to back him up.
I felt panicky. “FAS?”
Mitchell said, “Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” He wouldn’t look at me. “It’s not a teaching job.”
“It is a job in academe.” Tom looked my way and winced—conspiratorially? Apologetically? “Most administrators at Harvard and Princeton have Ph.D.s,” he added petulantly and then retreated deep into the sofa. “Anyway, they want to fill the position quickly.”
“Oh, Tom,” I said, slathering my voice with feigned disappointment. I snatched the stationery from Mitchell’s fingers and pretended to read the text. “I was truly excited for a minute there. I honestly thought you were about to tell us that you’d been offered a job at Harvard—a ticket out of New Jersey for you and Kitty.”
Tom tilted his head and gave me a wan little grin as if to apologize for any embarrassment he might have caused. He said, “Let me know soon if you think of someone who might be interested.”
I topped off his wineglass.
He asked about Mitchell’s students at Boston University.
“Boston College,” Mitchell said amiably.
“Right,” Tom said, “the Jesuits,” as if B.C. were a seminary and not a legitimate university.
Mitchell explained that the Italian department was small and not getting more popular with undergraduates, so he was still saddled with two intro Latin classes every semester on top of his literature classes, which left little time for research and writing.
Tom said, “Italian scholar wanders off course into a thicket of undergraduate ablatives. Didn’t you notice the sign?”
Mitchell looked confused.
Tom raised both his hands over his head and carved out an arc as he said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.”
Mitchell smiled at me. “That’s from Dante.”
I nodded. “Gates of Hell.”
“Cozy powder room!” Kitty was back, and I left to slice the Cherry Cheesecake! And plug in the venerable Electric Percolator! I was twenty-five years old, and as I stood in that too-small kitchen and tried to scrape the sugary red goo off the store-bought dessert, I absolutely believed that Mitchell would have been tenured had he married a skinny woman who made coffee in a French press.
All of this was in the bags we had packed and taken to Paris. And then we got lost.
We were so lost that we couldn’t find a French fry in Paris.
Dozens of taxis were whizzing by us both ways through the Marais, but when I suggested we could splurge and catch a ride back to our hotel, Mitchell pointed at the window of a clock shop behind me. Seven filigreed gold pocket watches with faded ivory faces were suspended on invisible wire from an iron dowel. A few feet behind this priceless mobile, an elderly man in a three-piece suit and a thin slick of silver hair was wielding a feather-duster like a billy club, slapping the wooden handle against his open palm, as if he thought we were casing the joint.
“Les cloches,” I said.
Mitchell smiled. “That’s the word for clock?”
“The plural,” I said.
He said, “La clutch?”
“Not quite,” I said.
He said, “Clush.”
I said, “Try cloash.” The more didactic I became, the more delighted he looked.
“La cloach?”
“More like the O in closet. La cloche. And I am not asking that shopkeeper for directions. He looks like he’s about two minutes away from calling the gendarme to get rid of us.” But by then the pomaded proprietor had pushed the door halfway open, his disapproving gaze aimed at Mitchell’s bare knees, and I surprised all of us by uttering a few halting sentences with present-tense verbs and several repetitions of the name of our hotel, and there poured forth from the shopkeeper a mercilessly detailed walking route, replete with landmarks where we were meant to veer off to the gauche or the droite, and when I thanked him, the shopkeeper winced and said to no one, Une autre canadienne, and closed the door.
I was elated.
Mitchell said, “Did you get all that?”
“Only a few words,” I said. “But who cares? He thinks I’m Canadian. Not that he meant it as a compliment.”
“It’s a left-handed insult,” Mitchell said, taking my hand and confidently leading me through the crowded streets, turning us droite, gauche, droite, gauche, this way and that, right back to our hotel, like clockwork. He had understood every word the clock-shop owner had spoken.
That night, Mitchell put on his wedding suit, and we were whisked off in a taxi to the Monte Carlo, an absurdly elegant little restaurant with a maître d’ done up in tails and mustache wax. Mitchell ordered for us both, les escargots and Chateaubriand pour deux—“surf ’n’ turf à Larousse,” he called it, surprising me with his pitch-perfect pronunciation. And then he told me he’d been offered a job at Harvard. “No more conjugations and declensions,” he said. “An assistant dean in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” he added quickly.
“Harvard,” I said too loudly, because I knew it would make him happy. And even in Paris, heads turned. I laid my hands on his and leaned in, lowering my voice. “Harvard? Since when?”
