The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I wanted . . . I thought . . . It’s the anniversary of my husband’s death. Next Tuesday. I need to be home. In case his spirit returns to say good-bye.”

  “I should have explained about the coffee pot,” Samantha said. “I was in such a hurry yesterday afternoon.”

  “I’ll clean up the stove,” I said. “But maybe we should call the airline first.”

  Samantha started to wipe off the stove. “We need some coffee. Let me show you.” She proceeded to demonstrate, using a little plastic cup to measure a small amount of water. Then she dipped her finger in a tiny jar of olive oil and rubbed the tip around the threads of the coffee pot. “You have to do this to get a proper seal,” she explained.

  She put the pot on a small burner with the lid up. We waited for the coffee, staring at the inside of the pot.

  “You have to keep the lid up,” Samantha said, “or it won’t make the crema. And that’s the whole point of this pot.”

  I knew because Paul had a pot like this that I was not allowed to touch. I didn’t want to spoil it for her.

  We waited. “It takes a while,” Samantha said.

  Finally a sheen of coffee wrapped itself around the stem and then suddenly the pot whooshed and Samantha turned off the burner. The coffee continued to bubble up through a special valve, or filter, and then Samantha poured two small cups with blue stripes under the rim, just like the ones we used at home. The surface of the coffee was covered with a rich crema. We sat down at the kitchen table.

  “You know,” Samantha said, “your husband’s spirit is free to wander over the whole universe. I’m sure he’ll find you right here in Verona.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course.”

  But then he could have found me in Galesburg . . .

  The coffee was delicious. The best I’d ever tasted. Better than the coffee in the big machines in the bars.

  Samantha, I learned, was from Bologna. We discussed Bologna. And after a while I realized that we were speaking in Italian, and that Samantha was calling me Francesca instead of Frances.

  Samantha loved Bologna and had never wanted to live anywhere else, but she’d fallen in love with a Veronese.

  “Amore,” I said, shaking my head. “Odi et amo. Catullus 85. ‘I hate and I love. How can I do both? I don’t know, but I feel it, and it’s a bitch.’ I’ve just finished a translation of Catullus,” I said. “I wanted to come back to his hometown. Maybe go out to Sirmio, the family place on Lake Garda.”

  “Sirmione,” Samantha said, giving it its Italian name. “We could go together, but I couldn’t do it this afternoon. I’ve got the play again tonight.”

  “It’s a different kind of love,” I said. “Not very romantic. Catullus and Lesbia weren’t Romeo and Juliet.”

  She laughed. “The love impulse is irresistible,” she said, “unstable. But so is the impulse to love one person with your whole heart. Have you been to the Casa di Giulietta?”

  I looked her in the eye: “Fake fake fake,” I said. “The balcony was added later to look like the balcony in the George Cukor film. But you know that.”

  “Yes, it’s fake,” she said, “but it’s become real. A real shrine. People come here when they’re in trouble, in pain. Like your shrine of Canterbury. Or Santiago di Compostella. They even write letters.”

  “ ‘Dear Juliet’ letters?”

  Samantha nodded. “There was a Russian woman who stayed three weeks in this apartment. She became the Russian Juliet. When we get a certain number of letters from Russia, we put them in a packet and send them to her in Moscow. She answers them in Russian and sends them back to us, and then we send them back to the people who wrote them.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. But it turned out that Samantha was one of a dozen volunteers—all young woman—who answered the letters. Five thousand letters a year.

  “Like Ann Landers.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that romantic love is nothing but trouble. It’s all based on frustration. In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a disease. And there was only one sure cure.”

  “What was that?”

  “Let the lovers live together for a while.”

  Samantha laughed. “Francesca,” she said, “you’re just like a window. I can see right through you. Tell me the truth, was that your experience? I mean really?” She touched me—a light touch on the wrist with her fingertips, and then a firm hand clasp on my forearm—and it had been such a long time since anyone had touched me that I broke down and started to cry, and by the time I was done crying, I’d told her about the end of Paul’s life and about Lois and about Stella and Jimmy and Tommy (but not about the murder).

