Vatican Waltz (7 page)

It was a clear night, cool near the water, the waves taller and more exuberant than anything I'd seen there in months. At age seventy-five, my father was in excellent condition, and we went along on the firmer sand at a good pace. Something hovered in the air between us, a moth of discomfort on that pretty landscape. After a few minutes he said, switching into Italian and staying with that language, “I understand now, why you go to church so much. All these years I saw you praying and praying, going to Mass even during the week, being quiet in the backyard or in your room, reading religious books. I never really understood.
Adesso
capisco.
Now I do.”

I kept silent, chewing on my surprise like the last bits of the meal, worried I'd break the spell he was under and he'd stop talking and close the door again on the neat, masculine room where he guarded his feelings.

“Because you know what I don't know,” he said. “You knew it all along. What I knew in my mind, like a thought, you knew in your heart—that this life goes by.”

I hooked my arm inside his.

“It goes by, Cinzia. And then what? Heaven? What's Heaven? How old are we in Heaven? All the people who died, where do they go in Heaven? How do they know each other? Are they married again? Are they still brother and sister or friends? How can that be, something like that?”

Still holding his arm, I turned him so we were looking out to sea and I said, “
Guardare, Babbo. Guardare il mare.
Look, Pa. Look at the ocean. I like to come here and think of everything that's in it, the way it comes in and goes out every day, like our breath, and we barely notice. Something much bigger than us has to have made that, don't you think so?”

He studied the bay for a few seconds, then turned and looked at me again with that same puzzled expression on his face, as if I were a new creature in his life. “See,” he said, “you can say things like that. You can talk that way. See what you are?”

“You're the same as me, Papa,” I said. “We're made of the same stuff.”

“Sure,” he said, in English now, as if, standing near the noisy surf on the empty beach, he no longer had to worry about being overheard and mocked for his accent. “The trucks I fix at the garage, they made of the same stuff like a Cadillac, too.”

“I'm the same as I always was,” I said. “A little bit fatter after that
pizza
dolce.
”

My attempt at humor passed him by completely. “Sure, just the same,” he said. “Why would you be different? But when I go, you pray for me, okay? With you praying for me, I'll have a chance.”

I held on to his arm and tried to move my mind nowhere into the future or the past. I wanted that moment in its fullness.

When we were walking back south along the beach, the wind at our backs, I said, “There's a chance, a small chance, that when I finish the clinicals in a month or so I'll have to go to Rome.”

“For work?”

“No, not exactly.”

“A boyfriend?” he said hopefully.

“I don't have a boyfriend.”

“You should have one,” he said, “a beautiful girl like you.”

“I'm special, I'm beautiful. I think you had something to drink before I got home.”

He didn't laugh.

“It has something to do with the Church. I'm not sure, but I think I may have to go and meet with somebody in Rome about Church business, about my prayers.”

“To become a nun?”

“No,” I said, and for a moment I thought I might explain the whole situation to him, but I said only “A priest I know in Boston wants me to go.”

“I have my cousin there, still, all these years. Franco. I told you about him. You can look him up. Right near Rome he lives. Rich now…the lawyer.”

“Want to come with me, Pa?”

“No no no no,” he said, forcefully, and the lightness was suddenly falling away from him like dry leaves from the bed of a speeding, overloaded pickup truck. I almost looked behind us to see the trail. “What I left, I'm-a never goin' back to.”

“It's different now, Pa.”

“No no no no,” he said again. “The memories ain't different. They half sleepin', the memories. Who wants to wake 'em up?”

After we'd walked another little ways he said, “You gonna stay over there?”

“No. A week, maybe two weeks, that's all. I was thinking I could use the money Aunt Chiara left. For the plane tickets and everything.”

“You can stay if you have to.”

“I'm fine, Papa. I'm happy here.”

“How?” he asked. “You work, you come home and clean the house. Where's the happy part? Tell me?”

“Praying makes me happy.”

