Gospel (134 page)

Lucy wondered if he was thinking straight.

O'Hanrahan shrugged deprecatingly. “So I get my name in the paper, what's that worth? So I make it back in the Scholastic Register. Whoopdiedo, that moron Shaughnesy's in there, what kind of honor is that? I'm not going to waste my final years—if I got
that
long—on some dry old book. I'm handing over the reins.”

Lucy saw herself suddenly exiled from the project altogether. And then his meaning became clear as she met his eyes.

“You mean…”

“I'm giving it to you, Luce, the
Gospel of Matthias.
I want you to do the final edit of the gospel and publish the findings as your thesis.”

Lucy had trouble finding her voice. “Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

He held up his hand. “No, listen to me. That will make your career, young lady. You will be as famous as Father Beaufoix and Morey and that crowd, and you deserve to be that famous, because you have a mind in that head of yours. And if you go back to work on that void you're currently shilling as a thesis, you'll rot in academia—trust me. I had a mind and I got caught up in academia and little by little what was good about me got ground down by drink and petty infighting and budget squabbles and anxiety over publishing and I was hell to live with—my wife, my son, if you only knew how…”

He slowed, feeling his throat tighten. No, he was not ready to look that so completely in the face yet, not in front of Lucy at least.

“Anyway, Luce, I'll talk to Morey and he can oversee you. And I'll call that anus Shaughnesy and get his approval and you can start your young life out where it ought to be. On top.”

“Sir, I … I can't.”

“Sure you can. I proclaim it; I'm speaking ex cathedra here.”

“But you worked so hard—”

“Yeah, but you know what the goddam truth is? I'm no writer. Never was. All my life I wanted a shelf of books across my office, like Morey, something to leave behind, when the truth is: all I am is a good teacher, a talker, on a good day Socrates, on a bad day some con-man who should have run for Congress. And Socrates never wrote anything down either, right?” He saw Lucy might cry or get emotional so he headed it off: “So dedicate the thing to me. Make me … you make me a footnote.”

But the last request had sounded hollow and sad, and Lucy sniffed back a tear. “We'll talk about it when you're feeling better—”

“I'm better already!”

A nurse in the doorway: “No, you're not. Miss,” she added, meaning Lucy, “you're gonna have to let our li'l patient rest now!”

Lucy blankly faltered toward the door. “I'll come back this afternoon. That'll leave you time with your sister.”

“Not that!” he cried in mock despair. “Check her bag for arsenic!”

The nurse fluffed his pillows and a very tired O'Hanrahan sank back into them. Lucy glanced at him before leaving. Of course, who doesn't look deathlike in those flimsy hospital gowns in this fluorescent splotchy lighting? Poor man, thought Lucy. And the next moment as she walked down the sterile hallways past other scenes of grief and wretchedness: and if this child is a boy, I'll name him Patrick. One gesture deserves another. One gesture of love, that is—oh, she thought, blinking back a tear and bravely taking a deep breath, not slowing her pace, I hope you don't die, old man.

(Which is just what Patrick was thinking.)

All alone now.

The curtains drawn, no lights on, no nurse, no Lucy, no Catherine.

It is done, O'Hanrahan said with a sad certainty. You've given away your ticket to immortality. Take down the pedestal on the Western Slopes, boys, I'm not coming after all. But that was the right thing, wasn't it? I do the right thing so rarely I'd forgotten it has a certain weight and shape in the heart and though it is not easy or happy-making particularly, there is a sense of connectedness and order. Ehh! Who wanted to write out all those damn footnotes anyway? It's just too bad the fun is over. He closed his eyes, feeling unusually weary. He snuggled down under the blankets, as he felt his knuckles and feet throb again, but dully. The pain in his side poked at him vaguely. Into
Your
hands, he thought looking at his gnarled, veinous old man's hands, freckled and palsied, I commend my spirit.

(But you know what, Patrick? We are going to let you live. A few more good years, and maybe even longer. After the bypass surgery, when you get out of here, get the diet on track, do the exercises they tell you, take the drugs—and not that Percodan stuff—you will have the time you need to find “Q.” Yes, it will mean going to Teheran and you'll have adventures, to put it mildly, and as always, We'll be with you. But Lucy will not. For Lucy another destiny awaits.)

