The Confessions of Frances Godwin (5 page)

I wanted to touch Paul, to comfort him. He had not wanted to accept the end of the affair, but now it was over. We inhabited two different worlds. We were not Romeo and Juliet but Dido and Aeneas. I was Aeneas—destined to move on—and he was Dido, destined to remain behind.

I took Sister Teresa by the hand, which made it difficult to finish my little cup of gelato, but it didn’t matter. I’d been putting a lot of effort into my new life. I no longer wanted all the beautiful outfits I saw in the shop windows. I was imagining a future devoted to good works. But I was very vague about this. I was letting one thing happen at a time. I was letting myself be led.

My own intention, which I kept secret, even from Sister Teresa, was to fast regularly, and to help some of the other students who were having difficulty in the class, and not to speak to Paul unless he spoke first. He was there the next day, and the next, feeding sparrows, eating more oranges.

But it annoyed me to think of him sitting there every day, so smug. What was he trying to prove? I finally asked Sister Teresa to wait by the ice cream truck while I spoke to someone who, I said, might be an old teacher. “If you see me raise my hand,” I said, “please join us right away.
Statim
? Okay?”

And so I sat down next to Paul. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

“As long as it takes.”

“I thought we decided .
.
.” I said, not sure exactly what we had decided, if anything, and then I asked: “How did you get here?”

“With love’s light wings,” he said, “did I o’er-perch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out.”

“Paul,” I said, “stop right now. We’re not going to play Romeo and Juliet again. Once was enough. Besides, everything has changed.”

“I had to see you, that’s all. I’ll go if you want me to.”

“You know that’s not what I
want
. Not like that.”

“What
do
you want?”

Paul was wearing his Italian suit. I never was impressed by men’s suits, but this one was beautiful, light brown, linen, striped, and I knew that he wore it only on special occasions.

“I’m not going to apologize,” he said, “if that’s what you want. For being here, I mean.” He paused. I didn’t say anything. “You loved me once.”

I didn’t recognize the quotation, but I pretended I did. “Paul, I’m not going to talk to you if you talk in quotations.”

“It’s not a quotation. It’s just something I said.”

“You’re the one,” I reminded him, “who warned
me
not to fall in love.”

“Ah, Frances,” he said. “that love, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof.”

I answered him with a quotation of my own: “God’s will is our peace,” I said, and I was immediately sorry I’d said it. What was I talking about?

“
La sua voluntade è nostra pace
,” Paul said.
His will is our peace.

I raised my arm, and Sister Teresa joined us immediately.

“
Piacere
,”
she said to Paul,
a pleasure.
And without even being introduced they began to speak in Italian. I knew that Paul knew Italian, but I hadn’t realized he was fluent. At least he sounded fluent. He said something that I didn’t understand, and Sister Teresa laughed. Maybe she needed a break from speaking Latin.

“
Nonne Latine loquamur
?” I said stiffly.
Shouldn’t we be speaking Latin?

Sister Teresa laughed again. “But you were speaking in English,” she said in Italian.

The sun was high in the eastern sky, over the prison. It was a beautiful day, but all the people looked sad to me—the man in a wheelchair whom we saw every day, the couples strolling hand in hand. You could hear the noise of the ice cream vendors over the bawling of portable radios. I felt almost ashamed of my own inner strength, my own vision. I was like a person in robust health in a group of invalids, though I was a little annoyed that Paul and Sister Teresa spoke too fast for me to keep up. Sister Teresa was saying something about riding on a donkey when she was a child in County Cork, and Paul was explaining that his suit actually came from Ireland. He showed her the label on the inside of the jacket. I looked too
:
BRIAN
& BRADY
.

Sister Teresa told Paul about Father Adrian and the spoken Latin course, and then they were talking about me. Sister Teresa reached over and touched me. She said that I was a shining example for all the students, a real angel.

Paul said that I’d been a shining example to the students in his Shakespeare classes, too. He was in Rome, he said, because he was sure that Shakespeare had spent some time in Italy. Too many descriptions in the plays matched up with actual sites in Italy.

“Shouldn’t you be in Verona?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he said. “In the very first scene of
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare mentions a grove of sycamore trees ‘that westward rooteth from this city side’ that’s not mentioned in any of his sources. If I could find that grove . . . but there are other things, too, and I wanted to start in Rome.”

In the late afternoon, after the lessons, the three of us went to a puppet show in the park, ostensibly a show for children but with intrusive erotic overtones for the adults—Pulcinella’s huge nose, for example, and the wooden spoon that he uses to beat everyone, or Columbina’s cleavage and perky stance, and all the erotic byplay, which I had trouble following, though Paul and Sister Teresa laughed and laughed. The puppet theater was a little square shack about the size of an outhouse with a sign in front admonishing children not to throw stones at the puppets.

That night we walked to Campo de’ Fiori for more deep-fried artichokes at Al Pompiere. Paul said the dish was called
carciofi alla Giudia
,
artichokes alla Judaea.
We were all native English speakers, but we conversed in Italian. I was ready to brain Paul for paying so much attention to Sister Teresa, but
I drank too much wine and invited him to come to seven-o’clock mass with us in the morning at Santa Maria in Trastevere. I didn’t know if I wanted to stop him in his tracks or if I wanted him to taste what I had tasted.

That night I lay on my back, opening myself up, praying for strength, listening for instructions, trying to imagine my way back to a time before we had complicated everything. If there’d ever been such a time.

I did not expect the spiritual life to be smooth sailing. Not at all. I welcomed Paul’s presence as a challenge. Paul was just the sort of problem you’d expect to crop up.

