Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “It must have been difficult to raise them by yourself.”

  She looked down at the floor while sipping from her glass.

  “Is he like his father?”

  “Yes. Very much like him.”

  “Anna, you sounded so worried on the phone.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. I don’t want Gianna to overhear.”

  They made conversation until the girl came and called them to supper. She and her mother ate a full meal. Elijah, who had eaten in Rome, picked at his plate. Gianna asked him travelogue questions about Israel. He gave the answers. She said she would like to work on a kibbutz when she graduated. He told some amusing stories, and they lingered over their wine. Eventually the girl yawned, kissed her mother, said good night, and went upstairs.

  Anna looked across the table.

  “You’re tired”, she said.

  “I am. But I will never sleep if I don’t learn what is troubling you.”

  “You won’t sleep if I tell you.”

  “If I have a choice, I would like to know tonight.”

  “It’s complicated. The telling of it will be long.”

  “Then we should begin.”

  Her eyes darkened and her lips grew firm. “Because of my work I have developed a frame of mind that is analytical. I try to keep strictly to logic and law. That, at least, must be obvious.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “I’m not a sentimental woman. I have always been—how shall I call it—cautious about nonobjective reality. This helped me as a young lawyer to prevail in a field dominated by men. In those years, one had to be twice as levelheaded as a male lawyer in order to be considered half as good. That is no longer so much the case, but when I began my practice it was true. I value that period of my life. It taught me a lot. Suffice it to say that I became adept at protecting my emotions. I rose in the legal profession, and as a result I am now where I am. I worked for this. I think I have earned it. But there was a cost. I rejected everything from my life that fell outside the precise boundaries of the rational. I lost my faith in God, in the Church, and in humanity as a species. I came to consider law as a teaching tool and a safeguard against the irrational forces in society.

  “Then I met another young lawyer, Stefano Benedetti. He was just beginning to have some influence in the Christian Democrat party. He was being groomed for the leadership. Italian politics were a mess, full of corruption and confusion. Stefano was honest and very, very bright. He was also a man of honor, and it was said by many that within the decade he could be the next prime minister. It was an exciting time for us. We were so happy. Gianna came along in our second year of marriage, and Marco arrived a year after that. Stefano’s family is wealthy. There was never any question of need. There were nannies. There were expensive vacations. Life was full and rewarding. After each birth, I resumed my practice within a few months. We climbed and climbed, without any of the usual clawing and manipulating that goes on in that kind of life. It seemed effortless. We were the golden couple.

  “Then one night in 1982 Stefano left his office and never arrived home. He just disappeared, without warning, without ransom notes, without any indication of where he had gone.”

  “You must have been mad with worry.”

  “I can’t describe to you the torments I endured.”

  “I knew nothing of this. I was buried in Carmel during those years. We had no real access to current events. Was he ever found?”

  “They found his body two months after his disappearance. He died by strangulation. He had been tortured.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You needn’t say anything. I know how difficult it must be to listen to a tale like this.”

  “Did the police find the killers?”

  “No. There has never been a single piece of evidence pointing in any direction, not even a misleading one. Total silence.”

  “Do you think it was politically motivated?”

  “I thought so until recently.”

  “You no longer think so?”

  “I have no evidence, but I believe the reason for his death is entangled with something so vast and sinister that it’s appalling to think of it.”

  “Then wouldn’t it be better to forget. . .”

  “Forget? I can never forget. I had to identify the body. What they did to him is beyond belief. The children have never been told. They know only that their father was assassinated, and they think, as I did for so many years, that it was a senseless act of terrorism, the Red Brigade or the covert fascist revival.”

  “Has something happened to throw new light on the crime?”

  “Nothing. It’s not a question of juridical evidence.”

  Elijah shook his head: “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s intuition. . . a womanly faculty that long lay dormant within me. I must now go back several years to describe another situation, one that seems to have no bearing on Stefano’s death. You are no doubt aware that I know the President personally.”

  Elijah nodded, unsure of where she was leading.

  “Our generation was dazzled by him. He was younger then. He wasn’t well known in the world, though even then he was beginning to be influential. You felt a sense of destiny clinging to him. He was very wealthy. He had connections to important banks in Italy, France, and Switzerland. He was a polymath. All those languages and degrees. He was writing books. Stefano said he was an outstanding economist, and more to his credit, a highly principled one. The list of his accomplishments is endless, as you know. He was the sincerest man I had ever met, after Stefano. He was always the humanitarian, always apolitical—in fact, some of his closest associates belonged to rival parties. He drew an amazingly eclectic group of people into his circle, and he possessed a remarkable skill for making each of us feel as if his interest were purely personal. One never felt used, even when it came to pass that this or that service would be appreciated by him. Such requests—I hesitate to call them that—were always expressed without pressure. He was, and is, a master of subtlety.