Lucy decided to go discuss O'Hanrahan's generosity with the rabbi and so she went down to look around in the cafeteria and she found herself standing beside the door to the women's room.

There it is.

She lectured herself: have one-tenth of the courage shown by O'Hanrahan who, facing death, has sacrificed what kept him alive for the likes of worthless little you. Let's get this over with.

Lucy went to the Ladies' toilet and looked in the mirror. She heard a flush from one of the stalls. A woman left and Lucy was all by herself. Lucy filled her cupped hands with cold water, splashed and looked at her face. This was not the young woman who had left Chicago in June.

She went into one of the stalls and with a nervous hand locked herself in. Her breathing was shallow and she sat on the toilet and breathed deeply for a bit, calming herself down. She read the instructions, collected with minimal awkwardness the urine sample, put in the stick, and held the kit in her hand. Please, please, God! It occurred to her that maybe there was a sister in the Early Church in the midst of a pregnancy scare waiting for her period who coined “saved by the blood, washed in the blood.” Had it been ten minutes?

Here Lucy felt her life measured in heartbeats, which were loud in her head. She pulled out the stick. It was pink. What did that mean?

She read the back of the kit: she was pregnant.

Oh, God.

But that can't be.

We'll do it again. Tears silently falling from her face, she left the bathroom, patching herself together. She marched directly to a water fountain and drank and drank. The cold water gave her a momentary neuralgia, hurting from the roof of her mouth through her whole skull. She slowed down but soon was compulsively drinking again.

The test, twenty minutes later, showed the same thing.

Is there a loophole to this? Some percentage of error?

Lucy looked at herself in the mirror, but this time the look returned was resolved and knowing. Could she follow through on the plan now in her head?

“Yep,” she sighed to the mirror. “It has to be.”

*   *   *

Lucy looked into her carpetbag and checked for the money she had withdrawn.

“You say Lafayette Road, didn't ya?”

“Yessir,” she told the taxi driver, a gray-headed black man, paunchy in an open white shirt that was a size too small.

“That women's clinic, right?”

“That's right.”

She was calm, after all. By the end of the day she would be, physically, who she was before this whole summer began. And the facts presented themselves with great limpid clarity: I am not cut out to be a mother, not even to endure the childbirth part for another woman. And while pregnant I drank, I smoked, I took small doses of cholera and typhus vaccines and no doubt this fetus is compromised. But even if I hadn't done those things, more important: I have never wavered from the notion that one day I would give myself to great service, great devotion to some aspect of God. For a while that meant being a star student at St. Eulalia's to win the nuns' approval. Then for a while it meant becoming a nun. Then I decided it meant writing a thesis on a religious subject. Now it means what it should have always meant: a life of service.

She looked down at her fist, clutching the business card of Catholic Relief Charities. On the phone a half-hour ago, they had been very enthusiastic, and if the training and preparation could start in October she could conceivably be back in Africa by Christmas. Whoo boy, what an argument that's going to be: Mom and Dad on the subject of why their little girl didn't come home for Christmas, dropped out of school, turned down that offer from that nice Mr. O'Hanrahan. I'll be in Africa, with any luck, celebrating a truer Christmas, attending in some small hopeful way to the mass of starvation and misery.

(You are meant for great service.)

What did I promise God during this pregnancy scare? How many years of charity work in the Sudan? Well, after what I am about to do, God will have the goods on me. This will be the greatest sin I have ever committed, but that will not derail my life … no, this will not change me as much as the life to follow.
That,
not this, is the defining act. And I do see what that aid-worker in Ethiopia meant: those faces haunt you.

(Go to them, then.)

She briefly faltered. I'm not Mother Teresa—

(Lucy Dantan will do. Go for a summer, or a year. We don't ask for lifelong service, Our demands are not that great. But how few people can even manage a summer, a week, a day of charity?)

Yeah, but You know me. I'll get over there and get started at something and then I'll feel like I have to stay until it's finished, and a summer will become a year, which becomes two years, which becomes a life. And I can see myself getting all politicized and speaking at the U.N. and campaigning for money with corporations and meeting with corrupt government officials and all the stuff you do when you're committed.

