The Chapel (18 page)

I took a few backward steps and let my gaze drop down from the Golden Gate to the Slaughter of the Innocents, which seemed too sad a last impression, so I lowered my gaze again, and there was Jesus being beaten by a crowd of jeering men wielding metal rods. T. had warned me that this story didn't end well for everyone. The horror of the scene was compounded by humiliation. One man was pinching the face of Jesus; another was pulling his hair. I consulted Sara's map. This was Number 32, The Flagellation (Coronation with Thorns).

I thought I deserved a more uplifting final image for the morning, but instead of turning to an angel or a starry patch of sky, I looked up
again at Jesus being flogged. A stream of blood ran down his face from puncture wounds in his scalp beneath the crown of thorns. Like the tears that ran down the faces of the grieving mothers above him.

Like the blood on T.'s back?

T. had been standing beneath the bloodied body of Jesus when he'd said, “You know everything.”

Someone brushed against my back, and I was certain it was T. I wished he'd found me staring at the ceiling or admiring the altar—anywhere but here. I turned. There was no one near me. Most of the crowd was clotted in the middle of the aisle, staring up and over my head at the Last Judgment. But a posse of well-dressed women was headed my way, and the tallest one was smiling at me. I moved deep into the corner and consulted Sara's map so I wouldn't have to interact like a normal adult.

“Liz?”

I tried to squeeze my entire body through the open toes of my pumps so I could slither away along the marble floor.

“Liz Berman?”

I said, “Hello.”

“You don't remember me.”

I knew her name was Rosalie Ellenbogen. She'd ended up as vice president of Harvard Real Estate before she took a job at NYU, or maybe Columbia.

“Rosalie Ellenbogen,” she said.

The other women had veered off and disappeared into a scrum of tourists. I tried to spot another tall one among them, a redhead named Rose Hips, or Rose of Lima, or some absurd variation on Rosalie. She'd also worked at Harvard until she and Rosalie ditched their respective husbands and turned themselves into the world's tallest lesbian couple. But the posse had dissipated. Rosalie was alone. I was happy to think that was a chronic condition.

Rosalie said, “I was so sorry to read of Mitchell's passing.”

Suddenly, time was passing the wrong way, like a reel of film rewinding, flicking back through the years, flashing images of the illness, Rachel's wedding, Sam's college graduation, and finally uncovering a sequence of Mitchell snapping shut his briefcase while I read the morning paper, and then Mitchell warning me that he was about to lean in and kiss me good-bye, my beloved Judas, pausing long enough beside my chair for me to straighten his necktie.

How often I had wanted to tug that silk like a length of rope, bend his head toward mine, and tighten and tighten his knotted tie. But I had choked back my anger instead of choking Mitchell to death, and I wouldn't have said another word to Rosalie if she had walked away.

Instead, Rosalie said, “Remember me to your children.”

“Remind me,” I said. “It was you and not your tall friend Rose Petal who fucked Mitchell, right? You can imagine, he was rather confused when you came out. And a little titillated, too.”

“I don't know what you mean,” she said.

I said, “Then maybe you don't know that your husband—Dan? Dave? Don? He called me and let me know he had pictures.”

Rosalie said, “This is ancient history.”

“No, home-security footage. I remember now—it was a movie,” I said. “He offered to make me a copy, but I was buried in back episodes of
Prime Suspect
at the time.” At the time, Rosalie had told everyone that her husband was shocked by her self-discovery but was kind during the divorce. A few months later, Dan-Dave-Don sent me a handwritten note. According to him, his home movie had cost Rosalie half of a sizable fortune he'd inherited. He also boasted about keeping his promise to keep Mitchell's name out of the whole mess. Unless I wanted the videocassette, he intended to destroy the evidence.

Rosalie said, “I had only intended to offer my condolences.” She drifted away toward the altar end of the chapel.

