Then he’d go back and sit silently for five minutes at the side of the altar.
It drove some parishioners crazy. You’d hear men and women muttering, coughing, moving restlessly in the pews, little kids crying and asking their parents what was going on, people kicking the kneelers and knocking their missals onto the floor, and even a few of the angriest ones walking out, and not trying to be very quiet about it either, as they opened and closed the heavy front doors.
Gradually, as our relationship deepened, the tone of our conversations in the confessional, and even at the table in the rectory over cups of coffee, began to change. As I grew older, Father Alberto began to speak about those things more and more openly with me. “Cynthia,” he’d say, “I value your opinion, so tell me, what do you think about the stuff I got into at Mass on Sunday?” Usually I’d begin by saying “I thought it was wonderful, Father. I thought it was exactly what we needed to hear.”
But he could tell I was being saccharine and polite. “Come on, now,” he’d say, “be real. Speak the truth. What do you think?” And we’d go from there into a conversation that sometimes lasted twenty or thirty minutes. My knees would hurt because I’d be kneeling in the confessional for so long, and once Father realized that, I started to say my confession face-to-face with him in one of the small conference rooms of the rectory, and then our talks sometimes lasted as long as an hour or an hour and a half. We’d argue, debate, discuss Church history, the lives of the saints. He’d talk about a certain cardinal’s behavior and how much it bothered him that some of his fellow priests, abusive, hurtful, deeply troubled men, had been protected in order to protect the reputation of the Church. We’d talk about the lawsuits and the court cases and friends of my father who were divorced, and we’d talk a bit about sex, too, although he was always careful to let me have my privacy in that regard. Not that there was much to protect. Lisa’s promise to invigorate my sex life had never amounted to anything. I’d kissed three boys in my brief adulthood. That was as far as it had gone and for years as far as it would go. When I went out, it was almost always in small groups of men and women, nursing school friends, a fun environment without much risk or thrill in it.
Then, as I moved into my third year of college, the tone of those conversations changed yet again. I’d stopped mentioning the spells, but Father Alberto started asking about them in a new way, and when I told him how the experiences were changing, he said he’d been meditating on them all that time and he’d come to the conclusion that I had a calling, that there was something special I was going to do on this earth. “Becoming a nurse is fine,” he said. “It’s valuable work, godly work. But I feel sure now that there’s something else for you.” He didn’t know what it was, he said, but he had a sense of it. “Intimations” was the word he used.
Then, a bit later, when he thought I was ready to hear it, he said his intimations told him my true calling would bring me great difficulty.
That part upset me, naturally. I didn’t want any great difficulties in my life. But, if I’m going to be perfectly honest, I have to admit that a small, hidden part of me didn’t really believe what Father Alberto was saying anyway. I knew by then that our friendship was as important to him as it was to me, and I wondered sometimes if, as he’d grown older without a wife and children, a nagging loneliness had taken hold of him and that loneliness was unconsciously leading him to make me out to be something I was not. I sometimes even wondered—I’m not proud of this—if our friendship might be a substitute for not having lovers in our life. I didn’t feel any particular physical attraction to him, and I doubt he felt any for me. I don’t mean it that way. I mean only that I worried about the temptations of the solitary life, the places it might lead us in our thoughts.
AT SOME POINT AFTER I finished my next-to-last year of college and was thinking about where I’d end up working, Father Alberto started to tell me he was getting into more and more “hot water” for his sermons, that the pastor of St. Anthony’s, Monsignor Zanelli, who’d always been a friend and supporter, was about to retire and finding it harder to protect him. He said he was receiving phone calls calling him “the Satan Priest,” and worse. “It won’t keep me from speaking the truth, Cynthia,” he’d say. “It won’t stop me. I have my own understanding of God, and the older I get, the surer I am of it. I’m a priest. It’s my job, precisely my job, to pass on that understanding. I’m not going to keep quiet about it.”
Calls came to his room in the rectory late at night, and when he answered he knew someone was on the other end of the line, taunting him with silence. He started to talk openly with me about an organization called Lamb of God, which was gaining popularity in the parishes around Boston in those difficult years. The Lamb of God people covered a spectrum from ordinary good Catholics with conservative social opinions to absolute fanatics who would violently disrupt school board meetings when the issue of birth control and sex education was being discussed, and they’d sometimes be seen on the television news making hateful comments about “the deterioration of the American moral fiber,” spoiled children, lazy workers, lenient priests. More and more often in those years the radical factions were speaking for all of Lamb of God, and I worried, even then, where it would lead. Obviously, the kinds of things Father Alberto said in his sermons were not pleasing to those people. “I’m on their radar now,” he told me, and he suspected that some of the more irrational members of the movement were the ones who were calling him up and sending him the hateful letters.
