The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  After they’d gone I was tempted to leave myself, but instead I sat on the hard steps till it was quite dark. The piazza wasn’t empty, but it was quiet. I had put my hair up in a French twist, again, but I’d done it in a hurry and I could feel it coming loose. It always came loose, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking at anything. I couldn’t focus, and when someone sat down beside me, I didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing his “Italian” suit. He was sitting beside me. The man who had once been the brightest constellation in my cosmos. His hair was still streaked with gray, his eyes set deep, his nose slightly beaked, his beard neatly trimmed.

  “Paul,” I said. “Don’t scold me.”

  “Why would I scold you?” he said.

  “You know something, I said. “In all the years we were married we never learned to read each other perfectly clearly, never solved the mystery.”

  He started to laugh and I started to cry. “Oh, Paul. I should have loved you better. Should have been more generous. There was room for all the books. Well, not all of them. And for the piano . . . We could have put the piano in the bay window. I didn’t see it till it was too late, and the telescope, too. We could have afforded it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time about the locks, and the dog. She’s staying with Lois.”

  “It’s all right, Franny. You were always careful with money.”

  “You mean cheap?”

  He laughed. “Don’t you get tired of remembering?”

  “That’s what Stella wanted to know.”

  “You’ve got to let go, Franny. Move on. Get yourself an eight-inch telescope; and get the piano back; get it restored. You can afford it now. It’s in a Pentecostal Church in Davenport. They haven’t taken care of it. Go to Naples and Reggio Calabria with Stella and Ruthy.”

  “And Tommy?”

  “Of course.”

  He stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. I wanted to tell him about Stella and Ruthy, about Jimmy and about “Casta Diva.” I wanted to ask him if he’d known that the car in the garage was a Shelby Cobra; I wanted to ask him about the joke he used to tell. It had a great opening: “Confucius’s Superior Man and Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man walk into a bar . . .” But I couldn’t remember the rest of it.

  But by this time I was sitting by myself by the fountain. The buskers were gone; the restaurants were closed. But I could still hear the music. Stars like daggers, tips touching my chest. Lingering smell of the baby’s diaper. Taste of the wine on the back of my tongue.

  “Paul,” I said aloud, remembering Samantha’s advice.

  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.

  I stayed on in Rome for a week. My hotel—Hotel Antico Borgo di Trastevere—was near the river. Every night I walked across the Ponte Cesto and ate in the same trattoria, Sora Lela, on the Isola Tiberina. I didn’t call Father Viglietti. I didn’t go to the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican Museum or the Borghese Gallery. But every evening I sat in the piazza, and every morning I walked to the French church to look at the Caravaggios, and every afternoon I climbed up the stairs to the Capitoline Hill. I tried to remember the passage at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, which Paul used to teach in the Freshman Preceptorial program at Knox, in which Freud compares the human mind to the Eternal City. Had Freud himself stood here on the Capitoline Hill, looking down at the Forum Romanum? Did he create his elaborate analogy with his Baedeker open on his desk, or did he simply have an extraordinary memory? All the traces of the Republic had disappeared, like the traces of our early lives, but in his imagination Freud could see the different strata of the city superimposed upon each other, Renaissance churches superimposed on ancient temples at every turn, the palaces of the Caesars superimposed on the earliest settlements on the Palatine Hill, Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, where I was standing, superimposed on one of the most sacred sites of antiquity.

  And in my own imagination I seemed to be looking down at the strata of my life, superimposed one on top of another: the Knox campus superimposed on the farm, the house on Prairie Street superimposed on Old Main, my classroom at the high school superimposed on the house on Prairie Street, Samantha’s apartment in via Vipacco superimposed on the apartment in via Pigna, a dozen piazzas superimposed on top of each other and on top of the public square in Galesburg, the loft apartment superimposed on all previous impositions.

  I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me now. I probably wouldn’t be going to prison after all, wouldn’t be adding my name to the list of those whose lives had been deepened by the experience of incarceration. I had to face the fact that I was a spiritual lightweight.

  I’m tempted to say that from where I was standing on the Capitoline Hill I could look down on my life and see things clearly, but I’d fooled myself too many times for that. But one thing I did see clearly. What I’d experienced in the piazza was not homesickness but joy. Even spiritual lightweights can experience joy.

  16

  The Music of the Spheres (October–November 2006)

  I went through Customs in Chicago and was met by Lois at the airport in Peoria. Lois had tinted her hair a metallic silvery blue, and she was getting married. To Jack Banks from the funeral home. She wanted me to be her bridesmaid. I was stunned.

  “Lois,” I almost said, “you’re sixty-six years old,” but I caught myself in time. Lois had surprised me, and I surprised myself. I was happy, too. “Of course,” I said, embracing my old friend, who had started to cry.

  It took us an hour to get back to Galesburg. I was tired, but before settling in Camilla, who’d been staying with Lois, I drove around town, inventing everything anew: the Carl Sandburg house on East Third Street; the Fourth Street bridge, from which you can see the second longest railroad hump in the world; the trees in Standish Park; the orange-and green-striped awnings on Seminary Street; Old Main, the only remaining site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate. I pulled over on Cherry Street and looked up into the window of Paul’s old office on the third floor through the windows on the southeast corner; I drove past the house on Prairie Street, not far from the Santa Fe tracks, where we’d spent most of our lives together.

