Vatican Waltz (2 page)

When I mentioned that Nana had told me the spells were gifts from God, Father Ghirardelli agreed, “Yes, yes,” he said so enthusiastically that a bit of saliva flew onto the confessional screen between us. He laughed and wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt. “That's just what they are. Gifts. Exactly right. Look at the mess I'm making.”

“But what do I do with them?”

“For now just accept them, the way you accept a birthday present. Just say, ‘Okay, God, thank you.' That's all. Don't ask too many questions of Him. Don't be a pest, a little
skutchamenza.
And don't worry about what they mean. Later on He'll help you figure it out.”

It was comforting to hear that, but at the same time, as I grew into my teenage years, all of it—the spells, the absence of my mother and grandmother, the deaths of uncles and aunts, the conversations with Father Alberto, the distance I was starting to feel between my friends' lives and my own (Lisa said she went to bed thinking about Joey Alimonte's eyes; I went to bed wondering what St. Lucy had actually looked like. But I couldn't say that, of course; I couldn't let myself say it.) was like an accumulation of puzzlement for me, a great pile of question marks overflowing my closet and drawers. Lisa and my other friends were becoming interested in boys; they'd sneak cigarettes and swear as if it were a badge of adulthood; they liked to go to the beach and sit on the hurricane wall, flirting, talking about makeup and dates and each other. I did some of those things, too. I was, as one of my friends put it, “seminormal,” but at the same time I kept feeling a magnetic draw to the church. Part of it was simply the beauty of that building in comparison to what surrounded us. Revere was not a rich community. In our part of the city the houses weren't fancy, and though they and the yards were mostly well kept, there were stingy landlords who wouldn't fix loose siding on a duplex and homeowners who didn't have the money for a paint job or a new front door; people drove old, dented cars or had a television antenna hanging from their roof like a sign that they were out of date, too poor for a satellite dish or cable, too tired to go up there and do the repair. They worked in the factories in Lynn or as plumbers or painters or clerks. They had a place to live and food to eat and small flecks of enjoyment here and there—the dog track, the movies, clothes shopping, the beach—but their lives were denim and gray wool, not satin and silk.

St. Anthony's Church, in comparison, was a work of art, a temple to the hope of something better, a spectacularly large building made of light brown irregular stones with a red tile roof and a seventy-foot bell tower and heavy front doors. When you stepped inside, what you saw was perfectly orderly and neat, the red carpet running up the center aisle like a ribbon of welcome, the pale wood pews to either side, elaborate stained-glass windows, square columns faced with marble, a white marble altar rail, and above it a complicated mural of Jesus floating with Mary and his apostles. There were four confessionals, two on either side; they had red velour drapes, and an octagonal light went on above them to show if one side or both was occupied.

I loved that building, every part of it, inside and out, and even though it wasn't open during the week, I made friends with Matilda the caretaker—red hair, three hundred pounds, a smile that sparkled with one gold tooth—and if I knocked on the side door of the rectory where the priests lived and ate their meals, she'd let me in and lead me through the baptistery into the dark, cool nave and leave me alone there for as long as I wanted.

Some days I wouldn't kneel or pray; I'd just sit and look at the altar flowers or the shiny tangerine-colored marble blocks on the walls to either side of the altar, etched with the names of people who'd given money, eighty years earlier, so the church could be built. My own grandparents' names were cut into one of those rectangular stones, and sometimes I'd look at them and think of my grandmother and try as hard as I could to feel her presence. And sometimes I did feel it, so much so that the skin on the backs of my shoulders would prickle and jump and I'd turn around to check the empty pews. I'd be almost certain I heard her voice again—a whispered “remember,” a forceful assurance that I'd been given a great gift and that with it would someday come a great responsibility. Those hours in church were a peculiar mix of pleasure, excitement, and fear: I sometimes believed I could reach across a thin membrane and touch the world of the dead.

But I almost never had a spell in church, and that was another pebble in the huge pile of puzzlement that filled the rooms of my mind. Those spells would come to me in home room and the cafeteria, in my bed, or as I was walking on the frozen beach in wintertime, alone, my collar turned up against the wind, a wool hat pulled down over my eyebrows, the cold salt air biting the skin of my cheeks and lips. Sometimes the feeling would be so intense I'd have to stop walking and sit on the hurricane wall. I'd perch there in the cold wind and soar into another part of my mind, a place that was very still and clear and warm and untroubled. There were no thoughts. There wasn't much in the way of images, but there was a calm, sweet, silent joy, a sense of welcome. It was as if, like a beloved pet, that quiet space had been waiting all day for me to come home.

