“What do you see?” Mary asked.
He told her. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “Pope Paul came down here a few months ago and said the Stations of the Cross. It was a mistake. The place dwarfed him. He looked lost, futile.”
They crossed the street and found a cabstand on the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The taxi whisked them past the Church of St. Maria in Aracoeli, once the site of a temple to the goddess Juno and of a palace of Caesar Augustus. There, according to myth, the Virgin and the Child descended and informed the trembling Emperor that henceforth “this is the altar of the son of God.” Now the magnificent Byzantine Virgin over the main altar shared with the Virgin of St. Maria Maggiore the responsibility of watching over the people of Rome. A few minutes of hairbreadth driving down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and they were at the entrance of the Piazza Navona. No traffic was allowed inside, the driver explained, and they hastily assured him in good Italian that they understood. With Mary’s hand resting lightly on his arm, Matthew Mahan entered their favorite Roman enclave.
Shaped like a huge outdoor salon, the piazza occupied the former circus of the Emperor Domitian. The palazzos, the church, and the other buildings along each side and at the loops on both ends composed an almost perfect harmony of form and space. Three fountains added their own circular contrasts to the composition. At this hour of the evening, there were strollers everywhere, the very old hobbling on canes, the very young pushed in carriages. Between the darkened facades of the palazzos and the church, the restaurants glowed busily. In the shadows, wrinkled old beggar women chewed on grapes, and other fruit and vegetables snatched from the shops of the nearby Campo dei Fiori market.
Before the first fountain, a huge bare-chested fire-eater performed. They gave him only a passing glance and headed for the central Fountain of the Rivers, one of Rome’s masterpieces. Four huge rocks supported a pedestal on top of which stood an obelisk from the Appian Way. On the rocks stood four statues symbolizing the Ganges, the Danube, the Nile, and the Rio de la Plata.
“They’re still waiting for it to fall,” Matthew Mahan said, pointing at two of the statues, who seemed to be reacting with fright and horror to the facade of the church opposite them. According to the story, this was the way the creator of the fountain, the great architect-sculptor Bernini, had spoofed the architect of the church, his rival Borromini.
Mary sighed. “I’m afraid that story has been disproved by the architectural historians. The church was built after Bernini finished the fountain.”
“It’s still a good story,” Matthew Mahan said. “I’m telling it to my tourists tomorrow.”
Mary was barely listening. She was gazing mournfully at the numerous hippies in their standard blue jeans, beads, and long hair sitting around the fountain rim. “I try to understand them. I even try to love them,” she said, “but they’re so vacuous, Matt. What’s wrong with them? What do they want?”
“I wish I knew.”
They turned back to the Tre Scalini and were soon sipping another set of Cinzano Biancos. They had a choice table, inside, so that the noise of the human traffic in the square was muted, while a window gave them a view of the Four Rivers Fountain. The food was superb, as usual, and Mary entertained him for a while with funny stories about her outrageous landlady, a countess who collected the rent for her apartments personally and always managed to be condescending even at her most mercenary. “She’s decided to take charge of my life,” Mary said, “as I’m sure she’s taken charge of everyone who made the mistake of letting her get too close. She keeps telling me I should marry. ‘It is never too late,’ she says.”
A temporarily forgotten sense of guilt assailed Matthew Mahan. He suddenly remembered something he had wanted to say to Mary Shea for years. The last time he had come to Rome he had almost said it, but prudence, that virtue to which bishops come naturally, and a fear of the eternally unpredictable feminine had held his tongue. But tonight he suddenly knew that he would say it. He would shuck off once and for all this role of protector, all-wise adviser that had been half hypocrisy for too long. It was only a matter of waiting for the right moment. He did not want to play the standard cleric and abruptly interrupt Mary’s gaiety with a solemn outburst. Instead, he entertained her with some of the nut mail he got every day. She particularly enjoyed the plan to end the Vietnam War Notre Dame style with a massive bombardment of daily communions.