I’ve never been a very political person. My father, a fairly typical parishioner at St. Anthony’s, wasn’t political either, certainly not about matters of the Church. When Father Alberto asked him to sit silently for five minutes and contemplate this or that question, he tried to do that. When a priest said the Church was being unfair to society’s outcasts, my father probably agreed in theory, but he had no comment and made no move to do anything about it. Issues like that were simply not a matter for discussion in our home. He went to Mass, did what he was told, and didn’t seem to think about it much, and so in that way—and in others—we had very little in common with Lamb of God Catholics. There was a kind of cushion between us and them. Father Alberto was the antithesis of their mentality, a man of love, not rules, a man who tried to unify, not divide, to sow understanding and compassion, not hatred and harsh judgment.
But like a lot of men and women of love—Jesus and Mary come to mind; Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln—that desire to unify, not divide, was exactly the trait that would eventually bring him trouble.
CHAPTER THREE
Near the beginning of my last year of college—it was September 24, about eight p.m.—Matilda called from the church, hysterical with grief, and said that Father Alberto had been in a terrible accident. He’d gone to someone’s house for dinner, she said, probably had a few glasses of wine, and crossing in front of St. Anthony’s—a place where Revere Street makes a ninety-degree curve—he’d been struck by a car. The driver didn’t stop; the police were looking for him. Father was in the intensive care ward of a hospital in Boston (the same hospital where I’d done my clinical practice and was hoping to work one day); could I give her a ride?
That news, sent through the phone line in Matilda’s frantic voice, hit me like a beam falling from the roof. I grabbed the keys to my father’s car and picked her up, and we drove into Boston, too fast, and parked in a no-parking zone in front of the hospital (the car was towed) and hurried inside.
Father Alberto wasn’t conscious, the nurse told us, and wasn’t expected to regain consciousness. No visitors were allowed, but she’d seen me on the wards and she remembered me and I talked to her for a while, told her that Matilda and I were as close as he had to family, and, as nurses will occasionally do in those situations, she bent the rules. Matilda was weeping so hard that she took two steps into the room, made the sign of the cross, and went out again, but I sat by Father Alberto’s bed, watching his chest move up and down in too-sma
ll bumps, praying under my breath, glancing up at the heart monitor as if that one pulse were the ticking clock of God’s kingdom on Earth. I put my right hand on Father’s wrist and squeezed, and, as if that touch had all the force of my love in it, his eyes fluttered and opened and I could see him slowly becoming aware of his surroundings. His irises wavered for a moment, as if he were having trouble controlling them, but I squeezed his hand again and he began to focus.
After a minute or more of just staring at me, he said the strangest thing: “I see who you are.”
I nodded. “Cynthia.”
He shook his head, said, “No,” faintly, and let his eyelids drop closed. I couldn’t tell if the shake of his head meant he was trying to tell me there was no hope for him or if his brain wasn’t working right and he was saying “no” to the Cynthia part, mistaking me for someone else. When people are close to death, they sometimes believe they see their mother or father or husband or wife at the bedside, even though that person has been dead for years. Doctors consider it an hallucination, nothing more than a change in brain chemistry brought on by the stress of dying or a combination of medicines. I wasn’t so sure. I loved science, but what I didn’t like was the certainty of some scientific minds, as if the known laws of chemistry, biology, and physics explained absolutely everything. What if those people were seeing the spirits of their loved ones? Why, given all the other miracles that surround us—sunrise, for instance, or childbirth—was that so impossible? I squeezed Father’s hand a second time. His eyes opened again, but just for a moment, as if raising the lids required the same amount of will and strength as lifting a heavy weight above his head.
“Father,” I said. He didn’t respond. I squeezed his hand gently a third time, I waited. Before my throat closed up completely, I said what I hadn’t been able to say to my grandmother: “Thank you.”
There was a twitch of what might have been a smile at the corners of his lips. The nurse came in, checked his IV line, the heart monitor, then hurried out to fetch a doctor. In the course of my training I’d seen a number of people die. Some struggled. Some, like my grandmother, drifted off into what looked like a peaceful sleep, the burdens of life left behind them like too-heavy luggage on the start of a long trip. Some tried to get out of bed or yelled or screamed, their faces twisted up in terror. I watched Father Alberto for any of those signs, I glanced up at the monitor, and when I looked back at him I saw that his eyes were open again, just barely, a quarter of an inch between the lids. His lips moved. “Can’t give up,” I thought he might have whispered. Or maybe “Don’t give up.” I leaned down and kissed his lips, and then the nurse and a doctor came hurrying into the room and Father Alberto’s eyes closed and the lines on the machines wavered a last time and went flat. I stepped away to let them work on him—it’s such a violent exercise, trying to keep someone in this world. Instead of leaving the room as they told me to, I stood in the doorway and watched. I could clearly see Father Alberto’s spirit gathering itself, almost the way a person brings his arms in close to his body and bends his knees before making a big jump. But this spirit didn’t have any shape that resembled a human body; it was something else, not ghostlike exactly but outlined in light, supple, electrical. Somehow—I could never say how—it contained, not his looks and personality, but Alberto Ghirardelli’s essence. There was a signature stamped on it. I watched that essence preparing itself, gathering itself up through his chest and throat and in the features of his face—just the smallest flexing of the smallest muscles there. And then it flickered a last time, like a candle flame going out, and made its leap into the next world.
