Damnation of Adam Blessing

by Packer, Vin

  • • •

  A light rain began to fall as Adam was leaving Passetto’s — a misty sort of precipitation with the sun still hot but screened by pinkish clouds. Adam had ordered an extra pot of coffee at the end of his meal, so that he no longer felt the gay euphoria he had while he was dining; instead, a not melancholy but more pensive feeling; serious, very serious now. A tonsured monk passed him in the street, and Adam crossed himself — the first time in his life he had ever done it, but it seemed very natural. In the taxi on his way to the Piazza Verano he remembered his first trip to Rome, when he had ridden an elevator to the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica. There were bits of saints’ bones for sale there, along with the rosaries, guidebooks and Benedictine liqueurs. There were signs everywhere which warned “Do not spit,” and Adam had thought at the time that it was comical for such signs to be there, but now he knew that it was very sad and he understood those signs. They were not there because people would spit, Adam decided, they were simply reminders that at any time, in any place, man could turn on you and foul you. Who was safe really, where was anyone safe from unkindness or vulgarity? Adam smiled. It no longer made him sad as it had in Passetto’s when he remembered Ernesto’s last words to him; it made him glad he could forgive Ernesto for another wrong, as he had forgiven all his friends. Perhaps when he left the cemetery he would return to St. Peter’s and buy a small sack of the saints’ bones for Ernesto. Adam leaned back and closed his eyes, his neck rubbing against the leather seat, which was hot and sticky. He felt slightly dizzy, and he wondered if he could give in to the impulse momentarily to let his mind whirl, as though it were a separate part unconnected with his body, and it would whirl and spin, and even Adam would not be aware of it … just for a few slow seconds. Like a weight lifted, the end of great pressure … lightness, floating. Dancing.

  • • •

  “Signore! Per favore, Signore!”

  Adam rubbed his eyes and sat up. The driver was pointing to an ornate procession in front of them. Black horses dressed in black plumes, a black hearse with a man on top wearing a Napoleonic hat.

  “Here you get out, Signore!” said the driver, with a shrugging gesture to indicate his helplessness. “We are sticked!” he said.

  Adam paid him. He waved a hand in answer to the driver’s “Grazie!” and he walked along until he came to the outside gates of the cemetery. The short nap on the way had confused him slightly. He had the sensation of having dreamed a horrendous nightmare, but none of it could he remember. Just the feeling left from it — a pit in his stomach; his heart beating too fast. He began to smell the sickly odor of countless flowers which were set up on stalls lining the cemetery’s outer gates. He waited while the black hearse passed through the gates; then he bought a bunch of lilies and went in the direction of the hearse.

  Inside, the Piazza Verano was a world of marble, peopled by marble angels, marble children, marble adults. The living, like Adam, seemed to be intruders, and Adam noticed that many of them walked in the careful, almost apologetic manner of someone going through another person’s house, without quite having his permission. Adam passed a marble house in front of which two small marble boys dressed in sailor suits exchanged a living rose. An inscription on a stone beside them said they had lived from 1860 until 1870. They were brothers: Tullio and Giusto.

  Adam walked on, and the rain was still the same vaporish quality, with the heat muggy, the sun pushing its fire through the veil of pink clouds. At another marble house, Adam saw a marble woman holding out her hand, as though she were beckoning to him. He stopped and stared at her. He imagined that he saw a faint smile on her marble lips. He looked beyond her and into the house. There were chairs to sit on. There was an altar with a white lace-edged cloth, and on the cloth were frames containing photographs of children. A bowl of oranges. A prayer book. Tiny lights burned under images of the Virgin.

  Adam went closer to the marble woman, to read her name on the tablet, but there was no name. He looked up again at her face and then she seemed to frown. He turned his back on her and hurried away, and he realized as he passed house after house, he would probably never find Ernesto’s wife’s mausoleum. He was not even sure there would be one so soon; sure only that the newspapers had announced her burial in the Piazza Verano.

  At a corner, mounted under glass on a small tombstone, was the photograph of a young boy about thirteen. He was posed standing on a hill with his arms pulling a dancing kite, his hair tossed in the wind, his face laughing. He wore knickers and a white blouse, and on one leg his stocking had slipped down to his ankles, and there was a dog pulling at the stocking. Under the photograph was a name — one word — followed with an exclamation point: Mario!

  Adam walked across to the tombstone and placed the flowers there.

  “Mario,” he said. He smiled and bent close to the photograph, “Is that your dog?” There were tears starting in his eyes, but he did not fight them and they blurred; a drop fell on the photograph. “I didn’t have a dog,” he said. “Mario, I didn’t have a dog.”

  Two priests passed with large soup-tureen hats, babbling together in Italian, smiling. They glanced at Adam and glanced away.

  “I’ll buy a kite for Timmy, Mario,” Adam said. “I’ll tell him about you.”

