The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  He left me everything, just as he promised. “Everything,” he liked to say during his last month on the sofa as I leaned in to feed him rice pudding, “everything will be yours,” as if it weren’t yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting at home by myself—admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died.

  Martine said, “Where are you going, madame?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, unpleasantly, for no good reason, or maybe because I had not been brave enough, or confident enough, or honest enough to say so to my children when they prevailed upon me to trade the bittersweet squalor of my sofa for their father’s idea of romance.

  “Okay,” Martine said. “Bon voyage, madame. But remember you are not alone.”

  “Oh.” I felt a swell of camaraderie. “What a sweet thing to say.”

  But Martine had just wanted me to move along. She was pointing at the long line behind me and waving forward a young German couple and their backpacks. “Bonjours! Où allez-vous?”

  I wheeled my way to an empty row of red plastic chairs and sat down. According to the sign behind the Air France booth, I had arrived at Gate 2D, and according to my ticket, my next flight departed from Gate 2D. I really was going nowhere. But without coffee and a sandwich, I knew I would soon pass out, so I got up and rolling. Fueled only by instinct, I rolled right past the first café, and then another, and then a newsstand and a crêperie on the edge of a vast, international food court that looked like the Seventh Circle of Hell, a throbbing pit of currency conversion and halting translation and hungry, hopeful travelers staring with disappointment at the cooling blobs of stuff on their Styrofoam plates as they waited for seats to open up. I veered off into a glass breezeway and onto an electric rubber sidewalk. The passage was echoey with the laughter and shouting of schoolkids in blue blazers and caps running the other way, but I could see to the end, just beyond the point where the conveyor belt bent back underground, to a bright, empty bank of gates and rows of empty blue plastic chairs. That was just where I wanted to be—nowhere. And I felt precisely what you are supposed to feel in France, a frisson, a splendid little chill of illicit delight when I realized what I was about to do.

  I aimed for the first open row with an unobstructed view of the runways. In a fit of inspiration, I tented my magazines on the nearby chairs, as if their occupants would return at any moment. I was not going to Venice. I was going to sleep. And then I was going home.

  A few rows away, a black man with a cockney accent was hovering over two plastic infant carriers, whispering reassuringly. When he noticed me, he waved.

  I held up my hand and raised two fingers, smiling sympathetically.

  He took a few wary steps my way and looked back at the babies. “Be asleep. Please be asleep,” he said, and then he turned a smile to me. “Twins.”

  I said, “Aren’t we lucky?”

  He looked confused.

  I spun my hand in little circles a few times in the air, indicating the unlikely silence and unpopulated room. “So peaceful.”

  “Oh, yeah, no Jews,” he said.

  This was odd enough to make me rethink the benefits of my isolated perch.

  He took a few more steps my way, hands in the pockets of his hero jacket, flapping the plackets, making himself bigger.

  I froze, but my head didn’t. It kept twitching back and forth—no, no, no, stay away, stay away.

  He stared at me, narrowing his gaze, and his lips tightened into a tiny smile. Finally, he closed his eyes, snorted dismissively, and then dipped his shoulder and headed back to his babies.

  At the other end of the room, three men in turbans and business suits emerged from another breezeway, each of them texting with one hand and dragging a carry-on case with the other. They looked like a modern-dress version of the Three Wise Men. They settled into seats facing me and the man with the babies, their backs to the traffic on the tarmac. Above them, I saw that each of the unmanned booths belonged to El Al airline. And this was the Sabbath. No flights for the Jews. Maybe that’s all the young father was trying to tell me. I wondered if I should clear up the awkwardness between us. I could have approached him. I could have apologized for my performance. I could have tried to explain that my panic had nothing to do with the color of his skin, as he had huffily assumed. It was the jacket that made him look like a thug. Would it have killed him to put on a button-down shirt and a blazer when he was traveling? His snorting at me didn’t help, either. Of course, he might say it wasn’t a snort but a yawn, or just nothing. Maybe he wasn’t even insulted. Maybe he had just walked away because I’d clammed up and he figured we’d run out of things to say to each other. His head was tilted back in his seat—probably sound asleep. And I was exhausted. And I was sure neither of us wanted to wake the babies.

