The Confessions of Frances Godwin (34 page)

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll just stay here for a while. In the piazza. And then I’ll walk back. It’s not far.”

I sat on the steps of the fountain all afternoon. I did not go into the church. I did not feel that I was free from sin. But I felt free from something. I wanted to call Stella. To hear her voice. It was late afternoon, eleven or twelve o’clock in Milwaukee. By this time lots of young people had gathered around the fountain. I got out my cell phone, but instead of calling Stella, I decided to try my astronomy app in the daytime. Something I’d never done. It worked. Astonishing. I kept looking up at the gray-blue sky, but of course there were no stars. And then looking back at the little screen on the cell phone. It was October, but the little screen on the phone was full of spring constellations. Pegasus was rising over Testaccio, Virgo was setting over the Janiculum. It was disorienting. To see these constellations in the daytime. In October. I couldn’t get my mind around it.

I sat on the steps till it started to get dark and the steps started to get crowded. A young couple with a baby that needed its diaper changed sat down next to me. I kept holding up my cell phone to see the stars and then looking at the sky itself, but I couldn’t ignore the smell. Mamma and Papà were struggling with the baby’s diaper. The baby really stunk it up. People—young people who’d never changed a baby’s diaper in their lives—moved away. I stayed put. Mamma and Papà had run out of baby wipes. I offered them a packet of Kleenex from my purse.

The father disposed of the diaper.

“I have a daughter too,” I said.

“Well,” the mother said, “we should have asked you to change her.”

“I’d have done it in half the time,” I said, and we started chatting.

What was I looking at? they wanted to know.

“The stars,” I said. They took turns looking at the stars on the screen on the phone and then up into the darkening blue sky.

I listened to the sexually charged banter of the young people sitting on the steps, touching and rubbing against each other. The lashing of the fountain, the gurgling of the baby, and the buskers scattered around the piazza.

“The Big Dipper,” the man said, looking at the phone and then at the sky and then back at the phone. Only he called it
orsa maggiore.

A man lay on his back near the church steps, knees up, supporting a young woman in a short checkered skirt who was spinning something on her fingers. Another man played a small accordion while another juggled three balls, then four, then five. I thought they were together but couldn’t be sure.

We sat on the steps till it grew dark and the real stars began to appear. There was too much light pollution to see any but the brightest stars—Altair in the east, Aldebaran in the west, Deneb overhead. Rome is at about the same latitude as Galesburg, so I felt right at home. If she looked up, Stella would see the same night sky, though Milwaukee is a little farther north, and it wouldn’t be dark for another six hours. Or seven. I could never remember.

I held the baby while her mother went to one of the trattorias in the piazza to get something to eat. She brought back a tray of salami and cheese, omelets, couscous, tarts and pizzas, pasta, crostini, salads, desserts. A half-liter of wine. Real glasses. Napkins.

I thought I could taste the stars, the food was so good, and the wine; and hear them too, in the sounds of the piazza, and even smell them in the faint smell of the baby’s diaper that still lingered in the air. And hold them in my arms, like the baby, whose name was Gina. I could hear it, the music of the spheres. Well, I could hear something.

After they’d gone I was tempted to leave myself, but instead I sat on the hard steps till it was quite dark. The piazza wasn’t empty, but it was quiet. I had put my hair up in a French twist, again, but I’d done it in a hurry and I could feel it coming loose. It always came loose, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking at anything. I couldn’t focus, and when someone sat down beside me, I didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing his “Italian” suit. He was sitting beside me. The man who had once been the brightest constellation in my cosmos. His hair was still streaked with gray, his eyes set deep, his nose slightly beaked, his beard neatly trimmed.

“Paul,” I said. “Don’t scold me.”

“Why would I scold you?” he said.

“You know something, I said. “In all the years we were married we never learned to read each other perfectly clearly, never solved the mystery.”

