The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  We walked down to Santa Maria in Trastevere—a half-hour stroll in daylight—and went to mass together.

  At the beginning of the mass itself the priest said a few words about the change from Latin to the vernacular that was just around the corner.

  “Error magnus,” I whispered to Sister Teresa. Big mistake.

  Sister Teresa took communion, but I stayed in my seat, trying to lose myself in a mosaic of the annunciation that was hard to see clearly because of the baldacchino over the high altar. An angel with a third feathery wing attached to his head appeared to be shaking his fist at the Virgin Mary. The Virgin didn’t look very happy.

  After mass we tried to speak in Latin as we were walking back up the hill.

  “Did King Evander point out the Janiculum to Aeneas?” I asked.

  “Nescio,” she said, I don’t know, and that was as far as we got.

  I hadn’t been able to cash a traveler’s check, so she treated me to lunch, a sandwich from the same cart where she’d bought the cappuccino and the dolce. Lots of people were taking the air.

  At three o’clock we were able to move into our rooms. I lay down on a firm, narrow bed and tugged my shoes off with my toes and slept till the next morning.

  Father Adrian was not a gentle man. He was a “tough-love” kind of priest—I was familiar with the type—who didn’t spare the rod of ridicule. It’s one thing to rattle off the list of deponent verbs that take the ablative. It’s another thing to stand in front of nineteen other people, twenty if you counted Father Adrian, and use one of these verbs in sentences illustrating the passive periphrastic in the perfect, imperfect, future, pluperfect, and future perfect tenses.

  There were nineteen of us. I was the youngest. My pal, Sister Teresa, was in the middle, about forty-five. The group included several priests and two German school teachers, with their big German-Latin dictionaries. The rest of us had our Lewis and Shorts.

  At first I didn’t see how I could hold out for eight weeks, but by the end of the third week we had watched the eruption of Mount Vesuvius with Pliny the Younger, taking turns summarizing passages from the letters he wrote to Tacitus; we had entered the cave of the Sibyl with Aeneas, and fought the second Punic War with Polybius—seventy thousand Roman soldiers slaughtered by Hannibal’s mercenaries at Cannae. All these exercises were challenging, but they were easier than sticking to Latin during the informal sessions after supper, where the main topic of conversation was the papal conclave, which began two days after our first class. Between classes Sister Teresa and I would walk to the north end of the park, where we could get a view of the dome of Saint Peter’s. We couldn’t see the Sistine Chapel, on the far side of the basilica, nor could we see the chimney. But we thought we might be able to catch sight of the smoke signal if we were there at the right time. The priests in our group were the biggest gossips. They listened to Radio Vaticana and pored over the accounts of the proceedings in L’Osservatore, the Vatican newspaper; and they entertained us with the conspiracy theories dating back to John’s election in 1958, when Radio Vaticana had announced the election of a new pope and then said that black smoke had mistakenly been identified as white smoke. And then with the conspiracy theories surrounding his death, barely two weeks earlier. Had he been murdered to prevent him from doing further damage to the Church? Had he secretly been a Freemason? Had the 1958 conclave been contaminated by outside influence—threats of a nuclear attack on the Vatican by the Soviet Union if a conservative anticommunist pope were elected? If such a threat had in fact reached the cardinals, then John’s election would have been invalid, and John would have been an antipope. Probably not, I thought. Sister Teresa and I were both glad that Father Adrian did what he could to put a stop to this kind of gossip, but the Church really knew how to put on a show, and it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement.

  The class usually met in a room in the convent, but on occasion we went outdoors and declaimed poetry in the park, sometimes attracting a small audience. It was embarrassing. Like doing tai chi exercises in public. Father Adrian had an iron will. No one thought of resisting. And he enjoyed embarrassing everyone. Teaching us humility, I suppose. He always called on Sister Teresa to declaim dirty poetry. But she didn’t seem to mind, wasn’t bothered by Catullus or Propertius. I envied her her high spirits, and her inner peace. I’d never really admired inner peace in others. Inner peace always seemed like a negative quality rather than a positive one. A damping down. But not in the case of Sister Teresa, who had the energy of a young horse. Like our old black Lab, she was thick and solid, all spiritual muscle.

