Second Spring Read online

  “Yet much remains, Carlo. If Siri wins, you will realize just how much.”

  “He wouldn’t put the Mass back in Latin, would he?”

  “Slowly and gradually he would restrict the number of times it might be done in English. They’re not opposed necessarily to a vernacular liturgy, only to the decline, as they see it, of papal power.”

  We were both silent for a moment. Above us a lovely full moon looked down benignly on the glittering mosaics of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. In a city of such beauty, how could there still exist such ugly realities as corruption and power lust?

  “Who’s our guy?” Chuck asked.

  Adolfo hesitated.

  “You must understand,” he said finally, “that there are very few Italian cardinals left who are capable of being Pope … Illness, ah, peculiarities, age. There is talk of Albino Luciani from Venice. He is a good man, a simple padre di compagna, a priest of the land, what you Americans would call a good parish priest. He walks the streets of Venice talking to people. He smiles and is witty and would never overturn a vote of his priests’ council. However, it is said that he is not sophisticated. One also hears that he has very poor health.”

  “The best we can do?”

  “I’m afraid so. Some of the Curia will support him, as will the Europeans and the Americans. You can never tell what will happen inside the conclave, however. One must pray.”

  “Indeed one must,” I said.

  Adolfo lifted the bottle of Frascati, noted my overturned glass, and offered some to Chuck. He declined with a lifted finger. Adolfo poured a small portion for himself. Two very abstemious Americans, he must have thought.

  I don’t look like a drunk you see, not at all. I haven’t had a drink in almost twenty years and don’t propose ever to have one again. I almost ruined my marriage and my life. Chuck saved me along with a couple of first-rate psychiatrists, including a little witch with immense and kind gray eyes named Maggie Ward. If you’ve been sexually abused by your father and routinely beaten by your mother, drink is one way to escape.

  “It is said that he has an open mind on that issue which is so important to you …”

  “And to all the Catholic married people in the world,” I interrupted.

  The Monsignor smiled briefly, his teeth flashing in the candlelight on the table.

  “Of course … You remember when the so-called test-tube baby was born in England? Everyone here condemned it naturally. Luciani began his very mild comment by congratulating the couple on the birth of their child.”

  “How dare he!” I said ironically.

  Adolfo smiled again. He enjoyed me. Most men do, though I have a hard time admitting that to myself.

  “This man Suenens has a lot of clout?” Chuck asked.

  “That is one way of putting it, Carlo. He was one of the great men of the Council. He was the Great Elector of the late Pope Paul, who would have made him secretary of state if the Curia had not threatened to resign. They would not have of course …”

  “Paul was never strong on courage against those guys, was he?”

  Msgr. Adolfo sighed very loudly.

  “I’m afraid not … Later he ostracized Suenens because he called for more collegiality between bishops and the Pope.”

  “I thought Pope Paul supported that.”

  “He did, but his feelings were hurt by Suenens’s criticism.”

  I expected Chuck to argue that a Pope can’t afford to have such sensitive feelings. However, he said nothing.

  “So we pray tomorrow for this Albino Luciani,” I said, filling the silence.

  “We pray fervently, Rosamaria. So much is at stake.”

  “You think he will win?”

  He hesitated.

  “How do you Americans say it? I don’t want to jinx the outcome?”

  At my insistence we walked back to the Hassler. We needed exercise. Chuck put his arm around my waist, just high enough so that his fingers were close to my breasts. A full moon sometimes does that to a man. I would be ravished before the night was over. To make sure of that outcome, I leaned against his arm.

  A couple of Italian men made lascivious comments about me. I ignored them. Chuck didn’t hear them.

  “You remember what Father Ed said to us?” I said.

  Ed was Chuck’s brother, six years younger than he was, three years younger than Peg, who was my age and my lifelong coconspirator. He had been the secretary of our crazy Cardinal O’Neill and, by his own admission, had barely kept his vocation and his sanity. Chuck gives me credit for persuading him to resign from the job.

