Gospel Page 2

  “He may not, but at least the Theology Department will have done what it can to retrieve him. It is with the most abundant possible tact and diplomacy that we want you to approach him, and suggest…” Dr. Shaughnesy attempted a look of concern, human compassion never being his strength and always having to be slightly play-acted. “… suggest that he come back home to his loved ones and fellow colleagues. Don’t let it end like this, in this … this childish display.”

  “Might,” Lucy speculated, “he really be on to something? I mean, this was the man who worked on the Nag Hammadi digs, the Nimrut Dag stele, who helped catalogue the Huntington Library fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe he’ll walk in the door with another Dead Sea Scroll or something.”

  Dr. Shaughnesy looked somewhat pained and twisted the large onyx ring on his left hand; Lucy observed his pale, long fingers. “I don’t think so, my dear. I have a file drawer full of hate mail from the man and I’m not sure he has any purpose but running up a tremendous bar and restaurant tab.” The head of the Theology Department twisted his ring again uncomfortably. “And yet, I don’t want to report him to the police for defrauding the department. I want to give him this warning—Patrick was responsible for hiring me, after all. We, his former colleagues and admirers, owe him this courtesy.”

  Lucy asked Dr. Shaughnesy why he was sure O’Hanrahan would be attending an upcoming dinner in All Souls College at Oxford University, Thursday night, June 21st, 1990. The Acolytes were a dining society for ecclesiasts from a number of faiths—Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, Judaism—who met once a year for a feast of fine food, rare wines, precious liqueurs, and an agreed-upon topic for learned, rousing debate.

  “He’s never missed one of these Acolyte Suppers yet,” said Shaughnesy. “And I have contacted a colleague at Cambridge who is in the Acolyte Society and, being indisposed, has ceded his place to me, and I in turn have put forward your name to attend.”

  “Wow.”

  “You are free, of course, to decline this trip for the department,” offered Shaughnesy, examining his bloodless hands.

  “Oh no, sir,” she had insisted. “What an opportunity. I mean, I’ve never really been anywhere at all. Is there … is there some reason you’re picking me to do this?”

  Shaughnesy smiled briefly. “We were going to send one of the faculty, but it occurred there was no one available whom Patrick might not take great exception to—so few of us are on speaking terms with him. And you are among the most mature grad students remaining in the department.”

  Lucy returned a wan smile. Her thesis: four years and counting.

  So, of course, she had to go on this trip. When she said she’d been nowhere, she’d meant it. Indiana, Wisconsin as far as the Dells, all over Illinois, once down to St. Louis when the big arch was dedicated when she was a kid. Also, Lucy couldn’t refuse the one thing ever asked of her in years of academic obscurity in this department. Especially with her thesis-extension hearing looming in September. And the fact that she’d been through three different senior advisers. No, there was no choice, politically. She had to go, and she had to succeed.

  Lucy also had to go because it would be exciting—a whole other country. And there had been so little excitement in her life that if Lucy had turned this down she would be lying awake for months cursing this missed opportunity for an expenses-paid trip to Great Britain. Besides, she wondered sometimes if her life had the capacity to be exciting, if the years were fated to continue just like the previous ones, safe and dull.

  A jolt from the turbulence brought Lucy back to the present.

  Between the plane crashing and dealing with Dr. O’Hanrahan, whose ferocious presence Lucy had witnessed in lecture halls a time or two, her body pumped an adrenaline of incessant worry. What if Dr. O’Hanrahan isn’t at Oxford as planned? What if he refuses to talk to her? What if he’s insane? What if Gabriel’s had a bad accident and O’Hanrahan is covering up.… Soon enough she would have her chance to learn the answers, Lucy thought as she looked out to see London in a soup of low-lying rain clouds. Oh thank you, Father, Jesus, and Holy Ghost, for delivering me safe and sound!

  (No problem.)

  Although, then again, most planes crash on takeoff or landing.

  (This is not the fighting spirit We might have hoped for, Lucy.)

  Touch down. Deceleration. Everyone alive.

