The Sparrow

5 CLEVELAND, OHIO: AUGUST 2014-MAY 2015

If his return from the Sudanese refugee station to the United States hadn't been so disorienting, Emilio Sandoz might have handled the impact of his first meeting with Sofia Mendes a good deal better. As it was, he took the brunt of it while jet-lagged and culture-shocked, and it was several weeks before he could establish custody of his reactions to the woman.

In the space of twenty hours, he had moved from a war zone in the Horn of Africa to the suburban campus of John Carroll University, set in the placid peace of a pretty neighborhood of old and well-kept houses, where the children screamed and ran but in play, laughing and robust, not stunned or desperate or starving or terrified. He was amazed at how shocking the children were to him. The gardens also startled him, on many levels—the soil, black as coffee grounds, the luxurious jumble of summer blossom and ornamental plants, the profligate use of rain and fertility…

He might have wished for a few days off but arrangements had already been made. He was to meet Sofia Mendes on his second day back, at a campus restaurant that served Turkish coffee—a fuel that, he would later learn, she required at regular intervals. Emilio got to the coffee shop early the next morning and sat in the back, where he could watch the door, silently taking in the ripples of laughter and witty, empty conversation all around him, getting used to English again. Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students—the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet. He was fascinated by the beautiful grooming and attention to detail: the arrangement of hair, the delicacy of shoes, the perfection of cosmetics. And thought of shallow graves in the Sudan, and mastered the anger, knowing it was partly exhaustion.

Through this garden of artificial delights and into his inclement mood, Sofia Mendes strode purposefully. Catching sight of her, knowing somehow that this was the woman he was waiting for, he recalled the words of a Madrid dance mistress describing what she looked for in an ideal Spanish dancer. "Head up, a princely posture. The waist held high above the hips, the arms suavamente articuladas. The breasts," she said with absurd aptness that made him laugh, "like a bull's horns but suave, no rigido." Mendes carried herself so well that he was surprised to find when he stood that she was hardly over five feet tall. Her black hair drawn back severely from her face in the traditional manner, she was dressed plainly in a red silk blouse and a black skirt. The contrast with the students around her was unavoidable.

Brows up, she held out her hand to shake his briefly and then looked back toward the crowd she had just walked through. "As pretty as a vaseful of cut flowers," she remarked, accurate and cool.

At a stroke, the vigor of the boys, the loveliness of the girls looked temporary. He could see which ones would age badly and which would soon be shapeless and how many would give up their extravagance and dreams of glory. And he was startled by the precision with which the image matched his mood, chilled by his own harshness, and hers.

It was her last bit of small talk for many months. They met three mornings a week for what felt to Sandoz like a relentless interrogation. He found that he could stand only ninety minutes at a time; afterward, he was nearly ruined for the day and it was difficult to concentrate on the elementary Latin course and the graduate seminars in linguistics he was assigned to teach during his stay at John Carroll. She never wished him a good morning or engaged in any chitchat. She simply slid into the booth, opened her notebook and began questioning him about his steps in learning a language, about tricks he used, habits he'd formed, methods he'd developed almost instinctively, as well as the more formal and academic techniques he used to analyze and understand a language, on the fly, in the field. When he tried to leaven the sessions with jokes or asides or funny stories, she stared at him, unamused, until he gave up and answered her question.

Courtesies provoked outright hostility. Once, at the very beginning, he rose as she sat down and replied to her first demand for information with an elaborate and ironic bow worthy of Cesar Romero. "Good morning, Senorita Mendes. How are you today? Are you enjoying the weather? Would you care for some pastry with your coffee?"

She looked up at him, eyes opaque and narrowed, as he stood waiting for a slight unbending from her, a simple civil greeting. "The gentlemanly Spanish hidalgo act is tasteless," she told him quietly. She let the silence go on for a moment and then her eyes dropped to her notebook. "Let's get on with it, shall we?"

It didn't take much of that to exorcize the Jungian vision of her as the ideal Spanish woman from his mind. By the end of the month, he was able to see her as an actual person and began trying to figure her out. English was not her first language, he was sure. Her grammar was too precise and her dentals were a bit damped, the sibilants a little drawn out. Despite her name and appearance, her accent was not Hispanic. Or Greek. Or French or Italian, or anything else he could identify. He put her single-mindedness down to the fact that she was paid on a fee-for-project basis: the faster she worked, the more she made. It was an assumption that appeared to be confirmed when she berated him once for being late.

"Dr. Sandoz," she said. She never called him Father. "Your superiors are paying a great deal of money to have this analysis done. Do you find it amusing to waste their resources and my time?"

The only occasion she said anything about herself was toward the end of a session that embarrassed him so thoroughly he even dreamed about it once, and awoke cringing at the memory. "Sometimes," he told her, leaning forward over the table, speaking without realizing how it would sound, "I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present."

