Children of God

13 Naples December 2060-june, 2061

"WHY NOT?" CELESTINA ASKED.

"Because he has asked us not to come, cara," Gina Giuliani said very clearly, beginning to lose patience on the fourth time through this particular line of interrogation. It was hard enough to manage her own disappointment without dealing with Celestina’s over and over. The story of my life these days, Gina thought, and tried not to sigh as she drained the pasta.

"But why can’t we?" Celestina whined. She leaned on the kitchen table with her elbows and rocked her little behind back and forth. "What will Lizabet eat?" she asked slyly: a sudden inspiration.

Gina looked up. Good, she thought judiciously. Very good. But she said aloud, "I’m sure Brother Cosimo has plenty of vegetables for Elizabeth." She stared at Celestina. "This is, by actual count, the seven hundred and thirty-first serving of macaroni and cheese I have made for you. This year alone."

"That’s a lot of fingers," Celestina said, and giggled when her mamma laughed. "Can we go tomorrow?"

Gina closed her eyes for a moment. "Cara. Please. No!" she said loudly, stirring in the cheese.

"But why not!" Celestina yelled.

"I told you: I don’t know!" Gina yelled back, plunking a bowl onto the table. She took a breath and lowered her voice. "Sit down and eat, cara. Don Emilio’s voice sounded a little husky—"

"What’s ’husky’?" Celestina asked, chewing.

"Swallow before you speak. Husky means hoarse. Like when you had your cold last week. Remember how your voice sounded funny? I think perhaps he’s caught your cold and doesn’t feel well."

"Can we go tomorrow?" Celestina asked again, spooning in another mouthful.

Gina sighed and sat down across from her daughter. "Relentless. You are absolutely relentless. Look. We’ll wait until next week and see how he feels. Shall we ask Pia’s mamma if Pia can come over to play after lunch?" Gina suggested brightly, and thanked God when the diversion worked.

This morning had marked the first time Emilio Sandoz had ever rung Gina Giuliani up, but her pleasure was quickly dampened by his tone when he asked if he might cancel their usual Friday visit. She agreed, naturally, and asked him if anything was wrong. Before he could answer, she made sense of the unusual roughness in his voice and asked, a little anxiously, if he were sick. There was a stony silence and then she heard his cool comment, "I hope not."

"I’m sorry," she said, a little huffily. "You’re right, of course. I should have realized it wasn’t good judgment to bring Celestina."

"Perhaps we have both made an error in judgment, signora," he said, the chill becoming glacial.

Offended, she snapped, "I didn’t realize she was coming down with anything. It’s not a very bad cold. She was over it in a few days. I’m sure you’ll survive."

When he spoke again, she could tell something was working on him but couldn’t imagine what it was.

"Mi scuzi, signora. There has been a misunderstanding. The fault is not in any way yours or your daughter’s." The Viceroy, she thought irritably, and wished he’d allowed a visual for the call—not that his face gave much away when he was like this. "If you will be so kind, I find that for now it is not… convenient that you should come." He paused, groping, which surprised her. His Italian was ordinarily excellent. " ’Convenient’ is not the correct word. Mi scuzi. I have no wish to offend you, signora."

Confused and disappointed, she assured him that no offense had been taken, which was a lie but one that she was determined to make true. So she told him that a change of scene would do him a world of good and prescribed an evening in Naples, which would be crowded and merry with shoppers. She was sure he’d be over the cold by mid-December. "No one does Christmas like the Neapolitans," she declared. "You have to see it—"

"No," he said. "This is impossible."

It was difficult not to be insulted, but she’d begun to know him and correctly interpreted his rigidity as fear. "Don’t worry! We’ll go at night! No one will recognize you—wear gloves and a hat and dark glasses," she suggested, laughing. "My father-in-law always sends guards with me and Celestina anyway. We’ll be perfectly safe!"

When this failed to move him, she took a step back and assured him, with a generous measure of irony, that she had no designs on his virtue and promised that Celestina would be their chaperone. This backfired rather decisively. There was another round of stiff apologies. She was astounded, when the call was over, by how very much she wanted to cry.

The flowers arrived that afternoon.

