The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Huge raindrops splattered against the windows, and the sun retreated across the concrete parking lot like an outgoing tide. This turn in the weather didn’t improve anybody’s mood, so I smiled apologetically at the knitter and said, “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  She waved me down. Once I was settled and the bus had pulled out of the parking lot, she pointed her thumb at the trench coat on the empty seats and whispered, “He’s the one who yelled at you. Welcome to junior high school.” She took up her knitting.

  I had a text from Rachel, which read: √

  The day had gone dark, and the Italian weather was being compared unfavorably to summer days in Raleigh, North Carolina, by the couple behind us, and they were also annoyed at the tour guide’s failure to clear up their confusion about Venice, the Veneto, and Vicenza, which was creating some anxiety about Tuesday.

  I saw the month ahead as a wall calendar, each day an empty window I wanted to jump out.

  “My name is Shelby Cohen,” said the knitter, never looking up from her lap, “and if you prefer peace and quiet, just say so.”

  “I was admiring your needles,” I said. On the top of the one nearest me was a shiny, piercingly blue stone disk in a silver setting.

  She said, “Do you knit?”

  “Oh, god, no,” I said, and into the awkward silence that followed, I tossed another conversation stopper. “I really don’t do anything.”

  “I don’t either, not in the summer,” she said casually. “I’m an accountant, and so is Allen, my husband, so we each take a month off in the summer, after the late-filing madness dies down. He’s a climber, and me—well, I’m a shopper. I found these needles last summer in a little hand-forging operation in a tiny town on Galway Bay, would you believe.”

  “Is that a gemstone?”

  “Lapis lazuli,” she said.

  I’d only ever seen that in museums. “So they are really precious.”

  “No, fifteen euros or something for the pair, but I think they were meant to be displayed and not used.” She showed me the top of the other needle. The silver setting was empty. She examined a patch of ivory wool ribbing she’d finished. “One cuff,” she said. “I am so sorry your husband died. I hope there’s some comfort for you in being here.”

  The Boston Globe obituary for Mitchell had been sent out as an addendum to the little biographical notes compiled by the tour company, which were meant to give us a head start on getting acquainted with our fellow travelers. I had never gotten around to reviewing the roster, but I wasn’t looking forward to being the sad sack of the group, the distraught widow. “I’m frankly not sure what I expected, but I am not very well prepared for this,” I said.

  “This—you mean the trip?” Shelby was working up a sleeve to go with that cuff.

  “The trip, Italian vocabulary, sticking to a schedule, holding down my end of a casual conversation on a bus. Being alone.”

  She leaned forward in her seat and pointed to the middle of her back with her needles. “Is something all ruffled up back there?”

  Something was amiss. I tugged tentatively at the wrinkly pink ruching between her shoulder blades, which dropped down, as did the puffed-up fabric on her shoulders, which I’d mistaken for epaulets. It was a cashmere cardigan.

  “Thanks,” Shelby said flatly. “That’s one of the downsides of traveling alone. You never know the condition of your hind quarters. But there are benefits, too.” She leaned back. “After the group meeting at the hotel, we’re on our own for dinner, and the doctor offered to take me along to a place he wants to try in the Piazza del Erbe.”

  The meeting, the doctor, the piazza—I should have grabbed my itinerary and welcome packet instead of my phone and memorized a few useful facts. I wasn’t even sure Shelby was inviting me along for her outing. “I don’t want to be a third wheel,” I said, the anthem of all third wheels.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you might be a fifth wheel,” she said, and she didn’t explain because my cell phone rang.

  It only rang twice and then stopped, but one of the men behind us said, “No, she didn’t turn her ringer off because she’s above the rules. Harvard, you know.”

  Shelby turned around quickly, as if she might say something in my defense, but I put my hand on hers.

  Shelby smiled. “I guess you’re used to that—occupational hazard.”

