Gospel (37 page)

When next O'Hanrahan awoke it was in Milano Centrale, Mussolini's fascist cathedral to the Italian railways. He had lost his traveling companions and gained a new one, a portly
signora,
grandmotherly, weighed down with shopping bags filled with breads and meats and cheeses. She nodded hello to O'Hanrahan and fell asleep before the train even left the station. As the train wended its way through Milan's crosstracks, O'Hanrahan noticed that someone had taken blue spray paint and removed the os from all the
MILANOS.
The work of anti-Italian-speaking Lombard separatists! O'Hanrahan smiled again. Oh Europa, you never get tired of renewing the old nationalistic struggles. Yeah, yeah, the EEC and 1992 and all that, but let an old man who knows your history retain a civilized doubt concerning your ability to get along for more than a few generations.

“Signore?”

O'Hanrahan turned to see a steward at the compartment door with a refreshment trolley.

“Si, grazie,”
said O'Hanrahan, ordering a coffee, then a sweet roll in a cellophane bag. The steward moved along and O'Hanrahan noticed the sleeping
signora
rearrange herself to get more comfortable. First class makes all the difference in the world. That and the bottle of brandy he had picked up at the Gare de Lyon in Paris before boarding the overnight train to Florence.

“Excuse me, sorry…”

The professor detected a familiar voice from the corridor outside.

“Excuse me …
pardone
…”

He heard the sliding and unsliding of compartment doors. Then Lucy stuck her head into his compartment:

“Dr. O'Hanrahan!” Lucy beamed. “Thank God, I found you!”

O'Hanrahan was speechless. Lucy scooted her cumbersome suitcase into the compartment. She alley-ooped it halfway up to the luggage rack but couldn't quite budge it further. “Uh, could you help me with this, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

He moved not an inch.

Finally, Lucy pushed her bag onto the hammock for luggage that was stretched above the seat. She sat down, still beaming, looking at him with those bugeye glasses he hated, two round circles like her round face. Her hair was really objectionable, straggly and hanging down in her eyes. And there was the
same
gray, poncholike, circus-tent sweater she apparently wore every living day.

“It'll be too hot to wear that sweater in Florence,” he said at last. “We'll see at last if you brought a change of clothes.”

She looked down at herself. “You don't like this sweater?”

“This isn't a conversation.”

Lucy looked in her big carpetbag. “When I tell you what I brought you you're going to be happy to see me. Aren't you curious how I found you? I took the night flight from Dublin to Milan and then I took a cab to the train station, then I got on this train and waited until the sun came up to check each compartment. I knew you didn't travel second class.”

O'Hanrahan crossed his arms, unimpressed.

She produced a train itinerary: “It didn't matter when you left Paris,” she said, “you would have to come in on the morning Milan train—this one—or you coulda gone through Torino, see?” She held up the schedule. “In which case I would have caught you in Florence. See right here—this black line?”

“Stop waving that in my face. You'll wake up the
signora.
”

Lucy fished through her carpetbag for her purse, and from the purse removed a wallet. She handed the credit card to O'Hanrahan: “You'll be happy when you see this. And here's the telegram that came with it. It arrived in Ballymacross after you left.”

The professor stirred at last. “Let's see that…” A smile played at the corners of his mouth but was quickly restrained. “Positively surreal. Who'd have thought Chicago would have coughed up a cent?” He handed the telegram back to her and examined the credit card:
PATRICK O'HANRAHAN
with
CORPORATE ACCOUNT
emblazoned under the logo. “Who the hell is John Smith?” he asked, referring to the sender of the telegram.

“University treasurer?”

“Never heard of him, not that I could tell you who the university treasurer is. Sounds like a name you sign in with at a cheap motel.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

“What would you know about cheap motels?” O'Hanrahan lovingly added the VISA card to his wallet. “Wonder what the spending limit is?”

Lucy brought out his sister's letter. “And now, sir, since you're in a reading mood—”

O'Hanrahan snatched it, pulled down the window to throw it out, Lucy yelped “No!” and the
signora
awoke. She gave them both a disapproving glare and they remained in suspended animation until she closed her eyes again. O'Hanrahan whispered to Lucy, as he pushed the window back up, “I know every word in it without reading it. The old battle-ax is incapable of surprising me.”

