The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Finally, the waiter returned and handed Anna a small white pastry box tied with blue string. Under the perfect bow, he had tucked a fork wrapped in a red napkin. From our table by the window, through the lobby, to the elevator, and up to the fourth floor, where Anna hugged me and then waved good-bye, I envied her that beautiful little box and all of the tiny, unpredictable, tender touches of Italy to come.

  MY OWN SURPRISE PACKAGE WAS WAITING FOR ME OUTSIDE the door to my room. I found a small white paper bag, its top neatly folded over, and a sheet torn from a notepad with the hotel’s crest stapled to the front. In a fancy hand, someone had written Sig.ra Berman, 414—Ricardo. I had never met anyone named Ricardo, but it was my last name and my room, so I assumed it was something distributed to members of the tour group.

  I peeked inside the bag. My door prize was a disappointment—a little jar of honey. I had just about an hour before I was due back at the chapel to meet T., and I knew Anna would be eager to have confirmation of my proposal, so I briefly rehearsed my plea and dialed Lewis Thayer at EurWay Travel. The first message I left was a series of halting preambles assuring him that I did not want a refund or a ride to the airport, so I called a second time and exhausted his voicemail’s time limit with a biographical portrait of Anna and a disquisition on the difficulties for a widow traveling alone, and when I replayed that message in my mind, I worried that Lewis might think I was actually angling for a refund. My third message was, I thought, a triumph of clarity, though I did end up feeling like one of those women who try to return a pair of absurdly expensive shoes after wearing them to one black-tie event.

  And I still had forty-five minutes to kill.

  I pulled my door prize out of the white bag. It was not honey. The little glass pot was outfitted with a complicated printed label that meant nothing to me until I read these words: La colla più affidabili! Not cola, but colla! I opened the jar, and the familiar scent confirmed my delight. It was a jar of amber glue with a bristled brush attached to the inner lid of the tin screw top.

  I opened my journal on the desk beside the window and found the six lines of poetry curling away from the second page. I pulled them up, rubbed what was left of the lip balm into the page, and painted a square of glue around the stain. I pressed the Dante down and smoothed the patch of poetry several times. This small victory was so gratifying that I scanned the room for something else to glue into the journal. From a pocket of my dress, I rescued one of Sara’s maps of the chapel and evened out the worst of the wrinkles and folds. I placed it on the next blank page of the journal. It fit, but just. After a quick trim with my nail scissors, the map could be more elegantly centered on the journal page. In the drawer of the desk, I found a pen and made a few dots to mark the perimeter of the cut-out map, and then I painted a thick frame of glue, and, within the frame, I added three very delicate vertical brushstrokes to hold the center portion flat, but before I laid the map down, my cell phone rang.

  I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. If it was Lewis politely turning down my request, I knew I wasn’t prepared. I decided it was best to let him leave a message. Within the hour, I could enlist T., and together we could surely come up with some way to pressure Lewis into accepting Francesca as a substitute for me.

  I waited a few minutes to give the new message a chance to register, and then my phone rang again—Rachel. This sent me into dead panic. Had Lewis called her to report my unstable behavior? I dropped the ringing phone on the bed, as if that would serve as an alibi when Rachel later asked why I hadn’t answered.

  I returned to the journal, but the glue had already hardened, spoiling a whole page. I turned to the next page and made another glue frame and hastily pasted in the map. Then I checked my messages.

  Lewis was noncommittal, but he had a British accent, so he sounded amused, which gave me hope. He was tied up until five and promised to ring again. Rachel had called to say she was on her way to an all-day deposition and guessed I would be asleep by the time she was free, so she promised to call again on Tuesday. She’d also picked up my newspapers and arranged to have delivery of the Times and the Globe suspended until the end of the month. She didn’t mention that she’d done this once before, after my first false start. Rachel wasn’t argumentative, but she was persistent. It occurred to me that I could get through the week in Cambridge without her knowing I had come home if I was willing to live without the daily papers—the only reason I ever turned on the lights.