I had never said a word about Rosalie to Mitchell, even during the week she came out to her colleagues at Harvard and Mitchell said, “You never know about people,” so often that I realized he was hoping I did know about the affair, or else hoping he might work up the nerve to tell me. I kept my silence as I kept my vow of fidelity—one of the Seven Virtues. And I learned that the flipside of that coin was a deadly vice. Like an unpopular schoolgirl with a perfect attendance record, I turned up for my marriage every day, my happiness wedded to my unhappiness.

Four, five, and even six years later, Mitchell would still occasionally toss Rosalie's name into a discussion of a news story about gay marriage. “Everybody has a right to be happy,” he'd say piously, as if he was proud to have done his part in the long struggle for human rights.

When the guard finally called us to the exit, I was all turned around until I realized that the Golden Gate, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Flagellation were behind me. I was staring at Number 41g on Sara's map, the last fresco in the eye-level row. This was the final image in the chapel sequence, the last of Giotto's black-and-white depictions of the Seven Virtues and the Seven Vices. Its title was Despair. It was a plain and realistic painting of a woman about my age, her fleshy arms angled out from her sides as if she were falling through the air, fists clenched, her scarf twisted around a nail in the wall above her head and looped and knotted around her neck, her soft skin bunched up against her jaw by the pressure of her handmade noose, her head bent toward her shoulder, her eyes closed.

I closed my eyes. As quick as that, the features of her face were inscribed upon my mind, as if she had long lived in my memory, as if I knew her well, as if she were my old familiar.

I should have left it there, but I noticed a thin red streak of something curling across her hair to the temple of her head. It was not
ornamental. It was invasive, like the antenna of a huge insect or the talon of small bird of prey. With the binoculars, I could trace that red line to the faded outline of a blood-red body, the horns and hairy torso of a furry beast with cloven hooves, a disgusting little demon diving into her forehead, claiming its prey.

This marked her as another kind of sacrificial lamb.

I marked this as the first accurate portrait of a woman ever painted by a man.

The guard yelled, “
Pronto!
”

I tilted the binoculars away from the hairy red beast and aimed my gaze at the hanged woman's face. But as I tried to magnify her features, they were not there. Where I recalled the thin bluish veil of her eyelids and the smooth pink curve of her cheek, the portrait erupted into gravelly gray patches of unpainted plaster. I dropped the binoculars and took a step closer. Her entire face had been erased. From just below her brow to the dark line of her lower lip, her painted features were blistered and eroded, her skin stripped away by time. Other frescoes had been touched up or filled in during the recent restoration, but she was so far gone that no one had even attempted to revive her. She had not been seen for centuries. I turned and walked away, and at the far end of the chapel, in the darkness near the altar, I remembered every facet of her face.

A
S
I
HURRIED BACK TOWARD THE VISITOR CENTER
, E
D
waved and stood up from a green bench. He was wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up above a pair of penny loafers and a black raincoat with old-fashioned brass buckles, as if we had a date at the malt shop. He was also holding my red bag and black umbrella, which I would have forgotten to retrieve. I fished around in the pockets of my shirtdress and found the coat-check token and, idiotically, handed it to
him as he leaned in to kiss my cheeks, so we ended up with our hands locked and his wet lips pressed against my neck.

He said, “I'm so sorry.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “I haven't had a hickey in years.”

He looked at the coin I'd pressed into his hand. “Is this a tip?”

We both bent toward his raised palm to examine the evidence. Instead of the coat-check token, I'd dug up a two-euro coin. Set inside a thin band of brass was a portrait of a man with a noble Roman nose, etched in silver, a wreath of laurels on his head.

I said, “I'm guessing an emperor or a pope.”

Ed said, “It's your friend—Dante.”

“No friend of mine,” I said, “He abandons his three kids and a wife to wander around writing poetry and that makes him a national hero?”

Ed said, “He didn't want to leave. He was exiled from Florence.”

I said, “He was invited back several times after that disastrous trip to Rome.”

Ed said, “You know it wasn't that simple.”

