The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  My first and enduring impression of the chapel was blue.

  The ceiling was a deep azure evening sky flecked with golden stars. The residents of the heavens were provided with golden portholes on either end, and from the smaller of these windows on the world bearded saints and patriarchs looked down approvingly. The bigger, central lookout above the altar end was occupied by Jesus in his middle age, and near the original entrance, above the Last Judgment, the Virgin Mary held her infant son for all to see.

  But wherever I looked, no matter which sainted gaze held mine, I felt the pulsing of that beautiful blue, not watery but viscous, as if all of us, the living and the dead, were swimming in that intergalactic amniotic fluid.

  Blue was my first impression every time I turned and looked to the top of another wall, the blueness of sky above and beyond the figures in each frame of the painted story circling around above us.

  This blueness was not constant. It faded from top to bottom, the sky in each succeeding row of pictures a little paler, each sequential layer of the story a little less saturated with the immensity and depth of eternity.

  Eventually, I had to give my neck a rest. Staring straight ahead, I ran my gaze along the row of pale greenish-gray panels at eye level, the Seven Vices on one side, the Seven Virtues on the other, rendered not in lifelike hues but colorless, pallid, like stolid marble statues of themselves.

  Second impression?

  Had one of the strangers wandering around me asked, I would have said my second impression of the chapel was the crazy smile on the white snout end of the big gray equine head of a donkey. He was giving Mary and Jesus a ride, but that didn’t really account for the smirk.

  My third impression was that T. had drawn the chapel perfectly. It was just one big barrel vault. There was a sanctuary with an altar embedded at one end, a window at the top of the other end, and six big windows cut into one side. And that was it for structural detail. The rest—not just the human figures and the landscapes, but what I had first seen as supporting columns and arches, elaborate pilasters and medallions carved in relief, and even the beveled and chamfered frame around every separate frescoed scene—was an illusion. The gloriously illuminated and architecturally complicated chapel was not really there. There was nothing but paint painstakingly applied to the smooth plaster walls of a brick-and-mortar barrel vault.

  The pleasure of this masterful illusion was complicated by my turning and turning and not seeing Mitchell. If I stood still, I could almost conjure his voice, but it was mixed up with the baritone narration that had accompanied the introductory video we’d watched. I closed my eyes to concentrate, but everything was jumbled up, a stew of half-remembered facts and speculation from which I plucked a pet confusion of mine about Dante and this chapel, which Mitchell always called Scrovegni’s chapel. He’d meant this as censure, not praise.

  As far as I knew, Dante had never seen this chapel. And yet in Dante’s visionary poem, Scrovegni had been singled out and labeled as an unredeemable scoundrel. I never understood, despite Mitchell’s many little lectures, why Dante had picked on Scrovegni, made his name infamous by identifying him alone among the crowd of otherwise anonymous moneylenders suffering in the Seventh Circle of his Inferno.

  According to the video, both Reginaldo Scrovegni and his son Enrico figured in the history of the chapel. Reginaldo had been infamous, one of the most ruthless and successful moneylenders of the 13th century. But Dante never met him, and there were plenty of rich usurers in Florence, whom Dante would have known personally and despised. Reginaldo was dead by 1300, when his son Enrico paid to have this chapel built and then decorated and offered up to the Virgin Mary.

  The dedication of the chapel—Enrico’s flamboyant act of contrition for the sins of his father—was memorialized by Giotto in the Last Judgment, the huge fresco Number 39 on Sara’s map. In the bottom left quadrant, Giotto painted Enrico and a priest hoisting the chapel building up to the Virgin Mary. This exchange was taking place while Jesus, high above them, was separating the haloed and pious figures from the eternally damned, several of whom were serving as snacks for a giant horned ogre with a potbelly.

  According to Giotto’s painting, Enrico and his chapel were firmly fixed on the side of the saved. Yet Dante’s poem had relegated the Scrovegnis to the deepest-down depths of hell.