They finished a bottle of Valpolicella with their main course, and Matthew Mahan surreptitiously swallowed two or three Titrilacs to soothe his ulcer. By now it was ten o’clock. The crowd in the piazza was beginning to thin. “Why don’t we have our coffee and
gelato
on the terrace?” he said. He signaled the waiter and issued the order. In a moment, they were seated at an outside table in the deliciously cool night air. The Romans, the tourists, even the hippies, slowly vanished from the piazza. In a few more minutes, it was almost empty. They sat there, lulled by the splash of the fountains, the magical mingling of light and water and marble that enriched their eyes as the sound charmed their ears.
“What a wonderful reunion, Mary. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see you so well, so lovely, so serene, after all these years.”
She lifted her face just slightly to him, and her eyes seemed to anticipate his words. Or was he only hoping that this was the case? “I hope the - the emotion in those words doesn’t upset you, Mary, or surprise you. But for years now there’s been something I wanted to tell you, something on my part that has been less than honest and has - well, troubled me. In those days in the early fifties, when I was the hustling young monsignor ready to tackle anything the bishop assigned to me, I - I wasn’t ready for someone like you, Mary, a woman with such depth, such sweetness, a woman who was my spiritual superior in so many ways. I thought it was just a matter of giving you the standard soft soap, spiritual consolation, daily mass, Communion, frequent prayer. All the time I was saying those things, Mary, a voice inside me was saying, ‘But not for her, she deserves something better. She wasn’t born to live this mutilated life, just because she had the bad luck to marry a drunken Irish bum.’ The more I saw you, Mary, the more panicky I became. I disguised it pretty well. Remember, you used to tell me I should have been a comedian?”
“That imitation you used to give of Archbishop Hogan, Matt. That’s still the funniest act I’ve ever seen or heard.”
“Act is the right word. I did everything I could think of, not only to make you happy - for a little while - but to avoid telling you the truth. I knew there was no hope of you ever getting an annulment, but I told you to come here - come to Rome - because if you stayed in the city, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, Mary.”
The
gelato tartufo,
the special ice cream of the Tre Scalini, the best in Rome, was untouched on the plates before them. As he talked, Mary had slowly leaned back in her chair, not a gesture that suggested she wanted to get away from him, no, it seemed more a desire to see him in perspective.
“I never thought you’d stay over here for the rest of your life, Mary. I just thought - even a year, maybe two, would give me a chance to get a grip on myself.”
A small, sad smile played across Mary’s lips. Now, in the same deliberate way, she leaned forward again and took his right hand, which was closed in a fist on the table, in both her smaller, softer hands. She did not lift it from the table. She simply wrapped her fingers around it and slowly unbent the contorted fingers.
“Oh, Matt,” she said, “Matt. To think that all these years I’ve let this trouble you.”
“You let -?”
“Do you think I didn’t know, Matt? Do you think I came over here just because you suggested it? Women may not be terribly bright about things like moral theology and church politics. But when it comes to knowing when a man is in love with them - it’s the rare woman who’s too dumb to miss that.” She leaned almost imperceptibly closer to him. “And they also know when they’re in love with the man.”
Her smile was more solemn now, more earnest. “Matt, I was the one who decided to come over here. I came of my own free will knowing that nothing could be done about my marriage. I came because I saw that you were a great priest. I saw that - no matter what you thought or felt about me - your priesthood was the real center of your life. I didn’t want to be guilty of destroying that part of you, Matt. It was too important to you - and to the world. When I came over here, I knew I was going to stay a long time.”
He felt unbelievable. A chaotic mixture of joy and sadness surged in his body. “My God,” he said, “what an egotistic ignoramus I am.”
Mary threw back her head and laughed heartily, reminding him of the way she used to laugh when he did his imitations of the Archbishop and other chancery office factotums fifteen years ago. “No,” she said, “no, you’re not an ignoramus. You’re just a man. And like all men, you naturally assume you’re running things.”
Now came a question he had also been afraid to ask for too long. Almost in spite of his will, it rose to his lips. “How has it really been, Mary? All those years I asked you - are you all right? I always took the answer you gave me - too easily. It was what I wanted to hear.”
“I know Matt. That’s why I gave it to you.”
She ran her finger around the rim of her wineglass. “It was terrible for the first few years. I - I drank and - there were men. I was so bitter and empty, Matt. Giving up you - seemed to take all I had left. This isn’t a good country for a woman in that frame of mind. It’s so easy to be exploited - and Italian men are artists at it.