He blushed when he heard what he'd said, making it worse, but she took no offense; indeed, she seemed to miss any connection that might have been taken wrongly. Instead, she seemed struck by a coincidence and looked out the cafe window, her mouth open slightly. "Isn't that interesting," she said, as though nothing else he'd told her so far had been, and continued thoughtfully, "I do the same thing. Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?"

And the moment passed, for which Emilio Sandoz thanked God.

If the sessions with Mendes were draining and faintly depressing, he found balance in an extraordinary Latin 101 student. In her late fifties, fine white hair drawn into a neat French braid, Anne Edwards was compact, quick and intellectually fearless, with a lovely pealing laugh she made frequent use of in class.

Two weeks into the course, Anne waited until the rest of the students cleared out of the room. Emilio, gathering his notes from the desktop, looked up at her expectantly.

"Are you allowed out of your room at night?" she asked. "Or do the cute ones like you have a curfew until they're senile?"

He flicked the ash off an air cigar and waggled his eyebrows. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well, I considered suggesting that we shatter our vows and run away to Mexico for a weekend of lust, but I've got homework," she said, shouting the last word, "because some sonofabitch Latin prof thinks we should learn ablative way too soon, in my humble opinion, so why don't you just come over for dinner on Friday night?"

Leaning back against his chair, he looked up at her with frank admiration. "Madam. How could I resist an invitation like that?" he asked. And leaning forward, "Will your husband be there?"

"Yes, dammit, but he's a very liberal and tolerant person," Anne assured him, grinning. "And he falls asleep early."

The Edwardses' house was a square, sensible-looking structure, surrounded by a garden that, Emilio was delighted to see, mixed flowers with tomatoes and pumpkin vines, lettuces, carrot patches and pepper plants. Pulling off gardening gloves, George Edwards greeted him in the front yard and waved him in through the door. A good face, Emilio thought, full of humor and welcome. Anne's age, with a full head of silver hair but with the alarming leanness one associated with chronic HIV or toxic hyperthyroidism, or aging runners. Running was the most likely explanation. The man looked very fit. Not, Emilio thought, smiling inwardly, the sort to fall asleep early.

Anne was in the large, bright kitchen, working on dinner. Emilio recognized the smell instantly but it was a moment before he could put a name to it. When he did, he collapsed into a kitchen chair and moaned, "Dios mio, bacalaitos!"

Anne laughed. "And asopao. With tostones. And for dessert—"

"Forget the homework, dear lady. Run away with me," Emilio pleaded.

"Tembleque!" she announced, triumphant, laughing but happy that she'd pleased a guest. "A Puerto Rican friend of mine helped with the menu. There's a wonderful colmado on the west side. You can get yautia, batatas, yuca, amarillos—you name it."

"You are probably unaware," Emilio said, face sincere, eyes glowing, "that there was a seventeenth-century Puerto Rican heretic who claimed that Jesus used the smell of bacalaitos to raise Lazarus from the dead. The bishop had him burned at the stake, but they waited until after dinner and he died a happy man."

George, laughing, handed Sandoz and Anne frosty shallow-bowled glasses, froth floating on creamy liquid. "Bacardi anejo," Sandoz breathed, reverent. George raised his glass and they toasted Puerto Rico.

"So," Anne said in a serious tone, delicate brows raised in polite interest, the soul of propriety but about to take a sip of her drink. "What's celibacy like?"

"It's a bitch," Emilio said with prompt honesty, and Anne exploded. He handed her a napkin to wipe her nose and, without waiting for her to recover, stood and created an earnest face to address a phantom crowd at an old-time Twelve Step meeting. "Hello. My name is Emilio and though I can't remember it, my unempowered inner child might have been a codependent sex addict, so I rely on abstinence and put my trust in a Higher Power. You're dripping."

"I am a highly skilled anatomist," Anne declared with starchy dignity, dabbing at her blouse with the napkin, "and I can explain the exact mechanism by which one blows a drink out one's nose."

"Don't call her bluff," George warned him. "She can do it. Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon."

"Oh, God," Anne groaned. "The old ones are the best ones."

"Jokes or husbands?" Emilio asked innocently.

And so the evening went.

When he next showed up for dinner, Anne met him at the door, put her hands on both sides of his face, rose on tiptoe and planted a chaste kiss on his forehead. "The first time you're here, you are a guest," she informed him, looking into his eyes. "After that, my darling, you're family. Get your own damned beer."

