The Chapel (5 page)

Shelby said, “And your parents?”

I felt like Typhoid Mary. “I do have a brother,” I said.

I couldn't tell if Shelby was afraid to ask another question or if her curiosity about me was waning. She had taken up her knitting again. I closed my eyes and tried to come up with something interesting to say. It seemed a safe bet that Shelby and Allen Cohen were Jewish, but I'd been wrong about the bolero. I didn't know where she lived or if she had children, but I didn't want to insult her by proving I hadn't read her personal profile.

“Do you want to see something beautiful?” Shelby passed me her phone. “Allen just sent me this. He's climbing the Three Saints this month in Southern California.”

Above a foreground of palm trees, a vast snowcapped run of ridges and peaks rose right out of the desert, topped off by an impossibly blue sky. I said, “Put your needle there—the blue one—put it right there, on the sky.”

Shelby tilted the stone toward the screen and smiled. “Lapis lazuli,” she said.

I nodded. It was bluer than the familiar blue sky—it was the empyrean, the brightness Dante had imagined beyond the bounds of heaven and earth, beyond past and future, beyond the beyond.

Shelby aimed her finger at the top of the little screen. “That's San Jacinto, the tallest of the peaks. Ten thousand feet high. That's where he's headed right now. I can show you a picture of Allen on the mountain.”

Her shoulder pressed into my arm and our hands touched again as she searched for the right button on her phone. I didn't move. I held my breath. I wanted to extend this contact, this oddly intimate moment, extend my readiness to believe in that blue above
and beyond the Three Saints, that immaterial place where Allen and Mitchell might someday meet.

“T
HE
H
OTEL
A
RENA IS PERFECT
. I
T
'
S IN A LONG, MODERN
,
arcaded concrete building with balconies, but inside it looks like the sort of place Thomas Mann might have stayed—a tiny wood-paneled reception desk, where a mustache in a tuxedo orchestrates dozens of dark-haired valets in green vests, and the elevator is smaller than your walk-in refrigerator. It's all so charming.” I was determined to make Rachel believe I was happy to be here.

“Is the bathroom tiny?”

“Compact,” I said. The sink was a cereal bowl. “Handsome old green-marble floor and white-tile walls. And I have a perfectly Italianate view of red-clay rooftops.” This was true if you lay in bed so that you couldn't see the tin ductwork directly below the one window. “I'll send you some pictures.”

“That's okay,” she said, “I've already seen the pictures on the Web. Daddy didn't want to upgrade to a balcony room because he'd read something about traffic noise at the front of the building.”

“I prefer it here at the back. It's so peaceful.” So was the front of the hotel, which faced Largo Europa, a two-lane street with a leafy pedestrian park separating it from the next block, but maybe it was trafficky on weekdays. Admittedly, I hadn't spent much time outside after we got off the bus, as it quickly became apparent that I was the only one in the group who'd paid the supplement to bring a second suitcase, and I didn't want to hear about it from the married couples. “My luggage arrived, safe and sound,” I said.

The boys were fine, work was busy, Rachel was proud of me but I shouldn't feel I had to call every day, just have, you know—and then a long pause. It was about noon in Boston. I guessed she was doing
the Sunday crossword and had hit a bad patch. “You know, have fun, and—” Another pause. “Eat pasta! Or just, you know—”

“Sweetie, I have to wash my face and leave for dinner soon.”

“Of course. Okay, so, let's see,” she said. I heard pages flipping. “Tomorrow is the Arena Chapel and St. Anthony's Basilica. And then you go to Vicenza on Tuesday, but that's only a day trip from where you are, so that will be easy. And then—is it Wednesday you go to Florence or Thursday morning?”

“Wednesday afternoon,” I said, “and then Moscow on Thursday and Tokyo on Friday.”

“Sorry. I'm acting like your mother,” Rachel said. “Or your father. I mean, Daddy. I'm sorry. I'll let you go.”

I said, “Kiss those two beautiful boys for me.”

Rachel said, “But you really are happy to be in Padua?”

I said, “I wouldn't be happy anywhere else.”

O
UR FREELANCE TOUR GUIDE IN
P
ADUA WAS
S
ARA, A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD
local woman in a white trench coat and thick black plastic horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and she had wound her long dark hair into a face-lifting bun. She spoke almost impeccable English, explained almost nothing, and narrated everything she did, occasionally nodding at questions and ignoring them. “I will now pass to each of you a personal copy of the itinerary for tomorrow, which is Monday,” she said as she slowly made her way to the twelve Padua side-trippers scattered throughout the hotel's windowless Executive Business Event Conference Center, a blank room with one hundred red restaurant-supply dining chairs, a long table, and a pull-down movie screen. From my perch near a desktop computer at the back of the room, I noted that the doctor with the silver hair was missing. “While I am now passing out the prepared itinerary, I will remind you that we must meet in the
lobby at nine-fifteen tomorrow morning after you have had time to enjoy a complimentary breakfast buffet of your choosing.”

One of the wives asked for dinner recommendations.

“Yes,” Sara said, “and you will notice there is no change from the itineraries you were issued in Venice except for the addition of details, including a local post office, which you can see is marked right here on the top left of the itinerary I am now holding up to show you in case you have some postal cards for that purpose.”

Two of the husbands momentarily commandeered the event to complain about the private balconies, which weren't private but one long, undivided balcony, so anyone could walk the length of any floor and look into everybody else's room, as if you were staying in a motel.

“The balconies are reserved for paying guests at the front of the hotel,” Sara said, “and there will be no flash cameras allowed inside the Scrovegni Chapel, which I point out now to your behalf on the back of each itinerary, where you can see the marked
Arena Chapel
.”

One of the women asked, “Which name do the locals use for the chapel?”