  “What would you say to Paul?” I asked her. “I mean, you as Juliet?”

  She looked into her empty espresso cup. “If I were Juliet,” she said, and after a long pause she put her hand over her heart and started to speak. I didn’t recognize the words in Italian: La mia generosità è davvero sconfinata come il mare.

  “It’s from the balcony scene,” she explained. “Just before the nurse starts calling Giulietta to come in.”

  And then I put two and two together.

  My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

  My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

  The more I have, for both are infinite.

  “That’s what Juliet would say to Paul?”

  “No. That’s what she would tell you to say to Paul’s spirit when he shows up. You don’t need to be afraid. He’s not going to scold you.”

  “What if he goes to say good-bye to Lois instead?”

  “That’s a risk you’ll have to take.”

  She gave me a cell phone to use—she had three—and said I probably needed an Italian SIM card for my phone to work in Italy. I wouldn’t be able to call the United States with her cell phone, but I’d be able to receive calls from the U.S., and I could make calls in Italy. I dialed her number. Her phone rang. The two of us stood in the kitchen and talked to each other on our cell phones.

  “What about Juliet?” I asked. “What would you say to her? If you were Juliet?”

  Samantha laughed again. “If I were Juliet, what would I say to Juliet? I’d say, ‘Don’t do what I did.’”

  I didn’t go home. I gave the eight hundred euros back to Samantha. I was no longer angry at Paul—I’d made a fool of myself—and it would have been too embarrassing to go home. How could I have explained? I didn’t want to lose face. I wasn’t going to taste the old happiness. That was out of the question. But I could get through four days before taking the train to Rome.

  That night I went to see Samantha and her husband, Giorgio, in Trappola Mortale, a British detective story translated into Italian and adapted for the stage.

  And on Monday morning, in the reading room of the Biblioteca Capitolare, the oldest library in the western world, I held in my hands the missing Verona codex, the one that had been discovered under a beer barrel seven hundred years earlier, the one read by Petrarch, the one that had disappeared in the fourteenth century. It was known to be corrupt already, but still, it was the source of all the other Catullus manuscripts. And there it was. In a solander box, right where God had told me to look for it. Hidden for centuries. Whoever had made the solander box had either not recognized the codex for what it was or else had deliberately miscataloged it.

  I was too overwhelmed to interrogate it properly. There were a number of cruxes I was curious about, but I turned directly to the apparent gap between Catullus II(a) and II(b). Were these one poem or two? Many scholars thought there were some lines missing between the two. Now I knew that they were one poem.

  I’d been over the poems so many times while working on Catullus Redivivus that they’d lost some of their pizzazz, but reading them in Gothic miniscule on leaves of parchment, reading them in the copy that Petrarch had held in his own two hands, reading them in the copy that had been discovered under a beer barrel seven hu
ndred years earlier, reading them in the manuscript that had kept Catullus from disappearing forever, was such a thrill that I dropped my fountain pen on the floor, as I was writing a note to myself on the back of a receipt, and ink spattered all over the floor. I’d forgotten the first rule of rare-book rooms: no pens, especially no fountain pens. I had a Kleenex in my purse and was trying to wipe up the spill when a priest-librarian came rushing over. He didn’t order me to leave, but he wasn’t interested in my apologies. I slipped the codex back into its box and said I’d be on my way. He didn’t encourage me to stay any longer.

  In the afternoon I took a bus out to Sirmione—Sirmio in Latin—and walked out to the Grotto of Catullus. I’d taken a picture of Paul in the so-called “grotto,” and he’d taken a picture of me. I had no idea where they were now. Probably in a box in the garage, which Stella and Ruthy and I had left more or less as we’d found it, though the car was gone and there was now room for the Cutlass Cruiser. I sat on the wall overlooking Lake Garda and declaimed Catullus 31: “Sirmio, eye of islands . . .” The wind was blowing off the lake. It was too cold to linger. I didn’t go into the museum. I turned around and took the bus back to Verona.

