The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “Shouldn’t you be in Verona?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “In the very first scene of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare mentions a grove of sycamore trees ‘that westward rooteth from this city side’ that’s not mentioned in any of his sources. If I could find that grove . . . but there are other things, too, and I wanted to start in Rome.”

  In the late afternoon, after the lessons, the three of us went to a puppet show in the park, ostensibly a show for children but with intrusive erotic overtones for the adults—Pulcinella’s huge nose, for example, and the wooden spoon that he uses to beat everyone, or Columbina’s cleavage and perky stance, and all the erotic byplay, which I had trouble following, though Paul and Sister Teresa laughed and laughed. The puppet theater was a little square shack about the size of an outhouse with a sign in front admonishing children not to throw stones at the puppets.

  That night we walked to Campo de’ Fiori for more deep-fried artichokes at Al Pompiere. Paul said the dish was called carciofi alla Giudia, artichokes alla Judaea. We were all native English speakers, but we conversed in Italian. I was ready to brain Paul for paying so much attention to Sister Teresa, but I drank too much wine and invited him to come to seven-o’clock mass with us in the morning at Santa Maria in Trastevere. I didn’t know if I wanted to stop him in his tracks or if I wanted him to taste what I had tasted.

  That night I lay on my back, opening myself up, praying for strength, listening for instructions, trying to imagine my way back to a time before we had complicated everything. If there’d ever been such a time.

  I did not expect the spiritual life to be smooth sailing. Not at all. I welcomed Paul’s presence as a challenge. Paul was just the sort of problem you’d expect to crop up.

  At mass he knelt between us, and I told him to get his butt off the pew and kneel up straight. Which he did.

  After mass Sister Teresa pleaded a cold, brought on by a dreaded colpa d’aria, a blow of air, a draft. Paul and I spent the day saying good-bye. He did not make a fuss, did not attempt to talk me into, or out of, anything. I could not detect any irony in his questions, nor sarcasm in his comments about the church. No comments about Jesus being a great moral teacher, or being the son of God in the sense that we’re all children of God. In short, he didn’t make fun of me. He took me seriously. He wished me well. He applauded my decision to work on weekends in the soup kitchen at the old Maxwell Street market in Chicago.

  We sat on a bench looking down at the prison, Regina Coeli, and I told him about my conversation with Sister Teresa. Most of the prisons in Italy, he said, had originally been convents.

  We walked down the hill to via della Lungara and had coffee in a bar across from the waiting room of the prison. I told him I’d been going to confession.

  Later we sat by the fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Waiting. For what? For Paul to leave.

  I told him that my mother hadn’t wanted me to fly across the ocean in a state of mortal sin, told him about my mother’s simple faith, as if she were one of Tolstoy’s peasants with immediate knowledge of God. (I’d read Anna Karenina twice.) This was going to be easier than I’d thought.

  “You’re happy,” he said.

  “And you?”

  “I’m happy too.”

  And that was it. Or, it might have been.

  We said good-bye at the foot of Ponte Sisto. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  I watched him walk across the bridge, waited for him to turn back for a last look. If he’d turned back I might have waved good-bye, but he didn’t look back. It’s a long bridge with three piers. I could hardly make him out as he turned up the Lungotevere dei Tebaldi. And then I ran after him. Over the bridge, then left along the river. I took the first turn to the right and found him in Piazza Farnese. Turning into a bar.

  “Don’t go!” I shouted as I saw him going into a bar.

  He didn’t hear me. He was talking to the barista when I went in. I watched as he ordered a beer and sat down at a table and picked up a copy of Corriere della sera.

  I sat down next to him. Out of breath.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “I like it when you tease me,” he said.

  “I’m not teasing,” I said. And I wasn’t. I was sure. My body was burning, in fact. I couldn’t think of anything except holding him in my arms, feeling his warm skin next to mine, his warm breath in my ear. I longed for him, as if he were far, far away instead of sitting right next to me.

  That night, while the new pope was addressing a crowd—a throng—of 250,000 in nine different languages (Latin, Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Russian), Paul and I walked along the Janiculum, looking down at the city and up at the stars.

