The Confessions of Frances Godwin (24 page)

“You haven’t bought a house, have you?”

“In Princeton? Are you kidding?”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

“I’m a Spitzer Fellow, Mrs. Godwin. I don’t want to move to Pittsburgh. I don’t understand .
.
.”

I tried to explain, but I simply didn’t understand it well enough, didn’t understand what God meant by “baryonic oscillations.”

I went to the mayor’s office in City Hall to warn him about Maytag. I’d met him once or twice, and he knew who I was, or appeared to know. He appreciated my concern. “We’ve given Maytag everything they asked for,” he said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Then they’re lying through their teeth,” I said.

I talked to my broker at A. G. Edwards where we had a little money, about fifty thousand dollars, from the sale of the house.

“Gold?” he said. “HA HA HA.”

At our next colloquium I went on the attack: “Pol Pot, Laurent Kabila, Milosevic. Why not go after them?”

”You need to worry about yourself,” he said. “Let me worry about Pol Pot and the others.”

The more God hammered away, the more I stiffened my back. But the argument was running out of steam.

“They might decide to drag the river after all, or the woman from the rest area might turn up. The one with the white border collie.”

“I can’t believe you,” I said.

“You need to put everything behind you except the most important thing. Now get in line. Clean out your attic.”

“That’s what my mother used to say:
Clean out your attic
.”

“Your mother knew what she was talking about.”

At the end of August Detective Landstreet turned up the woman with the dog whom I’d met in the rest area near Ottawa. He called and said he wanted me to drive up to Ottawa to be in a lineup.

“Excuse me,” I told him, “Are you crazy? I’m calling my lawyer.”

“This is a pre-indictment lineup,” he said. “You don’t have the right to an attorney unless you’ve been indicted.”

“Whoa,” I said and hung up.

I called David. He laughed, but he also asked, “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“David,” I said, “do I have to go up to Ottawa and stand in a line-up?”

“Of course not. It’s been eight weeks since that kid was killed.”

“Jimmy Gagg,” I said.

“A lineup would have to take place shortly after the crime. There’s no way the prosecutor would go for it now. Just sit tight. You don’t have to do anything and the detective knows it.”

Detective Landstreet did not call back, but my relationship with God had gone sour. I was furious. The next Saturday I confronted him, and I didn’t mince words. I called him a
canis feminae filius
(a son of a bitch) and told him his universe was more like a Rube Goldberg machine than an instrument of precision. I told him that nothing matched up, that none of the cycles were in synch, that if it were a clock, it wouldn’t keep good time, that if it were a piano, it would be out of tune. I told him that his music of the spheres sounded more like a gigantic wet fart than heavenly harmony.

God didn’t mince words either. He even quoted Catullus 43 at me, insulting my nose, my feet, my fingers, my mouth, my appearance in general, and even—and this is what burned me up, got my goat, ruffled my feathers—my command of spoken Latin. “
Nec sane nimis elegante lingua
,”
he declared.
He really was a
canis feminae filius
.

I did not darken the door of Saint Clement’s again for almost ten years. I continued to have a drink with Father Viglietti on Saturday afternoons, but I waited for him in the Seminary Street Pub.

I did not go to Verona to wait for Paul on the first anniversary of his death. I stayed right in Galesburg, though I mentioned to Lois that I’d thought about going.

“Why would you expect him to show up in Verona?” she asked.

“Because that’s where we were happy. We were as happy as any two people have ever been happy. Stella too. She was between boyfriends.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “If you’re not here he might come over to my place.”

“Lois, really.”

That first anniversary, which fell on a Friday, I waited. Lois wanted to wait with me, but I wanted to be alone. I thought if I could just talk to Paul one more time .
.
.

I fixed Paul’s favorite dinner: tortelloni from Hy-Vee and
costolettine di agnello fritte
—baby lamb chops in Parmesan cheese and egg batter—from Marcella Hazan’s
Classic Italian Cookbook.
I set the table for two. I broke open a bottle of wine from Paul’s “cellar” in the guest room closet, and a bottle of expensive mineral water. Perrier. Paul liked it, though it didn’t taste any better than the cheap Hy-Vee seltzer, and he never noticed when I switched them on him.