  In the evening I walked across town and shopped for myself at the little shops where Paul and I had shopped—near Ponte Pietra—and managed to e-mail Stella from an internet café on via Garibaldi, and recount all my “adventures.” At least I had a story to tell. I wouldn’t go home in disgrace. At least not this particular disgrace. I had not told her about my intention to confess to Father Viglietti.

  On the morning of the anniversary of Paul’s death I got up early, splashed cold water on my face, and went out without taking a shower. I was on the Ponte Navi when the sun came up and the tops of the Alps appeared on the horizon. I was standing outside our old apartment in via Pigna when the bells of the duomo began to ring and two priests scurried across Piazza Duomo, late for the first mass of the day. I was in Piazza delle Erbe when the venditori opened up their bancarelle, and I was the first one to order a cappuccino and a dolce in the little bar in Piazza Signori. I wanted to sit at a table outside in the piazza with my coffee and read Romeo e Giulietta in Italian and try to figure things out for myself.

  By the time I finished Act IV it was almost noon. The sky was pale blue and the temperature was just right, and I was thinking about Samantha’s advice, about what I’d say to Paul. I’d sat in this piazza, in this bar, with Paul, overlooked by statues, perched atop the Loggia del Consiglio, of Catullus and other worthies, including Pliny and Vitruvias. I folded Romeo e Giulietta around my thumb and wondered if I’d turned into one of the worldly cynical figures who surround the lovers in Shakespeare’s play. I tried to conjure up the lovers’ radiant inner experience, even though I knew then that I would never experience it again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  While I was waiting for something to happen, I imagined Paul joining me, ordering one of those orange drinks that I saw on every table. Some kind of liquor, like Campari. Aperol. Something that would turn me into a different person. What would I say to him? What would he say to me? I couldn’t imagine this conversation. In my imagination we sat there in silence. Till the silence became unbearable. You could have drowned in it.

  “Paul,” I said, just to hear the sound of my own voice. “Paul.”

  In the afternoon I took a nap. When I got up I took a shower and put on a decent outfit—a gray wool sweater that Paul had given me years ago, gray wool slacks, my black cloth coat. I wasn’t trying to make a statement, just to fit in. Paul had died about noon, seven o’clock Italian time, and I wanted to be on the balcony in the Casa di Giulietta by six thirty. The doors closed at seven thirty and everyone had to be out by eight o’clock.

  I bought a ticket, expensive, and went up the stairs. The house itself, unlike the gift shop, was as uncluttered as Tommy’s apartment. On the second floor I stopped at the computer station where four people at a time could send e-mails to Juliet! I was tempted, but thought better of it. On the third floor I admired Juliet’s bed. I was suddenly very tired and was tempted to lie down on the bed, which was, I thought, the bed that had been used in the Zeffirelli film. A formidable looking custode, in a civic uniform, seemed to read my thoughts and moved closer. “You wouldn’t be the first,” she said.

  “Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting,” I said. “What a lovely scene. Olivia Hussey was only thirteen, you know. Same age as Juliet. She had to get special permission to see the film because she was under age!”

  “In America, you mean. Not in Italy. But Leonard Whiting!” The custode touched her cheekbone with the tip of her finger and twisted her hand back and forth, as if she were drilling a hole in her cheek.

  On the balcony lovers were taking pictures of each other. “Let me have the camera,” I said to a particularly attractive young couple. “I’ll take a picture of you together.” I took their picture and then pictures of several more couples, and then Samantha’s cell phone rang inside my purse, which I had slung over my shoulder. It was Samantha, who laughed when I told her what I was doing.

  “Do you think I should warn them?” I asked her.

  “What would you say?”

  “That there’s more than bed to marriage. One of life’s hard truths.”

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of truth you can tell anyone who doesn’t already know it.”