  “Ed talks all the time,” Chuck replied. “Always has since you signed on as his confidant.”

  Father Ed’s name is Edward Michael. He likes to be called Michael or Ed. Chuck insists that he is Ed just as he insists that I am Rosemarie, though to everyone else in the family I am Rosie.

  I like being called Rosemarie, it makes me feel elegant. And sexy.

  “About the revolution not ending when the bishops went home.”

  “Oh yeah … Well, he said that the bishops thought that they’d had a nice little quiet revolution during the Council and they went home feeling quite euphoric about what they had done. However, the enthusiasm spread to the lower clergy and to the laity and within ten years they …”

  “We …”

  “All right, WE had swept away just about everything in the Church we didn’t like or seemed silly—birth control, masturbation, divorce, married priests, women priests, priests and nuns leaving their vocations, Confession before Communion, Mass every single Sunday. Yet we remained Catholic, vociferously so … That the conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he said that the bishops really didn’t understand this change or that no one could ever turn it around?”

  “Not even a Pope?”

  “Paul VI sure tried in 1968.”

  “And failed?”

  “You win, Rosemarie, you always do.”

  “Chucky, you should not play with my boobs in public!”

  “I don’t think the Pope has made a rule against that!”

  However, his fingers retreated a bit. Not too far, however. My hormones began to rage. No way he was going to fall asleep as soon as we returned to our suite.

  “Do you think our children will worry about these problems?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Yet they’ll still cheer for the Pope whenever they’re in Rome. And you know why?”

  “Because they’re Catholic,” he admitted. “Always will be, can’t ever be anything else.”

  “Right! We must remember to call your mother and see how Siobhan and Moire Meg are doing.”

  “Don’t miss us at all.”

  We climbed up the Spanish Steps, though Chuck pretended to be too old to try such a venture. I insisted.

  I kissed him passionately as we rode up in the elevator.

  He undressed me as we talked to our daughters on the phone, two exuberant and loving young women, both of whom insisted that we should have a good time during our vacation.

  “Chucky and Rosie,” Rosary freshman Moire Meg instructed us, “you totally need to have a good time.”

  We did the rest of that night anyway. Our worries about the future of the Church drifted far away.

  Chuck

  1978

  The gloriously dressed Italian cop warned me in a tone of voice reserved for grown men who were behaving like little children as I leaned out of the base of the obelisk to get an angle shot of a group of very little kids charging through a gaggle of earnest nuns. I didn’t understand the words but I knew I’d better climb down. If he had not helped me the last few steps, I might have fallen on my face.

  He shook his head in dismay. Crazy little American.

  As I climbed down, shamefaced, I saw my wife frowning at me from a distance. The frown matched the cop’s tone of voice—would you ever grow up?

  Rosemarie knew the answer. Rarely did sh
e interfere with my antics when I was pursuing my profession. After all, she was responsible for seducing me away from accounting. She caught my eye, grinned, and waved.

  She was wearing a lemon-colored sundress with spaghetti straps—defying the Vatican’s ban on such garb inside the Basilica itself.

  “I might just for the hell of it try to walk in.”

  “No way they’d miss you,” I said.

  She sniffed in response, an archduchess dismissing an annoying peasant.

  I waved back.

  The sundress was not necessary. The day was warm but not unbearably hot like the Roman August is supposed to be. As I watched her a couple of Roman males half my age must have made some lewd comment. She withered them with a quick contemptuous glance. It would be worth my life to try to defend her from such crudities. My Rosemarie could take care of herself.

  My father had warned me once that beautiful women of a certain sort become even more beautiful as they grow older. My wife, in her middle forties, was more appealing than ever, not untouched by age, but made richer by it. I remembered the amusements of the previous nights. You are a fool, Chuck, I told myself, for not making love to her on every possible occasion. Why must you be such a mope?

  Maybe after lunch this afternoon …

  The morning crowd in the Piazza San Pietro was nervous. It was too early for white smoke. The cardinals would not elect a Pope on the first or second ballot. Still they might. Who would it be? What would he be like? What would happen? It was like a crowd at the Bears season opener, expectant but prepared to be disillusioned.