“I know, I know,” I said. I felt Ed was scolding me for simplifying history. It wasn't the first time I'd been reprimanded for reducing Dante's heroics to a domestic drama. “He was aligned with the Guelphs, and the Ghibellines controlled Florence. I know, I know.” But even as I said this, I was sure I didn't know which side was which in that endless civil war. “Or was it the other way around? Who wanted to pledge allegiance to the pope? Wait a minute—which side became the Whites and which ones became the Blacks?” The history was all mixed up in my mind. I felt as if I'd crawled under my bed and got my head stuck in that suitcase stuffed with Mitchell's memorabilia. “Dante was an antipapist White, right? Anyway, all he had to do to get back into Florence was apologize.”

Ed said, “Maybe he didn't think he'd done anything wrong.”

I said, “Ever met a man who did?”

Ed said, “Do you mind if I ask a question about your husband?”

For a brief moment, I wanted to confess the affair with Rosalie on Mitchell's behalf. Instead, I said, “Of course not.”

Ed said, “I'm sure he loved you.”

I said, “That requires a very long answer, but it isn't really a question.” I wasn't sure if Ed was speaking in his pastoral role as comforter or preparing to propose himself as a fill-in for my absent, loving husband.

He said, “I'm sure he wanted you to be happy,” compounding my confusion.

“You can say anything to me, Ed,” I said.

To his shiny shoes, Ed said, “That's my point. That's the conundrum. I feel I can say anything to you.” And then he didn't say anything else. He stood stock still, hands hanging at his sides, like a young boy who found himself on the threshold of a declaration of something and could not figure out how to go forward or retreat. He sat down on the bench and then stood right up, as if we were going to start again from my entrance, take it from the top. “T. said your husband was writing a book about Dante,” Ed said.

I was game. “My husband had a lot of little projects on the side,” I said, trying to keep the door open for Ed to slip in whatever was really on his mind. But he walked a few paces away from me, leading us slowly forward, and I figured he wanted to leave behind whatever he hadn't said. “Mitchell wanted to call his book
Who Stole Dante?
He thought Giotto and Scrovegni were two of the thieves.”

“Which explains why Dante immortalized the Scrovegnis in the Seventh Circle of Hell? To avenge the theft?”

“Maybe,” I said. Ed seemed to be a chapter or two ahead of me. “The truth is, I haven't read every little note on every page.” Suddenly, everything I said sounded like a confession, a bid for absolution.

“He might have been on to something—something original,” Ed said. “The pope who orchestrated Dante's exile—Boniface VIII—he and his successor, Benedict IX, were deeply connected to Enrico Scrovegni through a Dominican priest, Altegrado de' Cattanei. Altegrado was given several papal assignments—in Padua and in Rome.” He paused, as if to say, Get it? One of Ed's most endearing qualities was his baseless conviction that I was his intellectual equal.

I nodded instead of admitting that I just wanted to prove Mitchell wrong.

“Altegrado probably designed the entire scheme for the chapel—which scenes were to be painted by Giotto.” Ed looked at me expectantly, but without any encouragement he sallied forth. “Most scholars identify him as the priest who appears with Enrico in the bottom of the Last Judgment fresco, hoisting the chapel up to the Virgin Mary, securing their salvation and—”

“But who was Dante mad at?” I think I broke his train of thought.

I also may have yelled. I know I had taken hold of Ed's crinkly black sleeves and tugged too hard because he sounded sort of unnerved when he said, “I don't know, I don't know,” and backed away a few steps.

I was as surprised as he was by my agitation, but instead of letting go, I tugged again and said, “Just give me your best guess.”

“I don't know, but running through them all—I mean the lifeblood of the popes, Altegrado, and Giotto—the lifeblood is Scrovegni's money.” He paused, but he seemed to recognize I was not satisfied. “I think Dante's damnation of Scrovegni must be a response to that image of Altegrado and Scrovegni—the picture of them giving the chapel to the Virgin Mary.”