  Giotto and Dante were contemporaries, and I knew they were both alive in 1300, but when I tried to recall who did what when—well, I couldn’t remember my children’s birthdays, never mind the speculative and often wildly revised estimates for the completion of a pre-Renaissance painting or a poem. Mitchell had shown me reproductions of Giotto’s Last Judgment many times, tracing his finger through the layered lines of saints and sinners to demonstrate the painter’s debt to Dante’s spiraling circles of hell. Mitchell believed that Giotto had been compelled to paint Enrico and his chapel into the scene because Scrovegni and everyone else in Italy had read The Inferno and Scrovegni wanted a happier ending for himself and his family name. This all made sense and, as was so often true of my conversations with Mitchell, did not really address my question. Why did Dante pick on Scrovegni, of all people?

  One startling detail from the video, which Mitchell had never mentioned and maybe never knew, wasn’t swallowed up in this historical stew—a teardrop. I was looking for a tear. It was the reason I had migrated to the corner of the windowed wall near the Last Judgment and looked up to the second row of panels from the top. It was somewhere in Number 20 on Sara’s map, the Slaughter of the Innocents.

  In that frame, a central patch of deep blue sky was bordered by two white towers. From a windowed parapet on the left, the red-robed King Herod pointed a finger, directing the attention of the hooded and helmeted soldiers beneath him. On the right were the white buttresses and arched windows of a church, half-hidden by a crowd of grieving mothers. One woman was cradling her baby, only its head visible above the back of a bigger soldier with a metal rod poised to break the woman’s embrace, and next to her a blue-robed woman was losing her grip as a bearded soldier tugged at her baby’s ankle with his left hand, a sword in his right hand aimed at the child’s bent spine. At this man’s feet, and piled shin-high against his comrades, were the bodies and severed heads of dozens of pierced and broken children, bent limbs, a bruised buttocks, and feet splayed at impossible angles. The babies were bulging out of the bottom of the frame, blurring the border between then and now, as if their broken bodies might fall down into your arms.

  “You need these. Trust me.” Shelby had sidled up to me and slid her hand around my waist. She passed me her binoculars and slipped away.

  Every hair on every child’s prone or thrown-back head had been imagined and painted with a separate, singular, delicate stroke of a bristle or two of Giotto’s brush. I felt a rush of tears, and the magnifying lenses were wet before I could pull them from my eyes. I was sobbing, and I was impatient with myself because I knew our time was almost up, but the vicious vulgarity of the murders and the tender hand of the painter who had labored over every hair on every baby’s head were combining and recombining in some sort of chemical reaction I couldn’t control.

  A uniformed man called “Tempo di andare!” from somewhere just behind me, and after the hushed groans of disappointment from the other guests died down, he called out again, “Time!” and I rubbed my sleeve across my eyes and looked through the lenses to the farthest-away woman at the front of the clot of mourning mothers. She was wearing green, and her empty hands were crossed in front of her hollow face, and there, from the sad slit of her eye, at the outside corner and tracing its way down her pink cheek until it gathered into a tiny dark drop as it fell from her jaw, I saw it. I saw where Giotto had painted, for the first time in the history of the world, a human tear. Behind her, a second tear fell straight from the inside of the almond eye of a red-veiled mother, streaking past her unbelieving, open mouth. And a faint tear stained the upturned, pleading face of the woman behind her, too, the mother i
n blue whose wide-eyed, terrified baby was being wrenched from her embrace.

  SHELBY, ANNA, AND I SAT FOR A LONG WHILE ON A SUNNY bench, the gusty breeze buffered by the abundance of roses on either side of us. We had wordlessly agreed to sit out the tour of the 3-D presentation in the visitor center and the collection of Paduan paintings in the museum next door. Moreover, none of us wanted to visit the Church of the Eremitani, and Anna and I didn’t want to take the tram to the basilica, either, but only Shelby was bold enough to break all of this news to Sara. While she did the heavy lifting, I braved the ticket counter in hopes of securing us a return visit to the chapel, but all of the spaces for the remaining tours had been sold.