  Sometimes, it seemed that I was married to every man in the world.

  I closed my eyes.

  I was roused a few times by noisy passersby and a couple of interminable public-safety alerts, but it was a screaming baby that finally woke me up. I felt fine until I stood, and then I felt like I did most mornings after a night on the too-soft sofa. But my soreness was tempered by triumph. I had successfully overslept and missed my flight. I also had thirteen new messages—a bonanza for a hermit like me. My semi-private quarters in the Jewish ghetto had filled up, but the twins and their father were gone, and so were the turbaned texters. This gave me a sense of status as the veteran, the queen of the displaced. I scrolled through my missed calls and texts—six from Rachel; two from Sam; one from Sam’s girlfriend, Susie; one from EurWay Travel; and one from the company that sold stretchy jeans to women who shouldn’t wear jeans.

  Sam was the softest target, but out of loyalty I dialed Rachel. She had done more than anyone to get me this far. It was seven o’clock in Paris, one in the afternoon in Boston. I imagined Rachel would be strolling the aisles of Whole Foods, shopping for something yummy. Her ex-husband took the two boys most weekends, and Rachel had been dating lately—that’s what she called cooking dinner, sleeping with a man, making him breakfast, and then getting him out of the way with time enough to complete the Sunday Times crossword before David dropped the boys back at home.

  She didn’t answer her phone. This was a surprise. I dialed again. Since Mitchell died, Rachel took my calls whether she was writing a brief or taking a bath with a new beau.

  I didn’t leave a message. Evidently, she’d got the message already.

  Sam answered on the first ring. “You’re alive.”

  “Hello, dear boy. I fell asleep in the airport, so I’m a little stiff, but otherwise unscathed.”

  “You missed your flight to Venice.” No questions. No recriminations. No proposed remediation. I was so grateful Rachel had not picked up.

  “I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” I said. A long silence followed, and I heard young girls squealing in the background. “Are you at school today?”

  “Volleyball tournament. I’ve been whipping up their spirits because we’re going to get crushed. Are you really okay?”

  “This was your father’s dream, not mine. It never really made sense, did it?” Jumbo jets were gliding up and out of sight every few seconds. “Me on a bus for a month? With other people?”

  Sam went silent. Maybe he was really thinking about my question, maybe he was downloading a new app, or maybe he was tying his shoe. Whenever I called my children, they treated me like one more member of the audience tuned in to the latest episode of their reality shows. Finally, he said, “What can I do?”

  I said, “Nobody has to do anything. Just don’t expect a postcard from the Vatican. I’m flying home tomorrow.”

  Sam said, “So what I could do is drive to Boston tomorrow and pick you up at Logan. We’ll be knocked out of the tournament by three, and Susie has to run the box office for the matinee at the theater tomorrow, so I’m on my own. Should I try to find you a hotel
near the airport where you can sleep tonight?”

  He’d do anything short of calling his sister. I said, “Have you spoken to Rachel?”

  “No. I’ve had thirty or so texts since noon, but I told her I was being hauled off the sidelines to referee and couldn’t talk till later. I wanted to know what you wanted first.”

  When I wanted the huge flat-screen TV, which I had never wanted in the house, taken out of Mitchell’s office and installed on the living room wall so he didn’t have to use a walker to watch a ball game, Sam took the train from New York and did the job, despite Mitchell’s objections about the ruination of the living room, and his complaints about my underestimating his stamina, and Rachel’s insistence that her father’s pride was more important than his physical comfort. The TV did hang at an odd angle, true. Unbeknownst to Mitchell and Rachel, there was a hole about the size of a volleyball in the plaster where Sam had badly misjudged the location of the stud on his first attempt—also true. And Sam had driven away that day in his father’s two-year-old BMW, and that loan, like so many others, had aged into a gift.

  Rachel got less and gave more. Once Mitchell took to the sofa, she rearranged her mornings and drove the boys to school herself so she could come by the house with the Wall Street Journal, which Mitchell had always read at the office. It pleased him not to have to belly up for home delivery. It pleased him to speculate wildly about Rachel’s salary as legal counsel for a pharmaceutical start-up frequently featured in the pages of the Journal. And after he died, I think it pained Rachel to see me sprawled out on that sofa for three months running, wrapped up in a sadness that was, at least, in part hers.

  “Listen, Mom, I have to go soon.” Sam had moved closer to the action, presumably to authenticate the sense of urgency with sound effects. “But I have to warn you—Rachel got in touch with Susie when she found out you didn’t get to Venice with your plane. I think Rachel wanted Susie to call her friend.” During the pause, the background noise got louder.

  “Tell Susie not to bother her friend.” Neither Sam nor I said again, but surely the word had bounced into our respective courts. This was not my first missed flight. Mitchell’s itinerary for the Italian adventure had anticipated a Thursday departure from Boston. But when Thursday afternoon arrived, and the taxi Rachel had arranged beeped from the curb, I gave the cabbie twenty dollars to get lost. When I called Rachel to tell her the trip was off, she offered to find me a therapist who specialized in agoraphobia, and by midnight she had a confirmation of my reservation on Air France for Friday evening from Susie’s friend at the online travel site, who had ticketed all of my international flights, and Rachel had also persuaded EurWay Travel to send a driver to meet me at Marco Polo Airport in Venice on Saturday afternoon. And now I’d missed my connecting flight. “Listen, Sam. Nobody has to do anything.” I’d been saying so for months.

  “Okay, okay. But just so you know—you are booked on a midday flight to Venice tomorrow,” Sam said. “Susie was going to text you the details.” The little volleyball players were chanting, Our turn, Our turn, Our turn. “You don’t have to go, Mom.”

  My cell phone binged with a new email from Rachel. “You have to go, Sam. And god knows I have to go somewhere they’re serving coffee. I hope your girls win. Give Susie my love. And a million apologies.”

  “Love you, Mom, wherever you are.” Sam clicked off.

  I rolled all the way back to that first crêperie, pointed to two dinner crepes on the illustrated menu, and accidentally ordered deux cafés au lait when I begged the waiter for some coffee—du café. I was halfway through the second cup before I felt up to reading Rachel’s message.

  Dear, dear, dear mother of mine—

  Six things.

  1.Your reservation number at the Novotel hotel for tonight is 9WX877YUSA. The hotel is a three-minute walk from Terminal 3. You are in Terminal 2.

  2.Your flight to Venice leaves tomorrow (Sunday) at 12:35 PM from Terminal 2. Susie’s text has your boarding pass and gate info.

  3.The same driver (Pietro) will be at Marco Polo (again) tomorrow with your name on a sign. Don’t stand him up again. And don’t tip him—he’s made a fortune off you already.

  4.The driver will take you to the train station, where the smaller group going to Padua will pick you up in the tour bus. (The driver is prepared to escort you to the bus. I’ve licensed him to be firm—up to and including handcuffs.)

  5.You haven’t missed much. Daddy had never thought of your initial stay as anything but recuperation from jet lag, which is why you have three full days in Venice at the end of the month.

  6.Don’t call me until you are in Padua so we don’t say what we’ll only wish we hadn’t said.

  Everything went according to Rachel’s revised agenda until my Venetian driver pulled into the train station almost half an hour before the tour bus was due. “We are too early,” he said, “and giving thanks to me for this favor.” Pietro stepped swiftly around his car, opened the back door, and offered me his hand.

  “I better just wait right here,” I said.

  Pietro took this as a rebuke, dropping his gaze to the pavement. His disappointment was exaggerated by his three-piece suit. He was old enough and bald enough to be an appropriate suitor. “This bus you must take is nowhere. Always, is always molto tardi. I promise you. Tardissimo.”

  “I really don’t speak a word of Italian.”

  “Me neither,” he said, pulling me out of the car.

  “My bag,” I said, as if having that in my grip would assure me of safe passage.

  Pietro obligingly dragged my canvas wheelie out of the trunk and led me around the side of the huge, squat train station. “Everybody in Venezia is not speaking just like you, right? See?” He pointed to a herd of elderly tourists ahead of us. Each of them was wearing a yellow baseball cap. “Tutti in ferie!” Pietro turned to me for confirmation.

