Gospel (133 page)

(But We love bargains. We make them all the time.)

A
UGUST
31
ST

Lucy was the first one to find the chapel this morning at Bullins Medical Center.

Inside the foyer was a variety of pamphlets, all produced by Bullins, many with his wide face and outstretched hands beaming from the cover. “When Death Comes to Call.” Here was one called “Prayer and Miracles,” which peddled miracles that happened to good Pentecostal Christians every single day, yes they did!

Lucy parted the chapel doors and saw it was empty. Considering it was a Bullins production, this chapel, nondenominational and modern, was in pretty good taste. Several short rows of pews led to a raised platform and a communion table of some kind, though no paraphernalia was about. A simple cross in blue stained glass behind the table sufficed. Lucy slipped into the last pew and breathed the still air of the little chapel; the hellish racket of life-support machines, ambulance sirens, and the ever-rasping intercom calling doctors and nurses for various codes and emergencies did not penetrate this peaceful room.

She reached in her pocket for her rosary.

Lucy knelt and bowed her head, weary of spirit, exhausted at the thought of a hundred Our Fathers or whatever assignment she had set for herself when she awoke after yet another wretched night of bad sleep.

(You could ditch the Our Fathers, and just talk to Us.)

Lord, she thought, half-praying, I've fallen back to the faith I had as a child, except going through these rituals doesn't register anymore. But I don't know what else to do. I feel very distant.
Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come
 … I'm hoping if I do these things by rote enough times, I can, you know, jump-start myself into the faith I used to have. That rascal Dr. O'Hanrahan! He's undermined me, or rather, the unshakable confidence I once had. Not in God, I know You're up there, but in which version of Him … Coptic, Moslem, Orthodox, Pentecostal, an academic faith like the Theology Department back in Chicago, an emotional, blinding, all-pervading faith like Patsy the TPL college student, religion as a sickness like poor Mrs. Bullins … Look, I don't want to feel this confused. God, complete with instructions, would come in real handy about now. I guess I don't know what I believe anymore. There you have it.

I'm going to go to the restroom and use the pregnancy kit and if I am knocked up, I am aware it's my own damn fault, and I will take what's coming to me but am I crazy here? I also—forgive the arrogance—think that I was destined for something
else
in this world besides being an unwed mother. I know, I know, what service could I possibly perform that might matter to You …

(Innumerable things. We wish religious people didn't think this way.)

… but I feel that I am on the threshold of something, just beginning to know myself and what I can do in this world. And here I go and louse this up with a kid. Maybe I'll keep it and stick it out and be disowned by my family and my friends and retire to some dark corner of Chicago sharing a house with some other single mother and work out some baby-sitting schedule to alternate with my classes. Jesus, Blessed Savior, that sounds like hell on earth what I've just said. I don't feel very forgiven, even after this talk.

(Why don't you forgive yourself first?)

With the arrival of two talkative white rural women, Lucy rose up and surrendered to a feeling of emptiness. She walked slowly to the Intensive Care Unit, in no hurry to face the lobby of miserable, anxious relatives.

No one can help me now, she figured calmly. Sister Miriam has triumphed!

(No, My child.)

No really, she has. She said sin would lead to ruin and disgrace, and she was right. All her sourness, all her accusing glares and pointed fingers were justified. She sensed I was a loser and now I've gone and proven it for her. It didn't take a lifetime of sin, either.
One
little lousy slip in twenty-eight years of clean living and
whammo
—

“Excuse me,” said a nurse at Lucy's side, as she entered the Intensive Care Unit. “You were with Mr. O'Hanrahan, weren't you?”

Lucy froze.

Oh, please. Please God. She prepared herself for the worst possible bad news.

“I've been looking for you, Lucy—it is Lucy, isn't it?” The nurse was a small woman, petite and perky, who could turn on enthusiasm and bedside optimism with ease. “Mr. O'Hanrahan has been asking for you.”

Lucy brightened. “He's out of his delirium?”

“He seems to be. The fever broke in the night and he was awake this morning. We're changing his sheets right now, but we'll be moving him to a regular hospital room within the hour. But give us, say, fifteen minutes, and then come visit with him, all right?”