“That’s why I moved to Venice. I lived with a businessman whom I met in Rome. I also wanted to be someplace where you wouldn’t visit me. There was always too much of a chance of you showing up in Rome. Well - the thing went sour in Venice. Too close to the wife, that sort of banal problem. Then he came to Venice. I met him. And everything began to change.”
“Roncalli?”
Mary nodded. “He told me that we all had to spend some time in the desert. Forty days, forty months, or in his case thirty years. Thanks to him, Matt, I was able to come back to Rome, back to you, without - the old fear.”
They began to eat their
gelato.
They savored the chocolate taste in silence for a moment. It seemed to Matthew Mahan the perfect physical expression of what they were feeling - sadness, regret, but a dark sweetness, too. Outside in the shadows of the piazza the fountains splashed, the light-filled water of the four rivers ran out to the Eternal City. Matthew Mahan sat with the woman he had loved and still loved, and slowly realized that there was one more question to ask.
“And now, Mary. How are you now?”
For the first time, she avoided his eyes. “Not - not good, Matt. Oh, I know what you’re going to say to me. The same thing my psychiatrist says. Don’t be so involved with the Church. Let the clerical politicians play their games.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Mary. What’s this about a psychiatrist?”
“I’ve been depressed, Matt. On and off, for the past year or so. It’s no fun. You can’t sleep. You find yourself thinking all sorts of sick thoughts. It even bothered my digestion for a while. I was living like an ulcer patient.”
“Really?” He was not sure which symptom upset him most. “And your psychiatrist blames the Church?”
“No. My morbid interest in the Church. In where it seems to be going. Or not going. It’s really a sense of loss, Matt. Loss of him, Don Angelo. Every day they seem to do something else that - that’s obscene - that makes him seem more remote, more - dead. Don’t you feel it, Matt? Don’t you sense that his spirit is being driven out of the Church?”
For a moment, something close to panic seized him. Was he part of this betrayal? Wasn’t that the only conclusion to be drawn from what he had just experienced in the Church of St. Peter in Chains? But to confess it would be devastating to this anguished woman confronting him.
“Mary, try to be - a little more charitable. Toward Paul. The men around him. Maybe it would help if I suggested including me. We’re all victims of the same thing, Mary. An incredible explosion of problems. And we’re just ordinary men, Mary. Not saints or geniuses like John. You do the best you can. But it’s so hard to get a perspective on whether that best is good or bad. The situation sort of engulfs you.”
“But charity, Matt. Charity and love. I’m sure you make them your first principles. And reasonable freedom.”
“I - I tell myself I do. I try. But maybe even you would say I don’t always succeed.”
It was almost a confession. Did she hear it? No, she was too embroiled in her own tormented emotions. “And birth control. That unspeakable encyclical? You fought that. You told me. You’re not browbeating your priests like that old ogre O’Boyle in Washington, D.C.”
“No. I’m trying to handle it - another way.”
“But how could it have happened? How could he turn his back on the commission, the best thinking of the best men? With the world drowning in people? How could he be so utterly heartless? How could he condemn women to my mother’s fate?”
“Your mother? Oh yes -”
Kathleen Murtagh had died giving birth to her fifth child in six years. Her husband’s second wife had made Mary’s childhood and adolescence a misery. She had married the first available man to escape from what she called a concentration camp. Inevitably, he turned out to be the worst available man.
Another wave of weariness washed over Matthew Mahan. “Mary,” he said. “Popes make mistakes, just like Archbishops and priests and everyone else. We have to live with them. We have to live with everybody. But we shouldn’t let anything shake our faith or our confidence in the Church. Christ himself told us that the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail against it.”
“What about the gates of heaven? Why don’t we look in that direction? Matt, it’s hope that’s being destroyed, not faith. That’s for the next world. But hope - that’s what the people want and need. I can’t tell you how much your becoming Cardinal meant to me, this way. Now you’re in a position to speak out - and be heard. You’ve got to do it, Matt. Somebody has to raise his voice against that crew in the Vatican.”