  “It’s hard to believe,” Paul said, “that Rome is at about the same latitude as Galesburg, so if we were in Galesburg we’d be looking up at the same night sky. Well, in another six hours.”

  “I took Professor’s Lynch’s astronomy course,” I said.

  “Right,” he said, and we both looked up at Boötes the Herdsman, my first constellation except for Orion and the Big Dipper. And beneath Boötes, Virgo, and the Coma Berenices, all of them sinking down into the Tyrrhenian Sea in the west.

  I did not go to confession again in Santa Maria in Trastevere. In fact, I was pregnant when I flew back to Chicago. It was too early to be sure, but in my heart I knew that Paul had planted his seed.

  I didn’t go to confession again, at least not a proper confession, for many, many years. But I’ve never forgotten what it was like to be free from sin. If only for a couple of weeks. It’s a great feeling, but it doesn’t convulse the entire being.

  3

  The Blessing (October 1964)

  As far as Ma was concerned, the world was coming to an end. At least her world was coming to an end, winding down. Our first Catholic president had been assassinated exactly one year earlier; Vatican II had thrown the church into turmoil; my mother’s fears about the importance of fasting on Fridays were coming true; and “Dominique,” a song by the Singing Nun, had been replaced in the number one spot on the charts by “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Elvis Presley had been bad enough, and now the Beatles, who had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, were coming up behind him. By April they dominated the charts. In another three weeks—on Monday, November 23, to be exact—Latin would cease to be the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. And finally: her only daughter had disgraced the family by having a baby out of wedlock.

  Baby Stella had been born in March. Paul and I weren’t married at the time, not till his divorce was final. And then we were married before a justice of the peace, not by Father Gordon in Saint Clement’s. So as far as my mother was concerned, we weren’t married at all. (Of course, in my mother’s eyes Paul hadn’t been married in the first place, since he wasn’t a Catholic.)

  I’d spoken to Ma a couple of times on the telephone, but we hadn’t been out to the farm, and they hadn’t seen baby Stella, who was now seven months old. So when my father called to see if Paul would like to help slaughter a hog, I thought “truce,” or at least an invitation to negotiate a truce. But it was also a test. Was Paul up to slaughtering a hog? I wasn’t sure. I let him talk to Pa on the phone, so Pa could issue the invitation in person.

  We were still living in the house on Chambers Street, which was up for sale. Paul’s wife, his ex-wife, Elaine, was rich but not vindictive. Illinois was not a no-fault state, so she had to sue on grounds of adultery. Paul did not contest, of course, so there was no problem, but the court wanted some names and dates—proof—and I was named as co-respondent, the współpozwany.

  I was taking classes at the college to fulfill the state education requirements. I was hoping to take over the Latin program at the high school when Miss Buckholdt, my old teacher, retired. I’d been one of her star pupils and she’d been happy that I was going to Loyola. Then d
isappointed, of course. She was the one who’d interested me in the spoken Latin program in Rome. She’d always wanted to try it herself, and maybe she would once she retired.

  The weather was cold, but not too cold. The hog weighed almost two hundred fifty pounds, a little heavier than usual because we were slaughtering late. It was a Canadian Lacombe gilt that my father favored. Next year we’d slaughter a Berkshire. My uncle’s preference. One hog a year for the two families.

  Ma and my aunt Klaudia were cooking pierogis in the kitchen and canning cherries at the same time. I said a few words in Polish to Izabella, the exchange student who was helping her. I didn’t know much Polish, and she answered me in perfect English. She was on the swim team at the high school, so she had to be driven into the YMCA, where the swim team practiced, every morning at five, which was when the team practiced. Ma didn’t drive and didn’t want to learn, which was very inconvenient out on the farm. She didn’t care. She went shopping with my aunt once a week. My cousin Jerzy loved to drive and my father had bought him a car so he could drive Ma around, but now he lived in Boston. Another cousin, Michal, who lived on the next farm, drove Izabella in to swim practice every morning in the car, a Studebaker. The top looked like the tower of a submarine. He was in love with her. He was big and strong, good looking, too, but too shy to put himself forward.