An ammonia-smelling hallway led to the lounge, where a despairing lot was assembled. A small family huddled awaiting news of Dad's heart attack. An old woman halfway to widowhood reading her Bible and looking up at the TV when someone got a letter on “Wheel of Fortune.” A young wife sliding her wedding ring back and forth on her finger nervously, a variation of wringing one's hands, trying to concentrate on a
National Geographic
magazine. Lucy sat in the corner, sinking into the squeaky vinyl overstuffed sofa, insultingly lemon-yellow and cheery.

“Excuse me,” said an elderly lady who sat down beside Lucy.

“Yes ma'am?”

“The nurse there said you were with Patrick O'Hanrahan?” The woman was orderly and prim, her gray hair pulled back; she was slender, dressed in a conservative navy blue. Lucy assumed she was sent over by the TPL people. She handed Lucy the fifth of bourbon.

“The nurse said for me to give it to you. Patrick is a trial, isn't he? Always has been. Would you like some orange juice?”

The woman had two Styrofoam cups and she reached into a large bag and produced a small carton, from which she poured Lucy some. “You,” she noted, “must be the graduate student paired with Patrick. My, you must have had some adventures. I thought Gabriel would be a boy, of course—”

“Oh,” corrected Lucy. “Gabriel was a boy. Is a boy. I'm Lucy Dantan, Gabriel's replacement. And you're…”

“Catherine O'Hanrahan,” she said, smiling.

Patrick's sister. The Witch of Wisconsin! “From Wisconsin,” Lucy mumbled.

“Yes, I'm a retired postal worker there, in Madison. He may have told you.”

This woman was no harridan, Lucy surmised in an instant, no grave-robbing, testament-seeking relative. Another deranged characterization from Dr. O'Hanrahan. They walked to his new room, a happier place than before, curtains pulled back and sun streaming in.

O'Hanrahan was awake. He groggily looked at his sister entering the room: “Good heavens, they must think I'm on my deathbed! Calling in you, Cathy!”

His sister became more reserved. “That you almost were, but no such luck.” Lucy noticed her Irish lilt was more pronounced around her brother, the both of them returned to the accents of childhood.

“Lucy,” noted Miss O'Hanrahan, “has been entrusted with your private stock.”

Lucy saluted her mentor by holding up the bottle.

“I expect not a drop to be missing from the precious grail, Miss Dantan. When they spring me from this clip joint, I'll relieve you of it.”

Miss O'Hanrahan looked at Lucy for sympathy. “He was never like this when he was young, you know. Quiet and shy and never spoke a word—”

“Good God, woman, you'll ruin my reputation! That what you came down here for?”

They argued good-naturedly over the letter and whether Patrick got it. Patrick denied he got it and accused Lucy of losing it—

“I did not! I gave it to you on that train—”

“Silence!” demanded O'Hanrahan. “I will not be intrigued against.”

Catherine enjoyed his distress: “I hope, since you've bankrupted yourself, what it was that you were chasing was worth it.”

O'Hanrahan, looking redder in the face, shifted his pillows behind himself. “Let me sit up and take a look at you. Hate to admit it, but you look good, Cathy—I look like shit, don't bother informing me.”

“I don't use that language, but ‘tis how you look all right.”

“Yes, if you must know, we found what we were looking for.” O'Hanrahan talked excitedly as a teenager might: “Get a load of this, Cath. A First-Century gospel, earliest in existence, by an actual disciple.”

Lucy now noticed the small silver cross on the navy blue blouse, no ring on the unmarried Miss O'Hanrahan's smooth hands. There goes me had I been born in that generation, Lucy reckoned: lucky for me I'm knocked up and a soon-to-be total Catholic outcast. Lucy noticed that Patrick rested his hand on his sister Catherine's hand, though they continued to battle and willfully misinterpet each other. I suppose in thirty, forty years this will be one of my family in the hospital bed, maybe even me, Lucy thought. Will aged versions of Nicholas, Cecilia, Kevin, and Mary come filing past, send get-well cards, do their duty? Inconceivable, that we should ever be so convenient and close. Maybe it takes an almost-death to unite Irish-American families. How little solidarity we Dantans have …

Catherine O'Hanrahan had to move her car from the thirty-minute zone and her brother cheered her departure provocatively. O'Hanrahan barked out some errands, forays for toiletries and razors and cough drops. “And pick up a fifth of Maker's Mark, while you're at it.”

