The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  I took Camilla for a walk. I let her run in the park, and then I hooked her leash on and we walked through a small crowd at the depot. Police were there with a police dog, to intercept dope coming in to the prison from Chicago. Camilla saluted the police dog, a tan German shepherd, and we walked south along the tracks all the way to Cedar Street, then up to the Knox campus. Then home. It was five o’clock.

  I didn’t start supper till seven o’clock. I drank a glass of the Barolo as I attempted to cut just the ribs out of four lamb chops. I grated the Parmesan and spread it out on waxed paper. I put the chops on the grated Parmesan and turned them. I dipped them in the beaten egg and then in bread crumbs, checking the recipe at every step of the way.

  I poured a second glass of wine as I added the tortelloni to a pot of boiling water. I forgot the salt and had to add it at the last minute. Too many things were going on. Paul never had any trouble juggling four or five dishes, but I was getting a little confused.

  I drank my third glass as I ate the tortelloni and the fourth as I sautéed the lamb chops. The bottle was empty by the time I ate my salad, but I was still functioning.

  I managed to get the dishes in the dishwasher and wash the pans.

  I was glad Lois wasn’t with me. I didn’t want her to see me in this condition. I was still functioning, but not at one hundred percent. More like forty percent. Not that she would have minded. She would have enjoyed it, in fact.

  I hadn’t expected Paul to come, of course, but I’d hoped that something would happen in me, that I’d see something, or hear something. Like Creusa returning to say a few words to Aeneas, though Creusa didn’t wait till the first anniversary of her death. Something to ease the pain of the end of the preceding year. Seinfeld helped. We’d always rented VCRs at Family Video. I kept expecting to discover one I hadn’t seen before, but it never happened. I’d rented one for that night. It hadn’t been rewound all the way and started up in the middle of “The Pony Remark.” Paul and I both loved that episode, and out of the blue Paul might say, “I hef pony, my sister hef pony, my cousin hef pony.”

  I started the dishwasher and went to bed.

  I repeated this performance every year on the anniversary of Paul’s death. I got very good at telling the butcher what I wanted him to do with the lamb chops. After a few years I started making the tortelloni myself, rolling the dough out with the materello that Paul had bought in Verona. And stuffing them with pumpkin and Parmesan cheese, ground almonds, and nutmeg. I became an expert on baby lamb chops in Parmesan cheese and egg batter.

  Paul didn’t show up, of course. The dead, like the horizon, are forever beyond our reach.

  PART IV: 2005–2006

  11

  Ave Atque Vale (June–October 2005)

  Father Viglietti was reassigned to Rome at the end of the 2004–2005 school year. He was going to teach at the Clementine Pontifical Academy. The new American cardinal, who had been in the Clementine seminary in Philadelphia with Father Viglietti, wanted to strengthen the Clementine presence in Rome, and the new pope had given him the go-ahead. The Clementine Pontifical Academy needed men like Father Viglietti—men of talent and learning who’d been buried in out-of-the way parishes, men who spoke Latin fluently, men who could be trusted.

  Why was I surprised? Everything else God had foretold had come to pass. The dot.com bubble had burst in March 2001 and the market had tanked. Gold had gone from about two hundred seventy dollars an ounce to five hundred sixty. If I’d followed God’s advice and bought gold . . . but never mind. Then in May of the same year scientists at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Maine announced the discovery of acoustic oscillations in the primordial fluid of the early universe, oscillations that can still be detected in the cosmic microwave background, providing support for the Inflationary Hot Big Bang model of the universe. You can hear the sounds of the early universe. I’d already heard them, twice, in the back of Saint Clement’s. This news did not make headlines in the Galesburg Register-Mail, but I got a call from Alan Teitlebaum at Princeton at the end of May. He couldn’t stop asking questions that I couldn’t answer. How could I possibly have known . . .? I couldn’t explain. Three years later Maytag, Galesburg’s largest employer, closed up shop and moved to Reynosa in Mexico. I did not get a call from the mayor thanking me for giving him a heads-up.

