Gospel (15 page)

The young Friar Minor went away, closing the door and not asking her in. She waited impatiently, checking her watch. Three minutes later he returned. “I don't think there's anyone here by that name.”

Lucy was adamant. “No, I am sure he's around, and if you tell him it's Lucy Dantan he will come out, I'm sure.”

“No, truly,” he faltered, “there's no one by that name within.”

Lucy heard more baritone mumblings from behind the door.

But then from behind her: “Lucy!”

Lucy spun around to see Gabriel in his familiar autumn jacket, T-shirt of their high school alma mater, and hole-ridden jeans approaching through the fog. He was eating a doner kebab from a van. The monk observed them both until Gabriel nodded that it was all right.

“What are you doing here, Lucy?”

“Gabriel,” Lucy commenced, “everyone's been so worried about you. No one's heard from you in months!”

Gabriel rolled his eyes, his mouth full. And after he swallowed, he said, “You had one of these? They're great. You can get all kinds of junk on it—”

“Yeah, I've had one. Gabriel,
talk
to me.”

“Damn,” Gabriel muttered, distracted. “It's leaking…” He held up his pita sandwich and revealed soppy napkins of sauce and tomato-goosh. “I'm going to throw this away…” Gabriel idled back to the corner where there was a trashcan.

Lucy followed in annoyance: “Gabriel, answer me. It's me, your old pal Lucy!”

He dropped the disintegrating kebab in the garbage. “You go first. Why are you here?”

“The department sent me,” she said as seriously as she could. “Dr. Shaughnesy figured you'd been kidnapped or something—murdered by Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

He lifted his hand to his face to bite his fingernails. “That's still a possibility.”

“What happened between you two anyway?”

Gabriel and his mobile face went through a highly visible performance of temptation and then resisting temptation, wanting to tell but deciding not to. “Uh, I can't talk about it, Luce. One day I promise I'll tell you the whole story.”

Then from the fog there was a deep voice: “Brother Gabriel?”

Lucy startled and even Gabriel jumped. They turned to see a Franciscan in full attire approach them. A monk about thirty, with his cowl pulled up—all he needed, thought Lucy, was a scythe to resemble Death. In the weak light, Lucy judged him to be Mediterranean with dark beard stubble.

“Brother Vincenzo?” said Gabriel.

“Your presence ees required,” said the friar with a trace of an accent. Brother Vincenzo turned and walked halfway back to the chapterhouse, but paused for Gabriel to follow.

“Gabriel,” whispered Lucy, “are you in some sort of trouble?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Oh come
on,
” she pleaded. “Tell me
something
to take back to Chicago. Look, I know O'Hanrahan found some kind of lost gospel that may be authentic and everyone wants it—see? I know virtually everything.”

“Did you know someone's probably been killed for it?” he said quickly.

She merely opened her mouth.

Gabriel arrived at the doorway and Brother Vincenzo stood within, holding it open for him. “So why don't you get back to Chicago as fast as you can and tell them everything's all right. I called my parents yesterday so they're not worried anymore, and, uh, I'll be home soon, real soon.”

“I thought you were going to leave the Franciscans,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, I was. But my time here in Europe, thanks to Dr. O'Hanrahan, ironically, made me reconsider. The Franciscans are my family now.”

“Gabriel,” she said, pulling him closer to hug him good-bye, “you're not a hostage, are you?”

“It's Patrick who's the hostage,” he said softly. Lucy was momentarily thrown by the reference to Dr. O'Hanrahan's first name. “The professor is hostage to some dream of academic immortality he probably won't live to see.” His eyes held so much more he wanted to discuss. But he averted them. “Bye, Luce.”

Lucy stood there speechless as Gabriel walked under Brother Vincenzo's arm and into the light. She heard the door thud. As she took a step away, she heard the door open again:

“Oh, wait a minute…”

A moment later Gabriel was back on the street putting ten postcards into her hand:

“Can you mail these for me?” he asked. “Got to leave early tomorrow for Ireland and I'm not going to be able to mail them from here.”

“Sure,” Lucy said numbly. “Our Mother Country, huh?”

“Right. Good-bye, now.”

