The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “Saffron?”

  “No,” she laughed. “Saffica as in Sappho.”

  “Oh,” I said, and allowed myself to slip into her happiness without asking any more questions. “Let’s put this moment in italics,” I said, thinking the conversation was over. Thinking that we’d said enough.

  Ruthy came back on Friday night and on Saturday morning the three of us walked over to Saint Clement’s for a little ceremony.

  Father Viglietti was waiting for us in the side chapel. We sat on folding chairs that had been set up in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  “Our help is in the name of the Lord,” Father Viglietti said, and Stella and Ruthy crossed themselves. I felt an involuntary twitch in my arm. Bodily memory.

  “Who made heaven and earth,” they said. I hadn’t been looking at the printed sheet Father Viglietti had prepared for us. I glanced over my shoulder at the closet-confessionals at the back of the nave, and then back at the program: Romans 8:26–31—If God is for us, who can be against us?

  Father Viglietti concluded with a blessing: “Lord, God of all creation, we bless and thank you for your tender care. Receive this life you created in love, and comfort your faithful people in their time of loss with the assurance of your unfailing mercy.

  “We ask this through Christ our Lord.”

  “Amen.“

  Father Viglietti sprinkled Stella with holy water.

  “May God be with you in your sorrow, and give you light and peace.”

  “Amen.”

  What had just happened, I wondered? What had been externalized, put into words, given a habitation and a name?

  Father Viglietti came for supper. Stella peeled four giant artichokes, the way Paul had taught her. Bending the leaves back and snapping them off, trimming off the green outer layer, scooping out the choke, slicing them into quarter-inch wedges that she sautéed in olive oil and garlic, then a splash of balsamic vinegar, then white wine. She and Ruthy and Father Viglietti talked all the time, and it was a pleasure for me to see the girls so animated, so focused on Father Viglietti. A handsome man. And I remembered Paul flirting with the nun in Rome, Sister Teresa. The one who taught Latin at a liceo in Florence. I see now that he did it to make me jealous, and it worked.

  Father Viglietti never defended the Church. But he never apologized, either. He just listened.

  “It’s the beginning of a journey,” Stella said.

  “For you or for the Church?” I said.

  “Both. But I think we’ve got a head start on the Church.”

  Father Viglietti asked Stella if she’d talked to Pope John Paul lately.

  “No,” she said, “and he’s Polish.”

  “Do you speak Polish?’

  “Just a few words that I picked up by accident. My grandparents spoke Polish to each other, but I never learned. If I knew Polish I could talk to the pope.”

  “I think his English is pretty good.”

  I was happy to see them so engaged, to listen to them talk about an upcoming convention in Boston, about a meeting between a group called Dignity and Cardinal John O’Connor in New York, about a poll conducted by the National Catholic Reporter, in 1996, that revealed that most U.S. Roman Catholics support full rights for homosexuals in the Church, including the right to marry. About a proposed rewording of the catechism.

  “We’re coming on strong,” Ruthy said.

  “Come the revolution,” Stella said, “and I’m the commissar.”

  Father Viglietti laughed.

  I thought once again of my early experiments with Lois while we were waiting for life to begin. Hard to imagine now. Hard to remember. These memories were like shadows. Lois and I never spoke of them, never brought them into the light. When we died, they would disappear with us. In those days you couldn’t have a man in your room. I’d pushed these experiments out of my imagination, out of my working memory. But now they came popping into mind, like distant but familiar stars as you start to get your night vision.

  On Sunday morning, when Stella and Ruthy returned from mass, Stella and I and Camilla walked back to the cemetery for some mother-daughter bonding. Once again I felt I was intruding on a sacred space. Paul’s grave. Stella broke down. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t terrible, and I suppose it was what I’d been waiting for, just being near her and knowing that she was going to be okay.

  “It’s just you and me, Ma,” she said. “Right now, I mean.” We’d been alone together for several days, but there were still things that had to be said.

  “And the dog.”