Lucy held it out to him, undeterred.

“All right, all right…”

Dear Patrick,

When news reached me that you had sold your's and Beatrice's house and closed your accounts at the bank

He grumbled, “
Yours
with an apostrophe, for Christ's sake. You see what I raised myself up from?”

I was at first in a panic, thinking you were in trouble, emotionally or financially. But now I hear from Dr. Shaughnesy that you are in Europe, living it up, waisting your money and no doubt drinking it dry. If you think spending every cent you have is spiting me, then I'm afraid you are very much mistaken. You don't have to bankrupt yourself on my account because I don't want a cent from you.

“Hmmm, the Wicked Witch of Wisconsin thought she was going to get a piece of valuable Forest Park real estate.” O'Hanrahan turned to Lucy. “I take it you've read this letter.”

Lucy, never able to lie when asked something directly, nodded guiltily.

And you are very much mistaken if you think that I'm going to bankrupt myself for you when you return. You are an ill man and you will need more than I have in the bank or your pension provides for you to see it through. Therefore this little spending spree in Europe has robbed you of any chance of a dignified treatment.

“Ehhhh,” sneered O'Hanrahan, skimming the next two pages, “she just carps on and on like this.”

Lucy asked quickly, “Are you really ill, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

“Catherine O'Hanrahan has been trying to get me committed or chucked in a clinic since 1974 so she can run my life. Just like she ran my mother's for nearly twenty years—she's only comfortable at a deathbed. If I wanted to make her day, I'd end up in the gutter like she predicts so she could rescue me and attain her crown of martyrdom.”

Lucy smiled agreeably though she was sure there was more to the story. She waited a moment more. “Rabbi Hersch said you were ill too.”

“What
is
this, a conspiracy? Do I look like I'm on death's doorstep to you?”

“Oh no, sir, in fact for your age—”

“Normal retirement age,” he ranted. Then, as if to himself, he swore he'd take the matter up with Rabbi Hersch next time he saw him. “I'm in perfect health, in fact.”

“That's what my father says too, sir, and his system is one big ulcer. Ulcers run in our family, actually. Too much worry but that's very Catholic…” O'Hanrahan glared at her, so she asked instead, “Does your sister have a point, Dr. O'Hanrahan? I mean, if you're using up all your, you know, money, then what are you going to do when you get … I mean, when you do retire?”

O'Hanrahan wasn't going to discuss his retirement plans with Lucy. “The great Dr. O'Hanrahan is going out in a blaze of glory. Zion's glory, angelic realms of glory, a hoary head and a crown of glory—we're not choosy. This gospel I'm after means
everything.
I may even be excommunicated, the highest honor accorded by the Roman Catholic Church.”

Lucy smiled, not meaning to.

“Grants, fellowships, appointments.” He paused, aware he was not quite as sure as his words. “I'll be respected,” he added.

“You're already respected, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

Yes, he thought, once upon a time, by people now mostly dead … And yes, in your little Theology Department circle I suppose I get a kind word or two, but what of The Ages? O'Hanrahan fell into thoughts of his former glories: Do you remember when you were a Jesuit novice at the American University in Beirut, Paddy? 1949? Do you remember what short work you made of the Thanksgiving Hymns in the Dead Sea Scrolls? Translated in part by
you,
the twenty-four-year-old kid, the goy! Professor Albright—that
genius,
who was among the first to recognize the value of the scrolls—do you remember the praise heaped upon you? Those Israeli masters, Sukenik and his son, those masterful Frenchmen, Dupont-Sommer and de Vaux … A head-turning swirl of adulation and promise that you'd eclipse them all!

(So what happened, Patrick?)

O'Hanrahan felt the adrenaline surge, that inescapable tension within: is there time enough? Time for me to join those ranks of academic immortality? Time to get a few points on the board? Lucy meanwhile was fading, her eyes getting heavy.