  “More like guilt by association,” I said. “I was a reference librarian until my children were born. Now, I teach reading to public-school kids. Or I did before Mitchell was diagnosed.” Well, about five years before the diagnosis, the public schools cut reading specialists out of the budget and I agreed to roam around the city as a fill-in librarian and substitute teacher’s aide. I spent many days portioning Gummi Bears into little paper cups under the scrutiny of women younger than my daughter. Mitchell urged me to quit and do something more rewarding, but I told him it was a point of pride. “With italics for emphasis on a point,” he’d said. This past September, I retired because I was finally fully vested, with a pension that might cover the rent for a third-floor walk-up studio apartment on the Somerville side of the Cambridge town line—if I went easy on the utilities.

  The woman directly behind us said, “No, it wasn’t because he was rejected.” She amped up the volume, or else she leaned forward so I could hear her clearly. “And I heard there were at least two other boys in his class who got into Harvard but went to Duke.”

  Shelby shrugged.

  I said, “I think Harvard is infuriating because all the self-important monkey business somehow preserves something people still look up to. It’s like the Vatican. I almost feel like skipping Rome because I know I’ll have to be grateful to the scoundrels after I see the Sistine Chapel.”

  Shelby said, “Are you a Catholic?”

  Not much of one, not since my sophomore year in college, when my mother died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm. She’d been plagued by migraines for months, and instead of bothering her doctor with complaints about a silly headache, she had decided to give up coffee for Lent on the advice of a parish priest whose sister was a missionary nurse in Guinea-Bissau—“formerly known as Portuguese-Guinea,” my mother reminded me each time we spoke that spring. My mother was all for the natives, who’d overthrown the repressive colonial government, but she was also sending ten dollars a week to the Portuguese convent and hospital to make sure the poor Africans didn’t throw out the quinine with the bathwater.

  My mother was not a fanatic. I’m sure she didn’t expect to be miraculously cured of her headaches. She had taken to religion as a young widow, and her piety and her devotion to her parish did not go unrewarded. She offered up the inexplicable and unbearable circumstances of her little, often lonely life and they acquired significance in the ancient and worldwide project of the propagation of the faith.

  Unlike my older brother, Richard, I had not really gotten to know my father before an industrial transformer he was installing exploded and killed him and three other young men, so I was vulnerable to the appeal of a heavenly father and stories of brave young saints whose gruesome deaths won them celebrity status in heaven. And when I got my first look at the graphic reality of pregnancy in a grade-school Hygiene and Holiness class, I got very interested in a career as a virgin martyr or a nun. Richard never succumbed and eventually got himself tossed out of two Catholic colleges in one year and dropped out of my life for a long time. I was in high school by then, and my friends’ older brothers were teaching them to drive, and their fathers were buying them flowers for just being in the chorus of a play, and I irrationally aimed most of my resentment at the Church and the big fuss everybody made about the Crucifixion, which seemed less tragic than my lot in light of the Resurrection three days later.

  But I was practiced and pious enough as a young Catholic girl to be an asset when Mitchell was navigating the implicit moral and social codes at Boston College. I also came in handy as a theological resource when he was still working on his Dante book in earnest
those evenings. Whether I was reading a recipe or pondering the persistent blanks in a Times crossword puzzle, I was delighted when Mitchell interrupted me with a question about the hierarchy of angels or a miracle. I was amazed to discover that stuff had value, and Mitchell and I were both astonished by my recall.

  On any given evening, in the midst of preparing dinner, I could recite the Seven Sacraments or the Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Cardinal Virtues. I was no scholar. I was more like Wikipedia with a cocktail shaker. But I had other skills, as well, and Mitchell’s readiness to exploit them registered as a compliment, elevating my degree in library science from technical training to an academic accomplishment and raising my hopes about my own prospects in the world. During my last year at the Cambridge library, I happily devoted more time to cross-referencing arcane 14th-century sources than to reshelving periodicals, but then we went to Paris, and he came home to a new job, and I came home pregnant.