A week later, Gina pitched them onto a compost pile with a resolute lack of sentimentality. She did keep the card. There was no signature on it, of course—only a note in a shopgirl’s handwriting: "I need some time." Which, she supposed, was the exact if unenlightening truth. So, for Christmas, Gina Giuliani gave Emilio Sandoz time.

ADVENT THAT YEAR WAS DIFFICULT. GINA SPENT IT WITH FAMILY AND old friends, trying not to think of where Carlo was, or with whom, or of what the flowers from Emilio might have meant. Gina Giuliani was not good at not thinking about things. December seemed as endless to her as it did to Celestina, who was dying for the month to be over so it would be time for the big Epiphany party at Carmella’s. That was when all the children would learn if they’d gotten coal or gifts from La Befana—the Bitch, who had rudely driven the Wise Men away when they stopped in Italy on their way to see the Christ Child.

Everyone tried to prevent Celestina’s holiday from being spoiled by spoiling her with presents instead. Gina’s in-laws were particularly lavish in their giving. They liked Gina, who was also the mother of a beloved granddaughter, and made sure that Carmella included her at all the parties. But despite Don Domenico’s regular denunciations of his son, Carlo was family, and blood counts.

Only Carlo’s aunt Rosa, seventy-four and not inclined to subtlety, addressed the situation at Carmella’s party. Trying to escape the crush of friends and relatives and the mind-boggling noise produced by dozens of children whipped into a froth of sugar, excitement and greed, she and Gina took refuge in the library.

"Carlo’s a prick," Rosa said flatly, as the two women settled into butter-soft leather chairs and put their feet up on a stylishly low table. "A gorgeous man, Gina, I see why you fell for him. But he’s never been any good! He’s my own brother’s son but I’m telling you, he’ll screw anything with a pulse—"

"Rosa!"

"Boys, dogs, whores," Rosa went on, as relentless as Celestina. "They think I don’t know, but I hear things. I’d shoot the bastard right in the balls if I were you." Her cloudy eyes full of conspiracy and violence, the skinny old woman leaned over to grip Gina’s arm with surprising strength. "You want me to shoot him for you?" she asked. Gina laughed, delighted by the idea. "I’ll do it!" Rosa assured her, sitting back comfortably. "I’d get away with it, too. Who’s going to prosecute an old broad like me? I’ll be dead before the appeals are done."

"It’s a tempting offer, Rosa," Gina said, loving her, "but I knew he was a rat when I married him."

Rosa shrugged, agreeing reluctantly. Carlo had, after all, left his first wife for Gina. Worse, Gina Damiano had met the gorgeous Carlo Giuliani at an ob-gyn clinic; she was the nurse who took care of Carlo’s mistress in post-op after an ugly second-trimester abortion. Gina could still remember the sense of detached amazement at her own stupidity when, mesmerized by his looks, she heard herself accepting Carlo’s irresistibly charming offer of dinner that first night.

She shouldn’t have been surprised when she caught him with the next lover, but Gina was pregnant with Celestina at the time and made the mistake of being outraged. The first beating was such a shock, she could hardly believe it had happened. Later, she remembered the mistress’s bruises, and Carlo’s explanations. The signs were all there—it was her own fault for ignoring them. She filed for divorce; believed his promises; filed again…

"Your marriage never would have worked anyway," Rosa said, breaking into Gina’s thoughts. "I didn’t want to say anything before the wedding— you always hope for the best. But Carlo’s gone so much—all that space shit. Even if he wasn’t a prick, he’s never home." Rosa leaned forward, voice low. "In my opinion," she offered, "it’s mostly my brother’s fault. Carlo takes after my sister-in-law’s side, you know? Even when they were first married, Domenico was screwing around so much, he couldn’t imagine that his own wife wasn’t. Never believed Carlo was his. Poisoned everything. Then my sister-in-law spoiled Carlo rotten, to make up for it. You know why Carmella turned out so well?"

Gina shook her head, brows up.

"Her parents ignored her. Best thing that could have happened! They were so busy fighting over Carlo, they never got around to making a mess of their daughter. Now look at her! A good mother, a wonderful cook, beautiful home—and she’s a very smart businesswoman, Gina! It’s no wonder Carmella’s running everything now!"