  “You should have called her Lesbia. That was Catullus’s girlfriend, wasn’t it?” I stooped to pet Camilla and unfasten her leash. She ran off to stretch her legs.

  “It’s good to have you home,” I said. “We can repaint your room, if you’d like, clean out the closet.”

  “I’m not staying, I can’t stay, Ma.”

  “You’re going with Ruthy?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I was hoping . . . I was hoping you could stay for a while. Maybe till the first anniversary of your dad’s death. In September. Lois says that the spirit of the dead person sometimes comes back on the anniversary of his death. Wouldn’t you want to be here for that?”

  “Ma, you can’t believe that. Lois? That’s crazy, Ma. I’m surprised at you.”

  “You never know.”

  “Yes you do. You know that’s nonsense. Consider the source.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m thirty-three years old, Ma. I can’t come back home.”

  “You could if you wanted to,” I said, but I knew she was right. The only thing worse than having her leave would be having her stay.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to take it easy for a while, then maybe waitress at the truck stop for a while. Ruthy’s the manager, you know. She’s got a business degree from the Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Till Ruthy gets her commercial driver’s license. Then we’ll start driving as a team. Maybe for Tommy. We’ll be okay.”

  I knew better than to ask if she was writing any poetry. But I blurted out the last lines of the poem on the refrigerator. “‘I didn’t know where he was going, but I was going to find out.’ You find out?”

  She laughed. “It’s not where he thought he was ‘going,’” she said, and then she said, “Ma, I’m sorry for everything.” She started to go on, but I interrupted her.

  “You don’t need to explain,” I said.

  “That’s as close as you’re going to get to an apology,” she said. “I’m ashamed, and I’m ashamed of being ashamed, and there’s nothing I can do about it, nothing you can do about it. I don’t know how you can stand having me around.” She squeezed her eyes closed and I realized she was on the edge of tears.

  “You’re my daughter, Stella. I love you. But I’m glad you’re sorry,” I said, “because now I can stop worrying about you.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me, Ma,” she said. “Not any more. It’s my turn to worry about you!”

  “Me?”

  “What are you going to do with yourself?”

  “I’m going to think about all the good times, all the happy times. All the stories. All the Christmases, all the Thanksgivings, all the Halloween costumes. They’re in a box in the garage. The photos, I mean. Remember when you came to Verona and went dancing with the landlady’s son, and we ate horse in the Caffè Romeo e Giulietta, and the landlady’s brother gave you that stone-age flint knife he made himself, and the way he started a fire with chips he shaved off a prehistoric petrified mushroom? And we walked all the way to Porta San Zeno and found the sycamore trees from the first scene in Romeo and Juliet? I still have a pile of offprints of the article Pa wrote about them, proving that Shakespeare actually went to Italy, but no one paid any attention to it. You’d think it would have made a big splash.
Pa was disappointed, but it doesn’t matter now, does it. I’d like to go back some time. Would you like to come?”

  “Don’t you get tired of remembering?”

  “Never,” I said.

  Stella and Ruthy left in the late afternoon, going back to Ottawa in Ruthy’s pickup. There were so many partings to remember: Stella going off to Knox, which was only half a mile away; Stella driving off to Iowa City in the VW bug that we bought for her so she could live out in the country, with a group of poets. Then taking off for New York with the fiction writer, without telling us. Driving off with Jimmy in Paul’s car.

  Maybe I was tired of remembering, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  10

  Colloquia (July–October 1997)

  Tommy called. More than once. I put him off. What could I do? I saw him in Milwaukee when I was helping Stella and Ruthy move into their new apartment. We cleaned and painted and bought some furniture at Goodwill. They both had commercial driver’s licenses now and were going to be driving for Tommy. It was a two-bedroom apartment on Farwell with a decent kitchen. Farwell runs parallel to Prospect, but has a very different feel, a big city–small city feel. Lined with shops and three-story walkups.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Tommy said. We were in the kitchen. This was a conversation I didn’t want to have.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I said. “I’m ashamed.”