At mass he knelt between us, and I told him to get his butt off the pew and kneel up straight. Which he did.

After mass Sister Teresa pleaded a cold, brought on by a dreaded
colpa d’aria,
a
blow of air
, a draft. Paul and I spent the day saying good-bye. He did not make a fuss, did not attempt to talk me into, or out of, anything. I could not detect any irony in his questions, nor sarcasm in his comments about the church. No comments about Jesus being a great moral teacher, or being the son of God in the sense that we’re all children of God. In short, he didn’t make fun of me. He took me seriously. He wished me well. He applauded my decision to work on weekends in the soup kitchen at the old Maxwell Street market in Chicago.

We sat on a bench looking down at the prison, Regina Coeli, and I told him about my conversation with Sister Teresa. Most of the prisons in Italy, he said, had originally been convents.

We walked down the hill to via della Lungara and had coffee in a bar across from the waiting room of the prison. I told him I’d been going to confession.

Later we sat by the fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Waiting. For what? For Paul to leave.

I told him that my mother hadn’t wanted me to fly across the ocean in a state of mortal sin, told him about my mother’s simple faith, as if she were one of Tolstoy’s peasants with immediate knowledge of God. (I’d read
Anna Karenina
twice.) This was going to be easier than I’d thought.

“You’re happy,” he said.

“And you?”

“I’m happy too.”

And that was it. Or, it might have been.

We said good-bye at the foot of Ponte Sisto. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

I watched him walk across the bridge, waited for him to turn back for a last look. If he’d turned back I might have waved good-bye, but he didn’t look back. It’s a long bridge with three piers. I could hardly make him out as he turned up the Lungotevere dei Tebaldi. And then I ran after him. Over the bridge, then left along the river. I took the first turn to the right and found him in Piazza Farnese. Turning into a bar.

“Don’t go!” I shouted as I saw him going into a bar.

He didn’t hear me. He was talking to the barista when I went in. I watched as he ordered a beer and sat down at a table and picked up a copy of
Corriere della sera.

I sat down next to him. Out of breath.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“I like it when you tease me,” he said.

“I’m not teasing,” I said. And I wasn’t. I
was
sure. My body was burning, in fact. I couldn’t think of anything except holding him in my arms, feeling his warm skin next to mine, his warm breath in my ear. I longed for him, as if he were far, far away instead of sitting right next to me.

That night, while the new pope was addressing a crowd—a throng—of 250,000 in nine different languages (Latin, Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Russian), Paul and I walked along the Janiculum, looking down at the city and up at the stars.

“It’s hard to believe,” Paul said, “that Rome is at about the same latitude as Galesburg, so if we were in Galesburg we’d be looking up at the same night sky. Well, in another six hours.”

“I took Professor’s Lynch’s astronomy course,” I said.

“Right,” he said, and we both looked up at Boötes the Herdsman, my first constellation except for Orion and the Big Dipper. And beneath Boötes, Virgo, and the Coma Berenices, all of them sinking down into the Tyrrhenian Sea in the west.

I did not go to confession again in Santa Maria in Trastevere. In fact, I was pregnant when I flew back to Chicago. It was too early to be sure, but in my heart I
knew
that Paul had planted his seed.

I didn’t go to confession again, at least not a proper confession, for many, many years. But I’ve never forgotten what it was like to be free from sin. If only for a couple of weeks. It’s a great feeling, but it doesn’t convulse the entire being.

3

The Blessing (October 1964)

As far as Ma was concerned, the world was coming to an end. At least
her
world was coming to an end, winding down. Our first Catholic president had been assassinated exactly one year earlier; Vatican II had thrown the church into turmoil; my mother’s fears about the importance of fasting on Fridays were coming true; and “Dominique,” a song by the Singing Nun, had been replaced in the number one spot on the charts by “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Elvis Presley had been bad enough, and now the Beatles, who had appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, were coming up behind him. By April they dominated the charts. In another three weeks—on Monday, November 23, to be exact—Latin would cease to be the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. And finally: her only daughter had disgraced the family by having a baby out of wedlock.

Baby Stella had been born in March. Paul and I weren’t married at the time, not till his divorce was final. And then we were married before a justice of the peace, not by Father Gordon in Saint Clement’s. So as far as my mother was concerned, we weren’t married at all. (Of course, in my mother’s eyes Paul hadn’t been married in the first place, since he wasn’t a Catholic.)

I’d spoken to Ma a couple of times on the telephone, but we hadn’t been out to the farm, and they hadn’t seen baby Stella, who was now seven months old. So when my father called to see if Paul would like to help slaughter a hog, I thought “truce,” or at least an invitation to negotiate a truce. But it was also a test. Was Paul up to slaughtering a hog? I wasn’t sure. I let him talk to Pa on the phone, so Pa could issue the invitation in person.

We were still living in the house on Chambers Street, which was up for sale. Paul’s wife, his ex-wife, Elaine, was rich but not vindictive. Illinois was not a no-fault state, so she had to sue on grounds of adultery. Paul did not contest, of course, so there was no problem, but the court wanted some names and dates—proof—and I was named as co-respondent, the
wspó
ł
pozwany.

I was taking classes at the college to fulfill the state education requirements. I was hoping to take over the Latin program at the high school when Miss Buckholdt, my old teacher, retired. I’d been one of her star pupils and she’d been happy that I was going to Loyola. Then disappointed, of course. She was the one who’d interested me in the spoken Latin program in Rome. She’d always wanted to try it herself, and maybe she would once she retired.