Gina laughed. "Now there’s a novel approach to parenting! Have two kids, and concentrate on ruining one."

"At least you won’t have to take care of Carlo when he’s old," Rosa resumed philosophically. "I thought Nunzio would never die!" A bluff, Gina knew. Rosa had been devoted to Nunzio and missed him very much, but unlike most Neapolitans, she refused to give in to operatic bathos. It was a characteristic that bound the two women together, across the generations. "Men are shits," Rosa declared. "Find yourself a twelve-year-old and train him right," the old lady advised. "It’s the only way."

Before Gina could reply, Celestina — extravagant compensation for a brief marriage to a gorgeous rat—burst into the room. Wailing, she delivered herself of a wide-ranging indictment, charging her cousins Stefano and Roberto with several atrocities having to do with her new bride doll and a space freighter. "It’s hopeless," Aunt Rosa said, throwing up her hands. "Even the little ones are shits." Shaking her head, Gina went off to set up some kind of demilitarized zone in the playroom.

THAT WINTER, GINA WOULD SOMETIMES TAKE THE FLORIST’S CARD OUT of her bureau drawer and look at it. Holding up an unbraced hand, she would say aloud, with Sandoz’s own antique formality, "No explanations are necessary." Nor were any likely to be offered, she realized as the weeks became months. Every Friday, she left guinea-pig chow and a bag of fresh litter at the refectory with Cosimo. After the first two visits, she made a point of doing this while Celestina was at kindergarten. It was bad enough trying to explain Carlo’s absences and inconsistencies to the child without attempting to explain Emilio Sandoz as well. Once, in early spring, she worked herself into a rage and considered banging on Sandoz’s door to tell him he could ignore her but not Celestina, but she identified this almost immediately as displaced emotion, more properly aimed at Carlo Giuliani than at an ex-priest she barely knew.

She understood that a good portion of what she felt and thought about Emilio Sandoz was concocted of equal parts romantic idiocy, hurt pride and sexual fantasy. Gina, she would tell herself, Carlo is a prick but you are a fool. On the other hand, she thought prosaically, fantasies about a dark, brooding man with a tragic past are more interesting than blubbering over getting dumped by a jerk for a teenaged boy.

And Emilio had sent her flowers. Flowers and four words: "I need some time." That implied something, didn’t it? It wasn’t all in her head. She had the note.

She might have wished for some golden mean between Carlo’s endlessly inventive eloquence and the strict, unexpansive silence of Emilio Sandoz. But in the end, she decided to play by Emilio’s rules, even if she didn’t know quite what they were. There didn’t seem to be any other choice, apart from forgetting him altogether. And that, Gina found, was evidently not an option.

WHAT COULD HE HAVE SAID? "SIGNORA, I MAY HAVE EXPOSED YOU AND your child to a fatal disease. Let’s hope I’m wrong. It will be months before we know." There was no point in scaring her—he was frightened enough for both of them. So Emilio Sandoz took himself hostage until he could prove to his own satisfaction that he was not a danger to others. It was an act of will, and it required of him a complete strategic reversal in his war with the past.

Living alone had allowed him to withdraw with honor from the battlefield his body represented. Once a source of satisfaction, it had become an unwanted burden, to be punished for its frailties and vulnerability with indifference and contempt. He fueled it when hunger interfered with his work, rested it when he was tired enough to sleep through nightmares, despised it when it failed him: when the headaches almost blinded him, when his hands hurt so much that he sat laughing in the dark, the pain comic in its intensity.

He had never before felt so entirely disconnected from himself.

He was not a virgin. Neither was he an ascetic; while studying for the priesthood, he had come to the conclusion that he would not be able to live as a celibate by denying or ignoring his physical needs. This is my body, he told his silent God, this is what I am. He provided himself with sexual release and knew this was as necessary to him as food and rest, as lacking in sin as the desire to run, to field a baseball, to dance.

And yet, he was aware that he had taken inordinate pride in his ability to govern himself and that this, in part, accounted for his reaction to the rapes. When he began to understand that resistance made it worse for him and more gratifying for those who used him, he tried to submit passively, to deny them as much as he could. It was beyond him: intolerable, impossible. And when he could not endure being used again, when he decided to kill or die rather than submit once more, it had cost Askama’s life. Was rape his punishment for pride? An ugly lesson in humility, but one he might have been able to learn, had Askama not died for his sins.

