Gospel (3 page)

Her roommate Judy was her best college-era friend.

Both were Roman Catholic, both of them went to the non-Catholic Chicago University, both were now graduate students, which mystified their complaining parents. Perhaps university prisoners-for-life was more like it, living in the grungy student ghetto in that biggest ghetto of all, the South Side of Chicago. Lucy, after starting out as a classicist, transferred to theology, specializing in Ancient Languages. No two worlds could be more distant than the world of St. John's Greek and the gauntlet Lucy regularly ran to class: the inner-city kids harassing her, the drunken homeless she must step over or dodge, the brazen drug deals at every corner obvious to the most naive policeman, the rape whistle she always carried, the personal schedule of when not to walk certain places, ride certain trains, be at particular bus stops.

About here her mom's scolding voice interfered with her memory: “You should be living, like any proper young lady, at home.”

To live away from home, according to Mrs. Dantan, as an unmarried girl meant orgies and fornication. Lucullan banquets, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lucy in the role of Valeria Messalina, coming home any day pregnant and unbetrothed. I
wish,
Mom, thought Lucy, I wish. Anything but the dullness of coming home to Judy. Judy was studying psychology, which to Lucy was … ironic. That was always the way with psychology students, she had observed, always in need of more desperate messed-up people to talk to so they could feel like they had the answers to their own disarrayed lives. No, that was cruel to Judy. But Judy did undermine her.

“Can I wear your sweater?” she'd ask. “Your hand-knit thing? I figure we're both about the same size and if it works for you it'll hide all my flab too.”

Judy was always on some form of unsuccessful diet and she was big on announcing how she and Lucy were sisters in weight problems. Lucy
was
a bit plump, twenty pounds overweight
max,
Irish-American, freckled, white-girl plump, but she wasn't the cow Judy was.

“I just wish we hadn't been raised Roman Catholic,” Judy would declaim. “That's why our lives are decades behind other women's.” Judy went on: “I mean, you don't
really
want to be in theology, you're just doing it out of guilt that you didn't become a nun like your mother wanted.”

Well, yes and no—

“And if we hadn't been raised Catholic, we'd have each had fifty boyfriends before now. That's why we're neurotic about sex.”

Yes, that was another ritual. Over the vegetarian casserole with the TV local news blaring, drinking skim milk and having first courses of plain yogurt to be followed by Weight Watchers frozen tuna lasagne, the endless discussion of men men men. Lucy had never been the type of woman to think night and day about men since, frankly, very few guys she'd met had appealed to her. Catholic or not, she found most men of the species loud and unkind and immature and, decisively, not interested in what interested her.

Judy: “… and Vito Campanella, Gabe's friend?
Hold me back,
for God's sakes. What a behind on that boy. I wish I could get him to walk backward.”

Judy had the rhetoric of horniness down to a precision not found in Catullus. If there hadn't been constant sightings of good-looking men and declarations of their great distance from Lucy, Lucy might have lived quite happily. As if Judy was some great object of romance. Okay.
Technically,
Judy was a little bit better looking in the face, though given to putting on more weight. It was her personality that kept men away, that and the nasalest, flattest Midwestern drawl. Besides, Lucy knew that her roommate's true and everlasting love was Paws the Cat.

Paws the Cat belonged to Judy, and Cattus—once part of a duo, Felis and Cattus, but Felis got run over—was Lucy's.

“Lucy, I think we have to talk,” Judy said the night before Lucy was to leave on this trip, as if Lucy had a second to waste. “I notice that you always give Cattus the same dish, but you put down any old thing for Paws to eat off of. And another thing, why do you serve your cat first when you dump out the Mr. Kittles?”

Because he's bigger and more aggressive.

“Because you always feed him first.”

No, Lucy explained at the time, because if I put down food in Paws's dish first, Cattus will think it's his and eat it.

“Only because he's used to being fed first.”

Lucy was often subjected to Judy meowing, talking cat-talk to Paws. “Big Cruel Lucy didn't feed yooooo, no she didn't! She doesn't care if we live or die!”

Yep, that was about the size of it.

(A little more charity would not go amiss, My dear.)

It was just that Judy made her so mad. The first year they roomed together was all right—just all right, nothing brilliant—but this year had become pure misery. Why haven't I moved out? she wondered.

