Vatican Waltz

by Roland Merullo

  That night when I came into the living room and said hello, he looked at me, and there was something so new and different in the features of his face that I was about to ask him what was wrong.

  “Cinzia,” he said, and even the fact that he’d chosen the Italian pronunciation of my name was different. I thought for a second that there was more bad news, that he’d been diagnosed with something horrible or that someone else we knew had just died and he’d been sitting there in shock, preparing himself to break the news.

  “Let me take you out for supper,” he said in Italian. “Your aunt left you two thousand dollars. She left me some money, too.”

  I thought I might fall over backward. Not because of the small inheritance but because my father was willing to spend some of it. He’d grown up poor in an Italy ravaged by political turmoil and war. During his working life, he’d made just enough money to pay the mortgage on our small house and put food on the table and gasoline in his five-year-old Pontiac (financial aid, loans, and summer jobs had gotten me through nursing school). During my childhood it was an exceedingly rare event for us to go out to eat, in part because my grandmother was such a good cook, in part because my father, after a day of work, didn’t particularly want to come home, shower, get dressed up, and step back out into society. But mostly it was because he was so careful with money, as if he expected another dictator to appear any day, another war to start, another long stretch of hunger and deprivation like the one he’d been forced to live through in the last years of Mussolini’s Italy.

  So when he said, “Cinzia, let me to take you out for supper,” it was as unexpected as if he’d said, “Cinzia, we’re moving to Norway. Pack your things.”

  “You sure, Pa?”

  “Winthrop,” he said, switching back to English as he often did. “Rossetti’s.”

  Rossetti’s was a place I’d been to exactly twice, once for a family reunion and once on a date. It was a wonderfully authentic Italian restaurant just across the road from Winthrop Beach. Probably a twelve-minute drive from our house.

  “Are you sure, Pa?”

  “Sì, sì,” he said, as if convincing himself. “Andiamoci.”

  I went upstairs and showered and changed my clothes. He dressed up and put on a pair of shoes—which was unusual because he almost always walked around in work boots—nice pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a sweater, and we climbed into the front seat of the Pontiac and set out as if for a drive across North America. It took a long time to find a parking space on Winthrop’s narrow streets. And we ended up having to wait about fifteen minutes on the sidewalk outside Rossetti’s. But when we were seated and had opened the menus there was another surprise.

  “I think you should have the lobster ravioli,” my father said.

  I’d already noticed them by then—I had a soft spot for ravioli—but I’d also noticed that they were one of the more expensive items on the menu, and, in deference to him, I’d shifted my eyes to the simpler pasta dishes.

  “And wine,” he said. “Una bottiglia. We gonna drink it together.”

  I was able, after a few seconds of internal struggle, to relax and let him be generous. The lobster ravioli were fancier versions of the crimped, ricotta-filled squares my grandmother had fashioned on a dish towel on the kitchen table; it seemed decadent to see such things—a peasant dish, really—filled with lobster meat. I had a salad beforehand, one and a half glasses of wine. My father had a small steak—which he cut, piece by piece, with a mechanic’s precision—and pasta on the side. The food was delicious, perfect, the service tinged with a particular kind of local friendliness I’d always loved. A light mood encircled us, as though the owner had hung silvery curtains by our table and arranged for the Neapolitan sun to shine through them. A mood like that was so unusual where my father and I were concerned that I found myself wondering if he might be undergoing some late-in-life personality change brought on by a tumor or a new medication.

  We decided to share a dessert of pizza dolce, a ricotta cheesecake that must have five thousand calories per slice. We sat for a while over coffee, too, and then he asked for the bill and paid in cash, keeping his scarred, rough hands under the table so I couldn’t see how much our great indulgence had set him back. When we were finished, he suggested we go to Revere Beach and take a walk. Another surprise. Another first. “We live near there all this time, you and me,” he said, “and when do we go? Mai. Never.”