  I went with her to seven-o’clock mass every morning that week at Santa Maria in Trastevere. The mass was celebrated in the small chapel, cordoned off to keep out the tourists. I kept glancing up at the mosaic of the annunciation, over the high altar, that I’d admired on my first Sunday. A little pamphlet told me that it was by Pietro Cavallini. The extra wing, I could see now, was really the wing growing out of the angel’s left shoulder, and the angel wasn’t really shaking his fist at the Virgin, he was offering her a two-finger blessing. The Virgin was holding a book in her left hand, her fingers curled under the cover to keep her place. God observes from a little window at the top as a dove—the divine sperm, the divine Word—wings its way on a shaft of light toward the ear of the unsuspecting Virgin.

  I was no longer hung up on belief. Is it true or not true? Did God really impregnate the Virgin Mary? Did Jesus really rise from the dead, physically? Or are these stories just metaphors? These questions had been very important when I was in high school, but they no longer troubled me. I stopped worrying about all the misdeeds of the Catholic Church, which I’d thrown in my mother’s face—the Spanish Inquisition, the Great Schism (three popes at one time!), the dysfunctional attitude toward sexuality, the persecution of the Jews, Father Gordon’s predecessor (who’d disappeared after a scandal involving an altar boy), and so on—and just let myself experience what I was experiencing as I knelt next to Sister Teresa in what was probably the earliest Christian church in Rome—certainly the first to be dedicated to the Mother of God—built on the site of a club for Roman soldiers, a site where oil had gushed forth on the day of Christ’s conception, heralding the coming of the Messiah; a site where popes and antipopes had engaged in internecine warfare long before the scandal of the Avignon papacy. What I was experiencing was a feeling that I was a part of a larger whole. I couldn’t really follow the sermons in Italian, but I’d get the general drift, and that was usually enough, though one sermon in particular, during the third week of the program, stands out in my memory. At least the end of it does. “You need only one little word to be saved,” the priest said, several times. I listened as hard as I could, even cupping my hands behind my ears, but the priest lowered his voice to a whisper when he pronounced that one little word, and I couldn’t hear it. I could have asked Sister Teresa, but I didn’t want to raise the issue of salvation with Sister Teresa, a Dominican, very well educated. She taught Greek as well as Latin in the liceo in Florence, which was run by an order of Irish nuns, though the lessons were all in Italian.

  The next Saturday, after the one-little-word sermon, I went to confession. It was a week and a day after Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini had been elected and chosen the name “Paul.” By this time the evening gossip had turned from conspiracy theories to speculation about the new pope’s intentions. I was not an eager disputant in these slow-moving Latin bull sessions, but I was hoping that he’d do what he said he was going to do: follow the path laid out by his predecessor. Sister Teresa and I had our doubts, which we shared on the way down from the Janiculum.

  “You could make your confession in Latin,” Sister Teresa said. We were speaking in Italian as we walked along via della Lungara.

  “Right,” I said, as we passed the guards standing outside the big front door of Regina Coeli.

  “You could go to Saint Pat’s if you want to do it in English.”

&n
bsp; “Saint Pat’s?”

  “In via Boncompagni. There are four Irish churches in town.”

  “Italian is fine,” I said, and we stopped talking for a while.

  I thought Italian would be less traumatic than English. But kneeling in the deep shadows of the confessional I started to speak in Latin. “Pater, pecavi . . .”

  “Piano, piano,” the priest said. Slow down. “Did Father Adrian send you to test my Latin?”

  “Non,” I said.

  “Start over,” he said. “This time in Italian.”

  Was this what I’d been wanting all along? I thought so. Clean out my attic, as my mother liked to say.