  The cherries were in jars in a pressure cooker on the stove. More jars were being sterilized in a steam bath on the woodstove on the porch. When you opened the kitchen door you could feel the heat.

  Paul sat at the table, drinking a glass of warm buttermilk that my mother had forced on him, listening to Aunt Klaudia, who was holding the baby and explaining the difference between hot pack and raw pack. Ma preferred hot pack; Aunt Klaudia preferred raw pack. So they took turns, hot pack one year, raw pack the next, just the way Pa and my uncle took turns with the hogs, Canadian Lacombe gilt one year, Berkshire the next. I sat next to Paul. He offered me some of his buttermilk, but I shook my head.

  “If you’d gone to mass yesterday,” Ma said to me, “you’d have heard Father Gordon say it in Latin. Three more weeks and it’s gone.” She cut her throat with her finger.

  “The old Tridentine mass,” Paul said. “It goes back a long way.”

  “You see,” Ma said, looking at me, “he knows more about it than you do.”

  “Father Gordon doesn’t really know Latin anyway,” I said. “He’s just memorized it. Like a parrot.”

  “Aren’t you Miss Smarty Pants,” Ma said. “Who hasn’t been to mass for how many years?”

  Paul said, “They’ve been preparing for this for a long time now, but I’m afraid they haven’t done a very good job. A lot of misinformation, confusion.”

  Ma poured some more warm buttermilk into Paul’s glass. “I know,” she said. “We been getting all these instructions about the responses. We have to say one thing instead of another, ‘The Lord be with you’ instead of ‘Dominus vobiscum.’ ‘And also with you’ instead of ‘et cum spiritu tuo.’” Aunt Klaudia welcomed the switch to English, but Ma had no stomach for changes in the liturgy.

  The buttermilk was a kind of test, though I don’t think Ma realized it. She made all my boyfriends drink warm buttermilk. She couldn’t understand how anyone could drink it cold, right out of the refrigerator. I had to laugh. Paul didn’t like milk in any form. He even put orange juice on his cereal. But he drank the buttermilk.

  “I think it’s nice,” my aunt said, “for everybody to know what’s going on. We have to go with the times. Nobody understands Latin anyway. Except Frances. And maybe you, Paul.”

  This was the first time one of the women had uttered his name.

  “You don’t just throw out the old ways,” Ma said. “Everybody in the world hears the same words. Gets the same blessings. Now they want to change all that.” She paused. “The Pope can go to hell if he wants to, that’s his business—”

  “But you’re not serving meat on Friday,” I finished the sentence for her.

  “It’s good to suffer a little bit once a week,” Ma said. “To remind you of somebody else’s suffering. Next they’ll be saying it’s okay for the priests to get married.” She crossed herself.

  “Eating fish is not suffering,” I said.

  “You had to love the pope,” Aunt Klaudia said. “The old pope. Pope John.”

  “He was a nice man,” Ma said, “but he made a lot of problems for everybody.”

  “He started Vatican Two,” I said.

  “Vatican Two,” she said. “What about Vatican One? Tell me what was Vatican One? Does anybody remember Vatican One?”

  “That was more than a hundred years ago,” Paul said.

  “You see, Franny,” Ma said (again), “your husband knows more than you do, and he’s not even a Catholic.”

  “Ma, he just looked up all this stuff in the Columbia Encyclopedia to impress you.”

  “Well, it’s nice that he went to all that trouble.”

  Baby Stella started to cry. “See, Ma,” I said, “you’re upsetting the baby.”

  Pa got out a bottle of potato schnapps. “Here,” he said, “rub a little of this on her gums.”

  “Put that away,” Ma said. “Give her to me, I’ll change her diapers.”

  “Ma, sit, sit. I’ll change her. Where’s the diaper bag?”

  “It’s on the couch,” Ma said, picking up the baby and going off into the living room, which was right off the kitchen. I could hear her singing in Polish, a song that she used to sing to me. I could remember the words, but not what they meant:

  A la la Kotki dwa

  Szary bury oby dwa

  la la Tatusiu

  Tru la lu la lu

  When my uncle, who’d gone into town to get a new rope for the block and tackle, returned, Pa got out the bottle of schnapps again. It was part of the drill.