None of it made sense.

Why had God not left him in Puerto Rico? He had never sought or expected spiritual grandeur. For years he was, without complaint, solo cum Solus—alone with the Alone, hearing nothing of God, feeling nothing of God, expecting nothing of God. He lived in the world without being part of it, lived in the unfathomable without being part of it. He was grateful to be what he had become: an ex-academic, a parish priest working in the slum of his childhood.

But then, on Rakhat, when Emilio Sandoz had made a place in his soul large enough and open enough, he had, against all expectation, been filled with God—not filled but inundated! He felt himself flooded, drowned in light, deafened by the power of it. He had not sought this! He had never taken pride in it, never understood it as recompense for what he had offered God. What filled him was incommensurate, measureless, unearned, unimagined. It was God’s grace, freely given. Or so he’d thought.

Was it arrogance and not faith, to have believed that the mission to Rakhat was part of some plan? Until the very moment that the Jana’ata patrol began to slaughter children, there was no warning, no hint that they were making a fatal mistake. Why had God abandoned them all, human and Runa alike? Why this silent, brutal indifference after so much apparent intervention?

"You seduced me, Lord, and I let You," he read in Jeremiah, weeping, when Kalingemala Lopore left. "You raped me, and I have become the object of derision."

Outraged that anyone’s faith should be tested as his had been, and profoundly ashamed that he had failed that test, Emilio Sandoz knew only that he could not accept the unacceptable and thank God for it. So he had abandoned his body, abandoned his soul—surrendered them unconditionally to whatever force had beaten him, tried to live only in a mind over which he retained sovereignty. And for a time, he found not peace but at least a kind of uneasy ceasefire.

Daniel Iron Horse put an end to that; whatever had happened on Rakhat, whoever was to blame, Emilio Sandoz was alive and his life touched other lives. So, he told himself, face it.

He ate decent meals three times a day, as though the food were medicine. He began again to run, circling the dormant retreat house gardens, working up to four eight-minute miles every morning, rain or shine. Twice a day, he forced himself to break off work and carefully picked up a set of handweights, methodically exercising arm muscles that now did double duty, indirectly controlling his fingers through the brace mechanisms. By April, he was approaching welterweight, and the shirts he wore no longer looked as though they were still on hangers.

The headaches persisted. The nightmares continued. But he won back lost ground with infantry doggedness and, this time, he was determined to hold it.

IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY CHILLY MORNING IN EARLY MAY AND CELESTINA was at kindergarten when Gina Giuliani glanced out the kitchen window and noticed a man on foot talking to the guard at the end of the drive. She recognized the gray suede jacket she’d bought for him before she recognized Sandoz himself and briefly considered doing something about her hair, but changed her mind. Pulling on a cardigan, she walked out the back door to meet him.

"Don Emilio!" she said smiling broadly as he approached. "You look well."

"I am well," he said without a trace of irony, responding to the automatic pleasantry as the literal truth that it was. "I was not certain before, but I am now. I have come to beg pardon, signora. I believed it was better to be rude than to worry you uselessly."

"Mi scuzi?" she said, frowning.

"Signora, two members of the Stella Maris party became ill on Rakhat. One died overnight. The other was sick for many months and was near death before he was killed," he told her with expressionless calm. "We were never able to determine the cause of either illness, but one of them was a wasting disease. Ah, I was correct not to say anything of this earlier," he said when her hand went to her lips. "Perhaps then you will forgive me. In December, it was brought to my attention that I might have carried that illness back with me." He held his arms out slightly from his body, presenting it to her as the irrefutable evidence he had required himself to produce. "As you see, I was suffering from cowardice, not from any pathogen."

She was speechless for a time. "So, you put yourself in quarantine," she said finally, "until you were sure you were healthy."

"Yes."

"I don’t quite see where cowardice fits in," Gina said.

The gulls were screaming and he let her wonder if the wind had carried her words away. "The men I spoke to on my way here tell me this stretch of coast is under guard at all times," he said. "This is true?"

"Yes." She pulled the hair away from her face and the cardigan tighter around her.