  Lucy was herded through Her Majesty’s Customs and emerged with a minimum of hassle and customs folderol. Her luggage rode the luggage carousel and she grabbed her overpacked suitcase quickly, relieved to see it had come with her, afraid someone would run off with it, still suspicious of this Europe place.

  Slowly she apprehended the foreignness of things. The sign: INFORMATION CENTRE. That’s right, she remembered from somewhere, they turn around the er’s, over here. Amid the Urdu and French and German snatches of conversation she recognized her own language, more clipped, sometimes more gracious and formal, sometimes incomprehensible but musical and bouncing. Yeah, she confirmed to herself, they even look English. Not all too different from the Irish she grew up with really, here and there. No bowler hats, though. No dreamy indolent boys from Eton, no chimney sweeps out of Mary Poppins, no royalty anywhere to be seen.

  The signs led her to a plaza, where she discovered it was damp and cold; she congratulated herself on the warm clothes she had brought. And look, there rounding the corner was her first red double-decker bus, its sign announcing Victoria Station. There was a line, which Lucy didn’t take notice of as she went to read the small posted schedule—

  “Excuse me,” said the protectress of the line, “there’s a queue.”

  After a dumb second, Lucy joined the silent regiment of waiting travelers at the very back, glared at the whole way.

  The bus wheezed into the dock and Lucy bought a ticket with a crisp blue five-pound note and sat by a window so she could look out; an elderly lady sat beside her. When the bus commenced the ninety-minute trip, the windows fogged up and Lucy persistently used her sweater shirtsleeve to wipe away a small peephole.

  “It’ll do that, it will,” said the older woman in a whispered voice.

  “I’m from America,” Lucy explained herself, “I just want to see out.”

  “Yes, it’s rather nice to see out.”

  That was it. First conversation in Britain.

  Well, at least she can tell Judy when she gets back home she made conversation, made friends, talked to people. Lived. It was important to prove this to Judy, her housemate back on Kimbark Street. Judy was adamant that Lucy never asserted herself or did anything fun. It had just about killed her that Lucy was chosen to take this trip for the department.

  Her roommate Judy was her best college-era friend.

  Both were Roman Catholic, both of them went to the non-Catholic Chicago University, both were now graduate students, which mystified their complaining parents. Perhaps university prisoners-for-life was more like it, living in the grungy student ghetto in that biggest ghetto of all, the South Side of Chicago. Lucy, after starting out as a classicist, transferred to theology, specializing in Ancient Languages. No two worlds could be more distant than the world of St. John’s Greek and the gauntlet Lucy regularly ran to class: the inner-city kids harassing her, the drunken homeless she must step over or dodge, the brazen drug deals at every corner obvious to the most naive policeman, the rape whistle she always carried, the personal schedule of when not to walk certain places, ride certain trains, be at particular bus stops.

  About here her mom’s scolding voice interfered with her memory: “You should be living, like any proper young lady, at home.”

  To live away from home, according to Mrs. Dantan, as an unmarried girl meant orgies and fornication. Lucullan banquets, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lucy in the role of Valeria Messalina, coming home any day pregnant and unbetrothed. I wish, Mom, thought Lucy, I wish. Anything but the dullness of coming home to Judy. Judy was studying psychology, which to Lucy was … ironic. That was always the way with psychology students, she had observed, always in need of more desperate messed-up people to talk to so they could feel like they had the answers to their own disarrayed lives. No, that was cruel to Judy. But Judy did undermine her.

  “Can I wear your sweater?” she’d ask. “Your hand-knit thing? I figure we’re both about the same size and if it works for you it’ll hide all my flab too.”

  Judy was always on some form of unsuccessful diet and she was big on announcing how she and Lucy were sisters in weight problems. Lucy was a bit plump, twenty pounds overweight max, Irish-American, freckled, white-girl plump, but she wasn’t the cow Judy was.

  “I just wish we hadn’t been raised Roman Catholic,” Judy would declaim. “That’s why our lives are decades behind other women’s.” Judy went on: “I mean, you don’t really want to be in theology, you’re just doing it out of guilt that you didn’t become a nun like your mother wanted.”

  Well, yes and no—

  “And if we hadn’t been raised Catholic, we’d have each had fifty boyfriends before now. That’s why we’re neurotic about sex.”

