The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  T. put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, “Spoiler alert. Not everybody gets a happy ending.”

  The guard called time and cleared the room, and we inched on to the fourth fresco, back to the stony wilderness—Joachim on his knees, a solemn shepherd to his left, a reassuring angel to his right, and a few sheep nosing around in the foreground. At the center, on a rocky height, red flames leapt into the bruised-blue sky from a stone barbecue oven, licking and curling around the blackened skeleton of a sacrificial lamb, its eviscerated neck and cranium raised up above its burned body, pointing to a disembodied heavenly hand reaching down from unseen heights.

  T. said, “Put on your peepers.”

  I didn’t want to magnify this moment. I was eager to move on. I couldn’t turn Mitchell into Joachim here. It was the carcass of the lamb that made me mindful of Mitchell, and for the first time ever I had to imagine the horrific moments in the crematorium after his flesh had vaporized in the intense heat, before his bones were reduced to ash. That was the end of his story. That was the happy ending I’d arranged for my husband. I said, “I’ve seen enough.”

  I tried to hand the binoculars to T., but he shrugged off the offer. I barely paused at the fifth panel, where Joachim was asleep while two young shepherds tended the flock. In the blue sky above, the red-winged angel who’d earlier visited Anne swooped in and urged Joachim on to Jerusalem and then sailed away, the tail end of its heavenly body evanescing in a comet stream.

  T. was lingering, and to hasten him along, I said, “And, finally, they meet at the Golden Gate.”

  “The threshold of history,” T. said. “Their story is just getting started.”

  “Lucky them,” I said, though I didn’t envy Anne a pregnancy at her age with no hope of an epidural.

  T. almost said something—he turned to me expectantly, opened his mouth, and narrowed his gaze, but instead of speaking he reached around his waist and pulled his blazer and shirt away from his back.

  I said, “You want to go.”

  T. said, “You want to stay?”

  It sounded more like a request than a question. I said, “For one or two more tours.”

  T. said, “And then an early lunch?” His head twisted away reflexively, and he winced over his shoulder, as if something surprising was happening on his back. He said, “Lunch with Ed?”

  I said, “For god’s sake, let me help you. Are you bleeding again?”

  T. said, “I’ll find you on a bench outside.”

  The guard was herding the others to the exit.

  T. turned and held up his hand, palm toward the Seven Vices on the opposite wall. “If ever I were able to talk about—” He moved his hand in tight little circles. “If I could talk to anyone about all of this, I’d want to talk to you.” He hurried away. The tourists cleared out. I was alone.

  I FELT THE PRESENCE OF THE OTHER PAINTED FIGURES AS I paced the center aisle of the chapel. I was looking for something, some explanation for the way the paintings worked on my imagination. In the café the day before with Ed and T., it was the depth and vastness of the sky that I remembered. I had recalled each painted scene as if I had been standing so close that I could see above the heads and shoulders of the human figures in the foreground. But I was not close, in fact. A railing all along the central aisle kept me at least ten feet from the chapel walls, and the lowest register of painted panels was ten feet higher than my line of sight. Anne and Joachim—they were at least another thirty feet above me. And yet, from this vantage, where I should have registered distortions in perspective, I was still inside the frame, aware of sky, or at least the sense of possibility that blue skies so reliably betoken, and my mind was reflexively adjusting for the angles and occlusions, rounding out the world around me, as if I had seen these scenes before, my point of view informed by memory.

  The frames that Giotto painted for each scene appeared to have dimension—they looked like raised-stone reliefs into which paintings had been fitted, which should have heightened my awareness that I was looking at art, paint on a plaster wall. Instead, the emphatic framing turned the paintings into windows, portals with a vantage on another time. These were not isolated snapshots from the past that simply let you see how other people dressed or spent their time. I was not looking at Anne or Joachim or the shepherds. Every painted figure was a habitable space within a world I’d entered, an invitation to see beyond the familiar borders and boundaries of myself.

  When I was alone in the chapel, it was not the painted people or their circumstances that drew me in. The frescoes themselves were charismatic.