Aside from the mysteries, the frustration, Lucy found it wrenching to see an old friend in a foreign country and not go celebrate, talk old times, make some new times. Gabriel was no more energized by seeing her than he would have been to meet a mere acquaintance. This depressed her. And his being so tight with the Friars Minor again annoyed her in a petty way. Jealousy, she accused herself. He belongs somewhere, you don't. I didn't become a nun, she thought, because I know how little fun nuns are. But I know monks have a better time than they let on, the ultimate men's club. Whatever joys and comforts Gabriel has as a Franciscan that, like so many other things in his life, is a closed door to me, damn it.

As she walked up the High Street, Lucy decided she would read the postcards. Who knows? Maybe one had a secret message for help.

No such luck. They were all dull, dutiful, here-I-am-in-merry-olde-Englande cards, tailored for parents and friends. She scanned the addresses: Christopher, Luke, Dr. Shaughnesy. “Sorry I haven't checked in, but everything's all right,” and so forth. There was a co-postcard to Judy and Lucy.

Dear girls,

My travels continue in ye oolde Oxforde, where I've fallen in love fifty times already! If I weren't celibate I'd sleep with anything with an English accent. How's those crazy cats??? I expect to see this silly card on your refridgerator, okay? Keep Chicago the same for me until I get back, end of the summer. All the best,

Gabriel

Never could spell, thought Lucy, considering “refridgerator.” The card was one of those Oxford-typical-scene cards of a pretty couple in
sub fusc
uniforms wildly riding a bicycle, being zany and youthful in the sun. Never happened once around this rainy penitentiary, Lucy assured herself. And what's with this Judy-and-Lucy business? Don't I get my own
individual
card? she wondered.

More depressed, she read Christopher's and it was full of Gabriel's more serious maunderings, descriptions of rain-soaked streets and gray skies and old tomes in Oxford libraries he was thrilled to touch, and hints of so much he had to tell Christopher when he got home.

Signed “lots of love.”

I hate men, Lucy decided.

Damp and cold, she stood before her mirror back in the Braithwaite guest room and unwrapped herself from her scarf. Briefly she held the scarf over her hair and brought the ends down around her chin so that she resembled a Holy Virgin, a righteous Puritan maid. With the ceiling beams and old walls behind her she contemplated this evocative image of piety: would she recant? Would she walk unbowed to the stake? Who knows that such decisions weren't made within these very walls and that she wasn't nudging to life the aggrieved ghosts of the 16th Century? She felt a chill suddenly and she turned from the mirror—enough of that!

Later, lying awake in bed, after she turned off the light and wrestled with the faucet so it wouldn't drip, she stared at the pattern of light on the slanted attic ceiling. I hate men for another reason, she continued: I hate men and all their little secret societies and mysteries and codes and clubs and projects. It would kill Gabriel and Rabbi Hersch and Dr. O'Hanrahan to let a woman in on their cloak-and-dagger nonsense, I don't care what progressive semifeminist line they spew about a female Holy Spirit, et cetera.

Well, Lucy assured herself, the good thing about being a woman is that a woman doesn't give a damn after a certain point. She would meet O'Hanrahan tomorrow at noon, hear the story, fly home, tell the department what they wanted to hear, naturally embellished a bit, and her duty would be done. A vacation to England all paid for. With, she smiled, two or three extra days remaining to sightsee!

I'll do London, Lucy fantasized. I'll go see a show, I'll see Buckingham Palace, the Tower, Big Ben. Or, I could go up to Scotland, which is supposed to be gorgeous, or maybe over to France for a few days and trot out my high school French. She felt herself giving over to sleep, so with a wide yawn she dashed off a prayer by rote.

(Better than no prayer at all, We assure you.)

France sounded good. Or, of course, I could go to Ireland like Gabriel. Yes, that would be a big hit with Dad and all the aunts back home. Souvenirs from Cork, Irish kitsch for Mom, a bottle of duty-free Bushmills for Dad from the actual isle.

Lucy listened to the bells all over town ring eleven. Strange people, the British, Lucy thought, snuggling down into the bed. Oxford is diffident and bureaucratic and formal … and yet, she sighed, there is romance here in this damp, in the stones, in dismal old Oxford. Not that it will find me, Lucy added wistfully. What a day, what a day, and what an idea: a female Holy Spirit. I somehow always knew this.