The wine was very special, a very expensive La Morra Barolo. I don’t know where Paul bought it, and he wouldn’t tell me how much he’d paid for it. But he’d been very excited about it, and I’d opened a bottle for him the week before he died. I thought it might draw his spirit back. I was not very knowledgeable myself. But this was a cru, not blended. There were five bottles left. Too bad he didn’t get to drink them all before he died. He wasn’t supposed to drink wine at all. That was one of the things we argued about.

It was colored a vibrant deep red, and had an intense nose (smelled great).

I spread out the tablecloth Paul had given me one Christmas, beautiful, but much too wide for our long (eight-foot), narrow (thirty-inch) table. I’d cut out a swath and resewn it, but the borders didn’t match at two of the mitered corners because I hadn’t cut it quite straight. That was not okay, but nothing could be done about it now.

Two napkins, which I’d made out of the leftover material.

I set everything out the way Paul liked it: the jar of flake salt, the Magnum pepper grinder, the bottle of California olive oil (Paul said all the Italian oil was adulterated), balsamic vinegar straight from Modena.

Paul had died in the morning. But I didn’t think he’d show up till suppertime. Maybe I was just postponing inevitable disappointment, but I wanted the whole day to anticipate.

What was I expecting? Nothing really. Not a knock on the door, or the rattle of the front door, or footsteps in the long hallway. I don’t know, but something, anything.

I sat down at the electronic piano and played through a couple of Chopin waltzes and picked out the melody of an old blues song. “Good and bad times, Honey, well that’s okay.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and everything was ready. I watched the minute hand on the old French clock touch the 3 and listened to the clock chime four. It had been an hour off since we’d moved and we’d never figured out how to reset the chimes. We tried various methods, but then the clock wouldn’t chime at all. For a while. And then it would start up again, still an hour off.

The lamb chops I’d special ordered at Thrushwood Farms were ready to be prepped. The recipe said to ask the butcher to flatten the eye of the chops, but that American butchers wouldn’t do it. Maybe, maybe not. I forgot to ask. I could do it at home with a cleaver, but I didn’t know what this meant. Just flatten the chop? And I forgot to ask the butcher to knock off the corner bone and remove the backbone. Oh well.

Now it was four o’clock.

I took Camilla for a walk. I let her run in the park, and then I hooked her leash on and we walked through a small crowd at the depot. Police were there with a police dog, to intercept dope coming in to the prison from Chicago. Camilla saluted the police dog, a tan German shepherd, and we walked south along the tracks all the way to Cedar Street, then up to the Knox campus. Then home. It was five o’clock.

I didn’t start supper till seven o’clock. I drank a glass of the Barolo as I attempted to cut just the ribs out of four lamb chops. I grated the Parmesan and spread it out on waxed paper. I put the chops on the grated Parmesan and turned them. I dipped them in the beaten egg and then in bread crumbs, checking the recipe at every step of the way.

I poured a second glass of wine as I added the tortelloni to a pot of boiling water. I forgot the salt and had to add it at the last minute. Too many things were going on. Paul never had any trouble juggling four or five dishes, but I was getting a little confused.

I drank my third glass as I ate the tortelloni and the fourth as I sautéed the lamb chops. The bottle was empty by the time I ate my salad, but I was still functioning.

I managed to get the dishes in the dishwasher and wash the pans.

I was glad Lois wasn’t with me. I didn’t want her to see me in this condition. I was still functioning, but not at one hundred percent. More like forty percent. Not that she would have minded. She would have enjoyed it, in fact.