"He says ’Mafia’ is the wrong term. It is the Camorra in Naples."

"Yes. Are you shocked?"

He shrugged and looked away. "I should have realized. There were indications. I have been preoccupied." He stared at the view of the sea that she had from her bedroom window. "It’s very beautiful here."

She watched him, profiled, and wondered what to do next. "Celestina will be home from school in a little while," she told him. "She’ll be sorry if she misses you. Would you care to wait? We could have a coffee."

"How much do you know about me?" he asked bluntly, turning toward her.

She straightened, startled by the question. I know that you treat my daughter like a little duchess, she thought. I know that I can make you laugh. I know that you…. She found the directness of his gaze sobering. "I know you are in mourning for dear friends, and for a child you loved. I know you believe yourself responsible for many deaths," she said. "I know that you were raped."

He did not look away. "I wish there to be no misunderstanding. If my Italian is not clear, you must tell me, yes?" She nodded. "You have offered me… friendship. Signora Giuliani, I am not naive. I am aware of the emotions of others. I wish you to understand that—"

She felt sick. Ashamed of her own transparent schoolgirl crush, she began to pray for a major tectonic event—something that would cause, say, the entire Italian peninsula to sink into the Mediterranean. "No explanations are necessary, Don Emilio. I’m terribly sorry that I’ve embarrassed you—"

"No! Please. Let me—. Signora Giuliani, I wish that we had met before — or maybe a long time from now. I am not clear," he said, looking to the sky, impatient with himself. "There is… a habit of thought in Christianity, yes? That the soul is different from and higher than the physical self—that the life of the mind exists separate from the life of the body. It took me a long time to understand this idea. The body, the mind, the soul—these are all one thing to me." He turned his head, letting the wind take the hair out of his eyes, which rested on the horizon where the brightness of the Mediterranean met the sky in a knifeblade of light. "I now believe that I chose celibacy as a path to God because it was a discipline in which the body and the mind and the soul were all one thing."

He stood silent for a moment, gathering himself. "When—. You must understand that there was not one rape but many, yes?" He glanced at her, but looked away again. "There were seventeen men, and the assaults went on for months. During that time, and afterward, I tried to separate what happened to me physically from what it… did to me. I tried to believe, It is only my body. This cannot touch what I am. It was… not possible for me to think in this way. Forgive me, signora. I have no right to ask you to hear this."

He stopped then, nearly defeated. "I’m listening," she said.

Coward, he thought savagely, and forced himself to speak. "Signora, I wish there to be no misunderstanding between us. Whatever the legalities, I am not a priest. My vows are a nullity. If we had met at another time, I would wish for us perhaps more than friendship. But what I once gave to God freely is now enforced by—" Nausea. Fear. Rage. He looked into her eyes and knew that he owed her as much truth as he could bear. "By aversion," he said finally. "I am not whole. Can it be acceptable to you that what I offer in return for your friendship will be something less?"

My body is healed, he was asking her to understand; my soul is still bleeding. It’s all one thing to me.

The wind, constant this close to the coast, sounded loud in her ears and carried the scent of seaweed and fish. She looked, as he had, toward the bay, its water sequined with sunlight. "Don Emilio, you offer me honesty," she said, serious for once. "This, I think, is not less than friendship."

For a time, there was no sound but the call of gulls. In the distance, down the driveway, a guard coughed and threw a cigarette on the ground, crushing it out with his shoe. She waited, but it was clear that Sandoz had done all he could. "Well," she said finally, remembering Celestina and the guinea pig, "you can still have the coffee."

There was a sort of gasping laugh that gave some measure of the strain, and the braced hands went to his head, as though to run his fingers through his hair, but then returned to his sides. "I think I’d rather have a beer," he said with artless candor, "but it’s only ten o’clock."

"Travel is so broadening," she remarked equably. "Have you ever had a Croatian breakfast?" He shook his head. "A shot of plum brandy," she explained, "followed by espresso."

"That," he said, rallying a little, "would do nicely." Then he became very still.

She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I’d have missed the moment he fell in love.