He looked out at the water. The waves were slapping the shore in a slow, hard rhythm, streaks of brown seaweed showing in each small curl. “Show me about it,” he said. “When we get home. Show me what you do to be happy like that when you say a prayer.”

Father Alberto had told me many times that he was sure God had a sense of humor. “He's a big trickster, Cynthia,” he liked to say, putting one hand flat on his large belly as if preparing to laugh but not actually laughing. “He takes the things we want—to be rich, beautiful, healthy, to live forever—and He turns them this way and that like a magician and plays His tricks on us with those things. Sometimes He gives us what we want for a little while, or partly, and then He takes it away and watches to see how we react. It's like He's saying ‘Is this what you think you're here for? Do you think I made you so you can have a nice face and have it forever, and everybody will give you compliments on it, and every time you look in the mirror you'll have a little puff of pride?' You think that's what the whole machine is for? The lungs and heart and skull and blood? I went to all that trouble so you could look in the mirror?”

On the day I was scheduled to meet with the archbishop I had reason to remember my late friend's God-as-trickster theory. It would be a long ride, I knew, and I'd wondered about, then decided against, asking to borrow my father's car. For one thing, going through the heart of Boston from north to south like that is suicide by traffic, and for another I hoped that the time on public transportation would allow me to prepare what I was going to say, to wrap up my nervousness in a kerchief and stuff it down into a corner of my purse. First, I had to take the bus down Revere Street to the subway station, then the blue line into downtown Boston, then switch to another line there, ride that line all the way to the end, and then take another short bus ride or, depending on how much time I had, make a long walk to the offices of the archdiocese. I knew it would take an hour and a quarter at least, so at the first subway station, to pass the time, I bought a newspaper I wasn't fond of, a tabloid known for gossip and big headlines. I don't know what made me do that—there was a photo of a pregnant actress on the front page, I had the smallest twinge of envy—but when the train came and I took my seat and opened the paper, I felt a shock that was like the pain of a broken bone.

On the second page my eye was caught by a story with this headline:
HOW ARE YOU MAKING OUT, FATHER
? There on my lap—one of God's painful jokes—was a photo of Father Welch kissing a woman. In Franklin Park, the caption said. Some enterprising photographer had either followed him there, based on a tip, or by the purest accident recognized him on a bench in Boston's huge, inner-city park. There was my confessor and adviser, clearly kissing a woman in a way that was more than friendly. The woman was black, Father Welch was white, which, of course, made the story that much more titillating. I stared at the picture for a long time and read the caption and the short article twice. At the end it said that the matter had been referred to the archbishop's office and would possibly result in Father Welch's being forced to leave the priesthood.

I set the paper down and looked out the opposite window. A flash of blue bay. Airport runways there. The timing of it was simply awful. There was no way on earth a person like me would have been granted an audience with the archbishop of Boston if it hadn't been for the intercession of Father Welch. A twenty-two-year-old nurse-in-training? A Revere girl, plain as a tree trunk in all respects, meeting with a man who rubbed shoulders with governors, senators, and popes?

I had a moment of wondering, as I folded the paper and set it on the seat beside me, if the news about Father Welch meant that the archbishop would refuse to see me. I was aligned with another radical priest, one who obviously wished there wasn't a vow of celibacy involved in his chosen profession. Though I knew beyond a doubt that it wasn't so, it would look like Father Welch had sent me to the archbishop for selfish purposes, to help his own cause.

Where would he go now? I wondered. What became of priests after they were fired?

The event and the tawdry press coverage raised a breaking wave of sadness in me. The subway train plunged into the tunnel that ran beneath Boston Harbor, and I felt I was being pushed face-first into an old sorrow. Being a loyal Catholic was starting to feel to me like being friends with someone who's doing something hurtful and refuses to listen when you try to talk about it. There was a similar stubbornness there, as if, in a world where big things changed at the speed of light, the Church was reluctantly reconsidering a few small rules, going along at the pace of a horse-drawn cart. I knew that a lot of people liked it that way, were proud of it even, felt that the Church's resistance to change was a badge of honor in a scattered, trivial, money-and-sex-mad world. I liked tradition, too, and loved some of the old-fashioned aspects of my Church, but the stubbornness and the damage it caused were tearing me in half.

