Gospel (10 page)

(And only Catholics need apply?)

Not that she was anti-Protestant exactly … but she remembered Christopher had this friend Luke, who was raised Lutheran and she was attracted to him, since he was tough-minded and easygoing socially at the same time—
rare
in Theology Department circles—and it didn't hurt that he was on the soccer team and was a blond hunk. Lucy brought him by the house on some tissue of an excuse to drop off a book, but mainly for Judy to get a look at him.

“Now you're cookin' with gas,” Judy whispered in the kitchen.

And emboldened, Lucy flirted rather successfully with Luke and might have even had a chance with him, but one night, over lots of wine, Christopher and Gabriel and Lucy and Luke got on to Catholic-versus-Protestant things and Luke quite cogently reviewed the last century of Catholic triumphalism and pronounced Roman Catholicism in severe decline and an amusing discussion of papal infallibility ex cathedra broke out, and while Gabriel and Luke talked and Christopher nodded, Lucy withdrew and thought: I know everything you say about Catholicism, Luke, is absolutely true, and I even agree with you, but you could never love me the way I have to be loved if you find the centuries of Catholic tradition that led up to the complicated person I've become as stupid as you say.

(Is it, My child, that you don't think your love would survive the controversy, or your Roman Catholicism?)

Darn it, Luke, she sighed, if only you were a dreamy semiagnostic with a misty New Age notion of universal order, open to weird mantras from the East and curious about all cults anywhere—
that
I could live with. But to be Christian and not Catholic is inevitably to be anti-Catholic and I'm not sure we could ever get around this.

“That's what I thought,” Judy had lectured when Lucy had tried to explain this. “You're gonna let a chance with a god like Luke go by because,” and here she sneered in the most demeaning imitation: “he's not Catholic like you. Tribalism. It's why they blow each other up in Northern Ireland, thinking like you think.”

(Judy had a point, Lucy.)

Lucy sighed, vaguely ashamed of herself for arriving in the end at a position her sour old Irish grandmother would have fiercely defended: only eat, drink, live, and breathe among Catholics.

Fact was, Lucy had squarely informed herself, she'd made a botch of it with men. No argument, really. Her track record on romance was nonexistent—and it was her own fault. You wouldn't hear from Lucy the whiny denunciations of her upbringing or her Catholicism or her guilt-inducing mother, her romanceless life was of her own painstaking crafting, her infallible sense of missing opportunities, running when she should stay put, investing much in pursuits of long shots and dead ends.

Lucy, somewhat more melancholy, left the café determined to track down Dr. O'Hanrahan and discover the whereabouts of Gabriel. Outside the low clouds were bright white and made her squint. Lucy ambled along the narrow sidewalk while butcher's boys on bikes sped by in old-fashioned straw hats and striped aprons, ferrying carnage to the various kitchens, for other banquets and feasts. Deliverymen rolled kegs of beer to colleges, milkmen racks of clinking bottles.

Lucy arrived at All Souls College and was permitted passage through to Dr. O'Hanrahan's guest room. She knocked to no avail, and would have left but there were signs of life within, a grunt, a creak.

“What is it?” O'Hanrahan growled a second before answering the door.

Lucy smiled and surveyed the great man in the clothes he must have passed out in the night before: “Good morning, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

“Who are you?” he asked groggily but seriously. “
What
are you?”

“I'm Lucy Dantan, remember?”

He stared at her. “Did I molest you in a drunken stupor last night? Whisper sweet Latin nothings into your ear?”

Lucy colored slightly. “Uh, no, sir.”

“Thank God; you're
really
not my type.”

“Nor you mine,” she risked. “I'm here for breakfast.”

“Oh.” He tried to focus again. “I set this up last night, did I?”

Lucy saw that a lie would be propitious here and said yes.

“All right, all right, let me throw some water on my face and get my coat, put on a tie.”

“The one you've got on looks fine, sir.”

O'Hanrahan surveyed his rumpled shirt and large belly not finding a tie. He reached behind his neck and retrieved the bedraggled tie that he had lain upon all night. “Lovely,” he grumbled. “Do you have a place in mind for breaking our fast?”

“Any place you want. Sir.”

