Earthquake I.D. (7 page)

Cesare turned thoughtful, putting the choice under the calipers of his Jesuit training. He must've spent a lot of time up in his head, or over in the library—like all Barb's favorite church people, over the years. The
Signore
must've turned so many pages, the paper had softened the edges of his testosterone. Not that Barbara was handling him gently, showing respect, the way she'd been raised. Her work at the Sam Center, she realized, had gotten her into the practice of being blunt. Especially the time one-on-one with Nettie, her mentor. A Bride of Christ, a Franciscan, Nettie had nonetheless taught Barbara not to pussyfoot around just because there was crucifix on the wall. Then too, when it came to Cesare here, one of the connections she'd felt from the first was his distaste for pat answers.

“Perhaps,” he said finally, “it would help if you didn't always think in such personal terms. Try putting some distance between yourself and these vicissitudes. Imagine that it were some other family, in which a successful executive gives up all that he has, or he gives up a—”

“Come on, do you really believe it's that simple? Give up all your worldly goods, for the sake of the least among you? That's not my Jaybird, building the New Jerusalem.”

“I should hope not. I'm rather a skeptic when it comes to New Jerusalems.”

“Well, I'm saying it's not
about
a better world, or not only. Jay's got something else going, a private agenda.” Her husband had brought the family here, Barb insisted, in an attempt to regain lost power. “He needed to run my life again.”

The old man looked dubious.

“Listen, I realize I talk a good game. How do you think I know an act when I see one? But I'm telling you, Jay, he had the real power. He's always had it.”

The old Dominican sat so still, his robes plainly laundered that morning, that he prompted the contrary image of Barbara's kids tearing around in a nearby soccer field, their shorts and sneakers smeared with grass. The place was open to the public most afternoons. Her chosen church wasn't down in the
vicoli
, but up in the family's part of town, where you found regularly groomed green-spaces and a responsible staff The last she'd seen the children, the teenagers were playing goalie and the younger ones were sharing a pickup squad with a few locals. Paul had looked fine, just another kid with a ball, and Barb had no problem leaving to meet with Cesare, a couple of staircases farther uphill (in this city even the best neighborhoods presented an aerobic workout).

What did it matter that Barb had discovered this man uptown? Cesare wasn't defined by the parish assigned him any more than by Jesuit or Dominican. He'd committed his ministry to “the wretched of the earth,” a phrase his new member from New York admired, though so far she'd avoided admitting that she didn't know the source. She knew enough, anyway. Barbara understood that though she liked the old man, there was chemistry, what she depended on in their give and take was his commitment to the opposing point of view: Jay's version of the Lulucitas' business in Naples. This made the Padre Superior a bracing corrective. Again, with him it was like with Nettie: if the wife could make her argument to this priest, then she might be frightened, she might be disappointed, but she wasn't merely whining. For Cesare hadn't needed an earthquake in order to do something for the non-Europeans, the people off the Italian books—the
clandestini
. Over the past couple of years, though it violated church policy, he'd allowed homeless blacks and Arabs a night or two of sanctuary. If they could make it up to Cesare's, these strays, they had an alternative to the lice-infested shelters in the old city, or the Camorra-run “squats” out by the mozzarella ranches.

Even now, the priest had two such lost souls camped in the church basement. The first time Barbara had spoken of the attack on her husband, Cesare had noted the date with interest; on her next visit, after he'd decided the American could be trusted, he'd revealed that he'd taken in “two poor creatures” that very same evening.

These two had been guests of the church for a week, Cesare reminded her now. “And it's obvious, don't you know,” he went on, “that these young men have had some scrape with the law. See them flinch when they hear a siren, it's entirely obvious.”

The mother wasn't sure what had brought this on.

“Well, one wonders, Mrs. Lulucita. These two in my care, one wonders if they weren't the same fellows as attacked your husband.”

Barbara got a hand on her purse, a reflex.

“This husband who you claim had the power to drag you all the way across the Atlantic—well, two penniless beggars laid him low just like that.”

“Mary, mother of God. What are—”

“Take care, Signora. That's a holy name you're using.”

“But what are you
saying?”
She and the priest were alone. Between morning Mass and evening Mass, people in this neighborhood preferred to stay home with the appliances. Now Barb had the purse in her lap, her hands in fists around the handle. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Why are you complaining to me about some so-called power in a marriage? In this world, power is a piece of iron pipe. It's a wallet full of Euros.”

“Oh,
Father
. The two that hit my Jaybird, that night they would've had the Euros. Now don't you think they would've taken the money and run? That's what the police think, they hightailed it for Norway or someplace that very night.”

Cesare had kept his own arms down. In another moment, unflappable, he undid what he'd just done. He pointed out that Jay's attackers had had a motorcycle, which meant they must've worked with some under-the-table dealer out on the city's periphery. Out in a mob neighborhood like Secondigliano, for instance. The two men the priest was keeping in the cellar, on the contrary, had shown up on foot.

“One could see that they didn't even have 90 cents for the funicular.”

Barbara hadn't quite shaken her panic, her blood-rush. “If you're saying there's no power dynamic in a marriage…” She tsked, irritated at her vocabulary,
power dynamic
. “If you're saying it wouldn't be about power out at the Refugee Center, the Glorious Jaybird Show, then you're the one who doesn't know how the world works.”

“But think of the reason you couldn't stand to see him in power. If that man had power, signora, it was because you loved him.”

Sighing, Barbara lifted her purse and set it back down.

“It was love between you two,” the priest said.

At least she resisted the counseling-session response,
I acknowledge that
. She looked to the altar. A thing of glazed concrete, flecked with shards of glass in purple and green, it hardly seemed an Italian piece. It was New Age California.

“Well, and wouldn't that love be the reason you still find yourself making love, actually, Mrs. Lulucita?”

“Oh, so far as that goes, listen.” Another reason she'd chosen this priest was how willing he was to talk about sex. “We can't be sure what's going on, so far as that goes. What does any of us know, honestly, when it come to the libido?”

“I suppose. But you are some years past forty.”

“Some years. Some years, there's a nice way to put it.”

Much as she preferred straight talk, Cesare's collar didn't give him the right to check her hormonal balances. Whatever menopause or its approach might have to do with Barbara's ongoing Neapolitan upheaval, she could handle that part of it herself. With Jay, she'd gone so far as to use the expression “change of life,” just the night before. This was after another spasm of clutching and gasping, turning to glass and tumbling through glass; her energy had been up.

“But,” the priest replied, “I'm not just talking about your body and its changes.”

“Cesare, I had five children, you know what I'm saying?”

“Indeed I do, signora. Your body and its changes, that's your own affair, finally. What I'm trying to talk about is a long and happy marriage.”

And faithful too, Father. Barb, nodding, sighing again, recalled in silence her lone suspicion of adultery. She'd suffered a wondering night or two early during her final pregnancy—and in the next minute, never mind that she and Cesare weren't in the confessional, she told him about it. “There were just two nights in twenty years,” the mother said, “two nights of something jay called a late inventory check, down at Viciecco & Sons.” And whatever kind of inventory the man had been taking, it was over and done with by the time the twins had entered their third trimester.

The priest had come closer again. “You have your doubts, but you don't know for certain? You can't bring yourself to ask him?”

“But haven't you heard what I've been telling you, Father? Haven't I been saying, inside a marriage, power is just as real as out on the street?”

“Well, power of a kind, I suppose. But you made your own choices. Didn't you just see fit to remind me that you have five children?”

Do the math, Barbara. Three boys plus twin girls equals enough to keep you happy. Or it used to be enough, as she'd explained to the old Jesuit the last time.

“Oh listen,” she reiterated now, “the mother scene, that's over for me.”

Cesare folded his arms, more sticks in sacks. “Really, Mrs. Lulucita?” Barbara had told him how she used to thrive in parenting, its snot and intimacy. “I heard you say that even on your first morning in Naples, on the most bewildering streets in Europe, you were such a dedicated parent that you could enter the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.”

“I know what I said, Father. Cesare. And I'll tell you something, I know the girls even better than I know Paul. But those girls are out of third grade now.” Barbara faced the speckled altar wall again; she didn't want to whine. “After this, the way their social life takes over, it's as if they've gotten their driver's license. The best part of being a mother, that was over before I left Bridgeport.”

Cesare might've shown some sympathy, a softening in his posture. But to hear him clear his throat, you would've thought he was grinding gears.

“Mrs. Lulucita.” His tone frosted the name's musicality. “You know, Christ wasn't nailed to the cross for unhappy wives.”

In his half-disgusted wave, Barb caught a glimpse of an alternative life. The man would've made a homosexual of the old school, courtly.

“In Dublin too, don't you know, the complaining was quite interminable. The song of the unhappy bourgeois.”

‘You're my priest,” Barbara told him. “I have to ask again, do you want me to lie? To live in a lie?”

“Well, let's rehearse what we have here, shall we? Children grow up and leave home, isn't that a fact of our existence? And lovers lose their charms, inevitably.”

Then with two knobby fingers still extended, Cesare reminded her that he went downtown three times a week, where he worked with people in real trouble. “The very sort of
clandestini
you'd find out at your husband's worksite.”

“So.…” Barb needed another look around the church. “So what you're saying is, before I book a flight for New York, I should go see what he's up to.”

“We live in a time of a great challenge, Mrs. Lulucita, one that seems to have come straight from Christ's teaching. This city, whether it can continue as a place of justice or not, seems now at the heart of that challenge.”

When Barbara cast her eyes up, the stony heights tweaked her knees with vertigo. ‘You remember I worked with broken families, Father? I never got the credentials for actual counseling, but I've done some good for families. For children.”

“But the effort Christ calls you to here in Naples, signora, requires no greater credential than a caring heart.”

She went on staring at the ceiling, her head on the back of the pew.

“A caring heart, Mrs. Lulucita.” The afternoon sun had sunk low enough to fill the stained-glass windows, and Cesare had leaned into a patch of these airborne colors. “When you adopted that girl, that time, what did you require, except—?”

“The adoption failed.” Barbara sat up and heaved to her feet. “If you ask me, I required a whole lot more.”

“Be that as it may, our
clandestini
brothers and sisters are lost children too.” Cesare moved with her, the kaleidoscopic glimmer shifting down his robe. He asked whether Barbara knew that some of these outcasts had started a hunger strike.

“A hunger strike?”

“Mrs. Lulucita, what did you expect, coming to Naples? Better pizza? Kisses under the Moorish wall?”

“Moorish? A Moorish—what?”

But the old Jesuit appeared to think the conversation was over. Unfolding from the pew, he broke into an unexpected smile, wrinkle-lifting. He declared that she and her family too were “strangers at the door, don't you know.” The culture might be different, he said, the skin color, “but Christ's challenge remains the same.”

She had to laugh, and hearing herself, was surprised at the pleasure in it. You would've thought they'd had a reassuring heart-to-heart. Then back outside in the siesta quiet, the odor of volcano, Barb reconsidered the man. The old curmudgeon. He'd been forged by the preaching of John XXIII, the liberation theology and new liturgy, and he'd been taking shots at the bourgeois since he'd first heard a call.

Yet she was confused, no point denying, out under the maples blotched by a constant exposure to diesel exhaust. Estranged and confused, she stood dappled with shadow. Yet she'd found her Duomo, the place that afforded the shiver she needed. At Cesare's she'd felt her spirit flex, a muscle tremor hard to place but easy to recognize, if you're a believer. She couldn't say whether she'd chosen her church and her priest or they'd chosen her, but either way she'd been out of parochial school long enough to know that the movements of faith didn't always follow the syllabus—that confusion often played a part.