  The news wasn’t all bad. I’d followed God’s advice and sent my translation of Catullus to Hausmann Books on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. God had been right. The editor who called me three months later—I’d almost forgotten about it—sounded like a young girl on the phone. The first thing she said, in fact, was “You probably think I’m a young girl. But I’m not. I’m probably about the same age as you.” The second thing she said was that she wanted to publish Catullus Redivivus. The third thing she said was, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  We sponsored our last Roman Republic tournament in late May, the day after examinations ended. In one corner of the room the fragile Republic defended itself against Carthage. In a second corner the Republic consolidated its powers and absorbed more and more provinces. In a third corner powerful politicians tore each other apart—like crabs in a bucket, as Father Viglietti put it—and brought the Republic to an end. Father Viglietti and I moved from one table to the next, helping students through the various phases of the game, encouraging them to note the parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic into Empire, and the decline of our own Republic, though Father Viglietti still hoped the United States would step up to the plate and assume its responsibilities as the world’s only superpower and impose a Pax Americana on the rest of the world. The botched election of 2000 echoed the irregular election of Pompey to the consulship in 70 B.C., though at least Pompey had demonstrated his abilities as a general. The attack on Iraq brought to mind Varus leading his legions into the Teutoburg Forest. But at least Varro had the decency to fall on his sword afterward. Hurricane Katrina brought to mind the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, though the massive relief effort in the Bay of Naples was headed up, and partly financed, by the emperor Titus himself.

  At the beginning of September Father Viglietti and I met in the Seminary Street Pub for a last drink. I had my dry-hopped ale and he had his old-fashioned. We celebrated the results of the National Latin Exam, went over a couple of problems I was having with Catullus 68, apparently written in Verona, and commiserated with each other over Father Viglietti’s departure. I wasn’t only sad, I was afraid, because Father Viglietti had become, for me, a shield against the indifference of the universe, and I detected God’s hand in his transfer to Rome. I was going to be on my own now.

  It had been twelve years since we’d met at a fund-raiser for the public library and discovered that we’d both taken Father Adrian’s spoken Latin course in Rome. Eleven years since we’d started getting together once a week to speak Latin. Ten years since he’d taken over Latin 3 at the high school—Sallust and Cicero in the fall, Plautus and Terence in the spring; nine years since he came over with a bottle of wine and sat with me on the night of Paul’s death and told me that I was on the threshold of a new and abundant life; eight years since I shot Jimmy in the parking lot of the TruckStopUSA. I’d never told anyone about Jimmy, but over our second round of drinks I was tempted to open up to Father Viglietti, tempted to make my confession right there in the Seminary Street Pub. I wasn’t sorry I’d killed Jimmy—I’d never thought for one minute that I’d done the wrong thing—but it was a burden, and I thought Father Viglietti could help me carry it. But then I thought it was too much to ask. Besides, I was driving him to the airport on Monday. I’d have one more chance.

  I did have one more chance as we sat opposite each other in the airport coffee shop while we waited for his flight to Chicago to be called, but I kept putting it off, and then he looked at his watch and said that he needed to get through security before they called his flight, so we said good-bye in front of the 1940s Caterpillar tractor in the concourse, outside the coffee shop, a
nd I listened to NPR on the drive home. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was back from Texas where she’d been defending the president’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The senate was gearing up for hearings on the president’s nomination of John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court. Three teenage girls admitted starting a fire in Paris that killed sixteen people. Two British soldiers had been killed in Basra. A previously unknown painting by Edward Munch had been discovered in Bremen. Photos taken through the wide-angle Burrell-Schmidt telescope in Arizona would help scientists reconstruct the last few billion years of the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

  In October I celebrated the ninth anniversary of Paul’s death, as I always did, with lamb chops coated with Parmesan cheese. After half a bottle of wine I told Paul about my students. I told him that Stella had taken over Tommy Gagg’s citrus accounts and that Ruthy, who understood computers, was now Tommy’s office manager. I told him that Father Viglietti had left for Rome and that I’d driven him to the airport. I told him about the challenges of translating and arranging the poems in Catullus Redivivus, that my editor wanted to abandon the traditional order and arrange the poems according to type: invective, friendship, love poems, epithalamia. It was a plan that appealed to me, though it was subject to all the ills that plague any taxonomy: overlapping categories, the difficulty of establishing categories in the first place and then of placing particular poems in particular categories, and so on. We did not agree on everything, but it was a happy collaboration. And exciting.

