The Chapel (17 page)

According to T., Joachim and Anne were not bit players. They were the parents of the Virgin Mary, but they had been of no interest to the young men who wrote the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, and so their stories never made it into the Catholic Bible. T. thought Giotto would have read about them in
The Golden Legend,
a compendium of the miraculous lives of many saints that was codified and circulated in 1250 or so. “The
Who's Who of Early Christendom
,” he said.

Joachim appeared in the first panel carrying a sacrificial lamb in his arms, but because he and Anne had been married for twenty years and still had no children, his sacrifice was rejected and he was cast out. Meanwhile, a rabbi half-hidden behind a wall was lavishing his attention on a much younger, presumably virile man. The baby business
complicated my desire to cast Mitchell in the role of Joachim—I was clinging to my happy ending—until I realized that Joachim's failure to father a child might be Mitchell's failure to finish his book, which was the reason he was cast out of the inner sanctum of scholars into the barren field of academic administration.

In the next panel, Joachim had wandered out to a rocky wilderness to tend to his flock with a couple of young shepherds, who shifted their glances away from him and his shame while the sheep scattered—Mitchell slinking past undergrads in Harvard Yard. Only a skinny little sheepdog, its articulated ribs especially evident compared to the full-bellied sheep in the foreground, looked happy to see him, and the dog and Joachim locked eyes—comrades in indignity.

The third panel broke the narrative line. It was a picture of Anne on her knees inside a room with verdant green walls—a kind of lushness entirely absent from the stony white landscapes in the previous scenes. To the right of Anne, a red-winged angel hovered in a window high above her, its torso evident inside the room, but the rest of its heavenly body was not visible in the exterior view of that wall. The annunciating angel was apparent only to Anne.

“The angel tells Anne to go to Jerusalem,” T. said. “You recognize this moment.”

“Not quite,” I said. I was trying to see myself in the pious posture of Anne. “But I am crazy about the color of her bedroom.”

T. said, “This is the Immaculate Conception.”

I said, “No, that's when Mary conceives Jesus.” I was pleased to have at least one ace up my sleeve from catechism classes.

T. said, “No, Mary is a virgin when she gives birth, but that's not what makes her immaculate. At her conception, when Anne and Joachim conceived their only child, an angel swept by so Mary would not be stained with original sin—thus, immaculate.”

I said, “Trust me, Catholic girls know what immaculate means.”
I was certain T. was wrong, but I was also losing the thread of my version of the story. “Who is that other woman?” To the left of Anne, on a porch separated by a wall with a lancet window, a handmaiden in an unflattering peasant dress was turning wool onto a wooden spindle, face forward, her dark eyes shifting toward the green room.

T. said, “That's obviously our friend Shelby.”

He was right. Only Shelby would risk that outfit. “Maybe you're here somewhere, too,” I said, spinning around to try to spot a likeness of T. in one of the paintings.

T said, “We should look for each other before we leave. Everything echoes something, and everyone prefigures someone else.”

“It's sort of reassuring,” I said, “like a never-ending story.”

T. put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, “Spoiler alert. Not everybody gets a happy ending.”

The guard called time and cleared the room, and we inched on to the fourth fresco, back to the stony wilderness—Joachim on his knees, a solemn shepherd to his left, a reassuring angel to his right, and a few sheep nosing around in the foreground. At the center, on a rocky height, red flames leapt into the bruised-blue sky from a stone barbecue oven, licking and curling around the blackened skeleton of a sacrificial lamb, its eviscerated neck and cranium raised up above its burned body, pointing to a disembodied heavenly hand reaching down from unseen heights.

T. said, “Put on your peepers.”

I didn't want to magnify this moment. I was eager to move on. I couldn't turn Mitchell into Joachim here. It was the carcass of the lamb that made me mindful of Mitchell, and for the first time ever I had to imagine the horrific moments in the crematorium after his flesh had vaporized in the intense heat, before his bones were reduced to ash. That was the end of his story. That was the happy ending I'd arranged for my husband. I said, “I've seen enough.”

I tried to hand the binoculars to T., but he shrugged off the offer. I barely paused at the fifth panel, where Joachim was asleep while two young shepherds tended the flock. In the blue sky above, the red-winged angel who'd earlier visited Anne swooped in and urged Joachim on to Jerusalem and then sailed away, the tail end of its heavenly body evanescing in a comet stream.

T. was lingering, and to hasten him along, I said, “And, finally, they meet at the Golden Gate.”

“The threshold of history,” T. said. “Their story is just getting started.”

“Lucky them,” I said, though I didn't envy Anne a pregnancy at her age with no hope of an epidural.

T. almost said something—he turned to me expectantly, opened his mouth, and narrowed his gaze, but instead of speaking he reached around his waist and pulled his blazer and shirt away from his back.

I said, “You want to go.”

T. said, “You want to stay?”

It sounded more like a request than a question. I said, “For one or two more tours.”

T. said, “And then an early lunch?” His head twisted away reflexively, and he winced over his shoulder, as if something surprising was happening on his back. He said, “Lunch with Ed?”

I said, “For god's sake, let me help you. Are you bleeding again?”

T. said, “I'll find you on a bench outside.”

The guard was herding the others to the exit.

T. turned and held up his hand, palm toward the Seven Vices on the opposite wall. “If ever I were able to talk about—” He moved his hand in tight little circles. “If I could talk to anyone about all of this, I'd want to talk to you.” He hurried away. The tourists cleared out. I was alone.