I hadn’t expected Paul to come, of course, but I’d hoped that something would happen in me, that I’d see something, or hear something. Like Creusa returning to say a few words to Aeneas, though Creusa didn’t wait till the first anniversary of her death. Something to ease the pain of the end of the preceding year.
Seinfeld
helped. We’d always rented VCRs at Family Video. I kept expecting to discover one I hadn’t seen before, but it never happened. I’d rented one for that night. It hadn’t been rewound all the way and started up in the middle of “The Pony Remark.” Paul and I both loved that episode, and out of the blue Paul might say, “I hef pony, my sister hef pony, my cousin hef pony.”

I started the dishwasher and went to bed.

I repeated this performance every year on the anniversary of Paul’s death. I got very good at telling the butcher what I wanted him to do with the lamb chops. After a few years I started making the tortelloni myself, rolling the dough out with the
materello
that Paul had bought in Verona. And stuffing them with pumpkin and Parmesan cheese, ground almonds, and nutmeg. I became an expert on baby lamb chops in Parmesan cheese and egg batter.

Paul didn’t show up, of course. The dead, like the horizon, are forever beyond our reach.

PART IV: 2005–2006

11

Ave Atque Vale
(June–October 2005)

Father Viglietti was reassigned to Rome at the end of the 2004–2005 school year. He was going to teach at the Clementine Pontifical Academy. The new American cardinal, who had been in the Clementine seminary in Philadelphia with Father Viglietti, wanted to strengthen the Clementine presence in Rome, and the new pope had given him the go-ahead. The Clementine Pontifical Academy needed men like Father Viglietti—men of talent and learning who’d been buried in out-of-the way parishes, men who spoke Latin fluently, men who could be trusted.

Why was I surprised? Everything else God had foretold had come to pass. The dot.com bubble had burst in March 2001 and the market had tanked. Gold had gone from about two hundred seventy dollars an ounce to five hundred sixty. If I’d followed God’s advice and bought gold . . . but never mind. Then in May of the same year scientists at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Maine announced the discovery of acoustic oscillations in the primordial fluid of the early universe, oscillations that can still be detected in the cosmic microwave background, providing support for the Inflationary Hot Big Bang model of the universe. You can
hear
the sounds of the early universe. I’d already heard them, twice, in the back of Saint Clement’s. This news did not make headlines in the Galesburg
Register-Mail,
but I got a call from Alan Teitlebaum at Princeton at the end of May. He couldn’t stop asking questions that I couldn’t answer. How could I possibly have known . . .? I couldn’t explain. Three years later Maytag, Galesburg’s largest employer, closed up shop and moved to Reynosa in Mexico. I did not get a call from the mayor thanking me for giving him a heads-up.

The news wasn’t all bad. I’d followed God’s advice and sent my translation of Catullus
to Hausmann Books on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. God had been right. The editor who called me three months later—I’d almost forgotten about it—sounded like a young girl on the phone. The first thing she said, in fact, was “You probably think I’m a young girl. But I’m not. I’m probably about the same age as you.” The second thing she said was that she wanted to publish
Catullus Redivivus.
The third thing she said was, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

We sponsored our last
Roman Republic
tournament in late May, the day after examinations ended. In one corner of the room the fragile Republic defended itself against Carthage. In a second corner the Republic consolidated its powers and absorbed more and more provinces. In a third corner powerful politicians tore each other apart—like crabs in a bucket, as Father Viglietti put it—and brought the Republic to an end. Father Viglietti and I moved from one table to the next, helping students through the various phases of the game, encouraging them to note the parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic into Empire, and the decline of our own Republic, though Father Viglietti still hoped the United States would step up to the plate and assume its responsibilities as the world’s only superpower and impose a Pax Americana on the rest of the world. The botched election of 2000 echoed the irregular election of Pompey to the consulship in 70
B
.
C
.,
though at least Pompey had demonstrated his abilities as a general. The attack on Iraq brought to mind Varus leading his legions into the Teutoburg Forest. But at least Varro had the decency to fall on his sword afterward. Hurricane Katrina brought to mind the eruption of Vesuvius in
A
.
D
.
79, though the massive relief effort in the Bay of Naples was headed up, and partly financed, by the emperor Titus himself.