Pilgrims (20 page)

The weight of the question struck her: which way to paradise? And a little voice within said, “Not this way, that's for sure.” She was lost in more ways than one.

She was a bad person. Perhaps God had put a price on her head even now, and should she dare to take Communion when she returned home, the Body of Christ would stick in her throat and she would choke to death. Of course one could avoid Communion, make all sorts of excuses, but bad things do happen to guilty people, no matter what they say. It's true. Call it “bad karma” or call it Nebraska, but a sinner has every reason to be paranoid. Something awful could be just about to happen. Cheryl could marry a man with obsessive-compulsive arsonist tendencies and Carl Jr. take up parachuting and Carla give birth to a dwarf.

She could imagine a sorrowing Sister Arvonne approaching her, hands outstretched. (
Don't take life into your own hands, my
child. Don't throw away all of God's gifts and two millennia of the
wisdom of the Holy Mother Church in favor of your own restless
heart. If you don't believe, that is okay—faith comes and goes—
but don't destroy the temple that God has built in your heart. Your
parents, your grandparents, your teachers, all of the faithful,
have worked and prayed and sacrificed to make you the good
woman you are. Don't throw it all away for an hour of pleasure.
)

She was lost, looking for paradise. Paolo had carefully pointed her toward it and she must've taken the wrong passageway because she came into a piazza full of parked cars, a sort of fifteenth-century parking lot, where an eager young man stood with a big steel hoop around his neck on which hundreds of car keys hung. He had made the piazza his parking lot. A red Fiat drove up, a lady hopped out, he parked the car in the mass of other cars, and added her keys to the hoop. Across the square, the high marble front of the church of Sant'Agostino, and she crossed over to look at it. Four slender pilasters with carved capitals (she read in her guidebook), the crests of a bishop and a cardinal on the façade, a fresco of St. Augustine himself (“Known for his work with the care and conversion of prostitutes, the church was built in what was then Rome's red light district.”). A church designed for women just like herself. She opened a small side door and walked into the dimness. When her eyes adjusted, she found herself standing next to the archangel Raphael, a gown slipping rakishly off one shoulder, holding a black marble half shell with holy water. She dipped her fingers in it and crossed herself.

In the dimness she could make out gilded baroque columns and colored marble, carved birds and plants, busts in niches, frescoes, an explosion of color—odd, to have such a gaudy display and so poorly illuminated—and then her eye met the eyes of a man in a black suit standing thirty feet away in the aisle, his right hand in his pocket, holding (it looked like) a pistol. A second man stood in a pew near him and a third and fourth in the side aisles, all of them in dark suits, dark hair swept back, and then she noticed, in the
middle of them, the man kneeling in prayer. Four hoodlum bodyguards protecting a sinner. They made no motion toward her and she stood stock still for a moment and then, seeing the statue of the Blessed Virgin a few feet beyond Raphael, stepped over to it and knelt on the cushion. If they wanted to shoot a woman at prayer, then so be it.

She asked to be forgiven for the sin of adultery, enjoyable though it had been. She asked that her love for Carl be restored to her heart, difficult though he is. She asked that she not be shot and killed, especially not in a state of sin. She prayed for her mother and father, that they have a peaceable old age. She prayed for the happiness of her children, though she had no clue what that might involve. She prayed for the well-being of her fellow pilgrims, that light shine into their hearts. She prayed for the new president and his family.

And then she prayed for the existence of God. She said, “I would feel so foolish talking to You like this if in fact You are simply a myth or a superstition. And think of how the people who built this church would feel. I mean, look at the work involved. The expense. The artistry. Does this not create some sort of an obligation to be real, Lord?

“I'm not demanding that You walk out of a cloud and talk to me, though I wouldn't object to it either. I just wish I believed in You more. I was brought up Catholic, You know. Which is pretty strict. Maybe not to You but to us it seemed pretty tough. All black and white. Do what you're told and don't slough off. You can't be a half believer. That was my preparation for life. And now here I am, riddled with doubt about You and the Life to Come and also what to do about this one.”

And then a door clicked shut. She looked around. The men in dark suits were gone.

So she got to her feet and continued living her life. The Holy Mother sat under a halo of gold stars, the infant God in her arms holding a bird in His hand, a silver leaf over His genitalia. Just beyond, in a little chapel, a large painting of an elderly man and woman kneeling in the dirt before the Madonna (“Note the famous dramatic lighting of Caravaggio, which emphasizes the Madonna's everyday clothing and dirty feet [scandalous to many in the seventeenth century] as the pilgrims kneel before her.”), just as she had just done, and light shone on her. Her phone beeped. There was a voice-mail message. It was Paolo. “Darling, did something come up? Did you decide not to come? It's okay. I'd love to see you whenever you can. I love you.”

“He drove us around the battle sites but they're all gone,” Carl told her that evening. “Just a lot of ugly high-rises and shopping arcades and pizza shops, gelato stands, gas stations. No monuments to be seen. Anyway, the Americans and British landed there at Anzio on the twenty-second of January, 1944, and fought inland through light German resistance up the beach and into the Padiglione Woods where the fighting got heavier. They had moved a couple miles inland by January twenty-fourth, but then the German commander, Kesselring, brought in two Panzer divisions and stopped them cold right there. There was an Anzio Beach Landings Museum but it was closed. So we stood around where the boats had come ashore and tried to imagine what it was like, thousands of men wading through the surf holding their rifles up over their heads, the landing ships coming up on the beach.”

“Did you find the grave?” she said.

“He's not there. We looked all through the American Cemetery outside Nettuno, about eight thousand Americans buried there and the names of three thousand missing written on the memorial walls. No Gussie.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Well, it's not your fault.”

But it was, of course.

She hadn't shown them Gussie's letters. Better to keep the mood lighthearted, she thought, than face up to Gussie's bitterness about the entire Italian campaign, the senselessness of it, the arrogance of the American command, Lieutenant General Mark Clark in particular. Probably Gussie was right and Clark was an ass, envious of Eisenhower's stature, aware that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was slated for early June, and anxious to get to Rome before D-Day put the Italian campaign on the back pages. The strategic importance of Italy was nil. The crucial thing was to demolish the German army, not to capture Rome. Clark let the Germans off easy and set his sights on a triumphal parade through the Eternal City. That's how Gussie saw it. He'd come ashore at Anzio and hooked up with the brigadier and seen and heard a lot. His next-to-last letter to Norbert began:

C
arl was very courtly to her that evening.
Did he know
about Paolo? Had she been spotted? Rome wasn't so big
you could assume secrecy
. “What did you do today?” he said, in a kind way, not accusingly. “Just living my life, walking around, seeing the sights,” she said.
True enough
. “Glad you're having a good time,” he said. He had unbent from his pissy attitude toward the Italians and he'd even adopted some of their style. He opened doors for her, bowing slightly, and offered her his hand up stairs, a courtier in a green nylon jacket and chinos. Once, offering her a chair in a restaurant, he even kissed her hand. Tuesday night, there he was in a sidewalk café near the river, sitting by her side, chatting her up, charming her with witty asides. Affecting a certain Continental style, a
knowingness
. Everyone had been content to stick with Chianti and then Carl out of the blue ordered a bottle of Tignanello. And pronounced it without hesitation. The waiter was impressed. He uncorked it and poured a splash into a glass and Carl swirled the wine around in a professional manner and tasted it.

“How is it?” said Wally. “Looks like wine to me.”

“I like it. It's more complex,” he said.

Carl had never commented on the complexity of wine before in his life. Nor had he ever indicated a preference for complexity, not in wine or anything else. And then he drank the wine and said, “One thing you get the sense of, being here in Rome, I must say—you get the feeling that there is a great great deal about life in this world that we will never understand and maybe we should stop trying to and just enjoy what we have.”

“Let me write that down, Shakespeare,” said Wally.

“I'm serious. Americans think we can understand everything and then solve it. Italians are different. Maybe it's enough just to live your life.”

“Thank you for the poem,” he said to her on the way back to the hotel. She had sent him the poem that ended,
I hope you
know, my darling one / I love you, after all is said and done
.

“That's nice that you're writing poems again.”

“It's not finished,” she said.

They made love that night. He lay in bed reading and she took a shower and stood by the bed toweling herself dry, one leg up on the bed. It felt like an Audrey Hepburn movie, except more explicit. He peered over the top of his book at her. It was
Beachhead
in Italy
, about the 1944 campaign, bought used at a curbside book table for one euro, a small triumph for Carl. She dried her legs and spread cream on them and pulled on her green warm-up pants and her
IF YOU'RE COLD, PUT ON A SWEATER
Tshirt. They lay side by side reading and then he turned out his light, and they lay on their backs for a while. “You having a good time?” he said. She said she was. “Everybody seems to be doing okay.” And then he turned toward her and put his arm across her
belly, and hitched his leg up over her leg, and she turned toward him and slipped her hand under his T-shirt, and the rest came flowing along naturally. A miracle. Pure divine intervention. She had said prayers to St. Helen, the patron saint of older women and the lovelorn in general, and the good saint, who had received her martyrdom at the hands of Eskimos in Greenland who set her adrift on an iceberg, came to Margie's aid, and suddenly Carl was her boyfriend again. It was nice. Very nice. And when it was over, he pulled his pajamas on and she put her head on his shoulder. And almost said, “That was wonderful.” Could have said it. But did not. She said, “Remember the time we went to Chicago for our anniversary and stayed at that famous hotel that turned out to be a welfare hotel with thousands of cockroaches that stampeded when we switched the light on, so we drove around and went to the Drake and you said, ‘Hang the expense,' and we sat in that bar with about a thousand photographs of famous people nobody ever heard of, and it was just us and the bartender and the pianist with black horn-rims and a guy back in the shadows who when our pupils adjusted to the light we saw was Robert De Niro. Remember?” He shook his head.

“He wore a tan raincoat. I smiled at him and he smiled back.”

“You must've been with someone else.”

“Darling, I've never
been
with someone else. The next night we saw
Chorus Line
and you hated it.”

“Maybe you dreamed it.“

“No. Sorry. Not
Chorus Line—Forest Time
—that musical about the magical grove where people never grow old. It was really really bad. But there was a song called ‘Mr. Happy' and you
said, ‘I'm so happy that I was able to talk you into marrying me.' Remember?”

He shook his head.

She sang:
“We've got love in our hearts, and sweet melodies,
and we're dancing our way through the trees.”

“Never heard it,” he said.

“Do I know you?” she said. “Did you father those children or was that someone else?”

He had already turned over and was lightly snoring. She stood at the window, naked, arms folded, looking out into the little courtyard. The dry fountain, wooden benches piled against it, workmen's toolboxes. How incomplete life is and unceasing. Three months she had waited to make love—longed for it, imagined it—and now there it was, done, and … life is still incomplete.

Nothing changes. We're still standing at the window, wishing for something else. You get your kids raised and out the door and realize you don't know any more than when you started. The Pope says High Mass and then he sits down and eats a cheese sandwich. You go to Rome for the experience of a lifetime and then it's time to go home and put in the tomatoes.

The next morning, she poked her head out of the bathroom, toothbrush in her mouth, and said, “That was nice, last night.” He murmured, lying in bed, his nose in
Beachhead in Italy
. She said, “It's been such a long time. Why?”

“I thought you weren't interested.”

“And that's why you went and slept in the guest room for three months?”

“Sorry.”

“I'm not upset, I'm just asking. Is that why you left our bedroom?”