  Yes, that was another ritual. Over the vegetarian casserole with the TV local news blaring, drinking skim milk and having first courses of plain yogurt to be followed by Weight Watchers frozen tuna lasagne, the endless discussion of men men men. Lucy had never been the type of woman to think night and day about men since, frankly, very few guys she’d met had appealed to her. Catholic or not, she found most men of the species loud and unkind and immature and, decisively, not interested in what interested her.

  Judy: “… and Vito Campanella, Gabe’s friend? Hold me back, for God’s sakes. What a behind on that boy. I wish I could get him to walk backward.”

  Judy had the rhetoric of horniness do
wn to a precision not found in Catullus. If there hadn’t been constant sightings of good-looking men and declarations of their great distance from Lucy, Lucy might have lived quite happily. As if Judy was some great object of romance. Okay. Technically, Judy was a little bit better looking in the face, though given to putting on more weight. It was her personality that kept men away, that and the nasalest, flattest Midwestern drawl. Besides, Lucy knew that her roommate’s true and everlasting love was Paws the Cat.

  Paws the Cat belonged to Judy, and Cattus—once part of a duo, Felis and Cattus, but Felis got run over—was Lucy’s.

  “Lucy, I think we have to talk,” Judy said the night before Lucy was to leave on this trip, as if Lucy had a second to waste. “I notice that you always give Cattus the same dish, but you put down any old thing for Paws to eat off of. And another thing, why do you serve your cat first when you dump out the Mr. Kittles?”

  Because he’s bigger and more aggressive.

  “Because you always feed him first.”

  No, Lucy explained at the time, because if I put down food in Paws’s dish first, Cattus will think it’s his and eat it.

  “Only because he’s used to being fed first.”

  Lucy was often subjected to Judy meowing, talking cat-talk to Paws. “Big Cruel Lucy didn’t feed yooooo, no she didn’t! She doesn’t care if we live or die!”

  Yep, that was about the size of it.

  (A little more charity would not go amiss, My dear.)

  It was just that Judy made her so mad. The first year they roomed together was all right—just all right, nothing brilliant—but this year had become pure misery. Why haven’t I moved out? she wondered.

  (Do you want an answer to that? You judge Judy for being a psychology major to observe others’ distress and feel superior to them, but My child, that’s what you do too. Always have. In St. Eulalia you usually gravitated to the girl who was less socially adept than you. Remember your friend Faith? Isn’t that the real cause of your resentment of Judy, that you see in her your own faults, your own limitations?)

  I don’t want to think about Chicago anymore, Lucy decided.

  She instead tried to make Berkshire and eastern Oxfordshire a little more like what she had expected. There were expressways and shopping malls and office parks and factories and no abundance of the thatched-cottage villages that she was hoping for. Every once in a while, too far from the highway to inspect, was an old Cotswold-stone church, a sturdy squarish bell tower amid a copse of trees and slate-roofed houses. Because the illusion and its beauty might have dissolved upon a closer look, she persuaded herself of its Englishness as the bus descended into another slight valley.

  The road soon became more congested, and the bus leaned through a series of inevitable British traffic circles. Lucy looked at her watch and knew they were almost to Oxford. Lucy was giddy to be somewhere that had been previously confined to PBS specials and the Travel Channel on cable TV back home. The bus crossed Magdalen Bridge and the city of medieval monasteries came into view, its fortress gates, the bell towers and steeples, quaint ye-olde-Englande shops crammed between the stone bastions, bands of boisterous uniformed students gathered outside the Examination Schools celebrating the end of the term and exams with champagne and revelry.…

  Lucy wanted off the bus so she could explore!

  OXFORD

  JUNE 20TH, 1990

  The clouds subsided and the rain-soaked High Street was briefly displayed in the queer off-white, horizontal light Oxford alone seems to enjoy. Lucy stared fondly at the scene: the gradual hill of High Street, the road winding upward and left, fortified on both sides by the palisade of ancient colleges presenting spired, stone facades to the road, the Georgian evenness of Queens College and the isolated statue of some queen, stylita, under a stone canopy above the gate.