  Like a pulse, I sensed the presence of that blue sky not only in the background of each picture but behind the frames and under every painted pilaster and column, a blueness roiling beneath the deepest-down coat of unpainted plaster, beneath the brick and mortar of the chapel walls. I knew this was an illusion, but so is the sky itself, that luminous dome above us, the true-blue air we breathe, the impossibly expanding insubstantial depth that we call space.

  A priest in a black cassock and white sneakers led a group of four young, black-suited men to my side and pointed to Joachim and the burned carcass of the lamb. “Now, look closely,” he said.

  The four young men raised their binoculars and focused. They looked like seniors in high school. In England. In 1940. They were extraordinarily clean-cut.

  I pointed my peepers at that sacrificial lamb, as T. had suggested.

  “Faintly sketched, above the charred carcass of the sacrificial lamb, almost invisible against the night sky, the plumes of smoke assume a shape.” The priest paused. “Can you see it?”

  One young man whispered, “An angel!”

  “An angel,” said the priest. “Notice its head cast up, its wings at rest, its fragile existence drawn ever higher by the loving hand of God in heaven.”

  “Prefiguring the Resurrection,” said another of the four young ones.

  “Sheep figure in all of the Joachim paintings,” the priest continued. His tone was more didactic than pontifical, so I couldn’t tell if the young men were prep-school students or seminarians. “We begin the cycle with the rejected sacrifice at the temple, and then the flock in the wilderness, and his holocaust, and, finally, when Joachim dreams in the desert, a single lamb sits on the highest ledge, apart from the bigger, woolly animals, its fragile legs folded, its head erect, its smooth white body shorn of its coat. Now, what do you notice about the two paintings in which St. Anne is present?”

  Almost in unison, the four young men said, “No sheep.”

  The priest was beaming. “There are no sheep in the Anne paintings, almost as if women occupy a separate realm. Which they did. Even St. Anne would not have been allowed into the temple.”

  One young man said, “So you’re comparing women to sheep?”

  I was standing two feet away from this nitwit.

  Another young man said, “Maybe Giotto is just saying women shouldn’t have to work outside the house.”

  “Use your heads,” the priest snapped. He smiled apologetically in my direction. “Think about the Lamb of God.”

  All four close-cropped heads bowed in unison. One of them muttered, “Jesus is the Lamb of God.”

  “And who is the Mother of God?”

  Someone said, “Mary.”

  “And who is the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary?”

  “St. Anne.”

  The priest said, “Giotto is illustrating the promise of Jesus, the coming of the Christ Child. When he depicts St. Anne, there are no sheep—symbolic prefigurations of the Lamb of God—because from this moment forward, the presence of Jesus becomes real in the story of the salvation of history.”

  This all made sense if you ignored the fact that the sheep were sheep. But the boys were nodding knowingly, and the priest led them across the room toward the manger and the Magi.

  When I looked again at Anne, alone in her green room, and Shelby in the peasant dress on the porch, I noted that Shelby was winding wo
ol and, later, at the Golden Gate, among the onlookers, there was Shelby again—it was unmistakably Shelby, her small breasts getting no boost whatsoever from that peasant dress—and she had a hand-knit wool blanket folded over her arms.

  In Giotto’s telling of the story, you could see the sheep as symbols, or you could see the sheep as sheep—just like the angels. Were those half-seen heralds really present, or were they fond hopes to which the dreamer pinned a pair of wings? Unlike Anne and Joachim, the Shelby figure was not visited by an angel. Outside of Anne’s room, the angel’s body wasn’t visible. And yet before the sainted couple had consummated their lifelong dream of conceiving a child, Shelby knew that Anne would soon be pregnant. Thus, the receiving blanket she had woven from the wool of that shorn sheep. This wasn’t a miracle or a symbol. This was Giotto’s genius, the human truth of the Golden Legend—not merely a mystical tale of divine intercession but a record of the foresight of a woman who had paid attention to the needs and longings of the people whom she loved and served. There was nothing mysterious about a woman like Shelby showing up at the Golden Gate with a receiving blanket at the ready. She was always expecting the best.