  Once I had the image of a Bears opener in my head it was easy to get the pictures I wanted. I scurried around the Piazza snapping shots with my Nikon of the kids waiting for the first smoke to appear out of the funny chimney above the Sistine Chapel. They were having a grand time. Some of them climbed on the obelisk, others sat on the bench around that pagan fertility symbol, yet others chased each other under the Bernini Colonnade. Teenagers flirted with one another, the boys acting like the macho lovers, which seemed to be the required posture for all postpuberty Italian males.

  There was nothing even remotely sacred about the atmosphere of the place. The giant Piazza was a vast playground through which anxious nuns, busy and self-important priests, and unsmiling German tourists walked. The kids ignored these trespassers in their park. Occasionally a cop would warn the kids to cool it a bit, just as he had warned me. The ragazzi paid little attention. It was their holiday after all.

  The pageantry of the Vatican is elaborate and solemn but the crowds that swarm at the fringes of the show are not particularly religious.

  The Romans are almost all Catholics. But most of them are not too serious about it, unlike northern Italians in places like Milan. So they don’t worry about the politics of the Church. There are too many memories of the days when the Pope was the absolute civil ruler of Rome. They cheer for the Pope because they’re Romans, but then they go home and become anticlericals. As Edward said once, Romans and their priests never speak to one another on the streets.

  “At least they don’t spit on one another.”

  So as a matter of principle I always say buon giorno to a priest or a nun when they cross my path, like we’d do in Chicago. When in Rome do as Chicagoans do. They look at me like I’m crazy.

  Several police buses were tucked away in a side street behind the colonnade. Cops, carabinieri if I remembered the uniforms correctly, were strolling around as if they didn’t expect any action. The crowds no longer rioted after the election of a Pope as they had in the good old days. The cops didn’t seem to mind when I took their pictures too.

  Maybe my theme would be Rome Prepares for the Election of a Pope.

  Solemn ceremonies, unsolemn people.

  I joined my wife.

  “What would I have done,” Rosemarie demanded, “if that cop had arrested you for endangering your life?”

  “Gone to the American consulate over on the Via Veneto and demanded my release.”

  “Who would have taken your pictures … Chucky, stop ogling my boobs!”

  “Can’t help it! My shots are not worth taking … Nothing religious about this scene at all.”

  “It frosts me,” she said, changing the subject, “to think that those guys up there who are deciding the future of our Church are all elderly celibate males who have no children and don’t find women attractive.”

  “Some of them do.”

  “They were taught in the seminary that they were not supposed to.”

  “Some of our evangelical friends are governed by married men who have children. They’re not sympathetic to feminism. But they presumably do sleep with their wives.”

  “They don’t enjoy it.”

  “Rosemarie!”

  “I’m being a bitch, Chucky. Sorry … I get so angry at those guys up there telling me how often I can sleep with my husband.”

  “Do you pay any attention to them?”

  “Not anymore.” She took my hand. “A lot of people still do.”

  “It used to be,” I said, “that the priests of Rome went into St. Pete’s several times removed and chose their bishop. Then they brought him out on the balcony. If the crowd cheered, they crowned him. If the crowd booed, they went back and tried again.”

  “Women got to shout?”

  “Who could have stopped them?”

  “I like that.”

  “Probably made more noise than the men did. Women usually do.”

  “CHUCKY!”

  She had not relinquished her grip on my hand.

  Msgr. Adolfo materialized next to us, wearing a beige sport shirt and black slacks. He always appeared mysteriously.

  “Nothing will happen this morning,” he said briskly. “They’ll be getting the feel of things. They were all whispering about Luciani going in. Now they’ll see whether there are really enough votes for him. It’ll be over this afternoon. He was the first bishop Pope John appointed, you know.”

  “What if he should die?” Rosemarie asked.

  “That’s an odd question,” the Monsignor said cautiously.

