Vatican Waltz (9 page)

The archbishop was momentarily lost in thought. He held his chin in one hand. The gesture seemed phony to me, contrived, unoriginal. I turned my eyes away, and they rested on the photo of the pope.

“Again,” he said, “I would appreciate very much if we would hold this between the two of us. I'd be happy to give you a piece of advice if my name is kept out of it.”

“Of course,” I said, but it wasn't what I wanted to say.

“I feel that your only recourse, to return to legal comparisons, is to bring your case before the Supreme Court. In this instance, that would mean Rome. There's an office in Vatican City that handles questions like this. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is that office from which various rulings are issued. For example, several years ago, the decision not to elevate the Virgin Mother to a place of doctrinal equality with her Son—do you remember that?”

“I remember that it made me angry.”

“Yes, well, it would have caused hard feelings either way.” He sipped from his glass and touched two fingers to his lips. “I think, honestly, that you have little hope. No hope, in fact. But if a matter like this is to be considered at a level where long-standing rules might actually be changed, then it would be considered in that office. These are very conservative people, you understand. The backbone of the bureaucracy. If the tradition of two thousand years guides me in my thinking, then that tradition
is
the thinking of the bishops and cardinals who advise His Holiness from that office. But you seem determined to see this through, and I feel strangely unwilling to dissuade you.” He shifted his eyes away and back. “It's a testament to your presence,” he said. “Ten minutes ago I was resolved to offer you a flat, ‘No chance,' shake your hand, and say good-bye. But there's something about you that makes me feel such a response would be…improper.” He looked at the window again and back into my face. “This is the best I can do at the present time. Though—again in deference to you—I would be willing to write a short note to a colleague in Rome, testifying, as it were, that you are indeed a good Catholic and a woman of a particularly rich interior life. My colleague is a cardinal of some influence.”

“Could you let me hand carry a copy? I mean, if I go?”

The archbishop could not keep a frown from tugging down the corners of his mouth. I worried for a moment that I'd offended him again, but if I did go to Rome, I didn't want to travel all that way and have nothing in my hand, nothing but the claim of a private conversation. “Agreed,” he said. “With the stipulation that you don't publicize it or otherwise spread it around more than is absolutely necessary.”

“Yes, of course. It's very good of you to take so much time with me. I'm grateful.”

“It's nothing, really.” The archbishop pushed his hands down against the arms of his chair, as if signaling that the meeting was coming to a close. But he didn't actually get up. “I made you a suggestion, that's all. Off the record. My way of slipping out of the noose of responsibility. That is what I can offer at this time.”

He smiled at me in an indulgent way, pushed down more forcefully against the arms of the chair, and stood, and it was only then that the years really showed in him. Creaky knees. An extra second to get upright. He seemed so much older than Father Welch; I wondered if he'd entered the seminary at a later age, and I wondered what kind of life he might have had before that.

Near the door, he put a gentle hand on my back, for just a second, then took it away. “In this world,” he said, “the good people, the people who try to change the stale old patterns—Christ, Martin Luther King, Gandhi—look what happens to them.”

“Father Ghirardelli,” I said.

“Another on the list.”

“It makes some people doubt that there's a God or that He's good.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling his good-bye and reaching out to shake my hand, “but, for me, quite the opposite. It makes me certain there has to be a better world.”

After the visit to the archbishop, I prayed and prayed and waited and hoped, but weeks went by without any word from his office and I began to convince myself that I'd fulfilled whatever it was that God had been asking of me. I'd been to see an archbishop, I'd made my case for a more inclusive Church; that's where the story would end. I felt a creeping sense of relief.

I was nearing the end of my schooling, finishing up an obstetrics course—my favorite to that point. Every day I helped women bring new life into the world, I went to church afterward, came home and made dinner for my father, said my prayers, and went to bed. Some nights, by the time I made it back to Tapley Avenue, he'd already cooked a meal for himself and was out with friends—at the dog track, usually, or playing cards at the Revere City Club. The tenderness of our evening at Rossetti's never repeated itself, but there had been, since that night, a noticeable change in the rooms of our house, a softening up of the molds we'd long ago poured ourselves into. He asked me to show him the type of prayer that made me so happy, and I did that, sitting with him in the living room and talking about wordless prayer, about simply letting the mind run and skitter and gently bringing it back with what Father Welch had called “a sacred word.” After a week or so my father asked me to show him a second time, and I sat with him again and we talked about it. Since his sister Chiara died, he said, he was having what he called “
un
po' di guai,”
a little trouble. If he didn't keep himself occupied with a TV show, a card game, the radio, or projects around the yard, his mind would go back, compulsively, to memories of my mother. When he'd been working every day and busy like that, it hadn't been so bad. Now the loss of her tormented him.

“What was she like, Papa?” I took that opportunity to ask. “You never really told me much.”