  We didn’t lose Dante when Mitchell veered off into the secular world of academic administration, but an unlikely passion we’d shared was downsized to a hobby. And nothing in my girlhood qualified me as a guide to Harvard Yard. I stayed at home until Rachel and Sam were in school. And now, I was no longer a wife, no longer a librarian or a teacher, and not really a mother anymore. Not a lot to go on conversationally. So, as no one in the Church hierarchy had bothered to excommunicate me for my many sins, I said, “I am a Catholic. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought Berman might be Jewish,” Shelby said. “One of my aunts—her maiden name was Effie Berman.”

  “Mitchell’s father was a Jew,” I said.

  Shelby said, “He’s passed on, too?”

  “Years ago,” I said. “And Mitchell’s mother, too.” Mitchell had insisted we move her from a nursing home in Philadelphia to a facility near us. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of her spending her last days alone, and though she had long since forgotten who he was, he visited her religiously, every Sunday morning, till she died three years later. I visited her three days a week after school, and spent the better part of my time in her room collecting compliments from her roommate and the nurse’s aide for Mitchell, whose devotion to his mother deeply impressed everyone.

  Shelby said, “And your parents?”

  I felt like Typhoid Mary. “I do have a brother,” I said.

  I couldn’t tell if Shelby was afraid to ask another question or if her curiosity about me was waning. She had taken up her knitting again. I closed my eyes and tried to come up with something interesting to say. It seemed a safe bet that Shelby and Allen Cohen were Jewish, but I’d been wrong about the bolero. I didn’t know where she lived or if she had children, but I didn’t want to insult her by proving I hadn’t read her personal profile.

  “Do you want to see something beautiful?” Shelby passed me her phone. “Allen just sent me this. He’s climbing the Three Saints this month in Southern California.”

  Above a foreground of palm trees, a vast snowcapped run of ridges and peaks rose right out of the desert, topped off by an impossibly blue sky. I said, “Put your needle there—the blue one—put it right there, on the sky.”

  Shelby tilted the stone toward the screen and smiled. “Lapis lazuli,” she said.

  I nodded. It was bluer than the familiar blue sky—it was the empyrean, the brightness Dante had imagined beyond the bounds of heaven and earth, beyond past and future, beyond the beyond.

  Shelby aimed her finger at the top of the little screen. “That’s San Jacinto, the tallest of the peaks. Ten thousand feet high. That’s where he’s headed right now. I can show you a picture of Allen on the mountain.”

  Her shoulder pressed into my arm and our hands touched again as she searched for the right button on her phone. I didn’t move. I held my breath. I wanted to extend this contact, this oddly intimate moment, extend my readiness to believe in that blue above and beyond the Three Saints, that immaterial place where Allen and Mitchell might someday meet.

  “THE HOTEL ARENA IS PERFECT. IT’S IN A LONG, MODERN, arcaded concrete building with balconies, but inside it looks like the sort of place Thomas Mann might have stayed—a tiny wood-paneled reception desk, where a mustache in a tuxedo orchestrates dozens of dark-haired valets in green vests, and the elevator is smaller than your walk-in refrigerator. It’s all so charming.” I was determined to make Rachel believe I was happy to be here.

  “Is the bathroom tiny?”

  “Compact,” I said. The sink was a cereal bowl. “Handsome old green-marble floor and white-tile walls. And I have a perfectly Italianate view of red-clay rooftops.” This was true if you lay in bed so that you couldn’t see the tin ductwork directly below the one window. “I’ll send you some pictures.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, “I’ve already seen the pictures on the Web. Daddy didn’t want to upgrade to a balcony room because he’d read something about traffic noise at the front of the building.”

