to turn a corner to see a beautiful and unexpected sight.
He could become a man without close human connections, only acquaintances, Europeans who would be happy to speak of what they’d seen that day without the unseemly American avidity for personal details. Most days, he would speak to no one. Most days he would be silent. He’s imagined the silence, liquid, seeping down to the dryness of what he would once have called his soul, a word he now refuses to use, even for want of something better, because he is sick to death of the endless call-up of false terms, the hunger for the food of the pseudo-sacred, the word
spiritual
as much a staple of the TV talk show as the words
child abuse
or
drug addiction
.
His mother is wrapped in silence now, but it is not the beautiful silence he dreams of and craves. The silence that surrounds his mother is heavy, blank. After Marie Kasperman eats, she puts her hands over her stomach, which is more huge than ever, suggesting not self-indulgence but disease. But Marie Kasperman has no disease in her. “The dear soul is, thankfully, very healthy,” says Sister Theresa, the pastoral counselor at the home. Sister Theresa is eternally grateful for the plastic statuettes Joseph regularly brings her by the gross. “Mr. Kasperman, you are always in my prayers.” Sister Theresa assured him it was all right for him to leave his mother for a Roman holiday. “Mr. Kasperman, she wouldn’t know Christmas from the Fourth of July.”
So why not leave for good? Why not leave her to the nuns who care for her, the nurses who answer her for the hundredth time when she says, “Did I ever have any children?” Why not leave all that for the clear dimensions of the Piazza Navona, the Piazza Farnese, the Piazza Mattei?
But that was his past life. What Pearl has done has divided his life inexorably. He is not the same man he was yesterday. His past has no importance to him, and the future is something he dares not contemplate. He walks in the present, in a present as foggy as his mother’s, in this city of clear light, this city of history in which he now feels no part.
Joseph goes back to the Santa Chiara. He stays at this hotel, as Dr. Meyers stayed there before him, not for the Pantheon or the synchronistic evidence of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, but because it is in the district where religious articles are sold. Unlike the windows of other piazzas (those shrines to minor commercial gods, windows filled with beautifully wrapped chocolates, beautifully tailored suits, gloves in every shade), the windows of the streets leading from the Piazza Minerva are filled with vestments and sacred vessels with singular, evocative names taken from their ancient use: chalice, pyx, ciborium, monstrance, censer, thurifer. And the sad clothing shops for nuns: mannequins in veils, mannequins meant to be unalluring, so unlike other mannequins with their prominent nipples. The nun mannequins are overlarge and wear neutral-colored nightgowns—white, gray, baby blue—bed jackets and booties testifying to the graying of the religious population and their need for clerical garments suitable for life in an invalid’s bed. This morning, as every morning when he leaves his hotel, he looks away from the windows full of ten-foot-tall statues of Pope John Paul II, averting his eyes until he comes to the window of vestments: silk embroideries and embossments, rose, green, white, purple. Some ugly, but not all. There is so much in his business he cannot look at. But he does his work well; he makes money, not only for himself but for Maria and Pearl, who have never had to worry about what anything costs because, at Maria’s father’s request, Joseph took up the business.
He phones the ticket agent from his room and discovers that there is only one flight a day from Rome to Dublin. It leaves at 8 a.m.; he has already missed it. But he tells himself this is all for the best. It would not be a good thing for him to arrive
He could become a man without close human connections, only acquaintances, Europeans who would be happy to speak of what they’d seen that day without the unseemly American avidity for personal details. Most days, he would speak to no one. Most days he would be silent. He’s imagined the silence, liquid, seeping down to the dryness of what he would once have called his soul, a word he now refuses to use, even for want of something better, because he is sick to death of the endless call-up of false terms, the hunger for the food of the pseudo-sacred, the word
spiritual
as much a staple of the TV talk show as the words
child abuse
or
drug addiction
.
His mother is wrapped in silence now, but it is not the beautiful silence he dreams of and craves. The silence that surrounds his mother is heavy, blank. After Marie Kasperman eats, she puts her hands over her stomach, which is more huge than ever, suggesting not self-indulgence but disease. But Marie Kasperman has no disease in her. “The dear soul is, thankfully, very healthy,” says Sister Theresa, the pastoral counselor at the home. Sister Theresa is eternally grateful for the plastic statuettes Joseph regularly brings her by the gross. “Mr. Kasperman, you are always in my prayers.” Sister Theresa assured him it was all right for him to leave his mother for a Roman holiday. “Mr. Kasperman, she wouldn’t know Christmas from the Fourth of July.”
So why not leave for good? Why not leave her to the nuns who care for her, the nurses who answer her for the hundredth time when she says, “Did I ever have any children?” Why not leave all that for the clear dimensions of the Piazza Navona, the Piazza Farnese, the Piazza Mattei?
But that was his past life. What Pearl has done has divided his life inexorably. He is not the same man he was yesterday. His past has no importance to him, and the future is something he dares not contemplate. He walks in the present, in a present as foggy as his mother’s, in this city of clear light, this city of history in which he now feels no part.
Joseph goes back to the Santa Chiara. He stays at this hotel, as Dr. Meyers stayed there before him, not for the Pantheon or the synchronistic evidence of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, but because it is in the district where religious articles are sold. Unlike the windows of other piazzas (those shrines to minor commercial gods, windows filled with beautifully wrapped chocolates, beautifully tailored suits, gloves in every shade), the windows of the streets leading from the Piazza Minerva are filled with vestments and sacred vessels with singular, evocative names taken from their ancient use: chalice, pyx, ciborium, monstrance, censer, thurifer. And the sad clothing shops for nuns: mannequins in veils, mannequins meant to be unalluring, so unlike other mannequins with their prominent nipples. The nun mannequins are overlarge and wear neutral-colored nightgowns—white, gray, baby blue—bed jackets and booties testifying to the graying of the religious population and their need for clerical garments suitable for life in an invalid’s bed. This morning, as every morning when he leaves his hotel, he looks away from the windows full of ten-foot-tall statues of Pope John Paul II, averting his eyes until he comes to the window of vestments: silk embroideries and embossments, rose, green, white, purple. Some ugly, but not all. There is so much in his business he cannot look at. But he does his work well; he makes money, not only for himself but for Maria and Pearl, who have never had to worry about what anything costs because, at Maria’s father’s request, Joseph took up the business.
He phones the ticket agent from his room and discovers that there is only one flight a day from Rome to Dublin. It leaves at 8 a.m.; he has already missed it. But he tells himself this is all for the best. It would not be a good thing for him to arrive
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