“Non volevo parlare di lei,”
he said. Of late he'd been avoiding the English language entirely, as though, moving farther into old age, he wanted only to turn his ears back in the direction of Naples and the syllables of his youth.
Non
volevo
parlare
di
lei.
“I didn't want to talk of her because I was afraid this would happen. She's with me now all the time, everywhere. I get jealous of other men who wanted to marry her, long ago. I wake up, and I think she's downstairs cooking the eggs. I come out of the City Club, and I think I see her waiting for me in the car. In the middle of sleep I reach over to touch her.”

“But what was she like?”

“Like? You've seen the pictures. Beautiful. You look like her.”

“I mean, her personality. What was your relationship like?”

“Relationship?” he said, pinching up his face. He understood the word, of course—
rapporto
in Italian—that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the whole idea of a “relationship” with a spouse or lover was a modern notion, and my father was a man buried up to his rib cage in the soil of a very different time. Even if he'd really wanted to walk out of that world, he could never have lifted himself all the way out of the Old World soil. “She was the other part of me,” he said after the muscles of his face relaxed, “the other half. You take away that half, and it's like you're walking around everywhere with one arm and one leg.”

“But how did she die? How, exactly?”

“How?” he said, “
Il
cuore.
The heart.” But immediately after saying that he looked away, something utterly atypical of him. He was a person of the most direct eye contact imaginable. Even as a little girl I noticed it and had often been made uneasy by it. Speaking to you at the table or outside in our above-ground pool, he'd fix you with his steady brown eyes and you not only had to look back, you almost couldn't move, couldn't form a sentence for a few seconds. It was as if the force of his whole being was concentrated there in two glistening brown marbles. But then, sitting in our living room, talking about something that had happened twenty years earlier, he flinched. I noticed.

“There's something else,” I said.

“Sure,” he agreed, but he pronounced the word very quietly, keeping his eyes out the window.
“Certo.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the eyes swung back, and when they rested on me again I knew that I'd just torn the wrapping off some old secret. It was strange, in the one or two seconds before he spoke again, strange to sense the size and weight of it and to feel a new truth uncovered there between us.
“Quando tu sei nata,”
he said quietly.

“When I was born? What do you mean, when I was born?” But by then I half knew.

“She died giving birth to you.”

“And no one told me?” I said loudly. “All these years?”

“Don't yell.”

“Papa! You lied to me about my mother all this time, and you want me to just say, okay, all right, no problem?”

He shrugged, broke eye contact again. “Your grandmother and I and Aunt Chiara, we didn't want you to feel bad about it.”

“Why would I feel bad about it?”

“You were big,” he said, holding his hands two feet apart. “It was hard for you, coming into this world. Hard for your mother. She broke open. She…lost the blood.” He waved a hand as if swatting away a wasp from the side of his face.

“But I couldn't help that. It wasn't my fault!”

“Sure, I know,” he said. “Everybody knows. But kids, sometimes they think that way. We didn't tell you at first so you wouldn't feel bad. Then, later, we kept not telling you.” The eyes wavered and returned and then:
“Mi dispiace.”
I'm sorry.

The apology—another first, a surprise almost as large as our new history—sucked most of the anger out of me. My father seemed suddenly so small there with his square head, rough skin, and bristly hair, the eyes buried in wrinkles as though a child had scratched lines around them for twenty years without mercy. “It's all right,” I said. But, strangely, it wasn't. Against every possible current of logic, beyond the anger and surprise, I was feeling what my father and grandmother had worried I would feel—a cold rivulet of guilt. Not that I'd killed my mother; of course I hadn't. But that she'd died bringing me to life. Intensified a hundredfold, it was the type of guilt you feel when someone does you a favor you know you can't possibly repay. Maybe guilt isn't the word for it.
Debt
might be a better word. Something owed, enormous, unrepayable. And made more intense, too, by the hard births I'd seen over the previous weeks, the blood and pain and exhaustion and fierce effort. My mother had gone through that and not just suffered but died in the process.

We sat for a few minutes without speaking, and then I calmed down enough to say, “Father Alberto taught me a different way of praying. Maybe that would be better. For both of us. He said there was an ancient Christian prayer, the Prayer of Giving. You think of somebody—as they're dying, on their birthday, anytime—and when you breathe in, you take every difficulty they have, every sadness, in this world or the next, you take it onto yourself. And when you breathe out, you give them strength, peace, health, joy. He said it doesn't matter if they're alive or dead. Doesn't even matter if they're a friend or an enemy, though it's harder if they're an enemy, naturally. I did it for Aunt Chiara when she was dying. I've been doing it for Mama ever since he taught me. When I go to church, I always start with a few minutes of that prayer. Every time I think of her, I just breathe in and feel like I'm taking every hard thing away from her and onto myself. You'd think it would make your own sadness heavier, but it doesn't, it makes it lighter.”

“You see,” he said, after a moment, “how strong you are?”

