Vatican Waltz (3 page)

I've never been a very political person. My father, a fairly typical parishioner at St. Anthony's, wasn't political either, certainly not about matters of the Church. When Father Alberto asked him to sit silently for five minutes and contemplate this or that question, he tried to do that. When a priest said the Church was being unfair to society's outcasts, my father probably agreed in theory, but he had no comment and made no move to do anything about it. Issues like that were simply not a matter for discussion in our home. He went to Mass, did what he was told, and didn't seem to think about it much, and so in that way—and in others—we had very little in common with Lamb of God Catholics. There was a kind of cushion between us and them. Father Alberto was the antithesis of their mentality, a man of love, not rules, a man who tried to unify, not divide, to sow understanding and compassion, not hatred and harsh judgment.

But like a lot of men and women of love—Jesus and Mary come to mind; Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln—that desire to unify, not divide, was exactly the trait that would eventually bring him trouble.

Near the beginning of my last year of college—it was September 24, about eight p.m.—Matilda called from the church, hysterical with grief, and said that Father Alberto had been in a terrible accident. He'd gone to someone's house for dinner, she said, probably had a few glasses of wine, and crossing in front of St. Anthony's—a place where Revere Street makes a ninety-degree curve—he'd been struck by a car. The driver didn't stop; the police were looking for him. Father was in the intensive care ward of a hospital in Boston (the same hospital where I'd done my clinical practice and was hoping to work one day); could I give her a ride?

That news, sent through the phone line in Matilda's frantic voice, hit me like a beam falling from the roof. I grabbed the keys to my father's car and picked her up, and we drove into Boston, too fast, and parked in a no-parking zone in front of the hospital (the car was towed) and hurried inside.

Father Alberto wasn't conscious, the nurse told us, and wasn't expected to regain consciousness. No visitors were allowed, but she'd seen me on the wards and she remembered me and I talked to her for a while, told her that Matilda and I were as close as he had to family, and, as nurses will occasionally do in those situations, she bent the rules. Matilda was weeping so hard that she took two steps into the room, made the sign of the cross, and went out again, but I sat by Father Alberto's bed, watching his chest move up and down in too-small bumps, praying under my breath, glancing up at the heart monitor as if that one pulse were the ticking clock of God's kingdom on Earth. I put my right hand on Father's wrist and squeezed, and, as if that touch had all the force of my love in it, his eyes fluttered and opened and I could see him slowly becoming aware of his surroundings. His irises wavered for a moment, as if he were having trouble controlling them, but I squeezed his hand again and he began to focus.

After a minute or more of just staring at me, he said the strangest thing: “I see who you are.”

I nodded. “Cynthia.”

He shook his head, said, “No,” faintly, and let his eyelids drop closed. I couldn't tell if the shake of his head meant he was trying to tell me there was no hope for him or if his brain wasn't working right and he was saying “no” to the Cynthia part, mistaking me for someone else. When people are close to death, they sometimes believe they see their mother or father or husband or wife at the bedside, even though that person has been dead for years. Doctors consider it an hallucination, nothing more than a change in brain chemistry brought on by the stress of dying or a combination of medicines. I wasn't so sure. I loved science, but what I didn't like was the certainty of some scientific minds, as if the known laws of chemistry, biology, and physics explained absolutely everything. What if those people
were
seeing the spirits of their loved ones? Why, given all the other miracles that surround us—sunrise, for instance, or childbirth—was that so impossible? I squeezed Father's hand a second time. His eyes opened again, but just for a moment, as if raising the lids required the same amount of will and strength as lifting a heavy weight above his head.

“Father,” I said. He didn't respond. I squeezed his hand gently a third time, I waited. Before my throat closed up completely, I said what I hadn't been able to say to my grandmother: “Thank you.”