(Do you want an answer to that? You judge Judy for being a psychology major to observe others' distress and feel superior to them, but My child, that's what you do too. Always have. In St. Eulalia you usually gravitated to the girl who was less socially adept than you. Remember your friend Faith? Isn't that the real cause of your resentment of Judy, that you see in her your own faults, your own limitations?)

I don't want to think about Chicago anymore, Lucy decided.

She instead tried to make Berkshire and eastern Oxfordshire a little more like what she had expected. There were expressways and shopping malls and office parks and factories and no abundance of the thatched-cottage villages that she was hoping for. Every once in a while, too far from the highway to inspect, was an old Cotswold-stone church, a sturdy squarish bell tower amid a copse of trees and slate-roofed houses. Because the illusion and its beauty might have dissolved upon a closer look, she persuaded herself of its Englishness as the bus descended into another slight valley.

The road soon became more congested, and the bus leaned through a series of inevitable British traffic circles. Lucy looked at her watch and knew they were almost to Oxford. Lucy was giddy to be somewhere that had been previously confined to PBS specials and the Travel Channel on cable TV back home. The bus crossed Magdalen Bridge and the city of medieval monasteries came into view, its fortress gates, the bell towers and steeples, quaint ye-olde-Englande shops crammed between the stone bastions, bands of boisterous uniformed students gathered outside the Examination Schools celebrating the end of the term and exams with champagne and revelry.…

Lucy wanted off the bus so she could explore!

OXFORD

J
UNE
20
TH
, 1990

The clouds subsided and the rain-soaked High Street was briefly displayed in the queer off-white, horizontal light Oxford alone seems to enjoy. Lucy stared fondly at the scene: the gradual hill of High Street, the road winding upward and left, fortified on both sides by the palisade of ancient colleges presenting spired, stone facades to the road, the Georgian evenness of Queens College and the isolated statue of some queen,
stylita,
under a stone canopy above the gate.

Lucy groped in her large carpetbag to unearth the guidebook she had bought, ready to decipher centuries of remainders and reconstructions. She walked to the middle of the square formed by St. Mary's Church, All Souls College, and the Bodleian Library. In the middle of the quad this big round five-story dome, the Radcliffe Camera, subject of most Oxford postcards, had been plopped down in the grass, it seemed, merely because it fit. No less impractical was another gate in the wall of All Souls College with its Indian mini–Taj Mahal dome, and two decorative towers shrieking up from the central building beyond it; farther down the street leading from the quad was a mock Bridge of Sighs at Hertford College, across from that there was a Greek Parthenon-like building, next to Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theater … it was like a stone playground full of cherished architectural follies, and everywhere the much-lauded spires, wherever one could be affixed, at every awning and roofpoint.

Lucy felt despondent at being in Oxford and yet not being enrolled there.

She noticed a group of chattering British female students, dressed in shapeless sweaters, drab woollen skirts and black stockings, a fashion sense Lucy could love, but one much helped by an Oxford backdrop. All I got, mourned Lucy, is crummy old Chicago. Yeah, Chicago is a great university, but Rockefeller built a lot of the romanesque, Oxford-like buildings in the 1930s, for Pete's sake, and the local joke is that old John D. proved you could even buy history. But you can't. Because the University of Chicago is dignified and practical and indisputably boring, and Oxford, like history, is silly, impractical, and, she conceded, utterly romantic.

Her map led her to the grim Tudor facade of Braithwaite College where Dr. Shaugnesy had arranged for her to stay. Lucy showed her letters of introduction to the porter, a grumpy red-faced man at the gate, who grunted, looked up at her, grunted, made a phone call no one answered, grunted again, read the letter, another grunt, then put on his glasses in order to be authoritative.

“Can't say I can 'elp ye, miss,” he said. “We got the Canadian Lawn Bowling Society in this week and rooms're tight. Ye'll have to take this up with the Bursary. Mrs. Miggins. And I don't envy ye none.”