When he said those words—again, it was so unlike him to offer compliments—I remember noticing that the shadows in the room had shifted a certain way and there were ribbons of light on his face from the curtained windows, two of them bending across his bent nose. He held up his hands and made them into fists so that the muscles of his forearms flexed. Forty-nine years of turning wrenches had made his hands and arms huge. “Popeye,” his sister had called him. He was a small man, barely literate, but I knew that his physical strength had made him feel like a force in the world. Now he held the arms up in front of himself. “Always I thought strong was this,” he said. “Now I see the other kind.”

“I don't feel very strong right now.”

“Because I told you about your mother,” he said.

“It's all right. It will just take a little time. I'm all right.”

“It's too late for me now, saying these prayers. I'll never catch up. You can't get strong when you're old.”

“Bullshit,” I said, surprising myself. I think that, once you start hearing the truth, or at least once you start tearing away the wrapping of old fibs, it leaves you raw, and, for that little bit of time at least, the rawness stripped me of the skin of good-girl politeness I usually lived in with him. Once the word was out—we never cursed in our house—I thought he'd frown and spin into one of his quick fits of fatherly disapproval, the same kind of thing I'd seen when I'd come home late for supper and he'd insist on making me another serving of pasta. But he looked at me again as if seeing a new person there, and he said, “
Va
bene.
Okay…later we'll try,” and I got up and went to make supper.

THE REVELATION ABOUT
HOW MY
mother had actually died moved quickly from the realm of surprise into the realm of fact. It made sense of a few small pieces of the past—my grandmother's last words, for one example—but it did nothing to fill the space left by her absence, nothing to change my routine or my prayers, nothing to ease what I'd come to think of as my dilemma. She was, I believed, in another dimension of life, a place that past suffering could not touch. I asked her to send some help, a bit of motherly advice, but I didn't really expect to receive it. My challenges in this life were my own.

Still, I suppose at that point I was looking for a sign, and I think if Father Alberto had been alive, he would have taken me to task for that. I could almost hear his voice: “Cynthia, it's important to be able to say, ‘Thy will be done' and ‘I accept what you have in mind for me.' But it's just as important to exercise your own free will. Understand? God wants surrender, sure, but surrender doesn't mean you go limp like a tomato plant after a hurricane.”

During those days I was half asleep in my passivity—there's no other word for it except maybe
laziness—
waiting for some kind of clear instructions, waiting for God to help me, instead of figuring things out for myself.

At the end of that week, as he'd promised, Archbishop Menendez sent me a copy of the letter he'd written to a Cardinal Rosario in Rome. In it he said he thought there was “a real possibility” that I had a true and unusual communication with God. He said he thought the particular message I was receiving was “somewhat suspect,” but, at the same time, as he put it, “the power of her presence” was enough that he felt he shouldn't close the door on me completely. After that introduction he went on to suggest, in the mildest terms, that the cardinal might consider meeting with me to discuss my situation—he sent along my name and address—but he emphasized that if I came to Rome, it would be at my own expense, that I was in no way being sponsored by him, the archdiocese, or any particular church. “Your eminence, I leave this matter to your judgment” was the way he closed. “I send this merely to inform you, without recommendation either way.”

I read the letter three times, folded it back into the envelope, and set it on the table beside my bed. The tone was so weak and apologetic. On the one hand the archbishop was saying what a good and special person I was, and on the other he was denying any involvement in my “situation,” as he called it, and going to some lengths to defend himself against the potential charge that he was in any way sponsoring or supporting a troublemaker.

Reading that letter was especially hard for me because I had no advisers at that point in my life, no one to talk to about my “situation.” I never spoke with friends about my prayer life. I hadn't had any contact with Father Welch since the big scandal broke. I'd written him two notes and heard nothing; the Paulist Center wouldn't give out his new phone number; I imagined that he and his girlfriend had moved far away, beyond the reach of the Boston press. But I wondered what he would have said about the archbishop's letter, and I wondered what Father Alberto would have said. I wondered what I was supposed to do then—book a flight to Rome, find Cardinal Rosario, and knock on the door of his office holding the archbishop's letter in one hand and impressing him with my “presence”?

I had an interesting dream that night, one of those dreams that's so vivid you wake up feeling as though you've left your body in another world. In the dream, Father Alberto was standing behind and to the side of me and speaking over my right shoulder. I was overjoyed to feel him there and wanted desperately to speak to him, but all he said was “Be careful walking.” Then he said it again in Italian:
“Sta' attenta quando cammini.”
I woke up, and after a minute of readjusting myself to ordinary life, I guessed—incorrectly as it would turn out—that it must simply be a connection I was making to his death.

One week after that dream, I came home and found that my father had set a piece of mail at my place at the table. The envelope was cream-colored, fine paper, and in the upper-left-hand corner were the words
Ufficio del Cardinale Armando Rosario/ Vaticano.
Inside, on stationery so thick it almost felt like a piece of cloth, was this short message, in English: