The Chapel (12 page)

I assured him I didn't.

“Why would you?”

The silence that followed was long enough that I thought we might leave it at that. I hadn't scrutinized a bill or a bank statement since Mitchell had gotten sick. This was not a matter of incompetence. In fact, it had been a point of pride. I had always been the bookkeeper and tax accountant in the house, and when Cambridge Trust offered to digitize our accounts and organize the whole operation online, I signed up immediately. When paying attention to Mitchell's care and comfort became a full-time occupation, and when missing him was all I could do in the course of a day, it was a relief to know the credit cards and the cable bill were being paid. Right to the end, Mitchell had grave doubts about the stability of the paperless world, and as long as he lived he accumulated enough ballast for both of us.

Lewis said, “Perhaps it would be better if I had this conversation with your daughter.”

“Oh, no.” I was prepared to write Lewis a check, not to call Rachel. She had managed all of the arrangements with EurWay for the last three months, including my many false starts, so I guessed that Lewis might have some sense of her impatience with my indecisiveness. “I'm afraid my daughter has resigned her post as trip advisor,” I said, aiming for a confidential tone of voice. “You'll have to deal with me.”

“A pleasure, I assure you,” Lewis said. “This is a minor matter of accounting. The refund will be issued as a credit on your charge card.”

“That makes it very easy for me. Thank you.”

“The amount refunded for hotels in Ravenna and Venice will not match the amount on the original statement from us.”

“Taxes and processing fees,” I said, trying to make it clear I was on top of this.

“Quite,” Lewis said, “but the differential largely reflects your choice to downgrade from A-Prime to Category B accommodations. We will refund at the lower rate, of course.”

I said, “Quite.” Apparently, sometime after Mitchell died, Rachel had decided to address my concern about the extravagant expense of a monthlong Italian adventure. I had raised the financial aspect only once, a few weeks after the diagnosis. Maybe I was being miserly, but I was imagining years ahead with Mitchell in and out of hospitals, second opinions and experimental drug therapies not covered by insurance, and when I'd added up the first EurWay itemized estimates, and the unforeseen add-ons and why-not dinners at overpriced restaurants with Michelin stars that might mean something to someone who mattered in Mitchell's office, I suggested to him that we could choose less luxurious hotels. I had said all of this to Mitchell, but I had never complained about the costs to Rachel. To me, at the time, Mitchell had said, “We're worth it.”

“And one more detail, if you can manage it,” Lewis said.

I said, “Of course.”

“Very well. Unless you would prefer we handle this as two distinct transactions, we will roll in the credits owed you for the other hotels, as well, which were in-process this week.”

“The Category B savings all over Italy,” I said.

Lewis said, “Quite.”

“Rolling it all into one refund makes good sense,” I said. “You're being very gracious about all of this. Thank you.”

“Delighted,” Lewis said. “Delighted.”

I hung up before he said it again. While I waited for T. to return, one of the three plaid-skirted girls reappeared from a doorway. She stood still, facing the street, as if she wasn't sure she wanted to leave. A third-story window opened above her, and the other two girls stuck their heads out. One of the girls upstairs yelled, “
Fottiti!
” The loner on the street didn't move. The two girls in the window yelled a few more times and then disappeared. A couple of seconds later, a little red canvas knapsack with long, loopy straps flew out the window. It looked like a parachute failing to open as it fell and thudded in the gutter. She still didn't move. Finally, I heard the window above her slam down. She picked up her bag, stuck her hand inside, and pulled out her phone, which she shook and held up in front of her face, as if it were a snow globe. She slung both straps of her red bag over one shoulder, and as she crossed the street, and maybe all the way home, she said, “
Porco dio, porco dio, porco dio
.”

T.
AND
E
D WAVED FROM THE FAR CORNER, NEAR THE
church, and as I headed up the street to join them, T. took hold of Ed's shoulders and bent toward him. Ed dropped his gaze, as if T. was saying something Ed didn't want to hear or didn't believe. When I got near enough to eavesdrop, T. backed off. For a moment, nobody seemed to know what to do.

Ed turned to me and said, “At my request, we are going to pretend that lecture never happened.”

T. said, “What lecture?”

It was clear this was not what they had just been discussing. “Oh, Ed,” I said, “are you that displeased with how it went?”

T. said, “How what went?” To Ed, he said, “Which piazza?”

Ed said, “Piazza dei Signori. It's the one behind Fruitti.”

T. led us out to Corso Garibaldi, and after he zigzagged across a couple of intersections, he cleared a path through a wide pedestrian mall clotted with window-shopping and gelato-eating tourists and a separate, fast-moving, steady stream of dark-suited pedestrian commuters that eased around the tourists like a river around rocks. Ed stayed by my side, his hand hovering protectively behind me.

Within a few blocks, the public space opened up, and the building facades acquired granite columns and marble porticos roped off from the confusion for after-work drinkers and early diners. “This is really beautiful here,” I said.

“This is the edge of Piazza del Erbe,” Ed said, pressing his hand to my back to turn me into the dark, arcaded sidewalk of a narrow street bordered by smaller shops and dozens of tiny restaurants, each with about four tables, ten waiters, and forty happy customers. I'd lost sight of T. “There are some really good places to eat in these blocks,” Ed said, “and the top-tier bars and cafés.”

“Let's get out of here, then,” I said.

“I owe you a drink at a decent bar,” he said apologetically. “But I'm addicted to these crackers with little crispy bits of kale that they make at this one place near San Clemente, a sweet little church.” He suddenly stopped walking as a blast of short beeps from a horn echoed around us.

A woman with long hair flew by on a pale-blue scooter, and as she passed, we saw a helmeted little kid on the back holding to his mother's waist for dear life. I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Ed leaned in and said, “What are you thinking?”