He took the long enjoyable walk to the Edwardses' house at least once a week after that. Sometimes he was the only guest. Often there were others: students, friends, neighbors, interesting strangers Anne or George had met and brought home. The conversation, about politics and religion and baseball and the wars in Kenya and Central Asia and whatever else caught Anne's interest, was raucous and funny, and the evenings ended with people calling out last jokes as they walked off into the night. The house became his cave—a home where a Jesuit was welcome and relaxed and off-duty, where he could soak up energy instead of being drained of it. It was the first real home Emilio Sandoz had ever had.

Sitting in their screened-in back porch, sipping drinks in the dusk, he learned that George was an engineer whose last job had involved life-support systems for underwater mining operations but whose career had spanned the technological distance from wooden slide rules to ILIAC RV and FORTRAN to neural nets, photonics and nanomachines. New to retirement, George had spent the early weeks of freedom cutting a swath through the old house, catching up on every small repair, taking curatorial pride in the smoothly working wooden window casings, the tuck-pointed brickwork, the tidiness of the workroom. He read stacks of books, eating them like popcorn. He enlarged the garden, built an arbor, organized the garage. He sank into pillowy contentment. He was bored brainless.

"Do you run?" he asked Sandoz, hopefully.

"I went out for cross-country in school."

"Watch out, dear, he's trying to sucker you. The old fart's training for a marathon," Anne said, the admiration in her eyes contradicting her tartness. "We're going to have to rebuild his knees if he keeps this nonsense up. On the other hand, if he croaks doing roadwork, I'm going to be a tastefully rich widow. I believe very sincerely in overinsuring."

Anne, he found out, was taking his course because she'd used medical Latin for years and was curious about the source language. She'd wanted to be a physician from the start but chickened out, afraid of the biochem, and so she began her career as a biological anthropologist. After finishing her Ph.D., she got work in Cleveland, teaching gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve. Years of working with med students in the gross lab did nothing to sustain her awe of the medical curriculum and so, at forty, she went back to school and wound up in emergency medicine, a specialty that required tolerance for chaos and a working knowledge of everything from neurosurgery to dermatology.

"I enjoy the violence," she explained primly, handing him a napkin. "Would you like me to explain about how that nose thing happens? The anatomy is really interesting. The epiglottis is like a little toilet bowl seat that covers the larynx—"

"Anne!" George yelled.

She stuck out her tongue. "Anyway, emergency medicine is great stuff. In the space of an hour sometimes, you get a crushed chest, a gunshot wound to the head and a kid with a rash."

"No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise.

"Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed.

Anne laughed. "Oh, God, Emilio. You'll love this. We used the rhythm method of birth control for years!" Her eyes bulged with disbelief. "We thought it worked!" And they howled.

He loved Anne, trusted her from the beginning. As the weeks went by and his emotions became more tangled, he felt more strongly the need of her counsel and the conviction that it would be good. But disclosure was never easy for him; the fall semester was half over before, one night after he finished helping George clear up the dinner wreckage, he found the nerve to suggest a walk to Anne.

"Behave yourselves," George ordered. "I'm old, but I can shoot."

"Relax, George," Anne called over her shoulder, as they started down the driveway. "I probably flunked the midterm. He's taking me out to break the news gently."

They chatted amiably for the first block or two, Anne's hand on Emilio's arm, her silver head nearly level with his dark one. He started twice but stalled out, unable to find words. Amused, she sighed and said, "Okay, tell me about her."

Sandoz barked a laugh and ran a hand through his hair. "Is it that obvious?"

"No," she assured him, gentle now. "It's just that I've seen you with a gorgeous young woman at the coffee shop on campus a few times, and I put two and two together. So. Tell me!"

He did. About Mendes's adamantine single-mindedness. Her accent, which he could mimic to perfection but could not identify. The hidalgo remark, so out of proportion to his mild attempt to soften the relationship. The antagonism he sensed but could not understand. And finally, ending at the beginning, the almost physical jolt of meeting her. Not just an appreciation of her beauty or a plain glandular reaction but a sense of…knowing her already, somehow.

At the end of all this, Anne said, "Well, it's just a guess, but what occurs to me is that she's Sephardic."

He came abruptly to a halt and stood still, eyes closed. "Of course. A Jew, of Spanish ancestry." He looked at Anne. "She thinks my ancestors threw her ancestors out of Spain in 1492."

"It would explain a lot." She shrugged and they began to walk again. "Personally, I love the beard, darling, but it does make you look like central casting's idea of the Grand Inquisitor. You may be pushing a lot of her buttons."

Jungian archetypes work both ways, he realized. "Balkan," he said, after a while. "The accent could be Balkan."

Anne nodded. "Maybe. A lot of Sephardim ended up in the Balkans after the expulsion. She might be from Romania or Turkey. Or Bulgaria. Someplace like that." She whistled, remembering Bosnia. "I'll tell you something about the Balkans. If people there think they're going to forget a grudge, they write an epic poem and make the children recite it before bed. You're up against five hundred years of carefully preserved and very bad memories about imperial Catholic Spain."