  “But Stefano didn’t like him. This was always a puzzle to me. When I pressed him for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on anything wrong with the man; he mistrusted him, but on some level that was inaccessible to me. My husband was a devout Catholic, you realize, and maybe that gave him some antennae that I had lost along the way. He gradually began to withdraw from that circle. I went along with him, of course, but unwillingly. We begged off the wonderful parties, the cultural events, the stream of invitations. Eventually, we were no longer asked.”

  “When was this?”

  “About three years before Stefano’s death.”

  “Permit me, Anna, but I couldn’t help noticing your familiarity with the President when we dined with him in Rome and Warsaw. At some point you must have resumed contact.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he come to the funeral?”

  “Oh, yes. He was there, but he was lost in the crowd. There were hundreds of dignitaries there, not to mention our families. I didn’t notice his presence, and if I had I would have attributed it to his social graces. An official condolence, swiftly forgotten. And yet, in the years following the death, he hired several private agencies to pursue the investigation long after the police had abandoned it. It must have cost him a fortune. He quietly turned Italy upside down in search of clues, and he did so without telling me. I eventually heard about it through mutual friends, and of course I was touched. I was so grateful. I sent him a card of thanks. He wrote back. The invitations started up again. I was heartbroken and terribly lonely. I attended some events, thinking that I might meet someone who could heal the gash in the bottom of my existence. My life was hemorrhaging out of that hole. But there was no one. No one could ever replace Stefano.”

  Her voice trembled, but she quickly regained her composure. “If Gianna and Marco hadn’t needed me so much, I would have killed myself. They saved my life.”

  “And the President? Did he
offer companionship, consolation?”

  “He tried. But even he couldn’t get through. Despite his many kindnesses, something inside of me couldn’t bear to draw close to a person Stefano had disliked so much. I put up the usual barriers a woman knows how to put up. We established a cordial relationship, which has continued uninterrupted to this day.”

  “Why do you remain a part of his company?”

  “There are memories of Stefano attached to that circle, old friends, many connections useful to my work. I am a private person, and it is isolating to be the kind of person I am. I work far too much. The children are always complaining to me about it. So, being loosely attached to the President’s circle opens some doors for me. It provides many welcome diversions.”

  “I thought you were an intimate.”

  “Everyone and no one is his intimate. There are circles within circles, and I occupy a position within an intermediate ring, far from the radioactive core, which is the President himself, but farther in than many people who consider him a close friend. It’s a very odd position.”

  “A unique one, I would guess.”

  “That may be so. There has never been any romantic involvement, if that’s what you’re wondering. No involvement of any kind.”

  Elijah sipped judiciously from his glass. It was empty. Anna got up and returned with the bottle.

  “I’m wearing you out. It’s late and you must be utterly fatigued. Driving with Marco is a sure recipe for exhaustion of the nervous system.”

  “I’m fine. I would be happy to talk all night if you like.”

  “Where was I? Oh, yes, the post-death relationship.”

  “Yes, that surprises me. What was his purpose?”

  “In keeping me? I’m mostly ornamental. I’m a public figure. He borrows an air of civic stability from association with me and people like me. Money is tainted. Men like him cherish a sterling reputation far more than their fortunes.”

  Here she paused and looked at the dark window, curtained with yellow lace.

  “I’ve been rambling. I shouldn’t do that. It’s unbecoming in a judge. Where was I?”

  “You referred earlier to some new light that has been thrown on the mystery surrounding your husband’s death. You spoke of an intuition.”

  “Oh, yes. How can I describe it? Let’s say that for many years I have filed away a large number of unexplained details gleaned from the social life in Europe. Most of it is insignificant, but some of it rises to the surface and has no explanation. None of it would be admissible as evidence in a courtroom. But as a judge you learn to detect things beneath the level of words, while striving to retain the fundamental objectivity.”

  “For example?”

  “A year ago your name came up at a party.”

  “A year ago I was digging in the garden at Carmel.”

  “Be that as it may, your name came up. You were mentioned as a man who had once risen in Israel and who might have been a forerunner of the kind of thing the President is now doing. Someone—I forget who—made a sneering reference to the fact that you had ‘got religion’ and thrown it all away. I found that intriguing. I had never met anyone who would consider doing such a thing. I thought I would like to meet you, but of course I dismissed it as unlikely.

  “Something happened during those few minutes when you were discussed. At the time it seemed insignificant, but for some reason I didn’t forget it. I put it away in my mysteries file. When you were discussed something passed behind the President’s eyes. How can I describe it without sounding like a writer of ghost stories trying to spook her audience with silly melodrama? I can only say that I saw a shadow pass through his eyes—behind his eyes. It took a split second. The look frightened me. Yet it was so quickly come and gone that I almost disbelieved I had seen anything. But that look triggered a memory which had been dormant for several years. I recalled a party that Stefano and I had attended at the Galéone Palace in Rome, almost twenty years before. On that occasion, we were having a wonderful time. The world glowed. Stefano was so admired. People loved him. You would have loved him too.”