  Adam straightened and backed away from the small tombstone. He gave a little wave at the photograph, smiling, the tears on his cheeks. As he started around the corner and down toward some lights on the ground in the distance, he remembered something about the dream he had on the way to the cemetery. He had been caught running down a narrow street with a knife in his hand. He remembered he was wearing the foulard and damask-tie silk dressing gown he had bought for Billy’s wedding gift. The smiling carabiniere from the questúra was arresting him for murder. He remembered that he had protested that he had murdered no one, and the carabiniere had only shrugged. “There is no reason, but it might make you feel better, Signore!”

  Adam stopped at a wrought-iron grating in front of him. It fenced off row upon row of concrete slabs, a hundred or more, with small bulbs by each one. The bulbs were about fifteen watts, only a quarter of them burning. Near the gate sat a fat old man in a little house nearly too small for him, the size of a ticket window. Outside the house were more lights fixed to a central switchboard which the man operated, and which connected with the lights that circled the concrete squares.

  Adam looked at the man, and the man said, “Five lire.”

  “Why?” asked Adam in Italian. Adam wiped the tears from his face with his handkerchief, while the man said in Italian, “For the dead.”

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t speak Italian well.”

  The fat man shrugged. He did not speak English.

  “Why?” Adam tried again.

  Behind him a voice said, “The lights are for the people who rest here.”

  He turned and faced one of the priests with the soup-tureen hats. In the priest’s hands was a rosary. He had great coarse peasant hands, and a gold tooth in front of his mouth. “I speak English,” he said unnecessarily. “Did you lose someone?”

  “Not here,” Adam said. “I’m a visitor.”

  “This is the ossario. The people are buried here.”

  “Where?”

  “In the ossario. Excuse me. In those wells.” He pointed at the fenced-in area. “For the poor, Signore. This is where the poor rest. They cannot afford tombs and land is scarce in Rome, so we put them in the earth ten years. Then, when the time is up, the bones are dug up and they are buried here in a common grave.”

  Adam’s eyes were blurred again from his tears. “Where are their friends who won’t bury them?” he said. “Where?”

  The priest looked at him a moment. Adam leaned into him. “Where are his friends?”

  The priest stepped away from Adam. He was smiling. He said something to the fat man and the fat man shook his head and held his nose with his fingers. The priest nodded.

  “I’m not drunk if you think t
hat,” said Adam. “Perhaps not, Signore, but you have a smell of it.” The priest turned and moved away, handing the fat man some lire.

  “Wait!” Adam called.

  The priest turned, hanging back, and Adam hurried across to him.

  “You have no right to treat me this way,” said Adam.

  “How did I treat you? I explained the ossario to you. I answered your questions.”

  “You told the man I was drunk.”

  “No,” said the priest, “I said you had a liquor breath. No more.”

  “Why did you want to be unkind. You of all people! Isn’t there enough unkindness in the world. Today at Passetto’s I was snarled at because I accidentally knocked over a wine bottle, and now from a Father, this treatment!”

  “Signore, I am a student priest, not a Father, and I have no time. Go back to your hotel and rest, Signore. Good day.”

  “Wait!” Adam said.

  “Good day, Signore!” The priest walked fast, but Adam followed.

  “Don’t you know what’s wrong? It’s wrong to talk about people behind their backs!”

  The priest did not look back. Adam continued following him. A woman kneeling by a marble statue of a nun looked up at Adam from her prayers, her rosary dangling in her hand.

  Adam called to her: “He runs away from me! He is supposed to be a priest!”

  “Listen!” Adam called after the priest. “I have a confession!”

  He was hot and now slightly dizzy again. The priest was far ahead of him now, but again he shouted, “I have a confession to make to you. A crime! Wait!” He caught hold of a marble man, leaned on him, starting to sob. The rain was falling harder now. Adam stumbled as he moved on. He picked himself up again. The knees of his trousers were damp and dirty. The rain seemed to come more, and the pink color of the sky was turning to gray. Adam was very tired. He could not make it to the gates of the cemetery. He stopped again, and then again he saw the marble woman with her arms beckoning to him. He walked past her to the house behind her. His thirst was tremendous, and as he looked in through the window at the oranges on the altar, he thought of biting into one and sucking out the juice. When he tried the door, he found it locked.

  “Please let me in,” he whispered. He leaned his head against the door, felt the cool metal on his forehead. “Please let me in.”

  Behind him he heard someone shouting in Italian.

  He let go of the door handle, and stumbled toward the marble woman. There was more shouting, and he saw people running toward him, people he seemed to recognize, but it was all a dream, wasn’t it? He thought he heard Dorothy Schackleford’s voice, but he fell to his knees without knowing if this were true. He put his head down on the cold marble slab beside the marble woman. “You don’t have any name,” he said to the cold marble. Then he toppled over on his back in the wetness, his eyes barely able to see the marble woman’s face through his tears. He blinked his eyes and looked up at the face, and there were no features there, just as there was no name on the slab beneath her.

