The Confessions of Frances Godwin (20 page)

I laughed. “Not me. After Father Viglietti
hears confessions.”

“He gave a good sermon last Sunday.” she said.

“You don’t hear many good sermons these days,” I said.

“How do
you
know?” she laughed.

“Just guessing.”

“He wears trifocals,” Stella said. “They make his eyes jump around.”

Pause.

“You don’t have to believe, you know,” Stella said.

“Do you believe?” I asked. Nervous, as if we were about to have a sex talk, or about to enter a sacred space.

“Yes and no,” she said. “It’s just that there’s something inside me that’s got to come out, take on some kind of form, if you know what I mean. So you’re not at the mercy of your own feelings all the time. Like Christmas and Thanksgiving, only all year. Like this week. The feast of John the Baptist’s coming up. He’s the only saint whose birthday is observed by the Church. He didn’t take the name of his father. An angel gave him his name.”

I didn’t know what to make of this.

“He’s like the Virgin Mary. Free from sin. Cleansed in the womb.”

“Do you believe that?”

She laughed. “No, Ma, I don’t
believe
that. But it’s a good story. It names something, gives it a shape, externalizes it.”

Awkward. But I was glad that she was opening up. Disclosing. Declaring herself. A door had been opened, and Stella wanted to walk through it.

“Is he homophobic?”

“Father Viglietti? Officially or unofficially?”

“Unofficially.”

“No. You’re not going to find a priest, any man, who’s nicer than Father Viglietti. No, I don’t mean ‘nicer,’ I mean deeply decent and understanding. He’s not going to trouble the universe about . . . about his own problems. But don’t you think you might find a church that’s a little less . . . a little more open to . . .”

“Ma, things are changing.”

“That’s not what I heard. Pope John Paul’s pretty hard-nosed.”

“It’s not going to happen all at once,” Stella said. “Maybe you could talk to him.”

“The Pope?”

“No, Father Viglietti.”

“Me? What do you want me to say?”

“I’d like some kind of ceremony for the fetus. I called the hospital. Nothing. There aren’t any remains. Nothing. It all went down the toilet. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. Wouldn’t have known I had a miscarriage if the doctor hadn’t told me.”

“I can talk to him. I don’t know if there’s a miscarriage ritual.”

“Ma, there’s a ritual for everything.”

“I’ll call him right now. But first let me ask you something.” I laid it on the line. About Stella’s string of lovers. “You’ve got to stop saying ‘yes’ to everything that comes around the corner. Look at Howard Banks, look at the writer you went to New York with, look at . . . Jimmy . . .” I was using the kind of voice you use when you’re telling someone something for their own good. I didn’t care for the tone, but it was what came out of my mouth.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she said.

“I’m your mother,” I said. “It’s something mothers have to say.”

“But isn’t she lovely,” Stella said. “The first time I saw her I wanted to take her home with me. I never know who I am around her. She’s unpredictable. I never know how she’s going to respond to me, so I don’t know how I’m going to respond to her. It’s exciting. I give thanks for her every day. It’s like coming out of a dark tunnel into the light.”

“She seems pretty stable to me, down to earth.”

“And I love her for that, too. I want all of her, everything she’s got to give. Even the way she eats her eggs in the morning. And she wants all of me.”

“And Tommy’s never, uh, said anything?”

“Jesus, Ma. You’re a piece of work. His sister’s a Saffica.”

“Saffron?”

“No,” she laughed. “Saffica as in Sappho.”

“Oh,” I said, and allowed myself to slip into her happiness without asking any more questions. “Let’s put this moment in italics,” I said, thinking the conversation was over. Thinking that we’d said enough.

Ruthy came back on Friday night and on Saturday morning the three of us walked over to Saint Clement’s for a little ceremony.

Father Viglietti was waiting for us in the side chapel. We sat on folding chairs that had been set up in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Our help is in the name of the Lord,” Father Viglietti said, and Stella and Ruthy crossed themselves. I felt an involuntary twitch in my arm. Bodily memory.

“Who made heaven and earth,” they said. I hadn’t been looking at the printed sheet Father Viglietti had prepared for us. I glanced over my shoulder at the closet-confessionals at the back of the nave, and then back at the program: Romans 8:26–31—If God is for us, who can be against us?

Father Viglietti concluded with a blessing: “Lord, God of all creation, we bless and thank you for your tender care. Receive this life you created in love, and comfort your faithful people in their time of loss with the assurance of your unfailing mercy.

“We ask this through Christ our Lord.”

“Amen.“

Father Viglietti sprinkled Stella with holy water.

“May God be with you in your sorrow, and give you light and peace.”

“Amen.”

What had just happened, I wondered? What had been externalized, put into words, given a habitation and a name?

Father Viglietti came for supper. Stella peeled four giant artichokes, the way Paul had taught her. Bending the leaves back and snapping them off, trimming off the green outer layer, scooping out the choke, slicing them into quarter-inch wedges that she sautéed in olive oil and garlic, then a splash of balsamic vinegar, then white wine. She and Ruthy and Father Viglietti talked all the time, and it was a pleasure for me to see the girls so animated, so focused on Father Viglietti. A handsome man. And I remembered Paul flirting with the nun in Rome, Sister Teresa. The one who taught Latin at a
liceo
in Florence. I see now that he did it to make me jealous, and it worked.

Father Viglietti never defended the Church. But he never apologized, either. He just listened.

“It’s the beginning of a journey,” Stella said.

“For you or for the Church?” I said.

“Both. But I think we’ve got a head start on the Church.”