On Saturdays I'd go see Father Alberto and we'd talk about what had happened during those moments, and I'd ask him for the fifth, tenth, or fiftieth time what he thought they meant, and he'd say, “God knows, Cynthia,” and lend me another book. He was a brilliant man, well read, open-minded, mostly self-educated, and he infected me with his love of learning, lending me books on history and philosophy, the writings of Teresa of Ávila, biographies of the saints, the history of the popes. I read them, of course, but at that age I appreciated them in the most superficial way, like a person who overhears a conversation in a foreign language she barely understands and catches only a few familiar words. Once, near Christmas, on a visit to our house, he gave me a coffee-table book of pictures of Italy and told me he was sure I'd get there one day—he'd had a vision of his own, he said—and I paged through it every night for months, studying the buildings and people, imagining myself in the squares and churches, wondering what it had been like for my grandmother when she was a girl in those places and why, exactly, she and my father and mother had decided to leave. “Mussolini,” my father said when I asked. “The
fascisti.
The war. Everybody, he was hungry alla time. Everything, she was on fire. The kids crying, the dogs and chickens runnin' around, smoke in the air, big piles of stones in the street. What? You wanted to stay in a place like that?”

“Did you know Nana and Mama then?”

“What, know? I was twelve, thirteen. You
nonna,
she was twenty, twenty-five, from another village, how was I gonna know her? You mama was born over there, I was already here. Nineteen years was always the difference.”

“How did you meet her, then?”

Another shrug. “She knew my cousin over there. My family.”

“Any more details than that, Pa?”

“What, details? You meet, that's all. God makes you meet.”

“Who's this cousin?”

“Franco, his name is.”

“You never mention him. Don't you like him?”

“What, like? He's a cousin. Rich. I didn't see him two times in a year when we were little.”

It seemed, with my father, that anytime the conversation turned toward the past it pierced a bubble of bad feeling. A sour tone came leaking out over the tops of his words and I wondered if his early years had been only misery—Mussolini, the war, having to leave his homeland, then losing his young wife—or if there was some secret pain or regret there, and the sourness was his way of steering the conversation back to better times.

OUR PATTERN OF LIFE—
HARMONY WITHOUT
much warmth, connection without much talk, good meals, the routine of weekly Mass, his work, my spells—went on unchanged well into my teenage years, and then, one night, a new thread was sewn through the middle of it. As I often did when I had a little time and a certain kind of urge—for wildness, for escape, for the feeling of being in nature—I decided to walk to the beach, only a mile or so from our home. The sun had just gone down. The air was cool. I sat on the waist-high wall and looked out across the bay, past the islands of Boston Harbor, still visible. The last light leaking out of the world gave everything an air of mystery, and for a little while it seemed that I could sense the whole sphere of the earth, all of us living out our small dramas on that stone ball, whirling around in the middle of empty space, everything—oxygen, water, sunlight, temperature—set up perfectly for our survival. I moved my eyes to the water, the tide slowly receding, the wet, slick, gray sand at its edge, the seagulls coasting, the shells and stones along the shore, one or two shadowy shapes walking there, and I could suddenly feel every atom, all of it thrumming with life. That life energy was clearly connected to the places I went in my spells. Looking at the scene in front of me, I felt I was touching something familiar, setting my finger on the pulse of a person I knew and sensing the life there, the mystery of the taken-for-granted working of the heart. It was a kind of language without sound, a communication with something unknown and unnamed. A rumbling, sparking mystery. And for the first time in my life that mystery took over the place, in my mind, where the man-shaped God had always stood.
God—
that word—could hold the shape of a person, but it could not possibly hold the vast, seething, spinning dimension of the world I was touching then. For the first time, no word stood between me and that mystery, no word, concept, or image.