“Been to sleep yet?” O'Hanrahan asked.

“A bit. On the plane for a while, and back there in second class. What I am is starved.”

O'Hanrahan proffered his sticky bun in the cellophane.

Lucy considered it and shook her head. “Better not,” she whispered: “I've still got diarrhea.”

The
signora
in the compartment repositioned herself with snorts and grunts.

“Why didn't you take the stuff I gave you?”

“I did, sir. It hasn't worked yet, all the traveling around. I think it was Mrs. McCall's boiled cabbage stew. You see, I don't really eat meat very much and—”

“Scusi,”
said a man who opened the door of the compartment quickly. A short man, dark curly hair, almost Arab-looking. He stared at Lucy and then O'Hanrahan, and then looked at the luggage rack at O'Hanrahan's satchel. O'Hanrahan startled, wondering if he was going to grab it, but then all of them heard the conductor in the corridor, coming to check tickets. The dark man looked at the conductor approach and then cursing under his breath, hurriedly left the compartment, slamming the door.

Lucy looked at O'Hanrahan. “What was that about?”

“Friend of yours, Miss Dantan?” O'Hanrahan protectively retrieved his satchel and held it on his lap.

The conductor appeared.
“Biglietti, per favore.”

Lucy, in a strained whisper, asked the professor to explain in Italian that she would pay to upgrade her second-class ticket.

As they haggled and quibbled, the train continued across the flat Emilian farmland, which could have been the fields of rural Illinois, Lucy soon told herself, feeling the need for the familiar in yet another new country. Soon there was Parma, then Modena, cities Lucy knew from medieval church history or literature—what excitements and explorations waited beyond the train station signs … Then Bologna. She craned at the window to view the domes and towers and ochre highrise buildings as they left Bologna Centrale. O'Hanrahan fell asleep and she missed his narration … not that she would have incurred his wrath by awakening him.

But soon, up from the plains miraculously, were the Apennines. The train began winding its way through a series of dramatic tunnels, bringing temporary darkness and consternation, because Lucy greedily wished to look out and assimilate. A flash of a rich man's villa. A few seconds of the neighboring
autostrada,
a four-lane engineering marvel of stilted bridges and tunnels. Another break between tunnels revealed a farm and a vineyard and … could that be a mule and peasant cart laden with grapes? Could Italy have remained so quaint back in these hills?

As O'Hanrahan opened his eyes briefly, Lucy pounced with a question: “How long are we going to stay in Florence?”

He drowsily closed his eyes as if he didn't hear, then said, “Long enough to put you on a plane for Chicago.”

FIRENZE

J
ULY
1
ST
, 1990

Within the hour the train, after numerous stop-and-start delays, pulled into Santa Maria Novella Station. O'Hanrahan stood up and reached for his bag without speaking a word to Lucy.

“We're getting off?” she asked.

“Could be.”

Lucy, in a panic, grabbed her suitcase and followed.

“Are we also going to Assisi?” she mumbled, dragging her suitcase a few paces behind him through the terminal.

“
We
are not going to Assisi.
I
am going to Assisi, after I talk to the Franciscans here. Florence is the traditional gossip-stop for Assisi since the Franciscans assigned here usually got drummed out of the big operation down the road. There's a library I want to look in as well, not that any of this has the remotest possibility of being your business.”

Over the cobblestone streets buzzing with Vespas and
motorini
with teenage couples clinging to the seats, past the plaza's postcard trees and sea of Scandinavian backpackers, Lucy followed O'Hanrahan into the sun and down a narrow street of hotels a block from the station.

“I've got lots of work to do,” he told her as he fished for the newly minted credit card. “So go play tourist. Not even
I
am so cruel as to put you on a plane without giving you a day in Florence to look around. Scram and don't bother me.”

O'Hanrahan checked in at the Hotel Davide and accompanied Lucy in the lift to the third floor. Lucy, he noted with some fondness, was wide-eyed, eagerly drinking it all in, impressed with the tall ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows and the small stone balcony outside … this was all so romantic and Italian to her, this average continental hotel room.