The Confessions of Frances Godwin (23 page)

“Hurry up. This is your last chance.”

“I want to hear them, the oscillations. The music of the spheres.”

“All right.”

God made a sound. Not too loud, not too soft. Not a sound that’s easy to describe, a sort of blatting sound, but musical, too. Somewhere between a major and a minor third, shifting from one to the other.

“That’s it?”

“It’s like a computer simulation. Otherwise you couldn’t hear a thing.”

Someone came out of the confessional on the right and the little girl, always last in line, disappeared into the one on the left.

“It’s not too late.”

“No way. Jimmy was a miserable piece of shit.”

“So are most people. That doesn’t mean you can just wipe them out.”

“What about the flood?”

“The flood. If I’d known how much flak I’d get about the flood . . . Funny, because I never
used
to get flak about the flood.”

“Make that sound again.”

God obliged. I lost track of time. Father Viglietti was shaking my shoulder. “I’m starting to worry about you, Frances. You were making a funny noise, and I think you were talking to yourself. Are you all right?”

“
Sum excellens
, Father.”
Just fine.

“
Esne parata bibere
?” Ready for a drink?

“
Certe
.” Of course.

“
Ego quoque
,”
he said.

Our little ritual.

That summer—the summer of 1997—God and I covered a lot of ground: the categorical imperative, natural law, existentialism, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, the expanding universe, the curvature of space. I was especially interested in the curvature of space because I simply couldn’t get my mind around it. But it turns out that space is not curved after all, or if it’s curved, the curvature is only local.

“The human mind,” God said, “can imagine almost everything. It can imagine—by analogy, of course—temperatures of millions of degrees, and billions of light years. But there are two things it can’t imagine: space-time curvature and quantum mechanisms. All the images are misleading. Real scientific understanding is based on mathematics. You can’t visualize these things. But fortunately you don’t have to worry about either one. Newtonian physics will do just fine. Imagine,” he went on, “that you’re standing on a flat plane, or plain, either one, in a dense forest. You walk out one hundred meters into the forest and then you walk in a circle around your starting point and count the trees. That will give you your circumference, right?” He spoke as if I’d disputed the truth of 2
π
r.

“Two pi r,” I said. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Now walk out another hundred meters and make another circle. Counting the trees.”

“Okay.”

“You should have twice as many trees in your circle, right?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t have to guess. The radius is twice as long, so the circumference will be twice as long.
If
you’re standing on a flat surface. That’s how you
know
you’re standing on a flat surface. If you’re standing on a curved surface—the top of a hill, or in the bottom of a valley—the circumference of the second circle will be more than twice the length of the circumference of the first circle. Now you can do the same thing with the stars. Pick a point, any point. Go out a hundred million light years, make a circle on an imaginary plane, and count the stars in your circle. Do it again, two hundred million light years. Make a circle and count the stars. If you’ve got twice as many stars in your second circle as in the first, then you know that space is flat.”

“Don’t you have to assume that the stars are equally spaced?”

“You don’t have to assume it. I’m telling you they
are
equally spaced.”

To tell you the truth, I found this information very satisfying. I never liked the idea that space, or space-time, was curved. But God always brought the
colloquium
back to Jimmy, back to natural law and human nature, Aristotle’s conception of nature, the Stoic elaboration of natural law theory, the Thomistic synthesis, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, the problems inherent in cultural relativism.

“You’ve read Cicero’s
De Officiis
,” he said.

“Of course.”

“His son was off in Athens with a huge allowance, but he was drinking and carousing instead of studying. Cicero was trying to put him on the right track. That’s what I’m trying to do with you. What’s morally wrong can never be expedient. When the Republic needed Cicero to come back from exile, he came back. He condemned Marc Antony, right? And Antony had him killed. Whose side are you on, Cicero’s or Antony’s? I always thought you were a Stoic.”

“The Stoics didn’t go to confession.”

“No? What about Seneca and Cicero? They reviewed their faults systematically in the presence of a respected philosopher. Now get in line,” he said. “We’re running out of time. I’m running out of patience.”

I was starting to weaken. I’d always admired Cicero. The founding fathers had all admired Cicero. But why didn’t he accept Caesar’s offer of a job? He might have made a difference.

“Get in line,” God said.

“The little girl isn’t here today,” I said. “Maybe she’s run out of sins.”

“Nobody runs out of sins,” God said. “She’s on vacation with her family. Now get in line.”

But there was no line, and Father Viglietti was coming out of the center closet. I was sure he was as thirsty as I was.

God and I remained on more or less friendly terms till the end of the summer, and God even offered practical advice—before doing what tyrants always do, that is, resorting to threats.

Regarding
The Roman Republic,
for example. “Stick to the first scenario, the Punic Wars, so that it won’t take ten hours. And don’t try it with just you and Father Viglietti. You need at least four people, five or six is better . . .”

And my translation of Catullus: “Keep working on it. Work on it every day. Do the marriage poems first; get them out of the way. Save the epigrams for last. Before you know it you’ll be done. Don’t waste your time sending it to any of the big publishing houses; go to the small presses, that’s where the action is anyway. Send it to Hausmann Books in Brooklyn, they’ve got an editor who knows her Latin. On the phone she sounds like a young girl, but actually she’s about your age. They won’t send you on a book tour, and they won’t offer you much money, but they’ll do a nice job.”