  It was a clear night, cool near the water, the waves taller and more exuberant than anything I’d seen there in months. At age seventy-five, my father was in excellent condition, and we went along on the firmer sand at a good pace. Something hovered in the air between us, a moth of discomfort on that pretty landscape. After a few minutes he said, switching into Italian and staying with that language, “I understand now, why you go to church so much. All these years I saw you praying and praying, going to Mass even during the week, being quiet in the backyard or in your room, reading religious books. I never really understood. Adesso capisco. Now I do.”

  I kept silent, chewing on my surprise like the last bits of the meal, worried I’d break the spell he was under and he’d stop talking and close the door again on the neat, masculine room where he guarded his feelings.

  “Because you know what I don’t know,” he said. “You knew it all along. What I knew in my mind, like a thought, you knew in your heart—that this life goes by.”

  I hooked my arm inside his.

  “It goes by, Cinzia. And then what? Heaven? What’s Heaven? How old are we in Heaven? All the people who died, where do they go in Heaven? How do they know each other? Are they married again? Are they still brother and sister or friends? How can that be, something like that?”

  Still holding his arm, I turned him so we were looking out to sea and I said, “Guardare, Babbo. Guardare il mare. Look, Pa. Look at the ocean. I like to come here and think of everything that’s in it, the way it comes in and goes out every day, like our breath, and we barely notice. Something much bigger than us has to have made that, don’t you think so?”

  He studied the bay for a few seconds, then turned and looked at me again with that same puzzled expression on his face, as if I were a new creature in his life. “See,” he said, “you can say things like that. You can talk that way. See what you are?”

  “You’re the same as me, Papa,” I said. “We’re made of the same stuff.”

  “Sure,” he said, in English now, as if, standing near the noisy surf on the empty beach, he no longer had to worry about being overheard and mocked for his accent. “The trucks I fix at the garage, they made of the same stuff like a Cadillac, too.”

  “I’m the same as I always was,” I said. “A little bit fatter after that pizza dolce.”

  My attempt at humor passed him by completely. “Sure, just the same,” he said. “Why would you be different? But when I go, you pray for me, okay? With you praying for me, I’ll have a chance.”

  I held on to his arm and tried to move my mind nowhere into the future or the past. I wanted that moment in its fullness.

  When we were walking back south along the beach, the wind at our backs, I said, “There’s a chance, a small chance, that when I finish the clinicals in a month or so I’ll have to go to Rome.”

  “For work?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “A boyfriend?” he said hopefully.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “You should have one,” he said, “a beautiful girl like you.”

  “I’m special, I’m beautiful. I think you had something to drink before I got home.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  “It has something to do with the Church. I’m not sure, but I think I may have to go and meet with somebody in Rome about Church business, about my prayers.”

  “To become a nun?”

  “No,” I said, and for a moment I thought I might explain the whole situation to him, but I said only “A priest I know in Boston wants me to go
.”

  “I have my cousin there, still, all these years. Franco. I told you about him. You can look him up. Right near Rome he lives. Rich now…the lawyer.”

  “Want to come with me, Pa?”

  “No no no no,” he said, forcefully, and the lightness was suddenly falling away from him like dry leaves from the bed of a speeding, overloaded pickup truck. I almost looked behind us to see the trail. “What I left, I’m-a never goin’ back to.”

  “It’s different now, Pa.”

  “No no no no,” he said again. “The memories ain’t different. They half sleepin’, the memories. Who wants to wake ’em up?”

  After we’d walked another little ways he said, “You gonna stay over there?”

  “No. A week, maybe two weeks, that’s all. I was thinking I could use the money Aunt Chiara left. For the plane tickets and everything.”

  “You can stay if you have to.”

  “I’m fine, Papa. I’m happy here.”

  “How?” he asked. “You work, you come home and clean the house. Where’s the happy part? Tell me?”

  “Praying makes me happy.”