  And just like that, I teared up again. I could feel myself sliding down from panic toward my sofa and the familiar furrow of my depression. To check my descent, I put the red bag on the chair beside the door. I still had fifteen minutes to kill. I turned around twice, looking for something else that could be glued into the journal. That ruined page was haunting me. I sat down with the scissors and pressed hard on the spine, but the leather binding was too sturdy to open up for a clean cut. I turned to the spoiled page. The thick lines of the square frame of dried glue were immediately apparent, but the three little vertical lines I’d painted inside were invisible. I traced my finger slowly across the page. I could feel them, each one. I tilted the page toward the light, and there they were—pale, smooth stains, like tears, so insignificant no one might ever notice. I pulled the pen out of the drawer and labeled this page: #20. Slaughter of the Innocents.

  IV

  On my way to the chapel, I stopped at the desk to thank Ricardo for the glue, and an unfamiliar green-vested man asked me for my room number.

  I said, “414. Why?”

  He said, “Signora Berman, yes?”

  I nodded, and he handed me my passport, which I’d forgotten to collect after checking in. I was another step closer to Cambridge. I said, “Ricardo?”

  He said, “At night only.”

  “I see,” I said.

  He said, “And the mornings, yes?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Later, he will be here?”

  “Sometimes, si, si, si,” he said, smilingly.

  Every conversation I had with an Italian was like walking on the beach and watching the tide erase our trail.

  I followed Sara’s roundabout route to the chapel, certain that any attempt at a shortcut was likely to land me in Bologna. I paused at the post office. Before he died, Mitchell had printed sixty labels for me, thirty addressed to Rachel and her boys and thirty addressed to Sam and Susie—“To save time,” he’d said. He wrote postcards to me and the children whenever he traveled farther than the grocery store, and I think he really believed I didn’t send postcards because I hadn’t paid attention to his routine, which made it easy. He even suggested a few pat phrases I might adopt and repeat. “Don’t try to be original, or it will turn into a chore for you,” he’d said. It was after three, so I convinced myself I should not stop, that I could buy stamps in the airport tomorrow, possibly from someone who spoke English. With a few strategically placed air mail stickers, I could even get away with sending the postcards later in the week from Cambridge.

  In the courtyard of the chapel, there were at least thirty Catholic priests, some in full-length black cassocks or brown hooded robes, others in black suits with white Roman collars, and a few of the men in jeans might have been Jesuits. Inside the visitor center, there was a large contingent of nuns in full headdress. In an American museum, they would have looked otherworldly, like visitors from another era, but here they looked like Management.

  “You have to take a vow of silence.” It was T. in the same blue blazer, a new white shirt. He had apparently been perched on the roof and swooped down when he spotted me. “And I need your passport. Follow me.” He led me inside to the ticket counter and introduced me to a priest in a black suit, who shook my hand. His name was Ed.

  Father Ed said, “You must be E.?

  I nodded.

  T. and the priest headed to the counter, and I stayed where I was. T. handed the priest my passport, then leaned on the counter, and handed his passport to the priest as well. The priest pulle
d an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it and the passports to a stern, squat, blue-uniformed woman. While she examined the contents of the envelope, T. smiled blithely, as if he often traveled with a priest as his personal valet.

  I heard T. say, “No, no, no,” and then the priest nodded toward T. and said, “Egli è il medico.” He turned, pointing to me, and said, “Lei è la vedova del professore. Dottore Berman, Decano dell’università di Harvard.”

  The uniformed woman disappeared with the letter and the passports. T. stayed at the counter, and the priest sidled up to me and said, “All set,” and led me across the room to a corner of the gift shop. He was not a lot taller than I was, but he had a reassuring, muscular presence under all that black, or maybe I was inferring too much based on his dark hair and eyes, and his impressive five o’clock shadow. “I hope the lecture won’t bore you,” he said.

  “My husband worked at Harvard,” I said. “I’ve been inoculated. Will it be in English?”

  “English and Italian.”

  “So it will be twice as long as necessary,” I said, as if I had been drinking.