  As I was filling the dishwasher I gave him my rendition of Catullus’s farewell to his brother:

  I have wandered through many countries

  and crossed many seas, my brother,

  to say good-bye at your grave.

  Words cannot contain my grief,

  and your ashes cannot speak.

  Death has separated us, brother from brother,

  but take these old-fashioned offerings, wet with my tears.

  O my brother. Hail and farewell.

  But I wasn’t happy with it, didn’t care for “old-fashioned offerings, wet with my tears,” which hovered on the edge of sappy; and there just wasn’t any other way to translate “Ave atque vale.”

  “Hello and good-bye”? I didn’t think so, though actually “Hello and good-bye” was probably more accurate than “Hail and farewell.”

  I pulled my Oxford Catullus off the shelf on top of the railroad desk and sat down with pen and paper and set to work, determined to keep at it till I got it just right.

  12

  100 MPH (Summer 2006)

  In June I completed the circle, came back to the place where I’d begun: Do not resuscitate. I had to laugh when I thought about it, and when I thought about the nurse telling me not to worry about my clothes. And then losing the clothes. I’d filled seventy pages of my Clairefontaine notebook.

  I hadn’t been worried about my clothes, of course, and I wasn’t worried now. The hernia repair had been successful; Jimmy’s murder had been in the cold-case file for seven or eight years. At least Detective Landstreet hadn’t contacted me since he’d asked me to go up to Ottawa to see if the woman with the dog–the woman I’d met at the rest area on the night I killed Jimmy–could identify me in a police lineup; God had gone back to tending the galaxies instead of poking his nose into my business, though I have to admit that I’d steered clear of Saint Clement’s; I had no classes to prepare, no papers to grade, no late-night teachers-union meetings; some of my students had loaded the boxes from my classroom into Jason Steckley’s father’s funeral van and stacked them in my garage; Stella and Ruthy were no longer driving over the road, so I didn’t have any reason to worry about them; Quintus Lutatius Catulus had been replaced by Gaius Valerius Catullus on the jacket of Catullus Redivivus; and three blurbs had arrived out of the blue, including one from the man who’d kept kissing his student-lover during his reading in the Common Room and one from the woman who’d talked on her cell phone while she was being introduced. I forgave them both.

  All I had to worry about now was whether it was too late to find some decent geraniums for my window boxes on the deck.

  All I had to worry about now was clearing out the garage, which was so full that I had to park the Cutlass Cruiser outside in the city parking lot.

  All I had to worry about now was life itself. How to fill up the thirty blank pages at the end of the beautiful Clairefontaine notebook. I thought maybe I’d be able to add a page or two at most, but my plan was to lie low for a while.

  Looking back I thought I could see things clearly, thought I could look down on my life as if I were standing on the Fourth Street Bridge watching it—my life—rolling down a track in the hump yard, rolling down to my destination track in the classification bowl. Of course you can’t actually see the hump yard from the Fourth Street Bridge. To see the hump yard you have to drive out all the way to the bridge on County Highway 10, by Old Thirlwell Road.

  But that’s the problem with autobiography, isn’t it? Especially spiritual autobiography. You can’t quite see everything from where you’re standing. You see a shape, you see ups and downs, conversions, turning points, reversals. But then you keep on living, you keep on driving from one bridge to the next, and every time you look down on your life, you see a different shape.

  That’s what happened to me. I kept on living, kept on driving, kept on glancing at my rear-view mirror, trying to discern the shapes, when I should have been keeping my eyes on the road. If I had, maybe I would have seen what was coming. But maybe not. Would I have done anything differently? No, I don’t think so.