  Our old house on Prairie Street had been near the tracks, and the loft apartment is near the tracks, too, the Burlington tracks on the south side of town, and that afternoon I took a nap with the bedroom windows open. The train whistles sounded like the horns of great ocean liners, heading out to sea. And the noise of the musicians setting up for the last street festival of the year made me think, for a moment, that I was still in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. But when I woke up I was home.

  That night I took the dog out for a walk. We went down in the elevator. I was singing my little elevator song—“We’re going down in the elevator, elevator, elevator, we’re going down in the elevator, all the way down”—when the elevator door opened and Dr. Parker from number 5—the doctor who’d done my hernia repair—emerged. We were both slightly embarrassed. “The dog’s getting old,” I said.

  “So am I,” he said.

  Camilla and I walked down the alley past the barbershop, across Mulberry Street to the little park by the depot. I let Camilla loose for a while and then we walked down Simmons Street to Standish Park. And then on to Hope Cemetery.

  You can see Paul’s grave from the sidewalk on Academy Street—it’s in the first row of graves, the tenth plot from the north side, next to our old friend Luther Carlson, who’d taught history—but we went inside the fence and I unhooked Camilla’s leash.

  I walked to the back of the cemetery where you get an open view of the western sky. Arcturus had sunk below the Amoco station, below the horizon. I couldn’t make out the Swan or Lyra, but Deneb was still in place, and Vega, and I could hear, faintly, the music from Seminary Street.


  Camilla had disappeared into the darkness. I called. She came back. I heard her before I saw her. We walked together back to Paul’s grave. I stared at my name on the stone, next to Paul’s: Frances Dziepak Godwin. No date under my name. Not dead yet. And the inscription: Pulvis et umbra sumus. We are dust and shadows. The plot was slightly smaller than most, for some reason, but there was plenty of room for a second box of ashes.

  I stayed up late watching one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, “The Pony Remark,” where the death of Aunt Mona interferes with Jerry’s softball game. After the game Jerry and George and Elaine speculate about the spirit of the dead woman. George doesn’t think that Manya’s spirit would be hanging out in the back room of Drexler’s Funeral Home, not if it could be traveling to distant galaxies and different dimensions discovering the secrets of the universe.

  What about Jimmy’s spirit? I wondered. What about Paul’s? I thought I knew where Paul’s was, but where would Jimmy’s spirit hang out? Where had he been happy? I thought he’d been happy nailing shingles up on the roof. But not happy enough. Maybe when he thought he was going to be admitted to the Writers’ Workshop and was being lionized by Stella and her friends? No, that was a false happiness. I didn’t know enough about him, but I could imagine him as a boy, or maybe as a young man on the market. Tommy wanted him to work in the office, but Jimmy wanted to be with the men, pushing a flat truck down the broad sloping sidewalk, unloading eighty-pound crates of cantaloupe and hundred-pound sacks of potatoes. That was the best I could do, and it was pretty good, actually. A physical life. Lifting, pushing, pulling, feeling your strength, the slight ache in your legs, going to work at four o’clock in the morning, looking forward to a beer at the end of the day, or a game of cricket on one of the pitches down by the lake. I could picture Jimmy holding a cricket bat, but I couldn’t imagine cricket itself, had no idea what a wicket was or what a bowler did or how Jimmy could have learned this incomprehensible game or why there were cricket pitches in Milwaukee in the first place.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do now. The opera invitation was still on the table. Naples and Reggia Calabria. Stella wanted me to go, kept after me. What could I do?

  What did I know for sure? What insights could I count on? I kept coming back to the same ones, kept going around in a circle.

  “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” I’d read that in a Sunday supplement. It’s the sort of insight that you can keep drawing on. You don’t just say “I get it” and move on. It stays with you. But Stella was happy.

  “There’s more than bed to marriage.” If you don’t understand this one, you haven’t been married for more than six months or so.

  “If what you’re doing right now isn’t meaningful, it won’t become meaningful if you keep on doing it forever.” Something Father Viglietti used to say.

  But there was a fourth thing, too, not exactly an insight, but something that kept demanding to be heard, one that is this: that the casta diva experience was now at the center of my life. Beauty, and not just any beauty. The kind of beauty I recognized in Chopin and Brahms, in Vergil’s lacrimae rerum and in Catullus’s farewell to his brother; in the swallows that gather in the sky at the end of “To Autumn” and in the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa; in the Caravaggios in the French church in Rome and in still lifes by Chardin, in the glimpse of 3C 273 we had through Professor Moon’s telescope back in 1980, right after my father died, and in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp that had passed our way in 1997, right after Paul’s death. It was the kind of beauty I saw in the old house on Prairie Street before we moved in—empty but full of promise—and after we moved out—empty but full of memories. I wanted to be able to command this beauty, to call it forth under my fingers. I was still thinking of it as a kind of window I could open at will, the kind of window through which we can catch a glimpse of our true home. But now I believe I was mistaken about this, as I’ve been mistaken about so many things.