He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain. It felt to him as physical and as unexpected as the moment when his hands finally stopped hurting after some awful bout of phantom neuralgia—when the pain was simply gone, as suddenly and as inexplicably as it had come. All his life, he had understood the power of silence. What had eluded him was the ability to speak of what was inside him, except sometimes to Anne. And now, he found: to Gina.

"I missed you," he told her, discovering it as he said the words.

"Good," she said, her eyes holding his, knowing more than he did himself. She started off for the kitchen. "How’s Elizabeth?" she called over her shoulder.

"Fine! She’s a good pet. I really enjoy having her around," Emilio said, jogging a few steps to catch up with her. "John Candotti made her an amazing cage—three compartments and a tunnel. Pig Land, we call it." He reached past Gina to open the door, closing his hand over the knob without thinking of the movement at all. "Would you and Celestina like to come for lunch some time? I have learned to cook," he told her grandly, holding the door for her. "Real food. Not just packaged stuff."

She hesitated before stepping through. "We’d love to, but I’m afraid Celestina eats very little aside from macaroni and cheese."

"Kismet!" he cried, with a smile like sunrise that warmed them both. "Macaroni and cheese, signora, happens to be my speciality."

AS THE DAYS LENGTHENED, THERE WERE LUNCHES, BRIEF VISITS, SHORT calls, messages left three and four times a day. Emilio was at the house when the papers came in the mail, finalizing the divorce, and Gina cried anyway. She learned early on that he could not eat meat; eventually, he was able to explain why, and she wept again, this time for him. When he admired Celestina’s drawings, the little girl went into mass production, and soon the bare walls of his apartment were brightly decorated with crayoned renderings of fairly mysterious objects in very nice colors. Pleased by the effect, Gina brought brilliant red geraniums for his windows one day, and this was an unexpected turning point for him. He had forgotten how much he’d enjoyed his turns taking care of the Wolverton-tube plants on the Stella Maris, and began finally to remember the good times and to find some inner balance.

They took Celestina for walks, sweating in the glorious light of the mezzogiorno—a violet sea to the west, shimmering sunlit crags to the east, the acrid-sweet scent of dust and flowers and asphalt sharp in their throats. Strolling along, they argued over stupid things, and enjoyed it, and went home to fresh bread fried in oil from olive trees eight hundred years old, and zucchini with provolone dolce, and almonds in honey. Lingering after supper, Emilio would put Celestina to bed, and Gina would listen, shaking her head, as the two of them made up a long, complicated story with many episodes, about a princess with curly hair who was allowed to eat nothing but treats even though her bones would get bendy, and a dog named Franco Grossi, who went on trips with the princess to America and the moon and Milan and Australia. By June, Emilio had admitted to the migraines, and Gina brought several new medications for him to try, one of which was a remarkable improvement over the Prograine.

There was, as the weeks passed, an unspoken understanding that he needed time, but perhaps not as much as he’d once thought.

Gina taught him to play scopa one night; once he got the hang of the game, she was amused by the ferocity with which he played, though distressed by how difficult it was for him to hold the cards. When she asked about this, he changed the subject and she dropped it for the time being. Then, on midsummer’s eve, perhaps to prove that his hands were fine, he and Celestina set themselves the goal of tying their own shoelaces, something both of them had given up on in the past.

"We can do it," Emilio insisted. "This time for sure! Even if it takes us all day, it’s okay because this is the longest day of the year."

All morning, they commiserated over how easy this was for other people, but conquered frustration together, and ultimately shared a radiant self-satisfaction in the accomplishment. Happy for them both, Gina suggested a celebratory picnic down on the beach, pointing out that this plan would afford many opportunities to take off and put on shoes with unnecessary frequency and great flourish. And so the long midsummer evening was passed in quiet contentment, Emilio and Gina ambling along the seashore behind Celestina, watching her chase seagulls and grub for treasures and heave stones into the water until she wore herself out. As the darkness began at last to deepen, they climbed the cliffside stairway— Gina’s pockets and hands full of shells and pretty rocks, Emilio’s arms full of sleeping child—and murmured greetings as they passed the Camorra guards, who smiled with complicity.