He started to laugh and I started to cry. “Oh, Paul. I should have loved you better. Should have been more generous. There was room for all the books. Well, not all of them. And for the piano .
.
. We could have put the piano in the bay window. I didn’t see it till it was too late, and the telescope, too. We could have afforded it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time about the locks, and the dog. She’s staying with Lois.”

“It’s all right, Franny. You were always careful with money.”

“You mean cheap?”

He laughed. “Don’t you get tired of remembering?”

“That’s what Stella wanted to know.”

“You’ve got to let go, Franny. Move on. Get yourself an eight-inch telescope; and get the piano back; get it restored. You can afford it now. It’s in a Pentecostal Church in Davenport. They haven’t taken care of it. Go to Naples and Reggio Calabria with Stella and Ruthy.”

“And Tommy?”

“Of course.”

He stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“Back,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. I wanted to tell him about Stella and Ruthy, about Jimmy and about “Casta Diva.” I wanted to ask him if he’d known that the car in the garage was a Shelby Cobra; I wanted to ask him about the joke he used to tell. It had a great opening: “Confucius’s Superior Man and Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man walk into a bar .
.
.” But I couldn’t remember the rest of it.

But by this time I was sitting by myself by the fountain. The buskers were gone; the restaurants were closed. But I could still hear the music. Stars like daggers, tips touching my chest. Lingering smell of the baby’s diaper. Taste of the wine on the back of my tongue.

“Paul,” I said aloud, remembering Samantha’s advice.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

I stayed on in Rome for a week. My hotel—Hotel Antico Borgo di Trastevere—was near the river. Every night I walked across the Ponte Cesto and ate in the same trattoria, Sora Lela, on the Isola Tiberina. I didn’t call Father Viglietti. I didn’t go to the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican Museum or the Borghese Gallery. But every evening I sat in the piazza, and every morning I walked to the French church to look at the Caravaggios, and every afternoon I climbed up the stairs to the Capitoline Hill. I tried to remember the passage at the beginning of
Civilization and Its Discontents,
which Paul used to teach in the Freshman Preceptorial program at Knox,
in which Freud compares the human mind to the Eternal City. Had Freud himself stood here on the Capitoline Hill, looking down at the Forum Romanum? Did he create his elaborate analogy with his Baedeker open on his desk, or did he simply have an extraordinary memory? All the traces of the Republic had disappeared, like the traces of our early lives, but in his imagination Freud could see the different strata of the city superimposed upon each other, Renaissance churches superimposed on ancient temples at every turn, the palaces of the Caesars superimposed on the earliest settlements on the Palatine Hill, Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, where I was standing, superimposed on one of the most sacred sites of antiquity.

And in my own imagination I seemed to be looking down at the strata of my life, superimposed one on top of another: the Knox campus superimposed on the farm, the house on Prairie Street superimposed on Old Main, my classroom at the high school superimposed on the house on Prairie Street, Samantha’s apartment in via Vipacco superimposed on the apartment in via Pigna, a dozen piazzas superimposed on top of each other and on top of the public square in Galesburg, the loft apartment superimposed on all previous impositions.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me now. I probably wouldn’t be going to prison after all, wouldn’t be adding my name to the list of those whose lives had been deepened by the experience of incarceration. I had to face the fact that I was a spiritual lightweight.

I’m tempted to say that from where I was standing on the Capitoline Hill I could look down on my life and see things clearly, but I’d fooled myself too many times for that. But one thing I did see clearly. What I’d experienced in the piazza was not homesickness but joy. Even spiritual lightweights can experience joy.

16

The Music of the Spheres (October–November 2006)

I went through Customs in Chicago and was met by Lois at the airport in Peoria. Lois had tinted her hair a metallic silvery blue, and she was getting married. To Jack Banks from the funeral home. She wanted me to be her bridesmaid. I was stunned.

“Lois,” I almost said, “you’re sixty-six years old,” but I caught myself in time. Lois had surprised me, and I surprised myself. I was happy, too. “Of course,” I said, embracing my old friend, who had started to cry.

