Gospel (13 page)

He slammed the door.

She breathed nervously. “Uh, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

A roar from within: WHAT?

“When will I see you again? I mean, if I get the money for you. I mean, it's not actually
my
credit card…”

The door opened. He spoke in a beatific whisper to hide the blast that would follow if she didn't go away soon. “Save me the
invokata
of the Eleusinian Mysteries of how you get this money. I don't care. Sell your young, chaste body on the street. Return to me before the pubs open and you're likely to find me—
now can I get back to work?
”

“I'm going, I'm going…”

She turned and ran down the stairs and heard the sound of the slamming door again. You know, nasty as he was to her, she sort of liked him anyway.

(That's because you have a good heart, Lucille.)

Getting $400 from Cecilia's MasterCard required a passport, a second ID, and an unaccustomed, un-American half-hour wait in a line at the Barclays Bank despite only four people being in front of her. But she got the cash.

Lucy spent the next hour souvenir-mongering, buying some Oxford marmalade for Mom, she'd get a bottle of duty-free Irish whiskey for Dad, and she'd better pick up something for Cecilia since she was bankrupting her … and that meant Mary too, and her brothers Nick and Kevin. And postcards, postcards to everyone. See? I do
too
have an exciting life is what a postcard from Europe said.

Dear Judy,

Well wouldn't you know, two days in England and there's this guy, Duncan. From the northern part, cute—even you'd think so—and that accent!

Lucy read what she'd begun and put her pen down, not sure whether she'd send it or not. Maybe some real romance would happen and she could write something more substantial.

(You mean something more the truth.)

She looked at the embellished episode of Duncan and tore the card up. You lie a little bit and then you have to lie a lot when asked questions about it and before you know it you've created a whole false life … She would rub Judy's nose in some other adventure.

(What is this obsession with bettering poor Judy?)

A page in Lucy's address book had a list of potential postcard recipients. Maiden aunts and godparents and lots of old people who never went anywhere and didn't think anyone should live anywhere else but Bridgeport, Chicago, the 11th Ward, Mayor Daley country, paradise on this Irish-American earth. Her mother had demanded that half a dozen old prayer-circle biddies get cards from Lucy abroad.

“Old Miss McGill has never been anywhere,” Mother lectured, “and think how she'd value a card from overseas! She has prayed for you and followed your growing up since you were the tiniest thing, and when you had your tonsils out she prayed for you, and for your confirmation she sent you two dollars and Lord knows she didn't have it to give.…”

All those tiresome old hags, Lucy thought.

(Lucy.)

Lonely,
tiresome old hags, Lucy corrected. Old women with nothing and no one. Well, I could write them all the same card and hope they don't compare them … but of course they
will.
They'll be on the phone the second they get their cards, rubbing each other's noses in their importance at getting a European missive from Mary Dantan's little girl.

(Sounds almost as petty as you and Judy.)

It was four o'clock and new, darker storm clouds had arisen since her lunchtime tea with the rabbi. Before recommitting herself to playing detective in the library, she decided she needed a local expert. Maybe the friendly woman in the magenta tights who lived on the Guest Room stairway. Ursula. Lucy went to Braithwaite to avail herself of her newfound acquaintance who was majoring in English. “Reading English,” as the British say, though Ursula soon assured her doing English at Oxford required very little reading whatsoever.

“What a relief, Lucy dear,” said Ursula, clearing off a chair for Lucy to sit upon, “I was praying for someone to come by and prevent me from writing this dire little essay. I have an essay crisis concerning D. H. Lawrence. Considering what Lawrence uses the word ‘crisis' for, I should think it best not to call it that, don't you agree?”

“I thought the term was over,” Lucy wondered.

“Well, I fear I've been a bad little girl and they're making me stay and write papers for penance. I've been terrified for two years of being sent down but, I've decided, they've devised far worse for me by making me stay up.”

Lucy took in Ursula's madcap room: Eastern carpets, a marble bust with an elaborate Edwardian lady's hat on it, knicknacks from around the world, onyx sphinxes, a small African mask, a kitsch ceramic Leaning Tower of Pisa, an impressive collection of empty champagne bottles along the window ledge.