  I tracked down our old Blüthner in a Pentecostal church in the Quad Cities, the Church of the Evangelical Brotherhood. The piano had needed some work when I sold it to a music store in Moline. Frank Johnson, who had tuned the piano for us, said, at the time, that I was lucky to get two thousand dollars for it. The music store had sold it to a church for (I found out later) five thousand. Fair enough. I bought it back for three thousand after lengthy and unpleasant negotiations. The piano looked fine, but it hadn’t been tuned in ten years. Middle C didn’t play at all. A lot of the notes repeated when you played them. The pastor went to his study to pray on my offer while I negotiated with the chairman of the Stewardship Committee. I never found out what God had told the pastor. I was out of there before he came back. The pastor, that is. The chairman of the Stewardship Committee had already folded up my check and stuck it in his billfold.

  The piano was delivered a week later by a big, strong man wearing a Cubs hat, like Ruthy’s. It was strapped onto a dolly, a special self-propelled dolly. The elevator was too small, but this dolly could climb stairs, using a special track that the piano man laid down. I went to get my camera and by the time I got back the dolly had negotiated the landing and was almost at the top. I took several photos as the dolly moved, under its own power, down the deck and through the dog gate, and turned into the apartment.

  I had spent the previous day moving all the books in the hallway, and the bookcases, into my bedroom and into the living room, to make sure there was room for the piano to negotiate the hallway. The dolly carried the piano into the living room. The moving man went back to his truck to get the legs. And the deck that holds the music. When he came back he gave a command with a little remote, like a TV remote, and the dolly turned the piano to a horizontal position. The mover attached the legs. The dolly set the piano down. The mover went back to his truck to get the lid and the lyre (the pedal assembly). The piano fit beautifully, angled into the bay window. Right where it belonged.

  I wrote out a check for three hundred dollars, which seemed pretty reasonable to me, and the mover guided the dolly back down the long hallway and out onto the deck. Without the piano, the dolly fit nicely into the elevator.

  That night, when I came out to get a drink of water, the piano startled me. I couldn’t see it itself, just a mysterious shadowy space, darker than the dark, like a black hole.

  I showed the photos to the piano tech who came to look at the piano while I was in the process of moving the books back into the hallway.

  “I hope he was fully insured,” he said. “Did he give you a proper bill of lading?”

  “He gave me something,” I said.

  “Humph,” he said.

  The piano tech’s name was Karl Holm. He had retired to Galesburg, his hometown. He’d grown up on Mulberry Street, had apprenticed to a piano tuner, then worked as a piano tech at Lyon & Healy in Chicago, where Paul’s mother had bought the piano in the first place. When Lyon & Healy closed their retail stores, he tuned for the Swedish pianist Magnus Magnusson. Now he lived alone in the house he’d grown up in at the end of Mulberry Street. I drove by his house on the way to the grocery store. His father had known Carl Sandburg, and he himself could remember a time when the seven loft apartments were a sort of dormitory for railroad workers, and the Packing House parking lot had been a coal yard. The little barber shop at the end of the alley had been the coal man’s house.

  He knew many of the great tuners, including Franz Mohr, Horowitz’s tuner. A Bible thumper. He didn’t know how Horowitz put up with him, but a lot of pianists did. He was the head tech for Steinway and a great tuner.

  I made a pot of espresso as he explained what he could and could not do in the confines of the apartment. He could not refinish the cabinet in the apartment; he could not replace the cast-iron plate; he could not replace the sounding board or pin block. Fortunately, none of these things had to be done, and there were many things that he could do.

  He jotted down a list as we drank our coffee, which I served on a
little tray with sugar and little spoons.

  What Mr. Holm proposed to do was this:

  Minor repairs: glue loose joints, remove broken screws, repair loose screw holes.

  Clean.

  Replace strings, hammers, and tuning pins—which would have to be specially ordered. About three weeks.

  Regulate. (I would have some decisions to make about tone and action.)

  Tune. (More decisions.)

  All these things could be done in the living room provided I didn’t mind letting him use the long harvest table, where I ate, for his work table. Regulating and tuning could be done in two days, but replacing strings, hammers, and tuning pins, which would have to be special ordered, would take much longer.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “It will be like hearing the music of the spheres.”

  He didn’t laugh. “I’m a Pythagorean,” he said. “You have to be, to be a piano tuner. Though it’s more complicated than Pythagoras thought. If he’d had a piano instead of a lyre he would have had a better grasp of the problem of fitting fifths and octaves together.”

  “Do you know that you can still hear the sound from the Big Bang?”

  “I didn’t know that. What does it sound like?”

  “You can’t actually hear it. It’s like the microwave background—outside the visible spectrum. These are sounds outside the audible spectrum. You need a computer simulation.”

  He spooned the sugar out of the bottom of his cup. “I’ll tell you what’s really odd,” he said. “Do you have any idea what happens when you push down a piano key?”

  “No,” I said.