They parted at the Jerusalem bus station. As Deborah climbed onto the first step, he impulsively pulled her back for one last embrace.
He could not let her go. He loved her with a fire so intense it would have burned all his resolve had Deborah allowed it.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she protested weakly. “Your friends, I mean the ones who saw us—”
“I don’t care—I don’t care about anything but you.”
“That’s not true—”
“I swear to God, I love you more.”
“No, Tim, you really don’t know how you feel.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I don’t know myself.”
She tried to break away, not only because his priesthood was at risk but because, for her own sake, she had to leave now or never. And she did not want him to remember her face streaming with tears.
Yet as they stood in one another’s arms, she could feel the sobs he, too, was struggling to suppress.
Their parting words were the very same—and spoken almost in unison. Each told the other, “God bless you.” And turned away.
When he reached Terra Sancta College, the two other Americans were already there.
“We were dog tired from the heat,” Patrick Grady explained. “Besides, no one can spend too much time here in Jerusalem.”
His colleague Cavanagh agreed, “It’d probably take a lifetime to see it all.”
Neither gave the slightest indication of whether he had seen the lovers in Bethlehem. That was yet another cross Tim had to bear. He would now be living in perpetual anxiety, wondering what his two classmates knew. Whether they would somehow use it to discredit him. And when.
“I confess, Hogan,” George said in a more amicable tone, “we’re sorry we didn’t ask you to come along. We would have had a much better time.”
“Oh?” Tim asked.
“I mean, my Latin’s good enough, but most of the inscriptions seemed to be in Greek. You would have really come in handy.”
“Thanks,” Tim answered dourly. “I’m flattered.”
Just as promised, pünktlich to the minute, Father Bauer and the German seminarians returned. All were exhausted, dusty, roasted by the late-summer sun.
Tim gave a retroactive shiver. It was a minor miracle that he and Deborah had not run into them as well.
The next morning, flying thirty thousand feet above the earth, and that much closer to the heavens, Timothy read his breviary, trying to flood his mind with pious thoughts. As their plane circled the city, awaiting permission to land, they passed over the Vatican. With Michelangelo’s rounded basilica opening out into Bernini’s many-columned piazza, St. Peter’s looked like a giant keyhole.
Lest the metaphor be lost on any of his sleepy charges, Father Bauer commented, “That is the true gate to Paradise, my brothers. And it is for us to earn the keys to the Kingdom of God.”
Timothy gazed down, and wondered if those gates were not shut to him forever.