“When you're unhappy, everything seems exemplary.”

Ed said, “And when you're happy?”

“How would I know?”

Ed put his hand behind my back, and we veered off to the right again. “I apologize for the hike,” he said. “I'm indulging myself—another symptom of unhappiness.”

I said, “What does
porco dio
mean in English?”

“Literally? God is a pig,” he said, smiling. “Did someone say that during my lecture?”

“I heard it on the street,” I said, “not from a nun.”

“It's not really foul. It's an all-purpose curse,” Ed said. “Or more of a cosmic complaint, like
goddammit
.” He stopped again. “That's actually a perfect example of what I was trying to get across today; that was the tone I was aiming at. I mean, it was not for nothing that Dante wrote about heaven and hell in the vulgate, in the vulgar Italian of silk merchants and moneylenders and carpenters, not Church Latin. That same impulse turns up everywhere in 1300 in the art—something coarse, or bawdy, or just the sense of bodies pushing through the veils of mystery and mystification.”

“Like Chaucer,” I said, aiming for something old and familiar.

“Right,” Ed said. “Like Boccaccio. Not sex jokes and toilet humor—I mean, there was plenty of that, but there was something else, something aggressively human. And happy to be human, not ashamed of themselves. Oh, E., you know all of this.”

I didn't. And until that moment, I didn't realize that Ed was genuinely ashamed, embarrassed by his performance. Whom had he hoped to impress?

Ed said, “It's the difference you see when you look at those golden Byzantine icons of the Virgin, or the saints in early Gothic paintings, and they're elongated and impossibly thin and angular, and then you see what Giotto did in the Arena Chapel—people with thighs and heavy hands and big heads.”

“People like us,” I said.

He sheepishly shook his big head.

I was staring at T., who was standing at the sunny end of the arcade, looking absurdly tall and lean and serene, like an elegant Byzantine portrait of St. Somebody of Constantinople. From his point
of view, Ed and I must have looked like a couple of barn animals in Giotto's manger scene. “I wanted to use words to do what Giotto did with colors and light and shadows,” Ed said. “That's exactly what I wish I'd said today. I didn't get it right, did I? But that's what I was aiming at, not another sermonette with footnotes by a Jesuit with an ivory tower up his ass.”

“Nobody mistook that lecture for a sermon,” I said.

Ed said, “What did T. say about it?”

“We both have a million questions for you,” I said.

“I see,” Ed said.

Had I understood earlier that T.'s reaction was all Ed really cared about, I would have happily lied about it. But we had caught up with T., and Ed took the lead, and T. fell into step beside me. He told me Shelby and Anna were hoping to meet us for dinner in about an hour, and then we turned into Piazza dei Signori, a big enclosed square, hemmed in on one side by the colonnaded balcony of the old Carrara family home, a block-long white granite palace centered on a bell and clock tower. By comparison, the little brick-front church where Ed was headed looked inconsequential, like one more of the many little row houses that lined the rest of the piazza. Ed waved to us from an unoccupied table he'd found in the middle of a fenced-off corral, one of dozens of ad hoc patios lining the perimeter of the piazza. The crowds spilled out so far from the storefronts that it was impossible to tell which café you were patronizing when you got to your seat. It was six-thirty, and as far as I could see, everyone in Padua was required by law to stop on the way home for an Aperol spritz. The orange cocktails glowed in the late-day sun like votive candles. T. casually said we should come by some morning for the famous open markets, as if we'd both rented villas for the summer season.

We sipped our spritzes, and Ed ate most of the kale crackers, politely leaving the ashtray of olives for me and T. to enjoy. For the
better part of an hour, we didn't speak. We just exchanged smiles, turning to acknowledge an especially well-groomed passerby or a waiter with a hot plate of something we wished we'd ordered. But every time I turned my head, I sensed that I was seeing through a frame into the wider world beyond.

“Do you see someone you know?” I felt Ed's warm hand land lightly on my forearm.

I said, “Déjà vu,” which was almost true. Ed's curious smile, the half-illuminated faces and shadowy bodies spread out around the widening spill of white tables behind him, the dim crimson facade of San Clemente at the edge of the piazza—I was seeing everything as if I were still standing in Giotto's chapel, staring into the open sky above the figures in the foreground of one of the frescoes, seeing us in their future. The past, the landscape of the life I had lived, was altered, unfamiliar, as I saw it now. But this inverted perspective seemed fragile or tenuous—a fleeting sensation that dissipated even as I attempted to describe it to myself.

T. said, “Exactly how big is the Arena Chapel?” He was snapping the edges off a kale cracker.

Ed said, “About sixty by thirty. Why?”

I said, “Feet?”

He nodded. “And just about sixty feet high.”

I said, “How can it be so small?”

T. waved his paper napkin so it opened to a thin square and laid it on the table. “I don't see why those Eremitani were so upset about it,” he said.

Ed said, “Well, if Scrovegni had been allowed to build the side chapels he'd planned, and the bell tower at the altar end, he would have been real competition for the monks. A bell was a way of calling all pilgrims, calling for alms, and attracting other paying customers. Plus, Scrovegni had Giotto, the most famous painter in Italy, running
around on scaffolding, making everybody else's painted heavens and hells look like yesterday's news.”

In one corner of his napkin, T. placed a little rectangular shard of his cracker. “Let's say this is the Scrovegni Chapel.” A bit below that, he formed two larger rectangles into a cross. “And this is the Church of the Eremitani.”

Ed said, “Maybe a little closer.”

T. said, “I'm not working to scale. Where was the old Roman Arena?”

Ed said something to a passing waiter, who handed him a red felt-tip pen. He drew a big
U
at an angle on the napkin. The right arm ended at the chapel, and the Church of the Eremitani was outside that line.