The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “Two pi r,” I said. “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Now walk out another hundred meters and make another circle. Counting the trees.”

  “Okay.”

  “You should have twice as many trees in your circle, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t have to guess. The radius is twice as long, so the circumference will be twice as long. If you’re standing on a flat surface. That’s how you know you’re standing on a flat surface. If you’re standing on a curved surface—the top of a hill, or in the bottom of a valley—the circumference of the second circle will be more than twice the length of the circumference of the first circle. Now you can do the same thing with the stars. Pick a point, any point. Go out a hundred million light years, make a circle on an imaginary plane, and count the stars in your circle. Do it again, two hundred million light years. Make a circle and count the stars. If you’ve got twice as many stars in your second circle as in the first, then you know that space is flat.”

  “Don’t you have to assume that the stars are equally spaced?”

  “You don’t have to assume it. I’m telling you they are equally spaced.”

  To tell you the truth, I found this information very satisfying. I never liked the idea that space, or space-time, was curved. But God always brought the colloquium back to Jimmy, back to natural law and human nature, Aristotle’s conception of nature, the Stoic elaboration of natural law theory, the Thomistic synthesis, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, the problems inherent in cultural relativism.

  “You’ve read Cicero’s De Officiis,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “His son was off in Athens with a huge allowance, but he was drinking and carousing instead of studying. Cicero was trying to put him on the right track. That’s what I’m trying to do with you. What’s morally wrong can never be expedient. When the Republic needed Cicero to come back from exile, he came back. He condemned Marc Antony, right? And Antony had him killed. Whose side are you on, Cicero’s or Antony’s? I always thought you were a Stoic.”

  “The Stoics didn’t go to confession.”

  “No? What about Seneca and Cicero? They reviewed their faults systematically in the presence of a respected philosopher. Now get in line,” he said. “We’re running out of time. I’m running out of patience.”

  I was starting to weaken. I’d always admired Cicero. The founding fathers had all admired Cicero. But why didn’t he accept Caesar’s offer of a job? He might have made a difference.

  “Get in line,” God said.

  “The little girl isn’t here today,” I said. “Maybe she’s run out of sins.”

  “Nobody runs out of sins,” God said. “She’s on vacation with her family. Now get in line.”

  But there was no line, and Father Viglietti was coming out of the center closet. I was sure he was as thirsty as I was.

  God and I remained on more or less friendly terms till the end of the summer, and God even offered practical advice—before doing what tyrants always do, that is, resorting to threats.

  Regarding The Roman Republic, for example. “Stick to the first scenario, the Punic Wars, so that it won’t take ten hours. And don’t try it with just you and Father Viglietti. You need at least four people, five or six is better . . .”

  And my translation of Catullus: “Keep working on it. Work on it every day. Do the marriage poems first; get them out of the way. Save the epigrams for last. Before you know it you’ll be done. Don’t waste your time sending it to any of the big publishing houses; go to the small presses, that’s where the action is anyway. Send it to Hausmann Books in Brooklyn, they’ve got an editor who knows her Latin. On the phone she sounds like a young girl, but actually she’s about your age. They won’t send you on a book tour, and they won’t offer you much money, but they’ll do a nice job.”

  “Will you write a blurb for me?”

  He laughed. “And if you want to see 3C 273 you’re going to need a bigger telescope. At least an eight-inch. A ten-inch would be better, but it would be too heavy to lug around. The eight-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain is probably a little better than the Meade, but I’d recommend the Meade because the manual is much easier to understand. With the built-in computer and the GPS all you have to do is tell it what you want to see and it will point right at it.”

  He warned me about a coming recession and advised me to get out of the market and buy gold before the dot.com bubble burst. “You’ve got fifty thousand dollars left from the sale of the house. Tell your broker at A. G. Edwards to put it in gold.”

  He told me to warn the mayor that Maytag, Galesburg’s largest employer, was going to pull out. Despite all the promises.

  “Why don’t you warn him?” I asked.

  “I have.”

  “Do you give everybody these warnings?”

  “Everybody. In one way or another.”

  “Bill Clinton too?”

  “I told him to keep it in his pants.”

  “He didn’t listen.”

  “Nobody listens.”

  “Any more advice for me?”

  “If you sold that car in the garage you could buy back your old piano. And you could afford a good telescope.”

  I didn’t want to deal with the car. “My neighbor Lois says that the dead return on the anniversary of their death to say good-bye.”

  “She picked up that nugget at the funeral home,” God said. “It happens, though. Not often, but it happens.”

  “Paul?”

  “If I were you I’d wait for him in Verona, not Galesburg. That way you could go to the Biblioteca Capitolare and have a look at the Catullus codex. It won’t be that useful. It’s already corrupt. But it would be quite a coup to find it.”

  “I can’t go to Verona in October,” I said, “I have to teach.”

  “You could go,” he said. “Take some time off. They can find a substitute. Father Viglietti would take your classes if you asked him.”