After a while it began to seem to me that my
mission,
if I could dare to use that word, my
protest,
my
quest
had everything to do with the sadness I felt at what had happened to people like Father Welch in the iron cage of rules that was our Church. For me, that Church, St. Anthony's especially, had always been a refuge from the everyday world, a place—so rare in this society—to go and be quiet, a building that encouraged thoughts that went beyond the ordinary concerns of daily life, beyond money and status and looks and growing old, a building that had been raised at great expense to stand as a reminder that there was another dimension of life, other things to be thinking about. I remembered that every time my grandmother passed the church on foot, in a bus, or in a car, she would etch a tiny cross onto her forehead with her right thumbnail. That habit had come to seem foolish to me as I grew older, pure superstition. But now I understood what Nana had been doing: reminding herself that there were considerations that went beyond the errands, hopes, and worries that always swelled up to seem so important, reminding herself that, as my father had recently discovered, one day we all disappear. That was the whole point of having a church, of weekly services, sacraments, prayer. It wasn't supposed to be about keeping the rules and being rewarded with an eternity of bliss, as if you were a student trying to please a strict teacher; it was designed to redirect our attention away from the clamoring fears and hopes that could drown out all thought of anything larger.

And now look what was happening. Only a few years earlier the archdiocesan headquarters, where I was headed that day, had occupied a Tudor mansion close to downtown Boston. But the sex abuse scandal had hit the city in a particularly strong way—the lives of hundreds of people, mostly men, had been destroyed by twisted priests, and that destruction had ultimately hit the Church in its pocketbook. The residence of the archbishop of Boston had to be sold to raise the millions of dollars needed for legal fees and penalties. In order to find priests to say Mass at the churches that remained open, the archdiocese had to go trolling for them in Africa or South America. There was nothing wrong with those priests, I knew, even in spite of my lukewarm feelings about Father Gerencia. Some of them were wonderful men from a strong spiritual tradition. But it seemed clear to me that things would have been so much better if priests whose job it was to keep reminding us, to keep putting the world into perspective, if those priests themselves had grown up in the neighborhood where they preached and if they had one foot firmly in the everyday world, had been able to marry, for instance, or kiss a woman on a park bench without a giant fuss being made. Or, even more, if they could be women who knew the particular concerns of women in the modern world—bearing and raising children, balancing that with a career, understanding their husbands, caring for their parents. It seemed so abundantly obvious that the Church I loved and cherished was shrinking down to a place where it would no longer have the power to remind people of that other dimension, and it seemed clear that so much of that shrinkage had to do with the fact that my Church, in clinging to the old ways, had fallen so far behind modern life that for many people—most of my once-Catholic friends—it wasn't even relevant any longer. They went back to St. Anthony's for the baptism of their child (a formal prelude to the big party), and on Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, or for a funeral—but it had no hold on their insides.

Thinking that way on the long subway ride was like a splint on my broken courage. It was beginning to seem at least possible that God might be sending the visions not as a way to test my paltry individual faith, not to see if I'd go insane under the assault, not to torment or confuse me, but in order to allow me to make some useful contribution to my Church, helping, alongside people like Father Alberto and Father Welch, to drag it back into relevance. It seemed to me as I got off at the smoky, littered station with its racket of squealing wheels and clanging overhead wires, that despite the barrage of doubts I lived with, it might be a perfectly worthwhile use of my time to act as one small voice calling for that kind of change. I hoped and prayed that Archbishop Menendez would see things that way. That he would listen, at least. That I wouldn't be chased away from the front door.

With the bus ride from the MBTA station, the trip was even longer than I'd expected. The Pastoral Center of the Archdiocese of Boston was housed in a modern, four-story, redbrick-and-glass building set in an industrial park. Except for the statue of Mary near the entrance, it resembled nothing so much as a corporate headquarters.