There was a twitch of what might have been a smile at the corners of his lips. The nurse came in, checked his IV line, the heart monitor, then hurried out to fetch a doctor. In the course of my training I'd seen a number of people die. Some struggled. Some, like my grandmother, drifted off into what looked like a peaceful sleep, the burdens of life left behind them like too-heavy luggage on the start of a long trip. Some tried to get out of bed or yelled or screamed, their faces twisted up in terror. I watched Father Alberto for any of those signs, I glanced up at the monitor, and when I looked back at him I saw that his eyes were open again, just barely, a quarter of an inch between the lids. His lips moved. “Can't give up,” I thought he might have whispered. Or maybe “Don't give up.” I leaned down and kissed his lips, and then the nurse and a doctor came hurrying into the room and Father Alberto's eyes closed and the lines on the machines wavered a last time and went flat. I stepped away to let them work on him—it's such a violent exercise, trying to keep someone in this world. Instead of leaving the room as they told me to, I stood in the doorway and watched. I could clearly see Father Alberto's spirit gathering itself, almost the way a person brings his arms in close to his body and bends his knees before making a big jump. But this spirit didn't have any shape that resembled a human body; it was something else, not ghostlike exactly but outlined in light, supple, electrical. Somehow—I could never say how—it contained, not his looks and personality, but Alberto Ghirardelli's
essence.
There was a signature stamped on it. I watched that essence preparing itself, gathering itself up through his chest and throat and in the features of his face—just the smallest flexing of the smallest muscles there. And then it flickered a last time, like a candle flame going out, and made its leap into the next world.

The doctors and nurses worked and worked—they're required to by law—but I could have told them it was no use. I said one Hail Mary, helping him on his way, and then, carrying a familiar sad weight, feeling an all-too-familiar hole opening in my world, I went out into the hall to find Matilda.

ON THE DAY AFTER FATHER
Alberto's death, Monsignor Ferraponte—who had taken over a group of local churches after the retirement of Monsignor Zanelli—put out a brief statement saying, basically, “We are all saddened by this loss.” To my ear at least, the tone of it was half sincere. There wasn't a single good word about Father Alberto, no praise, nothing about how beloved he'd been, and it struck me as doubly strange that the monsignor didn't preside over the funeral Mass and wasn't anywhere to be seen among the thousand or so people who crowded the church.

In the days and weeks following Father Alberto's death I felt as though I inhabited a great cold emptiness. It was all I could do to make myself go into Boston for school, to come home and finish the chores I was supposed to do around the house. My father seemed frightened by the depth of my grief. At the funeral he watched me as if I might melt. And later, at home, he was like a knight clanking through the kitchen and living room in a heavy armor of self-consciousness. Father Alberto's sudden death had taken hold of his world with two big hands and shaken it so hard that the things he'd always done easily—snapping green beans off a vine, gluing and clamping a loose leg on an old kitchen chair—seemed suddenly beyond him, as alien to his hands as the French language to his tongue.

“What's wrong, Pa?” I said at last.

“Nothin'.”

“You're not yourself.”

A grunt. A silence. Then: “You best friend you lost now.”

I looked at him through a quick lens of tears, but even in that sad blur I could see the fear on his face, a cold-weather tan. I
was
sad, of course, wrapped up in sadness from eyes to knees, but I wasn't afraid. “I'll see him again,” I said, because that was—and is—a certainty in my world. I know it like I know red from blue: God doesn't bring souls together for a few years in the ocean of eternity and then separate them forever. What sense would that make in a world that, even judging by the known laws of biology, chemistry, and physics, is otherwise so meticulously ordered?

“Nobody knows it for sure,” my father said, then he made a quick retreat to the consolation of television, that leaping, seductive, electronic world, a deathless universe.

Though the state and local police conducted an investigation—Matilda told me they knocked on every door in the neighborhood, hoping to find someone who'd seen or heard something on the night Father Alberto was killed—and though there were articles in the paper and notices on the TV news asking for help, the hit-and-run driver, drunk, careless, or an assassin, was never found. I went to the police station and told the officer on duty about the phone calls and veiled threats. I asked him to look at the Lamb of God movement for possible suspects, but even I knew how useless that would be. They'd have to trace the calls, somehow connect them to the hit-and-run driver; it would be the next thing to impossible.

I kept going to St. Anthony's, of course. I'd sit in the cavernous darkness and pray for Father Alberto and try to make contact with his spirit, just as I'd done with my grandmother after she died and with my mother for so many years. Even though he'd shaken his head when I said my name, I tried to make myself believe he'd known it was me there beside him in the hospital room and that what he'd said was “Don't give up.” In the echoing emptiness I ran our conversations through my mind over and over again, searching them for something I'd missed, some nugget of wisdom, some finger pointing me in a certain direction. What I remembered most, to my frustration, was his insistence, in our last few visits, that there was nothing more he could do for me.