“Of course,” Sara said, “the famous frescoes painted by Giotto more than seven hundred years ago had no equal in the world, as you will see. Interesting for all of you is Dante, the greatest poet for all time. He tells everyone in
Divina Commedia,
the greatest poem for all the world, that Giotto was the greatest of all painters in the world, better even than his own master, Cimabue.” Sara picked up an index card from the table behind her. “In painting, Cimabue thought to hold the field / Now Giotto is acclaimed by all / So that he has obscured the former's fame.”

Mitchell would not have approved. Sara was reading from the Mandelbaum translation, which Mitchell considered authoritative but tame. He preferred the wilder, woollier early translations that
delivered a more rousing narrative voice and served up plenty of errors and infelicities for him to annotate as he read. The reason I had been booked on this side-trip to Padua was for Mitchell to point out how heavily Giotto had leaned on Dante's ideas. Giotto was one of many answers to his title question,
Who Stole Dante?

“Lucky,” Sara said, “you will also see in the Bargello how Giotto painted a portrait of Dante.”

A woman who'd found time to curl her hair into a perfect platinum flip asked, “But isn't the Bargello museum in Florence?”

“Both of these great artists were, how you say,
Fiorentino
.”

The same woman said, “We actually say Florentine.”

“
Si, si, si, Firenze
,” Sara said.

“No, no, no,
Florence
is what we say. Like you say
Padova,
we say
Padua
.”

Shelby swiveled in her seat near the front of the room. “Potato,
Padova.
Let's call the whole thing off.”

“Agreed.” The blonde conceded the point with a shake of her flip. “But we still don't know whether we should refer to it as the Arena Chapel or the Scrovegni Chapel.”

“I will show you next this church of the Eremitani,” Sara said, her voice a little shakier now. “Next, not walking too far,” she stumbled on, sliding her finger down the map, “we will enjoy this ride on the tram for visiting the very holy basilica with the very holy tongue of St. Anthony looking even today almost like new, saving time to stop in many other famously beautiful chapels along the way.”

This went on for fifteen minutes. The frustration in the room was palpable, but it was held in check by the anxiety evident in Sara's earnest performance. Shelby shot me a couple of exasperated looks from the front of the room, and I nodded, but I wasn't eager for the event to end. I was dreading my dinner with strangers, and then sitting alone Monday morning with some panicky assortment of sweet rolls and
exotic-fruit nectar from that breakfast buffet, so I was hoping Sara would talk until Tuesday.

I felt someone's hands on my shoulders.

“Have I managed to miss absolutely every tedious detail?” As I turned, the silver-haired doctor slid into the chair beside me. He had changed into a blue linen blazer and a starched white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. He was at least six feet tall, and his taut, pale skin was deeply etched around the eyes and mouth with tiny, dark age lines. When he leaned toward me, his severe, angular profile widened into a delighted grin. He whispered, “At this moment, we are the only people in Italy not having a drink.” I got a whiff of gin and lemon and instinctively looked at my watch. It was almost seven. He nodded.

“Is there some questions at the back of this room?” Sara was peering at me.

Very loudly, the doctor said, “I suppose it might just be me, but—” He paused so everyone had time to turn around. He leaned back, rocking a bit in his chair, staring at Sara. “I'm a little bit on pins and needles back here. I just know, at any moment now, you are going to toss away those eyeglasses, shake your hair loose, and turn into Gina Lollobrigida. You are so very beautiful.”

One of the husbands yelped, “Exactly!” He started a round of applause that caught on as everyone laughed and nodded in agreement. Relief swept through the room like an unexpected wave, and as it receded, one of the wives said, “It really is true, Sara. You're just lovely.”

Sara leaned back against the table and waved her hand. “We can go enjoy the evening now.” Soon, she was surrounded by the couples, and the doctor wagged his head, which was suggestive enough to make me follow him to the hotel bar, a counter with six steel stools tucked into a dark alcove between the kitchen and the restaurant.

“Gin okay?”

I nodded.

He nodded at the bartender, who pulled down two tall glasses from a shelf, scooped a tablespoon of frozen lemonade into each, added an incautious amount of gin, topped it off with tonic water and a slice of lemon, and shoved them our way. The doctor clinked his glass against mine and said, “To so-and-so, who invented this perfect marriage of sour and bitter.”

It was a very good cocktail. “Who is so-and-so?”

“Long story,” he said.

I said, “What's the drink called? It's delicious.”

“We have time for two,” he said. “St. Shelby volunteered to escort the two elderly sisters with the wigs to the restaurant, and that won't be a quick trip. The drink is called a Perfect Marriage. Is it Elizabeth or Betsy or Liz or Mrs.?”

“Oh,” I said. “Me?” Either he talked too fast or I was drinking too fast.

He said, “I'll go with E. until further notice.” He waved at the bartender.

I panicked. “You're not serious about a second?”

He urged the bartender to mix up another round. “Let's just agree that you're sad and I'm sad, and we're both old enough to have our reasons.”

I said, “How old
are
you?”

“Jesus, I thought we were friends,” he said.

I said, “I don't have friends anymore, so I'm out of practice.” To make myself stop talking, I polished off my drink, which did not work. “I'm fifty-six,” I said, as if that qualified as a boast. It was a lie. “Fifty-seven, I mean. What year is it? I'm at least fifty-six.” To stem my rising anxiety, I just kept telling myself,
He's a doctor, he's a doctor, he's a doctor.

“I would have guessed younger for you. Honestly. I'm fifty-four.”

I was into the second drink. “What's your name?”

He said, “T.”

I said, “As in T-shirt?”

He said, “Before we go any further, I should warn you. The great restaurant in the Piazza del Erbe doesn't have a table for us. We'll be dining on pizza in the Piazza dei Fruitti. If that doesn't put you off, let's take one more sip and head out.”