  “I’ve committed adultery,” I said. No, not adultery, fornication. Not sure of the word, I tried fornicazione and hit the jackpot. “I’ve been disrespectful to my parents, especially my mother. I’ve told lies.” I stopped there. The priest waited for me to go on, but I thought it was enough, especially fornicazione. And then everything happened that was supposed to happen. The priest asked me to consider the seriousness of my sin and its effects on others, and to promise not to repeat it. I agreed to everything, and then he absolved me, in Latin, “in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” I was in a state of grace. It was like standing in a cold shower, or plunging into Lake Storey, after jogging on a hot day.

  Sister Teresa, who had already made her confession, was waiting for me at the fountain in the piazza, her fingers working a rosary. Penance? You always had to wonder about other people’s sins. She looked up at me, her face a question mark. My own face answered her. No need for words. We walked along the west bank of the Tiber, not talking at first, and then talking slowly and carefully in Latin all the way to Ponte Sublicio and then back up the east bank all the way to the Corso, and then backtracking through some smaller streets, not knowing exactly where we were and not caring, till we found ourselves in Campo de’ Fiori, where Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for proposing that the sun was just another star and that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds.

  We wandered around till almost eight o’clock and then ate in a restaurant on one of the little side streets that branch off the campo. Lots of diners had great big brown flowers on their plates. I didn’t know what they were. Neither did Sister Teresa. They weren’t flowers; they were deep-fried artichokes. Not little baby artichokes, but medium-size ones. Like everyone else, I’d been having a hard time in class. Father Adrian kept pushing and pushing us. But sitting with Sister Teresa, pulling the leaves off my artichoke, sprinkling them with fresh lemon juice, my mind had become calm. I could see things clearly, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the artichokes or because I’d received absolution.

  If I close my eyes I can still see Paul sitting on a bench on the Janiculum overlooking Regina Coeli. Not the new pope, Paul VI, but Paul Godwin, my Shakespeare professor. It was the fifth week of the course. We’d been declaiming Catullus 2 and discussing the possibility that some lines were missing between 2(a) and 2(b)—a famous crux in the famous poem about Lesbia’s sparrow. I was able to shine, since I’d done my honors thesis on Catullus, and when Father Adrian realized that I was familiar with the crux, he asked me to lead the discussion. I had to step up in front of the class and ask questions in Latin. And respond to questions too.

  “Quid omisum est?” What’s been left out?

  And so on. Pretty basic, but pretty exciting, too. And soon it was time for lunch.

  With my eyes still closed I see myself walking with Sister Teresa along the edge of the Janiculum. I see us buying two gelati, in little cups—my treat this time. And then I notice Paul and I realize that this is not the first day he’s been sitting on this bench.

  At first I think I must be mistaken. But there’s no mistaking Paul, though he’s looking very Italian. He’s peeling an orange with a knife and putting the peels down on a napkin spread out on his lap. Sister Teresa and I walk on by, and my sense of being free from sin is soothing. Especially in Sister Teresa’s presence. We’re on an elevated plane, above the world, looking down on Paul. Paul, I think to myself, will be a welcome challenge, a test of strength.

  Sister Teresa and I had both done well in class, discussing the pros and cons of the missing-lines hypothesis, and I was feeling strong, even as I thought about Paul. His touch. His fingers on the inside of my leg. His smell. Not cologne, but some kind of shaving gel. I’d seen it in his bathroom. But I was experiencing these sensations as if they were happening to someone else. Someone I’d been long ago. Well, not that long ago. About six weeks ago.

  It was good to be with Sister Teresa, good to walk in the circle of her happiness, her gusto, her goodness, which was not the kind of goodness that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you want to spoil something.

  I liked the way she stood up to Father Adrian. She was the only one who was not afraid of him. I thought he was a good person too, but his was a different kind of goodness. You did things his way. You pronounced Latin with a soft “g”, as in Italian, and “c” as “ch.” Ecclesiastical pronunciation. But Sister Teresa pronounced it her own way, the classical pronunciation, and after a while Father Adrian pretended not to notice. I liked the way she sang Gaudeamus Igitur in the convent basement. Her soprano voice was sweet, high, and loud at the same time.

  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 ans
wered 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.