  “I prefer it here at the back. It’s so peaceful.” So was the front of the hotel, which faced Largo Europa, a two-lane street with a leafy pedestrian park separating it from the next block, but maybe it was trafficky on weekdays. Admittedly, I hadn’t spent much time outside after we got off the bus, as it quickly became apparent that I was the only one in the group who’d paid the supplement to bring a second suitcase, and I didn’t want to hear about it from the married couples. “My luggage arrived, safe and sound,” I said.

  The boys were fine, work was busy, Rachel was proud of me but I shouldn’t feel I had to call every day, just have, you know—and then a long pause. It was about noon in Boston. I guessed she was doing the Sunday crossword and had hit a bad patch. “You know, have fun, and—” Another pause. “Eat pasta! Or just, you know—”

  “Sweetie, I have to wash my face and leave for dinner soon.”

  “Of course. Okay, so, let’s see,” she said. I heard pages flipping. “Tomorrow is the Arena Chapel and St. Anthony’s Basilica. And then you go to Vicenza on Tuesday, but that’s only a day trip from where you are, so that will be easy. And then—is it Wednesday you go to Florence or Thursday morning?”

  “Wednesday afternoon,” I said, “and then Moscow on Thursday and Tokyo on Friday.”

  “Sorry. I’m acting like your mother,” Rachel said. “Or your father. I mean, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’ll let you go.”

  I said, “Kiss those two beautiful boys for me.”

  Rachel said, “But you really are happy to be in Padua?”

  I said, “I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

  OUR FREELANCE TOUR GUIDE IN PADUA WAS SARA, A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD local woman in a white trench coat and thick black plastic horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and she had wound her long dark hair into a face-lifting bun. She spoke almost impeccable English, explained almost nothing, and narrated everything she did, occasionally nodding at questions and ignoring them. “I will now pass to each of you a personal copy of the itinerary for tomorrow, which is Monday,” she said as she slowly made her way to the twelve Padua side-trippers scattered throughout the hotel’s windowless Executive Business Event Conference Center, a blank room with one hundred red restaurant-supply dining chairs, a long table, and a pull-down movie screen. From my perch near a desktop computer at the back of the room, I noted that the doctor with the silver hair was missing. “While I am now passing out the prepared itinerary, I will remind you that we must meet in the lobby at nine-fifteen tomorrow morning after you have had time to enjoy a complimentary breakfast buffet of your choosing.”

  One of the wives asked for dinner recommendations.

  “Yes,” Sara said, “and you will notice there is no change from the itineraries you were issued in Venice except for the addition of details, including a local post office, which you can see is marked right here on the top left of the itinerary I am now holding up to show you in case you have some postal cards for that purpose.”

  Two of the husbands momentarily commandeered the event to complain about the private balconies, which weren�
�t private but one long, undivided balcony, so anyone could walk the length of any floor and look into everybody else’s room, as if you were staying in a motel.

  “The balconies are reserved for paying guests at the front of the hotel,” Sara said, “and there will be no flash cameras allowed inside the Scrovegni Chapel, which I point out now to your behalf on the back of each itinerary, where you can see the marked Arena Chapel.”

  One of the women asked, “Which name do the locals use for the chapel?”

  “Of course,” Sara said, “the famous frescoes painted by Giotto more than seven hundred years ago had no equal in the world, as you will see. Interesting for all of you is Dante, the greatest poet for all time. He tells everyone in Divina Commedia, the greatest poem for all the world, that Giotto was the greatest of all painters in the world, better even than his own master, Cimabue.” Sara picked up an index card from the table behind her. “In painting, Cimabue thought to hold the field / Now Giotto is acclaimed by all / So that he has obscured the former’s fame.”

  Mitchell would not have approved. Sara was reading from the Mandelbaum translation, which Mitchell considered authoritative but tame. He preferred the wilder, woollier early translations that delivered a more rousing narrative voice and served up plenty of errors and infelicities for him to annotate as he read. The reason I had been booked on this side-trip to Padua was for Mitchell to point out how heavily Giotto had leaned on Dante’s ideas. Giotto was one of many answers to his title question, Who Stole Dante?