“That was Trinity term,” she said proudly.

Scattered elsewhere were veils, scarves, lustrous raiments and puff-pillows strewn about the obligatory dorm-room furniture, as well as numerous glamorous photos on her dresser of herself with a variety of handsome, tuxedoed young men. Ursula flopped down on the floor, papers and critical books around her and, thank God, Lucy observed to her relief: a Monarch notes!

“I won't bother you long, Ursula, but where can I talk to someone about Anglo-Saxon poetry?”

“Alas, around Braithwaite most people could help you. It's the tragedy of the place.” Ursula craned upward to her desk and tore a piece of paper out of one of her textbooks without remorse. “Here,” she said, scribbling, “Dr. Renaldo, Staircase Ten. Our resident Anglo-Saxon don. He'd be more than happy to help you. God knows we, his charges, have as little to do with him and Anglo-Saxon as possible.”

It was raining now. The wind found Lucy from all directions, carrying the cold drizzle into her face. Looking dismally at her feet and walking stoically forward, she came to the stairwell. A roster of hand-painted signs, white on black, announced Room 5 was Dr. Renaldo's chamber. Ascending the groaning wooden stairs, centuries old, she passed student rooms with unidentifiable British house music seething on the tape players within. She found Room 5 and knocked on the door.

No sounds of life.

She knocked again, then took a step back and seated herself on the nearby stairs, to wait a bit. A moment later a female student enclosed in a tremendous bathrobe made her way down the stairs to a room nearby, yawning as she passed, just meeting the day at 4:30
P.M.
It amused Lucy to picture an American university converted to the Oxford system, with student dorms, faculty offices, and professor's accommodations all bunched together. It would be about a week before revolution would ensue.

Lucy then heard a stirring from Dr. Renaldo's office. The door opened about a half-inch, and a steely eye peered through. “What do you want?”

“Dr. Renaldo?”

“You've been sent by the Common Room?”

“The Common Room?”

“Oh, wait, I know who you are. You'd better come in then, after all. Quickly quickly…” He opened the door and swept her inside. Lucy found herself ushered to a Victorian upholstered chair with the stuffing long pounded out of it.

Dr. Renaldo closed the door behind him and scurried to his big oaken desk to face Lucy, while Lucy assessed the museum of a room: dark-paneled walls, no light except the glow of the electric fire in the stone fireplace and the halfhearted daylight from the old, thick-glassed window, framed engravings by the score, a faded sepia globe, and piles of papers, tomes, and paperbacks lying amid the shadows and decades of long-absorbed pipe smoke.

“Come to face the music, have you?”

Dr. Renaldo was a tall, gangly man with a high, precise voice, about fifty but with a boy's full head of golden hair, a bit too long with uneven bangs hanging over his forehead, a mane Lucy suspected of being artificially lightened. She noted his dark green, crushed velour—what did you call those things?—smoking jacket with some monogram on the breast pocket, his light blue shirt without a tie, ancient blue jeans with a thick leather belt and a giant buckle.

“Now then,” he said sharply. “Your essay, please.”

“My essay?”

He gave a mocking laugh, as he twisted in his squeaking swivel chair and reached for his already lit pipe. “Ah, what is it this time, hm? Glandular fever—that time-honored excuse? Expiring relatives? Break up with the boyfriend?” And then with deliciously clipped British consonants: “Chapped lips, perhaps? I've heard them all, and most of them from you, Miss Campbell-Miers.”

“Uh, excuse me, I—”

“Don't disappoint me, now.
Tears,
Miss Campbell-Miers! I want tears! Nothing short of your finest performance will do!”

“Uh, Dr. Renaldo, I think you have me mistaken for—”

“What?” he piped. “Oh, I do say indeed: an American accent! You simply surpass yourself! I take it we are working up to an amnesia scenario here?”

“My name is Lucy Dantan, sir, and really, I'm not one of your students.”

He pursed his lips. “You're not?”

“No.”

“You're positive you're not one of my first-years?”

“Yes, sir.”