  “You should be ashamed,” he said. “First you put me at ease, and now you won’t give me the time of day. And for no reason. Well, I suppose you had your reasons. But after Norma, I thought . . . And not one word of explanation. That’s what I don’t understand. Not one word! What were you thinking?”

  “If things had been different . . .”

  “You mean Jimmy being killed?”

  I nodded.

  “And the baby,” he said. “Maybe if Stella’d had the baby everything would have turned out okay. Between her and Jimmy, I mean.”

  “It was a terrible thing.”

  “I’m glad she found somebody else,” he said.

  “You’re not bothered?”

  “My sister . . .” He shook his head. “Per niente.”

  “That’s not what you were about to say.”

  “I don’t know what I was about to say. I know it was a terrible thing, but I didn’t push Stella out of the truck, Frances. That’s what I don’t understand. You act like I pushed her. It don’t make sense. Non fa senso.”

  I was too embarrassed to say anything.

  “Mi dica,” he said. “Talk to me, Frances. Tell me what went wrong. You don’t know how many times I’ve been over it in my own mind. Norma. Dinner at Spiaggia. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get reservations. They were harder to get than the tickets for Norma. Didn’t we have a good time? Didn’t June Anderson do a wonderful job? You know, the critics were a little bit lukewarm about the first performance, but that was at the beginning of February, and it was her first Norma. By the end of the season she had it down perfectly. Well, you were there. You heard her. And now she’ll be doing it everywhere. All over the world. She’s put her mark on it.”

  “I heard her, Tommy. It was beautiful. I got out Paul’s old Scribner Music Library and played through ‘Casta Diva’ on the piano. And I listened to it on a CD. Joan Sutherland. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Let me be blunt, Frances. Some things a person doesn’t like to say or hear out loud. But I got to say it anyway. Why humiliate me? After we’re together in the Palmer House with all those fancy pillows on the bed. Two old people, but pretty good. Maybe not for you. What do I know? Who knows anything about women? And then? That night after Jimmy was dead. After the vigil. You could have stayed with me that night. Maybe I was out of line, but you saw how much I needed you to hold me, and you walked away.”

  “I’m sorry, Tommy.”

  “Like I said, you don’t owe me anything. Except maybe one thing: an explanation. You decided you don’t like me? I can accept. You don’t enjoy being in my company? I can accept. You got another man? I can accept. You don’t want to come to Italy with me and your daughter and her friend? That’s harder, but I can accept. But you won’t explain yourself, you won’t talk to me. That I can’t accept. Most people live in fear, their lives are shaped by fear—fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of dying, fear of living. What are you afraid of, Frances?”

  “I can’t explain, Tommy, because I don’t understand myself.” Or maybe I just didn’t want to explain. Maybe I just didn’t want to know what would happen if I confessed, told him I’d killed Jimmy.

  Sitting in a pew at Saint Clement’s, on the corner of Prairie and South, I was contemplating a new board game—The Roman Republic—that I thought might be useful in the oversubscribed Roman Civ. class that Father Viglietti and I were going to team teach in the fall. It was Saturday afternoon. I was waiting for Father Viglietti, who was hearing confessions. The line was long. Well, longish. Longer than usual. But not as long as when I was a kid. I was a senior in high school when I made my last confession at Saint Clement’s. Pa would bring me in, and Ma. Sometimes they’d go to confession too. What could they have had to confess, I wondered at the time. I still wonder about people’s sins. Some sinners were sitting in pews or kneeling; others had lined up in the center aisle. They all looked so ordinary you had to wonder. A couple of men in overalls, one with purplish lips, one with a blond toupee. A large woman in a cotton housedress. A mother and father team with two sullen teenage sons, a farm family (I guessed). A handful of students from the college. A little girl on her own in a yellow jumper, her short blonde hair in a pixie cut. Surely no great sins here waiting to be confessed. No interesting sins. I couldn’t imagine that God had any special plans in mind for this lot.