  What about you? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  I sat on a bench outside the balcony door. It was cold, but not uncomfortably cold. I hadn’t told Samantha the whole story, hadn’t told her the bits I’d been keeping hidden even from myself, the bits about Paul’s first wife, who’d always been kind to me, and who’d flown out from New York for Paul’s memorial service and talked to me afterward and returned Paul’s old copy of Henderson the Rain King, which had gotten mixed up with her books when they separated. This was the woman Paul and I had deceived while I was still one of his students at Knox. Was it a transcendent vision that led us to the Super 8 motel out by the municipal airport? I shivered suddenly, as if I were confronting these hard truths for the first time. I still hadn’t figured things out, and I didn’t expect to now. I was just going to wait and see what happened.

  It’s the annual Shakespeare party and I’m in Paul’s attic, a big old attic in a big old Victorian house. The rafters are exposed. Roofing nails stick through the roof boards like the tips of thousands of tiny arrows. A keg of beer slops on a pile of towels. Cases of pop are stacked next to the keg, and trays of cheese and cold cuts from the food service are laid out on card tables. Everyone is smoking. Paul smoked then. Everyone did. Old sofas, left behind by previous owners, overflow with students and faculty.

  Paul and his wife, Elaine, have assembled a collection of costumes, which hang on hangers, from a low rafter, and a big box of hats. I try, as always, not to think of Elaine, who is in New York.

  An ancient Shakespeare party custom dictates the reversal of gender roles in the balcony scene. My Romeo outfit is a red toque with feathers sticking out of it and a burgundy blouse, with gold-trimmed hanging sleeves, over a black leotard. Paul has pulled on a woman’s bathrobe. I look up at him, a bearded Juliet, perched on a step ladder. “But soft,” I say, “what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” We play it straight, which is part of the fun, and suddenly Paul is on the balcony with me. Or I am in the attic with Paul. My Juliet. Or my Romeo. At first I can’t understand him, because he’s speaking in Italian and because I’m too surprised. I’ve been pretending to be asleep on my back on one of the old sofas. I’ve had too much to drink and am, in fact, on the edge of sleep. Everyone has gone home. The attic is empty, lit by a single floor lamp. Paul, sitting on the edge of the sofa, leans over and kisses me. Suddenly I’m as wide awake as I’ve ever been.

  Shakespeare leaves the night of passion to our imaginations. I’ve never believed that a thirteen-year-old, virginal Juliet, who’s never been around the block, would in fact experience
towering passion, sexual ecstasy. But who knows? In the Zeffirelli film, which Paul showed to the class, you see the young lovers on the morning after, looking very pleased with themselves. You catch a glimpse of Olivia Hussey’s breasts and some very nice shots of Leonard Whiting’s bare butt, the sight of which made me tingle when I saw it with the Shakespeare class. It’s not my first time around the block, but it’s my first time with a man who knows what he’s doing. I can feel Paul’s strong hands massaging the insides of my thighs. My whole body is on fire, radiating heat, and a young woman inside me is spreading her legs for her lover for the first time, leaving her old life behind her, waving good-bye to her mother and father in her old home, starting out slowly, taking the first tentative steps of a long journey, the sofa steady beneath her like firm ground, like the globe itself. She’s not hurrying because there’s plenty of time to get to wherever they’re going. Her mother is calling her back, like Juliet’s nurse. But she can barely hear her mother’s voice.

  In the distance a bell rang, and then rang again. I arched my hips to meet Paul’s, and then . . . And then I realized that my cell phone was ringing. I managed to find it in my purse, but the little lights on the phone were backward. The green light was on the left instead of the right, and the red light was on the right. I pushed the red light and the phone went dead. I realized I was holding the phone upside down. A few minutes later the phone rang again. Pronto, I said. Pronto, thinking it was Samantha, the only person who ever called me, but it was Stella, calling from Milwaukee.

  “Ma, Ma? Is that you? I can hardly hear you.”