Gospel (38 page)

Lucy soon made her escape into the city.

She spent the middle of the day in the Uffizi, and then, brandishing a guidebook, ran around after 4
P.M.
, when churches were open again, to half a dozen she couldn't properly name now—madonnas and masterpieces happily whirled about in her head, too much to disentangle. Lucy trudged back to the hotel with a pocket full of postcards to write, and collected her room key from the half-attentive desk boy she could not catch the eye of. She rounded the hallway to see O'Hanrahan emerge from his room preparing to leave.

“Hello, Dr. O'Hanrahan!”

“Hmph.”

“Just wanted you to know I was back from the Uffizi.”

“You like it? All that art?”

“It was the greatest museum I've ever been to in my life!”

“Did you sign the petition for them not to tear it down and put up a Holiday Inn?”

Still believing anything possible in Europe, Lucy protested, “They
can't
—the building is so nice…” Then she saw by O'Hanrahan's expression that he was kidding. Of course, he was kidding. “Oh, sir, are we going to dinner?”

“No, we are not going to dinner. I am going to dinner with some friars and the custodian at the Biblioteca Laurenziana after having a peek at their index.”

“I don't speak Italian, you know. And I don't guess my Latin's gonna go very far.”

O'Hanrahan was not even looking at her.

“I'll have to go it alone out there and I'm short of money now—”

“Should have gone home while you had the chance.”

Lucy put a right hand on her hip. “You wouldn't have had your credit card if I'd done that and we wouldn't be staying in such a nice hotel tonight, would we?”

Fair enough. He produced his wallet and slipped her a 50,000 lire note. “This oughta do you. Point to a slice of pizza in one of the bakeries. Get a gelato.”

“I've had some gelato in Chicago. They have this place up on North Michigan Avenue—”

“Goooood,” sang the professor, departing, “when you get back, it'll seem like you never left.”

Lucy, however, discovered mumbling English at shopkeepers was no problem, and some were even nice to her. She had a 2500 lire pile of gelato:
stracciatella, zuppa inglese,
and
zabaglione.
She wanted to try what
sounded
the most exotic. Lucy then strolled around and admired the buildings and the
palazzi
and the mix of people, soon finding herself in Piazza Signoria before the Medicis' stronghold, the Palazzo Vecchio with its crenellated high tower—looking like a personal fortress ought to, thought Lucy. Underneath this golden medieval skyscraper was all of Florence milling about, buskers and Eurohippies and lots of American tourists, mostly college-age girls, with trains of Italian locals straggling behind trying to score with them, laughing at everything they each said. Policemen on horseback patrolled indifferently, tourists lingered before the postcard trees and souvenir stands, and there were also the Florentines themselves, beautiful and confident, walking home with their shopping or going out to dine and, everywhere, the cooing, mewling birds in possession of the square, the sudden fluttering eruptions of excitable pigeons.

I could stay forever, Lucy thought.

Having walked most of the old quarter enraptured, she surrendered to the hotel, tired in her bones. She thought she'd leave a note:

Dr. O'Hanrahan,

How was your night? Did you find anything important? If so, you can come and tell me about it, I'll probably be awake.

Lucy

Lucy lay in her room, exhausted, but awake with the wonders of the day. It was as if someone had whispered: see how much of your life you have wasted?
This has always been here, Lucille.
And like the students and twenty-something-year-olds wandering in the
piazza
tonight, you too could have been here years ago. She thought of the girls in the square—boy, did American voices, nasal and one-half too loud, stand out in other countries; she saw why foreigners complained about Americans. Those girls weren't any more attractive than she was when she fixed herself up, Lucy thought, and they were besieged with Italian admirers. Some of those guys were sleazy beyond belief … but everyone looked to be having fun. A little summertime romance. Something to talk about when they get back. Something she wished she could tell Judy.