“Can't we keep talking, Father?”

“Of course, yes, we'll always keep talking. We'll be gabbing and snacking forever in the kitchens of eternity. But there's nothing more I can tell you, Cynthia. You're so far beyond any point I'll ever reach. You need to find somebody higher up, somebody wiser about this kind of prayer. You need, most of all, not to be so damn modest! If you can't come out and admit God is touching you in a special way, that's a kind of sin, too, don't you see?”

I laughed at that, changed the subject, but I filed it away where I filed everything else he'd ever said to me.

“Somebody higher up” meant, to my simple way of looking at things, the new monsignor, Father Alberto's immediate superior. Sitting there in the church, I decided that he'd been advising me to go and tell Monsignor Ferraponte about my spells. Explain the messages I thought I was getting from God. Ask his advice.

“What good will it do, to talk to somebody else, Father?” I'd argued. “What can somebody else tell me that you can't?”

“It's not a question of good, Cynthia. It's a question of your calling. How many times do I have to tell you this? You are being asked by God to do something. You have been given these special gifts. Believe me, I've heard the confessions of thousands of people in my life. No one I've ever met has had this kind of communication with God. It's not something to fool around with. God doesn't do things without a purpose. He's pointing you toward something, and I'm not a good enough man to know what that something is.”

I stalled and procrastinated. I kept telling him I had too much schoolwork, that I was too busy at home, but he knew the real reason as well as I did: more and more as the years passed, I hated making any kind of fuss about myself. The spells and visions were something I'd been living with for so long that they felt as much a part of me as my hair and hands, and it simply wasn't in my nature to lift my head above the tide of everydayness. I was very much like my father in that way: he did his work and came home. He didn't make any trouble, as if he believed that there were always snipers in the neighborhood and to lift your face above the wall everyone else crouched behind was to invite a bullet. But it was more than that. Most of my young feistiness—most, not all—had, over the years of visions and prayer, been rubbed smooth like a stone's sharp edges in surf. I was borne along in a near-constant peacefulness. I watched chips of Lamb of God protests on the nightly news, wondering if any of the angry faces I saw belonged to the person who had killed my friend. I read about the movement in the paper, but anger like that—anger that wanted some sinful Other to rail against—felt as alien to me as loud music in a library. I didn't want to add anything to the trouble on this earth. The last thing I wanted was fuss or confrontation.

Still, in spite of my natural reticence and solitariness, after Father Alberto died I started to let myself think about the possibility of finding someone else to talk with about the experiences I was having in prayer. If I did make an appointment with the new monsignor, I thought, what was the worst that could happen? He'd yell at me, chase me out of his office, call me a lunatic, a mad egotist, a foolish girl. So what? Maybe Father Alberto had been wrong, and that kind of rejection was exactly what I needed. Maybe my “calling” in life was simply to be a good nurse and daughter. Wasn't that enough?

The spells went on and on, like someone who calls your house and calls and calls and won't give up until you answer the phone. One night I was so buried in prayer that I stayed on the subway car after my stop—which was the end of the line—and the conductor had to come and shake me and tell me to get off before they made the loop and headed back to Boston. Week by week the spells seemed to take me further from ordinary life, to go on longer, to leave me with the stronger and more lasting certainty that I was touching another universe, a place where very different laws applied.

At about that same time, one after another, Catholic churches in Revere were closing. When I was a young girl, there had been seven of them in our city. By the time I started my last semester of college, there were three. As the doors closed and the parishioners were sent elsewhere, as real estate signs went up in front of the stone-and-wooden three-doored buildings, the assignments of the priests were changed, too. St. Anthony's was one of the three churches that stayed open; the empty spot created by Father Alberto's death was filled by a Father Gerencia, who was from Chile. As I've said, after Monsignor Zanelli resigned, Monsignor Ferraponte, who'd been the pastor at St. Ann's in Beachmont, had been made the monsignor and pastor of all three churches in Revere.