The Confessions of Frances Godwin (21 page)

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Tommy said. We were in the kitchen. This was a conversation I didn’t want to have.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said. “I’m ashamed.”

“You
should
be ashamed,” he said. “First you put me at ease, and now you won’t give me the time of day. And for no reason. Well, I suppose you had your reasons. But after
Norma,
I thought . . . And not one word of explanation. That’s what I don’t understand. Not one word! What were you thinking?”

“If things had been different .
.
.”

“You mean Jimmy being killed?”

I nodded.

“And the baby,” he said. “Maybe if Stella’d had the baby everything would have turned out okay. Between her and Jimmy, I mean.”

“It was a terrible thing.”

“I’m glad she found somebody else,” he said.

“You’re not bothered?”

“My sister .
.
.” He shook his head. “
Per niente
.”

“That’s not what you were about to say.”

“I don’t know what I was about to say. I know it was a terrible thing, but
I
didn’t push Stella out of the truck, Frances. That’s what I don’t understand. You act like
I
pushed her. It don’t make sense.
Non fa senso.
”

I was too embarrassed to say anything.

“
Mi dica
,”
he said. “Talk to me, Frances. Tell me what went wrong. You don’t know how many times I’ve been over it in my own mind.
Norma.
Dinner at Spiaggia. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get reservations. They were harder to get than the tickets for
Norma.
Didn’t we have a good time? Didn’t June Anderson do a wonderful job? You know, the critics were a little bit lukewarm about the first performance, but that was at the beginning of February, and it was her first
Norma.
By the end of the season she had it down perfectly. Well, you were there. You heard her. And now she’ll be doing it everywhere. All over the world. She’s put her mark on it.”

“I heard her, Tommy. It was beautiful. I got out Paul’s old Scribner Music Library and played through ‘Casta Diva’ on the piano. And I listened to it on a CD. Joan Sutherland. I’ll never forget it.”

“Let me be blunt, Frances. Some things a person doesn’t like to say or hear out loud. But I got to say it anyway. Why humiliate me? After we’re together in the Palmer House with all those fancy pillows on the bed. Two old people, but pretty good. Maybe not for you. What do I know? Who knows anything about women? And then? That night after Jimmy was dead. After the vigil. You could have stayed with me that night. Maybe I was out of line, but you saw how much I needed you to hold me, and you walked away.”

“I’m sorry, Tommy.”

“Like I said, you don’t owe me anything. Except maybe one thing: an explanation. You decided you don’t like me? I can accept. You don’t enjoy being in my company? I can accept. You got another man? I can accept. You don’t want to come to Italy with me and your daughter and her friend? That’s harder, but I can accept. But you won’t explain yourself, you won’t talk to me. That I can’t accept. Most people live in fear, their lives are shaped by fear—fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of dying, fear of living. What are you afraid of, Frances?”

“I can’t explain, Tommy, because I don’t understand myself.” Or maybe I just didn’t want to explain. Maybe I just didn’t want to know what would happen if I confessed, told him I’d killed Jimmy.

Sitting in a pew at Saint Clement’s, on the corner of Prairie and South, I was contemplating a new board game—
The Roman Republic—
that I thought might be useful in the oversubscribed Roman Civ. class that Father Viglietti and I were going to team teach in the fall. It was Saturday afternoon. I was waiting for Father Viglietti, who was hearing confessions. The line was long. Well, longish. Longer than usual. But not as long as when I was a kid. I was a senior in high school when I made my last confession at Saint Clement’s. Pa would bring me in, and Ma. Sometimes they’d go to confession too. What could they have had to confess, I wondered at the time. I still wonder about people’s sins. Some sinners were sitting in pews or kneeling; others had lined up in the center aisle. They all looked so ordinary you had to wonder. A couple of men in overalls, one with purplish lips, one with a blond toupee. A large woman in a cotton housedress. A mother and father team with two sullen teenage sons, a farm family (I guessed). A handful of students from the college. A little girl on her own in a yellow jumper, her short blonde hair in a pixie cut. Surely no great sins here waiting to be confessed. No interesting sins. I couldn’t imagine that God had any special plans in mind for this lot.

I looked back at
The Roman Republic.
It was a pretty hefty box, big enough to hold three or four
Monopoly
games. I hadn’t opened it yet. On the cover: a picture of a Roman general in a purple and gold toga, striding forward wearing the sort of military helmet the president wears in the Doonesbury cartoons on my bulletin board. I was anxious to try it out, anxious to get back into the classroom after the long summer.

I checked the line. It wasn’t moving. Someone was taking a long time in the confessional, which was nothing fancy, just a closet in the back of the nave. Three closets. The center one for the priest, the side ones for the confessants. But I was startled, because this time—maybe it was that the light had shifted slightly—all the people seemed vitally alive, full of life, the purple lips shining like garnets, the blond toupee like a flash of sunlight, the patterns on the woman’s housedress like stars in the sky, the teenage boys like Greek
kouroi,
the college students like wandering mendicants in their slashed jeans and jagged shirts. And I was thinking that they’d have some interesting stories to tell, that God could have some fun with them.

I was trying to loosen the top of the box that held
The Roman Republic,
which was more than three inches deep, when I heard a voice behind me. Curious. Neither male nor female: “
Vidi quod feceris, et scio quis sis
.” I saw what you did and I know who you are.