The silence lasted a little too long to give credence to his next remark. "I only wanted to understand her better." Anne made a face that said, Oh, sure. Emilio went on doggedly. "The work we are doing is difficult enough. Hostility simply makes it harder."

Anne thought of an off-color comment. She didn't say it, but Emilio read it on her face and snorted, "Oh, grow up," and she giggled like a twelve-year-old who's just discovered smutty jokes. Anne took his arm then and they started back toward the house, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood buttoning up for the night. Dogs barked at them, the leaves rattled and whispered. A mother called out, "Heather! Bedtime! I'm not going to tell you again!"

"Heather. Haven't heard that one in years. Probably named after a grandmother." Anne suddenly stopped and Emilio turned back to look at her. "Shit, Emilio, I don't know—maybe God is as real for you as George and I are for each other…We were barely twenty when we got married, back before the Earth's crust cooled. And believe me, nobody gets through forty years together without noticing a few attractive alternatives along the way." He started to say something, but she held up her hand. "Wait. I intend to bestow upon you unsolicited advice, my darling. I know this will sound glib, but don't pretend you aren't feeling what you feel. That's how things slide into hell. Feelings are facts," she said, her voice a little hard, as she began to walk again. "Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it's what you do about what you feel that matters." They could see George now, sitting on the front stoop in a pool of light, waiting for them. Her voice was very soft. "Maybe God will love you more if you come back to Him with your whole heart later."

Emilio kissed Anne good-night, waved to George, and started back to John Carroll with a great deal to think about. Anne joined George on the porch, but before Emilio got beyond earshot, she called out, "Hey! What did I get on the midterm?"

"Eighty-six. You messed up the ablative."

"Shit!" she yelled. And her laugh sailed out toward him in the dark.

By Monday morning, he had come to some conclusions. He did not shave, feeling that would be too obvious, but he adjusted his manner, becoming as neutrally Anglo as Beau Bridges. Sofia Mendes relaxed fractionally. He permitted himself no small talk and fell into the rhythm of question and answer that suited her. The work went more smoothly.

He began meeting George Edwards on his training circuit and going part way with him. Emilio decided to run the 10K in the big spring race. George, who would be running the full marathon, was glad for the company. "Ten kilometers is nothing to be ashamed of," the older man assured him, grinning.

And he found work to do at a high school in a miserable neighborhood of East Cleveland. He brought the energy to God.

In the end, he was rewarded with something like a moment of friendship. Sofia Mendes had suspended their meetings for several weeks and then let him know she had something for him to look at. He met her at his office and she spoke to his system, calling the file in from the net. Waving him into a chair and sitting down next to him, she said, "Just start in. Pretend you are preparing for assignment to a mission where you'll use a language you have never studied and for which no formal instruction is available."

He did as he was told. After several minutes, he began skipping around, asking questions randomly, pursuing instruction at different levels. It was all there, the experience of years, even the songs. His best effort, ordered and systematized, seen through the prism of her own startling intellect. Hours later, he pushed away from the desk and met her eyes, which were shining. "Beautiful," he said ambiguously, "just beautiful."

And for the first time, he saw her smile briefly. The look of fierce dignity returned and she stood. "Thank you." She hesitated but then continued firmly. "This has been a good project. I enjoyed working with you."

He rose, as it was clear she intended to leave, just like that. "What will you do next? Take your fee and relax on a beach, perhaps?"

She stared at him for a moment. "You really don't know, do you," she said. "A very sheltered life, I suppose."

It was his turn to look at her, uncomprehending.

"You don't know the significance of this?" she asked, indicating the metal bracelet she always wore. He had noticed it, of course, a rather plain piece of jewelry, in keeping with her preference for simple clothing. "I receive only a living stipend. The fee goes to my broker. He contracted my services when I was fifteen. I was educated at his expense and until I repay his investment, it is illegal to employ me directly. I cannot remove the identification bracelet. It's there to protect his interests. I thought such arrangements were common knowledge."

"This can't be legal," he insisted, when he could speak. "This is slavery."

"Perhaps intellectual prostitution is nearer the mark. Legally, the arrangement is more like indentured service than slavery, Dr. Sandoz. I am not held for life. When I repay the debt, I am free to go." She gathered her belongings as she spoke and made ready to leave him. "And I find the arrangement preferable to physical prostitution."

That was altogether more than he could take in. "Where will you go next?" he asked, still stunned.

"The U.S. Army War College. A military history professor is retiring. Good-bye, Dr. Sandoz."

He shook her hand and watched her go. Head up, a princely posture.