  He looked out at the water. The waves were slapping the shore in a slow, hard rhythm, streaks of brown seaweed showing in each small curl. “Show me about it,” he said. “When we get home. Show me what you do to be happy like that when you say a prayer.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Father Alberto had told me many times that he was sure God had a sense of humor. “He’s a big trickster, Cynthia,” he liked to say, putting one hand flat on his large belly as if preparing to laugh but not actually laughing. “He takes the things we want—to be rich, beautiful, healthy, to live forever—and He turns them this way and that like a magician and plays His tricks on us with those things. Sometimes He gives us what we want for a little while, or partly, and then He takes it away and watches to see how we react. It’s like He’s saying ‘Is this what you think you’re here for? Do you think I made you so you can have a nice face and have it forever, and everybody will give you compliments on it, and every time you look in the mirror you’ll have a little puff of pride?’ You think that’s what the whole machine is for? The lungs and heart and skull and blood? I went to all that trouble so you could look in the mirror?”

  On the day I was scheduled to meet with the archbishop I had reason to remember my late friend’s God-as-trickster theory. It would be a long ride, I knew, and I’d wondered about, then decided against, asking to borrow my father’s car. For one thing, going through the heart of Boston from north to south like that is suicide by traffic, and for another I hoped that the time on public transportation would allow me to prepare what I was going to say, to wrap up my nervousness in a kerchief and stuff it down into a corner of my purse. First, I had to take the bus down Revere Street to the subway station, then the blue line into downtown Boston, then switch to another line there, ride that line all the way to the end, and then take another short bus ride or, depending on how much time I had, make a long walk to the offices of the archdiocese. I knew it would take an hour and a quarter at least, so at the first subway station, to pass the time, I bought a newspaper I wasn’t fond of, a tabloid known for gossip and big headlines. I don’t know what made me do that—there was a photo of a pregnant actress on the front page, I had the smallest twinge of envy—but when the train came and I took my seat and opened the paper, I felt a shock that was like the pain of a broken bone.

  On the second page my eye was caught by a story with this headline: HOW ARE YOU MAKING OUT, FATHER? There on my lap—one of God’s painful jokes—was a photo of Father Welch kissing a woman. In Franklin Park, the caption said. Some enterprising photographer had either followed him there, based on a tip, or by the purest accident recognized him on a bench in Boston’s huge, inner-city park. There was my confessor and adviser, clearly kissing a woman in a way that was more than friendly. The woman was black, Father Welch was white, which, of course, made the story that much more titillating. I stared at the picture for a long time and read the caption and the short article twice. At the end it said that the matter had been referred to the archbishop’s office and would possibly result in Father Welch’s being forced to leave the priesthood.

  I set the paper down and looked out the opposite window. A flash of blue bay. Airport runways there. The timing of it was simply awful. There was no way on earth a person like me would have been granted an audience with the archbishop of Boston if it hadn’t been for the intercession of Father Welch. A twenty-two-year-old nurse-in-training? A Revere girl, plain as a tree trunk in all respects, meeting with a man who rubbed shoulders with governors, senators, and popes?

  I had a moment of wondering, as I folded the paper and set it on the seat beside me, if the news about Father Welch meant that the archbishop would refuse to see me. I was aligned with another radical priest, one who obviously wished there wasn’t a vow of celibacy involved in his chosen profession. Though I knew beyond a doubt that it wasn’t so, it would look like Father Welch had sent me to the archbishop for selfish purposes, to help his own cause.

  Where would he go now? I wondered. What became of priests after they were fired?

  The event and the tawdry press coverage raised a breaking wave of sadness in me. The subway train plunged into the tunnel that ran beneath Boston Harbor, and I felt I was being pushed face-first into an old sorrow. Being a loyal Catholic was starting to feel to me like being friends with someone who’s doing something hurtful and refuses to listen when you try to talk about it. There was a similar stubbornness there, as if, in a world where big things changed at the speed of light, the Church was reluctantly reconsidering a few small rules, going along at the pace of a horse-drawn cart. I knew that a lot of people liked it that way, were proud of it even, felt that the Church’s resistance to change was a badge of honor in a scattered, trivial, money-and-sex-mad world. I liked tradition, too, and loved some of the old-fashioned aspects of my Church, but the stubbornness and the damage it caused were tearing me in half.