With the Randolph Hotel as an announced destination, O'Hanrahan led the way briskly, Lucy following across the quads a step or two behind. Summoning all her bravery, Lucy tried to get personal and chatty: “You and Father Beaufoix seemed a bit, it seemed, like, um, combative last night.”

“We're always like that, since we met in Beirut after the War.” O'Hanrahan considered maligning the man, but came up civil. “He's a genius about African languages, a truly … truly great man of his field. I just can't stand all the Marxist bullshit. What's the use of being a progressive radical scholar if you're only going to turn around and embrace a stifling orthodoxy like Marxism the next minute—and a defeated, discredited orthodoxy at that…” He suppressed a yawn. “We haven't gotten along really since he challenged me at a public lecture in Paris about the origins of the Holy Spirit. I said She was the oldest and most original part of the Christian Trinity.”

“She?”

O'Hanrahan fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes and frowned to realize they were back in his room. “Just a minute,” he said. Passing one of the many entrances to the Covered Market, he ducked inside and returned a moment later with a lit cigarette in his mouth. “Want one?” he offered halfheartedly.

“Uh, no,” said Lucy. “I used to smoke cigarettes a bit back in school, but the nuns made life hell for me…” O'Hanrahan, Lucy sensed, couldn't care less. “The Holy Spirit is female?” she reiterated.

“Indeed She is. The Holy Spirit is a concept that emerged from the Jewish notion of
Sophia,
the Wisdom spirit of
Ecclesiastes,
the
Wisdom of Solomon.
She was so popular in Jesus' time that She was the only real rival Yahweh ever knew; Wisdom just about sank patriarchal monotheism. Christ would have used the words
ruah, shekanah,
both female gender to describe the spirit, the feminine glory and presence of God.”

“Wow, what a cool idea.”

“It is more than cool, it is historically correct,” said O'Hanrahan, warming with the cigarette and the late-morning bustle of the passing crowd. “There are traces of Man for 35,000 years and traces of a Great Mother or Earth Goddess virtually all that time. Then we come to 1700 years ago, the age of Jerome and Augustine and Ambrose, and
pfffft!
Our Great Mother is gone. There was a Supreme Mother in the Early Church, the Holy Spirit. The greatest ancient church of Christendom, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, was built to the Blessed Wisdom, again of female gender. But the Fathers of the Church eliminated all traces of Her; She became the Spirit
us
Sanct
us
under Jerome, the old misogynist.”

They shared an awkward silence to Cornmarket Street, the modern avenue of trendy storefronts and double-decker bus stops, swimming in exhaust and morning shoppers.

“Well,” O'Hanrahan offered, determined to make conversation, not sure why. “What's your thesis again?”

“Oh,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I'm interested in how the Corinthian alphabet shifted in the 300s
B.C.
Are you familiar with the evolution of some of the letters, like the Corinthian
lambda
and
sigma
about that time? It makes a difference, I think, a minor difference, to some of the translations and…”

She noticed O'Hanrahan yawning. Lucy felt a wave of tension pass through her again, at having mentioned the thesis that was to be reviewed in September.

“It's more interesting than I make it sound,” she offered.

(Not really.)

Crossing George Street and passing St. Mary Magdalene's Church and graveyard, O'Hanrahan pointed out Balliol College, founded in the 1200s as penance for a dirty joke told before a bishop—or for kidnapping him, depending what you read—and to the left of those medieval bastions, St. John's College, the college that tore down Richard II's Beaumont Palace, birthplace of the Crusader Richard Lion-heart and the niggardly King John, to use as foundation for its library filled with A. E. Housman's papers—

“The classicist? Housman's one of my heroes,” interjected Lucy.

“God help you,” muttered O'Hanrahan. “St. John's was the home of Edward Campion, cofounder of my beloved Trinity College in Dublin, who, speaking as one who has known the Jesuits, was a Jesuit's Jesuit. He almost got the hand of Elizabeth. In time the Church of England caught up to him, tore out his guts, quartered him, beheaded him, acting in that Protestant spirit of brotherly love.”

As O'Hanrahan regaled Lucy with martyrdoms and ghastly deaths, she came to understand that friendly, ingratiating small talk from Patrick O'Hanrahan came in the form of copious, learned lectures.