(That's because We've always been close, My child.)

Those Crusty Old Bachelor Fathers of the Church have done us ladies in, Lucy considered drowsily. I'd like to strike my own blow for God.

(And We're going to give you that chance.)

*   *   *

Meanwhile, O'Hanrahan looked at his watch. 11:01
P.M.

He looked at his ticket to Holyhead where he would catch the ferry across the Irish Sea tomorrow afternoon, being a man who never got on an airplane. But even I, O'Hanrahan thought, will wish I were on a plane when I set sail on that wretched body of water in this kind of weather.

It was a bittersweet parting from Oxford.

And there is nothing more desolate than a British train station after 11
P.M.
, since most routes have ceased for the night and there is a desperation about the final runs and last passengers who aren't already in bed or finishing up at the pub but heading out into the rain. In the gloom and chill O'Hanrahan had walked to the end of the platform where one could see the night skyline of Oxford, Nuffield College's green brass needle, and Lincoln College library illumined there, and St. Mary's and Christ Church thataway, and he had wondered: is this the last time I'll ever see this blessed town? God's own prodigal, His ever-wayward but brightest child?

(Come now, Patrick.)

Oxford, he mourned, is where I would have been a success! Not in accountable American academia with the mandatory publishing and office maneuvers and funding squabbles and 1990s political-correctness litmus tests and the innumerable students with nagging personal failures disguised as theses … No, in Oxford nothing matters but good company and good wine and an occasional dabble of a column in the
Times
to show, once a decade, you know your subject. And certainly not those pesky students—here they fend for themselves!

(Why must you always dwell on some life you might have lived and not on the life at hand? Did We give it to you for nothing?)

I would have been a don in the tradition of the medieval masters whose rooms had windows that never looked outside the college, for there
was
no world outside the college and its wine vaults and high table and one's colleagues, worthy and unworthy. Moreover, Oxford would have liked me back, thought O'Hanrahan. Here my not publishing a book would not have mattered. Dear Mordechai Hersch, a shelf of scholarly books to his name. But not Patrick O'Hanrahan. No, he left behind riotous evenings at bars throughout the world, the most inglorious theater, the old Irishman, belly full of booze and head full of stories. I have no family to carry on, no shelf of books to leave behind, no lasting discovery. Ah, to be like that bastard Father Beaufoix, immortal by his scholarship and publications—what a crown I might have worn!

(
Riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?
)

Here now, in the drizzle, was the train.

O'Hanrahan looked once more to the spires and would have prayed for a second chance to use his gifts anew, more wisely this time, more productively, if he thought such a prayer would be heard, let alone answered. Or if he thought prayer worked at all and wasn't the vainest waste of words yet conceived.

(You have lost your faith, Patrick.)

“I have lost my faith,” he said aloud to the rain-soaked night.

2

My dear brother Josephus, while in Alexandria last year [75
C.E.
], most civilized of cities, I read what I could of your youthful history of our people's endless contentions. I see in it great promise and assure you that one day you shall compose a truly first-rate history! Predictably, you have omitted all that you might have written about Our Master and the Church that was your brother's home for decades. Such petulance, and what a disservice to your readers.
1

2.
And if I may be permitted a breath of criticism: I found it difficult to read your work for your incessant toadying for the good opinion of Titus. Titus devoted himself to the destruction of the Jewish race, indulging in every cruelty, debauchery, and sodomy available to mankind. When convinced that Jews had swallowed their own treasure upon the fall of Jerusalem, Titus watched as these citizens were disemboweled alive and their organs searched for gold and trinkets.
2
Such a man is to be flattered?

But let me not sow the seeds of argument.

3.
Instead, let us return to the beginning of my troubles, during the twelfth year of Nero Caesar's ghastly reign [66
C.E.
], when it did not take a Daniel to read that Judea was months away from war and total annihilation. Four years before, James, the leader of the Jerusalem Nazirene community, the blood brother of Our Master, was executed under Sadducean influence.
3
The Nazirenes never recovered from his absence. Now more than once, I your brother, scholar and historian, offered to rise to the patriarch's chair, but no, instead the Jerusalem mob chose an unlearned young man called Symenon.
4
This boy could not even remember my name from visit to visit.