Lucy then replayed her visit with David McCall in her head. She was fairly sure he liked her and was interested and she just did all the same old dumb usual stuff to make sure romance never came to a point, to prevent being rejected. Would it have been so bad to come out and announce her interest directly? God, she thought, having made a fool out of myself over this guy Vito in the Theology Department back home, what did I have to lose with David? Vito was a short, dark Italian guy with cheekbones you could slice bread with, generally adored by women—particularly his rear end, venerated especially by Judy the
connoisseuse
herself. And Lucy had once flirted with him to a degree that Vito, very gently, suggested he was not available. Nonetheless, Judy and Lucy were positive that Vito was attainable and furthermore none of his girlfriends was any better looking than either of them—worse, thank God, much much worse!

Vito's brother looked identical from behind and was often mistaken for Vito, and hence was called Deutero-Vito. In the winter with everyone bundled up, anyone short and Mediterranean resembled Vito as well and Lucy remembered the day she had everyone in the Theology grad student coffee lounge howling by identifying two or three Pseudo-Vito's. In addition, you see, to the Deutero-Vito.

Theology grad student humor there.

Lucy then heard the lift engage, faintly, at the end of the hall. She listened for footsteps. There was a pause. Was it O'Hanrahan reading her note? She heard a crumpling of paper, then the door being opened, and then it being closed. Lucy was curious. She slipped out of bed and stuck her head out in the hall to look: her note was crushed into a ball on the floor before his door.

I love Italy so far, she thought, back in her bed and looking at the ceiling, but I wish I weren't here alone.

J
ULY
2
ND

Next day.

And what a day. The sky was a breeze-swept, clean and infinite blue, fit for going to sea like Amerigo Vespucci, fit for the mannerist blue on the pallet of Michelangelo or Pontormo, fit for the blue on the cerulean cape of the Most Blessed Virgin; and the sun was pure this morning, firing the earthen walls of faded yellow and deep orange, palaces and tenements alike—and for the lucky mortal who cared to raise his head there awaited the dizzying contrast of the baked ochre meeting the lapis lazuli of the sky. Lucy was intoxicated: is not this the weather that bore the Renaissance, cosseted the temperamental artists, soothed the poets, prodded the world to walk resplendent from the Dark Ages? Was it not on such a day that God made good His promise and sent an angel to inform Mary of what was to befall her—let's have the angel of Leonardo's
Annunciation
and let's have a Virgin by Botticelli, Lucy wasn't so choosy as to which one, and let's have the Christ Child by Michelangelo in his
Tondo Doni.

(With or without the five male hustlers frolicking in the background? What that man got away with.)

Lucy's head was spinning with Renaissance and romance—what was with her this morning? Calm down, she told herself, looking in the mirror, combing down her hair. On with the sweater, glasses, baggy jeans, and in her purse the guidebook of yesterday and her automatic camera and some postcards she'd yet to write. The professor was waiting for her downstairs, having this morning volunteered grouchily to show her a thing or two, before abandoning her to a Chicago-bound flight. Out of the room, down the stairs, those smooth marble stairs and the cool metal railing, handing in the key at the desk, and then out into this wonderful life-restoring light, warm heavenly air—

“Goddam it,” said O'Hanrahan, “are you going to tramp about in that lousy sweater and, aw geez, give me a break with those godawful bugeye glasses again—you told me you had contacts. I'm supposed to be seen with you? Didn't you bring anything else to wear, for Christ's sake?”

Lucy felt her face color completely, and she stammered, “Well, I thought I was going to England where it's cold, just for a weekend…” And she knew her lip was trembling and her eyes were tearing up. The
last
person she wanted to show a hint of emotion in front of.

“Well … don't get upset.”

An awkward silence, as they both tried to ascertain Lucy's emotional state.

“Well, stop picking on me all the time,” at last she sniveled, turning away.

“Look, I'm sorry, but I'm used to traveling solo, you see or…”

She wiped her eyes quickly, under her bugeye glasses. And at that moment a shriveled gargoyle of a Florentine, with a bicycle full of bread, coasted up and looked at them both with a caricature of a face, a cartoon person—

“Get outa here, you,” said O'Hanrahan, waving him along.

Lucy laughed but it came out as a sob. That clown must have thought this was a lover's quarrel. Old geezer and not-so-pretty young thing.