  “Yes, we’ll see how that goes over.” He had a strong, square, impassive face, which was probably an asset when people confessed their sins to him. “Most of the priests here are traveling from the States.” He glanced at his watch.

  I knew I was breaking my vow of silence, but getting a fact out of T. could be tricky, so I plunged ahead while I had the priest alone. “How do you and T. know each other?”

  “Oh. Caroline,” he said, and he paused long enough that I realized he expected me to recognize the name. “His ex-wife?”

  I nodded. This was news to me. I knew T. lived in Houston and was a partner in a general surgical practice, which was all he’d provided by way of facts for the EurWay passenger biographies.

  The priest said, “Caroline is my older sister.” He put his hand flat against my back. “But I knew him first. Now, I really am late, so the rest will have to wait until this evening.” He waved as he disappeared out the door.

  The clerical crowd was breaking up outside, so I took to one of the benches. When T. finally emerged, he flashed me the victory sign. As he joined me on the bench, he handed me my passport with a large white envelope. On the flap was an embossed gold seal that featured the words Commune di Padova. He said, “What time is your flight tomorrow?”

  I said, “Three o’clock or so. I have to buy the ticket before dinner. Is this an official city document?”

  “Yes. And since you’ve paid for Tuesday night in the hotel, I agree that a Wednesday departure makes more sense.”

  “Tomorrow is Tuesday,” I said.

  “And we have unlimited access to the Arena Chapel. It’s like being a Scrovegni for a day.” He opened my envelope and held up a letter typed under the same gold seal. “Ed arranged it for us.”

  “Is he the bishop of Padua?”

  “A medievalist at Georgetown. He’s on sabbatical here till December, writing a book about the First Jubilee.”

  “It sounds festive, anyway.”

  “I didn’t know what he meant by that either, so you’ll have to ask him. He won’t take it so hard coming from you. We’re having a drink with him after his lecture.”

  “Ed is giving the lecture? Even better.” I was pretending not to be lamenting my comments to Ed about the boring lecture by pretending to read my letter. “Who did you tell them I am?”

  T. said, “The widow of the late Professor Doctor Dean Berman, Dante scholar.”

  I said, “Mitchell was never dean of the college, or dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And he wasn’t faculty. Or a scholar, not in any practical sense. He ended up as a vice president—”

  I stopped because T. had pressed the back of his hand to my forehead. “Post–Harvard stress disorder. It will pass, like sunstroke. Was your husband not a dean? Did he not have a passion for Dante?”

  “Once, long ago.”

  “Over here, he gets to keep all of his titles. It’s like ringtoss. Can we say one word about Shelby’s jogging outfit?”

  I said, “Impetuous.”

  “Thank you. Unlike Shelby, I disapprove of your bequest to Anna.”

  It was like junior high. Everybody knew everything. I said, “Actually, Francesca is the beneficiary.”

  “Whence my objection,” said T. “I’m certain she speaks more English than she lets on.”

  “That will make it easier on Anna,” I said. He might be able to talk me out of a Tuesday flight, but the sisters were my business.

  T. said, “Folly.”

  I said, “Call me impetuous.”

  “But you’re here now.” T. grabbed hold of my hand. “Are you really that unhappy?”

  Everybody touched each other here, even Americans. “Sometimes,” I said. Every day brought a new measure, so it was hard to get a fix on it. She’s so unhappy that she didn’t shower today. She’s so unhappy that she forgot to return three phone calls from her brother in Atlanta. She’s so unhappy that she got down on her knees and scrubbed the walls of her self-cleaning oven. Most unnerving of all, sometimes she was happier than she let on.

  T. was looking disapprovingly at my Swiss Army watch. “A memento mori,” he said. He looked right into my eyes. “You are here.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s Italy,” he said urgently. “There are all kinds of wonderful drugs to improve our moods, and we can get them right over the counter.”

  “Are we missing Ed’s lecture?”