  By the end of the month I was ready to tackle the garage, but the garage wasn’t ready to be tackled. Fortunately Stella and Ruthy were driving down from Milwaukee to give me a hand, do the heavy lifting.

  We hadn’t had a garage on Prairie Street, but we’d had a big attic, and everything from the attic was now in the big garage at the apartment—Paul’s papers and notes, old Latin tests and quizzes, boxes of letters and newspaper clippings, Stella’s baby clothes, our bikes, the license plate from Pa’s old Studebaker. Plenty of stuff to inflame memory. And the sports car, of course. I wanted that car out of there. I didn’t even know what kind of car it was, but it reminded me of how helpless Paul had been at the end. Half a dozen trips around the parking lot was all he’d managed. And it reminded me of how Jimmy had stolen the car and all the repercussions of that theft.

  But I couldn’t pull it out of the garage because all the boxes from my classroom were piled up behind it, or in front of it, depending. Boxes of books, boxes with all the models of Roman buildings, boxes of posters and signs in Latin. I couldn’t move the boxes because of the hernia. Besides, there was no place to move them to. I couldn’t move the flower pots for same reason. The pots were plastic, but they were full of dirt, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to lift them.

  Stella and Ruthy arrived late that night and we got to work early in the morning. It was a sunny day, so they stacked the boxes from my classroom outside in the parking lot to clear a path for the car. But when we tugged off the heavy tarp, Ruthy started hyperventilating. “It’s a Shelby Cobra,” she said. “Do you know what you’ve got here? It’s a fucking Shelby Cobra. Pardon my French, but this is too amazing. You didn’t know? And Paul didn’t know?” She kept shaking her head and laughing.

  “It doesn’t have any windows,” I said. “And there’s no top.”

  “No top,” she said. “No windows, no door handles, no power steering, no power brakes—just the basics.”

  “What do you do if it rains?”

  “You get wet.”

  What I knew about cars I’d learned from helping Pa tune up his Ford pickup with 250,000 miles on it, out at the farm, and his 1952 eight-cylinder Packard Mayfair, with interior leather that matched the cranberry top over a cream body, and the Studebaker he bought so someone could drive Ma around.

  I closed the garage door, so no one would steal the car, and we went upstairs, boote
d up my computer, and googled “Shelby Cobra.” The 427 Cobra was the first American car to beat Ferrari—the first time any car had beaten Ferrari—in the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile World Manufacturers’ Championship in 1965 at Reims. If it was an original, then we were looking at over three hundred thousand dollars. Probably more. Depending on the model. Ruthy wasn’t sure ours was a 427. It might be a 289.

  Dr. Palmer’s widow had died years earlier, so I couldn’t get any information from her. I called Larry at Jones and Archer, where I still had the Oldsmobile serviced. “Probably a kit,” he said, “or a continuation car.”

  Stella and Ruthy had brought braunschweiger from Usinger’s, and a loaf of dark rye, and we made sandwiches and ate them while we waited for Larry. Paul loved braunschweiger. I’d never cared for it, but today it tasted wonderful.

  When Larry arrived and looked at the car, all he could do was shake his head. “You know,” he said, “this used to be every boy’s dream. When I was a kid we used to drive around and look in old barns, and behind them, hoping for something like this. We used to buy some old cars and sell them to the junk yard, but nothing like this. And it’s been right here in your garage?”

  “Ever since we moved in.”

  “What Shelby did,” Larry said, “was put a high-powered Ford engine in a British chassis. Guy over in Knoxville’s got one, you might want to talk to him. But his is a two eighty-nine. This is a four twenty-seven.” He popped the hood. “You can’t be sure from the VIN number,” he said, “because Shelby counterfeited some of his own cars. He had a block of VIN numbers for a hundred four twenty-sevens, but they only sold about fifty. Then in the nineties when the price of Cobras skyrocketed, he put together some cars from old parts, seated them on new chassis, and used the leftover VIN numbers to claim they were 1966 Cobras. But that was in the nineties.”