He looked up. He wasn't good at this sort of conversation. She knew that. But hey, it's life. You're fifty-five. Get used to it. “I just wished that sometimes you'd say that you wanted to make love with me.”

“And you were waiting for me to say that?”

He nodded.

So he had simply gone on strike. He had withdrawn his services until she asked for them to be resumed. And that led to the romantic getaway to Rome and that led to a half million in cool cash. Everything connects.

And down to breakfast they went. He took her hand, which had a coffee cup in it, and pressed it to his lips and whispered something like “love of my life” and then bowed and went back to the men's table where they were studying a map of the Allies' advance toward Rome through the Padiglione Woods and the Alban Hills. Wally was reading a history of the Allied campaign of 1944. The hilly wooded terrain favored the German defenders who retreated slowly, making the Americans and British pay dearly for each hill. It took five months of bitter fighting before General Clark got his picture taken parading into Rome and marching up the stairs to Michelangelo's City Hall.

She said good morning to Wally and Evelyn and Father Wilmer.

“How are you?” she said.

“Someday,” said Father, looking down at his scrambled eggs, “women will have their eggs removed, and fertilized in a laboratory,
and after the embryo has developed for a few days, they'll go in and rearrange the chromosomes to give people what they want in a child—math ability, resistance to colds, physical agility, verbal skills, blue eyes, small feet, you name it, you can have it. Every child will be a designer child. No flaws. I saw a program about this on TV last night. The BBC. And let me just say: that is a paradise I will be glad not to be living in.”

Miss Gennaro's burial was at 10:00
A.M.
and the pilgrims were all on deck at nine, dressed for the occasion, though Margie had told them, “You don't have to go. You really shouldn't feel obligated. None of us ever met the lady. I'm going because her daughter is the one who called me in January and told me about Gussie. Her mother was a friend of Gussie's, the old lady who died.”

“How did she know Gussie?” said Eloise. “She was Italian.”

“They were very good friends. I'll explain later.”

Eloise pulled back the curtain and looked out at the street. “That white truck has been parked there all night,” she said. “Isn't that suspicious?”

Margie ignored her.

“Don't you think about a terrorist attack?” she said, eyeballing the humanity passing by. “What if a bomb went off? We'd be blown to pieces.”

“Depends on how close you are.”

“What a ridiculous way to die—blown up on a trip that I never wanted to take in the first place.”

“You never wanted to what?” Margie laughed. “You were all over this from the moment I told you. You were flapping around like a hawk on a rabbit. Nobody twisted your arm. So what's your problem now?”

Eloise said she was sorry. It was just lack of sleep. Anxiety about her kids. Anger at the Fred situation. “And I'm worried about you,” she said.

Well, that was a new one. “Worried about what?”

Eloise looked at her. That serious maternal look. “Are you seeing someone while you're here?”

“I'm seeing all sorts of people. I'm looking at you right now.”

She smiled. “You know what I mean.”

“Of course not,” she said. But there was a telltale hesitation before she said it. And not enough astonishment written on her face.

“Be careful, darling,” said Eloise. “Don't blow up your house for a little excitement, you can get enough excitement from books.” And she got in the van.

So Eloise knew. Someone had told her, and maybe that someone had told someone else. And if that second someone were Irene or Evelyn, then likely there would be a scene. A righteous woman confronting the sinner. Carl would get wind of it. He'd be terribly hurt. He'd pull back into his shell and it would be up to Margie to resolve the outcome—go home to Minnesota? Stay in Rome?

That afternoon, she called up the American Overseas School on Via Cassia. Who, a kind lady with a New York accent informed her, were not hiring teachers now, but maybe she should try the Thavis School of Language (“The gifts God gave us are nurtured at Thavis”) so she did and a young man told her that indeed Thavis was looking for a native English speaker to teach full-time starting immediately, salary of $43,000 a year. “Think about it,” he said. Oh, she was thinking about it. Yes, indeed.