Lucy was given directions to get to the Bursary. Lucy quickly surveyed the square beyond this gate, a three-story quad with an even green lawn with several overlarge signs stating no one was to walk upon the grass. The signs had been allowed to become the most striking thing in this tomblike courtyard. She followed the cobblestone perimeter around the sacred grass until she came to a doorway with the numeral III above it, which opened to a dank passage leading to another square quad, replete with warning signs, a doorway that led to a masters' garden that no one but masters were to use, an outside stairway that led to a library that visitors were not permitted to see. Reminded of
Alice in Wonderland
—written by an Oxford don, Lucy recalled—Lucy finally found another passageway that led to a third and last quad and a doorway with the numeral XIII, The Bursary.

“We simply
cahn't
honor this,” breathed Mrs. Miggins, setting down the letter, the pain of all martyrdoms in her voice.
“One,”
she enumerated, “you are here after the Bursary's hours of operations…”

Lucy noticed the silver hair plastimolded into an arc up above Mrs. Miggins's head, her gestures, and even the pinched, heartless meting out of the English language were familiar somehow. She's modeling her public technique on Margaret Thatcher, Lucy realized.

Two, there was no notification to the Bursary of a guest room being made ready for Lucy. Three, consequently there was no staff notification, hence a room could not be prepared. Four, perhaps the rooms had been booked for an American garden club that paid dearly to be here each and every summer, for her information. Five, these exchanges with the University of Chicago—who can't just barge in here thinking it owns the place merely because it virtually does—involve some degree of paperwork, which, as Lucy could see, is impossible now since the sign outside
clearrrrrly
states the office hours of the Bursary during which business may be conducted.

“I suppose you Americans think we need but snap our fingers and arrange things like that. See this stack of papers?”

Lucy looked at the five sheets to the woman's left.

“American graduate students applying for a place in the college
to live.
As if we're here to supply that sort of thing! Well, all I will say is that we have quite enough of the Americans, thank you very much, and there will come a time we don't have to use our fine institutions for hotels for Americans merely to meet our economic needs.”

“Is there a guest room I could pay for?”

“As if we're a bed-and-breakfast? I suppose you think I have time to ring the lodge and investigate this for you?” Mrs. Miggins collapsed before the ordeal and pushed a single button connecting herself to the main gate. “Go back to the porter,” Mrs. Miggins then directed, “and speak to John and he will try to find something for you, and tomorrow, if it will not be too much trouble for you, return to this office
during
the posted office hours and we shall try to undo this … this damage.”

Lucy returned to the porter and:

1) filled out a form saying she had a guest room key and would give it back,

2) paid a £3 deposit and received a receipt,

3) filled out another form saying she had a doorkey to the college gate and would give it back,

4) filled out another form registering herself responsible for the guest room should any desecration occur in said guest room, and

5) handed over £6.25 for the guest room itself.

Lucy made her way through the quads and passageways to the gloomy, ill-lit Staircase IX. She trudged up to the very top of the groaning old stairs and found a door marked
Guest Room
staring her in the face … beside a plaque delineating the “Rules of the Guest Room.” Lucy turned the key to open the cold, dingy guest room with an old hospital bed and a rusted, dripping sink under a slanted attic ceiling. Oh well, she thought, what else can you expect from thousand-year-old rooms? How romantic! Perhaps a monk copied scrolls here once!

(The quad is 1925 pretending to be Victorian pretending to be medieval, but We're glad you're enjoying yourself.)

Lucy yawned as she sat on the bed and she realized if she put her head down she would fall asleep for hours, never to adjust to Greenwich Mean Time. She grabbed her guidebook with the map and headed out to explore All Souls College and see if Dr. O'Hanrahan was in residence.

All Souls College, she read as she walked: founded 1438 by Henry VI. The only college without students. All Souls is a collection of Fellows, reputed to be the cream of any generation, who gather to drink and talk and not too terribly much else. The test to be one of these elite was formidable. One needed to sit for exams in two of either Law, History, Philosophy, Economics, Politics, Literature, or Classics, submit three excellent essays, translations from an ancient language, and an oral quiz. Some fellowships must be forfeited upon marriage, as in the Middle Ages. And then there's the dining test. If you were bad company or a moron socially, that could blackball you. To hinder your path, a virtual obstacle course of difficult-to-eat foods was served: slurpable spaghetti, escargot with the shell-clamp, small game hen with knife and fork, and a dessert of cherries, which were passed to the candidate to see what he did with the pits. An insular, unaccountable place, All Souls College.