  T. stood up. “Park bench to church pew,” he said.

  “Pilgrim’s progress,” I said. I stood up and fell into step beside him. For some reason, he led us away from the chapel and out the gate. If the signs we passed were any indication, Ed was lecturing in the Church of the Eremitani. I was thinking ahead to Thursday and Friday, thinking it should probably be unthinkable, but thinking I would miss T. for a couple of days as much as I missed Mitchell, and maybe more.

  THE FIRST JUBILEE WAS DECLARED IN 1300 BY POPE Boniface VIII—aka, His Holiness P.T. Barnum—to drum up business for the dilapidated shrines and cemeteries and churches in Rome. It was a financial bonanza. On any given day, there were about a quarter of a million heat-stroked pilgrims trampling ancient ruins as they fought their way into old St. Peter’s to buy pizza and plenary indulgences, hoping like hell to end up with “full and copious pardon of all their sins.” There were also all-night block parties in Sienna, and no end of Paduan pageantry parading through streets crowded with pilgrims who couldn’t make the trip to Rome, not to mention knights errant galloping around, lances up, looking for a fight or a free drink or a reasonably priced damsel in Venice and Florence and many of the other independent communes throughout Italy—which was just a notion and not a nation for another five hundred years, and only then if you were willing to define a nation as a conglomeration of cities that changes prime ministers more often than the citizens change their underwear.

  That’s how Ed spoke. I didn’t object to the breakneck pace, but his offhand, derisive tone was bewildering. He might have been saving his more academic material for the Italians. I couldn’t see how his lecture was going over with the American priests, but from the way wimples were whipping around, I could tell he wasn’t scoring a lot of points with the nuns.

  I nudged T. to get his verdict.

  He shrugged and whispered, “This is my first visit to a Christian comedy club.”

  The setting wasn’t doing Ed any favors. Even by the dour standards of the Dark Ages, the place was a downer, a hulking bulwark of a building. The ceiling of the church was built like the hull of a ship, all shellacked dark-wood beams and rafters, and the walls were dull marble, alternating rows of green and maroon horizontal stripes, which were no more flattering to the Romanesque architecture than they were to a middle-aged woman’s midriff. The only relief was the light behind Ed, where the altar was set inside a bright domed space, its ceiling and walls decorated in the suburban Catholic
paint-by-numbers style—a pale blue sky with cartoonish, cottony clouds and a pastel Jesus surrounded by some sacred stuff I couldn’t really see. T. and I had been late so were stuck in the farthest-back benches.

  Before he crossed the language barrier, Ed hammered home the significance of the Jubilee Year, reminding all of the English speakers that Dante had been in Rome in 1300, sent as an emissary by his friends in Florence to beg Pope Boniface to butt out of their secular business. Years later, in The Divine Comedy—“that conniving fever-dream of worldwide condemnation and self-promotion in verse form”—Dante dated the launch of his famous trip through the Gates of Hell as Good Friday, 1300. And it was 1300 when Enrico Scrovegni sold off a town he owned in the Veneto and plopped down a pile of gold to purchase the decrepit site and tumble-down ruins of the old Roman Arena in Padua, with plans to build himself a new home and a little chapel.

  T. whispered, “It was a banner year.”

  One of the American priests raised his hand and shouted, “You’re saying Scrovegni owned Venice?”

  “No, you’re saying Venice, and I’m saying Veneto,” Ed said, alienating one of the few people in the pews still paying close attention. “The Veneto is the region that extends north of here, and Enrico owned a lot of it. The town he cashed in to buy the Arena is called Malo.”

  T. elbowed me, but I would not look his way. I did not need to be reminded that Malo was Francesca’s hometown. And I didn’t like the feeling that, like Enrico, I was meddling in Malo in an attempt to buy myself absolution.

  Ed said, “Okay, exercise time.” Nobody moved. He seemed almost heroically unfazed by the crowd’s animosity. “You’re going to have to stand up eventually. So if I can coax you out of those rock-hard wooden pews, I’ll ask you all to follow me to the chapel on my left. If you didn’t bone up on your Italian, just look at the pictures and wait for the English portion of our program to resume.”

  As he stood, T. said, “I will say not one word about Malo, but you must know my tongue is bleeding.”