As I was walking home that night, three boys came by in a car and rode along next to me, very slowly, saying things, threatening, mocking. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I remember that I was completely unafraid. After a minute or so I just stopped, turned to face them, and looked at them calmly as they glided along in the darkness, heads and arms out the windows, taunting, threatening. The car stopped. I thought they'd get out. But then my lack of fear seemed to pass across the air between us, a signal, a soundless voice. I remember the small splash of shame on the face of the boy in the back seat. He said something to the others; they sped away. After they were gone I felt surrounded by a cloud of calm strength, and for some reason I began to count my steps. And I think what happened was that the counting and the sense of fearlessness I felt served to focus my mind in an unusual way, and when I was several blocks from the house it seemed to me that the cocoon of my ordinary thoughts and hopes burst open. The wonderful place I was used to going in my spells gave way into another larger, brighter place that was so magnificent I had to stop walking and stand still on the sidewalk again and simply bathe in that light.

Gradually the new feeling dissolved, leaving only a sweet memory, but I felt I'd opened a door into another room in the enormous castle or mansion I was being given glimpses into now and again. I felt that I had traveled to a part of the stratosphere where fear couldn't breathe. It's really impossible for me to put this accurately into words, but the impression of that evening stayed with me, a kind of interior fireworks, beautiful, startling, unforgettable. It was as if, behind the old God of my imagination, this enormous, new, unnamable spirit was sliding across ancient grazing fields into a twilit landscape, and I was being asked to follow. The memory is like a chip in the kind of stone that has colorful crystals beneath a gray surface. It sparkles there, deep, deep inside me, even now, beyond every worry and hope.

I always did well academically—thanks, in part, to Father Alberto's unofficial tutoring—and when I finished high school I was admitted to Boston University Nursing School, something that made my father proud. If I wasn't going to have boyfriends and travel the familiar path toward marriage and family, at least I'd have a secure job to go to every week. If I wasn't going to act like a normal girl, at least he could tell his friends, “My daughter, she's the nurse,” and that would serve as a decent enough explanation for my strangeness.

I did have a few dates in those years. For whatever reason, though, the boys who asked me out to dinner or a movie (or once to play pool) seemed only half interested, as if they were going through the motions, trying to prove something to themselves: that they could go out on a date with a girl, that someone would say yes if they asked. They ventured a kiss, not much more. It was completely unintentional, but something about me seemed to set up a barricade of cool refusal around my innermost self, and though I was curious and felt the usual desire, it seemed that the world of intimacy was walled off to me, a country that would never issue me a visa. Before those dates I always looked at myself in the mirror. I'd been told—by relatives mostly—that I was pretty, but what matters is what you believe about yourself, not what others tell you, and I saw nothing particularly beautiful in that mirror—thick black hair with a few rogue curls in it, dark eyebrows, the long nose and large lips—nothing that matched the faces of the beautiful women I saw on TV or in magazines. Maybe the way I felt about my looks somehow magically infected the boys I was with: their kisses were almost apologies, as if they didn't want to insult me by shaking hands.

But for some reason, I really didn't know why, the absence of a serious love in my life was not a devastatingly sad thing for me at that point. There were times, especially alone in my room at night, when I'd ridden the subway home to Revere after my nursing classes, when I'd made a meal for my father and cleaned up afterward, when I'd finished my homework, climbed the stairs to my room, and was lying there looking at the ceiling, there were times when I felt a species of deep loneliness, a want of another person to confide in, to do things with, a body to hold my body against. Really, though, the pain was not as intense as it seemed to be for friends who talked to me about their own loneliness, their boyfriends and breakups and sexual fun, their waiting for the phone to ring or a text tone to sound, their anxiety—one way or the other—about pregnancy tests.

My closest friend, Lisa Dixon, had an on-again, off-again relationship with a boy we'd both known in high school, and there was so much drama and pain in it that it seemed to me more like torture than intimacy.

“Are you gay?” she asked me once when we were out for pizza and I told her, for the seventieth time, that there was no special man in my life.

“No.”

“Just not interested?”

“I'm interested. It just never works out for me.”

“You don't like sex?”

“I've never had sex.”

“You're joking, right?”

I shook my head.

“Well, we'll have to fix that,” she said, as if she had a particular man in mind for me, and detailed plans about what this man and I would do.