  “You yourself said that his health is poor. What if the same bunch of creeps had to vote again in the next couple of months?”

  “They would have to think the unthinkable—a straniero, a foreigner. There are no more acceptable Italian cardinals … But, Carlo, I will be asked tomorrow. Will you make a portrait of the new Pope before you go home?”

  I wondered who would ask him.

  “I can’t. I didn’t bring my Hasselblad with me.”

  “CHUCKY! We can buy another camera.”

  “They’re expensive.”

  “You can afford it. It’s tax deductible.”

  “Really?”

  I could never quite understand such matters, despite my degree in economics.

  “Really!”

  “What will we do with two of them?”

  “You’ll give one to your daughter … Our oldest child, Monsignor, is following in her father’s footsteps. She specializes in children.”

  Rosemarie removed her portrait gallery from her purse.

  “This is April Rosemary, our oldest daughter.”

  “Looks like her mother,” I said helpfully.

  “This is her son, Johnny Nettleton. His grandfather served with Chuck in Germany after the war when Chuck got the Legion of Merit.”

  “Market mistake.”

  “And this is her niece Maria Rosa O’Malley and Maria Rosa’s baby brother, Juan Carlos.”

  “Latins. Parents do jazz.”

  “Finally, this little redhead imp is April Rosemary’s sister Siobhan Marie. Just like her father.”

  Adolfo smiled genially at our little act, as he had smiled at the dialogue about the new Hasselblad.

  “Beautiful children. Many redheads in the family.”

  “Three—Maria Rosa, Johnny, and Siobhan. Four if you count my husband.”

  “You let one in and pretty soon t
he whole neighborhood goes.”

  Rosemarie did not tell him that our eldest had disappeared into the radical underground during her freshman year at Harvard. She had finally clawed her way back to us, fragile and uncertain. She was still not sure that she deserved to be forgiven, especially by her mother, whom she had idolized. Then she had suffered postpartum depression after Johnny’s birth and was struggling out of it.

  “We must call her this afternoon, Chuck, and tell her that she’s getting a new camera.”

  “Secondhand.”

  “No, you keep the old one and she gets the new one I buy this afternoon.”

  Naturally, my wife would buy it, lest I swoon over the cost— even after she had negotiated the dealer down to a reasonable price.

  “What are our guys doing up there?” I asked the Monsignor.

  The Piazza was filling up with people. Time for the kickoff.

  “The American cardinals?” he asked in surprise. “They are doing nothing at all. They wait till others tell them what to do, then believe that the Holy Spirit is whispering in their ears.”

  “That dumb?”

  “Carlo, the joke in the Vatican is that the American cardinals are so dumb that even the other cardinals notice it.”

  “Especially our own man from Chicago.”

  “He is a terrible man. Papa Montini tried to replace him earlier this summer, but in the end he lost his nerve.”

  “Just as he did on family planning,” Rosemarie said.

  She simply wouldn’t let it go. Not that I blamed her.

  “Fumato!” someone yelled.

  “È bianco! E bianco!”

  The smoke trickling out of the funny old chimney did indeed look white.

  “Too early,” Adolfo murmured.

  The crowd went wild. Kickoff time. Everyone fantasized that the Bears would run it back for a touchdown.

  Then the white smoke stopped. A moment later, a thick plume of unquestionably black smoke gushed into the sky above the Sistine Chapel.

  “È nero! E nero!” The crowd groaned—as if the blackness of the smoke were not obvious to everyone.

  The Bears had fumbled the kickoff.

  Rosemarie

  1978

  Though it was not yet noon, Chuck and I wandered into a trattoria on the Borgo Pio for a dish of pasta before we went camera shopping. The sky had turned gray as if the black smoke from the Sistine Chapel had suffused the heavens. The little eatery was all brown wood and pasta smell. The waitress looked at us like we were crazy. Only mad dogs and Americans ate the noon meal an hour before noon instead of an hour after like civilized people did. There were three British journalists sitting at a nearby table already eating pasta. They weren’t even Americans. Probably wanted to get their siestas started early.