  According to the soles of my feet, it was time to get off the marble floor, but according to Mitchell’s watch, I had six minutes left before the next changeover. Again, I felt the presence of Jesus and his Apostles and the other familiar painted figures, but now they were hovering, staring down on me, rather like my Cambridge neighbors at their windows when I ventured out to the mailbox in my bathrobe. I ignored them. I didn’t want to know what they were thinking. I didn’t want to see me through their eyes.

  I took a few backward steps and let my gaze drop down from the Golden Gate to the Slaughter of the Innocents, which seemed too sad a last impression, so I lowered my gaze again, and there was Jesus being beaten by a crowd of jeering men wielding metal rods. T. had warned me that this story didn’t end well for everyone. The horror of the scene was compounded by humiliation. One man was pinching the face of Jesus; another was pulling his hair. I consulted Sara’s map. This was Number 32, The Flagellation (Coronation with Thorns).

  I thought I deserved a more uplifting final image for the morning, but instead of turning to an angel or a starry patch of sky, I looked up again at Jesus being flogged. A stream of blood ran down his face from puncture wounds in his scalp beneath the crown of thorns. Like the tears that ran down the faces of the grieving mothers above him.

  Like the blood on T.’s back?

  T. had been standing beneath the bloodied body of Jesus when he’d said, “You know everything.”

  Someone brushed against my back, and I was certain it was T. I wished he’d found me staring at the ceiling or admiring the altar—anywhere but here. I turned. There was no one near me. Most of the crowd was clotted in the middle of the aisle, staring up and over my head at the Last Judgment. But a posse of well-dressed women was headed my way, and the tallest one was smiling at me. I moved deep into the corner and consulted Sara’s map so I wouldn’t have to interact like a normal adult.

  “Liz?”

  I tried to squeeze my entire body through the open toes of my pumps so I could slither away along the marble floor.

  “Liz Berman?”

  I said, “Hello.”

  “You don’t remember me.”

  I knew her name was Rosalie Ellenbogen. She’d ended up as vice president of Harvard Real Estate before she took a job at NYU, or maybe Columbia.

  “Rosalie Ellenbogen,” she said.

  The other women had veered off and disappeared into a scrum of tourists. I tried to spot another tall one among them, a redhead named Rose Hips, or Rose of Lima, or some absurd variation on Rosalie. She’d also worked at Harvard until she and Rosalie ditched their respective husbands and turned themselves into the world’s tallest lesbian couple. But the posse had dissipated. Rosalie was alone. I was happy to think that was a chronic condition.

  Rosalie said, “I was so sorry to read of Mitchell’s passing.”

  Suddenly, time was passing the wrong way, like a reel of film rewinding, flicking back through the years, flashing images of the illness, Rachel’s wedding, Sam’s college graduation, and finally uncovering a sequence of Mitchell snapping shut his briefcase while I read the morning paper, and then Mitchell warning me that he was about to lean in and kiss me good-bye, my beloved Judas, pausing long enough beside my chair for me to straighten his necktie.

  How often I had wanted to tug that silk like a length of rope, bend his head toward mine, and tighten and tighten his knotted tie. But I had choked back my anger instead of choking Mitchell to death, and I wouldn’t have said another word to Rosalie if she had walked away.

  Instead, Rosalie said, “Remember me to your children.”

  “Remind me,” I said. “It was you and not your tall friend Rose Petal who fucked Mitchell, right? You can imagine, he was rather confused when you came out. And a little titillated, too.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  I said, “Then maybe you don’t know that your husband—Dan? Dave? Don? He called me and let me know he had pictures.”

  Rosalie said, “This is ancient history.”

  “No, home-security footage. I remember now—it was a movie,” I said. “He offered to make me a copy, but I was buried in back episodes of Prime Suspect at the time.” At the time, Rosalie had told everyone that her husband was shocked by her self-discovery but was kind during the divorce. A few months later, Dan-Dave-Don sent me a handwritten note. According to him, his home movie had cost Rosalie half of a sizable fortune he’d inherited. He also boasted about keeping his promise to keep Mitchell’s name out of the whole mess. Unless I wanted the videocassette, he intended to destroy the evidence.