I
FELT THE PRESENCE OF THE OTHER PAINTED FIGURES AS
I
paced the center aisle of the chapel. I was looking for something, some explanation for the way the paintings worked on my imagination. In the café the day before with Ed and T., it was the depth and vastness of the sky that I remembered. I had recalled each painted scene as if I had been standing so close that I could see above the heads and shoulders of the human figures in the foreground. But I was not close, in fact. A railing all along the central aisle kept me at least ten feet from the chapel walls, and the lowest register of painted panels was ten feet higher than my line of sight. Anne and Joachim—they were at least another thirty feet above me. And yet, from this vantage, where I should have registered distortions in perspective, I was still inside the frame, aware of sky, or at least the sense of possibility that blue skies so reliably betoken, and my mind was reflexively adjusting for the angles and occlusions, rounding out the world around me, as if I had seen these scenes before, my point of view informed by memory.

The frames that Giotto painted for each scene appeared to have dimension—they looked like raised-stone reliefs into which paintings had been fitted, which should have heightened my awareness that I was looking at art, paint on a plaster wall. Instead, the emphatic framing turned the paintings into windows, portals with a vantage on another time. These were not isolated snapshots from the past that simply let you see how other people dressed or spent their time. I was not looking at Anne or Joachim or the shepherds. Every painted figure was a habitable space within a world I'd entered, an invitation to see beyond the familiar borders and boundaries of myself.

When I was alone in the chapel, it was not the painted people or their circumstances that drew me in. The frescoes themselves were charismatic.

Like a pulse, I sensed the presence of that blue sky not only in the background of each picture but behind the frames and under every
painted pilaster and column, a blueness roiling beneath the deepest-down coat of unpainted plaster, beneath the brick and mortar of the chapel walls. I knew this was an illusion, but so is the sky itself, that luminous dome above us, the true-blue air we breathe, the impossibly expanding insubstantial depth that we call space.

A priest in a black cassock and white sneakers led a group of four young, black-suited men to my side and pointed to Joachim and the burned carcass of the lamb. “Now, look closely,” he said.

The four young men raised their binoculars and focused. They looked like seniors in high school. In England. In 1940. They were extraordinarily clean-cut.

I pointed my peepers at that sacrificial lamb, as T. had suggested.

“Faintly sketched, above the charred carcass of the sacrificial lamb, almost invisible against the night sky, the plumes of smoke assume a shape.” The priest paused. “Can you see it?”

One young man whispered, “An angel!”

“An angel,” said the priest. “Notice its head cast up, its wings at rest, its fragile existence drawn ever higher by the loving hand of God in heaven.”

“Prefiguring the Resurrection,” said another of the four young ones.

“Sheep figure in all of the Joachim paintings,” the priest continued. His tone was more didactic than pontifical, so I couldn't tell if the young men were prep-school students or seminarians. “We begin the cycle with the rejected sacrifice at the temple, and then the flock in the wilderness, and his holocaust, and, finally, when Joachim dreams in the desert, a single lamb sits on the highest ledge, apart from the bigger, woolly animals, its fragile legs folded, its head erect, its smooth white body shorn of its coat. Now, what do you notice about the two paintings in which St. Anne is present?”

Almost in unison, the four young men said, “No sheep.”

The priest was beaming. “There are no sheep in the Anne paintings, almost as if women occupy a separate realm. Which they did. Even St. Anne would not have been allowed into the temple.”

One young man said, “So you're comparing women to sheep?”

I was standing two feet away from this nitwit.

Another young man said, “Maybe Giotto is just saying women shouldn't have to work outside the house.”

“Use your heads,” the priest snapped. He smiled apologetically in my direction. “Think about the Lamb of God.”

All four close-cropped heads bowed in unison. One of them muttered, “Jesus is the Lamb of God.”

“And who is the Mother of God?”

Someone said, “Mary.”

“And who is the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary?”

“St. Anne.”

The priest said, “Giotto is illustrating the promise of Jesus, the coming of the Christ Child. When he depicts St. Anne, there are no sheep—symbolic prefigurations of the Lamb of God—because from this moment forward, the presence of Jesus becomes real in the story of the salvation of history.”

This all made sense if you ignored the fact that the sheep were sheep. But the boys were nodding knowingly, and the priest led them across the room toward the manger and the Magi.

When I looked again at Anne, alone in her green room, and Shelby in the peasant dress on the porch, I noted that Shelby was winding wool and, later, at the Golden Gate, among the onlookers, there was Shelby again—it was unmistakably Shelby, her small breasts getting no boost whatsoever from that peasant dress—and she had a hand-knit wool blanket folded over her arms.

In Giotto's telling of the story, you could see the sheep as symbols, or you could see the sheep as sheep—just like the angels. Were
those half-seen heralds really present, or were they fond hopes to which the dreamer pinned a pair of wings? Unlike Anne and Joachim, the Shelby figure was not visited by an angel. Outside of Anne's room, the angel's body wasn't visible. And yet before the sainted couple had consummated their lifelong dream of conceiving a child, Shelby knew that Anne would soon be pregnant. Thus, the receiving blanket she had woven from the wool of that shorn sheep. This wasn't a miracle or a symbol. This was Giotto's genius, the human truth of the Golden Legend—not merely a mystical tale of divine intercession but a record of the foresight of a woman who had paid attention to the needs and longings of the people whom she loved and served. There was nothing mysterious about a woman like Shelby showing up at the Golden Gate with a receiving blanket at the ready. She was always expecting the best.

According to the soles of my feet, it was time to get off the marble floor, but according to Mitchell's watch, I had six minutes left before the next changeover. Again, I felt the presence of Jesus and his Apostles and the other familiar painted figures, but now they were hovering, staring down on me, rather like my Cambridge neighbors at their windows when I ventured out to the mailbox in my bathrobe. I ignored them. I didn't want to know what they were thinking. I didn't want to see me through their eyes.