“… just as they did with Alexander Briant—the rack, the thumbscrews, the scavengers' daughter, needles under the fingernails. And Cardinal Fisher. ‘Even,' mocked Henry VIII, ‘if you send him a red hat, he will have no head to put it on!'”

Lucy decided O'Hanrahan was not without a Tudorian aspect himself.

“Henry VIII was determined to burn all papist art and my favorite story is that he took the wooden image of St. Gdarn from its Welsh village. The locals warned that the image was prophesied to set an entire forest afire, so he had John Forest, unrepentant Catholic, burned at the stake holding Gdarn's statue so the prophecy would be fulfilled.”

“It's horrible to think of all the martyrdoms here,” said Lucy soberly.

“Oh, what's a stake-burning every so often, hm? Keeps the rapacious churchmen on their toes. I can think of half a dozen prelates today crying out for the stake. Cardinal O'Connor in New York, Marcinkus and his mob connections, Mahoney in L.A., all John Paul's current hacks. All the TV preachers, while we're at it. Swaggart, Tilton, Bullins, Falwell, all of 'em to the flames!”

Lucy stood across from St. Mary Magdalene and beheld an excrescence called the Martyr's Memorial: a free-standing, three-story overwrought Gothic spire that stood next to a bank of vandalized pay phones. A number of foreign exchange students congregated on the steps beneath the steeple, smoking cigarettes, striking poses.

Lucy looked at the spire. “More Catholics drawn and quartered?”

“Protestants this time. Bloody Mary at work.”

The year was 1556.

“Bishops Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer,” O'Hanrahan recounted, “were all Cambridge men so they were served up by their college hastily when the Inquisition came to call. Mary sent Spanish friars up here to see to the Inquisition—you want an inquisition done right, you gotta bring in the Spanish. Latimer burnt quickly, since he was allowed to have a supply of gunpowder tied round his neck. An
explosive
Reformer.”

“Oh, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

“Ridley,” noted O'Hanrahan with seeming relish, “had one of the worst stake-burning deaths I've ever heard about. Hours went by and the wind blew the flames away from the top half of his torso while up to his waist he was burnt away. ‘I cannot burn, God help me!' he kept crying out. A year later they got to Archbishop Cranmer, who had earlier recanted and said he'd convert back to Catholicism, though he was to be toasted anyway on general principle. But at the stake he renounced his recantation. He then thrust the hand that signed the recantation into the flames until it caught alight. Absolved, Cranmer committed the rest of himself to the fire soon after.”

“Pretty gruesome.”

“Cardinal Newman fought bitterly to have the Martyr's Memorial torn down, being a late-in-the-day Roman convert. Newman, Pusey, Keble, Hopkins—a whole generation of closet queens converting to Rome or at least a stratospherically High Church.”

Lucy's eyes widened at his appraisal; her mom, after all, led a Cardinal Newman Study Circle once. O'Hanrahan assured her on the doorstep of the hotel, “Whenever you see good Protestant boys sucking up to Rome, or Catholic boys drawn to orders, you're talking a better-than-average chance of homosexuality, since Catholicism is
camp,
after all. The boys wanna play dress-up, swish about in the robes, kiss the rings, swing the censer…”

Lucy dourly reflected that Judy had an unlikely ally here.

O'Hanrahan held the door to the hotel open for Lucy to pass through. “In any event the Catholic orders have crept back into Oxford, despite all the human bonfires. More practicing Catholics in England than practicing Anglicans now. There are even more practicing Moslems.”

“Really?”

“Let's hope Henry is rolling about in his grave, or in Hell or wherever he is.”

(Hell.)

The Randolph Hotel. A rich person's stopover in Oxford, home of high tea and $150-a-night rooms, where young gentlemen rent private chambers and get wildly drunk on Bollinger $70-a-bottle champagne, swing on chandeliers, expose themselves to the other patrons, pass out, throw up, and write large checks afterward to the Randolph Hotel, swearing they won't do it again next year. The breakfast room was muted Edwardian splendor, and silently Lucy and the professor made their way between the uniformed waiters and ferns and Oxford's well-dressed, quietly breakfasting elite.

“English Breakfast tea,” mumbled O'Hanrahan, rubbing his eyes, suffering more than he was used to, “is the
espresso
of tea. You can mainline the stuff.”