AS I GREW OLDER THE
conversations I had with Father Alberto—so different from the ones I had with Lisa—evolved to fit my new understanding of things, my new stage of life. I'm sure he did that on purpose, guiding me like any good soccer coach or violin teacher, gently expanding my horizons with more complicated reading material—Julian of Norwich, St. Augustine, Dostoevsky—ramping up the conversations so that we were wrestling with the idea of free will, imagining what must have happened at the Last Supper, pondering Jesus' final lament on the cross, his unforgettable “My Lord, my Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

Father Alberto was a quiet, unassuming man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a belly that pushed out in front of him like the middle of a wine barrel. If he wasn't visiting the sick or having dinner with parishioners, you'd often find him on the grounds of St. Anthony's, shoveling snow or pulling weeds in the parking lot or on the big stone patio—something, of course, that wasn't part of his job description. If you went up to him when he was working there, he'd always stop, stand up, slap the snow from his gloves or the dirt from his hands, give you a big smile and a hug, and invite you into the rectory to have coffee and cheesecake with him and Matilda in the kitchen. He was, at those times, as soft and gentle as the sash on a dress. But especially in later years, when he put on his vestments and stood at the altar, he changed into a different man. He seemed to grow taller and more broad-shouldered. He walked with more confidence, his head tilted slightly back. He lost some of his kindliness and said things that made older couples in the pews squirm and look at each other.

Sometimes when he gave those sermons—again, this happened more in his later years; I was well into college by then—he'd actually leave the altar and walk back and forth in front of the communion rail, occasionally even venturing halfway down the center aisle. No other priests did that, none that I'd seen or heard about anyway, certainly none of the priests in Revere, and soon he developed a reputation for being eccentric, weird, as he himself put it, a radical priest in a place where radicals of any kind were as rare as palm trees in Canada. If, on a given Sunday, he became particularly excited, he'd wave his arms and raise his voice and talk passionately about the Church (“the capital C Church” he always called it in those sermons), his love for the Church, how wonderful it was that it had existed for thousands of years and that the rite of the Mass had remained almost unchanged over all that time, how much money Catholic charities had given to help the poor all over the world, the good that was done in Catholic hospitals and Catholic colleges and schools, how much comfort the faith brought to people when they were sick and dying, when they lost someone in their family, when they were suffering through an emotional or psychological crisis.

At the same time, he said, the Church had many flaws, and, if we were to be fully rounded, honest-living Catholics, it was important for us to acknowledge them, too.

He was one of the few priests I knew who spoke openly about the sex scandals of that time period. “Lives have been ruined,” he would say, waving his arms and speaking so loudly that his voice echoed high up into the corners above the choir loft. “Lives have been ruined by some members of this Church, an organization that's supposed to stand for love and kindness and godliness. Let us look at the way we've hidden those grievous failings all these years. Let us admit our own culpability. And let us acknowledge the fact that we still exclude certain people. We exclude those who've been divorced, for one good example. We exclude those whose sexuality is different from that of the majority. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. If it gets me in trouble, I don't care anymore. If I upset you, let me ask you to consider something: Is exclusivity something Jesus would have condoned?” At a point like that in a particularly forceful sermon, Father Alberto would turn his back on the congregation, walk all the way up and stand behind the altar rail, as if it might offer him some protection. “Jesus,” he'd repeat, nodding his head respectfully, as we were all taught to do when saying God's name. “If you read the Bible, our Jesus stands for forgiveness, for inclusiveness, for wrapping his loving arms around the most marginalized in society, the poor, the sinners, the outcast. That's the Jesus we worship, isn't it? So tell me, what are we doing in the modern era? Inventing a new Jesus? A stricter, more hateful, more exclusive Jesus, somebody who likes the in-crowd, the safe majority, the ones who stayed married but not the ones who didn't? The ones who love a certain way? Who live a certain way? Let us think about that, can we? I'm going back now and I'm going to sit in my chair and not say a word to you for five full minutes, and I want everyone in this church to sit quietly, too. Kids, listen, you sit as quiet as you can and let your mother and father think for five minutes, and when you get home they'll give you a treat. Chocolate or something. Ice cream. Understand? I want us all to ponder the way we've been trying to remake Jesus, the way we cast certain members of the human family outside the embrace of his loving arms. Why are we doing that? What's in it for us? What do you think He would say if He were here?”

Then he'd go back and sit silently for five minutes at the side of the altar.

It drove some parishioners crazy. You'd hear men and women muttering, coughing, moving restlessly in the pews, little kids crying and asking their parents what was going on, people kicking the kneelers and knocking their missals onto the floor, and even a few of the angriest ones walking out, and not trying to be very quiet about it either, as they opened and closed the heavy front doors.