  The pierogis were cooling on a tray on top of the stove, where the dog, an old Norwegian elkhound, couldn’t get at them.

  Either my uncle was growing a beard or he just hadn’t shaved for several days. “So you’re the new husband,” he said, looking at Paul. His voice was raspy. “The new helper.” He looked at me. “And this is the baby.” Ma was standing in the doorway to the living room, baby Stella over her shoulder.

  The conversation, which had been awkward, turned to food—always safe. My uncle ate a pierogi. “You buy these at the A and P?”

  “Get away with you.”

  “Klaudia buys them frozen, don’t you?”

  “One time I try, that’s all. You going to kill that hog or we should go home.”

  Pa filled three shot glasses and handed one to my uncle and one to Paul. This was another test, not as difficult as the warm buttermilk.

  “Na zdrowie!” my uncle said. To health!

  “Na zdrowie!” Pa said.

  “Na zdrowie!” Paul said.

  And then they tossed back the shots.

  We’d managed to avoid the question that was on everyone’s mind. At least on Ma’s mind. Is this a valid marriage? And, what attitude should we take toward it? And, is there any point in talking about it to Father Gordon at Saint Clement’s?

  But I knew that the question was already moot.

  Paul and Pa and my uncle went out to slaughter the hog. It was an important occasion. Time for man talk. It was a mystery. Pa would have something to say to Paul. Threaten him? Probably not. That was my mother’s department. Probably tell him that he’d better take good care of me. I see them stop. Facing each other. I can almost hear their voices. But not quite. But I can see that they’re laughing.

  “So. This new husband of yours,” my aunt said. “He looking after you?”

  “I don’t need anyone to look after me.”

  My mother put her fingers under her eyes and pulled. It made her look like my grandmother, who used to wear a red ribbon as protection against the evil eye. I thought I might need a red ribbon before the day was over.

  “I heard he does all the co
oking.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “At Pete’s market.”

  “Why’d you go to Pete’s?”

  “They had lingonberries on sale.”

  “You didn’t call me?” Ma said.

  I watched through the window as my uncle threaded the new rope through the block and tackle and attached it to the pulleys. Paul and Pa and my cousin Michal—who was in love with Izabella—had gone to get the hog, which they would hang from a tree limb. A fifty-five-gallon oil drum full of boiling water sat on a piece of cattle panel laid over a charcoal fire. I could see the men talking. Paul was doing fine so far. He knew how to talk to my parents, not saying too much, but not bashful either. He was wearing a flannel shirt. Old. Just right for the occasion. I’d never seen it before. He’d been talking to our neighbor on Chambers Street, Willie, who ran the M&W Meat Market downtown, getting some tips on slaughtering. This was the sort of thing he loved, the sort of thing he thought of as “real life.”

  I went outside with my camera to take a picture as Paul and Pa led the hog up from the sty, the pen, like the heifer in the Keats poem. The sty, which was next to the barn where the driveway forks, was always kept clean. Pigs are clean. The hog had his own toilet area in one corner and a wallow in another. My uncle tested the water three times. Flicked the water off.

  The three men and Michal stood around the drum, talking, my uncle holding onto the rope around the hog. Pa handed his pistol to Paul. A long-barrel Colt .38 that I’d learned to shoot with, over Ma’s loud objections.

  After some more discussion Paul placed the pistol at the hog’s ear. The hog knew something was going on and wouldn’t stand still. You have to be careful.

  I took a picture and the hog looked up at me. Paul pulled the trigger. I took another picture. The hog went down slowly. Good for Paul. I’d seen it take as many as three shots. The body convulsed on the way down. I looked away as my uncle slit its throat. Then I took another picture as they tied the back legs together. It took all four of them to drag the hog up to the tree by the back porch and hoist it up with the block and tackle over a sturdy limb. Pa put a clean pail under the hog to catch the blood. For blood sausage. My uncle cut it open, and Michal was elected to pull the guts out and bury them so the dog wouldn’t get at them.