  Lucy groped in her large carpetbag to unearth the guidebook she had bought, ready to decipher centuries of remainders and reconstructions. She walked to the middle of the square formed by St. Mary’s Church, All Souls College, and the Bodleian Library. In the middle of the quad this big round five-story dome, the Radcliffe Camera, subject of most Oxford postcards, had been plopped down in the grass, it seemed, merely because it fit. No less impractical was another gate in the wall of All Souls College with its Indian mini–Taj Mahal dome, and two decorative towers shrieking up from the central building beyond it; farther down the street leading from the quad was a mock Bridge of Sighs at Hertford College, across from that there was a Greek Parthenon-like building, next to Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theater … it was like a stone playground full of cherished architectural follies, and everywhere the much-lauded spires, wherever one could be affixed, at every awning and roofpoint.

  Lucy felt despondent at being in Oxford and yet not being enrolled there.

  She noticed a group of chattering British female students, dressed in shapeless sweaters, drab woollen skirts and black stockings, a fashion sense Lucy could love, but one much helped by an Oxford backdrop. All I got, mourned Lucy, is crummy old Chicago. Yeah, Chicago is a great university, but Rockefeller built a lot of the romanesque, Oxford-like buildings in the 1930s, for Pete’s sake, and the local joke is that old John D. proved you could even buy history. But you can’t. Because the University of Chicago is dignified and practical and indisputably boring, and Oxford, like history, is silly, impractical, and, she conceded, utterly romantic.

  Her map led her to the grim Tudor facade of Braithwaite College where Dr. Shaugnesy had arranged for her to stay. Lucy showed her letters of introduction to the porter, a grumpy red-faced man at the gate, who grunted, looked up at her, grunted, made a phone call no one answered, grunted again, read the letter, another grunt, then put on his glasses in order to be authoritative.

  “Can’t say I can ’elp ye, miss,” he said. “We got the Canadian Lawn Bowling Society in this week and rooms’re tight. Ye’ll have to take this up with the Bursary. Mrs. Miggins. And I don’t envy ye none.”

  Lucy was given directions to get to the Bursary. Lucy quickly surveyed the square beyond this gate, a three-story quad with an even green lawn with several overlarge signs stating no one was to walk upon the grass. The signs had been allowed to become the most striking thing in this tomblike courtyard. She followed the cobblestone perimeter around the sacred grass until she came to a doorway with the numeral III above it, which opened to a dank passage leading to another square quad, replete with warning signs, a doorway that led to a masters’ garden that no one but masters were to use, an outside stairway that led to a library that visitors were not permitted to see. Reminded of Alice in Wonderland—written by an Oxford don, Lucy recalled—Lucy finally found another passageway that led to a third and last quad and a doorway with the numeral XIII, The Bursary.

  “We simply cahn’t honor this,” breathed Mrs. Miggins, setting down the letter, the pain of all martyrdoms in her voice. “One,” she enumerated, “you are here after the Bursary’s hours of operations…”

  Lucy noticed the silver hair plastimolded into an arc up above Mrs. Miggins’s head, her gestures, and even the pinched, heartless meting out of the English language were familiar somehow. She’s modeling her public technique on Margaret Thatcher, Lucy realized.

  Two, there was no notification to the Bursary of a guest room being made ready for Lucy. Three, consequently there was no staff notification, hence a room could not be prepared. Four, perhaps the rooms had been booked for an American garden club that paid dearly to be here each and every summer, for her information. Five, these exchanges with the University of Chicago—who can’t just barge in here thinking it owns the place merely because it virtually does—involve some degree of paperwork, which, as Lucy could see, is impossible now since the sign outside clearrrrrly states the office hours of the Bursary during which business may be conducted.

  “I suppose you Americans think we need but snap our fingers and arrange things like that. See this stack of papers?”

  Lucy looked at the five sheets to the woman’s left.

  “American graduate students applying for a place in the college to live. As if we’re here to supply that sort of thing! Well, all I will say is that we have quite enough of the Americans, thank you very much, and there will come a time we don’t have to use our fine institutions for hotels for Americans merely to meet our economic needs.”