Gradually, as our relationship deepened, the tone of our conversations in the confessional, and even at the table in the rectory over cups of coffee, began to change. As I grew older, Father Alberto began to speak about those things more and more openly with me. “Cynthia,” he'd say, “I value your opinion, so tell me, what do you think about the stuff I got into at Mass on Sunday?” Usually I'd begin by saying “I thought it was wonderful, Father. I thought it was exactly what we needed to hear.”

But he could tell I was being saccharine and polite. “Come on, now,” he'd say, “be real. Speak the truth. What do you think?” And we'd go from there into a conversation that sometimes lasted twenty or thirty minutes. My knees would hurt because I'd be kneeling in the confessional for so long, and once Father realized that, I started to say my confession face-to-face with him in one of the small conference rooms of the rectory, and then our talks sometimes lasted as long as an hour or an hour and a half. We'd argue, debate, discuss Church history, the lives of the saints. He'd talk about a certain cardinal's behavior and how much it bothered him that some of his fellow priests, abusive, hurtful, deeply troubled men, had been protected in order to protect the reputation of the Church. We'd talk about the lawsuits and the court cases and friends of my father who were divorced, and we'd talk a bit about sex, too, although he was always careful to let me have my privacy in that regard. Not that there was much to protect. Lisa's promise to invigorate my sex life had never amounted to anything. I'd kissed three boys in my brief adulthood. That was as far as it had gone and for years as far as it would go. When I went out, it was almost always in small groups of men and women, nursing school friends, a fun environment without much risk or thrill in it.

Then, as I moved into my third year of college, the tone of those conversations changed yet again. I'd stopped mentioning the spells, but Father Alberto started asking about them in a new way, and when I told him how the experiences were changing, he said he'd been meditating on them all that time and he'd come to the conclusion that I had a calling, that there was something special I was going to do on this earth. “Becoming a nurse is fine,” he said. “It's valuable work, godly work. But I feel sure now that there's something else for you.” He didn't know what it was, he said, but he had a sense of it. “Intimations” was the word he used.

Then, a bit later, when he thought I was ready to hear it, he said his intimations told him my true calling would bring me great difficulty.

That part upset me, naturally. I didn't want any great difficulties in my life. But, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, I have to admit that a small, hidden part of me didn't really believe what Father Alberto was saying anyway. I knew by then that our friendship was as important to him as it was to me, and I wondered sometimes if, as he'd grown older without a wife and children, a nagging loneliness had taken hold of him and that loneliness was unconsciously leading him to make me out to be something I was not. I sometimes even wondered—I'm not proud of this—if our friendship might be a substitute for not having lovers in our life. I didn't feel any particular physical attraction to him, and I doubt he felt any for me. I don't mean it that way. I mean only that I worried about the temptations of the solitary life, the places it might lead us in our thoughts.

AT SOME POINT AFTER I
finished my next-to-last year of college and was thinking about where I'd end up working, Father Alberto started to tell me he was getting into more and more “hot water” for his sermons, that the pastor of St. Anthony's, Monsignor Zanelli, who'd always been a friend and supporter, was about to retire and finding it harder to protect him. He said he was receiving phone calls calling him “the Satan Priest,” and worse. “It won't keep me from speaking the truth, Cynthia,” he'd say. “It won't stop me. I have my own understanding of God, and the older I get, the surer I am of it. I'm a priest. It's my job, precisely my job, to pass on that understanding. I'm not going to keep quiet about it.”

Calls came to his room in the rectory late at night, and when he answered he knew someone was on the other end of the line, taunting him with silence. He started to talk openly with me about an organization called Lamb of God, which was gaining popularity in the parishes around Boston in those difficult years. The Lamb of God people covered a spectrum from ordinary good Catholics with conservative social opinions to absolute fanatics who would violently disrupt school board meetings when the issue of birth control and sex education was being discussed, and they'd sometimes be seen on the television news making hateful comments about “the deterioration of the American moral fiber,” spoiled children, lazy workers, lenient priests. More and more often in those years the radical factions were speaking for all of Lamb of God, and I worried, even then, where it would lead. Obviously, the kinds of things Father Alberto said in his sermons were not pleasing to those people. “I'm on their radar now,” he told me, and he suspected that some of the more irrational members of the movement were the ones who were calling him up and sending him the hateful letters.