I entered from what seemed the back of the building, at ground level, near an enormous parking lot. I checked in at a circular desk backed by panels of light wood with a hand-disinfectant dispenser and a framed photo of the pope nearby. After waiting only a minute, I was greeted by a large woman, hair in neat cornrows, whose name I didn't catch and who said she was Archbishop Menendez's chief of staff. The woman was a bit kinder than the receptionist at St. Ann's but unsmiling and formal, not a person to make small talk with. So I held my nervousness inside and followed her up a set of stairs to a small waiting area. I took a seat there, opened a magazine—
Catholic
Living
—and immediately closed it. Said a prayer for Father Welch. For Father Alberto. For my father and my mother and Aunt Chiara and my grandmother, and myself. I needed to use the bathroom but decided to wait.

Soon Archbishop Menendez himself, dressed in plain black pants and a plain black shirt with a small square of white collar showing in front, opened the door to an office and motioned me in. He shook my hand—I was embarrassed at my sweaty palm—nodded as I introduced myself, made good eye contact, and smelled of Ivory soap. The office was bright with sunlight. There were plants on the window sills, a framed, signed photograph of the pope on one wall, a crucifix, an overloaded desk, and a set of bookshelves with titles I glanced at but couldn't quite read. It had a very different feeling, I noticed right away, from Monsignor Ferraponte's office, and Archbishop Menendez had a very different way about him. It gave me a burst of courage.

The archbishop led me to a leather sofa that looked new and sat opposite me in a matching leather armchair on the other side of a glass-topped coffee table. Everything except his desk was perfectly clean and orderly. There was a pitcher of ice water on a tray in front of him and two glasses. He filled them both, handed mine across, then sat back and studied me. I studied him in return and decided that, even in the black uniform, he looked more like a judge or professor than a man of the cloth. Or perhaps a surgeon, nearly old enough to retire. He had that same kind of confidence and brainy energy I'd seen in the OR, as if the winds of doubt never blew across his warm valley, as if nothing on this earth could possibly frighten or upset him.

“It's a good grace to meet you finally,” he said after he'd inspected me and had a sip from his glass. “I've heard so much about you.”

“How?” I asked. I'd put on my best blue dress, and I smoothed it over the tops of my legs and saw that my hands were shaking.

The archbishop laughed but didn't answer. He set his glass down on a coaster, sat back again, and interlaced his long fingers. I couldn't help but compare him with my father. He was the most clean-shaven man I'd ever seen, his cheeks shining in the window sunlight and his shock of salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from his forehead in smooth strands. But the difference between them was more than texture of skin or hair color. My father was a man of the body; he loved to work with his hands, his presence in the house felt like that of a block of stone or wood that moved, slowly, solidly, from kitchen table to living room chair, from front seat of the car to the front steps or the garden. The archbishop seemed light, almost translucent, as if he might float away if a window was opened.

“Diocesan gossip,” he said at last. “The word around here is that you have a rich prayer life.”

“Word?” I said. “From who? What word?”

Another polite laugh, a smile with sparkles at its edges. “Sources never to be named. Is it true? About you having a rich prayer life, I mean?”

“I do, yes, I think so, Your Holiness.”

“Let us drop the formal titles, shall we, just for this meeting?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I could feel myself blushing. I hadn't blushed since seventh grade, and it made me a little angry at myself. I didn't want to have come all that way for what would surely be my only meeting with an archbishop, and suddenly go little-girl shy. “Yes, I think I do.”

“I admire that,” he said. “I envy it. One of the aspects of this job I dislike, and there are many aspects to like, is that it leaves so little time for quiet prayer. I often think of Thomas Merton at the Gethsemane monastery, placing a notice on the bulletin board, pleading with his fellow monks not to elect him abbot for just that reason. He put his prayer life first. The right thing to do.”