“Will you write a blurb for me?”

He laughed. “And if you want to see 3C 273 you’re going to need a bigger telescope. At least an eight-inch. A ten-inch would be better, but it would be too heavy to lug around. The eight-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain is probably a little better than the Meade, but I’d recommend the Meade because the manual is much easier to understand. With the built-in computer and the GPS all you have to do is tell it what you want to see and it will point right at it.”

He warned me about a coming recession and advised me to get out of the market and buy gold before the dot.com bubble burst. “You’ve got fifty thousand dollars left from the sale of the house. Tell your broker at A. G. Edwards to put it in gold.”

He told me to warn the mayor that Maytag, Galesburg’s largest employer, was going to pull out. Despite all the promises.

“Why don’t
you
warn him?” I asked.

“I have.”

“Do you give everybody these warnings?”

“Everybody. In one way or another.”

“Bill Clinton too?”

“I told him to keep it in his pants.”

“He didn’t listen.”

“Nobody listens.”

“Any more advice for me?”

“If you sold that car in the garage you could buy back your old piano. And you could afford a good telescope.”

I didn’t want to deal with the car. “My neighbor Lois says that the dead return on the anniversary of their death to say good-bye.”

“She picked up that nugget at the funeral home,” God said. “It happens, though. Not often, but it happens.”

“Paul?”

“If I were you I’d wait for him in Verona, not Galesburg. That way you could go to the Biblioteca Capitolare and have a look at the Catullus codex. It won’t be that useful. It’s already corrupt. But it would be quite a coup to find it.”

“I can’t go to Verona in October,” I said, “I have to teach.”

“You
could
go,” he said. “Take some time off. They can find a substitute. Father Viglietti would take your classes if you asked him.”

“I couldn’t do that. He’s already doing an extra section of Latin 3. And he’s got too much to do. The new curate doesn’t speak English. Or Latin. He’s got the Fall Fest to prepare for .
.
.”

“You can shoot someone in cold blood, but you can’t ask for some time off?”

“Please.”

“Father Viglietti’s not going to be around forever, you know. The Clementines are starting to flex their muscles in Rome. They’ll be looking for men like Father Viglietti.”

“I guess that would be a good move for him,” I said.

“He likes it here,” God said. “He doesn’t have the stomach for Vatican politics.”

“Should I warn him?”

“He’s aware of the danger,” God said. “But Frankeska, time is running out. You need to get things sorted out before school starts.”

“If I confessed to Father Viglietti,” I said, “wouldn’t he have to tell me to go to the police?”

“Of course he would.”

“Then I couldn’t go to Verona, could I? And I wouldn’t be able to teach in the fall, either.”

“Frankeska,” he said, “you still think that because you’ve fooled the police you can fool me?”

“Is that a threat?”

“More of a warning.”

“You’re going to tip off the police?”

“I might. I might tell them where to find the gun.”

“The police returned my gun. It’s in the drawer of the little table by my bed.”

“Frankeska, don’t play games with me. The
other
gun. The one you used to shoot Jimmy.”

“That gun is at the bottom of the Mississippi River. Probably halfway to New Orleans by now.”

“I know exactly where it is. And it’s not halfway to anywhere. The long barrel makes that gun fairly heavy; it sank right into the sediment. It’s right where you dropped it. It might move downstream in a big flood. But not down to New Orleans. There will be a high crest in 2002. The gun will stay put till then. So what’s it going to be?”

I didn’t say anything. Nothing at all. Just closed my eyes and waited in silence for Father Viglietti.

“
Quomodo agis
?”
I said when I heard him finally emerge from the confessional and heard his footsteps in the aisle. How you doing?

“
Paratus bibere
,” he replied. Ready for a drink.

“
Me quoque
,” I said. Me too.

Three days later I got a call from Detective Landstreet. “If we were to drag the river right below the Centennial Bridge, what would we find?”

“I have no idea.”

“If I were to come to your house and ask to see your .38 again, could you put your hands on it?”

“Still in the drawer of the table by my bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Look, Detective Landstreet, you already checked the gun. You still can’t believe in coincidences?”

“No, I can’t. You see, we got an anonymous phone call telling us to dredge the river west of the bridge. It would be a bit of an investment. Divers, a boat, a lot of time, a lot of things to consider. So I just want to make sure we can put our hands on your .38 again if we need to.”

“You took my gun before. You kept it for two weeks. What do you think could have happened to it?”

“Would you please check?”

“You want me to look in the bedside table?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

I got the gun. Bedside table drawer. “It’s here,” I said. “You want me to hold it up to the phone?”

“That won’t be necessary. Just read me the serial number again.”

I read the serial number. “Go ahead and dredge. You may find a gun, but you won’t find my gun.”

What was he doing? What was he thinking? He’d already seen my gun. He knew it couldn’t possibly be at the bottom of the Mississippi. I suppose he was simply reminding me that I was still in the frame.

I was annoyed with God. I didn’t buy gold, but I tracked down my former student, Alan Teitlebaum, at Princeton, and told him to take the offer from Carnegie-Mellon.

“Mrs. Godwin,” he said, “Why would I do that? I just got married. And how did you know about the offer anyway?”