  I understood nothing he’d said, but I was not happy about those yellow hats. “Does my tour come with a uniform?”

  “You see now? Si, si, there she is for you.”

  We were perched at a railing, about ten feet above a busy dock at the edge of a dark, deep canal with a profound current churning up waves along the stone wall. “Is this the Grand Canal?”

  Pietro proudly said, “Canalasso.”

  “So—not the Grand Canal?”

  “We say here Canalasso.”

  Here at the train station? Here in Italy? Here in Venice? Our conversation had ping-ponged like that from the moment we met. We were both trying to be good sports, but we were whacking these balls at two different tables.

  Staring deep into the center of the canal, Pietro said, “E’ bella, no?”

  We had seen the canals from the car, and I had brought with me many memorable descriptions from novels, and images from the movies, but everything else was eclipsed by this first true glimpse of the watery world. From where I was standing, the dark sea surging through the city seemed ancient, and unnerving, and fantastical, like a dragon’s tail on a medieval map.

  Very softly, Pietro said, “Canalasso.”

  I said, “Canalasso,” which made me cry, as if Mitchell were streaming by below me, just beyond my reach.

  Pietro kindly let a lot of water pass beneath us before he moved. Calmly, he led me out of the sun to the shelter of an open café table outfitted with a red-and-blue Cinzano umbrella. He insisted on buying me my first coffee in Italy, and I insisted on paying. Actually, he said, “Café?” and after he paid, and wagged his hand dismissively while I dug out my wallet, I put a fifty-euro note under his espresso cup, and then he took off without a word for just long enough to make me wonder if that was the end of him. When he returned, he presented me with three accordion-pleated postcard collections. The top card on each stack was a view of the Grand Canal from just about the spot where we’d stood in silence together, but when Pietro spread the cards out across our table, what followed from Venice was unpredictable—the Tower of Pisa, a mosaic church cei
ling in Ravenna, a sheep on a Tuscan hillside, the Colosseum.

  “Oh, they’re all different. From everywhere,” I said. “So now I have to choose one set?”

  Pietro said, “Okay.”

  “I can’t choose,” I said. “I really can’t. Which one is the best?”

  Pietro smiled at me, at the umbrella, at the canal.

  I tried again. “Really. You choose, Pietro. Please.”

  “Tutto,” he said. “Choose everything.”

  II

  The bus ride from Venice to Padua was a little less than an hour long. The trip was slightly longer if you counted the fifteen-minute wait at the Venice train station for the widow from Cambridge, who was already famous for going AWOL at airports. At least eight of my twelve fellow passengers on the EurWay minibus counted the wait time against me, and so did the driver, an American college kid. As he crammed my red wheelie into the overhead luggage rack, he advised me of my obligation to be present at designated pickup locations fifteen minutes before departures.

  I thanked him and apologized for not knowing the routine.

  Somebody—one of the five men—shouted, “Read the contract.”

  “Sit here, if you like.” This offer came from a woman seated directly behind the driver. She pulled a skein of ivory yarn from the unoccupied seat beside her and skewered it with her two-foot-long bronze knitting needles. She had short dark hair parted on the side—she couldn’t have been fifty—and she was wearing pink capri pants with a pink bolero jacket over a white turtleneck, which made me think she lived alone and didn’t have any close friends. Surely, someone who loved her would have suggested a simple cotton cardigan. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful, so I reached up and rummaged for my cell phone while I assessed my options.

  No one else moved.

  The seats across the aisle from the knitter were occupied by a trench coat. The next two rows on both sides were apparently reserved for retired married couples, the four wives tucked neatly into window seats, their husbands with newspapers and maps sprawled out, legs crossed, their big shoes blocking the aisle. Behind the couples, next to the only open seats, was a tall, silver-haired gentleman with his eyes closed. Even at a glance, he was much too composed to be sleeping, so maybe he was meditating, but more likely he was praying I wouldn’t sit in the open row beside him. In the aisle seats at the very back, two women with identical silver perms and shiny navy blue jogging suits—sisters or suburban lesbians—were happily passing a digital camera back and forth, reviewing the record of their two days in Venice.