I always run away from problems. I’m a coward like Saint Peter, worse than Saint Peter. So I kept my mind on those October days in Rome and my mother’s story about the visit to the Pietà. I don’t know, maybe thinking about that wasn’t much of an escape.
Lisa said she wasn’t afraid, because that was the way to defeat every evil.
She was right, I told her, that was the correct attitude, but fear wouldn’t have been anything to be ashamed of either; Christ himself was afraid on the Mount of Olives.
And she smiled and said I never stopped preaching. Then she added that nevertheless, she wasn’t ready to lose her hair. Our love affair had deprived her of the pleasure of walking arm in arm in public with her gentleman friend, but her vanity was intact. She would buy a copper-colored wig, she said; she’d always dreamed of looking like Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man, and now her illness would provide her the opportunity.
It was Lisa who took me to see that film one afternoon at MoMA, my heart beating hard with the fear of being recognized and with the joy of being with her. At one point, she even squeezed my fingers, and I got excited while listening to the clatter of the subway as it passed under the museum.
“Abram,” she said, and she left it at that, and squeezed my fingers hard, while her favorite actress, up there on the screen, showed that she for her part was afraid of nothing.
That was the night she got pregnant.
I always run away, and I kept on thinking about my trip to Rome and my attempt to purify myself. About Saint Peter’s Basilica, crowded with pilgrims, and about the Romans’ jaded reaction to them: Over the course of the past two thousand years, they’d seen it all, and nothing could get them worked up, not even such an event. Then I thought about the nuns, walking in groups and silently smiling. Once I saw a most beautiful sister and wondered how many suitors she’d given up. Yes, they really seemed to be in the world but not of the world. I thought about how they lit up when they saw the pope appear in the window of his study, about the simple pride with which they recited the Angelus and then pondered the words of that weary, nasal-voiced pontiff, who within a few years would complain to God about his not having answered a papal prayer.
Shall I ever have that courage, that strength, that passion? Shall I ever have the greatest strength of all, the strength to bow my head?
I was staying with a friend of Father John’s, a priest brimming with enthusiasm who had founded a community in Brazil. He wasn’t cultured like Andrew, he’d read only religious texts, but he had Andrew’s same fervor, and he was following the same path. He too had decided to dedicate himself to the wretched of the earth, and he wanted to know all about the homeless in New York. The poverty-stricken people he ministered to had never even imagined what wealth might be, and one evening we discussed at length which was worse: to lose everything or never to have had anything. He would pray with his eyes closed, I can remember that as if it were yesterday, and he used to say that the only time he felt at home was when he stepped into a church. I hadn’t ever thought of that before, and from then on I would ask myself if it was the same for me.
The current pope, he told me, had written an encyclical that had caused quite a stir and even provoked some violent reactions: He’d challenged the world at a moment when doing so seemed impossible, when going against the current meant crucifixion. But isn’t that the lot of every authentic Christian, the very essence of our faith?
When I saw him at his Vatican window, he seemed to be such a mild, austere man, a man blessed with doubt: The strength of our ideas has nothing to do with the tone we use.
I knew his Humanae Vitae well, I’d read it in the seminary, but I’d never reflected on the fact that it was the last thing the pope would ever write. Maybe the reactions to his encyclical had been traumatic for him; maybe he felt he’d said all he had to say.
He’d written that letter for me too: For whoever embraced Christ, for whoever rejected him. For whoever knew nothing of him, and for whoever considered him history’s greatest con man.
The pope had also written his letter for Lisa, who believed that nothing and no one could stand in the way of our love, and who now was fighting for her life. She couldn’t be afraid, not someone like her, who had defied God.