When they got to the house, Gina held the back door open for him but did not turn on the lights; knowing the way, he carried Celestina through the quiet house to her doll-crammed room and waited while Gina cleared a nest in the bed full of stuffed animals. He could lift Celestina’s small weight if he was careful when he picked her up, but could not set her down again without damaging the braces, so Gina gathered her baby from his arms and lay the child in bed, and stood awhile, gazing down at her daughter.

Celestina, she thought. Who never stopped moving, who never stopped talking, who exhausted her mother before breakfast, who would have driven the Holy Mother herself to consider hiring a hit man. Whose face in sleep still showed the profile of a newborn, whose small fingers still held her mother rapt, whose knotted navel still traveled the coiled route to another belly in spirit. Who had quickly learned not to mention Papa’s new friends to Mamma.

Gina sighed and turned, and saw Emilio leaning against the door frame, watching her with a still face and eyes that hid nothing. He held his arms slightly away from his body, as he did for Celestina’s hugs, to keep from scratching the child with the hardware of his braces when she came to him for an embrace. So Gina came to him.

The edge of her lower lip was as fine as the rim of a chalice, and the thought almost stopped him, but then her mouth rose to meet his and there was no turning back, nor any wanting to. After all the years, the effort, the anguish—it was, he found, all very simple.

She removed his braces and helped him with his clothes, and then took off her own, feeling as familiar with him as if they had always been together. But she did not know what to expect and so she braced herself for a failure of nerve, or for brutal urgency, or for weeping. There was instead laughter, and she too found that it was simple. When the time came, she took him into her and smiled over his shoulder at the small sound he made, and nearly wept herself. Naturally, he came too soon—what could you expect? It didn’t matter to her, but a few moments later she heard his muffled chagrin next to her ear. "I don’t think I did that quite right."

She laughed as well, and told the air above him, "It takes practice."

He went motionless and she was afraid then that she’d hurt his feelings, but he rose on his elbows and looked down at her, face amazed, eyes merry. "Practice! You mean we get to do that more than once?"

She giggled as he collapsed on her again. "Get off me," she whispered after a while, still smiling, hands drifting along his back.

"I don’t think so."

"Get off me! You weigh a ton," she lied, kissing the side of his neck. "All that macaroni and cheese!"

"No. I like it here," he told the pillow under her head.

She put a finger into his armpit. He exploded and rolled away as she laughed and shushed him and whispered, "Celestina!"

"Soy cosquilloso!" he said, astonished. "I don’t know what that is in Italian. What do you call it when there’s a reaction to touch like that?"

"Ticklish," she told him and listened, amused, as he guessed at the verb and quickly conjugated it. "You sound surprised."

He looked over at her, chest quiet now. "I didn’t know. How would I find that out? People don’t tickle Jesuits!" She looked at him, massively skeptical in the dark. "Well, some people tickle some Jesuits," he admitted indignantly, "but I assure you, madam, that no one tickled me."

"Not even your parents? You weren’t always a priest."

"No," he said curtly.

Oh, God, she thought, realizing she’d wandered into some new mine-field, but he rose up on one elbow and draped an arm over her belly. "I hate macaroni and cheese," he confessed. "There were no dragons to slay for my beloved, but I ate macaroni and cheese for you. I want credit."

She smiled up at him, wholly content. "Wait," she said as he went to kiss her. "Go back to that part about ’beloved.’ " But his lips dropped once more onto her mouth, and this time he did better.

They were discreet, for Celestina’s sake, and he was gone before dawn. It was as difficult as anything he’d ever done, to say good-bye to her and leave. But there were other days at the beach that wore Celestina out early, and other nights that wore them both out late, and as that summer passed, she made him whole again. There was no memory of bestiality that she did not efface with beauty and gentleness, no humiliation that was not eclipsed by her warmth. And sometimes, when the dreams came, she was with him: salvation in the night. Before the summer was over, while the days were still far too long and the nights all too short, when the fragrance of lemon trees and oranges had deepened and drifted each night through her bedroom window to scent the sheets and her hair, he began to give back to her some of what she had given him.

He had a sense, sometimes, of flawless peace. The words of Donne seemed perfect: "For I am every dead thing / In whom love wrought new Alchemie." Attacked by hope, he could no longer resist belief in the goodness of having a future, and felt the past’s grip loosen. It’s over, he would think now and then. It’s finally over.