  She choked at this point, caught herself, and continued:

  “I had gone outside to breathe the night air. I was pregnant with Marco then and was feeling nauseous. I stood on the little balcony that overlooks a garden in the inner courtyard. A beautiful tree grows there, and I was fond of it. That evening, despite my upset stomach, I was deliriously happy. I wondered if there were anyone as happy as I on this earth. I went back into the small salon, the same room in which years later you and I first met. No one noticed me when I came in. There were all kinds of people there. Powerful people. Generals, financiers, politicians. Stefano was talking about the need to regenerate a moral vision for European politics. He called it Christian humanism. In those years, I found his unabashed Catholicism somewhat embarrassing. Like most of the people in the room I had rejected the Christian brand of humanism, but I loved him for his courage, and I couldn’t help admiring him. I was grateful for such a husband. He spoke passionately and eloquently. It was spellbinding. Everyone listened. I glanced at our host, expecting to see in his face what I felt in my heart. I thought that he too must love Stefano. Instead I saw something that startled me. He appeared to be appreciating Stefano, but a shadow passed across and through and behind his eyes. It shocked me. I shook it off as a figment of my imagination. It sank into my subconscious where it remained until last year when I saw that same look come into him at the mention of your name. Then I understood that the man who has become the most powerful figure in the world had hated my husband.”

  “And by implication hates me as well.”

  “That may be true, if I’m right.”

  “It could be groundless.”

  “It could be”, she said doubtfully.

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “I think my intuitions are correct.”

  “And so, what does it mean? Are you saying he may have been involved in Stefano’s death?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I have gone on as before, attending his banquets and committees, but with eyes wide open, watching, waiting. And my antennae are quivering at every turn. Infinitesimally small things. Signals, glances, shadows.”

  “As you said, nothing that could stand up in a courtroom.”

  “Precisely. It’s not on that level of manifestation.”

  “I still don’t understand my involvement. Why his interest in me?”

  “When your name was mentioned so disdainfully, the President said something that seemed insignificant at the time, but which I now suspect had another meaning. He said that regardless of your religion you were a person of outstanding qualities and could contribute something valuable to the new order. That’s exactly how he expressed it—contribute something valuable to the new order. No more was said, but I detected that strange mixture of malice and desire. I realized that he hated you and yet he wanted to use you for something. It totally baffled me. Why should he hate you, a man he had never met?”

  “People hate each other for all kinds of reasons.”

  “But why you?”

  Elijah thought. “It might be a hatred that has no roots in human motives. It might be purely spiritual.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The soul is not as simple as we think it is. Intellect, imagination, emotions, physical processes. The distinctive parts of the human makeup can overlap, blur, shift. Thoughts influence feelings and vice versa. Health influences mood and vice versa. Can anyone really know what happens in the privacy of this man’s soul? And yet I suspect he instinctively recognized that I represent the antithesis of his vision.”

  “He didn’t appear to believe that would be a problem.”

  “He is accustomed to influencing men’s minds. If a man can change as radically as I changed, isn’t it possible that I could be changed back again, back to his vision?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “The question is, does
he think it’s possible? Obviously, he does, or he would not have tried to draw me into your circle.”

  “But the malice. . . it was so instantaneous.”

  “His reaction could very well have been sparked by spiritual forces originating outside of the soul.”

  Anna looked dubious and waved away the thought with a hand.

  “Devils? I’m sorry, Father, but I’m too much the rationalist to entertain that idea.”

  He paused and considered. Would there be any point at this late hour in trying to convince her of the reality of unseen warfare? He would leave that for another day.

  She changed the subject for him:

  “When I met you that first time I saw that you possessed a character as honorable as Stefano’s but lacked his social graces. A man without guile, you are. Even so, as I listened to you and observed you, I asked myself if you would become another von Tilman. I wondered how they would try to reshape you. I thought they would probably succeed, because they almost always do.”

  “And what have you concluded?”

  “You are not a von Tilman. You never could be. Warsaw demolished that fear. But you are still a mystery to me.”

  “It’s quite simple, Anna. There is no mystery.”

  “Then clear it up for me.”

  “A man is what he loves. A man is what he will live for and die for.”

  “What do you love? What is real for you?”

  “I love God. He is real.”

  “Theology isn’t logical.”

  “Logic doesn’t contain theology; theology contains logic.”

  “That’s debatable. Oh, damn, there we go; now we’re sliding into the world of abstractions, where this sort of conversation always ends.”

  “The love God pours out on the world is effective in our lives to the degree that we open ourselves to it. Until we do, we presume it is just an abstraction.”

  “Is that so? I suppose it could be. Death was an abstraction until Stefano died.”

  “It’s the same with love.”

  “But tell me, you who have no human beloved, how can you speak of human love until you have loved another living, breathing human being?”