  After a while it began to seem to me that my mission, if I could dare to use that word, my protest, my quest had everything to do with the sadness I felt at what had happened to people like Father Welch in the iron cage of rules that was our Church. For me, that Church, St. Anthony’s especially, had always been a refuge from the everyday world, a place—so rare in this society—to go and be quiet, a building that encouraged thoughts that went beyond the ordinary concerns of daily life, beyond money and status and looks and growing old, a building that had been raised at great expense to stand as a reminder that there was another dimension of life, other things to be thinking about. I remembered that every time my grandmother passed the church on foot, in a bus, or in a car, she would etch a tiny cross onto her forehead with her right thumbnail. That habit had come to seem foolish to me as I grew older, pure superstition. But now I understood what Nana had been doing: reminding herself that there were considerations that went beyond the errands, hopes, and worries that always swelled up to seem so important, reminding herself that, as my father had recently discovered, one day we all disappear. That was the whole point of having a church, of weekly services, sacraments, prayer. It wasn’t supposed to be about keeping the rules and being rewarded with an eternity of bliss, as if you were a student trying to please a strict teacher; it was designed to redirect our attention away from the clamoring fears and hopes that could drown out all thought of anything larger.

  And now look what was happening. Only a few years earlier the archdiocesan headquarters, where I was headed that day, had occupied a Tudor mansion close to downtown Boston. But the sex abuse scandal had hit the city in a particularly strong way—the lives of hundreds of people, mostly men, had been destroyed by twisted priests, and that destruction had ultimately hit the Church in its pocketbook. The residence of the archbishop of Boston had to be sold to raise the millions of dollars needed for legal fees and penalties. In order to find priests to say Mass at the churches that remained o
pen, the archdiocese had to go trolling for them in Africa or South America. There was nothing wrong with those priests, I knew, even in spite of my lukewarm feelings about Father Gerencia. Some of them were wonderful men from a strong spiritual tradition. But it seemed clear to me that things would have been so much better if priests whose job it was to keep reminding us, to keep putting the world into perspective, if those priests themselves had grown up in the neighborhood where they preached and if they had one foot firmly in the everyday world, had been able to marry, for instance, or kiss a woman on a park bench without a giant fuss being made. Or, even more, if they could be women who knew the particular concerns of women in the modern world—bearing and raising children, balancing that with a career, understanding their husbands, caring for their parents. It seemed so abundantly obvious that the Church I loved and cherished was shrinking down to a place where it would no longer have the power to remind people of that other dimension, and it seemed clear that so much of that shrinkage had to do with the fact that my Church, in clinging to the old ways, had fallen so far behind modern life that for many people—most of my once-Catholic friends—it wasn’t even relevant any longer. They went back to St. Anthony’s for the baptism of their child (a formal prelude to the big party), and on Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, or for a funeral—but it had no hold on their insides.

  Thinking that way on the long subway ride was like a splint on my broken courage. It was beginning to seem at least possible that God might be sending the visions not as a way to test my paltry individual faith, not to see if I’d go insane under the assault, not to torment or confuse me, but in order to allow me to make some useful contribution to my Church, helping, alongside people like Father Alberto and Father Welch, to drag it back into relevance. It seemed to me as I got off at the smoky, littered station with its racket of squealing wheels and clanging overhead wires, that despite the barrage of doubts I lived with, it might be a perfectly worthwhile use of my time to act as one small voice calling for that kind of change. I hoped and prayed that Archbishop Menendez would see things that way. That he would listen, at least. That I wouldn’t be chased away from the front door.