  “I couldn’t do that. He’s already doing an extra section of Latin 3. And he’s got too much to do. The new curate doesn’t speak English. Or Latin. He’s got the Fall Fest to prepare for . . .”

  “You can shoot someone in cold blood, but you can’t ask for some time off?”

  “Please.”

  “Father Viglietti’s not going to be around forever, you know. The Clementines are starting to flex their muscles in Rome. They’ll be looking for men like Father Viglietti.”

  “I guess that would be a good move for him,” I said.

  “He likes it here,” God said. “He doesn’t have the stomach for Vatican politics.”

  “Should I warn him?”

  “He’s aware of the danger,” God said. “But Frankeska, time is running out. You need to get things sorted out before school starts.”

  “If I confessed to Father Viglietti,” I said, “wouldn’t he have to tell me to go to the police?”

  “Of course he would.”

  “Then I couldn’t go to Verona, could I? And I wouldn’t be able to teach in the fall, either.”

  “Frankeska,” he said, “you still think that because you’ve fooled the police you can fool me?”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “More of a warning.”

  “You’re going to tip off the police?”

  “I might. I might tell them where to find the gun.”

  “The police returned my gun. It’s in the drawer of the little table by my bed.”

  “Frankeska, don’t play games with me. The other gun. The one you used to shoot Jimmy.”

  “That gun is at the bottom of the Mississippi River. Probably halfway to New Orleans by now.”

  “I know exactly where it is. And it’s not halfway to anywhere. The long barrel makes that gun fairly heavy; it sank right into the sediment. It’s right where you dropped it. It might move downstream in a big flood. But not down to New Orleans. There will be a high crest in 2002. The gun will stay put till then. So what’s it going t
o be?”

  I didn’t say anything. Nothing at all. Just closed my eyes and waited in silence for Father Viglietti.

  “Quomodo agis?” I said when I heard him finally emerge from the confessional and heard his footsteps in the aisle. How you doing?

  “Paratus bibere,” he replied. Ready for a drink.

  “Me quoque,” I said. Me too.

  Three days later I got a call from Detective Landstreet. “If we were to drag the river right below the Centennial Bridge, what would we find?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “If I were to come to your house and ask to see your .38 again, could you put your hands on it?”

  “Still in the drawer of the table by my bed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Look, Detective Landstreet, you already checked the gun. You still can’t believe in coincidences?”

  “No, I can’t. You see, we got an anonymous phone call telling us to dredge the river west of the bridge. It would be a bit of an investment. Divers, a boat, a lot of time, a lot of things to consider. So I just want to make sure we can put our hands on your .38 again if we need to.”

  “You took my gun before. You kept it for two weeks. What do you think could have happened to it?”

  “Would you please check?”

  “You want me to look in the bedside table?”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  I got the gun. Bedside table drawer. “It’s here,” I said. “You want me to hold it up to the phone?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Just read me the serial number again.”

  I read the serial number. “Go ahead and dredge. You may find a gun, but you won’t find my gun.”

  What was he doing? What was he thinking? He’d already seen my gun. He knew it couldn’t possibly be at the bottom of the Mississippi. I suppose he was simply reminding me that I was still in the frame.

  I was annoyed with God. I didn’t buy gold, but I tracked down my former student, Alan Teitlebaum, at Princeton, and told him to take the offer from Carnegie-Mellon.

  “Mrs. Godwin,” he said, “Why would I do that? I just got married. And how did you know about the offer anyway?”

  “You haven’t bought a house, have you?”

  “In Princeton? Are you kidding?”

  “Then what’s stopping you?”

  “I’m a Spitzer Fellow, Mrs. Godwin. I don’t want to move to Pittsburgh. I don’t understand . . .”

  I tried to explain, but I simply didn’t understand it well enough, didn’t understand what God meant by “baryonic oscillations.”

  I went to the mayor’s office in City Hall to warn him about Maytag. I’d met him once or twice, and he knew who I was, or appeared to know. He appreciated my concern. “We’ve given Maytag everything they asked for,” he said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  “Then they’re lying through their teeth,” I said.

  I talked to my broker at A. G. Edwards where we had a little money, about fifty thousand dollars, from the sale of the house.

  “Gold?” he said. “HA HA HA.”

  At our next colloquium I went on the attack: “Pol Pot, Laurent Kabila, Milosevic. Why not go after them?”

  ”You need to worry about yourself,” he said. “Let me worry about Pol Pot and the others.”

  The more God hammered away, the more I stiffened my back. But the argument was running out of steam.

  “They might decide to drag the river after all, or the woman from the rest area might turn up. The one with the white border collie.”

  “I can’t believe you,” I said.

  “You need to put everything behind you except the most important thing. Now get in line. Clean out your attic.”

  “That’s what my mother used to say: Clean out your attic.”

  “Your mother knew what she was talking about.”