“The money will be a big boost,” he said.
I said, “Not teaching just to start with, or not teaching ever again?”
“We can buy a house,” he said. He slid his hands out from under mine and flapped open his napkin with a flourish. “No teaching. I’m strictly Administration from here on in.”
The restaurant seemed suddenly too small, too dark and smoky, too loud with incomprehensible conversations, too much like the rest of my life. But soon the sommelier was popping open a bottle of champagne, compliments of a tuxedoed gentleman at a neighboring table who confided he was Class of ’29, and Mitchell stood and proposed a toast to his blushing bride, and though the honeymoon was over by then, the chef sent out a complimentary dessert course of cheese and fruit on a circular slab of green marble under a large bell-shaped crystal dome, and the waiter bowed to me and said, “Shall I remove the cloche, madame?”
“La cloche,” I said.
Mitchell said, “La cloche. The bell.”
“Ah,” I said. “I gave you the wrong word at the clock shop. Why didn’t you correct me?”
Mitchell shrugged, letting me know it was his pleasure to indulge my ignorance.
I said, “Please remove la cloche, monsieur.”
The waiter backed away.
Mitchell said, “Horloge. I think that might be the word for clock.”
“Horloge,” I said.
“As in horology, or horologic,” Mitchell said. “From the Greek, I think.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “So.” The cheese smelled like a sewer. “Harvard!”
THIRTY-TWO YEARS LATER, I GOT LOST IN PARIS AGAIN, BUT this time I was alone with no one but myself to blame. My flight from Boston had landed twenty minutes early that Saturday morning in June, saddling me with even more time before my connecting flight took off at three-thirty. I was running on ninety minutes of sleep, two issues of Vanity Fair, two vodka tonics, and one defrosted Valium from Mitchell’s icebox pharmacy of expired prescriptions, so I was better prepared to kill myself than to kill four hours in Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The flight attendants had assured me that my checked bags would make the transfer without my assistance, but I headed for the nearest information booth in the busy terminal to confirm this and squander some time. I chose the longest and most unpromising of three lines, directly behind five tiny women wearing colorful silk head scarves and tennis shoes, who were cooing in a language sure to stump the middle-aged stewardess manqué at the counter. Before I got my “Bonjour!” from Martine, the blue-uniformed woman who, up close, looked even older than I did, I unzipped my bulging red canvas wheelie bag (borrowed from my daughter, Rachel, at her insistence) and extracted the leather-bou
nd Journal of Discovery (going-away gift from Rachel and, allegedly, her brother, Sam) to jot down information for surviving the layover. Perhaps Martine would be willing to map out the route to my departure gate, and recommend a lunch spot where English was spoken, and maybe I could persuade her to check an Italian weather forecast and let me know if I should expect rain when I got to Venice, as I was wearing espadrilles instead of my ugly new water-resistant walking shoes because I’d got seized with a fit of nostalgia right before leaving the house in Cambridge and pulled off the stretchy jeans (late-night catalog purchase strictly intended for travel days) and put on a venerable black-and-white Marimekko block-print belt dress, which still fit if I treated the belt as an ornament, casually knotted at the back.
I said, “Bonjour.”
“Bonjour. Où allez-vous, madame?”
“Yes,” I said, as if Martine’s question were philosophical. I was trying to remember why I had left my quiet house, my sofa beneath my bay windows, my pile of books, my remote control, my too-big TV mounted on my off-white living room wall at a slightly annoying angle to my pale blue chair rail and crown molding.
Martine smiled and optimistically said, “English?”
“Yes,” I said deliberatively, sticking a finger into the gutter of the journal before I closed it, as if that blank page might yet be filled in with some charming anecdote from the first day of my monthlong Italian adventure, the deluxe surprise Mitchell had painstakingly planned with the conspiratorial assistance of the children to celebrate our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary even though—Surprise!—I would have preferred a week of watching movies in bed with takeout Chinese for dinner. Even after—Surprise!—several hundred little malignant tumors, metastasized from a vicious cancer on his liver, had been discovered during Mitchell’s annual checkup on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the likelihood of his being alive in June was in grave doubt, his itinerary-making and optional side-trip selecting went on, each choice dictated by an annotation or a footnote he found as he paged through his Dante box, which he referred to till the last as his book.
The Chapel Page 1