(Yes. We can see it too.)

And one day maybe I will be working in some refugee camp like that nurse whose name I could not remember, and someone will wonder about me the way I wondered about her: why did you do this with your life? And I will not tell that interrogator any more than that nurse told me, because this is my sacrament. No one but myself and God will understand why I am going back to Africa and why I feel I have to. It is not for anyone else to judge or indulge in speculation. It is no doubt this independence from people's opinion and this dependence on God alone that the saints must have known—oh, Holy Spirit, let me be so sure always! I pray that my resolve will not weaken.

(It might. So many good intentions, so many chances for a happy world have passed away, so many just kingdoms, so many acts of kindness that would have changed life as it's lived today … all vapor, as someone practical talked Our children out of their dreams and missions.)

Lucy looked at the poor outskirts of Baton Rouge, dirty and despair-ridden. I'm hurting and I'm grieving, but I am not afraid of the procedure to come. Or of Africa.

(We can't promise you that planes won't go down or you won't get cholera or that death squads won't find you. We do what We can, but there are no guarantees. But We can promise you joy. Lasting and constantly renewing, the only happiness that endures.)

Just so you know I'm not a good person—

(But you are. And that's all that survives of you when you die, My child, the good that you have done. So much bad theology and empty talk about faith over works. Better the dispirited cynic complaining as she dishes free food in the soup kitchen than the pieties of cloistered prelates, theologians, purveyors of empty rituals, thesis-writers, makers of religious regulations. If you've done no good for anyone in your life, then to Hell with you! Simple as that.)

Sinners such as I can do Your work?

(The murderer Moses. The illiterate Mohammed. Jesus the Sabbath-breaker. The womanizing Martin Luther King. The fanatic Paul. The drunkard Noah. O My child, you do not know as We do, how you shall rise up.)

Lucy stared again at the card of Catholic Relief Charities. Promise, Holy Spirit, if I do this, You'll be with me?

The taxi stopped outside the Feliciana Parish Women's Center.

And promise, Holy Spirit, even though it's probably a sin to ask, that you'll be with me at the clinic through this procedure to come as well?

(But We have always been with you. And who is to say, My children, whether you invented Us or whether We created you. We hear each other's voices, do We not? All We can tell you is that We are true, as you are true, as love is true. And that We'll be with you always. Now, and until the end of time.)

 

 

[ … and Benjamin brought me to the door of the chamber where this hideous abomination, this death-relic of Our Master was supposed to be secreted.]
19

37.
And here, my brother, you shall no doubt find it strange—but I stopped and refused to go forward.

Benjamin brought the torch into the chamber and bade me follow but I stood frozen in my path! He approached what looked to be an embalmed body and began to unwrap the reeking linen and I demanded he stop and take me back upstairs.

He said to me, “But the soldiers are here now. They are sure to find you.”

I don't remember what happened precisely, owing to being beaten upon the head. I know that Benjamin attacked me, thinking I was trying to escape my payment to him. He hit me and took my belt and the money I had brought. I merely wished to be gone and in my excitement, clambering up the ladder to the house, crying out from my being attacked, my presence became known to the guards.

38.
I had no delusions, and I was well aware of the risks I took, so I did not debase myself by begging for mercies that I knew shouldn't be granted me. But something of my innate dignity must have impressed itself upon the Candace, because Her Opulence, tears flowing down her huge face, was so moved by my sentence that she has paid for me to retain my scribe, Tesmegan here, until my addition to their library was complete …

(My dear Tesmegan is confused. He is sitting here muttering—yes, write it all down, I'm almost done.) The young boy cannot understand my having incurred imperial disfavor and to have been sentenced, only to have run from the very prize I risked all for! Ah, my earnest scribe, we are all, all of us, sentenced to one death as it is, the same death, maybe today, maybe decades from now, but it will come. Do we truly wish to know what might leave us crushed and emptied? Do we wish to deprive ourselves of comforts in our saddest days of loss, in our struggle with great questions, in our final hours of earthly life?