  “And a lot you care!” said the marble woman.

  Epilogue

  THE FELLOW’S FLYER

  Fellow’s Foundation, Rome Chapter

  Amid the festivity of the Christmas Season, we pause to note with reluctance and sadness, that we are losing one of our most valuable and diligent Fellow’s workers. Adam Blessing is sailing for New York on the “Leonardo da Vinci,” December 19th. Our questions as to his future plans were answered in typical Adam fashion, with the simple and profound sentence: “My future is in the hands of Faith.”

  Adam Blessing has been with Fellow’s a year in January, heading up our Alcoholics Anonymous Chapter. No one who has ever heard “our Adam” speak, can doubt how sorely we will miss him. His accounts of his recovery from a mental illness were an inspiration to all — his confidence, his very nearly spiritual enthusiasm for his work, will make it utterly impossible for anyone to take his place. He can be succeeded — yes, but there is no one quite like “our Adam.”

  We have grown to think of him as our special “Blessing,” and our Treasury will be in mourning for a long time (as all Fellow’s members know by now, Adam was an unparalleled fund-raiser!). New Yorkers are in for a treat at the New Year’s meeting of A.A., which will be an open meeting, and which “our Adam” will address. Remember the date well: January 30th, at 8:00 P.M. in Riverton Memorial Church on 5th Avenue and 90th Street.

  We know Adam will be dropping in on another ex-Fellow’s worker, Mrs. Wilson Neer, our own Dorothy Schackleford, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Dorothy was one of our leading lights for two years, heading up the Fellow’s Children Center. Her cheerful smile and her hardy determination have been very much missed by all of us.

  So, with our hearts full and our spirits inspired by Adam, we say “Buon Natale,” but never good-bye. And speaking for all of us, I would like to put it in a more personal vein … as Santayana once wrote: “I scarce know which part my greater be,/ What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”

  PART THREE

  20

  WIN WINS ROUND ONE THOUSAND-AND-ONE;

  Manufacturer Ordered Out — For Peace

  A temporary cessation of hostilities was arranged yesterday as wealthy manufacturer Luther V. Schneider agreed to move out of the Bucks County estate he has been occupying with estranged wife Win Griswold Schneider, former society beauty.

  Lawyers for both sides in this knock-down-drag-out litigation agreed with Supreme Court Justice Paul Lindgren, that the battle line should be drawn back. Win and her millionaire husband have been living in the same $99,000 mansion on Lerch Road, Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and concentrating too much fire power in one area.

  Schneider, who claims his wife’s romance with the bottom of the bottle is jeopardizing their son’s health, has agreed to move into the family apartment on East 91st Street in New York, temporarily. Win, who claims any diversion she might have, nowhere near matches Schneider’s romance with his $100-a-week private secretary, is suing Schneider for separation. She asked $8000 monthly alimony, but agreed to accept $600 a week temporary alimony while regrouping her forces. Meanwhile, she will have full custody of the boy, Timothy Schneider, 11. Some two years ago this boy was the victim of a kidnapper, who has never been apprehended, largely due to the fact that Mr. Schneider refused to cooperate with authorities. The ransom money was given over to the kidnapper with no identifying marks on any of the bills, which reportedly added up to $100,000.

  In Schneider’s counter-affidavit he claimed his wife, at the time of the kidnapping, was concerned more about the amount of the ransom than about the safe return of her son. Schneider attributed the safe return to the fact he did not cooperate with local authorities or the F.B.I., but “trusted” the abductor. He does not trust his wife with their son, claiming she has often beaten the boy and ridiculed him for being “unbalanced.”

  Lindgren had adjourned Win’s separation trial without setting a date. This was three months ago. Since that time, he said, Schneider’s attorneys called him to report that Win had locked the child in a toolshed behind the house, in retaliation for “an unfounded conviction,” that Schneider was seeing Kate Weeks, his secretary, after office hours. Win’s lawyers yesterday responded that the boy liked to play in the toolshed and that Schneider had maliciously misconstrued the game to mislead the court. The lawyers for Win Schneider added that Schneider’s “gallivanting” with Miss Weeks was no secret to anyone. They said that Schneider had attacked their client, blackening her eye.

  After listening to both attorneys in yesterday’s Winter Court Session, Lindgren decided that, for the sake of the child, an armistice must be arranged, with Schneider’s move the first step.

  “Hello,” said the voice.

  “Hello.”

  There was a pause. Luther Schneider turned his swivel chair slightly to the left, facing his office windows. He said again, “Hello?” He glanced across his desk at Matt

  Flannery.
“Do you think it’s Timmy calling from the country?” he whispered, as though Flannery knew any better than he himself knew. Flannery shook his head. “Don’t get your hopes up, Lute.” He had a faint smile of encouragement on his face. Sometimes when Win was out of the house Mrs. MacGivern allowed Timmy to phone.