  On my way back to the bench, I saw Shelby waving me over to the gift shop. She had already picked up a commemorative T-shirt and two silk scarves, and I could only hope they didn’t stock togas in her size. I didn’t say a word, but I must have been making that face, which had staved off any number of fashion disasters for Rachel, because Shelby claimed the shirt was for a niece and then decided she would wait on the scarves.

  I told her we were locked out of the chapel for the rest of the day.

  “Well, we’re on our own for a while. Sara was not happy,” Shelby said, “but mission accomplished. I do think I may have spoiled any chance I had for getting in on the trip to Vicenza tomorrow.”

  “Is Sara the guide for Vicenza, too?”

  “Oh, if Lewis was here—you haven’t met him yet, but he’s a doll. He’s traveling with the bigger bunch in Venice. He’s one of the co-owners of EurWay, so he can make executive decisions. He’d let me ride in the luggage rack if there wasn’t a seat.”

  “You have to take my place,” I said. “I’m not going to Vicenza.” I didn’t continue. I wanted to tell her I was leaving, tell her she’d been one of the bright spots on this ill-begotten adventure, but I knew she would feel it was her job to talk me into staying.

  “Are you on the list? A seat on the bus is not the problem,” Shelby said. “It’s the meals and the pass for the Palladio building that will matter to Sara.”

  “I am signed up and prepaid, and I am absolutely not going to Vicenza tomorrow.” This was a pleasure and a relief, like giving away opera tickets. “You have to take my place.”

  It was clear Shelby wanted to ask why I wasn’t going on the side-trip, but instead she said, “Then I won’t take a run till later this evening. You go on to the basilica, and I’ll take Anna to lunch and back to the hotel for a nap, if she wants.”

  “Take your run now, and then you can meet up with Sara and the others at St. Anthony’s. Ushering Anna back to the hotel is just about what I can manage by way of social life this afternoon.”

  Shelby said, “Okay.”

  Her readiness to countenance my antisocial tendencies did sting. “Okay, then.”

  She said, “Let’s plan—tentatively—to have dinner, the three of us.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. I hoped T. was up for another night in the role of the dashing younger man.

  Anna and I ate an early lunch of frittatas at a window table in the hotel’s surprisingly bustling restaurant. We agreed they were good, but not good enough to make me rethink the plan to return to the Piazza dei Fruitti for another round of those superb pizzas. Midway through our meal, we saw Shelby jog by in pink spandex biking shorts and a matching tank top.

  “It’s lucky she found herself a husband, isn’t it?” Anna said. “She’s awfully kind.”

  She asked a few questions about Mitchell, and I learned that her husband had been an autoworker, not an executive as I had imagined. From her stories of her early days in Detroit and what she’d said the night before, I patched together a life that made Anna almost eighty years old. This made me feel a little glum about abandoning Shelby for the rest of the month, leaving her to attend to the vagaries of Anna’s tolerance for the rigors of the tour.

  As casually as I could manage, I asked Anna if she had a telephone number or email contact for Lewis. I felt I should tell someone I was going home so I didn’t get reported as a missing person, apt as that designation seemed.

  Anna reached under the table for her purse and pulled out her itinerary, which she handed to me. On the first page, in the margin beside her Venice hotel information, in careful little capital letters, she had written TWO DAYS WITH FRANNY!

  My eyes welled up.

  Anna said, “Are you missing your husband?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I hadn’t been thinking of Mitchell. I had been thinking of people who belonged together.

  Anna said, “It comes on like that, the loss of him.”

  “Like a migraine,” I said, too cavalierly, though it was true. Marriage had been a mixed blessing for both Mitchell and me, but missing him was debilitating. Almost my entire adult life had been lived in response to him, or in reaction against him, and now the thought of him just occasioned a kind of paralysis. “I’m not even sure if I miss Mitchell, or if I miss being a wife.”

  Apologetically, and maybe a little reprovingly, Anna said, “That’s none of my business.”

  “But it is,” I said. I flipped ahead to the Contacts page and copied Lewis’s number into my phone. “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  Anna looked alarmed. “Maybe you’ve said enough for now.”