Father Viglietti asked Stella if she’d talked to Pope John Paul lately.

“No,” she said, “and he’s Polish.”

“Do you speak Polish?’

“Just a few words that I picked up by accident. My grandparents spoke Polish to each other, but I never learned. If I knew Polish I
could
talk to the pope.”

“I think his English is pretty good.”

I was happy to see them so engaged, to listen to them talk about an upcoming convention in Boston, about a meeting between a group called Dignity and Cardinal John O’Connor in New York, about a poll conducted by the
National Catholic Reporter,
in 1996, that revealed that most U.S. Roman Catholics support full rights for homosexuals in the Church, including the right to marry. About a proposed rewording of the catechism.

“We’re coming on strong,” Ruthy said.

“Come the revolution,” Stella said, “and I’m the commissar.”

Father Viglietti laughed.

I thought once again of my early experiments with Lois while we were waiting for life to begin. Hard to imagine now. Hard to remember. These memories were like shadows. Lois and I never spoke of them, never brought them into the light. When we died, they would disappear with us. In those days you couldn’t have a man in your room. I’d pushed these experiments out of my imagination, out of my working memory. But now they came popping into mind, like distant but familiar stars as you start to get your night vision.

On Sunday morning, when Stella and Ruthy returned from mass, Stella and I and Camilla walked back to the cemetery for some mother-daughter bonding. Once again I felt I was intruding on a sacred space. Paul’s grave. Stella broke down. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t terrible, and I suppose it was what I’d been waiting for, just being near her and knowing that she was going to be okay.

“It’s just you and me, Ma,” she said. “Right now, I mean.” We’d been alone together for several days, but there were still things that had to be said.

“And the dog.”

“You should have called her Lesbia. That was Catullus’s girlfriend, wasn’t it?” I stooped to pet Camilla and unfasten her leash. She ran off to stretch her legs.

“It’s good to have you home,” I said. “We can repaint your room, if you’d like, clean out the closet.”

“I’m not staying, I can’t stay, Ma.”

“You’re going with Ruthy?”

She nodded.

“That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I was hoping . . . I was hoping you could stay for a while. Maybe till the first anniversary of your dad’s death. In September. Lois says that the spirit of the dead person sometimes comes back on the anniversary of his death. Wouldn’t you want to be here for that?”

“Ma, you can’t believe that. Lois? That’s crazy, Ma. I’m surprised at you.”

“You never know.”

“Yes you do. You know that’s nonsense. Consider the source.”

I nodded.

“I’m thirty-three years old, Ma. I can’t come back home.”

“You could if you wanted to,” I said, but I knew she was right. The only thing worse than having her leave would be having her stay.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take it easy for a while, then maybe waitress at the truck stop for a while. Ruthy’s the manager, you know. She’s got a business degree from the Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Till Ruthy gets her commercial driver’s license. Then we’ll start driving as a team. Maybe for Tommy. We’ll be okay.”

I knew better than to ask if she was writing any poetry. But I blurted out the last lines of the poem on the refrigerator. “‘I didn’t know where he was going, but I was going to find out.’ You find out?”

She laughed. “It’s not where he thought he was ‘going,’” she said, and then she said, “Ma, I’m sorry for everything.” She started to go on, but I interrupted her.

“You don’t need to explain,” I said.

“That’s as close as you’re going to get to an apology,” she said. “I’m ashamed, and I’m ashamed of being ashamed, and there’s nothing I can do about it, nothing you can do about it. I don’t know how you can stand having me around.” She squeezed her eyes closed and I realized she was on the edge of tears.

“You’re my daughter, Stella. I love you. But I’m glad you’re sorry,” I said, “because now I can stop worrying about you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me, Ma,” she said. “Not any more. It’s my turn to worry about you!”

“Me?”

“What are you going to do with yourself?”

“I’m going to think about all the good times, all the happy times. All the stories. All the Christmases, all the Thanksgivings, all the Halloween costumes. They’re in a box in the garage. The photos, I mean. Remember when you came to Verona and went dancing with the landlady’s son, and we ate horse in the Caffè Romeo e Giulietta, and the landlady’s brother gave you that stone-age flint knife he made himself, and the way he started a fire with chips he shaved off a prehistoric petrified mushroom? And we walked all the way to Porta San Zeno and found the sycamore trees from the first scene in
Romeo and Juliet
?
I still have a pile of offprints of the article Pa wrote about them, proving that Shakespeare actually went to Italy, but no one paid any attention to it. You’d think it would have made a big splash. Pa was disappointed, but it doesn’t matter now, does it. I’d like to go back some time. Would you like to come?”

“Don’t you get tired of remembering?”

“Never,” I said.

Stella and Ruthy left in the late afternoon, going back to Ottawa in Ruthy’s pickup. There were so many partings to remember: Stella going off to Knox, which was only half a mile away; Stella driving off to Iowa City in the VW bug that we bought for her so she could live out in the country, with a group of poets. Then taking off for New York with the fiction writer, without telling us. Driving off with Jimmy in Paul’s car.

Maybe I
was
tired of remembering, but I didn’t know what else to do.

10

Colloquia (July–October 1997)

Tommy called. More than once. I put him off. What could I do? I saw him in Milwaukee when I was helping Stella and Ruthy move into their new apartment. We cleaned and painted and bought some furniture at Goodwill. They both had commercial driver’s licenses now and were going to be driving for Tommy. It was a two-bedroom apartment on Farwell with a decent kitchen. Farwell runs parallel to Prospect, but has a very different feel, a big city–small city feel. Lined with shops and three-story walkups.