The doctors and nurses worked and worked—they’re required to by law—but I could have told them it was no use. I said one Hail Mary, helping him on his way, and then, carrying a familiar sad weight, feeling an all-too-familiar hole opening in my world, I went out into the hall to find Matilda.
ON THE DAY AFTER FATHER Alberto’s death, Monsignor Ferraponte—who had taken over a group of local churches after the retirement of Monsignor Zanelli—put out a brief statement saying, basically, “We are all saddened by this loss.” To my ear at least, the tone of it was half sincere. There wasn’t a single good word about Father Alberto, no praise, nothing about how beloved he’d been, and it struck me as doubly strange that the monsignor didn’t preside over the funeral Mass and wasn’t anywhere to be seen among the thousand or so people who crowded the church.
In the days and weeks following Father Alberto’s death I felt as though I inhabited a great cold emptiness. It was all I could do to make myself go into Boston for school, to come home and finish the chores I was supposed to do around the house. My father seemed frightened by the depth of my grief. At the funeral he watched me as if I might melt. And later, at home, he was like a knight clanking through the kitchen and living room in a heavy armor of self-consciousness. Father Alberto’s sudden death had taken hold of his world with two big hands and shaken it so hard that the things he’d always done easily—snapping green beans off a vine, gluing and clamping a loose leg on an old kitchen chair—seemed suddenly beyond him, as alien to his hands as the French language to his tongue.
“What’s wrong, Pa?” I said at last.
“Nothin’.”
“You’re not yourself.”
A grunt. A silence. Then: “You best friend you lost now.”
I looked at him through a quick lens of tears, but even in that sad blur I could see the fear on his face, a cold-weather tan. I was sad, of course, wrapped up in sadness from eyes to knees, but I wasn’t afraid. “I’ll see him again,” I said, because that was—and is—a certainty in my world. I know it like I know red from blue: God doesn’t bring souls together for a few years in the ocean of eternity and then separate them forever. What sense would that make in a world that, even judging by the known laws of biology, chemistry, and physics, is otherwise so meticulously ordered?
“Nobody knows it for sure,” my father said, then he made a quick retreat to the consolation of television, that leaping, seductive, electronic world, a deathless universe.
Though the state and local police conducted an investigation—Matilda told me they knocked on every door in the neighborhood, hoping to find someone who’d seen or heard something on the night Father Alberto was killed—and though there were articles in the paper and notices on the TV news asking for help, the hit-and-run driver, drunk, careless, or an assassin, was never found. I went to the police station and told the officer on duty about the phone calls and veiled threats. I asked him to look at the Lamb of God movement for possible suspects, but even I knew how useless that would be. They’d have to trace the calls, somehow connect them to the hit-and-run driver; it would be the next thing to impossible.
I kept going to St. Anthony’s, of course. I’d sit in the cavernous darkness and pray for Father Alberto and try to make contact with his spirit, just as I’d done with my grandmother after she died and with my mother for so many years. Even though he’d shaken his head when I said my name, I tried to make myself believe he’d known it was me there beside him in the hospital room and that what he’d said was “Don’t give up.” In the echoing emptiness I ran our conversations through my mind over and over again, searching them for something I’d missed, some nugget of wisdom, some finger pointing me in a certain direction. What I remembered most, to my frustration, was his insistence, in our last few visits, that there was nothing more he could do for me.
“Can’t we keep talking, Father?”
“Of course, yes, we’ll always keep talking. We’ll be gabbing and snacking forever in the kitchens of eternity. But there’s nothing more I can tell you, Cynthia. You’re so far beyond any point I’ll ever reach. You need to find somebody higher up, somebody wiser about this kind of prayer. You need, most of all, not to be so damn modest! If you can’t come out and admit God is touching you in a special way, that’s a kind of sin, too, don’t you see?”
I laughed at that, changed the subject, but I filed i
t away where I filed everything else he’d ever said to me.
“Somebody higher up” meant, to my simple way of looking at things, the new monsignor, Father Alberto’s immediate superior. Sitting there in the church, I decided that he’d been advising me to go and tell Monsignor Ferraponte about my spells. Explain the messages I thought I was getting from God. Ask his advice.
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