  Rosalie said, “I had only intended to offer my condolences.” She drifted away toward the altar end of the chapel.

  I had never said a word about Rosalie to Mitchell, even during the week she came out to her colleagues at Harvard and Mitchell said, “You never know about people,” so often that I realized he was hoping I did know about the affair, or else hoping he might work up the nerve to tell me. I kept my silence as I kept my vow of fidelity—one of the Seven Virtues. And I learned that the flipside of that coin was a deadly vice. Like an unpopular schoolgirl with a perfect attendance record, I turned up for my marriage every day, my happiness wedded to my unhappiness.

  Four, five, and even six years later, Mitchell would still occasionally toss Rosalie’s name into a discussion of a news story about gay marriage. “Everybody has a right to be happy,” he’d say piously, as if he was proud to have done his part in the long struggle for human rights.

  When the guard finally called us to the exit, I was all turned around until I realized that the Golden Gate, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Flagellation were behind me. I was staring at Number 41g on Sara’s map, the last fresco in the eye-level row. This was the final image in the chapel sequence, the last of Giotto’s black-and-white depictions of the Seven Virtues and the Seven Vices. Its title was Despair. It was a plain and realistic painting of a woman about my age, her fleshy arms angled out from her sides as if she were falling through the air, fists clenched, her scarf twisted around a nail in the wall above her head and looped and knotted around her neck, her soft skin bunched up against her jaw by the pressure of her handmade noose, her head bent toward her shoulder, her eyes closed.

  I closed my eyes. As quick as that, the features of her face were inscribed upon my mind, as if she had long lived in my memory, as if I knew her well, as if she were my old familiar.

  I should have left it there, but I noticed a thin red streak of something curling across her hair to the temple of her head. It was not ornamental. It was invasive, like the antenna of a huge insect or the talon of small bird of prey. With the binoculars, I could trace that red line to the faded outline of a blood-red body, the horns and hairy torso of a furry beast with cloven hooves, a disgusting little demon diving i
nto her forehead, claiming its prey.

  This marked her as another kind of sacrificial lamb.

  I marked this as the first accurate portrait of a woman ever painted by a man.

  The guard yelled, “Pronto!”

  I tilted the binoculars away from the hairy red beast and aimed my gaze at the hanged woman’s face. But as I tried to magnify her features, they were not there. Where I recalled the thin bluish veil of her eyelids and the smooth pink curve of her cheek, the portrait erupted into gravelly gray patches of unpainted plaster. I dropped the binoculars and took a step closer. Her entire face had been erased. From just below her brow to the dark line of her lower lip, her painted features were blistered and eroded, her skin stripped away by time. Other frescoes had been touched up or filled in during the recent restoration, but she was so far gone that no one had even attempted to revive her. She had not been seen for centuries. I turned and walked away, and at the far end of the chapel, in the darkness near the altar, I remembered every facet of her face.

  AS I HURRIED BACK TOWARD THE VISITOR CENTER, ED waved and stood up from a green bench. He was wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up above a pair of penny loafers and a black raincoat with old-fashioned brass buckles, as if we had a date at the malt shop. He was also holding my red bag and black umbrella, which I would have forgotten to retrieve. I fished around in the pockets of my shirtdress and found the coat-check token and, idiotically, handed it to him as he leaned in to kiss my cheeks, so we ended up with our hands locked and his wet lips pressed against my neck.

  He said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “My pleasure,” I said. “I haven’t had a hickey in years.”

  He looked at the coin I’d pressed into his hand. “Is this a tip?”

  We both bent toward his raised palm to examine the evidence. Instead of the coat-check token, I’d dug up a two-euro coin. Set inside a thin band of brass was a portrait of a man with a noble Roman nose, etched in silver, a wreath of laurels on his head.