He pondered this while enjoying a taste of his pipe. “All the better for you, actually.” Another taste. “No, you don't really look like Miss Campbell-Miers at that. I do my best to see my students as infrequently as possible, of course, so do forgive me … I don't suppose you'd consider
teaching
my first-years Anglo-Saxon, Miss Dantan?”

“I don't think I'm qualified, sir.”

“That's hardly stopped the English faculty before.” He looked genuinely dejected, but then sighed away this desolation. They shared a strange pause in which the silence seemed unbreakable. Then at last: “What, then, may I ask, brings you to this dread chamber?”

“Oh, I won't take up much of your valuable time, sir—”

“Valuable! What little you know!”

“—but I wondered if I could ask you a question or two about an Anglo-Saxon poem. I'm visiting from the University of Chicago.” Suddenly Lucy felt insecure about her status and fluffed it up a bit. “I'm here to do research for the University of Chicago, and I won't bother you for longer than five minutes, I promise.”

“Oh, you mustn't rush. Stay for hours, please. You must keep me from a deadly Senior Common Room function.” The don sucked on his pipe with glee. “In fact, your visit has worked out splendidly. What poem shall we discuss?”

“Cynewulf's poem
Andreas.
”

Renaldo almost allowed a smile. “Cynewulf didn't write the
Andreas,
for one thing. We can hardly imagine Cynewulf writing it, now can we?”

Lucy smiled in numb agreement.

“I'm rather surprised that you found a book that managed to attribute the
Andreas
to Cynewulf. For centuries that mistake has been corrected.” Then he rolled his eyes wearily. “Though there is yet one old fool, at Cambridge naturally, who published a monograph suggesting otherwise in the face of incontrovertible proof and world opinion.”

Lucy dug into her handbag for the little notebook. “Uh, it was, sir, a very old book. From 1623—”

“Yes, the Catherwood imprint of the Vercelli manuscript,” he said with pleasure. “Taken from a copy of the Vercelli we no longer possess, full of mistakes, very old, possibly authentic. My, what led you to that? I myself have produced a small, unread monograph on the subject, in the
Anglo-Saxon Quarterly Register,
winter issue, 1972. You, no doubt, saw it prominently displayed in Chicago University's library.”

Not sure if it was a joke, Lucy smiled.

“Here is the organ in question.” Dr. Renaldo unearthed a slim academic volume from under the pile of papers before him. “You'll be kind enough to read aloud the features of this quarter's offerings,” he added, handing it to Lucy.

Lucy scooted forward and read down the list of topics: “The Parou-sia in the Old English
Physiologus.
The Middle Cornish
Beunans Meriasek
and Arthurian Survivals. Theories on
Genesis B
after Line 441—”

“Grown men devoting their lives to this wretched matter,” he said pleasantly. “There is a rumor afoot that the faculty intends to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon requirement from the English Literature bachelor's degree.”

Lucy couldn't decide whether he was happy at the prospect.

“Of course, it's outrageous,” he went on. “I had to learn this excruciatingly useless language, and I think it's only fair that everyone should suffer likewise; I hate to think of future generations having things so luxuriously. I made it my speciality, principally so I could be assured of an appointment. All colleges are reduced to hiring an Anglo-Saxon scholar of some variety. I would never have been hired if I developed expertise in my first and truest love.”

“What was that, sir?”

“Late Stuart odes written in Latin.”

The 1930s coal black phone on his desk rang.

“Oh, Miss Dantan, could you get that?”

“Me?”

“If you would.”

Lucy picked up the phone. It was someone looking for Dr. Renaldo, the Senior Common Room meeting was about to begin and they were waiting for him. “Yes,” said Lucy, “well, I'll check and see if he's here…”

I'm not here,
he mouthed.

“No, he's not in his office,” said Lucy. “No, I'm quite sure. What am I doing here? Uh, waiting for Dr. Renaldo. Yes. Bye-bye.”

Dr. Renaldo was delighted watching her set the receiver down. “Good show! I suppose, indebted to you as I am, I should offer you some tea.”

“That would be nice, sir.” Lucy, no less chilled in this murky office than outside, welcomed a nice cup of English tea. English tea in an Oxford chamber brewed by an actual English don. To her disappointment, she saw him scoop some instant powder into a tea-stained mug.