It took us an hour to get back to Galesburg. I was tired, but before settling in Camilla, who’d been staying with Lois, I drove around town, inventing everything anew: the Carl Sandburg house on East Third Street; the Fourth Street bridge, from which you can see the second longest railroad hump in the world; the trees in Standish Park; the orange-and green-striped awnings on Seminary Street; Old Main, the only remaining site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate. I pulled over on Cherry Street and looked up into the window of Paul’s old office on the third floor through the windows on the southeast corner; I drove past the house on Prairie Street, not far from the Santa Fe tracks, where we’d spent most of our lives together.

Our old house on Prairie Street had been near the tracks, and the loft apartment is near the tracks, too, the Burlington tracks on the south side of town, and that afternoon I took a nap with the bedroom windows open. The train whistles sounded like the horns of great ocean liners, heading out to sea. And the noise of the musicians setting up for the last street festival of the year made me think, for a moment, that I was still in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. But when I woke up I was home.

That night I took the dog out for a walk. We went down in the elevator. I was singing my little elevator song—“We’re going down in the elevator, elevator, elevator, we’re going down in the elevator, all the way down”—when the elevator door opened and Dr. Parker from number 5—the doctor who’d done my hernia repair—emerged. We were both slightly embarrassed. “The dog’s getting old,” I said.

“So am I,” he said.

Camilla and I walked down the alley past the barbershop, across Mulberry Street to the little park by the depot. I let Camilla loose for a while and then we walked down Simmons Street to Standish Park. And then on to Hope Cemetery.

You can see Paul’s grave from the sidewalk on Academy Street—it’s in the first row of graves, the tenth plot from the north side, next to our old friend Luther Carlson, who’d taught history—but we went inside the fence and I unhooked Camilla’s leash.

I walked to the back of the cemetery where you get an open view of the western sky. Arcturus had sunk below the Amoco station, below the horizon. I couldn’t make out the Swan or Lyra, but Deneb was still in place, and Vega, and I could hear, faintly, the music from Seminary Street.

Camilla had disappeared into the darkness. I called. She came back. I heard her before I saw her. We walked together back to Paul’s grave. I stared at my name on the stone, next to Paul’s: Frances Dziepak Godwin. No date under my name. Not dead yet. And the inscription:
Pulvis et umbra sumus
.
We are dust and shadows.
The plot was slightly smaller than most, for some reason, but there was plenty of room for a second box of ashes.

I stayed up late watching one of my favorite
Seinfeld
episodes, “The Pony Remark,” where the death of Aunt Mona interferes with Jerry’s softball game. After the game Jerry and George and Elaine speculate about the spirit of the dead woman. George doesn’t think that Manya’s spirit would be hanging out in the back room of Drexler’s Funeral Home, not if it could be traveling to distant galaxies and different dimensions discovering the secrets of the universe.

What about Jimmy’s spirit? I wondered. What about Paul’s? I thought I knew where Paul’s was, but where would Jimmy’s spirit hang out? Where had he been happy? I thought he’d been happy nailing shingles up on the roof. But not happy enough. Maybe when he thought he was going to be admitted to the Writers’ Workshop and was being lionized by Stella and her friends? No, that was a false happiness. I didn’t know enough about him, but I could imagine him as a boy, or maybe as a young man on the market. Tommy wanted him to work in the office, but Jimmy wanted to be with the men, pushing a flat truck down the broad sloping sidewalk, unloading eighty-pound crates of cantaloupe and hundred-pound sacks of potatoes. That was the best I could do, and it was pretty good, actually. A physical life. Lifting, pushing, pulling, feeling your strength, the slight ache in your legs, going to work at four o’clock in the morning, looking forward to a beer at the end of the day, or a game of cricket on one of the pitches down by the lake. I could picture Jimmy holding a cricket bat, but I couldn’t imagine cricket itself, had no idea what a wicket was or what a bowler did or how Jimmy could have learned this incomprehensible game or why there were cricket pitches in Milwaukee in the first place.