“So you can brush your teeth with it?” she asked without a smile.

“So I can soak my dentures in it.”

Lucy and Dr. O'Hanrahan sat there silent a moment as she left the room. Catherine wasn't one to laugh out loud or openly appreciate her brother, but the routine they participated in, his outrages, her stoicism and concealed smiles, this was their sibling currency, this was their love.

Lucy offered, “Not my idea of the Witch of Wisconsin.”

“Ehhhh, she's all right,” said O'Hanrahan, joining his hands on his belly, sighing. “Perhaps, just maybe, I was a trifle unjust.”

Another silence.

“You're alive,” said Lucy. “It didn't look so good last night. Fever of 105. You were delirious.”

“I'll say. I had these crazy dreams and conversations with God … Luce, look in my satchel for that scrollcase I've been carrying around.”

Lucy rummaged through the dirty laundry and crumpled notepads. “You mean that cardboard-tube thing?”

“Yeah. You remember, that 14th-Century fake Ethiopian gospel I stole out of the Vatican Library.”

“It's not here.”

O'Hanrahan laughed. “Then I didn't dream that. It's in the hands of Father Sergius of Mt. Athos.”

Lucy thought she had seen him in the halls. “Tall guy, ancient. Beard down to here?”

“That's the guy. Our Mad Monk, in part.”

“Our other Mad Monk is a Mr. Kellner—”

“Matthias Kellner. Is he here too?”

“Was here. This morning I saw the monk fellow and Mr. Kellner chasing each other across the parking lot. I asked the rabbi, but he didn't have an explanation.”

“I will explain all to you in time.” O'Hanrahan felt joy well within him. His old friend Morey was here, his sister, Lucy. Oh, let them all make peace and reconcile.

“The rabbi's sleeping off jet lag, sir,” Lucy informed him. “Said he'd make it over here by lunchtime. He prayed a Hebrew prayer over you last night, so expect him to claim that Yahweh is the One True God.”

“Yahweh
is,
I'm prepared to admit it.” O'Hanrahan flashed back to the vision of a dank, enshadowed cell of Karak Castle, and Morey branded with the Star of David, looking out silently and accusing—dreadful dream! Dredged up from some dark quarter of shame! No, he would make amends, they would again embrace, and O'Hanrahan vowed to speak of his love for the rabbi.

O'Hanrahan then looked at Lucy.

What had he done to her, dragging this nice American girl all over creation … had they really been in England, in a boat off Northern Ireland in a storm, dodging mafiosi in Florence, driving around with that ass Stavros in Greece, scurrying from Palestinian hoodlums in the West Bank, then Cairo, then the Sudan across the desert, then a crash landing in Ethiopia—

“It's sort of dull now, huh?” she said telepathically. “Now that we're back in the States.”

“Don't know why you say that,” he said, pulling a chair round to his bedside so she could sit near him. “A war brewing with Iraq, CIA plots, the End Times and a Rapture due any minute. This country knows how to entertain. Called your parents?”

“I'm disowned. This morning we had weeping, and gnashing of teeth and how I didn't respect them, how my mother has taken to the bed, my father won't speak to me, which is a state I frankly prefer.” Lucy felt a wave pass through her, almost of nausea, a yearning to speak the truth about her possible pregnancy, to confess to Dr. O'Hanrahan.

“The gospel is about one-quarter done,” O'Hanrahan was saying. “Now that I'm alive—and who knows when I'll get ill again—I stand to be the most famous person in classical scholarship, theology. I recant all earlier remarks about vain old men; I'm going to get a hairpiece for the cover of
Time.
Ha! Can you see them incontinent with despair back at Chicago! Shaughnesy the Pretender, our Anti-Chairman! Oh that God would allow me to see their faces when…”

(Patrick.)

Yeah I know, I know. I was just hearing how it sounded, marching out the brass band one more time. I know what I have to do—what I
want
to do. And so do You.

“You were saying, sir?”

He looked at the clock on his bedstand. “But that's not really how it's going to happen. There'll be vine-leaves of glory, Miss Dantan, but I will not wear the crown.”