  “No, I want to give you something,” I said quickly, “but I’m not certain I will be allowed.” This sounded vaguely like the beginning of a smuggling operation. “I have to go home, to Cambridge, soon.”

  She looked aghast. “Is it one of your children?”

  Again, announcing my intention had calmed me down. “No, it is not any kind of emergency. I need to be at home.” None of this registered as reassuring to Anna, so I said, “It’s all set. I’ve already scheduled my flight. But I need your permission—I need to know if this is really what you want.”

  “I don’t want you to go away,” Anna said. “What gave you that idea?”

  Thank god, the waiter came by and recited the dessert specials, which restored a sense of normalcy. I ordered an espresso. Anna opted for the lemon tart.

  I didn’t wait for the waiter to return. I said, “I want to ask Lewis if my reservations and tickets and meals—if they can somehow be transferred to Francesca, if she can take my place.” I couldn’t decide if this plan was inspired or insane.

  Anna looked past me, her gaze darting around the room, as if maybe I had been talking to someone else. “My sister?”

  This tipped the balance toward the insane. “I don’t have a sister,” I said. “I barely have a brother.”

  Anna drew her napkin from her lap to the table. “Well, I’m sorry about that,” she said.

  I felt queasy, as if I’d arranged this lunch so I could sweet-talk her into selling me a sibling.

  Anna folded the napkin along the ironed-in creases. I couldn’t tell if she was mulling over my offer or waiting for an apology. Finally, she said, “My sister? Franny?”

  I said, “Only if you want her to join you.”

  “You barely know her.”

  This was starting to feel like a warm-up for the conversation I’d be having with Rachel when I tried to explain why I didn’t get even a partial refund. “It’s something I can do,” I said. I instantly regretted the phrase. I could see it had registered with Anna as a boast.

  She folded her hands, and then she tilted her head. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  I said, “To salvage what will otherwise be wasted?”

  Anna’s face tightened. She didn’t say anything.

  Two women at the table beside us burst out in laughter. I watched several tiny cars zip down Largo Europa. I could have used that espresso.

  Anna finally said, “I don’t know why I ordered that pie.” She placed her purse on the napkin, as if she were building a barrier between us.

  I said, “It was just an idea.”

  Anna unsnapped the brass clasp of her purse. “Should I call Francesca?” Sh
e had suddenly lit up, and she had her phone in her hand. “I mean, are you serious?” She sounded giddy.

  I wasn’t prepared for this change of heart, or her eagerness to seal the deal. “I’m not certain it can be done, but I do want to try,” I said.

  Anna was way ahead of me. “I can call her right now.”

  I should have put on the brakes, but I said, “Okay.” I was unnervingly aware that I had cooked up this plan on the basis of nothing but Shelby’s favorable review of Lewis’s disposition. It occurred to me that this could easily end badly—with me secretly paying Lewis another ten or fifteen thousand dollars for Francesca’s fare, and a FOR SALE sign in front of my house in Cambridge.

  Anna didn’t reach Francesca, but she left her a long, exuberant message in Italian. I couldn’t translate word for word, but the spirit of it was, Call me immediately, and pack a bag.

  The waiter returned, and I dropped a couple of ice cubes from my water glass into the little white cup and took a big sip of courage. Anna asked if she could take her dessert up to her room. The waiter bowed and backed away with the tart.

  Anna looked exhausted—dreamy, but half-asleep. She said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  I said, “I’m going to call Lewis. I’ll call you as soon as I have his answer.”

  “The awkward thing is that Francesca could pay you,” Anna said. “I can’t.”

  “The lucky thing is that the money doesn’t matter,” I said, feeling that my voice might shoot up into the soprano register at any moment. “It’s already spent.”

  “Surely, you could get a refund,” Anna said. “If you said it was an emergency, they’d have to give you something back. You’ve barely been here two days.”

  I shook my head, as if lying for profit was simply out of the question. But I was thinking, Two days? Two days? I was going to have to concoct a heartbreaker of a story to get Sam on my side before any of this leaked to Rachel.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. I was anticipating a wave of relief or delight, or at least a little jolt from the caffeine. Nothing.