A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin

He felt untrained for that sort of thing. The argument had started while they were drawing by a lake, and he threw his picture to the ground. He was angry. She had too many plans for him. She had him in the White House when he was not yet even just a defrocked priest. He threw his picture on the ground because he realized that she was young and nothing could be done about it. When the train came, she was crying, for she did love him, and perhaps because she was crying and she was young she struck a blow she had not meant to strike. She was not even Catholic but Episcopalian. She said through the steam and rain which soaked them both and was warm and very much like their tears—she said on that hot misty August day so uncommon for Switzerland, “And you are such a little man.” It was then that his mouth dropped open and he could say nothing. She cried and cried, and as the train left he ran after it halfheartedly with his mouth still open and tears streaming down his cheeks and the steam from the gaskets making his suit smell as if it had been just pressed.
    He looked at the high white mountains, and his smallness choked him. He boarded the next train to Rome after waiting in the station for seventeen hours. He did not eat, nor did he return for his belongings. It stayed misty and warm until he left.
    They
sent
him to Arizona. They would have thrown him out, but they needed someone there. He was perfect for the job. He could have left on his own. They offered him that, but he was afraid. The archbishop made him afraid. Offices made him afraid. Even cathedrals now made him afraid.
    The only thing that calmed him was the desert and its silent, dry heat. In the desert he started to seek God as he had not ever sought Him. In some ways he stayed weak, and in others he became very strong.
    He watched the blue mountains and the billowing sand, which was like the foam on the ocean when he came home from Italy, but cool and dry.
    Â 
    A MAN from the desert is not a dry man, but he keeps what is wet inside him, like a cactus, so that visitors to him wonder how in such a world he can be alive and have enough. Father Trelew had not been born in the desert, but his forty years there taught him much. Although there will be some who might deny that a man may be taught such a thing, it is a fact that Father Trelew was calm, quiet, and gracious during his first heart attack. It occurred while he dined with several other American priests near the hotel in a restaurant they had all frequented during the first weeks of the Council, and then abandoned, then remembered and rushed to, as Father Trelew had done with his drawing. He ate prosciutto and melon,
scaloppine alia zingara,
and drank gaseous mineral water and cold white wine. He was contemplating dessert and had his wineglass raised to his lips when he felt the first pain. It seemed as if the entire restaurant had been jolted by an earthquake, and the electricity somehow savagely unleashed to attack the assembled priests. At first he thought there
had
been an earthquake. He kept his glass to his lips, afraid to move. He would put it down, slowly. He would go without dessert, excuse himself, and walk to see a doctor. He did not want to trouble his companions, because they were younger and he felt they did not like him; he had said hardly a thing in the course of the meal while they burned with the politics of Council.
    But he could not move his arm to put his glass down. It was there for a full minute and no one noticed until he fell to the ground, for he could not stand the second wave. He fell to the ground still with the glass in his hand, apologizing and begging the pardon of the assembled priests, who were younger and who had ignored him.
    When he awakened in his hospital room, he was grateful that the walls were not white. Rome is a yellow color, an old saffron-powdered sun color which seems always rising upward. His room was a comforting beige, the color of a lightly done