“Where do they get people like that?” said O'Hanrahan, flailing for something neutral to say. “Look, uh, Luce. I'll declare a moratorium on treating you like shit for twenty-four hours. How's that?” He passed over his handkerchief to her.

“I don't think,” she said, pausing to blow her nose, “that you can go twenty-four hours being nice.”

“I don't either. But the first twenty minutes or so oughta be okay.”

Lucy smiled, recovering. “It's my period,” she said confidentially. “That always gets me all moody and sensitive.”

O'Hanrahan cut her off, putting an arm around her shoulder. “I don't wanna hear about your period. Don't wanna hear about your diarrhea. What I want is to have a good time with you today in Florence, all right? We'll go to the market, how about that?”

Sniffing, she headed back to her room.

(Happy with yourself, Patrick?)

A memory returned to O'Hanrahan, a memory of how his late wife teared up and how her face reddened and her lip trembled when she cried. Which he had given Beatrice much cause to do.

(And not without some amount of pleasure.)

What a bully he had become—the most loathsome thing on earth, the cantankerous, bitter old wretch savaging the helpless, making the little girls cry.

Lucy, meanwhile, ran upstairs and reassembled herself, quickly put in the dreaded contacts, and was back in a flash, totally embarrassed but relieved somehow.

First stop. The Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella and the cloisters with a fragment of a Uccello depiction of the Flood and Noah's ark and “God knows what kind of drugs the man was on,” O'Hanrahan observed. Uccello, the first surrealist. Second stop, San Lorenzo. There is Brunelleschi's graceful nave and there is a Bronzino fresco of poor St. Lawrence on the grill, a hysterical cast-of-thousands psychedelic martyrdom. Next door, the Medici Tombs and Michelangelo's sacristy featuring his statues of Night and Dawn.

“The man could not do tits,” elucidated O'Hanrahan.

In the shadow of San Lorenzo is the Florence Market, stall after stall of leather finery, jewelry, ceramics, loud bowling shirts and ludicrous scarves, souvenir T-shirts, noise and multicolored clutter in a marvelous Italian confusion. O'Hanrahan led the way through the tourist mobs with Lucy dutifully following, seeing a number of things she wanted. The professor halted before a stall featuring big, blowsy Italian dresses, sleeveless. He held out one for Lucy's approval, a white silky frock with blue polka dots. “You like?”

She giggled, “Me? It's not my style.”

“You don't
have
any style,” he gently corrected. “But then, I have only begun my vocation, my mission.”

A man within the stall, wearing one of the dazzling chartreuse and magenta shirts hanging on the racks around him, put out his short cigarette and added to the discussion, “
Si, signorina
would look byootiful in the dress. Byootiful, byootiful.”

After a brief discourse on what European size Signorina was, she slipped behind the stall to the changing room. The changing room was really a space enclosed by two sheets suspended from clotheslines. To the right you could look into the neighboring stall's changing-space. There an Italian boy was trying on a pair of jeans, advertised as 100%
FROM THE USA
by signs full of stars and stripes attractive to European customers. The boy looked over at her, smiling, shrugging, saying something in Italian, not embarrassed in the least to be observed in his boxer shorts. Not that he should be, thought Lucy, he's
gorgeous.
After his departure, Lucy slipped off the sweater and baggy jeans and put on the dress. There was a four-foot panel mirror leaning against a pole on the ground, which made it difficult to judge herself.

She couldn't go out in public in this. For one thing, her shoulders were whiter than white and she'd soon resemble a lobster. Not the most attractive upper arms in the world, a bodily region in recent years that had surmounted a challenge to the hips and thighs for fat-supremacy. Serious armpit stubble—

O'Hanrahan: “Come on! Stop temporizing!”

The dress was long enough to reach her knees, which was good because the thighs didn't need more exposure … she'd better get out there and get it over with.

“See?” she said, talking quickly, “it's just not me, and it shows off my fat butt—”

O'Hanrahan, astonishing her, slapped her backside: “It's a fine butt,
signorina.
This is the land of the big butt. Child-bearing hips turn a man on in these Mediterranean climes.” He stood back to look at his creation. “Stop slouching. Get those shoulders back—this your first dress? Didn't your mother teach you comportment?”