  I looked back at The Roman Republic. It was a pretty hefty box, big enough to hold three or four Monopoly games. I hadn’t opened it yet. On the cover: a picture of a Roman general in a purple and gold toga, striding forward wearing the sort of military helmet the president wears in the Doonesbury cartoons on my bulletin board. I was anxious to try it out, anxious to get back into the classroom after the long summer.

  I checked the line. It wasn’t moving. Someone was taking a long time in the confessional, which was nothing fancy, just a closet in the back of the nave. Three closets. The center one for the priest, the side ones for the confessants. But I was startled, because this time—maybe it was that the light had shifted slightly—all the people seemed vitally alive, full of life, the purple lips shining like garnets, the blond toupee like a flash of sunlight, the patterns on the woman’s housedress like stars in the sky, the teenage boys like Greek kouroi, the college students like wandering mendicants in their slashed jeans and jagged shirts. And I was thinking that they’d have some interesting stories to tell, that God could have some fun with them.

  I was trying to loosen the top of the box that held The Roman Republic, which was more than three inches deep, when I heard a voice behind me. Curious. Neither male nor female: “Vidi quod feceris, et scio quis sis.” I saw what you did and I know who you are.

  I started to turn.

  “Et noli versari,” the voice said. “Nihil non videbis.” Don’t turn around, you won’t see anything at all.

  I realized that the voice was speaking in Latin. I thought it must be Father Viglietti, the only other person in town, as far as I knew, who spoke Latin. We’d both taken Father Adrian’s spoken Latin course in Rome, though not at the same time, and we always spoke Latin when we got together on Saturday afternoons, and in front of the students, who seemed to think it was some kind of parlor trick.

  I turned around, but I didn’t see anything.

  Whoever it was was using the classical pronunciation, not the ecclesiastical pronunciation we learned in Rome, which is closer to Italian—“she-o” rather than “skio.”

  “Sta in acie,” the voice said. Get in line.

  “I’ve no intention of getting in line” I said
, in Latin.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for Father Viglietti. We’re going for a drink. And to talk about The Roman Republic. It’s a board game. I thought we could use it in our Roman Civ. class.”

  “Too complicated,” the voice said. “Seventy-five percent of the rules don’t really apply to anything, and the board itself doesn’t serve much purpose, and Roman numerals on the coins . . . Come on. Cute, but they make it hard to add and subtract.”

  “I like Roman numerals,” I said.

  “Turn the game over to the students. They’ll figure it out.” I looked down at the box in my lap. “He’s a whiskey priest, you know. Potentially. You shouldn’t encourage him.”

  “Father Viglietti?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s one of my oldest friends.”

  “Frankeska, the police may have forgotten what you did, but I haven’t. I saw what you did.”

  “And you know who I am.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I think I know who you are.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than hang around Saint Clement’s on a Saturday afternoon?”

  “I have a lot of things to do. Do you have any idea how many galaxies there are, just in the visible universe?”

  “No idea.”

  “Over one hundred twenty-five billion.”

  “And I suppose you have to look after each one?”

  “And that’s only on this side of the visual horizon. You know, the universe is expanding so fast that the light from the oldest galaxies can’t travel fast enough to reach Earth. So you’ll never see them.”

  “But you can see them?”

  “Yes, I can see them,”

  “Probe tibi,” I said. Bully for you. “And you have to keep them all running?”

  “It’s like trying to regulate a piano and keep it in tune, keeping the four basic forces constant, for example.”

  “I thought they just ran by themselves.”

  “Yes and no. It’s like concert pitch. It’s varied over the years, you know, and it varies from one ensemble to another. But not too much. If the strong nuclear force were two percent stronger, for example, then hydrogen would fuse into diprotons instead of deuterium and helium. The physics of matter would be radically different. You’d have a preponderance of heavy elements; you’d run out of carbon. You’d have to revise the Periodic Table. Or rather, I would. Life as you know it would be impossible.”