  At the end of August Detective Landstreet turned up the woman with the dog whom I’d met in the rest area near Ottawa. He called and said he wanted me to drive up to Ottawa to be in a lineup.

  “Excuse me,” I told him, “Are you crazy? I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “This is a pre-indictment lineup,” he said. “You don’t have the right to an attorney unless you’ve been indicted.”

  “Whoa,” I said and hung up.

  I called David. He laughed, but he also asked, “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “David,” I said, “do I have to go up to Ottawa and stand in a line-up?”

  “Of course not. It’s been eight weeks since that kid was killed.”

  “Jimmy Gagg,” I said.

  “A lineup would have to take place shortly after the crime. There’s no way the prosecutor would go for it now. Just sit tight. You don’t have to do anything and the detective knows it.”

  Detective Landstreet did not call back, but my relationship with God had gone sour. I was furious. The next Saturday I confronted him, and I didn’t mince words. I called him a canis feminae filius (a son of a bitch) and told him his universe was more like a Rube Goldberg machine than an instrument of precision. I told him that nothing matched up, that none of the cycles were in synch, that if it were a clock, it wouldn’t keep good time, that if it were a piano, it would be out of tune. I told him that his music of the spheres sounded more like a gigantic wet fart than heavenly harmony.

  God didn’t mince words either. He even quoted Catullus 43 at me, insulting my nose, my feet, my fingers, my mouth, my appearance in general, and even—and this is what burned me up, got my goat, ruffled my feathers—my command of spoken Latin. “Nec sane nimis elegante lingua,” he declared. He really was a canis feminae filius.

  I did not darken the door of Saint Clement’s again for almost ten years. I continued to have a drink with Father Viglietti on Saturday afternoons, but I waited for him in the Seminary Street Pub.

  I did not go to Verona to wait for Paul on the first anniversary of his death. I stayed right in Galesburg, though I mentioned to Lois that I’d thought about going.

  “Why would you expect him to show up in Verona?” she asked.

  “Because that’s where we were happy. We were as happy as any two people have ever been happy. Stella too. She was between boyfriends.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “If you’re not here he might come over to my place.”

  “Lois, really.”

  That first anniversary, which fell on a Friday, I waited. Lois wanted to wait with me, but I wanted to be alone. I thought if I could just talk to Paul one more time . . .

  I fixed Paul’s favorite dinner: tortelloni from Hy-Vee and costolettine di agnello fritte—baby lamb chops in Parmesan cheese and egg batter—from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook. I set the table for two. I broke open a bottle of wine from Paul’s “cellar” in the guest room closet, and a bottle of expensive mineral water. Perrier. Paul liked it, though it didn’t taste any better than the cheap Hy-Vee seltzer, and he never noticed when I switched them on him.

  The wine was very special, a very expensive La Morra Barolo. I don’t know where Paul bought it, and he wouldn’t tell me how much he’d paid for it. But he’d been very excited about it, and I’d opened a bottle for him the week before he died. I thought it might draw his spirit back. I was not very knowledgeable myself. But this was a cru, not blended. There were five bottles left. Too bad he didn’t get to drink them all before he died. He wasn’t supposed to drink wine at all. That was one of the things we argued about.

  It was colored a vibrant deep red, and had an intense nose (smelled great).

  I spread out the tablecloth Paul had given me one Christmas, beautiful, but much too wide for our long (eight-foot), narrow (thirty-inch) table. I’d cut out a swath and resewn it, but the borders didn’t match at two of the mitered corners because I hadn’t cut it quite straight. That was not okay, but nothing could be done about it now.

  Two napkins, which I’d made out of the leftover material.

  I set everything out the
way Paul liked it: the jar of flake salt, the Magnum pepper grinder, the bottle of California olive oil (Paul said all the Italian oil was adulterated), balsamic vinegar straight from Modena.

  Paul had died in the morning. But I didn’t think he’d show up till suppertime. Maybe I was just postponing inevitable disappointment, but I wanted the whole day to anticipate.

  What was I expecting? Nothing really. Not a knock on the door, or the rattle of the front door, or footsteps in the long hallway. I don’t know, but something, anything.

  I sat down at the electronic piano and played through a couple of Chopin waltzes and picked out the melody of an old blues song. “Good and bad times, Honey, well that’s okay.”

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and everything was ready. I watched the minute hand on the old French clock touch the 3 and listened to the clock chime four. It had been an hour off since we’d moved and we’d never figured out how to reset the chimes. We tried various methods, but then the clock wouldn’t chime at all. For a while. And then it would start up again, still an hour off.

  The lamb chops I’d special ordered at Thrushwood Farms were ready to be prepped. The recipe said to ask the butcher to flatten the eye of the chops, but that American butchers wouldn’t do it. Maybe, maybe not. I forgot to ask. I could do it at home with a cleaver, but I didn’t know what this meant. Just flatten the chop? And I forgot to ask the butcher to knock off the corner bone and remove the backbone. Oh well.

  Now it was four o’clock.