I started to turn.

“
Et noli versari
,” the voice said. “
Nihil non videbis
.” Don’t turn around, you won’t see anything at all.

I realized that the voice was speaking in Latin. I thought it must be Father Viglietti, the only other person in town, as far as I knew, who spoke Latin. We’d both taken Father Adrian’s spoken Latin course in Rome, though not at the same time, and we always spoke Latin when we got together on Saturday afternoons, and in front of the students, who seemed to think it was some kind of parlor trick.

I turned around, but I didn’t see anything.

Whoever it was was using the classical pronunciation, not the ecclesiastical pronunciation we learned in Rome, which is closer to Italian—“she-o” rather than “skio.”

“
Sta in acie
,” the voice said.
Get in line.

“I’ve no intention of getting in line” I said, in Latin.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for Father Viglietti. We’re going for a drink. And to talk about
The Roman Republic.
It’s a board game. I thought we could use it in our Roman Civ. class.”

“Too complicated,” the voice said. “Seventy-five percent of the rules don’t really apply to anything, and the board itself doesn’t serve much purpose, and Roman numerals on the coins .
.
. Come on. Cute, but they make it hard to add and subtract.”

“I like Roman numerals,” I said.

“Turn the game over to the students. They’ll figure it out.” I looked down at the box in my lap. “He’s a whiskey priest, you know. Potentially. You shouldn’t encourage him.”

“Father Viglietti?”

“Yes.”

“He’s one of my oldest friends.”

“Frankeska, the police may have forgotten what you did, but I haven’t. I saw what you did.”

“And you know who I am.”

“Exactly.”

“And I think I know who you are.”

“Of course you do.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do than hang around Saint Clement’s on a Saturday afternoon?”

“I have a lot of things to do. Do you have any idea how many galaxies there are, just in the visible universe?”

“No idea.”

“Over one hundred twenty-five billion.”

“And I suppose you have to look after each one?”

“And that’s only on this side of the visual horizon. You know, the universe is expanding so fast that the light from the oldest galaxies can’t travel fast enough to reach Earth. So you’ll never see them.”

“But
you
can see them?”

“Yes, I can see them,”

“
Probe tibi
,”
I said. Bully for you.
“And you have to keep them all running?”

“It’s like trying to regulate a piano and keep it in tune, keeping the four basic forces constant, for example.”

“I thought they just ran by themselves.”

“Yes and no. It’s like concert pitch. It’s varied over the years, you know, and it varies from one ensemble to another. But not too much. If the strong nuclear force were two percent stronger, for example, then hydrogen would fuse into diprotons instead of deuterium and helium. The physics of matter would be radically different. You’d have a preponderance of heavy elements; you’d run out of carbon. You’d have to revise the Periodic Table. Or rather,
I
would. Life as
you
know it would be impossible.”

“What if it were one percent stronger? Or maybe just a teeny-tiny bit stronger?”

“Well, there are always some tolerances, but in this case they’re very narrow.”

“What about gravity?”

“Gravity’s a little different. Gravity’s very weak, you know. Ten to the minus thirty-eighth times that of the strong force. When you pick up that fancy fountain pen that you carry around, you overcome the gravitational force of the entire Earth with no trouble. You can fool around a bit with gravity.”

“You mean we could get lighter or heavier?”

“Not so as you’d notice. But I do like to let things slide sometimes, just a little, to keep the physicists on their toes. That’s why they keep getting different results for the Big G. It’s a moving target.”

“The Big G?”

“The gravitational constant.”

“Astronomy One-o-one is about as far as I got,” I said. “And Lucretius.”

“Now there was an interesting chap. Everything explained in terms of natural phenomena. No room for intentionality. Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

“I read Lucretius to Paul when he was dying.”

“It’s really marvelous, isn’t it. And these astronomer chaps are quite clever. I have to get up early to keep a step ahead of them. You couldn’t have made it up.
You
couldn’t, I mean.”
Made what up?
I wanted to ask, but God kept on talking: “Look, there’s only one person left in line. You haven’t got much time.”

I looked. It was the little girl in the summer frock. “She doesn’t even look like she’s twelve. Not even old enough to sin. What kind of sins could she have to confess?”

“Don’t you remember when you were that age?”

“Forget it.”

“Go, go,” he said, “before it’s too late. The little girl’s the last one. She’s going in now.”

The little girl entered the confessional. But I didn’t get in line. I looked down at
The Roman Republic.
There were no women in the picture except a statue in the lower left corner of a woman carrying a small amphora in her right hand and holding out a bowl with her left.

“That little girl,” I said, “always takes her time. What’s she got to confess?”

“You don’t want me blabbing
your
secrets,” he said, “so I don’t suppose she wants me blabbing hers.”

“What secrets?”

“You had an affair in Rome, didn’t you? With an Italian. Guido Bevilaqua.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m putting it as a question. More polite.”

”Yes, but that was ages ago. I thought you were talking about Jimmy.”

“I am talking about Jimmy. Why do you think I’m here? You’ve got a lot to answer for. You should go to confession.”

“You too!
You’ve
got a lot to answer for.
You’re
the one who should be going to confession.”

“You need to worry about yourself, not about me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“It will eat away at you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said
.